Anxiety of children in the context of the present time In psychotherapy practices and in pedagogical-psychological counseling centers, one can observe a phenomenon that is highly likely (to a high degree) a logical symptom of the time in which families currently live their everyday life and in which the youngest generation grows up.
The increasing number of children who are troubled by anxiety and fear to an excessive degree is a warning signal not only for their parents and close ones, but for society as a whole. In an elevated intensity, these two emotions represent distress for the child and an obstacle to their favorable personal development, preventing them from fully realizing their life movement in authenticity—existence—and, in the context of temporality, creating in a certain sense a predisposing complexity for future time.
There are many reasons for the feeling of threat today. In the foreground is the family, as a specific place where a child, by its coming into the world, is ascribed and where it naturally belongs. The family is the site of the primary human experience with irreplaceable significance across the whole of life. Besides ensuring physical, psychological, and social needs, it is also the place that in an ontological context means the possibility and experience of acceptance in the sense of “communio” (community, mutual receiving). This phenomenon of home cannot be understood only ontically (objectively)—through a particular house, apartment, or possessions as such. In order to be able to experience acceptance, kindness, and acknowledgment, a person needs a home as relationality with close ones, needs acceptance in its authentic givenness, and also needs affirmation of its originality, all in the so-called ontological plane of existence. In the family, it is not just a simple atmosphere of independent people meeting; it is a sensitive, responsive emotional system, however, without structural grounding.
In the claim of ontological understanding appears the problem of the Cartesian2 demand for “clare et distincte” (clear and distinct) and the background that allows emergence. The forces of the emotional field are technically immeasurable; they reveal themselves in the specific emotional experiences of individual members of this system. Each present person emotionally experiences what is immediately present in their own way, all within insertion into temporality—interconnected past, present, and future. When a sensitive topic is addressed, the atmosphere changes abruptly, and just at that moment one can glimpse the tuning of the entire non-structural schema.
The emotional field is an answer to background-level questions, which is ontologically essential for all showing, for all phenomenologizing of human existence not only in this family system but for the complexity of life on planet Earth. The background is the essence of being in the present age, and if we want to meaningfully ask and find causes of anxiety and fear in a child, then beyond objectification, measurement, and subsequent methodological processing, one must allow what truthfully emerges and grasp the truth in the sense of aletheia (truth emerging from concealment into unconcealment)3. A Cartesian approach to effective intervention is insufficient and does not open a path toward otherness in the intractable condition of a child to whom anxiety and excessive fear significantly narrow life possibilities.
The claim extends not only to psychologists, but also to educators and other helping professions close to a child with the stated difficulty (dysaretace4) is to understand the family and home ontologically. The ontic standpoint is merely a description of facts relating to the individual, or even to all members of this system. To resolve the difficulty with the claim of returning the child’s original possibility, this is not sufficient. It is necessary to understand the existential concreteness of the child who suffers the difficulty, but also to perceive the core of the problem in the family schema, always relating to comprehensively transgenerational issues5. It is also necessary for it to be understood in ontological contexts as the too-late time in which the contemporary person in their family experiences everyday life under many demands.
The essence of today’s postmodern life is Nietzsche’s will to power, which means for the habitus of life only one thing—an effect of strength, an effect of power. Power enters into appearance only when the powerful increase in power. The adoration of power results in so-called overpowering, typical of today’s performance-centered life, burdening the person in a way that is hidden yet very powerful precisely in its concealment (powerful, powerless, non-powerful).
The family in its original setting is a place of the possibility of pelein—lingering/persevering—where this principle itself prevents the demand for performance; therefore it has fundamentally altered its original archetypal principles.
Will to power as the substance of being in the family means the need to have everything under control, to have power, and the goal is security and safety of life. Yet this goal cannot be fulfilled; in life situations the person is cast into life’s path without choosing it, by enacting movement along the life path—from birth to horizon—to death. By temporality is meant the arrangement of human dwelling “in between” (between birth and death) into temporal phases. Everything depends on how a concrete person organizes their dwelling and what is important to them, what is present. In the choice of what is present is also contained an image of the future, but also the past in the results it projects forward, and it profoundly shapes both presence and the future of the person.
The time of human life is not Aristotelian, punctual time. It is what is called temporal time, always containing past, present, and future in continuity. Phenomena such as passion, love, anger, and also fear and anxiety are an intentional intertwining of reason, will, and feeling without possibility of simple expression. They are phenomena of reticence and appropriation that are primordial existential structures founding humanity (Čálek 2004).
According to Heidegger and Hölderlin, gods and humans are in immediate dialogue, which is also expressed by the idea of the tetrad (earth, sky, gods, and humans). A person, by being too oriented toward things (objects) and technique, has lost the possibility of this dialogue, and the result is a constant effort to increase performance and intensify it. In this way of living, a person loses freedom, and what remains is excessive orientation toward objects (a hyper-consumerist style of life), forming the basis of onticity. Planning, control, readiness to meet performance—these are all worshipped and fulfilled in daily life, without awareness of excessive immersion and imprisonment in beings.
A person is, however, a being capable of relation, wonder, and reverence toward themselves, toward another person, and toward the world as such. The term eusebina recalled by Zdeněk Kratochvíl (1995)—the capacity for relation and reverence toward oneself and others—captures precisely a certain privilege of the human in the order of the world. Its opposite is asebia, which in the context of the impossibility of experiencing wonder and festive time in lived experience, fills the person with a sense of loneliness amid an overly noisy crowd and makes them anxious. The result is depersonalization and a turn toward the technical world without demand for feeling, and the beginning of this alteration in the existential dimension can be traced in specificities of the contemporary family crisis. The family, now as before, represents a microcosm opening the possibility to harmonize chronos (cosmic time) and kairos (time of inner human maturation) in the concreteness of the claim to protect and preserve transgenerations, and thereby preserve human existence on Earth. In this context, the family is a living and lived organism that continually continues to form further and further spaces with the possibility of protecting the sensitive germinal core against the claims of the outer world. In this way, it provides a safe space and enough time to realize the potential for growth and maturation, and synchronization also helps with an appropriate degree and management of existential anxiety.
Anxiety in Children
According to E. Erikson (1963), for every developmental period of human life, anxiety in an appropriate degree is typical, which is linked to the demand to fulfill the developmental task of that period. From this perspective, existential anxiety belongs to life (Pelcová 2001); it arises when an existing person projects their own experience. Anxiety and fear significantly contribute to personality development and are a significant phenomenon in the complex socialization process of the person with a negative impact. A child is born into the world always with the claim to dwell in the whole of the world—with oneself, with other people, and also with nature and everything that belongs to the content of full life.
It is therefore not only a concrete place, objects, and everything on the ontic plane (onticity), but precisely tuning in to the whole without marga (edge) brings a certain claim associated with existential anxiety. Heraclitus’ notion of the fiery clash, the so-called tetrad in the encounter of earth, sky, gods, and humans, expresses this requirement very well, and home is both the beginning and end of a person’s dwelling with the possibility of arranging life in everydayness with a suitable degree of existential anxiety.
The current situation is characteristic of a search for identity, meaning, and purpose; a person enacts their life discontinuously, episodically. Temporary, unstable, and superficial relationships are the result. The induced feeling of uncertainty and anxiety is the logical outcome, yet this differs from foundational existential anxiety, which naturally accompanies life. From the phenomenological perspective6, the key issue is social anxiety, which has roots in childhood.
The reasons leading to a sense of threat are many; for a child, foremost is the situation in the family, where they experience their childhood everyday life. The rising percentage of marriages that dissolve during the first ten years is a major burden for children born into that union, who have absolutely no possibility to influence the negativity of family breakdown in their lives. Another source of children’s distress is increasing expressions of violence, with which children encounter daily and everywhere—in the family, at school, on the playground. A flood of aggression is also experienced through media—human tragedy and pain, catastrophic reports, and instructions for cruelty are present in the content of news and programs that ignore timing and audience structure for ratings. All this combined produces an anxious orientation, and the too-late time (Bělohradský 2007) in a changing context and in the absence of naturalness in basic security and safety for the child means a certain yielding of self to a world where performance and numbers are valued. The value orientation and thinking of parents is redemptive insofar as it provides a child with a harbor of acceptance, reception, and general benevolence, which in their temporality provides the foundational possibility to supply enough strength for movement along life’s path in the sense of developmental tasks, but also for overcoming obstacles life brings, which are in a certain sense necessary—challenges for this movement.
A child at the moment of birth has already undergone roughly 40 weeks of very intense development. In the mother’s body, in the womb, complex mechanisms ensure overall development from conception to the point when the child is sufficiently capable of living independently. The womb, as a reproductive organ, has a maximum enlargement of about ten times its original size in an adult woman, yet even here limits are clear. At the moment when the “supply” of the mother and the “demand” of the child for “life-space” are in a certain differential (due to very complex, mutually connecting mechanisms, especially neuro-humoral ones), movement occurs in an ontic, but also significantly in an ontological context. Everything seems to foreshadow the life destiny for the whole lifespan—choice, exceeding limits, and also temporal boundedness. Ontically, the child is born into the world through the birth canal; during birth, it is claimed by a crisis with roots in physiological and anatomical structural grounding. In the ontological dimension, this is a significant separational crisis, in which the individual becomes unique within the community to which they belong.
A child passes through the birth canal much like Plato’s prisoner reluctantly leaves the cave—with a sense of threat, certainly also fear and anxiety, but also hope in a good future. The outcome is the same—free space, however without guarantee of certainty about the continuity of life and security in future time. Immediately after birth, the child is required to breathe, but also by the surrounding environment, and clearly becomes an individual at the moment of severing the umbilical cord. Through this act, it is separated from the placenta, which had provided all needs. Not by chance, in family therapy, the relationality in the emotional schema of the family, especially between parents, is called placentation, though it is meant in a non-objective register. The moment of breathing after birth can symbolically be seen as an autonomous act for both mother and child. The pain (algos, alégo) accompanying birth is not only the logical consequence of the claim of structural parts (the bodily shape and somatic content in terms of organ structures), but in the ontological dimension it means anchoring, a pulling toward the center; it is a pure difference (Hogenová 2002) speaking to absolute validity, evidentiality, irrebuttability. Birth pain, though seemingly “forgotten” by both woman and newborn, remains valid; it is incommunicable and experientially untransferable. Yet it is connected to rupture: according to Martin Heidegger (1996), it is difference itself, called the crack-fuga. The background of birth pain shows everything that gives value to the child as a human being and at the same time gives the mother value as being a mother—the value of her role. It also allows fulfillment of the separational claim into the role of mother, strengthening the woman in the claim of maternal care, which is so important for the child. It clarifies the worth of life for both mother and child, showing that they co-exist humanly. Life appears as a value only when it is simultaneously threatened and surpassed—threatened by death and surpassed by another value (Palouš 2008). Elective cesarean births are now a lively topic of debate in obstetrics. Ladislav Krofta, deputy director of the Institute for Maternal and Child Care, supports the view that women should have the option to choose a cesarean section as a method of delivery. He justifies this by arguing that women should not be forced into natural birth if they do not want it. This is therefore not a situation in which the mother or child is in immediate danger and a cesarean is needed to preserve future existence. The heated debate among experts clearly shows that medicine, with royal discipline in obstetrics, is not based purely on Cartesian foundations, and the argument that elective cesareans are common practice in developed countries abroad will not suffice, just as the argument of suffering in euthanasia does not. If a person gives up the possibility of natural birth and natural departure toward the horizon, Heidegger’s idea—and his warning at the same time—will very likely be fulfilled: technique at the peak of its effect can destroy itself and also the human being.
By birth, an individual enters into the community of the world, is demanded at every moment of life by movement, and anxiety is the anxiety of freedom, also arising from responsibility for this dwelling. If a mother lacks openness to fulfill the developmental phase demanded of her (motherhood) and refuses to undergo the birth act of her child in nature7, she closes for herself and the child authenticity of being-born (re-born) into the world. The cause must be sought in the childbearing temporality of the young woman (past, present, and future in interconnection), though very often it involves the transgenerational transfer of “debts.”
A child is born on the threshold of the cave (Palouš 1996) and through upbringing is led into freedom, possibility, and responsibility. But it can also be socially embedded and fastened similarly to a prisoner facing the cave wall. A parent who is not themselves in openness to freedom and possibility struggles profoundly to accept the claim of choice, always with uncertainty of outcome, without guarantee, without any tangible certainty. Anxiety and fear are emotionally burdensome, but also helpful emotions, indicators of human situationality. Still, they remain in the available possibility of life movement—the choice of responses to incoming life challenges, realizing one’s life freely, openly, authentically.
Lifelong development of the individual is characterized by response to the delimitation of boundaries and spaces, and growth can be perceived as the fulfillment of possibility in the authenticity of given personality and its development to the maximal possible breadth.
Forum internum—the inner space is the family environment that, in the claim of closeness in transgenerational interrelatedness (with the deceased and the not yet unborn), protects the child from demands of the outer world. Here kairos governs time, time of inner maturation, with significance in temporal temporality. Its opposite is cosmic time, chronos, which governs forum externum—the outer space. Through synchronization of these times, a favorable time-space of the child’s life opens, with the possibility to fulfill growth and developmental tasks in bio-psycho-social-spiritual complexity in an optimal way.
A family that accepts and protects can be compared to the anatomical womb. Therefore, family therapy seeks a certain analogy between the biological and social womb (Chvala, Trapková, 2008). In cohabitation of woman and man, it is very important that a substantial relationship be formed—stable, yet also changeable—allowing the individualization of both partners. According to S. Freud, the most frequent reason for seeking psychoanalytic help is mental impotence, meaning a certain inability to create, maintain, and develop partner relationships, leading to a condition called relationship impotence.
The opposite of this state is relational potency, which does not have an ontic dimension. In ontological grounding, this is a specific relational rootedness, a disposition, an emotional possibility of the imagined, but also of the intended in relationship with possibility of transformation in development. A disturbance of the possibility of sharing and communicating emotions in the family, between parents, means the impossibility of so-called “placentation,” that is, synchronization in relation with mother and father, with the close and distant surrounding world, dysaretace (imbalance) in the tetrad8, and the result is anxiety. Placentation means a certain possibility of synchronization in the family where the child is born and can be structurally compared to placentation in the anatomical womb, where through this anatomical structure the needed nourishment and essential developmental principles of the fetus are secured. In the anatomical placenta, the blood of fetus and mother does not mix; also in the family each of its members has an autonomous position and place, yet together they form a whole with an irreplaceable capacity to create the family system—the emotional field of the family. Certain dysfunctions are the result of a disruption in sharing and communicating emotions in the family. A child, in its vulnerability, quickly reacts to this situation, and the outcome can be various expressions—somatic complaints (frequent upper respiratory infections, middle-ear inflammations, laryngitis) and also states of anxiety and fear, which, however, cannot be regarded as a natural reaction supporting successful development.
A highly significant role here is played by temporal temporality in all actors of the family emotional schema. Certain developmental incompletions, debts in the sense of oscillations (transition from lower to higher developmental phases according to Erikson) are a offering (a possibility of completion), but also a major burden for all involved. A child oscillates between the worlds of mother and father (in terms of energies jin x jang) and fulfills within so-called separational tendencies (a term from family therapy) its growth tasks (Chvala, Trapková 2008). In a situation where one or both parents are not sufficiently available in the child’s lived time-space, a very complex situation emerges that may lead to various subsequent forms of dysfunction. The importance of the claim that a parent be authentic, adult in their egoity, open, with their place in the world in the sense of appropriation in authenticity (living from one’s own source) means, when translated to the child’s existence as their descendant, having open transgenerational possibility in postmodern times to linger at home with a possibility of initiating dwelling.
Only in this way is it possible in childhood and adulthood, in the whole life of a person, to manage and endure sorrow, which has its source in foundational attunement within human thrownness. This sorrow is ontological; it is unavoidable, with one intention in childhood, another in youth, and another in full adulthood and old age. Sorrow is a phenomenon accompanying the person from birth to death, without possibility of being measured, weighed, or grasped.
Because a person is capable of repeatedly using their experience (variating from past experiences—so-called retention) when carrying out their intentions in presence (protence) and then storing them again as experience, home and childhood experiences form the basis of their essential lived experience. The phenomenon of home, in fulfillment or non-fulfillment, plays a significant role throughout the duration of life and is a possible “root” of anxiety that the person experiences in actuality at all stages of life and that limits their given possibilities.
If a therapist or educator deals with a child’s behavior and wants to understand them not only on the ontic but above all ontological level, one must become aware of the whole relationality of the child in the sense of the emotional schema in which it was born and in which its everyday life unfolds. There is no separate world of children and adults. Everything is grounded in co-existence (Mit-sein), even earlier than the child is born, thanks to transgenerational interrelatedness. A child’s speech introduces it into the world, and through language the child comes into the world. According to Merleau-Ponty (1971), at the moment when the noise around it begins to mean something, it flips to the side of those who speak. A child in questioning “feels its way through the cosmos,” and a non-response, incomplete response, or a hurting response damages it. Anxiety and fear emerge in children’s speech, signaling the site of injury, but they can also be a path to possible treatment.
Conclusion
Anxiety and fear are emotions that belong to life, but not in an intensified form. The fear of small children of darkness, of separation from parents and loved ones, of lightning and storms—all this is normality. It is concerningly important to assess a state in which a child’s anxiety is not connected to a concrete thing or event and whose main symptom is limitation in ordinary life—when the child is limited in their successful development and well-being.
Generalized anxiety disorder in a child is characterized by fear and worry; emotions lack specificity and are disproportionate, most often linked with somatic reaction (bodily symptoms), which is a response in the unity of body and mind in inseparability9. A child may suffer from panic disorder with typical attacks, phobia (unjustified fear), post-traumatic stress (response to threatening and violent events), but also obsessive-compulsive disorder, typical in repeating certain actions compulsively as a result of intrusive thoughts. Treatment in classical manuals, methodologically Cartesianly focused pedopsychology or child psychiatry, is based on psychiatric and psychological examination and very often proceeds to indicating medications to reduce anxiety. Therapy aims to overcome anxiety and learn to respond better to stimuli in the context of everyday stress (pediatric adaptation of CBT).
Children coming to psychotherapeutic care, with indications for antidepressants, are increasingly more numerous. For a daseinsanalytic therapist, small patients suffering from a very broad range of difficulties are a challenge, but also a demand. Orienting in aspects of the child’s existence and their family, supporting the child in the possibility of authentic experiencing, is the foundation. Respect for aspects in the child’s life and attunement to individual contexts of their living means an investment of shared time and shared speech, dialogue with Socratic force of demand. Listening to the child, but also to their parents, immersion in their life stories, uncovering temporality—this all opens the path to shared search and resolution of an unfavorable state. It remains valid, however, that in anxiety and fear, the expert is not the therapist but the child who is experiencing the unfavorable state, and also the parent who is often the amplifier of this emotion in the interrelatedness of the family’s emotional schema. The emotional field cannot be measured, weighed, or otherwise concretized ontically; its clarity emerges in concrete reactions of individual members of this non-structural schema, in context of the attunement of their relationships—toward themselves, toward other close ones, toward society, and toward the whole of the world (nature and everything belonging to human existence).
Therapeutic entrapment in the ontic plane means giving up the possibility of closeness, sacrality, and mystery. All this are the original openings of medicine, standing on the intellectual foundations of Hippocrates, Hygie and other major figures of antiquity. Anxiety is solitude in an overly noisy world, without the possibility of concretization by a more advanced instrument. Patients—small and large—in psychotherapy are first and foremost people seeking themselves through rupture with closeness. They are not the target group of pharmaceutical companies, which today prosper strongly in a time described as postmodern or also too-late, and in the specificity of demands accompanying human existence. If reliance is placed on solutions only on the plane of techné, this is treatment in the form of iatreusis—that is, treatment only at the symptom level, significantly limiting a return to the person’s possibility of realizing life movement in the greatest possible breadth.
In this context, it is necessary to recall the Portuguese neurophysiologist António de Egas Moniz, who in 1949 received the Nobel Prize in the field of psychosurgery. In 1935 at a clinic in Lisbon, based on his study, a lobotomy was performed, first by chemical means, when a substance called ethyl alcohol was injected into the connection of the frontal lobes. Seven weeks later, a similar procedure was carried out surgically. This operation counts among the first operative interventions to modify human psyche, generally known as psychosurgical operations.
In the USA this operation was used very extensively, presented as “brain cleaning,” or “no worse than pulling a tooth,” and so on. The method had become so developed through frequent application to people suffering from anxiety and similar conditions that it was performed in outpatient form—together with electroshock and without further anesthesia a narrow instrument was inserted between the eye globe and eyelid; a sharp tip advanced to the frontal lobe, and rotational movements with this instrument carried out the lobotomy itself—severing connections between lobes. In the same year, approximately 10,000 procedures were performed in America; eight years later, the number had risen to 50,000 per year. Lobotomy changes a person’s psyche in a fundamental and irreversible way. Besides removing symptoms (primarily anxiety), it also brings numerous problems, especially regarding the integrity of the individual. Ethical objections and concerns about abuse were drowned out by a fashionable wave that lasted until the advent of modern psychopharmaka. Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest clearly documents such fears of possible misuse. Reality, in the context of loss of personality and even in the context of “good,” also affected one of J. F. Kennedy’s nurses, when her father could barely bear her otherness and did not heed her dissent to this procedure, which brought her closer to the horizon of life.
Onticity has a significant place not only in medicine but in all areas of science. It strengthens a sense of certainty and security, yet the great striving of the contemporary person remains unsatisfied. The mathematical world is not the natural world, even when presented as the true world. The desire for certainty, leading to dividing the person into two parts—body and mind, verification (reification) and falsification—does not diminish anxiety. To perceive the reactions and overall situatedness of an anxious child as an answer and then to seek questions is a path to their essential orientation and also a path of therapy in the sense of hygiensis—healing motivated by what led to the given difficulty.
The basis of such therapy, not only in the case of resolving child anxiety, is tuning the therapist’s habitual10 movement to the patient’s habitual movement, where both are called into the world and both “co-belong” to the world (Hogenová 2006). It is a connectedness with the whole of the world, and in this way the person in difficulty—within dysaretace (non-powerful)—returns to areté (Hogenová, 2000), to good, to health.
Author: PhDr. Helena Kalábová, Ph.D References:
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1 Ontology (Greek ontos, meaning being/existing + logos, word, speech) is a philosophical discipline concerned with being-as-such and fundamental concepts. Aristotle used the designation “first philosophy” for it as part of metaphysics; it addresses the most general questions. 2 René Descartes, born 1596 in Touraine, is regarded as the founder of modern methodology; an important work: 1637 Discourse on the Method, with a legacy extending into today’s methodology—the Cartesian requirement “clare et distincte,” clear and distinct with possibility of measurement, weighing, grasping, verification, and falsification. 3 Alétheia (Ἀλήθεια), Latin veritas, truth, then also personalized truth, unconcealment. The opposite of alétheia is doxa-opinion, error-pseudos, representation-phantasia, imitation-mimesis, poetizing-myth. 4 Aretace—the maintenance of balance in the sense of aretē; dysaretace is a disturbance of balance leading to difficulty. The term areté first appears in Greek written tradition in the 6th century BCE, most often mentioned in relation to justice. Later it is understood in concrete human life as one’s effort to find and clarify one’s own will. 5 In family therapy, it generally holds that a problem emerging in one member of the system appears as an emerging symptom whose essence, however, has a root in the saturation of the family’s emotional schema—for example, fast pace in the family under a performance claim, or unclear roles of mother and father in the original energetic setup (yin-yang). 6 Phenomenology—a discipline of appearance, rooted in Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, aiming to bring thought about the person “back to the things themselves”; it explains what and how appears and how it is manifested in human consciousness. It is a gaze toward the essence of knowing without imagination and logical grasping in Cartesian fashion. 7 A state in which a cesarean section is indicated for the sake of mother or child endangerment is not meant here. 8 A person exists between heaven and earth and within a certain order—in ancient thought, between gods. 9 Body and mind react as a whole; holistic perception is grounded in the inseparability of bodily and sensory parts of the organism (structural and non-structural parts in unity). 10 Overall movement in the sense of body and mind in unity.