A phenomenological approach to the phenomena of anxiety: a scoping review

The increasing number of diagnoses of anxiety disorders has highlighted the need for discussions about anxiety in its affective, psychopathological, and mundane dimensions. This scoping review mapped 36 scientific articles (2014-2025) to analyze how Phenomenology contributes to the understanding of anxiety as a global phenomenon. The results highlight trends in the field in 4 discursive categories. For authors of Phenomenological Psychopathology, anxiety is understood as a global alteration of being-in-the-world, characterized by disturbances in temporality (dysrhythmia, narrowing of the future), spatiality (feeling of invasion/avoidance), and intersubjectivity (hypervigilance towards others). In specific conditions such as social anxiety and OCD, anxiety appears as a way for the subject to deal with anguish and uncertainty. In phenomenological philosophy, anxiety (or anguish) is considered a human and existential phenomenon, enabling a confrontation with incompleteness and freedom. The clinical directions of the collected articles point to the ways in which clinical contact can, by enabling contact with uncertainty, pave the way for a creative production of meaning. The review concludes that, although the articles start from different focuses on anxiety, there is an observable tendency in strands of production understanding anxiety as a way of inhabiting the world. However, a gap is identified in the literature regarding the articulation of these phenomenological conceptions with the specific sociocultural contexts of contemporary times.