Self-help books, coaching books, management books? Secretly, I think: they promise so much. Fortunately, I don’t always think that, and that is just as well. There are books that have strongly influenced me. Here is my third book: it is not a management book, but a novel that has strongly influenced me.

NIETZSCHE’S TEARS

In the novel *Nietzsche’s Tears*, a bridge is built between fiction and non-fiction. The setting is Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. Psychoanalysis is on the verge of breaking through. The main characters are Friedrich Nietzsche, the ‘philosopher with the hammer’, and Dr. Joseph Breuer, one of the founders of psychoanalysis—you could say the intellectual father of Freud.

The young Nietzsche is walking around with suicidal thoughts after Lou Salomé refused to become his wife. At the same time, Dr. Breuer is obsessed with one of his patients and does not know what to do with his obsession with her. At the request of Lou Salomé, Breuer begins an attempt to ‘treat’ Nietzsche, but he discovers that Nietzsche playfully takes his—Breuer’s—problems in hand. In a thrilling series of sessions, a bizarre friendship develops between the two men. As a reader, you feel the abysses of the mind.

Once you start this book, you just want to keep reading. It is so exciting. But that is not why this book is on my list of stimulating books.

Yalom taught me to think clearly and also to be kinder to myself. Not only by reading this novel and his other novels such as *The Therapist* and *The Schopenhauer Cure*. Also through practical books such as *Therapy as a Gift* and *Looking into the Sun*. They keep me occupied more than average. Actually, every coach should read books by Yalom. Simply as required reading. Furthermore, Yalom’s books are interesting for everyone; at least if you are interested in observing people and seeing more psychological layers. Then you know much more about what is really going on.