4

Abysses and Horizons: Why

Psychoanalysis?

The field of psy, as we have seen in these initial meanders and incursions,
is drenched in subjective ideals of cure, treatment, pathology and nor-
mality. The ideological compass orienting the function of the clinic
reveals, accordingly, political consequences implied in epistemological
and ontological foundations of clinical praxis. As Nikolas Rose puts it,
“the idea of the norm, as it came into use in the late nineteenth century,
linked together the ideas of statistical normality, social normality and
medical normality: the norm was the average, the desirable, the healthy,
the ideal and so forth” (Rose, 2018, p. 9). In this sense, “normality—of
what it is to be normal, to think of oneself as normal, to be considered as
normal by others—leads to a set of rather profound questions” (Rose,
2018, p. 9). As such, the pathologisation of anxiety and the enquiry over
what anxiety is all about, what it is telling us and what are the grounds of
its emergence have meet question of ‘what can anxiety do?’. Now, we look
into the question of what psychoanalysis can offer to the treatment of
anxiety and why this is a path still worth pursuing, whilst considering the
many ‘dividualising’ aspects of the psychoanalytic discourse itself.
The matter of the ideological foundations of treatment in the field of
psy is dealt with philosophically with this horizon of situating anxiety as
‘vibration’, orienting this effort in relation to the limits of ‘being’ and

© The Author(s) 2024 57

A. C. Minozzo, Anxiety as Vibration, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62856-6_4
58 A. C. Minozzo

possibilities of ‘becoming’ in the experience of anxiety. To do so, we are

investigating the psychoanalytic unconscious in the understanding of the
affect of anxiety, which leads us to a point of ‘excess’, and this is what we
will tour in more detail through a discussion on the foundations of ‘nega-
tivity’ in psychoanalysis of the Freudian and Lacanian orientations. An
increased focus on biological, behavioural and individualised aspects of
psychological distress in contemporary understandings of anxiety
becomes evident. In psychoanalysis, conversely, unconscious, relational
and contextual elements frame distress and symptoms.

Anxiety and Psychoanalysis, Excesses

The manner in which psychiatry deals with psychic suffering through the
twentieth century can be characterised as a ‘descriptive psychopathology’
(Berrios, 1996). Biology and individual causality are at the heart of the
efforts of the DSM-III, IV and V (Rose, 2018), where the affect of anxi-
ety is divided, listed and pathologised accordingly. This debate involves
complex philosophical and ideological assumptions that permeate wider
discourses in psychiatry, psychologies and psychoanalysis that meet pre-
cisely at the complicated, yet often oversimplified, definition of what is
normal and what is pathological in affective life. In other words, the rid-
dle of quantifying and qualifying ‘how much anxiety is too much?’ is the
backbone of a contemporary dividual, estranged from anxiety.
Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century medical literature discussed
what were considered both ‘subjective’ (fear, phobia, etc.) and ‘objective’
(digestive, respiratory, etc.) aspects of what was later combined into the
understanding of ‘anxiety’ disorders or symptoms as unrelated phenom-
ena that were formative of other illnesses and of madness. In other words,
“by the mid-nineteenth century, the term anxiety was used in medical
writings to describe a mental state that fell within the range of normal
human experiences but was able to cause or lead to disease, including
insanity” (Berrios, 1996, p. 266). Bodily and psychological experiences
were, therefore, bound in anxiety. Yet, it was only in the later decades of
the nineteenth century that the prominence of a ‘nervous’ system, or a
ganglionar system, gave rise to an understanding of anxiety as having
something to do with an excessive production of some sort from within
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 59

the body and a link with perception—or what was being sensed from
outside. This focus on the nerves and neurology in the works of physi-
cians such as Xavier Bichat, Bénédict Morel and chiefly George Miller
Beard (Shorter, 2005) both in the USA and in Europe would see the
diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia’ grow in popularity, containing symptoms of
what we would now understand as anxiety or even an anxiety or panic
attack (Berrios, 1996). In the context of such diagnoses of a ‘weakness of
the nerves’ and of the social and medical enigma of hysteria, psychoanaly-
sis emerges as a clinical approach that accounted for the unconscious
traces and logics at the heart of symptoms. The psychoanalytic emphasis
on anxiety can be found in a very early theoretical proposition written by
Freud, ‘On The Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome From
Neurasthenia Under The Description “Anxiety Neurosis”’ (1894).
Anxiety neurosis was here being called as such “because all its compo-
nents can be grouped round the chief symptom of anxiety, because each
one of them has a definite relationship to anxiety” (Freud, 1894, p. 91).
Freud, in this paper, recognises the potential similarities in diagnosis of
cases of neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, but he moves on to clarifying
the difference between the two as lying precisely in the specific sexual
origins of anxiety neurosis—the sexual can be interpreted with a more
contemporary inflection as libidinal or concerning what Lacan names
jouissance, an enjoyment beyond the scope of the subject.
Freud also defends that the psychoanalytic method is the only one
capable of providing in-depth enough interpretations which not only
proved his theory of anxiety neurosis right but also unveiled symptoms.
He writes “it is impossible to pursue an aetiological investigation based
on anamneses if we accept those anamneses as the patients present them,
or are content with what they are willing to volunteer” (Freud, 1895,
p. 129).1 In other words, we cannot take presented symptoms or

1
It is worth mentioning how this statement seemingly leaves the power of being the ‘archaeologist’
of the mind and the holder of knowledge on the side of the analyst, similarly to the logic of the
prototypical models of diagnosis in psychiatry. Lacan displaces this position by considering the
analyst the subject ‘supposed to know’ rather than the one who actually knows in the transference.
Co-poiesis thus expands on being ‘supposed to know’ by encouraging a horizontal collaborative
production in the clinic.
60 A. C. Minozzo

narratives of complaints at face value, once they are not the ‘full picture’,
once consciousness is not sufficient to depict the grounds of psychic suf-
fering. The unconscious marks a division among methods, interpreta-
tions and treatments in the field of psy, wrapping symptoms around it.
In psychoanalysis, anxiety is defined as an affect, mobilising therefore
‘body’ and ‘mind’ equally. Anxiety “includes in the first place particular
motor innervations or discharges and secondly certain feelings; the latter
are of two kinds—perceptions of the motor actions that have occurred
and the direct feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which, as we say, give
the affect its keynote” (Freud, 1917, p. 395). In other words, the affect of
anxiety situates the subject in relation to what is beyond oneself, stretch-
ing perception and feelings that are both bodily and psychological, of
one’s position in the world—challenging thus the dividualising founda-
tions of mainstream psychiatric and psychological care. This move or
encounter with an abyss-within or a horizon-beyond oneself is at the
centre of the unsettling, overwhelming but also creative potential of this
‘exceptional affect’ that marks an appearance of what Lacan named the
register of the Real (Soler, 2014). What makes anxiety really compelling
also theoretically is how both Freud and Lacan have cast it as an affect of
‘excess’, as this close study of their work on anxiety in the next chapters
will reveal. For Freud, as per his 1917 Introductory Lecture on anxiety,
anxiety is an excessive affect that escapes the ego’s attempts of repressing
or representing a libidinal vicissitude—castration anxiety points thus to
the threat an overwhelming libido poses to the ego, which in its turn acts
as a psychic gatekeeper of stability in Freudian topology.
Post-Freudians, in particular Melanie Klein, interpret and modify
Freud’s topological model, which, after his publication of ‘Beyond the
Pleasure Principle’, in 1919, and ‘The Ego and the Id’, in 1923, shifts his
theories of anxiety to the workings of the Ego, Id and Super-Ego. Klein’s
work places anxiety at the centre of the psyche, with an idea that babies
are born ‘full’ of this overwhelming intensity, which towards her later
writings she saw as a manifestation of the death drive. In ‘The Theory of
Anxiety and Guilt’ (1948), Klein writes: “My contention that anxiety
originates in the fear of annihilation derives from experience accumu-
lated in the analyses of young children” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 29).
Anxiety, for her, is centrally connected to guilt, which, in turn, fuels the
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 61

shift from an early paranoid-schizoid position, where “hatred and perse-

cutory anxiety become attached to the frustrating (bad) breast, and love
and reassurance to the gratifying (good) breast” (Klein, [1948] 1988,
p. 34). Some states of transitory integration between the good and the
bad part-objects give rise to a “synthesis between love and hatred […]
which gives rise to depressive anxiety” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 34). This
transition towards the depressive position, where reparation becomes
possible, is formative of the ego, which in development would be able to
handle both what she called ‘persecutory anxiety’ and ‘depressive anxiety’,
equipped with the necessary defence-mechanisms to experience both
anxieties. In her words, such a mechanism is “the ego’s capacity of evolv-
ing adequate defences against anxiety, i.e. the proportion of the strength
of anxiety to the strength of the ego” (Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 40). Klein
forged her own theory of anxiety, with much creativity; carving her origi-
nal reading of the function of this affect, she writes: “An optimum in the
interaction between libido and aggression implies that the anxiety arising
from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never elimi-
nated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct”
(Klein, [1948] 1988, p. 42). In Klein’s clinical technique, and similarly in
other Object Relational traditions that would follow in the twentieth
century, the analyst works through the transference and countertransfer-
ence envisaging offering a therapeutic reparation (Rustin, 2015) through
introjections of qualities from the relation with the analyst and interpre-
tations that act to uncover and symbolise unconscious phantasies.
Lacan was rather sceptical of the techniques employed by Klein in the
clinic and the belief in the possibility of full-symbolisation of a phantasy,
as well as of prospects of life under a strong and stable ego, as, to him, the
ego, especially as it was formulated by the Ego-Analysts in the United
States, pertained to the register of the Imaginary. The Imaginary in Lacan
can be summarised as the function that offers coherence to the world
‘outside’ through the ‘image’, or the mirage of the subject. Its limits, the
limits of this anchoring ‘mirage’ and ‘subjective coherence’, are particu-
larly relevant to understanding anxiety, as in anxiety the fictional charac-
ter of this subjective mirage becomes evident—or better, the mirage is
under threat, the abyss comes near (Lacan, 1960). For Lacan, it is in anxi-
ety that the Real makes an ‘apparition’, since “anxiety highlights how
62 A. C. Minozzo

much of the subject is not captured by language, or how much is left over
after the most exhaustive attempts to encapsulate or represent the subject
in words” (Gallagher, 1996, p. 5). Because of its relation to the Real,
anxiety points at a failure of fantasy, and this theoretical relation is devel-
oped in detail throughout Lacan’s Seminar X on Anxiety, delivered
between 1962 and 1963. Fantasy functions as a cover up for a fundamen-
tal ‘structural fault’ of the subject, and it fails to provide this efficient
covering up in the moment of anxiety. This fact alone alludes to some-
thing beyond symbolisation, something that fails and in failing is unique
to each subject that is evident in anxiety. In other words, the mirage of
the subject is destabilised in anxiety. The curtain is lifted, a veil evaporates.
The psychoanalytic view of anxiety reiterates the psychoanalytic under-
standing of the symptom and diagnosis. This means that it goes against
the logic of contemporary hegemonic discourses in psychology and psy-
chiatry, in which anxiety is treated as a generator of ‘disorders’ in its own
right or as an isolated symptom to be ‘cured’ or ‘managed away’. For
Lacan, as much as for Freud, anxiety is not ‘the problem’, let alone ‘a
problem to be eliminated’ in the search of some ‘cure’. What the trail of
anxiety reveals to us in our psychosocial analysis of its journey in and out
of the clinic, from the mid to late twentieth century until the current
moment, is an affective-politics, or an affective domination, that steers
the subject away from any possibility of living with their anxiety, their
affects or conceiving life beyond the curtain or the veil of fantasy. Working
with anxiety as an affect of ‘excess’, however, is not a conventional or
unproblematic position psychoanalytically, especially when it touches the
very onto-epistemic foundations of Freudian and Lacanian thought. And
that is so in relation to the function of what frames such excess (fantasy,
defences or Oedipal-identifications) in the model of subjectivity that
informs a psy praxis.
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 63

 he Normal, the Pathological

T
and the Unconscious
During the twentieth century, several scholars and practitioners have
questioned psychiatric hegemony and the socio-political implications of
‘normality’. From the works of Thomas Szasz and Erving Goffman in the
United States, to David Cooper and R.D. Laing in Britain, as well as
Robert Castel and Franco Basaglia in France and Italy, the myths and
makings of mental illness have integrated what is understood as the (still
polemic) field of critical psychiatry and psychology (Middleton &
Moncrieff, 2019). In France, during the 1940s and 1950s, Georges
Canguilhem was closely associated with the radical clinic of Saint-Alban,
where Tosquelles, Jean Oury and Franz Fanon also lived and worked, tak-
ing Lacan’s psychoanalytic ‘return to Freud’ into the institution and fur-
thering its potencies in the treatment of psychoses (Robcis, 2021).
Canguilhem (1991), in On the Normal and the Pathological, from 1943,
what characterises a form of suffering that is ‘enough of a problem’ to be
considered a ‘pathology’ appears always in contrast with an idea—or
ideal—of normativity that frames the subject ideologically through rank-
ing possibilities of recognition of such suffering. As such, and building
from the movements of pathologising and diagnosing anxiety, we can
agree that there is neither a ‘normal’ nor a ‘pathological’ in itself, rather,
there are only these qualifications within the relation between an organ-
ism and the environment. Social context and the context produced by
the qualifications generated by the psychologies (and in an ample man-
ner, the psy-field) are crucial elements of any interpretation of ‘suffering’.
In short, what Canguilhem proposes is that the characterisation of what
is to suffer ‘normally’ or not is a producer of this very suffering too. This
ideological matter and its consequences have been examined in detail
through the ‘grammar’ of anxiety. Still, if psychoanalysis is to offer any-
thing different to this grammar, we must look at it closer and answer:
why psychoanalysis as our road towards an anxiety as vibration?
In the essay ‘What is Psychology?’, from the late 1950s, Canguilhem
adds a further layer to his critique of the ‘sciences’ of psyche, asserting that
“it is inevitable that in presenting itself as the general theory of behaviour,
64 A. C. Minozzo

psychology will incorporate some idea of Man. Hence, it is necessary that

we allow philosophy to question psychology about where this idea comes
from, and whether it may not be, ultimately, some philosophy”
(Canguilhem, 2016, p. 202). We can unpack this problem in two differ-
ent manners. First: the context producing and qualifying suffering as well
as the ideological normativity implicated when assessing this suffering are
not neutral. These initial points are fundamental to inquiring about this
affect in a non-normative manner and asking what is the role of both
diagnosis and cultural discourses in the contemporary understanding of
anxiety. That is, how do diagnoses and culture produce our relation to
this affect at an individual level? Second: there is an idea—and again, an
ideal—of subjectivity predicted in the very object of psychology, and by
being so, questions brought by philosophy (and critical theories, in gen-
eral, including feminist, ecological and decolonial epistemologies) cannot
be dismissed. In other words, psychology operates within an ontology
epistemically situated, or an understanding of the subject bound within
a scientific discourse. Therefore, if ever speaking of an ‘anxious self ’ or
‘anxious subject’, it is necessary to make it clear what this notion of self in
question is and how it is produced. This movement of contextualising the
conditions of subjective production and reproduction is, in particular,
one that permeates the psychosocial landscape.
In both elements of Canguilhem’s critiques, there is something that
sets psychoanalysis apart from other psychological practices, especially
those in evidence in the present time (such as CBT, Positive Psychology
and biological psychiatry). To follow this argument, we can return to
Foucault (2008), who questions in Mental Illness and Psychology (from
1954) the limits between what is considered a ‘pathology’ of the organic/
physical domain and the ‘mental’ or more subjective realm. These two
realms are, in Freudian psychoanalysis, as Foucault sees it, worked
through a complementary psyche-soma that extends beyond a simple or
linear etiological ‘cause and effect’ relation. As an illustrative example we
could think of the early texts on hysteria in Studies on Hysteria, in which
psychological phenomena implicate the body and are implicated by the
body enigmatically, rather than linearly. More clearly, in the Freudian
notion of the drive (pulsion, Trieb, first mistranslated as ‘instinct’ into
English), a complex interrelation of mind/body, without necessarily
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 65

privileging any part over the other is at stake. As a contrast, an example

of a cause/effect and a dualism between body/mind can be found in the
organicist psychiatric discourse that attempts to locate suffering in the
brain and treats mental ‘malaise’ through a rebalancing of chemical sub-
stances, natural or not to the human organism. Psychoanalysis, accord-
ingly, sits in between the organic-medical discourse and a philosophical
understanding of the self/subject that amplifies the understanding of a
self beyond the physical body yet not transcending it completely.
Psychoanalysis however moves over from a ‘soul versus flesh’ pre-modern
narrative that nineteenth century psychology set as the line between reli-
gion and science (Guéry & Deleule, 2014). In psychoanalysis, materiality
and discursivity are intertwined in a subject that is intrinsically political;
therefore, suffering is never completely alienated from its context, neither
is it totally absorbed by it. Suffering operates instead as this point of ten-
sion between the singular and the contextual.
To all psychologies, and to psychoanalysis too, and perhaps here being
a different project than that of philosophy or of social sciences, questions
of method or object are superseded by one matter that seems to have
greater importance, that is of the clinical ‘efficiency’ or ‘probity’ in ‘treat-
ing’ a patient and their psychic suffering. Rather than a neat theory, psy-
chologies and psychoanalysis, in the best case-scenarios, are grounded in
the clinic. Canguilhem reminds us that to free itself from the ‘unscien-
tific’ rancid aftertaste of being the ‘science of the soul’, “in 19th and 20th
centuries, the psychology of reaction and behaviour thought it made
itself independent by separating itself from all philosophy, that is to say,
from the kind of speculation that looks for an idea of Man beyond the
biological and sociological facts” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 212). However,
this system of verification of reality—let alone the classification of the
possibilities of reality seen in the following diagnostic manuals for
instance—led to an artificial doubling up of the reality of the ‘classifier’,
or the psychologist, over the reality of the ‘classified’, the ‘mentally ill’
patient. As he puts it, the behavioural focus of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth century—and even, we could propose, its contemporary twist in
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy—“could not prevent the recurrence of its
results in the behaviour of those who obtain them” (Canguilhem, 2016,
p. 212). In other words, the power relation established between the expert
66 A. C. Minozzo

and the patient actualises diagnoses (Proctor, 2008)—echoing what

Marcuse (1969) calls a ‘corporealisation of the superego’, or a symptom-
atic embodiment of authority. By separating itself from any ‘unscientific’
subjectivism that would be possibly questioned by philosophy, this
behavioural pattern classification system and a focus on the ‘organicist’
body of medical sciences, the field of psy “forbids philosophy from fur-
nishing the answer, [to] the question ‘What is psychology?’ [Which]
becomes ‘In doing what they do, what do psychologists hope to accom-
plish?’” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 212). According to Guéry and Deleule
(2014), psy-discourses are not just an ideological reflection of a capitalist
mode of production. Rather, they become an indispensable gear in the
social machinery that moves such ideological mechanisms. Ideology and
pathos, in psychopathology, are deeply intertwined, with its foundations
evident both in the subject assumed as normal and the subject assumed
as ill, as well as in the aims of the therapeutic treatment (Federici, 2020).
Whilst the ‘cure’ and ‘ease of suffering’ may be the core aim of much,
if not all, clinical practice, and the fact that such a foundation to the
clinic can be at times an indisputable debate, the very understanding of
what is suffering and why it needs to be ‘eliminated’ or even ‘cured’ car-
ries with itself a heavy ideological charge. To this, Canguilhem offers an
ironic yet relevant comment: “It is rather vulgarly, then, that philosophy
poses to psychology the question: tell me what you aim for so that I may
find out what you are?” (Canguilhem, 2016, p. 212). Here, then, the
contextual debate over what is suffering and how it accompanies the dis-
courses of normality and pathology is also a point in which psychoanaly-
sis offers its unique approach through the psychoanalytical understanding
of the symptom—not isolated, not universal, but particular and yet, in
relation to a wider social, political and discursive context.
Beyond a Cartesian dualism, and far from being monistic, Freudian
and Lacanian psychoanalysis then offers to the field of psy the innovation
of speech and the performative aspect of the narration of one’s own expe-
rience, as well as an understanding of the symptom as relating to demands
of recognition that are always produced through the social bond. The
early term of ‘deferred action’ (Nachträglichkeit) introduced by Freud in
the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, in 1895, when discussing the
case of Emma, already brings attention to the weight of the narrative and
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 67

speech over psychic reality, stressing how history, and poignantly one’s
own history, can be constructed retroactively. Such a movement marks a
crucial component of the psychoanalytic view of subjective formation,
much evidenced in the Lacanian use of the term ‘parlêtre’, the speaking-­
being, in which the lived experience is harnessed on a body that speaks,
this being the condition for subjectivity. Birman (2003) speaks of three
core ‘de-centrings’ brought in by psychoanalysis to the world of thought
and, specifically, to philosophy. I find Birman’s reading useful when
thinking, psychosocially, ‘why psychoanalysis?’, and will move into incor-
porating his views into our argument that follows.
Since Freud, it is in the unconscious—or in what lies beyond a con-
scious Ich—that psychoanalysis is anchored. The unconscious is, for
Freud (1923), the first ‘shibboleth’ of psychoanalysis, “the fundamental
premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-­
analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life” (Freud,
1923, p. 13). The unconscious, as Freud suggests as early as 1894, repeat-
ing it in 1915, 1920 and explicating in 1923, “does not coincide with the
repressed” (Freud, 1923, p. 18). Rather, “it is still true that all that is
repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed” (Freud, 1923, p. 18).
There is, as Freud repetitively reminds us, a part of the ego that is uncon-
scious and not related to repression or meaning; it is an ‘I’ beyond itself.
A clinic that operates with a subject of the unconscious is, therefore, a
clinic that works through the repetitions and pains, as well as the possi-
bilities on the horizon, of such an ‘I’ beyond itself. In other words, psy-
choanalysis is, or can be, as I will move into arguing, a creative practice
between ‘beings’ and ‘becomings’.
The more general contributions of psychoanalysis to both philosophy
and the sciences of the ‘psy’ (psychiatry, psychologies as well as neurology
and neurosciences) are, according to Birman (2003), fundamentally: (1)
the unconscious activity and (2) the manifestations of such activity. Within
these novel paradigms it is not solely a ‘divided subject’ that emerges,
which earlier philosophical texts were already proposing in their different
approaches; for example from the Cartesian to the Kantian subjects,
human ‘wholeness’ had been demystified in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. Rather, it is the production of desire (the potentialities,
the complexities of symptoms and structures, etc.) in the ‘being in the
68 A. C. Minozzo

world’ of an individual that is then understood through a systematic

mapping of the psychic and subjective dynamics. In ‘An Outline of
Psychoanalysis’, written in 1938, Freud starts off addressing this very
point at which his psychoanalytic works were arriving. Freud writes:

Psychoanalysis makes a basic assumption, the discussion of which is

reserved to philosophical thought but the justification for which lies in its
results. We know two kinds of things about what we call our psyche (or
mental life): firstly, its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or ner-
vous system) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness, which are
immediate data and cannot be further explained by any sort of description.
Everything that lies between is unknown to us, and the data do not include
any direct relation between these two terminal points of our knowledge. If
it existed, it would at the most afford an exact localization of the processes
of consciousness and would give us no help towards understanding them.
(Freud, 1938, pp. 144–145)

Here Freud acknowledges the idea of consciousness assumed by his

work and that it also runs along the side of, if not against, a scientific
tradition that tends—as it already did in the late 1800s—to localise acts
of consciousness in the brain and, at that time, in the nervous system.
Psychoanalysis brings to light the psychic apparatus and, with it, is able
to raise questions that are particular to knowledge after psychoanalysis,
different to other forms of divided subject or of subjectivity as carved
through the social bond that could be proposed without this psychoana-
lytic ‘mapping’.2 Freud was not a philosopher, “but he ended up by con-
structing psychoanalysis as a new field of knowledge, which formulated
new presuppositions in regards to subjectivity. His thought is directly
linked to philosophical thought through the problems psychoanalysis
posed to philosophy” (Birman, 2003, p. 16). In ‘Lecture XXXV The
Question of a Weltanschauung’, part of the New Introductory Lectures,

2
For example, in the fields of social and political sciences, the phenomenon of racism can be
unpacked through psychoanalytic lenses; whilst in the clinical setting psychoanalysis would find
unconscious marks of symptoms that have brought the patient into any particular care setting or
analytic space. Fanon (1952) and the Brazilian black feminist Lélia Gonzáles (1984), for example,
were pioneer scholars of the unconscious reverberations of racism and coloniality in the Freud-­
Lacan tradition.
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 69

Freud (1933a) opposes psychoanalysis to philosophy. Psychoanalysis,

unlike philosophy, was not for Freud a Weltanschauung, the German term
to which Freud offers a careful simple explanation as “an intellectual con-
struction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the
basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question
unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place”
(Freud, 1933b, p. 158). Freud points out that this ‘view of the universe’
was not the intention of psychoanalysis, since just by being a branch of
psychology, psychoanalysis was, rather, more justifiably to be subjected to
the ‘scientific’ Weltanschauung; yet, this ‘scientific’ view of the world was
not really appropriate to the psychoanalytic cause. And that is “due to the
procedures present in the scientific discourse, psychoanalysis would turn
itself over the research of circumscribed objects, whilst philosophy had
endeavoured always towards the totality of the being and of the real”
(Birman, 2003, p. 9). Such a conception of philosophy is naturally debat-
able, but it marks one of Freud’s later understandings of the status of the
psychoanalytic discourse as something ‘else’. Psychoanalysis is not a phi-
losophy, nor can it be ‘only’ a psychology.
Upon this last point, the extract of Freud’s ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’
quoted above reveals a conversation with the scientific status of psycho-
analytic work. Freud is clear when arguing that even if more advanced
scientific work enabled the localisation of consciousness ‘inside’ the brain,
the experience of consciousness and of the unconscious would not
change. And along with this, the ‘point’ or the ‘justification’ of psycho-
analysis also does not change. And that would be because psychoanalysis,
differently to neurosciences, ‘deals with something else’: psychoanalysis is
not trying to produce a theory of the world and life and it also should not
be bound to the medical-scientific discourse. That is, as mentioned previ-
ously, it may be the narrative offered to experience and the performative
aspect of subjectivity that matter in the analytic experience, more than
any ‘verifiable’ or ‘arguable’ reality.
Even when not particularly endeavouring to trace a whole new system
of meanings, truths or theories about the universe or anything in it,
Freudian psychoanalysis still was capable, under its due limitations of
being first and foremost a clinical practice, of shaking if not shifting cer-
tain paradigms around the conception of a self (Ricoeur, 2008). With the
70 A. C. Minozzo

psychoanalytic unconscious, a shift from the ‘conscious I’ to what lays

beyond it and the drive become the regulators of psychic experience.
Birman lists the three different meanings of the paradigmatic de-­centrings
inaugurated by Freud as: “1) from consciousness to the unconscious; 2)
from the ‘I’ to the other; 3) from consciousness, the ‘I’ and the uncon-
scious to the drive” (Birman, 2003, p. 60). What psychoanalysis adds to
theory and to the clinic and where it diverges from other mainstream
clinical practices is precisely an account of the psyche-soma that puts
consciousness and individualism in question. To this list, following the
‘vibrational moments’ we will track down across Freud and Lacan’s theo-
ries of anxiety and a Guattarian-feminist critique of psychoanalysis via
Lygia Clark, I add: 4) from the Other to the vibrational, affective ‘full-­
void’ Real. Let’s keep that in our pockets.

From an Abyss-within to a Horizon-beyond

When concluding the video interview Une Politique de la Folie, from
1989, Tosquelles—the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist psychiatrist who
founded Institutional Psychotherapy in France—leaves us with a ‘pro-
phetisation’: that the proletariat should remain connected to the uncon-
scious, rather than aim at gaining consciousness [rester branché sur
l’inconscient et non sur la prise de conscience] en route to emancipation.
Freud, Tosquelles (1991) argues, initially thought that the subject could
become conscious of their unconscious and unknown problems, formu-
lating a truth that would relieve suffering. Yet, Freud himself, Tosquelles
suggests, changed his mind by the 1930s, disenchanted with the focus on
gaining consciousness in favour of gaining unconsciousness. It is no secret
that his was a Lacanian flavoured Freud, or a ‘French Freud’ (Turkle,
1998).3 Is the psychoanalytic unconscious, however, an abyss-within the sub-
ject or a horizon-beyond oneself?

3
Tosquelles was a colleague and mentor of Jean Oury at the hospital in Saint-Alban. Oury later was
in charge of the La Borde clinic, where Guattari worked and learned. Tosquelles and Oury are
major influences in the praxis of ‘schizoanalysis’, which is a twist Guattari proposed along with
Deleuze of psychoanalysis, institutional psychotherapy and radical politics. Tosquelles and Jean
Oury used to distribute copies of Lacan’s doctoral thesis in psychiatry at the clinic in Saint Alban.
They also quizzed new practitioners on their knowledge of the French psychoanalyst’s work
(Dosse, 2010).
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 71

In Freud’s 1933 New Introductory Lectures, Lecture XXXI ‘The

Dissection of the Psychical Personality’, we find a final version of the
famous line and psychoanalytic motto he first presented in The Ego and
the Id, in 1923: Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden. “Where Id was, there ego
shall be”, in the original English translation by James Strachey. What
Freud was proposing was that psychoanalysis’ “intention is, indeed, to
strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to
widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can
appropriate fresh portions of the id” (Freud, 1933a, p. 80). Whilst this
very passage can attest to the psychoanalytic contract with a certain kind
of subjective adaptation—one that would allow a liberation of oneself
from an imposing super-ego in the production of a more autonomous,
‘strong’ ego, generating an individual of liberties, less repressions and per-
haps very suitable for the demands of a global neoliberal capitalist soci-
ety—it can equally attest to the contrary of adaptation to internalised
morality. This very passage also reads as a definition of the psychoanalytic
project and clinic as an expansion, a modification of the sense of self,
making it less stiff and nailed onto the Law, capable of entering an ethical
relationship to what extends beyond one’s consciousness.
In the nuance of the ambiguity of this passage rests my bet with psy-
choanalysis. What does psychoanalysis do, or what can it do, that
addresses the battles of psychic and psychosomatic suffering and, at the
same time, decentres the modern humanist subject, opening possibilities
for the creation of new ways of living, of new worlds? Can the psychoana-
lytic clinic of anxiety, thus, move from the level of an alienating subjec-
tive ‘estrangement’ to an ‘entanglement’? It is in this midst that I anchor
a question: What can anxiety do?
Anxiety, to Freud, Angst, was different to fear (Furcht) for it had no
object. It is a suffering, a discontent, an affect without a clear reason or
focus that mobilises both psyche and soma. Angst, in Strachey’s transla-
tion of Freud into English, becomes ‘anxiety’ and not ‘anguish’, a move
he justifies both in terms of the medical history of the term anxiety and
of its Latin root evoking choking, making of anxiety a powerfully descrip-
tive word for the sensation of this affect. He writes:
72 A. C. Minozzo

There is, however, a well-established psychiatric, or at least medical, use of

the English ‘anxiety’, going back (so the Oxford Dictionary tells us) to the
middle of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the psychiatric use of the two
words brings to light their parallel origins. ‘Angst’ is akin to ‘eng’, the
German word for ‘narrow’, ‘restricted’; ‘anxiety’ is derived from the Latin
‘angere’, ‘to throttle’ or ‘squeeze’; in both cases the reference is to the chok-
ing feelings which characterize severe forms of the psychological state in
question. A still more acute condition is described in English by the word
‘anguish’, which has the same derivation; and it is to be remarked that
Freud in his French papers uses the kindred word ‘angoisse’ (as well as the
synonymous ‘anxiété’) to render the German ‘Angst’. (Strachey, 1962,
pp. 116–117)

The word ‘angoisse’ rather than anxiété (the word utilised by Lacan, in
which Freud’s translations first appeared in French) could also be more
accurately translated as ‘anguish’ in English. In other Latin-rooted lan-
guages, such as Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, the choice in translation
of both Freud and Lacan matches ‘anguish’ more closely in the words
angústia and angoscia. Yet, the translation of Lacan’s seminars into English
also works with ‘anxiety’ and this is my choice in this cartographic effort,
echoing Strachey’s remarks about the medical history of ‘anxiety’ and the
potency of a ‘grammar’ of psychic suffering. As it navigates translations
and a telling medicalised history that marks its psychoanalytic journey,
anxiety is a central theme in psychoanalytic literature and one I am ven-
turing into in search of the creative potencies of psychoanalysis.
Lacan, in 1957, at the height of his structuralism, interprets Freud’s
aphorism—Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden—with a slight twist, one he
believed to be of a more truly Freudian inclination than that of the then
dominating Ego Psychologists, Melanie Klein, and, in a broad sense,
British analysts—those he accused of ‘Freudery’ [fofreudisme]. Instead of
focusing on strengthening the ego, his version, as he writes in ‘The
Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’ is:
“Where it was, I must come into being” (Lacan, 1957 [2006], p. 435).
Lacan sees the Freudian discovery as a lesson that tells us we cannot
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 73

ignore the ‘radical eccentricity’ of the self within itself. Not too long after,
in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, delivered between 1959
and 1960, Lacan discusses this aphorism once again, now to posit the
ethics of psychoanalysis as beyond the morality of the super-ego, or of the
morality of the Symbolic, and instead, involving an encounter with one’s
desire. In his words: “That ‘I’ which is supposed to come to be where ‘it’
was, and which analysis has taught us to evaluate, is nothing more than
that whose root we already found in the ‘I’ which asks itself what it wants”
(Lacan, 1959–1960 [1997], p. 7). The kind of ethics psychoanalysis
mobilised in its clinical course was, to Lacan, an ethics of the Real. The
Freudian contribution to the field of ethics, thus, is this encounter and a
positioning of the subject vis-à-vis the Real; in Lacan’s words:

More than once at the time when I was discussing the symbolic and the
imaginary and their reciprocal interaction, some of you wondered what
after all was “the real.” Well, as odd as it may seem to that superficial opin-
ion which assumes any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the
ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the contrary, will proceed instead from the
other direction by going more deeply into the notion of the real. Insofar as
Freud’s position constitutes progress here, the question of ethics is to be
articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the
real. (Lacan, 1959–1960 [1997], p. 11)

Anxiety, as Lacan teaches in his Seminar X Anxiety, delivered between

1962 and 1963, is precisely an affect that sits between desire and jouis-
sance (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2016], p. 175); it is an encounter with the
Real that mobilises or squeezes the subject between a Symbolically
wrapped delineation of oneself, which hangs by a thread once the
Imaginary fantasy of consistency fails, and the vastness and abyss that
extend beyond oneself, the Real. Interestingly, it is anxiety precisely that
is shunted out of diagnostic manuals and statistics when the biological
and pharmaceutical paradigms of psychiatry gain strength over psycho-
analysis after the late-1970s with the publication of the DSM-III
(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in the United
States. This encounter with the Real is then mediated by an ideological
74 A. C. Minozzo

grammar, inaugurating a politics of affect that resonates on the possibili-

ties of an ethical standing in relation to this abyss beyond oneself. The
experience of anxiety, so central to the psychoanalytic course, is patholo-
gised and locked into a state of estrangement, without, however, opening
up to possible new ways of living. This, as we can observe in this carto-
graphic exercise, reveals a type of alienation, an affective alienation
Deleuze (1992) calls a ‘dividualisation’. Perhaps Tosquelles would see it as
a state where you gain neither consciousness nor unconsciousness; rather,
one that is bound to a modulating external grammar, without roots,
branches and leaves—let alone an ever-changing rhizome for an
unconscious.
When Lacan, in 1957, characterises the unconscious as the Other’s
discourse (Lacan, 1957 [2006], p. 436), subjectivity is explicitly oriented
in relation to an Other that is equated to the Law, to language and to a
radical alterity. The Other is an ‘other’ not limited to identification or a
projection of the level of the ego, but a wider presence carved into the
Symbolic realm towards which a dialectical relation leaves a gap for the
subject to come into being. If the unconscious is the Other’s discourse,
the Real is subsumed within its limits and ‘being’ leaves not much room
for novel ‘becomings’. If the Real is a real of ‘being’ and not of ‘becom-
ing’, then it reveals a subtle and yet still alienating disconnection. This is
what Guattari found troublesome in Lacanian structuralist psychoanaly-
sis and wished to take further in his clinical practice and conceptual work.
This transposition echoes my critique of the process of subjectivation,
relationality, sociability and overall bio-politics anchored in a modern
humanist and patriarchal framework found in the roots of psychoanaly-
sis, in which a struggle for recognition by the Other modulates and locks
all possibilities of being within its orbit.
Guattari learns from Lacan that desire is not ‘individual’ and that sub-
jectivity is not individual either (Sauvagnargues, 2016). Whilst Lacan’s
‘transidividual’ unconscious from the early Rome Discourse (Lacan,
1953) presents us with a notion of desire that goes beyond the relational
Imaginary-to-Imaginary/ ego-to-ego field of possibilities—or really open-
ing to a world beyond identification so clearly in his critiques of Ego-­
Psychology, for example—we still find an unconscious trapped into the
universalism of ‘lack’ that derives from his structuralist interpretation of
 4 Abysses and Horizons: Why Psychoanalysis? 75

Freud. Rosi Braidotti, across her many publications and teachings (see
Braidotti, 2011), composes an argument for a ‘nomadic subject’—one
project that reflects the demands of post/decolonial and eco-feminist eth-
ics, not reliant on human exceptionalism and the universalist ‘Same’ of
modern humanism, nor on lack and castration—which is constructed
from her alignment, as a feminist scholar, to Deleuze and Guattari’s
‘becomings’, or devenir. The Guattarian engagement with psychoanalysis,
alive in his clinical practice, moves beyond Lacan as it does not trust in
the theoretical domination of the universal signifier, not reducing “the
signifying assemblage as a symbolic order and [assuming] the place of the
father as a master signifier, the Other that found the symbolic order”
(Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 144). Guattari shows us that this reliance on
the master signifier of the father is not neutral, but a mechanism of pro-
duction of a certain modulation of desire: this mode of production,
reproduction, extraction and separation dubbed by the Brazilian psycho-
analyst Suely Rolnik (2017) as ‘the pimping of Life’. Following such cri-
tique, or holding onto this ethical disposition, we find that the orbit of
the Other and its embedded universalisms does not suffice as a ground in
which to account for the Real, for ruptures, affects and excesses; once
such orbit does not suffice for any more radical decolonial or eco-feminist
emancipatory psycho-politics beyond the ‘pimping of Life’ (Rolnik,
2015, 2017, 2019; Preciado, 2018).
In this sense, ‘gaining unconsciousness’ or encountering the Real that
appears in anxiety entails opening up to common ‘becomings’, reorient-
ing the clinic towards the production of a co-poietic sinthôme.4 In doing
so, I diverge from the (feminist and queer-informed) suggestion of the
Argentinean psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici (2018), who, in her cri-
tique of hegemonic treatment methods such as CBT (Cognitive-­
Behavioural Therapy), proposes further ‘castration’ as an analytic solution
to anxiety. Instead of just renouncing the possibility of ‘having it’ within
a phallic episteme of sexual difference, I set out to map possibilities that

4
Sinthôme is a neologism rewriting the symptom, which Lacan introduces in Seminar XXIII. It
consists of a creative solution in the montage of the excesses of jouissance beyond the logic of
Oedipal castration. As such, it does not call for the clinical technique of interpretation, as it rests
outside the structural diagnosis, calling for a singular clinical engagement via constructions and
punctuations, or the ‘cut’ in the session.
76 A. C. Minozzo

veer away from the Oedipal order altogether. In this axis—Oedipus,

affective alienation and interpretation—I look for an alternative route to
the status of ‘rupture’ in the psychoanalytic clinic. Moving, thus, from a
clinic of the estranged ‘dividual’ to an entangled, situated subject. As
such, by embracing ‘vibration’ I move away from Oedipal configurations
in this proposition of a creative clinic of anxiety; and, although this book
is not mainly focused on questions of feminism in and out of psycho-
analysis, I hope this clinical and conceptual discussion is fruitful to femi-
nist figurations of all kinds.

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