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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
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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?
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Irvin D. Yalom
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Surely this sense of betrayal is what Robert Frost had in mind when he wrote: "Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee/And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me." io
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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she attempted to deal with her terror in a most ineffective and magical mode-a mode that I have seen many patients use: she attempted to elude death by refusing to live.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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میتوان خواندن را اراده کرد ولی نه فهمیدن را
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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انسان باید بیاموزد با دیگری ارتباط برقرار کند بیآنکه با بدل شدن به بخشی از او، به آرزوی فرار از تنهایی پروبال دهد، از سوی دیگر، باید بیاموزد با دیگری ارتباط برقرار کند بیآنکه او را تا سطح ابزاری برای دفاع در برابر تنهایی پایین بیاورد.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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وحشت مرگ همهجایی است و چنان عظمتی دارد که بخش قابلملاحظه از انرژی زندگی صرف انکار آن میشود.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Death and life are interdependent: though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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If we are unable to tolerate ourselves when we are alone, how can we expect anyone else to be enriched by our company? Before we can have a solid relationship with another, we must have a relationship with ourselves. We are challenged to learn to listen to ourselves. We have to be able to stand alone before we can truly stand beside another.
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Gerald Corey (Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy)
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The same point is made by the Hasidic Rabbi, Susya, who shortly before his death said, "When I get to heaven they will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' Instead they will ask 'Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could become?
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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آگاه شدن از این واقعیت که فرد متشکل از خودش است، هیچ مرجع تمامعیار خارجیای در کار نیست و فرد معنایی دلبخواه به دنیا میبخشد، به این معنا خواهد بود که فرد به بیپایگی بنیادین خویش آگاهی مییابد.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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وقتی فرد به دلیل انجام ندادن کاری که باید انجام میداد، احساس گناه میکند، این فکر پدید میآید که پس کاری میشد کرد و فضای حاصل از این فکر، بسیار تسکیندهندهتر از حقایق اگزیستانسیال طاقتفرسای زندگی است.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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By keeping death in mind, one passes into a state of gratitude, of appreciation for the countless givens of existence. This is what the Stoics meant when they said, “Contemplate death if you would learn how to live.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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بزرگ شدن، انتخاب کردن و جدا کردن خود از دیگران به معنای مواجهه با تنهایی و مرگ هم هست.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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مسئولیتپذیری موجب میشود فرد اعتقادش به وجود نجاتدهندهی غایی را کنار بگذارد و این کار برای کسی که جهانبینیاش را حول چنین اعتقادی استوار کرده، بسیار دشوار است.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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شر واپسین این است که زمان بیوقفه رو به نابودی است و بودن با نابودی دستبهگریبان.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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The enemies of conformity are, of course, freedom and self awareness
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Life cannot be lived nor can death be faced without anxiety. Anxiety is guide as well as enemy and can point the way to authentic existence. The task of the therapist is to reduce anxiety to comfortable levels and then to use this existing anxiety to increase a patient's awareness and vitality.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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درواقع، فقط جهانشمولی رنج انسانی است که باعث میشود در همه جای دنیا به بیماری (روانی) یکسانی برخورد کنیم.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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دانستن و عمل نکردن با ندانستن یکی است.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Wish" gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the child's play, the freshness, and the richness to "will." "Will" gives the self-direction, the maturity, to "wish." Without "wish," "will" loses its life-blood, its
viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only "will" and no "wish," you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan man. If you have only "wish" and no "will," you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot man.66
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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پرسشِ "چه معنایی در زندگی است؟" در درجه اول این فرض را پدید میآورد که معنایی در زندگی هست که نتوانستهایم آن را بیابید که با دیدگاه اگزیستانسیال که انسان عامل و فاعل معنا بخش زندگی است، در تعارض است.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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All of us react to our anxiety by “partializing” our world, by restricting our consciousness within narrow bounds, to areas that we can more or less control which provide us a sense of self-confidence.
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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هیچ انسانی نیست که همیشه کامیاب شود و همیشه بیافریند، هیچ انسانی نیست که مدام در تلاشهایش موفق باشد، ولی حرکت در مسیر درست حتی اگر به کامیابی منجر نشود، شاید معنای زندگی و تنها پاسخ اگزیستانسیال ممکن باشد.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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[P]leasure belongs to the category of events which cannot be brought about by direct intention; on the contrary, it is a mere side effect or by-product. Therefore the more one strives for pleasure, the less one is able to attain it.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
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آگاهی از مسئولیت یعنی آگاهی از اینکه خودمان سرنوشت، گرفتاریهای زندگی، احساسات و درنتیجه رنجهایمان را پدید آوردهایم.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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For Becker, this is literally true: Normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the truth of the human condition, and those who have difficulty playing this game are the ones we call mentally ill.
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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احساس گناه قبلاً بهصورت احساسی تعریف میشد که درنتیجه تجاوز خیالی یا واقعی به حریم دیگری به وجود میآمد، بعدها ما توجه منبع دیگری از احساس گناه نیز شدیم: تجاوز به حریم خویش، ناتوانی در زیستن زندگیای که به فرد اختصاص دادهشده است.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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If parents teach the child that all free impulse expression is undesirable and all counter will is bad, the child suffers two consequences: suppression of his or her entire emotional life, and stunted, guilt-laden will. The child then grows into an adult who suppresses his or her emotions and regards the very act of willing as evil and forbidden.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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The fact that a patient is classified as mentally or emotionally sick prevents the psychotherapist from enquiring into the possibility of whether, or to what extent, his patient may be cognitively right. It is perfectly possible that a person with 'existential frustration', 'ontological despair', or simply 'sub-clinical depression' may, because of his abnormal condition, be in a better position to look through the camouflage of life that still is deceiving the 'healthy' psychotherapists.
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Herman Tønnessen (Happiness is for the Pigs: Philosophy vs Psychotherapy)
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Our problem today is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols, hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their manipulation— only to find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we take so seriously, objectified in our objectifications.
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning. As for psychotherapy, however, it will never be able to cope with this state of affairs on a mass scale if it does not keep itself free from the impact and influence of the contemporary trends of a nihilistic philosophy; otherwise it represents a symptom of the mass neurosis rather than its possible cure. Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man.
First of all, there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's "nothingbutness," the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free.
To be sure, a human being is a finite thing and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. As I once put it: "As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps-concentration camps, that is-and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
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به عقیده فرانکل، معضل انسان امروزی این است که دیگر غریزه و یا سنت نیست که به او میگوید باید چه کند. حتی دیگر خودش هم نمیداند چه میخواهد بکند و فقط دو واکنش رفتاری نسبت به این بحران ارزش دارد، یا همرنگی با جماعت (آنچه دیگران میکنند) و یا تسلیم در برابر استبداد (انجام آنچه دیگران میخواهند).
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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دو شیوه متضاد در رویارویی بشر با مرگ وجود دارد، بشر یا میپیوندد یا میگسلد، یا در خود جای میدهد یا در هم میآمیزد، یا بر خودمختاری خویش تأکید میکند یا امنیت را در پیوستن به نیرویی دیگر میجوید.
مطمئناً منظور فروم هم از این جمله که انسان یا در آرزوی سلطهپذیری و اطاعت است یا مشتاق قدرت، همین بوده.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Mass consumerism requires that a product be attractive, well packaged, and, most important of all, easily and quickly consumed. Unfortunately these requirements are generally incompatible with the effort and the thoughtfulness that are needed if one is truly to examine and alter one's life and world perspective.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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آثار بزرگ ادبی ماندگارند، زیرا چیزی در خواننده برمیانگیزند که او را مشتاق درک حقیقتشان میکند. حقیقت شخصیتهای داستانی به این دلیل ما را تحت تأثیر قرار میدهد که حقیقت خود ماست.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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ترس از مرگ نقش عمدهای در تجربه درونی ما دارد، ذهنمان را به طرز بیبدیلی تسخیر میکند، مدام زیرپوستمان در غرش است و حضوری تیره و آشفته در حاشیه خودآگاهی دارد.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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as the clinician gains maturity, he or she gradually begins to appreciate that there are staggering problems inherent in an empirical study of psychotherapy.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Man lives in three dimensions: the somatic, the mental, and the spiritual.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
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two beliefs, or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
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All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
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Heidegger believed that there are two fundamental modes of existing in the world: (1) a state of forgetfulness of being or (2) a state of mindfulness of being.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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پاداشها در پی محبت میآیند، در پی محبت نمیروند.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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We will go to any length to avoid responsibility and to embrace authority even, if necessary, if it requires us to pretend to accept responsibility.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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One who does not feel is not sought out by others, but exists in a state of loneliness, cut off not only from one's feelings but from those of others.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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در درون هر فرد ترسی اساسی و بدوی هست که گاه به شکل ترس از زندگی و گاه به شکل ترس از مرگ رخ مینماید.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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death is the condition that makes it possible for us to live life in an authentic fashion.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
“
No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Significant problems arise in relationships for the alexithymic individual. Others never know how that person feels; he or she seems unspontaneous, wooden, heavy, lifeless, and boring.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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is the creation of a psychic world in which one does not experience freedom but exists under the sway of some irresistible ego-alien ("not-me") force. We call this defense "compulsivity.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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would say, reification has become the original sin of psychotherapy. But a human being is no thing. This no-thingness, rather than nothingness, is the lesson to learn from existentialism.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy)
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A denial of death at any level is a denial of one’s basic nature and begets an increasingly pervasive restriction of awareness and experience. The integration of the idea of death saves us; rather than sentence us to existences of terror or bleak pessimism, it acts as a catalyst to plunge us into more authentic life modes, and it enhances our pleasure in the living of life.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Great literature survives, as Freud pointed out in his discussion of Oedipus Rex,18 because something in the reader leaps out to embrace its truth. The truth of fictional characters moves us because it is our own truth.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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While the belief in personal specialness provides a sense of safety from within, the other major mechanism of death denial
—belief in an ultimate rescuer—permits us to feel forever watched and protected by an outside force.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
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Existential isolation, a third given, refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others, a gap that exists even in the presence of deeply gratifying interpersonal relationships. One is isolated not only from other beings but, to the extent that one constitutes one’s world, from world as well. Such isolation is to be distinguished from two other types of isolation: interpersonal and intrapersonal isolation. One experiences interpersonal isolation, or loneliness, if one lacks the social skills or personality style that permit intimate social interactions. Intrapersonal isolation occurs when parts of the self are split off, as when one splits off emotion from the memory of an event. The most extreme, and dramatic, form of splitting, the multiple personality, is relatively rare (though growing more widely recognized); when it does occur, the therapist may be faced (...) with the bewildering dilemma of which personality to cherish.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
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Uncomfortable with our sense-of-lack today, we look forward to that day in the future when we will feel truly alive; we use that hope to rationalize the way we have to live now, a sacrifice which then increases our demands of the future.
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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How is the existential vacuum to be explained? Unlike the animal, man is no longer told by his instincts as to what he must do. And in contrast to former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what it is that he basically wishes to do. Instead, he gets to wish to do what other people do (conformity) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
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If two wishes are mutually exclusive, then one must be relinquished. If, for example, a meaningful, loving relationship is a wish, then a host of conflicting interpersonal wishes-such as conquest, power, seduction, or subjugation-must be denied.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Some therapists may attempt to increase therapeutic leverage by accenting the individual's sole responsibility. The therapist helps the patient realize that not only is the individual responsible for his situation but that only he is responsible.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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The, world is not, as a great existential philosopher has seen it, a manuscript written in a code we have to decipher. No, the world is no manuscript which we are asked to decipher, but cannot; it is, rather, a record which we have to dictate ourselves.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
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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. But there is timing and judgment. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it. The thirst for religion is too strong, its roots too deep, its cultural reinforcement too powerful.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
“
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. But there is timing and judgment. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it. The thirst for religion is too strong, its roots too deep, its cultural reinforcement too powerful.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
“
The existential psychotherapy approach posits that the inner conflict bedeviling us issues not only from our struggle with suppressed instinctual strivings or internalized significant adults or shards of forgotten traumatic memories, but also from our confrontation with the “givens” of existence. And what are these “givens” of existence? If we permit our-selves to screen out or “bracket” the everyday concerns of life and reflect deeply upon our situation in the world, we inevitably arrive at the deep structures of existence (the “ultimate concerns,” to use theologian Paul Tillich’s term).
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Irvin D. Yalom (The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients)
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Now I can read and get a good night's rest which is what I really wanted all along." In that remarkable phrase-"which is what I really wanted all along"-lies the crux of Bernard's problem. The obvious question is, "Why, Bernard, if this is what you really want, did you not simply do that directly?
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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It is a matter of no small importance that one be able to explain and order the events in our lives into some coherent and predictable pattern. To name something, to locate its place in a causal sequence, is to begin to experience it as under our control.
No longer, then, is our internal experience or behavior frightening, alien or out of control; instead, we behave (or have a particular inner experience) because of something we can name or identify. The "because" offers one mastery (or a sense of mastery that phenomenologically is tantamount to mastery). I believe that the sense of potency that flows from understanding occurs even in the matter of our basic existential situation: each of us feels less futile, less helpless, and less alone, even when, ironically, what we come to understand is the fact that each of us is basically helpless and alone in the face of cosmic indifference.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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[T]he task of existential analysis consists precisely in bringing the individual to the point where he can of his own accord discern his own proper tasks, out of the consciousness of his own responsibility, and can find the clear, no longer indeterminate, unique and singular meaning of his own life.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
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Then growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I’m okay, you’re okay.
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David R. Loy (Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
“
Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning.
”
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
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The wish-blocked individual has enormous social difficulties. Others, too, wish to shout at such persons. They have no opinions, no inclinations, no desires of their own. They become parasitic on the wishes of others, and finally others become bored, drained, or fatigued at having to supply wish and imagination for them.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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For some of us the fear of death manifests only indirectly, either as generalized unrest or masqueraded as another psychological symptom; other individuals experience an explicit and conscious stream of anxiety about death; and for some of us the fear of death erupts into terror that negates all happiness and fulfillment.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death)
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I doubt that, in this case, I was dealing with a neurotic condition at all, and that is why I thought that he did not need any psychotherapy, nor even logotherapy, for the simple reason that he was not actually a patient. [...] A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
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our most problematic dualism is not life fearing death but a fragile sense-of-self dreading its own groundlessness, according to Buddhism. By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra’s Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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Recently, for example, I visited my optometrist to complain that my eyeglasses no longer functioned as of yore. He examined me and asked my age. “Forty-eight,” I said, and he replied, “Yep, right on schedule.” From somewhere deep inside the thought welled up and hissed: “What schedule? Who’s on schedule? You or others may be on a schedule, but certainly not I.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom)
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Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy)
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The majority of therapists realize, for example, that an apprehension of one’s finiteness can often catalyze a major inner shift of perspective, that it is the relationship that heals, that patients are tormented by choice, that a therapist must catalyze a patient’s “will” to act, and that the majority of patients are bedeviled by a lack of meaning in their lives.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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The evolution of Homo Sapiens into self-consciousness alienated the human species from the rest of the world, which became objectified for us as we became subjects looking out at it. This original sin is passed down to every generation as a linguistically conditioned and socially maintained illusion that each of us is a consciousness existing separately from the world.
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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Thought, in and of itself, has no external consequences-although it may be an indispensable overture to action: one may, for example, plan, rehearse, or muster the resolve for action. Action extends one beyond oneself; it involves interaction with one's surrounding physical or interpersonal world. Action need not entail gross, or even observable, movement. A slight gesture or glance toward another may be action of momentous import.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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[M]eaning cannot be grasped by merely intellectual means, for it supersedes essentially—or to speak more specifically—dimensionally, man’s capacity as a finite being. [...] This meaning necessarily transcends man and his world and, therefore, cannot be approached by merely rational processes. [...] [W]hat we have to deal with is no intellectual or rational process, but a wholly existential act which perhaps could be described by [...] ‘the basic trust in Being’.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
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{W]hat counts in therapy is not techniques but rather the human relation between doctor and patient, or the personal and existential encounter.
[...] A purely technological approach to psychotherapy may block its therapeutic effect. [...] [A]s soon and as long as we actually interpret our assignment merely in terms of techniques and dynamics we have missed the point—and we have missed the hearts of those to whom we wish to offer mental First Aid in their predicament.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
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Along with unemployment neurosis, which is triggered
by an individual's socioeconomic situation,
there are other types of depression which are traceable
back to psychodynamic or biochemical conditions,
whichever the case may be. Accordingly, psychotherapy
and pharmacotherapy are indicated respectively.
Insofar as the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned,
however, we should not overlook and forget that, per se,
it is not a matter of pathology; rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof
of one's humanness. But although it is not caused by
anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological
reaction; in other words, it is potentially pathogenic. Just
consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the
young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that
the three facets of this syndrome - depression, aggression,
addiction - are due to what is called in logotherapy
"the existential vacuum," a feeling of emptiness and
meaninglessness.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
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Psychotherapy endeavors to bring instinctual facts to consciousness. Logotherapy, on the other hand, seeks to bring to awareness the spiritual realities. As existential analysis it is particularly concerned with making men conscious of their responsibility-- since being responsible is one of the essential grounds of human existence. If to be human is, as we have said, to be conscious and responsible, then existential analysis is psychotherapy whose starting-point is consciousness of responsibility.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
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Anxiety (loneliness or “abandonment anxiety” being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent that he loses orientation in the objective world. To lose the world is to lose one's self, and vice versa; self and world are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-world relationship, i.e., to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in the state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient himself—as happens, one hopes, in psychotherapy—and again relate himself to the world directly, experientially, with his senses alive, he overcomes the anxiety. My slightly anthropomorphic terminology comes out of my work as a therapist and is not out of place here. Though the patient and I are entirely aware of the symbolic nature of this (anxiety doesn’t do anything, just as libido or sex drives don’t), it is often helpful for the patient to see himself as struggling against an “adversary.” For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, he can help in his own treatment by taking practical steps when he experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in his fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. He is not only opening the doors of his closet where the ghosts hide, but he often can also then take steps to reorient himself in his practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests him.
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Rollo May (Love and Will)
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A therapist who ignores man's spiritual side, and is thus forced to ignore the will-to-meaning, is giving away one of his most valuable assets. For it is to this will that a psychotherapist should appeal. Again and again we have seen that an appeal to continue life, to survive the most unfavorable conditions, can be made only when such survival appears to have a meaning. That meaning must be specific and personal, a meaning which can be realized by this one person alone. For we must never forget that ever man is unique in the universe.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
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A therapist who ignores man's spiritual side, and is thus forced to ignore the will-to-meaning, is giving away one of his most valuable assets. For it is to this will that a psychotherapist should appeal. Again and again we have seen that an appeal to continue life, to survive the most unfavorable conditions, can be made only when such survival appears to have a meaning. That meaning must be specific and personal, a meaning which can be realized by this one person alone. For we must never forget that every man is unique in the universe.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
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Medical ministry belongs in the work of every physician. The surgeon should have recourse to it as much and as often as the neurologist or psychiatrist. It is only that the goal of medical ministry is different and goes deeper that that of the surgeon. When the surgeon has completed an amputation, he takes off his rubber gloves and appears to have done his duty as a physician. But if the patient then commits suicide because he cannot bear living as a cripple - of what use has the surgical therapy been? Is it not also part of the physician's work to do something about the patient's attitude toward the pain of surgery or the handicap that results from it?
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded)
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Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every
age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The
existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the
present time can be described as a private and personal
form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as
the contention that being has no meaning. As for
psychotherapy, however, it will never be able to cope
with this state of affairs on a mass scale if it does not
keep itself free from the impact and influence of the contemporary trends of a nihilistic philosophy; otherwise
it represents a symptom of the mass neurosis
rather than its possible cure. Psychotherapy would not
only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even
though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the
patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true
picture of man.
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Viktor E. Frankl
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My own odyssey of therapy, over my forty-five-year career, is as follows: a 750-hour, five-time-a-week orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis in my psychiatric residency (with a training analyst in the conservative Baltimore Washington School), a year’s analysis with Charles Rycroft (an analyst in the “middle school” of the British Psychoanalytic Institute), two years with Pat Baumgartner (a gestalt therapist), three years of psychotherapy with Rollo May (an interpersonally and existentially oriented analyst of the William Alanson White Institute), and numerous briefer stints with therapists from a variety of disciplines, including behavioral therapy, bioenergetics, Rolfing, marital-couples work, an ongoing ten-year (at this writing) leaderless support group of male therapists, and, in the 1960s, encounter groups of a whole rainbow of flavors, including a nude marathon group.
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Irvin D. Yalom (The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients)
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This book deals with four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. The individual's confrontation with each of these facts of life constitutes the content of the existential dynamic conflict.
Death. The most obvious, the most easily apprehended ultimate concern is death. We exist now, but one day we shall cease to be. Death will come, and there is no escape from it. It is a terrible truth, and we respond to it with mortal terror. "Everything," in Spinoza's words, "endeavors to persist in its own being";3 and a core existential conflict is the tension between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the wish to continue to be.
Freedom. Another ultimate concern, a far less accessible one, is freedom. Ordinarily we think of freedom as an unequivocally positive concept. Throughout recorded history has not the human being yearned and striven for freedom? Yet freedom viewed from the perspective of ultimate ground is riveted to dread. In its existential sense "freedom" refers to the absence of external structure. Contrary to everyday
experience, the human being does not enter (and leave) a well-structured universe that has an inherent design. Rather, the individual is entirely responsible for-that is, is the author of-his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions. "Freedom" in this sense, has a terrifying implication: it means that beneath us there is no ground-nothing, a void, an abyss. A key existential dynamic, then, is the clash between' our confrontation with groundlessness and our wish for ground and structure.
Existential Isolation. A third ultimate concern is isolation-not interpersonal isolation with its attendant loneliness, or intrapersonal isolation (isolation from parts of oneself), but a fundamental isolation-an isolation both from creatures and from world-which cuts beneath other isolation. No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole.
Meaninglessness. A fourth ultimate concern or given of existence is meaninglessness. If we must die, if we constitute our own world, if each is ultimately alone in an indifferent universe, then what meaning does life have? Why do we live? How shall we live? If there is no preordained design for us, then each of us must construct' our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one's own creation be sturdy enough to bear one's life? This existential dynamic conflict stems from the dilemma of a meaning-seeking creature who is thrown into a universe that has no meaning.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring…. [I]t symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual inter-causality. (Francis Cook)56
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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According to my interpretation of Buddhism, our dissatisfaction with life derives from a repression even more immediate than death-terror: the suspicion ‘ that “I” am not real. The sense-of-self is not self-existing but a mental construction which experiences its groundlessness as a lack. We have seen that this sense-of-lack is consistent with what psychotherapy has discovered about ontological guilt and basic anxiety. We cope with this lack by objectifying it in various ways and try to resolve it through projects which cannot succeed because they do not address the fundamental issue.
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David R. Loy (Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism)
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هرچه بکوشیم تا دنیا را دوبهدو طی کنیم، درنهایت، تنهایی بنیادینی هست که باید تاب آوریم، هیچکس قادر نیست با دیگری یا برای دیگری بمیرد.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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زمان جاودانی اکنون است نه آینده.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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ما نیازمند نظام معنایی هستیم که طرح کلی ارزشها در آن لحاظ شده باشد، ولی جهان چنین چیزی فراهم نمیکند، جهان کاملاً نسبت به ما بیاعتناست، تنش میان آرمان انسان و بیتفاوتی جهان همان چیزی است که آلبر کامو "پوچی" موقعیت انسانی نام نهاده.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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هریک از ما سخت نیازمند جاودانگی، استواری، همزیستی و الگویی برای سرمشق قرار دادنیم، و باوجوداین، همگی باید با مرگ ناگزیر، بیپایگی، تنهایی و پوچی روبرو شویم.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)
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ما در حسرت خودمختاری هستیم، ولی از پیامد ناگزیر خودمختاری، یعنی تنهایی، طفره میرویم.
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Irvin D. Yalom (Existential Psychotherapy)