Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

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

This idea originated with psychologist Carl Rogers (see p 238), who taught that nonjudgmental listening and acceptance of another person’s feelings create rapport.

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

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

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.

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

Love has traditionally been the domain of poets, artists, and philosophers, but in the last 50 years the terrain of relationships has increasingly been mapped by psychologists.

Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.

For Pascal, lack of faith was a kind of laziness, a view summed up by T.S. Eliot in his introduction to the Pensées: “The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.

While a complex may make someone more timid or withdrawn, it could equally produce the need to compensate for that in overachievement.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

Her ego and id had fully lost the battle with her superego, and this was the only way they could be expressed.

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.

When the first force, social feeling and community expectation, is ignored or affronted, the person concerned will reveal certain aggressive character traits: vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy, playing God, or greed; or nonaggressive traits: withdrawal, anxiety, timidity, or absence of social graces. When any of these forces gains the upper hand, it is usually because of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Yet the forces also create an intensity or tension that can give tremendous energy.

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.

A fork in the developmental path leads a child either to imitate adults in order to become more assertive and powerful themselves, or consciously to display weakness so as to get adult help and attention.