Contemporary suffering and anxiety disorders: a psychoanalytic analysis of the rise of this diagnostic category and its relationship with current cultural aspects.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore, using a psychoanalytical reading, how some contemporary categorizations of suffering, centered around the psychodiagnosis of so-called anxiety disorders. Freud problematizes, through his concept of discomfort in civilization, how the form of becoming ill and suffering psychically is intrinsically related to the structural organizations of the culture in which the individual is inserted. In this sense, using a bibliographic review methodology, this article focuses on searching for notions of subjective and cultural character in today’s society that dialogue with the pragmatic nosology of anxiety disorders. Based on the categorization proposed by Birman, which divides the modalities of contemporary suffering into three registers (the body, the excess and the intensity), we relate and deepen, with Freud, Birman and Han, with other authors in complement, how these registers relate to panic, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders. The relationship was established mainly on the basis of a way in which anxiety manifested in contemporary times is expressed in ways that go beyond the classic models of transference neuroses, related to castration anguish.

Keywords: Anxiety disorders. Contemporary psychoanalysis. Suffering in culture.