This congress explores anxiety from psychoanalytic and philosophical perspectives.
Starting from Sigmund Freud’s and Martin Heidegger’s conceptions of Angst, two rather different approaches come to the fore. On the one hand, we have Freud’s interpretation in “Inhibitions, Symptom and Anxiety”, where he tries to define the concept of anxiety as a main element in neurosis and, on the other, Heidegger’s concept, which plays a major role in gaining the existential meaning of Dasein, literally translated as ‘being-there’. Despite this difference, many scholars have postulated a common anthropo-existential interpretation.
Anxiety as such marks the anthropological and existential passage from the non-distinction of the pre-subjective life to the distinction that emanates from the differentiation of the subject from the world. With Freud, a specific connection to repetition insists, formulating anxiety both as repetition of a traumatic situation and as a defence reaction facing a recognised danger-situation.
In 1962-63 Jacques Lacan held his Seminar X on Anxiety, where he notes the following: “What constitutes anxiety is when something, a mechanism, makes there appear….at the place which corresponds to the one occupied by the ‘o’ the object of desire…re-read the article on the Unheimlich,…as being the absolutely indispensable hinge for approaching the question of anxiety”.
Unheimlich – the ‘scary, creepy or eerie”- dominates discourse currently, initially intensifying during the Covid pandemic and escalating into psycho-social anxiety for children and young people; anxiety in relation to war in Europe and crisis in the Middle East; anxiety in the face of climate and threats to survival; anxiety surrounding identity and dismantling of established human rights.
Furthermore, recent findings on people’s memories, consolidation and systems of memory, memory dissociation, suppression and memory of emotions indicate there is a need for added research on anxiety.
8 CPD POINTS AWARDED