The Gift of Therapy
Eighty five short lessons on the craft of therapy, written by an existential psychiatrist looking back over a working lifetime.
Instead I prefer to think of my patients and myself as fellow travelers, a term that abolishes distinctions between 'them' (the afflicted) and 'us' (the healers).
Yalom sets out eighty five short chapters, each a single tip drawn from more than three decades of clinical practice, without the scaffolding of a formal theory. The chapters move across the mechanics of a session: how to open the hour, when self-disclosure helps and when it costs, how to keep the work in the here and now, how to use a patient's dreams, how to handle the therapist's own reactions. The organising claim is that the relationship itself, rather than any technique laid over it, does the therapeutic work.
Behind the advice runs Yalom's existential frame, in which mortality, freedom, isolation, and the search for meaning are the material patients bring, whether or not they name them. He writes for the working clinician who wants specific moves for the consulting room, drawing on interpersonal and existential thought without asking the reader to adopt a single school. Published in 2002, it collects the habits of a long career into a form a therapist can read in fragments between sessions.
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
- 2002
- HarperCollins
- HarperCollins, Harper Perennial paperback, 2002
- 320
- 9780061719615