Psychological Processes Quotes

The question was a fashionable one, whether a definite line exists between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity; and if so, where it lies?

The results of ethnic psychology constitute, at the same time, our chief source of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental processes.

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.

Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

We cannot therefore say that mental acts contain a cognitive as well as a conative element.

One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.

Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all.

Events become feelings, feelings become events

The human psyche creates structure. We all go through our lives like, 'Oh! And then I moved here.' We're pattern-seeking, structure-producing machines.

It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.

When we say we have patterns, there is a cyclical movement to everything. Our psychological and emotional processes also have become cyclical largely because of a very strong attachment and involvement with physical process, and physical process has to be cyclical; only then we exist. Without out cyclical movement there'll be no physical existence.