When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom
So although the novel is fiction, it is not, I think, an improbable account of how Friedrich Nietzsche might have invented psychotherapy. And Nietzsche could well have used therapy: he lived much of his life in deep despair. Ultimately I fashioned a plot which consists of this thought experiment: Suppose that Nietzsche were placed in a historical situation in which he would have been enabled to invent a psychotherapy derived from his own published writings, one that could have been used to heal himself.
But why Nietzsche? Why write a psychotherapy novel about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche? First, the basic tenets of much of my thinking about existential psychotherapy and the meaning of despair are to be found in Nietzsche’s writings. It is not that I read Nietzsche and deliberately set about to develop clinical applications for his insights. I’ve never thought or worked in that manner. Instead, my ideas about existential therapy emerged from my clinical work and then I turned to philosophy as a way of confirming and deepening this work.
In the process of writing the textbook Existential Therapy, I immersed myself for years in the work of the great existential philosophers—Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Of these, I found Nietzsche to be the most creative, the most powerful, and, by far, the most relevant for psychotherapy.
The idea of Nietzsche as a therapist may seem jarring to many of us because we so often think of Nietzsche as a destroyer or nihilist. After all, didn’t Nietzsche describe himself as the philosopher who does philosophy with a hammer? But Nietzsche, full of contradictions, revered destruction only as a stage in the process of creation—often he said that one can build a new self only on the ashes of the old.
Many have considered Nietzsche not as a destroyer but as a healer, a man who aspired to be a physician to his entire epoch. And the disease he hoped to treat? Nihilism—the post-Darwinian nihilism that was creeping over Europe in the late nineteenth century. In the wake of Darwin, all the old traditional religious values were crumbling. God was dead and a new secular humanism squatted in the temple ruins.
Nietzsche sought to use the death of God as an opportunity to create a new set of values. Over a century ago he said that “if we have our own ‘why’ of life we can put up with almost any ‘how.’” But Nietzsche wanted the new “why,” the new set of values, to be based not on supernatural values, but upon human experience, and upon this life rather than the illusion of some afterlife.
Contemporary scholarship has shown that Nietzsche anticipated Freud in many areas. Let us consider one example of his relevance for contemporary psychotherapy—his concept of the truly evolved individual (the Übermensch or superman or overman). Nietzsche believed that the path to becoming an Ubermensch lay not in the conquest or subjugation of others but through a self-overcoming.
The truly powerful man never inflicts pain or suffering but, like Zarathustra, is overflowing with power and wisdom and offers it freely to others. His offer emanates from a personal abundance, never from a sense of pity—that would represent a kind of scorn. So the overman, then, is a life affirmer, one who loves his fate, one who says “yes” to life.
In his life-celebratory stand, Nietzsche was much at odds with his first hero, Socrates, who just before taking his fatal draught of Hemlock said, “I owe Asclepius a rooster.” Why would Socrates owe the God of medicine a rooster—a fee the Greeks offered a doctor when he cured a patient? Apparently Socrates meant that he was now cured of the disease of life and its inherent, inescapable suffering. Nietzsche was at odds also with the Buddhist view that life was suffering and that relief from suffering lay in the giving up of attachments. According to this view the final goal of life is the detachment from individual consciousness, the end of the cyclical wheel of individual ego, the attainment of Nirvana.
But not so for Nietzsche, who once said, “Was that life? Well, then, once again!” Nietzsche’s overman is one who, if offered the opportunity to live life precisely the same way, again and again and again, and for all eternity, is able to say, “Yes, yes, give it to me. I’ll take that life and I’ll live it again in precisely the same way.” The Nietzschean overman loves his fate, embraces his suffering, and turns it into art and into beauty. And he is also a person who, in Nietzsche’s terms, “overcomes the narcotic need for some supernaturally imposed purpose.” Once a man can do that, Nietzsche said, he becomes an Übermensch, a philosophical soul, one of those who represents the next stage of human evolution.
So Nietzsche urged us not to strive towards the conquest of others but towards an interior, self-actualizing process, towards the realization of one’s potential. Nietzsche’s words were not lost to history: in the 1960s they found expression again in the human potential movement. He offered a new, non-supernatural, humanistically oriented purpose in life, namely that each of us is a bridge to something higher, is in the process of becoming something more. Our task in life, then, is the perfection of nature and of our own nature. Nietzsche’s instruction for the necessary inner work, his first “granite sentence,” was “Become who you are.”
These concepts have nothing to do with the world-conquering Aryan superman of World War Two Germany. During those years some of Nietzsche’s words were distorted into Nazi slogans. To understand that phenomenon one must draw a careful distinction between what Nietzsche really wrote and the twisted, vulgarized view of Nietzsche’s philosophy disseminated by his sister, Elisabeth—one of the great villainesses of intellectual history.
Elisabeth, who ultimately became Nietzsche’s literary executor, had strong proto-fascist, anti-Semitic leanings, whereas Nietzsche vigorously rejected these sentiments. He had a deeply ambivalent relationship to his sister—at times closely attached to her, at times dismissing her as “an anti-Semitic goose.” Nietzsche was much dismayed by her marriage in 1885 to Bernhard Förster, a professional anti-Semite, and was not altogether sorry to see her move with her husband to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, an Aryan colony built on soil “uncontaminated” by Jewish presence.
Ultimately, due to Förster’s ineptness and grandiosity, the Paraguay project floundered. Bernard Förster was accused of embezzlement and ultimately committed suicide. Elisabeth, after an unsuccessful attempt to salvage the colony, returned home to Europe just in time to take over her ailing brother’s estate. Seizing her one great chance to attain political prominence, she set about distorting Nietzsche’s writings to promulgate her Wagnerian-fascist ideas. So effectively did she do this that it has taken a generation of scholars to separate Nietzsche’s golden grain from Elisabeth’s chaff.
Nietzsche recoiled from the building of great Hegel-like philosophic systems. He was more a brilliant gadfly whose remarkable insights even now a century later continue to fuel philosophic investigations. Employing a penetrating, intuitive style, he preferred quick dips into the cold pool of truth which he, for the most part, described in brief, pithy aphorisms. He even wrote an aphorism about an aphorism:
A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time and is not consumed by all millennia, although it serves every time for nourishment: thus it is the great paradox of literature, the intransitory amid the changing, the food that always remains esteemed, like salt, and never loses its savor, as even that does. (Mixed Opinions and Maxims)
It is well-known that many fields—esthetics, philosophy, ethics, history, philology, politics, music—have profited from Nietzsche’s sparkling ideas. One of my intentions in When Nietzsche Wept was to underscore the relevance of Nietzsche’s psychological insights to contemporary psychotherapy.
In many places he stressed the importance of coming to terms with one’s destiny—destiny in the deepest sense, not just an individualistic life-developmental destiny, but in the very condition of being human. It was the task of the evolved human being, Nietzsche held, to look deeply into this destiny. Yes, that incurred suffering, but we must train ourselves to bear the suffering of truth. Staring at the truth is not easy, Nietzsche says, “It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in t
Nietzsche’s ability to stare unflinchingly at the truth, to break illusion, was remarkable. “One must pay dearly for immortality,” he said. “One has to die several times while still alive.” To become enlightened, to become worthy of immortality, one must face down the terror of death and to plunge into one’s own dying many times while still alive.
Though Nietzsche never explicitly addressed the field of medicine or psychiatry he nonetheless had thoughts about the training of healers:
Physician help thyself: thus you help your patients too. Let this be his best help—that he, the patient, may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
Or elsewhere:
You shall build over and beyond yourself, but first you must be built yourself, perpendicular in body and soul. You shall not only reproduce yourself, but produce something higher. (Ibid.)
Obviously these aphorisms, written a century ago, argue for the position (to which almost all contemporary teachers of psychotherapy ascribe) that a personal therapy is a sine qua non of the training of therapists. But another aphorism adds a moderating note: “Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends” (Zarathustra). In other words, even though personal exploration and insight is needed, total enlightenment (i.e., a full personal self-overcoming) may not be necessary because therapists can take their patients farther than they themselves have gone. Even the wounded therapist can still point the way to the patient-therapists are guides, not conveyer belts.
What about the nature of the healing relationship?
Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of confirmation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire—a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship. (The Gay Science)
“A shared thirst for an ideal above them. . . . Its right name is friendship.” Or is its right name psychotherapy—an authentic relationship, sharing a thirst for an ideal above, which emerges when all transference distortions have dissipated?
How close? How far? In a light piece of verse Nietzsche advises neither too distant nor too enmeshed. Perhaps the best role for the healer is as a participant-observer:
Do not stay in the field
nor climb out of sight
the best view of the world
is from a medium height (Ibid.)
What kind of therapist might Nietzsche have been? Ambitious, resolute, and uncompromising. He would have made no concessions, would have expected his clients to face the truth about themselves and their “situation” in existence. Would he have settled for symptom relief, for the limited goals of behavioral-cognitive modes? Listen:
I am a railing by the torrent: let those who can, grasp me. A crutch, however, I am not! (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
Or again:
For that is what I am through and through: reeling in, raising up, raising, a raiser, cultivator, and disciplinarian, who once counseled himself, not for nothing: Become who you are! (Ibid.)
Given even these few glimpses into Nietzsche’s relevance for contemporary psychotherapy, we may turn to the question of whether Nietzsche has taken his deserved place in the history of psychotherapy. The answer is absolutely not. Turn to history of psychiatry and psychotherapy textbooks, and you will find no mention of his name. Nietzsche’s insights, in my opinion, have neither been recognized nor harvested by our field.
Why not? After all, Nietzsche lived in the right place at the right time: the late nineteenth century in central Europe. This era, this place was the crucible of therapy. He was born in 1844, twelve years before Freud. To answer the question of why Nietzsche’s name (not his thoughts) has been ignored in the psychotherapy literature, we must turn to the relationship between Nietzsche and Freud. I refer, of course, to the intellectual relationship: the two men never met.
Nietzsche would not have known of Freud. By 1889, the end of Nietzsche’s intellectual career, Freud had published nothing in the field of psychiatry. But did Freud know Nietzsche’s work? Here the record is contradictory. Sometimes Freud flatly denied he had ever read Nietzsche; at other times he appeared to be intimately familiar with Nietzsche’s writings.
Was it possible that Freud was ignorant of Nietzsche’s work? How prominent was Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century? During his productive lifetime Nietzsche’s writings were not well-known. Thus Spake Zarathustra, his best known book, a standard undergraduate text for later generations, sold only a hundred copies its first year of publication. In fact, so few copies of any of his books sold that Nietzsche once claimed to know the owner of every copy. Nietzsche’s name was not unknown, however; throughout Western Europe there was an active underground Nietzsche appreciation movement, and many artists and intellectuals were aware of his genius.
Nietzsche’s death was no less remarkable than his life: he died either in 1889 or in 1900. In 1889 he suffered a cataclysmic dementia and his great mind was gone forever. Most medical historians have concluded that he suffered from tertiary syphilis-paresis (general paralysis of the insane), a common incurable condition of the era. After 1889 Nietzsche remained broken for the rest of his life, unable to think clearly, barely able to formulate a coherent sentence. His empty corporeal husk lingered on for eleven more years until his official death in 1900.
How Nietzsche ever contracted syphilis remains a huge puzzle for historians, since he was believed to have led a chaste life. Unfounded speculations abound, ranging from contact with the cigars of wounded soldiers when Nietzsche served in an ambulance corps in the Franco-Prussian War, to liaisons with prostitutes in Cologne, to medically prescribed romps with southern Italian peasant women, to (Jung’s theory) gay brothels in Genoa.
When Nietzsche was incapacitated, his sister, Elisabeth, moved in to take care of him (and his writings). A great self-promoter, she made the most of her one possible vehicle for fame—her brother’s philosophy—for the rest of her life. Her political pandering was so successful that Hitler funded her Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, visited her on her ninetieth birthday bearing a huge bouquet of roses, and, a few years later, attended her funeral and placed a laurel wreath on her casket.
Though Nietzsche was little known before his first death in 1889, Elisabeth was to change that dramatically in the next ten years. As a result of her promotion, all of Nietzsche’s work was republished and before long copies of his books by the tens of thousands cascaded off the great presses of Europe.
Perhaps Freud was relatively unfamiliar with Nietzsche’s writings during Nietzsche’s productive lifetime. However, it is highly improbable that he (or any educated middle European) would have been unfamiliar with Nietzsche after 1900. (Remember, Freud’s first published article in psychiatry appeared in 1893, and his first book, Studies in Hysteria, in 1895.) We know, too, that some of Freud’s university friends (for example, Joseph Paneth) became early devotees of Nietzsche in the 1870s and early 1880s and wrote to Freud about their opinions of Nietzsche. And of course there was Freud’s intimate twenty-six-year relationship with Lou Salomé who, as I shall discuss shortly, had once been intimate with Nietzsche. We know, also, that Freud prized Otto Rank’s gift of a complete set of Nietzsche’s writings bound in white leather which he took with him to London when the Gestapo forced him to leave Vienna and to leave much of his library behind.
We know also from the published detailed minutes of the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna that two entire meetings in 1908 were devoted to Nietzsche. In these minutes Freud acknowledged that Nietzsche’s intuitional method had reached insights amazingly similar to those reached through the lab
Though Freud said at times that he had not read Nietzsche, there were other times he said that he had tried to read Nietzsche but was too lazy—an odd statement considering Freud’s legendary diligence and energy. (A perusal of his daily schedule, often consisting of ten to twelve clinical hours before sitting down to write, always leaves me gasping for breath.) On still other occasions (and here, I believe, we move closer to the true dynamics) Freud said he tried to read Nietzsche but got dizzy because Nietzsche’s pages were so crammed with insights uncomfortably close to his own. Thus to read Nietzsche was to deprive himself of the satisfaction of making an original discovery: in other words, Freud had to remain ignorant of Nietzsche’s work lest he, as he put it, be forced to view himself as a “verifying drudge.”
Elsewhere he explicitly acknowledged that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche so precisely described and anticipated the theory of repression that it was only because he (Freud) was not well-read that he had the chance to make a great discovery. And making a great discovery was extraordinarily important to Freud, who realized early in life that a university career would be closed to him because of the anti-Semitism rampant in fin de siècle Vienna. Private practice was the only venue available to him, and the great independent discovery the only route to the fame he so much craved.