PARADOXES OF ANXIETY IN RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER: NON-NEUROTIC STRUCTURES

Abstract

The article is a report from the conference “Anxiety: Between the Alien and the Other” and is devoted to reflections on anxiety in non-neurotic structures and the specifics of their connection with the Other. The author explores the topic based on an understanding of the process of subjectivation as a paradoxical connection with the Other, in which the formation of the foundations for the fulfillment of the subject’s desires depends on the fate of the Other within the subject’s psyche. The contours of the study of this topic take into account the intersubjective and intrapersonal levels of mental life. The subject’s anxiety arises within the framework of an intersubjective connection, where the life of the subject’s drives depends on the responses of the Other. In non-neurotic structures, the Other is not experienced in a separate state, so their subject-object connection is practically hopelessly confused, and the connection with the Other is experienced by them as demonic. In these cases, intrusive, implosive, and fragmentation anxiety manifest non-neurotic structures. In addition to revising Freud’s ideas, the author refers to the theoretical considerations of A. Green, D. Winnicott, S. and S. Botella, who enriched the psychoanalytic approach to working with non-neurotic structures. In psychoanalytic work, it turns out that due to an insufficient, inadequate connection with the Other, non-neurotic structures repeatedly seek tension in anxiety. For them, anxiety becomes something that stops development, expansion of mental space, gaining independence, and the search for meaning. The specific anxieties of non-neurotics form a specific mental position of non-neurotic subjects around the anxious core – phobic. Such a mental phobic position leads to multiple and contradictory identifications, where the analysand becomes incapacitated due to preoccupation with isolating defensive solutions. The anxiety of non-neurotic analysands is the anxiety of intrusion and the anxiety of separation, which are experienced simultaneously. It is this double anxiety, which is very painful and leads us not to the problem of desire, but to the problem of the formation of thought processes.