Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOMSelf-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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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