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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I'm still learning.

Irvin D. Yalom

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Irvin D. Yalom
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 13
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
University Teacher
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Irvin David Yalom
Really
Strange
Unlike
Never
Learning
Finish
Greatest
Instrument
Understanding
Endless
Stills
Instruments
Still
Medicine
Self
Field
Work
Fields
Psychiatry

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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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, Pandora's box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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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, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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Live your life to the fullest and then, and only then, die. Don't leave any unlived life behind.
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled ... by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. 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. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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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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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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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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When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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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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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. Some have expressed the very opposite feeling--the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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