When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession

The novel imagines the lives of historical figures. Dr. Josef Breuer was a pioneering neurologist and one of the founders of modern psychology. His discovery of the role of the inner ear in regulating balance is referenced in the novel. Breuer is best known today for his treatment, together with his younger protégé Sigmund Freud, of Bertha Pappenheim, referred to pseudonymously in both men’s writings as Anna O. She exhibited a range of physical symptoms, including paralysis and loss of vision, and Breuer noticed that those symptoms seemed to lessen as she talked about them. Bertha’s conversations with Breuer and Freud later formed the basis for Freud’s early theories of psychoanalysis. Importantly, it was Bertha herself who coined the phrase “talking cure” to describe her treatment, and she also originated the term “chimney sweeping,” which both Breuer and Nietzsche use throughout the novel. A key contention of the book is that psychotherapy is always a collaboration between therapist and patient, and insufficient attention has been paid to Bertha’s own active role in the development of talk therapy.

Josef Breuer is 40 years old at the time of the novel. He has made two important scientific discoveries. Breuer’s background as a physician brings him into frequent contact with patients who exhibit symptoms of mental health challenges. Breuer ultimately came to believe that mental illness arose from past traumas that had not been sufficiently processed (Sandhu, Pavi. “Step Aside Freud: Josef Breuer is the True Father of Modern Psychotherapy.” The Scientific American, 30 June 2015). In Studies in Hysteria (1895), Breuer and Freud maintain that “[i]f the individual is unable to feel and express the emotions related to the traumatic experience, they are dissociated, that is, isolated in a separate state of consciousness that is inaccessible to ordinary awareness” (Sandhu). As Breuer developed his understanding of how trauma can cause mental illness, he likewise developed treatment approaches that involved accessing the original trauma by using talk therapy and hypnosis.

Freud is perhaps more universally known in the 21st century than his mentor. Many people will recognize his ideas of the subconscious within the novel. When the novel takes place, Freud is 29. He and Breuer discuss principles of psychoanalysis and talk therapy, and Freud’s claims to Breuer are more assertive and advanced. In the novel, Breuer remains somewhat skeptical of Freud’s insistence that there is a segment of the mind that is inaccessible to conscious thought and that imposes itself on an individual’s behavior without their awareness. As a young physician in the novel, Freud has not yet brought these ideas to the general public. However, when he did, his theories changed the nature of psychology. Breuer and Freud eventually became distanced from each other, and their collaboration ended because “Freud increasingly grew to believe that conflicts related to sexuality played an essential role in all cases of hysteria,” while Breuer maintained that “the phenomenon of dissociation due to trauma, which was implicit in his theory of hypnoid states, was more fundamental” (Sandhu). In the decades since, developments in psychology have largely borne out Breuer’s side of this debate, yet Freud’s theories—even the ones that have been roundly debunked from a scientific perspective—remain foundational to modern culture.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher and writer. Many of his sayings and aphorisms, such as “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” have become part of the modern lexicon. He also is famous for his somewhat misunderstood assertion, in The Gay Science, that “God is dead.” Read in context, the statement means that, since the rise of scientific rationalism in the Age of Enlightenment, collective religious faith is no longer the world’s primary source of meaning. Prophetic and aphoristic as always, Nietzsche pronounces these words as both lament and celebration: The world has lost the stories and myths that gave it meaning for thousands of years. In the absence of those myths—the absence of God—human beings will now have to invent new rituals and new myths in order to imbue the world with meaning for a new age. This is the surprisingly hopeful conclusion of Nietzsche’s famous nihilism—if the world has no inherent meaning, then it is up to us to give it meaning, and thus the possibilities are limitless. Nietzsche was a close study of human psychology, and “[m]any of [his] criticisms [of traditional European moral commitments] rely on psychological diagnoses that expose false consciousness infecting people’s received idea” (“Friedrich Nietzsche.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 19 May 2022). At the time of the novel’s present, Nietzsche is 38 years old and in failing health. He lived another 18 years and died in 1900.