Psychology on Simposeum

31 thinkers, each answering from their own writing with a citation to the page.

• Alfred Adler — 1870-1937 · It is the feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, insecurity, which determines the goal of an individual's existence.
• James Mark Baldwin — 1861-1934 · The ego and the alter are thus born together.
• Alfred Binet — 1857-1911 · To judge well, to comprehend well, to reason well, these are the essential activities of intelligence.
• Mary Whiton Calkins — 1863-1930 · There is never perception without a somebody who perceives, and there never is thinking unless some one thinks.
• Jean-Martin Charcot — 1825-1893 · We shall first begin with the empirical study of facts furnished us by direct observation, outside of all theoretical prejudices.
• Hermann Ebbinghaus — 1850-1909 · Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short.
• Sigmund Freud — 1856-1939 · The interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.
• Francis Galton — 1822-1911 · Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest.
• G. Stanley Hall — 1844-1924 · Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.
• Pierre Janet — 1859-1947 · Hysteria is a form of mental depression characterized by the retraction of the field of personal consciousness and a tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality.
• Carl Jung — 1875-1961 · Where there is so much light there must also be shadow.
• Daniel Kahneman — 1934-2024 · Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.
• Wolfgang Köhler — 1887-1967 · Hence follows this criterion of insight: the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole lay-out of the field.
• Emil Kraepelin — 1856-1926 · Cases of mental disease originating in the same causes must also present the same symptoms, and the same pathological findings.
• Jacques Lacan — 1901-1981 · The unconscious is structured like a language.
• Gustave Le Bon — 1841-1931 · The age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds.
• C. Lloyd Morgan — 1852-1936 · In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be fairly interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.
• Elizabeth Loftus — 1944-present · When you change memory, it changes you.
• William McDougall — 1871-1938 · The human mind has certain innate or inherited tendencies which are the essential springs or motive powers of all thought and action.
• Stanley Milgram — 1933-1984 · 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.
• Hugo Münsterberg — 1863-1916 · Applied Psychology will then become an independent experimental science which stands related to the ordinary experimental psychology as engineering to physics.
• Ivan Pavlov — 1849-1936 · I believe that the recognition and the study of the conditioned reflex will throw open the door to a true physiological investigation probably of all the highest nervous activities of the cerebral hemispheres.
• Jean Piaget — 1896-1980 · Intelligence is an adaptation.
• Théodule Ribot — 1839-1916 · The progressive destruction of memory follows a logical order—a law. It advances progressively from the unstable to the stable.
• Charles Spearman — 1863-1945 · Every normal man, woman, and child is, then, a genius at something, as well as an idiot at something.
• James Sully — 1842-1923 · Common sense, knowing nothing of fine distinctions, is wont to draw a sharp line between the region of illusion and that of sane intelligence.
• Edward L. Thorndike — 1874-1949 · If any given knowledge or skill or power or ideal exists, it exists in some amount.
• Edward Bradford Titchener — 1867-1927 · The psychologist seeks, first of all, to analyse mental experience into its simplest components.
• Margaret Floy Washburn — 1871-1939 · All thoughts and mental images, all the contents of consciousness, rest not simply on delayed full motor response, externally visible, but on delays in the systems of tentative movements.
• John B. Watson — 1878-1958 · Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select.
• Wilhelm Wundt — 1832-1920 · Every psychical compound shows attributes which may indeed be understood from the attributes of its elements after these elements have once been presented, but which are by no means to be looked upon as the mere sum of the attributes of these elements.