Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

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.

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

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.

Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative” says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action.

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

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

"تابع عادات الناجحين وستكتشف أنهم عادة ما يكونون قراء عظماء ... إن حب الاستطلاع والقدرة على التعلّم أمران حيويان لتحقيق أي إنجاز . ومن هنا جاءت العبارة الشهيرة "القادة قراء" وكما قال ديل كارينجي : الشخص الساعي للتطور يجب أن يشغل عقله دائما بقراءة الاعمال الأدبية ."

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

While Freud wrote of the drive toward pleasure or sex, and Adler of a drive toward power, Frankl believed that the human will to meaning was at least as strong a force in making us into who we are.

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