Product Description

Consists of eight case-studies of people the author has treated, including a woman of 67, obsessively pining with love for her 32-year-old previous therapist and a woman of 19 stone who has emotional difficulties because of her weight problem. Such stories reveal the diversity of human motivation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4301 in Books
• Published on: 1991-01-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Irving D. Yalom is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Customer Reviews

a really easy read
If you like reading case histories, then this is the book for you. It is a series of case histories with Irvin Yaloms thoughts included as part of the narrative. It tells you what happened, what he was thinking while it happened, what he was aiming for with his responses and where he occasionally went wrong! As a trainee counsellor, I found this a very refreshing and honest read. I also found it useful as a loose guide for hints and tips. It may not be an ideal practical skills manual, but it was entertaining, thought provoking and a wonderful insight to existentialism. Like one of the other reviewers, it was on my required reading list for my course, and also like that reviewer, it is the only one I picked up and read cover to cover within a few days - it really made me care about the clients he wrote about and I wanted to see what happened to them - luckily Irvin Yalom tells you!

Captivating
Only once in a while do you come across a book -- in a shop, library, or friend's collection -- and find that, within just a few lines, it's prose jumps out at you from the page, haunting you, until you posess and devour it for yourself. This is such a book.

A must for trainee counsellors
what can I say, I have been training as a counsellor for three years and this is the first book which was on the college book list that I could not put down. The other books on the list are still unread in my bookcase. Though reading Yalom I now understand existentialism . It was wonderful, very easy to read. the book was delivered on Thursday and I finished it on Friday, which is amazing for me as I live in a household of 4 young children. Buy it tommorrow, I'm going to buy more copies for all my friends as I promised them they could read mine when I had finished with it but I'm afraid that I won't get it back so they will have to have their own copy. If anyone knows of an address where I can write to Irvin Yalom let me know. By the way I have just ordered the rest of his books