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Chris Mawson was a colleague and a friend. His sudden and untimely death marked a great loss for psychoanalysis. He will forever be remembered and deeply appreciated for the enormous contribution he made as editor of the complete works of Wilfred R. Bion. Psychoanalysis and Anxiety: From Knowing to Being, which opens up important new directions for our field that Mawson might have explored even further had he lived longer, engages an innovative and fruitful dialogue between psychoanalysis, daseinanalysis,1 existential philosophy, and dramaturgy.
As the title indicates, resting at the core of psychoanalysis is the problem of anxiety—including ontological anxiety, the anxiety connected to our very sense of existence and being. The roots of this anxiety often extend back to the earliest infantile, perhaps even prenatal, phases of our being. Addressing it clinically forces us to consider the difference that Bion 2 asserted between knowing or knowing about (K) and being or becoming (O). What Mawson emphasizes is that ontological anxiety, often embedded in and hidden by the anxiety associated with more usual object relational situations and conflicts, is neither displayed in the ordinary world of symbolic representations nor susceptible to verbal representation. While it may produce phenomena that reveal themselves indirectly through empirically discernible sensory experience, ontological anxiety is itself unknowable in its essence or entirety and may only be available via inference and intuition. As Bion (1970) writes:
The realizations with which a psycho-analyst deals cannot be seen or touched; anxiety has no shape or colour, smell or sound. For convenience, I propose to use the term “intuit” as a parallel in the psychoanalyst’s domain to the physician’s use of “see,” “touch,” “smell,” and “hear.” [p. 7; see footnote 2]