Paul C. Vitz > Quotes

“The man who would have no imitators had legions of them, each infected with the mimetic dilemma that Rousseau personified: how to get others to notice how disinterested one is in whether they notice or not.”
― Paul C. Vitz, The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

“The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. (...) It shows, not that truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.”
― Paul C. Vitz, The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

“Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead , our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. (...) Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.”
― Paul C. Vitz, The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

“It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.”
― Paul C. Vitz

“It certainly proved convenient to that, just as western economies began to need consumers, there developed an ideology hostile to discipline, to obedience, and to the delaying of gratification. Selfism's clear advocacy of experience now, and its rejection of inhibition or repression, was a boon to the advertising industry, which was finding that the returns on appeals to social status and product quality were diminishing.”
― Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship

“As we have lost our identity as members of traditional communities, [...] we have found new identities of sharing grievance.
We are now united by being victims of everything from racism and sexism to "looks-ism" and "size-ism" to being adult children of alcoholics. America has become one huge circle in which everyone is pointing the finger of blame at someone else.”
― Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship

“It certainly proved convenient that, just as western economies began to need consumers, there developed an ideology hostile to discipline, to obedience, and to the delaying of gratification.
Selfism's clear advocacy of experience now, and its rejection of inhibition or repression, was a boon to the advertising industry, which was finding that the returns on appeals to social status and product quality were diminishing.”
― Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship

“[P]sychology has become a religion: a secular cult of the self[, ...] an intensely held worldview, a philosophy of life or ideology.”
― Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship

“It certainly proved convenient that, just as western economies began to need consumers, there developed an ideology hostile to discipline, to obedience, and to the delaying of gratification.
Selfism's clear advocacy of experience now, and its rejection of inhibition or repression, was a boon to the advertising industry, which was finding that the returns on appeals to social status and product quality were diminishing.”
― Paul C. Vitz, Psychology As Religi