‘Putting on a Face’: Sartre, Goffman, and Agoraphobic Anxiety in Social Space

Abstract

In this paper I attempt a hermeneutics of agoraphobic experience, presenting a reading of sufferers' accounts of the social and spatial phenomenology of this disorder in terms of managing existential anxieties. I seek to combine the philosophical insights of Sartre's account of ‘anguish’ with Goffman's sociotheoretical account of the individual's employment of techniques of ‘front management’ and ‘self-presentation’. Such techniques might, I argue, be regarded as a form of coping mechanism for dealing with the anxieties of social existence, especially those stemming from what Sartre terms the ‘look’ of Others. Agoraphobics' testimonies illustrate their difficulties in successfully deploying such techniques in the face of the anxieties they experience in social spaces. Interpreting agoraphobic experiences in this way adds a sociospatial theoretical dimension to existing accounts of the disorder, accounts that are currently of a predominantly psychological nature.

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