so in in the first lecture I already told you guys a little bit about this about this figure and I mentioned that the idea of being swallowed up by a beast of some sort and then cast back up is a very ancient and archetypal idea and an archetypal idea you might think of as an instinctive idea this is this is an idea of Carl Jungs by the way although it had its precursors and other intellectual U systems of thought you might think of an archetype as an idea that you can understand without being pre-exposed to it no now Blank Slate models of human cognition assume that all of our knowledge comes from our sensory experience but first of all there are very many problems with the blank slate model first of all Blank Slate models are just wrong like they're you know they're they were useful conceptual structures a couple of hundred years ago and there were situations where they could be applied in part to to systems of thought like um behaviorism but fundamentally we know perfectly well that the human being is not a blank slate and we also know that you couldn't be a blank slate and the reason for that is that there is so much information so to speak surrounding you and making up your experience that without some a priority structures to handle that experience for you and present it to your Consciousness in a in a pre-structured manner there's just not a chance that you could ever make sense out of it so plus we also know you know that your biology and your neurobiology is very much similar to that of all life on Earth really for that matter but extraordinarily similar to that of mammals and we know things for example that are quite interesting like um the systems that make up the deepest part of your brains and partly the part say that keep track of things like dominance hierarchies are hundreds of millions of years old and you share structure and function of those neuros neuros psychological elements with animals as distinct from you as Crustaceans so for example Crustaceans use the serotonin system to keep track of their dominance hierarchies and you do the same thing and drugs that work on people for dominance hierarchy Related Disorders like depression also work on lobsters and so so if you if you have a lobster you know that's a friend of yours and it's feeling depressed then you could recommend recomend that it uses serotonin reuptake Inhibitors and that'll make it you know a happy stretched out sort of confident Lobster instead of a you know bunched up and insecure Lobster and the reason I'm telling you that it is pretty comical and um but the reason I'm telling you that is because it indicates something of tremendous importance which is that you are one old thing and there are elements of your structure that are you know that are importantly hundreds of millions of years old and they structure the way that the world appears to you and so an archetypical idea in some sense is a is an idea that you can understand because you're a human being and you know if you think about this even for a few moments you can understand how this might be you know if someone comes up to you and says I'm angry today especially if you've been conversing them with them for some time it isn't generally necessary for you to ask well what do you mean angry you might ask well why are you angry or what happened but because the person who's making the statement has a nervous system like your nervous system you can both mutually assume that you know you've understood and experienced the emotion of anger and so instead of trying to describe what that's like you can just describe the particular situations that elicited it and you know there's lots of evidence for basic emotions I mean the list of basic emotions varies from thinker to thinker although they congregate around a pretty definable set and part of the reason that they differ at all is because well it isn't obvious how you distinguish an emotion from a motivational system and it's not even obvious that that you know the class of emotion is a reasonable class but there are certainly um subjective phenomena that emerge as a consequence of the active activity of fundamental brain systems that everyone shares so you know people understand what fear means means people understand what pain means uh disappointment frustration people understand what surprise means they understand Joy um they understand disgust I think I hit most of the major ones there and then there's you know there's other systems that don't look so emotion likee that are maybe more motivation like like hunger and thirst and and you know uncomfortable heat and uncomfortable coldness that people also understand and the reason you understand that is because you are a certain way and you are a certain way because for the same reason you have two legs most of you and two arms and two eyes and all of that you know you're you don't just spring out of the Void as a completely unstructured organism and you know it's difficult to say exactly what elements of human experience and behavior and cognition and thought and all that are inbuilt precisely because we're also quite modifiable from a cultural perspective you know so it's it's structure plus the capacity for tremendous modification but and it's hard to exactly say well how much is structure and how much is modification and partly the reason it's hard to say that is because it depends on how much effort you put into the modification right the more effort the more modification but having said all that the fact that we're similar in a priori structure is actually one of the preconditions that allows us to communicate with one another so there was a thinker a Harvard thinker named eel Wilson some of you may be familiar with that name he he's a famous biologist and he basically studies ants um which you know ants ants are very complicated and they're very successful there are more there are more ants by weight than there are people on on the earth so even though they're not necessarily concerned with overpopulation and environmental degradation there are in fact more ants so but one of the things eio Wilson pointed out was that you know even if we could talk to ants we wouldn't have anything to say to them and the reason for that is because ants concern eles with things that human beings have no intrinsic interest in so their fundamental value structure so to speak is so different from our value structure that there wouldn't be anything to talk about because you talk about with your friends and with your family you talk about shared human experiences you you talk about variation in shared human experiences and you just take for granted that the shared element of that exists and so you can think of the shared element of human experience as archetypal and then you might think well part of the shared Human Experience is archetypical because we share an underlying biology and also to some degree a culture but then there's this weird um what no man's land in some sense between the biological system per se and the system of subjective experience and ideas and you might say that the biological systems are ideational to some degree so you can imagine if you get angry you think angry thoughts and so what that means is the system that mediates aggression is also capable of thinking it thinks in abstractions and so there's a there's some relationship between the biological function which prepares your perception and your body for action and your capacity for abstract thought the the system that produces anger in some sense thinks within you is really more accurate way of thinking about it because as you all know if you've become particularly angry during an argument or a discussion with someone you may say things that you whatever you are comes to regret very soon after the conversation and so it's as if in some sense the system is speaking within you and if you start to think that way you can also develop much more understanding right away of what the psychoanalysts were about when they started to talk about unconscious processes so you could say and and this is a realistic way of thinking about it is that what the psychoanalysts um identified as unconscious processes in some sense were the thought patterns in Word and image and sometimes in Behavior as well of fundamental biological systems working within you and so even someone like Freud for example would say approximately look you know you're a relatively loose con collection of somewhat integrated biological subsystems and each of them posits a goal that's worth attaining but the problem is is that many of those goals exist in contradiction to one another and your problem problem as an organism is to unite those diverse biological goals that would be the ID for example from a frudia perspective to unite them into something that's relatively coherent and non internally contradictory and then also to express that Union in the social sphere where hundreds of thousands of other creatures more or less like you are trying to do the same thing it's a tricky Balancing Act and so but these these systems inside of you so to speak are informing you constantly and some of that they do with direct physiological sensation because there are generally Sensations that are associated say with motivational States or with emotions so and we kind of think of those as feelings whatever that means and then um there are ideas that are associated with it too and some of those ideas are well they're often fantasies so I can give you an example of that so it turns out that the interest that women have in and sexual behavior is dependent to some degree on their blood levels of testosterone and that varies across the menstrual cycle and so women tend to be most interested in sexual activity when their fertility is at a peak which is just after they ovulate and but it doesn't look like testosterone produces an increase in sexual behavior in a causal sort of manner like a drive what seems to happen is that the testosterone produces an increase in sexual fantasy and the fantasy produces the impetus for the action so that's a very interesting way of thinking about it you know because what happens in some sense is that the biological system that's underlying sexual desire sets up a world in imagination that is more likely to contain images of sexual gratification and the organism so to speak follows in its wake and you know you can see this if you pay attention to the structure of your own imagination you can see this sort of thing happening all the time you know if if you're in an argument with someone for example and they humiliate you or put you down and that produces feelings of resentment if you watch your imagination like it might be quite conscious and it might be quite fleeting you'll see that fantasies of Revenge for example and different scenarios of Revenge play out in the landscape of your imagination you know and when you're hungry you're studying away and you're concentrating on something and you know your blood sugar level Falls enough so your hypothalamus notes that maybe it's time for a few calories and so it starts to pop up you know an alternative sequence of ideas you know it's like well you know maybe it's time for a pizza and you know you think about a pizza and it's got some mushrooms on it maybe if you happen to like mushrooms and you know sooner or later the fantasy that's associated with The Hunger becomes sufficiently demanding sufficiently likely to take up the space inside your subjective experience that you'll switch activities from what you're studying especially if you're not that interested in it you'll you'll switch activities so that you pursue the new goal that's been put forth as a as a as a possibility by the action of one of these underlying biological systems now one of the things that Freud proposed and you know it's an interesting idea is that if you interfere with the activity of one of these systems especially the more Troublesome systems like sexual desire and aggression and those are Troublesome because in some sense they're the most social of emotions right because generally speaking and at least sometimes you need a partner for sexual activity although that seems to be less frequent than it used to be in the past and you know and anger is something that also is very socially disruptive and so one of Freud's claims was it's it's particularly difficult for individuals to integrate sexual desire and aggression into their personality and into the social world because those emotions are either socially disruptive or require a tremendous degree of coop operation from someone else and you know that was es sexuality that was especially true before there was reliable birth control and also when there was a lot more stigma associated with sex outside of marriage and also with childbirth outside of marriage so you know I don't in my clinical practice for example now I don't see that many people who have the sort of sexual repression problems that Freud found so common among his Victorian clients I mean in our culture it's more likely that people are having a terrible battle with the Demons of of hunger and you know they have some sort of eating disorder because they're starving themselves and then binging and starving themselves and then binging or eating some you know god- awful combination of pure carbohydrates and sugars on a sort of a random basis and so they disregulated their their hypothalamic systems because the hypothalamus controls hunger and then they get into a vicious battle with it and you like you don't win against your hypothalamus because mostly As far as it's concerned you're just an appendage to it so and it's much more powerful than you are as you'll find out if you ever have a scrap with it so you know people who have Eating Disorders they Gorge and binge completely against their will and they don't seem to be able to control it and that's because your hypothalamus won't let you starve it's not it's not into that sort of thing and so no matter how thin you want to be it would rather that you were alive and it's more powerful it it has the capacity to exert more control over your behavior than you do generally speaking the same thing often happens to people who develop addictions and the addictions an addictive substance in some sense harnesses a fundamental motivational system and if you if you train that motivational system over a long enough period of time to to seek out to successfully seek out the addictive substance and you train it and reward it by using the addictive substance when you are able to you know come across it you'll create this little biological monster in your brain you turn on at the drop of a hat and then you have very little control over when it's activated so and you see one of the things that happens when people go into rehab for drug addiction is that pretty easy to get them um through the withdrawal phase even if it's something like heroin you know and heroin withdrawal although people are always you know writing movies about how awful it is it's about as bad as a bad case of the flu and people you know very seldom die during heroin withdrawal they die during alcohol withdrawal all the time but you so you can get someone through withdrawal but as soon as you put them back in their natural environment where their friends are and the cues that are associated with the addiction are still in place they start taking the drug right away again you know regardless of all their good intentions and you know you can see that as well in your own behavior because I mean I doubt if a day passes where you don't do something that you swore you wouldn't do you know and you do it and then you think hm why did I do that it's like well what do you mean I precisely and that's the fundamental Psych analytic question cuz I you know even the the way the word looks it's one letter you know it's like a one ey it's like well is there an eye there well not really you know what there is generally speaking is a loose aggregation of systems that are more or less going in the same direction that's duded into thinking that there's a unity and that's that's a that's a prime psychoanalytic theory and the part of the reason that people suffer is because those systems first of all don't necessarily have your well-being in mind you know your your your pleasure your freedom from anxiety your freedom from pain like the system that mediates individual reproduction the sexual system like it doesn't really care about you so to speak it cares about whether or not you reproduce and you know one of the things you might think about if you think why is there so much conflict in human Intimate Relationships it's because the demands of sexual reproduction and the demands of individual happiness are not the same thing and you know you have to you have to try to integrate both of them but there's no reason that you would necessarily find the partner who would make your life most fulfilling also the one that you're sexually attracted to you know you'd hope that would be the case but like good luck with that you'll end up with some jerk you can't stand because you know you get so hot you can't stand it when you're anywhere near them so you know you might think well wouldn't it be nice if you could bring that under voluntary control it's like well good luck with that so you know so these are the sorts of things that you need to think about when you're thinking about what the psychoanalytic thinkers we thinking about as the unconscious in some sense the unconscious is the the ideational and motivational activities of all these underlying biological subsystems that make up your make up your being that make up the substrata of your psyche you know like you tend to think of your yourself as I so that would be the Freudian ego you know as the part of you that subjectively experiences and maybe also the part of you that has continuity of memory across time and for one reason or another we we tend to experience that as something of a Unity it's it's not obvious why exactly I think part of it is that we can separate ourselves out as a unit from the rest of the world including other people you know and we're aware of our boundaries physically and also temporally but I also think it's because for one reason or another we only seem to be able to do one thing at a time and so the limitation which is like a motor output limitation seems also to to imply to us that there's only one thing there but you know it's not that it's not that unreasonable to think about ourselves as something more like an antill than as something that's you know a completely unitary structure because obviously our physical structure is far from homogeneous right you're made up of all sorts of different subp parts and they're qualitatively different so anyways what I want to talk to you about today as far as as far as I can manage it is to to give you some insight or at least the insights I've been able to develop about how it is that your physiology speaks to your mind and I think the way to conceptualize that I'm trying to give you some sense of what symbols are now what Freud thought about symbols was that well let's say that you were in a society that was very sexually repressive and you were still stuck with the problem of a fairly powerful sex drive and your culture had taught you that that needed to be suppressed and repressed and controlled and Freud's idea was that well that thing like the monster in the basement doesn't really like to be pushed around and controlled and it's going to manifest its desires and its and its wants and its view of the world in sub subversive form so and for Freud the subversive forms would be different sorts of symbols so if you weren't um satisfying the system that was underlying sexual um interest then it would start to insert itself in random ways into your behavior perhaps when you're interacting with someone of the opposite sex or maybe into your dreams and your fantasies and it would do that in a disguised form because well because the part of you that was the integrated part the ego part in some sense wasn't really willing to communicate with it so it had to sort of sneak its message up and through well the yungi intake on that was slightly different uh Yung was perfectly willing to assume that Freud knew what he was talking about in some some domains especially those that were associated with Psychopathology but for Yung the realm of symbols was something different and for Yung the realm of symbols was where knowledge had its origin and so you can imagine that there are things that you know absolutely nothing about and of course you you don't know what those things are cuz you don't know anything about them but there's lots of them around and then you might imagine and there's also lots of things that exist that the people as a whole don't know anything about not just you they're beyond our comprehension as a species for Yung this symbol was a mediator between the absolute unknown and the relatively known and so as the human imagination expanded out and and mastered more and more territory there was like a periphery around the island of knowledge and that periphery was made up of symbolic representations that were that were pre- articulate knowledge so they were like things you might act out here's here's a way to think about that so you know you might watch a child who's engaged in pretend play okay and often children will pretend to be a mother or a father for obvious reasons you know and what they do is they observe their mother or their father and then they act them out but it's very interesting form of acting out because we think of it as imitation oh look you know she's imitating her mother but imitation means you move your arm like this and I move my arm like this and that is not what children do when they're playing what they do instead is a very complex form of generalization and they watch the mother and they extract out something like the pattern of the mother and they don't really understand what that pattern is because they don't have the articulation and the cognitive capacity to generate a fully articulated and verbalized model of the mother but they acted out in behavior and so it's a in a sense they're incorporating the spirit of the mother that's one way of thinking about it into their behavior and then they can act out things they don't understand or at least they don't understand in terms of being able to articulate them and you know lots of things you know you can't articulate you can't articulate how to walk you can't articulate how to ride a bike you can't articulate anything complex like how to engage in a successful relationship a lot of that knowledge is embodied assuming you have it at all so so it's it's dramatic action and and you could also think about the symbol as a mediator between dramatic action and full cognition so for example um imagine a child is playing at being a mother and then you stop them and you say well what are you doing and the child might say well I'm you know we're playing house I'm pretending to be mom and then you might say well how do you go about doing that and then they're going to try to articulate what they're doing you know and while they're doing that they're going to be using using their imagination and representing the things that they're trying to understand and then you can see how the symbol which would be the visual representation of the mother's action like a little movie that you might run in your head you can see how it might lay itself on top of the dramatic action as a precursor to articulation and so that's that's a good way of thinking about it is that the symbol is a precursor to articulation and that you use symbols of one form or another whenever you use imaginative representation as a precursor to understanding and so that happens for example when you're fantasizing about something so now for the psychoanalysts particularly psychoanalysts like Yung the imagination was something that had a spontaneous operation it would just go along on its own and do things and of course you also experience that if you first of all when you dream obviously because you're not in control of your dreams something's in control of them and they happen but it's not you or it's not the you that you normally think of yourself as and then if you're daydreaming the something analogous happens you know you find that maybe you're trying to concentrate on something and something that's of interest to you for one reason or another starts to creep into the theater of your imagination and lay out different scenarios of one form or another and it's sort of like the natural language of the psyche because it isn't obvious that the natural language of the psyche is in fact language right because we don't really know how long human beings have been using formal language you know the estimates 150,000 years that's one estimate I doubt if it's more than 2 million years 2 million years seems to be about how long we've been using fire so it's somewhere between 2 million and 150,000 years but compared to the entire history of our cognitive development you know which you can stretch back well to the beginning of life itself if you want or at least to the point where things had nervous systems that's more like 500 million years and so the psyche was operating without language for a much longer period of time that was operating with language and it was doing something to organize its conceptions of the world that were pre-linguistic so what we're going to talk about today or what we're already talking about is what the structure of those pre-linguistic cognitive forms might be and I'm I'm offering that to you partly as an element of the integrating theory that I told you I would try to deliver in the first lecture and also as a a means of giving you a a schema or a language to start to understand what symbolic representation means from a psychoanalytic perspective and I I hope that'll be very useful I mean it's it's been extraordinarily useful for me because it offers a key to understanding symbolic literature and symbolic modes of cognition so for example religious systems are symbolic modes of cognition par Excellence that's what they are and they're not object they're not primitive theories about the nature of the objective world that's a foolish way of looking at religious systems and it sets up an artificial dichotomy between religious belief and scientific belief and all that does is confuse people so religion religious belief is primarily about morality and morality is about how to act and religious symbolism is about how to construe the world as a forum to act in and that's what you you have to solve that problem because the big Pro biggest problem you have in your life and the biggest problem you always will have is how the hell should you act and you know that actually might be the fundamental question of existence to to the degree that action is the primary reality now you know if you're a materialist you don't really think that way because you think of the objective World stripped of its subjective importance as the ground of reality but it's not the ground of reality the ground of reality is whether or not you survive and reproduce at least from a darwinian perspective and that means that the most important element of reality is how you act that determines how whether or not you're going to be selected so to speak for reproduction and people are like evaluating each other on the basis of their Fitness for reproduction nonstop it's like almost almost all of social Congress has to do with that you know men organize themselves into very strict dominance hierarchies by competing with one another and women peel the men off the top and almost everything that you're doing in your day-to-day interactions with other human beings is an element of that fundamental process so that's all action oriented so so it's very much important to get these things right so I'm going to tell you you know how I piece this together to some degree and so we're going to start with the hypothesis we'll take a look at this there we go so one of the things you might ask is what do our immediate mamalian relatives how do they conceptualize the world and so we're going to assume that those are higher order primates because you know the evidence seems to suggest that we're relatively genetically similar to chimpanzees in particular and also to Bonos which are more or less a form of chimpanzee although their behavior differs and it looks like we diverged from the precursor to chimpanzees Bonos and human beings about 7 million years ago so we didn't come from chimps chimps bonabo and US came from something that was the precursor to all three and we know you can calculate how similar you are from a genetic perspective to another organism by measuring if you split your DNA into its into its halves and then you mix those DNA halves with the DNA halves of another animal they'll join up and the more related you are to that animal the more more energy it takes to pry them apart once they've joined up because they're a tighter match and so it turns out that we're you know extraordinarily tightly matched with chimpanzees so um so when you know you're wondering why you're so erratic it's and and uncontrollable and unpredictable it's because you're basically a chimpanzee that's been driven insane by self-awareness so you know what the hell do you expect from something like that you know it's amazing that we can even all sit in this room together so anyways you know you might ask what a creatures like that know and one of the one of the things that we've been able to determine are some of the precursors or Associates of of cortical development of brain size and there's various things that seem to be tightly associated with the development of larger brains but one of them in primates in particular is size of group so the bigger your group The more you have to keep track of the more social information you have to keep track of and if that's driving brain development at least in part because it's certainly not the whole story if it's driving behavior in part one of the things that that implies is that one of the most important sources of information that you have to contend with if you're a social primate is the social structure and so what you can infer from that is that your brain is primarily set up to assess social information now you can take that a little bit farther and then you might think well that means that may imply that the primary categories that you use naturally so to speak to understand the world are in fact social categories and then you could think well you know we've we've elaborated our cognitive systems up into the abstract far farther than our primate relatives have but because evolution is a conservative process new structures have their roots in Old structures right it's a necessary part of evolution because once an organism walks down a certain psychophysiological Road in some sense it's destined by that road which is why you have the same basic bodily platform as virtually well not only mammals but vertebrates in general you know four legs two eyes it's a very very standard form so you know once it's developed that's it that's the platform upon which further variation takes place now you might ask well first of all think think of your own situation in in relationship to the primate situation how much of your time during the day are you spending interacting with other people in one form or another now let's assume that that also means books movies all the artificial representations of people we're going to consider those representations of people as well and so then you might think well not when you're asleep except you're dreaming and you're almost inevitably dreaming of people but when you're awake well what is it is it 80% is it 90% I mean it depends to some some degree on how extroverted you are like if you're sufficiently extroverted you're going to try to drive it up to 100% you know and if you're really introverted maybe you you know you go hide in a closet now and then because you can't stand being around people but nonetheless most of your environment is a social environment you know like we like to think of the environment as a forest or a landscape something like that but the environment is actually the niche in which you live and the human Niche is highly social and then you add to that the fact that we're par bonding creatures and we have very long lasting relationships and our familial relationships are extraordinarily longlasting as well plus our period of dependency is extraordinarily long and and and and serious so you know we're for all the for the all the ideas mostly Western ideas about you know radical individualism we're unbelievably social creatures and we can't really survive outside of a social context and what that implies is that the fundamental categories of our perception are likely social and that we've taken those fundamental categories and applied them to other things so then imagine so here's some of the things that we know that that higher order primates can track um they can track dominance so you know primates live in hierarchies there's a female hierarchy and a male hierarchy and you know and the nature of those hierarchies depends on the primate but there are hierarchies and the hierarchies are extraordinarily important because if you're at the bottom of a hierarchy and you're a social primate like you're a whipping boy you're going to get kicked around your children are going to get kicked around if a if a disease comes whipping through your your tribe or your troop then if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy you're the one that's going to die because you're already stressed and full of parasites and poorly nourished and you don't have a good place to live and so you're going to get wiped off the map and even if you don't get killed by some disease if we track life expectancy across time if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy you're going to die way earlier and you're going to be old much younger than the people or the creatures that are at the top because the ones at the top get the best of everything and the ones at the bottom don't and so it turns out that your your place of of of position in the dominance Hier is an unbelievably important determinant of your probability of reproduction especially if you're male most females reproduce regardless of where they are in the dominance hierarchy but that isn't the case with males what happens in males is you get something more like a Pito distribution where there's a few males at the top who are unbelievably successful and then half the males at the bottom who are not successful at all and so that's one of the you know that's one of the chronic stressors that civilized societies have to deal with because well it for obvious reasons so so it turns out that primates are very very sensitive to dominance hierarchy structure and they know who's at their level and they know who's below their level and they know who's above and they track that across time and they track it across families and sometimes they track it across Generations because it can last Generations does in human beings it does in chimpanzees so our brains are pre-wired for dominance hierarchy comprehension and okay so that's one domain the dominance hierarchy now you can think about that in a variety of different ways you can think about that as the social organization you can think about that as the nature of the tribe you can think about that as the state or the nation or the people all of those things are dominance hierarchy variant in some sense um you can think about that as the father and or you could even think about that as God the Father with God being the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy in some sense and I think part of what religious ideation actually does is take the idea of the thing that's the top of the hierarchy whatever that is and make it into a deity now that the we know that people are much more likely to imitate those who are close to the top of the hierarchy because they want to pull in the behaviors and the attitudes and the ideas that made those people successful then you might think with regards to human beings that because we're extraordinarily intelligent and very much able to abstract that what we can do is we can look across dominance hierarchies because there are multiple sorts of dominance Ares among human beings and we can say okay well this person's at the top here and then this person's at the top here and this person's at the top here and all those top people share things in common that make them the top and then we can abstract out what the top means and we can say that's the top thing and I think that's partly what people are doing in the multigenerational process that they use to extract out religiously significant figures of adulation and admiration so they're like the best of all possible people across all possible circumstances okay but we'll leave that aside for a moment it looks like the fundamental symbolic structures that people use to represent the structure of the dominance Ary are paternal so the dominance hierarchy is like the great father and I think part of the reason for that is that among human beings and among chimpanzees although it's not so true with babos the male dominance hierarchy is the dominant hierarchy and you know this is a claim even that feminists make right because the feminists say that well that our culture is basically a patriarchal construction and you know they're not very happy about that but that's a whole different issue okay so one idea now the other thing you can think about here is that your brain has got to be organized so that it's capable of understanding the things that are most constant about the environment right and you might think well the things that are the most constant are the most real that's a way of defining real it lasts a long time and it's evident everywhere okay so then you might think well what are the most real things that human beings have to deal with you know and and one one answer to that is well there are certain kinds of objective realities that are the most real so you might say well things like trees are extraordinarily real but one of the things I'd like to point out to you is that despite the fact that trees are quite real they're not as real as dominance hierarchies because dominance hierarchies were around for a couple of hundred million years before there were trees and so one there have been dominant SES around for 400 million years long before there were vertebrates of our type and so the dominant s is an extraordinarily constant feature of life and part of the reason that we're wired up to be able to detect variations in dominance hierarchy status is because that that the fact of that structure is constant across all times in all places and so it's built right into our nervous systems and the fact that we share the ability to assess our dominance hierarchy position with Crustaceans and that this and which have a very simple nervous system and the fact that the same pharmacological substances work on Crustaceans that work on us for the same reasons at least with regards to dominance hierarchy indic Ates that the dominance hierarchy counter that you have functioning at the very base of your brain so to speak is an unbelievably potent mechanism and you're using it all the time one example is you know you might ask yourself why people are so obsessed with fashion and why Fashions have to change every year and part of the reason for that is that by attending to fashion and keeping up or being even on the avangard you show that you're ahead of the curve and the curve is always changing right it's like a technological curve you have to stay ahead of of the it isn't so much that you master the technology it's that you stay ahead of the technology and master the new and that indicates that you're conscious and alive and aware and capable of competing and that's one of the things that makes you more attractive at least in Principle as a mate or at least more competitive with the other creatures with whom you're competing for the attention of potential mates so that's just another indication of exactly how possessed You Are by the operation of these deep-seated biological systems and we know for example that there's very very little difference between a severe clinical depression and a very severe dominance defeat it's the same biological process fundamentally what what happens often with people who are clinically depressed is that their self assessed dominance is much lower than their actual competence and it's actually the gap between their competence and their and their selfworth assessment that constitutes the pathology so you know so you have someone when I assess people for depression I say well look you know do you have a job is it a good job you know do you have a do you have a family do you have an intimate partner do you have interests in various things in your life you know outside of your work um you know do you have the sort of Education that you want how's your physical health do you have a drug and alcohol problem and if the answer to all those is the the proper answer and they still feel really terrible then you might think oh well that person suffering from clinical depression because their self- assessed dominant status is not in keeping with their actual social status you know as opposed to people who come in and you ask them the same questions and it's like their family's completely insane they're alienated from them you know they they had a brain injury when they were four because their father hit them against a wall they've got no education at all they've got an alcohol problem you know they've been unemployed for seven years and they have a personality disorder it's like well they feel terrible but they're not depressed they just have terrible lives you know and it's not like you're not going to suffer if you have a terrible life but if I give someone like that an anti-depressant or suggest that they take one you know it might stop them from cutting their wrists but the probability that it's really going to improve their situation is relatively low because like what the hell are you going to do with that it's just too overwhelming a problem to even address all right so it looks like the dominance hierarchy as such seems to be represented by masculine symbols and it's something to keep in mind when you watch movies because symbols es especially that are associated with the father like the king for example are are representations of the dominant structure so so that's one fundamental symbol um let's look at another here all right so this is a rather complicated shift in argumentation so so perhaps you can accept for a minute the association between the dominance hierarchy and culture you see how those are the same thing or at least that they're similar our culture is actually made up of a variety of overlapping dominance hierarchies right because different professions and different Specialties have their own dominance hierarchies and they're sort of integrated into a meta hierarchy but so but regardless the culture is a dominance hierarchy a complex dominance hierarchy so then you might ask yourself well what exactly makes up the culture what is it that we're talking about when we're talking about the culture and the dominance hierarchy and so that that that leads into questions like what exactly constitutes a law you know so we have laws and you might think well what does it mean that there's a law well we can we can look at the obvious things there's a rule of some sort that's been written down that's one there's a rule that's been written down that if you transgress against you'll be tracked down and punished that's another example of a law another example is well it's a custom right most of the things that we have as laws are Customs that people have adopted at least in principle to regulate our interaction so that the probability of mutual cooperation is high and the probability of mutual aggression is low and so you might say well why do we all go forward on a green light that's arbitrary why is that law and the answer is well because everybody decided that that would be a law and then they decided they would act it out so it's a custom and you can see why it's an extraordinarily useful custom because if we didn't have it then we'd be crashing into each other at every intersection and none of our vehicles would be good for anything so that's another example of a law so if you think about a law as a set of Customs then you start to see the law as as the codified version of a behavioral contract right there's ways that we have all agreed to act or even if we haven't agreed to act that way we've agreed that there should be a structure that describes how you should act and that's what the culture is you know unless you're a nihilist or an anarchist or a criminal or or a terrorist or something like that you basically accept the fact that this structure has to exist and then you try to position yourself within it okay so then you can think well the culture and the dominance hierarchy is is two things at the same time or maybe even three things one is it's the way you act so when you say that you're a citizen of a given country what that essentially means is that you imitate the body of laws that that country has erected you're a behavioral manifestation of those rules roughly speaking or reverse you could say the law is a codified representation of the way everybody in the culture is behaving there's a like a dietic interaction right and so the law and the culture is actually a pattern of behaviors and expectations around those behaviors that everyone shares and you could also say it's the cumulative knowledge that the culture shares so the culture as a whole has a body of knowledge some of which is objective and some of which is moral and behavioral and you as a fragment of that also have have that at least in fragmentary form right you're a partial representation of the entire culture that would be something similar to Freud's idea of the super ego right because for Freud there was an ID and an ego and a super ego and the ID was basically you know biology and its ability to control you and the ego was poor little you and the super ego was the terrible force of culture crushing the little ego between the terrible force of biology and itself and so the super ego in some sense is culture and that's represented by masculinity now or by by by the farther figure most generally speaking now you could also Imagine the culture as the collection of all knowledge now that's fine now then you got to think about what knowledge is and that's a tough thing to get a handle on so because there's different definitions of knowledge we in many technical situations in our culture we privilege factual knowledge and we think of that as knowledge so for example if you're going to be an engineer or a physicist someone who's really dealing with things there are certain rules that apply to the operation of things and you have to know what those are and those don't NE necessarily have much to do with how you behave you know if you're an engineer and you go to work you work with things and you have to know how the things work now you also have to be part of a culture because if you're not you're going to not get along with the rest of the engineers and they're going to toss you out so you have to have both forms of knowledge but we're not interested it in the moment precisely about the factual knowledge we're more interested in the knowledge that makes you acceptable to other human beings and that enables you while you're operating in your own life to negotiate the social structure in such a way that you can be successful and successful would mean well you get to live that would be one definition there's some probability that you might find an intimate partner that's another element of success you're not suffering to the point where your own existence is intolerable you know and you're going to survive for some prolonged period of time with some amount of security and so that's what you're you know that's what you're trying to do and I would say to the degree that you're well inculturated which is that you're a good representation of your your cultural cultures knowledge in so far as it's relevant behaviorally then you're much more likely to be successful okay so we're going to we're going to equate that form of knowledge with the possibility of succeeding that makes you well you could call you could call it no you could call it emotional intelligence although I never would call it that because there's actually no such thing but it's more it's knowledge about how to act you know and and it's it's very very important that knowledge so just think about what you're all doing in this class right most of you don't know each other there's maybe 200 people in this class three of you are pretty damn crazy really you know and and probably about 10 of you are like on the edge so but there you all are sitting there peacefully right you're following a rule code and you're really following it first of all you're all sitting in your own chair right you're not sitting on the lap of someone next right and that makes you laugh right because what would happen if someone did that what would happen well you know a little flurry would break out because all of a sudden a primate is doing something that a primate's not supposed to do and that opens up an area of of un of the unexpected and the crazy right and God only knows what's going to happen when a little spot opens up where the unexpected and crazy emerges you know we don't like those spots and you can you can see this in your own behavior so for example if you're walking down blur Street Street and you happen to come across someone who's self-evidently homeless and they're wandering down the street and they're gesturing and they're talking to themselves there's a bunch of things you're going to do the first thing is is you're going to glance and look away and then you're going to make a relatively wide birth around the person and you're going to try not to make eye contact generally speaking and the reason for that think about that the reason for that is the space that that person inhabits is undetermined by cultural agreement right you don't know what the person will do and so all you do is walk around that space because God only knows what happened what might happen if you don't probably nothing because the person is preoccupied by whatever demons happen to be chasing them but you're not going to take that chance and so you all come in here and I mean look look you're pretty much all dressed the same you know roughly speaking acceptable variation but nothing outlandish so you get to be individual but not peculiar I think let see so far it looks okay right and you know where you're supposed to sit and I bet you how many of you sat in the same seat you sat in the first day yeah so so a good proportion of you how many didn't okay well you will soon because because you you'll have you'll have established your little territory you know and it will be it will be familiar to you and you'll gravitate towards it and you'll be happy about that because you'll start to become familiarized with the people in your immediate vicinity and they didn't kill you the first time so they might not kill you the second time right and so and you're all participating in a in a kind of collective drama right so what's the nature of this room what does it look like what's it called it's a lecture theater right why because there's a drama going on right and you're the audience and I'm hypothetically supposed to be providing the drama and we all know that because that's how the room is set up and when you come in here you obey the room you do what it tells you there's chairs and you sit in them and when I'm talking generally speaking you don't maybe you want to hopefully if I'm speaking properly then you don't care because you're happy to listen and the rule is you're supposed to look at me and listen and you're all following that rule and you know all of that is because you're very much inculturated and you're sane enough to follow the damn rules and one of the things you might think about this and this is where I thought the psychoanalysts kind of went astray is that the psychoanalysts tended to think that you were sane if your interior psychological structures were integrated and well put together so your psyche was sort of something inside your head roughly speaking and Sanity was something that was an individual issue but I think you know another way of looking that at that and it's it's a more powerful way of looking at it I think is that you're hardly self-regulator at all all you have to do is behave well enough so other people can stand being around you and you can Outsource the problem of your own sanity because as soon as you get a little weird if you have people around you they'll just tell you and so you don't have to remember how not to be weird you just have to pay enough attention to other people around you so that when they indicate by not listening to you or by not laughing at your jokes or by raising an eyebrow or by saying something smart about what you just did that you stop and reconsider and go on in your sane manner so it's also why people who are tremendously isolated often you know there's a loop there they're a little queer to begin with so to speak because you know there's something wrong with their ability to behave and then they get isolated and things just go seriously astray as a as a consequence of that so anyways the point I'm trying to make is that a lot of your knowledge is actually knowledge about how to behave right and that's the sort of knowledge that's really critical for psychological stability it's it's not related in any real sense to the world to the knowledge you have about the structure of the objective world and you kind of know that because animals are perfectly capable of surviving even complex animals like chimpanzees what they don't know a damn thing about the objective world right and their primary reality is social okay so one domain of symbolic representation is the dominance hierarchy and culture and I said that was associated with the paternal and there's reasons for that now here's here's another thing that needs to be conceptualized when you're walking down BL Street and you make a detour around the person who happens to be talking to themselves where are they because wherever they are that's not the same place you are if it was the same place you wouldn't have any trouble walking right by them wherever they are that's somewhere seriously different now it turns out that we also have the capacity to represent that and I would say an easy way to think about that is that we have there are two domains that are characteristic to experience and one domain is the domain of the known and the domain of the known is where when you act in a certain way what you want to happen happens got it and the reason that's the known is because if you act in a certain way and you get what you want that means that you know what you're doing it's actually the definition of knowing what you're doing and that that's a different definition than I know a fact about the objective world you know so if you tell someone a joke or you tell a group of people a joke and you know they laugh and maybe they want another joke it's like good for you you know what you're doing but if you tell them a joke and they sort of you know look uneasy and glance at each other well you know it's time to rethink your sense of humor and what what you just learned is that there's some mismatch between the manner in which you configure social reality and the social reality itself now imagine what happens if you do tell a joke or maybe a couple of jokes and they flop badly how do you feel when that happens if you have any sense how do you feel embarrassed embarrassed yes yes so maybe you turn red for example what what what might happen if you feel embarrassed what what would what would you do I tell as many jokes well hopefully right it's like you know that's right you'd re-evaluate your knowledge and you might think well what the hell is wrong with me or you might think what the hell's wrong with them which I would say is not a good starting point yeah but seriously though you know because you got to watch that because if it's 10 people in you maybe you're right maybe you are funny but if all 10 of them think you're not well either you're not funny or you're telling your jokes to the wrong people right and sometimes it is the case that it's everyone else that's got the problem but that's definitely not the first hypothesis that you might want to generate okay so there's a place that there's a place that exists that manifests itself when things that you don't want or expect happen and I would consider that unknown and the unknown is a complicated place because it's a place where unexpected things happen and that's also symbolically represented and that's generally symbolically represented by feminine figures now the reasons for that is extraordinarily complicated and it's going to take a very long time to explain it partly it's because the masculine as a symbolic realm is already used up that's the dominance hierarchy and because we're basically social cognitive organisms we're going to use representations that are basically human in order to start representing things that aren't precisely human because we have to start somewhere we have to start with our basic primate primate cognitive system and it's not like chimpanzees have culture you know they have dominance hierarchies and troops we have dominance hierarchies and troops and culture and we have to represent that some way and what the way we represent It Is by using the same systems that we were representing the simple structures with but generalizing with them to Encompass broader phenomena so so things that are permanent across time things you know or the fact that there are things that you know things that you don't know or the fact that there are things that you don't know that that's permanent and then there's one other thing across time that's permanent you the fact that there's an i in the equation right so you think well what are people's experiential Fields fundamentally composed of places you're secure in and that you understand so that's your territory and your territory is a very complex thing it might even be an ideological territory your territory things that you don't understand that's not your territory that's unexplored territory and you don't know what the hell is going on there and that's the unknown and then the last common element is you and so basic symbolic structures tend to represent those elements of reality known the unknown and the thing that mediates between them and the thing that mediates between them is you or more precisely the thing that mediates between them is your individual Consciousness and that's like mediating between Chaos and Order if you look up at the at the screen there look at the the Christian image on the left that's called the open virgin and there there were quite a few statues of this sort that were created in medieval Europe in the 13th 14th century and uh I want to sort of tell you what that sculpture means using the analytic schema that I just laid out for you so that you can get a sense of how this symbolic representation works now and this is a strange representation from a Christian perspective because well the representation is the Virgin Mary right that's the superordinate figure the female and inside that is God the father and inside that is Christ all right now the reason it's a strange Christian representation is that it's rare to see Mary represented as a figure that's superordinate to God and but we'll just leave that aside for now I think part of the reason that that happens that happened for these sculptures is because they were trying to express the relationship between these three fundamental elements in a way that was slightly different than the canonical Christian representation but here's how to read it well the outside that's the unknown that's the mother of all things now you might say well why is the unknown the mother of all things well where does new information come from new information comes from what you don't know you already know what you know everything new comes from what you don't know and so what you don't know is terrifying certainly because God only knows what's going to happen when you encounter it but it's also unbelievably potentially productive in fact you might think of it as potential the unknown is potential itself and so you need to know how to deal with potential because potential manifests itself in all sorts of places that you wouldn't necessarily that technically you wouldn't expect so almost by definition so you have the unknown on the very outside and then inside that you have culture it's like and so that's like nature and culture as well it's like unknown territory and known territory and then inside the culture holding the the holding you up so to speak is the individual and you might say well why in this representation is the individual crucified and the answer to that is quite straightforward life is mostly suffering and there's more to it though than that the other element too and this is part of a this is part of the complex representational system that underlies the symbolic representation of the individuals the individual is also something that can die and be reborn and that symbolic representation already showed you in the figure of Jonah right because the idea was there that some terrible thing swallowed this creature up pulled it down Into the Depths and then let it reemerge and I would say that's happened to you people many times already even though you probably don't know it so think back on your experience you know so so let's lay out a couple of things that everybody knows about someone close to you died someone close to you got a serious illness you got a serious illness you were completely heartbroken because a relationship failed catastrophically you were betrayed by a friend well I'm sure that for most of you at least well let's find out how many people in this room have had at least one of those things happened to to them right right and are is there anybody in here who's got off free from that so far oh well that's that's good that's amazing but you can see how you know unbelievably rare that is I'm sure you must have had some other terrible thing happen to you with any luck so so okay so you you perfectly well understand what those experiences are like so then the question is where do you go when an experience like that occurs Cs and you might think well what do you mean where do you go you're in the same place and I would say to you well no it depends pretty much on exactly what you mean by place you know places are times too and you can be one person at one moment in the same place and a completely different person in the next moment in the same place and that means you're really not in the same place at all and when something comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath you and you fall what you fall into is the unknown and a completely different place and that's the underworld of classical mythology and it's also the unconscious and part of the reason that it's the unconscious it's so complicated when the rug is pulled out from underneath you and you're somewhere you don't want to be and didn't expect and didn't like what starts to structure how you respond is the fundamental biological systems that make up the substrat of your psyche so for example the first thing that might might occur is that you experience it as a terrible shock and that's a physiological response and then maybe right afterwards you're angry or you're afraid or you're confused or you're depressed or you know it's another emotional response and then you start to imagine alternative scenarios or reasons why this thing might have occurred there's a whole set of processes that are automatically undertaken when you encounter something that's outside the realm of your expectation and your desire and if you understand that you see if you understand that and this is why I've told you all these complicated things today if you understand understand that that's a different place and that you cycle through that place and then back up to normal reality and through that place and then back up to normal reality multiple times throughout your life you can see that one it's inevitable that the individual is something that suffers two the individual is something that can suffer and then reconstitute itself as a consequence of that suffering it doesn't necessarily happen you know now and then something can come along and take you off at the knees and just never get back up but the general Human Experience is that you learn as a consequence of your failures and the reason for that is that the place that you go when you fail has a tremendous amount of information in it so for example it might be that if you were betrayed in a relationship that you're just too damn naive and there's a lot of things that you should have paid attention to in the world and maybe even within the person the person who you were attracted to with regards to their character or your own character that you should have known more about and if you would have known more about it well that would have been a particular hole you wouldn't have stepped it you know and so the so the appropriate reaction to a catastrophic failure and this isn't always possible is to react as how you're going to react which is usually it with shock and dismay and then to learn from the experience and to gather whatever information there is in the failure so that you can extract out that information and rebuild yourself out of it and restructure your conception of the world so it's richer and more dynamic now let let me just give you an example of that remember the The Hobbit right I don't know we spent a couple of hundred million dollars on that movie and you know it was written in the 1960s but it was based on very very old stories including some of the north sagas remember the The Hobbit at the beginning I think we established that that was Bilbo right so he lives in this little area called the Shire that's really protected and he's kind of a little guy and all the people in the Shire are kind of naive it turns out in The Lord of the Rings that they're actually protected there's these people called Striders that walk around the Border who happen to be the sons of ancient Kings who keep all the bad guys away and the Bloody Hobbits don't even know it and they're even kind of contemptuous of the Striders but they're keeping these hobbits so that they can be naive and self-satisfied and somewhat ignorant and you know a bit on the Arrogant side without even knowing that they're being protected okay well that's you that's why you were hooked into the story right off the bat and then they extract out one guy from this whole scenario who's you know got a little bit more going for him than the typical Hobbit and he wants to go outside of this paradise so to speak to encounter the actual world and so interesting because what's his what's his role what do they hire him as a thief yeah you think geez this pretty weird this guy's going on this developmental Quest you know he's going to turn into a hero and what does he start by doing he starts by becoming a criminal right but that's that seems to be part of the story it's actually part of the his heroic transformation and you know one of the things Yung said about heroic Transformations was that the first thing that happens when you put yourselfself out of side your zone of comfort if you do that voluntarily is that you encounter Your Shadow which is the part of you that is fundamentally in some sense antisocial and criminal and then you extract from that element of yourself those personality attributes you need to survive when you're outside where everything is comfortable and predictable and then what happens with billb while he encounters a dragon right that's the dragon we talked about already that's the thing that swallows you up when you don't know where you are and he and he gets a treasure as a consequence of that well you see what the story means is that if you go outside your zone of comfort if you go outside of what you understand and you do that voluntarily and you develop the skills that you've rejected that are necessary for your proper survival as an integrated human being you can encounter the thing that most frightens you and you can extract something of value as a consequence and that's the human story that's the fundamental story of mankind because we're always the thing that goes outside of what we understand to confront what we don't understand that frightens us so that we can get whatever that thing has and so that's part of the symbolic representations that you need to understand in order for us to continue to develop our investigation of phenomena like unconscious symbolism so that's that we'll see you next Tuesday [Applause]