A Discussion of Heidegger's Concept of Mood
Much Depends on the Distinction Between Primordial Mood and Psychological Mood
Key Question
Heidegger's description of human existence, based on the concept of the primordial mood of anxiety, denies that the individual has the capability to transcend her particular existence of powerlessness. She is immobilized by mood states and emotions emerging out of anxiety. She cannot escape her inauthenticity.{1}
The key question is: Is Heidegger's concept of the primordial mood of anxiety just propaganda? If Heidegger's concept cannot be established as ontological, then the way is formally opened to see it as a non-philosophical construct. If it is a non-philosophical construct, then we could apply to it the same kind of cultural reduction that Heidegger's followers so capably turned on their opponents.
Our first effort to deal with the question will be to examine the distinction between primordial anxiety (that is, ontological anxiety) and psychological anxiety. Ontological anxiety, as described by Kierkegaard and Heidegger, is underived. It exists as an unreachable source of human existence. Psychological anxiety by contrast is produced by other processes in our psychic life. If those processes could be changed (and psychologists believed they could be, e.g., by psychotherapy and pharmaceutical medicines), then psychological anxiety would dissolve.
When we examine psychological anxiety in depth, it looks remarkably like ontological anxiety, absent--apparently--the feature that it is not underived.
Freud's writings on psychological anxiety provide a relevant and contemporaneous comparison. Freud considered psychological anxiety to be central to development of normal and neurotic personalities.{2} "... the problem of anxiety is a nodal point, linking up all kinds of most important questions; a riddle, of which the solution must cast a flood of light upon our whole mental life." {3} He devoted considerable thought to it. His systematic statement of psychoanalysis, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1915-1917, devoted a key chapter to anxiety, as well as several crucial discussions relating anxiety to other central concepts of psychoanalysis.{4}
As a theoretical concept, neurotic anxiety centered on the therapeutic problem of the Being of the patient and the patient's disengagement from the world. Freud's discussion dealt with key issues that Heidegger raised in his discussions of primordial mood in Being and Time.
Also Freud understood psychoanalysis to exist as a theoretical science in a way that Heidegger believed all sciences did. According to Heidegger, all sciences stood within an arena of interpretation. In psychoanalysis, fact, concept, hypothesis, theory, inference, and evidence arose out of and stayed within interpretation. Objectivity and subjectivity similarly arose out of and remained within interpretation. There was no "objective evidence" for psychoanalysis. Other than becoming a trained analyst, a person could access the truth of psychoanalysis only "through the study of one's own personality." {5} Heidegger would have found much to agree with in this view.
Heidegger dismissed "psychologism" and would certainly have dismissed Freud's ideas as psychologism, but Heidegger did not stand on firm ground on this issue. Recall that his concept of primordial anxiety is arbitrary. Free assumption is not a strong basis for dismissing the arguments of others. We should not let this dismissal inhibit us from comparing Freud's and Heidegger's ideas.
Freud's Theory of Anxiety
Let's begin with Freud's general description. "Anxiety" (or dread or angst) is an "affective condition"--a combined physiological state and mental state. Physiologically, the breathing tightens, the nervous system is stimulated, the heart palpitates. The anxious person may feel faint. She shudders. Mentally, intense apprehensiveness is experienced. The person feels unable to act; she is, in the common expression, overwhelmed by anxiety.{6}
Apprehensiveness is distinguished from fear. Fear is an emotion that has a specific object. A person fears a danger or threat. The fear motivates action to confront or run from the danger. For instance, you are in a line in a bank, waiting for a teller to make a banking transaction. Several persons enter the bank. They do not behave as if they would make a normal transaction as you are. Your suspicions are aroused. They show handguns and shout for everyone to lie down on the floor. They are robbers. They intend to rob the bank. They shout that no one will be hurt if they follow instructions. You become fearful. You are afraid you might be hurt. You follow their instructions. You drop to the lobby floor. Your fear subsides.
In this example, the fear is a productive emotion. It focusses you completely on the danger and your situation regarding it. It mobilizes your body for action. It stimulates you to act. After you have acted, the emotion passes. From Freud's point of view, fear is healthy and "normal," because it is functional. Fear enables the person to engage the world through action.
In contrast to fear, anxiety is not normal, because it is not functional. It does not prepare a person for action, just the opposite. The anxiety prevents action. The emotion cannot do what emotions are supposed to do, which is to connect the person to the real world in a way that makes effective action possible. Anxiety is therefore injurious; it is a neurotic illness.{7}
What causes neurotic anxiety? Such anxiety cannot be caused by an actual danger or threat, because there is no perceived danger or threat in the condition. It cannot be caused, therefore, by the person's knowledge of the world. (Anxiety is not a phenomenon to be studied in the field of cognitive psychology).
Freud claims that anxiety is caused by the inability of the human sexual drive to complete sexual intercourse with another person toward whom which it is directed. We refer to heterosexual intercourse, which Freud considered normal. In sexual intercourse, the libido drives toward orgasm during penetration. The normal and natural progress of the sex act culminates in orgasms for both woman and man. The physiological tension (or energy) that had been building is suddenly released in the orgasm. Passion subsides. The individuals relax.
Suppose something happens so that the sex act cannot be completed. What becomes of the energy that was involved in the sexual activity? The energy must be dissipated somehow. The tension is displaced from its genital focus, pervades the entire body, and is experienced as anxiety. As Freud puts the matter thusly: "Anxiety is thus general current coin for which all the affects are exchanged or can be exchanged, when the corresponding ideational content is under repression." {8}
Freud presented an implicitly ontological, as well as psychological, theory. He understood anxiety as a crisis in the patient's Being. Human Being manifests itself in engagement of the person with other persons through social and psychological relations. When Being cannot engage with the world, it is diminished and altered. This statement is somewhat misleading, however, because it implies Being is a static state. Freud presented Being, rather, as a developmental process that occurs from birth to adulthood. It is more accurate to Freud's intent to say: the human organism obtains its Being in a process of personality formation. The person becomes a distinct personality by separating from her parents and engaging other persons in unified world of reciprocal love and productive work.
Anxiety is, therefore, a crisis in the development of a person's Being-in-the-world in which her effort to engage her world of relations with other persons is obstructed.
Anxiety in Children
We cannot doubt that Freud intended his theory of anxiety to be read in ontological terms. This intent is clear in his discussion of neurotic anxiety in children.
Freud discusses anxiety in children to clarify the difference between objective anxiety and neurotic anxiety and to explain the origin of phobias. By "objective anxiety," Freud referred simply to fear of perceived real threats. It was widely believed, according to Freud, that children frequently have objective anxieties, but seldom any neurotic anxieties. He argued to the contrary.
Children have few objective anxieties, but many neurotic anxieties. They simply are too unfamiliar with the world to have learned what is dangerous. Freud wrote of the child, "The less it knows the less it fears." {9}
Nonetheless children have much apprehension. What is its source?--Separation from mother. The child longs to be with her absent mother. This longing is a manifestation of the child's libido. We will follow Freud's argument in two examples. Imagine the following example (not Freud's) of a common situation.
A young child is away from her mother in a public place, such as a train station waiting room. (We may suppose that the mother might be only a few feet away, perhaps buying a train ticket, sufficiently close to keep an eye on the child, but not at the child's side.) A stranger approaches the child. The child becomes apprehensive. She cries.
Why does the child cry? Is it because the stranger frightens her? If this were so, this would be a case of objective anxiety. Freud says, however, the child is not crying out of fear. She cries because she is anxious. She wants her mother to be near her. She sees that the stranger is not her mother. Her love for her mother is obstructed by the stranger simply because the stranger is not her mother. The physical energy of the child's longing cannot be released through physical contact with her mother. The energy erupts as anxiety. This is neurotic anxiety, because there is no perceived object danger.
The child's Being-in-the-world is destroyed by her mother's absence. The absence disengages the child from her world. The child falls into non-existence. Non-existence is announced to the child by the physiological symptoms of the anxiety. Tightening of breathing warns of suffocation and the permanent extinction of Being.
Our second example concerns the child's fear of darkness. This is Freud's example. Fear of darkness is one of every child's first fears. Having your child cry after you turn out its nursery lights and leave the room is a familiar experience for parents. It is inevitably remedied by holding the child until it falls asleep and then returning the child to her bed. Is her fear of the dark an objective anxiety? It cannot be actual, of course. In the dark, quiet room, there is nothing for the child to see, nothing to hear, hence nothing to fear.
The child's anxiety is generated by separation from her parent, that is, by "undischarged libido." Her anxiety is neurotic anxiety. Is this ontological anxiety? Consider this passage from Freud's discussion. "I once heard a child who was afraid of the darkness call out: 'Auntie, talk to me, I'm frightened.' 'But what good will that do? You can't see me;' to which the child replied: 'If someone talks, it gets lighter.' " {10}
For the child, speaking unknowingly in metaphors, the presence of a loved Aunt, able to receive and return her love, is synonymous with the existence of the world and her (the child's) Being-in-its-world. The world is present in the light, because we can see it; in the darkness, reality does not exist and neither do we. In the quoted passage, the child has situated this metaphor within conversation with the loved Aunt.
Freud continues this discussion to explain the origin of phobias, such as the phobia of fearing darkness. Persistence of anxiety is intolerable to the child (or an adult, for that matter). To relieve the anxiety, the child searches out and finds some object in the world to which to attach its fear. The child can then deal with the feared object by running from it or taking some other action. For instance, the child who has separation anxiety in the dark develops a fear of the dark, that is, a phobia toward darkness. The invented fear can be dealt with by turning on a lamp (or getting someone to turn on a lamp), which would dissipate the anxiety. The original anxiety is neurotic. The child transforms neurotic anxiety into objective anxiety in an effort to release the anxiety. Adults continue this pattern.{11}
Sleep
We can extend Freud's example to the child's fear of sleep, by drawing on other passages on sleep in General Introduction. Freud clearly conceived of sleep as an ontological condition, not simply as a psychological phenomenon.
In sleep our conscious awareness of the outer world ceases. Freud's definition is interestingly stated. "Sleep is a condition in which I refuse to have anything to do with the outer world and have withdrawn my interest from it. I go to sleep by retreating from the outside world and warding off the stimuli proceeding from it." {12}
Sleep is not simply, as I briefly stated, the cessation of conscious awareness; it is not only a neurological process by which sensory input is dampened or deprived of conscious recognition.
It is also, Freud said, disengagement of one's personality (ego, "I") from the outside world. I relinquish Being-in-the-world, by withdrawing my interest in it. "Interests" are projected by the person onto the world. After projection, we experience our interests as present in the world independently of us. Our interests call from the world to us, causing us to approach and engage the world.
In order to sleep, we must silence our interests in the world, so they do not call to us and keep us awake. The obviousness of this problem is often witnessed with children, as Freud pointed out. "The child says ... 'I won't go to sleep yet; I'm not tired, I want more things to happen to me!' " {13}
We silence our interests by withdrawing them from the world. The interests lose their phenomenologically objective status and become phenomenologically subjective. Being subjective, they are under our control.{14} We extinguish them from consciousness. They are reborn after we wake, when we again project them out onto the world and let them take on their objective status. (Put differently, when we are awake, our interests appear objective to us by being "located" out in the world, where we respond to them as if they really were out in the world.)
Waking and going to sleep are, therefore, a unified, cyclical process of constituting our conscious world and unconstituting our conscious world.
Can we ever rid ourselves of anxieties? Certainly not. In childhood, neurotic anxieties are inevitable. Growing up is, in part, the process of curtailing the ever-present demands of the libido by the ego's needs to get along in the world. Healthy adults have successfully developed strategies to cope with their libido's endless demands. Anxiety of separating from mother is transformed and does not cripple adult love with other persons. The possibility of therapy for patients does not mean anxiety is not a fundamental constituent of the person. It might be caused--by conflict between libido and ego drives--but it cannot be removed. From that point of view, it is underived.
Summary
Examining Freud's treatment of anxiety, we see that Heidegger's distinction between the ontological and psychological concepts disappears. Freud's psychological treatment of anxiety is clearly ontological and the condition of neurotic anxiousness has ontological status. It has the same character as Heidegger's concept of primordial anxiety, which is disengagement from the world. Ontological anxiety is primordial mood that fails to complete its engagement with the world. Freud explained the failure as the inability of the libido to unite with its object; hence Freud is guilty of "psychologizing." Heidegger described--but did not explain--the failure; hence, Heidegger was philosophical, according to the lights of phenomenological practice.
Notes
1. Of course, this was not Kierkegaard's view. Kierkegaard believed the individual could transcend personal limitations through a leap of faith, though the capability and success of such an effort could not be self-engineered. We explain the Heidegger's vicious circle of powerlessness in article 3.
2. Let us recite and set aside the usual and banal objections to Freud's theories. Yes, the critics are correct. Libido development is not the only story, perhaps not the main story, in personality formation. Yes, Freud has a phallic focus on sexuality. Yes, his use of instinct, energy, and hydraulic metaphors is scientifically untenable. Yes, his notion of sexual normality is bound to his historic bourgeois culture, rather than objective understanding of human nature. Yes, he did not understand women's sexuality or psychology as well as he should have. With that ritual absolution out of the way, we can turn to the important points in his theory of neurotic anxiety.
3. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 401.
4. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, "Twenty-Fifth Lecture: Anxiety"; see also, "Fourteenth Lecture: Wish Fulfilment," pp. 226-230, and "Twenty-Fourth Lecture: Ordinary Nervousness", pp. 397-399.
5. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 23.
6. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, pp. 404, 408.
7. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, pp. 402-403.
8. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, pp. 410-411; see also p. 416-417.
9. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 415.
10. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 414.
11. See Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, pp. 414-418. We should notice that, for Freud, conversation is a mode of Being-in-the-World, just as for Heidegger.
12. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 92. We need to caution the reader that we are not here evaluating the current scientific credibility of Freud's theory of sleep. We are using it to support our comparison of Freud's theory of neurotic anxiety with Heidegger's contemporaneous theory of primordial anxiety.
13. Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 92.
14. When we cannot silence our interests, so that we can sleep or even entertain other interests, we are said to be obsessed with them; that is, we are neurotically ill.
References
Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. [Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse.] Authorized English translation of the revised edition by Joan Riviere, 1924. Preface by Ernest Jones and G. Stanley Hall. First English edition, 1920. Reprint edition. New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1953.
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