For many years, psychology was surprisingly little interested in happiness. - Tom Butler-Bowdon

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

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.

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.