The field of psy, as we have seen in these initial meanders and incursions, is drenched in subjective ideals of cure, treatment, pathology and normality. The ideological compass orienting the function of the clinic reveals, accordingly, political consequences implied in epistemological and ontological foundations of clinical praxis. As Nikolas Rose puts it, “the idea of the norm, as it came into use in the late nineteenth century, linked together the ideas of statistical normality, social normality and medical normality: the norm was the average, the desirable, the healthy, the ideal and so forth” (Rose, 2018, p. 9). In this sense, “normality—of what it is to be normal, to think of oneself as normal, to be considered as normal by others—leads to a set of rather profound questions” (Rose, 2018, p. 9). As such, the pathologisation of anxiety and the enquiry over what anxiety is all about, what it is telling us and what are the grounds of its emergence have meet question of ‘what can anxiety do?’. Now, we look into the question of what psychoanalysis can offer to the treatment of anxiety and why this is a path still worth pursuing, whilst considering the many ‘dividualising’ aspects of the psychoanalytic discourse itself.

The matter of the ideological foundations of treatment in the field of psy is dealt with philosophically with this horizon of situating anxiety as ‘vibration’, orienting this effort in relation to the limits of ‘being’ and possibilities of ‘becoming’ in the experience of anxiety. To do so, we are investigating the psychoanalytic unconscious in the understanding of the affect of anxiety, which leads us to a point of ‘excess’, and this is what we will tour in more detail through a discussion on the foundations of ‘negativity’ in psychoanalysis of the Freudian and Lacanian orientations. An increased focus on biological, behavioural and individualised aspects of psychological distress in contemporary understandings of anxiety becomes evident. In psychoanalysis, conversely, unconscious, relational and contextual elements frame distress and symptoms.

Anxiety and Psychoanalysis, Excesses

The manner in which psychiatry deals with psychic suffering through the twentieth century can be characterised as a ‘descriptive psychopathology’ (Berrios, 1996). Biology and individual causality are at the heart of the efforts of the DSM-III, IV and V (Rose, 2018), where the affect of anxiety is divided, listed and pathologised accordingly. This debate involves complex philosophical and ideological assumptions that permeate wider discourses in psychiatry, psychologies and psychoanalysis that meet precisely at the complicated, yet often oversimplified, definition of what is normal and what is pathological in affective life. In other words, the riddle of quantifying and qualifying ‘how much anxiety is too much?’ is the backbone of a contemporary dividual, estranged from anxiety.

Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century medical literature discussed what were considered both ‘subjective’ (fear, phobia, etc.) and ‘objective’ (digestive, respiratory, etc.) aspects of what was later combined into the understanding of ‘anxiety’ disorders or symptoms as unrelated phenomena that were formative of other illnesses and of madness. In other words, “by the mid-nineteenth century, the term anxiety was used in medical writings to describe a mental state that fell within the range of normal human experiences but was able to cause or lead to disease, including insanity” (Berrios, 1996, p. 266). Bodily and psychological experiences were, therefore, bound in anxiety. Yet, it was only in the later decades of the nineteenth century that the prominence of a ‘nervous’ system, or a ganglionar system, gave rise to an understanding of anxiety as having something to do with an excessive production of some sort from within the body and a link with perception—or what was being sensed from outside. This focus on the nerves and neurology in the works of physicians such as Xavier Bichat, Bénédict Morel and chiefly George Miller Beard (Shorter, 2005) both in the USA and in Europe would see the diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia’ grow in popularity, containing symptoms of what we would now understand as anxiety or even an anxiety or panic attack (Berrios, 1996). In the context of such diagnoses of a ‘weakness of the nerves’ and of the social and medical enigma of hysteria, psychoanalysis emerges as a clinical approach that accounted for the unconscious traces and logics at the heart of symptoms. The psychoanalytic emphasis on anxiety can be found in a very early theoretical proposition written by Freud, ‘On The Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia Under The Description “Anxiety Neurosis”’ (1894). Anxiety neurosis was here being called as such “because all its components can be grouped round the chief symptom of anxiety, because each one of them has a definite relationship to anxiety” (Freud, 1894, p. 91). Freud, in this paper, recognises the potential similarities in diagnosis of cases of neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, but he moves on to clarifying the difference between the two as lying precisely in the specific sexual origins of anxiety neurosis—the sexual can be interpreted with a more contemporary inflection as libidinal or concerning what Lacan names jouissance, an enjoyment beyond the scope of the subject.

Freud also defends that the psychoanalytic method is the only one capable of providing in-depth enough interpretations which not only proved his theory of anxiety neurosis right but also unveiled symptoms. He writes “it is impossible to pursue an aetiological investigation based on anamneses if we accept those anamneses as the patients present them, or are content with what they are willing to volunteer” (Freud, 1895, p. 129).Footnote 1 In other words, we cannot take presented symptoms or narratives of complaints at face value, once they are not the ‘full picture’, once consciousness is not sufficient to depict the grounds of psychic suffering. The unconscious marks a division among methods, interpretations and treatments in the field of psy, wrapping symptoms around it.

In psychoanalysis, anxiety is defined as an affect, mobilising therefore ‘body’ and ‘mind’ equally. Anxiety “includes in the first place particular motor innervations or discharges and secondly certain feelings; the latter are of two kinds—perceptions of the motor actions that have occurred and the direct feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which, as we say, give the affect its keynote” (Freud, 1917, p. 395). In other words, the affect of anxiety situates the subject in relation to what is beyond oneself, stretching perception and feelings that are both bodily and psychological, of one’s position in the world—challenging thus the dividualising foundations of mainstream psychiatric and psychological care. This move or encounter with an abyss-within or a horizon-beyond oneself is at the centre of the unsettling, overwhelming but also creative potential of this ‘exceptional affect’ that marks an appearance of what Lacan named the register of the Real (Soler, 2014). What makes anxiety really compelling also theoretically is how both Freud and Lacan have cast it as an affect of ‘excess’, as this close study of their work on anxiety in the next chapters will reveal. For Freud, as per his 1917 Introductory Lecture on anxiety, anxiety is an excessive affect that escapes the ego’s attempts of repressing or representing a libidinal vicissitude—castration anxiety points thus to the threat an overwhelming libido poses to the ego, which in its turn acts as a psychic gatekeeper of stability in Freudian topology.

Post-Freudians, in particular Melanie Klein, interpret and modify Freud’s topological model, which, after his publication of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in 1919, and ‘The Ego and the Id’, in 1923, shifts his theories of anxiety to the workings of the Ego, Id and Super-Ego. Klein’s work places anxiety at the centre of the psyche, with an idea that babies are born ‘full’ of this overwhelming intensity, which towards her later writings she saw as a manifestation of the death drive. In ‘The Theory of Anxiety and Guilt’ (1948), Klein writes: “My contention that anxiety originates in the fear of annihilation derives from experience accumulated in the analyses of young children” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 29). Anxiety, for her, is centrally connected to guilt, which, in turn, fuels the shift from an early paranoid-schizoid position, where “hatred and persecutory anxiety become attached to the frustrating (bad) breast, and love and reassurance to the gratifying (good) breast” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 34). Some states of transitory integration between the good and the bad part-objects give rise to a “synthesis between love and hatred […] which gives rise to depressive anxiety” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 34). This transition towards the depressive position, where reparation becomes possible, is formative of the ego, which in development would be able to handle both what she called ‘persecutory anxiety’ and ‘depressive anxiety’, equipped with the necessary defence-mechanisms to experience both anxieties. In her words, such a mechanism is “the ego’s capacity of evolving adequate defences against anxiety, i.e. the proportion of the strength of anxiety to the strength of the ego” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 40). Klein forged her own theory of anxiety, with much creativity; carving her original reading of the function of this affect, she writes: “An optimum in the interaction between libido and aggression implies that the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 42). In Klein’s clinical technique, and similarly in other Object Relational traditions that would follow in the twentieth century, the analyst works through the transference and countertransference envisaging offering a therapeutic reparation (Rustin, 2015) through introjections of qualities from the relation with the analyst and interpretations that act to uncover and symbolise unconscious phantasies.

Lacan was rather sceptical of the techniques employed by Klein in the clinic and the belief in the possibility of full-symbolisation of a phantasy, as well as of prospects of life under a strong and stable ego, as, to him, the ego, especially as it was formulated by the Ego-Analysts in the United States, pertained to the register of the Imaginary. The Imaginary in Lacan can be summarised as the function that offers coherence to the world ‘outside’ through the ‘image’, or the mirage of the subject. Its limits, the limits of this anchoring ‘mirage’ and ‘subjective coherence’, are particularly relevant to understanding anxiety, as in anxiety the fictional character of this subjective mirage becomes evident—or better, the mirage is under threat, the abyss comes near (Lacan, 1960). For Lacan, it is in anxiety that the Real makes an ‘apparition’, since “anxiety highlights how much of the subject is not captured by language, or how much is left over after the most exhaustive attempts to encapsulate or represent the subject in words” (Gallagher, 1996, p. 5). Because of its relation to the Real, anxiety points at a failure of fantasy, and this theoretical relation is developed in detail throughout Lacan’s Seminar X on Anxiety, delivered between 1962 and 1963. Fantasy functions as a cover up for a fundamental ‘structural fault’ of the subject, and it fails to provide this efficient covering up in the moment of anxiety. This fact alone alludes to something beyond symbolisation, something that fails and in failing is unique to each subject that is evident in anxiety. In other words, the mirage of the subject is destabilised in anxiety. The curtain is lifted, a veil evaporates.

The psychoanalytic view of anxiety reiterates the psychoanalytic understanding of the symptom and diagnosis. This means that it goes against the logic of contemporary hegemonic discourses in psychology and psychiatry, in which anxiety is treated as a generator of ‘disorders’ in its own right or as an isolated symptom to be ‘cured’ or ‘managed away’. For Lacan, as much as for Freud, anxiety is not ‘the problem’, let alone ‘a problem to be eliminated’ in the search of some ‘cure’. What the trail of anxiety reveals to us in our psychosocial analysis of its journey in and out of the clinic, from the mid to late twentieth century until the current moment, is an affective-politics, or an affective domination, that steers the subject away from any possibility of living with their anxiety, their affects or conceiving life beyond the curtain or the veil of fantasy. Working with anxiety as an affect of ‘excess’, however, is not a conventional or unproblematic position psychoanalytically, especially when it touches the very onto-epistemic foundations of Freudian and Lacanian thought. And that is so in relation to the function of what frames such excess (fantasy, defences or Oedipal-identifications) in the model of subjectivity that informs a psy praxis.

The Normal, the Pathological and the Unconscious

During the twentieth century, several scholars and practitioners have questioned psychiatric hegemony and the socio-political implications of ‘normality’. From the works of Thomas Szasz and Erving Goffman in the United States, to David Cooper and R.D. Laing in Britain, as well as Robert Castel and Franco Basaglia in France and Italy, the myths and makings of mental illness have integrated what is understood as the (still polemic) field of critical psychiatry and psychology (Middleton & Moncrieff, 2019). In France, during the 1940s and 1950s, Georges Canguilhem was closely associated with the radical clinic of Saint-Alban, where Tosquelles, Jean Oury and Franz Fanon also lived and worked, taking Lacan’s psychoanalytic ‘return to Freud’ into the institution and furthering its potencies in the treatment of psychoses (Robcis, 2021). Canguilhem (1991), in On the Normal and the Pathological, from 1943, what characterises a form of suffering that is ‘enough of a problem’ to be considered a ‘pathology’ appears always in contrast with an idea—or ideal—of normativity that frames the subject ideologically through ranking possibilities of recognition of such suffering. As such, and building from the movements of pathologising and diagnosing anxiety, we can agree that there is neither a ‘normal’ nor a ‘pathological’ in itself, rather, there are only these qualifications within the relation between an organism and the environment. Social context and the context produced by the qualifications generated by the psychologies (and in an ample manner, the psy-field) are crucial elements of any interpretation of ‘suffering’. In short, what Canguilhem proposes is that the characterisation of what is to suffer ‘normally’ or not is a producer of this very suffering too. This ideological matter and its consequences have been examined in detail through the ‘grammar’ of anxiety. Still, if psychoanalysis is to offer anything different to this grammar, we must look at it closer and answer: why psychoanalysis as our road towards an anxiety as vibration?

In the essay ‘What is Psychology?’, from the late 1950s, Canguilhem adds a further layer to his critique of the ‘sciences’ of psyche, asserting that “it is inevitable that in presenting itself as the general theory of behaviour, psychology will incorporate some idea of Man. Hence, it is necessary that we allow philosophy to question psychology about where this idea comes from, and whether it may not be, ultimately, some philosophy” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 202). We can unpack this problem in two different manners. First: the context producing and qualifying suffering as well as the ideological normativity implicated when assessing this suffering are not neutral. These initial points are fundamental to inquiring about this affect in a non-normative manner and asking what is the role of both diagnosis and cultural discourses in the contemporary understanding of anxiety. That is, how do diagnoses and culture produce our relation to this affect at an individual level? Second: there is an idea—and again, an ideal—of subjectivity predicted in the very object of psychology, and by being so, questions brought by philosophy (and critical theories, in general, including feminist, ecological and decolonial epistemologies) cannot be dismissed. In other words, psychology operates within an ontology epistemically situated, or an understanding of the subject bound within a scientific discourse. Therefore, if ever speaking of an ‘anxious self’ or ‘anxious subject’, it is necessary to make it clear what this notion of self in question is and how it is produced. This movement of contextualising the conditions of subjective production and reproduction is, in particular, one that permeates the psychosocial landscape.

In both elements of Canguilhem’s critiques, there is something that sets psychoanalysis apart from other psychological practices, especially those in evidence in the present time (such as CBT, Positive Psychology and biological psychiatry). To follow this argument, we can return to Foucault (2008), who questions in Mental Illness and Psychology (from 1954) the limits between what is considered a ‘pathology’ of the organic/physical domain and the ‘mental’ or more subjective realm. These two realms are, in Freudian psychoanalysis, as Foucault sees it, worked through a complementary psyche-soma that extends beyond a simple or linear etiological ‘cause and effect’ relation. As an illustrative example we could think of the early texts on hysteria in Studies on Hysteria, in which psychological phenomena implicate the body and are implicated by the body enigmatically, rather than linearly. More clearly, in the Freudian notion of the drive (pulsion, Trieb, first mistranslated as ‘instinct’ into English), a complex interrelation of mind/body, without necessarily privileging any part over the other is at stake. As a contrast, an example of a cause/effect and a dualism between body/mind can be found in the organicist psychiatric discourse that attempts to locate suffering in the brain and treats mental ‘malaise’ through a rebalancing of chemical substances, natural or not to the human organism. Psychoanalysis, accordingly, sits in between the organic-medical discourse and a philosophical understanding of the self/subject that amplifies the understanding of a self beyond the physical body yet not transcending it completely. Psychoanalysis however moves over from a ‘soul versus flesh’ pre-modern narrative that nineteenth century psychology set as the line between religion and science (Guéry & Deleule, 2014). In psychoanalysis, materiality and discursivity are intertwined in a subject that is intrinsically political; therefore, suffering is never completely alienated from its context, neither is it totally absorbed by it. Suffering operates instead as this point of tension between the singular and the contextual.

To all psychologies, and to psychoanalysis too, and perhaps here being a different project than that of philosophy or of social sciences, questions of method or object are superseded by one matter that seems to have greater importance, that is of the clinical ‘efficiency’ or ‘probity’ in ‘treating’ a patient and their psychic suffering. Rather than a neat theory, psychologies and psychoanalysis, in the best case-scenarios, are grounded in the clinic. Canguilhem reminds us that to free itself from the ‘unscientific’ rancid aftertaste of being the ‘science of the soul’, “in 19th and 20th centuries, the psychology of reaction and behaviour thought it made itself independent by separating itself from all philosophy, that is to say, from the kind of speculation that looks for an idea of Man beyond the biological and sociological facts” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 212). However, this system of verification of reality—let alone the classification of the possibilities of reality seen in the following diagnostic manuals for instance—led to an artificial doubling up of the reality of the ‘classifier’, or the psychologist, over the reality of the ‘classified’, the ‘mentally ill’ patient. As he puts it, the behavioural focus of the nineteenth and twentieth century—and even, we could propose, its contemporary twist in Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy—“could not prevent the recurrence of its results in the behaviour of those who obtain them” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 212). In other words, the power relation established between the expert and the patient actualises diagnoses (Proctor, 2008)—echoing what Marcuse (1969) calls a ‘corporealisation of the superego’, or a symptomatic embodiment of authority. By separating itself from any ‘unscientific’ subjectivism that would be possibly questioned by philosophy, this behavioural pattern classification system and a focus on the ‘organicist’ body of medical sciences, the field of psy “forbids philosophy from furnishing the answer, [to] the question ‘What is psychology?’ [Which] becomes ‘In doing what they do, what do psychologists hope to accomplish?’” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 212). According to Guéry and Deleule (2014), psy-discourses are not just an ideological reflection of a capitalist mode of production. Rather, they become an indispensable gear in the social machinery that moves such ideological mechanisms. Ideology and pathos, in psychopathology, are deeply intertwined, with its foundations evident both in the subject assumed as normal and the subject assumed as ill, as well as in the aims of the therapeutic treatment (Federici, 2020).

Whilst the ‘cure’ and ‘ease of suffering’ may be the core aim of much, if not all, clinical practice, and the fact that such a foundation to the clinic can be at times an indisputable debate, the very understanding of what is suffering and why it needs to be ‘eliminated’ or even ‘cured’ carries with itself a heavy ideological charge. To this, Canguilhem offers an ironic yet relevant comment: “It is rather vulgarly, then, that philosophy poses to psychology the question: tell me what you aim for so that I may find out what you are?” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 212). Here, then, the contextual debate over what is suffering and how it accompanies the discourses of normality and pathology is also a point in which psychoanalysis offers its unique approach through the psychoanalytical understanding of the symptom—not isolated, not universal, but particular and yet, in relation to a wider social, political and discursive context.

Beyond a Cartesian dualism, and far from being monistic, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis then offers to the field of psy the innovation of speech and the performative aspect of the narration of one’s own experience, as well as an understanding of the symptom as relating to demands of recognition that are always produced through the social bond. The early term of ‘deferred action’ (Nachträglichkeit) introduced by Freud in the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in 1895, when discussing the case of Emma, already brings attention to the weight of the narrative and speech over psychic reality, stressing how history, and poignantly one’s own history, can be constructed retroactively. Such a movement marks a crucial component of the psychoanalytic view of subjective formation, much evidenced in the Lacanian use of the term ‘parlêtre’, the speaking-being, in which the lived experience is harnessed on a body that speaks, this being the condition for subjectivity. Birman (2003) speaks of three core ‘de-centrings’ brought in by psychoanalysis to the world of thought and, specifically, to philosophy. I find Birman’s reading useful when thinking, psychosocially, ‘why psychoanalysis?’, and will move into incorporating his views into our argument that follows.

Since Freud, it is in the unconscious—or in what lies beyond a conscious Ich—that psychoanalysis is anchored. The unconscious is, for Freud (1923), the first ‘shibboleth’ of psychoanalysis, “the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life” (Freud, 1923, p. 13). The unconscious, as Freud suggests as early as 1894, repeating it in 1915, 1920 and explicating in 1923, “does not coincide with the repressed” (Freud, 1923, p. 18). Rather, “it is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed” (Freud, 1923, p. 18). There is, as Freud repetitively reminds us, a part of the ego that is unconscious and not related to repression or meaning; it is an ‘I’ beyond itself. A clinic that operates with a subject of the unconscious is, therefore, a clinic that works through the repetitions and pains, as well as the possibilities on the horizon, of such an ‘I’ beyond itself. In other words, psychoanalysis is, or can be, as I will move into arguing, a creative practice between ‘beings’ and ‘becomings’.

The more general contributions of psychoanalysis to both philosophy and the sciences of the ‘psy’ (psychiatry, psychologies as well as neurology and neurosciences) are, according to Birman (2003), fundamentally: (1) the unconscious activity and (2) the manifestations of such activity. Within these novel paradigms it is not solely a ‘divided subject’ that emerges, which earlier philosophical texts were already proposing in their different approaches; for example from the Cartesian to the Kantian subjects, human ‘wholeness’ had been demystified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, it is the production of desire (the potentialities, the complexities of symptoms and structures, etc.) in the ‘being in the world’ of an individual that is then understood through a systematic mapping of the psychic and subjective dynamics. In ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’, written in 1938, Freud starts off addressing this very point at which his psychoanalytic works were arriving. Freud writes:

Psychoanalysis makes a basic assumption, the discussion of which is reserved to philosophical thought but the justification for which lies in its results. We know two kinds of things about what we call our psyche (or mental life): firstly, its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be further explained by any sort of description. Everything that lies between is unknown to us, and the data do not include any direct relation between these two terminal points of our knowledge. If it existed, it would at the most afford an exact localization of the processes of consciousness and would give us no help towards understanding them. (Freud, 1938, pp. 144–145)

Here Freud acknowledges the idea of consciousness assumed by his work and that it also runs along the side of, if not against, a scientific tradition that tends—as it already did in the late 1800s—to localise acts of consciousness in the brain and, at that time, in the nervous system. Psychoanalysis brings to light the psychic apparatus and, with it, is able to raise questions that are particular to knowledge after psychoanalysis, different to other forms of divided subject or of subjectivity as carved through the social bond that could be proposed without this psychoanalytic ‘mapping’.Footnote 2 Freud was not a philosopher, “but he ended up by constructing psychoanalysis as a new field of knowledge, which formulated new presuppositions in regards to subjectivity. His thought is directly linked to philosophical thought through the problems psychoanalysis posed to philosophy” (Birman, 2003, p. 16). In ‘Lecture XXXV The Question of a Weltanschauung’, part of the New Introductory Lectures, Freud (1933a) opposes psychoanalysis to philosophy. Psychoanalysis, unlike philosophy, was not for Freud a Weltanschauung, the German term to which Freud offers a careful simple explanation as “an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place” (Freud, 1933b, p. 158). Freud points out that this ‘view of the universe’ was not the intention of psychoanalysis, since just by being a branch of psychology, psychoanalysis was, rather, more justifiably to be subjected to the ‘scientific’ Weltanschauung; yet, this ‘scientific’ view of the world was not really appropriate to the psychoanalytic cause. And that is “due to the procedures present in the scientific discourse, psychoanalysis would turn itself over the research of circumscribed objects, whilst philosophy had endeavoured always towards the totality of the being and of the real” (Birman, 2003, p. 9). Such a conception of philosophy is naturally debatable, but it marks one of Freud’s later understandings of the status of the psychoanalytic discourse as something ‘else’. Psychoanalysis is not a philosophy, nor can it be ‘only’ a psychology.

Upon this last point, the extract of Freud’s ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ quoted above reveals a conversation with the scientific status of psychoanalytic work. Freud is clear when arguing that even if more advanced scientific work enabled the localisation of consciousness ‘inside’ the brain, the experience of consciousness and of the unconscious would not change. And along with this, the ‘point’ or the ‘justification’ of psychoanalysis also does not change. And that would be because psychoanalysis, differently to neurosciences, ‘deals with something else’: psychoanalysis is not trying to produce a theory of the world and life and it also should not be bound to the medical-scientific discourse. That is, as mentioned previously, it may be the narrative offered to experience and the performative aspect of subjectivity that matter in the analytic experience, more than any ‘verifiable’ or ‘arguable’ reality.

Even when not particularly endeavouring to trace a whole new system of meanings, truths or theories about the universe or anything in it, Freudian psychoanalysis still was capable, under its due limitations of being first and foremost a clinical practice, of shaking if not shifting certain paradigms around the conception of a self (Ricoeur, 2008). With the psychoanalytic unconscious, a shift from the ‘conscious I’ to what lays beyond it and the drive become the regulators of psychic experience. Birman lists the three different meanings of the paradigmatic de-centrings inaugurated by Freud as: “1) from consciousness to the unconscious; 2) from the ‘I’ to the other; 3) from consciousness, the ‘I’ and the unconscious to the drive” (Birman, 2003, p. 60). What psychoanalysis adds to theory and to the clinic and where it diverges from other mainstream clinical practices is precisely an account of the psyche-soma that puts consciousness and individualism in question. To this list, following the ‘vibrational moments’ we will track down across Freud and Lacan’s theories of anxiety and a Guattarian-feminist critique of psychoanalysis via Lygia Clark, I add: 4) from the Other to the vibrational, affective ‘full-void’ Real. Let’s keep that in our pockets.

From an Abyss-within to a Horizon-beyond

When concluding the video interview Une Politique de la Folie, from 1989, Tosquelles—the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist psychiatrist who founded Institutional Psychotherapy in France—leaves us with a ‘prophetisation’: that the proletariat should remain connected to the unconscious, rather than aim at gaining consciousness [rester branché sur l’inconscient et non sur la prise de conscience] en route to emancipation. Freud, Tosquelles (1991) argues, initially thought that the subject could become conscious of their unconscious and unknown problems, formulating a truth that would relieve suffering. Yet, Freud himself, Tosquelles suggests, changed his mind by the 1930s, disenchanted with the focus on gaining consciousness in favour of gaining unconsciousness. It is no secret that his was a Lacanian flavoured Freud, or a ‘French Freud’ (Turkle, 1998).Footnote 3 Is the psychoanalytic unconscious, however, an abyss-within the subject or a horizon-beyond oneself?

In Freud’s 1933 New Introductory Lectures, Lecture XXXI ‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality’, we find a final version of the famous line and psychoanalytic motto he first presented in The Ego and the Id, in 1923: Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden. “Where Id was, there ego shall be”, in the original English translation by James Strachey. What Freud was proposing was that psychoanalysis’ “intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id” (Freud, 1933a, p. 80). Whilst this very passage can attest to the psychoanalytic contract with a certain kind of subjective adaptation—one that would allow a liberation of oneself from an imposing super-ego in the production of a more autonomous, ‘strong’ ego, generating an individual of liberties, less repressions and perhaps very suitable for the demands of a global neoliberal capitalist society—it can equally attest to the contrary of adaptation to internalised morality. This very passage also reads as a definition of the psychoanalytic project and clinic as an expansion, a modification of the sense of self, making it less stiff and nailed onto the Law, capable of entering an ethical relationship to what extends beyond one’s consciousness.

In the nuance of the ambiguity of this passage rests my bet with psychoanalysis. What does psychoanalysis do, or what can it do, that addresses the battles of psychic and psychosomatic suffering and, at the same time, decentres the modern humanist subject, opening possibilities for the creation of new ways of living, of new worlds? Can the psychoanalytic clinic of anxiety, thus, move from the level of an alienating subjective ‘estrangement’ to an ‘entanglement’? It is in this midst that I anchor a question: What can anxiety do?

Anxiety, to Freud, Angst, was different to fear (Furcht) for it had no object. It is a suffering, a discontent, an affect without a clear reason or focus that mobilises both psyche and soma. Angst, in Strachey’s translation of Freud into English, becomes ‘anxiety’ and not ‘anguish’, a move he justifies both in terms of the medical history of the term anxiety and of its Latin root evoking choking, making of anxiety a powerfully descriptive word for the sensation of this affect. He writes:

There is, however, a well-established psychiatric, or at least medical, use of the English ‘anxiety’, going back (so the Oxford Dictionary tells us) to the middle of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the psychiatric use of the two words brings to light their parallel origins. ‘Angst’ is akin to ‘eng’, the German word for ‘narrow’, ‘restricted’; ‘anxiety’ is derived from the Latin ‘angere’, ‘to throttle’ or ‘squeeze’; in both cases the reference is to the choking feelings which characterize severe forms of the psychological state in question. A still more acute condition is described in English by the word ‘anguish’, which has the same derivation; and it is to be remarked that Freud in his French papers uses the kindred word ‘angoisse’ (as well as the synonymous ‘anxiété’) to render the German ‘Angst’. (Strachey, 1962, pp. 116–117)

The word ‘angoisse’ rather than anxiété (the word utilised by Lacan, in which Freud’s translations first appeared in French) could also be more accurately translated as ‘anguish’ in English. In other Latin-rooted languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, the choice in translation of both Freud and Lacan matches ‘anguish’ more closely in the words angústia and angoscia. Yet, the translation of Lacan’s seminars into English also works with ‘anxiety’ and this is my choice in this cartographic effort, echoing Strachey’s remarks about the medical history of ‘anxiety’ and the potency of a ‘grammar’ of psychic suffering. As it navigates translations and a telling medicalised history that marks its psychoanalytic journey, anxiety is a central theme in psychoanalytic literature and one I am venturing into in search of the creative potencies of psychoanalysis.

Lacan, in 1957, at the height of his structuralism, interprets Freud’s aphorism—Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden—with a slight twist, one he believed to be of a more truly Freudian inclination than that of the then dominating Ego Psychologists, Melanie Klein, and, in a broad sense, British analysts—those he accused of ‘Freudery’ [fofreudisme]. Instead of focusing on strengthening the ego, his version, as he writes in ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’ is: “Where it was, I must come into being” (Lacan, 1957 [2006], p. 435). Lacan sees the Freudian discovery as a lesson that tells us we cannot ignore the ‘radical eccentricity’ of the self within itself. Not too long after, in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, delivered between 1959 and 1960, Lacan discusses this aphorism once again, now to posit the ethics of psychoanalysis as beyond the morality of the super-ego, or of the morality of the Symbolic, and instead, involving an encounter with one’s desire. In his words: “That ‘I’ which is supposed to come to be where ‘it’ was, and which analysis has taught us to evaluate, is nothing more than that whose root we already found in the ‘I’ which asks itself what it wants” (Lacan, 1959–1960 [1997], p. 7). The kind of ethics psychoanalysis mobilised in its clinical course was, to Lacan, an ethics of the Real. The Freudian contribution to the field of ethics, thus, is this encounter and a positioning of the subject vis-à-vis the Real; in Lacan’s words:

More than once at the time when I was discussing the symbolic and the imaginary and their reciprocal interaction, some of you wondered what after all was “the real.” Well, as odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which assumes any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the contrary, will proceed instead from the other direction by going more deeply into the notion of the real. Insofar as Freud’s position constitutes progress here, the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real. (Lacan, 1959–1960 [1997], p. 11)

Anxiety, as Lacan teaches in his Seminar X Anxiety, delivered between 1962 and 1963, is precisely an affect that sits between desire and jouissance (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2016], p. 175); it is an encounter with the Real that mobilises or squeezes the subject between a Symbolically wrapped delineation of oneself, which hangs by a thread once the Imaginary fantasy of consistency fails, and the vastness and abyss that extend beyond oneself, the Real. Interestingly, it is anxiety precisely that is shunted out of diagnostic manuals and statistics when the biological and pharmaceutical paradigms of psychiatry gain strength over psychoanalysis after the late-1970s with the publication of the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in the United States. This encounter with the Real is then mediated by an ideological grammar, inaugurating a politics of affect that resonates on the possibilities of an ethical standing in relation to this abyss beyond oneself. The experience of anxiety, so central to the psychoanalytic course, is pathologised and locked into a state of estrangement, without, however, opening up to possible new ways of living. This, as we can observe in this cartographic exercise, reveals a type of alienation, an affective alienation Deleuze (1992) calls a ‘dividualisation’. Perhaps Tosquelles would see it as a state where you gain neither consciousness nor unconsciousness; rather, one that is bound to a modulating external grammar, without roots, branches and leaves—let alone an ever-changing rhizome for an unconscious.

When Lacan, in 1957, characterises the unconscious as the Other’s discourse (Lacan, 1957 [2006], p. 436), subjectivity is explicitly oriented in relation to an Other that is equated to the Law, to language and to a radical alterity. The Other is an ‘other’ not limited to identification or a projection of the level of the ego, but a wider presence carved into the Symbolic realm towards which a dialectical relation leaves a gap for the subject to come into being. If the unconscious is the Other’s discourse, the Real is subsumed within its limits and ‘being’ leaves not much room for novel ‘becomings’. If the Real is a real of ‘being’ and not of ‘becoming’, then it reveals a subtle and yet still alienating disconnection. This is what Guattari found troublesome in Lacanian structuralist psychoanalysis and wished to take further in his clinical practice and conceptual work. This transposition echoes my critique of the process of subjectivation, relationality, sociability and overall bio-politics anchored in a modern humanist and patriarchal framework found in the roots of psychoanalysis, in which a struggle for recognition by the Other modulates and locks all possibilities of being within its orbit.

Guattari learns from Lacan that desire is not ‘individual’ and that subjectivity is not individual either (Sauvagnargues, 2016). Whilst Lacan’s ‘transidividual’ unconscious from the early Rome Discourse (Lacan, 1953) presents us with a notion of desire that goes beyond the relational Imaginary-to-Imaginary/ ego-to-ego field of possibilities—or really opening to a world beyond identification so clearly in his critiques of Ego-Psychology, for example—we still find an unconscious trapped into the universalism of ‘lack’ that derives from his structuralist interpretation of Freud. Rosi Braidotti, across her many publications and teachings (see Braidotti, 2011), composes an argument for a ‘nomadic subject’—one project that reflects the demands of post/decolonial and eco-feminist ethics, not reliant on human exceptionalism and the universalist ‘Same’ of modern humanism, nor on lack and castration—which is constructed from her alignment, as a feminist scholar, to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becomings’, or devenir. The Guattarian engagement with psychoanalysis, alive in his clinical practice, moves beyond Lacan as it does not trust in the theoretical domination of the universal signifier, not reducing “the signifying assemblage as a symbolic order and [assuming] the place of the father as a master signifier, the Other that found the symbolic order” (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 144). Guattari shows us that this reliance on the master signifier of the father is not neutral, but a mechanism of production of a certain modulation of desire: this mode of production, reproduction, extraction and separation dubbed by the Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik (2017) as ‘the pimping of Life’. Following such critique, or holding onto this ethical disposition, we find that the orbit of the Other and its embedded universalisms does not suffice as a ground in which to account for the Real, for ruptures, affects and excesses; once such orbit does not suffice for any more radical decolonial or eco-feminist emancipatory psycho-politics beyond the ‘pimping of Life’ (Rolnik, 2015, 2017, 2019; Preciado, 2018).

In this sense, ‘gaining unconsciousness’ or encountering the Real that appears in anxiety entails opening up to common ‘becomings’, reorienting the clinic towards the production of a co-poietic sinthôme.Footnote 4 In doing so, I diverge from the (feminist and queer-informed) suggestion of the Argentinean psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici (2018), who, in her critique of hegemonic treatment methods such as CBT (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy), proposes further ‘castration’ as an analytic solution to anxiety. Instead of just renouncing the possibility of ‘having it’ within a phallic episteme of sexual difference, I set out to map possibilities that veer away from the Oedipal order altogether. In this axis—Oedipus, affective alienation and interpretation—I look for an alternative route to the status of ‘rupture’ in the psychoanalytic clinic. Moving, thus, from a clinic of the estranged ‘dividual’ to an entangled, situated subject. As such, by embracing ‘vibration’ I move away from Oedipal configurations in this proposition of a creative clinic of anxiety; and, although this book is not mainly focused on questions of feminism in and out of psychoanalysis, I hope this clinical and conceptual discussion is fruitful to feminist figurations of all kinds.