Anxiety is feminine, irritatingly so, less respectable and more annoying than anger, less pitiable than fear, more selfish than depression. Sigmund Freud, in his early theory, before he gives up the ghost on neurosis’s material antecedents, thinks so, too, connecting anxiety to the first trauma in all our lives: the experience of birth: “The name anxiety—angustial—narrowness, emphasizes the characteristic tightening of the breath, which was at the time a consequence of an actual situation and is henceforth repeated almost regularly in the emotion. We shall also recognize how significant it is that this first condition of fear appeared during the separation from the mother.” (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [1920]). For this version of Freud, anxiety is primal, connected to a true first fear, but pathological, endlessly repeating the effects: pinching, squeezing, contracting a life in its grasp. And the euphemism for birth, “separation from the mother,” only underscores the difficulty of this idea. Anxiety is like the progress of a baby down the birth canal, inaugurating fear—not for you, the mother, in this theory, but for the child.

Anxiety is feminine, irritatingly so, less respectable and more annoying than anger, less pitiable than fear, more selfish than depression. Sigmund Freud, in his early theory, before he gives up the ghost on neurosis’s material antecedents, thinks so, too, connecting anxiety to the first trauma in all our lives: the experience of birth: “The name anxiety—angustial—narrowness, emphasizes the characteristic tightening of the breath, which was at the time a consequence of an actual situation and is henceforth repeated almost regularly in the emotion. We shall also recognize how significant it is that this first condition of fear appeared during the separation from the mother.” (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [1920]). For this version of Freud, anxiety is primal, connected to a true first fear, but pathological, endlessly repeating the effects: pinching, squeezing, contracting a life in its grasp. And the euphemism for birth, “separation from the mother,” only underscores the difficulty of this idea. Anxiety is like the progress of a baby down the birth canal, inaugurating fear—not for you, the mother, in this theory, but for the child.:

fette:

Claire Jarvis, from Woman Problems One moment, walking. The next—am I real?, for n+1 Magazine, February 10, 2017.