Anxiety: an Ontological and Medical Examination (original) (raw)
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Is there something like a ‘lesson’ that emerges from this study of anxiety in the history of philosophy (and psychology)? If so, then it is situated at two levels: an intra-philosophic level and a psychological one. The philosophical level shows how difficult, yet important it is to integrate affects into inquiries into the preeminence of reason. It pays attention to philosophies that discern, in anxiety, a sign of a pre-cognitive, pre-reflective ‘knowledge’, whether of our possibilities (i.e., freedom) or of Heidegger’s Leibnizian question, “Why is there being and not simply nothing?” The reason why psychoanalysis is philosophically indispensable to a history of anxiety lies in what psychoanalysis teaches us about an embodied subject. It teaches us that this compound sensation-emotion may well be the first that we experience, bodily, before there is so much as a ‘we’ or an ego evolved to represent the experience to ourselves (Freud and Levinas). Thus at the psychological level, anxiety would be the fundamental affect, accompanying sensations of pleasure and displeasure. Moreover, although it leaves us weakened when facing situations of danger, anxiety also holds the key to our responses to that danger. This is what Jan Philippe Reemtsma argues for his minima moralia, combining angst and irony as we confront the sad wages of modernity. Of course, the danger anxiety poses lies in its potential intensity and in our tendency to flail about in search of appeasement. That is why we must abide with it; take some distance through irony or thought. Finally, because it is both personal and social—to the point where Auden could speak of an “age of anxiety”—anxiety’s pathological variants raise the question of where abnormal affects part ways from normal ones. Beyond social suffering and pathology, however, anxiety belongs to our pre-reflective awareness—our affective “understanding” lacking determinate objects—of our connection to other people—and their significance in our lives.
The riddle of anxiety: Between the familiar and the unfamiliar
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2018
It is difficult to say what anxiety is, Freud tells us. This paper suggests various dimensions of anxiety. Anxiety evokes the original experience of helplessness; it is an affective state that is accompanied by physical sensations and bodily symptoms-expression of an excess that it is not possible to process psychically. Anxiety is also linked to the fear of loss of the imaginary integrity of the body, as well as of primary objects. Furthermore, anxiety marks the passage from the world of the narcissistic father and/or mother, in which the individual is alienated from his own history, to the dead father configuration that inserts the individual into his subjective temporality in the après-coup of an analysis. A detailed narrative of an analysis that gave rise to these ideas is presented. In this analysis the transsexual emerges to give shape to something that had not previously reached representation.
Apprehending anxiety: an introduction to the Topical Collection on worry and wellbeing
Synthese
The aim of this collection is to show how work in the analytic philosophical tradition can shed light on the nature, value, and experience of anxiety. Contrary to widespread assumptions, anxiety is not best understood as a mental disorder, or an intrinsically debilitating state, but rather as an often valuable affective state which heightens our sensitivity to potential threats and challenges. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, learning about anxiety can be relevant for debates, not only in the philosophy of emotion, but also in epistemology, value theory, and the philosophy of psychopathology. In this introductory article, we also show that there is still much to discover about the relevance that anxiety may have for moral action, self-understanding, and mental health.
Introduction: Taking on anxiety
Metalepsis: Journal of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis, 2021
Although they were written prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, a historical crisis doubtless entailing significant anxiety, all of the contributions to this first Special Issue of Metalepsis were composed within the historical moment of global "contagion," in the broad sense of a "contagion of the global" (a notion I develop in the "Editorial Afterword" to this Special Issue). They bear witness to an awareness that cultural values and information from divergent locations are interpenetrating and spreading across the earth to an unheard-of degree, beyond any controllable limits, such that identities are virtually dissolving or fragmenting in a sometimes anxious-making way. This situation requires that we come to terms with anxieties about identity-dissolution or identity-fragility without reacting against them in an attempt to "fix" identity, e.g. by building walls against the foreign, which are always erected in vain and with destructive results. Such a requirement of assuming anxiety, acknowledging it and taking it upon ourselves-a political-historical exigency-implies the necessity of a psychoanalytic ethics of anxiety. Each of the essays in this volume speaks in its own way of this necessity, as I indicate in the summaries that follow. Main Articles-from Freud to Klein to Jung to Lacan to Heidegger and beyond Donald L. Carveth opens the volume with a selective critical overview of the theories of anxiety in psychoanalysis-placing a particular emphasis on Freud and Melanie Klein (with briefer discussions of Karl Abraham, D.W. Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan along the way)-and existentialism. While recalling the main outlines of these theories, Carveth emphasizes a number of points that ultimately indicate an ethical dimension, to which the assumption of one's own anxiety may lead. He stresses first that Freud glimpses primarily the loss of something good as the possible object of anxious anticipation, whereas Abraham and Klein add to this picture the possibility of an anxiety that anticipates a persecutory attack. Further, as Carveth explains, Klein develops-under the heading of depressive (or reparatory) anxiety, which supercedes persecutory Introduction: Taking on anxiety Metalepsis volume 1 2021
The pathologization of anxiety in the contemporary world
2009
This work aims at reflecting on the anxiety concealing and pathologization as a frequent mark of subjectivity production in the contemporary world. The existencial analytic of Heidegger does a thematic discussion about anxiety as a basic affective mood of human being-there. From his analytic of beingthere and his later reflections on the modern technique, the directions in the current ways of avoidance of anxiety and the concealment of the essential condition of lack of protection of the existence through the control compulsion and security guard are argued. The medical and psicological approaches of the phenomenon of anxiety have been central strategies in this project of control. The essential paper of anxiety in the dynamics of existential singularization is still argued, as well as the consequence, for the psychological treatments, of a thematic appropriation of its place, from which, they can strengthen this concealing pathological approach or open space for the singularization...
The ontological character of anxiety
Journal of Religion and Health, 1967
The Ontological Character of Anxiety OUR AGE has been called an "age of anxiety." The phenomenon of anxiety has received much attention in the disciplines concerned with human experience. The humanities illuminate the function of anxiety in human experience through the dramatic modes of the novel and poetry. The human sciences of psychology and sociology analyze the influence of anxiety in man's intrapersonal experiences and in his interpersonal actions. Theology sees anxiety as a central phenomenon in man's relation to ultimate concerns. The literature of our generation gives the impression that man is disturbed at the roots of his being, and the central concept used to point to that disturbance is the concept of anxiety. The phenomenon to which the concept of anxiety points is a frequent topic in the discussion between religion and the psychology of personality. The discussions have shown that the students of the science of behavior and the students of religion are concerned with similar problems and often with the same phenomena. Our intention is to contribute to that discussion. We shall focus exclusively upon the analysis of anxiety made by the theologian Paul Tillich and the psychologist Carl Rogers. Tillich, in his extensive treatment of anxiety, concludes that it is a phenomenon with an ontological character. Rogers gives little critical attention to anxiety, and he seems uninterested in the question of its ontological quality. On the surface, Tillich and Rogers may appear to have nothing to say to one another, but our aim is to suggest that they have much to say to each other and that discussions of anxiety could profit from consideration of their respective insights and from a dialogue between them. The meaning of the terms Our concern is the ontological character of anxiety. "Ontology" and "anxiety" comprise the terms of discourse. Before we proceed with
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Starting from the analysis of the meaning of health and illness, the workfi nds the social role of medicine as a transposition of the medicalization fromclinical to the the social realm of existence. Discovering the medicalizationof social life as one of the indicators of postmodern rationality entropy, theanalysis focuses on the diff usion and fl uid fear as a basic epochal experience ofhuman existence in contemporary constellation world whose social shaping isnamed as the anxiety society.