Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir by Irvin D. Yalom
When one of our younger members stunned us by telling us that he had just been diagnosed with untreatable pancreatic cancer, we remained fully present with him as he openly and courageously discussed all his fears and concerns. Toward the end of his life, when he was too ill to travel, we held a meeting at his home. The entire group attended his memorial.
Each time a member died, we added a new member to keep our size relatively constant. We all attended the wedding of one member, which was held at the home of another member, and yet a third member conducted the wedding ceremony. The group also attended two other weddings and the Bar Mitzvah of a member’s son. On another occasion the entire group visited the residential center where a member suffering from severe dementia was confined. Many times we discussed adding female members, but since we always added just a single member at a time, most of us thought a woman would feel uncomfortably outnumbered. In retrospect, I think we erred in this decision. My hunch is that the group would have been even richer had we begun with both males and females.
I’ve always been active in the group, and early in its course I would often be the one, when the group seemed to be unengaged and avoidant of deeper issues, to make a process comment—that is, to remark on the group’s overconcern with safe, superficial issues; after the first few years, however, others have taken that role as frequently as I have. We’ve offered help to one another on a number of different levels. Sometimes we work on deeper character issues, or on members’ proclivities toward sarcasm, belittling remarks, guilt at taking up too much time, fear of exposure, or shame, and sometimes our focus is just to offer support and let a member know we stand close to him. Recently I arrived quite shaken up after a car accident the week before. Since the accident, I’d felt anxious driving and was beginning to question whether, at my age, I should still be behind the wheel. Another member told me that he had had a significant accident a few years earlier and had been shaken up for six months. He thought of it as a minor posttraumatic stress syndrome. Reframing it in that manner proved to be very useful to me, and I drove home feeling calmer, but still driving cautiously.
I am also a member of Pegasus, a writing group for medical doctors founded in 2010 by a good friend, Hans Steiner, the former head of the Stanford Department of Child Psychiatry. Our group of ten physician-writers meets monthly for two-hour evening meetings in which we discuss each other’s writing. The evenings end with dinner supplied by the one whose work has been critiqued. This group read many of the pages of this book, liked the first third far more than the rest, and urged me to put more of my own inner life into the text.
Several books and shorter pieces from group members have been published, including A Surgeon’s War by Henry Ward Trueblood—an amazing memoir describing the life of a trauma surgeon on the front lines during the Vietnam War. We do regular public readings at Stanford of new work by our members, and I have participated in these readings several times.
Pegasus has expanded, and at the present time there are four Pegasus groups made up of physicians and several medical students. On a few occasions the poets in our group have done public readings of poems inspired by artistic pieces—for example, paintings at the recently opened Stanford Anderson Collection, or musical performances by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Stanford resident musical group. We also offer grand rounds in psychiatry each year, offer a competition for student writing with a cash award, and sponsor an annual visiting professorship in the medical humanities.
I attend yet another monthly event, the Lindemann Group, named after one of the founding members, Erich Lindemann, an influential psychiatrist who was a longtime professor of psychiatry at Harvard and, in his last few years, at Stanford. I first joined the group at its founding in the 1970s and attended monthly meetings for years. At each of the two-hour evening meetings of eight to ten therapists, one of them presents a current problematic case. I much enjoyed the camaraderie for many years until Bruno Bettelheim moved to Stanford and joined the group. He felt that, because of his seniority, the meeting should consist of members presenting cases to him. Neither I nor anyone else could disabuse him of this idea, and when we came to an impasse, several of us dropped out. Many years after Bruno’s death, I was invited to rejoin, and I have cherished the group since then.
Each member presents a case in his or her own style. At one recent meeting, a member chose to use psychodrama and assigned group members parts to play (the patient, the wife, the therapist, other members of the family, an observing commentator, etc.). At first it seemed silly and off the point, but by the end of the meeting we all felt very stuck and unable to offer help to the patient—that is, we felt exactly like the presenting therapist in his work with his patient. It was an unusually powerful and graphic method of conveying his therapeutic dilemma.
The group in which I am most closely entwined is my family group. I’ve been married to Marilyn for sixty-three years, and rarely does a day pass that I do not thank my good fortune for having such an extraordinary life partner. Yet, as I have so often said to others, one doesn’t find a relationship: one creates a relationship. Over the decades, both of us have worked hard to create the marriage we have today. Whatever complaints I’ve had in the past have evaporated. I’ve learned to accept her few failings—her indifference to cooking, to sporting events, to bicycling, to science fiction, to science per se—but all these complaints are minor. I feel fortunate to have lived with a walking encyclopedia of Western culture who can immediately answer most of the historical or literary questions I pose.
Marilyn, too, has learned to overlook my failings—my intractable household messiness, my refusal to wear neckties, my adolescent infatuation with motorcycles and convertibles, and my feigned ignorance of how to operate the dishwasher and washing machine. We have arrived at a mutual understanding that I could not have anticipated as a young, impetuous, and often insensitive lover. Our major concerns now lie with each other’s well-being and the fear of what will happen when one of us dies before the other.
Marilyn is a scholar with an inquiring mind, and she is particularly steeped in European literature and art. Like me, she is an eternal student and reader. Unlike me, she is outgoing, gregarious, and socially skilled—as attested by her many friendships. Though we are both passionate about writing and reading, our interests don’t always overlap, and I think that’s for the best. I am drawn to philosophy and science, particularly psychology, biology, and cosmology. Aside from a Wellesley botany course, Marilyn has had no science education whatsoever and is entirely clueless about the modern technical world. I have to bargain hard to get her to accompany me to the planetarium and aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences, and, once there, she is eager to leave for the de Young art museum across the park, where she will spend ten minutes examining a single painting. She is my gateway to the world of art and history, but sometimes I’m beyond help. Though I’m hopelessly tone-deaf, she continues trying to awaken my musical sensibility, but when I’m driving alone and there is no baseball game, I often turn the radio dial to bluegrass.
Marilyn loves good wine, and for years I pretended to have a taste for it. But recently I’ve given up all pretenses and openly admit that I dislike the taste of alcohol in any form. Perhaps there is a genetic component: my parents also disliked alcoholic drinks, except for an occasional glass of beer and sour cream, a Russian concoction they often drank in the summer.
Fortunately, thank God, Marilyn is not a religious believer, but she has a secret yearning for the sacred, whereas I am a dedicated skeptic and align myself with the likes of Lucretius, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. We love films, but selection is often a challenge: she vetoes anything with violence or the slightest aroma of lowlife. For the most part, I agree with her, but when she’s away I’ll indulge in a con-man film or a Clint Eastwood western. And when she’s alone, the TV remains fixed at the cable French channel.
Her memory is good—too good at
Despite having four children, Marilyn never missed a year of teaching. We were dependent on young au pairs from Europe and daily household help. Like most people reared in California, our children have chosen to stay here, and we feel fortunate to have them all nearby. We gather often as a family and generally have summer vacations together, most frequently in Hanalei on the island of Kauai. The 2015 photo on the next page shows us with our children and grandchildren. It was posted only for a few days before Facebook removed it for indecency. (If you look hard, you’ll note my daughter-in-law discreetly nursing my youngest grandson.)
ENTIRE FAMILY IN HANALEI, HAWAII, 2015.
Our family life includes a lot of games. I played tennis for years with each of my three sons at a neighborhood tennis court—those are some of my fondest memories. I taught Reid and Victor chess at an early age and they both became strong players. I enjoyed taking them to tournaments from which they always emerged with a gleaming trophy. Reid’s son, Desmond, and Victor’s son, Jason, are also strong players, and we rarely have a family get-together without one or two chess games in progress.
Other games are much in evidence at family gatherings. There is Scrabble with my daughter, Eve, who is always the reigning champion. But most of all, I’ve enjoyed our medium-stake poker games and my regular pinochle games with Reid and Ben, using the same rules and stakes I played with my father and Uncle Abe.
At times Victor entertains us with magic tricks. In high school he was well-known as a prankster, and during his adolescence he was a professional magician performing at both adult and children’s functions. Anyone who attended his Gunn High School graduation ceremony will remember the sight of Victor solemnly marching down the aisle to receive his diploma when suddenly the mortarboard on his head burst into flame. The ceremony was interrupted with “oohs” and “aahs” and a huge burst of applause. I was as stunned as anyone else and begged him to tell me how he did it. As a dedicated magician, he had steadfastly refused to reveal any of his professional secrets, even to his pleading father, but on this one occasion he took pity on me and told me the secret of the burning mortarboard: a hidden aluminum foil basin in the brim of the hat, a reservoir of lighter fluid, a tiny match, and voilà! A flaming mortarboard. (Do not try this at home.)
I was so absorbed in teaching and writing and financially supporting my family that now, looking back, I feel I missed a great deal. I regret not spending more individual time with each child. At my friend Larry Zaroff’s memorial ceremony, one of his three children described a treasured family tradition in which their father spent much of each Saturday with one of his three children in turn. They had lunch together, one-on-one talks, and a visit to the bookstore where each chose a book. What a lovely tradition! As I listened, I found myself wishing I had entered more deeply into each of my children’s lives. If I had another go-round, I’d do it differently.
Marilyn was the primary parent on a daily level and put off most of her writing until the children were grown. After her required academic publications, she began to write for a broader public, following my lead. She published Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory in 1993, and since then she has authored seven other books, including A History of the Wife, Birth of the Chess Queen, A History of the Breast, How the French Invented Love, The Social Sex, and The American Resting Place with our son Reid, who is a fine art photographer. Each of her books was a great adventure for me. We are always each other’s first reader. She credits my fascination with women’s breasts for inspiring A History of the Breast, a cultural study of how women’s bodies have been viewed and represented throughout history. Yet my favorite is Birth of the Chess Queen, a book in which she traced the evolution of a piece that did not exist on the board for hundreds of years and first appeared around the year 1000 as the weakest piece on the board. Gradually she assumed more power as European queens grew more potent, and attained her present status as the game’s strongest piece at the end of the fifteenth century, during the reign of Queen Isabella of Spain. I’ve attended a great many of Marilyn’s readings at bookstores and universities and watched her with enormous pride. At present she is near completion of another book, The Amorous Heart, that will explore how the heart became a symbol for love.
Despite our strong work ethic, Marilyn and I have been firmly implanted within our family, fulfilling the roles of parents and grandparents for more than sixty years. We have tried to make our home a welcoming place not only for our children, but also for our friends and our children’s friends. Our house has hosted a great many weddings, book parties, and baby showers. Perhaps we felt this necessity even more than most people, since we left our own families of birth behind on the East Coast and have created a new network of family and friends in California, with roots into the future rather than the past.
Though we have traveled considerably in our lives—to many European countries, to a great many tropical islands in the Caribbean and Pacific, to China, Japan, Indonesia, and Russia—I find that, as I age, I grow more and more reluctant to leave home. The jet lag is more potent than in earlier years, and frequently I fall ill on long trips. When it comes to traveling, Marilyn, chronologically only nine months my junior, often seems twenty years younger. When invited to lecture now in a distant country, I invariably decline, often proposing a videoconference instead. I limit my travel to Hawaii and sometimes to Washington, DC, and New York, and to Ashland every year for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
In an interview shown in the 2014 film documentary Yalom’s Cure, our daughter, Eve, candidly told the filmmakers that Marilyn and I always put our relationship first—that is, above our relationship to our children. My instinct was to protest, but I believe she was right. Eve said that she had put her children first, but then added, wistfully, that her marriage did not last beyond twenty-five years. In post-film discussions with audience members, several viewers noted that our marriage appeared so strong and so enduring, whereas all four of our children had divorced. I responded that I suspect some historical factors are at play: 40 to 50 percent of contemporary US marriages end in divorce, whereas among my contemporaries divorce was very rare. During my first twenty-five or thirty years of life, I never knew a divorced person. In the discussions with film audiences about our children’s divorces, Marilyn always wanted to call out, “Hey, three of our children have remarried and have great second marriages.”
Following each of the divorces, Marilyn and I endlessly discussed what we might have done wrong. Are parents responsible for the breakdown of their children’s marriages? I’m sure that many parents have asked themselves that same unanswerable question. Divorce is generally a painful experience for everyone involved. Marilyn and I shared our children’s sadness, and to this day we are intimately involved with all of our children and grandchildren and are heartened by the support they give each other.
THE AUTHOR WITH HIS WIFE, MARILYN, IN SAN FRANCISCO, 2006.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
ON IDEALIZATION
Ever since my book The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy was adopted as a textbook forty-five years ago, I’ve had a loyal following among students and therapists. They are my primary audience and I never expected to have a wider readership. So I was both surprised and thrilled when my collection of therapeutic tales, Love’s Executioner, became a bestseller in America and was widely translated. It always gladdened my heart when friends wrote telling me they have
Marilyn was dismayed for many years to note that the one major country that entirely ignored me was France. She had been a Francophile ever since she started French classes at the age of twelve, and especially after her junior year in France with the Sweetbriar College program. I tried repeatedly to improve my French with several different teachers, but was so inept that even my wife concluded it was simply not my sport. In 2000, however, a new French publishing company, Galaade, made an offer for the French translation rights to the seven books I had written up to that time. Galaade published one of my books each year thereafter, and I soon had a sizable French readership.