Existential Psychotherapy
Death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness treated as clinical material.
Once again Irvin Yalom has produced a volume of great meaning and timeliness. He has crystallized the essence of existential psychotherapy.
Yalom sets out a therapy built on four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. He treats each as a fixed condition of being human, argues that anxiety and its defenses grow out of the confrontation with these givens, and shows how they surface in symptoms a clinician meets every week. The framework sits apart from drive theory and from developmental reduction; the material of a session is read as an encounter with limits rather than as displaced history.
For the consulting room, the book supplies a working vocabulary and a stock of clinical illustration. Yalom pairs case accounts with philosophy, empirical study, and literature, and stays close to what a patient actually says. Chapters move from the concern itself to how it distorts personality and then to what treatment can do. First published in 1980 by Basic Books, it remains the reference statement of the existential approach for practitioners.
About the author
Irvin David Yalom
Irvin D. Yalom (born 1931) is an American existential psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Stanford University. He is a central figure in existential and interpersonal approaches to therapy, framing much clinical work around four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. His textbook The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy remains a standard training reference. He also wrote Existential Psychotherapy, the case studies of Love's Executioner, the teaching guide The Gift of Therapy, and novels including When Nietzsche Wept.
Details
- 1980
- English
- Basic Books
- Basic Books, 1980
- 544
- 9780465021475