In 1956 after graduating from the university he went on to complete his internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and his residency at the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and completed his training in 1960.
Dr. Yalom believes that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story. As the years pass, this attitude moved him farther from the center of professional psychiatry. He believes that psychiatry is fiercely driven by economic forces to only provide de-individualizing, symptom-based diagnoses and uniform, protocol-driven, brief therapy for all.
His writing on existential psychology centres on what he refers to as the four "givens" of the human condition: isolation, meaninglessness, mortality and freedom, and discusses ways in which the human person can respond to these concerns either in a functional or dysfunctional fashion.
The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (1970)
Encounter Groups: First Facts (1973)
Everyday Gets a Little Closer (1974)
Existential Psychotherapy (1980)
Inpatient Group Psychotherapy (1983)
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989)
Concise Guide to Group Psychotherapy (1989)
When Nietzsche Wept (1992)
Lying on the Couch (1996)
The Yalom Reader (1998)
Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)
The Gift of Therapy (2002)
The Schopenhauer Cure (2005)
Staring at the Sun (2008)
I'm Calling the Police (2009)