One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhat? ‘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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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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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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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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 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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM