In Creatures of a Day, his 2015 collection of short case studies, eminent psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom looks at 10 intriguing “tales of psychotherapy” from his personal archives. In them, he convinces an embittered nurse to give herself the same care and attention she affords her wards, helps a colleague arrange his life in a way that allows for a happy and long-lived marriage, and encourages an elderly ballerina to come to terms with the loss of her youth—and the love of her life.

Today, however—or, more precisely, 11 days after the U.S. presidential election—Yalom has encountered a case that he does not know how to cure: the mass psychosis that has elevated a short-fingered vulgarian to the highest office imaginable.

How can we hold on to our sanity in the face of what seems to be an attack on reason itself?

“I’m afraid I can’t be more help than anyone else,” says the 85-year-old pioneer of existential psychotherapy, in a telephone conversation from his San Francisco office. “I’m dealing with the same thing, and I’ve got a very depressed, distressed wife at the present time. Many of my patients are bringing this up too. I just saw someone yesterday, and I said to him, ‘Well, think how 40 million people felt when Obama was elected.’ These things swing back and forth, and in democracy we can’t help but take turns. But I don’t have any good ways of consoling myself about this. I’m very, very alarmed by it.”

Yalom, at least, has no shortage of work to keep him away from gloom. Not only does the Stanford University professor emeritus maintain an active private practice, but he is only hours away from finishing an autobiography to add to the 15 psychology texts, novels, and story collections already to his credit.

“I’m trying to finish this book in the next couple of days,” he reveals. “I’m way behind for the publisher; they’re waiting for it.”

Understandably, our conversation is a short one. But over the course of our 15 minutes together we go deep, beginning by establishing the difference between talk therapy and the more pharmaceutically fuelled interventions popular in this age of anxiety.

“There’s every difference between them,” Yalom stresses. “Of course, all people in psychiatry are obviously working with the individual.…And sometimes, if they’re well enough trained, they can go further with them into the implications of their diagnosis.

“Everything I’ve written is to try and fortify that notion,” he continues. “It’s such an important way of offering help. We have to teach students how to be with patients and how to have the appropriate, accurate empathy with them. So I’m writing this very much against some of the trends for standardized treatment, or behavioural things where we prescribe exercises or work out of a manual. I’m arguing here that the thing that really creates change in people—and we’ve seen this in research project after research project for 50 years—is the nature of the relationship established between therapists and patients, the degree of intimacy and the degree of accurate empathy we have towards patients.”

Medication has its place, he allows. “You know, with schizophrenia and with major depressions and mania. But for the everyday discomforts of life, for how we get along with our parents or spouses or children, they’re not really the only answer to that. We’ve trained generations of therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counsellors, and coaches to be more attuned to working with a relationship and helping people learn more about how they relate to other people.”

Creatures of a Day takes its title from the Meditations of the Roman philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, a book Yalom often recommends to his patients. One message in its pages is that psychological dysfunction is not necessarily, as is often claimed, a product of industrial civilization, but instead an integral part of being human.

“It’s very interesting to read the ancients and see that in certain ways they were struggling with basic human problems the same way that we are,” Yalom notes. “They’re not struggling with the effects of the mass media and the Internet, but they’re struggling with the questions of existence.

“I sort of delved into that deeply in a textbook that I wrote on existential psychotherapy and looked at some of the timeless assaults that we have to deal with—questions, you know, of aging and death, and dealing with meaning in life, and creativity, and basic isolation,” he continues. “That’s the mother book for this book, and a lot of the other books I’ve written. But now I’m trying to demonstrate parts of it more openly, more palpably, by describing these patients. At first I started off writing textbooks that were filled with little stories, and now I’ve put the stories first. I’m not writing textbooks anymore.”

Larry Green interviews Irvin D. Yalom in a videoconference presentation at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on Sunday (November 27), as part of the opening gala of the 2016 Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. See the JCC Jewish Book Festival website for the full program.