Ирвин Ялом - The Schopenhauer Cure

something from him? And, anyway, whatever it is I crave, he does not have it to give.

«He does not have it to give»—how many times have I said that to how many

patients—about husbands or wives or fathers. Yet I can`t let Philip go, this unrelenting,

callous, ungiving man. Shall I write an ode about the obligation patients owe in later

years to their therapists?

And why does it matter so much? And why, of all my patients, choose to contact

him? I still don`t know. I found a clue in my case notes—the feeling that I was talking to a

young phantasm of myself. Perhaps there`s more than a trace of Philip in me, in the me

who in my teens and twenties and thirties was whipped around by hormones. I thought I

knew what he was going through, I thought that I had an inside track to healing him. Is

that why I tried so hard? Why he got more attention and energy from me than most of my

other patients combined? In every therapist`s practice, there is always some patient who

consumes a disproportionate amount of the therapist`s energy and attention—Philip was

that person for me for three years.

Julius returned home that evening to a cold dark house. His son, Larry, had spent

the last three days with him but that morning had returned to Baltimore, where he did

neurobiological research at Johns Hopkins. Julius was almost relieved that Larry had

left—the anguished look on his face and his loving but clumsy efforts to comfort his

father had brought more sorrow than serenity. He started to phone Marty, one of his

colleagues in his support group, but felt too despondent, hung up the phone, and instead

turned on his computer to enter the notes scribbled on the crumpled Starbucks paper bag.

«You have e–mail,” greeted him, and, to his surprise, there was a message from Philip. He

read it eagerly:

At the end of our discussion today you asked about Schopenhauer and how I was

helped by his philosophy. You also indicated that you might want to learn more about

him. It occurs to me that you might be interested in my lecture at Coastal College

next Monday evening at 7P.M. (Toyon Hall, 340 Fulton St.). I am teaching a survey

course on European philosophy, and on Monday I will give a brief overview of

Schopenhauer (I must cover two thousand years in twelve weeks). Perhaps we can

chat a bit after the lecture. Philip Slate

Without hesitation Julius e–mailed Philip:Thanks. I`ll be there. He opened his

appointment book to the following Monday and penciled in «Toyon Hall, 340 Fulton

7P.M. ”

On Mondays Julius led a therapy group from four–thirty till six. Earlier in the day he had

pondered whether to tell the group about his diagnosis. Though he had decided to

postpone telling his individual patients until he regained his equilibrium, the group posed

a different problem: group members often focused upon him, and the chances of someone

spotting some change in his mood and commenting upon it were much greater.

But his concerns were unfounded. The members had readily accepted his excuse of

the flu for having canceled the two previous meetings and then moved on to catch up on

the last two weeks of each other`s lives. Stuart, a short, pudgy pediatrician who

perpetually seemed distracted, as though he were in a rush to get to his next patient,

seemed pressured and asked for time from the group. This was a most unusual

occurrence; in Stuart`s year in the group he had rarely asked for help. He had originally

entered the group under duress: his wife informed him by e–mail that unless he entered

therapy and made some significant changes she was going to leave him. She added that

she had conveyed this via e–mail because he paid more attention to electronic

communication than anything said to him directly. During the past week his wife had

upped the ante by moving out of their bedroom, and much of the meeting was spent on

helping Stuart explore his feelings about her withdrawal.

Julius loved this group. Often the courage of the members took his breath away as

they regularly broke new ground and took great risks. Today`s meeting was no exception.

Everyone supported Stuart for his willingness to show his vulnerability, and the time

whizzed by. By the end of the meeting Julius felt much better. So caught up was he by

the drama of the meeting that for an hour and a half he forgot his own despair. That was

not unusual. All group therapists know about the wonderfully healing qualities inherent

in the atmosphere of the working group. Time and again Julius had entered a meeting

disquieted and left considerably better even though he had not, of course, explicitly

addressed any of his personal issues.

He had barely time for a quick dinner at We Be Sushi a short distance from his

office. He was a regular there and was greeted loudly by Mark, the sushi chef, as he took

his seat. When alone, he always preferred sitting at the counter—like all of his patients,

he was uncomfortable eating by himself at a restaurant table.

Julius ordered his usual: California rolls, broiled eel, and a variety of vegetarian

maki. He loved sushi but carefully avoided raw fish because of his fear of parasites. That

whole battle against outside marauders—now, what a joke it seemed! How ironic that, in

the end, it would be an inside job. To hell with it; Julius threw caution to the wind and

ordered some ahi sushi from the astonished chef. He ate with great relish before rushing

out to Toyon Hall and to his first meeting with Arthur Schopenhauer.

6

Mom and Pop

Schopenhauer

—

Zu Hause

_________________________

Thesolid foundations of our

view of the world and thus its

depth or shallowness are

formed in the years of

childhood. Such a view is

subsequently elaborated and

perfected, yet essentially it

is not altered.

_________________________

What kind of a man was Heinrich Schopenhauer? Tough, dour, repressed, unyielding,

proud. The story is told that in 1783, five years before Arthur`s birth, Danzig was

blockaded by the Prussians and food and fodder were scarce. The Schopenhauer family

was forced to accept the billeting of an enemy general at their country estate. As a

reward, the Prussian officer offered to grant Heinrich the privilege of forage for his

horses. Heinrich`s reply? «My stable is well stocked, sir, and when the food supply runs

out I will have my horses put down.»

And Arthur`s mother, Johanna? Romantic, lovely, imaginative, vivacious,

flirtatious. Though all of Danzig in 1787 considered the union of Heinrich and Johanna a

brilliant event, it proved to be a tragic mismatch. The Troiseners, Johanna`s family, came

from a modest background and had long regarded the lofty Schopenhauers with awe.

Hence, when Heinrich, at the age of thirty–eight, came to court the seventeen–year–old

Johanna, the Troiseners were jubilant and Johanna acquiesced to her parents` choice.

Did Johanna regard her marriage as a mistake? Read her words written years later

as she warned other young women facing a matrimonial decision: «Splendor, rank, and

title exercise an all too seductive power over a young girl`s heart luring women into tying

a marriage knot...a false step for which they must suffer the hardest punishment the rest

of their lives.»

«Suffer the hardest punishment the rest of their lives»—strong words from Arthur`s

mother. In her journals she confided that before Heinrich courted her she had had a young

love, which fate took from her, and it was in a state of resignation that she had accepted

Heinrich Schopenhauer`s marriage proposal. Did she have a choice? Most likely not. This

typical eighteenth–century marriage of convenience was arranged by her family for

reasons of property and status. Was there love? There was no question of love between

Heinrich and Johanna Schopenhauer. Never. Later, in her memoirs, she wrote, «I no more

pretended ardent love than he demanded it.» Nor was there abundant love for others in

their household—not for the young Arthur Schopenhauer, nor for his younger sister,

Adele, born nine years later.

Love between parents begets love for the children. Occasionally, one hears tales of

parents whose great love for each other consumes all the love available in the household,

leaving only love–cinders for the children. But this zero–sum economic model of love

makes little sense. The opposite seems true: the more one loves, the more that one

responds to children, to everyone, in a loving manner.

Arthur`s love–bereft childhood had serious implications for his future. Children

deprived of a maternal love bond fail to develop the basic trust necessary to love

themselves, to believe that others will love them, or to love being alive. In adulthood they

become estranged, withdraw into themselves, and often live in an adversarial relationship

with others. Such was the psychological landscape that would ultimately inform Arthur`s

worldview.

7

_________________________

If we look at life in its small

details, how ridiculous it all

seems. It is like a drop of

water seen through a micro–scope, a single drop teeming

with protozoa. How we laugh as

they bustle about so eagerly

and struggle with one another.

Whether here, or in the little

span of human life, this

terrible activity produces a

comic effect.

_________________________

At five minutes to seven Julius knocked out the ashes from his meerschaum pipe and

entered the auditorium in Toyon Hall. He took a seat in the fourth row on the side aisle

and looked about the amphitheater: Twenty rows rose sharply from the entry level where

the lecture podium stood. Most of the two hundred seats were vacant; roughly thirty were

broken and wrapped with yellow plastic ribbon. Two homeless men and their collections

of newspapers sprawled across seats in the last row. Approximately thirty seats were

occupied by unkempt students randomly sprinkled throughout the auditorium with the

exception of the first three rows which remained vacant.

Just like a therapy group, Julius thought, no one wants to sit near to the leader.

Even in his group meeting earlier that day the seats on either side of him had been left

vacant for the late members, and he had joked that a seat next to him seemed to be the

penalty for tardiness. Julius thought of the group therapy folklore about seating; that the

most dependent person sits to the leader`s right, whereas the most paranoid members sit

directly opposite; but, in his experience, the reluctance to sit next to the leader was the

only rule that could be counted on with regularity.

The shabbiness and dilapidation of Toyon Hall was typical of the entire campus of

California Coastal College, which had begun life as an evening business school, then

expanded and flowered briefly as an undergraduate college, and was now obviously in a

phase of entropy. On his walk to the lecture through the unsavory tenderloin, Julius had

found it difficult to distinguish unkempt students from homeless denizens of the

neighborhood. What teacher could avoid demoralization in this setting? Julius began to

understand why Philip wanted to switch careers by moving into clinical work.

He checked his watch. Seven o`clock exactly and right on cue Philip entered the

auditorium, dressed in the professorial uniform of checkered khaki pants, shirt, and a tan

corduroy jacket with sewed–on elbow patches. Extracting his lecture notes from a

properly scuffed briefcase and, without so much as a glance at his audience, he began:

This is the survey of Western philosophy—lecture eighteen—Arthur Schopenhauer.

Tonight I shall proceed differently and stalk my prey more indirectly. If I appear

desultory, I ask your forbearance—I promise I shall soon enough return to the matter

at hand. Let us begin by turning our attention to the great debuts in history.

Philip scanned his audience for some nod of comprehension and, failing to find it,

crooked his forefinger at one of the students sitting nearest him and pointed to the

blackboard. He then spelled out and defined three words,d–e–s–u–l–t–o–r–y, f–o–r–e–b–e–a–r–a-

n–c–e, andd–eb–u–t, which the student dutifully copied onto the blackboard. The student

started to return to his seat, but Philip pointed to a first–row seat, instructing him to

remain there.

Now for great debuts; trust me—my purpose for beginning in such a fashion will, in

time, become apparent. Imagine Mozart stunning the Viennese royal court as he

performed flawlessly on the harpsichord at the age of nine. Or, if Mozart does not

strike a familiar chord(here the faintest trace of a smile), imagine something more

familiar to you, the Beatles at nineteen playing their own compositions to Liverpool

audiences.

Other amazing debuts include the extraordinary debut of Johann Fichte.(Here a

signal to the student to write F–i–c–h–t–eon the board.) Does any one of you remember

his name from my last lecture in which I discussed the great German idealist

philosophers who followed Kant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:

Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte? Of these, Fichte`s life and his debut was the most

remarkable for he began life as a poor uneducated goose shepherd in Rammenau, a

small German village whose only claim to fame was its clergyman`s inspired sermons

every Sunday.

Well, one Sunday a wealthy aristocrat arrived at the village too late to hear the

sermon. As he stood, obviously disappointed, outside the church, an elderly villager

approached him and told him not to despair because the gooseherd, young Johann,

could repreach the sermon to him. The villager fetched Johann, who, indeed, repeated

the entire lecture verbatim. So impressed was the baron by the gooseherd`s

astoundingly retentive mind that he financed Johann`s education and arranged for him

to attend Pforta, a renowned boarding school later attended by many eminent German

thinkers, including the subject of our next lecture, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Johann excelled in school and later at the university, but when his patron died,

Johann had no means of support and took a tutoring job in a private home in Germany

where he was hired to teach a young man the philosophy of Kant, whom he had not

yet read himself. Soon he was entranced by the work of the divine Kant…

Philip suddenly looked up from his notes to survey his audience. Seeing no glint of

recognition in any eyes, he hissed at his audience:

Hello, anybody home? Kant, Immanuel Kant, Kant, Kant, remember?»(He motioned

to the blackboard scribe to write K–a–n–t.) We spent two hours on him last week?