Critique of Love's Executioner

God certainly created complicated beings when he created man and woman in his image. We are made up of mind, body and soul with such complex areas to explore as our mental state or "psyche", our emotional stability or "feelings", our physical condition or "body" and our spiritual well being or "soul". To put it more simply in Yalom's terms; "so much wanting, so much longing, and so much pain, so close to the surface…Destiny pain. Existence pain. Pain that is always there…just beneath the membrane of life. Pain that is all too easily accessible."

Yalom believes that the "primal stuff" of psychotherapy is "existence pain" rather than repressed instinctual strivings or imperfectly buried remnants of a tragic personal past espoused by Freudian psychoanalytical theorists. The primary clinical assumption on which Yalom bases his psychotherapeutic approach … is that "basic anxiety emerges from a person's endeavors, conscious and unconscious, to cope with the harsh facts of life, the 'givens' of existence."

According to Dr. Irvin Yalom there are four "givens" relevant to psychotherapy: 1) the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; 2) the freedom to make our lives as we will; 3) our ultimate aloneness; and finally, 4) the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life. "These 'givens' contain the seeds to wisdom and redemption."

Death is the most obvious. At some time in our life we will all have to come to terms with the reality of our own mortality. How will we live with the inevitability of death? Death is always to be eluded in some way. At the core of each one of us there is an ever-present conflict between the desire to exist and the awareness of the inescapability of death. Therefore, to adapt to the reality of death, we are continually devising ways to either deny or escape it. I certainly came to a personal awareness of the inescapability of death when I was abruptly faced with the diagnosis of stage 4-breast cancer in 1997. The reality of my own mortality screamed in my face.

Freedom another "given" of existence, seems the very opposite of death. We generally fear death, but we usually consider freedom to be a positive thing. However, freedom from an existential perspective is linked to anxiety, in that, contrary to the everyday experience, we do not enter into, ultimately leave, a well-structured world with an eternal grand design.