Anxiety, it appears, is the ego’s negative correlate—in acquiring an ego we get anxiety into the bargain. The ego which comes into being only as it sets itself apart from its outside—according to Freud its inner and outer outsides—maintains itself, by necessity, at the price of the anxiety that this separation/connection could break down. There is always the danger that what is ‘other’ to it might become too much—or too little. This is the constitutional weakness of the ego as identified by Freud. A breach of the ‘protective shield’, or its surrender, leads to the annihilation of individual life either physically or psychically; its excessive warding off of the outside leads to starvation and maddening loneliness. These are the ultimate dangers Freud points to as the ego’s Weltuntergang. The ego tries to find an accommodation—a place it can inhabit—whilst being pulled in opposing directions between the promises of immunity on the one hand and drift, or love, on the other. To avoid the anxiety this tension tends to engender is to become ill, or to go mad.
Kafka’s texts do not provide answers to the problem of anxiety— no-one reads him for reassurance, for good reasons. If anything, he opens up the experience of anxiety, and keeps it from closing down defensively. If he feels trapped inside it as in a prison he will not seek to escape it, though he knows the doors are open; indeed, his conviction that any such attempt is to no avail safeguards this impossibility. He did, after all, suspect that his anxiety belonged to what was most valuable about him.
It is as if he felt that had he succeeded in overcoming it he would have failed in other, more important ways. He certainly would not have been ‘Kafka’.
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