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.
IRVIN D. YALOMThere is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Living safely is dangerous.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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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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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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 must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
IRVIN D. YALOM