CONCLUSION
There is a perpetual uneasiness in the state of being conscious.
(MERLEAU-PONTY, SENSE AND NONSENSE)
The Musée d’Orsay
The roof of the Musée d’Orsay arches elaborately from one wall of the museum to another. It is a massive space, punctuated by huge windows, through which shafts of light flood in from above. Down below – on the museum floor – crowds of people line the main space before trailing off into the countless rooms and different levels structuring the place. Within this cavernous domain, you have sought sanctuary behind Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s immense monument, ‘Les Quatre Parties du Monde Soutenant la Sphère Celeste [The Four Parts of the World Holding the Celestial Sphere]’. The size of the monument mirrors the scale of the museum. Upon its great black base – already the size of an adult human – four figures, each representing different continents, are dancing in a circular motion, while holding a globe above their hands. The figures tower over you, and when you look upwards, the circumference of the globe appears as a colossal earth, unable to be supported by the hands of the figures below. The monument is shielding you from the gaze of the space and the people who occupy it. When you peer out from the sculpture, the space in front of you – known as l’allée centrale des sculptures – appears to be infinite. Yet you know in abstract that the space is finite, and that in order to leave the Musée d’Orsay it will become necessary for you to traverse the world in between the ‘Les Quatre Parties du Monde Soutenant la Sphère Celeste’ and the exit.
Your first movement beyond the sculpture is cautious. The movements you make are full of reservation, and only with greatest reluctance do you free the hand that is rigidly attached to the black base of the monument. Once your hands are free, your body moves with uncertainty, weaving erratically between the columns of people that stand before you and the outside world. As the crowds of people thicken in your midst, so your orientation becomes increasingly distorted. The colossal monument that had previously guided you in the Musée d’Orsay now becomes smothered in the dense crowds moving in and around the museum. Only the tip of the globe is visible, but in your disorientation, it is no longer possible for you to return to that place of sanctuary. You are unable to proceed. Frozen in your tracks, in this nowhere between the sculpture and the exit, you lose sight of yourself and begin to drift elsewhere.
The dream takes place in the daylight. You are aware of yourself as a discrete body standing in the hallway of sculptures, but despite this identification of your body as your own, you are nevertheless unable to move. Frozen in the gap between places, your body loses its unassailable presence as being here. As you attempt to move one foot in front of the other, you experience the moving foot as leaving a trail behind itself, as though it took a second or two for the materiality of the limb to catch up with its own motion. Likewise, when you turn your head rapidly from one corner of the hallway to another corner, your head continues to move even when it comes to a complete standstill. This fragmentation of bodily form is mirrored in the lack of distinction between the sculptures and the people that occupy the vast hallway. As these figures pass you by, your body jolts violently, as though your limbs were tethered between your own body and the bodies of others.
The field of vision that ordinarily guides you in the world is now marked with tiny specks of light, each of which is falling in a diagonal direction. This gentle movement generates the sense of both falling into and drifting away from space, a free-flowing motion that induces both anxiety and pleasure at once. In response to this uneasy mixture of joy and anguish, you raise the palm of your hand to your face in order to verify that it still occupies space and time. The face remains there, but does nothing to reconstitute your sense of self. As you close your eyes to regain your composure, a series of images floods your vision. At one moment, you are stuck in an airport unable to find your luggage; at another point, you are in an apartment and hear the sounds of a woman but cannot identify what room the sound is coming from; yet with another image, you are attempting to escape from a corridor, but must cross barbed wire in order to do so. You are brought back to the present when you feel the floor beneath you contort itself, as happens when you lie horizontally and suddenly feel the ground beneath you undulate. As this motion unfolds, paintings from corridors and rooms outside of your reach extend themselves from their confided space and seep through the hallway. The gaunt stare of Léon Spilliaert, captured in one of his self-portraits from 1903, meets your gaze. The painter’s sullen cheeks and pallid skin break away from the canvas, now occupying the same space as that of your own face. Every painting that is visible to you exacerbates and amplifies your sense of dread. In the depth of the dark reds and violent motions depicted on distant and near canvases, you are nauseated. These dynamic contours serve only to confuse the boundary line between where you begin and where the paintings end. Falling deeper and deeper into a state that is not you, you continue nevertheless to witness your own self as wedged in the Musée d’Orsay while all around you existence in its stubborn normality continues unabated.
‘As in a dream’
An abiding sense of strangeness haunts the topophobic experience of the world. In the face of empty plazas, constricted hallways and open fields, the phobic subject comes to a standstill, paralysed by a danger that is invisible to those around him, but is entirely real within his own anxiety. He himself is unable to explain the occurrence of these anomalies within experience, except to regard them as gaps in what is otherwise a ‘normal’ existence. Both in the midst of and in the aftermath of these episodes, the subject of anxiety is never fully present to himself, but instead situated in a divergent relation to the experiences he is undergoing. Our usage of the second-person narrative has intended to accentuate this rapport between my own experience of anxiety and an anxiety that evades that experience. To be either fully present or absent is impossible, and to speak accurately of the experience of being anxious, it is necessary to speak of a ‘you’ that addresses an ‘I’.
This disjunction between the intimacy of the I and the foreignness of the you underscores the strangeness peculiar to anxiety. It is a structure that is situated between conscious and unconscious levels of experience, at once neither present nor absent entirely, but instead operating in an interstitial space that collapses all fixed dichotomies. This dissolution of form during the experience of phobic anxiety is relayed in historic accounts, especially in the case of agoraphobia. We are already familiar with the motifs that mark the agoraphobe’s experience of space. The experience is one of alienation (‘he does not know why he is different from other people’); of derealization (‘he began to feel strange all at once, almost like a “hangover”’); of rationalization (‘he likes to believe he is normal’); of irrationality (‘he is absolutely unable to offer a specific reason for his feeling of anxiety; it is just there despite all reasoning’); and above all, of strangeness (‘he feels as in a dream’) (Knapp 1988, 62, 63, 67, 70).
As in a dream. Time and again, it is this oneiric realm that anxiety leads us towards. It is a world where things become bathed with an aura of weirdness. Materiality persists in and through this strangeness, but only now is divested of its quality as being irreducibly real. Prior to Westphal’s patients, a case from 1847 attests to this anxious dreamscape. The patient ‘claimed to feel as if she were not dead or alive, as if living in a continuous dream … objects [in her environment] looked as if surrounded by a cloud; people seemed to move like shadows, and words seemed to come from a far away world’ (cited in Sierra 2012, 8). Should we take the admission of dreaming as a mere rhetorical device, employed to describe what cannot be articulated in conventional terms? Or is there more to this expression than metaphor? Is there, in fact, something peculiar to the experience of anxiety that aligns it with the structure of dreaming? Our response to this question will depend in large on how we frame the subjectivity of dreaming. Whether or not dreaming is a departure or continuation from waking life has significant implications for our understanding of anxiety. By way of a conclusion to this book, we wish, so far as phenomenology will enable us to get close to the phenomena, to describe this strange dream that accompanies the experience of anxiety.
The verge of dreaming
In our experience of waking from a dream, there exist those brief moments, termed the ‘hypnagogic state’, when the world has yet to be reconstituted in the image we conferred upon it prior to falling asleep. Within this brief interval, all too readily covered up, we become lost. In the same fashion of being lost in the forest, the lack of orientation is ontological and concerns the very grounds of our being, for it is a loss that impinges upon the fabric of identity. For Edgar Allan Poe, hypnagogic images present themselves as a
class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are thoughts: they seem to me psychal rather than intellectual. They arise in the soul … only its epochs of most intense tranquility – and at those mere points in time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. I am aware of these ‘fancies’ only when I am on the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so. (cited in Mavromatis 1983, 13)
A number of points come to the surface. First, the hypnagogic state is a liminal state, and it occurs in between dreaming and waking, such that there is an overlap between the two spheres. Alongside this delicate, unstable oscillation between dreaming and waking, Poe’s ‘fancies’ gravitate towards the threshold of sleep and dream without ever falling into dreaming itself. The movement is delicate precisely because of its instability. At any point, but especially upon deliberate self-reflection, the dreamer can break the spell of the hypnagogic state, returning him to the wakeful realm from where he began his journey. ‘To tell the truth’, so Sartre writes, ‘a certain indulgence is necessary on my part. It remains in my power to shake this enchantment, to knock down these cardboard walls and to return to the wakeful world. This is why the transitory, unstable hypnagogic state is, in a sense, an artificial state’ (Sartre 2004, 44). Through the artificial episode, consciousness remains intact, and is not extinguished by the onset of hypnagogia. Indeed, consciousness is not only operational but also silently self-aware of its own augmentation, as Sartre puts it: ‘Consciousness would be a modifying capacity, endowed with a certain efficacy, which withdraws from the game and lets the phenomena unroll in blind succession, in the case of half-sleep’ (43). What is displaced from the scene, then, is not reality as understood in an objective sense, but rather the centrality of the ego. If we take the intellectual aspect of consciousness that Poe mentions to refer to the self-identifying ego, which identifies consciousness with the sense of being ‘me’, then hypnagogia provides us with evidence of a consciousness that exists independently of this ego.
Hypnagogia thus takes its point of departure the notion of the ego as a construct employed to discriminate and forge boundaries between self and other. These boundaries entail a series of restrictions, not only between the ego and its environment, but also between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ information (Mavromatis 1983, 464). One source of such unwanted information is an ‘intolerance of ambiguity’ (464). When the boundaries of the ego are loosened, either through deep relaxation or through disorders of the self, perceptual and conceptual boundaries are partly dissolved, in turn, ‘objects merge into one another and their meanings change, concepts lose their sharpness and expand to include other concepts remotely related to them or become identified with apparently entirely unrelated concepts’ (465).
To pass from hypnagogia to dreaming is to recuperate a referential world, in which I myself am situated and to some extent distanced from the theatre of images that unfolds before me. As Evan Thompson argues, whereas the hypnagogic state is characterized by the presentation of visual patterns that absorb us, in dreaming, we ourselves are at the centre of the dream world (Thompson 2015, 127). It is true that the subject who appears in a dream is a distorted, strange and often uncanny version of the self we identify with in waking life. But even within this haze, what is intact in dreaming is the totality of a world, in which I become immersed (127). In contrast to the dream, the manifestation of the hypnagogic image does not emerge for me from a fixed position, whereby I still retain a contemplative distance. Rather, consciousness becomes absorbed with it, tied up in it, and thereby enchanted by its sheer presence. What is preserved through the dream, beyond the augmentations of one’s mirror image and even when perceiving oneself in the third person, is the felt sense of mineness. It is I who am affected by the contents of the dream, whether it be horrifying or pleasurable, and when I awake from the dream, then it is I who am reflecting upon an experience that I have just undergone.
‘Where am I?’
Ostensibly, hypnagogia states are thought of as being restorative if not relaxing (Mavromatis 1983, 106). From Poe to Proust, the experience of hypnagogia is imbued with a felicitous orientation, providing a source of inspiration for the literary imagination. Indeed, the experience of toppling between wakefulness and sleep is one of pleasure, a movement of freedom and spontaneity, in which the semi-dreamer enters a state of deep relaxation while displacing the residual sense of self that ordinarily accompanies us. Inversely, a heightening of anxiety tends to inhibit the production of hypnagogia, given that hypnagogic images are predicated on the capacity to enter a ‘receptive mode’ of consciousness freed from a concern with futural action, which tends to be prevalent in anxiety (106). Where, then, does the anxiety of dreaming (and the dream of anxiety) fit into this peaceful realm? The point of departure for the anxious subject’s relation to hypnagogia begins not with an affirmation of the fluidity of the self but with a self that is fortified against ambiguity and otherness. As we have seen, the anxious self is a fragmented self. Divided into parts, each fails to form an intelligible unity, but instead fragments the self into contradictory and opposing aspects. For this reason, the anxious self is either a self or a no-self, and there is no space for ambiguity therein. One of the striking dimensions of hypnagogia in this respect is that it reveals a certain divergence between the ego and consciousness, and thus raises the question of who the actual subject of perception is. For the anxious subject, the unbound consciousness, now freed of its domesticity to the self, is experienced as a deviant consciousness, a consciousness that betrays the sense of self as having one story, and one story alone. For this reason, the hypnagogic consciousness is registered as an invasive and unsettling presence. In a report from 1879, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall provides us with evidence of this disturbing presence.
Children’s dreams of place are very vivid and melt like dissolving views into the waking sense of the real environment. ‘Where am I?’ is often the first problem of the morning consciousness, and there are often as strange ossifications and mosaics of two states, as in hypnagogic phenomena. Everything in the room is a lighthouse or buoy to aid them into safe harbour from the far dream voyages, and so cannot be moved without confusion. (Hall 1897, 161)
We have a precise account of the anxiety tied up with sleeping. The gap between sleepfulness and wakefulness is framed as a moment of vulnerability, in which the semi-dreamer no longer knows where he is and also what he is. In order to find his way back to the world, beacons of stability must survive the night, so that they can form a sense of temporal continuity. Hall’s reference to objects in the room being lighthouses is an exemplary way to phrase this relation. As with the lighthouse, the familiar object in the room radiates its presence through the fog of sleep, dispatching a homely signal long before the dreamer has returned to the homeworld. For this reason, another patient ‘can never have furniture moved in her bedroom, because the feeling of being turned around gives her a terrible panic’ (160). To conceal this object or to position it elsewhere would be to dissolve the integrity of the room as a whole. It is thus not a question of the object as a localized entity; rather, the object acts as a waypoint, around which the patient orients himself or herself both when sleeping and when waking. As this orientation is collapsed, the residue of dreaming creeps into waking life, unnerving the distinctions between form and formlessness, self and non-self. Finding ourselves in a waking dream is to be confronted with the strange texture of dreaming transplanted into everyday life. The relational nexus between things is dissolved, causing a collapse in both spatial and temporal orderings. Characteristically, the dream of anxiety (and the anxiety of dreaming) is a dream of immobility, of being present but unable to act in the face of impending threat. This stasis is predicated on a dispossession of space and time, each of which is seized from our control. As a result, we remain passive in the face of a world that takes place irrespective of our attitude towards it.
Clinical reports verify that the experience of waking up and falling to sleep is a crystallization of the anxiety tied up with the loss of selfhood. Thus we read of a patient who ‘often woke up in terror and cried loudly because she could not think where she was, even whether in bed or not’ (Halls 1879, 160). Another who ‘sweats, feels faint and nauseated if she cannot instantly locate every door and window on waking nights’ (160). Yet another who ‘is speechless and motionless with dread if she wakes up crossways or diagonally in bed, often thinking she has been carried elsewhere’ (160). To not know where one is; to be unable to locate the means of escape; and to wake in a position different to how one went to sleep: with each of these cases, waking (and thus sleeping) elucidates with peculiar clarity the gap between the image imposed upon the world and the opaque, anonymous and constitutionally unfamiliar zone of existence that underpins that image. Sartre himself reinforces this anxiety in his discussion of hypnagogia, writing how, ‘[o]ne feels one’s body very confusedly, even more vaguely the contact with the sheets and the mattress. The spatial position of the body is very poorly defined. The orientation is prone to blatant disorders. The perception of time is uncertain’ (Sartre 2004, 40). The confused and anxious quality of hypnagogia finds root in these distortions of boundaries. The question of where I am is thus also a temporal question concerning at which point I cease to be ‘me’.
The continuation of dreaming into waking life, no matter how brief, suggests an indivision between dreaming and non-dreaming. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that what preserves the liaison between these dimensions is the primordiality of the body (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 297). Just as the body haunts us in our dreams, so it remains with us in waking consciousness, providing us with a link to that other world, of which we only ever gain a momentary glimpse. To ask, in this light, whether dream and sleep move us away from waking life is also to ask where the strangeness inherent in anxiety leads us. Once again, we return to the tension between first and second-person experience: where am I when anxious? It is true; I am here situated in place. But the lack of self-coherence undermines the sense of being present to myself. As a result, I look upon myself, as though I were an object in a distant landscape. This sense of being pacified by anxiety draws us close to the quality of being in a dream. Of course, in the case of agoraphobic anxiety, we could search for an explanation for the dreamlike quality in positivistic terms. We could, for example, suggest that through being overly sensitized to his or her bodily experience of lived space, the subject of anxiety experiences a momentary loss of orientation in their proprioceptive awareness, with the resultant state ‘resembling’ that of being in a dream. But such an explanation would delineate in advance a place for dreaming that is sealed off from waking life, and thus reduce the experience to an ‘error’ in perception. ‘Every sensation’, so Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation’ (223). This placement of dreaming at the heart of sensation runs counter to the positivistic analysis of dreaming as belonging to a nonsensical side of existence. Rather, what Merleau-Ponty finds in dreaming is evidence of the primordial and anonymous existence that structures waking life without ever being reducible to that life. Alongside Merleau-Ponty, we do not take dreaming as a departure from waking life, but instead see it as an amplification of the impersonal and anonymous sphere that constitutes everyday existence, rendering life possible while at the same time marking a space of anxiety.
The gaps in the wall
Faced with a gap in our understanding of the world, such as the agoraphobe experiences when crossing a plaza, our compulsion is to search for an explanation in order to fill it. Left unexplained, the gap presents itself as an anomaly, both physically and psychically. As it draws attention to itself, so the fissure marks itself out as an inscription of absence within an otherwise plentiful existence, gnawing at both our waking and sleeping lives. In the case of dreaming, the elusiveness of the ‘phantom zone’ between sleeping and waking, between the foreignness of the dreamscape and the nativity of the homeworld is soon reduced to the semblance of stable existence, thanks to the power of memory and habit. But as is evident from experience, archiving the dream to the realm of unconsciousness does not, as it were, put the dream to sleep. Rather, the murky sense of the dream stays with us, drawing attention to the gaps and points of uncertainties in our supposed mastery of selfhood.
In the birth of psychoanalysis, it was Freud who, with his intolerance of the ‘defects’ in the ‘data of consciousness’, sought to fill the gaps of understanding with recourse to the unconscious (Freud 1991, 110). For Freud, the very existence of the unconscious is legitimated not as a discovery but as an ‘assumption’, which retroactively furnishes an explanatory account of symptoms, obsessions, and, above all, dreams (110). In ‘the mind of the hysterical patient’, bizarre symptoms can be traced back to ‘active unconscious ideas’, which are revealed through the course of psychoanalysis to varying levels of success (35). This ‘gain in meaning and connection’, which the unconscious provides, carries psychoanalysis ‘beyond the limitations of direct experience’ and allows Freud to position himself as an archaeologist in search of a lost origin, existing both beneath and behind the surface of consciousness, and waiting patiently to be recovered. In an image that he will return to time and again, he asks that we envision the following scenario.
Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions … He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory; the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. (Freud 2001a, 192)
Freud’s delight in the image of the analyst as explorer is evidently both theoretical and personal. What archaeology brings to Freudian analysis is evidence of the indestructibility of the past, an indestructibility that serves as a foundation for what Freud sees as the eventual fruition of psychoanalysis. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud consolidates these themes of archaeology and psychoanalysis by inviting us to the ‘Eternal City of Rome’ (Freud 2001b, 69). ‘In mental life’, so he writes, ‘nothing which has once been formed can perish – that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances … it can once more be brought to light’ (69). In order to demonstrate this point, Freud asks us to consider the walls and ruins marking Rome’s history (69).
Except for a few gaps, he will see the wall of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places he will be able to find sections of the Servian Wall where they have been excavated and brought to light … Of the buildings which once occupied this ancient area he will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they no longer exist … Their place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction. There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in which the past is preserved in historical sites like Rome. (69–70)
Inspired by his flair for archaeological description, Freud pushes the analogy a step further asking that we consider Rome as a ‘psychical entity’, with a long past and where the earlier phases of development continue to live alongside the present ones (70). The result of this spatial–temporal anarchism is that the ruins, castles and palaces of Rome now occupy the same spot instead of being preserved individually. Thus where ‘the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House’, leading Freud to ‘things that are unimaginable and even absurd’ (70). The problem, such as it is, concerns the impossibility of two or more different pasts occupying the same space simultaneously. The existence of this impossible city – perhaps even a dream city – forces Freud to draw his metaphor to an abrupt close: ‘A city is thus a priori unsuited for a comparison of this sort with a mental organism’ (71).
FIGURE C.1 Rue Beautreillis, Paris.
‘The stone that one drags up’
Freud’s account of archaeology draws us to the missing gap in our own phenomenology; namely, the unconscious. If the unconscious has been missing, then in a parallel sense, it has been there all along, unarticulated but nevertheless present. Already we have touched upon an entire set of gaps and limits in our phenomenological analysis of anxiety. Indeed, the very materialization of anxiety through the human body gives shape to this field of voids. As we have seen, in the midst of everyday life, events such as being unable to leave one’s home or cross a bridge leave our understanding of the world and of ourselves in a state of disarray. At first, the gaps in experience lend themselves to be contained and avoided. A series of strategies are employed to house and place anxiety. Thanks to this cautious stance, life persists, albeit in a constricted fashion. Before long, however, the anxiety previously conscribed to the corner resurfaces in another form, reinforcing its presence as an invariant facet of subjectivity rather than an incidental component.
The topographical structure of our journey testifies to the constant resurfacing of anxiety in its manifold forms. We began in the home, safeguarding ourselves from the instability of the outside world. Within the nooks and corners of the home, anxiety has no place. But this shelter is both precarious and porous, and even within the home we find ourselves in a world of contingency, surrounded on all sides by the brute possibility that our bodies will betray us. Just as the inescapable body possesses, so it resists being possessed itself, a dimension that is given voice in our intersubjective relations. Other people enter the horizon of experience, not as additional aspects of an otherwise solitary adventure, but as constituents of the structure of perception. Throughout this narrative, anxiety is never abated nor buried, but instead transferred from object to object. This process of transference is finite, and ultimately anxiety exceeds the constraints placed upon it, effectively disarming the image superimposed upon it. Perhaps it will be in the experience of being in a small room or perhaps it will be in the experience of flying, but one way or another, the props and rituals constructed and enacted to keep anxiety at the door will reveal themselves for what they are: mechanisms of personalization. In its return to the surface of appearances, anxiety asks to what extent we can endure the gap between who we take ourselves to be and what we actually are. More than this, anxiety forces us to ask whether or not we can tolerate the uncertainty of being a self, unknown and unknowable. Far from suggesting a resolution to these questions, the undeceivable dimension of anxiety repels any attempt at humanization. To ‘explain’ anxiety by way of befriending or personalizing it as a source of wisdom or rendering it an ally is only to defer if not reinforce its fundamental alterity.
Throughout this analysis, the temptation might have been to employ the unconscious as an explanatory device for experiences, which are otherwise inexplicable. To follow the Freudian model, we would be led to fill the gaps in consciousness through summoning the indestructible content that belongs to unconsciousness. This restoration of lost experience looks prima facie to be especially pertinent to phobic anxiety. Why does a human being come to a standstill in the face of a situation where danger is objectively speaking not present? Phenomenology comes to these experiences with a view of describing the affective and relational dimension of anxiety. Here, phenomenology retains its legitimacy as a method concerned with elaborating and rediscovering what is already close to us in experience, but often overlooked or obscured. A phenomenology of anxiety, as a study of thematic content, is a necessary but limited analysis. It is necessary, because without this analysis, the lived experience of anxiety – or any other mood – would be unvoiced. Yet the specificity of anxiety, both structurally and thematically, is that it calls into question the very place of the subject, such that a complete analysis of anxiety would presuppose the very dissolution of selfhood. There is thus a hither side of anxiety, which does not lend itself to conscious experience, but instead must be considered from the perspective of what is not conscious to experience. To this end, it becomes necessary to speak of anxiety in both phenomenological and non-phenomenological terms. On the one hand, anxiety appears for the subject as belonging to the realm of corporeal experience. In this context, the complexity of the lifeworld is mediated through the body’s perception of things. The emergence of anxiety for a subject – we need to think only of the crystalline simplicity of a person unable to leave his or her home – does so in the form of rupture. Anxiety breaks the spell with the world, such that the world protrudes, obtrudes and intrudes upon experience, alienating the subject from himself, others and the world more broadly. Just as the body is revealed in its otherness, so too is the world, which can never again be trusted as it did prior to anxiety. Beyond this phenomenological lens, however, anxiety alludes to that which lies beyond conscious experience.
The implicit status of the unconscious in our preceding explorations is evident in that Freud’s own formulation of the unconscious as being hidden and active mirrors Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body as operating on different levels. Just as the body is identifiable with subjectivity, so it also evades subjectivity, unveiling an impersonal level of existence, which can never be appropriated as my own. From the inception of his thought to its eventual conclusion, Merleau-Ponty approaches phenomenology’s relationship to consciousness from multiple angles. Already in the notion of phenomenological intentionality, with which Merleau-Ponty begins his thinking, we are faced with a consciousness that exceeds its own margins, thus denying phenomenology of the possibility of a ‘complete reduction’, to use his emblematic formulation (Merleau-Ponty 2012, Ixxvii). That phenomenology is unable to achieve a complete reduction only reinforces the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s reconceptualization of the body as a layered body, operating within unreflected zones of experience, each of which structures intentionality itself. It is thanks to the multidimensional aspect of the body that lived experience gains its unifying quality through the primordial relation between body and world, a relation that is structured in a meaningful and dynamic fashion. Against this backdrop, symptoms do not have a meaning when considered in isolation, but instead take shape when situated in a broader context.
Merleau-Ponty’s Freudianism only becomes more pronounced as his thinking proceeds. In ‘Man and World’, Merleau-Ponty praises Freud for developing a ‘new idea of the body’, which refuses the ‘dichotomy of soul and body’, and which is guided by a ‘hidden or latent logic’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 227–229). ‘Freud’s great discovery’, so Merleau-Ponty continues on this tone of veneration, consists of locating the ‘osmosis between the body’s anonymous life and the person’s official life’, which was ‘Freud’s unconscious’ (229). To the end, Merleau-Ponty retains the archaeological current of Freud’s unconscious, rejecting its static foundationalism, and instead accenting its quality as a ‘paradox’, paradoxical insofar as it marries the phenomenological with the non-phenomenological, the conscious and unconscious, and the immemorial and the contemporary without conflating them (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 70–71). This set of pairings is not a series of divisions etched in stone, but rather the space in which an impossible unconsciousness is located. Merleau-Ponty writes in the following terms:
Since our philosophy has given us no better way to express that intemporal, that indestructible element in us which, says Freud, is the unconscious itself, perhaps we should continue calling it the unconscious – so long as we do not forget that the word is the index of an enigma – because the term retains, like the algae or the stone that one drags up, something of the sea from which it was taken. (71. Emphasis added)
Merleau-Ponty’s terminology is telling. In the first instance, the unconscious is not an object to be approached discreetly, nor is it a sedimented layer of content, much less where that content is tied up with a pathology. Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the unconscious as an element moves us beyond the orthodox account of unconscious as becoming visible only in the case of a symptomatic appearance. Rather, the unconscious is an ‘enigma’ and an ‘element’, that which is ‘in us’ without ever being identifiable with us. For these reasons, the unconscious is coexistent with life and thus with phenomenology, as he writes in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘This unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our “consciousness”, but in front of us, as articulations of our field’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 180). By way of bridging the rapport between the personal and the impersonal, the unconscious serves as a non-thematic structural role, marking the strange adhesion between things without becoming an object in and of itself. It is the unconscious that serves to bridge the realm between the phenomenological and the non-phenomenological, between the immemorial and the contemporary. As silent, invisible and beyond thematization, the unconscious is the means by which the world is given its structure outside of the phenomena presented to us. The unconscious is that which is taken up in the atmosphere as a surrounding influence that accompanies our existence. As in front of us, the unconscious transcends the thematic dimensions that constitute our experiences, providing therein a rich undercurrent that both belongs to us while also evading us. Before our waking eyes, the unconscious thus spreads itself over consciousness, exceeding the gaps previously constructed to put it in its place, and marking its placelessness as one of uncanniness. In the image of a stone one drags up, carrying with it an oceanic life, we encounter a remainder that embodies this terrain, belonging to both the sea and the earth at once, to dream and wakefulness, without any rigid distinction separating them.
‘The oneirism of wakefulness’
From the index of an enigma to dreaming, we are led at all times by an experience of anxiety that reveals to us a series of gaps that cannot be filled with recourse to a topographical model of unconsciousness. Phenomenology alone confirms this. We take the haziness that surrounds anxiety – its quality as being dreamlike – seriously. The haziness is available to us in experience, and the dream that accompanies anxiety is far from a whimsical retreat into a Bachelardian state of reverie. When located on the verge of a perilous drop, trapped beneath the ground or lost at sea, anxiety takes root as a bodily experience. But this bodily anguish is also an experience of one’s sense of self falling apart. We have seen throughout this book, both in case studies and in first-person experience, that those who are subject to anxiety are especially vulnerable to the ontological disorientation that comes with this haziness. At the heart of this disorientation is the brief encounter with the impersonal infrastructure of existence, and it is a level of experience that is interwoven in our bodies, in our relation with others, and in our rapport with the home.
As these clear and distinct sensations unfold for us, a joint sense of not being present to oneself emerges. We treat this experience as having both a phenomenological and non-phenomenological dimension, having both a translucent and opaque side. We find, moreover, that the strangeness accompanying anxiety not only resembles the state of hypnagogic dreaming, but in fact is structurally parallel in a quite specific sense to the brief moments we wake from sleeping. There is an inherent haziness to be found in anxiety, whereupon the hypnagogic structure of the experience spills over the supposed gap between reality and appearance, and between dream and wakefulness. The subject of dreaming and anxiety is pacified and instituted at once, and what is carried through in the dream is not an invasion from the outside, but an intensification of what was already there. ‘At that moment’, so we read in a case study from 1887, ‘it seems to us that all of a sudden the surroundings become hazy, as something quite remote and of no concern at all … The impressions from the surroundings do not convey the familiar picture of everyday reality, instead they become dream-like or shadowy … as if seen through a veil’ (cited in Sierra 2012, 12). This osmotic haze is the space where dreaming and reality collapse into the same space, an impossible space previously denied by Freud in his quest for a sequential archaeology, and made flesh in the experience of anxiety.
Anxiety and dreaming are bound, then, in that both mark a ‘lowering of the barrier of the official personality’ (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 149). To embark on dreaming is not to be negated by the impersonality of the body, nor is it to be destroyed by anxiety. Rather, it is to be carried into the ‘oneirism of wakefulness’ that haunts both dreaming and anxiety at once (152). ‘Our waking relations with things’, so Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘and, above all, with others, have in principle an oneiric character: others are present to us as dreams, as myths, and that is enough to contest the cleavage between the real and the imaginary’ (206). The oneiric quality of existence accompanies us in waking life and need not announce itself in the form of anxiety. Throughout, there is an interweaving of distinctions; a life that is always exposed to the outside, a dream that infringes upon wakefulness, and a wakefulness that finds itself on the inside of a dream. If this ambiguity between states involves a certain pleasure, then it is a pleasure always rooted in anxiety. Thus, the ‘lowering of the barrier of the official personality’ finds root in both dreaming and anxiety. Where dreaming is concerned, we are carried off into a world that is both close and distant to us at once. It is a world that remains on the periphery of our waking life, folding over into that life, while at times betraying the image we adhere to in non-dreaming existence. Anxiety, on the other hand, follows the logic of hypnagogic dreaming in its partial effacement of the personalized self, revealing therein another layer of existence that both constitutes and denies identity in the same turn. The specificity of anxiety in contrast to hypnagogia is that it takes as its point of departure a subject unable to endure ambiguity and uncertainty. To depart, as the anxious subject must do, from himself is, indeed, to occupy a dreamscape. For it is a realm in which the personal I – the official self – is no longer sovereign, but instead caught up in a semi-formless haze.
Let us pause at the intersection between dreaming and anxiety to ask what happens when we are awoken with a start. To be awoken is to be faced with something that contests our identity, a thing that is ordinarily masked in our self-mastery. Dreaming and anxiety merge, and consequently we return to life in order to salvage what risks being destroyed in the dream. But the terrors of the night are not those that are left behind, but instead become imprinted into our waking consciousness. In the gradual relief of the official personality, the ‘orthopaedic’ (to use Lacan’s terms) brace that holds the fragmented body together in an image of being a coherent whole is weakened. Consequently, the story told to oneself of who one is loses its conviction. What is provoked when the control of this desire is ‘overly manifested’ is, in Merleau-Ponty’s own words, ‘anxiety and reawakening’ (149. Emphasis added). As the dream begins, be it in a nocturnal context or in a daydream, the distinctions that keep the self at the door to the home are unclothed. Through this metamorphosis, the oneiric haze deforming boundaries is enacted as the primary mode of perception.
FIGURE C.2 Piton de la Fournaise, La Réunion.
Against the breach in a person’s official life, Merleau-Ponty is led to ask the same question we ask of the subject of anxiety, namely, ‘Where is the dream for the dreamer?’ (150). Of course, the dream is ‘there’ for the subject undergoing the dream. But as soon as the person enters the scene of the dream, so the dream dissolves. The same is true of the experience of anxiety. The subject is there, in the midst of anxiety, but at the same time, he himself as a centre of personalized existence is partly suspended. It is for this reason necessary to return to the scene of anxiety (even if that only means turning one’s head towards the place one has just left) in order to grasp what took place. And what took place did so on the edge between personal and impersonal existence, between dreaming and wakefulness. In hypnagogic dreaming, we open ourselves more fully to the level of impersonal existence that is for the most part masked by the primacy of the ego. The eclipse of the ego through the awakening of the impersonal side of existence forces us to live at the level of pure sensation, oneiric and unarticulated, silent and obscure, yet experienced from the perspective of the still functioning self. If dreaming affords us a dizzying fusion of pleasure and strangeness, then where anxiety alone is concerned, the lowering of the ego coexists with an impending sense of collapse. Here, any such pleasure in the adventure of (un)consciousness is augmented with a sense of being too close to the unfillable gap, which threatens to annihilate the sense of self, and thus underscores the realization that I am not me.
In this respect, both hypnagogia and anxiety mark a partial return to a body that is in some sense pre-human, emerging before the subject has crystallized as a person. If perception renews this pre-history as unfolding into the present, then there is also ‘that intemporal, that indestructible element in us’ which is not reducible to humanity and is conceivable only in terms of a ‘return to the unarticulated, the withdrawal to a global or pre-personal relation to the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1994, 71; Merleau-Ponty 2010, 206). In a final note from The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty reinstates the point that the subject of dreaming is not strictly me, insomuch as I take partial leave of myself upon dreaming: ‘The “subject” of dreaming (and of anguish, and of all life) is the one’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 263). The one is that level of existence we have been tracing, pursuing and haunting throughout our foray into the phenomenology of anxiety. On a phenomenological level, the one appears through its indirection as the body that dissents from my possession. It is the body that marks the point where the I comes into contact with its own otherness. The one is that which cannot be integrated into my image of myself as a self. It is the excess of the impersonal organism rendering itself visible in the gaps between what I am and what I take myself to be.
In the vivid moments prior to sleep and upon awakening, we experience that anxious space where the I catches sight of the anonymous one both appearing and receding into the twilight. For a brief second, the body becomes imageless, illuminating the brute and impersonal substructure that renders our world visible. To dream, to be anxious, we leave behind that part of ourselves that strives towards self-mastery and self-possession, finding within each mode of being a world that exceeds our grasp while also being the very ground from where we evolve. Insofar as anxiety gnaws at our lives without ever becoming a discrete object of perception, and that it constitutes our subjectivity without ever revealing itself directly in the flesh, then for all its corporeal weight, anxiety stands at the threshold of dreaming and waking, revealing a glimmer of the fundamental otherness that lies in the midst of being you.