Analysis Of An Ubermensch

Kevin Vail

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Analysis of an Ubermensch

Student Name: Name of your College or University: Name of the course: Date:

Kevin Vail Christian Theological Seminary P 761 / 762 Roots of Self in the Family / Contemporary Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Fall Term, 2008

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CONTENTS

I

I NTRODUCTION ................................................. ........................ 3

II

T HE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE ............................................... ............ 5

III

I NTRODUCTION TO WHEN NIETZSCHE WEPT ..................... 12

IV

T HEORETICAL DISCUSSION OF THE PATIENT ...................... 15 I. THE PATIENT’S DIFFICULTY IN RELATING TO OTHERS II. SOMATIZATION OF THE PATIENT’S PSYCHOPATHOLOGY III. DISASSOCIATION

V

T HEORETICAL DISCUSSION OF THE TREATMENT ............... 26

VI

T HEOLOGICAL DISCUSSION ........................................ ........... 32 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................ ................... 0

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INTRODUCTION Friedrich Nietzsche is an enigma of modern philosophy. His work has been used to justify and support everything from the eugenic racism of the German NAZI party to the beliefs of radical anarchists. His soaring, poetic, German prose has equally inspired, challenged and offended his readers for over 100 years. He said of himself, in one of his last works, “I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite” (1967). Nietzsche’s work was not popular in his own time. His first works sold only a few dozen copies and his later works were published out of his own pocket. It would be for later generations to discover him. In his work The Gay Science, when the prophetic utterances of the death of God are rejected by his audience, his “madman” laments, “I come too early…. My time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering – it has not yet reached the ears of man” (Kaufmann, 1982, 96). Nietzsche has “reached the ears” modern man, in politics, ethics, metaphysics and linguistics to name just a few areas. Existentialists adopted him as a precursor to their philosophy and now the post-modern deconstructionists do the same. C.G. Jung and the existential psychology movement, among others, have plumbed him for psychological insights. A quote widely attributed to Sigmund Freud asserts that the father of psychoanalysis said of Nietzsche, “[he] had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live” (source unknown). However more contemporary psychoanalysts who have studied Nietzsche’s life and work have concluded he suffered from a variety of psychopathologies. In his work of psychological fiction, When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom remarks of Nietzsche that he is “a curious mixture… of massive

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blind spots and lightning originality”(1992, 164). I think we will see that despite his towering intellect and unquestionable genius, he was “human, all too human”. A number of psychological analyses of the man have been published in the century since his collapse into insanity and subsequent death 10 years later. This paper will examine one such analysis. Irvin Yalom’s psychological novel is, to my knowledge, unique in the genera of Nietzsche literature. He blends events from the life of the real Nietzsche with a “what if” scenario built from his understanding of Nietzsche’s life and philosophy as well as his own considerable clinical experience and expertise. Additionally, his talents as a writer make for an intriguing and gripping read. The events of the novel never happened but Yalom argues they could have. I will begin my endeavor with a discussion of the life of the real Friedrich Nietzsche, based on the authoritative literature. I will primarily rely on the scholarship of Walter Kaufmann whose work is primarily responsible for the wider appreciation and acceptance of Nietzsche’s philosophy in the United States during the post-war period. The primary purpose of this biographical sketch will be to outline the significant events and relationships of Nietzsche’s life that precede the events of Yalom’s novel and form the background, which I will utilize in theorizing about his psychopathologies. I will then proceed to outline the fictional events of the novel and identify a number of psychopathologies gleaned from the text of the novel and possible treatment interventions. Finally, I will examine the psychological and theological implications of Nietzsche’s strident atheism.

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THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE Friedrich Nietzsche was born in the small German village of Röcken bei Lützen, located in a rural farmland area southwest of Leipzig on October 15, 1844. He was the first-born son of a German Lutheran pastor, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813-1849) and his wife Franziska. As was common in Victorian Europe, his father was considerably older than his mother, he being thirtyone and she only being eighteen at the time of his birth. Madness comes early in the story of Nietzsche’s life. The King of Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, for whom he was named, and his father both suffered debilitating mental illnesses only a few years after his birth (Kaufmann, 1974). Friedrich’s father died from “softening of the brain” when he was only four years old. His younger brother, Joseph would also die at the age of 2 in 1850. Walther reports that Nietzsche did not learn to speak until the age of 2 ½ but after that picked up reading and writing very quickly, mastering both by the age of 4 (2002). After the deaths of Karl Ludwig and Joseph, Nietzsche’s family moved to Naumburg an der Saale where he lived as the only male in a household of women, consisting of his mother, his father's mother, Erdmuthe (d. 1856), his father's two sisters, Auguste (d. 1855) and Rosalie (d. 1867), and his younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (1846-1935) until 1858 when he entered the prestigious boarding school at Schulpforta (Wicks, 2008). He performed well academically at Schulpforta, particularly in religion, German literature and classics. His medical records from that time note that he was “shortsighted and often plagued by migraine headaches. His father died early of softening of the brain and was begotten in old age; the son at a time when the father was already sick. As yet no grave signs are visible but the antecedents require consideration” (quoted in Kaufmann, 1974, 23). Nietzsche graduated from Schulpforta after completing a thesis on Theognis and enrolled in the University of Bonn. At Bonn he briefly joined a fraternity but resigned in short order due

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to his disdain for his brothers’ “ lack of sophistication and [their] very unclassical, beer-drinking patriotism” (Kaufmann, 1974, 23). Nietzsche initially studied theology and philology but gave up his studies of theology and left Bonn in 1865, following his instructor Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig (Kaufmann, 1974). Nietzsche’s early friendships included Paul Deussen (1845 - 1919) and Erwin Rohde (1845 – 1898). It is via Deussen’s 1901 publication of Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche that we learn that the young Nietzsche, while in Cologne, was mistakenly taken to a brothel. In the story as reported by Deussen, Nietzsche was “[h]orrified at the sight of the flimsily clad women, [he] first froze, then walked over to a piano, which seemed to him the only live thing in the room, struck a chord, found the spell broken and hastened out” (Brann, 1931, quoted in Kaufmann, 1974, 24). A later student of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, speculated in his Neue Studien, published in 1948, that Nietzsche was unable to resist the temptation to visit a brothel again a year later and may have, at that time, infected himself with the syphilis that would be the cause of his collapse 24 years later (Kaufmann, 1974). Deussen was one of the few individual who would remain close to Nietzsche for his entire life. His relationship with Rhode began at Leipzig. According to Kaufmann they were so close they earned the nickname “the Dioscuri”. However, their relationship fell apart after Nietzsche’s break with and repudiation of Richard Wagner (1974). Nietzsche was appointed professor of Philology at Basel, on the recommendation of Ritschl, at the unprecedented age of 24, prior to even completing his doctorate at Leipzig. Ritschl, in his letter of recommendation wrote of Nietzsche: “However many young talents I have seen develop under my eyes for thirty-nine years now, never yet have I known a young man, or tried to help one along in my field as best I could, who was so mature as early and as young as this Nietzsche. His Museum articles

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he wrote in the second and third year of his triennium. He is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all while he was still a student. If – God grant – he lives long enough, I prophesy that he will one day stand in the front rank of German philology. He is now twenty-four years old: strong, vigorous, healthy, courageous physically and morally, so constituted to impress those of a similar nature. On top of that, he possess the enviable gift of presenting ideas, talking freely, as calmly as he speaks skillfully and clearly. He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig who – and they are rather numerous – cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is – and at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant here” (quoted in Kaufmann, 1982, 7-8). His tenure at Basel lasted only 10 years and in 1879, at the age of 34, he retired due to ill health. His health problems, Kaufmann speculates, may have been related to his brief military service as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. Kaufmann relates that during Nietzsche’s service he once found himself unrelieved and responsible for the care of 6 badly injured soldiers for a period of 3 days and nights. All the men, in addition to their wounds, were suffering from dysentery and diphtheria. Nietzsche became ill with both and required medical attention. He would later write to his friend Gersdorff – “the atmosphere of my experiences had spread around me like a gloomy fog: for a time I heard a sound of wailing which seemed as if it would never end” (quoted in Kaufmann, 1974, 26). Kaufmann notes that upon his return to Basel he appears “quite eager to drown in a double load of work” and concludes that Nietzsche may have had a “physical and nervous breakdown” from which he never completely recovered (1974). Another significant personae in Nietzsche’s early life was the well-known historian Jacob Burckhardt, whom Nietzsche befriended after publishing his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872. In temperament, Kaufmann compares Burckhardt to Goethe. Nietzsche retained his great respect for the much older Burckhardt until the end of his life. Also during his time at Basel, Nietzsche met Franz Overbeck, who was seven years his senior (Kaufmann, 1974). They would

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remain close friends for the duration of Nietzsche’s life and we have many of the letters they exchanged over the years. The most famous relationship Nietzsche had was with the German composer Richard Wagner, who he called “the greatest benefactor of my life” [Ecce Homo, II 6] (quoted in Kaufmann, 1974, 32). Nietzsche would devote two entire books to Wagner (The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner). Wagner initially enchanted Nietzsche with his opera Tristan which premiered in Munich in 1865 and he became acquainted with him personally in November of 1868, at the home of Hermann Brockhaus (Wicks, 2008). Like Burckhardt and Ritschl, Nietzsche found in Wagner a father figure. In Wagner’s wife, Nietzsche found an Oedipal mother figure. She became his great, impossible love. In his later poetry, Kaufmann explains, Nietzsche cast Cosima in the role of Ariadne to his Dionysus. His love for her was not revealed to her, however, until he wrote to her from his bed at the asylum in Jena in 1889. Kaufmann notes, “his days in the Wagner’s house in Tribschen were as close as he ever came to having a home in which he belonged and of which he could feel proud” (1974, 34). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche himself writes “I’d let go cheap the whole rest of my human relationships; I should not want to give away out of my life at any price the days of Tribschen” [II 5] (quoted in Kaufmann, 1974, 34). The issues that were to eventually divide them were Wagner’s militant nationalism and antiSemitism. Nietzsche also took offense to what he viewed as Wagner’s “ostentatious obeisance to Christian other worldliness” in his opera Parsifal which premiered in 1882 at Bayreuth (Kaufmann, 1974, 37). During the period of his deteriorating relationship with Wagner his migraine headaches and vomiting spells increased in severity and frequency, which Kaufmann asserts gave Nietzsche “an excuse to say away from Wagner after he had moved to Bayreuth” (1974, 37). In Yalom’s novel, Joseph Breuer notes the same, when during his one of his

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interviews of Nietzsche, he puts to him the question of whether he profits from his migraines. To this insinuation Nietzsche responds, “Yes, I should bless my illness, bless it. For a psychologist, personal suffering is a blessing – the training ground for facing the suffering of existence” (1992, 96). We cannot discuss Nietzsche’s relationships without mentioning his critically important relationship with his sister Elizabeth. As a boy Nietzsche was very devoted to his sister however as they grew up, he came to realize that in many ways she had embraced “the narrowness, the chauvinism, and the deeply unchristian Christianity which he loathed” (Kaufmann, 1974, 42). In 1885 Elizabeth married a leader in the German anti-Semitic movement, Bernhard Forester. They both moved to Paraguay to found a “Teutonic colony” called Nueva Germania. Nietzsche was deeply disappointed in his sister’s marriage and let her know so in a series of letters that are extant. He wrote, “The whole affair [the marriage] went through and through me. And since your son is in poor health, he was consequently sick all the time; this spring was one of the most melancholy springs of my life … For my personal tastes such an agitator [Forster] is something impossible for a closer acquaintance” (quoted in Kaufmann, 1974, 43). To Nietzsche’s chagrin, this association of his sister’s rubbed off on him in European society and his writings were used to justify their anti-Semitism, which he despised. In a letter to his sister dated 1887 he writes of the colony Forster and her at started, “One of the greatest stupidities you have committed – for yourself and for me! You association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy” (quoted in Kaufmann, 1974, 45). Nietzsche was repeatedly brought into conflict with the anti-Semitic ideology, which he unequivocally opposed, through his most important relationships. In the case of Wagner, this difference of opinion was fatal to the relationship and it certainly alienated him from his sister as

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well. Unfortunately for Nietzsche, after his collapse it was into his sister’s care that he went. After his death, she attached herself to his name, seized control of all legal rights to his writings and promoted the idea that her brother was a fellow proto-NAZI. From 1880 until his collapse in 1889, Nietzsche lived a rootless life. He had surrendered his German citizenship and never acquired citizenship rights in any other nation. He lived out of a suitcase, traveling around Europe, often in search of a better climate and environment for his increasingly severe medical problems. According to Wicks he went “circling almost annually between his mother's house in Naumburg and various French, Swiss, German and Italian cities. His travels took him through the Mediterranean seaside city of Nice (during the winters), the Swiss alpine village of Sils-Maria (during the summers), Leipzig (where he had attended university), Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence, Venice, and Rome, never residing in any place longer than several months at a time” (2008). The final relationship I will discuss begins in Rome in 1882. It was there that Nietzsche met Lou Salome. He was introduced to her via two other friends, Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Ree. She was young, bright, beautiful and extremely strong willed. She prided herself on freedom from social convention. The relationship between Nietzsche and Salome forms an important story device of Yalom’s novel, however, the facts are not entirely clear. One thing that is clear is that Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth and Miss Salome took an instant and intense dislike to one another. Elizabeth did everything she could to discourage Nietzsche’s interest in her. Recent scholarship has ascertained that in more than one case Elizabeth was guilty of altering, destroying or forging Nietzsche’s correspondences, to forward her anti-Semitic agenda. It was assumed, therefore, that Salome’s account of the relationship could be trusted and Elizabeth’s discounted, but now that too has been called into question. Yalom accepts and makes use of the

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report, by Salome, that Nietzsche had proposed marriage to her. According to Salome, he did so via Paul Ree and she declined. Nietzsche viewed this as a complete repudiation and accused Salome of using him to get closer to Paul Ree. He repudiated both of them by 1883. Wicks also accepts Salome’s account (2008). Kaufmann, however, rejects it, citing Rudolph Binion’s 1968 work Frau Lou (1974). Kaufmann writes “we cannot fully reconstruct the development that finally led him to break with Lou in December [1882]” (1974, 56). It is this ambiguity that Yalom exploits in his novel. The events of his novel, take place during the fall and winter of 1882 while Nietzsche was pining for Miss Salome and smarting from her rejection of his “marriage proposal”. For my purposes, I will accept Yalom’s use of the situation to forward his fictional story line, but the reader should be aware that the facts of the relationship are in dispute. I think it is clear, whether or not Nietzsche proposed marriage to Miss Salome, he was smitten with her and it is not inconceivable or out of character that he might have actually have done so. We will also analyze this as another instance of Nietzsche’s penchant for choosing unavailable women on which to lavish his affections. This biographical sketch brings us up to the events we wish to examine in Yalom’s novel. For the sake of completeness, I note that beyond the winter of 1882-3 very little changed for Nietzsche. He lived a simple, nomadic existence, subsisting off of the small pension he was granted by the University at Basel. He continued to write, and to not find much in the way of a following until a series of lectures given by Georg Brandes at the University of Copenhagen in 1888. Unfortunately, this much-delayed recognition was largely lost on Nietzsche. On January 3, 1889 he collapsed in the street at Turin. As the story goes he witnessed a horse being whipped by a coachman, he grabbed the man to prevent him from beating the horse and then collapsed in tears with his arms around the neck of the animal. He never recovered fully. He had momentary

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periods of lucidity over the next 10 years, but never wrote coherently again. He lived with his mother for 7 years until her death in 1897 and then was taken in by his sister Elizabeth. Friedrich Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900, apparently of pneumonia, complicated by a possible stroke. He was buried at the family gravesite, next to his father’s church in Röcken bei Lützen (Wicks, 2008). INTRODUCTION TO WHEN NIETZSCHE WEPT We are now familiar with the characters of the life of the real Nietzsche. The characters introduced by Yalom in his novel, aside from Miss Salome, were not actually part of Nietzsche’s life, but they could have been. Most students of psychoanalysis are familiar with them, so I will not bother with much in the way of introductions. Yalom’s main character is Joseph Breuer, the Viennese physician and mentor to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Freud himself also appears in the novel as a student, friend and confident of Breuer but is not directly involved with the treatment of Nietzsche around which the novel centers. Other characters include Breuer’s family and the subject of Freud and Breuer’s famous 1895 work, Studies in Hysteria, Anna O, whose real name, revealed in the 20th century, was Bertha Pappenheim. The novel is as much a story of Breuer and his struggles with despair and obsession as it is about Nietzsche’s struggles, but I will focus on Nietzsche. Irvin Yalom is a major figure in the field of existential psychotherapy and has authored a number of books on the subject. One of his most important contributions to the field has been a systematization of existential practice in his magisterial work Existential Psychotherapy. In this book he identifies four themes, around which, he argues, all psychopathology revolves. These themes are: 1. Death

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2. Meaning vs. Meaninglessness 3. Freedom 4. Isolation vs. Relationship His theory informs his writing and the novel revolves around these four themes. I will be applying the tools of contemporary object relations theory to his novel. I believe there is a point of overlap with object relations theory in his fourth theme, isolation vs. relationship. Yalom’s dictum, which appears in several of his works, is very apropos for the object relations practitioner, “It is the relationship that heals”. An argument could be made that it is impossible to tease out the real Nietzsche from Yalom’s interpretation of Nietzsche and I concede the point. However, I will accept Yalom’s picture of Nietzsche in his novel in good faith. When Nietzsche Wept is the story of Breuer’s attempt to apply his “talking cure” that he discovered in his treatment of Anna O. to Nietzsche. Breuer is enlisted by Lou Salome to treat Nietzsche for his “despair” but there is a catch. Nietzsche is far too proud to accept help with his emotional distress and has strange ideas about power in relationships. Breuer’s first attempt to treat Nietzsche consists of openly treating his medical issues while surreptitiously attempting to treat his psychological problems. This approach fails to gain Nietzsche’s confidence. Breuer then changes his strategy, and by playing on Nietzsche’s vanity, enlists Nietzsche’s help with his own despair, hoping to eventually “reverse the roles”. This approach is successful but Breuer finds himself drawn into the psychotherapeutic relationship in a way he had not expected. Yalom begins his story in Venice in October of 1882 when Breuer receives a cryptic note from Miss Salome desiring to meet him. Miss Salome tells Breuer that she has a friend afflicted with despair and she fears he may soon take his own life. She claims that “such a loss could extend far beyond me: this man’s death would have momentous consequences – for you, for European culture, for all of us” (p. 3). She describes to Breuer Nietzsche’s health problems and admits that

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she “would bear some responsibility for his despair”. She goes on to describe how Nietzsche has wandered Europe, consulting with many of the finest physicians and has found little relief from his illness. It is not for Breuer’s reputation as a healer of the body, however, that she has contacted him. She rather has sought him out as healer of the mind. She relates that her brother, Jenia, has attended Breuer’s lectures in Vienna on the case of ‘Anna O.’ and she wishes him to apply his talents to Nietzsche in an effort to treat his despair. However, there is a catch. Nietzsche does not know that Miss Salome has sought out Breuer on his behalf and would not approve of her doing so. Breuer is dumbfounded by such a request but fascinated by Miss Salome so he agrees to her plan to persuade Nietzsche to consult with him about his medical ailments and to meet with her again in Vienna in four weeks time. Salome is already alienated from Nietzsche, these events take place after the alleged “marriage proposal” described above in Nietzsche biography, therefore, she contacts Nietzsche’s friend, Franz Overbeck, who is concerned for his friend’s health. Overbeck persuades Nietzsche to travel to Vienna to consult with the eminent Dr. Breuer. What Miss Salome does not know, but is intimated to the reader, is that Breuer is struggling with his own obsession and despair as a result of his relationship with Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.). He had fallen in love with his patient during the course of her treatment and though he never acted on his feelings towards her he feels tremendous guilt and longing for Bertha as well as resentment towards his faithful wife, Mathilde, who forced him to quit the case and refer Bertha to another physician after Bertha delusionally proclaimed to her that she was pregnant with Breuer’s child. Nietzsche’s resistance to treatment provides insight on his neuroses. Specifically there are three I will discuss in detail:

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1. Nietzsche’s difficulty in relating to others and participating in healthy adult relationships. 2. Nietzsche’s physical ailments as somatic symptoms of his neuroses. 3. Nietzsche’s disassociation from himself and his splitting of objects in his environment. The story of their “counseling” relationship is a story about the development of psychotherapeutic practice for the last 100 years and proceeds through the stages described by Martha Stark in Modes of Therapeutic Action. The story of their relationship is also the story of negotiating the transference – countertransference in any psychotherapy. THEORETICAL DISCUSSION OF THE PATIENT PATIENT’S DIFFICULTY IN RELATING TO OTHERS. There are a number of interactions detailed in the novel that are indicative of Nietzsche’s difficulty with human relationships. During their second meeting, Salome reveals to Breuer the source of her concern that Nietzsche will never willingly agree to address his despair with him. She relates: “Nietzsche is extraordinarily sensitive to issues of power. He would refuse to engage in any process that he perceives as surrendering his power to another … and he is deeply distrustful of the motives of anyone who forgoes context and claims to be altruistic… No one desires, he believes, to help another: instead people only wish to dominate and increase their own power” (p. 17). Nietzsche deploys the defense of rationalization to keep others at arms length. During his initial consultation with Nietzsche, Breuer manages to discourse with Nietzsche about his relationships and thereby to indirectly discuss his despair. He approaches this initially by getting Nietzsche to discuss his sexual behavior. Nietzsche admits that he has no regular sexual partner and relates that, on the advice of a previous physician, he “worked out an arrangement with a young peasant woman in a village near Rapallo.” However, he reports, “at the end of three weeks I was almost moribund with head pain”. When Breuer inquires further, Nietzsche declares, “a flash of bestial

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pleasure followed by hours of self-loathing of cleaning myself of the protoplasmic stink of rutting, is not, in my view, the route to … organismic totality” (p. 62). Breuer then addresses his social relationships in general. He asks Nietzsche “can you deny that all of us are embedded in a social context, a context that historically has facilitated survival and provided the pleasure inherent in human connectedness.” Nietzsche’s reply is instructive, “Perhaps such herd pleasure are not for everyone… Thrice have I reached out and attempted to build a footbridge to others. And thrice I have been betrayed… No, it is not that I have trusted too little: my mistake was to trust too much. I am not prepared to, cannot afford to, trust again” (p. 62). Shortly after this exchange, Nietzsche’s initial physical assessment comes to an end and Breuer is left feeling stunned that his usually successful techniques for building trust with a patient have been foreclosed upon in such an absolute fashion. That evening, Breuer has dinner with Freud and consults with him on his patient. They arrive at a plan to focus on treating Nietzsche’s migraines by reducing stress. The prescription will be admission to a clinic with plenty of rest and a medical staff on hand to immediately treat any migraines that occur in their earliest stages. They then begin to discuss how to crack Nietzsche’s self-imposed isolation so that Breuer might deploy his new “talking cure” to treat his despair. They find a passage in Nietzsche’s work The Gay Science, which Breuer has been studying. It reads: “There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you: ‘Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?’ – Immediately you did not want to any more; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now thing of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel” (p. 85).

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Breuer and Freud conclude from this that Nietzsche is speaking of power and the aphorism indicates that Nietzsche “will interpret any expression of positive sentiment as a bid for power” (p. 85). In their next meeting, Breuer proposes that Nietzsche enter the Lauzon clinic for treatment of his migraines. Nietzsche rejects Breuer’s proposal on several grounds, for my purposes the most important of these is his questioning of Breuer’s motives. When Breuer presents his proposal, that Nietzsche be admitted to Lauzon clinic, Nietzsche argues he cannot afford such treatment on his modest pension. Breuer then offers him a free bed and medical care. He argues strenuously that Breuer’s claim to serve him, to alleviate his pain is false. He declares, “Such claims have nothing to do with human motivation. They are part of the slave mentality artfully engineered by priestly propaganda… no one has ever done anything wholly for others. All actions are self-directed, all service is self-serving, all love self-loving.” (p. 107) and “I will be used by you! Your pity for me, your charity, your empathy, your techniques to help me, to manage me – the effects of all these make you stronger at the expense of my strength. I am not rich enough to afford such help!” (p. 110). Here again we see Nietzsche’s rationalization defenses against those who would do him a kindness. Breuer is stumped, not a little angry and retorts, “Don’t you see, here’s a perfect example of why you cannot dissect your own psyche. Your vision is blurred! ... Because of your own unfortunate problems with friendships you make bizarre mistakes … You assume your own attitudes are universal and then you try to comprehend for all mankind what you cannot comprehend about yourself” (p 110-1). Nietzsche leaves Breuer’s office in huff and promises to return two hours to settle his bill. That night a Gasthaus owner bearing Nietzsche’s card with Breuer’s name and address on the opposite side awakens Breuer in the middle of the night. The Gasthaus owner explains that a

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guest of his is gravely ill. Breuer immediately goes to Nietzsche’s side and finds him in the throes of a severe migraine. Additionally, he has taken a near fatal does of chloral hydrate. In the depths of his pain, Nietzsche mumbles, barely audible, “help me” over and over. Breuer resolves anew to treat Nietzsche by any means necessary. Breuer returns four hours later and Nietzsche is some better. He warns Nietzsche that he took a near fatal dose of medication. Nietzsche replies to him “I don’t share your concern… Am I living? Dying? Who cares? No slot. No slot” (p. 130). When Breuer again returns to the Gasthaus to check on his patient, Nietzsche is more lucid and expresses his gratitude but is formal and insists making full payment for Breuer’s services. He still refuses Breuer’s entreaties to enter the Lauzon clinic for treatment, however, he does agree to stay in Vienna until Monday so that he may be better fit to travel back to Basel. When Nietzsche comes to Breuer’s office on Monday morning, Breuer has had an epiphany, an entirely new strategy to entice Nietzsche to stay in Vienna. He proposes to him that Nietzsche treat him for despair. Breuer proposes that he “act as physician to your body. I will concentrate only on your physical symptoms and medications. And you, in return, will act as physician to my mind, my spirit” (p. 138). Breuer discloses to him his despair, resentment of his wife and family, fear of aging and death. But only when Breuer states his motivation is entirely self-serving and challenges Nietzsche, “Are you strong enough to help me?”, does Nietzsche agree (p.142). The above are only a sample of the interactions present in the text but they are sufficient for us to make some theoretical deductions. James Grotstein has theorized “people inherently feel responsible for all that happened to them” (2000, 45) and that one reason for this belief is the need to possess “a sense of agency for the self”. The other reason he gives is “the presence of an archaic super-ego that colludes with and relentlessly intimidates the subject with guilt feelings for all that happens” (2000, 45). This

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super-ego is derived from the introjection of the image of hostile, sadistic, demanding and obligatory wishes, which had been previously expelled into the parent by projective identification (Klein, 1940, quoted in Grotstein, 2002). Helmut Walther at the University of Nuremberg, in his lecture on the early life of Nietzsche, notes that even at the age of 2 his sister Elizabeth describes him as “very passionate, what he, however, did not like to hear, later on, since he, according to the Nietzsche 'family tradition', learned to control himself early on”. He asserts that there were “various ‘tranquilizers’ for the passionate, yet still ‘speechless’ child”. Walther names three, the first of which was music. He reports that when Nietzsche “cried for unknown reasons, his father was asked to "make music" and instantly, "Fritzchen became as quiet as a mouse, sat upright in his little cart and did not turn his eyes away from the player". The second and third “tranquilizers” were described in a letter written in 1846 by Nietzsche’s father, “Brother Fritz is a wild boy who, at times, can only be brought under control by his father, since the rod is not far removed from the latter; however, there exists now another, more powerful helper, that is Christ who has already won the boy's head and heart, so that he does not want to hear anything else talked about but of 'heile Kist!’” This is what Walther calls the “Principle of the Pietists”, namely “the child's own will has to be broken so that the child can later be open to God's will” (2002). This “breaking of the will” occurred to Nietzsche at a time when he was unable to give symbolic meaning to it. Nietzsche also suffered the trauma of watching his father suffer a debilitating illness and then losing him at a young age. Of that experience Nietzsche wrote, “"My beloved father had to endure incredible pain, but the illness did not want to subside, rather, it grew day by day. Finally, even his eyesight was lost, and in eternal darkness, he had to endure the rest of his suffering" (quoted in Walther, 2002). Finally, after witnessing the agonizing death of his father, Nietzsche endured another trauma, the death of his two-year-old brother. Again the subject of responsibility is broached, but

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this time it is responsibility for the tragedy befalling another, not himself. Nietzsche recalls, “I dreamed that I heard funeral organ music from the church. Since I looked what the cause might be, suddenly, a grave was rising, and my father emerged, in his funeral attire. He hurried towards the church, and shortly after, he returned with an infant in his arms. The grave opened up, he went in, and the tombstone closed behind him. Instantly, the organ music stopped, and I awoke.--The day after this night, suddenly, little Joseph became ill, had cramps and died within a few hours. Our pain was unspeakable. My dream had come true completely” (quoted in Walther, 2002). Grotstein notes that Freud believed “in the unconscious there was no negation. All ideas and potential impulses live side by side, without conflict” (2000, 68). Therefore, responsibility and blame could live side by side in the unconscious. Grotstein writes, “We must first create the image of the object or the event we confront in order to personalize it as meaningful to us” and that “psychopathology can be understood as resulting from a significant intersubjective or interpersonal failure that occurs too overwhelmingly or too suddenly for the infant or patient to have imagine, phantasied, created, or ‘autochthonized’ it beforehand” (2000, 42-3). He goes on to argue, “traumatic memory is not like other memories that can be repressed. It is ‘remembered’ in the zero dimension; that is, it becomes… an infinite set (i.e. ’symmetrized’, without boundaries in either space or time and without end)” (2000, 87). Grotstein notes that “[t]rauma and psychosis are clinical examples of the predominance of symmetrical relations over asymmetrical ones. In trauma, for instance, victims generalize the class of the perpetrator so that the person who traumatized them becomes a whole class [e.g. my father=all men = all mankind]” (2002, 63). We can now compare this analysis with Breuer’s when he excoriates Nietzsche, “Because of your own unfortunate problems with friendships you make bizarre mistakes … you assume your own attitudes are universal and then you try to comprehend for all mankind what you cannot comprehend about yourself”. Nietzsche cannot accept pity or even compassion because of the shame he feels for

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“being responsible” for his abuse and the deaths of his father and brother. Breuer’s mistake here is to link the attitudes Nietzsche holds about human motivation and trust to his adult experiences of relationship. In fact, these attitudes can be linked to Nietzsche’s pre-verbal traumas at the hands of his father and his father’s subsequent abandonment of him into death. This is the betrayal that haunts Nietzsche. And what of Nietzsche’s misogyny and puritanical views on sex? While much of it could be explained by his cultural milieu, I believe we can attribute it in part to a similar mechanism as that which is developed above. Durant comments, “The early death of his father left him a victim to the holy women of the household, who petted him into an almost feminine delicacy and sensibility… It was his delight to seclude himself and read the Bible, or to read it to others so feelingly as to bring tears to their eyes. But there was a hidden nervous stoicism and pride him…all his life long he was to seek physical and intellectual means of hardening himself into an idealized masculinity” (1953, 403). Breuer writes in one of his “case notes” regarding Nietzsche, “In most aspects of human relatedness he has prodigious blind spots. But when it comes to the subject of women, he is barbaric, hardly human. No matter who the woman or what the situation, his response is predictable: the woman is predatory and scheming. And his advice about women is equally predictable: blame them, punish them! Oh yes, one other mode – avoid them!” (Yalom, 1992, 168). Nietzsche here could be reacting to rage at the women in his early life who raised him and whom he partially blames for the tragedies that befell him. Because those women “betrayed” him by not protecting him from the vicissitudes of life, all women are “predatory and scheming”. It is not uncommon for trauma victims to re-enact their traumas with other perpetrators, unconsciously selecting others who will cooperate with their re-enactment. This brings up the interesting possibility that in each of the adult relationships where Nietzsche felt betrayed he is in reality re-enacting this early traumatic relationship. His rationalizations about power are about his powerlessness in the face of his father’s abuse and his need to assert self-agency. Bromberg

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notes that the role of the psychotherapist in these situations is to “rebuild faith in self-other experience” (2006, 199). Unfortunately, Breuer himself has been drawn into the Nietzsche’s unconscious re-enactment; he is lying to Nietzsche the entire time. PSYCHOGENIC ILLNESS When Breuer meets with Nietzsche he again to presents his plan to admit him to a clinic and treat his migraines by treating his stress. There is an interesting exchange during this meeting that I alluded to previously. Breuer discusses the research linking migraines with general levels of stress. Nietzsche responds by asking if Breuer’s position implies that the patient chooses his illness. This leads Breuer to ask the question if Nietzsche profits from his illness. Nietzsche admits that he does. His illness has prevented him from reading his peers in philosophy, which he considers a boon; his illness has emancipated him from his teaching duties at Basel; it resulted in his release from military service and has confronted him with the actuality of death which caused him to work without rest and gave him “perspective and courage” to be himself (p. 96-7). I believe in the first three we again see the issue of relationships and Nietzsche’s self-imposed isolation from most human contact. It is generally accepted these days that most cases of migraines are psychogenic and in Nietzsche’s case it has served him to be ill. The last “blessing” of his migraines Nietzsche names also points to a possible psychogenic cause. Thomas Ogden postulates the existence of a primitive mode of experience which he calls the “autistic-contiguous”. Experience in this mode is dominated by “[s]ensory contiguity of skin surface, along with the elements of rhythmicity” (1989, 52). Like the more familiar ParanoidSchizoid and Depressive dialectic, the autistic-contiguous mode operates concurrently with the other two modes of experience. Anxiety in this mode of experience is associated with “the disruption of sensory cohesion and boundedness” (1989. 67). I believe that Ogden’s construct of

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the autistic-contiguous position may lend itself to a new way of exploring the phenomena of psychogenic illness. Nietzsche lived the life of an ascetic in the realm of ideas. He consciously denied himself even the most basic of comforts. His psyche forced him to pay attention to it. A person is never more aware of their body than when they are in pain. Ogden offers yet another insight, which I believe, is applicable to Nietzsche’s case. He notes, “The fact that one’s experience of self is powerfully rooted in the interplay of the sensory and the symbolic is often highly visible in psychoanalytic work with teachers and students of linguistics. These patients often experience anxiety states bordering on panic in association with the feeling that they are dissolving as they dismantle the binding power of language” (1989, 81). Nietzsche was a philologist, at the time a new and controversial discipline. He was at the very forefront of recognizing the social construction of language. Today, it is far more accepted that words have only the meanings that we give them. In Nietzsche’s day this was a revolutionary thought. There is yet a third possibility we might consider. Nietzsche’s headaches first became apparent at the age of 12. Walther attributes them to eye strain and notes that missed some school as a result (2002). Psychosomatic illness can be a learned response. Winnicott noted that appetite disorders were used a defense against anxiety and “by means of his symptoms he has managed to be a more or less lovable and social being” (1958, 40). The individual receives attention and approval for being ill and unconsciously seeks to recreate the experience. So while Nietzsche was learning to get attention and compassion for his illnesses, he was also beginning to engage in the study of language and dismantling it’s binding power over experience. There is a possible corollary here with his conscious rejection of pity and compassion as an adult. As Jung has argued, the unconscious is often compensatory to the conscious. That which Nietzsche could not

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tolerate consciously, expressed itself somatically through his illness.

DISASSOCIATION Two weeks after his first meeting with Miss Salome, Breuer meets with Nietzsche for the first time in his Vienna office. Nietzsche appears polite and cooperative with Breuer’s question regarding his physical health. Breuer is struck by the disconnect between Nietzsche’s personal demeanor and the strident tone of his writings. This is only the first of many such references to Nietzsche’s “dual personality”. There is the polite, quiet scholar who lives the life of an ascetic and the firebrand preacher of self-overcoming and autonomy who appears in his books. Howell and Bromberg have convincingly argued for the ubiquitous nature of disassociative phenomena. Bromberg writes, “Self states are what the mind comprises. Dissociation is what the mind does. The relationship between self-states and dissociation is what the mind is” (2006, 2). Howell makes the case that “[P]roblematic dissociation does not proceed from trauma alone. It encompasses not only the shattered self of posttraumatic severed connections, but also more general failures of integration. Poor psychological integration proceeds from family environments that are chaotic, abusive, neglectful, or all three” (2005, 17). Although disassociation need not be a result of trauma, as Howell and Bromberg argue, we have substantial evidence of trauma in the early childhood of Nietzsche as well as in adulthood. His abuse, the death of his father and his brother, his experience during the Franco-Prussian war, all point to the strong possibility of pathological dissociative processes. Bromberg observes, “To the degree that the attachment bond, and thus core self-continuity, was compromised by the patient’s particular ‘gorilla’, that gorilla lives out its existence as a not me experience” (2006, 73) and earlier in the same book argued,

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The effect of traumatic experience is that the person surrenders self-state coherence to protect self-continuity. When the illusion of unity is so dangerous to self-continuity that coherence cannot be maintained, experience that is disjunctive with the ongoing self-state that organizes core identity is denied simultaneous access to consciousness. The person become unable to hold conflicting ways of seeing himself vis-à-vis his objects within a single experiential state long enough to feel the subjective pull of opposing affects and dissonant self-perceptions as a state of mind that can be take as an object of selfreflection. As a consequence, inharmonious contents of the mind (affects, wishes, beliefs, etc.) are not readily accessible to self-observation, and the person tends to experience his immediate subjective experience as truth” (68). Nietzsche’s rage at his father for his abuse and his abandonment and at his mother for her inability to protect him was his “gorilla”, it was incompatible with the expectations and selfidentity he was operating under and constructing, so they were split off. Walther notes that Nietzsche was “’serious’ and ‘pensive’" at a young age and that “already in his childhood can we encounter that peculiar trait of Nietzsche that can be observed in him throughout his life: to adopt a formal behavior--in his writings, his striving for form, of which he, as we will soon see, already was aware very early. To Nietzsche, both in his life and in his writing, form served him as a hideout, protective shield and effective means, at the same time” (2002). The rage in his writing against Christianity, European society and morality is rage against his father who preached the love of Christ from the pulpit but did not “spare the rod”. The splitting of the self is a newer discussion in the psychoanalytic literature. Classically it was assumed that the psyche split the object. Ogden summarizes the classical position, “The schizoid patient to a large degree has retreated from the object relations with the whole external objects into an internal world comprised of conscious and unconscious relations to internal object. These phantasied object relations are conducted in a realm of omnipotent thought with heavy reliance on spitting and projective identification as modes of defense. It is a world of heroes and villains, of persecutors and victims; a work in which object ties are often addictive in nature, the loved objects are tantalizing and unattainable a work in which introjects are omniscient and conduct unrelentingly critical narratives of one’s phantasied and actual behavior. For this individual, external objects are so thoroughly eclipsed by transference projections of his internal object world that the qualities of the external objects are bare discernible” (1989, 84-5). This is apparent in Nietzsche. He often operates in a paranoid-schizoid mode with regard to his

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external objects. The people in his life, such as Richard Wagner, his wife Cosmia or Lou Salome, are either idealized or vilified. There is no in-between; they are identified with one symmetry or the other. THEORETICAL DISCUSSION OF THE TREATMENT The treatment of Nietzsche / Breuer proceeds in earnest from this point. Nietzsche enters the Lauzon clinic under the pseudonym Eckhart Mueller and meets with Breuer each day. They face the challenge of creating, from scratch; an entirely new treatment modality. However, they do draw on the experience Breuer gained from working with ‘Anna O.’. They use a method which Breuer calls “chimney sweeping”, in actuality, free association. Breuer’s treatment methods are certainly unorthodox by contemporary standards of psychoanalytic praxis but there are at least two issues raised in their process that are relevant to contemporary clinicians. 1. The development of psychoanalytic praxis from a classical model to a relational model. 2. Negotiating the transference – countertransference relationship. The first issue is raised in the earliest sessions between Breuer and Nietzsche when Breuer’s complains that Nietzsche fails to “join with me in a down-to-earth manner” (Yalom, 1992, 207). Nietzsche’s style at this point is to preach more than to counsel. He gives Breuer abstract philosophical constructs that Breuer cannot use. Breuer argues, “there is a gulf – a huge gulf – between knowing something intellectually and knowing it emotionally… This is where philosophy falls short. Teaching philosophy and using it in life are very different undertakings” (p. 209). Martha Stark has created a taxonomy of psychoanalytic praxis which is a useful guide for

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examining the various “modes of therapeutic action”. She has divided the various modes into 3 paradigms, which she calls simply models 1, 2 and 3. She notes that the models are interdependent – model 1 is dependent on a pre-existence of an empathic relationship; model 2 will contain interpretative elements as well as empathic relating and model 3 depends on the empathic relationship and will typically involves interpretative action as well (Stark, 2000). The earliest psychoanalysts learned from Freud their role was to be a “mirror” for the patient’s transference neurosis. To this end, they should be as invisible as a person as possible. Their job was to interpret for the patient. They were regarded as the experts to whom their patient came for “truth” about themselves. The counter-transference was regarded as an impediment from the therapist’s objectivity which would be resolved if the therapist himself had sufficient analysis. Psychopathology was viewed as existing strictly within the intrapsychic conflicts of the patient. Therefore, Stark calls this a “one person psychology”. It is a very hierarchical and patriarchal model with a typically modern, Gnostic flavor. This model is a structural conflict model, which primarily seeks to strengthen the ego through the process of abreaction (Stark, 2000). By the middle of the 20th century a new structural deficit model gained acceptance, chiefly through the work of the self-psychologists, which Stark calls model 2. The model emphasized the empathic relationship between the patient and therapist and used Winnicott’s notion of a “good-enough mother”. They viewed the role of the therapist as that of an adjunct the self of the patients (a selfobject). The focus for psychopathology in the patient began to shift to interpersonal dysfunction rooted in early childhood experience. Therefore a better understanding of very early psychic development became critical. Winnicott theorized that the depressive position was an achievement attained by the experience of “being held by a mother who adapts

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to ego needs” (1953, 263). The mother through regulation of the environment prevents unnecessary impingement on the infant’s state of “going-on-being”. In later stages the mother processes the infants affects that it cannot and returns them to it in a tolerable form through the cyclical process of projective identification and introjection. In both cases, the mother’s psyche makes up for the structural deficits of the infants psyche (1953). This was taken a model for psychotherapy, where the therapist’s self, in the role of “good-enough mother”, would allow the patient to have a “corrective experience”. Therefore they called this a “deficiency-compensation” model. The self-psychologists emphasized the absence of good objects in the psyche of the patient. The flow of affects was regarded as a one-way process, with the healthy psyche of the therapist providing the necessary components for the deficient psyche of the patient. Therefore, Stark calls this “a one and ½ person psychology”. What was primarily required of the therapist was empathic listening and relating (Stark, 2000). Contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy has moved into a understanding of therapeutic process as intersubjective, which Stark calls model 3. The intersubjective model emphasis the relationship created by the interaction of the subjectivity of the patient and the subjectivity of the therapist. Counter-transference is no longer viewed as an impediment to the psychotherapeutic process but as a crucial diagnostic tool. Intersubjective theorists have elaborated on Wilfred Bion’s container-contained paradigm and view the exchange of affects between therapist and patient as a two-way process. Therefore Stark calls this a “two person psychology”. She writes, “Model 3 addresses itself specifically to the force filed created by the patient in an effort to draw the therapist into participating in ways specifically determined by the patient’s early-on history – ways the patient needs the therapist to participate if she (the patient) is ever to have a chance to master her internal demons” (2000, xix). Bion theorized that in the therapist-patient dyad the therapeutic process was a co-created

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experience of ‘O’ (ineffable reality). The therapist must forgo “memory and desire” and allow the experience to unfold. Bion also stresses, as Winnicott did with his “good-enough” mother, the therapist will fail the patient and these failures are necessary for growth (1965). I understand this in terms one of my supervisors used to use, “trust the process”. Patrick Casement advocated that the therapist “provide a freedom for patients to use us in whatever ways belong to their own experience” (1985, 195). When the therapist allows him/herself to be led by the patient, s/he will eventually become “able to discover for herself the paradox of transference, becoming able to explore the recurring sense of sameness within a growing awareness of difference in the analytic relationship” (1985, 268). Relational (Model 3) therapists stress the presence of bad object (pathological introjects) in the the psyche of the patient. Through the psychotherapeutic process, these introjects are “detoxified”. (Stark, 2000). This development of the understanding of the psychotherapeutic process parallels the development of Nietzsche and Breuer’s relationship. They begin as doctor – patient and Breuer has the notion that he (the expert) will treat Nietzsche’s illness. His model is his treatment of Anna O., which he describes as being dependent on identifying the “cause” of her hysterical symptoms. “Cause” has the connation of something objective that can be discovered and imparted as knowledge to another. As their relationship progress, Nietzsche and Breuer find it is not the “cause” of the symptom that must be identified, but the “meaning” of the symptom. Meaning is always co-created in relationship with another. In the end of their time together, Nietzsche says to Breuer, “I’ve always dreamed of a friendship in which two people join together to attain some higher ideal. And here, now, it has arrived! You and I have joined together precisely in such a way! We’ve participated in the other’s self-overcoming (Yalom, 1992, 300). The second issue I would like to examine, which appears in Nietzsche and Breuer’s

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counseling relationship is that of negotiating the transference-countertransference. As their relationship progresses, Breuer finds himself experiencing the transference neurosis in regard to Nietzsche. Breuer writes in his case notes, “In the future … this talking treatment could be common place… Just as surgeons must first learn anatomy, the future “Angst doctor” must first understand the relationship between the one who counsels and the one who is counseled… I used to be critical of Nietzsche, but no longer. On the contrary, I now cherish his every word and, day by day, grow more convinced that he can help me… I used to compete with him, to devise chess traps for him. No longer! His insight is extraordinary. His intellect soars. I gaze at him as a hen at a hawk. Do I revere him too much! Do I want him to soar above me?” (Yalom, 1992, 230). “Understanding the relationship between the one who counsels and the one who is counseled” has been a gradual process in psychoanalytic thought. As was mentioned above, early psychoanalysts viewed the transference phenomena as a necessary process that allowed the intrapsychic conflicts to play themselves out on the mirror of the analyst. Counter-transference was to be avoided and was a sign the analyst needed more therapy himself. Self-psychologists viewed the counter-transference with suspicion as well. It was potentially an impediment to their empathic connection with the patient and interfered with their ability to make objective interpretations for the patient. Relational (Model 3) therapists have begun to understand the therapeutic relationship differently and to use the counter-transference in a totally new way. Thomas Ogden formulated the concept the creation of an analytic third through a matrix of the mutual projective identification. He argued, “Projective identification can be understood only in terms of a mutually creating, negating and preserving dialectic of subjects, each of who allows himself to be ‘subjugated’ by the other, a third subject (the subject of projective identification)… The analytic process, if successful, involves the reappropriation of the individual subjectivities of analyst and analyzand, which have been transformed through their

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experience of (in) the newly created analytic third” (Ogden, 1994, 100-1). What this means for psychoanalytic practice is “no thought, feeling, or sensation can be considered to be the same as it was or will be outside of the context of the specific (and continually shifting) intersubjectivity created by the analyst and analyzand” (Ogden, 1994, 73-4). Under this construct, far from being an impediment to analysis, the counter-transference, gives the analyst the “inside tract” on what disavowed otherwise unconscious affects and thoughts of the patient! As Ogden writes, “a view of the analyst’s experience that dismisses this category [the countertransference] of clinical fact leads the analyst to diminish (or ignore) the significance of a great deal (in some instances, the majority) of his experience with the analyzand” (p. 83). This understanding however, requires a significant degree of self-awareness on the part of the therapist. S/He must at all times remain in touch with what s/he is feeling and thinking and be prepared to share that, appropriately, as part of his interpretations for the patient. The implication for the therapist is not therefore that s/he needs less personal therapy, but more! It would unreasonable to suppose that a therapist must remain in therapy him/herself during the entire time they are in practice but certainly it would be wise to undertake regular “courses” of therapy in order that s/he maybe a more finely tuned instrument at the service of his/her patients. The new emphasis on dissociative phenomena in psychoanalytic thought has led to still further developments in this concept of intersubjectivity. Bromberg has written that, given the ubiquity of disassociation, it is the therapist’s task “to allow himself slowly to discover all her selves or self-states and to form relationships with each, while honoring that each hold its own truth its own reality, and its own treatment agenda, which must be discovered and taken seriously” (2006, 109.) Bromberg has postulated the patient’s enactments are his/her “effort[s] to negotiate unfinished business in those areas of selfhood where…affect regulation was not

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successful enough to allow further self-development at the level of symbolic processing by thought and language”(181) and therefore the “analyst’s self-revelation is… a necessary part of the clinical process if the therapeutic efficacy of analytic treatment is to most enduring and farreaching” (132). Enactments are often “sub-symbolic” experiences that are communicated through the counter-transference. He argues that these experiences are not the analyst’s “personal property” and it is the therapist duty to aid the patient, through his/her own self-disclosure, in representing these experiences symbolically. He writes, “a main part of the analyst’s job is to find words to get his own experience of enacted communication out on the table in a manner that facilitates the patient’s ability to do the same” (137). Thus, Bion’s concept of “transformations of O to K” is completed by the therapist self-disclosure. Contra Bion though, Bromberg argues that it is the process that must lead the content, “it is the affective aliveness that is generated by mutual spontaneity in a human interaction that hold it together as part of a relational analytic process” (138). THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSION Sometime in the first millennium B.C. an anonymous psalmist penned the words, “The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God” (Ps 13:1b). Atheism is today a largely acceptable position and many of the thinkers whose ideas have shaped the modern age were avowed atheists, including Friedrich Nietzsche. I argue however, that both psychologically and theologically; atheism is not only unwise but also impossible. It is informative to note that although atheism has been around as long as we know of, it has never meant what it is assumed to mean today. Both Socrates of classical Greece and Christians of ancient Rome were prosecuted and executed for “atheism”, but obviously a Christian is a theist and though it’s a more debatable assertion, Socrates was a theist as well. What Socrates and the ancient Christians

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were guilty of was not worshipping the gods of their culture and society. It was not that they did not worship any god; it was rather, they did not worship the right gods. The first commandment given to Moses on Mt. Sinai is against idolatry. The commandment precedes all the others because the others are dependent on it, both theologically and psychologically. St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica demonstrates that it is necessary that God is the efficient cause of all beings: “It must be said that every being in any way existing is from God. For whatever is found in anything by participation, must be caused in it by that to which it belongs essentially, as iron becomes ignited by fire. Now it has been shown above (Question 3, Article 4) when treating of the divine simplicity that God is the essentially self-subsisting Being; and also it was shown (11, 3,4) that subsisting being must be one; as, if whiteness were self-subsisting, it would be one, since whiteness is multiplied by its recipients. Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation. Therefore it must be that all things which are diversified by the diverse participation of being, so as to be more or less perfect, are caused by one First Being, Who possesses being most perfectly.” (Prima Pars, Q. 44, ad 1) He also shows that God is the final cause of all beings: “Every agent acts for an end: otherwise one thing would not follow more than another from the action of the agent, unless it were by chance. Now the end of the agent and of the patient considered as such is the same, but in a different way respectively. For the impression which the agent intends to produce, and which the patient intends to receive, are one and the same. Some things, however, are both agent and patient at the same time: these are imperfect agents, and to these it belongs to intend, even while acting, the acquisition of something. But it does not belong to the First Agent, Who is agent only, to act for the acquisition of some end; He intends only to communicate His perfection, which is His goodness; while every creature intends to acquire its own perfection, which is the likeness of the divine perfection and goodness. Therefore the divine goodness is the end of all things.” (Prima Pars, Q. 44, ad 4) One modern objection is voiced within the same above section. The objection as St. Thomas wrote it was “Further, all things desire their end. But all things do not desire God, for all do not even know Him. Therefore God is not the end of all things.” His reply is as relevant today as it

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was in the 13th century, “All things desire God as their end, when they desire some good thing, whether this desire be intellectual or sensible, or natural, i.e. without knowledge; because nothing is good and desirable except forasmuch as it participates in the likeness to God.” Therefore it is part of our very nature to seek God, as St. Augustine famously wrote, “Our hearts were made for you, O’ Lord, and they are restless til they rest in Thee” (Confessions, I). This statement and this idea have always been at the very heart of my theological anthropology. The modern atheist asserts he/she does not believe in any god but this assertion, is a distinctively modern and Western phenomenon. I contend it is false. He/she may not worship the god of his/her society but all beings worship a god, whether they know it or not. It is my contention that modern atheists are in the same boat, however, unlike the Christians of ancient Rome, they are not consciously aware of the object of their faith. They have imbibed the Christian teaching that there is no other God and therefore when the do not worship Him, they mistakenly believe they worship no god at all. I contend that they have turned to idols – ideologies and myths most often – communism, liberalism, Darwinism, Freudianism - these are modern idols to which many turn for answers to the questions that matter the most. Sadly, making anything god, other than God is as disastrous to the psyche as it is to the soul. The modern world has seen many attempts to make God irrelevant to human life. Immanuel Kant attempted to construct a morality without God; Karl Marx a society and a theory of history without God; Darwin an origin of man and other living creatures; Freud a psychology without God and Nietzsche a meaning to life without God. Though not all were conscious of what they were building, they all contributed to the increasing “secularity” of the world. Milbank has contended that secularism itself is a religion, specifically a theodicy (2006). This theodicy is a house of cards built on a number of flimsy assertions and ultimately on the error that man has a

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natura pura and is not dependent on God. John Milbank has argued that the creation of the “secular”, whether as a category of political or intellectual life, was imagined into being sometime during the Renaissance. It has as its foundation the univocal ontology of Bl. Duns Scotus. This ontology, he argues, disconnects the world from God. God becomes something “over there” while we and the world exist “over here” and being is one thing, which God merely has more of. God must be separated from His creation before one can think into being a society, a biology, a psychology or an ethic that does not include Him. It is, of course, logically impossible to prove the non-existence of God, just as it is logically impossible to prove the non-existence of any thing. Atheism stems from not from a rational examination of the evidence and the arguments but from an assumption that is basic to a person’s worldview. The zeitgeist to explain all things without reference to God has dominated the modern age and today to take God seriously as a scholar is to be relegated to the fringes of academic discourse. As Paul Vitz has noted, “there seems to be a widespread assumption, throughout much of intellectual community, that belief in God is based on all kinds of irrational, immature needs and wishes, where as atheism or skepticism flows from a rational, grown-up, nononsense view of things as they really are” (1999, xiv). It is interesting to note that several of the most prominent atheists have acknowledged the need, whether sociological or psychological for belief in God and the practice of religion. Most of their arguments have centered around morality, as Dostoevsky wrote, “If God is dead, everything is permitted”. It would seem here that they were guilty of an intellectual elitism, we must preserve a belief in god to control the behavior of the great unwashed but the intelligent and educated must pay obescience to the zeitgeist. The attitude that religious faith stems from ignorance and skepticism from enlightenment

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is a 180 turn from the position held in the Western world since the beginnings of Christianity. For the Christians of the first millennium and the Middle Ages, faith was the light of reason. St. Thomas wrote, “Just as bodily blindness is the privation of the principle of bodily sight, so blindness of mind is the privation of the principle of mental or intellectual sight. Now this has a threefold principle. One is the light of natural reason, which light, since it pertains to the species of the rational soul, is never forfeit from the soul, and yet, at times, it is prevented from exercising its proper act, through being hindered by the lower powers which the human intellect needs in order to understand, for instance in the case of imbeciles and madmen, as stated in I, 84, 7,8. Another principle of intellectual sight is a certain habitual light superadded to the natural light of reason, which light is sometimes forfeit from the soul. This privation is blindness, and is a punishment, in so far as the privation of the light of grace is a punishment. Hence it is written concerning some (Wisdom 2:21): "Their own malice blinded them." A third principle of intellectual sight is an intelligible principle, through which a man understands other things; to which principle a man may attend or not attend. That he does not attend thereto happens in two ways. Sometimes it is due to the fact that a man's will is deliberately turned away from the consideration of that principle, according to Psalm 35:4, "He would not understand, that he might do well": whereas sometimes it is due to the mind being more busy about things which it loves more, so as to be hindered thereby from considering this principle, according to Psalm 57:9, "Fire," i.e. of concupiscence, "hath fallen on them and they shall not see the sun." On either of these ways blindness of mind is a sin.” (Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 15, ad 1). For the Christian of the Middle Ages, all knowledge was a path to knowledge of God. There was a colloquial saying among the theologians of the period, “God has written two books, the Bible and the world, we should read both”. It is a failure of object relations psychology to take God seriously. With a few exceptions, it tends towards the same naturalistic explanations as other bodies of psychological theory. God and supernatural experience are to be explained away by constructs such as “the unthought known” (Christopher Bollas). Where mystical experience is permitted, there is an extreme epistemological skepticism, rooted in Kantianism. They seem to have forgotten that God has spoken to humanity, revealed Himself in Christ Jesus and continues to speak through the Holy

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Spirit. There are additional issues of epistemology that are too complex to discuss in their entirety here. There is excellent discussion of them in John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock’s book Truth in Aquinas for the interested reader. Dr. Paul Vitz has studied the question of atheism psychologically. It is his contention that Freud’s “projection theory” of God, i.e. God is a projection of our need for the security of an omnipotent father figure, fails as an explanation for theism but is a fine argument for atheism. It is his thesis that atheism is related to “disappointment in and resentment of his own father” (1999, 16). The theory is sound theologically, the apostle writes, “For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (Eph 3:14-15). In other words, a father participates in the fatherhood of God. He examines the lives of 29 prominent atheists and 21 prominent apologist for theism (18 Christian, 2 Jewish) over the last few hundred years, with particular attention to the relationship they had with their earthly father. In the overwhelming number of cases Vitz’s thesis is supported. The atheists, with the exception of 2, all had abusive or no relationship with their father. The theists with one, debatable exception (Soren Kierkegaard), all had strong and close relationships with their fathers (Vitz, 1999). Friedrich Nietzsche as was mentioned many times in the preceding pages, was one of the atheists who, after the age of 4, had no relationship to his father and was severely traumatized by both his abuse while he was alive and by his untimely and painful death. Vitz notes, as I have, it is common for young children to view death as a choice and react with anger towards the parent who has died. This is particularly true, with regard to the father, for young boys ages 3-5. There are two psychological reasons for this. First, there is the necessary resolution of the Oedipus complex. The young man, to successfully navigate this stage of development, must identify with

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the father. Secondly there is the social reality that the first 2 years are dominated by the relationship of the child to the mother and after age 5, the child will enter school and peer relationships will begin to take precedence. Also beyond the age of 7 or so, the child begins to understand intellectually that death is not a choice and is less likely to blame the offending parent. The atheist, really an “anti-theist”, transfers this anger at the father to the Father. (Vitz, 1999). There is certainly room to debate Vitz’s thesis but it also certainly warrants more research and discussion in psychoanalytic thought. There are certainly more, and simpler, causes of the modern phenomenon of atheism. Some experience abuse at the hand of a religious figure and for this cause turn away from God. It also very possible, in our culture, to absorb the zeitgeist that religious faith is irrational and atheism is rational with little reflective thought and to become an atheist by default. However, the first are better termed “anti-theists” for they do not simply disbelieve, they are angry with God. The second, typically unconsciously pursue one idol or another. They turn to ideologies and mythologies for their answers. Nietzsche was both an atheist of the type described by Vitz and of the “anti-theist” type, for he suffered abuse and abandonment by his father, who was also a figure of the Christian religion.

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