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Chris Coffman's Reviews > Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
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A friend gave me this book a few days ago. My friend is very well-educated, has lived all over the world, and has experienced more than most people. When he gave me the book, he said to me, "This book reflects my vision of the world".
How could I help but be intrigued?
Opening the book, he then read the following passage from the Preface: "Four givens are particularly relevant for psycho-therapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life."
When I recently read the novel LIFE AND FATE, which takes its characters through the massive Battle of Stalingrad and Stalin's Great Terror, I couldn't help thinking how poor in material for great novels is the typical life of a prosperous, well-educated professional living today in the OECD. Compared to the intensity of the experiences described in LIFE AND FATE, even wonderful writers like Ian McEwan are boring.
But, as the Preface accurately foreshadows, there is nothing boring about LOVE'S EXECUTIONER, because my friend is right-- the four issues described in the Preface do indeed define the human condition.
In a sense, LOVE'S EXECUTIONER offers, in the broadest possible sense, the ancient wisdom found in Psalms 90: "Teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." Dr. Yalom is quite frank about what he considers the "magical" thinking and "delusion" involved in religious belief, however. Aside from his commitment to unflinchingly acknowledge the truths he describes in his Preface (and therefore, "Teach us to number our days"), Dr. Yalom's faith resides in the healing potential of the relationship between the therapist and the patient. This could be generalised to incorporate the Second Commandment to "Love thy neighbour as thyself" with its emphasis on human relationships and mutual openness, but one senses that Dr. Yalom would acknowledge this point, at best, with a sardonic shrug--"Whatever gets you through the night."
Yalom is his own main character, and LOVE'S EXECUTIONER is a dramatic account of how the "character" Dr. Yalom undergoes dramatic encounters with deeply troubled characters not unlike the way the "character" Dante encounters vividly depicted souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
Like Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, LOVE'S EXECUTIONER is episodic. The ten tales all vary and will affect individual reader's differently. For some reason, I found the case of the morbidly obsese woman deeply moving, while being most unsettled by the cases of the elderly neurobiologist and the elderly accountant--perhaps because they were the patients most similar to me.
(REVIEW CONT'D as COMMENT #1)
How could I help but be intrigued?
Opening the book, he then read the following passage from the Preface: "Four givens are particularly relevant for psycho-therapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life."
When I recently read the novel LIFE AND FATE, which takes its characters through the massive Battle of Stalingrad and Stalin's Great Terror, I couldn't help thinking how poor in material for great novels is the typical life of a prosperous, well-educated professional living today in the OECD. Compared to the intensity of the experiences described in LIFE AND FATE, even wonderful writers like Ian McEwan are boring.
But, as the Preface accurately foreshadows, there is nothing boring about LOVE'S EXECUTIONER, because my friend is right-- the four issues described in the Preface do indeed define the human condition.
In a sense, LOVE'S EXECUTIONER offers, in the broadest possible sense, the ancient wisdom found in Psalms 90: "Teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." Dr. Yalom is quite frank about what he considers the "magical" thinking and "delusion" involved in religious belief, however. Aside from his commitment to unflinchingly acknowledge the truths he describes in his Preface (and therefore, "Teach us to number our days"), Dr. Yalom's faith resides in the healing potential of the relationship between the therapist and the patient. This could be generalised to incorporate the Second Commandment to "Love thy neighbour as thyself" with its emphasis on human relationships and mutual openness, but one senses that Dr. Yalom would acknowledge this point, at best, with a sardonic shrug--"Whatever gets you through the night."
Yalom is his own main character, and LOVE'S EXECUTIONER is a dramatic account of how the "character" Dr. Yalom undergoes dramatic encounters with deeply troubled characters not unlike the way the "character" Dante encounters vividly depicted souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
Like Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, LOVE'S EXECUTIONER is episodic. The ten tales all vary and will affect individual reader's differently. For some reason, I found the case of the morbidly obsese woman deeply moving, while being most unsettled by the cases of the elderly neurobiologist and the elderly accountant--perhaps because they were the patients most similar to me.
(REVIEW CONT'D as COMMENT #1)
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Started Reading
July 1, 2007
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Finished Reading
July 21, 2007
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I highlighted that same sentence in the Prologue and from henceforth, could not tear myself from reading the rest of the book. I've read some of Yalom's other works and am always in marvel at his courageous approach to helping his patients with the existential dilemma.
Hi Liz, the summary of the human condition offered by the Classical world was similar to that striking sentence of Yalom's: In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recedimus (How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing) and in the modern era how many of us have embraced the bleak first line of Nabokov's "memoir" SPEAK, MEMORY: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and what is our existence but a brief crack between two eternities of darkness?" Personally, I have a different view of the human condition, but I respect those like Yalom who rigorously adhere to a view of the world that is without hope, and yet attempt to find dignity and joy in life.
Others will relate to other patients, but what Yalom consistently does in each of these stories is to bring out the fascinating richness and complexity of human beings, the many layers and conflicting motivations and emotions, and by doing so he fully justifies the intense struggles and engagement of "Dr. Yalom", the character, in his efforts to diagnose and heal his patients, all of whom, whether likable or not, seem intensely alive in the pages of LOVE'S EXECUTIONER.
This not to say that Yalom is a genius of the order of Dante, of course, but these tales have an intensity that can be compared to the effect of great literature. Dr. Yalom derives his authority, not from artistic genius (although he is a skillful and sophisticated writer) but from the fact that he is intimately familiar with terrain that frightens and intimidates most of us: severe psychological distress, grief, suicidal feelings, depression, unresolvable anxiety. Like Dr. Szczeklik, the author of CATHARSIS, Dr. Yalom maintains his poise under circumstances in which most of us would be acutely uncomfortable, and probably ineffectual. The fact that these two doctors can calmly navigate the ground of life and death, of insanity and inner darkness, sets them apart and makes their books compelling.