Dialogue on Anxiety
Characters :
Heidegger
Freud
WILLIAM BARRETT
(NoTE:
I do not claim to speak with the accents of these fa–
mous men, nor even necessarily to represent their doctrines faithfully
in ev·ery detail; I only want to put forward two different currents of
ideas that flow more or less centrally about these names, without per–
haps ((giving the right" to either. The dialogue is a form for airing
different sides of a complex subject,
sans en conclure.
This is the art
of being systematically inconclusive-a very profitable one intellec–
tually, discovered by Plato in his early dialogues, but which nowadays
we ought to practice in more thoroughgoing, less unilinear, fashion
than he-that has nothing to do with the business of trying to play
the mediator. The mediator who invites two people of different per–
suasions to his house may end by getting his furniture smashed.
Unjust? Well, perhaps it is only his punishment for being too eager
to draw a conclusion . )
H: It is now the Age of Anxiety, I have read somewhere. We
two seem to have become its spokesmen. Perhaps it ought to be called
the Age of Insomnia. I have constructed, so to speak, the Metaphysics
of Insomnia. Are we to be congratulated? vVe seem to have put
something on the map.
F: Excuse me, I put nothing on the map, I only found what
had always been there : the burdens, tensions, and repressions. Per–
haps the burden
is
heavier now; only in that sense would I admit to
being a spokesman for the
Zeitgeist.
Religion, for one thing, is no
longer a universal recourse. In my writing on the subject of religion
I think I did not do justice to its remarkable aspect of sublimation.
There is no doubt that in the past religion provided many individuals
with an extraordinary power to sublimate.
H: The burdens are in every way heavier. Hegel drew the
