Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
IRVIN D. YALOMA sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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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 people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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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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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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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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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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When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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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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In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOM