Quotes from Tom Butler-Bowdon

The ego continually endeavors to create harmony between itself, the unconscious, and the outside world, but this does not always lead to perfect mental health. In fact, sometimes when the ego "wins" the person as a whole may have lost, since the win may involve the creation of a defense in order to have the ego maintain its sense of itself at all costs.

The ego is always alert to the dangers that the unconscious may over-throw it. It may try to intellectualize away unconscious urges, inhibit them, project them onto others, or deny them. Freud

Instead of trying to find out what goes on inside a person's head ("mentalism"), to know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way. Our

When a natural instinct surfaces, the ego wants to have it satisfied, but the superego does not allow that. The ego submits to the "higher" superego, but is left with the problem. It begins a struggle with the impulse and, to reduce the pain of not satisfying it, engineers a defense that allows itself to make sense of its decision to submit.

The behavioral doctrine was that human beings were motivated according to their primary drives of hunger, thirst, elimination, pain, and sex. Other

In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow's legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults.

In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow's legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults. Remarkably, this sort of touching went against the child-rearing views of the time.

as R. D. Laing showed in his landmark work on schizophrenia, some people lack this basic security and attempt to replace the vacuum with false selves. Most of the time we take it for granted, but it is only when it is lost that we can fully appreciate our brain's ability to create the feeling of selfpossession, or be comfortable with who we are.

Psychology is the science of mental life." William James

Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head. Between

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.

The superego, Freud wrote, is the "mischief maker which prevents the ego's coming to a friendly understanding with the instincts." It

It emerged from two other disciplines, physiology and philosophy. German Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is seen as the father of psychology because he insisted it should be a separate discipline, more empirical than philosophy and more focused on the mind than physiology. In the 1870s he created the first experimental psychology laboratory, and wrote his huge work Principles of Physiological Psychology.

While this example involved projecting instincts onto the world, Freud argued that this is a comparatively healthy form of defense. A more powerful and often more damaging defense is repression, because it requires the most energy to keep it in place.

Explanations of thoughts as the product of some deeper force such as the soul, he felt, were really the realm of metaphysics.

we change the course of our actions according to what we learn is good for our survival. If

The girl's envy and jealousy were transformed into unselfishness and thoughtfulness for others. Though

Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By changing our thinking, we can alleviate depression or simply have greater control over our behavior.

A more recent development in the cognitive field is "positive psychology," which has sought to reorient the discipline away from mental problems to the study of what makes people happy, optimistic, and productive.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By

11 Jerome Bruner Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture (1990) A founder of cognitive psychology argues for a model of the mind based on the creation of meaning rather than computational processing.

Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick." Steven Pinker

The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy." Alfred Adler