'Anxiety' – Ph.D. project
'Anxiety' - Ph.D. project by Anna Lena Stefanides
Abstract:
Anxiety, for one thing, is omnipresent, but then again it cannot be defined. In order to understand it as an obstacle to and facilitator of free ways of relating, I approach a conception of fear in my dissertation in which both the individual and socially conditioned as well as the natural and transcendental moments of anxietyare taken seriously. To this end, I concentrate on the historical social analysis by the critical theory of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and its successors, complemented by ethnological insights into various ways of understanding the world, the psychoanalytical examination by Freud and his successors, complemented by socio-psychological continuations and - in the broadest sense - existentialist discussions on anxiety (Luther, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir/Satre, Tillich, Drewermann). The focus here is on the relationship between subject and object as well as the necessity of finiteness and the possibility of freedom. The basis is Tillich's assumption that theology is capable of providing answers to existential questions. I reckon that an answer to the question of anxiety can be found in the doctrine of sin from the perspective of grace.
research assistant
NameAnna Lena Stefanides
Send encrypted email via the SecureMail portal (for TUD external users only).