Today I’m giving you a free look into my Mythic Mind Fellowship course, The Psychology of Søren Kierkegaard: Life in Anxiety & Despair, as we begin with the preface and introduction to The Concept of Anxiety. Before the argument proper, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, the Watchman of Copenhagen, tells us what kind of book this is and what kind of book it is not: not a clinical study, not a self-help manual, and not a theology textbook borrowing a psychological title. He is a psychologist with theology in view, writing a monograph rather than a system. The course is underway now and is included with Fellow and Companion memberships, so joining the Fellowship gets you the rest of it.

We look at what happens when sin is handled in the wrong field (aesthetics, metaphysics, or psychology on its own), why earnestness is the proper mood for this book, and how Haufniensis maps four neighboring disciplines: first ethics, dogmatics, psychology, and second ethics. Psychology can trace the real possibility of sin, but it cannot cross the qualitative leap. That is why its proper object is anxiety, which is not an ailment to be removed but the threshold where we face either despair or faith.