PSYCHOTHERAPY AND PHILOSOPHY AS LITERATURE
PSYCHOTHERAPY AND PHILOSOPHY AS LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: Born in Washington, Irvin David Yalom (1931-) comes from a family of Russian Jews who sought a better future in the American realm. Fascinated by books since childhood, Irvin chose the path of medicine he attended at the George Washington School of Medicine. Refused by 19 of the faculties of medicine he had been applying to, Yalom saw his dream come true. After medical studies, he performed military service for two years at the Tripler General Hospital in Honolulu. But his real aim was to share what fascinated him: psychotherapy. Thus, in 1963, he began to teach at Stanford University this new emerging branch which links medicine and psychology. A new scientific realm, this interdisciplinary border science, had not been exploited in the years before World War II.Although he was a psychiatrist as formation, Yalom incorporated in his literary and scientific writings a strong philosophical footprint. As he alone admitted in an interview, he was deceived by the limitations of theories he had studied in years of medical training: biological psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory. Yalom felt the bond between the two conceptual aspects was philosophy.Confirmation came to him when he read the book of Rollo May Existence (1958), which was a profoundly humanistic, existentialistic approach to psychoanalytic theories crystallized until that moment. Thus, Yalom sensed that, beyond psychiatric pathologies, there is the human condition, that core of experiences that is the common denominator of all of us.

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