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Book: Love's Executioner
Quotes of Book: Love's Executioner

Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
In choosing to enter fully into each patient's life, I, the therapist, not only am exposed to the same existential issues as are my patients but must be prepared to examine them with the same rules of inquiry. I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
I had helped him understand that he had lost sight of his personal boundaries. It is natural, I had told him, that one should respond adversely to an attack on one's central core-after all, in that situation one's very survival is at stake. But I had pointed out that Carlos had stretched his personal boundaries to encompass his work and, consequently, he responded to a mild criticism of any aspect of his work as though it were a mortal attack on his central being, a threat to his very survival. I had urged Carlos to differentiate between his core self and other, peripheral attributes or activities. Then he had to "disidentify" with the non-core parts: they might represent what he liked, or did, or valued-but they were not him, not his central being.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion-by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I {and the attendant anxiety of isolation} dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself. This is precisely why therapists do not like to treat a patient who has fallen in love. Therapy and a state of love-merger are incompatible because therapeutic work requires a questioning self-awareness and an anxiety that will ultimately serve as guide to internal conflicts. Furthermore,
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
The second, "alternatives exclude," is an important key to understanding why decision is difficult. Decision invariably involves renunciation: for every yes there must be a no, each decision eliminating or killing other options {the root of the word decide means "slay," as in homicide or suicide}.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
Why think about death? We can't do anything about it!" I tried to help her understand that, though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us. In other words, our awareness of death can throw a different perspective on life and incite us to rearrange our priorities.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
Rather, love is a way of being, a "giving to," not a "falling for"; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person. Though
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one {generally, but not always, the patient} more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
Beware the powerful exclusive attachment to another; it is not, as people sometimes think, evidence of the purity of the love. Such encapsulated, exclusive love-feeding on itself, neither giving to nor caring about others-is destined to cave in on itself. Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love. Rather, love is a way of being, a "giving to," not a "falling for"; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person. Though
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
From both my personal and my professional experience, I had come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
At other times Betty expressed anger at my forcing her to think about morbid topics. "Why think about death? We can't do anything about it!" I tried to help her understand that, though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us. In other words, our awareness of death can throw a different perspective on life and incite us to rearrange our priorities.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it; the rational questions one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts-not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter.
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Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner
Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilization been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. Though the word responsible may be used in a variety of ways, I prefer Sartre's definition: to be responsible is to "be the author of," each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom.
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