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We frequently hear that we live in an age of anxiety, from "therapy culture," the Atkins diet and child anti-depressants to gun culture and weapons of mass destruction. While Hollywood regularly cashes in on teenage anxiety through its Scream franchise, pharmaceutical companies churn out new drugs such as Paxil to combat newly diagnosed anxieties.
On Anxiety takes a fascinating, psychological plunge behind the scenes of our panic-stricken culture and into anxious minds, asking who and what is responsible. Putting anxiety on the couch, Renata Salecl asks some much-needed questions: Is anxiety about the absence of authority or too much of it? Do the media report anxiety or create it? Are drugs a cure for anxiety or its cause? Is anxiety about being yourself or someone else, and is anxiety really the ultimate obstacle to happiness?
Drawing on vivid examples from film such as the X Files and Cyrano de Bergerac, drugs used on soldiers to combat anxiety, the anxieties of love and motherhood, and fake Holocaust memoirs, Renata Salecl argues that what really produces anxiety is the attempt to get rid of it.
Erudite and compelling, On Anxiety is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, psychology and the cultural phenomenon of anxiety today.
200 pages, Paperback
First published June 16, 2004
If the ideology of the 1990s followed the commands ‘Just do it!’ and ‘Be yourself!’ Today it seems that the new motto the media promotes is: ‘No matter what you do, you will do it wrong, but it is better that you follow our advice and try again.’
philosophy and psychoanalysis discussed anxiety as an essentially human condition that may not only have paralysing effects, but also be the very condition through which people relate to the world
I said to myself it is not so terrible. It’s like a war movie. They’re actors, and I’m just some soldier. I don’t have an important role.
While soldiers claimed they prefered bayonet killing to anonymous killing because it is more personal and their responsibility is clear, military psychologists were trying to convince soldiers that war is just an impersonal game in which they are not responsible for their actions since they sacrifice themselves for a higher cause. The paradox is that the soldiers responded to this explanation by creating their own fantasies of killing [showing that] the soldiers also did not want to give up the guilt for their actions.
Contingency might appear as horrifying but, in the end, what really produces anxiety is the attempt to get rid of it.
The subject often has the impression that there is an Other who has stolen enjoyment from him or her, i.e. that somewhere there is a powerful authority, which seems to be without lack and thus capable of enjoyment in a way that leaves others deprived. [But] Lacan however, insisted that no object can fill the lack that marks the subject.
“I couldn’t possibly say what I’d like to say right now.” Singleton asks: “What?” and Allen responds: “I’d like to say you’re lovely.” To which Singleton responds: “Go ahead, say it. I’d like to hear it.”
Jacques-Alain Miller points out this attempt of women to insist in the possession of not having, i.e. to embrace their lack and thus appear as true woman, also takes other forms. [He observes that] the church had discovered true women before psychoanalysis: ‘It saw in them a threat and developed a solution: marry them off to God.’
▸ "in today’s society anxiety is linked to the fact that, on the one hand, no one seems to be in charge and, on the other, that someone might be in charge in a hidden way (which opens the door to all kinds of conspiracy theories). [Big Other knows I am familiar with this one.]"
▸ "the big Other as a coherent symbolic order does not exist; however, it nonetheless functions, in that the subject’s belief in it has a significant impact on their lives."
▸ "the subject often assumes a burden of guilt in order to keep the Other as a consistent order, often claiming responsibility for a crime he or she never committed so that the impotence of the authorities (for example, father, leader, etc.) will not be exposed."
When an American army commander was asked how he deals with the anxieties his soldiers face before a battle, his response was: ‘I am really cautious when I see a soldier who has no anxiety: When I see that special glimpse in the eyes of a soldier which shows that he has no fear of killing, I become horrified.’ Society without anxiety would similarly be a dangerous place to live in.