ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis came under the attention of many Jewish thinkers who, despite all the disparities of their positions, ended up with a similar conclusion, differing only in the finality of their verdict. They all, rather unanimously, tend to perceive psychoanalysis as essentially non-Jewish, because immersed in the tragic paradigm which closes the life of the individual in the past-oriented, cyclical and fatalistic eternal return of the same and, as such, offers no future and no hope. Freud, in his tragic register, gives anxiety a special status within human psyche, by saying, in the Kantian manner, that it constantly accompanies every conscious representation. In Freud's account, anxiety functions as a manifestation of "libidinal excess", i.e. an energetic surplus which characterizes human drives. Human being, this anxiety embodied, is thus the living truth of the created reality. The notion of creaturely anxiety constitutes the main theme of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the nature of modern melancholy.
