Love's Executioner

by Irvin D. Yalom

I believe that the primal stuff of psychotherapy is always such existence pain—and not, as is often claimed, repressed instinctual strivings or imperfectly buried shards of a tragic personal past. In my therapy with each of these ten patients, my primary clinical assumption—an assumption on which I based my technique—is that basic anxiety emerges from a person’s endeavors, conscious and unconscious, to cope with the harsh facts of life, the “givens” of existence.*

Specialness is the belief that one is invulnerable, inviolable—beyond the ordinary laws of human biology and destiny.

to be responsible is to “be the author of,” each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom.

Basically your existence is impervious to the fleeting thoughts, to the electromagnetic ripples occurring in some unknown mind. Try to see that.

Only when one feels an insight in one’s bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about “responsibility assumption,” but it’s all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you

construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change.

You can’t be outside your own law—that’s at the base of every ethical system.”

The first step in all therapeutic change is responsibility assumption. If one feels in no way responsible for one’s predicament, then how can one change it? That

Second, issues are never resolved once and for all in therapy. Instead, therapist and patient inevitably return again and again to adjust and to reinforce the learning—indeed, for this very reason, psychotherapy has often been dubbed “cyclotherapy.”

To lose a parent or a lifelong friend is often to lose the past: the person who died may be the only other living witness to golden events of long ago. But to lose a child is to lose the future: what is lost is no less than one’s life project—what

what one lives for, how one projects oneself into the future, how one may hope to transcend death (indeed, one’s child becomes one’s immortality project). Thus, in professional language, parental loss is “object loss” (the “object” being a figure who has played an instrumental role in the constitution of one’s inner world); whereas child loss is “project loss” (the loss of one’s central organizing life principle, providing not only the why but also the how of life).

The sentiment that one “should have done something more” reflects, it seems to me, an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable.

“And therefore,” as John Donne wrote, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Along with her purse and her three hundred dollars, an illusion was snatched away from Elva—the illusion of personal specialness.

Save, of course, my father, and he was really part of her, her mouthpiece, her animus, her creation who (according to Asimov’s first law of robotics) could not turn against his maker—despite my prayers that he would once—just once, please, Dad—pop her.

Of course, she was still special in that she had special qualities and gifts, that she had a unique life history, that no one who had ever lived was just like her. That’s the rational side of specialness.

But we (some more than others) also have an irrational sense of specialness. It is one of our chief methods of denying death, and the part of our mind whose task it is to mollify death terror generates the irrational belief that we are invulnerable—that unpleasant things like aging and death may be the lot of others but not our lot, that we exist beyond law, beyond human and biological destiny.

the absolute isolation that is integral to existence and the intimacy that dispels the dread, if not the fact, of isolation.

I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

hoped that when I was sixty-nine I’d be sufficiently alive and vital to worry about “getting it up.”