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. 

Map of the Soul: conscious & unconscious

I'm beginning Psyche Matters Dialogues on Thursday July 16th with a quick look at the history of psychoanalytic thinking about the human mind, more contemporary neuro-scientific discoveries about our brains, and most importantly how this information is applied in counselling and psychotherapy and in general relating.

I'll begin with an introduction to Freud's pioneering work on hypothesizing a part of the mind which is not under our conscious awareness or control, the unconscious.
Freud came to this conclusion after working initially with hypnosis and later with directing his patients to follow their associations. As his hysteric patients remembered traumatic childhood events and spoke about them Freud noticed that their symptoms reduced.

Many people consider that the existence of the unconscious has been debunked by contemporary psychologists and scientists but it remains a useful concept for psychotherapists who use it to explain incongruence in their patients, the sudden arrival of repressed memories and who notice in themselves and others the tendency to act differently than our conscious intention.

Freud suggested that we defend against primitive wishes and urges (id) that oppose the internalized 'civilizing messages' of our parents and teachers (superego) by repressing such thoughts and feelings but that these revisit us through slips of the tongue, our reaction to others, our behaviour and so on.
I will briefly look at his structural and topographical models, Jung's addition to the model of the collective unconscious, and Assagioli's egg diagram which contributes the idea of superconscious, the potential in us that is repressed.

I will also do a quick dive into the work of contemporary neuroscientists and their work on explicit and implicit memory, our new understandings of the structure of the brain, the neocortex and the limbic system. My sources for this is a great book: A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon
Vintage Books, 2001



Other Dialogue themes follow this link: psyche matters