Generalized anxiety disorder is among the world’s most prevalent psychiatric disorders and often manifests as persistent and difficult to control apprehension. Despite its prevalence, there is no integrative, formal model of how anxiety and anxiety disorders arise. Here, we offer a perspective derived from the free energy principle; one that shares similarities with established constructs such as learned helplessness. Our account is simple: anxiety can be formalized as learned uncertainty. A biological system, having had persistent uncertainty in its past, will expect uncertainty in its future, irrespective of whether uncertainty truly persists. Despite our account’s intuitive simplicity—which can be illustrated with the mere flip of a coin—it is grounded within the free energy principle and hence situates the formation of anxiety within a broader explanatory framework of biological self-organization and self-evidencing. We conclude that, through conceptualizing anxiety within a framework of working generative models, our perspective might afford novel approaches in the clinical treatment of anxiety and its key symptoms.

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Jungian archetypes have been of interest to psychoanalysts and have been a cornerstone of Jungian psychology through much of the 20th century. Whilst the notion of archetypes has been debated amongst psychoanalytic traditions as well as in contemporary mythology/anthropology, little work has been done on their utility in the cognitive and neurosciences. We propose a novel neural mechanism of archetypes, grounded in cross-cultural psychology, comparative mythology, as well as developmental psychology. The pragmatic function of archetypes may serve as a collective effort of free energy minimization under the free energy principle, emergent due to the sets of affordances offered by culture and ecology. In line with Carl Jung’s definitional scope, we argue that archetypes are rooted in deep ecological and social forces, generationally ingrained for the purpose of optimizing the accurate conceptual representation of agents’ ecological and social environments. We then speculate on theoretical mechanisms by which archetypes are transmitted across time. Finally, we discuss implications for the utility of Jungian archetypes and outline future research directions to expand this concept in the cognitive neurosciences.

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