The paper seeks to point out the relationship between anguish and the pathological manifestations of phobia and panic, and to demonstrate the adequacy of a proposal of therapeutic intervention within a psychoanalytical perspective. It reflects the parcial results of a theoretical research on anguish based on the formulations of Freud and Lacan. It is also reflexive of observations derived from present-day clinical practice. To this, data of clinic experience were used as reference. The results point to the usefulness of the psychoanalytic notion of phobia and panic since they confirm that the object of fear has a nature of substitute. This very nature makes the object fear permeable to the action of speech within the language device of the psychoanalytic clinic.
phobia; panic; anguish; psychoanalytical clinic.