The Concept of Unconscious Anxiety and its Use in Psychotherapy

The concept of unconscious anxiety may be nebulous, but evidently it is also useful. For it has survived decades of logical criticism and, like the dialectic of Hegel and Marx, seems to thrive on the contradictions that apparently lurk within its obscure depths. Such an intellectual phenomenon is, of course, no novelty. Indeed, it perhaps attests, as some would allege, to the vitality of the concept, with its inner tensions and conflicting references, so full of dynamic significance that it cannot be compressed, without misleading omissions or falsifying distortions, into any self-consistent definition. This may be true, but before we feel too virtuous about our intellectual limitations in the face of nature's infinite variety, let us remember that mystical absorption in a subject is not scientific knowledge about it, and that language, if it is to be usefully informative, must not imitate the obscurity of what it purports to describe. In these verbally luxuriant times, any psychiatric theorist who seriously desires operationally meaningful formulations needs a scalpel more than he needs a sponge. But more than either of these, since it is a necessary condition of intelligently using both, he needs a clear and unequivocal light on the subject. The purpose of this paper is to try to generate some of this “Natural Light.”

Since the meaning of “unconscious anxiety” is arrived at, in part, by negating a part of the meaning of “conscious anxiety,” let us begin by examining the meaning of this latter term. As generally used, outside of Freudian circles, the qualification “conscious” is redundant, for the term “anxiety” refers, by well-established usage, to a felt state of mind that is consciously suffered. If this usage is followed, and the definitional rule implied is adopted as our standard, then it obviously becomes inconsistent—it is logically impossible—for us to speak of unconscious anxiety. For on such definitional assumptions this locution would, like “unround circ