Anxiety—genuine or spurious?

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.”

Little Hans and the “Enigmatic Messages” of His Parents

The authors discuss the psychoanalytic treatment of Little Hans, drawing on the perspective offered by Laplanche's concept of “enigmatic messages,” which they believe can contribute to a better understanding of this case history. They conclude that Little Hans's positive Oedipus complex conceals his negative Oedipus complex in which he represents his parents’ oedipal problems in a distorted fashion. They demonstrate the way his parents project aspects of these problems into Hans's psyche, where his subsequent identifications with them lead to substitutive formations. They trace the course of Little Hans's horse phobia and examine his search for substitutive formations that have to align with his parents’ defenses if they are to succeed in securing his safety and their affection.

Detestable Residue: From Psychoanalysis to Blanchot and Lyotard

This chapter traces Freud’s interest in yet apparent aversion to phobia, from his earliest writings on the topic in the 1890s through to his reinterpretation of the 1909 Little Hans case study in the 1920s. Here, it is possible to detect something like a phobic reaction to phobia itself: what might be called Freud’s phobophobia. It is also be possible to find, in the subsequent literature on the case of Little Hans, traces of this phobic reaction contaminating sometimes sharply critical readings: in Deleuze’s markedly hostile attitude to this Freudian text, we find an aversion to what is in fact most ‘phobic’ about it. Through exploring the Lacanian idea that phobia prevents the onset of psychosis in the event of a certain lapse of the paternal metaphor, phobia seems to operate precisely through a certain resistance to itself, a doubleness that renders Freud’s phobophobia not just a psychological curiosity but perhaps a feature of the very structure of phobia from the outset. Psychoanalytic approaches to phobia with are contrasted with other ways to think about its subject-matter, notably in the writings of Blanchot and Lyotard.