Temporality and spatiality of anxious experience

Since the first descriptions of anxiety, it has been related with temporality and in particular with the dimension of future. Thus, we already find anxiety defined as a general feeling of threatening (from the future) in the German mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1634). He also used the image of “the wheel of anxiety”, with which he refers to its probable origin in a conflict between two forces which tend to separate themselves and are not able to do it, as a result from this centrifugal rotation movement of a wheel. This image also has a temporal character. In Kierkegaard, we read that “anxiety is always related with the future… and when we are disturbed by the past we are basically projecting toward the future…” In Heidegger's masterpiece, “Being and Time”, there is a chapter dedicated to the temporality of Befindlichkeit, and in particular to anxiety. Fear and anxiety have their roots, according to Heidegger, in the past, but their relation with the future makes them different: anxiety arises from the future as possibility, while fear arises from the lost present. In this paper, we try to make a contribution to the phenomenology of temporality (and of spatiality) of anxiety in relation with the analysis of a concrete anxiety experience: flight phobia. The analysis allows us to show both the desolation and narrowing of anxiety space, and with respect to temporality, the disappearance of every plan (the future), of every history (the past), and the reduction of the present to a succession of mere punctualities, behind which there arises, threatening, the nothingness itself.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.

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Do we Worry about the Past and Grieve for the Future? Situated Anxiety or Depression, Mood Valence and Affective Time Travel, Separated by Experiment in a Questionnaire

10.31234/osf.io/wcxq6 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

David A. Booth

Keyword(s):

Negative Affect ◽

Laboratory Experiments ◽

Affective Response ◽

Anxiety And Depression ◽

Convenience Sample ◽

Verbal Stimuli ◽

Psychometric Scales ◽

The Past ◽

The Future ◽

Fear And Anxiety

Some psychologists have viewed sadness and depression as reactions to past loss, while regarding fear and anxiety as responses to future threat. Such assumptions conflict with common experience of gloom about the future and worry about the past. Recent research on these issues by experiment and/or by questionnaire remains inconclusive. The psychometric questionnaires purport to be situation-free and the laboratory experiments use artificial tasks; hence, neither approach addresses realities in the present, past or future. In recent psychometrics, the distinction between anxiety and depression has been dissolved into one category of negative affect. One widely used inventory for separating the two emotions conflates depression with the absence of a good mood. These deficiencies were addressed in a diverse convenience sample (N = 379) by running an experiment entirely within a questionnaire. Each of the 40 question items was a miniature vignette, describing a past or future emotive situation while in bad or good mood. Five categories of situation varied in proportion of threat to loss. Strength and valence of affective response were measured by degree of autobiographical assent to or dissent from an item. This inventory provides fully affect-balanced situation-oriented depression / anxiety scaling.Effect sizes from analysis of variance showed that anxiety arises from past as well as future threats, while depression is at least as strongly oriented to losses in the future as in the past. Variation in category of situation or in valence of mood also had substantial effects. It is concluded that worry and gloom travel freely across time and situations, whether present mood is bad or good. Both laboratory experiments and psychometric scales come closer to actual processes of emotion and motivation when they revivify familiar situations using valence-balanced verbal stimuli.

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Future, or On the Redemption of Nature after Schelling and Nietzsche

Religija ir kultūra ◽

10.15388/relig.2017.11 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 8-17

Author(s):

Emilio Carlo Corriero

Keyword(s):

Full Article ◽

English Abstract ◽

Being And Time ◽

Western Philosophy ◽

Philosophy Of Nature ◽

The Past ◽

New Beginning ◽

The Future ◽

Time And Being ◽

Article Abstract

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] It is starting from the role recognized and attributed to nature by Schelling and Nietzsche that one understands the renewed relationship between being and time at the basis of the possibility for the new beginning of Western philosophy, prophesized by Heidegger in 1936. For both, the possibility of the very future passes by the necessary redemption of the past (that is an extreme liberation from its conceptual hypostatization) through a form of love for the All, which is possible to recognize only with a philosophy of nature that is able to show the “unprethinkable” ground of being and its eternal dynamics as potential potentiae. Only on the basis of this potentia potentiae of the “unprethinkable” past, the “coming event” of the future becomes possible, as well as that renewed relation between time and being, which permits a new beginning for Western philosophy.

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Time for Hegel

Hegel Bulletin ◽

10.1017/s0263523200007576 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 27 (1-2) ◽

pp. 125-132

Author(s):

Stephen Houlgate

Keyword(s):

Being And Time ◽

The Past ◽

The Future ◽

To Come

In section 82 of Being and Time Heidegger calls Hegel's account of time ‘the most radical way in which the ordinary [or vulgar] understanding of time has been given form conceptually’ (BT 480). For Heidegger, in the vulgar conception ‘the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the “now”; by contrast, Dasein's own “ecstatico-horizonal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future (BT 479). Hegel's problem, it seems, is that he has no time for the future.As Heidegger explains in his 1924 lecture on the concept of time, Dasein is futural because it is essentially possibility — ‘the possibility of its certain yet indeterminate past (CT 12). That future pastness is, of course, Dasein's death. Dasein is thus oriented towards the future because it is being-towards-death — the death that is certain to come, one knows not when.The vulgar interpretation of time represents a flight both from Dasein's death and from its futural temporality, since it places the present at the centre of concern. Time, for the vulgar understanding, is simply ‘a sequence of “nows” which are constantly “present-at-hand”, simultaneously passing away and coming along’ (BT 474). The past and future are thus understood to be no more than the now that is no longer or is not yet. The future in particular is hereby distorted: for it is not thought to be the certain though indeterminate possibility in relation to which our present existence is first constituted, but is conceived as present existence that is yet to come.

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The Experience of Time in Habitual Teenage Marijuana Smokers

European Psychiatry ◽

10.1016/j.eurpsy.2017.01.1290 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 41 (S1) ◽

pp. S717-S717

Author(s):

A. Dörr

Keyword(s):

High Rate ◽

Phenomenological Method ◽

Temporal Dimension ◽

Guiding Principle ◽

The Past ◽

Experience Of Time ◽

The Future ◽

Competing Interest ◽

The Relationship ◽

Future Plans

The research is qualitative; it studies the experience of time in young people who smoke marijuana in excess, given the high rate of smoking in the teenage years, a delicate stage regarding the planning of the future. Our objective is to see how the relationship between past and future plans is manifested in their biography, through goals and actions, in light of their ability to anticipate themselves. Our guiding principle is the ability to “anticipate oneself”, proposed by Sutter, a phenomenological psychiatrist. The information was obtained from the analysis of autobiographies of young persons through the hermeneutical phenomenological method developed by Lindseth, based on Ricoeur. The results reveal that in the biographies the past temporal dimension is characterized by poor descriptions, the present is where they extend themselves most, describing tastes, how they visualize themselves, but showing a lack of clarity in their interests. In the future, we see the absence of reference, giving the impression of no progression from the past, and without awareness of the fact that the future possibilities or lack thereof are heavily dependent on present actions.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

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