Quotes About Psychology

People were startled to hear that if we don't go to the spirit, the spirit comes to us as neurosis. This is the immediate, practical connection between psychology and religion in our time.

You must understand that when you approach the unconscious you are dealing with one the most powerful and autonomous forces in human experience.

The ego and the shadow come from the same source and exactly balance each other. To make light is to make shadow; one cannot exist without the other.

If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entree into life, remove your shadow from them. To give them a clean heritage, psychologically speaking is the greatest legacy. And, incidentally, you will go far in your own development by taking your shadow back into our private psychological structure— where it first originated and where it is required for your own wholeness.

Marriage is a very different experience for a man than for a woman. The man is adding to his stature; his world is getting stronger, and he has risen in stature and position. He generally does not understand that he is killing the Psyche in his new wife, and that he

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

People ignore the quantum maybe because they have largely never heard of quantum logic or Transactional Psychology, but they also ignore it because traditional politics and religion have conditioned people for millenniums — and still train them today — to act with intolerance and premature certainty.

Against all this mechanized barbarism, existentialist psychology and humanist psychology — aided, perhaps not coincidentally, by the metaphors of quantum physics — suggests that other models of human existence are possible and thinkable and desirable.

It is a well-known idea, not just among mystics, but among modern psychologists, that the sad person lives in a sad world, the angry person in an angry world, etc. Then the sad person reads sad books and the angry person reads angry books? Even if those books seem funny and optimistic, say, to other readers?

TRANSACTION: used here in the sense of Transactional Psychology, which holds that perception is not passive re-action but active, creative trans-action, and that the observer and the observed must be considered a synergetic whole.

As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the Thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again.

In fact, the emphasis on choice and creativity in existentialist-humanist psychology has an exact parallel in the two-hole experiment. Many physicists think the best metaphor to describe that experiment is to say that we create the wave or particle depending on which experimental set-up we choose.

Which column implies the medieval Aristotelian metaphysics (the essence theory) and which implies modern neurology and psychology (perception as the judgmental ACT of a perceiver)?

To the Transactional psychologist, quantum mechanics has the same fascination (and the same resemblance to brain science) as cryptozoology, lepufology and Disinformation Systems, and all these fields, the scientifically sober and the disreputably weird, bear a distinct family resemblance to each other.

What I call Idols are projections of these inner compulsions of human psychology. When an Idol speaks (through its priests) it only says what the Faithful want to hear.

Please remember that we deal always with probabilities, not certitudes, and you will not get too flustered as we proceed to the next twist in Quantum Psychology's kinky yellow brick road.

Those who take a Dominant imprint in this system seek power all their lives; those with a Submissive imprint seek Dominant types to lead them (the Reichian Fuhrerprinzip) and most people settle somewhere between these extremes, taking a masochist stance toward those above them (government, landlords etc.) and a sadist stance toward selected victims defined as below them (wives, children, inferior races, people on Welfare, etc.).

Again: I call this book Quantum Psychology rather than Quantum Philosophy because understanding and internalizing (learning to use) these principles can decrease dogma, intolerance, compulsive behavior, hostility, etc., and also may increase openness, continuous learning, growth and empathy — sombunall of which represent goals sought in most forms of psychotherapy, and sombunall forms of mystic religion.

Conversely, shrinking the body and muttering (or becoming totally silent) make up the usual Submission reflex. Crawling away with its tail between its legs, the dog's submission reflex, does not differ much from the body-language of an employee who made the mistake of disagreeing with the boss and received a Dominator (flexing/howling) signal in response.

Rejection of science and free discussion are, of course, characteristic of all totalitarian movements; thus, nonbiblical astronomy was heretical to the Inquisition, unpalatable anthropology was Jewish to the Nazis, unsatisfactory biology was banned as bourgeois in Stalin's Russia and irritating ethology is sexist (and unpleasant psychology is chauvinist) to these ladies.

2. Due to state-specific information, as discussed earlier, when you have one of these selves predominant, you forget the other selves to a surprising extent and act as if the brain only had access to the information banks of the presently predominant self. E.g., when frightened into infantile Oral states, you may actually think I am always a weakling, quite forgetting the times when your Anal Dominator self was in charge, or the Semantic or Sexual imprints were governing the brain, etc.

But, if we have a variety of potential selves rather than the one block-like essential self of Aristotelian philosophy, and, if each self acts as an observer who creates a reality-tunnel which appears as a whole universe (to those unaware of Transactional and Quantum Psychology), then: Each time an internal or external trigger causes us to quantum jump from one self' to another, the whole world around us appears to change also.

Milton said once, poetically, that whoever murders a book, murders a man. Psychologists would mostly agree that that is symbolically true. Destroying a book, like the psychotic behavior of slashing a photograph, expresses rage at the person who wrote the book or the person in the photo. One cannot help wondering, at this point, about those who burned the books of Dr. Reich or conspired to suppress the books of Dr. Velikovsky.

This parallelism between physics and psychology should occasion no great surprise. The human nervous system, after all — the mind in pre-scientific language — created modern science, including physics and quantum mathematics. One should expect to find the genius, and the defects, of the human mind in its creations, as one always finds the autobiography of the artist in the art-work.