søren kierkegaard the concept of anxiety

“The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholy.”įor Kierkegaard, unhappiness became not a condition but a vocation. “Oh, how frightful it is when for a moment I think of the dark background of my life, right from the earliest days!” Kierkegaard recalled. Michael Pedersen raised his seven children, of whom Søren was the youngest, under strict religious discipline, instilling a sense of fear and guilt that never left them. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, had grown up poor in the countryside, moved to Copenhagen to become a merchant, and ended up as one of the city’s richest men. Side by side with this fashionable style of feeling, Kierkegaard inherited from his ancestors a rigorously introspective Protestantism. the most faithful mistress I have known.” He considered his “melancholy” not a disease but a “close confidant . . . “Real depression, like the ‘vapors,’ is found only in the highest circles, in the former case understood in a spiritual sense,” he wrote two months later. But Kierkegaard had learned from Romantic literature that wild emotion was a sign of genius, especially when it was painful.

“At times, there is such a noise in my head that it is as though my cranium were being lifted up, it is exactly like when the hobgoblins lift a mountain up a little and then hold a ball and make merry inside,” he wrote in his journal in February, 1838, when he was twenty-four. The man would seek professional help, because, in the twenty-first century, he would recognize his propensities as symptoms-evidence of a psychological problem.īut when Søren Kierkegaard underwent these experiences in the Denmark of the eighteen-forties they had a different meaning. The goal would be to get him back to normal, as the world defines “normal”: able to take pleasure in life, to form relationships, to meet his obligations as a family member, friend, and citizen.

He would start seeing a therapist and might be prescribed medication. If this happened today-say, in Denmark, the standard example of a rational modern society-the man would sooner or later end up in a psychiatrist’s office, where he would probably be given a diagnosis of depression or bipolar disorder. His activity is so relentless that, in a few short years, he has accumulated many volumes’ worth of manuscripts. He abandons the career for which he has been studying for ten years and holes up in his apartment, where a kind of graphomania compels him to stay up all night writing at a frantic pace. For no apparent reason, he breaks up with the woman everyone thought he was going to marry-not because he loves someone else but out of a sudden conviction that he is incapable of marriage and can only make her miserable. Imagine an educated, affluent European in his late twenties, seemingly one of fortune’s favored, who suffers from crippling feelings of despair and guilt.

Søren kierkegaard the concept of anxiety