business class prompted investors to stake the future of gambling on a popular tourist destination the black sea closed. next states for lighter how interview shy i wish today also what makes people unhappy in modern society and this time it's american psychometrist young gnome who is in the child with host asking the questions. for the second week been avoided what role did opposing ideologies play or individuals in states to blame.

hello and welcome to spotlight the interview on our to. talk about pro to live life fully full also for martina one said that. we we have to steer death into the face every moment of our. psychometrist long trying to put this into the practice that he did in two psychotherapy why does a person have to think about death all the time and what makes people particularly happy and more reluctant to talk about it our guest today is. one of the best known most widely read and most influential psychiatry used in the contemporary world is a professor of psychiatry at stanford university out here in the existential theory

born into a jewish family up in a poor i think area well many kids of. his spend most of his childhood in the worst reading after completing his medical education and serving in the army urban ya'alon joined the faculty of stanford university made some of his most lasting contributions by teaching about group psychotherapy and developing his models exist in psychotherapy taking up the central existential. finding meaning in life and death. price for important contributions to religion and psychiatry. today to explain. to the show thank you very much thank you for being with. well the most. treating psychological problems when the world probably. says that. but as far as i know

you don't. approach well i understand it's a big issue but can you explain what. it was. what was different in your approach. you really have to keep in mind. psychotherapy all forms of psychotherapy or a great deal to freud. and i used a lot of ideas in my approach but one of the main things. in my training i felt there was far too much attention paid to the very earliest years of one's life. paid to about the future about what happened to us about ageing and diminishment and so i hope that. too much emphasis on the first couple of years of life but as for ford's idea of the unconscious of how we

might repress certain things. dreams i used a lot of ideas in my in my thought i think method of treatment. has been radically changed the idea of having a patient on a couch therapist behind the patients and not have a real relationship between the two. that i certainly disagree with all this is knowledge either i mean. about technology but i have to lay the patient out of work is that important oh yes yes i think is i think it's quite important in my work to relate very authentically to the patients were asking about the importance like the best psychotherapist for me is my mum she does it over the phone right and i don't know whether whether she's lying or standing or if she dressed true or not i mean i talked over the phone for fifteen minutes and it's fine but you know that she loves you and furthermore unlike any other person the world should love you

unconditionally no matter what you do so i think that's one of the aspects the therapist has to do it has to be certain unconditional positive regard and care for the patient so he or comes to college how to do that. ok you said a very interesting thing you know there is there's a joke maybe it's true that somebody asked psychotherapy you know from what age should i try to to teach my baby how to behave and and they said how old is he he said well he's three then you're three years late. isn't that true according to you isn't it true that by the age of five as they say the personality of a person is developed like ninety nine percent and what he learns later is just how to behave in different circumstances no i don't really know i don't think i think people can undergo substantial change you know as

a result of experiences later on that was one of the big differences with what was called the means a new forty an approach especially developed in the united states and in europe as well meaning that there was not only an emphasis on the first relationships the wife with the mother and the father but also more and more of a relationship with other other people that you relate. throughout your life your best friends your chums we're a child how popular your school. already figures like like parents like like teachers professors that you had so these also figure into that what we call character or personality building so so i don't think it's shaped that early i see people make unbelievable changes much later in their lives ok well i have a quote from yourself and it goes to live life fully one must accept that life most of us do not want to think about death but you know

that confronting death is the key to living a full authentic happy life and quote well could you describe what living a full life according to you first of all i do want to say i did say that but so did socrates and plato and a lot of other people. i don't exactly i don't get i don't get full credit by that but what i mean by that is that if we if we deny that they deny other things are going to happen to us we may not live as fully as we can i feel there's some advantage to taking they aware of death and it will change your life sometimes i can tell you how this probe brought home to me is that i worked for many years ten years perhaps with people who are dying of cancer i had the people in groups and were working which was very helpful to them but i began to

feel that a certain percentage of a third of these people began to say they were they were different they began to change the priorities in life what was important to them they began to say no to the things they didn't really want to do one of the forgotten this what a pity it was that i had to wait till now. but he was riddled with cancer to learn how to live so it's the idea of learning how to become wiser by keeping the fact that this president lives but when you say to live fully to live a full life what do you mean by that well well well well do you live a full life yourself what is it to live thinking about death well people think about this sometimes but what's a full life for one of the ways to look at a full life is to leave as little unlived life inside of you you know i have i'm

aware of my own problem does that mean what for example i'm sorry for interrupting but does that mean sleeping with every beautiful woman i see. is that. driving every nice car. i see advertised all things like that or is something different i think that when you really take your mind you begin to see these are really quite superficial issues you know they're just. sensual pleasures it means living so that you really have no regrets in your life you feel proud of what you've done you feel you've you've you've honored your life in a way so i would say you know there's a term that i used in my last book it's using the term awakening experiences and there are many characters in that maybe one of the great examples of that might be dick and story of a christmas carol where you know old ebeneezer scrooge is living a very selfish mean life until resisted by the angel of the future tapes him into the future watches his ministry in a row and then progress the story here is the terribly different man how do you

deal with religion because for example the orthodox christian religion well actually they're very religious people with the they say that this life is nothing this life is actually getting ready to the real life which starts after you meet god. actually you must be happy that you have finally dying and. just you should be ready to meet god but most of the religion they say they teach that there is life after death yeah so how did you with that and in your in your psychotherapy well let me reverse that for a moment and say that i think the fear of death is the mother of every single religion i mean that's one of the reasons why religion sprang up in the first place to help us deal with this so it's not explaining that explainable but the fear of death because i thought that the in the midst people believe that religion is. a originated in order to explain why the sudden rises why oh why it's cold in winter

why it's dark at night and things like that and it's risen it arrives to explain the deepest essential facts in our life which is the fact that we're going to grow old and we're going to be very frank and it's frightening to people since the beginning of life if you look at the history gyptian culture for example it's totally based around trying to deal with the afterlife and the great pyramids are or ways of denying that so i would say in my my own feeling that that's a sense of denial of death it's a way of denial that if i have a patient who is very religious i would not think of tampering at all with the religious beliefs in fact i will do what i can to strengthen the belief that if it's going to be helpful to the patients first priority that i have in therapy is the care of the patients is religion itself. is religion itself sort of to many people yes it is and so you should have more more more athletes those clients

than religious people yet for some people it's experience many people become more secular it's not as relevant i want to get back to the to the issue of driving fancy cars and dating beautiful women well this consumerism the modern ideology of most. the modern society which is and russia is pretty much l. with this thing this do you believe that it makes people really happy when it went away when the ideology of the modern world is just consuming buying more and buying better and making more money to buy want to spend more and while the second home with a lot of possessions is that sooner or later you don't have the possessions but they have you you're there satisfying for a moment and suddenly want more and more and more this is one of the it is a. very we have this we have this wants we have this need we fill it we have

a moment maybe not too long of satiation of satisfaction if you satisfied for a couple of moments hours or days as they want more and we want more and we want more so if you if you want to make a person really happy then maybe you'll teach him how to live without so many needs how to reduce his needs and many of the great philosophers have said that certainly spinoza those that are the central tenet of his ideas says irvin he along best selling us. will consider you this interview in less than a minute after this short break so stay with us i'm pretty damned. it was overshadowed by this tragedy. these two feel fear in the street just.

remember every second of this night and. it will remain in the memories in hearts forever. in a. little .

welcome back. just a reminder that today our guest on the show is. a best selling u.s. psychometrist. why it. started with the with a show of consumerism is that if we if we look at the statistics of suicides i think one of the highest rates in sweden is in sweden where the. level of living is one of the highest in the world so all these two things really connected the the. i mean amount of money and the consumer things people have and the number of sort of size. that for sure but i could tell you that it's probably got something to do with the limited amount of daylight. there is some evidence for that there's some evidence for becoming depressed at certain times of the year a lot of people have

a disorder that comes every winter and it can be treated fairly well with getting artificial light of the certain kind of intensity that yes same as russia someone told me a couple of days ago by the way and he was the right person to ask they said it wouldn't. like oranges on your on your breakfast table if you don't eat you look at them in the morning it makes you feel better. i don't know about that i think they'd be better off with a certain kind of light that they hear they read the morning paper with every morning and that's often a good treatment or to ward off depression ok well. let me just say in general. i think it's very hard to make generalizations about what you know what i do as they see people in depth so i find that each person three or four people may say look deeply into the lives each of them has a totally unknown to us from the outside circumstances that are causing their

despair. if somebody told me to become. there's a good many what i would say no you know why because i think that what makes people unhappy is that they don't find the meaning in life and i can find the meaning was. teach people to find the meaning of life isn't a chicken and egg thing do you have to see a meaning in your life to teach people to do the same and to make them happy are these think that is there a meeting in on me in your life you know i think we invent meanings for ourselves i think that's one of the existential facts of life that were hurled into a universe that doesn't have any meaning and that we have to spend a lot of time trying to invent

a meaning for selves and also try to forget that it's really the meaning so we try to believe that we discover the meaning and then to me we have to invent a meaning that sturdy enough to support a life and. really focus on that there's a therapist named victor frankl who built a whole school of therapy called therapy based on meaning of life and you emphasize that a great deal in his own work too he used to say that a third of his patients came because of a crisis of lack of purpose in life i have read. many times that people such a boom in psychotherapy and the united states and europe is that people in modern liberal democratic societies i generally more unhappy than their. moms and dads grandfathers grandmothers and so i want because the more freedom the

person the more choices the person has the. more happy is that true i think i think the more freedom you have the more choices you have. probably the more anxiety you often feel about this you get stressed i think so but at the same time i think you're more him in that way you're more fully human you know you're not so infantilized you begin to exercise your your reason begin to look at life more objectively that way because one of the examples is russia like in the ninety's when russia was in transition from the. regime. to freedom to democracy and so on the rate of return with the rate of suicide the the the rates around to happiness in society was was record low there's an example maybe an example it happens all the time that if we're faced with choices and we know that we faced with choices it poses

a lot of anxiety you know every single case of that i work with you ultimately get the idea that you have to make choices and that's very hard for some people it's very hard because making a choice or something means giving up something else that every yes means a no to something we can't relinquish things so that's a central issue in therapy i think i think freedom is something the idea that we are the author of our own lives and we make decisions we design our selves in a way it's something that's inherently anxiety provoking why are people particularly lonely in big cities and mega purposes whether billions of people are out why are the stories the people loved by millions of the most lonely people p.-p. people in the world is it a contradiction where it's only natural as you say well this small community you know provides a sense of continuity intimacy say the same people every day people know you big

cities they begin to lack the ways of meeting people that's where religion comes in for a lot of people a real. there are a lot of people who will join a religious organization or join a church as a way a billion social network for themselves they may not be religious themselves may not believe what the gospels say but nonetheless it provides a community for themselves and there's a lot of alienation and it's of large communities where people move on now once the same no one knows you you become anonymous on the ground man and i think does a great example of alienation and being cut off. internet internet really deprive people of communication does internet myth to millions of years people yeah that's a question we're going to be finding out much more about it in the future because

more and more people you know are building their friendship networks only in their lives even sex i mean everything i mean they think internet dating whatever they never know i mean i joined facebook by my son got me on facebook about two weeks ago and so i wrote a little thing on facebook and within thirty seconds i was getting six eight ten responses from people and so people are spending their lives on facebook and that's or connections but i think it's a lot better than no connections at all there are groups that are being on the internet therapy groups groups for people with cancer for example i don't think it's as good as a face to face group but i think it's better than no group at all sometimes it's useful people living far away living in isolated areas they have a group of people they can share with people who may have the same life problems or the same disease that they do and they don't feel quite so isolated well here's another point of view on this issue in

a report. here in the. u.k. my space study of more than sixty thousand social network uses choose. for the young it's becoming easier to communicate with friends online than to do so in the real world around two thousand respondents between the ages of fourteen and twenty one confessed feeling ill at ease and then not logged on to cyberspace meanwhile the younger generation is the most vulnerable group in terms of the potential dangers of staying online one major issue. which can even lead to suicide is most the case with thirteen year old meghan mayer the teenager hand to self in two thousand and six as to being targeted through a fake my space account created by her friends model occurs to some social networking websites can however be a blessing for others psychologists say online friends can make the harsh process

of growing up easier those teenagers who feel left out in real life can successfully socialize on the internet all about balancing online life with the real world can be a difficult task. so so so so so you think internet is good but but but a person. should find the right limit the. amount of internet internet face to face relationships are far better. ships that go on life you know it because for example. for many years working on t.v. i was sure that television was something for only people but television is for somebody the prime time is seven o'clock on saturday seven pm but who the hell is watching television seven pm on saturday only lowly people who sit at will watch the nothing else they would watch television but. there's a good there's a good ready for that don't have a t.v. in your bedroom don't have a t.v.

in your kitchen in your living room have a special television room use it a cinema i mean go watch the news and come back to three alive that's all the same . i think that's true i think also it's an incredible distraction you know as a writer i know that i can't help being seduced by checking of email every twenty minutes or so there's actually a company now that they're sponsoring you have a way of turning off your internet for four or five hours in a row for writers. help you write much more effectively that way i'm almost signing up for that because i find myself my attention span so much less you know five or ten minutes now find myself cruising the net about some issue that i don't really have to know thank you thank you very much and just to remind. the show today was. famous american psycho therapist if you have your say on spotlight if you want to

to interview someone in particular just drop me a line that. are you and let's keep the show interactive. tomorrow with more first time columns on what's going on outside russia until then stay in the party and take. british. markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy.

the are. the top stories from all see this hour slowed stalled as the u.s. official ends combat missions in iraq fifteen thousand troops stay behind to assist local sources leading critics say america's proclaimed pull out of the shah mahmood blows up and concerns remain about the stability of the country with political leaders still unable to form a government to conclusive elections and my. problem is in the name didn't village severely to fight suja trial it sounds of commits suicide the less they get an aid from those sources but despite the destination threat to the help it wasn't about so-called. undoctored russian military gambling took for most regionals the senior staff have failed to trust business as opposed to investors to stake big feature of gambling on a popular tourist destination the black sea comes. up with every top all top stories in less than half an hour.