Quotes on Psychology

..the average child in our society generally prefers a safe, orderly, predictable, organized world, which he can count on, and in which unexpected, unmanageable or other dangerous things do not happen, and in which, in any case, he has all-powerful parents who protect and shield him from harm.

The concepts of individuation and belonging have been portrayed as inherently adversarial. Typpically, the belief is that one is attainable only at the expense of the other. [...] Individuating is not an escape from belonging. Belonging need not be an engulfing, confining, or restricting experience. We believe that it's possible to intergrate these processes. In other words, we think of individuation and belonging as complementary in nature. You cannot truly belong unless you can detach. Individuation and belonging represent a natural dialectic. The more connected you are, the freer you are to venture out and find yourself. The more secure you feel as an individual, the freer you are to be involved in relationships with others, to belong without fear of engulfment or enslavement.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

It is just the ones who have loved and been well loved, and who have had many deep friendships who can hold out against hatred, rejection or persecution.

Rather than living our lives ourselves, we are lived by unknown and uncontrollable forces.

The child needs an organized world rather than an unorganized or unstructured one.

I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over.

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.

.. [there are] people who, according to the best data available, have been starved for love in the earliest months of their lives and have simply lost forever the desire and the ability to give and to receive affection.

One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.

Love and affection, as well as their possible expression in sexuality, are generally looked upon
with ambivalence and are customarily hedged about with many restrictions and inhibitions.

A want that is satisfied is no longer a want. The organism is dominated and its behavior organized only by unsatisfied needs. If hunger is satisfied, it becomes unimportant in the current dynamics of the individual.

The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive- obsessives try frantically to order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.

Our social pattern is such that the successful man is not supposed to be afraid or bored or lonely. He must find this world the best of all worlds; in order to have the best chance for promotion he must repress fear as well as doubt, depression, boredom, or hopelessness.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision making which replace the principles of instincts. he has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another anger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

What a man can be, he must be.

Other broader aspects of the attempt to seek safety and stability in the world are seen in the very common preference for familiar rather than unfamiliar things, or for the known rather than the unknown. The tendency to have some religion or world-philosophy that organizes the universe and the men in it into some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole is also in part motivated by safety-seeking. Here too we may list science and philosophy in general as partially motivated by the safety needs....

Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

Script analysis is then the answer to the problem of human destiny, and tells us (alas!) that our fates are predetermined for the most part, and that free will in this respect is for most people an illusion.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

...parental outbursts of rage or threats of punishment directed to the child, calling him names, speaking to him harshly, shaking him, handling him roughly, or actual physical punishment sometimes elicit such total panic and terror in the child that we must assume more is involved than the physical pain alone.

... we may say of the receptors, the effectors, of the intellect and the other capacities that they are primarily safety-seeking tools.

Injustice, unfairness, or inconsistency in the parents seems to make a child feel anxious and unsafe.

The whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought are bound to make you into opponents of psychoanalysis.

...love is not synonymous with sex. Sex may be studied as a purely physiological need. Ordinarily sexual behavior is multi-determined, that is to say, determined not only by sexual but also by other needs, chief among which are the love and affection needs. Also not to be overlooked is the fact that
the love needs involve both giving and receiving love.

A sane society is that which corresponds to the needs of man — not necessarily to what he feels to be his needs, because even the most pathological aims can be felt subjectively as that which the person wants most; but to what his needs are objectively, as they can be ascertained by the study of man. It is our first task then, to ascertain what is the nature of man, and what are the needs which stem from this nature.

When the rules are more important than people, destructiveness is inevitable.

Another peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change. For our chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defined very simply as a place where there is plenty of food.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.