When Nietzsche Wept (novel)

The book takes place mostly in Vienna, Austria, in the year 1882, and relates a fictional meeting between the doctor Josef Breuer and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Influenced by the revolutionary ideas of his young disciple Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer starts the dangerous strategy that will become the origin of psychoanalysis.

Yalom's book is fictional but contains many references to history and historical personalities: Josef and Mathilde Breuer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salome, Sigmund Freud, Bertha Pappenheim, Paul Rée as well as mentioning Franz Overbeck, and the composer Richard Wagner.

In 2007 Yalom's novel received a film adaptation by the director Pinchas Perry, starring Armand Assante, Ben Cross and Katheryn Winnick.

[citation needed] In 2012, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lou Salome, the woman who plays a key role in the book, another theatrical adaptation of the novel was made by the theatrologist and translator of Yalom in Greek, Evangelia Andritsanou.