Therapy

this enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director?” The young man longs for some sudden transforming event or revelation, a “tempest” like the one that comes at the end of the Book of Job, when God really sticks it to Job and says in effect, “Can you do what I can do? If not, belt up,” and Job submits and God rewards him by giving him twice as many sheep and camels and she-asses as he had before. “Job is blessed and has received everything double,” says the young man. “This is what is called a repetition.” Then he reads in a newspaper that the girl has married somebody else, and he writes to Constantius that the news has liberated him from his obsession: “I am again myself... The discord in my nature is resolved, I am again unified... is this not then a repetition? Did I not get everything doubly restored? Did I not get myself again, precisely in such a way that I must doubly feel its significance?” His last letter ends with a rapturous thank you to the girl, and an ecstatic dedication of himself to the life of the mind:
     
...first a libation to her who saved a soul which sat in the solitude of despair. Hail to feminine magnanimity! Long life to the high flight of thought, to moral danger in the service of the idea! Hail to the danger of battle! Hail to the solemn exultation of victory! Hail to the dance in the vortex of the infinite! Hail to the breaking wave which covers me in the abyss! Hail to the breaking wave which hurls me up above the stars!
     
    Now if you know anything about Kierkegaard’s life, and I know a bit by now, you don’t need to be told that this story was very close to his own experience. Soon after he got engaged to Regine he started to have doubts about whether they could ever be happy together, because of his own temperament. So he broke off the engagement, even though he was still in love with the girl, and she was still in love with him and begged him not to break it off, as did her father. Kierkegaard went away to live in Berlin for a while, where he wrote Either/Or, which was a long, roundabout apology and explanation for his conduct towards Regine. He said later that it was written for her and that the “Seducer’s Diary” in particular was meant to “help her push her boat from the shore”, i.e., to sever her emotional attachment to him, by making her think that anyone capable of creating the character of Johannes must be something of a cold-blooded selfish bastard himself. You could say that Kierkegaard’s writing “The Seducer’s Diary” was like the young man in Repetition pretending to have a mistress. In fact, when he finished Either/Or, Kierkegaard immediately started work on Repetition, going over the same ground in a story that was much closer to his own experience. But when he came back to Copenhagen and discovered that Regine was already engaged to somebody else, was he overjoyed? Did he feel liberated and unified like the hero of Repetition ? Did he hell. He was devastated. There’s an entry in the Journals at this time which obviously describes his feelings:
     
The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become ridiculous in his own eyes in a matter of essential importance, to discover, for example, that the sum and substance of his sentiment is rubbish.
     
    Obviously he’d been secretly hoping that his decision to break off the engagement would be miraculously reversed without his own volition, and that he would marry Regine after all. Even when he was sailing to Germany, on his way to Berlin, he noted in his journal: “Notwithstanding it is imprudent for my peace of mind, I cannot leave off thinking of the indescribable moment when I might return to her.” That was the repetition he had in mind: he would get Regine twice. Like Job he would be blessed and receive everything double. He actually heard about her new engagement when he was working on Repetition, and scrapped the original ending of the story, in which the hero commits suicide because he cannot bear to think of the suffering he has caused his beloved.
    So all that high-falutin’ stuff about feminine magnanimity and the vortex of the infinite was an attempt to get over his disappointment at Regine’s transference of her affections to someone else, an effort to see this as a triumph and vindication of his conduct, not an exposure of his