Anxiety and Feeling

In this week’s dialogue I’ll present some ideas about the causes and treatment of anxiety.

I want to start as usual with Freud and but talk particularly of the further development of his ideas by the British Object Relations psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott and also visit with the more contemporary ideas of relational psychoanalyst, Stephen Mitchell and some insights from neuroscience about the reptilian brain and the limbic system. Hopefully we will start to build a picture not just of what anxiety is and it’s relationship to sensing and feeling, but also of the different types of anxiety and what that means for the treatment needs of people who suffer from anxiety.

In a way we continue last week’s theme of attuning to the person who we work with and how they organise their experience of themselves, of others and of relating itself. All of us, of course, experience anxiety from time to time. To be alive is to experience uncertainty, separation and threat. The question then becomes how to live life with awareness of danger and also awareness of pleasure and possibility.