Psychoanalysis and Anxiety: From Knowing to Being

Psychoanalysis and Anxiety: From Knowing to Being combines psychoanalytic, existential and dramaturgical perspectives on the study of anxiety.

The book explores the implications for psychoanalysis of including a consideration of the being of the patient, and of the analyst. The central principle throughout is that the psychoanalytic and the existential belong together since it is the irreducible fact of anxiety that unifies them. It is in relation to anxiety that we are helped by other human beings to bear what is, and what we are.

Divided into four sections, the book begins with the distinction made in antiquity between anxiety and fear, before discussing its treatment by philosophers such as Heidegger, who regarded anxiety as the mood most disclosive of our being, and Kierkegaard, who distinguished between fear and angst. The book then explores how anxiety has been understood by major psychoanalytic theorists, including Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bion, before