There is an old saying that goes something like this: “Which one of us if told that ‘everything has been revealed; you have been found out’ wouldn’t pack his/her bag and catch the first train out of town!” At some level, all is known by us. Furthermore, every salient feature about us is repeated again and again in our psyche. There is no way we can hide it, not can we be totally oblivious to the fact that other people see these features in us every day—in our behavior, in our expressed feelings, and regarding the decisions we make about interpersonal relationships. All of this relates, fundamentally, to a concept offered many years ago by Sigmund Freud—signal anxiety. (Freud, 1936/1990). While this concept was replaced years later by Freud in his own evolving concepts of anxiety, the original notion about signal anxiety remains relevant today—especially as we analyze the dynamics of Q2.
Signal Anxiety: in his own analysis, Freud (1936/1990, p. 60) begins by noting that anxiety is not the only unpleasant feeling that we experience—there is “tension, pain or mourning, grief.” The unique characteristic of anxiety is that it “is the reproduction of some experience which contained the necessary conditions for an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths, and that from this circumstance the unpleasure of anxiety received its specific character.” Thus, according to Freud, “anxiety arose originally as a reaction to a state of danger—and it is reproduced whenever a state of that kind recurs.” (Freud, 1936/1990, p. 60) Freud concludes that: “we cannot find that anxiety has any function other than that of being a signal for the avoidance of a danger-situation.” (Freud, 1936/1990, p. 64)
Freud’s signal anxiety seemed strange and mysterious at the time. After all, how can we know what we can’t know? Today it is less strange. Chaos theory and, in particular, the phenomenon called “fractals” offer an explanation. Patterns keep repeating themselves at all levels of a system. We have a hint of what is opaque (and frightening) because we see this same pattern repeated at a more conscious—and benign—level. We get a little fear from dropping when we ride a roller coaster. This ride gives us a sense of the big fright that would come from falling to our death. We get a taste of terror when we attend a scary movie. This movie briefly samples the profound feelings that would accompany real life fear associated with the experience of being attacked by a murderous villain or alien monster.
Clearly, we often become anxious in our relationships with other people, especially if the processes of disclosure and feedback are involved. This anxiety in turn serves as a signal that something threatening lies below the surface of this relationship—or something unpredictable or threatening is associated with the context in which this relationship is taking place. In essence, our “psyche” splashes our face (or guts) with painful anxiety to inform us that this relationship or context is to be avoided.
We also might use the metaphor of “inoculation” to describe the signaling properties of anxiety. Ernest Becker (1971, p. 43) uses this metaphor when discussing Freud’s notions about anxiety:
“Freud understood this process of the ego taking over anxiety as a sort of “vaccination” of the total organism. As the central perceptual sphere learns what the organism gets anxious about, it uses an awareness of this anxiousness in small doses, to regulate behavior. The growing identity “I” must feel comfortable in its world and the only way it can do this is experimentally to make the anxieties of its world its own.”
Signal anxiety doesn’t really hurt us (unless it is long-lasting), but it does wake us up. It lets us know that we need to be vigilant and careful not to proceed further toward the threatening interpersonal relationship or context—or any thoughts, feelings or memories associated with this relationship or context. The paradox is that at some level we are fully aware of the thing that threatens us—otherwise we wouldn’t splash ourselves with the noxious anxiety. We must know or even experience what is threatening to us to decide that we don’t want to know it or experience it. Furthermore, we often know (opaquely) more than we want to know. This knowledge powerfully influences our level of trust, our desire to be honest, and the ways in which we avoid disclosing to other people and avoid or misinterpret feedback from other people.
