There are few states as maddening as anxiety. It leaves you nauseous, breathless, and just so goddamn shaky. You spend your days reminding yourself you (probably) will not die, but furious at all the ways your body reveals its doubtsabout this. For years, I would think I could keep my composure – control over what someone thought of me -, only for my trembling to betray just how little control I actually had.
Then there is the exhausting choreography of avoidance. Trying to explain that your Uber bill is sky-high because buses are too stressful, late-night walks are dangerous, and no, you really cannot get in that elevator, talk to that person, or walk along that cliff, creates an alienation even Kafka might struggle to capture. You know it is illogical and you know you are being a bummer, but that knowledge does little to quell the fear. They say those of us who have lived with anxiety are good in a crisis, and it makes sense: living in a near-death state must give you a certain handle on it.
While anxiety can be absolutely debilitating, creating a kind of passive deer-in-the-headlights feeling, it is also highly active. It can be a powerful mobiliser that often leads to action, for better or worse. In moments of acute panic, that action usually sends us to a doctor, to Google or a therapist. There, we are told it is our “alarm system” stuck in overdrive. This sounds reassuring but hides a norm: anxiety is fine, yours is just too sensitive. Your heart races, your thoughts spiral, and your muscles tense because you cannot seem to switch it off like everyone else. Essentially, you are told there is something wrong with how you are responding to a completely normal state of affairs.
Because of this right-or-wrong framing, most treatments focus on calming the alarm system, helping you feel safer and more in control. Sometimes that is necessary. But there is a paradox here: a person feels an intense need to be in control, so they become acutely aware of all the ways they are not in control, which in turn fuels the alarm system. So, the cure is to find ways for that person to regain a sense of control… just softer? What? It has always felt like a vicious cycle. The very thing fuelling the anxiety becomes the thing you are told to lean on to fix it. In that way, I am not sure if anxiety is just a glitch, as it seems tangled up with how one tries to hold themselves together.
Psychoanalysis offers a wider approach, if stranger. Freud called anxiety a “danger signal” from the unconscious. Lacan pushes further: anxiety does not arise when something is missing. It appears when we are too close to what we think will complete us, what Lacan calls the objet a, the structural cause of desire. The objet a is not an object to be obtained, but the leftover created when we entered the world of language; it’s akin to a proximity to our own body that we traded to become speaking beings.
Here, Lacan departs from the self-help model. Anxiety does not come from emptiness; it is the tremor that occurs when the fantasy of wholeness edges into view. In Lacanian terms, the lack this fantasy covers up is not a hole we once filled and lost, but a structural gap produced by our entry into language. For instance, imagine an infant crying. If the baby were completely satisfied, why cry? That cry signals a need that someone else must fill. From that moment on, we relate to the world not from completeness, but from this gap. We speak, act and desire from the sense that something is missing. But, from those first cries, our needs are not only mediated by another’s response, but those responses are never perfect and never exactly as imagined. That gap is not only permanent, it’s where we exist; the difference between what we imagined we wanted in that cry and what the Other gave us is where we will come to ‘be’. Anxiety arises when something (a person, a situation, a word) comes too close to collapsing that gap, promising a fullness that cannot be delivered.
Seen this way, anxiety is indeed an alarm, but one that warns of proximity to the point where our fantasy falters. This is why anxiety feels both absurd and utterly real: it is the Real brushing up against the fragile structure that keeps us intact. If we meet this panic only with breathwork, exercise or affirmations, we risk reinforcing the fantasy that a lost object exists and could be recovered if we “got back on track”. This keeps us bound to the ideal of a masterful, whole self, deepening alienation from our structural division.
Psychoanalysis takes another route. It treats the thing that makes you unbearably shaky as a clue to the coordinates of your objet a. These coordinates are unique, written in the signifying chain of your history: a fear of public speaking might knot itself to a parent who was a “public servant”; a terror of elevators might link to a childhood moment of being “stuck” in the Other’s desire. The singularity of the symptom is the singularity of how your lack was met (or not) by the Other.
From this perspective, anxiety is not a glitch to be managed or erased. It is the terrain upon which the fundamental fantasy (the fantasy of an object of completion) can be traversed. It confronts you with an ethical choice: to keep chasing control, or to question the very structure that makes the fantasy so compelling. Psychoanalysis tries to map this terrain with questions: Why this fear? Why now? What lack in the Other does this object pretend to fill? The answers will be illogical, impolite and resistant to control. But in following them, you loosen the fantasy’s hold.
In that sense, anxiety offers not a path to mastery, but a chance to reorient your relation to desire. Not to feel whole, but to live in a different way with lack. In so doing, your trembling, shaking and fear can start to mean something beyond failure and faulty wiring.
Written by Molly Fitz