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.

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. Even

He looked for ways in which new ideas could come into being via spontaneous insight rather than conflict.

In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults.

A nation becomes great not by a mere imposition of order and power, but by letting go, knowing that there is much to gain by open discussion.

"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 ."

11 Jerome Bruner Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture (1990) A founder of cognitive psychology argues for a model of the mind based on the creation of meaning rather than computational processing.

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.

If you know a person’s personality type their behavior begins to make sense.

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.

William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature.

we still have a long way to go in terms of creating a rock-solid science that could match the certainty of, say, physics and biology. In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick.

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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.

What drives them, more than rewards, is the desire to find or create order where there was none before.