Psychopathology Quotes

In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today, we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity. (Harry Harlow)

The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.

J. G. Ballard

Ludwig's book is outstanding. It pulls together a mound of pertinent data, much of it new, into coherent patterns...Throughout the book the reader is offered a wealth of insights and serious questions...Ludwig's development of a Creative Achievement Scale [is] a valued contribution in its own right, allowing researchers a comprehensive objective tool for scoring subjects' degree of achievement... Ludwig has cleared up much of the confusion and opinionated muddleheadedness... that has been attached to the topic and the thinking regarding a relationship between psychopathology and creativity.

Arnold M. Ludwig

This is an excellent research report that should, once and for all, resolve senseless controversies about the correlation of creativity with psychopathology.

Arnold M. Ludwig

Let it be remarked ... that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.

Norbert Wiener

To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.

Richard Weaver

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.

Saul Bellow

He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power.

Robert A. Heinlein

I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.

J. G. Ballard

For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.

J. G. Ballard

It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it. (Anthony Storr)