Matters of Death and Life: For ourselves and for the Planet

Abstract

This interview was presented as a pre-recorded video at the EAP Congress on 12th and 13th March 2022 due to the fragile health condition of Irvin Yalom. The interview was conducted by Eugenijus Laurinaitis and is based on Yalom’s book A Matter of Death and Life (2021), wherein he reflected on his farewell from his wife, with whom he had been together since he was 14 years old, and the subsequent grieving process. Now at the age of 91 years and being unwell, Yalom is in the process of coming to terms with his own death. This interview produced a highly personal account of his life and work. He explains how important writing has always been to him and how it helped and continues to help him overcome crises by putting them into words. The audience gains an insight into Yalom’s Jewish-Russian background and his family during the Second World War and how this shaped him, and you realise that he was a severely traumatised child, who unknowingly absorbed the transgenerational consequences of the traumatisation of his entire family over the course of his life. Against this backdrop, he points out that, when working with people who have been exposed to such extreme experiences, therapy requires relationships which make the experiencing of closeness possible, something that was missing in his early childhood. In light of the current threats to life on our planet, he recommends this not only in the practical therapeutic setting, but also for therapists working with therapy groups to enable them to process how they themselves deal with the existential issues raised in the face of the pandemic, war, and climate catastrophe. It is worth viewing the original English version of the video. It is available on the EAP website (https://www.europsyche.org/latest-news-2/latest-news). A written English version of the interview was published in 2022 in International Journal of Psychotherapy, 26(2).