Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) is an influential 19th Century philosopher whose works and ideas were followed by other important philosophers, particularly by Nietzsche, who viewed himself as Schopenhauer’s successor. His work also influenced Freud's ideas on psychoanalysis.Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in his long essay Schopenhauer the Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer, says the philosopher is a “psychologist of the will” and his works to run by way of the psychological radicalism of Nietzsche, straight to Freud and the men who built up his psychology of the unconscious and applied it to the mental sciences.Following Thomas Mann’s interpretation of Schopenhauer’s ideas, it is not surprising to see Dr. Irvin D. Yalom, a well known psychotherapist and best selling author, choose Schopenhauer as a central character of one of his novels : The Schopenhauer Cure. As in his other two novels based on prominent philosophers, Nietzsche and Spinoza, (When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession and The Spinoza Problem: A Novel)I decided to include “The Stages of Life”, of Schopenhauer’s Counsels and Maxims in this volume. In this essay he considers that in our childhood we are more given to using our intellect than our will. Following that golden age or magic years of learning about the external world, Schopenhauer warns us that then "… comes the great period of disillusion, a period of very gradual growth; but once it has fairly begun, a man will tell y...