When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

by Irvin D. Yalom

“Born too soon!”

‘Dogs can have fleas and lice, too.’”

Who can comprehend my torment, my sleepless nights, my flirtation with suicide? After all, haven’t I everything one could wish: money, friends, family, a beautiful and charming wife, renown, respectability? Who will comfort me? Who refrain from asking the obvious question: “What more can you want?”

Despair? No, perhaps once true, but not now. My illness belongs to the domain of my body, but it is not me. I am my illness and my body, but they are not me. Both must be overcome, if not physically, then metaphysically.

“Sometimes,” Nietzsche responded, “teachers must be hard. People must be given a hard message because life is hard, and dying is hard.”

“Truth,” Nietzsche continued, “is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so! Your patient’s wish to be in God’s hands is not truth. It is simply a child’s wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the everlastingly bloated nipple we have labeled ‘God’! Evolutionary theory scientifically demonstrates God’s redundancy—though Darwin himself had not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.”

“It is not the truth that is holy, but the search for one’s own truth! Can there be a more sacred act than self-inquiry? My philosophical work, some say, is built on sand: my views shift continually. But one of my granite sentences is: ‘Become who you are.’ And how can one discover who and what one is without the truth?”

“That is not a choice for man. It is not a human choice, but a grasp for an illusion outside oneself. Such a choice, a choice for the other, for the supernatural, is always enfeebling. It always makes man less than he is. I love that which makes us more than we are!”

“Yes, he must decide how to face death: to talk to others, to give advice, to say the things he has been saving to say before his death, to take his leave of others, or to be alone, to weep, to defy death, to curse it, to be thankful to it.”

Hope is the worst of evils because it protracts torment.”

And the way Nietzsche dared to say things! Imagine! To say that hope is the greatest evil! That God is dead! That truth is an error without which we cannot live! That the enemies of truth are not lies, but convictions! That the final reward of the dead is to die no more! That physicians have no right to deprive a man of his own death! Evil thoughts! He had debated Nietzsche on each. Yet it was a mock debate: deep in his heart, he knew Nietzsche was right.

disbelief is inherently stressful! Only the strong can tolerate it. Do you know what the real question for a thinker is?” He did not pause for an answer. “The real question is: How much truth can I stand? It is no occupation for those of your patients who wish to eliminate stress, to live the tranquil life.”

“It’s not what you may tell others, I accept your word on that. What matters is what you will tell yourself, and what I will tell myself. In all that you have told me of your motives, there was, despite your continuing claims of service and the alleviation of distress, nothing really of me in it. That is how it should be. You will use me in your self-project: that, too, is expected—it is the way of nature. But do you not see, I will be used up by you!

I find it remarkable that you are responsible for all of your thoughts and all of your deeds, whereas she”—Nietzsche’s voice was stern, and he shook his finger at Breuer—“she, by virtue of her illness, is exonerated from everything.”

As he left today, I asked him, what he would see if he were not blinded by trivia. Thus I pointed the way. Will he take it?

The other torments him. She pretends weakness so as to press herself against him as she walks. She pretends to sleep so as to place her head against his manhood and, when bored with these small torments, she humiliates him publicly. When that game is up, she moves on and continues her tricks with the next victim. And he is blind to all this.

Like you, I have often wondered why fears reign at night. After twenty years of such wondering, I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars—always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight.

I have known many who dislike themselves and try to rectify this by first persuading others to think well of them. Once that is done, then they begin to think well of themselves. But this is a false solution, this is submission to the authority of others. Your task is to accept yourself—not to find ways to gain my acceptance.”

The ‘lover’ is not one who ‘loves’: instead, he aims for sole possession of his loved one. His wish is to exclude the entire world from some precious good. He is as mean-spirited as the dragon guarding his golden hoard! He does not love the world—on the contrary, he is utterly indifferent to all other living creatures.

I must first teach you to walk, and the first step in learning to walk is to understand that he who does not obey himself is ruled by others. It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.”

those who wish to pursue the truth must forsake peace of mind and devote their life to inquiry. “This I knew at twenty-one, half a life ago. It is time for you to learn it: it must be your basic starting place. You must choose between comfort and true inquiry! If you choose science, if you choose to be liberated from the soothing chains of the supernatural, if, as you claim, you choose to eschew belief and embrace godlessness, then you cannot in the same breath yearn for the small comforts of the believer! If you kill God, you must also leave the

shelter of the temple.”

“Gloomy? Ask yourself, Doctor Breuer, why are all the great philosophers gloomy? Ask yourself, ‘Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?’ I’ll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision—the common people and the children!”

Puzzled, he sought for the source of his anxiety amidst the trash of his mind. And that is how we find him today, rummaging through the rubbish, as if it contains the answer. He even asks me to rummage with him!”

He is a self-deceiver: he makes choices but refuses to be the one who chooses. He knows he is miserable, but he does not know that he is miserable about the wrong thing! He expects from me relief, comfort, and happiness. But I must give him more

misery. I must change his trivial misery back into the noble misery it once was.

When I confront him with the fact that he has allowed his life to be an accident, he denies the possibility of choice. He tells me that no one embedded in a culture can choose.

“But sooner or later your obsession must yield, Josef. My model is so obviously correct. It’s so clear that behind your obsession lie your primary fears about Existenz. It’s also clear that the more we speak explicitly about these fears, the stronger your obsession gets.

Don’t you see how your obsession tries to divert your attention away from these deep facts of life? It’s the only way you know to soothe your fears.”

“Let me tell you about a Buddhist monk I met last year in the Engadine. He lives a spare life. He meditates half his waking hours and spends weeks without exchanging a word with anyone. His diet is simple, only a single meal a day, whatever he can beg, perhaps only an apple. But he meditates upon that apple until it’s bursting with redness, succulence, and crispness. By the end of the day, he passionately anticipates his meal. The point is, Josef, you don’t have to relinquish passion. But you have to change your conditions for passion.”

Perhaps you cannot bear the truth of a relationship to a beautiful woman.”

“So, Josef, you win the competition without having had to compete!” “Yes, that is another meaning of Bertha—safe contest, certain victory. But a beautiful woman withoutsafty—that is something else.” Breuer fell silent.

“I’ve always believed, Josef, that we are more in love with desire than with the desired!”

“That you’re still as alone as before, as alone as each person is sentenced to be. You’ve manufactured your own icon and then are warmed by its company. Perhaps you are more religious than you think!”

That strange Russian book about the Underground Man continues to haunt me. Dostoevsky writes that some things are not to be told, except to friends; other things are not to be told even to friends; finally, there are things one does not tell even oneself! Surely it is the things Josef has never told even himself that now erupt within him.

We skeptics have our enemies, our Satans who undermine our doubting and plant the seeds of faith in the most cunning places. Thus we kill gods, but we sanctify their replacements—teachers, artists, beautiful women. And Josef Breuer, a renowned scientist, beatifies, for forty years, the adoring smile of a little girl named Mary.

Breuer gestured toward the bouquets of fresh-cut flowers that lay before many graves. “In this land of the dead, these are the dead, and those”—he pointed to an old untended and abandoned section of the cemetery—“those are the truly dead. No one now tends their graves because no one living has ever known them. They know what it means to be dead.”

It’s there in your cemetery dread, in your concerns about meaningless, in your wish to be observed and remembered. The paradox, your paradox, is that you dedicate yourself to the search for truth but cannot bear the sight of what you discover.”

“Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.”

Have you lived your life? Or been lived by it? Chosen it? Or did it choose you? Loved it? Or regretted it? That is what I mean when I ask whether you have consummated your life. Have you used it up?

Time devours and devours—and gives back nothing. How terrible to hear you say that you lived the life assigned to you! And how terrible to face death without ever having claimed freedom, even in all its danger!”

And time that stretches back infinitely, must it not also stretch ahead infinitely? Must not we, in this moment, in every moment, recur eternally?”

“To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you’ll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It’s to produce a creator.

‘Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.’ I guess I’ve chosen.

that an ideal marriage relationship exists only when it is not necessary for each person’s survival.”

“I meant only that, to fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation. Only when one can live like the eagle—with no audience whatsoever—can one turn to another in love; only then is one able to care about the enlargement of the other’s being. Ergo, if one is unable to give up a marriage, then the marriage is doomed.”

the key to living well is first to will that which is necessary and then to love that which is willed.”

You yourself told me that there is no the way, that the only great truth is the truth we discover for ourselves.”

“Do you know that no other woman has ever touched me? Not to be loved or touched—ever? To live an absolutely unobserved life—do you know that is like? Often I go for days without saying a word to anyone, except perhaps ‘Guten Morgen’ and ‘Guten Abend’ to my Gasthaus owner. Yes, Josef, you were right in your interpretation of ‘no slot.’

Perhaps we’re all fellow sufferers unable to see each other’s truth.”