Anxiety and depression are immersive states eroding relation to others

Evidence

Anxiety is immersive, a case of apprehension involving breathlessness, dizziness, palpitations, an accumulation of undischargeable excitation. Depression, too, is immersive, an intrapsychic conflict of ego and superego that results in apathy, unwillingness to engage, and an inability to work through. Futurelessness, isolation, anxiety, distance: these plights trigger an overwhelming absorption, an incapacity to relate beyond the self in either language or action. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 81

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘immersive’ means in psychic terms — an absorption that blocks relation beyond the self — which sets up her link between suffering and the aesthetics of immediacy.