Fellow Travelers

In my first year of graduate school, I found myself soaking up Irvin Yalom’s work. Yalom’s approach to psychotherapy is existential, often dealing with issues such as meaning making, facing mortality, and the implications of freedom. Aside from being a brilliant therapist, he’s a wonderful writer with a gift for articulating the subtle and transpersonal elements of the therapeutic relationship.

The first book I read of his was The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients. It contains 85 chapters, each of which is just a few pages and presents its own little gem about the therapeutic process. The chapters stand alone, yet the book flows when read cover to cover.

In chapter Three, Yalom offers ‘fellow travelers’ as a more fitting term for the patient-therapist relationship, explaining, “[the term] abolishes distinctions between “them” (the afflicted) and “us” (the healers).” In the chapter Yalom paraphrases Hermann Hesse’s story Magister Ludi and illustrates why it is such a beautiful tale about life and the healing relationship.

The Gift of Therapy is worth getting for that chapter alone but is packed full of excellent insights. Some of my personal favorites are 6, 8, 47, and 85.