The Schopenhauer Cure(81)
Life, consisting of an inevitable tragic downward slope, is not only brutal but entirely capricious.
We are like lambs playing in the field, while the butcher eyes them and selects first one then another; for in our good days we do not know what calamity fate at this very moment has in store for us, sickness, persecution, impoverishment, mutilation, loss of sight, madness, and death.
Are Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic conclusions about the human condition so unbearable that he was plunged into despair? Or was it the other way around? Was it his unhappiness that caused him to conclude that human life was a sorry affair best not to have arisen in the first place? Aware of this conundrum, Arthur often reminded us (and himself) that emotion has the power to obscure and falsify knowledge: that the whole world assumes a smiling aspect when we have reason to rejoice, and a dark and gloomy one when sorrow weighs upon us.
29
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I have not written for the crowd…. I hand down my work to the thinking individuals who in the course of time will appear as rare exceptions. They will feel as I felt, or as a shipwrecked sailor feels on a desert island for whom the trace of a former fellow sufferer affords more consolation than do all the cockatoos and apes in the trees.
* * *
“I’d like to continue where we left off,” said Julius, opening the next meeting. Speaking stiffly, as though from a prepared text, he rushed on, “Like most therapists I know, I’m pretty open about myself to close friends. It’s not easy for me to come up with a revelation as raw and pristine and right out there on the edge as those some of you have shared recently. But there is an incident I’ve revealed only once in my life—and that was years ago to a very close friend.”
Pam, sitting next to Julius, interrupted. Putting her hand on his arm, she said, “Whoa, whoa, Julius. You don’t need to do this. You’ve been bullied into this by Philip, and now, after Tony exposed his bullshit motives, even Philip has apologized for requesting it. I, for one, don’t want you to put yourself through this.”
Others agreed, pointing out that Julius shared his feelings all the time in the group and that Philip’s I-thou contract was a setup.
Gill added, “Things are getting blurred here. All of us are here for help. My life’s a mess—you saw that last week. But so far as I know, Julius, you’re not having problems with intimacy. So what’s the point?”
“The other week,” Rebecca said, in her clipped precise speech, “you said I revealed myself in order to give Philip a gift. That was partially correct—but not the whole truth: now I realize I also wanted to shield him from Pam’s rage. However, that said, my point is…what is my point? My point is that confessing what I did in Las Vegas was good therapy for me—I’m relieved to have gotten it out. But you’re here to help me, and it’s not going to help me one bit for you to reveal yourself.”
Julius was taken aback—such strong consensus was an oddity in this group. But he thought he knew what was happening. “I sense a lot of concern about my illness—a lot of taking care of me, not wanting to stress me. Right?”
“Maybe,” said Pam, “but for me there’s more—there’s something in me that doesn’t want you to divulge something dark from your past.”
Julius noted others signaling agreement and said, to no one in particular: “What a paradox. Ever since I’ve been in this field I’ve heard an ongoing chorus of complaints from patients that therapists were too distant and shared too little of their personal lives. So here I am, on the brink of doing just that, and I’m greeted by a united front saying, ‘We don’t want to hear. Don’t do this.’ So what’s going on?”
Silence.
“You want to see me as untarnished?” asked Julius.
No one responded. “We seem stuck, so I’ll be ornery today and just continue and we’ll see what happens. My story goes back ten years ago to the time of my wife’s death. I had married Miriam, my high school sweetheart, while I was in medical school, and ten years ago she was killed in a car crash in Mexico. I was devastated. To tell the truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered from the horror of that event. But to my surprise, my grief took a bizarre turn: I experienced a tremendous surge in sexual energy. At that time I didn’t know that heightened sexuality is a common response to confrontation with death. Since then I’ve seen many people in grief become suffused with sexual energy. I’ve spoken with men who’ve had catastrophic coronaries and tell me that they groped female attendants while careening to the ER in an ambulance. In my grief, I grew obsessed by sex, needed it—a lot of it—and when our friends, both married and unmarried women, sought to comfort me, I exploited the situation and took sexual advantage of some of them, including a relative of Miriam’s.”
The group was still. Everyone was uneasy, avoided locking gazes; some listened to the shrill chirping of a finch sitting in the scarlet Japanese maple outside the window. From time to time over many years of leading groups Julius had wished he had a cotherapist. This was one of those times.
Finally, Tony forced some words out: “So, what happened to those friendships?”
“They drifted away, gradually evaporated. I saw some of the women over the years by chance, but none of us ever spoke of it. There was a lot of awkwardness. And a lot of shame.”