Chapter 11 May: Existential Psychology 333underlying sense of dread and anxiety. The failure to confront death serves as a
temporary escape from the anxiety or dread of nonbeing. But the escape cannot be
permanent. Death is the one absolute of life that sooner or later everyone must face.
People experience anxiety when they become aware that their existence or
some value identified with it might be destroyed. May (1958a) defined anxiety as
“the subjective state of the individual’s becoming aware that his [or her] existence
can be destroyed, that he can become ‘nothing’ ” (p. 50). At another time, May
(1967) called anxiety a threat to some important value. Anxiety, then, can spring
either from an awareness of one’s nonbeing or from a threat to some value essen-
tial to one’s existence. It exists when one confronts the issue of fulfilling one’s
potentialities. This confrontation can lead to stagnation and decay, but it can also
result in growth and change.
The acquisition of freedom inevitably leads to anxiety. Freedom cannot exist
without anxiety, nor can anxiety exist without freedom. May (1981, p. 185) quoted
Kierkegaard as saying that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Anxiety, like
dizziness, can be either pleasurable or painful, constructive or destructive. It can
give people energy and zest, but it can also paralyze and panic them. Moreover,
anxiety can be either normal or neurotic.
Normal Anxiety
No one can escape the effects of anxiety. To grow and to change one’s values
means to experience constructive or normal anxiety. May (1967) defined normal
anxiety as that “which is proportionate to the threat, does not involve repression,
and can be confronted constructively on the conscious level” (p. 80).
As people grow from infancy to old age, their values change, and with
each step, they experience normal anxiety. “All growth consists of the anxiety-
creating surrender of past values” (May, 1967, p. 80). Normal anxiety is also
experienced during those creative moments when an artist, a scientist, or a
philosopher suddenly achieves an insight that leads to a recognition that one’s
life, and perhaps the lives of countless others, will be permanently changed. For
example, scientists who witnessed the first atomic bomb tests in Alamogordo,
New Mexico, experi-
enced normal anxiety
with the realization that,
from that moment for-
ward, everything had
changed (May, 1981).
Neurotic Anxiety
Normal anxiety, the
type experienced during
periods of growth or of
threat to one’s values, is
experienced by every-
one. It can be construc-
tive provided it remains
Normal anxiety is proportionate to the threat and can be
constructive. © Amble Design/Shutterstock