Existential Psychotherapy.

YALOM, Irvin D.

Item Number: 141497

New York: Basic Books, 1980.

First edition, early printing of the definitive account of existential psychotherapy. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “For Sherry Irvin D. Yalom.” Fine in a near fine dust jacket.

First published in 1980, Existential Psychotherapy is widely considered to be the foundational text in its field— the first to offer a methodology for helping patients to develop more adaptive responses to life’s core existential dilemmas. In this seminal work, American psychiatrist Irvin Yalom finds the essence of existential psychotherapy and gives it a coherent structure, synthesizing its historical background, core tenets, and usefulness to the practice. Organized around what Yalom identifies as the four "ultimate concerns of life"—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness—the book takes up the meaning of each existential concern and the type of conflict that springs from our confrontation with each. He shows how these concerns are manifest in personality and psychopathology, and how treatment can be helped by our knowledge of them. Drawing from clinical experience, empirical research, philosophy, and great literature, Yalom provides an intellectual home base for those psychotherapists who have sensed the incompatibility of orthodox theories with their own clinical experience, and opens new doors for empirical research.