There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
IRVIN D. YALOMWe take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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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.
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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 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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
IRVIN D. YALOM