CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
DEATH, FREEDOM, ISOLATION, AND MEANING
For years in the 1970s my existential psychotherapy textbook was always simmering in my mind, but it seemed so diffuse and overwhelming that I was unable to start writing it until one day when Alex Comfort visited us. I recall the two of us sitting in my rebuilt tree-house studio talking. He listened intently as I told him about my reading and my ideas for the book. After about an hour and a half, Alex stopped me and solemnly proclaimed, “Irv, I’ve listened, I’ve heard you out, and, with total confidence, I pronounce that the time has come for you to stop reading and start writing.”
Exactly what I needed! I could have flailed about for several more years. Alex knew about books—he had published over fifty of them—and somehow his compelling tone and faith in me allowed me to clear my docket and start writing. The timing was perfect, since I had just been invited to spend a scholarly year at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Though I continued to meet with a few patients, I wrote almost full-time for the entire 1977–1978 academic year. Unfortunately, I did not take full advantage of the chance to get to know some of the thirty other distinguished scholars, including the future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But I did form a friendship with sociologist Cynthia Epstein, who has remained in our life to this day.
I made such good progress that I completed the book a year later. I began it with an incident from an Armenian cooking class taught by Efronia Katchadourian, the mother of Herant Katchadourian, a good friend and colleague. Efronia was a great cook, but she spoke little English and taught entirely by demonstration. As she prepared her dishes, I jotted down all the ingredients and all her steps, but, try as hard as I could, my dishes never tasted as good as hers. Surely, I thought, this was not an insoluble problem: I resolved to observe her even more closely, and at the next lesson I watched her every step as she prepared her dish and then handed it to her lifelong attendant, Lucy, to place into the oven. This time, I kept my eye on Lucy and saw something extraordinary: on the way to the oven, Lucy casually threw in handfuls of various spices that struck her fancy! I am absolutely persuaded that those extra throw-ins made all the difference.
I used this introductory anecdote to reassure readers that existential psychotherapy was no new strange esoteric approach but had always been present in the form of valuable, but unspoken, throw-ins offered by most experienced therapists.
In each of the book’s four sections—death, freedom, isolation, and meaning—I described my sources, my clinical observations, and the philosophers and writers whose work I drew upon.
Of the four sections of the text, the one on death is the longest. Elsewhere in professional articles I had written a good bit about working with patients facing death, but in this text I focused on the role that death awareness can play in the therapy of a physically healthy patient. Though I think of death as the distant thunder at our picnic of life, I also believe that a genuine confrontation with mortality may change the way we live: it helps us trivialize the trivial and encourages us to live without building up regrets. So many philosophers, in one way or another, echo the lament of my patient dying of cancer: “What a pity I had to wait until now, until my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.”
Freedom is the ultimate concern most central to many existential thinkers. In my understanding, it refers to the idea that, since we all live in a universe without inherent design, we must be the authors of our own lives, choices, and actions. Such freedom generates so much anxiety that many of us embrace gods or dictators to remove the burden. If we are, in Sartre’s terms, “the uncontested author” of everything that we have experienced, then our most cherished ideas, our most noble truths, the very bedrock of our convictions, are all undermined by the awareness that everything in the universe is contingent.
The third topic, isolation, does not refer to interpersonal isolation (i.e., loneliness), but to a more fundamental isolation: the idea that we are each thrown alone into the world and must depart alone. In the ancient Everyman tale, a man is visited by the angel of death, who informs him that his time has come to an end and he must take the journey to face judgment. The man pleads that he be allowed to take someone with him on his journey, and the angel of death responds, “Sure—if you can find someone willing to go.” The rest of the story depicts his unsuccessful attempts—his cousin, for example, says he cannot go because he has a cramp in the toe. Finally he finds someone to accompany him, but, in this Christian morality tale, it is not another being, but instead good deeds. The only comforting thing that can accompany us while dying is the knowledge that we have lived well.
My discussion of isolation focuses a great deal on the therapist-patient relationship, on our wishes to fuse with another, on our fear of individuation. As death approaches, many are aware that when they perish their whole unique separate world will perish as well—that world of sights and sounds and experiences unknown to anyone else, not even life partners. As I reach my mid-eighties, I experience that form of isolation more and more keenly. I think about the world of my childhood—the Sunday-night gatherings at Aunt Luba’s home, the odors wafting from the kitchen, the roast brisket, the tsimmes, the cholent, the games of Monopoly, my chess games with my father, the odor of my mother’s Persian lamb coat—and then I shudder as I realize all of this exists now only in memory.
The discussion of the fourth ultimate concern, meaninglessness, touches on such questions as “Why were we put here? If nothing endures, what sense does life have? What is the point of life?” I’ve always been moved by Allen Wheelis’s account of throwing a stick for his dog, Monty, to retrieve.
If then I bend over and pick up a stick, he is instantly before me. The great thing has now happened. He has a mission.… It never occurs to him to evaluate the mission. His dedication is solely to its fulfillment. He runs or swims any distance, over or through any obstacle, to get that stick.
And, having got it, he brings it back: for his mission is not simply to get it but to return it. Yet, as he approaches me, he moves more slowly. He wants to give it to me and give closure to his task, yet he hates to have done with his mission, to again be in the position of waiting…
He is lucky to have me to throw his stick. I am waiting for God to throw mine. Have been waiting a long time. Who knows when, if ever, he will again turn his attention to me, and allow me, as I allow Monty, my mood of mission?
It is reassuring to believe that God has a purpose for us. Secular people find it discomfiting to know they must throw their own sticks. How reassuring it would be to know that somewhere out there exists a genuine, palpable purpose-in-life, rather than only the sense of purpose-in-life? Ovid’s comment comes to mind: “It’s useful that there should be gods, so let’s believe there are.”
Though I’ve often thought of my book Existential Psychotherapy as a textbook for a course that did not exist, I never intended to create a new field of therapy. My intent was to increase all therapists’ awareness of existential issues in their patients’ lives. In recent years there have appeared professional organizations of existential therapists and, in 2015, I spoke via videoconference at the large first international congress of existential therapists in London. Though I welcome the increased emphasis on existential issues in therapy, I have some difficulty with the concept of a separate school of therapy. The organizers of the international congress had enormous difficulties establishing a comprehensive definition of the school. After all, there will always be patients whose therapy work primarily involves interpersonal issues, or self-esteem, or sexuality, or addiction, and for these patients existential questions may not be immediately pertinent. This has implications for training. Rarely does a week pass without some student asking me where they can be trained as an existential psychotherapist. I always suggest they first become trained as a general therapist, learn an array of therapy approaches, and then, in postgraduate programs or supervision, familiarize themselves with the specialized material of existential psychotherapy.