Too-broad questions, such as, "What's on your mind?" are apt to be answered "nothing" nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be c...areful of slipping into ""psycho-speak," however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you're reading a script from the latest child-psychology text.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, an...y more beautiful?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If tragedy is made effective by provoking the phenomenon which psychology calls "empathy"Mby causing us, that is to say, actually ...to participate in the feelings of another--pure comedy must achieve its effects by completely inhibiting that phenomenon and by establishing a sense of separateness from the creatures whose antics we observe. Such sympathy as we feel for them is lofty and patronizing, like our sympathy for a child whose sorrows we know to be (however intense for him) transitory and trivial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our species successfully raised children for tens of thousands of years before the first person wrote down the word "psychology." ...The fundamental skills needed to be a parent are within us. All we're really doing is fine-tuning a process that's already remarkably successful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we ...are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative... body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertnes...s for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »