Anxiety
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, in "The Concept of Anxiety" (1844), described anxiety or dread associated with the "dizziness of freedom" and suggested the possibility for positive resolution of anxiety through the self-conscious exercise of responsibility and choosing. In "Art and Artist" (1932), the psychologist Otto Rank wrote that the psychological trauma of birth was the pre-eminent human symbol of existential anxiety and encompasses the creative person's simultaneous fear of – and desire for – separation, individuation, and differentiation.
The Concept of Anxiety
In "Philosophical Fragments" Kierkegaard described the Learner in Error before God. Here he questions how the Learner discovers this Error. New sciences were emerging that challenged the conventional ethics of the time as well as the notions of guilt and sin. Kierkegaard described the struggle elegantly. He says, "Ethics and dogmatics struggle over reconciliation in a border area fraught with fate. Repentance and guilt torment forth reconciliation ethically, while dogmatics in this receptivity to the proffered reconciliation, has the historically concrete immediacy with which it begins its discourse in the great dialogue of science. And now what will be the result?" and "Innocence is ignorance, but how is it lost?" The Concept of Anxiety" P. 12, 39