When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  “But, Friedrich, we do not disagree. I’m being persuaded to your point of view, and I now believe your model is correct. But to attack my obsession directly is not to invalidate the model. You once described my obsession as a fungus or a weed. I agree, and I agree also that if I had cultivated my mind differently long ago, that obsession would never have taken root. But now that it’s here, it must be eradicated, pulled out. The way you’re going about it is too slow.”

  Nietzsche fidgeted in his chair, obviously uncomfortable with Breuer’s criticism. “Do you have specific suggestions for eradication?”

  “I’m a captive of the obsession: it’ll never let me know how to escape. That’s why I ask you about your experience with such pain and about the methods you’ve used to escape.”

  “But that was exactly what I was trying to do last week when I asked you to look at yourself from a great distance,” Nietzsche replied. “A cosmic perspective always attenuates tragedy. If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” Breuer was growing increasingly annoyed. “I know that intellectually. Still, Friedrich, such a statement as ‘a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic’ simply does not make me feel better. Forgive me if I sound impatient, but there is a gulf—a huge gulf—between knowing something intellectually and knowing it emotionally. Often when I lie awake at night frightened of dying, I recite to myself Lucretius’ maxim: ‘Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.’ It’s supremely rational and irrefutably true. But when I’m really frightened, it never works, it never calms my fears. This is where philosophy falls short. Teaching philosophy and using it in life are very different undertakings.”

  “The problem is, Josef, that whenever we abandon rationality and use lower faculties to influence men, we end up with a lower and cheaper man. When you say you want something that works, you mean you want something that can influence emotions. Well, there are experts in that! And who are they? The priests! They know the secrets of influence! They manipulate with inspiring music, they dwarf us with towering spires and soaring naves, they encourage the lust for submission, they proffer supernatural guidance, protection from death, even immortality. But look at the price they extract—religious thralldom; reverence for the weak; stasis; hatred of the body, of joy, of this world. No, we can’t use these tranquilizing, antihuman methods! We must find better ways of honing our powers of reason.”

  “The stage director of my mind,” Breuer responded, “the one who decides to send me images of Bertha and my burning house, doesn’t seem to be affected by reason.”

  “But surely”—and Nietzsche shook his clenched fists—“you must realize that there is no reality to any of your preoccupations! Your vision of Bertha, the halo of attraction and love that surround her—these don’t really exist. These poor phantasms are not part of numinal reality. All seeing is relative, and so is all knowing. We invent what we experience. And what we have invented, we can destroy.”

  Breuer opened his mouth to protest that this was exactly the kind of exhortation that was pointless, but Nietzsche plunged on.

  “Let me make it clearer, Josef. I have a friend—had one—Paul Rée, a philosopher. We both believe that God is dead. He concludes that a life without God is meaningless, and so great is his distress that he flirts with suicide: for convenience, he wears at all times a vial of poison around his neck. For me, however, godlessness is an occasion for rejoicing. I exalt in my freedom. I say to myself, ‘What would there be to create if gods existed?’ You see what I mean? The same situation, the same sense data—but two realities!”

  Breuer slumped dejectedly in his chair, by now too dispirited even to rejoice in Nietzsche’s mention of Paul Rée. “But I tell you that these arguments don’t move me,” he complained. “What good is this philosophizing? Even though we invent reality, our minds are devised in such a way as to conceal this from ourselves.”

  “But look at your reality!” Nietzsche protested. “One good look can show you how makeshift, how preposterous it is! Look at the object of your love—this cripple, Bertha—what rational man could love her? You tell me she often can’t hear, becomes cross-eyed, twists her arms and shoulders into knots. She can’t drink water, can’t walk, can’t talk German in the mornings; some days she talks English; some days, French. How does one know how to speak to her? She should have a sign posted, like a restaurant, advertising the langue du jour.” Nietzsche smiled broadly, much amused by his joke.

  But Breuer did not smile. His expression darkened. “Why are you so insulting to her? You never mention her name without adding ‘the cripple’!”

  “I merely repeat what you have told me.”

  “It’s true she is ill—but her illness is not all she is. She’s also a very beautiful woman. Walk with her in the street, and all heads will turn in your direction. She’s intelligent, talented, highly creative—a fine writer, a keen critic of the arts, gentle, sensitive, and, I believe, loving.”

  “Not so loving and sensitive, I think. Look at how she loves you! She attempts to seduce you into adultery.”

  Breuer shook his head. “No, that’s not——”

  Nietzsche interrupted. “Oh yes, oh yes! You can’t deny it. Seduction is the correct word. She leans on you, pretending she cannot walk. She puts her head in your lap, her lips by your manhood. She tries to ruin your marriage. She humiliates you publicly by pretending to be pregnant with your child! Is this love? Spare me from such love!”

  “I don’t judge or attack my patients, nor do I laugh at their illnesses, Friedrich. I assure you, you don’t know this woman.”

  “Thank God for that blessing! I’ve known some like her. Believe me, Josef, this woman doesn’t love you, she wants to destroy you!” said Nietzsche fervently, rapping on his notebook at each word.

  “You judge her by other women you’ve known. But you’re mistaken—everyone who knows her feels as I do. What do you gain by ridiculing her?”

  “In this, as in so many things, you are hobbled by your virtues. You, too, must learn to ridicule! That way lies health.”

  “When it comes to women, Friedrich, you are much too hard.”

  “And you, Josef, are much too soft. Why must you continue to defend her?”

  Too agitated to sit any longer, Breuer arose and walked over to the window. He gazed out over the garden, where a man with bandaged eyes was shuffling: with one arm he clutched a nurse and, with the other, tapped the path before him with a cane.

  “Release your feelings, Josef. Don’t hold back.”

  Continuing to stare out the window, Breuer projected his voice over his shoulder. “It’s easy for you to attack her. If you could see her, I assure you, you’d sing a different tune. You’d be on your knees to her. She’s a dazzling woman, a Helen of Troy, the very quintessence of womanhood. I told you already that her next physician has also fallen in love with her.”

  “Her next victim, you mean!”

  “Friedrich”—Breuer turned around to face Nietzsche—“what are you doing? I’ve never seen you like this! Why are you pushing this so hard?”

  “I’m doing exactly what you asked me to do—finding another way to attack your obsession. I believe, Josef, that part of your distress comes from buried resentment. There is something in you—some fear, some timidity—that won’t permit you to express your anger. Instead, you take pride in your meekness. You make a virtue of necessity: you bury your feelings deep and then, because you experience no resentment, you assume that you are saintlike. You no longer assume the role of the understanding physician; you have become that role—you believe you are too fine to experience anger. Josef, a little revenge is a good thing. Swallowed resentment makes one sick!”

  Breuer shook his head. “No, Friedrich, to understand is to forgive. I explored the roots of each of Bertha’s symptoms. There is no evil in her. If anything, too much good. She is a generous, self-sacrificing daughter who fell ill because of
her father’s death.”

  “All fathers die—yours, mine, everyone’s—that’s no explanation for illness. I love actions, not excuses. The time for excuses—for Bertha, for yourself—has passed.” Nietzsche shut his notebook. The meeting was over.

  The next meeting began in equally stormy fashion. Breuer had requested a direct attack on his obsession. “Very well,” said Nietzsche, who had always wanted to be a warrior. “If it’s war you want, it’s war you’ll get!” And for the next three days he launched a mighty psychological campaign, one of the most creative—and one of the most bizarre—in Viennese medical history.

  Nietzsche began by eliciting Breuer’s promise to follow all directives without questions, without resistance. Then, Nietzsche instructed him to compose a list often insults and to imagine hurling them at Bertha. Next, Nietzsche encouraged him to imagine living with Bertha and then to visualize a series of scenes: sitting across the breakfast table and watching her with legs and arms in spasm, cross-eyed, mute, wry-necked, hallucinating, and stuttering. Nietzsche then suggested even more unpleasant images: Bertha vomiting, sitting on the toilet; Bertha with the labor pains of pseudocyesis. But none of these experiments succeeded in bleaching the magic out of Bertha’s image.

  At their next meeting, Nietzsche tried even more direct approaches. “Whenever you’re alone and begin to think about Bertha, shout ‘No!’ or ‘Stop!’ as loud as you can. If you’re not alone, pinch yourself hard whenever she enters your mind.”

  For two days, Breuer’s private chambers echoed with “No!” and “Stop!” and his forearm was bruised from pinching. Once in the fiacre, he shouted “Stop!” so loud that Fischmann reined the horses in sharply and waited for further instructions. Another time, Frau Becker came rushing into the office at the sound of a particularly reverberating “No!” But these devices offered only tissue-thin resistance to his mind’s desire. The obsessions kept coming!

  On another day, Nietzsche instructed Breuer to monitor his thinking and, every thirty minutes, to record in his notebook how often and how long he thought about Bertha. Breuer was astounded to learn that rarely did an entire hour pass without his ruminating upon her. Nietzsche calculated that he spent approximately one hundred minutes a day on his obsession, over five hundred hours a year. This meant, he said, that in the next twenty years, Breuer would devote over six hundred precious waking days to the same boring, unimaginative fantasies. Breuer groaned at the prospect. And kept on obsessing.

  Nietzsche then experimented with another strategy: he ordered Breuer to devote certain designated periods to thinking about Bertha, whether he wanted to or not.

  “You insist on thinking about Bertha? Then I insist that you do it! I insist that you meditate about her for fifteen minutes six times a day. Let’s go over your daily schedule and space the six periods throughout your day. Tell your nurse you need the uninterrupted time for writing or record keeping. If you want to think about Bertha at other times, that’s fine—that’s up to you. But during these six periods, you must think about Bertha. Later, as you accustom yourself to this practice, we will gradually decrease your time of forced meditation.” Breuer followed Nietzsche’s schedule—but his obsessions followed Bertha’s.

  Later, Nietzsche suggested Breuer carry a special purse in which to put five Kreuzer every time he thought about Bertha; he was then to donate that money to some charity. Breuer vetoed the plan. He knew it would be ineffective because he liked to give to charity. Nietzsche then suggested he give the money to Georg von Schönerer’s anti-Semitic German National Association. Even that didn’t work.

  Nothing worked.

  Excerpts from Dr. Breuer’s Case Notes on Eckart Müller, 9—14 December 1882

  There is no longer any point in deceiving myself. There are two patients in our sessions and, of the two, I am the more urgent case. Strange, the more I acknowledge this to myself, the more amiably Nietzsche and I seem to work together. Perhaps the information 1 received from Lou Salomé has also changed the way we work.

  I have, of course, said nothing to Nietzsche about her. Nor do I speak of my becoming a genuine patient. Yet I believe he senses these things. Perhaps in some unintentional, nonverbal way, I communicate things to him. Who knows? Perhaps in my voice, my tone or gestures. It’s very mysterious. Sig is interested in such details of communication. I should talk about it with him.

  The more I forget about trying to help him, the more he begins to open up to me. Look what he told me today! That Paul Rée was once a friend. That he, Nietzsche, had had his own love pain. That he had once known a woman like Bertha. Perhaps it’s best for both of us if I just focus on myself and forget about trying to pry him open!

  Also, he now alludes to the methods he uses to help himself—for example his “perspective-changing” approach in which he views himself from a more distant, cosmic perspective. He’s right: if we view our trivial situation from the long skein of our lives, from the life of the whole race, from the evolution of consciousness, of course it loses its overarching significance.

  But how to change my perspective? His instructions and exhortations to change perspective don’t work, nor does trying to imagine myself stepping back. I can’t remove myself emotionally from the center of my situation. I can’t get far enough away. And judging from the letters he wrote Lou Salomé, I don’t believe he can either!

  . . . He also places great emphasis on the expression of anger. He made me insult Bertha ten different ways today. This method, at least, I can understand. Anger discharge makes sense from a physiological perspective: a buildup of cortical excitation must be periodically discharged. According to Lou Salomé’s descriptions of his letters, that’s his favorite method. I think he has within him a vast storehouse of anger. Why, I wonder? Because of his illness? Or his lack of professional recognition? Or because he has never enjoyed a woman’s warmth?

  He’s good at insults. I wish I could remember some of his choicest ones. I loved his calling Lou Salomé a “predator clothed as a housecat. ”

  It comes easy to him—but not to me. He’s precisely right about my inability to express my anger. It runs in my family. My father, my uncles. For Jews, repression of anger is a survival trait. I can’t even locate the anger. He insists it’s there toward Bertha—but I’m sure he’s confusing it with his own anger toward Lou Salomé.

  How unfortunate for him to have gotten entangled with her! I wish I could offer him my sympathy. Think of it! This man has almost no experience with women. And whom does he choose to involve himself with? Certainly the most powerful woman I’ve ever seen. And she’s only twenty-one! God help us all when she’s fully grown! And the one other woman in his life, his sister, Elisabeth—I hope never to meet her. She sounds as forceful as Lou Salomé and probably meaner!

  . . . Today he asked me to imagine Bertha as a baby with a bowel movement in her diapers—and to tell her how beautiful she is while imagining her gazing at me cross-eyed and wry-necked.

  . . . Today he told me to put a Kreuzer in my shoe for every fantasy and to walk on it all day. Where does he get these ideas? He seems to have an endless store of them!

  . . . shouting “No!” and pinching myself, counting every fantasy and recording it in a ledger, walking with coins in my shoe, giving money to Schönerer . . . punishing myself for tormenting myself. Madness!

  I have heard that they teach bears to dance and to stand on two legs by heating the bricks of the floor under them. Is that so different from this approach? He tries to train my mind with these ingenious little methods of punishment.

  Yet I am no bear and my mind is too rich for animal-trainer techniques. These efforts are ineffective—and they are demeaning!

  But I cannot blame him. I asked him to attack my symptoms directly. He humors me. His heart is not in these efforts. All along he has insisted that growth is more important than comfort.

  There must be another way.

  Excerpts from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Notes on Dr. Breuer, 9-14 December 188
2

  The lure of a “system”! I fell prey to it for a time today! I believed that Josef’s suppression of anger was behind all of his difficulties, and I exhausted myself trying to incite him. Perhaps long repression of passions alters and enervates them.

  . . . He presents himself as good—he does no harm—other than to himself and to nature! I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.

  I believe he needs to learn to curse before I can trust his generosity. He feels no anger! Is he so afraid someone will hurt him? Is this why he does not dare to be himself? Why he desires only small happinesses? And he calls this virtue. Its real name is cowardice!

  He is civilized, polite, a man of manners. He has tamed his wild nature, turned his wolf into a spaniel. And he calls this moderation. Its real name is mediocrity!

  . . . He trusts me now and believes in me. I have given my word that I will endeavor to heal him. But the physician must first, like the sage, heal himself. Only then can his patient behold with his eyes a man who heals himself. Yet I have not healed myself. Worse, I suffer the very afflictions that beset Josef. Do I, by my silence, do that which I have sworn never to do: betray a friend?

  Shall I speak of my affliction? He will lose confidence in me. Will that not harm him? Will he not say that, if I have not healed myself, I cannot heal him? Or will he become so concerned with my affliction that he will abandon the task of wrestling with his own? Do I serve him best through silence? Or through acknowledging that the two of us are similarly afflicted and must join forces to find a solution?

  . . . Today I see how much he has changed . . . less devious . . . and he no longer wheedles, no longer attempts to strengthen himself by demonstrating my weakness.

  . . . This frontal attack on his symptoms, which he has asked me to launch, is the most dreadful wallowing in shallow waters I have ever done. I should be a raiser, not a lowerer! Treating him as a child whose mind must be slapped when it misbehaves is lowering him. And lowering me as well!