Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir by Irvin D. Yalom
“What does it say?”
“It says, ‘I’ve got all my problems solved. Tell me about yours.’ ”
Many times Irene’s comments hit home. A story is told about the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whose leg was broken in a traffic accident. While lying in the street, waiting for the ambulance, he was heard to say, “Finally, finally, something has happened to me.” I know exactly what he meant. Irene had my number, all right. Teaching at Stanford for over thirty years, I’d lived in the same house, watched my children walk to the same schools, and never had to face dark tragedy: no hard, untimely deaths—my father and mother died old, he at sixty-nine, she in her nineties. My sister, seven years older, was still alive at that time. I had not yet lost close friends, and my four children were all healthy.
For a therapist who has embraced an existential frame of reference, such a shielded life is a liability. Many times I have yearned to venture out of the ivory tower into the travails of the real world. For years I imagined spending a sabbatical as a blue-collar worker, perhaps as an ambulance driver in Detroit or a short-order cook on the Bowery or a sandwich maker in a deli. But I never did. The siren call of writing retreats to Bali or a visit to a colleague’s Venetian apartment or a fellowship to Bellagio on Lake Como was irresistible. In many ways, I have been insulated from hardship. I’ve never even had the growth experience of a marital separation, never faced adult aloneness. My relationship with Marilyn has not always been placid—thank God for the Sturm und Drang, since we have both learned from it.
I told Irene she was right, and I admitted that I’ve sometimes envied those who live more on the edge. At times, I told her, I worry that I may encourage my patients to take a heroic plunge for me.
“But,” I told her, “you’re not right when you say I have no experience of tragedy. I can’t help thinking about death. When I am with you, I often imagine how it would be if my wife were fatally ill, and each time I am filled with indescribable sadness. I am aware, fully aware, that I’m on the march and that I’ve moved into another life stage. All the signs of aging—my torn knee cartilage, my fading vision, my backaches, my senile plaques, my graying beard and hair, dreams of my own death—tell me I’m moving toward the end of my life.”
She listened but said nothing.
“And another thing,” I added, “I’ve chosen to work with dying patients, hoping they would draw me closer to the tragic core of my own life. And indeed they did; I went back into therapy for three years as a result.”
After such a retort, Irene nodded. I knew that nod—that characteristic nod cluster of hers, one sharp chin jerk followed by two or three soft nods—her somatic Morse code to tell me I had made a satisfactory response. I had grasped the first lesson—that to treat grief, the therapist cannot stay distant, but must encounter mortality at close range. And many more lessons followed around which I chose to structure the story. In this tale, the patient was the real teacher, and I was only the intermediary passing on her lessons.
The piece I most enjoyed writing was without a doubt “The Hungarian Cat Curse.” In this story, Ernest Lash (on leave from Lying on the Couch) attempts to treat Merges, a vicious, German-speaking cat in his ninth and final life. Merges was a well-traveled character who, in an earlier life, had consorted with Xanthippe, a cat living in Heidegger’s home, and was now mercilessly haunting Artemis, Ernest’s lover.
On one level the story is a farce, but on another level I think it may be my deepest discourse on death and the amelioration of death terror. I wrote much of the story during a visit with Bob Berger, a close friend since medical school who died during the writing of this memoir. I set the story in Budapest, and Bob, who had grown up in Hungary, gave me Hungarian names for the characters, streets, bridges, and rivers.
I fondly remember a public reading of Momma and the Meaning of Life at Book Depot in Mill Valley, where my son Ben, a theater director, and I read the Ernest-Merges conversation aloud. I’m not keen on memorial services, but if my family decides to have one after my death, I’d like that dialogue to be read—it would lighten up the event. So please, Ben, play the cat and choose one of your brothers, or one of your favorite actors, to play Ernest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
ON BECOMING GREEK
Of all the foreign countries that have translated my work, Greece, one of the smallest, looms largest in my psyche. In 1997, Stavros Petsopoulos, the owner of Agra Publications, bought the Greek-language rights to all my books and engaged a married couple, Yannis Zervas and Evangelia Andritsanou, as translators. Thus began a long and meaningful relationship for our family. Yannis is an American-trained psychiatrist and well-known Greek poet, and Evangelia is a clinical psychologist as well as a translator. Though Greece has never played an important role in the field of psychotherapy and has a literate population of roughly 5 million, it immediately became my largest audience per capita in the world, and I am better known as a writer there than anywhere else. I have never understood why.
Since our first encounter with Greece, when our baggage got lost and Marilyn and I traveled light for five days as tourists, we have had two extraordinary visits together. The first was preceded by a visit to Turkey. In 1993, I gave a workshop for psychiatrists at the Bakirkoy Hospital in Istanbul and then led a two-day personal growth group of eighteen Turkish psychiatrists and psychologists in Bodrum, an ancient town on the Aegean Sea that is described by Homer as “the land of eternal blue.” That group worked hard for two full days, and I was much impressed by the sophistication and openness of many of its members. After the workshop, one of the psychiatrists, Ayça Cermak, with whom I have stayed in touch to this day, acted as a guide, driving Marilyn and me through parts of western Turkey and then back to Istanbul. There we caught a plane to Athens and boarded a ferry for the island of Lesbos. Marilyn had long been interested in the poet Sappho, who had lived on Lesbos in the seventh century BC surrounded by her female disciples.
Just off the ferry, I was delighted to see a small motorcycle rental shop, and off we went to explore Lesbos on an ancient but seemingly cooperative motorcycle. Toward the end of the day, just as the sun vanished into the ocean, the motorcycle took a final gasp and expired outside a deserted village. We had no choice but to spend the night in the ruins of an abandoned guesthouse, where Marilyn got little sleep after spotting a large rodent scuttling through the four-foot-high bathroom. By noon the following day, the motorcycle shop had sent a replacement via a truck, and we continued on our way, passing through welcoming villages, idling in tavernas, chatting with other guests, and watching contented, white-bearded old men drinking retsina and playing backgammon.
I had met Yannis in 2002 at an American Psychiatric Association Conference in New Orleans, where I was given the Oskar Pfister Award in Religion and Psychiatry. Astonished by this award, I asked the committee why they had selected me, an openly religious skeptic, and they responded that I, more than most other psychiatrists, had dealt with “religious questions.” After my presentation, which was subsequently published as a monograph titled Religion and Psychiatry and appeared in Greek and Turkish translations, I had lunch with Yannis, who extended an invitation from Stavros Petsopoulos to speak in Athens.
A year later, we arrived at Athens and immediately took a forty-five-minute flight on a small plane to Syros, a small Greek island on which Yannis and Evangelia had a summer home. Suffering badly from jet lag, I always require a couple of days’ acclimation before speaking appearances. We rested on the island at a little inn in the small town of Hermoupolis, breakfasting every morning on home-baked croissants and jam made from figs growing on a sprawling tree on the front lawn. Two days later we were scheduled to leave the island for a press conference in Athens, but, the night before our departure, the ferryboat personnel went on strike, and Stavros then booked a small four-seat plane.
On the short flight to Athens, the pilot, who had read When Nietzsche Wept, talked to me
The following day, 2,500 people came to hear my address in the hotel ballroom. The lobby was so packed that I could get there only via a circuitous path through the underground kitchen. Only nine hundred headphones had been ordered, and the idea of simultaneous translation had to be scrapped at the last minute. I cut my comments by half so as to permit sequential translation. The translator, who had been prepared to work from a written copy of my presentation, went into a panic, but she got through it and did an excellent job. Listeners interrupted the speech throughout with questions and comments. Someone in the audience heckled me so vociferously for not answering all the questions fully that the police had to remove him.
After my talk, when I signed books, many buyers brought gifts—honey from their own beehives, bottles of home-brewed Greek wine, paintings they had done. One dear elderly woman insisted that I accept a gold coin her parents had sewn into her coat when she escaped from Turkey as a child.
That evening, I felt exhausted, gratified, and beloved, but puzzled by the extent of the acclaim. There was little more I could do but go with the flow and try to keep my equilibrium. Laden with gifts, we returned to our hotel room and saw yet another gift: a boat, two feet long, with fluttering sails entirely made of chocolate. Marilyn and I happily munched away.
The following day I signed books at Hestia Bookstore, a small shop in the center of Athens. I’ve done dozens of bookstore signings before and since, but this was the granddaddy of all signings. The queue led out of the store and continued for eight blocks, causing considerable traffic disruption. People not only bought new books at the store but also brought with them some previously bought books for me to sign. Writing their names was taxing, as most were foreign to me—for example, Docia, Ianthe, Nereida, Tatiana—and difficult to spell. Customers were then asked to print their names in large letters on yellow slips of paper to hand to me with their books. Many were taking photographs, but that held up the line and soon they were asked not to take photos. After an hour the book purchasers were told I would be able to sign a maximum of only four, and then, an hour later, three, and eventually only one old book along with new books. Even so, the signing lasted almost four hours, and I signed over eight hundred new books and a great many more older ones. Recently I was saddened to hear that the venerable Hestia Bookstore had closed its doors for good, a victim of the Greek monetary crisis.
The great majority of bookstore customers in that line were women—as is always the case at my book signings—and I had the singular experience of having at least fifty lovely Greek women whisper in my ear, “I love you.” Lest it get to my head, Stavros pulled me aside and told me that Greek women use those words frequently, with a more casual meaning than Americans.
The signing at the Hestia Bookstore came to mind ten years later, when an elderly British physician asked to see me in consultation. Dissatisfied with his life as a bachelor and his own unrealized potential, he was highly ambivalent about consulting me: on the one hand, he wanted my help; on the other, he was also deeply envious of my success as a writer, because he was convinced that he, too, had the talent for writing fine books. Toward the end of our consultation, he recounted a key story that had haunted him for fifty years, ever since he had spent two years in Greece teaching English at a girls’ school. At the end of the farewell ceremonies, just as he was preparing to leave, a beautiful young Greek student gave him a goodbye hug and whispered in his ear, “I love you.” Ever since then, he had thought of that young student, heard her whispered words in his mind, and tortured himself for not having had the courage to embark upon the life that was meant for him. I offered him all I could but I knew that the one thing I could not say was, “When Greek women say ‘I love you,’ it doesn’t mean the same to them as in the US or perhaps in the UK. In fact, one afternoon fifty Greek women whispered those same words to me.”
The day after the Hestia signing, the Panteion University awarded me my only honorary doctorate. I was awed to stand before a large audience in a grand hall whose walls were covered with paintings of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Epicurus, and Aeschylus. The following evening, Marilyn spoke at the University of Athens on feminist issues. Heady stuff for the Yalom family!
My next visit to Greece came four years later, in 2009. Marilyn had been invited by the University of Ioannina to speak about her book A History of the Breast. Knowing we were coming to Greece, the Onassis Foundation invited me to give an address about my new book, The Schopenhauer Cure, in the Megaron, the largest concert hall in Athens.
LECTURE AT MEGARON IN ATHENS, 2009.
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM, ATHENS, 2009.
When we arrived in Athens, we were given a private tour of the new Acropolis Museum, due to open in a few weeks. Upon entering, we were astounded at the glass floors that allowed us to see, under our feet, layer after layer of ruins of civilizations going back thousands of years. Elsewhere in the museum were the Elgin Marbles, known by the name of the Englishman who carried about half of them off from the Acropolis to the British Museum. The missing (some would say stolen) sections were presented in plaster casts of a different color from the originals. Returning works of art to their country of origin is a bedeviling problem for all museums today. When in Greece, however, we empathized with the Greeks.
From Athens we flew to Ioannina, where Marilyn had been invited by Professor Marina Vrelli-Zachou to speak at the university, an impressive institution of 20,000 students. As always, when I heard Marilyn address an audience, I sat back happily and restrained my impulse to shout out, “Hey, hey, that’s my wife.” The following day our hosts took us on a tour of the countryside and to Dodona, an ancient site mentioned in Homer. We sat for a long time in the Greek amphitheater on seats constructed 2,000 years ago, and then strolled over to the grove of trees where oracles had once interpreted the language of blackbirds. Something about the site—its massiveness, its dignity and history—was deeply moving, and despite my skepticism, I had a taste, a faint taste, of the sacred.
We strolled through the town of Ioannina, which bordered a beautiful lake, and ended up at a synagogue dating to Roman times that still functions as a place of worship for the city’s small Jewish community. During World War II, almost all the Jews in Ioannina were killed, and very few survivors returned. The remaining group is so small that the synagogue now permits women to count among the minyan, the ten Jewish males required by Jewish law to hold a religious service. Walking through the marketplace, watching the old men playing backgammon and sipping ouzo, we inhaled the wonderful smells associated with this country, but one irresistible aroma—baklava—enticed me, and I followed my nose to the bakery, where I found two dozen different varieties. I still fantasize about a writing retreat in Ioannina, preferably in the neighborhood of the bakery.
In the Ioannina University bookstore, as we both signed books, Marilyn asked the owner about my popularity with Greek readers. “Yalom is the best-known American writer here,” he said. Marilyn asked, “What about Philip Roth?” “We like him too,” he answered, “but we think of Yalom as Greek.”
Journalists have asked me over the years about my popularity in Greece, and I can never really answer. I know that, despite not speaking a word of Greek, I nonetheless feel at home there, and even in the United States I feel warmly disposed toward people of Greek descent. I am enthralled by Greek drama and philosophy, and by Homer, but this doesn’t explain it. It may be more of a Middle Eastern phenomenon, since my readership is also disproportionately high in Turkey, Israel, and Iran.
Surprisingly, I regularly get email from Iranian students, therapists, and patient
With so much devastating news in the world today, all of us grow fatigued or numb, but whenever a newscaster mentions Greece, Marilyn and I always pay attention. I will always feel a sense of wonder toward the Greeks and grateful to be considered an honorary Greek.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE GIFT OF THERAPY
Rilke’s book Letters to a Young Poet has occupied a special niche in my mind, and for years I imagined writing such a work for young therapists, but I could never find a shape and structure for that project. That changed one day in 1999 when Marilyn and I visited the Huntington Gardens in San Marino in Southern California. We went there to see the extraordinary grounds, and especially the Japanese garden and its bonsai trees. Toward the end of our visit, I wandered into the Huntington Library and browsed through a new exhibit, “Best Sellers of the English Renaissance.” Best sellers? That caught my attention. I was struck by the fact that six of the ten bestsellers in the sixteenth century were books of “tips.” For example, Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry, from 1570, offered a hundred tips about crops, livestock, and good housekeeping to farmers and farmers’ wives. It was reprinted eleven times by the end of the century.