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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking theme from a great psychoanalyst to reveal its depth and richness. These lapidary, often provocative formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
“When someone walking in darkness sings, they deny their anxiety, but they do not see any clearer for it.”
This poetic metaphor by Sigmund Freud, taken from his work “Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety,” encapsulates with striking acuity his conception of anxiety as an affect, a signal linked to a dangerous situation. Singing in the dark, Freud tells us, is a desperate attempt to ward off anxiety in the face of the unknown and the darkness, without altering in the slightest the threatening reality confronting us.
Caught in the tumult of their history, which violently intrudes into their daily lives, the Lebanese constantly confront a feeling of anxiety whose true face and devastating power—both psychic and physical—they sometimes struggle painfully to perceive. Subjected for decades to repeated traumas, an endless and covert war, chronic political instability, and the grip of corrupt individuals psychically fixated at archaic stages of their emotional development, Lebanon, or its current shadow, has become the theater of a paroxysmal and multifaceted anxiety.
Under the deceptive appearances of resilience and denial, the Lebanese population bends under the weight of a constant and ineffable apprehension. Every moment of daily life is haunted by the acute awareness of imminent, unpredictable danger, capable of shattering at any moment the fragile veneer of apparent normality.
In the face of this diffuse and omnipotent threat, psychic survival strategies multiply, as inventive as they are desperate. Headlong retreats into artificial paradises, compulsive entertainment, and manic agitation are all attempts to keep at bay this insidious and pernicious anxiety that never relinquishes its prey. For behind this facade of forced carefreeness lie gaping wounds, indelible traumas that deeply undermine the individual and social psychic fabric.
But this Lebanese anxiety, singular as it is in its intensity and persistence, transcends its geographical framework: it also speaks to us of the human condition in its universality. It reveals, as through a magnifying mirror, the shadow lurking at the heart of our being, as depicted by psychoanalyst Christian Jeanclaude, that fundamental unease that constitutes us as desiring and mortal subjects. In this sense, Lebanon is perhaps the paradigmatic name of our intimate and painful relationship with anxiety.
In Sigmund Freud’s work, anxiety is distinguished from fear. Fear is triggered by a real and identifiable danger. Anxiety, however, appears related to an indeterminate threat, the inseparable companion of desire and drive, the intimate reverse of repression, the alarm signal of an ego in distress faced with the pressure of unconscious representations. Anxiety of castration, anxiety of loss, anxiety of death—for Freud, anxiety is the immutable rock on which the illusion of the subject’s omnipotence and the denial of an unfillable lack shatter.
Lacan deepens and subverts this view, entwining anxiety with the very structure of the subject. For him, anxiety arises in the gap of the Other’s desire when the scene of the fantasy that veiled the “trauma-hole” wavers. Anxiety becomes the affect that does not deceive, the paradoxical compass that guides the subject toward their desiring truth—that is, toward the unconscious search for the object of their desire, too close or too distant, creating an unbearable tension. For this subjective truth is impossible to face directly, except at the price of radical dispossession—in other words, at the disconcerting discovery forcing the subject to admit, with Freud, that our ego “plays the role of the foolish august who meddles everywhere so that the spectators believe it directs everything that happens.”
Let us now question those who, through their creations and profound sensitivity, manage to touch the unspeakable within us: poets, writers, and artists. They describe anxiety as the shadow cast by our condition as speaking beings. From Maupassant’s “The Horla,” depicting the slow decay of a man plagued by an invisible and threatening presence, to Kafka and his characters trapped in oppressive and incomprehensible situations in “The Metamorphosis” or “The Burrow,” and through Sartre’s “Nausea,” plunging Roquentin into visceral anxiety faced with the absurdity of the world, literature has incessantly examined this “uncanny strangeness” prowling at the heart of our being, this ineffable anxiety that grips us without our ever being able to fully unravel its causes.
In the face of this existential ordeal, psychoanalysis presents itself as the most fruitful path. Not as a miracle cure that would make anxiety disappear by some sleight of hand after a few sessions, but as an invitation to recognize it, to make room for it, to transform its lead into gold. Throughout therapy, the subject can learn to tame their anxiety, to make it a demanding compass rather than a crushing burden. While it cannot be reduced to nothingness, we can learn to work with it, transmuting it into a precious spur to reinvent and liberate ourselves.
Anxiety, if we dare to welcome it, also serves as a powerful call to lucidity, self-discovery, and inner metamorphosis. It is this paradoxical viaticum that tears us from our comfortable illusions and pushes us onto the steep paths of a more authentic truth. In this sense, it may be the most precious of affects, tirelessly reminding us of our fundamental humanity, in its most burning and vital aspects. It is up to us to make room for it, to recognize it as that unpleasant part within us that also holds our most intimate freedom.
As René Char writes in Leaves of Hypnos: “In our darkness, there is not a place for Death. All the place is for Life.”
