In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we turn toward the unsettling terrain of anxiety, not as a clinical symptom to be corrected, but as a fundamental mode of human existence. Drawing from existential and phenomenological thinkers, we ask: what does anxiety reveal about our being in the world?

We begin with Heidegger’s notion of Angst, that strange and unsettling mood which exposes the raw fact of our thrownness into existence. From there, we enter the clinical space of Daseinsanalysis, where Ludwig Binswanger’s analysis of Ellen West offers a haunting portrayal of a person whose entire world—bodily, social, temporal—has collapsed under the weight of unbearable freedom.

But anxiety does not only speak in words. It shakes the body and preempts language. With Julia Kristeva, we explore the bodily reaction of abjection, the nauseating boundary-collapse between self and other, subject and object—where anxiety takes on a visceral, almost pre-symbolic intensity.

This is not an episode about overcoming anxiety—but about encountering it as a revelatory mood: one that speaks to our vulnerability, our potential, and our longing to make meaning where none is guaranteed.