Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
IRVIN D. YALOMTo the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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What? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said? Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis.
IRVIN D. YALOM