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Reading this and looking at some of the other titles Yalom has published the suspicion grew that he might like to write a series of adventures about an enigmatic doctor who travels through time and space solving complex mysteries. Of course ideally this doctor would need some kind of charming but hapless companion, in this case the young Freud whose suggestions nearly lead Dr. Breuer into disaster but who eventually turns good thanks to his handy use of a watch to hypnotise the good Doctor into experiencing a parallel life from which he can emerge thinking Maya, maya and thus with new understanding accept and embrace his life, ah...

The title promises tears, cruelly the author holds them back to the last page, whether his technique in this regard is equal to that of noted Northumbrian wordsmith Catherine Cookson I don't know, nor am I much moved to find out.

As I noted in the updates I started this book in the expectation that it would be awful, hopefully amusingly so, at first say for about a hundred pages I was obliged to channel the spirit of Robin the boy wonder, and exclaim every other paragraph or so "Holy info-dump Batman!" the interesting thing here was that the information was irrelevant - does it matter if Lou Salome crossed her legs or not, or what shape Dr. Breuer's breakfast roll was, or if he ate one or three, or if Neitzsche met a Buddhist monk, any monk or just read about one in Switzerland, or what Yalom believes a typical upper middle-class Viennese dinner in 1882 consisted of, or who ate whipped cream with their cake?

Yalom's triangular Kaisersemmel gave me traumatic flashbacks to reading All the light we cannot see and left me thinking if you are just going to make stuff up you might as well have the inter-galactic space dog leave off chasing the Rings of Saturn and come down to cure Nietzsche, admittedly since an inter-galactic space dog is still a dog, the cure would consist of urging Nietsche to put on his hover boots and come down the park to chase squirrels, but hey, why not? Woof! Woof!

Well, one reason would be is that this is all a bit pedagogical and space dogs generally are not on hand to assist people studying to become therapists to help their clients (view spoiler)[ and mores the pity, though the squirrels are awfully relieved (hide spoiler)], I sense in this book there is an attempt to communicate to students some of the difficulties and pitfalls of working with a client. Personally if I was one of those students I think I would prefer the blurry photostat with the twelve bullet-points ,but no doubt I'm just grumpy, or old fashioned, or not up for monetising my experience through a new medium or something.

I'm mildly interested that English is unusually not the dominant choice of language for reviewing this book. Which reminds me of George Mikes' How to be an alien in which he mentions that a French book about the Popular Front was mistranslated into English as the Popular Behind and became a best selling marital aid. I wonder if this novel was translated back into English if we'd find that Herr Dr. Breuer was powerfully aroused by the touch of Herr Professor Nietzsche's famously droopy moustache and that he urged his darling Fritzchen not to forget his whip the next time he came? Stranger things have happened I imagine (view spoiler)[ but not triangular Kaisersemmel, that is too much (hide spoiler)].

Still there is something nice and genuinely touching (view spoiler)[ not in a creepy way like a predatory employer (hide spoiler)] in people wanting to read and indeed write about dead people like Nietzsche, Breuer and Freud rather than mysteriously topless muscular firemen or space-dogs or treasure hunting Nazis and what have you. It suggests some kind of hunger for knowledge and understanding, even a desire for engagement with big ideas and fancy notions. Whether books like this are the gateway drugs to harder stuff or an end in themselves I couldn't say (view spoiler)[ because I don't know (view spoiler)[ at a guess both probably (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]. On the other hand this is absolutely the book for you if you've ever wanted to eavesdrop on somebody else's therapy sessions without having to plant a bug in the room. Although it may leave you with the desire to burst in with a jar of wasabi paste and a spoon.

Final thought. One character urges the other to consider if his tears had voices, what would they say? Hard not to say 'give me a tissue you bastard, can't you see I'm crying'?