Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

Tags: #Psychology, #Movements, #Psychoanalysis, #Research & Methodology, #Emotions

Love's Executioner (44 page)

BOOK: Love's Executioner

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Love’s Executioner
was a pivotal turning point for me. During my first several years as a member of the Stanford University Medical School faculty, I had been heavily involved in psychotherapy teaching, research, and publishing in professional journals. I developed a specialty in group therapy and, during my first sabbatical, embarked on writing a textbook on group therapy. After finishing this book, I turned to another interest that had long been percolating under the surface—the role of existential concerns in human life and human distress. After a decade of study and research, I wrote a textbook,
Existential Psychotherapy
, intending not to establish a new field but to make all therapists more aware of existential issues. Four major existential concerns—death, meaning in life, isolation, and freedom—play a crucial role in the inner life of every human being and constitute the thrust of that book.

Once this book was finished, I continued to develop new ideas about the utilization of these existential concerns in therapy, but gradually came to the conclusion that such ideas are best expressed through the narrative form. It did not escape me that the ideas of some of the most important existential thinkers—for example, Camus and Sartre—are most vivid and compelling in their stories and novels rather than in technical philosophic works.

Nor did it escape me that narrative played a vital, if covert, role in my textbooks. I have heard from many teachers and students that the numerous tales—some a few pages long, some merely a paragraph or two—I had interspersed in both
The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
and
Existential Psychotherapy
vastly increased each book’s effectiveness. Students have told me they were more willing to plod through dry theory knowing there would likely be an interesting tale just around the bend.

And so I gradually developed the notion that the best way I could convey my ideas to students, and enhance an existential sensibility, was through narrative. In 1987, I took the plunge and resolved to write a different kind of book, a book in which I would put story first and theoretical discussion second. In no way was I deviating from my role as a teacher of psychotherapy—I was simply going about it in a different fashion.
Love’s Executioner
was meant to be a collection of teaching stories aimed (like all my subsequent stories and novels) at the young psychotherapist and all other people, including patients, interested in psychotherapy. The mother book fueling the ideas for the stories was
Existential Psychotherapy
.

There was yet another component in this decision. I had always wanted to be a storyteller. As long as I can remember, I’ve been a voracious reader and somewhere in early adolescence I began yearning to be a real writer. That desire must have been percolating on the back burner as I pursued my academic career, for as I began writing these ten stories, I sensed I was on the way to finding myself.

Books and places are bonded together in my memory. Whenever I reread or even think about a book I’ve read, I immediately visualize the place where I first read it. Rereading
Love’s Executioner
evoked a stream of delicious memories that began in 1987 when my youngest child left home for college, and my wife and I set off around the world for a year’s sabbatical. First, we became acquainted with Japanese culture, as I taught for two weeks in Tokyo; then, two weeks of travel in China where my wife, a feminist scholar, lectured to university students and teachers. On my last day in China, I spent an afternoon alone wandering through the back streets of Shanghai and came upon a handsome but entirely deserted Catholic church. After making certain I was alone, I entered the confessional booth (appropriating the priest’s seat) and meditated upon the generations of priests who had heard confessions in this box. I envied their ability to pronounce, “You are forgiven.” What therapeutic power! While sitting in that seat of power, I had an extraordinary writerly experience. For an hour, I slipped into a reverie in which the entire plot of “Three Unopened Letters” came to me. I scribbled the essentials of the story on the only paper available to me: the blank pages of my passport.

It was in Bali that I began to write in earnest. We settled into a two-month stay in Kuta on Bali in an exotic house that had a high wall around the large lush garden property but no interior walls other than hanging shades. Needing no reference books for my writing, I traveled light and had only a stack of my session notes for about fifty patients. The atmosphere was exotic and otherworldly. Birds in iridescent colors boldly perched in the intricately twisted trees of the garden and caroled strange melodies. The perfume of unfamiliar blossoms intoxicated me where I sat in the garden reading all my notes over and over again. As memories of my sessions flowed through my mind over the days, a story would, almost without my noticing it, take root and develop such energy as to compel me to put aside all other notes and devote myself to that particular story. As I started writing, I had no idea where a story would lead or what shape it would take. I felt myself almost a bystander as I watched it develop organically. I had often heard writers say a story writes itself, but it was only then that I understood what they meant as one after another of my stories wrote itself. After two months, I had an entirely new and deep appreciation of an old anecdote I had heard in high school about the nineteenth-century English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray: in it, as he came out of his study, his wife asked how the day’s writing had gone. He responded, “Oh a terrible day! Pendennis [one of his characters] made a fool of himself today and I couldn’t stop him.” Soon I became used to hearing my characters talk to one another. I eavesdropped all the time—even after finishing the day’s writing, when I was strolling arm in arm with my wife on one of the endless buttery sand Balinese beaches.

Soon I was to have another writerly experience, one of the peak experiences of my life. At some point while deep into a story, I observed my fickle mind flirting with another story, one that appeared to be slowly taking shape beyond my immediate perception. I understood that as a signal—an uncanny one—to myself from myself that the story I was writing was coming to an end, with another on the way.

I had written all my previous books with pencil and paper with the help of my Stanford secretary, who typed them out. But it was now 1987—time to modernize and switch to a computer and printer. I taught myself to type on the flight overseas by means of a video game in which, when letters attacked my spaceship, my only defense was to punch an attacking letter before it detonated my ship. The computer was one of the earliest and still unreliable portable models, and the printer even more unreliable, giving up the ghost after one month in Bali. Alarmed at the prospect of my work disappearing without a trace into the computer’s innards, I sought help. There turned out to be only one printer in Denpasar, the major city of Bali, and it was located in a computer school. From it, through either begging or bribing (I’ve forgotten which), I obtained a precious hard copy of my work to date.

Inspiration came quickly in Bali. I had no distractions (in those halcyon days before e-mail) and have never written better or more quickly. While there, I wrote the title story of
Love’s Executioner
, as well as “In Search of the Dreamer” and “If Rape Were Legal . . . ,” and transcribed the notes I had made in my passport in the confessional for “Three Unopened Letters.” I wrote “Two Smiles” and “Do Not Go Gentle” in Hawaii and the remaining stories in Paris, most of them in a café down the street from the Pantheon.

My initial plan was to follow each story with a few paragraphs discussing the theoretical points it illustrated. I soon found this plan unwieldy and instead put all the theoretical material into a fifty-page epilogue in which I explained in depth what my book was really about. Shortly after I had sent the manuscript to my publisher, I was contacted by Phoebe Hoss, an editor from hell (but also from heaven), with whom I was to have a long, ferocious struggle. She was absolutely persuaded that no theoretical explanation whatsoever was needed, and that I should let my stories speak for themselves. We battled for months. I submitted one version after another; each one was returned to me considerably shortened until, after several months, she had reduced my fifty-page prologue to about ten pages. As I reread the book now, I am reminded once again that she was absolutely right.

Though I feel proud of this book, I have regrets about one story—“Fat Lady.” Several obese women have e-mailed me that my words seriously offended them, and today I would probably not be so insensitive. Nonetheless, though I have put myself on trial several times and found myself guilty, let me take advantage of this opportunity to state my defense. I am the main character in this story, not the patient. It is a story about countertransference—that is, irrational, often shameful, feelings a therapist experiences toward a patient that constitute a formidable obstacle in therapy. My negative feelings about obese people prevented me from achieving the deep engagement that I believe is necessary for effective therapy. While I struggled internally with these feelings, I had not expected my patient to perceive them. She had, nonetheless, accurately sensed my feelings, as she recounts at the end of the story. The story depicts my struggle to work through these unruly feelings in order to relate to the patient at a human level. However I may deplore those feelings, I can take pride in the denouement expressed in the story’s final words: “I could get my arms all the way around her.”

I end this retrospective with an observation my younger self would have found surprising: namely, that the view from eighty is better than expected. Yes, I can’t deny that life in the later years is just one damn loss after another; but, even so, I’ve found far greater tranquility and happiness in my seventh, and eighth and ninth decades than I ever imagined possible. And there’s one additional bonus to aging:
reading your own work can be more exciting!
I have found that the memory loss that no one escapes has some advantages. As I turned the pages of “Three Unopened Letters,” “Love’s Executioner,” “The Wrong One Died,” among other stories, I felt myself burning with delicious curiosity. I had forgotten how they ended!

For a detailed discussion of this existential perspective and the theory and practice of a psychotherapy based upon it, see my
Existential Psychotherapy
(New York: Basic Books, 1980).

These differing visions were later published as
Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy
(New York: Basic Books, 1974).

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All names, identifying characteristics, and other details of the case material in this book have been changed.

eISBN : 978-0-465-03160-3

BOOK: Love's Executioner

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