Soren Kierkegaard

Assuming he doesn’t already have one, this gives a person every possibility
of acquiring an unsound mind in a reasonably sound body.
Kierkegaard frequently concerned himself with sin as an act that is carried
out again and again in concealment—“sin is committed in secret”—and
that continues to be repeated despite the protests of the higher and better
self .As he wrote in 1835: “When a person rejoices at having triumphed
over the power of temptation, almost at that very moment, right after the
most complete of victories, some apparently insignificant external event
may occur that hurls him like Sisyphus from the top of the cliff.” Matters
were not made any better by the fact that there appeared to be a masturba-
tory gene in the family: In the days when Michael Kierkegaard had thought
of retiring from his business enterprise, his first thought had been to turn it
over to his brother, Peder Pedersen Kierkegaard .But Peder was sick, and
in 1786 he had had to spend several months in Frederik’s Hospital, where
he was diagnosed as “deranged.” His illness could not be described precisely,
however; in his medical record Peder’s psychic disturbances were linked
to constipation, but at length it was stated that his illness stemmed from
masturbation .Søren Aabye later related that on one occasion, when Uncle
Peder was visiting in Copenhagen, he wore three overcoats despite the fact
that it was a broiling hot summer day .According to Peter Munthe Bruun,
Kierkegaard’s father had once said: “When I can’t sleep, I lie down and talk
with my boys, and there are no better conversations here in Copenhagen.”
We would like to believe the old man, but we also ask ourselves whether
perhaps the story of Peder and the three overcoats might not have been one
of the nocturnal lectures with which merchant Kierkegaard impressed upon
his two half-grown boys the necessity of taking timely action to keep desire
in check.
Of course, in grouping masturbation with the “crimes against which one
could struggle only with the continuing help of God,” Kierkegaard’s father
contributed to a quite drastic warping of his son’s sex life, but he also helped
focus Søren Aabye’s interest in the various forms and displacements of the
sexual instinct .Thus, to his journal entry about the young woman with the
moist desires Kierkegaard appended a reflection about the sense of inevita-
bility that accompanies sexual desire when it enters the subconscious .“Ev-
erything that is to happen tends to be preceded by a certain premonition,”
he wrote, “but just as this can have a deterrent effect, it can also be a tempta-
tion because a person can get the notion that he is predestined, as it were;
it is as if he can see himself as having been transported via a certain logic to
some conclusion, but as having no influence whatever over this logic.”
Kierkegaard had experienced how sexual forces could suddenly express
themselves in spite of the norms and the barriers from which the clear light