Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhat? ‘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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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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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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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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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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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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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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM