3 Types of Existential Anxiety
Anxiety is probably one of the most common complaints that I see in my therapy practice. But despite being so common it’s oddly hard to define, both for my clients and for me as the therapist.
When someone says they have anxiety, what exactly are they talking about?
Ultimately I think the word “anxiety” means a lot of different things, but I want to look closer in this post at a particularly existential approach to anxiety. This means that it’s anxiety having to do with just being as a person and not with some kind of dysfunction.
Fear and Anxiety
According to existential theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965), there is a big difference between fear and anxiety. For Tillich, fear has a particular object - a thing to be afraid of. Anxiety on the other hand is about nothing - about nothingness itself, or as he calls it “non-being”.
I think scary movies get this distinction just right. Doesn’t a scary movie always have more impact when you can’t see the monster? Think of the movie Jaws. “Fear” is when the shark is right in front of you and you can fight it off or swim away or blow it up with an oxygen tank in its mouth. “Anxiety” is when you can’t see anything in the water and everything is ominously quiet - when it feels like the water is infinitely deep and full of unknowns.
As Tillich describes it, anxiety is when we come into confrontation with “non-being” in some way. It’s when something fundamental to us is negated by nothingness, and we can’t fight back because there is no thing to fight back against. How do you fight back against nothingness?
Three Types of Anxiety
Let’s take this idea of anxiety in relation to nothingness one step further.
Tillich describes three different ways that we come into confrontation with nothingness, or non-being, leading to three types of anxiety.
The first type of anxiety Tillich identifies is when our very being confronts non-being. We become aware of the limits of our life and the fact of our mortality, of the non-life awaiting us in the future. This lead to the anxiety of death.
The second type of anxiety is when our deepest sense of meaning confronts non-being, or maybe what we could call non-meaning. In other words, the anxiety we feel when our sense of meaning, purpose, and what-it’s-all-about hits its limits and runs into meaninglessness or emptiness.
The third anxiety is when our sense of morality confronts non-being, or non-morality. We are are at some point confronted with the fact that right and wrong has its limitations and is at best ambiguous, or that the world doesn’t seem to have the same morality that we do.
What Do We Do?
The three existential anxieties that Tillich writes about are heavy. Just reading about them can bring up a kind of unsettled feeling. So what do we do with all this?
That’s actually a great first question, and is generally where Existential Psychotherapy starts: what do we do with the life we have, even it’s anxiety-producing parts? In other words, what are we already doing right now with these anxieties?
This first question leads into another basic question of Existential Psychotherapy: what can we do with the life we have, even given it’s anxiety-producing parts? In other words, what kind of life is possible, what choices can we make, what freedom is still available, and what life are we willing to create for ourselves?
By recognizing the fundamental givens that come with being, we can then begin to recognize the anxiety we feel as a result and how we tend to handle that anxiety. But it doesn’t stop there. We can go a step further by finding the courage to recognize our freedom and our potential, and create our life with each choice we make.
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