The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin Yalom

After a few moments of silence, Stuart added, “That’s it.”

  “That’s it?” asked Tony. “A well-soused, good-looking broad invites you into her hotel room, and you give her what she’s asking for? Man, no way I’d pass that up.”

  “No, that’s not it!” said Stuart. “It is that I was a physician and someone sick, someone probably with incipient or full-blown alcoholic hallucinosis, crossed my path, and I end up screwing her. That’s a violation of the Hippocratic oath, a grievous offense, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it. I can’t let go of that evening—it’s seared into my mind.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself, Stuart,” said Bonnie. “This woman’s lonely, in her cups, steps out in the hallway, sees an attractive younger man, and invites him into her bed. She got just what she wanted, maybe what she needed. Probably you did her a world of good. She probably considers that a lucky night.”

  Others—Gill, Rebecca, Pam—were poised to speak, but Stuart preempted them: “I appreciate what you guys are saying—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said similar things to myself—but I’m really, truly, not asking for reassurance. What I wanted to do is just tell you about it, take this sordid act out of so many years of darkness and into the light—that’s enough.”

  Bonnie responded, “That’s good. It’s good you told us, Stuart, but this ties in with something we’ve talked about before: your reluctance to accept help from us. You’re terrific about giving help, not so good at letting us help you.”

  “Maybe just doctor reflexes,” replied Stuart. “I had no med school courses on being a patient.”

  “Don’t you ever get to go off duty?” asked Tony. “I think you were off duty that night in the Miami hotel. Midnight with a tipsy, horny broad—go for it, man, get laid, enjoy yourself.”

  Stuart shook his head. “A while ago I listened to a tape of the Dalai Lama speaking to Buddhist teachers. One of them asked him about burnout and whether they shouldn’t have some regularly scheduled off-duty time. The Dalai Lama’s reply was priceless: Off duty? The Buddha says, ‘Sorry, I’m off duty!’ Jesus is approached by a sufferer and replies, ‘Sorry, I’m off duty today!’ The Dalai Lama giggles all the time, but he found this particular idea absolutely hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing.”

  “I’m not buying it,” said Tony. “I think you’re using your M.D. to avoid life.”

  “What I did in that hotel was wrong. No one will ever convince me otherwise.”

  Julius said, “Fourteen years ago and you can’t let it go. What about the repercussions of this incident?”

  “You mean besides self-excoriation and disgust?” said Stuart.

  Julius nodded.

  “I can tell you that I’ve been a damn good doctor, that I’ve never, not for an instant, ever again violated the ethics of my profession.”

  “Stuart, I decree that you’ve paid your debt,” said Julius. “Case closed.”

  “Amen,” echoed several others.

  Stuart smiled and crossed himself. “This takes me back to Sunday Mass during my childhood. I feel like I’ve just come out of the confession booth absolved.”

  “Let me tell you a story,” said Julius. “Years ago in Shanghai I visited a deserted cathedral. I’m an atheist, but I like visiting religious places—go figure. Well, I walked around and then sat down in the confession booth, on the priest’s side, and found myself envying the father confessor. What power he had! I tried to mouth the words, ‘You are forgiven, my son, my daughter.’ I imagined the supreme confidence he enjoyed because he believed himself a vessel carrying the cargo of forgiveness straight from the man upstairs. And how puny my own techniques seemed in comparison. But later, after leaving the church, I came out of it by reassuring myself that at least I was living according to principles of reason and not infantilizing my patients by representing mythology as reality.”

  After a short silence, Pam said to Julius, “You know what, Julius? Something’s changed. You’re different from the way you were before I left. Telling stories about your life, stating opinions on religious belief, whereas you always avoided such things in the past. I gather it’s the effect of your illness, but, nonetheless, I like it. I really like your being more personal.”

  Julius nodded. “Thanks. That silence gave me a sinking feeling that I had offended some religious sensibilities here.”

  “Not mine, Julius, if you’re worried about me,” said Stuart. “Those polls that say that ninety percent of Americans believe in God leave me bewildered. I left the church in my teens, and if I hadn’t then, I would leave now after what’s come out about priests and pedophilia.”

  “Nor mine,” said Philip. “You and Schopenhauer have something in common regarding religion. He believed the church leaders exploited man’s ineradicable need for the metaphysical and that they infantilized the public and dwelled themselves in a state of perpetual deception by refusing to confess they had deliberately cloaked their truths in allegory.”

  Philip’s comment interested Julius, but, noticing that only a few minutes remained, he steered the group back to process. “A lot happened today. A lot of risks were taken. Feelings? Some of you have been very quiet—Pam? Philip?”

  “It hasn’t escaped me,” Philip said quickly, “that what has been revealed here today, what has caused so much needless torment, for me, for others, flows from the supreme and universal power of sex, which my other therapist, Schopenhauer, taught me is absolutely inbuilt, or, as we would say today, hardwired into us.

  “I know many of Schopenhauer’s words about this since I’ve often cited them in lectures. Let me quote a few: ‘[Sex is] the strongest and most active of all motives…. It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort. It…interrupts every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes…the greatest human minds.’ ‘Sex does not hesitate to intrude with its trash, and to interfere with…the investigations of the learned—’”

  “Philip, this is important stuff, but, before we stop today, try to speak about your feelings rather than Schopenhauer’s,” interrupted Julius.

  “I’ll try, but let me continue—just one more last sentence: ‘Every day it destroys the most valuable relationships. Indeed it robs of all conscience those who were previously honorable and upright.’” Philip stopped. “That’s what I wanted to say; I’m finished.”

  “Haven’t heard feelings, Philip,” said Tony, grinning at the opportunity to confront Philip.

  Philip nodded. “Just dismay about how we poor mortals, we fellow sufferers, are such victims of biology that we fill our lives with guilt about natural acts as Stuart and Rebecca have done. And that we all have the goal of extricating ourselves from the thralldom of sex.”

  After a few moments of the customary silence following one of Philip’s pronouncements, Stuart turned to Pam: “I’d sure like to hear from you today. What do you feel about what I’ve laid on the group? You were on my mind when I thought about confessing here. I’ve been thinking that I’ve put you in a tough place because in a way you can’t forgive me without also forgiving Philip.”

  “I feel as much respect for you as ever, Stuart. And don’t forget that I’m sensitized to this issue. I was exploited by a doctor—Earl, my soon-to-be ex-husband, was my gynecologist.”

  “Exactly,” said Stuart. “That compounds it. “How can you forgive me without also forgiving both Philip and Earl?”

  “Not true, Stuart. You’re a moral person—after listening to you today and hearing of your remorse, I feel that way even more. And that incident in the Miami hotel doesn’t grab me—ever read Fear of Flying?”

  Seeing Stuart shake his head, Pam went on, “Take a look at the book. Erica Jong would call what you had a simple ‘zipless fuck’; it was mutual, spontaneous coupling, you were kind, no one got hurt, you took responsibility to make sure she was okay afterward. And you’ve used the incident as a moral compass since then. But Philip? What can one say about a man who models himself after Heidegger and Schopenhauer? Of a
ll philosophers who ever lived, those were the two who were the most abject failures as human beings. What Philip did was unforgivable, predatory, without remorse—”

  Bonnie interrupted, “Hold on, Pam, did you notice that when Julius tried to stop Philip, he absolutely insisted on one more sentence about sex robbing the person of conscience and destroying relationships. I wonder, wasn’t that something about remorse? And wasn’t that directed to you?”

  “He has something to say? Let him say it to me. I don’t want to hear it from Schopenhauer.”

  “Let me butt in here,” said Rebecca. “I left the last meeting feeling bad for you and for all of us, including Philip, who, let’s face it, has been pissed on here. At home I starting thinking of Jesus’s remark about how he who is without sin should cast the first stone—that’s got a lot to do with what I revealed today.”

  “We’ve got to stop,” said Julius, “but, Philip, this is exactly what I was fishing for when I asked you about your feelings.”

  Philip shook his head in puzzlement.

  “Have you understood that today you were given a gift by both Rebecca and Stuart?”

  Philip continued to shake his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s your homework assignment, Philip. I want you to meditate on the gifts you were given today.”

  24

  * * *

  If we do not want to be a plaything in the hands of every rogue and the object of every fool’s ridicule, the first rule is to be reserved and inaccessible.

  * * *

  Philip walked for hours after the meeting, past the Palace of Fine Arts, that decaying colonnade built for the 1915 International Exposition, circled the adjoining lake twice while watching the swans patrolling their territory, and then strolled along the marina and Chrissy Field path by San Francisco Bay until he reached the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. What was it Julius instructed him to think about? He recalled the instruction to think about Stuart and Rebecca’s gift, but before he could focus his mind he had already forgotten his assignment. Again and again he swept his mind clear of all thought and tried to focus on soothing and archetypal images—the wake of swans, the pirouetting of Pacific waves under the Golden Gate—but he continued to feel oddly distracted.

  He walked through the Presidio, the former military base located on the overlook of the mouth of the bay, and down to Clement Street with its twenty blocks of wall-to-wall Asian restaurants. He chose a modest Vietnamese pho shop, and when his beef-and-tendon soup arrived, he sat quietly for a few minutes, inhaling the lemongrass vapor rising from the broth and staring at the glistening mountain of rice noodles. After only a few mouthfuls he requested the rest be packaged for his dog.

  Generally inattentive to food, Philip had routinized his eating habits: breakfast of toast, marmalade, and coffee, a main meal at noon at the school student cafeteria, and a small inexpensive evening repast of soup or salad. All meals, by choice, were taken alone. He took solace, indeed sometimes broke into a full smile, when he thought of Schopenhauer’s habit of paying for two at his eating club to ensure that no one sat next to him.

  He turned homeward to his one-bedroom cottage, as sparsely furnished as his office, situated on the grounds of a grand house in Pacific Heights, not far from Julius’s. The widow, who lived alone in the house, rented the cottage to him for a modest sum. She needed the additional income, valued her privacy but wanted an unobtrusive human presence nearby. Philip was the man for the job, and they had lived in isolated proximity for several years.

  The enthusiastic greeting of yelps, barks, tail wagging, and acrobatic leaps into the air offered by Rugby, his dog, usually cheered Philip, but not on this evening. Nor did his evening dog walk nor any of his other routine leisure activities bring Philip tranquillity. He lit his pipe, listened to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, read distractedly from Schopenhauer and Epictetus. His full attention was caught once, for only a few moments, by one particular Epictetus passage.

  If you have an earnest desire towards philosophy, prepare yourself from the very first to have the multitude laugh and sneer. Remember, if you are persistent, those very persons will afterwards admire you…. Remember if you ever happen to turn your attentions to externals, for the pleasure of anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life.

  Yet his sense of uneasiness remained—an uneasiness that he had not experienced in some time, a state of mind that in years past had sent him out like a sexually crazed beast on the prowl. He strode into his tiny kitchen, cleaned his breakfast dishes from the table, turned on his computer, and submitted to his only addictive vice: he logged in to the Internet chess club and played five-minute blitz games silently and anonymously for the next three hours. Mostly, he won. When he lost it was usually through carelessness, but his irritation was short-lived: immediately he typed in “seeking a game,” and his eyes lit up with childish delight as a brand-new game commenced.

  25

  Porcupines, Genius, and the Misanthropist’s Guide to Human Relationships

  * * *

  By the time I was thirty I was heartily sick and tired of having to regard as my equals creatures who were not really so at all. As long as a cat is young it plays with paper pellets because it regards these as alive and as something similar to itself. It has been the same for me with human bipeds.

  * * *

  The porcupine fable, one of the best-known passages in all of Schopenhauer’s work, conveys his frosty view of human relationships.

  One cold winter’s day a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order, through their mutual warmth, to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effects of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now, when the need for warmth once again brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so they were tossed between two evils, until they discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the needs for society, which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men’s lives, drives them together but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities once more drive them apart.

  In other words, tolerate closeness only when necessary for survival and avoid it whenever possible. Most contemporary psychotherapists would unhesitatingly recommend therapy for such extreme socially avoidant stances. In fact the bulk of psychotherapy practice is addressed to such problematic interpersonal stances—not only social avoidance but maladaptive social behavior in all its many colors and hues: autism, social avoidance, social phobia, schizoid personality, antisocial personality, narcissistic personality, inability to love, self-aggrandizement, self-effacement.

  Would Schopenhauer agree? Did he consider his feelings toward other people as maladaptive? Hardly. His attitudes were so close to his core, so deeply ingrained that he never viewed them as a liability. On the contrary, he considered his misanthropy and his isolation a virtue. Note, for example the coda of his porcupine parable: “Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble and annoyance.”

  Schopenhauer believed that a man of internal strength or virtue will not require supplies of any kind from others; such a man is sufficient unto himself. This thesis, interlocked with his unwavering faith in his own genius, served as a lifelong rationalization for the avoidance of closeness. Schopenhauer often stated that his position in the “highest class of mankind” imposed the imperative not to squander his gifts in idle social intercourse but instead to turn them to the service of humanity. “My intellect,” he wrote, “belonged not to me but to the world.”

  Many of Arthur’s writings about his supreme intelligence are so flamboyant that one might consider him grandiose were it not for the fact that his assessment of his intellectual prowess was accurate. Once Arthur applied himself to being a scholar, his prodigious intellectual gifts became evident to all about him. The tutors who prepared him for the university were astounded at his precoc
ious progress.

  Goethe, the one man of the nineteenth century whom Arthur considered his intellectual equal, eventually came to respect Arthur’s mind. Goethe had pointedly ignored the young Arthur at Johanna’s salons when Arthur was preparing for the university. Later, when Johanna asked him for a letter of support for Arthur’s application to the university, Goethe remained masterfully noncommittal in his note to an old friend, a professor of Greek: “Young Schopenhauer seems to have changed his studies and occupations a few times. How much he has achieved and in what discipline, you will readily judge for yourself if, out of friendship for me, you will give him a moment of your time.”

  Several years later, however, Goethe read Arthur’s doctoral dissertation and was so impressed with the twenty-six-year-old, that during Arthur’s next stay at Weimar, he regularly sent his servant to fetch him for long private discussions. Goethe wanted someone to critique his much-labored work on the theory of colors. Though Schopenhauer knew nothing of this particular subject, Goethe reasoned that his rare innate intelligence would make him a worthy discussant. He got rather more than he bargained for.

  Schopenhauer, greatly honored at first, basked in Goethe’s affirmation and wrote his Berlin professor: “Your friend, our great Goethe, is well, serene, friendly: praised be his name for ever and ever.” After several weeks, however, discord arose between them. Arthur opined that Goethe had made some interesting observations on vision but had erred on several vital points and had failed to produce a comprehensive theory of color. Dropping his own professional writings, Arthur then applied himself to developing his own theory of colors, differing in several crucial ways from Goethe, which he published in 1816. Schopenhauer’s arrogance eventually corroded their friendship. In his journal Goethe described the ending of his relationship with Arthur Schopenhauer: “We discussed a good many things in agreement; eventually, however, a certain separation proved unavoidable, as when two friends, having walked together so far, shake hands, one wanting to go north and the other south, and very soon losing sight of one another.”