What? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said? Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis.
IRVIN D. YALOMLiving safely is dangerous.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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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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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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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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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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
IRVIN D. YALOM