Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
IRVIN D. YALOMOne 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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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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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
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Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy enslave the spirit.
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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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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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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)
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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
IRVIN D. YALOM