Last updated: November 3, 2026

For Søren Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling of hopelessness but a wrong relationship to your own self. In The Sickness unto Death (1849) he defines it as a misrelation in the self, and he distinguishes three forms: not knowing that you have a self at all, not wanting to be yourself, and defiantly wanting to be yourself on your own terms. His most unsettling claim is that despair is close to universal, and that the most common kind is the one you do not notice.

That makes Kierkegaard’s despair something very different from a bad week, and also from depression in the clinical sense. You can be cheerful, successful and popular and still be in despair, in his sense. You can also be miserable and closer to the cure than anyone around you. This post explains how that works, why he thought it mattered, and what he believed the way out was.

A Cup That Keeps Overflowing

The meme above shows a hand pouring a jug labelled “Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death” into a small cup labelled “You, the reader”. Out flows despair, despair, despair, and the cup overflows onto the table: more despair. Anyone who has tried to read the book in one sitting knows the feeling. Kierkegaard does not let up. Just when you think you have found a form of life that escapes despair, he shows you that it is one more variety of it.

The joke hides the book’s purpose, though. Kierkegaard published it under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with the subtitle “A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening”. Edification means building up. The pouring is supposed to wake you, not drown you. Despair, for Kierkegaard, is like an illness that has to be diagnosed before it can be treated, and his relentless catalogue is the diagnosis.

A Sickness You Cannot Die From

The title comes from the Gospel of John. When Jesus hears that his friend Lazarus is ill, he says: “This sickness is not unto death.” Lazarus dies anyway and is raised again, so for a Christian, Kierkegaard argues, even death is not the end. The truly hopeless sickness must be something else. That sickness is despair, and its torment is precisely that it does not kill you. The despairing person wants to be rid of himself and cannot. In one of the book’s grimmest formulations, to be sick unto death is to be unable to die.

Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855) knew the subject from the inside. He grew up in Copenhagen with a deeply melancholic father who, according to Kierkegaard’s journals, feared that the family lay under a curse, broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841 for reasons he never fully explained, and spent much of his short life writing under a crowd of pseudonyms, each representing a different way of living. He was ridiculed in the satirical paper The Corsair and died at 42 after a furious public attack on the Danish state church. He described his own state of mind with the Danish word tungsind, heavy mindedness. If you want his life and his idea of faith first, start with Kierkegaard on Truth and Faith.

What Is the Self, and How Can It Go Wrong?

The book opens with what may be the most famously difficult paragraph in philosophy. A human being is spirit, Kierkegaard writes; spirit is the self; and the self is “a relation that relates itself to itself”. It sounds like a riddle written by Hegel on a bad day, and partly it is a parody of Hegelian language. But the idea underneath is fairly simple.

A human being, for Kierkegaard, is a combination of opposites: finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, necessity and possibility. You have a body, a history and limits, and you also have imagination, freedom and longing that go beyond any limit. That combination alone does not yet make a self. A self appears when you take a stance toward this combination, when you relate to who you are and try to hold the opposites together. And since nobody built themselves, the self is ultimately established by something else, which for Kierkegaard is God.

Despair is what happens when that relationship goes wrong, when the self relates to itself in a distorted way. Kierkegaard’s word is usually translated as “misrelation”, and that is why so many people search for “despair as misrelation in the self”. The point is that despair is not caused by circumstances. Losing a job or a lover can reveal despair, but the despair was already there in how you related to yourself. You thought you were despairing over the job. In fact you were despairing over yourself.

Three Forms of Despair

Kierkegaard sorts despair by how conscious it is, from the most oblivious to the most intense. The three forms are easiest to compare side by side.

The first form is the most widespread and the most comfortable. Kierkegaard calls it spiritlessness. Such a person, he says, lets himself be cheated of his self by “the others”, becomes a copy, a number, one of the crowd, and is perfectly content. Ignorance does not cure despair. It is simply despair that has not noticed itself, the way someone can be ill without knowing it.

The second form is despair in weakness, and it is the one most people recognise. You know there is a self, and you do not want it. Kierkegaard’s example is a man who despairs over something earthly, loses it and wishes he were someone else. He imagines changing himself like a coat. Deeper versions despair over their own weakness itself, refusing to accept the self that is weak. This is the form people mean when they search for “not willing to be oneself”.

The third form is the most intense: defiance. Here a person knows what they are and wants to be themselves, but entirely on their own terms, as their own creation, owing nothing to anyone. Kierkegaard gives it a chilling image. It is as if an author made a slip of the pen, and the mistake became conscious and refused to be corrected, insisting on staying in the text as proof of what a poor writer the author is. The defiant self clings to its own suffering as evidence against the world. Readers have heard in this an uncanny portrait of certain modern ideals of self creation, and it is no accident that later atheist existentialists took up exactly this form and tried to turn it into a virtue.

The Balancing Act of Being Human

Besides the three forms, Kierkegaard describes despair as a failure to hold the opposites of the self in balance, and this part of the book is surprisingly practical. Someone who lives only in the infinite, in fantasy, plans and abstract feelings, loses touch with the concrete life in front of him. Someone who lives only in the finite becomes small and conformist, worn smooth like a pebble by the crowd. The same goes for possibility and necessity. Live only in possibility and everything becomes possible and nothing becomes real. Live only in necessity and you suffocate, because nothing new can happen. The determinist and the fatalist, Kierkegaard says, lack possibility, and for him the cure is the belief that for God everything is possible.

This is why people who search for Kierkegaard and “existential crisis” find him so modern. The person scrolling through endless options and never committing to one is in the despair of possibility. The person who believes nothing can ever change is in the despair of necessity. Neither needs more information. Both need a different relationship to themselves. C.M. Black explores a neighbouring condition, the boredom that eats a life from inside, in Suffering From Endless Boredom? Meet Søren Kierkegaard and Ennui.

Despair Is Not Depression

Many people search for “Kierkegaard depression”, and the connection is understandable. But Kierkegaard’s despair is a spiritual and existential category, not a medical one. It concerns how a person relates to their own self, not their mood, energy or brain chemistry. Someone in deep despair, in his sense, may feel fine. Someone suffering from clinical depression is not thereby in despair in his sense, and certainly not to blame for it. Reading Kierkegaard as a diagnosis of mental illness gets both him and the illness wrong. If you are struggling and the feeling stays and gets heavy, talking to someone you trust or a professional is a better next step than another chapter of The Sickness unto Death. Our post on philosophy in psychotherapy shows where existential ideas have found a place in therapy.

That said, Kierkegaard did think despair had a strange value. Becoming aware of your despair is already progress, because it ends the comfortable ignorance of the first form. In Either/Or (1843), his earlier book, the character Judge William gives a young aesthete some startling advice: choose despair. Not wallow in it, but choose it, because only by despairing of a life built on pleasure and mood can you choose yourself in earnest. Despair, in this sense, is the crack through which a self can begin.

The Way Out: A Self That Rests in Its Source

Kierkegaard’s cure is faith, and he defines it with the mirror image of despair. Faith is the state in which the self, in relating to itself and in willing to be itself, “rests transparently in the power that established it”. In plain words: you stop trying either to escape yourself or to create yourself from nothing. You accept yourself as given, by God in Kierkegaard’s Christian framework, and then you take responsibility for becoming that self.

This is not a comfortable doctrine. Kierkegaard’s faith is not a set of reassuring beliefs. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, faith is “the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty”. There is no proof, no system and no crowd to lean on. You stake your life on something you cannot demonstrate, and you do it as a single individual. Kierkegaard’s famous line that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards, which we have printed on a shirt, describes the same situation. You never have the full picture before you have to choose.

Readers who do not share his Christianity have still found the structure useful. The core idea, that a person must accept the self they have been given, including its limits, and then take responsibility for it, can be read without the theology. Whether it works without the theology is another question, and Kierkegaard himself would have said no.

What a Critic Would Say

A careful reader should notice a problem with the diagnosis. If people who feel fine are in despair without knowing it, and people who feel desperate are in despair too, then no possible evidence could show that someone is not in despair. A claim that nothing could refute is, by ordinary standards, not a discovery but a definition. Kierkegaard would accept that. He is not offering an empirical theory of human psychology but a description of human existence from a Christian standpoint, and its test is whether readers recognise themselves in it. That is a legitimate kind of philosophy, but it is worth being clear about what it is and is not.

A second objection concerns the cure. Because despair is defined as a failure to rest in the power that established the self, faith in God is the only possible way out by definition. Secular readers have tried to keep Kierkegaard’s analysis while replacing God with something else, such as commitment to a person, a cause or a way of life; the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus was a well known example. Whether that substitution works or quietly changes the whole structure is still debated.

A third objection comes from social philosophy. Theodor W. Adorno, who wrote his first book on Kierkegaard in 1933, accused him of retreating into pure inwardness, as if the self could be fixed while the world around it stayed exactly as it was. Someone in despair because of poverty, exploitation or loneliness may need changed circumstances more than a changed relation to the self. Kierkegaard’s answer, that circumstances only reveal a despair already present, is powerful. It can also become an excuse to ignore the circumstances.

Kierkegaard Against the System

Kierkegaard wrote all this partly as a protest against Hegel, whose philosophy dominated Copenhagen in his youth. Hegel explained everything as moments in the development of world spirit, and Kierkegaard asked what that explanation meant for an actual person who has to decide how to live on a Tuesday. In his journals he mocked the thinker who builds an enormous palace of ideas and then lives in a shed beside it. You can see what he was reacting against in our beginner’s guide to Hegel.

That protest made him, a century later, the grandfather of existentialism. Heidegger took up his analysis of anxiety and the crowd, Sartre his emphasis on choice, and the theologian Paul Tillich his account of despair. The atheist existentialists kept the diagnosis and dropped the cure, which is why their heroes often look like Kierkegaard’s defiant despair with better publicity. The whole story is in What Is Existentialism?, and the rival answer of the absurdists, who refuse both despair and the leap of faith, in Is Absurdism Just Existentialism With Good Vibes?.

Living With the Diagnosis

What would Kierkegaard ask you, if he could? Probably not whether you feel happy. He would ask whether you know that you have a self at stake, whether you are trying to be someone else, and whether you are trying to make yourself entirely on your own. Most of us, honestly, are a bit of all three on different days. The book’s harshness is a form of respect. It assumes that every single person is worth being woken up.

If you want to read it, use a modern translation, take it slowly, and start with Part One, where the definitions and the forms of despair are laid out. Then read it next to his gentler works. And if the cup overflows, remember that, for Kierkegaard, noticing the overflow is the first sign that something in you is still alive. For a wider look at the question of meaning when the old answers fail, continue with What Is Nihilism?.