Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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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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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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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!
IRVIN D. YALOM