What is your creed? What are you dreaming about? What would you like to pass on to your children? How does death help us live? These and many other questions were asked to psychotherapist Irvin Yalom by his Russian colleagues and readers.
1. Fear of death is the deepest fear and I have worked on it with many patients. They come to me for a different reason, but in the process of working, this fear is revealed deep inside. Working with the fear of death and with the awareness of our mortality is the way to awaken ourselves to life. In the film Yalom’s Cure, dir. Sabine Jiziger, 2014, I ask the patient to take a sheet of paper and draw a line on it from left to right: «The beginning of this line is your birth, the end of the line is your death.» Then I ask her to mark where she now thinks she is on that line. This is one way to help patients get used to the idea that this is the trajectory of life, life is finite and we want to live it in the best possible way.
2. I have worked a lot with patients who have lost a husband or wife, discussing with them how they cope with grief. Mourning lasts quite a long time, at least a year for women who have lost their husbands. You need to go through all the important dates of the year, through all the holidays: the first Christmas, the first Easter, the first birthday, the first wedding anniversary … And each date brings a new stream of memories. Usually, when we have gone around this circle twice, the grief is dulled.
3. When I was 14, my father had a very serious heart attack and we were afraid that he would die. In those years, doctors in America came home, and at three or four in the morning we were waiting in horror for the doctor. And when the doctor arrived, he patted my hair (then I had hair), stroked my head and said that everything would be all right, and that calmed me down a lot. He put a stethoscope in my ears and let me listen to my father’s heart saying, «Do you hear how well it beats? Everything will be fine». And it brought me such tremendous relief that I decided that I also wanted to comfort and reassure people. This is one of the stories that inspired me to decide to become a doctor.
- What is the meaning of life: a question that has no answer?
4. When I wrote the book “When Nietzsche Wept”, I read Nietzsche (books, letters) so much that at some point I began to speak in his voice, I became a translator of his ideas. And the text also became similar to the texts of Nietzsche: I began to use some of his words, began to build phrases like him. Now I could not write like that, it was a very powerful experience. I would like to title my memoirs with a quote from Nietzsche: “So that was life? Well, one more time!”1. In other words, «then let’s do it again.» I have no regrets about my life, I think I lived it as well as I could.
5. How would I define happiness? I feel quite happy now, at this stage of my life. I think for me happiness is directly related to the fact that I have little regret. I do a lot of work on regrets in therapy. I say to the patient: “How to live a life in which there will be no regrets? If I see you in a year, what new regrets will accumulate during this time in your life? My motto is to live without regrets. Realize yourself. Have loving relationships with others. Help other people, my patients, help my children. Making the world a better place. And to be the best writer I can be, but that’s part of self-realization.
1 F. Nietzsche «Thus Spoke Zarathustra», part III, «On Vision and Riddle» (Interbook, 1990).