Temporality and spatiality of anxious experience

Abstract

Since the first descriptions of anxiety, it has been related with temporality and in particular with the dimension of future. Thus, we already find anxiety defined as a general feeling of threatening (from the future) in the German mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1634). He also used the image of “the wheel of anxiety”, with which he refers to its probable origin in a conflict between two forces which tend to separate themselves and are not able to do it, as a result from this centrifugal rotation movement of a wheel. This image also has a temporal character. In Kierkegaard, we read that “anxiety is always related with the future… and when we are disturbed by the past we are basically projecting toward the future…” In Heidegger's masterpiece, “Being and Time”, there is a chapter dedicated to the temporality of Befindlichkeit, and in particular to anxiety. Fear and anxiety have their roots, according to Heidegger, in the past, but their relation with the future makes them different: anxiety arises from the future as possibility, while fear arises from the lost present. In this paper, we try to make a contribution to the phenomenology of temporality (and of spatiality) of anxiety in relation with the analysis of a concrete anxiety experience: flight phobia. The analysis allows us to show both the desolation and narrowing of anxiety space, and with respect to temporality, the disappearance of every plan (the future), of every history (the past), and the reduction of the present to a succession of mere punctualities, behind which there arises, threatening, the nothingness itself.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.