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. YALOMIt 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!
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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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We 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.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
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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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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