When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  “Of course, Frau Becker—as usual. But you seem perturbed?” Breuer knew that she had not only taken a great dislike to Lou Salomé during her first visit but also blamed her for the entire burdensome venture with Nietzsche. The daily visit to the Lauzon Clinic introduced such a strain into Breuer’s office schedule that he now rarely had time to pay much attention to his nurse.

  “To be honest, Doctor Breuer, I was irritated by her strolling into your office, so crowded with patients already, and expecting you’d be here waiting for her and that she should be ushered in ahead of everyone else. And, on top of that, asking me for the professor’s address! Something not right about it—going behind your back and the professor’s too!”

  “That’s why I say you did the right thing,” said Breuer soothingly. “You were discreet, you referred her to me, and you protected our patient’s privacy. No one could have handled it better. Now, send in Herr Wittner.”

  At around five fifteen, Frau Becker announced Fraulein Salomé’s arrival and, in the same breath, reminded him that five patients were still waiting to be seen.

  “Whom shall I send in next? Frau Mayer has been waiting almost two hours.”

  Breuer felt squeezed. He knew that Lou Salomé expected to be seen immediately.

  “Send Frau Mayer in. I’ll see Fraulein Salomé next.”

  Twenty minutes later, when Breuer was in the midst of writing his note on Frau Mayer, Frau Becker escorted Lou Salomé into the office. Breuer jumped to his feet and pressed to his lips the hand she offered. Since their last meeting, her image had dimmed for him. Now he was struck, once again, with what a beauty she was. How much brighter his office had suddenly become!

  “Ah, gnädiges Fräulein, what a pleasure! I had forgotten!”

  “Forgotten me already, Herr Doctor?”

  “No, not you, just forgotten what a pleasure it is to see you.”

  “Then look more carefully this time. Here, I give you this side”—Lou Salomé turned her head flirtatiously first to the right, then to the left—“and now the other—I’ve been told this is my best side. Do you think so? But now tell me—I must know—you read my little note? Were you not perhaps offended by it?”

  “Offended? No, of course not—though certainly chagrined at having so little time to offer you—perhaps just a quarter of an hour.” He motioned to a chair and, as she settled herself—gracefully, slowly, as though she had at her disposal all the time in the world—Breuer took the chair next to her. “You saw my full waiting room. Unfortunately, there’s no leeway in my time today.”

  Lou Salomé seemed unperturbed. Though she nodded sympathetically, she still gave the impression that Breuer’s waiting room could not possibly have anything to do with her.

  “I must,” he added, “still visit several patients at home, and tonight I have a medical society meeting.”

  “Ah, the price of success, Herr Doctor Professor.”

  Breuer was still not content to leave the matter. “Tell me my dear Fraulein, why live so dangerously? Why not write ahead so I can arrange time for you? Some days I have not a free moment, and on others I am called out of town for consultation. You could have come to Vienna and been unable to meet with me at all. Why take the risk of making a trip in vain?”

  “All my life people have warned me about such risks. And yet thus far I have never—not once—been disappointed. Look at today, this moment! Here I am, talking with you. And perhaps I shall stay over in Vienna, and we can meet again tomorrow. So tell me, Doctor, why should I change behavior that seems to work very well? Besides, I am too impetuous, I often cannot write ahead because I do not plan ahead. I make decisions quickly and act on them quickly.

  “Still, my dear Doctor Breuer,” Lou continued, serenely, “none of this is what I meant when I asked if you were offended by my note. I wondered whether you were offended by my informality, by my using my first name? Most Viennese feel threatened or naked without formal titles, but I abhor unnecessary distance. I should like you to address me as Lou.”

  My God, what a formidable—and provocative—woman, Breuer thought. Despite his discomfort, he saw no way to protest without allying himself with the stuffy Viennese. Suddenly he appreciated the nasty position into which he had placed Nietzsche a few days ago. Still, he and Nietzsche were contemporaries, while Lou Salomé was half his age.

  “Of course, with pleasure. I shall never cast a vote for barriers between us.”

  “Good, then Lou it shall be. Now, as for your waiting patients, rest assured that I have nothing but respect for your profession. In fact my friend Paul Rée and I often discuss plans for entering medical school ourselves. Thus I appreciate obligations to patients, and shall rush to the point. You’ve guessed, no doubt, that I come today with questions and important information about our patient—if, that is, you are still meeting with him. I learned from Professor Overbeck only that Nietzsche left Basel to come to consult with you. I know nothing else.”

  “Yes, we have met. But tell me, Fraulein, what information do you bear?”

  “Letters from Nietzsche—so wild, and enraged, and confused he sometimes sounds as if he’s lost his mind. Here they are,” and she handed Breuer a sheaf of papers. “While waiting to see you today, I copied excerpts for you.”

  Breuer looked at the first page, in Lou Salomé’s neat hand:

  Oh the melancholy. . . where is there a sea in which one can really drown?

  I lost that little that I had: my good name, the trust of a few people. I shall lose my friend, Rée—I have lost the whole year due to the terrible tortures which have hold of me even now.

  One forgives one’s friends with more difficulty than one’s enemies.

  Although there was much more, Breuer abruptly stopped. However fascinating Nietzsche’s words, he knew that every line he read was a betrayal of his patient.

  “Well, Doctor Breuer, what do you think of these letters?”

  “Tell me again about why you felt I must see them.”

  “Well, I got them all at once. Paul had been withholding them from me but decided he had no right to do that.”

  “But why is it urgent that I see them?”

  “Read on! Look what Nietzsche says! I thought certainly a physician must have this information. He mentions suicide. Also, many of the letters are very disorganized: perhaps his rational faculties are deteriorating. And also, I am only human, all these attacks on me—bitter and painful—I can’t just shake them off. To be honest, I need your help!”

  “What kind of help?”

  “I respect your opinion—you’re a trained observer. Do you regard me in this fashion?” She flipped through the letters. “Listen to these charges: ‘A woman without sensitivity. . . without spirit. . . incapable of love . . . undependable. . . crude in things of honor.’ Or to this one: ‘a predator clothed as a house pet,’ or to this: ‘You are a small gallows bird, and I used to think you were the embodiment of virtue and honorableness.’ ”

  Breuer shook his head vigorously. “No, no, of course I do not view you in this way. But in our few meetings—so brief and businesslike—how much value can my opinion be? Is that really the help you seek from me?”

  “I know that much of what Nietzsche writes is impulsive, written in anger, written to punish me. You’ve talked to him. And you’ve talked about me, I’m sure. I must know what he really thinks about me. That is my request of you. What does he say about me? Does he really hate me? Does he regard me as such a monster?”

  Breuer sat silent for a few moments, thinking through all the implications of Lou Salomé’s questions.

  “But, here I am,” she continued, “asking you more questions, and you haven’t yet answered my previous ones: Were you able to persuade him to talk to you? Do you still meet with him? Are you making progress? Have you learned to become a doctor of despair?”

  She paused, staring directly into Breuer’s eyes, waiting for a reply. He felt the pressure build, pressure from all sides—from her, from Niet
zsche, from Mathilde, from his waiting patients, from Frau Becker. He wanted to scream.

  At last, he took a deep breath and replied, “Gnädiges Fraulein, how very sorry I am to say that the only reply I can make is none at all.”

  “None at all!” she exclaimed in surprise. “Doctor Breuer, I don’t understand.”

  “Consider my position. Although the questions you ask me are entirely reasonable, they cannot be answered without my violating a patient’s privacy.”

  “That means, then, that he is your patient, and that you are continuing to see him?”

  “Alas, I cannot even answer that question!”

  “But surely it is different for me,” she said, growing indignant. “I’m not a stranger or a debt collector.”

  “The motives of the questioner are irrelevant. What is relevant is the patient’s right to privacy.”

  “But this is no ordinary type of medical care! This entire project was my idea! I bear the responsibility for bringing Nietzsche to you to prevent his suicide. Surely I deserve to know the outcome of my efforts.”

  “Yes, it’s like designing an experiment and wanting to know the outcome.”

  “Exactly. You’d not deprive me of that?”

  “But what if my telling you the outcome jeopardizes the experiment?”

  “How could that happen?”

  “Trust my judgment in this matter. Remember, you sought me out because you deemed me an expert. Therefore I ask you to treat me as an expert.”

  “But Doctor Breuer, I’m not a disinterested bystander, not a mere witness at the site of an accident with morbid curiosity over the fate of the victim. Nietzsche was important to me—is still important. Also, as I mentioned, I believe I bear some responsibility for his distress.” Her voice grew shrill. “I, too, am distressed. I have a right to know.”

  “Yes, I hear your distress. But as a physician, I must first be concerned with my patient and align myself with him. Perhaps some day, if you go through with your own plans to become a physician, you will appreciate my position.”

  “And my distress? Does that count for nothing?”

  “I am distressed by your distress, but I can do nothing. I must suggest you go elsewhere for help.”

  “Can you supply me with Nietzsche’s address? I can contact him only through Overbeck, who may not be passing my letters to him!”

  Finally, Breuer grew irritated at Lou Salomé’s insistence. The stand he must take became clearer. “You are raising difficult questions about a physician’s duty to his patients. You force me to take positions I haven’t reasoned through. But I believe, now, that I can tell you nothing—not where he lives, or the state of his condition, or even whether he is my patient. And, speaking of patients, Fraulein Salomé,” he said, getting up from the chair, “I must return to those who await me.”

  As Lou Salomé, too, started to rise, Breuer handed her the letters she had brought. “I must return these to you. I understand your bringing them, but if, as you say, your name is poison to him, there is no way in which I may use these letters. I believe I erred in reading them at all.”

  Swiftly she took the letters, wheeled, and, without a word, stormed out.

  Mopping his brow, Breuer sat down again. Had he seen the last of Lou Salomé? He doubted it! When Frau Becker entered the office to ask whether she could send in Herr Pfefferman, who was coughing violently in the waiting room, Breuer asked her to wait a few minutes.

  “As long as you want, Doctor Breuer, just let me know. Maybe a nice cup of hot tea.” But he shook his head and then, as she left him alone again, closed his eyes and hoped for rest. Visions of Bertha assailed him.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE MORE BREUER THOUGHT about Lou Salomé’s visit, the angrier he became. Not angry at her—toward her he now felt mainly fear—but angry at Nietzsche. All the time that Nietzsche had been berating him for his preoccupation with Bertha, for—how did he put it?—“feeding at the trough of lust” or “rummaging through the trash of your mind,” there, all the while, rummaging and guzzling alongside, had been Nietzsche!

  No, he should not have read a word of those letters. But he had not thought of that quickly enough, and now what could he do with what he had seen? Nothing! None of it—neither the letters nor Lou Salomé’s visit—could he share with Nietzsche.

  Strange that Nietzsche and he shared the same lie, each concealing Lou Salomé from the other. Did dissimulation affect Nietzsche in the same way it did him? Did Nietzsche feel corrupt? Guilty? Might there be some way of using this guilt for Nietzsche’s benefit?

  Go slowly, Breuer said to himself on Saturday morning, as he walked up the wide marble stairway toward room 13. Don’t make any radical moves! Something significant is taking place. Look how far we’ve come in just one week!

  “Friedrich,” Breuer said immediately after completing a brief physical examination, “I had a strange dream about you last night. I’m in a restaurant kitchen. Sloppy cooks have spilled oil all around on the floor. I slip on it and drop a razor which lodges in a crack. Then you come in—though not looking like yourself. You’re wearing a general’s uniform, but I know it’s you. You want to help me retrieve the razor. I tell you not to, that you’d just drive it in deeper. But you try anyway, and you do drive it deeper. It’s wedged tight in the crack, and every time I try to extract it, I cut my fingers.” He stopped and looked expectantly at Nietzsche. “What do you make of this dream?”

  “What do you make of it, Josef?”

  “Most of it, like most of my dreams, is nonsense—except that part about you must mean something.”

  “Can you still see the dream in your mind?”

  Breuer nodded.

  “Keep looking at it and chimneysweep about it.”

  Breuer hesitated, looking dismayed, then tried to concentrate. “Let’s see, I drop something, my razor, and you come along——”

  “In a general’s uniform.”

  “Yes, you come along dressed like a general and try to help me—but you don’t help.”

  “In fact, I make things worse—I drive the blade in deeper.”

  “Well, all that fits with what I’ve been saying. Things are getting worse—my obsession with Bertha, the burning house fantasy, the insomnia. We’ve got to do something different!”

  “And I’m dressed like a general?”

  “Well, that part’s easy. The uniform must refer to your lofty manner, your poetic speech, your proclamations.” Emboldened by the new information he had obtained from Lou Salomé, Breuer continued, “It’s symbolic of your unwillingness to join with me in a down-to-earth manner. Take, for example, my problem with Bertha. I know from my work with patients how common it is to have problems with the opposite sex. Virtually no one escapes the pain of love. Goethe knew that, and that’s why The Sorrows of Young Werther is powerful: his love-sickness touched every man’s truth. Surely it’s happened to you.”

  Obtaining no response from Nietzsche, Breuer pressed further. “I’m willing to wager a large sum you’ve had a similar experience. Why not share it with me so the two of us can talk honestly, as equals?”

  “And no longer as general and private, the powerful and powerless! Ach, sorry, Josef—I agreed not to talk about power, even when issues of power are so obvious they hit us on the head! As for love, I don’t deny what you say; I don’t deny that all of us—and that includes me—taste its pain.

  “You mention Young Werther,” Nietzsche continued, “but let me remind you of Goethe’s words—‘Be a man and do not follow me—but yourself! But yourself!’ Did you know that he put that sentence into the second edition because so many young men had followed Werther’s example and committed suicide? No, Josef, the important issue here is not for me to tell you about my way, but to help you find your way to grow out of your despair. Now, what about the razor in the dream?”

  Breuer hesitated. Nietzsche’s acknowledging that he, too, had tasted the pain of love was a major revelation. Should he pursue it furthe
r? No, it was enough for now. He allowed his attention to drift back to himself.

  “I don’t know why there should be a razor in the dream.”

  “Remember our rules, Josef. Don’t try to reason it out. Just chimneysweep. Say everything that occurs to you. Omit nothing.” Nietzsche leaned back and closed his eyes, waiting for Breuer’s answer.

  “Razor, razor—last night I saw a friend, an ophthalmologist named Carl Koller, who is entirely clean-shaven. I thought this morning about getting my beard shaved off—but I often think about that.”

  “Keep sweeping!”

  “Razor—wrists—I have a patient, a young man who’s despondent about being a homosexual, and cut his wrists with a razor a couple of days ago. I shall see him later today. His name, incidentally, is Josef. Though I don’t think about cutting my wrists, I do think, as I’ve told you, about suicide. It’s lazy thinking—it’s not planning. I feel very remote from the act of killing myself. It’s probably no more likely than burning up my family or carrying Bertha off to America—yet I think about suicide more and more.”

  “All serious thinkers contemplate suicide,” Nietzsche noted. “It’s a comfort that helps us get through the night.” He opened his eyes and turned to Breuer. “You say we must do something else to help you. What else?”

  “Attack my obsession directly! It’s ruining me. It’s consuming my whole life. I’m not living now. I’m living in the past, or in a future that will never be.”

  “But sooner or later your obsession must yield, Josef. My model is so obviously correct. It’s so clear that behind your obsession lie your primary fears about Existenz. It’s also clear that the more we speak explicitly about these fears, the stronger your obsession gets. Don’t you see how your obsession tries to divert your attention away from these deep facts of,life? It’s the only way you know to soothe your fears.”