Is it possible for anxiety to be cured?

One of the few industries that seems to have benefited in the US and UK from the Trump-Brexit upheaval is psychotherapy.

Therapists in both countries have reported a surge in anxiety linked to political events – from apprehension among immigrants about possible deportations to a more general sense of unease that the world is on the brink of some calamity or war.

Philosopher Dylan Trigg can empathise with this angst, having himself suffered from agoraphobia – a debilitating form of fear linked to perceived hazards in the surrounding environment.

Reflecting on his specific experiences – the panic he has felt, for example, when crossing a bridge – has given him a deeper understanding of anxiety in general. It has also led him to believe that the study of this mental “disorder” should not be left to therapists alone.

To think one is immune from anxiety suggests a myopic view of oneself and the world

In particular, he argues against the idea that anxiety is a wholly internal state. “Rather, the experience of anxiety is both shaped and expressed by our relation to the world more broadly.”

In addition, anxiety need not always be negative. In the history of philosophy, he notes, “anxiety occupies an especially pivotal place” and is bound up with what makes life meaningful.

Trigg, a Marie Curie Research Fellow at University College Dublin, is studying the issue using the methods of phenomenology, the examination of first-hand experience pioneered by the German Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl. "Philosophy complicates the picture of anxiety," says Trigg, "but also deepens, enriches, and ultimately provides a more accurate account of the mood."

Can one be human without experiencing some level of anxiety?

Dylan Trigg: “A colleague once told me that anxiety played no part in her life, that it was one emotion among many. Philosophers would tend to find this dismissal of anxiety questionable.

“Philosophically, anxiety is often presented as a venerated emotion, able to generate insights into issues of meaning, freedom, death, and ethical responsibility. Part of this privileging is based on the conviction that anxiety is something that every ‘normally functioning human being’ is exposed to...

“No matter how it is managed, anxiety gives sharp expression to the sense that the meaning we confer upon things is contingent, and this meaning can be reversed or undermined at any given moment.

“So perhaps another way to put this question would be to reverse it – would one be inhuman without experiencing anxiety? I’m not entirely sure, but certainly to think that one is either immune or insulated from anxiety would seem to suggest a myopic view of oneself and the world.”

You say anxiety is “not just something that occurs internally”; rather it is shaped by our relation to the world. Can you explain?

“Historically, anxiety has often been approached as a medical or psychiatric disorder. This is no less true today. One of the dominant models of treating anxiety in Europe and the US is cognitive behavioural therapies, where the emphasis is on changing individual thought patterns.

“Such approaches may be useful for managing problems with anxiety, but they are limited to treating anxiety as either a set of localised symptoms or a defect in our thinking. From a phenomenological perspective, affective states are not ‘internal’ in this respect but can only be understood within relation to the world.

The experience of anxiety is an experience of the world as an anxious place

“Think of an event such as house break-in. On the surface, being broken into seems to concern a localised event – namely, a violation of one’s home.

"But when a house is broken into, the event is not limited to the act itself, but is instead carried with us insofar as it generates a more pervasive insecurity in our experience of the world, our relations with others, and with our very idea of home.

“As much as we carry our moods with us, our moods are also extended in the world more generally, such that we could speak of an atmosphere of insecurity. This is especially true of anxiety.

“Anxiety cannot be understood only as a set of neurological functions, cognitive processes, or physiological reactions. Rather, the experience of anxiety is an experience of the world as an anxious place.

"It is an experience of other people as producing or diminishing anxiety, an experience of spatiality as fragmented, time as anticipatory, and one’s sense of self as disunited.”

You’ve written about how anxiety can be caused by “the rupture of a story we tell ourselves about the kind of world we inhabit”. Does this suggest anxiety can be ameliorated by being more honest with ourselves?

“One of the things that I’m thinking about these days is the relation between anxiety and nostalgia. Brexit and Trump are both structured in part by a toxic mixture of the insistence on reclaiming a narrative conceived in the past and an anxiety in the face of that narrative dissolving. The result is reactionary movement driven by both of these affects.

“Each of us has a story we tell ourselves about what kind of world we live in, and such a story is necessary to retain continuity over time. Anxiety appears when that story becomes so rigidly constructed that it cannot tolerate ambiguity.

“There is, if you like, an implicit ethical demand that anxiety asks of us; namely, to be receptive toward otherness and difference. Does this understanding of anxiety imply a relativistic outlook based on an uncritical acceptance that each narrative is equally valid?

“The question is especially pressing in the face of broad disagreement about what kind of world we live in, and how to deal with issues such as North Korea, the rise of the far-right, and the fragmentation of national identity.

"I don’t think being receptive to difference means being relativistic, however. Rather, it means recognising that anxiety issues a warning to us, not to retreat into nostalgia or dogma, but to interrogate the grounds of our beliefs, no matter how uncomfortable that process might be.”

How do you look upon your own agoraphobia now? Do you regard it as a burden, or as a gift in helping you see the world differently?

“This question occasionally comes up at conferences when I speak on anxiety. Save for an on-going phobia of flying - which is unfortunate given I fly once or twice per month - the last time I had an experience of agoraphobia was probably late 2011, which makes it an increasingly distant memory.

"But it seemed to me important to capture the strangeness of this state, which has received very little philosophical attention, and to try to give voice to the complexity of agoraphobia.

Anxiety finds a way to sift through the preventive measures and techniques we employ to 'treat' it

“My own sense is that agoraphobia is a significant mood insofar as it discloses fundamental attributes of human existence that are common to agoraphobic and non-agoraphobic people in equal measure. These issues include the extent to which we own our bodies, the affective experience of other people, the structure of time and space, and the contingency of home.

“What is peculiar to agoraphobia is that these issues are amplified. So, if there is a value here, then it is terms of eliciting insight. But I am reluctant to say agoraphobia - or any other mental disorder - is a ‘gift’. This sort of title seems to retroactively superimpose a value on an experience, which, as it is undergone in the present, is of limited value.”

Is there a cure for anxiety?

“If we think in Freudian or behavioural therapy terms then anxiety is presented as a set of symptoms which, if not strictly curable, can at least be managed.

“Such a view is predicated on the idea that anxiety concerns a set of conflicts that occur within an already formed self, such that if we remove the conflicts producing those symptoms, then we end up anxiety free. Many of the anxiety memoirs that have sprouted up in the last few years employ this logic. But the picture might not be as straightforward as this.

“Anxiety, to paraphrase Lacan, cannot be deceived. What this means is that it finds a way to sift through the preventive measures and management techniques we employ to ‘treat’ anxiety.

“Instead of thinking about cures for anxiety, it might be better not only to think in terms of how we can live alongside anxiety but also to think more critically about the nature of anxiety itself. Here, I think, philosophy can play a vital role.”

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Ask a sage:

Question: Does Brexit mean Brexit?

Edmund Husserl replies: "Between the meanings of consciousness and reality there yawns a veritable abyss."