Quotes on Aging and Mortality Related Issues

Lawrence and Eda Leshann - Psychotherapy and the Patient with a Limited Life-Span
Psychotherapy and the Patient with a Limited Life-span
(From essays - Death: Interpretations)

Writing on the Subject of:

Writing on the Subject of:

On reducing mortality fear by being in touch with core self and life goals:

In the inexorable reality situations, the fear of death -- and with it guilt and self-contempt -- seems usually to be related to a sense of never having lived fully in one's own way, of never having sung the unique song of one's own personality. Thus it is by the quest for one's own essence -- by finding an engaging in one's own type of relationship and activities -- that the fear of death may, perhaps, be most successfully used.

 

On the importance of self discovery as being valid at any age, no matter what longevity may be expected:

"Perhaps life can be seen more validly as an extension in values than as an extension in time. Here may be an approach to a philosophy of therapy that does not differentiate patients according to the length of life left to them - an evaluation which can never be more than a guess, since the universe gives no one guarantees. If a person has one hour to live and discovers himself and his life in that hour, is not this a valid and important growth? There are no deadlines on living, none on what one may do or feel so long as one is alive."

On the idea that self discovery is equally valid anytime in our life:

To the question, what can one hope to accomplish with the dying patient?, our answer is that the validity of the process of the search for the self is in no way dependent on objective time measurements, that the extension of the psyche -- in another age, one might have called it the growth of the soul -- is not relevant to the fluttering leaves on the calendar.