Irvin D. Yalom

Irvin D. Yalom (2014)

Irvin D. Yalom (born 13 June 1931) M.D. is an author of fiction and nonfiction, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University, existentialist and psychotherapist.

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• 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.
  • Live Case Consultation, Psychotherapy.net^{[specific citation needed]}

• If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven't done, if we've lived an unfulfilled life, when death comes along, it's a lot worse. I think it's true for all of us.
  • How to Die, The Atlantic, October 2017 Issue [1]

• One of the most important things was from a patient who said to me what a pity it was that he had to wait until now, when he was riddled with death, to learn how to live. And I have used that phrase many times: hoping that if you introduce people, in an appropriate way, to their mortality that might change the way they live and allow them to trivialise the trivia in their life.
  • The grand old man of American psychiatry on what he has learnt about life (and death) in his still-flourishing career, The Independent [2]

• I think living well is the key: trying not to build up regrets for the things we didn't do in our lives; to try to live a regret-free life in which we feel satisfied in what we're doing; and to try to be kind to ourselves and not disappointed in ourselves.
  • The grand old man of American psychiatry on what he has learnt about life (and death) in his still-flourishing career, The Independent [3]