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.
John Addington Symonds
Symonds was born at Bristol, England in 1840. His father, the senior John Addington Symonds, M.D. (1807–1871), was the author of "Criminal Responsibility" (1869), "The Principles of Beauty" (1857) and "Sleep and Dreams". Considered delicate, the younger Symonds did not take part in games after age 14 at Harrow School, and he showed no particular promise as a scholar. Symonds moved to Clifton Hill House at the age of ten, an event which he believed had a large and beneficial impact towards his health and spiritual development. Symonds' delicate condition continued and he suffered from nightmares as a child in which corpses in and under his bed prompted sleepwalking, and on one such occasion he was almost drowned when sleepwalking in the attic of Clifton Hill House when he reached a cistern of rainwater. According to Symonds, an angel with "blue eyes and wavy, blonde hair" woke him and brought him to safety; this figure frequented Symonds' dreams and was potentially his first homosexual awakening.