The Gift of Suffering: Kierkegaard and Traumatophilia

This paper reinterprets Kierkegaard’s discourse on suffering by placing it in dialogue with Avgi Saketopoulou’s psychoanalytic concept of traumatophilia. Rather than reading Kierkegaard as affirming the intrinsic value of suffering, the paper argues that both thinkers locate the possibility of transformation in the subject’s encounter with an originary and irremissible opacity at the core of human existence. Drawing on resonances between Kierkegaard and Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, the paper shows how suffering exposes this constitutive vulnerability and can become an opening beyond the consolations of repair. The analysis culminates in a Kierkegaardian, traumatophilic reading of Sofie Laguna’s Infinite Splendours, which narrates a life shaped not despite but through trauma. The novel also highlights mourning as a missing conceptual element in Kierkegaard and Saketopoulou. Mourning is the labor that allows trauma to become generative without being justified. Together, these threads offer a constructive rethinking of suffering, subjectivity, and transformation.