Okay, so we’re going to wrap up Freud today.
So Freud occupies a strange position in the history of psychology, because Freud wasn’t
a psychologist, he was a medical doctor. And many of the people whose theories we’re
discussing were clinicians, were MDs, not psychologists. Well of course when Freud was
around, at least when he was training, psychology hadn’t yet become an independent science.
Now the same was true of Jung, and part of the consequence of that was that when the
new science of psychology developed into what you’re studying today, the psychoanalysts
and the medical community basically stayed outside of that. And there’s never really
been a meeting of the minds between experimental psychologists and psychoanalysts. Although,
by the 1980s, the cognitive psychologists were promoting their discovery of the cognitive
unconscious, which always felt to me a little bit ungrateful, given that Freud had actually
laid the groundwork for the theory of the unconscious and elaborated that in quite great
detail, you know, almost a hundred years before. There’s some resistance (and that’s what
a psychoanalyst would say) among the experimental psychology community to credit Freud with
any of his real discoveries, and I think that’s very unfortunate, partly because a) he did
make the discoveries, and b) the psychoanalysts still understand more about the nature of
the unconscious than modern experimental psychologists. Because modern experimental psychologists
insist on viewing the brain as a cognitive process, or something like a computer, and
that isn’t what it is. It’s a living system composed of other living subsystems. And that
means that, as we’ve discussed already, the human psyche and its subordinate components
are better conceived of as personalities and sub-personalities than in any other manner,
than in systems or than in information processing machines.
It’s… I think perhaps the most fundamental accomplishment of psychoanalysis, following
Nietzsche, actually, to view the human mind, the human psyche, as a place of relatively
integrated sub-personalities. I mean, even when modern people talk about themselves,
they talk about the ‘I’ (which would roughly be the ego, in Freudian terms), they tend
to think of themselves as a unitary phenomenon. But the problem with that notion is that people
continually do things… they find themselves doing things that in principle they don’t
want to do, or things that they’re ashamed of, or lying when they don’t want to lie,
or generally misbehaving. And it’s also, of course, everybody’s observation that
you can try to tell yourself what to do, but that doesn’t work very well. So you know,
you’ve experienced this, undoubtedly in your own life many, many times, when you’re
sitting down and you’re trying to study for something, particularly if you’re not
very interested in it, then all sorts of alternative possibilities will make themselves manifest
in the theater of your imagination. And in a sense what’s happening in those situations
is that parts of you that are organised around other goals or, from the Freudian perspective,
say, driven by other desires, are trying to hijack control of your motor output. And that
frequently happens, so that you find yourself, for example, procrastinating, or rationalising,
or displacing (those are all Freudian concepts). A displacement would be, instead of doing
the work you’re supposed to do you go off and do some other work. You know, it’s not
a bad way of procrastinating, but it’s not great, because you’re not focusing on what
you should be focusing on. And so, in some sense, you’re at war with yourself. And
the major player in the war, at least in principle, is the ego, and that would be equivalent to
Freud’s conscious mind, at least in the initial stages of his theory.
It’s somewhat complicated to talk about Freud because of course his theory developed
across time, and in the beginning, he basically broke the mind up into the conscious mind
and the unconscious mind. And you can think of the conscious mind, well that’s you,
essentially, that’s the you that you can refer to during day to day experience. And
then the unconscious mind is a storehouse of two broad classes of phenomena. And one
would be drives that are grounded in instinct, that are either at odds with your current
goal, or memories, often traumatic, that you haven’t been able to integrate into your
conscious framework. And so those pesky things take on their own life.
You know if you take an animal and you take out increasingly large segments of its cortex,
say, the animal still organises itself into that animal. Like it starts to lose function,
especially if you go deep into the brain (and you can kill an animal if you go deep into
the brain), but if you stay on the cortical surface, you can take an awful lot of brain
tissue out without interfering with a lot of the animal’s ability to sustain itself.
And what that shows is that the brain is organised in such a way so that isolated components
of it will take on a function of the entire personality. And that’s demonstration, in
some sense, that the sub-elements of the psyche, or perhaps sub-systems of the brain, can organise
themselves into functional living units. And it stands to reason. I mean, if you lose an
arm you don’t stop functioning. You just reorganise your personality minus the arm.
And if you have only managed to integrate a certain subset of the potential psychic
manifestations of your mind, then that subset is going to formulate the main personality,
but all the other things you’re ignoring or can’t integrate, they’re going to have
a life of their own. They don’t just disappear. And so, Freud offers the unsettling idea that
you’re by no means master in your own house. And one of the ways you can determine that
is by watching yourself do things that you don’t want to do. And those are things,
for example, that you’d have a hard time facing up to, because of course most of the
things that you don’t want to do are things that you might be ashamed of or anxious about.
And then of course there’s the defeat that you suffer when your ego is hypothetically
in control of the circumstance and you find your behaviour or your thoughts directed in
some direction under the control of something that you think that you’ve mastered.
You can really see this in conditions like anorexia. Especially if it’s accompanied
by bulimia, which it often is. So anorexia is an eating disorder that causes people,
I think essentially, to become extremely disgusted with their own physiology, with their own
physical being. And it warps their perceptions terribly. So I had an anorexic client at one
point, and she was a rather small woman, maybe 5’2” or something like that. Quite thin,
obviously, she had anorexia. And I asked her when she was in my office if her thigh was
bigger or smaller than mine. And she said well it was about the same size. So I took
a piece of paper and I sat on it and I drew the outline of my thigh on it, and then I
had her sit on the same piece of paper and she drew the outline of her thigh. And of
course, there was probably that much space on both sides between the two outlines. Well
she probably looked at that for fifteen minutes. You know, she could not believe that that
could possibly be the case. And I think what happens in anorexics is that
they stop being able to look at their whole bodies. So when you look at yourself in the
mirror, you kind of have to look in a Gestalt manner, you have to get a picture of the whole.
Alternatively you can focus on small parts, but the more you focus on parts, the more
difficult it is to see the parts in relationship to the whole. And anorexics get unbelievably
focused on small elements, and they confuse themselves. So for example, if they’re looking
at their arms and there’s some flesh on it, they are unable to make a distinction
between flesh and fat, and they want no fat, they want to go right down to the bone. And
they can’t… because they’re concerned about that tiny little part or maybe this
tiny little part, or wherever they happen to be focusing, they get completely unable
to perceive their own bodies. And it’s quite striking how far that can go.
And then the bulimic end of it is, well, the person will starve themselves for a long period
of time, and of course, we’ll think about this in modern physiological terms, feeding
behaviour is regulated by the hypothalamus, and that’s an ancient brain region that
controls fundamental biological systems. And it’s right above the spinal cord and it’s
a very, very, very powerful centre of control in the brain. It’s functional enough, and
I think I told you this before, that if you take a cat and you cut off its entire cortex,
and even most of its emotional systems, if you leave it just with the hypothalamus and
spinal cord, which means it almost has no brain, it can organise its behaviour almost
perfectly, as long as you keep it in a simple environment.
So anyways, the anorexic attempts to starve but… so that’s a conscious goal, you might
say, or an ego-related goal, or you could even think about it as a goal that’s motivated
by other unconscious forces, because she doesn’t know why she wants to starve, but in any case,
what generally happens is, she’ll run into an emotionally upsetting situation. Now emotional
upset, it makes you anxious, or puts you in emotional pain. That activates higher brain
centres than the hypothalamus, but they’re still pretty low, they’re still pretty primordial.
And one of the things that kind of emotional upset does (let’s call it stress) is shut
off your long-term planning. And the reason for that is that if you’re stressed in the
immediate now, your body and brain presume that you should devote… divert resources
from the hypothetical future to solving the problem that’s right in front of you, and
that’s often a more behaviourally oriented solution, like freezing or withdrawing, or
something like that. So it shuts off your pre-frontal cortex.
Well as soon as that happens, then the hypothalamus, which is, as I said, a very powerful system,
just reaches up in some sense and dominates the person. I mean, it’s been there for
God only knows how long, you know, tens of millions of years, and its job is to stop
you from starving to death. And you know, you can imagine that over the course of evolutionary
history anybody who had a relatively weak feeding instinct died. And so they weren’t
our ancestors. And so what happens to the bulimic is, something will upset them, and
then they’ll get an uncontrollable desire for often something that’s high-calorie
and sweet and full of fat, logically enough, because they’re starving, and then they’ll
eat a whole quart of ice cream and two loaves of bread.
And you know, they describe the state that they’re in while they’re doing that as
dissociative. You know, it doesn’t feel like them. Well you can imagine why, in some
sense. It partly is the whole realm of eating behaviour. And eating is a sub-personality,
it’s not just a behaviour and it’s not a drive. When you think about when you’re
hungry, it’s not like your brain is moving you literally step by determined step. It’s
that you start fantasizing about food and you start thinking about what you maybe want
and then you start to make plans about where you’re going to go or how you’re going
to cook it and what social surround there’s going to be and a whole bunch of things, and
that’s the hungry you. Well in an anorexic or a bulimic, the hungry part of the person
is so dissociated from the ego part, that they’re basically in a war. But one of the
problems with being in a war with your hypothalamus is that it almost always wins. And it’s
a good thing, because otherwise you die. And lots of anorexics do manage to starve themselves
to death. And so that’s a good example of just exactly
how dissociable the mind can be. And the mind is also… the brain is dissociable in the
strangest possible ways. So here’s an example. I don’t remember the name of this syndrome,
it might pop into my mind. So you can have a particular kind of stroke, and here’s
the effect of the stroke. You develop the fixed delusion that a person who’s very
close to you (Capgras syndrome) has died or been kidnapped, or somehow disappeared, and
has been replaced by their exact double. And so it’s obviously something… it manifests
itself as something akin to psychosis. And what happens is that the stroke damages the
relationship between, generally, the visual systems that identify faces and the emotional
systems that tag the identified face with familiar emotion. So basically what happens,
let’s say it happens to you and it’s your mother… you look at your mother, but it
isn’t your mother. You know, your mother comes with a whole complex of memories, and
you know, she’s set in a very broad context of memory and emotion. And then you look at
this person, and it looks like your mother, but none of that is happening. And so then
you develop this idea that well, if it’s not my mother and looks exactly like my mother,
well then what could possibly be going on? And the answer is well obviously she’s been
taken away and replaced by her exact duplicate. People get into real trouble with this sort
of delusion, as you might imagine, because they get obsessed with trying to solve the
problem: what did you do with my mother? And you can understand why but here’s a weirder
thing, which is that it’s modality-specific. So that if they listen to their mother on
the phone, that’s their mother. So you see exactly how dissociable the brain is, the
mind is. Even down to small sub-functions. So there are people with strokes who can sing
but who can’t talk. And there are people who lose nouns and there are people who lose
only verbs. And there are people who can identify things but they can’t name them. So the
idea that the brain is a dissociable entity is obviously correct. And here’s another
example of it. Well you dissociate all the time. Now if you
look at the way the brain is structured. So there’s a strip right about here called
the motor strip. And if you’re doing brain surgery and you touch someone with an electrode
on that strip they’ll move the corresponding part of the body. And the hands are very,
very over-represented, and so is the face and the lips and the tongue, for obvious reasons.
We fiddle around with the world a lot, we move our arms and our hands a lot. The feet
are over-represented too. And then we communicate about that with our face and our tongues.
So there’s huge representation there. And if you touch that you get motion, or at least
the person will describe a strong impulse to move. Well out of that grew the pre-frontal
cortex. And the best way to think… people think about that as the substrate of abstract.
It’s not really a good way of thinking about it, because you’re not really out to think.
You’re out to act. And the reason you think is so that you can try out some actions in
a little world of fantasy before you implement them in your behaviour. So to think things
through means to conjure up an abstracted world and then to conjure up a representation
of yourself acting in that world to calculate the consequences and then to decide whether
you’re going to implement it. Well that’s another form of dissociability. Because you
could think without acting. Now, you know, it’s certainly that part
of you that’s able to conjure up the alternative worlds that human beings seem to particularly
identify with, you know. That part that’s thinking… at least modern people really
think of the part that’s thinking as them, or the part that’s capable of conjuring
up abstract ideas. And if it wasn’t dissociable you’d just act out everything you thought.
Well that wouldn’t work very well. So the brain is actually designed, in many ways,
so to speak, to be dissociable. So if you understand that, and then you understand the
two sets of phenomena that are likely to be dissociated, then you kind of got the essence
of Freudian theory. And the things that are likely to be dissociated are 1) memories that
were traumatic, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, and 2) impulses… they’re
not impulses, they’re not even drives, which was the Freudian way of thinking about it,
they’re sub-personalities… troublesome sub-personalities. And you can imagine that
those would be linked to complex positive and negative emotions. One might be resentment,
guilt, shame, anger, anxiety, jealousy, rage, lust, all of those emotions are difficult
to integrate into a personality properly, partly because, in their pure manifestation,
they’re not… they disrupt the social order. So like, think about how well regulated all
of you are sitting here. You think, well you’re… it’s six million years since you diverged
from chimpanzees. If we took a bunch of chimpanzees that knew each other as well as you know each
other, this place would be an absolute brutal massacre. So, you know, for whatever reason,
you can control your primordial instincts, that’s one way of looking at it, that’s
how Freud would look at it, you learn to control them. And Freud’s theory, and this is where
it differs from the theories that we talked about earlier, say with regards to Piaget,
Freud’s theory is really more about control. He thought of all these potential sub-systems
and memories conflicting with each other. Like a war. Like a Hobbesian war. So Hobbes
was the philosopher who said that life is nasty, brutal, and short, and that in this
state of nature everyone is at war with everyone else. And so you need a Leviathan, a top-down
control system, who will punish any deviance from the social contract. Well that’s the
Freudian super-ego. Now Freud thought of the unconscious and the conscious mind to begin
with, but later he dissociated that up into id, ego, and super-ego. And then he thought
that each of those had their unconscious elements. So you, if you’re under the grip of an id-related
sub-personality, let’s say, you could be conscious of that, but there’s the possibility
for all sorts of other id-related sub-personalities to emerge, so those would be in your unconscious.
And it’s also possible, and highly likely, in fact, that the way that you’re perceiving
the world and the way you’re acting in it, and even what you state as your goals are
influenced in ways that you don’t understand by the action of these unconscious systems.
So for example, maybe some of you are headed for medical school, and if I ask you why you’ll
give me six humanitarian reasons, but the actual reason is because your grandmother
would be disappointed if you weren’t. And she might not even be alive anymore, you know,
she may have… your mother may have imitated your grandmother so that that ideal is firmly
embodied in her, and that set up the unspoken expectations about your behaviour ever since
you were a tiny child. So that’s an interesting sub-element of
psychodynamic theory too, and it’s really something to watch for in your personal relationships.
It’s very, very frequently, if you watch carefully, that you can see someone, especially
someone you love, because you have to know them well, being taken over, in some sense,
by the spirit of one of their ancestors. And I don’t mean this in a metaphysical way.
I mean that the thought… the personality of the grandmother or the personality of the
mother has a structure that’s well-known to the individual in question, and that individual
spent a lot of time imitating them in all sorts of ways. And those imitated structures
can be passed down generation to generation. I mean in fact, that’s partly what constitutes
your culture, right? It’s the imitated personality of all of your ancestors that constitutes
your culture. And those things can possess. Ideologies possess you in… not exactly the
same way, but in a similar way. Okay, so you’ve got the id, and you’ve
got the ego and the super-ego. And, as in the Hobbesian worldview, there’s real tension
between them, so that the id is always trying to get its base gratifications, its base desires
gratified. Now, in Freudian times, that was mostly problematic in relationship to sex.
And the reasons for that are quite clear. There was no valid birth control, there was
very little employment option for women, so their sexual behaviour had to be very, very
tightly regulated or they’d fall outside of the social structure into prostitution,
or something like that, and then there was the threat of various venereal diseases, most
particularly syphilis, which is as awful a disease as you can imagine. It can imitate
or mimic all sorts of other diseases, and it’s transmissible from mother to child.
So it’s a nasty one. So it was very difficult for the Victorians to integrate sexuality,
because well, exactly how did you do that? The one pathway to potential integration,
something the super-ego would approve of, was a martial pathway. But you know, people
back then, back in the 1960s, people were getting married around 19 or 20, but that’s
actually a historical anomaly. I mean, typically speaking, in the Victorian age, a man usually
couldn’t afford to get married till he was in his mid-to-late twenties, he just didn’t
have the resources. Women were married usually younger than that.
But so there was a long period of time, for men particularly, but also for women, where
the sexual drive, from a Freudian perspective, was fully flourishing, fully manifesting itself,
but there was no socially approved mode of expression. And so, under those conditions,
there’s a war between the id and the super-ego, and the poor little ego is crushed in the
middle. Now you could certainly see that when we were watching the movie, the Crumb brothers
movie, because they were basically in the same situation. There was no socially approved
way that they could manifest any sexual or any aggressive behaviour. And what happened
as a consequence was that both of those fundamental sub-personalities, let’s call them, become
incredibly pathologised. Particularly characterised by resentment and the desire for revenge.
Because remember these systems think… if someone’s excruciatingly sexually frustrated,
let’s say, and let’s think about it in the broader scheme of things, because sexuality
isn’t really… it’s not a narrow uni-dimensional drive. You know, it’s associated with playfulness,
and it’s associated with the desire for social contact, and the desire for communication,
and the desire for touch… like it’s a complicated, multi-branching phenomenon. Well,
in the case of the people who we were watching in the movie, none of that was either integrated
into their personalities, let’s say, or permitted by society. And so it was bent and
warped and frustrated and then generated all sorts of ideas about resentment and revenge
around it. So you can develop an incredibly pathological sub-personality.
In the one cartoon if you remember, it was the one that was most disturbing, where Mr.
Natural brought Robert that headless woman. So he wanted pure gratification without responsibility.
So it’s a really id driven phenomenon. So he had intercourse with her and immediately
after that was unbelievably guilty. And you can see… so you think about what that must
mean. It’s like someone is under the grip of one sub-personality, and it’s shaping
all of their thoughts and their memories and their emotions. And all of a sudden that becomes
gratified, so it’s satiated, it disappears and bang, up comes the other one. And in this
particular example it was guilt and shame and anxiety, terror even, and self-loathing,
all of those things. And if you read about the experiences of people who commit particularly
atrocious crimes, it’s very, very common for them to experience exactly that. They’re
driven by sexual/aggressive impulses, because those are the ones generally that culminate
in particularly atrocious individual crimes. And then they’ll commit them and instantly
flip back into their normative personality, except they’re absolutely terrified by what
they did. And you know, it’s… more than one person is inhabiting the same psyche.
Now, they’re tied together by memory, generally speaking, although Freud would say you can
also dissociate memory. And so Freud talked about memories being repressed. And that’s
caused an awful lot of trouble, for a whole variety of reasons. Because memory is not
the objective recording… it’s not the objective unbiased recording of actually occurring
events. First of all because you can’t objectively record certain kinds of events, like we talked
about this before. You can’t really objectively record a discussion between a man and a woman
who’ve been married for 20 years about anything important because for them, each word and
each phrase and each sentence and each facial expression has to be interpreted within the
context of the entire relationship in order for the meaning of the utterances to be extracted.
And there’s just no way you can record that in a video. You’d have to have videoed the
entire relationship. And so you’re not going to do that. And so memory is a very, very
peculiar thing, and the idea that you could have an objective record is not a very sophisticated
idea. Anyways, Freud idea, in some sense… he had
a somewhat… I hate to say… it was an insufficiently sophisticated notion of what memory was. Now
I hate to say that, because Freud was a very sophisticated person. But he did, in some
sense, believe in the existence of an objective interpersonal world. And so he thought that
if something terrible happened to you when you were a child, that you had a record of
the memory. It was there, as the memory, as the event. And then you needed something that
would, like a censor that would repress that, and then you needed a place for it to be repressed
into, which would be the unconscious. But if you take apart a traumatic memory, generally
speaking, with someone… sorry, he [Freud] also thought that repressed memory might be
represented in a symptom, a symbolic symptom. So I think that the repression theory suffers
from the inadequacy of its representation of memory, because here’s a different way
of thinking about it. It’s more in keeping with the layer model, a hierarchical layer
model that we’ve been entertaining as we’ve progressed.
So imagine that you’re molested by your uncle, because it’s usually a family member,
when you’re four. Sexually molested. Okay, the first thing you have to ask yourself is
just exactly what kind of memory do you have? Imagine you’re completely sexually naïve,
which basically means you know nothing about the sexual act, and its implications, or the
mechanics, but this happens to you. So the first question is, how do you represent that?
Because to remember something you have to represent it, that’s the thing. Because
you don’t just have a memory of the event. It’s always interpretation, because there’s
so many things going on. Well so, maybe your representation is pain and confusion, something
like that. And then there’d be another layer over that, which would be the necessity for
secrecy. Because of course, the person who does the molesting is going to tell you, well
one of two things, three maybe: it’s good for you, you asked for it, don’t tell anyone
or they’ll think you’re a bad person, this will be our little secret. Something
like that. So then there’s that whole overlay of secrecy and inadmissibility, and what are
you supposed to do about that when you’re four? How are you supposed to understand that
soemthign has just transpired that you’re not allowed to share with anyone? You don’t
have a model of the world that’s sophisticated enough to account for all that.
And so then perhaps from then on what you do is avoid thinking about it. Now that’s
not the same thing as repression. Avoiding thinking about something is not the same as
repression. Because it doesn’t require an act of repress in order to do it. And then
maybe, you know, years later, you start to recall what happened. But what you recall
is an unclear mess. And maybe most of it… because you might say, well how are things
represented as memories when you can’t develop a sophisticated representation? And what seems
to happen, and this is in a sense, the reverse of Freudian theory, is that the event is represented
in the body. And so you can think about the representation of event as a multilayered
neurological phenomenon. And so if you encounter something that’s unexpected or frightening,
the first thing that happens is that very, very ancient reflexive systems act first.
And those things are fast. And so that’s the sort of thing that, for
example, might protect you against a snake bite. If a snake jumped out at you you’re
going to jump backwards, and believe me, you do that before you even see the snake. Because
it probably takes you a quarter of a second to produce a complex visual representation
of the snake. And if you wait around for a quarter of a second, then you’re dead. And
so what’s happened is that your nervous system has conserved basic reflexes that are
only a few synapses long. And so maybe those work between your retina and your spinal cord.
Your retina and maybe a very primordial emotional system, like the amygdala, is wired up to
detect things like snakes and it just sends a message down to your spinal cord, or slightly
more sophisticated motor control systems that says “jump backwards now’. And then maybe,
you think about it, it isn’t even till after that that your heart rate goes up and your
blood pressure goes up and you start to breathe heavily, and then there’s a wave of fear
and revulsion, which is perhaps there to teach you not to do such a stupid thing again. You
know, we don’t exactly know why you would experience negative emotion, you know, or
what function a negative emotion has, except that we do know that a pattern of neurological
behaviour that’s followed by a punishment, or a threat, is less likely to be re-implemented
in the future. Okay, so the reaction to the anomalous thing
is body, and then maybe it’s emotion, and then maybe it’s image, like imagination,
you know, what just happened? And then maybe it’s articulated speech. But lots of things
don’t get past image to articulated speech, and some things, I think, don’t even get
past body. [Dr. Peterson’s phone rings] Sorry about that. So I don’t think that
these traumatic memories are so much repressed, as Freud had it, as never brought forward
for development. So I’ll tell you a story about how this
might work, okay? So one time I had this client, and she was 27, and I only saw her once. This
was when I was just training to be a psychotherapist. And she came in to see me and she said that
she had been plagued by these thoughts of being sexually abused when she was a child.
And I said, well, who was doing this to you? And she said, well it was my brother. And
she said, he was a lot older than me. And so I formulated this mental model of her being,
you know, somewhere between 10 and 13 and her brother being somewhere between 15 and
20, because the way she described it was that she was overpowered by a physically larger
male. So we talked for a while. And then she finally told me… I said well how old were
you when this happened? And she said well I was four. Okay, and then I said, well okay,
how old was your brother? And she said well he was six. And so I said well look, you know,
here’s one way of looking at it. Like you’re looking at it from the perspective of the
four-year-old. It’s a regression, in some sense. That’s still how old you are as far
as experiencing the memory. Here’s an alternative hypothesis. Your brother wasn’t a predator,
you were both terribly supervised children. Well, you know, that made the lights go on
in her mind. Because she never thought about it that way. Like she’d never taken that
representation, which would be her emotional experience as a four-year-old related to a
six-year-old… a six-year-old is a lot bigger and more powerful than a four-year-old, right?
It’s like 50% older, so it’s a big deal when you’re four. But if the issue for the
memory is its relevance to current conceptualisation and behaviour, it was much better for her
to update the memory, in a sense, and think, well, yeah, like a six-year-old’s this high,
and a four-year-old’s this high, and what the hell were my parents doing anyways? And
that’s an entirely different story than the one that she had come in with.
And you know, that seemed to be a great relief to her, and that’s partly because, you know,
if you’re bothered by a traumatic memory, it keeps resurfacing on you, which it will,
and it’s actually one of the ways of identifying a traumatic memory, it’s that the thing
won’t leave you alone. It’ll keep coming up in dreams and when your mind is wandering,
it’ll keep coming up when your mind is wandering, and maybe it’ll come up when you’re going
to sleep at night, like it invades your mind. There’s a reason for that, and the reason
is is that the underlying emotional systems that are associated with anxiety, so those
are mostly the hippocampus and amygdala duo, in some sense, that are mediating those, they’re
an alarm system. And the alarm is something that’s potentially dangerous has happened,
you need to figure out what it means so you can stop that from happening in the future.
Okay so you need a plan. And to get a plan you have to do a causal analysis of the relationship
between your behaviour and the traumatic outcome. That would be the first thing. And then you
have to come up with a way that that won’t happen again. And, of course, for my client,
that happened pretty much right away, because now she was a 27-year-old woman and the probability
that she was going to be subject in any serious way to a situation the same as the one she
was remembering was zero. And I’ve seen this in other clients too,
is when they’re… okay, I had another client, who, when she was, I think I told you about
her briefly, when she was young, four years old, she jumped in a shopping cart and went
down a hill, like a paved hill, in the shopping cart and spilled out at the bottom and hurt
herself. And they took her to the hospital. And then, you know, she’s all primed for
being threatened. So that kind of means you’re open to rewiring. And so then when she’s
in the hospital they don’t let her parents come and see her for a couple of weeks. So
the trauma, the pain and the anxiety and the threat and the ambulance ride and all those
things, which sort of puts her in a state like this, which might be a, like a, state
that’s particularly conducive to learning, because if something traumatic is happening,
you should be learning about that, what the world’s like around that right now. And
she developed a permanent trauma-related paranoia about institutions, which turned, by the time
met her, had turned into a whole philosophy of institutional oppression. But its core
was that, and you know, rightly so, its core was that combination of physiological trauma
and psychological trauma. And you know, mishandling of the situation by people in authority.
So you can see under those circumstances how a traumatic memory can become a core of a
whole large sub-personality, and that has to be taken apart very carefully, especially
if that subpersonality isn’t the kind that can be easily integrated into the world. So
for example, if you’re paranoid about all institutions, you’re in real trouble, because
in a modern world, you’re faced with the necessity of dealing with institutions all
the time. And if you’re more distrustful and paranoid about them than you could be
if you were sophisticated, all that’s going to happen is they’re going to continually
mistreat you. Because I mean if a dog comes up to you and it’s looking suspiciously
and it’s barking and growling, you’re not going to pet it. The way that you interact
with the system depends… the reaction of a system to you is dependent, to a large degree,
on how you approach the system. So anyways, the dissocaibility idea is a really
good one. I mean, if you want to get to know yourself better, and this is sort of a combination
of Freudian and Jungian ideas, one of the things to do is to… so imagine that you
have some sort of goal in mind. The first question that you might ask yourself is, why
do you have that goal? What are the influences on you that have set that goal up, because
it easily could be conscious or partially conscious, or poorly explained, or implicit,
any of those things. So you want to know that, why are you doing what you’re doing? And
the second thing is, if you find yourself avoiding things on the way to that goal, the
next question is, why are you avoiding them? And you know, that’ll mean delving into
parts of yourself that are quite hidden and quite uncomfortable. So for example, if you
discover that the reason you’re pursuing a particular goal is because it’s what your
parents want you to do, one question that immediately arises is, yeah but is that what
you want to do? And, you know, that’s a very complicated
question. Because you’d have to dissociate the part of you that’s ‘the you that doesn’t
want to do it’ from the part of you that’s ‘the you that does want to do it’. And
then you’d have to figure out why in the world you’d be avoiding. So you know, it
might be that you’re unbelievably angry that you’ve been tilted towards this particular
goal for reasons that have nothing to do with your choice, and so that every time you have
the opportunity to study, or accomplish something that would move you farther to that goal,
you’re either not motivated, so you can’t pay attention, you can’t study, you can’t
learn, and you procrastinate all the time, or you do seriously counter-productive things.
So people for example, people can be… I just had someone write me here a while ago,
because he was watching the YouTube lectures, and he said that he had dreams for six weeks
that he drove his car off a cliff and crashed it. And then, at the end of the dream series
he drove his car off the cliff and crashed it. And he asked me what that meant. And I
said well, the dream is telling you that you’re being far too careless with your life. I mean,
that’s what driving a car off a cliff repeatedly means. It’s like, you know, that’s a good
descent, unconscious descent, into the underworld. Well, and he was being warned, the psychological
reality was such that the warning was extremely serious and so was the danger. And so then
you might say, well why would he drive himself off a cliff? Well, you know, that’s a suicidal
gesture. And then you might ask, well why would somebody be suicidal, and that could
be, well they’re out for revenge against their parents, or they’re out for revenge
against the whole world, or they’re out for revenge against themselves, or they just
want to make their painful consciousness go away, or they’re living a messy and pointless
and painful life, and they want to punish themselves for it. You know, it’s very,
very complicated and tangled down there at the bottom of things, and people don’t really
like to look into it, and I suppose to some degree that’s the shadow element. Because
what you find there is seldom what you want. I mean one of the prime dictums of Jungian
psychotherapy, and most psychotherapies are predicated on the idea that you should find
out what you’re avoiding and then you should figure out how to voluntarily face it. Now,
you might add to that, you should find out what you’re doing and why, and see if that’s
actually what you want to be doing. And if those reasons are reasons you like. That might,
you know, in some sense sum up therapy in a couple of phrases. But in order to manage
that, then you have to look at all the things you’ve been avoiding. Well, what do you
avoid? Well, it isn’t rainbows and cookies, right? The things that you avoid are the things
that no one wants to look at. And so, Jung’s primary dictum for his psychotherapeutic practice
was a Latin phrase, which is ‘instercuilinis invinoteur’ which I’m probably pronouncing
wrong, which means either ‘in filth it will be found’, or ‘where you want most is
to be found where you least want to look’. And you know those… that’s a horrible
philosophy. But you can see that it’s almost self-fulfilling, because of course the things
you’re going to avoid are the things you don’t want to face. Obviously.
Now, the shadow element of the psyche, in some sense, when you were watching the movie,
for example, you saw these drives, mostly sexual and aggressive, that were manifesting
themselves in all sorts of ways. And so that would be maybe the repressed or unincorporated
elements of the id. But then there was another more complex side of that, where the… people
were reacting to that, because they felt downtrodden and oppressed and anti-social and critical
of social structure and all of that. Because they were unable to manifest themselves properly
in the world. And that produced fantasies of extreme destruction, exceptional destruction.
And for them they were mostly sexually related. But for other people that can manifest itself
in incredibly violent fantasies about the destruction of society as such. So if you
can’t invite all the parts of you out to play, the parts that get left behind are not
very happy about it, and they don’t just sit around having a tea party. They turn into,
especially as you mature, they turn into these warped monsters. And their mode of action
in the world is anything but positive. And a Freudian world… like the world of
the psychoanalytic unconscious, is quite a terrifying place, because it makes you second-guess
everything. It’s like, it’s not a paranoia. It’s very, very difficult, once you’re
trained psychoanalytically, to ever assume that someone’s benevolent motivations are
only what they claim they are. You’re always looking for the other missing piece. And I
think it’s extremely useful, you know, because you run into people, particularly ideologues,
who will claim that they’re acting on the world’s behalf. It’s like, yeah, who made
you a saint? And why should I believe all the good is on your side? Like, what is it
that you’re not talking about? What is it that you’re not revealing? I got something
from Greenpeace once, for example, that was asking for donations. And the brochure was
just photographs of all the people who were on the board. I thought, why do I want to
see photographs of all the people who are on the board of Greenpeace? Or, the other
question is, why do they want to show them? Well, you don’t have to think very hard
to figure that out. You know, it’s a status manoeuver. What you’d expect in a mail-out
like that is “here’s six things that we’ve done in the last six years that have improved
the planet, and here’s what we spent, in relationship to administrative costs, and
here’s why it was a good idea”, not “here’s our leaders”. Now there’s something wrong
there. And I mean, I picked Greenpeace because it just happened to pop in mind but it’s
the case for all sorts of organisations. Alright, so Freud, by 1900, had identified
a lot of different functions of the unconscious, and so, here’s four of them. One was the
unconscious had a conservative function, which meant that it stored memories, often inaccessible
to voluntary recall. Now we don’t really know how memories are stored in the brain,
but here’s a guess. So when you have an experience, imagine that that produces a pattern
of neural activity. It’s not just neural, but a pattern of activity in your brain and
in your body. At least part of how you remember is to reactivate that pattern, but it’s
not that simple obviously, because otherwise you’d act out all your memories precisely,
and we don’t know exactly how that initial pattern of experience gets edited down to
the thing you remember. But we do know that it gets edited down in some ways as a consequence
of its relevance to your current goal structure. How that happens? [shrugs] It seems computationally
impossible. We really don’t understand how it happens at all. We don’t understand how
you can compute what’s relevant and what isn’t. It seems that the world is too complex
for that to even be possible. So conservative. Dissolutive. The unconscious
contains habits, once voluntary, now automatized, and dissociated elements of the personality,
which may lead a parasitic existence. So I talked a little bit about traumatic memories,
and how they might form the node of the development of the sub-personality, but there’s something
else that’s worth understanding too. So let’s say you start practising a new minor
mode of being, a new attitude, or a new personality attribute, or a new habit, let’s say. It
can be a fairly small thing. When you first start practising it, you’re not very good
at it. For those of you who are musicians, when you first start to play a piece, you’re
very inefficient at it. And then the more you practice it, the more efficient you get.
It’s very weird. I’m not a very good pianist but I learned to play one really difficult
song. But the terrible thing is that I’ll learn to play it, and then at some point I’ll
realise I don’t know the notes any more, and as soon as I realise I don’t know the
notes, I can’t use those habit patterns anymore. And then I have to figure out the
notes again, it’s very, very annoying. But anyways, when you first start practicing
something, it’s effortful, it requires a lot of brain activation, that’s what the
scanning studies show. But as you practice it more and more, the amount of brain that
you use starts to shrink… it generally moves left because the right hemisphere is more
involved in novelty processing. It generally moves left and then it moves back, and the
area gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until you’ve generated up a little machine.
Or it’s a little hard-wired sub-personality that takes care of that particular operation.
Now that’s worth thinking about too, because what that means in some sense is that your
brain is full of the things that you’ve practised. And that’s not exactly psychological,
right, it’s psychophysiological. It’s part of your psyche but it’s also hard-wired
into your brain. If you want to overcome one of those habits you have to build a new machine
that shuts it off. You can’t just get rid of it. And then what happens if you get stressed
often, that new machine will get… I don’t know exactly how it happens. The stress will
reduce the functioning of the new machine and the old habit will pop back up.
Some of you will have noticed this. How many of you have moved away from home? Okay so
how many of you notice, when you go to your family of origin, that all sorts of personality
traits that you thought you abandoned immediately come flooding back. So you know that sensation,
right? You go back there and it’s like bam! There’s a groove, and you’re right in
it. And you know, maybe you’re as mature as a 30-year-old when you’re at your own
house but as soon as you come home, it’s like poof! You’re fourteen again. And it’s
partly because of that expectancy situation set up by your parents, but it’s also partly
because you just don’t understand how much of your behaviour is automatic and cued by
ongoing events. It’s habitual. And so, those, you might think of those as somewhat dissociated
elements of the personality as well. Creative. The unconscious serves as the matrix
of new ideas. So that’s a more Jungian idea and the way that seems to work… you might
think, how in the world can you come up with a new idea? It doesn’t make sense, right?
Because what, are you conjuring something out of nothing? Well, and you can say well
they’re combinations of old ideas, but that’s not that helpful because you can’t just
take a bunch of old ideas and then shuffle them and come up with some new, spectacular
ideas. It’s a lot more complicated than that. So here’s one way to think about…
Freud investigated, in some sense, the surface of the creative unconscious, and he was more
concerned about the… Jung called Freud’s unconscious the personal unconscious. So that
might be the unconscious that you have that’s related specifically to your experiences,
conscious and unconscious. Like it can be deep. Jung had a dream once, for example,
(I hope I’ve got this right) that Freud and him were excavating the basement of a
structure, and that Jung broke through and found another huge structure underneath that.
And that’s just about exactly right. And so there’s the personal unconscious and
then underneath that, in theory, there’s what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’.
And that would be, God only know what that is. But in part what it would be is whatever
it is that makes you human from an evolutionary perspective.
And we don’t know… like you have a specific mode of being that’s a human mode of being.
I think it was E. O. Wilson, who’s a great entomologist and also the originator of sociobiology,
which is like a branch of evolutionary psychology, he studied ants forever, and social behaviour
of ants. And he once said if we could talk to ants we wouldn’t have anything to say
to them. And what he meant by that is that, like ants are interested in a bunch of things
that you don’t care about at all. Like they’re not jealous, they don’t get jealous, they
don’t fall in love, they don’t have sexual feelings or behaviours. They’re not a cognitive
creature. It’s like, what the hell are you going to talk to an ant about? “How’s
it going, carrying that grain of sand?” An ant doesn’t even care about that. And
so it’s interesting, it’s really a profound observation, because what it indicates is
that you couldn’t even communicate with someone unless you were 99% the same as they
are. Because to communicate with someone means you have to share a whole massive immense
set of presuppositions. So for example, if I say I got jealous at a party last week.
It’s like, you’re not going to say, what do you mean, jealous? That isn’t going to
be your question. You’re going to say, well what were the particular circumstances that
elicited that response? I don’t have to explain anger, I don’t have to explain playfulness,
hunger… you know, all the basic human motivations that you see displayed say, in the typical
adventure movie or romantic comedy. It’s like, those don’t need explanation, because
we’re the same. And it’s that sameness that constitutes the essence of the collective
unconscious. Now, Jung’s hypothesis was that you’re
not only biologically structured, you know, in terms of your morphology and your physiology,
but that that extends right up into your brain structure and even above that, into the contents,
either the contents of your psyche, or at least into the way that your psyche becomes
organised across time. And you know, it seems like a hypothesis that’s so bloody obvious
that you can’t believe that people would have disputed it for so long, but experimental
psychologists were very strongly influenced by behaviourists. And the behaviourists assumed,
partly for ideological reasons, and partly for the sake of scientific simplicity, that
human beings were blank slates, and that all we were was what we learned.
Well, there’s a book out now called ‘Human Universals’, unfortunately I can’t remember
the name of the author right now [Donald Brown] but it’s a book, it’s a work of sociology/anthropology,
and this person has collected human commonalities, so what’s the same about people everywhere.
Well, we pretty much all wear clothes, sometimes for protective purposes, but if not, generally
at least for ceremonial purposes. There’s pair-bonding in societies, people fall in
love. The basic emotions are the same. We use fire, that’s a big deal, you know, because
no other animal can manage that. There’s literally dozens and dozens of universal commonalities
across people, and that’s part of the substructure of the collective unconscious.
So anyways, back to the creative idea. Well, partly your creative act is going to be a
consequence of your attempts to integrate the peculiarities of your own experience with
the peculiarities of your culture, and the more general phenomena and states of being
that you share with other people. So because you come into the world and have your own
viewpoint, you have access to information that no other person has access to. And so
to some degree, that can be the basis of your creativity, just that information. But then
in order to communicate it, which is also part of being creative, right, because you
can’t just be… if you’re creative but no one can understand you, it’s more like
you’re schizophrenic than you are creative. You have loose associations and so forth but
you can’t put together a coherent story. So then you have to take that unique information
and integrate it with your cultural knowledge, your cultural narratives, and ground it in
universal human biology, and then you can present that as a creative act.
Now, that’s one possible place for the origin of new ideas, but here’s another. So remember
we talked about Piaget. And Piaget basically said that to begin to understand something
you act it out. So you represent the world with your body. By sitting on a chair you
represent the chair with your body. By walking through a doorway you represent the doorway
through your body. By grabbing a glass you do the same thing. So you’re matching…
you’re imitating the world all the time. So you’re mapping it onto your physiological
structure. Okay, so that you get a sense, that would mean, that’s kind of what understanding
means. You know, because that’s a complex term to sort of understand. What does it mean
to understand something? It means to get a grip on it. And you know, we use those terms
for a reason. You know, you’re standing firmly in relationship to it. You can handle
it. All of those things. So that’s one… so that’s the beginning,
but then also you’re capable of imitating, so you can imitate yourself, which is what
you do when you repeat experiences that have a positive outcome, but you can also imitate
other people. But then you think, okay, well who are those people imitating? Well the answer
to that is, it’s like we’re LED screens, and we’re constantly rippling imitations
of imitations of imitations of imitations across our physiological landscape. I mean,
you guys are the sum total of a very long evolutionary process, but you’re also the
sum total of an incredibly long process of mimicry. And so, what you mimic is your culture.
So you could think of your culture as something with a personality. It’s a complex personality.
And it’s the personality of your ancestors, a perfectly reasonable way of looking at that.
And you imitate that. You know, that’s why we call our laws a ‘body of laws’. And
you could say that the legal system, especially with English common law, is the articulated
representation of the imitative customs and rituals of the entire society. It’s been
brought right up into full articulation. But it was there to begin with.
So part of where you draw your material for creativity is that you observe the behaviours
and interactions of all people who’ve been imitating all people since the beginning of
time. And that’s unbelievably informative. It’s way more informative than you could
ever represent. You know how much information someone can indicate with just lifting your
eyebrow a quarter of an inch, right? That can indicate irony, that can indicate the
relationship of the joke to another set of jokes that that person knows that you like,
and it’s very complicated. You can’t articulate all that. But in some sense you know it, right,
you’re a player in that game. Well now and then… so then imagine, okay, you’ve got
all that embodied, to the degree that you’re a sophisticated player. Then your imagination
is representing you, and it’s representing the world. So that’s an abstraction, right?
Because your imagination is not the world, it’s a representation of the world. And
then what you can do… so that means in the imagination, there’s all sorts of information
that’s about the imitated behaviour. And then, then you can talk about the image.
That’s sort of what you do when you interpret a dream. So what’s your dream doing? Your
imagination is watching you wander around in the world. And you have your category systems
and your theories and so forth. And so then your dream puts forth what that… like an
imagistic representation of what that might signify. And it’s in this weird language,
which is an image-laden language. It can range from completely incoherent, just juxtaposed
images, to unbelievable complex and sophisticated full-developed narratives. And that’s part
of the process by which the information that’s embedded in you and the culture at a behavioural
level moves up to the imagination and then pops up into articulated space. So you have
a dream, the dream is about you. And then you talk about the dream, and what you’re
doing. You’re trying to translate the images into articulated representations. And that’s
also a good way of thinking about how memory moves from the bottom up.
And what’s interesting… you know how sometimes you have a realisation or a moment of insight?
And that… there’s a feeling that goes along with that, it’s like a charge. And
I think it’s a charge that you get from simplifying something but also from experiencing
the new possibilities that emerge as a consequence of that realisation. What seems to happen
is that you have the behavioural realm, let’s say, the things you act out, and all the things
you imitate, very, very, complex. And then on top of that you have the image of that,
right? And you’re trying to get the image right but it’s really hard because this
changes and this floats around. So you’re trying to get those lined up, and then on
top of that you’re trying to get your articulated representations lined up, so that you can
say about what you know about who you are. And when all those come together, you think
man, I’ve got my act together. But now and then you’ll have an insight, you know, you’ll
think… well, like this women who I told you about who had been molested. The insight
was well, I was a little kid but so was my brother. Bang! It’s like, wow, all sorts
of things that didn’t make sense anymore just fall into place. You get this articulated
representation that can sum up a whole bunch of… what would you call them? Divergent
and apparently unrelated image representations. And then all of a sudden your path forward
is clearer. Because you know more about who you are and you know more about how you…
where you’re going. And that is in large part what’s happening
in psychoanalysis. It’s certainly something that happens in dream analysis, which is something
that Freud also pioneered. You know, Freud believed that dreams were wish fulfillments.
And, you know, he believed that the function of dreams about wish fulfillments were to
protect sleep. So for example, maybe you’re really thirsty, and you go to sleep. And you
dream about drinking water. Some of you who have consumed too much beer the night before
might be familiar with those sorts of dreams. And so you’re dreaming that you’re searching
out fountains and you’re drinking, and Freud’s interpretation of that would be, well, you
should stay asleep. And so the dream is providing your underlying id-related motivational system,
say the one that governs thirst, with the fulfillment of its desire. But I think that’s…
I really think that’s wrong, although it’s weird because dreams of course could be doing
all sorts of things. But what seems to happen instead… I realised this most particularly
once I heard about a study about the effects of testosterone, cycling testosterone on female
sexual activity. So the plan is this, is that in women testosterone
levels vary across the monthly cycle, and so does sexual desire. And what seems to happen
is that as testosterone increases, the frequency of sexual acts doesn’t necessarily increase,
but the frequency of sexual fantasy increases. And so the hormone is driving the fantasies,
and then the fantasies drive the behaviour, it’s something like that. And so, the dream
isn’t fulfilling a wish, what it’s doing is… that’s how the motivational system
manifests itself in a plan for action. It’s like well you should be going to look for
sources of water, if you’re thirsty. And so, because the… you know the hypothalamus
has to communicate with you somehow. It doesn’t just grip your behaviour and move you around
like a robot. You know, it has to indicate what the state, what your state is, it does
that all sorts of ways, and then start tilting you towards solutions, using your memories
and your skills and everything that would be related to successful outcomes of that
form in the past. The other thing I should say about creativity,
and this is I think something very useful for understanding people’s reactions to
psychoanalysis. I have a lot of creative people in my clientele, for a variety of reasons,
and some who aren’t creative. And creativity is a trait. And most people aren’t creative.
It’s not common. And some people who are creative are so creative it’s just absolutely
beyond comprehension. So Picasso for example, created 65,000 works of art, three a day for
65 years. Now that guy was creative. So anyways, lots of people aren’t creative, and they’re
not interested in psychoanalytic ideas, they’re not interested in archetypal ideas, they’re
not really gripped by narrative. So if you happen to be… one marker for creativity
by the way, for openness, is really liking fiction. And women actually like fiction more
than men, because women are actually slightly higher in part of openness than men are.
So what else… if you like poetry, you know, and it gives you an aesthetic experience,
if you really get deeply involved in music, if you’re able to produce things that are
creative. If you have the kind of mind that works in associations. So for example, if
I told you guys alright, write down as many words as you can in the next three minutes
that begin with the letter L. Those of you who are more creative would come up with more
words. So there’s a verbal fluency component. I could say, okay, how many uses can you think
of for a brick? And then I would score that. The first would be how many uses you came
up with, that would be the sheer number, I’d throw away the stupid ones that make no sense,
and often you have to get a panel of people to make that judgment, right. You know, you
could say “well, you could use it as a thing”. It’s like no, X, you don’t get a score
for that. So then, you get another score for how uncommon your response was. And that’s
an originality dimension. And actually if you calculate those two dimensions, fluency
and originality, from a divergent thinking task, which is the one I just told you about,
you can predict how creative people are quite well.
Anyways, the really creative people seem to have a deep well-spring of unconscious ideas
that are always flowing forth, and some of those people dream like mad. And they have
extremely sophisticated and complex dreams, and those dreams seem to guide their behaviour.
And that’s quite entertaining when you see that in psychotherapy if you have an interest
in such things. And you might say well, how do you know if your dream interpretation is
true? And the answer to that is, well how do you know if how you interpreted the last
book you read is true? And the answer to that is, you don’t, and even if you did, you
don’t know how you know it. Because lots of people can read a book and they come away
with slightly different interpretations of it. And that’s because, you can imagine
that the book is a multi-level pattern. And then the reader is a multi-level pattern.
And then if you put those two together, you get a multi-level pattern that’s made out
of the reader and the book, and that’s going to be unique for every single reader. Except
that we have commonalities of structure so that we can communicate about it.
So you read a book and it strikes you, certain things strike you and certain things seem
right. If you do a dream interpretation, it’s a collaboration between you and the client
about the interpretation. So usually what I do is I have people, first of all they’ll
tell me their dream, from beginning to end. Now Freud would say, already you’re introducing
all sorts of bias, because they’re not telling you the dream, they’re telling you the dream
as they interpret and remember it. It’s like yeah, that’s a problem. But you do
what you can, you know? And I tell people just write it down as fast you can and try
not to think about it too much, because we don’t want post-dream editing. And so then
I’ll listen to it, and then they’ll tell it to me again, slowly. And then I’ll listen
to a sentence and then I’ll let my associational network work on it, and then see what that
reminds me of, and then I’ll ask the person what it reminds them of. And then we’ll
talk about… those are the direct associations, those are the things Freud would call ‘free
associations’. And you could say, well, around every utterance, like a sentence, there’s
a collection of potential meanings, right? And those meanings might be direct meanings,
like really tightly associated with it, to sort of loose meanings. And so you can hit
back and forth with client and therapist, until you think, oh yeah, okay, that seems
to be where that’s going. And you’re also thinking about it in relationship to the person’s
current life experiences and the rest of the dream and maybe all the dreams they told you
about before. So it’s insanely complicated. But it’s what people do when they listen
to a conversation. You know, how do you know you’re interpretation of a conversation
is true? Well, you know, there’s a variety of ways that you can approximate that, but
you don’t know. And there’s lots of different ways of interpreting a conversation. That’s
why the post-modernists ended up in their little hole with regards to literature. They
realised that there’s no limit to the number of ways you can interpret a book. But then
they took the next step which was that therefore it has no meaning. It’s like no no no, wrong,
wrong. It’s very unsophisticated thinking. It just means that the way the book portrays
meaning is exceedingly complex, and you can’t describe it using normal, linear rationality.
It doesn’t mean the meaning isn’t there. That’s so pathetic. That’s such a pathetic
theory. It’s dangerous too because it means that nothing has any meaning and that’s
the most dangerous theory, that. So anyways, you talk to the person about the
dream and the dream image and about what that triggers off in their memory, and you also
watch what they say, because sometimes… so for example, someone (this just happened
recently) might be describing a dream where they, where they’re wandering around somewhere,
and they’ll say “and I’m taking the wrong road”. You think oh, okay! Well now
we know what your dream meant because you just said it. I’m taking the wrong road.
And that’s a Freudian slip, and it’s so interesting, because if you listen to people
tell their dreams, you have to kind of listen… it’s like they have two minds talking at
the same time. And one is describing the dream, but the other one is describing their life,
and they don’t even notice the connection, and you point it out and they go oh yeah!
Right, right I didn’t know I said that. And that’s a Freudian slip. And I think
what’s happening, in part, is the right hemisphere, which is an image accumulation
and aggregation system, it’s kind of a low-resolution pattern collection system, uses mostly images.
And tries to put them together in meaningful ways, but the meaning is vague and comprehensive.
And then the left hemisphere, roughly speaking, which is the linguistic hemisphere, is trying
to state what that says in words. And it’s very difficult to make that transformation,
but that’s why dream analysis works in part. It’s because you’re facilitating the movement
of the information in the images into the articulated part of the personality. You’re
moving information up the abstraction hierarchy to the point where it can be well utilised.
Now, I’ll end this with… I’ll end this discussion of Freud with a description of
some research that was done recently by… relatively recently, let’s say the last
20 years, by this psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, whose name is James Pennebaker.
And Pennebaker is a particularly smart psychologist. And he had this idea… Freud had another
idea that was related to therapy, and he thought that what happened, if you came into therapy
and you talked about a traumatic event, was that you were cured by catharsis, which meant
that the trauma had a bunch of emotion associated with it, and that was repressed but it was
down there kind of struggling to get out, and causing you all sorts of stress and misery
trying to hold it down. And then if you could just tell someone about it, and express your
feelings, then that would help you. Expressing your feelings does not help you, by the way.
That turns out to be wrong, but it turns out to be wrong in an interesting and useful way.
Because it’s sort of… it’s almost right. So what Pennebaker did was he took undergraduates
and he had them come in to the lab for three consequential days, and he had them write
for fifteen minutes each day about the worst thing that they had ever done or the worst
thing that had ever happened to them. Often people are traumatised by something they did,
not something that happened to them. In fact, more often, because someone watches themselves
do something absolutely horrific, and then they think, ‘oh my God! I did that! Who
am I?” They don’t know, and then that’s… you know, things start coming unglued.
So anyways, Pennebaker had them do that, and then for the next two weeks they felt pretty
wretched about it. And so, that’s interesting, because if they would have only measured the
result of the intervention in the two week time-span, everyone would have said never
write down your traumatic experiences because it’ll make you worse. But over the next
six months, what happened in particular was that their physical health improved. They
went to the doctor less, they reported less illness, and so forth. And it’s because
their overall level of stress decreased, for complex reasons that we could talk about later.
But then Pennebaker, being an excellent scientist, he thought okay, well catharsis works, you’re
expressing your trauma and poof! You’re fixed. But he went back and he thought, well
wait a second. Maybe how you express it matters. So he went back and he counted all the words
that were associated with emotion, and all the words that were associated with understanding
and cognition. And what he found was two things: one was the more words that you use, particularly
as your narrative developed, that indicated comprehension and understanding, the better
you did over time. And so what happens is, it’s not the expressing
of your emotion, it’s the expressing of your emotion and then the weaving of the memory
into a new coherent representation from which you derive a moral. So what’s the moral
of a trauma? Don’t let it happen again. That’s the moral. And the threat systems
are going to be throwing that thing up at you constantly until you figure it out. How
did I get into this, how do I avoid it in the future? That doesn’t mean it’s your
fault, but your anxiety systems, they don’t care about that. They care about how you’re
not going to fall into the same hole. And the only way to do that is to analyse the
causal pathways that led to the hole to begin with, and see if you can either reconfigure
your behaviour and your attitude, so that doesn’t happen again, or maybe you just
don’t go those places anymore. Either way. And your… the trauma threat systems, as
soon as you come up with a comprehensive representation that you believe in, they’ll leave you alone.
And this can happen very, very rapidly. Like with nightmares, I’ve cured people’s nightmares
in one session, no problem. I ask them to bring the nightmare up into
their imagination. Maybe someone’s chasing them. Okay, think about them chasing you.
You’ve got to visualise it, really visualise it. The more real you make it, the better.
Okay, they’re being chased. How are you feeling? “I’m all anxious and afraid”.
Okay, turn around and look at the thing that’s chasing you. So they do that. Then maybe they
say what it is or whatever, but maybe they don’t even do that. And then I say okay,
before you go to bed at night, just when you’re almost falling to sleep, you’re in a hypnogogic
state, where images are starting to come, you run that. So they run that, poof! That
nightmare’s gone. And the reason for it is that they’ve now reconfigured themselves
as the thing, not the thing that’s being chased, that’s a prey animal, they’ve
configured themselves as the thing that can turn around and face the thing that’s chasing
them. And that’s the same motif as the dragon hunt in the Jungian archetypes, right? Face
what you’re afraid of and that will cure you. And that’s really one of the fundamental
motifs of Freudian psychoanalysis. So, you know you have an exam on Thursday.
I’ll post representative questions of the exam when I get home after this lecture, probably
this evening. The test is here, it’s multiple choice, you’ll have no problem finishing
it, it’s not that long. And if you’ve done the readings and come to the lectures,
you’ll probably do fine. It’s not a tricky test.