Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

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

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

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

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.

While a complex may make someone more timid or withdrawn, it could equally produce the need to compensate for that in overachievement.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.

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

They may camouflage their true feelings in ingenious ways: To show that they are not vain, they may purposely pay less attention to dress or be overly modest.

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.

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.

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the common idea of a creative individual coming up with great insights, discoveries, works, or inventions in isolation is wrong. Creativity results from a complex interaction between a person and their environment or culture, and also depends on timing.

Burns notes the catch-22 nature of depression: The worse we feel, the more distorted our thoughts become, and this thinking plunges us even lower into black feelings about ourselves.

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

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.

Trust your intuition, rather than technology, to protect you from violence.

It is characteristic of insight solutions and new ideas that they should be obvious after they have been found.