Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir

by Irvin D. Yalom

  I didn’t protest. I knew he was right: I hadn’t been ready to hear it, and I must have conveyed that to him in a multitude of ways. I had long avoided any type of exposure to the Holocaust. I was horrified, as a teenager, when, shortly after the Allies liberated the concentration camps, the newsreels showed the few survivors, looking like human skeletons, and the mountains of corpses everywhere, being moved by bulldozers. Decades later, when Marilyn and I went to see Schindler’s List, she drove separately, knowing that I would most likely bolt before the end of the film. And I did. For me it was a predictable formula. If I saw or read anything graphic about the horrors of the Holocaust, I would be swept by a storm of feelings: terrible sorrow, unbearable rage, crippling agony, to think of what the victims must have experienced, and to think of myself in their place. (It was sheer luck that I had been safe in America rather than in Europe, where my father’s sister and her entire family, and my uncle Abe’s wife and four children, were murdered.) I never expressed my feelings explicitly to Bob, but he had picked them up in many ways: he told me that, though I had listened to some of his other wartime stories, I had never once asked him a question.

  A half-century later, Bob had a horrendous experience in a Nicaraguan airport when someone attempted to kidnap him. He was heavily traumatized and it was shortly afterward that he contacted me and asked me to write about his life experience during his adolescence in Nazi-occupied Budapest. We spent a great many hours together discussing the kidnapping and all the memories it revived of the wartime years.

  I braided his adolescent life experiences together with an account of our friendship into a novella, I’m Calling the Police, published in the United States as an ebook. In Europe eight countries published it in paperback. The title is taken from a particularly hair-raising incident in the novella. Though it had been over sixty years since the end of the war when the book was published, Bob so feared the Nazis that he balked at having his real name on the book jacket. I reminded him that any living Nazis would be in their nineties and harmless, but he insisted on using a pseudonym—Robert Brent—for the English and Hungarian versions. Only after a sustained campaign did he relent and agree to have his real name on seven of the translations, including the German one.

  I have often marveled at Bob’s courage and tenacity. As an orphan, he came from a displaced persons (DP) camp to the United States after World War II speaking not a word of English. After attending less than two years at Boston Latin High School, he was accepted to Harvard, where he not only performed well enough to get into medical school, but also played varsity soccer—and all of this when he was completely alone in the world. Later he married Pat Downs, a physician, the daughter of two physicians, and the granddaughter of Harry Emerson Fosdick, the eminent pastor of the interdenominational Riverside Church in Manhattan. Bob asked her to convert to Judaism before their marriage and Pat agreed. In the conversion process, Pat told me, things were proceeding well until the rabbi announced that Jewish dietary laws banned the eating of shellfish, including lobster. Having spent much of her early life in Maine, Pat was stunned. She had eaten lobster all her life and felt this was too much, a potential deal-breaker. The rabbi, perhaps because of Pat’s eminent grandfather, was so eager to bring her into the fold that, after consulting with a consortium of rabbis, he made a rare exception: she, alone of all Jews, would be permitted to eat lobster.

  Bob chose to train as a heart surgeon—he told me that the only time he felt entirely alive was when he held a beating heart in his hand. He had an extraordinary career as a cardiac surgeon, became professor of surgery at Boston University, wrote over five hundred research and clinical papers in professional journals, and was on the brink of doing the world’s first heart transplant before another surgeon, Christiaan Barnard, beat him to the punch.

  At the end of 2015, after suffering the loss of my sister and of my three close friends, I had several weeks of the flu, with loss of appetite and weight loss, and then an acute bout of gastroenteritis, most likely food poisoning, with vomiting and diarrhea that left me dehydrated. My blood pressure was so dangerously low that my son Reid drove me from San Francisco to the Stanford emergency room, where I remained for a day and a half. I received seven liters of intravenous fluid, and my blood pressure slowly returned to normal. As I awaited the results of an abdominal CT scan, I had, for the first time, a strong sense that I might be dying. My physician daughter, Eve, and my wife stayed with me, offering comfort, and I tried to soothe myself by drawing upon a thought I had often invoked in my work with patients: the greater the sense of unlived life, the greater the terror of death. This equation calmed me as I considered how few regrets I have about the life I’ve lived.

  After discharge from the hospital I weighed only 139 pounds—about 20 pounds under my average weight. Sometimes the hazy memory of my medical education creates problems. In this instance, I was haunted by a medical maxim: If the patient has significant weight loss of unknown cause, think of an occult cancer. I imagined my abdomen laced with metastatic lesions. During this time I comforted myself with a thought experiment suggested by Richard Dawkins: Imagine a laser-thin spotlight moving inexorably along the immense ruler of time. Everything that the beam has passed is lost in the darkness of the past; everything ahead of the spotlight is hidden in the darkness of that yet to be. Only that which is illuminated by the laser-thin spot of light is alive and aware. That thought always brings me solace: it makes me feel lucky to be alive at this moment.

  I sometimes think the very act of writing is my effort to dispel the passage of time and inevitable death. Faulkner put it best: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion and hold it fixed so that at some point a stranger reads it and it comes back to life again.” I believe that thought explains the intensity of my passion to write—and to never stop writing.

  I take very seriously the idea that, if one lives well and has no deep regrets, then one faces death with more serenity. I have heard this message not only from many dying patients but also from great-souled writers such as Tolstoy, whose Ivan Ilych realized he was dying so badly because he had lived so badly. All my reading and life experiences have taught me the importance of living in such a manner that I would die with few regrets. In my later years, I have made a conscious effort to be generous and gentle with everyone I encounter, and I proceed into my later eighties with a reasonable degree of contentment.

  Another reminder of my mortality is my email. For more than twenty years I’ve been receiving a good amount of fan mail each day. I attempt to respond to each letter—I think of it as my form of daily Buddhist lovingkindness meditation. It gives me joy to think that my work offers something to those who write me. But I am also aware, as the years go by, of the ever-increasing numbers of email—a rush that is fueled by the knowledge that I shan’t live too much longer. Increasingly, this message is entirely explicit, as in this email that came a few days ago:

  . . . I wanted to write to you a long time ago, but thought that you would get overwhelmed with emails and would not have the time to read them all; however I thought I would email you anyway. As you say yourself, your age is advanced and you may not be around for much longer and then it would be too late.

  Or in another that arrived the following day:

  . . . To put it bluntly, and I think you will appreciate this, I realize you will no longer be here at some point. I don’t want to take your existence for granted and regret not contacting you when it’s too late. . . . It would mean a lot to me to have an exchange with you because most people I know are not interested in discussing death, nor have they made their own personal connection with the fact that they will die.

  Sometimes, in recent years, I have started lectures by acknowledging the size of the audience and saying, “I’m aware that, as I age, audiences grow larger and larger. And of course that is wonderfully affirming. But if I put on my existential spectacles I see a darker side and I wonder, why such a rush to see
me?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  FINAL WORKS

  I was a teenager when I first heard Einstein’s response to quantum theory: “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Like most science-minded adolescent boys, I revered Einstein and was astounded to hear that he believed in God. The fact called into question my own religious skepticism, and I sought an explanation from my junior high school science teacher. His answer: “Einstein’s God is the God of Spinoza.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Who is Spinoza?” I learned that Spinoza was a seventeenth-century philosopher and pioneer of the scientific revolution. Though he often referred to God in his writing, his Jewish community had excommunicated him for heresy when he was twenty-four, and many, if not most, scholars regard him as a closet atheist. It would have been dangerous, my teacher told me, for Spinoza to express skepticism about the existence of God in the seventeenth century, and he protected himself by frequently employing the term “God.” However, whenever Spinoza uses the word “God,” most scholars understand him to mean the orderly laws of nature. I picked out a life of Spinoza from the library’s A–Z biography section and, though I didn’t understand much of it, I resolved that someday I would learn more about Einstein’s hero.

  About seventy years later, I came across a book that rekindled my interest. I learned how, after Spinoza’s excommunication from Judaism, he had refused to attach himself to any religious community. Instead he had worked as a glass-grinder making lenses for spectacles and telescopes, lived frugally in isolation, and composed philosophical and political tracts that changed the course of history. That book was Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein, a novelist and philosopher. One by one I had devoured her extraordinary novels, but it was Betraying Spinoza, part philosophy, part fiction, and part biography, that set my mind on fire. The thought of writing a novel about Spinoza percolated in my brain, but I felt entirely stymied. How could I write a novel about a man who had lived mostly in his thoughts, whose life was solitary and without intrigue or romance, spending his adulthood in rented rooms, grinding lenses and scribbling with quill and ink?

  Fortuitously, I was invited to Amsterdam to address an association of Dutch psychotherapists. Though, as I have aged, I rarely look forward to overseas travel, I welcomed this opportunity and agreed to give a workshop with the proviso that they arrange a Spinoza day, during which a knowledgeable guide would accompany my wife and me to Spinoza sites in the Netherlands: his birthplace, various residences, his grave, and, most important of all, the small Spinoza museum, the Spinozahuis, in the small town of Rijnsburg. So, after a daylong presentation in Amsterdam, Marilyn and I and our guides—the president of the Dutch Spinoza Society and a well-informed Dutch philosopher—set out on our mission.

  We visited the Amsterdam neighborhood where Spinoza spent his early life, saw the houses in which he later dwelled, and took the same barge rides on the canal that he had taken. I now had numerous visual details of Spinoza’s Holland, but I was no closer to formulating the narrative necessary for a novel. All that changed when I visited the Spinozahuis. At first I was disappointed to find that the museum held none of Spinoza’s personal effects. Instead, I saw a replica of the lens-grinding equipment he would have used, and a portrait painted after his death. Moreover, our guide informed me that the portrait may not have been accurate, because no likenesses of him were made during his lifetime. All the paintings of Spinoza were based on written descriptions.

  Then I turned to the museum’s major attraction: Spinoza’s personal library of 151 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books. I had been looking forward to holding books that Spinoza’s fingers had touched, hoping that his spirit would inspire me. Although the public was not permitted to touch the books, I was granted special permission. As I held one reverently in my hands, my guide drifted over to my side and gently said, “Pardon me, Dr. Yalom . . . perhaps you know this . . . but Spinoza’s hands never touched this book, or, indeed, any of the books in the library: these books are not the actual physical books owned by Spinoza.”

  I was stunned. “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  “After Spinoza’s death in 1677, Spinoza’s tiny estate could not cover the costs of his funeral and burial, and his one possession of value, his library, had to be auctioned off.”

  “But these books here, these ancient books?”

  “The auctioneer was exceedingly punctilious. For the auction he wrote an extremely detailed description of each book—the date, publisher, city, binding, et cetera. Two hundred years after his death, a wealthy patron provided funds to reconstitute Spinoza’s entire library, and the buyers faithfully followed the auctioneer’s book descriptions in their purchases.”

  Though I was interested in all that I saw and heard, none of it was the stuff of a novel. Discouraged, I turned to leave, but at that very moment, I overheard the word “Nazis” used in a conversation between our guides and the museum guard. “Why the Nazis? What were they doing in this museum?” They told me an amazing story. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Holland, a troop of ERR soldiers appeared at the museum, closed and sealed it, and confiscated the entire library.

  “So this library again had to be reconstituted?” I asked. “And that means these books are twice removed from the touch of Spinoza’s fingers?”

  “No, not at all,” my guide reassured me: “To everyone’s amazement, the entire collection stolen by the Nazis, minus only a few volumes, was found after the war hidden in a sealed salt mine.”

  I was astonished and bursting with questions. “The ERR—what does that stand for?”

  “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg—the task force of Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg, the man in charge of looting Jewish possessions throughout Europe.”

  My heart began to race. “But, why? Why? Europe was in flames. Why would they bother to confiscate this small village library when they could loot all those Rembrandts and Vermeers?”

  “No one knows the answer to that,” my guide replied. “The only clue we have is a sentence in the report written by the officer in charge of the raid—it was given as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Now it is in the public domain and you can easily bring it up on the Internet. It says in effect that the Spinoza library contains works of great importance for the exploration of the Spinoza problem.”

  “Spinoza problem?” I asked, growing even more intrigued. “What does that mean? What kind of problem did the Nazis have with Spinoza? And why would they preserve all the books in this library rather than burning them like everything else Jewish throughout Europe?”

  Like a mime duo, my hosts hunched their shoulders and showed their palms—they had no answers.

  I left the museum with an intriguing and unsolved puzzle! Manna from heaven for a famished novelist! I got what I came for. “I’ve got a book now,” I told Marilyn. “I’ve got a plot and a title!” and, as soon as I returned home, I began writing The Spinoza Problem.

  Before long, I developed an entirely plausible explanation for the Nazis’ “Spinoza problem.” I learned in my reading that Goethe, the literary idol of all Germans, including the Nazis, was fascinated by Spinoza’s work. In fact, Goethe had mentioned in one of his letters that he carried Spinoza’s Ethics in his pocket for an entire year! Surely this must have presented an enormous problem for a Nazi ideologue: How could Germany’s greatest writer have been so devoted to Spinoza, a Portuguese-Dutch Jew?

  I decided to intertwine two life narratives—that of Benedict Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher, and that of Alfred Rosenberg, a pseudo-philosopher and Nazi propagandist. As a fiercely anti-Semitic member of Hitler’s inner circle, Rosenberg had ordered the confiscation of Spinoza’s library, and it was Rosenberg who ordered that the books be saved rather than burned. In 1945 at the Nuremberg trials, Rosenberg was sentenced to death by hanging along with eleven other top-ranked Nazis.

  I began by wr
iting alternating chapters—Spinoza’s life set in the seventeenth century and Rosenberg’s in the twentieth—and developed a fictional connection between the two characters. Soon, however, it became too cumbersome to keep shifting back and forth between two eras and I decided to write the entire Spinoza story first, then Rosenberg’s afterward, and then finally interlaced the two stories with the necessary sanding and polishing to ensure a snug fit.

  Writing narratives set in two different centuries greatly increased the necessary research, and The Spinoza Problem took more time than any other book I’ve published (with the exception of Existential Psychotherapy). But I never considered it work: on the contrary, I was stimulated and eager to get to my reading and writing every morning. I read, not without difficulty, Spinoza’s major works, commentaries on those works, and many biographies, and then, to unravel remaining mysteries, solicited advice from the Spinoza scholars Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Nadler.

  I spent even more time researching the birth and development of the Nazi Party and Alfred Rosenberg’s role in it. Though Hitler respected Rosenberg’s ability and assigned him to important positions, he greatly preferred the company of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. Rumor has it that Hitler once hurled Rosenberg’s major work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, across the room, shouting, “Who can understand this stuff!” Rosenberg was so pained that Hitler did not love him as much as the others that he sought psychological help on more than one occasion, and I used an actual psychiatric report in my novel.