Anxiety

Welcome once again my readers, I will remind you that you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the concepts of the Actual and Imagined described in the blog here. However, for the purposes of this blog, all you have to know is that the “Imagined” describes one’s beliefs about themselves, while the “Actual” describes one’s perceptions of themselves.

There are a variety of anxiety disorders described in the DSM-V and other diagnostic manuals. These disorders range anywhere from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to Generalized Anxiety Disorder, but the prescriptive statements I make about anxiety will pertain to socially-contingent anxiety. Which is to say, anxiety whose existence is contingent on other people.

To explain my conceptualization of anxiety, I will borrow from a thought experiment developed by Jacques Lacan.

First, we must understand that the praying mantis participates in sexual cannibalism; about 90% of sexual encounters between praying mantises end in the female praying mantis eating the head of the male praying mantis. Now image you are a praying mantis who has just finished mating with a female praying mantis. However, you are wearing a mask of either a male praying mantis or a female praying mantis. The catch is that you don’t know which mask you are wearing. The mask you wear will determine how you are viewed by the female praying mantis and whether she chooses to eat your head.

According to Lacan, this interaction in which you don’t know how someone else sees you (in our example, the female praying mantis) is what we call anxiety. He calls it the “sensation of the desire of the other“. Anxiety stems from our inability to know how people view us and our inability to know what others expect of us.

This conceptualization ties in nicely with our established notions of the Actual Self and Imagined Other. Fundamentally, the sensation of anxiety occurs when we are unable to conform our Actual Self to other’s Imagined Other of ourselves. In simpler terms, we feel anxiety when we are unable to conform to the desires and expectations of others.

Other Psychoanalysts have theorized that the sensation of anxiety stems from a loss of an object or the loss of a love of an object. However, I see anxiety as quite the opposite. Anxiety is not about a loss of an object itself, it is about the unknowability and unattainability of another’s desires. Again, these desires are unobtainable and unknowable because the desires of others are unknown to us.