Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy - Hardcover

Yalom, Irvin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465029647 ISBN 13: 9780465029648

Publisher: Basic Books, 2015

Synopsis

"All of us are creatures of a day," wrote Marcus Aurelius, "rememberer and remembered alike." In his long-awaited new collection of stories, renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom describes his patients' struggles-as well as his own-to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life, and how to reckon with its inevitable end. In these pages, we meet a nurse, angry and adrift in a morass of misery where she has lost a son to a world of drugs and crime, and yet who must comfort the more privileged through their own pain; a successful businessman who, in the wake of a suicide, despairs about the gaps and secrets that infect every relationship; a newly minted psychologist whose study of the human condition damages her treasured memories of a lost friend; and a man whose rejection of philosophy forces even Yalom himself into a crisis of confidence. Their names and stories will linger long after the book's last page is turned. Like Love's Executioner, which established Yalom's preeminence as a storyteller illuminating the drama of existential therapy, Creatures of a Day is funny, earthy, and often shocking; it is a radically honest statement about the difficulties of human life, but also a celebration of some of the finest fruits-love, family, friendship-that life can bear. We are all creatures of a day. With Yalom as a guide, we can find in this book the means not just to make our own day bearable, but meaningful-and perhaps even joyful.

About this title

Review:

"Stunning."--Salon

"Creatures of a Day is just what the doctor ordered!"--Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

A remedy more powerful than any fad or pill could promise."--Washington Post

"Poignant and bracing."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"Stunning."

"These individual accounts of emotional challenges and resolutions--from a man ashamed of his hoarding to a woman with a terminal cancer diagnosis--shine a brilliant light on what it means to be human and to need help."--Daniel Menaker, author of The Treatment and My Mistake: A Memoir

"Irvin Yalom has produced a book of such piercing depth that to enter into it is transformative. You feel less like you are reading Creatures of a Day than that it is reading you."--Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, McArthur Fellow and author of Plato at the Googleplex and Betraying Spinoza

"Dr. Yalom has written a magical book. Anyone who has ever thought about his or her own aging or mortality will love this book."--George Valliant, professor of psychiatry, Harvard University, and author of Triumphs of Experience and Aging Well

"Yalom sees the therapist as a poet. He sees therapy as an art. And he sees his clients as fellow poets, working the high wire, along and with him."--Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune

"This book is the best of its kind I've read to date, offering a tender and credible look behind the curtain, through a powerful series of vignettes."--Miranda Palmer, PsychCentral

Book Description:

Eminent psychotherapist and bestselling author, Irvin D Yalom, gives us a new collection of ten absorbing tales of psychotherapy, revealing the mysteries, frustrations, pathos and humour at the heart of the therapeutic encounter.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0465029647
• ISBN 13: 9780465029648
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224