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.