Abnormal Psychology Quotes

Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression. ~ Mark Epstein

We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions. ~ Brene Brown

Religious people are forced to perform mental gymnastics to reconcile real life with their delusions. When Christianity, Islam and the rest of the world religions finally have gone the way of Zeus, they will leave behind a legacy of case studies for students of abnormal psychology. ~ Al Stefanelli

This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office. ~ Don DeLillo

Freud was the man who seeded a progeny of doctors interested in abnormal psychology. With the intellectual force of a battering ram, Freud penetrated deeply into the untouched and delicate flower that was psychosis. His strong, trunk-like stature as an analyst led to the cherry popping of many previously unthought theories on the mind. He also proved that people constantly think about sex even while not penis reading about it. ~ Dan Wilbur

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all? ~ Carrie Fisher

I'm afraid you can't create tragedy out of abnormal psychology. ~ Andrew Sarris

Not everything that steps out of line, and thus "abnormal", must necessarily be "inferior". ~ Hans Asperger

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one's mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind. ~ Erving Goffman

A purely causalistic psychology is only able to reduce every human individual to a member of the species Home sapiens, since its range is limited to what is transmitted by heredity or derived from other sources. But a work of art is not transmitted or derived–it is a creative reorganization of those very conditions to which a causalistic psychology must always reduce it. ~ C.G. Jung

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Deciding when and where you're going to do something will dramatically increase the likelihood you'll follow through. Let's look at the results from a specific study. Because most psychology research uses students as guinea pigs, this example relates to essay writing. Students who had an essay to complete were divided into two groups. One group was asked to state when and where they would complete their essay. Of this group, 71% completed the essay before the due date. The other group was given the due date but were not asked to state when and where they'd write their essay. Only 32% of this group finished on time. This extremely simple, two-minute intervention transformed the task from one in which most people failed to one in which most people succeeded.
To implement this change in your own life whenever you're planning to take action, identify when and where you'll act. Make this a habit you do every time. ~ Alice Boyes

You can't overestimate the importance of psychology in chess, and as much as some players try to downplay it, I believe that winning requires a constant and strong psychology not just at the board but in every aspect of your life. ~ Garry Kasparov

I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write ... and you know it's a funny thing about house cleaning ... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Psychology, and medicine. Accounts of scientific lives in neuroscience ~ Anonymous

A child's attachment process begins within the first year of life ... ~ Asa Don Brown

Some of the games that you can't win weren't meant to be played. ~ Daniel V Chappell

Century after century, the belief that an individual's physical health was independent of his or her emotional health has so dominated medical thought that there has even been open contempt for anyone who would dare to claim that a person's physical well-being is the sum of its internal and external influences. ~ Sandy Oshiro Rosen

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. ~ Umberto Eco

Everyone's always on the hunt for a mirror. It's basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others. Others - your sister, your parents - they want to look at you and see themselves. They want you to be a flattering reflection of them - and vice-versa. It's normal. I suppose it's really normal if you're a twin. But being somebody else's mirror? That is not your job." Nora ~ Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

The term "fed up" actually comes from falconry. When you train a falcon, you train it by hunger, using it as a tool to manipulate the bird's psychology. So when the bird has had too much to eat, it won't cooperate and gets annoyed by any attempts to tell it what to do. It simply sits in the top of a tree and sulks. It is "fed up". ~ Douglas Adams

You know that saying 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing'? That's so true of positive psychology. Our latest research tells us that the pursuit of happiness is a delicate art. Certain approaches to seeking happiness are now known to backfire, whereas others are effective. ~ Barbara Fredrickson

Naked flights of art unshackled and incandescent songs of poetry undiluted return to the soul what hate, ignorance, fear, and violence steal from the heart. ~ Aberjhani

It's not other people's job to make you happy and fulfilled; it's yours. It's important to always be nice and respectful of others, but it's even more important to be nice and respectful toward yourself. You have to live with yourself the rest of your life, so stop being so hard on yourself. Focus on your strengths and lead by example. You are special and unique in every way. And if other people don't appreciate you for who you are, it's their loss. Remember, there are some people who don't even like chocolate cake! ~ Anonymous

Personal Construct Therapy was the pioneer of a fully constructivist psychology, emphasizing that people are essentially like scientists in continually developing meanings and explanations of the world, which are employed to guide action and decision making. ~ Jacqui Stedmon

All life pulsates in time to the Earth and our artificial fields cause abnormal reactions in all organisms... Increasing electropollution could set in motion irreversible changes leading to our extinction. ~ Robert O. Becker

Thoughts influence actions. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes ... Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

we all try to silence painful emotions. but when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us and why. ~ Stephen Grosz

Our heads are filled with 'knowledge', a knowledge that in some areas pre-empts our seeing anything at all. ~ Idries Shah

Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments. ~ Temple Grandin

Many people say that psychiatrists just want to push drugs. Well I seriously have to say, without medication, I'd be locked up in a VA hospital somewhere. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you ... and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

When I look in the fridge, I see groceries, but I don't see food. My stomach growls; but there is no appetite.
Appetite and hunger are different. Appetite is the mental prompting that kicks the auto-response into drive so you actually reach out, take the food, put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow. I learned this in my first psychology course. Eating isn't just a physical need; it starts in the mind, generating hunger, which then should trigger the body to ingest food. I have no sparks between these plugs. ~ Julie Gregory

A bulimic person's shame may lead her to try to hide not only her eating-disorder behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and may try to act as if she does not need or want anything or anyone. When that attempt inevitably fails, she may wish that others could magically read her mind and respond to her needs and wants without her having to ask for anything. To avoid the shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to food, rather than relationships, for comfort. ~ Sheila M. Reindl

I felt as though I were plunging into something new and quite abnormal. I had the strangest and most vivid impressions, such as I had never before known in the mountains. There was something unnatural in the way I saw Lachenal and everything around us. I smiled to myself at the paltriness of our efforts, for I could stand apart and watch myself making these efforts. But all sense of exertion was gone, as though there were no longer any gravity. This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity--these were not the mountains I knew: they were the mountains of my dreams (pp.206-207). ~ Maurice Herzog

Spirituality is the ability to face any situation of life through constant evolution, responsibility and equanimity. ~ Amit Ray

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. ~ Camille Paglia

Anyone who has physically incarnated on the Earth is energetically connected to the people they love, and to the Earth, indefinitely... ~ Jonni Gray

A 'normal person' is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Half of life is lost in charming others.
The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.
Leave this play. You have played enough. ~ Rumi

The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you - when there's a loss that will alter your life forever - you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you've touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are. ~ Tara Brach

Since the early 1920s a unique spiritual path has existed in Japan. This distinctly Japanese version of yoga is called Shin-shin-toitsu-do, and it combines seated meditation, moving meditation, breathing exercises, and other disciplines to help practitioners realize unification of mind and body. Besides yoga, it is a synthesis of methods, influenced by Japanese meditation, healing arts, and martial arts; along with Western psychology, medicine, and science. Shin-shin-toitsu-do is widely practiced throughout Japan, although it is almost unknown in other countries. Through its principles of mind and body coordination people have an opportunity to realize their full potential in everyday life.A remarkable man created this path, and he led an equally remarkable life. He was known in Japan as Nakamura Tempu Sensei, and this is his story. ~ H.E. Davey