A long time ago my friend Ben lent me a book, called Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, after I expressed an interest in learning about psychology.  On the face of it, the book looked a little too much like a work of fiction to be a usual introduction to the field, but I’m not one to judge a book by its cover (har, har) and Ben knows his stuff, so I put it on my bookshelf and forgot about it for months.

Fast forward to sometime this year, and I finally found the time to pick it up.  In the foreword, Dr Yalom gets on with it straight away and charges through an overview of every conceivable problem that the human mind could possibly come up with, complete with plenty of “Oooooh, that’s why I think that” moments that I’m sure anyone reading it would find.  It then moves through 10 case studies, each detailing one of his patients.  The whole thing feels wonderfully intimate, leading the reader into the lives of both patient and therapist in a way that almost feels wrong: the revelations offered seem a little too private to be published. I was struck by Yalom’s ability to take a case and boil it down to its fundamentals to find a model that fits, but then build it up again to produce a solution that was tailor-made to fit the individual.  I suppose this is what psychotherapy is all about, and perhaps there are a million other books out there doing the same thing, but this book definitely isn’t one that I’ll forget about any time soon.