Scott Stossel, author of MY AGE OF ANXIETY thinks that there is a metaphysics of anxiety. “To grapple with and understand anxiety,” he says, “is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.” Many people have made this claim, but it can mean different things. It can mean that human beings are creatures who care about the future, and so hoping for good outcomes and worrying about bad ones comes with membership in the species. This is, roughly, the existentialist view. Sartre thought that we feel anxiety when we appreciate the responsibility we bear whenever we act—when we realize that, ultimately, there is nothing out there, including the ethical systems we are born into, that backs up our choices, and nothing that guarantees that they will be the right ones. Dogs and cats, presumably, do not know this feeling. Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom. The idea that anxiety is central to the human condition can also mean that our mental life is characterized by psychic conflict, and anxiety is the symptom of that conflict. This is, roughly, the psychoanalytic view. It’s what Freud meant when, in 1917 (not, as Stossel has it, 1933), he called anxiety “a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence.” Anxiety is the common feature of all neuroses. Feeling anxious is what makes people seek psychiatric help. It’s a signal that unconscious drives are in conflict—that (as Freud believed in 1917) the ego is repressing a libidinal impulse. We’re not aware of the conflict itself—we’re not aware that we have a repressed desire—but we are aware of our anxiety. That’s what makes it the key to understanding what’s going on inside our heads. Anxiety plays a big role in other accounts of the human condition, too. In theology, anxiety has been associated with the concepts of conscience, guilt, and original sin. Reinhold Niebuhr called anxiety “the inevitable spiritual state of man.” In evolutionary psychology, anxiety is usually explained as part of the “fight or flight” reflex that gets triggered in the presence of danger. The reflex is naturally selected for: organisms that lack it might fall off a cliff or get crushed by a mastodon, because their physiologies failed to warn them of a threat to their survival. And, in some schools of sociology and cultural theory, anxiety is interpreted as a reaction to the stress and uncertainty of modern life. It’s a natural response to unnatural conditions. It’s how we know that the world is headed in a bad direction. This is the hand the student of anxiety is dealt. But he can pick only one card. The existentialist’s anxiety, the psychoanalyst’s anxiety, and the anxieties of theologians, sociologists, and evolutionary psychologists have almost nothing to do with one another. They are not even compatible with one another. If anxiety is a product of modern life, then it is not the result of unconscious drives. If it’s the result of unconscious drives, then it is not a sign of our existential awareness of the nature of freedom. It can’t be entirely conscious, unconscious, socially conditioned, and hard-wired at the same time. The most we can say is that a mood that almost everyone experiences has featured prominently in various theories of human life and the world we inhabit. Louis Menand, in The New Yorker
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 10:10:37 +0000
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