ABSTRACT
More than 150 years ago, Kierkegaard (1980) described anxiety as the “ambiguity of subjectivity” (p. 197). He reasoned that anxiety corresponded to the future and to the “infinite possibility of being able” (p. 44). Abstractly, he argued, subjectivity lacks content; it is a moving “magic picture” (p. 159) in search of adventure. In Kierkegaard’s view, Hegelian logic could not account for anxiety; this logic was unable to accommodate ambiguous transitions such as impatiently wanting to act and looking toward the future with a feeling “in one’s bones that a storm is approaching” (p. 115). In Kierkegaard’s terms, it is the dreaming spirit, not merely a dialectic, that anticipates the need to posit a synthesis, uniting the “temporal and the eternal” as well as the mind and body (p. 81). But this spirit also disturbs selfrepresentations in and through time.
