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So today we're going to talk about Freud. Freud is probably, perhaps, the most controversial of the psychological theorizers that we've been discussing in the first part of this course. I don't know what it is about Freud.
Jordan Peterson explores Freud's controversial theories, their historical context, and their impact on psychology and culture.
Key Takeaways
- Freud's theories remain influential despite controversy and partial inaccuracies.
- Clinical psychology operates as a hybrid between science and applied value-based practice.
- Cultural and historical context is crucial to understanding Freud's ideas and mental illness.
- Freud's focus on unconscious drives and sexuality addresses difficult but essential psychological topics.
- Understanding Freud benefits from multimedia examples and comparison with other theorists like Jung.
Summary
- Freud is one of the most controversial figures in psychology, introducing many foundational ideas despite criticism.
- Peterson discusses Freud's hybrid nature of theory, blending science and values, and being 'helpfully wrong' as a clinical tool.
- Historical context is provided to understand the cultural and societal influences on Freud's work, including Victorian-era norms.
- Freud's ideas about the unconscious, sexuality, and the conflict between individual drives and cultural demands are examined.
- The lecture highlights the sociological elements of mental disorders and how culture shapes their manifestation.
- Examples from movies and recordings are used to illustrate Freud's concepts, though such examples are rare.
- The lecture touches on the biological basis of language and mental illness, and the challenges of balancing species propagation with individual well-being.
- Peterson compares Freud's ideas with those of Jung and discusses the importance of understanding Freud through multiple perspectives.
- The role of repression, sexuality, and the superego versus id conflict are central themes in Freud's theory as presented.
- The lecture also briefly references the impact of Darwinian ideas on Freud's work and the evolution of psychological thought.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Freud and his Controversy
- 06:55Using Movie Clips to Illustrate Freud's Ideas
- 12:05Sexuality and its Problems in Freud's Time
- 16:49Conflict Between Species Propagation and Individual Health
- 21:57Neurosis and Psychological Suffering
- 26:28Focus and Attention in Psychology
- 30:53Morality and Social Interactions in Primates
- 40:01Freud's Ideas in Relation to Darwin and Culture
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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exactly people really like to give him a rough time even though it's quite clear that many of the things we take for granted as psychologists today were first introduced into the public realm of knowledge by Freud now Freud would say that the
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Exactly. People really like to give him a rough time, even though it's quite clear that many of the things we take for granted as psychologists today were first introduced into the public realm of knowledge by Freud. Now, Freud would say that the
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and uh I think there's a lot of Truth to that I also think that Freud was one of those people who was right at some levels of analysis and not so right at others but but I would say that even where he wasn't right he
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reason that people are so upset with his theorizing is that they don't like the implications of what he says, and that he could have predicted that as a consequence of his theory because Freud talks about things that people don't really like to talk about.
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conceptualize conceptual schemes as tools then you can also Al understand how a better tool is an improvement even though it's not necessarily right and a lot of the clinical theories are quite tooll likee given that they're applied to the problems of of poor mental
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And I think there's a lot of truth to that. I also think that Freud was one of those people who was right at some levels of analysis and not so right at others, but I would say that even where he wasn't right, he
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appropriately is but it straddles as we've discussed the space between value and Science and so the theories have to be a hybrid a strange hybrid now I'm going to play you a little recording and this is the only recording that was ever
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was helpfully wrong. A theory can be helpfully wrong if it's better than the theory that it replaced, just like a hammer is a better tool for chopping down a tree than a wrench. It's not as good as an axe, but if you
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Tuesday I'm going to show you some movie clips because it like as with Yung one of the best ways to understand Freud is to actually see some examples of what he was talking about now those examples are hard to come by as it turns
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conceptualize conceptual schemes as tools, then you can also understand how a better tool is an improvement even though it's not necessarily right. A lot of the clinical theories are quite tool-like, given that they're applied to the problems of poor mental
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I to okay so I'm going to get you some historical background so that you can understand the context within which Freud was operating now the reason I'm going to do this because you might think well why is the history necessary and
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health. So, I don't really think of clinical psychology precisely as a science because it's an applied science, and that makes it more like a form of engineering. I mean, it can be based on scientific insight, which it
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substrate for language learning we don't really understand it you can think of it as a capacity although that doesn't help but when you launch a baby into the world and the baby encounters a linguistic Community he or she learns to
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appropriately is, but it straddles, as we've discussed, the space between value and science, and so the theories have to be a hybrid, a strange hybrid. Now, I'm going to play you a little recording, and this is the only recording that was ever
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at one level of analysis and maybe that biological disruption in some sense is somewhat constant across cultures but then the manner in which the disturbance manifests itself the specific manner is going to be shaped by the culture and
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made of Freud, strangely enough. I mean, the recording technology was there, but it's only a minute and 23 seconds long. So I'll play that, and then we'll do a fairly comprehensive job of walking through Freud's theory. Then on
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take forms that differ with the culture because sometimes in some epochs there's going to be trouble in the society with regards to incorporating one set of drives and other times there's going to be trouble incorporating another set of
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Tuesday, I'm going to show you some movie clips because, like with Jung, one of the best ways to understand Freud is to actually see some examples of what he was talking about. Now, those examples are hard to come by, as it turns
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that sex is extraordinarily problematic for all sorts of reasons when one of the main reasons is apart from pregnancy apart from unwanted pregnancy um apart from the passions that sexual attraction inflames it's also an incredibly effect Ive Vector for the transmission of
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out, but I have a movie that—there is a movie, I should rephrase that—that does a great job of it, really a great job. So, okay, here's the recording. I—the [Music] my UNC as the new method of treatment of
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happened in the Victorian era was that when the when the Europeans came to North America They Carried a variety of different NES measles MPS smallpox those were very very hard on the Native American population and wiped about 95%
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I to. Okay, so I'm going to get you some historical background so that you can understand the context within which Freud was operating. Now, the reason I'm going to do this is because you might think, well, why is the history necessary? And
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anyways it was a devastating illness civilus I mean um it was certainly the syphilis problem in Europe in the late 19 1900s was certainly as serious as the AIDS crisis in the 20th century which is still to some degree running out
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part of the reason it's necessary is because mental disorders, such as they are, have a sociological element. So you might think about it this way: the human brain is obviously predisposed to learn languages, so there's a biological
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whereabouts when because it it was at the end of the ' 50s that the birth control pill was invented and the birth control pill was what propelled the political movements that facilitated the movement of women into the workplace on mass by the 1970s I mean
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substrate for language learning. We don't really understand it. You can think of it as a capacity, although that doesn't help. But when you launch a baby into the world and the baby encounters a linguistic community, he or she learns to
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between propagation of the species and the happiness and health of the of a particular individual and it's a difficult problem to solve especially because children are dependent for so long so this is from HRI alen who wrote a
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speak very, very rapidly. But the languages are different depending on the culture, and mental illnesses are like that. So you could think, well, there can be biological disruption at one level of analysis. Sorry about that, guys. There can be biological disruption
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fair bit of Freud I took from the discovery of the unconscious because it's it's regarded as the best scholarly work that was ever done on the history of the psychoanalytic movement and also on Freud and Jung and Adler and so Ellen
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at one level of analysis, and maybe that biological disruption, in some sense, is somewhat constant across cultures. But then the manner in which the disturbance manifests itself, the specific manner, is going to be shaped by the culture. And
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so so here's what the world was like 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
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then, of course, and this is a Freudian idea, because culture battles against the individual to some degree, and so that's sort of the idea of the superego against the id. Then the battle between the individual and culture is going to
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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 sexual repression a supposed characteristic of the Victorian psyche was often merely the expression
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take forms that differ with the culture because sometimes, in some epochs, there's going to be trouble in the society with regards to incorporating one set of drives, and other times there's going to be trouble incorporating another set of
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problematic if a woman became pregnant outside of wedlock and the other thing that's really necessary to understand is that people in the late 1800s didn't have very much money you know um even in the Civilized world so to speak in the
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drives. And so, for Freud, in Freud's time, sexuality was very heavily—was very problematic. I don't think it's exactly appropriate to say that it was repressed. I would say more that it was extraordinarily problematic, and the reason for that is
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three factors that made sexuality difficult to integrate one was the the sheer danger of pregnancy for women um and then disease and then the fact well the the fact associated with that that there were no contraceptives venial disease
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that sex is extraordinarily problematic for all sorts of reasons. One of the main reasons is, apart from pregnancy, apart from unwanted pregnancy, apart from the passions that sexual attraction inflames, it's also an incredibly effective vector for the transmission of
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likely to be transmitted to the Next Generation in the form of hereditary syphilis which in turn had become a nightmarish myth and to which many Physicians attributed all diseases of Unknown Origin well en syphilis was was and is a particularly problematic
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disease. And so part of the reason that people have mixed motives with regards to their sexual behavior is because, like eating, sex is one of those activities that can also potentially be contaminating. And one of the things that
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sexuality now Freud was also very much influenced by nche elen bie says that psychoanalysis belongs to that unmasking Trend the search for hidden unconscious motivations characteristic of the 1880s and 1890s in Freud as in n words and deeds are viewed as manifestations of
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happened in the Victorian era was that when the Europeans came to North America, they carried a variety of different diseases: measles, mumps, smallpox. Those were very, very hard on the Native American population and wiped about 95%
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dreams and mental illness now you know it seems to me and and I I don't know if this if it also seems to you that these are sorts of things that we take for granted now that people don't always say
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of it out. There is a theory that syphilis was the reverse gift and then it was brought to the Old World by the New World. It was the only illness, as far as anyone knows, that had that particular characteristic.
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influence their dreams and influence their actions in ways that are difficult to discover and that passions and dreams and mental illnesses are manifestations of the unconscious and so you see what happens to a thinker whose ideas are rapidly
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Anyways, it was a devastating illness. Syphilis, I mean, it was certainly the syphilis problem in Europe in the late 19th and early 1900s was certainly as serious as the AIDS crisis in the 20th century, which is still to some degree running out,
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which is staggeringly fast from a historical perspective I mean when when you absorb a great thinker's ideas and those become axioms now they're they're they're what people assume then all that's really left of what they're they think is what's the error right because
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especially in developing countries, but has been somewhat controlled. And so there were also very, very rigid gender roles, you know, and that was pretty true, I would say, around the world until the 20th century and probably really until the 1950s or thereabouts, when
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mental energy Quant of latent or inhibited energy or release of energy or transfer from one drive to another is also to be found in nche before Freud nche conceived the Mind as a system of drives that can Collide or be fused into
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because it was at the end of the '50s that the birth control pill was invented. And the birth control pill was what propelled the political movements that facilitated the movement of women into the workplace en masse by the 1970s. I mean,
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take a form of energy like Sexual Energy let's say and and and pour it into something else now the sublimation idea is a very interesting one because for Freud it was more of an individual issue so if a if a one one he
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people like to attribute that to political pressure, but without the biological transformation, the political pressure would have been pointless. So I think it's hard for modern people to understand how problematic sex was for the Victorians.
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channeled into other activities and so you know one of the obvious examples of that would be paintings of nudes for example um or into creativity in general and and frud actually believed that the reason that people became civilized was
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There's a conflict between propagation of the species and the happiness and health of a particular individual, and it's a difficult problem to solve, especially because children are dependent for so long. So this is from H.R. Allen, who wrote a
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works better as a philogenetic um hypothesis than as an ontogenetic hypothesis so and here here's why um it is certainly the case that one of the reasons that people are creative especially one of the reasons that men are creative is because if a man is
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great book. If you're really interested in psychoanalytic thought, this is the best book you can read as an introduction. It's called The Discovery of the Unconscious. And a lot of what I'm going to tell you about Freud, although I've read a
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biological relatives which are the chimpanzees are extremely selective maters and women tend to mate across and up dominance hierarchies and and this looks like a biological propensity it's the case for women all around the world it's also as far as we can tell the
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fair bit of Freud, I took from The Discovery of the Unconscious because it's regarded as the best scholarly work that was ever done on the history of the psychoanalytic movement and also on Freud and Jung and Adler. So Allen
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the things that's happened is that as women have become educated like educated men will marry uneducated women but educated women will not marry uneducated men and so one of the one of the one of what's happened as we've transformed our
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B., who was an existential psychotherapist who lived in Montreal at least when he was older, produced a very evenhanded historical representation of the precursors to the idea of the unconscious and then of Freud's theories and Jung's theories and Adler's theories.
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income inequality in North America is a consequence of of of the fact that women will only mate across or up dominance hierarchies so they won't they're looking for someone who's at least as competent as they are or more competent
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So here's what the world was like. 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.
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massive difference it's an unbelievably massive difference it has very powerful sociological consequences n well understood those processes that have been called defense mechanisms by Freud particularly sublimation repression and the Turning of instincts towards oneself both give a new expression to dito's Old assumption
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Women who wore slacks or wore their hair short or smoked were hardly to be found. The universities admitted no female students until the early 1890s. Man's authority over his children and also over his wife was unquestioned. Education was authoritarian. The despotic
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perspective that was different from that of P and I I think PJ is actually correct for Freud the individual is striving upwards to manifest their true nature which is in some ways can be quite brutish and what the super U is doing what Society
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father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel. Laws were more repressive, deli—
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certainly understand that and I I think that is true the more tyrannical a society becomes and as Ellen B pointed out Victorian society was quite authoritarian and the more authoritarian a society the more there is a struggle between the individual attempting to be
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an individual and the culture attempting to turn them into an absolutely predictable Cog in a machine but you know P so Freud of course viewed the primary conflicts in mental life as the ego tortured by the in some sense right
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being driven by underlying biological forces but also severely inhibited and repressed by the super ego um you know it's a it's it's a it's a it's a perfectly persuasive model and there are situations under which it's more applicable but P's idea
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that the fundamental conflict within people isn't necessarily social versus the individual for p the fundamental conflict was between motivational systems and then between their expression across time within the individual and then between their expression across time within the
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individual in relationship to all other individuals and to society so it was more like a complex problem that could be solved by a civilized game than it was a massive force that being the super ego crushing the individual into
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submission now you might say that for neurotic people and neurotic is a strange word but we'll say for the sake of of of argument right now that a neurotic person who is is suffering sufficiently from the conditions of
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their life for psychological reasons that their life is not bearable in its current form they're suffering enough to interfere with their own movement forward um what Freud says about the ego versus the super ego might well be true in the
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case of people who are aren't well adapted because they haven't been able to organize their own motivational drives in a stable manner within themselves and then they haven't been socialized effectively so that they can fit into the broader Community like like
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a dancer might in a complex dance then they're much more likely to experience the social World versus them especially if they're rejected and and and they can't gratify any of their fundamental needs because their because of their inability or their awkwardness so I
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would say to the degree that you're suffering from from failure so to speak for one reason or another you're much more likely to see the the social rules as a harsh and repressive super ego obviously they're not doing you any good I would say
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that's probably more likely to happen if you're somewhat near the bottom of a given dominance Archy and that also means if you're at the bottom of a given dominance hierarchy that you're more much more likely to consider the spirit
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of the structure as an authoritarian spirit and a repressive spirit because obviously it isn't making room for you and and sometimes of course that's the case you know I mean there's lots of societies where everyone at the bottom
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has nothing and only the people at the top have something you know and it's it's hard to see how you could not view the culture SL super ego as something that was harsh and repressive and and authoritarian and crushing under those
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circumstances so I also think that it was probably an idea that was more relevant during the initial during the the mid to late stages say of the development of the Industrial Revolution because to work in a factory meant
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something very different than to work as a peasant first of all if you were working in a factory you you became Bound by time in a way that human beings had never been bound by time you know we
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we time everything seconds mean something to Modern people you know but it took a long time for the idea that that the time was of the essence for the organizing of organizing of human life and a lot of that occurred as people
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moved into the factories and so you can see for example the the legacy of that in in the modern Elementary in the modern pre-university school systems because the school systems that most of you attended with their rows of desks and their buzzers
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and their bells and their recesses are basically Factory structures that emerged from the Industrial Revolution that were characteristic of the way that working people who worked in factories organize their lives so the the bells that go off between periods and to
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announce that it's noon and to tell you that school's out those are Factory bells and so you can see you can see Echoes of Freud's idea that the super ego and and the ego and the ID are in
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Conflict by imagining for example how difficult it is for a very active six-year-old especially if they're male to sit quietly and regulate themselves by the Bell for six or seven hours you know when they first go to grade one and
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the fact that you know Freud would say if he was alive that the reason that so many people have attention deficit disorder is because the demands of the super ego so to speak in the school system are so excessive that there's
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that The Clash produces pathology now the pathology is obviously defined by the situation if you Define pathology as being unable to sit down and pay attention to things that are deadly boring while you should be running around playing and having fun and
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wearing yourself to a frazzle then that's pathology that's attention deficit disorder and you can treat it with rlin but that's only because you can treat anybody with rlin you know as I'm sure many of you know so you know
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Brin is an amphetamine and it makes you focus more on whatever you happen to be focused on though there's no real evidence that it provides any boost in academic achievement over any reasonable amount of time but if you think about it
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that way you see you can understand what Freud meant by this super ego versus ego conflict or the super ego ego id conflict attention deficit disorder is a perfect example of that and then the pathology is defined by the circumstance
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if we didn't have schools that are like the schools we have we we wouldn't have attention deficit disorder as a as a as a pathology now and people like to think about it as a scientific category you know it's a disease and it's it's a
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disease is like an objective entity it's like well no it's not a disease and it's not an objective entity it's a social cultural construction however there are certain people who are going to be more prone to be diagnosed with it than others and
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that would mostly be um extroverted open extroverted kids because they're not going to sit down and shut up because they can't they're extremely curious and mostly what they want to do is talk to everyone and play now PP Jack
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PP Yak PP actually has done really interesting experiments with male rats and he showed that if you deprive male juvenile Rats of rough and tumble play they um their prefrontal cortex doesn't mature which is also a real hat off to
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PJ's theory of play as critical for higher levels of development and that you can you can also inhibit their tendency to play using Ridin so it's pretty sad it's in fact it's appalling really so and I see people in
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my clinical practice fairly frequently who come in and said well they were diagnosed with ADHD when they were like four or whatever it's like great you know pathetic it's pathetic that that happens okay so a lot of what Freud did
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was an analysis of his own fantasies and of course we wouldn't consider that necessarily an appropriate methodology from the scientific perspective but there's something that you need to know about the scientific perspective that people never talk about mostly what you
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learn about in Psychology when you're being taught experimental techniques in Psychology is hypothesis testing right but no one ever talks to you about hypothesis generation the the idea there is that well you have a hypothesis and then you lay out an
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experiment and test it it's like well yeah but coming up with the hypothesis to begin with is like you just don't find them lying around on the street you know you have to think them up and so the scientific process is hypothesis
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generation that's the first part and then hypothesis testing and then the third part of it is um generalization from the test to the real world and psychologists never talk about the first step they concentrate obsessively on the second and they ignore the third almost
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completely so because we just assume generalization from the lab to the real world we never actually check to see if that's true and it's very seldom true because the real world tends to be a lot more complex and difficult and ordinary
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and and uncooperative than the lab does but you don't have to discuss your hypothe it's so funny because if you're writing a scientific paper you actually generally falsify your you you lie about how you came up with your hypothesis
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basically because you know you you do a literature review and you show how your hypothesis is extracted as a logical conclusion from all of this reading that you've done and the truth of the matter is is you were sitting with your
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graduate students in the bar drinking beer and someone said something funny and then maybe you thought up something you could test it's like you're not going to write that down in your intro but no but it's quite funny a because
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you it's it's quite amusing because we really don't talk about how we generate hypothesis in our paper we act as if it's a consequence of logical of induction or logical deduction and it's not it's it's very seldom that I mean
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sometimes you're reading along and you think oh yeah that idea and this idea fit together but even then you rarely like I've found that often when I have an idea it's what comes from this literature here and then from this
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literature over here and trying to actually explain how I got that idea in introduction it's like you can't it's just you don't have the space and so it's quite funny I I I mean I don't think that it's I don't really think
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that it's a lie it's a format you know what I mean it's a it's a it's a mode of doing things it but but it has nothing to do with hypothesis generation and Freud you know Freud used his imagination and he and he
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and he used his ability to think and so that's both imaginative production which is basically creativity and then rationality which is logical thinking and he generated all sorts of hypothesis and his test wasn't a lab test it was a
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test in practice so his idea was well I've got this notion I'll try laying it out in in in the therapeutic process and I'll make observations about how that plays itself out now you know you could consider that relatively weak
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methodology from a scientific perspective but I got to tell you something about that too so you know you may know you may not know that there were two streams of animal experim animal Behavioral Science in the 20th century they still exist one was
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behaviorism and other was ethology now there's some pretty famous ethologists um Conrad Loren was an ethologist Nicholas tinbergen was an ethologist France dewal now who studies primates in mostly primates in the zoo mostly chimpanzees Jane good all those
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people are all ethologists and what they do is they go out into the natural habitat of animals the blanchards who study rats in their natural habitat or another example um it's fossy I think who who studied gorillas there seem to
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be women all the time who go out into the Wilderness and observe primates you know it's quite interesting um maybe they're more interested in the social behavior something like that but it is quite striking anyways the ethologists what they do is they go look at animals
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behave in their natural environment and the thing is is that you kind of end up with a narrative description of their behavior so it's not as technical as the observations that you produce if you're working on lab animals right but a lab
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animal and a normal animal are not really very similar at all so so one of the things you probably don't know is that when when when Skinner was experimenting on rats and Skinner he was a smart guy man we learned a lot thought
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from Skinner he kind of laid the groundwork for the methods that are used by sophisticated neuroscientists especially those who work with animals and they're really the ones who do the work he laid down the groundwork for that sort of Investigation so it's not
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like I don't have any respect for Skinner it's like he he knew exactly what he was doing he starved his damn rats down to 3/4 of their normal body weight so the skinnerian rat was first of all bitterly Lonesome because he
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lived in a cage all by himself and that isn't how rats live and then he was like starving to death so he would work like mad for food and so what what Skinner did in some sense was take a complex animal and simplify
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it simplify the hell out of it by making it isolated and starving and then he could observe Its Behavior under those conditions and you could extract a tremendous amount of information out about how animals behave By Us by using
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a simplified animal but you lose a lot too so for example it's pretty easy to get starved bored Lab Rats to take cocaine they'll do it or so if you give them free access to cocaine man they'll just
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take it all the time they they won't even eat but if you have a rat out there in rat land you know so you give them a social environment and it's it's a setup so that it's like a normal rat would
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have the rats aren't that interested in cocaine so you know you can see how the the context there is a major determinant of the outcome so Freud I would think of Freud and all the other clinicians more as ethologists than as behavioral
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scientists you know and France dewal for example he's a great person to read if you haven't read anything by France dewal it's f r NS d w a l and he's he's like a pedian for chimps and what he's
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observed over a series of books mostly making observations at the arnam zoo in the Netherlands is the emergence of morality among chimpanzees as a consequence of their social interactions now it's not that simple because the moral the ground for Morality emerges as
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a consequence of the way the chimps organize themselves into dominant structures so there's a sociological element but but by the same token The Chimps are biologically prepared to inhabit dominance hierarchies so there's a continual interaction between the social the social structuring of the
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behavioral patterns in the dominance hierarchy and The evolutionary success of the chimp because think about it this way the higher you are in a dominance hierarchy the more likely it is that you're going to leave Offspring well so
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obviously obviously what that means is that the more prepared you are biologically to succeed in a dominance hierarchy the more likely you are to be successful and in human beings it's a major issue especially for men because if they're not successful in the male
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dominance Archy they do not leave any Offspring so for example a lot of you won't be able to believe this but if you sit and think about it for a week you'll figure it out cuz it's true you have
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twice as many female ancestors as you do male ancestors now you think how can that be possible and the answer is the a your average forefather if every woman has a child but only every second man has a child
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then that's exactly what you end up with every second man man in that case would have two children right but that can easily happen so for example if if you could imagine a situation where one man made 10,000 women
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pregnant and you know that's not as much of an impossibility as you might think then you obviously under conditions like that you'd have far more female ancestors than you would have male ancestors so anyways so Freud and Yung and the other
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clinicians are basically ethologists and what they're doing is studying human beings in their ra relatively natural environment and trying to figure out how they work and it isn't obvious to me that prolonged observation over multiple years of many
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people in a clinical setting where you talk about everything is a less realistic way of gathering information especially for generating hypothesis than assessing 40 undergraduates for 20 minutes in a lab you know now I think what you get what happens is that you
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can be more specific in the lab so you can do high resolution work in a lab but you can do low resolution work as a clinician and I do think that it's at the low resolution levels of theorizing that most of the hypotheses
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are generated right so these things have to play against one another and it's it's not reasonable to presume that one mode of evidence Gathering is superior to the other in all situations so this is by Freud's biographer Ernest
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Jones who was a great admirer of Freud and who really established the ground on which the history of psycho analysis was going to be written um he's been accused of being too much of an acolyte and I think there's some
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truth in that but I guess you pretty have to be pretty interested in someone before you're going to write their biography so we shouldn't be too hard on them in the summer of 1897 Freud undertook his most heroic feate a
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psychoanalysis of his own unconscious it's hard for us nowadays to imagine how momentous this achievement was that difficulty being the fate of most pioneering exploits yet the uniqueness of the feat remains once done it is done forever for no one again can be the
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first to explore those depths in the long history of humanity the task had often been attempted philosophers and writers from Solon to Montaine from juvenile to schopenhauer had essayed to follow the advice of the delic Oracle know thyself but had also come to the
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effort inner resistances had barred Advance there had from time to time been flashes of intuition to point the way but they had always flickered out the realm of the unconscious whose existence was so often postulated remained dark and the words of heraclitus still stood
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the soul of man is a far country which cannot be approached or explored Freud had no help no one to assist the undertaking in the slightest degree worse than this the very thing that drove him onward he must have dimly
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divined could only result in profoundly affecting his relations or perhaps even severing them with the one being to whom he was so closely bound and who had steadied his mental equilibrium it was daring much and risking much what
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indomitable courage both intellectual and moral must have been needed but it was forthcoming well you know yeah really I mean I would say that prior to Freud and N Western civilization in particular Western philosophical the Western philosophical tradition
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absolutely overvalued the role that rationality played in the realm of human behavior you know emotions and people still think this way emotions were often considered the enemy of reason and motivations also the enemy of reason and you can understand that right
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because your your observations of a given phenomena are going to be biased by the emotions and the motivations that you bring to the Forefront and a lot of what scientists were trying to do as they learned how to
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be scientists were to get the damn emotions and the motivations out of the way and the personal biases biases and the demand to to elevate your career and to be right and to beat the other primates and so forth and so on they're
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trying to clear that out so that you could you could tend clearly to certain classes of phenomena and then of course it was a post Renaissance phenomena to identify the the central being of human beings with rationality and furthermore there was
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also a deeper idea than that which which we all still fall prey to in many ways and that idea was essentially that human beings had a soul that was separate from the body and so the central nature of
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the Soul when it was operating properly was rational now I can understand why Humanity has always had the idea that people have a soul and that there's a body you know I mean I think it's an obvious reflection
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of the fact that we have an identifiable Consciousness that seems unique and individual and it's wandering around in a body you know and they seem separable in some way but it wasn't until Freud that that people I think
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intellectuals people who are serious about understanding the human psyche had to really grapple with the fact that we were embodied and that our our rationality because the way our rationality really works is that it doesn't even get to work until it's
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pre-filtered by emotions and motivations and the body you know so you could think about rationality as the master of the ship but and and perhaps that was the way to think about it before Freud but after Freud and and this is how we think
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now it's like no no no first you're a boy and that screens out most everything and structures what you see and then inside that you're a set of motivations you're always motivated one way or another and then inside that you're emotionally
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evaluating things before they even reach your rational Consciousness and then inside that there's a little rational guy who's you know trying to zip around and make Intelligent Decisions but without all that underpinning he wouldn't even be able to operate and
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this is this is right this is why the farthest that people have got in in the pursuit of AR artificial intelligence is with embodied robots embodied cognitive agents it turns out that you can't have pure rationality without the body and so
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and Freud is you just can't escape the fact that Freud was the person who was beating the drum for that perspective for for 50 years and he did it extraordinarily successfully after Freud you you could never pretend that you
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weren't a sexual being or an aggressive being or a biased being or an un conscious being or a defended being or repressing being or a lying being while you were doing whatever it was that you were doing and those things had to be
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taken into account and you know it it wasn't much before Freud that Darwin came up with his darwinian hypothesis and so you know it was it was exactly at that time that it was necessary for us to to understand
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our evolutionary kinship or in some sense even identity with with other creatures ranging from those that were quite like us to those that were are very much unlike us all the way down the philogenetic chain there's tremendously important inter relationships and so
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Freud's idea fit into Darwin's idea like mad you know all of a sudden human beings were animals they weren't a Divine soul in a body now the Divine Soul idea has its merits but the animal idea has its
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merits too and it was Freud who sort of rubbed people people's noses in the fact that they were animals along with Darwin and that was part of the reason why he faced such resistance so Freud was definitely an ally of the
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Evol of the of the idea of evolutionary biology and I also think he was a real precursor in many ways or perhaps the groundbreaker for for the development of fields like affec of Neuroscience which which you know is a relatively new field
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until well until the 1960s in Psychology you weren't even allowed to think that people thought wasn't until the cognitive Revolution that psychologists were willing to think that people thought and that maybe animals did I mean everyone else on the bloody Planet knew that
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people F but the psychologists were refusing to admit it and that was because they were using strictly behavioral propositions in their lab work and there was some real utility in that and the cognitive scientists came along in the early 1960s and said well
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hold on a minute we're not just stimulus response machines even though there are levels of analysis at which we are and then it wasn't until much later 40 years later really 30 years later a lot as a consequence of the influence of Russian
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neuros psychologists as it turns out that it became self-evident that well yeah yeah Cog cognition but you know what about emotion and what about motivation and you know can we actually study those as biological properties and the answer to that turned out to be oh
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yeah yeah we certainly could and not only that that it's obviously it's obvious that our higher order cognitive functions are nested within fundamental emotional and motivational systems and it's also obvious who's in charge and it's not the higher order cognitive
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functions unless you're blindly naive you know if even if you look at the brain from a neuroanatomical perspective the strength of the projections reaching up from the base of your brain from places like the hypothalamus which is the ground of fundamental motivational
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systems like aggression and sexuality those are like tree trunks the little tendrils coming down from the top of your brain that that do the regulation you know the conscious regulation those are like little Vines you know so as
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long as you're reasonably satiated and everything's under control you can pretend that your rational mind is running the show but when push comes to shove it's like well no you know and it's also pretty obvious that you don't
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even really like it when your rational mind is under control too much because and this is again a reflection of the super ego versus ego dichotomy is you're always running around you know consuming great amounts of alcohol and other sorts
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of um you know Consciousness altering substances which usually alter it for the worst so to speak so that you can do impulsive and crazy and idiotic things that are really really entertaining and fun so we don't want to forget about
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who's in charge and Freud was and and still is a very good corrective for people who are convinced that their rational intellect is the fundamental element of their being now the the the creative illness that that Jones talked about and that
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hre Alber talked about is a variant of the initiation process that we've been describing and one of the things that um people like Alam B pointed out is that it's often the case that people who make great discoveries go through a
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protracted period of chaos while they're making their discoveries before they put the discoveries together and that happened to Darwin for example you know because Darwin per knew perfectly well you know he's a pretty straight-laced Englishman old Darwin he knew perfectly
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well that he was lighting a bomb it was a big bomb I mean I think you could safely say that Darwin was the most revolutionary scientist who ever lived you know when I was growing up it seemed to be Einstein but the old Darwin man
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he's he's making a he's making his move and it's especially the case because Darwin not only outlined natural selection which you know kept biologists busy for a whole 100 years but he also outlined sexual selection and all the
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biologists ignored that for 100 years and they're coming back to it now so I was hard on Old Darwin because he knew that the world was going to go from 8,000 years old and created by God to God only knows how long and the
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consequence of somewhat random biological processes I mean that's a major league shift in the old world view and you know so to the degree that Darwin Darwin's personality was structured both explicitly and implicitly by um Protestant religious presuppositions which it was because in
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many ways he was a conventional person you know he was taking a mighty axe to the basic trunk of his the to the thick trunk of his being you know and he suffered for that he had anxiety disorders and it's no bloody
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wonder you know I mean if you were Darwin and you weren't nervous you wouldn't have had any idea what you were launching on the world it was a massive Revolution you know in Freud's notion that we were deeply embedded in our
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animal selves also was was the precursor to having people start to comprehend themselves not in terms of you know the last 100 years of history or the last 500 years of history or maybe even the entire 5,000 years of recorded history
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but the 7 million years since we've been separated from our common ancestor with chimps and the 60 million years since we were living in trees and the 220 million years since there were mammals and the 400 million years when our ancestors
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were basically lobsters and that's a completely different way of thinking about the world and like it's something that we haven't digested yet and I would say for Freud was in the Forefront of the of the revolu ution that produced that
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transformation in thinking it was also hard on Freud and that's what Jones is pointing out you know I mean Freud was definitely an anti-religious Destroyer like n you know he was another announcer of the death of God and Freud's idea
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about religion was that it was a defense anxiety against death a sorry a defense mechanism against death anxiety you know and to the degree that you guys are being taught Terror management theory for example it's like that's Freud
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straight and simple I mean Terror management theory was developed by Ernest Becker and Ernest Becker was a psychoanalyst even though he was a so sociologist and he wrote the denial of death in an attempt to update Freudian presuppositions so Freud is by no means
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dead and the idea of associations you know that people people's thinking is associational and that the associations are actually linked together by emotional similarity it's like well the implicit attitudes all the implicit attitudes research is predicated on that
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idea they don't ever credit Freud with it but it was Freud's initial Discovery you know he discovered that that people's thoughts wandered in a sense you know and that you could you could see why they wandered if you paid
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attention you could track the underlying rationale for the connection between sets of disperate ideas by paying close attention and you could interpret them and that's really what he did with free association and you know I would say that I don't really think Freud
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discovered free association I think what he did is observed that many of his severely damaged clients who I think would have had some variant of borderline personality disorder if we would have seen them today if you just let them talk they would free
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associate and what that was in some sense it was the it was the consequence of the fact that their personalities had never really been organized and maybe that's because no one had ever listened to them you know so I can tell you as
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far as I can see that people organiz their personalities by talking and if you don't have someone to listen it's like well you've got all these ideas rattling around in your head that are basically rooted in emotion and they're
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not linked together by any coherent narrative and they're not pruned that's another thing you need other people to say you know that's a really stupid way of looking at things you know and if you don't have that well then especially if
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you've got a reasonably creative mind you're going to generate a whole mass of counterproductive you know but but reason but potentially founded ideas that you just can't call so and Freud figured that out with his idea of free
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association so he'd let people come into his office and he wouldn't really look at them he' just let them lie on the couch and see he'd say well just say whatever comes to mind and they'd go wandering around on some quasi random
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path and Freud would note the connections between the things they said and infer what the underlying structure was and and what he was doing was this essentially so look if let's say you go see a movie and then
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your friend says well what was the movie about you don't say well the first thing we saw were the credits and then you know and then you say to your friend all the credits and then you describe every
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single movement that all the characters make including when they blink their eyes and how they move their arms and it's like you don't do that you do something really weird and mysterious which is you take the movie and you
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break it down you boil it down to its gist whatever that is it's like well here's the important features of the movie you say that here's 5 minute summary it's like you might ask well why don't you just listen to the five minute
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summary instead of going to the damn movie but the weird thing is is you can do that you know and you do it without even thinking about how insanely complex It is Well Freud was doing that with his
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clients they'd come in there and like lay out this massive kind of incoherent verbal chain and he'd listen and and he'd hint at them perhaps what it meant and he'd he'd extract out the gist of the story and then if the if if the
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advantage to having your memory reduced to gist is that you can only only have to remember the important things then all the things that aren't important you can let go of you know and you see this happening if if you ever have a fight
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with someone especially someone that you love you know how how it happens all the time is you'll start fighting about something that's trivial and then both of you will figure figure out well we're really not fighting about that at all
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and then the question is well what are you fighting about and one answer to that is the person who was the irritating person who started the argument provoked it say because that happens might not even know what in the
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world it is that they're irritated about you have to kind of torture them to death for an hour before they can figure out what it was that drove the irritation and manifest it in some articulated form so in a sense that's bringing things up
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from the depths of the unconscious you know now Freud would have thought of those things as repressed you know I don't want to talk about that with you because I repressed it I don't really think that's right often I think what
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happens is that irritation manifests itself in vague moods and you have to investigate the mood and the emotion using different articulated Frameworks which is kind of what an argument is about until you stumble across the actual articulation you know and so
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you're being tortured by your partner for one reason or another maybe it's because for the 50th time you left the dish rag on the coun or something and after fighting with them for an hour you figure out that they had a really bad
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day at work for reasons that they didn't really notice and don't want to talk about so that's Freudian psychoanalysis I mean you guys are to the degree that you're sophisticated communicators you're going to be doing that all the time I mean how many of you
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actually believe that everything a person says is what they mean or that they have perfectly transparent self- knowledge I think No One Believes that anymore or you know if you do believe that well yeah haven't been paying attention I would say that's really the
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the bottom line so these creative illnesses are a consequence of this dissent and rebirth process that we talked about before and that's much more likely to happen you see I marked revolutionary at the top you know when you when you're a genius you blow apart
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the basic presuppositions of an entire culture and to the degree that your personality is predicated on those assumptions and maybe even your place in the world when you chop that over it's like you fall too you know and the whole
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idea that Darwin had that that the environment itself could modify biological forms through selection God it's such a brilliant idea because well because it precisely because it accounts for why complex forms can emerge in the absence of an intelligent designer now
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you know no doubt there are holes in darwinian theory you know I don't know how many of you know this but there's a whole new field of science that's popped up really in the 21st century called epigene epigenetics it turns out that
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you can that Lamar who was really the the prime um what adversary in some sense of Darwin Dar Lamar believed you could inherit acquired characteristics right for a straight darwinian it's like no that doesn't happen there's lots of
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evidence now that you can acquire inh that you can inherit acquired characteristics so they've showed for example with rats that if you produce a certain amount of Terror Laden phobia in a rat the rat pops three generations down are still predisposed
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in that manner and you know we just scratched the surface of epigenetics it turns out that your experience can alter the structure of your DNA it does that by a process which I don't understand called methylation and methylation
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apparently is the modification of the DNA structure by additions of little uh clumps of you know little chemical units little molecules to some in some way we don't get that encodes actual environmentally relevant information so you know that's pretty mindboggling
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so the my point is the final word on how we evolved is not yet in but Darwin popped up this idea that while you didn't need an intelligent designer it's like uhoh that's a big problem for a for a world whose primary notion
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before then was that everything was the creation of something that was not only intelligent but benevolent so it's a little hard on people to come up with those ideas and there's no reason at all for them not to think that they're
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completely insane when it first happens because they think something that's really deep and revolutionary that no one else thinks or has thought up and so the probability that you've done that instead of just going Stark raving mad is like zero right so for every actual
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genius there must be 10,000 people who are convinced in some bizarre manic paranoid manner that they are genius and they're not so it's rough Freud was also one of the first people to really go after the idea that we could
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represent ideas in symbolic form in a manner that was in fact represent presentational but that we ourselves didn't understand and I mean that's a that's another revolutionary idea right is that we could express that it was possible to express Concepts especially
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those that were associated with emotion and motivation using non-linguistic representations that needed to be deciphered now Freud's initial theory about that was that the reason that happened was because and this is where I think he got something seriously wrong
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but whatever like you know you have to say that with respect Freud appeared to think of memory in a way that we wouldn't think of memory anymore like he he seemed to think something like when you made a when you
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experienced an event the event was as if you experienced it that that was the event so what you experienced was the reality of the event and then sometimes you didn't like the implication of that event or perhaps you couldn't understand
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it but you could understand it enough to know that it was horrible that'd be a traumatic event and then just shove that sucker down into the depths of your being where where where you didn't have to think about it anymore and then it
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would poke itself up into the nether regions of your Consciousness partly in dreams partly and interestingly enough in slips of the tongue you know we still call those Freudian slips and I'll tell you one of the things that's really cool
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about doing dream analysis and Psychotherapy is that people make slips of the tum tongue all the time tum e slips of the tum yeah well I won't interpret that for now but if you listen to people make Freudian slips while
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they're talking to you about their dreams they're often telling you exactly what the dream means and it's so cool I've seen people you know how words can have two meanings right or sometimes three meanings sometimes when someone is
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telling you about the their dream they'll use a sentence to describe part of the dream that simultaneous ly accounts for the other part of the dream without them even not noticing and then all I'll do because we're trying to
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puzzle out the dream is I'll tell them back what they just said and they'll go you know they'll have a little startle it's like oh yeah that's obviously what that means and how in the world people are smart enough to do that on the Fly
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is beyond me you know it's like it's hard enough to talk about one thing at a time but to manage to talk about two things with the same sentence in a coherent way it's like way to go brain
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and I think what's happening is we kind of know that you know the left hemisphere roughly speaking is a linguistic hemisphere right but there's a corresponding area in the right hemisphere that's more or less in the same physiological location that this
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part inhibits tonically it's it inhibits it all the time and it kind of seems that what happens is now and then that other part of the brain can get access to speech now it's not very linguistic so it sort of stumbles around and maybe it
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does it in more symbolic terms cuz it thinks imagistically but now and then it's got something to say and then poof both of them are talking at the same time and that is the coolest thing like the problem is it's very I can't tell
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you about it you know because and this is one of the problems with psychoanalytic phenomena is that you can't really understand them in the absence of the context that a lengthy therapeutic interaction provides you know it's like you know how if it is if
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you have an old friend it's like you you can just say the number of a joke you know it's like that's joke 42 and they'll laugh because they know the joke you know you have this shared history that enables you to make reference to
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things just using fragments and you can't explain how you do that to someone else well the same thing happens in therapy it's like you've talked to this person for Endless hours about the most important things that are going on in their life and then
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there'll be communication communicative phenomena that emerge within that context and there you know they strike you with the force of Revelation but you can't communicate them to anyone else CU you can't conjure up the entire context which is partly why I want to show you
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this movie on Tuesday because it's the only thing I've ever seen that actually manages to do this it's it shows Freudian Psychopathology because it gives you enough contextual information to actually infer it so so that's really smart all that whole free association
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thing man that's his idea that it was emotional systems repressed or not part of the ID or not cuz his idea of the unconscious was somewhat it was somewhat confused in a sense it depended on when he was thinking about it I mean first of
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all the unconscious was a place to put things you didn't want to pay any attention to but then later it sort of became the ID and the ID was the place of these primordial drives and emotions and so it's not a bad model of the
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unconscious you know especially if you think about it as something alive and the unconscious is alive it is not a cognitive machine and you know modern psychologists talk about the cognitive unconscious it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah right there's a cognitive
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unconscious it's like well what about the rest of them you know the motivational unconscious and the emotional unconscious and those things so the affective neuroscientists are on to that anyway so it doesn't really matter but you know Freud got there way
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early and you know he would he would note that you see this all the time you're talking to someone they're mad at you you know and you say well you're mad at me and they go well no I'm not and
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you know and their face makes it perfectly evid evid that they're mad at you and so does their tone of voice it's like okay are they lying are they repressing or are they just more than one thing at the same
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time well you know each of those ideas is a perfectly good idea but it's certainly clear that the thing you're facing is by no means a unified phenomena you say well you're mad at me and they go no I'm not it's like sure
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you're not you know and if you poke and prod them and irritate them and get them to talk eventually they'll probably figure out why they're mad cuz maybe they don't know or they weren't willing to admit it to themselves or they hadn't
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fully articulated it and then maybe they'll tell you usually they'll cry first and then they'll tell you well that's how it is right if you you watch how these things progress It's like it isn't until something collapses in some
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sense in the person that and they sort of soften I guess they let their Persona drop or something like that until they soften they're not going to tell you what's going on so they're defendant you know and that's another Freudian idea
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you defend yourself against certain phenomena and certain truths it's like yeah you certainly do that and you know you do it about you pretend that other people are other than you know them to be people do that all the time when
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they're in a relationship that they should have ended like a year ago if they had any sense at all and they know it it's like oh no you know this is going to work out they use that stupid
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voice which means that you're only talking from here right cuz they're ignoring the entire rest of their body and what it's saying they know perfectly well that's absolute rubbish they have no way of explaining to you why they're
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doing it they don't know themselves it's like Freud he knew what he was talking about you know and if you You observe in your own behavior your proclivity to do absolutely absurd and self-destructive things at the drop of a hat and be
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entirely unable to control it you know I mean we talked a little bit about eating disorders it's like there's like 80 or 90 of you in this room that means at least 30 of you have an eating disorder
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so you're like having this horrible battle with your hypothalamus for all sorts of weird reasons and you know that's sort of the modern equivalent of Freudian sexual Psychopathology because you know we can sleep around but we don't know how to eat anymore so I don't
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know if that's much of an improvement so this is Freud the mind is a composite of contradictory drives um and Freud actually wasn't he wasn't really a drive theorist because he was more sophisticated than that you know because
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really when he talks about drives in the broader context of his writing it's clear that he's talking more about subpersonalities because these drives manifest themselves as living entities with their own emotional systems their own thoughts their own impulses even
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their own ability to speak and you know that's true because now and then you say something when you're angry you think well I wish I wouldn't have said that it's like who's doing the wishing there exactly you know it's like it wasn't you
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that said it well only said it was because I was angry well that means you're not your anger well that's Freud's Point ego id id is anger it is the thing that bubbles up all these impulsive actions and statements and
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you're going to detach yourself from that sucker as soon as you can and you're going to expect people to forgive you for it like I wouldn't have said that if you wouldn't have made me so angry it's like which is like the worst
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kind of apology right it's like I did something rude to you because you're a horrible and I'm your victim it's like that's a great apology so Freud was also pretty damn sophisticated in his approach to the unconscious so here's some here's some
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functions that he had identified as early as the 1900s so he said the unconscious has a conservative faculty it stores memories often unaccessible to voluntary recall it's like it's an interesting idea right so where are those things that you remember that you
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could remember but that you aren't well that's a hard one right it's like well I don't know where they are but they seem to be somewhere when I want to recall them and Freud would say Well they're in the unconscious now it's
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obviously a black box hypothesis right you know because it's not very explanatory but at least he had the sense that it was reasonable to think of them as somewhere dissolutive the unconscious contains habits once voluntary now automatized and
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dissociated elements of the personality which may lead a Paras itic existence man that's smart you know the idea that that if you did something habitually that that would produce an an automatized system you know we didn't get there with with uh with Neuroscience
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until maybe the last 20 years when we actually figured out that is what happens you know when you first start doing something it's complicated your whole brain is involved in that that's why it's so exhausting because you're really not good at it right so you're
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stumbling around like you're trying to learn a piano piece for example you know you make mistakes and you're just a clutz at it and then you practice and practice and practice and as you're doing that less and less of your brain
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is involved interestingly enough and the parts that are active move from the right to the left and then they move back and as they move back they get smaller and smaller and smaller until you have a little habit machine that
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enables you say to play that piece of piano uh music or that is really good at liking cocaine depending on what you've been practicing you know and then that's little monster in your head especially if it's associated with something like
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cocaine and good luck getting rid of that because you've a you've automated it and built it into your biology and Freud would say well then the thing just runs as an autonomous unit it's like yeah that's right he nailed that exactly
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right creative the unconscious serves as the Matrix of new ideas that's smart that's smart often when you're coming up with new ideas you actually free associate as well people call that brainstorming so good work Freud that was real smart
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mythopoetic the unconscious constructs narratives and Fantasies that appear Mythic or religious in nature it's like well Yung took that and just ran with it right but Freud never quite made the connection there unfortunately because he was so interested in hammering home
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the point that human beings were biological creatures he never really was able to Grapple with the idea that well yeah we're biological creatures but the mythopoetic function is a biological function and so to say that religion is only a death a defense against death
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anxiety is actually it actually contradicts his own Theory now Yung pointed that out to Freud he said well you know there's a bit of a logical problem here and Freud said to him and this is what caused their break it
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doesn't matter if we don't go down the biological determinist route so to speak then we'll be overwhelmed by a tide of occult nonsense and of course well that happened there was the Nazis first they're pretty good at cult nonsense and
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then there's the whole New Age movement so and you know young is Yung is Tangled Up in that even though I don't think he's responsible for it so Freud wasn't going to go there and he had his reasons
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you know but Yung thought well that's just not I'm going there and he that's because Yung had a mythopoetic imagination of incalculable complexity and that was just where he was headed but but Freud figured that out it's very very smart
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and you know a lot of modern neuroscientists and and modern psychologists haven't even haven't got anywhere near this yet you know the idea that the UNC unconscious has a mythopoetic function it's like I don't think you've learned that in any of your
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Neuroscience courses yet but it's coming you know I mean it it's it's the case obviously since we have mythopoetic structures they came from somewhere and they're not just stories you know that's that's a that's a that's just not a
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sophisticated way to think so okay what time is it it must be getting close because you're all getting rustly two minutes two minutes okay well that's good then so what we'll do with the next class is we'll go a little
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farther with Freud and then I'm going to show you some I think they're shocking so be prepared that what I'm going to show you is a shocking movie and it if it doesn't make you uncomfortable in many ways and squirm around then you're
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just not paying attention so be be warned okay and psychopathology is not pretty so and it's another reason why people don't like to admit that it exists see you soon
Topics:Freuddepth psychologyJordan Petersonpsychoanalysisunconscioussexualitysuperegoidmental illnesspsychological theory
