2015 Personality Lecture 02: Historical Perspectives - Mythological Representations

So, in the first lecture, I already told you guys a little bit about this figure, and I mentioned that the idea of being swallowed up by a beast of some sort and then cast back up is a very ancient and archetypal idea. An archetypal idea you might think of as an instinctive idea. This is an idea of Carl Jung's, by the way, although it had its precursors in other intellectual systems of thought. You might think of an archetype as an idea that you can understand without being pre-exposed to it.

Now, blank slate models of human cognition assume that all of our knowledge comes from our sensory experience. But, first of all, there are very many problems with the blank slate model. First of all, blank slate models are just wrong. They were useful conceptual structures a couple of hundred years ago, and there were situations where they could be applied in part to systems of thought, like behaviorism. But fundamentally, we know perfectly well that the human being is not a blank slate.

We also know that you couldn't be a blank slate, and the reason for that is that there is so much information, so to speak, surrounding you and making up your experience. Without some a priori structures to handle that experience for you and present it to your consciousness in a pre-structured manner, there's just not a chance that you could ever make sense out of it. Plus, we also know that your biology and your neurobiology is very much similar to that of all life on Earth, really for that matter, but extraordinarily similar to that of mammals.

We know things, for example, that are quite interesting like the systems that make up the deepest part of your brain, and partly the part, say, that keeps track of things like dominance hierarchies, are hundreds of millions of years old. You share structure and function of those neuropsychological elements with animals as distinct from you as crustaceans.

So, for example, crustaceans use the serotonin system to keep track of their dominance hierarchies, and you do the same thing. Drugs that work on people for dominance hierarchy-related disorders, like depression, also work on lobsters. So, if you have a lobster that’s a friend of yours and it’s feeling depressed, then you could recommend that it uses serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and that’ll make it a happy, stretched out sort of confident lobster instead of a bunched up and insecure lobster.

The reason I’m telling you that, it is pretty comical, but the reason I’m telling you that is because it indicates something of tremendous importance, which is that you are one old thing, and there are elements of your structure that are importantly hundreds of millions of years old. They structure the way that the world appears to you. An archetypical idea, in some sense, is an idea that you can understand because you’re a human being.

If you think about this even for a few moments, you can understand how this might be. If someone comes up to you and says, “I’m angry today,” especially if you’ve been conversing with them for some time, it isn’t generally necessary for you to ask, “What do you mean angry?” You might ask, “Why are you angry?” or “What happened?” But because the person who’s making the statement has a nervous system like your nervous system, you can both mutually assume that you’ve understood and experienced the emotion of anger.

Instead of trying to describe what that’s like, you can just describe the particular situations that elicited it. There’s lots of evidence for basic emotions. The list of basic emotions varies from thinker to thinker, although they congregate around a pretty definable set. Part of the reason that they differ at all is because it isn’t obvious how you distinguish an emotion from a motivational system, and it’s not even obvious that the class of emotion is a reasonable class.

But there are certainly subjective phenomena that emerge as a consequence of the activity of fundamental brain systems that everyone shares. So, people understand what fear means, people understand what pain means, disappointment, frustration. People understand what surprise means, they understand joy, they understand disgust. I think I hit most of the major ones there.

Then there are other systems that don’t look so emotion-like that are maybe more motivation-like, like hunger and thirst and uncomfortable heat and uncomfortable coldness that people also understand. The reason you understand that is because you are a certain way, and you are a certain way because, for the same reason, you have two legs, most of you, and two arms and two eyes. You don’t just spring out of the void as a completely unstructured organism.

It’s difficult to say exactly what elements of human experience and behavior and cognition and thought and all that are inbuilt, precisely because we’re also quite modifiable from a cultural perspective. So, it’s structure plus the capacity for tremendous modification. It’s hard to exactly say how much is structure and how much is modification, and partly the reason it’s hard to say that is because it depends on how much effort you put into the modification.

The more effort, the more modification. But, having said all that, the fact that we’re similar in a priori structure is actually one of the preconditions that allows us to communicate with one another. There was a thinker, a Harvard thinker named E.O. Wilson; some of you may be familiar with that name. He’s a famous biologist, and he basically studies ants. Ants are very complicated, and they’re very successful. There are more ants by weight than there are people on the Earth.

So, even though they’re not necessarily concerned with overpopulation and environmental degradation, there are, in fact, more ants. One of the things E.O. Wilson pointed out was that, you know, even if we could talk to ants, we wouldn’t have anything to say to them. The reason for that is because ants concern themselves with things that human beings have no intrinsic interest in. Their fundamental value structure, so to speak, is so different from our value structure that there wouldn’t be anything to talk about.

With your friends and with your family, you talk about shared human experiences. You talk about variations in shared human experiences, and you just take for granted that the shared element of that exists. You can think of the shared element of human experience as archetypal. You might think, well, part of the shared human experience is archetypical because we share an underlying biology and, also to some degree, a culture.

But then there’s this weird no man's land, in some sense, between the biological system per se and the system of subjective experience and ideas. You might say that the biological systems are ideational to some degree. You can imagine if you get angry, you think angry thoughts. What that means is the system that mediates aggression is also capable of thinking. It thinks in abstractions, and so there’s some relationship between the biological function, which prepares your perception and your body for action, and your capacity for abstract thought.

The system that produces anger, in some sense, thinks within you. It’s really a more accurate way of thinking about it because, as you all know, if you’ve become particularly angry during an argument or a discussion with someone, you may say things that you, whatever you are, comes to regret very soon after the conversation. It’s as if, in some sense, the system is speaking within you.

If you start to think that way, you can also develop much more understanding right away of what the psychoanalysts were about when they started to talk about unconscious processes. You could say, and this is a realistic way of thinking about it, that what the psychoanalysts identified as unconscious processes, in some sense, were the thought patterns in word and image, and sometimes in behavior as well, of fundamental biological systems working within you.

Even someone like Freud, for example, would say approximately, “Look, you know, you’re a relatively loose collection of somewhat integrated biological subsystems, and each of them posits a goal that’s worth attaining. But the problem is that many of those goals exist in contradiction to one another, and your problem as an organism is to unite those diverse biological goals.” That would be the id, for example, from a Freudian perspective: to unite them into something that’s relatively coherent and non-internally contradictory, and then also to express that union in the social sphere where hundreds of thousands of other creatures, more or less like you, are trying to do the same thing.

It’s a tricky balancing act. These systems inside of you, so to speak, are informing you constantly. Some of that they do with direct physiological sensation because there are generally sensations that are associated, say, with motivational states or with emotions. We kind of think of those as feelings, whatever that means.

Then, there are ideas that are associated with it too, and some of those ideas are often fantasies. I can give you an example of that. It turns out that the interest that women have in sexual behavior is dependent to some degree on their blood levels of testosterone, and that varies across the menstrual cycle. Women tend to be most interested in sexual activity when their fertility is at a peak, which is just after they ovulate.

But it doesn’t look like testosterone produces an increase in sexual behavior in a causal sort of manner, like a drive. What seems to happen is that the testosterone produces an increase in sexual fantasy, and the fantasy produces the impetus for the action. That’s a very interesting way of thinking about it, you know, because what happens in some sense is that the biological system that’s underlying sexual desire sets up a world in imagination that is more likely to contain images of sexual gratification, and the organism, so to speak, follows in its wake.

You can see this if you pay attention to the structure of your imagination; you can see this sort of thing happening all the time. You know, if you’re in an argument with someone, for example, and they humiliate you or put you down, and that produces feelings of resentment, if you watch your imagination, it might be quite conscious and it might be quite fleeting. You’ll see that fantasies of revenge, for example, and different scenarios of revenge play out in the landscape of your imagination.

When you’re hungry, you’re studying away, concentrating on something, and your blood sugar level falls enough so your hypothalamus notes that maybe it’s time for a few calories. It pops up an alternative sequence of ideas. You know, it’s like, “Well, maybe it’s time for a pizza.” You think about a pizza. It’s got some mushrooms on it, maybe, if you happen to like mushrooms. Sooner or later, the fantasy that’s associated with the hunger becomes sufficiently demanding and sufficiently likely to take up the space inside your subjective experience that you’ll switch activities from what you’re studying, especially if you’re not that interested in it. You’ll switch activities so that you pursue the new goal that’s been put forth as a possibility by the action of one of these underlying biological systems.

Now, one of the things that Freud proposed – and you know, it’s an interesting idea – is that if you interfere with the activity of one of these systems, especially the more troublesome systems, like sexual desire and aggression, and those are troublesome because, in some sense, they’re the most social of emotions, right? You need a partner for sexual activity, although that seems to be less frequent than it used to be in the past. Anger is something that is also very socially disruptive. One of Freud’s claims was that it’s particularly difficult for individuals to integrate sexual desire and aggression into their personality and into the social world because those emotions are either socially disruptive or require a tremendous degree of cooperation from someone else.

That was especially true before there was reliable birth control and when there was a lot more stigma associated with sex outside of marriage, and childbirth outside of marriage. You know, in my clinical practice, for example, now I don’t see that many people who have the sort of sexual repression problems that Freud found so common among his Victorian clients. In our culture, it’s more likely that people are having a terrible battle with the demons of hunger. They have some sort of eating disorder because they’re starving themselves and then binging and starving themselves and then binging or eating some awful combination of pure carbohydrates and sugars on a sort of a random basis.

They’ve disregulated their hypothalamic systems because the hypothalamus controls hunger. They get into a vicious battle with it. You don’t win against your hypothalamus because, as far as it’s concerned, you’re just an appendage to it. It’s much more powerful than you are, as you’ll find out if you ever have a scrap with it. People who have eating disorders gorge and binge completely against their will, and they don’t seem to be able to control it because your hypothalamus won’t let you starve. It’s not into that sort of thing.

No matter how thin you want to be, it would rather you were alive, and it has the capacity to exert more control over your behavior than you do, generally speaking. The same thing often happens to people who develop addictions. An addictive substance, in some sense, harnesses a fundamental motivational system. If you train that motivational system over a long enough period of time to seek out the addictive substance and you reward it by using the addictive substance when you are able to come across it, you’ll create this little biological monster in your brain that turns on at the drop of a hat, and then you have very little control over when it’s activated.

When people go into rehab for drug addiction, it’s pretty easy to get them through the withdrawal phase, even if it’s something like heroin. You know, heroin withdrawal, although people are always writing movies about how awful it is, it’s about as bad as a bad case of the flu. People very seldom die during heroin withdrawal; they die during alcohol withdrawal all the time. You can get someone through withdrawal, but as soon as you put them back in their natural environment, where their friends are and the cues that are associated with the addiction are still in place, they start taking the drug right away again, regardless of all their good intentions.

You can see that as well in your own behavior because I doubt if a day passes where you don’t do something that you swore you wouldn’t do, and you do it, and then you think, “Hm, why did I do that?” It’s like, “Well, what do you mean I precisely…?” That’s the fundamental psychoanalytic question because, you know, even the way the word looks, it’s like one letter, you know, it’s like a one “I.” It’s like, “Well, is there an ‘I’ there?” Well, not really. What there is, generally speaking, is a loose aggregation of systems that are more or less going in the same direction that’s diluted into thinking that there’s a unity.

That’s a prime psychoanalytic theory. The part of the reason that people suffer is because those systems, first of all, don’t necessarily have your well-being in mind. You know, your pleasure, your freedom from anxiety, your freedom from pain, like the system that mediates individual reproduction, the sexual system – it doesn’t really care about you, so to speak. It cares about whether or not you reproduce.

One of the things you might think about if you think, “Why is there so much conflict in human intimate relationships?” It’s because the demands of sexual reproduction and the demands of individual happiness are not the same thing. You have to try to integrate both of them, but there’s no reason that you would necessarily find the partner who would make your life most fulfilling to also be the one that you’re sexually attracted to. You’d hope that would be the case, but good luck with that. You’ll end up with some jerk you can’t stand because, you know, you get so hot you can’t stand it when you’re anywhere near them.

You might think, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if you could bring that under voluntary control?” It’s like, well, good luck with that. These are the sorts of things that you need to think about when you’re thinking about what the psychoanalytic thinkers were thinking about as the unconscious. In some sense, the unconscious is the ideational and motivational activities of all these underlying biological subsystems that make up your being, that make up the substrata of your psyche.

You tend to think of yourself as “I.” That would be the Freudian ego, you know, as the part of you that subjectively experiences and maybe also the part of you that has continuity of memory across time. For one reason or another, we tend to experience that as something of a unity. It’s not obvious why exactly. I think part of it is that we can separate ourselves out as a unit from the rest of the world, including other people. We’re aware of our boundaries, physically and also temporally.

But I also think it’s because, for one reason or another, we only seem to be able to do one thing at a time. The limitation, which is like a motor output limitation, seems also to imply to us that there’s only one thing there. But you know, it’s not unreasonable to think about ourselves as something more like an ant hill than something that’s a completely unitary structure, because obviously our physical structure is far from homogeneous. Right? You’re made up of all sorts of different sub-parts, and they’re qualitatively different.

So, anyways, what I want to talk to you about today, as far as I can manage it, is to give you some insight, or at least the insights I’ve been able to develop, about how it is that your physiology speaks to your mind. I think the way to conceptualize that is by trying to give you some sense of what symbols are.

Now, what Freud thought about symbols was that, well, let’s say that you were in a society that was very sexually repressive and you were still stuck with the problem of a fairly powerful sex drive, and your culture had taught you that that needed to be suppressed and repressed and controlled. Freud’s idea was that, well, that thing like the monster in the basement doesn’t really like to be pushed around and controlled, and it’s going to manifest its desires, its wants, and its view of the world in subversive form.

For Freud, the subversive forms would be different sorts of symbols. If you weren’t satisfying the system that was underlying sexual interest, then it would start to insert itself in random ways into your behavior, perhaps when you’re interacting with someone of the opposite sex or maybe into your dreams and your fantasies, and it would do that in a disguised form because, well, the part of you that was the integrated part, the ego part, in some sense, wasn’t really willing to communicate with it. So, it had to sort of sneak its message up and through.

Well, the Jungian take on that was slightly different. Jung was perfectly willing to assume that Freud knew what he was talking about in some domains, especially those that were associated with psychopathology. But for Jung, the realm of symbols was something different. For Jung, the realm of symbols was where knowledge had its origin. You can imagine that there are things that you know absolutely nothing about, and of course, you don’t know what those things are because you don’t know anything about them, but there are lots of them around.

There are also lots of things that exist that people as a whole don’t know anything about, not just you. They’re beyond our comprehension as a species. For Jung, this symbol was a mediator between the absolute unknown and the relatively known. As the human imagination expanded out and mastered more and more territory, there was a periphery around the island of knowledge, and that periphery was made up of symbolic representations that were pre-articulate knowledge. They were like things you might act out.

Here’s a way to think about that. So, you might watch a child who’s engaged in pretend play. Often children will pretend to be a mother or a father for obvious reasons. What they do is they observe their mother or their father and then they act them out. It’s a very interesting form of acting out because we think of it as imitation. “Oh, look, you know, she’s imitating her mother.” But imitation means you move your arm like this, and I move my arm like this. And that is not what children do when they’re playing.

What they do instead is a very complex form of generalization. They watch the mother and they extract out something like the pattern of the mother. They don’t really understand what that pattern is because they don’t have the articulation and the cognitive capacity to generate a fully articulated and verbalized model of the mother, but they act it out in behavior. It’s, in a sense, they’re incorporating the spirit of the mother; that’s one way to think about it, into their behavior.

Then they can act out things they don’t understand or at least they don’t understand in terms of being able to articulate them. Lots of things, you know, you can’t articulate. You can’t articulate how to walk. You can’t articulate how to ride a bike. You can’t articulate anything complex, like how to engage in a successful relationship. A lot of that knowledge is embodied, assuming you have it at all.

So, it’s dramatic action. You could also think about the symbol as a mediator between dramatic action and full cognition. For example, imagine a child is playing at being a mother, and then you stop them and you say, “Well, what are you doing?” The child might say, “Well, I’m, you know, we’re playing house. I’m pretending to be mom.” You might say, “Well, how do you go about doing that?”

Then they’re going to try to articulate what they’re doing, and while they’re doing that, they’re going to be using their imagination and representing the things that they’re trying to understand. You can see how the symbol, which would be the visual representation of the mother’s action, like a little movie that you might run in your head, might lay itself on top of the dramatic action as a precursor to articulation.

That’s a good way of thinking about it, that the symbol is a precursor to articulation, and that you use symbols of one form or another whenever you use imaginative representation as a precursor to understanding. That happens, for example, when you’re fantasizing about something.

For the psychoanalysts, particularly psychoanalysts like Jung, the imagination was something that had a spontaneous operation. It would just go along on its own and do things. You experience that, first of all, when you dream, obviously, because you’re not in control of your dreams. Something’s in control of them, and they happen, but it’s not you, or it’s not the you that you normally think of yourself as.

Then if you’re daydreaming, something analogous happens. You find that maybe you’re trying to concentrate on something, and something that’s of interest to you for one reason or another starts to creep into the theater of your imagination and lay out different scenarios of one form or another. It’s sort of like the natural language of the psyche.

It isn’t obvious that the natural language of the psyche is, in fact, language because we don’t really know how long human beings have been using formal language. The estimate is 150,000 years; that’s one estimate. I doubt it’s more than 2 million years. 2 million years seems to be about how long we’ve been using fire, so it’s somewhere between 2 million and 150,000 years.

Compared to the entire history of our cognitive development, you know, which you can stretch back well to the beginning of life itself if you want, or at least to the point where things had nervous systems, that’s more like 500 million years. The psyche was operating without language for a much longer period of time than it was operating with language, and it was doing something to organize its conceptions of the world that were pre-linguistic.

What we’re going to talk about today, or what we’re already talking about, is what the structure of those pre-linguistic cognitive forms might be. I’m offering that to you partly as an element of the integrating theory that I told you I would try to deliver in the first lecture, and also as a means of giving you a schema or a language to start to understand what symbolic representation means from a psychoanalytic perspective. I hope that’ll be very useful.

It’s been extraordinarily useful for me because it offers a key to understanding symbolic literature and symbolic modes of cognition. For example, religious systems are symbolic modes of cognition par excellence; that’s what they are. They’re not primitive theories about the nature of the objective world. That’s a foolish way of looking at religious systems, and it sets up an artificial dichotomy between religious belief and scientific belief.

All that does is confuse people. Religious belief is primarily about morality, and morality is about how to act. Religious symbolism is about how to construe the world as a forum to act in. You have to solve that problem because the biggest problem you have in your life, and the biggest problem you always will have, is how the hell should you act.

That might actually be the fundamental question of existence to the degree that action is the primary reality. Now, if you’re a materialist, you don’t really think that way because you think of the objective world, stripped of its subjective importance, as the ground of reality. But it’s not the ground of reality. The ground of reality is whether or not you survive and reproduce, at least from a Darwinian perspective, and that means that the most important element of reality is how you act.

That determines whether or not you’re going to be selected, so to speak, for reproduction. People are evaluating each other nonstop on the basis of their fitness for reproduction. Almost all of social congress has to do with that. Men organize themselves into very strict dominance hierarchies by competing with one another, and women peel the men off the top. Almost everything that you’re doing in your day-to-day interactions with other human beings is an element of that fundamental process.

That’s all action-oriented. It’s very much important to get these things right. I’m going to tell you how I piece this together to some degree. We’re going to start with the hypothesis.

One of the things you might ask is, how do our immediate mammalian relatives conceptualize the world? We’re going to assume that those are higher-order primates because, you know, the evidence seems to suggest that we’re relatively genetically similar to chimpanzees, in particular, and also to bonobos, which are more or less a form of chimpanzee, although their behavior differs. It looks like we diverged from the precursor to chimpanzees, bonobos, and human beings about 7 million years ago.

So we didn’t come from chimps; chimps, bonobos, and us came from something that was the precursor to all three. We know you can calculate how similar you are from a genetic perspective to another organism by measuring if you split your DNA into its halves and then you mix those DNA halves with the DNA halves of another animal. They’ll join up, and the more related you are to that animal, the more energy it takes to pry them apart once they’ve joined up because they’re a tighter match.

It turns out that we’re extraordinarily tightly matched with chimpanzees. So, when you’re wondering why you’re so erratic and uncontrollable and unpredictable, it’s because you’re basically a chimpanzee that’s been driven insane by self-awareness. What the hell do you expect from something like that? It’s amazing that we can even all sit in this room together.

You might ask what creatures like that know. One of the things that we’ve been able to determine are some of the precursors or associates of cortical development and brain size. There are various things that seem to be tightly associated with the development of larger brains, but one of them, in primates in particular, is the size of the group. The bigger your group, the more you have to keep track of, the more social information you have to keep track of.

If that drives brain development at least in part (because it’s certainly not the whole story) and if it’s driving behavior, one of the things that implies is that one of the most important sources of information that you have to contend with if you’re a social primate is the social structure. What you can infer from that is that your brain is primarily set up to assess social information.

Now, you can take that a little bit farther, and you might think, well, that means that may imply that the primary categories that you use, naturally, so to speak, to understand the world are, in fact, social categories. You could think, “Well, we’ve elaborated our cognitive systems up into the abstract far farther than our primate relatives have, but because evolution is a conservative process, new structures have their roots in old structures.”

It’s a necessary part of evolution because once an organism walks down a certain psychophysiological road, in some sense it’s destined by that road. This is why you have the same basic bodily platform as virtually, well, not only mammals but vertebrates in general. Four legs, two eyes—it's a very standard form. Once it’s developed, that’s it; that’s the platform upon which further variation takes place.

Now, you might ask, well, first of all think of your own situation in relationship to the primate situation. How much of your time during the day are you spending interacting with other people in one form or another? Now, let’s assume that also means books, movies, and all the artificial representations of people. We’re going to consider those representations of people as well.

Now, you might think, well, is it 80%? Is it 90%? I mean, it depends to some degree on how extroverted you are. If you’re sufficiently extroverted, you’re going to try to drive it up to 100%. If you’re really introverted, maybe you go hide in a closet now and then because you can’t stand being around people. But nonetheless, most of your environment is a social environment.

We like to think of the environment as a forest or a landscape, something like that, but the environment is actually the niche in which you live. The human niche is highly social. Then you add to that the fact that we’re pair-bonding creatures. We have very long-lasting relationships. Our familial relationships are extraordinarily long-lasting as well, plus our period of dependency is extraordinarily long and serious.

For all the mostly Western ideas about radical individualism, we’re unbelievably social creatures, and we can’t really survive outside of a social context. What that implies is that the fundamental categories of our perception are likely social and that we’ve taken those fundamental categories and applied them to other things.

So, here are some of the things that we know that higher-order primates can track. They can track dominance. Primates live in hierarchies; there’s a female hierarchy and a male hierarchy. The nature of those hierarchies depends on the primate, but there are hierarchies, and the hierarchies are extraordinarily important. Because if you’re at the bottom of a hierarchy and you’re a social primate, like you’re a whipping boy, you’re going to get kicked around.

Your children are going to get kicked around. If a disease comes whipping through your tribe or your troop, then if you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, you’re the one that’s going to die because you’re already stressed and full of parasites, poorly nourished, and you don’t have a good place to live. You’re going to get wiped off the map. Even if you don’t get killed by some disease, if we track life expectancy across time, if you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, you’re going to die way earlier, and you’re going to be old much younger than the people or the creatures that are at the top because the ones at the top get the best of everything, and the ones at the bottom don’t.

It turns out that your place of position in the dominance hierarchy is an unbelievably important determinant of your probability of reproduction, especially if you’re male. Most females reproduce regardless of where they are in the dominance hierarchy, but that isn’t the case with males. What happens in males is you get something more like a Pito distribution where there are a few males at the top who are unbelievably successful and then half the males at the bottom who are not successful at all.

That’s one of the chronic stressors that civilized societies have to deal with. It turns out that primates are very, very sensitive to dominance hierarchy structure, and they know who’s at their level, and they know who’s below their level, and they know who’s above. They track that across time, and they track it across families, and sometimes they track it across generations because it can last generations. It does in human beings; it does in chimpanzees.

Our brains are pre-wired for dominance hierarchy comprehension. Okay, so that’s one domain: the dominance hierarchy. Now you can think about that in a variety of different ways. You can think about that as the social organization; you can think about that as the nature of the tribe; you can think about that as the state or the nation or the people. All of those things are dominance hierarchy variant, in some sense. You can think about that as the father, and you could even think about that as God—the Father, with God being the thing that’s at the top of the hierarchy in some sense.

I think part of what religious ideation actually does is take the idea of the thing that’s the top of the hierarchy, whatever that is, and make it into a deity. We know that people are much more likely to imitate those who are close to the top of the hierarchy because they want to pull in the behaviors and the attitudes and the ideas that made those people successful. Then you might think with regards to human beings that, because we’re extraordinarily intelligent and very much able to abstract, what we can do is look across dominance hierarchies because there are multiple sorts of dominance hierarchies among human beings.

We can say, “Okay, well this person’s at the top here, and then this person’s at the top here, and this person’s at the top here.” All those top people share things in common that make them the top, and then we can abstract out what the top means. I think that’s partly what people are doing in the multigenerational process that they use to extract out religiously significant figures of adulation and admiration. They’re like the best of all possible people across all possible circumstances.

We’ll leave that aside for a moment. It looks like the fundamental symbolic structures that people use to represent the structure of the dominance hierarchy are paternal. The dominance hierarchy is like the great father, and I think part of the reason for that is that, among human beings and among chimpanzees (although it’s not so true with baboons), the male dominance hierarchy is the dominant hierarchy.

This is a claim even that feminists make, right? Because the feminists say that, well, our culture is basically a patriarchal construction, and they’re not very happy about that; but that’s a whole different issue. Okay, so one idea. Now, the other thing you can think about here is that your brain has got to be organized so that it’s capable of understanding the things that are most constant about the environment.

You might think, well, the things that are the most constant are the most real—that’s a way of defining real. It lasts a long time, and it’s evident everywhere. Okay, so then you might think, well, what are the most real things that human beings have to deal with? And one answer to that is, well, there are certain kinds of objective realities that are the most real.

You might say, well, things like trees are extraordinarily real, but one of the things I’d like to point out to you is that, despite the fact that trees are quite real, they’re not as real as dominance hierarchies because dominance hierarchies were around for a couple of hundred million years before there were trees. There have been dominance hierarchies around for 400 million years, long before there were vertebrates of our type.

The dominance hierarchy is an extraordinarily constant feature of life. Part of the reason that we’re wired up to be able to detect variations in dominance hierarchy status is because that structure is constant across all times in all places, and it’s built right into our nervous systems. The fact that we share the ability to assess our dominance hierarchy position with crustaceans, which have a very simple nervous system, and the fact that the same pharmacological substances work on crustaceans that work on us for the same reasons, at least with regards to dominance hierarchy indicates that the dominance hierarchy counter that you have functioning at the very base of your brain, so to speak, is an unbelievably potent mechanism, and you’re using it all the time.

One example is you might ask yourself why people are so obsessed with fashion and why fashions have to change every year. Part of the reason for that is that by attending to fashion and keeping up, or even being on the avant-garde, you show that you’re ahead of the curve. The curve is always changing; it’s like a technological curve. You have to stay ahead of literally, it isn’t so much that you master the technology; it’s that you stay ahead of the technology and master the new, and that indicates that you’re conscious and alive and aware and capable of competing. That’s one of the things that makes you more attractive at, least in principle, as a mate, or at least more competitive with the other creatures with whom you’re competing for the attention of potential mates.

That’s just another indication of exactly how possessed you are by the operation of these deep-seated biological systems. We know, for example, that there’s very little difference between severe clinical depression and very severe dominance defeat. It’s the same biological process fundamentally. What happens often with people who are clinically depressed is that their self-assessed dominance is much lower than their actual competence, and it’s actually the gap between their competence and their self-worth assessment that constitutes the pathology.

You have someone—when I assess people for depression, I say, “Well, look, you know, do you have a job? Is it a good job? Do you have family? Do you have an intimate partner? Do you have interests in various things in your life outside of your work? Do you have the sort of education that you want? How’s your physical health? Do you have a drug and alcohol problem?” If the answer to all those is the proper answer, and they still feel really terrible, then you might think, “Oh, well that person’s suffering from clinical depression because their self-assessed dominant status is not in keeping with their actual social status.”

You know, as opposed to people who come in, and you ask them the same questions, and it’s like, “Their family’s completely insane; they’re alienated from them. They had a brain injury when they were four because their father hit them against a wall. They’ve got no education at all; they’ve got an alcohol problem; they’ve been unemployed for seven years and they have a personality disorder.” It’s like, well, they feel terrible, but they’re not depressed; they just have terrible lives.

It’s not like you’re not going to suffer if you have a terrible life, but if I give someone like that an antidepressant or suggest that they take one, you know, it might stop them from cutting their wrists, but the probability that it’s really going to improve their situation is relatively low because, like, what the hell are you going to do with that? It’s just too overwhelming a problem to even address.

It looks like the dominance hierarchy as such seems to be represented by masculine symbols. It’s something to keep in mind when you watch movies because symbols, especially those associated with the father, like the king, for example, are representations of the dominant structure. So, that’s one fundamental symbol.

Let’s look at another. This is a rather complicated shift in argumentation.

Perhaps you can accept for a minute the association between the dominance hierarchy and culture. You see how those are the same thing, or at least that they’re similar. Our culture is actually made up of a variety of overlapping dominance hierarchies, right? Because different professions and different specialties have their own dominance hierarchies, and they’re sort of integrated into a meta hierarchy. But regardless, culture is a dominance hierarchy—a complex dominance hierarchy.

Then you might ask yourself, well, what exactly makes up the culture? What is it that we’re talking about when we’re talking about culture and the dominance hierarchy? That leads into questions like, what exactly constitutes a law? We have laws, and you might think, well, what does it mean that there’s a law?

We can look at the obvious things. There’s a rule of some sort that’s been written down; that’s one. There’s a rule that’s been written down that if you transgress against, you’ll be tracked down and punished; that’s another example of a law. Another example is, well, it’s a custom. Most of the things that we have as laws are customs that people have adopted, at least in principle, to regulate our interaction so that the probability of mutual cooperation is high and the probability of mutual aggression is low.

You might say, well, why do we all go forward on a green light? That’s arbitrary. Why is that law? The answer is, well, because everybody decided that that would be a law, and then they decided they’d act it out. It’s a custom.

If you think about a law as a set of customs, then you start to see the law as the codified version of a behavioral contract, right? There are ways that we have all agreed to act, or even if we haven’t agreed to act that way, we’ve agreed that there should be a structure that describes how you should act. That’s what culture is, you know, unless you’re a nihilist or an anarchist or a criminal or a terrorist or something like that.

You basically accept the fact that this structure has to exist, and then you try to position yourself within it. You can think that the culture and the dominance hierarchy are two things at the same time, or maybe even three things. One is it’s the way you act. When you say that you’re a citizen of a given country, what that essentially means is that you imitate the body of laws that that country has erected. You’re a behavioral manifestation of those rules, roughly speaking.

Or, conversely, you could say the law is a codified representation of the way everybody in the culture is behaving. There’s a, like, a dyadic interaction, right? The law and the culture is actually a pattern of behaviors and expectations around those behaviors that everyone shares. You could also say it’s the cumulative knowledge that the culture shares.

The culture as a whole has a body of knowledge, some of which is objective and some of which is moral and behavioral. You, as a fragment of that, also have that, at least in fragmentary form, right? You’re a partial representation of the entire culture. That would be something similar to Freud’s idea of the superego, right? Because for Freud, there was an id and an ego and a superego, and the id was basically, you know, biology and its ability to control you, and the ego was poor little you, and the superego was the terrible force of culture crushing the little ego between the terrible force of biology and itself.

The superego, in some sense, is culture, and that’s represented by masculinity now, or by the father figure, most generally speaking. You could also imagine the culture as the collection of all knowledge. Now, that’s fine, but then you have to think about what knowledge is, and that’s a tough thing to get a handle on because there are different definitions of knowledge.

In many technical situations in our culture, we privilege factual knowledge, and we think of that as knowledge. For example, if you’re going to be an engineer or a physicist, someone who’s really dealing with things, there are certain rules that apply to the operation of things, and you have to know what those are, and those don’t necessarily have much to do with how you behave. If you’re an engineer and you go to work, you work with things, and you have to know how the things work.

You also have to be part of a culture because if you’re not, you’re going to not get along with the rest of the engineers, and they’re going to toss you out. You have to have both forms of knowledge, but we’re not interested in the moment precisely about the factual knowledge.

We’re more interested in the knowledge that makes you acceptable to other human beings and that enables you, while you’re operating in your own life, to negotiate the social structure in such a way that you can be successful. Successful would mean, well, you get to live. That would be one definition.

There’s some probability that you might find an intimate partner; that’s another element of success. You’re not suffering to the point where your own existence is intolerable, and you’re going to survive for some prolonged period of time with some amount of security. That’s what you’re trying to do, and I would say to the degree that you’re well-inculturated, which is that you’re a good representation of your culture’s knowledge, insofar as it’s relevant behaviorally, then you’re much more likely to be successful.

We’re going to equate that form of knowledge with the possibility of succeeding. You could call it knowledge. You could call it emotional intelligence, although I never would call it that because there’s actually no such thing. It’s more knowledge about how to act, you know, and it’s very, very important that knowledge.

Just think about what you’re all doing in this class, right? Most of you don’t know each other. There are maybe 200 people in this class; three of you are pretty damn crazy, really. Probably about ten of you are, like, on the edge. But there you all are sitting there peacefully, right? You’re following a rule code, and you’re really following it.

First of all, you’re all sitting in your own chair. You’re not sitting on the lap of someone next to you, right? That makes you laugh because what would happen if someone did that? What would happen? You know, a little flurry would break out because all of a sudden, a primate is doing something that a primate’s not supposed to do, and that opens up an area of the unexpected and the crazy, right?

God only knows what’s going to happen when a little spot opens up where the unexpected and crazy emerge. We don’t like those spots, and you can see this in your own behavior. For example, if you’re walking down the street and you happen to come across someone who’s self-evidently homeless, and they’re wandering down the street and they’re gesturing and talking to themselves, there are a bunch of things you’re going to do.

The first thing is you’re going to glance and look away, and then you’re going to make a relatively wide berth around the person, and you’re going to try not to make eye contact, generally speaking. The reason for that—think about that—the reason for that is the space that that person inhabits is undetermined by cultural agreement. You don’t know what that person will do, and all you do is walk around that space because God only knows what might happen if you don’t.

Probably nothing because the person is preoccupied by whatever demons happen to be chasing them, but you’re not going to take that chance. You all come in here, and I mean, look, you’re pretty much all dressed the same, you know, roughly speaking—acceptable variation, but nothing outlandish.

So, you get to be individual but not peculiar. Let’s see, so far it looks okay, right? You know where you’re supposed to sit. I bet you how many of you sat in the same seat you sat in the first day? Yeah, so a good proportion of you. How many didn’t? Okay, well, you will soon because you’ll have established your little territory, you know, and it will be familiar to you, and you’ll gravitate towards it.

You’ll be happy about that because you’ll start to become familiarized with the people in your immediate vicinity, and they didn’t kill you the first time, so they might not kill you the second time, right? You’re all participating in a kind of collective drama, right? So what’s the nature of this room? What does it look like? What’s it called?

It’s a lecture theater, right? Why? Because there’s a drama going on, right? You’re the audience, and I’m hypothetically supposed to be providing the drama. We all know that because that’s how the room is set up.

When you come in here, you obey the room; you do what it tells you. There are chairs, and you sit in them. When I’m talking, generally speaking, you don’t. Maybe you want to, hopefully, if I’m speaking properly, then you don’t care because you’re happy to listen. The rule is you’re supposed to look at me and listen, and you’re all following that rule.

You know, all of that is because you’re very much acculturated, and you’re sane enough to follow the damn rules. One of the things you might think about this—and this is where I thought the psychoanalysts kind of went astray—is that the psychoanalysts tended to think that you were sane if your interior psychological structures were integrated and well put together, so your psyche was sort of something inside your head, roughly speaking, and sanity was something that was an individual issue.

But I think another way of looking at that, and it’s a more powerful way of looking at it, I think, is that you’re hardly self-regulatory at all. All you have to do is behave well enough so other people can stand being around you, and you can outsource the problem of your own sanity. As soon as you get a little weird if you have people around you, they’ll just tell you.

You don’t have to remember how not to be weird; you just have to pay enough attention to other people around you so that when they indicate by not listening to you or by not laughing at your jokes or by raising an eyebrow or by saying something smart about what you just did that you stop and reconsider and go on in your sane manner.

That’s also why people who are tremendously isolated often, you know, there’s a loop there—they’re a little queer to begin with, so to speak, because there’s something wrong with their ability to behave. Then they get isolated, and things just go seriously astray as a consequence of that. So, anyways, the point I’m trying to make is that a lot of your knowledge is actually knowledge about how to behave, right?

That’s the sort of knowledge that’s really critical for psychological stability. It’s not related in any real sense to the world, to the knowledge you have about the structure of the objective world. You kind of know that because animals are perfectly capable of surviving, even complex animals like chimpanzees. What they don’t know is a damn thing about the objective world, right?

Their primary reality is social.

One domain of symbolic representation is the dominance hierarchy and culture. I said that was associated with the paternal, and there are reasons for that. Now here’s another thing that needs to be conceptualized: when you’re walking down the street and you make a detour around the person who happens to be talking to themselves, where are they? Because wherever they are, that’s not the same place you are.

If it was the same place, you wouldn’t have any trouble walking right by them. Wherever they are, that’s somewhere seriously different. Now, it turns out that we also have the capacity to represent that, and I would say an easy way to think about that is that we have—there are two domains that are characteristic of experience, and one domain is the domain of the known.

The domain of the known is where, when you act in a certain way, what you want to happen happens, got it? The reason that’s the known is because if you act in a certain way and you get what you want, that means that you know what you’re doing; it’s actually the definition of knowing what you’re doing.

That’s a different definition than “I know a fact about the objective world.” If you tell someone a joke, or you tell a group of people a joke, and they laugh, and maybe they want another joke, it’s like, “Good for you; you know what you’re doing.” But if you tell them a joke and they sort of, you know, look uneasy and glance at each other, well, you know, it’s time to rethink your sense of humor.

What you just learned is that there’s some mismatch between the manner in which you configure social reality and the social reality itself. Now, imagine what happens if you do tell a joke or maybe a couple of jokes, and they flop badly. How do you feel when that happens? If you have any sense, how do you feel?

Embarrassed? Yes, yes. So maybe you turn red for example. What might happen if you feel embarrassed? What would you do?

Tell as many jokes. Well, hopefully, right? That’s right. You’d reevaluate your knowledge, and you might think, “Well, what the hell is wrong with me?” Or you might think, “What the hell’s wrong with them?” Which I would say is not a good starting point.

But seriously, though, you know, because you have to watch that because if it’s ten people in you, maybe you’re right. Maybe you are funny. But if all ten of them think you’re not, well, either you’re not funny, or you’re telling your jokes to the wrong people, right?

And sometimes, it is the case that it’s everyone else that’s got the problem. But that’s definitely not the first hypothesis that you might want to generate. Okay, so there’s a place that exists that manifests itself when things that you don’t want or expect happen, and I would consider that unknown.

The unknown is a complicated place because it’s a place where unexpected things happen, and that’s also symbolically represented, and that’s generally symbolically represented by feminine figures. The reasons for that are extraordinarily complicated, and it’s going to take a very long time to explain it.

Partly, it’s because the masculine as a symbolic realm is already used up; that’s the dominance hierarchy. Because we’re basically social cognitive organisms, we’re going to use representations that are basically human in order to start representing things that aren’t precisely human because we have to start somewhere. We have to start with our basic primate cognitive system.

It’s not like chimpanzees have culture, you know. They have dominance hierarchies and troops; we have dominance hierarchies and troops and culture, and we have to represent that in some way. The way we represent it is by using the same systems that we were representing the simple structures with, but generalizing with them to encompass broader phenomena.

Things that are permanent across time: things you know, or the fact that there are things that you don’t know. Or the fact that there are things that you don’t know that’s permanent, and then there’s one other thing across time that’s permanent—you.

The fact that there’s an “I” in the equation, right? So, you think, “Well, what are people’s experiential fields fundamentally composed of?” Places you’re secure in, and that you understand. That’s your territory, and your territory is a very complex thing. It might even be an ideological territory.

Your territory: things that you don’t understand—that’s not your territory; that’s unexplored territory, and you don’t know what the hell is going on there. That’s the unknown. The last common element is you. So, basic symbolic structures tend to represent those elements of reality: the known, the unknown, and the thing that mediates between them.

The thing that mediates between them is you or, more precisely, the thing that mediates between them is your individual consciousness. It’s like mediating between chaos and order.

If you look up at the screen there, look at the Christian image on the left; that’s called the open Virgin. There were quite a few statues of this sort that were created in medieval Europe in the 13th and 14th century. I want to sort of tell you what that sculpture means using the analytic schema that I just laid out for you so that you can get a sense of how this symbolic representation works.

This is a strange representation from a Christian perspective because, well, the representation is the Virgin Mary, right? That’s the superordinate figure, the female. Inside that is God the Father, and inside that is Christ. The reason it’s a strange Christian representation is that it’s rare to see Mary represented as a figure that’s superordinate to God.

We’ll just leave that aside for now. I think part of the reason that that happens for these sculptures is because they were trying to express the relationship between these three fundamental elements in a way that was slightly different than the canonical Christian representation.

Here’s how to read it: well, the outside—that’s the unknown. That’s the mother of all things. You might say, “Well, why is the unknown the mother of all things?” Well, where does new information come from? New information comes from what you don’t know. You already know what you know. Everything new comes from what you don’t know.

What you don’t know is terrifying, certainly, because God only knows what’s going to happen when you encounter it. But it’s also unbelievably potentially productive. In fact, you might think of it as potential. The unknown is potential itself, and so you need to know how to deal with potential because potential manifests itself in all sorts of places that you wouldn’t necessarily—that technically—you wouldn’t expect, so almost by definition.

You have the unknown on the very outside. Inside that, you have culture. That’s like, and so that’s like nature and culture as well; it’s like unknown territory and known territory. Then inside the culture, holding you up, so to speak, is the individual. You might say, “Well, why in this representation is the individual crucified?” The answer to that is quite straightforward: life is mostly suffering.

There’s more to it, though than that. The other element, too—and this is part of the complex representational system that underlies the symbolic representation of the individual—is the individual is also something that can die and be reborn. That symbolic representation already showed you in the figure of Jonah, right? Because the idea was there that some terrible thing swallowed this creature up, pulled it down into the depths, and then let it reemerge.

I would say that’s happened to you people many times already, even though you probably don’t know it. So, think back on your experience. Let’s lay out a couple of things that everybody knows about. Someone close to you died; someone close to you got a serious illness; you got a serious illness; you were completely heartbroken because a relationship failed catastrophically; you were betrayed by a friend.

Well, I’m sure that for most of you, at least—well, let’s find out—how many people in this room have had at least one of those things happen to them? Right? Is there anybody in here who’s gotten off free from that so far? Oh, well, that’s good! That’s amazing. But you can see how unbelievably rare that is.

I’m sure you must have had some other terrible thing happen to you with any luck. So, okay, you perfectly well understand what those experiences are like. So then the question is, where do you go when an experience like that occurs? You might think, “Well, what do you mean, where do you go? You’re in the same place.”

I would say to you, “Well, no, it depends pretty much on exactly what you mean by place.” You know, places are times, too. You can be one person at one moment in the same place and a completely different person in the next moment in the same place, and that means you’re really not in the same place at all.

When something comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath you and you fall, what you fall into is the unknown and a completely different place. That’s the underworld of classical mythology and it’s also the unconscious. Part of the reason that it’s the unconscious—it’s so complicated—when the rug is pulled out from underneath you and you’re somewhere you don’t want to be and didn’t expect and didn’t like, what starts to structure how you respond is the fundamental biological systems that make up the substratum of your psyche.

For example, the first thing that might occur is that you experience it as a terrible shock, and that’s a physiological response. Then, maybe right afterwards you’re angry, or you’re afraid, or you’re confused, or you’re depressed; you know, it’s another emotional response.

Then you start to imagine alternative scenarios or reasons why this thing might have occurred. There’s a whole set of processes that are automatically undertaken when you encounter something that’s outside the realm of your expectation and your desire. If you understand that, you see, if you understand that—and this is why I’ve told you all these complicated things today—if you understand that that’s a different place, and that you cycle through that place and then back up to normal reality and through that place and then back up to normal reality multiple times throughout your life, you can see that, one, it’s inevitable that the individual is something that suffers; two, the individual is something that can suffer and then reconstitute itself as a consequence of that suffering.

It doesn’t necessarily happen, you know. Now and then, something can come along and take you off at the knees and just never get back up. But the general human experience is that you learn as a consequence of your failures, and the reason for that is that the place that you go when you fail has a tremendous amount of information in it.

So, for example, it might be that if you were betrayed in a relationship that you’re just too damn naive, and there are a lot of things that you should have paid attention to in the world and maybe even within the person—the person you were attracted to with regards to their character or your own character—that you should have known more about. If you would have known more about it, well, that would have been a particular hole you wouldn’t have stepped in, you know.

The appropriate reaction to a catastrophic failure—and this isn’t always possible—is to react as you’re going to react, which is usually with shock and dismay, and then to learn from the experience and to gather whatever information there is in the failure so that you can extract out that information and rebuild yourself out of it and restructure your conception of the world so it’s richer and more dynamic.

Let me give you just an example of that: remember the Hobbit, right? I don’t know; we spent a couple of hundred million dollars on that movie, and it was written in the 1960s, but it was based on very, very old stories, including some of the North sagas.

Remember the Hobbit at the beginning? I think we established that that was Bilbo, right? So he lives in this little area called the Shire that’s really protected, and he’s kind of a little guy; all the people in the Shire are kind of naive. It turns out, in The Lord of the Rings, that they’re actually protected. There are these people called Striders that walk around the border who happen to be the sons of ancient kings who keep all the bad guys away, and the bloody Hobbits don’t even know it.

They’re even kind of contemptuous of the Striders, but they’re keeping these hobbits so that they can be naive and self-satisfied and somewhat ignorant and, you know, a bit on the arrogant side without even knowing that they’re being protected.

Okay, well that’s you. That’s why you were hooked into the story right off the bat. Then they extract out one guy from this whole scenario who’s, you know, got a little bit more going for him than the typical Hobbit, and he wants to go outside of this paradise, so to speak, to encounter the actual world.

So interesting, because what’s his role? What do they hire him as? A thief. Yeah, you think, “Geez, this is pretty weird. This guy’s going on this developmental quest, you know; he’s going to turn into a hero.” What does he start by doing? He starts by becoming a criminal, right?

But that seems to be part of the story. It’s actually part of his heroic transformation. One of the things Jung said about heroic transformations was that the first thing that happens when you put yourself outside your zone of comfort, if you do that voluntarily, is that you encounter your shadow, which is the part of you that is fundamentally, in some sense, antisocial and criminal.

You then extract from that element of yourself those personality attributes you need to survive when you’re outside where everything is comfortable and predictable. Then what happens with Bilbo? Well, he encounters a dragon, right? That’s the dragon we talked about already. That’s the thing that swallows you up when you don’t know where you are, and he gets a treasure as a consequence of that.

You see, what the story means is that if you go outside your zone of comfort, if you go outside of what you understand, and you do that voluntarily, and you develop the skills that you’ve rejected that are necessary for your proper survival as an integrated human being, you can encounter the thing that most frightens you, and you can extract something of value as a consequence, and that’s the human story.

That’s the fundamental story of mankind because we’re always the thing that goes outside of what we understand to confront what we don’t understand that frightens us so that we can get whatever that thing has.

That’s part of the symbolic representations that you need to understand in order for us to continue to develop our investigation of phenomena like unconscious symbolism. So that’s that. We’ll see you next Tuesday. [Applause]