specific fobia vs general anxiety (what's better)
Lately, I’ve been reading more Freud, which got me thinking about where anxiety actually comes from.
Anxiety is something most of us have experienced. Some people feel it, but pretend it’s not there. For others, anxiety dictates what they do (or don't do). If they’re afraid of something, they avoid it. Others do the exact opposite. If they’re afraid of something, they feel compelled to do it anyway. And then there are those who confuse anxiety with love, or falling in love.
Anyways... it makes me ask myself / you guys one question: is it better to experience generalized anxiety, the kind where you have no idea where it’s coming from and feel anxious all the time, or anxiety tied to something specific? Like public speaking, flying, or intimacy?
In the book Two Child Neuroses, Sigmund Freud, who most of you probably know, discusses the case of "Little Hans." Hans is a young boy from Vienna who (long-story-short) develops a phobia of being bitten by a horse, as well as a fear of horse-drawn carriages. It’s a real case from the first decade of the 20th century. Naturally, there are plenty of other details to it, but we won't go into those today.
According to Freud, Hans’s anxiety transforms itself from a generalized fear where he would be afraid of everything into this specific phobia. Psychologically, this was seen as something good. It’s better for Hans to anchor his anxiety onto a specific object, like horses and carriages, than to be constantly terrified of the world in general.
Why?
Because once his anxiety centers on horses, Hans is actually able to avoid them, which is exactly what he does. Due to his phobia, he stops leaving the house, outside of which carriages pass frequently. So in a way, he arranges his life to avoid triggering the anxiety altogether.
In doing so, he avoids the panic. But he also gains secondary benefits, like the jouissance of staying home with his mother. By the way, I highly recommend reading Freud’s original account of the case.
The takeaway here is that for Little Hans, functioning with a specific fear was much easier than living with free-floating anxiety. To me, that’s a fascinating perspective that gives me a lot to chew on.
There’s one more thing I wanted to bring up, though.
From my understanding, any therapeutic approach aimed purely at eliminating a specific phobia (like fear of spiders, the dark, or horses) misses the mark if it fails to realize one thing. A specific phobia rarely stems from an actual bad experience with the object itself, like being bitten by a horse, which Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) might suggest. Usually, it runs much deeper in the unconscious.
What does that mean for therapy?
If you simply extinguish one phobia, another one will likely pop up in its place because the root cause in the unconscious remains untouched.
At least, that’s my takeaway, which I started looking into after my own experience with CBT. CBT operates quite on the surface compared to psychoanalysis, which digs deep into the unconscious to reach those root causes, while conceptualizing it completely differently than CBT.
Yours,
Mikolaj