Quotes About Psychology

In Uncommon Therapy, Jay Haley

Conscience is the internal perception of the reaction of a particular wish operating within us

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.

The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.

Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences.

The poor ego… serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task. Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id.

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

No one believes in his own death.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

The creative writer acts no differently from the child at play: he creates a fantasy world, which he takes very seriously; that is to say, he invests large amounts of emotion in it, while marking it off sharply from reality.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is What does a woman want

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.