Soren Kierkegaard

in accordance with the rules of aesthetics.’ Now it goes without saying that
a reviewer resembles a poet in every detail, except that he does not have
the torments in his heart or the music on his lips. See, therefore I would
rather be a swineherd in Amagerbro and be understood by the swine than
be a poet and be misunderstood by people.”
If we didn’t know better, we might be tempted to believe that Kierke-
gaard had secretly been reading Freud, for Freud, too, diagnosed artistic
creativity as a symptom of an unresolved conflict within the artist, a sublima-
tion of a crisis in the self-relation. The artist or poet is a person whose
own life is not congruent with what he writes about, and his writing is
compensation for a lack of existential realization. He can tell everyone else’s
secrets, only not his own, and this lack of clarity is precisely the unconscious
growth zone for artistic productivity. Even Judge William had a notion of
this: “A poet existence as such resides in the obscurity that results when
despair has not been carried through, when the soul constantly trembles in
despair and the spirit cannot achieve genuine transfiguration.”
Everything King Midas touched turned to gold; everything Kierkegaard
touched turned to writing. But unlike King Midas, who in the end came
close to perishing of hunger, Kierkegaard lived off the writing he himself
produced. And before anyone else did so, he acknowledged the connection
between his mental crises and the therapeutic function of writing: “Oh,
how burdensome! As I have often said about myself, like that princess in
theThousand and One Nights, I saved my life by telling stories—that is, by
productivity. Productivity was my life. A melancholia of immense propor-
tions, inner sufferings of the sympathetic sort, everything, everything, I
could manage everything—if I was permitted to produce.” This idea of
sublimation recurs in a myriad of more or less identical versions, repeated
so often that a prosaic “et cetera” can slip into the middle of his anguished
confessions as an almost unnoticeable bit of dissonance: “I became produc-
tive, which rescued me from a melancholia profoundly rooted in my being
et cetera.”
Among these stereotypically introverted journal entries, which at some
points congeal into sheer cliche ́s, there are, however, also reports of how
happy he is with his work, its naturalness, its divine blessedness. In other
words, he reports on his work as a successful sublimation, as, for example,
in this sketch of a typical workday from 1849: “I get up in the morning and
thank God. Then I get to work. At a set time in the evening I break off,
thank God—and then I sleep. And that is how I live, admittedly at some
moments not without bouts of melancholia and sadness, but essentially in
the most blessed enchantment, day in and day out.” Kierkegaard lived in a
close-knit synthesis of monastic routine and inspired rapture into which