Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
IRVIN D. YALOMSome 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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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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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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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM