Facing Death: Staring at the Sun (I) Dr. Yalom

http://www.yalom.com/

To live life fully, one must accept that it ends,
says the existential psychoanalyst. "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die." -- Yudhishtara answers Dharma, from "The Mahabharata"

it is not just love that we look for in all the wrong places. If Irvin Yalom is right, it is life itself. By denying death, the psychoanalyst suggests, we misdirect our search for happiness. The true meaning of life, his work suggests, lies in engaging what we most fear.

Yalom has the credentials to make such a claim. He is the author of the highly regarded 1980 textbook, "Existential Psychotherapy" and his bestselling work "Love's Executioner" shows how such neuroses as eating disorders can be alleviated by bringing patients' death-anxieties to the surface. His novel "When Nietzsche Wept" is a thought-provoking exploration of how psychology might have fared had it been invented by the Ur-existential thinker Nietzsche rather than Freud. His new novel, "Lying On The Couch," will be published next month.

I spoke with Yalom in the office he has built next to his comfortable home on a peaceful street in Palo Alto. A quiet man, he exudes an air of mild anxiety oddly appropriate to the existential realities -- death, freedom, isolation, meaninglessness -- of which he writes. He becomes passionate mainly when affirming his strong belief in science and his skepticism about non-material or spiritual understandings of life.

Well, did the last 5 billion years bother you? I mean, it seems to me that what happens after we die is not really the problem. It is a kind of peace. The challenge for us is how we live between now and then, whether we have the courage to stop denying it and use our anxieties to live more authentic, meaning-filled and purposeful lives.

Salon interview with Yalom

http://www.salonmagazine.com/weekly/yalom960805.html

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Irvin
• yalom
• staring
• at
• the
• sun
• facing
• death
• existential
• meaning
• dying
• philosophy
• greek
• stoics
• denial
• of
• mortality
• fragility
• yt:stretch=16:9
• hiding
• from
• humanity

[2bsirius]

It's hard to come up with an authentic answer to the dilemma of our personal death. I've saved this video to my favorites and I'm ordering the book this morning.

[pangeaprogressblog]

@2bsirius Yes in thinking of this challenge I thought of Wittgenstein's limits of language -the limits of my world...and Sir Martin Rees stating that there are limits to what the human brain can contemplate in vanguard science.

[fireblaze876]

We may aswell just bring earth

[fireblaze876]

By then we would have ditched the earth and found a new planet the earth would be remembered but if so with future technolagy we may be able to move planets and lukily if we find a big one about the size of saturn

[SuzaneVonRichthofen]

I've just come from a video where Richard Dawkins is asked to predict what life on earth will be like in 10 million year's time and he says quite casually that the humans species very likely won't be here. I felt a catch in my throat even though I know I'll be long dead anyway. It's humbling to think of how insignificant we are. As Schopenhaeur put it, life is but a thin layer of mould on the surface of Earth, which in turn is but a grain of dust in the universe.

[seanstrnad]

I cannot but feel sad in accepting that this life is so short and in some sense without any significant point. :(

[960random]

is it overcoming the "terror" or overcoming the "dread"?

[CounsellingQld]

what inspires me is that Irvin brings clarity to a subject that many confuse and complicate...Im new to counselling but Im working my way through all his books...thank you Irvin

[HiAdrian]

One of the simplest and most effective sentences is "death is the state you were in before you were born". Many people can relate to that, and it gives them the feeling of it being an old hat, you've done it for billions of years before this life.

I can only feel bad about death in a sense of those after me forgetting my path and story, but that's not a common thought for me. So i've been quite content with death from childhood on, i'm much more afraid of suffering, of being alive in suffering.