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.

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.

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.