Soren Kierkegaard

son. Then comes the catastrophe with Regine that changed his life and
made him an author. And then, finally, Kierkegaard approaches his medical
appointment. We do not learn how the consultation went in any concrete
or clinical sense, but even by itself, the unfree and formal style of Kierke-
gaard’s journal account makes clear the clumsy, shy—and in the most literal
sense,buttoned-up—manner in which he had approached the matter: “Even
though I am no friend of confidants, even though I am absolutely disin-
clined to speak to others about my innermost affairs, I nonetheless believe
and always have believed that a person must not fail to make use of the
remedy of consulting another person. Only it must not become a frivolous
intimacy, but a serious and professional communication.” That was Kier-
kegaard’s lengthy run-up, now his leap: “I have therefore spoken with my
physician about whether he believed this misrelation in my constitution,
between the physical and the psychical, could be overcome so that I could
realize the universal. This he doubted. I asked him whether he believed
that the spirit was capable of refashioning or reshaping such a fundamental
misrelation by force of will. This he doubted. He would not even advise
me to bring the whole of my willpower (of which he has some notion) to
bear upon it, for then I might explode everything.”
We sense how carefully Kierkegaard formulated the questions he put to
Bang so that he would only get to hear what he could have said to himself.
More than anything else, the consultation was in reality simply a formality
and barely concealed the fact that Kierkegaard was not genuinely interested
in a medical diagnosis of his sufferings. His notion, that by summoning up
all his willpower he might be able to reshape the misrelation between the
soul the body, was quite in keeping with the generally held view at the
time, namely that one could cure mental disorders with external, iron disci-
pline and moral toughness, with mortification of the flesh. “From that mo-
ment my choice was made. This grievous misrelation, with all its suffer-
ings—which undoubtedly would have made suicides of most of those who
had enough spirit to comprehend fully the appalling nature of their suffer-
ing—I have viewed as my thorn in the flesh, my limitation, my cross. I
have thought of it as the costly bargain in which God in Heaven sold me a
spiritual strength that has not yet found its equal among my contemporaries.
This does not make me conceited,for I am indeed crushed; my desire has
become my bitter daily pain and mortification.”
The second time that Kierkegaard is known to have consulted Bang was
in connection with several ecstatic days around Easter 1848. In the journal
entry for April 19, 1848, following two large “N.B.’s” we can read: “My
entire being is transformed. My concealment and self-enclosedness are bro-
ken—I must speak. Great God, grant me grace!” No sooner had Kierke-