Psychologists From The United States

"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."

"It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. The fact that obedience is often a necessity in human society does not diminish our responsibility as citizens. Rather, it confers on us a special obligation to place in positions of authority those most likely to use it humanely. And people are inventive. The variety of political forms we have seen in history are only several of many possible political arrangements. Perhaps the next step is to invent and to explore political forms that will give conscience a better chance to resist errant authority."

"If you think it is easy to violate social constraints, get onto a bus and sing out loud. Full-throated song now, no humming. Many people will say it's easy to carry out this act, but not one in a hundred will be able to do it. The point is not to think about singing, but to try to do it. Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist."

"I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

"The Milgram experiments asked participants to play the role of a “teacher,” who was responsible for administering electric shocks to a “learner” when the learner failed to answer test questions correctly. The participants were not aware that the learner was working with the experimenters and did not actually receive any shocks. As the learners failed more and more, the teachers were instructed to increase the voltage intensity of the shocks — even when the learners started screaming, pleading to have the shocks stop, and eventually stopped responding altogether. Pressed by the experimenters — serious looking men in lab coats, who said they’d assume responsibility for the consequences — most participants did not stop administering shocks until they reached 300 volts or above — already in the lethal range. The majority of teachers delivered the maximum shock of 450 volts. We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable — that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over."

"It becomes clear that the Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo experiments replicated, in a compressed time, the dynamics of authority and groupthink that play a critical role in our socialization. Asch showed that once the standard is set, people will adopt it and go along with it, even if it is illogical. When the stakes are raised, as they were in Milgram's work, people may struggle with unethical commands, but the majority still obey. And when authorities set parameters but leave the decision-making to the rest of us, we still have a tendency to impose strict control on those we consider deviant. All of these findings affirm the power of culture, socialization, and our widespread fear that we will be judged and punished. Since human beings have a desperate need for safety, approval, and belonging (which yields access to group resources), the worst kind of punishment is ostracism. This shunning may be subtle or extreme."

"While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority."

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act."

"Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority."

"The relational model provides different categories, different underlying structures into which experience can be organized. Here the establishment of strong connections to others, in reality or in fantasy, is presumed to be primary. Forms of relationship are seen as fundamental, and life is understood largely as an array of metaphors for expressing and playing out relational patterns: discovery, penetration, domination, surrender, control, longing, evasion, revelation, envelopment, merger, differentiation, and so on. The body is still centrally important. Sexuality and bodily experiences are viewed as particularly apt arenas for this activity, since sexuality is enormously multiform and plastic. The number of different body parts, the variability of interactions, the poignancy of the sensations, the immense number of combinations — the almost infinite variety of human sexual possibilities make this an enormously fertile reservoir of metaphors for expressing different types of relationships, different configurations of connections, between self and others."

"Sexual dysfunction often plays a key role in risk management by couples over time. It seems crucial not to get too excited about the other, and diminished excitement serves the purposes at once of self-protection and revenge. I was once excited about you, the diminished arousal seems to be expressing, but there is not much to get excited about now. Often lovers work together to pretend they are safer (even if also a bit sadder) over time, by collapsing their expectations of each other in collusively arranged, choreographed routine. Each feels the other is less exciting because of being so familiar and predictable. And each acts towards the other in as wholly and artificially predictable a fashion as possible. But, of course, lowering expectations also empties out passion. No risk, no gain."

"Rather than being a measure and consequence of the power of naturally occurring sexual desire, pornography is a measure of the extent to which people tend to prefer controlling desire through contrivance rather than being surprised by desire that spontaneously arises."

"From this perspective, the common experience of the fading of romance over time may have less to do with the inevitable undercutting of idealization by reality and familiarity than with the increasing danger of allowing oneself episodic, passionate idealization in a relationship that one depends on for security and predictability. Intense excitement about another is a dangerous business; it often is much safer to surrender to it with a person one cannot possibly spend much time with or will never see again. Sustaining desire for something important from someone important is the central danger of emotional life. What is so dangerous about desiring someone you have is that you can lose him or her. Desire for someone unknown and unobtainable operates as a defense against desire for someone known and obtainable, therefore capable of being lost."

"Love and desire are both thoroughly human. Our problem with them is that they orient us toward very different goals. Love seeks control, stability, continuity, certainty. Desire seeks surrender, adventure, novelty, the unknown. In love we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire we are searching both for missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protect so fiercely.Erotic passion destabilizes one's sense of self. When we find someone intensely arousing who makes possible unfamiliar experiences of ourselves and an otherness we find captivating, we are drawn into the disorienting loopiness of self/other. We tend to want to control these experiences and the others who inspire them. Thus emotional connection tends to degrade into strategies for false security that suffocate desire."

"If the deepest, most fundamental levels of the analysand's pathology are to be reached, the relationship with the analyst becomes the vehicle for the establishment and articulation of bad-object relations. The analyst cannot enter the analysand's world in any form other than as a familiar (that is, "bad," or less than gratifying, object). This is true even though there often are elaborate resistances to the experience of the transference. Otherwise the analysis does not touch the analysand deeply, offers no promise, no hope for connection and transformation."

"One of the most profound and universal realizations of later childhood, a realization that probably is never totally integrated, is the discovery that one's parents are not necessarily representative of the human species, that one has grown up in an idiosyncratically structured family with its own peculiarities and dramas."

"When sexuality is operating in the service of intimacy, it is the fact that it is the particular other who is responding to the vulnerability inherent in sustaining desire that generates intensity and meaning. It is precisely the physiological intensity of the sexual response that lends the sexual encounter its dramatic interpersonal significance. This suggests that it is a mistake to regard the role of sexuality in relation to needs for relatedness and attachment as a "sexualization," which implies that sex is carrying something that can and somehow should be attended to in other ways. (Although this is sometimes the case.) The distinction between preoedipal and oedipal developmental levels often implies such an artificial and misleading separation between sexual experience and issues of attachment and connection. There is perhaps nothing better suited for experiencing and deepening the drama of search and discovery than the mutual arousal, sustaining, and quenching of sexual desire."

"In the integrated relational model presented here, sexuality and relational issues are not seen as alternative foci. Rather, sexuality is regarded as a central realm in which relational conflicts are shaped and played out."

"I'm tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race, they simply don't want to change!"

"The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us. That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life."

"But until my Journal of Psychoanalytical Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes."

"That dissociated selves were an everyday part of life in antiquity and the Middle Ages is a much-denied fact of historians, just as anthropologists deny that their subjects are dissociated personalities who live in an animistic world full of alters inhabiting animals, objects, and dead ancestors."

"It is no wonder that historians have chosen to hide, deny and whitewash the record here uncovered."

"Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wet nurses as the mothers themselves were."

"Although one anthropologist mentioned that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly painful," they are not usually considered traumatic to children. Since empathy with children's feelings is nearly absent, gratuitous mutilation of the children is common, such as tightly binding newborn infant's heads for months to elongate the skull, or [...]."

"Anthropologists have concluded that "child abuse...is virtually unknown" in New Guinea."

"As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely reported by anthropologists, but in positive terms. [...] "This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed". Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's genitals, he [L.L. Langness] calls this "love"."

"Most ethnologists scrupulously avoid describing how these children feel about participating in the killing or eating of their siblings."

"Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students."

"Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous."

"Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad —the maddest of all being the historian's belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it —our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors."

"I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped, even with training, to use their feelings as psychohistorical research tools, although there is a whole new generation of psychohistorians just now beginning to write who are able to do so. To expect the average historian to do psychohistory is like trying to teach a blind man to be an astronomer [...]. Whenever I speak to a scholar of the emotional development necessary to make a good psychohistorian and get a blank look of total incomprehension, I try to find a way to leave the subject of psychohistory altogether. My listener usually is in another world of discourse where emotional reactions are not considered crucial to the results."

"Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. [...] Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development."

"Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.""

"I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science)."

"There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades."

"Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians — childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on — suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books."

"Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks."

"Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why."

"Deep Democracy is our sense that the world is here to help us to become our entire selves, and that we are here to help the world to become whole."

"I am a very careless person in some ways, I lose everything. But I never lost anything of this Course. People would would stop me in the subway and say, “Miss, you forgot your something or other, and hand it back to me.” Taxis would honk their horns, you know and say, “You left something in the back seat.” My secretary would say, “Are you sure this belongs in this case report, it doesn't sound right?” It was impossible to lose this Course, and I tried. But it...followed me around in an odd kind of way. People would send it back to me, anything. And I always got it back. We never lost anything, which is incredible."

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

"The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning."

"The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s Presence, Which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite."

""I saw myself entering a cave in a rock formation on a bleak, windswept seacoast. The entrance to the cave was low, and the cave was quite deep. All I found in it was a very old and large parchment scroll. Its ends were rolled around heavy, gold-tipped poles, the two sides touching at the scroll's center and tied together by a strip of parchment that fell away as my fingers touched it. I untied the ends and opened the scroll just enough to expose the center panel, on which only two words were written; 'God is', and nothing else. …"As with the subway experience several years earlier, an aspect of the cave experience likewise found its way into the Course. The workbook states: "We say 'God is', and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless" (W-pi. 169.5:4)."

"There’s nothing that I would call ordinary audition about this at all. It doesn’t really.. It’s a curious thing that will be very difficult to explain. Somebody asked me, “Was it as though your hand was moving?” No. I wrote perfectly voluntarily in response to…I call it a voice, but “a voice” has sounds...or sounds as though it has something to do with hearing. And I didn’t hear anything. I think it’s the sort of hearing that you can’t really describe. It doesn’t have anything to do with ears, or waves hitting a drum or anything on that order. I don’t really know, I think maybe I’m using the wrong word when I say “hear.” I sort of recognized it, it was very rapid, I could even....if I didn’t catch a phrase, I could sort of say, “Would you mind doing that again?”"

"Sperry's thinking about subjective experience, consciousness, the mind, and human values makes a powerful plea for a new scientific examination of ethics in the workings of consciousness. These ideas were crystallized in his paper "The Impact and Promise of the Cognitive Revolution" (1993)."

"People who had damage to the right cerebral hemisphere were unable to recognise simple patterns, or enjoy music, but they could still speak normally. People with left-brain damage were able to recognise patterns, but their speech was impaired. Obviously, then, the left deals with language, and you would expect a split-brain patient to be unable to read with his right eye (connected, remember, to the opposite side of the brain). Sperry's patient was also unable to write anything meaningful (i.e., complicated) with his left hand. They noticed another oddity. if the patient bumped into something with his left side, he did not notice. And the implications were very odd indeed. Not only did the split-brain operation give the patient two separate minds; it also seemed to restrict his identity, or ego, to the left side. When they placed an object in his left hand, and asked him what he was holding, he had no idea. Further experiments underlined the point. If a split-brain patient is shown two different symbols -- say a circle and a square -- with each eye, and is asked to say what he has just seen, he replies, 'A square'. Asked to draw with his left hand what he has seen, and he draws a circle. Asked what he has just drawn, he replies: 'A square'. And when one split-brain patient was shown a picture of a nude male with the right-brain, she blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully: 'I don't know'. The implications are clearly staggering. The person you call 'you' lives in the left side of your brain. And a few centimeters away there is another person, a completely independent identity. Where language is concerned, this other person is almost an imbecile. In other respects, he is more competent than the inhabitant of the left-brain; for example, he can make a far more accurate perspective drawing of a house. In effect, the left-brain person is a scientist, the right-brain an artist."

"The impact of Sperry's philosophy, similar to that of his scientific discoveries previously, has now transcended the boundaries of science and reaches into human awareness worldwide. Dr. Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, for instance, is deeply impressed by, and actively promotes, Sperry's work — He fully recognizes the significance of the neuroscientist's theory of emergence and downward causation, which transcends dualism and reductionism, leads in an unbroken continuum from atoms to subjective experience, and describes each newly emergent phenomenon in the universe as an entity in its own right with laws and properties that never before existed. Such new emergents (which disappear in reductionist thinking) affect everything else on earth, including the elements that created them (downward causation) but most importantly the future quality of evolution. Values, thus — as emergents of brain function — are recognized as the most powerful determinants on earth, even in the world of science."

"I think time will show that the new approach, emphasizing emergent "macro" control, is equally valid in all the physical sciences, and that the behavioral and cognitive disciplines are leading the way to a more valid framework for all science. Although the theoretic changes make little difference in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on, they are crucial for the behavioral, social, and human sciences. They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain."