Abstract

The Lonely Labyrinth winds the suggestion that "Kierkegaard was a profoundly sick man, and that the character of his sickness established a privileged perspective for the understanding of his work." In the light of this thesis, his "works turn out to be, not abstruse theologico-philosophical treatises or mysterious aesthetic essays, but successive moves in a complicated dialectic of therapy." They are "efforts... to find not truth but health." Part One of Thompson's book sketches the biographical, psychological, philosophical, and literary background of Kierkegaard's authorship. Part Two--the major division of the book--offers readings of the pseudonymous works from Either/or through Concluding Unscientific Postscript.