When the Body Becomes a Question
Health anxiety often involves more than just worry. It can take the form of obsessive checking, persistent fear of serious illness, or the need for constant reassurance — from doctors, search engines, or loved ones. Symptoms are felt in the body, but the disturbance reaches further.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, health anxiety is not irrational. It speaks to something in the subject’s relation to uncertainty, mortality, and the body as a site of meaning. Often, it is not simply the body that is feared — but what the body might be failing to guarantee.
For some, the body becomes a kind of message board — every ache or sensation carrying a potential catastrophe.
Beneath this, there may be a more fundamental difficulty in locating oneself in relation to care, to desire, or to the demand of the Other. In this way, health anxiety can be understood less as a fear of disease, and more as a question about how one exists in the world — and what threatens that existence.
In therapy, the goal is not to offer endless reassurance, but to listen carefully to how these fears are structured — and what might lie beneath them. Over time, many find that their relation to the body, and the world, shifts. The symptom softens, and a different kind of stability becomes possible.
Health Anxiety Therapy DublinRecommended Reading:
Various Authors. Scilicet, The Speaking Body
Counselling
Eating Disorders & Body Dysmorphia