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Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir

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Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom puts himself on the couch in a lapidary memoir


Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself. He opens his story with a nightmare: He is twelve, and is riding his bike past the home of an acne-scarred girl. Like every morning, he calls out, hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in his dream, the girl's father makes Yalom understand that his daily greeting had hurt her. For Yalom, this was the birth of empathy; he would not forget the lesson. As Becoming Myself unfolds, we see the birth of the insightful thinker whose books have been a beacon to so many. This is not simply a man's life story, Yalom's reflections on his life and development are an invitation for us to reflect on the origins of our own selves and the meanings of our lives.

ISBN-13: 9781541698994

Media Type: Paperback(Reprint)

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 05-28-2019

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

Irvin D. Yalom, MD, is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was the recipient of the 1974 Edward Strecker Award and the 1979 Foundations' Fund Prize in Psychiatry. He is the author of When Nietzsche Wept (winner of the 1993 Commonwealth Club gold medal for fiction); Love's Executioner, a memoir; Becoming Myself, a group therapy novel; The Schopenhauer Cure; and the classic textbooks Inpatient Group Psychotherapy and Existential Psychotherapy, among many other books. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Birth of Empathy 1

Chapter 2 Searching for a Mentor 4

Chapter 3 I Want Her Gone 10

Chapter 4 Circling Back 15

Chapter 5 The Library, A-Z 23

Chapter 6 The Religious War 27

Chapter 7 A Gambling Lad 40

Chapter 8 A Brief History of Anger 44

Chapter 9 The Red Table 51

Chapter 10 Meeting Marilyn 59

Chapter 11 College Days 64

Chapter 12 Marrying Marilyn 77

Chapter 13 My First Psychiatric Patient 82

Chapter 14 Internship: The Mysterious Dr. Blackwood 86

Chapter 15 The Johns Hopkins Years 92

Chapter 16 Assigned to Paradise 111

Chapter 17 Coming Ashore 122

Chapter 18 A Year in London 142

Chapter 19 The Brief, Turbulent Life of Encounter Groups 151

Chapter 20 Sojourn in Vienna 156

Chapter 21 Every Day Gets a Little Closer 163

Chapter 22 Oxford and the Enchanted Coins of Mr. Sfica 169

Chapter 23 Existential Therapy 176

Chapter 24 Confronting Death with Rollo May 187

Chapter 25 Death, Freedom, Isolation, and Meaning 195

Chapter 26 Inpatient Groups and Paris 201

Chapter 27 Passage to India 208

Chapter 28 Japan, China, Bali, and Love's Executioner 220

Chapter 29 When Nietzsche Weft 234

Chapter 30 Lying on the Couch 246

Chapter 31 Monima and the Meaning of Life 252

Chapter 32 On Becoming Greek 262

Chapter 33 The Gift of Therapy 270

Chapter 34 Two Years with Schopenhauer 278

Chapter 35 Staring at the Sun 284

Chapter 36 Final Works 297

Chapter 37 Yikes! Text Therapy 305

Chapter 38 My Life in Groups 310

Chapter 39 On Idealization 323

Chapter 40 A Novice at Growing Old 334

Acknowledgments 343