Becoming Myself by Irvin D. Yalom

Author:Irvin D. Yalom
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EXISTENTIAL THERAPY

Ever since reading Rollo May’s Existence early in my psychiatric residency and taking my first philosophy courses at Hopkins, I had been wondering how I could begin to incorporate the wisdom of the past into my field of psychotherapy. The more philosophy I read, the more I realized how many profound ideas psychiatry had ignored. I much regretted that I had only a rickety foundation in philosophy and the humanities in general, and was determined to begin to address these gaps in my education.

I started auditing a number of Stanford undergraduate courses in phenomenology and existentialism, many of them taught by a remarkably lucid thinker and lecturer, Professor Dagfinn Føllesdal. I found the material fascinating, if dense and difficult, and struggled particularly with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. I found Heidegger’s Being and Time opaque, but also intriguing, so much so that I sat through Dagfinn’s Heidegger course twice. He and I were to develop a lifelong friendship. The other Stanford professor teaching courses in my area of interest was Van Harvey, who, despite his staunch agnosticism, was the long-term chair of the Stanford Department of Religious Studies. Sitting in the front row of his classroom, I listened, mesmerized, to his lectures on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, two of the most unforgettable courses I’ve ever taken. Van Harvey, too, became a close friend, and to this day we meet for regular luncheons to talk about philosophy.

My whole professional life was changing: less and less did I seek collaboration with scientific projects conducted by members of my department. When psychology professor David Rosenhan went on sabbatical, I stepped in to teach his large undergraduate course on abnormal psychology, but that would be my finale—the last such course I taught.

I gradually drifted away from my original affiliation with medical science and began grounding myself in the humanities. This was an exciting time, but also a time of self-doubt: I often felt like an outsider, losing touch with new developments in psychiatry and, at the same time, becoming just a dabbler in philosophy and literature. Gradually I would pick and choose among thinkers who seemed most relevant to my field. I embraced Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Schopenhauer, and Epicurus/Lucretius, and bypassed Kant, Leibniz, Husserl, and Kierkegaard because the clinical application of their ideas was less apparent to me.

I also had the good fortune of attending classes given by English professor Albert Guerard, a remarkable literary critic and novelist, and then the honor of co-teaching with him. He and his wife, Maclin—also a writer—became dear friends. In the early 1970s Professor Guerard started a new PhD program in Modern Thought and Literature, and Marilyn and I both served on his board. I began teaching more in the humanities and less in the medical school. Some of the earliest offerings in Modern Thought and Literature included “Psychiatry and Biography,” which I co-taught with Tom Moser, the chair of the Stanford English Department, who also became a good friend. Marilyn and I co-taught “Death in Fiction,” and I also co-taught “Philosophy and Psychiatry” with Dagfinn Føllesdal.

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