Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
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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!
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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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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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
IRVIN D. YALOM