makes people unhappy in modern society this time with american psychiatry over the yallow who's in the child with host asking the questions. conduce childhood was overshadowed by this tragedy. these two feel the fear of the street just. remember every second of this nightmare. it will remain in their memories and hearts forever. in addition to. the top of the little. one all.

hello again and welcome to spotlight the interview on r.t. i'm melding all of them to do we'll talk about how to live life fully philosopher martina once said that to live life intensively we have to steer death into the face every moment of our. best selling us psychometrist earvin year long tries to put this into the practice that ensued psychotherapy why does a person have to think about death all the time and what makes people particularly . in more of their lives to talk about it our guest today is urban. urban geologist one of the best known most widely read and most influential

psychiatry in the contemporary world he's a professor of psychiatry at stanford university and here into the existential is a theory born into a jewish family irvin gallon. university . teaching groups. meaning in life. prize for important contributions to really.

thank you for being. well. but. what. was different approach. you really have to keep in mind. psychotherapy. in my approach but one of the main things. i felt there was far too much attention paid to. pay. the future about what happened to us about aging and. the.

too much emphasis on first couple of years of life but as for fords i did. conscious of how we might repress certain things the way we used dreams i used a lot of free and ideas in my in my thought i feel a method of treatment though 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 this is a college either i mean the. technology the patient out of ways is an important oh yes yes i think i think it's quite important in my work to relate very authentically to the patient 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 in the world she loves 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 a certain unconditional positive regard and care for the patient so he or comes to the house to do that. you said a very interesting thing you know there's a joke maybe it's true that somebody. you know from want to age should try 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's 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. the big differences with what was called a freudian means a new fraidy an approach especially developed in the united states and in europe as well meaning that there is not only an emphasis on the first relationships a life with the mother and the father but also more more of a relationship with other other people that you relate to throughout your life your best friends your chums we're a child how popular you are in school other figures like like parents like ally teachers professors that you had so these also figure into 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 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 who give more of it i don't know exactly so 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 deny other things are going to happen to us that we may not live as fully as we can i feel there's some advantage to taking being aware of death and it will change your life sometimes i can tell you how this probe was brought home to me is

that i worked for many years ten years perhaps with people who were dying of cancer i had the people in the groups and were working which was very helpful to. but i began to feel that a certain percentage of them let's say 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 them said to me and i've never forgotten this what a pity it was that i had to wait till now till my body 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 in our 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 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 those that mean sleeping with every beautiful woman i see well 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 pure fun sation 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 they use and in my last book it's use 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 days or scrooge is living

a very selfish mean life until he says it by the angel of the future takes him into the future watches the funeral and then progress the story he is the terribly different man. how do you deal with religion because for example the orthodox christian religion well actually the very religious people with the they say that this life is nothing this life is actually getting ready to the real life which starts off the meat got here so so so so 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's 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 theory 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 the unexplainable 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 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 frightened and frightened people since the beginning of life if you look at the 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 the sense of denial of death it's a way of denial that if i have a patient who's very religious i would not think of tampering at all with religious beliefs in fact i will do what i can to strengthen the belief that if it's going to be helpful to the patient first priority that i have in therapy is the care of the

patients is religion itself could be. is religion itself sort of many people yes it is so you should have more. more more after this clients than the religious people here who are out for some people it's a real there'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 and the modern ideology of most of the modern society which is and russia is pretty much hell with this thing does do you believe that it makes people really happy when when and where 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 know they're satisfying for

a moment and suddenly want more and more and more this is one of the ideas that. we 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 to reduce his needs and many of the great philosophers have said that certainly spinoza was that of the central tenet of his ideas says he along best selling us. we'll continue this interview in less than a minute short break so stay with us and pretty dumb down.

player. play. play. this history still keeps its secrets but it's time from the feel of the soviet files. between black and obsolete.

coming into the future. from mental mark simone one costs makes a mechanical engineer an automotive pioneer. is most in the majors to choose the checkered flag. welcome back to spotlight i'm. just a reminder that today our guest on the show is. best selling us psychiatrist. why it was. started with the with a show of consumerism is that if we if we look at the statistics.

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 i could tell you there's probably 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 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. but let me just say in general when we think about suicide it's very hard to make generalizations about that what you know what i do is they see people in depth so i find that each person three or four people may look deeply into the lives each of them has a totally unknown to us from the outside unknown set of circumstances that are causing their despair. if somebody told me to become. was good money 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 being a wife. 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 it is their meeting i don't mean your life now i think we invent meanings for ourselves we should and 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 rather than to me we have to invent a meaning that sturdy enough to support a life and there's 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 young emphasize that a great deal in his own work to 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 human that way you're more fully human you know

you're not so infantilized you begin to exercise or 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 happiness in society was was a record low there's ample may be an example it happens all the time that if we're faced with choices and we know that we faced with choices it causes 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 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 the decisions we design or 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 the p.p. people in the world is it a contradiction we're it's only natural as you say well this small community you know provides a sense of continuity intimacies see the same people every day people know you big cities 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 or may

not believe what they say but nonetheless it provides a community for themselves and there is a lot of alienation and it's large communities where people move on now once the same no one knows you you become anonymous on the ground man and 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. even sex i mean everything i mean dating internet dating whatever they never know i mean i joined facebook my 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 facebook and that's are 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 the report. here in the. u.k. my space study of more than sixteen 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 hosh 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 i think

internet is face to face and 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 who has prime time it's seven o'clock on saturday seven pm but who the hell is watching television seven pm on saturday only lowly people who said it i watched 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 to realize that's all the same with into. i think that's true i think also it's an incredible distraction you know as 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 was sponsoring you have a way of turning off your internet for four or five hours in a row for writers and a half it helps you write much more effectively that way i'm almost thinking of signing up for that because i find myself my attention span so much less down you know five or ten minutes now infamous elfs cruising the net about some issue that i don't really have to know thank you thank you very much and just to remind that it's more a guest on the show today was earlier than the 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 at albion up at. are you and let's keep the show interactive spotlight who've got tomorrow with more first hand columns on what's going on and outside russia until then stay in party and take care.

not only to stay alive. but to keep your faces and souls in human circumstances. nine hundred. really honors and to survive each.

more news today violence has once again flared up. these are the images go world has been seeing from the streets of canada. showing up for a shelter all day. in the czech republic is available in just generally hutto historians central otoh primavera. most of the stuff i used to which are so much east in bosnia and herzegovina available in who told me the children of each tell a joke. but you know to put you know so topia to her told you her lena caldera bridgie cotto tones. in serbia multis available in the hyatt regency they are going to.

this is also your travel the headlines we're following here this on. time to turn the page president obama has said the future of iraq is now in the hounds of the iraqi people and live televised address tomorrow the end of combat missions in the country he said ex-president george w. bush the invasion was a patriot with whom he disagreed however and one of the would have done this time continues america must turn out to repairing its economy. also the south problem is in the indian village severely hit by a two year drought to commit suicide unless they get urgent aid from those sources but despite that astonishing threat know how possible to have such. an image of god i'm going to say the remote regions same.