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About the book

On Writing a Teaching Novel

When Nietzsche Wept

IN A MANNER I COULD NEVER have anticipated, my unconscious played a key role in the writing of Love’s Executioner: as I approached the end of each of the first nine stories, the next one mysteriously wafted into my mind, as though I had unknowingly constructed in advance an outline and table of contents. While I worked on the ending of the tenth story, “In Search of the Dreamer,” another surprise was in store for me: I found myself unaccountably thinking not of another story, but of Friedrich Nietzsche. Soon it was obvious what my next project would be and even before Love’s Executioner was fully edited I began work on a novel about Nietzsche and his relationship to psychotherapy.

I never regarded the writing of Love’s Executioner as a radical departure from my role as an academician; I was simply fulfilling the job description—making a contribution to the professional literature of my field. I meant Love’s Executioner to be a pedagogical device—a collection of teaching tales to be used in psychotherapy training programs.

It was with that same sentiment that I began When Nietzsche Wept. My target audience was still the professional psychotherapy community and my intention was to introduce the student to the fundamentals of existential therapy by way of a new pedagogical device, a teaching novel.

I am preoccupied with stories and have always begun my lectures, articles, and books with some brief narrative, often a description of a recent therapy encounter, which I use as a springboard for pedagogical instruction. I shall begin this discussion of When Nietzsche Wept accordingly—by describing several stories about the basic nature of the patient-therapist relationship which have rattled about in my mind for many years. In one way or another, the echoes of these tales ring throughout the pages of the novel.

The Story of the Two Healers

Hermann Hesse, in his novel Magister Ludi, tells a tale about two renowned healers, one of whom lived in North India and the other in the southern part of the subcontinent. Though they were both powerful healers, they worked in different ways, one through offering sagacious advice, and the other through quiet and inspired listening.

Though they never met, they worked as rivals for many years until the younger healer, the one who lived in the North, grew spiritually ill and fell into despair. He tried unsuccessfully to heal himself using his own therapeutic methods and, ultimately, in desperation, set out on a journey to South India to seek help from his rival healer.

Week after week he journeyed on his pilgrimage. One evening he settled into an oasis and fell into a conversation with an older traveler to whom he described the purpose and goal of his pilgrimage. Imagine his astonishment when the older man replied, “Oh, this is indeed a miracle. I am the very man you seek.”

Without hesitation the older healer invited his younger rival into his home where they lived and worked together for many years, first as student and teacher, then as full colleagues. Years later the older man fell ill and on his deathbed called his young colleague to him. “I have a great secret to tell you,” he said, “a secret that I have long kept. Do you remember that night we met on the oasis and you told me you were on your way to see me?” The younger man replied, “Of course, I remember. How could I forget that night? It was the turning point of my entire life.”

The dying man took the hand of his younger colleague and said, “My secret is that I, too, was in despair, and on the night of our meeting I was traveling to seek help from you.”

Hesse’s tale has always moved me in a preternatural way. I think it’s an illuminating statement about giving and receiving help, about honesty and duplicity, and about the relationship between the healer and patient. For years I found it so compelling that I never wanted to tamper with it or even read it again. Yet at the same time I have been drawn to the idea of composing variations on its basic theme: it strikes so deep into the very heart of the therapy relationship. Consider, for example, how each man received help. The younger healer was nurtured, nursed, taught, mentored, and parented. The older healer, on the other hand, received help in a different manner—through serving another, through obtaining a disciple from whom he received filial love, respect, and salve for his isolation.

But I’ve often wondered whether these two wounded healers took advantage of the best therapy available to them. Perhaps they missed the opportunity for something deeper, something more powerfully mutative. Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene when they moved into honesty with the admission that they were both simply human, all too human. Though the twenty years of secrecy may have been helpful, it may also have prevented a more profound kind of help. What would have happened, what manner of growth might have taken place, if the conversation at the deathbed had occurred twenty years earlier?

Another Story of a Wounded Healer

Thirty-five years ago I read a fragment of a play, Emergency, by Hellmuth Kaiser, published in a psychiatric journal (and later in Effective Psychotherapy, a volume of Kaiser’s collected papers). Although I’ve never seen a reference to it or, until recently, reread it, Kaiser’s delicious plot has stayed in my mind all these years. It begins with a woman visiting a therapist to plead with him to help her husband, also a therapist, who is deeply depressed and likely to kill himself.

The therapist replied that he, of course, would be glad to help and advised her to tell her husband to call for an appointment. The woman responded that therein lay the problem: her husband denies that he is troubled and rejects all suggestions to obtain help. The therapist wonders how he can be of service. How can he help anyone who is unwilling to see him?

“I have a plan,” the woman said and then proceeded to suggest that he should pretend to be a patient, enter into treatment with her husband and, through a gradual role reversal, smuggle help for her husband into their meetings.

The rest of the play fragment is poorly executed and fails to fulfill its promise. But the central conceit—the patient becoming the therapist—seemed a gorgeous idea, and I yearned to finish that play someday.

Turning the Tables—Another Version

When I first came to Stanford in 1962, Don Jackson, a highly gifted therapist, offered a weekly teaching seminar in which he demonstrated interview techniques. He had an innovative, intuitive interviewing style and never failed to use some unexpected, quirky (and effective) approach. One day Paul Watzlawick, a psychologist with equally quirky tendencies, arranged a mischievous stunt involving a visiting psychologist from Germany. He asked the visitor to demonstrate his interviewing approach at the seminar and informed him that the patient he was to interview had a delusion that he was the famous psychiatrist, Don Jackson. Conversely he told Don Jackson that the patient he was to interview had a delusion that he was a famous psychologist from Germany. I don’t remember the resolution of the situation but I do recall a riotous and crazy-making beginning of the session in which the two interviewers scrambled wildly for roles.

In another conference a few weeks later, Don Jackson was asked to interview a highly delusional, three-hundred-fifty-pound Hawaiian chronic patient who believed he was the celestial emperor of the ward and dressed accordingly, in magenta trousers and a long flowing purple cape. Every day, perched imperiously on his velvet-draped chair, regarding patients and staff alike as supplicants and vassals, he held court on the ward. After a few minutes of exposure to the patient’s regal demeanor, Don Jackson suddenly fell to his knees, bowed his head to the ground, took his keys out of his pocket, and, arms outstretched, offered them to the patient saying, “Your highness, you, not I, should possess the keys to this ward.” The patient, his left eye twitching, pulled his cape about him and stared hard at the genuflecting psychiatrist. For a moment, just for a moment, he appeared perfectly sane, as he said, “Mistah, one of us here is very, very crazy.”

Note, incidentally, that I could have made this point using professional psychiatric prose by describing Don Jackson’s technique of creating a therapeutic alliance by entering a patient’s delusional system and undermining the delusion by a reductio ad absurdum approach. But dramatization—that is, fictionalization (I did not personally witness this incident, which took place nearly fifty years ago)—conveys the information more vividly and memorably.

Patient and Therapist—Other Perspectives

Harry Stack Sullivan, one of the most influential American psychiatric theorists, defined psychotherapy as a discussion of personal issues between two people, one of them more anxious than the other. And if the therapist develops more anxiety than the patient, Sullivan went on, he becomes the patient and the patient the therapist.

Or consider Jung’s view that only the wounded doctor can truly heal. Jung took it so far as to suggest that the ideal condition obtains when the patient brings the perfect salve for the therapist’s lesion.

Or consider how often it happens that therapists begin a therapy session with a heavy heart, with anxiety that exceeds that of the patient sitting with them. I certainly have. And often have finished a therapy session feeling much better. In fact, like the older healer in the Magister Ludi story, I may have profited as much as my patient. How does this come about? How did I receive benefit without explicitly addressing my discomfort? Perhaps I received help as a byproduct of altruistic behavior—i.e., being helped through the act of helping others. Or is it that I feel better about myself because of my effectiveness as a leader—I end up feeling I am good at what I do. Or perhaps I feel better because I have dipped into the healing waters of an intimate relationship that I myself have helped to construct.

I have found this to be particularly true in my group therapy practice. Many times I have started a therapy group session feeling troubled about some personal issue and finished the meeting feeling considerably relieved. The intimate healing ambience of a good therapy group is almost tangible. Scott Rutan, an eminent group therapist, once compared the therapy group to a bridge built during a battle. Though there may be some casualties sustained during the building (i.e., group therapy dropouts), the bridge once in place can transport a great many people to a better place.

And how many therapists have shared my experience of being called upon to offer aid to past teachers or mentors, to consult with family members of past therapists, or even to be therapist or caretaker of one’s own prior therapist?

These themes—the parameters of the relationship between patient and therapist—were some of the particular issues I wanted to explore in a teaching novel. But there was more. On a more ambitious level I wanted to introduce the reader to the fundamentals of an existential approach to psychotherapy. I decided to experiment with an unorthodox teaching method: to invite the reader to be present at the fictional conception and birth of existential therapy.

The novel invites the reader to participate in some thought experiments. Suppose Freud had never lived: what type of psychotherapy might have evolved? Or perhaps a better question: Suppose Freud had lived and left us only his topographical model of the mind (that is, his posited structure of the psyche encompassing the dynamic unconscious and the mechanisms of defense) without his psychoanalytic content—without the idea of anxiety issuing from the vagaries of psychosexual development? And imagine, further, the nature of psychotherapy if the content were based on an existential model—that is, that anxiety issues from a confrontation with the terrifying facts of life inherent in existence?

But all this was too airy, too dry and abstract for an engrossing novel. I needed not just ideas but flesh and blood human beings who had lived these ideas. But who? And when? I wanted to clothe the development of these ideas in fictional garb. I knew I wanted to write fiction, but a special kind of fiction: fiction which would serve a rhetorical, pedagogical purpose. In thinking about the nature of fiction, I ran across a phrase in a novel by Gide, Lafcadio’s Adventures, (also translated as The Vatican Cellars). “History,” Gide said, “is fiction that did happen. Whereas fiction is history that might have happened.” Fiction is history that might have happened. Perfect! That was precisely the fiction I wanted to write. My novel When Nietzsche Wept could have happened. Given the very improbable history of the field of psychotherapy, all the events of this book could have come to pass if history had rotated only slightly on its axis.

So although the novel is fiction, it is not, I think, an improbable account of how Friedrich Nietzsche might have invented psychotherapy. And Nietzsche could well have used therapy: he lived much of his life in deep despair. Ultimately I fashioned a plot which consists of this thought experiment: Suppose that Nietzsche were placed in a historical situation in which he would have been enabled to invent a psychotherapy derived from his own published writings, one that could have been used to heal himself.

But why Nietzsche? Why write a psychotherapy novel about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche? First, the basic tenets of much of my thinking about existential psychotherapy and the meaning of despair are to be found in Nietzsche’s writings. It is not that I read Nietzsche and deliberately set about to develop clinical applications for his insights. I’ve never thought or worked in that manner. Instead, my ideas about existential therapy emerged from my clinical work and then I turned to philosophy as a way of confirming and deepening this work.

In the process of writing the textbook Existential Therapy, I immersed myself for years in the work of the great existential philosophers—Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Of these, I found Nietzsche to be the most creative, the most powerful, and, by far, the most relevant for psychotherapy.

The idea of Nietzsche as a therapist may seem jarring to many of us because we so often think of Nietzsche as a destroyer or nihilist. After all, didn’t Nietzsche describe himself as the philosopher who does philosophy with a hammer? But Nietzsche, full of contradictions, revered destruction only as a stage in the process of creation—often he said that one can build a new self only on the ashes of the old.

Many have considered Nietzsche not as a destroyer but as a healer, a man who aspired to be a physician to his entire epoch. And the disease he hoped to treat? Nihilism—the post-Darwinian nihilism that was creeping over Europe in the late nineteenth century. In the wake of Darwin, all the old traditional religious values were crumbling. God was dead and a new secular humanism squatted in the temple ruins.

Nietzsche sought to use the death of God as an opportunity to create a new set of values. Over a century ago he said that “if we have our own ‘why’ of life we can put up with almost any ‘how.’” But Nietzsche wanted the new “why,” the new set of values, to be based not on supernatural values, but upon human experience, and upon this life rather than the illusion of some afterlife.

Contemporary scholarship has shown that Nietzsche anticipated Freud in many areas. Let us consider one example of his relevance for contemporary psychotherapy—his concept of the truly evolved individual (the Übermensch or superman or overman). Nietzsche believed that the path to becoming an Ubermensch lay not in the conquest or subjugation of others but through a self-overcoming.

The truly powerful man never inflicts pain or suffering but, like Zarathustra, is overflowing with power and wisdom and offers it freely to others. His offer emanates from a personal abundance, never from a sense of pity—that would represent a kind of scorn. So the overman, then, is a life affirmer, one who loves his fate, one who says “yes” to life.

In his life-celebratory stand, Nietzsche was much at odds with his first hero, Socrates, who just before taking his fatal draught of Hemlock said, “I owe Asclepius a rooster.” Why would Socrates owe the God of medicine a rooster—a fee the Greeks offered a doctor when he cured a patient? Apparently Socrates meant that he was now cured of the disease of life and its inherent, inescapable suffering. Nietzsche was at odds also with the Buddhist view that life was suffering and that relief from suffering lay in the giving up of attachments. According to this view the final goal of life is the detachment from individual consciousness, the end of the cyclical wheel of individual ego, the attainment of Nirvana.

But not so for Nietzsche, who once said, “Was that life? Well, then, once again!” Nietzsche’s overman is one who, if offered the opportunity to live life precisely the same way, again and again and again, and for all eternity, is able to say, “Yes, yes, give it to me. I’ll take that life and I’ll live it again in precisely the same way.” The Nietzschean overman loves his fate, embraces his suffering, and turns it into art and into beauty. And he is also a person who, in Nietzsche’s terms, “overcomes the narcotic need for some supernaturally imposed purpose.” Once a man can do that, Nietzsche said, he becomes an Übermensch, a philosophical soul, one of those who represents the next stage of human evolution.

So Nietzsche urged us not to strive towards the conquest of others but towards an interior, self-actualizing process, towards the realization of one’s potential. Nietzsche’s words were not lost to history: in the 1960s they found expression again in the human potential movement. He offered a new, non-supernatural, humanistically oriented purpose in life, namely that each of us is a bridge to something higher, is in the process of becoming something more. Our task in life, then, is the perfection of nature and of our own nature. Nietzsche’s instruction for the necessary inner work, his first “granite sentence,” was “Become who you are.” These concepts have nothing to do with the world-conquering Aryan superman of World War Two Germany. During those years some of Nietzsche’s words were distorted into Nazi slogans. To understand that phenomenon one must draw a careful distinction between what Nietzsche really wrote and the twisted, vulgarized view of Nietzsche’s philosophy disseminated by his sister, Elisabeth—one of the great villainesses of intellectual history.

Elisabeth, who ultimately became Nietzsche’s literary executor, had strong proto-fascist, anti-Semitic leanings, whereas Nietzsche vigorously rejected these sentiments. He had a deeply ambivalent relationship to his sister—at times closely attached to her, at times dismissing her as “an anti-Semitic goose.” Nietzsche was much dismayed by her marriage in 1885 to Bernhard Förster, a professional anti-Semite, and was not altogether sorry to see her move with her husband to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, an Aryan colony built on soil “uncontaminated” by Jewish presence.

Ultimately, due to Förster’s ineptness and grandiosity, the Paraguay project floundered. Bernard Förster was accused of embezzlement and ultimately committed suicide. Elisabeth, after an unsuccessful attempt to salvage the colony, returned home to Europe just in time to take over her ailing brother’s estate. Seizing her one great chance to attain political prominence, she set about distorting Nietzsche’s writings to promulgate her Wagnerian-fascist ideas. So effectively did she do this that it has taken a generation of scholars to separate Nietzsche’s golden grain from Elisabeth’s chaff.

Nietzsche recoiled from the building of great Hegel-like philosophic systems. He was more a brilliant gadfly whose remarkable insights even now a century later continue to fuel philosophic investigations. Employing a penetrating, intuitive style, he preferred quick dips into the cold pool of truth which he, for the most part, described in brief, pithy aphorisms. He even wrote an aphorism about an aphorism: A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time and is not consumed by all millennia, although it serves every time for nourishment: thus it is the great paradox of literature, the intransitory amid the changing, the food that always remains esteemed, like salt, and never loses its savor, as even that does. (Mixed Opinions and Maxims) It is well-known that many fields—esthetics, philosophy, ethics, history, philology, politics, music—have profited from Nietzsche’s sparkling ideas. One of my intentions in When Nietzsche Wept was to underscore the relevance of Nietzsche’s psychological insights to contemporary psychotherapy.

In many places he stressed the importance of coming to terms with one’s destiny—destiny in the deepest sense, not just an individualistic life-developmental destiny, but in the very condition of being human. It was the task of the evolved human being, Nietzsche held, to look deeply into this destiny. Yes, that incurred suffering, but we must train ourselves to bear the suffering of truth. Staring at the truth is not easy, Nietzsche says, “It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished” (The Gay Science). Ultimately suffering becomes the great liberator which permits us to plumb our deepest depths. Earlier I mentioned Nietzsche’s first granite sentence, “Become who you are.” Nietzsche’s second granite sentence was “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” Nietzsche’s ability to stare unflinchingly at the truth, to break illusion, was remarkable. “One must pay dearly for immortality,” he said. “One has to die several times while still alive.” To become enlightened, to become worthy of immortality, one must face down the terror of death and to plunge into one’s own dying many times while still alive.

Though Nietzsche never explicitly addressed the field of medicine or psychiatry he nonetheless had thoughts about the training of healers:

Physician help thyself: thus you help your patients too. Let this be his best help—that he, the patient, may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

Or elsewhere:

You shall build over and beyond yourself, but first you must be built yourself, perpendicular in body and soul. You shall not only reproduce yourself, but produce something higher. (Ibid.)

Obviously these aphorisms, written a century ago, argue for the position (to which almost all contemporary teachers of psychotherapy ascribe) that a personal therapy is a sine qua non of the training of therapists. But another aphorism adds a moderating note: “Some cannot loosen their own chains and can nonetheless redeem their friends” (Zarathustra). In other words, even though personal exploration and insight is needed, total enlightenment (i.e., a full personal self-overcoming) may not be necessary because therapists can take their patients farther than they themselves have gone. Even the wounded therapist can still point the way to the patient-therapists are guides, not conveyer belts.

What about the nature of the healing relationship?

Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of confirmation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire—a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship. (The Gay Science)

“A shared thirst for an ideal above them. . . . Its right name is friendship.” Or is its right name psychotherapy—an authentic relationship, sharing a thirst for an ideal above, which emerges when all transference distortions have dissipated?

How close? How far? In a light piece of verse Nietzsche advises neither too distant nor too enmeshed. Perhaps the best role for the healer is as a participant-observer:

Do not stay in the field

nor climb out of sight

the best view of the world

is from a medium height (Ibid.)

What kind of therapist might Nietzsche have been? Ambitious, resolute, and uncompromising. He would have made no concessions, would have expected his clients to face the truth about themselves and their “situation” in existence. Would he have settled for symptom relief, for the limited goals of behavioral-cognitive modes? Listen: I am a railing by the torrent: let those who can, grasp me. A crutch, however, I am not! (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

Or again:

For that is what I am through and through: reeling in, raising up, raising, a raiser, cultivator, and disciplinarian, who once counseled himself, not for nothing: Become who you are! (Ibid.)

Given even these few glimpses into Nietzsche’s relevance for contemporary psychotherapy, we may turn to the question of whether Nietzsche has taken his deserved place in the history of psychotherapy. The answer is absolutely not. Turn to history of psychiatry and psychotherapy textbooks, and you will find no mention of his name. Nietzsche’s insights, in my opinion, have neither been recognized nor harvested by our field.

Why not? After all, Nietzsche lived in the right place at the right time: the late nineteenth century in central Europe. This era, this place was the crucible of therapy. He was born in 1844, twelve years before Freud. To answer the question of why Nietzsche’s name (not his thoughts) has been ignored in the psychotherapy literature, we must turn to the relationship between Nietzsche and Freud. I refer, of course, to the intellectual relationship: the two men never met.

Nietzsche would not have known of Freud. By 1889, the end of Nietzsche’s intellectual career, Freud had published nothing in the field of psychiatry. But did Freud know Nietzsche’s work? Here the record is contradictory. Sometimes Freud flatly denied he had ever read Nietzsche; at other times he appeared to be intimately familiar with Nietzsche’s writings.

Was it possible that Freud was ignorant of Nietzsche’s work? How prominent was Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century? During his productive lifetime Nietzsche’s writings were not well-known. Thus Spake Zarathustra, his best known book, a standard undergraduate text for later generations, sold only a hundred copies its first year of publication. In fact, so few copies of any of his books sold that Nietzsche once claimed to know the owner of every copy. Nietzsche’s name was not unknown, however; throughout Western Europe there was an active underground Nietzsche appreciation movement, and many artists and intellectuals were aware of his genius.

Nietzsche’s death was no less remarkable than his life: he died either in 1889 or in 1900. In 1889 he suffered a cataclysmic dementia and his great mind was gone forever. Most medical historians have concluded that he suffered from tertiary syphilis-paresis (general paralysis of the insane), a common incurable condition of the era. After 1889 Nietzsche remained broken for the rest of his life, unable to think clearly, barely able to formulate a coherent sentence. His empty corporeal husk lingered on for eleven more years until his official death in 1900.

How Nietzsche ever contracted syphilis remains a huge puzzle for historians, since he was believed to have led a chaste life. Unfounded speculations abound, ranging from contact with the cigars of wounded soldiers when Nietzsche served in an ambulance corps in the Franco-Prussian War, to liaisons with prostitutes in Cologne, to medically prescribed romps with southern Italian peasant women, to (Jung’s theory) gay brothels in Genoa.

When Nietzsche was incapacitated, his sister, Elisabeth, moved in to take care of him (and his writings). A great self-promoter, she made the most of her one possible vehicle for fame—her brother’s philosophy—for the rest of her life. Her political pandering was so successful that Hitler funded her Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, visited her on her ninetieth birthday bearing a huge bouquet of roses, and, a few years later, attended her funeral and placed a laurel wreath on her casket.

Though Nietzsche was little known before his first death in 1889, Elisabeth was to change that dramatically in the next ten years. As a result of her promotion, all of Nietzsche’s work was republished and before long copies of his books by the tens of thousands cascaded off the great presses of Europe.

Perhaps Freud was relatively unfamiliar with Nietzsche’s writings during Nietzsche’s productive lifetime. However, it is highly improbable that he (or any educated middle European) would have been unfamiliar with Nietzsche after 1900. (Remember, Freud’s first published article in psychiatry appeared in 1893, and his first book, Studies in Hysteria, in 1895.) We know, too, that some of Freud’s university friends (for example, Joseph Paneth) became early devotees of Nietzsche in the 1870s and early 1880s and wrote to Freud about their opinions of Nietzsche. And of course there was Freud’s intimate twenty-six-year relationship with Lou Salomé who, as I shall discuss shortly, had once been intimate with Nietzsche. We know, also, that Freud prized Otto Rank’s gift of a complete set of Nietzsche’s writings bound in white leather which he took with him to London when the Gestapo forced him to leave Vienna and to leave much of his library behind.

We know also from the published detailed minutes of the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna that two entire meetings in 1908 were devoted to Nietzsche. In these minutes Freud acknowledged that Nietzsche’s intuitional method had reached insights amazingly similar to those reached through the laborious systematic scientific efforts of psychoanalyses. The Psychoanalytic Society explicitly credited Nietzsche with being the first to discover the significance of abreaction, of repression, of the significance of forgetting, of flight into illness, of illness as an excessive sensitivity to the vicissitudes of life, and of the importance of the instincts in mental life—both the sexual and sadistic instincts. Freud, in fact, went so far as to point out the two or three ways in which he thought Nietzsche had not anticipated psychoanalysis. Obviously the act of delineating the ways in which Nietzsche did not anticipate psychoanalysis implies that he was fully aware of the many ways in which Nietzsche did anticipate psychoanalysis.

Though Freud said at times that he had not read Nietzsche, there were other times he said that he had tried to read Nietzsche but was too lazy—an odd statement considering Freud’s legendary diligence and energy. (A perusal of his daily schedule, often consisting of ten to twelve clinical hours before sitting down to write, always leaves me gasping for breath.) On still other occasions (and here, I believe, we move closer to the true dynamics) Freud said he tried to read Nietzsche but got dizzy because Nietzsche’s pages were so crammed with insights uncomfortably close to his own. Thus to read Nietzsche was to deprive himself of the satisfaction of making an original discovery: in other words, Freud had to remain ignorant of Nietzsche’s work lest he, as he put it, be forced to view himself as a “verifying drudge.” Elsewhere he explicitly acknowledged that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche so precisely described and anticipated the theory of repression that it was only because he (Freud) was not well-read that he had the chance to make a great discovery. And making a great discovery was extraordinarily important to Freud, who realized early in life that a university career would be closed to him because of the anti-Semitism rampant in fin de siècle Vienna. Private practice was the only venue available to him, and the great independent discovery the only route to the fame he so much craved.

The idea of himself as an original thinker making an independent discovery was, thus, crucially important to Freud, whose creative energy depended on this romantic image of himself. “Even Einstein,” Freud said, “had the advantage of a long line of predecessors from Isaac Newton forward, whereas I had to hack every step of my own way alone, through a tangled jungle.” Nietzsche, grounded in classical philosophy, especially the earliest philosophers—the pre-Socratic Greeks—had a very different attitude towards priority. “Am I called upon,” Nietzsche asked, “to discover new truths? There are far too many old ones as it is.” He believed that the past was always embodied in the great man and sought only “to put history in balance again.” Never a modest man, Nietzsche predicted that “a thousands secrets of the past will crawl out of their hiding places into my sunshine.” (The Gay Science) Thus there is evidence that Freud knew and admired the work of Nietzsche. According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud placed several great men in a pantheon and said he could never achieve their ranks. In this group were Goethe, Kant, Voltaire, Darwin, Schopenhauer—and Nietzsche. Perhaps some of Freud’s confused feelings toward Nietzsche issued from his ambivalence towards the entire discipline of philosophy. At times Freud derided philosophy for its lack of a scientific methodology. Yet at other times he yearned to settle into pure philosophic and historical speculation, and considered his entire medical career as a detour, a false turn from his true calling as a Lebens-philosopher, an unraveler of the mystery of how man came to be what he is.

To summarize, there are several answers to the question “Why write a psychotherapy novel starring Friedrich Nietzsche?” Nietzsche was extraordinarily prescient about the field of psychotherapy and exercised considerable influence upon Freud. Freud never acknowledged his debt to Nietzsche. The field of psychotherapy, as a whole, has followed Freud’s lead and ignored Nietzsche’s contributions.

There is still another reason to write a novel about Nietzsche—the extraordinary drama of his life. He was born in 1844 into a family of modest means. His father, a Lutheran minister, died when Nietzsche was five. His genius noted at an early age, Nietzsche was awarded a scholarship to one of the best schools in Germany. At the age of twenty-four, before he matriculated from a graduate university program in philology, he was offered, and accepted, the chair in classical philology at the University of Basle. While there he began to suffer dreadfully from an illness which had first appeared in his adolescence and was to plague him all his life. The illness was not the syphilis which ultimately was to kill him, but almost certainly an extremely severe migraine condition.

His migraine so incapacitated him—according to Stefan Zweig he was sometimes ill more than two hundred days a year—that at the age of thirty, Nietzsche had to resign his professorship. As he put it, he kicked the dust of the German-speaking world from his shoes and departed to Italy, where he spent the rest of his life traveling mostly in southern Italy and Switzerland, going from one modest hotel to another, searching for the climate and the right atmospheric conditions which would grant the health to think and to write for two or three days in a row.

Perhaps the reader might be wondering about my claim of great drama in Nietzsche’s life. From the perspective of external events, Nietzsche’s life might seem unusually uneventful. Yet from the internal perspective, this is a remarkable life. There is deep drama in this lonely man, one of the great, courageous minds of history wandering from one unassuming Gasthaus to another in Italy and Switzerland while unflinchingly confronting the harsh facts of human existence. And Nietzsche always pursued his task starkly, without material comfort (he lived on a small university pension), without a home (his steamer trunk lugged from hotel to hotel contained all his possessions), without a family (save for a distant mother and the problematic Elisabeth), without the touch of a loving friend, without a professional community (he never again had a university position), without a country (because of his anti-German sentiments he gave up his German passport and never stayed in one place long enough to obtain another), without recognition (his publishers, he said, should have worked in political intrigues—they were skilled at keeping secrets and his books were their greatest secret), and without acclaim or students. Hegel is reputed to have said on his deathbed, “In my entire career I’ve had only one student who understood me, and even that student misunderstood me.” I think Nietzsche would have to go further yet, would have had to contemplate on his deathbed that he never had a single formal student.

Perhaps the lack of acclaim troubled Nietzsche less than most because he had an unswerving belief in his ultimate place in history. In his preface to one of his later books (The Antichrist) he says, “This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living today. Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.” “Born posthumously”—a marvelous phrase which I considered using as the title of my novel.

Nietzsche suffered a great deal during these years from the effects of the debilitating migraine, as well as from the isolation and the sheer task of living a life devoid of illusion. He often said that despair is the price one pays for self-awareness and wondered how much truth a man could stand. Perhaps, also, the despair issued from some kind of presentiment of his percolating disease—the ticking time bomb that would burst his brain apart at the seams when he was forty-five.

Let us return now to the basic thought experiment that was to constitute the spine of my novel: Suppose that Nietzsche were placed in a historical situation in which he would have been enabled to invent a psychotherapy. derived from his own published writings, one that could have been used to heal himself.

In which way could a psychotherapeutic experience have helped Nietzsche? Through insight? Unlikely. Recall that Freud said Nietzsche was a man who had more insight about himself than any man who ever lived. More than insight would have been needed. What Nietzsche needed was a therapeutic encounter, a meaningful relationship. Nietzsche experienced himself as desperately isolated. His letters bulge with references to his loneliness: “Neither among the living nor the dead is there anyone with whom I feel kinship”; “No one who had any sort of God to keep him company ever reached my level of loneliness” (F. Nietzsche to F. Overbeck; see Nietzsche, a Self-Portrait from His Letters, ed. Fuss and Shapiro).

But Nietzsche in psychotherapy? Is it conceivable that Nietzsche would have made himself vulnerable, would have asked another to help him? And would Nietzsche’s grandiose, arrogant self have permitted the self-disclosure required for successful therapy? Obviously the plot called for some device which would have permitted Nietzsche to be in control of the therapy procedure.

And when should the story be set? Nietzsche was in despair much of his life. Would there have been a particularly propitious time for a therapeutic encounter? Ultimately I settled on the autumn of 1882, when Nietzsche was thirty-eight and, following the breakup of a brief, passionate (but chaste) love affair, had slumped into such a state of despair that his letters were full of suicidal ideation. The woman, Lou Salomé, a young remarkable Russian, would go down in history as a writer, critic, disciple of Freud, practicing psychoanalyst, and friend and lover to several eminent men of the late nineteenth century, including the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

One of the most striking aspects of Nietzsche’s depression in 1882 was his rapid recovery: though he was suicidal in the autumn of 1882, it was only a few months later in the spring of 1883 that he began energetically writing Thus Spake Zarathustra. He completed the first three parts in only ten days, writing this book as no great book has ever been written, as though he were in a trance, as though he were a medium through whom the book was being written.

Furthermore, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a life-affirming, life-celebratory work. How was Nietzsche able to transport himself from a deep depression to life-affirmation in only a few months? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable, and wonderful, for Nietzsche to have had a successful therapy encounter at the end of 1882?

But who would be Nietzsche’s therapist? That was a vexing problem. In 1882 there were no professional psychotherapists. There was no such thing as dynamic psychotherapy: Freud was twenty-seven years old and had yet to enter the field of psychiatry.

If Nietzsche had seen a contemporary physician for his despair, he might have been told there was no medical treatment for his condition, or he might have been sent to Baden-Baden, Marienbad, or one of the other Central European spas for a water cure, or perhaps he might have been referred to the church for religious counseling. There were no practicing secular therapists. Though A. A. Liébault and Hippolyte Bernheim had a school of hypnotherapy in Nancy, France, they offered no psychotherapy per se, only hypnotic symptom-removal.

I wish I could have staged the novel a decade later: by then Freud would be developing psychoanalytic methods and a Freud-Nietzsche encounter would have made an interesting story. Close but not possible: by 1892 Nietzsche had already lapsed into irreversible dementia. No, all things pointed towards 1882 as the most propitious historical moment.

Unable to identify a psychotherapist in 1882, I decided to invent one and began sketching a fictional Jesuit priest-therapist (a lapsed priest, because of Nietzsche’s anticlerical sentiments). Then it suddenly dawned on me that there was, after all, right under my nose, one therapist alive in 1882—Josef Breuer, whose work I knew particularly well because I had taught a Freud appreciation course every year for over a decade. Breuer, Freud’s friend and mentor, is remembered chiefly because he was the first to employ dynamic theory and methods in the psychotherapy of a patient. Though the full case history of the patient, Bertha Pappenheim (whom Breuer gave the pseudonym of Anna O.), was published in 1893, in a psychiatric journal, and again in Breuer and Freud’s 1895 book Studies in Hysteria, Breuer had actually treated her many years earlier, in 1881.

Once I had selected Breuer as Nietzsche’s therapist, the rest of the plot quickly fell into place. In the early 1880s Nietzsche had consulted a great many Central European physicians because of his deteriorating health. Breuer was not a psychiatrist but a superb medical diagnostician and the personal physician to many of the eminent figures of his era. It would have been historically plausible for Nietzsche to have sought consultation with Breuer. And, as we see from letters reproduced on pages 302—306 that were discovered after the publication of this novel, it almost happened.

In the novel I brought the two together through the machinations of Lou Salomé. Feeling guilty about her role in Nietzsche’s depression, she asks Breuer to meet with Nietzsche. In this regard Lou Salomé’s behavior is indeed fictional, since the historical evidence suggests she was a free spirit and unlikely to be burdened by a guilty conscience.

But she was undoubtedly a woman of considerable intelligence, charm, and persuasiveness. Though Breuer first takes the position that there is no medical treatment for love-sick despair, Lou Salomé urges him to improvise and reminds him that, until he invented it, there was also no treatment for Anna O.’s hysteria. (Though the case had not yet been published I suggest that Lou Salomé might have heard about Anna O. from her brother, Jenia, who, in a stroke of good fortune for the historical consistency of my plot, happened to be a medical student in Vienna in 1882 and might have studied with Breuer.

Once my characters were in place I had the great writerly experience of seeing my characters coming to life and taking over the story. They appeared to converse all the time, and my task seemed merely to stay tuned in, to record their discussions, and to watch with amazement how the story gradually evolved.

When Nietzsche Wept has had a long and unusual life striking some particularly strong chords in European, Near Eastern, and South American audiences with many countries far outselling the United States, including Germany, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Argentina, and Brazil. In 1993, it won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for Fiction. In November 2009, it was selected by the city of Vienna to be honored in the weeklong “Eine Stadt, Ein Buch” festival during which a hundred thousand copies were distributed free to the citizens of Vienna (see www.einestadteinbuch.at). The following year France awarded it the Saint-Maur “Livre de Poche” Prize. Stage plays of When Nietzsche Wept have had long runs in Brazil and Argentina, and it has been made into a film by Pinchas Perry, starring Armand Assanti and Ben Cross.