PRELIMINARIES

The Concept of Anxiety is a maddeningly difficult book. In one of the most lucid commentaries on this short tract, Arne Gron has suggested that the book is too difficult; in other words, it could have profited from another rewrite. In one of the central images of The Concept of Anxiety, anxiety is likened to dizziness. One reader of Kierkegaard has commented that the book attempts to evoke the very dizziness that it describes. Another prominent Kierkegaard scholar insists that the book is simply a spoof, devoid of any serious psychological insight. While I disagree with this scholar's assessment, I sympathize with his judgment that The Concept of Anxiety has elements of farce.

If someone were to articulate a Kierkegaardian ethic, one of the dictums would certainly be -be honest about what you know and do not know. In all honesty, I must confess that there are many passages in The Concept of Anxiety the meaning of which completely escapes me. Worse yet, Kierkegaard scholars are silent on most of these passages. Nevertheless, exasperating as it is, The Concept of Anxiety is a wise book. It is also a book that has exercised an enormous influence on philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre and theologians such as Tillich, Barth, and Niebuhr. Moreover, if a single text needed to be chosen as the source book of existential psychology and psychoanalysis, it would most certainly be The Concept of Anxiety.