Throughout their teachings, both Freud and Lacan approached anxiety as a privileged affect in human experience. Freud developed two distinct and apparently contradictory theories on anxiety. From the very beginning, he linked its emergence to the question of sexuality. Lacan, in turn, devoted an entire Seminar to it, in the early 60s. He affirmed, contrary to existing definitions, that anxiety "is not without an object". He added that it is "the only affect which does not deceive".

These different approaches to anxiety allow for different ways of linking it with desire, the symptom, and the real. How to recognize anxiety? How to treat it?
This seminar will introduce the psychoanalytic theorization of anxiety in various moments of Freud's and Lacan's works, and their clinical implications.


Florencia F.C. Shanahan is a Psychoanalyst and Senior Clinical Psychologist in Dublin. Member of ICLO (Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation), the NLS (New Lacanian School) and the WAP (World Association of Psychoanalysis), and Analyst of the School One (AS - 2019/2022). She is the current editor of The Lacanian Review Online.