Anguish in “panic disorder”: a provisional exit out of the capitalist discourse
Anguish; Panic disorder; Psychoanalysis; Capitalist discourse; Jacques Lacan
The increase in cases diagnosed as panic disorder has driven many people to emergency services. The disorder is considered to be one of the most prevalent causes of absence from work in today's Brazil. After excluding the possibility of a heart attack, medical practitioners usually declare that the patient has no issues, then prescribe anxiolytics and / or antidepressants, and attribute the cause to neurochemical changes. Unlike medicine, psychoanalysis does not take this manifestation of anguish as unfounded, but as an indication that there is something to be heard. Another difference concerns the concept of healing. In medicine, diagnosis depends on the idea of disease or otherwise on the evidence of the existence of disease, which must be indexed at the time of diagnosis and eliminated in the healing process for sake of the individual's well-being – without necessarily relating the diagnosis to its history or its insertion within culture. For psychoanalysis, the subject's discontent is always related to culture and historical time. Healing is additive and implies a transformation in the subject's position in relation to their history, and it is represented by speaking-well about what causes suffering. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the presence of anguish in the so-called panic disorder. The question that guides the investigation is: what would be the relationship between that anguish and the capitalist discourse in contemporary times? The hypothesis can be formulated as follows: the manifestation of anguish that presents itself in the so-called panic disorder can be considered an effort to call a halt, cutting the excess produced by capitalist discourse. In general, patients who come to psychoanalysis after having been diagnosed with panic disorder are aware of the presence of something excessive in their lives and seek to build limits to this excess. Considering that the capitalist discourse, as presented by Lacan, convokes the subject to an uninterrupted metonymic sliding, the manifestation of anguish as presented in the diagnosis of panic disorder, more than being a pathology (as medicine insists), can be understood as a provisional exit out, a refusal to be engulfed by contemporary acceleration, in which he/she find him/herself entangled.