Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety

Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy – and phenomenology in particular – until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna. Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike. Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1. The Home at Night 2. Under the Skin 3. Two Ocular Globes 4. Lost in place 5. Through the Mirror Conclusion Index

About the Author :
Dylan Trigg is FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Review :
Topophobia is not only a vital resource for any foray into the meaning of the disquieting encounter with space, but it is furthermore a text that offers the potential for pathos and solace. Trigg's ability to bring together the philosophical, the filmic and the literary without trivialising ... makes him a writer of great importance not only to the phenomenological tradition but to contemporary thought more generally. Readers will be captivated by Dylan Trigg's penetrating insights into and eloquent accounts of his experience of anxiety. They lead him into strikingly new and important ideas for psychology and philosophy. Dylan Trigg's Topophobia puts you inside the phenomenology of place-related phobias, so that you can explore the modulations of such experiences as they unfold and twist themselves into an anxiety that is without boundaries. This is a true phenomenological study of how places appear cut up and displaced, how they are darkened and blindingly lit, how they overwhelm, grab you and close in, how one's body turns against itself, freezes, and starts to drift, and how others invade and obstruct one's intentions. Trigg also draws from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to map out a detailed landscape of anxiety, delivering a deep analysis of the interweaving of the conscious and the unconscious elements that constitute the phobias related to place. He shows us that anxiety and the self are always more than, and at the same time, less than personal. Topophilia, our love of place and our embeddedness in it and indebtedness to it, is not the only story to tell about place. In Topophobia, Dylan Trigg brilliantly shows that topophobia is woven through our experience of place, from its most intimate to its most public. He is equal parts Virgil and J. G. Ballard: he is our guide into the anxious, uncanny, nausea-inducing, claustrophobic, and agoraphobic places we are seduced by and condemned to live in, and he is the one who puts into words that which haunts us. But this is not an account of the macabre, nor is it a tour of the bleak spaces of post-industrial collapse. Trigg gives us a rigorous phenomenology of the gaps and fissures of everyday place, the anxieties and ambiguities of being a body that must at some level be committed to its places, and yet which does not always experience a similar commitment in return. This book should have a rightful place for anyone interested in phenomenology, place, and body.