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 everyday. 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 what 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 animals, 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 tail, 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 the 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 behavior. 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 you’re 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’re 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 you’re
little corner dejected and bitter for the rest of your life. Now, you know, you might
that 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 because 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
short 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 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 developmental 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 moth 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 the 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.