I'm Calling the Police

"Something heavy is going on -- the past is erupting -- my two lives, night and day, are joining. I need to talk." Irv Yalom's old medical school friend was making a plea for help. In their fifty years of friendship, Bob Berger had never divulged his nocturnal terrors to his close comrade. Now, finally, he found himself forced to.

In I'm Calling the Police, Berger recounts to Yalom the anguish of a war-torn past: By pretending he was a Christian, Berger survived the Holocaust. But after a life defined by expiation and repression, a dangerous encounter has jarred loose the painful memory of those years. Together, they interpret the fragments of the horrific past that haunt his dreams.

I'm Calling the Police is a powerful exploration of Yalom's most vital themes -- memory, fear, love, and healing -- and a glimpse into the life of the man himself.

Auteur

Irvin D. Yalom, MD, is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was the recipient of the 1974 Edward Strecker Award and the 1979 Foundations' Fund Prize in Psychiatry. He is the author of When Nietzsche Wept (winner of the 1993 Commonwealth Club gold medal for fiction); Love's Executioner, a memoir; Becoming Myself, a group therapy novel; The Schopenhauer Cure; and the classic textbooks Inpatient Group Psychotherapy and Existential Psychotherapy, among many other books. He lives in Palo Alto, California.