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When Nietzsche Wept
Release Date: 2005-01-01
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List Price: $14.95
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Product Description
In nineteenth-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era. Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him. When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental "talking cure," Breuer never expects that he too will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient. In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense, to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship.
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 Good plot and good content, but begs a more concise writing style
If this plot is original, then the author truely deserves credit for his imagination that brought various real historical figures together in this believable drama. I also appreciate how the author weaved into the plot many references to Nietzsche's philosophy, Freud's psycholoanalysis, socio-political background in Europe and the state of medicine at around 1882 in Europe. I am not an expert in these areas, but it seems that the author's references were well-researched and good enough for the general audience at least. For me, reading this book is a good short cut to get some reminder of the Nietzsche and Freud reading that I should have retained in school. I am even inspired by this book to read and re-read some Freud and Nietzsche.
The talking therapy conversation between Breuer and Nietzsche, which dominates the book, gave me a valuable glimspe into how psyschotherapy works and the mindsets of psychologists. But, the rather serious downside of this book is that the writing style of these conversations is too long, too over-analyzed and too cumbersome. Like some reader said, the first 100 pages are slow. I found myself often saying "please cut to the chase" in my head while reading the book. It seems that the author thinks that each piece of analysis/observation he offered is so interesting that he can't pare down the less important points. Unless you are a reader who, like me, love Vienna and is interested in psychoanalysis, western philosophy and medicine, I would not recommend this book. Personally, I am glad that I read it though.
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 Enjoyable ( noneapplies )
I savored this book and looked forward to reading it each night, not wanting it to end. One of my favorite writers.
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Yet another captivating, must-read from Yalom! ( ethelagain )
I wanted so badly to believe all of the details in this story were true; Yalom described the characters with fantastic but not excessive detail, and allows the reader to get inside the head of each, and to varying extents. I can't get enough of Yalom. If you like to learn about therapy, read his books!
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Learning to Love One's Life ( robin_friedman )
Irvin Yalom is a psychiatrist with a deep interest in philosophy. In works of fiction and non-fiction he has tried to combine these two disciplines for the insights they may jointly offer to people. "When Nietzsche Wept" (1992) is probably Yalom's most successful novel. In his book, Yalom imagines a lengthy encounter between Josef Breuer (1842-1925), a Viennese physician who, among other accomplishments helped found psychoanalysis, and the philosopher Friederich Nietzsche.(1844 -1900)
Yalom's story is subtitled "A Novel of Obsession". Both Nietzsche and Breuer are obsessed with a woman and with sexuality, as well as with their own loneliness, and their attempts to understand themeselves and find meaning in their lives. The book is set in Vienna in 1882. Breuer, age 40, and highly successful has ended the doctor-patient relationship with a woman in her early twenties, Bertha O., with whom he has been sexually obsessed. Breuer has been using talk-therapy with Bertha, the first time this technique had been attempted. Breuer has been neglecting his wife, Mathilde, and their five children over his obsession with Bertha and with his heavy commitments to his medical practice and research.
While Breuer and Mathilde are on a brief holiday, Breuer is approached by the young, beautiful and highly self-willed Lou Salome who asks Breuer to help cure the suicidal tendencies of her friend and teacher Nietzsche. Nietzsche had, in fact, fallen in love with Salome, proposed to her, and been rejected. He is deeply despondent and, indeed, suicidal, and suffers from migraine headaches.
The first half of the book details how Breuer and Nietzsche make contact and shows their initial testy relationship. In the second part of the book, Breuer persuades a highly reluctant Nietzsche to enter a clinic for a short stay, where Breuer will attempt to cure Nietzsche's migraines and Nietzsche, in turn, will offer philosophical counselling to Breuer to try to help the physician understand his life, his obsession with Bertha, and his feelings about Mathilde.
In the course of their discussions, Breuer and Nietzsche gradually become friends and reveal some of their innermost feelings to each other. Both men share a deep skepticism towards religion, with Nietzsche famous for his aphorism, "God is dead". In Yalom's book, Nietzsche explains that the goal of his thought is to find meaning in live rather than nihilism or despair in the face of the denial of theism. In the course of the book, the reader learns a great deal about Nietzsche's thought, with portions of his imaginary conversations with Breuer taken extensively from his writings.
Through his conversations with Nietzsche, Breuer comes to learn something of his fear of dying and of purposelessness, and, with great strain, he frees himself of his obsession with Bertha. Nietzsche comes to understand Breuer, and he learns something of his relationship to Lou Salome. He recognizes more fully than he had done earlier the loneliness of his path in life, but he also recognizes his need for affection and friendship with others. Nietzsche, with this new understanding, determines to follow through with the course he has set himself. When the book concludes, Nietzsche is about to begin writing his masterwork, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".
Yalom's book explores two difficult ideas of Nietzsche's: the doctrine of eternal recurrence and the, for Nietzsche, closely related injunction: "amor fati" -- to love one's fate or one's life. With moments of trepidation and some highly surprising twists in the story Breuer, and Nietzsche too, learn to love their respective lives.
Yalom's book is an imaginative creation of the birth of "talk therapy" and it shows the relationship between philosophical concerns and the concrete issues of individuals that are explored in psychotherapy. In addition to its portrayals of the two major characters, Yalom offers good portrayals of the young Sigmund Freud, a student and friend of Breuer, of Lou Salome, and of fictitious characters such as Breuer's long-suffering friend Max and Breuer's coachman, Fischmann.
Yalom has written a compelling philosophical novel about Nietzsche which helps show the impact Nietszche's thinking continues to exert on many readers. The book may encourage readers to explore Nietzsche's difficult thought for themselves. In its own right, Yalom's book may help people think in a new way about their lives and to work towards "amor fati" --- living one's life so that one may understand, shape, and embrace one's destiny.
Robin Friedman
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brillant work (accuracy aside)
This is a very heart-touching novel, easily one of the book novels I've read. But it must not be approached as a history text, or you'll be rather disillusioned. Yalom makes it clear that none of the events in the text actually occurred; nevertheless, in a very intricate way Yalom humanizes Nietzsche, who, judging from his works alone, can come off as bitter and arrogant. Also, some of Nietzsche's philosophies as interpreted by Yalom can be interpreted in other ways, but the author does provide a nice summary of Nietzsche's key ideas, in particular the idea of eternal recurrence, a popular theme of Nietzsche's that can be misleading and/or difficult to grasp.
I highly recommend this text for any fan of Nietzsche's; it's a nice supplement to Nietzsche's own works.
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