2016 Personality Lecture 02: Introduction and Overview (Part 2)

I talked a little bit last time about what we were going to cover, but we didn’t get quite through it so I’m going to finish that. For those of you who weren’t here last time, you can watch the lecture because it’s online. So, we stopped at the depth psychologists, really, and those are the psychoanalysts.

And psychoanalysts are people who are concerned with—well, for a psychoanalyst, roughly speaking, you’re a collection of loosely integrated spirits. That’s one way of thinking about it—or subpersonalities. You’re not a unity. And those subpersonalities have their basis in, well in all sorts of things. They might have their basis in past especially traumatic experiences or in patterns of socialization that characterized your family, but they might also have their basis in fundamental biological motivational systems.

So, for example, a psychoanalyst would contextualize anger, or perhaps sexual attraction, as a subpersonality. And the reason for that is that—well you know what it’s like when you get angry. You get angry at someone you love, and you know, first of all, you know, and it’s some level you’re wishing harm. Now, that might only be that you want to win the argument and you want them to be nicely crushed while you do it, but so there’s a desire that comes along with the anger.

But there’s a lot of other things that happen too. So, for example, if someone’s annoying you, even if you love them, the probability that at that moment you’re going to be able to easily access all the memories you have about how annoying they are and have a difficult time accessing the memories about how wonderful they’ve been to you is quite high. You know, and you know that because sometimes you get angry with someone and you have an argument with them, and you sort of clue in later.

You snap out of your more or less possessed state and you think, “Yeah, well you know, I really wasn’t taking the context into mind and I was kind of harsh.” So, well, so and so then you think, “Well, who’s in control?” And that’s the question the psychoanalysts are really interested in, and their answer is it’s not generally you. And so it’s very terrifying reading in some sense because, you know, people like to think of themselves as masters of their own house, so to speak, and it’s just, it’s only vaguely true.

And, you know, people—you know that too because you make maybe New Year’s Eve—ah, what do you call those?—resolutions. How you’re going to be a better person. I think the most common ones is man, you’re going to hit the gym three times a week. It’s like, “No, you’re not actually!” And so very few people do and that’s partly because, well it’s hard, and so you don’t want to do hard things.

And the reason for that is because they’re hard, so it doesn’t take much explanation. But it’s also because you can’t just tell yourself what to do. And that’s annoying too because life would be a lot easier if you could just say, “Okay, well you know, sit down, study for two hours, don’t watch cats on YouTube—or whatever it is that you’re watching.” And no, no, no, that isn’t what happens.

You sit there and you study for a while and then, you know, you’re thinking about cats, and the next thing you know you’re watching haunted mansions in London or some damn thing. You know, so and it’s a scary idea in some sense because if you think, well, if you’re not really master of your own house, you know if you don’t know yourself under full voluntary control—and you certainly don’t—then what does?

And you know Freud is interesting in that regard because he really talked about the motive powerful of fundamental motivational systems. Mostly for Freud it was aggression and sexuality. And you know those are—those are big motivators; let’s make no mistake about it. And so he thought of you as—that the conscious part of your personality maybe as the—it’s like the captain of a ship with a very unruly crew.

It’s a nice metaphor because, of course, the ship’s o...