Quotes About Psychology

In other words, the regressed individual either defers to authority or acts out a critical, parental role, neither of which represents a genuine adult response.

They may alternate between an extremely dependent posture on one hand, and an authoritarian stance when they are in the parental mode.

Bateson (1972) describes the prepsychotic child as growing up "unskilled in determining what people really mean and unskilled in expressing what he really means, which is essential for normal relationships." He suggests that this situation occurs in normal relationships as well. When a person is caught in a double-bind situation, he will respond defensively in a manner similar to the schizophrenic, though less intensely.

From my interaction with this man and my knowledge of Marilyn's childish manipulations, I knew that he had been provoked into accepting his wife's view of men and of himself as being angry and harsh. His boys were growing up to believe that because they were male, they, too, were mean and unfeeling.

As a result of the manipulations and distortions designed to protect the fantasy of her love, both children had been severely damaged in their capacity to feel or even think.

An honest, unloving father or mother will do far less damage to his or her child than a role-playing, "loving" parent. A rejecting and unloving parent will cause a child pain, but a dishonestly rejecting parent causes the child pain and makes him or her feel "crazy.

This type of parent causes the child to become unsure of the ability to think and perceive correctly and ultimately causes the son or daughter to develop symptoms of psychological illness.

Many children do not feel love for their parents either. After they have been damaged in their early years, they tend to have a self-centered, exploitive interest but no real feeling for their parents as people. Because their original affectionate feeling toward their parents was rejected, they become withholding and inward.

When children imagine themselves as one with their parent to protect against the feelings of hurt, pain, and rejection from that parent, they also incorporate the parental attitudes and behaviors that are causing them distress. In this manifestation of the fantasy bond, children parent themselves in the same destructive ways their parents did.

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality

the tension introduced by covering up the absence of love further injures the child. Because they cannot bear to know that they are rejecting of their children, many parents systematically cut off the children's opportunity to develop and cure themselves of their pain.

interpersonal trauma subtype

Rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brain, the drugs creat them.

Once you the forces that govern behavior,it's harder to blame the behaver

It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better. This hypothesis was tossed out during the mid-1970s by both Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers.

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.

emotions are just evolution's executioners.

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

An interesting question these psychologists tend not to ask is why the muscle metaphor is apt. In other words, why is it that early successes at self-discipline lead to more successes, whereas early lapses lead to more lapses? If self-discipline is really good for the organism, you wouldn't expect natural selection to make it so easy for a few early lapses to destroy self-discipline. Yet there's no denying that a few injections of heroin can be the end of a productive life. Why?

I" act differently when in different "moods

Brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system.

accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.