Celia Green (1935) British philosopher
The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)
“There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else.”
Illness As Metaphor (1978), ch. 7 (pp. 55-56)
Context: There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the "reality" of a disease. That reality has to be explained. (It really means; or is a symbol of; or must be interpreted so.) For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.
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Susan Sontag168
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004Related quotes
Arthur C. Clarke book Dog Star
Dog Star, p. 786
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
“I'm convinced that responsibility is some kind of psychological disease.”
Brandon Sanderson book Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia
Source: Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia
John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
The Human: Against fundamentalism ― religious and scientific (p. 18)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)
Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)
Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 101
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
Certainly we all want to live the well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must honestly say to you tonight my friends that there are some things in our world, there are some things in our nation to which I'm proud to be maladjusted, to which I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self defeating effects of physical violence.
1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)
“I don’t know. There isn’t always an explanation for everything.”
Ernest Hemingway book The Sun Also Rises
Variant: There isnt always an explanation for everything.
Source: The Sun Also Rises
W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist
W. Ross Ashby, "Review of Analytical Biology, by G. Sommerhoff." In: Journal of Mental Science Vol 98 (1952), p. 88; As cited in Peter M. Asaro (2008)