The Schopenhauer Cure(5)
“To change ‘it was’ into ‘thus I willed it’—that alone shall I call redemption.”
Julius understood Nietzsche’s words to mean that he had to choose his life—he had to live it rather than be lived by it. In other words he should love his destiny. And above all there was Zarathustra’s oft-repeated question whether we would be willing to repeat the precise life we have lived again and again throughout eternity. A curious thought experiment—yet, the more he thought about it, the more guidance it provided: Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.
He continued flipping the pages and stopped at two passages highlighted heavily in neon pink: “Consummate your life.” “Die at the right time.”
These hit home. Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind. Julius often likened Nietzsche’s words to a Rorschach exam; they offered so many opposing viewpoints that the readers’ state of mind determined what they took from them. Now he read with a vastly different state of mind. The presence of death prompted a different and more enlightened reading: in page after page, he saw evidence of a pantheistic connectedness not previously appreciated. However much Zarathustra extolled, even glorified solitude, however much he required isolation in order to give birth to great thoughts, he was nonetheless committed to loving and lifting others, to helping others perfect and transcend themselves, to sharing his ripeness. Sharing his ripeness—that hit home.
Returning Zarathustra to its resting place, Julius sat in the dark staring at the lights of cars crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and thinking about Nietzsche’s words. After a few minutes Julius “came to”: he knew exactly what to do and how to spend his final year. He would live just the way he had lived the previous year—and the year before that and before that. He loved being a therapist; he loved connecting to others and helping to bring something to life in them. Maybe his work was sublimation for his lost connection to his wife; maybe he needed the applause, the affirmation and gratitude of those he helped. Even so, even if dark motives played their role, he was grateful for his work. God bless it!
Strolling over to his wall of file cabinets, Julius opened a drawer filled with charts and audiotaped sessions of patients seen long ago. He stared at the names—each chart a monument to a poignant human drama that had once played itself out in this very room. As he surfed through the charts, most of the faces immediately sprang to mind. Others had faded, but a few paragraphs of notes evoked their faces, too. A few were the truly forgotten, their faces and stories lost forever.
Like most therapists, Julius found it difficult to seal himself off from the unremitting attacks on the field of therapy. Assault came from many directions: from pharmaceutical companies and managed care, which sponsored superficial research orchestrated to validate the effectiveness of drugs and briefer therapies; from the media, which never tired of ridiculing therapists; from behaviorists; from motivational speakers; from the hordes of new age healers and cults all competing for the hearts and minds of the troubled. And, of course, there were doubts from within: the extraordinary molecular neurobiological discoveries reported with ever-increasing frequency caused even the most experienced therapists to wonder about the relevance of their work.
Julius was not immune to these attacks and often entertained doubts about the effectiveness of his therapy and just as often soothed and reassured himself. Of course he was an effective healer. Of course he offered something valuable to most, perhaps even all, of his patients.
Yet the imp of doubt continued to made its presence known: Were you really, truly, helpful to your patients? Maybe you’ve just learned to pick patients who were going to improve on their own anyway.
No. Wrong! Wasn’t I the one who always took on great challenges?
Huh, you’ve got your limits! When was the last time you really stretched yourself—took a flagrant borderline into therapy? Or a seriously impaired schizophrenic or a bipolar patient?
Continuing to thumb through old charts, Julius was surprised to see how much posttherapy information he had—from occasional follow-up or “tune-up” visits, from chance encounters with the patient, or from messages delivered by new patients they had referred to him. But, still, had he made an enduring difference to them? Maybe his results were evanescent. Maybe many of his successful patients had relapsed and shielded that information from him out of sheer charity.
He noted his failures, too—folks, he had always told himself, who were not ready for his advanced brand of deliverance. Wait, he told himself, give yourself a break, Julius. How do you know they were really failures? permanent failures? You never saw them again. We all know there are plenty of late bloomers out there.
His eye fell upon Philip Slate’s thick chart. You want failure? he said to himself. There was failure. Old-time major-league failure. Philip Slate. More than twenty years had passed, but his image of Philip Slate was crisp. His light brown hair combed straight back, his thin graceful nose, those high cheekbones that suggested nobility, and those crisp green eyes that reminded him of Caribbean waters. He remembered how much he disliked everything about his sessions with Philip. Except for one thing: the pleasure of looking at that face.
Philip Slate was so alienated from himself that he never thought to look within, preferring to skate on the surface of life and devote all his vital energy to fornication. Thanks to his pretty face, he had no end of volunteers. Julius shook his head as he rifled through Philip’s chart—three years of sessions, all that relating and support and caring, all those interpretations without a whisper of progress. Amazing! Perhaps he wasn’t the therapist he thought he was.