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★★★★★ 5
The best of its kind.
As a clinical psychologist who has been practicing, doing research on, and teaching assessment and therapy for more than 25 years I have encountered many books and many more articles and research papers on psychotherapy. While some have real value, most do little more than take up space and help the people who wrote them advance their careers. All too rarely one comes across a book that changes one's way of looking at things and helps one to approach this field in a new and qualitatively better fashion. Yalom's book on Existential Psychotherapy is one such book. I first read this when I was in graduate school in the early 1980's and just learning about psychotherapy, and about life. This book opened my eyes and gave me an over-arching way of thinking about myself, my patients, and the things that I was doing. Unlike most texts on therapy, it was not limited to the parochial "theoretical orientations" and mechanistic models of therapy technique that I was learning then and have seen proliferate ever since. Since this time I have re-read this book many times, and each time I have gotten more from it.
Yalom tries to go through the collected wisdom of mankind, not just in the narrow world of scientific psychology, but in philosophy, art, and religion, to explain how everyone must face certain existential realities such a mortality, temporality, resonsibility and isolation, and how the struggle to face these basic issues underlies many of the symptoms and complaints that lead people to seek the help of mental health professionals. Unfortunately, as Yalom points out, all too often we fail to see these as such, and offer help in the form of superficial, pseudoscientific psychologizing, technical trivialities and medications that often do more harm than good. While, used humbly and wisely, these things are not without value, their value is often fatally limited by their failure to see the larger context of life and its challenges. Once having read and really thought about Yalom's book, that becomes much harder to do; and thereby inevitably enriches one's practice and one's life.
Regardless what kinds of therapies and what kinds of patients one works with - or even if one's practice is limited primarily to assessment or research - this book provides a philosophical and conceptual bedrock that can inform and enrich what one does. I am so happy to see that this book is still in print, and I would encourage anyone who plans to make a living trying to be seriously involved in other people's lives to avail themselves of this book. It is a treasure and a masterpiece. I intend to us it in my classes this year and for as long as it remains in print.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2013
