As an afterthought, he added, “Human, all too human!”
The title of his book brought a smile to Nietzsche’s face. “Touché, Doctor Breuer! Who can quarrel with that felicitous phrase? I understand now your feelings, but still I’m not clear about their implications for our procedure.”
Breuer chose his words carefully in this delicate area.
“Nor am I. But I do know that I must be able to relax my guard. It will not work for me to feel I must be careful about what I reveal to you. Let me tell you about a recent incident that may be relevant. I was speaking to my brother-in-law, Max. Now I have never been intimate with Max because I have regarded him as psychologically insensitive. My marriage, however, had deteriorated to the point where I needed to discuss it with someone. I attempted to bring it up in a conversation with Max but was so overcome with shame that I found it hard to go on. Then, in a way I never expected, Max reciprocated by revealing similar difficulties he was encountering in his life. Somehow his revelation freed me, and, for the first time ever, he and I had a personal discussion. It helped enormously.”
“When you say ‘helped,’ ” Nietzsche immediately asked, “do you mean your despair diminished? Or your relationship with your wife improved? Or did you have a discussion that was momentarily expiating?”
Ach! Breuer realized he was caught! If he claimed his discussion with Max was truly helpful, then Nietzsche would raise the question why he needed his, Nietzsche’s, counsel. Careful, careful.
“I don’t know what I mean. I only know I felt better. That night I didn’t lie awake and cringe with shame. And since then I’ve felt more open, more ready to pursue an investigation of myself.”
This is not going well, Breuer thought. Perhaps a simple direct appeal would be better.
“I am certain, Professor Nietzsche, that I could express myself more honestly if I could be assured of your acceptance. When I talk about my obsessive love or my jealousy, it would help to know if you have experienced such things, too. I suspect, for example, that you find sex disagreeable and disapprove greatly of my sexual preoccupation. Naturally, this makes me uneasy about revealing these facets of myself.”
A long pause. Nietzsche stared at the ceiling in deep thought. Breuer felt expectant, for he had been skillful in increasing the pressure. He hoped Nietzsche was now finally about to give something of himself.
“Perhaps,” Nietzsche replied, “I have not been clear enough about my position. Tell me, have the books you ordered arrived from my publisher?”
“Not yet. Why do you ask? Are there passages relevant to our discussion today?”
“Yes, particularly in The Gay Science. There I state that sexual relationships are no different from other relationships in that they, too, involve a struggle for power. Sexual lust is, at bottom, lust for total dominance over the mind and body of the other.”
“That doesn’t ring true. Not for my lust!”
“Yes, yes!” Nietzsche insisted. “Look deeper, and you will see that lust is also a lust for dominance over all others. The ‘lover’ is not one who ‘loves’: instead, he aims for sole possession of his loved one. His wish is to exclude the entire world from some precious good. He is as mean-spirited as the dragon guarding his golden hoard! He does not love the world—on the contrary, he is utterly indifferent to all other living creatures. Did you not say this yourself? This is why you were pleased at—I’ve forgotten her name—the cripple?”
“Bertha, but she’s not a cripp——”
“Yes, yes, you were pleased when Bertha said you would always be the only man in her life!”
“But you take the sex out of sex! I feel my sexual urge in my genitals, not in some abstract mental arena of power!”
“No,” stated Nietzsche, “I merely call it by its right name! I do not object to a man who takes sex when he needs it. But I hate the man who begs for it, who gives up his power to the dispensing woman—to the crafty woman who turns her weakness, and his strength, into her strength.”
“Ach, how can you deny the truly erotic? You ignore the impulse, the biological craving that is built into us, that permits us to reproduce! Sensuality is a part of life, of nature.”
“Part, but not the high part! Verily, the mortal enemy of the high part. Here, let me read you a phrase I wrote early this morning.”
Nietzsche put on his thick spectacles, reached over to his desk, picked up a worn notebook, and flipped through pages filled with an illegible scrawl. He stopped at the last page and, his nose almost touching it, read, “ ‘Sensuality is a bitch that nips at our heels! And how nicely this bitch knows how to beg for a piece of spirit when denied a piece of meat.’ ”
He closed the book. “So the problem is not that sex is present, but that it makes something else vanish—something more valuable, infinitely more precious! Lust, arousal, voluptuousness—they are the enslavers! The rabble spend their lives like swine feeding in the trough of lust.”
“The trough of lust!” Breuer repeated to himself, astonished by Nietzsche’s intensity. “You have strong feelings about this matter. I hear more passion in your voice than ever before.”
“Great passion is required to defeat passion! Too many men have been broken on the wheel of lesser passion.”
“And your own experiences in this domain?” Breuer was fishing. “Have you yourself had unfortunate experiences that helped shape your conclusions?”
“Your earlier point, about the primal goal of reproduction—let me ask you this:”—Nietzsche stabbed the air thrice with his finger—“Should we not create—should we not become—before we reproduce? Our responsibility to life is to create the higher, not to reproduce the lower. Nothing must interfere with the development of the hero inside of you. And if lust stands in the way, then it, too, must be overcome.”
Face reality! Breuer told himself. You have virtually no control over these discussions, Josef. Nietzsche simply ignores any question he doesn’t wish to answer.
“You know, Professor Nietzsche, I agree, intellectually, with much you say, but our level of discourse is too abstract. It’s not personal enough to be helpful to me. Maybe I am too wedded to the practical—after all, my entire professional life has focused upon eliciting a complaint, making a diagnosis, and then addressing that complaint with a specific remedy.”
He leaned forward, to look directly at Nietzsche. “Now, I know my type of malady cannot be addressed so pragmatically—but, in our discussion we veer too far to the opposite extreme. I can’t do anything with your words. You tell me to overcome my lust, my lesser passions. You tell me to nurture the higher parts in myself—but you don’t tell me how to overcome, how to nurture the hero in myself. These are fine poetic constructs, but right now, to me, they are just airy words.”
Apparently unaffected by Breuer’s plea, Nietzsche responded like a teacher to an impatient schoolboy. “In time I shall teach you how to overcome. You want to fly, but you cannot begin to fly by flying. I must first teach you to walk, and the first step in learning to walk is to understand that he who does not obey himself is ruled by others. It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.” With that, Nietzsche took out his small comb and began to groom his mustache.
“Easier to obey another than command oneself? Once again, Professor Nietzsche, why not address me more personally? I get the sense of your statement, but do you speak to me? What can I do with it? Forgive me if I sound earthbound. Right now my desires are mundane. I wish for simple things—to sleep a nightmare-free sleep past three in the morning, to feel some relief from precordial tension. Here is where my Angst sets up housekeeping, right here——” He pointed to the center of his sternum.
“What I need now,” he went on, “is not an abstract, poetic statement but something human, direct. I need personal engagement: Can you share with me what it has been like for you? Did you have a love or an obsession like mine? How did you get past it? Overcome it? How long did it take?”
“There i
s one more thing I’ve planned to discuss with you today,” said Nietzsche, putting away his comb and, once again, ignoring Breuer’s question. “Do we have time?”
Breuer settled dispiritedly back in his chair. Obviously Nietzsche was going to continue to ignore his questions. He urged himself to be patient. He looked at his watch and said he could stay another fifteen minutes. “I’ll be here every day at ten for thirty to forty minutes, though there will undoubtedly be days when an emergency will force me to leave sooner.”
“Good! There’s something important I want to say to you. Many times I have heard you complain of unhappiness. In fact”—Nietzsche opened his notebook to Breuer’s list of problems—“ ‘general unhappiness’ is the first problem on your list. Also today you have spoken of your Angst, your cordial tension——”
“Precordial—the region on top of the cor, the heart.”
“Yes, thank you, we teach one another. Your precordial tension, your night fears, your insomnia, your despair—you speak much of these complaints, and you describe your ‘earthbound’ desire for immediate relief from discomfort. You lament that your discussion with me does not provide it in the way your discussion with Max did.”
“Yes. And——”
“And you want me to address your tension directly, you want me to provide comfort.”
“Exactly.” Breuer leaned forward again in his chair. He nodded, urging Nietzsche along.
“I resisted your proposal, two days ago, that I become your—what shall we call it?—your counselor and help you deal with your despair. I disagreed when you claimed I was a world expert because I had studied these matters for many years.
“But, now as I reflect upon it, I realize you were right: I am an expert. I do have much to teach you: I have devoted much of my life to the study of despair. How much of my life, I can easily show you. A few months ago, my sister, Elisabeth, showed me a letter I had written to her in eighteen sixty-five, when I was twenty-one. Elisabeth never returns my letters—she stores everything away and says that some day she will build a museum to house my effects and charge admission. No doubt, knowing Elisabeth, she’ll have me stuffed, mounted, and displayed as the main attraction. In that letter, I stated that there was a basic division of the ways of men: those who wish for peace of soul and happiness must believe and embrace faith, while those who wish to pursue the truth must forsake peace of mind and devote their life to inquiry.
“This I knew at twenty-one, half a life ago. It is time for you to learn it: it must be your basic starting place. You must choose between comfort and true inquiry! If you choose science, if you choose to be liberated from the soothing chains of the supernatural, if, as you claim, you choose to eschew belief and embrace godlessness, then you cannot in the same breath yearn for the small comforts of the believer! If you kill God, you must also leave the shelter of the temple.”
Breuer sat quietly, looking out of Nietzsche’s window into the sanatorium garden, where an elderly man in a wheelchair sat with closed eyes while a young nurse pushed him around a circular path. Nietzsche’s comments were compelling. It was hard to slough them off as mere airy philosophizing. Yet, once more, he tried.
“You make it sound more choiceful than it was. My choice was not so deliberate, nor so deep. My choice for godlessness was less an active choice than a matter of being unable to believe in religious fairy tales. I chose science simply because it was the only mode possible to master the secrets of the body.”
“Then you conceal your will from yourself. You must now learn to acknowledge your life and to have the courage to say, ‘Thus I chose it!’ The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices!”
Breuer squirmed in his chair. Nietzsche’s preaching tone made him uncomfortable. Where could he have learned it? Not from his preacher-father, who had died when Nietzsche was five. Could there be genetic transmission of preaching skills and inclinations?
Nietzsche continued the sermon. “If you choose to be one of those few who partake of the pleasure of growth and the exhilaration of godless freedom, then you must prepare yourself for the greatest pain. They are bound together and cannot be experienced apart! If you want less pain, then you must shrink, as the stoics did, and forgo the highest pleasure.”
“I’m not sure, Professor Nietzsche, that one must accept that morbid Weltanschauung. That sounds like Schopenhauer, but there are other, less gloomy points of view.”
“Gloomy? Ask yourself, Doctor Breuer, why are all the great philosophers gloomy? Ask yourself, ‘Who are the secure ones, the comfortable, the eternally cheerful?’ I’ll tell you the answer: only those with dull vision—the common people and the children!”
“You say, Professor Nietzsche, that growth is the reward of pain——”
Nietzsche interrupted. “No, not just growth. There is also strength. A tree requires stormy weather if it is to attain a proud height. And creativity and discovery are begotten in pain. Here, allow me to quote myself from my notes of just a few days ago.”
Again, Nietzsche thumbed through his notes, and then read, “ ‘One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’ ”
Breuer was now growing more irritated by Nietzsche’s reading. His poetic speech felt like a barricade between them. On balance, Breuer was certain that things would be better if he could bring Nietzsche down from the stars.
“Again, you are too abstract. Please don’t misunderstand me, Professor Nietzsche, your words are beautiful and powerful, but when you read them to me, I no longer feel that we’re relating personally. I grasp your meaning intellectually: yes, there are rewards of pain—growth, strength, creativity. I understand it here”—Breuer gestured to his head—“but it doesn’t get into here”—he gestured to his abdomen. “If this is to help me, it’s got to reach me where my experience is rooted. Here, in my entrails, I experience no growth, I give birth to no dancing stars! I have only the frenzy and the chaos!”
Nietzsche smiled broadly and wagged his finger in the air. “Exactly! Now you’ve said it! That’s the problem precisely! And why no growth? Why no worthier thoughts? That was the point of my final question yesterday, when I asked what you’d be thinking if you were not preoccupied with those alien thoughts? Please, sit back, close your eyes, and try this thought experiment with me.
“Let us take a distant perch, perhaps on a mountain peak, and observe together. There, over there, far away, we see a man, a man with a mind both intelligent and sensitive. Let us watch him. Perhaps once he looked deeply into the horror of his own existence. Perhaps he saw too much! Perhaps he encountered time’s devouring jaws, or his own insignificance—mere speck that he is—or life’s transiency and contingency. His fear was raw and terrible until the day he discovered that lust soothes fear. Therefore, he welcomed lust into his mind, and lust, a ruthless competitor, soon crowded out all other thoughts. But lust does not think; it craves, it recollects. So this man began to recollect lustfully of Bertha, the cripple. He no longer looked into the distance, but spent his time recollecting such miracles as how Bertha moved her fingers, her mouth, how she undressed, how she talked and stuttered, walked and limped.
“Soon his whole being was consumed with such pettiness. The great boulevards of his mind that were built for noble ideas became clogged with trash. His recollection of having once thought great thoughts grew dimmer and soon faded away. And his fears faded also. He was left with only a gnawing anxiety that something was amiss. Puzzled, he sought for the source of his anxiety amidst the trash of his mind. And that is how we find him today, rummaging through the rubbish, as if it contains the answer. He even asks me to rummage with him!”
Nietzsche stopped, awaiting Breuer’s response. Silence.
“Tell me,” Nietzsche urged, “what do you think of this man we observe?”
Silence.
“Doctor Breuer, what do you think?”
Breuer sat on in silence, his eyes closed, as if he had been mesmerized by Nietzsche’s words. br />
“Josef! Josef, what do you think?”
Rousing himself, Breuer slowly opened his eyes and turned to look at Nietzsche. Still, he did not speak.
“Don’t you see, Josef, that the problem is not that you feel discomfort? What importance is tension or pressure in your chest? Who ever promised you comfort? So you sleep poorly! So? Who ever promised you good sleep? No, the problem is not discomfort. The problem is that you have discomfort about the wrong thing!”
Nietzsche glanced at his watch. “I see I am keeping you too long. Let us end with the same suggestion I offered yesterday. Please think about what you would be thinking about if Bertha did not clog your mind. Agreed?”
Breuer nodded and took his leave.
Excerpts from Dr. Breuer’s Case Notes on Eckart Müller, 6 December 1882
Strange things happened in our talk today. And none of it as I had planned. He answered none of my questions, revealed nothing of himself. He takes his role as counselor so solemnly that at times I find it comical. And yet, as I examine it from his perspective, his behavior is entirely correct: he is honoring his contract and trying, as best he can, to help me. I respect him for that.
It is fascinating to observe his intelligence grappling with the problem of how to be helpful to a single individual, to a flesh-and-blood creature—to me. So far, however, he remains strangely unimaginative and relies completely on rhetoric. Can he truly believe that rational explanation or sheer exhortation will cure the problem?
In one of his books, he argues that a philosopher’s personal moral structure dictates the type of philosophy he creates. I believe now that the same principle is true in this type of counseling: the counselor’s personality dictates his counseling approach. Thus, because of Nietzsche’s social fears and misanthropy, he selects an impersonal, distant style. He is, of course, blind to this: he proceeds to develop a theory to rationalize and legitimize his counseling approach. Thus, he offers no personal support, never holds out a comforting hand, lectures to me from a lofty platform, refuses to admit to his own personal problems, and declines to engage me in a human fashion. Except for one moment! Toward the end of our talk today—I forget what we were discussing—he suddenly referred to me as “Josef.” Perhaps I am more successful than I thought in establishing rapport.