Thread by @drjanaway

An examination of anxiety;

Anxiety, as most we experience it, is an unpleasant feeling of pressure related to some potential, threatening event. And yet, when considered on merit, the event is often so unrealistic that the anxiety is considered bizarre, even embarrassing.

The original Freudian ideas, which are now extrapolated and refined toward diagnostic categories such as #generalisedanxietydisorder and #phobias, evolved to explain an incongruence between physical and emotional symptoms, and their target or explanation.

To consider this more deeply, we must first agree that there are different levels of consciousness in which our ideas and perceptions interact, some are not accessible to us, and are acted upon by psychic mechanisms to make them understandable or tolerable.

We are all familiar with the concept of an unconscious mind, where memory lives and ideas exist when not thought of directly, or the odd feeling of being driven toward a certain reaction, or indeed the lack of control around such reactions.

Early models of anxiety considered this reaction to be the result of the transposition of fear toward an understandable, if not always related, external object (although I borrow from Klein here.) Essentially, the feared event or object would be intolerable within our thought..

so the object would be switched for something else. Earlier Freudian ideas looked heavily at sexuality, however, this is often a misnomer and was replaced by a more generalist drive toward 'life giving' ideals, passions etc.

It was the irreconcilability of a relation to an object that provided an alternative object plus anxiety (fear,) which could not easily be ceased as the original object is lost. In some cases, this anxiety becomes attached to the concept of anxiety itself,becoming 'free-floating'

In other situations, the object would remain and become a phobia, but the affect (fear) would become grossly disproportional. But in these cases oft could be overcome, as nothing remained hidden in the less accessible parts of the mind.

When considering psychology along darwinian lines, we must consider its inherent survival value, that is its place within first a biological and then social niche. A fear (phobia) may be easily explicable, but generalised anxiety less so, given its cost.

Freudian therory, at its core, professes to be biological in its explanations, that is play some mediating role in survival and adaptation, and irregardless, anxiety and its symptoms are prevalent across society.

Although fundamental explanations for it differ, i.e we consider biologically or behaviourally the idea of reinforcement, adrenaline, etc, none of these disparate concepts need to be fully explanatory but may form part of a behavioral chain toward an end goal.

If we consider a transposition of sexual drive toward anxiety against another object, it may act to preserve the role of the individual within an intolerant society. The specific nature of the object acted upon is irrelevant, only the ability to do so.

Thus we can see anxiety not as its own substance, but the end result of a motivation to avoid something dangerous, either thematically but out of proportion, or in someway less tolerated by the individual and transposed toward something else.

If we now consider the diagnostic categories as they stand, many such as OCD and ED can be understood this way, not to say this is 'the way,' but as a method of transposition. I am sure that many will disagree, but I have often found what is seen and the underlying cause differ.

So what is the take away here; in many situations anxiety is there to protect you, but sometimes it may indicate that there is something that needs to be worked through that is only, if at all, linked to what is feared.