ABSTRACT
This chapter develops directly out of agoraphobics' accounts of the initial panic attack(s) that seemed to presage the development of their condition. The agoraphobic thus comes to associate such spaces with feelings of panic and becomes anxious about the loss of control such spaces might induce, leading them to avoid them whenever possible. The chapter suggests that spaces of consumption are emblematic of what we might call 'agoraphobic landscapes', those arenas ostensibly 'productive', and subjectively representative of the most acute anxiety and ardent avoidance. Soren Kierkegaard invokes a spatial metonymies that echoes sufferer's accounts of agoraphobic anxiety. Kierkegaard's reference to the 'consumption of the self is doubly pertinent given agoraphobics' constant references to consumer spaces—shops, streets, supermarkets, and especially shopping malls—as sites associated with panic attacks. A great deal of energy, not to mention finance, is expended in attempts to pinpoint vulnerabilities to be exploited, and ways to elicit particular consumer responses.
