The Concept of Anxiety

Introduction

The book appeared in June 1844 under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, “the watchman of Copenhagen”, and is subtitled a psychological deliberation on the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin. Starting from the story of Adam, Kierkegaard asks how sin enters the world and answers with a psychology of freedom: anxiety has no definite object, as fear does, but is directed at the mere possibility of being able to act. It is ambiguous, attracting and repelling at once, which Kierkegaard calls a sympathetic antipathy. Long overshadowed by his other works, the book became a source for Heidegger, who refers to it in his analysis of anxiety in Being and Time, and for Sartre’s concept of anguish.

Connections

Taken up in

• Psychology of Worldviews1919 · Karl Jaspers
• Being and Time1927 · Martin Heidegger

More works by Søren Kierkegaard

• 1843Either/Or
• 1843Fear and Trembling
• 1846Concluding Unscientific Postscript