Read Online Love's Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom - Free Book Online

about this happening on a dance floor?”
    “I said earlier that it was only those twenty-seven days that I ever felt euphoric. That’s not entirely true. I often felt euphoric when I was dancing. Often everything disappeared then, me and everything else, there was just the dance and the moment. When I dance in my dreams, it means I’m trying to make everything that’s bad disappear. I think it also means being young again.”
    “We’ve talked very little about your feelings about being seventy. How much do you think about it?”
    “I guess I’d have a different slant on therapy if I were forty rather than seventy. I’d have something to look forward to. Wouldn’t psychiatrists rather work with younger people?”
    I knew that there was rich material here. I felt strongly that Thelma’s fear of aging and death fueled her obsession. One of the reasons she wanted to merge in love, and be obliterated by it, was to escape the terror of facing obliteration by death. Nietszche said, “The final reward of the dead—to die no more.” Yet here was also a wonderful opportunity to work on our relationship. Although the two themes we had been exploring (the flight from freedom and from the isolation of separateness) constituted, and would continue to constitute, the content of our discourse, I felt that my best chance to help Thelma lay in the development of a meaningful relationship with her. I hoped that the establishment of an intimate bond with me might sufficiently attenuate her bond with Matthew so that she could pry herself loose from him. Only then would we turn to the identification and removal of the obstacles that were preventing her from establishing intimate relationships in her social life.
    “Thelma, when you ask whether psychiatry doesn’t prefer to work with younger patients, it sounds to me that there is a personal question in there.”
    Thelma, as usual, avoided the personal. “It stands to reason that there is more to be gained in working with, say, a young mother with three children. She has her whole life ahead of her, and her improved mental condition would benefit her children and her children’s children.”
    I persisted. “What I meant was that I thought there was a question, a personal question, you might be asking me, something involving you and me.”
    “Wouldn’t psychiatrists rather treat a thirty-year-old patient than a seventy-year-old patient?”
    “Can we focus on you and me rather than on psychiatry, psychiatrists, and patients ? Aren’t you asking this question: ‘How do you, Irv’”—Thelma smiled here. She rarely addressed me by name, either given name or surname—“‘feel about treating me, Thelma, a woman who is seventy years old?’”
    No answer. She stared out the window. Her head shook ever so slightly. Damn, she was stubborn!
    “Am I right? Is that the question?”
    “That’s a question, not necessarily the question. But if you had just answered my question the way I first put it, I would have gotten the answer to the question you just asked.”
    “You mean you would have learned my opinion about how psychiatry, in general, feels about the treatment of the average elderly patient, and then you would have assumed that that was the way I felt about treating you.”
    Thelma nodded.
    “But that’s so roundabout. And it may be inaccurate. My general comment may have been a guess about the whole field and not an expression of my personal feelings about you. What stops you from directly asking me the real question?”
    “This is the kind of thing I worked on with Matthew. This is exactly what he called my shitty habits.”
    That gave me pause. Did I want to ally myself in any way with Matthew? Yet I was certain this was the correct trail to follow.
    “Let me try to answer your questions—the general one you asked and the personal one you didn’t. I’ll start with the more general one. I, personally, like to work with older patients. As you know from all those