Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

Irvin D. Yalom was born on in 1931 in Washington, D.C., to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Belarus approximately fifteen years before his birth. His family operated a grocery store and Yalom spent his childhood living in a small apartment above the store. With limited guidance from parents who were entirely consumed in the struggle for economic survival and had virtually no secular education, Yalom found refuge in the local library and developed an early passion for reading, particularly fiction.

Yalom completed his undergraduate education at George Washington University, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1952, followed by his Doctor of Medicine from Boston University School of Medicine in 1956. He completed his internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City in 1957 and his residency at Johns Hopkins University’s Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore, Maryland, where his mentor Jerome Frank introduced him to group therapy by inviting him to observe sessions. The influence of Rollo May’s Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958) led Yalom to take philosophy classes to enhance his psychotherapy approaches.

After two years of Army service at Tripler General Hospital in Honolulu, Yalom began his academic career at Stanford University in 1962. He was appointed to the faculty in 1963, promoted to full professor of psychiatry in 1973, and granted tenure in 1968. Yalom achieved professor emeritus status when he retired from Stanford in 1994 though he continued maintaining a part-time private practice.

Yalom’s writing on existential psychology centers on what he refers to as the four “givens” of the human condition—isolation, meaninglessness, mortality, and freedom—and discusses ways in which humans can respond to these concerns either functionally or dysfunctionally. His approach represents a departure from traditional psychoanalytic methods by addressing fundamental existential concerns directly rather than interpreting them as symbols of other unconscious conflicts.

In 1970, Yalom published The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, speaking about the research literature around group psychotherapy and the social psychology of small group behavior. This foundational text emphasized what he called curative factors, including group cohesiveness and universality, and has been translated into several languages with numerous revisions. His 1980 work Existential Psychotherapy addressed the four basic concepts related to human existence: death, freedom, isolation, and meaning.

Staring at the Sun, published in 2008, is the culmination of Yalom’s career-long focus on death anxiety as a fundamental human concern. The work draws extensively from Yalom’s clinical experience, particularly his decade-long work with cancer patients, which provides empirical foundation for his theoretical claims about how confronting mortality can lead to psychological transformation and enhanced appreciation for life. The book’s argument is enhanced by Yalom’s willingness to include personal material about his own encounters with mortality, including childhood experiences with death and his therapeutic relationship with mentor Rollo May. Yalom’s books have sold more than 5,000,000 copies worldwide, and his works have been translated into over twenty languages, indicating broad international appeal for his integration of existential philosophy with practical therapeutic applications.