Quotes About Psychology

LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.

The body is the unconscious mind.

Projection is the attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something. Projection is an unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.

Most people, by the time they are grown, have blocked so many feelings that they have lost touch with themselves in ways they do not even recognize.

Another problem with repressing bad feelings is that you thereby shut off the good feelings too! When you block yourself from pain, you block yourself from pleasure.

Severe trauma explodes the cohesion of consciousness.

Once the stage of psychological disintegration is reached, death is often not far away," John Leach writes in Survival Psychology. "[T]he ability people possess to die gently, and often suddenly, through no organic cause, is a very real one.

humans suffer from an endless number of emotional problems and challenges, most of these can be traced to early developmental and shock trauma that compromise the development of one or more of the five core capacities.

The coping strategies that initially helped us survive as children over the years become rigid beliefs about who we are and what the world is like. Our beliefs about ourselves and the world, together with the physiological patterns associated with these beliefs, crystallize into a familiar sense of who we are. This is what we come to view as our identity.

Affect dysregulation

ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD, a poster in the hospital

The skandhas present a complete picture of ego. According to Buddhist psychology, the ego is simply a collection of skandhas or heaps—but actually there is no such thing as ego. It is a brilliant work of art, a product of the intellect, which says, "Let's give all this a name. Let's call it 'I.

In February, the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.

And that's the whole point. The mind, Doctor. It's everything. If you think you have a pain in your arm and there's no physical reason for it, you don't hurt any less.

18. Schlegal was disappointed that the people he tortured always talked. What do you think were the motivations behind someone who talked and someone who didn't? If you were in a situation where someone was trying to get information from you, what would be the final straw to make you talk?

Man's habits change more rapidly than his instincts.

As market expert Jason Zweig puts it, "If we shopped for stocks the way we shop for socks, we'd be better off." We are wrong when we feel good about stocks having gone up, and we are wrong when we feel bad about stocks having gone down.

We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.

we live in a system, an ideology, and probably a wounded psychology that allow full feeling only sporadically. The system numbs us; it also depends on our numbness.

The mind of no man is a unit, but is a community of mental states that influence one another.

Promiscuous animals, by and large, have smaller brains, for relationship demands a good deal of processing power, and promiscuity is a denial of relationship. Monogamy, as many of us know, is costly and hard: it demands work, though the pay-off can be profound. The work is often emotional work: give and take; forgiveness and forbearance.

Why, no one is sane, straight along, year in & year out, & we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, & express themselves in various forms — fortunately harmless forms as a rule — but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while...

The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

...psycho-analysis — that is... confession without absolution.