When I first moved to Eastbourne as a student, I made the visit (like thousands of sightseers do) to the beauty spot of Beachy Head. I remember walking the clifftop and experiencing something I can only describe as vertigo: well, what it actually felt like was a pull over to the edge. Morbid curiosity? (After all, this is a beauty spot with a darker side: About 23 people choose to die each year by jumping from the cliffs). No, this was an acknowledgement that I could jump, and knowing that was a choice was terrifying and very disorientating. For sometime after I wondered what this meant: was I wanting to die? It was only when talking with others that I realised I was not alone. Friends talked of driving on a motorway and touching the terror of knowing they could turn the wheel at anytime taking the car into oncoming traffic. Although reassuring to some extent it was only years later when encountering existential philosophy and in particular Soren Kierkegaard that I found deeper comfort. “The dizziness of our freedom” (1844) was how Kierkegaard described on looking from a high spot to that down below there is an arousing of the fear of falling, accompanied instantly with a terrifying impulse to jump. Kierkegaard’s use of metaphor pinpoints anxiety, and its stemming from the awareness of freedom to choose to either jump over or stay put; a choice between being and non-being (if one uses the language of Paul Tillich). This metaphor indicates the experience of anxiety as “being affirming itself against non-being” (May, 1950 pg xxi); it also signifies the lack of any pre-justification for choices – the possibility within our potential is staggering.
Subjectively, anxiety and fear can be indistinguishable; yet when we question the object, fear feels like something concrete is being considered whilst anxiety (according to Kierkegaard) is the fear of the future and all its boundlessness. Sartre’s talk of a nausea we experience when we accept our no-thing-ness (1943) certainly makes sense to me on a bodily level. And as Kirkland-Handley in his work (see Kirkland-Handley, 2002; Kirkland-Handley & Mitchell, 2005) the etymological root ‘ang’ (latin, angere, to squeeze or strangle; German, angst, meaning narrow or tight) underlines anxiety cannot be without soma. As much as we may appreciate a life with freedom to choose, this freedom is scary “because it is in tension with our need for a certain sense of security” (Todres, 2011 pg 75).
I have talked a little bit about Rollo May’s position on anxiety previously; a position fashioned by his love of Kierkegaard. And like Kierkegaard, May felt that anxiety must be understood in the context of an orientation toward freedom. “Anxiety is the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality” (May, 1950). These ‘threats’ come in multiple forms: the threat to our physical existence is easy to understand; the threat to our psychological existence must be considered more deeply, because this is happening time and time again as we weigh up all the choices…let alone the anxiety having once made a choice! What we deem as a ‘threat’ will always be in juxtaposition to another ‘threat’ (we saw this in our choices to be authentic to ourself or live in “bad faith”). May explained this is because the values held essential to the individual’s existence as a personality are also in contradiction (May, 1950). My need for time alone might clash with my need to be affirmed by others. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t…and damned while we hover in making the choice. And to underline, this anxiety is not something we can escape – by the very nature of being thrown into this world and all the potential, we are sure to meet the experience of anxiety as it “constitutes an assertion of the real nature of our subjective engagement with the world” (Smail, 1984 pg 82). As I often discuss with trainees, the anxiety of our clients is the anxiety of our humanity – a totally appropriate response of bodymind to our thrownness into an infinite world, in which we must make choices with outcomes never certain, and to cap it all, we inevitably move toward one end point! As Smail continues, “to fall prey to anxiety is, at least in part, to fall out of self-deception”. Anxiety can thus be harnessed for our creative endeavour to be human (May, 1950), or at least to jerk us from our pseudo-securities (Kirkland-Handley & Mitchell, 2005).
Anxiety is bound up in temporality, and the same is true for its couplet partner: what anxiety is to the future, guilt is to the past. This is not the guilt that arises from transgressions toward others nor the neurotic guilt that arises from imaginary transgressions (Yalom, 1980). In fact, we might consider existential guilt more like regret or remorse. Here is a chance to reveal what can be called the more ‘romantic’ world view through the eyes of the humanistic tradition: Like the creativity to be harnessed through anxiety (May, 1950), the humanistic description is closer to a heroic search; how guilt fuels an individual in a self-expressing desire for wholeness and completeness i.e. the individual’s responsibility for actualizing their potential (see the writing of Yalom and May). In contrast, within the frame of Heidegger’s ontology, guilt is given as an ever-present and unavoidable part of human existence due to the fundamental ambiguity and groundlessness. As Cooper (2003) says, we will always experience an “in debt to ourselves” (pg 23) no matter what choices we make. Take some time to reflect on this now – what choices have you made in life that might still on some level linger in you? I look back to the decision to remain childfree, a decision I knew then and still know now as ‘right’ for me and yet a part of me wonders what life the Helen-who-became-parent would have lived. In essence, we will always experience existential guilt for not actualising the potential of the choice not made; maybe even the grief for the unlived life? For Heidegger, existential guilt calls us back to a life that is truly our own ensuring we continue to respond to (rather than passively follow) the ‘they’ (Heidegger, 1927).