The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

Course overview

The Gift of Therapy is Irvin Yalom's gift to the future generations of psychotherapists.Yalom's brand of spirituality is found in his wisdom, authenticity, honesty and his existential view of life. The American Psychiatric Association awarded him the 2000 Oscar Pfister prize for important contributions to religion and psychiatry. The book is a repository of wisdom, gleaned from his 35 years of psychiatric practice. Yalom sees psychotherapy changing radically; prompted by an economically driven healthcare system to provide a 'streamlined psychotherapy, inexpensive, brief, superficial and insubstantial'. In his own words he continues, 'I worry about psychotherapy -- about how it may be deformed by economic pressures and impoverished by radically abbreviated training programs. Nonetheless, I am confident that, in the future, a cohort of therapists coming from a variety of educational disciplines (psychology, counseling, social work, pastoral counseling, clinical philosophy) will continue to pursue rigorous postgraduate training and, even in the crush of HMO reality, will find patients desiring extensive growth and change willing to make an open-ended commitment to therapy. It is for these therapists and those patients that I write the Gift of therapy.'