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Kierkegaard used to complain that “the age of making distinctions is passed.”1 The age of making the distinction between despair and depression is certainly passed. Indeed, were someone today to say that he was in despair, we would almost surely think that what he really meant to say was that he was depressed. No doubt the demise of despair has something to do with the collapse of ‘sacred order.’2 It used to be that despair was considered one of the seven deadly sins, inasmuch as the despairing individual was considered to be giving up on God. Today, despair is understood to be hopelessness, hopelessness to be depression, and depression to be something that you treat, as Kierkegaard puts it, mit Pulver and mit Pillen,3 that is, by throwing pills at it. Still, I have at times sensed some dissatisfaction with the present tendency to read every pang of the psyche as a symptom of an illness most frequently understood as a “chemical imbalance.” Kierkegaard gave much thought to the meaning of mental anguish, and his meditations on this subject should speak to an age in which most people will, at some point in their lives, seek out professional help for psychological problems, most commonly for depression. In this chapter I will examine Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the relation between depression and despair. Kierkegaard’s published writings on depression are, for the most part, written into his pseudonymous texts, Stages on Life’s Way, Repetition, and Either/Or. There have been a number of commentaries4 on the prototheories contained in these works, but scant attention has been paid to Kierkegaard’s own self-observations regarding what he termed his “thorn in the flesh”5 or depression.6 I will focus on the introspective soundings that Kierkegaard takes in his journals, for it is, I believe, in these pages that Kierkegaard offers the most light on the difference between the night of the psyche and the night of the spirit. 9. Despair and Depression GordonMarino 122 · Gordon Marino From the first to the last page of his life, Kierkegaard dragged the ball and chain of his melancholy around. Like Pascal, Montaigne, and other keepers of the invisible darkness, Kierkegaard watched his depression with the eye of a naturalist, and like more modern psychological men and women, he kept copious notes on his sorrow. Through hundreds of entries there are a number of recurrent themes: for one, that he was in unspeakable and chronic mental anguish . By his own account, Kierkegaard’s depression was severe enough to bring him to the razor’s edge. In 1836 he made the following journal entry: “I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witticisms poured from my lips, everybody laughed and admired me—but I left, yes, the dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit and wanted to shoot myself.”7 This self-revelation hints at the theme of hiddenness, which is explicit in other journal entries. One of the fixed points in Kierkegaard’s authorship is his claim that the inner and outer are incommensurable.8 For Kierkegaard, you cannot read the liniments of a person’s spiritual life off from his actions. There are hints of this anti-Hegelian precept in Kierkegaard’s notes on his melancholy. Over the years he alternately gloats and moans about his ability to conceal both the fact and content of his psychological suffering: “People have continually done me indescribable wrong by continually regarding as pride that which was intended only to keep the secret of my melancholy. Obviously, I have achieved what I wanted to achieve, for hardly anyone has ever felt any sympathy for me.”9 On the basis of some experience, Kierkegaard insisted that there is nothing more painful than being misunderstood. In fact, on his reading it was the impossibility of understanding Jesus’ mission here on earth that set Christ’s agony apart from the pain of others who have suffered for the truth.10 Kierkegaard can often be caught sneering at those who cannot detect the pain that he takes such pride in being able to hide, yet the journals are rife with sighs of longing for human understanding and contact. Like later depth psychologists, Kierkegaard recognized that the ego has its ways of deflecting painful affects. He perceived that depressives try to hide from their lack of feeling by sinking their self-consciousness in the world. This...

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