The Meaning of Anxiety

I have no desire to speak in strong terms about this age as a whole, but he who has observed the contemporary generation will surely not deny that the incongruity in it and the reason for its anxiety and restlessness is this, that in one direction truth increases in extent, in mass, partly also in abstract clarity, whereas certitude steadily decreases.

—Søren Kierkegaard, THE CONCEPT OF DREAD

UNTIL THE COMING OF FREUD AND THE OTHER DEPTH psychologists, the problem of anxiety lay in the provinces of philosophy, especially in its branch of ethics, and in religion. The philosophers who dealt most explicitly with anxiety and fear were those whose primary concern was not with the formation of an abstract intellectual system, but rather with the existential conflicts and crises of living human beings. They could not escape confronting anxiety, as the living human being cannot. It is thus no historical accident that the most penetrating insights into anxiety and its related problems should have come from those thinkers whose interests were both religious and philosophical, such as Spinoza, Pascal, and Kierkegaard.

An inquiry into the philosophical backgrounds of the problem of anxiety is of help in understanding contemporaneous anxiety in two respects. The first and most obvious help is in the actual insights into the meaning of anxiety to be found in the writings of these philosophers—insights which, as seen in Kierkegaard, not only often antedate Freud’s theories but in some respects predict developments after Freud. Second, such an inquiry illuminates one phase of the historical background of the problem of anxiety in our society. Since an individual’s anxiety is conditioned by the fact that he stands at a particular point in the historical development of his culture, it is indispensable to have some understanding of the individual’s culture, including the dominant ideas which formed the atmosphere in which he grew up, if we are to understand his anxiety.1 Thus, our investigation in this chapter should cast light on the genesis of certain cultural issues and attitudes which are crucial for much contemporaneous anxiety.

One such issue, for example, is the dichotomy between mind and body, which was enunciated in its dominant modern form by Descartes and other thinkers of the seventeenth century. This not only produced psychological disunity and anxiety for large numbers of people in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in some respects specifically set the problem of anxiety for Freud.²

Another such issue has been the tendency in our culture to be preoccupied with “rational,” mechanical phenomena and to suppress so-called “irrational” experience. Since anxiety is always partially irrational, there has been a tendency in our culture to repress the experience. We may approach this issue by means of two questions: Why did anxiety not emerge as a specific problem until the middle of the nineteenth century? And why was anxiety not dealt with as a problem in the various schools of psychology (excepting psychoanalysis) until the latter 1930’s, despite the fact that during the previous half-century the study of fears had been prominent in psychology? Among the varied legitimate answers to these questions, an important one is our widespread tendency since the Renaissance to look askance at “irrational” phenomena. We tend to admit in our own experience as well as to accept as a legitimate area for investigation only those aspects of experience which can be made to appear “rational”—that is, aspects of experience for which intellectual “reasons” can be presented. This tendency, for example, appeared in several of the cases in the study of anxiety in unmarried mothers presented in this book. See especially that of Helen, who had strong anxiety arising from her extramarital pregnancy but who sought to repress this anxiety beneath a continual concern for the quasi-scientific “facts” of pregnancy. Helen’s need to exclude from conscious awareness all ideas and feelings which were not intellectually “acceptable” and explicable is typical of many persons in our society.

Since fears are experienced as specific and definite, we can present “logical” reasons for them, and we can study them by mathematical means; but anxiety is generally experienced by an individual as a profoundly irrational phenomenon. The tendency to suppress anxiety because it seems irrational or to rationalize it in terms of “fears,” is by no means limited to sophisticated intellectuals in our culture. It continually crops up in clinical or psychoanalytic work as a major hurdle in therapy with anxiety problems. The case of Helen in this book (Chapter 9) is a good example. For an understanding of the genesis of such tendencies, we must inquire into the background of the accepted attitudes and normative ideas of our society.

In the discussion which follows, I do not treat philosophical formulations as either cause or effect, but rather as one expression of the total cultural development of the period. The particular philosophers whose formulations have become important for their own and subsequent centuries (such as those we shall refer to in this chapter) are those who were successful in penetrating and expressing the dominant meaning and direction of development of their culture. It is in this sense that the formulations made by the intellectual leaders of one century become the common currency, in the form of unconscious assumptions, of large numbers of people in succeeding centuries.³

We begin with the seventeenth century because in that century the systems of thought which have been dominant for the major part of the modern period were formulated. Many of the formative principles which guided the scientists and philosophers of that century had emerged in the Renaissance, but it was in the seventeenth century—that remarkable classical period of Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Leibnitz, Locke, Hobbes, Galileo, Newton—that they received their systematic formulation.

The philosophies of the seventeenth century had one theme in common with respect to the understanding of human nature: they presented the “rationalistic solution to the problem of man.”4 The common denominator was the confidence that each man was a rational individual who could arrive at autonomy in his intellectual, social, religious, and emotional life. Mathematics was conceived as the chief tool of reason. This belief in “autonomous reason,” as Tillich calls it, or “mathematical reason,” in Cassirer’s phrase, was the guiding intellectual principle of the cultural revolution which, beginning in the Renaissance, resulted in the overthrow of feudalism and absolutism and ultimately led to the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. It was believed in that age that autonomous reason would make possible the control of the individual’s emotions (e.g., Spinoza). Autonomous reason would also make possible the mastery of physical nature—a confidence which was later to be thoroughly substantiated by far-reaching progress in the physical sciences. Descartes gave impetus to this development by his sharp distinction between mind and the processes of thought (intension) on one hand and physical nature (extension) on the other.

The crucial point was in a corollary to Descartes’ dichotomy—namely, that physical nature, including the body, could be understood and controlled by means of mechanical, mathematical laws. The way was thus paved for the preoccupation in modern times with phenomena susceptible to mechanical and mathematical treatment. This preoccupation was to be accompanied both by an endeavor to extend the application of the methods of mechanics and mathematics to as many areas of experience as possible, and by a tendency to omit from consideration those aspects of experience which were not susceptible to such methods of treatment. The suppression of the nonmechanical and “irrational” aspects of experience went hand in hand, both as cause and effect, with the needs of the new industrialism following the Renaissance. What could be calculated and measured had practical utility in the industrial, workaday world, and what was “irrational” did not.

The confidence that physical nature and the human body were mathematically and mechanically controllable had vast anxiety-dispelling effects. This was true not only in meeting man’s material needs and overcoming the actual threats of physical nature but also in freeing the human being from “irrational” fears and anxiety. A way was opened for dissolving the multitude of fears of devils, sorcerers, and forms of magic which had been the foci of pervasive anxiety in the last two centuries of the Middle Ages as well as in the Renaissance itself. Tillich points out that the Cartesians, by means of their assumption that the soul could not influence the body, were able to “disenchant the world.” The persecution of witches, for example, which had occurred throughout the Renaissance up to the early eighteenth century, was overcome through such Cartesian formulations.

The confidence in the power of the autonomous, rational individual, which had emerged at the Renaissance and was more explicitly formulated in the seventeenth century, thus had on one side its anxiety-dispelling effects. But on the other side, since the confidence in reason was inseparably connected with the individualism of the Renaissance, it brought in its train new sources of anxiety in feelings of psychological isolation on the part of the individual.5 In some ways, in fact, the doctrine of autonomous reason was in itself an intellectual expression in the seventeenth century of Renaissance individualism. Descartes’ classical phrase, “I think; therefore, I exist,” shows the emphasis on rational processes as a criterion of existence, but it also implies that one arrives at belief in one’s own existence in vacuo as far as the community is concerned. Compare the present psychological concept that the experience of identity of the self occurs when the child becomes aware of other people as distinct from himself. W. H. Auden phrases this social origin of the self in succinct poetic terms:

. . . for the ego is a dream

Till a neighbor’s need by

name create it.⁶

If this “neighbor’s need” is not taken into consideration, the way is opened for new anxiety.

This problem of isolation of the individual was also confronted in the thought of the seventeenth century, and the solution presented had far-reaching effects in allaying anxiety. The solution consisted of the belief that the liberation of reason in every person would lead to a realization of a universal humanity and to a system of harmony between individuals and society. That is to say, the individual need not feel isolated, for if he courageously pursued his own reason, his conclusions and his interests would ultimately be in accord with those of his fellow-men and a harmonious community would be achieved. Moreover, even a metaphysical basis for overcoming isolation was presented—namely, that the pursuit of universal reason would lead the individual into accord with “universal reality.” As Cassirer put it, “mathematical reason was the bond between man and the universe.”7

Both the individualistic character of the thought of this period and the factors compensating for it can be seen in Leibnitz. His basic doctrine of the “monads” is individualistic in the sense that the monads are unitary, separated; but the compensating element is given in his doctrine of “pre-established harmony.” Tillich expressed this graphically:

In the system of harmony the metaphysical solitude of every individual is strongly emphasized by the doctrine that there are “no doors and windows” from one “monad” to the other one. Every single unit is lonely in itself, without any direct communication. The horror of this idea was overcome by the harmonistic presupposition that in every monad the whole world is potentially present and that the development of each individual is in a natural harmony with the development of all the others. This is the most profound metaphysical symbol for the situation in the early periods of bourgeois civilization. It fitted this situation because there was still a common world, in spite of the increasing social atomization.⁸

These anxiety-dispelling ways of thought are essential to understanding why the specific problem of anxiety is so rarely confronted by the thinkers of the seventeenth century. I shall demonstrate in the writings of Spinoza that the confidence that fear could be overcome by reason did serve to a considerable extent to obviate the problem of anxiety. We shall also discuss Pascal, a representative of the period who could not accept the prevalent confidence in the power of autonomous reason and for whom anxiety was therefore a central problem.

SPINOZA: REASON OVERCOMING FEAR

An eminent example of the method of dealing with fear in terms of mathematical reason is found in the writings of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza “ventures to make the last and decisive step in this mathematical theory of the world and the human mind,” remarks Cassirer; “Spinoza constructs a new ethics . . . a mathematical theory of the moral world.”⁹ It is well known that Spinoza’s writings are replete with acute psychological insights which are remarkably close to contemporary scientific psychological theories, such as his statement that mental and physical phenomena are two aspects of the same process.¹⁰ We can be sure that if Spinoza does not concern himself with anxiety, it is not because of lack of psychological discernment. At many points he anticipates later psychoanalytic concepts, as, for example, when he states that a passion (he uses “passion” to mean an emotional complex, not as Kierkegaard uses it to mean commitment) “ceases to be a passion when one has formed a clear and distinct idea of it.”¹¹ This is a curious prediction of a later psychoanalytic technique, i.e., clarifying an emotion.

Spinoza believed that fear is essentially a subjective problem—that is, a matter of one’s state of mind, or attitudes. He defines fear in juxtaposition to hope: they are both characteristic of the person in doubt. Fear is an “uncertain pain” arising from the idea that something we hate may befall us, and hope is an “uncertain pleasure” arising from the idea that a good we wish may come to pass. “It follows from these definitions,” he adds, “that fear cannot be without hope, nor hope without fear.”12 Fear “arises from a weakness of mind and therefore does not appertain to the use of reason.”¹³ Hope also is a weakness of mind. “Therefore the more we endeavor to live under the guidance of reason, the less we endeavor to depend on hope, and the more to deliver ourselves and make ourselves free from fear and overcome fortune as much as possible, and finally to direct our actions by the certain advice of reason.”¹⁴ Spinoza’s guidance on how to overcome fear is consistent with the general rational emphasis of the time, in which emotion is not repressed but rather made amenable to reason. It is true, he holds, that an emotion can be overcome only by a contrary, stronger one. But this can be done by paying attention to the “ordering of our thoughts and images.” “We must think of courage in the same manner in order to lay aside fear, that is, we must enumerate and imagine the common perils of life and in what manner they may best be avoided and overcome by courage.”¹⁵

At several points in his analysis Spinoza stands on the threshold of the problem of anxiety, as, for example, when he defines fear in juxtaposition to hope. The simultaneous presence of fear and hope within a given individual, perpetuated over a period of time, is one aspect of the psychic conflict that is seen by later writers, including myself, as anxiety.¹⁶ But Spinoza does not cross the threshold into the problem of anxiety itself. In marked contrast to Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, he does not see conflict between hope and fear as persistent or necessary; fears can be overcome by courageous dedication to reason, and hence the problem of anxiety does not confront him.

A similar difference between Spinoza and philosophers of the nineteenth century is evidenced in the treatment of confidence and despair. In Spinoza’s terms we are confident when the cause of doubt has been removed from our hope—i.e., we are certain the good event will occur. And we are in despair when the element of doubt is removed from our fear—i.e., when we are certain that the evil event will occur or has occurred. For Kierkegaard, in contrast, confidence is not the removal of doubt (and anxiety) but rather the attitude that we can move ahead despite doubt and anxiety.

In Spinoza it is that word certain which strikes us so boldly. If one believed, as apparently Spinoza in his century could believe, that such intellectual and emotional certainty could be achieved, enviable psychological security would result. This belief, of course, underlay Spinoza’s constructing a mathematics of ethics; one should be as certain about an ethical problem as one is about a proposition in geometry. The essential point is that for Spinoza the removal of doubt and the attainment of certainty is possible if we direct ourselves by the “certain advice of reason.”

The central problem of anxiety does not intrude itself into Spinoza’s thought. One cannot escape the conclusion that, given the cultural situation in which he lived, his confidence in reason served him satisfactorily.17

PASCAL: THE INADEQUACY OF REASON

Though representative of the eminent intellectuals of the seventeenth century in his mathematical and scientific genius, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was the exception in that he did not believe human nature, with all its variety, richness, and contradiction, could be comprehended by mathematical rationalism. He believed that rational certitude about man was not in any sense identical to rational certitude in geometry and physics. Thus he sounds to us like a contemporary, while Spinoza sounds like a man from a different age. The laws that operate in human life are, to Pascal, laws of chance and “probabilities.” Hence he was impressed by the contingency of human existence.

When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid, and wonder to see myself here rather than there; for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there, now rather than then.

On beholding the blindness and misery of man, on seeing all the universe dumb, and man without light, left to himself, as it were, astray in this corner of the universe, knowing not who has set him here, what he is here for, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will wake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island. And thus I marvel that people are not seized with despair at such a miserable condition.18

Pascal was thus directly concerned with not only anxiety which he himself experienced but which he believed he observed underneath the surface of the lives of his contemporaries, evidenced by the “perpetual restlessness in which men pass their lives.”¹⁹ He noted the unceasing endeavors of people to divert themselves, to escape ennui, to avoid being alone, until “agitation” becomes an end in itself. The great bulk of diversions, he felt, were actually endeavors of people to avoid “thoughts of themselves,” for if they should pause for self-contemplation, they would be miserable and anxious.

In his preoccupation with the contingent and uncertain aspects of human experience, Pascal took cognizance of the fact that reason was offered by his contemporaries as a guide to certainty; but he believed that reason is undependable as a practical guide. It is not that he devaluated reason as such. On the contrary, he believed it to be the distinctive quality of man, the source of man’s dignity in the midst of unthinking nature, and the source of morality (“to think well . . . is the principle of morality”²⁰). But in practical life reason is undependable because it is “pliable to every sense,” and sense reports are notoriously deceptive. Moreover the usual confidence in reason is faulty, he held, because it fails to take into account the power of the emotions.²¹ Pascal conceived of the emotions in both a positive and a negative sense. He saw values in the emotions that were not comprehended in rationalism, expressed in this beautiful and justly quoted sentence: “The heart has reasons which the reason knows not of.” On the other hand, the emotions often distort and overrule reason, and reason becomes mere rationalization. Overconfidence in reason often facilitates the abuse of reason to support mere custom, or the power of kings, or to rationalize injustice. In practice, reason is often a matter of “Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on that.”22 He was impressed with the frequency with which self-interest and vanity are the actual motivations of men, and are then justified by “reason.” Greater trust could be placed in reason, he remarks epigrammatically, if “reason were only reasonable.” In all these qualifications of the prevalent confidence in reason, it is clear that Pascal valued very highly what he termed a “genuine love of and respect for wisdom,” but he felt that love of and respect for wisdom are rare phenomena in human life. Hence he saw the human situation much less optimistically than his contemporaries. “We are placed in a vast medium,” he observed, “ever floating uncertainly between ignorance and knowledge.”²³

We have suggested that the confidence in reason, as interpreted by the intellectual leaders of the seventeenth century, served to dispel anxiety. It is some support for this hypothesis that Pascal, the one who could not accept the rationalistic solution to human problems, was at the same time the one who could not avoid anxiety.

Pascal stands as an exception, however, to the prevalent formulations of his day, and to the central stream of the philosophical developments in the modern period.²⁴ On the whole, the belief that through reason Nature could be mastered and man’s emotions ordered served the intellectual leaders of that day relatively satisfactorily, so that the problem of anxiety rarely is confronted in their thought. I suggest that the cultural position in which Spinoza and the other thinkers of this classical phase of the modern period found themselves did not result in the inner trauma which was to occur to comparable intellectual leaders in the nineteenth century and to vast numbers of people in the twentieth century. The central belief in the power of autonomous reason gave a psychological unity to the culture which was not to be threatened with serious disintegration until the nineteenth century.

KIERKEGAARD: ANXIETY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In the nineteenth century we can observe on a broad scale the occurrence of fissures in the unity of modern culture which underlie much of our contemporary anxiety. The revolutionary belief in autonomous reason which had been central in the inception and structuralization of modern culture was now supplanted by “technical reason.”²⁵ The rapidly increasing mastery over physical nature was accompanied by widespread and profound changes in the structure of human society. The economic and sociological aspects of these changes concern us in a later section, but here it is important to note the changes at that time in people’s views of themselves.

This was the era of “autonomous sciences.” Each science developed in its own direction; but a unifying principle, as Cassirer phrases it, was lacking. It was against the consequences of “science as a factory” that Nietszche warned; he saw technical reason progressing rapidly on one hand and the disintegration of human ideals and values on the other, and he feared the nihilism which would result. The views of man presented in the nineteenth century are not divorced, in most cases, from the empirical data produced by the advancing sciences; but since science itself was without a unifying principle, there was great variance in the interpretations of man. “Each individual thinker,” Cassirer, remarks, “gives us his own picture of human nature”; and whereas each picture is based upon empirical evidence, each “theory becomes a Procrustean bed on which the empirical facts are stretched to fit a preconceived pattern.”²⁶ Cassirer continues:

Owing to this development our modern theory of man lost its intellectual center. We acquired instead a complete anarchy of thought. . . . Theologians, scientists, politicians, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists all approached the problem from their own viewpoints. To combine or unify all these particular aspects and perspective was impossible . . . every author seems in the last count to be led by his own conception and evaluation of human life.

Cassirer feels that this antagonism of ideas constituted not only “a grave theoretical problem but an imminent threat to the whole extent of our ethical and cultural life.”27

The nineteenth century was marked by a cultural compartmentalization, not only in theories and in the sciences but in other phases of culture as well. In aesthetics, there was the “art for art’s sake movement” and an increasing separation of art from the realities of nature—a development attacked toward the end of the century by Cézanne and Van Gogh. In religion there was a separation of theoretical beliefs and Sunday practices from the affairs of weekday life. The compartmentalization in family life is vividly portrayed and attacked by Ibsen in The Doll’s House. With respect to the psychological life of the individual, the nineteenth century is broadly characterized by a separation of “reason” and “emotions,” with voluntaristic effort (will) enthroned as the method of casting the decision between the two—which resulted generally in a denial of the emotions.

The seventeenth-century belief in the rational control of the emotions had now become the habit of repressing the emotions. In this light it is easy to understand why the less acceptable emotional impulses, such as sex and hostility, should have undergone particularly widespread repudiation. It is this psychological disunity which set the problem for the work of Sigmund Freud. His discoveries relating to unconscious forces and his techniques designed to assist the individual to find a new basis for psychological unity can be adequately understood only when seen against the background of compartmentalization of personality in the nineteenth century.²⁸

In view of this psychological disunity, it is not surprising that anxiety should have emerged as an unavoidable problem in the nineteenth century. It is not surprising also that in the middle of that century we should find Kierkegaard producing the most direct, and in some ways the most profound, study of anxiety to appear up to that point in history. The disunity itself was, of course, anxiety-creating. The search for a new basis for unity of personality, as pursued by Kierkegaard and later by Freud, necessitated first of all confronting, and so far as possible solving, the problem of anxiety.

This breakdown in the unity of thought and culture was keenly felt by a number of sensitive and prophetic thinkers of the nineteenth century, many of whom can be grouped under the term Existentialists. The existentialist movement dates from the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling’s Berlin lectures in 1841, delivered before a distinguished audience including Kierkegaard, Engels, and Burckhardt.29 In addition to Schelling and Kierkegaard, existential thinking is represented on one wing by the “philosophers of life”—Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and later Bergson—and on its sociological wing by Feuerbach and Marx.³⁰ “What all philosophers of Existence oppose is the ‘rational’ system of thought and life developed by Western industrial society and its philosophical representatives.”³¹ Tillich characterized the endeavors of these existential thinkers as “the desperate struggle to find a new meaning of life in a reality from which men have been estranged, in a cultural situation in which two great traditions, the Christian and the humanistic, have lost their comprehensive character and their convincing power.” Tillich continues:

During the last hundred years the implications of this system have become increasingly clear: a logical or naturalistic mechanism which seemed to destroy individual freedom, personal decision and organic community; and analytic rationalism which saps vital forces of life and transforms everything, including man himself, into an object of calculation and control. . . .³²

In their rejection of traditional rationalism, the existential thinkers insisted that reality can be approached and experienced only by the whole individual, as a feeling and acting as well as a thinking organism. Kierkegaard felt that Hegel’s system, which confuses abstract thought with reality, was nothing short of trickery. Kierkegaard and others in this line believed that passion (using this word as meaning full commitment) cannot be divorced from thinking. Feuerbach wrote, “Only that which is the object of passion really is.”33 Said Nietzsche, “We think with our bodies.”

Thus, these thinkers sought to overcome the traditional dichotomy between mind and body and the tendency to suppress the “irrational” aspects of experience. Pure objectivity is an illusion, Kierkegaard held; and even if it weren’t, it would be undesirable. He emphasizes “the word ‘interest’ (inter-est), which expresses the fact that we are so intimately involved in the objective world that we cannot be content to regard truth objectively, i.e., disinterestedly.”³⁴ Kierkegaard reacted strongly against rigid definitions of such terms as “self” and “truth”; he felt they could be defined only dynamically, i.e., dialectically, as continuously developing among living people. “Away from speculation,” he cried, “away from ‘the System’ and back to reality.”³⁵ He insisted that “truth exists for the particular individual only as he himself produces it in action.”³⁶ This sounds like a radical subjectivity, which on the surface it is; but it must be remembered that Kierkegaard and the others in this movement believed that this was the way to a genuine objectivity as opposed to the artificial objectivity of the “rationalistic” systems. As Tillich expressed it, these thinkers “turned toward man’s immediate experience, toward ‘subjectivity,’ not as something opposed to ‘objectivity,’ but as that living experience in which both objectivity and subjectivity are rooted.”³⁷ Also, “They tried to discover the creative realm of being which is prior to and beyond the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity.”

It was the aim of these thinkers to overcome the compartmentalization of their culture by a new emphasis on the individual as a living, experiencing unity—i.e., the individual as an organism which thinks, feels, and wills at the same time. The existentialists are important in this study, not only because the dichotomy between psychology and philosophy is broken down in their thought, but also because now for the first time in the modern period anxiety comes directly into the foreground as a specific problem.

We turn now directly to Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). He is regarded on the Continent, according to Brock, as “one of the most remarkable psychologists of all time, in depth, if not in breadth, superior to Nietzsche, and in penetration comparable only to Dostoievski.”38

The keystone idea in Kierkegaard’s little book on anxiety,³⁹ published in 1844, is the relation between anxiety and freedom. Kierkegaard held that “anxiety is always to be understood as oriented toward freedom.”⁴⁰ Freedom is the goal of personality development; psychologically speaking, “the good is freedom.”⁴¹ Kierkegaard defines freedom as possibility. This he views as the spiritual aspect of man; indeed, it is not inaccurate to read “possibility” whenever Kierkegaard writes “spirit.” The distinctive characteristic of the human being, in contrast to the merely vegetative or the merely animal, lies in the range of human possibility and in our capacity for self-awareness of possibility. Kierkegaard sees man as the creature who is continually beckoned by possibility, who conceives of possibility, visualizes it, and by creative activity carries it into actuality. When the specific content of this possibility is, in psychological terms, I shall discuss below in dealing with Kierkegaard’s ideas of expansiveness and communicativeness. It suffices here to emphasize that this possibility is human freedom.

Now this capacity for freedom brings with it anxiety. Anxiety is the state of the human being, says Kierkegaard, when he confronts his freedom. Indeed, he describes anxiety as “the possibility of freedom.” Whenever possibility is visualized by an individual, anxiety is potentially present in the same experience. In everyday experiential terms, this may be illustrated by our recalling that every person has the opportunity and need to move ahead in his development—the child learns to walk, and moves on into school, and the adult moves into marriage and/or new jobs. Such possibilities, like roads ahead which cannot be known since you have not yet traversed and experienced them, involve anxiety. (This is “normal anxiety,” and is not to be confused with “neurotic anxiety,” which will be considered below. Kierkegaard makes it clear that neurotic anxiety is a more constrictive and uncreative form of anxiety which results from the individual’s failure to move ahead in situations of normal anxiety.)⁴² There is anxiety in any actualizing of possibility. To Kierkegaard, the more possibility (creativity) an individual has, the more potential anxiety he has at the same time. Possibility (“I can”) passes over into actuality, but the intermediate determinant is anxiety. “Possibility means I can. In a logical system it is convenient enough to say that possibility passes over into actuality. In reality it is not so easy, and an intermediate determinant is necessary. This intermediate determinant is anxiety . . .”43

Viewing anxiety developmentally, Kierkegaard begins with the original state of the infant. This he terms the state of innocence, in which the infant is in immediate unity with its natural condition, its environment. The infant has possibility. This entails anxiety, but it is anxiety without specific content. In this original state anxiety is a “seeking after adventure, a thirst for the prodigious, the mysterious.”⁴⁴ The child moves ahead, actualizing his possibilities. But in the state of innocence he is not self-consciously aware that the possibility of growth, for example, also involves crises, clashes with, and defiance of his parents. In the state of innocence, individuation is a potentiality which has not yet become self-conscious. The anxiety connected with it is “sheer possibility,” i.e., without specific content.

Then in human development comes self-awareness. Kierkegaard cites the story of Adam as a presentation in myth form of this phenomenon. Disposing immediately of the deteriorated view of this myth as a historical event, he insists that “the myth represents as outward that which occurred inwardly.”⁴⁵ In this sense the myth of Adam is re-enacted by every human being somewhere between the ages of one and three. Kierkegaard interprets it as a portrayal of the individual’s inner awakening into self-consciousness. At some point in development there occurs the “knowledge of good and evil,” as the myth puts it. Then conscious choice enters the picture of possibility. There occurs a heightened sense both of the portentous nature of possibility and of the responsibility that goes with it. For now the possibility of conflict and crises confronts the individual; possibility is negative as well as positive. Developmentally, the child now moves toward individuation. And the road over which he moves is not one of immediate harmony with environment or specifically with parents, but a road which continually skirts the edges of defiance of this environment; and indeed in many cases the road must move directly through actual experiences of conflict with parents. The threat of isolation and powerlessness and the consequent anxiety arise at this point in the child’s development (discussed later). Individuation (becoming a self) is gained at the price of confronting the anxiety inherent in taking a stand against as well as with one’s environment. Describing the moment of this heightened awareness of the possibility of freedom, Kierkegaard speaks of “the alarming possibility of being able.”46

It may be helpful to point out here that Kierkegaard’s central problem when he writes psychologically is how a person can will to be himself. To will to be himself is man’s true vocation. Kierkegaard holds that we cannot specifically define this self one is to be, for the self is freedom. But at considerable length he points out how people try to avoid willing to be themselves: by avoiding consciousness of the self, by willing to be some one else or simply a conventional self, or by willing to be oneself defiantly, which is a form of tragic, stoic despair and, therefore, doomed to fall short of full selfhood. His word “will” is not to be confused with nineteenth-century voluntarism, which consisted chiefly of repression of unacceptable elements within the self. Rather, this willing is a creative decisiveness, based centrally on expanding self-awareness. “Generally speaking, consciousness, i.e. consciousness of self, is the decisive criterion of the self,” he writes. “The more consciousness, the more self. . . .”⁴⁷

This is not a foreign language to anyone conversant with modern psychotherapy. One basic aim of therapy is to enlarge self-awareness by means of clarifying inner self-defeating conflicts which have existed because the individual has been forced to block self-awareness at earlier times.⁴⁸ It is clear in therapy that these blockages in self-awareness have occurred because the person has been unable to move through accumulations of anxiety at various points in his growth. Kierkegaard makes it clear that selfhood depends upon the individual’s capacity to confront anxiety and move ahead despite it. Freedom, to Kierkegaard, is not a simple accretion, nor does it occur as spontaneously as the plant grows toward the sun when the rocks that block it are removed (as the problem of freedom is sometimes oversimplified in deteriorated forms of psychotherapy). Freedom, rather, depends on how one relates oneself to oneself at every moment in existence. This means, in present-day terms, that freedom depends on how responsibly and autonomously one relates to oneself.

When Kierkegaard speaks of the awakening of self-awareness following the state of innocence of the child, one is tempted to compare this with the data of contemporary psychology. The difficulty in such a comparison is that the equivalence is never entirely complete. For example, Kierkegaard’s idea of the self is only partially contained in the psychological term ego, which is its nearest equivalent. But we can say that the awakening of self-awareness is roughly parallel to what is now meant in some psychological quarters by the “emergence of the ego.” This occurs generally somewhere between the ages of one and three; we can observe in babies that this self-awareness does not exist, whereas it is discernible in the child of four or five. So far as Kierkegaard’s own view goes, he believed this change is a “qualitative leap,” and cannot, therefore, be adequately described by scientific methods. Kierkegaard’s aim is to describe phenomenologically the human situation—of an adult, for example—which he finds as a state of conflict (self-awareness) set against a backdrop of innocence.49

As a consequence of this “leap” into self-awareness, anxiety becomes reflective—that is, it now has more content. Anxiety “in the later individual is more reflective as a consequence of the participation of the individual in the history of the race.”⁵⁰ Self-awareness makes possible not only self-directed individual development, but also self-conscious historical development. Just as the individual now sees himself as not merely at the mercy of his environment and his natural condition, but as possessing the capacities of choice and independence, so he sees himself likewise as something more than an automaton, swallowed up in a meaningless historical development. Through self-awareness man can mold and to an extent transform his present historical development. This does not annul the determining influences of one’s historical environment. “Every individual begins in a historical nexus,” Kierkegaard writes, “and the consequences of natural law are still as valid as ever.”51 But what is of crucial significance is how a person relates himself to his historical nexus.

Kiekegaard’s argument up to this point may be summarized as follows: In the state of innocence there is no separation of the individual from his environment, and anxiety is ambiguous. In the state of self-awareness, however, there occurs the possibility of separation as an individual. Anxiety is now reflective; and the individual can through self-awareness partially direct his own development as well as participate in the history of the race.

We now come to a crucial point. Anxiety involves inner conflict; this is another and important consequence of self-awareness. Anxiety “is afraid,” says Kierkegaard, “yet it maintains a sly intercourse with its object, cannot look away from it, indeed will not. . . .” ⁵²(Our author adds, for reasons the reader can well understand, “If to one or another this may appear a difficult saying, I can do nothing about it.”) And again, anxiety

is a desire for what one dreads, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears, but what one fears one desires. Anxiety then makes the individual impotent.⁵³

This inner conflict which characterizes anxiety is familiar in modern clinical psychology; it has been described specifically by Freud, Stekel, Horney, and others. Ample illustrations of it can be cited from clinical data, especially in its exaggerated form in neurosis: a patient has sexual or aggressive desires, yet he fears these very desires (including the consequences of them), and a persistent inner conflict is engendered. Every person who has been seriously ill physically knows that he has severe anxiety lest he not get well, yet he flirts with the prospect of remaining sick; he is sympathetic, in Kierkegaard’s words, to the prospect he hates and fears most. This is a phenomenon more profound than the mere desire for the “secondary gain” of illness, be it emotional or physical. Possibly Freud was struggling with this phenomenon when he postulated the much questioned formulation of the “death instinct” as in conflict with the “life instinct.” It would seem that Otto Rank comes closer to Kierkegaard (and at the same time avoids the less acceptable elements in Freud’s postulation) in his concept of the conflict between the “life will” and the “death will.”54 The conflict occurs not only in anxiety, but is itself the product of anxiety—i.e., one has such conflict to the extent that one already has anxiety in the situation.

In any case, Kierkegaard makes it clear that he would not limit this inner conflict to neurotic phenomena. He believes that in every possibility, in every experience of anxiety beyond infancy, the conflict is present. In every experience the individual wishes to move ahead, actualizing his possibilities; but at the same time he plays with the prospect of not doing so—i.e., there is in him a wish not to actualize his possibilities. Kierkegaard would describe the difference between the “neurotic” and “healthy” state by saying that the healthy individual moves ahead despite the conflict, actualizing his freedom, whereas the unhealthy person retrenches to a “shut-in” condition, sacrificing his freedom. The radical distinction between fear and anxiety appears at this point: in fear one moves in one direction, away from the feared object, whereas in anxiety a persistent inner conflict is in operation and one has an ambivalent relation to the object. Kierkegaard always insists that although anxiety in the reflective stage has more content, it can never be assigned a wholly specific content, for it describes an inner state, a state of conflict.

Another consequence of self-awareness is that responsibility and guilt feeling enter the picture.⁵⁵ Guilt feeling is a difficult and perplexing problem, to Kierkegaard as well as in contemporary psychology, and to my mind it is often evaded by oversimplification. We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. One has anxiety because it is possible to create—creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process). One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. It is valuable to let patients in therapy know this—to point out that the presence of anxiety means a conflict is going on, and so long as this is true, a constructive solution is possible.

Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves destructive as well as constructive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If you do not do this, you are refusing to grow, refusing to avail yourself of possibilities; you are shirking your responsibility to yourself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist).56 Every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or toward established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed so that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present. “The greater the genius,” writes Kierkegaard, “the more profoundly he discovers guilt.”⁵⁷

Although sex and sensuality are often made the content for this guilt, Kierkegaard did not believe that sex and sensuality are in themselves sources of either anxiety or guilt. Sex is significant, rather, because it stands for the problem of individuation and community. In Kierkegaard’s culture as well as in ours, sex is often the clearest fulcrum of the problem of being a self—e.g., having individual desires, urges, yet being in expanding relationships with others. The complete fulfillment of these desires involves other persons. Sex may thus express this individuality-in-community constructively (sex as a form of interpersonal relatedness), or it may be distorted into egocentricity (pseudo-individuality) or into mere symbiotic dependence (pseudo-community). In what we may take as an analogy, Kierkegaard speaks of anxiety culminating in the woman at the birth of a child, because “at this instant the new individual comes into the world.” Anxiety and guilt are potentially present at every instant that individuality is born into community. And this is not only in the figurative sense of the birth of a child, but in the birth of new phases of one’s own individuality. According to Kierkegaard, one is, or ought to be, continually creating his own selfhood every instant of his life.58

The belief in fate, says Kierkegaard, is often used as a method of avoiding the anxiety and guilt feeling in creativity. Since “fate is a relation of spirit (possibility) to something external,” such as misfortune, necessity, or chance, the full meaning of anxiety and guilt are not felt. But Kierkegaard holds that this taking of refuge in a doctrine of fate sets limits to creativity. Thus he believed that Judaism, in which the problem of guilt was frankly faced, represents a higher level than Hellenism, which rested with a belief in fate. The creative genius in the highest sense does not seek to avoid anxiety and guilt through recourse to belief in fate; he creates by moving through anxiety and guilt.

One form of the loss of freedom is the state of “shut-upness.” “Shut-upness” is a graphic term for the processes of blocked awareness, inhibition, and other common neurotic reactions to anxiety.⁵⁹ This is the state, points out Kierkegaard, that has been characterized historically as the “demoniacal,” and since he cites some biblical cases of hysteria and muteness, we know that he is referring to various clinical forms of neurosis and psychosis. The trouble in such cases he felt to be an “unfree relation to the good.” Anxiety takes the form of “dread of the good”; the individual endeavors to shut out freedom and constrict his development. Indeed, “freedom is precisely the expansive,” Kierkegaard holds; “freedom is constantly communicating,” he adds, foreshadowing the concepts of Harry Stack Sullivan.⁶⁰ In the demoniacal state, “unfreedom becomes more and more shut-up and wants no communication.”⁶¹ Kierkegaard makes it clear that he is not referring, in the phrase “shut-upness,” to the reserve of the creative person, but to shut-upness as withdrawal and as a form of continual negation. “The demoniacal does not shut itself up with something, but shuts itself up.”62 Hence he also holds that the shut-up is the tedious (the impression of being extinct) and the vacuous. The shut-up person has anxiety when confronted with freedom or the “good” (these two terms are used as synonyms at this point). The “good” in Kierkegaard’s sense signifies to the shut-up person a challenge to reintegrate himself on the basis of freedom. The “good” furthermore, he describes as expansiveness, ever increasing communicativeness.

Kierkegaard believed that it is a false compassion to view the shut-up personality as a victim of fate, for this implies that nothing can be done about it. A real compassion involves facing the problem with guilt (i.e., responsibility). This is responsibility on the part of all of us, whether shut-up or not. The courageous man prefers, when ill, to have it said, “this is not fate, this is guilt,” for then his possibility of doing something about his condition is not removed from him. For “the ethical individual,” Kierkegaard continues, “fears nothing so much as fate and aesthetic folderol which under the cloak of compassion would trick him out of his treasure, viz., freedom” (ibid., p. 108 n.). I can illustrate this experientially from a realm which is supposed in our culture to be even more closely referable to fate than psychological disturbances—i.e., infectious illnesses. When I was ill with tuberculosis (before the days of drugs to cure the disease), I noticed, in observing myself and many other patients, that we were often reassured by well-meaning friends and medical personnel that the disease was due to an accident of infection by the tubercle bacillus. This explanation on the basis of fate was thought to be a relief to the patient. But actually it threw many of the more psychologically sensitive patients into greater despair. If the disease were an accident, how could we be certain it would not occur again and again? If, on the other hand, the patient feels that his own pattern of life was at fault and that this was one of the causes of his succumbing to the disease, he feels more guilt, to be sure, but at the same time he sees more hopefully what conditions need to be corrected in order to overcome the disease. From this point of view, guilt feeling is not only the more accurate attitude, but it is also the one yielding the more genuine hope. (Needless to say, Kierkegaard and I are referring to rational, not irrational guilt. The latter has unconscious dynamics, is unconstructive, and needs to be weeded out.)

Shut-up states, in the last analysis, are based upon illusions: “it is easy to see that shut-upness eo ipso signifies a lie, or, if you prefer, untruth. But untruth is precisely unfreedom. . . .”63 He suggests that those who work with shut-up personalities should realize the value of silence, and should always keep their “categories very clear.” He believed that the shut-up state can be cured by inward revelation, or “transparency,” and his references to this on the psychological level are not unlike contemporary ideas of catharsis and clarification.

Freedom may also be lost psychosomatically. To Kierkegaard “the somatic, the psychic, the pneumatic” (possibility) are so interrelated that “a disorganization in one shows itself in the others.”⁶⁴ He adds a third determinant to the customary psyche and soma, namely the self. It is this “intermediate determinant” which involves possibility and freedom. He did not believe that personality is a mere synthesis of psyche and soma. If it is to be developed to its larger capacities, personality depends upon how the self relates itself to both psyche and soma. This is another indication that Kierkegaard’s concept of the self is not to be identified with merely a portion of the psyche such as the ego. The self is in operation when an individual is able to view both psyche and soma with freedom and to act on this freedom.

Other examples of the loss of freedom as a result of anxiety are seen in the rigid personalities. These are the personalities, writes Kierkegaard, who lack inward certitude.

A partisan of the most rigid orthodoxy may be demoniacal. He knows it all, he bows before the holy, truth is for him an ensemble of ceremonies, he talks about presenting himself before the throne of God, of how many times one must bow, he knows everything the same way as does the pupil who is able to demonstrate a mathematical proposition with the letters ABC, but not when they are changed to DEF. He is therefore in anxiety whenever he hears something not arranged in the same order. And yet how closely he resembles a modern speculative philosopher who found a new proof for the immortality of the soul, then came into mortal danger and could not produce his proof because he had not his notebooks with him.65

The kind of anxiety which is related to lack of inward certitude may show itself on one hand by willfulness and unbelief—the negating attitude; and on the other hand by superstition. “Superstition and unbelief are both forms of unfreedom.”⁶⁶ The bigot and the unbeliever are in the same category with respect to the form of anxiety underlying their frame of mind. Both lack expansiveness; “both lack inwardness and dare not come to themselves.”⁶⁷

It is not surprising to Kierkegaard that people should do everything possible to avoid anxiety. He speaks of his “cowardly age” in which “one does everything possible by way of diversions and the Janizary music of loud-voiced enterprises to keep lonely thoughts away, just as in the forests of America they keep away wild beasts by torches, by yells, by the sound of cymbals.”⁶⁸ For anxiety is an exceedingly painful experience. And again we quote, because of its vividness and aptness, his description of this painfulness:

And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharpwitted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.⁶⁹

But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as a human being. “If a man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety. Since he is a synthesis he can be in anxiety, and the greater the anxiety the greater the man. This, however, is not affirmed in the sense in which men commonly understand anxiety, as related to something outside a man, but in the sense that man himself produces anxiety.”70

Kierkegaard writes in his most engaging vein about anxiety as a “school.” Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within. “Even in relation to the most trifling matters, so soon as the individuality would make an artful turn which is only artful, would steal away from something, and there is every probability that it will succeed, for reality is not so sharp an examiner as anxiety—then anxiety is at hand.”⁷¹ Accepting anxiety as a teacher may seem a foolish counsel, he admits, especially to those who boast of never having been in anxiety. “To this I would reply that doubtless one should not be in dread of men, or of finite things, but only that man who has gone through the anxiety of possibility is educated to have no anxiety.”⁷²

On one side—which we may term the negative side—this education involves facing and accepting the human situation frankly. It means facing the fact of death and other aspects of the contingency of existence, and from this Angst der Kreatur one learns how to interpret the reality of one’s human situation. “When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he can demand of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every anxiety which alarms [Aengste] may the next instant become a fact, he will interpret reality differently, he will extol reality. . . .”⁷³

On the positive side, going to school to anxiety enables one to move through the finite and petty constrictions and to be freed to actualize the infinite possibilities in personality. The finite to Kierkegaard is that which “shuts up” freedom; the infinite refers in contrast to “opening up” doors to freedom. The infinite, therefore, is part of his concept of possibility. Finiteness can be defined as one experiences it in the innumerable constrictions and artificial limitations that we observe in the clinic as well as in our own lives. The infinite cannot be so defined, because it represents freedom. In facing anxiety, Kierkegaard extols the attitude of Socrates who

solemnly flourished the poisoned goblet . . . as a patient says to the surgeon when a painful operation is about to begin, “Now I am ready.” Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches it thoroughly, constraining out of him all the finite and the petty, and leading him hence whither he would go.74

In such confronting of anxiety the individual is educated to faith, or inward certitude. Then one has the “courage to renounce anxiety without any anxiety, which only faith is capable of—not that it annihilates anxiety, but remaining ever young, it is continually developing itself out of the death throe of anxiety.”

To the scientifically minded reader, it may seem that Kierkegaard in the above quotations is speaking in poetic and paradoxical figures of speech. This is, of course, true; but his meaning may be summarized in clear, experiential terms. On one hand he is anticipating the contention of Horney and others that anxiety indicates the presence of a problem which needs to be solved; and in Kierkegaard’s mind, anxiety will dog the steps of the individual (if he does not engage in complete neurotic repression) until it is resolved. But on the other hand, Kierkegaard is proclaiming that “self-strength” develops out of the individual’s successful confronting of anxiety-creating experiences. This is the way one becomes educated to maturity as a self.

What is so amazing in Kierkegaard is that despite his writing 130 years ago, and despite his lack of the tools for interpreting unconscious material—which tools have been available in their most complete form only since Freud—he so keenly and profoundly anticipated modern psychoanalytic insight into anxiety. At the same time he placed these insights in the broad context of a poetic and philosophical understanding of human experience. In Kierkegaard one finds a promise of the dawning of that day for which the French physiologist Claude Bernard yearned, the day when “the physiologist, the philosopher and the poet will talk the same language and understand each other.”