Quotes About Psychology

every psychic defence mechanism known to the modern psychologist makes its appearance somewhere in Shakespeare.

Self-esteem is a concept that belongs to the psychology of the Real Me. The Real Me, of course, is someone who is inherently good and admirable: Man being by nature good, inside every bad man there's a good one trying to get out, obstructed, alas, by such phenomena as low self-esteem.

Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud said they were, but if so it is a road that I don't want to go down.

Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last thirty years, namely scaring and shaming people.... I am questioning whether you can go on doing that indefinitely ... [pushing] that same fear-guilt button over and over again. As psychologists will tell you, when a client comes in with an addiction, they are already ashamed. You don't shame them further.

Through the Adult the little person can begin to tell the difference between life as it was taught and demonstrated to him (Parent), life as he felt it or wished it or fantasied it (Child), and life as he figures it out by himself (Adult).

Parent is not the same as mother or father, Adult means something quite different from a grownup, and Child is not the same as a little person.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Questions about God's existence, self disclosure, saving action and almighty power reminded me of my inadequacies. For me the theo in theology had become little more than a question mark. I could confidently discuss philosophy, psychology and social change, but God made me uneasy.

The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts:

A person usually has two reasons for doing something, a good reason and the real reason.

The Moral Sense Test developed by Harvard psychologists in 2003 can be found online at: moral.wjh.harvard.edu

Laughter is just a slowed down scream of terror.

'Gone Girl' is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife.

Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'

I needed a check-up from the neck up.

Evil or manipulative people don't need a book, they just do it anyway.

Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

All of my writing career is about how human beings negotiate dark matter.

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

The great thing about scenes that involve nervous breakdowns - in the little experience I have doing them - is that there's no way to craft it. You just have to do it, and it sort of crafts itself in just being incredibly messy.

A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping.

National isolation breeds national neurosis.

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.