The meaning of fantasy and anxiety

This chapter focuses on negative dialectics showed, in the life of the neurotic, dialectical dilemmas that involve oscillating fantasies and anxiety states are impossible to escape. It suggests that the twins, fantasy and anxiety, are wrapped around each other in such a close embrace that all meaning remains self-referential; it does not slide but constantly circles round like greyhounds chasing the hare on a dog track. The chapter looks at the role of time in the process of producing meaning by briefly revisiting Sigmund Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit. It discusses the way in which meaning remains the "ghost in the machine". Meaning is, in many senses, the traces left after the unconscious has been at work on the problems of consciousness, just as fantasy is a series of red herrings, constantly leading us away in all directions from the far-reaching and ever present threat of anxiety.