Lying On the Couch – Irvin D. Yalom
I feel dead and I hurt myself to know I’m alive.
I feel deadened and must take dangerous risks to feel alive.
I feel empty and try to fill myself with drugs, food, semen.
But these are brief fixes. I end up feeling shame—and even more dead and empty.
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(the protagonist, about his book)
What chance did it have in this ocean of books, one frail little spirit, swimming for its life?
[…]
“Do not confuse value and permanence—that way lies nihilism,” Ernest murmured as he tried to shake off his blues. He invoked his familiar catechisms: “Everything fades,” he reminded himself. “That’s the nature of experience. Nothing persists. Permanence is an illusion, and one day the solar system will lie in ruins.” Ah yes, that felt better! And better yet when Ernest invoked Sisyphus: a book fades? Well then, write a fresh book! And then yet another and another.
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Her gaze was intense. Ernest rarely thought of Ruth, his wife who had died six years before in an auto accident, but he remembered with gratitude one gift she had given him. Once, in their early days, before they had stopped touching and loving each other, Ruth had revealed to him the woman’s ultimate secret: how to capture a man. “Such a simple matter,” she had said. “One has only to look into a man’s eyes and hold his gaze for a few extra seconds. That’s all!” Ruth’s secret had proven accurate: time and again he had identified women trying to pick him up.
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«[…]Consider this puzzle: two widows, recently bereaved, each having been married for forty years. One of the widows had gone through much suffering but had gradually reclaimed her life and enjoyed some periods of equanimity and, on occasion, even great pleasure. The other fared much worse: a year later, she was mired in deep depression, at times suicidal, and required ongoing psychiatric attention. How can we account for the difference in outcome? It is a puzzle. Now let me offer a clue.
“Though these two women resembled each other in many ways, they differed greatly in one significant respect: the nature of their marriages. One woman had had a tumultuous, conflicted marital relationship, the other a loving, mutually respectful, growing relationship. Now my question for you is: Which was which?”
[…]
“Yes, exactly!” said Ernest to a woman in the third row who had ventured a reply. “You’re right: the woman with the conflicted relationship had the worse outcome.[…]»
[…] “But doesn’t that seem counterintuitive? One might think that the widow who had had a deeply gratifying, loving, forty-year relationship might fare less well. After all, hasn’t she had the greater loss?
“Yet, as you suggest, the reverse is often the case. There are several explanations. I think ‘regret’ is the key concept. Think of the anguish of the widow who feels, deep down, that she has spent forty years married to the wrong man. So her grief is not, or not only, for her husband. She is in mourning for her own life.”
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But Marshal had not been swayed by these new developments. At sixty-three, he had been a psychiatrist long enough to have lived through several such positivistic swings. He remembered wave after wave of ecstatic optimism (and subsequent disappointment) surrounding the introduction of Thorazine, psychosurgery, Miltown, Reserpine, Pacatal, LSD, Tofranil, lithium, Ecstasy, beta-blockers, Xanax, and Prozac—and was not surprised when some of the molecular biological fervor began to wane, when many extravagant research claims were not substantiated and when scientists began to acknowledge that perhaps, after all, they had not yet located the corrupt chromosome behind every corrupt thought.
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Then I gave up the book, I got bored.