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Why then? We quarreled over everything. For several minutes she sobbed and then finally talked about what had happened. She had given me the warning she wanted, and now she leaned back in her chair. Her cancer and her treatment were both extremely painful. Most likely that was the point of his preoccupationthat he might forget his infestation. Elva liked my laughing. So the two men had said the wrong thing. Throughout Love's Executioner, Irvin Yalom uses several different theories when working with patients. Although she was in bad shape now, she was no worse than when she started. But soon irritation replaced the giggle. Stay focused! I told her of my own difficulties in coming to terms with death; that, though the fact of death cannot be altered, ones attitude toward it can be vastly influenced. Lets see if I have this right. But so much irritation? Not only did it explain his defensiveness at work, but he could extend this disidentification model to pertain to his body. . Its that I dont have faith in them. Here, look at the month of July: four migraines and each one preceded by either impotence or a grade-one or -two sexual performance.. Love's Executioner.docx. During her four years of illness, many courses of chemotherapy had prolonged her life but left her, each time, bald and agonizingly ill. Chrissie had had dozens of painful bone marrow extractions and so many bloodlettings that finally there were no more veins to be found. It was best to keep the lid of this underworld sealed. The most I can hope for is to stay out of a mental hospital. It also helped a lot when you kept asking me what had helped me in the past. Surely you want that? She had her back to me, but I thought I could see a slight nod of agreement. I agreed to speak to him for the last ten minutes of Thelmas hour and also made it clear that I would feel free to report back to her the entirety of our discussion. Once I accept someone for treatment, I commit myself to stand by that person: to spend all the time and all the energy that proves necessary for the patients improvement; and most of all, to relate to the patient in an intimate, authentic manner. Think about that. Tears were streaming down her face and onto her denim skirt. Meil- tai ne aistros blyksnis tarp dviej moni; yra didiulis skirtumas tarp simyljimo ir meils. Another kind of emergence was taking place. The story In Search of the Dreamer offers a unique backstage view of the escape of death anxiety and the minds last-ditch attempt to contain it: here, amidst the pervasive, dark death imagery of Marvins nightmare is one life-promoting, death-defying instrumentthe glowing white-tipped cane with which the dreamer engages in a sexual duel with death. Yalom! This time it was different, you went beyond words.. Perhaps I should have. Those letters must weigh ten pounds. She had always lived in the privileged circle, outside the unpleasantness, the nasty inconveniences visited on ordinary peoplethose swarming masses of the tabloids and newscasts who are forever being robbed or maimed. Quotes from Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy While there, I wrote the title story of Loves Executioner, as well as In Search of the Dreamer and If Rape Were Legal . But Marie felt trapped with Elmer. And so I gradually developed the notion that the best way I could convey my ideas to students, and enhance an existential sensibility, was through narrative. Her tight shoulders relaxed, her face loosened, her head turned ever so slightly toward me. Ill answer all your questions.. Could Marvin have possibly dreamed them? I dont want to get closer to them.. Try deepening a friendship with the people you already know., I saw a smile begin to form on Carloss lips. During the last year of her life, her physicians had installed a permanent intravenous catheter that permitted easy access to her bloodstream. Pain that is always there, whirring continuously just beneath the membrane of life. There were several reasons. Still another common scenario is for parents to overprotect the surviving children. It was ineffable. I dont know why, but I suddenly saw them in a different way! Love's Executioner 2. Several months later, his paper (with no mention of Dr. K. and no citation of their collaborative work) appeared as the lead article of an outstanding neurobiology journal. Our next appointment was the day following the next group meeting. Large folds of overhanging flesh broke off and were washed away. She undressed me and then took off all her clothes.. 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. So you never really belonged anywhere, never were truly at home. I think of what you told me about your bed in your aunts housethat cot youd unfold every night in the living room., The last to sleep, the first to rise. I tried very, very delicately to express that idea, in order not to provoke Daves exquisite sensitivity. dispenses itif Im good. Look, give yourself a break. But could I relate to Betty? So you deal with your guilt now by hanging on to Chrissie, by not getting on with your life?, I just cant forget her. Saul threw himself passionately into the hastily conceived project and treasured his consultation hours with Dr. K., in which they reviewed Sauls progress and sought meaningful patterns in the disparate basic research literature. I asked Betty to talk about her first experiences and early conceptions of death. The front door was ajar, as he had told me it would be. Everyone always says things in reviews like, "I wish I could give such-and-such book negative stars!" Matthew treated me like a patient, not a friend. The fact that Phyllis was unwilling to talk to me, even once, to help her husband, who was now in extremis, belied Marvins account of his idyllic, harmonious marriage. 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. Im surprised because I didnt know I had a daughter. I had never before heard Thelma speak metaphorically; it was as though someone else were speaking. Her dental sessions in his office were humiliating: whenever his assistant left the room, he would make sexually suggestive comments and manage frequently to brush his hands across her breasts. She called and arranged to go out to dinner with a man named George, who asked her to wear a rose in her hair and to meet him in the bar of a local restaurant. I did not think that he would be a good candidate for a deep, uncovering type of psychotherapy. Maybe I should give them to Mort or Jay or Pete to store for me. It was into this extraordinary tangle that Mikeof course, knowing none of thishad dropped his innocent, rational suggestion that Marie seek her doctors help in understanding her pain. I couldnt go any farther, but it was too narrow to turn around and go back. It almost never does. The hardest part for me in our work together is the frustration I have at the amount of distance you put between us. My first impulse was to get the hell away, far awayand not see her again. She presented her true case history so poignantly and convincingly that I was fully persuaded. The fact that Penny was in crisis, or said she was, presented me with a dilemma. Like me, she had made the big generational jump. But that day the tears had no end. Remember that every time youve sunk into a depression, youve climbed out again. I had also embarrassed myself professionally. It was a slide of a mans head. Then I turned to the dream. She caught herself and slowed down. Penny responded matter-of- factly that what she did was best for her and best for them. Then two hundred, a fifty-pound loss! No one had ever before asked such blunt questions. I met with Phyllis and Marvin as a couple for several more sessions. Take this all away. love's executioner two smiles summary I resolved to give him everything, to give in to him on every issue. Exploring the discrepancy in our views was treacherous because then she was likely to feel rebuffed. But suppose it was never a shared experience! But the next week Thelma, for the first time, missed her appointment. Elva bent forward, holding her hand to her mouth as though to exclude someone in the room, showed me a remarkable number of enormous teeth, and said, I whomped the shit out of him!. What was the last event in the chapter on Elva and what was the meaning of the event? Perhaps I should have, but I couldnt wait. Where is that moment now?, Well, where is it? It sounds important. 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. But at the same time she became unaccountably more distressed and reported more sadness and more anxiety. This macabre thought, Betty suspected, was echoed in the dream image of retrieving her friends dead body from the tunnel. She ultimately concurred and arranged residential care for her father in Mexico. Should I ask harsh existential questions of a dying man, a widow, a bereaved mother, and an anxious retiree with transcendent dreamsquestions for which I have no answers? No, she hated groups. What I meant was that I thought there was a question, a personal question, you might be asking me, something involving you and me., Wouldnt psychiatrists rather treat a thirty-year-old patient than a seventy-year-old patient?, Can we focus on you and me rather than on psychiatry, psychiatrists, and patients? Throughout the treatment, he used a variety of helping skills and approaches to attempt to breakthrough her within six months. Its just that Ive been so hurt by Matthew that Im not going to make myself vulnerable again to another therapist., Youve got good answers for everything, but what it all adds up to is Dont get close. You cant get close to Harry because you dont want to hurt him by telling him your intimate thoughts about Matthew and suicide. Transference - feelings that the patient attaches to the therapist that originated out of earlier relationships. . Thelma had not recovered by the next day and was exceptionally labile throughout our session. Somehow, Marge said, our last hour turned things around. When I asked for his reaction, he became strangely formal and said, Ill take your suggestions under consideration and let you know my decision., Was he disappointed? She said that, if it were true for me, it was true in spades for herthat she had led a totally self-centered life, that shes never given anything of herself., I reminded her of that. Betty now entered into a depression which was short-lived and had a curious, paradoxical twist. Ive waited. But I was pleased he never believed he knew unknowable things. I dont remember exactly what we talked about, but it helped me change a lot.. Take a look at this. Well, I thought, that was something! I ended the session thinking that, though she might fulfill her research commitment, there was little chance she would resume therapy. Though we may falter, grow ill, though we may arrive at the very edge of life, there is, we are convinced, a looming, omnipotent servant who will always bring us back. love's executioner two smiles summary. Yet her despair deepened. I wonder about this because Yaloms late wife, Marilyn Yalom, was a feminist writer from the beginning of their marriage (as he states in his recently released autobiography Becoming Myself ). Though the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, such is rarely the case: instead, as these stories bear witness, therapists frequently wobble, improvise, and grope for direction. Now he realized where this discussion was leading, and began to perspire. 8. No, really. Im talking about now and about how you cannot live life because you continually replay past history over and over. I stammered, You know, psychiatrists dont ordinarily touch their, Let me interrupt you before you tell any more fibs and your nose gets longer and longer like Pinocchio. Betty seemed amused at my squirming. Now why, thought I, do her feet not reach the ground? He remained remarkably clinical. (We are all stuck with some anxiousness about death. She hardly seemed to breathe. Go visit the porno shops in the Tenderloinitd be good for your education. At sixteen? Whats happened?, A few days ago, I was driving home from workI finish up about one in the morningand I had a blackout. The night before our meeting, he had had a short dream which was full of mystery. You tell me Im not readynot ready to stop therapy, not ready to get married, not ready to adopt a child, not ready to stop smoking. The story depicts my struggle to work through these unruly feelings in order to relate to the patient at a human level. Living on a ranch, she was no stranger to death. Perhaps I was intrigued by her beauty, by her ebony hair in bangs framing her astonishingly white, perfectly featured face. If giving fifty thousand dollars is a good idea, it will still be a good idea a month from now. They were evil, awful people, especially one toothless old crone whose face reminded me of Susan Jennings. We distort others by forcing them into our own preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes:We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, those ideas have certainly the principal place. Marvin immediately began to berate himself for his insensitivity to her and for his sexual failure and toppled into a profound depression. Sometimes, as in Pennys family, the surviving children suffer because so much of the parents energy is bound up with the dead child, who is both memorialized and idealized. She felt that she was talented but had never developed her talents because, since the age of thirteen, she had had to earn a living. Over the months I had been seeing Carlos, I had discovered that I could chart, with astonishing accuracy, the course of his cancer by noting the things he thought about. Im really interested in what you said about being, or rather pretending to be, jolly. Phyllis came over and gave me a head and neck massage. Without front windows you dont know where youre heading., How would that apply to you, by what youre facing ahead of you in your life now?, Retirement. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe therapy as treating the patient as an adult. Penny felt guilty for her amnesia, for not having talked more about death with her daughter. Wed be relating together as two bad little boys. Now dont jump to conclusions. Here he shook his finger at me for greater emphasis. I think the dream is about death and future life, and it uses your symbol of comparing death and rebirth to a trade of cars. Earlier Penny had told me that she was in frequent communion with Chrissie, visiting her daily in the cemetery and spending an hour a day grooming her grave and talking to her. Im not her, you know! A lover of words (he spoke several languages), he marveled at the transposition of soul and sole. Nonetheless, I can still see far into the distance. There are, in these ten tales of psychotherapy, few explicit discussions of meaning in life. He would, I suspected, be more reasonable in a week or two, and under ordinary circumstances I would simply have been patient. I started to point out that she was speaking as though I werent in the same room with her, but couldnt summon the energyshe had worn me down. Its true, you were more open than the other men in the group. Given the choice of discussing the dream from the perspective of death or of sex, Marvin, with dispatch, chose the latter. You get what you deserve, depending on what youve done or the way youve lived your present life. Men and womenand these are by no means desperate or needy but successful, well-functioning, well-dressed people who glitter as they walkare stirred to their depths. In this book, Yalom discusses ten clients, their therapy journey and his own development as an existential psychotherapist. I had no weight. I meant the things I said to you, every one of them. We were talkingthat was the important thing. Miles), Im Calling the Police (with Robert Berger), and my children, Eve, Reid, Victor, and Ben. I asked her to describe the main feelings in the dream. In similar fashion, Bettys (Fat Lady) therapy was ineffective as long as she could attribute her loneliness to the flaky, rootless California culture. So I, as a child, am dead. What conclusions can be drawn from these data concerning the inventories? Thelma began the next session by telling me that it had been an awful week. Penny, youre a tough judge. Biologically, our nervous systems are organized in such a way that the brain automatically clusters incoming stimuli into configurations. She was incapable, or unwilling, to reveal herself in the immediate present that we two were sharing. Would that change his attitude about them? Obviously, she gave him that power in an effort to deny her own freedom and her responsibility for the constitution of her own life. The voice was so different, so forceful, so authoritative, I looked around the office for an instant to see who else might have entered. She said that it was important to her to be listened to, that she had no one else but me and nowhere else but my office to express her pain. Thelma (Loves Executioner) knew that her love obsession was stripping her life of reality. Our next session started uneventfully. Indeed, Marvin reinforced that whimsical notion. She flat out refuses to see a shrink, a marriage therapist, a sex therapistanyone. More than anything, I felt sorrow. A week later, I arrived at work one morning to find my door broken open, my office rifled, and the clothes gone. Where transference refers to feelings that the patient erroneously attaches (transfers) to the therapist but that in fact originated out of earlier relationships, countertransference is the reversesimilar irrational feelings the therapist has toward the patient. I replay in my mind each of our meetings together during those twenty-seven days. I shouldnt have used the word enjoy a few minutes ago. He merely shook his head. When her two daughters were sick, the family doctor made a house call. The first smile followed Mikes recommendation that Marie discuss her pain in detail with her oral surgeon; the second when he drove home the point that she would not feed poisoned food to her dog. To yield to her now would render me absolutely ineffective. This question was particularly painful for Betty who, by that time, had visited a gynecologist and been told that she had an endocrine disorder that would make it impossible for her to have children. It was the flesh-and-blood Marvin who was irritating and uninteresting. The physical appearance of the two parrots is of no help: they resemble one another closely; and both, moreover, satisfy Flauberts published description of Lulu. Hed foul himself as much as me. It is trueor, rather, was truethat, when we first began to meet, I was put off by your body., Tell me, Betty, knowing thisseeing that I didnt look at you or was uncomfortable with you why did you stay? It is almost impossible for patients to see therapists as they really are. , , , .