Quotes about psychology

The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.

I believe Freud was talking about something real, though perhaps his ideas, taken literally, lead to absurdity – for his genius was poetic rather than scientific; his ideas are more valuable as metaphors than as literal truths.

Freud captured the imagination of a whole continent and civilization for a good reason. Though on the surface inconsistent, illogical or "way out," his followers, with their cautious logic, their experiments and revisions have nothing comparable to say. Freudianism is so charted so impossible to repudiate because Freud grasped the crucial problem of modern life: Sexuality.

If we had to name the one cultural current that most characterizes America in the twentieth century, it might be the work of Freud and the disciplines that grew out of it.

Freudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance, its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its upkeep, our modern Church. We attack only uneasily, for you never know, on the day of final judgement, whether might be right. Who can be sure that he is as healthy as he can get? Who is functioning at his highest capacity? And who not scared out of his wis? Who doesn't hate his mother and father? Who doesn't compete with his brother? What girl at some time did not wish she were a boy? And for those hardy souls who persist in their skepticism, there is always that dreadful persist in their skepticism, there is always that dreadful word resistance. They are the one who are sickest: it's obvious, they fight it so much.

Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.

He didn't believe in psychiatrists, he said. But actually he did believe in them, so much that he was afraid of them.

I was embarrassed to be such a fool in a situation that I had told myself and other people countless times I would never submit to -- talking to a psychiatrist, ostensibly seeking help, but without any confidence that he could give it. I have never believed these people can do anything for an intelligent man he can't do for himself. I have known many people who leaned on psychiatrists, and every one of them was a leaner by nature, who would have leaned on a priest if he had lived in an age of faith, or leaned on a teacup reader or an astrologer if he had not enough money to afford the higher hokum.

"Psychology plays a great part in my profession. I am rather a well-known criminal lawyer -- or have you checked that, too? I have to know something about the way people function. Without a pretty shrewd psychological sense I couldn't do what I do, which is to worm things out of people they don't want to tell. That's your job, too, isn't it." "No. My job is to listen to people say things they very badly want to tell but are afraid nobody else will understand. You use psychology as an offensive weapon in the interest of justice. I use it as a cure. So keen a lawyer as yourself will appreciate the difference."

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions. (p. 402)

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.