Love's Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989) Irvin D. Yalom, M.D. Condition is fair; dust jacket has some staining. Cover and pages are very good.
In this rare glimpse of the thoroughly engaged therapist at work, a master psychiatrist openly confronts not only his own feelings and errors but the uncertainty at the heart of the therapeutic encounter.
These ten tales vividly re-create the way Dr. Irvin Yalom breaks through that uncertainty to a patient's ultimate truth- to the fear of death, say, behind the life-denying nostalgia of Thelma, the elderly patient of the title story who is possessed by a long-past love affair; or behind the macho behavior of Carlos, a middle-aged man compulsively lustful in the face of his fatal cancer. It is, says Dr. Yalom, only by recognizing the stark facts of human existence, only through full awareness of oneself as mortal, that any one of us, not merely patients in therapy, can come to live as whole creatures.