Dal dominio della paura al potere dell’angoscia nei processi integrativi: Angoscia come “sentimento presente”

Abstract

Through a clinical vignette, the Author talks about contemporary clinical practice, where we encounter individuals who communicate their detachment, at times even total, from their feelings and fears. They seem incapable of getting in touch with their own existential dimension, wilfully committed as they are to avoid experiencing the inevitable angst that many internal and external situations engender during one’s complicated journey through life. What we are witnessing here is basically the dissociation of the angst-producing feeling, which appears and is revealed to the clinician, through either detachment or a simple action. In any case, this feeling that generates both detachment and its opposite – for instance, a hypomanic reaction – proves to be “absent”, and is not perceived by the patient. In this way, angst can be avoided and indeed seem “absent”, but what is experienced is the complete range of raw emotions connected to it, like fear, terror, panic, detachment, apathy, anhedonia, etc.