Yalom's Strategies in Treating Death Anxiety and Their Philosophical Foundations

This paper studies Ervin Yalom's strategies in the treatment of death anxiety and his philosophical foundations. Yalom is a Sartre-type existential psychotherapist seeking to reduce the problem of death anxiety through existential solutions based on atheism and unbelieving in religions. He believes that man has accidentally been thrown into this non-meaningful world and has no choice but to give it meaning. According to him, human beings face four existential concerns in this world: death, freedom, loneliness, and emptiness, death is the most important among them. As an existential psychotherapist, with a naturalistic and atheistic approach and a nihilistic view to death, he accepts the reality of death as a human existential concern and tries to reduce its anxiety by strategies such as thanatopsis, having an existential vision to death, thinking about Being, self-disclosure, increasing life satisfaction, desensitization of death, creativity, rippling.