Ive had other therapists who tried to be warm, to put you at ease, but Matthew was different. I was in a frenzy of curiosity and questioned her closely. Another asked about what it felt like to reveal the existence of the letters to the group. I fumbled for words of comfort. I dont even care if he means it, I just want him to say he cares about me. They were a mystery to him. Thanks to my thoughts, it still lives. Obviously, it was a fiction that Matthew had any real power over her. I learned not to expect any personal rewards from my work with Thelma. But youve got to remember that Im not thinking in a completely logical fashion.. As though she were reading my mind, Thelma continued, lifting her chin and projecting her words as to a large audience. What I was going to say was that this obsessionlets find a better word if obsession offends you, No, its O.K. Primarily, though, my attention was fixed on Matthew. Did I hate this book. When I spoke to Dr. Z. about the need for pain relief, he grew belligerent and reminded me he knew a lot more than I did about surgical pain. Moreover, the painter- therapist had sprayed deathher fathers death, her own deathinto her house. I mused aloud, What would she have said in that situation? Over the years Ive always called him whenever Ive changed therapists., But I thought you did not discuss him with all these therapists., I didnt. Despite the horror of his cancer and his narrowness of spirit, I was drawn to Carlos. Her love obsessionwhat else could one call it?was powerful and tenacious, having dominated eight years of her life. When I urged her to compare his life with her own, she realized that some of her grief was misplaced: it was her own life, not her fathers, that was tragically unfulfilled. Two weeks ago Thelma had reported an anxiety dreamthe only dream she reported during the entire therapy:I was dancing with a large black man. I was on a high narrow ledge. Its that I dont have faith in them. I knew a way. I meant the things I said to you, every one of them. She then continued in chilling voice and staccato cadence to give me the real facts about herself. If I were going to be helpful to Betty, I had to sort out, to trust, and to act upon my feelings. There was considerable internal preparation as well, which Betty found difficult to describe other than to say she was gathering inner resolve and waiting for the right moment to commence the diet. We had only a few minutes left. Too ashamed to invite any visitor inside, she tried at first to repay invitations by entertaining in restaurants. Sometimes the dreams, like the first ones, were frightening expressions of ontological anxiety; sometimes they foreshadowed things to come in therapy; sometimes they were like subtitles to therapy, providing a vivid translation of Marvins cautious statements to me. But that was a false alarm. And outrageously activeoften charging at a patients defenses with a battering ram! I thought you came to see me because you wanted to stop tormenting yourself.. Would he flee his own discovery? The fact that Penny was in crisis, or said she was, presented me with a dilemma. This paper advances two important aspects of the evidence-based foundation of existential therapy: therapist factors and implications for diversity/individual differences. (That I was the group therapy instructor in the program must have complicated things for her.) For most people, the greatest loss to bear is the death of a child. When did you move? Marie and he locked gazes for a moment. Now every week was a bad week. What about Elva, Yalom's mother, and counter-transference? Not only was our initial, tentative cocktail chatter indefinitely prolonged, but I had a strong sense that, even when we got past this stage, we would remain fused to the surface of thingsthat as long as Betty and I met, we were doomed to talk about pounds, diets, petty work grievances, and the reasons she did not join an aerobics class. I got scared and kept saying over and over, I only wanted the trim painted.. Well, what I mean is that I hadnt worked before with heavy patients, and Ive gotten a new appreciation for the problems of I could see from her expression that she was sinking even deeper into disappointment. To believe that nothing in life is more important than that he think well of you?, I dont really believe hes trying to drive me to suicide. Can you see how impossible it would be for each of you to re-create the particular mental state you were in? I hate to be love's executioner." (from the opening of the title story) In this rare glimpse of the thoroughly engaged therapist at work, a master psychiatrist openly confronts not only his own feelings and errors but the uncertainty at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. Save, of course, my father, and he was really part of her, her mouthpiece, her animus, her creation who (according to Asimovs first law of robotics) could not turn against his makerdespite my prayers that he would oncejust once, please, Dadpop her. My suggestion was more effective than I anticipated. Shortly after termination of therapy, about three years ago, Saul, an accomplished neurobiologist, had received a distinguished awarda six-month fellowship at the Stockholm Research Institute in Sweden. You want me to go on? Not Feminist. I wouldnt have made it without you. Its gone., Does any memory of it exist? He remembered banging his fist on his desk, forcing himself to remember the chill of his mothers forehead when he kissed her as she lay in her casket. It was gratifying to him that I had seen him performing so competently and efficiently. They been nothing but trouble. On several occasions I refused social invitations, some even from Dr. K., because I would not leave the library.. But once I married Harry, love was over. And yet another dream:I am taking an examination. His wife had left him four years ago. Even though I didnt talk about him all those years, I still thought he should know which therapist I was seeing. But it was not until shortly after her father died that Betty grasped the truth about the inevitability of her own death. Exploring the discrepancy in our views was treacherous because then she was likely to feel rebuffed. Why take everything so . I didnt even know about his connection to the Stockholm Institute. Later, when I invited her into my office, I complimented her on it and she told me, with a conspiratorial hush and a finger crossing her lips, that she had spent most of the week shopping for it. Perhaps, he suggested, I was tired of talking treatments and wanted to switch specialties. Consider ten to be the most significant revealing you can imagine and one to be the type of revealing you might do, lets say, with strangers in a line at the movies., A mistake. Her suicidality, extremely high at the onset, was reduced to the point where she may no longer be considered a suicidal risk. His voice cracked. For the moment, pretend youre hanging on to Chrissie because you choose to. But what? D-d-d-dont leave m-m-m-me, I d-d-d-d-d-disappear when youre not here., The performance was extraordinary: like watching the curtain call of an actress who has played several roles in an evening and amuses the audience by briefly, perhaps for just a few seconds, slipping back into each of them. You put yourself on trial for the crime of not letting Chrissie go when she was about to die, and you sentenced yourself to self-hatred. What do you think Ill missthe new tax forms?, Sometimes retirement stirs up important feelings because it is such an important milestone in life. Youve thought that maybe he was trying to drive you to suicide. Matthew came to visit but stayed only fifteen minutes and his presence, Thelma said, was worse than his silence: he evaded any allusions she made to their twenty-seven days of love and insisted on remaining formal and professional. After a short distance he stops, walks around to the front, and, with his black cane, which now has a glowing white tip, he leans over, parts the gauze, and methodically inserts the white tip into the babys vagina. I was careful to respect Daves privacy by not revealing his age or any extraneous material. I almost killed myself once and I believe I will succeed the next time. She had always lived in the privileged circle, outside the unpleasantness, the nasty inconveniences visited on ordinary peoplethose swarming masses of the tabloids and newscasts who are forever being robbed or maimed. But to lose a child is to lose the future: what is lost is no less than ones life projectwhat one lives for, how one projects oneself into the future, how one may hope to transcend death (indeed, ones child becomes ones immortality project). Without front windows you dont know where youre heading., How would that apply to you, by what youre facing ahead of you in your life now?, Retirement. She had been robbed. I had a sense he was talking about things he had never discussed before. But I dont want to. While there, I wrote the title story of Loves Executioner, as well as In Search of the Dreamer and If Rape Were Legal . His search was so frantic, his need so pressing, that he defeated himself. , and transcribed the notes I had made in my passport in the confessional for Three Unopened Letters. I wrote Two Smiles and Do Not Go Gentle in Hawaii and the remaining stories in Paris, most of them in a caf down the street from the Pantheon. Of course, I never explicitly expressed these sentiments. I, too, had never reread the letters. I was very excited by what Marge said. Theres something else thats important. What I find are two baby kittens who have not yet opened their eyes. In the light of that belief, the perils of overactivity seemed slender. Heart transplantwhat an inspired visual symbol for psychotherapy!] Dave, tell me some more about the letters and what they mean to you.. He had changed his mind about retirement and was now working part-time, but had switched fields and was doing more real estate development and managementwork that he found more interesting. A life sentence?. One day when he was alone, he tried it. What did I do? I was still in a very fragmented state of mind. . He learned that his eyes, like those of a newborn kitten, had been closed. I knew that Thelma would take the rest of the hour spinning obsessional webs. Remember, I need to be filled in I havent seen you in three years. Marvin simply took her hand. This section starts with a woman named Thelma who is severely depressed. Rereading Loves Executioner evoked a stream of delicious memories that began in 1987 when my youngest child left home for college, and my wife and I set off around the world for a years sabbatical. If any patients have ever been helped in that fashion, it wasnt because of the search and the finding of that false trail (a life never goes wrong because of a false trail; it goes wrong because the main trail is false). She had, as she put it, played a lot of fantasy games. In fact, I feel warm inside when I see her at the end of the day. And therefore, as John Donne wrote, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.. Mike had done a superb job: he had established a good rapport with Marie and had effectively achieved all of his consultation goals. I had long before decided not to take the baitnot to follow her into the hypnoidal statebut instead would call her out of it. Her eyes blazed as she continued to defile Marge who, she said, was incurable, hopeless, and pathetic. I think I understand your pain, and I have a lot of empathy for itIve experienced that kind of pain in the past myself. What do you mean by my entertaining you?, Betty, this is important, the most important stuff weve gotten into so far. Synopsis: In these compelling true-life tales of therapy, Irvin Yalom not only gives us a rare glimpse into But she wanted more and I couldnt give more. Is it a crime to keep on hoping? She had joined a womens therapy group and was working on her fear of attending social functions. Though there is something reassuring about an omniscient therapist who is always in control of every situation, there can be something powerfully engaging about a fumbling therapist, a therapist willing to flounder with the patient until they, together, stumble upon an enabling discovery. Take away this pain.. She had more to tell me. There had to be some other way. She could not sit for the session but three times stood and paced up and down. Precisely six months after her chance meeting with Matthew in Union Square, she left a goodbye note to her husband, Harry, who was out of town for the week, waited until his goodnight phone call from the East Coast, took the phone off the hook, swallowed all the tablets, and went to bed. I hoped that the establishment of an intimate bond with me might sufficiently attenuate her bond with Matthew so that she could pry herself loose from him. I didnt know yet, but I didnt think he was either in love or loving. It has been translated into twelve languages and is now in its fourth edition. I like the way he avoided diagnosis or categorization. Its four years now. No more jousting or crudity. You hear me? Love's Executioner offers a tragic, deeply felt vision of the human condition. If I kept the letters, they could act as a guy line: he couldnt simply float away and disappear. Im interested in the problem youre struggling with, and I think I can help you. Except in your memories., Elva was really crying now, and her stubby frame heaved with sobs for several minutes. Saul could barely restrain himself from interrupting and exclaiming, I dont care who was with him, how he died, where he was buried, who spoke at the memorial service! But they didnt help. The smile said, Yes, yes, Dr. C., I get the point. Though we try hard to go through life two by two or in groups, there are times, especially when death approaches, that the truththat we are born alone and must die alonebreaks through with chilling clarity. After that, there seemed to be no further work we could do, and we parted. Theyre jerks with no cojones, they sit around whimpering and saying nothing., Tell me what happened in the meeting from your perspective., Sarah talked about the rape, she tell you that?, And Martha did, too. My mother is a crazy, embittered lady, and I grow more like her every day. Youre punishing yourself for something youre doing now, something youre continuing to do this very moment. Arent you? I wanted another to bear witness to what I had been going through with Marie, someone to say to me, Shes tough. I met Elmer once when Marie brought him to my officean ill-mannered creature that growled and noisily licked his genitals during the entire hour. I was moved now when she told me how she cried herself to sleep. Id be this way with any therapist in the world. But, to my amazement, the session proceeded well. Naturally, I was concerned about her depression. The terms of the award were generous: a fifty-thousand-dollar stipend, no strings attached, and he was free to pursue his own research and to do as little or as much teaching and collaborative work as he chose. Maybe you let your personal feelings about dogs and fathers get out of hand!, God, youre persistent! How could it be otherwise? How honest? For a long time she had remained lifeless in therapy, and I had to do the job of two people. Never again did the family have a stable home. Saul did not fail to register this, and the salubrious effect of the letter was immediate and profound. Maybe youd like to get some caring from the group, but how can you get it when you come on so tough? He bragged that he was now the most supportive and sensitive member. I had seen Marvin for the first time only a few minutes earlier when I went out to my waiting room to fetch him. Even though she gave no evidence of it, I believe she was relieved. It seemed to me at the time that I had made the right recommendation. I eavesdropped all the timeeven after finishing the days writing, when I was strolling arm in arm with my wife on one of the endless buttery sand Balinese beaches. Instead, she . I reminded him now of that metaphor. Maybe someone will think of me in some freak moment just as I think of the extinct single-edged razor blade. It is one of our chief methods of denying death, and the part of our mind whose task it is to mollify death terror generates the irrational belief that we are invulnerablethat unpleasant things like aging and death may be the lot of others but not our lot, that we exist beyond law, beyond human and biological destiny. Itll show you some interesting connections between my migraines and my sex life.. His self- recriminations for not having acted with greater dispatch continued all week and included verbal self-assaults and physical abusepinching himself and pounding his head against the wall. The course and the exam is over. I just fear were heading toward trouble. Thats a question, not necessarily the question. Penny accepted my offer but said that money was a big problem for her. Brief Summary of Book: Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom. When Betty told me about going to a western bar where two rednecks sidled up behind her and mocked her by mooing like a cow, I felt outraged for her and told her so. I tried mightily to persuade her that it was a positive, not a negative, thing that had emerged in therapy. Could she feel the difference? Actually, I understated the case to you. It seemed to me that the important consideration was my relationship with my patientthe betweenness (one of Bubers endless store of awkward phrases) of Marge and me. Say some more about being next., Its like my father was no longer there to protect me. Given the choice of discussing the dream from the perspective of death or of sex, Marvin, with dispatch, chose the latter. I had spent too many hours in my youth silently hating my mothers vicious tongue. Nothing. Who wants temporary friendships?, The problem with that attitude is you end up with an unpeopled life. Learn how your comment data is processed. My wife is in front of me. These discussions released a flood of painful memories about a lifetime of rejection by males. Several minutes later when she finished that anecdote (complete with a full historical account of how she and her sister first developed the habit of telling long tangential stories), we were hopelessly removed from our starting place and I had been effectively distanced. I . I was reduced to prescribing Marie sedation sub rosa. Share to Twitter . What Ive been doing was exactly what Phyllis was doingdepending on magic.. Pop psychologists forever talk about responsibility assumption, but its all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. The patients are here for their therapy, not mine. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change. Yet had I spent hours with Mike and shared all this information, still I would not have adequately conveyed my experience of Marie. Was my piqued vanity causing me to be impatient with Saul? This specific goal, never to be attained, had powerful sexual connotations. whats the word? Marvin, it must not be easy for you to talk about intimate aspects of your life to a stranger. In part she cried because of her loss, but in large part because she considered her fathers life to have been such a tragedy: he never obtained the education he wanted (or that she wanted for him), and he died just before he retired and never enjoyed the years of leisure for which he had longed. Next, I was trying to get into the window of a room where her body might be. Alas, however, as Thelma was to teach me before this case was over, much wonderful therapy may be wasted on a patient! Now I was deeply concerned. Throughout this period of rapid weight loss, another extraordinary phenomenon was taking place. I did not want Mike to have a smooth and easy consultation: I wanted him to struggle as I had to struggle. But it was also important that he continue attending his therapy group. She answered an ad in the personal section of The Bay Guardian, a local newspaper. Yalom is especially famous for his work with existential theory. Even more important, meaning gives birth to values and, hence, to a code of behavior: thus the answer to why questions (Why do I live?) That was my ulterior motive in the consultation. I grew concerned with the amount of resistance in the group. Dana Flanigan. There was another vehicle with problems with the rear-vision mirror. And, even though we wont meet again, Ill still retain that change.. She did not seem surprised by my offer and immediately agreed to return next week at the same time. GET EXCLUSIVE OFFERS. Counter-transference - irrational feelings the therapist has toward the patient? So the fact that he could still love me, despite everything he knew, meant so much.. Just tell me when he died! Eventually Saul obtained the exact date of death and, through some fast arithmetic, established that Dr. K. must have died before the journal could have reached him, and thus could not have read Sauls article. What happened then? Weve only got seven more sessions, unless you reconsider your decision to stopThelma shook her head firmly. That was surprising since the writer seems so youthful, energetic, and often unrestrained and sophomoric. Go back to that moment, Penny, that moment when you should have let Chrissie go, that moment youve blotted from your memory. Her father made a fair living as a department-store delivery man but was, if her mothers account were to be trusted, a callous, joyless man who died of alcoholism when Penny was eight. If only she could stop working, do something for herself, finish high school, go to college full-time, study nonstop, and take off from there (there was the dream train taking off into the air!). You can read this before Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy PDF . Soon I received more warnings:Phyllis and I are having dinner in a ramshackle restaurant. Marvin paused. 2 These differing visions were later published as Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy (New York: Basic Books, 1974). She was incapable, or unwilling, to reveal herself in the immediate present that we two were sharing. I could have, for example, given more serious consideration to Thelmas twenty years of psychiatric care! It was very beautiful. It was apparent that both he and I had reservations. I encouraged her to plunge into her grief; I wanted her to explore and express every facet of it. Everything but the clothing had changedher carriage, her face, her self- assurance, her walk. It was not her doing: it was the work transfer, or the sterile California culture, or the absence of cultural events, or the jock social scene, or societys miserable attitude toward obese people. I ended the session thinking that, though she might fulfill her research commitment, there was little chance she would resume therapy. Thelma (Loves Executioner) knew that her love obsession was stripping her life of reality. I ended the session by establishing a contract. Historical recall is a futile exercise in getting the heads out of the way. She had given me the warning she wanted, and now she leaned back in her chair. Maybe I was wrong, but I think her eyes said, Are you satisfied now? I did not comment on her gaze. But Elmer loomed as a major barrier between Marie and her new life. Fraid youll judge me, I guess. Hes not anywhere. Had her sons always been difficult? It was time to face the truth: I had botched this case beyond belief, and I could not transfer blame to the patient, or her husband, or the human condition. She told my secretary that she was thirty-eight years old and divorced, that she had lost her daughter four years previously, and that it was urgent for her to be seen immediately. Think of your hand as a storehouse of numbness. Her head shook ever so slightly. . I hoped that when I was sixty-nine Id be sufficiently alive and vital to worry about getting it up.. She doesnt return your calls, shes been living with a man and now thats breaking up, shes making arrangements to move in with someone else. Heady stuff! His first association to the car, the curious black box on wheels, was to say, It is not a coffin. Noticing my raised eyebrows, he smiled and said, Was it one of you fellows who said you give yourself away by protesting too much?, The car has no front windows, Marvin. Now you really know that hes dead. Ill agree to do my best.. Without opinions, without impulses, without inclinations, they become parasites on the desires of others. So much longing. How could love ever choose to ravage that frail, tottering old body, or house itself in that shapeless polyester jogging suit? Your email address will not be published. It was at this time that I first began to suspect that for Betty there was no here there. Matthew was a charmer. Then he continued. What do you get out of it? Obviously he had rehearsed this material beforehand. Im all dried up, I cant cry any more. Yet her despair deepened. He had no genuine care for Thelma, for the flesh-and-blood Thelma! What had we done to drive Dave away? This time it was different, you went beyond words.. He was obviously depressedwith good reasonand spoke bitterly and wearily of his ten-year ordeal with cancer. The event is severe (his migraines are exceptionally disabling); it is unexpected (sex never presented any unusual problems previously); and it is sudden (it erupted in full force precisely six months ago). And suppose one of them mistakenly thought her experience was the same as his?. I finally said, Lets go, a good lay might be just the thing to get rid of some of this tension. Marvin paused. love's executioner two smiles summary. She was right; those were exactly my thoughts. But there was nothing funny about Sauls appearance. She left to go home. I soon learned that over the last twenty years she had been chronically depressed and in psychiatric treatment almost continuously. I think he saw them but, to spare me embarrassment, made no comment and hurried along to the next insight: I am not my shoes.. I didnt know her name and she didnt have much freedom, but we each knew how to find the other. I think Ive been staying just ahead of them for sixty-three years. She rose from her chair. It didnt really do it. Saul received a distinguished award (a 6 month fellowship at the Stockholm Research Institute and a $50,000 stipen with no strings attached). His death was not one of the dark, muffled, conspiratorial passings. Her major buts were that since Dr. Z. had started the job, heand only hereally knew what was going on in her mouth. No, she hated groups. Yet Ive often thought about that crime. Oh no, I want a hug! Getting into the spirit of it, Elva hoisted her purse onto my table, opened its jaws wide, and began to empty it. Ill help you talk. Another thing: if she was revealing more of herself to me than to anyone before, then what was the nature of her close relationships? So Saul, as he was wont to do in such situations, did nothing. In spite of her age, Thelma is physically fit and had always driven herself to my office. Whose death will make me truly dead? Whatever has happened since then can never erase what he gave me then.. From both my personal and my professional experience, I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. Why should he have a working body and Chrissie, who loved her little body, have hers eaten away by cancer? First, I was distracted by the envelopeits jagged edges were gouging my ass. Yalom viewed the smiles as irony. Start by lying here on the couch and concentrating on your breathing. That was an improvement on Dr. Farber., The second reason is that I could understand how you felt. God knows what was in those lettersprobably some irrelevant announcement, a scientific meeting or a new journal. You exist without my thinking or writing about you, just as I keep existing when you arent thinking of me. 10 , , . As a memorial to Chrissie, Penny had kept her room unchanged, with all her clothes and possessions in their familiar places. What of him? Had I stepped into a trap? After finishing this book, I turned to another interest that had long been percolating under the surfacethe role of existential concerns in human life and human distress. But watching Marvin change over the last several weeks has been impressive. Whenever I reread or even think about a book Ive read, I immediately visualize the place where I first read it. Imagine this scene: three to four hundred people, strangers to each other, are told to pair up and ask their partner one single question, What do you want? over and over and over again. For the first time I felt very close to Marvin. Aside from a seventeen-year-old son and daughterdizygotic twins, who lived with his ex-wife in South AmericaCarlos, at the age of thirty-nine, found himself virtually alone in the world. But be careful, he suspects you of playing a cat-and-mouse game.. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced it didnt fit.

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