When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom

I recently wrote a very favorable review of the most recent novel by Irvin Yalom, The Spinoza Problem, which was written in 2012 and is probably the best book that I read in 2014, fiction or nonfiction. When Nietzsche Wept was written 20 years earlier. The book may not play to as wide as audience as his latest novel, but, as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I loved this book too. This book is the only one of Yalom’s which was made into movie, in 2007.

The story is one of a fictional encounter between Josef Breuer and Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. Breuer was an eminent Viennese physician in the 1870s and 1880s, and was a mentor to Sigmund Freud. Like Freud, Breuer’s further rise in academic medicine was blocked because he was a Jew in a time of rising anti-Semitism. Although Breuer discovered the “talking cure” which led to Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis, he was mostly a neurologist. The concept of the unconscious was not yet well understood, and no one had yet talked about issues such as transference, or as was so important in this book, countertransference.

Nietzsche was a German philosopher known for nihilism and the phrase “God is dead” (philosophy being only one of his many talents), was ill for much of his life until his early death in 1900 at the age of 55. In the book, as proposed to Breuer by a beautiful Russian woman, Lou Salome, even though Nietzsche could not know of her behind-the-scenes involvement, Breuer undertook the treatment of Nietzsche for both his horrendous migraines and his unacknowledged despair. Meanwhile Breuer was tormented by his own obsessional love for a patient, Bertha Pappenheim, who as the result of Breuer’s papers about his treatment of her, became the famous Anna O. Yalom paralleled the struggle that Nietzsche had with his thoughts and feelings toward Lou Salome while Breuer had similar struggles with Bertha Pappenheim. In an attempt to lure the resistant Nietzsche into treatment, Breuer violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship when Breuer realized that Nietzsche could help him with his own obsessions. Yalom writes of an intense psychic intimacy between doctor and patient. Written by a master clinician in today’s world, the treatment arrangement by Breuer was wildly unconventional by the standards of 1882 and would certainly be grounds for malpractice in current times.

I loved the brilliant and emotive dialogue between the two principals, and meanwhile, I got to learn more about Nietzsche. This work of historical fiction is not an easy and quick read, but the story of the mutual therapy between Breuer and Nietzsche was incredible. If you’re a student of psychology, then read this book.

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The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom

If you were involved in any form of psychotherapy training program since 1970, you probably know the name of this author, Irvin Yalom, M.D., a professor emeritus from Stanford. He wrote the definitive texts about group psychotherapy. I’ve read his books cover-to-cover and have used them as reference works since then. The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy is now in it’s 9^th edition. I was aware that Yalom had written a number of fiction books, but I had never ventured there until now. I’m not sure if my favorite genre is crime/espionage or historical fiction. I love both, but this book tends to tip the scales towards the latter.

The Spinoza Problem presents a very clever juxtaposition of the 17^th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza and the 20^th century Third Reich anti-Semitic ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. In reality, Spinoza’s work led to the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 18^th century, and Rosenberg authored some of the most important work that laid the foundation for the Holocaust. Rosenberg, from Estonia, held the 18^th and 19^th century German author and philosopher Goethe in highest esteem, but that led him to the “Spinoza problem.” Rosenberg could not understand why Goethe had so highly valued the work of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was Jewish, at least until his excommunication from the Amsterdam community at the age of 23. Surely, thought Rosenberg, any valued thought that came from Spinoza must have been stolen from an earlier Aryan work, or Spinoza himself was not truly a Jew.

This is a dialogue driven novel as Spinoza wrestled with the evolution of his own ideas, as well as his excommunication from his community as the result of challenging not only the superstitions of Judaism, but of all religious practices. John Lennon’s song Imagine (“and no religions too”) is surely a Spinoza derivative. Much of the current day thought as represented by comedian and political satirist Bill Maher started with Spinosa. I had little familiarity with Spinosa before reading Yalom’s book, and I was surprised to learn that much of my own philosophy clearly derives directly from him. In Yalom’s book, Rosenberg, who rose to being the editor in chief of Hitler’s most important daily newspaper, was shown having believable conversations with Hitler and others. In order to help us understand Spinosa, Yalom takes us briefly back to Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus. The author brings remarkable richness to this work by fictionalizing an attempt at psychotherapy with the impenetrable Rosenberg. In a conversation with his psychiatrist, Rosenberg was told that Spinosa had been referred to as a “devious atheist, repeatedly using the term ‘God’ to encourage seventeenth-century readers to keep reading…. To Spinosa, Nature and God are synonyms; you might say he naturalizes God.”

At the Nuremburg Trials at the end of World War II, there were 24 defendants, and Rosenberg sat between the highest surviving SS officer and the governor-general of occupied Poland. Yalom wrote, “The chief American counsel, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert J. Jackson, wrote, ‘It was Rosenberg, the intellectual high priest of the “master race,” who provided the doctrine of hatred which gave the impetus for the annihilation of Jewry, and who put his infidel theories into practice against the Eastern Occupied Territories.” Ultimately, Rosenberg was the only member of the Third Reich at the Nuremburg trials who failed to repudiate his racist beliefs and dedication to the ideals of Hitler. Rosenberg was quoted at the trials as having said, “No matter how often I go over everything in my mind, I still cannot believe there was a single flaw in that man’s character.” Along with the 10 other defendants, Rosenberg was hanged on October 16, 1946.

This is a wonderful book, and if you’re ready for some high quality historical fiction and can tolerate an occasional fictional conversation with the Fuhrer, this book gets my highest recommendation.


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