The Fear in All of Us - 1

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

A client was telling me recently about their experience of an anxiety attack. It happened in the workplace and involved panic, sweating, a rising sense of fear along with racing, negative thoughts. Coupled with this was a twofold additional response. One was an unmistakable sense that the anxiety was out of all proportion to the event that triggered it – being asked to take on a new project. And second was a recoiling at the idea that it should have been happening to them and that it was a particular failing on their part to be reacting in this way. This latter being almost a fear of the fear itself.
So, this had all the signs of the classic anxiety attack. An unpleasant sense of fear, increasing rapidly in intensity, seemingly out of nowhere, that threatened to overwhelm this client and over which they had no sense of control
For a ‘disorder’ that is probably embedded in the widest range of psychical disturbances and emotional issues, there is still very little public understanding, or even medical understanding, of what really causes it.
Certainly there are plenty of descriptions of the symptoms of anxiety and many diagnostic categories that include the heading of anxiety. But when it comes to actual explanations of where it comes from they are pretty thin on the ground.
The official definition is that it is a psychological and physiological state characterized by cognitive (thoughts), somatic (bodily), emotional, and behavioural components. These components combine to create an unpleasant feeling that is typically associated with uneasiness, fear, or worry.
The same definition considers anxiety to be a generalized mood condition that occurs without an identifiable triggering stimulus. As such, it is distinguished from fear, which occurs in the presence of an observed threat. Additionally, fear is related to the specific behaviours of escape and avoidance, whereas anxiety is the result of threats that are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable.
A degree of anxiety is considered to be a normal reaction to stress but when it becomes excessive or insistent, it falls under the classification of an anxiety disorder.
That is the official position on anxiety. Against this backdrop I thought it might be interesting to consider the psychoanalytic understanding of anxiety, in particular the Freudian/Lacanian approach (the Freudian position reinterpreted by French teacher, author, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr Jacques Lacan), which in my view offers the richest theory available.
A good starting point might be to differentiate the rather obvious point about the beginnings of anxiety. Often you find that people come to therapy when anxiety becomes unbearable and unmanageable in their lives. By that stage, usually, they have lived with a reduced level of anxiety without any overt knowledge of its existence for many years. When it does emerge in a problematic way, a common description of the experience is that it simply cropped up, triggered by nothing they can point to as the cause, but that it has been having a debilitating influence ever since.
The most common request is to return people to the point in their lives when there was 'no anxiety'. And, equally, to act quickly in bringing about such a change.
But anxiety is not something that simply arises in someone’s life unannounced. In most cases you will, on deeper examination, find traces of it stretching back through their history. And, while it is possible for people to feel the benefit of beginning therapy almost immediately, ‘fixing’ anxiety is not something that can be done without an investment of time and patience.
Freud, as far back as 1894 in his paper 'Anxiety' first pointed to the link between anxiety and desire, an odd coupling you might think. And, incidentally, while you may often hear people say that Freud is old hat, like so many of his discoveries this link has been making its way down through psychoanalytic thinking and theorising ever since. Why is the link between desire and anxiety such a discovery?
Because desire is one of our earliest and most persistent drivers towards pleasure, comfort, security, happiness and everything positive. Its opposite is the thing we experience when all these positives are absent: anxiety. No-one before this had noticed that the striving for pleasure, well being, comfort, happiness, confidence, wholeness, peace of mind and even love was the opposite side of the same coin which included anxiety.
Anxiety is the lack of all these things. And in its adult form, it is the painful awareness, the uncomfortable truth, the frightening disappearance of our subjective autonomy, and even sometimes the disempowering realisation that we might lack these things.
So where does this ability to experience a lack of this kind come from? In my next blog I am going to look at how this happens. Far from emerging as a result of no known cause or triggered by small, ad hoc occurrences of daily life, psychoanalytic theory proposes that anxiety is an intrinsic part of human experience and is present from our earliest stages of life.

* The next blog will appear on Friday August 21,2009.