Irvin Yalom is one of the best known, most widely read and Through his many books, which are accessible to ordinary readers as well as illuminating for psychotherapists, he has provided a guide for living in a perplexing world. A recent poll of American psychotherapists voted him to be one of the three most important living therapists, but the worldwide success of his books suggests that his prominence is international.
Rather than positioning himself as a representative of one of the hundreds of "schools" or approaches to psychotherapy. Yalom offers a message that goes to the heart of psychotherapy. Taking up the central existential concerns of human life, Yalom's work engages the problems of finding meaning in life and confronting death, concerns that had lain beyond the scope of psychiatry.
Writing in a literary style that reviewers have compared to Freud, Yalom details what actually happens in the intimate human encounter that is psychotherapy. Yalom does not shrink from exposing his own thoughts and feelings about what occurs; he, too is a vulnerable and searching human being. He makes his thinking about his patients, and his efforts to treat them, transparent, exposing his doubts, reservations and struggles as well as his insights.
He has written two textbook, two volumes of case history stories, three novels about therapy, a guide for therapists and one book of counsel for the masses confronting death. Across all of this work, he explores the limitless and complex possibilities of the healing inherent in genuine human connection and authentic awareness of the dilemmas of human existence.
Irvin D. Yalom: On Psychotherapy and the Human Condition traces the genesis and evolution of his thinking and presents some of the seminal ideas of his writings.
©
2007
Ruthellen Josselson Ph.D.
