ABSTRACT
While he developed the theory of the unconscious and elucidated phobic phenomena, Sigmund Freud was modifying his anxiety theory with it as shown in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. He was distinguishing anxiety provoked by a traumatic situation from an anxiety signal which alerts the subject to the virtually traumatic feature of a situation. Starting from there, Freud differentiates real anxiety when faced with an outside threat from neurotic anxiety, when the threat comes from the unconscious. The anxiety is felt in the experience of the big Other’s supposed demand. This demand anguishes him because it makes him imagine the demanded object when he should be renouncing it. The solution to neurotic anxiety is to move to desire, to give up this narcissistic identification with the missing object of the parental Other, in order to desire what it lacks in the symbolic sense, once the supposed parental big Other has been decompleted.
