Soren Kierkegaard

attributable to the fact that he recognized some of his own psychosomatic
abnormalities in Adler, but that, unlike Adler, he would never have dreamt
of construing the attacks religiously and interpreting them as a revelation?
Was his book on Adler perhaps a sort of indirect communication to Adler
about the situation? Or did Kierkegaard observe in Adler a series of symp-
toms with which he was indeed familiar, but for which he had no name?
It looks more than coincidental that it was the very same Justinus Kerner,
whose tales about doppelga ̈ngers Kierkegaard had read with a shudder, who
later explained that the phenomena he had described were associated with
epilepsy. Why did Kierkegaard speak of “the sensual pleasure of productiv-
ity,” and why did he suspect that Adler was in an ecstatic state when he
wrote? Was he projecting his own experiences? Had Kierkegaard, like
Adler, erroneously interpreted the symptoms of the illness? Or did he have
in mind this very illness in 1848, when he wrote in a journal entry that in
the future people would study his life and what he called “the intriguing
secret of all the machinery?” And what experiences, if not those of an epi-
leptic, form the basis of a journal entry like this one from 1849: “Sometimes
in a moment of despondency it occurs to me that Christ was not tested in
the sufferings of illness, least of all in these most painful of sufferings, in
which the psychic and the somatic touch upon one another dialectically.”
Not everyone who runs naked through the streets of the city is an Archi-
medes. Not everyone who cuts off an ear is a van Gogh. And not everyone
who suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy is a Søren Kierkegaard! Nonethe-
less, questions abound, and Kierkegaard took most of the answers with him
into the grave. But we are not leftcompletelyempty-handed. It is true that
the word “epilepsy” nowhere occurs in his journals, and the only time
Kierkegaard mentioned it in all of his published works was in a derivative
and metaphorical sense—“just as when the tongue of an epileptic utters the
wrong word.” But, for one thing, this absence could in itself be a piece of
evidence, and for another thing, a number of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries
expressed themselves much more straightforwardly. In a letter to his daugh-
ter Augusta dated October 3, 1863, Sibbern wrote: “People said he died
paralyzed in his lower body, no doubt of epilepsy. But epilepsy can put the
soul in a very exalted state.” Sibbern was scarcely correct in assuming that
the paralysis of his lower body was due to epilepsy, but in any event “peo-
ple” (Sibbern himself?) had suggested that Kierkegaard had suffered from
epilepsy, which, Sibbern believed, accorded perfectly with Kierkegaard’s
often exalted state. And it seems no mistake when Sibbern, in describing
Kierkegaard’s 1855 assault on the church, spoke of it as “Kierkegaard’sat-
tack.” Later, in hisWriting from the Year 2135, Sibbern returned to the matter,