The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin Yalom

  What was going on with Philip? Was it possible that he was simply overcome by apprehension or shyness? Unlikely. No, he’s probably pissed at my insisting on his entering a group, and, in his passive-aggressive way, he’s giving me and the group the finger. God, Julius thought, I’d just like to hang him out to dry. Just do nothing. Let him sink or swim. It would be a pleasure to sit back and enjoy the blistering group attack that will surely come.

  Julius did not often remember joke punch lines, but one that he had heard years ago returned to him now. One morning a son said to his mother, “I don’t want to go to school today.”

  “Why not?” asked his mother.

  “Two reasons: I hate the students, and they hate me.”

  Mother responds, “There are two reasons you have to go to school: first, you’re forty-five years old and, second, you’re the principal.”

  Yes, he was all grown up. And he was the therapist of the group. And it was his job to integrate new members, to protect them from others and from themselves. Though he almost never started a meeting himself, preferring to encourage the members to take charge of running the group, today he had no choice.

  “Four-thirty. Time to get started. Philip, why don’t you grab a seat.” Philip turned to face him but made no movement toward a chair. Is he deaf? Julius thought. A social imbecile? Only after Julius vigorously gestured with his eyeballs to one of the empty chairs did Philip seat himself.

  To Philip he said, “Here’s our group. There’s one member who won’t be here tonight, Pam, who’s on a two-month trip.” Then, turning to the group, “I mentioned a few meetings ago that I might be introducing a new member. I met with Philip last week, and he’s beginning today.” Of course he’s beginning today, Julius thought. Stupid, shithead comment. That’s it. No more handholding. Sink or swim.

  Just at that moment Stuart, rushing in from the pediatric clinic at the hospital and still wearing a white clinical coat, charged into the room and plunked himself down, muttering an apology for being late. All members then turned to Philip, and four of them introduced themselves and welcomed him: “I’m Rebecca, Tony, Bonnie, Stuart. Hello. Great to see you. Welcome. Glad to have you. We need some new blood—I mean new input.”

  The remaining member, an attractive man with a prematurely bald pate flanked by a rim of light brown hair and the hefty body of a football linesman somewhat gone to seed, said, in a surprisingly soft voice, “Hi, I’m Gill. And, Philip, I hope you won’t feel I’m ignoring you, but I absolutely, urgently need some time in the group today. I’ve never needed the group as much as today.”

  No response from Philip.

  “Okay, Philip?” Gill repeated.

  Startled, Philip opened his eyes widely and nodded.

  Gill turned toward the familiar faces in the group and began. “A lot has happened, and it all came to a head this morning following a session with my wife’s shrink. I’ve been telling you guys over the past few weeks about how the therapist gave Rose a book about child abuse that convinces her that she was abused as a child. It’s like a fixed idea—what do you call it…an idea feexed?” Gill turned to Julius.

  “An idée fixe,” Philip instantaneously interjected with perfect accent.

  “Right. Thanks,” said Gill, who shot a quick look at Philip and added, sotto voce, “Whoa, that was fast,” and then returned to his narrative. “Well, Rose has an idée fixe that her father sexually molested her when she was young. She can’t let it go. Does she remember any sexual event happening? No. Witnesses? No. But her therapist believes that if she’s depressed, fearful about sex, has stuff like lapses in attention and uncontrollable emotions, especially rage at men, then she must have been molested. That’s the message of that goddamned book. And her therapist swears by it. So, for months, as I’ve told you ad nauseam, we’ve been talking about little else. My wife’s therapy is our life. No time for anything else. No other topic of conversation. Our sex life is defunct. Nothing. Forget it. A couple of weeks ago she asked me to phone her father—she won’t talk to him herself—and invite him to come to her therapy session. She wanted me to attend, too—for ‘protection,’ she said.

  “So I phoned him. He agreed immediately. Yesterday he took a bus down from Portland and appeared at the therapy session this morning carrying his beat-up suitcase because he was going to head right back to the bus station after we met. The session was a disaster. Absolute mayhem. Rose just unloaded on him and kept on unloading. Without limits, without letup, without a word of acknowledgment that her old man had come several hundred miles for her—for her ninety-minute therapy session. Accusing him of everything, even of inviting his neighbors, his poker chums, his coworkers at the fire department—he was a fireman back then—to have sex with her when she was a child.”

  “What did the father do?” asked Rebecca, a tall, slender, forty-year-old woman of exceptional beauty who had been leaning forward, listening intently to Gill.

  “He behaved like a mensch. He’s a nice old man, about seventy years old, kindly, sweet. This is the first time I met him. He was amazing—God, I wish I had a father like that. Just sat there and took it and told Rose that, if she had all that anger, it was probably best to let it out. He just kept gently denying all her crazy charges and took a guess—a good one, I think—that what she is really angry about is his walking out on the family when she was twelve. He said her anger was fertilized—his word, he’s a farmer—by her mother, who had been poisoning her mind against him since she was a child. He told her he had had to leave, that he had been depressed out of his gourd living with her mother and would be dead now if he had stayed. And let me tell you, I know Rose’s mother, and he’s got a point. A good one.

  “So, at the end of the session he asked for a ride to the bus terminal, and before I could answer, Rose said she wouldn’t feel safe in the same car with him. ‘Got it,’ he said, and walked away, lugging his suitcase.

  “Well, ten minutes later Rose and I were driving down Market Street, and I see him—a white-haired, stooped old man pulling his suitcase. It was starting to rain, and I say to myself, ‘This is the shits.’ I lost it and told Rose, ‘He comes here for you—for your therapy session—he comes all the way from Portland, it’s raining, and goddamnit I’m taking him to the bus station.’ I pulled over to the curb and offered him a lift. Rose stares daggers at me. ‘If he gets in, I get out,’ she says. I say, ‘Be my guest.’ I point to Starbucks on the street and tell her to wait there and I’ll come back in a few minutes. She gets out and stalks off. That was about five hours ago. She never did show up at Starbucks. I drove over to Golden Gate Park and been walking around since. I’m thinking of never going home.”

  With that, Gill flopped back in his chair, exhausted.

  The members—Tony, Rebecca, Bonnie, and Stuart—broke out into a chorus of approval: “Great, Gill.” “About time, Gill.” “Wow, you really did it.” “Whoa, good move.” Tony said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you tore yourself loose from that bitch.” “If you need a bed,” said Bonnie, nervously running her hands through her frizzy brown hair and adjusting her goggle-shaped, yellow-tinted spectacles, “I’ve got a spare room. Don’t worry, you’re safe,” she added with a giggle, “I’m far too old for you and my daughter’s home.”

  Julius, not happy with the pressure the group was applying (he had seen too many members drop out of too many therapy groups because they were ashamed of disappointing the group), made his first intervention, “Strong feedback you’re getting, Gill. How do you feel about it?”

  “Great. It feels great. Only I…I don’t want to disappoint everybody. This is happening so fast—this all just happened this morning…I’m shaky and I’m fluid…don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “You mean,” said Julius, “you don’t want to substitute your wife’s imperatives with the group’s imperatives.”

  “Yeah. I guess. Yeah, I see what you mean. Right. But it’s a mixed bag. I really want, really really need this encou
ragement…grateful for it…I need guidance—this may be a turning point in my life. Heard from everyone but you, Julius. And of course from our new member. Philip, is it?”

  Philip nodded.

  “Philip, I know you don’t know about my situation, but you do.” Gill turned to face Julius. “What about it? What do you think I should do?”

  Julius involuntarily flinched and hoped it had not been visible. Like most therapists, he hated that question—the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” question. He had seen it coming.

  “Gill, you’re not going to like my answer. But here it is. I can’t tell you what to do: that’s your job, your decision, not mine. One reason you’re here in this group is to learn to trust your own judgment. Another reason is that everything I know about Rose and your marriage has come to me through you. And you can’t avoid giving me biased information. What I can do is help you focus on how you contribute to your life predicament. We can’t understand or change Rose; it’s you—your feelings, your behavior—that’s what counts here because that’s what you can change.”

  The group fell silent. Julius was right; Gill did not like that answer. Neither did the other members.

  Rebecca, who had taken out two barrettes and was flouncing her long black hair before replacing them, broke the silence by turning to Philip. “You’re new here and don’t know the backstory that the rest of us know. But sometimes from the mouth of newborn babes….”

  Philip sat silent. It was unclear whether he had even heard Rebecca.

  “Yeah, you have a take on this, Philip?” said Tony, in what was, for him, an unusually gentle tone. Tony was a swarthy man with deep acne scars on his cheeks and a lean, graceful athletic body exhibited to good advantage in his black San Francisco Giants T-shirt and tight jeans.

  “I have an observation and a piece of advice,” said Philip, hands folded, head tilted back, and eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Nietzsche once wrote that a major difference between man and the cow was that the cow knew how to exist, how to live without angst—that is, fear—in the blessed now, unburdened by the past and unaware of the terrors of the future. But we unfortunate humans are so haunted by the past and future that we can only saunter briefly in the now. Do you know why we so yearn for the golden days of childhood? Nietzsche tells us it’s because those childhood days were the carefree days, days free of care, days before we were weighted down by leaden, painful memories, by the debris of the past. Allow me to make one marginal note: I refer to a Nietzsche essay, but this thought was not original—in this, as in so much else, he looted the works of Schopenhauer.”

  He paused. A loud silence rang out in the group. Julius squirmed in his chair, thinking, Oh shit, I must have been out of my fucking mind to bring this guy here. This is the goddamnedest, most bizarre way I’ve ever seen a patient come into a group.

  Bonnie broke the silence. Turning her gaze squarely upon him, she said, “That’s fascinating, Philip. I know I keep yearning for my childhood, but I never understood it that way, that childhood feels free and golden because there’s no past to weigh you down. Thanks, I’m going to remember that.”

  “Me too. Interesting stuff,” said Gill. “But you said you had advice for me?”

  “Yes, here’s my advice.” Philip spoke evenly, softly, still making no eye contact. “Your wife is one of those people who is particularly unable to live in the present because she is so heavily laden with the freight of the past. She is a sinking ship. She’s going down. My advice to you is to jump overboard and start swimming. She’ll produce a powerful wake when she goes under, so I urge you to swim away as fast and as hard as you can.”

  Silence. The group seemed stunned.

  “Hey, no one is going to accuse you,” said Gill, “of pulling your punches. I asked a question. You gave an answer. I appreciate that. A lot. Welcome to the group. Any other comments you got—I want to hear them.”

  “Well,” said Philip, still looking upward, “in that case let me add one additional thought. Kierkegaard described some individuals as being in ‘double despair,’ that is, they are in despair but too self-deceived to know even that they are in despair. I think you may be in double despair. Here’s what I mean: most of my own suffering is a result of my being driven by desires, and then, once I satisfy a desire, I enjoy a moment of satiation, which soon is transformed into boredom, which is then interrupted by another desire springing up. Schopenhauer felt this was the universal human condition—wanting, momentary satiation, boredom, further wanting.

  “Back to you—I question whether you’ve yet explored this cycle of endless desires within yourself. Perhaps you’ve been so preoccupied with your wife’s wishes it’s kept you from becoming acquainted with your own desires? Isn’t that why others here were applauding you today? Wasn’t it because you were finally refusing to be defined by her wishes? In other words, I’m asking whether your work on yourself has been delayed or derailed by your preoccupation with your wife’s wishes.”

  Gill listened, mouth gaping, gaze fixed on Philip. “That’s deep. I know there’s something deep and important in what you’re saying—in this double despair idea—but I’m not getting it all.”

  All eyes were now on Philip, who continued to have eyes only for the ceiling. “Philip,” said Rebecca, now finished with replacing her barrettes, “weren’t you saying that Gill’s personal work won’t really begin until he liberates himself from his wife?”

  “Or,” Tony said, “that his involvement with her prevents him from knowing how fucked-up he really is? Hell, I know this is true for me and the way I relate to my work—I been thinking this past week that I’m so busy being ashamed of being a carpenter—being blue-collar, being low-income, being looked down on—that I never get around to thinking about the real shit I should be dealing with.”

  Julius watched in amazement as others, thirsty for Philip’s every word, chimed in. He felt competitive urges rising but quelled them by reminding himself that the group’s purposes were being served. Cool it, Julius, he said to himself, the group needs you; they’re not going to desert you for Philip. What’s going on here is great; they are assimilating the new member, and they are also each laying out agendas for future work.

  He had planned to talk about his diagnosis in the group today. In a sense his hand was now forced because he had already told Philip he had a melanoma and, to avoid the impression of a special relationship with him, had to share it with the whole group. But he had been preempted. First there was Gill’s emergency, and then there was the group’s total fascination with Philip. He checked the clock. Ten minutes left. Not enough time to lay this on them. Julius resolved that he would absolutely begin the next meeting with the bad news. He remained silent and let the clock run out.

  12

  1799—Arthur Learns about Choice and Other Worldly Horrors

  * * *

  The kings left their crowns and scepters behind here, and the heroes their weapons. Yet the great spirits among them all, whose splendor flowed out of themselves, who did not receive it from outward things, they take their greatness across with them.

  —Arthur Schopenhauer, age sixteen at Westminster Abbey

  * * *

  When the nine-year-old Arthur returned from Le Havre, his father placed him in a private school whose specific mandate was to educate future merchants. There he learned what good merchants of the time had to know: to calculate in different currencies, to write business letters in all the major European languages, to study transport routes, trade centers, yields of the soil, and other such fascinating topics. But Arthur was not fascinated; he had no interest in such knowledge, formed no close friendships at school, and dreaded more each day his father’s plan for his future—a seven-year apprenticeship with a local business magnate.

  What did Arthur want? Not the life of a merchant—he loathed the very idea. He craved the life of a scholar. Though many of his classmates also disliked the thought of a long apprenticeship, Arthur’s protests ran far dee
per. Despite his parents’ strong admonitions—a letter from his mother instructed him to “put aside all these authors for a while…you are now fifteen and have already read and studied the best German, French and, in part, also English authors”—he spent all his available free time studying literature and philosophy.

  Arthur’s father, Heinrich, was tormented by his son’s interests. The headmaster of Arthur’s school had informed him that his son had a passion for philosophy, was exceptionally suited for the life of a scholar, and would do well to transfer to a gymnasium which would prepare him for the university. In his heart, Heinrich may have sensed the correctness of the schoolmaster’s advice; his son’s voracious consumption and comprehension of all works of philosophy, history, and literature in the extensive Schopenhauer library was readily apparent.

  What was Heinrich to do? At stake was his successor, as well as the future of the entire firm and his filial obligation to all his ancestors to maintain the Schopenhauer lineage. Moreover, he shuddered at the prospect of a male Schopenhauer subsisting on the limited income of a scholar.

  First, Heinrich considered setting up a lifelong annuity through his church for his son, but the cost was prohibitive; business was bad, and Heinrich also had obligations to guarantee the financial future of a wife and daughter.

  Then gradually a solution, a somewhat diabolical solution, began to form in his mind. For some time he had resisted Johanna’s pleas for a lengthy tour of Europe. These were difficult times; the international political climate was so unstable that the safety of the Hanseatic cities was threatened and his constant attention to business was required. Yet because of weariness and his yearning to shed the weight of business responsibilities, his resistance to Johanna’s request was wavering. Slowly there swiveled into mind an inspired plan that would serve two purposes; his wife would be pleased, and the dilemma of Arthur’s future would be resolved.