Psychoanalytical Notebooks No. 42/43: The Point of Anxiety

Everyone senses anxiety is on the rise today. Compared to even a decade ago, it seems both more acute and more widespread, more intense and more banal, to the point of becoming a feature of everyday life. Several recent factors start to explain this: the global Covid-19 pandemic, the infolding disaster of climate change, and now the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence. But what to do with all this anxiety? Big Pharma aims to medicate it away, while mindfulness wishes to meditate it away. CBT tries to eliminate it as a cognitive bias. Biological psychiatry reduces it to neural circuitry and cortisol. Others actively amplify anxiety through conspiracy theories, turning it to their political advantage with profound consequences for democracies.

This issue of The Psychoanalytical Notebooks showcases the very different conceptualisation of, and know-how with, anxiety in psychoanalysis. Lacan famously dedicated his tenth seminar to anxiety, granting it a central place by calling it “the sole affect that does not deceive”. For Lacan, anxiety is a compass for the real by which we should be oriented. This issue is entitled “The Point of Anxiety” to go against the contemporary grain by indicating that anxiety is more than a “pointless” dysfunction or disorder to be removed. To be a subject is to experience anxiety. In this issue, you will discover that psychoanalysts have much to say about today’s pandemic panics, eco-anxieties, and fears about new technologies such as AI, but also that, in their clinical practice, there is a “point of anxiety” that modifies the subject’s relation to desire and brings them closer to the act. As Lacan also said in Seminar X, “to act is to snatch from anxiety its certainty”.