Psychoanalysis and Anxiety: From Knowing to Being

From Knowing to Being

Chris Mawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429618963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

Psychoanalysis and Anxiety: From Knowing to Being combines psychoanalytic, existential and dramaturgical perspectives on the study of anxiety.

The book explores the implications for psychoanalysis of including a consideration of the being of the patient, and of the analyst. The central principle throughout is that the psychoanalytic and the existential belong together since it is the irreducible fact of anxiety that unifies them. It is in relation to anxiety that we are helped by other human beings to bear what is, and what we are.

Divided into four sections, the book begins with the distinction made in antiquity between anxiety and fear, before discussing its treatment by philosophers such as Heidegger, who regarded anxiety as the mood most disclosive of our being, and Kierkegaard, who distinguished between fear and angst. The book then explores how anxiety has been understood by major psychoanalytic theorists, including Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion, before a third part discusses how key principles of drama relate to therapeutic practice and theory, including a re-evaluation of the concept of catharsis, as well as Brecht's concept of making strange the familiar. The pursuit of insightful knowledge in psychoanalysis is reconsidered in the book's concluding section, with a shift of emphasis from psychoanalytic interpretations as statements of knowing to interpretive activity as a continuous process of becoming informed.

This insightful and wide-ranging volume will fascinate practising psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, anyone working in mental health, as well as scholars of philosophy and theatre.

PART I

Anxiety

From the ancient world to ontological philosophy

1

Anxiety

Antiquity towards modernity

In a letter to Richard Bentley in 1753, Horace Walpole described a small pew hung with green damask as “a modernity which beats all antiquities for curiosity” (Wright, 1842, p. 184). An apt epigraph for this chapter would be its transposition: “But here is an antiquity which beats all modernities for curiosity”, because in specific Epicurean texts to which I will draw attention there appear some of the earliest systematic writings on the mind, and in those passages it is emotion rather than cognition that is recognised as being at the heart of the mind. In this chapter I will begin with these writings to show how some of the observations concerning anxiety, and of the human being’s relations towards it, are startling both in their acuity and contemporary relevance.

In the first century bce, in his epic philosophical texts, De rerum natura¹ (The Nature of Things), the Roman philosopher Lucretius,² distinguished anxiety from fear almost two thousand years before Søren Kierkegaard did so. Following the principles of his teacher Epicurus, Lucretius stated that, although in terms of material comforts men may amply (or even richly) be satisfied, “they yet, O yet, within the home, / Still had the anxious heart [anxia corda]”.

For when saw he that well-nigh everything

Which needs of man most urgently require

Was ready to hand for mortals, and that life,

As far as might be, was established safe,

That men were lords in riches, honour, praise,

And eminent in goodly fame of sons,

And that they yet, O yet, within the home,

Still had the anxious heart which vexed life

Unpausingly with torments of the mind.³

(Lucretius, 50 BCE, De rerum natura, Book VI, 13)

Lucretius distinguished between anxiety and the more palpable fears and desires, for which he used the term timor, upsurges of which prevented the stoical imperturbability that some had considered within their grasp through the operation of reason. In these verses Lucretius can be read as signifying ‘home’ not only to indicate the literal dwelling place, but the innermost one, the mind itself.⁴ The meaning becomes clearer when I return to the verses of Lucretius later in this chapter, when I discuss his historically early depiction of the mind as a vessel, a container with its own autonomous potential for creating inner sources of anxiety, independently of external circumstances.

But first, here are two short vignettes from Greek medical texts belonging to the compilation known as the Hippocratic Corpus,⁵ in which there appears the description of a man suffering intense anxiety brought on during the night by the eerie sound of flutes. His name was Nicanor of Athens.

Nicanor’s affection,⁶ when he went to a drinking party, was fear⁷ of the flute girl. Whenever he heard the voice of the flute begin to play at a symposium, masses of terrors rose up. He said that he could hardly bear it when it was night, but if he heard it in the daytime he was not affected. Such symptoms persisted over a long period of time [my emphasis].

(Hippocrates, 1994)

The ancient texts describe another sufferer, whose name was Democles.

Democles, who was with him,⁸ seemed blind and powerless of body, and could not go along a cliff, nor on to a bridge to cross a ditch of the least depth, but he could go through the ditch itself. This affected him for some time.

(Müri, 1986, p. 230)

True to the nature of pathos (πάθoς) this phenomenological description of anxiety in the two men – the vignette given did not involve ‘diagnosis’ or ‘treatment’ of the condition – has the quality of evoking our pity and fear, reminding us that we are, actually or potentially, fellow-sufferers. We can feel ourselves involved with and alongside Nicanor and Democles in their anxieties – terrors welling up at the haunting sounds of the night and the cripplingly vertiginous anxiety felt by a man feeling suspended helplessly over what is, or is felt to be, an abyss. The specific, tangible fears evoke also an awareness of something of the deeply ontological, the human-condition elements immanent in the specifics of the situations depicted. From what unknown place does an eerie, ominous sound emanate? What does it portend? Is the ground, or anything at all, really solid beneath my feet? Will I fall for ever? On what can I truly depend?

The reference here to pity and fear is a specific reference to the writings of Aristotle (c.335 bce) in his Poetics (Περὶ ποιητικῆς). It is the earliest known writing on the theory of the structure and dynamics of tragic drama, and the concepts will be considered in detail later in the book, in Chapter 7. Concerning this important concept of Aristotle’s, Gotthold Lessing (1767) wrote:

It is certainly not Aristotle who has made the division so justly censured of tragic passions into terror and compassion. He has been falsely interpreted, falsely translated. He speaks of pity and fear, not of pity and terror; and his fear is by no means the fear excited in us by misfortune threatening another person. It is the fear which arises for ourselves from the similarity of our position with that of the sufferer; it is the fear that the calamities impending over the sufferers might also befall ourselves; it is the fear that we ourselves might thus become objects of pity. In a word, this fear is compassion referred back to ourselves.

(Lessing, 1767, “On Aristotle’s pity and fear” [my emphasis])

I have emphasised the latter part of this description by Lessing because it brings out so clearly the striking correspondence of Aristotle’s conception to the confluence of two later psychoanalytic concepts which will feature in this book. These are Freud’s (1895) concept of the Nebenmensch, the fact that the first object internalised into the ego is a fellow human being, and that of introjective identification in the work of Melanie Klein. Later I will show how her concept of projective identification, and Wilfred Bion’s model of the container–contained, hold affinities with Aristotle’s work on the transformations made possible by the functions of purging and catharsis in the dramatic form of tragedy. The contemporary theories of projective identification can be seen in prototypic form in elements of Aristotle’s Poetics and in passages of Lucretius’ epic philosophical poem. This I will describe in a separate chapter, Chapter 7.

Returning now to Lucretius, here are the lines from Book VI of his philosophical work in which, having first stated that anxiety can strike us from within in spite of externally derived sources of security, he goes on to write of the autonomy of the mind, making use of the analogy of a container capable of generating, from within itself, poisonous contents having harmful effects upon whatever comes into it. He pictures the heart/mind, the anxia corda, as a containing vessel affecting its contents:

Then he, the master, did perceive that ’twas

The vessel itself which worked the bane, and all,

However wholesome, which from here or there

Was gathered into it, was by that bane

Spoilt from within, – in part, because he saw

The vessel so cracked and leaky that nowise

’T could ever be filled to brim; in part because

He marked how it polluted with foul taste

Whate’er it got within itself. So he,

The master, then by his truth-speaking words,

Purged the breasts of men, and set the bounds

Of lust and terror.⁹

(Lucretius, 50 BCE, De rerum natura, Book VI)

Lucretius writes that goodness which has been experienced as internalised does not remain so for long, because the mind – as a container for its experience – can never be entirely satisfied, nor can its feelings of frustration and anxiety be wholly relieved for more than a short while. The observation of this universal experience will prove important when we return to the subject of satisfaction and pain in the next chapter, by considering Freud’s earliest theory of anxiety.

Lucretius’ allusion to the leaky vessel as a symbolic form for dissatisfaction and ingratitude is a reference to the Greek myth of the fifty discontented daughters of Danaus (Δαναΐδες), water-nymphs who were called the Danaids, or, in Ovid’s account,¹⁰ the Belides, forty-nine of whom murdered their new husbands on their wedding nights and were punished by the gods to a fate that calls to mind the curse of Sisyphus. They were made interminably to carry water in vessels with holes in them, and so could never achieve the purpose of washing away their crimes.

It is the second part of the text that holds a greater significance for later theories of mind. Lucretius suggests with poetic imagery that the mind is analogous to a vessel “polluted with foul taste / Whate’er it got within itself”. This is the insight that the mind itself is by virtue of its own inner workings a producer of noxious events. It is the workings of the vessel itself, states Lucretius, that can generate destructiveness and the concomitant anxiety stemming from it, not only because the container cannot ever be filled to the brim – full and complete satisfaction cannot be attained – but because the mind itself is capable, by its own processes, of contaminating its contents.

This is a striking insight into the nature of one of the most important aspects of mental functioning, the existence and the autonomy of an inner world, anticipating by more than two thousand years Freud’s conception of a mental apparatus, the concept of psychical reality, and – in particular, as we will consider later, Bion’s model of the mind as a container in which contents can be destructive to their container and a container can exercise damaging effects upon those elements contained within it.

Shakespeare, who had read Lucretius’ poem, expressed, in the following lines from As You Like It, the insight that even good and creative properties could wreak poisonous harm within the mind of the one possessing them:

Know you not, master, to some kind of men

Their graces serve them but as enemies?

No more do yours. Your virtues, gentle master,

Are sanctified and holy traitors to you.

O, what a world is this, when what is comely...