Love’s Executioner & Other Tales of Psychology
Irvin D. Yalom is a licensed psychiatrist and professor at Stanford Medical School. Schooled in Rogerian here-and-now, unconditional-personal-regard theory, Yalom presents 10 case studies from his private practice in Love’s Executioner & Other Tales of Psychology. Each story is a mixture of psychiatry and literature. Analyzing each patient’s acting out behaviors, Yalom attempts to provide a demonstration of what he believes is the main therapeutic benefit of psychiatry – the mutual learning and relationship shared between client and therapist. Throughout the case studies which are semi-fictional and disguised to preserve therapist-client integrity, the issues of death (existential anxiety), love, sexuality, and freedom weave the narratives together and underscore universal aspects of the human condition. As Yalom (1989, 7) notes regarding death in his Prologue “There is another way—a long tradition, applicable to psychotherapy—that teaches us that full awareness of death ripens our wisdom and enriches our life”.
The case study entitled Fat Lady concerns the issue of freedom primarily. “Fat Lady” is Betty, a 250-pound, 5-foot-2-inch woman who comes to Yalom for help with her eating disorder. Typically, such a case study would reveal the case of a depressed, lonely obese woman. This one is no different in doing so. However, where it, and the other studies are unique is the way in which we get to see the frank opinions, thoughts, and feelings of the therapist as well. In doing so, Yalom not only shows us that he believes the therapeutic value of therapy is a mutual learning process for both therapist and client, but also the feelings and issues all human beings, including psychiatrists, must work on to evolve a better being “I have always been repelled by fat women. I find them disgusting: their absurd sidewise waddle, their absence of body
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