ABSTRACT
My interest in annihilation anxieties (AA) goes back to a 1980 clinical observation that recalcitrant symptoms in more disturbed patients are often underlaid by defended anxieties concerning annihilation and threats to survival. Analytic scrutiny revealed that these anxieties included apprehensions of being overwhelmed, dissolved, invaded, or going insane. In addition to constructing a research instrument to measure the extent of these anxieties in clinical populations (Benveniste, Papouchis, Allen & Hurvich, 1998; Hurvich, 1989; Hurvich, Benveniste, Howard & Coonerty, 1993; Hurvich & Simha Alpern, 1997; Hurvich, Allen, & Mcguire, 2006a; Levin & Hurvich, 1995), I embarked on an intensive study of the psychoanalytic literature that revealed a consequential incongruity concerning annihilation fantasies and anxieties (Hurvich, 2003). On the one hand, there were hundreds of references to the correlates of survival-related apprehensions. On the other, formulations of such anxieties tended to be relatively undeveloped, and accorded little conceptual status in standard current mainstream theoretical works. Recent compendia of psychoanalytic theory and practice (Goldberger, 1996; Gray, 1994; Moore & Fine, 1995; Nersessian & Kopff, 1996; Person, Cooper & Gabbard, 2005) 66rarely mention these phenomena, or refer to them only in passing. I concluded that an important set of anxiety contents and experiences were either being overlooked or remained undeveloped in serious mainstream theorizing. Although these compendia did deal with psychic trauma, a closely related concept, they neither related psychic trauma to the psychoanalytic theory of anxiety nor reached any kind of consensus regarding its definition. Exceptions include the work of Krystal (1968, 1988) on Massive Psychic Trauma and volumes edited by Furst (1967), and Rothstein (1986), among others. A recent statement by Andre Green (2006) is congruent with my observation that there has been a failure to develop the implications of annihilation anxieties. Green wrote that issues such as fears of annihilation, primitive agonies and nameless dread are mentioned “in relation to theory with regard to a hypothetical appearance during the childhood of patients, but their clinical description in the adult has been given little detailed attention in clinical psychoanalysis” (p. 42, italics added).
