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. YALOMTo love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.
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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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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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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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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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Living safely is dangerous.
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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
IRVIN D. YALOM