Books

The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin Yalom

Andrew Barley enters group therapy with Irvin Yalom.

Irvin Yalom is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford and is the author of one of his profession’s standard texts, The Theory and Practice of Group Therapy. But nestled beneath the title of Yalom’s new book The Schopenhauer Cure are the words, ‘A Novel’. The words seem miserly for a book filled with so much. For beside the novel’s story there’s an interlaced psychological biography of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Yalom’s hallmark therapeutic tips woven in and twelve pages of reference notes. It is a tremendous achievement and an absorbing read built on months of research and original translation work.

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