Kierkegaard examines the moment before the Fall, when Adam stands in innocence and feels something he cannot name: anxiety, the dizziness of freedom. Written under a pseudonym, this psychological study anticipates existentialism and psychoanalysis by decades. The prose is dense and deliberately difficult, circling its subject without ever quite pinning it down, which is appropriate for a book about what cannot be grasped. Anxiety is not fear of something specific but the vertigo we feel before infinite possibility. Heidegger and Sartre would build on this foundation. Kierkegaard published it the same year as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, an astonishing burst of philosophical creativity.