Situated anxiety

a phenomenology of agoraphobia

Dylan Trigg

pp. 187-201

in: Annika Schlitte, Thomas Hünefeldt (eds), Situatedness and place, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Anxiety is sometimes thought of as either a state of mind, lacking a thick spatial depth, or otherwise conceived as something that individuals undergo alone. Such presuppositions are evident both conceptually and clinically. In this paper, I present a contrasting account of anxiety as being a situated affect. I develop this claim by pursuing a phenomenological analysis of agoraphobia. Far from a disembodied, displaced, and solitary state of mind, agoraphobic is revealed as being thickly mediated by bodily, spatial, and intersubjective dimensions.