The Schopenhauer Cure (10 page)

"It's clear. What ground rules does the group have?"

"First confidentiality--you speak to no one about other members of the group.

Second--you strive to reveal yourself and to be honest in expressing your perceptions of other members and your feelings about them. Third--everything must go on inside the group. If there is contact between members outside the group, it must be brought back into the group and discussed."

"And this is the only way you're willing to supervise me?"

"Absolutely. You want me to train you? Well, this is my prerequisite."

Philip sat silently with eyes closed and his forehead resting on his clasped hands.

Then he opened his eyes and said, "I'll go along with your suggestion only if you are willing to credit the group therapy sessions as supervisory hours."

"That's a stretch, Philip. Can you imagine the ethical dilemma that creates for me?"

"Can you imagine the dilemma your proposal creates for me? To turn my attention to my relations with others when I never wish for anyone to be anything to me. Besides, did you not imply that improving my social skills will make me more effective as a therapist?"

Julius stood up, took his coffee cup to the sink, shook his head, wondered about what he had gotten himself into, returned to his seat, exhaled slowly, and said, "Fair enough, I'll agree to sign off the group therapy hours as supervision."

"One other thing: we haven't discussed the logistics of the exchange--of my offering you guidance on Schopenhauer."

"Whatever we do on that matter will have to wait, Philip. Another therapy pointer: avoid dual relationships with patients--they will interfere with therapy. I refer to all kinds of ancillary relationships: romantic, business, even teacher and student. So I much prefer, and this is for your sake, to keep our relationship clean and clear. That's why I am suggesting we start with the group and then, in the future, enter into a supervisory relationship, and then, possibly--I make no promises--a philosophy tutorial. Though at the moment I feel no great desire to study Schopenhauer."

"Still, can we establish a fee for my future philosophical consultation with you."

"That's iffy, and a long way off, Philip."

"I'd still like to set the fee."

"You continue to amaze me, Philip. The goddamnedest things you worry about!

And the things you don't!"

"Just the same, what's a fair fee?"

"My policy is to charge the supervisee the same fee I charge for individual therapy--with some reduction for beginning students."

"Done," said Philip, nodding.

"Hold on, Philip, I want to be certain you've heard me say that the idea of a Schopenhauer tutorial arrangement is not of great import to me. When the topic first arose between us, all I did was to voice some slight interest in how Schopenhauer had provided so much help to you, and you ran with the ball and assumed we had made a contractual arrangement."

"I hope to increase your interest in his work. He had much to say of great value to our field. In so many ways he anticipated Freud, who borrowed his work wholesale, without acknowledgement."

"I'll keep an open mind, but, I repeat, many of the things you've said about Schopenhauer do not pique my desire to know more about his work."

"Including what I said in my lecture about his views on death?"

"Especially that. The idea that one's essential being will ultimately be reunited with some vague, ethereal universal life force offers me zero comfort. If there is no persistence of consciousness, what possible solace could I draw from that? By the same token, I get little comfort from knowing that my bodily molecules will be dispersed into space and that ultimately my DNA will end up being a part of some other life-form."

"I'd like us to read together his essays on death and on the indestructibility of being. If we did, I'm certain--"

"Not now, Philip. At the moment I'm not as much interested in death as I am in living the rest of my life as fully as possible--that's where I am."

"Death is always there, the horizon of all these concerns. Socrates said it most clearly, 'to learn to live well, one must first learn to die well.' Or Seneca, 'No man enjoys the true taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it.'"

"Yes, yes, I know these homilies, and maybe in the abstract they are true. And I have no quarrel with incorporating the wisdom of philosophy into psychotherapy. I'm all for it. And I also know that Schopenhauer has served you well in many ways. But not in all ways: there's a possibility that you may need some remedial work. And that's where the group comes in. I look forward to seeing you here for your first meeting next Monday at four-thirty."

10

The Happiest

Years of

Arthur's life

_________________________

Just
because

the

terrible

activity of the genital system

still slumbers, while that of

the brain already has its full

briskness, childhood is the

time

of

innocence

and

happiness,

the

paradise

of

life, the lost Eden, on which

we look back longingly through

the whole remaining course of

our life.

_________________________

When Arthur turned nine, his father decided the time had come to take over the direction of his son's education. His first step was to deposit him for two years in Le Havre at the home of a business partner, Gregories de Blesimaire. There, Arthur was to learn French, social graces, and, as Heinrich put it, "become read in the books of the world."

Expelled from home, separated from his parents at the age of nine? How many children have regarded such exile as a catastrophic life event? Yet, later in life, Arthur described these two years as "by far the happiest part of his childhood."

Something important happened in Le Havre: perhaps for the only time in his life Arthur felt nurtured and enjoyed life. For many years afterward he cherished the memory of the convivial Blesimaires, with whom he found something resembling parental love.

His letters to his parents were so full of praise for them that his mother felt compelled to remind him of his father's virtues and largesse. "Remember how your father permits you to buy that ivory flute for one louis-d'or."

Another important event took place during his sojourn in Le Havre. Arthur found a friend--one of the very few of his entire life. Anthime, the Blesimaire son, was the same age as Arthur. The two boys became close in Le Havre and exchanged a few letters after Arthur returned to Hamburg.

Years later as young men of twenty they met once again and on a few occasions went out together searching for amorous adventures. Then their paths and their interests diverged. Anthime became a businessman and disappeared from Arthur's life until thirty years later when they had a brief correspondence in which Arthur sought some financial advice. When Anthime responded with an offer to manage his portfolio for a fee, Arthur abruptly ended the correspondence. By that time he suspected everyone and trusted no one. He put Anthime's letter aside after jotting on the back of the envelope a cynical aphorism from Gracian (a Spanish philosopher much admired by his father): "Make one's entry into another's affair in order to leave with one's own."

Arthur and Anthime had one final meeting ten years later--an awkward encounter during which they found little to say to one another. Arthur described his old friend as "an unbearable old man" and wrote in his journal that the "feeling of two friends meeting after a generation of absence will be one of great disappointment with the whole of life."

Another incident marked Arthur's stay in Le Havre: he was introduced to death. A childhood playmate in Hamburg, Gottfried Janish, died while Arthur was living in Le Havre. Though Arthur seemed undemonstrative and said that he never again thought of Gottfried, it is apparent that he never truly forgot his dead playmate, nor the shock of his first acquaintance with mortality, because thirty years later he described a dream in his journal: "I found myself in a country unknown to me, a group of men stood on a field, and among them a slim, tall, adult man who, I do not know how, had been made known to me as Gottfried Janish, and he welcomed me."

Arthur had little difficulty interpreting the dream. At that time he was living in Berlin in the midst of a cholera epidemic. The dream image of a reunion with Gottfried could only mean one thing: a warning of approaching death. Consequently, Arthur decided to escape death by immediately leaving Berlin. He chose to move to Frankfurt, where he was to live the last thirty years of his life, largely because he thought it to be cholera-proof.

11

Philip's First

Meeting

_________________________

The
greatest wisdom is to make

the enjoyment of the present

the supreme object of life

because

that

is

the

only

reality, all else being the

play of thought. But we could

just as well call it our

greatest folly because that

which exists only a moment and

vanishes as a dream can never

be worth a serious effort.

_________________________

Philip arrived fifteen minutes early for his first group therapy meeting wearing the same clothes as in his two previous encounters with Julius: the wrinkled, faded checkered shirt, khaki pants, and corduroy jacket. Marveling at Philip's consistent indifference to clothes, office furnishings, his student audience, or, seemingly, anyone with whom he interacted, Julius once again began to question his decision to invite Philip into the group. Was it sound professional judgment, or was his chutzpah raising its ugly head again?

Chutzpah
: raw nervy brashness.
Chutzpah:
best defined by the renowned story of the boy who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy from the court on the grounds that he was an orphan.
Chutzpah
often entered Julius's mind when he reflected upon his approach to life. Perhaps he had been imbued with chutzpah from the start, but he first consciously embraced it in the autumn of his fifteenth year when his family relocated from the Bronx to Washington, D.C. His father, who had had a financial setback, moved the family into a small row house on Farragut Street in northwest Washington. The nature of his father's financial difficulties was off limits to any inquiry, but Julius was convinced that it had something to do with Aqueduct racetrack and She's All That, a horse he owned with Vic Vicello, one of his poker cronies. Vic was an elusive figure who wore a pink handkerchief in his yellow sports jacket and took care never to enter their home if his mother was present.

His father's new job was managing a liquor store owned by a cousin felled at forty-five by a coronary, that dark enemy which had either maimed or killed a whole generation of fifty-year-old male Ashkenazi Jews raised on sour cream and fat-flaked brisket. His dad hated his new job, but it kept the family solvent; not only did it pay well, but its long hours kept Dad away from Laurel and Pimlico, the local racetracks.

On Julius's first day of school at Roosevelt High in September 1955, he made a momentous decision: he would redo himself. He was unknown in Washington, a free soul unencumbered by the past. His past three years at P.S. 1126, his Bronx junior high school, were nothing to be proud of. Gambling had been so much more interesting than other school activities that he spent every afternoon at the bowling alley lining up challenge games betting on himself or on his partner, Marty Geller--he of the great left-handed hook. He also ran a small bookie operation, where he offered ten-to-one odds to anyone picking any three baseball players to get six hits among them on any given day.

No matter who the pigeons picked--Mantle, Kaline, Aaron, Vernon, or Stan (the Man) Musial--they rarely won, at best once in twenty to thirty bets. Julius ran with like-minded punks, developed the aura of a tough street fighter in order to intimidate would-be welchers, dumbed himself down in class to remain cool, and cut many a school afternoon to watch Mantle patrol the Yankee Stadium center field.

Everything changed the day he and his parents were called into the principal's office and confronted with his bookie ledger-book, for which he had been frantically searching the previous couple of days. Though punishment was meted out--no evenings out for the remaining two months of the school year, no bowling alley, no trips to Yankee Stadium, no after-school sports, no allowance--Julius could see his father's heart wasn't in it: he was entirely intrigued by the details of Julius's three-player, six-hit caper. Still, Julius had admired the principal, and falling from his grace was such a wake-up call that he attempted to reclaim himself. But it was too little, too late; the best he could do was to move his grades up to low Bs. It wasn't possible to form new friendships--he was role-locked, and no one could relate to the new boy Julius had decided to become.

As a consequence of this episode, the latter-day Julius had an exquisite sensitivity to the phenomenon of "role-lock": how often had he seen group therapy patients change dramatically but continue to be perceived as the same person by the other group members. Happens also in families. Many of his improved patients had a hell of a time when visiting their parents: they had to guard against being sucked back into their old family role and had to expend considerable energy persuading parents and siblings that they were indeed changed.

Julius's great experiment with reinvention commenced with his family's move. On that first day of school in Washington, D.C., a balmy Indian summer September day, Julius crunched through the fallen sycamore leaves and strode into the front door of Roosevelt High, searching for a master strategy to make himself over. Noticing the broadsides posted outside the auditorium advertising the candidates for class president, Julius had an inspired thought, and even before he learned the location of the boys' room he had posted his name for the election.