https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angst
But Angst in the sense of Kierkegaard and Heidegger is totally different from the mood of fearfulness or timidness. Generally speaking it is not a mood in the usual sense which can be equated with other moods like despair or gaiety or serenity etc. Kierkegaard claims also for Angst an object, although this object is of a totally different nature than all objects of fear. He names the object of Angst either ‘freedom’ (ibid. p 42) or ‘the nothing’ (ibid. p. 61). When Kierkegaard speaks of freedom as the object of Angst, he has in mind neither social nor political nor psychic freedom, but the freedom which belongs to the human condition and is therefore independent of the ontic circumstances we live in. Whereas we can be deprived of social or political freedom and can feel psychologically unfree, the ontological freedom Kierkegaard has in mind cannot be taken away from us and we cannot renounce it either, but we are, as Sartre has put it with his famous formula, ‘condemned’ to it (Sartre, 2008: pp 506; 574).
Now we are able to give an adequate account of the difference between fear and Angst:
Fear is an ontic emotion which has as its objects all sorts of concrete dangers which may threaten our life or our well-being, whereas Angst is an ontological emotion* which has as its object only one and the same danger which marks us as human beings: freedom, respectively the nothing. (p. 19)
*no, it is not emotion, it is FATE
Alice Holzhey-Kunz (2016) Why The Distinction Between Ontic and Ontological Trauma Matters For Existential Therapists. Existential Analysis 27(1):16-27.
Presentation, London 14-17 May, 2015 World Congress for Existential Therapy
