The Schopenhauer Cure(10)
Julius nodded.
“I remember being very attached to our therapy. It became another compulsion, but unfortunately it didn’t replace the sexual compulsion but merely coexisted with it. I remember anticipating each hour with eagerness and yet ending with disappointment. It’s difficult to remember much of what we did—I think we strove to understand my compulsion from the standpoint of my life history. Figuring it out—we always tried to figure it out. Yet every solution seemed suspect to me. No hypothesis was well-argued or well-grounded, and, worse, not one had the slightest impact on my compulsion.
“And it was a compulsion. I knew that. And I knew that I had to stop cold turkey. It took me a long time, but eventually I realized you didn’t know how to help me and I lost faith in our work together. I recall that you spent inordinate amounts of time exploring my relationships—with others and especially with you. That never made sense to me. It didn’t then. It still doesn’t. As time went by, it became painful to meet with you, painful to keep on exploring our relationship as though it were real or enduring or anything other than what it truly was: a purchase of service.” Philip stopped and looked at Julius with his palms up as though to say, “You wanted it straight—there it is.”
Julius was stunned. Someone else’s voice answered for him: “That’s straight, all right. Thanks, Philip. Now, the rest of your story. What’s happened to you since?”
Philip placed his palms together, rested his chin on his fingertips, stared up at the ceiling to collect his thoughts, and continued. “Well, let’s see. I’ll start with work. My expertise in developing hormonal agents to block insect reproduction had important implications for the company, and my salary escalated. But I grew profoundly bored with chemistry. Then, at age thirty, one of my father’s trust funds matured and was turned over to me. It was a gift of freedom. I had enough to live on for several years, and I canceled my subscriptions to the chemistry journals, dropped out of the work force, and turned my attention to what I really wanted in life—the pursuit of wisdom.
“I was still miserable, still anxious, still sexually driven. I tried other therapists, but none helped me any more than you had. One therapist, who had studied with Jung, suggested I needed more than psychological therapy. He said that for an addict like me the best hope for release was a spiritual conversion. His suggestion led me to religious philosophy—especially the ideas and practices of the Far East—they were the only ones that made any sense. All other religious systems failed to explore the fundamental philosophical questions but instead used God as a method of avoiding true philosophical analysis. I even put in a few weeks at meditation retreats. That was not without interest. It didn’t halt the obsession, but nonetheless I had a feeling that there was something important there. I just wasn’t yet ready for it.
“Meanwhile, except for the interlude of forced chastity in the ashram, and even there I managed to find a few sliding doors, I continued the sexual hunt. As before, I had sex with a lot of women, by the dozens, by the hundreds. Sometimes two a day, anywhere, anytime I could find them—the same as when I was seeing you. Sex once, occasionally twice, with a woman and then moving on. Never exciting after that; you know the old saying: ‘You can only have sex for the first time with the same girl once.’” Philip lifted his chin from his fingertips and turned to Julius.
“That last comment was meant to be humor, Dr. Hertzfeld. I remember you once said it was remarkable that, in all our hours together, I never once told you a joke.”
Julius, now in no mood for levity, forced his lips into a grin even though he recognized Philip’s little bon mot as something he himself had once said to Philip. Julius imagined Philip as a mechanical doll with a large key jutting from the top of his head. Time to wind him up again. “And then what happened?”
Gazing at the ceiling, Philip continued. “Then one day I reached a momentous decision. Since no therapist had helped in any way—and, sorry to say, Dr. Hertzfeld, that included you—”
“I’m beginning to get that particular point,” Julius interjected, then quickly added, “No apologies needed. You’re simply answering my questions honestly.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to dwell on that. To continue, since therapy had not been the answer, I decided to heal myself—a course of bibliotherapy, assimilating the relevant thoughts of the wisest men whoever lived. So I began systematically reading the entire corpus of philosophy starting with the Greek pre-Socratics and working my way up to Popper, Rawls, and Quine. After a year of study my compulsion was no better, but I arrived at some important decisions: namely, that I was on the right track and that philosophy was my home. This was a major step—I remember how much you and I had talked about my never being at home anywhere in the world.”
Julius nodded. “Yes, I remember that, too.”
“I decided that, as long as I was going to spend years reading philosophy, I might as well make a profession of it. My money wouldn’t last forever. So I entered the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Columbia. I did well, wrote a competent dissertation, and five years later had a doctorate in philosophy. I embarked on a teaching career and then, just a couple of years ago, became interested in applied or, as I prefer to think of it, ‘clinical philosophy.’ And that brings me up to today.”
“You haven’t finished telling me about being healed.”