I told him I would come because I was the only one who could help, but as I started down into the darkness, the stairwell grew more and more narrow and the flimsy banister came off in my hands. Id like you to check in on your internal state every four hours, when you are awake, and jot down your observations. I never had one till six months ago!, And the link between sex and depression?. I was so preoccupied with these thoughts and with plans for our future work that I missed the first part of Thelmas next commentbut I heard the ending of the sentence all too clearly. Amazon.com: Love's Executioner: 9780465020119: Yalom, Irvin D.: Books As the reader you are not quite sure why Thelma, at this stage, has decided to do this. I was glad to run into Thelmainto you, Thelma, turning to her. It was no big deal., I notice, too, that whenever I try to move closer to you, you let me know you dont need anything., Im here for help. It didnt fit with the rest of her presentation. . And I know just where Id start!. I cant talk to Harry because Ive got only two things on my mindMatthew and suicideand both topics are off limits. These are true stories, but I have had to make many changes to protect the identity of the patients. Yet the blade is not extinct. He had no sense of familiarity with the dream and related to it as though it were some alien text. Elva had been traumatized and now-suffered from commonplace post- traumatic stress. Phyllis and I have already discussed it, and she is ready to talk to you.. My real reasons for taking on Thelma lay elsewhere: first, I was fascinated by encountering a love obsession at once deeply rooted and in a vulnerable, exposed state, and I was not to be swayed from digging it out and investigating it; second, I was afflicted by what I now recognize as hubrisI belived that I could help any patient, that no one was beyond my skills. Though she, Mike, and I shared an hour, each of us had a vastly different, and unpredictable, experience. No, behavioral therapy was the best choice. Then Id think about how to slice my wrists. Has an emphasis on oedipal anxiety which resulted in the sexual act being welded to primitive catastrophic anxiety. So you never really belonged anywhere, never were truly at home. I think of what you told me about your bed in your aunts housethat cot youd unfold every night in the living room., The last to sleep, the first to rise. Ive thought it before but never said it out loud., She put her head down, almost into her lap. How could Jeff forget when Penny papered the walls with Chrissies picture, slept on her bed, turned her room into a memorial? If she, at the age of sixteen, had kept her two children, she would have been nailed down to the same life her mother had. My God, shes right! I was about to ask about Harry being good at giving things up, but Thelma raced on. Though I could write a clinical article about Marge or tell colleagues about the course of therapy, I could never really convey the essence of my experience with her. Thus, though Dave could resist assuming responsibility for his marital problems, he could not resist the immediate data he himself was generating in group therapy: that is, his secretive, teasing, and elusive behavior was activating the other group members to respond to him much as his wife did at home. . I knew that Thelma would take the rest of the hour spinning obsessional webs. We stayed on such a formal level that our use of first names seemed ungainly. Perhaps, but Penny had a better explanation for the sadness in both the blackout and the dreams. The judges would be thrown into disarray. I felt sorry for the discomfort he experienced in each course of therapy. Ever since I hung up the phone, Ive been kicking myself for chickening out and not having asked Matthew the two really important questions. She and he had increasingly diverging views about religion, and she could not follow his conversion into a fundamentalist Christian sect. I had persuaded him, with difficulty, that a sexual approach to Sarah would be both futile and unseemly. I wasnt about to give a guarantee that I would never callbut fortunately she didnt ask for that. Of course, I have my rationalizations. Fraid youll judge me, I guess. The mother book fueling the ideas for the stories was Existential Psychotherapy. Swept along by hubris and by my curiosity, I had disregarded twenty years of evidence at the outset that Thelma was a poor candidate for psychotherapy, and had subjected her to a painful confrontation which, in retrospect, had little likelihood of success. What I find are two baby kittens who have not yet opened their eyes. Noting that we still had fifteen minutes left, I decided to do some work on another front. Our discussion about the smiles opened up such rich material for therapy that I put aside my musings about differing views of reality and helped Marie explore her self-contempt for the way she had compromised herself with Dr. Z. Ive been thinking a lot about telling you. But he had overstepped himself. All of my arguments met a similar fate. Somewhere in there, maybe a subtitle (but it couldnt be, because I cant spell it) was the word evolution there was a strong feeling about the word. . Over the years Ive always called him whenever Ive changed therapists., But I thought you did not discuss him with all these therapists., I didnt. When the two museums were under construction (long after Flauberts death), each of the curators went, separately, to the municipal museum with a copy of the receipt in hand, and asked for Flauberts parrot for his museum. Painful thoughts or memories may emerge which will temporarily make you more uncomfortable than you are right now.. I cringed when I reflected on all the other obese women whom I had related to in an intolerant fashion. Soon the pounds flowed off in rivuletstwo, three, four, sometimes five pounds a week. Such states dont last long: the unbonded obsessional, like nascent oxygen, quickly melds with some mental image or idea. The message:I realize now that I have not done what I might have done with my life. I picked up my mail and walked back to the house, flipping through the usual batch of junk advertisements, charity requests. I suggested that we meet six times and then evaluate whether treatment seemed worthwhile. I was moved now when she told me how she cried herself to sleep. The mother of God will protect me.. My week has been a horror, sheer hell! I was musing on the tone of this final commentnot quite sardonic, not quite coquettishwhen Thelma got up, telling me on her way out that she would schedule the next hour with my secretary. Marge is a creep. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. . Thelmas eyes were fixed on me. He wanted time to think about it during the week. She, I, anyone, can be struck down at any time. It was so hard to talk about this, she said, because she was so ashamed of being ashamed of her own father. No, it wasnt the intrusion or even the inconvenience of the calls I hated: it was how we talked. Some of the topics shook me up, they apply more to me than to him., For example, regret. Thats the most terrible part about dyingyou have to do it alone., Another member: Even so, even though youre alone in your boat, its always comforting to see the lights of the other boats bobbing nearby.. But watching Marvin change over the last several weeks has been impressive. I say that often to students. We sat in silence together. During a long conversation about his years fellowship, I mentioned that I once had a friend, Saul, who also had a rewarding stay there. It was everything else, the silent footsteps, the blackness, the sense of deep foreboding. The most extreme, and dramatic, form of splitting, the multiple personality, is relatively rare (though growing more widely recognized); when it does occur, the therapist may be faced, as was I in the treatment of Marge (Therapeutic Monogamy), with the bewildering dilemma of which personality to cherish. As I turned the pages of Three Unopened Letters, Loves Executioner, The Wrong One Died, among other stories, I felt myself burning with delicious curiosity. I could get long winded here (in fact my colleagues and I half joked about writing a response to this book called Yaloms Executioner in which we deconstruct everything wrong with it) but I wont. Carlos, as I recall, went off on a tangent of associations about the identity of the female auto rental clerk. How is it possible for retirement not to evoke deep feelings about the passage and passing of life, about the meaning and significance of ones entire life project? Our next session started uneventfully. Squashed flat on the Safeway parking lot and then to be washed away by a fire hose. Again and again, I asked the same question: Who, what, are you grieving for?, Betty responded, I think Im grieving for love. To make matters worse, he had written an important article on a related subject that was immediately accepted for publication. One evening in the midst of a marital dispute, she uncharacteristically drank too much, went out of control, threw plates against the wall, and narrowly missed her husband with a lemon pie. Each curator was escorted into a large stuffed-animal room containing at least fifty virtually identical stuffed parrots! Soon he reported a series of dreams with explicit material about aging and death. Though these tales of psychotherapy abound with the words patient and therapist, do not be misled by such terms: these are everyman, everywoman stories. I once saw a newspaper cartoon of a pudgy lost little man saying, Suddenly, one day in your forties or fifties, everything becomes clear. But if you had just answered my question the way I first put it, I would have gotten the answer to the question you just asked., You mean you would have learned my opinion about how psychiatry, in general, feels about the treatment of the average elderly patient, and then you would have assumed that that was the way I felt about treating you., But thats so roundabout. He wants her to have a loving relationship with a man and have a loving family. I thought thats the way I, too, will pass. He knows now that death is waiting for him. I always listen carefully to first statements. Moreover, eight years of Thelmas taped phone messages had to be getting to him, and I was confident that he, too, longed for release. There is your Harry, and there is my Sonia.. In fact, she had not accepted that Chrissie was dead even now, four years later. It was my idea to invite Matthew, my idea to ask him the questions you did. I thought I saw her nod her head. It was a slide of a mans head. Perhaps it was his love for his children or the plaintive way he grasped my hand with both of his when he was leaving my office. However I may deplore those feelings, I can take pride in the denouement expressed in the storys final words: I could get my arms all the way around her.. I thought of tearing that chart to shreds and enjoying every moment of it. She followed my advice to have a direct confrontation; and when the tenant refused to alter her cooking habits, Marie scarcely hesitated to ask the woman to move. Think of process as opposed to content. One patient cried, I want my dead darling daughter back, as she neglected her two living sons. Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. Every migraine of the last four months was preceded within twenty-four hours by a sexual failure.. And another declared, I want to be young forever, as she, an old woman, could not relinquish her obsessive love for a man thirty-five years younger. And that other Marge? She had not returned my smile when I greeted her in the waiting room, and followed a step or two behind me as I escorted her down the hall. For example, why did Dave refuse to tell his wife that he was in therapy? By that criterion, Saul was psychotic. Her stutter always annoyed me. Now shes fading. This was the time, I thought, to open it wide, to debride it, and to allow it to heal straight and true. Marge returned to the topic of her lack of success and how much more accomplished was her thirty-year-old boss. The lawsuit dragged on for three years, and she settled for a disappointingly small sum. And another pleaded, I want the parents, the childhood I never had, as he agonized over three letters he could not bring himself to open. Though she had reassured me that she would be all right, I had been greatly concerned about her. He also resisted my attempts to engage him more personally and directly: for example, when I had asked him about his wound or pointed out that he ignored any of my attempts to get closer to him. I thought we had finally broken through the impenetrable barrier: that finally Marvin and the dreamer had fused and spoken with one voice. Alas, he, too, was farsighted, and more of our first minutes together were consumed by his switching to his reading glasses. Heres what I want you to do. My general comment may have been a guess about the whole field and not an expression of my personal feelings about you. Theresa, I feel for you and your boyfriend, but I dont know how to help. Betty must have felt that the obstructions to losing weight had been sufficiently removed because she gave unmistakable evidence that a major campaign was about to be launched. Everything but the clothing had changedher carriage, her face, her self- assurance, her walk. Although Penny did not ask for more time, it was obvious we had to meet again. Another insisted, I want to fuck every woman I see, as his lymphatic cancer invaded the crawl spaces of his body. But Thelma never found this thesis persuasivewith, I now think, good reason. I was lying in bed still recovering from my migraine. Although I think. She didnt know what would happen to her if she didnt have her weekly fix. It seemed to me she was still resisting closeness by referring to a fix rather than to me, and I gradually confronted her on that point. The culmination of master psychiatrist Dr. Irvin D. Yalom's more than 35 years in clinical practice, The Gift of Therapy is a remarkable and essential guidebook that illustrates through real case studies how patients and therapists alike can get the most out of therapy. Does Yalom believe that we can relate to people if we can vividly and reliably categorize them? You showed up time and time again in my office waiting room. About eleven years before, she began treatment with Matthew, a young, handsome psychology intern, and met weekly with him for eight months at the clinic and continued to see him in his private practice for another year. Dan, one of my patients, attended a meditation retreat where he engaged in treposa, a meditation procedure in which two people hold hands for several minutes, lock gazes, meditate deeply upon one another, and then repeat the process with new partners. If Saul had already sent the money to the Stockholm Institute, should I not advise them to return the gift? But when I focused on her depression, she presented a persuasive case that depression was an appropriate response to her life situation. Love's executioner | Ekitablarlar I was excited for him. PSYC 347. Reading Love's Executioner, you are given an inside view of someone who has made a successful career at trying to understand and categorize something that cannot ever be understood or explained: the human mind. His voice cracked. No one in her life now, not even her husband, knew about her past, about either her twins or her high school reputationthat, too, was something she had been trying to escape. I was afraid shed be very embarrassed about this later, and I didnt want to make it worse by any hint of criticism. Thelmas life was saved only by heroic medical efforts. It would be a delicate procedureafter all, people change, and love never staysbut still, perhaps, it is within the realm of possibility. According to her mother (Betty told me she had no recollection of this), she was reassured by her parents that only old people die, but then she pestered them for weeks by chanting she didnt want to grow old and by repeatedly asking her parents how old they were. It was, however, also true that my future patients would benefit from whatever growth I could attain. He had so much caring, so much loving. You shake your head no almost instantaneously. Its an old friend. Penny had said she was no longer feeling a connection with Chrissie in her cemetery visits (now down to two or three a week). Characters like that do not come along often in life. Just as he once had attempted to buy his way into his family, he was now trying to buy a secure seat at the table of Dr. K. and the Stockholm Institute. I gave her everything she wanted. Earlier you said you can find out (or at least make a good guess about) the answer to a personal question by asking an impersonal one. I liked the way you admitted you didnt know and then invited me to explore it together with you.. She stopped and sank into her chair. Marvin started to read the dream in such a mechanical manner that I stopped him and employed the old Fritz Perls device of asking him to begin again and to describe the dream in the present tense, as though he were experiencing it right now. I met with Phyllis and Marvin as a couple for several more sessions. Brent, sixteen, was in juvenile hall detention for participating in a burglary; Jim, nineteen, was a heavy drug user. The only remaining approach I could think of involved that one burst of emotion I had seen in our first sessionthe tactic seemed so contrived and so simplistic that I could not possibly have predicted the astonishing result it would produce. Well thats different from being asked to throw a switch. She had ignored my distinction between forgetting and letting go, but I let it pass. It was not that Marie could not be decisive. In one dream she and he wore identification badges and kept switching them with each other. In that situation, Marie had acted with alacrity. Now she saw locks, doors, burglar alarms, and telephones. Betty made it clear immediately that she hoped therapy would help her get to the point where she could seriously consider weight reduction, but she was a long way from that at this time. And when you began, the two of us were in agreement that you needed to work on ways of developing relationships. Love's Executioner: Case Presentation by Amanda McBride Why keep them at all?, Dave looked at me incredulously. Otto Rank described this life stance with a wonderful phrase: Refusing the loan of life in order to avoid the debt of death.. Summary. Ill take care of the rest. In effect, that was what happened. The message I believed the dreamer was sending me:I try to look back but my vision fails. If we look at it that way, we can make more sense of the powerful fear the dream carried. After I was discharged I immediately flew back to San Francisco, and it was the following day that I met Thelma, sheerly by chance, in Union Square. Or is it that you want me to visit you at home and help open them there? I suspected I would have cause to regret this crude pressure, but I couldnt stop myself. He was the one who knew the most about what was happening in her face and mouth. And that was that! Thelma turned her face directly toward me for the first time and added, in a resigned, weary voice, Ive never seen him again. The others werent as good, very morbid.. I understood that as a signalan uncanny oneto myself from myself that the story I was writing was coming to an end, with another on the way. Whenever Dan discussed such experiences, I had to constrain my skepticism and rationalism: Spiritual linkage, indeed! The Four Gives of Life I was entirely satisfied with my words: I had covered myself and had been clear enough to prevent any misunderstandings. Thats when I will be truly deadwhen I exist in no ones memory. love's executioner two smiles summary. If she punished him in any manner, Elmer retaliated by hosing down carpets in other rooms. . Professionally, he regarded it as a successful consultation. Like I shouldnt have been saying these things about Phyllis. The preparation was finally complete, and the real therapy could now begin. And so Marie and Dr. Z. were locked in a complex dance, whose steps included a spurned surgeon, a million-dollar lawsuit, a broken jaw, several fractured teeth, and brushed breasts. Love's Executioner Study Guide - PSYC 220 Flashcards | Quizlet Consequently, Chrissie was forced to be alone with her thoughts. These words were said quickly, but the cadence slowed for the last sentence. But there are no more slicing razor bladesjust those safe injectable ones. Remember that I said that each of us establishes in the group the same kind of social world we have in our real life?, Now, look whats happening to you in the group! Chapter 5 I Never Thought It Would Happen to Me, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, (with Morton A. Lieberman and Matthew B. Thats exactly why I would never, not in a hundred years, dream that he would treat me like this. Decisions are difficult for many reasons, some reaching down into the very socket of being. Having already overscheduled himself with teaching and consultation commitments to younger colleagues, he was forced to work much of the night preparing for his sessions with Dr. K. At the end of his six months, the project was still unfinished, but Saul assured Dr. K. he would complete it and see it published in a leading journal. So why? . Unless I could protect and remain faithful to that relationship, any hope of therapy was lost. Just keep noticing that the air entering your nostrils always feels cooler than the air leaving your nostrils. She had never before talked openly about these issues: perhaps the sheer catharsis helped; perhaps it was useful for her to recognize the magical nature of her thinking; perhaps some of her horrifying thoughts were simply desensitized by talking about them in the daylight in a calm, rational manner. My Carlos? But be forewarned, individual treatment will most likely require many months, even a year or longer, and it will not be a rose garden. Marvin felt better after our session and was highly optimistic until, a few days later, a curious event occurred. Though Elmer was really Charless dog, and though Marie had an aversion to dogs, she had gradually grown affectionate toward Elmer, who for years had slept in her bed. Put yourself in Ruths placetwenty-three years old, two small children, been through a hard time, presumably looking for some strong support for herself and her kids, having only a laymans knowledge and fear of cancerdo you represent the kind of security and support shes looking for? I suggested several options: to see the two of them myself; to refer them to someone else; or to refer Phyllis to a female therapist for a couple of sessions and then for the four of usPhyllis, Marvin, I, and her therapistto meet in conjoint sessions. What for? We were now beginning the fifth month; and, though Thelma assured me she would honor her commitment, she made it clear that she would not be willing to continue longer than six months. You can either move up or down.. Marge, Me said, should write her autobiography and entitle it (here she began to chuckle) Born to Be Pathetic.. Im only asking for time, Saul. What had happened to his cravings for closeness? He reassured Phyllis that travel was important to him, but not so important that he couldnt wait until she was ready. I encouraged her to plunge into her grief; I wanted her to explore and express every facet of it. She stopped. My idea that keeping the letters would make it harder for Dave to terminate therapy was, I realized quickly, nonsense. Her suicidality, extremely high at the onset, was reduced to the point where she may no longer be considered a suicidal risk. Our termination session was a high-spirited graduationit lacked only a brass band accompanying his triumphant march out into the world. His uncle, a coarse, brusque man whom Saul had rarely mentioned, procured him a spot near a subway entrance and dropped him off every morning at five-thirty and retrieved him three hours later to deposit him at schoolno matter that Saul was invariably late by ten or fifteen minutes and began every school day with a reprimand. Upon first meeting Elva eight months before, I could find little to love in her. I had never thought to inquire. Specialness is the belief that one is invulnerable, inviolablebeyond the ordinary laws of human biology and destiny. Though Betty was very frightened and initially resisted my suggestion, she gamely agreed and entered a therapy group led by two psychiatric residents. Getting into the spirit of it, Elva hoisted her purse onto my table, opened its jaws wide, and began to empty it. Their chest wall vanished, just melted away leaving a square blue-red cavity with rib-bar walls and, in the center, a liver-colored glistening heart thumping away. He opened them suddenly and checked with me: You asked for this. My whole lifes gone by feeling it was too late. I had expected that Phyllis would accompany him, but he arrived alone, looking anxious and haggard. I feel sorry for the mouse and go outside to it. We shook hands, and as he left my office I became aware that I was glad to see him go. Love's Executioner Paperback - June 5, 2012 by Irvin D. Yalom (Author) 1,521 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle $12.99 Read with Our Free App Audiobook $0.00 Free with your Audible trial Paperback $12.99 61 Used from $5.64 31 New from $12.71 3 Collectible from $11.89 MP3 CD $12.95 1 New from $12.95 A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER In fact, I stopped reading it halfway through because it was so upsetting, and Im someone who hates leaving things unfinished. I hand in my blue book and remember that I havent answered the last question. Marvin assured me that she was very set in her ways. His eyes pleaded with me: I cant go on. The scope and expansiveness of his badness was, of course, evidence of an ominous grandiosity which, in turn, overlay a deeper sense of worthlessness and insignificance. I had written all my previous books with pencil and paper with the help of my Stanford secretary, who typed them out. He does so in a non-morbid way. That would not be uncharacteristic of him. Once again, Dr. K. gave guarded assent. Time and again I had hit against a concrete wall. But she never smoked another cigarette. I had strongly suspected from the beginning that he would likely drop out of the group. Though we try hard to go through life two by two or in groups, there are times, especially when death approaches, that the truththat we are born alone and must die alonebreaks through with chilling clarity. I want to sink into the embrace of some warm daydream. Ive called him countless times since and left messages on his tape machine. (Maybe that would be sufficient. In the relatively short period of six months, he had made enormous discoveries. She had been highly promiscuous in her teens; in fact, she had been the school po white slut (her term), and the father could have been any of ten boys. Eventually time erodes the memory of the event, and victims gradually return to their prior, trusting state. Go ahead. At first he returned some of my calls, but then I stopped hearing from him at all. At first it seemed that these flashbacks, as well as the accompanying extreme mood swings, were chaotic, random occurrences; but after several weeks, Betty realized that they were following a coherent pattern: as she lost weight she re-experienced the major traumatic or unresolved events of her life that had occurred when she was at a particular weight. A well-meaning but blustering and insensitive student (later, mercifully, to become an orthopedic surgeon) was conducting an interview before his classmates and attempting to use the early Rogerian technique of coaxing the patient along by repeating the patients words, usually the last word of the statement.