ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical and social context of anxiety as it relates to nursing work, unpicking the framing of anxiety both in, and as, the social practices of nursing. In doing so, Dawn Freshwater draws on the works of Soren Kierkegaard, who situated anxiety as structural to human existence, directly relating anxiety to the ability to ‘do’ and to ‘be’ in the world, and to find meaning through both in work. Importantly, Kierkegaard correlates this active negative with the freedom/determination to live authentically. Whilst anxiety may be transmuted into specific individual coping mechanisms, it simultaneously needs to be understood as producing useful social practices within the nursing disciplines. Providing the energy/force to stimulate the qualitative leap into morally infused nursing built on good faith and authenticity. Moral courage is proposed as one device through which nurses may better manage and understand their own anxieties, including death anxiety, and enhance resilience in themselves and their charges. It is also proposed as way of understanding and managing how anxieties are institutionally and sociologically framed. Moreover, anxiety and moral courage are framed as one route to creating more purposeful and authentic nursing practices, that are values-led and both personally and socially meaningful.
