The Schopenhauer Cure(92)
“Many I knew I had helped but had I had an enduring impact on their lives? That was the question that plagued me. I think I told the rest of group before Pam returned that I had to know the answer to this question so badly I decided to contact some of my old patients to find out whether I had truly made a difference. Seems crazy, I know.
“Then, while browsing through the charts of my long-ago patients, I also began thinking of those I had failed to help. What had happened to them? I wondered. Could I have done more? And then the thought, the wishful thought, arose that maybe some of my failures were late bloomers, maybe they had gotten some delayed benefit from our work together. Then my eye fell upon Philip’s chart, and I remember saying to myself, ‘If you want failure, there is failure—there is someone you really didn’t help—you couldn’t make even a dent in his problems.’ From that moment on, I had an irresistible impulse to contact Philip and find out what happened to him, to see if, in some way, I had been useful to him after all.”
“So that’s how it came about that you called him,” said Pam. “But how did it come about that he entered the group?”
“You want to pick it up from here, Philip?” said Julius.
“I believe it would be a richer exercise if you continued,” said Philip with the slightest trace of a smile on his lips.
Julius quickly filled the group in on the subsequent events: Philip’s appraisal that his therapy had been without value and that Schopenhauer had been his real therapist, the e-mail invitation to the lecture, Philip’s request for supervision…
“I don’t get it, Philip,” interrupted Tony. “If you didn’t get anything from Julius in therapy, then why in hell would you want his supervision?”
“Julius posed that exact question, several times,” said Philip. “My answer is that even though he didn’t help me, I could still appreciate his superior skills. Perhaps I was a recalcitrant, resistive patient, or perhaps my particular type of problem would not yield to his particular approach.”
“Okay, got it,” said Tony. “I interrupted you, Julius.”
“I’m about finished. I agreed to become his supervisor with one condition: that he first spend six months in my therapy group.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever explained why you made that condition,” said Rebecca.
“I observed the way he related to me and to his students and told him that his impersonal and uncaring manner would interfere with his becoming a good therapist. Is that your view of it, Philip?”
“Your precise words to me were: ‘How can you be a therapist when you don’t know what the fuck is going on between you and other people?’”
“Bingo,” said Pam.
“Sounds like Julius, all right,” said Bonnie.
“Sounds like Julius when his buttons are being pushed,” said Stuart. “Were you pushing his buttons?”
“Not intentionally,” replied Philip.
“I’m still not clear, Julius,” said Rebecca. “I understand why you called Philip, and why you advised him to get group therapy. But why did you put him in your group or agree to supervise him? You have plenty on your plate now. Why take on this additional task?”
“You guys are tough today. That’s the big question and I’m not sure I can answer it, but it’s got something to do with redemption and setting things right.”
“I know a lot of this discussion was to fill me in and I appreciate that, “said Pam. “I have just one more query. You said Philip twice offered you comfort—or tried to. I still haven’t heard about the first time.”
“Right, we started toward there but never got to it,” Julius responded. “I attended one of Philip’s lectures and gradually understood that he had constructed it specifically to offer me some help. He discussed at length a passage from a novel in which a dying man obtained much consolation from reading a passage by Schopenhauer.”
“Which novel?” asked Pam.
“Buddenbrooks,” replied Julius.
“And it wasn’t helpful? Why not?” asked Bonnie.
“For several reasons. First Philip’s mode of giving me comfort was very indirect—much like the way he just presented the passage by Epictetus…”
“Julius,” said Tony, “I’m not being a smart ass, but wouldn’t it be better to speak directly to Philip—and guess who I learned this from?”
“Thanks, Tony—you are one hundred percent right.” Julius turned to face Philip. “Your mode of offering me counsel in the course of a lecture was off-putting—so indirect and so public. And so unexpected because we had just spent an hour in private face-to-face talk in which you seemed utterly indifferent to my condition. That was one thing. And the other was the actual content. I can’t repeat the passage here—I don’t have your photographic memory—but essentially it described a dying patriarch having an epiphany in which the boundaries dissolved between himself and others. As a result he was comforted by the unity of all life and the idea that after death he would return to the life force whence he came and hence retain his connectedness with all living things. That about right?” Julius looked at Philip, who nodded.
“Well, as I tried to tell you before, Philip, that idea offers me no comfort—zero. If my own consciousness is extinguished, then it matters little to me that my life energy or my bodily molecules or my DNA persists in deep space. And if connectivity is the quest, then I’d rather do it in person, in the flesh. So”—he turned and scanned the group and then faced Pam—“that was the first consolation Philip offered, and the parable in your hands is the second.”