Quotes About Psychology

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically … on children than the unlived life of the parent. —CARL JUNG

La psychanalyse et la sociologie ne prennent pas en compte l'oppression des femmes. Ne la prenant pas en compte, elles la reprennent nécessairement à leur compte : elles l'intègrent comme un donné.

L'échec de ses tentatives est dû à ce qu'elles ont toutes accepté la prétention exorbitante de la psychanalyse d'être, non pas un système d'interprétation de la subjectivité, mais la subjectivité même [...] Sous couvert d'introduire le matérialisme dans la subjectivité, on introduisait en fait l'ennemi dans la place, l'idéalisme dans l'histoire.

In the meantime, the works of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices.

Developmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as imperfect speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time.

According to Fred Dick, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, all the laboratories that have tried to find a language area have been successful in that they have indeed found dozens, even hundreds, of them.

Human nature...is more powerfully acted on through imagination and sentiments than through intellect and reason.

During my many years of interviewing murderous psychopaths, I have noted all of them have over-inflated egos.

They are narcissists, pumped full of self-esteem, but that self-esteem is always hanging by a thread and once pricked, their egos burst like a balloon.

As psychotherapist Dr Alice Miller says: 'the grandiose person is never really free. First, because he is so excessively dependent on admiration from others; and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions and achievements that can suddenly fail with far-reaching consequences.

Furthermore, in a new study reported in the journal Science, subjects who read Alice Munro stories—specifically, the collection Too Much Happiness—demonstrated sharper social and psychological insight than those who did not.

I suppose it's easier to kill people if you can pretend to yourself that they're not really people at all.

But does psychological sophistication override a sense that some actions are just plain bad? How much of human behaviour, in the end, can one understand?

If he had been a monster, I wouldn't have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I'm interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life's unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.

It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological maneuver. 216

If you pretend to feel a certain way, eventually you do feel that way.

If you pretend to feel a certain way, eventually you do feel that way. That has been a surprisingly pleasant lesson to learn in life.

To anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,' the man says, 'it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived when grief is experience in later life.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones.

it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.

He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.

As British writer Gordon Burn wrote in Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son (one of the very few good books written about serial killers),