Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Dear Irv Yalom,This letter is a declaration of gratitude for your newly published book, Creatures of a Day, and the artful legacy you’ve bestowed upon the field of psychotherapy. In the era of fast technology and mass production, your attention to relationship and the handcrafted nature of therapy is a life line. In all of your 50 years as a psychotherapist, you didn’t sell out for clinical blueprints and formulaic approaches. Instead, you opted to stay true to what you knew--the here and now, the importance of the therapeutic relationship, and your own internal thoughts and experiences as essential elements for your work with clients. Creatures of a Day waves a flag and asks us to take notice. It invites us back into the mystery of our work and reminds us to celebrate our humanness. Your masterful story telling allows us to see you and your clients in action, mistakes and vulnerabilities included, and shares pivotal moments that will provoke thoughtful learning for generations of therapists. So thank you for this.You show us your mistakesYou see, your books (especially Love’s Executioner and Creatures of a Day) let us into your thoughts and experiences. We get to hear you talk to yourself and occasionally grapple with doubt. We get to know your own vulnerabilities and how they influence your therapeutic relationships. This is such a rare view. And I am hungry for it. There are too few books, too few videos, and fewer workshops or trainings that offer this kind of perspective for therapists. We don’t get to see masters make mistakes. We don’t get to hear supervisors or consultants narrate their doubts. So, I consider your book an invitation to write about my own similar encounters in my work. And to continue to make this kind of conversation central to my trainings and retreats for therapists. Thank you for the inspiration and the permission.You offer central themes and an individualized perspectiveAs a collection of psychotherapy tales, I think of Creatures of a Day as a series. Like a series of paintings that are created around central themes, your tales invite us to look at the existential themes of aging, death, and connectedness. And, just like a painting series, each reader will take with them a message that is individualized and of unique importance to him/her. In this way, you are truly exhibiting your art as a writer and a psychotherapist. In Creatures of a Day, two patients read the same book and take from it a very different, but beautifully applicable, message. A nurse perceives the angry words she hissed to her dying patient completely opposite of the way in which they were received by the woman she was treating. And a case that you filed away as a blunder turns out to have been a life changer that is only revealed about a decade or so later. This is a reminder to me that while we can’t predict how our art is received, we can in fact commit to creating and collaborating in the very best way we can.You invite humanness and the art of relationshipI’d like to let you know that in addition to the invitation to write about my experience as a therapist, I welcome your permission to be human with my clients. And, with that comes a renewed dedication to knowing and experiencing what being human is for me. This means deepening my relationship with my art, continuing my work in therapy, and showing up with the same honesty and openness that you let us see in your book.You make risk a good thingYou ask your patients to risk and use this in as a very important subject during the course of treatment. You take several risks in Creatures of a Day, and show us that risks are a vital part of being an authentic and real therapist. You show us that in your work you are just being honest and attending to your experience and the client’s experience. In fact it is more risky to be untruthful or hide than it is to show up and attend the the relationship.You inspire meI won’t stop practicing. You inspire me to continue to write about my own work. And in my own small way, carry your legacy forward.Once again, thank you for your guidance, your influence, and your legacy.Lisa Mitchell, MFT, ATR, LPCwww.innercanvas.com

A playful collection, written by a man of 82 with the mind of a twenty-something. Yalom's stories play with the idea that psychiatry misses the mark through reducing complex human experience to a clinical diagnosis. Others explore the self-delusion of the psychiatrist himself, his own limitations in dealing with dying clients. All of Yalom's stories play with words in an engaging way, and his characters speak and act in a real way. A masterfully told collection of stories. Highly recommend!

Like with all Yalom's novels, he gives us tidbits of himself in terms of self-revelations, but like all of his novels he goes head on into some heavy dialogues about life and the meaning it has or doesn't not have with his "patients". He learns perhaps at times more about himself than the "patients" reveal about themselves, at times the catharis is anything but what Yalom had expected or searched after, but via circumstances out of his "relationship" with them, they discover what it is they were seeking. Happenstance? A seed from the 'dialogue' between therapist and patient had been planted, only to be harvested in its own due time? Yalom certainly does provoke self-reflection, at least in this reader. Would that Yalom would actually have the courage to do more self-revealing about his own inner workings, his own emotional state(s) as he grows older and toward eventual death. But, he refrains from such disclosures just when it seems he is about to pull the curtain to show himself (kinda like the Wizard of Oz, but there is no Toto to do the pulling for him). His intellectual acumen, his analytical mind, his creativity is evident in all his novels, and particularly in this series of 'case studies', but that curtain remains securely tied preventing any in depth self-revelation. Is the therapist "resistant"? His conviction of no after life makes intellectual sense to me, but the emotional content of 'fear' of the unknown is never explored, and sadly not. He could have provided us with an even more powerful invitation into self-awareness, I suspect, if he had gone down that pathway.

Though I knew of Irvin Yalom's books, I somehow missed reading any of them before, during or after my licensure as a mental health professional. "Creatures of a Day" is my first Yalom book, but with certainty, I can say that it won't be my last. For if his previous books are half as good as this one... they'll all be worth reading.Creatures of a Day contains ten "portraits" of clients and Yalom's work with them. Portraits is the right word since the descriptions are so vivid and compelling that one might actually feel they're in the room watching Yalom and the clients do the dance of therapy. The topics of death and meaning in life connect the stories as one might expect from a humanist/existentialist therapist. More than one of the stories were sadly sweet and brought tears to my eyes as I read... yet I could not put down the book and read it within just a few sessions.As a therapist, who also eschews diagnosis and manualized treatments, seeing a master therapist at work was invaluable. And surprisingly, Yalom doesn't gloss over the "mistakes" he makes or focus only on his expertise. This book more than anything shows the power of moments that matter, the healing connection that can happen when one person fully meets another where they're at.All therapists should read this book, but it shouldn't be limited to professionals. Everyone will relate to these stories and the people they depict so humanly well... Don't miss out on Yalom's work, especially "Creatures of a Day."