Hour of the Heart: Connecting in the Here and Now
About this ebook
Facing memory loss at age ninety-three as well as the fallout from a global pandemic that moved much of daily life online, legendary psychotherapist and bestselling author Irvin D. Yalom was forced to vastly reconsider the shape of his sessions with patients. Rather than throw in the towel in the face of change, Dr. Yalom considered head-on the limitations imposed by these new realities and revolutionized his practice. Turning his focus to what might be achieved in a one-hour, one-time-only meeting between patient and practitioner, Dr. Yalom employed an even more concerted use of his “here and now” approach.
In Hour of the Heart, Yalom recounts some of these intense, life-changing sessions, exploring an array of human predicaments through the lens of existential psychotherapy and his own late-career development as a therapist. In recounting these consultations, he shows how a therapist’s willingness to be open helps patients let down their own guards, leading to a deeper and more immediate connection—one necessary to achieving profound realizations in just sixty minutes. This vulnerability led Yalom to disclose details about his personal life that he might previously have kept hidden from patients, including his traumatic childhood in Washington, DC, the evolution of his thinking about philosophy and psychotherapy, and his personal experience with grief and loss after the recent death of his wife. Throughout, he pushes the boundaries of self-revelation to strengthen the therapeutic relationship.
Life is precious and our time together short. Written in collaboration with his son, Hour of the Heart shows us how to forge deeper human connection in the moment, with more honesty and vulnerability. That hour of connection, occurring during a time of isolation and grief for so many, helped to sustain both patient and therapist, and enriched Yalom’s vision of what psychotherapy can do.
This profound book offers a rare look into the heart of therapy, exploring:
- Aging and Memory Loss: Dr. Yalom’s candid reflections on facing his own cognitive decline and how it forced him to revolutionize a six-decade-long practice.
- The Art of Self-Disclosure: A master therapist’s guide to using personal stories—including the death of his wife, Marilyn—not as a distraction, but as a bridge to deeper connection with patients.
- The "Here and Now" in Practice: An intense focus on single-session consultations, showing how profound breakthroughs are possible when both therapist and patient commit to being fully present.
- A Father-Son Collaboration: A unique literary partnership that blends a lifetime of wisdom with fresh insight, written with his son Benjamin as Yalom’s own memory began to fade.
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About the author
Irvin D. Yalom, M.D., is one of the world’s foremost psychiatrists, a visionary therapist and internationally bestselling author. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Love’s Executioner, Momma and the Meaning of Life, When Nietzsche Wept, the Schopenhauer Cure, and most recently A Matter of Death and Life, a dual memoir written with his late wife, Marilyn Yalom, PhD. His textbooks Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy and Existential Therapy are standards for therapists in training worldwide. In 2014 he was the subject of the documentary Yalom's Cure. Now in his nineties, Dr. Yalom continues to live and write in Northern California.
Benjamin Yalom is a San Diego-based psychotherapist, with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who focuses on values, relationships, and existential concerns. He is a long-time writing collaborator with his father, Irvin D. Yalom. Prior to his doctoral studies in Marriage and Family Therapy, Ben was the visionary force behind foolsFURY theater, which helped transform San Francisco’s performing arts scene in the early 2000s. He is also an award-winning fiction writer. www.yalomtherapy.com
