Quotes from Tom Butler-Bowdon

A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority.

A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority. A good upbringing should be able to dissolve this sense of inferiority, and as a result the child will not develop an unbalanced need to win at the expense of others.

He notes that it remains the cancer of the mental health world: We are close to finding a cure, but not close enough for those who do not respond quickly to drugs or therapy.

While a complex may make someone more timid or withdrawn, it could equally produce the need to compensate for that in overachievement. This is the "pathological power drive," expressed at the expense of other people and society generally. Adler identified Napoleon, a small man making a big impact on the world, as a classic case of an inferiority complex in action.

Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.

Love has traditionally been the domain of poets, artists, and philosophers, but in the last 50 years the terrain of relationships has increasingly been mapped by psychologists.

Her ego and id had fully lost the battle with her superego, and this was the only way they could be expressed.

For Pascal, lack of faith was a kind of laziness, a view summed up by T.S. Eliot in his introduction to the Pensées: "The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.

Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses. Neo-Freudian

Melanie Klein focused on how a "schizoid" personality could develop as the result of an infant's relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world. Most

Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses.

50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Spiritual Classics, which explore books on the more transformational and spiritual sides of psychology.

Melanie Klein focused on how a "schizoid" personality could develop as the result of an infant's relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world.

As the early memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) wrote, "Psychology has a long past, but only a short history." He meant that people have been thinking about human thought, emotion, intelligence, and behavior for thousands of years, but as a discipline based on facts rather than speculation psychology is still in its infancy. Even

While Freud wrote of the drive toward pleasure or sex, and Adler of a drive toward power, Frankl believed that the human will to meaning was at least as strong a force in making us into who we are. While

Alfred Adler was a member of Freud's original inner circle, but broke away because he disagreed that sex was the prime mover behind human behavior. He was more interested in how our early environments shape us, believing that we all seek greater power by trying to make up for what we perceive we lacked in childhood—his famous theory of "compensation.

If Adler's theory of human action relates to power, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl's brand of existential psychology, "logotherapy," posits that the human species is uniquely made to seek meaning.

While we are pushed by drives, we are pulled by meaning, and

In all these situations of conflict the ego is seeking to repudiate a part of its own id. Thus the institution which sets up the defence and the invading force which is warded off are always the same; the variable factors are the motives which impel the ego to resort to defensive measures. Ultimately all such measures are designed to secure the ego and to save it from experiencing 'pain.

We do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in us creating psychological defenses.

While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her

In the 1950s, American psychology was dominated by the behaviorists, whose endless experiments with lab rats aimed to show how easily the mammalian mind was shaped by its environment. Harlow

The term "defense" in relation to psychology was first used by Sigmund Freud in 1894. He meant it to describe, as Anna Freud said, "the ego's struggle against painful or unendurable ideas or effects," which may lead to neurosis. The

The ego develops a defense in order to protect itself against being overcome by unconscious demands such as sex and aggression. The work of the psychoanalyst is to get the person to become conscious of their instinctual urges, which may involve isolating the pain experienced when they were originally confronted by an unsatisfied impulse.