How Anxiety Begins In All of Us - 3

By Kevin Murphy MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


To pick up where I left off last week on the subject of anxiety, I was writing about drawing on two notions from contemporary psychoanalytic theory. The first of these was that the roots of adult anxiety reside in infancy as a result of the experiences of connection and rupture, particularly the temporary but necessary connections and ruptures the infant experiences with its primary carer, and which each of us as infants undergo during our development.
The roots of anxiety reside in such moments even before the child has a developed ego with which to defend against the negative aspects, particularly of rupture i.e. the breaking off of contact by the mother to allow her do other necessary tasks. This process is part of the human structural framework and occurs most markedly at phases like weaning, in which the infant must either accept or not accept a loss.
But out of these experiences, a pattern, however primal, is laid down, a template if you like, that dictates future responses to issues of connection to the larger body of human society or, indeed, the rupturing from it, however real or imaginary they might be.
The second notion I wrote about last week was the power of the visual image of the infant at the Mirror Stage, from about six months onwards, to override the more real experience of the fragmentation and uncoordinated nature of its body. In other words, the visual image offers an answer to bodily fragmentation in terms of wholeness and perfection. And so in this way the infant gets its first answer to the question of who it is.
This is a jubilatory experience of recognition but at the same time is also a cause of anxiety. Why? Because the perfection of the image it sees, this ‘other’ that is perfect, has the potential to overwhelm it. In order to accommodate these opposing forces, the infant identifies with the image, owns it, incorporates it, takes it into itself, metaphorically speaking. And this is, in Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, the moment when the infant is jolted into a radically new direction in terms of its identity and in terms of the power of the visual image.
What we learn from this theory is that the birth of identity, the ‘I’ that we understand ourselves to be, takes place at a point of rupture in our relatively comfortable state of existence up to that moment. At the moment our identity is crucially formed we emerge from fragementation to embrace a visual image that offers the semblance of perfection. At the same time anything else about ourselves, the uncoordinated imperfection, fades into the background into that great holding area known in psychoanalytic theory as the unconscious.
From that moment on, ‘seeing’, witnessing, having the evidence of our eyes becomes the unassailable criterion for practically everything we will henceforth judge to be true or not true. And, equally, it inaugurates a distrust, disbelief, disregard, even fear for that which cannot be seen or corroborated by the evidence of our eyes.
The second thing we learn from the theory is that the birth of identity takes place, along with the accommodation of loss and rupture as structural elements of the human infant experience, alongside the experience of anxiety. The inaugural moment of establishing the first visual sense of who we are is woven in with the experience of anxiety.
The third thing it tells us is that in the moment when we are gaining our first tentative visual inkling of who we are, we are essentially an object in front of another object that appears before us. We become ‘I’, in our first moment of identity, by becoming the same as, identifying with, this other object. That might sound like an inconsequential point but what happens in adult anxiety is this very thing in reverse.
In adult anxiety we revert from having an objective sense of who we are, a perspective that allows us stand back, evaluate, view ourselves relatively dispassionately and one that anchors us to reality by various connections, beliefs, attitudes and relationships. Instead we are 'jolted' back to an almost primal sense of vulnerable subjectivity. We come to painfully inhabit ourselves in a way that is so intense it debilitates us and brings into sharp relief our fragile sense of wholeness.
When I conclude on this subject next week, I will be pointing to what contemporary psychoanalytic theory has to say about this reverting to a peculiarly unworkable subjective sense of ourselves, the experience we know as anxiety, and why it is so overwhelming for us.