quotations about psychology
So it seems to me that the illusion of realism arises from the fact that we don't just use folk psychology privately to anticipate--each one of us--the behavior of each other. In contrast, if chimpanzees, for instance, use folk psychology, they don't talk about it. They are individual folk psychologists, but we're not. We're communal folk psychologists who are constantly explaining to other people why we think that so and so is going to do such and such. We have to talk, and when we talk, since life is short, we have to give an edited version of what we're actually thinking, so what comes out is a few sentences. Then of course it's only too easy to suppose that those sentences are not mere edited abstractions or distillations from, but are rather something like copies of our translations of the very states in the minds of the beings we're talking about.
DANIEL CLEMENT DENNETT
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Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds
Compared to law, psychology is, chronologically speaking, entering its adulthood, and given a number of important differences between the two disciplines, it comes as no surprise that tension and conflict between them persists.
ANDREAS KAPARDIS
Psycholody and Law: A Critical Introduction
The first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology's failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.
NAOMI WEISSTEIN
"Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law"
Despite the burgeoning technologies in the field of "helping", on many levels psychotherapy is still a crapshoot. Some of the goal of training, I think, is to help students accept that fact. The work is part science, part art, and part luck. Learning to tolerate the anxiety inherent in that recipe is critical for any clinician.
MARTHA MANNING
Undercurrents
The field of psychology is in a state of crisis. We are no closer now to understanding the most fundamental problems of psychology than we were when psychology became a science a hundred years ago. Each of us is aware of being a unique "self", different from other people and the world around us. But the nature of the "self", which is central to all psychology, has no physiological basis in any contemporary theory and continues to elude us. The concept of "mind" is as perplexing as ever ... There is a profusion of little theories -- theories of vision, pain, behaviour-modification, and so forth -- but no broad unifying concepts.
RONALD MELZACK
attributed, Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness