2014 Personality Lecture 09: Sigmund Freud II (Depth Psychology)

Have to ask me some questions about the exam. There's not much to say; most of the descriptions listed on the syllabus, it'll be in this class. I don't regard my exams as particularly tricky, so if you come to the lectures and do the reading, people generally do know as well in this class as they do in other classes, maybe a little bit better. So it's all multiple choice, and you won't run out of time. So I don’t... that's about all there is to say. There are sample questions posted on the website, so you can go there and see what the questions are going to be like. I just selected them randomly from questions I've used before, so they're representative of what you're going to see.

So all right, back to Sigmund Freud. I found a recording of Freud; I think it’s the only known recording. It's from a BBC broadcast not too long before he died. I'll play it. You can listen along or read along because he has a pretty heavy accent, so it's somewhat difficult to follow.

“My professional industry alliance to break through mind your life and find my own action, which is covered family beautiful about the unconscious life. Unfortunately, to live and move time and out of high-quality treatment of I have to any energy good thing I'm not familiarism.”

So a few introductory comments to this lecture: It's hard to imagine the degree to which Freud reintroduced biological or introduced biological ideas into the study of the human psyche. Because by the time Freud came along, most of the formal thought about thought and about the human psychology was very influenced by Enlightenment ideas, and so there was a relatively widespread belief that people were rational and scientific and becoming increasingly more so. And perhaps people were becoming increasingly so, but Freud put the biology back in psychology. I mean, he was a medical doctor and he was trained as a neurologist, and he was also part of a burgeoning interest in placing human beings firmly in the category of the animal kingdom that was characteristic of the late 1900s, particularly in relationship to Darwin.

It was Freud who most particularly established the fact that our rationality is, in some sense, nested inside our motivations and emotions and our unconscious mind. And I think there's no doubt that those claims are correct. Psychologists have always had anonymity towards Freud; it's not exactly clear why. He was a psychiatrist; he was a medical doctor, so maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's the distinction between the different professions. I don't... but I also have this proclivity to believe that psychologists tend more towards the type of person who's convinced that the primary activities that characterize the human psyche are rational, cognitive, and... and we certainly have Freud to thank in large part for making a strong case that that's not true.

You'll encounter lots of psychologists who do their best, in some sense, to push Freud to one side and consider his theories outdated and unproven and, you know, I don't really think that's fair, partly because the literature regarding psychoanalysis as an effective treatment seems to indicate quite clearly that it's at least as or more effective than other psychotherapeutic schools. And it's basically showed that since outcome studies of psychotherapy have been conducted, so that's three or four decades.

I don't know if there are gender differences; I've actually never looked into that with regards to outcome studies. I don't think they're substantive, so because I've never heard much made of them. Now the other issues that Freud described, for example, that much of our psychological life is unconscious and much of it is motivated by what are both implicit memories—so memories we don't really realize that we have anymore—or basic biological drives— that seems to me to be unquestioned.

Thirty years ago, a little more than that, psychologists rediscovered the unconscious, and they made a big fuss about that. But I was well versed in psychoanalytic thinking by that time and certainly didn't regard that as particularly revolutionary because, as far as I could tell, the psychoanalysts had been there 60 years before. In fact, a lot of the experimental procedures that psychologists use to examine the unconscious are derived from the sorts of word association studies, priming studies, in some sense that Carl Jung pioneered when he was still working with Freud.

So we have a lot to thank Freud for. I mean, he also introduced and developed the idea of psychotherapy as something distinct from medical treatment for mental disorders. And, you know, I think there is room for a variety of opinions about the overall social and cultural utility of psychotherapy. I've read interesting critiques making the claim that it's reduced the necessity for familial and friendship ties, for example, as it's proliferated through society. But be that as it may, all of the psychotherapeutic fields that are practically applied, I think, have Freud to thank for their founding.

So it seems a bit on the ungrateful side to criticize him too harshly. I've also found that Freud's conceptualizations of certain pathways to psychological pathology are fundamentally correct, and I'll discuss those in a little bit more detail as we proceed through today's lecture.

Now, because the late 1900s is now a long time ago, it's useful to put Freud in his historical context. This is partly the history of psychology, I suppose, but it also sheds some light on how the nature of psychiatric and psychological disorders transform with time. Because you know, you tend to think of them as—especially if you're more scientifically oriented—you tend to think of a disorder or an illness as something that approximates a scientific category. But the thing about illnesses, diagnostic categories, let's say, is they're not precisely scientific categories. In fact, they might not be scientific categories at all. They're informed by science sometimes.

And I would say, increasingly, as we develop the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, which is the fundamental book that outlines psychiatric and psychological diagnosis, particularly in North America but increasingly around the world—science is being used to inform the language that sits at the bottom of the dimensions along which the pathologies are defined.

So for example, with regards to the personality disorders, there's increasing emphasis—although not enough emphasis yet—on dimensional models such as the big five. But you have to understand that medical diagnostic categories serve a number of purposes. And you shouldn't get cynical about this; often people start out by thinking about diagnostic categories as scientific, and then they soon find out that the idea that they're scientific can be criticized on multiple different fronts and quite severely.

Michelle Foucault, for example, has done a lot of that, and his works were regarded as revolutionary by people who didn't know anything about the history of psychiatric disorders, because most of what he outlined was already known by people who took the time to know. Partly what Foucault outlined was the fact that psychiatric diagnostic categories, like medical diagnostic categories, play a sociological and political and economic role as well as a scientific and treatment-oriented role.

And that's partly because, as I mentioned at the beginning of the lecture series, when you're attempting to move someone from abnormality, say, or ill health towards normality or health—and those aren't precisely the same; it's not precisely parallel lines there—you’re doing a lot more than science; you're also involved in ethics, and you can't help it. And then you know, you also have to think about why it is that we have psychiatric diagnostic categories, for example.

And you know, some of the critics of psychiatry, especially in the 1960s, regarded it as primarily an economic or political movement that was designed to categorize people who engaged in abnormal behavior and to prevent them from exercising their full rights in society. No, because it was thought of as a purely oppressive enterprise. Now all you have to do is take a walk around Toronto and see all the deinstitutionalized schizophrenics wandering around enjoying their freedom to understand that the description of psychiatry as a purely tyrannical or oppressive sociological regime has a lot to account for.

Because those people were deinstitutionalized in the late 60s and early 70s and the institutions have never been rebuilt. And all that happened was that they were dumped on the streets where they generally stopped taking their medication and survived very poorly. So even if psychiatry plays a sociological, political, and economic role, don't be thinking that that invalidates it as an enterprise. It just means that it's a very complex enterprise that has to span multiple dimensions, and it stands on many different philosophical and scientific foundations.

Now, psychiatric diagnostic categories and the symptomatology that's associated with them also transform with time, and that's kind of a strange thing, especially if you think about psychiatric ill health as a biological phenomenon. But language transforms across time too, and it's grounded in biology. And the truth of the matter is that nothing that human beings do or experience exists in a cultural vacuum.

So for example, when I was young, a common schizophrenic delusion, especially for the paranoid schizophrenics, was that the TV was talking to them. Now, obviously they didn't have that delusion in 1920 because there weren't any televisions. So by the time it was, say, 1930, it would be in the radio, and now the most common focus of paranoia is the internet. And there’s some reason for that; I mean, because even if the TV wasn't spying on you, the internet probably is.

So that's a simple example showing how cultural transformation can change the contents and the phenomenology that's associated with a given psychiatric disorder. So you can think of them as being characterized by some combination of biological pathology, historical pathology—pathology that's limited to the individual's experience—and then you can think about that all as nested inside a given cultural context, which in itself may be pathological or normative.

And so it's the interplay of all those factors that makes understanding mental illness and diagnostic categories a very challenging enterprise, especially when you also add to that the necessity for social control, which would be the political economic dimension, and then also for intervention at the individual level. Because one of the things you want to ask yourself is, well, what serves society better? Does society serve better by putting people who are completely unable to adopt normative behavior, who may be disruptive and frightening, somewhere where they cannot disturb the bulk of the population?

So that's question number one, and the answer to that is not obviously—that's a mistake. Now it may be a mistake, and it certainly would be a mistake in some cases, but you can't just simply say that it's a mistake all the time because you want to be able to walk around on the streets relatively unharassed and free of fear. It's not an unreasonable desire for a civilized society.

Then the next question—or maybe even the first question—might be, well, do these institutions help the individuals with whom they directly interact? And then the right answer to that is, compared to what? Because compared to perfect, the answer is no. But compared to no help whatsoever, the answer is probably yes. And so it’s also worthwhile to be useful in your—or to be realistic in your expectations.

So for example, most people who are schizophrenic don't like to take their psychiatric medication, and the reason for that is because antipsychotic medications, which were only really popularized at the end of the 1950s, work on the biological axis, the dopaminergic system that produces positive emotion. And so if you take an antipsychotic, it's going to flatten out your positive emotion and demotivate you and sort of take the color out of your life. And you can imagine that that's not very amusing.

And then, of course, if you take them and you start to feel better, and maybe you're feeling better for three or four months or six months or a year, you're going to be thinking, well, maybe I'm better, and then you're going to stop taking them. So if you ask a schizophrenic very frequently about their medication, they'll say, "Well, they're not very happy to be taking it, and they'd like to quit as soon as they can." But that does not necessarily mean that the medication is not doing something that's beneficial; it just means that the best they can hope for is not very good.

And that doesn't point directly to a flaw in the system that's dealing with them; it just points to the terrible nature of the disease and its fundamentally intractable qualities. Okay, so back to Freud. Now, a lot of what Freud saw was sexual pathology. Now you might ask yourself why.

Well, the first thing we could point out is that when Freud was alive, society was very highly divided by gender—was divided by gender roles. And men were authorities and women were, by and large, subordinate, although that situation is more complex than the simple reading of history might lead you to conclude.

So for example, if you read Tolstoy's novels characterizing Russian society in the late 1900s, you find out that among the aristocratic women—and after all, only the aristocrats had power—there was plenty of power being exercised. The women essentially structured society; men were involved in politics, and they were involved in war, but women were setting up the social interactions that characterize the bulk of society in their groups and in their own interactions.

So it's not clear who was doing what; what is clear, though, is that in Victorian times, sex was a lot more dangerous for women than it is now. And it's plenty dangerous now. A) There was no reliable forms of birth control, that's a big problem, and B) there was tremendous risk of syphilis. And syphilis, for all intents and purposes, was as bad, or is as bad, or worse than AIDS now—it's controllable now, but it wasn't controllable then.

And syphilis could also be passed on to children, and it was a neurological disease that could take virtually any form. So it was a real terror for European society. And so the reason that the Victorians were sort of repressive in sexual matters was because the environment demanded it.

And we know—and more research has been done on this recently; it's fascinating research—we know that as the rate of contagious pathogens in the environment increases, the degree to which a society becomes authoritarian increases, and very rapidly in fact. There's recent data showing that—a paper published just a few months ago—showing that the correlation between infectious disease prevalence in a given geographical locale and authoritarian political views held by the individuals in that locale approaches 0.7, which is absolutely phenomenal.

It's such a high correlation that it almost eats up all of the relationship. And so as the risk of infectious disease rises, people become less and less tolerant in their views on interpersonal behavior, and a lot of that's going to be associated with sexual behavior because that's a very good vector for the transmission of disease.

We should remember that, you know, if we hadn't been so technologically advanced in the 1980s, well first of all AIDS wouldn't have spread because it spread because of air travel. But apart from that, you know, AIDS could have taken us all out; it was just luck of the draw and technological power that enabled us to keep it under control. And you know, there's no reason to assume that another sexually transmissible plague like AIDS won't come along.

So because promiscuity increases, the rate at which sexually transmissible diseases are transmitted rises exponentially, right? And in a connected world, that's bad news. So my point is, the Freudians, the Victorians, had their reasons to be relatively repressive from a sexual perspective.

There is another problem too, which for women in particular, which was thank you—apart from the danger of pregnancy and the danger of sexually transmitted disease, there was also the danger of the destruction of their social reputation. And so if a woman got a reputation for, um, promiscuity at any level, the probability that she was going to be tossed out of her sociological niche into some god-awful life of prostitution, for example, was really quite high.

So now, that sets up the sociological—what would you call it?—the sociological surround. You don't repress something unless engaging in it has high costs, and certainly for the Victorian, sexual behavior was a high-cost enterprise, especially for the women. And so Freud, given Freud's emphasis on biological motivation and given his belief that sexual drive was fundamentally one of the fundamental biological motivations, you can see that the stage is set for, in some sense, a developmental conflict.

Now, the conflict's already there when you’re a child, say of 11 or 10. You exist in a world where the demand or even the desire for engaging in sexual behavior is low, but as soon as puberty kicks in, things change dramatically. Then the child is faced with the problem of integrating the new demand that’s placed on them by the maturation of their body into their personality and into the social surround, and that's no simple matter when there are genuine conflicts between its expression and other important considerations like social propriety and health, for example, or maybe medium to long-term relationship stability, or maybe the provision of a safe place to raise children, etc.

So that's the situation that the Floridians, or the Victorians, found themselves in. Now Freud believed that many of the patients that he saw, the female patients, had been sexually abused or molested as children. He wavered in that belief throughout his life and has been called to task rather severely for that by more current critics. But Freud was one of the first observers of the extreme malleability of memory, and he found it very difficult when he was interacting with his clients, especially the ones who were more hysterical in their essential orientation, to distinguish between memories that they had made up or fantasies and things that actually happened to them.

And until you encounter someone whose memory structure is extremely incoherent and chaotic, it's almost impossible to realize to what degree people can wander around in the world with no sense whatsoever of what's happened to them. So for example, I had a client at one point who told me that she thought she had been raped five times, and so the first thing you might note if you heard a statement like that is that the word “thought” is a very peculiar insertion in that sentence, because it’s not exactly all that straightforward to understand how you would have any doubt about that if it happened five times.

So she was a very strange woman, and she was a person who was very much like someone Freud would have described in the late 19th century as a hysteric. She had virtually no catalyzed identity; she was, as far as I could tell, almost completely hollow in that none of the things that had ever happened to her seemed to have been processed beyond the mere fact that they occurred. And I think that a big part of that was because she didn't really ever have anyone to talk to, and one of the things that's emerged as a consequence of Freud's work in part is a realization of the degree to which communication about your experiences is advantageous or even necessary in the maintenance of mental health.

Now Freud believed that you needed to talk about experiences that were particularly emotionally significant partly because it was necessary to release or or abriac the emotions that were associated with the experience. He called that catharsis. More recent research, particularly that done by James Pennebaker, has indicated that it's actually the articulation of those experiences—the verbalization and their transformation into a coherent representation—that seems to be beneficial for mental health rather than the mere expression of emotion. But just because Freud was only partially right about why his method worked doesn't mean he was wrong about the fact that it did work.

Now this woman was unemployed and had been for years, although she dressed in a business suit, and she had talked her way into hosting a cable television show in the town I was working in that was a program about fostering the entrepreneurial spirit, even though she was unemployed and never started a business in her life. And she had also talked her way onto a government board that was charged with investigating the development of a high-speed rail lake in Southern Ontario, even though she had absolutely no experience whatsoever with business or railways.

So she had a reasonably well-developed persona. From a Jungian perspective, I asked her at one point to show me her resume, and she brought me in a binder— you know those three-ring binders that were an inch and a half thick with those little tab dividers that you use to segregate different sections of your CV? In which she had included a 20-page description of her recent dreams and a discussion or a list of all the novels she'd read in the last 10 years.

She was completely incapable of noting that every single thing about that CV was inappropriate, even though she didn't suffer from any formal thought disorders. She wasn’t schizophrenic or psychotic in any way. With regards to the rape statement, she told me that what happened to her frequently was that she would go to a bar in her vague and ill-defined way and she'd have a few drinks or maybe more than a few, and then she'd end up back at her place with some man or at his place and then that night they would have sexual relations, and then in the morning she was unclear about whether or not that was voluntary.

Now this was a fascinating case for me because she outlined that story to me and at this point I had become somewhat familiar with the danger of therapist manipulation of patient memories because therapists can implant, so to speak, memories in clients. But it’s very very complicated because when you’re dealing with someone who's as chaotic and vague as this particular person was, it's virtually impossible not to implant memories just by talking about them.

So here's... so I thought she told me this story, and I thought, okay, I have a chance to reorganize this woman's entire conception of her past sexual experiences by uttering a variety of sentences. So I could have said, well, unless you give express consent to each stage of a sexual transaction, then you're clearly being victimized, and your claim that you may have been raped five times could be transformed into the claim that you were. Or I could have said, are you completely out of your mind? If you go to a bar and a singles bar by yourself and you have six or seven drinks or however many drinks you had, and you bring someone home or go to their place and you end up in bed with them and that happens five times, then probably you have something to do with it; making a claim of rape is absurd.

And then you might ask yourself which of those opposing interpretations are correct, and it doesn't matter, because I didn't tell her either of them, because it was up to her to sort out exactly what had happened. Now it's not that easy to believe that people like that exist, but they do, and she was someone who had never reflected on any of her experiences; she had no real articulated identity.

And a big part of that was because she was completely isolated. And so when Freud got confused about whether his clients' memories of sexual trauma in childhood were accurate or inaccurate, the reason that he got confused was because he was frequently dealing with people who were confused right down to the bottom of their souls and who, for one reason or another, had never been able to engage in the process of articulation that would have allowed them to establish a well-established, a well-differentiated identity.

The text that I'm showing you in these slides is based upon a book by a man named Henry Ellenberger, who was an existentialist psychologist/psychiatrist who lived in Montreal, and he wrote a book called "The Discovery of the Unconscious." And if you're interested in psychoanalytic thought and the history of psychoanalytic thought, that's the best book that's ever been written—it's called "The Discovery of the Unconscious."

Now the other thing Ellenberger points out—because I paraphrased his book here—is that punishments for transgressions in the Victorian times were also fairly draconian, and that also sets up the situation for conflict. Now if you're driven by something that's a very strong drive and you're liable to encounter tremendous trouble as a consequence of engaging in it, it's not a very easy thing for you to do to figure out how to negotiate that particular landscape.

Ellenberger says, "Psychoanalysis evidently belongs to that unmasking trend, the search for hidden unconscious motivations characteristic of the 1880s and 1990s. In Freud, as in Nature, words and deeds are viewed as manifestations of unconscious motivations, mainly of instincts and conflicts of instinct.” For both men, the unconscious is the wild realm of the wild brute instincts that cannot find permissible outlets, that derive from earlier stages of the individual and of mankind and that find expression in passion, dreams, and mental illnesses.

Even the term “id” does, originates from Nietzsche. The dynamic concept of mind with the notions of mental energy, quanta of latent or inhibited energy, or release of energy, or transfer from one drive to another is also to be found in Nietzsche before Freud. Nietzsche conceived the mind as a system of drives that can collide or be fused into each other.

This is from "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud" by Jones, who was Freud's biographer, talking about the process that resulted in Freud's hypothesis about the unconscious. Jones says, “In the summer of 1897, Freud undertook his most heroic feat, a psychoanalysis of his own unconscious,” as something that's akin, in some sense, to the initiatory routines that I described for you at the beginning of this course. 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 first to explore those depths.

In the long history of humanity, the task has often been attempted—philosophers and writers from Salon to Montaigne from Juvenal to Schopenhauer had essays to follow the advice of the Delphic oracle, “know thyself,” but all had succumbed to the 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 to remain dark, and the words of Heraclitus still stood: “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 onwards he must have dimly divined, however much he tried to conceal it from himself, could only result in profoundly affecting his relations, perhaps even severing them, with the one being to whom he was so closely bound and who had steady his mental equilibrium. It was daring much and risking much. What courage, intellectual and moral, must have been needed, but it was forthcoming.

Now obviously Jones is a real admirer of Freud, and he believed that Freud's hypothesis emerged from a careful analysis—Freud's careful analysis of his own fantasies and drives and unconscious life. The Freudian model divides the human psyche in a variety of different ways, the symbolist of which is conscious and unconscious.

Ellenberger points out that by 1900, four functions of the unconscious had been described. There's the conservative; so that's memory. That's memory, so in some manner that we don't really understand your psyche is the storehouse of representations of experiences that you've had prior to today. Now some of those are recallable as the stories that constitute your experience; those would be the sorts of things that come up in your mind as images, maybe dreamlike images or movie-like images, or stories that you can explicitly tell people about your past experiences where you're the actor in those experiences.

There's also the elements of memory that enable you to do things like to speak, and you don’t have conscious access to how it is that you know how to speak, or for example, how it is that you know how to ride a bike—that's more implicit forms of memory. So that unconscious contains the information or the skills or the circuitry that enables you to engage in complex motor acts that you've learned to do.

The unconscious contains habits; those are the more procedural elements that I just described and dissociated elements of the personality, which may lead a parasitic existence. Now that's an interesting idea. So part of that's predicated on the notion that, I showed you this hierarchy before, yes, you've seen this before, right? So now you can imagine that when you're watching, when you're interacting with maybe your father, your mother, your sister, your great aunt, or that there are chunks of their personality that you incorporate into yourself sort of from whole cloth.

And maybe you're doing that in the Piagetian sense by imitating them and that your being is full of these hierarchies or sub-hierarchies, each of which is devoted toward a single purpose or maybe a singular collection of purposes. And that you can switch back and forth between being dominated by one of these or the other. Some of them are more straightforward, like the state of perception and action that might characterize you if you're simply angry or if you're simply possessed by sexual desire.

But the more complicated ones would be those that make those who know you say, “You're acting just like your mother now,” or “You're acting just like your father now.” And what that means, in a sense from the Freudian perspective, and I think as well from the Piagetian perspective, that you've incorporated huge subsets of the habits and perceptual schemas that make up the people who were closest to you in your developmental history.

Now, Freud would believe that those things can motivate you unconsciously in that, for example, you might be living out your parents' unconscious dreams, or maybe you're living out your parents' unconscious dreams that you'll be a bad child. That happens very frequently. I've seen families, for example, where a daughter was born instead of a son to the great dissatisfaction of the mother, and the consequence of that was that that child was essentially demonized from day one.

And to the degree to which that was precisely unconscious behavior on the part of the mother was debatable, but certainly if you asked her if she was out to destroy her child with every action she ever took, she would say no. But if you watched her carefully across months, you would see that that was precisely what she was doing.

Now you might ask, well, why would someone develop an attitude like that? And this particular person, the mother, had grown up in a culture where boys were more valued than girls, certainly within the confines of a given family. And she'd already had a daughter, so was that her—was it the culture? Was it something that she picked up from her parents? God only knows! But it was this free-floating spirit, in a sense, that happened to inhabit her and shaped the way that she was interacting with the world without her really understanding what she was doing at an articulated level at all.

In fact, if you ever more or less confronted her with the evidence that she was doing such a thing, she did absolutely everything you could possibly imagine to refuse to take any ownership for that whatsoever or to articulate it or even to conceive that a human being might be capable of such a thing. Even though the situation in her family made appalling look like a vacation.

Creative, the unconscious serves as the matrix of new ideas. Well here's an idea: Where do your thoughts come from? Well, you know, you say you think them up. Well, you know, as far as black box explanations go, that's a prime one. There's, what do you mean you think them up? Jung pointed out that's not even accurate; it's more like they appear in your experience more or less unbidden. You know, it’s a funny thing because you can concentrate, and that seems to facilitate the process of the generation of new ideas at least sometimes, but most of the time it just seems like you’re standing in a room by yourself in the dark and a thought comes; and where does it come from?

Well, the psychoanalytic explanation for that, which is more of a description, is well, it comes from the unconscious. That is, the unconscious is producing those mythopoetic. The unconscious constructs narratives and fantasies that appear mythic or religious in nature. So what that means at least in part is that some of the dissociated fragments of personality, say, that inhabit you and guide your actions are so ancient, partly because of their biological basis and partly because of the ancient historical overlay on top of that, that they take the form of great myths and stories that look like they're common to everyone in one form or another.

So for a good example of that might be the degree to which you are possessed by rivalry with your sibling, which is one of the oldest stories that, you know, the individual members of mankind tell to one another, because it's such a common experience and because the manner in which that experience is going to manifest itself has been shaped by cultural representations.

Freud was also very much convinced that the mind was a composite of contradictory drives. This is a very interesting proposition and I think one that's true. I think you could see it most particularly if you consider the behavior of two-year-olds. And as I've already discussed with you, if you watch a two-year-old, they rapidly cycle from one intensely motivated state to another, and I think a reasonable way of conceptualizing that is that much of the underlying biology of the two-year-old is already in place in terms of his or her fundamental motivations.

A two-year-old can be hungry, and a two-year-old can be hot or cold or uncomfortable in a variety of different ways or feel pain or feel anxiety or feel joy or feel, um, exhilaration or curiosity or surprise; all that circuitry is there. But it's not integrated at a higher level into a functioning personality, because in part what the functioning personality is is a collective agreement among all those fundamental drives as to which is going to take priority, when and under what conditions, and the integration of that with the entire broader cultural milieu.

So for example, by the time your two-year-old is four, you would expect them to be able to self-regulate, which means when they step into a particular circumstance, they should be able to determine which of their motivational states is going to be allowed to manifest itself. We would think about that as a form of learned inhibition, even though it's really not; it's more like the integration of those motivated states into a higher-order game where each of them gets a chance to express themselves but only in a particular order and only under particular circumstances.

And then of course the four-year-old has to have learned to do that in the presence of other children and in the presence of other adults, so that the fundamental motivational structures are integrated into a higher-order structure that allows everybody to get along just fine and for everyone to pursue the things that they need to pursue. And so part of the reason you might think that you have a cortex is so that you can take the more fundamental elements of your drives, which you could think of as part of the Freudian Id, which means it's the thing that in you isn’t you; it's the things that you're subject to from within.

The reason that you have a cortex, in many ways, is so that you can figure out how to integrate those complex states of being that keep you alive in some fundamental sense into a society that's characterized by hundreds of thousands of other creatures trying to do the same thing at the same time. And so you can imagine that that requires particular adaptation to the particulars of the society and the more general functions of the deep end.

So the unconscious is partly the Id, which is this collection of drives. Freud concentrated mostly on the sexual drives and the aggressive drives because those are... or instincts—the sexual instincts and the aggressive instincts. It's a better term than drive because those are the most difficult to integrate into the surrounding social milieu. Because sex, for example, is a pretty selfish act; it isn't an altruistic act in any sense, and in some sense, it's also a zero-sum game. You're in competition with everyone else for your success at that particular game.

You can say the same thing about aggression, especially if you think about it in relationship to dominance hierarchy striving, because there are very few positions in any given dominance hierarchy that are at the top, and so in some ways, the competition is zero-sum and it's every person against every other person. But while that's happening, you have to keep the dominance hierarchy itself in place, right? Because there’s no sense in destroying the structure that you’re trying to climb.

And so Freud points out continuously that this is a very, very difficult process of integration. He also points out that, in some sense, the way that people solve that problem is not by integrating; what they do instead is repress. Now repression has two elements. One might be—and this is maybe more what's dealt with by cognitive behavioral psychologists—one form of repression is you just don't develop the capacity.

So let’s say if you're a sophisticated child and you're a fairly aggressive child, then what you learn to do is to integrate your aggression into the games that you play with other people. So maybe you turn into a very competitive and skilled child, and that doesn't mean precisely that you've inhibited your aggression; it means that you've developed it into an unbelievably sophisticated set of skills so that you can manifest it within the games that people play without blowing the games apart.

So you can be a competitive and skilled basketball player, for example, which can be extremely aggressive, or a hockey player, or something like that, but everyone still wants to play with you. So that means that there's been no repression of the aggressive drive or limited; it's just been integrated into all the things that it can conceivably inform.

The alternative to that would be, well, let’s say your parents said you're never to be angry with anyone under any circumstances whatsoever because good people never get mad. Now lots of people believe that, identifying aggression with evil certainly, or at least with the kind of actions that only people they despise engage in, which generally means that their capacity for aggression is still there in a very nascent and underdeveloped form, but that they have absolutely no skills whatsoever that would be useful for integrating it into their lives.

So for example, one manifestation of the integration of aggression is, let’s say that you’re negotiating for a job. It’s an aggressive negotiation because they want you cheap and you don’t want to be taken cheaply. So if you’re good at really drawing on your aggressive ability, the first thing that you figure out is, well, how is it that I can say no in this negotiation and mean it? Which is an aggressive act.

If you want something from me and I just say no, then at minimum, I’m putting up a wall that you don’t get to cross. And if you’re negotiating with someone and you can’t do that, you lose and then people walk all over you, and then what’s going to happen to your aggression is it's going to manifest itself in resentment, which is, you know, a very unproductive form of aggression.

And then according to Freud, I think this is a very accurate observation, that resentment is going to drive leakages of aggressive behavior everywhere. So you'll come home from the negotiation where you didn't get the salary that you deserved, and you know, your husband or your wife will say some little niggling thing that's under most circumstances wouldn't bother anyone, and poof, there'll be a big fight, which is not very helpful, and maybe you don't even know why it happens.

And that would be part of being unconsciously motivated, and this sort of thing happens all the time. It seems to especially happen with things like aggression, because if you get picked on, you know, repeatedly during the day, each time that happens, the mechanisms that say they're the defensive aggression mechanisms that reside in the hypothalamus, they're sort of noting that you're taking dominance hierarchy blows and being pushed down the structure where it's unsafe because you don't want to be at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy.

And then that system has a proclivity more and more to grab your behavior and your perception and react as it should because you don't want to be pushed down the dominance hierarchy. And then if enough darts have been thrown at you for that day, then someone will push you over threshold, and poof, all hell breaks loose. But it's very unsophisticated behavior, and it's likely to work at cross purposes to the end that could be achieved if those impulses were properly integrated into the personality.

So from the Freudian perspective, the answer would never be don't be aggressive, partly because you don't have that choice; the answer would be if you're going to be aggressive, which you need to be because that protects you, then be sophisticated about it, and don't pretend that it isn't there. And people do that all the time; that's part of repression.

Part of what Freud described as repression can ease more simply be conceptualized just as self-deception. You tell yourself, well, I’m not that sort of person, and the truth of the matter is, oh yes you are! And then there’s a deeper truth underneath that, which is not only are you, but you should be. And that applies on the dimension of aggression and on the dimension of sexuality, because another thing that you might think about is, well, how many marriages break down because of infidelity?

And then the answer to that is a substantial proportion, often because a marriage cannot tolerate even one act of infidelity. I mean, if it’s hidden, that’s one thing; maybe the marriage can still survive, even though, you know, it’s on very unstable ground at that point. But if the act of infidelity is exposed or admitted to, then the contractual relationship at that point becomes radically unclear. It’s very difficult to maintain a marriage relationship after that.

Well, you might ask yourself, well how is it that you stop such a thing from happening? And a psychoanalytic act, a psychoanalytic answer would be, well don’t try to be too good in your marriage. And what the Freudians would mean by that is, well, you don’t want to be the sort of 1950s couple, each of whom sleeps in a different bed because even though that might fulfill some restricted notions of propriety and purity, the problem probability that it will satiate the more instinctive sexual desires that necessarily manifest themselves and, more importantly, that also make up part of what makes life Dionysian and rich instead of just rational and dull—those things have to be integrated inside the marriage.

And that means that it’s difficult, I think this is often a difficult thing for men to do because—and maybe this is less true than it was, but I doubt it—there’s a difference between the category wife and the category mistress. And the wife category is sort of a pure category. Maybe it's like mother or maybe it's like sister or maybe it's like Anna. And then there's the mistress category, which is more like stripper or prostitute or temptress or something like that.

And well, if each category is completely separate from the other, then if you're in the married category, the mistress category is going to start looking pretty attractive. And so the trick is to get those things integrated. But that also means that the man in the relationship has to foster the development of the mistress in his wife. And often his moral propriety will stop that from happening, or maybe his jealousy, because one of the things that you see happening, for example, in marriages if the wife starts to make herself— and this can also be reversed—if the wife starts to make herself look more attractive, perhaps to get in better physical shape, to dress better, to look more attractive in public, to the degree that the husband is insecure and feeling inferior, he'll interfere with that because he's afraid if she gets more attractive, then she'll attract someone who will take her away from him.

So he’ll do everything he can to unconsciously ensure that she’s as oppressed and dowdy as she can possibly be so that at least she doesn’t run away from him screaming. And that’s a standard Freudian entanglement and something that’s very characteristic of many close relationships. You see the same things often, say, between parents and children, where the mother or the father are afraid that the child will surpass them in some way or leave them.

And that’s the Freudian Oedipal situation; if either parent is afraid that the child will leave, then the parents will do everything they can to undermine every movement whatsoever towards the child’s independence and keep them infantile. And the infantile highest child becomes dependent but unbelievably resentful, as they should, because the parent is doing everything they can unconsciously to ensure that the best part of the child is never allowed to develop. And that’s an unbelievably common occurrence.

Freud believed that was characteristic of most families, and that was partly because of the long developmental period that children need in order to become independent. But more complexly, it was because the dynamics between the father and the mother may be impaired in one fashion or another, sexually or from a perspective of communication or in any of the ways that people can be mismatched. And maybe as well the couple's isolated, somewhat friendless, and so there are many things that they need to be accruing to themselves in order for their lives to be full and they're not getting them.

And so then they turn to their children for more attention than they should, for example, and encourage their children to pay more attention to them than they should. And then from the Freudian perspective, what happens is that the whole unconscious dynamic and fantasy structure of the household becomes extremely pathologized so that what people are acting out, so to speak, is this weird intermingling of mother, father, child, and lover where none of the roles are clearly apparent, where none of the roles are clearly distinguished from one another.

It's a mess, you know. And that’s a situation that’s very much facilitated by deceit on the part of the parents, because maybe the husband asks the wife, “Well, are you happy here?” and she says, “Well, of course, everything’s always going well in our household,” and what she means is, “I’d like to take out a knife and stab you 15 times while you’re asleep.” But she doesn’t regard that as an appropriate verbal statement even though it might be something that she’s fantasizing about deeply, you know, for hours a day.

But there’s no way that's going to come to light, you know? You can see these sorts of things happening if you pay attention to your fantasy life from a Freudian perspective, because you’ll see, if you can catch flashes of fantasy, especially when you’re frustrated or disappointed or annoyed or something hasn’t gone your way, you’ll have little stories branch off in your mind.

And those are these underlying id-like systems that are trying to inform your behavior, but they're kind of one-sided and single-minded, and the fantasies that they pop up can be, you know, pathologically aggressive or say pathologically sexual, but they're attempting to make a case for a mode of being that needs to be integrated into your personality.

Now the other thing the Freudians noted was to say the less sexual you are as an integrated personality, the more sexuality will manifest itself as pathologized in your fantasy. It's partly because in some sense, it has to scream very loudly to get your attention, but it's also because if you refuse to allow something that's alive a healthy path of development, it's not just going to go away.

You put a potato in the cellar and you shine a very dim light on it; all you get are these white spindly shoots that are hideous and, you know, appalling. But the thing is trying to live, and the same thing applies from the Freudian perspective to the fundamental instinctual motivations that drive human beings. It’s like they can be deeply pathologized to the degree that they’re not allowed to be properly expressed, and then you can get more and more dissociated from them, so that it becomes an increasing war between fantasies that are developing more and more to the pathological side and the ego which is doing everything it can to increasingly defend itself from those realizations.

So here's a list. This is a good list. This is a very good list to think about. Here are some of the voluntary actions that people undertake in order to ensure that the unconscious, both as a repository of instinctual motivation and as a repository of memory, becomes as pathological as possible. And so one way of thinking about the Freudian unconscious, apart from the Id element, which is the instinct part—this is more to do with the memory element—is, well, when people engage in something that's pathological, are they conscious of it? And the Freudians would say, well, generally not.

But that doesn't mean they weren't conscious of it when they first did it; it's like the decision—it's like the decision to lie is conscious. You may forget that you did it and only be moving forward through time the consequences of having engaged in it. And the fact that you've made it habitual and that there are consequences, maybe something you forget, and that becomes unconscious, but it doesn't mean you didn't know what you were doing when you first did it. And so here are some of the little nasty tricks that people play on each other and on themselves in order to ensure that they don't accurately represent the nature of their experience.

And you might ask yourself, what does accurate representation mean given that there’s no way you can ever have a coherent and complete representation of anything that ever happens to you? And so one rule of thumb for that is that, well, you’ve accurately represented something that’s happened to you that was negative in the past if you’ve represented it such that you're not going to do it again in the future. Because the purpose of memory, in large part, is to stop you from doing the same stupid things that you’ve already done again in the future. It’s not purely representational, right? It’s adaptive.

And so if you're twisting and distorting your memory so that they're more acceptable to you from a conceptual level but not developing in this direction that would allow you to become increasingly adapted, then you're engaging—you're likely engaging in one or more of these processes. Repression—well, repression is that you just don't admit it. I think mostly what happens when people repress is not so much that they actively repress. It's not exactly that they do something and they remember it and then they push it down; it's that they do something and there are some consequences, and the consequences are complex and maybe they’re motivated, and then they just don’t think about it anymore because it's easy not to think about something. You just don't think about it.

It's easy. So in some sense—although this isn't a precisely Freudian idea—the default position is repression, you know, because most of the things that you do are complex and they require articulation in order to understand. You can just avoid engaging in that, and then the nasty little situation will remain emotionally valent and attempting to pop up in your memory structure. Those are the sorts of things that maybe you remember that happened more than 18 months ago that still cause an emotional response when you bring them to mind. That’s a good clue that there’s something there that you have not articulated. Sometimes it’s because you don’t want to, and sometimes it’s just because you can’t, you know? You just don’t know how to make sense out of the occurrence.

You know, maybe you were bullied a lot when you were 13, and it still bothers you when you think about it, but you still haven't been able to figure out exactly why. Deny it? Well, that’s just outright, you know, when you’re dealing with a teenager and they’re lying and you say, “Are you lying?” and they say, “No,” that’s the end of that reaction.

Reaction formation—oh, that was a sneaky one. So Freud would observe that, for example, in sibling relationships where, you know, one sibling is extremely irritated at the other, but the way they cover that up to themselves and other people is by overdoing it in the other direction. So you know maybe a husband is having some serious second thoughts about his wife, and what he does in order to stay unconscious of that particular bit of reality is act with excessive character words. Or whenever they go out, there’s always a falseness about that.

I mean, if your antenna are up at all, that sort of thing actually—when maybe it’s worse for me because I’ve seen this so often—I’m sensitive to it. That sort of thing turns my stomach, you know? When you see this saccharine falseness with which people treat each other, you know, there’s something god-awful brewing right underneath the surface, and neither of them will admit to it. You know a good fistfight would do them a lot of good, but instead they’ll just torture each other to death with politeness for two or three decades.

So displacement—I already talked about that one. My boss yells at me, I yell at my husband, my husband yells at the baby, and the baby bites the cat—the sort of movement of the problem down the dominance hierarchy. Identification—um, you’re bullied in school, and so you start bullying kids that are younger than you. Rationalization—oh, this is a good one if you’re intelligent.

So all of those of you—you’re all pretty intelligent—if you want to be neurotic, the best thing to do would be to turn your intelligence to the function of rationalization so that when you do something that is clearly not in your best interest or anyone else’s, then you want to meditate on how to formulate a sequence of complex explanations that make that pathological behavior look positively altruistic and then stick to that, you know, as hard as you can in every argument that you ever have for the rest of your life.

So that’s an excellent use of intelligence. Intellectualization—same sort of thing—that’s usually when you dress up your neurosis with philosophy. And so you often see that in people who, instead of addressing their own personality pathologies, blame them on, you know, the pathological cultural conditions, and try to foment revolutions of one type or another because it’s pretty clear that they don’t have the problem; it’s the whole society that has the problem.

And if it would just reorganize itself around them, then everything would be fine. I saw a good example of this in the Atlantic Monthly several months ago where a woman who had, despite her best efforts, in some sense not being married by the time she was in her 40s blamed the structure—the entire structure of Western civilization for their continued failure of her dating attempts, which, you know, that might be the case. But I would say that before you jump to that conclusion, you might give some consideration to the fact that perhaps you’re integrally involved in that failure.

Sublimation—oh yes, well Freud regarded this as a real driving force in culture per se. So cold here? Okay, then I’ll sculpt naked women. So Freud believed that instinctual motivations, like sexuality, that weren’t finding their expression in the logical behavioral conclusion could be the energy—could be channeled, so to speak, into other sorts of pursuits.

And the sublimation explanation is really interesting from an evolutionary psychology perspective because you see these weird things happening not only in human beings but also in animals. There's this animal verb called a bower bird; if you look them up—Bowers, b-o-w-e-r—they're really cool birds. And so the males make this—they go on the ground and then they sweep the ground with their wings, and then they build this really complicated weaved thing that's nest-like.

And then they make little art pictures in front of it. So they take like red leaves and they put them all in a pile, and then they go find some yellow leaves and they put them in a pile, maybe a few rocks and some seeds and some bottle caps, and they make this really beautiful display. And they, you know, there’s a bunch of them in one area that do that, and then the females come along and they look at the artistic display and they look at the little bird and they look at the artistic display. And maybe they’re happy and move in, or maybe they hop off to find some other barrel bird’s little artistic production, and they're really nice.

Like these are major league efforts, especially given that birds make them. And if the bower bird gets visited by three or four females and, you know, the whole artistic thing isn’t going very well, then they erase the little thing they’ve done with their wings and they tear apart the little thing they’ve woven, and then they’re all depressed.

And that’s a good example of a complex idea called sublimation. Obviously, the bird is utilizing its creative capacity to fill a sexual instinct. Now Freud would say the sexual instinct is being channeled into the creative production, and it’s actually relatively hard to make a case against that if you’re a Darwinian.

And we know, for example, that one of the things that makes human beings attractive to one another is creativity, you know, manifested, say, in dress and all sorts of other things. And so, you know, the question is, is sexuality driving that at the individual level, which would be a Freudian interpretation, or is it tangled up in it even more deeply at a biological level in this whole reason that people are creative is so that we're attractive to one another, and that drives the species and it drives reproduction.

And so our creative endeavors somehow tangled up deeply with our reproductive desire, and it’s certainly not an unreasonable proposition. Projection—so you’re arguing with someone. Well, you do, you guys do this all the time. You’re making me mad.

It’s like you think about that; that’s a really interesting statement. It’s like, well, you know, it’s true in a way, right? Because now, you’re arguing with someone who’s really annoying, and clearly, they’re making you mad. On the other hand, the only reason they’re making you mad is because you’re accepting the, you know, the structure within which the argument is occurring. And the fact that they’re able to elicit that sort of response from you means that your interpretation of the circumstance plays a causal role.

So that’s a complex form of projection. A simpler form of projection is, well, you just don’t think about it at all. It’s like you’re not touchy; the other person’s annoying. And a lot of arguments are actually about settling that you’re touchy. No, you’re annoying. No, you’re touchy. No, you’re annoying. It’s like how do you ever settle that?

Well, usually you start dishing out even larger insults. You know, not only are you annoying, but you annoy lots of other people, not just me. You know, and that’s a funny kind of projection because it obviously isn't—it often isn’t precisely clear who started what or who is in fact at fault.

Anyways, that’s not a comprehensive listing of Freudian defense mechanisms, but it's not a bad one. Foreign ideas are at the core of psychological conflict. I’d give an example, let’s do a psychosomatic one. Sort of thing is extremely complicated, so that a client once—she had a real fun time.

I’ll change the story a little bit. She was at a job that she had been training at for a long period of time, and she thought she was doing pretty well. But they fired her, and then they packed her up and put her on her bicycle to go home the same day. And then on the way home she drove her bicycle down a ravine and, you know, crashed into a tree. So that’s a real fun; that’s a one-two punch, right?

So first of all your job disappears, and then as you’re just barely not recovering from that, then bang! You get hurt. And she was quite hurt as a consequence of the accident. So she had come to see me for what looked like post-traumatic stress disorder, but there was a bit of an underlying thought disorder that was sort of associated with it.

But to make a long story short, one of the things that she did when she came to see me was she was always like this, and I found this very bothersome after a while—because of mirror, I think it was mirroring. So she’d come in here like this, and that would make me uncomfortable. And one day I had mentioned this to her and she said she thought she had hurt her arm, and maybe she had.

And so I started getting her to move her arm a little bit, so she’d move it like this, and then she’d move it like this, and then she was getting so she could move it pretty well. And then the next time she came in, she was still like this, and I got this weird impulse and I said, well, come over; just stand. I’ve seen her for like years by this point. I said just stand by my desk.

And so she stood like this, and I sort of pounded my fist down her spine, and she cried for like 45 minutes. So that was pretty interesting. I mean it was like light pounding, eh? And then her shoulder was looser and she could move her arm more. So then I kind of investigated that, and she said, well she was afraid to move her arm because she might damage it more.

And so then I looked into that, and then she told me a story about how one time when she was five years old, she'd gone accidentally into a wagon and gone down a hill and cracked up at the bottom, and then they put her in the hospital, and then her parents weren't allowed to see her for like a month and a half, which is what hospitals used to do because they were sadistic and stupid.

And so that left her with a permanent distrust of institutions, which was sort of associated with the kind of the paranoid edge of her post-traumatic stress disorder but also accounted for why she didn't want to move her arm because she thought if she moved it, then that might hurt her more and then she’d end up in the hospital. So that’s a good example of how unconscious memories and conflicts—part of the big conflict there for her was she had a real problem with institutions, you know? And a lot of that was politicized; there was something wrong with all institutions, which is true but irrelevant in most cases, you know? Because you still have to adapt to the damn things.

But it had really hurt her adaptation because she couldn’t trust institutions, and then if she ever got hurt physically, she couldn’t move herself because she was afraid she’d re-damage the body part, and then she’d end up in an institution. So that’s a good example.

Incomprehensible distress. See if I can come up with a good example of that. Oh, I can give you a hallucination one. This is a good one. So I had a client one time who he was a schizophrenic. I met him in a behavioral outpatient inpatient ward in Montreal.

And I was doing an IQ test with him and he wasn’t concentrating at all. And so I said, why aren’t you concentrating? And he was looking all distracted, and he said because the war between the battle between good and evil in heaven is going on in my head, which I thought was the most interesting reason for not concentrating I had ever heard. And then I spent some time, like, getting to know him, walking around with him for some hours on the ward, and even though he was paranoid, he opened up to me after a while.

And I asked him about how his illness had developed, and he had been—he was the third son of a first-generation immigrant family, and so, you know, there was a lot of ambition in the family. His oldest brother was a doctor, and then the second oldest was a lawyer or maybe the other way around. And so he was taking a master’s degree in some behavioral science at McGill, and he got behind.

And so he faked his research data, and he wrote up his thesis, and then he handed it in. And then that night he went home and went to sleep. And he woke up in the middle of the night, and the devil was sitting on his bed at the end, and that was the beginning of his schizophrenic illness.

And so that’s the hallucination manifestation of an unconscious moral conflict. While unconscious, to some degree, he knew that he had done wrong; what he wasn’t conscious of was exactly how much damage that was going to do to him. Now, you know, you could say—well, maybe he had a predisposition to psychosis before he faked his data and that was interfering with his performance, and that’s why he got behind, and you know, who knows?

These things are usually complexly causally looped. But there was no doubting the phenomenology, and when he said that he couldn’t concentrate on IQ test because the battle between good and evil in heaven was going on in his head, he meant it. Whatever that means.

And when he told me that he woke up and saw the devil sitting at the foot of his bed, like that was a hallucination, well fair enough, but that really doesn’t explain it. Which is why people in mental hospitals generally don’t talk to schizophrenics, because they’ll tell you things that will curl your hair if you listen, and they’re very difficult to make sense of. And that’s partly why Freud noted at the beginning of this lecture, in the little recording that I played for you, that his ideas were met with incomprehension and hostility and continue to be met in that manner to this day.

See you soon.