This article reads the representation of anxiety in Nuri İyem’s Çığlık ( The Scream ), a portrait of an Anatolian woman, through an iconodiagnostic and art-historical lens, placing it in dialogue with Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Whereas Munch externalizes anxiety through distortion, movement, and an audible scream, İyem internalizes distress through stillness, silence, and emotional containment. Munch’s figure dissolves into anonymity through distortion and the loss of defining features; İyem, by contrast, constructs anonymity through repetition and typification, transforming the individual into a collective cultural subject. İyem’s repeated faces do not erase identity but absorb it into a shared, culturally mediated silence. Read together, the two works present anxiety as at once a universal human condition and a culturally situated experience. Beyond their art-historical interest, the two paintings offer a model for cross-cultural emotional literacy: the clinical capacity to recognize distress even when it is expressed through an unfamiliar cultural idiom. Just as Munch's canvas invites a form of visual psychological autopsy and İyem's figure a reading of collectively shaped suffering, the clinician must learn to read emotion in patients whose cultural expression of anxiety may differ from their own.