Irvin D. Yalom
14 quotes
Biography
Irvin David Yalom is an American existential psychiatrist who is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, as well as author of both fiction and nonfiction.
"Every person must choose how much truth he can stand."
"Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair."
"Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death."
"The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices."
"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."
"What an existential approach is about is positing that our bad feelings, our dysphoria, our despair, our anxiety emanates not only from our own life history and all the traumas we may have had in the past, and not only from the figures that we have introjected — many of these figures being unloving, or uncaring, or neurotic on their own parts — and emanates not only from our current life crises, but it emanates also, also, from our confrontation with the existential facts of life, with our confrontation with the human condition."
"Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude."
"Encased in an elaborate illusion of unlimited power and progress, each of us subscribes, at least until one's midlife crisis, to the belief that existence consists of an eternal, upward spiral of achievement, dependent on will alone. This comforting illusion may be shattered by some urgent irreversible experience ... None more potently confronts us with finiteness and contingency than the imminence of our own death."
"Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?"
"I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marilyn and I... our initial friendship began because we are both readers. I've gone to sleep almost every night of my life after having read in a novel for 30 or 40 minutes. I'm a great reader of fiction and much less so of non-fiction."
"I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy - I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection."
"Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?"
"We're not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams."
"The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived."