Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

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

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

"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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

First, love your work

She discovered Carl Jung’s book Psychological Types and it became the theoretical foundation for a lifetime’s work, later taken up by her daughter (who became Isabel Briggs Myers).

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

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.

But of greater concern is the fact that psychologists tend to give progressively less attention to a motive which pervades our entire lives.

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

But first we have to accept the idea that thinking long and hard about something does not always deliver us better results, and that the brain actually evolved to make us think on our feet.