When Nietzsche Wept

Note. I continue my trek to fin de siècle Vienna, part of my continuing efforts to distract myself from what the media delicately calls “everything going on now.” 

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession - Irvin D. Yalom 

 

I like historical fiction, generally speaking, since I have no problem with an author using historical facts as background to fiction. I usually have a problem with using actual historical figures as characters, since I assume the writer is using real people as mouthpieces, which I’m uneasy with. But in this one I trusted Yalom, a psychiatrist and academic, to have done his homework and not play fast and loose with the positions of his characters.

The setting is the fin de siecle Vienna, a hotbed of change in science, medicine, and the arts. Dr. Josef Breuer, busy physician and part-time researcher on equilibrium, is suffering the fall-out of disastrously treating Bertha Pappenheim for her visual disturbances, hallucinations, partial paralysis, and speech problems. Having turned forty, he’s having intrusive erotic and romantic fantasies about Bertha mainly because he doesn’t want to face the reality of getting old and having to adjust his expectations of life. In short – he’s having the usual existential crisis of seemingly successful affluent middle-aged men. 

Into his office confidently shimmies the beautiful and persuasive Lou Salome. She’s afraid that her friend Friedrich Nietzsche, an unknown and poor philosopher, is suicidal. She wants Breuer to treat him without telling Nietzsche of her machinations on his behalf. Mainly because he is beguiled by her beauty, Breuer agrees.

Breuer treats Nietzsche’s severe migraines but also inveigles the philosopher to apply his radical ideas about life into helping Breuer get over his obsession with Bertha. The jousting of the two brilliant protagonists during the therapy sessions makes for interesting reading for people into the history of psychoanalysis and the heroic approach to life. Telling Breuer nothing is more daring than self-enquiry, Nietzsche rhetorically asks, “Become who you are. And how can one discover who and what one is without the truth?”

The novel has many pithy ideas that have a Stoic flavor, though Nietzsche thought the Stoics mean and petty and narrow. “A tree requires stormy weather if it is to attain a proud height” could be right out of Seneca’s letters. Marcus Aurelius could have written “Life is a spark between two voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death” in his Meditations. And the overstated claim “There are no facts, only interpretations” echoes Hamlet’s “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” and Epictetus’ “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.”

Conclusion: very readable. In fact, I read this novel of ideas twice. Even if the characters involved here never actually met, the author still tells the story in such a way that I could believe in the plausibility of their meeting. Another recommendation is that reading this book made me want to read other books by the author.