Writing the Talking Cure

Jeffrey Berman

Description

A distinguished psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Irvin D. Yalom is also the United States' most well-known author of psychotherapy tales. His first volume of essays, Love's Executioner, became an immediate best seller, and his first novel, When Nietzsche Wept, continues to enjoy critical and popular success. Yalom has created a subgenre of literature, the "therapy story," where the therapist learns as much as, if not more than, the patient; where therapy never proceeds as expected; and where the therapist's apparent failure provesultimately to be a success.

Writing the Talking Cure is the first book to explore all of Yalom's major writings. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Jeffrey Berman comments on Yalom's profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature and emphasizes the recurrent ideas that unify his writings: the importance of the therapeutic relationship, therapist transparency, here-and-now therapy, the prevalence of death anxiety, reciprocal healing, and the idea of the wounded healer. Throughout, Berman discusses what Yalom can teach therapists in particular and the common (and uncommon) reader in general.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Existence Pain

1. The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy : The Art of Self-Disclosure

2. Every Day Gets a Little Closer : A Dual Perspective of Therapy

3. Existential Psychotherapy : Living with Death Anxiety

4. Inpatient Group Psychotherapy : Educating Observers and the Observed

5. Love’s Executioner : Living with Existence Pain

6. When Nietzsche Wept : Gratitude and Its Discontents

7. Lying on the Couch : The Threat of Sexual Boundary Violations

8. Momma and the Meaning of Life : The “Smoldering Inner Compost Heap” of Creativity

9. The Gift of Therapy : The Hazards and Privileges of Being a Therapist

10. The Schopenhauer Cure : Searching for an Antidote

11. Staring at the Sun : Novel Healing

12. The Spinoza Problem : “A Sedative for My Passions”

13. Creatures of a Day : Anticipating Endings

Conclusion : Yalom’s Cure and Becoming Myself

Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• États-Unis
• Psychotherapy
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438473895
• Langue: English

Extrait

Writing the Talking Cure
Also by Jeffrey Berman
Joseph Conrad: Writing as Rescue
The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis
Narcissism and the Novel
Diaries to an English Professor: Pain and Growth in the Classroom
Surviving Literary Suicide
Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom
Empathic Teaching: Education for Life
Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning
Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure (with Patricia Hatch Wallace)
Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss
Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C. S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin
Death Education in the Writing Classroom
Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life
Confidentiality and Its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy (with Paul W. Mosher)
Writing Widowhood: The Landscapes of Bereavement
Writing the Talking Cure
Irvin D. Yalom and the Literature of Psychotherapy
Jeffrey Berman
Cover photograph: Michael Zagaris.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Berman, Jeffrey, 1945– author.
Title: Writing the talking cure : Irvin D. Yalom and the literature of psychotherapy / Jeffrey Berman.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021839 | ISBN 9781438473871 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438473888 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438473895 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Yalom, Irvin D., 1931– | Psychotherapy.
Classification: LCC RC480 .B377 2019 | DDC 616.89/14—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021839
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the future—our beloved grandchildren: Audrey, Max, Nate, Skyler, Sloane, and Talia. And to Julie, the sparkling jules of my life.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Existence Pain
1. The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy : The Art of Self-Disclosure
2. Every Day Gets a Little Closer : A Dual Perspective of Therapy
3. Existential Psychotherapy : Living with Death Anxiety
4. Inpatient Group Psychotherapy : Educating Observers and the Observed
5. Love’s Executioner : Living with Existence Pain
6. When Nietzsche Wept : Gratitude and Its Discontents
7. Lying on the Couch : The Threat of Sexual Boundary Violations
8. Momma and the Meaning of Life : The “Smoldering Inner Compost Heap” of Creativity
9. The Gift of Therapy : The Hazards and Privileges of Being a Therapist
10. The Schopenhauer Cure : Searching for an Antidote
11. Staring at the Sun : Novel Healing
12. The Spinoza Problem : “A Sedative for My Passions”
13. Creatures of a Day : Anticipating Endings
Conclusion: Yalom’s Cure and Becoming Myself
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Irvin Yalom for taking the time to read and comment on the manuscript for Writing the Talking Cure before I submitted it for publication. He pointed out factual errors, helped me to make connections I hadn’t seen, and allowed me to include his comments in my study. Irv and Marilyn Yalom invited my wife, Julie, and me to dinner in the spring of 2017 when I was doing research at the Yalom Archives at Stanford University. It was a great pleasure meeting the Yaloms, who could not have been more gracious. Reading Irv Yalom’s responses to my manuscript, I had the same feeling that I do when I read his books: he is one of the people, as Henry James observed in “The Art of Fiction,” “on whom nothing is lost.” I have long known, like countless others, that reading and writing are therapeutic; authoring a book on Irvin Yalom has been the least expensive and most effective psychotherapy in my life.
I am grateful to the staff at Stanford University’s Department of Special Collections, who went out of their way to help me during my research at the Yalom Archives, which contain hundreds of letters testifying to the power of his writings. A typical comment, written by a woman grieving the recent death of her father: “I want to thank you for all of your generous literature. You have helped me to embrace death and understand death anxiety and the importance of living life to its fullest—and most important, to share the expression of love with those [with] whom we share common paths. Had I not drowned myself in your writing, I do not think I would be coping as well as I am. Thank you, thank you with all of my heart.” One could write an entire chapter on Yalom’s correspondence, especially his influence on mental health professionals, as can be seen in a 2004 letter from an Australian therapist: “You have been the most influential therapist in my training and I would hate to think that you weren’t around anymore to share your wisdom and humour.”
Part of the discussion of psychobiography in When Nietzsche Wept appears in my chapter “Hemingway’s Suicides: A Psychobiographical Approach to Literature” in Critical Insights: Psychological Approaches to Criticism , edited by Robert C. Evans, published by Grey House in 2017. Some of the information about Anne Sexton’s sexual relationship with her psychiatrist Frederick J. Duhl appears in the book Paul W. Mosher and I coauthored, Confidentiality and Its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy , published by Fordham University Press in 2015.
I’m grateful to the two anonymous State University of New York Press readers for their helpful suggestions for improving this book. This is my fourth book published by SUNY Press, and, as always, I am grateful to James Peltz for his unwavering support. Special thanks to Rafael Chaiken, assistant acquisitions editor at the press, who helped expedite production of the manuscript. I always take the time to correct my students’ grammatical and stylistic errors, and for that reason I’m grateful to my superb copyeditor, Dana Foote, who pointed out my own grammatical and stylistic errors. Finally, I wish to thank Julie, who helped me in countless ways, including spending hours patiently removing the mysterious artifacts that appeared when she formatted the manuscript.
Introduction
Existence Pain
I belong to those readers of Irvin Yalom who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust in him sprang to life at once and has been the same for nine years. I understood him as though he had written for me (this is the most intelligible, though a rather foolish and conceited, way of expressing it).
The preceding sentences describe precisely how I feel reading Irvin Yalom’s writings, though, truth be told, these are not my words but Friedrich Nietzsche’s, appearing in his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” to express his boundless admiration for his intellectual mentor. I came across this passage while reading both philosophers’ writings for my research on two of Yalom’s novels, When Nietzsche Wept and The Schopenhauer Cure .
I don’t mean to imply that I’m a Nietzsche or that Yalom is a Schopenhauer. But Yalom has long been one of my heroes—and for longer than the nine years Nietzsche mentioned. I admire Yalom for his profound contributions to both psychotherapy and fiction and for his vast humanity. He is not the first to write about “existence pain,” but few authors have explored the subject more incisively, over a longer period of time, in both nonfictional and fictional writings, than Yalom. Indeed, he has transmuted existence pain into a distinctive approach to both psychotherapy and the art of psychotherapy tales.
My aim throughout this book is to show Yalom’s growth and development as both an existential psychotherapist and a storyteller. Nietzsche eventually turned against his former mentor, rejecting Schopenhauer’s gloomy pessimism and nay-saying; by contrast my appreciation of the life-affirming Yalom has grown deeper over time. My trust in Yalom sprang to life when years ago I read first Love’s Executioner and then When Nietzsche Wept. Both works dazzled me. I then began to read systematically all of his writings. I am an English professor, not a psychotherapist, but I believe I understand him as though he has written for me. If such an admission could make Nietzsche feel foolish and conceited, I have no problem feeling the same way.
“Autobiographical Note”
Therapist self-disclosure is the cornerstone of Yalom’s writings, so it’s appropriate that we begin with his “Autobiographical Note.” He was born in Washington, DC, in 1931 to parents who had immigrated to the United States shortly after World War I from a Russian village. Living in a tiny apartment above his parents’ grocery store in a poor, black n