Read The Schopenhauer Cure Online

Authors: Irvin Yalom

Tags: #Fiction, #General

The Schopenhauer Cure (6 page)

Friday November 2, 1990. DDD (death-discovery day) + 16

No doubt about it: searching out Philip Slate was a bad idea. A bad idea to think I could get something from him. A bad idea to meet with him. Never again. Philip a therapist?

Unbelievable--a therapist sans empathy, sensitivity, caring. He heard me say on the phone that I had health problems and that these problems were part of the reason I wanted to meet with him. Yet not one personal question about how I was doing. Not even a handshake. Frigid. Inhuman. Kept ten feet away from me. I worked like hell for that guy for three years. Gave him everything. Gave him my best stuff. Ungrateful bastard.

Oh yes, I know what he would say. I can hear that disembodied precise voice of his: "You and I had a commercial transaction: I gave you money and you provided your expert services. I paid promptly for every hour of your consultation. Transaction over.

We're even; I owe you nothing."

Then he'd add, "Less than nothing, Dr. Hertzfeld, you had the best of our bargain.

You received your full fee, whereas I received nothing of value in return."

The worst thing is, he's right. He owes me nothing. I crow about psychotherapy being a life of service. Service lovingly given. I have no lien on him. Why expect 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

_________________________

The
solid 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.

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