Therapy and Kierkegaard’s Modes of Subjectivity

Of all the philosophers I’ve ever read, there is something unique about the work of Soren Kierkegaard.  This uniqueness seems to stem from the notion that reading him seems to make a demand for secondary sources in order to be able to understand what is happening in the various texts.  Even with such obscurantist and obfuscating writers as Heidegger, or Deleuze, or Derrida, you at least get a sense while reading them that what is being written is meant to be interpreted more-or-less at face value, even if it must be parsed out over the course of multiple readings.  With these other philosophers, there is usually an argument, and though that argument is being made in a mind-numbingly complex fashion, the intention is still that you should be able to read this book or this essay and come away with some ideas about what the philosopher intended and (presumably) what they believed at the time of writing.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, notoriously took a more literary approach to his philosophy.  This, in some sense, was part of his ironic project.  He wanted to be able to write with some level of detachment from the ideas being communicated.  The ultimate point was not that you would come away knowing that Kierkegaard believed such and such a thing to be true and used such and such a set of arguments to communicate that belief.  Rather, he could continuously deconstruct and contradict, with the ultimate point being to promote a sense of uncertainty in the reader as to what their own convictions actually are.  This is true from his earliest work, Either/Or (which is embedded in so many layers of authorship it would be disingenuous to even speak of “the” pseudonymous writer), all the way through his Sickness Unto Death, all of which tackle the same set of problems—subjectivity, anxiety, faith, existence—but from oftentimes different and even opposing angles.

This can make it hard to know how one ought to go about applying the work of Kierkegaard to the project of doing therapy.  It’s not that he has nothing to say about the nature of the human condition and human psychology.  In fact, he has more to say than just about any other philosopher one could point to.  It’s just that, unlike texts like Being and Time or Beyond Good and Evil, there is no point in the text where the rhetoric breaks and Kierkegaard gives us “what he really means”.  Louis Mackey (if not one of the best readers of Kierkegaard, certainly one of the best writers who endeavors to interpret his work) resolves this dilemma by suggesting that Kierkegaard ought to be taken on his own word and read, as Kierkegaard himself suggested, as more of a poet than a philosopher.

Which is an opinion that I think carries a lot of merit.  Before I got to the Mackey essay, I was recently rereading Either/Or and realizing it is much more effectively read like a novel constructed out of philosophical essays, more intended to tell a story which contains interesting ideas than a treatise on anyone particular thing or set of ideas.  It’s really much more Dostoyevsky than it is Hegel, even in as much as it stands as a criticism of Hegel’s influence on mid-19th century thought.

You can see the distinction just moving from that text to its precursor in Kierkegaard’s bibliography, his academic thesis The Concept of Irony, which is much more of a philosophical text, quoting and rebutting earlier philosophers; tracing a history of the concept and application of irony; attempting to chart new ways of interpreting the concept’s relevance and utility based on a certain kind of reading.  And then immediately on the heels of that book, comes a text written by Kierkegaard that opens with a preface from a fictional editor, who claims to have found the dueling writings of two other essentially anonymous writers in a desk that he bought secondhand, one of whose essays, it is suggested, may or may not be the work of yet another fourth (fifth?) unknown writer.  The two sections of the book then make essentially opposing arguments for how one should choose to live their life, aesthetically or ethically, with the editor character offering some thoughts about whether or not the arguments can or ought to be reconciled.  However, it seems we are meant to know, from several anecdotal nuggets sprinkled throughout the introduction, that our editor is basically kind of a buffoon, and so presumably his interpretation is not to be trusted, or at the least not necessarily meant to be reflective of Kierkegaard’s.

Which, after 700 or so words of how impossible it might be to categorize the work in any formal way, still leaves the question of what to do with this.  To my thinking, the answer lies somewhere in a descriptive reading of the text and trying to schematize and make sense out of the conditions Kierkegaard is using these characters to represent.  Notably, in the texts that runs from Either/Or through to Fear and Trembling and concluding with Sickness Unto Death, one project of that collection is to engage in a description of the progression of stages of life from the aesthetic, through the ethical, and on into the religious, a progression which is born out through a subjective relationship with despair (or tragedy) and anxiety.  Importantly, in The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard also outlines some of the more striking paradoxical positions of the self, which are: the finite and the infinite; the temporal and the eternal; and necessity and possibility (sometimes also translated as freedom).

So, at least in some sense, we end up with something that looks a little like this

                                                      Infinite                                    Eternal                                    Possible

Religious ^ ^

I I

  I I

  I I

Ethical                                                      Despair                                  Anxiety

  I I

  I I

  I I

I I
I I

Aesthetic

                                                      Finite                                        Temporal                              Necessity

[Unfortunately the webhosting platform didn’t seem interested in carrying over the line formatting I did in word so we’ll have to use our imagination for the upward arrows signaling an increase in despair and anxiety across modes of existence—hopefully it ends up looking serviceable on the back end.] 

A couple of things jump out at me when we do this.  The first is the ease with which one can draw a parallel between the degree to which anxiety and depression are the most common complaints in the consulting room and how often the belief among psychotherapists is that they must join the client in some process of reducing/relieving/eliminating these symptoms.  Kierkegaard does not offer a way out, but he does encourage a moving through.  That does not stand to reason that I think our job as therapists should be to increase anxiety or depression, nor that there isn’t in certain instances something about these conditions that is fundamentally physiological.  But there is something to be said for caution to be used in moving too quickly towards resolution without first gaining some sense of if an identified crisis is developmentally necessary for a client to move into a deeper state of communion with their own subjectivity.  When we examine this progression relationally, it speaks volumes to the necessity to be sensitive to transference/countertransference dynamics, and one’s ability to sit with the client’s symptoms (and very likely one’s own depressive and anxious tendencies).

Another item is how closely this reflects something like Freud’s id, ego, and superego.  Briefly, the aesthetic is often interpreted as something like the realm of hedonism or immediacy; the ethical is the realm of societal roles, relationships, and various other commitments; and the religious the realm of the absolute and the infinite.  We could easily draw comparisons along this trajectory of the id (aesthetic), superego (ethical), and ego (religious) as the progression from a merger of subject and object that is pure immediacy, to the recognition of a differentiation of subject and object with a perceived duty to the world of objects, and the cultivation of a subjectivity which develops sophisticated mechanisms for satisfying both needs.  This especially bears out if we keep in mind that, in translation, the transition from the “id” to the “ego” is the transition from the “it” to the “I”.  I would further, following Heidegger, like to express the possibility that beyond even the religious is something like the ontological, which accounts for an awareness of existence that exists beyond the subject/object split, and therefore beyond an eternal and absolute subjectivity as the pinnacle of development, though expanding on that thought is beyond the scope of the current post.

Thirdly, and lastly for this post, to draw further parallels to the psychoanalytic tradition, I think it is important to note that “progression to” does not necessarily imply “progression from”.  What I mean by that, is that movement into the ethical does not necessarily mean the abandonment of the aesthetic.  In fact, the author of Part II of Either/Or makes the appeal that one gets to the ethical through an exploration of the aesthetic and an embrace of the despair and melancholy that the aesthetic brings.  That, much like the kind of human development suggested by psychoanalysis, the progression does not suggest moving through a rigid and constrained set of functional worldviews, but the ability to build upon, yielding increasingly sophisticated and differentiated ways of engaging with the world.  In the same way that the id, ego, and superego must interact, or in the same way we must learn to healthily exist on a spectrum from merger to separation, self to other, subjectivity to objectivity, a more complex and richly defined existence resides in the ability to harness the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious modes of existence.  Much like Freud’s sublimation, we can never abandon our hedonistic tendencies or desire for immediate experiences, and so must learn to account for and accommodate those desires, and similarly must help those we work with learn how to forge their own path to that type of negotiation of needs.

Clearly, these are just some preliminary sketches and don’t account for the whole of Kierkegaard’s output.  But as can be seen, even in this rough outline, there are some interesting things being said about the human condition that I think any existentially and philosophically oriented psychotherapist would do well to incorporate into their thinking.