From Side Effects blog:
All of this is perfectly familiar to any introduction to existentialism,
and in existential therapy circles, anxiety has been harnessed as a
pathway to the disclosure of value. Thus in the work of Ludwig
Binswanger, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, and Medard Boss, anxiety assumes a
hermeneutic aspect to it. For them, anxiety is not something to be
“cured,” but a mood to be read. More of this later perhaps. For now, I
am again thinking through the experiential aspect of anxiety, which has
been curiously overlooked. More broadly, I am concerned, above all, with
the relationship between the unreality of the world and the loss of
self, each of which is an expression of anxiety.
On this point,
R.D. Laing remains especially insightful. The strength of Laing is that
he gives flesh to Heidegger’s conceptual structure, inserting the body
where Heidegger’s da-sein analytic leaves us disembodied. Laing’s
visceral account of “ontological insecurity” signals a subjectivity
“more dead than alive” whose loss of identity is marked by a lack of
temporal continuity, a feeling of being insubstantial,
estranged from
his body, and a fundamental insecurity with regard to other people, such
that relation to others is a matter of being “preoccupied with
preserving rather than gratifying” the self. Here, Laing’s Hegelian
influence is directed toward the ontologically insecure person, for whom
no dialectic reconciliation between self and other is possible.
In
the impasse, the stability of the embodied self is consistently put in
question, and the anxiety marking ontological insecurity is orientated
toward the preservation of the self. This is the “engulfment,” which
Laing regards as the threat to the autonomy of the self. Alongside
engulfment, “impingent” is the term Laing applies to “the full terror of
the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in…” This
sets in place the germs of an agoraphobic experience of the world: for
the ontologically insecure person, movement is stifled from all
directions by a need to retain spatio-temporal continuity, and thus
preserve an intensely delimited “reality.” Far from a liminal state,
Laing is right to recognise the incipient presence of impingement in the
everyday: “Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take
on a persecutory, impinging aspect.”
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