Working as an anxiety-focused therapist, one encounters much that is perplexing. There are the slippages and tensions that clients experience: between anxiety’s cognitive content and its emotional valences; between the neuro-sensory logic of anxious response and the overwhelming intensity of its occurrence; between anxiety as a mobilizing, meaningful concern and a debilitating or destructive anguish. Clients can find it difficult to gain purchase amidst these confusions, and this lack of footing itself often intensifies the anxiety—sometimes to the point of paralyzing despair.

One way to respond to this is to offer clarification, dispel ambiguity, and devise a treatment plan that stridently targets the presenting concerns. Such confidence may indeed sometimes be well-founded, and goes a long way to easing symptoms. Yet these reactions may themselves stem from a place of anxiety in the therapist, who pressures themselves to soothe quickly and guarantee solutions—perhaps in order to avoid the deeper recognition of anxiety’s confusing terrain.

It can thus be a powerful clinical wager (for client and therapist) to linger with the anxiety and see what one learns merely by noticing. The goal here is not primarily to relieve symptoms (nor even to decide whether they amount to an anxiety diagnosis), but to become acquainted with them and thereby less prone to be disturbed in their presence. This step, often practiced through explicit techniques of mindfulness or Focusing, can be a rich source of new framings: clients may find a clearer delineation of their concern, discover a broader context to their unease, or become more adept at recognizing the build-up of agitating sensations that usually bowls them over. In short, abiding with anxiety can allow some form of therapeutic self-understanding to unfold.

Bergo is motivated by a similar insight in Anxiety, though she applies it at a historical-conceptual level rather than a clinical one. The framing inquiry of the book is to ask what the concept of anxiety has to teach us, given its historical trajectory, regarding our contemporary politics and culture. For especially today, we risk being so inescapably steeped in anxiety that its pressures sweep us away or paralyze us. Here, too, there are nuances and ambiguities that deserve closer attention: an experience of anxious vigilance, for example, could reflect a laudable awareness of everything that is at stake in our world and thus worthy of defending—or it might mark a frightening susceptibility to panicked delusions that spin all too easily into scapegoating and violence.

In light of such disparate possibilities, Bergo urges us to dwell with anxiety and gain some understanding of it before we rush to condemn or embrace (or diagnose and perhaps medicate) it. Part of such understanding, in her view, involves grasping anxiety “in the depth of its historical and philosophical unfolding,” including the varying “meaning and roles” it has carried, and how these variations contribute to our current confusions.Footnote 1 It is this history, especially the post-Kantian strands of it, that she intends to trace in her book.

Despite its unassuming title, this volume is not as straightforward nor delimited a study as one might think. It presents (and meets) many of the hermeneutic challenges that have come to be associated with the notion of writing a “history of x,” including the elusiveness of the phenomenon and the historiographer’s situatedness. For the anxiety under scrutiny here is not a singular topic or diagnostic category. It is instead quite “multidimensional” and “polymorphous,” showing up variously as an experience of abyss, alterity, angst, anguish, concern, despair, enthusiasm, fear, force, longing, nausea, repression, resentment, sin, striving, and urgency.Footnote 2 Some consider it a temporary disturbance, while others accord it a permanent (if hidden) structural role. Anxiety also straddles a fraught philosophical dichotomy, being described as both sensation (a bodily event) and emotion (something in conscious awareness). Given the range of these registers, it is perhaps clear why there has not heretofore been a focused or sustained conversation among European thinkers around this theme. Anxiety’s facets instead show themselves, however obliquely, in philosophical and scientific treatments of culture, embodiment, ethics, expression, freedom, instinct, life, method, nature, neurosis, subjectivity, and time.

With a topic this amorphous and elusive, rendering an exhaustive or unifying account in the mode of problem-history would be disingenuous. It may be just as problematic to tell a story about conceptual fragments that, however disconnected in the past, can now be assembled from a purportedly settled standpoint. Yet one can make the elusiveness and unsettledness part of the story, and this is exactly the course Bergo charts. While confident in the glimpses she is tracing, and making overt influences quite clear where they exist, she readily admits that her “narrative threads interweave without forming a single cord,” and that hers is an incomplete story without “an overarching ‘lesson’ to be gleaned.”Footnote 3 This leaves us with more than a mere patchwork of views, however. Bergo’s efforts to locate anxiety’s meaning across multiplicity are tedious yet rewarding. Eschewing a dense narrative of continuity allows for proximities, intimations, and gaps to resonate and play. We are left less with a tight conceptual genealogy of anxiety than with enticing indications of its “overdetermined” texture—and finally, of its role as an under-recognized yet formative current within recent European discourse.Footnote 4

The thinkers from this discourse that Bergo has chosen to interrogate and interweave will be familiar to most readers: the book’s chapters respectively cover Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger (who gets two chapters), and Levinas, with interspersed excursions into Hegel and Pinel, Darwin, and Husserl. Each of these chapters explores the way in which some aspect or framing of anxiety, from the barest allusion to full-on thematization, is woven into the texture and topics of disciplines of the mind. What gradually emerges is a widening understanding of the mind itself.

We learn, for instance, that Hegel drew on the French psychiatrist Pinel—specifically the notion of an “indestructible kernel of rationality” in all derangements—to oppose Kant’s rational psychology and underscore the relevance of affect in our understanding of consciousness as universal.Footnote 5 Schopenhauer also gets more credit than usual, with the recognition that he sets anxiety “at the heart of the first wave of post-Kantian philosophy.”Footnote 6 A surprising connection to the book’s social-cultural frame lies in Bergo’s treatment of Darwin, sentiment, and sympathy. Far less surprising, given her role as a trustworthy scholar of Levinas, is her lucid and synthetic engagement with his oeuvre—in particular his “locating the enactment of responsibility in the intersubjective flesh,” which Bergo has helpfully unpacked as an anxious “tremulousness between precognitive and cognitive processes.”Footnote 7 Gradually attuning us to this swaying edge turns out to be a major point of Bergo’s historical approach.

In their mode and depth of interpretation, many of Bergo’s chapters could stand on their own as close readings of key texts. These are fresh and lively discussions, though it bears stating that their richness owes much to Bergo’s synthesizing and extending the scholarly discourse on each thinker. This is therefore decidedly not an expository or survey work, and a reader’s orientation within it will correlate strongly with their background expertise or willingness to delve into the extensive array of sources. As long as one is able to follow Bergo’s threads, though, what stands out is her capacity to inflect familiar material with uncanny resonances, without much editorial prodding. The Nietzsche we encounter here, for example, is one concerned with “two pairs of anxiety”: embodied pathos and reactive resentment, as well as mourning the death of God and rendering it the “ultimate transvaluation” through eternal recurrence.Footnote 8 The result is a demystified, non-reductive picture of Nietzsche that is theologically unavoidable and plausibly resonant with current conceptions of emergent consciousness. Later in the book, it is refreshing to see Husserl’s work on time consciousness and passive synthesis described so clearly and with such a suggestive eye toward the theme of affect. In Bergo’s account, we get a convincing sense both of his setting a “new formal groundwork for psychology,” and of his role as a target for subsequent deformalizing dismantlings.Footnote 9

One can certainly quibble with Bergo’s historical scope and thematic selections: Why start with Kant? Why only four pages on Merleau-Ponty? Could one trace more recent threads than Levinas? Given the framing concern of the book, one might also wonder whether a less figure-centered approach could have resulted in a tighter cultural or conceptual narrative. Yet part of what Bergo manages to underscore with her story is just how much there still is to unpack here: Have we fully appreciated Darwin’s actual line of research? Have we thought through what Nietzsche meant by “interpretive forces”? Are we satisfied with the blind spots of existentialism and phenomenology? One will certainly come away from this book inspired to explore more recent philosophical work on anxiety, but one may also find oneself wanting—even needing—to revisit some of one’s most cherished texts and ideas.

Given the spareness of narrative scaffolding between chapters, the book’s broader trajectory really comes into view through an almost atmospheric effect of each cumulative insight. As Bergo traces the many branchings of thought, the reader begins to grasp the understated significance of what she is drawing together: these are thematic undercurrents of affect, pervading some of the densest conceptual nodes of European thought, and yet often elusive to the very thinkers who are swept up in them. The waves of deformalization that Bergo has accounted for are thus not interesting solely for their conceptual results, but for the embodied intuitions that they convey: namely, that there is much more to be conceptualized in the pre-reflective, that anxiety may just prove to be the “fundamental affect,” a “basic state of the body-mind.”Footnote 10 To articulate anxiety with any clarity, then, requires an account of that hyphenated conjunct, and this will likely entail drastically revising our inherited frameworks of what we are.

This conclusion in turn serves to justify Bergo’s hermeneutic approach itself. A history is also always about the present in which it is written, and the widest thrust of Bergo’s book may be that anxiety, like “body-mind,” is a concept still undergoing formation—with all of the uneasy aporiae that go along with this. In charting the many modes in which thinkers have approached anxiety, and noting how much was left either unnoticed, disconnected, or avoided, she is not proudly waving a bull’s eye that they have allegedly missed. Instead, she recognizes us as being similarly indisposed. Though not announcing it loudly, her book challenges any notion that we have “cracked the code” of anxiety—be it through neuroscience, phenomenological reduction, or psychoanalysis. In everyday experience, we seem rather to encounter both its crucial centrality to our pre-reflective being (what Bergo terms our “livingness”) and the decentering difficulty of bringing this to language in ways that also capture its more intentional or existential meaning to us.

Bergo cautions against bridging these aspects overhastily and without remainder—recall the “tremulousness” she finds so insightful in Levinas. To grasp anxiety more adequately, both as concept and as cultural-political force, seems to require a capacity to abide with this fluctuating ambiguity at the core of our being. The wager here, as in therapy, is not that understanding will erase anxiety, but that getting to know anxiety also means facing ourselves more squarely, resulting perhaps in an ironic stance that provides distance and opens more affective possibilities. Part of our contemporary struggle, it seems, lies in the simultaneous recognition of this need and refusal of its risk.