Premium
Anxiety, Symptoms and Containment: A Tale of Two Situations
Author(s) -
Bishop Bernardine
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
british journal of psychotherapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.442
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1752-0118
pISSN - 0265-9883
DOI - 10.1111/bjp.12069
Subject(s) - anxiety , psychology , personality , pathological , identity (music) , character (mathematics) , addiction , psychoanalysis , clinical psychology , social psychology , psychiatry , medicine , geometry , mathematics , pathology , physics , acoustics
In this paper the author considers the relationship between anxiety, symptoms and containment. She notes that the securest of us feel what we can call mature anxiety. Physically, it is different from immature, pathological anxiety where development of a part or parts of the self has been arrested. Immature, pathological anxiety, which is encountered and treated in the consulting room, brings with it the bodily upset that is seen in anxiety. In the author's experience what we struggle with nowadays is far more likely to be variants of what we have come rather vaguely to call personality disorder. In this situation the anxiety, though intense, is diffused through the self, finding its fateful and addictive manifestations in relationships and their failure, identity problems, inability to work and the sequelae of that, pathological indecision, rage and a general, miserable dissatisfaction with life and what it offers. But anxiety remains central all the time. To provide a frame for some of these thoughts, the author considers D ickens's A T ale of T wo C ities . The character of D r M anette provides an example of the symptomatic personality, and the character of S idney C arton of the much more modern, personality‐disordered individual.