Love's Executioner

by Irvin D. Yalom

I used to be so sure. What arrogance! And now what kind of truth was I stalking? I think my quarry is illusion.

But there is timing and judgment. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it. The thirst for religion is too strong, its roots too deep, its cultural reinforcement too powerful.

There was something conspiratorial about the request. We’d be relating together as two bad little boys. Could I build a solid therapeutic relationship on such insubstantial foundations?

I felt caught. I really couldn’t answer without revealing some of the material Dave had shared with me in our individual session. He hadn’t, for example, told the group that Soraya had been dead for thirty years, that he was sixty-nine and felt near death, that he had asked me to be the keeper of the letters. Yet, if I revealed these things, Dave would feel betrayed and probably leave therapy. Was I walking into a trap? The only possible way out was to be entirely honest. I said, “Dave, it’s really hard for me to respond to your question. I can’t tell you my thoughts about the dream without revealing information you shared with me before you entered the group. I know you’re very concerned about your privacy, and I don’t want to betray your trust. So what do I do?” I leaned back, pleased with myself. Excellent technique! Just what I tell my students. If you’re caught in a dilemma, or have two strong conflicting feelings, then the best thing you can do is to share the dilemma or share both feelings with the patient.

Of course, all these sentiments remained hidden from Mike and Marie. Then I wondered about the two of them—their unfilled wishes, their hidden reflections and opinions about the consultation. Suppose, a year from now, Mike and Marie and I each wrote recollections of our time together. To what extent would we agree? I suspect each of us would barely be able to recognize the hour from the other’s account. But why a year? Suppose we were to write it a week from now? Or this very moment? Would we be able to recapture and record the real, the definitive, history of this hour? This is no trivial question. On the basis of data patients choose to provide about events taking place long before, therapists routinely believe they can reconstruct a life: that they can discover the crucial events of the early developmental years, the real nature of the relationship with each parent, the relationship between the parents, between the siblings, the family system, the inner experience accompanying the frights and bruises of early life, the texture of childhood and adolescent friendships. Yet, can therapists or historians or biographers reconstruct a life with any degree of accuracy if the reality of even a single hour cannot be captured? Years ago I conducted an experiment in which a patient and I each wrote our own view of each of our therapy hours. Later when we compared them, it was at times difficult to believe that we described the same hour. Even our views of what was helpful varied. ...

Flaubert’s lament, in Madame Bovary: 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.

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our own preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted.

If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nuture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcends category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.

Details are wonderful. They are informative, they are calming, and they penetrate the anxiety of isolation: the patient feels that, once you have the details, you have entered into his life.

The overactive therapist often infantilizes the patient: he does not, in Martin Buber’s term, guide or help the other to “unfold” but instead imposes himself upon the other.

Remember that every time you’ve sunk into a depression, you’ve climbed out again. The one good—the only good—thing about depression is that it always ends.”

“Why do we,” I mused, “pursue these unfavorable comparisons? It’s so self-punishing, so perverse—like grinding an aching tooth.”

I’ve always believed that it’s as important to find out what makes one better as it is to determine what makes one worse, so I asked her what had made the difference.

Though charmed by her ingenuous compliment, I was made uncomfortable by both thoughts: the mysterious “somehow,” and the vision of me as a miracle worker. As long as Marge thought in those terms, she would not get better because the source of help was either outside of herself or beyond comprehension. My task as a therapist (not unlike that of a parent) is to make myself obsolete—to help a patient become his or her own mother and father. I didn’t want to make her better. I wanted to help her take the responsibility of making herself better, and I wanted the process of improvement to be as clear to her as possible. That’s why I felt uncomfortable with her “somehow,” and so set about exploring it.

I cannot alter the future because I am being overtaken by the past.”

“If we stare too hard into the past, it’s easy to be overcome with regret. But now the important thing is to turn toward the future. We’ve got to think about change. What must not occur is that five years from now you look back with regret over the way you’ve lived these coming five years.”