Dread

‘Religious dread’ (or ‘awe’) would perhaps be a better designation. Its antecedent stage is ‘daemonic dread’ (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive off-shoot, the ‘dread of ghosts’.

Otto argues that dread, in its numinous form, is the primordial affect underlying all religion and mythology, distinguishable from ordinary fear by its quality of awe before the daemonic.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis

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Nameless Dread Individuals with the Connection Survival Style create specific content to name the feeling that something bad is going to happen, a state of hypervigilance characterized in NARM as nameless dread.

NARM theory identifies ‘nameless dread’ as the core traumatic residue of early relational disruption, which the psyche attempts to domesticate by generating phobias, shame, and obsessive-compulsive symptomatology.

Laurence Heller, Ph D, Healing Developmental Trauma How Early Trauma Affectsthesis

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the individual in these situations often experiences a rush of dread, a dread independent of the physical threat involved, a lonely dread that is a wind blowing from one’s own desert place—the nothing that is at the core of being.

Yalom locates dread as an existential phenomenon arising from groundlessness and isolation, irreducible to any external danger and pointing instead to the void at the center of existence.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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The more the development of dread is limited to a flash, to a mere signal, the less does it hinder the transition from the state of anxious readiness to that of action, and the more expediently does the whole course of events proceed.

Freud’s signal theory distinguishes dread as a functional preparation for danger from its pathological elaboration, positioning the term within a broader taxonomy of anxiety, fear, and fright.

Freud, Sigmund, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917thesis

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Hence we know of two sources for feelings of guilt: that arising from the dread of authority and the later one from the dread of the super-ego.

Freud identifies dread of authority and dread of the super-ego as the twin psychosocial mechanisms that enforce instinctual renunciation and generate civilizational guilt.

Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930thesis

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it is the stance that makes us live in dread of holocaust, the final result of the idea of the world as dead. The holocaust began the moment the world was declared dead; all anxiety about the actual end is the accumulation of the daily dread of the destructive power over things.

Sardello argues that collective dread is the cumulative psychic toll of modernity’s disenchantment, whereby treating the world as inert matter generates a chronic, civilizational terror of annihilation.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting

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Infantile dread has very little to do with objective anxiety (dread of real danger), but is, on the other hand, closely allied to the neurotic anxiety of adults. It is derived like the latter from undischarged libido.

Freud distinguishes infantile dread from realistic fear, tracing it to the same libidinal economy as adult neurotic anxiety and establishing the developmental continuity of the concept.

Freud, Sigmund, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917supporting

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Occasionally some jolting experience in life tears a rent in the curtain of defenses and permits raw death anxiety to erupt into consciousness. Rapidly, however, the unconscious ego repairs the tear and conceals once again the nature of the anxiety.

Yalom describes how dread in its rawest form — naked death anxiety — is ordinarily suppressed by defensive operations, erupting only when life-events rupture the protective membrane of denial.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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If we dread a bad result from what we are about to do (or have just done), or if we begin to wish the situation were better, then our attention is drawn from what we need to be doing at the moment.

In the I Ching interpretive tradition, dread of outcome is treated as a distraction from innocent presence, its avoidance constituting a form of psychological virtue.

Carol K. Anthony, A Guide to the I Ching, 1988aside

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