Quotes About Psychology

This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth.

Parents, they'll screw you up every time.

Based on decades of observation, I propose that sudden high levels of praise always trigger an equal amount of inner self-loathing.

Yeah, parents will always fuck you up.

Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who used to be called insane are the picture of perfect mental health.

Even a killer needs to talk, to tell his life story, so bad he'll come and sit beside a grave or a rotting body and just blab, blab, blab at it for hours. Until he makes sense. Until the killer can convince himself with the story of his new reality. The reality that--he was right.

The mentalis, the corrugator, all those little muscles of the face, those are the first things you learn in art school anatomy. After that, you can tell a fake smile because the risorius and platysma muscles pull the lower lip down and out, squaring it and exposing the lower teeth. Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.

In the modern Oedipal story, it's the mother who kills the father and then takes the son.

Stabbing, Mitzi could write a book about. For example, why some killers kept stabbing for so long. Only the first thrust is intended to inflict pain. The subsequent twenty, thirty, forty stab wounds are to resolve the suffering.

Then because she thought it would make a good case study, I had Koro Syndrome, where you're convinced your penis is getting smaller and smaller and when it disappears, you'll die (Fabian, 1991; Tseng et al., 1992).

En la historia edípica moderna, es la madre la que mata al padre y se lleva al hijo. Y uno no se puede divorciar de su madre. Ni matarla.

We laugh so that we don't scream.

Or maybe," Miriam seethes, "men swim in a septic pool of bad ideas about tough guys and big dicks, and they float there, soaking in it, gulping down mouthfuls of that shit, and it gets inside them, infects them, makes their blood go black and sour. Fathers take their sons and shove their heads down under the water, too, just to make sure they all get a taste. Maybe men are fucking broken. You ever think that?

The thing worth noting with manipulators is, curiously, once you realize what they are, they become strikingly easy to manipulate. —

It is our own evil thoughts which madden us.

Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again.

Psychoanalysis and dianetics are, on the face of it, both absurd. People are what they are because of causes that go infinitely farther back than infancy of the mother's womb

At a more serious level, the desirability of aligning our actions with the more powerful laws of nature, society, and psychology, in order to lead a productive life, is a central theme in many works, particularly the ancient Chinese classic, Tao te Ching.

George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," Psychological Review 63, 81–97 (1956).

Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven't got mob psychology anymore. You can't have mob psychology when people don't give a damn what happens to a thing that's dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.

Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology.

any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology.

This kind of business (murder) required detachment. The trick was to do it almost casually, as you might flick on the radio, or swat a mosquito.

We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.