Anxieties and Defences: Normal and Abnormal*

This paper reflects on some issues that have emerged since Social Defences against Anxiety—Explorations in a Paradigm (Armstrong and Rustin, 2014) was published in 2014, and is a contribution to a continuing debate on these issues. Its starting point is an implicit contrast in the perspective taken by different contributors to the volume, in regard to the nature, significance, and function of anxiety as a social state of mind. This difference has both cultural and ideological dimensions. One perspective is broadly shaped by concerns for “social protection”, embodied in the health, education, and welfare systems of the UK. Anxieties are believed to arise, in the context of responses to physical or mental ill-health, social deprivation, deviancy, or sexual disturbance, and also of breakdowns of relationships and organisations. It is the task of certain social institutions, networks, and professions to manage these. They are often found to do this badly, as in Isobel Menzies Lyth's original study, by means of unconscious social defences that have harmful unintended consequences. The sources of the anxieties in question are seen as natural and unavoidable elements of human lives, but as nevertheless constituting threats to well-being. The underlying goal is to find ways of coping with the anxieties that lessen their impact, and that enable them to be borne in constructive ways. Common issues are those faced by welfare systems whose tasks are those of social reparation. For many years an anxiety has been widely felt throughout the relevant professions and services in Britain that their entire function has been placed under threat through demands for their marketisation and through an increasing scarcity of resources. This has been as a crisis of a “dependency culture”, (Khaleelee, 2003; Khaleelee & Miller, 1985), even though an important aspect of this crisis is intolerance and disparagement of the condition of dependency itself (Dartington, 2010).