2015 Personality Lecture 09: Depth Psychology: Sigmund Freud (Part 02)

As you know, um, Freud believed that a substantial proportion of the symptoms he saw among his clients were of psychological origin, despite the fact that some of them were manifest physically. Uh, these things do happen, by the way. Uh, I had a client who was from Eastern European background, which is relevant in that I believe her upbringing to be more similar to the kind of upbringing that the Victorians that Freud studied were than say more the people in the West.

Um, she had the same thing that her grandmother had, which was um, psychosomatic epilepsy, and so she expressed what were often sexual conflicts through epileptic seizures. Um, she had an epileptic seizure of this type in my office one day, and you know, she was unsure whether they were real or not. But I've seen people have epileptic seizures, and as a general rule, it's quite upsetting. But she had an epileptic seizure in my office, and one of the things I noted was that it didn't really bother me.

One of the things I've noticed about being a therapist is if someone is manifesting a lot of emotion and it’s not bothering me, then it’s a good hint that there's something wrong—that it's not real. There's something about it that isn't exactly right because it doesn't seem to hook in your AIC systems the same way.

So, um, I had another client—this has actually happened to two of my clients. The first one was attacked by her boyfriend, and uh, she was unbelievably naive. She was so naive you could write a whole book about how naive she was. I'm serious, it was unbelievable. Her parents actually taught her, this is the literal truth, her parents taught her that adults were angels. It's not a good way of preparing your child for the grown-up world.

Anyways, she'd had a fight with her boyfriend, and he attacked her with sexual intent. When we went through this and it was under hypnosis, she described his face. She said he had a look of sheer malevolence, right? She'd never seen that. She was like a 28-year-old woman, she had an undergraduate degree—she was no idiot.

Um, I asked her like how could you reconcile your belief that adults were angels with all the things that you learned about history in your undergraduate degree? And she basically said, well I just put those things in a compartment and didn't pay any attention to them. It's like, yeah, okay. So she saw this guy's face when he was intending harm, and it was actually the look on his face that traumatized her.

It traumatized her so badly that she had severe psychosomatic symptoms severe enough to get her diagnosed as schizophrenic for 5 years—non-stop at night for 4 hours at a time. And the symptoms were that her whole body would shake and she would be unable to sleep. So, I had another client who had the same thing—not the same thing, but a similar thing happened to her in high school where a boy was picking on her continually with malevolent intent.

The thing that really made that memory stick in her face was the look of malevolence on his face. So, so you see, some people are definitely capable of some behavior that is most well-explained, as far as I can tell, in terms that are similar to Freud's—what's repressed: unbearable memories, often sexual and impermissible desires.

How do you defend against things that you don't want to be true? Well, there's repression. Freud really thought that was unconscious; people didn't know they were repressing. So I sent you guys a link, you may have noticed about the Gman studies on married couples. I think their studies are bloody brilliant. You know, and what Gman found—and it's exactly typical—is that the couples who were going to get divorced, when you see them in their natural habitat, they're all nice to each other.

But their psychophysiological systems are just going berserk. They're like prey and predator to each other. You know, and I don't know if that's repression or if it's suppression—these things are very difficult to distinguish because they're not that well defined. But there is a lot of activity beneath the surface, that's for sure.

The problem with being psychophysiologically aroused like that is that the consequence of that over time is physical, right? Because what happens when you're aroused like that is you produce a lot of the stress hormone cortisol, and that activates the general stress response. The general stress response basically robs your future stores of energy and ability to overreact in the present. If you do that long enough, well, you'll damage your brain; that's one of the things that happens, but there are many other things that happen too.

So, denial—people will just say, well that's not so bad, or maybe that's normal. We'll see a lot of that when I show you this movie. Reaction formation, which is like it's overcompensation in some sense. So maybe you really hate your sister, and you buy her a great big Christmas present because you'd like to think that you like her, but really you don't like her at all.

Um, there often sibling rivalry can be unbelievably intense. Um, displacement—this is a good one: my boss yells at me, I yell at my husband, my husband yells at the baby, the baby bites the cat. You know, so it's a cascading chain of emotion. Often I find with people though that if they come home and they're in a bad mood and they're touchy, you know, and you say something to them and you know they fly off the handle, it isn’t exactly so much that they've suppressed or repressed or denied what's happening at work—at least not in any obvious sense, not that day.

Often you have to pry around in the person and talk to them and harass them a bit until they, you know, often till emotion arises. Which is partly why Freud thought about his transformation process as cathartic. Then they figure out they'll cry and say, well I'm really upset, but at my boss. It’s not obvious that the person actually knew that when they came home.

The unconscious issue is quite a difficult one to tear apart. My conclusion has been that when people... that repression isn't really much different than lying, except that the LIE is initially conscious when you first make it. But if you keep habitually lying about something, you develop a little automated circuit that either does the lying or that has the replacement story at hand.

After you know 200 repetitions of the same damn lie, you've built a little machine in your head that handles all that, and at that point it can be unconscious because you don't need to be conscious to make that decision anymore. So if you practice something deceptive long enough, I think it becomes habitual and unconscious. I would recommend that you don't do that unless you want your head full of little pathological monsters that you can't control.

I mean, maybe it’s already like that; that would be a Freudian idea. Identification is another defense mechanism; you're bullied, you want to become the bully. Rationalization—that's when you don't actually... this is the thing that people who are highly intelligent are really good at. You know, they've got a problem and they come up with some perfectly coherent and reasonable explanation for the problem or the misbehavior that has absolutely nothing to do with what's actually going on.

And if you marry someone, for example, who's more introverted than you or less verbally fluent, this is something to really watch for. Because just because you could win an argument with someone doesn't mean you're right. And if you're verbally fluent and extroverted, you can often tie people up in knots. But I would say beware of that because just because the person you're arguing with can't formulate their ideas as fast as you and just because they may not be able to hold their own in an argument with you, that does not mean they don’t know what they see.

If you have any intelligence and you're married to someone like that, you actually try to coax what they think out of them and help them articulate it and formulate it because there's always the possibility that you're doing something underhanded and sneaky and dangerous in the medium to long term. And it might be better for both of you if you figured it out.

Intellectualization—well if you’ve ever watched a Woody Allen movie, you know what that is. Um, Woody Allen should have had Yan Psychotherapy, not Freudian Psychotherapy, because he's a creative person. And one of the things I've noticed is that I have clients who are very creative and other clients who aren't as creative. And the ones who are creative spontaneously manifest processes in their dreams that are most easily interpreted in Jungian form.

Doesn't seem to be the case for people who aren't creative, though. And if I talk to them about mythological or symbolic ideas, it doesn't click for them, so what we usually do is things that are much more practical—much more like behavior therapy.

Projection is a good one: I'm not irritated, you’re irritating. You know, and it’s a toss-up often because you know you might think, well, no one can irritate you without your permission. It's like, believe me, if you think that, you’ve not been around some world-class irritating people, because there are certainly people, borderline personalities are like that, who I don't care if you're a saint. Man, sooner or later you're going to get irritated because that's actually the goal of their behavior in large part.

So Freud's fundamental theory was that unconscious ideas were at the core of many psychological conflicts, like incomprehensible distress or psychosomatic symptoms. The psychosomatic symptom is when your body attempts to represent something that you're repressing. Now I think there's two ways of looking at that because I don't actually think... I don't always think that's what happens.

I think sometimes the reaction to the situation in question is actually somatic to begin with, and then if it's articulated and worked out, the body can, it’s like the memory local shifts or the representation area shifts. So for example, I had a client—she had a wonderful time; she got fired from her job, and they bundled her into her car, and it was sudden; she didn't see it coming.

Then on the way home her car was hit by another car. So like that was a perfect way to be traumatized because she was already really upset and on edge obviously, and then this car hit her at about 50 miles an hour, and it hurt her quite badly. And she had like minimal brain injury, which is a really rough one because it has nonspecific symptoms.

And like she’d come to therapy and I'd talk to her—her ideas were quite fragmented, so it took us quite a long time to kind of weave a coherent story together. But she'd sit there like this, you know, and one of the things that I found after a while when I was working with her was that I was really uncomfortable watching her, and it was a discomfort that seemed to center about here —it was a physiological response, probably a mirroring response.

One day I said to her, it was like a spontaneous impulse, I said, "Come over," we’d worked together for a long time by this time, I said, "Look, come over here, um, lean on the desk." So I had her lean on the desk, and then I sort of pounded on her shoulders down her spine, and she started to cry. And she cried for like 45 minutes, and then that loosened up a shoulder.

Then we... another thing we did was I had her—she said she couldn't lift her arm, so we were doing basically exposure. I said, "Okay, lift your arm and then let it go. Lift your arm another inch and let it go. Lift your arm another inch and let it go." And soon we had her arm up like this. She hadn't moved her arm above her head in like five years because she was in this protective crouch, it's like a response.

And I think that if you're traumatized, often what happens is your body throws itself into a state of hyper-preparation, and unless you can, unless you can bring the meaning of the traumatic event up and articulate it and throw away what it isn’t— you know, like because when she got hit by the car and lost her job, part of her idea was, "Well, my life is over now." You know, because you can understand why someone would think that.

So I would say, "Well, yes, that’s understandable, but it's too global and vague a formulation to be helpful. But if your life is over and there's nothing you can do, this is probably the right thing to do." You know, and so sometimes it's not so much that the somatic symptoms are a consequence of repression and then symbolic representation; it’s that the actual response to the event starts out physiological, and it never gets any farther than that.

So partly what you're doing is... I think it’s like a permanent manifestation of the stress response. So he thought of behavioral anomalies in this way and hallucinations and delusions. Like a lot of this stuff is dead on, as far as I'm concerned.

Like you see this a lot with people that you have an intimate relationship with, you know, like there’s something off about what they're doing. Well, for example, in the Gman study, that’s a good example. You know how Gman said, um, the successful couples responded to each other's bids, right?

So if you're in the house and your wife says, “Oh look, there’s a cardinal in the backyard and it's really pretty,” you know what that means is maybe you could come over here and look at this bird with me, and you know that would help me understand that you like me and are interested in what I'm doing. You know, and so you can say in Gman terms, you can just say, "I don't want to look at your stupid bird." That's not a great response.

Or you can say, "Really?" Okay, you put down your newspaper, whatever it is, and look like you're really perturbed, and then you walk over there. No, that's a good response too because then you can also destroy her pleasure in looking at the bird, so without really looking like a son of a gun.

So that's a good one; or you can just sort of sigh, I love that one, which means, "Oh, you're annoying. I'm so put upon. I really... you're always asking me to do stupid things, and I'm so generous and giving, and here you are exploiting me again." And then you go over and you look at the bird, and you know, maybe smile with your mouth but not your eyes, and that’s real nice.

And then the other one is, well you go over there like a civilized human being, like interacting with someone that you’d actually like to get along with for the next 30 years. But the things in all those other three categories, those are—there's like just in that sigh, there's a whole bloody mess of snakes underneath it, you know?

And if you watch someone who does that and you go after them, you know if you decide you're going to solve this, you have to dig down into that sigh—like God only knows how deep it might be a decade old, you know? They're harboring some bloody resentment that occurred like 15 years ago. Those things are just stacked up like little bombs underneath the surface of this little tiny behavioral action, you know?

Usually, people will just ignore it, which is not a good idea, but because they're conflict avoidant—people are very, very conflict avoidant, and they like to think that well, if everything's just all right right now, it'll stay all right into the future. It's like no, it won’t; it absolutely will not. And if you don’t deal with those little things, then all the monsters that are packed up inside them will eventually eat you, so... but that's a while in the future, so you don’t really have to worry about it.

It's not a very good way of thinking about things. Freud also not noted that people make jokes about things that are often repressed, and that's definitely the case. If you watch a good comedian, especially the ones that are a little bit more on the outrageous side, what they're doing constantly is saying things that people don't want to believe but know are true.

So they'll reveal something that everybody knows, and everybody will laugh because, yeah, we know that, but you're not supposed to say it. And, um, what's his name—the Indian I see from....yeah, yeah, that's the guy! I mean he's always making racial jokes, right? So funny, see; his whole audience is full of it's really, really racially and ethnically mixed, and all he does is pick out people and assault them for their race or ethnic identity, and they're all laughing like, "Oh, it’s so cute that we’re all in here like insulting each other."

But, you know, he’s giving voice to what, to commonly held stereotypes that no one will admit to holding or knowing. And so it's kind of a relief to everyone to have that brought out in the open in some safe place.

So slips of the tongue are also an interesting phenomena. You can watch people very carefully for this because now and then they'll say something that means something other than what they thought it would say, or it means something contrary, or it's a hint into one of these like stacks of monsters that normally they don't want to admit to.

And you have to be sharp to catch these things; you have to pay real attention. You can also see the same thing with micro-expressions, often with people. That's given rise to this whole new politically correct movement about suppressing microaggressions, which is like one of the most pathological things I've ever heard of, you know? Like getting rid of your microaggressive expressions—that does not make you a good person; it just makes you a trickier sort of psychopath.

So Freud also was extremely interested in dreams, and his theory was that a dream was a wish fulfillment. And like I really don’t think that's a good theory. I think that sometimes some dreams have a wish-like element, although I should say, even though I’m not very fond of the wish fulfillment theory, I don’t think it's comprehensive enough. His—the other things he had to say about dreams were absolutely brilliant.

So his book—um, if you want to read one book by Freud, I would say the book on dreams is the best. Unfortunately, at the moment I can't remember what it's called. The Interpretation of Dreams, right? It's a very thick book, and you know you can't boil down Freud's theory of dreams—it's a whole book—into one phrase, "wish fulfillment."

You know he was way smarter than that, and so you—Freud's writing is sort of like fiction; you can't condense it, you have to read it. So, you know, sometimes it seems obvious—like if the dream is of a sexual nature you can easily see, well, that might be a wish fulfillment or something like that.

And hungry people will dream about food, and so it's not the case that—and lonely people will dream about social comfort and so forth. So it's not the case precisely that the dream can't have anything to do with wishes. Jung's idea, which I think is a better idea and I think it's more grounded in how we understand dreams in the modern world, was that the dream was compensatory.

So that if you're, if you had a particularly rigid viewpoint of the world and that rigid viewpoint was actually impeding your progress forward, that the dream would spin up counter propositional fantasies in an attempt to update the, the stiffening and the rigidity of the more explicit belief system.

And, um, I think there's some good evidence for that in modern studies of dreaming. It seems—it's certainly the case that dreams do seem to update your memory, and, uh, I think partly what the dreams are doing too—and this is maybe where some of the symbolic content comes from—is there's this... you know it's not obvious how you should structure a category, right?

Because categories are very fluid. You know, you might think well all men is a good category, you know? And then you might think well all white men and all non-white men is a good category depending on what you're discussing and so on. You know the contents of your categories often depend on what you want to do with the category.

So it's not obvious what should be in the box and what shouldn't be. And partly what the dream is doing too is by loosening up the categorical structure, you know, because things can fluidly change and transform in dreams. It allows you to experiment with recategorization while you're asleep without having to suffer the consequences of that in the waking world because you're paralyzed, right?

So I think it's more accurate to think of the dream as an as part of the process by which new knowledge becomes eventually articulated— and that's more of a Jungian perspective. So, you start out not knowing anything about it, and then maybe you can code it onto your behavior; that would be something P would suggest.

And then after it's coded onto behavior, maybe you can start expressing it in image—especially in dynamic images. And so that would be something like fiction, and so you can think of dreams as a kind of fiction. And then once you've got the thing laid out in fiction, especially if it's kind of coherent, then it's not a huge leap from that to having an articulated model.

And I think a lot of what you're doing when you do dream interpretation in psychotherapy is you're doing the same thing that you would do if you were interpreting literature. Um, and you know you think, well, is it worthwhile thinking about literature? It's like, well, you know it's worthwhile reading it. Fine. Is it worthwhile thinking about what you're reading? It's a different process; it’s like arguably...

Well, so the dream has a function and it does whatever dreams do, and then perhaps there's also some utility in attending to the dream consciously and trying to elaborate upon its contents. And Freud would do that with free association—it works. It really works. It's quite fun if you have someone who's a good dreamer, you know?

You say, "Okay." The way I do it is they tell me the dream, they read it, and I listen to it, and I let my imagination work on it so it kind of builds up an associational net. And then I have them start from the beginning again, and whenever they come to a theme or an object or something like that that's identifiable, then I ask them what that reminds them of.

And so to me what we're doing is fleshing out the associational network, and that's a Freudian idea. And then if you walk through the whole dream— like, and then, you know, people will associate, and then that will remind them of something, and then maybe they'll remember why a specific date is in the dream or something like that.

And so it’s like the dream is putting together ideas that have a vague cloud around them and it’s trying to sequence and organize them, and you seem to be able to facilitate that process with conscious reflection. So, and for some people it's extremely useful—like, I mean, U one of the things Jung said which I really liked was that if you're stuck in a problem and you can't solve it, you have no idea how to solve a terrible conflict of some sort, you have to look where you don't know.

And he thought, well, one of the places that you don't know is in your dreams, and you think, well, dreams are doing something. And there's good evidence that part of what dreams are doing is dealing with novel information, you know? They're trying to conceptualize novel information. And so that's a good place to look for potential solutions because you can also think of the dream as part of a hypothesis-generating mechanism.

That would also be the creative imagination. So I think often the reason—I think maybe the reason that sometimes people remember dreams that are extremely emotional and they feel compelled to tell them is perhaps is because the people who did that—I think about it from an evolutionary perspective— the people who did that and exposed the fantasy to the group were more likely to gather information about what it meant and possibly more likely to survive.

And so there seems to be a trigger level, you know, above which the dream is specifically particularly powerful—sufficiently emotionally impactful so that you actually remember it when you wake up. And Jung would often consider those big dreams, you know, especially if they had archetypal content, and those would also sometimes be dreams that had relevance beyond the relevance to the specific individual.

So they might be dreams that are working really hard on a problem that's collective. So, and you know, you think well where do new ideas come from? You know, well they just appear in my head; it's like that’s not a very good theory. You know, the idea has a birthplace; the birthplace is in the unknown, and then there's a tremendous amount of elaboration of that information before it ever gets up to where it pops into your head as an articulated statement.

You know, that's not a—that's not an instantaneous magical transformation. Or maybe you can think it is, but it's, you know, it's not a very useful theory. And the idea that there are multiple stages of processing of information, each with their own nature, is much more in keeping with the way that modern people look at the brain—which is as a, um, organ that's evolved that has very, very archaic elements, like massively archaic—like the ones I told you about that you share with lobsters.

And then there's all sorts of weird systems built on top of that that are basically there for biological purposes, and you know, then there's a cortical cap that sort of elaborates, and all those things are working together to extract out information that you can use for living. It's certainly not mechanical; it's not exactly computational. It's a multi-stage process, and dreams and imagination are involved, at least at the hypothesis stage.

So you can think of dreams as a hypothesis in some sense. But although I don't think, I don't think it's reasonable to say that dreams do one thing any more than it is reasonable to say that thinking does one thing. But the compensatory idea is a good one, and you can kind of think of the wish fulfillment idea as a subset of that.

So the dream is also Freud says a process of regression that manifests itself simultaneously in three fashions: as topical regression from the conscious to the unconscious, as temporal regression from the present time to childhood. Sometimes you see this with people who've had repetitive nightmares.

One thing I can tell you—you can try this—if you have a repetitive nightmare, usually it presents the same thematic problem over and over, like maybe you're being chased by a monster. When you turn around, um, maybe your hands are tied or something like that, you know, which—and if you told me about that I'd think, well who or what is tying your hands, right? That would be the first question.

But one of the things you can do to make that nightmare go away is to sit down, reimagine the nightmare, and fix the ending. Now you have to come up with a reasonable ending. So for example, I had a client who was afraid—she had a cabin, it was a very interesting case—she had a mouse phobia and she was afraid mice would run up her leg. That was the specific content of the phobia.

And she had a cabin, and she didn't like to go to the cabin for two reasons. One was a mouse might run up her leg, and the second was she was up there alone, and she was afraid that she would get attacked and sexually assaulted. So it doesn't take much of a Freudian genius to figure out the connection between those two things.

But one of the things we did was first of all talk it through as if it was a reasonable fear. It's like, well you are up there alone; maybe you could have an alarm system and some good locks. It’s like, you know, so your fear might be predicated on some realistic appraisal, you know which you’re repressing; you're not dealing with it; it is potentially dangerous.

Fix that, get a dog, you know? So we did all that and simultaneously treated her mouse phobia through behavioral exposure. And then she was having these dreams of these guys breaking in and raping her, and so we had her walk through—I think she bought a bat and put it by her bed, which was something I suggested—and then we walked her through. I walked her through the dream and we changed the ending.

So what she did was the guy climbed in the window, and she picked up the bat and she smacked him one, and then she sprayed him with oven cleaner, which is like a really nasty thing to do. Then she tied him up in a chair, and she was like she was dancing around in the office thinking that's, you know, that's a hero myth essentially, right? We changed—we transformed the dream from victim to hero essentially, and that was the end of her nightmares.

And that happens more often than you might think because the dream is presenting you with a problem, right? It's like a threat detection mechanism. It says, well, here's a threat, maybe it's expressing it in symbolic terms or maybe it's using a general category like monster. It's like are monsters chasing you? Well, it depends on what you mean by monsters, but functionally, yes, they are.

You might think, well, conceptualizing them as monsters isn't exactly accurate; it's like well, it's not exactly clear that it's not accurate. So I think a monster is a monster is like a representation of the class of all things that could chase you and devour you, and there's lots of those that are symbolic and articulate, like if you're arguing with someone who can defeat you.

Or, you know, there are certainly predators on the internet that are waiting for you at pretty much any moment to slip up, and like the idea that the world is full of monstrous embodied forces that have you as target for prey, it's like yes, that's right; obviously, that's right.

So Freud's theory of dreams was essentially that there was a latent content in the dream, which is what the dream really meant, and then the layers of weird transformation of the idea. He thought about displacement where one thing would stand for another, or condensation where a lot of events would be rammed together in a very short sequence or symbolization.

So like the mouse in my client‘s phobia would be a good example of symbolization of fear of sexual penetration, and dramatization—he thought of those as all ways that the dream was hiding the latent content from the dreamer in order to protect sleep. Whereas Jung—and Freud really argued about this and it's part of what broke them apart—Jung said, no, no, no, that might be right in some cases, but generally what the dream is doing, it's just a fact of nature.

The dream is trying to think something up, and so it might be concentrating on something that you refuse to admit to and repress, but sometimes it's just like out there with free play at fantasy trying to generally orient you in the world. So he thought about it—and Jung also thought—it's like Jung was an archaeologist of the ID in some sense.

You know, he thought of the ID as a much more creative place in some sense than Freud did and as the place where new ideas and new adaptive patterns were born. So he believed that the dream was generally fairly illogical and that one of the things you did when you recounted the dream, no matter how accurately you tried to recount it, was to transform it into more of a narrative form than it actually took as a dream.

And so no doubt that’s true because when you describe an experience, even if it's an experience you have every day, you basically extract out the gist and then describe the experience. And you have to do the same thing with dreams because you can't present the images, so it might—just the act of telling the dream might even be useful in that sense because what you're doing is making whatever that thought is more coherent than it would otherwise be.

So, I want to run through this psychosexual theory very rapidly and then I want to show you some examples of it. So Jung believed that, in some sense, you know you had a primary energy and that that psychic energy—that's what we call energy. You know when you say I'm feeling energetic today, it's not obvious what that means, but Freud regarded that as libidinal.

He thought that there were multiple sources of libido, but the most fundamental source was sexuality. And I think he thought that in part because of the influence of Darwin’s ideas. Because Darwin basically said that the goal of organisms was essentially to procreate, you know? And the sexual urge is extraordinarily strong, and so he thought it was primary.

And you can make a reasonable case that it’s primary, but I think it's too reductionistic because there's lots of drives that people have, and it isn’t obvious that they all coagulate into a single source of energy somewhere in the psyche. If you look at the way the brain is structured actually, the part of the brain that wakes you up is called the reticular activating system, and it's, it's—a—it’s some strands way down in the brain stem that branch out in many, many ways out into the brain like a tree, in some sense.

If you twist your head the wrong way when you have a car accident, sometimes you can shear off those tracts, and then you're in a coma, and there's nothing that can be done about it. But the reticular activating system is really, really old; like, it seems older than all the motivational and emotional systems. And so if there is a libido—which would be whatever it is that the reticular activating system does in order to awaken you from your slumber, say, or to put you on alert when something happens—it looks like it’s older than all the isolated motivational and emotional systems.

So the libido, per se, isn't sexual by all appearances; it’s something that's below sexuality, you know? So, but you know, it's still reasonable to note that sexuality is a powerful driving force. So Freud said it begins its development in infancy. The infant is a sexual being, by which he meant the infant is capable of experiencing sexual pleasure.

So when I should let you know that one of the practices of Victorian nurses with male babies was to masturbate them till satiation so they would sleep. So it's not—it’s not like there's no evidence for sexual pleasure in children— in infants, in particular. Freud thought about that polymorphously perverse, by which he meant that the infant was willing to take pleasure in any activity whatsoever, and babies can have some pretty messy habits without any structuring of that.

And then that got channeled in various ways as the baby developed. So here are his stages: the oral period. Well it's quite interesting that when a baby is born the part of its body that is in fact most mature, most like a mature part in terms of its eventual function, is in fact the mouth and the tongue. And obviously, there's obvious reasons for that because the baby has to be able to latch onto the nipple, you know, right away, and that's actually quite a complicated activity.

It's a complicated social activity, and it requires a fair bit of coordination between the baby and the mother. It's not something automatic, so if the baby didn't come out, um, you know, wired up for certain basics in certain basic ways, it wouldn't be able to get going to begin with. So, it's definitely wired up in an oral manner.

So he thought of the oral character as passive, optimistic, and dependent. Then there's the anal period where Freud thought—that's where the ego met the superego for the first time in some sense, where the child had to renounce primary pleasure. And so that would be the pleasure of defecation fundamentally in favor of a more complex form of behavior.

And that was actually an inhibitory process, and it's certainly the case that parents can get into like year-long wars with kids over toilet training. You know, I've seen some pretty weird examples of that. So I saw one parent who, who was in such a war with, with their three-year-old that that three-year-old would only defecate if the mother put a diaper on them.

So it had perfect control, but it was like there was a war going on. So, and he thought of anal people as orderly, parsimonious, and obstinate. It's kind of interesting too because one of the things that we found recently is that conscientiousness is one of the big five traits, right? You can break it into orderliness and into industriousness, and orderliness predicts conservatism and predicts authoritarianism, and it’s associated with disgust sensitivity.

So I thought, huh, that's pretty interesting, you know? And it’s also the other thing that's really cool about orderliness and disgust sensitivity is that it is associated with disgust associated with anything that would contaminate, and so the idea that that’s associated in some sense with anal thinking is—it’s there’s something about it that's right, you know?

And it's also pretty important to note that the reason that all you people are going to live to be 90 or thereabouts roughly speaking isn’t doctors, it's plumbers. So right, really. So you know, the—life is in itself contaminating, and we have a built-in system that's the disgust system to take care of that problem. And it's clear that that does vary in strength between individual, and it's also clear that the degree to which that, if you have a stronger disgust system, you're much more likely to be conservative in your political beliefs.

So that's pretty cool. It's like, it's not something obvious. You know, the phallic period, 3 to 5, um, that's when Freud believed that children often discovered masturbation, and that's when girls develop penis envy and boys develop castration anxiety, which I said is a small price to pay for the possession of a penis. Yeah, so all right, here's a way of thinking about the Oedipal phase: it's basically hostility and erotic attraction towards the parents.

Now Freud thought about this as a normative part of development, and that's a tough one. It certainly does seem to be the case, and there is some experimental evidence that boys fight more with their fathers and girls fight more with their mothers, so that's kind of interesting. But I think I'm not so sure that the idea that this is normative development is exactly right, and maybe Freud got skewed over a bit because he was always dealing with people who had one form of pathology or another.

Now here's how to develop an Oedipal situation if you want to with your children. Some of you will take this road, so maybe this will help you do it better if that's really what you're into. So the thing to do is make sure that your marriage is quite hostile so that you have a lot of underlying resentment to your partner, and that will encourage you to subtly turn one of your children or more of them against that parent without them really knowing it.

And you can do that by covertly reinforcing them when they do that or ignoring them—that's even better—when they do the opposite. So, you know, maybe your daughter is being nice to your husband, you're already mad at him, so that you make it known to her using one strategy or another that you don’t really approve of that sort of behavior.

So that's a pretty effective way of doing it. Then the next thing to do is, this works really well if you have a young boy and you’re a woman, it's like, you know, you want to develop a lot of hostility towards your husband. So you really don't want to have anything to do with him, and you don't really want him to even touch you, and because of that, you're not even really all that happy about men.

And so then you do two things: you turn to your son because he's kind of harmless, and you make your relationship way closer than it should be with him, and you encourage all sorts of things that are really kind of on the edge of acceptable behavior. And at the same time, you repress and crush any part of him that would develop the kind of masculinity that would enable him to turn into the kind of monster that you think your husband is.

So that's really effective, and people can do that for like 20 years. And the outcome is that I have a lot of business as a therapist because I... I do see this sort of thing, and a lot of what happens in therapy is that it's an interesting thing. People come to see me to solve all sorts of problems, like of a very large number of sorts, but one of the common problems is they cannot get away from their families.

They can't break those initial—doesn't even break them. The family can't negotiate a way to allow the person to manifest the independence that would be necessary for them to have their own life and their own family and their own career. And so they're struggling and they're caught in these often ugly nets, like often unbelievably ugly nets, and they can't get out of them.

And that's what we're going to see right now. So now this character Robert Crumb, he's quite the character. We should turn those lights down. Yeah, that's good. Maybe we can do voiceover on this later, so it doesn't really matter if we have it.

Let’s do that, okay? So Robert Crumb was an underground cartoonist—he's an underground cartoonist—and he lived in Berkeley in the late 60s, and this documentary was made about him and his family. And so I'm going to get you to watch as much of it as we can watch, and maybe I'll show you a bit more in the next class.

I'm not supposed to because we're supposed to do something else, but I might, anyway. Now this film—I love this film for a variety of reasons. First of all, I think it's a work of genius. Second, I've never ever seen any film of any sort that does as good a job of illustrating not only what Freudian psychopathology is and how it manifests itself symbolically, but also how the family plays into it.

So away we go. [Music] [Music] For [Music] [Music] For hell, you don't want to—okay so here's what happened: the film crew wants to go to his house where his brother still lives and film his brother Charles, who's lived there since he was—he's like 55, and he's lived there since he was a teenager.

And you notice how Robert uses a very soft voice. He's talking to his mother, and you know—he's got a whole... he's a famous guy, he’s got a whole film crew there, and he's basically asking his mother if it's okay if he brings his friends over, and she basically says, well, I don't think that would be such a good idea. And he backs off right away.

And then when he gets off the phone, he says, well she said no, you know, that's it. So, you know, that's—that's if you have a good snake detector working and you're listening and watching closely, you know that there are a tremendous number of snakes under the surface already.

One actually: people's—I mean, their way of expressing their connection to eternity, whatever you want to call it modern music doesn't have that, AL people themselves that way more so. So that's a very paradoxical set of statements because on the one hand he's expressing—he says he really loves old music and he loves it because he can hear the soul of the Common Man being expressed.

But then he takes like a potshot at the entire world of music since 1920, which indicates a tremendous amount of implicit arrogance. And he also says that that's the only time that he feels any love for humanity. It's like, well, first of all, I'm not sure that his attitude towards humanity as a whole is actually all that relevant.

And second, if you put yourself in the position where you regard yourself as a credible judge of humanity, it's like you might want to take a few back steps back from your narcissism—right? Right then and there. So, and I'm not kidding about this; I'll tell you, those kids who shot up that Columbine High School, they had their motivations and they wrote them down and they knew exactly what they were doing.

And the leader, who was the more literary of the two, said quite explicitly that he was the judge of the human race. And as far as he was concerned, it didn't pass his judgment and that, you know, that he—it was perfectly reasonable for him to go on the cleansing binge, you know? And he didn't just want to shoot up a whole, you know, a few students in the school; he had bombs planted all over the school.

He wanted a whole apocalyptic scene, and they had dreamed about blowing up Detroit. And so you can imagine what would happen if someone like him got their finger on the button of the hydrogen bomb. So, you know, Jung said if you go deep enough into the shadow, you find hell. It's like, that's exactly right, and it's no joke.

[Music] This is Mom’s house. So, Charles, you read any good books lately? I guess I am, I don't know, kind of like recycling a lot of these books. Mean, by recycling they've got a very interesting voice tone which you might pick up on as well. It's very ironic, like everything they say is ironic. It's got this kind of bitter and arrogant twist in it, and they're talking about absolutely catastrophic things—like nightmarishly catastrophic things—yet there's this sort of adolescent-like banter and laughter about it.

And you read them all year, 20 years ago; now you're reading them. I do that because there’s else to read. Any recent writers? Interested as the old Victoria? So, you know, Freud would say here that there’s an awful lot of intellectualization going on, and there definitely is.

So these guys are very divorced from their bodies, and they have every reason to be. Charles was the one that started this whole comic thing in his family. He was completely obsessed with comics when we were kids. Had absolutely no other normal kid interest; he wasn't interested in toys or games, he didn't play sports, he didn't do anything but read comics, draw comics, think comics, and talk comics.

You know, I like drawing, but I had other drawing interests besides comics—like to draw realistic scenes and, you know, just pictures of buildings, cars, and stuff. He wasn’t interested in that at all—only comics. The earliest one that still existed I had is Charles Drew; this one supposed to be me—that's him.

Yeah, so you hear that laugh? It's like, that’s the situation they’re in as adults, and Charles could see that coming. He had all sorts of homicidal fantasies about Robert, you know? What my father? Over—maybe I was unconsciously imitating him when I forced you to draw comic books?

There's still a kind of sibling rivalry going on between me and Robert. Up in this, like, little room upstairs and the whole rest of the world didn't know what the was going on. So these three primordial monkeys working it out in the trees—situation inspired by the Disney movie where Robert New plays Long John Silver after saw on TV in 1955.

We started like playing pirates, you know, like normal kids do. Go out, you know, pretend you made this ship out of old refrigerator carts and everything. Charles would walk around town dressed up like Long John Silver in this old coat of my mother, this long green coat, and he made himself a three-pointed hat. He had a crutch tied to his leg.

We go around town that way. I didn’t realize years later how fixated Charles really was on this Treasure Island, and this thing dominated our play and our fantasy for six or seven years. After that, when you drew these comics about Treasure Island, it became this real elaborate thing way beyond the original Disney film.

This is one of Charles’—this is one of our Twan comics in which he would draw some of the characters and I would draw some of—we would... each other. That was also a great school of cartooning for me is having to come up with clever retorts to him. He was actually much clever and funnier than I was; it actually got kind of tiresome, but, you know, he had to do it. He was in charge.

I had this very like definite bad problem about Charles. I think a lot of it had to do with my overly morbid sensitivity to the guy or something as well as his, you know, natural affinity to get in there and profit off, you know, of course was somewhat of a middle man.

They had this way of like restricting or causing like like terrible self-consciousness and restriction in me as a kid. I was like morbidly modest in my body—like sex—completely removed. It came time for me to become, you know, sexually aware; when I was like puberty, Stu, like sex was nowhere near in my life; you know, just like nothing to do with it—like so heavily repressed, which naturally have—that’s when the seizures started.

I have a seizure—seizure like at a point where behavior—well, I actually forget the whole sex, which is an awful involved topic, you know? That’s all I thought about when I was in my early 20s was sex and I masturbate about four or five times a week. How frequently did you? I don't masturbate anymore; my sexual desires are completely dead.

Like I told to the other night, I can't even get any...tion anymore. I don't know whether it's one thing or maybe it's a combination—maybe it's a combination of the medication and the lack of external stimulation. Maybe approaching old age too has something to do with it; I mean, you need some external stimulation to keep up your interest.

I don’t know, now that my sexual desires are going on, not so sure I want them back in sexual memories. I remember actually... I remember being like four years old and getting erections. I was my aunt or my mother’s sister and kind of humping her legs and her shoes like under the table.

I remember going in my mother’s closet and she had these cowboy boots that she wore when it rained and humping those in the closet. And I remember singing while I was about five or six, was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny and I cut out this Bugs Bunny off the cover of a comic book and carried it around with me in my pocket and looked at it periodically and it got all wrinkled up and handling it so much that I asked my mother to iron it on the ironing board to flatten it out, and she did.

I was deeply disappointed because it got all brown; she ironed it, brittle and crumbled it apart. I don't know, I have this sexual attraction to cartoon characters, you tell me. I—that all changed when I turned 12. I became fixated on...she...she...Que to the Jungle TV show around like ‘55.

[Music] 56, totally obsessed with she; you went to bed about things I want to do with [Music]. She—now you see how he conceptualizes himself in relationship to her too, so he's like this, well he's a lot smaller than she is, and he's clearly dependent on her physical strength and ability, and so he definitely conceptualizes himself as a subordinate entity.

Robert was very hung up on sex as a little kid, even more so than I was. I think you were more inhibited as a child than I was even sexually. I think you were more afraid of women than I was as a young person. When I was in high school, I had a few dates with girls. When you were in high school, you didn't have any dates at all with anybody; actually, sort of good-looking and everything; I was a handsome good-looking teenager.

But there was just something that was wrong with my personality, I don't know. The kids, high school was an absolute nightmare. I was the most unpopular kid in the high school; people were always picking on me and beating me up, and the girls wouldn't have anything to do with me; they treated me like I was the scum of the year. This STP I'm talking all about my problems with women starting high school.

I learned a lot about women because there was this guy in Scutch—this guy here—who was like a mean bully but he was also very charming, and all the girls liked him. He was the dreamboat, but he was also a bully, and my brother Charles was one of the guys he singled out for particular attention.

You had this gang of flunkies that hung around with this guy, Scutch. So remember this scene where they SC punches up my brother in the hallway at school. It's sight for me to see. Charles gave up trying to be popular or have girlfriends or anything. Everybody saw that he couldn’t fight back, beat up by Scutch, so that was probably enough to get his depression going because, it’s a major dominance hierarchy defeat.

And he was also an outcast, so he's not even in the dominance...he was one of the class of boys, by his own account, that was so contempt that he wasn't even in the realm of possible date partners for any of the girls. And so when you're thinking about why Robert is drawing women with like vicious bird heads, one of the things that you might think about is that for men at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy or outside the dominance hierarchy completely—like these guys were—all they ever got from girls, including their own mother, was rejection.

Like harsh rejection, and it was enough basically... well, it was really, in the final analysis, it was enough to kill Charles. Now I'm not blaming the girls, but I'm trying to explain why Robert is expressing himself the way that he's expressing himself, why these images come up.

Made a few—people that are out there, you got—you got to take into consideration the fact that I'm taking tranquilizers. That makes it a lot easier than it otherwise be, you know? And so Charles still has this kind of dream in the back of his head too, which is really the image, the idea that Charles has it much easier and much better than he does because he doesn't really have to deal with the world, and he can just stay at home in comfort with his mother.

It's like he's not in comfort; the guy that commits suicide six months after this film is taking these tranquilizers, antidepressants. If it wasn't for them, I'd probably go completely crazy living here at home with mother. Now that’s extremely interesting.

So Jung had this idea about synchronicity, you know? And he said now and then things would happen in the world that were connected weirdly because of like an emotional contagion, and it's a very strange idea. But I want to show you an example of it because it's actually caught on film here. So when Charles and Robert are talking about their mother, you notice Charles hunches right over, right?

He's like even more inside than he normally is, and they turn into two 13-year-old teenage boys talking upstairs so their mother won't hear them. As soon as they mention her, she pipes up, “If it wasn't for them I’d probably go completely crazy living here.”

You can't tell my mother the absolute truth, I don’t think we should be talking about this. Now you see, when he did hear her, she's complaining about the curtains being closed or something and this camera crew cluttering up her house. Which, you know, probably hasn't been cleaned since 1957.

It's not really that she matters, that she cares that they’re there. What she's doing is expressing her dominance, and she does it in a very subterranean way, and Charles is absolutely terrified of her. Like, what's wrong with it? Some film equipment or something, some kind of film equipment, mother? I don't know, don’t worry about it; it's all going to be out of here; I'll be back to normal.

Show girl talking about how one of their friends got a date with Scutch and how envious they all are. This is how I felt about, I'm a little bitter about it, as you can see here. Show here how I thought that most teenage boys were very cruel and aggressive and everything like that. If girls would see that I was more kind and sensitive, they would like me more; impressed by the fact that I could draw, but, could understand why they liked these cool, aggressive guys not me because I was more kind and everything—more like them.

But I realized they didn't want me to be like them, basically. I felt very hurt and knew misunderstood because I considered myself talented and intelligent. I was not very attractive physically; I didn't think those things really matter. It was what's inside. When I was 13, 14, trying to be a normal teenager, I was like really a jerk just—I tried to, you know, act like I thought they were acting; it just came out all wrong and weird.

So then I just stopped completely and just became a shadow. And I wasn't even there—people weren't even aware that I was, you know, in the same world they were in. And that kind of freed me completely because I wasn't under those pressures to be normal. So I got interested in old time music and went to the black section town knocking on doors and looking for old records and things like that.

They would be unthinkable if you were going to be a normal teenager. So Robert, you know, he despite the fact that he grew up in a family that was very difficult to escape from, did follow his creative interests, you know? And he picked a path that was characteristic of individuality, and it did get him out, you know? He gave up on conformity, but he found an alternative.

So, you know, it's pretty impressive, and he did become very, very successful. I want to show you—I can't show you all of what I wanted to show you today, but I do understand... went through the war; and they—you just wanted... this thing was so tight, subconscious teenager, force me f enters a door, and you take her outside; you got with this, ey girls, a Living Color.

It's like very hard armored personality line quion. Right into the—you got a good GR in test, you got... missed it. Where is it here? Died '82? My job hit you real hard; I was 5 years old on Christmassy. This whole thing happened, stack at me, busted my collarbone.

Yeah, Char had a pinched... for getting in trouble. Very diabolical as a kid, and my father would like beat him unmercifully for these things that he was always doing, these crimes he was always committing, and it just... it just made him worse. I think a subconscious desire to be punished—I don’t know; I think aamine aetam. Now where in the world is this? Oh yeah, here we go.

Yeah, I think we've got 10 minutes here. So, about '17; I started being driven by that obsession that I'll go down in history as a great artist. That will be my revenge. My image celebrating Valentine's Day, February 13, 1962, I decided to reject conforming when society rejected me.

I’ve heard all that be yourself stuff when I was myself; people think I’m nuts. Guess I’ll have to be satisfied with cats and old records; girls are just utterly out of my reach; they won't even let me draw them. Yeah, all that changed after I got famous.

I was used to what he had been doing, which was really quite sweet; and then he did this one that was just incredibly hostile to women. Very SE hostile; I wasn’t expecting it, and it was really... I was really shocked and just taken aback. You know, really just kind of like whack.

It’s hard for me to believe that he can’t just channel himself into doing better work. I like a lot of his work—and certainly I don't miss the satirical aspect of it—but then I find myself having a completely different reaction, you know? Perhaps one of being really turned off and disgusted.

And, um, you know, this cartoon Joe Blow is one that I thought about a lot in that light. On the one hand, it's a satire of the 1950s, the healthy facade of the American family, and it kind of exposes the sickness under the surface. But at the same time, you sense that crime is getting off on it himself and some other ways, and on another level, it’s an orgy.

It's a self-indulgent orgy in a fantasy, and the fantasy, you know, specifically this story is a story about a father who commands his daughter to give him, and she does. And they wind up having sex, and the little sort of Leave it to Beaver type brother character comes running in and sees the father and the sister, and he's shocked and upset.

He goes running to the mother to tell her, and Mom comes out of a closet wearing sort of S&M kind of get up, and the B... Bo... oh cool, you know? And the next thing, Mom and son are having sex, and the whole panel ends—the whole cartoon ends with the parents saying, "Gee, we should spend more time with the kids," you know—something like that.

Um, so you know, you read something like this and I think that it has gone over the line from satire of a 1950s hygienic, you know, um family, and denial into something which is just producing, and I think this theme in his work is omnipresent. It's part of an arrested juvenile.

[Music] Vision. So the mother has these cute things scattered everywhere. I talk a bit about—we don't really talk that much; we hold aloof from each other for the most part. You spend all your time down here watching television, doing and doing your cross puzzles, and I... I spend...

So you can see how well they communicate. We too, reuse living in the same. Do you do most of the talking in the relationship? Oh, there's no doubt about that. You told me that even you take those medications, but you still feel nervous and depressed sometimes.

Yeah, but not as much as—not as much as I would if I wasn't taking the medication. What do you think would happen if you stopped taking this stuff? I don’t know. I tried it a couple of times, and I didn’t like what was starting to happen. You could—it's as if I were becoming gradually unhinged.

So I got B—Hur, I tried this a couple of times, about two or three times. Do you still think they're picking my brain, mother? Now she doesn't have to clean up for the cameras, that's for sure. Some people like me, and some don't.

So you realize that this is a, a man who's spent like 30 years in his room upstairs and has no friends and has never had any friends, and that’s his mother’s response: quietly from extreme to the make trouble on the streets. One of the last times I went out with him, we were walking around, and he just went up to some old lady in the street, started like drilling her about her spiritual life, and she just like got really frightened and threatened to call the police and everything.

Goes up to these strangers on the streets, starts raving at them. No, he was just...un—I does leave the house. He always got trouble when he went out. You give me one good reason for leaving the house.

I'm out taking illegal drugs or so illegal; got that right. This is true. One thing I—all this and $2 teeth upstairs you won’t wear them; well, they are at first; you got to kind of leave them in there anyway.

I never see anybody food or go... I take a bath about once in six weeks. I believe in having a certain pride in yourself. Why not? That your ego gets out of hand or you can't exist except in relation to other people. Your hygiene pretty good? I never constipated; that's about all I can say for myself.

Give it 15 more seconds—Father, is that you? I say something, but I'm your kids are always giving us cast. Story? You're always obsessed with... well, when you kids were real little, I used to have to take care of your—my—my...so tried giving us all en that didn't work out.

No, I never gave any en. You had to give us en if we didn’t behave. Mind of person who's interested in legs and is very different. Well, that gives you some indication of a Freudian family. It's not pretty.

Good luck on the exam on Thursday. As you know already, there are lots of sample questions posted on the net. So it's all—it’s here, right? Okay.