Irvin D. Yalom - The Schopenhauer Cure, Introduction

"On Psychotherapy and the Human Condition is like Yalom himself: lucid, open, wise. It is a good story about a great storyteller. It chronicles the art and heart of psychotherapy."

— David Spiegel, M.D., Willson Professor & Associate Chair of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science Stanford University School of Medicine

Motivation for the Book by Ruthellen Josselson

I first encountered Irvin Yalom through his writing when I was a clinical psychology intern in 1970. The Massachusetts Mental Health Center, where I was in training, was an august bastion of psychoanalytic thought, but I walked through the halls clutching Yalom’s Theory and practice of group psychotherapy as ammunition with which to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of this institution. In those days, Yalom espoused a radical approach to psychotherapy which advocated the importance of human relationship between therapist and patient and located the action of psychotherapy in interpersonal learning. These were incendiary ideas in those times where people were still debating the implications of therapists saying “Good morning” to patients for fear that this would disrupt the transference of infantile experiences from patients onto therapists. The idea that therapists could create a very human and humane relationship with patients and be even more effective rather than less, that the focus of therapy could be in the nature of adult relationships that patients were creating with the people in their lives, that therapists could talk genuinely with patients about the shared dilemmas of the human condition – these were subversive ideas. The book was, of course, greeted with contempt by my professors and supervisors but it heralded a sea change in my generation who saw the wisdom it contained, and we modified our understanding of our work, slowly and over the years, accordingly. Today, when I read contemporary relational psychoanalysis, I see that psychoanalysis is only now, thirty years later, discovering what Yalom was teaching back then.

Indeed, The Theory and practice of group psychotherapy, now in its 5th edition, is probably the most widely read work in all of mental health practice. It has been translated into xx languages.

But Yalom’s influence has not been limited to psychotherapy practitioners. He has distilled his insight about the problems of existence into several novels that have had worldwide appeal to people outside the psychotherapy professions. Daily, he receives letters and emails from people in many countries detailing the ways in which reading his work has changed their lives.

Ten years after my first encounter with Yalom’s writing, in a period of despair in my own life, I read Existential Psychotherapy, his next most classic work. The wisdom in this book seemed to speak directly to me as I was grappling with questions about meaning and isolation. Reading what he had to say, it was as if he were in the room with me, offering me courage and hope. I experienced him, through reading, as a consoling friend, someone who had been to the same dark places and found some light. So I became one of the thousands who have written to him over the years, thanking him for writing what he did and telling him how much he had helped me. And, to my astonishment, he wrote back. (This was before email and the necessity of addressing envelopes and finding a stamp.) Thus began a friendship and colleagueship that has endured for 27 years.

Recognizing his uniqueness and specialness within the field of psychiatry and beyond, I set out, in this biographical project, to understand the roots of his particular form of wisdom – and his capacity to communicate it to others. What path has led him to such a nuanced and insightful understanding of the problems of being human?