ABSTRACT

This chapter gives an outline of Kierkegaard’s life and thought, specifically to his suffering, that which he named ‘the thorn in his flesh’: the significance of his relationship to his deeply religious and melancholic father, and his love for his fiancée, Regine Olsen. The focal point of Kierkegaard’s being unable to marry is the conflict between being alone with his melancholy and living intimately with another person. Here I speculatively suggest that his estrangement from Regine, that which so sparked his creative impulses, marks not only his move towards religious authorship but also the sacrifice of his sexual self-identity. This argument that Kierkegaard’s choice not to marry concretises his orientation towards the spiritual at the expense of the body and its sexual nature is laid out in full later in ‘That Religious Neurotic: Kierkegaard on the Couch’.