“Love and Psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. A good therapist fights darkness and seeks enlightenment, while romantic love is underpinned by mystery and crumbles upon inspection" (use quote) This is the overarching theme prevalent in the first story of Yalom's book, also it titled "Loves Executioner", this story Yalom decides to treat a 70-year-old woman named "Thelma" who had a love affair with her former therapist, Mathew, eight years ago Although Yalom believed that no one was at the beyond his abilities to break Thelma's obsession with her former therapist, he soon realized that he was overwhelmed by excessive arrogance and that the problem was more intricate and complex than it seemed, because of a bag of geriatric therapy research decides to treat Thelma and give her “good therapy,” compared to the interns she was used to seeing. Yalom felt she had not received adequate therapy in the twenty years she had been seeing an inexperienced therapist as Yalom felt of being able to treat any patient and Thelma was no different. I personally thought that this was one of Yalom's first mistakes, that is, assuming that a person can treat virtually anyone, not admitting possible limitations that he has not explored in himself since the situation is never the same. Yalom was intrigued by his romantic obsession and could I don't understand why her former therapist, who was considerably younger, even wanted to have sex with Thelma, who he describes as "a frumpy old woman." (quote) All these aspects of Thelma's crisis, the love story with her ex-therapist, her obsession and the power he gave to Matthew, made her the ideal candidate for the geri..... .half of paper.... .ew he made her feel young and alive as she was obsessively attracted to him. I thought Yalom had somehow lost his temper, but he was running out of time. I think if Yalom had had more time to work with Thelma instead of having a threesome session so early and having her realize and accept what she already knew the answers to, the therapy might have turned out differently. All in all I felt that the story was unequivocally one of the most confusing and intricate stories I have ever read in Yalom's book and that the overall message I took home from this was that love and obsessions are difficult to intellectualize and understand objectively I like it as much as we would like. Although what may logically be the best decision, love is not based on logic and the only executioner of love cannot come from the suggestions of another person or the therapist, but rather from oneself and within oneself..