What do You think about Love's Executioner And Other Tales Of Psychotherapy (2000)?
Your therapist is judging you. Sorry, it sucks. I know the idea is that they are objective observers looking out for your best interest rather than the often hypercritical, dismissive average human being with a capacity for conversational boredom and bad advice, but they're not. Especially not Dr. Yalom. Dr. Yalom hates fat people, he develops a sexual attraction to one of his patients' multiple personalities and encourages her to incorporate this split-self into her overarching self so she'll be a more entertaining patient (and won't be so pathetic in general), he successfully convinces a lady to euthanize her incontinent dog in order to bolster her sex life (jerk), he sizes his patients up as hopeless human beings, rambling about how annoying certain cases were for him (with details), describing each individual while "masking their identities" to "protect confidentiality" in an almost Deconstructing Harry, Leslie's "not" Lucy sort of way. He is walking a lawsuit razor's edge, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if one of these folks showed up at his house with a pistol. There's not a chance in hell that I'd go see him after reading this. I mean, he gets pretty catty, pretty "oh shut up, you whiny little bitch." He reaaally lays into that fat lady. He calls people names. He relays very personal, veryvery embarrassing information, and then scoffs at it. As off-putting as this is, though, it's also one of the things that make the book stick out. Honesty. One of the best scenes in the t.v. Hannibal is where Dr. Lecter's most annoying patient is relaying a fantasy alternate-reality where he saves Michael Jackson from death by being his best friend. The look on Hannibal's face and condescending tone of his voice is priceless: god, you are insufferable, blubbering excuse for a human being. Cannibal or not, shrinkydinks are just people at the end of the day, with the same penchant for annoyance as you or I, the same neuroses and triggers. Just people. (Your therapist is judging you.)To Dr. Yalom's credit, he is not asserting that his preconceived notions about his past patients were fair or accurate. This book is as much about the individual cases he has dealt with as about his growth as a psychiatrist, his separating of his own prejudices from the therapeutic process. In that sense, it is both intriguing, and kinda weirdly narcissistic. This book seems less for people with a passing interest in psychotherapy, and more for future head-docs who need to really understand that in their chosen field, they are as much up against their inherent selves as they are the problems their patients are seeking help facing. The cases are mostly what I'd assume to be pretty garden variety, but they still hold interest. Well, except for that last one where it was all about analyzing some dude's dreams because, snooze. I could fall asleep listening to my loved ones' dreams, let alone those of some average stranger. It wasn't a waste of time at all, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Mostly because of that thing with the dog.
—Paquita Maria Sanchez
There is no adventure more exciting, nothing so wonderful and frightening, and so fraught with danger, as delving into the mind of a human being. On that point alone this book is moving and emotional and funny as few works of fiction can be. When going on such a perilous journey into the true heart of darkness it behooves one to have an experienced and trustworthy guide. Dr. Irving Yalom knows the terrain and the beasts that lurk within... yet I would prefer having Fred C. Dobbs showing me the way in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. At least with Dobbs you know where you stand. Yalom is duplicitous and self aggrandizing, his writing screams contempt and distain for all but his most attractive female patients. At the same time his writing, when keeping to the trail of his client's problems is compelling and insightful. But it is Yalom's incessant and obnoxious inner monologue that ruins this book for me. Yalom is smarmy and lascivious to women he finds attractive, and dismissive and cruel in his descriptions of those who don't match his standards. He compartmentalizes men in the same way. When one women, far below his standards and the first of the ten case studies that make up the book says her last therapist called her on her "...shitty habits" Yalom tells us, “This phrase startled me. It didn’t fit with the rest of her presentation.” That's how I felt about him throughout the book. The insight he shows in the introduction of the book is waylaid time and time again by his incessant, obnoxious, and judgmental inner monologue. This, along with his ego and self-centeredness proved for a very unenjoyable read. If I want to read the musings of a horndog I'll stick with Errol Flynn's "My Wicked Wicked Ways" and be spared the hubris. But wait! What's this, an afterword! Ah, written 25 years after the book was first published. Now I'll see the wisdom of the man who wrote the introduction! Now, matured and distilled by age and experience, I'll see the wise reflections on his egotistic, insulting asides and comments of his freshman book. But what to my wondering eyes do appear? He actually envies and praises his writing. He makes a very backhanded apology for what he wrote about one of his clients but finds room to lionize himself even there. I don't care about his experience, reputation or certifications. "If it looks like a smuck, swims like a smuck, and quacks like a smuck, then it probably is a smuck."
—Tracy Sherman
I didnt enjoy this book as much as i hoped i would, for me Dr Yalom's prose was a bit too repetative and the points he was making were sledge hammered home at times. His style of setting up each tale from a defined outlook until arriving at the denoument with a change of perspective was a bit of an easy device to fall back on, but i understand why he did this as its an easy to follow plot narrative. I did however enjoy 3 of the tales The Wrong One Died, Three Unopened Letters and In Search of Dreams. But on the whole his conclusions about death and awareness of death as a means of grapsing life by the throat as it were have been covered before and have been more profoundly written about. He didnt add anything new for me or enlighten any aspect of it. On the plus side i did enjoy his honesty.During one story he includes a paragraph from Madame Bovary by Flaubert which is this "Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars".That is great writing Flaubert was a master at it, and that paragraph somes up the book for me, even though Dr Yalom uses this to sum up the emotionally and intellectually stunted people he treats it also sums up his writing in that he tried very hard to write a book that would melt the stars but ultimately for me he didnt succeed.
—David
