Friday, October 30, 2009

Kierkegaard today....


I'm trying to schedule my posts around ClinkShrink's AAPL updates.

From the NYTimes, here's a piece by Gordon Marino on....What if Kierkegaard were alive today? Would he YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, take Prozac and be done with it?

Marino writes:

Each of us is subject to the weather of our own moods. Clearly, Kierkegaard thought that the darkling sky of his inner life was very much due to his father’s morbidity. But the issue of spiritual health looms up with regard to the way that we relate to our emotional lives. Again, for Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling, but an attitude, a posture towards ourselves. The man who did not become Caesar, the applicant refused by medical school, all experience profound disappointment. But the spiritual travails only begin when that chagrin consumes the awareness that we are something more than our emotions and projects. Does the depressive identify himself completely with his melancholy? Has the never ending blizzard of inexplicable sad thoughts caused him to give up on himself, and to see his suffering as a kind of fever without significance?

If so, Kierkegaard would bid him to consider a spiritual consultation on his despair, to go along with his trip to the mental health clinic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting but wrong conclusion motivated by the delusion that mental health is the answer to everything. Spiritual travails begin only because of the sufferer's attachment to the object of desire. Since it does not follow that mental health treatment always is a sufficient condition to increase consciousness by helping the client to let go of his object of desire, it does not follow that it is always the best course.

Sarebear said...

I've never even heard of Kierkegaard (sp?). Not sure I'd go with him anywhere, he sounds a bit moody. He sounds a bit too much like me in some ways, heh.