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. YALOMPsychotherapy 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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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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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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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