Anxiety and Joy: Kierkegaard vs. Freud Through Peanuts
This essay uses a single Peanuts cartoon strip — in which Lucy van Pelt urges Snoopy to abandon happiness for worry — as a philosophical parable to compare two major theories of anxiety. Drawing on Freud's account of "angst vor etwas" in Civilization and Its Discontents and Kierkegaard's treatment of faith and dread in Fear and Trembling, the paper traces Snoopy's emotional journey through social anxiety, internalized conscience, and a final return to joy. It argues that Freud would interpret Snoopy's laughter as hysterical repression, while Kierkegaard would read it as a genuine leap of faith — revealing a fundamental difference in how each thinker understands the relationship between anxiety, meaning, and human happiness.
- Introduction: A Cartoon Parable of Anxiety: Peanuts strip introduced as philosophical parable
- Freud's Model of Anxiety and the Peanuts Strip: Freudian anxiety and social conscience applied to Snoopy
- Kierkegaard's Leap of Faith and Snoopy's Joy: Kierkegaard's faith as alternative to Freudian dread
- Freud vs. Kierkegaard: What Happens in the Final Panel: Repression versus faith explain Snoopy's final joy
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What makes this paper effective
- The Peanuts cartoon functions as a sustained, concrete anchor that makes abstract philosophical concepts genuinely accessible and memorable throughout the essay.
- The comparative structure is clean and disciplined: each theorist is introduced on his own terms before being applied to the same textual object, allowing direct contrast without distortion.
- The essay uses a single, sharply defined question — what happens between the penultimate and final panels of the cartoon? — as a pivot point that crystallizes the core philosophical difference between Freud and Kierkegaard.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates the use of a popular-culture artifact as a philosophical test case. Rather than simply summarizing Freud and Kierkegaard, the writer applies each theory to a specific interpretive problem (Snoopy's final burst of laughter), forcing the theoretical frameworks into direct, illuminating conflict. This move — using a shared object to expose divergence between theories — is a hallmark of strong comparative philosophical writing.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with the cartoon parable and frames the two theoretical lenses it will apply. The second section walks through Freud's anxiety model, panel by panel. The third section introduces Kierkegaard's existential-religious alternative, centering on Abraham and the leap of faith. The final section stages a direct confrontation between the two readings, resolving the comparison around the question of what Snoopy's joy ultimately means. Works Cited follows MLA format.
Introduction: A Cartoon Parable of Anxiety
What is the relationship between anxiety and happiness? Consider a joke on this topic before turning to serious theoretical approaches. In a Peanuts cartoon strip by Charles M. Schulz, the strip's resident know-it-all and amateur psychiatrist, Lucy van Pelt, observes Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy hopping around in a giddy dance of happiness. "How can you be happy when you don't know what this year has in store for you?" she shouts. Snoopy looks chastened as Lucy continues, "Don't you worry about all the things that can happen?" He then looks anxious — sick unto death — as Lucy says: "That's better… live in dread and fear… be sensible." But in the strip's final panel, Snoopy bursts out into joyful laughter ("hehehe") and begins his happy dance again.
This cartoon strip functions as a small but illuminating parable. The following essay evaluates it using two approaches to anxiety: the existential approach given by Søren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, and the psychoanalytic approach taken by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents.
Freud's Model of Anxiety and the Peanuts Strip
Freud provides a useful starting place, because the Freudian concept of angst vor etwas — "fear before something" — is precisely what Lucy van Pelt is trying to get Snoopy to feel. Freud famously claims that all anxiety is angst vor etwas: it is not only confrontational (I stand before society, I stand before God and feel fear) but also anticipatory (I feel anxious before the event; my anxiety is an expectation) (Bloom 57).
In Chapter VII of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud outlines the mechanism by which anxiety operates within civilization. The earliest form is "social anxiety," in which people feel fear before the opinion of others and allow this anxiety to control their behavior (Freud 85). Freud believes this principle organizes most of society, but he also posits a "higher stage" in which anxiety and authority are internalized — we respond to an inner sense of fear, the voice of conscience, rather than to external social shame or punishment for transgression.
Part of the joke of the Peanuts comic is that it perfectly illustrates the dynamic of Freud's model. Snoopy is happy at the beginning; Lucy does not understand why. She subjects Snoopy to her opinion of his behavior, and Snoopy complies with "social anxiety," replacing his happiness with sorrow and worry. By the third panel, Snoopy seems to have internalized the source of anxiety — reaching the level Freud (and Lucy van Pelt) recommend — walking away from Lucy, no longer needing her social presence to awaken the conforming fear. Yet in the final panel, Snoopy has apparently realized that his internalized conscience no longer supports the fear: he is happy again. From Freud's standpoint, this may simply be a lesson about the short memories of dogs.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Transl. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 2010. Print.
Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. Studies in Hysteria. Transl. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1930. Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Transl. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.
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