Soren Kierkegaard

and when Vigilius Haufniensis peers into a physician’s office, he has in his
eye a splinter from a troll’s magic mirror that captures grotesque scenes:
“People have viewed the demonic from the vantage point of medical treat-
ment. And obviously this means with powders and with pills—and then
with enemas! Now the pharmacist and the doctor join forces. The patient
is removed so as not to frighten the others. In our courageous times we
dare not tell a patient that he is going to die; we dare not call the pastor out
of fear that the patient will die of shock.”
Yet, with all this, Kierkgaard has not excluded the possibility of examin-
ing suffering from a medical vantage point; he has merely situated it one or
two notches below the psychological and the “pneumatic” approaches. At
one point in 1846 he raised this question in one of his “journals” (and of
course he himself used this medical-sounding term for those volumes):
“And when you get right down to it, in the medium of actuality and of
becoming, what do the physiologist and the physician really know, then?”
The question is raised preemptively and with rhetorical resignation, but it
had a highly personal reference, for Kierkegaard really did not know what
the physician really knew about psychosomatic misrelations.
He therefore found it advisable to consult his physician, Oluf Lundt
Bang, who was very well known at the time. Bang was Bishop Mynster’s
half-brother and had been the Kierkegaard family physician for almost a
generation. His relationship with Kierkegaard was on the level of social
acquaintance, if not personal friendship, and he would occasionally invite
Kierkegaard to dinner. On December 29, 1849, for example, Kierkegaard
received an enthusiastic invitation that, for once, hadnotbeen written in
verse. Bang suffered from an an irrepressible urge to write verse on every
occasion, and he loved to send lengthy rhymed letters after Kierkegaard had
presented him with one of his books; even Bang’s autobiography was writ-
ten in verse.
An extensive journal entry from 1846—titled “How I Have Understood
Myself throughout the Whole of My Work as an Author”—is devoted to
his first visit to the doctor. In this entry Kierkegaard presents a compact
autobiographical sketch that begins with language that would later become
almost proverbial: “I am in the deepest sense an unhappy individual and
from my earliest days have been nailed fast to one or another suffering that
verged on madness and that must have its deeper origin in a misrelation
between my mind and my body—because (and this is both remarkable and
a source of infinite encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit, which
on the contrary, perhaps because of the tense relationship between my mind
and my body, has been granted an unusual resilience.” Next comes his
relationship with his aged father, whose melancholia was passed on to the