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. YALOMTo the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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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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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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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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.
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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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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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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM