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.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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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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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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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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Living safely is dangerous.
IRVIN D. YALOM