When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  We are in a strange struggle. To see who can most help the other. I am troubled by this competition: I fear it will confirm for him his inane “power” model of social relations. Maybe I should do what Max says: stop competing and learn what I can from him. It is important for him to be in control. I see many signs that he feels victorious: he tells me how much he has to teach me, he reads his notes to me, he looks at the time and cavalierly dismisses me with an assignment for our next meeting. All this is irritating! But then I remind myself that I am a physician: I do not meet with him for my personal pleasure. After all, what is the personal pleasure in removing a patient’s tonsils or dislodging a fecal impaction?

  There was one moment today when I experienced a strange absence. I almost felt as though I were in a trance. Maybe I am, after all, susceptible to mesmerism.

  Friedrich Nietzsche’s Notes on Dr. Breuer, 6 December 1882

  Sometimes it is worse For a philosopher to be understood than to be misunderstood. He tries to understand me too well; he attempts to wheedle specific directions from me. He wants to discover my way and use that as his way also. Not yet does he understand that there is a my way and a your way, but that there is no “the” way. And he does not ask for directions forthrightly but instead wheedles and pretends his wheedling is something else: he tries to persuade me that my revelation is essential to the process of our work, that it will help him talk, will make us more “human” together, as though wallowing in muck together is what it means to be human! I try to teach him that lovers of truth do not fear stormy or dirty water. What we fear is shallow water!

  If medical practice is to serve as a guide in this endeavor, then must I not arrive at a “diagnosis”? Here is a new science—the diagnosis of despair. I diagnose him as one who longs to be a free spirit but cannot shed the fetters of belief. He wants only the yes, the acceptance, of choice, none of the no, the relinquishment. He is a self-deceiver: he makes choices but refuses to be the one who chooses. He knows he is miserable, but he does not know that he is miserable about the wrong thing! He expects from me relief, comfort, and happiness. But I must give him more misery. I must change his trivial misery back into the noble misery it once was.

  How to detach trivial misery from its perch? To make suffering honest again? I used his own technique—the third-person technique that he employed with me last week in his clumsy attempt to entice me to put myself into his care; I instructed him to look at himself from above. But it was too strong; he almost fainted. I had to speak to him as a chld, to call him “Josef,” to revive him.

  My burden is great. I work for his liberation. And my own as well. But I am not a Breuer: I comprehend my misery and I welcome it. And Lou Salomé is no cripple. Yet I know what it is to be besieged by one whom I love and hate!

  CHAPTER 16

  A GREAT PRACTITIONER of the art of medicine, Breuer usually began his hospital visits with bedside small talk which he gracefully guided into medical inquiry. But there was to be no small talk when he entered room 13 of the Lauzon Clinic the following morning. Nietzsche immediately announced that he felt unusually healthy and wished to waste none of their precious time talking about his nonexistent symptoms. He suggested that they get right down to business.

  “My time will come again, Doctor Breuer; my illness never strays too long or too far. But now that it’s en vacance, let’s continue our work on your problems. What progress have you made on the thought experiment I proposed yesterday? What would you think about were you not preoccupied with fantasies of Bertha?”

  “Professor Nietzsche, let me speak of something else first. There was a moment yesterday when you dropped my professional title and called me Josef. I liked it. I felt closer to you, and I liked that. Even though we have a professional relationship, the nature of our discourse requires that we speak intimately. Would you, therefore, be willing for us to use one another’s first names?”

  Nietzsche, who had arranged his life to avoid such personal interaction, was nonplused. He squirmed and stuttered but, apparently finding no gracious way to refuse, finally nodded grudgingly. To Breuer’s further question whether to address him as Friedrich or Fritz, Nietzsche all but barked, “Friedrich, please. And now to work!”

  “Yes, to work! Back to your question. What’s behind Bertha? I know there is a stream of deeper and darker concerns, which I’m convinced intensified several months ago when I passed my fortieth year. You know, Friedrich, a crisis around the forty-year mark is not unusual. Take care, you have only two years to prepare yourself.”

  Breuer knew that his familiarity made Nietzsche uncomfortable, but that also parts of him yearned for closer human contact.

  “I am not very concerned,” said Nietzsche tentatively. “I think I have been forty since I was twenty!”

  What was this? An approach! Without question, an approach! Breuer thought of a kitten his son Robert had recently found in the street. Set out some milk, he had told Robert, and back away. Let it drink safely and become used to your presence. Later, when it feels secure, you may be able to caress it. Breuer backed away.

  “How to best describe my thoughts? I think morbid, dark things. Often I feel as if my life has crested.” Breuer paused, remembering how he had put it to Freud. “I’ve climbed to the peak, and when I peer over the edge to view what lies ahead, I see only deterioration—descent into aging, grandparenting, white hair, or, indeed”—tapping the bald center of his scalp—“no hair at all. But no, that’s not quite right. It’s not descending that troubles me—it’s the not ascending.”

  “Not ascending, Doctor Breuer? Why can’t you continue to ascend?”

  “Friedrich, I know it’s hard to break the habit, but please call me Josef.”

  “Josef, then. Tell me, Josef, about not ascending.”

  “Sometimes I imagine everyone has a secret phrase, Friedrich, a deep motif that becomes the central myth of one’s life. When I was a child, someone once called me ‘the lad of infinite promise.’ I loved that phrase. I’ve hummed it to myself thousands of times. Often I’ve imagined myself as a tenor singing it at a high pitch: ‘the laaaaaad of in-fin-ite prom-ise.’ I liked to say it slowly and dramatically, emphasizing each syllable. Even now the words move me!”

  “And what has happened to that lad of infinite promise?”

  “Ah, that question! I ponder it often. What has become of him? I know now that there is no more promise—it’s been used up!”

  “Tell me, precisely what do you mean by ‘promise’?”

  “I’m not sure I know. I used to think I did. It meant the potential to climb, to spiral upward; it meant success, acclaim, scientific discoveries. But I’ve tasted the fruit of these promises. I’m a respected physician, a respectable citizen. I’ve made some important scientific discoveries—as long as historical records exist, my name will always be known as one of the discoverers of the function of the inner ear in the regulation of equilibrium. And, also, I participated in the discovery of an important respiratory regulatory process known as the Herring-Breuer reflex.”

  “Then, Josef, are you not a fortunate man? Have you not fulfilled your promise?”

  Nietzsche’s tone was puzzling. Was he truly asking for information? Or playing Socrates to Breuer’s Alcibiades? Breuer decided to answer at face value.

  “Fulfillment of goals—yes. But without satisfaction, Friedrich. At first, the flush of a new success lasted for months. But gradually it has grown more fleeting—weeks, then days, even hours—until now the feeling evaporates so quickly that it no longer even penetrates my skin. I now believe my goals were imposters—they were never the true destiny of the lad of infinite promise. Often I feel disoriented: the old goals don’t work any more, and I’ve lost the knack of inventing new ones. When I think about the flow of my life, I feel betrayed or tricked, as though a celestial joke has been played on me, as though I’ve danced my life away to the wrong tune.”

  “Wrong tune?”

  “The tune of the lad of infin
ite promise—the tune I’ve hummed all my life!”

  “It was the right tune, Josef, but the wrong dance!”

  “The right tune but the wrong dance? What do you mean?”

  Nietzsche remained silent.

  “You mean I interpreted the word ‘promise’ incorrectly?”

  “And ‘infinite’ as well, Josef.”

  “I don’t understand. Can you speak more clearly?”

  “Perhaps you must learn to speak more clearly to yourself. In the last few days, I have realized that the philosophic cure consists of learning to listen to your own inner voice. Didn’t you tell me that your patient, Bertha, cured herself through talking about every aspect of her thoughts? What was the term you used to describe that?”

  “Chimneysweeping. Actually she invented the term—to sweep her chimney meant to unplug herself so that she could ventilate her brain, cleanse her mind of all disturbing thoughts.”

  “It’s a good metaphor,” Nietzsche said. “Perhaps we should try to use the method in our talks. Perhaps right now. Could you, for example, try to chimneysweep about the lad of infinite promise?”

  Breuer leaned his head back in his chair. “I think I’ve said it all. That aging lad has reached the point in life when he can no longer see its point. His purpose for living—my purpose, my goals, the rewards that drove me through life—all seem absurd now. When I dwell on how I have pursued absurdities, how I have wasted the only life I have, a feeling of terrible desperation settles over me.”

  “What should you have pursued, instead?”

  Breuer felt heartened by Nietzsche’s tone, more kindly now, more assured, as if he were familiar with this terrain.

  “That’s the worst part! Life is an examination with no correct answers. If I had it to do all over again, I think I would do exactly the same thing, make the same mistakes. The other day I thought of a good plot for a novella. If only I could write! Imagine this: a middle-aged man, who has led an unsatisfying life, is approached by a genie, who offers him the opportunity to relive his life while maintaining full recall of his previous life. Of course, he leaps at the chance. But to his amazement and horror, he finds himself living the identical life—making the same choices, the same mistakes, embracing the same false goals and gods.”

  “And these goals you live by, where did they come from? How did you choose them?”

  “How did I choose my goals? Choose, choose—your favorite word! Boys of five or ten or twenty don’t choose their life. I don’t know how to think about your question.”

  “Don’t think,” urged Nietzsche. “Just chimneysweep!”

  “Goals? Goals are in the culture, the air. You breathe them in. Every young boy I grew up with inhaled the same goals. We all wanted to climb out of the Jewish ghetto, to rise in the world, to achieve success, wealth, respectability. That’s what everybody wanted! No one of us ever set about deliberately choosing goals—they were just there, the natural consequences of my time, my people, my family.”

  “But they didn’t work for you, Josef. They were not solid enough to support a life. Oh, perhaps they might be solid enough for some, for those with poor vision, or for the slow runners who chug all their lives after material objectives, or even for those who attain success but have the knack of continually setting new goals just out of their reach. But you, like me, have good eyes. You looked too far into life. You saw that it was futile to reach wrong goals and futile to set new wrong goals. Multiplications of zero are always zero!”

  Breuer was entranced by these words. Everything else—walls, windows, fireplace, even the corpus of Nietzsche—faded. He had been waiting all his life for this exchange.

  “Yes, everything you say is true, Friedrich—except for your insistence that one chooses one’s life plan in a deliberate fashion. The individual doesn’t consciously select his life goals: they are an accident of history—are they not?”

  “Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.”

  “But,” Breuer protested, “no one has such freedom. You can’t step outside the perspective of your time, your culture, your family, your———”

  “Once,” Nietzsche interrupted, “a wise Jewish teacher advised his followers to break with their mother and father and to seek perfection. That might be a step worthy of a lad of infinite promise! That might have been the right dance to the right tune.”

  The right dance to the right tune! Breuer tried to concentrate on the meaning of these words, but grew suddenly discouraged.

  “Friedrich, I have a passion for such talk, but a voice inside keeps asking, ‘Are we getting anywhere?’ Our discussion is too ethereal—too distant from the pounding in my chest and the heaviness in my head.”

  “Patience, Josef. How long did you say your Anna O. chimneyswept?”

  “Yes, it took time. Months! But you and I don’t have months. And there was a difference: her chimneysweeping always focused on her pain. But our abstract talk about goals and life purpose feels irrelevant to my pain!”

  Nietzsche, unperturbed, continued as if Breuer had not spoken. “Josef, you say all these life concerns intensified when you became forty?”

  “What perseverance, Friedrich! You inspire me to be more patient with myself. If you have enough interest to ask about my fortieth year, then I must certainly find the resolve to answer you. The fortieth year—yes, that was a year of crisis, my second crisis. I had an earlier crisis at twenty-nine when Oppolzer, the chief of medicine at the university, died during a typhus epidemic. The sixteenth of April in eighteen seventy-one—I still remember the date. He was my teacher, my advocate, my second father.”

  “I’m interested in second fathers,” said Nietzsche. “Tell me more.”

  “He was the great teacher of my life. Everyone knew he was grooming me to be his successor. I was the best candidate and should have been selected to fill his vacant chair. Yet it did not happen. Perhaps I didn’t help it happen. An inferior appointment was made on political grounds, possibly on religious ones as well. There was no longer a place for me, and I moved my laboratory, even my research pigeons, into my home and entered full-time private practice. That,” Breuer said sadly, “was the end of my infinitely promising academic career.”

  “In saying you didn’t help it happen, what do you mean?”

  Breuer looked at Nietzsche with amazement. “What a transformation from philosopher to clinician! You have grown physician’s ears. Nothing escapes you. I threw in that comment because I know I must be honest. Yet it’s a sore point still. I hadn’t wanted to talk about it, yet it was the very statement you picked up.”

  “You see, Josef, the very instant I urge you to talk about something against your will—that’s the moment you choose to assume power by paying me a very fine compliment. Now can you still claim that the struggle for power is not an important part of our relationship?”

  Breuer slumped back in his chair. “Oh, that again.” He waved his hand in front of him. “Let’s not reopen that debate. Please, let it go.”

  Then he added, “Wait! I’ve got one last comment: if you forbid the expression of any positive sentiments, then you bring to pass the very kind of relationship you predicted you would discover in vivo. That’s bad science—you’re tampering with the data.”

  “Bad science?” Nietzsche thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right! Debate closed! Let’s return to how you didn’t help your own career.”

  “Well, the evidence is abundant. I procrastinated writing and publishing scientific articles. I refused to take the formal preliminary steps necessary for tenure. I didn’t join the correct medical associations, or participate in university committees, or make the right political connections. I don’t know why. Maybe this has to do with power. Maybe I shrink from the competitive struggle. It’s easier for me to compete with the mystery of a pigeon’s equilibrium system than with another man. I think it’s my problems with competition that cause me such pain when I think of Bertha
with another man.”

  “Maybe, Josef, you felt that a lad of infinite promise shouldn’t have to scratch and claw his way upward.”

  “Yes, that, too, I’ve felt. But whatever the reason, it was the end of my academic career. It was the first wound of mortality, the first assault on my myth of infinite promise.”

  “So, that was at twenty-nine. And turning forty—the second crisis?”

  “A deeper wound. Becoming forty shattered the idea that all things were possible for me. Suddenly I understood life’s most obvious fact: that time is irreversible, that my life was running out. Of course, I knew that before, but knowing it at forty was a different kind of knowing. Now I know that ‘the lad of infinite promise’ was merely a marching banner, that ‘promise’ is an illusion, that ‘infinite’ is meaningless, and that I am in lockstep with all other men marching toward death.”

  Nietzsche shook his head emphatically. “You call clear vision a wound? Look at what you have learned, Josef: that time cannot be broken, that the will cannot will backward. Only the fortunate grasp such insights!”

  “Fortunate? A strange word! I learn that death approaches, that I’m impotent and insignificant, that life has no real purpose or value—and you call that fortunate!”

  “The fact that the will cannot will backward does not mean the will is impotent! Because, thank God, God is dead—that does not mean existence has no purpose! Because death comes—that does not mean that life has no value. These are all things I shall teach you in time. But we have done enough for today—perhaps too much. Before tomorrow, please review our discussion. Meditate upon it!”