Anxiety (Ideas in Psychoanalysis) - Softcover

Emanuel, Ricky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840461861 ISBN 13: 9781840461862

Publisher: Icon,Totem Books, 2000

Synopsis

Anxiety is a feeling that is familiar to us all.

About this title

About the Author

Ricky Emmanuel is a Child and Adult Psychotherapist working as a Consultant Child Psychotherapist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and Head of Child Psychotherapy Services for Camden and Islington Community NHS Trust. He teaches at the Tavistock Clinic in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

As I begin to write this book, I am faced with many anxieties. Will I manage to finish it on time and get it to the publisher? Will it be good enough? Do I know what I want to say and can I say it clearly enough? This seems normal. Facing a new and potentially daunting task gives rise to anxiety in all of us. But how will I cope with these anxieties? Will they overwhelm me and lead to a paralysis of thought and writing, or will they spur me on to 'create' this book? What exactly are these anxieties? And what function, if any, do they have?

If I try to examine exactly what I am anxious about - in other words, think about and name my own emotional experience - then perhaps the anxieties will be mollified. My anxieties are not necessarily irrational ones, although some of them may be. If I examine them more closely, I find that I am anxious about my performance. In other words, will I be judged harshly? Will I be exposed as fraudulent? Do I know enough about the subject to warrant having being asked to write this book? Will I find inspiration from what psychoanalysts call my 'good objects', those mysterious guiding forces within me that are the basis of my security? Will my 'uncertainty cloud' about the whole enterprise be received and held by them, or will I let 'them' down?

This latter anxiety relates to an intimidating or tormenting feeling associated with the fear of being harshly judged, but also a different quality of anxiety, a dejected feeling concerning whether I can be worthy of my good object's expectations of me. This may be recognised by some readers as having something to do with one's conscience, Sigmund Freud's superego and the ego ideal in their relationship to my ego. There are also allusions to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's differentiation of the qualities of anxiety divided into persecutory and depressive anxiety, and the problem of containment of this anxiety described by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. We therefore see that the subject of this book is potentially a vast one, covering the whole spectrum of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalyst Robert Hinshelwood writes: 'The history of psychoanalysis has been one of trying to understand the core anxiety of the human condition.' In this book I will attempt to trace how anxiety has been thought about in psychoanalysis from Freud to the present time, when the world of neuroscience has started to bring fresh insights into psycchoanalytic formulations. I hope the examples I use are illustrative of the points I am trying to make, as this is not a theoretical exposition of the development of the concept of anxiety in psychoanalytic thought, but rather an attempt to make everyday life situations faced by all of us more comprehensible from a psychoanalytic point of view.

Edition details

• Publisher: Icon,Totem Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840461861
• ISBN 13: 9781840461862
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80