Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy Paperback – July 28, 2020

He is a tremendous writer..engaging and har to put down. I haven't read this one yet. It is for my stay in hospital for knee replacement, but his Love's Executioner is one of my all time favorite books.

Great read for a layman in psychology like me.

But not a bad book. Interesting stories, great writing, easy read. A lot of insight into transference which is helpful for counseling students.

Irvin Yalom is a premier therapist. This is a classic and should be read by those seeking self awareness. Very readable

Having read Irvin Yalom's novel The Spinoza Problem which was a fascinating psychological comparison of Spinoza and Nazi propagandists, I wanted to explore his non-fiction.What I got was better than I expected. Momma and the Meaning of Life contains several poignant stories that cast light onto the process of death and dying. His stories show how the process can be ennobling--especially when it is nurtured by a gifted therapist.

Silly me, who didn’t realize this was a book of non-fiction until I was well into it. The first chapter seemed beautiful and “litry” to me, and so I proceeded, thinking this might be like “When Neitzsche Wept” but it wasn’t. Instead, it was more like several stories loosely sewn together into a sort of crash course in psychotherapy, which did not reflect particularly well on the field of psychotherapy or its practitioners.I learned in Twelve-Step recovery that EGO stands for Easing God Out, and there was a lot of EGO in these pages – too much for me – until I encountered a hugely redeeming thread running through: mortality (the practically verboten subject of death). To me, THIS is The Subject most worthy of consideration in life, yet many hide their heads in the sand, as if not seeing The Subject renders it specious. It is regrettable that some are so fearful of “the debt of death” that they refuse “the loan of life.”Yalom himself admits that his “frenzied life pace was but a clumsy attempt to quell death anxiety.” He thinks the field of medicine may have beckoned to him because “it offers the only hope of mastery over death” and, in a way, it did. When he and a colleague led a support group for terminal cancer patients, they did not find people who were bitter and morose; they found people whose death sentences had “bestowed a special poignancy” to life. One group member shared that “it took till now, till our bodies were riddled with cancer, to know how to live.”One of my favorite lines in this book says, “You’ve got to find your own song to sing.” It yanked my head out of the sand, so to speak. I agree with Yalom that “the most enlightened individuals are those aware of their destination” and when he says, “You and I are just fellow travelers through this life, both of us listening to the bell tolling.” I hope we are both listening. Because we are all terminal.

The short stories based on real stories are great, I didn't like the fictional ones that much. But I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys deap topics.

What else is there to say it's the legendary Dr Yalom what's not to love