The age of anxiety
In The Age of Anxiety: a Baroque Eclogue, published in 1947, W.H. Auden wrote:
‘We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.’¹
Written in the shadow of the Second World War, these lines speak directly to the devastation of that time. Yet they also carry a resonance that extends far beyond their historical moment. They echo into the present, capturing not only the ideological, political, religious, ecological and internecine conflicts that shape our world today, but also something more intimate: the everyday neuroses that can hold us in place, preventing us from changing in ways that might allow us to live more fully.
This is the paradox at the heart of therapeutic work – and one we encounter within ourselves as much as in our clients. On a conscious, rational level, we may say that we want change. Yet on another, largely unconscious level, our defences work quietly and persistently to maintain the status quo. Even when that status quo is painful, even when – echoing Auden – we remain caught in a state of dread that can feel both psychically and, at times, physically limiting.
Thomas Merton captures this dynamic with clarity in The Seven Storey Mountain: ‘The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.’²
Anxiety itself reflects this tension. Derived from the Latin angor and ango – to constrict³ – it is both a natural response to distress and an experience that can, at times, feel suffocating. It can narrow our sense of possibility, tightening its grip in ways that inhibit us from engaging fully with life.
To change, then, is not to eliminate suffering, but to alter our relationship to it. Life will inevitably bring difficulty – its share of slings and arrows – but the stance we take toward that experience shapes what becomes possible. Change asks something of us: that we tolerate uncertainty, that we relinquish old certainties, and that we allow familiar illusions to fall away.
Among the most persistent of these illusions is the belief that what is familiar is therefore safer – even when it causes us harm. It is a belief that surfaces again and again in the consulting room, and one that is equally recognisable in our own lives.
C.S. Lewis expresses the wider truth succinctly: ‘Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.’⁴
References
1. Auden WH. The age of anxiety: a Baroque eclogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2011.
2. Merton T. The seven storey mountain: an autobiography of faith. San Francisco, CA: HarperOne; 1999.
3. Latin Dictionary. Latin definition for: ango, angere, anxi, anctus. https://tinyurl.com/3jsm735u (accessed 18 November 2023).
4. Lewis CS. The problem of pain. Francisco, CA: HarperOne; 1999.
This is an edited extract from an editorial first published in Private Practice, December 2023, published by BACP©