Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy (Perennial Classics)
By:
Irvin D. Yalom
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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Description:
The collection of ten absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients' dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist. Not since Freud has an author done so much to clarify what goes on between a psychotherapist and a patient.
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Release Date: 2000-09-05
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Good writer, but where is the compassion? - To be honest: I am writing this review after having read just 35 pages. I purchased this book because I, as a layperson, enjoyed his "The Gift of Therapy." Yalom is insightful, an excellent writer, an efficient, and, it seems, an effective therapist. However, the beginning of the first piece in "Love's Executioner" made me wonder about the extent of his compassion. For instance, he says about Thelma, a 70-year-old woman who is consumed by a brief affair she had eight years before she sees Yalom: "Everything I saw in my first glance--her wrinkled seventy-year-old face with that senile chin tremor, her thinning, peroxided, unkempt yellow hair... told me she had to be mistaken, that she could not be in love. How could love ever choose to ravage that frail, tottering old body, or house itself in that shapeless polyester jogging suit?"
No shame here.
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Deplorable Yalom - His "elegant interpretations" his "powerful words" his seniority towards everyone in his field. Yalom is a supercilious prat...
His reaction towards Betty, the obese woman, was utterly disgusting! Surely his thoughts have to have been more repellant han her body shape. "I have been repelled by fat women. I find them disgusting:...everything, everything I like to see in a woman , obscured in an avalanche of flesh...How dare they impose that body on the rest of us...The origins of these feelings?...I never considered them prejudice."
Although I have enjoyed reading the vignettes on his various patients I just cannot tolerate this narcissistic, supercilious man any longer.
What an awful person to entrust your innermost thoughts to, and to expect sensitivity and empathy from. He can't stop thinking about himself!!
Talk about countertransference. What an insurmountable obstacle it must be to him.
Better he use up all of his time writing books. Save the vulnerable and fragile people that approach him from wasting their money on pampering his enormous ego.
I am appalled. Outraged. Annoyed.
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Repelled by author's contempt for women - I found this book in the garbage in front of my building, god knows I should have left it there. The writing is excellent and the stories are fascinating, but the author injects far too much of himself and his repulsive attitude towards women into the narrative. "If only rape were legal"..ha ha the hard core feminists were outraged. In the Love's Executioner story, he winks at us..who would find a 70 year old woman attractive? The Fat Lady rants were truly nauseating. His self-serving wrap-up did nothing to ameliorate the foul taste of his hatred for fat women. Then, in the very next story, he says, "I like hard women.."
Who cares what he likes? What a pompous, arrogant jackass.
I didn't read any more, I threw the book in the garbage can from whence it came. Sometimes "free" books aren't worth the price. I wish I could get back that hour of my life, and purge the writer's nastiness from my mind! Imagine going to someone like this at a vulnerable stage in one's life, only to be patronized and treated with contempt! This guy has serious issues that need to be looked at.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Helpful for both therapist and client - As a student in the field and someone participating in counseling myself, this book offered many insights into my behavior in both roles. Great book for anyone interested in psychology from any angle.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
I strongly recommend this book... - This was my first Yalom book. The title caught my interest then i bought the book and started to read it before dozens of books i planned to read.
The preface, which explains the very/basic pains of being/ life, i think includes one of the most crucial basic lectures in one's life... After this strong preface, the main structure of the book, the tales section, focusing on more personal issues -but still being very universal- is lighter.
The book finishes with a marvellous tale called "In the Search of Dreamer" in which deep/ hidden/ unconscious feelings, disappointments, desires are revealed to the patient by extraordinary dreams. I was amazed at Dr Yalom's talent in interpreting these astonishing dreams.
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