American existential psychiatrist (1931- )
Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world. And if you do the latter, you're not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Salon Magazine
The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Existential Psychotherapy
If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown. 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.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Salon Magazine
If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Schopenhauer Cure
You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
IRVIN D. YALOM
The Spinoza Problem
The single most characteristic aspect of contemporary inpatient treatment programs is their astonishing range and variation. When I visit outpatient clinics around the United States, I invariably find therapeutic group programs to be broadly consistent from one clinic to another. However, in contemporary inpatient units there exists a blooming profusion of types of groups, of leader strategies and techniques, of patterns of composition, and of duration and frequency of meetings. One's head spins at such abundance: either it represents a great burst of creativity simultaneously erupting in inpatient hospitals all over the country, or it reflects significant and lamentable chaos in the field.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Inpatient Group Psychotherapy
If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive? My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable. Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Salon Magazine
Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door. Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness. Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
IRVIN D. YALOM
interview, Wise Counsel