1

Introduction: Anxiety

We often hear that we, as society, have never been so anxious. If that’s so,
then what could we do with all this anxiety? Is it possible to consider that
we can experience it, traverse it, towards some sort of emancipation rather
than being further subjugated, medicalised or simply paralysed by our
anxiety?
This is a psychosocial cartography anxiety which takes you, reader, for
a long and deep walk towards a creative clinic of this puzzling affect—our
site, destiny and point of departure all at once. Accompanying us are
several psychosocial scholars, psychoanalysts and feminists past and pres-
ent. In our travels, these disciplines and traditions of scholarship will also
be questioned in light of the forms of subjective and social alienation they
produce and reproduce. In this sense, anxiety matters on the couch but
also outside of it. If you are a clinician, researcher, artist or activist, this is
an invitation of thinking-together.
The ubiquitous anxious sensation of dread, breathlessness, paralysa-
tion and panic has been at the centre of debates in psychiatry, psychology,
psychoanalysis and the target of wellness rituals and advice over the last
century. Measured by governments as a sign of populational lack of well-
being, medicated en masse in primary care and heard as a common com-
plaint of those arriving at a psychoanalytic couch—often after having

© The Author(s) 2024 1

A. C. Minozzo, Anxiety as Vibration, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62856-6_1
2 A. C. Minozzo

tried other methods and therapies to ease their suffering—anxiety has

been called a ‘silent epidemic’ affecting a fifth of the population in places
such as the United States and the United Kingdom (Cooke, 2013;
Bandelow & Michaelis, 2015).
In psychoanalysis, since Freud, anxiety is curiously not something to
get rid of so fast, or the problem itself. Rather, it is an affect integral to
psychic experience that functions as a signal of a threat to the ego (Freud,
1917, 1926). Being so, anxiety is considered to be a ‘compass’ in the
mapping of an analytic treatment (Miller, 2007). Some clinical approaches
within psychiatry and the psychologies, such as Positive Psychology, and
even psychoanalytic orientations from a British and North-American tra-
dition, find value in strengthening one’s ego defences against the hurri-
cane that anxiety may feel like. In the Freudian and Lacanian orientations,
broadly speaking, however, making the ego more malleable, capable of
riding the sweeping waves from the unconscious that become apparent in
anxiety, is the direction of the treatment in which anxiety is not a stranger
to the self; instead, it is entangled in the life of the subject, in their abysses
and horizons.
In this book, I take you for a cartographic-trip to the possible ‘full-­
void’ of anxiety, arguing that psychoanalysis not only offers valuable
insights into what one’s anxiety is all about as it also opens possibilities for
the constructions of new modes of living departing from the rupture to
the self that characterises the experience of anxiety. My writing here,
which comes as a result of an extensive research combined with years of
clinical practice privately and in community projects, makes the point
that psychoanalysis, when (and if ) read through non-Oedipal lenses,
informs not only what can be done to anxiety but also points towards
answers of ‘what anxiety can do’.
In looking for the clues to the possibilities of anxiety as an affect, I will
trace a route into a creative clinic, one that holds on to what I call psy-
choanalytic ‘vibrational moments’ where the affect of anxiety takes the
subject away from an abyss-within into a horizon-beyond oneself. In
doing so, I explore the possibilities of ‘being’ and ‘becomings’ for psycho-
analysis by thinking through the potentialities of rupture in the psycho-
analytic clinic, and also, what to do with it: interpret rupture within
structural frames or mobilise it into novel and collective ways of being,
assembling it through the technique of co-poiesis, as we learn holding
 1 Introduction: Anxiety 3

hands with the late-Brazilian artist Lygia Clark and inspiring thinkers
such as Félix Guattari and Rosi Braidotti, all of whom have shaken psy-
choanalytic pillars in their own way. Such balance is a subtle and yet seri-
ous political matter that crosses feminist, ecological and decolonial
demands and critiques to the clinical and epistemological pillars of ana-
lytic praxis. At the same time, it speaks to the mundane, here-and-now,
experiences of anxiety we are understood to be all immersed in.
In this psychosocial cartography, I set psychoanalysis and its potential
approach to anxiety as resting between a ‘dividualising’ alienating modu-
lation of affect—which relies on the Oedipal paradigm of domination
and castration—and the plane of immanence Lygia Clark (1994) calls a
‘full-void’, which vibrates through the subject what extends beyond one-
self as an ethics of multiplicity and togetherness (Deleuze, 1992; Braidotti,
1994, 2006). Exploring the troubles and the promises of both a ‘dividu-
alising’ and a ‘vibrational’ model of psy, I search for the psychoanalytic
unconscious in its moment of excess, rupture and too-muchness that
characterises anxiety—or, an anxiety as vibration, in search of a psycho-
social creative clinic. This clinic is a clinic where other worlds are possible
and unfold in the complicated threshold of necessity and possibility—or
what is, was and what could be.

References
Bandelow, B., & Michaelis, S. (2015). Epidemiology of Anxiety Disorders in
the 21st century. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 17(3), 327–335.
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
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Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: On Nomadic ethics. Polity Press.
Clark, L. (1994). Nostalgia of the Body. October, 69(Summer), 85–109.
Cooke, R. (2013, September 15). Living with Anxiety: Britain’s Silent Epidemic.
The Guardian. Sunday. [Online]. https://www.theguardian.com/soci-
ety/2013/sep/15/anxiety-­epidemic-­gripping-­britain
Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7.
4 A. C. Minozzo

Freud, S. (1917). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. In The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVI
(1916–1917): Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III)
(pp. 241–463). The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Freud, S. (1926). Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. In The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX (1925–1926):
An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of
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