Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

The guy I read and I love is Irvin Yalom.

I was in group therapy for years but it wasn't the same thing. It was more about growing.

But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists - far greater interest than ever before.

I loved the study of psychology. I didn't love seeing patient after patient. I was perpetually overstimulated, busy decoding everything I took in.

My dad is a doctor, a professor of psychiatry, and my mum is a psychotherapist.

I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.

Psychoanalysts seem to be long on information and short on application.

I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.

In therapy you sit down; in analysis you lie down.

My goal is to become a therapist by the time I'm 50.

Therapy is not a 'white thing.' It's a clinical thing.

The fact remains that many of the most creative and innovative hypotheses that are eventually verified by empirical research are born in the consulting room out of practitioners' work with individual patients.

Derek, my husband, is a psychotherapist.

We're communal animals. If we're by ourselves, we can feel wrong and crazy and out of step with society. We really need those talking circles.

Sometimes you're a psychiatrist and sometimes you're a group therapist. The dynamics in between people and the misgivings sometimes that artists have when they get into the studio because they're under a different level of scrutiny. A lot of them can be insecure about it. My job is not simply to make musical determinations but sometimes to just keep people from flipping out during the process.

I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough.

I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge but merely repeats his lesson to his students, can only load their minds, he cannot quicken them.

Love is nature's psychotherapy.

It's very important to distinguish between chemical depression that requires medication and talk therapy.

Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.

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.

When I recall my teachers at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal. . . . We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! . . . I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages - though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him.

I have been in schools around the country, and I have written on education for years. Once, I was once doing a profile on Justice William Brennan and I was in his chambers, and Brennan asked, "How do we get the words of the Bill of Rights into the lives of the students?" Well, it is not difficult. You tell them stories.

During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.