as you know um Freud believed that U substantial proportion of the symptoms he saw among his clients were of psychological origin despite the fact that some of them were manifest physically uh these things do happen by the way uh I had a client who was from Eastern from Eastern an Eastern European background which is relevant in that I believe her upbringing to be more similar to the kind of upbringing that the victorians that Freud studied were then say more the people people in the west um and she had the same thing that her grandmother had which was um psychosomatic epilepsy and so she expressed what were often sexual conflicts through epileptic seizures um she had an epileptic seizure of this type in my lab my office one day and and uh you know she was unsure whether they were real or not but I've seen people have epileptic seizures and as general rule it's quite upsetting but she had an epileptic seizure in my office and one of the things I noted was that it didn't really bother me and one of the things I've noticed about being a therapist is if someone is is manifesting a lot of emotion and uh it's not bothering me then it's a good hint that there's something wrong that it's not real there's something about it that isn't exactly right because it doesn't seem to hook in your AIC systems the same way so um I had another client this has actually happened to two of my clients the first one was attacked by her boyfriend and uh she was unbelievably naive she was so naive you like you could write a whole book about how naive she was I'm serious it was unbelievable her parents actually taught her this is the literal truth her parents taught her that adults were Angels it's not a good way of preparing your child for the grown-up World anyways she'd had a fight with her boyfriend and he attacked her um with with sexual intent and when we went through this and it was under hypnosis she described his face she said he had a look of sheer malevolence right she'd never seen that she was like a 28-year-old woman she was a she had a she had an undergraduate degree she was no idiot um I asked her like how could you reconcile your belief that adults were angels with all the things that you learned about history in your undergraduate degree and she basically said well I just put those things in a compartment and didn't pay any attention to them it's like yeah okay so she saw this guy's face when he was intending harm and it was actually the look on his face that traumatized her and it traumatized her so badly that she had severe psychosomatic symptoms severe enough to get her diagnosed as schizophrenic for 5 years non-stop at night for 4 hours at a time and the symptoms were that her whole body would shake and she would be unable ble to sleep so and I had another client who had the same thing not the same thing but a similar thing happened to her in high school where a boy was picking on her continually with malevolent intent and the thing that really made that memory stick in her face was the look of malevolence on his face so so you see some people are definitely capable of some behavior that is most L explained as far as I can tell in terms that are similar to Freud's what's repressed unbearable memories often sexual and impermissible desires how do you defend against things that you don't want to be true well there's repression Freud really thought that was unconscious people didn't know they were repressing so I sent you guys a link you may have noticed about the Gman studies on married couples I think their studies are bloody brilliant you know and what Gman found and it's exactly typical is that the couples who were going to get divorced when you see them in their natural habitat they're all nice to each other but their psychophysiological systems are just going berserk they're like prey and Predator to each other you know and you know I don't know if that's repression or if it's suppression these things are very difficult to distinguish because they're not that well defined but but there is a lot of activity beneath the surface that's for sure and the problem with being psychophysiologically aroused like that is that the the consequence of that over time is physical right because what happens when you're aroused like that is you produce a lot of the stress hormone cortisol and that activates the general stress response and the general stress response basically robs your future stores of energy and ability to overreact in the present and if you do that long enough well you'll damage your brain that's one of the things that happens but there's many other things that happen too so denial people will just say well that's not so bad or maybe that's normal we'll see a lot of that when I show you this movie reaction formation which is it's like it's it's overc compensation in some sense so maybe you really hate your sister and you buy her a great big Christmas present you know because you'd like to think that you like her but really you don't like her at all um there often sibling rivalry can be unbelievably intense um displacement this is a good one my boss yells at me I yell at my husband my husband yells at the baby the baby bites the cat you know so it's a cascading chain of of emotion often I find with people though that if they come home and they're in a bad mood and they're touchy you know and you you you say something to them and you know they they fly off the handle it isn't exactly so much that they've suppressed or repressed or denied what's happening at work at least not in any obvious sense not at that day often you have to like pry around in the person and talk to them and harass them a bit until they you know often till emotion arises which is partly why Freud thought about his transformation process is cathartic and then they figure out they'll cry and say well I'm really upset but at my boss and it's not obvious that the person actually knew that when they came home and like the unconscious issue is quite a difficult one to to tear apart my conclusion has been that when people that repression isn't really much different than lying except that the LIE is initially conscious when you first make it but if you keep habitually lying about something you develop a little automated circuit that either does the lying or that has the replacement story at hand and after you know 200 repetitions of the same damn lie you've built a little machine in your head that handles all that and at that point it can be unconscious because you don't need it you don't need to be conscious to make that decision anymore so if you practice something deceptive long enough I think it becomes habitual and unconscious so I would recommend that you don't do that unless you want your head full of little pathological monsters that you can't control I mean maybe it's already like that that would be a Freudian idea identific ation is another defense mechanism you're bullied you want to become the bully rationalization that's when you don't actually this is this is the thing that people who are highly intelligent are really good at you know they've got a problem and uh they come up with some perfectly coherent and reasonable explanation for the problem or the misbehavior that has absolutely nothing to do with what's actually going on and if you if you marry someone for example who's more introverted than you or less verbally fluent this is something to really watch for because just because you could win an argument with someone doesn't mean you're right and if you're verbally fluent and extroverted you can often tie people up in knots but I would say beware of that because just because the person you're arguing with can't formulate their ideas as fast as you and just because they may not be able to hold their own in an argument with you that does not mean they don't know what they see and if you have any intelligence and you're married to someone like that you actually try to coax what they think out of them and help them articulate it and formulate it because there's always the possibility that you're doing something underhanded and sneaky and dangerous in the medium to long term and it might be better for both of you if you figured it out intellectualization well if you've ever watched a woody Ellen movie you know what that is um Woody Ellen should have had Yan Psychotherapy not Freudian Psychotherapy because he's a creative person and one of the things I've noticed is that I have clients who are very creative and other clients who aren't as creative and the ones who are creative spontaneously manifest processes in their dreams that are most easily interpreted in Union form doesn't seem to be the case for people who aren't creative though and if I talk to them about mythological or symbolic ideas it doesn't click for them so what we usually do things that are much more practical what much more like behavior therapy projection is a good one I'm not irritated you're irritating you know and it's it's it's a tossup often because you know you might think well no one can irritate you without your permission it's like believe me if you think that you've not been around some worldclass irritating people because there are certainly people borderline personalities are like that who I don't care if you're a saint man sooner or later you're going to get irritated because that's actually the goal of the behavior in large part so Freud's fundamental theory was that unconscious ideas were at the core of many psychological conflicts like incomprehensible distress or psychosomatic symptoms the psychosomatic symptom is when your body attempts to represent something that you're repressing now I think there's two ways of looking at that because I don't actually think I don't always think that's what happens I think sometimes the the reaction to the situation in question is actually sematic to begin with and then if it's articulated and worked out the body can can it's like the memory local shifts or the representation area shifts so for example I had a client she had a wonderful time she she got fired from her job and they bundled her into her car and it was sudden she didn't see it coming and then on the way home her car was hit by another car so like that was a perfect way to be traumatized because she was already really upset and on edge obviously and then this car hit her at about 50 miles hour and it hurt her quite badly and she had like minimal brain injury which is a really rough one because it has nonspecific symptoms and like she she she'd come to to therapy and i' I'd talk to her her ideas were quite fragmented so it took us quite a long time to kind of weave a coherent story together but she'd sit there like this you know and one of the things that I found after a while when I was working with her was that I was really uncomfortable watching her and it was a discomfort that seemed to Center about here it was a physiological response probably a mirroring response and one day I said to her it was like a spontaneous impulse I said come over we' worked together for a long time by this time I said look come over here um lean on the desk so I had her lean on the desk and then I sort of pounded on her shoulders down her down her spine and she started to cry and she cried like for 45 minutes and then that loosened up a shoulder and then we another thing we did was to I had her she said she couldn't lift her arm so we were're doing basically exposure I said okay lift your arm and then let it go and then lift your arm another inch and let it go and then lift your arm another inch and let it go and soon we had her arm up like this she hadn't moved her arm above her head in like five years because she was in this like protective Crouch it's like a response and I I think that if you're traumatized often what happens is your body throws itself into a state of hyper preparation and then unless you can unless you can bring the meaning of the traumatic event up and articulate it and throw away what it isn't you know like because when she got hit by the car and lost her job part of her idea was well my life is over now you know because you can understand why someone would think that so I would say well yes that understandable but it's too Global and vague a formulation to be helpful but if your life is over and there's nothing you can do this is probably the right thing to do you know and so sometimes it's not so much that the Sy the sematic symptoms are a consequence of repression and then symbolic symbolic representation it's that the actual response to the event starts out physiological and it never gets any farther than that and so partly what you're doing is and I think it's it's like a permanent manifestation of the stress response so he thought of behavior anomalies in this way and hallucinations and delusions like a lot of this stuff is dead on as far as I'm concerned like you see this you see this a lot with people that you you have an intimate relationship with you know like there's something off about what they're doing well for example in the Gman study that's a good example you know how Gman said um the successful couples responded to each other's bids right so if if you're in the house and your your wife says um oh look there's a there's a cardinal in the backyard and it's really pretty you know what that means is maybe you could come over here and look at this bird with me and you know that would help me understand that you like me and are interested in what I'm doing you know and so you can say in Gman terms you can just say I don't want to look at your stupid bird that's not a great response or you can say really okay you put down your newspaper whatever it is and look like you're really perturbed and then you walk over there no that's a good response too because then you can also destroy her pleasure in looking at the bird so without really looking like a son of a so that's a good one or you can just sort of sigh I love that one which means oh you're annoying I'm so put upon I really you're always asking me to do stupid things and I'm so generous and and giving and here you are exploiting me again and then you go over and you look at the bird and you know maybe a smile with your mouth but not your eyes and that's real nice and then the other one is well you go over there like a civilized human being like inter inter acting with someone that you'd actually like to get along with for the next 30 Years but the things in all those other three categories those are there's like just in that sigh there's a whole bloody mess of snakes underneath it you know and if you if you watch someone who does that and you go after them you know if you decide you're going to solve this you have to dig down into that sigh like God only knows how deep it might be a decade old you know they're harboring some bloody resentment that occurred like 15 years ago those things are just stacked up like like little bombs underneath the surface of this little tiny behavioral action you know and usually people will just ignore it which is not a good idea but because they're conflict avoidant people are very very conflict avoidant and they like to think that well if everything's just all right right now it'll stay all right into the future it's like no it won't it absolutely will not and if you don't deal with those little things then all the monsters that are packed up inside them will eventually eat you so but that's a while in the future so you don't really have to worry about it it's not a very good good way of thinking about things Freud also not noticed that people make jokes about things that are often repressed and that's definitely the case if you watch a good comedian especially the ones that are more a little bit more on the outrageous side what they're doing constantly is saying things that people don't want to believe but know are true and so they'll reveal some thing that everybody knows and everybody will laugh because yeah we know that but you're not supposed to say it and um what's his name the Indian IC from yeah yeah that's the guy I mean he's always making racial jokes right so funny CU his whole audience is full of it's really really racially and ethnically mixed mixed audience and all he does is pick out people and like assault them for their race or ethnic identity and they're all laughing way like oh it's so cute that we're all in here like insulting each other but you know he's he's he's giving voice to um what to commonly held stereotypes that no one will admit to hold holding or knowing and so it's kind of a relief to everyone to have that BR out in the open in some safe place so slips of the tongue are also an interesting phenomena you can watch people very carefully for this because now and then they'll say something that means something other than what they thought it would say or it means something contrary or it's a hint into one of these like stacks of monsters that normally they don't want to admit to and you have to be sharp to to catch these things you have to pay real attention you can also see the same thing with micro Expressions often with people that's given rise to this whole new politically correct movement about suppressing microaggression which is like one of the most pathological things I've ever heard of you know like getting rid of your microaggression Expressions that does not make you a good person just makes you a trickier sort of psychopath so Freud also was extremely interested in dreams and his theory was that a dream was a wish fulfillment and like I really don't think that's a good good theory I think that sometimes some dreams have a wish likee element although I should say even though I'm not very fond of the wish fulfillment Theory I don't think it's comprehensive enough his the other things he had to say about dreams were absolutely brilliant so the his book um if you want to read one book by Freud I would say the book on dreams is the best and unfortunately at the moment I can't remember what it's called the interpretation of dreams right it's a very thick book and you know you can't boil down Freud's theory of Dreams it's a whole book into one phrase wish fulfillment you know he was way smarter than that and so you you don't Freud's writing is sort of like fiction you can't condense it you have to read it so you know sometimes it seems obvious like if the dream is of a sexual nature you can easily see well that that might be uh you know a wish fulfillment or something like that and hungry people will dream about food and so it's not the case that and lonely people will dream about social comfort and so forth so it's not the case precisely that the dream can't have any anything to do with wishes yung's idea which I think is a better idea and I think it's more grounded in how we understand dreams in the modern world was that the dream was compensatory so that if you're if you had a particularly rigid Viewpoint and of the world and and that rigid Viewpoint was actually impeding your progress forward that the dream would spin up counter propositional fantasies in an attempt to update the the the stiffening and the and the rigidity of the more explicit belief system system and um I think there's some good evidence for that in modern studies of dreaming it's it seems it's certainly the case that dreams do seem to update your memory and uh I I think partly what the dreams are doing too and this is maybe where some of the symbolic content comes from is there's this you know it's not obvious how you should structure a category right because categories are very fluid you know you might think well all men is a good category you know and then you might think well all white men and all non-white men is a good category depending on what you're discussing and so on you you know the contents of your categories often depend on what you want to do with the category so it's not obvious what should be in the box and what shouldn't be and partly what the dream is doing too is by loosening up the categorical structure you know because things can fluidly change and transform in dreams it allows you to experiment with recategorization while you're asleep without having to suffer the consequences of that in the waking world because you're paralyzed right so I think it's more accurate to think of the dream as an as part of the process by which new knowledge becomes eventually articulated and that's more of a union perspective so you start out not knowing anything about it and then maybe you can code it onto your behavior that would be something P would suggest and then after it's coded onto Behavior maybe you can start expressing it in image especially in Dynamic images and so that would be something like fiction and so you can think of dreams as a kind of fiction and then once you've got the thing laid out in fiction especially if it's kind of coherent then it's not a huge leap from that to having an articulated model and I think a lot of what you're doing when you do dream interpretation in Psychotherapy is you're doing the same thing that you would do if you were interpreting literature um and you know you think well is it worthwhile thinking about literature it's like well you know it's worthwhile reading it fine is it worthwhile thinking about what you're reading it's different process it's like arguably well so the dream has a function and it does whatever dreams do and then perhaps there's also some utility in attending to the dream consciously and trying to elaborate up on its contents and Freud would do that with free association it works it really works it's quite fun if you have someone who's a good dreamer you know you say okay they the way I do it is they they tell me the dream they they read it and I listen to it and I let my imagination work on it so it kind of builds up an associational net and then I have them start from the beginning again and whenever they come to a theme or an object or something like that that's identifiable then I ask them what that reminds them of and so to me what we're doing is fleshing out the associational network and that's a Freudian idea and then if you walk through the whole dream like and then you know people will associate and then that will remind them of something and then maybe they'll remember why a specific date is in the dream or something like that and so it's like the the dream is putting together ideas that have a vague Cloud around them and it's trying to sequence and organize them and you seem to be able to facilitate that process with conscious reflection so and for some people it's extremely useful like I mean U one of the things Jung said which I really liked was that if you're stuck in a problem and you can't solve it you have no idea how to solve a terrible conflict of some sort you have to look where you don't know and he thought well one of the places that you don't know is in your dreams and you think well dreams are doing something and there's good evidence that part of what dreams are doing is dealing with novel information you know they're trying to conceptualize novel information and so that's a good place to look for do potential Solutions because you can also think of the dream as part of a hypothesis generating mechanism that would also be the creative imagination so I think often the reason I think maybe the reason that sometimes people remember dreams that are extremely emotional and they feel compelled to tell them is perhaps is because the people who did that I think about it from an evolutionary perspective the people who did that and exposed the fantasy to the group were more likely to gather information about what it meant and possibly more likely to survive and so there seems to be a trigger level you know above which the dream is specifically particular sufficiently emotionally impactful so that you actually remember it when you wake up and youung would Al often consider those big dreams you know especially if they had archetypal content and those would also sometimes be dreams that had relevance beyond the relevance to the specific individual so they might be dreams that are working really hard on a problem that's Collective so and you know you think well where do new ideas come from you know well they just appear in my head it's like that's not a very good theory you know the idea has a birthplace the birthplace is in the unknown and then there's a tremendous amount of elaboration of that information before it ever gets up to where it pops into your head as an articulated statement you know that's not a that that's not an instantaneous magical transformation or maybe you can think it is but it's you know it's not a very useful Theory and the idea that there are multiple stages of processing of information each with their own nature is much more in keeping with the way that modern people look at the brain which is as a um organ that's evolved that has very very archaic elements like massively archaic like the ones I told you about that were that you share with lobsters and then there's all sorts of weird systems built on top of that that are basically there for biological purposes and you know then there's a cortical cap that sort of elaborates and all those things are working together to to extract out information that you can use for living it's certainly not mechanical it's not exactly computational it's it's a multi-stage process and dreams and Imagination are involved at least at the hypothesis stage so so you can think of dream is a hypothesis in some sense and but although I don't think I don't think it's reasonable to say that dreams do one thing anymore than it is reasonable to say that thinking does one thing but the compensatory idea is a good one and you you can kind of think of the way fulfillment idea is a subset of that so the dream is also Freud says a process of regression that manifests itself simultaneously in three Fashions as topical regression from the conscious to the unconscious as temporal regression from the present time to Childhood sometimes you see this with people who've had repetitive nightmares one thing I can tell you you can try this if you have a repetitive nightmare usually it presents the same thematic problem over and over like maybe you're being chased by a monster when you turn around um maybe your hands are tied or something like that you know which and if you told me about that I'd think well who or what is tying your hands right that would be the first question but one of the things you can do to make that nightmare go away is to sit down reimagine the Nightmare and fix the ending now you have to come up with a reasonable ending so for example I had a client who was afraid she had a cabin was very interesting case she had a mouse phobia and she was afraid mice would run up her leg that was the specific content of the phobia and she had a cabin and she didn't like to go to the cabin for two reasons one was a mouse might run up her leg and the second was she was up there alone and she was afraid that she would get attacked and sexually assaulted so doesn't take much of a Freudian genius to figure out the connection between those two things but one of the things we did was first of all talk it through as if it was a reasonable fear it's like well you are up there alone maybe you could have an alarm system and some good locks it's like you know so your fear might be predicated on some realistic some realis IC uh appraisal you know which you're repressing you're not dealing with it it is potentially dangerous fix that get a dog you know so we did all that and simultaneously treated her Mouse phobia through behavioral exposure and then she was having these dreams of these guys breaking in and raping her and so we had her walk through I think she bought a bat and put it by her bed which was something I suggested and then we walked her through I walked her through the dream and we changed the ending so what she did was the guy climbed in the window and she picked up the bat and she smacked him one and then she sprayed him with oven cleaner which is like a really nasty thing to do then she tied him up in a chair and she was like she was dancing around in the office thinking that's you know that's a hero myth essentially right we change we transformed the Dream from victim to Hero essentially and that was the end of her nightmares and that happens more often than you than you might think because the dream is presenting you with a problem right it's like a threat detection mechanism it says well here's a threat maybe it's expressing it in symbolic terms or maybe it's using a General category like monster it's like are monsters chasing you well it depends on what you mean by monsters but functionally yes they are you know well you might think well conceptualizing them as monsters isn't exactly accurate it's like well it's not exactly clear that it's not accurate so I think a monster is a monster is like a representation of the class of all things that could chase you and devour you and there's lots of those that are symbolic and articulate like if you're arguing with someone who can defeat you or you know there there are certainly Predators on the on the internet that are waiting for you at pretty much any moment to slip up and like the idea that the world is full of monstrous embodied forces that have you as Target for prey it's like yes that's right obviously that's right so so Freud Freud's theory of Dreams was essentially that there was a latent content in the dream which is what the dream really meant and then the layers of weird transformation of the idea he thought about displacement where one thing would stand for another or condensation where a lot of events would be rammed together in a very short sequence or symbolization so like the mouse in in my client's phobia would be a good example of of symbolization of fear of sexual penetration and dramatization he thought of those as all ways that the dream was hiding the the latent content from the dreamer in order to protect sleep whereas y Yung and Freud really argued about this and it's part of what broke them apart Yung said no no no that's that might be right in some cases but generally what the dream is doing it's just a fact of nature the dream is trying to think something up and so it might be concentrating on something that you refuse to admit to and repress but sometimes it's just like out there with free play at fantasy trying to generally Orient you in the world so he thought about it and Yung also thought it's like Yung was an archaeologist of the ID in some sense you know he thought of the ID as a much as a more creative place in some sense than than Freud did and as the place where new ideas and new adaptive patterns were born so he believed that the dream was generally fairly illogical and that one of the things you did when you recounted the dream no matter how accurately you tried to recount it was to transform it into more of a narrative form than it actually took as a dream and so no doubt that's true because when you describe an experience even if it's an experience you have every day you basically extract out the gist and then describe the experience and you have to do the same thing with dreams because you can't present the images so it might that just the act of telling the dream might even be useful in that sense because what you're doing is making whatever that thought is more coherent than it would otherwise be so so I want to run through this this psychosexual Theory very rapidly and then I want to show you some examples of it so Yung believed that in some sense you know you had a primary energy and that that psychic energy that's what we call Energy you know when you say I'm feeling energetic today it's not obvious what that means but Freud regarded that as libidinal and he thought that there were multiple sources of libbido but the most fundamental Source was sexuality and I think he thought that in part because of the influence of Darwin's ideas because Darwin basically said that the goal of organisms was essentially to procreate you know and the sexual urge is extraordinarily strong and so he thought it was primary and you can make a reasonable case that it's primary but I think it's too reductionistic because there's lots of drives that people have and it isn't obvious that they all coagulate into a single source of energy somewhere in the psyche if you look at the way the brain is structured actually the part of the brain that wakes you up is called the reticular activating system and it's it's it's a it's some strands way down in the brain stem that that that Branch out in in a m in many many ways out into the brain like a tree in some sense if you twist your head the wrong way when you have a car oxygen sometimes you can Shear off those tracts and then you're in a coma and there's nothing that can be done about it but the reticular activating system is really really old like it seems older than all the motivational and emotional systems and so if there is a libido which would be whatever it is that the reticular activating system does in order to awaken you from your Slumber say or to put you on alert when something happens it looks like it's older than all the the uh isolated motivational and emotional systems so the libido per se isn't sexual by by all appearances it's it's something that's below sexuality you know so but you know it's still reasonable to note that sexuality is is a powerful driving force so Freud said it begins its development in infancy the infant is a sexual being by which he meant the infant is capable of experiencing sexual pleasure so when I should let you know that one of the practices of Victorian nurses with male babies was to masturbate them till they till satiation so they would sleep so it's not it's it's not like there's no evidence for sexual pleasure in in in children in infants in particular Freud thought about that polymorphously perverse by which he meant that the infant was willing to take pleasure in any in any activity whatsoever and babies can have some pretty messy habits without any structuring of that and then that that got channeled in various ways as the as the as the baby developed so here are here are his stages the oral period Well it's quite interesting that when a baby is born the part of its body that is in fact most mature most like a mature part in terms of its eventual function is in fact the the mouth and the tongue and obvious there's obvious reasons for that because the baby has to be able to latch onto the nipple you know right away and that's actually quite a complicated activity it's a complicated social activity and it requires a fair bit of coordination between the baby and the mother it's not something automatic so if the baby didn't come out um you know wired up for certain basic in certain basic ways it wouldn't be able to get going to begin with so it it's definitely wired up in an oral manner so he thought of the oral character as power passive optimistic and dependent then there's the anal period where the the Freud thought that's where the ego met the super ego for the first time in some sense where the child had to renounce primary pleasure and so that would be the pleasure of defecation fundamentally in favor of a more complex form of behavior and that that was actually an inhibitory process and it's certainly the case that parents can get into like year long Wars with with kids over toilet training you know so I've seen some pretty weird examples of that that so I I saw one parent who who was in such a war with with their three-year-old that that three-year-old would only deficate if the mother put a diaper on them so it had perfect control but it was like there was a war going on so and he thought of anal people as orderly parsimonious and obstinate it's kind of interesting too because one of the things that we found recently is that conscientiousness is one of the big five traits right you can break it into orderliness and into industriousness and orderliness predicts conservatism and predicts authoritarianism and it's associated with disgust sensitivity so I thought huh that's pretty interesting you know and it's also the other thing that's really cool about orderliness and discussed sensitivity is that it is associated with disgust associated with anything that would contaminate and so the idea that that's associated in some sense with with with anal thinking is it's there's something about it that's right you know and it's also pretty important to note that the reason that all you people are going to live to be 90 or there abouts roughly speaking isn't doctors it's plumbers so right really so you know uh the the life is in itself contaminating and we have a built-in system that's the disgust system to take care of that problem and it's clear that that does vary in strength between individual and it's also clear that the degree to which that if if you have a stronger disgust system you're much more likely to be conservative in your political beliefs so that's pretty cool it's like it's not something obvious you know the phallic period 3 to 5 um that's when Freud believed that children often discovered masturbation and that's when girls develop penis envy and uh boys develop castration anxiety which I said is a small price to pay for the possession of a penis yeah so all right he here's a way of thinking about the edle um phase it's basically hostility and erotic attraction towards the parents now Freud thought about this as a normative part of development and that's a tough one it certainly does seem to be the case and there is some experimental evidence that boys fight more with their fathers and girls fight more with their mothers so that's kind of interesting but I think I'm not so sure that the idea that this is normative development is exactly right and maybe maybe Freud got skewed over a bit because he was always dealing with people who had one form of pathology or another now here's here's how to develop an eatable situation if you want to with your children some of you will take this road so maybe this will help you do it better if that's really what you're into so the thing to do is make sure that your marriage is quite hostile so that you have a lot of underlying resentment to your partner and that will that will encourage you to subtly turn one of your children or more of them against that parent without them really knowing it and you can do that by covertly reinforcing them when they do that or ignoring them that's even better when they do the opposite so you know maybe your daughter is being nice to your husband you're already mad at him so that you you know you make it known to her using one strategy or another that you don't really approve of that sort of behavior so that's a pretty effective way of doing it then the next thing to do is this works really well if you have a young boy and you're a woman it's like you know you want to you want to develop a lot of hostility towards your husband so you really don't want to have anything to do with him and you don't really want him to even touch you and because of that you're not even really all that happy about men and so then you do two things is that you turn to your son because he's kind of harmless and you make your relationship way closer than it should be with him and you encourage all sorts of things that are really kind of on the edge of acceptable behavior and at the same time you repress and Crush any part part of him that would develop the kind of masculinity that would enable him to turn into the kind of monster that you think your husband is so that's really effective and people can do that for like 20 years and the outcome is that I have a lot of business as a therapist because I I do see this sort of thing and a lot of a lot of what happens in therapy is that it's an interesting thing is people come to see me to solve all sorts of problems like of of of a very large number of sorts but one of the common problems is they cannot get away from their families they can't they can't break those initial doesn't even break them the family can't negotiate a way to allow the person to manifest the Independence that would be necessary for them to have their own life and their own family and their own career and so they're struggling and they're caught in these often ugly Nets like often unbelievably ugly Nets and they can't get out of them and that's what we're going to see right now so now this character Robert crumb he's quite the character we should turn those lights down yeah that's good maybe we can do voice over on this later so it doesn't really matter if we have it wh let's do that okay so Robert Crum was an underground cartoonist is an underground cartoonist and he lived in Berkeley in the late 60s and this documentary was made about him and his family and so I'm going to get you to watch as much of it as we can watch and maybe I'll show you a bit more in the next class I'm not supposed to because we're supposed to do something else but I might anyways now this film I love this film for a variety of reasons first of all I think it's a work of Genius second I've never ever seen any film of any sort that does as good a job of illustrating not only what Freudian Psychopathology is and how it manifests itself symbolically but also Al how the family plays into it so away we go [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] for hell you don't want to that okay so here's what happened the film crew wants to go to his house where his brother still lives and film his brother Charles who's lived there since he was he's like 55 and he's lived there since he was a teenager and you notice how Robert uses a very soft voice he's talking to his mother and you know he's got a whole he's a famous guy he's got a whole film crew there and he's basically asking his mother if it's okay if he brings his friends over and she basically says well I don't think that would be such a good idea and he backs off right away and then when he gets off the phone he says well she said no you know that's it so you know that's that's if you if you have a good snake detector working and you're listening and watching closely you know that there are a tremendous number of snakes under the surface already one actually people their way of expressing their connection to Eternity whatever you want to call it modern music doesn't have that L people themselves that waymore so that's a very paradoxical set of statements because on the one hand he's expressing he says he really loves old music and he loves it because he can hear the soul of the Common Man being expressed but then he takes like a potot at the entire world of Music since 1920 which indicates a tremendous amount of of implicit arrogance and he also says that's the only time that he feels any love for Humanity it's like well first of all I'm not sure that his attitude towards Humanity as a whole is actually all that relevant and second if if you're if you put yourself in the position where you regard yourself as a credible judge of humanity it's like you might want to take a few back steps back from your narcissism right right then and there so and I'm not kidding about this I'll tell you those kids who shot up that Coline high school they had their motivations and they wrote them down and they knew exactly what they were doing and the leader who was the more literary of the two said quite explicitly that he was the judge of the human race and as far as he was concerned it didn't pass his judgment and that you know that he it was perfectly reasonable for him to go on the cleansing binge you know and and he didn't just want to shoot up a whole you know a few students in the school he had bombs planted all over the school he wanted a whole apocalyptic scene and they had dreamed about blowing up Detroit and so you can imagine what would happen if someone like him got their finger on the button of the of the of a hydrogen bomb so you know Yung said if you go deep enough into the shadow you find hell it's like that's exactly right and it's no joke [Music] this is Mom's house so Charles you read any good books lately I guess I am I don't know kind of like recycling a lot of these books mean by recycling they've got a very interesting voice tone which which you might pick up on as well it's very ironic like everything they say is ironic it's got this kind of bitter and arrogant twist in it and they're talking about absolutely catastrophic things like nightmarishly catastrophic things yet there's this sort of adolescent like banter and and laughter about it and you read them all year 20 years ago now you're reading them I do that because there's else to read any recent writers interested as the old Victor so you know Freud would say here that there's an awful lot of intellectualization going on and there definitely is so these these guys are very divorced from their bodies and they have every reason to be Charles was the one that started this whole comic thing in his family he was completely obsessed with comics when we were kids had absolutely no other normal kid interest he wasn't interested in toys or games he didn't play sports he didn't do anything but read Comics draw Comics think comics and talk you I like drawing but I had other drawing interest besides Comics like to draw realistic scenes and you know just pictures of buildings cars and stuff he was interested in that at all only Comics the earliest one that still existed I had is Charles Drew this one supposed to be me that's him yeah so you hear that laugh it's like that's the situation they're in as adults and Charles could see that coming and he had all sorts of homicidal fantasies about about Robert Unita what my father over maybe I was unconsciously imitating him when I forced you to draw comic books there's still a kind of sibling rivalry going on between me and Robert was when we were little kids and he was still living in I said I think basically the Robert and I are still competing with each other dra coms I still think of Charles approval when I'm draw whether like Charles and everybody drawing com yeah so what basically happened was Robert got the world and Charles got his mother so they both won but Charles I don't think is very happy with what he won the family the animal Town Publishing Company was had a club we had as little kids where we sat around and talked about economics I was usually the president and Robert was usually the vice president and Carol was usually the secretary and Sandy was the treasurer and Maxon was the supply boy and he still still he still resents that he still resents the fact that we imposed the role of Supply boy on him Max 310 Max was the scapegoat in the family five kids he was definitely the bottom of I to explain is that we had these meetings with this this club that Char anal Town Comics Club yeah comics and all that stuff everybody got their had their different job their different like a secretary and president of Vice President I was Supply boy I got little you know directed Robert did or something still the whole thing it's this like incredible crazy sibling thing between me and Charles and Robert up in this like little room upstairs and the whole rest of the world didn't know what the was going on so these three primordial monkeys working it out in the trees situation insired by the Disney movie where Robert new plays Long John Silver after saw on TV in 1955 we started like playing Pirates you know like normal kids do go out you know pretend you made this ship out old refrigerator cart and everything Charles would walk around town dressed up like Long John Silver this old coat of my mother just long green coat and he made himself a three-pointed hat he had a crutch TI his leg we go around town that way I didn't realize years later how fixated Charles really was on this Treasure Island and this thing dominated our play and our fantasy for six or seven years after that when you drew these comics about Treasure Island and it became this real bro elaborate thing Way Beyond the original Disney film this is one of Charles this is one of our Twan comics in which he would draw some of the characters and I would draw some of we with each other that was also a great School of cartooning for me is having to come up with clever retours to him he was actually much clever and funnier than I was it actually got kind of tiresome but you know he had to do it he was in charge I had this very like definite bad problem about Charles I think a lot of to do with my like overly morbid sensitivity to the guy or something to as well as his you know natural Affinity to get in there and profit off you know course was somewhat of a middle man they had a this way of like restricting or causing like like terrible self-consciousness and restriction in me as a kid I was like morbidly modest in my body like sex like completely remed it came time for me like to become you know sexually aware when I was like puberty Stu like sex was nowhere near in my life you know just like nothing to do with it like so heavily repressed which naturally have that's seizure started I have a seizure seizure like a a point where Behavior well I actually to get the whole sex which is an awful involved topic you know that's all I thought about when I was in my and early 20s with sex and I masturbate about four or five times a week how frequently did you I don't masturbate anymore my sexual desires are completely dead like I told to the other night I can't even get any tion anymore I don't know whether it's it's it's one thing or maybe it's a combination maybe it's a combination of the medication and the lack of external stimulation maybe approaching old age too has something to do with mean you need some external stimulation to keep up your interest I don't know now that my sexual desires are going on not so sure I want them back in sexual memories I remember actually I remember being like four years old and getting erections my aunt or my my mother's sister and kind of humping her legs and her shoes like under the table I remember going my mother's closet and she had these cowboy boots that she wore when it rained and humping those in the closet and I remember singing while was was about five or six was sexually attracted Bugs Bunny and I cut out this Bugs Bunny off the cover of a comic book and Carri it around with me my pocket and took that and looked at it periodically and got all wrinkled up and handling it so much that I asked my mother to iron it on the ironing board it flatten it out and she did I was deeply disappointed because it got all brown and she ironed it brittle and crumbled it apart I don't know I have this sexual attraction to cartoon characters you tell me I that all changed when I turned 12 I came fixated on she she que to the Jungle TV show around like 55 [Music] 56 totally obsessed with she went to bed about things I want to do with [Music] she now you see how how he conceptualizes himself in relationship to her too so he's like this well he's a lot smaller than she is and he's clearly dependent on her physical strength and ability and so he definitely conceptualizes himself as a subordinate entity robt was very hung up on sex was a little kid even more so than I was I think you were more inhibited as a child than I was even sexually I think you were more afraid of women than I was as a young person when I was in high school I had a few dates with girls when you were in high school you didn't have any dates at all with anybody actually sort of goodlooking at everything I was a handsome goodl looking ch teenager but there was just this something that was wrong with my personality I don't know the kids high school was an absolute nightmare I was the most unpopular kid in the high school people were always picking on me and beating me up and and the girls wouldn't have anything to do with me they treated me like I was the scum of the Year this STP I'm talking all about my problems with women starting High School I learned a lot about women because there were this guy in scutch this guy here who was like a this mean bully but he's also very charming and all the girls liked him he's the dream boat but he was also a bully and my brother Charles was one of the guys he singled out for particular attention you had this gang of flunkies that hung around with this guy's scutch so remember this scene where they SC punches up my brother in the hallway at school s sight for me to see Charles gave up trying to be popular or have girlfriends or anything everybody saw that he couldn't fight back beat up by scutch so that was probably enough to get his depression going because it's a major dominance hierarchy defeat and he was also an outcast so he's not even in the dominance Hy he was one of the class of boys by his own account that was so contemp that he wasn't even in the realm of possible date partners for any of the girls and so when you're thinking about why Robert is draw drawing women with like vicious bird heads one of the things that you might think about is that for men at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy or outside the dominance hierarchy completely like these guys were all they ever got from girls including their own mother was rejection like harsh rejection and it was enough basically well it was really in the final analysis it was enough to kill Charles now I'm not blaming the girls but um I'm trying to explain why Robert is expressing himself the way that he's expressing himself why these images come up made a few people that are out there you got you got to take into consideration the fact that I'm taking tranquilizers that makes it a lot easier than otherwise be you know and so Charles still has this kind of dream in the back of his head too which is really the image the idea that that Charles is living out which is that Charles has it much easier and much better than he does because he doesn't really have to deal with the world and he can just stay at home in Comfort with his mother it's like he's not in Comfort the guy he commits suicide six months after this film taking these tranquilized anti-press if it wasn't for them I'd probably go completely crazy living here at home mother now walk that's extremely interesting so Yung had this idea about synchronicity you know and he said now and then things would happen in the world that were connected weirdly because of like an emotional contagion and it's a very strange idea but I want to show you an example of it because it's actually caught on film here so when Charles and Robert are talking about their mother you notice Charles hunches right over right he's like even more inside than he normally is and they they turn into two 13-year-old teenage boys talking upstairs so their mother won't hear them as soon as they mention her she pipes in if it wasn't for them I'd probably go completely crazy living here walk you can't tell my mother the absolute truth I don't think we should be talking about this now you see when when he did hear her she's complaining about the the curtains being closed or something and this camera crew cluttering up her house which you know probably hasn't been cleaned since 1957 it's not really that she matters that she cares that they're there what she's doing is expressing her dominance and it's and she does it in a very a very Subterranean way and Charles is absolutely terrified of her like what what what thing what's wrong with it some film equip or something some kind of film equipment mother I don't know don't worry about it it's all going to be out of here I'll be back to normal show girl talking about how one of their friends got a date with scutch and how envious they all are this is how I felt about I'm a little bitter about it as you can see here show here how I thought that most teenage boys are very cruel and aggressive and everything like that if girls would see that I was more kind and sensitive they would like me more impressed by the fact that I could draw but could understand why they like these cool aggressive guys and not me because I was more kind and everything more like them I was more like them but I realized they didn't want me to be like them basically I felt very hurt and cruy misunderstood because I considered myself talented and intelligent I was not very attractive physically I didn't think those things really matter it was what's inside when I was 13 14 trying to be a normal teenager I was like really a jerk just I tried to you know act like I thought they were acting it just came out all wrong and weird so then I just stopped completely and just became a shadow and I was wasn't even there people weren't even aware that I was you know in in the same world they were in and that kind of freed me completely because I wasn't under those pressures to be normal so I got interested in old time music and went to the black section Town knocking on doors and looking for old records and things like that they would be Unthinkable if you were going to be a normal teenager so Robert you know he despite the fact that he grew up in a family that was very diff ult to escape from did follow his creative interests you know and he he picked a path that was characteristic of individuality and it did get him out you know he gave up on Conformity but he found an alternative so you know it's pretty impressive and he did become very very successful I want to show you I can't show you all of what I wanted to show you today but I do understand went through the war and they just wanted this thing was so tight subconscious teenager forc me f enters a door and you take her outside you got with this ey girls a Living Color it's like very hard armored personality line quion right into the you got a good GR in test you gots missed it where is it here died 82 my job hit you real hard was 5 years old on Christmasy this whole thing happened stack at me busted my collar bone yeah Char had a pinched for getting in trouble very diabolical as a kid and my father would like beat him unmercifully for these things that he was always do these crimes he was always committing and it just it just made him worse I think a subconscious desire to be punished I don't know I think aamine aetam now where in the world is this oh yeah here we go yeah I think we've got 10 minutes here so about 17th I started being driven by that Obsession that I'll go down in history as a great artist that will be my revenge my image celebrating Valentine's Day February 13th 1962 I decided to reject conforming when Society rejected me I've heard all that be yourself stuff when I myself people think I'm nuts guess I'll have to be satisfied with cats and old records girls are just utterly out of my reach they won't even let me draw them yeah all that changed after I got famous I was used to what he had been doing which was really quite sweet and then he did this one that was just incredibly hostile to women very SE hostile and I was I wasn't expecting it and it was really I was really shocked and just taken ab and you know really just kind of like whack it's hard for me to believe that he can't just Channel himself into doing better work I like a lot of his work and certainly I don't miss the satirical aspect of it but then I find myself having a completely different reaction you know perhaps one of being really turned off and disgusted and um you know this this cartoon Joe Blow is one that I thought about um a lot in that light on the one hand it's a satire of the 1950s the healthy facade of the American family and it kind of exposes the sickness under the surface but at the same time you sense that crime is getting off on it himself and some other way and on another level it's an orgy it's a self-indulgent orgy um in a fantasy and the fantasy you know specifically this story is a story about a father who commands his daughter to give him a and she does and they wind up having sex and the little sort of leave to Beaver type Brother character comes running in and sees the father and the sister and he's shocked and upset he goes running to the mother to tell her and Mom comes out of a closet wearing sort of SNM kind of get up and and the B Bo oh cool you know and the next thing m mom and son are having sex and the whole panel ends the whole cartoon ends with the parents saying gee we should spend more time with the kids you know something like that um so you know you read something like this and I think that it has gone over the line from satire of um a 1950s hygienic you know um family and denial into something which is just producing and I think this theme in his work is omnipresent it's part of an arrested juvenile [Music] Vision so the mother has these cute things scattered everywhere I talk a bit about we don't really talk that much we hold aloof from each other for the most part you spend all your time down here watching television doing and doing your cross puzzles and I I spend so you can see how well they communicate we two reuses living in the [Music] same do you do most of the talking and the relationship on there's no doubt about that you said told me that even you take those medications but you still feel nervous and depressed sometimes yeah but not as not as much as I would if I wasn't taking the medication what do you think would happen if you stop taking this stuff I don't know I tried it a couple of times and I didn't like what was starting to happen get I as if I were becoming gradually unhinged so I got B Hur I tried this a couple of times about two or three times do you still think they're picking my brain mother now she doesn't have to clean up for the cameras that's for sure some people like me and some don't so you realize that this is a a man who's spent like 30 years in his room upstairs and has no friends and has never had any friends and and that's his mother's response quiety from extreme to the make trouble on the streets one of the last times I went out with him were walking around and you just went up to some old lady in the street started like drilling her about her spiritual life and she just like got really frightened and threaten to call police and everything goes up to these strangers on the streets start raving at them no he was justun I does leave the house any always got trouble when went out you give me one good reason for leaving the house we I'm out taking illegal drugs or so illegal got that right this is true one thing I all this and $2 teeth upstairs you won't wear them well they are at first you got to kind of leave them in there anywhere I never see anybody food or go I take a bath about once in six weeks I believe in having a certain pride in yourself why not that your ego gets out of hand or you're can't exist except in relation to other people your hygiene pretty good I never constipated that's about all I can say for myself give it 15 more seconds father us that you I say something but I your kids are always giving us cast Story You're always obsessed with well when you all you kids were real little I used to have to take care of your my my so tried giving us all en that didn't work out no I I never gave any en youat to give us en if we didn't behave mind of person who's interested in legs and is very different well that gives you some indication of a Freudian family it's not pretty good luck on the exam on Thursday as you know already the there are lots of sample questions posted on the net so it's all it's here right okay