2015 Personality Lecture 08: Depth Psychology: Sigmund Freud (Part 1)

So today we're going to talk about Freud. Um, Freud is probably, perhaps, the most controversial of the psychological theorizers that we're, that we've been discussing in the first part of this course. Um, I don't know what it is about Freud 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 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, 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 I would say that even where he wasn't right, he 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 conceptualize conceptual schemes as tools, then you can also understand how a better tool is an improvement even though it's not necessarily right. And a lot of the clinical theories are quite tool-like, given that they're applied to the problems of poor mental health. So, and 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 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 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. And then on 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 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, so here's the recording: [Music] "My UNC as the new meod of treatment of 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 part of the reason it's necessary is because mental disorders, such as they are, have a sociological element.

And so you might think about it this way: the human brain is obviously predisposed to learn languages, so there's a biological 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 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 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 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 take forms that differ with the culture because sometimes in some epochs, there's going to be trouble in society with regards to incorporating one set of drives, and other times there's going to be trouble incorporating another set of 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'd say that more that it was extraordinarily problematic.

And the reason for that is that sex is extraordinarily problematic for all sorts of reasons. 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 effective vector for the transmission of 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.

One of the things that happened in the Victorian era was that when the Europeans came to North America, they carried a variety of different—measles, mumps, smallpox. Those were very, very hard on the Native American population and wiped about 95% of it out. There's a theory that syphilis was the reverse gift and that 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.

Anyways, it was a devastating illness. Syphilis, I mean, um, it was certainly—the syphilis problem in Europe in the late 1900s was certainly as serious as the AIDS crisis in the 20th century, which is still to some degree running out, especially in developing countries, but it has been somewhat controlled. And so we're also very, very rigid in 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.

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, 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. Um, 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 Havi Alen, who wrote a 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."

Um, a lot of what I'm going to tell you about Freud—although I've read a 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 and so on. Ellen B., who was an existential psychotherapist who lived in Montreal at least when he was older, produced a very even-handed 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.

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. 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 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 of two facts: the lack of diffusion of contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease. Now, there's another issue as well because, because employment opportunities were extraordinarily limited for women, for a variety of reasons, it was also very, very 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 late 1800s, the average amount of money in today's terms that people lived on was about a dollar a day. So it's almost impossible for us to imagine how much wealthier we are now than people were only 120 years ago.

So there were three factors that made sexuality difficult to integrate. One was the sheer danger of pregnancy for women, um, and then disease, and then the fact—well, the fact associated with that—that there were no contraceptives. Venereal disease was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution, and because prostitutes were almost invariably contaminated and, therefore, potential sources of infection. We can hardly imagine today how monstrous syphilis appeared to people of that time, made worse by the fact that it was 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, syphilis was—and is—a particularly problematic pathogen because it produces a massive range of symptoms, and so there's no telling what form it will necessarily take in one victim compared to another. So the Victorians had no shortage of reasons to be in serious conflict about sexuality. Now Freud was also very much influenced by Nietzsche. Ellen B. says that psychoanalysis belongs to that unmasking trend, the search for hidden unconscious motivations characteristic of the 1880s and 1890s. In Freud, as in Nietzsche, words and deeds are viewed as manifestations of unconscious motivations, mainly of instincts and conflicts of instincts.

For both men, the unconscious is the realm of the wild brutish instincts that cannot find permissible outlets derived from earlier stages of the individual and of mankind, and find expression in passion, dreams, and mental illness. Now you know it seems to me—and 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 what they mean, that their speech and their actions are unduly influenced by factors that they're not necessarily conscious of, that some of the drives or the motivational states that are characteristic of people influence the manner in which they speak, 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 integrated into the culture, and that was the case with Freud despite the fact that he said there was great resistance—and there was—but, I mean, the ideas that he put forth were integrated into Western culture during his lifetime. This is staggeringly fast from a historical perspective. I mean when you absorb a great thinker's ideas and those become axioms, now they're what people assume, then all that's really left of what they think is what's the error, right? Because the errors, of course, don't become incorporated, and then the thinker just gets blamed for his errors. So, and that's certainly something that happened to Freud.

Even the term id, which actually means—it originates from Nietzsche—the dynamic concept of mind with the notions of 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 Nietzsche. Before Freud, Nietzsche conceived the mind as a system of drives that can collide or be fused into one another. In contrast to Freud, however, Nietzsche did not give prevalence to the sexual drive, whose importance he duly acknowledged, but to aggressive and self-destructive drives.

Nietzsche also understood those processes that the Freudian called defense mechanisms, particularly sublimation. To sublimate something is to take a form of energy, like sexual energy, let's say, 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 man thought of sexual energy, libido, as a kind of—in some sense a free energy—it was a source of energy that the psyche could use. And because it was in some sense a free source of energy, it could be 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. Freud actually believed that the reason that people became civilized was because we learned how to sublimate our instinctual energies into forms of activity and thought that were acceptable in the social community.

Now the funny thing about the idea of sublimation is that I think it actually works better as a phylogenetic hypothesis than as an ontogenetic hypothesis. So, and 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 successfully creative and that makes him successful, the probability that he's going to have a wider choice of mates, or at least the possibility of what he might consider a higher quality mate, goes up immensely. And that's partly because women—unlike their closest biological relatives, which are the chimpanzees—are extremely selective maters.

And women tend to mate across and up dominance hierarchies, 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 source of the rapid expansion of human creative ability and intelligence. It's true just as much in egalitarian societies as it is in societies that are extremely unequal, um, and it's also one of the major causes now of income inequality because one of the things that's happened is that as women have become educated, educated men will marry uneducated women, but educated women will not marry uneducated men.

So one of the—what's happened as we've transformed our society increasingly into an intellectual meritocracy that also allows the contribution of conscientiousness is that we're getting assortative mating between smart and conscientious people at the upper strata of the socioeconomic distribution. And the estimates now are that about 25% of income inequality in North America is a consequence 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, so depending, of course, on what you mean by competent. Whereas men are not—the correlation between women's socioeconomic status and their mating opportunity is slightly negative. The correlation between men's socioeconomic status and their mating potential, so to speak, is about 0.56. Like, that's a massive difference—it's an unbelievably massive difference; it has very powerful sociological consequences.

Now, Nietzsche 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 that modern man is afflicted with a peculiar illness bound up with civilization. Because the civilization demands of man that he renounce the gratification of his instincts. Now, so for Freud and for Nietzsche, they both— they both adopted a perspective that was different from that of Piaget. And I think Piaget 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 superego is doing—what society is doing—is actually inhibiting it; it's stopping it from happening. So it's basically, it's as if society puts each individual into a jail cell of sorts and only allows them to do certain things within that cell. Now you can certainly understand that, and 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 an individual and the culture attempting to turn them into an absolutely predictable cog in a machine. But you know, Freud, of course, viewed the primary conflicts in mental life as the ego tortured by—in some sense—right, being driven by underlying biological forces but also severely inhibited and repressed by the superego.

You know, it's a perfectly persuasive model, and there are situations under which it's more applicable. But Piaget's idea that the fundamental conflict within people isn't necessarily social versus the individual. For Piaget, 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 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 superego, crushing the individual into submission. Now, you might say that for neurotic people—and neurotic is a strange word, but we'll say for the sake of argument right now that a neurotic person is suffering sufficiently from the conditions of 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.

What Freud says about the ego versus the superego might well be true in the case of people who 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 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 they can't gratify any of their fundamental needs because of their inability or their awkwardness.

So I would say to the degree that you're suffering from failure, so to speak, for one reason or another, you're much more likely to see the social rules as a harsh and repressive superego. Obviously, they're not doing you any good. I would say that's probably more likely to happen if you're somewhat near the bottom of a given dominance hierarchy.

And that also means if you're at the bottom of a given dominance hierarchy that you're much more likely to consider the spirit of the structure as an authoritarian spirit and a repressive spirit because obviously it isn't making room for you. And sometimes, of course, that's the case. You know, I mean, there's lots of societies where everyone at the bottom has nothing, and only the people at the top have something. You know, and it's hard to see how you could not view the cultural super ego as something that was harsh and repressive and authoritarian and crushing under those circumstances.

So I also think that it was probably an idea that was more relevant during the initial, during the mid to late stages, say of the development of the Industrial Revolution because to work in a factory meant something very different than to work as a peasant. First of all, if you were working in a factory, you became bound by time in a way that human beings had never been bound by time. You know, we time everything—seconds mean something to modern people. But it took a long time for the idea that time was of the essence for the organizing of human life, and a lot of that occurred as people moved into the factories.

And so you can see, for example, the legacy of that 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 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 organized their lives.

So the bells that go off between periods and to 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 superego and the ego and the id are in 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 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 superego, so to speak, in the school system are so excessive that that 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 wearing yourself to a frazzle, then that's pathology. That's attention deficit disorder, and you can treat it with Ritalin, but that's only because you can treat anybody with Ritalin. You know, as I'm sure many of you know.

So, you know, Ritalin 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 that way, you see, you can understand what Freud meant by this superego versus ego conflict, or the superego-ego-id conflict. Attention deficit disorder is a perfect example of that. And then the pathology is defined by the circumstance. If we didn't have schools that are like the schools we have, we wouldn't have attention deficit disorder 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 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 that would mostly be 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, Piaget actually has done really interesting experiments with male rats, and he showed that if you deprive male juvenile rats of rough-and-tumble play, their prefrontal cortex doesn't mature. Which is also a real hat off to Piaget's theory of play as critical for higher levels of development. And you can also inhibit their tendency to play using Ritalin, so it's pretty sad. It's, in fact, it's appalling really.

So, and I see people in 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 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 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 idea there is that, well, you have a hypothesis and then you lay out an experiment and test it. It's like, well, yeah, but coming up with a 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 generation. That's the first part. And then hypothesis testing. And then the third part of it is 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 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 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 lie about how you came up with your hypothesis basically because 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, you were sitting with your 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 because we really don't talk about how we generate hypotheses in our paper. We act as if it's a consequence of logical induction or logical deduction, and it's not. It's very seldom that. I mean, 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 literature over here. And trying to actually explain how I got that idea in the introduction, it's like, you can't. It's just— you don't have the space, and so it's quite funny.

I mean, I don't think that it's—I don't really think that it's a lie; it's a format, you know what I mean? It's a mode of doing things, but it has nothing to do with hypothesis generation. And Freud, you know, Freud used his imagination, 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 hypotheses.

And his test wasn't a lab test; it was a test in practice. So his idea was, well, I've got this notion. I'll try laying it out in the therapeutic process, and I'll make observations about how that plays itself out. Now, you know, you could consider that relatively weak 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 behavioral science in the 20th century. They still exist. One was behaviorism, and another was ethology. Now there's some pretty famous ethologists—Konrad Lorenz was an ethologist, Nikolaas Tinbergen was an ethologist, Frans de Waal, now who studies primates, mostly primates in the zoo, mostly chimpanzees, Jane Goodall—those 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, are another example. Um, it's Fossey, I think, who studied gorillas. There seem to 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 or something like that, but it is quite striking.

Anyways, the ethologists, what they do is they go look at animals 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 animal and a normal animal are not really very similar at all, so one of the things you probably don't know is that when Skinner was experimenting on rats—and Skinner, he was a smart guy, man; we learned a lot 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 like I don't have any respect for Skinner; it's like 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 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.

What Skinner did, in some sense, was take a complex animal and simplify 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 using 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 take it all the time. 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 a setup so that it's like a normal rat would have—the rats aren't that interested in cocaine. So, you know, you can see how 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 scientists, you know?

And Frans de Waal, for example, he's a great person to read if you haven't read anything by Frans de Waal. It's F-R-A-N-S D-E W-A-A-L, and he's like a pediatrician for chimps. And what he's observed over a series of books, mostly making observations at the Arnhem 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 ground for morality emerges as a consequence of the way the chimps organize themselves into dominant structures. So there's a sociological element, but by the same token, the chimps are biologically prepared to inhabit dominance hierarchies. So there's a continual interaction between the social structuring of the 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 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 dominance hierarchy, 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 because it's true: you have twice as many female ancestors as you do male ancestors.

Now you think, how can that be possible? And the answer is that your average forefather—if every woman has a child but only every second man has a child, then that's exactly what you end up with. Every second man, in that case, would have two children, right? But that can easily happen. So for example, if you could imagine a situation where one man made 10,000 women pregnant, 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, Freud and Jung and the other clinicians are basically ethologists, and what they're doing is studying human beings in their 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 people in a clinical setting where you talk about everything is a less realistic way of gathering information, especially for generating hypotheses, than assessing 40 undergraduates for 20 minutes in a lab, you know?

Now, I think what you get—what happens is that you 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 are generated. Right? So these things have to play against one another, and 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 Jones, who was a great admirer of Freud and who really established the ground on which the history of psychoanalysis was going to be written. He's been accused of being too much of an acolyte, and I think there's some 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 him.

In the summer of 1897, Freud undertook his most heroic feat, a 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 first to explore those depths.

In the long history of humanity, the task had often been attempted. Philosophers and writers from Solon to Montaigne, from Juvenile to Schopenhauer had essayed to follow the advice of the Delphic Oracle: "Know thyself!" but had always come 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—remained 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 onward he must have dimly 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 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 in Western civilization in particular, the Western philosophical tradition 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? Because your observations of a given phenomena are going to be biased by the emotions and the motivations that you bring to the forefront.

A lot of what scientists were trying to do as they learned how to be scientists was to get the damn emotions and the motivations out of the way, and the personal biases and the demand to elevate your career and to be right and to beat the other primates and so forth and so on—they're trying to clear that out so that you could attend clearly to certain classes of phenomena. And then of course it was a post-Renaissance phenomenon to identify the central being of human beings with rationality.

Furthermore, there was also a deeper idea than that, 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 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 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 intellectuals—people who are serious about understanding the human psyche—had to really grapple with the fact that we were embodied and that our rationality—because the way our rationality really works is that it doesn't even get to work until it's 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 perhaps that was the way to think about it before Freud—but after Freud—and this is how we think 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 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 this is right. This is why the farthest that people have got in the pursuit of artificial intelligence is with embodied robots—embodied cognitive agents. It turns out that you can't have pure rationality without the body.

And Freud is—you just can't escape the fact that Freud was the person who was beating the drum for that perspective for 50 years, and he did it extraordinarily successfully. After Freud, you could never pretend that you weren't a sexual being or an aggressive being or a biased being or an unconscious being or a defended being or a repressing being or a lying being while you were doing whatever it was that you were doing, and those things had to be taken into account.

And you know, it wasn't much before Freud that Darwin came up with his Darwinian hypothesis. And so, you know, it was exactly at that time that it was necessary for us to understand our evolutionary kinship or in some sense even identity with other creatures, ranging from those that were quite like us to those that were very much unlike us— all the way down the phylogenetic chain. There's tremendously important interrelationships.

And so 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 merits too. And it was Freud who sort of rubbed 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 idea of evolutionary biology. And I also think he was a real precursor, in many ways, or perhaps the groundbreaker, for the development of fields like affective neuroscience, which, you know, is a relatively new field. Until, well, until the 1960s, in psychology, you weren't even allowed to think that people thought. It 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 people thought, 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, 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 neuropsychologists, as it turns out—that it became self-evident that, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 yeah, yeah, we certainly could!

And not only 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 functions unless you're blindly naive. You know, 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 systems like aggression and sexuality, those are like tree trunks.

The little tendrils coming down from the top of your brain that do the regulation, you know, the conscious regulation—those are like little vines. You know, as 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 even really like it when your rational mind is under control too much because—and this is again a reflection of the superego versus ego dichotomy—you're always running around consuming great amounts of alcohol and other sorts of, 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 who's in charge, and Freud was—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 creative illness that Jones talked about, and that Havi Allen talked about, is a variant of the initiation process that we've been describing. And one of the things that people like Allen B pointed out is that it's often the case that people who make great discoveries go through a 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 knew perfectly well—he's a pretty straight-laced Englishman, old Darwin—he knew perfectly 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—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 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 consequence of somewhat random biological processes.

I mean, that's a major league shift in the old worldview. And you know, to the degree that Darwin's personality was structured both explicitly and implicitly by Protestant religious presuppositions, which it was because in many ways, he was a conventional person. You know, he was taking a mighty axe to the thick trunk of his being, you know, and he suffered for that. He had anxiety disorders, and it's no bloody 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, Freud's notion that we were deeply embedded in our animal selves also 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, 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 were basically lobsters.

And that's a completely different way of thinking about the world, and it's something that we haven't digested yet. And I would say Freud was in the forefront of the revolution that produced that 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 Nietzsche. You know, he was another announcer of the death of God, and Freud's idea about religion was that it was a defense 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 straight and simple. I mean, terror management theory was developed by Ernest Becker, and Ernest Becker was a psychoanalyst even though he was a sociologist, and he wrote "The Denial of Death" in an attempt to update Freudian presuppositions.

So Freud is by no means dead, and the idea of associations, you know, that people's thinking is associational and that the associations are actually linked together by emotional similarity—is like, well, all the implicit attitudes—all the implicit attitudes research is predicated on that idea. They don't ever credit Freud with it, but it was Freud's initial discovery. You know, he discovered that people's thoughts wandered in a sense, you know, and that you could see why they wandered if you paid attention. You could track the underlying rationale for the connection between sets of disparate 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 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 associate. And what that was in some sense, 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 far as I can see that people organize 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 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 you've got a reasonably creative mind, you're going to generate a whole mass of counterproductive, you know, but potentially founded ideas that you just can't call.

So Freud figured that out with his idea of free association. So he'd let people come into his office, and he wouldn't really look at them; he'd just let them lie on the couch and say, well, just say whatever comes to mind, and they'd go wandering around on some quasi-random path. And Freud would note the connections between the things they said and infer what the underlying structure was, and what he was doing was this essentially.

So look, if let's say you go see a movie and then 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—you say to your friend, all the credits—and then you describe every 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 break it down. You boil it down to its gist, whatever that is.

It's like you might ask, well, why don't you just listen to the five-minute 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 clients. They'd come in there and lay out this massive kind of incoherent verbal chain, and he'd listen, and he'd hint at them perhaps what it meant, and he'd extract out the gist of the story.

And then if the advantage to having your memory reduced to gist is that you can 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 you ever have a fight with someone, especially someone that you love. You know how it happens all the time is you'll start fighting about something that's trivial, and then both of you will figure out, well, we're really not fighting about that at all.

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 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 manifested it in some articulated form.

So in a sense, that's bringing things up 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 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.

And so 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 counter or something. And after fighting with them for an hour, you figure out that they had a really bad 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, to the degree that you're sophisticated communicators, you're going to be doing that all the time.

I mean, how many of you 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, you haven't been paying attention. I would say that's really the bottom line. So these creative illnesses are a consequence of this descent 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're a genius, you blow apart 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 idea that Darwin had, that the environment itself could modify biological forms through selection. God, it's such a brilliant idea because, well, because it precisely accounts for why complex forms can emerge in the absence of an intelligent designer.

Now, 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 epigenetics. It turns out that you can—that Lamarck, who was really the prime adversary in some sense of Darwin, believed you could inherit acquired characteristics. Right? For a straight Darwinian, it's like, no, that doesn't happen. There's lots of evidence now 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’s pups three generations down are still predisposed 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 apparently is the modification of the DNA structure by additions of little, 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 mind-boggling. 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, uh-oh, that's a big problem for a world whose primary notion 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 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 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 represent ideas in symbolic form in a manner that was in fact presentational, but that we ourselves didn't understand. And I mean, that's another—that's another revolutionary idea, right? Is that we could express—that it was possible to express concepts, especially 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— 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 seemed to think something like when you made a— when you experienced an event, the event was as if you experienced it; that that was the event.

And then sometimes you didn't like the implication of that event, or perhaps you couldn't understand 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 you didn't have to think about it anymore. And then it 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 about doing dream analysis and psychotherapy is that people make slips of the tongue all the time. Slips of the tongue! Yeah, well, I won't interpret that for now, but if you listen to people make Freudian slips while 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 telling you about their dream, they'll use a sentence to describe part of the dream that simultaneously accounts for the other part of the dream without them even noticing. And then all I'll do, because we're trying to 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 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. 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 part inhibits tonically; 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 does it in more symbolic terms because 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 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 you have an old friend, it's like 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 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 there'll be communication phenomena that emerge within that context, and they strike you with the force of revelation.

But you can't communicate them to anyone else because you can't conjure up the entire context, which is partly why I want to show you this movie on Tuesday, because it's the only thing I've ever seen that actually manages to do this. It shows Freudian psychopathology because it gives you enough contextual information to actually infer it. So that's really smart.

All that whole free association thing, man, that's his idea, that it was emotional systems, repressed or not, part of the id or not, because his idea of the unconscious was somewhat—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, right? There's a cognitive 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 early, and you know, 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 you know—and their face makes it perfectly evident 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 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 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, because maybe they don't know or they weren't willing to admit it to themselves or they hadn't 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? You watch how these things progress. It's like it isn't until something collapses in some 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 defended, you know? And that's another Freudian idea: 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 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 voice, which means that you're only talking from here, right?

Because 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 doing it. They don't know themselves. It's like Freud—he knew what he was talking about, you know? And if you observe in your own behavior your proclivity to do absolutely absurd and self-destructive things at the drop of a hat and be 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 kind of apology, right? It's like, I did something rude to you because you're 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 functions that he had identified as early as the 1900s. So he said the unconscious has a conservative faculty; it stores memories often inaccessible to voluntary recall. It's like, it's an interesting idea, right? So where are those things that you remember that you 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 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 dissociated elements of the personality which may lead a parasitic existence. Man, that's smart! You know, the idea that if you did something habitually, that that would produce an automatized system! You know, we didn't get there with neuroscience 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 stumbling around like you're trying to learn a piano piece, for example. You make mistakes, and you're just a klutz at it, and then you practice and practice and practice, and as you're doing that, less and less of your brain 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 enables you to play that piece of piano music or that really good at liking cocaine, depending on what you've been practicing. You know, and then that's a little monster in your head, especially if it's associated with something like cocaine. Good luck getting rid of that because 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 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! Mythopoetic: the unconscious constructs narratives and fantasies that appear mythic or religious in nature. It's like, well, Jung 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 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 defense against death anxiety is actually—it actually contradicts his own theory.

Now Jung 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 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 then there's the whole New Age movement.

So—and you know, Jung is—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, you know. But Jung thought, well, that's just not—I’m going there, and he—that's because Jung had a mythopoetic imagination of incalculable complexity, and that was just where he was headed.

But Freud figured that out; it's very, very smart. And you know, a lot of modern neuroscientists and modern psychologists haven't even—haven't got anywhere near this yet. You know, the idea that the unconscious has a mythopoetic function, it's like, I don't think you've learned that in any of your neuroscience courses yet. But it's coming, you know? I mean, it's the case—obviously, since we have mythopoetic structures, they came from somewhere, and they're not just stories. You know, that's just not a 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 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 if it doesn't make you uncomfortable in many ways and squirm around, then you're just not paying attention.

So 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.