Soren Kierkegaard

in order to conform to people and imitate their postures and attitudes; just
as his silence during the moment of confidentiality ought to be seductive
and voluptuous, so that what is hidden can take pleasure in stealing forth and
chatting with itself in the artificially constructed privacy and tranquillity—in
like manner, he [the psychologist] ought also have in his soul the poetic
originality that makes it possible for him to create something integral and
systematic out of what is always present in the individual in a merely partial
and disjointed fashion .When he has perfected himself at this, he will no
longer have to take his examples from literary models or serve up half-dead
reminiscences but will be able to bring his observations out of the water,
completely fresh, still wriggling and displaying their full range of colors.”
The Concept of Anxietyis an ingeniously alarming work that brings to-
gether two disciplines, psychology and dogmatics .A journal entry from
1842 contains a provisional definition of the set of problems they face in
common, defining anxiety (using a phrase that would later become so fa-
mous) as a “sympathetic antipathy,” that is, as an empathetic hostility or an
ambivalence (another term we use today—a bit too frequently): “Now peo-
ple have often enough treated the nature of original sin, and yet they have
lacked a principal category, namelyanxiety .And this is its essential determi-
nant: Anxiety is in fact a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy.
Anxiety is an alien power that seizes the individual, and yet one cannot
break free of it, and one does not want to—because one fears .But what
one fears is what one desires .Anxiety now renders the individual powerless,
and the first sin always takes place in powerlessness.”
With his searching analyses of the significance of sexuality for such phe-
nomena as hysteria and aggression, Kierkegaard was not merely Freudian
long before Freud, he was also more Jungian than Jung himself, in the sense
that Kierkegaard held fast to the theological self in the face of every sort of
psychological determinant .That Kierkegaard was capable at all of writing
the book at a time when modern psychology had scarcely entered pu-
berty—“Psychology is what we need,” he declared programmatically—can
only be explained by his formidable capacity for conflict-laden introspec-
tion, without which the analyses of such phenomena as demonic encapsula-
tion and anxiety for the good would have been unthinkable.
Since, as is well known, identity problemscanstem from the fact that
deep down a person knows quite well who he is, it is perhaps not so strange
that Kierkegaard was compelled to distance himself a bit from his own in-
sights about himself by attributing them to the pen of a pseudonym: Vigilius
Haufniensis, the watchful Copenhagener, who could thus serve as an excel-
lent cover for another watchful Copenhagener by the name of Søren Aabye
Kierkegaard.