The Danish Doctor of Dread

• The Danish Doctor of Dread

  tags: philosophy psychology anxiety

  • the chronic, disquieting feeling that something not so good was about to happen.
  • Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy,” a simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion.
  • Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
  • is in our anxiety that we come to understand feelingly that we are free, that the possibilities are endless, we can do what we want
  • Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world,  forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there.
  • Kierkegaard also believed that, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
  • The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.

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