We often hear that we, as society, have never been so anxious. If that’s so, then what could we do with all this anxiety? Is it possible to consider that we can experience it, traverse it, towards some sort of emancipation rather than being further subjugated, medicalised or simply paralysed by our anxiety?

This is a psychosocial cartography anxiety which takes you, reader, for a long and deep walk towards a creative clinic of this puzzling affect—our site, destiny and point of departure all at once. Accompanying us are several psychosocial scholars, psychoanalysts and feminists past and present. In our travels, these disciplines and traditions of scholarship will also be questioned in light of the forms of subjective and social alienation they produce and reproduce. In this sense, anxiety matters on the couch but also outside of it. If you are a clinician, researcher, artist or activist, this is an invitation of thinking-together.

The ubiquitous anxious sensation of dread, breathlessness, paralysation and panic has been at the centre of debates in psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis and the target of wellness rituals and advice over the last century. Measured by governments as a sign of populational lack of wellbeing, medicated en masse in primary care and heard as a common complaint of those arriving at a psychoanalytic couch—often after having tried other methods and therapies to ease their suffering—anxiety has been called a ‘silent epidemic’ affecting a fifth of the population in places such as the United States and the United Kingdom (Cooke, 2013; Bandelow & Michaelis, 2015).

In psychoanalysis, since Freud, anxiety is curiously not something to get rid of so fast, or the problem itself. Rather, it is an affect integral to psychic experience that functions as a signal of a threat to the ego (Freud, 1917, 1926). Being so, anxiety is considered to be a ‘compass’ in the mapping of an analytic treatment (Miller, 2007). Some clinical approaches within psychiatry and the psychologies, such as Positive Psychology, and even psychoanalytic orientations from a British and North-American tradition, find value in strengthening one’s ego defences against the hurricane that anxiety may feel like. In the Freudian and Lacanian orientations, broadly speaking, however, making the ego more malleable, capable of riding the sweeping waves from the unconscious that become apparent in anxiety, is the direction of the treatment in which anxiety is not a stranger to the self; instead, it is entangled in the life of the subject, in their abysses and horizons.

In this book, I take you for a cartographic-trip to the possible ‘full-void’ of anxiety, arguing that psychoanalysis not only offers valuable insights into what one’s anxiety is all about as it also opens possibilities for the constructions of new modes of living departing from the rupture to the self that characterises the experience of anxiety. My writing here, which comes as a result of an extensive research combined with years of clinical practice privately and in community projects, makes the point that psychoanalysis, when (and if) read through non-Oedipal lenses, informs not only what can be done to anxiety but also points towards answers of ‘what anxiety can do’.

In looking for the clues to the possibilities of anxiety as an affect, I will trace a route into a creative clinic, one that holds on to what I call psychoanalytic ‘vibrational moments’ where the affect of anxiety takes the subject away from an abyss-within into a horizon-beyond oneself. In doing so, I explore the possibilities of ‘being’ and ‘becomings’ for psychoanalysis by thinking through the potentialities of rupture in the psychoanalytic clinic, and also, what to do with it: interpret rupture within structural frames or mobilise it into novel and collective ways of being, assembling it through the technique of co-poiesis, as we learn holding hands with the late-Brazilian artist Lygia Clark and inspiring thinkers such as Félix Guattari and Rosi Braidotti, all of whom have shaken psychoanalytic pillars in their own way. Such balance is a subtle and yet serious political matter that crosses feminist, ecological and decolonial demands and critiques to the clinical and epistemological pillars of analytic praxis. At the same time, it speaks to the mundane, here-and-now, experiences of anxiety we are understood to be all immersed in.

In this psychosocial cartography, I set psychoanalysis and its potential approach to anxiety as resting between a ‘dividualising’ alienating modulation of affect—which relies on the Oedipal paradigm of domination and castration—and the plane of immanence Lygia Clark (1994) calls a ‘full-void’, which vibrates through the subject what extends beyond oneself as an ethics of multiplicity and togetherness (Deleuze, 1992; Braidotti, 1994, 2006). Exploring the troubles and the promises of both a ‘dividualising’ and a ‘vibrational’ model of psy, I search for the psychoanalytic unconscious in its moment of excess, rupture and too-muchness that characterises anxiety—or, an anxiety as vibration, in search of a psychosocial creative clinic. This clinic is a clinic where other worlds are possible and unfold in the complicated threshold of necessity and possibility—or what is, was and what could be.