Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir

Best-selling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D.

Yalom puts himself on the couch in a lapidary memoirIrvin D.

Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others.

In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself.

He opens his story with a nightmare: He is 12 and is riding his bike past the home of an acne- scarred girl.

Like every morning, he calls out, hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in his dream, the girl's father makes Yalom understand that his daily greeting had hurt her.

For Yalom, this was the birth of empathy; he would not forget the lesson.