The Schopenhauer Cure (41 page)

Stuart described growing up in poverty; his father had died

when he was eight, and his mother, who worked two jobs, was

never home when he returned from school. Hence, he had been a

latch-key child, preparing his own dinner, wearing the same soiled clothes to school day after day. For the most part, he had

succeeded in suppressing the memory of his childhood, but his

son's presence propelled him back to horrors long forgotten.

"Blaming my son is crazy," he said, "but I just keep feeling

envy and resentment when I see his privileged life." It was Tony who helped crack Stuart's anger with an effective reframing

intervention: "What about spending some time feeling proud at

providing that better life for your son?"

Almost everyone made progress. Julius had seen this before;

when groups reach a state of ripeness, all the members seem to get better at once. Bonnie struggled to come to terms with a central paradox: her rage toward her ex-husband for having left her and her relief that she was out of a relationship with a man she so thoroughly disliked.

Gill attended daily AA meetings--seventy meetings in

seventy days--but his marital difficulties increased, rather than decreased, with his sobriety. That, of course, was no mystery to Julius: whenever one spouse improves in therapy, the homeostasis of the marital relationship is upset and, if the marriage is to stay solvent, the other spouse must change as well. Gill and Rose had begun couples' therapy, but Gill wasn't convinced that Rose could change. However, he was no longer terrified at the thought of

ending the marriage; for the first time he truly understood one of Julius's favorite
bon mots: "The only way you can save your marriage is to be willing (and able) to leave it."

Tony worked at an astonishing pace--as though Julius's

depleting strength were seeping directly into him. With Pam's

encouragement, strongly reinforced by everyone else in the group, he decided to stop complaining of being ignorant and, instead, do something about it--get an education--and enrolled in three night courses at the local community college.

However thrilling and gratifying these widespread changes,

Julius's central attention remained riveted on Philip and Pam. Why their relationship had taken on such importance for him was

unclear, though Julius was convinced the reasons transcended the particular. Sometimes when thinking about Pam and Philip, he was visited by the Talmudic phrase "to redeem one person is to save the whole world." The importance of redeeming their relationship soon loomed large. Indeed it became his raison d'etre: it was as though he could save his own life by salvaging something human from the wreckage of that horrific encounter years before. As he mused about the meaning of the Talmudic phrase, Carlos entered his mind. He had worked with Carlos, a young man, a few years

ago. No, it must have been longer, at least ten years, since he remembered talking to Miriam about Carlos. Carlos was a

particularly unlikable man, crass, self-centered, shallow, sexually driven, who sought his help when he was diagnosed with a fatal lymphoma. Julius helped Carlos make some remarkable changes,

especially in the realm of connectivity, and those changes allowed him to flood his entire life retrospectively with meaning. Hours before he died he told Julius, "Thank you for saving my life."

Julius had thought about Carlos many times, but now at this

moment his story assumed a new and momentous meaning--not

only for Philip and Pam, but for saving his own life, as well.

In most ways Philip appeared less pompous and more

approachable in the group, even making occasional eye contact

with most members, save Pam. The six-month mark came and

went without Philip raising the subject of dropping because he had fulfilled his six-month contract. When Julius raised the issue, Philip responded, "To my surprise group therapy is a far more

complex phenomenon than I had originally thought. I'd prefer you supervise my work with clients while I was also attending the

group, but you've rejected that idea because of the problems of 'dual relationships.' My choice is to remain in the group for the entire year and to request supervision after that."

"I'm fine with that plan," Julius agreed, "but it depends, of

course, on the state of my health. The group has four more months before we end, and after that we'll have to see. My health

guarantee was only for one year."

Philip's change of mind about group participation was not

uncommon. Members often enter a group with one circumscribed

goal in mind, for example, to sleep better, to stop having

nightmares, to overcome a phobia. Then, in a few months, they

often formulate different, more far-reaching goals, for example, to learn how to love, to recapture zest for life, to overcome loneliness, to develop self-worth.

From time to time the group pressed Philip to describe more

precisely how Schopenhauer had helped so much when Julius's

psychotherapy had so utterly failed. Because he had difficulty answering questions about Schopenhauer without providing the

necessary philosophical background, he requested the group's

permission to give a thirty-minute lecture on the topic. The group groaned, and Julius urged him to present the relevant material more succinctly and conversationally.

The following session Philip embarked upon a brief

lecturette which, he promised, would succinctly answer the

question of how Schopenhauer had helped him.

Though he had notes in his hand, he spoke without referring

to them. Staring at the ceiling, he began, "It's not possible to discuss Schopenhauer without starting with Kant, the philosopher whom, along with Plato, he respected above all others. Kant, who died in 1804 when Schopenhauer was sixteen, revolutionized

philosophy with his insight that it is impossible for us to

experience reality in any veritable sense because all of our

perceptions, our sense data, are filtered and processed through our inbuilt neuroanatomical apparatus. All data are conceptualized through such arbitrary constructs as space and time and--"

"Come on, Philip, get to the point," interrupted Tony. "How

did this dude help you?"

"Wait, I'm getting there. I've spoken for all of three

minutes. This is not the TV news; I can't explain the conclusions of one of the world's greatest thinkers in a sound bite."

"Hey, hey, right on, Philip. I like that answer," said Rebecca.

Tony smiled and backed off.

"So Kant's discovery was that, rather than experience the

world as it's really out there, we experience our own personalized processed version of what's out there. Such properties as space, time, quantity, causality are
in us,
not out there--we impose them on reality. But, then, what
is
pure, unprocessed reality? What's really out there, that raw entity before we process it?
That
will always remain unknowable to us, said Kant."

"Schopenhauer--how he helped you! Remember? Are we

getting warm?" asked Tony.

"Coming up in ninety seconds. In his future work Kant and

others turned their entire attention to the ways in which we process primal reality.

"But Schopenhauer--and see, here we are already!--took a

different route. He reasoned that Kant had overlooked a

fundamental and immediate type of data about ourselves: our own bodies and our own feelings. We can know ourselves from

the
inside,
he insisted. We have direct, immediate knowledge, not dependent on our perceptions. Hence, he was the first philosopher to look at impulses and feelings from the
inside,
and for the rest of his career he wrote extensively about interior human concerns: sex, love, death, dreams, suffering, religion, suicide, relations with others, vanity, self-esteem. More than any other philosopher, he addressed those dark impulses deep within that we cannot bear to know and, hence, must repress."

"Sounds a little Freudian," said Bonnie.

"The other way around. Better to say that Freud is

Schopenhauerian. So much of Freudian psychology is to be found in Schopenhauer. Though Freud rarely acknowledged this

influence, there is no doubt he was quite familiar with

Schopenhauer's writings: in Vienna during the time Freud was in school, the 1860s and '70s, Schopenhauer's name was on

everyone's lips. I believe that without Schopenhauer there could have been no Freud--and, for that matter, no Nietzsche as we

know him. In fact Schopenhauer's influence on Freud--

particularly dream theory, the unconscious, and the mechanism of repression--was the topic of my doctoral dissertation.

"Schopenhauer," Philip continued, glancing at Tony and

hurrying to avoid being interrupted, "normalized my sexuality. He made me see how ubiquitous sex was, how, at the deepest levels, it was the central point of all action, seeping into all human

transactions, influencing even all matters of state. I believe I recited some of his words about this some months ago."

"Just to support your point," Tony said, "I read in the

newspaper the other day that pornography takes in more money

than the music and the film industry combined. That's huge."

"Philip," said Rebecca, "I can guess at it, but I still haven't heard you say exactly how Schopenhauer helped you recover from your sexual compulsion or...uh...
addiction.
Okay if I use that term?"

"I need to think about that. I'm not persuaded it's entirely

accurate," said Philip.

"Why?" asked Rebecca. "What you described sounds like an

addiction to me."

"Well, to follow up on what Tony said, have you seen the

figures for males watching pornography on the Internet?"

"Are you into Internet porno?" asked Rebecca.

"I'm not, but I could have taken that route in the past--along with the majority of men."

"Right about that," said Tony. "I admit it, I watch it two or

three times a week. Tell you the truth, I don't know anyone who doesn't."

"Me, too," said Gill. "Another of Rose's pet peeves."

Heads turned toward Stuart. "Yes, yes, mea culpa--I've

been known to indulge a bit."

"This is what I mean," said Philip. "So is everyone an

addict?"

"Well," said Rebecca, "I can see your point. There's not just

the porn, but there's also the epidemic of harassment suits. I've defended quite a few in my practice. I saw an article the other day about a dean of a major law school resigning because of a sex

harassment charge. And, of course, the Clinton case and the way his potentially great voice has been stilled. And then look at how many of Clinton's prosecutors were behaving similarly."

"Everybody's got a dark sex life," said Tony. "Some of it's

like--who's unlucky? Maybe males are just being males. Look at me, look at my jail time in being too pushy in my demands for a blow job from Lizzie. I know a hundred guys who did worse--and no consequences--look at Schwarzenegger."

"Tony, you're not endearing yourself to the females here. 0r

at least to this female," said Rebecca. "But I don't want to lose focus. Philip, go on, you're still not making your point."

"First of all," Philip continued without a hitch, "rather than tsk-tsking about all this awful depraved male behavior,

Schopenhauer two centuries ago understood the underlying reality: the sheer awesome power of the sex drive. It's the most

fundamental force within us--the will to live, to reproduce--and it can't be stilled. It can't be reasoned away. I've already spoken of how he describes sex seeping into everything. Look at the Catholic priest scandal, look at every station of human endeavor, every profession, every culture, every age bracket. This point of view was exquisitely important to me when I first encountered

Schopenhauer's work: here was one of the greatest minds of

history, and, for the first time in my life, I felt completely understood."

"And?" asked Pam, who had been silent throughout this

discussion.

"And what?" said Philip, visibly nervous as always when

addressed by Pam.

"And what else? That was it? That did it? You got better

because Schopenhauer made you feel understood?"

Philip seemed to take no note of Pam's irony and responded

in an even tone with a sincere manner. "There was a great deal more. Schopenhauer made me aware that we are doomed to turn

endlessly on the wheel of will: we desire something, we acquire it, we enjoy a brief moment of satiation, which rapidly fades into boredom, which then, without fail, is followed by the next 'I want.'

There is no exit by way of appeasing desire--one has to leap off the wheel completely. That's what Schopenhauer did, and that's what I've done."

"Leaping off the wheel? And what does that mean?" Pam

asked.

"It means to escape from willing entirely. It means to fully

accept that our innermost nature is an unappeasable striving, that this suffering is programmed into us from the beginning, and that we are doomed by our very nature. It means that we must first

comprehend the essential nothingness of this world of illusion and then set about finding a way to deny the will. We have to aim, as all the great artists have, at dwelling in the pure world of platonic ideas. Some do this through art, some through religious asceticism.

Schopenhauer did it by avoiding the world of desire, by

communion with the great minds of history, and by aesthetic

contemplation--he played the flute an hour or two every day. It means that one must become observer as well as actor. One must recognize the life force that exists in all of nature, that manifest itself through each person's individual existence, and that will ultimately reclaim that force when the individual no longer exists as a physical entity.