Examination Trauma and Stress Anxiety

Examination Trauma and Stress

The period leading up to the examination can be as stressful as the results day that follows. For many people taking exams the experience is worse than a trip to the hospital or the dentist. The trauma may last for years.

This is what the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud said about exams

Everyone who has received his certificate of matriculation after passing his final examination at school complains of the persistence with which he is plagued by anxiety-dreams in which he has failed, or must go through his course again, etc. For the holder of a university degree this typical dream is replaced by another, which represents that he has not taken his doctor's degree, to which he vainly objects, while still asleep, that he has already been practising for years, or is already a university lecturer or the senior partner of a firm of lawyers, and so on. These are the ineradicable memories of the punishments we suffered as children for misdeeds which we had committed -- memories which were revived in us on the dies irae, dies illa of the gruelling examination at the two critical junctures in our careers as students. The 'examination-anxiety' of neurotics is likewise intensified by this childish fear. When our student days are over it is no longer our parents or teachers who see to our punishment; the inexorable chain of cause and effect of later life has taken over our further education. Now we dream of our matriculation, or the examination for the doctor's degree -- and who has not been faint-hearted on such occasions? -- whenever we fear that we may be punished by some unpleasant result because we have done something carelessly or wrongly, because we have not been as thorough as we might have been -- in short, whenever we feel the burden of responsibility.

In the next blog we will be examining what you can do about stress and anxiety.