Love's Executioner

Freedom not only requires us to bear responsibility for our life choices but also posits that change requires an act of will.

While the assumption of responsibility brings the patient into the vestibule of change, it is not synonymous with change.

niques to make patients aware of how they themselves create their own problems. A powerful technique, which I use in many of these cases, is the here-and-now focus.

Since patients tend to resist assuming responsibility, therapists must develop tech

Every therapist knows that the crucial first step in therapy is the patient’s assumption of responsibility for his or her life predicament. As long as one believes that one’s problems are caused by some force or agency outside oneself, there is no leverage in therapy.

“everything,” in Spinoza’s words, “endeavors to persist in its own being.” At one’s core there is an ever-present conflict between the wish to continue to exist and the awareness of inevitable death.

conscious and unconscious, to cope with the harsh facts of life, the “givens” of existence.1

In my therapy with each of these ten patients, my primary clinical assumption—an assumption on which I based my technique—is that basic anxiety emerges from a person’s endeavors,