This dissertation examines whether the modern category of "emotion"—from the perspective of current history of emotions—is suitable for describing the phenomenon of anxiety as analyzed by Vigilius Haufniensis in Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Despite repeated classifications of Kierkegaard's thinking on anxiety, boredom, or despair as "emotion theory" (cf. McCarthy 1980; Kangas 2004; Roberts 2013; Pocai 2021), significant contradictions arise: The concept of emotion typically encompasses bodily, intentional, and secular aspects (Wierzbicka 1999; Boddice 2018; Dixon 2018), which clash with Kierkegaard's Protestant-dogmatic focus on original sin and his specific terminology. Thesis: The category "emotion" is unsuitable and leads to an anachronistic misreading, caused by the uncritical adoption of Anglo-American psychological terms and a lack of cultural-historical sensitivity. Method: Through a conceptual-historical and phenomenological lexical analysis of the original Danish in The Concept of Anxiety—compared to contemporary emotion concepts—alternatives such as "feeling" (Stalfort 2016), "existential feeling" (Ratcliffe 2008), or "mood" (Heidegger; McCarthy/Kangas) are tested. "Mood" emerges as the most promising candidate. Contribution: The project heightens sensitivity to culturally specific phenomena in historical texts and qualifies Kierkegaard's work for interdisciplinary emotion discourses. It corrects common Kierkegaard reception and enriches philosophy of emotion through more precise categorization. Author: Matthias Heinecke, Leipzig University