Irvin D. Yalom

Irvin Yalom's Jewish parents emigrated from Belarus and kept a grocery store in Washington. Professor of psychiatry at Stanford, he set out the four 'givens' of existence — death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness — as the material of therapy; his textbook on group psychotherapy has run to six editions and his case narratives, Love's Executioner among them, brought psychotherapy to a wide readership.