The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin Yalom

  “I hope to increase your interest in his work. He had much to say of great value to our field. In so many ways he anticipated Freud, who borrowed his work wholesale, without acknowledgement.”

  “I’ll keep an open mind, but, I repeat, many of the things you’ve said about Schopenhauer do not pique my desire to know more about his work.”

  “Including what I said in my lecture about his views on death?”

  “Especially that. The idea that one’s essential being will ultimately be reunited with some vague, ethereal universal life force offers me zero comfort. If there is no persistence of consciousness, what possible solace could I draw from that? By the same token, I get little comfort from knowing that my bodily molecules will be dispersed into space and that ultimately my DNA will end up being a part of some other life-form.”

  “I’d like us to read together his essays on death and on the indestructibility of being. If we did, I’m certain—”

  “Not now, Philip. At the moment I’m not as much interested in death as I am in living the rest of my life as fully as possible—that’s where I am.”

  “Death is always there, the horizon of all these concerns. Socrates said it most clearly, ‘to learn to live well, one must first learn to die well.’ Or Seneca, ‘No man enjoys the true taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it.’”

  “Yes, yes, I know these homilies, and maybe in the abstract they are true. And I have no quarrel with incorporating the wisdom of philosophy into psychotherapy. I’m all for it. And I also know that Schopenhauer has served you well in many ways. But not in all ways: there’s a possibility that you may need some remedial work. And that’s where the group comes in. I look forward to seeing you here for your first meeting next Monday at four-thirty.”

  10

  The Happiest Years of Arthur’s life

  * * *

  Just because the terrible activity of the genital system still slumbers, while that of the brain already has its full briskness, childhood is the time of innocence and happiness, the paradise of life, the lost Eden, on which we look back longingly through the whole remaining course of our life.

  * * *

  When Arthur turned nine, his father decided the time had come to take over the direction of his son’s education. His first step was to deposit him for two years in Le Havre at the home of a business partner, Gregories de Blesimaire. There, Arthur was to learn French, social graces, and, as Heinrich put it, “become read in the books of the world.”

  Expelled from home, separated from his parents at the age of nine? How many children have regarded such exile as a catastrophic life event? Yet, later in life, Arthur described these two years as “by far the happiest part of his childhood.”

  Something important happened in Le Havre: perhaps for the only time in his life Arthur felt nurtured and enjoyed life. For many years afterward he cherished the memory of the convivial Blesimaires, with whom he found something resembling parental love. His letters to his parents were so full of praise for them that his mother felt compelled to remind him of his father’s virtues and largesse. “Remember how your father permits you to buy that ivory flute for one louis-d’or.”

  Another important event took place during his sojourn in Le Havre. Arthur found a friend—one of the very few of his entire life. Anthime, the Blesimaire son, was the same age as Arthur. The two boys became close in Le Havre and exchanged a few letters after Arthur returned to Hamburg.

  Years later as young men of twenty they met once again and on a few occasions went out together searching for amorous adventures. Then their paths and their interests diverged. Anthime became a businessman and disappeared from Arthur’s life until thirty years later when they had a brief correspondence in which Arthur sought some financial advice. When Anthime responded with an offer to manage his portfolio for a fee, Arthur abruptly ended the correspondence. By that time he suspected everyone and trusted no one. He put Anthime’s letter aside after jotting on the back of the envelope a cynical aphorism from Gracian (a Spanish philosopher much admired by his father): “Make one’s entry into another’s affair in order to leave with one’s own.”

  Arthur and Anthime had one final meeting ten years later—an awkward encounter during which they found little to say to one another. Arthur described his old friend as “an unbearable old man” and wrote in his journal that the “feeling of two friends meeting after a generation of absence will be one of great disappointment with the whole of life.”

  Another incident marked Arthur’s stay in Le Havre: he was introduced to death. A childhood playmate in Hamburg, Gottfried Janish, died while Arthur was living in Le Havre. Though Arthur seemed undemonstrative and said that he never again thought of Gottfried, it is apparent that he never truly forgot his dead playmate, nor the shock of his first acquaintance with mortality, because thirty years later he described a dream in his journal: “I found myself in a country unknown to me, a group of men stood on a field, and among them a slim, tall, adult man who, I do not know how, had been made known to me as Gottfried Janish, and he welcomed me.”

  Arthur had little difficulty interpreting the dream. At that time he was living in Berlin in the midst of a cholera epidemic. The dream image of a reunion with Gottfried could only mean one thing: a warning of approaching death. Consequently, Arthur decided to escape death by immediately leaving Berlin. He chose to move to Frankfurt, where he was to live the last thirty years of his life, largely because he thought it to be cholera-proof.

  11

  Philip’s First Meeting

  * * *

  The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality, all else being the play of thought. But we could just as well call it our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort.

  * * *

  Philip arrived fifteen minutes early for his first group therapy meeting wearing the same clothes as in his two previous encounters with Julius: the wrinkled, faded checkered shirt, khaki pants, and corduroy jacket. Marveling at Philip’s consistent indifference to clothes, office furnishings, his student audience, or, seemingly, anyone with whom he interacted, Julius once again began to question his decision to invite Philip into the group. Was it sound professional judgment, or was his chutzpah raising its ugly head again?

  Chutzpah: raw nervy brashness. Chutzpah: best defined by the renowned story of the boy who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy from the court on the grounds that he was an orphan. Chutzpah often entered Julius’s mind when he reflected upon his approach to life. Perhaps he had been imbued with chutzpah from the start, but he first consciously embraced it in the autumn of his fifteenth year when his family relocated from the Bronx to Washington, D.C. His father, who had had a financial setback, moved the family into a small row house on Farragut Street in northwest Washington. The nature of his father’s financial difficulties was off limits to any inquiry, but Julius was convinced that it had something to do with Aqueduct racetrack and She’s All That, a horse he owned with Vic Vicello, one of his poker cronies. Vic was an elusive figure who wore a pink handkerchief in his yellow sports jacket and took care never to enter their home if his mother was present.

  His father’s new job was managing a liquor store owned by a cousin felled at forty-five by a coronary, that dark enemy which had either maimed or killed a whole generation of fifty-year-old male Ashkenazi Jews raised on sour cream and fat-flaked brisket. His dad hated his new job, but it kept the family solvent; not only did it pay well, but its long hours kept Dad away from Laurel and Pimlico, the local racetracks.

  On Julius’s first day of school at Roosevelt High in September 1955, he made a momentous decision: he would redo himself. He was unknown in Washington, a free soul unencumbered by the past. His past three years at P.S. 1126, his Bronx junior high school, were nothing to be proud of. Gambling had been so much more interesting than other school a
ctivities that he spent every afternoon at the bowling alley lining up challenge games betting on himself or on his partner, Marty Geller—he of the great left-handed hook. He also ran a small bookie operation, where he offered ten-to-one odds to anyone picking any three baseball players to get six hits among them on any given day. No matter who the pigeons picked—Mantle, Kaline, Aaron, Vernon, or Stan (the Man) Musial—they rarely won, at best once in twenty to thirty bets. Julius ran with like-minded punks, developed the aura of a tough street fighter in order to intimidate would-be welchers, dumbed himself down in class to remain cool, and cut many a school afternoon to watch Mantle patrol the Yankee Stadium center field.

  Everything changed the day he and his parents were called into the principal’s office and confronted with his bookie ledger-book, for which he had been frantically searching the previous couple of days. Though punishment was meted out—no evenings out for the remaining two months of the school year, no bowling alley, no trips to Yankee Stadium, no after-school sports, no allowance—Julius could see his father’s heart wasn’t in it: he was entirely intrigued by the details of Julius’s three-player, six-hit caper. Still, Julius had admired the principal, and falling from his grace was such a wake-up call that he attempted to reclaim himself. But it was too little, too late; the best he could do was to move his grades up to low Bs. It wasn’t possible to form new friendships—he was role-locked, and no one could relate to the new boy Julius had decided to become.

  As a consequence of this episode, the latter-day Julius had an exquisite sensitivity to the phenomenon of “role-lock”: how often had he seen group therapy patients change dramatically but continue to be perceived as the same person by the other group members. Happens also in families. Many of his improved patients had a hell of a time when visiting their parents: they had to guard against being sucked back into their old family role and had to expend considerable energy persuading parents and siblings that they were indeed changed.

  Julius’s great experiment with reinvention commenced with his family’s move. On that first day of school in Washington, D.C., a balmy Indian summer September day, Julius crunched through the fallen sycamore leaves and strode into the front door of Roosevelt High, searching for a master strategy to make himself over. Noticing the broadsides posted outside the auditorium advertising the candidates for class president, Julius had an inspired thought, and even before he learned the location of the boys’ room he had posted his name for the election.

  The election bid was a long shot, beyond long shot—longer odds than betting on the tightfisted Clark Griffith’s inept Washington Senators to climb out of last place. He knew nothing about Roosevelt High and had yet to meet a single classmate. Would the old Julius from the Bronx have run for office? Not in a thousand years. But that was the point; precisely for this reason, the new Julius took the plunge. What was the worst that could happen? His name would be out there, and all would recognize Julius Hertzfeld as a force, a potential leader, a boy to be reckoned with. What’s more, he loved the action.

  Of course, his opponents would dismiss him as a bad joke, a gnat, an unknown know-nothing. Expecting such criticism, Julius readied himself and prepared a riff about the ability of a newcomer to see fault lines invisible to those living too close to the corruption. He had the gift of gab, honed by long hours in the bowling alley of wheedling and cajoling suckers into match games. The new Julius had nothing to lose and fearlessly strolled up to clusters of students to announce, “Hi, I’m Julius, the new kid on the block, and I hope you’ll support me in election for class president. I don’t know crap about school politics, but, you know, sometimes a fresh look is the best look. Besides, I’m absolutely independent—don’t belong to any cliques because I don’t know anybody.”

  As things turned out, not only did Julius recreate himself, but he damn near won the election. With a football team that had lost eighteen straight games and a basketball team almost as hapless, Roosevelt High was demoralized. The two other candidates were vulnerable: Catherine Shumann, the brainy daughter of the diminutive long-faced minister who led the prayer before each school assembly, was prissy and unpopular, and Richard Heishman, the handsome, red-haired, red-necked football halfback, had a great many enemies. Julius rode the crest of a robust protest vote. In addition, to his great surprise, he immediately was embraced vigorously by virtually all the Jewish students, about 30 percent of the student body, who had heretofore kept a low, apolitical profile. They loved him, the love of the timid, hesitant, make-no-waves Mason-Dixon Yid for the gutsy, brash New York Jew.

  That election was the turning point of Julius’s life. So much reinforcement did he receive for his brazenness that he rebuilt his whole identity on the foundation of raw chutzpah. The three Jewish high school fraternities vied for him; he was perceived as having both guts and that ever so elusive holy grail of adolescence, “personality.” Soon he was surrounded by kids at lunch in the cafeteria and was often spotted walking hand in hand after school with the lovely Miriam Kaye, the editor of the school newspaper and the one student smart enough to challenge Catherine Schumann for valedictorian. He and Miriam were soon inseparable. She introduced him to art and aesthetic sensibility; he was never to make her appreciate the high drama of bowling or baseball.

  Yes, chutzpah had taken him a long way. He cultivated it, took great pride in it, and, in later life, beamed when he heard himself referred to as an original, a maverick, the therapist who had the guts to take on the cases that had defeated others. But chutzpah had its dark side—grandiosity. More than once Julius had erred by attempting to do more than could be done, by asking patients to make more change than was constitutionally possible for them, by putting patients through a long and, ultimately, unrewarding course of therapy.

  So was it compassion or sheer clinical tenacity that led Julius to think he could yet reclaim Philip? Or was it grandiose chutzpah? He truly did not know. As he led Philip to the group therapy room, Julius took a long look at his reluctant patient. With his straight light brown hair combed straight back without a part, his skin stretched tight across his high cheekbones, his eyes wary, his step heavy, Philip looked as though he were being led to his execution.

  Julius felt a wave of compassion and, in his softest, most comforting voice, offered solace. “You know, Philip, therapy groups are infinitely complex, but they possess one absolutely predictable feature.”

  If Julius expected the natural curious inquiry about the “one absolutely predictable feature,” he gave no sign of disappointment at Philip’s silence. Instead he merely continued speaking as though Philip had expressed appropriate curiosity. “And that feature is that the first meeting of a therapy group is invariably less uncomfortable and more engaging than the new member expects.”

  “I have no discomfort, Julius.”

  “Well then, simply file what I said. Just in case you run across some.”

  Philip stopped in the hallway at the door to the office in which they had met a few days before, but Julius touched his elbow and guided him down the hall to the next door, which opened into a room lined on three sides with ceiling-to-floor bookshelves. Three windows of wood-lined panes on the fourth wall looked out into a Japanese garden graced by several dwarf five-needle pines, two clusters of tiny boulders, and a narrow eight-foot-long pond in which golden carp glided. The furniture in the room was simple and functional, consisting only of a small table next to the door, seven comfortable Rattan chairs arranged in a circle, and two others stored in corners.

  “Here we are. This is my library and group room. While we’re waiting for the other members, let me give you the nuts-and-bolts housekeeping drill. On Mondays, I unlock the front door about ten minutes before the time of the group, and the members just enter on their own into this room. When I come in at four-thirty, we start pretty promptly, and we end at six. To ease my billing and bookkeeping task, everyone pays at the end of each session—just leave a check on the table by the door. Questions?”

  Ph
ilip shook his head no and looked around the room, inhaling deeply. He walked directly to the shelves, put his nose closely to the rows of leather-bound volumes, and inhaled again, evincing great pleasure. He remained standing and industriously began perusing book titles.

  In the next few minutes five group members filed in, each glancing at Philip’s back, before taking seats. Despite the bustle of their entrance, Philip did not turn his head or in any way interrupt his task of examining Julius’s library.

  Over his thirty-five years of leading groups, Julius had seen a lot of folks enter therapy groups. The pattern was predictable: the new member enters heavy with apprehension, behaving in a deferential manner to the other members, who welcome the neophyte and introduce themselves. Occasionally, a newly formed group, which mistakenly believes that benefits are directly proportional to the amount of attention each receives from the therapist, may resent newcomers, but established groups welcome them: they appreciate that a full roster adds to, rather than detracts from, the effectiveness of the therapy.

  Once in a while newcomers jump right into the discussion, but generally they are silent for much of the first meeting as they try to figure out the rules and wait until someone invites them to participate. But a new member so indifferent that he turns his back and ignores the others in the group? Never before had Julius seen that. Not even in groups of psychotic patients on the psychiatric ward.

  Surely, Julius thought, he had made a blunder by inviting Philip into the group. Having to tell the group about his cancer was more than enough on his plate for the day. And he felt burdened by having to worry about Philip.