Full transcript
0:10So on to Sigmund Freud
0:12We'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
0:18We could get a fair way through it
0:21He's still persona non grata, I would say among experimental psychologists and probably clinical psychologists as well
0:28But that seems to me to be very unfair
0:31Freud Freud is one of those thinkers who?
0:35All that's left are his mistakes
0:38and the reason for that is that everything that he
0:41Discovered or put forward is so entrenched in our culture now that we think it's self-evident and so everything
0:48correct has been assimilated and that just leaves everything that's more or less floating on top to look wrong and
0:54But Freud is also one of those thinkers who was always wrong in an interesting way and that's very useful. And so I
1:01also think that many of the things that he put his finger on that are of
1:06still disputed for example, the idea of the Oedipus complex are much more useful than people are willing to
1:12admit
1:14especially in the clinical realm because the eatable complex which we'll talk about quite a bit is actually a
1:21description of a fairly
1:24stable
1:26form of familial psychopathology where
1:29child gets trapped within the confines of a family because the relationship with one parent or the other or both is so tight that
1:37they can't break beyond it and maybe because of their own inability to
1:42move towards independence but more frequently because of
1:47What you might describe as a kind of conspiracy between the son and and the parent or the child and the parent
1:53that prevents them from
1:55moving towards
1:58Autonomous life and keeps them in a state of essentially a state of childhood dependence
2:06Freud said I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients under the influence of an older friend
2:13And by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious and psychic life
2:20The role of instinctual urges and so on out of these findings grew a new science psychoanalysis
2:24A part of psychology and a new treatment for the neurosis. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck
2:30People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory
2:35Resistance was strong and unrelenting in the end
2:38I succeeded in inquiring pupils and building it up in international psychoanalytic Association
2:42But the struggle is not over he made that recording just shortly before he died. He moved to to England to escape the Nazis
2:52Before Freud I guess
2:57The mind was
2:59It's complicated because Freud of course was not the only person to be thinking along the lines that he thought Pierre
3:05jennae
3:06who was one of his teachers had originated and started to develop many of the ideas that I would say were popularized by Freud but
3:15The idea of the unconscious mind was not
3:19Certainly not as well developed
3:22prior to Freud as it became afterwards and
3:26Before that I suppose
3:31You might say that insofar as people thought of the mind at all
3:34They thought of in philosophical terms and the mind would be that part of you
3:38That's that you're aware of like in the dark in
3:41The Cartesian sense Descartes said I think therefore I am and it kind of seems in some sense
3:47Self-evident that you're aware of and have control over the contents of your own mind
3:53But that was what Freud really questioned and he questioned it deeply said well
3:58first of all the idea that you're one thing like one mind is a dubious idea to begin with because
4:05People are full of internal contradictions. And then the idea that your mind is all of one type
4:11it's it's all of one form was also very questionable as far as Freud was concerned because you could be fractionated into
4:18subcomponents and
4:20You know the idea for example that your anger or your sexual desire could be an autonomous part of your personality in some sense
4:27It could overtake you and control you. That's really a Freudian idea and
4:32one of the classic Freudian ideas really is that people are made out of sub personalities and
4:38Those sub personalities are alive. And that's one of the things I really like about the psychoanalytic thinkers because even the
4:46Psychologists who say over the last thirty years are they're about
4:49Since maybe longer now
4:52anyways, since the demise of behaviorism as an ideology and
4:57the admission by psychologists that there were
5:01There is an active unconscious or many active unconscious which is a better way of thinking about it
5:07Psychologists still really haven't come to terms with the idea in any deep sense that these unconscious
5:13Processes are living things, you know there
5:16When psychologists talk for example about the cognitive unconscious they're talking about something that that they describe it more machine-like
5:24with more machine like metaphors and that's not reasonable you you understand things a lot better if you
5:30understand that the sub components that make up people the fragmentary bits of them and also the biological
5:36subsystems that that are part and parcel of your being are
5:40Much more intelligently viewed as personalities there
5:44there are kind of uni dimensional personalities in some sense so that for example, if you're angry you're nothing, but angry I mean
5:50That'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
5:56That's certainly true
5:57If you get hungry enough or thirsty
5:59Or too hot or any of those things you you kind of collapsed to a simpler personality. That only has one
6:04Motivation in mind and we'll talk a lot as we progress about the grounding of those uni-dimensional
6:11Motivational systems in biology, but I'd have to say that Freud was
6:15among the first at least the first to
6:18Synthesize a coherent theory of this multiplicity and to put it forth
6:24while also insisting that much of what was happening to you and inside of you was
6:30not
6:32immediately accessible
6:34To your awareness and it's a very profound. It's a very profound discovery
6:39it means among any among many other things that you
6:44can formulate ideas
6:46First of all, it means that you can act out things
6:49That you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand it
6:53also means that
6:55Your memory can contain things that's represented in one way, but that can't be understood in another
7:01So for example, and we know this is true because there are independent memory systems. There's an independent memory system for procedures
7:08That's for actions. There's an independent
7:11memory system for what you might describe as imagination for for the memory that uses images and then there's a another system that
7:19articulates knowledge that's the semantic memory system and it's not obvious at all that the contents of all of those are
7:26equivalent and that's why for example
7:30you 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
7:36Watch other people act and then they make a little drama out of that and that drama has information in it
7:41But you don't necessarily know what that information is in that you can't describe it consciously
7:47Right. It's it's akin to the PA Chetty an idea. That kids can play a game
7:52and 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
7:56Game and so dreams can contain information. That's full of
8:00the encoding of behavior that has information in it that you're not consciously aware of and so then you can become
8:06consciously aware of that in a kind of a revelation side
8:09Maybe 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
8:14and
8:15That's all all our ability to think that way in some ways can be traced back to Freud
8:23Now Freud concentrated mostly I would say at least in terms of pathology on
8:29sexual and aggressive
8:31Impulses and I I don't think that there's any mystery for modern people
8:36about why aggressive impulses might be particularly difficult to integrate into the personality and might remain underdeveloped or will say
8:44repressed although those aren't the same thing and
8:48I think in order to you might think that in different times in society
8:53Some things are allowed to surface express themselves and other things are less allowed. And so
8:58Victorian times had a number of
9:01characteristics that made the repression of sexuality particularly likely and perhaps also the repression of aggression and we're talking about
9:07Victorian times in in Europe, obviously and only one time in one place
9:13As Henry or Ellen Burgess says this is a great book by the way
9:17the discovery of the unconscious if you're interested in
9:20If you're really interested in psychoanalytic ideas Freud Jung and Adler and also the history of those ideas
9:25There's no better book than the discovery of the unconscious. It's an absolutely remarkable book a great work of scholarship
9:31I think it it goes for about
9:33250 pages before it even gets to Freud and so it places Freud's discoveries in their historical context
9:39So that's a really good thing to know
9:40Allen Burgess says it was a world shaped by man for man in which women occupied the second place
9:46Political rights for women did not exist the separation and dissimilarity of the sexes was sharper than today
9:52women who wore slacks their hair shorter smoked were hardly to be found and the universities admitted no female students, man's
9:59Authority over his children and his wife was unquestioned education was authoritarian
10:04The despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel
10:10Laws were more repressive delinquent youth sternly punished and corporal punishment was considered indispensable
10:16now
10:18So the times themselves I would say were harsher and more repressive but then there was an element to sexuality that was also
10:26Extraordinarily
10:27Problematic. I mean the first thing you might notice might consider and people generally don't it's almost impossible to overstate
10:35how
10:37revolutionary the birth control pill actually is
10:41You know people like to think that the political rights that women have attained have been a consequence of a political struggle
10:47But I don't buy that for a second. I don't think that's true even in the least
10:50I think that what happened was that we underwent a biological revolution in the 1950s late
10:561950s with the emergence of the birth control pill and that for the first time in human history gave women
11:02Pretty reliable control over the reproductive function not really transformed them into entirely different biological
11:08beings in many many ways like here's an example a subtle example, so, you know
11:13if you track women through their
11:16Ovulation cycle and you show them a picture of a man same man
11:19And you do nothing but vary his jaw width
11:22When they're ovulating the guy with the wider jaw is more attractive and when they're not
11:27Ovulating the farthest away from that the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive and that's associated with testosterone levels
11:33And so women who are fertile like more masculine men and basically if you're on the pill then you're never in that
11:39Ovulation phase and so one thing that may have happened and I don't know this for sure
11:44but it's it's interesting to consider is that
11:46Since women have been taking the birth control pill their preference for less
11:49masculine 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
11:56Existed and exists now politically between men and women, but the point is is that you just cannot ignore
12:03The massive consequences of a biological revolution like that and to make any other factor causal when you're trying to understand
12:10The political movement movements especially in the last say 40 years. It's you're putting the cart before the horse now
12:18It's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology if certain
12:23Political changes with regards to the emancipation of women hadn't already been in place, right?
12:29No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception
12:33So you can't separate the biological from the political entirely
12:36but it's still it's still very useful to organize your organizing your thinking to realize just how profound a
12:45Revolution that was but now back in the Victorian times
12:48There's another thing about sexuality
12:50Modern people like to think that there's nothing dangerous about sex and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever
12:56Hypothesize because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous
12:59Emotionally it's dangerous socially
13:01it's dangerous because of the
13:04Possibility of unwanted pregnancy and it's dangerous because of the possibility of sickness and that's a major one
13:09I mean
13:10So when aids emerged in the 1980s that could have easily killed all of us now the fact that it didn't was wonderful
13:16But it did kill hundreds of millions of people. So it was no joke. It was a big deal and
13:22ADEs
13:23mutated to take advantage of promiscuity and so the
13:27Relationship between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease is actually mediated at the biological level. But anyways back in the 1890s
13:34They had the same problem, right? They had the problem with syphilis and syphilis is one nasty disease
13:39it'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
13:46so part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was not only because of the
13:53possibility of unwanted pregnancy the relative poverty of people
13:57You know back in 1895 in Europe the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in in modern terms
14:04You know
14:05it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were and so
14:08sex 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,
14:16given the lack of employment
14:18opportunities for women back in the Victorian period if you happen to get pregnant out of wedlock you were and
14:23You were in serious trouble
14:24and so the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly as hardly a
14:30surprise because it was so difficult to integrate into the full-fledged personality, you know, and it has it as it still is so
14:38Sexual repression
14:39supposedly characteristic feature of the Victorian period was often merely the expression of two facts the lack of diffusion of
14:45contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease it was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost
14:52Invariably contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection we can hardly imagine today how monstrous silithus syphilis appeared to people of that time
15:00Well, we can imagine that a little bit better than they could in 1970 because it hasn't you know, AIDS is still with us
15:06Although it's nowhere near the plague that it was say
15:0925 years ago
15:12Well, here's the Freudian world Freud
15:15so let's let's take a look at the history of or the idea of the
15:19Unconscious to begin with and one of the things that you might want to consider
15:23Conceptually is that there are many different forms of unconscious
15:26There's not just one and so Alan bursae points out that by 1904 functions of the unconscious had been described
15:33There's a conservative function. So the unconscious stores memories often unaccessible to voluntary recall
15:40Well, that's a strange one, you know
15:42obviously you remember your past but you don't remember all of
15:45What you can remember at any given time and you don't really have access to that full store of memories
15:51although you can try to remember so the unconscious is the
15:55You could imagine the memories are represented somehow
15:59Neurologically, but neural the neurological structure isn't exactly the mind like the neurological structure isn't exactly your consciousness
16:06There's some relationship between them that we don't know and the unconscious
16:10from a conceptual perspective is the place that your memories are that you
16:15Sometimes can get access to and sometimes can't and so
16:19you 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
16:25access to them one might be that you've just forgotten them and
16:28One might be that they're so painful that you don't want to bring them to mind
16:32You'll you'll engage in tricks to stop yourself from getting access to them
16:36And or maybe they're memories that are so complex that and painful that even if you did get access to them
16:43You wouldn't exactly know what to do with them
16:45and 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
16:51Utility and when you understand that a little bit you understand more about what Freud meant by repression
16:57The thing about Freud is that he kind of believed that
17:00like many people believe now that when you remember an event in the past
17:05It's it's almost as if you're using a video tape recorder and that when you experience that the memory is somehow
17:11Recorded in you like it happened
17:14But that's not a very accurate version of how memory works I mean
17:19We know that memories can be easily distorted
17:22for example
17:23if you interview someone about an event and
17:25You 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
17:31And you ask them about the same event?
17:33they'll often incorporate the thing that they were told into the event and
17:37So and the idea that you can make an objective record of something that's happening to you is kind of a strange notion anyways
17:44because so for example if you're having an argument with someone and
17:48Later you I asked what the argument was about and the other person has asked what the argument is about
17:53there's no necessary reason why the accounts will
17:56Jibe at all because a lot of time when you're having an argument with someone you're arguing about what the argument is about
18:02Right say well, you're angry at me. Well why this is why I think you're angry at me
18:07You say no this is why I think this event has occurred and you're thinking about especially if we know each other
18:13Well, you're thinking about the contextualization of that event across our entire history
18:19and 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
18:25Going to draw and for us just to get on the same page about the memory. It's going to be very difficult
18:30So the idea that in specially with complex interactions with people that you can somehow
18:35make a video recording of the memory and actually capture what happens is is very very
18:41It's it's not true. You you can't I mean you might be able to extract out certain objective facts, but
18:48But generally if it's a dialogical issue if it's a relationship issue
18:51It spans such a long period of time that just cutting a slice of it out doesn't
18:56constitute a reasonable record of what it means and
19:00That's what you're more concerned with - like when when you have an experience, you know
19:05I'm not so much concerned about what happened from an objective perspective
19:08You're more concerned about what the experience means and then you might ask
19:13Well, what does it mean to mean something and that was the question? I was trying to answer in that paper
19:19I had you read right at the beginning of the class
19:21but one of the things that meaning means is that it has
19:25Implication for the way you look at the world or the way you act in the world. And so if I tell you something meaningful
19:30what that's going to mean is in the future you're going to act slightly differently or maybe
19:35Radically differently depending on how meaning it meaningful it is but also that the way that you look at the world has shifted
19:41And the way that you look at the world is actually an unconscious. It's actually an unconscious process
19:46I mean
19:46You don't know
19:48While you're looking at the world how it is or why it is that you're looking at the world in that way
19:52I mean because well
19:55First of all, it would just be too complicated and second you wouldn't be able to concentrate on what was actually going on
20:01So your attention?
20:03For example is mediated by unconscious forces and you know that you know that perfectly well and this is another Freudian observation, you know
20:10if you're sitting down to
20:13study
20:15for example
20:16your conscious intent is to study but you know perfectly well that all sorts of
20:20Distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination
20:24Non-stop and annoyingly and and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except maybe wait it out, you know
20:30So you'll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away. You'll think about I don't know
20:35Maybe you want to watch the G in the virgin on Netflix or something like that
20:38Or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich
20:40or 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
20:45It's time for a cup of coffee or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't
20:52Very 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
20:58Control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop. Maybe you think well, this is a stupid course
21:03Anyways, why do I have to read this damn paper? And what am I doing in university? And what's the point of life?
21:07It's like you can really well
21:10You can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework and and and then you might think well
21:15what is it in you that's trying to avoid because
21:19After all, you took the damn course and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen?
21:25Well, because you're you're a mess now. That's basically why you haven't got control over yourself at all
21:33And no more than I have control over this laptop
21:38Okay, so there's the memory function of the unconscious and there's the dis dis eluted function
21:44That's an interesting one the unconscious contains habits once voluntary now are tamo ties and dissociated
21:51Elements of the personality which may lead a parasitic existence. That's an interesting one
21:56I would relate that more to procedural memory, you know, so what you've done is practice certain habits, whatever they might be
22:02Let's call them bad habits and you like those things to get under control?
22:06But you can't so maybe when you're speaking for example, you use like and you know
22:10And 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
22:16But you don't - because you've built that little machine right into your being right? It's
22:21Neurologically wired and it's not under conscious control and anything you practice
22:26becomes that
22:27It becomes part of you and and that's another element of the unconscious a different part
22:32And then there's a creative part which is that well
22:35You know you're sitting around and maybe you're trying to write something or maybe you want to
22:40Produce 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
22:46And especially in dreams. It's like what where do those things come from and even more strange?
22:53One of the things that's really weird about dreams and almost impossibly weird is that you're an observer in the dream
22:58It'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?
23:06It's almost like you're watching a video game or a movie but you're producing it that at least in principle
23:12Although the psychoanalysts would say well, no not exactly your ego isn't producing it. Your unconscious is producing. It's a different thing
23:19It's a different thing. And of course Jung would say well it's deeper than that. The collective unconscious might be producing it
23:24It's in some sense
23:25It isn't you?
23:26exactly
23:27or 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
23:33you identify with that's the ego and
23:35outside of that is the unconscious the it'd
23:38That's more the place of impulses and you could think about those as the biological
23:42Subsystems that can derail your thinking right and that govern things like hunger and sex and aggression and your basic
23:49instincts is another way of putting it and it's a reasonable way of thinking about it because these are
23:53Subsystems that you share with with animals you share them certainly with mammals
23:57You share most of them with reptiles you share a lot of them with em Finian's and even going all the way down to
24:03Crustaceans there's commonality for example in the dominance hierarchy circuits
24:07and so these are very very old things and the idea that you're in control of them is
24:14Well, you're not exactly in control of them and I would say the less integrated you are
24:20The 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
24:27You can be like with people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. For example
24:31which which which is
24:33Which seems to be I would say that dissolute of elements in some sense of the unconscious the way that it's portrayed here
24:39Poor people with obsessive-compulsive disorder they can spend half their time
24:43Doing things that they can't really control and they have very strong
24:47Impulses to do them and it's very hard on them to block them
24:50You know, they they'll almost panic if those things are blocked and then you have people with Tourette's syndrome
24:54you know that they'll be doing all sorts of weird dances and
24:59spouting off obscenities and and and and imitating people
25:04without being able to control it and and
25:07Sometimes a little bit of anti-psychotic medication can dampen that down but it's as if there are these autonomous
25:12semi spirits inside of them that grip control over their behavior and make them do things and you know,
25:19you find that to some degree in your own life because maybe
25:21You've become very attractive to someone even maybe you don't want to be attracted to the person and then you find yourself
25:26You know texting them when you know perfectly well that you should be going to bed and you know
25:31you're you're in a grip of something and and you can't control it and that's all part of the
25:35unconscious and all part of what Freud was studying
25:39The dynamic unconscious it's alive and it's a compass that the mind is a composite of contradictory drives now
25:47The way Freud thought about this basically was that with the end and the ego and the super-ego
25:52so if you think about the end as the place where these contradictory drives emerge
25:57So it's sort of nature within the ego is the thing that's sort of being pushed back and forth by those
26:03Contradictory 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
26:10model than the Piaget daeun model because Piaget assumed that what would happen is that
26:15As the child and I like the Piaget and model better
26:18I think I think in healthy development the Piaget daeun model is correct
26:22But in unhealthy development
26:24I think the Freudian model is correct that
26:27Instead of integrating say the aggressive and sexual drives for the sake of argument into your personality as you develop
26:33What happens is the super-ego just represses them instead so they don't become a dynamic part of you
26:39Integrated into your ego. They're just repressed. You just don't manifest them and
26:44That's how you be a good person and you can be the victim of a very harsh
26:47super-ego and that often happens if you've had a particularly tyrannical
26:52Parent one or both or maybe a tyrannical grandparent or maybe you're your own inner tyrant
26:58And you've picked up tyrannical voices through your whole life and aggregated them into this terrible judge
27:03that's always watching you that's criticizing everything you do and
27:07Restricting you badly and really badly and what you're allowed and not allowed to do you see that with anorexic women?
27:13Well men could be anorexic too, but it's much much less rare
27:17They have super egos that are just or one way of thinking about it
27:20That's just they're just deadly they're just criticizing every bit of them. Well right to the point
27:25They're really criticizing them out of existence right is you have to be so perfect that the perfection is not
27:32Aligned with the ability to live you don't get to eat, you know and and people like that
27:38They look at their bodies
27:39they even look at their bodies incorrectly like
27:42anorexic seem to be unable to see their bodies as a whole they can only see their bodies as parts and
27:48When you start seeing your body as parts
27:50you'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
27:57anyways
27:58Piaget thought about the ego as in some sense as the game that's played by all these
28:05Dynamic drives that's shaped by the broader community. And so that could all be integrated
28:08But Freud would say well look when that doesn't happen instead
28:11You're subject to the tyranny of the super-ego and it just says you should never be angry, right?
28:16You should never express yourself sexually because if you do there's something wrong with you
28:20you're a bad person and you're a bad person if you ever get aggressive or and so and then people who are
28:26living like that under those circumstances
28:28You know they get they well they're they're repressed is the right way to think about it
28:38Now Freud was interested in the idea that mental disorders could be caused for two reasons one would be purely
28:45Bodily, like maybe a head injury or say in the case of schizophrenia
28:48Which is a good example of manic depressive disorder
28:51we have reason to believe that there's something
28:53Physiological going on even though but identifying that has been very difficult and it's because there isn't one form of schizophrenia
29:00there's probably many pathways of
29:03brain injury that lead to
29:04schizophrenic like symptoms and there's likely not one form of manic depressive disorder either if you think of the form as having a
29:11Standard causal pathway. We know that there are because we've done genetic Studies on people
29:16Who have manic depressive disorder in their family and you can identify genes within a family that seemed to be contributing to the disorder?
29:23but the problem is is that those genes don't seem to be
29:26so then you'll take another family group with manic depressive disorder and it'll be a different genetic combination that causes that so
29:33so part of the reason why
29:35It's difficult to associate the even the more biological
29:40Mental disorders with with biology all the way down is because they're so complex and then there are other forms of mental
29:47Disorder that don't seem to be structure at all structural at all
29:51They seem to have more to do with well
29:52Let's call it the psyche right and that it's more like the contents of your thought have a problem rather than the structures
29:59Underlying your thought and of course that distinction is difficult to make in a fine-grained way
30:05But you kind of get the point
30:06I mean just because there's an error in your thinking doesn't mind really mean that the underlying biology in some sense has been
30:13compromised it's complicated because if the air is bad enough, then it can compromise the underlying biology but
30:19but whatever it's a conceptual distinction and part of the conceptual distinction is is
30:25Helpful, 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
30:31then that
30:34Implies a different course of treatment at least in principle then it does if you're thinking about a psychological
30:40disorder where you might
30:41think about talking to someone for example and straightening out their thoughts or helping them learn to behave in a different way and
30:48It was really Freud
30:50Who started to?
30:51Think that he was the first person to really pause it and this is pretty interesting that directly pause it that dialogue or conversation
30:59Or speaking could be curative
31:01And now that's another thing that people don't like to give him credit for I mean there wouldn't be all these
31:07helping industries social social work and psychology and and
31:12Biological Psychiatry insofar as that also involves communication and counseling and all these things now that would have existed
31:20In all likelihood if Freud wouldn't have made the original
31:25hypothesis that
31:27There was something about communication that could be curative. No
31:31Freud believed that
31:35Experiences that hadn't been now. He thought about experiences has repressed and this goes back to the videotape idea of memory
31:43so the idea would be that you have a record of everything that's happened to you and the records actually accurate and
31:49then some of those things that happen to you were very very shocking to you were very hurtful or very
31:54depressing or very threatening and so you've decided that you're
32:00Those have become repressed you're not paying any attention to them now
32:04He has a complex mechanism to account for that and I actually think this is a place where his theory went badly wrong
32:10because you don't have a videotape memory and
32:13It isn't obvious that the memories that you have of traumatic events are fully fledged and causally
32:21appropriate but just not paid attention to it's more like they're murky and
32:26Unclear in and of themselves and they contain too much and I don't think that people so much repress as they do
32:34refuse to attend to or are unable to attend to so it's more like a passive avoidance than a
32:40Passive avoidance of something that needs to be explored and gone through rather than it is
32:45something you know that you don't want to look at that you are part of you has put away and
32:50and I think that's a major weakness in his theory and has led to a lot of
32:53Problems with the idea of repression per se. But anyways, that was his idea that
32:58Terrible things have happened to you and you or some part of you doesn't want to
33:05To know about them to know about them. And so they live this those repressed experiences live an autonomous life of their own - and
33:13You here's an example of a trivial example of how that might work
33:18imagine that you're at work and
33:20Your boss says something to you that disturbs you maybe it makes you question whether your job is stable
33:26So you're kind of set about that
33:27But it's a casual offhand comment and you go back to work and you just sort of forget that that even happened, you know
33:34Maybe because you're attending to something else
33:36but then you go home and you're just
33:37Crabby as can possibly be and you go home and one of the people there says something a little annoying and you snap at them
33:43It's like well that's analogous to what Freud would call a complex, right?
33:47Is that this because you could imagine what's happened is that the boss's words have brought up a whole little sub personality
33:55predicated on doubt
33:56Up to the surface and who knows how deep that would be?
33:59Well what happens if I lose my job and if I lose my job, well, what sort of person am I?
34:04Exactly. 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
34:09I going to do in the future. So it's this whole cluster of ideas that surrounds that doubt and that's been activated
34:15It's a little part of you and then maybe you're not attending to that because you're busy doing some other work
34:20But when you go home something triggers it and like it's already there
34:24It's all you get way more upset than you should and that's that's what a complex is except in a much more
34:29complicated manner like a complex might be a whole series of
34:35experiences that you've had that are united by some emotion like threat
34:40That aren't haven't been transformed into a coherent representation
34:44But that can rise out of the unconscious and possess you if you guys many of you guys have been
34:50Depressed at at least one point in your life, you know, it's actually very common for University of Toronto students
34:57especially in their first year
35:00It's about one in three if you if you have students the Beck Depression Inventory
35:04But one in three taught University of Toronto students in our research have have hit criteria for hospitalization
35:11I 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
35:16It's like it's it's it's a part of your personality sort of subsumes the whole and depression quite classically is well
35:23You 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
35:28For anything and you're pretty damn hopeless about the future and so that's a complex as well
35:33and it's a complex that consists of nothing but negative emotion and it structures your
35:38Memory and your percept and your plans for the future all at the same time
35:42now
35:44Freud had a very lengthy list of ways that people could be treacherous towards
35:51Experiences they had that they wanted to repress and so he called them defense mechanisms
35:56This is how you fool yourself into believing that you don't have to take into account a certain set of negative experiences
36:04you know, it's like
36:06Well, we'll go through the repression. Okay. Well we talked about that denial. Well that often denial is a very complicated one
36:18See if I can come up with a good example
36:22It was a classic example for people who have I think it's called anis Ignasi, I don't remember exactly it's neglect
36:29That's a less technical way of thinking about so let's say you have a right parietal
36:32Damage 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
36:39It's there and you don't know that the left side of anything
36:41Is 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
36:47hand 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
36:53Lose the idea of left and I think it's sort of like, you know how when you're looking forward
36:57There's nothing behind you. You can't see anything back here. It's it's not black. It's not even gone
37:03It's just simply not there at all. And so if you could imagine that sort of stretching around halfway
37:09That seems to be something what neglect is like, but anyways, if you if you take someone with neglect according to Ramachandra
37:16and then if you irrigate their ear with cold water the
37:20Ear on the opposite side, then they'll kind of have a little convulsion and then all of a sudden
37:26They become aware of their missing left side
37:29If you talk to them before you do the irrigation, you say well well
37:32what's up with your left arm and they'll say well I
37:35My arthritis is bothering me and I don't want to move it they come up with some
37:39Something that sounds akin to denial, you know
37:42And then if you can snap them out of that with that irrigation and they'll have a catastrophic
37:47emotional response
37:48logically enough to the loss of their entire left side and
37:52Ramachandran report that lasting about 20 minutes and then they'll snap out of it and go right back into the denial and
37:58sometimes people deny things because
38:01They can't update what's happened to them is so overwhelming that they cannot
38:05Construct a new model. They just rely on the old one and you see this
38:10Well, imagine first that you've just had a tooth pulled and you know
38:14How many how long your tongue takes to like remap the inside of your mouth?
38:17It's really hard to come up with a new concept of you if something catastrophic happens, and so sometimes the denial is just that
38:25Something the thing that has happened is so overwhelming that the person can't model it
38:29But then maybe also they refuse to think about it and you see this
38:34emerging in lots of strange ways
38:35so for example, if people develop diabetes, for example
38:39They're often not very good at taking their medication or regulating their diet and you might say well they're denying the existence
38:44of their illness and to some degree
38:46They're probably doing that because who the hell wants to think that they're diabetic but even worse than that
38:51It's like it's complicated to be diabetic
38:54You'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
38:59Person what to eat when to eat how to check your blood
39:03you have to be careful whenever you go out and eat like there's there's a
39:07Hundred new things a day that you have to learn and so separating denial from inability is a hard one
39:12But 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
39:20Reaction formation. Oh, that's one. Maybe you hate your sister and maybe you have your reasons, but you shouldn't hate your sister
39:26So what you do is act as if you really really like her. That's an overcompensation
39:31So that's another form of defense mechanism
39:35displacement
39:36My boss yells at me. I yell at my husband. My husband yells at the baby the baby bites the cat
39:41Well, they're not really dealing with the problem, which is the boss. It's just pushed on down the road and
39:48Identification you're bullied and instead of coming to terms with the fact that bullying occurs. You start bullying other people
39:58Rationalization, well, you know what that means already, you know
40:01Maybe you don't do your homework you're procrastinating. I bet you can come up with fifteen rauch
40:07No problem for why it's actually not necessary for you to do your homework right then
40:13Intellectualization 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
40:21Intelligent reasons why he's so messed up even though he knows he's messed up and it doesn't help
40:26sublimation
40:27Well that that was one of the things that Freud thought characterized art
40:32So for example, there's a lot of erotic content in art
40:34and
40:34so if you're having trouble establishing a
40:37relationship or if you want to have a relationship with many people then maybe what you do is sculpt nudes or paint them and then
40:43there's projection which is
40:46I'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
40:53And so I assume that you're characterized by all the dark motivations that I won't admit to in myself
40:58so
41:02Now Freud also believed that it was unconscious ideas that were at the core of psychological conflicts and he
41:08Described those conflicts as incomprehensible distress
41:12psychosomatic symptoms and so those would be the manifestation of
41:16psychological of
41:18The manifestation of psychological content in bodily form that might be stress a stress-related illness might be one way of thinking about that
41:27I've had clients who had hysterical epilepsy. So that was quite interesting. So that was a somatic
41:33manifestation of a psychological problem
41:36back when Freud was
41:39practicing
41:40Hysteria was much more common
41:42and maybe that was partly because Victorian society was so
41:45Centred on the theater and so dramatic and people would come in with like a paralyzed arm or something like that that he could
41:51Sort out with hypnosis, and so they were manifesting their
41:55Psychological distress in bodily form often in a manner that was representative of that
42:02psychological conflict in some way
42:05Behavioral anomalies hallucinations and delusions. He thought that all of those could be
42:11manifestations of
42:13inner internal psychological conflict with their sets of unconscious ideas, so
42:19You know, let's go back to the - the boss example
42:23Your boss says something nasty to you. Come home
42:26Someone says something a bit
42:27Provoking and you fly off the handle and then you have an argument about what the hell is up with you because they say well
42:32Look what I said was, you know this big and you reacted like this and you're gonna say, well no
42:37No, you're always annoying like that
42:39And which is kind of a denial thing and maybe the person doesn't let up and they say no
42:45No, I really know that something's wrong
42:46And you do like six other things to keep them the hell away from you and finally they're persistent enough
42:51so you break down crying and you say well I had this terrible day at work and you didn't even really notice that you
42:56knew that until the moment of the moment of the tears and you see that very frequently in psychotherapy - if you're talking to people
43:04for example
43:05Maybe they're relating a story about their their marriage that collapse badly and they're talking and all of a sudden
43:11they'll say something and they'll tear up and
43:13Then they'll continue and you can grab that you say look you just said something
43:17I noticed that your eyes filled with tears when you said that what was going through your mind
43:22Now often they'll they unless you catch it quick they'll forget
43:26So they're talking and they'll have and the talking about the past is you know
43:32flashing off imagistic memories and you'll say well that made you cry and
43:36And they often don't like that because for obvious reasons that something's come up that
43:41they don't want to talk about and
43:43So you say well what was flashing through your mind and the person will tell you like quite a lengthy
43:48little memory fantasy about a sequence of events that you know is still a
43:53Hot-button issue and that's another example of this underlying complex, you know
43:58and if you watch people
44:00You can watch people in normal conversation
44:02this happens all the times their eyes will move or they'll smile or you can see as
44:06They're speaking that all sorts of different ideas are flitting through their head
44:10It's dreamlike in a sense - it's sort of as if the person is talking and they're dreaming at the same time
44:16There's this image Laden set of memories that's going on at the same time and that can be quite broad
44:21far broader than they could encapsulate in the words and
44:24so 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
44:31They pause for a long time. That's another one
44:33You know that some things come up that that that's occupying their mind and interfering with the flow of conversation
44:40Freud was very good at listening in that manner
44:44While that happens with jokes too, you know and
44:48Like for example when I was showing you guys the Lion King
44:52Stills the other day and I showed you that picture of nella laying on her back with that
44:56peculiar expression on her face everybody immediately laughed and
45:00the you be Freud would have considered that an entry point into the
45:04Unconscious because there is a reason you were laughing about it. It goes along with it
45:08well
45:08it would have gone along with a sexual complex in that situation and everybody recognizes it instantly and they laugh about it and
45:15Comedians are really good at that because if they're good comedians
45:18They say what everyone's thinking but no one will say and it's a relief to everyone. You know, he
45:23What's his name?
45:28Canadian comedian so he's making racial jokes. No. No, it's Canadian. Uh, yeah Russell Russell Peters
45:35I mean, he's a great example of that, you know
45:36He feels a whole stadium with people of all different ethnicities and every single one of them is dying to be
45:42Insulted because of their racial background, you know
45:45it's a relief to
45:46everyone so he had salts the herbs and then he insults the Jews and then he insults the Christians and he's going
45:51Oh, I'm so glad finally someone said that
45:53No, 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
46:01Being repressed and staying below the surface
46:04It's way too weighty for people so jokes expressed in playful language what culture will not?
46:10formally express so
46:12You know to that when the culture starts going after the comedian's that things are not good
46:16So you should leave the damn comedians alone
46:18Because there are the people that can tell the truth and if you start to get annoyed at them, then that's not good
46:23so
46:27So a Freud was also extraordinarily interested in dreams
46:33Poor Freud who were just not gonna be able to cover him in enough detail. Well, um,
46:40How will we do this because I should tell you about the dreams
46:46Freud wrote a book called the interpretation of dreams and he he was the first person I would say who
46:52subjected dreams to a really comprehensive analysis and he used them to
46:58Investigate the place of complexes in his psychotherapeutic practice. So his clients would recount their dreams to him now
47:05He believed that dreams always expressed an unconscious wish and that was tied into his theory of repression
47:11And so for example if you were very very sexually repressed
47:15which was very common at the time then you'd have dreams with sexual content that we're expressing the the
47:23expressing the
47:24Undesirable fantasy essentially and by analyzing the dream you could get down to what you could get down to what was being repressed
47:32now Freud believed that the dream
47:35more or less tied itself in knots
47:37trying to hide its
47:38Content 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
47:45Of the let's call it the semantic memory system
47:47It was it was more like a feeler out into the unknown
47:50it was trying to
47:51Represent 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
47:58Unpleasant content from the dreamer but to express it in the only language that the dream could use and so Freud
48:05Of course also believed that some of that was true
48:08All right. Well, we're gonna have to stop there. So
48:12since it's 2 o'clock, so we'll see you on
48:15Tuesday