of consciousness takes its cues, and he used a theological term to explain
the situation: “predestined, as it were.” At the same time, Kierkegaard was
aware that a prohibition could call forth precisely what it wished to hinder
because it gives form and focus to the objects of desire that are otherwise
so obscure .“Therefore one must be very careful with children .One must
never assume the worst, or by a premature suspicion or a chance remark
.. .summon up an anguished consciousness in which innocent but weak
souls could easily be tempted to believe themselves guilty, to despair, and
thus to take the first step towards the destination that had been foreshad-
owed by the anxiety-laden premonition... .In this respect as well, it may
be said: ‘Woe to him by whom temptation comes.’ ”
This journal entry is from 1837, when Kierkegaard was only twenty-
four .Nonetheless he had already seen through his father’s flagrant error and
had quite understandably turned a deaf ear when the paterfamilias would
inform his son at regular intervals “that it was a good thing for a person to
have ‘such an elderly, venerable confessor in whom he could really con-
fide.’ ” The son did not feel the least bit tempted to confess, all the less so
because the father had already put a fateful mark upon the son’s desire,
reversing what is natural and unnatural, andto this extenthad sexually mo-
lested his child .“If a child were told,” Kierkegaard wrote in 1845, “that it
was a sin to break one’s leg, what anxiety the child would live in, and how
much more often he would probably break it; he would even view almost
breaking one’s leg as a sin... .As in the case, for example, of a man who
had been very debauched and who, precisely in order to deter his son from
the same behavior, came to view the sexual instinct itself as a sin—forgetting
that there was a difference between himself and the child.”
By connecting his father with the prohibition and the prohibition with
the desire, Kierkegaard laid bare the components of a logic of the libido
that would later play such a decisive role in his analyses of inherited sin
[Danish:Arvesynden, literally “inherited sin” but often translated as “original
sin”] inTheConceptofAnxiety, where he would also make use of his earlier
journal entry about the “premonition” that precedes the inevitability with
which the instinct emerges: “The logic of sin moves onward; it drags the
individual along like a woman whom an executioner drags by the hair while
she shrieks in despair .Anxiety comes first; it discovers the logic before it
arrives, just as one can sense in one’s bones that a storm is approaching .It
comes closer; the individual trembles like a horse that stops and neighs at
the spot where it once had shied .Sin conquers .” The use of metaphors here
makes it abundantly clear how the individual is “predestined, as it were,”
allowing herself to be dragged against her will to the scaffold where what
she fears will take place .Throughout Kierkegaard’s writings there are many