The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin D. Yalom

  Stuart was the informal group historian: he was blessed with such a retentive memory that Julius could always call on him for an account of past or present group events. He tried not to overuse Stuart, who was in the group to learn how to engage others, not to be a recorder of events. Wonderful with his child patients, Stuart was socially at a loss whenever he left the perimeter of his pediatrician role. Even in the group he often carried some of the accoutrements of the trade stuffed in his shirt pocket: tongue depressors, penlight, lollipops, medication samples. A stable force in the group for the past year, Stuart had made enormous progress in, as he had put it, "project humanization." Yet interpersonal sensitivity was still so undeveloped that his recounting of group events was entirely without guile.

  Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes before responding. "Well, let's see--

  we began with Bonnie and her desire to talk about her childhood." Bonnie had been Stuart's frequent critic, and he glanced at her for approval before continuing.

  "No, not quite right, Stuart. Right facts, wrong tone. You're making it sound flippant. Like I just want to tell a story for the fun of it. There are a lot of painful memories from my childhood that are now coming up and haunting me. Get the difference?"

  "I'm not sure I do get it. I didn't say you were doing it for the fun of it. That's just the kind of thing my wife complains about. But, to continue: next there was some stuff with Rebecca, who felt insulted and angry with Bonnie for pointing out how she was preening and attempting to impress Philip." Stuart ignored Rebecca's slapping her hand to her forehead and muttering, "Goddamnit," and continued, "Then there was Tony's feeling that we were using a more complex vocabulary in order to impress Philip. And then Tony commented that Philip was a show-off. And Philip's sharp response to Tony.

  And then there was my comment to Gill that he avoided displeasing women so much that he lost his sense of self.

  "Let's see what else..." Stuart scanned the room. "Well, there's Philip--not what he said but what he didn't say. We don't talk too much about Philip, as though it's taboo.

  Come to think about it, we don't even talk about not talking about him. And, of course, Julius. But we worked on that. Except that Bonnie was particularly concerned and protective, as she often is about Julius. In fact, the Julius part of the meeting started with Bonnie's dream."

  "Impressive, Stuart," said Rebecca. "And pretty complete: you left out only one thing."

  "And that is?"

  "Yourself. The fact that you were being the group camera again, photographing rather than plunging in."

  Often the group had confronted Stuart about his impersonal style of participation.

  Months ago he described a nightmare in which his daughter had stepped into quicksand and he could not save her because he wasted so much time getting his camera out of his backpack to take a snapshot of the scene. That was when Rebecca labeled him the "group camera."

  "Right you are, Rebecca. I'll pack my camera away now and say I agree entirely with Bonnie: you are a good-looking woman. But that's not news to you--you know that.

  And you know I think so. And, of course, you were preening for Philip--doing and undoing and stroking your hair. It was obvious. How did I feel about it? I felt a little jealous. No, a lot jealous--you never preened for me. No one ever preened for me."

  "That kind of thing makes me feel like I'm in prison," Rebecca shot back. "I hate it when men try to control me like this, like my every movement is under scrutiny."

  Rebecca broke off each word, showing an edge and a brittleness that had been under wraps for a long time.

  Julius remembered his first impressions of Rebecca. A decade ago, long before she entered the group, he had seen her individually for a year. She was a delicate creature with an Audrey Hepburn graceful, slim body and precious, large-eyed face. And who could forget her opening comment in therapy? "Ever since I turned thirty I've noticed that when I enter restaurants, no one stops eating to look at me. I'm devastated."

  Two sources of instruction had guided Julius in his work with her both individually and in the group. First, there had been Freud's urging that the therapist should reach out in a human way to a beautiful woman and not withhold himself or penalize her simply because she was beautiful. The second had been an essay he had read as a student titled, "The Beautiful Empty Woman," which made the point that the truly beautiful woman is so often feted and rewarded solely for her appearance that she neglects developing other parts of herself. Her confidence and feelings of success are only skin-deep, and once her beauty fades she realizes she has little to offer: she has developed neither the art of being an interesting person nor that of taking an interest in others.

  "I make observations, and I'm called a camera," said Stuart, "and when I say what I feel I'm labeled a controlling man. Talk about feeling cornered."

  "I don't get it, Rebecca," said Tony. "What's the big deal here? Why are you freaking out? Stuart's just saying what you've said yourself. How many times have you said you know how to flirt, that it comes naturally to you? I remember your saying that you had an easy time in college and in your law firm because you manipulate men with your sexuality."

  "You make me sound like a whore." Rebecca swiveled suddenly to Philip.

  "Doesn't that make you think I'm a whore?"

  Philip, not distracted from gazing at his favorite spot somewhere on the ceiling, answered quickly, "Schopenhauer said that a highly attractive women, like a highly intelligent man, was absolutely destined to living an isolated life. He pointed out that others are blind with envy and resent the superior person. For that reason, such people never have close friends of their same sex."

  "That's not necessarily true," said Bonnie. "I'm thinking of Pam, our missing member, who is beautiful too and yet has a large number of close girlfriends."

  "Yeah, Philip," said Tony, "you saying that, to be popular, you have to be dumb or ugly?"

  "Precisely," said Philip, "and the wise person will not spend his life or her life pursuing popularity. It is a will-o'-the-wisp. Popularity does not define what is true or what is good; quite the contrary, it's a leveler, a dumbing down. Far better to search within for one's values and goals."

  "And how about your goals and values?" asked Tony.

  If Philip noted the surliness in Tony's question, he gave no evidence of it and replied ingenuously, "Like Schopenhauer, I want to will as little as possible and to know as much as possible."

  Tony nodded, obviously baffled about how to respond.

  Rebecca broke in: "Philip, what you or Schopenhauer was saying about friends was right on the mark for me--the truth is that I've had few close girlfriends. But what about two people with similar interests and abilities? Don't you think that friendship is possible in that case?"

  Before Philip could answer, Julius enjoined, "Our time is growing very short today. I want to check in about how you all are feeling about our last fifteen minutes.

  How are we doing here?"

  "We're not on target. We're missing," said Gill. "Something oblique is going on."

  "I'm absorbed," said Rebecca.

  "Nah, too much in our heads," said Tony.

  "I agree," said Stuart.

  "Well, I'm not in my head," said Bonnie. "I'm close to bursting, or screaming, or..." Bonnie suddenly rose, gathered up her purse and jacket, and charged out of the room. A moment later Gill jumped up and ran out of the room to fetch her back. In awkward silence the group sat listening to the retreating footsteps. Shortly Gill returned, and as he sat he reported, "She's okay, said she's sorry but she just had to get out to decompress. She'll go into it next week."

  "What is going on?" said Rebecca, snapping open her purse to get sunglasses and car keys. "I hate it when she does that. That's really pissy."

  "Any hunches about what's going on?" asked Julius.

  "PMT, I think," said Rebecca.

  Tony spotted Philip scrunching his face signifying confusion and jumped in.

  "PMT
--premenstrual tension." When Philip nodded, Tony clenched his hands and poked both thumbs upward, "Hey, hey, I taught you something,"

  "We've gotta stop," said Julius, "but I've got a guess about what's going on with Bonnie. Go back to Stuart's summary. Remember how Bonnie started the meeting--

  talking about the chubby little girl at school and her unpopularity and her inability to compete with other girls, especially attractive ones? Well, I wonder if that wasn't recreated in the group today? She opened the meeting, and pretty quickly the group left her for Rebecca. In other words, the very issue she wanted to talk about may have been portrayed here in living color with all of us playing a part in the pageant."

  18

  Pam in India

  (2)

  _________________________

  Nothingcan alarm or move him

  any more. All the thousand

  threads of willing binding us

  to the world and dragging us

  (full

  of

  anxiety,

  craving,

  anger, and fear) back and

  forth in constant pain: all

  these he has cut asunder. He

  smiles and looks back calmly

  on the phantasmagoria of this

  world which now stands before

  him as indifferently as chess—

  men at the end of a game.

  _________________________

  It was a few days later at 3A.M. Pam lay awake, peering into the darkness. Thanks to the intervention of her graduate student, Marjorie, who had arranged VIP privileges, she had a semiprivate room in a tiny alcove with a private toilet just off the women's common dormitory. However, the alcove provided no sound buffer, and Pam listened to the breathing of 150 other Vipassana students. The whoosh of moving air transported her back to her attic bedroom in her parents' Baltimore home when she lay awake listening to the March wind rattling the window.

  Pam could put up with any of the other ashram hardships--the 4A.M. wakeup time, the frugal vegetarian one-meal-a-day diet, the endless hours of meditation, the silence, the Spartan quarters--but the sleeplessness was wearing her down. The mechanism of falling asleep completely eluded her. How did she used to do it? No, wrong question, she told herself--a question that compounded the problem because falling asleep is one of those things that cannot be willed; it must be done unintentionally. Suddenly, an old memory of Freddie the pig floated into her mind. Freddie, a master detective in a series of children's books she hadn't thought about in twenty-five years, was asked for help by a centipede who could no longer walk because his hundred legs were out of sync.

  Eventually, Freddie solved the problem by instructing the centipede to walk without looking at his legs--or even thinking about them. The solution lay in turning off awareness and permitting the body's wisdom to take over. It was the same with sleeping.

  Pam tried to sleep by applying the techniques she had been taught in the workshop to clear her mind and allow all thoughts to drift away. Goenka, a chubby, bronze-skinned, pedantic, exceedingly serious and exceedingly pompous guru, had begun by saying that he would teach Vipassana but first he had to teach the student how to quiet his mind.

  (Pam endured the exclusive use of the male pronoun; the waves of feminism had yet not lapped upon the shores of India.)

  For the first three days Goenka gave instruction in the anapana-sati --mindfulness of breathing. And the days were long. Aside from a daily lecture and a brief question-and-answer period, the only activity from 4A.M. to 9:30P.M. was sitting meditation. To achieve full mindfulness of breathing, Goenka exhorted students to study in-breaths and out-breaths.

  "Listen. Listen to the sound of your breaths," he said. "Be conscious of their duration and their temperature. Note the difference between the coolness of in-breaths and the warmth of out-breaths. Become like a sentry watching the gate. Fix your attention upon your nostrils, upon the precise anatomical spot where air enters and leaves."

  "Soon," Goenka said, "the breath will grow finer and finer until it seems to vanish entirely, but, as you focus ever more deeply, you will be able to discern its subtle and delicate form. If you follow all my instructions faithfully," he said, pointing to the heavens, "if you are a dedicated student, the practice of anapana-sati will quiet your mind. You will then be liberated from all the hindrances to mindfulness: restlessness, anger, doubt, sensual desire, and drowsiness. You shall awaken into an alert, tranquil, and joyous state."

  Mind-quieting was indeed Pam's grail--the reason for her pilgrimage to Igatpuri.

  For the past several weeks her mind had been a battlefield from which she fiercely tried to repel noisy, obsessive, intrusive memories and fantasies about her husband, Earl, and her lover, John. Earl had been her gynecologist seven years ago when she had become pregnant and decided upon an abortion, electing not to inform the father, a casual sexual playmate with whom she wished no deeper involvement. Earl was an uncommonly gentle, caring man. He skillfully performed the abortion and then provided unusual postoperative follow-up by phoning her twice at home to inquire about her condition.

  Surely, she thought, all the accounts of the demise of humane, dedicated medical care were hyperbolic rhetoric. Then, a few days later, came a third call which conveyed an invitation to lunch, during which Earl skillfully negotiated the segue from doctor to suitor. It was during their fourth call that she agreed, not without enthusiasm, to accompany him to a New Orleans medical convention.

  Their courtship proceeded with astonishing quickness. No man ever knew her so well, comforted her so much, was so exquisitely familiar with her every nook and cranny, nor afforded her more sexual pleasure. Though he had many wonderful qualities--he was competent, handsome, and carried himself well--she conferred upon him (she now realized) heroic, larger-than-life stature. Dazzled at being the chosen one, at being promoted to the head of the line of women packing his office clamoring for his healing touch, she fell wholly in love and agreed to marriage a few weeks later.

  At first married life was idyllic. But midway into the second year, the reality of being married to a man twenty-five years older set in: he needed more rest; his body showed his sixty-five years; white hair appeared in defiance of Grecian formula hair dye.

  Earl's rotator cuff injury ended their tennis Sundays together, and when a torn knee cartilage put an end to his skiing, Earl put his Tahoe house on the market without consulting her. Sheila, her close friend and college roommate, who had advised her not to marry an older man, now urged her to maintain her own identity and not be in a rush to grow old. Pam felt fast-forwarded. Earl's aging fed on her youth. Each night he came home with barely enough energy to sip his three martinis and watch TV.

  And the worst of it was that he never read. How fluently, how confidently he had once conversed about literature. How much his love of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda had endeared him to her. And what a shock to realize only a short time later that she had mistaken form for substance: not only were Earl's literary observations memorized, but his repertory of books was limited and static. That was the toughest hit: how could she have ever loved a man who did not read? She, whose dearest and closest friends dwelled in the pages of George Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch, Gaskell, and Byatt?

  And that was where John, a red-haired associate professor in her department at Berkeley with an armful of books, a long graceful neck, and a stand-up Adam's apple, came in. Though English professors were expected to be well-read, she had known too many who rarely ventured out of their century of expertise and were complete strangers to new fiction. But John read everything. Three years before she had supported his tenure appointment on the basis of his two dazzling books, Chess: The Aesthetics of Brutality in Contemporary Fiction and No Sir!: The Androgynous Heroine in Late Nineteenth-Century British Literature.

  Their friendship germinated in all the familiar romantic academic haunts: faculty and departmental committee meetings, faculty club luncheons, monthly readings in the Norris Auditoriu
m by the poet or novelist in residence. It took root and blossomed in shared academic adventures, such as team teaching the nineteenth-century greats in the Western civilization curriculum or guest lectures in each other's courses. And then permanent bonding took place in the trench warfare of faculty senate squabbles, space and salary sorties, and brutal promotion committee melees. Before long they so trusted each other's taste that they rarely looked elsewhere for recommendations for novels and poetry, and the e-mail ether between them crackled with meaty philosophical literary passages. Both eschewed quotations that were merely decorative or clumsily clever; they settled for nothing less than the sublime--beauty plus wisdom for the ages. They both loathed Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both loved Dickinson and Emerson. As their shared stack of books grew taller, their relationship evolved into ever greater harmony. They were moved by the same profound thoughts of the same writers. They reached epiphanies together. In short, these two English professors were in love.

  "You leave your marriage, and I'll leave mine." Who said it first? Neither could remember, but at some point in their second year of team teaching they arrived at this high-risk amorous commitment. Pam was ready, but John, who had two preteen daughters, naturally required more time. Pam was patient. Her man, John, was, thank God, a good man and required time to wrestle with such moral issues as the meaning of the marriage vow. And he struggled, too, with the problem of guilt at abandoning his children and how one goes about leaving a wife, whose only offense had been dullness, a wife transformed by duty from sparkling lover into drab motherhood. Over and over again John assured Pam that he was en route, in process, that he had successfully identified and reconnoitered the problem, and all he needed now was more time to generate the resolve and select the propitious moment to act.

  But the months passed, and the propitious moment never arrived. Pam suspected that John, like so many dissatisfied spouses attempting to avoid the guilt and the burden of irreversible immoral acts, was trying to maneuver his wife into making the decision.