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

Yalom says that facing death often helps people reprioritize their lives, encouraging them to ignore trivial concerns and embrace more meaningful actions. Patients with severe illnesses, such as cancer, often come to an understanding of life while living with their disease. For patients who are not ill themselves, grieving for others who have passed away may be an opportunity to explore death and mortality. Yalom believes that fears of death play a role in everyone’s psyche and that therapists should normalize these discussions, which might be prompted by a variety of life events such as aging, retirement, or becoming empty nesters or grandparents.

Yalom’s approach is to discuss the patient’s perspective on death openly and frankly, uncovering how they have thought of it throughout their lives and exploring the losses they have experienced thus far. If therapists are calm and open about death, this signals to the patient that they are allowed to bring up the subject.

Yalom claims that sexual obsessions are often simply fears about death manifesting in a different way, because sex is “the absolute vital antithesis of death” (138). Therapists should help their patients explore their fantasies and understand their deeper meaning or impetus.