Gift of Therapy, The: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients (P.S.)

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Certainly helpful to therapists and patients, may also help any thoughtful person seeking to improve relationships with others and self-understanding. Booklist It is daunting to realize that I am entering a designated later era of life,” writes one of America’s leading psychotherapists, Irvin D. Yalom, at the beginning of The Gift of Therapy. Students have often asked why I don’t advocate training programs in existential psychotherapy. The reason is that I’ve never considered existential psychotherapy to be a discrete free-standing ideological school.Rather than attempt to develop existential psychotherapy curriculums, I believe it is preferable to supplement the education of all well-trained dynamic therapists by increasing their sensibility to existential issues. It is discussions about death which help us move from our everyday mode of existence (full of distractions with our material surroundings) to an ontologic mode of being (filled with wonderment and readiness for change).

Remove the Obstacles to Growth When I was finding my way as a young psychotherapy student, the most useful book I read was Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth. And the single most useful concept in that book was the notion that the human being has an inbuilt propensity toward self-realization. If obstacles are removed, Horney believed, the individual will develop into a mature, fully realized adult, just as an acorn will develop into an oak tree. Of course I knew, consciously, that he was entirely correct, but from deep within me a cry welled up: “What schedule? Who’son schedule. It is altogether right that you and others may be on schedule but certainly not I!” Yalom is very human with his clients, even in the places where many of us would pretend to greater perfection than we could ever have. He is generally described as an existential psychotherapist and asks his clients to create real relationships with him and others, face the finiteness of life, and accept responsibility for how they are living – “Even if ninety-nine percent of the bad things that happen to you is someone else’s fault, I want to look at the other one percent—the part that is your responsibility. We have to look at your role, even if it’s very limited, because that’s where I can be of most help” (pp. 139-140).of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients by Irvin D. Yalom

Anyone interested in psychotherapy or personal growth will rejoice at the publication of The Gift of Therapy, a masterwork from one of the most accomplished psychological thinkers of our day. As an award-winning author of both nonfiction and fiction and a psychiatrist in practice for 35 years, Yalom imparts his unique wisdom in this remarkable guidebook for successful therapy.The two healers never met, and they worked as rivals for many years until Joseph grew spiritually ill, fell into dark despair, and was assailed with ideas of self-destruction. Unable to heal himself with his own therapeutic methods, he set out on a journey to the south to seek help from Dion. An economically driven health-care system,” he writes, “mandates a radical modification in psychological treatment, and psychotherapy is now obliged to be streamlined – that is, above all, inexpensive and, perforce, brief, superficial, and insubstantial.”