50 Psychology Classics Quotes

In short, every child develops in ways that best allow them to compensate for weakness; “a thousand talents and capabilities arise from our feelings of inadequacy,” Adler noted.

Growing into an environment in which everyone else seems bigger and more powerful, every child seeks to gain what they need by the easiest route.

Unlike other animals we are aware of our instincts, and as a result may attempt to shape or control them.

Character” is the unique interplay between two opposing forces: a need for power, or personal aggrandizement; and a need for “social feeling” and togetherness (in German, Gemeinschaftsgefühl).

most of us can literally “choose” to be happy, if we understand the mind’s thought–emotion mechanism.

A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority.

If you have ever talked about having an “identity crisis” you have psychologist Erik Erikson to thank for inventing the term. Erikson

Unpleasant feelings merely indicate that you are thinking something negative and believing it. Your

Truly creative people work for work’s own sake, and if they make a public discovery or become famous that is a bonus. What

This idea originated with psychologist Carl Rogers (see p 238), who taught that nonjudgmental listening and acceptance of another person’s feelings create rapport. Applied

Between the stimulation received from the environment and our response, certain processes had to occur inside the brain, and cognitive researchers revealed the human mind to be a great interpreting machine that made patterns and created sense of the world outside, forming maps of reality.

Beck’s three principles of cognitive therapy were: All our emotions are generated by our “cognitions,” or thoughts. How we feel at any given moment is due to what we are thinking about. Depression is the constant thinking of negative thoughts. The majority of negative thoughts that cause us emotional turmoil are plain wrong or at least distortions of the truth, but we accept them without question.

Neo-Freudian Karen Horney believed that childhood experiences resulted in our creation of a self that “moved toward people” or “moved away from people.” These tendencies were a sort of mask that could develop into neurosis if we were not willing to move beyond them. Underneath was what she called a “wholehearted,” or real, person.

To some extent this area was foreshadowed by pioneering humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote about the self-actualized or fulfilled person, and Carl Rogers, who once noted that he was pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about people.

Love has traditionally been the domain of poets, artists, and philosophers, but in the last 50 years the terrain of relationships has increasingly been mapped by psychologists.

He notes that it remains the cancer of the mental health world: We are close to finding a cure, but not close enough for those who do not respond quickly to drugs or therapy.

Her ego and id had fully lost the battle with her superego, and this was the only way they could be expressed.

A fork in the developmental path leads a child either to imitate adults in order to become more assertive and powerful themselves, or consciously to display weakness so as to get adult help and attention.

A desire for recognition emerges at the same time as a sense of inferiority. A good upbringing should be able to dissolve this sense of inferiority, and as a result the child will not develop an unbalanced need to win at the expense of others.

Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.

The study showed that even when the wire mother was the one lactating, the monkeys vastly preferred to be with and have physical contact with the soft-cloth mother.

They had no idea what was or wasn’t appropriate behavior, no concept of the usual give and take of normal relationships.

In the medical field, it is commonly assumed that the more information practitioners have, the better their decisions. However, this is frequently not so. More

The behavioral doctrine was that human beings were motivated according to their primary drives of hunger, thirst, elimination, pain, and sex. Other

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

For many years, psychology was surprisingly little interested in happiness.

William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature.

Psychology is the science of mental life.” William James

Douglas Stone and his colleagues give excellent advice on how to deal with some of the most challenging workplace encounters.

The common route to this knowledge is life experience,

Explanations of thoughts as the product of some deeper force such as the soul, he felt, were really the realm of metaphysics.

While we are pushed by drives, we are pulled by meaning, and

We do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in us creating psychological defenses.

While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her

The superego, Freud wrote, is the “mischief maker which prevents the ego’s coming to a friendly understanding with the instincts.” It

The girl’s envy and jealousy were transformed into unselfishness and thoughtfulness for others. Though

The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression. Even

Whatever he thought he was, it was painfully clear he was not.

All personalities can be measured according to two or three basic biologically determined dimensions.

was obviously in debt to Carl Jung’s distinction between introverts and extraverts, he

The source of extraversion or introversion was in the varying levels of excitability of the brain; the driver

of how upset, nervous, worried, anxious, or stressed we have a tendency to be.

Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick.” Steven Pinker

The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.” Alfred Adler

we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick. To

It is the feeling of inferiority, inadequacy and insecurity that determines the goal of an individual’s existence.

In short, every child develops in ways that best allow them to compensate for weakness;

When any of these forces gains the upper hand, it is usually because of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Yet

What drives them, more than rewards, is the desire to find or create order where there was none before.

Creative people take their intuition seriously, looking for patterns where others see confusion, and are able to make connections between discrete areas of knowledge.

Only 10 percent were middle class. The

We are happiest when we are being creative because we lose our sense of self and get the feeling that we are part of something greater. We

We are actually programmed to get satisfaction and pleasure from discovery and creativity, he says, because its results lead to our survival as a species. New

While a complex may make someone more timid or withdrawn, it could equally produce the need to compensate for that in overachievement. This is the “pathological power drive,” expressed at the expense of other people and society generally. Adler identified Napoleon, a small man making a big impact on the world, as a classic case of an inferiority complex in action.

Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By

In the 1950s, American psychology was dominated by the behaviorists, whose endless experiments with lab rats aimed to show how easily the mammalian mind was shaped by its environment. Harlow

It is a myth that there is one “creative personality.” Something all creative people seem to share is complexity—they “tend to bring the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.

The ego is always alert to the dangers that the unconscious may over-throw it. It may try to intellectualize away unconscious urges, inhibit them, project them onto others, or deny them. Freud

Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head. Between

49 Wilhelm Wundt Principles of Physiological Psychology (1873–74) The book that made Wundt the dominant figure in the new science of psychology. Translated into English by Edward Titchener in 1904.

In 1960, for example, the Committee for Long Range Studies of the Brookings Institution prepared a report for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warning that even indirect contact—i.e., alien artifacts that might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the moon, Mars or Venus or via radio contact with an interstellar civilization—could cause severe psychological dislocations. The study cautioned that “Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.

Barry Schwartz’s distinction between maximizers and satisficers has given us the counterintuitive insight that restricting our choices in life can actually lead to greater happiness and satisfaction, and

If Adler’s theory of human action relates to power, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s brand of existential psychology, “logotherapy,” posits that the human species is uniquely made to seek meaning.

we still have a long way to go in terms of creating a rock-solid science that could match the certainty of, say, physics and biology. In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick.

Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack.

11 Jerome Bruner Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture (1990) A founder of cognitive psychology argues for a model of the mind based on the creation of meaning rather than computational processing.

A more recent development in the cognitive field is “positive psychology,” which has sought to reorient the discipline away from mental problems to the study of what makes people happy, optimistic, and productive.

Instead of trying to find out what goes on inside a person’s head (“mentalism”), to know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way. Our

In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults.

As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone’s dignity intact.

The term “defense” in relation to psychology was first used by Sigmund Freud in 1894. He meant it to describe, as Anna Freud said, “the ego’s struggle against painful or unendurable ideas or effects,” which may lead to neurosis. The

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s work with phantom limbs seems to confirm the brain’s remarkable ability to create a sense of cognitive unity even if the reality (of many selves, and of many layers of consciousness) is more complex.

Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses.

A central idea in Adlerian psychology is that individuals are always striving toward a goal. Whereas Freud saw us as driven by what was in our past, Adler had a teleological view—that we are driven by our goals, whether they are conscious or not. The

While this example involved projecting instincts onto the world, Freud argued that this is a comparatively healthy form of defense. A more powerful and often more damaging defense is repression, because it requires the most energy to keep it in place.

The remarkable writings of Oliver Sacks, for instance, show that the brain continually works to create and maintain the feeling of an “I” that is in control, even if there is in fact no part of the brain that can be identified as the locus of “self feeling.

Dimensions of Personality was Eysenck’s first book, and has a dry, academic style. However, in grounding for the first time in science the concept of introversion/extraversion, it laid the foundation for 50 years’ work in the field of personality difference.

Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses. Neo-Freudian

Melanie Klein focused on how a “schizoid” personality could develop as the result of an infant’s relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world.

Melanie Klein focused on how a “schizoid” personality could develop as the result of an infant’s relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world. Most

Frankl’s brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It

Harlow went so far as to suggest that perhaps the main function of nursing was to ensure frequent physical contact between baby and mother, since the loving bond seemed so vital for survival. After all, he noted, long after the actual sustenance stops, it is the bond that remains.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By changing our thinking, we can alleviate depression or simply have greater control over our behavior.

Though they could be affectionate to other monkeys, few were able to mate as adults, and those who did have offspring were not able to take care of them properly. Clearly, the lack of normal response from their fake mothers, and their isolation from other monkeys, had made them socially backward. They

In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults. Remarkably, this sort of touching went against the child-rearing views of the time.

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

The ego develops a defense in order to protect itself against being overcome by unconscious demands such as sex and aggression. The work of the psychoanalyst is to get the person to become conscious of their instinctual urges, which may involve isolating the pain experienced when they were originally confronted by an unsatisfied impulse.

As the early memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) wrote, “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” He meant that people have been thinking about human thought, emotion, intelligence, and behavior for thousands of years, but as a discipline based on facts rather than speculation psychology is still in its infancy.

The cognitive psychology revolution has had a dramatic impact on mental health, and two of its major names are David D. Burns and Albert Ellis. Their mantra that thoughts create feelings, not the other way around, has helped many people to get back in control of their lives because it applies logic and reason to the murky pool of emotions.

When a natural instinct surfaces, the ego wants to have it satisfied, but the superego does not allow that. The ego submits to the “higher” superego, but is left with the problem. It begins a struggle with the impulse and, to reduce the pain of not satisfying it, engineers a defense that allows itself to make sense of its decision to submit.

as R. D. Laing showed in his landmark work on schizophrenia, some people lack this basic security and attempt to replace the vacuum with false selves. Most of the time we take it for granted, but it is only when it is lost that we can fully appreciate our brain’s ability to create the feeling of selfpossession, or be comfortable with who we are.

Alfred Adler was a member of Freud’s original inner circle, but broke away because he disagreed that sex was the prime mover behind human behavior. He was more interested in how our early environments shape us, believing that we all seek greater power by trying to make up for what we perceive we lacked in childhood—his famous theory of “compensation.

The ego continually endeavors to create harmony between itself, the unconscious, and the outside world, but this does not always lead to perfect mental health. In fact, sometimes when the ego “wins” the person as a whole may have lost, since the win may involve the creation of a defense in order to have the ego maintain its sense of itself at all costs.

In all these situations of conflict the ego is seeking to repudiate a part of its own id. Thus the institution which sets up the defence and the invading force which is warded off are always the same; the variable factors are the motives which impel the ego to resort to defensive measures. Ultimately all such measures are designed to secure the ego and to save it from experiencing ‘pain.

It emerged from two other disciplines, physiology and philosophy. German Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is seen as the father of psychology because he insisted it should be a separate discipline, more empirical than philosophy and more focused on the mind than physiology. In the 1870s he created the first experimental psychology laboratory, and wrote his huge work Principles of Physiological Psychology.

Harlow observed that when his baby monkeys grew up, they had many things wrong with them. Instead of the normal range of responses, they swung between clinging attachment and destructive aggression, often tearing at their body or shredding bits of cloth or paper. Even as adults they had to cling to soft, furry things, and did not seem to know the difference between living and inanimate objects. Though

Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

Are your conversations a competition in which “the first person to draw breath is declared the listener"? Not many people are good listeners. Research has found that "75 percent of oral communication is ignored, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten." There is a huge difference between merely hearing and listening, Bolton notes. The word "listening" is derived from two Anglo Saxon words, hlystan ("hearing") and hlosnian ("waiting in suspense"). The act of listening therefore means more than just something physical, it is a psychological engagement with another person (p. 34).

As Wundt is read today only by those with a specialized interest, he is not included in the list of classics. American philosopher William James (1842–1910), however, also considered a “founding father” of modern psychology, is still widely read. The brother of novelist Henry James, he trained in medicine and then transferred to philosophy, but like Wundt felt that the workings of the mind deserved to be a separate field of study. Building on a theory by German neuroanatomist Franz Gall that all thoughts and mental processes were biological, James helped to spread the remarkable idea that one’s self—with all its hopes, loves, desires, and fears—was contained in the soft gray matter within the walls of the skull.