Existential Anxiety

An Aetiological Investigation

M.A. in Psychotherapy and Counselling

Year one term one

? 1995

Existential philosophers have raised anxiety to a primary place as the affect that discloses the nature of human being. In the development of this philosophy a clear theoretical distinction has also been developed between, on the one hand, neurotic anxiety and normal everyday anxiety that the average person would readily admit to feeling, and on the other 'existential anxiety' something fundamental, universal in humanity but rarely experienced. In this essay I will investigate the causes of existential anxiety in two senses, the possible causes of the experience of existential anxiety within an individual and the possible causes of the phenomena of this particular affect, anxiety, being given this prominence by those philosophers.

The discussion that follows will be psychological rather than philosophical and I will commence with a quotation from a philosopher who was a great psychologist:

Though not a philosopher I accept the accuracy of Neitzsche's assessment in regard tomy hypothesis which informs this essay, which is that 'existential anxiety' is an indicator of unresolved neurotic, or developmental, issues. This is the reverse position to that advocated by, for example, Rollo May and Paul Tillich, that pathological anxiety is a special case of existential anxiety.

Existential anxiety manifests in the literature as a concept in two aspects, as a basic fundamental condition of human being and as a rare and elusive experience of an individual; not an affect among others but something almost, it seems, numinous in its significance. In the first aspect it exists as the inevitable consequence of the human awareness of death and aloneness. In the second aspect it reveals the freedom and concomitant meaningless absurdity of the individual human life.

Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) related his exploration of anxiety or dread to original sin as both the cause and the result. In the first innocence, he claims, anxiety is already present, because in human innocence there exists even in its first dreaming state a potential for some other condition about which innocence knows nothing, and 'nothing begets dread' (Kierkegaard, 1944: 38). The dread that is posited in innocence however is not a suffering or a burden and Kierkegaard refers to the urge of children to explore, take risks, seek out marvels as 'indicating this dread in innocence, a dread the child cannot do without'. Kierkegaard speaks of the ambiguity of the transition from innocence to guilt 'he who through dread becomes guilty is innocent, for it was not he but dread, an alien power, which laid hold of him ....... for he sank in the dread which he loved even while he feared it' (Kierkegaard, 1944: 39).

Dread is also for Kierkegaard the intermediate determinant between possibility and actuality. Between perceiving a course of action as possible, and carrying out the action there is the indefinable moment when the freedom of possibility becomes the commitment of action 'the qualitative leap'. 'Dread is not a determinant of necessity but neither is it of freedom; it is a trammelled freedom' (Kierkegaard, 1944: 45). Accepting the given Christian view of human being as a combination of body and soul whose diverging tendencies must be brought into harmony by spirit, Kierkegaard asserts that spirit is connected to its situation as dread.

In all this discussion the point is made that anxiety is fundamental to the human condition and Kierkegaard makes a powerful analysis of forms of what is now called neurotic anxiety that in the theological language he is using, are the consequence of sin. Yet at the conclusion of his study Kierkegaard lauds dread as the great educator. Through experiencing the torments of anxiety which facing the possibilities inherent in human freedom must evoke the individual is instructed in faith. He provides the supreme example to illustrate his argument, the agony (anguish) of Christ in the garden, so much more terrible than his suffering on the cross, because it related to the not yet. This educative process is not without danger, and someone who allows the 'anguish of dread' (Kierkegaard, 1944: 142) to lead them away from faith and not towards it may come to self-slaughter. But if a person through enduring its attacks learns to welcome dread it will cleanse the soul. All this can be understood in terms of what Kierkegaard named as 'the dialectical determinants in dread' in his seminal definition of dread as 'a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy' (Kierkegaard, 1944: 38).

Heidigger (1899 - 1975) writing as a Christian theologian (Kaufman 1980) calls anxiety the fundamental mood. It affects the most basic disclosure of the nature of being-in-the-world. He relates it to finitude and to fallenness, by which he means the capacity of the human being, the Dasein to flee from itself, from its authentic state as a being-towards-death. If the Dasein does not immerse itself in the crowd or in the trivial daily round then anxiety will reveal the essential insecurity of existence. No object or being can be named as the cause of anxiety. Nothing is the focus of anxiety, and this experience of anxiety in the face of nothing, which Heidigger says is a rare experience, is also seen by him as of major importance since with the shattering of false securities the individual has the possibility of becoming responsible and of living authentically (MacQuarrie 1972).

Anxiety in relation to finitude has been analysed in depth by Paul Tillich (1886 - 1965) another theologian who accepts and elaborates on the distinction between fear and anxiety made by his predecessors. He defines anxiety as the state of a being aware of its own possible non-being, aware indeed that its non-being is implicit within its being (Tillich, 1952). Fear always has an object and because an object shares in being itself in some way with the human who fears it, it can be met with courage that can struggle with the object, whether resisting, enduring or understanding it and in this way participates in the object. This participation is the love that overcomes fear. Anxiety in that it is experienced in relation to nothingness, the negation of all things, offers no possibility of participation. There can be no struggle with nothingness. Love is helpless without an object (Tillich, 1952). Tillich asserts that the human mind always seeks to discover or create objects of fear to escape this basic ontological anxiety which it cannot endure in its totality beyond an instant. Since courage cannot struggle against anxiety the response of courage must be to take anxiety into itself and affirm its being as including its non-being.

As non-being is defined by the being it negates, it is possible to discuss types of non-being and the anxiety related to them. A human being can be threatened not only with physical or ontic non-being - death, but also with spiritual or with moral non-being. It is possible for the pursuits of life to lose the power and credibility to engage the individual, activity can then become empty of significance and ultimately life seem meaningless and this is the threat of spiritual non-being. In the same way a person can fail to fulfil their potential, to take responsibility for becoming the person they could be and this is the threat of moral non-being experienced as existential guilt and self-condemnation.

Tillich was writing at a time when the issue of neurosis and of the sought after 'cure' for human anxiety had to be taken into account. He acknowledges the idea that all persons possess neurotic elements but is firm in his conviction that a distinction can be made between the pathological and the healthy and he does this on the basis of openness to life. The neurotic individual, possessing a greater sensitivity to non-being and anxiety, lives a limited if intense life defended against many aspects of reality that are felt to be too threatening. The healthy person can accommodate and integrate a broad range of reality situations and normally remains unaware of the non-being and accompanying anxiety in the depths of their being.

To conclude this section I will introduce the atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980), the proto-typical existentialist, for whom anxiety, or anguish, is the state of a human being conscious of being free. Anguish reveals freedom to consciousness (Manser, 1966). As is his style Sartre makes clear his arguments by means of an example. He contrasts the experience of a man walking a cliff path who may be afraid of specific mishaps - a falling rock, a slip of the foot - with the experience of the man when looking down from the cliff and suddenly realising  BOOKMARK  that there is nothing to stop him from throwing himself down. The great height may seem to pull him down and however firmly he may decide one moment not to jump there is still nothing to prevent him changing his mind the next moment. This freedom that cannot be bound by any choice is experienced as anguish. Since nothing stands in the way of the leap from the cliff, anguish for Sartre, as for others, is related to nothingness, the nothingness within human consciousness that can be filled with any selected content of values, ideas or actions, in contrast to the solid givenness of objects. Sartre does not suggest that it is necessary to continually experience anguish, for people do not need to be conscious of their freedom while pursuing their freely chosen project in life. Only rarely when freedom is not being expressed in activity, as in the case of the man contemplating the precipice, is anguish felt (Manser, 1966). Still to experience this anguish is to be more authentically human.

Anxiety has naturally been a major issue for depth psychologists. Rollo May (1909 - 1995) a practising psycho analyst with a background in theology, was deeply influenced by his years of confrontation with a life threatening disease, tuberculosis. In his daily struggle with anxiety he found that the descriptions of Kierkegaard and Tillich mirrored his own experience in a way that Freud's brilliant but impersonal analysis of the dynamics of anxiety did not. His thesis on the topic sums up a wide ranging survey of the research done on anxiety and of clinical material of his own and others with the statement that 'The omnipresence of anxiety arises from the fact that, when all is said and done, anxiety is our human awareness of the fact that each of us is a being confronted with nonbeing' (May, 1977: 329).

In his study May lays stress on the priority of anxiety over fear and on the necessary distinction between the two, often blurred by others such as Freud. He concludes that an infant is born with the innate capacity to experience the undifferentiated and objectless condition of anxiety and that fear related to particular objects is learned as part of the early developmental process. His clinical work confirmed that anxiety levels in adult life were often determined by the early history of the individual's relationship with the mother. Rather than accept Freud's formulation of anxiety as the response to separation (birth) or threat of loss of the object he related it to the loss of the values essential for existence represented by the relationship to mother, in the infant's case security (May, 1977). If an essential value is lost the person is confronted with the possibility of death. The neurotic person will experience more exaggerated threats to unrealistically selected essential values.

I will make a critical analysis of one of May's examples to show how he uses clinical evidence to support his existential philosophical conclusion, and to provide grounds for my own position. The case study of Tom was originally published in a work on human gastric function and was cited by May because the accurate assessments of Tom's physiological reactions to emotional stress, made possible by the fistula in his stomach, provided evidence on the distinction between fear and anxiety. Two incidents were used. In the first, Tom was present in the laboratory where he was temporarily employed when a doctor suddenly entered, searched angrily for something which Tom had mislaid in his previous tidying of the room, eventually found what was wanted and left. During this search and for a few moments after Tom's gastric activity decreased and, standing still, silent and pale-faced, he was visibly afraid. In the second episode Tom spent a wakeful night anxious about the possible response to the question he had decided to ask in the morning as to how long his employment would continue. The next day his gastric activity was found to have been greatly increased.

For May this case not only confirms the distinction between fear and anxiety with physiological evidence but also supports his central hypothesis that anxiety is the response to a threat against a core value with which the existence of the individual is identified. In Tom's case the value was that of being the strong successful supporter of his family. May notes in regard to the second incident, but passes over the fact, that Tom's anxiety in the night had two clear objects, unemployment in the long term, and the daunting act of questioning his employer in the short term, both of which, in Tillich's terms, courage could and no doubt did confront and overcome. The threat of being discovered to have made an error in the laboratory May takes to be a more superficial danger which Tom's body reacted to by physiological preparation for flight. But in fact being detected in a fault was terrifying precisely because it could lead to a loss of the job and being shown up as incompetent might be considered an equally serious threat to Tom's core self-image. The danger at the deeper level, which May correctly pinpoints through much clinical evidence as crucial in anxiety is equally present in both the above incidents and while drawing one distinction another far more obvious one that Kierkegaard stressed is ignored, namely the immediacy of the first threat and the future conditional nature of the second.

My own experience of anxiety is that it is a mixture of emotions of which the central one is fear. In discussing the relevant work of early philosophers May quotes Spinoza's treatment of hope and fear, and admits that the commingling of these two emotions in a person is one aspect of the intra-psychic conflict that is now named anxiety, and he gives much space to the issue of conflict in relation to anxiety. He notes that in the sleepless night Tom was experiencing the conflict between his need to be the independent breadwinner and the possibility of becoming again dependent on welfare payments. But this conflict between fear and hope is not that to which Kierkegaard refers in the definition quoted above, and which May himself experienced when ill with tuberculosis. Tom does not consciously feel an antipathetic sympathy for the unemployment he fears. Unconsciously however it can be deduced from what is known of Tom that this was indeed the case. The early history of this subject recorded by the original researchers show him as having 'had a fear and a love for his mother ...... such as he had for the Lord' (May 1944: 73) and as relating very dependently first to his mother and subsequently to the doctors themselves. The real conflict was between his fear of being, and need to be, dependent, the dilemma of fear and love, or need, for the same object.

May, in turning to existential philosophy, was rejecting the de-personalising aspects of Freudian psychobiological theory, but even while he was bringing the fruits of European philosophy to America, within psychoanalysis itself the same process of reclaiming the whole person was occurring through the alternative avenue of psychodynamic research. Harry Guntrip, a psychoanalyst also with a background in theology, building on the work of Fairbairn and Winnicott, broke away definitively from instinct and drive theory to persons-in-relationship, objects-relations theory as a basis for understanding the human psyche. His exposition of the earliest origin of psychic disfunction (Guntrip, 1968) suggest a root cause for existential anxiety.

The theory asserts that an infant's prime goal is the object, the mother, and not the impersonal gratification of instinctual urges. In reaction to seriously inappropriate mothering of any kind, the infant psyche retreats within itself, but since total withdrawal from outer contact would be death, a split occurs. A much depleted portion of the ego, the central ego, remains in contact with the external world. The principal portion of the ego that withdraws from the unsatisfying environment into an internal fantasy world, of introjected bad objects, is split again into what Fairbairn called the libidinal ego and the anti-libidinal ego. The former, under the persecuting attacks of the latter splits again. The regressed ego, or 'true heart of the self' flees from the intolerable internal world to a last refuge in the deep unconscious, into a fantasied re-creation of the womb there to await the possibility of re-birth. This is the schizoid condition.

In the pathological state the schizoid personality is profoundly introverted, out of touch with and detached from reality, with a powerful inner fantasy world normally unconscious but threatening to break through and overwhelm what Winnicott dubbed the false self which is often experienced consciously as a two-dimensional facade or shell. The withdrawal of libidinal energy from the real world results in it being experienced as empty, unreal, meaningless, and this is mirrored by the sense of a void within, of being nobody, nothing, of no one really there behind the facade. The schizoid person has shallow tenuous relationships, displays little emotion, can be arrogant or rigid in behaviour and beliefs, very independent and judgementally rejecting of others but also of self, and given to intellectualising. Inside this shell however there is a ravening hunger for love and dependence, the unmet need of the infant, but the fear of love is too great to be overcome. The fear is of destroying the loved object because the need is so devouring or of being engulfed by the desperately needed object and losing the self.

Guntrip maintains that there is a continuum between the healthy and the neurotic and that schizoid  BOOKMARK  characteristics are almost universal. Tom's case can be seen as illustrating a schizoid foundation in a normal individual who has led a reasonably successful and courageous life. His terrified withdrawal into silent immobility in the presence of an angry authority figure on whom he felt some dependence suggests the original infantile reaction to the emotionally cold mother he needed and feared. For Guntrip the schizoid split is a fear/flight reaction, anxiety occurs due to the permanently dangerous condition of the unconscious internal conflicts, which would have fuelled the worryings of Tom's sleepless night.

The brief summary of Guntrip's conclusions throws up many key words and concepts shared with the philosophers whose work has been examined. Kierkegaard's definition of anxiety, highlighted above, expresses exactly the schizoid dilemma caught between fear and love. He seems also to take the origins of anxiety back to earliest infancy and his reference to anxiety as an alien power is congruent with the schizoid experience of the repressed split-off ego structures. Tillich's analysis of the anxiety of meaninglessness and condemnation echoes the experience of the schizoid individual struggling to attain psychological reality for self and world and hating, fearing, and therefore judging the weak dependent infantile ego within. The influence of the regressed ego is experienced by the central ego or false self as a yearning for oblivion, a pull towards death and in extreme cases may lead to suicide or Kierkegaard's self-slaughter. For the false self it is again that insidious antipathetic sympathy and its operation in a case like Sartre's example of the man on the cliff is clear. The anxiety of non-being that is contained within being speaks precisely to the schizoid horror of depersonalisation. The anxiety-creating dualism of body and soul that Kierkegaard discusses is one of the ways that Christianity has incorporated the basic ontological insecurity (Laing, 1960) of the schizoid state into its dogma.

The schizoid individual with a fragmented inner state needs structure to contain and support his weakened ego such as, for example, a compulsive work routine or a rigid belief system. The intense anxiety that is linked by existential philosophers to the apprehension of possibility can be understood as an indicator of the terror felt at the core of the personality when an ego supporting structure is threatened. This terror and this inner weakness must at all costs be denied and defended against by the central ego as they seem a threat to mastery in the external world (Guntrip, 1968). This factor can be seen as causal in the emphatic need of the existential writers to separate anxiety and fear and raise the former to a primary status not vulnerable to further analysis. Anxiety in the face of death, non-being, is thought to be universal and evidence to the contrary, Kaufmann names the old Romans, Socrates and David Hume (Kaufman 1980), and I would add Spinoza, is not recognised. The original plight of the infant seeking to preserve an ego within an overwhelmingly negative object-relationship was of course a life and death issue and any confrontation with death in later life would be likely to touch off the latent anxiety of the deeply unconscious inner struggle. The description of Spinoza as an almost saintly philosopher who never reacted with anger to attacks against him and faced death calmly and without fear (Popkin and Stroll 1969) suggests a man without serious repressed inner conflicts. Without this internal pressure he was able to analyse rationally the conflict of hope and fear and did not, as May comments, come to the problem of anxiety (May, 1977). This is in contrast to the existentialist thinkers that are the concern of this essay.

The reason for the rise to prominence of the concept of anxiety in the deliberations of the philosophers under discussion has already been implied. It is possible to interpret the stress laid on the distinction between anxiety and fear, the priority of anxiety and its objectless nature as a necessary defence against the repressed fear and need for the original object. The suggestion is that these men all had seriously though not pathologically schizoid foundations and that neither the too rapidly changing unstable external world nor an out-dated Christian anthropology could provide a holding structure adequate to their needs. True to schizoid self-sufficiency they each laboured to create an authoritative intellectual edifice for the purpose and in doing so performed a valuable and timely service for our schizoid culture. That they themselves had an awareness of this is attested by the missionary zeal (Warnock, 1970) that they have in common. The call to face anxiety, to accept and struggle with it, is an affirmation in philosophical language of Erickson's conclusion in his developmental model (Erickson, 1950) that a stage of life not successfully negotiated originally may be worked through again at a later date.

As evidence for the above suggestion the description of Kierkegaard as a precocious and solitary child, arrogant, unhappy and contemptuous of his peers (Poole and Stangerup 1989) may be adduced, together with his later life-style, solitary at home but engaging in transitory intellectual interactions with many people in his daily walks around Copenhagen. Heidegger likewise withdrew into an isolated life. Tillich was said by his biographers to have been changed by his war experience from a 'repressed puritanical boy' to 'a wild man' (Kelsey, 1989: 134). However it is from the life of Sartre that I will introduce information from the period of life when the schizoid splits occur.

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in June 1905 to a mother separated by an uncertain distance from her husband, who had been trying for some months to prevent the recall to naval duty that did finally occasion the separation. His father returned five months after his birth to find a baby 'forever moving forever excited. He screams at the top of his lungs, roars with laughter, never cries' (Cohen-Solal, 1985: 24). Jean-Baptiste Sartre's deteriorating health meant that the baby had very little contact with his no doubt anxious and unhappy mother from his eleventh month when he was left with his grandparents until his fifteenth month when his father died. It is recorded that the baby was sickly and in a letter his grandmother tells how 'despite all my troubles I have to be young and sing to keep Poulou happy' (Cohen-Solal, 1985: 25).

This early history indicates the probability of schizoid insecurity originating from the experience of an impingeing over-stimulating mother, herself in a state of needy anxiety both before and after his birth. The subsequent disruption of the relationship with mother by the return of his sick father, followed by her absences and her replacement by surrogate figures all hiding their real feelings about the situation behind a bright entertaining facade (Cohen-Solal, 1985) would compound the effects. After his father's death Jean-Paul led a secure and stimulating but over protected childhood as the focus of his mother's undivided and admiring attention. The genuinely loving care lavished on the child at the centre of his grandfather's household was clearly a powerful stimulus to the growth of Sartre's creativity and intellectual powers, but this growth would all be of the central ego, the original discontinuity would still exist. The cruel internal conflict between the persecuting anti-libidinal ego and the weak and helpless libidinal ego can be seen as a factor in Sartre's conflictual external activities and as informing his penetrating analysis of the sado-masochistic dilemma of human love relationships (Manser, 1966). His life-style, extensive but intense, politically engaged, fuelling his creative workaholism with drugs to the detriment of his health, maintaining a rigid daily work routine (Cohen-Solal, 1985) and denying approaching death even on his deathbed, is a refutation of Tillich's simplistic distinctions.

In this essay I have drawn comparisons between some of the phenomenological descriptions of anxiety by existential philosophers and diagnostic features of the schizoid condition to suggest this condition as a root cause of existential anxiety. I have detailed some evidence from what is known of the characters and life histories of these thinkers to support the contention that they were, in their work, responding to their own schizoid issues. In doing this I have been expanding on Guntrip's assertion that

I have drawn on Guntrip's work because it illumined for me the nature of my being in my crisis in the way that Kierkegaard's writing supported May through his crisis. Kierkegaard, unhampered by the later splits between philosophy and psychology, and between the neurotic, the normal and the existential, could use his profound personal experience of dread as the basis for a free ranging study of all the subtle variations of human experience subsumed under that word. However to have experienced an answer before completing an investigation is to  BOOKMARK  be liable to error and, like May, I have no doubt somewhere missed the obvious. Guntrip of course also had a schizoid core and like May he moved to psychoanalysis from Ministry when he found theology would not answer. Perhaps a Sartrean valediction would be appropriate. For each their neurosis was part of the facticity and the differing conclusions of their intellectual endeavours represent their freely chosen response.