Quotes About Psychology

The human animal needs meaning as well as food and air and sex and water. The sense that life is meaningless is at the root of a great deal of depression, aggression, and addiction, which can only be addressed by a restoration of the sense that life is meaning-full.

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!

An original and explosive book. It starts out by making psychology, the science of the mind, what's it actually is—as exciting and suspenseful as a good mystery story. —George B. Leonard

including Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and popularizers such as Archibald Alison, elaborating on sensibility and sympathy as the most important aspects of human psychology. These products of what Henry May calls the Didactic Enlightenment were enormously influential in America. They were heavily represented in the curricula of American colleges, and their ideas influenced everything from the Declaration of Independence to the practice and theory of all of the fine arts.

I guess what I'm saying is that people who don't have nightmares don't have dreams.

He was explaining the six universal human needs: certainty, variety, love, significance, growth, and contribution.

Genetic research shows that the medical model is all wrong when it comes to psychological problems.

In summary, parents matter, schools matter and life experiences matter, but they don't make a difference in shaping who we are. DNA is the only thing that makes a substantial systematic difference, accounting for 50 per cent of the variance in psychological traits. The rest comes down to chance environmental experiences that do not have long-term effects.

What a waste to attempt to change behavior without truly understanding the driving needs that cause such behavior!

We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.

A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge - that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she might be.

Denial is apt to be quicker than the truth, and so are well-rehearsed lies.

In other words, when the need for reciprocity was aroused, it didn't matter whether they liked him or not. They "owed," and so they paid. Reciprocity can be a dictatorial force, and it can come in many shapes and sizes.3

The human brain is wired to see relationships, not detached elements. The artist Heinz Kusel, who taught color theory for twenty years, explained: "Color by itself doesn't exist. All that we see as color is created by relationships-what the color is next to, what surrounds it. A name for a color is absurd, because its appearance is constantly changing as a result of its environment. There are no fixed colors. In a different context it's changed completely."2

The great source of terror in infancy is solitude. William James (1890)

In a sense, they had committed emotional suicide in order to protect themselves from the painful truth of their experiences.

Many existential thinkers hypothesize that the fear of death is greater in people who do not live up to their potential than in those who fulfill themselves (Yalom, 1980). This thesis leads to the conclusion that therapeutic interventions which free patients from their repressions, so that they will be better able to actualize themselves, will also reduce their fears about dying.

Most of us reject or manipulate our environments to avoid any emotional interaction that would contradict our early conception of reality, and this fact of human nature may be the single most delimiting factor for all psychotherapies

As I got to know him, I learned that Paul had a continuous "tape" playing in his head that degraded everything. He once described this process as, "…it's like a demon sits on my shoulder and continually ridicules me.

The patient creates a negative picture of people to support deep feelings of basic mistrust. In losing empathy and feeling for others, one no longer feels compassion toward oneself. This condition arouses a profound sense of existential guilt that only adds to the feelings of self-hatred and isolation. Loss

Emotional deprivation is at the core of neurotic addiction and abnormal dependency.

Regression is defined here as a psychological retreat to a prior stage of development in order to reduce fear and foster an illusion of security.

Parents in their dishonesty manipulate their children and hide their real feelings, and of course their children learn early to manipulate back.