This is by Irvin D. Yalom, psychiatry professor and author of The Spinoza Problem, which I enjoyed listening to last year.

While reading up on that book, I came across this interesting snippet: "The novel When Nietzsche Wept [that's its English title] had only a lukewarm reception here [in the United States] but was selected as the book of the year in Austria -- 100,000 copies were distributed free to the citizens of Vienna." Really? Yes, really. Vienna runs a "One city, one book" campaign every year, which does indeed involve choosing a book, and distributing tens of thousands of free copies. Fabulous idea. It must be wonderful to be picked. In effect, the Austrian capital becomes one big "reading club" for the chosen book. And in 2009, Yalom's was the lucky work.

Because I thought I'd rather read any Nietzsche quotes that might pop up in the original language, I read the German version of the novel, translated by Uda Straetling, entitled as above. (The original English version not only differs slightly, as noted, but also sports a subtitle -- A Novel of Obsession -- that is not reproduced in the German version.) That original version was published in 1992 (ie, 20 years before The Spinoza Problem). The German version appeared two years later.


Geneva 2023. Nietzsche frequently passed through this city

It's 1882, and eminent Viennese physician Josef Breuer is contacted by the brilliant and free-spirited Lou Salome, a Russian-born emigre. Breuer primarily deals with purely physical ailments, but he is known for developing a "talking cure" for a disturbed woman called Bertha Pappenheim (what is less known is his passionate obsession with her). Salome wants Breuer to use this talking approach to heal philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for whose debilitating physical symptoms and deep depression she thinks she might be partly responsible (there was an unfortunate triangle, also involving Paul Ree, whom we don't meet). No doctor has been able to find a successful treatment for Nietzsche, so Salome is turning to Breuer. She wants him, however, to keep schtum about her own role as mediator.

Breuer agrees to take the task on (confiding his thoughts, all the while, to colleague and protege Sigmund Freud). But Nietzsche is a hard man to help. Refusal after refusal induce Breuer to propose an exchange: Breuer will treat Nietzsche's physical ailments, while Nietzsche will use his philosophical understanding to try to halt Breuer's own slide into depression.

In reality (and Yalom is always good about telling us at the end what's "true" and what's "made up"), Nietzsche and Breuer never met. But all these figures are real people. There was indeed a curious intellectual/emotional trinity involving Salome, Ree, and Nietzsche; Breuer was indeed Freud's mentor; Pappenheim (her case-file coded "Anna O") was indeed a real patient of Breuer's (we don't know for certain that he was obsessed with her, but contemporary sources indicate he could have been).

And all this thought is real thought. We are introduced to many of the foundations of psychoanalysis, as the characters grope their way towards understanding the unconscious, or the role of dreams, or the efficacy of "chimney sweeping" (the technique of free association). As Yalom puts it: "In 1882, there was no psychotherapy, and Nietzsche, of course, never explicitly addressed these questions. But when I read Nietzsche, I got the impression that self-knowledge and self-realization were existentially significant concerns for him." Ebba Paulsson puts this very nicely: "Yalom uses the genre of alternative history fiction in order to show the affinities of the ideological and philosophical positions of the main characters and thereby also describe a sort of zeitgeist in which psychoanalysis arose as a theory and treatment."



Similarly, the ideas we hear Nietzsche using in his "treatment" of Breuer closely mirror his actual writings. Here are some, as quoted from the various conversations:

** People need hard lessons, because life is hard and so is death.
** It is not the truth as such that is sacred to me, but the search for our own truth. What action would be more sacred than self-enquiry?... One of my immovable landmarks is: 'Become who you are.' And how can people advance to who and what they are without truth?
** Truth is also an illusion, but one we can't live without.
** There are basically two attitudes to life: The attitude of those who seek peace of mind and happiness, and who believe and must hold fast to their faith, and the attitude of those who seek the truth, and who must renounce all peace of mind, and consecrate their lives to the search for knowledge... You have to choose between comfort and real striving for truth!... If you kill God, then you must also leave the protected temple precinct.
** Hope is the worst of evils, because it prolongs the torment of human beings.
** What doesn't kill me makes me stronger [yes, this is Nietzsche...].
** Dissect your motivations in their entirety! You will find that no-one ever does anything exclusively for others. All action is directed towards the self, all service serves the self, all love is self-love.
** I have come to the conclusion that fear is not born out of darkness, but rather resembles the stars -- always immovably there, just invisible in the bright light of day.
** You must still have chaos inside you to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
** The cosmic perspective diminishes everything tragic. If we rise high enough, we reach heights from which even tragedy ceases to be tragic.
** Time cannot be broken; therein lies our heaviest burden. And the biggest challenge is to live with, and in spite of, this burden.
** Die at the right time... Live victoriously, live fully! Death loses its terror provided you die after living your life, living it fully! If you don't live at the right time, you can't die at the right time... Have you lived your life? Or were you lived by it?
** Only this life, this moment, is immortal. There is no afterlife, no goal to which this life aspires, no apocalyptic tribunal, no last judgement. This moment lasts for ever, and you alone are your entire audience."
** [On the thought experiment of eternal return, eternally reliving the life you have lived, he asks:] Is the idea an abomination to you? Or do you feel as although you had never heard anything more divine?... You must live in such a way that you can say yes to this idea.
** Your good nature, your dedication to duty, your loyalty -- they are the bars of your prison. You will perish on account of these little virtues.

We also learn about Nietzsche's practice. He walks obsessively, for example, convinced that he arrives at his best insights, his clearest thoughts, while pacing the earth. And he's highly mobile: "My home is my suitcase."

And, as an aside to all this, there's plenty about late-19th-century Vienna. Antisemitism, for example... And the prevailing climate of nihilism...



This is another of Yalom's "teaching novels", and to like it, you're going to need a taste for long stretches of somewhat artificial dialogue, and a willingness to accept that talk takes precedence over action.

I have no problems with either of those features. And the book has fuelled my already growing interest in Nietzsche. (I was introduced to him as an undergraduate, but I think I just wasn't intellectually ready to grapple with these ideas, and therefore remember little about our encounter.)

There were, however, some elements of the novel that I took issue with. Structurally, the opening sections, in which Breuer and Nietzsche dance around each other, one trying to heal, the other strenuously resisting being healed, are perhaps a little long. (Clearly, Yalom had the "teaching novel" technique off to a finer art 20 years later.)

But the bit I resented most -- and couldn't help but feel was a real cop-out -- was the hypnotism exercise...

Poor Breuer seems to get worse under Nietzsche's treatment. He realizes that his obsession with Bertha is a surrogate for a growing disillusionment with the way his time on earth has unfolded. He feels he has wasted his life trying to live up to the label -- "an infinitely promising boy" -- that was bestowed on him as a child. He pursued the same goals as all the other boys around him: All wanted to outgrow the Jewish ghetto, make their way in the world, and achieve success, riches, and a good reputation. Breuer has done all that. He has a fine clientele, an inspiring circle of friends, a beautiful wife, and five children (whom he rarely sees, in accordance with the custom of the age). But he is far from happy. He has not been able, as Nietzsche puts it, to realize his potential.

Chapter 21 leads us to believe that Breuer has made a definitive break with his old life and relationships -- with everything that he feels has kept him prisoner. While empathizing with him, in his newly isolated predicament, we're also really curious as to how this is going to turn out. Bold, surely, to appear to advocate the renunciation of hearth and home, career and fame... His wife, Mathilde, certainly has some choice things to say about his desire for freedom: "I wish I had your freedom -- a man's freedom to get an education, to choose a career."

And then it turns out he has experienced all this renunciation under hypnosis... It's the slightly more sophisticated but no less unacceptable equivalent of the "and-then-I-woke-up-and-it-was-all-a-dream" technique.

The exercise is supposedly effective. Breuer wondered how things would have been if he had chosen a different path in life. And in the simulation, he finds out: The consequent loneliness is very scary. Waking up, he realizes that the important thing is to WANT what you've been given. It's the old maxim: You can't always have what you want, but you can always want what you have... "Today, perhaps for the first time," he says, "I feel as though I had willed my life... Finally, I can say, 'Yes, I wanted this life. It is good'... I now know that the key to a fulfilled life lies in wanting what is inevitable, and then loving what is wanted." Amor fati. Love your fate.

It all sounds rather pat to me...



Slightly more convincing is Nietzsche's cathartic experience, when he allows himself to admit that the loneliness that he has worn like a suit of armour ("I've always been alone... That's my lot. I welcome it") is also a burden to him (he acknowledges that Salome was the only one who filled up the empty space inside him, and fears dying alone). After shedding the tears of the title, he says: "It is strange, but at the very moment when, for the first time in my life, I reveal my loneliness in all its bottomlessness and terror, at that very moment the loneliness melts away!... I will always be alone, but what a difference, what a glorious difference, to want what I do. Amor fati -- choose your destiny, love your destiny."

Aside from the hypnosis frustration, I also wonder whether Lou Salome (1861-1937) gets fair treatment... She is depicted here as the archetypal wily minx, wrapping both Nietzsche and Breuer around her little finger. Is this fair? I don't have enough information to say. But, according to Deborah Hayden, Nietzsche scholars have tended to echo the philosopher's own dramatic switch from praising Salome to ruthlessly denigrating her. In the course of her life she went on to play important roles in the lives of Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud, and she became the world's first female psychoanalyst. Does that fit with the character we meet here? But then again, in 1882, she was only 21...



Which brings me to attitudes to women in general. Nietzsche comes across as fairly misogynistic (although biographer Sue Prideaux insists he isn't).

But you don't -- or I don't -- feel much sympathy for Breuer in this area either. Mathilde, patients, staff -- they're all pretty much seen as objects. He notes, for example, how different Salome is from other women of his acquaintance: "He had a completely new kind of woman in front of him. This woman was free!" But that doesn't stop him clamping his eyes on her bosom...

It's always questionable to apply the overlay of 2023 to an account written in 1992 of events occurring in 1882. But it was hard not to be disturbed by the casually exploitative attitudes. Aside from the professional ethics angle, the age differences were striking. When this action plays out, Breuer was 40, and Nietzsche 38, while Pappenheim (who, incidentally, went on to become "a groundbreaking social worker") was 23, and Salome, as noted, 21...

I somehow wanted from the omniscient author -- anachronistically, maybe -- more acknowledgment of the inappropriateness of all this stuff... But, judging by this piece, Yalom may well have his own problems with objectivization...

A highly informative and productive read, then, but with some jarring elements.