On Agoraphobia by Graham Caveney

Author:Graham Caveney [Caveney, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2022-03-28T17:00:00+00:00

Couch

‘Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available.’

Wilfred Bion, Cogitations

Freud never met David, although he might well have been describing him when he wrote: ‘The agoraphobic patient imposes a restriction on [the] ego so as to escape a certain instinctual danger – namely, the danger of giving way to his erotic desires . . . I may cite as an instance the case of a young man who became agoraphobic because he was afraid of yielding to the solicitations of prostitutes . . . The phobia of being alone is unambiguous in its meaning: it is, ultimately, an endeavour to avoid the temptation to indulge in solitary masturbation.’

If, for the nineteenth century, agoraphobia was a symptom of modern urbanity, Freud’s intervention was to re-describe it in terms of psychic displacement. He viewed the phobic scene – buildings, streets and plazas – as symbolic of repressed fears and desires. It is not the empty environment from which we recoil, but ourselves – or rather those parts of ourselves which lie buried, hidden, and which we transfer onto the objects and spaces around us. ‘In the case of phobias one can see clearly how this internal danger is transformed into an external one,’ he wrote: ‘The agoraphobic is always afraid of his impulses in connection with temptations aroused in him by meeting people on the street . . . In his phobia he makes a displacement and is now afraid of an external situation.’

A phobia is a drama in which our unconscious gets brought to life.

There are theories that Freud himself was agoraphobic. In The Search Within, Theodor Reik, fellow analyst and disciple of Freud’s, recalls walking with him in their native Vienna: ‘We crossed a street that had heavy traffic, Freud hesitated as if he did not want to cross. I attributed the hesitancy to the caution of the old man, but to my astonishment he took my arm and said, “You see, there is a survival of my old agoraphobia, which troubled me much in younger years.”’

Freud the agoraphobic. It’s a tantalising admission; it does not feature prominently in our collective portrait of the man. Does it discredit his readings of agoraphobia, or validate them?

It was in an essay of 1897 that Freud made his most controversial claim about the condition. ‘Agoraphobia seems to depend on a romance of prostitution,’ he wrote in ‘The Architecture of Hysteria’, ‘a woman who will not go out by herself asserts her mother’s unfaithfulness.’

Fear of the streets is a fear of the kind of woman she might become on the streets, the promise and the threat of her own sexuality.

Streets represent the opportunity for illicit encounters, for the woman to become the prostitute she both envies and fears. Streets produce street-walkers.

Freud’s diagnosis may sound jarring today. Yet, for better or worse – for better and worse – his impact on our understanding of agoraphobia is with us still. We may no longer be Freudians but we accept that people have a past, and that their past stays with them.

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