Soren Kierkegaard

is evidence of a colossal energy surplus, a sort of mental health despite every-
thing, which is why the label of manic-depressive—which has been put
forward now and then for want of anything better—seems quite erroneous.
Psychiatrists speak of folie a`deux, by which they mean an illness that the
mentally ill person can impart to others. And a rather obvious supposition
is that the father passed on his depressive condition to his son, Søren Aabye,
who in fact seems to have recognized this years later: “Now if I had been
brought up in more ordinary fashion—yes, it stands to reason that I would
scarcely have become so melancholy.”
It would certainly be heartless as well as incorrect to assert that when
Kierkegaard was dejected, he was merely feeling the way ordinary people
ordinarily feel, but it was undeniably a refreshing contrast to the traditional
presentation of Kierkegaard as a permanent depressive with a hunchback
when his brother-in-law Johan Christian Lund spontaneously exclaimed
(after having read some of Kierkegaard’s posthumously published papers):
“Well, isn’t that an unpleasant thought, that a person who always seemed
so happy was so fundamentally melancholic.” We are almost tempted to
assume that Kierkegaard was right when he wrote to M. H. Hohlenberg
(in a letter marked by a certain irrational exuberance) that the cause of his
melancholia was perhaps to be found in the rubber of his galoshes.
“I dare say that he was never melancholic during the long period I knew
him, and it was only during his final two or three years that I no longer saw
him,” wrote Sibbern, age eighty-four, about Kierkegaard, with whom he
had first become acquainted in the early 1830s and whose dissertationOn
the Concept of Ironyhe had helped to evaluate. During the period of Kierke-
gaard’s engagement, Sibbern would occasionally come along as a sort of
chaperon, sitting in the coach when the young couple were driven out
to the Deer Park, so he must have acquired at least some knowledge of
Kierkegaard’s psyche. Nor was Sibbern blind to the fact that Kierkegaard
“was, inherently and in his innermost being, a very inwardly complicated
sort of person.” If Sibbern saw no traces of melancholia in Kierkegaard, it
of coursecouldhave been because Sibbern, as Kierkegaard once remarked
to Hans Brøchner, totally lacked “an eye for the disguised passions, the
reduplication by which the one passion assumes the form of another.” This
latter criticism is not entirely fair, however. In the same breath in which
he made his controversial remark about Kierkegaard’s lack of melancholia,
Sibbern added: “I must nonetheless point out that it is certainly possible for
a man to carry a great melancholia within himself along with a good deal of
liveliness and buoyancy.” The reader is therefore tempted to conclude that
Kierkegaard’s nature contained more “liveliness and buoyancy” than “mel-
ancholia.” In reality, he was like everybody else—merely multiplied tenfold.