Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

The ego develops a defense in order to protect itself against being overcome by unconscious demands such as sex and aggression. The work of the psychoanalyst is to get the person to become conscious of their instinctual urges, which may involve isolating the pain experienced when they were originally confronted by an unsatisfied impulse.

For many years, psychology was surprisingly little interested in happiness.

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

Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head.

49 Wilhelm Wundt Principles of Physiological Psychology (1873–74) The book that made Wundt the dominant figure in the new science of psychology. Translated into English by Edward Titchener in 1904.

Harlow went so far as to suggest that perhaps the main function of nursing was to ensure frequent physical contact between baby and mother, since the loving bond seemed so vital for survival. After all, he noted, long after the actual sustenance stops, it is the bond that remains.

The ego continually endeavors to create harmony between itself, the unconscious, and the outside world, but this does not always lead to perfect mental health. In fact, sometimes when the ego “wins” the person as a whole may have lost, since the win may involve the creation of a defense in order to have the ego maintain its sense of itself at all costs.

What is humor, de Bono asks, but the sudden restructuring of existing patterns? If

When a natural instinct surfaces, the ego wants to have it satisfied, but the superego does not allow that. The ego submits to the “higher” superego, but is left with the problem. It begins a struggle with the impulse and, to reduce the pain of not satisfying it, engineers a defense that allows itself to make sense of its decision to submit.

A more recent development in the cognitive field is “positive psychology,” which has sought to reorient the discipline away from mental problems to the study of what makes people happy, optimistic, and productive.

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.

Psychologists are able to divide personality into five main dimensions: introverted or extraverted; neurotic or stable; incurious or open to new things; agreeable or antagonistic; and conscientious or undirected. All five dimensions can

crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.” Willing is not conscious resolve, but rather being true to what one loves or sees.

Honesty, which seems “old-fashioned” to the fast crowd, is the basis of all enduring success, since it brings with it knowledge of the self.

All areas of a person’s life, whether it is work, marriage, or raising children, require outward effort, and it is the effort itself that brings about happiness.