Individual Psychology Quotes

An intelligent couple can read their Darwin and know that the ultimate reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know that the woman cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their sexual desire is in no way diminished by the knowledge. Sexual desire is sexual desire and its force, in an individual's psychology, is independent of the ultimate Darwinian pressure that drove it. It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale.

I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to another.

television. It has changed the way that we perceive the world out there, and though we know that - have indeed been bombarded with analyses on the consequences for society, for the family, and for individual psychology - I don't believe that we have yet begun to appreciate the reach of its subliminal effects, of what we might call 'the slow viruses.' They not only get into our ways of seeing, they pervade the ways in which we weave our perceptions together into patterns that support and explain our thinking and our doing and both direct and hinder various kinds of relationships.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

I tend to come from a more psychological - that's sort of my passion. I'm interested in the psychology of politics as well - and obviously I'm interested in what's going on in the world - but my passion is more the psychology of people.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the developmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question.

I actually think that self-interest is overrated as an all-purpose guide to political motive. It leaves out something at least as powerful and immovable - individual psychology.

I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.

The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power.

Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.

There is no such thing as a normal psychology that holds for all people.

I mean that I think I find the psychology of people more interesting than politics. I think the psychology of politics is more interesting than straight politics.

Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you.

Because of the term ‘whip’, it is assumed that members can be beaten into submission, but I’ve seldom seen that be successful. It’s getting to know the individual, what they think, how they feel, what’s going on in their personal life, are they agonizers or quick deciders, what kind of leverage can be used with them or on them.