When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  The idea of himself as an original thinker making an independent discovery was, thus, crucially important to Freud, whose creative energy depended on this romantic image of himself. “Even Einstein,” Freud said, “had the advantage of a long line of predecessors from Isaac Newton forward, whereas I had to hack every step of my own way alone, through a tangled jungle.”

  Nietzsche, grounded in classical philosophy, especially the earliest philosophers—the pre-Socratic Greeks—had a very different attitude towards priority. “Am I called upon,” Nietzsche asked, “to discover new truths? There are far too many old ones as it is.” He believed that the past was always embodied in the great man and sought only “to put history in balance again.” Never a modest man, Nietzsche predicted that “a thousands secrets of the past will crawl out of their hiding places into my sunshine.” (The Gay Science)

  Thus there is evidence that Freud knew and admired the work of Nietzsche. According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud placed several great men in a pantheon and said he could never achieve their ranks. In this group were Goethe, Kant, Voltaire, Darwin, Schopenhauer—and Nietzsche. Perhaps some of Freud’s confused feelings toward Nietzsche issued from his ambivalence towards the entire discipline of philosophy. At times Freud derided philosophy for its lack of a scientific methodology. Yet at other times he yearned to settle into pure philosophic and historical speculation, and considered his entire medical career as a detour, a false turn from his true calling as a Lebens-philosopher, an unraveler of the mystery of how man came to be what he is.

  To summarize, there are several answers to the question “Why write a psychotherapy novel starring Friedrich Nietzsche?” Nietzsche was extraordinarily prescient about the field of psychotherapy and exercised considerable influence upon Freud. Freud never acknowledged his debt to Nietzsche. The field of psychotherapy, as a whole, has followed Freud’s lead and ignored Nietzsche’s contributions.

  There is still another reason to write a novel about Nietzsche—the extraordinary drama of his life. He was born in 1844 into a family of modest means. His father, a Lutheran minister, died when Nietzsche was five. His genius noted at an early age, Nietzsche was awarded a scholarship to one of the best schools in Germany. At the age of twenty-four, before he matriculated from a graduate university program in philology, he was offered, and accepted, the chair in classical philology at the University of Basle. While there he began to suffer dreadfully from an illness which had first appeared in his adolescence and was to plague him all his life. The illness was not the syphilis which ultimately was to kill him, but almost certainly an extremely severe migraine condition.

  His migraine so incapacitated him—according to Stefan Zweig he was sometimes ill more than two hundred days a year—that at the age of thirty, Nietzsche had to resign his professorship. As he put it, he kicked the dust of the German-speaking world from his shoes and departed to Italy, where he spent the rest of his life traveling mostly in southern Italy and Switzerland, going from one modest hotel to another, searching for the climate and the right atmospheric conditions which would grant the health to think and to write for two or three days in a row.

  Perhaps the reader might be wondering about my claim of great drama in Nietzsche’s life. From the perspective of external events, Nietzsche’s life might seem unusually uneventful. Yet from the internal perspective, this is a remarkable life. There is deep drama in this lonely man, one of the great, courageous minds of history wandering from one unassuming Gasthaus to another in Italy and Switzerland while unflinchingly confronting the harsh facts of human existence. And Nietzsche always pursued his task starkly, without material comfort (he lived on a small university pension), without a home (his steamer trunk lugged from hotel to hotel contained all his possessions), without a family (save for a distant mother and the problematic Elisabeth), without the touch of a loving friend, without a professional community (he never again had a university position), without a country (because of his anti-German sentiments he gave up his German passport and never stayed in one place long enough to obtain another), without recognition (his publishers, he said, should have worked in political intrigues—they were skilled at keeping secrets and his books were their greatest secret), and without acclaim or students. Hegel is reputed to have said on his deathbed, “In my entire career I’ve had only one student who understood me, and even that student misunderstood me.” I think Nietzsche would have to go further yet, would have had to contemplate on his deathbed that he never had a single formal student.

  Perhaps the lack of acclaim troubled Nietzsche less than most because he had an unswerving belief in his ultimate place in history. In his preface to one of his later books (The Antichrist) he says, “This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living today. Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.” “Born posthumously”—a marvelous phrase which I considered using as the title of my novel.

  Nietzsche suffered a great deal during these years from the effects of the debilitating migraine, as well as from the isolation and the sheer task of living a life devoid of illusion. He often said that despair is the price one pays for self-awareness and wondered how much truth a man could stand. Perhaps, also, the despair issued from some kind of presentiment of his percolating disease—the ticking time bomb that would burst his brain apart at the seams when he was forty-five.

  Let us return now to the basic thought experiment that was to constitute the spine of my novel: Suppose that Nietzsche were placed in a historical situation in which he would have been enabled to invent a psychotherapy. derived from his own published writings, one that could have been used to heal himself.

  In which way could a psychotherapeutic experience have helped Nietzsche? Through insight? Unlikely. Recall that Freud said Nietzsche was a man who had more insight about himself than any man who ever lived. More than insight would have been needed. What Nietzsche needed was a therapeutic encounter, a meaningful relationship. Nietzsche experienced himself as desperately isolated. His letters bulge with references to his loneliness: “Neither among the living nor the dead is there anyone with whom I feel kinship”; “No one who had any sort of God to keep him company ever reached my level of loneliness” (F. Nietzsche to F. Overbeck; see Nietzsche, a Self-Portrait from His Letters, ed. Fuss and Shapiro).

  But Nietzsche in psychotherapy? Is it conceivable that Nietzsche would have made himself vulnerable, would have asked another to help him? And would Nietzsche’s grandiose, arrogant self have permitted the self-disclosure required for successful therapy? Obviously the plot called for some device which would have permitted Nietzsche to be in control of the therapy procedure.

  And when should the story be set? Nietzsche was in despair much of his life. Would there have been a particularly propitious time for a therapeutic encounter? Ultimately I settled on the autumn of 1882, when Nietzsche was thirty-eight and, following the breakup of a brief, passionate (but chaste) love affair, had slumped into such a state of despair that his letters were full of suicidal ideation. The woman, Lou Salomé, a young remarkable Russian, would go down in history as a writer, critic, disciple of Freud, practicing psychoanalyst, and friend and lover to several eminent men of the late nineteenth century, including the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

  One of the most striking aspects of Nietzsche’s depression in 1882 was his rapid recovery: though he was suicidal in the autumn of 1882, it was only a few months later in the spring of 1883 that he began energetically writing Thus Spake Zarathustra. He completed the first three parts in only ten days, writing this book as no great book has ever been written, as though he were in a trance, as though he were a medium through whom the book was being written.

  Furthermore, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a life-affirming, life-celebratory work. How was Nietzsche able to transport himself from a deep depression to life-affirmation in only a few months? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable, and wonderful, for Nietzsche to have had a successful therapy encounter at
the end of 1882?

  But who would be Nietzsche’s therapist? That was a vexing problem. In 1882 there were no professional psychotherapists. There was no such thing as dynamic psychotherapy: Freud was twenty-seven years old and had yet to enter the field of psychiatry.

  If Nietzsche had seen a contemporary physician for his despair, he might have been told there was no medical treatment for his condition, or he might have been sent to Baden-Baden, Marienbad, or one of the other Central European spas for a water cure, or perhaps he might have been referred to the church for religious counseling. There were no practicing secular therapists. Though A. A. Liébault and Hippolyte Bernheim had a school of hypnotherapy in Nancy, France, they offered no psychotherapy per se, only hypnotic symptom-removal.

  I wish I could have staged the novel a decade later: by then Freud would be developing psychoanalytic methods and a Freud-Nietzsche encounter would have made an interesting story. Close but not possible: by 1892 Nietzsche had already lapsed into irreversible dementia. No, all things pointed towards 1882 as the most propitious historical moment.

  Unable to identify a psychotherapist in 1882, I decided to invent one and began sketching a fictional Jesuit priest-therapist (a lapsed priest, because of Nietzsche’s anticlerical sentiments). Then it suddenly dawned on me that there was, after all, right under my nose, one therapist alive in 1882—Josef Breuer, whose work I knew particularly well because I had taught a Freud appreciation course every year for over a decade. Breuer, Freud’s friend and mentor, is remembered chiefly because he was the first to employ dynamic theory and methods in the psychotherapy of a patient. Though the full case history of the patient, Bertha Pappenheim (whom Breuer gave the pseudonym of Anna O.), was published in 1893, in a psychiatric journal, and again in Breuer and Freud’s 1895 book Studies in Hysteria, Breuer had actually treated her many years earlier, in 1881.

  Once I had selected Breuer as Nietzsche’s therapist, the rest of the plot quickly fell into place. In the early 1880s Nietzsche had consulted a great many Central European physicians because of his deteriorating health. Breuer was not a psychiatrist but a superb medical diagnostician and the personal physician to many of the eminent figures of his era. It would have been historically plausible for Nietzsche to have sought consultation with Breuer. And, as we see from letters reproduced on pages 302—306 that were discovered after the publication of this novel, it almost happened.

  In the novel I brought the two together through the machinations of Lou Salomé. Feeling guilty about her role in Nietzsche’s depression, she asks Breuer to meet with Nietzsche. In this regard Lou Salomé’s behavior is indeed fictional, since the historical evidence suggests she was a free spirit and unlikely to be burdened by a guilty conscience.

  But she was undoubtedly a woman of considerable intelligence, charm, and persuasiveness. Though Breuer first takes the position that there is no medical treatment for love-sick despair, Lou Salomé urges him to improvise and reminds him that, until he invented it, there was also no treatment for Anna O.’s hysteria. (Though the case had not yet been published I suggest that Lou Salomé might have heard about Anna O. from her brother, Jenia, who, in a stroke of good fortune for the historical consistency of my plot, happened to be a medical student in Vienna in 1882 and might have studied with Breuer.

  Once my characters were in place I had the great writerly experience of seeing my characters coming to life and taking over the story. They appeared to converse all the time, and my task seemed merely to stay tuned in, to record their discussions, and to watch with amazement how the story gradually evolved.

  When Nietzsche Wept has had a long and unusual life striking some particularly strong chords in European, Near Eastern, and South American audiences with many countries far outselling the United States, including Germany, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Argentina, and Brazil. In 1993, it won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for Fiction. In November 2009, it was selected by the city of Vienna to be honored in the weeklong “Eine Stadt, Ein Buch” festival during which a hundred thousand copies were distributed free to the citizens of Vienna (see www.einestadteinbuch.at). The following year France awarded it the Saint-Maur “Livre de Poche” Prize. Stage plays of When Nietzsche Wept have had long runs in Brazil and Argentina, and it has been made into a film by Pinchas Perry, starring Armand Assanti and Ben Cross.

  A Conversation with Irvin D. Yalom

  You’ve had two careers—as a psychiatry professor and as a writer. How do these two activities relate to each other?

  I would say they are symbiotic. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and when I entered medicine and then psychiatry, I applied my writing abilities to academic publications—first in accounts of my results in psychotherapy research which I published in professional journals and then to the writing of several textbooks in my field. My textbooks were vastly improved by my story writing. For example, my group therapy textbook has dozens of short stories about therapy sprinkled throughout the text—some just a few lines or a paragraph long, some up to three pages. Students have often told me they were willing to put up with reading dry theory because they knew that an interesting story would be coming along in a page or two. Conversely, my daily psychotherapeutic work exploring the inner world of my patients vastly aided me in character creation when I turned to more literary pursuits.

  “ As a teenager I was in love with literature and read fiction voraciously (still do) and developed the indelible idea that the very best thing a person could do in life was to write a very good novel. ”

  How did you make that transition from academic writing to fiction?

  It was a long time coming. As a teenager I was in love with literature and read fiction voraciously (still do) and developed the indelible idea that the very best thing a person could do in life was to write a very good novel. I made the big plunge carefully when, on a year long sabbatical from Stanford, I wrote a book of ten stories, Love’s Executioner, which were based on heavily disguised accounts of therapy with ten patients. My belief was that I was still fulfilling my academic contract because these stories were meant to be teaching tales. In fact my secret target audience for every book I’ve written has been the young psychotherapist. The success of Love’s Executioner—it immediately was a New York Times bestseller—encouraged me to take the real plunge and fulfill my lifelong goal: to write a novel. And soon my thoughts drifted to writing a fanciful novel of how Nietzsche might have participated in the invention of psychotherapy. I loved that experience and have continued—for the last several decades I have alternated writing fiction and nonfiction.

  “I remember the Sylvan, a tiny cinema around the corner, where my parents deposited me three or four times a week to keep me off the unsafe streets. ”

  Where did you grow up?

  In Washington, DC, where my parents owned a small liquor and grocery store.

  What is your earliest memory?

  The summer heat rising from the torrid pavement; the heat slamming you in the face as you left the home even early in the morning; the heat that often drove my parents—and hordes of other inner-city families—to spend the night on the “speedway,” a park on the banks of the Potomac. I remember also my father taking me with him to the sprawling outdoor market in southeast DC at 5:00 A.M. to buy produce for the store. And I remember the Sylvan, a tiny cinema around the corner, where my parents deposited me three or four times a week to keep me off the unsafe streets. For the same reason, each summer they sent me to camp for eight weeks, which generated by far the most delicious memories of my childhood.

  I remember Sundays, always a time of family gatherings. A group of my parents’ relatives and friends from the old country stayed connected and met every Sunday for picnics and dinners, which were always followed by card playing—the women, canasta or poker; the men, pinochle. And Sunday mornings were mellow times, etched clearly in my mind. Usually I played chess with my father—often with him singing in accompaniment to Yiddish songs played on the phonograph—or Victrola, as we
called it then.

  Where are your ancestors and parents from? Did they leave behind any interesting stories?

  My parents came from small shtetls near the Russian-Polish border. Sometimes they said they were from Russia, sometimes, from Poland. My father joked that they’d change the country to Poland when they decided they couldn’t bear another long severe Russian winter. My father came from Selz and my mother from Prussina, about fifteen kilometers away. All the shtetls in the area were destroyed by the Nazis and several of my relatives, including my father’s sister and his brother’s wife and children, were murdered in concentration camps. My father’s father was a bootmaker who often shopped at my maternal grandfather’s feed and grain store. My parents met as teenagers and married after immigrating to the United States in 1921. They arrived penniless to New York and for most of their lives struggled for economic survival. My father’s brother had opened a small postage-stamp-sized store in Washington, DC, and encouraged my parents to move there. They owned a series of grocery and then liquor stores, each one slightly larger and more successful.

  Did both of your parents work in the liquor and grocery store? What memories of the store do you have?