The following paragraphs come from
the chapter on existential anxiety in
Our Existential Predicament:
Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety, & Death.
This chapter is called
"Existential Anxiety: Angst"
This section of the chapter is 7 pages long.
The following quote is the first three pages of that section,
namely pages 103-105.

III. ANXIETY AS A PHENOMENON OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

     Our Existential Malaise is not a psychological state.
Altho it is often described in psychological metaphors,
our Existential Predicament itself is a phenomenon of the human spirit.
What distinguishes our psychological dimension
from our spirit-dimension is the criterion of freedom.
(As we shall see in a moment, there are other manifestations of spirit,
but freedom serves well as a focus of them all.)

     The social sciences are based on various behavioral and causal models;
they attempt to describe, explain, predict, and control human behavior.
These sciences are successful to the degree
that we human beings operate within the principles of cause and effect.
But when we exercise our freedom, causal models become useless;
external explanation, prediction, and control become impossible.
However, as free persons we can still describe
what we are trying to do with our lives
and what our Existential Malaise subjectively feels like.
But there is no way to explain freedom or anxiety
because all explanations require causal models.
(Consequently, this is a phenomenology of anxiety
rather than a psychology of anxiety,
because it does not attempt to find a cause or source of anxiety,
only to describe as clearly as possible what angst feels like.)

     Freud was one of the psychologists who tried to explain anxiety
with pseudo-scientific models depicting 'causes' and 'reasons' for the feeling.
He postulated a whole system of psychological mythology (id, ego, super-ego),
which he hoped would explain how people become anxious.

     Søren Kierkegaard is the best example of a phenomenologist
who tried to describe anxiety from the inside rather than explain it.
He saw existential anxiety not as a symptom of a mixed-up psyche
but as a manifestation of human spirit and freedom.
George Alfred Schrader underlines this contrast:

          Long before Freud, Kierkegaard recognized the possibility of anxiety
          as response to the dread that stems from human contingency.
          Whereas Freud and many of his followers
          have represented anxiety as an abnormal state of mind
          due to a displacement of libininal energies,
          Kierkegaard regarded it as an altogether normal response
          to the potentially terrifying uncertainty of the human condition.
          He characterized despair as "anxious dread" and hence as
          a deficient way of responding to the universal phenomenon of dread....
          For Kierkegaard...anxiety is a sickness of the human spirit
          rather than of the psyche alone....

     Chapter 6    EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY: ANGST    by JAMES PARK    103

              The primary difference between Freud and Kierkegaard
          is that for Freud anxiety is rooted in man's biological nature
          and can be explained in terms of natural cause and effect processes,
          whereas for Kierkegaard it is a manifestation of human freedom.

          [George Alfred Schrader, Jr., Editor Existential Philosophers:
          Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967)
          Chapter 1 "Existential Philosophy: Resurgent Humanism"
          by George Alfred Schrader, Jr., p. 17]

     Another way to see this contrast is to note that psychology
attempts to interpret human existence objectively and from below
—by reducing it to simpler principles—
whereas existential phenomenology
attempts to understand human existence subjectively and from above
—in terms of the highest life-meanings and goals of the particular person.
(Viktor Frankl contrasts depth psychology with height psychology.)
Unless we are reductionist psychologists, says John Macquarrie,

          we do not relate to other people as if they were only objects
          that we could see and hear and touch
          or even as if they were simple living organisms
          from which reactions could be evoked.
          We relate to them as persons,
          and we talk about them or talk to them
          in a language appropriate to persons.

          [John Macquarrie Paths in Spirituality (NY: Harper & Row, 1972) p. 43]

     On the next page of the same book Macquarrie goes on to offer
an excellent description of the life of the spirit:

               What then is the dynamic form or mode of being
          which we call 'spirit' and which we know in human experience?
          It may be described as a capacity for going out of oneself
          and beyond oneself;
          or, again, as the capacity for transcending oneself.
          Man is not closed or shut up in his being.
          He is not just another object among the objects that make up the world,
          with a given nature and destiny.
          To him there belong essentially freedom and creativity,
          whereby he is able to shape (within limits) both himself and his world.
          It is this openness, freedom, creativity,
          this capacity for going beyond any given state in which he finds himself,
          that makes possible self-consciousness and self-criticism,
          understanding, responsibility, the pursuit of knowledge,
          the sense of beauty, the quest for the good, the formation of community,
          the outreach of love and whatever else belongs to the amazing richness
          of what we call the 'life of the spirit'. [Paths in Spirituality p. 44]

104      OUR EXISTENTIAL PREDICAMENT: LONELINESS, DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, & DEATH

     Macquarrie does not mention it here, but spirit also has a dark side: angst.
Anxiety arises in the free, open, creative dimension of our beings
—a part of human existence ignored by many psychologists.
(A few psychologists who do notice human freedom include:
R D Laing, Viktor Frankl, Sidney Jourard, Ludwig Binswanger,
Thomas Szasz, Carl Rogers, & Rollo May.)

     Our human spirits are sometimes severely limited,
but they are never completely suppressed.
This may explain how we occasionally ignore our anxiety:
When our spirits are suppressed, our angst is suppressed.
As Kierkegaard notes many times, the more spirit, the more anxiety.
Thus, if we are concerned merely to avoid noticing our existential anxiety,
we might best live only in our psychological, emotional, and intellectual
dimensions, eliminating the troublesome dimension of spirit.
If we could become completely spiritless,
we might avoid confronting our existential anxiety altogether.

     But even when we are most superficial and spiritless,
we occasionally hear the still small voice of our spirits;
and when we become more inward, our anxiety becomes more conscious.

     In his book on existential anxiety published in 1844,
Kierkegaard wondered about the emergence of spirit—and anxiety:

               That existential anxiety makes its appearance
          is the pivot upon which everything turns.
          In the state of innocence, we are not merely animals,
          for if at any time in our lives we were merely animals,
          we would never become persons of spirit.
          So spirit is present, but in a state of immediacy, a dreaming state.
          How does spirit relate to itself in this situation?
          We discover ourselves through existential anxiety.
          As spirit, we cannot escape from ourselves.
          Nor can we sink down into the vegetative life,
          for we are required to be spirit.
          We cannot flee from anxiety, for we love it;
          really we do not love it, for we flee from it.
          Our dilemma has thus reached its apex.
          We find ourselves in innocence and ignorance.
          But we are not brute animals,
          because even in our puzzlement, we are qualified by spirit.
          Our Predicament is precisely existential anxiety,
          in which we confront the immense nothing.

          [Søren Kierkegaard The Concept of Anxiety Tr. Reidar Thomte
          (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 43-44.
          Søren Kierkegaard The Concept of Dread Tr. Walter Lowrie
          (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944) p. 39-40.
          Paraphrase based on both translations.]

     Chapter 6    EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY: ANGST    by JAMES PARK    105

   If you would like to read this whole chapter
(also published as a separate book),
you have two options:

    A new edition of this chapter published as a separate book
has just appeared, 2001:
Existential Anxiety: Angst.

    The fourth edition (2001) of the larger book
in which this chapter appears:
Our Existential Predicament:
Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety, & Death.