The “what if?” and fictional premise of “When Nietzsche Wept” is that Lou Salome heard of Anna O.’s cure, hunted down Breuer on his vacation in Venice, hinted at her menage a trois with Ree and Nietzsche, and hectored him into a consultation by saying she was afraid her friend would soon kill himself and that “the future of German philosophy hangs in the balance.”

While he treated no other patients by psychotherapy, Breuer fully discussed his technique and conclusions with Freud and finally collaborated with him on “Studies in Hysteria” in 1895. Josef Breuer was then just 40, two years older than Nietzsche, but he was already the father of five children, an eminent physician and physiologist in Vienna, a foremost authority on equilibrium and respiration, a friend and mentor to a 26-year-old intern named Sigmund Freud and a forerunner in the field of psychoanalysis.Įarlier, Breuer had treated the hysteria of Bertha Pappenheim-the famous “Anna O.” of psychoanalytic history-by a kind of “talk therapy” in which he forced her to recall troubling experiences under hypnosis and found that her neurotic symptoms disappeared when unconscious processes were exposed to consciousness. There developed a galling “Pythagorean relationship” in which both men were equally smitten by Lou and were so flirtatiously teased but chastely turned away that Nietzsche finally referred to her as “a predator clothed as a house pet” and left for Italy in such despair that his friends feared suicide.ĭr. In 1882, however, his friend Paul Ree introduced him to 22-year-old Lou Andreas Salome, a brilliant, beautiful and boldly unconventional feminist and future psychoanalyst. Hating the imprisonment of his job, and hated by his faculty colleagues, the stern and imperious “philosopher of culture” left the university after a few years for a hard and simple life of furious writing, bleak isolation and sexual asceticism. His first book, “The Birth of Tragedy,” was followed by “The Gay Science” and the highly aphoristic “Human, All Too Human,” but Nietzsche found neither readers nor respect. After studying first theology and then classical philology, Nietzsche turned to philosophy and was so impressive a student that he won both a doctorate and a professorship at the University of Basel without having completed a dissertation. His father died of “softening of the brain” when Friedrich was 5, and he was forced into a company of grandmother, mother, sister and aunts that he finally found alienating.

The facts behind this fascinating “novel of obsession” are these: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in 1844, the grandson of Lutheran ministers.

When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom