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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15907 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-01
• Released on: 2005-01-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This talky first novel by psychotherapist Yalom is set in 1882, when Joseph Breuer, an eminent physician and mentor of Sigmund Freud, strives to apply his recently discovered talking cure to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Freud's mentor, Josef Breuer, attempts to cure Friedrich Nietzsche of suicidal despair in the clinics, cemeteries, and coffeehouses of 19th-century Vienna--in this first novel by the author of the bestselling Love's Executioner: an entertaining and highly original tale of an uncompromising friendship between two brilliant men. Distinguished physician, renowned scientist, beloved husband and father, Josef Breuer finds himself at 40 simultaneously at the crest of his professional life and near the bottom of a pit of incomprehensible despair. Cursed with nightmares, insomnia, and obsessive sexual fantasies of his former patient, Anna O. (whom he cured, miraculously if temporarily, through a new technique called ``talk therapy''), Breuer welcomes the distraction when the imperious future psychoanalyst Lou Salom‚ demands that he use talk therapy to cure the suicidal depression of her friend, Friedrich Nietzsche. Because the poverty-ridden, unknown philosopher is too proud to accept spiritual help from anyone, Breuer must somehow cure the younger man without his knowledge--but the physician welcomes the challenge, and soon solves it by posing as the patient himself and begging Nietzsche's help in relieving his own existential pain. Unable to refuse, dour Nietzsche agrees to embark on a month of daily ``talks'' with the physician. The ensuing dialogue between a man of the world and an unworldly man becomes increasingly compelling as first Breuer, then Nietzsche, uncovers his forgotten past and delves deep into his own and the other's unconscious desires and fears. Throughout, Yalom's evocation of Breuer imprisoned in a classic midlife crisis, Nietzsche stymied by his own pride, loneliness, and terror, Lou Salom‚ cracking her feminist whip, and young Sigmund Freud eagerly following each conversation's twists and turns make for a stimulating dip into the pools of 19th-century philosophy, psychology, and culture. A delectable fantasy--in which the sole disappointment is that it didn't actually occur. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Irvin D. Yalom is the bestselling author of Love's Executioner, Momma and the Meaning of Life, and The Gift of Therapy, as well as several classic textbooks on psychotherapy, including the monumental work that has long been the standard text in the field, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy.

Customer Reviews

Yet another captivating, must-read from Yalom!
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!

Learning to Love One's Life
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

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.