IRVIN YALOM This is the same group about four meetings later. .docx

IRVIN YALOM: This is the same group about four meetings
later.
JULIUS: Good to see everybody.
TONY: Good to be back.
BONNIE: Good to see you.
STUART: You look well, Julius.
BONNIE: You do.
JULIUS: Yeah? Well, I'm feeling not too badly. Have you been-
-it's interesting, Stuart, that you commented about that. I
appreciate that.
STUART: I think that we all think about you quite a bit. And
your situation.
JULIUS: How do you feel about that?
STUART: A little nervous. It's difficult. And I believe we said
several weeks ago that we were going to try to talk about that a
little bit more directly. And I don't know that we have.
PAM: I think I have seen a lot of different words around Julius'
illness, situation. Everybody seems to--how do you feel about
that, Julius?
JULIUS: I'm not sure about your question, Pam. What are you
asking me?
PAM: Julius has cancer and that is devastating. And somehow

we tend to use different words. You just used "situation." I have
heard other people say "illness." I want to check in with people.
TONY: I'm fine with whatever we say as long as it's not
confusing.
JULIUS: You have been feeling confused?
TONY: Just sometimes I don't understand what everybody is
talking about. I don't know how to put it. Always on the spot. I
don't want to talk about it right now.
JULIUS: You say you don't want to talk about "it" right now.
What's the "it?"
TONY: Sometimes, especially recently with Philip, he uses a lot
of terminology that is difficult for me to understand. It's just
hard to put my head around things sometimes. I just feel dumb
sometimes. But you guys know that.
REBECCA: No.
PAM: Tony, sometimes you say the most straight from the hip,
pivotal thing to people.
TONY: That's good to know.
REBECCA: And I think it is hard for all of us to wrap our
minds around somebody who has cancer.
TONY: Yeah, I think I was just saying that whatever the word
is, like melanoma, malignant, things like that were just kind of
always--it took me awhile to kind of get my head around it.
JULIUS: Well it has taken me a bit of time to get around it, too.

TONY: I bet.
JULIUS: And I--I'm glad in some ways, Stuart, that you led the
meeting off with asking me about that because, as we have been
talking this last while, for you to go to feelings is not an easy
thing. What is it like for you to tell me that you are concerned
about me?
STUART: Well, I am. I'm definitely concerned. I know we all
are. And this group is certainly a place where we can come to
talk to one another and I worry about that being upset. And I
also know that you are responsible for bringing us here
together. So I have a lot of gratitude.
JULIUS: Concern. Gratitude. Feels good for me to hear.
Obviously I want to know that what I do is of value.
TONY: Helps me out a lot. Well, you know, all of you help me
out a lot. But like I said a few sessions ago, just, I don't know,
without this group I wouldn't have a touchstone to be able to
kind of vent or have just a place to kind of depressurize, you
know? This is good. It's simple.
JULIUS: Simple?
TONY: It is just easy here. Not easy. What the fuck am I trying
to say? I feel like I get to come here and work on just letting
out things that are pent up or hearing other people let it out.
And for me that is like, I don't know, it adds something because
it's like I am learning from all of you how to do that better.
Sometimes I feel pent up.
JULIUS: How has Tony been doing?
STUART: Well, if you remember early on in our time together,
Tony seemed to be getting in fights a lot. That hasn't happened

for awhile, so that's good.
REBECCA: We have also been confronting people about their
own shit, which has been really good. Like Philip a couple of
weeks ago who wasn't, who isn't responding a lot directly, and
you confronted him on that, and I think that was really
important.
TONY: Speaking of which, she just said he didn't and then he
isn't. How does that make you feel, Philip?
PHILIP: I am wondering if you are accurately interpreting my
actions. I don't pretend to behave in a manner that is normal for
everyone else. This is part of what makes me an individual and
unique human being. It is part of what makes me myself.
So please, I would suggest you to listen to my words and this
should accurately reflect my position in the group and my place
and the contributions that I am making. That I don't engage your
eyes is not that my eyes aren't engaged, they are just engaged
inwardly.
TONY: Inwardly. Because I just ask because she is saying that
you aren't being engaging, and sometimes you aren't. I mean
you shoot your philosophy to us often enough and it's helpful.
But you just seem really cold sometimes, you know? And I
think that affects all of us here.
PHILIP: You find that coldness discomfiting?
TONY: I--yeah. REBECCA: I'm personally, to be candid,
wondering how in the hell you picked up girls in bars. Right?
I'm not trying to take a jab. I'm just--who are you, compared to-
-?
PHILIP: Well, first of all I am not that same gentleman. The

person that I became thanks to the great works of the
philosophers that are my guide, was the one who I was allowed
to develop this disattachment which I am finding that you are
misunderstanding. It is a way--Throwing your feelings out upon
the ground for all to judge and look at is only one way. I have a
different way of being in the world. And I feel it is, I think
strongly, it has been of great benefit to myself.
TONY: How does that look?
PHILIP: How does what look?
TONY: The way you are being of great benefit to yourself? It
just sounds like--I don't know, I almost feel a little bit judged at
the way that we come to this group and we do express ourselves
and you saying that there are other ways. Of course you have a
different way.
STUART: But it does seem that Philip has offered many
contributions that have been helpful to some of us. Whether you
feel warmly about him as a person or not, whether I do, seems
off the point a little bit.
TONY: Fair enough.
PAM: Yeah, but putting in philosophical interjections about
things is not risk-taking at all for this person. This person has
spent his entire life detaching from the world and, and has
stated here--and this is what I don't understand, Julius--has
stated here that his whole point of life is to not make contact
with people. And yet he is in this group. I don't understand that,
and I continue not to understand it.
I think it's fine to have philosophical statements, improve us
and give us thoughts about how we might change, but what is
that really doing?

PHILIP: What you criticize is exactly what I have to offer the
world. If I may connect the dots for you. I am here as a student.
What I am here a student of is to do Julius's job as a therapist,
as a counselor, to advise others. My method does not happen to
be of the same ilk. It is not the same method. That is how I am
unique. That is what I have to offer the world--an objective,
philosophical approach. It is not different and differences often
are threatening to people and I understand that and I am
prepared for the consequences. But I stand by my differences
because I stand by this point of view as being the right one for
me and for many others, as others in the group, Pam, have said
it has helped them.
JULIUS: How are people feeling?
BONNIE: I have a question to ask Philip, and I am curious
about that your eyes are turned inward. And I wonder how you
feel about what you see inside of you, because as we all felt you
were such a help to us and then with the revelation of how you
treated Pam, I wonder what you feel about yourself? Would you
look yourself in the eyes?
TONY: Any guilt?
PHILIP: Many years ago I tore myself from the attachments of
public opinion.
BONNIE: What about your own opinion of yourself?
PHILIP: My own opinion is based upon my intellectual
analyses, my personal faculties, and I would not be here--If I
believed I was behaving erroneously I would behave differently.
So obviously I feel that this is a very helpful way for me to
behave and I have the belief that I have something to offer to
others.

JULIUS: Philip, I think you may be missing something here.
People are not asking you--I think Bonnie is asking a question
about how you make sense of your behavior toward Pam 15
years ago. Am I right, Bonnie? Is that what you were asking
about?
PHILIP: It's no secret. I have addressed that I was a sexual
addict 15 years ago. It is not something that I am proud of.
Indeed, as you have noticed, I have worked very hard to develop
how I am today, which is in a direct response to that addiction.
And I am a little bit confused in some ways with the vehemence
of Pam's reaction, since she went quite willingly into a social
interaction with myself in which we interacted and went our
separate ways.
PAM: We interacted and went our separate ways?
PHILIP: We did. Am I in error?
PAM: He just called the fact that he fucked me and devirginized
me a "social interaction." I mean how cold is that?
PHILIP: Do you prefer the term "fuck" to "interaction"? Are
yours more--how is "fuck" better than "interaction?"
PAM: You are talking about manipulating a girl of 18 who was
not only just vulnerable to men but vulnerable to her teacher.
PHILIP: Behavior which I have since fixed.
PAM: And you manipulated that status and you took me and you
had sex with me. And you not only had sex with me--
PHILIP: You had sex with me, too.

PAM: But you dropped me.
REBECCA: I'm feeling very uncomfortable.
TONY: Yeah, me too.
JULIUS: Track that. What is the discomfort about? Follow those
feelings, Rebecca, Tony.
TONY: The last thing Philip said is you almost sound like you
are not taking responsibility for being in that interaction with
him then. You are saying he fucked you. I mean, everything that
you said is about it being done to you, as if you had no will of
your own.
PAM: well, it's very alluring when you are 18 years old and
your older teacher comes at you and says the right things and
does the right things, and all of a sudden you are dropped with
having to deal with him in your class and your whole class
future. The repercussions of that event tragically laid out for me
for years. So, yeah, I want him to take some responsibility for
this. And, yeah, I feel that this is not--I can take only so much
responsibility. And what I am so angry about is that this man is
not taking any responsibility and shows no remorse for his
actions. Look at him!
PHILIP: Am I not taking responsibility?
BONNIE: Can you apologize to her?
JULIUS: What do you think about that? Don't respond to yes or
no, Philip. What do you think about that as an idea?
PHILIP: The idea of apologizing. Well. I suppose I--I continue
to go back to the situation. And I look at it, and, yes, there were
certain power imbalances, as Pam keeps referring to. I was

indeed the instructor of her class. And yet we had a mutually
satisfactory--
JULIUS: You are answering something different than the
question that has been posed to you.
PHILIP: Yes, how do I--Could you say it again, please?
STUART: Julius asked you how you felt about the idea of
apologizing.
JULIUS: Thanks, Stuart.
PHILIP: It's not a question to me and my outlook of how I feel.
The question is one--in my viewpoint of the world which I
understand you don't accept--it is an intellectual consideration
for me and I see that you don't appreciate that, but that is how I
am different.
JULIUS: Philip--
TONY: You are avoiding the question.
JULIUS: Yes. I guess I am feeling even more, Tony, I
appreciate Stuart, you Tony, you kind of pushing Philip. And I
think you are kind of pushing my work forward, the work that I
feel needs to be done. And I've got to tell you, I recognize in
pushing this forward, I guess I am more and more aware of the
passage of time and your not making, Philip, the best use of
time. And time, because of what I am aware of, is becoming
more and more precious. And I don't want to burden you with
that but I feel I am not really being honest if I don't speak my
mind about that.
And the way I kind of look at this, Philip, is that you spent the
first half of your life addicted to sex, and the second half of

your life addicted to not being addicted to people. And I'm
wondering if there is any way for you to kind of create some
more working space for you. And that is why I am harping on
the issue of an apology--not because an apology is going to
make this all pretty and nice, but to create some more working
space for you. Do you know what I mean? Something between
these two polarities.
PHILIP: If you could elaborate, actually, on working space
would be helpful.
JULIUS: Can anybody help me out?
STUART: Well, it seems like you're saying that Philip is a little
bit trapped between his behavior in the past and his current--
what's the word you continue to use, Philip? Detachment?
Disattachment, yes?
PHILIP: That acceptable.
STUART: From people which doesn't leave him--doesn't leave
you a lot of room to make choices in how you are going to
interact with people. Is that--?
JULIUS: That's perfect. It is kind of like you swapped on
compulsion for another. Where is your free will? Where is your
choice?
TONY: Are you looking for growth, if you are asking for
working space? Do you want to grow into anything more?
PHILIP: I think I do understand what you are saying right now,
and I just feel like--I think I am not being listened to or
something, because all that is in my head is what I have said
many times before. My growth--and I feel that I have made
strides. If you had seen me before, and one person has, I am a

different person. And my strivings and my growth--how can I
see it as any other way but this that I have obtained with the
help of the great philosophers, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche,
etc, Plato--
I'm looking for growth. Indeed, I'm looking for growth. How
can you say that I am not looking for growth? I am pursuing
that growth at the expense of everything else in my life every
single day. I go home and I read Schopenhauer and I read Kant.
And what I am trying to do is obtain a higher level of my
intellect. I would like to--
REBECCA: You are growing in one way, Philip. Growing
intellectually and reading more books is not "growth."
PHILIP: I disagree.
REBECCA: You can disagree all you want but everything you
are saying right now is bullshit. I'm sorry, but all she is asking
for is an apology and an answer to a question. If you listen, she
just wants to know--we all want to know--if you are going to
just think about giving an apology and you go into this diatribe.
You've said some really amazing things but right now all you
are doing is avoiding the question.
TONY: And just a point of process. I don't think Pam--were you
asking for an apology or was that Bonnie?
STUART: That was Julius. That wasn't Pam.
TONY: Okay.
GILLL: I think Pam was pointing out that he never had
apologized.
PHILIP: I am able to apologize. If that is what is necessary, I

will apologize.
JULIUS: Can you appreciate what it means for Pam to know
that you understand the impact of what happened? Am I right,
Pam, that that is important for you?
PAM: If I felt like he meant it. I just--I don't think he has
changed. I look at this person and I see the same person that I
knew when I was 18. Manipulative--I think he's manipulating
the group. Impressing people with the things that he says,
talking about a philosopher that is counterproductive to the
group.
So I don't know what that apology would mean to me.
BONNIE: I understand your feelings, Pam, but I'm sorry, I
wouldn't really want to apologize to somebody who just said
that to me.
JULIUS: Say more, Bonnie.
BONNIE: I just think that, I feel like--Like Gill a couple of
sessions ago, we had to be able to hear him and you have to be
able to lay the groundwork in order for somebody to be able to
say something they have never said before. And you have to be
willing to try even if you are scared.
JULIUS: That is a really important statement for you to make.
BONNIE: You have helped me to make that statement.
JULIUS: I'm not going to take credit for it away from you. That
would be cheapening what you have just done. I think you are
really pushing your envelope. I think it's an important point. It
is an important point because of your feedback to Pam, and it is
important because you are out here. And I am so glad you didn't

end by saying "I'm sorry" or "I'm not sure about what I am
saying."
BONNIE: I'm trying not to say it.
JULIUS: Gill, what do you think? Do you think Bonnie is on to
something about Pam?
GILL: I would have to agree. I think Pam is still sort of the
Supreme Court justice, still maybe only judging.
STUART: I would just like to throw out, Pam, you said a minute
ago that you didn't see any change in Philip from the man you
knew 15 years ago. And it seems clear that, as Julius just said,
maybe all he has done is trade addictions, but that is certainly a
change, isn't it?
PAM: That doesn't count as a change to me, not for what it
would mean to me. Not what it would mean to other women.
How many women? There was a list of women that he kept, that
Molly, my very good friend, found. A list of all the women and
all the positions. I'm sorry, but that is really screwed up.
REBECCA: But Pam, do you expect him to call every one of
those women and apologize to each and every one?
PAM: No, and I don't expect him to be in the same therapy
group as them, either.
BONNIE: That's true.
PHILIP: You accuse me of trading addictions for another
addiction and that they are both the same. You say you would
have objected as strongly had I read Schopenhauer to you.
PAM: I don't disagree that Schopenhauer is a wonderful writer.

He is a wonderful philosophical writer. But in terms of adopting
your whole life to being just like him, that is counterproductive
in my opinion.
TONY: Pam, what do you want him to change into? You know,
what would it look like for him to change? What would he look
like? What would the qualities be?
PAM: I don't know where I can begin. He would look at people,
for one thing. He'd own up to what he had done. He'd feel
remorse. He'd start saying the word "I feel." I could go on all
day.
PHILIP: I come back to fashion, and that many of the things
that you cannot stand, that repulse you about me, I see as
fashion. ten years ago everybody said "I think" and nobody said
"I feel." What is that: progress or fashion?
JULIUS: Philip, how are you feeling right now? I'm going to
ask you to put aside Schopenhauer because I am aware that both
you, and you, Pam, have experienced a great deal of distress
and are experiencing a great deal of distress right now. It's a lot
easier for us, Pam, to see it with you. But I've got to believe
that it is no less evident somewhere inside of you, Philip. And I
want us to--I know it is not easy for you to keep coming here
every week and face this barrage. But you have to recognize
that you are doing some things here that are really inflaming the
situation.
Now we can't change you, but we can give you feedback, and
hopefully you will take that under advisement, your personal
counsel to use your phrase, and see what you want to do with it.
You don't even need to respond right now. It might, in fact, be
even more productive if you just thought about it for a moment.
I am aware also that we have been giving this a lot of time and

there is other stuff that we may need to look at today. I'm also
conscious of the fact, Stuart, that you commented about the
group's concern about my cancer. And I want to make sure that
if that is on somebody's mind that we can speak to that, too.
TONY: It's always on our mind, I would think.
BONNIE: Yeah.
TONY: We've got a lot out of this process. I would even say we
care about you. At least I care about you. And I think about it.
It makes me think about my own mortality a lot, too.
PAM: Julius, you know how I feel. You're the best.
REBECCA: Of course we all think about it. We're here every
week.
TONY: It's kind of like an elephant in the room.
JULIUS: It's kind of like a what?
TONY: An elephant in the room. Not that you are an elephant.
JULIUS: You mean it is so prominent but we're not speaking
about it. Well, I'll tell you how I would like us to speak to this.
And that is that I think what happens here is precious. And I
would like us to make the best use of our time together. I don't
want this group to end, but it's going to end. We have a number
of sessions left. I think I am going to be able to fulfill my
commitment. But when this group ends, I want us to have as few
regrets as possible about what we did together. It is not usual
for me to speak like this, so I need to check that out with you
and see how you are experiencing me. But I think it is the best
way I know of dealing what I'm dealing with.

So when this group ends, I would like for you guys to have as
few regrets as possible about what we've done. And I've got to
confess Philip, maybe that is part of what is driving me with
you. But in some ways, only because you have been so stuck,
and I see other people making real movement.
PHILIP: Julius, if I may.
JULIUS: I appreciate you calling me Julius. That's not usual.
PHILIP: I want to ask a question about the process that I am
here to be studying. We all have been revealing parts of
ourselves, and there is a mutual give and take. And as a future
person in your shoes, I can't help but comment that I feel that
you have not commented yourself upon--I can't tell if you are
being forthcoming or not about your cancer. You spoke about
the group's concern. I did not hear you commenting upon your
own personal concern. Julius, how am I supposed to behave in
the future as a therapist, is where my mind is headed.
PAM: I feel that this is a personal attack. This is really unfair.
You as the therapist shouldn't have to reveal anything anymore
or any less than you are.
TONY: I disagree.
REBECCA: I do, too.
TONY: Not that I feel you are being disingenuous. But how do
you feel? Is it a concern?
JULIUS: Of course it is a concern.
PAM: He's in a really difficult decision.
REBECCA: Well maybe it would help him, too.

JULIUS: I don't want to avoid the question, but do you know
what just struck me, Pam, is that you are always quick to look
out for me. I feel that you don't give some of the other men in
the room a break, but that you are always looking out for me.
There is a part of me, obviously, that likes that, but another part
of me that says we've got to make sense of why that is.
STUART: I feel that way.
TONY: Yeah.
PAM: Julius, I just--You are a great guy. Every man should be
as great as Julius. I don't know how to respond to that. I don't
think that that's my problem. You know, I'm just seeing it as it
is. You know?
GILL: So the rest of us aren't valid?
PAM: I didn't say that. If I didn't think you were valid at all I
wouldn't say anything.
JULIUS: Gill, if that look had words, what would you say when
you just turned to Pam?
GILL: The look she gave me or the look I gave her?
JULIUS: Both.
GILL: I think the look she gave me said, "No, you are not
valid." She was even silent along with it. I'm still scared of her.
PAM: See, that's not my problem. Why should that be my
problem? If Gill hides something from us for weeks and weeks,
he gives us this whole other story about Rose and we really
empathized with him. I feel cheated. I feel like I don't know

who this person is. I think it is great that you've finally come
and out said what you needed to say. I think it is great.
TONY: Do you think it is valid?
PAM: Of course. I think it is valid.
JULIUS: So Gill, that is one half of the equation. What's the
other half of the equation? Pam has responded. But I want to
know what you were feeling when you looked over at Pam.
GILL: Like I said, just scared. Like she doesn't think I'm
anything, and then when she gives me that look I think, "Hey,
maybe I'm not."
JULIUS: And when Pam says, "Julius, you are the best," what is
that like for you?
GILL: Makes me feel a little less of a person. Not that--I think
you are great, too. But maybe we could acknowledge that the
rest of the men in this room are in some way men, at least.
PAM: Have I not acknowledged that the men are men? It's just--
it's frustrating.
GILL: Or insects.
JULIUS: I need to check something out with you because I am
very concerned right now. Am I doing something that makes
you need to tell me I'm great?
BONNIE: Sometimes. Julius, I feel like I want you to share with
us, and then sometimes I don't want to know anything about
you, because you are our leader. And if you can't do it, I can't
do it.

REBECCA: I want to know more about you. I want you to
share. Because I don't want you to be imperfect. Because he has
problems just like we do.
TONY: That's tough to live up to.
JULIUS: You don't want me to be imperfect.
REBECCA: I don't want you to be perfect. You don't have to be
perfect. You are great, but maybe you're not the best, you
know?
JULIUS: I feel that I am sharing a lot with you guys every
session. It is different. It is not historical information. I feel I
am sharing something with you right now when I ask the
question, "Am I doing something that causes you to tell me that
I am great?" Because I've got to tell you, it makes me feel
uncomfortable. It makes me concerned that I am not being seen
in a fully three-dimensional way.
REBECCA: I feel like that a lot.
PHILIP: Julius, I feel that the question that I posed to you
earlier, I'm coming back to. Could it be your avoidance of
sharing like the rest of the group shares in the same manner that
the rest of the group is strongly encouraged and sometimes
badgered into sharing--is your lack of sharing, is that perhaps
the thing that causes some members of the group to call you
great? And should there be this difference between the role of
the counselor and the role of the group members in group
therapy? Is there a difference?
TONY: Really quickly before you answer, I just love that you
said "I feel" at the beginning of that statement.
PHILIP: Did I?

JULIUS: It snuck out, huh? It's great Tony, that you caught that.
I'm not going to evade your question.
PHILIP: For the second time.
JULIUS: But you see, Tony, you're able to do something with
Philip that I think Pam can't right now, and that is see him as
more than just two dimensions. And that is why I am concerned,
also, about me being called "great." Because if I'm two
dimensions on that side, it is not real. It is not human. And I
want to be human here. That doesn't mean that I am going to tell
you everything about me, but I am going to tell you what I feel
right here with you guys about being here with you.
And I am concerned that if I'm great, and Gill feels like he is
chopped liver, then that is not good for him, nor me, nor you,
Pam. It's kind of like you categorize people. And saying that,
you have been terribly, terribly hurt and injured by Philip, and
your anger in many ways is justified. I don't want you to
misunderstand me about that for one second. But your anger is
something that I think is a very powerful force in your life. And
I've been shielded from it.
PAM: It's just I can't see every man the same way. I mean, I
can't give compassion--I just don't feel able to give compassion
to Philip. And you know, it's fine. I can see, Gill, where you're
coming from and maybe how you kept it from us. And that's just
where you are at. That's, I guess, where you are coming from.
But I can't just equally forgive everybody. We haven't even
heard--I haven't even heard an apology from Philip.
TONY: Is that what you want?
PAM: It would be good for a start.

REBECCA: Well we left off with Philip saying he would think
about it. So maybe he has thought about it.
TONY: And saying he was capable of an apology.
PHILIP: What I stated was that if an apology was necessary I
am perfectly capable of offering one. And I shall.
REBECCA: That seems necessary.
PHILIP: I apologize.
REBECCA: For what?
JULIUS: You've got a chance, here, Philip.
TONY: Come on man, take a risk.
PHILIP: I--I am struggling at this moment because I don't see
the world in quite the same way but I will try to interpret my
differences into language you can understand. I am able to
observe that I have caused you pain. And I do apologize for
that.
You accused me of having no remorse. To me, I have shown
quite strong remorse. Indeed, I have spent the past 10 years, the
past decade and more, in correcting the very behavior which
you say I have no remorse for. A daily dose of correction. If
that is not remorse, I don't know what is.
That I don't profess myself in the same manner as you do does
not mean that I show no remorse. To me the most effective way
is by correcting my actions, and that I have done.
REBECCA: That's really good.

JULIUS: That is a powerful statement. You look like there is a
fair bit of feeling still there.
PHILIP: I--I am not accustomed to this and--I'm out of my
element.
JULIUS: You may be out of your element, but it feels a lot more
real and accessible than when you are in your element.
PHILIP: Real and accessible, maybe. But, Julius, I am not sure I
am a big fan of these--feelings. I chose the course--
JULIUS: I'm going to jump in Philip, because I don't want you
to subtract from what you've just added. I want you just to kind
of savor that. I'm also aware of the passage of time. And you
said something, Rebecca, that I think we shouldn't miss. It
seemed the idea of being two-dimensional, three-dimensional,
kind of really captured you. You said something. Let's pursue
that. I just need to check with you, Philip. Are we okay parking
this with you here right now? Can we move on to Rebecca?
PHILIP: Yes, absolutely.
JULIUS: You sound, Rebecca, like someone who knows what it
is like to be not three-dimensional. REBECCA: Well, Bonnie
and a number of other people in the group have brought up quite
a bit how I preen and how I flirt quite a bit. And how that's--
well, that's all I am, because I think I am so beautiful and so
popular and how wonderful that is. Well the reason I came into
therapy with Julius was at the age of 30 people stopped looking
at me and stopped commenting on my outside beauty. And you
have really ridden my ass about that quite a bit.
And well the funny thing is that I don't think in this group that I
don't think anyone has brought up anything other than the way I
look, or the way you think that I think that I look, or the way

that people look at me and the things I do to try to get men's
attention because that's all I want.
TONY: I don't know if that's true. It seems like we focus on
that, but that we're asking often enough what's the inner life.
And I think we're trying to coax that out. Am I mistaken? That's
what I sense when we are asking more of you. More than what--
god, I always get tongue-tied. JULIUS: You are moving in a
good direction, Tony. Stick with it.
TONY: Okay, okay. Yeah, it seems like we are asking you to
look at more than your looks. You know? We're bringing that
up.
REBECCA: Well I think you need something to look at, because
they're going too. So I would like some direction in some point,
in some way, of something I can look to--because I don't really
want to look at anything in the mirror anymore.
PHILIP: I think, Rebecca, the group has been trying to tell you
to look within. That there is something there that is of value and
that, indeed, I have stated perhaps too often, that that can be the
foundation for the rest of your life.
JULIUS: What do you see when you look inside, Rebecca?
REBECCA: There is really nothing there.
JULIUS: What do you see when you look in the mirror?
REBECCA: Nothing anymore.
JULIUS: Nothing inside?
REBECCA: Or outside.

JULIUS: What would you like to see inside? What do you wish
was there?
REBECCA: Someone who could have girlfriends, and who was
a really good mom to her kids. And who pursued things that she
liked and didn't think other people wanted her to do a lot.
TONY: What are those?
REBECCA: Racquetball, of all things.
JULIUS: Racquetball?
REBECCA: Mm-hmm. I was never any good at it, though.
JULIUS: Being a good mom, being a good friend--those are
things that you would like?
REBECCA: Very much so.
JULIUS: What is it like to hear that?
TONY: It sounds like a blanket statement. It sounds like you
may have--isn't there any instance of that at all, of being a good
mother or being a good friend?
REBECCA: I don't have any girlfriends.
STUART: I don't think she said she never does those things, but
merely that's a goal that she would like to have more of.
JULIUS: Thanks, Stuart.
BONNIE: It is very profound for me to hear that and see,
Rebecca, you get upset. I feel like beautiful people and popular
people can sustain themselves. And I feel the same way that you

do, and I guess that I don't understand that.
REBECCA: Why?
BONNIE: I always thought that we were just so different.
JULIUS: And you recognize that there is more that you have
alike. What is that like, Bonnie?
BONNIE: It gives me confidence.
JULIUS: Confidence?
BONNIE: Uh-huh. JULIUS: So your work right now, Rebecca,
is at least being helpful to Bonnie.
REBECCA: That's good.
JULIUS: What just happened? I'm afraid I can't see, Rebecca,
your face. All I can see is the rest of your body language. What
is happening?
BONNIE: I guess I don't feel so alone. I don't have to feel so
jealous.
TONY: I would be so bold as to say it looked like friendship.
You know?
JULIUS: You know, Tony, you have your own way with words.
BONNIE: Thanks Tony.
REBECCA: Thank you, Tony.
JULIUS: I said earlier that--Stuart, I hope I haven't evaded your
question completely about my cancer. And we're out of time

right now for today's meeting. But what I will say, what I do
want to say before we stop, is that I feel very much alive right
now working with you all in the way that you've been working
today. And we'll see what next week brings.
IRVIN YALOM: We are going to go on for discussion, but
before we start I would like to spend just a few minutes have
each of the participants introduce themselves to you so we see
who they are. Maybe you could say something about either your
next performance, your next play, or your last play. But real
quickly, let's run through that.
ALEX ASCHINGER: All right. My name is Alex Aschinger and
I perform Friday and Saturday nights at the San Francisco
Comedy College, which is over on Mason.
DEBORAH ELIEZER: Hi, my name is Deborah Eliezer. I'm a
member of FoolsFURY Theater Company and I also produce a
performing arts summer camp for kids called Swivel Arts,
www.swivelarts.com. I'm a voice-over and an actor and a dancer
and I will have Ben tell you about our next show. The first
weekend in March is "Apartment" at CounterPULSE here in the
city for those locals, so you can look that up on our website.
Thank you very much.
BRIAN LIVINGSTON: My name is Brian Livingston. I'm also a
member of the FoolsFURY Theater Company, and I'm about to
work on a project with them in about a month or so. And thanks
a lot for having us.
ANGELA BUSH: Hi, I'm Angela Bush. I'm the company
manager of FoolsFURY Theater and we have some shows
coming up which Ben is going to tell you about and also I am
going to be in the "Vagina Monologues" which [Laylee] is
directing and it is going to be at the Castro Street Theater
March 9 on a Thursday. So please come, that would be

wonderful. And thank you so much.
LAYLEE: I'm Laylee and I'm a member of the improve troupe
that performs at the San Francisco Comedy College. I'm part of
FoolsFURY which will be having a show in May--look for it. it
is called " The Devil On All Sides." It is about the
Serb/Croatian War. It is fabulous. I'm directing the "Vagina
Monologues V-Day 2006." It is at the Castro Theatre,
Ticketweb.com. Thank you so much.
MICHAEL SOMMERS: I'm Michael Somers. I will also be
appearing in the "The Devil On All Sides." You can go out to
see that theater or you can sit on your butts at home and watch
the premiere episode of "The Evidence" starring Martin Landau
and Orlando Jones, and I have a nice little co-starring role
there. But what I really want you to come to the show, "The
Devil On All Sides," but also the show that is my creation
called, "Uncle Buzzy's Hometown Theater Show." I'm Uncle
Buzzy and you get my wife's free homemade cookies instead of
a ticket at the door.
BEN YALOM: And they're really good.
MICHAEL SOMMERS: I do the world's greatest chicken
impression, too. So if that doesn't get you there, what will?
Take a flyer for me or go to UncleBuzzy.org. BEN YALOM: I'm
Ben Yalom. You may have recognized the slight resemblance.
My father...I'm also the artistic director of FoolsFURY Theater,
hence all of these people here. We are a local avant-garde
ensemble. We do performances and training and camps all year
long in the San Francisco area.
We do a lot of dance work and theater work and using things
like masks and all sorts of physical things in addition to
wonderful texts. We have an upcoming show not this coming
weekend but the following weekend called "Apartment," three

nights only. It is a company-devised piece starring Deborah
Eliezer at the Counter Pulse. And then our big show coming up
for the late spring is called "The Devil On All Sides." It will be
at Traveling Jewish Theater where we are a resident company.
It's a wonderful American premiere of a contemporary French
play by an amazing playwright who will be in town for the
opening. We are very happy to be performing it, and just a little
nervous about spending the next two months full-time working
on it and finding out what kind of wonderful creative things we
are going to have. So please, check it out. The Web site is
FoolsFURY, like Angry Clowns. FoolsFURY.org. And if you
are in town, please come see us.
IRVIN YALOM: Okay, let me just give a free association about
the meeting, and then turn it open to you all. First of all one of
my thoughts when I first started thinking about Arthur
Schopenhauer and group therapy is I wanted to get him in a
therapy group and I wanted to do a historical novel, but it was
impossible. I mean, he died 30 or 40 years before our field
began.
I tried thinking of inventing a character, an ex-Jesuit, I thought,
who was well-schooled in philosophy as Jesuits are. I wasted
about six months on that. And finally gave in--I could not write
a historical novel about Schopenhauer because he was the most
isolated man I have ever encountered in history.
So then I gave it up, wrote another book, and came back to it
and thought, "Well, I want to have Schopenhauer the person in
the book, but I will have someone that is his clone," and that
would be Philip. And you could go through, as I did in the
book, you can get a whole list of--a misanthrope's manifesto. So
many things about Schopenhauer would make you think he is
the last person in the world to be in the group. He would say,
"Distrust is the mother of safety." "Do not tell a friend what

your enemy ought not to know." "Regard all personal affairs as
secrets and remain complete strangers, even to our close
friends." "We must never show hatred or anger except in our
actions." "It is only the cold-blooded animals that are
poisonous." "From the tree of silence hangs the fruits of peace."
On and on like this. So then I thought, well put him in a therapy
group, that is the worst person in the world you can imagine in
a therapy group. On the other hand, what a kick. If you could
help Arthur Schopenhauer in a therapy group, you could help
anyone.
So that was part of my motivation. Is there a way we can work
in this group to actually change this person? Now, this group
today for the first forty minutes or so was at an impasse. Philip
was sticking to his guns and the group was working. Often in
my novel, I have the group regarding him as a strange life form.
They circle him, he says something, they don't know what to
make of it, they're chewing on his words for a while.
But we went through a lot of that today, and finally the group,
in a very different way than the novel, began to find a way to
begin to crack through that. It was just the beginnings of it
today. And in the novel I went through it in a number of ways.
One of the ways I went through it was through Pam, through a
number of members of the group revealing things about
themselves, real major, what they thought of as misdeeds, sins,
indiscretions, sexual indiscretions. Rebecca did it. She talked
about a very brief--forgive me for saying this, Rebecca--but for
a very brief fling as a prostitute one or two evenings. And
others did a similar thing.
And even Julius talked about his sexual indiscretions. After his
wife died he accepted some of the comfort of some of the
relatives and friends of his wife's, and was sexually involved
with them.

And who else? Let's see. Stuart talked about a major
indiscretion when he was at a convention and feels that he
might have taken advantage of someone who was perhaps rather
disturbed, and he has never forgiven himself for that.
So a lot of these indiscretions came out. And then the point was
that Pam forgave them all. She forgave, eventually, Gill for not
telling about the alcoholism; and she forgave Seymour, and
forgave Stuart. She forgave everyone. Then the pressure got
even greater leverage on her. Why is it that she couldn't
forgive? That was the beginning of the crack between the two of
them.
She started quoting everything involved with Schopenhauer, and
then she let it slip that she majored in Schopenhauer. And then
suddenly Philip could say, "You majored in Schopenhauer?
Well, that means maybe I wasn't such a bad teacher after all."
And she would have to say, "Well I never said you were a bad
teacher. In fact, you were probably the best teacher I ever had."
And then the cracks began to come and the impasse began to
break down. And so it was happening in this group as well, in
an entirely different way.
And then you notice how the leader of the group here just kept
storing things. There was work to be done in the impasse. He
also had to assess when that work was enough for this group
because you need other work to be done, too. He heard
something that one person said, he heard something, for
example with Rebecca, and he stored it, and he came back to it
when he thought the time was right. We sometimes think of a
theme building, and maybe a time of theme satiation.
Some therapists have trouble at that point, letting go of the
theme. You drag on and on, and it becomes lifeless. So you
have to kind of find a way to think, decide when there is maybe

some theme satiation, and see if you can break in because there
are other things waiting to be done in the group. And Gill, for
one of them was something that he came back to. And he came
back to Stuart, too.
And then they went into a final investigation of Rebecca. When
I was a resident, there was an essay that came out--it's long out
of print, I'm sure--by a man named Saperstein, called "The
Beautiful Empty Woman." And it was just a lovely essay about
the problems of the beautiful empty woman--the woman who is
so beautiful that everything comes to her just because of her
flesh or the way that she looks. And she never really has to do
anything, and consequently often never has a sense of internal
worth, internal values, internal skills. And that, in a sense, was
what was happening for Rebecca.
So right at the end of the group that was beginning to open up.
And I had the strong sense that this group was just mounting in
power until we suddenly have to break. I would have to see the
next meeting of this group and the next meeting of this group. It
was just building up so nicely.
And the inquiries about his health, each time he would say I'm
not going to dodge that, I'm going to go back to it, I'm going to
talk to that. Time ran out today but we know he will do it at the
next meeting because he can't, I think, say, "There are things
I'm not going to talk about in this group."
Philip was pressing him a little hard about, "this is supposed to
be"--in the novel Philip says, "Well, you are working on a kind
of a Buber "I-thou" encounter except there is no I in there. You
are letting everyone else reveal themselves. There was a whole
period of time with a lot of self-revelation. Why aren't you
revealing?"
And then Tony caught the question. How come you are asking

that now? After all, here you were, this great philosopher in the
group. Pam came into the group and showed the group you were
living in the sewers for a long period of time, so maybe you
need to knock Julius off his perch as well. And that was part of
the reason why he kept prodding Julius to reveal.
So that is what I was seeing and feeling about the group. What
questions do you have about this that you'd like to talk about, or
comments or questions to any of the people that are in the
group? AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Are you suggesting, with a
topic as crucial as the impending death of the therapist, that it
would not be talked about thoroughly?
IRVIN YALOM: Oh yes. I am not suggesting that. It needs to be
talked about thoroughly, and it would stymie the group if it's
not. And it can never be talked about thoroughly enough. The
problem, of course, in the group--and with the limit of time, we
weren't showing that as much here--the problem is that nothing
else can get talked about, because everything else feels trivial
in comparison. It is hard to talk about other things.
And of course, that has an important positive side, because you
start thinking of, if things really start to get so trivial or
problems start to feel trivial in the face of death, well, maybe
that is because things are trivial in the face of death. Maybe we
ought to reprioritize what seems important and what seems
trivial to us. And that's how so many people have talked about
how it is not going into a bleak blackness to think about death,
but in fact thinking about death, incorporating it, is a way of
revitalizing your life.
MOLYN LESZCZ: I will comment also, because I think it's a
very good question. What I felt in the group was that I wanted
to kind of keep it up in the air without consuming the group
with it. And when Pam talked about how great Julius was, and
others said how great Julius was, I felt this was--I asked the

question, "Am I doing something to elicit these expressions of
my greatness?" And part of what I am thinking about is, "Are
they responding to my narcissistic vulnerability by buoying me
at a time when they might be concerned about my decline?"
The question, however, didn't get answered in the way I thought
it might have. But we went in another really productive area, I
felt, which was, if I am two-dimensional to the positive, and
others are two-dimensional to the negative, then we have some
scope to work here to kind of flesh this out. And we were really
we were able to capitalize on that with Rebecca and Bonnie in
the last few minutes of the meeting.
If it stayed as an elephant in the room that wasn't being talked
about, I think the therapist--Julius, myself--would have had to
go into it in a more frontal approach. But I felt we were kind of
milking the best benefit of it without preoccupying the group
with it.
IRVIN YALOM: And I thought such a beautiful response to
"You're so great," for him to immediately turn to exploring that
and "What am I doing to pull that greatness from you?" is a
wonderful example of the use of the self of the therapist. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: I saw a contrast between the two
sessions, a very strong contrast. The first was exciting, had
emotional depth, seemed to have direction, its own flow. And
the second act, if you will, kind of lacked direction, didn't have
vibrancy. Was kind of flat. And I've been asking myself, what is
the difference here? My thought is, and I would welcome others,
too, is that the question was proposed to Julius of what is going
on inside of him about this cancer. And masterfully, if I may
put it that way--I'm saying that in a way a little sarcastically--
Julius avoided that question. And I think the group took
direction from that. The therapist is a model, and as the
therapist kind of avoided that I think others avoided some of
their internal feelings in great contrast to the first session. Any

thoughts on any--did others see these differences between the
two, and what might account for them?
BEN YALOM: Can I speak to that? I think maybe just one
element. I don't know about the way that things transpired with
Julius in that conversation. I get the sense that we managed to
talk around that for a while, but gleaned some things from it.
But one thing we talked about backstage if you will, was I felt,
and perhaps incorrectly so, but I felt like in that first group we
brought in an enormous amount of really good dramatic material
from the book. We skimmed out the major issues for most of the
book.
IRVIN YALOM: Some of the major issues.
BEN YALOM: Some. Yes, sorry. Some of the major issues. And
I perhaps incorrectly felt that we might have been doing a
disservice here in terms of really looking at the therapy
techniques because we as actors and artists are very attuned to
what are the big dramatic hits that we are going to get. And so I
was sort of making an effort to refocus us a little bit as we
spoke backstage into what might have been a little more useful
process-wise. So it may not have played off as quite as good
theater but I hope it had at least as good teaching value.
MOLYN LESZCZ: A comment about the transparency. I felt I
tried to strike a balance between being transparent about what I
felt in the here and now. I didn't go into great depth about my
own sense of what I imagine it would feel like to be knowing
that I had a malignancy.
But in terms of therapist transparency, we always have to
weight what are the benefits, what are the risks, in whose
interest is this? And as a therapist I think I would have
recognized that part of the pull would have been to use this
wonderful group to support me, and I felt that I didn't want to

do that to excess.
I felt the way this group could support me would be by working
in a way that would reduce regrets when we hit an inevitable
limit. So in another session I think there may have been more of
a direct response to the point that you are raising.
I felt we are always walking a tightrope in the issue of
transparency. And part of what I guess I want to speak to is that
kind of reflective process the therapist has to be engaged in
order to maximize benefits and minimize hazards. AUDIENCE
MEMBER 3: I had the unique experience of co-leading a
psychotherapy group with my first late husband who died of a
malignant melanoma. And I have two comments. One is that it
was a remarkable experience, as you can imagine, and that the
group was very protective as long as we needed the group to be
protective, which is what I observed, perhaps from my own
experience, that is what I observed. But the second is that when
we no longer needed to be as protective of ourselves and the
group because we were farther along in that process ourselves,
they didn't want to talk about it. They wanted to feel a
connection.
IRVIN YALOM: How long did the group go on and what
happened to the group? AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: It was a
couples group, and it continued. I still lead couples groups and
all of the couples were at the memorial service at the University
of Pennsylvania.
IRVIN YALOM: So he led the group with you pretty fairly
close to time of death? AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Until it was no
longer appropriate for him to do that, yeah.
IRVIN YALOM: Did he have any questions about being in the
group? How did he make the decision to go ahead and work?
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Much the same way you did.

IRVIN YALOM: I'm really interested in hearing that. Thanks
for that so much. AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: I was really moved
by both sessions, but particularly the last one, and found myself
choked up and really involved. And that's unusual for me to be
so impressed. It made me feel that the actors should become
really good group members and that Molyn should become an
actor. And then for Irv to write something and to see it actually
come to life must be just the greatest joy that a writer can have.
IRVIN YALOM: Great pleasure. AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: I
mean to literally be able to create life with your pen. There
were a couple of rubs for me, just from my own practice or
orientation. First let me say that the part that really impressed
me in terms of Molyn's therapeutic skill was using what went on
with Pam in terms of being two-dimensional, and then using it
with himself, and then using it with Philip. That was just such a
beautiful piece of work. And where there were the rubs in both
sessions, I just flinched a little bit, was not acknowledging
opposites and duality. Like with Pam when she was furious at
the beginning, she wasn't helped or it wasn't articulated that you
can feel both things. You can be forgiving and you can feel
angry. And with Bonnie I wanted to say to her, "What if you felt
the opposite of a nothing? What would that be like for you and
to try on the opposite?"
IRVIN YALOM: Good, thank you.
MOLYN LESZCZ: Good comments. AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: I
just want to commend Molyn and Irv and the group. I thought it
was terrific. I think you guys could take this on the road. I think
it could stand as a show. It was wonderful.
The one thing missing from its quite accurate depiction of a
therapy group were silences, which I certainly understand given
this context, but I wonder, Irv or Molyn, if you had any

thoughts in general about therapists handling silence. Certainly
in a group like this, many of the silences, should they occur,
would have been thoughts of death, the therapist's death. But
any thoughts?
IRVIN YALOM: I'm not a great fan of silences. I'm a little bit
too impatient. And I don't want them going on for long time.
But when an unusual silence emerges I will try to dig into the
silence. I will try to ask members if we could explore exactly
what they were thinking. Sometimes even a go-around. "Could
we all go-around very quickly and off the top of your head tell
me what is passing through your mind in those two minutes?"
That often can generate a ton of material. So I don't like when
silences go on for five minutes in a group.
MOLYN LESZCZ: I felt Philip needed some silence, though--
when I interjected and said "Don't respond; just sit with this."
Silence, of course, can mean a whole host of things.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: I was wondering if you could give
some more guidance on how you have that sense of when theme
saturation occurs. My sense, for example, in that moment you
were just talking about when you switched over to Rebecca with
the two-dimensional, was that there was still a lot of juice. I
was wondering about Pam--what was she sitting with hearing
that? I certainly could be very guilty of riding things too long. I
tend to think of sort of the Gestalt cycle of wanting to work it
through enough that they can come down and take some sense
out of it.
And you jumped around much more, both in the first and
second, in a way which I was wondering if you were
consciously balancing the group--I couldn't really take from it,
but it worked. Can you help me understand what you were doing
and how you made those choices?
MOLYN LESZCZ: There is the concept of choice point

analysis, and that in a group--in any group let alone this group
where everything is so compressed--you are always making
decisions about the cost-benefit of whatever you do. And you
can't milk something completely with one or two interactions at
the expense of others in the group.
So Irv, you have written about something before, that the group
therapist is almost like a shepherd in a sense, facilitating and
making sure that no one gets left too far behind. And you have
to give something to get something, and fortunately we don't
have to do everything in one meeting.
I will look for other cues. A lack of emotional intensity,
disinterest, body language of people in the group, that they are
disengaged. Or if a group is really engaged I will probably run
with it further--I will run with it further for sure. But I am also
thinking, if we are doing this, what are we not doing by doing
this? That goes back to Elaine's comment about the duality--that
there is always a tremendous amount that is going on.
IRVIN YALOM: And theme satiation--you can recognize it by
there are fewer and fewer people participating in it as well, and
people have dropped off as well. But it is an error, I think, to let
it go on too long. AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: Like the lady who
spoke before I had a patient in my group who was dying.
Actually he died two months ago. And he came up until the
three weeks before he died in the group. And my question is
this--because I haven't read the book so I don't know how that
happens in the book. If you are a therapist and you know that
you are dying, and your group knows that you are dying, what
are you going to do with this group? Do you find somebody to
keep this group going after you die or do you let the group die
with you? That is my question.
IRVIN YALOM: Both possibilities are open. This was a long-
term group that worked with him. And you see what happened

here the group--he set a time limit. "We have another year; it is
a long enough period of time. "Other people will bring someone
else in--bring a younger person in over the last couple of
months and have the group go on. If it is a group that's built for
a long time that is extremely powerful, it feels to me like a pity
to me to end this thing which has become such a great,
wonderful vehicle to just carry people to a safer place. So if I
had my druthers, I would like the group not to end.
VICTOR YALOM: I think that was a great job. It really
demonstrated many of the principles of group therapy. I should
add that the actors were part of FoolsFURY Theater which is a
theater company run by Ben Yalom, my brother, your son.
IRVIN YALOM: Well cast.
VICTOR YALOM: And a couple questions come up for me. One
is the important issue of group selection. Philip, the lead
character here, clearly has what we would call schizoid
tendencies or more than tendencies, Isn't there a real risk in
putting someone like this in a group--the risk that he could
become a deviant member?
IRVIN YALOM: I think Julius was taking a risk with Philip.
But he had a special motivation for putting him in the group. He
knew him well. He felt that he could tolerate any discomfort
from being in a deviant position. Moreover, he was going to be
a therapist, and it was dreadfully essential for him to have this
group experience. And as you have heard already, he is like
Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer would consider being in a therapy
group as his recipe for hell. And so he wanted to change Philip
very much, but he sensed something in Philip that was perhaps
going to be able to yield a bit and interact with other people.
VICTOR YALOM: Obviously if he can make us of the group
and join the group, it can really address his core issues. But the

question is whether he is able to use the group in that way and
not be too disruptive.
IRVIN YALOM: As you see, Julius worked very hard with
Philip. Very hard with him. And there was a background of
caring behind that, too. They had known one another before.
VICTOR YALOM: Any other thoughts just in general on group
selection?
IRVIN YALOM: I think you want to select people who you
think can participate in the work of this group. If they can't
quite engage in the group process and are not ready to do that,
then put them in another group that works at a slightly different
pace in that group. The other people in that group were
obviously all well suited for this. And also the length of time--
some people have been in this group for two or three years
already.
VICTOR YALOM: Another thing is conflict. There is a lot of
conflict in these groups, and that is something that members are
often scared of when thinking about group, when you are
encouraging them to be in a group. Therapists are also often
wary about conflict in the groups, but in fact it can be very
helpful and can energize a group.
IRVIN YALOM: Sometimes it's useful if a therapist can deal
with conflict when it comes their way. If patients in a group are
angry at a therapist or feel he made an error in such a way, it is
better for the therapist to do some modeling about how to
handle this. And if you have co-leaders in the group, that is a
great time for co-leaders to be helpful for one another.
Members in a conflict, or a pair that is in conflict, can profit
enormously, for once staying with the conflict rather than
breaking the relationship and running off--being able to stay in

there, work things out. Oftentimes those people come to
treasure each other's contributions at the end of therapy. That is
the person they select as having helped them the most.
VICTOR YALOM: Right. And for other members--say, other
members that are averse to conflict--they may be sitting just in
the room or between the members, and that would be an
example. Then you could work with them. What was it like for
them to be sitting there experiencing conflict?
IRVIN YALOM: Right. And some people try to make it even
easier for them by doing some role playing for a brief period of
time. It is all another way of conditioning them to be able to do
this in slightly less painful ways. It's really taking a great risk if
you have a group of your classmates or a group of people that
you work with all the time, and being in conflict with them, that
is much riskier than doing that in a stranger group.
MALE VOICE: Another big theme here in the book has to do
with therapist disclosure for both of these groups. The
disclosure, of course, that Molyn had a fatal illness and how
that impacted the group and group members' attempts to elicit
information about that from him.
IRVIN YALOM: Yes, therapists are participant-observers. They
are observers of the group but they are also participating in that
group. I feel like doing a lot of groups early in my career made
me much more comfortable with self-disclosure. I couldn't be in
a group with everybody in the group calling each other by their
first name, calling me Dr. Yalom. I had to be a part of the group
more, go by first name, very willing to talk about here and now
feelings I might have towards anyone else in the group.
Molyn did that at one occasion. What he did was to say, "I have
a dilemma." He is saying, in effect, "I have a dilemma. On the
one hand I want to continue with Philip, but on the other hand I

don't want to leave you out or you out." So that is a kind of
disclosure, what is going on in his own internal processes. So I
am very much in favor of certain types of therapist disclosure,
which is not necessarily disclosing about one's outside life in a
way that is not going to be useful to the group. So I try to
disclose in the here-and-now very fully in the group.
VICTOR YALOM: Right. And although many members did ask
him about his feelings about his illness, he didn't get into too
much of that in these groups, but he did kind of give a
promissory note that he would come back to that.
IRVIN YALOM: Yes, he did. And there would be meetings
where he would bring it up. He made it very clear that he is
aware that an unspoken, an un-discussed issue as big as his
illness is going to be like an elephant in the room. There is a
cardinal rule in that when something really big doesn't get
talked about, then nothing else gets talked about either. So he is
going to bring it back. He is going to even start meetings in the
future by talking about his illness, hold little back from them.
VICTOR YALOM: Well, thank you very much for taking the
time to be here today and discussing this.
IRVIN YALOM: You're welcome. I'm pleased to be a part of
this because I think this is going to be a really good group
therapy teaching tool.
VICTOR YALOM: And very different from anything else.
IRVIN YALOM: Unique.
VICTOR YALOM: Hello, I'm Victor Yalom. I'm pleased to be
here today with Dr. Irvin Yalom. He's made outstanding
contributions to the field of group and existential
psychotherapy. He's also written many books, both fiction and

nonfiction, all revolving around psychotherapy themes. He's
also my father. Good to be here.
IRVIN YALOM: Good to be here for me, too.
VICTOR YALOM: In a few minutes, we're about to see two
demonstration groups that were filmed at the American Group
Psychotherapy Association annual conference here in San
Francisco.
Prior to the groups, in your opening remarks, you set the stage
for them, so we don't need to do that here, but suffice it to say
that the groups are inspired by your novel, The Schopenhauer
Cure, which is really set in group therapy. And the groups are
led by Molyn Leszcz, who is your co-author of the fifth edition
of your text, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy.
Now, that's a big book, over 600 pages, so we can't do justice to
it here. But I think it would be helpful if you could summarize
the core principles of your model of group psychotherapy.
IRVIN YALOM: Basically, I want to make the point--and I do
in there--that we're really talking about group therapies. There
are a tremendous number of different types of group therapies--
more, it seems, every year--and we do talk about that in the
text.
But, this type of group that we're going to be looking at today, I
feel, is the central model of group therapy. And we can change
it in many different ways to fit different clinical situations,
different clinical populations, but primarily, it's an
interpersonal group. This is a group where we're making the
assumption--and it's an assumption I believe very much--that
people come to see us, for the most part, because they can't
establish and maintain nurturing, ongoing interpersonal
relationships.

VICTOR YALOM: Right. And when you say people come to see
"us," you're meaning any therapist; not a group therapist, an
individual therapist.
IRVIN YALOM: Exactly. Any therapist.
VICTOR YALOM: Even if they're depressed or anxious, it often
revolves around interpersonal themes, breakups--
IRVIN YALOM: Exactly. Interpersonal isolation causes
depression, and then depression makes that even worse.
In the group, we focus very much on trying to change people's
interpersonal relationships. We try to do this quite directly by
focusing on the relationships between people in the group.
So this means--and this is what you're going to see in these next
two meetings--this means the group is focused very much on
relationships between one another.
VICTOR YALOM: This is what you call the here-and-now.
IRVIN YALOM: Exactly, the here-and-now. These two groups
stay very much in the here-and-now. You won't hear people
talking about the past very much, although sometimes that's
important for some period of time. But you don't hear people
talking about their outside lives. The great majority of the talk
in these groups is on the relationships between the people.
VICTOR YALOM: Now, of course, when you do this, or you
explain it to people in preparation for a group, that seems
somewhat counterintuitive to people, because they say, "Well,
I'm not here to work on my relationships with people in the
group. I'm here to make these changes in my life."
IRVIN YALOM: Right. Some of them won't even know what

you're talking about. "I've got a problem with my boss. What's
talking about my relations with these people I'll never see
again?"
But we have to disabuse them of that, and educate them about
that. We do that throughout the group, but especially in the
early preparatory meetings. We tell them, in effect, that the
group is a kind of social microcosm. And by that, we mean that
the group is a micro-representative of all kinds of outside issues
that you're going to encounter.
With that patient you just mentioned, if you're having trouble
with the boss, great chances are you're going to have some
issues going on with someone in the group who you feel is very
aggressive or authoritarian.
VICTOR YALOM: Or if you're a people-pleaser, and you take
care of other people but never get your own needs met, that's
going to get reenacted in the relationships in the group.
IRVIN YALOM: Absolutely. And the job of the therapist is to
begin to call attention to that. "You know, I have a feeling
you're doing here what you're doing out there."
Or if a person is self-effacing or if a person is grandiose or if a
person is monopolistic or has no empathy for others, all these
traits will unfold in a group that's not relatively structured, and
will go on for long periods of time.
VICTOR YALOM: Providing that the therapist does his or her
job, which is to focus the group on the relationships in the
group.
IRVIN YALOM: Right. And that's the therapist's main job in
this group: to keep the group focused on the here-and-now.
VICTOR YALOM: And that's a hard skill to learn.

IRVIN YALOM: It is. It is a complex group, and it takes a lot
of learning. And it's far more difficult to learn than you have a
manual that tells you what to do [at that meeting] and certain
kinds of homework. You really have to deal with any kind of
issues that are presented by the group.
VICTOR YALOM: All right. So, now, as we watch the first
group, what should the viewer be looking for to get the most out
of it?
IRVIN YALOM: Well, look, for one thing, what the leader
does. But, you know, these patients have already been trained.
They've been in the group for quite a while, some of them for
quite some time.
So look what's happening. See if the group stays in the here-
and-now. Take a look at what happens with disclosure, when
people disclose themselves. See how the therapist keeps the
themes going in the group. See how much the therapist discloses
about himself.
Then there's an unusual situation in this group. Take a look at
what the presence of death--in that the leader himself has a fatal
disease--what that is beginning to do to people.
VICTOR YALOM: Okay, so let's watch the group, and then you
and I will reconvene afterwards.
IRVIN YALOM: Glad to.
I'm really looking forward to this afternoon. And I don't know
how many times I've said that to audiences without really
meaning it. This time, I really mean it. I am very excited about
this.

How rare is it? In fact, it may be unique. This is the first time in
history anything like this has been done, where a novelist gets
to see his characters come alive; not coming alive in a
screenplay or movie, which is more or less following the script
of the book, but the characters that are created in my novel are
just cut loose, like Pinocchio. And they may follow some things
in the book, but the instructions are just to take off. No one will
lead them.
I told them all, "Don't worry. Wherever you go or whatever
track you do, Molyn will bring you back, as a good group
therapist will."
So, they're not going to follow the script of the book, with this
one exception. The first meeting is going to start at a certain
time in the book, and I need to give you some backstory. This is
a backstory that, of course, Julius knows and all the other group
members know, except for one--Pam--who's been away for a
couple of months and she's just coming back into this meeting
today.
I have a lot of different reasons for writing this novel, but I'm
going to stick simply to what's relevant to our presentation
today.
But the major thing I want to say, I'm writing this novel as a
way of teaching something about group therapy. And our major
hope today is that the result of this is to help you in your group
therapy practice. We want to help experienced group leaders
feel more supported by our saying and doing things that you all
do anyway in your groups, and we want to help beginning group
therapists to get some kind of guidelines for how to work with
an unusual group meeting.
The novel starts, then the part that relates to this group starts
with something that is very rare in a group but it's not unknown-

-and I've known such things--a group therapist getting a
terrible, fatal illness. And he has been given a bad prognosis.
It's malignant melanoma. The doctor said, "We think you'll get
one good year of good-functioning life."
So, he is going to be able to function well for a year. That was
how I picked out his disease, incidentally. I wanted somebody
who could be in relatively good health for a year, and be able to
work for a year.
So I went through all the possible malignancies, the various
things that people could get, talked to all my oncology friends,
and malignant melanoma seemed to be the right disease to give
poor Julius.
Julius at that point went through in his mind what we will see
everyone go through, and each of us, having to cope with the
idea of his own non-being. He goes through a series of personal
investigations; he goes through a great deal of panic; and then
finally, the panic subsides--and I won't go into this in depth--
but with some aid of some philosophical help, especially using
one of his own favorite philosophical writers--one of mine too,
of course.
He rereads some passages in Nietzsche, especially the passage
surrounding the idea of eternal return, a very wacky kind of
notion that Nietzsche developed. He meant it seriously at first,
but later recognized it as a thought experiment; not a mere
thought experiment, but a thought experiment that could change
your life if you really listened to it.
And the thought experiment was to imagine a demon coming to
you one night, whispering into your ear that this life, as you
have lived it, will return to you exactly again and again and
again throughout all eternity, and that every event that
happened will once again return to you. What would you feel?

Would you curse me, as a demon, or would you perhaps bless
me for bringing you the gladdest news in your life?
So, the object of that, if we think about that, I do think this an
important idea and concept in therapy. I use it all the time. The
issue is, are you living your life in such a way that you would
want this exact same life to be repeated again and again and
again, throughout all eternity? Or, would you gnash your teeth
and curse the demon? You never want to go through this life
again. If that's the case, then why?
And then we get into the concept, in therapy, of regrets. What
are you doing in your life that's causing regrets? Then we can
be much more therapeutic by flashing forward: what can we do
so that one year from now, two years from now, you won't have
accumulated even more regrets?
That helped Julius a great deal. And he thought about it, and he
thought that he was living his life right--that he was extremely
proud of spending his life having been a therapist. It was an
extraordinary delight for him to be able to bring something to
life in others, and he would go on living this last life in exactly
the same way he had lived all his previous years. So that was
why he decided that he would work and lead this group, which
was a very important part of his practice.
Those of you who are experienced group therapists know how
important a really well functioning, long-term group can be.
And maybe some of you have experienced the same thing that
Julius did and I have, which is that a group often creates a
helpful aura about it. It's like a bath you go into. And it's not
only that all the members in the group may get better at once,
but also the therapist is helped, too, by being in this group.
So Julius was thinking that. He was thinking how glad he was
he had spent his life in this fashion. He was thinking, then, of

the people he had helped, wondering about contacting old
patients that he'd seen 20, 30 years ago.
Then, suddenly, he got the notion of patients he had failed with.
And he thought, "Well, some of these failures aren't really
failures. Some of them are late bloomers."
We all know about the concept of patients who take something
that they learned in therapy and start using it years later, when
they're ready for our premature interpretation. Julius had always
dismissed failures as people who weren't quite ready for his
advanced brand of delivery.
But he started thinking about his failures. And then, as he did--
and he was looking in his chart room--his eye fell upon a very
thick chart, the chart of a man named Philip--Philip, who is
right here in this group. And he thought, if ever there were a
failure, that was it.
Philip had been somebody he'd seen 20 years before. He was a
sex addict. He had worked two or three times a week with Philip
for at least three years, and hadn't budged him one inch. He felt
absolute failure. Whatever happened to Philip? He'd never heard
of him after he stopped therapy.
And he began to get an impulsion to get in touch with Philip.
The idea of seeing Philip again just sort of burrowed into him,
just like the melanoma, and he determined to get in touch with
Philip.
Maybe he had helped him after all. Or maybe he still had
another chance. Maybe he's older now, and wiser and riper.
Maybe he had something still to give. Maybe he could still
redeem himself. So he got in touch with Philip.
Saw him individually, in an individual session, only Philip said,

"Please come to my office. I'm a counselor, too, now."
He had worked as a chemist. And then Julius still learned that
Philip had been helped enormously--it changed his whole life.
How?
He said, "I decided that since our sessions--your sessions, mine-
-were totally worthless, and very expensive"--and he knew just
how much money he had spent on this; Philip was quite tight--
he said he decided he was going to read all the books of the
Western canon of philosophy. He was going to find something
in the accumulated wisdom of the last two thousand years that
might be helpful to him.
And, while he was doing that, he had a little money saved up
and he decided he was going to switch fields and he was going
to become a philosopher. So, he got his Ph.D. in philosophy.
And, while at Columbia getting his doctorate, he met the perfect
therapist for him, someone who had really cured him of his
addiction.
"Oh, who was that?" Julius was wondering. He was very excited
about that. "In New York? What institute was he in?"
"His name was Arthur," Philip said. "Arthur Schopenhauer was
the man to whom I owe my life."
So, Philip became a counselor, a philosopher, and then recently
had turned to becoming a philosophical counselor, a new kind
of development in our field, philosophers who set up shop and
offer clinical philosophy consultation.
Julius didn't quite much like what he had seen in Philip--not
only the idea that Philip confirmed that he had been useless to
him, but also, he didn't feel that Philip had really changed very

much--that he still was the same aggressive, kind of schizoid,
uncaring person he had always been.
Imagine his surprise a short time later when Philip contacted
him and asked him whether or not he, Julius, would be willing
to supervise him. He needed a certain number of supervisory
hours to get his license in counseling. He didn't need it for
practice, but it would help in other ways, in malpractice
unintelligible or so.
Julius was astonished at this. "Well, why would you call me
when you say I'm a total failure?"
"Well, that doesn't mean you're a bad therapist. It means you
just weren't good with me. You used the wrong kind of
therapy."
Julius thought about it and he said, "No way I'll supervise you."
And thought to himself, You're about the worst candidate for
being a therapist I've ever seen. You're a hater. Therapy is a
calling. You've got to care for people.
He said, "No, I will never do that."
But then he began thinking about: if he didn't do it, someone
else would. Maybe there was still a chance to redeem himself
after all. And he met with Philip at an individual session, and he
offered a very strange bargain to Philip.
And the bargain was "I agree that I will supervise you in your
work if, and only if, you will spend six months in my therapy
group."
The last thing in the world Philip wanted to do. Philip was like
Schopenhauer. I built him, I constructed him, so that he was a

Schopenhauer clone. And being together with other people,
being close and being intimate, would be Schopenhauer's and
Philip's personal view of hell. But that was the only way he was
going to get his license.
Philip agreed to come into this strange group as a member. And
he had been there for about three meetings when this particular
meeting occurred.
What happened in those three meetings was that, much to Julius'
surprise, Philip ended up being somewhat--what should I say?--
popular in the group. The group sort of valued his contributions,
even though they were uttered in a kind of disembodied,
uncaring way. But he uttered some wise things--wise things
from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard and Kant--and the group
was impressed and felt helped by him.
He even gave advice. He advised one of the members in the
group, Gill, who will raise his hand, to leave his wife. "She's a
sinking ship. Get out of there and swim as fast as you can. She's
going to leave a big wave, but it'll suck you down. Start
swimming fast!"
The group liked that Philip was giving advice to them. So,
gradually, what was happening in the group was there was a
growing integration of Philip, although not as a real member--
he was kind of a disembodied person--but as someone who had
concepts and a different way to do the therapy. A growing
competition, perhaps, in a young counselor coming into the
group in competition with an older, established, experienced--
but dying--therapist. That's one of the motifs that's happening in
this group.
The other thing I need to tell you before we start the group is
that one of the members, Pam, who is--would you raise your
hand, Pam?--who has been an essential key member, kind of the

life of the group. All group leaders know there's one particular
person who they don't like to see absent from a meeting. It's
sort of the life in that group is in that person. She was well
liked, and was a key part of that group. Julius liked her very
much.
But she had been become obsessed in a way that therapy was of
no help to her. She got caught up with a lover and a husband.
She wanted to leave her husband but her lover wouldn't leave
his wife for her. And she got so caught up with this, she finally
took a friend's advice and went away to India to a meditation
retreat for a couple of months, which didn't help too much,
either.
And after those two months, Pam returns to the group. People
have been eagerly waiting in the group. So, Philip had already
been meeting with the group for about four weeks. And then,
they'd been getting some emails, and Julius announced to the
group the previous meeting, he'd just gotten an email from Pam
and she might well be coming back to this meeting.
So, this meeting starts. Pam has just walked into the room, has
been greeting two or three of the members that she first saw on
entering the room. And now the group comes to life.
MOLYN LESZCZ: Just before we move into the group therapy
setting itself, a few other points. What we hope to be able to
demonstrate--Irv has spoken about the existential theme and
perspective. We're also going to focus on the interpersonal
perspective as well, using the group as the microcosm in which
each individual person's view of himself influences the way
they relate. The way they relate impacts on others in the room--
in the group, in their lives--and becomes a kind of self-fulfilling
prophecy, a way to maintain a very familiar, albeit very
unsatisfying, status quo.

Part of the task of a therapist is to try to create a cohesive
environment, a social microcosm, where people are able to
bring themselves as they genuinely are. We don't want people
on their best behavior. We want them to be real.
We want to focus as much as possible on interpersonal
feedback--learning from one another, understanding how each
person recreates his own environment in the room itself.
One of the things that we talked about earlier when we met with
the actors together--we have a wonderful cast of characters, I
must tell you--is that many therapists, myself included, try to,
before people come into a group, have a kind of formulation, or
a kind of roadmap in my mind about each individual.
Then I look for ways in which we can access that in the course
of the group. So I am going to take advantage of that
methodology to also flesh out a little bit about the characters
beyond what Irv has said. This will also introduce you to the
characters.
Just before I do that, I want to also comment that we're going to
hopefully illuminate issues to do with therapist transparency,
therapist disclosure, counter-transference--its use, its hazards--
recognizing this is a bit more complicated than usual because
Julius recognizes that he is failing physically. And, although
cognitively intact, he knows he has a limited amount of time
left to work with this group. But, as Irv commented, this is how
he wants to spend his life. This is what revitalizes him.
The group knows about this. Pam has learned about it through
email before she comes into the group.
We have heard about Philip--I'll start at this end--schizoid,
robotic, wanting to make himself completely devoid of any
emotion or feeling that links him to people. Attachment

emphasizes vulnerability as a recipe for his destruction. There's
a problem with his sexual addiction that he has dealt with by
just withdrawing completely from human interaction and human
feelings.
Bonnie. Want to signal so people will know?
Bonnie is a woman who has always seen herself as the frumpy,
overweight girl; never part of the central circle; always feeling
that any time she was a friend to someone, it was an imposition
upon them. Someone who prefers to stay on the margins of life.
Self-valuing, undercutting. Has difficulties with her daughter,
and is divorced.
Tony is a kind of archetype of a man's man. Primal. Driven. As
distant as Philip is from his primal instincts right now, Tony is
right in there, knee-deep. There's a kind of an animal, jungle
quality that some of the women in the group quite like, and
some of the men might even envy a bit. Tony sees himself as
really in this kind of two-dimensional way.
Pam, as Irv has commented, is just coming back. A university
professor. Angry at men--angry in particular at men who
disappoint and exploit, and men who fail because of their own
lackings. And her anger is a powerful and formidable force.
Gill is a man who Philip counseled about "Get away from your
wife. She's a sinking ship." Gill does not really make a big
presentation of himself in the group. He is more present by
virtue of his absence. Soft. Kind of weak. Feeble, in some
regards. Unwilling to hold his own emotions; unwilling really to
speak his own mind in any substantive way.
Rebecca is a woman who came into therapy because, at the age
of 30, she recognized that for the first time, people were not
stopping to eat when she would walk into a restaurant. She'd

grown up all of her life feeling that her beauty was a key that
would open any door. When she began to age and lose a sense
of her unique beauty, looked inside and didn't like what she
saw. Has a sense of herself as only being the outside.
Stuart is a pediatrician who's in therapy, as we know happens
sometimes, because his wife said to him, "If you don't get into
treatment, I'm leaving."
So, a decent man, but lacking emotional motivation, emotional
conviction. There's a very telling scene in the book. Stuart is
identified in the group really as the group historian and the
group camera: not a real participant, but someone who recalls
the details without a lot of emotion. Had a dream about his
daughter dying in quicksand, and he couldn't rescue her because
he was busy trying to get a camera to try to record what was
happening.
It is two-thirty now. We are going to meet in this group. In just
a moment, we're going to start; and once we're in role, we're in
role for 55 minutes. Then Irv will lead a discussion --Irv will
actually discuss and dissect what's gone on. If any of you have
had anxiety about having your work analyzed or scrutinized in
supervision, this is a way to overcome any kind of apprehension
that you might have.
Then we're going to take a break. Then we're going to
reconvene at a session a few sessions further down the road.
Then we will have ample time at the end of our afternoon again
for Irv's comments and critiques, and for your input and
perspective. We want to make good use of that dialog at the
end. We're going to stop at 5:45 and ask you please to complete
evaluations or critical reviews.
I think we're ready to begin. So, just to remind you, Pam has
just returned to the group, has hugged and made contact with all

the old members of the group, is just taking her seat now,
absolutely overwhelmed by seeing Philip in the group that had
been her haven and sanctuary.
PAM: You insect! I'm floored! I came back here from India and
I can't believe this. I thought, I was so happy to see everybody.
I was so happy to be coming back into the group, and now what
do I find? You!
JULIUS: You know Philip?
PAM: We knew each other many years ago. Fifteen years ago.
Can you elaborate on that, Philip?
PHILIP: Greetings, Pam. Yes, 15 years ago, we indeed had an
encounter. I would like to posit, perhaps, that that was 15 years
ago, after all. And I've come a long way, and I hope that you
have as well.
PAM: Oh, just stop right--this is ridiculous, Julius. I can't
believe this. The man--15 years ago, he was my teacher
assistant, which basically means he was teaching my class. I'm
18 years old. I'm a virgin. My best friend, Molly, falls in with
this guy for three weeks in this class. So, he's not only our
teacher, but then he has a relationship with my best friend.
Then, he drops her after three weeks, during which time, he
deflowers me. He has sex with me two times and drops me, too.
PHILIP: You've not heard me deny this, Pam, and I will not
deny this. It is all true. I will--
PAM: Look at him sitting there! I'm sorry, but you are the same
as you were 15 years ago. I don't know why this man is here.
I'm feeling really threatened.

PHILIP: You want me to take care of it? I'm just kidding you.
I'm trying to quell the mood a little bit.
JULIUS: Look, Pam, I'm really sorry about this. I know you
came back already with a lot to deal with. I want to say I'm
delighted to have you back. I'm stunned at this. It hasn't
happened to me ever before in 40 years of practice. And it's
clear you and Philip have had this history. I'm not sure how we
should proceed. But I do very much want you to stay.
PAM: I don't know if I'm going to be able to stay. Julius, I
heard about you and what you're going through. I was very
happy you called me on the phone and we talked about it. I was
looking forward to coming back into the group. I don't want to
be dealing with this right now. I want to be talking about you,
and what's going on with Julius.
And I'm just --I'm floored.
REBECCA: Pam, no one wants you to leave. That's not what
this is about whatsoever.
STUART: No one.
REBECCA: Philip has been here for three weeks. You need to
work this out, because Philip has had some really interesting
comments for the group.
STUART: He's been very helpful.
PAM: Very helpful?
STUART: Well, he's made some good suggestions.
PAM: Look at how he's sitting! He can't even look at me! I
really find this hard to believe. In fact, I find this to be

something of a joke. This is my haven. This is where I come to
feel safe. And now, the man--do you know that I am no longer
friends with the person that --that whole incident broke up me
and my best friend. We try to maintain an email relationship,
but that's nothing compared to what we were.
That man--you--broke me!
PHILIP: If I may--
PAM: And broke up this relationship with my best friend. And
you don't even care.
PHILIP: If I had a moment to comment upon some of these
observations you have thrown my way, I might remind you that,
of course, it was 15 years ago. Of course, you were a consensual
participant in our action, as was your friend.
I am here as part of a contract that I have with Julius, and which
I intend to fulfill.
I apologize that my hateful reminder sitting here, that you
obviously despise this "insect," as you stated earlier. But this is
not something that I am responsible for.
I exist. Here I am. And I have used this gaze to reflect inwardly,
to look honestly at my intellectual faculties to come up with my
view of the world.
PAM: You're just--
PHILIP: I'm not affected by your hatred. I'm only affected by
my own perception of the world. And this is where I gather
strength, and this is where I suggest you could also foster some
strength as well.

JULIUS: I've got to ask you guys, how are you experiencing
what's happening so far?
BONNIE: I feel like I don't have any room to talk, because my
husband left me and I don't know anything about relationships,
obviously, but--
REBECCA: Bonnie, this really isn't about you right now.
TONY: I'm a little distraught over something I just heard you
say just now, Philip, was about that you were here under a
contract with Julius. And I was also hoping that you were here
for us as well, to be a participant with us and to be part of the
group.
PHILIP: Being a part of the group is the essence of my contract
with Julius. And therefore, I will learn and participate and, as
you put it, be there for you.
PAM: I don't even see how this person can be a part of the
group if his mandate is to act just like Schopenhauer, who was
absolutely about detaching and not personalizing. Look what he
just said. He just called deflowering his student a social
interaction.
He can't even call me by name. How is this person going to help
me by being here? I don't see it. I don't see how he's going to
help any of us.
GILL: Well, I think already he has helped some of us. I'm sorry
that you've had this relationship with him that makes you
uncomfortable, but some of us need him here. He gave me a lot
of good advice. He helped me to leave my wife, which
obviously didn't work out. But it was good advice, and it was a
good step, and I just failed.

JULIUS: Look, Pam, this is awful. I know how important this
group has been for you. I want to know how glad I was that you
were coming back. I had no idea about this. I hope you know
that.
PAM: Well, I appreciate you telling me that, because walking in
here, I just felt like I was being punched in the stomach.
JULIUS: I'm sure.
BONNIE: I'm sorry, I just feel like, as important as this is, it
just pales in comparison to you, Julius. I mean, we haven't even
talked about it. And I'm sorry that this situation came up but it
just ...
PAM: I wanted to talk about how you're feeling, too, Julius. I'm
thrown, too.
REBECCA: We're all worried about you, Julius.
BONNIE: Uh-huh. JULIUS: I appreciate that. And I want to say
a couple of things. First, I'm glad, Bonnie, that you said what
you did about me just a moment ago. I was kind of puzzled,
Rebecca, by you, in essence, silencing Bonnie, and I wondered
what motivated that. So, I'm glad that you didn't stay silenced.
And, talking about me, obviously we're going to do that. We
have to do that. But I don't know right now whether that's the
priority. No, that's okay. That's okay. I'm alert to it. I know you
have a lot of feelings about it.
But I think the first thing we need to do, to determine, is
whether we're going to be able to work together as a group,
whether you're going to be able to work through this.
There have been many times we have used these kinds of awful

events as opportunities. What do you guys think?
PAM: Well, Julius, that's just the kind of thing that you'd
usually say. And that's just the kind of thing that pisses me off.
But I'm not leaving my group.
REBECCA: No one's asking you to leave the group, Pam.
STUART: Yeah. I think, in fact, there's been a lot of
encouragement for you to stay, and I believe that's what Julius
is saying now; that although this is a challenging time, it might
be useful--
PAM: Stuart, can you say something about how you feel?
STUART: Well, there's a lot of tension among all of us here in
the group right now, and we're feeling what's happening
between you and Philip is clearly very difficult. And I think
we'd all like to know that the group is going to hold together,
and that you can stay and attempt to work these things out.
TONY: Has anybody heard a feeling yet from Stuart?
REBECCA: No.
BONNIE: I have. STUART: I feel--I feel that I would like you
to stay.
JULIUS: That's a feeling. That's a feeling.
BNNIE: I'm sorry, I would just like to point out that how can he
share a feeling if he's not within the group? His chair is
removed from the circle.
STUART: I'm sorry.

BONNIE: Thank you, Stuart.
TONY: Something that came up for me, Julius, if I may, is that
you were asking to not talk about this right now.
PAM: Yes.
TONY: How does that feel for the group? Can we table this to
another time, or is there some sort of resolve that should happen
now?
GILL: Well, it seems like Julius was asking whether we're okay
to continue. And I think as long as we know that Pam's going to
stay in the group, I'd be okay with us moving on.
PHILIP: Tony, some clarification. Are you speaking now of the
situation with Julius or the situation between Pam and myself?
TONY: I was talking about the situation between Pam and you.
PHILIP: I am completely able to continue. I would like to make
an observation. A lot of concern has been put the way of your
old and dearly beloved member, Pam. And I've not noticed one
question about whether Philip--myself--shall be staying in the
group. This is something that doesn't affect me, because I do
not take my personal worth from the views of others, so that is
all.
REBECCA: I, for one, would like you to stay, Philip. I think
you've been absolutely fabulous in this group, and I've enjoyed
you every second that you've been here since you joined.
TONY: You would.
REBECCA: Hm?

IRVIN YALOM This is the same group about four meetings later. .docx

IRVIN YALOM This is the same group about four meetings later. .docx

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IRVIN YALOM This is the same group about four meetings later. .docx