Whistling in the Dark

Abstract

According to a recent newspaper article, 40 million people in the European Union live in anxiety every single day (results of an unnamed survey of 20,000 patients in 558 doctor's offices in Germany). Apparently only 6% of the population can summon the courage to talk about their anxiety with their doctor. It would seem that doctors have too little time to recognize the signs of what the article calls the “new illness”. Nor are they encouraged to do so by the renowned scientific journals, where the focus is solely on a purely medical treatment for anxiety, or by the pharmaceutical industry, where anxiety is equated with “long-term easy money”. The title of the article immediately struck me, especially since it seemed to be in flat contradiction to its subtitle: “Anxiety as the other side of affluence. Being afraid without knowing why”. Let me first of all try to explain why this contradiction did not really surprise me. It is well known that `anxiety' is traditionally opposed to `fear', where the difference is said to be that fear has a clear object but anxiety does not. One is afraid of something determinate, whereas with anxiety one appears to be afraid without knowing precisely why or what one fears. Yet this distinction is not so straightforward: merely mentioning it is not the same as maintaining it, as can be seen in this frequently cited passage from 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 appears to waver between two possibilities: either anxiety is essentially characterized by indeterminacy and a lack of object, in which case it is literally anxiety for nothing, or anxiety is temporarily undetermined, in which case it is anxiety for something that cannot immediately be named (certainly not by the one who suffers from it) but that could be named and determined with the proper technique or therapy. In this second case — the one Freud clearly prefers — anxiety would be a fear whose object is provisionally undetermined. And indeed, hardly a paragraph further Freud no longer concerns himself with the distinction he just drew and with seeming carelessness sets aside the rules of correct usage which he brought to his readers' attention: “a real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic anxiety is anxiety about a known danger of this sort. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger. Neurotic danger is thus a danger that has still to be discovered. Analysis has shown that it is a pulsional danger [Triebgefahr]. By bringing this danger which is not known into consciousness, the analyst makes neurotic anxiety no different from realistic anxiety, so that it can be dealt with in the same way”. Neurotic anxiety, then, is only anxiety as long as the danger causing the anxiety is unknown. And Freud's treatment for revealing that danger essentially boils down to turning the neurotic anxiety into a realistic anxiety, or more precisely: to show that the danger, although different in each case, (pulsional danger; danger from the external world) is knowable in principle and so does not betray anxiety but fear! Realistic anxiety already has an object (a known danger) and is therefore fear. Neurotic anxiety has a hidden object which can and must be disclosed: “where there is anxiety there must be something that one is afraid of”. Evidently, “anxiety is not so simple a matter”, as Freud himself wrote and, one could add, experienced in the text from which I have just quoted at length.