Irvin Yalom

The Schopenhauer Cure really is a remarkable book. It shouldn't work, but it does. Once the story of Julius' cancer diagnosis and his dispiriting reconnection with Philip is out of the way, the novel introduces a lively cast of characters all of whom have been in group-therapy with Julius for a good while. Julius, who is appalled that Philip plans to be a counsellor himself when he has the social skills of a lump of granite, set this up so that Philip could see Julius demonstrate the social skills needed to hold the group together and help its participants resolve their issues. Philip confirms Julius' doubts by refusing eye contact with anybody and quoting the gloomiest prognostications of Schopenhauer instead of engaging in the process of interrogating his own feelings and behaviour. This is because Philip has adopted Schopenhauer's scornful attitudes towards his fellow man, and genuinely believes that isolating oneself from people who will only be disappointing, allows the life of the mind to flourish and achieve great things.

Things go from bad to worse when Pam returns from her sabbatical at an Indian ashram, only to be confronted by the college professor who used all his female students for fleeting encounters, including her. Hostility 101 erupts and it takes all of Julius' professional skills and the support of the rest of the group to hose down her #MeToo rage. As the sessions progress, all of the participants find new ways of looking at themselves and learn new ways of being that will bring them greater satisfaction in life. What's really interesting about this is the brutally frank and often hurtful things they say to each other and how Julius reframes these insulting conflicts so that other members of the group intervene to smooth things over. It can be a 'gift' when somebody says something about you that you didn't know about yourself, and it can help you to identify things that are keeping you 'stuck' in a negative space. If you've ever wondered how group-therapy works, this book is enlightening.

Woven through the novel is the poignant story of Schopenhauer's life. So, no, you don't need to know anything about S and I don't have any intention of reading him. But you may enjoy this brief video which summarises his importance to Freud amongst others, and how he was the first philosopher to write about The Will to Life, i.e. sex.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0zmfNx7OM4&t=14s[/embed]

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/09/05/the-schopenhauer-cure-2005-by-irvin-d-yalom/… (more)

Yalom is a practicing psychotherapist, professor emeritus at Stanford, and author of The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, which has been through several editions and is apparently a major textbook and guide. In an afterword, he says that he started writing novels as a way of illustrating the reality of therapy more vividly and accurately than he could in a textbook. Interestingly, Yalom's approach is that of an existential therapist who aims to help alleviate "the anxiety inherent in the raw facts of existence...that we have the misfortune to be thrown into a universe without any intrinsic meaning." Judging from the techniques and attitudes of the book's therapist character, whom we can assume is based on himself, he's kinder than that description might lead us to imagine. Although he admires Nietzsche, who strikes me (no matter how many times I try to meet him on his own ground) as the G. Gordon Liddy of philosophy, Yalom understands that a solution to the pain and struggle all of us humans experience usually involves relationships. To that end, he leads group therapy circles with patience and compassion, helping people understand themselves through their interactions with others.

I knew almost nothing about group therapy before I read this book, and was not only convinced by its portrayal here, but absorbed. Although Yalom isn't a great prose stylist and doesn't achieve a natural feel to either his expository passages or his characters' dialog, I was able to brush aside the sometimes cliché-ridden, florid word choices and unconvincing plot setups because the group interactions were realistically charged, and I really did always want to know what happened next. The book's doctor, Julius Hertzfeld, has learned that he has only a few years to live, and as part of his personal closure, seeks out a patient from his past that he was unable to help. After this patient, Philip, left the care of Dr. Hertzfeld, Philip discovered the philosophy of the early 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, which he claims cured him of his powerful urge to seduce and abandon women, an activity he successfully concluded hundreds of times without any feeling of relief or satisfaction. Now Philip no longer engages with women or anyone else; he is cold, mechanical, arrogant and stand-offish, and claims that he has found the secret to life. This novel is the story of Philip's unwilling journey in a group therapy circle, as well as a detailed, but somewhat unsuccessful, introduction to the thought and character of Schopenhauer.

As I said, the group circle dynamics fly off the page and keep you reading. It goes pretty quick, and if you're like me, you'll learn a lot about this kind of therapy. Unfortunately, the chapters about the group circle are frequently interrupted by chapters that tell the story of Schopenhauer's life, and in those chapters, the book falls with a thud. By the end, I was skimming them quickly in an effort to get back to the more important content. Schopenhauer, like Philip, was an unpleasant person and beyond merely eccentric. In the course of the book, we're exposed to countless quotations from his works and anecdotes about his life, but we wait in vain for any demonstration of why he was (briefly) the most-read philosopher of his century, or for any passage to strike us as demonstrative of genius rather than crankiness. So Schopenhauer himself is the biggest flaw in the story that he inspired.

There's a short section following a group member's trip to India that stands out as particularly vivid and effective, particularly when it describes the encounter between the American woman and a younger Indian man on the train. It was almost like a short story, or a passage from another book, although it did connect well with the bigger story in progress. The novel could have used more vignettes like this and fewer documentary chapters about the Scrooge-like Schopenhauer.… (more)

A friend recommended this book to me because she found it life-changing. I’m not sure that I’d say the same, but it did find it very moving and powerful. I suppose I expected the case studies to be more about the therapist applying a theoretical framework, like detective work. The author is much wiser than that, though. He insists that theoretical frameworks always end up being abandoned and that there isn’t one key memory from childhood that explains current pain. I suppose popular depictions of therapy tend to promulgate such cliches. Yalom writes lucidly and sympathetically, without arrogantly assuming that he knows what is going on in his patients’ heads. I really appreciated this insight into the mind of a skilled therapist, one who explains in detail how difficult it is to know what is going through someone else’s mind. His list of barriers includes the gap between image and language, selective disclosure, and bias error.

The cases recounted in the book are varied and interesting, although at their core all the patients are suffering from the same basic human worries: fear of death, or of loneliness, or of freedom, or of life’s meaninglessness. One of Yalom’s aims seems to be to reconcile patients to their inevitable death, without it being a paralysing fear. I liked that not all the cases he recounts were successful as such - in ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ the patient suddenly dropped therapy, for example, and the outcome in ‘Love’s Executioner’ was ambiguous. This demonstrates that there is no single linear path to improvement to be derived from the case studies; people are too complex for that. My favourite chapter was ‘Two Smiles’ for its discussion on misinterpretation and unknowability. I particularly liked this quote: ‘Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing that we can categorise them, we will neither identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcends category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.’… (more)