psychology

Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one__ authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically.

From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.

Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.

I do not use psychiatric terms in my writing because the entrenched and developing behaviours were perfectly normal reactions to abnormal situations.

There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it's the cause that is usually most vilified.

Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes__erhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations__nstead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.

We already live on the planet of war, we already live on the red planet, and it's a war against children. All the other wars are just the shadows of the war on children.

The tombstone over the grave of the conscience always reads: "Human Nature".

Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situation.

[W]ishing for immortality won't make life last any longer.

There is no amount of love that is worth the life of a child.

One of the great Sufis said: 'A saint is a saint unless he knows that he is one.

How old you would become if you don't know how young you are.

If you really want to do something, you__l find a way. If you don__, you__l find an excuse.Remember if you never act, you will never know for sure and you will be left standing in the same spot forever. Making excuses takes the same amount of time as making progress!

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

Marginalised and abused children are often overlooked even today, and risk becoming marginalised and abused adults who may never receive acknowledgment or respect for the immense physical and emotional burden they carry from childhood or indeed have their full potential realised.

As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.