This panel addresses the ways in which Kierkegaard’s published and unpublished writings, authorship, performativity, pseudonyms, existentialisms, and religiosity offer paradigms, concepts, and ideas of potentiality and meaning for addressing the histories and legacies and continued and increasing occurrence of trauma in a 21st century world marked by global crises, pandemics, social upheaval, democratic uncertainty, stratification, and persistent violence against marginalized individuals and groups. Meditations on biopolitical traumas of the self, others, and society emerge in Kierkegaard’s entire corpus—Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death, for example—opening the way for religious and philosophical dialogues with psychology, trauma studies, literature, and moral injury; developing strategies for care, pastoral care, and chaplaincy; exploring the epistemic and emotional position of the fragmentary self in relation to the reconciled self, and examining positionality and the reading process from the perspective of the traumatized individual. These papers explore existential, material, and embodied traumas impacting the human condition.
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.
The Wounded Self: Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Trauma in The Sickness Unto Death
This paper interprets Søren Kierkegaard’s account of despair in The Sickness Unto Death as a phenomenology of wounded selfhood. Contemporary trauma theories describe trauma as a disruption in the subject’s capacity to sustain a coherent relation to itself and its past, producing fragmentation and forms of alienation that resist ordinary processes of meaning-making. I suggest that Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair anticipates this structure of wounded subjectivity.
For Kierkegaard, the self is “a relation that relates itself to itself,” grounded in its dependence upon the power that established it. When this relation becomes disordered, the result is despair—an existential and spiritual distortion in the self’s relation to itself, others, and God. Read alongside contemporary trauma theories, Kierkegaard’s account illuminates the rupture of self-relation and the difficult struggle to recover a self reconciled before God.
This paper will explore traumatized individuals' experiences of meaning. A traumatized individual in a depressed state can have a fragmented experience of meaning that becomes tied to their mood: as their experience of trauma becomes acutely present, they lose touch with a felt sense of meaning. This raises an important question: Is it possible for such a person to have a commitment to meaning that is independent of mood, that can sustain them throughout their various reactions to trauma? This paper will examine Soren Kierkegaard’s distinction between “mood” and “earnestness” in his discourse “At a Graveside” as one possible answer. It will argue that earnestness transcends moods like those experienced by who suffer from traumatic pasts because (1) it is active and (2) it is rooted in the eternal. This implies that Kierkegaardian earnestness, understood with clinical sensitivity, might provide grounding for those who struggle with trauma.
| Vanessa Rumble | rumble@bc.edu | View |