Anxiety, Freedom, and the Work of Being Human

New York City, late 1960s. On an upper floor of a modest Manhattan office building, a man in his late fifties sits across from a young advertising executive who cannot stop shaking his leg. Traffic murmurs far below; steam hisses in the radiators; the office is quiet enough that the ticking of a clock punctuates every silence. The patient has just finished describing a familiar, hollow ritual: wake before dawn, skim headlines, catch the train, sell images of products he doesn’t believe in, drink too much in the evening, lie awake wondering why he is so afraid when “nothing is really wrong.”

The therapist—broad-shouldered, with a heavy brow and searching eyes—does not immediately ask about childhood traumas or offer a diagnosis. Instead he leans forward and asks, almost conversationally, “What is it, exactly, that you are afraid will happen if you stop?” The question is simple, but the air changes. The young man hesitates. He is afraid, he realizes, of discovering that beneath the motion there is nothing solid, that without his job and the busyness and the noise he will be exposed as a fraud. The fear is not of losing money or status; it is of finding no answer to the question, “Who am I?” That, the therapist suggests, is not a problem to be medicated away. It is an existential anxiety—a signal that something essential in his way of living has become false.

This is the terrain in which Rollo

Niklas Osterman BHPRN, MA