Anxiety – Borderlines in/of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

From his earliest writings until into his old age, Freud was constantly occupied with the problem of fear. First, he tried to integrate fear as the recurrence of repressed memories into his framework. Subsequently to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he revised his approach to fear which, then, he defined as a reaction of the self to a danger. However, if fear is no longer understood as a consequence, but rather as a cause of repression, then fear appears as an uncanny "boundary creature" ("Grenzwesen", Freud) of psychoanalytic theory: intimate, though still alien in its intimacy.