Anxiety Part Three
When the
idea of 'fear’ was first encountered in this essay - by way of the distinctions made
by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure-Principle - a certain point was emphasized in the
comments that followed. "Because of the specificity which is characteristic of fear,
it allows the possibility of definite plans to be formulated. . . . All of this, however,
is quite in contrast to the hazy indefiniteness surrounding apprehension. The uncertainty
which characterizes this situation limits the amount of planning which can be completed; .
. ." The important point to notice, here, is that 'fear' tends to involve an aspect
of knowledge, while apprehension seems to be rooted in some kind of deficiency with
respect to the processing of, or access to, certain kinds of information.
More
specifically, when one fears something, for example, a dog, one's fear
encompasses a certain amount of knowledge. This information includes such factors as:
dogs, types of dogs, characteristics of dogs, experience with dogs, etc.
On the basis
of such information, one begins to construct a conceptual geometry which, among other
things, contains a range of possibilities in relation to dogs. One’s acts tend to be
a manifestation of one set, or another, of cognitive functions involving these
possibilities.
However,
when, in some given context, one is apprehensive, an individual’s conceptual geometry
seems to be like a ship without compass or rudder. For example, in the phenomenon of
‘separation anxiety’, one of the most prominent features of this condition
revolved about a child’s sense of helplessness and its concomitant dimension of
'directionlessness' which tended to interfere with, and undermine, any sort of planned
action.
Moreover,
this aspect of ‘directionlessness’ pervaded one's perception of the danger,
itself, as well as, the range of possibilities connected with one's attempt to cope with
the perceived danger. As a matter of fact, because these last two facets of cognitive
functioning (namely, perception and building a conceptual geometry are deficient in
various ways), one is unable to act appropriately, or at all.
The
distinction between fear and anxiety becomes increasingly important, if one, briefly,
returns to the previously mentioned notion of ‘consensual validation’. Riezler
contends that:
"The
process in which he forms his preliminary world could not proceed if the child were not
aware of living in the world of his elders. His first assumption is his mother and her
knowledge. The mother is not simply one of many items in a phenomena! field. The entire
phenomenal field is referred to the mother. The assumption of her knowledge underlies and
accompanies every hypothesis the child makes concerning the nature of things. As the child
builds up his own world, he ‘learns’ the world of his elders..."26
Not only
does the ‘assumption of her knowledge’ underlie and accompany ‘every
hypothesis the child makes’, but the mothering-ones’ presence shapes, colors,
and orients - for better or worse - the infant’s and child’s general engagement
of the world. For all practical purposes, the mother - at least in the beginning - is
the conceptual geometry through which an infant and young child existentially navigates
her or his way through life.
Just as an
adult depends upon his or her own conceptual geometry to help understand and cope with
life, the child depends on the mother’s conceptual geometry in the same way. In
either case, if anything were to happen to their respective conceptual geometries, both
the adult and the child would become helpless and without direction.
Such
'informational directionlessness', however, does not lead to fear but to a sense of
apprehensiveness or anxiety. As noted previously, whatever else ‘fear’ may
entail, it contains, on a minimal basis, some possibility for directed action (fight,
flight, or some other strategy)27. If one lacks this possibility, one's basic affective
state is not fear but apprehension or anxiety - although there might be some degree of
fear woven into the fabric of one’s state of anxiety.
One of the
characteristics of anxiety is that irrespective of how mild the associated felt-state may
be, the phenomenology of anxiety tends to be antagonistic to action. For example, if one
feels mildly anxious about an upcoming talk, then, according to the theory advanced in
this essay, one's anxiety gives expression to one's recognition28 that there
are various kinds of lacunae or gaps in one’s conceptual geometry concerning the talk
- these lacunae might have to do with: performance, other people’s perception of the
talk, the impact the talk might have on one’s career or standing in the community,
implications for self-esteem, and so on.
However, the
range of possibilities surrounding such concerns tends to be so open-ended and diffuse
that one would have difficulty formulating a specific course of action which,
simultaneously, could address all of one’s concerns with respect to the speech. In
fact, to the extent that the horizons surrounding such diffuse possibilities involving the
forthcoming speech begins to expand, an individual may begin to blur the conceptual lines
which demarcate between what is possible and what is not possible ... what is likely to
happen, and what is not likely to happen.29
One is not
afraid of what is going to happen. Rather, because one doesn’t know what will happen,
one becomes apprehensive or anxious.
Anxiety
attacks occur when the aforementioned lines of demarcation concerning possibility tend to
break down or disintegrate - at least for a period of time. During this interim, one is
unable to act in any directed manner because one has become overwhelmed by possibilities
along with various, unanswered questions concerning what significance to assign to such
possibilities, and, therefore, one has no sense of direction for how to cope with these
uncertainties.
Two British
psychiatrists, Bowlby and Robertson, discovered that while very young infants were
concerned, apparently, largely with issues of physical needs, somewhat older infants
(between 3-6 months) seemed to have a slightly different orientation to life.
One of the
most striking characteristics of these older infants was their apparent recognition of the
mother as individual and not just as someone who gratified physical needs. By the time the
child is between 18-24 months old, this engagement of the mother as a person apart from
issues of physical need has a central place in the child’s developing conceptual
geometry.30
In the words
of Bowlby and Robertson:
"He is
by no means content to be fed and tended by anyone, but appreciates his mother as a
particular person and has a hunger for her love and presence which is as great as his
body’s hunger for food. He has been weaned from the breast, but he is still
unrecovered from complete dependence on the protection and love of this one person."31
The
foregoing observations dovetail with the views of Riezler noted previously - namely, the
first assumptions of the child concern the mother and her knowledge. In many ways, the
mother’s behavior, attitudes, and emotions form substantial aspects of a child’s
initial conceptual geometry.
There are a
number of studies on institutionalized children, as well as other kinds of studies, which
support the perspective being outlined here. For instance, Spitz investigated a cluster of
behavior traits known as ‘anaclitic depression’.32
In terms of
implications for the present essay, perhaps, one of the most significant results of
Spitz’ investigation is that even when the physical needs of very young,
institutionalized children were met (e.g., adequate food, physical comfort, etc.), the
child seemed to need something more:
"In
many cases, this unusual behavior [i.e., anaclitic depression] began to appear after the
child was separated from its mother or mother substitute. If favorable mother child
relationships were reestablished within three months, a more normal course of development
occurred. However, if the deprivation lasted longer than five months, the child did not
improve but continued to deteriorate."33
Although the
specific principles which regulate this phenomenon are still under investigation, the
available evidence does seem to indicate that the relationship between mother and child
goes beyond both the satisfaction of physical needs, as well as simple emotional
attachments. The onset of the symptoms of anaclitic depression in these children suggests
that process are going on in their psyches which are eating away at something which is of
crucial importance to them.
Such
evidence points to an area which Freud either failed to explore or mis-understood. This
area revolves around a child's dependence on the mother above and beyond the mother's role
as the one who satisfies physical needs or as a possible object of sexual desire.
Actually,
the fact that Freud did not arrive at some similar conclusion is rather amazing.
Certainly, there was sufficient evidence available to him which might have permitted him
to make an educated conjecture concerning this issue.
For example,
a very prominent piece of evidence existed in the form of the phenomenon of
'separation-anxiety'. After all , even when a mother was absent for any length of time,
the infant’s needs still satisfied through the presence of a governess.
Strangely
enough, Freud did not seem to think it odd that although the basic needs of the infant
were satisfied, the infant stiff longed for the mother. The existence of this longing
suggests that Freud did not probe to the heart of the mother-child relationship.
Rather,
because he was pre-occupied with the child's sexual attachment to his mother, this tended
to close him off to other possibilities34. Although Freud proved himself, over
the course of his life, to be quite willing to make theoretical changes - even in relation
to fundamental precepts, his openness had limits and very definite biases.
In any
event, as Erickson points out:
"Knowing
what we know today, it is obvious that somebody had to come sometime who would decide that
it would be better for the sake of the study of human motivation to call too many rather
than too few things sexual, and then to modify the hypothesis by careful inquiry."35
One of the
ways in which the hypotheses of Freud has been modified involves the whole realm of
psychical needs encompassing aspects of emotional attachment between mother and child
which appear to be non-sexual in nature. The remainder of this essay will concentrate on
providing added detail to certain aspects of these non-sexual, psychical dimensions.
R.D. Laing
has written along lines which can contribute to the present discussion. Although,
ultimately, his reflections on his clinical experience took him to a variety of points of
interest other than just the matter of anxiety, in the Divided Self , Laing
indicates that:
"Most
people feel they begin when their bodies begin and that they will end when their bodies
die. We could say that such a person experienced himself as embodied.
"This,
however, need not be the case. . .there are individuals who do not go through life
absorbed in their bodies but rather find themselves to be, as they always have been,
somewhat detached from their bodies. Of such a person one might say that he has never
become quite incarnate and he may speak of himself as more or less unembodied.
"Here
we have a basic difference in the self’s position in life. We would almost have, if
the embodiment or un-embodiment were ever complete in either direction, two different ways
of being human."36
The embodied
person is rooted in his or her biological constitution and its component building blocks
of bone, muscle, etc.. The body of this sort of individual constitutes the base of
operations through which such a person engages existence. From this port, the person sets
to meet the world.
To the
extent that a person is embodied, that individual will consider herself or himself to be
co-extensive with the body. The dangers which threaten the body, threaten the
individual’s sense of self, and the objects which attract the body reflect that
person’s sense of self.
The approach
to life of a ‘disembodied’ individual, however, contrasts, substantially, with
that of people who are characterized as being ‘embodied’. According to Laing,
observation, rather than participation, is a central feature of the
‘disembodied’ orientation.
In addition
to observing the activity of the body and its engagement of the physical world, the
disembodied individual also focuses upon criticizing, directing, and/or applauding the
body. In other words, the disembodied individual tends to focus upon controlling all that
the body does or is.
The center
of ontological gravity, so to speak, has changed from the body (i.e., the embodied individual)
to phenomenology of mental activity. In the case of a disembodied individual, the
‘self’ is no longer synonymous with the body but, instead, is given expression
through the agencies of internal analysis, judgement, and control with respect to the
body’s engagement of the external world. Furthermore, these mental processes are
perceived by the individual as being detached and isolated from the external world.
Of course,
most people are a combination of embodiment and disembodiment typologies. To what extent
either of these ontological orientations is genetically fixed and how much is shaped by
environmental influences remains an open question.
Laing
touches on these matters, when he says:
"In
short, physical birth and biological aliveness are followed by the baby's becoming
existentially born as real and alive....
"The
individual , then, may experience his own being as real , whole; as differentiated from
the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly that his identity and autonomy
are never in question; as a continuum in time; as having an inner consistency,
substantiality, genuineness, and worth; is spatially co-extensive with the body; and,
usually, as having begun in or around birth and liable to extinction with death. He thus
has a firm core of ontological security....
"... in
the individual whose own being is secure in this primary sense, relatedness with others is
potentially gratifying; whereas the ontologically insecure person is preoccupied with
preserving rather than gratifying himself; the ordinary circumstances of living threaten
his low threshold of security . . ."37
We
understand the 'ontological' from the perspective of having a conscious awareness of our
'Being' and the modalities of our living which are embedded in that Being. In these terms,
one might briefly summarize the difference between ontological security and ontological
insecurity as a function of one’s capacity to cope.
The
experiential background of the ontologically secure individual forms a solid base of
operations from which to extend out into the world. A sense of ontological security
provides an individual with a relatively clear conception of his or her own, distinct
position in relation to other people and things Moreover, it frames and orients an
individual's approach to interpersonal situations by rooting that person’s psychic
life in conditions which have been, for the most part, gratifying and satisfying to
varying degrees, and, as such, ontological security has been intimately woven into the
fabric of that individual’s conceptual geometry.
The
experiential background of the ontologically insecure individual , on the other hand,
leaves sizable lacunae in the foundation through which that person engages life. As a
result, one of the most prominent features of an ontologically insecure individual is the
significant degree of uncertainty which surrounds and permeates one’s relationship
with oneself, others, and the world.
Although
each individual is ontologically insecure at birth, and for some time afterwards, the
ontologically insecure adult represents that sort of individual who is never able to
overcome the basic sense of insecurity which one inherits at birth. The ontologically
insecure individual has a conceptual geometry, but it is only a ragged, piecemeal,
inferior shadow of the conceptual geometry of an ontologically secure person.
Although
Frieda Fromm-Reichman uses the term 'self-realization’38, essentially, she
is saying the same thing when she contends that:
"The
lack of freedom for self-realization and the feeling of stagnation and 'nothingness' that
goes with it, this sense of psychological death, seems to me to be at the root of many
people's anxiety. To repeat, they cling to infantile, intrapersonal patterns, and as
result, feel helpless without really knowing why. They are unable to grow emotionally, to
develop or change. They are not able to think, feel and act according to their
chronological age. They live anachronously in a deadening emotional rut where they
compulsively continue to distort their interpersonal images of new people whom they meet,
and to misvalue the interpersonal reactions and behavior of these people along the line of
the conception gained in the resolved interpersonal childhood contacts."39
While there
are many ways for an individual to become 'stagnated', Harry Stack Sullivan40
describes at least one way which is quite important in the present context. It concerns
his conception of 'anxiety'.
According to
Sullivan, the 'tension of needs' are not the only cause of reduction in an infant's
'euphoria', or sense of well-being. Anxiety also can cause such a reduction.
Unlike other
needs, however, anxiety is not related to the infant’s physiochemical environment.
The felt tension generated by physical/material needs is directed toward a specific
source. The tension to which anxiety gives expression, on the other hand, is, for the
infant, non-specific, and, in many ways, without direction.
According to
Sullivan, anxiety is empathically transferred from the mothering-one to the infant. That
is, the infant is, in some unspecified manner, able to feel discomfort because of the
anxious discomfort present in the mothering-one.
Due:
". . .
to the peculiar emotional linkage that subtends the relationship of the infant with other
significant people - the mother or the nurse,"
the infant
feels a strange tension without any accompanying physiochemical need. Thus, the tension of
anxiety, as experienced early in prototypic contexts (the earliest, most rudimentary form
of experience), is distinguished form other instances of reduction in euphoria by the
absence of a specific source which can account for why one is experiencing a reduction in
one’s normal sense of existential euphoria derived from the state of being alive.
Anxiety simply exists in the infant.
With this
sort of experience in mind, Sullivan advances a postulate:
"The
tension of anxiety, when present in the mothering-one, induces anxiety in the
infant."41 When this tension of anxiety is reduced in the infant (which
first requires anxiety be reduced in the mothering-one), this reduction of tension does
not result in satisfaction but in 'interpersonal security'.
For
Sullivan, this means that anxiety is a function of the infant's necessary, interpersonal,
communal existence; that it is necessary for a significant other to co-operate in
relieving an infant's need. Seemingly, a child is able to sense (but not understand) any
emotional change, brought about by tension in the mothering-one, which might interfere
with co-operative behavior.
The
foregoing way of putting things is, however, somewhat misleading. Sullivan believes that
an infant is unable to connect the felt tension of anxiety with the mothering-one who
induced it. Moreover, at this point, the infant is not developmentally capable to be able
to logically extrapolate the anxiety in the mothering-one with any, possible impairment of
future co-operation which such anxiety might signify to an adult mind.
Consequently, perhaps, a more correct way of describing the situation is to say that an
infant 'senses' or 'feels' that something is wrong, without knowing what that something
is.
Originally,
if an infant felt a tension of need, the child could seek to evoke, say, the
'nipple-in-lips' situation through a 'crying-when-hungry' behavior.
‘Crying-when-hungry’ (this expression is used by Sullivan to denote an
infant’s experiential perspective and, for the infant, is distinct from, say,
‘crying-when-cold’ or ‘crying-when-anxious’) causes the mother to
manifest tenderness.
In the
present case, this tenderness takes the form of, among other things, presenting the
mother’s milk-laden nipple to the infant. The infant’s tension of hunger tends
to maintain this situation until the original tension has been reduced below a certain
threshold.
According to
Sullivan, the experience of hunger envelops the functions of recall and foresight - recall
relates back to previous instances of satisfaction (along with the 'coloring' which
accompanied that experience), while foresight relates forward to anticipated satisfaction
with respect to future instances in which the tension of hunger arises (along with various
projections concerning the potential for gratification in association with the mother.
Eventually,
as the infant is engaged in sucking activities across time, tactile and thermal properties
in the region of the infant’s mouth, along with a variety of other visual and
emotional currents, come to constitute a ‘sign’ that satisfaction (i.e.,
reduction of a need of tension - in this case, hunger) will, or will not, be forthcoming.
As an infant's ability to identify tactile, thermal , visual, auditory, and emotional cues
in conjunction with satisfaction-giving and non-satisfaction giving experiences grows, an
infant becomes able to differentiate between types of signs and assign significance,
meaning, or interpretation to such sets of signs.
Some of
these discriminations become signs of categories of signs. Sullivan refers to such signs
as 'symbols'.
For
instance, certain facial expression of the mothering-one may invariably appear
concurrently with other factors (such as posture, sound of voice, etc.). In time, each of
these may indicate that tender behavior is forthcoming which in turn, indicates a
forthcoming satisfaction of need through reduction of a given felt tension.
The
foregoing brief sketch of a portion of Sullivan’s theoretical framework parallels
what has been emphasized earlier in the present essay. Conceptual development brings about
a constantly expanding awareness of unity among various types of experiences - unity in
the sense of certain facets of the phenomenology of experience coming to be perceived as
being related or 'falling together'.
All of these
experiences and discriminations lead to the development of an individual’s conceptual
geometry concerning self, others, life, and the world. In fact, one might say that
‘signs’ and ‘symbols’ are the guideposts which are at the heart of a
framework of postulates, hypothesis, theories, conjectures, and so on, which form the core
of an individual’s conceptual geometry.
Now, imagine
an instance in which a mother42 becomes anxious while feeding her infant. Also
imagine that the infant's need has not been brought to resolution.
From the
infant’s side of things, the felt aspect of anxiety tends to cause an infant in such
a situation to avoid using the existing system of integrated signs and symbols which,
normally, are directed toward resolving hunger. As far as the infant is concerned, the
present nipple-in-lips context is no longer the sort of nipple- in-lips situation which
has been experienced in the past and led to a satisfying experience.
Something is
wrong. The felt presence of anxiety has modified the situation. The infant's
transformation of energy - i.e., sucking - ceases.
In the
foregoing sense, anxiety is disjunctive and opposes a tension of need - in this case,
hunger - rather than reduces it. The infant becomes so preoccupied with the felt aspect of
the tension of anxiety, that significant needs get pushed into the background.
There is
still a need for food. The infant is still hungry, The nipple of the anxious mother is, we
are assuming (and, sometimes, this assumption is not warranted because the intensity of
the mother’s anxiety disrupts the production of milk), still capable of providing
milk. However, the interpersonal situation between mother and child has disintegrated.
Our
fictional infant’s predicament has become quite complicated. Not only is a
significant need unresolved, the discomfiture of anxiety which is present is, in many
ways, unmanageable.
Since
anxiety is often shrouded in uncertainty and phenomenological fuzziness with respect to
its generating source, the infant’s rudimentary functions of recall and foresight
cannot be relied upon to point the way to appropriate action for the relief of anxiety
while continuing to be engaged in the anxiety-producing circumstances. According to
Sullivan:
"...severe
anxiety probably contributes no information. The effect of severe anxiety reminds one in
some ways of a blow on the head, in that it simply wipes out what is immediately proximate
to its occurrence. If you have a severe blow on the head, you are quite apt later to have
an incurable, absolute amnesia covering the few moments before your head was struck.
Anxiety has a similar effect of producing useless confusion, and a useless disturbance of
the factors of sentience which immediately preceded its onset..."43
Alternatively,
one also might say that because, over time, an infant may come to recognize - either
overtly, or in an indirect, subconscious manner - that by withdrawing from a situation in
which anxiety is being felt, then, in time, the felt anxiety tends to dissipate, the
infant might come to believe that withdrawing from situations is the only way to deal with
the presence of anxiety. However, because, previously indicated, the nature of anxiety is
often diffuse and non-specific, there is a potential for the infant to draw the wrong
conclusions concerning the relationship between withdrawal and anxiety reduction
More
specifically, although withdrawing from situations in which anxiety has arisen does help
to lessen the felt tension of anxiety, nevertheless, the reduction is rarely total.
Therefore, this residual anxiety presents a problem because one now has to find something
new from which to withdraw in the hopes of alleviating the felt tension of this residual
anxiety.
The strategy
of withdrawal has the potential for placing an individual on what is referred to as an
‘intermittent, variable reinforcement schedule’ in which rewards (in this case,
the reduction of felt anxiety) come at unpredictable intervals. Such reinforcement
schedules can underwrite the linkage of all manner of arbitrary factors, and they tend to
do so in the form of habitual patters of behavior which are very hard to break (e.g., for
example, gambling, compulsions, obsessions).
In his book,
The Abnormal Person and His World, Stern writes:
"A
position similar in many respects to that of Heidegger is taken by the psychologist
Schachtel. Schachtel uses as his starting point the concept of embeddedness, To be in a
state of embeddedness means to be surrounded and sheltered by what is familiar. The
proptotype of this state is the prenatal existence in the womb. All human growth means a
separation from the state of embeddedness, and such separation, actual or threatened,
arouses anxiety, whenever the person is or feels helpless to cope with it."44
Approached
from a slightly different, but related, perspective:
"The
problem of the psychiatrist is more or less to spread a larger context before the patient;
insofar as that succeeds, the patient realizes that, anxiety or not, the present way of
life is unsatisfactory and is unprofitable in the sense that it is not changing things for
the better; whereupon, in spite of anxiety, other things being equal, the self-system can
be modified."45
Finally, in Escape
From Freedom, Fromm argues that:
"...the
new freedom which capitalism brought for the individual added to the effect which the
religious freedom of Protestantism already had had upon them. The individual became more
alone, isolated, became an instrument in the hands of overwhelmingly strong forces outside
of himself; he became an ‘individual’, but a bewildered and insecure
individual."46
In modern
times, we are beset with a flood of information concerning technology, science, world
events, life styles, choices, and so on. The conceptual world is increasingly divided up
amongst a proliferation of disciplines and areas of expertise, each with their own
language, rules, purposes, and techniques.
Confronted
with all of this information, the individual is constantly threatened with a sense of
directionlessness whose - to invert, if not pervert, Pascal’s saying - ‘center
is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. Perhaps, this is why:
"Not
only is the understanding and treatment of emotional disturbances and behavioral disorders
has anxiety become recognized as the ‘nodal problem, in Freud’s words; but it is
now seen likewise to be nodal in such different areas as literature, sociology, political
and economic thought, education, religion, and philosophy."47
