Why do you like Irvin Yalom?

For me, this is some amazing consistency and stability of his own position. He is such a «long-playing», not just playing, champion. As Elkonin once said about Vygotsky, that he was not just an armchair scientist, but a person who constantly worked with people, with subjects, conducted research, and so on. It seems to me that Yalom, against the backdrop of the entire psychotherapeutic world, if we talk about his contemporaries, is the most “long-playing” champion. And his stability is striking both in personal, family relationships, and in his such extreme devotion to the psychotherapeutic field, to clients, to the entire psychotherapeutic context. It’s enchanting.

This is, first of all, individuality, personality, the ability to be a subject, non-attachment to one thing. Lack of doctrinaire aspiration. The opportunity to work in many systems of therapy, not positioning yourself as a multidisciplinary consultant, but showing that a person in therapy is, first of all, a person. This universality of presenting oneself and accepting another person as a person is the most important thing for me in Yalom.

Leonid Krol, psychologist, coach, business coach

When I was at a major scientific conference in America, I came to see his work. He seemed very interesting to me, after which I was the first in the country to translate and publish his book in my publishing house. He is interesting to me because he quickly moved away from the classics — he began to deal not with traditional psychiatry and psychoanalysis, but with living existential things — group psychotherapy, which is close to me. On the one hand, he is the author of what has already become classic works on group and existential therapy. On the other hand, he is a complete outsider from the point of view of the traditional American way. The American Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Association consider him such a strange person, in part even an outcast. And I’m interested in the fact that he made a classic out of outsiders.

I really like his book «The Executioner of Love», which won the Pulitzer Prize, on the one hand, he received a literary award, and at the same time remained a professional, having found such a genre of an interesting story about people.

Ksenia Kiseleva, editor-in-chief of Psychologies magazine

We are very pleased that this teleconference will take place and that we are participating in it as partners. In Psychologies magazine, we have repeatedly written about Irvin Yalom and his books, published several interviews with him. And it seems to us that this is one of those unique personalities that are of interest to absolutely everyone — both psychologists and non-psychologists. In addition, this is a person who has unconditional authority, which is very valuable and very rare. I hope that this teleconference will give everyone who came to it something of their own, important and necessary for their lives.