Kierkegaard's meditation on despair, which he defines as the sickness of the self that cannot die. Under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, he anatomizes the varieties of despair with the precision of a clinician: the despair of not knowing you have a self, the despair of not wanting to be yourself, the despair of wanting to be yourself. Dense, difficult, and penetrating, the book presages existentialist philosophy and modern psychology alike. Reading it is like undergoing an examination you did not know you needed.