Love's Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom Read Free Book Online Page A

held beliefs about therapy, and my areas of keenest psychological interest, have arisen from personal experience. Nietzsche claimed that a philosopher’s system of thought always arises from his autobiography, and I believe that to be true for all therapists—in fact, for anyone who thinks about thought.
    At a conference approximately two years prior to meeting Thelma, I had encountered a woman who subsequently invaded my mind, my thoughts, my dreams. Her image took up housekeeping in my mind and defied all my efforts to dislodge it. But, for a time, that was all right: I liked the obsession and savored it afresh again and again. A few weeks later, I went on a week’s vacation with my family to a beautiful Caribbean island. It was only after several days that I realized I was missing everything on the trip—the beauty of the beach, the lush and exotic vegetation, even the thrill of snorkeling and entering the underwater world. All this rich reality had been blotted out by my obsession. I had been absent. I had been encased in my mind, watching replays over and over again of the same and, by then, pointless fantasy. Anxious and thoroughly fed up with myself, I entered therapy (yet again), and after several hard months, my mind was my own again and I was able to return to the exciting business of experiencing my life as it was happening. (A curious thing: my therapist eventually became a close friend and years later told me that, at the time he was treating me, he himself was obsessed with a lovely Italian woman whose attention was riveted to someone else. And so, from patient to therapist to patient goes La Ronde of obsessional love.)
    So, in my work with Thelma, I stressed to her how her obsession was vitiating her life, and often repeated her earlier comment that she was living her life eight years before. No wonder she hated being alive! Her life was being stifled in an airless, windowless chamber ventilated only by those long-gone twenty-seven days.
    But Thelma never found this thesis persuasive—with, I now think, good reason. Generalizing from my experience to hers, I had mistakenly assumed her life to have richness that she was missing because of her obsession. Thelma felt, though she did not explicitly say so at the time, that the obsession contained infinitely more vitality than her lived experience. (Later we were to explore, also with minimal impact, the reverse of that formula—that it was because of the impoverishment of her life that she embraced the obsession in the first place.)
    By approximately the sixth session, I had worn her down and—to humor me, I believe—she agreed that the obsession was the enemy and had to be extirpated. We spent session after session simply reconnoitering the obsession. It seemed to me that the source of its hold on her was the power she had given Matthew. Nothing could be done until we diminished that power.
    “Thelma, this feeling that the only thing that matters is for Matthew to think well of you—tell me everything you know about it.”
    “It’s hard to put into words. The idea of him hating me is unbearable. He’s the one person who has ever known everything about me. So the fact that he could still love me, despite everything he knew, meant so much.”
    This, I thought, is precisely the reason therapists should not become emotionally involved with patients. By virtue of their privileged role, their access to deep feelings and secret information, their reactions always assume larger-than-life meanings. It is almost impossible for patients to see therapists as they really are. My anger toward Matthew grew.
    “But, Thelma, he’s just a person. You haven’t seen him for eight years. What difference does it make what he thinks of you?”
    “I can’t tell you why. I know it doesn’t make sense but, to the bottom of my soul, I believe that I’d be all right, I’d be happy, if he thought well of me.”
    This thought, this core false belief, was the enemy. I had to