The Location of Anxiety

Abstract

This paper offers an alternative to the Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of anxiety by tracing a middle ground between their accounts of signification and object-attachment. Both psychoanalysts work with a limited understanding of the cognitive complexity which underlies infants’ expressive behaviors during the pre-Oedipal stage as well as the dynamics influencing the development of the ability to know other minds. After analyzing anxiety as both a concept and operative affect in Freud and Lacan, this paper turns to the folk psychology notion of the theory of mind and a specific experiment called the false belief task to show how psychoanalysis might rethink the encroachment of the symbolic in view of the more complex cognitive developmental dynamics. Rather than framing the onset of the symbolic order as a swift entry into language, this paper proposes rethinking it as a process with a longer temporality and a more complex set of expressive behaviors (language, gesture, embodied expression).