At once startlingly profound and irresistibly practical, Yalom's insights — let the patient matter to you; create a new kind of therapy for each patient; how and how not to use self-disclosure — will help enrich the therapeutic process for both patient and counselor. Video My patients do not let me forget that I grow old. But they are only doing their job: have I not asked them to disclose all feelings, thoughts, and dreams? Even potential new patients join the chorus and, without fail, greet me with the question: “are you stilltaking on patients?” Now that you have understood the theoretical definition of existential therapy, it’s time that you understand a bit better how it works in practice.

In the therapeutic enterprise we must tread a fine line between some, but not too much, objectivity; if we take the DSM diagnostic system too seriously, if we really believe we are truly carving at the joints of nature, then we may threaten the human, the spontaneous, the creative and uncertain nature of the therapeutic venture. Remember that the clinicians involved in formulating previous, now discarded, diagnostic systems were competent, proud, and just as confident as the current members of DSM committees. Undoubtedly the time will come when the DSM-IV Chinese restaurant menu format will appear ludicrous to mental health professionals. Now that he was dying, the hour had come, Dion told Joseph, to break his silence about that miracle. Dion confessed that at the time it had seemed a miracle to him as well, for he, too, had fallen into despair. He, too, felt empty and spiritually dead and, unable to help himself, had set off on a journey to seek help. On the very night that they had met at the oasis he was on a pilgrimage to a famous healer named Joseph. Patients want therapists to pay attention to the minute details of their life: This gives a good jump-start on bonding.Decision is another boundary experience (like death). Making a decision cuts us off from other possibilities.Decision leads to finiteness and groundlessness – domains soaked with anxiety. After this, the book includes several chapters (#45 – #51) dealing with the last of the givens of existence – freedom – and its corollaries: responsibility and decision-making.

In other and plainer words: it is one thing to explicitly start a discussion about death, isolation, meaning and freedom (content), and a completely another thing to implicitly derive conclusions from stories which seemingly bear no relation to these existential topics. Though I selected these suggestions haphazardly and expect many readers to sample these offerings in an unsystematic manner, I have tried, as an afterthought, to group them in a reader-friendly fashion. Therapist and Patient as "Fellow Travelers" Andrè Malraux, the French novelist, described a country priest who had taken confession for many decades and summed up what he had learned about human nature in this manner: "First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks...and there is no such thing as a grown-up person." Everyone—and that includes therapists as well as patients—is destined to experience not only the exhilaration of life, but also its inevitable darkness: disillusionment, aging, illness, isolation, loss, meaninglessness, painful choices, and death. v Let patients’ matter to you: Let them enter your mind, change you and don’t conceal this from them. It doesn’t matter if one finds meaning; what matters is the engagement in the pursuit; and therapists need to remove all isolation-creating obstacles to this engagement.

Yalom understands freedom in the way most existential philosophers understand it: as a way of assuming responsibility for your life in a chaotic, unstructured world. The Gift of Therapy is primarily a book targeting therapists: especially those who already know something about Yalom and existential therapy and are familiar with the theoretical aspects of the practice.

When in need, systematically collect the history of your patient, including interviewing his/her significant other and exploring previous therapy;When I was finding my way as a young psychotherapy student, the most useful book I read was Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth. And the single most useful concept in that book was the notion that the human being has an inbuilt propensity toward self-realization. If obstacles are removed, Horney believed, the individual will develop into a mature, fully realized adult, just as an acorn will develop into an oak tree. Let me dilate this terse definition by clarifying the phrase “dynamic approach.” Dynamichas both a lay and a technical definition. The laymeaning of dynamic(derived from the Greek root, dunasthi— to have power or strength) implying forcefulness or vitality (to wit, dynamo, a dynamic football runner or political orator) is obviously not relevant here. But, if that were the meaning of dynamic, then where is the therapist who would claim to be other than a dynamic therapist, in other words, a sluggish, or inert therapist? Reading what Dr. Yalom wrote was like listening from a grandfather sitting at his feet. This is his first book I'm reading and I'm sure this won't be the last. The emotions that raced in me as I read his open letters were diverse but a few among them were nurtured, healed and understood. I guess he not only has a way of healing people with his talks but also does quite a job in healing through writing. However, the very fact that it is not systematic and structured makes it a great introductory book for patients to psychotherapy: if therapists train themselves to look through your window, here’s your chance to look through theirs.

Acclaimed author and renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom distills thirty-five years of psychotherapy wisdom into one brilliant volume. I soon learned that love felt treasonous to her. To love another was to betray her dead husband; it felt to her like pounding the final nails in her husband's coffin. To love another asdeeply as she did her husband (and she would settle for nothing less) meant that her love for her husband had been in some way insufficient or flawed. To love another would be self-destructive because loss, and the searing pain of loss, was inevitable. To love again felt irresponsible: she was evil and jinxed, and her kiss was the kiss of death. The former is reserved for individuals and is “a dynamic therapeutic approach that focuses on concerns rooted in existence;” it is based on the assumption that despair is the result of a personal confrontation with the givens of existence.Definition of existential psychotherapy: Existential psychotherapy is a dynamic therapeutic approach which focuses on concerns that are rooted in existence.