When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  Breuer paused, awaiting Nietzsche’s rebuttal. None came. He was rapt in thought.

  Breuer continued. “The other day you described your belief that the specter of nihilism was stalking Europe. You argued that Darwin has made God obsolete, that just as we once created God, we have all now killed him. And that we no longer know how to live without our religious mythologies. Now I know you didn’t say this directly—correct me if I’m mistaken—but I believe you consider it your mission to demonstrate that out of disbelief one can create a code of behavior for man, a new morality, a new enlightenment, to replace one born out of superstition and the lust for the supernatural.” He paused.

  Nietzsche nodded for him to continue.

  “I believe, though you may disagree with my choice of terms, that your mission is to save humankind from both nihilism and illusion?”

  Another slight nod from Nietzsche.

  “Well, save me! Conduct the experiment with me! I’m the perfect subject. I have killed God. I have no supernatural beliefs, and am drowning in nihilism. I don’t know why to live! I don’t know how to live!”

  Still no response from Nietzsche.

  “If you hope to develop a plan for all mankind, or even a select few, try it on me. Practice on me. See what works and what doesn’t—it should sharpen your thinking.”

  “You offer yourself as an experimental lamb?” Nietzsche replied. “That would be how I repay my debt to you?”

  “I’m not concerned about risk. I believe in the healing value of talking. Simply to review my life with an informed mind like yours—that’s what I want. That cannot fail to help me.”

  Nietzsche shook his head in bewilderment. “Do you have a specific procedure in mind?”

  “Only this. As I proposed before, you enter the clinic under an assumed name, and I observe and treat your migraine attacks. When I make my daily visits, I shall first attend to you. I shall monitor your physical condition and prescribe any medication that may be indicated. For the rest of our visit, you become the physician and help me talk about my life concerns. I ask only that you listen to me and interject any comments you wish. That is all. Beyond that, I don’t know. We’ll have to invent our procedure along the way.”

  “No.” Nietzsche shook his head firmly. “It is impossible, Doctor Breuer. I admit your plan is intriguing, but it is doomed from the onset. I am a writer, not a talker. And I write for the few, not the many.”

  “But your books are not for the few,” Breuer quickly responded. “In fact, you express scorn for philosophers who write only for one another, whose work is removed from life, who do not live their philosophy.”

  “I don’t write for other philosophers. But I do write for the few who represent the future. I am not meant to mingle, to live among. My skills for social intercourse, my trust, my caring for others—these have long atrophied. If, indeed, such skills were ever present. I have always been alone. I shall always remain alone. I accept that destiny.”

  “But, Professor Nietzsche, you want more. I saw sadness in your eyes when you said that others might not read your books until the year two thousand. You want to be read. I believe there is some part of you that still craves to be with others.”

  Nietzsche sat still, rigid in his chair.

  “Remember that story you told me about Hegel on his deathbed?” Breuer continued. “About the only one student who understood him being one who misunderstood him—and ended by saying that, on your own deathbed, you couldn’t claim even one student. Well, why wait for the year two thousand? Here I am! You have your student right here, right now. And I’m a student who will listen to you, because my life depends on understanding you!”

  Breuer paused for breath. He was very pleased. In his preparation the day before, he had correctly anticipated each of Nietzsche’s objections and countered each of them. The trap was elegant. He could hardly wait to tell Sig.

  He knew he should stop at this juncture—the first object being, after all, to ensure that Nietzsche did not take the train to Basel today—but could not resist adding one further point. “And, Professor Nietzsche, I remember how you said the other day that nothing disturbed you more than to be in debt to another with no possibility of equivalent repayment.”

  Nietzsche’s response was quick and sharp. “You mean that you do this for me?”

  “No, that’s just the point. Even though my plan might in some way serve you, that is not my intention! My motivation is entirely self-serving. I need help! Are you strong enough to help me?”

  Nietzsche stood up from his chair.

  Breuer held his breath.

  Nietzsche took a step toward Breuer and extended his hand. “I agree to your plan,” he said.

  Friedrich Nietzsche and Josef Breuer had struck a bargain.

  4 December 1882

  My dear Peter,

  A change of plans. Again. I shall be in Vienna for an entire month and, hence, must, with regret, postpone our Rapallo visit. I will write when I know my plans more precisely. A great deal has happened, most of it interesting. I am having a slight attack (which would have been a two-week monster were it not for the intervention of your Dr. Breuer) and am too weak now to do more than give you a precis of what has transpired. More to follow.

  Thank you for finding me the name of this Dr. Breuer—he is a great curiosity—a thinking, scientific physician. Is that not remarkable? He is willing to tell me what he knows about my illness and—even more remarkable—what he does not know!

  He is a man who greatly wishes to dare and I believe is attracted to my daring to dare greatly. He has dared to offer me a most unusual proposition, and I have accepted it. For the next month he proposes to hospitalize me at the Lauzon Clinic, where he will study and treat my medical illness. (And all this to be at his expense! This means, dear friend, that you need not concern yourself about my subsistence this winter.)

  And I? What must I offer in return? I, who none believed would ever again be gainfully employed, I am asked to be Dr. Breuer’s personal philosopher for one month to provide personal philosophic counsel. His life is a torment, he contemplates suicide, he has asked me to guide him out of the thicket of despair.

  How ironic, you must think, that your friend is called upon to muffle death’s siren call, the same friend who is so enticed by that rhapsody, the very friend who wrote you last saying that the barrel of a gun seemed not an unfriendly sight!

  Dear friend, I tell you this about my arrangement with Dr. Breuer in total confidence. This is for no one else’s ear, not even Overbeck. You are the only one I entrust with this. I owe the good doctor total confidentiality.

  Our bizarre arrangement evolved to its present form in a complex manner. First he offered to counsel me as part of my medical treatment! What a clumsy subterfuge! He pretended that he was interested only in my welfare, his only wish, his only reward, to make me healthy and whole! But we know about those priestly healers who project their weakness into others and then minister to others only as a way of increasing their own strength. We know about “Christian charity”!

  Naturally, I saw through it and called it by its true name. He choked on the truth for a while—called me blind and base. He swore to elevated motives, mouthed fake sympathy and comical altruisms, but finally, to his credit, he found the strength to seek strength openly and honestly from me.

  Your friend, Nietzsche, in the marketplace! Are you not appalled by the thought? Imagine my Human, All Too Human, or my The Gay Science, caged, tamed, housebroken! Imagine my aphorisms alphabetized into a practicum of homilies for daily life and work! At first, I, too, was appalled! But no longer. The project intrigues me—a forum for my ideas, a vessel to fill when I am ripe and overflowing, an opportunity—indeed, a laboratory, to test ideas on an individual specimen before positing them for the species (that was Dr. Breuer’s notion).

  Your Dr. Breuer, incidentally, seems a superior specimen, with the perceptiveness and the desire to stretch upward. Yes, he has the desire. And he
has the head. But does he have the eyes—and the heart—to see? We shall see!

  So today I convalesce and think quietly about application—a new venture. Perhaps I was in error to think that my sole mission was truth finding. For the next month, I shall see if my wisdom will enable another to live through despair. Why does he come to me? He says that after tasting my conversation and nibbling a bit of Human, All Too Human, he has developed an appetite for my philosophy. Perhaps, given the burden of my physical disease, he thought that I must be an expert on survival.

  Of course he doesn’t know the half of my burden. My friend, the Russian bitch-demon, that monkey with false breasts, continues her course of betrayal. Elisabeth, who says Lou is living with Rée, is campaigning to have her deported for immorality.

  Elisabeth also writes that friend Lou has moved her hate-and-lie campaign to Basel, where she intends to imperil my pension. Cursed be that day in Rome when I first saw her. I have often said to you that every adversity—even encounters with pure evil—makes me stronger. But if I can turn this shit into gold, I shall. . . I shall. . .—we shall see.

  I have not the energy to make a copy of this letter, dear friend. Please return it to me.

  Yours,

  F.N.

  CHAPTER 13

  IN THE FIACRE on their way to the clinic later that day, Breuer raised the question of confidentiality, and proposed that Nietzsche might feel more comfortable being admitted under a pseudonym—specifically as Eckart Müller, the name he had used when discussing his patient with Freud.

  “Eckart Müller, Eckkkkkkart Müuuller, Eckart Müuuuuuuller,” Nietzsche, obviously in high spirits, caroled the name to himself slowly in a soft whisper as if to discern its melody. “It’s as good a name as any other, I suppose. Does it have special significance? Perhaps,” he speculated mischievously, “it’s the name of some other notoriously obstinate patient?”

  “It’s simply a mnemonic,” Breuer said. “I form a pseudonym for a patient’s name by substituting for each initial the letter in the alphabet immediately preceding it. Thus, I got E.M. And Eckart Müller was simply the first E.M. that occurred to me.”

  Nietzsche smiled. “Perhaps, some medical historian will one day write a book on famous physicians of Vienna, and wonder why the distinguished Doctor Josef Breuer so often visited a certain Eckart Müller, a mysterious man without past or future.”

  It was the first time Breuer had seen Nietzsche being playful. It boded well for the future, and Breuer reciprocated. “And pity the philosophic biographers of the future when they attempt to trace the whereabouts of Professor Friedrich Nietzsche during the month of December in the year eighteen eighty-two.”

  A few minutes later, when he had thought more about it, Breuer began to regret having suggested a pseudonym. Having to address Nietzsche by a false name in the presence of the clinic staff imposed a wholly unnecessary subterfuge upon an already duplicitous situation. Why had he added to his burden? After all, Nietzsche did not need the protection of a pseudonym for the treatment of hemicrania, a straightforward medical condition. If anything, their present arrangement demanded that he, Breuer, take the risks, and hence, he, not Nietzsche, needed the sanctuary of confidentiality.

  The fiacre entered the eighth district, known as Josefstadt, and stopped at the gates of the Lauzon Clinic. The gatekeeper, recognizing Fischmann, discreetly avoided peering into the cab and scurried to open the swinging iron gates. The fiacre lurched and bounced over the hundred-meter cobblestone driveway to the white-columned portico of the central building. The Lauzon Clinic, a handsome, four-story structure of white stone, housed forty neurological and psychiatric patients. When it was built three hundred years before as the city home of the Baron Friedrich Lauzon, it lay immediately outside the city walls of Vienna and was encircled by its own walls, along with stables, a coach house, servants’ cottages, and twenty acres of garden and orchard. Here, generation after generation of young Lauzons were born, reared, and sent out to hunt the great wild boar. Upon the death of the last Baron Lauzon and his family in the typhoid epidemic of 1858, the Lauzon estate had passed to Baron Wertheim, a distant, improvident cousin who rarely left his country estate in Bavaria.

  Advised by the estate executives that he could divest himself of the burden of his inherited property only by transforming it into a public institution, Baron Wertheim decided that the building should become a convalescent hospital, with the stipulation that his family receive perpetual free medical care. A charity trust was established, and a board of trustees enlisted—the latter unusual for including not only several leading Viennese Catholic families but two Jewish philanthropic families, the Gomperzes and the Altmanns. Though the hospital, which had opened in 1860, ministered primarily to the wealthy, six of its forty beds were endowed and made available to poor, but clean patients.

  It was one of these six beds that Breuer, who represented the Altmann family on the hospital board, commandeered for Nietzsche. Breuer’s influence at the Lauzon extended beyond his board membership; he was also the personal physician of the hospital director and several other members of the administration.

  When Breuer and his new patient arrived at the clinic, they were greeted with great deference. All formal intake and registration procedures were waived, and the director and the chief nurse personally conducted doctor and patient on a tour of the available rooms.

  “Too dark,” Breuer said about the first room. “Herr Müller needs light for reading and correspondence. Let’s look at something on the south side.”

  The second room was small but bright, and Nietzsche commented, “This will do. The light is much better.”

  But Breuer quickly overruled him. “Too small, no air. What else is free?”

  Nietzsche also liked the third room. “Yes, this is entirely satisfactory.”

  But Breuer again was not pleased. “Too public. Too noisy. Can you make something available farther from the nursing desk?”

  When they entered the next room, Nietzsche did not wait for Breuer’s comment but immediately put his briefcase into the closet, took off his shoes, and lay down on the bed. There was no argument, since Breuer also approved of this bright, spacious third-floor corner room, with its large fireplace and excellent view of the gardens. Both men admired the large, slightly bald, but still regal salmon-and-blue Isfahan carpet, obviously a remnant of happier, healthier days at the Lauzon estate. Nietzsche nodded in appreciation of Breuer’s request that a writing table, a gas desk lamp, and a comfortable chair be placed in the room.

  As soon as they were alone, Nietzsche acknowledged that he had gotten up too quickly from his last attack: he felt fatigued, and his head pain was returning. Without protest, he agreed to spend the next twenty-four hours resting quietly in bed. Breuer walked down the hall to the nursing desk to order medications: colchicine for pain, chloral hydrate for sleep. So heavily addicted was Nietzsche to chloral that withdrawal would require several weeks.

  When Breuer leaned into Nietzsche’s room to take his leave, Nietzsche lifted his head from his pillow and, holding out the small glass of water by his bed, proposed a toast: “Until the official beginning of our project tomorrow! After a brief rest, I plan to spend the rest of the day developing a strategy for our philosophic counseling. Auf Wiedersehen, Doctor Breuer.”

  A strategy! Time, Breuer thought in the fiacre on the way home, time for me, too, to think about a strategy. So consumed had he been with ensnaring Nietzsche that he had given no thought whatsoever to how he was to tame his quarry, now in room 13 of the Lauzon Clinic. As the fiacre swayed and rattled, Breuer tried to concentrate on his own strategy. It all seemed a muddle, he had no real guidelines, no precedents. He would have to devise an entirely new treatment procedure. Best to discuss this with Sig; it was the kind of challenge he loved. Breuer told Fischmann to stop at the hospital and locate Doctor Freud.

  The Allgemeine Krankenhaus, the Vienna General Hospital, where Freud, a clinical aspirant, was preparing himself for
a career as a medical practitioner, was a small city unto itself. It housed two thousand patients and consisted of a dozen quadrangle buildings, each a separate department—each with its own courtyard and wall, each connected by a maze of subterranean tunnels to all the other quadrangular buildings. A four-meter stone wall separated the entire community from the outside world.

  Fischmann, long familiar with the secrets of the maze, ran to fetch Freud from his medical ward. A few minutes later, he returned alone: “Doctor Freud’s not there. Doctor Hauser said he went to his Stammlokal an hour ago.”

  Freud’s coffeehouse, the Café Landtmann on Franzens-Ring, was only a few blocks from the hospital; and there Breuer found him, sitting alone, drinking coffee, and reading a French literary journal. The Café Landtmann was frequented by physicians, clinical aspirants, and medical students; and though far less fashionable than Breuer’s Cafe Griensteidl, it subscribed to over eighty periodicals, perhaps more than any other Vienna coffeehouse.

  “Sig, let’s go to Demel’s for a pastry. I’ve got some interesting things to tell you about the case of the migrainous professor.”

  Freud had his coat on in seconds. Though he loved Vienna’s premier pastry shop, he couldn’t afford to go except as someone’s guest. Ten minutes later, they were seated at a quiet corner table. Breuer ordered two coffees, a chocolate torte for himself, and a lemon torte mit Schlag for Freud, which he finished so quickly that Breuer persuaded his young friend to choose another from the three-tiered silver pastry wagon. When Freud had finished a chocolate custard mille-feuille and a second coffee, both men lit cigars. Then Breuer described in detail everything that had happened with his Herr Müller since their last talk: the professor’s refusal to enter psychological treatment, his angry departure, the middle-of-the-night migraine, the strange house call, his overdose and peculiar state of consciousness, the small, plaintive voice calling for help, and, finally, the remarkable bargain they had struck in Breuer’s office that morning.