A Reading of Anxiety follows the sessions of Lacan’s Seminar X, examining its presentation of the structure of anxiety, step by step.

Christian Fierens considers why and how the structure of anxiety always depends on speech even if it remains on the threshold between the symbolic and the real and explains that there is a genuine connection between anxiety and the Lacanian object a which puts in doubt the obviousness of any object. The book then explores the importance of anxiety for the practice of the analyst, determines that the object a is fundamentally void and discusses encountering nothingness. Finally, Fierens establishes that this nothingness inside the object and inside anxiety leads to the truth of anxiety.

A Reading of Anxiety will be an essential book for students as well as clinicians to find a practical way to cope with anxiety as a clinical approach to the real in psychoanalysis. It will be relevant to all readers interested in the work of Lacan.

Christian Fierens is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist based in Belgium. He holds a PhD on psychosis in Freud’s work and has published several books on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, including The Soul of Narcissism and The Jouissance Principle, both published by Routledge.