Irvin yalom biography
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
In the couple of years before reading this book I had 4 acquaintances in their early 40's, all with young children, die of cancer. Having young kids myself, I was really starting to worry about an untimely death of my own. I wouldn't say reading this book fixed all that, because hey, none of us knows how long we have, but this was a good exploration of the topic.
I read this about a year ago and had quit putting reviews up on Goodreads because I didn't want a friend to know I hadn't read his book yet but was still managing to read other books (sorry!), but I had typed up sections I wanted to remember and I'm surprised now to go back and see how extensive my notes are.
Here they are if you want a feel for the book, or at least the parts I connected with:
p. 32 The Stoics (Chrysippus, Zeno, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius) taught us that learning to live well is learning to die well and vice versa.
p. 49 “What precisely do you fear about death?” --“All the things I would have not done.” A theme of great importance: the positive correlation between the fear of death and the sense of unlived life.
p.
50 Nietzsche—“Consummate your life” “Die at the right time” Zorba the Greek – “Leave death nothing but a burned out castle”
p. 93 John Gardener in Grendel—“Everything fades: alternatives exclude” For every yes there must be a no, and every positive choice means you have to relinquish others. Many of us shrink from fully apprehending the limits, diminishment, and loss that are riveted to existence.
p.
95 The belief that life is a perpetual upward spiral often arises in psychotherapy. The alternative is hard to bear—that each of us is finite and destined to traverse the passage from infancy and childhood through maturity to ultimate decline.
p. 96 “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago”—Nietzsche
People undergo regression as a response to trauma.
Inner demons once conquered are conquered once again. Good ideas, even ideas of power, are rarely sufficient in a single shot: repeated doses are necessary.
“Living the identical life, over and over again, for all eternity”—Nietzsche
The idea of eternal recurrence. Zarathustra poses a challenge: what if you were to live the identical life again and again throughout eternity—how would that change you?
What if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you.
p.
No positive change can occur in your life as long as you cling to the thought that the reason for your not living well lies outside yourself. As long as you place responsibility entirely on others who treat you unfairly—a loutish husband, a demanding and unsupportive boss, bad genes, irresistible compulsions—then your situation will remain at an impasse.
You and you alone are responsible for the crucial aspects of your life situation, and only you have the power to change it.
Irvin yalom staring at the sun quotes It appears your browser does not have it turned on. I can offer an example of how to die. I wouldn't say reading this book fixed all that, because hey, none of us knows how long we have, but this was a good exploration of the topic. It would be very helpful for psychotherapists, hospice workers, nurses, and caregivers as well as anyone plagued by death anxiety so, basically, everyone.And even if you face overwhelming external restraints, you still have the freedom and the choice of adopting various attitudes toward those restraints.
One of Nietzsche’s favorite phrases is amor fati (love your fate): in other words, create the fate that you can love.
p. If you engage in this experiment and find the thought painful or even unbearable, there is one obvious explanation: you do not believe you’ve lived your life well.
I would proceed by posing such questions as, How have you not lived well? What regrets do you have about your life?
My purpose is not to drown anyone in a sea of regrets for the past but, ultimately, to turn his or her gaze toward the future and this potentially life-changing question: What can you do now in your life so that one year or five years from now, you won’t look back and have similar dismay about the new regrets you’ve accumulated?
In other words, can you find a way to live without continuing to accumulate regrets?
p. “Become who you are” –Nietzsche (familiar to Aristotle and passed on through Spinoza, Leibnitz, Goethe, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Karen Horney, Abraham Maslow, and the ’s human potential movement, down to our contemporary idea of self-realization.
The concept of becoming “who you are” is closely connected to other Nietzsche pronouncements, “Consummate your life” and “Die at the right time.” In all these variants Nietzsche exhorted us to avoid unlived life.
Staring at the sun yalom: The here and now, the content of the session versus the process, the real relationship between the people as opposed to a learner to a higher being. Now, even though death is nowhere near as much fun to think about as sex, the argument is intuitively persuasive. You and you alone are responsible for the crucial aspects of your life situation, and only you have the power to change it. Mohammad Hanifeh.
He was saying, fulfill yourself, realize your potential, live boldly and fully. Then, and only then, die without regret.
p. “Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death”—Otto Rank
Individuals who numb themselves and avoid entering life with gusto because of the dread of losing too much.
p. Otto Rank posited a useful dynamic, an ongoing tension between “life anxiety” and “death anxiety,” which may be exceedingly useful to the therapist.
In his view, a developing person strives for individuation, growth, and fulfillment of his or her potential. But there is a cost! In emerging, expanding, and standing out from nature, an individual encounters life anxiety, a frightening loneliness, a feeling of vulnerability, a loss of basic connection with a greater whole.
When this life anxiety becomes unbearable, what do we do? We take a different direction: we go backward; we retreat from separateness and find comfort in merger—that is, in fusing with and giving oneself up to the other.
Yet despite its comfort and coziness, the solution of merger is unstable: ultimately one recoils from the loss of the unique self and sense of stagnation.
Thus, merger gives rise to “death anxiety.” Between these two poles—life anxiety and death anxiety, or individuation and merger—people shuttle back and forth their entire lives. This formulation ultimately became the spine of Ernest Becker’s extraordinary book, The Denial of Death.
p. Schopenhauer’s triplet of essays: what a man is, what a man has, what a man represents
1.
What we have. Material goods are a will-o’-the-wisp. Schopenhauer argues elegantly that the accumulation of wealth and goods is endless and unsatisfying; the more we possess, the more our claims multiply. Wealth is like seawater: the more we drink, the thirstier we become.
In the end, we don’t have our goods—they have us.
2. What we represent in the eyes of others. Reputation is as evanescent as material wealth. Schopenhauer writes, “Half our worries and anxieties have arisen from our concern about the opinions of others…we must extract this thorn from our flesh.” So powerful is the urge to create a good appearance that some prisoners have gone to their execution with their clothing and final gestures foremost in their thoughts.
The opinion of others is a phantasm that may alter at any moment. Opinions hang by a thread and make us slaves to what others think or, worse, to what they appear to think—for we can never know what they actually think.
3. What we are. It is only what we are that truly matters. A good conscience, Schopenhauer says, means more than a good reputation.
Our greatest goal should be good health and intellectual wealth, which lead to an inexhaustible supply of ideas, independence, and a moral life. Inner equanimity stems from knowing that it is not things that disturb us, but our interpretations of things.
This last idea—that the quality of our life is determined by how we interpret our experiences, not by the experiences themselves—is an important therapeutic doctrine dating back to antiquity.
A central tenet in the school of Stoicism, it passed through Zeno, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to become a fundamental concept in both dynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Such ideas as the Epicurean arguments, rippling, the avoidance of the unlived life, and emphasis on authenticity in the aphorisms I cite all have usefulness in combating death anxiety.
But the power of all these ideas is greatly enhanced by one other component—intimate connection to others—to which I turn in the next chapter.
p. the play Everyman, where he tries and fails to convince someone to accompany him into death. Finally Good Deeds agrees.
You can take with you from this world nothing that you have received; you can take only what you have given.
p. In a terminal cancer support group, “I have decided that there is, after all, something that I can still offer. I can offer an example of how to die. I can set a model for my children and my friends by facing death with courage and dignity.”
p.
Socrates believed that the best course for a teacher—and, let me add, a friend—is to ask questions that will help a student excavate his or her own wisdom.
“I realized that if we all must die, nothing had any point—my piano lessons, my making my bed perfectly, my gold stars at school…”
“Jill, you have a young daughter who’s about nine.
Imagine that she asked, ‘If we are going to die, then why or how should we live?’ How would you answer?”
Unhesitatingly she replied, “I’d tell her about the many joys of living, the beauty of the forests, the pleasure of being with friends and family, the bliss of spreading love to others and of leaving the world a better place.”
After finishing, she leaned back in her chair and opened her eyes wide, astonished at her own words, as though to say, “Where did that come from?”
“Great answer, Jill.
You’ve got so much wisdom inside. This is not the first time you’ve arrived at a great truth when you imagine advising your daughter about life. Now you need to learn to be your own mother.”
The task, then, is not to offer answers, but to find a way to help others discover their own answers.
The same principle operated in the treatment of Julia, the psychotherapist and painter, whose death anxiety stemmed from her not having fully realized herself and neglecting her art in order to compete with her husband in earning money.
I applied the same strategy in our work when I asked her to assume a distant perspective by suggesting she imagine how she’s respond to a client who behaved as she did.
Julia’s instantaneous comment—“I’d say to her, you are living a life of absurdity!”—signaled that she needed only the slightest guidance to discover her own wisdom.
Therapists have always operated under the assumption that the truth one discovers for oneself has far greater power than a truth delivered by others.
p. My work with Jack was also sprinkled with attempts to help him locate and revitalize neglected parts of himself, ranging from his poetic gifts to his thirst for an intimate social network.
Therapists realize that it is generally better to try to help a client remove the obstacles to self-actualization than to rely on suggestions or encouragement or exhortation.
I also tried to reduce Jack’s isolation, not by pointing out the social opportunities available to him, but instead by focusing on the major obstacles to intimate friendships: his shame and belief that others would regard him as a foolish man.
And, of course, his leap into intimacy with me was a major step: isolation only exists in isolation; once shared, it evaporates.
The Value of Regret
Regret has been given a bad name. Although it usually connotes irredeemable sadness, it can be used in a constructive manner. In fact, of all the methods I use to help myself and others examine self-realization, the idea of regret—both creating and avoiding it—is most valuable.
Properly used, regret is a tool that can help you take actions to prevent its further accumulation.
You can examine regret both by looking behind and by looking ahead. If you turn your gaze toward the past, you experience regret for all that you have not fulfilled. If you turn your gaze toward the future, you experience the possibility of either amassing more regret or living relatively free of it.
I often counsel myself and my patients to imagine one year or five years ahead and think of the new regrets that will have piled up in that period.
Then I pose a question that has real therapeutic crunch: “How can you live now without building new regrets? What do you have to change in your life?”
p. The way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greater depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost.
p. Therapy offers opportunities par excellence for rippling.
In every hour of work, I am able to pass along parts of myself, parts of what I have learned about life.
p. Yalom’s mentors—Jerome Frank, John Whitehorn, and Rollo May. May’s book Existence. (especially the first 3 essays).
p. One half of my conscious screen is sober and always aware of transience. The other half, however, offsets it by playing a different show, a scenario I can best describe by a metaphor suggested by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who asks us to imagine a laser-thin spotlight moving inexorably along the immense ruler of time.
Everything that the beam has passed is lost in darkness of the past; everything ahead fo the spotlight is hidden in the darkness of the yet to be born. Only what is lit by the laser-thin spotlight lives. This image dispels grimness and evokes in me the thought of how staggeringly lucky I am to be here, alive, and luxuriating in the pleasure of sheer being!
And how tragically foolish it would be to diminish my brief time in the life-light by adopting life-negating schemes which proclaim that real life is to be found elsewhere in the utterly indifferent immense darkness ahead of me.
p.
Note the two instances during the session when I shifted into the here-and-now. Mark began the hour by saying that “as usual” on the way to my office he had slipped into an enchanting reverie about his patient, Ruth. That comment obviously had implications for our relationship. I stored it and, later in the session, inquired about why, on the way to see me, he habitually obsesses about Ruth.
Later Mark posed several questions to me about my death anxiety and about my children, and I responded to each question, but made sure of taking the next step of exploring his feelings about posing questions to me and about my answering them.
Therapy is always an alternating sequence of interaction and reflection upon that interaction. Finally, the session with Mark illustrates the synergy between ideas and relationship: both factors were at work in this session, as in most therapy sessions.
Terence, a second-century Roman playwright, offers an aphorism that is extraordinarily important in the inner work of the therapist: I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.
Thus, at the end of the session when Mark gathered the courage to ask a question he had long suppressed—“How do you judge me as a therapist for the whole Ruth episode?”—I chose to answer that I could empathize with him because I’ve also at times been sexually aroused by patients.
I added that this was also true of every therapist I’ve ever known.
Mark posed an uncomfortable question, but, when faced with it, I followed Terence’s maxim and searched my own mind for some similar recollection and then shared it. No matter how brutal, cruel, forbidden, or alien a patient’s experience, you can locate in yourself some affinity to it if you are willing to enter into your own darkness.
p.
Up to now, I have for pedagogical reasons discussed ideas and relationship separately, but it is time to put them together. First, a fundamental axiom: ideas will be effective only when the therapeutic alliance is solid.
p. I believe that a therapist has everything to gain and nothing to lose by being entirely transparent about the process of therapy.
Considerable persuasive research in both individual and group therapy has documented that therapists who systematically and thoroughly prepare patients for therapy have better outcomes. As for transference, I believe it is a hardy organism and will grow robustly even in broad daylight.
So I am personally transparent about the mechanism of therapy.
I tell patients about how therapy works, about my role in the process, and, most important of all, what they can do to facilitate their own therapy. If it seems indicated, I have no hesitation about suggesting selected publications about therapy.
I make a point of clarifying the here-and-now focus and, even in the first session, ask about how the patient and I are doing in it.
I ask such questions as “What expectations you have of me? How do I fit or not fit those expectations? Do we seem on track? Do you have feelings about me that we should explore?
I follow such questions by saying something like this: “You’ll find that I do this often. I ask such here-and-now questions because I believe that the exploration of our relationship will provide us valuable and accurate information.
You can tell me about issues arising with friends or your boss or your spouse, but always there is a limitation: I don’t know them, and you can’t help but give me information that reflects your own bias. We all do that; we can’t help it. But what goes on here in this office is reliable because we both experience and can work on that information immediately.” All my patients have understood this explanation and accepted it.
Open the door a crack on their personal life, some therapists fear, and patients will relentlessly ask for more.
“How happy are you? How is your marriage going? Your social life? Your sexual life?”
This is, in my experience, a bogus fear.
Although I encourage patients to ask questions, no patient has ever insisted on knowing uncomfortably intimate details of my life. If that were to happen, I would respond by focusing on the process; that is, I would inquire about the patient’s motivation in pressing or embarrassing me. Again, I emphasize to therapists, reveal yourself when it enhances therapy, not because of pressure from the patient or because of your own needs or rules.