When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  “But, Professor Nietzsche, as you yourself say, power is the important thing. I had the power by virtue of my position. She looked to me for help. I was aware of her vulnerability, aware that she loved her father very much, perhaps too much, and that her illness was precipitated by his death. I also knew that she imbued me with the love she had felt for him, and I exploited it. I wanted her to love me. Do you know what her last words to me were? After telling her I was transferring her care to another doctor, I walked away, and she called out, ‘You will always be the only man for me—there will never be another man in my life!’ Terrible words! Evidence of how much I had harmed her. But there was something even more terrible: I enjoyed those words! I enjoyed hearing her acknowledge my power over her! So you see, I left her weakened. Crippled. I might as well have bound and maimed her feet!”

  “And since you last saw her,” Nietzsche asked, “what has been the fate of this cripple?”

  “She was admitted to another sanatorium, in Kreuzlingen. Many of her original symptoms have recurred—her mood fluctuations, her loss of her mother tongue every morning, and her pain, which can be controlled only by morphine, to which she is addicted. One fact of interest: her doctor there fell in love with her, removed himself from her case, and has subsequently proposed marriage to her!”

  “Ah, the same pattern repeats itself with the next doctor, you notice?”

  “I notice only that I am devastated by the thought of Bertha together with another man. Please add ‘jealousy’ to your list: it’s one of my major problems. I am infested with visions of the two of them talking, touching, even making love. Though such visions inflict great pain, I continue to torment myself. Can you understand that? Have you ever experienced such jealousy?”

  This question marked a turning point in the session. At first, Breuer had deliberately revealed himself in order to set a model for Nietzsche, hoping to encourage him to reciprocate. But soon he had become entirely immersed in the confessional process. There was, after all, no risk—Nietzsche, believing he was Breuer’s counselor, had given his oath of confidentiality.

  It was a new experience: never before had Breuer shared so much of himself. There was Max—but with Max, he had wished to preserve his image and had chosen his words carefully. And even with Eva Berger, he had always held back, concealing his age creaks, his vacillations and self-doubts, all those qualities that might make an older man appear weak or stodgy to an attractive young woman.

  But when he began to describe his jealous feelings about Bertha and her new doctor, Breuer had changed back into the role of Nietzsche’s physician. He did not lie—indeed, there were rumors about Bertha and another doctor, and, indeed, he had suffered from jealousy—but he exaggerated his feelings in an attempt to orchestrate Nietzsche’s self-revelation. For Nietzsche must have felt jealousy in the “Pythagorean” relationship involving himself, Lou Salomé, and Paul Ree.

  But this strategy was without effect. At least, Nietzsche gave no evidence of unusual interest in this theme. He merely nodded vaguely, turned the pages of his notebook, and scanned his notes. The two men lapsed into silence. They stared at the dying fire. Then Breuer reached into his pocket and took out his heavy gold watch—a gift from his father. The back was inscribed, “To Josef, my son. Bear the spirit of my spirit into the future.” He looked at Nietzsche. Did those weary eyes reflect the hope that this interview might be nearing its end? It was time to go.

  “Professor Nietzsche, it does me good to talk to you. But I have a responsibility to you as well, and it occurs to me that I prescribed rest to avoid inflaming your migraine and then snatched it away by forcing you to listen for so long. Another thought: I remember the description you once gave me of your typical day, a day containing little close contact with others. Is this too large a dose all at once? Not only too much time, too much talk and listening, but also too much of another’s intimate life?”

  “Our agreement calls for honesty, Doctor Breuer, and it would not be honest to disagree with you. It has been a great deal today, and I am fatigued.” He slumped back in his chair. “But no, I don’t hear too much of your intimate life. I learn from you, too. I meant it when I said that when it comes to learning how to relate to other people, I have to start from scratch!”

  As Breuer stood and reached for his coat, Nietzsche added, “One final comment. You’ve talked a great deal about the second item on our list: ‘besieged by alien thoughts.’ Perhaps we have today exhausted that category, for I now have an appreciation of how these unworthy thoughts invade and possess your mind. Yet they are nonetheless your thoughts, and it is your mind. I wonder what benefit there is to you in permitting this to occur—or, to put it more strongly—in making it occur.”

  Breuer, who had one arm in his coat sleeve, froze. “Making it occur? I don’t know. All I can say is that, from the inside, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like it happens to me. Your claim that I make it happen has—how shall I say?—no emotional meaning for me.”

  “We must find a way to give it meaning.” And Nietzsche rose and walked to the door with Breuer. “Let us try a thought experiment. For tomorrow’s discussion, please consider this question: If you were not thinking these alien thoughts, what would you be thinking?”

  Excerpts from Dr. Breuer’s Case Notes on Eckart Müller, 5 December 1882

  An excellent beginning! Much accomplished He developed a list of my problems and plans to focus on one at a time. Good. Let him think this is what we are doing. To encourage him to confess, I bared myself today. He did not reciprocate but, in time, it will come. Certainly he was astounded, and impressed, by my openness.

  I have an interesting tactical idea! I shall describe his situation as if it were my own. Then I let him counsel me and, in so doing, he will silently counsel himself. Thus, for example, I can help him work on his triangle—with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée—by asking for help with my triangle with Bertha and her new doctor. He is so secretive that this may be the only way to help him. Perhaps he will never be honest enough to ask for help directly.

  He has an original mind. I cannot predict his responses. Perhaps Lou Salomé is right; perhaps he is destined to be a great philosopher. As long as he avoids the subject of human beings! In most aspects of human relatedness he has prodigious blind spots. But when it comes to the subject of women, he is barbaric, hardly human. No matter who the woman or what the situation, his response is predictable: the woman is predatory and scheming. And his advice about women is equally predictable: blame them, punish them! Oh yes, one other mode—avoid them!

  As for sexual feelings: Does he have any at aff? Does he view women as too dangerous? He must have sexual desire. But what happens to it? Is it dammed up, exerting pressure that must somehow burst out? Can that be, I wonder, the source of the migraine?

  Excerpts from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Notes on Dr. Breuer, 5 December 1882

  The list grows. To my list of six, Doctor Breuer added five more.

  7. Feelings of being trapped—by marriage, by life

  8. Feeling distant from wife

  9. Regret about refusing Eva’s sexual “sacrifice”

  10. Overconcern about other physicians’ opinions of him

  11. Jealousy—Benha and another man

  Will the list ever end? Will each day spawn new problems? How do I make him see that his problems clamor for attention only in order to obscure that which he does not wish to see? Petty thoughts infiltrate his mind like a fungus. They will eventually rot his body. As he left today, I asked him, what he would see if he were not blinded by trivia. Thus I pointed the way. Will he take it?

  He is a curious mix—intelligent yet blind, sincere yet devious. Does he know of his own insincerity? He says I help him. He praises me. Does he know how I hate gifts? Does he know gifts scratch my skin and destroy my sleep? Is he one of those who pretends to give—only to elicit gifts? I shall not give them. Is he one who reveres reverence? Is he one who wants to find me rather than himself? I must gi
ve him nothing! When a friend needs a resting place, it is best to offer a hard cot!

  He is engaging, sympathetic. Beware! About some things he has persuaded himself to reach upward, but his entrails have not been persuaded. About women, he is hardly human. A tragedy—to wallow in that muck! I know that muck: it is good to look down and see what I have overcome.

  The greatest tree reaches for the highest heights and sinks the deepest roots, into darkness—even into evil; but he neither reaches up nor thrusts downward. Animal lust drains his strength—and his reason. Three women rend him, and he is grateful to them. He licks their bloody fangs.

  One of them sprays him with her musk and pretends to sacrifice. She offers the “gift” of bondage—his bondage.

  The other torments him. She pretends weakness so as to press herself against him as she walks. She pretends to sleep so as to place her head against his manhood and, when bored with these small torments, she humiliates him publicly. When that game is up, she moves on and continues her tricks with the next victim. And he is blind to all this. No matter what, he loves her. Whatever she does, he pities her patienthood, and he loves her.

  The third woman binds him into permanent captivity. But that one I prefer. At least she does not hide her claws!

  Letter to Lou Salomé from Friedrich Nietzsche, Decembe. 1882

  My dear Lou,

  . . . You have in me the best advocate but also the most merciless judge! I demand you judge yourself and that you determine your own punishment. . . . I had decided for myself back in Orta to reveal my whole philosophy to you. Oh you have no idea what a decision that was: I believed I couldn’t make a better present to anyone. . . .

  I tended back then to consider you a vision and manifestation of my earthly ideal. Please note I have terrible eyesight!

  I think no one can think better of you, but also not worse.

  If I had created you I would have given you better health and much more beyond that which is far more worthy. . . and perhaps a bit more love for me (although that has the absolute least importance) and it would have been the same with friend Rée. Neither with you nor with him can I speak even a single word about matters of my heart. I imagine you don’t know at all what I want?—but this forced noiselessness is almost suffocating because I am fond of you people.

  F.N.

  CHAPTER 15

  FOLLOWING THEIR FIRST SESSION, Breuer devoted only a few more minutes of his official time to Nietzsche: he wrote a note in Eckart Müller’s chart, briefed the nurses about the status of his migraine, and, later in his office, wrote a more personal report in a notebook identical to the one Nietzsche used for his own notes.

  But over the next twenty-four hours, Nietzsche claimed much of Breuer’s unofficial time—time pilfered from other patients, from Mathilde, from his children, and, most of all, from his sleep. Sleeping only fitfully during the early hours of the night, Breuer dreamed vividly, disquietingly.

  He dreamed that he and Nietzsche were talking together in a room that had no walls—perhaps a theater set. Workers who passed by carrying furniture listened to their conversation. The room felt temporary, as though it could all be folded up and carted away.

  In a second dream, he sat in the bathtub and opened the water faucet. Out poured a stream of insects, small pieces of machinery, and large globules of slime which dangled from the faucet’s mouth in long, odious strands. The machinery parts puzzled him. The slime and insects disgusted him.

  At three o’clock, he was awakened by his recurrent nightmare: the ground trembling, the search for Bertha, the earth liquefying beneath his feet. He slipped into the earth, sinking forty feet before coming to rest on a white slab inscribed with an illegible message.

  Breuer lay awake, listening to the pounding of his heart. He tried to calm himself with intellectual tasks. First, he wondered why things that seem sunny and benign at twelve noon so often drip with fear at three in the morning. Obtaining no relief, he turned to another diversion and tried to recall everything he had revealed to Nietzsche earlier that day. But the more he remembered, the more agitated he became. Had he said too much? Had his disclosures repulsed Nietzsche? What had possessed him to blurt out all his secret, shameful feelings about Bertha and Eva? At the time it had seemed right, even expiating, to share everything; but now he cringed to think of Nietzsche’s opinion of him. Though knowing Nietzsche had puritanical feelings about sex, he had nonetheless assaulted him with sexual talk. Perhaps intentionally. Perhaps, hiding behind the mantle of patienthood, he had meant to shock and outrage him. But why?

  Soon Bertha, the empress of his mind, glided into view, flattening and scattering other thoughts, demanding his sole attention. Her sexual allure was unusually powerful that night: Bertha slowly and shyly unbuttoning her hospital gown; a naked Bertha entering trance; Bertha cupping her breast and beckoning him; his mouth filled with her soft, jutting nipple; Bertha parting her legs, whispering, “Take me,” and tugging him to her. Breuer throbbed with desire; he considered reaching out to Mathilde for relief, but could not bear the duplicity and the guilt of, once again, using her body while imagining Bertha beneath him. He rose early to relieve himself.

  “It seems,” Breuer said to Nietzsche later that morning while reviewing his hospital chart, “Herr Müller had a much better night’s sleep than did Doctor Breuer.” He then recounted the events of his night: the fitful sleep, the dread, the dreams, the obsessions, his concerns about having revealed too much.

  Nietzsche nodded knowingly throughout Breuer’s statement and recorded the dreams in his notebook. “As you know, I, too, have known such nights. Last night, with only one gram of chloral, I slept for five consecutive hours—but such a night is rare. Like you, I dream, I choke on night-dread. Like you, I have often wondered why fears reign at night. After twenty years of such wondering, I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars—always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight.

  “And dreams,” Nietzsche continued as he rose from the bed and walked with Breuer across the room to their chairs by the fireplace, “dreams are a glorious mystery which beg to be understood. I envy you your dreams. I rarely capture mine. I do not agree with the Swiss physician who once advised me not to waste my time thinking about dreams because they were nothing but random waste material, the nightly excretions of the mind. He claimed the brain cleanses itself every twenty-four hour by defecating the day’s excess thoughts into dreams!”

  Nietzsche paused to read his notes on Breuer’s dreams. “Your nightmare is entirely baffling, but I believe your other two dreams emerged from our discussion yesterday. You tell me you worry that you might have revealed too much—and then you dream of a public room without walls. And the other dream—the spigot and mucus and insects—does it not corroborate your fear that you spewed out too much of the dark, unpleasant parts of yourself?”

  “Yes, it was strange how that notion grew larger and larger as the night progressed. I worried that I had offended you, shocked or disgusted you. I worried how you might regard me.”

  “But did I not predict it?” Nietzsche, sitting cross-legged in the chair opposite Breuer, tapped his pencil against his notebook for emphasis. “This worry about my feelings is what I had feared; it was precisely for this reason I urged you not to reveal more than was necessary for my comprehension. I wish to help you stretch and grow, not weaken yourself by confessing your failings.”

  “But, Professor Nietzsche, here we have a major area of disagreement. In fact, last week we quarreled about this very issue. Let’s try to reach a more amiable conclusion this time. I remember your saying, and also I read in your books, that all relationships must be understood on the basis of power. Yet that’s simply not true for me. I’m not competing: I have no interest in defeating you. I only want your help in recapturing my life. The balance of power between us—who wins, who loses—seems trivial and irrelevant.”

  “Then why, Doctor Breuer, do you feel ashamed of having
shown me your weaknesses?”

  “Not because I’ve lost some contest with you! Who cares about that? I feel bad for one reason only: I value your opinion of me, and I fear that, after yesterday’s sordid confession, you think far less of me! Consult your list”—Breuer gestured toward Nietzsche’s notebook. “Remember the item about self-hatred—number three, I believe. I keep my true self hidden because there are so many despicable things about me. Then I dislike myself even more because I’m cut off from other people. If I’m ever to break this vicious cycle, I must be able to reveal myself to others!”

  “Perhaps, but look”—and Nietzsche pointed toward item 10 in the notebook. “Here you say you are overconcerned with the opinions of your colleagues. I have known many who dislike themselves and try to rectify this by first persuading others to think well of them. Once that is done, then they begin to think well of themselves. But this is a false solution, this is submission to the authority of others. Your task is to accept yourself—not to find ways to gain my acceptance.”

  Breuer’s head began to spin. He had a quick, penetrating mind and was not accustomed to being systematically outreasoned. But, obviously, rational debate with Nietzsche was inadvisable; he could never defeat him or persuade him of anything contrary to his position. Perhaps, Breuer concluded, he might do better with an impulsive, irrational approach.

  “No, no, no! Believe me, Professor Nietzsche, while that makes sense, it won’t work with me! I know only that I need your acceptance. You are right: the ultimate goal is to be independent of others’ opinions, but the route to that goal—and I speak for myself, not for you—is to know that I am not beyond the pale of decency. I need to be able to reveal everything about myself to another and to learn that I, too, am. . . simply human.”