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Danger and fear are humanity’s oldest allies. The painful emotions, fears, and terrors inherent to strategies of combat and flights have always been the foundations of the anthropological paradox: individual and collective creativity are deployed within such fragility. What does human neoteny at the beginning of the life of the infans reveal about the adult’s fears? What do “initial powerlessness” and the baby’s “first unhelp” reveal about his bodyguard, the Nebenmensch, their “fellow human being”? Is a psychoanalytical psychopathology of “fundamental anthropology” (Laplanche 2002) a fertile source for exploring our fears? What does psychoanalysis contribute to this debate, in which psychological and physical realities interweave? Based on two case studies (a child and an adult), the author outlines some understandings based upon the distinction between signal anxiety and automatic anguish.