Psychological Dynamics Quotes

The opposite of love is not hate. It is fear.

The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely.

All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.

When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.

History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.

Sometimes I'm real cool, but sometimes I could be a real asshole. I think everyone is like that.

Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent.

I feel like, as an adult, a lot of how you feel about yourself and what your inner workings are can be revealed in a sexual situation.

People frequently bore me, sometimes amuse me, most often irritate me, but rarely intrigue me.

When I'm working as a director, I might have an idea of my own but I'm also trying to get great ideas out of my actors. Directing is much more psychological - it's a lot like being a general. And you have to be organized. While you're making a film, you have between 2 and 500 people asking you a billion questions.

I like exploring both the light parts and the dark parts of a single person. And all of those shades tend to come out most acutely in stories about families.

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

There is a hint of despair in the cry of 'I told you so,' an element of disappointment in the apparent satisfaction when idols turn out to have clay feet. The human race, when it thinks it has proved that no one is superior, is partly gratified and partly depressed.

When we hate someone we make them more powerfull than they are.

Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

It is an essential part of the interpretive work that it should keep in step with fluctuations between love and hatred, between happiness and satisfaction on the one hand and persecutory anxiety and depression on the other.

Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.

The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.

People [are] as much a source of entertainment as they [are] a source of irritation. it keep[s] things balanced.

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

Before I start a book, I talk over my characters with a friend who is a counselor. I like to make sure I have the right dynamics in place and understand each character's belief system, fears, coping mechanisms and things like that.

I mean that psychologically. I think [Donald Trump] showed in the debates when he encounters criticism or challenge he behaves the way a bully would. He just doesn't take it well.

Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.

Well, it's not all the same, but there are a lot of parallels. I'm not sure how to answer [on psychology background], but I think when I was studying psychology I had a professor and a friend who would talk about "process" all the time. Your process, his process, the group's process. There's some carryover from that discussion to my creative work.