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THE BIG READ At 83, Irvin D Yalom is the grand old man of American psychiatry, an unorthodox and tireless practioner of what he calls 'existential therapy'. SIMMY RICHMAN asks him what he has learnt about life (and death) in his still-flourishing career
There are not too many writers who could include the phrase "the meaning of life" in the title of a book and actually go some way to delivering on that promise.
A little over 10 years ago I was reeling from the death of my father. In the house of a close relative, a counsellor, I picked a book off the shelf with the title Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy. It was by Irvin D Yalom, a writer I had encountered before through a novel called When Nietsche Wept. (he has also written novels about Schopenhauer and Spinoza.) I picked it up and read the title story, although, being the true account of Yalom's sessions with a patient, perhaps "story" is not the correct word for this particular work. Either way, Momma and the Meaning of Life shook me to the core and its message is as vivid today as the moment I sat there, shaking with gri ef both real and implanted, reading it.
Admittedly, there can at times be what some might dismiss as a greeting-card sentimentality in Yalom's books. But when the central themes are death, existentialism and the darkest recesses of the human psyche, you'd have to be particularly hard-hearted not to forgive a little sugar coating. What is not in doubt is that for someone who is not primarily an author, Yalom is one hell of a writer.
Yalom, for the uninitiated, is a practising psychiatrist who is also the emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. Over more than 50 years in practice, he has imparted his unique wisdom to hundreds of patients and also found the time to write four novels, four collections of sessions and a number of textbooks for practitioners - at least one of which, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (1970), is still widely used today.
A little more on that "unique wisdom". Yalom is not one of those who sits back and lets his...