Therapist and patient each wrote a private account of every session for a year, sealed them, and exchanged them only months later.
Summary
In the early 1970s Irvin Yalom made his patient an unusual offer. Ginny Elkin — a gifted, blocked young writer who could not pay a full fee — would write a candid summary of each session in place of payment. Yalom would write one too. Neither would read the other’s until both were handed, unopened, to his secretary; they would swap and read in batches, every few months.
What came back is the book’s whole point: two accounts of the same hour that frequently do not match. He records his interpretations, his impatience, his self-doubt. She records what actually reached her — rarely the clever intervention, often a stray warm remark he had forgotten making. The gap between the two columns is the most honest picture of therapy anyone has published.
Ginny’s foreword, written for the reissue, sets out the life she brought into the room: the monster shyness, the years put out to pasture, the fear that some horrible secret was being withheld from her by her own mind.
Why read it
For therapists it is a permanent corrective — proof that the moments patients keep are not the ones clinicians think they are giving. For general readers it is the least guarded account of what an hour of therapy is actually like, written before Yalom had any public reputation to protect.
Read Ginny’s foreword → · It pairs naturally with The Gift of Therapy and with the best books for new therapists. For where it falls in his career, see Irvin Yalom’s books in order.