So today we're talking about personality and personality is something that
everybody knows a little something about.
Lay people know about personality because that's how we identify each other
to one another.
It's how we identify ourselves. What's consistent about us
is what makes us feel like there is
an identifiable pattern that we can rely upon. That's
what personality in essence is. It's an individual's unique assortment
of stable behavior patterns or stable traits
that are more or less going to be exhibited across situations
and across lifetime, although they're not written in stone,
and as we'll see when we get to social psychology, situations can have profound
impacts on our behavior such that we act inconsistent
with what other people might think to be our behavior traits or characteristics,
and as you saw with intelligence, there were lots and lots of different
theories of intelligence and likewise, and maybe even more so,
there are lots and lots of theories of personality.
And if you take a class in personality, you will find very quickly that there
isn't
a consensus of what it is exactly anymore then there's a consensus of
exactly what intelligence is. But we know way more than we used to know because we
are a science. Now,
we started out with Freud who is probably the most famous
of all people associated with psychology though he wasn't a psychologist per se.
He was not a scientist. He was a theorist and he was a physician,
and he practiced in his time, which was a male-dominated
time, a white-dominated time, in a middle-class
area of Vienna, and so his patients were largely
middle-class or upper class Viennese women
whom he saw in a clinical practice for having
issues dealing with life, and he
worked with some other people. He became famous in his own time
but he largely developed his own independent theory
of personality accounting for everything
in a person's life and how it develops very early on, personality,
and then affects the rest of life there forward in a very deterministic way. So,
from a philosophical perspective he was a determinist,
and his ideas as we'll see are very controversial.
They hold lots of concepts within them that people find aversive,
and the thing about Freud is to keep him in context, not throw the baby out
with the bathwater, but
science has thrown out a lot of his concepts since he
came up with them. But his concepts were very logically sound concepts
based upon some pretty rigid biases he had.
So he had biases against women especially because
he was from a male-dominated patriarchal time. He thought they were inferior and
he sought to explain that
through processes of development. He also
thought that your personality is pretty much fixed
by the time you're in your teens and that that would dominate who you were to
be
for the rest your life and that while we might give you a little insight we wouldn't
hold out
much hope for a lot of change for you. So, in the sense that he
felt like who you were was fixed, we later find out that's not the case
in social situations that are very powerful, but we also find out that
all of us can change and all of us can change profoundly if we want to change. So,
we start out with Freud
paying some homage to him but realizing that while he started the
field,
and did so in a very powerful way, his biggest contribution to
understanding personality scientifically was really to piss a bunch of people off.
A lot of people just disagreed with him flatly. They thought he was
off the mark and way off the mark. That's one of the reasons he was so
controversial. He talked a lot about sexuality,
something that just wasn't talked about in the early nineteen hundreds and
how that played into everybody's experiences but
most people misunderstood what he was saying when he was talking about sexuality.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more but he was talking about being
fixed in your personality when you're very young, that your unconscious drives
a lot of your conscious behaviors,
and that sex had a lot to do with who you were and and how you were motivated
and and that we had these really negative impulses inside us that society
really represses and presses down and molds into a functional member
and all of that was really not received well by many people. Some people on the
other hand
thought that he was really a genius and that he was on to something that nobody else
had ever tapped into fully
or really tried to understand or given credence to, and so he had some very
devout adherents and those people, and the people who opposed Freud,
then engaged in lots of research to prove him right or to prove him wrong
and as such the field advanced because of the impetus he provided
in just simply laying out his systematic theory. So keeping
in mind that we take him with a grain of salt, let's go through Freudian
psychoanalysis on an introductory level and see what we can learn from it and
and you will resonate with some of this and you'll recognize some of it.
So,
psychoanalytic theory starts with three levels of mind,
the conscious, the preconscious, or subconscious,
and the unconscious. Now we're all sharing consciousness right now
at varying levels. Some people are daydreaming and they're not really
present with us but they're awake and they're upright
and in that sense they're conscious and what they're experiencing in their
fantasies or daydreams, just drifting off,
is their conscious experience at the moment. In other words, they could describe
it, they can relate it to other people, they can shift it, bring it back to me,
and attend
to what we're talking about, but we all have that
shared experience that this is a classroom and this is America
and this is a particular time of the day at a particular time of the month in a
particular year
and we all share that reality because we're all conscious
individuals. That much everybody can agree on.
We're conscious creatures. Where does that consciousness come from?
Think back to when we're talking about functionalism and William James and he was
talking about a stream of consciousness,
that it's just kind of this ongoing thing and you can never stop thinking.
Well, where does your next thought come from? It's coming.
There's no doubt about it's coming. You're going to have a thought
in a second, in another second,
in a minute and another minute and you don't have to think what am I going to think next.
It just happens. So the idea is where does that
next thought come from and that would be your subconscious from a Freudian point of view, that it's
kind of bubbling up
from where? Potentially from an unconscious source. Now the unconscious source
is a very hard thing for a lot of people to grapple with and lend credence to
because
by definition you're not aware of it. So how could anything
you're unaware of have any influence over the things you are aware of
and moreover Freud thought it had the most influence
on your moment to moment experience in ways that,
because you aren't aware of, you can't modify
or change, which is why he feels that your early experiences that shape that
unconsciousness inside of you
are so deterministic that they will have continued influences over you because you
aren't aware of them.
If you would like to change them, you would have to become aware of them. You would have to
develop
insight. You'd have to then work very hard to become conscious of something that is
typically beyond your own awareness
and then that is going to be very difficult to change because it's deep down inside of you.
In a way, we're all universes to ourselves. We're all worlds to ourselves
and we let each other know certain things about ourselves on the surface
but there's
stuff within us that we don't even understand. Most people can
can grant that much. But he would say the unconscious is the biggest influence on our
moment to moment behavior and that, by itself, is pretty controversial.
Then he talks about three divisions of mind
and in these divisions of mind we have the id.
The id you have probably heard of. There's a cartoon, the Wizard of Id.
The id consciousness. Well id is not really conscious.
Id is an experience that drives us. Id is a part of our psyche
and id is primitive. It has base drives,
animalistic drives, very primal wishes and wants,
and it dominates in early childhood, and it operates on the pleasure principle of
immediate gratification.
So, looking at children developing, young children
tantrum very easily because they want what they want when they want it
without regard to any other consequences or any other considerations of other
people,
because they want it. Well, that's the
idea of the id. The id is a life force. It is a driving
motivating factor in our lives and early on it's unchecked. It just does what it
does because
it is the primal operating force.
It's the libido. It's where the libido is housed. You've probably
heard libido. It's a part of popular culture now. It's in
songs. It's in Nirvana songs, in old Young MC songs.
Go to the church in my new tuxedo, check your libido.
Libido. What is it? It's a life force. It is a
motivational drive within oneself
and in some ways, it has sexual characteristics to it. Now, when we talk about
sexual characteristics in a Freudian sense,
that does not negate sex as most people think about it,
where we are talking about sexual behavior,
but for him we're really talking about sexual behavior as a progenitor of the
species,
that we are all primally driven
to mate to continue the species.
Without mating, we cease to exist. We become extinct,
and in that sense, it's a driving force for humanity.
It's one that in his day was never talked about. Therefore, it was extremely
controversial just to start talking about it.
So the life force drives us to survive
and to procreate and to ensure that our offspring continue on, so to
ensure their survival. To show you how
interesting Freud's mind was, in my way of thinking,
he did not initially have a death force.
Almost sounds like a Star Wars concept. He modified his
theories as he encountered new information in his own life. His theories were expansive,
many, many, many volumes.
Very tight logic. Not scientific. That's the difference between just common sense
or thinking well or thinking systematically and then
finding evidence to support those notions. But he was faced with seeing
World War I
which was the war to end all wars. It was a level of violence
that was unparalleled and unprecedented.
War was not unprecedented, but war on that scale
was unprecedented and so if you have a life force,
and that's your primary driving instinct, well then
how could you go out and risk dying for a cause or for a country
or whatever the case may be. It would try to
promote your survival. But here we are amassing
destruction, laying waste
to entire landscapes, entire sections of humanity.
What drives that destructiveness in people? He would say it would be Thanatos,
the death force, and that causes for him all acts
of aggression and destruction. So, what we'll see pretty early on with Freud is that
he's got a lot of theories that explain a lot of things
retrospectively. So, if I saw somebody engage in an act of aggression,
or destruction, vandalism, whatever the case may be,
I could go well that was their Thanatos in operation,
but it doesn't help me predict future behavior, right? So, it's not a piece of
knowledge that allows me
to make predictions and in that sense it's not really scientific.
I can't put it to the test. It's hard to operationalize
what is a Thanatos? What is a libido? And how do I test
libido or test Thanatos and somebody 's who high on Thanatos should be
more aggressive or more destructive, and somebody who's lower in it and higher in libido should be
more proactive and positive, et cetera, maybe,
depending on how you define this. But, it defies
scientific description.
The primary process then is the notion that you can't always get what you want,
to quotes some famous lyrics by the Rolling Stones,
and when you can't get what you want, it's not that that notion goes away. It's
not that the desire goes away,
the thing that you want so badly but can't get,
that drive to get it still exists and the primary process then allows you
to create fantasies and daydreams to gratify
that desire at least mentally and somewhat emotionally by engaging in
fantasy
and the fantasy doesn't necessarily have any realistic means to achievement. If
there was a realistic means, you would just gratify the wish
or the want in that early stage of life. So you have a kid who is tantruming here.
I want a cookie, I want a cookie, I want a cookie, right?
They don't respond to reason. You say, well, you can't have a cookie because it's about
dinner time and
that will spoil your dinner and first you need to eat a healthy meal and then if you
have room you might have some desert. They don't respond to that because the id is driving
the ship at that point. It's what's in control
and it doesn't respond to reason. But you don't get what you want
and so not getting it, you can still go, well, I want a cookie, you get sent to your
room, or you get spanked, or whatever, because you're tantruming.
You're still ruminating on wanting that cookie and you're
fantasizing about having it, perhaps.