2016 Personality Lecture 01: Introduction and Overview (Part 1)

Well, after all that. So, welcome to Psychology 230. Nice to see you all here. So, what I’m going to do today—how I’m going to start—is I’m going to give you an overview of the content of the course and then I’ll give you an overview of the class requirements right at the end. But I think we might as well jump right into the content to begin with.

So, there’s a website—I don’t really like Blackboard so I have my own website. You can go to jordanbpeterson.com and underneath there there’s a menu that lists all the courses and the full syllabus is listed there. So, all the information that you’re going to need about the course can be found there, including most of the readings, although there is also a textbook, which I presume the majority of you have already purchased.

So, it also lists the other things you need to know like what days the tests are going to be and what the assignments are and I’ll go over that anyways at the end of the class. So, but to begin with I’m going to tell you what the course is about so you can decide whether you’re in the right class or not.

So, personality is a somewhat peculiar field of study in psychology because it spans a number of subdisciplines that aren’t particularly well suited to one another. So, for example, it spans clinical psychology and experimental psychology. And it also spans an approach that is associated fundamentally with single individuals with an approach that analyzes individual characteristics in large groups, which is generally what you have to do in experimental psychology.

It’s also a relatively strange admixture of philosophy and, I would say engineering and medicine, as well as science. And you might think of medicine as a science but it’s not, and the reason that it’s not is because it’s concerned with the promotion of health and health is not a scientific category. It’s a category that can’t help but be value-laden because you have to decide what constitutes health and what constitutes illness, or what constitutes wellness and what constitutes pathology.

And there’s no way you can do that without bringing value judgments into the equation. It’s particularly true in psychology because when you’re thinking about what a healthy personality might be, you generally don’t merely think in terms of the absence of pathology. You think in terms of the presence of positive traits, right, and someone who’s fully healthy mentally and physically. While the psychologists and especially the humanistic psychologists from the 60’s might consider someone who’s truly psychologically healthy self-actualized, which would mean in some sense that they’ve been able to develop the entirety of their positive potential, whatever that is.

So because of these peculiarities, personality psychology the course, a course in personality psychology has to be pretty wide-ranging. And so this course is in fact wide-ranging. It brings in elements of cultural history, elements of moral philosophy, and then elements that I would consider are almost completely biological. And it does that in order to provide you with a multidimensional view of what it means to be a human being.

I have some other principles that I abide by while I’m teaching this course as well and one of those is that I don’t really want to tell you about anything that I don’t you will find useful. And useful, like there’s a difference between a fact and a useful fact, right? There’s lots of facts, you can go on Google and you can drown yourself in facts—I’m sure you do that every day. But a useful fact to me is one that transforms the way that you look at the world or the way that you act in the world in some manner that you find beneficial.

And so another way of describing useful from that perspective is relevant. And so one of the principles I abide by is I don’t really want to teach you anything that isn’t relevant. And my criteria for relevant is, first: Is it going to make a difference to you personally? So are the things that you learn immediately meaningful to how you interact with the world? And then the second is: Is there some evidence that the facts that you’re going to be presented with actually have some social utility or some political utility or some economic utility? So that the fact that you know them makes a difference to the way that you act in a way that also affects the people around you.

And so it’s for those multiple reasons that I brought together the material that I have brought together. Now that means that there are some factors that you have to take into account before you take this course. And there’s another personality course being given at exactly the same time, well I don’t—this semester anyways—and so it may be that that one is more suitable for you than this one. I don’t know, but I can tell you what this one is going to be like.

And so if that isn’t what you want or if that’s not what you’re interested in then you probably shouldn’t take this course. So the first issue is that there’s a lot of reading. There isn’t as much reading as there used to be in this course, by the way, but there’s still a lot of reading and a lot of it’s original source material both from the personality theorists themselves and then also original source material from empirical papers.

So, I would say that not only is there a lot of reading, but the reading is actually quite difficult. I think it’s useful, given the way I already defined utility to you, and so I believe that reading what I present to you is going to be good for you, but if you don’t have time to do a lot of reading then you’re going to find this course frustrating.

So, there’s also, because of the emphasis on clinical theoreticians which is a major part of personality theory—especially the more classical personality theory, which by the way is generally the elements of personality theory that most students are most interested in—there’s a lot of what I would consider philosophical material. And the reason it’s philosophical is because it’s concerned with how a person should live and that’s a much different question than what a person is.

So it’s how a person should live or perhaps how a person might transform themselves or act in order to transform themselves so that there personality is, well for lack of a better term, better. Now, you can substitute healthier for better but in a context like the one we’re discussing the difference is trivial really.

So, then the last thing that I would caution you against is that I don’t lecture from the reading material. So, often I’m not exactly sure even what I’m going to tell you when I come to class. I know the material, but I don’t want to stick to a prescribed outline; I want to talk to you about the things that I think are important.

And so, with luck, that’ll make the lectures worth attending and worth listening to. But, if you’re more inclined from a temperamental perspective to want a course where things are laid out in a very orderly fashion and they progress in a linear fashion and it’s predictable and the lectures reflect the reading material, then this is not a good course for you.

And so I would presume that would be the case if you’re orderly, and by the way, that’s one of the subdivisions of the Big Five Personality Trait Model, and orderly people tend to be conscientious. But they like things cut and dried and laid out in a linear fashion. I’m not that orderly; I’m higher in openness and openness is a creative dimension.

And open people tend to use relatively loose associations when they speak and to cover a wide amount of territory. And, so, some people will like that. If you like reading literature, for example, you’d probably like this course. If you don’t, then you probably won’t. So, anyways, that’s pretty much enough for the warnings.

So, now I’ll tell you what we’re going to talk about. One of the things that makes human beings unique is the fact that we’re self-conscious. Now, you’ll see ethologists, or people who study animal behavior, do relatively elementary tests of self-consciousness on animals. So, one of the most famous demonstrations of such self-consciousness is the mirror test.

And so in the mirror test what you essentially do is you take an animal, maybe a chimp or maybe a three year old child, and you put a lipstick mark on their forehead or on their nose and then you show them a reflection of themselves in the mirror. And if they wipe off or gesture towards the lipstick mark then can make the presumption that they understand that it’s them that’s being reflected in the mirror, or at least they understand that well enough so that they can use the mirror as a guide to action with their hand or whatever it is that they happen to be pointing with and the reflection.

Now, dolphins seem to be able to manage that, there’s some members of the corvid family, so those are basically crows and ravens—those things are really smart and they seem to possess rudimentary self-consciousness—I said dolphins, cetaceans in general, so whales—although I don’t know if all whales are self-conscious because it’s for example difficult to get a mirror big enough to show a blue whale—human beings, and that’s about it.

Now, I don’t think that’s a very good definition of self-consciousness really, because the mere fact that you can recognize yourself, it’s also not fair to some animals like dogs, right, because dogs would need a smell mirror really, because, and most animals are very very smell predicated. Most of the brain is structured with the olfactory system as its core, unlike us really because our brains are structured with the visual system at the core and that makes us rather peculiar.

So it’s a little unfair to animals like dogs or any rats that rely primarily on olfaction to orient themselves in the world. But the thing is I don’t think that’s really a very good definition of self-consciousness; it’s very rudimentary. You might say well that’s the first sort of step to being self-conscious because if you’re fully self-conscious I think you need to two more things.

You need the capacity to imitate, which is a much more important capacity than people generally realize. In fact, I would say it’s of equivalent importance—it’s of equivalent importance to language. In fact, I’m not even sure that you can use language if you can’t imitate. First of all, obviously all the words you use are also the words that other people use. Otherwise, you’re not going to be very comprehensible.

So, even the mere fact that you do speak means that you’re relying on imitation to get your point across. So, you need imitation and the reason you need imitation is because once you can imitate, you can use your body as a representational structure to represent the world and other people. You can even use your body as a representational structure to represent yourself, which you might do, for example, if you’re telling a joke at a dinner party and then you, you know, act out a self-parody and everyone laughs.

So, and then with regards to language, well language obviously enables you to build sophisticated models of the world that are well-articulated, to exchange those with other people, and to think. Ok so, in order to be self-conscious you have to be able to recognize that you exist in this physical envelope, at least here and now; you need to be able to imitate, because that’s partly how you come to understand yourself and other creatures like you, which is a very important part of being self-conscious, right—I mean everything I learn about any of you is also going help me understand the sort of creature that I am, whether that’s for good or for evil—and then with language, well not only can we articulate our representations about others in the world, but we can also store those articulated representations over very very very very long spans of time.

And we do that partly in ritual, which is the acting out of a representation, and we do that partly with regards to stories, which are in some sense an articulated representation of an acting out, right, because you can think of a story as a drama. So a drama is behavior representing behavior and then a story is an articulated representation of a drama. Now we have very old rituals and we have very very old stories.

And so, part of what we do in this course is we go back to as close to the beginning as we can possibly manage to start to understand how people have understood themselves and represented themselves across the span of human history. And we’re doing that because we want to be able to put our current knowledge in some kind of historical context.

And part of the reason for that is, well one of the things that characterizes a human personality is that it’s a historical phenomena. You know I’m sure you’ve heard in many classes that much of what makes up your personality is a cultural construct. Well, whether or not much of it is or not isn’t really the issue. Certainly some of it is, and an important part—you’re a cultural creature.

And that means that you have emerged from a tradition that has been shaped in any number of ways by an extraordinary lengthy historical past—well historical and biological. And so what that means in part is that if you don’t understand your history, and that’s your history as it matters, not necessarily some collection of facts, then you don’t understand yourself.

So, you know, human beings in their self-conscious form, we don’t really know how old we are. More or less biologically or genetically identical creatures to us existed at least 150,000 years ago but we seem to have discovered fire and were able to master it maybe 2 million years ago. You know and that requires a fair bit of intelligence. And there are artifacts that indicate a fairly high level of cultural capacity that are at least 50,000 years old.

So, we can’t really say when we got fully self-conscious, and perhaps we might also say that we’re not even fully self-conscious yet because you know, really, what the hell do you know about yourself. You know, you’re really really really really complicated. And at best you have a partial model of who you are and that thing fails all the time, which as you can tell because you’re always doing things that surprise you and often not in a particularly positive way. So, there’s no end of mystery.

Anyways, the upshot of all of this is that we’re going to establish the context first that’s a historical context and I want to do that two ways. The first thing I want to do is to talk to you about mythological representations of personality. And that’s more important than you might think. In fact, it’s probably more important than you do think.

By myth, what I mean is the representations of human beings in extremely long-lasting and persistent stories. And so some of those are the stories that are found in various religious traditions, but there’s oral traditions that surround those religious traditions, you know assuming that the religious traditions are written down; and there’s fairy tales and that sort of thing; and standard narratives that people used to guide themselves as they moved through the world.

And most of the clinical theories that we’re going to discuss, so Freud’s theory and Jung’s theory and the theory of the Existentialists and the Phenomenologists and the Humanists and so forth, are variants of those mythological stories. Now, part of the reason for that is that Nietzsche said once that a philosopher was seldom anything other than the unconscious advocate of their cultural worldview.

So, what he meant by that was you already come to the scene with a set of presuppositions. Now, some of those are embedded in your behavior. So, for example, when you walk—when you attend a funeral you know how to behave. Generally, you’re quiet and solemn. You might not be able to explicate the rules a person should follow at a funeral, but you can do it.

Now, you could perhaps articulate them if pressed, but it’s not like you’re following those rules when you go to a funeral; you just know what to do. If someone pressed you, you could turn it into a list of rules but it’s really more encoded in your actual behavior. You just automatically know what to do.

You can tell, you know, whenever you interact with someone who’s really socially fluent, you can tell that they’re not consciously processing the way that they’re acting—otherwise they’re self-conscious and awkward. They’re very fluid. It’s automatized behavior and it’s coded right into them. So, if you’re a great philosopher, according to Nietzsche at least, what you do is you take a look at how you act and what you think and then you say “Well this is what it’s like.”

It’s not so much that you’re inventing new ideas; it’s that you’re articulating the nature of structures that are already there. So, you can imagine, for example, imagine that you’re particularly interested in wolves. And so you go out and you study some wolves and one of the things you see is that the wolves have a dominance hierarchy.

So, there’s a leader and then there is struggle in the pack to see who’s going to be the dominant leader. Now, there’s a couple problems with that which is that, you know if Wolf A and Wolf B fight and they’re pretty evenly matched and they tear each other to shreds, then Wolf C is going to come in and pound both of them and that’s not a particularly useful strategy for Wolf A or for Wolf B. Plus then the pack loses the power of Wolf A and Wolf B, so that’s hardly useful at all.

So, what’s happened is that wolves have evolved dominance and submission strategies so that they can figure out who is going to lead and who is going to follow without having to engage in the kind of physical combat that’s going to result in damage. And so usually what happens is that two wolves face off—you’ve probably seen cats do this when they encounter each other you know out on the street—the first thing they do is sort of turn sideways and puff themselves up, right, and they dance back and forth; it’s quite comical.

But what the cat’s trying to do is look big and it’s supposed to—it’s trying to make the other cat nervous enough to leave. And so what wolves do is roughly the same thing. They puff out so they look big and they make all sorts of ferocious noises and they threaten each other and usually what happens is one wolf will lose his nerve, flop down, roll over, and show his throat.

And that basically means something like “I’m useless and, you know, and pathetic and you can tear up my throat if you want because of that,” and the other wolf thinks “Yeah, you are pretty useless and pathetic, but you know, we’re going to need you tomorrow to hunt down a deer, so you know, you can get up and protect your miserable self and that’ll be okay.”

Now, if you were watching that, you might say, “Wolves follow rules,” but of course they don’t; that’s just how wolves act. When you describe what the wolves are doing then you turn it into a rule, but it wasn’t a rule to begin with; it was just a pattern of behavior. Now human beings are like that. We’re chalked full of patterns of behavior. And they’re the consequence of our biology, which is something we’ll talk about in depth in the last half and the course, and they’re a consequence of our culture.

And they’re built into our bodies. Like every time you interact with another person, they’re telling you how to behave, right? “Don’t be too obtuse.” “Try to be a little bit witty.” “Have something interesting to say.” “Don’t be too annoying.” “If you’re going to say something funny make sure it’s funny.” “Take turns while you talk.” “Play nicely.” “Take your turn.” “Don’t eat all the bread.” Etc, etc.

You know, and so if you don’t abide by those rules then people lift their eyebrow at you. Or they don’t smile at your jokes. Or they don’t look at you. Or they roll their eyes when you come in, which is really not a good sign by the way. And you get punished severely for it. And then if you do act like they would like you to act, you know, then people smile at you and they invite you to their place for dinner and, you know, maybe you have an intimate relationship and some people that like you.

And so we’re exchanging information about how we should manifest ourselves in our bodies with every possible interaction. And what that means is that shapes the way that we act. Now, the problem is—or partly is—is that you don’t really understand the consequences of that. Like, you can act it out more or less depending on your social skill and the degree to which you’ve been exposed to other people, but that doesn’t mean that you’re conscious—that you can consciously articulate all the rules that underlie that and if you think that maybe you can, well fine.

You know, imagine a well-behaved four-year-old. You know, by four, you’ve got a lot of the social rules down because by four you can play with others. If you’re ever going to be able to you can already do it by the time you’re four. If you can’t by the time you’re four you are in serious trouble because other kids won’t play with you and then they won’t teach you how to act and then you stay immature and isolated and, you know, off in your little corner dejected and bitter for the rest of your life.

Now, you know, you might think that’s a little rough but it’s not; that’s what the data indicate. So, anyways, what this means in part is, well, we’ve been shaping how all of us behave as long as we’ve been social. Now you might say “Well how long have we been social?” Well, crustaceans are social.

So, lobsters, for example, organize themselves into dominance hierarchies and they modify each others’ behavior. And that’s 400 million years. So, we’ve been social and living in groups since our ancestors departed on the evolutionary timescale from the ancestors of lobsters. So, that’s a very very very long time. There weren’t any trees around back then. So, social life is older than trees. So, you can be sure that you’re adapted to it in a major way. So, it’s built into your biology but then there’s the historic element of it too.

And it’s quite—we’re quite flexible from a cultural perspective. So, there’s an example: this guy named Robert Sapolski, who I really like; he’s a great scientist. He went off to Africa to study baboons. And baboons are not pleasant, generally speaking. They fight a lot; they’re bullies. They bite. They can really bite. A baboon, like a predatory cat will think twice about taking on a baboon. They’ve got major teeth and their temperament is not particularly positive.

Sapolski went and studied a group of baboons and they were engaged in typical baboon behavior, grasping each other all the time and bullying each other. And they were all stressed out because—Sapolski knew that because he measured their levels of stress and testosterone and so forth. And so it was a pretty miserable baboon existence, but then what happened was that the baboons went to feed somewhere that I don’t remember and they—a lot of them contracted tuberculosis.

And it turned out that almost all the hyper aggressive males got tuberculosis and died and all that was left was the beta males, roughly speaking. And then the whole baboon culture transformed so that it became much more agreeable and much more cooperative. And then when aggressive baboons would move into that territory, you know singly, on their own, then they’d get all placid and calm too.

So, it’s interesting because obviously baboons aren’t social to the degree we are but it does indicate that even at the advanced primate level—you know their brains are pretty big but not as big as ours—that cultural transmission of behavior expectation can be quite powerful and it can transform quite rapidly. So, anyways we’ve been shaping each others’ behavior for a very very very very long time.

And a lot of that’s encoding deeply in biology and in culture. Now biologically, and we’ll talk about this a lot when we get to the biological section, one of the ways you can know how social you are is by how hurt and ashamed you get when you make a serious social error. You know, so if you’re at a party and you make a fool of yourself, you know, depending on your level of neuroticism—which is also a Big Five Trait that indexes how sensitive you are to negative emotion—you might obsess about what an idiot you are for the next three or four months, or maybe even for the next five years.

You know, people do not like social exclusion. You know, and you have a little counter that’s more or less built into the back of your brain that roughly, first of all it estimates how successful you are—there’s an estimation that actually seems to occur right at birth where when part of your neuroticism levels are set. And then that can be modified to some degree by learning.

You know, and if you’re a top baboon, well you’re going to experience less negative emotion and more satisfaction than you are if you’re a bottom baboon and it’s exactly the same with people. So, you know, we like to be climbing up dominance hierarchies and we like to be near the top of dominance hierarchies. And if the little counter at the back of your brain notices that, you know, you’re doing a good job of climbing towards the top of relevant dominance hierarchy then its going to produce more serotonin and you’re not going to be in as much pain, you’re not going to be as depressed, you’re not going to be as anxious, you’re not going to be stressed, and so forth.

So there’s a biological basis for our social being and it’s extraordinarily important to us how we fit into social groups. Ok, so we’ve also been trying to figure out what the hell we are, who we are, for thousands and thousands of years, partly as a consequence of imitation, you know, because I can act you out and that’ll sort of help me understand what you’re like; and partly as a consequence of articulated communication.

A lot of that’s storytelling. Now people have been telling stories for we have no idea how long. I mean, if you go and visit peoples that have no written language and who have been isolated from the rest of human society for let’s say tens of thousands of years—and such people still exist—you find that they tell stories, they dance, they act each other out, you know.

So, we know certainly that the propensity to tell stories and to engage in ritual behavior is far older than our ability to write. I suspect you can push it back at least 50,000 years, although I suspect it’s a lot older than that. And so, what’s happened is that across those timescales, we’ve started to tell stories about one another that represent how we act.

And then you might think well some of those stories are interesting and memorable and some of them aren’t and then we tend to remember the interesting and memorable ones and pass them on. And so you can also imagine human beings aggregating together in groups of thousands and thousands of people over thousands and thousands of years telling their stories to one another and hammering those stories into some sort of mutually acceptable and comprehensible form.

And so, for example one example of that is that if you look at the creation stories—the creation story that say occurs in Genesis in the Old Testament—it’s a member of a class of creation stories that characterized Middle Eastern mythology and it seems to have arisen out of the organization of separate Middle Eastern tribes thousands and thousands of years ago, each with their own traditions, into a relatively homogenous story that characterized a large group of people’s central beliefs.

So, we have information about how we act from the representations that we’ve made of those actions that we’ve passed forward and a lot of those take the form of myths—religious stories. And, so, part of what we’re going to do is we’re going to begin the course with two foundation-establishing themes.

One has to do with the structure of mythological representations and the second has to do with a set of rituals and processes and beliefs that have been identified more or less worldwide that have to do with shamanic transformation. Now, the title of this course is “Personality and its Transformations,” and the reason it’s titled that way is because you aren’t just who you are. You’re also something that changes all the time.

You’re more like a river than like a rock. You’re constantly transforming. What’s the name of? The physicist Erwin Schrödinger thought that people were dissipative structures. It’s a very interesting idea. So, a dissipative structure is a structure that maintains its structural integrity while its elements transform completely.

So you know when you let the water out of a sink you get a whirlpool, right? And the whirlpool is a fairly stable entity, but the water that the whirlpool is made of is constantly changing. That’s a dissipative structure. Well, that’s what you’re like. You maintain your form across time but your elements are constantly transforming.

And people are very very transformative creatures. You know, we can, unlike animals really because animals are sort of what they are and that’s it. I mean they have some capacity to learn but not much. Your typical beaver is acting more or less today like, you know, his great great great great grandfather was acting 5000 years ago. There’s no real accretion of culture, whereas with human being, we transform like mad.

I mean we do that culturally, things aren’t much—there’s so many things, for example, that are different now than there were twenty years ago that it’s almost impossible to imagine. And then, so we transform on a cultural scale quite rapidly but we also do that individually. I mean you guys have all just made the transition to university, just roughly speaking.

You know, I’m sure that you’re like you were in some ways when you were at high school, but well hopefully you’re better than you were in high school a whole bunch of ways as well. You should be more mature but your personality may have transformed substantially. You know, and with any luck you’re not done with your sequences of transformations.

You know, that’s going to be something that characterizes you for the rest of your life insofar as you’re a dynamic person, your eyes are open, you pay attention, and you can learn. And so one of the things you might say is that the most stable thing there is about you in personality is its capacity to transform. And that’s really something that’s worth knowing, you know, because one of the things I can tell you about the great myths of mankind—there’s lots of them and they have different themes—but one of the most powerful themes is the way you get yourself out of trouble is to transform your personality.

Now you think, you kind of do that every time you learn something, right, because you learn something and you’re a little different than you were before. Hopefully different in a significant way and hopefully different in a way that helps you solve problems that you couldn’t solve before. So, you could say that one of the leitmotifs of being human is, “well if I encounter an obstacle I can just transform and I can figure out some way of getting around it,” and that’s something that makes us quite remarkable.

Now, and one of the things that I could suggest to you, and I think this is one of the largest ideas that exist—especially communicable in this sort of time—is that it’s much better to identify with your capacity to transform than it is to identify with who you are now. And that can get you out of an awful lot of trouble. I mean one of the things that characterizes ideologues, for example, or people who are trapped in fixed belief systems is that they worship who they are now.

And that’d be all fine if everything was going a hundred percent for them but it’s seldom the case. And so, unless you’re life is perfect—and that seems highly improbable—maybe if you were someone else it would be better. And you know, that’s all you’ve got in some sense because changing the world in some way that’s going to make you feel better about it, well you know, you might be able to do that in some small way but the probability that you could or should try to do that on a large scale is—it’s pretty low.

So, in the mythological representation section I’m going to talk to you about the fundamental elements of narrative. And the reason that I think that that’s necessary is because there’s sort of two things that you have to consider when you’re talking about people and one is: objectively, what is a person like? The same way you might think about what a rat is like or maybe even what a rock is like. So, that’s a scientific question in some sense.

But then there’s another question which—or maybe two questions: how do people act and how should they act? And maybe the first one is a scientific question but the second one certainly isn’t. And the way that we explore how people do act and how they should act has a lot more to do with narrative than to do with science.

And you know, you know this; all you have to do is think about it. You know, you think about where do you get most of your information about what people are like when you’re not actually just interacting with some people. And the answer to that is quite straightforward: you read novels, you read literature, you go see movies, you watch Game of Thrones, you binge on Game of Thrones you know, you go watch Star Wars, you know maybe you line up for three days if you’re completely insane to go see Star Wars.

You know and you might ask, “Well, what in the world are you doing?” Well, people are hungry for information about how people do act and how they should act. And we’re absolutely compelled by narratives. And there’s a reason for that. Well, and you kind of know what a narrative is and what one isn’t, right? You go to a movie and you think, “Ah, the character development’s pretty good but, you know, as a story it was terrible.”

And then maybe you talk to your friends about why it was a terrible story but the funny thing is you kind of know, right? It’s like, some things are stories and some things aren’t and laying out what actually makes something a story, that’s very difficult. But you still know it and you can have some consensus even. You know, if you look on IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes, you know, people form large-group consensus about what constitutes an acceptable narrative pretty damn quickly.

And there seems to be at least a certain amount of agreement, you know, barring individual differences. So, the mythological and the shamanic discussions that we’re going to undertake have a couple of purposes and one is to provide you with the foundations of a language that you can use to understand narrative.

And that’s going to prove very very useful because most of the clinical theories that we’re going to talk about are really narrative based. And once you understand their mythological substructure so to speak, it gives you a framework within which you can slot the theories. You know, because one of the things that’s complicated about personality theory is that there are a lot of personality theories.

And you might think, “Well, how the hell can that be?” Because if it’s a theory, theoretically there can only be one. Like, there’s only one Theory of Relativity, roughly speaking, because it’s a little fuzzy around the edges but people agree on the core elements. While with personality theory, there’s many many different personality theories.

And, so, then you might think, “Well, how are you supposed to make any sense out of that?” And well there’s two ways. One is to put of all of them into a more fundamental underlying structure, and that’s something that I’m really going to strive to have you guys do while you’re taking this course.

And the other is to actually adopt a slightly different set of presuppositions about personality theories. And so you can say, “Well, there’s only one Theory of Relativity,” but then you might say, “Well yeah, there’s only one Theory of Relativity but then consider a toolbox.” So maybe some of you are relatively handy and you have a toolbox.

What’s in a toolbox? Hammers—or a hammer—saws, wrenches, pliers, vise grips, etc. You know and you might say, “Well, they’re tools. Why do you need all those tools?” And the answer is well, you can hammer a nail in with a wrench but it’d be a lot better if you could use a hammer and you can probably bang a bolt off with a hammer but it would be a lot better if you have a wrench.

And, so, then you might think, “Well, if you’re trying to do something complicated and sophisticated, why not have a bunch of tools?” Now, we don’t generally think of scientific theories as tools, although that is what they are. Above all else, they’re tools.

And then when we’re dealing with something as complicated as a human being, well we may need more than one tool to get to the bottom of it. And it’s also the case, you know, that to say understand a human being, well that’s a complicated thing. It’s like—because you might say, “Understand to what end?” You don’t mean comprehensive, universal, omniscient understanding. Obviously, you mean, “I want to know X about someone because I have some desire in relationship to my interactions with them.”

And so, there’s all sorts of tools that can facilitate that. So what I would say is that, you know, Freud’s a microscope and Jung is a telescope; that’s one way of thinking about it. I mean there’s no particular reason I associated either of those with those two tools, but the point is is that if paid careful attention to personality theories they can expand your capacity to represent yourself in ways that’s extremely useful.

Because, you know, you should understand who you are and why, and what implications that has for you. Because you’re a transformable creature but you also have a fairly stable underlying substructure, right? Otherwise you’d just melt like an octopus.

So, you’re this weird dynamic combination of relatively permanent structure and then embedded capacity to transform. You have a nature and so understanding your nature is extraordinarily worthwhile. And so hopefully what we’re going to do during this course is give you a whole bunch of tools to understand yourself and other people with.

Tools that will really be useful; things you can use day to day to understand yourselves and your families and so on and to improve your future—with any luck. And then also cover the elements of you that are stable, most of which I would say have been discovered—at least in the more objective sense—by biological psychologists.

So, mostly animal researchers peculiarly enough. Okay, so mythological representations—we’re going to take a trip back through time. We’re going to look at archaic and ancient stories of mankind told by members of our species to each other. And I’m going to concentrate on stories that have lasted—we don’t know how long.

You know, we have stories that in the written form are 4000 years old, but all the evidence suggests that those stories are based on traditions that go back far far beyond that; at least 50,000 years—and maybe way before that. So we’ll take a look at those and that will give us a foundation that we can use to build on.

And then we’re going to look at shamanic rituals and descriptions to get some sense of the archetype of transformation, which sort of means, well, what is it that you have to undergo when you’re changing and what are you likely to experience when that happens? Now I can give you a bit of a preview: um, it’s not always the case—maybe it’s seldom the case—that if you learn something important that it’s pleasant.

You know, this happens to people all the time. So maybe, I don’t know, maybe you had a recent relationship that went seriously sour. And you know maybe it was because you were going out with a jerk or maybe it’s because you’re just not very sophisticated. And no doubt you’re trying to figure out which of those happens to be true while you’re, you know, considering the relationship.

But generally what happens to people when they’re moving towards something and the bottom falls out, because something occurs that they didn’t understand and couldn’t predict, maybe in their own behavior—maybe you had an affair while you were in your relationship and you didn’t expect that—well, what happens is your current model of yourself, and perhaps even of the world, is demonstrated as insufficient.

And that rattles you up badly. And then you’re rattled up for some good length of time—not very motivated, somewhat depressed, fairly anxious, you sort of fell apart, you don’t know which way is up. And then maybe if you’re lucky you think about it and talk about it and put yourself back together.

And when you come out the other side you’re a little smarter and a little more together than you were to begin with. Now, if you’re unlucky, you just stay in the little pit for—people can stay in the little pit for a very very long time and that’s not so good.

And so, you know, the process of transforming is actually quite dangerous because it doesn’t necessarily have to be completed in a successful manner. But it does have a pattern and the pattern usually is you think you know what you’re doing and then something happens to demonstrate that you actually don’t know what you’re doing.

And that puts you in a spin. And then through careful analysis and support and discussion—and other processes that we don’t really understand very well—you come to incorporate the anomalous knowledge that knocked you on your back, you reconstruct your personality and your representations of the world, and then you move ahead, hopefully, more than you were before.

But it’s an interesting thing to know, you know. One of the things Nietzsche said, again, was that you could—you could tell the character of a human being by how much truth they’re willing to tolerate. Now that’s an interesting phrase, eh, because you generally think of people, because they’re optimistic, they generally think of truth as something positive; obviously it’s better to know the truth.

It’s like, no, if you pull the wool over your eyes as a general rule learning the truth is not a pleasant experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s something—not something you should do, but the idea that the path to enlightenment is blissful: that’s not a very smart idea. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

So, the shamanic rituals basically manifest in an archetypal way. So, one of the things you see happening with the typical—the shaman, by the way shamanism is a worldwide phenomena and it seems to be associated with primordial or archaic psychology of transformation. It’s often drug-aided. And generally what happens is that the shamanic transformation is accompanied by the descent into something approximating psychological death and then a rebuilding and a rebirth that puts the person out on the other side.

It’s like an initiation ritual and that’s another way of thinking about it. Or you might think about it as the depressing that possessed you during your first semester of university which either knocked you out of the university altogether—because that happens to a lot of people—or which you recovered from and finally became a university student, although perhaps that wasn’t a particularly pleasant transition.

You know, we’ve done some testing with U of T students and it’s interesting to note that about a third of you meet criteria for clinical depression your first year here. Now what that indicates to me is that the criteria for clinical depression are a little on the sensitive side, but regardless—because if a third of people meet the criteria you think, “Yeah, well that’s a little sensitive.” But by the same token, you know, it’s not an easy adjustment and the old you has to die.

And generally that’s not very pleasant. So, and it’s a good way to think about the impediments to learning because you hardly ever learn something without having part of you die first. And that’s part of the reason that people are rather resistant to learning anything new that’s important.

Okay, well so you’ve got that. Now, after that we’re going to talk about Piaget. And Piaget isn’t necessarily known as a personality psychologist but that’s okay. Piaget published a very—he was a developmental psychologist, maybe the greatest developmental psychologist. He published a very large number of books—many of which haven’t even been translated yet, some of which haven’t even been published yet.

So, Piaget thought a lot of things about a lot of things. And he’s generally known for his stage theory of development but he really wasn’t all that into that stage theory. It just seemed to be the part of his theory that I would say rather dimwitted Western intellectuals could grasp onto most easily and so that’s generally what you hear about.

But Piaget was a very very sophisticated thinker. And one of the things he was interested in was, well he was interested in how the child in some sense boots itself up. That’s a reasonable way of thinking about it, because you know when you turn on a computer, what happens is a certain number of primitive functions—primitive fundamental functions—come online first.

And then those functions enable more complex functions to emerge. And then those functions enable more complex functions to emerge. And soon there your computer is, waiting for you. And human beings are kind of like that. So when we’re first born—we’re very primitive when we’re first born. We’re very immature; that’s a better way of thinking about it.

We’re not precisely primitive; we still have very large brains and there are more connections in those brains at birth than there will be for the rest of your life, which is quite interesting. You actually die into your personality. Because what happens isn’t so much that you make new connections; it’s that a whole bunch of the ones you already have that you don’t use disappear. So that’s pretty peculiar.

Anyways, when you’re first born there’s not a lot to you in terms of capacity to engage with the world. Your mouth is pretty wired up, your lips and your tongue—which is a good thing because you have to breastfeed and that’s actually not very simple. You have to have a clue to do that and it’s the first complex social interaction that you’re likely to engage in.

So, you—you’re born with a bit of a priori sophisticated wiring already in place, but the rest of you, man, it’s not there much at all. You can’t control your arms; you know if you watch a baby in a crib—a young baby—and it’s not swaddled up, you know their arms sort of float around in space and so do their legs.

And now and then they might hit themselves and generally that seems to come as quite a shock to the baby. It’s not—its peripheral nervous system, the peripheral elements of its central nervous system are not well developed at birth. And so it’s almost as if the baby has to discover its limbs—it sort of expands from the middle outwards—it has to discover its limbs and then start to figure out what to do with them.

And so what Piaget attempted to do was to lay out the processes by which a child unfolded into the world. Now, some of—there’s a biological basis to that because you come into the world at birth with a set of reflexes at hand. And those reflexes are enough to get you started.

And so Piaget—here’s one way of trying to understand Piaget. I like it quite a bit. It’s a bit of an oversimplification but it’ll do. There’s lots of different ways of thinking about what the world is made of. Now, you know, if you’re classically—if you’re a classical scientist—you tend to think that the world’s made out of matter.

You know and then matter is made out of atoms and then atoms are made of—god only knows what atoms are made out of, right, because by the time you get under atoms you just have no idea what’s going on down there. But, you know, we generally don’t think about that too much and we sort of assume Newtonian reality and that everything is made out of hard little particles like dust and that’s the scientific model.

But there’s other ways of looking at the world that are not only equally valid but equally necessary and equally powerful. One of them is that you can look at the world as a matrix of information. You know, and so information generally has significance and meaning—at least insofar as information is conceptualized by human beings.

And so, for example, if you’re ten years old and you’re crawling around on the floor and the dog has a ball and you grab it and the dog nips you, that’s informative. And so, what Piaget claims is that children come into the world with an information-seeking structure and that as they interact with the world phenomena emerge that they can model with their bodies.

So, for example, if I’m going to drink this then I have to model it with my hand before I can do so. And so it turns out, for example, when if this thing’s sitting here—especially if I’m thirsty—and I look at it my eyes tell my hands to get ready to grab it.

And so when you say you understand something what you mean is that—part of what you mean—is that when you perceive it, it maps itself onto your body. And so this happens at pretty low levels of your nervous system. So, for example, there are people who are blind. They say they’re blind; they can’t see anything. But if you move your hands up like this and ask them to guess which hand you’re lifting they can do it with almost a hundred percent accuracy.

And you think, “Well how the hell can that possibly be? They’re blind!” Well, the reason that happens is because your eyes are detecting patterns in the world, some of those patterns you perceive as conscious reality, but other patterns are just mapped onto your spine or onto your emotional system.

Doesn’t—you don’t need the perception of the object in order to have that activated. Because, you know, you probably think, “There’s the world,” you see it, you think about it, you evaluate it, and you act. It’s like, that isn’t how it works. It’s very seldomly how it works.

Partly because it’s just too damn slow. You know, if you had to think about everything you’d be running over pedestrians nonstop, right? You have to be able to react very very quickly and part of the way you do that is by having your sensory systems map right onto your motor output systems.

So, Piaget. Well, for Piaget, part of the way that the personality emerges out of the doldrums of infancy is that the child encounters the world and incorporates the information that they gather as a consequence of bumping up against it. And, then, they build themselves in some sense from their bodies and the ability—the abilities that they’re practicing with their bodies like the gripping mechanism and the pointing mechanism and the scratching mechanism and all those things that they can build—they build those up to the point where they can start to use abstractions.

And so the baby sort of spirals out of nowhere using its exploratory capacity, absorbing information from the world, and creates its personality that way. It’s a lovely model and we’ll cover that in some detail.

The depth psychologists. I concentrate primarily on Jung and Freud. And you know if you take a personality course, generally you’ll be introduced to Freud first and then you’ll be introduced to Jung and maybe Adler and some of the neo-Freudians, more or less as afterthoughts to Freud.

But I don’t really think that’s appropriate. First of all, I think you can make a strong case that Jung was—that the utility of Jung’s theory is particularly evident when you’re talking about radical similarities between people. So, Jung was very biologically orientated. In some ways he was way ahead of biological psychiatrists and psychologists because when Jung was beginning to formulate his theories, in the West—in North America anyways and in the United States—most of the people who were studying human beings were behaviorists.

And behaviorists basically presume that you were a blank slate at birth and that you learned how to do everything that you know how to do. Well, that’s not true at all. First of all, you can’t learn everything that you know how to do because you have to know something to start the whole process off, and second, you know, you don’t have to learn really to understand what a dog’s growl means.

You know it’s kind of wired into you. And you really don’t have to learn to be afraid of the dark, man. You’ve got that down by the time you’re about three. You know, so there’s lots of things that are built right into people and what exactly that means we’re not sure about.

I mean it does look, for example, like snake phobia is innate and even if the actual phobia isn’t innate—and it probably is—you can learn to be phobic of snakes in no time flat, whereas like trying to become phobic of pistols is very very difficult. Now, Jung was very interested in the—I think what the best way to think about it is the substrata of human cognition.

You know, because human beings are a particular type of thing. It’s not like our souls are disconnected from our bodies and that our knowledge is somehow appropriate or universal in some way that would make sense if we didn’t have bodies. We’re not like that at all. We’re in our bodies. Our brains are adapted to our bodies.

Our minds are adapted to our bodies and so is our knowledge. And that means that our cognitive abilities—our theories of the world—have biological substructures and those are presuppositions in some sense for our knowledge that we don’t have to learn. So, for example, you don’t really have to learn that being punched hurts; you just discover that.

You don’t really have to learn what a smile means. You don’t really have to learn what anger means. You know, you’ll experience it. So it’s right in you. You watch little kids, little babies—when they’re crying they’re often angry. So, for example, by nine months of age a baby can more or less identify its mother. So, someone walks into the baby’s room and takes a look at the baby and it’s not the baby’s mother and the baby starts crying and you think, “Oh, poor baby.”

It’s like, fair enough, that baby is not sad; that baby is angry. And you can tell if you look at the baby because it’s turning all red and that’s what people do when they cry when they’re angry. And so it’s a good thing to know when you’re arguing with someone and they get upset and maybe they start to cry.

You think, “Oh, the poor person,” but then if you look you’ll see that they’re all red. And that means that they’d like to strangle you but their, you know, their social niceties is hopefully preventing them. So, and that can certainly change your attitude towards whether or not you should be feeling sorry for them when they hurt their feelings.

So, there’s all sorts of things that are universal about human beings and Jung was very very interested in what those universals are and how they played out in patterns of behavior. So, you can imagine—you can imagine that you have an instinct, say like anger. And thinking about it that way, it’s like a cross-section: that’s person’s angry.

You know, and you can imagine the facial configuration that would go along with that. But in a more sophisticated way if you wanted to represent anger maybe you’d represent it like a drama—like a story. You know, and that’s actually what you want to know if someone gets angry, right? “What happened?”

Well, imagine if you took a thousand stories about angry people and you boiled them all into one story so that everything that was common about all the stories about anger were encapsulated in a single story. Well that would be the archetypal story of anger. And everyone would recognize it because it’s like anger represented like a movie in some sense in it’s purest form.

Well that’s an archetype and that’s the sort of thing that Jung was extraordinarily interested in—understanding and documenting. And it’s a tremendous amount of fun. So one of the things we’ll do is I’m going to show you some movies—probably the Lion King, at least parts of it—and I’m going to show you how the archetypal structure manifests itself.

And that’s really worth knowing. It’s kind of a pain because then from now on you’ll go to movies and you’ll think, “Oh well, that’s that archetypal structure,” and “That’s what that symbol means,” and you’ll really be annoying to your friends. But it’s very entertaining and it’s very illuminating.

And partly because what’s really cool about these archetypal story structures is not only do they tell you who they are but they tell you in some sense who you should be. Now, that’s cool, because one of the things that modern people have a real problem with is trying to understand whether or not life has any meaning, you know.

We look at the world from a scientific perspective and we say, “Well, it appears that all this is, you know, without meaning; it doesn’t mean anything with any cosmic sense.” It’s a pretty dopey conclusion as far as I’m concerned because the originators of the scientific method excluded subjective meaning from the doctrine at the outset.

So, you know, if you look at the world scientifically and you say, “Well, it’s without subjective meaning,” it’s like, “Well, yeah, obviously,” because science was set up so that all the subjective meaning would be stripped away from the phenomena. So, you know, it’s not something to be really shocked about afterwards and it also doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as subjective meaning.

It just means that it’s very difficult to get a grip on from a purely scientific perspective. And one of the lovely things about archetypal stories is they tell you in a way that’s universally believable who you are. And that’s very cool.

And, you know, because you think—you learn this in university too and it just tears me up, you know. You learn implicitly or explicitly in almost all of the fields of study that you’re going to undertake—especially on the humanities end—that morality is relative and that there’s no ultimate meaning, which is a really rotten thing to be teaching people of your age.

You know, because you’re too damn young to be nihilistic. You know, you can be nihilistic when you’re 85—you’re all done by then—but to be nihilistic now that’s a bloody catastrophe. You know, and it’s completely pointless because the notion of—the notion that things are meaningless in some ultimate sense: it’s an extraordinarily primitive philosophical theory.

And it does not serve people well. It makes them sick. And so one of the things that you might consider is that if your stupid theory makes you sick maybe there’s something wrong with it. It might be a criteria for the utility—or perhaps even the truth of the theory, you know. Depends on how you think about these things.

You know, you might say, “Well, if a truth makes you sick that doesn’t mean it’s any less of a truth.” Well, maybe. Maybe it really does mean that it’s much much less of a truth. It depends to some degree what you mean by truth.

So, anyways, Jung’s very very very very useful for that. He’s a terrifying thinker. Really, like I read—when I was about 23 or 24 I spent two years and I read pretty much about everything Jung wrote; it’s about twenty-three volumes. And it just blew me into bits.

I had no idea what the hell was going on—my dreams changed. Really, it was really rough. I was reading Nietzsche at the same time and he’s just about as bad. Like Nietzsche said he philosophized with a hammer. You know, and that’s great unless he’s taking a hammer to your skull and that’s not nearly so pleasant.

So, you know, Jung—he’s a completely different sort of creature and I think that’s part of the reason that you never really learn about him in university. You know, if you don’t understand him he looks weird, and if you do understand him a little bit he’s terrifying and you’re bloody well going to stop. You’ll think, “Ah, no that’s okay. I don’t—I don’t really need to know that.”

So, Freud. Freud’s a nice whipping boy for psychologists, which I also think is pretty pathetic because ungrateful to begin with. You know, Freud was really the person who formalized the idea of the unconscious. You know, and everyone takes that for granted, that there’s a cognitive unconscious.

That’s what the psychologists discovered in what, the 1980’s. “There’s a cognitive unconscious.” It’s like, “Yeah, good work guys. They’d figured that out back in 1910.” You know, but you don’t see credit being given to Freud for making that sort of discovery if you look at experimental psychology, which I think—like I said—I think that’s really ungrateful.

Freud’s a strange guy. And, you know, you can take issue with—especially the details of his theory. You know, like the Oedipal complex, for example, or penis envy, those sorts of things. It’s like, you know, in some ways they seem laughably anachronistic, but you know sometimes someone can be wrong in the details and right in the overall conception.

You know, because theories are multilayered things, right? So, sometimes I read a student essay, you know, and the sentences are just awful. This person, like God only knows where they learned to write—probably in a high school somewhere. And, you know, it’s incomprehensible, but if you read the whole thing you think, “Man, there’s an idea in here.”

You know, the person is smarter than their ability to write. And so then you can write—you can say, “Look, you can’t write worth a damn but, you know, you’re pretty smart and you’ve got some ideas in here that if you could articulate might be of really high quality.”

So, you can be wrong in the details and right in the overall picture and Freud was like that all the time. And Freud was also unbeatable in relationship to familial pathology. So, from Freud’s perspective, the fundamental task of the emerging human being was to extricate themselves from their family.

Now, you might think, “Well why is that such a problem?” Well, here’s a couple of reasons. Well, first, your parents take care of you so like maybe you don’t want to dispense with that too early, especially if they really really take care of you. And that’s the Oedipal situation from the Freudian perspective.

It’s like, the Oedipal’s situation arises when you have a parent—or two parents—who do so much for you that you’re no longer able to do anything for yourself. And that is not a good situation; it’s extraordinarily pathological. And there is nobody like Freud who lays out the details of that pathology.

And we’re going to watch a movie, “Crumb” it’s called, which is a very disturbing movie—which I suppose is a trigger warning for those of you who think you need trigger warnings. It’s a very very distressing documentary but it will show you Freudian psychopathology like you’ve never seen it—unless you happen to live in a thoroughly Oedipal family.

Alright. So, look, I didn’t get through the whole outline. I’ll tell you very briefly what you’re going to be required to do and then we’ll continue this is the next lecture. So, there’s three exams: two midterms and a final. They’re multiple choice.

Okay, I’ll post some of the questions before the exam so that you know what you’re getting into. I don’t think they’re particularly difficult; some of you will beg to differ. There’s pressure on us this year to curve the grades so beware. I may have to do that okay just—and you need to know that.

You have to write an essay: 750 words. That’s not a very long essay but that makes it actually more difficult. The sign-up for the topics of the essay are on the website. You can just go there and sign up. There’s twenty different topics and there’s fifteen slots for each topic so I would recommend that you do that quite quickly.

You have to do a personality self-analysis: 7.5 percent of your grade. The link to that is online too. You can get started on that whenever you want. Your TA—one of them—that’s Christine Brophy; she’s over there in the corner patiently waiting for me to introduce her.

She has office hours; they’re posted online. You can sign up for her office hours online. You can also sign up for my office hours online. So, well that’s halfway through what the course is going to be about. So, we’ll see you on Thursday.