But I was to struggle with that question many times before the dnouement of this therapy, and could not have guessed then that, of all the riddles in the case of Thelma, it was the riddle of Matthew I was destined to solve most fully. Ill tell you the truth, if rape were legal, Id do itonce in a while.. This business of comparing yourself unfavorably to others is always self-destructive. The sexual act is seen also by the protagonists of other stories as a talisman to ward off diminishment, aging, and approaching death: thus, the compulsive promiscuity of a young man in the face of his killing cancer (If Rape Were Legal . I believe that the primal stuff of psychotherapy is always such existence painand not, as is often claimed, repressed instinctual strivings or imperfectly buried shards of a tragic personal past. I made an appeal to efficiency. 2. I, for my part, had reservations because I was so pessimistic about treatment: I agreed to work with him because I saw no other viable therapy option. I wasnt certain. We quarreled over everything. Would I be allowed to hug you? Matthew answered my questions by taking my hand, pulling me into his lap, and hugging me tightly for several minutes. You knew that before, I know. Ive taken up seventy-five percent of the meeting already, and I know that others want some time today., Reluctantly, we left Dave and turned to other matters in the group. He liked to talk to me, but I believe that the primary attraction was the opportunity to reminisce, to keep alive the halcyon days of sexual triumph. Perhaps it was there and then that I resolved that Elmer would have to go. Marvin feels youre cold and uninvolved and that youve taken little personal interest in his lifein how he got to be the person he is today.. Love's Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom | 9780141975443 - Booktopia And the length of the sentence! I tried mightily to persuade her that it was a positive, not a negative, thing that had emerged in therapy. I remember that Thelma and I both asked many questions, each of which he answered fully. A grandfather who told her stories? Phyllis wants you out of their lives. It takes away the depthit makes it into nothing. Get on with it! If I were forced to assign an official diagnostic label to Marie, I would follow the formula prescribed in the current psychiatric diagnostic and statistical manual and arrive at a precise and official-sounding six-part diagnosis. Youve got to be kidding. Patienthood is ubiquitous; the assumption of the label is largely arbitrary and often dependent more on cultural, educational, and economic factors than on the severity of pathology. It was only when he started acting professionally, when he went back into a formal role, that he hurt me. I had forgotten how they ended! Though Mike knew that his patient had grasped the concept, he nonetheless pressed the point home: Then why not treat your body as well as you would treat your dog?. For a brief time I felt a wave of eerie nausea, as though I were peering through a rent in the fabric of reality, at something forbidden, at the raw ingredients, the clefts and seams, the embryonic cells and blastulas that are, in the natural order of things, not meant to be seen in the finished human creature. Or had I been expertly maneuvered? Every sexual rush, colored red, was reduced to a five-point scale according to Marvins performance: premature ejaculations were separately coded, as was impotencewith a distinction made between inability to sustain an erection and inability to have one. Yes, I was certain I had acted with her best interests in mind. I ended up responding so well to the process, though, that I've continued seeing her in private practice ever since. My next car is going to be a Maserati., But if cars are dream symbols of bodies, why would you, in your next life, get the body, or the life, that you hate above all others?, Carlos had no option but to respond. In fact, though there had been considerable sexual caressing during her twenty-seven days with Matthew, they had had intercourse only once, the first evening. She then notified the police about the threat (but not, of course, about the highway chase), and for the last week her house had been under constant police surveillance. What would happen if you stopped trying to entertain me?, I dont see anything wrong with having some fun. I felt caught. and thats why I have to stop therapy!, I scrambled to respond. The strange, full contralto voice pronounced: As long as youre going to pretend to be a Jewish intellectual, you might as well furnish your office like one. Or, was it possible that he was far ahead of me and mocked himselfand me, toowith subtle irony? I had also embarrassed myself professionally. She was convinced he was going to die soon, though the doctors claimed that his prognosis was not hopeless despite his debilitated physical condition and his advanced age (he was sixty-three). She must have laughed twenty times during the session, her high spirits apparently in no way dampened by my stern refusal to be coerced into laughing with her. . By virtue of their privileged role, their access to deep feelings and secret information, their reactions always assume larger-than-life meanings. I was still in a very fragmented state of mind. Marvin simply took her hand. One is isolated not only from other beings but, to the extent that one constitutes ones world, from world as well. And still unopened. He writes about various patient's problems, such as obesity, dealing with grief, low self-esteem, loneliness, the trauma of being . Brent, sixteen, was in juvenile hall detention for participating in a burglary; Jim, nineteen, was a heavy drug user. Would I discover the brutal facts of human experience that the enchantment concealed? He really admired Dr. K but decided to write another article without crediting him as a source. If we stare too hard into the past, its easy to be overcome with regret. You are much more available for love now than you were a few months ago. Betty started each hour with a progress report: ten pounds lost, then twenty, twenty-five, thirty. I asked him about the two smiles. No, that would not work. Wellthis is the part youll find hard to believefor the last twelve months my moods have been totally controlled by sex. Gradually Bettys acute anxiety subsided. Marie and he locked gazes for a moment. At first I thought that the timing could not have been worse. Whose death will make me truly dead? MIUC catalog Details for: Love's executioner and other tales of I was about to ask about Harry being good at giving things up, but Thelma raced on. Each read every line of his or her story (except for one patient who died before I finished) and gave me approval for publication. It is true I was unsympathetic to Elmer, but I knew about my lack of interest in dogs and had been carefully monitoring myself. In fact, usually they dont., If I would have given in to feelings every time I was hurt, Id never have gotten anywhere., I notice that it is very hard for you to talk about wounds., I was one of hundreds. I hadnt asked who would leave it ajar if he were confined to bed. In the remaining time, he reinforced his instructions on self-hypnosis and taught her how to respond to cigarette craving with auto-hypnosis and increased awareness (hyperception, as he put it) of the fact that she needed her body to live and that she was poisoning it. Did he ejaculate inside of us? Its just a thought I have sometimes. I need some time to digest all this. He would, I suspected, be more reasonable in a week or two, and under ordinary circumstances I would simply have been patient. Everyone was trying to help her talk and, rightly or wrongly, I decided it would help Martha if I shared with the group that I had been raped three years ago. It was going to take Marvin a long time to share his vulnerability. Put yourself into the future. If I were to write my summary of that hour, I would stucture it around two particularly real moments: the two times Marie and Mike locked gazes and she smiled and nodded. Sometimes Id imagine the blood filling a paper cup. The whole dream was soaked in fear., What feeling was there in the dream about the insertion of the cane into the babys vagina?, If anything, that part seemed almost soothing, as though it quieted the dreamor, rather, it tried to. I doubted that I would find the answers to these questions. He always called me on my shitty habits.. I left Atlanta and never looked back., Not till now. We battled for months. But he was impatient to get marriedhe had dated Phyllis since he was fifteenand, since he had no financial resources, decided to become a high school teacher. My mouth is so dry I can hardly talk. No doubt they resented that arrangement while Chrissie was alive, I suggested, but what of their anger now when Penny refused to let them use their sisters room after her death? The secretaries all loved him. She had taken the ritualized widow walkthrough the cancer diagnosis; the awful, toxic, gut- wrenching chemotherapy; their last visit together to Carmel; their last drive down El Camino Real; the hospital bed at home; the funeral; the paperwork; the ever-dwindling dinner invitations; the widow and widowers clubs; the long, lonely nights. Yes, he had known Saul. Thelma grew deeply despondent after all attempts to contact Matthew failed. We met thrice weekly during this time, and I attempted to help her understand the source of her tears. Pennys eyes widened. Anxious and thoroughly fed up with myself, I entered therapy (yet again), and after several hard months, my mind was my own again and I was able to return to the exciting business of experiencing my life as it was happening. When I started the group, your instructions were that I should be honest in expressing my feelings in the group. I tried to help Thelma talk. Love's executioner and other tales of psychotherapy . Instead of talking about Chrissies tragedy, she spent the next two hours describing the tragedy of her own life. I should have written Dr. K. immediately. Concentrate on having a good conversation. I was now permitted to interrupt her instantaneously (reminding her, of course, of our new agreement) whenever she giggled, adopted a silly accent, or attempted to amuse me or to make light of things in any distracting way. Im nothing. In a curious way her disclosure helped us to deal with the ending of therapy, since it brought us full circle, back to the beginning of therapy, back to that hitherto mysterious first dream in which her two little sons, dressed like girls, were on display in an institution. I doubted whether it would be possible to separate her from her obsession without first helping her to enrich other realms of her life. The unknowability of the other inheres not only in the problems I have describedthe deep structures of image and language, the individuals intentional and unintentional decision to conceal, the observers scotomatabut also in the vast richness and intricacy of each individual being. Instructors praise his group therapy text because it is based on the best available empirical evidence. Now she saw locks, doors, burglar alarms, and telephones. During my meeting with my next patient, it was hard to get my mind off Saul. Not much other therapy has gone on. She smoked furiously during the session, often taking two or three drags before angrily snuffing out the cigarette, only minutes later to light up another. Its the common denominator of every form of blissromantic, sexual, political, religious, mystical. In this instance, for example, if he hadnt been desperate for Dr. K.s approval, he would have avoided the whole problem by doing what any collaborator doessimply keep ones co-author informed about all developments in their joint work. Before parting, I extracted some commitments from Thelma: she agreed to think more about her decision and to meet with me again in three weeks, and she promised to honor her commitment to the research project by meeting, six months hence, with the research psychologist and completing the battery of questionnaires. unl dean's list fall 2022; tv prva 1 uzivo; cudd energy services; sumi sumi : matching puzzle. The second, alternatives exclude, is an important key to understanding why decision is difficult. I think I had a premonition at the time that, before my work with Thelma was over, I would be called to account for hubris. Cookies on OCLC websites. 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. Matthew entered. I heard the men whispering and conspiring in a menacing way. The ten years of therapy before Matthew? "Good" therapy, with a "good" patient is at bottom what kind of venture? It was time now to make a recommendation to Marvin about treatment. She continued in a derisive, gloating manner: You could have her in therapy for thirty years, but Id still win. I decided to increase my leverage by triangulation, and I approached the same issue from another direction: And, Carlos, something else comes to my mind right now. It is not possible to rebuild your house at nightto change the course you have set, just as you are preparing to enter the sea of death. Me! I fantasized Mickey Mouse, the sorcerers apprentice in Fantasia, sweeping away my distracting thoughts until I had to sweep away that image, too, in order to attend to Betty. Everything I saw in my first glanceher wrinkled seventy-year-old face with that senile chin tremor, her thinning, bleached, unkempt yellow hair, her emaciated blue-veined handstold me she had to be mistaken, that she could not be in love. Thats your depression talking, Marge, not you. I looked forward to seeing her and being with her. All names, identifying characteristics, and other details of the case material in this book have been changed. She had died while giving birth. Im good at it. Maries first step, Mike suggested, was to learn more about her pain: to differentiate between functional and unnecessary pain. I began to objectify him: Saul was no longer a person who was depressed but was instead a depressionspecifically, in terms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a major depression of a severe, recurrent, melancholic type, with apathy, psychomotor retardation, loss of energy, appetite and sleep disturbance, ideas of reference, and paranoid and suicidal ideation. The whimpering Marge in front of me or the sexy, insouciant Marge? My initial plan was to follow each story with a few paragraphs discussing the theoretical points it illustrated. No one had ever before asked such blunt questions. She never stayed focused on any issue but quickly moved on to other grievances. Ive gone over all the pros and cons, and I now believe you are rightIm in such bad shape that its not likely anything could make me worse!, Thelma, those arent my words. And what do you make of the allusions to deathundertakers, silence, blackness, the whole atmosphere of dread and foreboding?. Will you open the letters before you mail that letter to Dr. K.? Perhaps others would evaluate her very differently from the way I would. He remembered them well and was convinced that they signified impact and connection. Penny was still a haunted woman, but her demons now dwelled in the present rather than the past. You saw that picture of mebe honest, tell the truth, was I not beautiful? She continued, without waiting for my response. Love's Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom - Audiobook - Audible.co.uk I was delighted for her and commended her strongly each week on her efforts. I was astounded by the resistance he had put up. Bereaved parents are also, by analogy, confronted with their own death: they have not been able to protect a defenseless child, and as night follows day they comprehend the bitter truth that they, in their turn, will not be protected. What payoff did Dave get from a belief that he was imprisoned by a woman? I had developed a variety of hypotheses about his behavior, but I was not remotely prepared for the story I had just heard. Then Mike discussed pain with her. I had her attention. Please read the following five stories in this collection: Love's Executioner, Do Not Go Gentle, Two Smiles, Three Unopened Letters, and In Search of the Dreamer. Perhaps, but Penny had a better explanation for the sadness in both the blackout and the dreams. Time and again I had hit against a concrete wall. I was afraid I would find her dead in this large castle on a high mountain. It was time to face the truth: I had botched this case beyond belief, and I could not transfer blame to the patient, or her husband, or the human condition. Love's Executioner General Chapter Overviews - Quizlet I didnt know her name and she didnt have much freedom, but we each knew how to find the other. So that was one thing in your favor. And I guess you can say Ive found a way to take them with me! For Chrissakes stop pushing him! Phyllis came over and gave me a head and neck massage. She was talking in lists again. This moment, this brief interval between obsessions, was the crucial time for us to workbefore Thelma re- established her equilibrium by latching onto something or someone. If she punished him in any manner, Elmer retaliated by hosing down carpets in other rooms. Besides, it was by no means clear that we could have gone much further. And now what kind of truth was I stalking? Those images kept drifting back into his mind especially the image of the gaunt Victorian undertaker or temperance worker. My psychiatrist finally advised me to sever all contact, to be totally silent. I wished I had a brown paper bag for him to breathe into but, lacking that old folk remedy (as good as any other for counteracting hyperventilation), I tried to talk him down. I recommended reading material and urged her to visit a female gynecologist and to explore these issues with her girlfriends and her therapy group. But Elmer loomed as a major barrier between Marie and her new life. Such pragmatic use of dreams is commonplace in therapy. Think of your jaw and cheek growing more and more numb. You seem familiar with itId be very interested to know your opinion of it. I feel O.K. It is almost impossible for patients to see therapists as they really are. To tell you the truth, I was scared. I tried another tack. I didnt want to stop seeing Betty. Finally, he grieved for himself, for the imprisoned dreamer, for the little boy crying for help in the darkness. She didnt know what would happen to her if she didnt have her weekly fix. It seemed to me she was still resisting closeness by referring to a fix rather than to me, and I gradually confronted her on that point. Im way down. We did not know, then, that it was to be a permanent farewell. A common, and vigorous, attempt to solve existential isolation, which occurs in several of these stories, is fusionthe softening of ones boundaries, the melting into another. In a conversation, the content consists of the actual words uttered, the substantive issues discussed; the process, however, is how the content is expressed and especially what this mode of expression reveals about the relationship between the participating individuals. She remembered each of them very well. Your life would have been very different?, Let me back up a minute. Penny, you talk to Chrissie every day. The first step in all therapeutic change is responsibility assumption. Did I have the right to do that? The surgeon is lying down. I have never had a long-term relationship with a man nor any hope of ever having one. And another declared, I want to be young forever, as she, an old woman, could not relinquish her obsessive love for a man thirty-five years younger. She considered termination to be an attack upon meand she was right! I continued, And that one of the most important principles of groups is that the group is a miniature worldwhatever environment we create in the group reflects the way we have chosen to live? He reassured Phyllis that travel was important to him, but not so important that he couldnt wait until she was ready. The real actress, the responsible consciousness, remained concealed backstage. To my surprise, she joined a square-dancing group (this ladys got guts, I thought) and a weekly bowling leagueher father had often taken her bowling when she was a child, she explained. There she was in an autotrance, eyes closed, flickering eyelids covering frenetic REM-like activity. In part she cried because of her loss, but in large part because she considered her fathers life to have been such a tragedy: he never obtained the education he wanted (or that she wanted for him), and he died just before he retired and never enjoyed the years of leisure for which he had longed. Not only was she turned off therapy, she volunteered, but she had no further need of it: she had been feeling much better, certainly far better than three weeks ago! I watched her go down the stairs. My eating is out of control, Betty said, chuckling, and added, You could say my eating is always out of control, but now it is really out of control. I was willing to be her executioner, to sacrifice her for you. So I said nothing but simply raised my eyebrows. Marvin spoke in a deliberate, pedantic manner. This question plagues contemporary men and women, and many seek therapy because they feel their lives to be senseless and aimless. What are they teaching you in medical school nowadays?. I hoped to show her that another person could know her fully and still care for her. He didnt give a damn about Martha and me, he was just getting his sexual kicks. Marvin listened attentively to what I said, but his facial expression was so frozen that I had no hint of what he felt. I personally feel shocked. Obviously, it was a fiction that Matthew had any real power over her. Second, issues are never resolved once and for all in therapy. Besides, I felt I had to accept the letters. Can you remember any of it? A lot of therapists, at this point, would have made an interpretation about the way she was shutting me out. Youve done a helluva good job with her. That needy part of me did not act in Maries best interests. When one person, the therapist, treats another, the patient, it is understood from the beginning that the treatment pair, the two who have formed a therapeutic alliance, are not equals or full allies; one is distressed and often bewildered, while the other is expected to use professional skills to disentangle and examine objectively issues that lie behind that distress and bewilderment. Others, and among them I include myself, marvel that anyone can take diagnosis seriously, that it can ever be considered more than a simple cluster of symptoms and behavioral traits. Betty insisted she was taking huge risks, yet, as I said to her, Betty, you rate yourself ten, yet it didnt feel that way to me. Im afraid that, if I form friends here and start to like it, I might not want to leave. You have to try, you know. That was a hell of a thing for her to have gone through, and I felt for her, but it seemed to me that she had erred by trying to bootleg therapy for herself in the group. To make matters worse, that evening Marge had gone to a public lecture given by an extremely articulate and attractive young woman philosopher. she asked. I had known Carlos to close up completely like this on other occasions. His eyes open now to the existential facts of life, he was grappling with the inevitability of death and with his powerlessness to save himself. Forgetting Chrissie is like saying I never loved her. After Chrissies death, Penny was still unavailable to her sons: the rage she felt toward them, much of it only because they were alive instead of Chrissie, created a silence between them. Then he turned into Matthew. Thats not entirely true. First, she enrolled in an eating-disorder program at the clinic where I worked and completed their demanding protocol, which included a complex physical workup and a battery of psychological tests. Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. Aiku, ir plaios palets vis kit. But in the group discussion, Dave took it upon himself. After a few minutes he tried to continue. His blood pressure (he had told me earlier) had risen to one hundred ninety over one hundred twenty; and six years before, at a time of stress, he had had a severe, nearly fatal coronary. As though she were reading my mind, Thelma continued, lifting her chin and projecting her words as to a large audience. And, of course, behind the scenes, I was subtly guiding her toward that decision.
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