A Vast Empty Place
The appearance of the Dirschauer Bridge, where the curve had a wide span, was an uncomfortable experience; during the times he had to cross it, a great feeling of anxiety overcame him, combined with the fear that he could become insane and would jump over the bridge during such a condition.
(CARL FRIEDRICH OTTO WESTPHAL, DIE AGORAPHOBIE)
The Pont Marie
13 March 2011. You are standing beside the Pont Marie, a small bridge positioned just off the Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères. The bridge arches gently over the Seine before disappearing into the crowds on the Île Saint-Louis. Out of view, the Pont Marie will continue until it merges with the Pont de la Tournelle, before resuming its journey on the Left Bank, at which point Paris will cease to be accessible to you. At the entrance of the bridge, you will re-enact a series of attempts at crossing the structure, each time finding yourself unable to master the unfamiliar terrain that divides you from the rest of the city. Faced with the prospect of navigating the bridge, your body emits a series of sensations and movements, which, despite being familiar to you, still mark the possibility of a trauma yet to be written into your flesh.
Having broken free from the tip of the bridge, a dozen or so people pass you by. Disorientated, you stand ground, waiting for the glare of the sun to withdraw into the shadowline. Other people come and go in this process. Some move beyond the bridge back into the Marais while others proceed onwards towards the bustle of the Left Bank. A handful of people stop in the middle of the Pont Marie, pausing in the twilight. For you, no such freedom is available. You remain at the arch of the structure, impatient with your inability to journey beyond the adjoining Quai des Célestins and onto the bridge itself. Part of this ritual, as you will admit to yourself, is not without a certain love and fascination. As much an experience of anxiety, the ritual of the bridge crossing is also a form of infatuation. In your inability to cross the bridge, you are also overwhelmed with a fixation on the bridge, and without this fixation, your sense of self would come undone.
Where to place yourself in this dizzying world? Two options present themselves. The first option is to align yourself in relation to the road, which carries with it the risk of being overwhelmed by the passing traffic, much of which consists of cyclists and the occasional bus, though very few cars. The alternative is to cling onto the small wall, which defends you from the river below. The wall is continuous with the road, forming a barrier against the depths, and at first glance, strikes you as the favourable option. As you position yourself towards the edge of the bridge, holding the wall with one hand and supporting your balance with the other, you look down to the river below. The waters flow evenly and gently, interrupted only by the passing of tourist boats, who proudly proclaim how the Pont Marie has entered the mythology of the Parisian landscape as the ‘lover’s bridge’.
FIGURE P.1 Pont Marie, Paris.
But in the romance there is also anxiety. In the midst of your attempt at getting placed on the bridge, an opposing desire to jump into the river below emerges. To descend into the Seine would mean desensitizing yourself to your problematic relation to bridges by way of affirming the anxiety that engenders the phobia in the first place. Having survived the fall, you would resurface on the riverbanks a different person. Thereafter, the bridge would lose its power to determine where you can and cannot move in this world. But before you can find it within yourself to make the leap, you gain sight of the image of your body drenched and humiliated on the banks below, and thus abandon the project. For the decisive minutes that follow, this middle ground between earth and water will become your home in the world. On it, you will attempt to transform not only your own body, but also the bridge, which, until now, has shaped your body just as your body has shaped the bridge.
One foot follows the other. Those feet make small steps, but nevertheless proceed in the right direction. Methodically, you divide the bridge into smaller chunks of space, each of which you contend with on its own terms. Thus, the opening of this expedition begins by reaching the first lamppost. Hereafter, the central point of the bridge marks the next waypoint on your voyage. As the middle draws near, your experience of space undergoes a transformation. Whereas you had previously been the centre of your own experience, now, space is encircling you. The distance between you and the Quai des Célestins, from where you began, seems to have extended not only in space, but also in time. The duration that has passed between now and then is lost in an abyss that neither belongs to the bridge nor to you, but to some other world between inner and outer space.
Meanwhile, the very materiality of the bridge, its surrounding roads, together with the water that runs beneath it, has lost its reassuring familiarity and now become impregnated with a strange texture. No matter how hard you grip onto the lamppost, that same texture remains alien. Looking into the distance, towards the adjoining Pont Sully, which connects to the Île Saint-Louis on the eastern side, the perspective becomes marked by a flat dimensionality, as though it were a theatrical backdrop lacking all depth and for this reason, unreal. Likewise, the apartments off the Rue Le Regrattier, which you have often admired from afar, now sway in the wind, as if made of cardboard.
FIGURE P.2 Rue Le Regrattier, Paris.
Against this dizzying world, your body cramps and recoils. Your posture stoops like a man who, having prematurely aged, has either lost his way in a forest at night or has otherwise been exposed to a sudden trauma. In an attempt to recover balance, you cling to any available surface. As you lose your grip on things, you simultaneously become lost on the bridge itself, lost in a world of no discernible dangers. Your body jolts violently; each of your limbs is now beginning to lose its coherence, becoming a mass of extension with nothing other than their proximity to one another in common. As for your central nervous system more broadly, at any given moment, you are prepared for death. Were you to suddenly lose consciousness – which, for some fortuitous reason, has never happened in the past – you will need to find the softest patch of concrete to fall upon, lest your head falls on the ground beneath. In the absence of a patch of grass, you cling harder to the lamppost, which has now become your home by proxy.
This precipice that you have encountered in the middle of the Pont Marie serves to modify your relation with other people. Several people have paused to collect their thoughts just beside where you are standing. In the midst of your collision of space and time – a crisis that you are encountering in an invisible depth accessible only in your anxiety – the others are unwelcome visitors, who serve as external observers of your internal drama. With their obtrusive gaze, they enflame your anxiety by breathing new life into it. In return, you experience them through a scornful eye, which you hope will be felt by each of them in turn. Moments after, they move on of their own accord, unconcerned with your crisis.
As the sun withdraws behind clouds, you find shelter in the darkness, and surge towards the Île Saint-Louis, which until now has resembled a distant island, as much a mythical entity as it is an actual reality. Freeing yourself from the lamppost, which has proven itself to be central in your attempt at getting placed in the world, you stride forcefully to the other side of the bridge. With your heart palpating frantically, you veer right and find shelter in a doorway on the Quai de Bourbon.
FIGURE P.3 Quai de Bourbon, Paris.
Your first time on the Île Saint-Louis carries with it a sense of the uncanny. Looking back across the river, you see the Right Bank, from the Hôtel de Ville to Sully Morland in all its splendour. It is massive, much wider than you previously imagined, in fact. The contours of the landscape range from steep inclines to apartment blocks, each of which is punctuated by metro stations. Having never seen this vista from the perspective of the Quai de Bourbon, except for when passing in a taxi one night, you become attuned to the sense of awe the astronauts on board the Apollo 17 must have had when seeing the Earth in its totality for the first time. Indeed, as with the astronauts who allowed us to gain a sense on our own place in the cosmos, you too take a photo, not only to record this moment, but also to attest to the fact you were here, standing in a doorway in 7 Quai de Bourbon, despite your phobia of crossing bridges.
The bridge gathers
Intuitively, we take bridges as objects that encourage movement and connection. Indeed, the very term ‘bridging’ has come to signify an agreement, in which two or more parties come to a covenant through (and on) the mediating structure of a bridge. The bridge provides common ground, a public space, whereupon one transgresses one’s own boundaries in order to meet the boundaries of the other person. The bridge is an exemplary space of neutrality, from which sheer possibility is forged and then extended to surrounding space. In Heidegger’s famous terms, the bridge gathers (Heidegger 1977, 330). Heidegger refers to the way the bridge is not simply a passive space that connects one place to another, as if the bridge were the background in this movement. Beyond this, the bridge articulates the meaning of places that cross over or pass under it. For Heidegger, the bridge is emblematic of this act of place-making. If it were not for the bridge, the land and river surrounding the immediate space would be sealed off from one another, and, in some circumstances, made uninhabitable. Across vast ravines, and over rivers wider than the Seine, life becomes possible thanks in part to the bridge rendering boundaries, not a series of limits, but ‘something [that from which] begins its essential unfolding’ (332).
If the bridge has the unique power to build relations between places and people, then it is precisely for those reasons the bridge also serves to cut those place and people into parts. Just as a bridge can soften, if not sometimes erase the boundaries between places, so it can simultaneously render those boundaries more pronounced. From the perspective of a subject suffering from spatial anxieties and phobias – the subject under question in this book – a bridge can become illustrative of an existence that is both circumscribed and constrained. For such a subject, the bridge does not enter the horizon of experience as a boundary, from which life begins, but instead as a fundamental limit, against which life ends. Indeed, beyond the bridge, any such life remains speculative, seen from afar but never experienced in the flesh.
But how does a bridge, which is ordinarily an object of unification and harmony, become an anxious space? To gain a sense of the multifaceted complexity involved in such questions, let us return to the bridge from a phenomenological perspective. We can observe several relations. The first relation is with the bridge itself. The bridge is a material thing in the world. It has a reality – let us assume – that is not dependent on the perception of an observer. The bridge, in its structural and material integrity, persists both spatially and temporally. Thanks to this persistence, a relation with the bridge is possible in the first instance. At which point does anxiety enter the bridge? Does the bridge emit an anxious quality in and of itself or is anxiety carried to the bridge? That the experience involves several environmental factors that extend beyond the bridge suggests that the onset of anxiety involves neither the subject nor the bridge in isolation, but instead takes place in their very pairing, thus constituting a general ‘mood’ of anxiety. As the sun moves beyond the clouds, the bridge reveals itself in a different way. Now, space becomes more welcoming. This unfolding of the bridge as a more inviting place involves the subject, the bridge, and the surrounding world coming together as a whole. To ask, then, would another person be as troubled by the rays of the sun as is the case for the anxious person is to underplay the relational structure involved in such an experience. The issue, after all, is not one of locating the ‘cause’ of how the bridge becomes a site of anxiety – as though the anxiety were ‘in the head’ of the subject – but instead, of attending to the specificity of this relation as it comes into existence, a relation which privileges neither subject nor object, but the exchange between them.
In this rapport between the bridge and its dweller, we face a complex and dynamic involvement, which centres at all times on the role of the body. In our illustration, the body is less the foundation of an integrated experience, and more a site of alienation and uncanniness. Throughout, the body becomes an object of suspicion, in which each of its sensations is experienced as a potential betrayal against the self. Note also that this disturbed relation to the body not only unhinges the coherence of the self, but also folds back upon the world, with the anxious body coexisting alongside an anxious world.
With the body, another relation unfolds: to that of place. Where to place oneself on the bridge? The answer is not obvious, but instead involves a relational dynamic, which entails both calculating potential dangers in abstraction and finding one’s footing intuitively. Far from uniform, the relation between the body and place is thematically altered depending on where we are positioned. Added to this question of getting placed, the structure of space is also modified in accordance with the experience of anxiety. As we see, spatiality loses its form as a unified whole, and instead is reduced to a series of fragmented parts. Thematically, this disturbed sense of orientation and distance means that the world loses its familiar constancy, and now assumes the quality of being partly unreal. Body, space, self. To this tripartite group, we must now add the relation between the body and others. In our illustration, other people are not inconspicuously set in the background, but are instead accented in their obstructiveness. They assume a special role, not only in preventing movement, but also in amplifying the experience of anxiety itself, an experience that would be wholly different were the bridge devoid of other people.
A final relation emerges in this account: between the subject and their own anxiety. Far from a wish to eliminate anxiety, as though it were simply an inconvenience to an otherwise ‘normal’ life, throughout this expedition there remains a strong attachment to anxiety, such that the affect would even be increased by jumping into the Seine – a movement that is stalled only when confronted with the possibility of anxiety being replaced by humiliation. This compressed outline reveals the complexity at stake in the present book. At least five distinctive relations can be identified: between the mood of the subject and the world; between body and the self; between spatiality and the body; between the body and others; and between anxiety and subjectivity. The task of this book is to investigate these themes under the rubric of what we call topophobia.
Topophobia and agoraphobia
The usage of the term ‘topophobia’, as it will be used, refers to a broad set of spatial phobias such as agoraphobia, claustrophobia and, not least, gephyrophobia (fear of bridges). The advantage of using the term ‘topophobia’, however, is that the concept remains ambiguous enough to include an entire spectrum of relations a person might have with place, including both the anxiety of being exposed (agoraphobia) and enclosed (claustrophobia), being in the darkness (lygophobia) or in the light (photophobia), and both of falling (vertigo) and of rising (acrophobia). Our concern, then, is not solely with the connection between urban space and home, as would classically tend to be the case for agoraphobia. Rather, our concern is with the disordering of space more broadly, be it in the city square, on a plane at night or in a forest at dawn.
The seeds for the use of the term ‘topophobia’ were planted in my previous book, The Memory of Place (Trigg 2012). In that book, the term is employed to describe a form of ‘spatiotemporal homesickness’ (194). In this context, topophobia refers to the way in which the boundary line demarcating one place from another loses its porousness and becomes fixed. This fixing of boundaries serves not only to define but also to restrict the character of place. Such an approach to place would be evident in the case of nostalgia, where an effort is made at fixing a certain place in both space and time, thus sealing it off from the surrounding world in an attempt at fabricating a specious sense of ‘home’. Against the threat of difference, the nostalgic subject and, as we will see later, the phobic subject rely on a series of strategies to ensure the outside, in its otherness, never encroaches upon the inside, in its intimacy. Indeed, the relation between the nostalgic and the phobic subject are rooted in a joint disordering of home, where ‘home’ denotes not only a relation to space, but also to one’s own body. This is especially true in the case of agoraphobia, and indeed, it is around the theme of agoraphobia that our study encircles.
The relation between topophobia and agoraphobia is a relation of generality and specificity. If topophobia refers to a generalized disordering of spatiality (and thus embodiment), then agoraphobia marks a particular instance of this disordering in terms of focusing on public space as a space of fear, thus the etymological heritage of ‘agora’ returns us to the ancient marketplace or gathering space in Greece. Yet the structure of agoraphobia reveals a more complex mode of experience than a localized fear of space alone, and if the condition can be framed as an anxiety disorder concerning public space, then it is such only in relation to an adjoining attachment to home. Throughout its rich history, the agoraphobic condition has developed into various spatial phobias, including ‘la peur des espaces’, ‘horreur du vide’, ‘platzschwindel’ (square dizziness) and, finally, agoraphobia (cf. Marks 1987). The Greek heritage of the term ‘agoraphobia’ – ‘phobia’ extending from the mythical figure Phobos – only gains a medical sense in the late nineteenth century, along with a series of other disorders that have since become part of the medical lexicon, not least anorexia and claustrophobia (cf. Trotter 2004; Vidler 2000). Writing a few years after the conception of agoraphobia, the French psychiatrist Henri Legrand du Saulle provides us with an accurate and still relevant description of the main symptomatology involved in agoraphobia:
This anxious state, which mostly consists of an exaggerated and absurd feeling of fear faced with emptiness, usually goes with a sense of weakness in the legs, a passing circulation hyperactivity, mild pins and needles, a growing sensation of numbness, coldness, heat waves, cold sweats, shaking, impulses to cry, irrational apprehensions, hypochondriac concerns, muffled laments, and a general state of truly painful turmoil, with diverse alterations of facial coloration and physiognomic expressions … The intelligence remains sane and moral freedom is entirely intact. (Legrand du Saulle 1878, 7–8)
In terms of precipitating factors, the clinical literature on agoraphobia confirms Legrand du Saulle’s analysis in finding a specific triggering event, such as the sudden onset of illness or the loss of a parent, as either bringing about the onset of agoraphobia or otherwise solidifying its incipient role in the structure of the subject (cf. Marks 1987, 330). Prior to Legrand du Saulle, the term ‘agoraphobia’ was coined in 1871 by the German psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (Knapp 1988). Westphal identifies a series of themes still applicable to the experience of agoraphobia:
[T]he less an open space is interrupted by objects, the easier it is for the [agoraphobia] to appear; but also the passing of long fronts, now and then through unknown or empty streets, or in the highest level even a short walk through a familiar environment, has the same effect. The condition can be lessened or forced to disappear through an escort, especially while engaging in conversation; at the sight of a vehicle going the same direction, or seeing an open door in one of the houses located on abandoned streets, and so forth. (Knapp 1988, 74)
As we see, homogeneous space – space perceived as having no horizon – becomes especially problematic as it leaves the agoraphobic subject ‘stranded’ in a void, without any means of escape. Westphal locates two rejoinders to the subject’s anxiety: the role of what will become the ‘trusted other’ and the function of a ‘prop’, be it a moving vehicle or, archetypically, an umbrella. Indeed, already in this preliminary account, we see that an ‘open door’ is the bearer of a symbolic meaning that fuses the experience of space with the importance placed on other people. As Westphal goes on to say, the transformation of others and objects cannot be reduced to ‘a common feeling of dizziness’, but instead points more specifically to an anxiety, which is to be distinguished from mere vertigo (74). As to the prognosis, Westphal’s patients appear to have benefited from the then prevalent forms of treatment, such as spending time in a water spa, complemented with a ‘few glasses of strong wine’ (40).
The development of agoraphobia after Westphal follows two broad developmental trajectories. In the first case, agoraphobia is presented as a disorder in space. According to this line of thought, what instils anxiety in the subject is a fault in urban design, which agoraphobic patients would be especially sensitive towards. Emblematic of this view, the Austrian architect and city planner Camillo Sitte, writing only twenty years after Westphal’s invention of agoraphobia, localized agoraphobia [platzscheu] to the act of ‘walk[ing] across a vast empty place’, thus rendering the condition a peculiarly urban one:
Agoraphobia is a very new and modern ailment. One naturally feels very cozy in small, old plazas … On our modern gigantic plazas, with their yawning emptiness and oppressive ennui, the inhabitant of snug old towns suffer attacks of this fashionable agoraphobia. (cited in Collins 2006, 183)
Observing how plazas can have a ‘pernicious influence on their surrounding structures’, Sitte reduces the agoraphobe to a passive agent, overwhelmed by a landscape in which the subject’s own psychological disposition plays a minor role. Indeed, of key interest to Sitte is not the psychodynamics of the agoraphobe’s world view, but the very presence of the agoraphobic subject as a symptomatic manifestation of a fault in modern urban design, the implication being that agoraphobia is ultimately a concern of aesthetics rather than psychiatry (cf. Carter 2002). Sitte’s anti-modernist aesthetic is consistent with the medical literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In each case, agoraphobia gains its quality as anxiety inducing in response to changes in the environment, be it as a vertical movement of building space upwards or as a horizontal movement of accelerating modes of transport. The diagnosis of agoraphobia as an environmental problem is not solely the province of urban theorists and architects, but is also evident in philosophers. Writing in 1890, William James makes a series of striking observations on a condition ‘which has been described of late years by the rather absurd name of agoraphobia’:
The patient is seized with palpitation and terror at the sight of any open place or broad street which he has to cross alone. He trembles, his knees bend, he may even faint at the idea. Where he has sufficient self-command he sometimes accomplishes the object by keeping safe under the lee of a vehicle going across, or joining himself to a knot of other people. But usually he slinks round the sides of the square, hugging the houses as closely as he can. This emotion has no utility in a civilized man but when we notice the chronic agoraphobia of our domestic cats, and see the tenacious way in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling to cover, and only venture on a dash across the open as a desperate measure even then making for every stone or bunch of weeds which may give a momentary shelter when we see this we are strongly tempted to ask whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some of our ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful part to play? (James 1950, 421–422)
James proceeds beyond the level of critique offered by Sitte in compounding a disorder in space with a disorder in the very idea of the human. Now, the agoraphobic subject is presented not simply as an aesthete, overly sensitized to his or her surroundings, but quite the opposite: as an uncivilized being, who finds him or herself in the company of feral animals, and seemingly in danger of regressing back to a primitive state of development. Such a disparaging account of the agoraphobe is not out of place in the earlier characterization of the condition as a ‘sickness’, be it of urban spatiality (Sitte), or of will due in some cases to an ‘excess of wine and venery’, or, in the case of Freud, of sexuality (Neale 1898, 1322).
Writing only a few years after Legrand du Salle, Freud comes to the topic of agoraphobia in his 1895 paper ‘Obsessions and Phobias’ (Freud 2001a). Freud’s references to agoraphobia in the corpus of his work are infrequent though significant, not least because the psychoanalyst was himself prone to bouts of agoraphobia (cf. Jones 1974). As Freud sees it, obsessions and phobias constitute ‘separate neuroses’ (Freud 2001a, 74). Their difference is primarily in their affective structure. Where phobias are concerned, the enduring emotional state is anxiety. In obsessions, the affective dimension is subject to flux, just as the idea itself that the patient is obsessed with can also change. To demonstrate the dynamic nature of obsessional neurosis, Freud provides several illustrations of seemingly incongruent fixations, such as a woman compelled to count floorboards in an anxious state, another woman in the grip of an obsession with her breathing and yet another woman obsessed with collecting stray pieces of paper (77–78). In each case, Freud provides a ‘reinstatement’ explaining the motivation behind these acts. The strength of such obsessions comes about, so Freud suggests, as a defence against an ‘incompatible idea’, which would threaten the ego more radically than that of an obsessive disorder, chiefly, of course, in the form of a repressed sexual desire. Far from a loss of control, what connects obsessions with phobias is their role in concealing an anxiety greater than that experienced in the moment. Consider a scene from The Interpretation of Dreams:
Let us suppose that a neurotic patient is unable to cross the street alone – a condition which we rightly regard as a ‘symptom’. If we remove this symptom by compelling him to carry out the act of which he believes himself incapable, the consequence will be an attack of anxiety; and indeed the occurrence of an anxiety-attack in the street is often the precipitating cause of the onset of an agoraphobia. We see, therefore, that the symptom has been constructed in order to avoid an outbreak of anxiety; the phobia is erected like a frontier fortification against the anxiety. (Freud 2010, 546)
Instead of being an expression of anxiety, and that alone, the symptom serves to keep anxiety in its place. As tension accumulates, the avoidance of anxiety-inducing situations intensifies, until the patient’s movements become inhibited by a series of rituals and obsessions, all of which strive to frame anxiety as an intentional object of experience. As we will see later, the phobic object serves to divide the world into zones of familiarity and unfamiliarity, safety and danger. What this means is that anxiety’s object is not identifiable with anxiety itself. Indeed, the construction of the object of anxiety is generated by a need to manage an anxiety greater than that of the object. To see how this plays out experientially, let us envision how agoraphobia comes into existence.
A subject prone to anxiety leaves her home and suffers from a sudden sense of being ill-at-ease. Dizziness, nausea, migraine or a feeling of faintness follows, leading the subject to feel weakened and unable to control herself. Soon after, her body feels as though it is on the verge of giving way, possessed by an invisible agency that has no correlating object. If the subject is caught in a transitional or interstitial space – it need not be a bridge, but may be an elevator, a queue or a hallway – then an urge to flee or cling to the nearest surface will emerge. Alongside clinging to the walls and floors, the anxious subject is overwhelmed with the urge not simply to flee, but also to hide. Columns, alleyways, corners and imposing trees with overhanging branches all serve to conceal the subject’s anxiety from the surrounding world. Once in proximity to a reliable object – a second home, so to speak – the anxiety dissipates rapidly and the subject regains control of her body, albeit a body that is now fatigued. Despite recovering from the episode, the subject is likely haunted by the extent of the transformation. Indeed, the power of this haunting is so great and leaves such a visceral imprint on the subject’s sense of bodily self that she will now adjust her existence in the world, so as to avoid endangering herself to the same ordeal in the future.
Isaac Marks describes what happens next: ‘Once she cannot get off an express train, as soon as anxiety starts she will restrict herself to local trains; when these, too, become the setting for anxiety she retreats to buses, then to walking, then to going only a few yards from home, until finally she becomes unable to proceed beyond the front gate without a companion’ (Marks 1987, 336). The zone of safety for the agoraphobe becomes increasingly more circumscribed as the anxiety assumes a more pervasive role in the subject’s world. From anxiety, then, we move to avoidance, and then to phobia itself. The invention of phobia within the subject’s life splits the world into parts, placing a sanction on places and situations that have a tendency to destroy the subject’s sense of control. In avoiding anxiety-inducing situations and places through a series of elaborate rituals and practices, the phobic subject retains the illusion of having a control over the world and her bodily response to the world. If the illusion involves an element of superstition and blind faith, then such practices merely testify to the precarious structure upon which the agoraphobe stands.
***
As we will see in this book, psychoanalysis brings to light in an especially effective way the dynamic structures that give rise to phobia anxiety. One way the method does this is through attending to unconscious dimensions, which empirical psychology traditionally overlooks. Thus, the avoidance response inherent in agoraphobia is not simply a Pavlovian response to discomfort, which can be explained in terms of conscious perceptions and beliefs about perceptible danger. More than this, the ritual of avoiding certain places and situations takes place, for the most part, on an unconscious level, and precisely for this reason, is felt experientially as a shock to the subject. How to explain the avoidance of a bridge, or a queue, or even a hallway? The subject himself or herself is unable to rationally account for his or her response, other than discerning a sense of danger in spite of the fact that no danger is empirically visible. But agoraphobia, as with any phobic disorder, does not take its meaning from structures alone, and nor can agoraphobia be understood in terms of an intrapsychic conflict. What tends to be underplayed in the psychoanalytical perspective, to say nothing of cognitive behavioural models, is the bodily dimension of anxiety, not least in terms of the body in its relation to unconsciousness. Because of this neglect of corporeal existence, the world in which the agoraphobe inhabits – including its spatio-temporal-intersubjective aspects – is often presented as a static backdrop, against which intrapsychic conflicts are played out. Thus, in the case of the Freudian analysis, space gains a phobic quality only insofar as it is an expression of unconscious content. What such an analysis does not attend to is the co-constitution of spatiality and subjectivity as being in a dialogical relationship. The understanding of spatiality as being a static backdrop is even more pronounced in the earlier studies of agoraphobia, where the agoraphobe is presented as a passive agent responding to the environment around him or her. In what follows, we aim to put the body, in all its complexity, back in place.
A phenomenological perspective
To speak of the experience of topophobia in the sense of a relation with the world requires a clarification of terms. For Merleau-Ponty, the term ‘world’ conveys an overarching significance. In particular, ‘world’ points towards the circularity between body, subjectivity and others. This notion of a circular relation between these three aspects is phenomenologically exemplary insofar as it relies on the idea of the world as a dynamic and fluid totality rather than a fixed milieu. Throughout Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, from the early works to the late conception of flesh, world and the body mark two sides of the same plane of existence. Indeed, both world and body gain their defining characters through being paired with one another, and to this extent cannot be considered in isolation from each other, as he has it, ‘far from my body being for me merely a fragment of space, there would be for me no such thing as space if I did not have a body’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 104).
Because of this reversibility between body and world – again, a theme that is consistent throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work – the experience of one’s own body is at the same time a perception of the world. Likewise, the perception of the world can only be understood within the context of the perceiving body. It is for these reasons, that Merleau-Ponty will write the following words in Phenomenology of Perception: ‘The body is our general means of having a world’ (147). This action is possible thanks to the fact that the body is primordially rooted in the spatial world. Spatiality, considered from an objective side, is the condition of there being a bodily experience of space in the first place. For Merleau-Ponty, therefore, it makes no sense to speak of objective space without reference to the body, leading him to remark ‘to be a body is to be tied to a certain world, and our body is not primarily in space, but is rather of space’ (149).
What, then, is spatiality? On the one hand, space is a homogeneous extension of matter that can be analysed in geometrical and topological terms. It is a grid of references, uniform in its objective properties, and thus able to be viewed from an isotropic perspective. Of course, this is not how we actually experience space. Our experience tells us that space is not homogeneous, but rather defined by a multiplicity of affective and sensorial components, all of which sculpt the felt texture and shape of any given place. A mood shapes our experience of the world, binding us with things in a meaningful and singular fashion (Heidegger 1996; Trigg 2013b). One human being loses another and the person left behind experiences the world in a new way. Laden with a heavy atmosphere, the world becomes cast in an equivalent light. Familiar streets and roads that once assumed a background presence are now accented by what they lack. Those same streets protrude more pointedly into the person’s experience of the world, losing their character as being a horizon onto other places and instead marking a distance from the world one once knew. Likewise the home, formerly a place of sanctuary, now becomes enshrouded by the presence of those who no longer inhabit it. In this place, the body of the survivor experiences the home not as a centre of life, but as a memorial to that which has passed beyond the living.
Let us also consider the misfortune of being broken into. The intrusion is not contained to the house itself, but instead disperses an atmosphere of insecurity throughout the broader region. Insecurity is carried through the body, such that the transgression of the house extends into an entire experience of both spatiality and other people. Suspicion and mistrust enter the person’s world, as other people become marked with a sense of insidious threat. As for the home itself, it becomes a locus of insecurity and danger that was previously absent prior to the intrusion. Whereas the pre-broken home – and thus pre-broken world – was a place of privacy, now, it feels watched, as though it could at any time be broken again. The body that occupies this home is no longer rested in the world but instead exists in a state of tension.
Finally, the body becomes damaged. A limb is broken and now the body must find its way through the world in an impeded manner. Patterns of daily life that were never a problem, now present themselves as formidable challenges, which must be approached both cautiously and slowly. The stairs leading to the home lose their inviting quality and now become a hindrance separating the broken person’s body from his or her home. Broader patterns of navigation must now be reconsidered so as to accommodate the broken limb in its readjustment to the world. Moreover, the readjustment returns to the identity of the person. Having taken it for granted that the person’s identity was constituted by the usage of four limbs, now this identity must undergo a process of reconfiguration. Both body and world share in this joint adjustment, with each co-partaking of a broken body and world.
These examples give us three ways in which the body–world relation is modified in accordance with a multiplicity of factors. In the first example, the bodily experience of the world undergoes a shift in meaning in accordance with a mood of mourning and loss. In the second case, the broken house extends its reach to a feeling of insecurity that permeates the body and the world. And in the final case, the focus moves to the body itself as the fundamental bearer of a particular world, which, at all times, hinges on the body’s ability to move through the world. In each situation, it is not the case that there is a world outside of the body, which is then animated by the body’s involvement. The world is not constituted by the bodily subject in a causal way, but instead defines itself in a dialogical relationship with the body.
A phenomenology of anxiety
In the current book, the mood we are concerned with is anxiety. Phenomenology’s relation to anxiety is an intellectually rich, if not wholly intoxicating, one. One of the reasons for this intellectual intoxication is due to the venerated status of anxiety not only within phenomenology but also within philosophy itself. How is it that anxiety has become the philosophical mood par excellence? There are at least two reasons: a conceptual reason and, what might be called, a transformative reason.
In the first case, while moods such as fear, love and boredom have all assumed an importance within the history of philosophy, there can be no doubt that anxiety occupies an especially pivotal place. If we follow this question through a Heideggerian route, we find that anxiety presents itself as an ‘original mood’, original because anxiety confronts us with the fact that ‘they are beings – and not nothing’ (Heidegger 1977, 105). This appeal to the contingency of being provides anxiety with its ontological structure, going so far as to reveal ‘being as a whole’ (102). How does anxiety do this? Heidegger’s argument is that in anxiety, the pregiven meaning of things in their everyday context slips away, including that of our own selves. In this slippage of things, the subject ‘hovers’ above and beyond their personal existence, revealing the ‘pure Da-sein’ that dwells beneath this personalized being (103). The result is that we feel ‘ill-at-home’ in the world, as the world reveals itself to be the site of an irreducible and original strangeness (111). All of which is to distinguish anxiety from other affects, not least fear. If fear is thought of as being ‘fear in the face of something … in particular’, then anxiety, inversely, is thought of as lacking a determinate object of concern (102). We might think of this distinction in another way. If fear concerns itself with a particular object, then this implies that fear has a localizable quality to it, which the fearful subject can develop a relation to. Anxiety, on the other hand, lacks this localized dimension, and thus assumes an omnipresent hold on the subject, such that the structure of the subject itself is put into doubt. It is precisely this relation between the structure of the subject and its possible dissolution that is peculiar to anxiety.
As to the second reason why anxiety has assumed the importance it has, as an original mood anxiety is not a value neutral affect, but instead imbued with a transformative structure. What this means is that anxiety – in some capacity – instigates a fundamental insight into the nature and structure of the subject. Quite obviously, we can think of Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety as having an educative value, so much so that he will even go so far as to speak of anxiety as a ‘school’ (Kierkegaard 1981, 156). Let us also think here of Heidegger’s reflections on the value of anxiety as having the capacity to individualize the subject such that an authentic relation towards being-towards-death is possible. These reflections, which no doubt constitute some of the richest passages in Being and Time, are interwoven with the conceptual structure of anxiety. As the everyday presentation of the world slips away from us, so the world is revealed to us in an uncanny way. Stripped of its familiar attributes, our taken-for-granted relation to the world is momentarily ruptured by the advent of anxiety, leaving us with a sense of being ill-at-home in the world (Heidegger 1996). In anxiety, it is not just that things intrude upon us, but that the ‘world has the character of complete insignificance’ (174). What is uncanny in this movement is not simply that meaning is proven to be contingent, but that not-being-at-home ‘becomes phenomenally visible’ as a mode of fleeing from anxiety (176). We can think of this act of uncanniness becoming visible in terms of becoming aware of the role we as individuals play in being complicit with the production of a meaning. Gaining a self-reflexive awareness of how meaning is produced brings about a moment of anxiety in knowing at the same time how precarious that meaning is. For these reasons, anxiety is not one mood among many, but is instead a ‘fundamental kind of attunement belonging to the essential constitution of Da-sein’ (177). Yet Heidegger does not leave us stranded in anxiety. The crevice between being and world establishes the possibility of other ways of being-in-the-world afforded by a movement of separation between self and other. Anxiety thus carries with it a realization of other possibilities in the world, and without the confrontation with anxiety, Dasein’s eventual appropriation of its own existence remains impossible.
In Heideggerian phenomenology, anxiety tends to be treated as an opportunity for what Levinas terms a space of ‘supreme vitality’ (Levinas 2005, 70). The alliance between anxiety and freedom presupposes not only a value to anxiety, but also a fundamental nature. The nature of anxiety, as it is presented in Heidegger, Kierkegaard and to some extent Sartre, attests to the transformative function of anxiety, a function that is not simply prescribed as an ethical framework, but instead takes root in the conceptual status of anxiety itself. From a critical – that is, Levinasian – perspective, the task becomes one of rupturing the narrative of anxiety, and, more specifically, of attending to the way anxiety assumes a voice to what is ostensibly an enigmatic if not mute experience. Levinas provides an outline of the problem we face:
And when one writes a book on anxiety, one writes it for someone, one goes through all the steps that separate the draft from the publication, and one sometimes behaves like a merchant of anxiety. (60)
Levinas identifies a risk problematic to any philosophical treatment of anxiety. The risk has two aspects. On the one hand, to write about anxiety means reproducing the experience of it, and so modifying it. In becoming a ‘merchant of anxiety’, the mood is tied to the page on which it is written, however loosely. More than this, the writing of anxiety also reveals a performative dimension, in that anxiety is written before the face of another person. Yet if the writing of anxiety is a confrontation with the other for whom one writes, then it is also a dialogue with oneself. In each case, a phenomenology of anxiety, such as it is practised in this book, proceeds to move around the edges of anxiety, encircling it, returning to it, discarding it. There is necessarily an element of repetition at work, as a phenomenological study of anxiety requires returning to the same scene from different angles. The anxiety itself shifts, articulating itself primarily through the body, then in our relation with others, before then manifesting itself through the spatiality of the home. Each of these articulations does not claim to exhaust the meaning or definition of anxiety. Rather, the phenomenology in question attempts to outline the singularity of a given experience.
Despite this shifting movement of anxiety, the experience outlined in this book can be characterized in a precise way and attached to a specific form of bodily existence. The form is characterized by the felt transformation of the body from a locus of meaning, ownership and unity to an impersonal site of alienation and anonymity. In what follows, we will see that this transformation is both expressive of anxiety and the object of anxiety. Moreover, at stake in this movement is not only a transformation of the body, but also of our relation to spatiality and intersubjectivity. Thus, when confronted with the anxious quality of the home or of the gaze of another person, our concern remains with a fundamental change in our experience of a personalized and familiar world to an impersonal and unfamiliar world.
Why, then, should we take the impersonal aspect of the body as being related to the experience of anxiety? As I will suggest, it is with the lived experience of the body in its anonymity and impersonality that the boundary line between self and the non-self is put into question. In speaking of an impersonal level of existence, we mean that aspect of existence that serves to destabilize, threaten and dissolve the image we have of who we are. We are taking the theme of impersonal existence, therefore, not as an innocuous structure of subjectivity, but as a presence that menaces the very image of selfhood. This formulation of impersonal existence, which will be unfolded in dialogue with Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, is specific to the experience of phobic anxiety. However, the anxiety intertwined with bodily life is present for both phobic and non-phobic subjects and can be formulated as a question: Where does the body as my own begin and end? The extent to which this question will provoke anxiety is contingent on several factors. For some people, the boundaries between self and other(ness) are porous if not elastic, such that gradients of ambiguity and uncertainty are experienced without any considerable peril to the integrity of selfhood. For them, a sense of self is a malleable construct. For other people, especially anxious subjects, the ‘gap’ between one’s sense of self and what lies outside of this sense is rigidly construed, such that there is an intolerance of uncertainty. This intolerance is especially striking in the case of the anxious person’s relation to their body. In the gap where the body comes to the edge of its personalized existence, a space is created from where the body’s otherness comes to the foreground. The issue does not concern how my body is distributed or extended through space, such that I still retain possession of that extended materiality. Rather, we are concerned with the point at which the ongoing renewal of the body as my own – that is, my set of memories, values, dreams, phantasies and fears – is no longer capable of supporting those personalized values, and thus reveals itself in its resistance to accommodate selfhood. This resistance may take shape in the gaze of another person, or it may be felt in specific buildings, or on certain bridges. In each case, what prompts and sustains anxiety is an unknowable and unknown dimension of the body, which is revealed, not as an accident disclosed by a sickly perception, but as the very constitution of corporeal existence.
The anxiety we are concerned with in this book is remote from an entire range of related phenomena, not least a generalized anxiety, which spreads itself through the world in a non-specific fashion. Nor is the anxiety at stake, one that can be localized as a ‘given’ of the everyday that each human being invariably has to contend with, such as economic insecurity, loneliness or the indeterminacy of freedom. Although this book hinges upon aspects of existential phenomenology, our orientation departs from a humanism, in which anxiety becomes sublimated as a mode of reintegration for the subject. Primarily, our concern is neither with the ‘value’ of anxiety nor with its ‘management’; less even the function of anxiety in the individual’s ‘self-realization’ (cf. Goldstein 1966; May 1977). Any such conversion of anxiety as an opportunity to be mastered for the subject is an anxiety conceived retroactively, and guided at all times by a predefined value. In all this, we do not deny the possibility of anxiety as having a value. Indeed, two of the fundamental aims of this book are to contribute to the understanding of anxiety as it is lived and to identify the specificity of what is at stake when we feel anxious. If our analysis serves as a source of insight for sufferers of anxiety, then our aim will have been achieved. However, to elaborate on the relation between anxiety and value is the task of a different project, and a project that can only begin once we have an understanding of how the body is shaped by anxiety and likewise how anxiety is shaped by the body.
Our phenomenology disembarks from a Heideggerian approach in identifying anxiety, not as a mood of existence reducible to human subjectivity in its appeal to self-realization, but as the site of an irreducible anonymity that outstrips subjectivity. For this reason, Heidegger does not assume a central figure in what follows. Despite this distancing from Heideggerian phenomenology, throughout this book, we rely extensively on the lived experience of the body. Indeed, the recurring motif we will encounter is that of experiencing one’s body as uncanny or alien. To this extent, our foray into anxiety does not consist simply in mining insights in collaboration with Merleau-Ponty. We wish, instead, to develop a new understanding of anxiety. This understanding has its basis in a series of concepts outlined in my previous books – especially ‘un-place’, the ‘phantom zone’, together with the ‘unhuman body’, and ‘unhuman phenomenology’ – all of which accent the uncanny aspects of experience, whereupon the lived experience of the body in its everyday habitat becomes the vehicle for an anonymous body at the fringe of personal perception (Trigg 2012, 2013a, 2014a). The precise structure of the experience of anxiety extends beyond descriptive phenomenology and requires a careful look not only at what appears for consciousness, but also at what refuses to appear. As such, we will require both a conceptual and experiential analysis of the movements of the body as considered phenomenologically and non-phenomenologically.
The case studies
A brief word of explanation is needed on the methodology of this book. The ‘case studies’ analysed in this book, those experiences of anxiety and phobia from where our interpretations and conceptual insights are drawn, have their roots in my own experience. Such experiences are affixed to a time and a place, a circumscribed zone of experience from where this book draws both its reserves and its strengths. For this reason, the gender pronoun employed most frequently (though not exclusively) in this book is masculine. That Topophobia is based upon my own experiences of phobic anxiety does not mean that this book is limited to those experiences. Indeed, these personal experiences are in turn described and interpreted alongside historical case studies, both as a means to deepen our understanding of the experience in question and also to broaden our understanding of anxiety as involving diverse and complex patterns of behaviour. Above and beyond (or more accurately, beneath and prior) the cultural and social dimensions shaping the experience of spatial phobias, this book implicitly maintains that a series of invariant structures defines such experiences. In particular, we hold that phobias such as agoraphobia adhere to a general principle. The principle underlying such experiences can be characterized as a boundary disorder framed by the transformation of one’s own bodily experience of the world, in its subjective and intersubjective dimensions, such that the perception of the world becomes almost anonymous and formless. We understand this almost anonymous and formless presence to be anxiety.
Given that any such phenomenological study of anxiety or agoraphobia depends in large upon the sources being presented – be they historical or contemporary – the question emerges of how a phenomenology of topophobia will proceed without succumbing to mere anecdotal description. In fact, the question is something of a misnomer. If phenomenology begins with the descriptive level of thematic content, then it is not obvious that it should remain at that level. Phenomenology is a critical method of inquiry, meaning that it is distinct from the introspective examination of one’s psychological contents. Thus, for an applied phenomenology to proceed – whether it is a phenomenology of agoraphobia or a phenomenology of spaceflight – a balance between the careful description of experience and the subsequent critical interpretation of that experience must each play a role.
Our concern, then, is with what we can broadly call a hermeneutics of the body. What this means is that our understanding of the body is not exhausted by a descriptive account of the lived experience of the world. The body exceeds such descriptions, belying another surface not always available to phenomenology. Despite this limit, we begin with the body, and it is to the body that we must always return. The body we find in Topophobia is one marked by a series of sensations or symptoms that require interpreting. The body speaks, though what it is saying is not always clear. Faced with an object of phobia, devoid of all objective dangers, the body comes to a standstill. Something intervenes, an invisible presence. In this gap between the experience of the world and the world as it presents itself in objective terms, the role of a corporeal hermeneutics assumes a central place. To the extent that the current book involves a descriptive account of bodily experience alongside a critical interpretation of that experience, the method used in Topophobia remains the same as of that in my previous books, The Thing (2014), The Memory of Place (2012) and, to a lesser extent, The Aesthetics of Decay (2006). In each case, phenomenology is employed to capture the specificity of a particular experience. This approach does not proclaim to exhaust the topic in question – indeed, the phenomenology outlined in this book is necessarily limited given the labyrinthine scope of anxiety. Our aim, in fact, is narrowly construed to the anxiety tied up with one’s experience of the body as impersonal. Although central – necessary even – to the experience of anxiety, the account of anxiety as told in this book is mediated throughout from the perspective of the body.
Therefore, while I consult historical instances of anxiety and phobia, the main focus of this work is on the phenomenology of spatial phobias, as they are lived. What this means is that we take seriously the value of lived experience as a point of departure for understanding the nature of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and spatiality. The mention here of beginning with lived experience serves to underline the importance of experience within the phenomenological method, but at the same time avoids drawing a line between phenomenology’s movement beyond conscious experience and towards unconsciousness. This focus on both conscious and unconscious aspects of experience does not imply that a social or cultural background is irrelevant, nor is it to suggest that issues of politics and gender are secondary to an understanding of anxiety. Much important work has already been written on this background specifically in relation to agoraphobia, debates which are worth pursuing (Callard 2006; Davidson 2003; Jacobson 2011). Likewise, given our focus on the experiential dimension, our analysis does not take its guidance from third-person studies, indexical definitions, less even statistical evidence detailing the prevalence of anxiety disorders, as one would find in the medical literature. For all these reasons, we do not engage in recent debates concerning the classification of anxiety within the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Important though these debates are, they occupy another set of concerns, which can be pursued elsewhere (Decker 2013; Horwitz 2013; Phillips and Paris 2013).
In spite of my preceding admission that this work draws and folds back upon my own experience of spatial phobias, I have chosen to describe a series of agoraphobic and anxious encounters not in the first-person narrative but in the second-person. My reasons are twofold. First, on a structural level, the use of second-person is employed to accent the dis-possessed structure of the phobic experience, an experience in which ‘I’ am not fully present to myself but instead dispersed through my body and through the landscape that surrounds the body. Where am ‘I’ when anxious? This question, in fact, will become the hinge around which Topophobia revolves. It is for this reason that the ‘I’ is used in a provisional sense, an indexical placeholder, which we will return to time and again. This surrounding ambiguity concerning the place of the subject is especially true given that the descriptions used are, in effect, memories, which, if shaping my experience of the world, nevertheless do not impede upon that experience.
In the light of this uncertainty over the place of the anxious self, I address myself to myself. Here, I am a stranger undergoing an experience that I identify as being me, and yet fail to integrate fully within an existential framework. Who, then, is the ‘you’, the reader or myself? Between self and other, the ‘you’ appears as another subject outside of each category, an impersonal subject who is in possession of a certain type of experience, at once addressing the self while also speaking beyond the self. This ‘I’ that devolves into the ‘you’ finds a special place in the phenomenology of anxiety, a phenomenology that cannot remain content with speaking with the centrality and certainty of the first-person voice, but instead must contend with multiple voices speaking through the body. Such a self – my own self – is being gazed upon by myself, a self that must be interpreted and interrogated before it can be understood, so far as understanding is possible.
To speak, then, of certain factual details – Paris beneath a grey sky, the number 87 bus crowded with passengers – means having to contend with a set of experiences, which exceed the limits of pure description. If phenomenology retains its pledge to return to the things themselves, then in the case of an experience where the subject occupies an ambiguous place, an indirect route must be mined. A phenomenology of anxiety is an atypical phenomenology in that it demands not only a fidelity to the experience in question but also a vigilance over not reducing such experiences to a coherent narrative, in which the subject looks on from afar. In this respect, the use of second-person is less the means by which I can remove myself from the scene of anxiety, and more the means to get closer to it.
Alongside this structural consideration of the role of the anxious subject, a thematic issue also plays a part in this second-person narrative. At all times, it is a question of attempting to do justice to a certain type of experience that cannot be captured by factual data alone. If phenomenology as a method concerns the attempt at outlining, not only the salient structural features of an experience, but also its thematic content, then there is a question of how this can be achieved with language. If we take the example of crossing a bridge, there would be any number of ways to describe this experience. One could cite the objective features of the act in terms of presenting first-person testimonial ‘evidence’, which is how much of the contemporary literature on anxiety and agoraphobia is narrated. What tends to follow is a clinical study of patient reports that is divested of its dynamism and restricted to the level of factual existence. This is not to underplay or dismiss the legitimacy of these reports, but simply to address the possibility that where a phenomenology of phobia is concerned, a particular attention to language is required in order to convey both the structural and affective aspects of anxiety beyond a factual level.
The peculiarity of a condition such as agoraphobia is that it resists empirical evidence. We are, to be sure, in the realm of a specific kind of strangeness, as though in a dream. This strange dimension of phobic anxiety is captured in the intersecting of the everyday and the extraordinary. The inability to cross a bridge does not derive from empirical danger, but of a danger that has spooked the subject. It is a danger that has no place on the bridge, but instead draws back upon the subject. The subject sees or otherwise senses something out-of-joint on the bridge, yet he himself cannot find the source of the disorder. The anxiety on the bridge seems to fall through the body, and thereby elude understanding. To articulate the nature of this encounter, it is necessary for language to give voice to the strangeness inherent in anxiety. Phenomenology is an attempt to discover such a language, a language that is able to both attend to the phenomena on a descriptive level but also to push that description to a threshold, in which phenomenology itself comes to its own limit.
***
Topophobia begins by considering the relationship between topophobia and topophilia through the figure of the home. Historically, phenomenology has tended to centralize the home as a privileged place for human dwelling. The same is true of agoraphobes. We begin on a theoretical level by exploring the ambivalence of home in the works of Levinas and Bachelard, taking as our example the sickness of the home as unveiled by the night. There, we will find that the philic attachment to place belies a phobic repulsion towards other places. This dialectic between the home and the non-home reappears in the case of phobic subjects, who operate between the poles of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, between a fixation on place as the centre of unity and the experience of place as the centre of disintegration.
If our first chapter is concerned with the conceptual status of home as a privileged place for phobic subjects, then in the second chapter we give flesh to this status through considering the body. Consistent with our overarching theme of homeliness and unhomeliness, we take the phobic body to be an articulation of the uncanny body. As understood in this context, uncanniness refers to a tension in bodily existence involving two aspects. On the one hand, we have a sense of the body as something irreducibly mine. Yet at the same time, the materiality of the body is not reducible to my lived experience of being a self. Instead, who I am is implicated by a set of automatic and anonymous functions, which operate irrespective of who I am as a person. In the course of our investigation, we will frame this body both in Merleau-Pontyan terms of anonymous corporeality and in Sartrean terms of nauseating sliminess.
A phobic subject does not exist only within the interiority of his or her body. This body is also constituted by its relation with others. Chapter 3 focuses on the role of others within the world of the phobic subject. We begin with a question: How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? We will see that intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality, and that our relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. We will explore these issues through the experience of travelling on a bus in Paris. What this illustration will reveal is that our relation with others is not causally linked, as though there were a body, then a world, and then a subject that provided a thematic and affective context to that experience. Instead, body, other and world will be shown as intertwined in a single unity that cannot be considered apart.
In the fourth chapter we return again to a central topic of Topophobia: home. Building on the analysis in the first chapter, we will consider the function of the home, not only as a discrete entity, but also as a presence that structures the agoraphobe’s experience of spatiality more broadly. This exploration involves both an analysis of the structure of spatiality alongside a specific consideration of the home as a centre. We shall pursue this aim through several illustrations, each of which is united by the sentiment of being lost in place. In fact, we will discover that the home involves two sub-centres: an ontological centre and a world centre. As inseparable and co-constitutive, these centres enable us to understand how certain features in the agoraphobe’s world gain their quality as anxiety inducing through involving an interplay between unfamiliarity and unreality.
Our final chapter marks a departure from what is broadly a phenomenological analysis through considering from a psychoanalytical perspective the role of the body image as a means of placing anxiety. To this end, we will turn to both Lacan and Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the mirror stage, as well as recent research on the phenomenology of body image. What we will see is that through providing a specular image of oneself, the mirror stage outlines the transformation of the fragmented body to the illusion of unity. In this turn towards psychoanalysis, we will be in a position to question the place of anxiety itself. Does anxiety derive from a conflict within the subject, or does the subject itself derive from anxiety? With each possible answer, we end up with an entirely different account of both subjectivity and anxiety.