The riddle of anxiety: Between the familiar and the unfamiliar

ABSTRACT

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.

Il est difficile de définir ce qu’est l’angoisse, nous dit Freud. L’auteur de cet article propose d’envisager la question de l’angoisse sous différents aspects. L’angoisse évoque tout d’abord la situation de détresse originaire ; c’est un état affectif qui s’accompagne de sensations physiques et de symptômes corporels – l’expression d’un trop-plein qu’il est impossible de transformer psychiquement. L’angoisse est également liée à la peur de perdre l’intégrité imaginaire du corps, ainsi qu’à celle de perdre les objets primaires. En outre, l’angoisse marque le passage du monde du père et/ou de la mère narcissiques, où l’individu demeure étranger à sa propre histoire, à la configuration du père mort qui insère l’individu dans sa subjectivité temporelle, dans l’après-coup d’une analyse. L’auteur présente le compte-rendu détaillé d’une analyse, qui lui a inspiré ces idées. Au cours de cette analyse, l’émergence d’une dimension transsexuelle a permis de donner une forme à quelque chose qui était demeuré jusque-là irreprésenté.

Was Angst ist, ist laut Freud schwer zu sagen. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt verschiedene Dimensionen der Angst. Angst weckt die ursprüngliche Erfahrung der Hilflosigkeit. Sie ist ein affektiver Zustand, der mit körperlichen Sensationen und Symptomen einhergeht – Ausdruck eines Zuviel, das psychisch nicht mehr verarbeitet werden kann. Angst hängt auch mit der Furcht zusammen, die imaginäre Integrität des Körpers sowie die Primärobjekte zu verlieren. Darüber hinaus markiert Angst den Übergang von der Welt des narzisstischen Vaters und/oder der Mutter, in der das Individuum seiner eigenen Geschichte entfremdet ist, zur Konfiguration des toten Vaters, die das Individuum in seine subjektive Zeitlichkeit im Après-Coup einer Analyse versetzt. Vorgestellt wird der detaillierte Bericht über eine Analyse, die diesen Überlegungen zugrunde liegt. In dieser Analyse tauchte das Transsexuelle auf, und dadurch erhielt etwas Gestalt, das zuvor nicht hatte repräsentiert werden können.

È difficile definire precisamente che cosa sia l’ansia, ci dice Freud. Con il presente lavoro si intende suggerire che all’ansia siano in realtà sottese diverse dimensioni. In primo luogo essa evoca il vissuto originario di impotenza: uno stato affettivo accompagnato da sensazioni fisiche e sintomi somatici, tutti espressioni di un eccesso di stimoli che il bambino piccolo non è in grado di elaborare psichicamente. All’ansia è pure collegata la paura della perdita della fantasticata integrità del corpo, oltre che degli oggetti primari. Oltre a ciò, i vissuti di ansia segnano il passaggio dal mondo del padre (e/o della madre) narcisistico, in cui l’individuo è alienato dalla propria storia, alla configurazione del padre morto, che nell’après-coup di un’analisi inserisce l’individuo all’interno della sua temporalità soggettiva. Viene qui presentato il racconto dettagliato di un’analisi che ha permesso all’autrice di sviluppare queste idee, analisi in cui l’emergere della dimensione transessuale ha dato forma a quacosa che precedentemente non aveva avuto accesso alla rappresentabilità.

Es difícil definir qué es la angustia, nos dice Freud. En este artículo, la autora sugiere varias dimensiones de la angustia. La angustia evoca la experiencia originaria de la impotencia; es un estado afectivo acompañado de sensaciones físicas y síntomas corporales, expresión de un exceso que no se puede procesar psíquicamente. La angustia también está vinculada al temor a perder la integridad imaginaria del cuerpo, así como a los objetos primarios. Además, la angustia marca el pasaje del mundo del padre o madre narcisista, en el cual el individuo está alienado de su propia historia, hacia la configuración del padre muerto que inserta al individuo en su temporalidad subjetiva en el après coup de un análisis. Se presenta una narración detallada de un análisis que dio lugar a estas ideas. En este análisis emerge lo transexual para dar formar a lo que hasta ese momento no había alcanzado representación.

KEYWORDS:

• Anxiety
• helplessness
• excess
• murdered father
• dead father
• temporality
• après-coup
• transsexual

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Don Campbell, Gregorio Kohon, Caroline Polmear, and my anonymous readers for their comments to an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1 The relationship between anxiety and its expression in the soma is present from the outset. The first reference to anxiety in Freud’s writings, out of the 255 references to anxiety in the body of his work, describes the symptoms developed by Anna O as follows:

“A girl, watching beside a sick-bed in a torment of anxiety, fell into a twilight state and had a terrifying hallucination, while her right arm, which was hanging over the back of her chair, went to sleep; from this there developed a paresis of the same arm accompanied by contracture and anaesthesia. She tried to pray but could find no words; at length, she succeeded in repeating a children’s prayer in English. When subsequently a severe and highly complicated hysteria developed, she could only speak, write and understand English, while her native language remained unintelligible to her for eighteen months” (Freud 1895, pp. 4–5).

Another example is that of Miss Lucy R:

“I will describe an instance which I happen to have analysed in the course of the last few days. I was treating a woman of thirty-eight, suffering from anxiety neurosis (agoraphobia, attacks of fear of death, etc.). Like so many such patients, she had a disinclination to admitting that she had acquired these troubles in her married life and would have liked to push them back into her early youth. Thus, she told me that she was seventeen when she had had a first attack of dizziness, with anxiety and feelings of faintness, in the street in her small native town, and that these attacks had recurred from time to time, till a few years ago they had given place to her present disorder. I suspected that these first attacks of dizziness, in which the anxiety faded more and more into the background, were hysterical and I made up my mind to embark on an analysis of them. To begin with she only knew that this first attack came over her while she was out shopping in the principal street” (Freud 1895, p. 112; italics added).

2 Shepherdson (2001) has indicated that Freud’s first theory of anxiety is more complex than usually understood in the literature. Freud states that anxiety in the first model is not understood as a purely physiological phenomenon as it arises “‘by transformation out of accumulated sexual tension’ that can then take different paths” ([1892–1899] 1950, p. 191, Freud’s italics).

3 The term jouissance has been largely left untranslatable in the English editions of Lacan’s work. In the structural model of the mind, Freud established a link between sexuality, repetition and trauma through the discovery that there is something that he designates “beyond the pleasure principle.” The activity of discharge is linked now not to the pleasure principle but to the Nirvana principle—the aim of reaching a state of “nought” tensions that he linked to the death drives.

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986), Lacan first developed the concept of jouissance, in opposition to the pleasure principle, a jouissance that compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, and thus jouissance is linked to suffering.

Jouissance thus designates an excess of pleasure, a satisfaction that is overwhelming, that brings suffering as a result of a prolonged state of internal excitation, in a mixture of the life and death drives. Freud gives several examples of this state that are beyond the pleasure principle: the fort–da game, the dreams of traumatic neurosis, the compulsion to repeat, the negative therapeutic reaction.

4 It is reported by Jones that in a discussion before the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society in 1909 Freud stated that “every affect … is only a reminiscence of an event” (in Strachey 1959, p. 84).

5 Heidegger in 1927 also established a distinction between anxiety and fear. Fear is always fear of something threatening, some particular thing in the world. Fear has an object. Anxiety has no reference to anything in particular; it is indeterminate. Anxiety is experienced in the face of something completely indefinite. It is, Heidegger insists, “nothing and nowhere.” This leads Heidegger to link anxiety and the uncanny (Heidegger 1992).

6 In Lacanian formulation the Other refers to the symbolic order. Initially the mother is the Other for the child, in what it is still a dyadic relationship. It is only progressively that the Mother introduces the child to the Paternal Law. The desire of the mother, in Lacan’s linguistic terminology, must go under the bar of the paternal metaphor, where the desire of the mother is attenuated and submitted to repression in the child’s mind. If the mother is in a fusional relationship with the child, the paternal function as a third fails (see Bailly 2009, pp. 79–85). In the French literature, since Lacan’s formulation, an object needs to be known and then lost for desire and subjectivity to be structured. Desire refers to an absence and belongs to the same field as phantasy and dream (Mannoni 1968, p. 11; see also Perelberg 2000, p. 9). An overwhelming presence of the Other in a dyadic structure means that an absence, or a lack has not taken place and the symbolic order has not been properly established (see also Perelberg 2013a, for the presence of this theme in current French literature).

7 These ideas have connections with Green’s notion of the framing structure. Green states that when holding her infant, the mother leaves the impression of her arms on the child, and this constitutes a framing structure that, in her absence, contains the loss of the perception of the maternal object and a negative hallucination of it. The framing structure is the outcome of the internalization of the maternal environment created by maternal care. It is the “primordial matrix of the cathexis to come” (Green 1986, p. 166). The capacity for the negative hallucination of the mother lies at the origins of representation; it is against the background of negativity that future representations of the object are inscribed. This is the role of the negative in its structuring function (Green 2005, p. 161; Perelberg 2016).

8 One of the reviewers of this paper suggested that Khalish may be understood as a hysteric who puts forward the question “Am I a man or a woman.” The hysteric patient, however, tends to represent a drama within his or her own body. In the case of this patient, the material indicates that the bodily boundary was crossed (for instance, he was actually penetrated by a transsexual in Colombia). He was concretely seeking men who appeared as women but who had kept their penis. The analysis progressively indicated a more archaic layer of the riddle present in terms of his wish for and fear of fusion with phallic mother (therefore the Gary quotation), on the one hand, and/or the wish to submit to the father in a feminine way, on the other.

9 Castration anxiety is understood in terms of a “threat to the imaginary integrity of the body.” One needs to be reminded, however, that “for the girl nothing is lacking in the real of the organism, which means that the absence of the penis can only be registered with respect to the imaginary body, just as, for the boy, the threat of castration is to be understood, not to the danger of a real loss, but as a threat to the imaginary integrity of the body” (Sheperdson, p. Liii).

10 In the psychoanalytic literature there is a contradiction between those who work from a framework that emphasizes separation anxiety (Kleinian approach) and those who stress the significance of castration anxiety. Rosemary Davies has addressed this discussion very aptly (2012). A potential solution is the approach that understands that castration, as the signifier of the imaginary loss of integration to the self, retranslates everything else après coup. “For it is in the restructuring of the internal world that takes place during the Oedipal stage that a new meaning is given to the anxiety of birth, the loss of the breast, of faeces and the threat to phallic narcissism” (Davies 2012, p. 1106). In the Freudian framework the central function of castration as an organizer of difference means that retroactively it re-signifies all other forms of loss (Lacan, seminar XI, 1973, pp. 95–96).

11 Quinodoz has offered an understanding of vertigo as an expression of separation anxiety manifested in bodily sensations (1990). Her patient Luc had narcissistically introjected into a split-off part of his ego a containing object felt to be unreliable. For a patient fused narcissistically with the object in a part of his ego, there is no boundary between his ego and the object whereby the two can be distinguished. The claustro-agoraphobic dimensions experienced by her patient are captured in the following interpretation: “It is as if you would like me to hold you in my arms, tight enough for you not to feel dropped by me, but not so tight that you feel suffocated” (Quinodoz 1990, p. 57).

My perspective includes some other aspects not present in Quinodoz’s discussion. First, I am bringing forth a specific contribution derived from the French tradition in which the role of the Other, as representing the symbolic order for the constitution of the psyche, is included in the theoretical and clinical framework. What emerges in this case of analysis is an experience of an object that had not facilitated separation and the beginnings of desire. A second point of reference is my view that archaic anxieties are transformed and invested with further meaning après-coup that retrospectively re-interprets and re-sexualizes the more archaic.

12 At times I thought that Khalish was referring to transvestites more to than transsexuals. This provoked a certain confusion, as I would be wondering whether the person had or had not retained his penis. Was this perhaps part of a countertransference enactment, reflecting Khalish’s own anxieties? In the text I have retained the term that Khalish used all the time. One needs, nevertheless, to bear in mind Stoller’s ideas that the transsexual man has no interest in his own penis. According to Stoller, a crucial measure as to whether someone is transsexual will be whether or not he enjoys using his penis for sexual pleasure. (Stoller 1968, 1975).

13 Klein has suggested the notion of the combined parent figure in several of her papers (e.g. 1929, 1930, 1932). In 1952 she described this figure as “the mother containing the father’s penis or the whole father; the father containing the mother’s breast or the whole mother; the parents fused inseparably in sexual intercourse” (1952, p. 79).

14 “ … for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (Freud 1919, p. 241).