Anxiety
Today's psychiatric language frequently uses the terms panic attack and anxiety attack, both of which are rather common diagnoses. Given that we live in times of great uncertainty in terms of social relations, which is often accompanied by precarious economic circumstances, it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between these phenomena.
Psychoanalysis tends to use the term anxiety, and it does so in a very specific way.
Unlike some trends in medicine and psychiatry, which consider anxiety a physical dysfunction or a negative affliction, and unlike psychology, which considers it a mental disorder, for psychoanalysis anxiety is the way to access what is most singular in each person.
Jacques Lacan taught an entire seminar, Seminar X, on this subject. He considers anxiety an affect that goes beyond language or words. Lacan considers the ideas of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard very seriously, who placed anxiety where the Hegelian dialectic of concepts breaks down. In this same Seminar X, Lacan says of anxiety: "it is an affect that does not deceive".
Manifestations of anxiety and distress
Anxiety often manifests itself combined with despair, and can occur in times of agitation and anger. In psychoanalysis it is an affect that has its roots in the helplessness or Hilflosigkeit that Freud spoke of.
It is an unbearable, painful affliction, which can produce major obstacles and even a feeling of paralysis, leaving some people feeling that there is no way out. Some people live with small levels of anxiety in their daily lives: cold sweats, a knot in their stomach, dizziness, and tremors, among others.
Treatment
Medicine aims to make anxiety disappear, often with drugs. Psychoanalytic therapy involves seeing what role anxiety plays when it occurs in a person's psyche, then seeks to reduce and eliminate it once located.
Treating anxiety requires a great deal of tact and sensitivity because a person who experiences anxiety may be in a rather fragile and insecure state, to the extent that their self-image is also most likely broken or at least damaged.
Therapy always bears in mind that anxiety is experienced by a person who speaks, and it is through the words they say about their anxiety that they can be treated. If anxiety does not deceive, it is because it raises a question, the question of desire.
We have anxiety when we don’t know what the Other wants from us. What does the Other want from me? That is why Lacan also said that anxiety is not without an object. The cause of this anxiety is the presence of the Other as such.
If anxiety does not deceive, then the treatment is aimed at the analyst raising the question about the patient's desire in reference to the Other’s desire. We can put a stop to anxiety when a symptom that serves this purpose is found in therapy.