Anxiety and social organisation

I have argued in the preceding section that acquired routines, and forms of mastery associated with them, in the early life of the human being, are much more than just modes of adjusting to a pre-given world of persons and objects. They are constitutive of an emotional acceptance of the reality of the `external world' without which a secure human existence is impossible. Such acceptance is at the same time the origin of self-identity through the learning of what is not-me. Although this position emphasises the emotional aspects of early encounters with reality, it is perfectly compatible with the view of the nature of external reality offered by Wittgenstein. Wittgensteinian philosophy has sometimes been pulled in a relativist direction by its interpreters, but it seems plain that Wittgenstein was not a relativist. There is a universally experienced world of external reality, but it is not directly reflected in the meaningful components of the conventions in terms of which actors organise their behaviour. Meaning is not built up through descriptions of external reality, nor does it consist in semiotic codes ordered independently of our encounters with that reality. Rather, `what cannot be put into words' -- interchanges with persons and objects on the level of daily

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practice -- forms the necessary condition of what can be said and of the meanings involved in practical consciousness.

To know the meaning of words is thus to be able to use them as an integral part of the routine enactment of day-to-day life. We come to know reality not from perceiving it as it is, but as a result of the differences formed in daily practice. To come to know the meaning of the word `table' is to get to know what a table is used for, which implies also knowing how the use of a table differs from other functional objects, like a chair or a bench. Meanings presuppose sets of differences, but these are differences accepted as part of reality as met with in daily experience, not only differences between signifiers in the structuralist sense.

Prior to the acquisition of language, the differences which are later elaborated into linguistic meanings are established in the potential space introduced between infant and caretakers. Reality is not just the here-and-now, the context of immediate sensory perception, but identity and change in what is absent -- out of sight for the moment or, indeed, never directly encountered but simply accepted as `there'. Learning about external reality hence is largely a matter of mediated experience. Although most of the richer textures of such experience depend on differentiated linguistic details, a grasp of the qualities of external reality begins much earlier. Learning the characteristics of absent persons and objects -- accepting the real world as real -- depends on the emotional security that basic trust provides. The feelings of unreality which may haunt the lives of individuals in whose early childhood basic trust was poorly developed may take many forms. They may feel that the object-world, or other people, have only a shadowy existence, or be unable to maintain a clear sense of continuity of self-identity.

Anxiety has to be understood in relation to the overall security system the individual develops, rather than only as a situationally specific phenomenon connected to particular risks or dangers. Anxiety, virtually all students of the subject agree, has to be distinguished from fear. Fear is a response to a specific threat and therefore has a definite object. As Freud says, anxiety, in contrast to fear, `disregards the object': in other words, anxiety is a generalised state of the emotions of the individual. How far anxiety will be felt in any given situation, Freud goes on to point out, depends to a large degree on a person's `knowledge and

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sense of power vis-à-vis the external world'. ⁶ A circumstance of `anxious readiness' is different from anxiety as such, because it is a physiological, and functional, condition of preparedness of the organism to face a source of threat. Preparation for action, as it were, is what expedites an appropriate response to danger; anxiety itself is inexpedient, and tends to paralyse relevant actions rather than generate them. ⁷

Because anxiety is diffuse, it is free-floating: lacking a specific object, it can come to be pinned to items, traits or situations which have an oblique (although unconsciously precise) reaction to whatever originally provoked it. Freud's writings contain many illustrations of people who exhibit fixations or obsessions of various kinds, but otherwise appear relatively free from anxious feelings. Anxiety is substitutive: the symptom replaces the anxiety, which is `swallowed up' by the rigid pattern of behaviour that is adopted. The pattern is nonetheless a tensionful one, because an uprush of anxiety occurs when the person is unable to carry out, or is prevented from carrying out, the behaviour in question. Substitute formations have two advantages in respect of the management of anxiety: they avoid the direct experience of psychic conflict deriving from ambivalence, and they block off the further development of anxiety from its prime source. Anxiety, it seems reasonable to conclude, does not derive from unconscious repression; on the contrary, repression, and the behavioural symptoms associated with it, are created by anxiety. Anxiety is essentially fear which has lost its object through unconsciously formed emotive tensions that express `internal dangers' rather than externalised threats. We should understand anxiety essentially as an unconsciously organised state of fear. Anxious feelings can to some degree be experienced consciously, but a person who says `I feel anxious' is normally also aware of what he or she is anxious about. This situation is specifically different from the `free-floating' character of anxiety on the level of the unconscious.

All individuals develop a framework of ontological security of some sort, based on routines of various forms. People handle dangers, and the fears associated with them, in terms of the emotional and behavioural `formulae' which have come to be part of their everyday behaviour and thought. Anxiety also differs from fear in so far as it concerns (unconsciously) perceived

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threats to the integrity of the security system of the individual. The analysis of anxiety worked out by Harry Stack Sullivan, rather than that of Freud himself, is very useful here. ⁸ Sullivan emphasises that the need for a sense of security emerges very early on in the life of the child, and is `much more important in the human being than the impulses resulting from a feeling of hunger, or thirst'. ⁹

Like Winnicott and Erikson, Sullivan stresses that the infant's early sense of security comes from the nurturance of the caretaking agents -- which he interprets in terms of the infant's sensitivity to parental approval or disapproval. Anxiety is felt through a -- real or imagined -- sensing of a caretaker's disapproval long before the development of consciously formed responses to the disapprobation of the other. Anxiety is felt as a `cosmic' experience related to the reactions of others and to emerging self-esteem. It attacks the core of the self once a basic security system is set up, which is why it is so difficult for the individual to objectify it. Rising anxiety tends to threaten awareness of self-identity, since awareness of the self in relation to constituting features of the object-world becomes obscured. It is only in terms of the basic security system, the origin of the sense of ontological security, that the individual has the experience of self in relation to a world of persons and objects organised cognitively through basic trust.

The distinction between anxiety and fear, or apprehension that has an externally constituted object, has quite often been coupled to a further distinction between neurotic and normal anxiety. ¹⁰ However, this latter differentiation seems unnecessary if we recognise that anxiety depends fundamentally on unconscious operations. All anxiety is both normal and neurotic: normal because the mechanisms of the basic security system always involve anxiety-generating elements, and neurotic in the sense that anxiety `has no object,' in Freud's usage of that phrase. How far anxiety has a crippling effect on the personality, or expresses itself in, for instance, compulsive or phobic behaviour, varies according to the psychosocial development of the individual, but these characteristics are not a function of different types of anxiety. Rather, they concern the level of anxiety and the nature of the repressions to which it is linked.

Anxiety has its seeds in fear of separation from the prime

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caretaking agent (usually the mother), a phenomenon which for the infant threatens the very core of the emerging self and of ontological security more generally. Fear of loss -- the negative side of trust developed across the time-space absences of the parenting figures -- is a permeating feature of the early security system. It is in turn associated with hostility, generated by feelings of abandonment: the antithesis of the sentiments of love which, combined with trust, generate hope and courage. The hostilities provoked by anxiety in the infant can most easily be understood as reactions to the pain of helplessness. Unless constrained and channelled, such hostilities can give rise to spiralling anxieties, especially where the expression of anger in the infant produces a reactive hostility on the part of parenting figures. ¹¹

Identification and projection form major means whereby potential spirals of anxiety and hostility are avoided. Identification is partial and contextual -- the taking over of traits or patterns of behaviour of the other which are relevant to the resolution or diminishing of anxiety-creating patterns. It is always a tensionful affair, because it is partial, because mechanisms of projection are involved, and because it is fundamentally a defensive reaction to potential anxiety. Anxiety stimulated by the caretaker's absence, the time-space relation which is the arena for the development of basic trust, is the first impetus to identification, and also is the beginning of processes of cognitive learning whereby characteristics of the object-world are grasped. Becoming `part of the other', that is to say, builds up a gradual understanding of absence and what `the other' is as a separate person.

Since anxiety, trust and everyday routines of social interaction are so closely bound up with one another, we can readily understand the rituals of day-to-day life as coping mechanisms. This statement does not mean that such rituals should be interpreted in functional terms, as means of anxiety reduction (and therefore of social integration), but that they are bound up with how anxiety is socially managed. The observing of `civil indifference' between strangers passing on the street, so brilliantly analysed by Goffman, serves to sustain attitudes of generalised trust on which interaction in public settings depends. <sup>12</sup> This is an elemental part of how modernity is `done' in everyday interaction, as we can see by comparing the phenomenon to typical attitudes in pre-modern contexts.

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Civil indifference represents an implicit contract of mutual acknowledgement and protection drawn up by participants in the public settings of modern social life. A person encountering another on the street shows by a controlled glance that the other is worthy of respect, and then by adjusting the gaze that he or she is not a threat to the other; and that other person does the same. In many traditional contexts where the boundaries between those who are `familiars' and those who are `strangers' is sharp, people do not possess rituals of civil indifference. They may either avoid the gaze of the other altogether, or stare in a way that would seem rude or threatening in a modern social environment.

Rituals of trust and tact in day-to-day life, as discussed by Goffman, are much more than merely ways of protecting one's own self-esteem and that of others (or, when used in particular ways, of attacking or undermining self-esteem). In so far as they concern the basic substance of everyday interaction -- through control of bodily gesture, the face and the gaze, and the use of language -- they touch on the most basic aspects of ontological security.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 777