Metalepsis: Journal of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis

Contributors

2021-04-06T01:34:30+00:00

Introduction: Taking on anxiety

2021-01-03T07:02:53+00:00

The psychoanalytic theory of anxiety and defense

2021-01-03T06:32:06+00:00

The chronological development of Freud’s theories of anxiety is reviewed in connection with the series of infantile danger-situations, the distinction between traumatic and signal anxiety, and the defenses evoked by the latter to avoid the former. The central defense of turning aggression away from the object and back against the self, thus generating the hostile superego, is emphasized. A critique of Freud‘s one-sided conception of danger as loss of the good is offered in light of Melanie Klein’s recognition of the danger constituted by the presence of something bad. In light of the shift from topographical to structural theory additional types of anxiety are distinguished: instinctual anxiety experienced by the ego in the face of the Id; Reality anxiety in the face of the external world; moralistic anxiety in the face of the superego. While Freud failed to distinguish persecutory and reparative anxiety and guilt, Klein and her followers posited two fundamentally different layers or positions in the mind, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive or reparative positions characterized by these two types of anxiety and guilt respectively. There has been a good deal of confusion due to the widespread failure to distinguish depressive anxiety from depression: there is no depression in the depressive position because the splitting involved in depression is a paranoid-schizoid phenomenon. The existentialists remind us that not all anxiety and guilt is neurotic.

Anxiety: Melanie Klein's 'deeper' layers

2021-01-03T06:37:46+00:00

In Klein’s development of a clinical practice with children, she concentrated on the presence and content of anxiety in the little patient’s play. This led her away from a basic theory grounded in instincts and energy. As her method developed and her experience accumulated she emphasized the meanings of anxiety and in particular the forms it took in unconscious phantasy. Ultimately, she became aware of profound phantasies, and anxiety, in her patients about the formation and integrity of the ego, and not just the neurotic conflicts the ego struggles with – those anxieties about identity she called the deeper layers of the unconscious.

The dialogue with the unconscious in working with anxiety

2021-01-03T07:08:04+00:00

A defining tenet of Jung’s approach to psychotherapy is that the therapy is more than a dialogue between the psyche of the patient and that of the therapist. There is an invisible but active third perspective in the room: that of the unconscious, representing a viewpoint that, though shared by the therapeutic dyad, has its own autonomy and objectivity. Following Bion, psychoanalyst James Grotstein has said that in each session the analyst must freshly specify the anxiety that is present. Expressions of the unconscious, as in dreams, active imagination, and artistic products, tend to be very helpful in this task, sometimes calling attention to what is at the heart of the anxiety and sometimes reframing the situation to show that there is a limit to how much a particular anxiety has to teach us. Drawing on dreams reported in his own practice, as well as by seminal Jungian teacher Marie-Louise von Franz and a friend in analysis with another colleague, the author demonstrates how such expressions from the unconscious have illuminated and contextualized the nature of anxiety in therapy and life situations. Offering a fourth example of the unconscious bringing objective insight, the author describes his own consulting of the I Ching about a political development that was making him and many of his patients anxious. This divinatory method, introduced to analytical psychology by Jung, seems particularly well designed to help understanding that is unconscious become conscious and explicit.

Anxiety—genuine or spurious?

2021-01-03T07:11:28+00:00

In this essay I use contemporary accounts, often journalistic, of the extremely anxious condition that young adults, “quarter lifers,” appear to be suffering in large numbers. Their anxiety is often characterized by a paralyzing inability to accomplish the most trivial seeming tasks, while nonetheless working successfully at their jobs. They express bitter disappointments about the state of their lives, when their dreams—framed largely by their parents—have failed to materialize. Why this rise in anxiety— not only in the numbers of diagnoses and treatments we are now seeing—but in young adults’ experience of it as a semi-permanent condition?

The answer lies in Freud’s somewhat difficult 1925 essay, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” in which Freud links anxietywith “animal phobias” and “agoraphobias.” Unlike with the other two neurotic indicators (inhibitions and symptoms), anxiety is not an unconscious repression of enjoyment. Instead anxiety stages a unique reenactment of both Oedipus and castration anxiety simultaneously: the anxious person is pulled by contrary impulses, wanting to earn the Father’s love by giving up Oedipal desires (out of fear of castration by the Father), and a unique return of Oedipus (desire to possess the Mother by wishing their Father dead). Freud’s example is Little Hans, he of the horse phobia. The agoraphobia of today’s young adults is prime example of anxiety as the psychical inability to leave home or live their life outside their parents’ restrictive and narrow version of what their child’s life “ought to be.”

Responding for anxiety itself

2021-01-03T07:15:21+00:00

The reading presented in this essay, which manages to interrogate only a few pages of Freud’s text, is motivated by a question, claimed by the need to raise that question, as it concerns the relation between anxiety and responsibility. The reading carried out here should be taken, then, as an attempt at the elaboration of this question, perhaps even as a contribution to that elaboration, even though, as that reading progresses, it becomes only more preoccupied with only one single sentence found within the few pages it reads, by even then fixating, seemingly without justification, upon one peculiar phrase within that sentence, consisting of only three words.

Heidegger’s Angst and apocalyptic anxiety

2021-01-03T17:33:16+00:00

In this article I distinguish between the existential anxiety evoked by a confrontation with human finitude and what I call Apocalyptic anxiety signaling the end of human civilization itself. The end of civilization would terminate the historical process that gives meaning to individual existence. Apocalyptic anxiety announces the collapse of all meaningfulness, a possibility so horrifying that it commonly leads to evasion of its source.

A touch of separation— toward an ethics of anxiety in the age of the global contagion

2021-01-03T17:37:24+00:00

I examine the relation between anxiety and the COVID-19 pandemic. For context, I begin by sketching the rise of anxiety as a theme from the 19^th century to the post-World War II era, as a mood of the individual in a world without absolutes. Then, I characterize the current moment as the age of the anxiety of the global contagion. Next, I examine the most general effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the individual ego, as simultaneous radical separation from and connection with others. I proceed to juxtapose this situation with Freud’s anxiety theory, which likewise involves simultaneous separation and connection. The social ego today thus appears, from a Freudian perspective, as in an exacerbated anxiety-state. I claim that this exacerbation helps us understand more clearly Freud’s anxiety theory, and vice versa. I then consider where this anxiety takes place, and so I examine the Freudian “site” of anxiety—the ego. This examination clarifies two aspects of Freud’s ego-theory: both the sense in which the Freudian ego is (post)modern, and the sense in which Freud’s linkage of anxiety with the ego is not occasional, but constitutive. That is, the ego is the site of anxiety, in that anxiety characterizes the ego as such, because the ego is a (post) modern liminal structure. I suggest in conclusion that the affirmation and acceptance of anxiety as a fundamental experience of the ego, and of the psyche more generally, constitutes an ethical imperative for psychoanalysis in general, and especially in the contemporary age of the global contagion.

Anxiety states and early relational trauma

2021-04-05T22:58:27+00:00

A clinical tour de force that leaves some theoretical questions unanswered

2021-04-05T23:04:57+00:00

Anxiety, the other, and the ethics of desire

2021-04-05T23:08:21+00:00

A phenomenology of the other world

2021-04-05T23:11:09+00:00

Reading psychoanalytically

2021-04-05T23:13:27+00:00

The self-contestation of thought

2021-04-05T23:15:24+00:00