These famous sayings are divided into three categories: mental health and general human behavior quotations, shock treatment quotations, and funny psychology quotations.
Famous Sayings About Mental Health and General Human Behavior
"My friend…care for your psyche…know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves" – Socrates
- "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves." – Carl Jung
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results." - Rita Mae Brown (this is a famous psychology quotation).
- "Today I resumed my practice and saw my first batch of nuts again. I must now transmute the nervous energy gained during my holidays into money to fill my depleted purse." – Sigmund Freud in a letter to Carl Jung, Oct 1, 1910. (Freud probably didn't realize his words would end up as a psychology quotation on the internet).
"The main symptom of a psychiatric case is that the person is perfectly unaware that he is a psychiatric case." – Oleg P. Shchepin in the New York Times, Nov 1988.
Psychology quotations can be a good way to lighten heavy thoughts about psychological disorders or poor mental health.
Shock Treatment Quotations
"It is more dangerous to drive to the hospital than to have the treatment. The unfair stigma against ECT is denying a remarkably effective medical treatment to patients who need it." – Charles Kellner, editor of Convulsive Thereapy. In 1995 issue of USA Today (Dec 6). Quite an opinionated psychology quotation.
- Hemingway on shock therapy: "What these shock doctors don't know is about writers and such things as remorse and contrition and what they do to them. They should make all psychiatrists take a course in creative writing so they'd know about writers…Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It's a bum turn, Hotch, a terrible." – Ernest Hemingway, to an interviewer at the Mayo Clinic where Hemingway received shock therapy. (After a second set of shock therapy, he killed himself with a shotgun.)
"Perhaps we are doing the right thing but in a very crude way just as if one were trying to right a watch with a hammer." – Harold E. Himwich, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1943.
- "ECT is one of God's gifts to mankind." – Max Fink in the Washington Post, Sept 1996. Compare this with Hemingway's psychology quotation above! Different therapies work for different people.
"What I think it did was to act like a Roto-Rooter on the depression. It just reamed me clear and the depression was gone." – Roland Kohloff in the New York Times, July 1993.
The shock treatment quotations contradict one another, showing that what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another. Psychological disorders can be difficult to treat.
Funny Psychology Quotations
"Freud: if it's not one thing, it's your mother." – Robin Williams.
- "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." – Anonymous (American).
"Neurotic" means he's not as sensible as I am, and "psychotic" means he's even worse than my brother-in-law. – Karl Menninger. A somewhat humorous psychology quotation.
- "Anyone who would go to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined." – Samuel Goldwyn. Isn't this psychology quotation a little redundant?
"A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions that your wife asks for nothing." – Joey Adams
Funny quotations about psychology can relieve stress and ease the stigma of counseling and mental illness.
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Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen - Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen is a full-time writer and blogger in Vancouver, BC, and the creator of the Quips and Tips blog series.
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