by Irvin Yalom
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To the learned men and philosophers of Europe: for you, a windbag like Fichte is the equal of Kant, the greatest thinker of all time, and a worthless barefaced charlatan like Hegel is considered to be a profound thinker. I have therefore not written for you.
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If Arthur Schopenhauer were alive today, would he be a candidate for psychotherapy? Absolutely! He was highly symptomatic. In “About Me” he laments that nature endowed him with an anxious disposition and a “suspiciousness, sensitiveness, vehemence, and pride in a measure that is hardly compatible with the equanimity of a philosopher.”
In graphic language he describes his symptoms.
Inherited from my father is the anxiety which I myself curse and combat with all the force of my will…. As a young man I was tormented by imaginary illnesses…. When I was studying in Berlin I thought I was a consumptive…. I was haunted by the fear of being pressed into military service…. From Naples I was driven by the fear of smallpox and from Berlin by the fear of cholera…. In Verona I was seized by the idea I had taken poisoned snuff…in Manheim I was overcome by an indescribable feeling of fear without any external cause…. For years I was haunted by the fear of criminal proceedings…. If there was a noise at night I jumped out of bed and seized sword and pistols that I always had ready loaded…. I always have an anxious concern that causes me to look for dangers where none exist: it magnifies the tiniest vexation and makes association with people most difficult for me.
Hoping to quell his suspiciousness and chronic fear, he employed a host of precautions and rituals: he hid gold coins and valuable interest-bearing coupons in old letters and other secret places for emergency use, he filed personal notes under false headings to confuse snoopers, he was fastidiously tidy, he requested that he always be served by the same bank clerk, he allowed no one to touch his statue of the Buddha.
His sexual drive was too strong for comfort, and, even as a young man, he deplored being controlled by his animal passions. At the age of thirty-six a mysterious course of illness confined him to his room for an entire year. A physician and medical historian suggested in 1906 that his illness had been syphilis, basing the diagnosis only upon the nature of the medication prescribed, coupled with Schopenhauer’s history of unusually great sexual activity.
Arthur longed to be released from the grip of sexuality. He savored his moments of serenity when he was able to observe the world with calm in spite of the lust tormenting his corporeal self. He compared sexual passion to the daylight which obscures the stars. As he aged he welcomed the decline of sexual passion and the accompanying tranquillity.
Since his deepest passion was his work, his strongest and most persistent fear was that he should lose the financial means enabling him to live the life of the intellect. Even into old age he blessed the memory of his father, who had made such a life possible, and he spent much time and energy guarding his money and pondering his investments. Accordingly, he was alarmed by any unrest threatening his investments and became ultraconservative in his politics. The 1848 rebellion, which swept over Germany as well as the rest of Europe, terrified him. When soldiers entered his building to gain a vantage point from which to fire on the rebellious populace in the street, he offered them his opera glasses to increase the accuracy of their rifle fire. In his will, twelve years later, he left almost his entire estate to a fund established for the welfare of Prussian soldiers disabled fighting that rebellion.
His anxiety-driven letters about business matters were often laced with anger and threats. When the banker who handled the Schopenhauer family money suffered a disastrous financial setback and, to escape bankruptcy, offered all his investors only a small fraction of their investment, Schopenhauer threatened him with such draconian legal consequences that the banker returned to him 70 percent of his money while paying other investors (including Schopenhauer’s mother and sister) an even smaller portion than originally proposed. His abusive letters to his publisher eventually resulted in a permanent rupture of their relationship. The publisher wrote: “I shall not accept any letters from you which in their divine rudeness and rusticity suggest a coachman rather than a philosopher…. I only hope that my fears that by printing your work I am printing only waste paper will not come true.”
Schopenhauer’s rage was legendary: rage at financiers who handled his investments, at publishers who could not sell his books, at the dolts who attempted to engage him in conversations, at the bipeds who regarded themselves his equal, at those who coughed at concerts, and at the press for ignoring him. But the real rage, the white-hot rage whose vehemence still astounds us and made Schopenhauer a pariah in his intellectual community was his rage toward contemporary thinkers, particularly the two leading lights of nineteenth-century philosophy: Fichte and Hegel.
In a book published twenty years after Hegel succumbed to cholera during the Berlin epidemic, he referred to Hegel as “a commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive, and ignorant charlatan, who with unparalleled effrontery, compiled a system of crazy nonsense that was trumpeted abroad as immortal wisdom by his mercenary followers.”
Such intemperate outbursts about other philosophers cost him heavily. In 1837 he was awarded first prize for an essay on the freedom of the will in a competition sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Society for Learning. Schopenhauer showed a childlike delight in the prize (it was his very first honor) and greatly vexed the Norwegian consul in Frankfurt by impatiently clamoring for his medal. However, the very next year, his essay on the basis of morality submitted to a competition sponsored by the Royal Danish Society for Learning met a different fate. Though the argument of his essay was excellent and though it was the only essay submitted, the judges refused to award him the prize because of his intemperate remarks about Hegel. The judges commented, “We cannot pass over in silence the fact that several outstanding philosophers of the modern age are referred to in so improper a manner as to cause serious and just offense.”
Over the years many have agreed entirely with Schopenhauer’s opinion that Hegel’s prose is unnecessarily obfuscating. In fact, he is so difficult to read that an old joke circulating around philosophy departments is that the most vexing and awesome philosophical question is not “does life have meaning?” or “what is consciousness?” but “who will teach Hegel this year?” Still, the level, the vehemence of Schopenhauer’s rage set him apart from all other critics.
The more his work was neglected, the shriller he became, which, in turn, caused further neglect and, for many, made him an object of mockery. Yet, despite his anxiety and loneliness, Schopenhauer survived and continued to exhibit all the outward signs of personal self-sufficiency. And he persevered in his work, remaining a productive scholar until the end of his life. He never lost faith in himself. He compared himself to a young oak tree who looked as ordinary and unimportant as other plants. “But let him alone: he will not die. Time will come and bring those who know how to value him.” He predicted his genius would ultimately have a great influence upon future generations of thinkers. And he was right; all that he predicted has come to pass.
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Seen from the standpoint of youth, life is an endlessly long future; from that of old age it resembles a very brief past. When we sail away, objects on the shore become ever smaller and more difficult to recognize and distinguish; so, too, is it with our past years with all their events and activities.
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As time raced by, Julius looked forward with increasing anticipation to the weekly group meeting. Perhaps his experiences in the group were more poignant because the weeks of his “one good year” were running out. But it was not just the events of the group; everything in his life, large and small, appeared more tender and vivid. Of course, his weeks had always been numbered, but the numbers had seemed so large, so stretched into a forever future, that he had never confronted the end of weeks.
Visible endings always cause us to brake. Readers zip through the thou
sand pages of The Brothers Karamazov until there are only a dozen remaining pages, and then they suddenly decelerate, savoring each paragraph slowly, sucking the nectar from each phrase, each word. Scarcity of days caused Julius to treasure time; more and more he fell into astonished contemplation of the miraculous flow of everyday events.
Recently, he had read a piece by an entomologist who explored the cosmos existing in a roped-off, two-by-two piece of turf. Digging deeply, he described his sense of awe at the dynamic, teeming world of predators and prey, nematodes, millipedes, springtails, armor-plated beetles, and spiderlings. If perspective is attuned, attention rapt, and knowledge vast, then one enters everydayness in a perpetual state of wonderment.
So it was for Julius in the group. His fears about the recurrence of his melanoma had receded, and his panics grew less frequent. Perhaps his greater comfort stemmed from taking his doctor’s estimate of “one good year” too literally, almost as a guarantee. More likely, though, his mode of life was the active emollient. Following Zarathustra’s path, he had shared his ripeness, transcended himself by reaching out to others, and lived in a manner that he would be willing to repeat perpetually throughout eternity.
He had always remained curious about the direction the therapy groups would take the following week. Now, with his last good year visibly shrinking, all feelings were intensified: his curiosity had evolved into an eager childlike anticipation of the next meeting. He remembered how, years ago, when he taught group therapy the beginning students complained of boredom as they observed ninety minutes of talking heads. Later, when they learned how to listen to the drama of each patient’s life and to appreciate the exquisitely complex interaction between members, boredom dissolved and every student was in place early awaiting the next installment.
The looming end of the group propelled members to address their core issues with increased ardor. A visible end to therapy always has that result; for that reason pioneer practitioners like Otto Rank and Carl Rogers often set a termination date at the very onset of therapy.
Stuart did more work in those months than in three previous years of therapy. Perhaps Philip had jump-started Stuart by serving as a mirror. He saw parts of himself in Philip’s misanthropy and realized that every member of the group, except the two of them, took pleasure in the meetings and considered the group a refuge, a place of support and caring. Only he and Philip attended under duress—Philip in order to obtain supervision from Julius, and he because of his wife’s ultimatum.
At one meeting Pam commented that the group never formed a true circle because Stuart’s chair was invariably set back a bit, sometimes only a couple of inches, but big inches. Others agreed; they had all felt the seating asymmetry but never connected it to Stuart’s avoidance of closeness.
In another meeting Stuart launched into a familiar grievance as he described his wife’s attachment to her father, a physician who rose from chairman of a surgery department, to medical school dean, to president of a university. When Stuart continued, as he had in previous meetings, to discuss the impossibility of ever winning his wife’s regard because she continually compared him to her father, Julius interrupted to inquire whether he was aware that he had often told this story before.
After Stuart responded, “But surely we should be bringing up issues that continue to be bothersome. Shouldn’t we?” Julius then asked a powerful question: “How did you think we would feel about your repetition?”
“I imagine you’d find it tedious or boring.”
“Think about that, Stuart. What’s the payoff for you in being tedious or boring? And then think about why you’ve never developed empathy for your listeners.”
Stuart did think about that a great deal during the following week and reported feeling astonished to realize how little he ever considered that question. “I know my wife often finds me tedious; her favorite term for me is absent, and I guess the group is telling me the same thing. You know, I think I’ve put my empathy into deep storage.”
A short time later Stuart opened up a central problem: his ongoing inexplicable anger toward his twelve-year-old son. Tony opened a Pandora’s box by asking, “What were you like when you were your son’s age?”
Stuart described growing up in poverty; his father had died when he was eight, and his mother, who worked two jobs, was never home when he returned from school. Hence, he had been a latch-key child, preparing his own dinner, wearing the same soiled clothes to school day after day. For the most part, he had succeeded in suppressing the memory of his childhood, but his son’s presence propelled him back to horrors long forgotten.
“Blaming my son is crazy,” he said, “but I just keep feeling envy and resentment when I see his privileged life.” It was Tony who helped crack Stuart’s anger with an effective reframing intervention: “What about spending some time feeling proud at providing that better life for your son?”
Almost everyone made progress. Julius had seen this before; when groups reach a state of ripeness, all the members seem to get better at once. Bonnie struggled to come to terms with a central paradox: her rage toward her ex-husband for having left her and her relief that she was out of a relationship with a man she so thoroughly disliked.
Gill attended daily AA meetings—seventy meetings in seventy days—but his marital difficulties increased, rather than decreased, with his sobriety. That, of course, was no mystery to Julius: whenever one spouse improves in therapy, the homeostasis of the marital relationship is upset and, if the marriage is to stay solvent, the other spouse must change as well. Gill and Rose had begun couples’ therapy, but Gill wasn’t convinced that Rose could change. However, he was no longer terrified at the thought of ending the marriage; for the first time he truly understood one of Julius’s favorite bon mots: “The only way you can save your marriage is to be willing (and able) to leave it.”
Tony worked at an astonishing pace—as though Julius’s depleting strength were seeping directly into him. With Pam’s encouragement, strongly reinforced by everyone else in the group, he decided to stop complaining of being ignorant and, instead, do something about it—get an education—and enrolled in three night courses at the local community college.
However thrilling and gratifying these widespread changes, Julius’s central attention remained riveted on Philip and Pam. Why their relationship had taken on such importance for him was unclear, though Julius was convinced the reasons transcended the particular. Sometimes when thinking about Pam and Philip, he was visited by the Talmudic phrase “to redeem one person is to save the whole world.” The importance of redeeming their relationship soon loomed large. Indeed it became his raison d’être: it was as though he could save his own life by salvaging something human from the wreckage of that horrific encounter years before. As he mused about the meaning of the Talmudic phrase, Carlos entered his mind. He had worked with Carlos, a young man, a few years ago. No, it must have been longer, at least ten years, since he remembered talking to Miriam about Carlos. Carlos was a particularly unlikable man, crass, self-centered, shallow, sexually driven, who sought his help when he was diagnosed with a fatal lymphoma. Julius helped Carlos make some remarkable changes, especially in the realm of connectivity, and those changes allowed him to flood his entire life retrospectively with meaning. Hours before he died he told Julius, “Thank you for saving my life.” Julius had thought about Carlos many times, but now at this moment his story assumed a new and momentous meaning—not only for Philip and Pam, but for saving his own life, as well.
In most ways Philip appeared less pompous and more approachable in the group, even making occasional eye contact with most members, save Pam. The six-month mark came and went without Philip raising the subject of dropping because he had fulfilled his six-month contract. When Julius raised the issue, Philip responded, “To my surprise group therapy is a far more complex phenomenon than I had originally thought. I’d prefer you supervise my work with clients while I was also attending the group, but you’ve rejected that idea
because of the problems of ‘dual relationships.’ My choice is to remain in the group for the entire year and to request supervision after that.”
“I’m fine with that plan,” Julius agreed, “but it depends, of course, on the state of my health. The group has four more months before we end, and after that we’ll have to see. My health guarantee was only for one year.”
Philip’s change of mind about group participation was not uncommon. Members often enter a group with one circumscribed goal in mind, for example, to sleep better, to stop having nightmares, to overcome a phobia. Then, in a few months, they often formulate different, more far-reaching goals, for example, to learn how to love, to recapture zest for life, to overcome loneliness, to develop self-worth.
From time to time the group pressed Philip to describe more precisely how Schopenhauer had helped so much when Julius’s psychotherapy had so utterly failed. Because he had difficulty answering questions about Schopenhauer without providing the necessary philosophical background, he requested the group’s permission to give a thirty-minute lecture on the topic. The group groaned, and Julius urged him to present the relevant material more succinctly and conversationally.
The following session Philip embarked upon a brief lecturette which, he promised, would succinctly answer the question of how Schopenhauer had helped him.
Though he had notes in his hand, he spoke without referring to them. Staring at the ceiling, he began, “It’s not possible to discuss Schopenhauer without starting with Kant, the philosopher whom, along with Plato, he respected above all others. Kant, who died in 1804 when Schopenhauer was sixteen, revolutionized philosophy with his insight that it is impossible for us to experience reality in any veritable sense because all of our perceptions, our sense data, are filtered and processed through our inbuilt neuroanatomical apparatus. All data are conceptualized through such arbitrary constructs as space and time and—”