Irvin Yalom, executioner of love. Irvin Yalom: The Executioner of Love and other psychotherapeutic stories Irvin Yalom the Executioner of Love fb2

My family:

to my wife Marilyn,

my children Eve, Reid, Victor and Ben

Love's Executioner & Other Tales

of Psychotherapy

Published with permission from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC (USA) and Alexander Korzhenevsky Agency (Russia)

Acknowledgments

More than half of this book was written during a sabbatical I spent traveling. I am grateful to the many people and organizations who cared about me and made it easier for me to write this book: the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bellagio Research Center of the Rockefeller Foundation, Drs. Mikiko and Tsunehito Hasagawa - in Tokyo and Hawaii, Cafe Malvina in San Francisco, Benington Institute's Science Creativity Program.

I am grateful to my wife Marilyn (my harshest critic and loyal assistant), Basic Books editor Phoebe Hoss, who prepared this and my previous books for publication, and Linda Carbone, editor of my project at Basic Books. Thanks also to the many, many of my colleagues and friends who did not run away as fast as they could when they saw me approaching them with another story in my hands, but expressed their criticism to me and expressed support or consolation.

The path to this book was long, and along the way I, of course, lost many names. But here are some of them: Pat Baumgardner, Helen Blau, Michelle Carter, Isabel Davis, Stanley Elkin, John Felstiner, Albert Gerard, McLean Gerard, Ruthelin Joselson, Herant Katchadorian, Stina Katchadorian, Marguerite Lederberg, John L'Heureux, Morton Lieberman, Dee Lum, K. Lum, Mary Jane Moffat, Nan Robinson, my sister Jean Rose, Gina Sorensen, David Spiegel, Winfried Weiss, my son Benjamin Yalom, those who interned in psychology at Stanford in 1988, my secretary Bee Mitchell , who for ten years published my clinical notes and the ideas from which these stories grew. I am forever grateful to Stanford University for its support, academic freedom, and the intellectual atmosphere it provides that is essential to my work.

I am greatly indebted to the ten patients who graced these pages. All of them read their stories (with the exception of one, who died before the end of my work) and agreed to publication. Each of them reviewed and approved the changes I made to maintain anonymity, many provided editorial assistance, and one patient (Dave) gave me the title of his story. Some patients commented that the changes were too dramatic and insisted that I be more precise. Two were unhappy with my excessive self-exposure and some literary liberties, but nevertheless gave their consent and blessing in the hope that their story might be useful to therapists and/or patients. I am deeply grateful to all of them.

All the stories in this book are true, but I had to change a lot of them in order to maintain the anonymity of the patients. I have often resorted to symbolically equivalent substitutions in relation to the patient's personality traits and life circumstances; sometimes I transferred the features of another patient onto the hero. The dialogue is often fictitious, and my thoughts are added after the fact. The camouflage is well done, and in each case it is possible only for the patient himself to overcome it. I am sure that readers who think that they recognize any of the ten characters in the book will definitely be mistaken.

Imagine this scene: three or four hundred people who do not know each other are divided into pairs and ask each other one single question: “What do you want?” - repeating it over and over again.

What could be simpler? One innocent question and its answer. And yet, time after time, I have seen this group exercise produce unexpectedly strong feelings. At times the room simply shakes with emotion. Men and women - and these are not desperate and unhappy people, but prosperous, confident, well-dressed people who look successful and prosperous - are shocked to the core. They turn to those whom they have lost forever - parents, spouses, children, friends who have died or abandoned them: “I want to see you again”; "I want you to love me"; “I want you to know how much I love you and how I regret that I never told you about this”; “I want you to come back, I’m so lonely!”; “I want to have the childhood I never had”; “I want to be young and healthy again. I want to be loved and respected. I want my life to have meaning. I want to achieve something. I want to be important and significant, I want to be remembered.”

So many wishes. So much sadness. And there is so much pain lying so close to the surface that it can only be reached in a few minutes. The pain of inevitability. The pain of existence. The pain that is always with us, that constantly hides behind the surface of life and which, alas, is so easy to feel. Many events: a simple group exercise, a few minutes of deep reflection, a piece of art, a sermon, a personal crisis or loss - all remind us that our deepest desires will never be fulfilled: the desire to be young, to stop old age, to bring back the departed, to find eternal love , protection, significance, immortality.

And when these unattainable desires begin to control our lives, we turn to family, friends, religion, and sometimes to psychotherapists for help.

This book tells the stories of ten patients who turned to psychotherapy and, in the process of treatment, faced the pain of existence. But that's not why they came to me: all ten patients suffered from common everyday problems: loneliness, self-loathing, impotence, headaches, hypersexuality, excess weight, high blood pressure, grief, all-consuming love addiction, mood swings, depression . But somehow (and each time in a new way) in the process of therapy, the deep roots of these everyday problems were discovered - roots that went deep into the very basis of existence.

"I want! I want!" - heard throughout all these stories. One patient cried: “I want my beloved dead daughter back!” - and at the same time she pushed her two living sons away from her. Another claimed: “I want to fuck every woman I see!” - while the lymphoma was spreading through all the nooks and crannies of his body. The third dreamed: “I want to have parents, a childhood that I never had,” and at that time he himself was tormented by three letters that he did not dare to open. Another patient stated: “I want to be forever young,” and she herself was an elderly woman who could not give up her obsessive love for a man 35 years younger than her.

I am sure that the main subject of psychotherapy is always this pain of existence, and not at all suppressed instinctual drives and not the half-forgotten remains of past personal tragedies, as is usually believed. In my work with each of these ten patients, I proceeded from the following clinical belief on which my technique is based: anxiety is caused by the individual's attempts, conscious or unconscious, to cope with the harsh facts of life, with the “givens” of existence.

I have found that four realities are of particular relevance to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and those we love; freedom to make our lives what we want; our utmost loneliness; and finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or meaning to life. No matter how dark these facts may seem, they contain seeds of wisdom and deliverance. I hope that I have been able to show in these ten psychotherapy stories that it is possible to face the facts of existence and use their energy for the purpose of personal change and growth.

The executioner of love and other psychotherapeutic stories Irvin Yalom

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Title: The executioner of love and other psychotherapeutic stories
Author: Irvin Yalom
Year: 1989
Genre: Foreign psychology, Personal growth, Psychotherapy and counseling

About the book “The Executioner of Love and Other Psychotherapeutic Stories” by Irvin Yalom

“The Executioner of Love” is one of the key works of the famous American existentialist psychotherapist. In the book, Yalom, as always, shares his experience with the reader through exciting stories. The problems that Yalom’s patients face are relevant to absolutely everyone: the pain of loss, the inevitability of aging and death, the bitterness of rejected love, the fear of freedom. The reader is waiting for a colossal intensity of passions, very frank author's confessions and a dashingly twisted plot that keeps in suspense until the last page.

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My family:

to my wife Marilyn,

my children Eve, Reid, Victor and Ben

Love's Executioner & Other Tales

of Psychotherapy

Published with permission from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC (USA) and Alexander Korzhenevsky Agency (Russia)

PSYCHOLOGICAL BESTSELLERS

Get out of the vicious circle! How to leave problems in the past and let happiness into your life

Why do we make the same mistakes over and over again? Where to look for the reasons for our failures? In their book, leading American psychotherapists Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko will share unique facts about behavioral patterns and tell you how to break the vicious circle and change your life for the better.

Strength of will. Take control of your life

Do you think it is impossible to train willpower? Think self-discipline isn't one of your talents? J. Tierney and R. Baumaster offer a simple system of self-education that does not require extreme effort. The authors share a whole range of ways to “outsmart” yourself and gradually, day by day, make willpower and self-control a natural part of everyday life. Their approach is a rare case when it is proposed to solve a problem not head-on, but using workarounds.

Return to the cafe. How to get rid of the burden of problems and catch a wave of luck

If the bustle of everyday life is depressing, if you don’t know how to free yourself from the burden of problems, if your soul is heavy, it’s time to change everything! This is a new novel from John Strelecki, author of the bestselling book "Cafe at the End of the Earth", about finding your path and following your desires. A wonderful atmosphere of kindness and sincerity, fascinating stories about our role in this world and answers to the most important questions about the purpose of life will forever change your attitude towards reality and open the way to change.

How I became myself. Memories

Memory is an unreliable thing, a book in this regard is a real salvation for those who realize the importance of their past. World bestselling author and popular psychologist Irwin Yalom has captured all the most important moments of his life on the pages of his new book. With these memoirs, the reader has a unique opportunity to immerse himself in the memories of one of the most successful modern writers, whose books fell in love with the whole world and secured his title as a master of words and a brilliant conversationalist.

Acknowledgments

“Didn’t it take him a long time to realize that this was wrong?” – I thought.

-Can you continue?

“I asked him, ‘What if I call you next year or five years from now? Would you meet me? Could we walk across the Golden Gate Bridge again? Will it be possible for me to hug you? In response, Matthew silently took my hand, sat me on his lap, and hugged me tightly for several minutes.

Since then, I have called him a thousand times and left messages on his answering machine. At first he answered some of my calls, but then I stopped hearing from him at all. He broke up with me. Complete silence.

Thelma turned away and looked out the window. The melody disappeared from her voice, she spoke more judiciously, in a tone full of bitterness and despair, but there were no more tears. Now she was closer to tearing or breaking something than to crying.

“I was never able to figure out why—why it all ended the way it did.” During one of our last conversations, he said that we should get back to real life, and then added that he was infatuated with another person. “I thought to myself that Matthew’s new love was most likely another patient.

Thelma didn't know whether this new person in Matthew's life was a man or a woman. She suspected that Matthew was gay. He lived in one of the gay districts of San Francisco and was handsome in the way that many homosexuals are: he had a neat mustache, a boyish face and the body of Mercury. This idea came to her a couple of years later when, while showing someone around the city, she cautiously walked into one of the gay bars on Castro Street and was amazed to see fifteen Matthews there - fifteen slender, attractive young men with neat mustaches.

The sudden break with Matthew devastated her, and her lack of understanding of its reasons made her unbearable. Thelma thought about Matthew constantly; not an hour went by without some kind of fantasy about him. She became obsessed with this “why?” Why did he reject her and leave her? But why? Why doesn't he want to see her or even talk to her on the phone?

After all her attempts to reconnect with Matthew failed, Thelma became completely disheartened. She spent the whole day at home, staring out the window; she couldn't sleep; her speech and movements slowed; she lost her taste for all activities. She stopped eating, and soon her depression no longer responded to either psychotherapeutic or drug treatment. After consulting with three different doctors about her insomnia and receiving a prescription from each for sleeping pills, she soon collected a lethal dose. Exactly six months after her fateful meeting with Matthew in Union Square, she wrote a goodbye note to her husband Harry, who was away for a week, waited for his usual evening call from the East Coast, picked up the phone, swallowed all the pills and went to bed.

Harry couldn't sleep that night, he tried to call Thelma again and was alarmed that the line was constantly busy. He called the neighbors and they knocked on Thelma's windows and doors to no avail. They soon called the police, who broke down the door and found Thelma dying.

Thelma's life was saved only thanks to the heroic efforts of doctors.

As soon as she regained consciousness, the first thing she did was call Matthew. She left a message on his answering machine, assuring him that she would keep their secret and begging him to visit her in the hospital. Matthew came, but stayed only fifteen minutes, and his presence, according to Thelma, was worse than silence: he ignored all her hints about the twenty-seven days of their love and did not go beyond the boundaries of a formal professional relationship. Only once did he break down: when Thelma asked how his relationship with the new “subject” was developing, Matthew snapped: “You don’t need to know about it!”

- That's all. “Thelma turned her face to me for the first time and added in a hopeless, tired voice: “I never saw him again.” I called and left messages for him on memorable dates for us: his birthday, June 19 (the day of our first meeting), July 17 (the day of our last meeting), Christmas and New Year. Every time I changed therapists, I called to let him know. He never responded.

All these eight years I have been thinking about him non-stop. At seven in the morning I would wonder if he was awake, and at eight I would imagine him eating oatmeal (he loves oatmeal - he was born on a farm in Nebraska). Walking down the street, I look out for him in the crowd. He often appears to me in one of the passers-by, and I rush to greet the stranger. I dream about him. I remember in detail each of our meetings during those twenty-seven days. In fact, most of my life passes in these fantasies - I barely notice what is happening around me. I live the life I had eight years ago.

My family:

to my wife Marilyn,

my children Eve, Reid, Victor and Ben

Love's Executioner & Other Tales

of Psychotherapy

Published with permission from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC (USA) and Alexander Korzhenevsky Agency (Russia)

PSYCHOLOGICAL BESTSELLERS

Get out of the vicious circle! How to leave problems in the past and let happiness into your life

Strength of will. Take control of your life

Return to the cafe. How to get rid of the burden of problems and catch a wave of luck

How I became myself. Memories

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Imagine this scene: three or four hundred people who do not know each other are divided into pairs and ask each other one single question: “What do you want?” - repeating it over and over again.

And when these unattainable desires begin to control our lives, we turn to family, friends, religion, and sometimes to psychotherapists for help.

Of all these facts of life, the most obvious, the most intuitive, is the fact of death. Even in childhood, much earlier than is usually thought, we learn that death will come, that it is inevitable. Despite this, according to Spinoza, “everything strives to remain in its own being.” At the very core of man lies a conflict between the desire to continue living and the awareness of the inevitability of death.

Adapting to the reality of death, we are endlessly inventive, coming up with new ways to deny and avoid it. In early childhood, we deny death with the help of parental consolations, secular and religious myths; later we personify it, turning it into some kind of creature - a monster, a skeleton with a scythe, a demon. After all, if death is nothing more than a creature pursuing us, we can still find a way to escape from it; besides, no matter how scary the monster that brings death is, it is not as scary as the truth. And it is that we carry in itself sprouts of one's own death. As children get older, they experiment with other ways to alleviate death anxiety: they defuse death by making fun of it, they challenge it with recklessness, they desensitize themselves by talking excitedly about ghosts, and they watch hours of horror movies in the reassuring company of peers with a bag of popcorn.

As we get older, we learn to put thoughts of death out of our heads: we distract ourselves from them; we turn death into something positive (transition to another world, return home, union with God, eternal peace); we deny it by supporting myths; we strive for immortality by creating immortal works, continuing in our children, or by converting to a religious faith that affirms the immortality of the soul.

Many people disagree with this description of the mechanisms of death denial. “What an absurdity! - they say. – We do not deny death at all. Everyone dies, this is an obvious fact. But is it worth dwelling on it?

The truth is that we know, but we don't know. We know about of death, we intellectually recognize it as a fact, but at the same time we—or rather, the unconscious part of our psyche that protects us from destructive anxiety—separate ourselves from the horror associated with death. This process of splitting occurs unconsciously, imperceptibly for us, but we can be convinced of its presence in those rare moments when the denial mechanism fails and the fear of death breaks through with all its power. This may happen rarely, sometimes only once or twice in a lifetime. Sometimes this happens to us in reality - either in the face of our own death, or as a result of the death of a loved one; but most often the fear of death manifests itself in nightmares.

A nightmare is a dream gone wrong; a dream that, having failed to cope with anxiety, did not fulfill its main task - to protect the sleeper. Although nightmares differ in their external content, each nightmare is based on the same process: the terrible fear of death overcomes resistance and breaks through into consciousness. The story "In Search of the Dreamer" contains a unique inside look at the psyche's desperate attempt to escape the fear of death: among the endlessly dark images that fill Marvin's nightmares, there is one object that resists death and supports life - a sparkling wand with a white tip, with which the dreamer enters into a sexual duel with death.

Characters in other stories also view the sexual act as a talisman that protects them from infirmity, old age and the approach of death: such is the obsessive promiscuity of a young man in the face of a cancer that is killing him (“If only violence were allowed ...”) and the worship of an old man of yellowed letters from his deceased lover ( "Don't go sneaking")

Over many years of working with cancer patients facing death, I have noted two particularly effective and common ways to reduce the fear of death, two beliefs or misconceptions that provide a person with a sense of security. One is confidence in one’s own uniqueness, the other is faith in ultimate salvation. Although they are delusions in the sense that they are “persistent false beliefs,” I do not use the term “delusion” in a pejorative sense: they are universal beliefs that exist in each of us at some level of consciousness and that play a role in a few of my stories.

Extraordinary - it is a belief in one’s invulnerability, an inviolability that transcends the ordinary laws of human biology and fate. At some point in life, each of us faces some kind of crisis: it could be a serious illness, career failure or divorce; or, as in the case of Elva from the story “I Never Thought This Could Happen to Me,” an event as simple as the theft of a wallet that suddenly reveals to a person his ordinariness and destroys his belief that life will be constant and endless rise.

While belief in one's own specialness provides an inner sense of security, another important mechanism for denying death is faith in an absolute savior - allows us to feel that some external force is taking care of us and protecting us. Although we may stumble, get sick, find ourselves on the very brink of life and death, we are convinced that there is an almighty and all-powerful protector who can always resurrect us.

These two belief systems together form a dialectic of two diametrically opposed reactions to the human condition. A person either asserts his independence by heroically overcoming himself, or seeks security by dissolving in a higher power; that is, a person either stands out and moves away, or merges and immerses. A person becomes his own parent or remains an eternal child.

Most of us usually live quite comfortably, managing to avoid thoughts of death. We laugh and agree with Woody Allen when he says, “I'm not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there.” But there is another way. There is an ancient tradition, quite applicable to psychotherapy, that teaches that a clear awareness of death fills us with wisdom and enriches our lives. The last words of one of my patients (“If violence were allowed...”) show that although reality death destroys us physically, idea death can save us.

Freedom, another fact of existence, is a dilemma for some of the characters in this book. When Betty, an obese patient, said that she had eaten too much before coming to see me and was going to eat again as soon as she left my office, she was trying to give up her freedom and convince me to start controlling her. The whole course of therapy with another patient (Thelma from the novel “The Executioner of Love”) revolved around the theme of submission to an ex-lover (and therapist), and I tried to help her regain her freedom and strength.

Freedom as a given of existence seems to be the direct opposite of death. We are afraid of death, but we consider freedom to be something absolutely positive. Isn't the history of Western civilization marked by the desire for freedom, and is it not this desire that drives history? But from an existential point of view, freedom is inextricably linked with anxiety, since it presupposes, in contrast to everyday experience, that the world we came into and will someday leave is not ordered, it was not created once and for all according to some grandiose project. Freedom means that a person is responsible for his decisions, actions, and his life situation.

Although the word "responsibility" can be used in different meanings, I prefer Sartre’s definition: to be responsible means “to be the author,” that is, each of us is the author of his own life plan. We are free to be anything but unfree: in Sartre's words, we are condemned to freedom. In fact, some philosophers make the even stronger claim that the structure of the human psyche determines the structure of external reality, the very forms of space and time. It is in the idea of self-creation that anxiety lurks: we are creatures striving for order, and we are frightened by the idea of freedom, which assumes that beneath us there is emptiness, an absolute abyss.

Any therapist knows that the first critical step in therapy is for the patient to accept responsibility for his life's difficulties. As long as a person believes that his problems are due to some external cause, therapy is powerless. After all, if the problem is outside of me, why should I change? It is the external world (friends, work, partner) that must change - or be replaced by something or someone else. Thus, Dave (“Don’t Walk Around”), who complained bitterly about feeling like a prisoner in a marriage with his domineering and suspicious possessive wife, could not make any progress in solving his problems until he realized that he had built his own prison

Because patients typically resist accepting responsibility, the therapist must develop techniques to help patients become aware of the ways in which they create their own problems. A very powerful technique that I use on many occasions is focusing on the here and now. As patients seek to recreate in therapy settings the same interpersonal problems that plague them in life, I concentrate on what is happening at the moment between me and the patient, and not on the events of his past or current life. By studying the details of the therapeutic relationship (or, in group therapy, the relationships between group members), I can directly point out to the patient how and in what ways he influences the reactions of other people. Thus, although Dave may have resisted taking responsibility for his marital problems, he could not reject the direct evidence from his group therapy experience that his secretive, irritating, and evasive behavior caused other group members to react to him in much the same way as his wife did.

Likewise, Betty's therapy ("Fat Girl") was ineffective as long as she attributed her loneliness to the variegated and rootless culture of California. It was only when I showed her how, during our sessions, her impersonal, timid, aloof demeanor recreated the same indifference in the therapeutic environment that she began to realize her responsibility for creating isolation around herself.

Although accepting responsibility leads the patient toward change, it does not mean change itself. And no matter how much the therapist cares about understanding, taking responsibility and self-actualization of the patient, it is change that is the true achievement.

Freedom not only requires us to take responsibility for our life choices, it also implies that change is impossible without willpower. Although therapists rarely use the concept of "will" explicitly, we nevertheless spend a lot of effort trying to influence the patient's will. We endlessly clarify and interpret, assuming that understanding itself will lead to change. This assumption of ours is a secular analogue of faith, since it cannot be empirically verified. After years of interpretation do not lead to change, we can begin to appeal directly to the will: “You know, you still need to make an effort. You must try. There is a time to reason, but now is the time to act.” And when direct exhortations fail, the therapist goes so far (as shown in my stories) that he uses any known means of influencing one person on another. Thus, I can advise, argue, harass, flatter, egg on, beg, or simply endure and wait for the patient to tire of his neurotic view of the world.

Our freedom manifests itself precisely as will, that is, the source of actions. I consider two stages in the manifestation of will: a person begins with a desire, and then makes a decision and acts.

Other patients are unable to make a decision. Although they know exactly what they want and what needs to be done, they cannot act and hesitate on the threshold. Saul ("Three Unopened Letters") knows that any normal person would have opened the letters; but the fear they cause paralyzes his will. Thelma (“Love’s Executioner”) knows that obsessive love is tearing her away from real life. She knew that she is living a life that, in her own words, ended eight years ago, and in order to return to reality, she needs to get rid of her reckless passion. But she could not or would not do this and resisted all my attempts to strengthen her will.

The decision is difficult to make for many reasons, and some of them lie at the very core of our existence. John Gardner, in his novel Grendel, describes a wise man who sums up his meditations on the mysteries of life with two simple but terrible phrases: “Everything fades away. The alternatives are mutually exclusive." I have already spoken about the first statement - the inevitability of death. The second phrase contains the key to understanding the difficulty of any decision. A decision inevitably contains a refusal: every “yes” has its own “no,” every decision made destroys all other possibilities. The root of the word "decide" means "to kill", as in the words homicide (murder) and suicide (suicide). Thus, Thelma clung to the negligible chance that she would ever be able to return the love of her lover, and giving up this opportunity meant destruction and death for her.

Existential isolation - the third given - is caused by an insurmountable gap between the Self and others, a gap that exists even in very deep and trusting interpersonal relationships. A person is separated not only from other people, but also from the world, to the extent that a person creates his own world. This existential isolation must be distinguished from other types of isolation - interpersonal and internal.

The man is worried interpersonal isolation, or loneliness, if he lacks social skills or character traits conducive to close communication. Internal isolation occurs when the personality is split, for example when a person separates his emotions from his memories of an event. The most acute and dramatic form of splitting, multiple personality, is quite rare (although it has become frequently discussed). When a therapist actually encounters a case like I did in Marge's therapy (Therapeutic Monogamy), he may be faced with a strange dilemma: which personality should he treat?

Since the problem of existential isolation is insoluble, the therapist must debunk its illusory solutions. A person's attempts to avoid isolation may interfere with normal relationships with other people. Many friendships and marriages fail because, instead of caring for each other, partners use each other as a means of dealing with their isolation.

A fairly common and effective attempt to avoid existential isolation, found in several of my stories, is merging, blurring the boundaries of one’s own personality, dissolving into another. The power of the fusion tendency was demonstrated by a subliminal perception experiment in which the phrase “Mom and I are one” flashed on a screen so quickly that subjects could not consciously perceive it, but reported that they felt better, stronger, more confident. The effect was even seen in comparative improvements in treatment outcomes (including behavior change) for smoking, obesity, and adolescent behavioral problems.

One of life's great paradoxes is that developing self-awareness increases anxiety. Merger dispels anxiety in the most radical way - by destroying self-awareness. The person who falls in love and experiences the blissful state of merging with the beloved does not reflect as his lonely, doubting “I” and the accompanying fear of isolation dissolve into “we.” Thus, a person gets rid of anxiety by losing himself.

This is why therapists don't like to deal with patients who are in love. Therapy and loving fusion are incompatible because therapeutic work requires a doubting self and anxiety, which serves as an indication of internal conflicts.

In addition, I, like most therapists, find it difficult to establish a productive relationship with a passionate patient. For example, Thelma from the story “The Executioner of Love” did not want to establish a relationship with me: all her energy was absorbed by love addiction. Beware of exclusive and strong attachment to another; she is not, as it often seems, an example of absolute love. Such exclusive love, closed in on itself, not needing others and not giving them anything, is doomed to self-destruction. Love is not just a passion that flares up between two people. Falling in love is infinitely far from permanent love. Love is, rather, a form of existence: not so much attraction as dedication, an attitude not so much towards one person, but towards the world as a whole.

Although we usually strive to live life in pairs or in groups, there comes a time, most often in the run-up to death, when the truth is revealed to us with cold clarity: we are born and die alone. I have heard many dying patients confess that the worst thing is not that you are dying, but that you are dying all alone. But even in the face of death, another's true willingness to be there to the end can overcome isolation. As the patient in the story “Don't Sneak” puts it: “Even if you are alone in a boat, it is always nice to see the lights of other boats bobbing nearby.”

So, if death is inevitable, if one fine day all our achievements, and even the solar system itself, will perish, if the world is a game of chance, and everything in it could be different, if people are forced to build their own world and their life plan in this world, then what is the meaning of our existence?

This question haunts modern man. Many people turn to psychotherapy feeling that their lives are aimless and meaningless. We are creatures searching for meaning. Biologically, we are designed in such a way that our brain automatically combines incoming signals into certain configurations. Understanding the situation gives us a feeling of dominance: feeling helpless and confused in the face of new and incomprehensible phenomena, we strive to explain them and thereby feel power over them. Even more important, meaning gives rise to values and the resulting rules of behavior: the answer to the question “why?” (“Why am I living?”) provides an answer to the question “how?” (“How do I live?”).

In these ten psychotherapy stories, open discussion of the meaning of life is rare. The search for meaning, like the search for happiness, is possible only indirectly. Meaning is the result of meaningful activity. The more persistently we look for it, the less likely we are to find it. A person always has more reasonable questions about meaning than answers. In therapy, as in life, meaning is a byproduct of engagement and action, and that is where the therapist should focus his or her efforts. The point is not that passion provides a rational answer to the question of meaning, but that it makes the question itself unnecessary.

This existential paradox—a person searching for meaning and certainty in a world that has neither—has enormous implications for the profession of psychotherapy. In his daily work, the therapist who strives to genuinely relate to his patients experiences great uncertainty. The confrontation of patients with insoluble questions of existence not only poses the same questions to the therapist, but also makes him understand, as I myself had to understand in the story “Two Smiles,” that the experiences of another are elusively intimate and inaccessible to final understanding.

In fact, the ability to tolerate uncertainty is key to the profession of psychotherapy. Although the public may believe that therapists consistently and confidently guide patients through predictable stages toward a predetermined goal, this is rarely the case. On the contrary, as these stories indicate, the therapist may often hesitate, improvise, and feel his way blindly. The strong temptation to gain confidence by identifying with a particular ideological school and narrow therapeutic system often leads to a deceptive result: preconceptions can prevent the spontaneous, unplanned encounter that is necessary for successful therapy.

For a more detailed discussion of this existential approach and the theoretical and practical principles of psychotherapy based on it, see my book: Existential Psychotherapy (N.Y., Basic books, 1980).

In Russian, this meaning of the word “decide” is preserved in criminal jargon (“resolve”). – Approx. translation

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