Walter Lowrie wrote that he saw the themes in The Sickness unto Death as a repetition of those in Kierkegaard’s earlier work, Fear and Trembling, and as being even more closely related to those in The Concept of Anxiety.

[4][5] Anti-Climacus introduces the book with a reference to a phrase in the Gospel of John, 11:4: "This sickness is not unto death."

Although humans are inherently reflective and self-conscious, to become a true "self" one must be conscious that the source and ground of this "self" is love, "the power that created it".

The second kind of despair is refusing to accept the self outside of immediacy; only defining the self in immediate, finite terms.

This is the state in which one realizes that one has a self, but wishes to lose this painful awareness by arranging one's finite life so as to make the realization unnecessary.

Specifically, Kierkegaard defines the opposite of despair as faith, which he describes by the following: "In relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it."

People commonly ascribe the name "God" to the "power that created" the self, but Anti-Climacus's text is more subtle than this orthodox viewpoint.