When Nietzsche Wept - by Irvin Yalom - Book Review

To recommend a book with a heavy sounding title like 'When Nietzsche Wept', is a difficult task. I am sure most of my Indian friends would neither find the title appealing nor relate to it. A more intriguing title would have been : 'Whisky Sour of the Mind'. I'll explain why later in this piece, but for the moment, let’s stick with the original.

Most Indians don't relate to Nietzsche for several reasons, commencing with them having to check the spelling and also the pronunciation of his name (knee-च).  

His anti-religionist, sceptic stance ("God is Dead"),  directed against the Christian concepts of Good and Evil, does not resonate with the Indian psyche brought up on Hindu ambivalence of Dharma. His thoughts like 'Eternal Recurrence' (there is only one life which just goes on recurring ad-infinitum) are antithetical to Hindu belief of many lives which can change as per your karma. 

The shameless misappropriation and deliberate misinterpretation of his thoughts by the Nazis to justify their ideology, is off-putting. This also discouraged the British from planting his seeds in the minds of the English speaking intelligentsia during the Raj. Post independence the liberal intellectuals who drove the awareness of western philosophy in Indian Universities were more comfortable with Marx, Kant and Bentham. So Nietzsche in India, was left to be discovered  only by a few bibliophiles, most of who started and stopped their excursion with "Thus Spake Zarathustra". 

This preamble, in this review was necessary to bring out why I too, like most Indians, know very little of Nietzschean philosophy and yet after reading just this one book can sound intelligent about it. Now onto the book itself.

Irvin Yalom, the author, is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and has written several fiction and non-fiction books. Given his academic background he calls this book a 'teaching novel'.  It's a historical fiction novel - a story of historical characters that could very well have happened but didn't.  The bulk of the novel consists of dramatised conversations between Nietzsche with Josef Breuer, another great mind in nineteenth century Europe and a distinguished physician of Vienna, who laid the foundation of psychotherapy ('talking cure'), which was later developed by his protégé Sigmund Freud. 

In the story, Breuer meets an estranged close young friend of Nietzsche, Lou Salome who says that Nietzsche is in mental despair because of his chronic migraine and is contemplating suicide. She wants Breuer to treat his mental condition using the 'talking cure' method that he used recently on another patient called 'Anna O'. She makes a further stipulation that, since Nietzsche will never knowingly accept it, Breuer must treat him without letting on that he is doing so. Persuaded more by the feminine charms of Lou Salome, rather than any conviction in his ability to help Nietzsche, Breur accepts the challenge. Lou then almost entirely retreats from the story. 

What follows is interesting intellectual sparring between Nietzsche and Breuer before they arrive at an understanding. This is where the book really warms up. Saying more would be a spoiler.

The intense conversations between the two protagonists (Nietzsche and Breuer), centre around the human mind - the cusp where philosophy meets psychotherapy. The story provides the stage to explore whether individual psychotherapy can be generalised into a medical science, and can philosophy be turned into an applied discipline, as a cure for mental distress in a given individual case. Despair, loneliness, obsession, death, betrayal, dreams, which lie at the fringes of existential spectrum, are recurrent themes in the book, as are more mundane matters like lust, duplicity and marriage.  

As they get more personal and come on first name terms the doctor-patient relationship between Friedrich and Josef blurs. Who is treating who? The treatment becomes simultaneously a contest and a collaboration. Will they meet their objectives? Can they meet their objectives?  

As a reviewer, my task is to give you an honest and good enough picture of the book so that you are either intrigued enough to read it or decide that it's not for you. Towards this end, I could have echoed the pithy descriptor - 'teaching novel' - as the author himself called it.

But as a novel, I can find several faults with it. Other than the two protagonists no other character is sufficiently developed. The female characters seem very one dimensional. The denouement seemed a bit unrealistic. 

As a teaching aid too it offers only a small window in Nietzschean thought and can't even be called a primer. Psychoanalysis was just getting seeded at that time, and  beyond a point, there isn't scope to logically expound on it. 

But yet I highly recommend it. 

In a Whiskey Sour (a cocktail with Bourbon whiskey, lime, syrup, egg white, and bitters), each ingredient individually isn't appealing when described in the recipe, but when blended in the right proportions by a good bartender it can be delightful. But even for cocktail lovers it is an acquired taste. 

Think of this book as the Whiskey Sour of the Mind. 

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My rating:  4 stars