libidinous extroversion as a trait typical of the romantic ironist: “Now he
is on the way to the monastery, and along the way visits the Venusberg;
now he is on the way to the Venusberg, and along the way he prays at a
monastery.”
Thus, when Kierkegaard had to write his autobiography and depict his
religious development, he had no trouble with recycling material that he
had elsewhere classified as aesthetic.
“My Father Died—Then I Got Another Father in His Place”
These complex self-presentations, in which deception and self-deception
struggle with each other exhaustingly and on equal terms, are sometimes
accompanied by more straightforward journal entries where, for example,
traumatic childhood experiences return, but in transfigured form. The pain
had not vanished, but it had diminished just enough for Kierkegaard to take
pen in hand—and then inform us that the most decisive details would re-
main shrouded in silence: “Oh, how frightful it is when I think for even a
moment of the dark background of my life, right from the earliest days.
The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melan-
cholia, of many things in this connection that I cannot even write down. I
acquired such anxiety about Christianity, and yet I felt myself strongly
drawn toward it.”
The entry recurs at various places in the journals in a welter of variations,
and the reader has to summon up extraordinary goodwill to be able to get
beyond thinking about thetherapeuticeffect that this very act of committing
the trauma to writing must have had for Kierkegaard, whose sole confidant
was of course his journal. And naturally, the very fact that he worked
through his traumatic experiences by writing them down has misled later
generations into focusing more on the traumas themselves than on the dis-
tance Kierkegaard placed between them and himself, line by line, as time
went by. In a journal entry from the early summer of 1848, which Kierke-
gaard begins quite abruptly, we can sense how that distance is increasing:
“But of course, my father’s death was also a frightfully shattering experience
for me—how much so I have never spoken of to a single person. The entire
first part of my life was generally so enveloped in the darkest melancholia
and the most profoundly brooding fog of misery that it is no wonder I was
as I was. But all this remains my secret.”
Kierkegaard has confronted his reader with this frank concealment so
often that one almost reacts with resignation. He wants to and yet he doesn’t
want to; his urge to confess is characterized by a sympathetic antipathy, an