The courage to be and the narrowed self
Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be came out in 1952. It is a short book by a theologian, and psychotherapists have read it ever since. Most summaries stop at its famous list of three anxieties. The chapter after it gets quoted less. It asks what happens to a person who cannot bear anxiety.
Three anxieties, as a frame
Chapter 2 is called "Being, Nonbeing, and Anxiety". There Tillich sorts anxiety by what it threatens. Nonbeing, his word for everything that can undo a person, reaches a person in three places.
The first is the anxiety of fate and death. It threatens simply being alive and in the world. Tillich calls it ontic. The second is the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. It threatens what a person lives for, and he calls it spiritual. The third is the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. It threatens a person's standing before their own judgment, and he calls it moral.
Each comes in two strengths. Fate is the relative threat, death the absolute one. Emptiness is relative, meaninglessness absolute. Guilt is relative, condemnation absolute. The three are interwoven, and in one life one of them usually leads.
Tillich insists that this anxiety cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself. That sentence sets up everything that follows. If the anxiety cannot go away, the only question is what a person does with it.
Rollo May, who studied with Tillich, drew a related line between normal and neurotic anxiety. His account has its own page, on the meaning of anxiety.
Courage does not remove it
Chapter 3 is "Pathological Anxiety, Vitality, and Courage". Its first section, "The Nature of Pathological Anxiety", starts from a plain statement. Courage does not remove anxiety. Existential anxiety cannot be removed, so courage has to take it in.
For Tillich courage is self-affirmation "in spite of". A person affirms their own being in spite of the threat of nonbeing. The courageous person takes the anxiety upon themselves. Here, Tillich writes, lies the key to understanding pathological anxiety. It begins where this taking upon oneself fails.
Avoiding being
What happens to someone who cannot take anxiety upon themselves? Tillich's answer is that they can still avoid despair. They do it by escaping into neurosis. They go on affirming themselves, but on a smaller scale.
"Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being."
— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), chapter 3, "Pathological Anxiety, Vitality, and Courage", section "The Nature of Pathological Anxiety", p. 66
The line is often quoted on its own. Read in place, it is precise. The neurotic does not lack self-affirmation. It can be strong, even emphatic. What is affirmed is a reduced self.
Some of that self's possibilities are never allowed to happen. Tillich explains why. To actualize one's being is to accept nonbeing and the anxiety that comes with it. Every real step into life widens the surface where one can be hurt. So the person gives up part of their potential being in order to save what is left.
The narrowing is a trade. Less life buys less exposure to what threatens life.
The reduced self holds on hard
This structure, Tillich writes, explains the ambiguities of the neurotic character. The self is reduced, and yet its affirmation can be intense. The territory is small, and it is held all the harder for that.
Later in the chapter he names the forms this takes. Against the anxiety of fate and death, pathological anxiety produces an unrealistic security. Against guilt and condemnation, an unrealistic perfection. Against doubt and meaninglessness, an unrealistic certitude. Each is a small fortified place. Inside it the threat seems to be kept out.
The word that repeats is "unrealistic". The security is real to the person who holds it. It is unrealistic because it stands on a piece of the world cut down to fit.
More sensitive, not less
Tillich does not describe the neurotic as someone lesser. He says the opposite. The neurotic is more sensitive than the average person to the threat of nonbeing. The narrowing answers a threat that is felt more sharply.
The average person, in his account, is lacking in the intensity that can make the neurotic creative. Their anxiety does not push them to build imaginary worlds. They affirm themselves together with the parts of reality they happen to meet.
What the chapter leaves open
The passage describes a structure, and it stops there. Tillich does not say where the line falls between an ordinary cautious life and a neurotic one. He does not say which possibilities a person ought to reclaim. He names the price of the trade and leaves the accounting to the reader.
Read this way, "avoiding being" means specific things left undone. A conversation that never happens. A wish never said aloud. A place one does not go. Each keeps a threat at a distance and takes something from the life it protects.
Where do I live less, so that I fear less?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.