Brief Book Reviews: December 2025

Popular Books Relevant to Mental Health

Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Irvin D. Yalom; HarperPerennial; 1989

312 pages; $12 (paperback)

Reviewed by Edmund S. Higgins, MD

In his mid-50s, after his youngest child left for college, Irvin Yalom, a full professor at Stanford University, with a long history of writing about psychotherapy, undertook to write about his work with 10 individual patients. These were patients who came to him with many of the complaints we see in our practices—depression, sexual problems, love obsessions, mood swings, and unrelenting grief, to name a few. Unlike most modern psychiatrics, Yalom treated his patients with psychotherapy. His goal was to flush out what he calls existence pain: the inevitability of death, our ultimate aloneness, the burden of accepting responsibility, and the absence of any obvious meaning of life. Not your grandfather’s chemical imbalance.

Yalom’s treatment approach is what might be called “here and now.” He believes that patients bring their relational problems, defense mechanisms, and usual behavioral patterns into the clinical office. Or to put it another way, they cannot stop from behaving like themselves. The stories in Love’s Executioner are about patients playing out their problems in therapy, and Yalom using his feelings—his reactions to their behavior—to guide the course of therapy. This is a book about countertransference and the power it has to affect outcome.

Yalom is a skilled clinician who is willing to acknowledge his own feelings and failings . . . the ones that well up in the sessions. The way he discusses it, his feelings are the key to healing. In some cases, he verbalizes his feelings. These self-disclosures are not always flattering and can be risky, but are therapeutic, at least in the cases he has chosen to discuss. His feelings—revulsions, attractions, and boredom—are enlightening to hear and will be familiar to all of us who have sat with patients. The stories stress the dual roll we have in mental health treatment—we are both observers and participants.

Not all the cases make for great stories, and parts are even cringe worthy. But they are all stories that can leave enduring effects on the reader, as well as the patients.

Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir

Irvin D. Yalom; Basic Books, 2017

352 pages; $40 (hardcover)

Reviewed by Edmund S. Higgins, MD

Yalom is one of the most influential psychiatric writers of our time. He has written numerous widely read books—textbooks that are on almost everyone’s office shelves—that have changed the way clinicians practice psychiatry. He teaches us in ways that tell stories which capture the reader’s attention and improve our approach to patient care. He has influenced generations of psychiatrists. He reminds us why we went into this field of medicine.

Becoming Myself is his memoir—his life, and specifically his life as a clinical and research psychiatrist, focused on the benefits of psychotherapy. I am a big fan of Yalom’s writing, but I would argue this book is not his best work. It does not seem right to say this about such an esteemed literary psychiatrist, but this book does not rise up to his usual standard.

Yalom entered his psychiatry residency in 1957, so the book provides a pleasing description of the development of our field, from the psychological perspective. Furthermore, the details of his practice of group psychotherapy, and his efforts to enhance its effectiveness, make for fabulous reading.

Hower, too much of the book is a detailed chronical of the events of his life, and read more like a diary. Of note, in the afterword of Love’s Executioner, written 25 years after the original publication of that book, when he was in his 80s, Yalom writes about his younger self, “This Guy writes a lot better than I can.”

Dr Higgins is an affiliate associate professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina.