Quotes About Psychology

Shaming people into being virtuous doesn't change behaviour.

Laughter is a Trojan horse to enter into direct contact with the unconscious, strike the imagination, and trigger visceral reactions.

When you're watching Psycho, there' s that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.

The purpose of inquiring about people's parents isn't to join them in blaming, judging, or criticizing their parents. In fact, it's not about their parents at all. It's solely about understanding how their early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits).

O terapeuta explicou que, com frequência, diferentes partes do nosso íntimo querem coisas distintas, e se silenciamos as partes que consideramos inaceitáveis, elas encontrarão outras maneiras de se fazerem escutar.

Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death.

Your feelings don't have to mesh with what you think they should be," he explained.

As Andrew Solomon wrote in The Noonday Demon: "The opposite of depression isn't happiness, but vitality.

There's a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for "rejoice").

Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.

Insight is the booby prize of therapy" is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't change when you're out in the world, the insight—and the therapy—is worthless

Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous systems and help them stay present.

Sometimes people can't identify their feelings because they were talked out of them as children.

Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind. Whereas Freud interpreted dreams on the object level, meaning how the content of the dream related to the dreamer in real life (the cast of characters, the specific situations), in Jungian psychology, dreams are interpreted on the subject level, meaning how they relate to common themes in our collective unconscious.

It's no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.

Projective identification is like tossing a hot potato to the other person. The man no longer has to feel his anger, since it's now living inside his partner.

Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, "like doing therapy with a condom on.

not that she's hiding her feelings; it's that she can't access them. There's a word for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for "rejoice").

The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they'll find other ways to be heard.

Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If

alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present

flight to health is a phenomenon in which patients convince themselves that they're suddenly over their issues because, unbeknownst to them, they can't tolerate the anxiety that working through these issues is bringing up.