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Kierkegaard and Existential Psychotherapy

cropped-sketch_1840_regineknippelsbro_iii_a-1.jpgMuch has been written about Kierkegaard and psychotherapy. That makes sense, given that Kierkegaard had a profound understanding of human psychology. 

Irvin Yalom, an existential psychiatrist, discusses Kierkegaard at length in Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). Several more recent works have appeared on Kierkegaard and psychotherapy, including Everyday Mysteries: A Handbook of Existential Psychotherapy (Routledge, 1997), Psychology and the Other (Oxford, 2015), and Therapy and the Counter-tradition: The Edge of Philosophy (Routledge, 2016). 

Anthony Stadlen, an existential psychotherapist working in London has been running a series of international, interdisciplinary “Inner Circle Seminars” for many years. This year he has two seminar series that focus on Kierkegaard. The first series, which focuses on Fear and Trembling, is already underway. The fourth seminar in that series will be given by John Lippitt this May. 

Stadlen has arranged a second “satellite” series to supplement the Fear and Trembling series. This series will examine two other works, Repetition and Three Upbuilding Discourses. The reason for this additional series of seminars is that these two works were published the same day Fear and Trembling appeared, October 16, 1843. Stadlen’s assumption is that the three works should be understood together and that a careful reading of all three could help to make Kierkegaard’s purpose in the notoriously opaque Fear and Trembling a little easier to divine. 

I am very excited to be invited to be part of this seminar because I have a keen interest in the psychotherapeutic potential of philosophy and of Kierkegaard’s thought in particular. I’m actually a certified philosophical counselor and member of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. The series looks like it will be excellent. The seminar leaders, in addition to myself, are George Pattison, C. Stephen Evans, Jerome (Yehuda) Gellman and Mariam Al-Attar. I won’t describe the seminars or the presenters in any detail here because Stadlen has posted an announcement about them that contains all the detail one would want, including his contact information. It will suffice here to say that 

— Pattison’s seminar will focus on Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses. 

— My seminar will focus on Repetition. 

— Evans will talk about “divine command theory” as it relates to Fear and Trembling and Works of Love. 

— Lippitt, who gave the first two seminars in the main seminar series on Fear and Trembling, will focus on the questions of whether there is a “teleological suspension of the ethical” and whether there is “an absolute duty to God.” 

— Gellman will focus on Hasidic interpretations of the Akedah and the light these can cast on Kierkegaard’s treatment of it. 

— Finally, al-Attar will look at “divine command theory” in the Islamic tradition and it’s relation to Fear and Trembling.

More information on the seminars can be found on Stadlen’s blog.

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Something on Johannes de silentio

IMG_3634Adam Kirsch’s inexplicable addition of a definite article in front of “Silentio” in his mention of Johannes de silentio, the pseudonym under which Kierkegaard published what is perhaps his most famous work, Fear and Trembling (see the post just before this one), got me thinking again about that pseudonym and how little attention has actually been paid to it.

It is generally presented as a straightforward name, like Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus, and Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonyms Kierkegaard used for Repetition, Philosophical Crumbs, and The Concept of Anxiety, respectively. It isn’t a name, though, at least the de silentio part isn’t. It’s a description. Kierkegaard’s other pseudonyms use upper-case letters to begin what functions as the surname. Johannes de silentio doesn’t. The pseudonym appears in all caps on the original title page, but only “Johannes” is capitalized at the end of the preface (see the illustration for this article).

Part of the reason scholars have missed this, is that translators have missed it. Alasdair Hannay got it right in his translation for Penguin, but both Princeton translations, the first by Walter Lowrie, done in 1941, and the second by Howard and Edna Hong, done in 1983, get it wrong. Unfortunately, the Princeton translations are the ones that have long been preferred by scholars. The result is that this point about the pseudonym under which Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling has gone unnoticed.

Johannes de silentio is typically taken, as Kirsch does in his review, to mean John of Silence, or John who cannot speak. Since, however, the “de silentio” is clearly a description rather than a surname, Johannes di silentio could be interpreted to mean John from silence, which is to say, not John who is silent, but John who is attempting to break a silence, John who is attempting to explain what is perhaps inexplicable: the situation of Abraham.

Hannay actually discusses this in the introduction to his translation of Fear and Trembling. We notice, he writes

that Kierkegaard has given his author the name ‘Johannes de silentio’, which is allegedly borrowed from one of the Grimms’ fairy-tales, ‘The Faithful Servant’. Kierkegaard’s John of Silence is not, however, at all a silent person. If he was he wouldn’t be an author. Nor was the faithful servant in the fairy-tale. He told his master, the young king, of three dangers threatening him, though realizing that in doing so he would be turned to stone. (To anticipate a further connection with Fear and Trembling, when the royal couple later got two sons they gave the lives of these in sacrifice in order to bring Johannes back to life, whereupon Johannes brought the children back to life.) (p. 10.)

Hannay was right. Johannes, the putative author of Fear and Trembling, is far from silent. Like his German counterpart, he warns of three dangers. Kierkegaard’s Johannes arguably attempts, through his description of the situation of Abraham, to warn his readers of three dangers presented in the form of questions that comprise the three Problemata of the work.

The connection between the fairy tale and the subject of Fear and Trembling is even closer, however, than Hannay suggests. The royal couple didn’t volunteer the lives of their sons in order to bring their faithful servant back to life. After faithful Johannes was turned to stone, the king, realizing what had happened, was so grief stricken that he took the stone statue of Johannes and placed it beside his bed.

Once when the queen was at church, the story reads

and the two children were sitting beside their father and playing, he again looked sadly at the stone statue and said, “Oh, if only I could bring you back to life again, my most faithful Johannes,”

Then the stone began to speak and said, “You can bring me back to life again if you will in return give up what is dearest to you.”

The king cried, “For you I will give up everything I have in the world.”

“The stone continued, “If you will cut off the heads of your two children with your own hand, then sprinkle their blood on me, I shall be restored to life.”

The King was horrified when he heard that he would have to kill his own dearest children, but he thought of faithful Johannes’s great loyalty and how he had died for him, then drew his sword and with his own hand cut off the children’s heads. And when he had smeared the stone with their blood, it returned to life, and faithful Johannes stood before him again, healthy and well.

He said to the king, “Your faith [Treue] shall not go unrewarded,” then taking the children’s heads, he put them on again, then rubbed the wounds with their blood, at which they became immediately whole again, and jumped about and went on playing as if nothing had happened.

Kierkegaard was a lover of fairy tales and among his many collections of fairy tales was the second edition of Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, where the story in question, “Der treue Johannes,” or “Faithful Johannes,” appears as number no. 6.

Kierkegaard was likely taken by the title “Faithful Johannes” (my emphasis), as well as by the strength of the parallel with the Abraham story.

In fact, the fairy tale puts a decidedly Christian slant on the story because in “Faithful Johannes” not only is the king is required to sacrifice the lives of his children if he wishes to rescue Johannes, the king does this because Johannes “had died for him” (für ihn gestorben war).

Perhaps the silence that Johannes, the author of Fear and Trembling, is attempting, in a somewhat cryptic way, to break is the silence concerning Kierkegaard’s severing of his engagement with Regine Olsen. That is, perhaps he is attempting to communicate, not merely to his former fiancée, but to all of literate Copenhagen, the reasons behind what many viewed as his callous and unprovoked violation of social convention, not to mention of an innocent young woman’s trust.

This is not the first time, of course, that such an explanation has been offered for Fear and Trembling. I think it may be the first time, however, that the parallel to the Grimms’ fairy tale has been explored in depth and that the decidedly Christian slant the story places on the requirement of filicide as a demonstration of faith has been exposed.

 

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APA Report and Book Giveaway

Diptyque_de_Melun_reconstitué
The Melun Diptych

The annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association was in Philadelphia last weekend. I chaired a session organized by the Søren Kierkegaard Society entitled “Kierkegaard on Practice and Inner Strength.” The speakers were excellent and we were very fortunate in that despite the fact that the session was in the very last slot on the very last day of the conference, we had a decent-sized audience and an excellent discussion.

The first speaker was Dylan Bailey, a graduate student working with John Davenport at Fordham University. Bailey’s paper was entitled “Kierkegaard and Socrates on Midwifery and Practical Understanding.” One of the things I particularly liked about the paper is that it didn’t merely look at Kierkegaard and Socrates. It placed the views of both in the context of contemporary work on understanding such as Christopher Baumberger, Claus Beisbart, and Georg Brun’s, “What is Understanding? An Overview of Recent Debates in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,’ in Explaining Understanding. New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (Routledge, 2016). Bailey is one to watch. His paper was excellent and he is working with one of the best Kierkegaard scholars in the business!

The second speaker was Kevin T. Di Camillo. Di Camillo’s paper was entitled “Jean Fouquet’s The Melun Diptych: Weaning in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and Melanie Klein’s Guilt, Love and Reparation — A Study in Kenosis and Theosis.” One of the things that made the session so excellent was the non-traditional nature of Di Camillo’s paper and its placement between two more traditional papers. I’ve always found it difficult to sit through three dense scholarly papers in a row. Di Camillo’s paper was a departure, however, from the traditional dense scholarly paper. It was dense, but in a different way. It was rich with references to the painting that was its subject, so it required audience members to repeatedly search the two posters Di Camillo had made of the painting for illustrations of his points. That is, it was sort of an audience-participation presentation, made even more enjoyable by the fact that Di Camillo had thoughtfully provided the audience with two transcendently delicious pandoros from his family’s prize winning Di Camillo Bakery. (I’m a big fan of pandoro and panettone. I’m ashamed to say, however, that I had been buying them from TJMax. Never again Di Camillo’s pandorro was a revelation!).

There was a lively discussion of whether weaning was always necessarily traumatic in the way that Klein and Kierkegaard appear to suggest. Chandler Rogers, a Teaching Fellow at Boston College, interjected that Vanessa Rumble points out in “Why Moriah?: weaning and the trauma of transcendence in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling” that Kierkegaard’s impression of weaning was likely influenced by the deaths of sisters as a consequence of childbirth. “Weaning normally calls to mind,” writes Rumble,

the movement of individuation and dawning consciousness/ self-consciousness, a passing moment of separation and mourning. The infant emerges from a state which, retrospectively, will appear as one of unity, plenitude, into the difficult reality of mediating between the necessary and the possible, the real and the ideal, in short, into the reality of our freedom and its limits. In the experience of Kierkegaard and his siblings, however, weaning is tied, through the pronouncements of the midwives, to horrific loss. Milk, the infant’s earliest nourishment, and the mother’s first medium for communicating her love, care and attention, becomes, in the accounts which Kierkegaard heard swirling about his sisters’ deathbeds, a poison which attacks the mother’s brain. The milk that was to join the mother to the child and sustain the child destroys the mother, separating them brutally and definitively. And after the trauma comes the invariable question: what is all this to mean? (259)

Rumble’s paper is one of my all-time favorites. It isn’t just an exceptionally rigorous and insightful piece of scholarship. It is beautiful. If I remember correctly, I heard her present an early version of it at a conference. It can be found now, however, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2015) which is available in a very reasonably priced ebook edition.

That brings me to the one really sour note of the conference. I found what looked to be a very interesting new book from Routledge entitled The Kierkegaardian Mind. It’s a big volume with lots of subject divisions and an impressive list of contributors. Here’s the thing: The ebook version is $184! It’s actually more expensive, on Amazon anyway, than the hardcover, which retails on Amazon for $173! There’s no excuse for that. Routledge has a lot of good books on Kierkegaard, but most of them are far too expensive for individuals and not every university library will have them. What that means is that they are not going to be cited as much as they deserve to be. I won’t be citing this one, in any case, unless I can get a copy from Penn’s library and even then, given that I will have it for only a very finite period of time, I won’t cite it so much as I would otherwise.

It’s important that presses such as Routledge publish works on Kierkegaard. Scholars can’t get tenured without publications. They can’t make reputations, however, if people don’t cite their work. An essay in a book that few people ever read and hence fewer still actually cite, will take a career only so far. An increasing number of humanities departments are looking not just at publications when considering tenure and promotion decisions, but also at how often a scholar’s work is cited. That’s not so unfair as it sounds because there are also an increasing number of predatory journals and presses so it is becoming easier for scholars to get their work published in purportedly peer-reviewed journals and books. Few scholars can keep up with the proliferation of such journals and presses and this is even more true of administrators who are not themselves scholars. The thinking is that a scholar whose work is any good will be cited by other scholars. Presses such as Routledge, whose books are astronomically overpriced, are wreaking havoc with that logic. Belt tightening that has effected nearly all institutions of higher education outside the Ivy League has meant that many universities no longer automatically purchase every book that comes out of a university press, not even out of the top university presses. That means lots of excellent scholarship is failing to reach as wide an audience as it deserves.

On the topic of the affordability of scholarly works, I’ve decided to give away five copies of Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology (Baylor, 2010) to graduate students who would like to use the book as part of their research for their dissertations. I got these copies at deeply discounted prices when Baylor came out with the paperback. All you need to do to secure a copy is send me an email with a brief summary of your dissertation, an explanation of the use you plan to make of the book, your dissertation director’ name, and your address, and I will put a copy in the mail to you. I have only these five copies to give away, though, so they will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

The two papers described above were not the only papers in the SKS session. I am going to save the last paper, Siobhan Marie Doyle’s excellent “Gender and the Practical Dimensions of Kierkegaard’s Existential Philosophy” for my next blog post.