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.
IRVIN D. YALOMAbsolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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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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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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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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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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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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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
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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.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
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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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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
IRVIN D. YALOM






