Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy (Perennial Classics) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book should be required reading for anybody either undergoing psychotherapy or providing it. Irvin Yalom uses his experience with ten clients to illustrate how people change in therapy. Sometimes the change comes out of brilliant insights, sometimes it comes from the therapist's mistakes. Either way, Yalom's integrity in relating these vignettes helps the reader understand the process better.
If you're not in therapy, perhaps this book will help you understand yourself and your internal processes a bit better. Which of Yalom's patients do you identify with? Which to you totally reject? Either of those patients, and Yalom's treatment of them, has something to teach you.
If you are in therapy, notice how Yalom treats his patients, how he thinks about them. How does this compare to your relationship with your therapist? Do you experience the same challenges, the same caring, the same dynamic? Or do you just show up and whine for an hour?
As a therapist, I found Yalom's work particularly brave. Who would write a book about their mistakes? Yet, from his mistakes, I find myself learning--and also better enabled to learn from my mistakes. Reading Love's Executioner helped to keep me from sitting on that God-like Throne and remember to be a human being with my clients; a fellow sufferer, an ally in the healing process.
And if the idea of therapy seems not to apply to you, then you may simply find this book a fascinating story about how a thoughtful and insightful man deals with the sorrows, wounds, and needs of other human beings. These stories impart a powerful understanding of human relationships, whether you're involved in therapy or not.
Five stars for candor and courage. Five stars for a sharp writing style that holds attention better than most "case studies," and five stars for choosing stories that speak to the depths of people's hearts.
(If you'd like to discuss this book or review, click on the link above to drop me an email. Thanks!)

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Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy From A Buddhist Perspective Review

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(More customer reviews)A friend loaned me this book, and from the notes in its margins, it looks like it has passed through many hands before mine. "It's Epstein's best book," my friend explained, "and it changed my life." Mark Epstein is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and this book is his result of twenty years' experience in both Western psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation (p. x).
In the Dalai Lama's Foreward to Epstein's 1995 book, and in his own more recent books including THE ART OF HAPPINESS (1998), STAGES OF MEDITATION (2001), and AN OPEN HEART (2001), he tells us the "purpose of life is to be happy" (p. ix). However, as Epstein reveals in his insightful book, clinging to the self causes suffering. Whereas attachment, aversion, delusion, and faulty perceptions not only cause suffering, they also offer the potential for "release" (p. 16). "We are locked into our minds," Epstein writes, "but we do not really know them. We are adrift and struggling, buffeted by the waves of our minds, having not learned how to float" (p. 17). (Perhaps this is what my own Zen teacher meant when he once told me that I "think too much.")
To find enlightenment, the Buddha encouraged us to become as lamps unto ourselves (p. 40), and Dogen observed that, "to study Buddhism is to study the self" (p. 20). This is also the premise of THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER. Epstein has organized his book into three parts, the Buddhist psychology of mind (pp. 11-102), meditation (pp. 103-155), and therapy (pp. 157-222). In Part I, he demonstrates how Buddhist teachings are the key to understanding the psychology of mind (p. 41), and how those teachings are "less about religion (in the Western sense) than they are a vision of reality containing a practical blueprint for psychological relief" (p. 45). In Part II, Epstein examines the basic Buddhist meditation practice of "bare attention." Meditation, he explains, promotes the therapeutic goals of integration, humility, stability and self awareness (p. 129). In Part III, using non-technical terminology, Epstein integrates Freud's practice of psychotherapy into Buddhist teachings. In the end, Epstein's book is not so much a "feel-good" book about finding happiness in our lives, as a feel-real book well worth reading.
G. Merritt

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