Quotes About Psychology

We all marry our unfinished business. We all marry our mothers and fathers. And in our closest relationships, we become our mothers and fathers.

I'm a couples therapist specializing in male psychology, gender issues, trauma, and power.

And the more trauma you sustained as a child, the more compelling you and me becomes.

But most of us do not reenact the experience of the trauma itself. Instead, we act out the coping strategy that we evolved to deal with it.

Pia Mellody, spoke of the Adaptive Child as a "kid in grown-up's clothing." The Adaptive Child is a child's version of an adult, the you that you cobbled together in the absence of healthy parenting. Here's a chart detailing the traits of the Adaptive Child, as distinct from the Wise Adult.

Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into "better than" grandiosity nor "less than" shame. But the essence of psychological patriarchy is the nonexistence of such middle ground.

making a child into the family hero—the light all others depend upon—is a form of trauma.

The flight from shame into grandiosity lies at the heart of male covert depression.

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.

you may seek out a partner who psychologically resembles your mother and found that you have walked right back into a difficult relationship. Perhapse you chose to be close to someone who turns out to be as volatile as your mother and who inflicts discomfort all too familiar to you. Or perhaps gradually, over time, your partner or close friend becomes like your mother; that may be because you unconsciously behave in ways that encourage others to treat you as your mother did.

The first glass is a sedative, the second a psychologist, the third glass an excuse, and the fourth a lobotomy.

Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out. . . . No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.

Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?

Nature soaks every evil with either fear or shame.

She knew from her own experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound.

If mention of degrees is necessary to establish someone's credentials, the preferred form is to avoid an abbreviation and use instead a phrase such as: John Jones, who has a doctorate in psychology.

This calls for a very special plan of psychology and extreme violence

The intersection of multiple forms of oppression complicates the experience of trauma and the trauma recovery process (Holzman, 1996).

He who licks his wounds cannot be affectionate

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

Psychoanalysis, it seems, does wonders for a man's prose style: it renders it labyrinthine without subtlety.) There is no place, then, for human agency, except the kind that leads you to talk about yourself in the presence of another for twenty years. Shallowness can go no deeper.

Pauperism is above all a psychological, not an economic, condition.

The Real Me may actually have no obvious connection to the Me as it acts in the world and appears to others. It is a secret and beautiful garden only accessible only by means of psychology