Quotes About Psychology

If someone frankly asks for reassurance and gets it, that is an operation. If someone asks for reassurance, and after it is given turns it in some way to the disadvantage of the giver, that is a game.

A game looks like a set of operations, but after the payoff it becomes apparent that these operations were really maneuvers; not honest requests but moves in the game.

Freud knew the answers. If you don't understand something about sex, don't say it's awful or mysterious. Look it up in Freud.

Despair is a concern of the Adult, while in depression it is the Child who has the executive power.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Laughter is the only sane response to pathological lying.

The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent.

How can a person brim over with life energy and big plans one moment and feel suicidal the next? She can cycle exactly that way because of the god-bug syndrome.

Eric R. Kandel

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Dreams - A microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

Centroversion persistently strives to ensure that the ego shall not remain an organ of the unconscious, but shall become more and more the representative of wholeness. That is to say, the ego fights against the unconscious tendency that seeks to master it, and instead of allowing itself to be possessed, learns to keep its independence in relation to both inside and outside.

The fabric of archetypal canon which used to support the average man has given way... [p. 439]

The fact that they have failed to rescue and redeem the feminine side of themselves is often expressed psychologically in an intensive preoccupation with universals to the exclusion of the personal, human element.

The more acute the systemization of consciousness is, the more sharply it constellates the contents of the unconscious.

Affective reactions resulting from fascination are dangerous; they amount to an invasion by the unconscious.

In these circumstances, when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the group, the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.

Thus, on the primitive level, conscious realization is called eating. When we talk of the conscious mind "assimilating" an unconscious content, we are not saying much more than is implied in the symbol of eating and digesting.