Contents
“When I work with a patient, I don’t have a pre-planned plan, I don’t know where we are going with him. Each person is unique, and in a sense, a new therapy has to be created for each patient.” Books that combine the gift of a psychotherapist with the talent of a writer tell about how this therapy is born.
“We are all creations for a day, and other stories”
Irvin Yalom perfected a special genre – the story of an experienced psychotherapist about the meetings taking place in the office where he receives clients. In terms of the twist of intrigue, the unexpected twists and the dynamics of what is happening, these stories are quite comparable to the best examples of the detective genre. Only the intrigue here is special – it concerns events that take place not around us, but in the soul of the client, in his inner life.
Almost all of the stories in the book deal with the challenges of old age and death in one way or another. Not everyone admits that they care about these topics, however, as the author shows with several vivid examples, attitudes towards death can have a decisive influence on our lives, sometimes from a young age.
The ancients taught not to be afraid of death – when it comes, we will no longer be. But modern psychology clarifies: death often enters our lives long before it ends. And depending on how well we realize this and how ready we are to recognize its reality and inevitability, it either poisons us for many years, or, on the contrary, makes life brighter and deeper, making us feel more responsible for it. To be on the side of life means not to run away from the thought of death, but to accept it into life.
“Schopenhauer as medicine”
Terminally ill psychotherapist Julius Hertzfeld decides to find a former patient, Philip Slate, whom he once could not help. However, as it turns out, he was already “cured by Schopenhauer” … This is a dialogue of different views on death and its impact on our lives. The story about the sessions of the psychotherapeutic group alternates with the life story of Schopenhauer and reads like a fascinating detective story.
“The Spinoza Problem”
“This time the author focuses on the fate of Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, a modest spice seller from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the XNUMXth century, who from childhood discovered extraordinary mental abilities,” says existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. – The story of a man who could not stop thinking, and the price he paid for it, is one of the two lines of the novel. And the second line is the XNUMXth century, the life story of Alfred Rosenberg, one of the ideologists of the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews.
Two biographies on the pages of the novel are intertwined like a DNA double helix, connected by many bridges. Both characters are smart people. But how differently they use their minds! The novel captivates, plunging us into the thick spicy atmosphere of Yalom’s thoughts. There are two main themes that concern him.
One is the problem of unwillingness and inability to think, a great misfortune of our time. Young people don’t want to talk. And this is dangerous, because it is much easier to trust the authorities, who interpret smoothly and confidently for us. Yalom shows how a superficial attitude towards life inevitably leads to tragedies – both social and personal.
“Existential Psychotherapy”
“Documents, anecdotes, quotations, diary entries, abstracts of serious research, polemical notes for memory – all this is collected in a brilliant textbook, which at the same time is a popularization of the most serious problems,” Leonid Krol, editor-in-chief and publisher of a new psychotherapeutic series, describes this work in the preface.
Irvin Yalom focuses on the pain points of every person’s life: fear of death, loneliness, meaninglessness and freedom. What happens to us when we ourselves or others “press” them? With many specific examples, Yalom shows different reactions, from pathological to effective, and the transition paths from the first to the second.
Much of Existential Psychotherapy sounds like it has a direct bearing on our present here-and-now situation, even though more than 30 years have passed since the publication of this classic work. For example: “One of the most common dynamic defenses against awareness of responsibility is the creation of a mental world in which there is no experience of freedom, but existence under the rule of some irresistible force alien to the Ego (“not I”). It seems that this is similar to the state that many residents of Russia are experiencing today.
“Stationary group psychotherapy”
Existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom wrote a book to help those who work in a hospital environment and must fit into its rigid framework (this makes it difficult to practice a non-directive approach). This time we will not talk about psychological problems, but about diseases and the treatment group for those who suffer from them.
Yalom urges to focus not on the patient’s disease, but on the interaction of members of the psychotherapeutic group. And emphasizes the therapeutic significance of the principle of “here and now.”
“Gift of Psychotherapy”
Yalom called The Gift of Psychotherapy “an open letter to a new generation of psychiatrists and their patients.” And this is really an invaluable description of the laws of the psychotherapeutic process, which makes the book interesting for those who need to understand what psychotherapy is, how it works and what principles it is based on.
“Psychotherapeutic Stories”
“As a result of many years of working with patients, he has developed a collection of unique life stories. The temptation to cast this texture into an art form was strong, and Yalom took up writing, – writer Leonid Yuzefovich reflects. “Although his psychotherapeutic stories are mostly based on real events, they are still fiction. What, in my opinion, is its main drawback.
It would be unfair to reproach Yalom with a lack of skill: his prose is of decent quality. But an amazing thing: the less “artistic” in Irvin Yalom’s prose, the simpler and more specific the author’s style, the greater the emotional impact it produces.
The dry, almost documentary stories of Paula, Yaloma’s patient, who managed to prolong her life by helping others, or Irene, who came to a psychotherapist to prepare for her inevitable loss (her husband was diagnosed with a fatal diagnosis), act on the reader like an electric shock. And the graceful but fictional short stories – stylizations of cases from practice, of which there are also many in the collection – cause a smile at best. In other words, the truer the story, the better it is – at least in the case of Yalom.