Irvin Yalom

Then and there he conducted a thought experiment. First he tried to slip into the Viennese persona with all the pomposity he had come to hate. By puffing himself up and silently muttering “How dare she!,” squinting his eyes and gritting his frontal cerebral lobes, he re-experienced the pique and indignation that envelop those who take themselves too seriously. Then exhaling and relaxing, he let it all slip away and stepped back into his own skin—into a state of mind which could laugh at itself, at its own ridiculous posturing.

He couldn’t help remarking, “I see you prefer to do things for yourself. Doesn’t that deprive men of the pleasure of serving you?”
“We both know that some of the services men provide are not necessarily good for women’s health!”

“Marriage? No, not for me! I have told you. Oh, perhaps a part-time marriage—that might suit me, but nothing more binding.”

“Despair—not illness. I have several recommendations. May I share them with you?”
Is there no limit to her presumption? he wondered indignantly. She speaks as though she were my confrère—the head of a clinic, a physician with thirty years of experience—not an inexperienced schoolgirl.

one desires, he believes, to help another: instead, people wish only to dominate and increase their own power.

Paul—Herr Rée—but, Doctor”—she flushed for only an instant, but long enough for Breuer to notice, and for her to notice him noticing—“allow me to call him Paul, since that is how I address him, and today we have no time for social niceties. I’m very close to Paul, though I’ll never immolate myself in marriage to him or to anyone!
“But,” she went on impatiently, “I have spent enough time explaining a brief involuntary flushing of my face. Aren’t we the only animals that blush?”
At a loss for words, Breuer could muster only a nod.

“And then, Fräulein?”
“Then I resolved to be more frank when we next met. But it turned out to be unnecessary. Nietzsche quickly realized that he was as frightened by the prospect of marriage as I was repelled by it.

humans appear to be meaning-seeking creatures who have had the misfortune of being thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life and to perform the tricky maneuver of denying our personal authorship of this meaning. Thus we conclude instead that it was “out there” waiting for us. Our ongoing search for substantial meaning systems often throws us into crises of meaning.

forces in conflict within the individual generate the individual’s thought, emotion, and behavior

Therapy should not be theory-driven but relationship-driven