So on to Sigmund Freud
We're going to give him somewhat short shrift. I'm afraid because we only have an hour to talk about Freud, but that's okay
We could get a fair way through it
He's still persona non grata, I would say among experimental psychologists and probably clinical psychologists as well
But that seems to me to be very unfair
Freud Freud is one of those thinkers who?
All that's left are his mistakes
and the reason for that is that everything that he
Discovered or put forward is so entrenched in our culture now that we think it's self-evident and so everything
correct has been assimilated and that just leaves everything that's more or less floating on top to look wrong and
But Freud is also one of those thinkers who was always wrong in an interesting way and that's very useful. And so I
also think that many of the things that he put his finger on that are of
still disputed for example, the idea of the Oedipus complex are much more useful than people are willing to
admit
especially in the clinical realm because the eatable complex which we'll talk about quite a bit is actually a
description of a fairly
stable
form of familial psychopathology where
child gets trapped within the confines of a family because the relationship with one parent or the other or both is so tight that
they can't break beyond it and maybe because of their own inability to
move towards independence but more frequently because of
What you might describe as a kind of conspiracy between the son and and the parent or the child and the parent
that prevents them from
moving towards
Autonomous life and keeps them in a state of essentially a state of childhood dependence
Freud said I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients under the influence of an older friend
And by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious and psychic life
The role of instinctual urges and so on out of these findings grew a new science psychoanalysis
A part of psychology and a new treatment for the neurosis. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck
People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory
Resistance was strong and unrelenting in the end
I succeeded in inquiring pupils and building it up in international psychoanalytic Association
But the struggle is not over he made that recording just shortly before he died. He moved to to England to escape the Nazis
Before Freud I guess
The mind was
It's complicated because Freud of course was not the only person to be thinking along the lines that he thought Pierre
jennae
who was one of his teachers had originated and started to develop many of the ideas that I would say were popularized by Freud but
The idea of the unconscious mind was not
Certainly not as well developed
prior to Freud as it became afterwards and
Before that I suppose
You might say that insofar as people thought of the mind at all
They thought of in philosophical terms and the mind would be that part of you
That's that you're aware of like in the dark in
The Cartesian sense Descartes said I think therefore I am and it kind of seems in some sense
Self-evident that you're aware of and have control over the contents of your own mind
But that was what Freud really questioned and he questioned it deeply said well
first of all the idea that you're one thing like one mind is a dubious idea to begin with because
People are full of internal contradictions. And then the idea that your mind is all of one type
it's it's all of one form was also very questionable as far as Freud was concerned because you could be fractionated into
subcomponents and
You know the idea for example that your anger or your sexual desire could be an autonomous part of your personality in some sense
It could overtake you and control you. That's really a Freudian idea and
one of the classic Freudian ideas really is that people are made out of sub personalities and
Those sub personalities are alive. And that's one of the things I really like about the psychoanalytic thinkers because even the
Psychologists who say over the last thirty years are they're about
Since maybe longer now
anyways, since the demise of behaviorism as an ideology and
the admission by psychologists that there were
There is an active unconscious or many active unconscious which is a better way of thinking about it
Psychologists still really haven't come to terms with the idea in any deep sense that these unconscious
Processes are living things, you know there
When psychologists talk for example about the cognitive unconscious they're talking about something that that they describe it more machine-like
with more machine like metaphors and that's not reasonable you you understand things a lot better if you
understand that the sub components that make up people the fragmentary bits of them and also the biological
subsystems that that are part and parcel of your being are
Much more intelligently viewed as personalities there
there are kind of uni dimensional personalities in some sense so that for example, if you're angry you're nothing, but angry I mean
That's an overstatement obviously or if you're afraid you're nothing but afraid or if you're hungry you're nothing but hunger well
That's certainly true
If you get hungry enough or thirsty
Or too hot or any of those things you you kind of collapsed to a simpler personality. That only has one
Motivation in mind and we'll talk a lot as we progress about the grounding of those uni-dimensional
Motivational systems in biology, but I'd have to say that Freud was
among the first at least the first to
Synthesize a coherent theory of this multiplicity and to put it forth
while also insisting that much of what was happening to you and inside of you was
not
immediately accessible
To your awareness and it's a very profound. It's a very profound discovery
it means among any among many other things that you
can formulate ideas
First of all, it means that you can act out things
That you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand it
also means that
Your memory can contain things that's represented in one way, but that can't be understood in another
So for example, and we know this is true because there are independent memory systems. There's an independent memory system for procedures
That's for actions. There's an independent
memory system for what you might describe as imagination for for the memory that uses images and then there's a another system that
articulates knowledge that's the semantic memory system and it's not obvious at all that the contents of all of those are
equivalent and that's why for example
you can dream things that you don't know because one of the things you might think is that your dreams watch you act and they
Watch other people act and then they make a little drama out of that and that drama has information in it
But you don't necessarily know what that information is in that you can't describe it consciously
Right. It's it's akin to the PA Chetty an idea. That kids can play a game
and you can take them away from the game and then they won't know how to describe the rules even though they can play the
Game and so dreams can contain information. That's full of
the encoding of behavior that has information in it that you're not consciously aware of and so then you can become
consciously aware of that in a kind of a revelation side
Maybe that's what you do when you become aware of the meaning of a dream or the meaning of a fantasy or something like that
and
That's all all our ability to think that way in some ways can be traced back to Freud
Now Freud concentrated mostly I would say at least in terms of pathology on
sexual and aggressive
Impulses and I I don't think that there's any mystery for modern people
about why aggressive impulses might be particularly difficult to integrate into the personality and might remain underdeveloped or will say
repressed although those aren't the same thing and
I think in order to you might think that in different times in society
Some things are allowed to surface express themselves and other things are less allowed. And so
Victorian times had a number of
characteristics that made the repression of sexuality particularly likely and perhaps also the repression of aggression and we're talking about
Victorian times in in Europe, obviously and only one time in one place
As Henry or Ellen Burgess says this is a great book by the way
the discovery of the unconscious if you're interested in
If you're really interested in psychoanalytic ideas Freud Jung and Adler and also the history of those ideas
There's no better book than the discovery of the unconscious. It's an absolutely remarkable book a great work of scholarship
I think it it goes for about
250 pages before it even gets to Freud and so it places Freud's discoveries in their historical context
So that's a really good thing to know
Allen Burgess says it was a world shaped by man for man in which women occupied the second place
Political rights for women did not exist the separation and dissimilarity of the sexes was sharper than today
women who wore slacks their hair shorter smoked were hardly to be found and the universities admitted no female students, man's
Authority over his children and his wife was unquestioned education was authoritarian
The despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel
Laws were more repressive delinquent youth sternly punished and corporal punishment was considered indispensable
now
So the times themselves I would say were harsher and more repressive but then there was an element to sexuality that was also
Extraordinarily
Problematic. I mean the first thing you might notice might consider and people generally don't it's almost impossible to overstate
how
revolutionary the birth control pill actually is
You know people like to think that the political rights that women have attained have been a consequence of a political struggle
But I don't buy that for a second. I don't think that's true even in the least
I think that what happened was that we underwent a biological revolution in the 1950s late
1950s with the emergence of the birth control pill and that for the first time in human history gave women
Pretty reliable control over the reproductive function not really transformed them into entirely different biological
beings in many many ways like here's an example a subtle example, so, you know
if you track women through their
Ovulation cycle and you show them a picture of a man same man
And you do nothing but vary his jaw width
When they're ovulating the guy with the wider jaw is more attractive and when they're not
Ovulating the farthest away from that the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive and that's associated with testosterone levels
And so women who are fertile like more masculine men and basically if you're on the pill then you're never in that
Ovulation phase and so one thing that may have happened and I don't know this for sure
but it's it's interesting to consider is that
Since women have been taking the birth control pill their preference for less
masculine men has become more pronounced and that could easily be one of the things that's fueling at least some of the tension that's
Existed and exists now politically between men and women, but the point is is that you just cannot ignore
The massive consequences of a biological revolution like that and to make any other factor causal when you're trying to understand
The political movement movements especially in the last say 40 years. It's you're putting the cart before the horse now
It's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology if certain
Political changes with regards to the emancipation of women hadn't already been in place, right?
No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception
So you can't separate the biological from the political entirely
but it's still it's still very useful to organize your organizing your thinking to realize just how profound a
Revolution that was but now back in the Victorian times
There's another thing about sexuality
Modern people like to think that there's nothing dangerous about sex and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever
Hypothesize because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous
Emotionally it's dangerous socially
it's dangerous because of the
Possibility of unwanted pregnancy and it's dangerous because of the possibility of sickness and that's a major one
I mean
So when aids emerged in the 1980s that could have easily killed all of us now the fact that it didn't was wonderful
But it did kill hundreds of millions of people. So it was no joke. It was a big deal and
ADEs
mutated to take advantage of promiscuity and so the
Relationship between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease is actually mediated at the biological level. But anyways back in the 1890s
They had the same problem, right? They had the problem with syphilis and syphilis is one nasty disease
it's it can mimic almost any other disease and it's devastating to your nervous system and you can pass it on to your children and
so part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was not only because of the
possibility of unwanted pregnancy the relative poverty of people
You know back in 1895 in Europe the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in in modern terms
You know
it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were and so
sex in a poverty-stricken place is also a lot more dangerous than it is in a rich place because especially if you were, you know,
given the lack of employment
opportunities for women back in the Victorian period if you happen to get pregnant out of wedlock you were and
You were in serious trouble
and so the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly as hardly a
surprise because it was so difficult to integrate into the full-fledged personality, you know, and it has it as it still is so
Sexual repression
supposedly characteristic feature of the Victorian period was often merely the expression of two facts the lack of diffusion of
contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease it was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost
Invariably contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection we can hardly imagine today how monstrous silithus syphilis appeared to people of that time
Well, we can imagine that a little bit better than they could in 1970 because it hasn't you know, AIDS is still with us
Although it's nowhere near the plague that it was say
25 years ago
Well, here's the Freudian world Freud
so let's let's take a look at the history of or the idea of the
Unconscious to begin with and one of the things that you might want to consider
Conceptually is that there are many different forms of unconscious
There's not just one and so Alan bursae points out that by 1904 functions of the unconscious had been described
There's a conservative function. So the unconscious stores memories often unaccessible to voluntary recall
Well, that's a strange one, you know
obviously you remember your past but you don't remember all of
What you can remember at any given time and you don't really have access to that full store of memories
although you can try to remember so the unconscious is the
You could imagine the memories are represented somehow
Neurologically, but neural the neurological structure isn't exactly the mind like the neurological structure isn't exactly your consciousness
There's some relationship between them that we don't know and the unconscious
from a conceptual perspective is the place that your memories are that you
Sometimes can get access to and sometimes can't and so
you might think well that there are the memories that you can't get access to there might be a variety of reasons you can't get
access to them one might be that you've just forgotten them and
One might be that they're so painful that you don't want to bring them to mind
You'll you'll engage in tricks to stop yourself from getting access to them
And or maybe they're memories that are so complex that and painful that even if you did get access to them
You wouldn't exactly know what to do with them
and so there's not a lot of reason for you to bring them to mind because all it is is pain without any without any
Utility and when you understand that a little bit you understand more about what Freud meant by repression
The thing about Freud is that he kind of believed that
like many people believe now that when you remember an event in the past
It's it's almost as if you're using a video tape recorder and that when you experience that the memory is somehow
Recorded in you like it happened
But that's not a very accurate version of how memory works I mean
We know that memories can be easily distorted
for example
if you interview someone about an event and
You make suggestions that there was something present in the event that wasn't there and then you bring them back a couple of weeks later
And you ask them about the same event?
they'll often incorporate the thing that they were told into the event and
So and the idea that you can make an objective record of something that's happening to you is kind of a strange notion anyways
because so for example if you're having an argument with someone and
Later you I asked what the argument was about and the other person has asked what the argument is about
there's no necessary reason why the accounts will
Jibe at all because a lot of time when you're having an argument with someone you're arguing about what the argument is about
Right say well, you're angry at me. Well why this is why I think you're angry at me
You say no this is why I think this event has occurred and you're thinking about especially if we know each other
Well, you're thinking about the contextualization of that event across our entire history
and I'm doing the same thing and I'm gonna highlight things that you're not gonna highlight and I'm gonna draw causal inferences that you're not
Going to draw and for us just to get on the same page about the memory. It's going to be very difficult
So the idea that in specially with complex interactions with people that you can somehow
make a video recording of the memory and actually capture what happens is is very very
It's it's not true. You you can't I mean you might be able to extract out certain objective facts, but
But generally if it's a dialogical issue if it's a relationship issue
It spans such a long period of time that just cutting a slice of it out doesn't
constitute a reasonable record of what it means and
That's what you're more concerned with - like when when you have an experience, you know
I'm not so much concerned about what happened from an objective perspective
You're more concerned about what the experience means and then you might ask
Well, what does it mean to mean something and that was the question? I was trying to answer in that paper
I had you read right at the beginning of the class
but one of the things that meaning means is that it has
Implication for the way you look at the world or the way you act in the world. And so if I tell you something meaningful
what that's going to mean is in the future you're going to act slightly differently or maybe
Radically differently depending on how meaning it meaningful it is but also that the way that you look at the world has shifted
And the way that you look at the world is actually an unconscious. It's actually an unconscious process
I mean
You don't know
While you're looking at the world how it is or why it is that you're looking at the world in that way
I mean because well
First of all, it would just be too complicated and second you wouldn't be able to concentrate on what was actually going on
So your attention?
For example is mediated by unconscious forces and you know that you know that perfectly well and this is another Freudian observation, you know
if you're sitting down to
study
for example
your conscious intent is to study but you know perfectly well that all sorts of
Distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination
Non-stop and annoyingly and and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except maybe wait it out, you know
So you'll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away. You'll think about I don't know
Maybe you want to watch the G in the virgin on Netflix or something like that
Or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich
or you should get the dust bunnies from out from underneath the bed or it's time to go outside and have a cigarette or maybe
It's time for a cup of coffee or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't
Very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by and so they pop up and try to take
Control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop. Maybe you think well, this is a stupid course
Anyways, why do I have to read this damn paper? And what am I doing in university? And what's the point of life?
It's like you can really well
You can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework and and and then you might think well
what is it in you that's trying to avoid because
After all, you took the damn course and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen?
Well, because you're you're a mess now. That's basically why you haven't got control over yourself at all
And no more than I have control over this laptop
Okay, so there's the memory function of the unconscious and there's the dis dis eluted function
That's an interesting one the unconscious contains habits once voluntary now are tamo ties and dissociated
Elements of the personality which may lead a parasitic existence. That's an interesting one
I would relate that more to procedural memory, you know, so what you've done is practice certain habits, whatever they might be
Let's call them bad habits and you like those things to get under control?
But you can't so maybe when you're speaking for example, you use like and you know
And you say I'm a lot and you've practiced that so you're really good at it and you'd like to stop it
But you don't - because you've built that little machine right into your being right? It's
Neurologically wired and it's not under conscious control and anything you practice
becomes that
It becomes part of you and and that's another element of the unconscious a different part
And then there's a creative part which is that well
You know you're sitting around and maybe you're trying to write something or maybe you want to
Produce a piece of art or a piece of music or maybe you're just laying in bed dreaming and you have all these weird ideas
And especially in dreams. It's like what where do those things come from and even more strange?
One of the things that's really weird about dreams and almost impossibly weird is that you're an observer in the dream
It's like a dream is something that happens to you. Well, you're dreaming it theoretically so how is it that you can be an observer?
It's almost like you're watching a video game or a movie but you're producing it that at least in principle
Although the psychoanalysts would say well, no not exactly your ego isn't producing it. Your unconscious is producing. It's a different thing
It's a different thing. And of course Jung would say well it's deeper than that. The collective unconscious might be producing it
It's in some sense
It isn't you?
exactly
or it isn't the you that you think of when you think of you and that's the ego from the Freudian perspective the you that
you identify with that's the ego and
outside of that is the unconscious the it'd
That's more the place of impulses and you could think about those as the biological
Subsystems that can derail your thinking right and that govern things like hunger and sex and aggression and your basic
instincts is another way of putting it and it's a reasonable way of thinking about it because these are
Subsystems that you share with with animals you share them certainly with mammals
You share most of them with reptiles you share a lot of them with em Finian's and even going all the way down to
Crustaceans there's commonality for example in the dominance hierarchy circuits
and so these are very very old things and the idea that you're in control of them is
Well, you're not exactly in control of them and I would say the less integrated you are
The less you're in control of them and the more they're in control of you and that can get really out of hand, you know
You can be like with people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. For example
which which which is
Which seems to be I would say that dissolute of elements in some sense of the unconscious the way that it's portrayed here
Poor people with obsessive-compulsive disorder they can spend half their time
Doing things that they can't really control and they have very strong
Impulses to do them and it's very hard on them to block them
You know, they they'll almost panic if those things are blocked and then you have people with Tourette's syndrome
you know that they'll be doing all sorts of weird dances and
spouting off obscenities and and and and imitating people
without being able to control it and and
Sometimes a little bit of anti-psychotic medication can dampen that down but it's as if there are these autonomous
semi spirits inside of them that grip control over their behavior and make them do things and you know,
you find that to some degree in your own life because maybe
You've become very attractive to someone even maybe you don't want to be attracted to the person and then you find yourself
You know texting them when you know perfectly well that you should be going to bed and you know
you're you're in a grip of something and and you can't control it and that's all part of the
unconscious and all part of what Freud was studying
The dynamic unconscious it's alive and it's a compass that the mind is a composite of contradictory drives now
The way Freud thought about this basically was that with the end and the ego and the super-ego
so if you think about the end as the place where these contradictory drives emerge
So it's sort of nature within the ego is the thing that's sort of being pushed back and forth by those
Contradictory drives and the super-ego is the thing that's on top saying you better behave yourself you better behave yourself and so it's a different
model than the Piaget daeun model because Piaget assumed that what would happen is that
As the child and I like the Piaget and model better
I think I think in healthy development the Piaget daeun model is correct
But in unhealthy development
I think the Freudian model is correct that
Instead of integrating say the aggressive and sexual drives for the sake of argument into your personality as you develop
What happens is the super-ego just represses them instead so they don't become a dynamic part of you
Integrated into your ego. They're just repressed. You just don't manifest them and
That's how you be a good person and you can be the victim of a very harsh
super-ego and that often happens if you've had a particularly tyrannical
Parent one or both or maybe a tyrannical grandparent or maybe you're your own inner tyrant
And you've picked up tyrannical voices through your whole life and aggregated them into this terrible judge
that's always watching you that's criticizing everything you do and
Restricting you badly and really badly and what you're allowed and not allowed to do you see that with anorexic women?
Well men could be anorexic too, but it's much much less rare
They have super egos that are just or one way of thinking about it
That's just they're just deadly they're just criticizing every bit of them. Well right to the point
They're really criticizing them out of existence right is you have to be so perfect that the perfection is not
Aligned with the ability to live you don't get to eat, you know and and people like that
They look at their bodies
they even look at their bodies incorrectly like
anorexic seem to be unable to see their bodies as a whole they can only see their bodies as parts and
When you start seeing your body as parts
you're really in trouble because you can't get a sense of actually what it looks like and body perception is very very complicated, but
anyways
Piaget thought about the ego as in some sense as the game that's played by all these
Dynamic drives that's shaped by the broader community. And so that could all be integrated
But Freud would say well look when that doesn't happen instead
You're subject to the tyranny of the super-ego and it just says you should never be angry, right?
You should never express yourself sexually because if you do there's something wrong with you
you're a bad person and you're a bad person if you ever get aggressive or and so and then people who are
living like that under those circumstances
You know they get they well they're they're repressed is the right way to think about it
Now Freud was interested in the idea that mental disorders could be caused for two reasons one would be purely
Bodily, like maybe a head injury or say in the case of schizophrenia
Which is a good example of manic depressive disorder
we have reason to believe that there's something
Physiological going on even though but identifying that has been very difficult and it's because there isn't one form of schizophrenia
there's probably many pathways of
brain injury that lead to
schizophrenic like symptoms and there's likely not one form of manic depressive disorder either if you think of the form as having a
Standard causal pathway. We know that there are because we've done genetic Studies on people
Who have manic depressive disorder in their family and you can identify genes within a family that seemed to be contributing to the disorder?
but the problem is is that those genes don't seem to be
so then you'll take another family group with manic depressive disorder and it'll be a different genetic combination that causes that so
so part of the reason why
It's difficult to associate the even the more biological
Mental disorders with with biology all the way down is because they're so complex and then there are other forms of mental
Disorder that don't seem to be structure at all structural at all
They seem to have more to do with well
Let's call it the psyche right and that it's more like the contents of your thought have a problem rather than the structures
Underlying your thought and of course that distinction is difficult to make in a fine-grained way
But you kind of get the point
I mean just because there's an error in your thinking doesn't mind really mean that the underlying biology in some sense has been
compromised it's complicated because if the air is bad enough, then it can compromise the underlying biology but
but whatever it's a conceptual distinction and part of the conceptual distinction is is
Helpful, if you're trying to think at least in part about how you might cure it because if you're thinking about a brain disease
then that
Implies a different course of treatment at least in principle then it does if you're thinking about a psychological
disorder where you might
think about talking to someone for example and straightening out their thoughts or helping them learn to behave in a different way and
It was really Freud
Who started to?
Think that he was the first person to really pause it and this is pretty interesting that directly pause it that dialogue or conversation
Or speaking could be curative
And now that's another thing that people don't like to give him credit for I mean there wouldn't be all these
helping industries social social work and psychology and and
Biological Psychiatry insofar as that also involves communication and counseling and all these things now that would have existed
In all likelihood if Freud wouldn't have made the original
hypothesis that
There was something about communication that could be curative. No
Freud believed that
Experiences that hadn't been now. He thought about experiences has repressed and this goes back to the videotape idea of memory
so the idea would be that you have a record of everything that's happened to you and the records actually accurate and
then some of those things that happen to you were very very shocking to you were very hurtful or very
depressing or very threatening and so you've decided that you're
Those have become repressed you're not paying any attention to them now
He has a complex mechanism to account for that and I actually think this is a place where his theory went badly wrong
because you don't have a videotape memory and
It isn't obvious that the memories that you have of traumatic events are fully fledged and causally
appropriate but just not paid attention to it's more like they're murky and
Unclear in and of themselves and they contain too much and I don't think that people so much repress as they do
refuse to attend to or are unable to attend to so it's more like a passive avoidance than a
Passive avoidance of something that needs to be explored and gone through rather than it is
something you know that you don't want to look at that you are part of you has put away and
and I think that's a major weakness in his theory and has led to a lot of
Problems with the idea of repression per se. But anyways, that was his idea that
Terrible things have happened to you and you or some part of you doesn't want to
To know about them to know about them. And so they live this those repressed experiences live an autonomous life of their own - and
You here's an example of a trivial example of how that might work
imagine that you're at work and
Your boss says something to you that disturbs you maybe it makes you question whether your job is stable
So you're kind of set about that
But it's a casual offhand comment and you go back to work and you just sort of forget that that even happened, you know
Maybe because you're attending to something else
but then you go home and you're just
Crabby as can possibly be and you go home and one of the people there says something a little annoying and you snap at them
It's like well that's analogous to what Freud would call a complex, right?
Is that this because you could imagine what's happened is that the boss's words have brought up a whole little sub personality
predicated on doubt
Up to the surface and who knows how deep that would be?
Well what happens if I lose my job and if I lose my job, well, what sort of person am I?
Exactly. And what about all these other times that I've failed and then maybe you remember the other times that you failed and what am
I going to do in the future. So it's this whole cluster of ideas that surrounds that doubt and that's been activated
It's a little part of you and then maybe you're not attending to that because you're busy doing some other work
But when you go home something triggers it and like it's already there
It's all you get way more upset than you should and that's that's what a complex is except in a much more
complicated manner like a complex might be a whole series of
experiences that you've had that are united by some emotion like threat
That aren't haven't been transformed into a coherent representation
But that can rise out of the unconscious and possess you if you guys many of you guys have been
Depressed at at least one point in your life, you know, it's actually very common for University of Toronto students
especially in their first year
It's about one in three if you if you have students the Beck Depression Inventory
But one in three taught University of Toronto students in our research have have hit criteria for hospitalization
I mean the back is a little oversensitive as far as I'm concerned, but but you know what? It's like when you're depressed
It's like it's it's it's a part of your personality sort of subsumes the whole and depression quite classically is well
You can't think of anything good that happened to you in the past and you can't think of any reason why the present is good
For anything and you're pretty damn hopeless about the future and so that's a complex as well
and it's a complex that consists of nothing but negative emotion and it structures your
Memory and your percept and your plans for the future all at the same time
now
Freud had a very lengthy list of ways that people could be treacherous towards
Experiences they had that they wanted to repress and so he called them defense mechanisms
This is how you fool yourself into believing that you don't have to take into account a certain set of negative experiences
you know, it's like
Well, we'll go through the repression. Okay. Well we talked about that denial. Well that often denial is a very complicated one
See if I can come up with a good example
It was a classic example for people who have I think it's called anis Ignasi, I don't remember exactly it's neglect
That's a less technical way of thinking about so let's say you have a right parietal
Damage from a stroke and you lose the left side of your body so you can't move it anymore, but worse you don't know
It's there and you don't know that the left side of anything
Is there anymore and god only knows how that happens but like you'll only eat half the food on your plate only on the right
hand side and if someone asks you to draw a clock you'll cram all the numbers into the one side and so you kind of
Lose the idea of left and I think it's sort of like, you know how when you're looking forward
There's nothing behind you. You can't see anything back here. It's it's not black. It's not even gone
It's just simply not there at all. And so if you could imagine that sort of stretching around halfway
That seems to be something what neglect is like, but anyways, if you if you take someone with neglect according to Ramachandra
and then if you irrigate their ear with cold water the
Ear on the opposite side, then they'll kind of have a little convulsion and then all of a sudden
They become aware of their missing left side
If you talk to them before you do the irrigation, you say well well
what's up with your left arm and they'll say well I
My arthritis is bothering me and I don't want to move it they come up with some
Something that sounds akin to denial, you know
And then if you can snap them out of that with that irrigation and they'll have a catastrophic
emotional response
logically enough to the loss of their entire left side and
Ramachandran report that lasting about 20 minutes and then they'll snap out of it and go right back into the denial and
sometimes people deny things because
They can't update what's happened to them is so overwhelming that they cannot
Construct a new model. They just rely on the old one and you see this
Well, imagine first that you've just had a tooth pulled and you know
How many how long your tongue takes to like remap the inside of your mouth?
It's really hard to come up with a new concept of you if something catastrophic happens, and so sometimes the denial is just that
Something the thing that has happened is so overwhelming that the person can't model it
But then maybe also they refuse to think about it and you see this
emerging in lots of strange ways
so for example, if people develop diabetes, for example
They're often not very good at taking their medication or regulating their diet and you might say well they're denying the existence
of their illness and to some degree
They're probably doing that because who the hell wants to think that they're diabetic but even worse than that
It's like it's complicated to be diabetic
You're no longer the same person that you were and so you have to learn a whole bunch of new ways to be this new
Person what to eat when to eat how to check your blood
you have to be careful whenever you go out and eat like there's there's a
Hundred new things a day that you have to learn and so separating denial from inability is a hard one
But you can also understand that people might deny. No, that's just not happening. That's that's I'm not going to admit to that
Reaction formation. Oh, that's one. Maybe you hate your sister and maybe you have your reasons, but you shouldn't hate your sister
So what you do is act as if you really really like her. That's an overcompensation
So that's another form of defense mechanism
displacement
My boss yells at me. I yell at my husband. My husband yells at the baby the baby bites the cat
Well, they're not really dealing with the problem, which is the boss. It's just pushed on down the road and
Identification you're bullied and instead of coming to terms with the fact that bullying occurs. You start bullying other people
Rationalization, well, you know what that means already, you know
Maybe you don't do your homework you're procrastinating. I bet you can come up with fifteen rauch
No problem for why it's actually not necessary for you to do your homework right then
Intellectualization what Woody Allen's movies are about like that. He's got all these neurotic problems, but he's smart and so he can come up with
Intelligent reasons why he's so messed up even though he knows he's messed up and it doesn't help
sublimation
Well that that was one of the things that Freud thought characterized art
So for example, there's a lot of erotic content in art
and
so if you're having trouble establishing a
relationship or if you want to have a relationship with many people then maybe what you do is sculpt nudes or paint them and then
there's projection which is
I'm having an argument with you and I'm unwilling to admit to my moat my dark motivations, and I'm very skeptical of you
And so I assume that you're characterized by all the dark motivations that I won't admit to in myself
so
Now Freud also believed that it was unconscious ideas that were at the core of psychological conflicts and he
Described those conflicts as incomprehensible distress
psychosomatic symptoms and so those would be the manifestation of
psychological of
The manifestation of psychological content in bodily form that might be stress a stress-related illness might be one way of thinking about that
I've had clients who had hysterical epilepsy. So that was quite interesting. So that was a somatic
manifestation of a psychological problem
back when Freud was
practicing
Hysteria was much more common
and maybe that was partly because Victorian society was so
Centred on the theater and so dramatic and people would come in with like a paralyzed arm or something like that that he could
Sort out with hypnosis, and so they were manifesting their
Psychological distress in bodily form often in a manner that was representative of that
psychological conflict in some way
Behavioral anomalies hallucinations and delusions. He thought that all of those could be
manifestations of
inner internal psychological conflict with their sets of unconscious ideas, so
You know, let's go back to the - the boss example
Your boss says something nasty to you. Come home
Someone says something a bit
Provoking and you fly off the handle and then you have an argument about what the hell is up with you because they say well
Look what I said was, you know this big and you reacted like this and you're gonna say, well no
No, you're always annoying like that
And which is kind of a denial thing and maybe the person doesn't let up and they say no
No, I really know that something's wrong
And you do like six other things to keep them the hell away from you and finally they're persistent enough
so you break down crying and you say well I had this terrible day at work and you didn't even really notice that you
knew that until the moment of the moment of the tears and you see that very frequently in psychotherapy - if you're talking to people
for example
Maybe they're relating a story about their their marriage that collapse badly and they're talking and all of a sudden
they'll say something and they'll tear up and
Then they'll continue and you can grab that you say look you just said something
I noticed that your eyes filled with tears when you said that what was going through your mind
Now often they'll they unless you catch it quick they'll forget
So they're talking and they'll have and the talking about the past is you know
flashing off imagistic memories and you'll say well that made you cry and
And they often don't like that because for obvious reasons that something's come up that
they don't want to talk about and
So you say well what was flashing through your mind and the person will tell you like quite a lengthy
little memory fantasy about a sequence of events that you know is still a
Hot-button issue and that's another example of this underlying complex, you know
and if you watch people
You can watch people in normal conversation
this happens all the times their eyes will move or they'll smile or you can see as
They're speaking that all sorts of different ideas are flitting through their head
It's dreamlike in a sense - it's sort of as if the person is talking and they're dreaming at the same time
There's this image Laden set of memories that's going on at the same time and that can be quite broad
far broader than they could encapsulate in the words and
so you can catch that and if you're really listening to someone really paying attention to them you can see when they're doubtful or when
They pause for a long time. That's another one
You know that some things come up that that that's occupying their mind and interfering with the flow of conversation
Freud was very good at listening in that manner
While that happens with jokes too, you know and
Like for example when I was showing you guys the Lion King
Stills the other day and I showed you that picture of nella laying on her back with that
peculiar expression on her face everybody immediately laughed and
the you be Freud would have considered that an entry point into the
Unconscious because there is a reason you were laughing about it. It goes along with it
well
it would have gone along with a sexual complex in that situation and everybody recognizes it instantly and they laugh about it and
Comedians are really good at that because if they're good comedians
They say what everyone's thinking but no one will say and it's a relief to everyone. You know, he
What's his name?
Canadian comedian so he's making racial jokes. No. No, it's Canadian. Uh, yeah Russell Russell Peters
I mean, he's a great example of that, you know
He feels a whole stadium with people of all different ethnicities and every single one of them is dying to be
Insulted because of their racial background, you know
it's a relief to
everyone so he had salts the herbs and then he insults the Jews and then he insults the Christians and he's going
Oh, I'm so glad finally someone said that
No, so so he's speaking to part of their unconscious and it's the part that's actually uncomfortable with all of that kind of discussion
Being repressed and staying below the surface
It's way too weighty for people so jokes expressed in playful language what culture will not?
formally express so
You know to that when the culture starts going after the comedian's that things are not good
So you should leave the damn comedians alone
Because there are the people that can tell the truth and if you start to get annoyed at them, then that's not good
so
So a Freud was also extraordinarily interested in dreams
Poor Freud who were just not gonna be able to cover him in enough detail. Well, um,
How will we do this because I should tell you about the dreams
Freud wrote a book called the interpretation of dreams and he he was the first person I would say who
subjected dreams to a really comprehensive analysis and he used them to
Investigate the place of complexes in his psychotherapeutic practice. So his clients would recount their dreams to him now
He believed that dreams always expressed an unconscious wish and that was tied into his theory of repression
And so for example if you were very very sexually repressed
which was very common at the time then you'd have dreams with sexual content that we're expressing the the
expressing the
Undesirable fantasy essentially and by analyzing the dream you could get down to what you could get down to what was being repressed
now Freud believed that the dream
more or less tied itself in knots
trying to hide its
Content in some sense and Jung believed instead that the dream was actually trying to be as clear as it could it just wasn't part
Of the let's call it the semantic memory system
It was it was more like a feeler out into the unknown
it was trying to
Represent things as clearly as it could and so its use of symbols and that sort of thing wasn't so much to hide the actual
Unpleasant content from the dreamer but to express it in the only language that the dream could use and so Freud
Of course also believed that some of that was true
All right. Well, we're gonna have to stop there. So
since it's 2 o'clock, so we'll see you on
Tuesday