On the Eroticization of Anxiety

Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the remarkable way in which an individual's repressed libido is able to make use of infantile mechanisms and substitutive organs for its satisfaction. We have thus come to recognize that psychical and bodily functions that have apparently no connection with sexuality can be put at its disposal as surrogates for it, i.e. can be eroticized. Intestinal activities, for example, or, as can be frequently observed, suffering, may express the censored satisfaction of a libido that has remained attached to the Oedipus stage.

For some time now we have been considering the possibility that anxiety also can be eroticized in a similar fashion—especially as there are, perhaps, connections existing between anxiety and fore-pleasure that make it easier for the libido to utilize anxiety as a substitutive gratification.

It is not difficult to observe that the power to cause anxiety in anyone, whether in phantasy, or in games, or even in business, is often consciously experienced as a satisfaction by many people. One only needs to recall the numbers of popular ghost-stories which are so calculated to rouse anxiety in children and even in adults, and can therefore be directly employed to create anxiety. To these may be added dramatic representations of deeds of horror, terrifying experiences, dreadful catastrophes, etc.

Mention need hardly be made of the way in which human beings have often systematically framed their conduct with the object of reducing their fellow-men to submission by causing them anxiety. Indeed this forms an essential part of our educational methods, both in the relations of parents and teachers to children, and of the State, its authority or its leaders, to the masses. It would certainly be very interesting to make a more exact investigation with the object of discovering how far these affective relations among the individuals composing a social order can be sexualized. In other words, to what extent does the alarming