Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
Irvin D. Yalom, 2008
Almost nobody wants to talk about death, yet the fear of it still seeps into sleepless nights, panic and a life put off until later. Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom spent decades working with people afraid of dying, and he gathered their stories together with the ideas of Epicurus and Nietzsche. This book shows you how to turn terror into an anxiety you can live with, and why the thought of the end helps you live more fully.
Who it is for
For anyone kept awake at night by thoughts of death, anyone who has recently lost someone, marked a milestone birthday or gone through a change that suddenly made life feel shorter. And for everyone who wants to live in a way they won't regret later.
How can you live now without building new regrets? What do you have to change in your life?
A conversation that ends after one sentence
While Irvin Yalom was writing this book, friends asked him what he was working on. He answered: a book about overcoming the terror of death. And the conversation was over. Almost no one asked a second question.
Yalom, a psychiatrist and professor emeritus at Stanford, worked for many years with people who were afraid to die. The French writer La Rochefoucauld believed that neither the sun nor death can be looked at directly. Yalom wouldn't recommend staring into the sun to anyone, but he suggests looking straight at death, as you would at any other fear, and taking it apart piece by piece.
He doesn't promise that the anxiety will disappear completely. In his words, it is the price we pay for being aware of ourselves. His goal is more modest: to turn terror into an everyday anxiety you can live with, and to notice how life becomes brighter and more precious because of it.
Ahead are seven of his ideas and the stories of people who came to him. Let's start with a woman who was sure she was crying over her son.
Tears for a son and a bandage on the neck
Susan, a successful accountant, called Yalom in a panic. Her adult son had been sent to jail for a month on drug charges. For four days she hadn't slept or eaten, and she kept picturing him dying in a gutter. At the same time, she knew that relapses in addiction treatment happen almost every time.
At the end of the session, Yalom asked about the bandage on her neck. It turned out to be a facelift, a present to herself for her sixtieth birthday. Yalom suggested that most of her anxiety was not about her son but about aging and time running out. Her son was her way of going on into the future. Yalom gave it a name: an immortality project. Susan sighed and admitted that her son wasn't sturdy enough for the job. Yalom answered that no child is sturdy enough for that, and that her son had never signed up for the job.
The psychologist Rollo May said that anxiety about nothing tries to become anxiety about something. The fear of death is like smoke from the next room: we smell it and look for the fire where there isn't one.
A few weeks later Susan calmed down and decided to change careers, and six months later she sent Yalom a card with a country inn on it and a note: “First night on the house!” If an anxiety seems bigger than its cause, it's worth asking yourself what it is really about.
About the author
Irvin Yalom is an American psychiatrist, professor emeritus at Stanford University and the author of the classic textbook Existential Psychotherapy. He also wrote the novels When Nietzsche Wept and The Schopenhauer Cure, and Love's Executioner, a collection of stories from his practice.
All books by this author: Irvin D. Yalom
Terms from the book
- Scrooge
- Dickens
- Epicurus
- Nabokov
- Seligman
- Dorothy
- Nietzsche
- Dawkins
- La Rochefoucauld: François de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century French writer, author of the famous Maxims. His saying about the sun and death stands on the title page of Yalom's book.
- Susan: One of Yalom's patients in the book, a successful accountant. The author changed the names and details of all the patients in the book.
- immortality project: A phrase from the book: a cause or a person through whom we hope to go on after death. For many parents, their children become that project.
- Rollo May: An American psychologist and one of the founders of the existential approach in psychotherapy. He was Yalom's therapist and friend.
- Alice: A patient who saw Yalom for more than thirty years. The author changed her name.
- awakening experience: Yalom's term for an event that confronts a person with the thought of death and makes them see their life differently. For example, a loss, an illness, a milestone birthday or a powerful dream.
- Julia: One of Yalom's patients, a therapist and an artist. The author changed her name.
- symmetry argument: Epicurus's argument: the nonexistence after death is the same as the nonexistence before birth, and we are not afraid of the second one.
- Barbara: One of Yalom's patients, a schoolteacher. The author changed her name.
- rippling: Yalom's image, not a scientific term: a person's influence spreads through other people's lives like circles on water, even when no one remembers the person anymore.
- gratitude visit: An exercise Yalom learned from Martin Seligman: write a letter of thanks to a living person and read it aloud to that person when you meet.
- eternal return: Nietzsche's thought experiment: imagine that you will have to live your life, exactly the same, again and again for all eternity.
- Bergman: Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish film director, maker of Cries and Whispers (1972).
- Agnes: A character in Bergman's Cries and Whispers, a woman who dies in agony and asks to be held.
All terms
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