When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
IRVIN D. YALOMI thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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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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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.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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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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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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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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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM