Irvin D. Yalom

Practised and taught existential psychotherapy at Stanford across a long career, and puts his own sessions on the page with a candour the profession has not always welcomed.

Love's Headsman presents ten case histories and includes his boredom, his irritation and his attraction, on the argument that the therapist's reaction is data rather than a lapse to be hidden.

The four ultimate concerns he works from are death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness, and Staring at the Sun is the book about the first. He also wrote novels, including one that puts Nietzsche in treatment with Josef Breuer. Becoming Myself is the late memoir, written in his eighties, and it is unsentimental about ageing and about his wife's death.