The Place of Annihilation Anxieties in Psychoanalytic Theory

Abstract

Survival-related clinical reports are abundantly found in the works of classical, object-relational, and self psychological writers, but are underrepresented in major theoretical formulations on anxiety. Fears of being overwhelmed, merged, penetrated, fragmented, and destroyed, as contents of unconscious and conscious fantasies, are regularly interrelated with the typical dangers. Fifteen preliminary propositions invite closer study of such apprehensions and provide definitional components. Annihilation anxieties are triggered by survival threat; are found early but can be engendered throughout the life cycle; constitute a basic danger; are residuals of psychic trauma; have specifiable subdimensions; may occur in presymbolic form or be associated with fantasies in conflict/compromise formation; may arise with or without anticipation; may be accompanied by controlled or uncontrolled anxiety; are motives for defense; and may be associated with particularly recalcitrant resistances. The study of annihilation anxieties in relation to the basic danger series has both theoretical and clinical advantages, especially for understanding traumatic, anxiety, phobic, psychosomatic, addictive, narcissistic, borderline, and psychotic manifestations, as well as sexual problems (including perversions), nightmares, dissociative and panic states, and especially difficult resistances.

Dissociation, Traumatic Attachments, and Self-Harm: Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation

“…When the caretaker who is meant to protect the child preys upon him instead, this presents the child with the impossible dilemma of wanting to be comforted by the caretaker while being terrified of being annihilated by the caretaker. This annihilation anxiety (Hurvich 2003) causes the infant to freeze in a trance-like stillness, the beginning of a tendency toward dissociation (Perry et al 1995). The infant's dissociative processes seem linked to the caregivers' own unresolved traumas, losses, and dissociation interacting in a self-perpetuating loop with the ongoing dissociative processes in the infant's mind, creating a predisposition to respond to later life stressors with dissociation (Liotti 1995(Liotti , 2006LyonsRuth 2003).…”

More simply human: on the Universality of Madness

“…Some individuals do not simply worry that some disaster will occur if they fail to conduct their rituals, they know it. They cannot interrupt their compulsions to test their convictions, because even thinking about doing so invites annihilation anxiety (Hurvich, 2003). A patient of mine who has never had a "break" accounted for her tardiness one day by explaining she had gotten a late start boiling her sheets and towels.…”

Traumatic Subjective Experiences Invite Suicide

“…Freud never lost his interest in mental trauma, ultimately taking the view that when the mind is overwhelmed by affects breaking through mental structures inadequate for their regulation, annihilation experiences resulted. He compared these annihilation moments to childhood experiences of maternal abandonment, leading to the lasting mental injuries that underlie the "repetition compulsion" (Hurvich, 2003).…”