Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy Book

Your therapist is judging you. Sorry, it sucks. I know the idea is that they are objective observers looking out for your best interest rather than the often hypercritical, dismissive average human being with a capacity for conversational boredom and bad advice, but they're not. Especially not Dr. Yalom. Dr. Yalom hates fat people, he develops a sexual attraction to one of his patients' multiple personalities and encourages her to incorporate this split-self into her overarching self so she'll be a more entertaining patient (and won't be so pathetic in general), he successfully convinces a lady to euthanize her incontinent dog in order to bolster her sex life (jerk), he sizes his patients up as hopeless human beings, rambling about how annoying certain cases were for him (with details), describing each individual while "masking their identities" to "protect confidentiality" in an almost Deconstructing Harry, Leslie's "not" Lucy sort of way. He is walking a lawsuit razor's edge, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if one of these folks showed up at his house with a pistol. There's not a chance in hell that I'd go see him after reading this. I mean, he gets pretty catty, pretty "oh shut up, you whiny little bitch." He reaaally lays into that fat lady. He calls people names. He relays very personal, veryvery embarrassing information, and then scoffs at it. As off-putting as this is, though, it's also one of the things that make the book stick out. Honesty. One of the best scenes in the t.v. Hannibal is where Dr. Lecter's most annoying patient is relaying a fantasy alternate-reality where he saves Michael Jackson from death by being his best friend. The look on Hannibal's face and condescending tone of his voice is priceless: god, you are insufferable, blubbering excuse for a human being. Cannibal or not, shrinkydinks are just people at the end of the day, with the same penchant for annoyance as you or I, the same neuroses and triggers. Just people. (Your therapist is judging you.)

To Dr. Yalom's credit, he is not asserting that his preconceived notions about his past patients were fair or accurate. This book is as much about the individual cases he has dealt with as about his growth as a psychiatrist, his separating of his own prejudices from the therapeutic process. In that sense, it is both intriguing, and kinda weirdly narcissistic.

This book seems less for people with a passing interest in psychotherapy, and more for future head-docs who need to really understand that in their chosen field, they are as much up against their inherent selves as they are the problems their patients are seeking help facing. The cases are mostly what I'd assume to be pretty garden variety, but they still hold interest. Well, except for that last one where it was all about analyzing some dude's dreams because, snooze. I could fall asleep listening to my loved ones' dreams, let alone those of some average stranger. It wasn't a waste of time at all, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Mostly because of that thing with the dog.