Irvin D. Yalom

American psychiatrist, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford — faculty from 1963, tenured 1968 — who built the best-known model of existential-psychotherapy and taught group psychotherapy. Still in part-time private practice at the time of the source record.

Major works: The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (1970), Existential Psychotherapy (1980), the novel When Nietzsche Wept (1992, Commonwealth Club Gold Award), and staring-at-the-sun (2008) on death anxiety. He received the 2001 Oskar Pfister Award for contributions to religion and psychiatry.

His organising idea is the four givens — isolation, meaninglessness, mortality, freedom — as conditions everyone meets rather than pathologies anyone has.

Yalom is the spoke’s cleanest illustration of the method rule that keeps carl-jung here and philosophers next door: a man who wrote a novel about Nietzsche and a treatise on death, filed under psychology because he worked in a clinic.

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existential-psychotherapy · staring-at-the-sun · james-hollis · carl-jung