Anxiety as vibration: in search of a creative clinic through anxiety

Minozzo, Ana Carolina (2021) Anxiety as vibration: in search of a creative clinic through anxiety. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This theoretical research addresses the limits of ‘being’ and ‘becomings’ in psychoanalytic praxis from the perspective of anxiety, arguing for a psycho-political intervention in the clinic. Combining medical humanities, art theory and psychosocial studies, I ask: What can anxiety do? Anxiety, for Lacan, is an affect that sits between desire and jouissance; it is an encounter with the Real that mobilises or squeezes the subject between a Symbolically-wrapped delineation of oneself, which hangs by a thread once the Imaginary fantasy of consistency fails, and the vastness and abyss that extends beyond oneself, the Real. Interestingly, anxiety is shunted out of the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) when the biologistic and pharmaceutical paradigms of psychiatry gain strength over psychoanalysis after the 1970s, only to return as a companion to a biomedicalised depression. The affect of anxiety is, thus, pathologised and locked into a state of estrangement, without, however, opening up to possible new ways of living, revealing a mode of affective alienation Deleuze (1992) calls a ‘dividualisation’. In this piece I explore the possibilities of an encounter with the Real as a sphere of excessive affect in psychoanalysis, calling this meeting a vibration. Anchoring my enquiry on the art practice of Lygia Clark, I utilise vibration as a conceptual artifice when thinking of affects beyond an Oedipal frame, beyond ego-to-ego relations and a short-circuit of individualised bodily jouissance. Or, as Clark named it, beyond the ‘Plane’ into where lies the ‘full-void’. I ask: What can psychoanalysis do that addresses the battles of psychic suffering and, at the same time, decentres the modern humanist subject, opening possibilities for the creation of new ways of living, of new worlds? Anxiety is the affect I work with in the search for a critique of the dividualising residues in psychoanalysis of the Freudian and Lacanian orientation, moving towards an entangled, situated and creative clinic, shifting from the paradigm of interpretation to that of co-poiesis.

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