ABSTRACT
The grandfathers of existentialist psychotherapy were two great emotional cripples: Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. They took in the culture so totally that it nearly extinguished them, and then, by a very public superhuman convulsion of ridding themselves of it, they changed the course of civilisation and influenced the lives of billions who will never know they existed. Kierkegaard was a student for a long time, and lived a seemingly extroverted popular social life as a young man about town, somewhat spendthrift and dissolute, always highly entertained and brilliantly entertaining to others, belying his inner state. Making a tour of Kierkegaard's different selves as expressed by his different pseudonyms and in his own name, people find in one place a picture of marriage as an ideal state of happiness and goodness, especially when he was complaining at God forbidding him to have it, but in another region there is a clear contempt for women.
