Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?

50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Spiritual Classics, which explore books on the more transformational and spiritual sides of psychology.

The fact that people don’t get along all the time suggests that we don’t understand or value the ways other people see the world. A

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.

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.

Burns lists ten “cognitive distortions,” such as all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, and giving ourselves labels. By understanding these distortions, we are led to the awareness that “feelings aren’t facts,” they are only mirrors of our thoughts.

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

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

A preference for extraversion (seeing life in terms of the external world) or introversion (greater interest in the inner world of ideas) is independent of your preferences for sensing, thinking, intuition, and feeling.

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.