Two accounts of the same hour
In 1970 Irvin Yalom began seeing a young writer who could not write. She could not afford treatment, and instead of a fee they agreed on something else. After every session each of them would write a free account of the hour, honestly and with no audience in mind. The pages went to Yalom's secretary in sealed envelopes, and neither of them read the other's while the writing was fresh.
The therapy ran for about a year and a half. The two sets of notes were published in 1974 as Every Day Gets a Little Closer, under Yalom's name and the pseudonym Ginny Elkin.
The hours did not match
What makes the book strange is not either account. It is the distance between them.
Yalom writes down what a therapist writes down: the shape of the hour, what he tried, where he judged the work to be. Ginny writes down what stayed with her, and that was often something else entirely. An interpretation he had thought decisive can leave no mark on her page, while a passing remark he never noticed making is the thing she takes home.
Each account holds together on its own. Together they suggest that the two people in the room had not quite been in the same hour.
Writing as part of the treatment
The notes were never meant as documentation. They were where the hour went on after the door closed.
Yalom says as much about the arrangement: the writing turned out to be part of the treatment rather than a record of it, for him as much as for her. It gave each of them somewhere to put what had not been said in the room, with the other person absent and unable to answer. Knowing the pages would be read one day kept them from turning into a private diary. Knowing they would not be read for a long while kept them honest.
What the record belongs to
A session leaves almost nothing behind. Memory keeps a version of it, and the version drifts. What the two of them had at the end was a pair of records that no memory could have reconstructed, and that neither of them owned alone.
Which leaves the question the book never settles. A page written afterwards by one person, about two people, in words the other did not choose: does it belong to the one who wrote it, or to the hour it describes?
Epimelea is a psychotherapy app working in the existential school. The conversation carries on from one session to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person whose sessions it holds.
This page describes a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical care and not an emergency service. If you are in danger right now, call your country's emergency number or find a helpline at findahelpline.com.