by Irvin Yalom
“Inherited from my father…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 506 / “,” § 28
Schopenhauer’s precautions and rituals: Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 287.
A physician and medical historian suggested…: Iwan Bloch, “Schopenhauers Krankheit im Jahre 1823” in Medizinische Klinik, nos. 25–26 (1906).
“I shall not accept any letters…”: Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 240
“commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, p. 96 / § 12
“We cannot pass over in silence…”: Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 315
“But let him alone…”: Saunders, Complete Essays, book 5, p. 97. See also Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 647, para. 387
“Seen from the standpoint of youth…”: Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 483–84 / chap. 6, “On the Different Periods of Life.”
“It means to escape from willing entirely”: See discussion in Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, pp. 220–25.
“When a man like me is born…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 510 / “,” § 30
“Even in my youth I noticed…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 484 / “,” § 3
“My life is heroic…”: Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 485–86 / “,” § 4
“I gradually acquired an eye…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 492 / “,” § 12.
“I am not in my native place…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 495 / “,” § 17.
“the smaller the personal life…”: Grisenbach, Schopenhauer’s Gespräche, p. 103.
“Throughout my life I have felt terribly lonely…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 501 / “,” § 22
“The best aid for the mind…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 499 / § 20
“Whoever seeks peace and quiet…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 505 / § 26.
“It is impossible for anyone…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 517 / “—Maxims and Favourite Passages.”
“When, at times, I felt unhappy…”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 488 / “,” § 8.
“that nothing but the mere form…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 1, p. 315 / § 57.
“Where are there any real monogamists?…”: Saunders, Complete Essays, book 5, p. 86. See also Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 624 / § 370.
“Everyone who is in love…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 2, p. 540 / chap. 44, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love.”
“We should treat with indulgence…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 305 / chap. 11, § 156a.
“Some cannot loosen their own chains…”: Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 83. F. Nietzche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), p.83. Translation modified by Walter Sokel and Irvin Yalom.
“I will wipe my pen and say…”: Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 25.
“It is not fame…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, pp. 397, 399 / chap. 4, “What a Man Represents.”
“extracting an obstinate painful thorn…”: Ibid., vol. 1, p. 358 / chap. 4, “What a Man Represents.”
“mouldy film on the surface of the earth…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 2, p. 3 / chap. 1, “On the Fundamental View of Idealism.”
“A useless disturbing episode…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 299 / § 156
“Not to pleasure but to painlessness…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 517 / “,”—Maxims and Favourite Passages.”
“everyone must act in life’s great puppet play…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 420 / § 206
“The really proper address…”: Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 304, 305 / § 156, 156a.
“We should treat with indulgence…Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol.2, p. 305 / chap. 11, § 156a.
“all the literary gossips…”: Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 26
“If a cat is stroked it purrs…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, p. 353 / chap. 4, “What a Man Represents.”
“the morning sun of my fame…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 516 / “,” § 36
“She works all day at my place…”: Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 348.
“At the end of his life, no man…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 1, p. 324 / § 59.
“A carpenter does not come up to me…”: Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
“In the first place a man…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 284 / § 144
“I can bear the thought…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 393, “Senilia,” § 102.
“The life of our bodies…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 1, p. 311 / § 57.
“What a difference there is…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 288 / § 147.
Schopenhauer’s final thoughts on death…: Safranski, Schopenhauer, p. 348.
“It is absurd to consider nonexistence…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 2, p. 467 / chap. 41, “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature.”
“We should welcome it…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 322 / § 172a.
“If we knocked on the graves…”: Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 2, p. 465 / chap. 41, “On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature.”
The dialogue between two Hellenic philosophers: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 279 / § 141
“When you say I, I, I…”: Ibid., vol. 2, p. 281 / § 141
“I have always hoped to die easily…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p. 517 / “,” § 38
“I now stand weary at the end of the road…”: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, p. 658 / “Finale.”
“I am deeply glad to see…”: Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 25.
“This man who lived among us a lifetime…”: Karl Pisa, Schopenhauer (Berlin: Paul Neff Verlag, 1977), p. 386
“Mankind has learned…”: Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, vol. 4, p.328, “Spicegia,” § 122.
Acknowledgments
This book has had a long gestation and I am indebted to many who helped along the way. To editors who assisted me in this odd amalgam of fiction, psychobiography and psychotherapy pedagogy: Marjorie Braman (a tower of support and guidance at HarperCollins), Kent Carroll, and my extraordinary in-house editors—my son, Ben, and my wife, Marilyn. To many friends and colleagues who read parts or all of the manuscript and offered suggestions: Van and Margaret Harvey, Walter Sokel, Ruthellen Josselson, Carolyn Zaroff, Murray Bilmes, Julius Kaplan, Scott Wood, Herb Kotz, Roger Walsh, Saul Spiro, Jean Rose, Helen Blau, David Spiegel. To my support group of fellow therapists who, throughout this project, offered unwavering friendship and sustenance. To my amazing and multitalented agent, Sandy Dijkstra, who among other contributions suggested the title (as she did for my preceding book, The Gift of Therapy). To my research assistant, Geri Doran.
Much of the Schopenhauer correspondence that exists either remains untranslated or has been clumsily rendered into English. I am indebted to my German research assistants, Markus Buergin and Felix Reuter, for their translation services and their prodigious library research. Walter Sokel offered exceptional intellectual guidance and helped translate many of the Schopenhauer epigrams preceding each chapter into English that more reflects Schopenhauer’s powerful and lucid prose.
In this work, as in all others, my wife, Marilyn, served as a pillar of support and love.
Many fine books guided me in my writing. By far, I am most heavily indebted to Rudiger Safranski’s magnificent biography, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1989) and grateful to him for his generous consultation in our long conversation in a Berlin café. The idea of bibliotherapy—curing oneself through reading the entire corpus of philosophy—comes from Bryan
Magee’s excellent book, Confessions of a Philosopher (New York: Modern Library, 1999). Other works that informed me were Bryan Magee’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983; revised 1997; John E. Atwell’s Schopenhauer: The Human Character (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Christopher Janeway’s Schopenhauer (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Patrick Gardiner’s Schopenhauer (Saint Augustine’s Press, 1997); Edgar Saltus’s The Philosophy of Disenchantment (New York: Peter Eckler Publishing Co., 1885); Christopher Janeway’s The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael Tanner’s Schopenhauer (New York: Routledge, 1999); Frederick Copleston’s Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism (Andover, UK: Chapel River Press, 1946); Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 2001); Peter Raabe’s Philosophical Counseling (Westport, Conn.: Praeger); Shlomit C. Schuster’s Philosophy Practice: An Alternative to Counseling and Psychotherapy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999); Lou Marinoff’s Plato Not Prozac (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Pierre Hadot and Arnold I. Davidson, eds., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Michael Chase, trans., New Haven: Blackwell, 1995); Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994); Alex Howard’s Philosophy for Counseling and Psychotherapy: Pythagoras to Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 2000).
About the Author
IRVIN D. YALOM is the bestselling author of Love’s Executioner, Momma and the Meaning of Life, and The Gift of Therapy, as well as several classic textbooks on psychotherapy, including the monumental work that has long been the standard text in the field, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy.
www.yalom.com
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Also by Irvin D. Yalom
Lying on the Couch
When Nietzsche Wept
The Gift of Therapy
Momma and the Meaning of Life
Love’s Executioner
Every Day Gets a Little Closer
The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
Existential Psychotherapy
Inpatient Group Psychotherapy
The Yalom Reader
Encounter Groups: First Facts
(with Morton Lieberman and Matt Miles)
Credits
Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Jacket illustration by Ms. Leander Reeves/www.kittycave.net
Copyright
THE SCHOPENHAUER CURE. Copyright © 2005 by Irvin D. Yalom. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-184088-3
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