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 a third part discusses how key principles of drama relate to therapeutic practice and theory, including a re-evaluation of the concept of catharsis, as well as Brecht's concept of making strange the familiar. The pursuit of insightful knowledge in psychoanalysis is reconsidered in the book's concluding section, with a shift of emphasis from psychoanalytic interpretations as statements of knowing to interpretive activity as a continuous process of becoming informed.

This insightful and wide-ranging volume will fascinate practising psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, anyone working in mental health, as well as scholars of philosophy and theatre.

Chris Mawson is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and works in private practice as a psychoanalyst. He is editor of The Complete Works of W. R. Bion (2014), with Francesca Bion as Consulting Editor.

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 a third part discusses how key principles of drama relate to therapeutic practice and theory, including a re-evaluation of the concept of catharsis, as well as Brecht's concept of making strange the familiar. The pursuit of insightful knowledge in psychoanalysis is reconsidered in the book's concluding section, with a shift of emphasis from psychoanalytic interpretations as statements of knowing to interpretive activity as a continuous process of becoming informed.

This insightful and wide-ranging volume will fascinate practising psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, anyone working in mental health, as well as scholars of philosophy and theatre.

Acknowledgements

About the author

Foreword by Ronald Britton

Introduction

Chapter 1: Anxiety: Antiquity towards Modernity

Chapter 2: Heidegger: Care and the anxiety of being

PART II Anxiety and Psychoanalysis: Freud, Klein, Bion and Winnicott

Chapter 3: Anxiety, Communication and the Mind: Freud's work of the specific action

Chapter 4: Melanie Klein: The primary projective process and two forms of anxiety

Chapter 5: W. R. Bion: The theory of a container to transform anxiety

Chapter 6: D. W. Winnicott and the being of the patient in analysis

Chapter 7: The Dramaturgical dimension I: Catharsis Revisited

Chapter 8: The Dramaturgical dimension II: Making Strange the Familiar

Chapter 9: From Knowing towards Being

Chapter 10: Becoming informed: Knowing from Being (O K)

Chapter 11: On the difficulty for the analyst in being with the patient

Chapter 12: Recommendations on method

References