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

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 19th 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.

Heidegger’s Angst and apocalyptic anxiety

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.

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.”

Anxiety: Melanie Klein's 'deeper' layers

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.