Love's Executioner

& Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Contributors

By Irvin D. Yalom

On Sale
Jun 5, 2012
Page Count
312 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465020119

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

An “utterly absorbing” collection of ten classic tales from the therapist’s chair by renowned psychiatrist and best-selling author Irvin D. Yalom (Newsday)

Why was Saul tormented by three unopened letters from Stockholm? What made Thelma spend her whole life raking over a long-past love affair? How did Carlos’s macho fantasies help him deal with terminal cancer?

In this engrossing book, Irvin Yalom gives detailed and deeply affecting accounts of his work with these and seven other patients. Deep down, all of them were suffering from the basic human anxieties—isolation, fear of death or freedom, a sense of the meaninglessness of life—that none of us can escape completely. And yet, as the case histories make touchingly clear, it is only by facing such anxieties head on that we can hope to come to terms with them and develop. Throughout, Dr. Yalom remains refreshingly frank about his own errors and prejudices; his book provides a rare glimpse into the consulting room of a master therapist.

  • "Inspired.... Yalom writes with the narrative wit of O. Henry and the earthy humor of Isaac Bashevis Singer."
    San Francisco Chronicle
  • "Dr. Yalom demonstrates once again that in the right hands, the stuff of therapy has the interest of the richest and most inventive fiction."
    New York Times
  • "Wise, humane, stirring, and utterly absorbing.... Irvin Yalom's book is charged with hope and generosity of spirit."
    Newsday
  • "The fascinating, moving, enervating, inspiring, unexpected stuff of psychotherapy is told with economy and, most surprisingly, with humor."
    Washington Post Book World
  • "Like Freud, Yalom is a graceful and canny writer. The fascinating, moving, enervating, inspiring, unexpected stuff of psychotherapy is told with economy and, most surprising, with humor."
    Washington Post Book World
  • "[In Love's Executioner,] Yalom showed that the psychological case study could give readers what the short fiction of the time increasingly refused to deliver: the pursuit of secrets, intrigue, big emotions, plot."
    Laura Miller, The New York Times

Formats and Prices

Price

$19.99

Price

$25.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD
  2. ebook $12.99 $16.99 CAD

Irvin D. Yalom

About the Author

Irvin D. Yalom, MD, is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was the recipient of the 1974 Edward Strecker Award and the 1979 Foundations’ Fund Prize in Psychiatry. He is the author of When Nietzsche Wept (winner of the 1993 Commonwealth Club gold medal for fiction); Love’s Executioner, a memoir; Becoming Myself, a group therapy novel; The Schopenhauer Cure; and the classic textbooks Inpatient Group Psychotherapy and Existential Psychotherapy, among many other books. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Learn more about this author