The psychiatrist Irvin David Yalom

There are personalities who reign in the world of words. They are in states with the ease to create worlds that will leave a trace in the minds of thousands of people. One of these modern wizards is Irvine Yalom. He was born on June 13, 1931 in Washington and is an American psychiatrist, theorist and practitioner, lecturer and author of novels. His parents emigrated from Russia to the United States in the 1920s. They dwell in Washington where they open a grocery store and live over it. Irvine attended the local school, later George Washington University, but graduated as a medic at Boston University. His academic career takes place at Stanford University, where he has been a full professor since 1968. His activities are devoted to existential psychology and group psychotherapy.

Along with his scientific writings in the early 1990s, he also published a series of novels - "When Nietzsche is weeping," "Hangman of love", "The healing of Schopenhauer", "The problem of Spinoza", "Closer every day" , "Lying on the couch". His novels are a brilliant example of the ability to make fiction with the help of competent knowledge and stubborn biographical and historical research. He is not only a professional in the field of psychoanalysis (an unchanging source of stories about him) but also a deep connoisseur of modern philosophy. Honorary Professor at Stanford University, author of critically acclaimed bestsellers, a highly sought after therapist, Yalom Young for 80 years. Tall, sharp-headed and alive, with a quiet but loud voice, he will only be once in the conversation to show me an email on his computer - in a letter sent by a cybercafe, an homeless tells him he found the waste bin his book and it transformed his life.

Irwin D. Yalom does not conceal his satisfaction - as if the old boy, the son of immigrants, focused on psychology through literature, today holds the proof that he has managed to reconcile his two passions - writing and therapy. Because their purpose is the same: to help people on the road to more freedom and tranquility. The novel "When Nietzsche is weeping" is one of Yalom's iconic works and combines philosophy and psychotherapy - a technique that allows the golden section to be found between the attractive and the deep-seated in dealing with the major universal and individual problems. As the author himself says, the story in "When Nietzsche is crying" could happen. This is an extraordinary historical and philosophical psychotherapeutic journey in the field of the unconscious, the deeply depressed, the ever disturbing and above all human, too human, in the adventure called life.

Nietzsche is an eccentric philosophical ascetic, "overwhelmed" by his philosophical ideas that cause him so strong brain "contractions" that no physician pointed out for his time fails to relieve him. Nietzsche brings a love burden in his chest, whose diagnosis is Desperation. This disease can cure only one doctor and this is Dr. Breuer, a close friend and mentor of the medical trainee Sigmund Freud. But in order for the doctor-patient scheme to be successful, one has to give up his role ...

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