A Critical Disquisition on the Ideology of Anxiety

The essay explores how transdisciplinary and psychoanalytic perspectives can contribute to critical psychological studies of anxiety, namely how psychological concepts themselves constitute relevant relations and obstacles for subjects in practice. Building on the subject science of German/Nordic critical psychology, the research object of this paper is centered around the precarious ambiguity of anxiety in its subjective and objective forms. In German/Nordic critical psychology, anxiety is an integral aspect of human agency in and through how subjects relate to their possibilities to act in tandem with the possible effects of transacting those possibilities concretely. How the subject relates to its possibilities has societal preconditions and implications and is mediated by cultural objects and their meanings in structures of ideology. With the advent and proliferation of therapeutic discourse, anxiety itself has become one such cultural object and a pivotal form of everyday ideology. In the paper, I will begin from a personal encounter with the therapeutic discourse followed by an introduction to German/Nordic critical psychology and its later post-psychological developments. By analyzing the concept of anxiety throughout representative Danish therapeutic research, I will outline the promises of an existentialist critique of ideology: how critique only properly reflects subjectivity to the extent that it emancipates the subject from its spontaneous ideological form.