Quotes About Psychology

Human beings are powered by emotion, not by reason Study after study has proven that if the emotion centers of our brain are damaged in some way, we don't just lose the ability to laugh or cry, we lose the ability to make decisions.

Such a hope, such a psychology of expectation, fused the California experience irretrievably onto a dream of better days: of a sudden, almost magical, transformation of the ordinary. Ironically, such an expectation was also reprising the dreams of the Spanish conquistadores, explorers, and maritime adventurers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish quest for El Dorado was now being Americanized with its psychological and mythic hold as powerful as ever.

Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

In the case of Ellen West], whatever chance the woman might have had to grow and to express herself will now have vanished. For her obsession with her body is, fundamentally, an expression of violence towards her soul.

When I became older and read about Hitler's personal psychology, it became obvious that he was driven to seek superiority because of his inner sense of inferiority.

Carl Jung, who talked about the "collective unconscious," but many others have developed similar ideas. The concept is that a group of people—even humanity as a whole—develop a collective state of consciousness that affects all people who are part of the group.

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

Animal models have shown that prolonged stress suppresses neurogenesis in the hippocampus, the organ that plays such an important role in memory and where we want to be upregulating the production of new connections.

people with a diagnosis of generalised anxiety disorder tend to have a larger amygdala, which is linked to paying greater attention to threatening or fearful stimuli.

How could a real person kill an imaginary animal?

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

They're laughing because they're mad, too mad to be able to tell what's funny any more. The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what's funny is one of them.

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.

Turkle refers to studies showing that, when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in their peripheral vision changes both what they talk about and their degree of connectedness.

When guilty shame wears a mask of curiosity, men are turned inside out, becoming strangers to themselves.

If a man believed he was Hitler, did you send him to the barber for a short back and sides? – 'Teething Problems

It doesn't matter how old you are, what level of schooling you've had or where you live—stalking is innate to the female psyche. We've all been there.

Because some adopted kids do. They feel like their mothers—because it's always the mothers, since we were the ones who were pregnant—abandoned them. There's a theory that every adopted kid is traumatized because they were adopted.

I used to have nightmares about normal stuff – people chasing me or falling. But then about three years ago they started changing and becoming more…um…real? And harder to forget.

She knew what nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.

this integration [of the shadow]…leads to disobedience and disgust, but also to self-reliance, without which individuation is unthinkable.

I remember once over lunch, out of the blue my guru told me about the question posed by James Joyce: "When he and his daughter spoke the same language and said similar things, why did he become famous and yet his daughter was diagnosed schizophrenic?" Based on Dr. Carl Jung consultation of James Joyce & daughter Lucia.

La neurosis es siempre un sustituto de los sufrimientos verdaderos...

Everyone in your dreams is you.