Fears and Anxiety, the Object in Question
Lilia Mahjoub
Freud in 1925
In his major article, “Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety” (1925), Freud sets out to highlight and clarify the specificity of anxiety, to examine its links with inhibition and the symptom and to distinguish between them. In his text, Freud seeks to grasp the essence of anxiety, to separate truth from error, and it is clear that what is still only a notion cannot be graspedeasily.
He writes that anxiety is, in the first place, something felt, a state of affect, promptly adding that he does not know what an affect is either;[1] that it is a sensation that has an obvious aspect of displeasure, but that anxiety does not designate just any type of displeasure.
In his Addendum B on anxiety, after having linked it to expectation, he attributes two characteristics to it: indefiniteness, Unbestimmtheit, and the lack of an object, Objektlosigkeit[2] – even though, concerning the latter, he had previously noted that it was “a reaction to the felt loss of the object”[3] which is not to say, as one would have to admit, that no object is there. Also, on several occasions he posits that “the loss of object” is the determining condition of anxiety.[4]Moreover, there is often mention in his article of the experienced absence of the object, for example, very early on in the infant’s life, where the absence is that of the mother. This experienced absence becomes the danger in response to which “the infant gives the signal of anxiety.”[5] It is, therefore, in relation to the presence and absence of the object that anxiety is situated. With Freud, the danger is merged with the object.
Let us also point out that Freud only mentions the term fear [Furcht] once in this study.[6] Anxiety changes its name and becomes fear when it has found an object.
Lacan in 1957
As early as 1957, Lacan puts forward some interesting leads for distinguishing anxiety from fear. He, too, draws upon the case of Little Hans’s phobia.
He gives a valuable indication concerning anxiety, which is a moment of suspension of the subject “between a moment at which he no longer knows where he is, and […] a moment when he will become something in which he will never be able to find himself again.”[7]
Anxiety occurs for Hans when something appears in the form of a drive (his penis stirring) and he sees the trap, the lure, which was for a long time the paradise that he lived with his mother. If anxiety is manifested at the heart of this subjective crisis, it is not, however, there to resolve his difficulty in assuming his castration; it is the phobia that emerges from the anxiety that brings into play the signifiers necessary for him to assume his castration.
From that moment on, with the symptom of phobia, faced with the horses of anxiety, Angstpferde, it is no longer anxiety that Hans experiences but fear. And he has fears – especially of horses that bite, of horses that fall and create chaos. Fear, unlike anxiety, is something that can be articulated and named. In this way, many points of danger arise for Hans that will restructure his world.
The signifier horse is not, however, what frightens him. Its function is to lend itself to all sorts of transfers. Moreover, Hans expresses another fear to his father: that the latter might leave. Lacan emphasizes that here fear shows itself in the form of the absence of an object, which gives fear an unreal quality. “Hans is afraid of the absence of the father, an absence which is there and which he is starting to symbolize.”[8]
Furthermore, what frightens Hans – the bite, the fall of the horses, the movement, the father’s absence – turns out to be as much feared as desired: they are “double-edged signifier elements.”[9] But these fears are mixed with crystallisations of anxiety and isolating the fear from the anxiety remains complex in this period of Lacan’s elaboration.
Lacan in 1962
It was in 1962 that Lacan took a further step, emphasizing that the opposition between fear and anxiety, according to their respective positions in relation to the object, had made things confusing. Lacan considers that it was a mistake to have put forward that fear has an object, and that we were too quick to add that fear was adequate to the object from which the danger originates.
Lacan, who is then forging his object a, argues not that anxiety has no object, which has been deduced from certain parts of Freud’s discourse, but that “it is not without an object,”[10] which does not mean that we know what the object is. This is a major difference.
Drawing three examples of fears from Anton Chekhov’s short story, “Panic Fears,”[11] Lacan shows that compared to anxiety, which is not without an object, fear is without object. With these three fears, there is no threat, but something that is “referred to the unknown”;[12] and, unlike anxiety, “the subject is neither seized, nor concerned, nor implicated in his inmost depths.”[13] In the example of the dog that stares at him and follows him, it is not the dog that Chekhov is afraid of, but something behind it, the devil, no doubt like Faust’s dog, that occupies his mind.
Lacan returns to Addendum B, to point out that Freud also wrote that anxiety is essentially Angst vor etwas, “anxiety faced with something.”[14] This is where he distinguished Realangst – translated as objective or real anxiety or anxiety in the face of real danger – from neurotic anxiety. However, we must not confuse the real, as Lacan conceives it, with the Realangst that qualifies the danger of which Freud speaks, for this would be a mistranslation. The real anxiety of Realangst, does not concern the Lacanian real, notably because Freud specifies that in this anxiety faced with real danger, this danger is known, whereas in the other, neurotic anxiety, the danger is not known.
Only the question of the real, as Lacan puts it, can guide us on this opaque function of anxiety.
Thus, it is this something [etwas], in the face of which anxiety operates “as a signal [that] belongs to the realm of the real’s irreducibility.”[15] In other words, anxiety is the signal of the real. Lacan formalized this irreducible part with the object a, insofar as it is what remains of the subject’s subjective division, namely the lost object.
Lacan, therefore, gives us the key to what Freud designates as the loss of the object.
We have to deal with this lost object in both desire and in anxiety. As a signal of the real, amongst all the other signals, anxiety is the one that does not mislead, unlike fear which is linked to the imaginary and the symbolic. This affect of anxiety does not signal to the subject his desire but a “sensation of the desire of the Other,”[16] of the real Other[17]; for it is the path of the Other via the passage through anxiety that has allowed the subject to emerge.
Today
At the heart of discontents, in other words, the symptoms that our civilization entails today, it is advisable not to confuse fears and anxiety. It is also crucial beforehand, to distinguish the symptom from anxiety, as Freud and Lacan did. The place and function of the object depend on this.
It is with the analytical discourse that Lacan raises this pollution,[18] that is the object a, to the position of semblant, which is not the same thing as producing it or making it blurt out a knowledge that believes itself to be absolute, as the discourses that govern us do – be it the capitalist or the scientist, both discourses are on the side of the master[19] – and thus arousing fears, those fears that paralyze (withdrawal into oneself), make people flee or become delusional, as we see with what afflicts the world (viruses, wars, etc.).
As Lacan remarked, anxiety is a dimension that is at the very least preserved in psychoanalysis, namely that it is a passageway between “returning to assured cosmism” and “the maintaining of a historical pathos.”[20] Let’s wager on the analytical discourse to continue to do so.
References
[1] Freud, S., “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” in S.E. XX, p. 132.
[2] Ibid., p. 165.
[3] Ibid., p. 137.
[4] Cf. Ibid., pp. 137-8.
[5] Ibid., p. 138.
[6] Ibid., p. 167.
[7] Lacan, J., The Object Relation, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. A.R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2020, p. 218.
[8] Ibid., p. 336. [translation modified]
[9] Ibid., p. 351.
[10] Lacan, J., Anxiety, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. A.R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2014, p. 89.
[11] Chekhov, A., “Panic Fears,” The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, Berkeley, Mint Editions, 2021, pp. 82-5.
[12] Cf. Lacan, J., Anxiety, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, op. cit., p. 159.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., p. 157.
[15] Ibid., p. 160.
[16] Cf. Lacan J., Seminar IX, “L’identification,” lesson of 4 April 1962, unpublished.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Lacan, J., … or Worse, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, ed. J.-A. Miller,, tr. A.R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2022, p. 194.
[19] Lacan, J., The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. R. Grigg, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007, p. 149.
[20] Cf. Lacan, J., Anxiety, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, op. cit., p. 38.