The Meaning of Anxiety: Rollo May
Contents
Introduction
Centrality
of the problem of anxiety in our day
In
philosophy and theology
In
Psychology
Chapter
2 Philosophical Interpreters of Anxiety
17th
Century
Spinoza
Pascal
Kierkegaard:
Anxiety in the 19th century
Chapter
3 Anxiety interpreted biologically
The
startle pattern
Anxiety
and the loss of the world
Origins
of anxiety and fear as seen by Goldstein
The
capacity to bear anxiety
Neurological
and physiological aspects of anxiety
Perceptions
of Danger
Balance
in the autonomic system
Voodoo
Death
Psychosomatic
aspects of anxiety
Gastric
functions
Culture
and the meaning of disease
Chapter
4 Anxiety Interpreted Psychologically
Do
animals have anxiety?
The
study of children’s fears
Maturation
in anxiety and fear
Fear
Masking Anxiety
Stress
and anxiety
Recent
research on anxiety
Cognitive
theorists
State
and trait anxiety
Relationship
between anxiety and fear
Faith
Anxiety
and Learning theory
Personal
Comment
Chapter
5 Anxiety interpreted by the psychotherapist
Freud’s
evolving theories of anxiety
Anxiety
and Repression
Origins
of anxiety as seen by Freud
Trends
in Freud’s theories of Anxiety
Rank
Adler:
Anxiety and inferiority feelings
Jung:
anxiety and the threat of the irrational
Horney
Anxiety and hostility
Horney
origins of anxiety
Sullivan:
Anxiety as apprehension of disapproval
Chapter
6 Anxiety interpreted culturally
The
importance of the historical dimension
Individualism
in the renaissance
Competitive
individualism in work and wealth
Fromm:
Individual isolation in modern culture
Anxiety
and the market place
Mechanisms
of escape
Kardiner: Western man’s growth pattern
Chapter
7 Summary and synthesis of theories of anxiety
The
nature of anxiety
Normal
and neurotic anxiety
Origins
of anxiety
Maturation
of the capacity for anxiety
Anxiety
and fear
Anxiety
and Conflict
Anxiety
and hostility
Culture
and community
Chapter
8 Case studies demonstrating anxiety
What
we seek to discover
Harold
Brown
Chapter
9 The study of unmarried mothers
Chapter
10 Gleanings from the Case studies
Anxiety
underlying fear
Conflict:
Source of anxiety
Rejection
by parents and anxiety
Cleavage
between expectation and reality
Chapter
11 Methods of dealing with anxiety
In
extreme situations
Destructive
ways
Constructive
ways
Chapter
12 Anxiety and the Development of the self
Creativity,
Intelligence and anxiety
The
realisation of self
Definitions
Irrationality
Anxiety
Notes
Introduction
Centrality of the problem of anxiety in our day
Mid-20th century anxiety is rife:
Conditions for anxiety
1.
External
a.
ATom bombs
b.
War
c.
Social, economic, political upheaval
2.
Internal
a.
Psychological disorientation
b.
No clear values
c.
No clear standards of conduct
1920s: age of implicit anxiety: symptoms of anxiety in
literature
1950s age of explicit anxiety: Camus, existentialism
Camus:
17th Century=century of mathematics
19th Century=century of biology
20th Century=century of fear
Kafka: Anxiety rises when bureaucratic efficiency replaces
meaningful relationships and individual autonomy
Anxiety lowers when you have a home, a calling and are a
member of a community.
Hesse: Anxiety rises when we value more the rationalistic
and mechanical as opposed to the dynamic and irrational
Signs of covert anxiety
1.
Compulsive work to gain money (a feeling of power in face of the
powerlessness of anxiety)
2.
Compulsive joining of clubs to conform
Anxiety can be triggered when we feel lost and therefore
unsafe, so when things have no foundation, when danger is that the whole thing
could come crashing down.
Fascism is the answer to freedom and anxiety which can’t be
managed is supplanted by authority and security. In confusion and emptiness
there you will find anxiety, which some find intolerable and is addressed
either on a personal or on a social level.
In philosophy and theology
Tillich: anxiety is man’s response to non-being
Kierkegaard: anxiety is fear of nothingness
Non-being does not just mean death, but death of what makes
your existence meaningful. Meaninglessness is non-being. The self can dissolve
through an attack on its values\meaning.
Niebuhr: anxiety is the concomitant emotion that reflects
the paradox that man is finite and bound and yet has freedom.
In Psychology
Willougby: Anxiety is a contributory factor to suicide,
mental disorders and divorce. All of the latter are rising in our age.
Chapter 2 Philosophical Interpreters of Anxiety
Up until Freud, anxiety was only a concern of philosophers
and theologians. The only philosophers who were interested in it were those
interested in existential conflicts and human crises. Anxiety therefore was of
especial interest to philosophers who had a religious interest, i.e. Kierkegaard,
Spinoza and Pascal.
Spinoza and Pascal.
The separation of mind and body by Descartes creates anxiety
for 19th and 20th century people but also sets the
problem of anxiety for Freud. This has
led to a valuing more of the rational, determinate and mechanical against the
irrational. This in turn has led to a suppressing of anxiety.
Anxiety as a problem didn’t emerge until 19th century
and only a topic for psychology from 1930. Anxiety rationalised is fear, which
is determinate.
17th Century
Rationality was the solution to the problem of man.
Mathematics is the chief tool of rationality. It was believed that reason could
conquer emotions.
Descartes: body can be understood and controlled by
mechanical and mathematical means. This is why we are currently in an age that
only values that which can be measured. Therefore we suppressed the irrational
and that which can’t be measured as unimportant.
That we could control the body with rationality dispelled
anxiety. This was the case as the threat of witches and sorcerers who could
control your body with spells was quashed as it was rationality that was the
controller of bodies, not magic.
The confidence in rationality in the renaissance went hand
in hand with the rise of individualism. This however provoked anxiety due to
the fear of being isolated.
The isolation of the individual however was seen to be
overcome by individual’s adherence to universal rationalism which then joined
people. So we need to liberate rationality in people for them to partake in
universal rationality and therefore not be isolated again.
Therefore anxiety wasn’t a central problem to Spinoza or Leibniz
as they were confident that rationality is all we need. This wasn’t the case
for Pascal.
Spinoza
Spinoza believed fear is a subjective problem, a matter of
ones state of mind. It is the opposite of hope.
Fear says something bad may happen, hope says something good. Spinoza
thought that both fear and hope arise from a weakness of mind. He believed an
emotion could only be overcome by a stronger one, so to deal with fear, then
let courage use rationality to establish how life’s pitfalls can be avoided.
May sees one source of anxiety as emotional conflict, an impossible
situation.
If you remove doubt from fear and add certainty then you get despair.
If we remove doubt from hope then we get confidence.
Spinoza thus sees rational certainty as that which can provide
psychological security.
Pascal
Pascal thought that people suffered anxiety and used
diversions to avoid thinking about it.
He didn’t see that the certitude of rationality was applicable in the
contingent nature of existence, why am I rather than I am not. He also saw that
rationality can be used by emotions, and indeed sometimes emotions can overrule
rationality. He saw rationality used for
purposes of self-interest. He said he
would value reason more if it were rational. Pascal was an exception to thinkers
of his time.
The power given to rationality in the seventeenth century
dealt with anxiety, through giving a psychological unity.
Kierkegaard: Anxiety in the 19th century
Where we had started with a universal reason applicable to
all domains in the seventeenth century. In the 19th century then you
started getting a technical reason. As sciences disciplines developed
independently, they became both autonomous and incommensurate. At the same time of getting technical reason
there was psychological compartmentalisation.
Where rationality tried to master emotions in the seventeenth century,
in the nineteenth it started to repress it. So there was psychological compartmentalisation.
Disunity is anxiety provoking, the disunity of the personality Freud tried to
put back together again. There was a
cultural disunity as the church started to lose its power to religion, so you
have their fundamental disunities, culture, personality and rationality.
In response to this disunity existential thinkers rejected traditional
rationalism to understand humans, rather saying that their thinking, emotions
and behaviour need to be understood as a unity.
Kierkegaard relates anxiety and freedom He sees freedom is
the goal of personal development. In freedom we are in our essence, rather than
an animal or vegetable, which are some ways in which we react. Man is beckoned by possibility, who conceives
of possibility, imagines it and by creative activity carries it into existence.
Freedom brings with it anxiety.
Every person has the opportunity to develop, to learn to
walk, to learn to talk, drive. This freedom is anxiety provoking as you have
not been down these paths, this is normal anxiety.
Neurotic anxiety is the individual’s failure to move ahead
in the face of normal anxiety. The more possibilities you offer yourself the
more normal anxiety you have. Possibility passes into actuality via its
determinant of anxiety.
Kierkegaard sees an infant as having unity with their environment,
they don’t objectify, so they have anxiety, fear without object. The
possibility for growth involves crisis, this can be conflicts with loved ones
and his environment. Kierkegaard sees that infants start to objectify between
the ages of one to three. The threat to a child of isolation and powerlessness
is a source of anxiety. Developing, becoming a self, nurturing your
possibilities is the case at the threat of conflict, isolation, and
powerlessness which is anxiety provoking.
Kierkegaard sees man’s true vocation is to will to be
himself, but the paradox of this is freedom, so whatever man strives for cannot
be the goal, he must surpass this in his freedom. So whilst man might will the
determinate to be himself, the reality is indeterminate.
To avoid becoming yourself, you can deny certain parts of
you, you can state that your determined by an external agency, you can avoid
developing certain parts of you, and perpetuate a repetition of what you have
done before, you can develop certain parts that aren’t you, or a conventional
version of you, so what society dictates.
Kierkegaard says selfhood, depends on an individual’s ability
to confront anxiety and move ahead despite it.
Freedom he says is how one relates to oneself in every moment of
existence. Children become self-aware around the age of 4.
Kierkegaard says anxiety maintains inner conflict: it is
both afraid and maintains a careful eye on that which it is afraid of, anxiety
makes the individual impotent. This can be seen in Freud’s repression, where
the desire to do something is terrifying, so there is suppression, which is
made in terms of anxiety, which protects the suppression. So at once when we
feel anxious it points to something we are afraid of doing, i.e. we want to, to
some level. Kierkegaard anxiety is being
sympathetic to what you hate and fear most, so it’s a possibility and it’s your
worst nightmare at the same time.
In freedom I can both develop, move ahead and also do the
opposite, this is my freedom, and this therefore is anxiety provoking by
design. Neurotic anxiety is where you shut down your freedom in the face of
anxiety. In fear you move away from your feared object. In anxiety you have a
persistent inner conflict. Kierkegaard=anxiety is a state of conflict.
Self-awareness produces guilt and responsibility.
Kierkegaard=One has anxiety because one can create oneself.
Anxiety means there’s a conflict going on. One has anxiety as one has
possibilities, if life was determined then there would be no anxiety. So the
conflict for Kierkegaard is either I embrace change which provokes anxiety
though stepping into the unknown and killing the old me, or I don’t change and
I atrophy, which restricts and therefore threatens the self, and produces
guilt, in short the death of the person I should be.
To take a possibility is to kill an old piece of you, you
have a responsibility to find the best ways that you to live and act. In short you have a responsibility to
actualise your possibilities. This is to find new and creative and more
satisfying ways of living, ways of expressing yourself. You feel guilt if you
do not do this. Every creative expression offers the possibility of aggression
to your old self, to your environment and to your loved ones and it may not be
a good choice, but only you can tell.
Sex is one place that is a symbol for anxiety, it is a
powerful individual need, but it needs other people. So it then throws us into
the anxiety of we are both an individual but also a shared being, one that is
part of the society, the species etc. This creates the tension of the
determined ways we should act, how we need to fit in with societies conventions
but yet we have a need to be ourselves.
To not face anxiety, is to suffer from shutupness, where you
inhibit, block awareness and avoid. Pathological anxiety responses aim to block
out freedom, and constrict his development. Freedom is expansive and constantly
communicating, freedom is the opposite. Shutupness is withdrawal and continual
negation.
The difficulty with explanations of fate, is that if a bad
thing happened it can happen again, it is the opposite to freedom and
responsibility. If you feel guilt for your circumstance then you feel
responsible and can do something about it. So it could be that if you consider
yourself having freedom in how you respond, then you are less afraid of what
happens, if you consider that what happens defines how you are then you may be
terrified of something really bad happening.
For Kierkegaard somatic, psyche and possibilities are
interrelated systems, disorganisation in one is shown in the others. This would
means values\goals\plans\ of a person is a system in itself, meaningfulness
then is a system.
Kierkegaard=rigid personalities lack inward certitude…Intriguing
A rigid personality, lacks inward certitude, and has truth
and certainty by performing certain ceremonies which if he doesn’t do cast him
into anxiety. People keep anxiety away by loud sensations, like you keep the
wolves away in the forest. The anxious wolves are the lonely thoughts, the
feeling...
It is only when you realise you can demand nothing of life,
and catastrophe, death, contingency lurk next to man and could happen the next
instant, that you can take a different attitude to reality.
Finiteness is the opposite of freedom, in trying to manage
anxiety you become shutdown and not free. Inward certitude can be seen as a
faith that you can cope, and that to face the anxiety that is freedom, this
provides inward certitude.
Anxiety indicates the presence of a problem that needs to be
solved. It is the recognition of a conflict that there is no obvious solution
for which is highly threatening, damned if you do, damned if you don’t, but
there is a problem here that needs to be solved.
Self-strength develops out of handling anxiety creating
situation.
Chapter 3 Anxiety interpreted biologically
Explanations of anxiety
Integrative mechanisms that represent our understanding of
an event as anxiety provoking e.g. beck
The startle pattern
The startle response is a precursor to anxiety or fear. The
startle response is primary, innate and involuntary. The startle response
exhibits a protective constriction of the body. It is said that due to the
suddenness of the stimuli, it can’t be integrated, so a protective response is required.
We are startled before we are threatened. Neurologically the stimulus is too
much to be processed so the emergency response system goes into action. After
the unconditioned startle comes the conditioned emotional response of fear,
anger, curiosity etc.
Goldstein=Anxiety is the subjective sensation of the
organism in a catastrophic condition. Catastrophic conditions is when an
organism cannot cope with the demands of its environments or what it means to
be this organism is in danger of collapse.
Goldstein Anxiety then is when someone’s existence is
threated, be it cognitively, value, or physically. A person’s values, or
beliefs about itself or the world, can be things it considers an essential part
to its existence, again functionality, or resource….Thus anxiety exists within
a person in certain situations. I appraise this situation to threaten something
important to me.
The response you can have to this is to let go the element
of your existence that is threatened, shut down your world, so you don’t enter
into the catastrophic provoking situation
Goldstein believed our core drive is to actualise our
nature. These drives to actualise your nature, can be psychophysical like sex,
or psychosocial like success, if this is an essential element of your being
then threat to this is anxiety provoking.
Anxiety and the loss of the world
Goldstein argues that anxiety is fear without object, indeed
clients can report that it is precisely this objectlessness that is terrifying.
Fear works with objects that you can fight or flee, Anxiety has no object so
you cannot fight or flee. The anxiety response is meaningless frenzy, then a
shutting off from the world, to reduce all affect and any engagement with the
catastrophic or anxiety. So there is a situation in which there is anxiety, and
it is this that we remove ourselves from.
Fear sharpens the senses and drives to action, anxiety
paralyzes the senses and renders them unusable. The attachment in phobia of
anxiety to a particular object, is a relief as then we have something to fear,
although this is a pseudo object.
Goldstein: The fact that the anxiety response in the
catastrophic condition confuses the senses and the perception, means that
anxiety cannot have an object reference in the world. The relationship between
self and world breaks down in anxiety
Severe anxiety is experienced as the dissolution of self. The
dissolution of the existence of the personality, effective that which was most
feared to prompt the anxiety. So it is better rather to speak of someone being
anxiety rather than having it.
Origins of anxiety and fear as seen by Goldstein
Goldstein=Anxiety is developmentally primary to fear. Infant’s
initial responses are diffuse and undifferentiated. Fears come later as objects
are recognised. Goldstein=Fear is the threat that you could be thrown into a
catastrophic situation. If you think of an anxiety\panic attack as the height
of anxiety, the fear is the fear that this will happen again, i.e. panic
disorder.
Whilst anxiety can reduce itself by placing its fear onto
pseudo objects, and turn itself into fear. In therapy, anxiety can be reduced
by reappraising the situation as not catastrophic, and not impossible. Again
decatastrophisation shows the individual there is no catastrophe as they can
manage it.
Children can have anxiety produced by sudden appearance,
rapid approach, intensity of stimulus, all of these have one factor in common,
you can’t adequate assimilate these experiences, thus the demands of the
environment are too high and therefore you feel you existence under threat., I
need to be able to cope with the demands of the environment, to be safe. I need
to be able to get what I need out of the environment, be satisfied, Threats on
either side will be a threat to my existence therefore produce anxiety.
The capacity to bear anxiety
Goldstein the capacity to bear anxiety is crucial for self-realisation.
A new possibility for development of the self will show itself as anxiety. You
need to move through anxiety not away from it. Children and creative adults
have a high tolerance of bearing anxiety, they move ahead into new
possibilities in spite of their anxiety. In new possibilities you can be
shocked, you can have threats to your existence, but these threats can be
overcome, this is going through anxiety. Goldstein: The more original a human
the deeper his anxiety. Dogmatism is the opposite of someone who welcomes
anxiety, someone who is creative.
Culture is the product of overcoming anxiety not sublimating
as in Freud.
Neurological and physiological aspects of anxiety
The effects of the parasymptathic nervous system are
pleasure, relaxation and comfort, coming from rest and digest functions. The effects
of the sympathetic system are anxiety, anger and fear.
The sympathetic affects are preparation for fight of flight,
which can mean chemicals released into the blood to help clotting, blood
diverted to the major organs, increase in dilation to see more, panting to take
on more oxygen, voiding of bladder and bowels so the organism is lighter to
fight or flee.
Perceptions of Danger
When the autonomic system is activated then the thalamus
sends signals to the hypothalamus, which activates the alert system, and the
hypothalamus sends a signal to the cerebral cortex which then interprets the
situation which is a major component in the extent of activation and whether
its fight or flight.
The threat that prompts the autonomic system may be external
or internal. The latter being unacceptable desires, that threaten the existence
of the individual. The cortex dampens
down the responses of the lower areas of the brain, and it’s for this reason
you see babies with strong emotions as their cortex isn’t well developed. Thus if you remove the cortex then you get
automatic and excessive reactions. Intense fatigue or illness may also inhibit
the action of the cortex. Again the cortex helps interpret and differentiate,
you can see this undifferentiated reflexive emotional response in babies.
The cortex thus allows you to say where the danger is coming
from, if it is truly dangerous or not, if it can be dealt with or not.
If an individual is confronted by an experience they think
is beyond their control, they may be thrown back into a reflexive undifferentiated
response.
Balance in the autonomic system
The sympathetic and para sympathetic systems are balanced,
like flexor and extensor muscles. The sympathetic is stronger as it can overrule
the para sympathetic. Fear inhibits
digestion, whereas it requires an awful lot of eating to overcome fear.
A small degree of stimulation in the sympathetic system, may
seek to enhance the effect of a pleasurable activity, you may get a feeling of
adventure, or sense of engaging in exciting sexual activity. It’s like the arm
performs better when there is a slight bit of tension in it, likewise if there’s
something at stake, something significant then performance is enhanced.
As the sympathetic and para sympathetic are a joined system,
a see saw, then this can explain why some people when they feel anxious start
eating, as this para sympathetic activity can start to quieten the sympathetic
system, of course there may also be a relation to the comfort from childhood
when anxiety was due to not being fed and being fed reduced anxiety.
In sex the early stages of sexual arousal are found in the
para sympathetic system, so erections, correlated to the tender and gentle
feelings of sex. In a similar way some
people when the masturbate finds it reduces anxiety. Sexual ejaculation and
orgasm are however mediated by the opposite system, the sympathetic. So whilst
the erection part of masturbation can allay anxiety, the orgasm can promote
it. Of course the psychological effects
of sex are complex, and part of the overall organism but this is part of that.
Sympathetic stimulation results in a general state of
excitement. Adrenalin has a general distribution in the blood stream, and thus
produces a diffused effect, which explains why anger, anxiety and fear are all
over feelings.
The fight flight or freeze response:
Fight, I can overcome the threat, eyes become restricted and
focus on the attack surface, I feel anger
Flight, I can flee the threat, I feel fear
Freeze, I am helpless, I feel anxiety, I will play dead and
hope the threat passes soon
The physiological process, the activation of the sympathetic
nervous system, the release of adrenaline are the same for all response, fear,
anxiety and anger. It is only the interpretation that makes the difference, and
then the physiological responses on the basis of that.
Voodoo Death
Here you have a death from belief, I believe I have broken a
taboo, or the witch doctor has cursed me. My sympathetic nervous system gets
activated and is a high state of excitation. Paralysed by anxiety, and with no
outlet, then death can occur. This can be demonstrated with cats, where if you
remove the cortex, after several hours of sham rage, then the cats can die.
Death happens as blood or oxygen does not get supplied to vital organs.
Psychosomatic aspects of anxiety
Humans as an organism are involved in transactions of input
and output. If an emotion needs to be outputted but is inhibited then, you can
get psychosomatic substitution. Bulimia as excessive appetite, Anorexia as
insufficient appetite? Over protective mothers pre disposes a child to anxiety.
Some relation can be found between lack of appetite and
frustrated feelings of love, which have then turned to hostility and then
feelings of guilt. So the love as appetite, has to be thwarted as it is the
cause of the pain.
Diarrhoea is associated with anxiety. Increased blood
pressure is generally associated with anger Anxiety is seen to sit under anger,
well I guess there’s an interpretation of threat. Frequency of urination can be accompanied by anxiety
connected to competitive ambition.
Gastric functions
There seems a symbolic relation between gastric functions
and the need for care, dependent love and support, which came from being fed by
the mother. So really things that are part of the para sympathetic system, the
rest and digest system. When there is activation of the fight, flight then the
need for the comfort, care and love gets accentuated, the need for rest, and
digest increases.
In tests anxiety was shown to produce increased gastric
activity which could result in gastric ulcers. NHS website says there is no
hard evidence linking stress and ulcers, although it does say that stress makes
them worse.
Wolff and Wolff, studied Tom who had a fistula into his
stomach, they saw when he felt fear then gastric activities slowed. Other
affects related to the hypo functioning of the stomach are sadness,
discouragement and self-reproach. In times of anxiety then there was an
accelerated gastric activity. Tom also showed hyper stomach activity when
feeling resentment or hostility.
I guess one way to understand the relationship between
stomach activity and the sympathetic nervous system, is when someone wants to
restrict their sympathetic response, a form of somatic repression, restriction,
inhibition maybe. This would then explain why there are no definitive
relationships between stress and stomachs as it depends if the person is trying
to inhibit it.
Eating whilst an anti-sympathetic movement, can also be seen
as an act of aggression, in the symbolism that animals eat their prey.
Culture and the meaning of disease
The function of a disease is that it shrinks your world.
This can resolve a conflict, as with lesser responsibilities and concerns there
are more resources available for the conflict and for life. Health is a freeing
of the organism to realise its capabilities. People can use disease like older
generations used to use the devil. They would say that they could project their
hated experiences onto the devil, In order to not take responsibility for them.
As it is much more acceptable to have an organic disease than a mental one,
this can influence the psych somatisation of mental distress. The culture dictates how a person resolves
their anxiety and what symptoms he employs.
With Tom, when he had an emotion that was a withdrawal
without an intention to struggle, then you would see a decrease in gastric
activity, e.g. fear, sadness, self-reproach.
However when there was a struggle, such as with anxiety, anger,
hostility or resentment then the gastric functions were working overtime.
It is often that you can analyse rage and hostility
(struggle emotions) to underlying anxiety, so there could be more ease for an
emotion to turn into another one if they have a similar foot print.
There tends to be an inverse relationship between an individual’s
ability to tolerate anxiety and the appearance of psychosomatic symptoms.
If there is a conscious struggle for which there has been no
progress or which is becoming intolerable then symptom formation can give some relief. When people become organically ill anxiety
tends to reduce. Then when good health returns, and a resumption of daily life
is offered then anxiety returns.
Chapter 4 Anxiety Interpreted Psychologically
Do animals have anxiety?
Goldstein thought so, in the undifferentiated fright, like
children. This would be deemed normal anxiety. As animals don’t have self-consciousness
it seems more accurate to say they have a state of vigilance, they expect a
danger and are looking out for it.
Animals can ask questions, what is it, what happens next,
and have a time parameter within which the question and answer, makes sense,
for dogs it’s about 30 mins, for sheep about 10 mins. Within these times these
animals can plan for the future.
Vigilance in the part of animals is the precursor to anxiety
in humans. Vigilance is a way of existing for an animals and involves multiple
systems, all sensory systems, perception.
What is it, is the question of curiosity. What happens next, is the question of
planning.
Because we can plan, therefore we can live by ideals, values
and goals.
Liddell state, anxiety and planning are two sides of the
same coin. Anxiety accompanies intellectual activity as its shadow.
The human’s capacity for imagination, their use of symbols
and meanings, their creative and intellectual capacities are the necessary
conditions for anxiety. If there was no imagination there would be no anxiety.
Liddell asserts that intellect and its shadow anxiety are products of man’s
social intercourse. Although social intercourse is only available via the inner
potentialities associated with individuality.
The study of children’s fears
Children can fear things they have never encountered, only
imagined. In the 1950s children were
assumed to have instinctive fear of darkness, animals, large bodies of water,
slimy things and so on, which are assumed to be prepared fears that are
inherited from our ancestors. Then the
argument came there are only two build in fears loud sounds and loss of
support, all others are conditioned said John B Watson. This was then disproved
and what took its places was any intense, novel, unexpected stimulus that the
child was unprepared for is frightening.
So you might say that anything that the child cannot react adequately is
perceived as a threat, and responded to with anxiety.
Maturation in anxiety and fear
If you put a baby in a small pen, at different levels of
maturation you get different levels of response, from none, to mild, to strong
distress. To be able to feel fear, which requires an object to fear, then you
need to be able to objectify and to understand that object as an object of
fear, so as your knowledge grows then your fear can.
After the infant period, children can develop imaginary
fears, i.e. they imagine things that could frighten them even if they haven’t
seen them. Once competition and social
status becomes something they understand then fear can be related to loss of
status.
Adults who report their childhood fears more often report
fears of loss of social status than do children. They have a memorial
perceptual bias, based on what their current concerns are.
Jersild=most childhood fears, children have had no
experience of, e.g. fear of lions and witches, and aliens
Children’s fear is unpredictable, they can go to a place,
have a stimulus then at some time it can be something to be feared. Children’s
fear of strangers, is context dependent, and not obviously predictable, so Rollo
May’s theory is that there is something underneath it, more complex than
conditioning that can explain it.
Fear Masking Anxiety
Rollo May =the irrational and unpredictable nature of
childhood fears becomes made sensible if these fears have an objectivated form
of an underlying anxiety. The functionality of a fear masking anxiety is that
anxiety can’t be defended against as there is no object to fear, although there
can be a situation. But if there is an object then we know what to do, we can
flight or fight it. It can also be a
relief of an impossible situation, so I love and am scared of my parents, I
want to leave them but can’t survive without them. If I can then substitute the
fear of lions for this then that will be easier I have no dilemma, I am scared
of lions. But how can this substitution take place? Well by the lion somehow
symbolising the parents in one aspect, then you would need to respond to the parents
in a non-conflictual way, i.e. love, and the fear be put onto the lion so no
contradiction and therefore anxiety maintains. This would be negatively
reinforced, but again how would it be enabled? I suppose where you can get
symbolic traction, when you can at some point look at the lion and see, feel
the parent, when you can do that, then we’re off and running. So fear masking anxiety, is that we have an
anxious situation where we fear and we love say, and then we feel anxiety. If
we fear something else we can love unambiguously and we get rid of anxiety.
Stress and anxiety
Stress is object based, anxiety not. Stress derives from
physics and engineering, treating us an object that can bear or not levels of
stress, stress happens from outside, or sometimes inside to us.
Anxiety depends on interpretation, so it’s not events that
cause anxiety its how we interpret them. Stress\fear is a halfway station to
anxiety. Anxiety is how we handle stress. Stress can sometimes relieves
anxiety, so during WW2 then levels of anxiety dropped as you had something very
specific to worry about. Thus people have something concrete to pin their inner
turmoil on.
Stress is a threatening part of the situation, I am being
stressed because of x, and anxiety is the whole. I feel unsafe as I am weak,
the world is threatening.
Recent research on anxiety
Cognitive theorists
Cognitive theorist, e.g. Lazarus’ claim an individual’s
appraisal of the threat serves as the key to anxiety. Anxiety, for them, ties
up with expectancy and unresolved fear. So novice parachutists had high arousal
prior to jumping which was found as overwhelming experienced as aversive. Experienced parachutists were high focussed
arousal that increased their awareness.
Epstein linked anxiety with self-esteem. If you think
yourself can disintegrate, you can lose identity as you are fragile, then you
are more likely to catastrophize.
Increases in self-esteem produce feelings of happiness,
integration energy, freedom and expansiveness. Decreases in self-esteem produce
feelings of unhappiness, disorganisation, anxiety and constriction.
Maybe this is the thing with anxiety and its attempt to
constrict, it attempts to hold the self together
State and trait anxiety
Trait being a way of responding, state being transitory
condition fired by the autonomic nervous system. Trait anxiety generally dates back to early childhood,
where there was maternal rejection through punishment.
Relationship between anxiety and fear
Conditioning theorists who equate anxiety with fear, have
developed behaviour therapy on the basis of this. Their greatest success is
with phobics. However conditioned fear cannot be the basis for anxiety as
conditioned fear basis itself on certainty whereas anxiety basis itself on
uncertainty and lack of control
Faith
Charles ford=people with faith in religion, their commanding
officer coped with anxiety inducing situations much better than those who
didn’t.
Anxiety and Learning theory
Mowrer= when a behaviourist saw anxiety they thought it as a
symptom, which was the solution to a psychological problem. Anxiety was a conditioned form of pain
reaction. So organism perceives danger,
stimulus, then its response is anxiety.
Any behaviour which reduces anxiety becomes rewarded. Therefore on this doctrine learning theory is
at the basis of all anxiety.
However as Mowrer worked to prove this, he used anxiety and
fear interchangeably, he used the threat of electrical shock to show negative
reinforcement, and he equated anxiety with the physiological symptoms of pain.
Then he questioned things when he asked himself why animals learn non integratively neurotic
behaviour, this he argued was that because they were incapable of anticipating
long time rewards and punishment to balance them against immediate punishment
and reward.
Mowrer argues that integrative behaviour depends on
integrating the future with the present.
Goldstein showed that when there is cortical damage, then abstract and
possible experience isn’t possible all that is left is the concreted.
To transcend the present, we need language, with its
symbolic and rational approach. We also
need social and historical development as the future depends on socially
constructed values, well socially constructed everything, goals, language,
culture etc.
Mowrer thought that man’s ability to transcend the present
was based on the symbols of universal values that were constructed through the
history of society.
Thus there becomes a major difference between integrative
learning and adjustive learning. Adjustive learning adjusts to difficult
situation, so it is negative reinforcing in the present. Integrative learning
incorporates both the current situation and the imagined future situation. In
some ways there is sense of self and identity, of that person that moves through
the past, present to future than someone that just adjusts feelings in the
present. Thus integrative learning supports identity in a stronger way than
does adjustive.
Mowrer sees that anxiety is as a result of a social dilemma,
e.g. child loves and fears parent.
Mowrer agrees with Freud where real fear is repressed which
results in neurotic anxiety and symptom formation. Freud saw the drive that creates
the fear as an instinct, Mowrer sees it as an ethical dilemma. The individual
fears withdrawal of love and approval, on the part of significant others. It is
these fears that are then repressed, so I fear withdrawal of love but I can’t
leave you.
Mowrer would say that anxiety is the repression of the
superego, of the moral conflict that the person faces, not the outcome a la Freud.
Anxiety is an outcome of responsibility and guilt, I love you but I fear or
hate you, I have guilt for my fear and hate, and responsibility for my love. I
am in an impossible situation, and it is a moral, value based impossible
situation, I only have turmoil due to my values.
Mowrer shows anxiety as a turmoil, a conflict, and also a
problem to be solved. Anxiety is the expression of personal disorganisation
that seeks integration. I love and I fear and I want to integrate, maybe my
fear is unfounded, maybe I want to moderate my love. Maybe I want to see I can
cope without this love. Anxiety under treatment should result in moral fear and
guilt.
Personal Comment
Prior to 1950 nothing written about anxiety save Kierkegaard.
The people who come to therapy are the people who have moulded theories of
anxiety. So if sexual and aggressive desire are repressed, then the person in
society would be seen as weak and neurotic and worthy of therapy, thus Freud
develops his ideas. If the desires for friendly, charitable relations with
others, then this is the mark of a competitive person, who will achieve their
goals irrespective of the human outcome, these are considered in our society
successful.
Adler maintains one of our basic human needs is to be a
responsible social creature.
Chapter 5 Anxiety interpreted by the psychotherapist
Freud’s evolving theories of anxiety
Rank: life fear is anxiety going forward becoming an
individual, death fear is anxiety going backwards dissolving the individual.
Between these two fears the individual is thrown back and forth through their
life.
Freud has had a massive and lasting influence, so you don’t
need to agree with him, but it’s useful to know what he said.
Freud is in a long list of explorers including Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer who saw the significance of the irrational elements
of the individual. These aspects tend to
be suppressed post renaissance in the west.
Whilst he wanted to be a scientist, he aimed to describe the irrational
within a rational framework! Freud saw anxiety as the basic problem of
emotional disorders.
Freud’s theories evolved throughout his life.
Freud distinguish between fear and anxiety, fear has an
object, whereas anxiety is the state of a person. Freud saw there being objective anxiety and neurotic anxiety. The
form is real and a reaction to an external danger like death. He conceives it
as natural, rational and useful. It is part of the instinct to self-preservation.
This anxiety aims to prevent sudden threats for which the individual is unprepared
and is functional. When the level of
anxiety is disproportionate to the threat then this is dysfunctional. Any
development of anxiety beyond the initial prompting to survey the danger and
prepare flight is inexpedient.
Anxiety and Repression
Freud noticed that people who have inhibitions or anxiety
symptoms are remarkably free of anxiety. In phobias or OCD if the rituals or
avoidance are performed then there is little anxiety around. With phobia there
is intense anxiety around the object but little in other places. Thus the
argument is that there is a substitutive processes going on, where all anxiety
in the person’s life is substituted for this one focus. Freud thought
frustrated libido is transferred into anxiety, but then what about sexually
fulfilled anxious people.
Objective anxiety generates a flight reaction to external
threats. In neurotic anxiety then the flight is from one’s own affect.
So Freud Theory 1: repressed affect (standardly libido) is
transformed into anxiety, the reason is the affect is seen as dangerous
He then splits up the psyche into ego, super ego and id,
which forces theory 2.
Theory 2 is there is anxiety through the perception of an
impossible\ambivalent state by the ego, e.g. I love and hate my father, it is
this anxiety that is then repressed. The ego now becomes the source of the
anxiety.
Neurotic anxiety for Freud was related to objective anxiety.
The internal neurotic anxiety was a preparation for an external objective
anxiety. So with a little boy he hates his father but can’t act on it, as his
father is far larger than him, which threatens objective anxiety. In some ways
I need to renounce my feared love of my mother as I fear the retaliation of my
father.
Origins of anxiety as seen by Freud
Freud sees anxiety as part of the self-preservation
instinct. Freud’s objective anxieties
would be fear of fire, heights, darkness and loneliness. Freud finds the origins of anxiety in the
birth trauma and the fear of castration.
The birth trauma becomes the affective template for any life threatening
situation. The prototypes of birth
anxiety and castration are that they show the anxiety of separation from the
loved one, or the meaning maker.
Trends in Freud’s theories of Anxiety
Freud moves from anxiety is the outcome of repressing
libido, to anxiety is what is repressed and is a result of trying to avoid
external objective anxiety, so we see a trend in terms of anxiety being
internally generated, i.e. conflicting drives, to be externally generated. He
also argues that symptoms prevent the development of more anxiety and are
created to avoid the danger situation of which anxiety sounds the alarm. So Freud
is moving from an intra-psychic view of anxiety to an organismic one.
So we have anxiety is when we feel helpless (we cannot
flee), that can be cut off from safety, put into a dangerous situation. It can
refer the threat to what makes us us, which can be our life, or something attribute
or possession that makes us us.
Rank
Rank saw that the central problem for humans is
individuation, and that life is a series of separations. Each separation gives
the possibility of more autonomy and individuation to the human. Leaving the
womb, the breast, the school. For Rank anxiety is the apprehension of these
separations. Anxiety is thus felt as the threat to the individual’s unity, and
stability of their current situation.
Anxiety is also experienced if separation isn’t made and the individual
doesn’t become more autonomous, doesn’t develop.
Anxiety is then felt as you leave the wholeness and there is
projection into a radically different state in the world. Anxiety can also be
felt if you don’t take that step and you feel constricted, choked even.
Rank sees that we come into the world with fear and it
exists independently of outside threats. He also states that having an object
to point this primal anxiety at is therapeutic.
For Rank the following are terms for anxiety
1.
Primal fear
2.
Fear of life
3.
Inner fear
For young children the feeling of undifferentiated
insecurity is a reasonable definition of anxiety.
For Rank there is life fear and death fear. Life fear is the
anxiety at every autonomous possibility. So let’s call it life anxiety is the
anxiety that when you develop yourself you develop new relations, new aspects
of yourself and consequently kill old parts. Thus it is the anxiety of losing
the unity that you had as a person, that safety. Life anxiety is the fear of individuation
Death anxiety then is the fear of being swallowed up by the
whole. It is anxiety least one stagnates in dependent symbiotic relationships.
It is anxiety that you do not develop yourself to your full potential.
Rank thinks: The neurotic then cannot keep these two aspects
in balance, they fear losing stability so don’t develop their potential, nor do
they have loving relationships as they fear dependency on others. Many
neurotics have a great need to appear independent, but actually keep excessive
dependence. Because of this exaggerated anxiety then the neurotic engages in
widespread constraint of his impulsive and spontaneous activity and which as a
consequence has widespread guilt.
Rank sees that individuation is only possible by means of
relations in the world with others and collective values. This is then why you
see the prevalent type of neurotic with a feeling of inferiority and
inadequacy, a fear of responsibility, guilt feelings and hyper self-consciousness
because the collective values in society that has been given by religion,
static class frameworks, have been taken away and the individual has been
thrown to the middle, with no values.
Adler: Anxiety and inferiority feelings
Adler uses the term inferiority in the same way that others
use the term anxiety. I.e. the basic motivation for neuroses.
Adler sees humans beginning life in a state of biological inferiority
and insecurity, i.e. babies are inferior to their parents. This helplessness is
overcome by increasing social relationships. Normal development can be affected
by objective and subjective factors
Objective inferiority can be organic weakness, cultural
weakness i.e. being a member of a minority that there is prejudice to, or being
in an adverse position in the family constellation. Objective inferiority can
be adjusted to.
How neurotic symptoms develop in relation to weakness is how
that weakness is perceived. This is between weakness as a fact and as a
feeling. The former sees the fact of weakness, I have a bad back, I am not very
good as a painter. This is in comparison with the feelings, I am weak, which
are descriptions for the self. Neurosis develops when weakness, inferiority are
cited as something about the self, something about the core existence. When
weaknesses are seen as facts, they becomes hurdles to surmount. When inferiority is about the self, then you
can get power based compensatory strategies.
Adler saw the development of this position when an adult has
a child in an exploitative fashion where the child provides a function, to be
compensation for their weakness, as an extension of their own self, in this
case the child’s self-identity will be on the basis of power\weakness of the
attribute the child is loved for. If the love of the child is quite apart from
the function they provide for the parents, then the child has a self-identity
irrespective of power\weakness.
When your parents have conditions of worth for you, i.e. you
are loved in so far as you are x. Then you feel inferior and anxious when you
are not x, and spend the rest of your life trying to be x. This also tends to
equate self with x, so if x is not there, then you would say I am not good, I
am weak, I am bad. However if there were no conditions of worth, then you would
not equate the I with any specific attribute, and if you lack x, you would say
I lack x, but not equate yourself with x. So here you get where anxiety comes in, I am
loved in so far as I am x, I am loved in so far as I have worth, what I am is
x. Thus a central part of myself is x, and if it is threatened then I feel
anxiety.
The neurotic activity to overcome inferiority is to gain
power over persons, to put yourself up and others down, however this generates
inter person hostility and leads to an increase in isolation.
For Adler: the feeling of anxiety when the self is
threatened is a cue to retreat to previous positions of security, so it evades
responsibility and decision making. Adler saw anxiety as also being a weapon of
aggression as a means of dominating others.
So a child’s anxiety can be used to control her mother’s actions.
For May: the secondary gain of control in anxiety is not the
main aspect of anxiety, but rather is used in desperation in the face of this
situation.
For Adler anxiety can be overcome by the bond which binds
the individual to humanity: only the individual can go through life without
anxiety is the individual who is conscious of belonging to the fellowship of
man. Thus anxiety can be overcome through love and socially useful work, so
anxiety is socially constructed and socially overcome.
Jung: anxiety and the threat of the irrational
Jung never synthesised his views on anxiety, however Jung
did believe that anxiety is the individual’s reaction to the invasion of the
conscious mind by irrational forces. So a fear that I could go mad, is Jung’s
anxiety. Thus it could be an invasion
of our animal instincts from archaic aspects of our human functioning, If the irrational forces are only thinly
blocked off then there is a threat of psychosis, if they are completely blocked
off then there is a stifling of creativity (going sane phillips!)
Kierkegaard would say to avoid futility you have to work
through anxiety and not avoid it.
Jung: People have a fear of the secret perils of the soul.
Jung says that man places an excessive importance on rationality which doesn’t
lead to rational integration but rather the use of the intellect for purposes
of ego and power. Trying to force everything
under the guise of rationality leads to nature fighting back, and it is here
were you can develop health anxiety, which is nonsensical, but it is the
irrational of the human breaking through, under its dominance by rationality.
How can I make sense of this, well desires are not rational, I want to eat,
fuck, punch, possess etc., they can be subsumed under rational banners, only
allowing those that allow me to get to a stated end. Again action is not rational,
we can rationalise after the fact, but to allow the irrational is to allow
action that is desire even if it doesn’t fit under a rational goal. So really the irrational is to do things that
do not fit within a purposive rational plan.
Horney Anxiety and hostility
Freud\Jung saw anxiety as a property of the individual
Horney, Stack, Fromm and Sullivan as anxiety arises out of disturbed
interpersonal relationships in a social setting. So psychosocial..
Whilst intra-personal anxiety triggers are not denied, i.e.
frustrated drives, it is only when this frustration threatens some value or
mode of interpersonal relationship which the individual holds vital to their
security. The other gives me danger or security, they can abandon me, they can
ridicule me, they can hail me, they can value me, they can thank me. I have
value only in the eyes of the other, my security is mostly threatened in an
interpersonal context, death is the only exception to this.
Horney places anxiety as prior to instinctual drives. The concept of drive equates to some level of
compulsion. Horney argues that impulses and desires do not become drives except
to be motivated by anxiety.
Drives become compulsive in neurotics as there is low
frustration tolerance. Compulsive drives aim not at satisfaction but at safety.
For Horney a fear is related to a specific danger to which
the individual can make a specific adjustment. Anxiety is the feeling of
diffuseness, and uncertainty and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness
toward the threat. It is the feeling of being unsafe because either of
inadequate capabilities or because of size of potential threats, but in the
light of this, there isn’t a specific threat just that I am not safe. For Horny
again anxiety is the threat to some core aspect of the personality.
Horney origins of anxiety
Normal anxiety=feeling in the contingency of existence in
the face of death, powers of nature etc.
Neurotic anxiety=arises out of the conflict between
hostility and dependency. Anxiety is the expected hostility from others.
Basic anxiety is Horney term for anxiety that leads to
neurotic defences. It is neurotic in two ways one that it forms neurosis and
two that it comes out of disturbed relationships between child and significant
other.
For Horney then anxiety is the outcome of the impossible
situation, where the child feels anxiety as they are dependent on their parent
and are hostile to them. The hostility is then repressed, which makes the child
less able to fight real dangers and gives them through their repression a
greater feeling of helplessness. Helplessness inheres in the basic nature of
anxiety. Neurotic symptoms are then
security measures against basic anxiety. They are the response in the face of
your own helplessness in the face of a potentially hostile world.
Anxiety is the response to the threat to something a person
thinks their safety depends on.
If you are in fact helpless and can do nothing about it,
then a neurotic defence makes sense, as you defend yourself against the
anxiety, it is all you can do as it is real.
Therefore you have basic anxiety, a conflict of hostility
and dependence, where you feel helpless, you develop a neurotic response of
masochistic dependence, and become very clingy to someone. Then if that
relationship failed you would feel anxiety, as the basic anxiety coping strategy
is now undone. Again the coping response
to the basic anxiety, may be narcissistic, or becoming unobtrusive. Again if these
coping strategies are threatened then anxiety is felt.
With neurotic anxiety then the question to be asked is what
vital value is being threatened which is vital to the personality against
previous helplessness.
So anxiety can be triggered by anything that threatens the
coping mechanisms of not feeling helpless.
Sullivan: Anxiety as apprehension of disapproval
Sullivan says=
·
psychiatry is the study of interpersonal
relations
·
Personality an interpersonal phenomenon,
developing out of initial relationship with primary care giver.
·
Person and environment one indissoluble unit
·
Relationship with primary care giver, the
prototype for relationships with other significant people, the matrix of which
ends up forming the personality
·
Two types of human activity that aim at
satisfactions, e.g. eating, sleeping and those aiming at security, which relate
more closely to man’s cultural equipment. Security aims at ability and power.
Presumes that the power motive of security ties up with a human desire to
expand in ability and achievement.
·
The organism has a desire to have a widening
impact on its environment
·
Language is a tool for man to get security with
over his, environment and fellow man, the precursor of this was crying
·
Anxiety arises out of infants perception of the
disapproval of significant persons in their interpersonal world, this
disapproval threatened the relationship, which in turn would provoke a helplessness
·
It is through Primary Care Giver reward and
punishment that the personality develops
·
Anxiety restricts the activity of the infant in
areas the Primary Care Giver disapproves of. Anxiety is thus the policeman that
operates when the Primary Care Giver isn’t there
·
To try to limit anxiety then we try to avoid the
things that can provoke it, so we might disassociate from phenomena that
provoke it, or avoid situations, deny certain experiences etc. Thus we limit our experience to manage anxiety
·
With strong provokers of anxiety, e.g. a strong
desire, an unambiguous situation, then it can be heard to dissociate and it is
then that substitutive and compulsive symptoms develop.
Chapter 6 Anxiety interpreted culturally
Anxiety can be both triggered by standard and values of
current culture and also managed by the stability and unity or lack of it by
culture.
So currently being strong, independent and a competitive
success is a source of anxiety as people repress their dependent needs, and
fear they can achieve the former.
Hallowell: quantity of anxiety is a function of beliefs
superimposed upon dangerous situations
The importance given to competitive success by society
correlates with the amount of anxiety that threats to it not happening give.
Individual competitive success can also be achieved through the failure of
others as much as one’s own progress
Individual Competitive success is a cultural product, it
cannot be seen to relate to security, as communal success can provide security,
and indeed individual competitive success can weaken society, and therefore
security. Indeed other societies, e.g. kamanche Indians, have competition as an
independent factor to security.
The importance of the historical dimension
Anxiety can only be understood as part of a culture at a
certain time, and indeed within the historical development of concepts of man
and society. In many ways the rational individual was born in the renaissance.
The idea here is that to understand anxiety, you need the historical
development of the concept of person as much as the childhood of the adult.
A person is rigidly determined by history when they are
unaware of it, in the same way that they are rigidly determined by their past
when they are unaware of the relationship between their past and their present.
Individualism in the renaissance
The individualism of the renaissance is seen as a reaction
against the collectivism of the middle ages. The citizen of the middle ages was
aware of themselves by role, class, gender, nationality and none of these
things changed. Emotion was channelled communally in festivals be they via the
church or the crusades of the army.
By the 14th and 15th century the
hierarchical structure of the church and society which previously had been a
structure to channel emotion became a structure to suppress it and suppress vitality, The last century of the middle ages was
pervaded by feelings of anxiety and depression , with the dread of death and
fear of devils and sorcerers. The pictures of Bosch and Grunewald show this
very vividly.
Giotto, in the “first renaissance”, depicted a new humanism,
the range of individual experiences and emotions and in the same manner an
individual naturalism. In medievalism
man had been part of a collective, part of a role, a unit in a social
organism. For Giotto in the initial
blush of the renaissance it is the individual who is valued, but in the full
renaissance then it is the powerful individual that is valued. This is the seed for the current anxiety for
competitive success, the powerful individual is valued.
With the renaissance came social mobility, anyone with
intelligence and courage could achieve success. Also what was required was a
moral laxity. Success was the standard by which acts were judged, if you could
accumulate value then the acts were good.
The post renaissance individualism saw society as the arena
for the individual to achieve triumph over. Success in accumulating value for
themselves judged all acts.
Opposing the limitless success and power of competitive individuals
is set a continuous restlessness and perturbation. You can see this in the eyes
of the people in Angelo’s painting of the dammed, frightened by their fall, and in the Sistine
chapel. This continuous restlessness can be found in people who are successful
in competitive 183 individualisms, which is seen as the psychological isolation
and the lack of positive values within the community.
Fromm: individualism brings strength and isolation, doubt,
scepticism and therefore anxiety.
Competitive individual success at any cost, by villainy and
infamy or by being heralded and a hero. So aggression over society or by being
desire by society, just set yourself apart and over it, the individual craving
for fame. This need for recognition is the sign of an isolated child.
An individual’s attitude towards others becomes an attitude
towards himself. Alienation towards others soon leads to alienation towards
yourself. As much as others becomes
objects to be manipulated so he becomes an object to be manipulated too, to
have wealth and power over, what does this mean? Thus you only value yourself
on the basis of your success over yourself, your continual improvement. So others
are to have success over, which leads you to treating yourself in the same way,
as an object to have power over, so you need continually increasing success
over your past achievements otherwise you fail, should you fail you show
yourself self-contempt. Success is a goal without satiation point and the
desire for it increases with achievement. The use made of success is largely
power over others.
In the middle ages rewards were post mortem, for your social
body, be it family, church, country, post renaissance in the here and now. Post
renaissance reward is about standing out from your fellows.
Post renaissance, then rewards are given for individual
striving within the bourgeoisie morality.
The problem for post renaissance western culture is how an
inter-personal community can be developed with the values of individual self-realization,
thus freeing its members from individual isolation and concomitant anxiety
inhering in excessive individualism.
Competitive individualism in work and wealth
Competitive individualism has been greatly abetted by the
economic developments post Renaissance. Pre renaissance the guilds made
competition impossible. Post renaissance people are seen to have a right to
amass wealth and the employ it as power. Post renaissance nothing is seen as
having more authority than individual reason. The idea was that economic
egotism would lead to economic harmony is society at large. Economically for
the most part of the two centuries post the renaissance this was true as people
material ownership increased, however this was at a psychological cost inter
personally and intra psychically.
The intrinsic meaning of work became the salary not the
activity, social and self-esteem moved from the application of labour the
acquirement of money, the work meant nothing in itself, it was a job only.
Given the factors or production weren’t owned by employees the job was
therefore precarious. When the creative activity of the work gave social esteem
and self-esteem then there was an increase of the feeling of self-strength and
a decrease of anxiety.
Industrialism led to wealth being the accepted criterion of
prestige and success. Wealth is eternally competitive as someone can always
have more than you. Wealth becomes not something the increases enjoyment but
rather becomes a symbol of success and worth.
One way to deal with anxiety, the feeling of helplessness is
to increase activity, although this only allays the symptoms. Competitive
economic individualism is the principle that can cause anxiety, however the
middle classes when anxious will defend this principle to the hilt seeing it as
the salvation, when in reality it is the cause.
May: competitive individualism militates against the
experience of community and the lack of community is a central factor in the
creation of anxiety.
Fromm: Individual isolation in modern culture
Central concern is psychological isolation as the outcome of
economic freedom, the personality is constructed as powerless, isolated and
alone, and individual competitive success is the way back to power and value.
Isolation is the first cousin to anxiety. Humans develop within a social matrix
but then when isolated the individual fails to relate to himself of his
intrapersonal world. This is similar to Kierkegaard who saw anxiety in terms of
individuality, freedom and isolation.
For Fromm there are two types of freedom positive and
negative, negative freedom is freedom from restraint, and positive freedom is freedom
to build new relatedness.
So as a child grows they individuate from the parents bond,
then they feel anxiety. At that point then they can either move to new
relatedness, surrender freedom to avoid anxiety by forming a new dependency or
by formulating neurotic patterns.
To release the negative constraints of freedom, provokes
anxiety as you have less sense of belonging, less identity and therefore less
potential value. It was society that demarcated you as valuable and without it
you aren’t. To create new freedoms is to
release the old dependency and create new ways of belonging that suit you, but
then it could so be that that will be seen as a dependency in time which will
need to be overcome.
The post renaissance individual has economic freedom but is
threatened by powerful supra-personal forces of capital and the market, with
everyone a competitor.
Anxiety is especially a problem of the middle classes. The
middle classes being between the very rich and the very poor. The very poor
wanted to break the law to get what they needed, the very rich broke the laws
to get what they wanted, the middle classes tended to uphold and prescribe the
law, so they could work towards what they deserved. The middle class were thus hostile to the very
top and very bottom but because they wanted to preserve an ordered structure
couldn’t display this, so repressed it, and repressed hostility can lead to
anxiety.
One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity, Anxiety
that arises out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal
economic forces on one hand, but the belief in the efficacy of individual
effort on the other hand.
Why does frantic activity allay anxiety, maybe it gives the
sense that you are working towards powerfulness, it’s a distraction and you
don’t feel the anxiety.
Anxiety and the market place
In the modern capitalist society then people are seen as
commodities who have value, salary value, capital value, social value, desirable
value… Self-confidence/esteem is largely what others think of you, how they
value you. Thus you are alienated from yourself in that you value yourself in
terms of what others think of you. Thus self-esteem is dependent on the market
place of the other, who value, it is safer to be valued on the basis of the attributes
that you see and enjoy, although if value requires rewards, then it is only
socially that this can happen
This means that to allay anxiety, to have worth, to be safe
you continually have to achieve in the market place, to retain your value in
the eyes of others. In modern capitalism
we become cogs in impersonal machines, as consumers or suppliers, the machines
being too big for us to comprehend.
Mechanisms of escape
Autonomy conformity=adopting the personality that is offered
to you by your culture
The idea being that if you conform to those individuals
around you, you will no longer feel isolated or anxious. However they do that
at the price of renouncing autonomous strength and hence become powerless and
insecure.
Sadism and masochism offer mechanisms of escape where the
individual becomes absorbed in the other. Masochism aims to get rid of the
burden of freedom and its isolation and anxiety.
Sadism is a response to the feelings of helplessness that
anxiety and isolation develop.
Kardiner: Western man’s growth pattern
Kardiner: western man has a basic personality structure,
which has changed little over past 2000 years.
Development of personality= The first personality growth
pattern is strong bond with mother, producing individuals high valuation of
themselves, producing strong ego and strong superego. Strong bond with mother
leads to passivity and affective dependence in times of crisis. The second
personality growth pattern is the introduction of taboos, e.g. sex and toilet
training. Doubt arises in the continuation of parental care because of the
punishment and withdrawal of love when the social rules come to be passed over,
through punishment and rewards. This can then lead to hostility developing
which may be directed towards the parents and if so must be repressed, if it is
high. Alternatively the hostility may be directed towards siblings who threaten
to take care away. As the affective needs of the child are reduced, when rules
are appliedto them their emotions are
less looked after this can produce higher anxiety and greater need for
dependence on mum. (God this feels a bit like a fairy story). During this
period the need for obedience is greatly enhanced (this makes sense and follows
for the importance of rule bound behaviour later.
This personality pattern leads to considerable emotional
potential but an incapacity for direct expression because of the blocked action
pattern. Its positive aspect is high degrees of productivity but its negative
aspect is high levels of anxiety.
Success, social prestige arise from this personality growth
pattern.
Success is made the compensation for the shortcoming of all
other functions, e.g. his affective needs being looked after, the pleasure of
knowing that he is cared for. Self-esteem comes out social prestige and
success.
Wealth is a symbol of social prestige. When anxiety arises
then the antidote to this is success, which reasserts self-esteem.
Competitive striving is motivated by hostility, an original
hostility that was borne out of the original taboos and restriction and threat
to take the primary care givers love away. Competitive striving however just
creates hostility with co-workers and provokes more isolation and pain which
then as the anxiety that drives competitive striving requires a balm.
May= it is the inconsistency, irregularity and undependability
of parents behaviour towards children that creates anxiety, mistrust and
isolation.
Society is the replacement structure of family, feudal lord
and church as the arbiter of social control, of definition of the self, however
if you are competitively engaged with society then it becomes an unstable
platform.
Chapter 7 Summary and synthesis of theories of anxiety
The nature of anxiety
Freud, Goldstein and Horney think that anxiety is a diffuse
apprehension and that the difference with fear is that fear is of a specific
object, whereas anxiety is a general feeling, which can be provoked in a
situation.
Phenomena of anxiety are of uncertainty and helplessness.
Example of anxiety: a student’s professor fails to acknowledge student and
student feels anxiety thinking am I nobody, am I nothing. Fear is going to the
dentist. Anxiety stays with me, fear goes when I’m not going to the dentist.
The threat of anxiety is therefore to something deep in us,
to something closer to the core or essence of my personality.
Anxiety is then the feeling of threat to the essential parts
of one’s personality. This can be either through not doing the things that you
think will keep your essential aspects safe, e.g. don’t walk in the woods at
night. When the fear becomes specific, then you can direct your energy and
flight or fight. Anxiety is the feeling that this fear could reoccur and you
don’t know when and you don’t know where.
Anxiety can I guess also be felt in the face of a specific
object, that threatens your being, e.g. threat of redundancy which means that
without a job, you would no longer be you, you would be in your eyes worthless.
The threat then is also for you as a subject being distinct from other objects.
In full anxiety then separation between these two is lost.
Anxiety then is the threat to an essential part of your
being. This can mean one of your values or attributes, e.g. success, or your
possessions, or your sanity, or your relationships. It can also be provoked by
coping responses you have against anxiety, e.g. being close to a strong person.
In most languages it is said that you have a fear, but you
are anxious. Anxiety is the experience of the threat to dissolution of the
self.
The threat to the self that anxiety is can be:
1.
Physical=Death/Disfigurement
2.
Cognitive=meaningless
3.
Emotional=madness
4.
Socially=isolated
5.
Behaviourally=incapacity
6.
Values=purposeless
Normal and neurotic anxiety
Normal anxiety= living under an oppressive regime, knowing
at some point you are likely to be taken to a concentration camp. Normal
anxiety is proportionate to the threat.
Normal anxiety is
1.
Proportionate to the threat
2.
Doesn’t involve intra psychic conflict
3.
Does not require a neurotic defence mechanism
4.
Can be confronted consciously constructively
Normal anxiety is a lesser intensity than neurotic anxiety,
and can be managed by rational activity.
One common form of normal anxiety is that related to the
threats of nature, i.e. sickness, fatigue and eventually death. A normal response to this, is to act in a
way to make the probability less likely, but accept that some of them may
happen. In most people normal and neurotic anxiety is inter mingled. Neurotic death anxiety can be the case when
death comes to symbolise ultimate powerlessness and helplessness, where the
actual concerns may be closer to home.
Life is a process of separations which can provoke anxiety,
so individuating from parents. Rank shows that normal anxiety inheres in all
experience of separation, as this anxiety is overcome, then new richer
relationships are constructed. Normal
anxiety may be known as potentially anxiety creating situations as if the
anxiety situation is handled effectively, only small levels of anxiety may be
felt.
Normal anxiety is objectively threatening, any similar
person would feel anxiety, Subjective anxiety is subjectively threatening, in
that similar people in a similar situation would not experience anxiety.
Neurotic anxiety is:
1.
Disproportionate to the objective danger
2.
Involves repression\ disassociation
3.
Involves retrenchment of activities and
awareness such as inhibitions, development of symptoms and other defence mechanisms
Repression of fear of a threat results in the individual
being unaware of the source of their fear thus you can get objectless anxiety.
Indeed what could also be repressed is anxiety. Repression increases the individuals feeling
of helplessness in that it involves a curtailing of their own autonomy, an
inner retrenchment and shelving of their power.
Origins of anxiety
Normal anxiety is an expression of the organism to a life
threatening and uncertain threat. It
seems that humans have the capacity to react to threats which is inherited,
what those threats are seem to be dependent on the society born into.
Babies have very few protective responses, most fears are
conditioned response by learning. Babies
are scared of new things, sudden noises, strangers, falling, basically neophobes
Freud saw two sources of neurotic anxiety as the birth
trauma and fear of castration. However
Mowrer pointed out that the threat needs to be present for the affect to remain
so the birth trauma can be seen symbolically.
To the infant the mother is the source of their physical
needs and their emotional security.
Therefore Sullivan held that anxiety has its roots in mother’s
disapproval which means the threat of physical and emotional satisfaction. Horney
has the origin of conflict being the conflict between dependency on parents and
hostility towards them. Fromm and Kierkegaard
hold that the roots of anxiety are in the process of individuation and the need
to relate to other people in the community.
Maturation of the capacity for anxiety
Three types of human response to danger
1.
Startle response
a.
Pre emotional innate reaction
2.
Anxiety
a.
Undifferentiated emotional response
3.
Fear
a.
Specific emotional response
At 8 months babies get stranger fear, so a stranger walks
into the room, they might cry. That the
threat response develops in this way makes sense as the infant can’t
differentiate objects in the early months.
Soldiers however demonstrate in opposite ways, under severe threat, the
threat becomes undifferentiated.
Very young infants show apprehension, behaviour that shows
threat without having a specific feared object, so anxiety.
May: Startle response, then normal anxiety, then fear and
finally neurotic anxiety. Adults do the same thing, if there is a gunshot you
are startled, feel anxious whilst you find out whether the gun was pointed at
you, then fear when you see who fired.
Anxiety and fear
Fear can suspend gastric activity, anxiety increases
it. Fear has a flight response, anxiety
doesn’t. Anxiety has a catastrophic
response where fear doesn’t.
A large proportion of children’s fears are irrational. The
proposition is that it is anxiety which underlies these fears and can make
sense of them. So we can see both anxiety and substation in action. Anxiety is
a general term, so a fearful situation is anxiety provoking, how much anxiety
depends on how significant the threat is to person’s existence.
So fear is of a specific thing, anxiety is general.
Anxieties object is some essential part of the personality, fears object is
specific. So the idea is that fear can threaten us, and is like a war being
fought on a specific battlefront, anxiety is the threat of being overwhelmed as
you don’t know where you are going to get attacked from.
So for instance if I am frightened that I could lose all my
money and this is an essential part of my personality then I can feel anxiety,
I don’t know when and where this attack on an essential element of me will take
place. If there is a run on the stock market where I have all my money then I
can be afraid that I could lose all my money, but I know where to direct my
energies to managing and responding to this crisis.
Fear is of something objective and specific, I am afraid
that the run on the stock market will lose me my money, so I can respond to
that.
Anxiety is the feeling that I could lose all of my money as
financial institutions are unstable.
Anxiety seems more a problem of psychology and possibility
Fear seems one of problem solving
Anxiety: general, threat of being overwhelmed, helpless, out
of control, a threat to something essential within your personality
Fear: specific, threatened, in need of response. If you fear
that you can’t deal with your fears then this can result in anxiety, as the
threat is to something essential to your personality
For example I am afraid of stepping out in front of moving
cars, so I don’t, and I don’t feel fear anymore. I know that if I inadvertently
stepped out in front of a car, felt fear, then I would very quickly get out of
the way of the car. If I didn’t think I could manage this fear then I would be
anxious as I wouldn’t believe I could cope with my fear of cars.
Anxiety and Conflict
Neurotic anxiety always involves inner conflict. An
unresolved conflict means that one side of the conflict is always repressed
which then produces neurotic anxiety. Anxiety produces helplessness, paralysis
and impotence. This could be the sense of mum says left dad says right or we’ll
leave you, choosing either side is anxiety provoking as both are essential
parts of me. So therefore I feel anxiety. Could the same be true for an
unresolved conflict, both are essential to the person so neither side can be
chosen? Rollo May would answer yes. I also think that if there is a specific
threat to something essential to the personality that is so strong that it is
likely to happen then you feel anxiety, if the threat is to something essential
to the personality but you are stronger than it, then you may well feel fear.
Anxiety is the emotion when there’s a sense that we are overwhelmed by what is
happening, I am hopeless, it is too powerful and there is no way of escape.
So what can cause anxiety?
1.
Unspecific threat to something essential to the
personality
2.
This threat can be a conflict between two
essential aspects, i.e. there’s a no win situation
3.
There is a situational threat, e.g. walking in
woods at night, the thought I could die at some point
4.
There is a threat to standard coping responses e.g.
being with a strong person, because without them I’m vulnerable
Freud’s libidinal frustration model as cause of anxiety is
between the id of the individual and their superego, which is constructed by
society.
May thinks that the anxiety provoking conflicts are
conflicts between or a dialectical relationship between the individual and
their society. The individual is free and unique but depends on their society
for being valued, and for the types of behaviour that can be performed. They
arise from society and use society’s tools and valuation and yet are free and
unique.
Infants individuate from their parents, and their development
is on one aspect to depend less on their parents and more on themselves, thus
they detach themselves, feel anxiety and then develop more mature relationships
with their parents. Any blockage during this development will cause anxiety. To
detach is to get freedom from, but this must then be replaced by a freedom to,
create new forms of interrelation or isolation will ensue and therefore
anxiety. When there is dependence without freedom then there is a person
clinging to a relationship who cannot live outside it. If you can’t live on your
own powers then you are threatened by every new situation that requires you to
act autonomously on your own powers.
The individual who is independent without relatedness will
be hostile to those who they believe caused their isolation. For the individual who is symbiotically
dependent then the hostility will be directed at the person who they think has
suppressed their freedom.
If an individual avoids autonomous conditions he becomes
shut in and avoids conflict with others, although promotes a greater personal
conflict in terms of neurotic anxiety and neurotic conflict.
The synthesis of the dialectic of individual in community is
the individual’s progressive actualisation of his capacities in expanding
community.
Anxiety and hostility
Anxiety and hostility are related, one generates the other.
Anxiety with its feelings of helplessness, conflict, isolation is a painful
experience. One is hostile to those who have created anxiety in you.
Hostility in anxious people gives rise to more anxiety as
the individual feels helpless and if they expressed their hostility then they
fear they would be crushed.
May argues that anxiety is primary and hostility secondary,
I guess if you are not anxious then you express your hostility. Hostility does exist on its own, but repressed
hostility goes with anxiety.
Culture and community
Individual competitive success is the cause of much anxiety
in current society.
Social prestige goals are defined as success and success is
measured in economic terms. The
accumulation of wealth is seen as the accumulation of power. Success is relative, it is competitive, it is
success over others.
Any threat to your individual competitive success is anxiety
provoking as this is an essential part of peoples’ personalities.
The sense of competitive success as defining worth starts at
school with worth being co-extensive to grades, and who is most popular, cool,
smart, good at sport and all the other competitions that go on. Love then can
be then not be a means to overcome isolation but a way of self-aggrandizement, i.e.
making yourself bigger through having acquired a mate, in the have a hot
partner, and cute kids competition.
Anxiety comes from competitive individual success not merely
when the means to success are threatened, but through the isolation that
individual success leads to and the alienation from self and others, i.e. I
have to be better than I was and better than you. Anxiety also rises out of the
intra social hostility borne of individual competitive approaches. Likewise one’s
self worth is precarious dependent on the market and the views and achievements
of others.
The vicious circle of self-worth through individual
competitive success, is feel anxiety, put more effort into individual competitive
success, increase intra-social hostility and aggression, increase isolation and
increase a feeling of helplessness.
Post renaissance there is a disintegration of the individual
and a rise of anxiety, there is also a disintegration in society, where there
is no unity but rather perpetual competition. In today’s society we are told
that we can all be successful if we are determined and energetic, but yet this
is only true for the privileged bourgeois in our society and everyone else is
left feeling helpless and unsuccessful. The individual is dependent on his
ability to get to a position of power, through education, connection and skill,
and is then dependent on market forces.
There is also the illusion of the power of individual
rationalism, i.e. I can live by the evidence and by the facts. However decisions are mostly made by the
anonymous das man, so in psychology you work with a client, and take a rational
decision, but that is contradicted by the evidence of an RCT, the books written
on the foundation of the RCT and the opinions of the colleagues who have read
those books. Even if you show weakness in the RCT, there is a weight of opinion
against you and your understanding of the case you are working on.
The illusion of rationality is also that there are no contradictions
or vagueness, and that everything has an answer. This by its certainty can
allay anxiety.
Unemployment can be anxiety provoking when the value of
employment is under threat, when there is mass unemployment, those people who
thought that having a job and earning was a vital part of their personality is
now threatened, although with the current unemployment culture this has now
changed.
Totalitarianism is the neurotic response to the need for
community.
Chapter 8 Case studies demonstrating anxiety
Due to the terrifying nature of anxiety can be repressed, put out of mind, etc., so
working with people with anxiety then you need to be aware of what they are
saying and what they are not, what they may be implying.
What we seek to discover
Neurotic fears will focus now on this object now on that and
what makes sense of that is the underlying neurotic anxiety. Neurotic anxiety
always has some conflict as its source, the conflict originally occurred between
the child and the parent. So why is
there conflict in neurotic anxiety, in normal anxiety then we are afraid of
dying so we take some level of steps to make sure this doesn’t happen too early
but beyond that we accept that this is what happens to us. In neurotic anxiety,
then we are afraid that we will lose our ability to be a success, where is the
conflict here? A for instance TAF I want to scream abuse at strangers because I
am angry, but an essential part of my character is to be a good upstanding
person, so the thoughts come into my mind, causes me a lot of anxiety, in case
I did act on them, and I then try to suppress them. If I
have thoughts of wanting to stab myself or others which is dystonic, then I may
have a conflict through on one hand wanting to hurt myself as I am angry at myself
and on another seeing being a responsible person as being vital to my
personality, so the conflict then gets developed into intrusive thoughts.
Can it be shown that anxiety is related to hostile feelings
and when anxiety subsides so does the hostility?
Can it be shown that anxiety retards the development of the personality
and that creative individuals are confronted with higher levels of anxiety?
Harold Brown
Kierkegaard=Anxiety is afraid, yet it maintains a sly
intercourse with its object that it cannot look away from. Anxiety is a desire
for what one dreads. What one fears one desire, anxiety makes the individual
impotent.
The idea here is that there is an impossible conflict which
threatens something significant to the personality and that an event happens
where there is something of subjective significance to the original conflict,
then affect of this conflict then arises.
So with responsibility OCD, it could be that leaving the
house is a trigger to anxiety because it is a cue to be responsible, and that
there is a conflict in that if I am responsible then... may have a childhood
thing where if I am responsible then it means that I won’t need dad and he will
leave me.
How come relationships with your parents can keep having
anxiety making effects? Well, what can also be the case is that is the
relationship you have with your mother is prototypical. If you are successful
your mother resents you but you are dependent on your mother. Now as an adult
you see less of your mother, but feel that you can’t have intimate
relationships if you are successful, and you could keep this belief going by
ensure you have relationships with people who need to be dominant over you, in
the same way that mother was, thus the prototypical relationship continues,
indeed it makes sense, that you would be attracted to a similar person to the
person who taught you about intimacy.
If you are asked to
be responsible which you do think yourself equipped to do then you may feel
hostile. If the person who asks you to do this is vital to your wellbeing then
you will need to repress your hostility.
There is an inverse relationship between anxiety symptoms
and how much anxiety is in consciousness. The function of these symptoms is to
protect the person from anxiety provoking situations.
Chapter 9 The study of unmarried mothers
Study of unmarried mothers as they are in a crisis situation
in a shelter which means their individual behaviours are more amendable to
study, more pronounced, than in normal situations.
So all mothers have an extra marital pregnancy are all in an
anxiety provoking situation. Argument being here that the anxiety they feel
will be both related to the specific situation and also show individual
patterns that would be provoked by any anxiety situation.
Sometimes the anticipation of danger is felt as more
unpleasant than the danger itself so people rush into it.
Repressed guilt gives rise to anxiety, repressed hostility
gives rise to anxiety.
Sometimes parents both reject and overprotect, the latter
being compensation for the former.
If a situation that provokes anxiety doesn’t provoke an
internal conflict then it is said to be realistic.
Scared stiff can be a literal event, where fear will
constrict the muscles
You can restrict your
engagement with the world and other people to restrict your anxiety.
Idealisation can be a way of covering up felt hostility to
someone, you can see this happening when there is small chink in the idealisation,
then large scale hostility will erupt.
Psychotic developments can cover up anxiety.
Rebelliousness to gain a mothers concern.
Anxiety can be laughed off, denied, said that I don’t care
about it, intellectualised away.
High standards can be the outcome of a strong superego and
can lead to repressed spontaneity and instinctual promptings.
If you fail against introjected standards then you can
reject yourself, punish yourself for these failings, with the self-taking the place
of the person who you introjected from.
Conflicts underlying neurotic anxiety can be the hiatus
between reality and introjected expectation from the parents.
Chapter 10 Gleanings from the Case studies
Anxiety underlying fear
Conscious fear can be a substitute for anxiety, it can keep
it hidden, thus as you experience more anxiety then the fear drops and vice
versa. Thus the rational and realistic fear can displace the anxiety, which is
diffuse and personality threatening. What relation is there between fear and
anxiety, can you unpick the fear to get to the anxiety? A neurotic fear is an
exaggerated aspect of the underlying anxiety, it is a particularised foci of
underlying anxiety. The fear to act as a displacement to the underlying
anxiety, must have a subjective logical relation to it.
It can happen that there can be severe underlying anxiety
and then a respite, even though the conditions for the underlying anxiety
haven’t changed. May suggests that there is standardly guilt accompanying
internal neurotic conflict, and that after a severe anxiety attack, there’s
some relief as the guilt has been paid off, through the pain of the anxiety.
Neurotic anxiety and hostility rise and fall together:
Anxiety has a sense of complete helplessness and therefore hostility is
directed to the person(s) who occasioned it. Repressed hostility can lead to
anxiety if the hostility would threaten a vital aspect of the person. To
repress hostility you may take its opposite and adopt more behaviours of trying
to please people.
Conflict: Source of anxiety
Things that activate a personality threatening inner
conflict will occasion anxiety. Anxiety is a predictor of threat, when there is
a threat to an essential value then the feeling is anxiety, when the threat is
to a peripheral value then the feeling is fear.
In neurotic anxiety then you need
1.
A threat to an essential value
2.
If threat 1 is avoided then there is a threat to
another essential value
In other words there needs to be a conflict between 2
essential values, in realistic anxiety, there is the anxiety say about death,
and you can manage it so it doesn’t become neurotic, you manage it by living a
life to give you a greater probability of having a longer life.
Difference between occasion and cause of anxiety. The
occasion is the situation where anxiety will be triggered, the base conflict is
the cause of the anxiety and the occasion heightens one aspect of it. The
occasion of anxiety is that which activates the conflict which is the cause of
anxiety. The more realistic the anxiety, then the closer the relation between
occasion and cause, e.g. in a boat surrounded by sharks occasions anxiety. The
more neurotic the anxiety then the greater the displacement, the more you need
to interpret back from occasion to underlying conflict.
Rejection by parents and anxiety
The theory is that rejection by parents predisposes an
individual to anxiety. This correlates when the person can’t accept the
rejection as an objective fact, so when they have high expectations of their parents,
they can’t believe that their parents reject them. These can go together, you idealise your
mother to cover up her rejection of you. The idealisation enables you to
suppress the hostility you feel towards them, it’s the opposite of what is
felt. To avoid this anxiety if you can appraise your parents objectively then
you don’t get neurotic anxiety, I you don’t accept their rejection, idealise
them, or perpetually try to change them when objectively this isn’t going to
happen, then you get caught in neurotic anxiety.
Sometimes the parental relationship, i.e. the relationship
you have with your parent gets internalised and influences the relationships
that you have with others, your patterns. So you might need to be completely dependent
on another but then believe that others are not dependable. If the parental
rejection is taken as what it is, then affection can be sought elsewhere, if
however it isn’t, the parent is idealised to compensate for the rejection, then
the conflict will become neurotic.
Cleavage between expectation and reality
Neurotic anxiety doesn’t seem to arise out of having a bad
mother who rejects you but out of having a mother you never knew would be bad
or good. It seems there comes problems when the parents mask their rejection
with concern or love. When a parent is rejecting and hostile the child can give
hostility back and get their needs met elsewhere, but if the parents rejection
isn’t clear then the child suppresses their hostility. So if mum acts hostile
sometimes but covers it up with pretences of
love then the child needs to understand this, which they may do by
making the hostility unconscious and a conflict with their idealisation of the
parent, thus for them to be hostile to the parent, would jeopardise their
idealised relationship which would be threatening.
Chapter 11 Methods of dealing with anxiety
Anxiety has a purpose originally to protect us from wild
beasts, now we get anxiety when we are afraid of losing out to the competition,
being ostracized or isolated. The purpose of anxiety remains the same to protect
those things that are vital to our existence.
Some triggers of anxiety, that we will die, get ill and
become isolated are realistic things that we can learn to accept. The
limitations of our life can produce anxiety as it can art. Much advertising shows people who have got
over their anxiety with just one purchase, happiness awaits. Things people do
to show they are in control of a situation, e.g. arguing, joking etc. are ways
of reducing anxiety. This would be everyday anxiety management, it only becomes
clinical on the extent that it is done. Humour gives a distance from threat, so
gallows humour is quite functional.
In extreme situations
Soldiers in Vietnam conquered anxiety by
1.
Self-belief
2.
Belief in something they belong to: Religion\Cause
3.
Keeping busy
In extreme situations you need defences against anxiety
Destructive ways
The negative ways of dealing with anxiety range from
behavioural traits like excessive shyness, through neuroses and psychosomatic illness
to psychosis, as well as avoidance. Negative approaches merely get rid of the
symptoms rather than the underlying causes so the anxiety returns.
Normal response to neurotic comes when the behaviour to
allay anxiety becomes habitual rather than any intrinsic wish to perform the
action.
Rigidity of thinking can also be a way of protecting from
anxiety. This gives temporary security
at the cost of finding new truths\experience.
Beliefs in superstition\fate etc. is a way of avoiding full
responsibility.
Conscious activity is more painful than neurotic symptoms,
but is also more useful as it shows the problem that can be addressed.
The way to run away from something in yourself is to
dissociate, deny, diminish or joke about.
Sometimes anxiety can be used as a defence, see how anxious
I am, you couldn’t possibly make me more anxious.
Constructive ways
Anxiety represents a challenge as there is the presence of a
contradiction with a person’s value system.
Two common methods of resolving anxiety:
1.
An expansion of awareness so any unconscious conflict
becomes conscious, so that you can synthesise the problem
2.
Achieving of goals within the conflict
Neurotic anxiety is the result of failing to deal in
childhood with anxiety provoking situations.
Kierkegaard said anxiety is a better teacher than reality as
situations can be avoided but anxiety comes from inside and it can only be
avoided at the cost of constriction of the personality. The aim really, like
the child learning to walk and falling many times, is to move ahead despite the
anxiety. To move ahead even if you are afraid can be accompanied by the spirit
of adventure. However when the anxiety is more severe than it is accompanied by
the sheerest kind of dogged determination. What has helped soldiers with this,
is the threat of backing out, is greater than the threat of going forward.
Anxiety vs a value, neurotic anxiety means the former wins,
whereas moving through the anxiety the latter wins.
Kierkegaard=you are restricting your development unless you
pursue with inner integrity and courage the new experiences that arise for you
every day.
Thus anxiety and fear can only be “overcome” through moving
in accordance with your values, in spite of them.
Chapter 12 Anxiety and the Development of the self
Agoraphobia as a shrinking of possibilities, a narrowing of
the world, thus there is a restriction of the personality. Doing this blocks
off any conflicts that can lead to anxiety. When anxious your productivity and
originality drops. Your productivity
drops through the paralysis that anxiety leads to. On one side with anxiety,
the threat you have dissolution of self, on the other side, to go through that
which frightens you, towards your values, leads to realisation of potential,
actualisation of self.
Creativity, Intelligence and anxiety
Do more creative people face higher levels of anxiety?
Kierkegaard=anxiety is experienced as you face more
possibilities in your development
It wouldn’t mean creative individuals display more anxiety,
as they could have developed better ways at managing it.
In May’s study this is the case, the more impoverished the
character the less the anxiety.
An anxious student can reduces their anxiety by blaming
themselves or others for their performance, thus feeling either depression or
anger.
Small amounts of anxiety will spur performance larger
amounts will debilitate it.
The argument is that neurotic anxiety is borne out of
contradiction between expectation and reality at an early age. Artists however
trade in this relation, their art is both how they see things, and how they
imagine things, and i.e. there is a contradiction, a gap between the two. ~This
leads to his picture being more stimulating than reality. This is also the case with scientists who use
his hypothesis and test against reality to find a new fact, likewise the
moralist, who thinks how things are and how things should be and uses this gap
to develop new behaviour via legislation. In these endeavours the gap between
how things are and how the person would like them to be is called imagination,
thus the gap between reality and expectation can either be the basis for
anxiety or creativity. I guess the difference being in the former there is a
threat within the gap.
In neurotic anxiety there is a contradiction in the gap
between expectation and reality, e.g. I love and hate my mother, as she is
amazing and evil. In productive activity this gap produces a creative tension
which holds no contradiction, e.g. I want to change and work less hard, the old
me with their values dies and is replaced by the new me.
The realisation of self
Two ways to use the concept self
1.
Sum total of all a person’s capacities
2.
Self-awareness and freewill
Kierkegaard, Sullivan and from use the term in the second
way.
Self-realisation is the exploring of new possibilities, ways
of being, capacities, which will be anxiety inducing as you don’t know how to
do them, you may get into hostile situations and you will kill the old you as
you do this. To realise yourself you must move through the anxiety. Anxiety is
tolerated to varying degrees in everyone but most in children and creative
individuals. Least of all in brain injured people.
Sullivan believes it is through anxiety experiences that the
young child comes into being. The mother’s disapproval causes anxiety, so the
child stops doing that which causes the anxiety.
As a child develops they become more independent of the
parents, which creates anxiety. If they move through the anxiety then they
develop different bonds with parents and others, if the anxiety is too great
they return to dependency on their parents, and their dependency may be even
stronger.
An enlarging of self-awareness happens when you realise new
possibilities. As the child develops their ego, then on one side they have
freedom to act, on the other side responsibility, so the emotions going with
this being anxiety for freedom and guilt on responsibility side.
To venture causes anxiety, to not venture you lose yourself.
Definitions
Irrationality=that
behaviour which you can’t predict, e.g. rational economic individual means someone’s
behaviour follows the laws of economics. Irrational no good reason for a
behaviour, i.e. it was out of character. Bizarre action, that is abnormal. So
society define what is normal behaviour and if you act wildly outside it you
would be defined as irrational. Likewise if you see the world radically
different to the rest of the population then you would be defined as
irrational. Irrational doesn’t follow the laws of logic, or the axioms of
reasons, e.g. causality. Strong emotions as irrational? Irrational as that
which cant’ be measured, as rationality needs determinacy.
Anxiety=
1.
I appraise this situation to threaten something
essential to me.
2.
I am in an impossible situation that threatens
something essential to me.
Notes
Anxiety definition and on the continuum
Anxiety bourne of weak self-esteem and conditions of worth
from parents.
Anxiety as an inferiority meaning I am bad rather I am bad
at…
Anxiety as the original threat of mums punishment about that
which Im not, ie the development of the personality
Anxiety symptom relief through being busy
Success in individual competitive success is never ending
Importance culturally of being individually competitively
successful: better than
Disassociation is avoidance of an experience, denial is
avoidance of an experience
Two forms of anxiety, the threat to personality of where you
are, the threat to personality of moving where you want to be, i.e. development.
Start 9.15 going for
the hour then mobilisation then another hour
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