“If Any Man Loveth Not His Father”: Søren Kierkegaard’s Psychology of Love

In Soren Kierkegaard’s (1813–1855) philosophical psychology, love is not a feeling or a shared mental state per se; instead, love is a self-relation that is grounded in a unified and transcendent principle beyond self and society. This chapter seeks, through a Kleinian psychobiography of Kierkegaard, to sketch an outline of a psychology of love beyond the paradigm of persons-in-relation, which is dominant in social science research today. We will draw upon Soren Kierkegaard’s troubled relationship with his father Michael Kierkegaard to illustrate just how the transcendent function of the superego in Freud, which was taken over somewhat by the overarching concept of phantasy in Kleinian thought, can be seen as a gesture toward radical transcendence. In our concluding remarks, we will touch upon Donald W. Winnicott’s “non-communicating self” as a perhaps unconscious elaboration of Freud’s transcendent primal father.