Psychology Quotes

The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity as an exhausted and run-down public institution, its building falling apart and its professional image tarnished.

~ Mike Jay

Instead of focusing on isolated objects and events, we can expand our fixed perspective and allow the deeper process (often taking the form of a mythic narrative of some sort) that is animating events to reveal itself. Instead of superimposing our limiting ideas and beliefs onto the waking dream, we can allow life to show its dreamlike nature to us.

~ Paul Levy

Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were locked up.

~ Mike Jay

To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad was a tiny fraction of today's and what we would now call mental disorders were often understood as religious ecstasies or diabolical possessions.

~ Mike Jay

The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognised immediately as a classic paranoid delusion. But in 1797 it was something that had never been encountered before, and would emerge as the baffling leitmotif of a case that was unprecedented in almost every imaginable way.

~ Mike Jay

As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long known in popular slang as Bedlam. The principal public asylum in London, it had accepted dangerous and insane paupers as 'objects of charity' for centuries, and was proud of the claim that it had never turned anyone away.

~ Mike Jay

Matthews' shout of treason in the House was no random outburst of lunacy, but the last act in an astonishing adventure: one that might indeed have changed the history of Europe. But by this point there was no-one left to confirm the truth of the story. Most of the witnesses were dead, and those who were alive were not interested in talking.

~ Mike Jay

At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a pauper of the south London parish of Camberwell. He had a wife and a young family. He appeared to be of unsound mind.

~ Mike Jay

The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.

~ Stefan Molyneux

RemedyYour medicine is in you, and you do not observe it. Your ailment is from yourself, and you do not register it.Hazrat Ali

~ Idries Shah

There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.

~ Neel Burton

...it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions—or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.

~ Oliver Burkeman

Create delusion. Establish doubt. Feed paranoia.

~ John Katzenbach

When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.

~ Idries Shah

Families that feel together, heal together.

~ Christina G. Hibbert Psy.d.

The stupidest man I ever met had a favourite saying. It was: 'What do you think I am, stupid, or something?

~ Idries Shah

But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

~ Oliver Burkeman

By nature, however, we are born ignorant. Therefore should we not try to learn? Some people produce more than the usual amount of androgens and therefore become excessively aggressive. Does that mean they should freely express violence? We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The apparently normal personality - the alter you view as the clientYou should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the real person, and the other personalities are less real. The client who comes to therapy is not the person; there are other personalities to meet and work

~ Alison Miller

Seven Rules Formulated for Teaching Arithmetic:1) Consider the situation the pupils faces.2) Consider the response you wish to connect with.3) Form the bond; do not expect it to come by miracle.4) Other things being equal, form no bond that will have to be broken.5) Other things being equal, do not form two or three bonds when one will serve.6) Other things being equal, form bonds in the way that they are required later to act.7) Favor, therefore, the situations which life itself will offer, and the responses which life itself will demand. (p. 101)

~ Edward Lee Thorndike

The person following is never in control, which she knows full well and which is exactly why she does it.

~ Sara Gruen

The unconscious is the true accumulation of your history. It can be accepted or rejected but it can't fundamentally be altered.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, these ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

~ Irvin D. Yalom

The commonest error of the gifted scholar, inexperienced in teaching, is to expect pupils to know what they have been told. But telling is not teaching. The expression of facts that are in one's mind is a natural impulse when one wishes others to know these facts, just as to cuddle and pat a sick child is a natural impulse. But telling a fact to a child may not cure his ignorance of it any more than patting him will cure his scarlet fever. (p. 61)

~ Edward Lee Thorndike

Of course present knowledge of psychology is nearer to zero than to complete perfection, and its applications to teaching must therefore be often incomplete, indefinite, and insecure. The application of psychology to teaching is more like that of botany and chemistry to farming than like that of physiology and pathology to medicine. Anyone of good sense can farm fairly well without science, and anyone of good sense can teach fairly well without knowing and applying psychology. Still, as the farmer with the knowledge of the applications of botany and chemistry to farming is, other things being equal, more successful than the farmer without it, so the teacher will, other things being equal, be the more successful who can apply psychology, the science of human nature, to the problems of the school. (pp. 9-10)

~ Edward Lee Thorndike

It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down.

~ Angus J.l. Menuge

Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself

~ Joost A.m. Meerloo

I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also see people, architecture and events laid out chronologically in the columns. When I think of the year 1805, I see Trafalgar, women in the clothes of that era, famous people who lived then, the building, etc. The sixth to tenth centuries are very green, the Middle Ages are dark with vibrant splashes of red and blue and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are brown with rich, lush colours in the furniture and clothing.

~ Claudia Hammond

The Air Loom had been constructed by the Jacobins in Paris around the time of their coup d'etat in 1793. Just as they had corrupted the ideals of the Enlightenment to their despotic ends, so had they corrupted Enlightenment science. The secret of its power was pneumatic chemistry, the science of the invisible elements known as 'airs' or 'gases,' which had been developed by some of the great geniuses who had inspired the revolution.

~ Mike Jay

When the intensity it takes to extricate one from a negative state is equal to or greater than the intensity that perpetuated the state, then the person can be freed of that state

~ I. Alan Appt

Many had suspected that the political disasters of the past few years had a hidden cause. The bloodiness of the French mob rule was something unnatural, with a pitiless and inhuman progression that had never been seen before.

~ Mike Jay

The inability of Darwinian psychology to account for human reasoning is devastating to its pretensions to be a science. The prestige of science depends on the application of highly advanced practical and theoretical reason. A 'science' that is incompatible with such reasoning is therefore at odds with the very essence of scientific activity.

~ Angus J.l. Menuge

I am an owl, bird of the night. I see everything. I know everything.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

~ Gabor Maté

The pioneer, the creator, the explorer is generally a single, lonely person rather than a group, struggling all alone with his inner conflicts, fears, defenses against arrogance and pride, even against paranoia. He has to be a courageous man, not afraid to stick his neck out, not afraid even to make mistakes, well aware that he is, as Polanyi has stressed, a kind of gambler who comes to tentative conclusions in the absence of facts and then spends some years trying to figure out if his hunch was correct. If he has any sense at all, he is of course scared of his own ideas, of his temerity, and is well aware that he is affirming what he cannot prove.

~ A.h. Maslow

After years of research, depth psychologists and others argue that each sex carries both the psychological and physical traits of the other. No man is purely masculine, just as there is no purely feminine woman. Jungian psychologists call the feminine characteristics of the male psyche the Anima; the female psyche's masculine characteristics they the Animus. Both the Animus and Anima develop in complex fashion as the personality grows to maturity. Neither men nor women can reach psychological maturity without integrating their respective contrasexual other. A man's female elements enhance his manhood, just as a woman's male aspects enhance her womanhood.

~ Douglas Gillette

The word 'choice' is a fraud while people choose only what they have been taught to choose.

~ Idries Shah

If there's more that you can do, then do it. If there's not more that you can do, then be content with what you're doing. But if there is despair, the despair can only be that you can do more. Because when you're doing as much as you can do, you will not feel despair. Because despair is the gap between what you could be doing and what you are doing.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Excerpt from The Strength in KnowingDoubt is the archenemy of the purity of thought and it inhibits theessence of all that is

~ I. Alan Appt

The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured

~ Idries Shah