Anxiety is one of the most misunderstood experiences in mental health. We're told it's a disorder to be managed, a chemical imbalance to be corrected, or irrational thoughts to be challenged. But from a psychoanalytic perspective, anxiety is none of these things. It's a signal—and understanding what it's signaling changes everything.
What the Mind Actually Does
To understand anxiety, we first need to understand what thinking is. This might sound abstract, but it's actually quite concrete. Thinking is the process by which the mind takes experiences and makes them manageable. It transforms raw experience into something that can be shared with others in words.
This involves two basic operations: naming the experience and locating it in space and time. When something happens to us, the mind works to say, "This was when I hurt myself and cried, and no one came to help me," and "This took place at home when I was ten." These operations might seem trivial, but they're fundamental to psychological health. They allow us to integrate experiences into the fabric of our lives.
When Thinking Becomes Dangerous
Anxiety emerges when the mind learns that certain experiences are dangerous to think about. This learning happens early, usually in family situations where particular thoughts or feelings were either simply "unspeakable" or else actively punished.
Perhaps certain topics were simply never discussed—sexuality, anger, disappointment, fear. Perhaps early curiosity was met with shame or punishment. Perhaps expressing certain feelings threatened the stability of the family system. Whatever the specific circumstances, the child learns that putting certain experiences into words carries a cost.
The mind responds to this danger through repression—it attempts not to think about these experiences. But here's the problem: the unthought experience doesn't simply vanish. It retains its power to impress itself on the mind. It continues to demand attention, to push toward consciousness, even though thinking it feels forbidden.
Anxiety is the result of this conflict. It's the fear that a forbidden thought will force its way into consciousness and overwhelm us, calling up the early punishment or collapse we learned to associate with thinking certain things.
When this conflict takes place in real time, the result is an anxiety attack.
The Impending Disaster That Already Happened
Many people who struggle with anxiety describe a persistent feeling of impending disaster—a sense that something terrible is about to happen even when everything appears fine. This feeling is particularly puzzling because it seems to have no rational basis.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this "impending disaster" is actually a memory of a past collapse that has been defensively projected into the future. Remember that thinking locates experiences in time and space? Repression interferes with this process. To avoid recognizing a past collapse or trauma, the mind displaces it forward in time, converting it into something that hasn't happened yet instead of something that has already happened.
This defensive maneuver allows us to avoid thinking about what actually occurred, but at the cost of living in constant dread of what might occur.
Why the Forbidden Thought Feels Catastrophic
The unthought experience feels dangerous because our early caretakers couldn't tolerate it. They were either frightened by it themselves, so that we never learned to face it, or punished us for expressing it. Since children depend on their parents for survival, anything that threatens the parental bond feels like a threat to existence itself.
Thinking the forbidden thought—remember, thinking is a preparation for speaking—felt like risking our survival. That early danger gets encoded in the psyche and continues to operate even when we're adults and no longer dependent on those original caretakers.
Although this is a subject for another blog post, it's worth mentioning in passing that the anxiety in PTSD ultimately has the same origin.
Why Speaking Brings Relief
Here's the paradox: the anxiety is always worse than actually thinking the thought. Once you can name the experience, locate it in the past, and recognize that thinking it doesn't threaten your survival, it loses its power to generate anxiety.
It's like walking with a pebble in your shoe and trying to deal with the discomfort by not thinking about it. The pebble doesn't go away just because you're not acknowledging it. But once you recognize what's causing the irritation, you can do something about it—like taking off your shoe and getting rid of the pebble.
Unthought thoughts retain their urgency precisely because they haven't been processed. Once they're brought into consciousness, named, and located in time, they become manageable. They're no longer looming threats but past experiences that can be integrated and understood.
An Example
Consider someone who develops an intense fear of elevators in adulthood. Through psychoanalytic work, we might discover that the phobia traced back to a childhood incident in which a trusted adult had behaved recklessly in an elevator, deliberately creating a terrifying situation for the child. The hypothetical client's parent had been present but had been too intimidated to intervene.
The anxiety attached itself to elevators because the real thought—"I was in danger and my parent failed to protect me"—was too threatening to think as a child. Elevators became the carrier of that unthinkable experience. Once the client can name what had actually happened and recognize the childhood context in which the parent's failure occurred, the elevator phobia might diminish or even dissolve entirely. The anxiety had been pointing all along toward something that needed to be thought.
The Therapeutic Task
This is where therapy becomes essential. Many people can't think the forbidden thought alone because the early danger signal is too strong. They need someone who can demonstrate that the thought can be spoken without catastrophe—that it can be engaged with directly, without fear, collapse, deflection, or punishment.
As a therapist, I create a space where previously unthinkable thoughts can be thought. By showing that I can hear what you're afraid to say, and that neither of us will be destroyed by it, I make it possible for the work of thinking to proceed. Once the forbidden thought can be thought, the anxiety that surrounded it begins to lift.
A Different Understanding
This view of anxiety is quite different from what you'll encounter in most therapeutic approaches. It doesn't treat anxiety as a disorder to be managed or a malfunction to be corrected. Instead, it recognizes anxiety as meaningful—a signal that important psychological work remains undone.
The goal isn't to eliminate anxiety through coping strategies or medication, though these may have their place. The goal is to understand what the anxiety is protecting you from knowing, and to create the conditions under which that knowing becomes possible.
This is harder work than learning relaxation techniques, but it's also more fundamental. It addresses the source of the anxiety rather than its symptoms. And in my experience, it brings a kind of relief that mere symptom management cannot provide.