Kierkegaard, Anxiety, and the Formation of the Self

Søren Kierkegaard is one of the thinkers who has influenced the way I understand psychological suffering, especially suffering linked to selfhood, inner conflict, freedom, and despair. I specialise in psychodynamic and existential psychotherapy, and my work is informed in particular by Winnicott, Jung, and Kierkegaard, whose ideas help me think about depth, meaning, anxiety, and the formation of the self. What I value in Kierkegaard is that he takes seriously something modern life often avoids: that anxiety is not always merely a symptom to be removed, but can be bound up with the problem of becoming a self.

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

This matters deeply in psychotherapy.

Many people come to therapy because they feel anxious, depressed, stuck, overwhelmed, or divided against themselves. Sometimes their suffering is linked to trauma, attachment wounds, or relational pain. But sometimes it also reflects a quieter and more existential difficulty: the struggle to live in a way that feels inwardly real, morally serious, and genuinely chosen.

Kierkegaard helps us think about that struggle.

Anxiety as more than a symptom

In everyday language, anxiety is often treated simply as something to be reduced. Of course overwhelming anxiety can be painful and disabling, and it matters enormously to help people suffer less. But Kierkegaard recognised that anxiety can also arise from the fact of freedom itself.

To be human is, in part, to face possibility. We are not only shaped by the past. We are also confronted by choice, uncertainty, and responsibility. This can produce a kind of dizziness: the awareness that one could live differently, speak differently, refuse differently, leave, stay, love, create, or become.

For some people, this possibility is exhilarating. For many, it is terrifying.

Anxiety, in this deeper sense, is not just fear of an external threat. It can be the unease that accompanies becoming.

The self as a task

Kierkegaard did not think of the self as a fixed object. He understood the self as something one must come into relation with. To become a self is not automatic. It is a task, and often a painful one.

Many people live at a distance from themselves. They may live according to duty, convention, compliance, fear, family expectation, or external success while feeling inwardly estranged. They may look stable from the outside, but feel curiously absent from their own lives. They may not be living falsely in a conscious sense, yet something in them remains unclaimed.

This is one reason Kierkegaard is so psychologically rich. He helps us see that suffering may arise not only because life is difficult, but because the self has not been fully inhabited.

Despair and the divided self

Kierkegaard wrote powerfully about despair, not simply as misery, but as a form of misrelation within the self. A person may despair by not wanting to be themselves, or by trying too strenuously to be a self built on illusion, control, or defiance. They may feel fragmented, trapped, false, inwardly empty, or chronically restless.

This can look very contemporary.

A person may be successful and deeply unwell. They may be surrounded by activity but inwardly unanchored. They may be constantly busy yet unable to bear stillness. They may know how to perform, but not how to dwell inwardly in their own life.

Therapy can become a place where this despair is not merely managed, but thought about more deeply. What kind of self has the person had to become? What do they fear would happen if they lived more truthfully? What forms of avoidance, self-deception, or compliance have become woven into their life? What has been refused, postponed, or split off?

Kierkegaard and choice

One of Kierkegaard’s gifts is his insistence that existence involves choice. This does not mean that people are simply free in some easy, privileged, or simplistic sense. Trauma, attachment, social power, class, coercion, illness, and history all shape what is possible. But even within constraint, people often suffer over the question of how to live.

Should I leave? Should I stay? Should I speak? Should I forgive? Should I risk being known? Should I keep living as I have been? Should I choose safety or aliveness? Duty or desire? Familiar misery or uncertain freedom?

Psychotherapy often becomes the place where these questions gather force.

Kierkegaard helps us understand why this can feel so destabilising. Choice exposes us to uncertainty. It deprives us of the fantasy that some external authority can fully decide for us. It asks us to bear the burden of a life that must, in some sense, be lived from within.

Anxiety, authenticity, and avoidance

Because freedom is difficult, many people avoid it. They cling to what is familiar, externally sanctioned, or emotionally pre-scripted. They remain in stale relationships, deadening roles, inherited identities, or repetitive suffering because the alternative feels too open, too risky, or too undefined.

Here again, anxiety is not only pathology. It may be the threshold between an old life and a more real one.

This does not mean that all anxiety is good. Severe anxiety can be devastating and requires care, grounding, and often significant therapeutic work. But Kierkegaard reminds us that some anxiety belongs to the process of becoming more truthful. Not all unease is a sign that one is on the wrong path. Sometimes it is the cost of stepping out of false certainties.

How Kierkegaard influences my work

Kierkegaard influences my psychotherapy by helping me think about:

• anxiety as linked not only to danger, but also to possibility
• the self as something that must be lived into, not merely described
• despair as a divided relationship within the self
• the difficulty of freedom, responsibility, and choice
• the temptation to avoid authenticity through compliance, distraction, or self-deception
• the moral and existential seriousness of becoming more inwardly truthful

This means I am often interested not only in what symptoms a person has, but in how they are living. What is being avoided? What is being betrayed inwardly? What truth feels unbearable? What possibilities produce fear? What kind of self is trying to emerge beneath the anxiety?

Kierkegaard, trauma, and psychological depth

Kierkegaard was not a trauma theorist, and it would be simplistic to force his ideas where they do not belong. Trauma must be understood psychologically, relationally, bodily, and developmentally. But his thought can still enrich trauma work, especially where people are struggling not only with symptoms, but with the meaning of their life after suffering.

Trauma can narrow possibility. It can imprison a person in fear, shame, repetition, or collapse. Healing often involves not only reducing symptoms, but recovering some capacity for choice, authorship, and inward freedom.

In this sense, existential thought and trauma therapy can fruitfully meet.

Final thoughts

Kierkegaard reminds us that human suffering is not always reducible to diagnosis alone. Sometimes it concerns how one is living, what one is avoiding, what one dares not become, and how one has come to stand in relation to oneself.

Therapy cannot remove the difficulty of existence. But it can help people live it more consciously, more honestly, and with less inward division.

That may mean suffering less. It may also mean something more demanding and more meaningful: becoming more fully a self.