2017 Personality 09: Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious

So, on to Sigmund Freud. We're going to give him somewhat short shrift, I’m afraid, because we only have an hour to talk about Freud, but that's okay. We could get a fair way through it. He's still persona non grata, I would say, among experimental psychologists and probably clinical psychologists as well. But that seems to me to be very unfair. Freud is one of those thinkers who? All that's left are his mistakes, and the reason for that is that everything that he discovered or put forward is so entrenched in our culture now that we think it's self-evident. And so, everything correct has been assimilated, and that just leaves everything that's more or less floating on top to look wrong.

But Freud is also one of those thinkers who was always wrong in an interesting way, and that's very useful. And so, I also think that many of the things that he put his finger on that are still disputed, for example, the idea of the Oedipus complex, are much more useful than people are willing to admit, especially in the clinical realm. Because the Oedipus complex, which we'll talk about quite a bit, is actually a description of a fairly stable form of familial psychopathology where the child gets trapped within the confines of a family because the relationship with one parent or the other, or both, is so tight that they can't break beyond it. And maybe because of their own inability to move towards independence, but more frequently because of what you might describe as a kind of conspiracy between the son and the parent or the child and the parent that prevents them from moving towards an autonomous life and keeps them in a state of essentially a state of childhood dependence.

Freud said, "I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients under the influence of an older friend. And by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious and psychic life: the role of instinctual urges and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science—psychoanalysis—a part of psychology and a new treatment for the neurosis. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end, I succeeded in inquiring pupils and building it up in the International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not over." He made that recording just shortly before he died. He moved to England to escape the Nazis.

Before Freud, I guess the mind was… It's complicated because Freud, of course, was not the only person to be thinking along the lines that he thought. Pierre Janet, who was one of his teachers, had originated and started to develop many of the ideas that I would say were popularized by Freud. But the idea of the unconscious mind was not certainly not as well developed prior to Freud as it became afterward. And before that, I suppose you might say that insofar as people thought of the mind at all, they thought of it in philosophical terms. The mind would be that part of you that you're aware of, like in the dark, in the Cartesian sense. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," and it kind of seems in some sense self-evident that you're aware of and have control over the contents of your own mind. But that was what Freud really questioned, and he questioned it deeply, saying, "Well, first of all, the idea that you're one thing, like one mind, is a dubious idea to begin with because people are full of internal contradictions."

And then the idea that your mind is all of one type, it's all of one form, was also very questionable as far as Freud was concerned because you could be fractionated into subcomponents. You know, the idea, for example, that your anger or your sexual desire could be an autonomous part of your personality, in some sense, it could overtake you and control you. That's really a Freudian idea. And one of the classic Freudian ideas really is that people are made out of subpersonalities, and those subpersonalities are alive. And that's one of the things I really like about the psychoanalytic thinkers because even the psychologists who say over the last thirty years, or they're about since maybe longer now, anyways, since the demise of behaviorism as an ideology and the admission by psychologists that there are... There is an active unconscious or many active unconsciouness which is a better way of thinking about it. Psychologists still really haven't come to terms with the idea in any deep sense that these unconscious processes are living things.

You know, when psychologists talk, for example, about the cognitive unconscious, they're talking about something that they describe more machine-like with more machine-like metaphors. And that's not reasonable. You understand things a lot better if you understand that the subcomponents that make up people, the fragmentary bits of them, and also the biological subsystems that are part and parcel of your being are much more intelligently viewed as personalities. There are kind of unidimensional personalities in some sense so that, for example, if you're angry, you're nothing but angry. I mean that's an overstatement, obviously, or if you're afraid, you're nothing but afraid, or if you're hungry, you're nothing but hunger. Well, that's certainly true if you get hungry enough or thirsty or too hot or any of those things. You collapse to a simpler personality that only has one motivation in mind.

And we'll talk a lot as we progress about the grounding of those unidimensional motivational systems in biology. But I'd have to say that Freud was among the first, at least the first to synthesize a coherent theory of this multiplicity and to put it forth while also insisting that much of what was happening to you and inside of you was not immediately accessible to your awareness. And it's a very profound discovery. It means among any, among many other things, that you can formulate ideas. First of all, it means that you can act out things that you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand. It also means that your memory can contain things that's represented in one way but that can't be understood in another.

So, for example, we know this is true because there are independent memory systems. There's an independent memory system for procedures, that's for actions. There's an independent memory system for what you might describe as imagination, for the memory that uses images, and then there's another system that articulates knowledge; that's the semantic memory system. And it's not obvious at all that the contents of all of those are equivalent. And that's why, for example, you can dream things that you don't know because one of the things you might think is that your dreams watch you act, and they watch other people act, and then they make a little drama out of that, and that drama has information in it, but you don't necessarily know what that information is in that you can't describe it consciously.

Right, it's akin to the Piagetian idea that kids can play a game, and you can take them away from the game, and then they won't know how to describe the rules even though they can play the game. Dreams can contain information that's full of the encoding of behavior that has information in it that you're not consciously aware of. And so, then you can become consciously aware of that in a kind of a revelation side. Maybe that's what you do when you become aware of the meaning of a dream or the meaning of a fantasy or something like that.

And that's all our ability to think that way, in some ways, can be traced back to Freud. Now, Freud concentrated mostly, I would say, at least in terms of pathology on sexual and aggressive impulses, and I don't think that there's any mystery for modern people about why aggressive impulses might be particularly difficult to integrate into the personality and might remain underdeveloped—or, we'll say, repressed, although those aren't the same thing. And I think in order to—you might think that in different times in society some things are allowed to surface, express themselves, and other things are less allowed. And so Victorian times had a number of characteristics that made the repression of sexuality particularly likely, and perhaps also the repression of aggression. And we're talking about Victorian times in Europe, obviously, and only one time in one place.

As Henry Ellenberger says, this is a great book, by the way, "The Discovery of the Unconscious." If you're interested in psychoanalytic ideas—Freud, Jung, and Adler—and also the history of those ideas, there's no better book than "The Discovery of the Unconscious." It's an absolutely remarkable book, a great work of scholarship. I think it goes for about 250 pages before it even gets to Freud, and so it places Freud's discoveries in their historical context. So that's a really good thing to know.

Ellenberger says it was a world shaped by man for man, in which women occupied the second place. Political rights for women did not exist. The separation and dissimilarity of the sexes was sharper than today. Women who wore slacks, their hair shorter, smoked, were hardly to be found. And the universities admitted no female students. Man's authority over his children and his wife was unquestioned. Education was authoritarian. The despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel. Laws were more repressive. Delinquent youth sternly punished, and corporal punishment was considered indispensable.

Now, so the times themselves I would say were harsher and more repressive. But then there was an element to sexuality that was also extraordinarily problematic. I mean, the first thing you might notice might consider, and people generally don't, it’s almost impossible to overstate how revolutionary the birth control pill actually is. You know, people like to think that the political rights that women have attained have been a consequence of a political struggle, but I don't buy that for a second. I don't think that's true even in the least. I think that what happened was that we underwent a biological revolution in the 1950s, late 1950s, with the emergence of the birth control pill. And that for the first time in human history gave women pretty reliable control over their reproductive function—not really transformed them into entirely different biological beings in many, many ways.

Like here's an example, a subtle example. So, you know, if you track women through their ovulation cycle and you show them a picture of a man, the same man, and you do nothing but vary his jaw width, when they're ovulating, the guy with the wider jaw is more attractive. And when they're not ovulating, the farthest away from that, the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive, and that's associated with testosterone levels. And so women who are fertile like more masculine men. And basically if you're on the pill, then you're never in that ovulation phase. And so one thing that may have happened—and I don't know this for sure, but it's interesting to consider—is that since women have been taking the birth control pill, their preference for less masculine men has become more pronounced. And that could easily be one of the things that's fueling at least some of the tension that existed and exists now politically between men and women.

But the point is that you just cannot ignore the massive consequences of a biological revolution like that, and to make any other factor causal when you're trying to understand the political movements, especially in the last say 40 years, you're putting the cart before the horse. Now, it's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology if certain political changes with regards to the emancipation of women hadn't already been in place, right? No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception. So, you can't separate the biological from the political entirely, but it's still very useful to organize your thinking to realize just how profound a revolution that was.

But now back in the Victorian times, there's another thing about sexuality. Modern people like to think that there's nothing dangerous about sex, and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever hypothesize because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous emotionally, it's dangerous socially, it's dangerous because of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, and it’s dangerous because of the possibility of sickness, and that's a major one. I mean, when AIDS emerged in the 1980s, that could have easily killed all of us. Now, the fact that it didn't was wonderful, but it did kill hundreds of millions of people. So it was no joke. It was a big deal. And AIDS mutated to take advantage of promiscuity, and so the relationship between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease is actually mediated at the biological level.

But anyways, back in the 1890s, they had the same problem, right? They had the problem with syphilis, and syphilis is one nasty disease. It can mimic almost any other disease and it's devastating to your nervous system, and you can pass it on to your children. And so part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was not only because of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy but also the relative poverty of people. You know, back in 1895 in Europe, the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in modern terms. You know, it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were. And so, sex in a poverty-stricken place is also a lot more dangerous than it is in a rich place because especially if you were, you know, given the lack of employment opportunities for women back in the Victorian period, if you happened to get pregnant out of wedlock, you were in serious trouble.

And so the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly a surprise because it was so difficult to integrate into the full-fledged personality, you know, and it still is. So, sexual repression—supposedly a characteristic feature of the Victorian period—was often merely the expression of two facts: the lack of diffusion of contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease. It was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost invariably contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection. We can hardly imagine today how monstrous syphilis appeared to people of that time. Well, we can imagine that a little bit better than they could in 1970 because it hasn't, you know, AIDS is still with us, although it's nowhere near the plague that it was, say, 25 years ago.

Well, here's the Freudian world. So, let's take a look at the history of or the idea of the unconscious to begin with. One of the things that you might want to consider conceptually is that there are many different forms of unconscious. There's not just one. And so, Ellenberger points out that by 1904, functions of the unconscious had been described. There's a conservative function. So the unconscious stores memories often inaccessible to voluntary recall. Well, that's a strange one. You know, obviously, you remember your past, but you don't remember all of what you can remember at any given time, and you don't really have access to that full store of memories although you can try to remember.

So the unconscious is—imagine the memories are represented somehow neurologically, but the neurological structure isn’t exactly the mind. Like the neurological structure isn't exactly your consciousness. There's some relationship between them that we don't know, and the unconscious from a conceptual perspective is the place that your memories are that you sometimes can get access to and sometimes can’t. And so you might think, well, that there are the memories that you can't get access to. There might be a variety of reasons you can't get access to them. One might be that you've just forgotten them, and one might be that they're so painful that you don't want to bring them to mind. You'll engage in tricks to stop yourself from getting access to them. And maybe they're memories that are so complex and painful that even if you did get access to them, you wouldn't exactly know what to do with them, and so there's not a lot of reason for you to bring them to mind because all it is is pain without any utility.

And when you understand that a little bit, you understand more about what Freud meant by repression. The thing about Freud is that he kind of believed that, like many people believe now, that when you remember an event in the past, it's almost as if you're using a video tape recorder, and that when you experience that, the memory is somehow recorded in you like it happened. But that's not a very accurate version of how memory works. I mean, we know that memories can be easily distorted. For example, if you interview someone about an event and you make suggestions that there was something present in the event that wasn't there, and then you bring them back a couple of weeks later and you ask them about the same event, they'll often incorporate the thing that they were told into the event.

And so the idea that you can make an objective record of something that's happening to you is kind of a strange notion anyways because, for example, if you're having an argument with someone, and later you—ask what the argument was about, and the other person is asked what the argument is about, there's no necessary reason why the accounts will jibe at all. Because a lot of time when you're having an argument with someone, you're arguing about what the argument is about. Right? Say, “Well, you're angry at me.” “Well, why?” “This is why I think you're angry at me.” You say, “No! This is why I think this event has occurred.” And you're thinking about, especially if we know each other well, you're thinking about the contextualization of that event across our entire history, and I'm doing the same thing, and I'm gonna highlight things that you're not gonna highlight, and I'm gonna draw causal inferences that you're not going to draw, and for us just to get on the same page about the memory, it's going to be very difficult.

So the idea that, especially with complex interactions with people, that you can somehow make a video recording of the memory and actually capture what happens is very, very—it’s not true. You can't— I mean, you might be able to extract out certain objective facts, but generally, if it's a dialogical issue, if it's a relationship issue, it spans such a long period of time that just cutting a slice of it out doesn't constitute a reasonable record of what it means. And that's what you're more concerned with. Like, when you have an experience, you know, I'm not so much concerned about what happened from an objective perspective. You're more concerned about what the experience means. And then you might ask, “Well, what does it mean to mean something?”

And that was the question I was trying to answer in that paper I had you read right at the beginning of the class. But one of the things that meaning means is that it has implications for the way you look at the world or the way you act in the world. And so if I tell you something meaningful, what that’s going to mean is in the future you're going to act slightly differently or maybe radically differently depending on how meaningful it is, but also that the way that you look at the world has shifted. And the way that you look at the world is actually an unconscious process. I mean, you don't know, while you're looking at the world, how it is or why it is that you're looking at the world in that way. I mean, because, well, first of all, it would just be too complicated, and second, you wouldn't be able to concentrate on what was actually going on.

So your attention, for example, is mediated by unconscious forces, and you know that. You know that perfectly well, and this is another Freudian observation. You know, if you're sitting down to study, for example, your conscious intent is to study, but you know perfectly well that all sorts of distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination nonstop and annoyingly, and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except maybe wait it out. You know, you’ll be sitting there reading, and your attention will flicker away. You’ll think about, I don't know, maybe you want to watch "The G In the Virgin" on Netflix or something like that, or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich, or you should get the dust bunnies out from underneath the bed, or it's time to go outside and have a cigarette, or maybe it's time for a cup of coffee. Or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by.

And so, they pop up and try to take control of your perceptions and your actions nonstop. Maybe you think, “Well, this is a stupid course anyway. Why do I have to read this damn paper? And what am I doing in university? And what's the point of life?” It's like you can really—well, you can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework. And then you might think, “Well, what is it in you that's trying to avoid?” Because after all, you took the damn course and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen? Well, because you're a mess. Now, that's basically why—you haven't got control over yourself at all, and no more than I have control over this laptop.

Okay, so there's the memory function of the unconscious, and there's the dissolute function. That's an interesting one. The unconscious contains habits, once voluntary, now habits and dissociated elements of the personality which may lead a parasitic existence. That's an interesting one. I would relate that more to procedural memory. You know, so what you've done is practice certain habits, whatever they might be—let's call them bad habits—and you like those things to get under control, but you can't. So maybe when you're speaking, for example, you use "like" and "you know," and you say "um" a lot. And you've practiced that, so you're really good at it, and you'd like to stop it, but you don't, because you've built that little machine right into your being, right? It's neurologically wired, and it's not under conscious control. And anything you practice becomes part of you.

And that's another element of the unconscious—a different part. And then there's a creative part, which is that, well, you know, you're sitting around and maybe you're trying to write something, or maybe you want to produce a piece of art or a piece of music, or maybe you're just laying in bed dreaming and you have all these weird ideas. And especially in dreams, it's like, where do those things come from? And even more strange, one of the things that's really weird about dreams and almost impossibly weird is that you're an observer in the dream. It's like a dream is something that happens to you. Well, you're dreaming it, theoretically, so how is it that you can be an observer? It's almost like you're watching a video game or a movie, but you're producing it, at least in principle.

Although the psychoanalysts would say, "Well, no, not exactly. Your ego isn't producing it. Your unconscious is producing.” It's a different thing. It's a different thing. And of course, Jung would say, "Well, it's deeper than that. The collective unconscious might be producing it." It's in some sense—It isn't you, exactly, or it isn't the you that you think of when you think of you. And that's the ego, from the Freudian perspective; the you that you identify with—that’s the ego. And outside of that is the unconscious—that's more the place of impulses. And you could think about those as the biological subsystems that can derail your thinking, right? And that govern things like hunger, and sex, and aggression, and your basic instincts.

It's another way of putting it and it's a reasonable way of thinking about it because these are subsystems that you share with animals. You share them, certainly, with mammals. You share most of them with reptiles. You share a lot of them with amphibians, and even going all the way down to crustaceans, there's commonality, for example, in the dominance hierarchy circuits. And so, these are very, very old things, and the idea that you're in control of them is—well, you're not exactly in control of them. And I would say the less integrated you are, the less you're in control of them, and the more they're in control of you. And that can get really out of hand, you know. You can be like with people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, which seems to be, I would say, the dissolute elements in some sense of the unconscious the way that it's portrayed here.

Poor people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, they can spend half their time doing things that they can't really control, and they have very strong impulses to do them, and it's very hard on them to block them. You know, they'll almost panic if those things are blocked. And then you have people with Tourette's syndrome, you know, they’ll be doing all sorts of weird dances and spouting off obscenities and imitating people without being able to control it. And sometimes a little bit of antipsychotic medication can dampen that down, but it's as if there are these autonomous semi-spirits inside of them that grip control over their behavior and make them do things. And you know, you find that to some degree in your own life because maybe you've become very attractive to someone even maybe you don't want to be attracted to the person, and then you find yourself texting them when you know perfectly well that you should be going to bed, and you know you're in the grip of something. And you can't control it. And that's all part of the unconscious and all part of what Freud was studying.

The dynamic unconscious, it's alive, and it's a compass that the mind is a composite of contradictory drives. Now the way Freud thought about this, basically, was that with the id, the ego, and the superego. So if you think about the id as the place where these contradictory drives emerge, so it’s sort of nature within, the ego is the thing that’s sort of being pushed back and forth by those contradictory drives, and the superego is the thing that's on top saying, "You better behave yourself. You better behave yourself." And so it’s a different model than the Piagetian model because Piaget assumed that what would happen is that as the child—and I like the Piagetian model better, I think—in healthy development, the Piagetian model is correct. But in unhealthy development, I think the Freudian model is correct. That instead of integrating, say, the aggressive and sexual drives, for the sake of argument, into your personality as you develop, what happens is the superego just represses them instead. So they don't become a dynamic part of you integrated into your ego. They're just repressed. You just don't manifest them.

And that’s how you be a good person. And you can be the victim of a very harsh superego, and that often happens if you've had a particularly tyrannical parent, one or both, or maybe a tyrannical grandparent, or maybe you're your own inner tyrant, and you've picked up tyrannical voices through your whole life and aggregated them into this terrible judge that's always watching you, that's criticizing everything you do and restricting you badly and really badly in what you're allowed and not allowed to do. You see that with anorexic women. Well, men could be anorexic too, but it's much, much less rare. They have superegos that are just deadly. They're just criticizing every bit of them. Well, right to the point, they're really criticizing them out of existence, right? You have to be so perfect that the perfection is not aligned with the ability to live. You don't get to eat, you know? And people like that, they look at their bodies; they even look at their bodies incorrectly. Like anorexics seem to be unable to see their bodies as a whole; they can only see their bodies as parts. And when you start seeing your body as parts, you're really in trouble because you can't get a sense of actually what it looks like, and body perception is very, very complicated.

But anyways, Piaget thought about the ego in some sense as the game that’s played by all these dynamic drives that’s shaped by the broader community. And so that could all be integrated. But Freud would say, "Well, look, when that doesn't happen, instead you're subject to the tyranny of the superego, and it just says you should never be angry, right? You should never express yourself sexually because if you do, there’s something wrong with you. You’re a bad person, and you’re a bad person if you ever get aggressive." And so then people who are living like that under those circumstances, you know—they're repressed. This is the right way to think about it.

Now, Freud was interested in the idea that mental disorders could be caused for two reasons. One would be purely bodily, like maybe a head injury or, say, in the case of schizophrenia, which is a good example of manic-depressive disorder, we have reason to believe that there's something physiological going on. Even though identifying that has been very difficult, and it’s because there isn't one form of schizophrenia. There are probably many pathways of brain injury that lead to schizophrenic-like symptoms, and there's likely not one form of manic-depressive disorder either. If you think of the form as having a standard causal pathway, we know that there are because we've done genetic studies on people who have manic-depressive disorder in their family, and you can identify genes within a family that seem to be contributing to the disorder.

But the problem is that those genes don't seem to be... So then you'll take another family group with manic-depressive disorder and it'll be a different genetic combination that causes that. So part of the reason why it's difficult to associate even the more biological mental disorders with biology all the way down is because they're so complex. And then there are other forms of mental disorders that don't seem to be structural at all. They seem to have more to do with, well, let's call it the psyche, right? And that it’s more like the contents of your thought have a problem rather than the underlying structures of your thought.

And of course, that distinction is difficult to make in a fine-grained way, but you kind of get the point. I mean, just because there's an error in your thinking doesn't mean that the underlying biology, in some sense, has been compromised. It's complicated because if the air is bad enough, then it can compromise the underlying biology. But whatever, it's a conceptual distinction, and part of the conceptual distinction is helpful if you're trying to think, at least in part, about how you might cure it. Because if you're thinking about a brain disease, then that implies a different course of treatment at least in principle than it does if you're thinking about a psychological disorder where you might think about talking to someone, for example, and straightening out their thoughts or helping them learn to behave in a different way.

And it was really Freud who started to think that—he was the first person to really posit, and this is pretty interesting—that directly positing that dialogue or conversation or speaking could be curative. And now that’s another thing that people don't like to give him credit for. I mean, there wouldn’t be all these helping industries, social work, and psychology, and biological psychiatry insofar as that also involves communication and counseling and all these things. Now, that would have existed in all likelihood if Freud wouldn't have made the original hypothesis that there was something about communication that could be curative.

Now, Freud believed that experiences that hadn't been—now he thought about experiences as repressed, and this goes back to the videotape idea of memory. So the idea would be that you have a record of everything that's happened to you and the record is actually accurate, and then some of those things that happen to you were very, very shocking to you, or were very hurtful, or very depressing, or very threatening, and so you've decided that those have become repressed; you're not paying any attention to them. Now, he has a complex mechanism to account for that, and I actually think this is a place where his theory went badly wrong because you don't have a videotape memory, and it isn't obvious that the memories that you have of traumatic events are fully fledged and causally appropriate but just not paid attention to.

It's more like they’re murky and unclear in and of themselves, and they contain too much. And I don’t think that people so much repress as they do refuse to attend to or are unable to attend to. So it's more like a passive avoidance than a passive avoidance of something that needs to be explored and gone through rather than it is something, you know, that you don't want to look at, that you are—part of you has put away. And I think that’s a major weakness in his theory and has led to a lot of problems with the idea of repression per se.

But anyways, that was his idea. Terrible things have happened to you and you—or some part of you doesn’t want to. To know about them—to know about them. And so they live—those repressed experiences live an autonomous life of their own. And here’s an example, a trivial example of how that might work. Imagine that you’re at work and your boss says something to you that disturbs you. Maybe it makes you question whether your job is stable, so you’re kind of set about that, but it’s a casual, offhand comment, and you go back to work and you just sort of forget that that even happened. You know, maybe because you’re attending to something else, but then you go home and you’re just crabby as can possibly be, and you go home and one of the people there says something a little annoying, and you snap at them.

It’s like, “Well, that’s analogous to what Freud would call a complex,” right? Is that this—because you could imagine what’s happened is that the boss’s words have brought up a whole little sub-personality predicated on doubt up to the surface. And who knows how deep that would be? Well, what happens if I lose my job? And if I lose my job, well, what sort of person am I exactly? And what about all these other times that I’ve failed? And then maybe you remember the other times that you failed, and what am I going to do in the future? So it’s this whole cluster of ideas that surrounds that doubt, and that’s been activated. It’s a little part of you, and then maybe you’re not attending to that because you’re busy doing some other work, but when you go home, something triggers it. And like it’s already there.

You get way more upset than you should, and that’s what a complex is, except in a much more complicated manner. Like a complex might be a whole series of experiences that you’ve had that are united by some emotion—like threat—that aren’t—haven’t been transformed into a coherent representation, but that can rise out of the unconscious and possess you. If you’ve been—many of you guys have been depressed at at least one point in your life, you know, it’s actually very common for University of Toronto students especially in their first year. It’s about one in three if you have students fill the Beck Depression Inventory. But one in three University of Toronto students, in our research, have hit criteria for hospitalization.

I mean the Beck is a little oversensitive as far as I’m concerned, but, but you know what it’s like. When you’re depressed, it’s like a part of your personality sort of subsumes the whole. And depression, quite classically, is, well, you can’t think of anything good that happened to you in the past, and you can’t think of any reason why the present is good for anything, and you’re pretty damn hopeless about the future. And so that’s a complex as well, and it’s a complex that consists of nothing but negative emotion, and it structures your memory and your percept and your plans for the future all at the same time.

Now, Freud had a very lengthy list of ways that people could be treacherous towards experiences they had that they wanted to repress, and so he called them defense mechanisms. This is how you fool yourself into believing that you don't have to take into account a certain set of negative experiences. You know, it’s like, well, we’ll go through the repression. Okay, well, we talked about that. Denial? Well, that one—is often denial is a very complicated one. See if I can come up with a good example. It was a classic example for people who have—I think it’s called anosognosia. I don’t remember exactly, it’s neglect—that’s a less technical way of thinking about.

So let’s say you have a right parietal damage from a stroke, and you lose the left side of your body, so you can’t move it anymore. But worse, you don’t know it’s there, and you don’t know that the left side of anything is there anymore. And God only knows how that happens. But like you’ll only eat half the food on your plate, only on the right-hand side. And if someone asks you to draw a clock, you’ll cram all the numbers into the one side. And so you kind of lose the idea of left. And I think it’s sort of like, you know how when you’re looking forward, there’s nothing behind you. You can’t see anything back here. It’s not black. It’s not even gone. It’s just simply not there at all.

And so if you could imagine that sort of stretching around halfway, that seems to be something what neglect is like. But anyways, if you take someone with neglect, according to Ramachandran, and then if you irrigate their ear with cold water—the ear on the opposite side—then they’ll kind of have a little convulsion and then all of a sudden they become aware of their missing left side. If you talk to them before you do the irrigation, you say, “Well, what’s up with your left arm?” and they’ll say, “Well, my arthritis is bothering me, and I don’t want to move it.” They come up with something that sounds akin to denial, you know. And then if you can snap them out of that with that irrigation, then they’ll have a catastrophic emotional response, logically enough, to the loss of their entire left side.

And Ramachandran reports that lasting about 20 minutes, and then they’ll snap out of it and go right back into the denial. And sometimes people deny things because they can’t update. What’s happened to them is so overwhelming that they cannot construct a new model. They just rely on the old one, and you see this—well, imagine first that you’ve just had a tooth pulled, and you know how many—how long your tongue takes to like remap the inside of your mouth. It’s really hard to come up with a new concept of you if something catastrophic happens. And so sometimes the denial is just that something that has happened is so overwhelming that the person can’t model it.

But then maybe also they refuse to think about it, and you see this emerging in lots of strange ways. So for example, if people develop diabetes, for example, they’re often not very good at taking their medication or regulating their diet, and you might say, “Well, they’re denying the existence of their illness.” And to some degree, they’re probably doing that because who the hell wants to think that they’re diabetic? But even worse than that, it’s complicated to be diabetic. You’re no longer the same person that you were, and so you have to learn a whole bunch of new ways to be this new person. What to eat, when to eat, how to check your blood. You have to be careful whenever you go out and eat. There’s a hundred new things a day that you have to learn, and so separating denial from inability is a hard one.

But you can also understand that people might deny. “No, that’s just not happening. I’m not going to admit to that.” Reaction formation? Oh, that’s one. Maybe you hate your sister, and maybe you have your reasons, but you shouldn’t hate your sister. So what you do is act as if you really, really like her. That’s an overcompensation. So that’s another form of defense mechanism. Displacement? My boss yells at me; I yell at my husband. My husband yells at the baby; the baby bites the cat. Well, they’re not really dealing with the problem, which is the boss. It’s just pushed on down the road.

And identification? You’re bullied and instead of coming to terms with the fact that bullying occurs, you start bullying other people. Rationalization? Well, you know what that means already. You know, maybe you don’t do your homework; you’re procrastinating. I bet you can come up with fifteen rationalizations, no problem, for why it's actually not necessary for you to do your homework right then. Intellectualization? What Woody Allen's movies are about—he's got all these neurotic problems, but he's smart, and so he can come up with intelligent reasons why he's so messed up, even though he knows he's messed up, and it doesn't help.

Sublimation? Well, that was one of the things that Freud thought characterized art. So, for example, there’s a lot of erotic content in art. And so if you’re having trouble establishing a relationship, or if you want to have a relationship with many people, then maybe what you do is sculpt nudes or paint them. And then there’s projection, which is I’m having an argument with you, and I’m unwilling to admit to my dark motivations, and I’m very skeptical of you. And so I assume that you’re characterized by all the dark motivations that I won’t admit to in myself.

So now Freud also believed that it was unconscious ideas that were at the core of psychological conflicts, and he described those conflicts as incomprehensible distress—psychosomatic symptoms. And so those would be the manifestation of psychological—of the manifestation of psychological content in bodily form. That might be stress, a stress-related illness might be one way of thinking about that. I’ve had clients who had hysterical epilepsy, so that was quite interesting. So that was a somatic manifestation of a psychological problem. Back when Freud was practicing, hysteria was much more common, and maybe that was partly because Victorian society was so centered on the theater and so dramatic.

And people would come in with a paralyzed arm or something like that that he could sort out with hypnosis, and so they were manifesting their psychological distress in bodily form, often in a manner that was representative of that psychological conflict in some way. Behavioral anomalies, hallucinations, and delusions—he thought that all of those could be manifestations of inner internal psychological conflict with their sets of unconscious ideas. So, let’s go back to the boss example. Your boss says something nasty to you. You come home; someone says something a bit provoking, and you fly off the handle, and then you have an argument about what the hell is up with you because they say, “Well, look what I said was, you know, this big,” and you reacted like this.

And you’re going to say, “Well, no, no, you’re always annoying like that.” And which is kind of a denial thing, and maybe the person doesn’t let up and they say, “No, no, I really know that something's wrong.” And you do like six other things to keep them the hell away from you, and finally, they're persistent enough, so you break down crying and you say, “Well, I had this terrible day at work,” and you didn’t even really notice that you knew that until the moment of the tears. And you see that very frequently in psychotherapy. If you’re talking to people, for example, maybe they're relating a story about their marriage that collapsed badly, and they’re talking, and all of a sudden they’ll say something, and they’ll tear up, and then they’ll continue.

And you can grab that. You say, “Look, you just said something. I noticed that your eyes filled with tears when you said that. What was going through your mind?” Now, often they’ll—unless you catch it quick, they’ll forget. So they’re talking, and they’ll have—and the talking about the past is flashing off imagistic memories, and you’ll say, “Well, that made you cry.” And they often don’t like that because, for obvious reasons, that something’s come up that they don’t want to talk about. And so you say, “Well what was flashing through your mind?” And the person will tell you, like, quite a lengthy little memory fantasy about a sequence of events that, you know, is still a hot-button issue, and that's another example of this underlying complex.

You know, and if you watch people, you can watch people in normal conversation. This happens all the time—their eyes will move, or they’ll smile, or you can see as they’re speaking that all sorts of different ideas are flitting through their head. It’s dreamlike in a sense, sort of as if the person is talking and they’re dreaming at the same time. There’s this image-laden set of memories that’s going on at the same time, and that can be quite broad, far broader than they could encapsulate in the words. And so you can catch that. And if you’re really listening to someone, really paying attention to them, you can see when they’re doubtful or when they pause for a long time. That’s another one. You know that some things come up that that’s occupying their mind and interfering with the flow of conversation.

Freud was very good at listening in that manner. While that happens with jokes, too. You know, and like, for example, when I was showing you guys the "Lion King" stills the other day, and I showed you that picture of Nala laying on her back with that peculiar expression on her face, everybody immediately laughed. And the—Freud would have considered that an entry point into the unconscious because there is a reason you were laughing about it. It goes along with it. Well, it would have gone along with a sexual complex in that situation, and everybody recognizes it instantly, and they laugh about it. And comedians are really good at that because, if they’re good comedians, they say what everyone’s thinking but no one will say, and it’s a relief to everyone.

You know, he—what’s his name? Canadian comedian—so he’s making racial jokes. No? No, it’s Canadian. Yeah, Russell Peters. I mean, he’s a great example of that. You know, he fills a whole stadium with people of all different ethnicities, and every single one of them is dying to be insulted because of their racial background. You know, it’s a relief to everyone. So he insults the Arabs, and then he insults the Jews, and then he insults the Christians, and he’s going, “Oh, I’m so glad finally someone said that!”

No, so he’s speaking to part of their unconscious, and it’s the part that’s actually uncomfortable with all of that kind of discussion being repressed and staying below the surface. It’s way too weighty for people. So jokes expressed in playful language what culture will not formally express. So, you know, to that when the culture starts going after the comedians, that things are not good. So you should leave the damn comedians alone because there are the people that can tell the truth. And if you start to get annoyed at them, then that's not good.

So, Freud was also extraordinarily interested in dreams. Poor Freud, we’re just not gonna be able to cover him in enough detail. Well, how will we do this? Because I should tell you about the dreams. Freud wrote a book called "The Interpretation of Dreams," and he was the first person, I would say, who subjected dreams to a really comprehensive analysis, and he used them to investigate the place of complexes in his psychotherapeutic practice. So his clients would recount their dreams to him.

Now, he believed that dreams always expressed an unconscious wish, and that was tied into his theory of repression. And so, for example, if you were very, very sexually repressed—which was very common at the time—then you’d have dreams with sexual content that were expressing the undesirable fantasy, essentially. And by analyzing the dream, you could get down to what was being repressed. Now, Freud believed that the dream more or less tied itself in knots trying to hide its content, in some sense. And Jung believed instead that the dream was actually trying to be as clear as it could; it just wasn't part of the, let’s call it the semantic memory system. It was more like a feeler out into the unknown; it was trying to represent things as clearly as it could.

And so, its use of symbols and that sort of thing wasn’t so much to hide the actual unpleasant content from the dreamer, but to express it in the only language that the dream could use. And so, Freud, of course, also believed that some of that was true. All right. Well, we're gonna have to stop there. So since it's 2 o'clock, we’ll see you on Tuesday.