The Schopenhauer Cure

A Novel

Irvin D. Yalom

To my community of older buddies who grace me with their friendship, share life`s

inexorable diminishments and losses, and continue to sustain me with their wisdom and

dedication to the life of the mind: Robert Berger, Murray Bilmes, Martel Bryant, Dagfinn

Føllesdahl, Joseph Frank, Van Harvey, Julius Kaplan, Herbert Kotz, Morton Lieberman,

Walter Sokel, Saul Spiro, and Larry Zaroff.

16

Schopenhauer`

s Main Woman

_________________________

Onlythe male intellect,

clouded by the sexual impulse,

could call the undersized,

narrow–shouldered, broad–hipped, and short–legged sex

the fair sex.

—Arthur Schopenhauer on women

Youreternal quibbles, your

laments over the stupid world

and human misery, give me bad

nights and unpleasant dreams....

I have not had a single

unpleasant moment I did not

owe to you.

—A letter to Arthur Schopenhauer

from his mother

_________________________

The most important woman, by far, in Arthur`s life was his mother, Johanna, with whom

he had a tormented and ambivalent relationship which ended in cataclysm. Johanna`s

letter liberating Arthur from his apprenticeship contained admirable motherly sentiments:

her concern, her love, her hopes for him. Yet all these required a proviso: namely, that he

remain at a convenient distance from her. Hence her letter of liberation advised him to

move from Hamburg to Gotha rather than to her home in Weimar, fifty kilometers away.

The glow of warm feelings between the two following Arthur`s emancipation from

servitude evaporated quickly because of the brevity of Arthur`s stay at the preparatory

school in Gotha. After only six months the nineteen–year–old Arthur was expelled for

writing a clever but cruelly mocking poem about one of the teachers and beseeched his

mother for permission to live with her and continue his studies at Weimar.

Johanna was not amused; in fact the prospect of Arthur living with her sent her into

a frenzy. He had visited her briefly a few times during his six–month stay at Gotha, and

each visit had been the source of much displeasure for her. Her letters to him following

his expulsion are among the most shocking letters ever written by a mother to a son.

...I am acquainted with your disposition...you are irritating and unbearable and I

consider it most difficult to live with you. All your good qualities are darkened by

your super–cleverness and thus rendered useless to the world...you find fault

everywhere except in yourself...thereby you embitter the people around you—no one

wishes to be improved or illuminated in such a forcible manner, least of all by such

an insignificant individual as you still are. No one can tolerate being criticized by

someone who displays so many personal weaknesses, especially your derogatory

manner which, in oracular tones, proclaims that this is so and so, without even

suspecting the possibility of error.

If you were less like you are, you would only be ridiculous but, being as you

are, you become most annoying.... You might have, like thousands of other students,

lived and studied in Gotha...but you did not want this and so you are expelled....

such a living literary journal as you would like to be is a boring hateful thing because

one cannot skip pages or fling the whole rubbishy thing behind the stove, as one can

with the printed one.

In time Johanna resigned herself to the fact that she could not avoid accepting

Arthur at Weimar while he prepared for the university, but she wrote again, in case he

missed the point, and expressed her concerns in even more graphic terms.

I think it wisest to tell you straight out what I desire and what I feel about matters so

we understand one another from the outset. That I am very fond of you, I`m sure you

will not doubt. I have proven it to you and will prove it to you as long as I live. It is

necessary for my happiness to know you are happy but not to be a witness to it. I have

always told you that you are very difficult to live with.... The more I get to know you

the more strongly I feel this.

I will not hide this from you: as long as you are what you are, I would rather

make any sacrifice than consent to be near you.... What repels me does not lie in your

heart; it is in your outer, not your inner, being. It is in your ideas, in your judgment,

your habits; in a word, there is nothing concerning the outer world in which we agree.

Look, dear Arthur, each time you visited me only for a few days there were

violent scenes about nothing and each time I only breathed freely again when you

were gone because your presence, your complaints about inevitable things, your

scowling face, your ill humor, the bizarre opinions you utter...all this depresses and

troubles me, without helping you.

Johanna`s dynamics seem transparent. By the grace of God she had escaped the

marriage that she had feared would imprison her forever. Giddy with freedom, she

exalted in the idea of never again being answerable to anyone. She would live her own

life, meet whomever she wished, enjoy romantic liaisons (but never marry again), and she

would explore her own considerable talents.

The prospect of relinquishing her freedom for Arthur`s sake was unbearable. Not

only was Arthur a particularly difficult, controlling person in his own right, but he was

the son of her former jailer: the living incarnation of too many of Heinrich`s unpleasant

features.

And there was the issue of money. It first surfaced when Arthur, at nineteen,

accused his mother of lavish spending, which imperiled the inheritance he was to receive

at the age of twenty–one. Johanna bristled, insisted it was well known that she served

only bread–and–butter sandwiches at her salons and then excoriated Arthur for living far

beyond his means with expensive dining and horseback–riding lessons. Eventually, such

quarrels about money were to escalate to unbearable levels.

Johanna`s feelings about Arthur and about motherhood are reflected in her novels:

a typical Johanna Schopenhauer heroine tragically loses her true love and then resigns

herself to an economically sensible, loveless, and sometimes abusive marriage but, in an

act of defiance and self–affirmation, refuses to bear children.

Arthur shared his feelings with no one, and his mother later destroyed all his

letters. Still, certain trends seem self–evident. The bond between Arthur and his mother

was intense, and the pain of its dissolution haunted Arthur his entire life. Johanna was an

unusual mother—vivacious, forthright, beautiful, freethinking, enlightened, well read.

Surely, she and Arthur discussed his immersion in modern and ancient literature. Indeed

it may be that the fifteen–year–old Arthur made his momentous choice in favor of the

grand tour rather than university preparation because of his desire to remain in her

presence.

It was only after his father`s death that the tone of the mother–son relationship

changed. Arthur`s hopes of replacing his father in his mother`s heart must have been

crushed by her hasty decision to leave him in Hamburg and move to Weimar. If his hopes

were revived when his mother liberated him from his pledge to his dead father, they were

again shattered when she sent him to Gotha, despite the vastly superior educational

resources available in Weimar. Perhaps, as his mother suggested, Arthur intentionally

arranged to be expelled from Gotha. If his actions were based on his wishes to rejoin his

mother, he must have been disheartened by her unwillingness to welcome him in her new

home and by the presence of other men in her life.

Arthur`s guilt about his father`s suicide had its origins both in his joy of liberation

and in his fear that he may have hastened his father`s death by his disinterest in the world

of commerce. It was not long before his guilt transformed into a fierce defense of his

father`s good name, and to vicious criticism of his mother`s behavior toward his father.

Years later he wrote:

I know women. They regard marriage only as an institution for supply. As my father

grew wretchedly sick, he would have been abandoned except for the loving charity of

a faithful servant who performed the necessary basic acts of caring. My mother held

parties, while he lay down in loneliness; my mother had fun, while he was suffering

painfully. That`s the love of women!

When Arthur arrived in Weimar to study with a tutor for university entrance, he

was not permitted to live with his mother but in separate lodgings she had found for him.

Awaiting him there was her letter laying out, with ruthless clarity, the rules and

boundaries of their relationship.

Mark now on what footing I wish to be together with you: you are at home in your

lodgings, in mine you are a guest...who does not interfere in any domestic

arrangements. Every day you will come at one o`clock and stay until three, then I

shall not see you again all day long, except on my salon days which you may attend if

you wish, also eating at my house those two evenings, provided you will abstain from

tiresome arguing, which makes me angry.... During the midday hours you can tell me

everything I need to know about you, the rest of the time you must look after

yourself. I cannot provide your entertainment at the expense of mine. Enough, now

you know my wishes and I hope you will not repay me for my motherly care and love

by giving me opposition.

Arthur accepted these terms during his two–year stay in Weimar and remained

strictly an observer at his mother`s social evenings, not once engaging the lofty Goethe in

conversation. His mastery of Greek, Latin, the classics, and philosophy progressed at a

prodigious rate, and, at the age of twenty–one, he was accepted into the University at

Göttingen. At the same time he received his inheritance of twenty thousand Reichstalers,

enough to provide a sufficient but modest income for the remainder of his life. As his

father had predicted, he would have great need of this inheritance—Arthur was never to

earn a pfennig from his vocation as a scholar.

As time passed, Arthur viewed his father as an angel and his mother a devil. He

believed that his father`s jealousy and suspicions about his mother`s fidelity were well

founded, and he worried that she would fail to revere his father`s memory. In his father`s

name, he demanded that she live a quiet sequestered life. Arthur vehemently attacked

those whom he considered his mother`s suitors, judging them lesser, «mass–produced

creatures,” unworthy of replacing his father.

Arthur studied at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin and then obtained a

doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. He lived briefly in Berlin but soon

fled because of the impending war against Napoleon and returned to Weimar to live with

his mother. Soon, the same domestic battles erupted: not only did he upbraid his mother

for misusing the money he had made available for his grand–mother`s care, but he

accused her of an improper liaison with her close friend MГјller Gerstenbergk. Arthur

became so brutally hostile to Gerstenbergk that Johanna was forced to see her friend only

when Arthur was absent from the home.

During this period an often–quoted conversation occurred when he gave his mother

a copy of his doctoral dissertation, a brilliant treatise on the principles of causation titled

«On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.»

Glancing at the title page, Johanna remarked: «Fourfold root? No doubt this is

something for the apothecary?»

Arthur: «It will still be read when scarcely a copy of your writings can be found.»

Johanna: «Yes, no doubt the entire printing of your writings will still be in the

shops.»

Arthur was uncompromising on his titles, rejecting any considerations of

marketability.On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason should have

been more properly titledA Theory of Explanation. Nonetheless, two hundred years later,

it is still in print. Not many other dissertations can claim that distinction.

Ferocious arguments continued about money and about Johanna`s relationships

with men until Johanna`s patience was exhausted. She let it be known she would never

break off her friendship with Gerstenbergk or anyone else for Arthur`s sake. She ordered

him to move out, invited Gerstenbergk to move into his vacated rooms, and wrote Arthur

this fateful letter.

The door which you slammed so noisily yesterday after your improper behavior

toward your mother is now closed forever between you and me. I am leaving for the

country and shall not return until I know you are gone.... You do not know what a

mother`s heart is like—the more tenderly it loves, the more painfully it feels every

blow from a once loved hand.... You yourself have torn away from me: your

mistrust, your criticism of my life, of my choice of friends, your desultory behavior

toward me, your contempt for my sex, your unwillingness to contribute to my

contentment, your greed—this and a lot more makes you seem vicious to me.... If I

were dead and you had to deal with your father, would you have dared to

schoolmaster him? Or try to control his life, his friendships? Am I less than he? Did

he do more for you than I did? Loved you more than I did?...My duty toward you is

at an end. Go your way, I have nothing more to do with you.... Leave your address

here, but do not write to me, I shall henceforth neither read nor answer any letter from

you.... So this is the end.... You have hurt me too much. Live and be as happy as you

can be.

And the end it was. Johanna lived for another twenty–five years, but mother and

son were never again to meet.

In old age, reminiscing about his parents, Schopenhauer wrote:

Most men allow themselves to be seduced by a beautiful face.... nature induces

women to display all at once the whole of their brilliance...and to make a

«sensation»...but nature conceals the many evils [women] entail, such as endless

expenses, the cares of children, refractoriness, obstinacy, growing old and ugly after a

few years, deception, cuckolding, whims, crotchets, attacks of hysteria, hell, and the

devil. I therefore call marriage a debt that is contracted in youth and paid in old

age....