American existential psychiatrist (1931- )
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
Only the wounded healer can truly heal.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Lying on the Couch
It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
One 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.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Publisher's Weekly, Aug. 17, 1992
Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence ... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
The ultimate goal of therapy ... it's too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential. Things that Freud used to say; being able to work and to love, that's pretty good summary of it right there. But mainly it's this idea I tried to explain ... you have to develop a separate new therapy for every single patient. So for some patients the goal will be this and for some the goal will be that. For one patient I have now the goal really is for him to be able to discuss some of his vulnerabilities with his wife and then have a real relationship between the two of them.
IRVIN D. YALOM
"Seven Questions for Irvin Yalom", Psychology Today, Mar. 25, 2009
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. The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient's control over every interaction.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Inpatient Group Psychotherapy
Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Wise Counsel
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. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
I don't let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that's offering the patient comfort. I never want to take away something when I don't have anything better to offer him in a way.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Wise Counsel
Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
Certainly as I've grown older, I've been thinking a lot more about the end of my life, which may not be too far away. My father and his brothers all died relatively young because of heart conditions. So I think, Well, life is finite. I don't have unlimited years left, and I want to know what is more central to me and my life right now. Above all, I don't want to do anything that feels repetitious.... I don't want to belong to any more committees or teach anymore, because the field is becoming drugs, pharmacotherapy. The next generation of therapists isn't going to be trained for psychotherapy because the insurance companies aren't going to be paying for it any longer. What feels most central for me is being creative and looking at the way in which I have creative talents and gifts that I haven't used. I basically see myself as a storyteller engaged in ideas that have to do with an existential, deeper approach to life. I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of these gifts being unused.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Salon Magazine
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
The Spinoza Problem
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
When Nietzsche Wept
Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion. Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Wise Counsel
Once, several years ago, some friends and I enrolled in a cooking class taught by an Armenian matriarch and her aged servant. Since they spoke no English and we no Armenian, communication was not easy. She taught by demonstration; we watched (and diligently tried to quantify her recipes) as she prepared an array of marvelous eggplant and lamb dishes. But our recipes were imperfect; and, try as hard as we could, we could not duplicate her dishes. "What was it," I wondered, "that gave her cooking that special touch?" The answer eluded me until one day, when I was keeping a particularly keen watch on the kitchen proceedings, I saw our teacher, with great dignity and deliberation, prepare a dish. She handed it to her servant who wordlessly carried it into the kitchen to the oven and, without breaking stride, threw in handful after handful of assorted spices and condiments. I am convinced that those surreptitious "throw-ins" made all the difference.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Existential Psychotherapy