Quotes About Psychology

Freud—like all of us—was caught in. To melt oneself trustingly into the father, or the father-substitute, or even the Great Father in the sky, is to abandon the causa-sui project, the attempt to be father of oneself. And if you abandon that you are diminished, your destiny is no longer your own; you are the eternal child making your way in the world of the elders.

This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn't feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud's explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man's physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.

Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person's relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it.

the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.

Perhaps Becker's greatest achievement has been to create a science of evil. He has given us a new way to understand how we create surplus evil—warfare, ethnic cleansing, genocide.

If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people.

Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.

to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

C. J. Martes, healer and author, has helped clients in more than forty countries for nearly twenty years. In 2004 she developed Akashic Field Therapy (AFT), an integral method of quantum healing that helps individuals identify and then remove subconscious negative patterns and beliefs at the mental, physical, and spiritual level. Her work blends A-field (Akashic Field) Theory, Behavioral and Integral Psychology, Vibrational Medicine, and Western science.

Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.

Freud described eros as the life instinct, doing battle with thanatos, the death instinct.

It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives.

No history has a more lasting effect on our adult loves than the one we write with our primary caregivers.

Publicul românesc este dezorientat, sugestibil, capricios, înzestrat cu un gust dubios [...] orice carte lansat? pe pia??, bun? sau rea este un mare risc, o aventur? care, adesea, poate duce falimentul sau bog??ia. Psihologia publicului nostru nu cunoaÈ™te nicio lege în afara de legea capriciului

But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear.

Androgynous fashion, long hair, the Pill, a new interest in the inner psychological life - an unabashed sloppiness, if you will - really marks the sixties. It was when Britain went girlie. And what do girls do? Girls shop.

Androgynous fashion, long hair, the Pill, a new interest in the inner psychological life – an unabashed soppiness, if you will – really marks the sixties. It was when Britain went girlie. And what do girls do? Girls shop.

They've met a thousand liars and heard a million lies. Yours ain't gonna fly. They won't tell you that you're full of crap—they'll keep you talking, getting you to lie about a bunch of things, making notes in their head while you tell yourself that you're the most persuasive motherfucker on the planet. They want you to walk away thinking you got away with it, or so panicked you screw up in front of them.

But being manipulative isn't necessarily a mark of intelligence. I mean, have you ever met a child?" she asks rhetorically.

Two percent of the population is sociopathic. They just don't feel the way you or I do about others. If you come in contact with fifty people in a day, one of them is a sociopath.

I've learned that you never win a battle of wills with a crazy person because they don't even know there's a battle.

There are even genes that correlate with charisma. Some of them overcompensate for a lack of internal empathy. They make you feel like they care more than anyone else while you're nothing to them.

Neuroscientists say they can predict an action our mind has decided to take moments before our conscious mind has even decided what we think we're going to do. The function of consciousness, they argue, isn't to make decisions, but to rationalize them after the fact.

Theory of Mind to practical use—understanding how others see the world.