Angst: Understanding Existential Dread

Explore an in-depth academic analysis of angst, tracing its etymology, philosophical origins from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, and its role in modern psychology.

Dr. Mohammed Looti An academic and researcher specialized in
PUBLISHED
Scientifically Reviewed · Dr. Marwa Abd-Alazim · October 16, 2026
Medically & Scientifically Reviewed Verified: October 16, 2026
Dr. Marwa Abd-Alazim PhD in Psychology
Faculty Member • University of Kerbala
Review Criteria & Clinical Standards

This content undergoes rigorous scientific peer-review and medical editorial standards at Arab Psychology Network to ensure clinical accuracy, validity, and compliance with evidence-based guidelines from leading psychological and healthcare authorities (APA / WHO).

Human consciousness is uniquely burdened by the awareness of its own contingency, finitude, and unyielding freedom. Few psychological phenomena capture this distinctively human predicament as profoundly as angst, an affective state characterized by deep existential apprehension, dread, and unfocused disquiet. Far beyond everyday stress or concrete fear, angst represents an encounter with the abyss of self-determination and the realization that one is fundamentally responsible for generating meaning in an indifferent universe.

Angst

1. Concise Definition

Angst is an intense, pervasive feeling of generalized dread, anxiety, or existential unease that arises not from an immediate, identifiable external threat, but from the contemplation of the human condition, freedom, mortality, and the fundamental groundlessness of existence. Within psychological and philosophical frameworks, it denotes an acute ontological awareness of one’s vulnerability, autonomy, and the weight of personal choice.

Unlike acute fear, which is directed toward a localized, observable hazard in the environment, angst is objectless; it addresses the indeterminate nature of being itself. In clinical and existential literature, it functions both as a destabilizing crisis and as an essential catalyst for psychological individuation, forcing the individual to confront the authenticity of their choices and the inevitability of their non-being.

Contemporary psychology views angst as an overarching affective-cognitive construct straddling the boundary between normal existential reflection and debilitating psychopathology. When modulated effectively, it impels creative expression, personal maturation, and moral accountability; when uncontained or overwhelming, it can manifest as chronic generalized anxiety, demoralization, or profound existential despair.

2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin

The term angst entered the English lexicon directly from German, where it possesses an expansive heritage rooted in the Old High German angust and the Proto-Germanic *angustiz, signifying narrowness, constraint, or distress. Cognates span multiple Indo-European branches, originating from the Proto-Indo-European root *anǵʰ-, meaning tight, painfully constricted, or choked—an etymological lineage shared by words such as anger, anguish, anxiety, and angina.

The conceptual transformation of the word from physical constriction to existential vertigo occurred largely through 19th-century European philosophy. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard utilized the Danish term angest (or angst) in his seminal 1844 treatise Begrebet Angest (The Concept of Anxiety). When Kierkegaard’s works and the subsequent phenomenological treatises of German philosophers like Martin Heidegger were widely translated and discussed, the German word Angst was preserved in psychological and philosophical discourse across the globe because no single English term sufficiently captured its synthesis of dread, ontological vertigo, and freedom.

By the mid-20th century, popularized through psychoanalytic translations of Sigmund Freud’s Hemmung, Symptom und Angst (1926) and the burgeoning existentialist movement in literature and art, “angst” was fully naturalized into the English language, maintaining both its technical academic prestige and colloquial variants designating adolescent turmoil or generalized life discontent.

3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form

Pronunciation: In standard International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), angst is transcribed as /æŋkst/ in Modern English and [ʔaŋst] in standard German. It is articulated as a single, closed syllable featuring an open-front unrounded vowel followed by a velar nasal consonant cluster.

Part of Speech: Angst functions primarily as an uncountable abstract noun (e.g., “He was paralyzed by existential angst”). In modern informal English, it is occasionally modified or used attributively as an adjective (angsty) to describe an emotional state or artistic output dominated by brooding melancholy and inner turmoil.

Grammatical Collocations: The noun frequently collocates with adjectives denoting scope or source, such as existential angst, adolescent angst, neurotic angst, or cultural angst. In formal academic discourse, it appears in prepositional structures such as “angst of freedom” or “angst before the void.”

4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation

At its core, angst represents the psychological response to the sudden unveiling of existential realities that everyday social routines and cognitive defenses normally obscure. Under normal circumstances, individuals navigate their lifeworld through constructed narratives of stability, social roles, cultural values, and predictable routines. These structures provide what sociologists call “ontological security.” Angst shatters this protective apparatus, exposing the individual to the bare, unvarnished realization that these meaning structures are human inventions rather than absolute, objective cosmic guarantees.

The distinguishing psychological hallmark of angst is its objectlessness. Whereas an animal feels fear in the presence of a predator, human beings experience angst when confronted with nothingness—the lack of predetermined purpose, the finality of death, and the abyss of open possibility. This makes angst inherently disorienting; because it lacks an objective focal point in physical space, the individual cannot fight it, flee from it, or neutralize it through standard behavioral coping mechanisms. The danger is not outside; it resides in the very condition of conscious existence itself.

Psychologically, this produces a state of acute internal tension. The individual feels an agonizing sense of weight: every decision made entails the renunciation of infinite alternative possibilities, and no external authority can ultimately validate whether the chosen path was the “correct” one. Angst is thus fundamentally tied to responsibility. It is the dizziness that accompanies the realization that one is the ungrounded author of one’s own identity, ethics, and future.

Crucially, contemporary psychological literature delineates healthy or normal angst from its pathological counterparts. In healthy existential angst, the affective discomfort remains within a threshold that prompts creative problem-solving, self-reflection, and authentic living. In pathological or neurotic configurations, however, the inability to tolerate this existential uncertainty precipitates chronic defense mechanisms—such as compulsive rituals, rigid dogmatism, dissociative detachment, or paralyzing depressive states—which seek to extinguish the discomfort at the expense of psychological vitality.

5. Historical Development

The systematic study of angst evolved through three primary intellectual eras: the philosophical foundations of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the psychoanalytic and humanistic developments of the mid-20th century, and contemporary cognitive-affective neuroscience.

In 1844, Søren Kierkegaard published The Concept of Anxiety under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. Kierkegaard approached angst through a theological and psychological lens, defining it as “the dizziness of freedom.” Using the biblical narrative of Adam’s fall, Kierkegaard argued that the divine prohibition ignited an awareness of possibility—the capacity to choose differently—which provoked deep ontological dread. He argued that angst was an indispensable prerequisite for spiritual awakening and individual selfhood.

During the interwar period, Martin Heidegger radically secularized and ontologicalized the construct in his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). Heidegger drew a rigorous philosophical boundary between fear (Furcht), which pertains to entities within the world, and angst (Angst), which discloses the world as such and reveals our Geworfenheit (thrownness) into mortal existence. For Heidegger, angst tears human beings away from the complacent, unthinking conformity of “the herd” (das Man) and forces them to confront their authentic identity as mortal beings heading inevitably toward death (Sein-zum-Tode).

In the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre expanded these insights within French existentialism in Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre used the term angoisse (the French equivalent of angst) to capture the human realization that “existence precedes essence.” Because there is no God or human nature to dictate human action, individuals are “condemned to be free.” Any attempt to escape this freedom through pre-packaged roles or deterministic excuses constitutes what Sartre famously termed “bad faith” (mauvaise foi).

Concurrently, clinical psychology integrated the concept through existential psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud conceptualized angst in two forms: realistic anxiety (reaction to external danger) and neurotic anxiety (repression of instinctual drives). Later, theorists such as Rollo May introduced existential angst to American clinical psychology with his foundational 1950 text The Meaning of Anxiety. May argued that the modern era had alienated individuals from their biological and spiritual foundations, leaving them vulnerable to pervasive, unarticulated dread. In the late 20th century, Irvin Yalom synthesized these principles into a formal therapeutic framework, identifying four “ultimate concerns”—death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness—that continuously generate angst.

6. Theoretical Foundations

The psychological conceptualization of angst rests upon several intertwined theoretical pillars across psychodynamic, existential-humanistic, and cognitive-evolutionary paradigms.

Existential-Humanistic Paradigm: This school of thought, championed by figures like Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, and Irvin Yalom, asserts that human beings are meaning-seeking creatures navigating an intrinsically meaningless or indifferent universe. Within this paradigm, angst is not considered a symptom of mental illness; rather, it is viewed as an intrinsic, inevitable parameter of being human. Theoretical models here distinguish between “normal anxiety”—which is proportionate to the existential situation, does not require repression, and can be used constructively—and “neurotic anxiety,” which results from the chronic failure to confront normal existential dread, leading to rigid defenses and emotional constriction.

Terror Management Theory (TMT): Formulated in the late 1980s by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, based on the cultural anthropological writings of Ernest Becker, TMT provides an empirical psychological framework for understanding existential angst. TMT posits a fundamental psychological conflict: human beings possess an evolutionary drive for self-preservation alongside cognitive capacities sophisticated enough to comprehend the inevitability of their own demise. To buffer against the potential terror and angst generated by this awareness, humans construct cultural worldviews and self-esteem systems. When these cultural buffers are challenged or mortality salience is heightened, existential angst surges to the fore.

Psychodynamic and Ego Psychology: In psychodynamic theory, angst is conceptualized as an affective alarm signal utilized by the ego to signal impending danger, whether from overwhelming instinctual impulses (id), punitive moral mandates (superego), or harsh realities of the objective world. Neo-Freudians like Karen Horney shifted the focus toward relational dynamics, introducing “basic anxiety”—a deep feeling of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world, which forms during early childhood when basic security needs go unmet.

Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology: From a contemporary cognitive perspective, angst is conceptualized as the hyper-activation of abstract mental simulation systems. Human beings have evolved superior prospective memory and predictive processing machinery, allowing them to project hypothetical future scenarios across decades. While this confers immense survival advantages, it also permits the simulation of non-existence, societal breakdown, and irrevocable decision errors, resulting in chronic, self-generated cognitive-affective distress without an immediate sensory referent.

7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions

To accurately assess and conceptualize angst, researchers divide the phenomenon into distinct theoretical components, structural dimensions, and experiential subtypes:

  • Ontological Dimension (Mortality Awareness): The pervasive, chilling confrontation with biological finitude and non-being. It involves the direct recognition that physical life is fleeting and can terminate unexpectedly at any moment, rendering temporal existence fragile.
  • Teleological Dimension (Meaninglessness and Void): The disorienting sense of vacuum that emerges when pre-established social, religious, or philosophical systems collapse. It manifests as a persistent question: “What is the ultimate purpose of my actions if everything eventually fades?”
  • Volitional Dimension (The Burden of Freedom and Agency): The psychological weight associated with personal autonomy. Every life path pursued necessitates the death of other potential lives; the realization that one cannot blame parents, society, or fate creates intense volitional dread.
  • Relational Dimension (Existential Isolation): The recognition that despite interpersonal intimacy, love, and community, an unbridgeable gulf separates individual conscious experience. Every individual enters the world alone, experiences consciousness privately, and must face death alone.
  • Affective-Somatic Component: The physiological footprint of angst, characterized by a persistent autonomic nervous system humming, feeling constricted in the chest, shallow respiration, throat tightness, and general psychomotor restlessness.
  • Cognitive-Evaluative Component: Hyper-reflexivity, recursive rumination regarding one’s identity, chronic questioning of societal norms, and an acute awareness of human fallibility.

8. Examples & Illustrative Cases

To understand the multi-layered manifestation of angst, examine the following clinical and real-world vignettes:

Case 1: Mid-Career Vertigo and Existential Paralysis
Marcus, a 42-year-old corporate attorney, achieves full partnership at a prominent legal firm—a goal he had pursued single-mindedly for nearly two decades. Within weeks of securing this milestone, Marcus is overcome by an inexplicable, paralyzing dread. He reports no acute financial, medical, or marital stressors, yet he finds himself waking at 3:00 AM with a racing pulse and a pervasive conviction that his entire life has been built upon an arbitrary illusion. When evaluated, Marcus shows no signs of acute panic attacks or specific phobias. Instead, he describes an acute teleological angst: “I spent twenty years climbing this mountain, only to realize I don’t care about the summit. Now I have another forty years to live, and every path forward seems equally arbitrary. I feel completely untethered.” His dread is not fear of failure, but rather the terrifying freedom to choose a life path without an objective compass.

Case 2: Adolescent Individuation and Existential Awakening
Sophia, an 18-year-old student preparing to depart for university, begins exhibiting severe emotional withdrawal, melancholy, and restlessness. She becomes intensely critical of her family’s social conventions, consumer habits, and religious rituals, referring to them as “meaningless theater.” She reports feeling as though she is watching herself in a film, disconnected from her peers who appear happily preoccupied with social media and athletic events. Sophia’s presentation illustrates adolescent angst—an essential, albeit painful, developmental milestone wherein identity deconstruction, the dissolution of parental idealization, and the confrontation with total personal responsibility collide simultaneously.

Case 3: Health Crisis and the Collapse of Immortality Ideology
Elena, a 58-year-old architect, receives a diagnosis of early-stage, treatable breast cancer. Although her oncological prognosis is exceptionally favorable, the medical scare completely ruptures her intuitive sense of invulnerability. Even after successful surgical resection and clear margins, Elena remains consumed by a pervasive somatic and existential angst. She cannot look at her architectural blueprints without thinking about the structures outlasting her physical body. Her distress is not a simple fear of dying from a specific disease; it is the ontological shock that she is mortal, leading to an extensive re-evaluation of how she expends her remaining time.

9. Measurement & Assessment

Because angst is an abstract, subjective, and philosophically dense construct, empirical psychologists have faced unique challenges in operationalizing and measuring it. Nonetheless, psychometric researchers have developed reliable self-report inventories and clinical protocols to evaluate existential dread.

The Existential Anxiety Questionnaire (EAQ): Developed to operationalize Paul Tillich’s existential typologies, the EAQ measures anxiety across three core domains: fate and death (ontological), emptiness and meaninglessness (teleological), and guilt and condemnation (moral). High scores indicate a high degree of vulnerability to existential crises.

The Existential Concerns Questionnaire (ECQ): Created by van Bruggen and colleagues (2017), the ECQ provides a psychometrically robust, concise instrument measuring general existential anxiety. Factor analyses reveal that existential dread can be captured as a singular broad construct comprising five theoretical facets: death, meaninglessness, guilt, isolation, and identity/freedom. The scale is widely used in empirical research to differentiate between standard neurotic traits and existential burdens.

The Purpose in Life Test (PIL) and Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ): Originally established by Crumbaugh and Maholick (1964) and modernly expanded by Steger and colleagues (2006), these scales do not measure angst directly, but rather assess its inverse: the presence of and search for meaning. An elevated “search for meaning” coupled with an exceptionally low “presence of meaning” strongly correlates with acute existential angst and despair.

Differential Clinical Assessment: In clinical practice, distinguishing between angst, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) requires a comprehensive clinical interview. Clinicians evaluate the focus of apprehension: if the client’s worries are largely instrumental and concrete (e.g., finances, punctuality, social evaluations, disease contamination), standard diagnostic criteria for anxiety disorders are met. If the primary source of suffering is the overarching nature of human existence, the contingency of reality, or the lack of cosmic purpose, existential angst is designated as the primary presenting issue.

10. Applications & Practical Significance

The concept of angst possesses vital utility across diverse therapeutic, educational, and organizational environments.

Existential Psychotherapy: In clinical settings, therapists trained in existential modalities (such as Logotherapy, Daseinsanalysis, or Existential-Integrative Therapy) do not pathologize angst. Instead of attempting to immediately eliminate the anxiety via pharmacological interventions or symptom-suppression techniques, clinicians treat angst as an instructive emotional indicator. Therapists help clients sit with their dread, unpack what values are being compromised or brought to light, and utilize the affective energy to make conscious, courageous, authentic life choices.

Palliative and End-of-Life Care: When individuals face terminal medical diagnoses, physical pain management is only one dimension of comprehensive treatment. Terminally ill patients frequently suffer from acute “demoralization syndrome” or profound death angst. Modern palliative care integrates existential distress protocols, including Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (developed by William Breitbart) and assisted psychedelic-assisted therapy, which have demonstrated substantial efficacy in mitigating existential dread and helping patients find peace in their final chapter.

Creative Arts and Cultural Production: Historically, angst has been a profound driver of human cultural output. The German Expressionist movement, the literature of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, the cinematic works of Ingmar Bergman, and modern musical subcultures (such as punk, grunge, and post-rock) are explicit artistic translations of angst. By transforming private, isolating dread into shared public aesthetics, creators and audiences collectively metabolize the tension of the human condition.

Leadership and High-Stakes Decision-Making: In high-stakes organizational and political realms, leaders often experience a variant of existential angst when making irreversible, systemic choices that directly influence thousands of lives without sufficient information. Navigating this volitional angst without succumbing to defensive avoidance, authoritarian rigidity, or moral paralysis is a hallmark of mature, authentic leadership.

11. Research & Empirical Evidence

Although historically grounded in philosophy, angst has been extensively studied through modern quantitative psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and social experimentation.

Terror Management Theory Empirical Body: Over three decades, hundreds of empirical studies have validated the foundational tenets of Terror Management Theory. Experimental paradigms repeatedly demonstrate that when researchers induce “mortality salience” (e.g., asking participants to briefly describe what will happen to them when they die, or having them fill out surveys in sight of a funeral home), profound behavioral shifts occur. Participants routinely display heightened defensive adherence to their cultural, political, or religious ingroups, exhibit increased hostility toward outgroup members, and strive harder to bolster their self-esteem as a shield against underlying existential angst.

Neurobiological Correlates: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies investigating existential processing and mortality awareness reveal distinct neural footprints. Research by Klackl et al. (2014) and related neuroimaging groups indicates that processing existential dilemmas and mortality threats recruits the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—the brain’s primary error-monitoring and conflict-detection hub—alongside the anterior insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). When death-related or existential conflicts are rendered salient, the ACC registers this awareness as an existential “coherence violation,” signaling affective discomfort that demands compensatory cognitive adjustments.

The Protective Role of Meaning: Empirical research consistently identifies subjective meaning in life as the most powerful psychological buffer against debilitating angst. Longitudinal studies conducted by Michael Steger and others demonstrate that individuals with high self-reported meaning in life show lower baseline cortisol levels, reduced autonomic reactivity when exposed to existential stressors, and significantly greater psychological resilience when experiencing trauma or life transitions.

12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations

While the fundamental conditions of human existence—mortality, agency, and vulnerability—are universal, the manifestation and intensity of angst vary across cultural contexts.

Individualistic vs. Collectivistic Cultures: In Western, highly individualistic societies, personal self-actualization, individual autonomy, and personal success are paramount. Consequently, angst in Western contexts frequently centers upon the volitional and identity dimensions: “Am I living my best life? Have I chosen the correct career? Am I being true to myself?” Conversely, in collectivistic cultures, where the self is embedded within family, ancestral lineage, and communal obligations, existential dread is often relational or duty-centered. Angst may manifest as the fear of failing one’s ancestors, bringing dishonor to the family, or becoming alienated from the collective harmonious web.

Secular vs. Sacred Worldviews: Secularization in modern industrialized nations has dramatically dismantled traditional metaphysical frameworks that historically answered humanity’s existential questions. Without a shared cosmogony, an objective moral order, or the promise of an afterlife, individuals in highly secularized societies bear the sole psychological burden of constructing their own meaning from scratch. Anthropological and cross-cultural surveys indicate that cultures retaining deeply integrated spiritual or communal rituals report lower levels of isolated existential angst, as death and suffering are framed within a continuous, sacred narrative.

Linguistic Nuance: The precise emotional flavor of angst varies across languages. While the German Angst emphasizes constriction and general ontological dread, the Portuguese concept of saudade carries a melancholic yearning for a lost or unattainable presence; the Russian toska signifies an unnamable, deep spiritual ache or longing without an object; and the Japanese concept of mono no aware acknowledges the bittersweet, transient nature of all things with acceptance rather than dread.

13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations

Despite its theoretical richness, the construct of angst has faced continuous scrutiny, methodological critique, and cultural debate.

The Critique of Bourgeois Privilege: A long-standing socio-economic criticism, voiced by various Marxist and post-colonial critics, suggests that angst is a “luxury emotion” reserved for affluent, bourgeois individuals whose basic physiological and economic needs are well met. When an individual is struggling with food insecurity, systemic oppression, or immediate physical survival, there is little cognitive bandwidth to ponder the abstract groundlessness of being. Critics argue that existential angst reflects a self-absorbed introspection made possible only by leisure and comfort.

Counter-perspective: Existential theorists refute this claim, noting that individuals in extreme deprivation—such as Viktor Frankl and his fellow prisoners in Nazi concentration camps—frequently confront raw existential questions of meaning, dignity, and mortality with even greater urgency than comfortable citizens.

Measurement and Overlap with Clinical Disorders: Methodologists have questioned whether existential angst represents a truly distinct empirical construct or merely an articulate, intellectualized subtype of neuroticism, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or subclinical depression. Critics point to the significant statistical correlation between scales measuring existential anxiety and those measuring neuroticism, suggesting that high-trait-anxious individuals simply frame their constitutional emotional vulnerability through existential vocabulary.

Pathologization vs. Normalization: There is an ongoing tension within modern clinical psychiatry regarding whether to categorize existential distress as an adjustment disorder or to preserve it as a healthy, non-pathological crisis of growth. The heavy reliance on symptom-focused pharmacotherapy in contemporary medicine risks dulling an individual’s existential sensitivity, potentially preventing the profound personal re-evaluation and life realignment that acute angst is uniquely situated to catalyze.

14. Related Terms & Distinctions

To avoid conceptual confusion, angst must be systematically distinguished from closely related psychological states:

  • Fear: Fear is an acute, adaptive neurobiological response directed toward a concrete, identifiable, and immediate external threat (e.g., encountering a venomous snake). In contrast, angst is chronic, diffuse, internal, and entirely objectless.
  • Anxiety: While often used synonymously in everyday speech, clinical anxiety typically involves anticipatory apprehension regarding foreseeable future threats, performance tasks, or social evaluations. Angst, by contrast, operates on an ontological level, questioning the very context, ground, and validity of existence itself.
  • Anguish: Anguish denotes an overwhelming, intense state of acute emotional or physical suffering, often following a devastating loss, moral trauma, or severe injury. Angst is less acutely violent, persisting as an ambient, disquieting undercurrent of dread.
  • Depression: Depression is characterized by anhedonia, psychomotor slowing, apathy, feelings of worthlessness, and a flat affective state. Angst is an activated, agitated, and searching state; it contains dynamic psychological energy, whereas depression represents emotional deflation and exhaustion.
  • Ennui / Apathy: Ennui is a state of listless weariness, boredom, and dissatisfaction resulting from a lack of interest in one’s environment. Angst is deeply engaged and troubled by the stakes of living, rather than indifferently disengaged.

15. Summary / Key Takeaways

Angst is not a trivial emotional complaint or an ordinary bout of daily tension; it is a fundamental encounter with the reality of human existence. Emerging from the nexus of consciousness, freedom, and the absolute awareness of death, angst forces human beings to recognize that they are the architects of their own destinies in an open, ungrounded universe. Whether understood through Kierkegaard’s “dizziness of freedom,” Heidegger’s call to authenticity, or contemporary empirical frameworks like Terror Management Theory, angst holds a dual nature.

When denied, repressed, or pathologized, it manifests as chronic psychological dysfunction, rigidity, and neurotic despair. Yet, when confronted courageously and integrated into conscious awareness, angst serves as a vital transformative engine. It cuts through superficial cultural scripts, strips away inauthentic posturing, and challenges the individual to cultivate a deeply felt, resilient, and authentic life of purpose.

References

  • Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
  • Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Time
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The concept of anxiety: A simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin (R. Thomte, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1844).
  • May, R. (1950). The meaning of anxiety. Ronald Press.
  • Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1943).
  • van Bruggen, V., Vos, J., Westerhof, G., Bohlmeijer, E., & Glas, G. (2015). Systematic review of existential anxiety in psychology and psychotherapy. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 18(6), 469–488.
  • Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.

Cite This Article

Looti, M. (2026, October 16). Angst: Understanding Existential Dread. PSYCHOLOGICAL DATABASE. https://english.arabpsychology.com/dictionary/angst-psychological-construct/
Looti, Mohammed. “Angst: Understanding Existential Dread.” PSYCHOLOGICAL DATABASE, 16 October 2026, https://english.arabpsychology.com/dictionary/angst-psychological-construct/.
Looti, Mohammed. “Angst: Understanding Existential Dread.” PSYCHOLOGICAL DATABASE. October 16, 2026. https://english.arabpsychology.com/dictionary/angst-psychological-construct/.