Notable Psychology & Psychiatrists Posters “L...-”
for classrooms, homeschoolers and professional offices.

Notable psychologists and psychiatrists ~

Jacques Lacan
b. 4-13-1901; Paris, France
d. 9-9-1981; Paris

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan made contributions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory based in Freudian thought.

Jacques Lacan quotes ~
• “Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.”
• “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”

R. D. Laing
b. 10-7-1927; Glasgow, Scotland
d. 8-23-1989; heart attack

Psychiatrist R. D. Laing was influenced by existential philosophy. He and a group of colleagues started a psychiatric community where the physicians and patients lived together, he was involved in the rebirthing movement, and challenged traditional psychiatry which considers mental illness as primarily a biological phenomenon, without any social, intellectual or political significance.

R. D. Laing quotes ~
• “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
• “Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
• “Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
• “We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.”
• “Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.”

Konrad Lorenz
b. 11-17-1903; Vienna, Austria
d. 2-27-1989; Vienna

Konrad Lorenz, in his studies of instinctive behavior, rediscovered the principle of imprinting in the behavior of birds.

As a child Lorenz was influenced by Selma Lagerlof's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, a story that incorporated geese into a geopgraphy text, and he was a student of Julian Huxley (grandson of “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley).

Lorenz was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Nikos Tinbergen “for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals”.

One of the most memorable stories in Lorenz' On Aggression has implications about leadership that would make a great school classroom discussion. In the experiment physiologist Erich von Holst removed the forebrain – which controls the schooling instinct that pulls fish to the center of a school – from a common minnow. One of the defining characteristic of schooling fish is each individual is continually moving toward the center of the group where it is less likely to be picked off by predators (attacked by bullies?). While a single fish will dart out of the school to chase after food, they immediately return after they catch it. In the experiment the minnow that lost its forebrain no longer had the instinct to school, meaning that it never turned back to the group. In effect the ‘brainless’ fish was freed to darted about anything else of interest – and all the other fish would instinctually follow.

• Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins by Konrad Lorenz