In the first pages of ‘An Autobiographic study’, from 1925, Freud narrates his collaborative work with Breuer, hinting at a divisive trait between the two doctors’ personalities when writing: “The theory which we had attempted to construct in the Studies remained, as I have said, very incomplete; and in particular we had scarcely touched on the problem of aetiology, on the question of the ground in which the pathogenic process takes root” (Freud, 1925, p. 23). The ground, the basis, the context. Freud was concerned with what allowed for psychic processes to take place, and this was a matter dealt with in a number of his texts, when both internal and external realities were negotiated in manners that would permit certain traits, actions and, ultimately, symptoms to emerge. Psychoanalysis speaks of a subject harnessed to the world and in its theories and practices, psychic structure and the lived experience carry the same weight.

Anxiety, which is not a symptom, but an affect, is mostly acknowledged through its appearance on the body, confusing any delineated spaces of the symptom, affect, internal and external worlds, psyche and soma. This affective riddle is studied in detail in what follows. In this chapter, I offer close critical readings of Freud’s key theoretical formulations of anxiety, which are revealed in a contrast with mainstream psychiatric nosology. I work with less popular nineteenth century texts and letters known as ‘pre-psychoanalytic’ works, all the way through to Freud’s 1930s final remarks on the topic of anxiety. Through the method of close readings, it is possible to grasp the nuanced transformations of Freud’s theories of the ‘grounds’ of anxiety across four decades, in the build-up to a formulation of anxiety as vibration—or anxiety as an affect of rupture that vibrates through the subject and beyond oneself, an affect of entanglement. The pieces selected operate as an archive, offering insight into the ‘grounds’ of anxiety; their importance is given by how ‘anxiety’ is the kernel of the psychoneuroses in Freudian psychoanalysis. The following close readings of Freud will enable us to rescue specific ‘vibrational moments’ in his theories of anxiety, in which an anxiety that is not relying on Oedipus is more apparent both at the very beginning of his writings and at the very end, as follows.

Freud’s Works on Anxiety

Already in Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess, an attempt to unravel the complexities of anxiety (angst, in the German original) was being traced. The mechanisms of this affect and its connections to a discharge of libido, repression and fear followed Freud’s works over decades, from the end of the nineteenth century to his last years of his life in the early 1930s, marking different stages of the development of his theories on anxiety, which emerges as a direct neurotic repression and moves towards a more refined understanding of the importance and variations of this puzzling affect. In the seminal ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, 1926, Freud’s delineation of the aetiology and symptomatology of anxiety presents the first important shift in this understanding, as his clinical experience was then able to suggest that “it was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety” (Freud, 1926, pp. 108–109). Anxiety, at a point that succeeded his works on the libidinal economy surrounding the life and death drives in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), was seen as a form of psychic protection against threats to one’s integrity. It is precisely over the variations of such threats, their origin and their relation to the manifestation of a subsequent anxiety that Freud mapped concepts such as realistic anxiety, neurotic anxiety, moral anxiety, primary anxiety, castration anxiety and signal anxiety. As this chapter will demonstrate, it is only in the mid-1920s that the Oedipal metaphor marks the Freudian theory of anxiety in relation to castration and, consequently, sexual difference. Anxiety seemingly wears many hats in the Freudian oeuvre, all of them as an ‘excess’—either in the form of an abyss within or of a vast horizon beyond the limits of the ‘I’ (the Ich, ego). In what follows, I stay as close as possible to Freud, grasping his rationale and logic according to his own words, moving into a clear understanding of Lacan’s contributions to the topic in the next chapter—and, subsequently, a debate on the limits of psychoanalytic theory to contemporary praxis.

Letters to Fliess and Late Nineteenth Century

Two letters, known as drafts A and B, pose important points in Freud’s early theories on anxiety, specifically anxiety neurosis. In draft A1, from 1892, a text in bullet points, sexuality and repression already form his hypothesis. In draft B, from the same year, 1892, Freud was working on an aetiology of neuroses, and chronic state and an attack of anxiety are mentioned as two different manifestations of anxiety that can be combined in symptoms that revolve around the body (i.e. hypochondria, agoraphobia, etc.) and the sexual noxa (Freud, 1892, p. 183). According to Freud, the latter means events or circumstances that disrupt some sort of ‘natural’ flow of sexual satisfaction. It is, however, only a couple of years later that Freud elaborated in more detail his work in progress on the equation of neurosis, sexuality, repression and anxiety. In an 1894 short letter to Fliess, known as Draft E, Freud takes his friend through his thinking process. There he explores anxiety neurosis, which he at first and for the next coming decades understands as linked with sexuality. Sexuality, as it will unfold across his work, starts off as a bodily excess he names ‘libido’ and moves, later, into a modification of the idea of ‘castration’ in relation to the ‘phallus’, where anxiety is placed.

Freud writes: “All I know about it is this: It quickly became clear to me that the anxiety of my neurotic patients had a great deal to do with sexuality; and in particular it struck me with what certainty coitus interruptus practiced on a woman leads to anxiety neurosis” (Freud, 1894a, p. 78). Coitus interruptus, which was a common practice at the time, over half a century before the popularisation of the contraceptive pill, caused particular anxiety, both in men and women (following the heteronormative view of sexuality displayed in these letters). However, this first observation soon after called for revision, since anxiety would appear even in people not worrying about pregnancy. Another factor emerges in Freud’s early observations that will carry a certain weight in his theories of anxiety, that of its connections with the physical body, at this point solely linked with sexual satisfaction. Freud spells out the following:

[…] anxiety neurosis affects women who are anaesthetic in coitus just as much as sensitive ones. This is most peculiar, but it can only mean that the source of the anxiety is not to be looked for in the psychic sphere. It must accordingly lie in the physical sphere: it is a physical factor in sexual life that produces anxiety. (Freud, 1894a, p. 78)

Freud reports having followed a variety of cases in which sexuality and anxiety would be connected, ranging from a ‘virginal anxiety’ until the “anxiety of men who go beyond their desire or strength, older people whose potency is diminishing, but who nevertheless forcibly bring about coitus” (Freud, 1894a, p. 79). However, he does not provide any detail of such cases. Yet, such wide range of cases were, to him, connected by “an accumulation of physical sexual tension” (Freud, 1894a, p. 79) that lead to anxiety via a ‘detour’ of such accumulation and its discharge, in which this accumulated tension is ‘transformed’ into anxiety. There is, thus, right from the start of his understanding a path forming through a physical excess that is left unsatisfied firstly physically, but for reasons that could be physical or not, and then accumulated and psychically transformed into something else; this something else would be the manifestation of anxiety symptoms. Anxiety and the drive are early partners in psychoanalytic thinking.

The physicality of anxiety was stressed in this very early text and as Freud was developing his work on melancholia at the time of writing this letter, he offered an interesting parallel between these two states, which are demarcated precisely by the duality of psychic and physical.

Quite particularly often, melancholies have been anaesthetic. They have no desire for coitus (and no sensation in connection with it), but they have a great longing for love in its psychic form—one might say, psychic erotic tension; where this accumulates and remains unsatisfied, melancholia develops. This, then, would be the counterpart to anxiety neurosis. Where physical sexual tension accumulates—anxiety neurosis. Where psychic sexual tension accumulates—melancholia. (Freud, 1894a, p. 80)

Melancholia, here, is enticed by an external presence that results in an internal response being quantitatively re-balanced, since “for that purpose any reaction suffices that diminishes the inner psychic excitation by the same quantum” (Freud, 1894a, p. 80). Anxiety, on the other hand, derives from an internal source of tension that lies in the body—sexual drive, hunger, thirst—and the difference here being that only very ‘specific’ things could quench and satisfy these needs, preventing their occurrence again in ‘the organs concerned’ to each need. By tracing this path, Freud provided an interesting theory of psyche-soma. Connecting body and psyche, a type of ‘threshold’ appears. Only when such threshold is reached, affective states are able to deploy psychic connections, entering, as he puts it, “into relation with certain groups of ideas, which then set about producing the specific remedies” (Freud, 1894a, p. 80). The drives are the motor of psychic activity.

Sexual libido is seen as somewhat independent from the psyche at the same time as it depends upon a psychic origin. Anxiety emerges when either one’s psychic reality, for example a defence mechanism that interrupts the possibility of this libido transformation “as it should be” from psyche/body to body back to psyche, or when something just physical proves to be the ‘noxa’ (coitus interruptus as a practice, or a bodily malfunction, etc.). Anxiety arises through “the accumulation of physical tension and the prevention of discharge in the psychic direction” (Freud, 1894a, p. 82). Why anxiety, specifically, is what Freud leaves as an open question at the end of this letter, when he provides an answer that is, in a certain way, rather flimsy. Anxiety, he argues, arises, instead of anything else, as its typical symptoms resemble the very act of discharge of the accumulated sexual tension, by which he means, anxiety symptoms resemble the sexual act, so anxiety symptoms become a substituting route of discharge:

Anxiety is the sensation of the accumulation of another endogenous stimulus, the stimulus to breathing, a stimulus incapable of being worked over psychically apart from this; anxiety might therefore be employed for accumulated physical tension in general. Furthermore, if the symptoms of anxiety neurosis are examined more closely, one finds in the neurosis disjointed pieces of a major anxiety attack: namely, mere dyspnea, mere palpitations, mere feeling of anxiety, and a combination of these. Looked at more precisely, these are the paths of innervation that the physical sexual tension ordinarily traverses even when it is about to be worked over psychically. The dyspnea and palpitations belong to coitus; and while ordinarily they are employed only as subsidiary paths of discharge, here they serve, so to speak, as the only outlets for the excitation. This is once again a kind of conversion in anxiety neurosis, just as occurs in hysteria (another instance of their similarity); but in hysteria it is psychic excitation that takes a wrong path exclusively into the somatic field, whereas here it is a physical tension, which cannot enter the psychic field and therefore remains on the physical path. (Freud, 1894a, p. 82)

Much of this letter gave origin to an expanded paper published that same year under the title ‘On The Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome From Neurasthenia Under The Description “Anxiety Neurosis’” (1894b). As the title suggests, this text is concerned mainly with setting an aetiology and mechanisms particular to neurasthenia (a popular diagnosis of the time) and what he was referring as ‘anxiety neurosis’, the latter being the transformed discharge of accumulated sexual tension as he had written to Fliess.

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, 1894b, p. 91). The clinical symptoms identified by Freud in this paper of what would consist of an anxiety neurosis were:

  1. 1.

    General irritability;

  2. 2.

    Anxious expectation—which he saw as central to neurosis, once “we may perhaps say that here a quantum of anxiety in a freely floating state is present, which, where there is expectation, controls the choice of ideas and is always ready to link itself with any suitable ideational content” (Freud, 1894b, p. 93);

  3. 3.

    Anxiety attacks that are sudden and not linked to a train of ideas and a more general anxiousness, that appears as a feeling of anxiety that the patient feels as linked to a bodily function, this emerging in complaints “of ‘spasms of the heart’ ‘difficulty in breathing’ ‘outbreaks of sweating’ ‘ravenous hunger’ and such like; and, in his description, the feeling of anxiety often recedes into the background or is referred to quite unrecognizably as ‘being unwell’ ‘feeling uncomfortable’ and so on” (Freud, 1894b, p. 93);

  4. 4.

    Different types of anxiety attacks, for example, accompanied by breathing problems, or heart beating problems, or even ravenous hunger;

  5. 5.

    pavor nocturnus or night terrors on adults and children;

  6. 6.

    Vertigo;

  7. 7.

    Phobias related to chronic anxiousness or vertigo, ranging from physiological dangers to locomotion dangers and apparent in phobia of thunderstorms in the first case to agoraphobia in the latter, for example;

  8. 8.

    Digestion activities disturbances;

  9. 9.

    Paraesthesias;

  10. 10.

    And, finally, all the above, in either an attack or a chronic form.

Such symptoms could be easily ‘confused’ with that of neurasthenia, a condition popularly diagnosed after George Miller Beard, an American neurologist, described it as a problem or weakness of the actual ‘nerves’ (Berrios, 1996). Freud, in this paper, recognizes the potential similarities in diagnosis of cases of neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, but he moves on to clarifying the difference between the two as resting precisely on the specific sexual origins of anxiety neurosis. What he adds in this paper, furthering from his earlier letter to Fliess, is that in many cases of anxiety neurosis, sexual desire is also lessened, adding this other layer to the ‘origins’ of anxiety since “the mechanism of anxiety neurosis is to be looked for in a deflection of somatic sexual excitation from the psychical sphere, and in a consequent abnormal employment of that excitation” (Freud, 1894b, p. 108). In neurasthenia, Freud signals, it can be that the ‘unloading’ is not as adequate (masturbation as a replacement for the ‘normal coition’, is the example he provides); yet, “anxiety neurosis, on the other hand, is the product of all those factors which prevent the somatic sexual excitation from being worked over psychically. The manifestations of anxiety neurosis appear when the somatic excitation which has been deflected from the psyche is expended subcortically in totally inadequate reactions” (Freud, 1894b, p. 109). By pairing, once again, the symptoms of anxiety and the physical aspects of sexual interactions (which, in this logic, must include another person, or an other), Freud “depicts the symptoms of anxiety neurosis as being in a sense surrogates of the omitted specific action following on sexual excitation” (Freud, 1894b, p. 111).

Freud will then move into differentiating, for the first time, the affect of anxiety and anxiety neurosis. Elaborating on the function of anxiety, Freud claims that the ‘regular’ affect of anxiety offers a certain protection against something external that cannot be dealt with accordingly. Anxiety neurosis thus is a response to an internal excess, whilst the affect of anxiety has external bearings. He writes:

The psyche finds itself in the affect of anxiety if it feels unable to deal by appropriate reaction with a task (a danger) approaching from outside; it finds itself in the neurosis of anxiety if it notices that it is unable to even out the (sexual) excitation originating from within—that is to say, it behaves as though it were projecting that excitation outwards. The affect and its corresponding neurosis are firmly related to each other. The first is a reaction to an exogenous excitation, the second a reaction to the analogous endogenous one. The affect is a state which passes rapidly, the neurosis is a chronic one; because, while exogenous excitation operates as a constant force, in the neurosis, the nervous system is reacting against a source of excitation which is internal, whereas in the corresponding affect it is reacting against an analogous source of excitation which is external. (Freud, 1894b, p. 112)

If we make a simple parallel between what Freud proposes here and the rise in reports of anxiety by the ONS in the UK during the first COVID-19 lockdown, for instance, a less pathologised approach unfolds. The affect of anxiety is, if anything, under such Freudian lenses, a healthy reaction to overwhelming external circumstances. Such affect, rather than a ‘stranger’ within, qualifies an entanglement with the world, or a deep psychic, bodily, libidinal connection with it. If a complex symptomatic presentation is developed in relation to such anxiety, then the singular layers of one’s drive and its bearings in the subjective positioning of the patient in the world are also involved in a complaint of high anxiety. In both cases, neurotic or not, anxiety is an affect of entanglement and depth, rather than of surface and estrangement—as qualified in the hegemonic diagnoses and treatment discourses post-1970s.

Two months after the publication of ‘On The Grounds’, in the January 1895 issue of the journal Neurologisckes Zentralblatt, Leopold Löwenfeld, a German psychiatrist, published a critique of the paper. Freud responds in the same year with the essay ‘A Reply to Criticisms of My Paper on Anxiety Neurosis’ (1895), picking up on his conclusions that followed from clinical observations.

I arrived at the proposition: anxiety neurosis is created by everything which keeps somatic sexual tension away from the psychical sphere, which interferes with its being worked over psychically. If we go back to the concrete circumstances in which this factor becomes operative, we are led to assert that [sexual] abstinence, whether voluntary or involuntary, sexual intercourse with incomplete satisfaction, coitus interruptus, deflection of psychical interest from sexuality, and similar things, are the specific aetiological factors of the states to which I have given the name of anxiety neurosis. (Freud, 1895, p. 124)

Löwenfeld had challenged the above logic by providing cases in which anxiety neurosis emerged from singular events of fright, not sharing the sexual path suggested by Freud. Freud responds by claiming he did not doubt his colleague’s cases, neither other ‘official academic medicine’ cases as possibilities of refusal of his hypotheses; he doubted, however, the very kind of interpretation being provided to cases by these other practitioners. So, he writes,

if anyone wants to prove to me that in these remarks I have unduly neglected the significance of the stock aetiological factors, he must confront me with observations in which my specific factor is missing—that is, with cases in which anxiety neurosis has arisen after a psychical shock although the subject has (on the whole) led a normal vita sexualis. (Freud, 1895, p. 128)

Freud defends the psychoanalytic method as—it seems, at least in contrast with neuropathological methods—the only one capable of providing in depth enough interpretations that would not only prove his theory of anxiety neurosis right as really unveil symptoms once “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). In other words, the complaints of a surface level symptom presentation cannot be treated as the totality of this symptom. Rather, the Freudian method will trace the grounds and dynamics of symptom-formation in the unconscious.

These very early writings on anxiety, when considered together, propose two interesting entries into the notion of ‘vibration’ I am carving through this cartography: (1) its relation to the drive and (2) its internal and external sources of stimuli. Whilst reading Freud’s almost stereotypical pairing of any symptomatology with sexuality (and an essentialist heteronormative view of such) is rather frustrating, the addition of libido, satisfaction, discharge and the overall dynamics of the drive are fundamental to his contribution to the field of psy. The subject appears as one that is marked by jouissance, rather than simply being a one-dimensional social subject guided by morality. When attributing to anxiety a relation to libidinal excess, Freud proposes a treatment that is fundamentally contrary to the method of symptom isolation and ‘checklist’ proposed by mainstream psychiatry. The subject presented here not only enjoys as they also are harnessed to the world and its contingencies and stimuli. Anxiety, as seen in these early texts, is also ‘naturalised’ rather than ‘pathologised’, appearing as a dynamic relation to the body, the unconscious and stimuli (both as a regular affect and in anxiety neurosis, as seen above). Another nuance I find interesting here is the non-reliance on sexual difference observable in these works. Elaborated before Freud delineated the Oedipus Complex, these texts do not propose different unconscious positions and symptom formation for ‘men’ and ‘women’. Rather we are dealing with a threshold of excess that mobilises the body and psyche in anxiety. Guattari rescued these letters and Freud’s ‘energetic model’ of the unconscious in the later years of his thinking precisely because of their non-reliance on Oedipus.

Introductory Lectures: Lecture XXV, 1917

In the final part of his Introductory Lectures, about two decades after his initial works on anxiety neurosis, Freud provides an updated and objective account of his theory of anxiety. He sets out by proposing that whilst most people must have already experienced the ‘sensation’ or the ‘affect’ of anxiety, there is something particular in the experiences of anxiety of neurotics, and to this he will dedicate this lecture. This affect is seen by Freud as particularly complex for “there is no question that the problem of anxiety is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence” (Freud, 1917, p. 393). This shared experience of anxiety both in a ‘normal’ and in a ‘pathological’ state is given more structure in this lecture, once Freud offers a distinction between ‘realistic’ and ‘neurotic’ anxieties.

Realistic anxiety, whilst being “connected with the flight reflex and […] regarded as a manifestation of the self-preservative instinct” (Freud, 1917, p. 394), accounts for a rather rational manifestation. It makes little sense if we think that in such occasions of imminent danger, being anxious does little to help avoiding such danger, and quite the contrary, can bring about a paralysis and lack of action that could be the opposite of self-preservative. However strange this may seem, Freud points out that it is preparedness for the danger that increases one’s attention and motor capacity, reading for action. Anxiety as a ‘signal’ is divided in two ‘moments’ and “the preparedness for anxiety seems [to me] to be the expedient element in what we call anxiety, and the generation of anxiety the inexpedient one” (Freud, 1917, p. 395). Our perception of these expressions of anxiety leads Freud to the central question of: What exactly is anxiety?

His answer is that anxiety is an affect. Affect, in its turn, is a complex concept that “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). Affects, in this view, relate to the body and the psyche, touching on perception and feelings. The ‘imprint’ of the affect of anxiety, which is then repeated when this affect comes about, is present at the instant of birth, as well as in the ‘unpleasant’ separation from the mother. He writes:

We believe that it is in the act of birth that there comes about the combination of un-pleasurable feelings, impulses of discharge and bodily sensations which has become the prototype of the effects of a mortal danger and has ever since been repeated by us as the state of anxiety. The immense increase of stimulation owing to the interruption of the renovation of the blood (internal respiration) was at the time the cause of the experience of anxiety; the first anxiety was thus a toxic one. (Freud, 1917, p. 396)

Affect, in Freudian theory, thus, has to do with an extension of oneself, mobilising perception; and a relation to the other, the mother more specifically, as a primary love and dependency object. In this discreet sense, by thinking of anxiety as an affect as such, Freud builds upon his earlier libidinal theory that accounted for stimulus that leads to anxiety as endogenous, or of an understanding of sexuality as endogenous, rather than as a ‘drive’. A drive, as such, mobilises both the internal and external realms, in and out, the extimate (external and intimate), in Lacanian words.

The differences between the affect of anxiety, that which can be shared by anyone, and a neurotic experience of anxiety follow in this text. An ‘expectant anxiety’, or an anticipation of something that can happen and is undesirable, is a shared affective state in which “we find a general apprehensiveness, a kind of freely floating anxiety which is ready to attach itself to any idea that is in any way suitable, which influences judgement, selects what is to be expected, and lies in wait for any opportunity that will allow it to justify itself” (Freud, 1917, p. 398). When too much of this ‘expectant anxiety’ appears it “forms a regular feature of a nervous disorder to which I have given the name of ‘anxiety neurosis’ and which [I] include among the ‘actual’ neuroses” (Freud, 1917, p. 398). Freud observes that there is also another type of anxiety, phobia, that instead of being free-floating and characterised by the above-mentioned neurotic ‘structure’ of anxiety “is bound psychically and attached to particular objects or situations. This is the anxiety of the extremely multifarious and often very strange ‘phobias’” (Freud, 1917, p. 398).

Freud’s previous work on anxiety neurosis forms a base to his explanations surrounding yet another type of neurotic anxiety, that “faces us with the puzzling fact that here the connection between anxiety and a threatening danger is completely lost to view” (Freud, 1917, p. 401)—or an anxiety without ‘reality’ nor object. This lack of a correlation to danger leads Freud to a few hypotheses when trying to connect realist anxiety and neurotic anxiety. For example: Could there be anything the patient is in fact afraid of at the heart of their neurotic anxiety? This crucial point, later to be developed further in his 1926 text ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, finds its first explanation here, bringing back the previous ideas of discharge of sexual libido. Without departing from his earlier texts too drastically, Freud argues that “it is not difficult to establish the fact that expectant anxiety or general apprehensiveness is closely dependent on certain happenings in sexual life, or, let us say, certain employments of the libido” (Freud, 1917, p. 401). That would be the case in the most varied contexts, even when sexuality is bound to ‘cultural differences’; he states that “however much these relations are altered and complicated by a variety of cultural influences, it nevertheless remains true of the average of mankind that anxiety has a close connection with sexual limitation” (Freud, 1917, p. 402). All in all, these observations led him “to conclude that the deflection of the libido from its normal employment, which causes the development of anxiety, takes place in the region of somatic processes” (Freud, 1917, p. 404). What will become clearer as Freud moves along with his writing is that for him, a normal employment of libido must involve another object or an extension beyond one’s own body and idea of self.

Whilst neurotic and realistic anxiety as different ‘categories’ proposed by Freud in this text may have different origins—the former related to ‘libido put to ‘abnormal’ employment’ and the latter ‘a reaction to danger’—in the way such anxieties are felt, there is no distinction, for what is ‘real’ or ‘dangerous’ are complex categories when dealing with the unconscious. This open question is also picked up in the following decade, when Freud works with the concept of ‘castration anxiety’.

It is necessary to introduce another factor that Freud presents here adding further to his theories on anxiety, that of the oppositions between the ego and libido:

As we know, the generation of anxiety is the ego’s reaction to danger and the signal for taking flight. If so, it seems plausible to suppose that in neurotic anxiety the ego is making a similar attempt at flight from the demand by its libido, that it is treating this internal danger as though it were an external one. This would therefore fulfil our expectation that where anxiety is shown there is something one is afraid of. But the analogy could be carried further. Just as the attempt at flight from an external danger is replaced by standing firm and the adoption of expedient measures of defence, so too the generation of neurotic anxiety gives place to the formation of symptoms, which results in the anxiety being bound. (Freud, 1917, p. 405)

The ego, here being confronted by some internal libidinal ‘call’, starts to appear as the guarantor of a certain psychic stability in the end of Freud’s lecture, which ends with the debate between anxiety and repression. He asks, “what happens to the affect that was attached to the repressed idea?” (Freud, 1917, p. 403) and his answer is “that the immediate vicissitude of that affect is to be transformed into anxiety, whatever quality it may have exhibited apart from this in the normal course of events” (Freud, 1917, p. 409). Such ‘discharge’ into anxiety of what was repressed also follows a particular route in phobias, slightly different then in cases of other neuroses:

In phobias, for instance, two phases of the neurotic process can be clearly distinguished. The first is concerned with repression and the changing of libido into anxiety, which is then bound to an external danger. The second consists in the erection of all the precautions and guarantees by means of which any contact can be avoided with this danger, treated as it is like an external thing. Repression corresponds to an attempt at flight by the ego from libido which is felt as a danger. A phobia may be compared to an entrenchment against an external danger which now represents the dreaded libido. (Freud, 1917, p. 410)

This ‘remainder’ is accounted for in Freud’s most famous case of phobia, Little Hans, published in 1909 and delineating that some excess of this ‘libidinal flow’ not grasped by the conversion in anxiety will not be shifted onto the object even in cases of phobia. In this sense, anxiety appears to us clearly as a ‘surplus’ or an excess in what Freud called ‘libido’ that does not and cannot find total and complete grounds to be satisfied or channelled in the body (in sex, eating, drinking or other points when need and desire circle what later will be the ‘drive’) nor in representation, or words and symbolisation. Here we must pay special attention to the quality of this ‘surplus’, as it will be the grounds on which Lacan will later pin down the Real (where anxiety is located)—an excess that is not connected to desire nor satisfaction, and which is not bound by symbolisation.

In this account of anxiety, Freud is able to schematise anxiety within the topology of the ‘ego’ as functioning as a guarantor for subjectivity thus, gatekeeping excessive libido. This formulation is crucial to the understanding of anxiety as vibration, once it describes the psychic life of the subject formulated by psychoanalysis—one whose excesses are displaced (phobia), channelled (affect of anxiety) or accumulated (anxiety neurosis) in the body. Psyche-soma, or the subject of the drive, clearly presents a libidinal charge to ideas and representation. In this manner, and again without relying on Oedipal sexual difference, Freud challenges what is later proposed by Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, which accounts for a non-libidinised relation to thoughts, working, instead, with an automatic body/mind model of the subject. What is also interesting in this 1917 work is that it again does away with the pathologisation of anxiety, describing so clearly that this is a fundamental affect that is formative of psychic experience. In treatment, thus, when working with a case of extreme anxiety, the ego and its function of a gatekeeper of psychic stability is the focus of the treatment. Instead of getting rid of anxiety altogether, the Freudian model implies that we work through it. This, of course, does away with the reliance on psychopharmakon as a treatment for anxiety, or a treatment for stopping the body ‘feeling’ anxiety.

Whilst Freud gives us a rich account of how anxiety is an integral part of psychic experience and points towards a treatment of the ego, he is yet to add his theories of the function of the Id and the superego in this equation that results in anxiety. When he does so, the Modern humanism (and patriarchal) tone of his psychoanalytic ideas becomes stronger, as I will develop next.

Inhibitions Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926

It is in this 1926 essay that Freud outlines his most elaborate theory of anxiety, following a temporal logic that can be summarised as initially connecting anxiety as an un-discharged sexual tension; then as repressed libido. He further differentiates between anxiety being either realistic or neurotic and, finally, proposes that anxiety is a signal in the ego of a danger of disintegration. In this paper, Freud ‘updates’ earlier views, especially in respect to libido and anxiety, a view he now regards as “not [in] accord with the general character of anxiety as a reaction to unpleasure” (Freud, 1926, p. 161). Unpleasure, in psychoanalytic parlance, is of the order of the excessive, that which disturbs homeostasis.

The essay itself is quite contradictory and fragmented, divided in chapters and including a final addendum, where earlier concepts are summarised, reworked, rejected and confirmed, sometimes in a very circular manner. Yet, there are important points that will later be worked over by Lacan in the 1960s. Freud begins arguing about the differences between an inhibition and a symptom, which may seem simple but reveal his journey into some key dynamics of psychic structures. Parting from the common use of each term being the first of a ‘non-function’ and the latter a ‘wrong-functioning’, Freud indicates that in reality the very inhibition, or a ‘non-functioning function’, can be a symptom itself in the eyes of psychoanalysis. Anxiety and inhibitions are correlated. Freud explains that “some inhibitions obviously represent a relinquishment of a function because its exercise would produce anxiety” (Freud, 1926, p. 88). Whilst the inhibition to eat or towards the sexual act can take place, a symptom would be, as he offers as examples, vomiting or disgust at the idea of sex. In the clinic, mapping the function and dynamics of a symptom is a fundamental direction in the treatment. This is a way to trace the singular arrangement of one’s subjectivity in relation to their psychic suffering.

For Freud, when there is a restriction of an ego-function, an inhibition takes place “the ego renounces these functions, which are within its sphere, in order not to have to undertake fresh measures of repression—in order to avoid a conflict with the id” (Freud, 1926, p. 90). Thus, we find here inhibitions being seen almost as a ‘protective measure’. At the same time, inhibitions can represent self-punishment, “in order to avoid coming into conflict with the super-ego” (Freud, 1926, p. 90). Whilst inhibitions “are restrictions of the functions of the ego which have been either imposed as a measure of precaution or brought about as a result of an impoverishment of energy” (Freud, 1926, p. 90), symptoms differ by not being “a process that takes place within, or acts upon, the ego” (Freud, 1926, p. 90). Here is why Lacan will go on to say that anxiety is not a symptom, rather, it is an affect.

Freud challenges his earlier understanding of the symptom, which was by now complicated by the findings in his work on ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920):

A symptom is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of the process of repression. Repression proceeds from the ego when the latter—it may be at the behest of the superego—refuses to associate itself with an instinctual cathexis which has been aroused in the id. The ego is able by means of repression to keep the idea which is the vehicle of the reprehensible impulse from becoming conscious. (Freud, 1926, p. 91)

This view of the symptom in relation to unpleasure as what is actually being ‘looked for’ instinctually posits that a symptom appears when “as a result of repression the intended course of the excitatory process in the id does not occur at all; the ego succeeds in inhibiting or deflecting it” (Freud, 1926, p. 91). This ego, which is in a somewhat privileged position in relation to perception and thus consciousness of the outside world, “wards off internal and external dangers alike along identical lines” (Freud, 1926, p. 92) by means of a flight. Whilst the external stimuli are met with bodily movements (for example, you may ‘run away’), an internal unwelcomed process will be met with repression. The ego will withdraw the cathexis emerging off an instinct (as the translation goes, or the ‘drive’) that is going to be repressed and will ‘employ’ “that cathexis for the purpose of releasing unpleasure (anxiety)” (Freud, 1926, p. 93). Therefore, with this mechanism, Freud supersedes his earlier account of an automatic transformation of what is repressed into anxiety, bringing it into the realm of the ego, which allows for a more complex mapping of the subject, their being in the world, their bodily being in the world and stimuli of all orders. The libidinal excess from the drive and from reality-resting are routed by a gatekeeping ego, which manages the rhythm of excess in light of a possible dissolution of the ego’s stability. Anxiety, therefore, is a by-product of the Id.

Otto Rank’s then contemporary theory of the trauma of birth as one of the early universal ‘mnemic symbols’ for anxiety also leaves space for other traumatic experiences and the sexual act to act as such symbols—which appears in Freud’s earlier writings on this topic. Freud writes: “Anxiety is not newly created in repression; it is reproduced as an affective state in accordance with an already existing mnemic image. If we go further and enquire into the origin of that anxiety—and of affects in general—we shall be leaving the realm of pure psychology and entering the borderland of physiology” (Freud, 1926, p. 93). Rank’s theories, that Freud was writing in contrast with, suggested that birth was the universal traumatic experience and the nucleus of the neuroses. However, “Freud’s examination shows that this cannot be the case. A child’s anxiety-potential increases, not decreases after birth” (Mitchell, 1974, p. 81). What is particularly interesting at this point is the connection Freud makes with affect as a kind of blueprint that gets repeated. He writes: “Affective states have become incorporated in the mind as precipitates of primaeval traumatic experiences, and when a similar situation occurs they are revived like mnemic symbols” (Freud, 1926, p. 93). As we can see, affect thus appears in this piece as a repetition without difference; here we see anxiety as reproducing ‘being’ and hardly opening into new ‘becomings’.

Repression being the activating mechanism of symptom-formation and anxiety, according to Freud’s logic, remains slightly puzzling, especially in regard to its relation with the super-ego. This leaves Freud with an open-ended understanding that there are primal repressions and an ‘after-pressure’, which could be perhaps demarcated by the emergence of the super-ego; nonetheless, in small children, who are pre-Oedipal, there is, as he sees, still intense anxiety.

When repression fails, “the instinctual impulse has found a substitute in spite of repression, but a substitute which is very much reduced, displaced and inhibited and which is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction” (Freud, 1926, p. 95). In trying to satisfy a drive via such substitutive process (which is the dynamic of symptoms, in a general sense), the repressive mechanism “is forced to expend itself in making alterations in the subject’s own body and is not permitted to impinge upon the external world. It must not be transformed into action” (Freud, 1926, p. 95). The ‘internalisation’ of the effect of repression en route to become anxiety is explained as follows: “As we know, in repression the ego is operating under the influence of external reality and therefore it debars the substitutive process from having any effect upon that reality” (Freud, 1926, p. 95). The ego at first struggles against this newly emerged symptom, as if trying to get rid of a ‘foreign body’; however, a secondary, and, as Freud sees it, more complicated process takes place subsequently, that of a ‘conciliation’ to the point of enjoyment—as Lacan would phrase it—with this symptom. Freud writes:

Being of a peaceable disposition it [the ego] would like to incorporate the symptom and make it part of itself. It is from the symptom itself that the trouble comes. For the symptom, being the true substitute for and derivative of the repressed impulse, carries on the role of the latter; it continually renews its demands for satisfaction and thus obliges the ego in its turn to give the signal of unpleasure and put itself in a posture of defence. (Freud, 1926, p. 100)

This ‘signal of unpleasure’ is anxiety. With the introduction of the ‘signal’, following what I presented in the Introduction, anxiety appears as fundamentally a psychosocial phenomenon, comprising a subject beyond itself. Freud reworks yet another of his earlier ideas, that which argued that anxiety is produced by repression. By dissecting neurosis through the cases of phobia in Little Hans and the Wolf Man, pointing at each case’s symptom and inhibitions whilst working on their castration anxiety, Freud elaborates that “the majority of phobias go back to an anxiety of this kind felt by the ego in regard to the demands of the libido. It is always the ego’s attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and which sets repression going. Anxiety never arises from repressed libido” (Freud, 1926, p. 109). Anxiety, thus, “is produced from the libidinal cathexis of the instinctual impulses” (Freud, 1926, p. 110), slightly different to what he suggested in his early theories.

Conversion Hysterias and obsessional neurosis bring, on their turn, another layer to Freud’s understanding of the symptom in relation to the logic of satisfaction and the ‘agency’ of the ego, the id and the super-ego over one another. In obsessional neurosis, the tendency in symptom-formation “is to give ever greater room to substitutive satisfaction at the expense of frustration. Symptoms which once stood for a restriction of the ego come later on to represent satisfactions as well, thanks to the ego’s inclination to synthesis, and it is quite clear that this second meaning gradually becomes the more important of the two” (Freud, 1926, p. 118). The ego is then reduced to the role of satisfying the symptom, as Freud writes: “The over-acute conflict between id and superego which has dominated the illness from the very beginning may assume such extensive proportions that the ego, unable to carry out its office of mediator, can undertake nothing which is not drawn into the sphere of that conflict” (Freud, 1926, p. 118). This riddle brought to light from cases of phobia, obsessive neurosis and conversion hysterias is somewhat problematised in the following pages, when Freud brings up the remarkable hypothesis that castration anxiety lays in the backdrop of anxiety in general. Juliet Mitchell (1974) argues, in her influential Psychoanalysis and Feminism, that it is in this essay when Freud reformulates his theories of anxiety, that he “changed not the nature but the connotations and scope of the theory of castration. Anxiety precedes the fear of castration; it is a red-light warning of a possible danger” (Mitchell, 1974, p. 81). Castration, as a cornerstone of subjectivity within the Oedipal metaphor, as I will reach in what follows, is a problematic point of criticism from feminist scholars to the mental life assumed by psychoanalysis.Footnote 1 Whilst the Freudian subject is indeed psychosocial—rather than solely biological or individualised, as mainstream practices of psy will have it—this subject is still anchored in a type of subjective alienation in which the ‘moral’ of the Oedipal father is internalised in a guarantee to an affective modulation, crystallising patriarchy as a means to manage the excessiveness of the drive—a view that is not sufficiently challenged by even some feminist contemporary psychoanalysts such as Gherovici (2018).

According to Freud, in phobias, the relation to castration anxiety is rather straightforward: “As soon as the ego recognises the danger of castration it gives the signal of anxiety and inhibits through the pleasure-unpleasure agency (in a way which we cannot as yet understand) the impending cathectic process in the id” (Freud, 1926, p. 125). In this case of phobia, the ego is successful in its ‘solution’ to anxiety, avoiding it by avoiding the ‘object’ where it was displaced to or through the very inhibitory symptom. What Freud suggests, making this ‘simple’ economic equation more sophisticated, is that the danger in phobia towards which the ego is giving a signal is the danger of castration, in a manner that is no different to a ‘realistic anxiety’—when there is something ‘real’ threatening the subject—the difference however being “that its content remains unconscious and only becomes conscious in the form of a distortion” (Freud, 1926, p. 126). Similarly, in obsessional neurosis, a danger is also being ‘solved’, but the difference here is that “the danger-situation from which the ego must get away is the hostility of the superego” (Freud, 1926, p. 128), an internalised danger, not external. This ‘threat’ on the ego parting from a scrutinising superego is also ‘felt’ as real and also derives from castration, but in this case it becomes what Freud calls ‘moral anxiety’.

So far, what Freud offers on the topic of anxiety is that anxiety is, be it in cases of phobia, hysteria or obsessional neurosis, a ‘reaction’ to some ‘situation of danger’, and it becomes apparent “by the ego’s doing something to avoid that situation or to withdraw from it” (Freud, 1926, p. 128). Whilst anxiety itself is not a symptom, but an unwanted affect that serves as a signal to this imminent danger, “symptoms are created so as to avoid a danger-situation whose presence has been signalled by the generation of anxiety” (Freud, 1926, p. 129). The danger situation, the threat, to which anxiety is a signal of, is lined by castration, which, for Freud at this point, can be identified in various instances, from separation to death, all of which present a danger to the integrity of the ego. He writes: “I am therefore inclined to adhere to the view that the fear of death should be regarded as analogous to the fear of castration and that the situation to which the ego is reacting is one of being abandoned by the protecting super-ego—the powers of destiny—so that it has no longer any safeguard against all the dangers that surround it” (Freud, 1926, p. 130). What we see here is this danger of fragmentation, of an annihilation of the unifying or ‘stable’—even if by an illusion of stability—sense of self as the basis of anxiety. This characteristic underlies the of anxiety as a vibration, as it will become clearer as we move along. This is also precisely the grounds for anxiety Lacan will be working with, situating the subject as bound to the Other, in a position lacking of any autonomy, which is at the foundations for his theories on anxiety. Evidently, the choice of the word ‘castration’ and its reverberations with ‘lack’ within a phallic matrix of subjectivity are far from unproblematic from feminist lenses.

For Freud, the ‘manifestation’ of anxiety is particular to the body, to specific ‘physical sensations’ that are here pointed as mostly respiratory, connected to the heart and motor in their discharge. In short, anxiety is linked to “(1) a specific character of unpleasure, (2) acts of discharge and (3) perceptions of those acts” (Freud, 1926, pp. 132–133). And it is precisely in the way anxiety is characterised through the acts of discharge connected to it and how such acts are perceived that anxiety differs from other kinds of ‘un-pleasures’. Freud even offers the specific examples of pain and mourning, that can be similar, yet diverge in their ‘discharge’, for “anxiety is based upon an increase of excitation which on the one hand produces the character of unpleasure and on the other finds relief through the acts of discharge” (Freud, 1926, p. 133). Despite its remarking physiological characteristics, which Freud mentions as an increase in excitation that produces unpleasure and at the same time finds a path of discharge; there is more to anxiety than this very physiology. The unconscious is also highly associated in this ‘specificity’ of anxiety, once there is a specific ‘temporality’ of anxiety brought together by the very ‘marks’ it leaves on the subject and their experience. This ‘line’ or ‘trail’ of anxiety is, Freud supposes, connected to a ‘model’ experience that is reproduced through the anxious feeling, this initial experience “contained the necessary conditions for such an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths, and that from this circumstance the unpleasure of anxiety receives its specific character” (Freud, 1926, p. 133). One of such early experiences is the trauma of birth. Whilst Freud acknowledges that some biological observations with non-mammals can possibly refute the trauma of birth theory, it nonetheless cannot be so easily discarded in relation to the human experience, and what follows from this assumption would be the questioning of ‘why’ anxiety. What would be its function, presuming there is any? “The answer seems to be obvious and convincing: anxiety arose originally as a reaction to a state of danger and it is reproduced whenever a state of that kind recurs” (Freud, 1926, p. 134).

Instead of the trauma of birth in the way Rank has proposed, Freud sees birth and the subsequent developments in small children as allowing for a ‘primal anxiety’ which is linked to the fear of object loss. This fear of object loss and anxiety are, however, enveloped in the same danger-signal logic. Freud suggests earlier that this involves this initial danger, a possibility raised in the infant’s awareness that without the ‘mother’ it can vanish without care, nourishment, etc., all of which is ‘processed’ by the infant as a satisfaction-unsatisfied-unpleasure state. This growing tension that emerges with need and the state of non-satisfaction that sees stimuli accumulating to the point of unpleasure sees infants unable to master this tension physically or discharge it, “analogous to the experience of being born” (Freud, 1926, p. 137), giving rise to anxiety in relation to this very ‘danger’. Only when the baby is able to process this danger as linked to the presence of the mother that her absence becomes a danger itself.

Yet, an early infant anxiety, this primary anxiety and the fear of loss are also analogous to what happens later on, when castration becomes the danger, when the phallic phase is reached, as “in this case the danger is of being separated from one’s genitals” (Freud, 1926, p. 139). The genital, particularly the penis, of high narcissistic value, as Freud paraphrases from Ferenczi, is linked with the fantasy of it being what could once again unite the child with the mother. In castration, “being deprived of it [the phallus] amounts to a renewed separation from her, and this in its turn means being helplessly exposed to an unpleasurable tension due to instinctual need, as was the case at birth” (Freud, 1926, p. 139). At this point Freud introduces the problematic riddle of sexual difference to his theory of anxiety, which, as I will discuss in what follows, is important in the formulation of a psychosocial approach to this affect that does not rely on Oedipal sexual difference as the anchor of subjectivity.

For Freud, with the subsequent refinement of perception and psychic activities, the fear of loss of the mother and castration are followed by the super-ego, when the latter is ‘installed’ as a ‘depersonalisation’ of the parental figure/agency that once allowed for castration. When the super-ego is installed as part of the psychic structure, a type of anxiety emerges which is social and Freud calls ‘moral anxiety’. Subsequently, the ego will signal with anxiety when the ‘disapproval’ from the super-ego becomes prominent. And here, in this complex state of anxiety in relation to the super-ego, a foundation for the Lacanian anxiety and the desire of the Other is laid down: “The final transformation which the fear of the super-ego undergoes is, it seems [to me], the fear of death (or fear for life) which is a fear of the super-ego projected on to the powers of destiny” (Freud, 1926, p. 140). Or, as Lacan asks, in Italian: Che vuoi?

Avoiding danger, removing oneself from the possibility of it, the reactions to this danger are closely linked to anxiety and of course the question of what are these dangers and the place they occupy in one’s psychic structure is the next question, that is addressed on a tangent. Freud moves to the end of this essay by summarising the different ‘stages’ in life as per how one is situated to face one’s anxiety, a process that culminates with negotiations over the process of ‘being in the world’ in the most direct sense. There is a justification of a moral internalisation and the affect of anxiety as correlate, not to mention the, yet again, focus on the ‘boy’s’ psychosexual development.

In early infancy the individual is really not equipped to master psychically the large sums of excitation that reach him whether from without or from within. Again, at a certain period of life his most important interest really is that the people he is dependent on should not withdraw their loving care of him. Later on in his boyhood, when he feels that his father is a powerful rival in regard to his mother and becomes aware of his own aggressive inclinations towards him and of his sexual intentions towards his mother, he really is justified in being afraid of his father; and his fear of being punished by him can find expression through phylogenetic reinforcement in the fear of being castrated. Finally, as he enters into social relationships, it really is necessary for him to be afraid of his super-ego, to have a conscience; and the absence of that factor would give rise to severe conflicts, dangers and so on. (Freud, 1926, pp. 146–147)

This ‘line’ is not particularly ‘linear’ in everyone’s experiences, as a person can get caught in an earlier manner of dealing with the excess stimuli and “remain infantile in their behaviour in regard to danger and do not overcome determinants of anxiety which have grown out of date” (Freud, 1926, p. 146). That would characterise neurosis and also offer light on the quantitative aspects of this economy of stimuli in the dynamics of repression. Repression, repetition and anxiety form a cycle of excesses and remainders operating in a somewhat non-organised circuit, propelled by the interplay of control and excess of libido so vividly evidenced in the production of anxiety.

Sexual difference as well as moral anxiety and castration are for Juliet Mitchell (1974) central themes for a feminist engagement with psychoanalysis, once they are intrinsically linked with the debate of the Oedipus Complex. Anxiety, thus, has a feminine imprint in Freudian thought, as she explains:

The anxiety caused by the mother going can be resolved by understanding that she will come back […]. The point is that this anxiety does not (any more than does the anxiety of birth), involve socially unacceptable ideas. On the other hand, the incestuous desire for the mother that then arises does involve the forbidden. Now, anxiety comes into play to suggest fear of castration if these incestuous ideas are not abandoned. […] If the castration complex is not adequately resolved—and that means the possibility of castration in not symbolically accepted, then the Oedipus complex is not shattered and aspects of its irresolution will recur in later neurosis. (Mitchell, 1974, p. 82)

Freud, through the function of the phallus (in the evident description of patriarchy present in his theory of psychosexual development), connects narcissism and the Oedipus complex—or a modulation of desire within a politically situated family drama, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) will denounce in Anti-Oedipus—with the concept of castration. This model of positing sexual difference thus relied on the artifice of anxiety, once a fear of castration would, for a little boy, be expressed through an outburst of anxiety, such as seen in the case of Little Hans. Mitchell writes:

Freud gave a number of reasons for the value attached to the phallus […]. Having incorporated it into the concept of narcissism—its ownership is crucial to the nature of the ego being formed, or rather its loss would be an immense blow for the narcissistic ego—Freud had to recognise the distinction between the sexes in this respect. This recognition, and the diverse role of the castration complex, led him, in the second half of the twenties and thirties to a reassessment of the Oedipus complex and from there to the development of his theories of femininity and the pre-Oedipal narcissistic stage. (Mitchell, 1974, p. 88)

Lacan will make castration anxiety even more central to his theory of this affect. Castration and the phallic law, as well as a positioning of the subject on the side of ‘having it’ or ‘lacking it’ in a Symbolic and Imaginary form, are the grounds for his theory of sexual difference. What Juliet Mitchell observed, so early in the encounter between psychoanalysis and feminism, and what she argues in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, is that Freud’s theory of anxiety, which unfolds through lack, loss and separation, is utilised to account for a type of castration (the ‘castration complex’), for when castration is already there (‘femininity’). Anxiety, thus, is a feminist issue.

As we have seen so far, in this paper, Freud makes several changes to his previous views on the topic of anxiety, taking into account his works in other texts as mentioned before such as ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 1920, and ‘The Ego and the Id’, 1923. Anxiety, by 1926, then, is more complex than an overwhelming excess of libido finding its ‘way out’; it now passes through the mental apparatus, mobilising the body accordingly, in much less ‘pre-arranged’ zig zags, once the Id and also repression come to negotiate stimuli, protections, symptoms and remainders. The ego is the ‘seat’ but also the ‘source’ of anxiety—an assertion that Lacan would challenge in his take on the subject, taking it away from the ego. Rank’s work on the trauma of birth as a ‘prototype’ to anxiety was also worked over, raising the central discussion around what is perceived as a situation of danger, a threat to the ego, and not only neurotic or realistic anxieties but also moral anxiety. The existence of an ‘original’ situation of danger was circumvented until Freud was able to reach the heart of the question in the identification of the factor of a ‘threat to the ego’.

Anxiety as ‘signal’, as it has been conceptualised in this paper, also comes close to ‘fear’, nonetheless Freud offers a very precise clarification of the difference between the two. Again, this is a point that Lacan will pick up later in relation to anxiety and the ‘lack of the lack’, subverting Freudian logic. To Freud, “anxiety [Angst] has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word ‘fear’ [Furcht] rather than ‘anxiety’ [Angst] if it has found an object” (Freud, 1926, p. 165). Having ‘something’ to be anxious ‘about’ brings up the question of the nature of this ‘something’, of it being ‘real’ or ‘not real’, and in this paper Freud insists that something is ‘real’ as long as it feels as such to the subject. In this sense, a bearing on ‘material reality’ is not what defines what is a ‘realistic’ of neurotic anxiety, rather, the external (as in an external object) or internal (instinctual/drive-related) ‘nature of this sources’ of anxiety, both share the same ‘realistic basis’.

New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: Lecture XXXII Anxiety and Instinctual Life, 1933

Written in 1932 and published the following year, Freud’s New Introductory Lectures series was never delivered, rather, printed straight away in 1933, covering a number of topics that crossed psychoanalysis. The lecture on ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’, the last of his pieces dedicated specifically to the theme of anxiety, sets off by promising updates but nevertheless no real ‘final’ answers in regard to the riddle of anxiety. The text, in the first half, in particular, when recapping the previous lecture on the same topic, Lecture XXV from 1917, and updating its findings, is very much in line with the contributions found in ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, pointing at an anxiety as signal to a situation of danger; a danger deriving from a traumatic experience and an anxiety formed around the fear of castration and its repercussions.

Freud departs from what is known about anxiety by that point, that it is “an affective estate—that is to say, a combination of certain feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series with the corresponding innervations of discharge and a perception of them, but probably also the precipitate of a particular important event, incorporated by inheritance” (Freud, 1933, p. 81). Anxiety had a sort of ‘footprint’ on the psyche-body that would see itself resonating in future experiences of anxiety. Another point raised still in 1917 was in relation to the different ‘types’ of anxiety: neurotic and realistic, and their origin and process. Whilst the latter seems to be clearer to understanding, as a response to an external threat and the preparedness towards it, the former, by his account, was still left slightly up in the air in 1917. However, the 1926 essay deals with this difference in more detail.

One key aspect that is now clearer in relation to anxiety in cases of hysteria and neurosis is the mechanism of repression, that by now, towards the later years of Freud’s life, is more refined than what was offered in early texts. By 1932 he was already working over his second topographical model of the psychic apparatus, and the id, ego and super-ego come to function as dynamic agencies of the psyche with more clarity. In regard to anxiety and repression, our understanding can benefit

if we separate what happens to the idea that has to be repressed from what happens to the quota of libido attaching to it. It is the idea which is subjected to repression and which may be distorted to the point of being unrecognizable; but its quota of affect is regularly transformed into anxiety—and this is so whatever the nature of the affect may be, whether it is aggressiveness or love. (Freud, 1933, p. 83)

In light of this transformation, Freud reminds us of previous works in linking symptom and anxiety—a correlation that becomes confused at times in the 1926 work, precisely because they “represent and replace each other” (Freud, 1933, p. 83) in different case scenarios. Therefore, “it seems, indeed, that the generation of anxiety is the earlier and the formation of symptoms the later of the two, as though the symptoms are created in order to avoid the outbreak of the anxiety state” (Freud, 1933, p. 84). Another point clarified on this occasion is that what one is really afraid of in cases of neurotic anxiety and realistic anxiety is their own libido, and the difference here would be that in neurotic anxiety “danger is internal instead of an external one and that it is not consciously recognised” (Freud, 1933, p. 84). This ‘re-employment’ of libido in anxiety and the fact that it may be replaced by a symptom that is ‘physically bound’ is what gains more consistency in this current presentation, once, as Freud points out, it is in the interplay between id, ego and super-ego that we can grasp further what is the Freudian contribution to the riddle of anxiety.

The ego being, as he previously established, the ‘seat of anxiety’, does not mean that despite anxiety not being ‘in’ the id, for instance, that these other psychic agencies do not exercise any impact on the formation of anxiety. Quite the contrary, as Freud elaborated in the 1926 piece, there is a centrality of castration anxiety that can be read over different cases and at different moments in life of any individual. He related the ‘fear of castration’ to a sense of helplessness, lack of autonomy and a threat to the subject. Yet, so far the Freudian subject of anxiety has been—despite the account of hysteria—much focused on a presupposed ‘male/masculine’ individual. Here Freud for once differentiates castration in the possible implications it has over sexual difference, whilst still keeping to the ‘findings’ of the work on the previous decades:

Fear of castration is not, of course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is evidently a later prolongation of the infant’s anxiety if it finds its mother absent. You will realise how real a situation of danger is indicated by this anxiety. If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her child, it is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs and is perhaps exposed to the most distressing feelings of tension. (Freud, 1933, p. 87)

What is interesting here is that Rank’s trauma of birth and the centrality over this separation from the mother, instead of a centrality in castration, could somehow hint at a less Oedipal sexual difference in the foundations of anxiety. Yet, as Freud dismisses this claim of the centrality of the trauma of birth, we are left with anxiety as a riddle that seats in the ego but is mobilised by the id and the super-ego as well and mobilising the body in its turn through a path that, in this account, relies on the Oedipal structure. What we can also read into this centrality of castration is a problematic infantilisation of women/femininity, once he posits that:

The danger of psychical helplessness fits the stage of the ego’s early immaturity; the danger of loss of an object (or loss of love) fits the lack of self-sufficiency in the first years of childhood; the danger of being castrated fits the phallic phase; and finally fear of the super-ego, which assumes a special position, fits the period of latency. In the course of development the old determinants of anxiety should be dropped, since the situations of danger corresponding to them have lost their importance owing to the strengthening of the ego. But this only occurs most incompletely. Many people are unable to surmount the fear of loss of love; they never become sufficiently independent of other people’s love and in this respect carry on their behaviour as infants. (Freud, 1933, p. 88)

Through this logic Freud explains how neurotics are held onto this early, infantile relation to danger, not being able to ingress in the phallic phase that entails a ‘getting over’ the fear of being ‘left’, just as for women. Women, for not being able to enter the Oedipal phase as such, and neurotics are stuck in this infantilised state. An obvious testament to Freud’s patriarchal views—which I add to what has been elaborated by Juliet Mitchell (1974) on the topic, as mentioned above.

Another key aspect of Freud’s late theory of anxiety is its relation to repression. Whilst at first it was thought that repression generated anxiety, we now understand that it is the other way around, as previously mentioned. Anxiety, therefore, is located in the interplay between ego and id. Such ego and id relation in anxiety only becomes clear after the 1923 text, substituting the visual model of vessels of quantities Freud proposed in the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, outlined in 1895. The ego “makes use of an experimental cathexis and starts up the pleasure-unpleasure automatism by means of a signal of anxiety” (Freud, 1933, p. 90), which is activated on the face of the dangers of the repetition of a certain traumatic experience that would emerge if a ‘call’ of the id were to be attended to. Given this, anxiety and repression can go different ways. There may be an anxiety attack (which is when the ego withdraws completely from what Freud calls this ‘objectionable excitation’ it is alerting against) or the ego may offer a counter-balance, an anticathexis that will be joined by the reserved energy of the repressed impulse resulting in a symptom.

Signal anxiety ‘sets in action’ the pleasure-unpleasure principle impact of repression, transforming what goes on in the id, or ‘instinctual/drive impulses’ that belong there. Freud offers different scenarios to what happens in the id through repression. “In some cases the repressed instinctual impulse may retain its libidinal cathexis, and may persist in the id unchanged, although subject to constant pressure from the ego” (Freud, 1933, p. 92). At other times this ‘instinctual impulse’ vanishes leaving only a trace of libido, of energy, that is ‘diverted’ thereafter—which he posits as being the case when the Oedipus complex is well resolved. Another option would be for “a regression of the libidinal organisation to an earlier stage. This can, of course, only occur in the id, and if it occurs it will be under the influence of the same conflict which was introduced by the signal of anxiety” (Freud, 1933, p. 92).

Quantities of tension that cannot be dealt with, which are overwhelming to the consistency of the subject, are still the backbone of anxiety. This includes signal anxiety, where “what is feared, what is the object of the anxiety, is invariably the emergence of a traumatic moment, which cannot be dealt with by the normal rules of the pleasure principle” (Freud, 1933, p. 94). Therefore, anxiety is almost a secondary process that has to have an initial point at a previous experience, a rule maintained even when it is a case of anxiety neurosis “owing to somatic damage to the sexual function” (Freud, 1933, p. 94). A fresh contribution in this text then is this short observation that supersedes the 1926 text, stating that “we shall no longer maintain that it is the libido itself that is turned into anxiety in such cases [of anxiety neurosis linked to the bodily sexual function]” (Freud, 1933, p. 94). In summary, Freud offers “a twofold origin of anxiety—one as a direct consequence of the traumatic moment and the other as a signal threatening a repetition of such a moment” (Freud, 1933, p. 94). And in so doing, he moves psychoanalysis away from its cruder focus on the sexual drive and towards the matter of an overwhelming threat to the consistency of the ego.

Yet again, Freud’s view of anxiety is that it is a central affect to ‘normal’ experience and that it has a function. By functioning as a signal to a threat to the stability of the ego, anxiety is able to establish itself as a ‘compass’ in the map of the treatment (Miller, 2007). It is by going through the clues of anxiety that we can get in touch to what is anchoring one’s ego. Whilst some clinical approaches (from mainstream biologist psychiatry to certain orientations in psychoanalysis) might find value in strengthening the ego’s mechanisms of defence (from some psychoanalytic schools to forms of counselling and psychotherapy that are humanistic, or ‘person-centred’), or one’s ‘ideal of oneself’ (think here of CBT, Positive Psychology and wellness, in general), a Freudo-Lacanian practice will lead towards disputing the very illusion that the ego consists on. Anxiety is then the guiding principle of this practice; and if one has to be less anxious, the solution is to make the ego less stiff and a little more malleable. Instead of a stranger, anxiety is deeply entangled into the Freudian subject.

The Trail of Anxiety in Freud

The very final systematic account of anxiety in Freudian writing appears in one of his last written pieces, before passing away in London. In ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’, from 1938, his later ideas about the id, the ego and the functions and dynamics of anxiety are expressed. We quite clearly see anxiety as a negotiation between these psychic agencies, operating as a threshold of overwhelming tension and the movement of preservation of integrity. The ego appears as a gatekeeper, guaranteeing an adaptation to the ‘world’, against both internal and external dangers of annihilation of the subject. The id, in this final account, appears as a still mysterious and charged psychic sphere that is directly connected with the body, the drive and perception. Freud writes:

The id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its instinctual needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions—coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure—govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. (Freud, 1938, p. 198)

This overwhelming flow of pleasure-unpleasure is then channelled through the activity of the ego, guided by ‘the sensations of anxiety’. In Freud’s words: “The ego has set itself the task of self-preservation, which the id appears to neglect. It [the ego] makes use of the sensations of anxiety as a signal to give a warning of dangers that threaten its integrity” (Freud, 1938, p. 199). It is interesting that Freud’s development of his theory of anxiety as a signal of an imminent threat first starts with a focus on realistic dangers, which are dangers to the body and to life. He then moves on to dangers that are more subjective, related to the ego, to the preservation of some integrity and a sense of ‘self’ that is guaranteed and stabilised through the ego’s activities. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis—especially in the context of the several Jewish analysts that escaped Nazi persecution in Europe during and around the period of WWII—grows in the United States into a further preoccupation with these promises of stability conferred to a well-functioning ego. Adaptation and strengthening the ego’s defences become central to the work developed by Anna Freud in the 1940s in Britain and by Ego-Psychology in the United States (Frosh, 1987). In France, Lacan puts this into question, twisting the roles of the id and ego. Freud’s ‘Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden’ becomes “Where it was, I must come into being” (Lacan, 1957 [2006], p. 435). Anxiety, as an affect of sensations that at once overwhelm and inform the ego, assumes a central and intriguing role in subjectivity. It can at the same time paralyse and cause suffering, whilst it may point at new horizons, opening up the gates of the id beyond the limits of the ‘illusion’ of the ego.

This view of the function of anxiety is, therefore, contrary to the hegemonic psychiatric nosology, where, instead, the goal is to eliminate anxiety altogether, keeping any ‘sense of self’ unexamined. From this perspective, the Freudian view of anxiety already hints at a possible ‘becoming’ away from a frozen ‘being’. In doing so, the Freudian theories of anxiety open the way to an understanding of anxiety as a ‘vibration’, or as an affect of the order of excess, beyond the delineation of the individual.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, there is a strong reliance on the Oedipal myth and a subsequent formulation of castration anxiety that anchors the psychoanalytic understanding of sexual difference. However, what this detailed close reading of this archive has revealed is the potential of the ‘unbound’ character of anxiety found in the pre-psychoanalytic texts, the 1917 paper and the 1938 text. In these occasions, Freud does not rely on the Oedipal model so strongly, rather connecting anxiety to (1) excessive libido and (2) the id. The early energetic model of psyche-soma will map anxiety into a dynamic of excessive libidinal pressure that will result in anxiety. The locus of libido is the Id. When Freud, in 1938, say that the id “has a world of perception of its own” (Freud, 1938, p. 198) he leaves a door open for an understanding of affect that extends beyond the ‘I’ (ego, Ich), beyond morality/internalised culture or modulations of desire (superego). The id, thus, is crossed by perceptions of what extends beyond oneself, which produce pressure onto the ego, an activity such that Freud sees as anxiety. If anxiety is then seen as a production in the ‘I’ that echoes an accumulation, or a flow of libido imprinted upon the Id but accumulated not just through the drive, but also through this ‘perception’ capacity of the Id, then anxiety is an affect that vibrates between a ‘being’ (the ego/superego consistencies of the subject) and ‘becomings’—or the effects of the flows perceived in the Id of what extends beyond the ‘I’ and might put the very consistency of the ‘I’ at risk.

In this chapter, a close reading of Freud’s systematic delineations of the grounds of anxiety allows us to rescue two main pillars of his theory. These are first, the rescuing of Freud’s very early account of anxiety that is not reliant on an Oedipal understanding of the subject. Secondly, the function of anxiety as a signal for the insistence of ego-activity in preserving a sense of reality. Lacan will formulate a theory of anxiety as an affect that marks an encounter with the Real that takes these two pillars of Freudian theory further. He will, specifically, problematise the promise of a strong ego in a theory of anxiety as ‘excess’.

Freud’s very early work, in the nineteenth century, addresses the question of anxiety as an excess that is not bound to symbolisation or to Oedipal function. What we have seen is a dynamic relation between the ‘libidinal flow’ and ‘representatives’, or ideas, in Freud’s model of psyche-soma. A ‘conversion’ takes place when the surplus tension of the drive cannot find sufficient or adequate grounds in the frameworks enveloping it. In the case of hysteria, for example, there is an established tradition of feminist thinking of this mode of conversion under the lenses of hysteria and hysteric symptoms as a form of social protest against a patriarchal arrangement (from Cixous, 1976 and Mitchell, 2000 to Webster, 2018 among several others). In Lacanian parlance it would be a case of the explicit limits of the Symbolic and relation to the Real in hysteria as well as in anxiety. In anxiety a ‘conversion’ takes place moving the Real of the body that finds no place in experience. In other words, the phenomenological body of the subject in culture as experiencing the resonances of a chaotic and excessive energetic flow is evident in Freud’s very early account of anxiety. This is foundational to delineating anxiety as a ‘vibration’.