Abnormal psychology Quotes

“After earning a degree in Marketing at Auburn University, I spent the next five years in the business world, which is a polite way of saying that I had eleven jobs in a five-year period, including door to door sales, skip tracing people who didn’t want to be found, repossessing cars and collecting on defaulted student loans. During this five-year period, I did an in-depth study of abnormal psychology and sociopathic behavior – and then I divorced him.”

“Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.”