The Roots of Anxiety - 2

By Kevin Murphy MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

I wrote in my last blog about the issue of anxiety as it is understood by psychoanalytic theory and, as I mentioned, I propose to elaborate a little on that. Anxiety is an omnipresent human experience that, for those who experience it, creates intense fear. It turns the world around us into a strange place, a place that was once familiar and that is now threateningly unfamiliar. It converts, in an instant, a sense of control over one’s life into a complete absence of control. With that absence of control comes the threat, the fear, the terror, that we will be overwhelmed by it. And that the part of us that functions as the person we know ourselves to be will be swamped and no longer exist.
You often hear people describing anxiety as a fear with no object – there is nothing visible that is causing us to fear. Or we often hear people describing triggering events in their lives that are relatively insignificant but which cause them massive, persistent anxiety. It is as if the triggering event couldn’t possibly be the cause of such an intense reaction, again suggesting that there is no good reason for such intense anxiety.
But with anxiety there is an object, albeit an invisible one; it is the fear of being made powerless, of being overcome, of being shut down as a person, of being unable to deal effectively with whatever life throws at us. At its core there is a helplessness that epitomises the sense of lack I spoke about last week. And so against our will we are thrown into a place where, rather than the desiring being that needs something and seeks satisfaction of that need, we become unable to do so because we are somehow lacking. Within this new and unpleasant experience we are not just powerless but we are also unrecognizable to ourselves, that is the identity we thought we had is missing, however temporarily, and that is what adds to this unnerving and frightening experience.
Unlike a great deal of theorizing in this area, psychoanalytic theory seeks to explain causes, especially those that are not visible or observable. Going back to the beginning, Freud and his adherent, child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, believed anxiety was linked to the very earliest moments of the infant child and that anxiety in adults is a reactivation of these early experiences. These involve the connection and rupture that are part and parcel of the infant child’s relationship with the mother – the breast being given and the breast being taken away and so on. They bring with them the threat of annihilation in the world of the infant who has still no developed ego with which to defend against such threats.
In the 1960s and 1970s French psychoanalyst Dr Jacques Lacan moved the theory on by suggesting that there was another significant moment happening around this time in the formation of the child. This new ‘moment’ was something of a breakthrough that no one had theorized before but which has since been widely accepted by most schools of thought.
Lacan called it the Mirror Stage, a period or, indeed, a 'moment' in the infant child’s life, from six months onward, when seeing its own reflection for the first time - in a mirror or any reflecting surface, even the image of another infant - it gets its sense of identity.
The wholeness of the image the child sees in the 'mirror' is at odds with its fragmented and relatively uncoordinated bodily experience relative to its stage in life. It comes with a jublilatory sense of triumph, one that can be seen in the excitement of the child. But it also comes with a paradoxical effect because along with the jublilation of being 'whole' as opposed to fragmented, there is the threat that this other, this not-me could pose a threat.
As such this 'moment' marks a huge turning point both in terms of the mental life of the child - in terms of how it understands itself - and in terms of the importance which the bodily image, the visual image, will have for the child thereafter as it develops to adulthood.
The richness of the Mirror Stage as a theory is that it proposes that the child sees wholeness in the image while experiencing uncoordinated fragementation in the body. The allure and perfection of one is contrasted with the inhibition and imperfection of the other. In other words there is a conflict between the imaginary reflection and the reality of the body.
This conflict, deriving an identity of wholeness from something that is not intrinsically us, leads to aggressive tension because the wholeness of the image threatens to overwhelm the child with the threat of annihilation, a repeat of an earlier threat stemming from the serial connection and rupture with the breast. In order to cope with this aggressive tension the child identifies with the image it sees before it.
This resolution of conflict, this choosing of the image of wholeness and relative perfection in psychoanalytic theory, is the first moment of the formation of what we come to know later as ‘I’, my identity, the person who I perceive myself to be. And bear in mind, this is the very thing that vanishes in an anxiety attack.
In a fascinating paper on this subject by Dublin psychoanalyst Dr Olga Cox Cameron she says we can view the trajectory of this process more clearly in adult form, in an example taken from literature. This is in Shakespeare’s Henry V, most particularly in the famous speech Henry makes on the eve of the battle of Agincourt.
Faced with a weary, fragmented army that is due to take on a superior French army Henry conjures up for them in his speech an image of heroism that inspires them to victory. The heroic imagery presented wholeness, while the reality was one of fragmentation and un-coordination. Yet the image was the thing they identified with over the reality and it ‘lifted’ or ‘jolted’ the weary army into new life.
Drawing together these two strands; the roots of anxiety in infancy as a result of the experiences of connection and rupture, and the power of the ‘whole’ image to override the fragmentation of the body, next week I’ll look at how psychoanalytic theory explains the mechanism of anxiety as most adults experience it.