Quotes About Psychology

Infantile prehistory does not remain inert in the adult. Rather, infantile prehistory is perpetually re-created by the adult's current attitudes.

In all identification, elements of sadomasochism are present.

One finds societies which do not have an Oedipus complex (cf. Malinowski). The Oedipus complex might be an 'institutiton' tied to the structure of our society.

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.

Traumatic experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a 'dated' moment; it is of its essence to survive only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality.

As an advent of the impersonal, repression is a universal phenomenon.

Melanie Klein had distinguished the concept of ambivalence from that of ambiguity. Ambivalence is where the subject makes two alternative images for the same being; alternatives that are not seen as representing the same object. Ambiguity is an adult concept. The subject perceives two images, but he knows that they apply to the same object.

In psychology, we cannot dispense with the need for an appeal to lived experience, and it is clear that Piaget's schema does not respond to the experience of the subject.

The social is at the interior of the individual and the individual is at the interior of the social, since the past individual is himself interpsychologic from birth...There is no competition between psychology and interpsychology...All is social and all is individual.

The movement of this Work is psychologically inwards, at first. Later it is both inwards and outwards.

Ich muß gestehen, daß ich zuerst den Eindruck hatte, unter Verrückte gefallen zu sein.

you don't have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn't about killing or even hurting the other guy, it's about scaring him enough to call it a day.

Fear sells.

Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.

All the seemingly positive valuations and judgments of ressentiment are hidden devaluations and negations.

Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.

The difference between mad people and sane people . . . is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.

Experimental and clinical psychologists have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an "actual" experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed with Psycho-Cybernetics!

If he feels bad because he is inferior, the cure is to make himself as good as everybody else, and the way to feel really good is to make himself superior. This striving for superiority gets him into more trouble, causes more frustration, and sometimes brings about a neurosis where none existed before. He becomes more miserable than ever, and "the harder he tries," the more miserable he becomes.

I must repeat: Psycho-Cybernetics does not say that man is a machine. Rather, it says that man has a machine that he uses.

The underlying emotional problem has the same common denominator in every patient. This common denominator is that the patient has forgotten how, or probably never learned how, to control his present thinking to produce enjoyment.

psychologist Daniel W. Josselyn wrote in his book Why Be Tired?: