Translator’s Introduction
Anxiety is life’s inescapable accompaniment, its constant undertow. Every step we take offers it an opportunity; to avoid anxiety we would have to lock ourselves away. But who would then dare say we were not still anxious? The nineteenth- century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman humorously describes the increasing insanity of a minor civil servant who, taken in care, begins to interpret everything around him as designed to comply with his wishes. Doors closed to him are for his protection, if they are open it is to facilitate his royal progress, and harsh treatment in the asylum is part of the ritual of coronation to the Spanish throne. If we may allow that madness can purge all anxiety, on this side of insanity there are those of us whose daily routines can be so ordered as also to arouse the suspicion that our lives are ruled not so much by the order we impose as by a persistent undercurrent of anxiety that explains the resort to rules. We are still anxious, anxious about anxiety. Even open defiance of anxiety, facing it head-on as in extreme sports, may be seen as a way of acknowledging its motivational power. But then it might also reveal something deeper, a need to focus on a particular danger to be overcome in order to clear the mind of possibilities we prefer not to fathom.
To many of us that might seem a good thing, even if the means appear drastic; although there appears to be nothing obviously pathological in defying danger, it is in a way therapeutic. A rush of adrenalin can give a welcome sense of well-being. But there are cases of unsuppressed anxiety that clearly spell some sort of disorder. They have been given labels: anxiety disorder—plain and simple—or more ominously, obsessive compulsive disorder and traumatic stress and social anxiety disorders. These merge with or are components in familiar phobias, such as agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and acrophobia, panicky desires to avoid large open spaces, small enclosures, and unusual heights. The treatments that psychologists and psychiatrists provide give sufferers a more circumscribed sense of their own existence, a greater sense of security in the here and now, and an indifference to what may come. Unlike that of those who face anxiety head-on by defying it, it is the indifference of someone for whom the possibilities that seem so alarming have been safely put out of mind.
Kierkegaard tells us that this is wrong. It is to turn our backs on possibilities upon which our human destinies may depend, spiritual possibilities that we are by nature prone to avoid and therefore naturally shun, but which we nevertheless have it in us to face. The Concept of Anxiety speaks of a dawning spirit or, in more concretely psychological terms, of a growing awareness of our peculiar status among living creatures as conscious of our own singularity, of not being in immediate continuity with our surroundings but in some way above or apart from them, able to see ourselves as selves in relation to the world, and to other selves with whom we share it. Perhaps, among the disorders mentioned here, those that come closest to anxiety in Kierkegaard’s sense are the phobias, in particular a sense of catastrophic severance from one’s relation to solid earth. In another way, Kierkegaard’s anxiety is both like and unlike what is known as “generalized anxiety disorder,” a form of disability in which there is no specific mental allergen as in the case of those phobias, but an indiscriminate anxiety in which anything that comes along causes worry. However, unlike GAD, which focuses on each particular as it comes, indeed on any particular, the anxiety in Kierkegaard’s analysis “differs altogether from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite.”
In a suggestive rather than clear indication of what this anxiety is, we are told that it is “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” In following the clue that the mention of freedom provides, we can begin to see what kind of generalized anxiety Kierkegaard is talking about, and also why he will claim that it is a misunderstanding to think of it as a “disorder” that can be treated with “pills and powders.” It will turn out to be a global rather than a generalized anxiety that, rather than having anything or everything as its focus, is anxiety in the face of nothing. The metaphors drawn on to describe it can remind us of those phobias and of acrophobia in particular: “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom that emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis, and freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.”
Anxiety in this generalized form is not something to be cured by therapy; in fact “cure” is not the right word for its removal at all. Anxiety can be replaced only by the freedom whose harsh requirements are its cause. Being free requires us to release the brakes that anxiety represents in order to accept and appropriate our proper spiritual fulfillment or perhaps even to recognize, if that is what we in the end believe, that no such prospect is in store. Roughly, in The Concept of Anxiety, the dizzying height from which anxious spirit shrinks in its acrophobic panic should be grasped as the vantage-point from which the human being may achieve its proper fulfillment but in a nonfinite form. To use medication or such relaxation techniques as meditation and yoga, or just plain exercise, to reduce the effect of socially disabling and personally destabilizing forms of generalized anxiety is one thing; it is another to interrupt progress toward spiritual fulfillment by reducing levels of consciousness. To do so merely adds to the aggregate of what Kierkegaard here calls sinfulness, and to the “objective” anxiety that is consonant with it, that already exists in a society, and in the context of which every individual later than Adam loses innocence.
But why this reference to sin and to Adam? What is “hereditary sin” doing in the title and isn’t it usually called “original”? How can the barbaric idea that this biblical figure is to blame for a point of departure for which we later humans have no responsibility be of any interest to our enlightened age, even to that element of it still tuned into religion?
The opening chapter of The Concept of Anxiety (henceforth Anxiety) puts some effort into sweeping aside that simple reading of the Genesis story. The point in doing so is to tell us that we are all in Adam’s position, except that unlike Adam we do not begin from scratch in a state of unalloyed innocence. For we who come later, a sense of sinfulness is already fixed in ways, in habits and practices, that are charged with the sins of our predecessors, sins of authority as much as of disobedience, some of them also taken on by what passes for Christianity itself. But then Christianity, as Kierkegaard sees it, is not a topic for treatises. Nor do doctrine and ritual get to the content let alone core of true religion; ceremony and the intoning of words no more make a genuinely religious community than mere flag-waving makes a nation. Christianity, one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms says elsewhere, is better understood as a form of communication, a way of associating based not on outward proof of membership but on an understanding of what it is to be a human being, with its deficits, trials, and hopes for fulfillment, and also fear of what is required to make good the human deficit. That complex fear, a fear that is also a longing, is the theme of this “simple” psychological deliberation.
But then there is sin. That bad conduct is to be understood as a violation of God’s law sounds rebarbative in an age versed in Nietzsche and Freud, even to those of the Christian faith. Faithful Nietzscheans dispense with God in any case, the deity being a long-standing impediment to a new morality that exploits the possibilities of selfhood rather than, as Nietzsche reads traditional Christian morality, repressing them. As for Freudians, they will be seeking fulfillment in their personal happiness by removing more complicated hindrances to that end, since for them evil has something to do with unnecessary inhibitions in the way of healthy psychosomatic development. Anxiety’s topic is also the malfunctioning psyche, but it says that proper psychic functioning depends on a balance between psyche and soma “sustained by spirit.”
Kierkegaard’s criticism of his society and its ways, inside and outside religion, does however bear comparison with Nietzsche’s, and vice versa. The difference is that Nietzsche saw himself as clearing a space that leaves no room for God’s comeback, while Kierkegaard’s clearance is designed to allow God at last to have a look in. Both thinkers are products of the German Idealist tradition but in their different ways mark its ending. To grasp the reason for Kierkegaard’s focus on hereditary sin, and its connection with anxiety, it helps therefore to look at the terms of that tradition, since it is these that he uses to oppose it. This fact can easily mislead one into supposing that Anxiety is a conscious parody dressed up as a treatise on anxiety simply to ridicule the very idea of attempting such a thing. From there it would be but a short step to suppose that nothing in it should be taken seriously. The reader may conclude that, on the contrary, never was there a more serious “treatise” on anxiety. It places anxiety where it belongs, in that dawning consciousness, peculiar to humankind, of a forced capacity to reflect on the manner of its own existence, among other things but somehow very centrally, on the nature or role of this very capacity. The complex purpose of this “deliberation” is to persuade us that the topic in question is too important to spend time finding a place for it in a system of thought. Kierkegaard’s “essays [attempts],” “deliberations,” “compilations,” and “expositions” have an openly “unscholarly,” that is to say in the term of the time “unscientific” style, signaling that rather than presenting views for further and in principle endless discussion, their purpose is to put readers back on track, to restore these topics to an “actuality” where the problem is faced head-on. Kierkegaard’s plan of campaign can be said, in general, to be directed at retrieving such “topics” from the vicarious lives they have for centuries led in an intellectual arena as puzzles for clever minds, minds self-authorized to arrive at and dictate doctrines and patterns of behavior for the respectful or fearful to follow. Their proper place is as challenges in each individual’s confrontation with the conditions of actual existence.
Anxiety (Danish Angest) was no new concept in the intellectual circles at the time Kierkegaard wrote. In his reading of the Romantics he would have come across the German “Angst” often enough. Philosophers, too, in the Romantic era helped themselves liberally to notions associated with mental conflict and stress in their dynamic visions of the way in which the world came about and is en route—even endlessly—to its fulfillment. At their center was the now seldom discussed Schelling (1775–1854), whose System des transzendentalen Idealismus and subsequent works introduced the Absolute Idealism that engaged the attention of much of intellectual Europe in the early nineteenth century. In doing so it nurtured more familiar names: Hegel and Marx, but also Kierkegaard.
For Schelling, history was a series of stages emerging from a Fall which, much like a metaphysical edition of the big bang, accounts for the presence of sheer diversity out of nothing. Diversity seeks unity in its difference and unification is the goal of the continuing development. Humankind is a part of the diversity but also party to the unifying, at least in principle. Participation requires will or understanding or both. For this humankind finds a model in the ideal of a personal God, a God that is no human invention but rather, if an invention at all, one that the ground of all things has come up with itself. Briefly, the ground of all things forces itself into the shape of personality so that humankind, through imitation, may contribute to the continuing creation which then becomes also its own fulfillment. A long footnote in Chapter 2 of Anxiety tells us that in Schelling’s works “there is often talk of anxiety, wrath, anguish, suffering etc.,” something that Kierkegaard refers to a little cheekily as “the deity’s creative birth pangs.” But he warns us not to confuse these agonizings with those that follow the “positing of sin.”
Hegel (1770–1831), once a student-friend of Schelling’s, his younger colleague to whom much of his earlier thinking was indebted, retained this “conflict” terminology in his own rationalistic version of spiritual emergence. This was one in which the personal God dissolves pantheistically, or some would say altogether, into the developing world as we find it, this now being where, if at all, we find the divine will at work. In the Phenomenology we read, in connection with the development of self-conscious spirit as separate from the world it surveys:
With the positing of a single particular . . . [consciousness establishes] the beyond . . . [and in this way] suffers violence at its own hands, [spoiling] its own limited satisfaction. When consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety [Angst] may well make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. . . . If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia. Or, if it entrenches itself in sentimentality . . . [etc.]
Anxiety’s reader will find these words, and at least one metaphor, almost exactly reproduced in the second chapter in an account of “Subjective Anxiety.” But where the gist of Hegel’s philosophy was, through rational conceptualization of the human situation and its continuing history, to restore the belief that thought captures reality as it is, Kierkegaard polemicizes fiercely in the other direction. As the epigraph to Anxiety puts it, the age of distinctions is over; all distinction can be reconciled, even that between subject and object. Anxiety fights that view. Self-conscious spirit apprehends a beyond that it knows thought cannot possibly reach, but for which it nonetheless has a longing, although in a more personal and full-blooded way than that provided in thought. But this it can do only at the cost of all familiar means of self-identity. Anxiety is the ambiguous mood in which spirit becomes self-conscious in this gap-widening setting. Hegel talks negatively of the “sighs and prayers” of religion. To him they merely indicate that consciousness has so far failed to see the “true identity of inner and outer.” For Kierkegaard (in this respect as well as others coming closer to Kant, of whose thought he speaks with respect) that failure is inevitable and should not only be accepted but exploited to spiritual advantage. One way of reading not just Anxiety but the preceding and succeeding pseudonymous works is as a many-sided attempt to replace the still dominant Romantic view of religion with another that acknowledges the great strain that religious belief puts upon the understanding.
A further footnote, this one on Anxiety’s final page, refers to a writer, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), a main proponent of the late eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang (sometimes translated “Storm and Stress”) movement. Hamann had been Kierkegaard’s own early inspiration in the matter of subjectivity. The footnote recalls Hamann’s characterization of Angst as an “impertinent disquiet and holy hypochondria,” something described with Hamann’s characteristic pungency as the “fire with which we season sacrificial animals in order to preserve us from the putrefaction of the current seculum [century].” In a journal entry from two years prior to Anxiety’s publication and only a few months after returning from a prolonged stay in Berlin, where among other things he had attended Schelling’s famous lectures and also written a considerable portion of the second part of Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes that he regrets both that Hamann had not pursued this thought and that he had not understood it in the way that he, Kierkegaard, would prefer. In that same entry we can get a sense of Kierkegaard’s preferred understanding. It contains his first recorded pondering on the role of anxiety in relation to sin:
Now people have often enough treated the nature of original sin, and yet they have lacked a principal category, namely anxiety; this is its essential determinant. Anxiety is in fact a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power that seizes the individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself free of it and one does not want to, for one fears, but what one fears is what one desires. Anxiety now renders the individual powerless, and the first sin always takes place in powerlessness; therefore it apparently lacks accountability, but this lack is the actual snare.
So Anxiety’s topic can be traced in its time from a Romantic concern with the power of passions to reveal the nature of reality in both literature and philosophy and through a vision of the world in which a personal God shows the way to human participation in the further completion of the creation. But according to Kierkegaard (or his pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript) we cannot find God in the creation, and for that reason knowledge of good and evil is not to be found there either. That is the meaning of the Fall.
Kierkegaard’s psychology is unlike any scientific discipline that goes by that name today. It is essentially Hegelian in its structure and aims, though again anti-Hegelian in its stress on the individual subject. Psychology was for Hegel a science of “subjective spirit,” its topic that same dynamic of spiritual emergence we find in Schelling. But in Hegel’s case the dynamics (or the “dialectic”) are described exclusively in terms of humankind’s developing self-awareness. The point of view is that of a historical consciousness. Spiritual advance at any historical moment is manifested in existing institutions. These, along with the existing social morality, express the result, so far, of a progressively rational historical development under the name of “objective spirit.” According to Hegel, it is through participation in and adherence to current institutions and morality that individual subjects become themselves. A science of subjective spirit has little to do positively except take note that individuals as a rule instantiate a degree of objective spiritual development, which is perhaps why Anxiety can say, “We hardly ever see the concept of anxiety treated in psychology.” Any exceptions are to be explained in terms of what they lack and psychology has of course a pathology up its sleeve, taking note of the fact that individuals may not conform to objective spirit. Positively, for Hegel, subjective spirit is the locus of the individual conscience, through which the objective spiritual environment realizes its directives, or as that in which objective spirit is expressed at the level of consciousness. The source of evil is the individual conscience’s failure to be such an expression and to take the question of good and evil into its own hands. Since, or if, the existing order is a manifestation of God’s will, taking things into one’s own hands is to perpetrate what the author of Fear and Trembling, referring directly to Hegel’s account in Philosophy of Right, calls a “moral form of evil.”
A science of subjective spirit for Kierkegaard is quite the opposite. The choice between good and evil rests with subjective spirit. Kierkegaard therefore had to resist giving the impression that his emphasis on the passion of faith in the face of the absurd meant that he was just a Romantic who had brought Christianity and a personal relation to God into the picture merely to add a touch of personal responsibility. Good and evil are still “knowledge,” but it is available only to what Anxiety’s companion work Philosophical Crumbs (or Fragments) calls “a new organ,” namely faith. For Kierkegaard a science of subjective spirit is vital in the interests of greater self-awareness: “Psychology is what we need and above all a sound knowledge of human life and sympathy for its interests.” Acquiring that knowledge is a “task to be solved before there can be any question of completing a Christian view of life.” But the Christian view of life is not included in the science. As Anxiety’s Introduction makes clear, the science stands on its own feet before handing over its results to “dogmatics.”
The psychologist here is an observer of ordinary life and can look into or even write literature based on observation and hypotheses based on personal experience but also testable in their projected implications: “Someone who has occupied himself with psychology, and with psychological observation, according to some standard will have acquired a general human flexibility that enables him at once to construct his example which, even if lacking factual authority, has an authority of another kind.” It is not to the rare case that the psychologist looks but to things that “happen everywhere . . . and every day if only the observer is present.”
And yet, in this work, the psychologist’s topic is indeed discussed from the point of view of someone in whose growing self-awareness there comes a point when sin is “posited.” Anxiety’s observations are from that point of view. The trajectory of its deliberation is indicated in a further quotation from the journal entry calling for a “sound knowledge of human life and sympathy for its interests”:
In what sense is the sensuous, or rather sexuality, sin? If every Sunday one preaches a love which is spirit and truth, letting the erotic disappear as though it were nothing, then marital relations will become so spiritual that the sexual is forgotten and the cloister or abstinence will be far truer. What is to be made of it all if with the Church’s consent we visit the theater in the evening and hear the erotic extolled? We are not supposed to go into the monastery but to marry. Right, but that is a rather foolish thing to do if the highest expression of marital love is a love unconcerned with sex.
Whether science or not, even Kierkegaardian psychology does not reach to the human core, which is the self that “no science knows” and is known only to itself.
But what interest is there today in psychological discussion, scientific in any sense or none, that has original or hereditary sin as its reference? Indeed what purpose other than cultural curiosity, or whatever other focus of what Kierkegaard disparagingly calls “interest,” is served by retranslating a work published 170 years ago?
The answer must be given in the reading, but several things speak for the continued relevance of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the matter. He himself prophesied that what he called “the category of the single individual” would be his lasting contribution to history. He may be right. He called it his own category, as indeed it was, not only because he formed it in the way he did, but more importantly because it was born of his own experience. For him it was a religious category, something that in our own age strikes many readers as confining. Today we associate singularity with social and psychological isolation rather than with the requirements of a relationship to God. Or, in a more philosophical vein, we at most associate it with that offshoot of German Idealism that became known as Existentialism, and of which Kierkegaard is sometimes proclaimed to be the father.
In pointing to religion, Anxiety makes clear that its own concern is with the complex dynamics in which the human being awakens to its spiritual situation and to the needs to which religion responds. Although the New Testament is liberally cited and Christianity occasionally alluded to, Anxiety’s biblical focus is on the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve. The Genesis story in Anxiety is refashioned to epitomize what happens in every case of the dawning of spirit, except that in the course of time there is an accumulation of anxiety corresponding to the sinfulness that one generation inherits from its predecessor. Adam had no part in “objective” anxiety, but neither do we share with Adam any of his pristine innocence. We awaken spiritually to a world that through the centuries has accommodated itself to the trials of spirit. It has done so by making spirituality itself sound more easy and even fun, or, alternatively, by giving people ample opportunity to keep their minds off the larger existential worry. Not only amusements but whole ways of life have been cultivated that alleviate the restlessness or unease that any intimation of a spiritual destiny might cause. But these too place a host of other worries in their path. It can of course be, and has been, the case that such worries are avoided only by the rich or by those paid to talk incessantly of spiritual fulfillment. But the modern world is one in which events have overtaken the situation where work was a way of closing the mind. Widespread unemployment on the one hand and lives with extensive built-in leisure periods provide increasing exposure to the ennui that was once the doubtful privilege of the few. Boredom, says Anxiety, is “a continuity in nothingness.” This point is brought home in the most elaborate discussion of anxiety, “Anxiety about the Good” or “the demonic,” in Chapter IV.
The anxieties nowadays labeled “disorders” can themselves be nervous responses to ways of life unconsciously but strategically placed in the path of a greater fulfillment that is too hard to accept. Rather than accept it, we prefer to think of fulfillment in terms of restoring to our lives better ways of functioning in an increasingly complex world. We put off all thought of what it means to be a merely finite creature—until such times as we have to cope with that too, but then in ritual ways that allow us to extinguish that anguish as an unavoidable interlude.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the German existentialist philosopher and social critic, picks up Anxiety’s threads at this point. His project is descriptive, or “phenomenological,” which means removing Anxiety’s psychology from the context of religion and translating it into a general account of the human being’s inescapably finite situation. In an account a good deal less “simple” than Kierkegaard’s seminal “deliberation,” Heidegger offers a kind of critical prolegomena to any future theology. Anxiety, following Kierkegaard, is the mood in which human beings awaken to the peculiarly exposed vantage point they “enjoy” by virtue of their specifically reflective form of awareness, loosening an initially immediate tie with the world. Although Heidegger offers no reason of the kind we find in Kierkegaard, in terms of a lost opportunity of fulfillment, for why we should not avoid anxiety but face it, the possibility of a theological view remains but with the finite limits of our lives in full view. Thus Heidegger can talk in Sein und Zeit (1927) of an inauthentic immersion in everyday life (Das Man). Authentic selfhood consists in “being toward death,” where Dasein (the German equivalent of Tilværelse, or human existence) acquires an understanding of what it is to be a single human being and also of a disposition to escape this insight by falling back into Das Man. This abstract substantive is doubtless derived from Kierkegaard’s liberal use of “man,” properly translated as “one” as in “one thought that . . .”, but convertible as often in the present translation into the passive form “it was thought that . . .” Heidegger’s expression is sometimes translated as “the they.” Relapsing from isolation into Das Man is a source of guilt which through retrospection to the initial state of immersion is then directed also at that state. Readers of Anxiety will note a considerable parallel here with Kierkegaard’s text and its treatment of guilt (prior to sin). It is indeed hard to imagine what would remain of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein had he not come across Anxiety and also Kierkegaard’s own concentrated piece of social criticism in A Literary Review. From Heidegger’s mining of these sources we can further trace the influence of Kierkegaard on that arch-existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and his concept of the “singular universal.” Both philosophers draw what can be called anthropological conclusions from the inherent presence in the human of a global anxiety, one that differs from a generalized anxiety that focuses on specific events and situations even though indiscriminatingly.
Sociologists too have concerned themselves with human singularity, but in terms of social and associated cultural causes. The dissolution of conditions of social belonging were stated in the late nineteenth century by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim with his notion of anomie (Le Suicide, 1897), sometimes called “normlessness.” Just as Kierkegaard finds psychology a necessary preliminary to an understanding of the individual’s relation to the promise of salvation, so Durkheim argues for the independent status of sociology as a science that can uncover facts irreducible to those of psychology. Kierkegaard might have agreed, so long as those facts of psychology were irreducible in turn. Max Weber, the German sociologist in whose circle Kierkegaard was seriously discussed, is well known for noting what he termed the “demystification of the world” (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, 1922). An atomizing of society leaves individuals with little but the power of reason, with which they dissolve the myths that once gave people and nations their psychological guarantees, but also reorganize society in productive ways designed to guarantee survival. Beyond the contentment that a well-organized society requires and therefore makes possible, at least for some people, no further questions arise of a deeper fulfillment.
Instead, fulfillment in the form of social guarantees of selfhood is found in some necessary “other,” that is to say in some external authority to which the subject is subject, and what is a subject after all if not subjected to something? Increasingly in Kierkegaard the claim is that the other that establishes the self, to which the self is subject and acquires selfhood, is God. Fulfillment takes the form of faith, not as an act of allegiance or some special stance that would be merely a kind of flag-waving, but in actively following the will of God as revealed in the example of Christ. Seeing how things were going in the direction later analyzed by the sociologists, Kierkegaard wrote in 1847 that “[t]he evolution of the whole world tends in the direction of the absolute significance of the category of the particular.” But that, for Kierkegaard, “is precisely the principle of Christianity.” Others might put this in another way, saying that the way the world is going is one in which if Christianity had not been invented earlier, it would have been better to invent it now. But, regarding invention, a passage in the concluding pages of Anxiety’s accompanying publication Philosophical Crumbs reads:
No philosophy (because it concerns only the intellect), no mythology (because it concerns only the imagination), no historical knowledge (which concerns only memory) has ever got such an idea, which suggests that in this connection one can make the ambiguous claim that it did not arise in any human heart.
Christians must of course believe this. The Other that provides the subject with its given ideal of selfhood cannot do its work if it is thought to be merely a human device designed to do that. No belief in God can be a belief in the believer’s own invention. Readers of Kierkegaard may not like his version of what they must not believe they have invented, but any revision has to be believed to be real.
Kierkegaard knew firsthand the personal problems that occupy psychiatry and since his time have interested philosophers and sociologists. He interests us as much in his own acute powers of psychological perception and self-observation as in the framework within which he exercised them. One “thesis” that emerges from this “simple” psychological deliberation is that psychological observation begins in the observer’s self-awareness and broad experience of the ways of the psyche. There is a message here for much that goes for psychiatry in our day. What one may say of the author of The Concept of Anxiety’s place in our thought today is that, even if he predates official proclamations and analyses of the subject’s separation from the guarantors of selfhood, his own activity with its personal background anticipates that very situation.