Quotes About Psychology

Aggression often masks a desire to seduce – I'd read that in Boris Cyrulnik, and Boris Cyrulnik isn't fucking around.

cada vez que pensamos demasiado en el pasado, que volvemos una y otra vez sobre un episodio doloroso, y el psicoanálisis se reduce a poco más que eso, incrementamos las posibilidades de reproducirlo.

Freud debería haber optado al premio Nobel, pero de Literatura

Psychotherapist," I corrected. "We do the same thing as shrinks, but we use smaller words and keep our egos in check.

We bury what we don't want to know. And sometimes it comes out in odd ways

Fear of the dark. Until I came here, I thought that was for children; that you grew out of it. But it never really goes away. It's always there underneath. The oldest fear of all.

Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind.

The puzzle for psychology is how people maintain views of the world that are contrary to the evidence. Why, for example, is the USA both a powerhouse of science and scientific discovery, while at the same time it demonstrates a rapid growth in fundamentalist religious sects that deny or distort the very evidence that science presents?

All serial killers fixate in the latency phase, although they will also fixate in one or more of the other psychosexual phases. They always feel like outsiders.

the father figure was perhaps physically, and definitely emotionally, absent when the boy was in his latency phase. As a boy, therefore, the serial killer had no positive father figure with whom to identify.

Because of the fact that they failed in their socialisation process, serial killers treat their victims as mere objects that exist for the gratification of their own needs. They show no empathy for the victim.

It is my job as an investigative psychologist to try to decipher the serial killer's particular fantasy from his crime scene. The fantasy will point to the fixation which will give us a key to understanding the killer we are investigating. The better we understand him, the more likely we are to catch him.

Simons admitted to being sodomised as a young boy, during which he was the passive victim. The only way he could master this abuse was by repeating it, and by identifying with his tormentor by becoming the active aggressor. He reversed the passive-active roles.

Simons selected a victim just like himself, namely a Coloured schoolboy between the ages of eight to fourteen. Symbolically he committed suicide when he killed that boy, for he was killing himself.

he did not want to resist the urge to kill again after his bail hearing. This is common in serial killers. Not even the fact that they have been arrested and identified, nor the threat of a prison sentence, will prevent them from killing again and again.

Serial killers do not belong, not to anyone.

Another South African serial killer who fixated in the Oedipus phase was the Cape Town Prostitute Killer. He had, however, lost the battle for his mother's affection and felt mentally castrated by her rejection and her preference for other men.

Stewart Wilken is an example of a serial killer who fixated during the oral phase. He was abandoned, and as a result deprived of being breastfed by his mother. His basic needs as an infant regarding hunger and security were grossly neglected. The oral fixation manifested already as a toddler when he bit anyone who angered him, including his adoptive mother. This is a example of oral sadism.

He had two types of victim. The prostitutes resembled the women who had rejected him and he acted out his agony and anger in a symbolic manner on these victims. The boys represented himself and, like Simons, he acted out his suffering directly on these victims.

By sodomising the boys, Wilken fell into the typical pattern of passive-active role reversal by identifying with the aggressor and selecting a victim like himself. When he sodomised and strangled 12-year-old Henry Bakers he even told Henry that he was going to do to him what was done to himself when he was a child of Henry's age.

Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls.

Since Wilken was never able to master the trauma in his life, he is still caught up in the compulsion to repeat it,

to become a serial killer, a person must have fixated in one or more of the psychosexual developmental phases, which caused a fantasy to evolve in the subconscious.

Why can't serial killers take turns? Why do they have to come at us three or four at a time?