Big Questions

As mentioned previously, after graduation I read most of Yalom’s tome on group therapy. I found it very easy to read so I started looking at some of his other works. I seem to remember one of you recommending “The Gift of Therapy,” which I read next and found extremely helpful. He doesn’t delve into existentialism and dream interpretation until the end of the book, but I found the first 75% to have great, general principles to use in therapy (kind of like “A Guide to Possibilityland,” another great read).

I then read his “Love’s Executioner” that has ten accounts of therapy with ten different clients. For the most part it was an entertaining read and a good introduction to existential therapy. Just to recap, existential therapy focuses on the 4 “givens” of life – death, our aloneness in the world, lack of meaning in the world, and freedom/responsibility. As mentioned before, he does some dream interpretation and is not too far removed from psychoanalysis. Accordingly, existential therapy is not a brief therapy.

In general I am still being very eclectic in my therapeutic approach, so I have gleaned the following from what I’ve read. It fits the way I think personally because I do think a lot about existential problems. I agree that many mood disorders would be alleviated if people will work on some of these existential questions. Of course, it fits nicely with the gospel (Yalom’s take is actually antithetical to the gospel, but hey, you don’t hit a home run every time) and the idea that we change as individuals as we know our purpose on earth, who we are, where we’re going, and use our agency wisely. With that in mind, I appreciated what my co-worker gleaned from his reading of Yalom, that there are certain “givens” in life, and we do better when we accept those givens. So as for application, I’ll probably add it to my cognitive-behavioral repertoire as one more subject that I can discuss with clients when we both agree that it would be beneficial for the client to look at it.