When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  “Then why not promote me?”

  “To what, Sig? To Exner’s or Fleischl’s job—if they ever leave? At one hundred Gulden a year? Brücke’s right about the money! Research is a rich man’s work. You can’t live on that stipend. And support your parents? You wouldn’t be able to marry for ten years. Maybe Brücke wasn’t too delicate, but he was right in saying that your only chance to remain in research is to marry for a large dowry. When you proposed six months ago to Martha, knowing she would bring you no dowry, you—not Brücke—decided your future.”

  Freud closed his eyes for a moment before answering.

  “Your words wound me, Josef. I’ve always sensed your disapproval of Martha.”

  Breuer Knew how difficult it was for Freud to speak forthrightly to him—a man sixteen years older than he and not only his friend, but his teacher, his father, his older brother. He reached out to touch Freud’s hand.

  “Not true, Sig! Not at all! We disagree only about timing. I felt you had too many hard years of training ahead of you to burden yourself with a fiancee. But we agree about Martha—I met her only once, at the party before her family left for Hamburg, and liked her immediately. She reminded me of Mathilde at that age.”

  “That’s not surprising”—Freud’s voice softened now—“your wife was my model. Ever since I met Mathilde, I’ve been looking for a wife like her. The truth, Josef, tell me the truth—if Mathilde had been poor, wouldn’t you still have married her?”

  “The truth, Sig—and don’t hate me for this answer, it was fourteen years ago, times have changed—is that I would have done whatever my father required of me.”

  Freud remained silent as he took out one of his cheap cigars, then offered it to Breuer, who, as always, declined it.

  As Freud lit up, Breuer continued, “Sig, I feel what you feel. You are me. You are me ten, eleven years ago. When Oppolzer, my chief of medicine, died suddenly of typhus, my university career ended just as abruptly, just as cruelly, as yours has. I, too, had considered myself a lad of great promise. I expected to succeed him. I should have succeeded him. Everyone knew that. But a gentile was chosen instead. And I, like you, was forced to settle for less.”

  “Then, Josef, you know how defeated I feel. It’s unfair! Look at the chair of medicine—Northnagel, that brute! Look at the chair of psychiatry—Meynert! Am I less able? I could make great discoveries!”

  “And so you will, Sig. Eleven years ago, I moved my laboratory and my pigeons into my home and continued my research. It can be done. You’ll find a way. But it will never be the way of the university. And we both know it’s not just the money. Every day the anti-Semites grow more shrill. Did you see the piece in this morning’s Neue Freie Presse, about the gentile fraternities bursting into lectures and pulling Jews out of the classroom? They’re threatening now to disrupt all classes taught by Jewish professors. And did you see yesterday’s Presse? And the piece about the trial in Galicia of a Jew accused of a ritual murder of a Christian child? They actually claim he needed Christian blood for the matzo dough! Can you believe it? Eighteen hundred and eighty-two, and it still goes on! These are cavemen—savages coated with just the thinnest glaze of Christianity. That’s why you have no academic future! Brücke dissociates himself personally from such prejudice, of course, but who knows how he really feels? I do know that in private he told me that anti-Semitism would ultimately destroy your university career.”

  “But I’m meant to be a researcher, Josef. I’m not as suited as you for medical practice. All Vienna knows of your diagnostic intuition. I don’t have that gift. For the rest of my life, I shall be a journeyman doctor—Pegasus yoked to the plow!”

  “Sig, I have no skills that I cannot teach you.”

  Freud sat back, out of the candle’s light, grateful for the darkness. Never had he bared so much to Josef, or to anyone except Martha, to whom he wrote a letter every day about his most intimate thoughts and feelings.

  “But, Sig, don’t take it out on medicine. You are being cynical. Look at the advancements of just the last twenty years—even in neurology. Think of the paralysis of lead poisoning, or bromide psychosis, or cerebral trichinosis. These were mysteries twenty years ago. Science moves slowly, but in every decade we conquer another disease.”

  There was a long silence before Breuer continued.

  “Let’s change the subject. I want to ask you something. You’re teaching a lot of medical students now. Have you run across a Russian student by the name of Salomé, Jenia Salomé?”

  “Jenia Salomé? I don’t think so. Why?”

  “His sister came to see me today. A strange meeting.” The fiacre passed through the small entranceway of Bäckerstrasse 7 and lurched to a sudden stop, making the carriage sway on its heavy springs for a moment. “Here we are. I’ll tell you about it inside.”

  They dismounted in the imposing sixteenth-century cobblestone courtyard surrounded by high, ivy-draped walls. On each side, above open ground-level arches braced by stately pilasters, rose five tiers of large arched windows, each containing a dozen wood-framed panes. As the two men approached the vestibule portal, the Portier, always on duty, peered out through the small glass panel in his apartment door, then rushed to unlock the door, bowing to greet them.

  They ascended the stairs, passing Breuer’s office on the second story, to the family’s spacious third-floor apartment, where Mathilde waited. At thirty-six, she was a striking woman. Her satiny, glowing skin set off a finely chiseled nose, blue-gray eyes, and thick chestnut hair, which she wore coiled in a long braid on the top of her head. In a white blouse and a long gray skirt wrapped tight around her waist, she cut a graceful figure, though she had given birth to her fifth child only a few months before.

  Taking Josef’s hat, she brushed his hair back with her hand, helped him off with his coat, and handed it to the house servant, Aloisia, whom they had called “Louis” ever since she had entered their service fourteen years before. Then she turned to Freud.

  “Sigi, you’re drenched and frozen. Into the tub with you! We’ve already heated the water, and I’ve laid out some of Josef’s fresh linen for you on the shelf. How convenient the two of you are the same size! I can never offer such hospitality to Max.” Max, her sister Rachel’s husband, was enormous, weighing over two hundred sixty pounds.

  “Don’t worry about Max,” said Breuer. “I make up for it with referrals to him.” Turning to Freud, he added, “I sent Max another hypertrophied prostate today. That’s four this week. There’s a field for you!”

  “No,” Mathilde interjected, taking Freud’s arm and leading him toward the bath, “urology is not for Sigi. Cleaning out bladders and water pipes all day! He’d go mad in a week!”

  She stopped at the door. “Josef, the children are eating. Look in on them—but just for a minute. I want you to take a nap before dinner. I heard you rustling around all night. You hardly slept.”

  Without a word, Breuer headed toward his bedroom, then changed his mind and decided instead to help Freud fill the bath. Turning back, Breuer saw Mathilde lean toward Freud and heard her whisper, “You see what I mean, Sigi, he hardly talks to me!”

  In the bathroom Breuer attached the nozzles of the petroleum pump to the tubs of hot water Louis and Freud were carrying in from the kitchen. The massive white tub, miraculously supported by dainty brass cat claws, quickly filled. As Breuer left and walked down the hall, he heard Freud’s purr of pleasure as he lowered himself into the steaming water.

  Lying on his bed, Breuer could not sleep for thinking about Mathilde confiding in Freud so intimately. More and more, Freud seemed like one of the family, now even dining with them several times a week. At first, the bond had been primarily between Breuer and Freud: perhaps Sig took the place of Adolf, his younger brother, who had died several years before. But over the past year Mathilde and Freud had grown close. Their ten years’ difference in age allowed Mathilde the privilege of a maternal affection; she often said Freud reminded her of Josef when
she had first met him.

  So what, Breuer asked himself, if Mathilde does tell Freud of my disaffection? What difference does it really make? Most likely Freud already knows: he registers everything that goes on in the household. He’s not an astute medical diagnostician, but he rarely misses anything pertaining to human relationships. And he must also have noticed how starved the children are for a father’s love—Robert, Bertha, Margarethe, and Johannes swarming over him with ecstatic shrieks of “Uncle Sigi,” and even little Dora smiling, whenever he appears. Without doubt Freud’s presence in the household was a good thing; Breuer knew that he himself was too personally distracted to supply the kind of presence his family needed. Yes, Freud filled in for him; and, rather than shame, he, for the most part, felt gratitude to his young friend.

  And Breuer knew he could not object to Mathilde’s complaining about her marriage. She had grounds for complaint! Almost every evening, he worked until midnight in his laboratory. He spent Sunday mornings in his office preparing his Sunday-afternoon lectures to the medical students. Several nights a week, he stayed at the café until eight or nine, and he now played tarock twice a week, rather than once. Even the midday dinner, which had always been inviolate family time, was being encroached upon. At least once a week, Josef overscheduled himself and worked through most of the dinner break. And, of course, whenever Max came, they locked the door of the study and played chess for hours.

  Giving up on the nap, Breuer went into the kitchen to ask about supper. He knew that Freud loved long hot soaks, but was anxious to get through the meal and still have time for work in the laboratory. He knocked on the bathroom door. “Sig, when you’re finished, come to the study. Mathilde’s agreed to serve us supper there in our shirtsleeves.”

  Freud quickly dried himself, donned Josef’s underwear, left his soiled linen in the hamper to be washed, and hastened to help Breuer and Mathilde load trays for their evening meal. (The Breuers, like most Viennese, had their main meal at midday and ate a modest evening supper of cold leftovers.) The glass-paneled door to the kitchen dripped with mist. Pushing it open, Freud was assailed by the wonderful, warm fragrance of carrot-and-celery barley soup.

  Mathilde, ladle in hand, greeted him. “Sigi, it’s so cold out I’ve made some hot soup. It’s what you both need.”

  Freud took the tray from her. “Only two bowls? You’re not eating?”

  “When Josef says he wants to eat in the study, that usually means he wants to talk to you alone.”

  “Mathilde,” objected Breuer, “I did not say that. Sig will stop coming here if he doesn’t get your company at dinner.”

  “No, I’m tired, and you two have had no time alone this week.”

  As they went down the long hallway, Freud popped into the children’s bedrooms to kiss them good night; he resisted their entreaties for a story by promising to tell them two stories on his next visit. He joined Breuer in the study, a dark-paneled room with a large central window draped in rich maroon velvet. Stuffed in the lower part of the window, between the inner and the outer panes, were several pillows to serve as insulation Guarding the window was a sturdy dark-walnut desk on which were heaped open books. On the floor was a thick blue-and-ivory-flowered Kashan carpet, and three walls were lined from floor to ceiling with bookcases crammed with books in heavy dark leather bindings. In a far corner of the room, on a Biedermeier card table with thin, tapering black-and-gold spiraled legs, Louis had already set a cold roast chicken, a salad of cabbage, caraway seeds, and sour cream, some Seltstangerl (salt and kemmelseed breadsticks), and Giesshübler (mineral water). Now Mathilde took the soup bowls from the tray Freud was carrying, placed them on the table, and prepared to leave.

  Breuer, conscious of Freud’s presence, reached out to touch her arm. “Stay for a while. Sig and I have no secrets from you.”

  “I’ve already eaten something with the children. You two can manage without me.”

  “Mathilde”—Breuer tried for lightness—“you say you don’t see me enough. Yet here I am, and you desert me.”

  But she shook her head. “I’ll stop back in a bit with some strudel.” Breuer threw a look of entreaty toward Freud, as though to say, “What else can I do?” A moment later, just as Mathilde was closing the door behind her, he noticed her glance significantly toward Freud, as if to say, “You see what has become of our life together?” For the first time, Breuer became aware of the awkward and delicate role in which his young friend had been placed: to be a confidant to both members of a disaffected couple!

  As the two men ate in silence, Breuer noticed Freud’s eyes scanning the bookshelves.

  “Shall I save a shelf for your future books, Sig?”

  “How I wish! But not in this decade, Josef. I’ve no time even to think. The only thing a clinical aspirant at the Vienna General Hospital has ever written is a postcard. No, I was thinking, not of writing, but of reading these books. Oh, the endless labor of the intellectual—pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris.”

  Breuer smiled. “A wonderful image! Schopenhauer and Spinoza distilled, condensed, and funneled through the pupil, along the optic nerve, and directly into our occipital lobes. I’d love to be able to eat with my eyes—I’m always too tired now for serious reading.”

  “And your nap?” Freud asked. “What happened to it? I thought you were going to lie down before supper.”

  “I can’t nap anymore. I think I’m too tired to sleep. That same nightmare woke me again in the middle of the night—the one about falling.”

  “Tell me again, Josef, exactly how did it go?”

  “It’s the same every time.” Breuer downed an entire glass of seltzer, put down his fork, and sat back to allow his food to settle. “And it’s very vivid—I must have had it ten times in the last year. First I feel the earth tremble. I am frightened and go outside to search for. . . ”

  He deliberated a moment, trying to remember how he had described the dream previously. In it he was always searching for Bertha, but there were limits to what he was willing to reveal to Freud. Not only was he embarrassed by his infatuation with Bertha, but he also saw no reason to complicate Freud’s relationship with Mathilde by telling him things he would be constrained to keep secret from her.

  “. . . to search for someone. The ground beneath my feet starts to liquefy, like quicksand. I sink slowly into the earth and fall forty feet—exactly that. Then I come to rest on a large slab. There is writing on the slab. I try to make it out, but I cannot read it.”

  “Such an enticing dream, Josef. One thing I’m sure of: the key to its meaning is that undecipherable writing on the slab.”

  “If, indeed, the dream has any meaning at all.”

  “It must, Josef. The same dream, ten times? Surely you wouldn’t allow your sleep to be disturbed by something trivial! The other part that interests me is the forty feet. How did you know it was precisely that?”

  “I know it—but don’t know how I know it.”

  Freud, who had as usual quickly emptied his plate, quickly swallowed his last mouthful and said, “I’m sure the figure is accurate. After all, you designed the dream! You know, Josef, I’m still collecting dreams, and more and more I believe that precise numbers in dreams always have real significance. I have a new example I don’t think I’ve told you about. Last week we had a dinner for Isaac Schönberg, a friend of my father’s.”

  “I know him. It’s his son Ignaz, isn’t it, who’s interested in your fiancée’s sister?”

  “Yes, that’s the one, and he’s more than ‘interested’ in Minna. Well, it was Isaac’s sixtieth birthday, and he described a dream he’d had the night before. He was walking down a long dark road and had sixty gold pieces in his pocket. Like you, he was entirely certain of that precise figure. He tried to save his coins, but they kept falling out of a hole in his pocket, and it was too dark to find them. Now, I don’t believe it was a coincidence that he dreamed of sixty coins on his sixtieth
birthday. I’m certain—how could it be otherwise?—that the sixty coins represent his sixty years.”

  “And the hole in the pocket?” Breuer asked, picking up a second joint of chicken.

  “The dream must be a wish to lose his years and become younger,” replied Freud, as he, too, reached for more chicken.

  “Or, Sig, maybe the dream expressed a fear—a fear that his years are running out and that he soon will have none left! Remember, he was on a long dark road and trying to recover something he’d lost.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Perhaps dreams can express either wishes or fears. Or maybe both. But tell me, Josef, when did you first have this dream?”

  “Let me see.” Breuer recalled that the first time was shortly after he had began to doubt whether his treatment could help Bertha, and in a discussion with Frau Pappenheim had raised the possibility of Bertha’s being transferred to the Bellevue Sanatorium in Switzerland. That would have been about the beginning of 1882, nearly a year ago, as he told Freud.

  “And wasn’t it last January, I came to your fortieth birthday dinner,” asked Freud, “along with the entire Altmann family? So, if you’ve had the dream since then, doesn’t it follow that the forty feet signifies forty years?”

  “Well, in a couple of months, I’ll be forty-one. If you’re right, shouldn’t I fall forty-one feet in the dream, beginning next January?”

  Freud threw up his arms. “From here on, we need a consultant. I’ve come to the limits of my dream theory. Will a dream once dreamed change to accommodate changes in the dreamer’s life? Fascinating question! Why are years disguised as feet anyhow? Why does the little dream maker residing in our minds go to all that trouble to disguise the truth? My guess is that the dream won’t change to forty-one feet. I think the dream maker would be afraid that changing it one foot as you get one year older would be too transparent, would give away the dream code.”