What can therapists learn from Kierkegaard?

What can therapists learn from Kierkegaard? John Lippitt Abstract In our largely secular age, in which the latest generation of religion’s “cultured despisers” often seem to speak for the cultural mainstream, what has psychotherapy to learn from an unorthodox nineteenth century Lutheran with an uncompromising view of the importance of a proper “God-relationship”? There can be no denying the influence of Kierkegaard on important psychotherapeutic figures as diverse as Ludwig Binswanger, Rollo May, Carl Rogers and Ernest Becker (Stewart (ed.), 2011). His insightful diagnoses of anxiety and despair have been a significant influence on existential psychotherapy. As one therapist recently told me, Kierkegaard is a source of great insight provided we “ignore the religious stuff”. Yet therapists who insist on taking their Kierkegaard safely secularised are missing a trick. In this article, I shall argue that it is in some of his less well-known, explicitly “religious” writings, that Kierkegaard offers some of his most important insights for therapeutic practice. Introduction Why should therapists read Søren Kierkegaard? Gordon Marino has written movingly about his experience of reading Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in the wake of a marital break-up, and grasping from it the important insight that psychological suffering is something that can be done well or badly (Marino, 2014, pp. xxii-xxiii). Marino explicitly compares Kierkegaard to a therapist, adding: 1 His way of recasting the landscape of human existence helped float my spirit when I was going under in ways that were positively chilling to everyone around me (ibid. p. xxiii). Also relevant here is the fascination readers, including novelists, have taken in the details of Kierkegaard’s own biography (including the infamous broken engagement to Regine Olsen). In a number of very different but highly engaging novels, reading Kierkegaard serves as an important part of a process of therapeutic self-discovery (e.g. Lodge 1995, Kimmel 2003). I have argued elsewhere (Lippitt, 2013) that Kierkegaard offers a rich conception of “proper self-love” that I believe has important implications for therapy. Central to this account is the application to ourselves of the trust, hope and forgiveness that are central to his accounts of love of God and neighbour. But here I shall concentrate primarily on a perhaps surprising theme from this famous diagnostician of anxiety and despair: what the reflections on “the lilies and the birds” in Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses can teach us about contentment and self-acceptance and their relation to gratitude and patience. Here’s the plot. I shall first outline something of the way that Kierkegaard is typically presented to psychotherapists: as an insightful diagnostician of anxiety. I shall then suggest how some of the Upbuilding Discourses serve as an important complication to this picture. The perhaps unexpected theme of contentment will emerge as crucial here. Then, I’ll mention some of the other themes relevant to therapy in Kierkegaard’s discourses, such as cultivating gratitude and learning patience, and how they might both be rooted in the contentment discussed. Kierkegaard: the Anxiety Guy? Most students of existential psychotherapy will probably at some point have encountered Heidegger’s brief, pregnant remark that “the man who has gone farthest in analyzing the phenomenon of anxiety – and again in the theological context of a “psychological” exposition 2 of the problem of original sin – is Søren Kierkegaard” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 452). And it is as an insightful analyst of anxiety (and sometimes despair) that Kierkegaard is typically presented in this context. Emmy van Deurzen, for instance, notes that for Kierkegaard anxiety is essential to spiritual life: Anxiety as the basic experience of our confrontation with our essential paradox cannot be avoided without cost. If we try to avoid it, we will either go under in it or we will be simply insensitive to existence and unable to truly live (van Deurzen, 2010, p.13). Van Deurzen claims that this “remarkable insight” is “of great relevance to twenty-first century psychotherapy” (ibid). Whereas most contemporary psychotherapy treats anxiety as a problem to be reduced to as minimal a level as possible, for Kierkegaard it is “a sign that the struggle with human paradox is taken seriously” (ibid). (By “paradox” here I take van Deurzen to mean the various ostensibly opposed elements in the human being (eternal/temporal; finitude/infinitude; possibility/necessity) which Kierkegaard discusses.) I have no wish to deny that Kierkegaard offers insightful analyses of anxiety and despair (the latter concept, explored in detail in The Sickness unto Death, being one that largely displaces the former in his writings). Certainly there is no shortage of quotes that would support such a view – and Kierkegaard must be one of the most quotable thinkers in the history of philosophy. For instance, he remarks (under the guise of his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis) that “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p.155), and associates the lack of anxiety with spiritlessness: “If … the speaker maintains that the great thing about him is that he has never been in anxiety, I will gladly provide him with my explanation: that is because he is very spiritless” (ibid, p.157). But this does not mean that Kierkegaard just leaves us with – or in – anxiety. Nor does it mean that anxiety can straightforwardly be appropriated by existential psychotherapy without reference to Kierkegaard’s theological background: to become anxious “in the right way” means, for him, to be anxious about sin (rather than about, say, sex 3 or guilt) (McDonald, 2013). In what follows, I shall suggest that in his less well-known Upbuilding Discourses – particularly those on “the lilies and the birds” – Kierkegaard offers a way of addressing the problem of anxiety that is significantly at odds with the popular picture of him as the theorist of anxiety par excellence. Moreover, this proposal for how to learn to live with – and in a sense transcend, while not attempting to root out, anxiety – is a method at least significant parts of which are accessible to those of all faiths and none. We might even suggest that it offers a version of what Rollo May claims to be the therapist’s task: “to reduce anxiety to tolerable levels and then to use the anxiety constructively” (Yalom & Josselson, 2011, p.301, citing May, 1977, p. 374). Another Kierkegaard: the Upbuilding Discourses Kierkegaard’s discourses address a variety of recognisable human problems – such as anxiety, cowardice, the difficulties of learning to be patient and various forms of self-doubt. In this way, they clearly issue an invitation to test their ideas against the reader’s life, an invitation that echoes the famous motto which ends the second volume of Either/Or: “only the truth that builds up is truth for you” (Kierkegaard, 1987, p. 354). George Pattison has suggested that, although billed as Kierkegaard’s “religious” writings, all that the early discourses really assume is that the reader has become seriously concerned about the meaning of their life and is willing to consider what they – the discourses – have to say about where such concern is pointing them and how it is misconceived if it ends up in anxious self-absorption when its real function is to help them find a deeper and more solid foundation for their lives (Pattison, in introduction to Kierkegaard, 2010, p. xv). Pattison further characterises this in terms of the images of the gift; creation; and love. In other words, Kierkegaard counterposes to anxiety a fundamental trust in the goodness of the life that we have been given. Built into this is a complex kind of self-acceptance. To say this 4 is not to underestimate the enormous difficulty that this will pose to many, in the face of seemingly overwhelming suffering. Kierkegaard recognises that accepting the gift is “the first and most difficult of the tasks with which life confronts us” (ibid, p. xx). But he insists that accepting where we are – and stepping forward in faith and hope in the future – is the only way of moving on. We’ll explore these themes in what follows. Unlikely Teachers: the Lilies and the Birds In showing how we might do so, Kierkegaard turns to some unlikely teachers: the lilies of the field and the birds of the air mentioned in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. What Pattison calls creation might (as he notes) also be understood merely as nature, and human psychology is part of this. We shall shortly see how Kierkegaard suggests we might use the lilies and the birds as our teachers. The overall message, I shall suggest, is the possibility of opposing debilitating anxiety with a certain kind of contentment. Kierkegaard’s message in the discourses is not, as some might expect, to lay guilt upon us. Indeed, he urges selfforgiveness. Kierkegaard does not hesitate to talk of sin, but the most important message about it, for him, is the message that one’s sins have been forgiven. This crucial, liberating fact gives us all the licence we need to forgive ourselves – a task which Kierkegaard recognises (not least from personal experience) to be extraordinarily difficult. Any account of Kierkegaard as the thinker par excellence of anxiety that does not also stress forgiveness and self-forgiveness will remain a one-sided account. (For more on this and its nuances, see Lippitt 2013). This brings us to what is, perhaps, the most important of all the concepts Kierkegaard discusses: love. The way that we ultimately get beyond guilt and sin is in the faith that we are loved. Kierkegaard’s message is: you are loved, so love. You are forgiven, so forgive. 5 Kierkegaard’s first three discourses on the lilies and the birds comprise the second part of the 1847 text Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. They serve as a commentary on Matthew 6: 24-34 (part of the Sermon on the Mount), a passage that so intrigued Kierkegaard that he returned to it on several occasions. He describes the lilies and the birds alluded to there as our “divinely appointed teachers” (Kierkegaard, 1993, p.157), and the discourses go on to consider what they teach. The theme of the first discourse is “to be contented with being a human being” (ibid, p.159 & p.162), and both it and the biblical passage on which it reflects address the worried (ibid, p.160). The first thing we are to learn from the lilies and the birds is their silence, through which we humans might learn a kind of self-forgetfulness that counteracts the destructive self-centredness and self-absorption that is, for Kierkegaard, at the heart of so many human ills. The distressed person can achieve this by contemplating the lilies and the birds and in so doing at least temporarily forgetting himself – and yet he, “unnoticed … learns something about himself” (ibid p.162). What does he learn? Kierkegaard here seems to be arguing for a parallel between the beauty of a lily and that of a human being (ibid, p.165). The sheer wonder of being alive, of being human, is typically forgotten through the “worried inventiveness of comparison” (ibid). Comparison now becomes a crucial theme in the discourse, and the kind of damaging self-focus that it encourages inspires one of the most moving passages in the discourse literature, on “the worried lily”. In this parable – a lovely example of Kierkegaard’s literary inventiveness, of playing with and riffing on a biblical passage – the life of a beautiful, carefree lily is complicated by the arrival of a little bird who visits; stays away; and then returns. The lily, initially puzzled by the bird’s comings and goings – why doesn’t it, like the lily, stay in one place? – falls “more and more in love with the bird – precisely because it was capricious” (ibid, p. 167). Instead of delighting in the lily’s beauty, the bird stresses its difference (its freedom of movement) and – 6 worse still - waxes lyrical about the beauty of other lilies it has encountered on its travels. It typically ends its chatter with the remark that “in comparison with that kind of glory the lily looked like nothing – indeed, it was so insignificant that it was a question whether the lily had a right to be called a lily” (ibid). Unsurprisingly, the lily becomes worried, and its self-doubts disturb its previously carefree existence. Now its static life starts to seem restrictive. Influenced by the bird’s destructive chatter, the lily starts to feel humiliated, and to wish it was a Crown Imperial, which the bird has told it is the most gorgeous of all lilies, envied by all others. Now comes a subtle twist in the tale. The lily convinces itself that its desire is not so unreasonable, since it is not, “asking for the impossible, to become what I am not, a bird, for example. My wish is only to become a gorgeous lily, or even the most gorgeous” (ibid, p.168). It is as if the lily has been reading self-help literature, with its advice to “be the best you can be”… Eventually, the lily confesses its worries to the bird, and together they hit upon a solution. The bird will peck away the soil restricting the lily to its spot, uproot it, and together they will fly to where the most gorgeous lilies grow, in the hope that with the change of place and with the new surroundings the lily might succeed in becoming a gorgeous lily in the company of all the others, or perhaps even a Crown Imperial, envied by all the others (ibid, pp.168-69). Of course, we know how this turns out. Once uprooted, the lily withers and dies. The parallel that Kierkegaard draws is that the lily is the human being, while the “naughty little bird” is “the restless mentality of comparison, which roams far and wide, fitfully and capriciously, and gleans the morbid knowledge of diversity” (ibid, p.169). Further, the little bird is “the poetic and the seductive in the human being” (ibid), and the poetic is a mixture of truth and untruth. While the diversity it notes between human beings is not a falsehood, the poetic “consists in maintaining that diversity … is the supreme, and this is eternally false” (ibid). 7 The problem arises from stressing the diversity that results from the spirit of comparison more than our common humanity. This seems to speak to all kinds of issues about “status anxiety”. Relatedly, the lily’s key mistake seems to be to fail to recognise its earthbound nature, and to refuse to be what it was intended to be (ibid, p.170). Hence Kierkegaard concludes: if a human being, like the lily, is contented with being a human being, he does not become sick with temporal worries, and if he does not become worried about temporal things, he remains in the place assigned to him; and if he remains there, then it is true that he, by being a human being, is more glorious than Solomon’s glory (ibid). Human freedom is rooted. From the lilies, we can learn to be contented with being a human being; not to fret over diversity (read: status anxiety); and to be able to think “as inspiringly about being a human being as the Gospel speaks tersely about the lilies” (ibid). The key message is that in an important sense, our common humanity transcends the diversity between us. Kierkegaard also brings out the risks of comparison in other riffs on the theme of the lilies and the birds. Take the story of an unfortunate wood-dove. Initially satisfied, like our earlier lily, with living from day to day, the wild dove one day gets chatting to two tame doves, who present him with another perspective. The preening tame doves pride themselves on always having access to the farmer’s grain, in comparison to which the wood-dove starts to worry about his now comparatively precarious day to day existence. Eventually the envious wood dove sneaks into the dove-cote – only to be discovered by the farmer and to meet his demise (ibid, pp.174-76). Just as the lily fell victim to its own anxious vanity, so the wood-dove falls victim to worry about earning a living. Ultimately Kierkegaard takes this discussion in the direction of our dependence on God, and – this time stressing differences as well as similarities between human beings and the birds of the air – reflections on work as a human being’s “perfection” 8 (ibid, pp.177 & 198). But here I want to stress that in this story too the problem arises from comparison, “insofar as the worry about making a living is not the actual pressing need of the day today but is the idea of a future need” (ibid, p.198): Worried about making a living, the worried person is unwilling to be contented with being a human being but wants to be different or to have diversity, wants to be rich, independently wealthy, prosperous, fairly secure, etc. In other words, he does not look at the bird of the air – away from the diversity of human life – but he looks comparingly at others, at the diversity, and his worry about making a living is a relation of comparison (ibid, p.179). This also trails a theme that Kierkegaard will stress when he returns to the lilies and the birds in later discourses, where he insists that from these teachers we can learn to be joyful. Joy is explained as being “present to oneself”, which in turn is unpacked as “truly to be today” and to view as irrelevant “tomorrow” (Kierkegaard, 1997a, p.38-9). The joy that the lilies and birds teach puts “the whole emphasis on: the present time” (ibid, p. 39). In a related discourse, Kierkegaard describes “the next day” as “the grappling hook with which the huge mass of worries seizes hold of the single individual’s little ship” (Kierkegaard, 1997b, p.72, my translation); thus “if a person is to gain mastery over his mind, he must begin by getting rid of the next day” (ibid, p. 71). The silence that the lily and bird also teach human beings is explicitly linked to forgetting oneself and one’s plans (1997a, p. 19). Does all this depend upon sharing Kierkegaard’s Christian faith? Actually, I don’t think so. Pattison & Jensen (2012) rewrite some of these polyphonic discourses as dialogues between “SK” (a believer) and “KS” (a non-believer). Certainly, much in the discourses depends upon taking a religious perspective seriously. On Kierkegaard’s telling, we can learn from the lilies and the birds to cast all our sorrows upon God (Kierkegaard, 1997a, p.41); freedom is only achieved by acknowledging that God, not me, provides for my well-being (Kierkegaard, 1993, p.177); and the silence that we can learn from the lilies and the birds is associated with 9 becoming nothing before God (Kierkegaard, 1997a, pp. 10-11). But as Pattison points out, these ideas are not introduced dogmatically and Kierkegaard, consistent with his claim to be “without authority”, is not so much “teaching” as “raising questions, offering new and unexpected perspectives on familiar problems, subverting expectations” (Pattison & Jensen, 2012, p. xi). Most important is Pattison’s observation that insofar as Kierkegaard is a Christian writer, his concern is less with instructing his readers about the content of Christianity than with alerting them “to why the questions addressed by Christianity should matter to them” (ibid, p. x). Tellingly, he adds that for Kierkegaard, “the point is not to get a ‘message’ across, it is to engage readers in a process of change and, like a therapist, help them to become alert to the movements and needs of their own hearts” (ibid, p. xi, my emphasis). For this reason, I think that there is much in the discourses that can “build up” believer and non-believer alike. Jensen reports having found a reading group with no theological background being “fired up” by themes the discourses raised (ibid, p. xiii). In particular – and this will be my main focus for the rest of this essay – I think there is much in what Kierkegaard says about contentment being threatened by the “naughty little bird” who embodies “the restless mentality of comparison” that will strike a chord with those of all faiths and none. This bites most of us, in ways we might not like to admit. Of course we would chuckle at those who judge their self-worth in terms of the number of their Facebook friends. And I found rather absurd the attitude of a fellow academic who seemed to value himself in significant part by the number of followers he had acquired on academia.edu (helpfully, he kept me appraised of the figure on a regular basis). And yet. I will confess to having recently felt pleased on noting, in a recent update to my profile on that site, that it was 10 rated in the “top 2% by 30 day views” – shortly followed by a twinge of envy at the colleague who, it turned out, was in the top 1%. “Comparison” feeds both anxiety and vanity. What the “naughty little bird” homes in on is our vulnerability to how what we think of ourselves can become a function of what others think of us. During a brief period in therapy, I found myself musing on the fact that in some circumstances I do, and in other circumstances I don’t, care much about external opinions of me. Reflecting on what the difference was, I concluded that the former applies when I suspect the view of me – my flaws and inadequacies – might be accurate. This is when I feel the need to justify myself to myself, and also where countervailing opinions portraying me in a more favourable light become something for which I can be - almost pathetically - grateful. All this shows, perhaps, the grip the “naughty little bird” has over me. Of course, the relation between diversity and our common humanity is a matter of emphasis: Kierkegaard has no wish to deny the importance of uniqueness or singularity. He speaks of how God gives in such a way that each individual “becomes a distinctive individuality” (1995, pp. 271-72) and claims that “at every person’s birth there comes into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular” (1993, p. 93). In The Sickness unto Death, we read: Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, destined to become himself, and as such every self is certainly angular, but that only means that is to be ground into shape, not that it is to be ground down smooth, not that it is to utterly abandon being itself out of fear of men, or ... not to dare to be itself in its more essential contingency (Kierkegaard, 1980b, p. 33). The discourses we have been discussing put the point in a similar way: do not mistake being “ground into shape” – formed - for being “ground down smooth” – crushed or annihilated. To be taken out of yourself in the way the lilies and birds inspire, to focus on being glad to be 11 alive, is not to lose one’s essential individuality, but to see it in a fresh light, a light through which the anxieties of particularity can be challenged - and even silenced. Gratitude and Patience Finally, how else might we take up Kierkegaard’s invitation to treat the lilies and the birds as our teachers? What else can they teach? First and foremost, as we have seen, they confront us with the possibility of being content just to be alive and to be our “given” selves. This alone might be an important message – encouraging “reframing” - to any of us who typically “want to manage our lives and write our own script in ways that are just not realistic” (Pattison & Jensen, 2012, p.96). At this point, some might wish to talk of “mindfulness”. But Kierkegaard would, I think, want to place a greater focus than this tradition necessarily does on gratitude: gratitude for all that is good in our lives, and for life itself (ibid, p.97). So the lilies and birds perhaps also teach an attitude to life that shows how gratitude might have the power to drown out a feeling of overwhelming anxiety. John McLuckie, a pastor who works with cancer patients, reports on how often such an attitude has helped such patients to live with the enormous life-changes that such a diagnosis brings about (ibid, p.128). Nor is this necessarily limited to those with a religious faith: it is notable that secular existential therapists such as Irvin Yalom also focus at this point on the value of “counting your blessings” and becoming aware of your natural surroundings (lilies and birds included, no doubt!) (Yalom & Josselson, 2011, p. 306). Kierkegaard would perhaps discuss this in terms of a move beyond resignation to grace. The point here is that the contentment we have discussed is made easier if we are able to view life as a gift. And receiving this gift in gratitude involves accepting myself, warts and all, as I currently am. While this certainly does not rule out trying to improve, to get out of our ruts and “move on” with our lives, it does raise what is, for Kierkegaard, an important distinction 12 between a problem and a burden (Pattison & Jensen, 2012, p. 32). What is the difference? The answer, I think, is that to describe something as a problem already implies that there must be a solution, and that this is what one is seeking. Whereas to recognise the same thing as a burden suggests a different approach: the question now becomes how I am to shoulder the burdens that life necessarily brings me. For instance, how am I to live with my memories of my own past failures? Should I be aiming to overcome my faults – all of them? – or to find a way of learning to live with them? My suspicion is that many clients come to therapy to deal with what they perceive to be problems, and look to therapy – or, worse, to the therapist – for a solution. In such a case, part of a successful therapeutic process might involve helping them to reframe their issues as burdens. Perhaps there is a kind of contentment that could grow from this very realisation? The link between contentment and finding the best in one’s situation - learning to live with one’s burdens - is nicely brought out in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love parable about two artists. One travels the world and yet fails to find a face with such perfection that he considers it worth painting. The second stays at home, but in his small circle finds each face, for all its flaws, to have a beautiful and glorious side, such that his art “satisfies me without making any claim to be an artist” (Kierkegaard, 1995, p.158). It is just this, says Kierkegaard, which shows the second to be the true artist. The parable is meant to illustrate the difference between foolishly searching for someone worthy of one’s love, and finding something lovable in everyone one meets, but it also seems relevant to our topic here: the contentment that the second artist has found in his humble craft. There is plenty more that could be said. A related theme central to the discourses is silence, one manifestation of which is the way in which our need to be “noticed”, recognised and appreciated might add to our anxiety. This issue warrants more nuanced treatment than I have 13 room for here, but one aspect of the “silence” that we may learn from the lilies and the birds is the courage to perform small actions of great significance to our self-development which are not noticed by others (and in this sense are done silently). If we cash out our value in terms of being noticed by others (living our lives as perpetual teenagers?), we are doomed not to recognise the importance of such small steps. There is a clear link here to another important theme in the discourses, namely learning patience. This warrants an essay of its own, but let me here make two observations. First, note that Taalmod, the Danish term for patience used by Kierkegaard, literally refers to the courage to bear or endure. Thus, as Pattison and Jensen note, to be patient is “to be able to bear with ourselves and to accept who we are with endurance” (Pattison & Jensen, 2012, p. 49). Second, consider how the contentment I have tried to sketch above might give rise to patience. As Steve Porter suggests, while the two are distinct, “patience emerges under the influence of contentment. We can be patient when we are content but it is difficult to be patient when we are discontent” (Porter, 2012, p.129n5). McLuckie (Pattison & Jenson, 2012, p.128-9) notes the importance of themes in Kierkegaard’s discourses on learning patience – learning simply ways to endure – to the experiences of those living with cancer. Please don’t misunderstand me. It has been no part of my aim in this article to claim that a recipe of contentment, gratitude and patience is the panacea to all the issues which therapy clients present. But I suspect that many might find considerable solace, inspiration and – dare I suggest it – even joy in reflecting on the message of this strand of Kierkegaard’s writings; a strand we might well describe as “therapeutic”. Along the lines of what I have been suggesting here, let me leave the final word to Pattison and Jensen: whereas many readers imagine Kierkegaard as being especially preoccupied with the darker side of life, these writings [the discourses, especially those on the lilies and the birds] show clearly that his aim is precisely not to leave us 14 brooding on whatever darkness afflicts us, but to accompany us on our way to a more open, freer, and more joyous way of living in the world (Ibid, pp. 99-100). 15 References Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Kierkegaard, S. (1980a) The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1980b) The Sickness Unto Death, trans. H.V. and E.H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1987) Either/Or, Volume II, trans. H.V. and E.H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. 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