The Telephone Call
The telephone rang at twenty past seven in the morning, which Dr. Friedrich Weihenruh already took to be information about the caller before the man had said a word.
"Weihenruh."
"Brunner. Konrad Brunner. I have a problem with my daughter."
"Then you have called the wrong man, Mr. Brunner. Your daughter may have a problem. You have a wish. Those are not the same thing, and the distinction will save us both time."
A pause, in which one could hear a man unaccustomed to being corrected.
"Livia, twenty-three. Threw over her studies in the fourth semester, just short of her qualifying exams. Has been sitting half days in a bookstore for a year and a half. Gets up at eleven, cancels everything, barely speaks. The family doctor checked what one checks: blood count, thyroid, iron. Nothing. He calls it a depressive episode, mild to moderate, whatever that is supposed to mean. I asked him about suicide explicitly. It never came up."
"That was a good question," said Weihenruh. "Unfortunately you asked it in the tone of an inventory."
"Doctor, I paid for that child to attend the best preparatory school in the region, a year in Boston, two degree programs. I would like her to function again."
"You would like her to function again as planned. That is also not the same thing." Weihenruh poured himself tea. "I will work with her for one day. Nine to six, here by the lake, interrupted by two meals. Two conditions. First. You pay in advance. Second. Your daughter comes voluntarily, and she may leave at any time. If she gets up at half past nine and drives home, you pay for the full day."
"Those are peculiar conditions."
"They are the only ones under which the day can take place at all. Everything you pay for on your daughter's behalf belongs to you, Mr. Brunner. For my work I need something that belongs to her. At the moment the only thing I can think of is her staying."
Nine O'Clock
The föhn wind had turned in the night, the lake lay unnaturally clear, and the mountains on the far shore stood so close that one might have called them intrusive. Livia Brunner arrived seven minutes late, in sneakers and with the expression of a person who has received a summons.
She sat down, looked past Weihenruh at the bookshelf, and said:
"Before we start: my father paid for this. Not even this is anything I accomplished myself."
Weihenruh nodded slowly.
"That's true."
She looked at him for the first time. She had evidently been expecting an objection and had prepared something for it, which now lay unused.
"He bought the day," Weihenruh continued. "The only question is who works today. Incidentally, I arranged with him that he pays even if you get up in ten minutes and leave."
"You told him he pays even if I walk out?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"So that your staying is worth something."
Livia drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. Then came the line she had meant to greet him with and now fired off a little late:
"And now you cure me. Like a case of the clap."
"The comparison is better than you realize," said Weihenruh. "I'll come back to it. First I would like to know how you are."
"I feel worthless."
Weihenruh set down his cup.
"That is not a feeling."
The First Thought
"Now you're going to start quibbling over words," said Livia. "Nine oh seven. A record."
"I'm not quibbling, I'm sorting. Feelings are: sad, afraid, angry, ashamed, empty. Those are states. You can describe them, but you cannot refute them. If you tell me you are sad, there is nothing I could offer against it, and I would have no desire to." He raised a hand. "Worthless is something else. Worthless is a measurement. And where something is measured there is a yardstick, a scale, and somebody who applied it."
"Hairsplitting."
"It is the difference between being powerless and being in charge. A feeling you cannot examine. A verdict you can. Whoever confuses the two considers himself powerless — and is even right about that, for as long as he keeps confusing them."
Livia said nothing.
"What do you feel when you think that about yourself?"
She needed longer than she wanted to.
"Shame," she said at last.
"Good. And when did you last think it?"
"Last night. Half past eleven. I saw a picture on my phone, a woman from my program. Lisbon, new job, roof terrace. I thought: I have nothing to show."
"Keep the picture," said Weihenruh. "Exactly that picture. And set a different thought beside it, namely: She has a job in Lisbon. Nothing further. No consolation, no interpretation, no addendum. And then tell me what happens to the shame."
Livia closed her eyes. It took a moment.
"It gets smaller," she said. "Not gone. Smaller."
"The picture was the same both times. The thought was different. The feeling was different." Weihenruh leaned back. "You have just observed the only mechanism that matters today. It is not the event that makes the feeling. The thought makes it, the one you send after the event. And the thought is yours."
"I can't just talk myself into something else."
"No. Which is why we are not talking ourselves into anything. We are examining." He smiled politely. "Talking yourself into things is what you have been doing for two years. I am merely proposing that you try examining them for a change."
Six Sentences
He put a sheet of paper in front of her and a pencil, which Livia took for a lapse of staging.
"Write down what you think about yourself. Not how you are. Sentences."
"Kindergarten."
"As long as a thought is circling in your head it is not an assertion but weather. Weather cannot be refuted; you can only duck under it. A sentence on paper, by contrast, has a subject, a predicate, and a claim to truth. It can be false. That is its greatest merit."
She wrote for twenty-seven minutes. What stood there at the end was this:
I finish nothing.
Everyone else is further along.
There's no point in starting.
Nobody gets in touch with me.
My father is right.
I can accomplish nothing under my own power.
Weihenruh read it without moving his face and wrote something on a sheet of his own.
"What are you writing there?"
"One of your sentences."
"Which one?"
He turned the sheet around. On it stood a single one, underlined:
There's no point in starting.
Livia made a sound that, in friendlier circumstances, would have been called a laugh.
"That one, of all of them. It's the most harmless of the lot."
"It is the only order."
She looked up.
"Five of these sentences are descriptions," said Weihenruh. "Descriptions can be false and still lie about doing nothing. Your third sentence is not a description. It is an instruction, and instructions get carried out. You do not start. Therefore you finish nothing. Therefore your first sentence is true by evening, and your fifth along with it." He tapped the paper. "This sentence is not the most harmless. It is the workshop. It manufactures the evidence with which the other five justify themselves."
It was quiet for a while. Outside, a motorboat puttered past.
"That's unpleasant," said Livia.
"Yes," said Weihenruh.
Lunch
There was bread, cheese, tomatoes, and a white wine that Livia did not touch. Weihenruh talked about the lake: about the difference between the föhn and the bise, about a neighbor who had been building a rowboat for eleven years and regularly announced that it would be finished by next spring.
After ten minutes Livia could not stand it any longer.
"Aren't we going on?"
"Not over a meal."
"Why not?"
"Because otherwise you drive home and the entire day has been one long reproach." He cut himself a piece of cheese. "Besides, I like eating."
She studied him.
"You make a decent living out of people being miserable."
"I make a living out of people ceasing to come to me," said Weihenruh. "Whoever keeps his patients is paid for nothing happening. That is an exceptionally sound business model, and it feeds an entire profession. It simply isn't mine."
"And if you have a sentence like that yourself? One of the same kind?"
"I have a list. It has grown shorter. It is not empty." He pushed the breadbasket toward her. "That is not coyness. Anyone who tells you he has his head entirely under control is selling you something."
After the meal Livia went out onto the terrace with her phone and came back ten minutes later. Weihenruh did not ask.
The Ladder
"Give me a sentence from this morning."
"You have the list."
"I would like to hear it."
"Nobody gets in touch with me."
"What happened before you thought that?"
Livia considered. "I wrote to Nora. On Tuesday. She didn't answer."
Weihenruh wrote a single sentence on his sheet and turned it toward her. Nora did not answer on Tuesday.
"That is an observation. It is true; I have nothing to object to. What follows from it?"
"That she has no interest in me."
He wrote it underneath. "An assumption. It may be so, it may not. Go on."
"That everyone feels that way about me."
"A verdict." Third line.
"And that there's something fundamentally wrong with me."
"A law," said Weihenruh, and wrote the fourth line. Then he turned the sheet all the way around. "Four sentences. Look and tell me which fact was added between the first and the fourth."
Livia looked at the paper. She looked at it for a long time.
"None."
"None. No second Tuesday, no phone call, not a word from anyone. You made a law of nature out of one unanswered message, and it took you roughly a second and a half. That is, incidentally, a remarkable achievement."
"You're making fun of me."
"No. I am observing that your head is very fast. Fast is good. Fast and unexamined is expensive."
Livia pulled the sheet across to her side.
"And if she really doesn't like me?"
"Then line two gets a check mark. Line four still gets nothing."
"That's whitewashing."
"Whitewashing would be to strike line two and write she loves me instead. I am asking for nothing of the sort. I am asking you to draw a line between what you know and what you assume. Nobody has drawn that line so far. Which is why line four has stood there unchallenged for two years and passes for a description of your person."
He should have stopped there. He did not stop.
"And what, in your view, stands underneath all four lines? What would have to be true of you for line four to be a candidate at all?"
Livia went rigid.
"You want me to say: I am worthless. So that you can write it down and then we work on it together. I know this. The others wanted it too." She stood up. "I'm leaving."
Weihenruh stayed seated.
"The door is open. Your father pays either way."
She stopped at the door, her hand already on the handle, and evidently waited for something.
"That was my mistake," said Weihenruh. "I was too fast. Of all people."
Livia laughed. It surprised her, it was brief, and it was real.
Then she sat down again. It was the second time that day she had done so of her own accord.
Five O'Clock, the Tea
"If you want to know where the sentence comes from," Livia began, "my mother always said I was the sensitive one and my sister the capable one, and then she —"
"I don't want to know."
She set down her cup.
"With every psychotherapist I've been to, that was the main event. Always the mother. You're the first one who doesn't want to hear it." She looked at him. "Maybe you're just lazy."
"A well-aimed sentence," said Weihenruh. "I'll answer it seriously, because it deserves that. I do not dispute that your thoughts have an origin. Of course they do; nobody invents at the age of six, out of nothing, that he is the sensitive one. Only, the origin changes nothing about whether they are true. A false sentence does not become truer because your mother said it, and a true one does not become falser. Explaining and changing are two different operations. If explaining healed, historians would be the healthiest people in this country."
He set down the teapot.
"This morning you asked whether I would cure you like a case of the clap. So let us establish where the comparison holds. With the clap, nobody asks about your childhood. One asks: what is there, and what works against it. No sensible physician would make the treatment depend on the state of your relationship with your mother." He raised his index finger. "And now the difference, which is the real joke of your situation. Against the clap you need a physician, because you cannot manufacture penicillin yourself. Against your thoughts you need nobody, because the remedy is already sitting complete inside your head. You possess a sharp, fast, logically working mind. You have been using it against yourself for two years — with a precision that sincerely impresses me."
Livia looked into her cup.
"We have three hours left," said Weihenruh. "You may have them for whatever you like. If you wish, we will talk about your mother. I will only tell you in advance what six o'clock will look like: you will feel very well understood, and you will think exactly as you thought at nine this morning. That is not a trick of mine. It is a prediction, and you are free to test it."
"And if I want it anyway?"
"Then that is what we do. I sold a day, not a method."
She considered it longer than he liked.
"No," she said. "Let's go on with the stuff that hurts."
The Proof
"Back to the workshop," said Weihenruh. "There's no point in starting. What would have to happen for that sentence to be false?"
"That I start something and finish it."
"When did you last finish something?"
"Never."
"Never is a very large word for a person not yet twenty-four. Let's take the last year."
"Nothing."
"You work in a bookstore. Do you read?"
Livia shrugged. "Forty, fifty books a year. That doesn't count."
"Go on."
"I did the Christmas catalog in the fall. Eighty titles, copy, layout, all of it. It went out." She waved it away. "That doesn't count either, that was work."
Weihenruh put down the pencil.
"You have just supplied me with two counterexamples and devalued both in the same breath. That is not modesty, that is bookkeeping: what speaks for the sentence gets entered; what speaks against it gets written off as a special case. A yardstick that discards every counterexample is no longer a yardstick. It is a creed."
"And now I'm supposed to think positive."
"Good heavens, no. One does not call out to a drowning person that he should drink less water either. One shows him where the bottom is." Weihenruh pushed the sheet toward her. "The bottom is the line between what you know and what you assume. I have nothing else on offer. It is only an astonishing amount."
He drew her two columns.
"For the next two weeks. On the left you write down beforehand what you assert — this won't help, I can't manage it, she won't get in touch. On the right, afterward, what actually occurred. I am not sending you jogging, I am not prescribing pleasant experiences or walks with therapeutic ambition. What you do is a matter of indifference to me. What interests me is the prediction."
"And if I turn out to be right?"
"Then you write that down just the same. Otherwise you are not examining, you are advertising. Young women your age tend in any case to —"
"How do you know that?"
Weihenruh stopped.
"Observation or law?" asked Livia.
There was a pause in which a psychotherapist of lesser stature would have said something soothing.
"Verdict," said Weihenruh. "Rightly objected to." And he struck the sentence from his own sheet.
At half past five Livia wrote the list out again. It had not grown shorter because sentences had vanished. It had grown shorter because it was sorted:
Nora did not answer on Tuesday. — I know this
She has no interest in me. — I assume this
Everyone else is further along. — I assume this, never counted
There's no point in starting. — assertion, to be tested
I can accomplish nothing under my own power. — my father's assertion, adopted by me, never tested
"And now?" she asked.
"Two hours in three weeks. After that we'll see. Perhaps twice more, perhaps not."
"And then?"
"Then you won't need me anymore. That is not a threat. That is the point of the exercise."
The Dock
He walked her down to the water. The sun was already low, the lake had taken on that color for which no language has a usable word, and at the dock lay a boat that had been without a motor since spring.
"What does a day like this cost, anyway?" asked Livia.
Weihenruh named the figure.
Livia whistled through her teeth. Then she said, without any particular emphasis:
"I'll pay for the next one myself."
Weihenruh looked out over the lake and said nothing, because some sentences are made smaller by commentary.
"So now what, Doc?" She pointed at the boat. "Do we ride off into the sunset and enjoy life?"
"If you like."
Livia looked at her watch.
"Can't. I've got plans at seven."
"Since when?"
"Since lunch."
"With whom?"
"With Nora." She slung her bag over her shoulder. "She answered within four minutes. Line two doesn't get a check mark."
She walked up the gravel path. Halfway up she turned around once more.
"I'll bring the sheet along. In case you want to check it."
"I don't want to check it," Weihenruh called after her. "I want to read it."
He stood on the dock a while longer. The föhn had died down, the lake lay there like a sheet of pressed tin, and across the water the sun was in fact going down, entirely without spectators.
The boat stayed where it was.
Cognitive Psychotherapy from Dr. Dietmar Luchmann, LLC, works on the thinking errors that cause the suffering — in writing, by video, or in a single-day block. Three paths, one goal.
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Dr. Friedrich Weihenruh is a literary alter ego through which the author gives narrative form to his experiences as a psychotherapist. The stories are based on true events but have been fictionalized: to protect privacy and professional confidentiality, names, locations, and details have been changed. Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.
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