On the ideality of no anxiety

12 giugno 2026 – IPRS Roma, Istituto Elvio Fachinelli

My reflections here come out of my analytic practice in New York, which has become increasingly centered on young adults. I would like to draw on case material from a young female patient, whom I name Kate, whose presentation illuminates a difficulty that has grown more visible in my practice: the fragile, often elusive emergence of transference. I find myself asking whether this difficulty speaks to something larger in the cultural landscape, an emerging ideal of psychic life shaped by the relentless pursuit of anxiety’s eradication, as though the mind were meant to exist untouched by disturbance, sealed against unease.

By difficulty in establishing transference, I do not simply mean resistance before analytic work. I mean something more structural: the analyst being increasingly not placed in the position of the subject supposed to know, the one presumed to know something of the patient’s unconscious desire but rather as one among multiple other practitioners, life coaches, prescribers, and wellness providers, and even more dramatically, iPhone therapy apps, as one more agent of relief. As such, the demand addressed to the analyst is not to sustain a space in which free association, conflict and desire may emerge, but to alleviate existential angst as quickly and completely as possible.

This demand for relief, I suggest, is not without cost. When anxiety is no longer received as a signal and an invitation to an unexpected emergence that gestures toward what lies beyond the subject’s grasp, yet carries profound subjective meaning, but is instead treated as an intolerable intrusion upon the ego’s narcissism to be eliminated, something essential is placed at risk. Memory, desire, and the very tension that makes analytic work possible all begin to erode under the pressure to be rid of unease. […]

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