After a skin cancer diagnosis psychotherapist Julius Herzfeld is suddenly confronted with his own mortality. Reexamining his life and work he contacts one of his former patients, Philipp Slate, his most spectacular professional failure. Upon visiting him he finds Slate's seemingly incurable compulsion to seek sexual gratification now apparently healed by the pessimistic teachings of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

was born 13 June 1931. Yalom is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, as well as an author of both fiction and nonfiction. He is best known as a proponent of existential psychotherapy, a method that operates on the assumption that inner conflict within a person is due to the individual's confrontation with the givens of existence: inevitability of death, freedom and its attendant responsibility, existential isolation, meaninglessness.