As a Woman Alone at Night on the Way Home: Fear Between Discursive Knowledge and Compulsive Neuroticization

An Essay by Sarah Victoria Heinrich

The door clicks shut behind me; it is just past midnight, and I am on my way home. “Text me when you get home safely,” my friend said. I nodded, we embraced, and then she released me into the night. At the first intersection, I deliberately choose a small detour. It is somewhat longer, but better lit.

I constantly scan my surroundings out of the corner of my eye. With one hand I clutch my phone; with the other I jingle my keys—deliberately loudly. I do this even though I am still far from home. I do not know exactly when these movements became routine. I only know that I never consciously decided to adopt them. They are, rather, a reflex of my subconscious, a response to a gnawing, queasy unease.

An unease that I try to meet with reason—by downplaying it, relativizing it, rationalizing it—but which I ultimately cannot escape. It is this unease of having to walk home alone at night as a woman.

When I arrive home, the heavy door of my building falls shut behind me. I push the already-latched door once more, just to be safe. Nothing happens—and yet it was there: fear.

Some time later, when I tell my partner about this persistent unease on nighttime walks home, he nods, seeming understanding. After a somewhat longer pause, however, he says: “Hm—honestly, I’ve never had to think about that.”

The sentence is meant neither dismissively nor indifferently—and it is precisely in this that its depth lies. It marks no disagreement, but rather a blank space. For him, the nighttime walk home is not a problem. For me, it is.

Which Perspective Is Heard? Mechanisms of Exclusion in Foucault

The night thus constitutes itself not merely as the absence of light, but also as a cultural space within which power relations, norms, and orders of knowledge appear in condensed, symbolic form, and within which structural inequalities—some long thought forgotten—become visible once again. Which perspective is heard within discourse is an expression of what counts as knowledge, and thus as power, within that discourse.

It would seem that the general inadequacy of feeling fear on nighttime walks home selects, organizes, and channels the discourse on the night, determining what may even be said about the night and recognized as legitimate.

The Paradox of Fear: Between Neurotic Compulsion and the Stabilization of a Narrative

And perhaps those who dismiss this fear as irrational are right; for human judgment seems—following Lacan as well—to be nothing more than an inferentialist practice of giving, taking, and acknowledging reasons, one that ultimately only serves to keep alive the never-quieting antagonism of the subconscious.

Fear at night, then, would be nothing more than the neurotic circling around an ontological void within the psyche, which—fed by what has been heard, recounted, and seen—attempts in an enigmatic way to compensate for a lack of experience through phantasmatic scenarios of everything that could happen on the way home.

If we add Freud’s position to this, the fear repeatedly felt on nighttime walks home might rather be the psyche’s enjoyment of experiencing itself as suffering—a libidinal suffering, as Freud writes—even as one simultaneously wishes not to feel this fear at all.

Could it be, then, that the unease felt in the dark paradoxically provides stability, insofar as it ultimately produces a stabilization of the subconscious? A kind of consolidation for an irrational phantasm that one has never actually experienced oneself, yet which becomes reality through the mere sensation of fear?

For if fear did not repeatedly confirm the neurotic features of the subconscious, one would have to admit to oneself that one’s own narrative about the threatening and uncanny nature of walking home at night was untrue.

Kafka, too, seems to suggest this when he frames it as a human dilemma that we attempt to compensate for enigmatic voids through compulsive neuroticization. The necessity to neuroticize seems to be our essential nature as human beings—so that the seemingly simplest solution would be: “You no longer need to be afraid when the ghost comes to you, for the real fear is the fear of the cause of the fear.” (Kafka 1983: 38).

The Sayable and the Repressed in the Discourse on the Night

This is perhaps why those people are right who say that the fear of having to walk home alone at night is merely compulsive neuroticization around a void of signifiers, serving in the end only to keep one’s own narrative about the night true.

And yet, with Foucault, it is ultimately the madman—in all his naivety—who speaks the truth. It merely seems that society tends to recognize truth only where it finds a referential point of its own.

And although one may be reluctant to weigh fear as usable evidence in the struggle over the truth of the discourse on the night as a cultural space, the real question is a different one: which perspective is heard and taken seriously within societal discourse on the night?

For if what the madman—here, the fearful one—says were heard, as in Foucault, then the fear felt at night would be less a lack of referential connection to reality than the revelation of a structural problem, one that exposes gender-specific imbalances and power relations. The very recognition that not everyone has had to think about this points to the asymmetry of discursive structures and ultimately reveals a conflict with the prevailing, dominant order of knowledge.

Conclusion

The night, then, is not merely the absence of light, but the revelation of power relations that still determine which perspective is heard and which is dismissed as “madness.”

It points to structural inequalities that, while increasingly granting women the right to speak about their fear, do not always seem to grant them, despite this right to speak, full status as accountable participants in discourse.

The fear of the night may, in part, be the compulsive neuroticization of a widely shared societal narrative, for which the individual unconscious continually seems to gather evidence—yet it is also, at the same time, a question of discursive power relations.

The night does not end in the morning. It continues in discourses that reveal which perspective is heard, which reality is made visible—and which remains in the dark.

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel (1972): L’ordre du discours [The Order of Discourse]. Munich.
Foucault, Michel (1992): L’ordre du discours [The Order of Discourse]. Frankfurt am Main.
Kafka, Franz (1983): Stories. In: Brod, Max (ed.): Franz Kafka, Collected Works. Frankfurt am Main.
Lacan, Jacques (1978): The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar, Book II. Paris. German edition: Vienna 2015.
Lacan, Jacques (1998): The Formations of the Unconscious. The Seminar, Book V (1957–1958). Paris. German edition: Vienna 2006.
Lacan, Jacques (2004): Anxiety. The Seminar, Book X (1962–1963). Paris. German edition: Vienna/Berlin 2010.