Okay, so there were a couple of things that
I wanted to tell you that were left open in the last lecture. The first one was that I told you that there
were two types of games and then I only told you about one type of game, so I know you’ve
all been dying of curiosity about that ever since. So, the first type of game that we talked
about was the one where every one has a particularly shared goal. You might of that as a structured game. But the second type of game that Piaget was
interested in was dramatic or pretend play games. And generally how a pretend play episodes
works is that—well a child can always do this by him or herself—but if it’s a group
game usually what happens is the kids get together in a little group and they basically
script out a little play. And its like—what might you call it? Spontaneous improvisation. You know, and so maybe they’ll play house
and they’ll assign, you know, a player to each role and I guess that would normally
be mother and father and baby, often, and maybe pet—dog or cat. So, you know, you can be the cat and you can
be the mom and you can be the dad. And then they’ll set up a little dramatic
arena. Maybe it’s a, you know, like a table covered
with blankets, which kids seem to particularly like and then they’ll run through the game. Now, and in some sense what they’re doing
is imitating their parents or maybe their pet or maybe the baby, but it’s not exactly
imitation, and this is an important thing to note, because imitation would imply—if
you’re imitating someone what you’re in sense doing is duplicating what they just
did. Now there are robots, for example, now. If you want to teach the robot how to do something,
so maybe the robot’s got an arm—in fact it does—you can grab it’s arm and you
can go like this. And then as long as you pt can there, the
robot will do exactly that, precisely that. So you’re teaching it—it has the capability
of imitating movements that it’s already done once. But, you know, when you’re a kid and you’re
playing house and maybe you’re being the mother, you don’t precisely duplicate with
your body exactly the movements that you saw your mother make maybe the last time you saw
her or the last time you were watching her. What you seem to be able to do instead is
to watch your mother over long periods of time and extract out something that you might
describe as her spirit. And I know that that’s not really a psychological
or a scientific word but it’s a useful word because—or you could perhaps say her personality
but it’s not her personality exactly because it’s her personality as mother, which isn’t
really her personality. It’s the Mother personality and that Mother
personality is something that has been practiced by mothers for who knows how long. And what the child seems to do when she, we’ll
say for this example, is watching her mother is extract out what the spirit of motherhood
is and then embody that, right? And so you might think of the spirit of motherhood
as those elements of behavior and perception and emotion and cognition, for that matter—but
it’s all of those embodied simultaneously—what’s in common across all the instances of acting
like a mother. You know, so you can say, “Well, that’s
mother-like behavior,” and who knows what that might be. I mean, what you want to do is conjure up
the stereotype roughly speaking of the mother. You know, people don’t really like stereotypes,
especially in psychology, but almost all your thinking is in stereotypes so there’s not
much difference between a stereotype and a category, you know. Categories are oversimplifications and so
are stereotypes. But anyways, so you take—imagine the stereotype
of a mother and then the child is acting that out. And what they’re trying to do is to become
the mother roughly speaking. So, and why? Well, for obvious reasons. There are obvious reasons why someone would
do that. It’s because without mothers there wouldn’t
be any human beings and so if we didn’t have successful mothers that would be the
end of us and so we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. So, now one of the things that Piaget observed
was that this kind of dramatic play was extraordinarily important to children because it helped them
learn how to act like they would act maybe when they’re older children or maybe when
they’re teenagers or maybe when they’re young adults. It’s a trial run in a relatively safe environment. One of the things I’ve been thinking about,
it’s not that easy to precisely specify the role of the father, but I really believe
that one of the things that fathers do, if they do a good job of being fathers, is that
they circumscribe a safe space within the house or within the familial environment where
the children can play free of interference. And so then because play is also a very sensitive
behavior, by which I mean that it’s easy to disrupt play in children. If there’s anything wrong with the child
they won’t play. So one of the ways that you can tell if your
child is doing well is that they’re playing. I mean I suppose you could say the same thing
about your dog or maybe even your partner. You know, if they’re in a playful mood then
perhaps there isn’t anything particularly wrong with the relationship at the moment
and all the needs that might be regarded in some sense as more fundamental have been met. And so to get children to play well you have
to circumscribe a safe area and they have to be taken care of. And then they can experiment with different
modes of being, and they do that by themselves but they also do that in the company of other
children. And obviously what they’re doing is practicing
for later roles. And, you know, you see this sort of thing
in children at multiple levels because not only will they play out being a parent—that’s
a very common element of child’s play—but they’ll also often develop sort of fixations
on slightly older children, maybe a year older or two years older, and sort of hero worship
them and follow them around and imitate them even more directly than they might imitate
a parent. Now obviously the child has his or her reasons
for that and the reasons are is they’re trying to advance to the next stage, so they
scan the environment; look for something who seems to have done that well, whatever that
means, who looks competent and is maybe friendly and can tolerate having a, you know, kid trail
along behind them; and they act them out. And so play, all the forms of play that we
described—the two basic forms—are extremely important to children. And when you see them pretending, as a parent,
one of the things that you should realize is that it’s an extraordinarily important
form of activity; it’s how they socialize themselves. Now, the other thing that I didn’t mention—this
is concentrating on Piaget as well—is, you know, we talked a little bit in the mythological
and shamanic initiation lectures about the idea that human personality evolution is a
punctuated, upward development. So you move ahead and then you encounter something
that gets in your way, some sort of severe obstacle, and it either blocks you behaviorally
so that you can’t get to your goal using your current behavioral plans or it’s even
more complex than that and it disrupts the whole structure that you’re using to integrate
your behavior across time. You know, so the difference between that would
be roughly the difference between say going home to your partner or going on a date with
our partner, assuming people still do such things, going out with your partner and them
being in an irritable mood. And so what that would mean is maybe you smile
at them or you tell them a joke and, you know, it falls flat or that respond in an angry
manner and so you’re going to orient to that; it’s going to things fall apart a
little bit; you might say, “Oh, the whole night’s ruined.” You probably don’t say the whole relationship
has had it, but if that happens enough times you might. But you might say, “Oh, the whole night’s
ruined,” or maybe you’ll—which is probably a bit of an overreaction right off the bat. Like my impression as a clinician is that
when people are being difficult to get along with you should let them do it three times
while you track it, because then the third time they do it you can say, “Look you’ve
done this. Here’s what you’re doing.” And they say, “No, I’m not doing that,”
and you say, “Ha! Yes you are because I saw you do it then and
then, and then.” And then they’re basically screwed; you
win right away if you do that. So, but more seriously, if it’s just one
little episode it’s best to let it go. You don’t really have any proof and maybe
there’s just some, you know, local thing wrong. Three times, that’s a whole different issue
because then you’ve got some credibility and it’s a nice balance between being too
impulsively reactive—you know, because you should stand up for yourself, right? Well, does that mean that you should respond
to every little slight? Well, you’re going to be reacting all the
time if you do that, but you don’t want to be a pushover and let people walk all over
you. So you have to find some balance between being
tolerant, so you don’t have unnecessary fights, and being tough so that you don’t
have unnecessary fights, and three is a nice number. Anyways, so you’re out with your partner
and they’re being annoying and, you know, you can reconstruct your behavior. Maybe instead of telling jokes you look at
your phone and let them calm down or something like that. You haven’t disrupted much of the frame
that you’re using to interact with, right? The night, the evening, is still continuing
in it’s planned manner; you can still use the perceptual structures and the expectations
that were guiding you. They were modified at a very high resolution,
minor level. And then, so that’s going to upset you a
little bit because you’re going to think, you know, “What’s going on here?” Maybe you’ll think, “Is there something
wrong with me?”—if you’re self-conscious you’ll do that—or maybe you’ll think
that there’s something wrong with them. Whatever. But it’s not that serious. But then, you know, maybe you’re out with
your partner and, you know, some person wanders over—you’re in a restaurant—some person
wanders over to the table and says, “Hello,” to your partner. “I didn’t know that you had a girlfriend
or boyfriend. You, you know, you didn’t tell me that when
we went out last week.” Well that’s going to be a whole different
scenario. Right yeah, and you all laugh about that because
you know perfectly well that it’s a different scenario. Right, and you might say, “Well, why is
the one scenario more disrupting than the other?” and the answer to that is something like:
if your presuppositions about the world are arranged in a hierarchy, in a sense, so that
the little actions that you take to do something are at the very bottom of the hierarchy, or
they’re the micro-details, and then you continue to abstract up all the way to the
top, which might be, “I’m in a committed relationship”—now there are levels of
hierarchy going from being in a committed relationship to the little actions that you
undertake with one another—the higher up you have to go in the hierarchy, the higher
up the disruption occurs in the hierarchical level, the more upset you’re going to be. So irritable partner, well you can sort of
walk around that; unfaithful partner, well, you know, that’s pretty much up at the top
of the hierarchy where you have to start rethinking your past and your present and your future,
and maybe you are and who they are and who men are and who women are, and it’s like,
it’s really a disaster, right? Everything falls apart. Well, then that’s the little trip to the
underworld that we talked about. Now Piaget had an idea like that also with
regards to children, because his stage theory is a punctuated theory. One of the things he noted about children
was that they would construct a structure and a structure would be—I think again the
best way to think about it as is a personality because a personality has thoughts and emotions
and motivations and actions; it’s all of those at the same time. It’s this little alive subelement of you,
and children are conjuring up these little subelements of themselves that have functional
utility, as they build themselves from their motor systems upwards, and now and then they
run into a situation where the tools that they’ve built—the subpersonalities that
they’ve built—aren’t fulfilling the desired function. So maybe that’ll happen when, you know,
a three-year-old goes to kindergarten and isn’t making friends easily. Well that’s going to be—a child’s going
to come home after that and cry, fall apart, and maybe be angry, and tell their parents,
“No one would play with me.” And, you know, they’ll breakdown; they’ll
have tears. And it’s almost as if they switch from a
domain where they’re competent. Like, emotion signifies, especially negative
emotion, signifies that you’ve moved from the domain in which you’re competent to
the domain in which you’re not competent, and if you’re crying, for example, then
that’s often a distress signal. Sometimes it’s anger but it’s often a
distress signal and it means, “I’ve ended up in a situation where what I know is no
longer sufficient to produce the outcomes that I desire.” So you cry and then you get help. People come and say, “Well, what’s the
matter?” and they give you a little bat. And, you know, and they console you and maybe
they help you strategize about what you could do to make the situation better or how you
could act. Or, if you’re a smart parent, maybe you
play with your child and offer them—you know, and upgrade their ability to interact
socially. Or you take them on additional play-dates
or whatever and monitor their behavior and help them reconstruct their little subpersonalities
and bring in more information so that it’s more sophisticated. So that would be the Piagetian—so this is
a combination of the Piagetian ideas of the Stage Theory, which is movement upward with
a punctuation, and that’s the confusion because the previous structure is no longer
well-adapted to the world; and then the idea of assimilation and accommodation. Now Piaget kind of made assimilation and accommodation,
in a sense, opposites, and it’s not exactly. It’s hard to figure out. But assimilation, for Piaget, is when you
pull information in and the structure—the internal structure that you’re pulling it
into—doesn’t really have to change that much. And accommodation is when you pull in a fairly
mighty piece of information, often negative, and it’s so disruptive that the structure
that you’re using to understand the information has to be reconstructed. Now, Piaget thinks of assimilation or accommodation,
but I think it’s much easier to think about it on a continuum with the assimilation occurring
at the level of micro-behaviors. You know, like if you’re trying to pick
up a fork, you know, and maybe your hand’s numb, you try to pick up a fork and it doesn’t
work a couple times then you just change your grip and pick it up. Like it’s a little annoying. You’re going to look at the fork and you’re
going to try a couple of routines to pick it up but, you know, it’s not going to bring
your whole damn world to a halt. You know, so whereas if you find a dead mouse
in your soup, well that’s going to be a whole different story, and again it’s a
hierarchical issue. And so at the bottom, near the motor structures,
I would say it’s easy to assimilate; you just have to make minor changes to the—I
like to think about them as maps really; they’re maps or personalities. I know those don’t sound the same but they’re
very similar. Depends on whether the thing needs a little
adjustment or whether you have to toss the whole thing away and build a new one. You know, it’s the difference between tightening
the lug nuts on your car or buying a new car. You can see levels of—you can understand
it as levels of difficulty. Another way of thinking about it—you need
to know this because you need to understand how it is that you figure out how upset you
should get when something goes wrong. It’s a very very complicated question. If you wake up with an ache in your side,
how upset should you be? Well you don’t know. It’s like, maybe it’s nothing; maybe you’re
going to die of cancer in six months. You don’t know. And so it’s not self-evident how people
calibrate their emotions when something goes wrong because the extent of the thing that
when wrong is not clearly evident. Your partner’s crabby when you go out for
dinner. Does that mean that you’re going to break
up in two weeks? Well, it might mean that. So why don’t you just flip out right away
because the whole world’s coming to an end. Well, some people do, right, and those would
be people who are higher in negative emotion or higher in trait neurotism. Because they’re more likely to react as
if a small, potentially small, anomaly or uncertainty or threat or discontinuity or
unexpected occurrence is catastrophic, where an emotionally stable person, you know, you
might have to say, “I’m breaking up with you,” before they’re going to, you know,
look upset and maybe even then it’s not going to bother them that much. So you think of the motor hierarchy, you know,
ranging from microbehaviours at the bottom to abstractions at the top and then you can
understand how you might compute how upset you get when something goes wrong. Assume that it’s small to begin with. Check at that level. If you can’t fix it at that level advance
one level up. If your car doesn’t work you don’t buy
a new one. The first thing you do is maybe see if the
battery is dead, right, because that’s the path that you could take that would cause
you the least amount of trouble. And it’s a really good schema for mental
hygiene. It’s like Occam’s razor. You know Occams razor in science, right? Does everybody know what Occam’s razor is? How many people know what Occam’s razor
is? Okay, how many people don’t know? Oh, that’s amazing. It’s amazing. Okay, well you should know. It’s really too bad that you don’t know. It’s undoubtedly no reflection on you. Anyways, Occam’s razor is a phrase referring
to a principal that was established by an ancient thinker, Occam, and he said, “Does
not multiply your explanatory principles beyond necessity.” Okay and so what he meant was: If you have
six reasons why something might have gone wrong and you can rank-order them in terms
of complexity, pick the simplest one and then until you disprove that stick with it and
then go to the next simplest one and so on. And it’s often used as a guiding principle
in science where the idea is if you have a simple explanation, don’t complicate it
up with a bunch of unnecessary assumptions. And it also might be reflective of a deeper
underlying truth, which is that it’s unlikely for any set of entities to be in any particular
configuration, but it’s particularly unlikely for them to be in an unlikely and complex
configuration. So anyways, so hopefully that’s understandable. You can tangle all those ideas together. At the bottom of your personality hierarchy
there are actions; at the top there are abstractions—moral abstractions like, “Be a good person”. When you run into something that’s unexpected,
the amount you get upset is proportionate to the level in the hierarchy where the damage
appears to be taking place. Now you kind of have to guess at that and
partially you do that with your temperament—so if you’re high in neruroticism you guess
catastrophe and if it’s low in neuroticism you guess irrelevant—and you do that partly
because of the way that you perceive your own competence—you know, because if you’ve
encountered minor to major problems in the past, say even if you’re a nervous person,
and you’ve solved them you might’ve learned, “Well yeah, it’s a problem but I can fix
problems so it’s not really a problem,” which is a really good way to think of yourself. You know, that’s a much better way to think
of yourself than, “I’m a person with no problems.” It’s like, good luck with that. But, “I’m a person who could successfully
address problems if I concentrated on them”: that’s very very useful. And then the other way that your nervous system
sort of decides how upset you should get when something happens is by looking at how other
people treat you. And if they treat you like you’re competent
then your nervous system gets less neurotic. That’s a good way of thinking about it. You produce more serotonin, you react less
globally to indications of error. Okay, so anyways so Piaget: he’s talks about
assimilation. Assimilation is when you have to make a little
change and accommodation is when the whole damn structure has to be reconfigured, and
he thought about those, in some sense, as separate types of learning, but they’re
not; they’re on a continuum from very simple to very complex. Have any of you ever heard of the idea of
a paradigm shift? How many people have heard of that? Okay, how many people haven’t? Alright, do you know the name Thomas Kuhn? Anybody? No, okay well Thomas Coon was a philosopher
of science and he wrote a book in 1962 called “The Nature of Scientific Revolutions”,
and Kuhn basically said the same thing about the way knowledge structures proceeded as
Piaget said about the progression of knowledge structures within the individual. So Kuhn was concerned about large-scale transformations
in scientific viewpoint. So let me give you an example: so in the late
1890’s, physicists were convinced that they were just going to have to shut the whole
endeavor down. Why? Well, because the physicists knew everything
that there was to know. There wasn’t a single phenomena, at that
point, that physicists could not account for except one, and here’s the one they couldn’t
account for: So imagine you’re on a train and it’s
going that way at half the speed of light. And you shine a flashlight—you’re standing
on the top of the train, obviously protecting yourself against the wind, and you shine a
light going ahead and you measure the speed of light out of your flashlight. The speed of light is 186 000 miles per second
out of your flashlight. Okay, so now you’re on the ground and you’re
watching this train zip by. And the guy’s on top of it shining a flashlight
and light comes out of the front of his flashlight and you measure the speed of it. What’s the speed? Well, you might think, “Well, obviously
it’s the speed of light plus half the speed of light because the train is going half the
speed of light and the light is going the speed of light. And so the light coming from the combination
of the train and the light is the speed of light plus half the speed of light; that’s
what would happen if someone was throwing a ball, right?” But that isn’t right. What happens is it’s the speed of light
and no matter how fast you’re going when you shine your flashlight out, the light coming
out of your flashlight is going to be going exactly 186 000 miles an hour—I mean a second. A second, sorry. 186 000 miles a second. It’s not additive. And so if you’re on the train and you’re
going backwards and you’re shining you’re light, and the person measures it, it’s
not the speed of light minus half the speed of light, which is what it would be if your
were throwing a ball. It’s the speed of light. Well, nobody knew how the hell to account
for that. It’s like, that just made no sense at all
but everyone was ignoring it. Well, it turns out you can’t ignore that
and that wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t quite well-laid out at the end of the nineteenth
century from the perspective of physics, but it was a big one. And to solve that Newtonian physics had to
be completely overthrown and quantum physics put in its place. And quantum physics is—quantum physics,
you might think of it as a box like this and inside that there’s a box that says Newtonian
physics. And so quantum physics can explain everything
that Newtonian physics can explain but it explains some more things beside, and so you
would say, because of the, it’s a better theory. Now, I might say, “Well, you’ve just made
a personality transformation. Are you a better person than you were before?” and you might say, “Well, how in the world
can you make a judgment like that?” And I would say, “Well, if you’re a better
personality you can do all the things you could do before, just as well or maybe even
a little better, plus there’s a bunch of new things you could do. That’s a better personality.” It’s another interesting example of how
the idea of better, which really is a moral idea in some sense, better versus worse, you
can conceptualize it—well, this is one of the things that Piaget is really really useful
for, because it gives you a language that’s grounded in observation and in science to
start to handle questions that start to border on the moral. So a better personality can do more than the
previous personality could, and you certainly see how that would be applicable to your life. And one of the things I would suggest as a
consequence to that is: you know, people always compare themselves to other people, and generally
what you do is you compare yourself—you make a little dominance hierarchy out of the
people that are right around you. And this is a very annoying propensity because
what it means is that no matter how successful you get in your life you’re still going
to be in the middle of the dominance hierarchy. So you’ll end up, I don’t know maybe you’ll
end up—God I don’t know—maybe you’re CEO of a hundred million dollar company, let’s
say. Well, you’d go hang out with a bunch of
CEOs and there are ten of them. Three of them are CEOs of a two billion dollar
company. It’s like, you’re a pretty little CEO
among those people, but who are you going to be comparing yourself to? The guys who pick up your trash? It’s like no. You could but you won’t; you’ll have your
little group around you and you’ll be somewhere in the middle. And so that’s useful to know because that
means that what you have to learn to cope with is the fact that you’re going to be
somewhere in the middle. And then you might say, “Well, how do you
cope with that because you should be improving and you also want to be very good at something?” Well, I think the best way to do that, and
this is especially true when you’re older, is that you don’t compare yourself to other
people; you compare yourself to the previous version of you. It’s a good control, right, because you’ll
see, especially by the time you’re about thirty, when you’re young you have to compare
yourself to other people because when you’re young you’re a lot like all other people,
in some sense, but by the time you’re thirty or older you’re not very much like other
people at all. And so, you know, because the conditions of
your life start to become so unique and specific to you. Well then comparing yourself to other people
isn’t very helpful, but comparing yourself to who you were before: that’s really helpful
and you can keep doing that your whole life. And it’s a fair game, right, because the
previous you had all the problems and all the opportunities and positive attributes
that you have. It’s fair; it’s a fair game and it’ll
save you an awful lot of misery. So, alright so Piaget outlined different forms
of games and he talked about different ways that those aided in socializations. And you can understand that—I use this “meta”
idea, which was the hierarchy of personality, to sort of explain that. From a Piagetian perspective, you put yourself
together from your body upward toward increased abstractions, and as you do that you can do
more things with your body but you can also do more complex things integrating those things
that your do with your body across time and with increasing numbers of other people. Now, Piaget has this really cool idea about
what constitutes reality as a consequence of that. So he would say: Alright, so let’s say you
can choose Game A or you can choose Game B and you might say, “Well, I want to figure
out whether Game A or Game B is a better game because if I’m going to play a game it might
as well be a better game.” And he would say, “Okay, so here’s how
you can figure out if the game you’re playing is a good one: it’s good for you. Now. It’s good for you now, next week, next month,
next year, and ten years from now. So not only is it good for you now, but if
you play it repeatedly things get better for you.” Okay, so that’s a game where you’re taking
the future into account. It’s not an impulsive game. You know, like cocaine is really good for
people for about a day, but over a week or six months or five years it’s a degenerating
game. So, and you can’t use your emotion to determine
that because cocaine generally suffuses the person who’s using it with a sense of power
and possibility. So you can’t just rely on your emotion,
no more than you can when you’re tempted to do something impulsive and fun but that
might have negative consequences. Okay, so the game should be good now and across
the future. And then it should be good for you and it
should be good for you and it should for your family and it should be good for your social
community and so forth, as you spiral outward, and it should be good for all of those things
across multiple expanses of time. And Piaget would call that an “equilibrated
game.” Now, there’s another additional idea behind
the idea of an equilibrated game which is that if I’m playing a game that’s good
for me and it’s good for you and it’s good for you and it’s good for you, then
we probably will all be willing to play it voluntarily. And so that’s also why Piaget believed that,
in some sense, a game-like structure—let’s say a social structure—that everybody plays
because they want to is much better than a game-like structure where everyone plays because
they have to. And so he would say, well that’s in part
the technical difference between a tyranny and a democracy. And it’s bloody smart thinking. You know, I think Piaget got farther with
that idea than anyone else had ever in history, because you can understand—there’s this
old idea. It was Hume—another philosopher. What’s his first name? Hume. David? What’s that? David? David! Yes, you’d think I could remember that. David Hume. He has this idea that you can’t derive an
“ought” from an “is”. So it’s another one of those principles,
like Occam’s razor, and what it means is something like this: No matter how much you
know about something that doesn’t mean that you can figure out what you should do about
it. So here’s an example: Let’s say, we know
AIDS is a problem, we know cancer’s a problem, we know heart disease is a problem, we know
poverty’s a problem, etc. There are all these problems. How do you determine how you would allocate
resources to those different problems? Well, it’s a very very difficult problem
to get at from a scientific perspective, and the reason for that is that well there are
all these variables that you would have to equate. Imagine you built a spreadsheet and so you
were thinking, “Okay, which is the most troublesome of these things and, you know,
which could we solve with the least amount of money.” Well, the problem is is that to determine
whether something is troublesome you still have to make a value judgment. Like, there’s no way you can get to the
bottom of the problem without introducing the problem of value judgment, and that’s
partly why it’s very difficult to derive an ought—what you should do—from an is—what
you know. And that’s why there’s a distinction between
science and morality or science and religion, that’s another way of thinking about it:
is that they’re different domains. Now, Piaget, in some sense, has described
a way out of that because he does say, “Well look: a theory that’s better than a previous
theory is the theory that explains the same amount and more—and you can apply that to
your personality—and a game that’s better than a different game is one that benefits
you and more people but it also does that over different spans of time.” Now a game like that’s very hard to compute. You know, when people talk about environmental
sustainability what they’re really talking about is a Piagetian equilibrated game where
you can live in your family and your family can live in society and society can operate
within an economy and the economy can exist within an ecology without having the economy
tilt the ecology so that you can’t live and your family can’t live and your society
can’t function and the economic system can’t function. So there is this idea of multilevel balance
but those things are very difficult to compute, you know. So, but it’s still a nice principle. You know, so if you’re thinking—well,
if you need a justification for what you’re doing and you want to put yourself on firm
moral ground, which is really useful because then people can’t push you around verbally
or intellectually or any other way. Because you’re grounded; you’re standing
on something solid. It’s like, you need to know: why is this
good for you as if you were someone you were taking care of? Why is good for you across a long period of
time? How does it benefit your family? How does it benefit society? And then, you know, you can keep stepping
upward from there. So, well I can give you one example of someone
who’s doing that, I think. You know about that Dutch kid who’s figured
out how to get plastic out of the oceans? Well, he’s not just whining about it and
parading around with a sign that says, you know, “I don’t like pollution.” It’s like, as if you need to tell people
that, you know, because everyone really doesn’t like—“I don’t like pollution and I’m
against poverty.” It’s like, “Yeah, well find someone who’s
for pollution and poverty.” Anyways, this kid was about seventeen, something
like that, and he was diving around—he’s a diver. I think he was spearfishing and he noticed
there was more plastic than fish. And this wasn’t a very happy discovery for
him. And then so he started thinking about that:
How can we get the plastic out of the oceans? And then he was looking at manta rays, and
manta rays have these big wings that help them sort of glide through the ocean. And he about that for a while, and then he
thought, “Well, maybe I can build this sort of manta ray thing that lies on the surface
of the ocean in a triangle and then it could be towed through the ocean and all the plastic
would go to the apex of the triangle. And then you could just scoop it up.” But then he did his calculations and I haven’t
got this story quite right but this is basically the story. He did some calculations and found out well,
that’s not cost effective because it takes a lot of energy to drag this thing through
the water and there’s a lot of water. And, you know, plus you’re polluting like
mad while you’re dragging this thing through the water. And so probably it’s just not that helpful. But then he realized that if you go out in
the ocean there are there these massive things called “gyres,” which are like huge water
hurricanes—except they’re very very very slow moving. But they’re huge; they’re continent size. And so the oceans are already always moving
so he thought, “Ha! Since the ocean is moving, there’s no real
reason to have to drag the, you know, the plastic or the plastic-gatherer through the
water. You could just nail it to the ocean bed with
cables and then just have it sit there. And then the ocean would go through all by
itself. So, he built a prototype, which wasn’t very
big, and he gathered up a fair bit of plastic. All the plastic’s in about the top foot
of the ocean by the way, and it really increases in density as you move up towards the top
inch. So then he built a bigger one and he got a
bunch of—he went on Kickstarter and then he raised a bunch of money. And then he got a bunch of engineers to look
at his idea and they said, “Well, you know, this would probably work.” So then they built a big one—a couple of
kilometers long—which is now in place off the shore of Japan. They also sent a whole flotilla of people
from California to Hawaii to do a garbage estimate, to see how much garbage there was
in the water, because there’s a big spot in the middle of the Pacific called the “Great
Garbage Spot,” which is full of—or the “Great Plastic Spot?” It doesn’t matter—that’s full of plastic. And so they went to estimate how much there
was in it. Anyways, he thinks he can guide this thing
to the bottom of the ocean in these big gyres; make it, you know, a hundred kilometers long
in a V-shape; put a kind of a collector at the end of it; load all the plastic he collects
up of barges; go re-refine that into oil or plastic; and pay for it while he’s doing
it. And so you can look him up and I think he’s
like nineteen or twenty now. So, you know, that’s a good equilibrated
game, right? That works out really well. He gets to make some money, good for him;
he gets to employ a bunch of people, that’s a good thing; everybody’s happy about it
because, good, you know, we’re getting rid of the garbage; and like there’s no downside. So, you know, it’s hard to say—it’s
hard to come up with an argument for why that isn’t a good thing. And it’s good because everyone benefits
all the way up. So, that’s an equilibrated state. It’s a very very very smart idea. Okay, now Jung. Experimental psychologists don’t like Jung—well,
they don’t like Freud either and they don’t have much time for clinicians in general. But that’s ok: they’re not trying to solve
the same problems. Now, usually if you take a personality course,
you’ll cover Freud before you cover Jung, and the reason for that is that Freud, in
some ways, proceeded Jung historically and lots of people, especially the Freudians,
like to think of Jung as Freud’s student. And there’s some truth to that because Freud
was the first person who really collected up ideas about the unconscious and formalized
them, publicized them, and applied them to the problems of pathology and mental health. So good for him. And Freud was unparalleled at describing pathological
families, and there are plenty of those. But Jung was interested in something that
was underneath that. I mean Freud got underneath things a lot,
you know. He was also one of the first people to point
out just exactly how potent sexual and aggressive motives were in shaping the way that we thought. But Jung: Jung was more interested—like,
in some sense, Jung was more like a Darwinian biologist. He was much more interested in the biological
and psychological philosophical history of fundamental human behavioral patterns. And so Jung wasn’t like a behaviorist. A behaviorist would think when you’re born
there’s nothing there except the possibility to learn things; you’re a blank slate. And then everything you learn is a consequence
of sensory information that you’re picking up and what you learn as a consequence of
that. But Jung, he didn’t think that at all. He thought that there’s a specific human
nature, and he set out to understand what that human nature is. Now, a couple of lectures ago I talked to
you about the characters that you might imagine making up the world that you inhabit. So I said, well you can think about the absolute
unknown, which is the unknown that’s so unknown that you don’t even know it’s
there. That’s something that is really really shocking
if you ever encounter it, and it’s the sort of thing that you’re exposed to, hypothetically,
whenever you go to a horror movie that depends on fear. Right, because horror movies that depend on
fear confront you with things that do not behave the way they’re supposed to behave,
like inanimate objects that move. You know if all of a sudden you discover an
inanimate object that moves there’s a lot that’s wrong with your particular model
of the world. And you can kind of experience that in a horror
movie because things will do things that they’re not supposed to do, like walls will bleed. That’s just not supposed to happen and so
it’s very upsetting to see something like that. But you’re exposing yourself to that in
horror movies and trying to—well, you’re trying to develop some courage because God
only knows which of your fundamental major assumptions might just turn out to be wrong. So we talked about representations of the
absolute unknown, and I suggested that those were often associated with serpentine predators;
and then we talked about representations of culture, because every character has to contend
with culture, whether it’s a fictional character or you. You’re stuck with it. You’ve got your culture—and some of that’s
positive because here you are: you can talk, you can read, it’s warm, you know, you’ve
got a bright future ahead of you. And then it’s also a destructive tyrant
because it’s ruining the world and all those things that you already know about. And then so that’s culture, then there’s
nature because you’re stuck with that too. And there’s a benevolent element of nature
that’s usually portrayed with feminine symbols—and that’s the Mother Nature that environmentalists
know and love—and then there’s, you know, Mother Nature that gives your mother cancer
when she’s forty—and that’s the downside of Mother Nature and you’re pretty much
stuck with that too. And then there’s you and, you know, there’s
all the useful things about you—the sort of heroic things. Technically, you know, the parts of you that
would be able to confront the unknown and to prevail or to confront the tyrannical part
of the culture and to prevail. That’s the positive part and then there’s
the negative part, which is the part of you that you know very very well that’s always
causing trouble for you and other people. And it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to
and is resentful and angry and petty and mean and ignorant and blind and impulsive and rationalizing
and all of these lovely things that people are more than capable of doing. Now those are all archetypes. And so they’re archetypes because they’re
the fundamental personalities that we use to orient ourselves in life. I guess that’s the best way of thinking
about it. Now, when Jung talked about an archetype it’s
kind of complicated because sometimes he talks about them as instincts and sometimes he talks
about them as images and sometimes he talks about them as stories. But the best way to contend with that is to
understand that they’re all of those at the same time. So, for example, if you go to a romance—which
is a kind of archetypal story—you go to a romantic comedy, say, that means, you know,
the protagonists have a love affair and it turns out positively. Romantic comedy: an archetypal structure. Well, what are the characters doing? Well, they’re driven by instinct, obviously,
so that’s the instinctive level of the archetype; and then it’s a behavioral pattern because
they’re interacting with each other; and it’s a story because someone has selected
out the major elements of the events, in the way that would be most engaging to an audience,
and portrayed them. So they archetype can be all of those things
at the same time. There’s no contradiction; it just makes
it a more complex phenomena. It’s best again to think of it as a personality. An archetype is a personality, and an archetypal
story is the manner in which an archetypal personality manifests itself across time. And there are lots of archetypal stories,
and I can give you a couple of fundamental examples. The fundamental archetype of male behavior
is the dragon story—is confronting the dragon. And that’s to go out, confront the dragon,
which can be all sorts of things—it can be the absolute unknown; it can be the negative
element of femininity, which is a dragon that stops men cold all the time—and usually
what happens as a consequence is that the person gets a treasure or gets a girl. Okay, the fundamental female archetype, as
far as I’ve been able to tell—it’s a little harder to track down; it took me a
long time—is Beauty and the Beast, and the reason I figured that out—there’s a bunch
of reasons but I only figured it out about two years ago and I thought, “Yeah, of course
that’s it.” I read this book by the guys who do data analysis
at Google and it’s called “A Billion Wicked Thoughts.” It’s quite an interesting book, and basically
what it is it’s a study of search engine behavior. And, you know, I think about 18-19% of search
engine behavior is sexual in nature, and so then you might think, “Well, what are men
doing and what are women doing?” Well, we know what men are doing: they’re
looking at pictures of naked women, broadly speaking. What are women doing? Ha! They’re not looking at pictures of naked
men; they’re reading about sex. So women’s pornography use is literary. And so I thought, “Oh that’s interesting. That makes sense,” because actually women
read more fiction than men, by the way. Women are more predisposed to reading fiction. Women seem to be more interested in people
than in things, a very stable cross-cultural gender difference. Anyways, so women are reading about sex. And you know that if you buy, if you look
at—when I was a kid and on holidays, summer holidays, my mom used to pack along like thirty
Harlequin romances. Do you know what a Harlequin romance is? Does everybody know what a Harlequin romance
is? Does anybody not know? Okay, most people know? It’s a cheap pulp romance, you know? It’s like deserving young woman meets dashing
and somewhat distant guy and he’s already with someone, but she doesn’t deserve him,
and then she charms him. And then, you know, he decides that she’s
actually the one and then she gets to have him and then everyone lives happily every
after. So that’s a Harlequin romance. Now, the original Harlequin romance—they
published millions of these bloody things—was just that, and it was a pretty plain, G-rated
story. But since the 70’s Harlequin has exploded
and it’s gone from, you know, G-rated stories of the sort I told you to like triple-X versions. And they’re all very popular and those sorts
of stories are also reflected in female use of the Internet. And so what you see is that they look up Beauty
and the Beast stories and there are five major protagonists—and this is something that
I think is so absolutely comically it just killed me when I first read it. Here are the five major guys in female X-rated
pornography: okay, werewolf, yeah; vampire, yeah; surgeon; yeah; billionaire, yeah; pirate. So, isn’t that funny? Man, it just blew me over, but, you know,
it’s not much different, in some sense, than the male archetypal story of confronting
the dragon, right? Because—and I’ll show you something from
Sleeping Beauty that makes this very clear. I’ll show you that today. Because, you know, if you think about it,
so these are kind of bad guys. Well, the werewolf and the vampire in particular,
right, but the pirate’s sort of up the too. And you might think, “Well, why would men
like that figure in women’s archetypal sexual narratives?” and the answer to that is: well, what the
hell good is a man that can’t be dangerous, right? Think about that. And, you know, this bloody theme is played
out in romantic comedies all the time; think about it. There’s the girl and she has a friend. He’s a guy. He’s kind of a guy who never grew up. He’s usually—what’s his name? There’s a comedian: Seth Rogan. He’s usually Seth Rogan. You know, and he’s kind of joe everyone
and he’s kind of funny and he’s her friend, but he really wants to sleep with her and
she knows that. And she knows that he’s not just her friend,
and he isn’t just her friend; he just likes to pretend that. You know, and then there’s the guy who she’s
interested in who’s not like Seth Rogan and he’s got an edge to him, you know. And then the story usually plays out—there’s
an interplay between those three characters. And, you know, the Seth Rogan guy is always
going, “Well, why doesn’t why doesn’t she like me?” And the answer is: well, just watch him for
ten minutes and you know why. You know, partly because she doesn’t want
a friend. She wants someone who’s good for someone,
and someone who’s good for something is someone who’s got a powerful edge. And part of what happens in the female archetype
is that the female civilizes that, at least in relationship to herself. Ok, so and then, as far as I’m concerned,
that’s not much different, as I said already, than the male hero myth. So, I’m going to show you, first, I’m
going to show you something from Sleeping Beauty. So let me just find it here. What’s the universal video player? Yeah yeah, that’s the one. Thanks. I’ve got to download it because, well they
strip this machine every night, and so you have to always download things over and over. Okay, so let’s talk about the structure
of Sleeping Beauty for a minute. So, there’s a king and a queen, and, you
know, they live in a kingdom—logically enough. And they’re trying to have a baby and that
doesn’t work out very well. And then all of a sudden, you know, after
time passes they have this baby girl, and her name is Aurora. So that’s sort of a reference to the sky,
obviously, right? And you often see with archetypal characters
that they’re affiliated, in some sense, with cosmic phenomena. So, for example, you know, king’s and queens
have crowns, right? And then divine figures have halos. Well there’s not much difference between
a crown and a halo, and the crown is the sun. The little points on it: those are the rays
of the sun. Or it’s the moon. It depends if the crown is made out of gold
or silver, because gold is a solar metal and silver is a lunar metal. And so, when something is associated with
the cosmos that means that it’s gone from the purely personal to the impersonal or the
transpersonal or the archetypal. And the archetypal would be not your father,
but the Father as such—like the spirit of the Father; not your mother, but the spirit
of the Mother as such. And so, when you have the king and the queen
you have the Sun and the Moon. You have the ruler of the day sky and the
ruler of the night sky. You have the ruler over everything that the
light touches, and you have the transpersonal figures of Mother and Father. Okay, so now you see this in lots of movies
and hero stories and comic books. So, the most commonly portrayed pattern is
that the hero has two sets of parents, right? Harry Potter: he’s got the Dursley’s,
and they make him live under the staircase, and then he has his brother/ cousin. What’s his name? Dudley. What’s that? Dudley. Dudley! Yeah, it’s the long version of “dud.” And, you know, he’s a bad brother, and so
they’re actually the archetypal hostile brothers. Harry Potter. Hero and adversary. And then he’s got his ordinary parents,
and those are the parents that, well they’re real ordinary: they live in an English suburb
and they’re extraordinarily conservative and narrow-minded. They don’t want anything to do with anything
to do with anything magic whatsoever. And then he has his Heavenly parents, who
are his magic parents. Right, and they come back in spirit form now
and then throughout the movie when he really needs them. So, Superman: he’s got his Earthly parents
and his Heavenly parents, right? If you go onto Wikipedia and you look up,
“Orphan hero,” I think they have 160 of them listed; same motif over and over. The reason for that is, well first of all,
when you’re a teenager, one thing you think is, “Ugh, are these really my parents?” Right, and so and the answer to that is yes
and no. And it’s yes, in that well, obviously, from
a strict immediate biological perspective they’re your parents. But from an archetypal perspective, it’s
like, well you have parents going back three and a half billion years. Your parents are just the latest in a very
very very long line of parents. And so the reason you call your father “Dad,”
or “Father,” or whatever you happen to call him, is because it’s in recognition
of the fact that the relationship that you have with him, to some degree, isn’t personal;
it’s archetypal. He’s the Father. He plays that role for you. And, you know, you can even tell when he’s
playing it properly because you might tell your friends, you know, “I don’t have
a very good father.” It’s like, well how the hell do you know
that? You know, it’s sort of like you’ve got
this idea in your mind about what a good father would be like, and if he’s not doing that
then it’s not him—you know, subject to your childhood and teenage misinterpretations. And, you know, “I have an awful mother.” It’s like, well, compared to what? Well, compared to the ideal mother. Well, you might say, “Well, just who is
this ideal mother.” Well, you can see her in religious representations
all the time. So in Christianity, for example, you’ll
see her represented as the Virgin Mary, who’s the perfect mother. And that’s why she’s a holy figure. And she’s a holy figure partly—an archetypal
figure, lets say—because any society that doesn’t worship the mother and the infant
dies. It has to be sacred because everybody starts—everyone
has that relationship, and if the society doesn’t support it properly and value it
properly then, well, then there’s something seriously wrong with the society. So, now Sleeping Beauty. King and Queen. Baby. Okay, so we’ve got the familiar triad going
there. So then they decide they’re going to christen
her; they’re going to name her, and that’s sort of when she becomes an individual. And they make a mistake when they’re going
to christen her. And what’s the mistake? Do you remember? How many of you have seen Sleeping Beauty? Yes, and how many of you haven’t. Okay, so of those who haven’t, have you
seen other Disney movies? Have you seen other Disney movies? Lion King. Lion King. Okay, anything other than that? No. Okay, is there anybody here who’s never
seen an animated Disney movie? Okay, fine. Well, you see how densely—there wasn’t
anyone as far as I could tell—you see how densely distributed throughout the culture
those stories are, you know, even though they’re very very old stories, but even in their movie
form they’re quite old for movies. Okay, so the mistake they make is they don’t
invite the evil queen to the christening. And that’s Maleficent. Well, obviously there’s a satanic undertone
to that, and you know that because she’s got these black horns that she wears and like
she’s got this cape that’s basically on fire. I mean you can tell that she’s an evil person. And so she’s an archetype; she’s the archetype
of the negative feminine actually. And it’s a very very smart story. You think, well, why would you invite something
like that to your daughter’s christening, especially if you’ve been waiting for her
forever and she’s a real princess and everything’s perfect. It’s like, okay here’s another story. So, this is another archetypal story. So there’s these kids and their mother gets—their
father, I think—gets divorced, or separates, or his wife dies, or whatever. And so he picks up with this new woman and
she decides she doesn’t really like these kids very much. And that happens a lot by the way. So if you have a step-parent, you are 100
times more likely to be physically abused. So it’s the biggest single risk factor. It’s up there with having a drunk parent. So, anyways, a nasty little statistic. You know, it’s hard enough to tolerate kids
but when they’re someone else’s kids then it makes it even more difficult. And that’s a Freudian observation and it’s
no joke. And people are not that friendly, and there’s
terrible jealously. Like, you know, if a man and a women start
going out and a woman has children and the man is jealous and the children get in the
way, especially if they also bother him because maybe they’re not that happy that he’s
not actually their father—maybe he’s just a creep, you know, you never know—well the
tension that can build up in a situation like that can rapidly become unbearable and it
can last forever. So, anyways so she tells her new husband,
“Take those damn kids out in the bush and see if you can lose them,” and so he’s
not very happy with this but I guess he’s wrapped around the finger of his new wife
and not very bright and kind of evil on his own. And so he takes the children out into the
forest and leaves them there. And so this is kind of hard on the children. It’s like they’re out in the wilderness,
which is maybe how you feel when your mother dies and, you know, your father goes and marries
a new woman. You’re out in the bloody wilderness. And they get lost and then they’re lost
and they’re all freaked out because they’re lost. And they’re going to starve and wolves are
going to eat them because this is like medieval Europe forest and it’s full of wolves and
they eat people. So, and they’re wandering around out there
and they come across a gingerbread house. Now, if you’re a skeptical person and you’re
not naïve, the first thing you think is, “This is too good to be true.” It’s like, yeah a house: okay fine. A shack maybe, or even a lean-to: sure, that
could happen, but a house that’s also made out of candy. It’s like, “Nah, there’s something going
on there that’s not so good.” You know the kind of person that’s really
nice to you but really isn’t? You remember again the Harry Potter series? Remember that woman? She was a bureaucrat. She had all those plates of kitten. Umbridge, Dolores. Umbridge, Dolores. Dolores means sad, right? Umbridge means to take offense. So she’s the sad woman who takes offense. And she’s got all these pictures of kittens
on her plates, right? They’re on ceramic plates. And so those are like hyper-sentimental. It’s like, “Oh, aren’t they cute? And they’re on plates and everything and
we’ll put them on our wall,” and, you know, it’s like really low-end taste. And the sentimentality is a facade. Jung would call that a persona of benevolence. But remember old Dolores Umbridge. She’s not exactly your benevolent type. In fact, you know, let her loose on the world
and horrible things happen. And what’s her name? The woman who wrote Harry Potter. She got that exactly right. It’s one of her best characters, I think. So, she’s got that, you know, fake voice
that often hear people who actually don’t like children use when they’re talking to
children. “Oh! Aren’t you just the cutest little thing?” It’s like, you know, you can actually talk
to children and they actually like that. And then they don’t think that, you know,
you’re possessed by something that they should run anyway from as fast as possible. Anyways, so Hansel and Gretel. The woman comes out and she’s all nice. And she says, “Oh, children, you’re lost
in the forest. Why don’t you come in and have some gingerbread.” And so then she puts little Hansel in a cage—like
a bird-cage I think—and she gets Gretel to do all the slavery stuff, you know. So she’s not so nice. And then every day she’s stuffing them well
with gingerbread and then she goes and feels little Hansel’s legs so that he’s nice
and plump so she can throw him into the stove and eat him. And what that means is: beware of people who
are too nice to you because what they’re trying to do is devour you. And it’s the prime dictum of Freudian psychopathology. If you have a parent—now Freud concentrated
mostly on mothers because mothers are more likely to do this. Because for a variety of reasons that we’re
not going to talk about—probably because they are oriented towards babies but whatever. If you’re too nice to your child and you
do everything for them, what happens to them? Well, then they can’t do anything for themselves. And so then what happens? Well, then they live in your basement until
they’re fifty. You know, and then they get irritated one
day and they shoot up Dawson College. So there’s a deep metaphor in the story,
and the story is if it’s too damn good to be true it’s probably aiming at your destruction. Okay, now back to Sleeping Beauty. So, Sleeping Beauty, Aurora, is going to be
christened, and they decide not to invite the evil queen to the christening. Now, that’s not a very good idea. One time I had—this is a composite client—so
this person, all she wanted to do was sleep. So she’d sleep like sixteen – seventeen
hours a day. And she was doing that partially with sleeping
pills, because it’s hard to sleep that much, but left to her own devices she would just
sleep. Now, you might say, “Well, why would someone
want to do that?” and then you could say, “Well, for the same
reason that people drink themselves into unconsciousness and oblivion.” Which is like it’s painful to be conscious,
especially when your life isn’t going that well and maybe you’re afraid of things,
and so why be awake and suffer when you can be unconscious and not suffer? And so that was basically her idea. And she was a vegetarian and she was terrified
of butcher shops and she was terrified of raw meat. And that was logical because she was sort
of terrified of life, and if you’re going to be terrified of life, if you really think
about it it’s the whole bloody raw meat part of life that you’re more or less terrified
by. So that was very concretized in her situation. And so I used to take her to supermarkets
through the raw meat section because that’s what you do in psychotherapy. In case any of you want psychotherapy, you
have to do the thing you least want to do, and so that’s not particularly fun. That’s the gateway to enlightenment: you
walk through the gate that you least want to. Well, so now you why people aren’t enlightened;
because it’s not all fun and games and follow your bliss and all that nonsense. It’s like figure out what you’re afraid
of and avoiding and confront it voluntarily. So anyways, I got a little background from
her and her mother, who I met—who was definitely the evil queen—I mean she yelled at me for
like forty-five minutes in my office. It was really quite remarkable. I hadn’t had anyone—I’ve only had one
other person yell at me in my office ever, and she was also definitely an evil queen. But this woman, she was just something else. Like it was just jaw-dropping to watch her
perform. And she used to phone up my client all the
time, three or four times a day, and tell her how stupid and useless she was. And so if you have parents that phone you
up every day and tell you how stupid and useless you are, then it’s perfectly within your
rights to not talk to them because that isn’t what they should be telling you. So then you can say, “Well, how about if
I call you, instead of you calling me, and how about if it’s once every two weeks,
instead of three times a day, and how about if you say anything nasty I just hang up and
then I just don’t talk to you for a month.” And then you might say, “Well, I couldn’t
do that to my mother,” and I would say, “Well, that’s because she already won.” So anyways, this girl, her mother loved her
to death when she was little; she was perfect. She was a princess when she was little but
then of course she hit puberty. You know, and then that’s the end of the
whole princess thing because then of course you want to go out and have a life and maybe
associate with boys and do all that sort of things that’s not the least bit child-princess
like. And that’s when everything broke down and
started to go in a very very bad direction. And that was partly because her mom didn’t
want to invite the Evil Queen to her little daughter’s life, because the Evil Queen
is like the negative part of nature. And like, if you have a little girl, well
the probability that she’s going to grow up and be a teenager and then a woman is pretty
high unless you do something to seriously interfere with that, which you might. And so you bloody well better be prepared
for that when she’s three and not treat her like she’s someone who’s feet are
never going to touch the earth. You have to have the whole element of life
in there. I had another client. Her parents taught her that adults were angels—and
I don’t mean metaphorically; they actually taught her that. And, in doing so, they set her up for serious
post-traumatic stress disorder, which she had for about five years, because she ran
into someone, who wasn’t an angel—surprise surprise—and all he did to her, roughly
speaking, was look at her like he wanted to kill her. And you think, “Well, nobody can be traumatized
like that.” It’s like, “Well, A, probably no one’s
ever looked at you like that, so don’t be so sure; but B, if they did look at you like
that AND you thought that adults were angels, then you were pretty much nicely set up to
have post-traumatic stress disorder. So, anyways you might think that you’re
doing your children a big favor by keeping the Evil Queen out of their nursery, but,
you know, you might let them see a glimpse of her now and then so they can get used to
the fact that she exists. You know, and I guess that’s why children
have pets in part. Like mice: they don’t last very long. So you have a live mouse for a while and then
you have a dead mouse, and that’s not very good. But then there’s some things that you get
accustomed to while you’re doing that, and maybe it’s not so good to protect your children
from that because they’re going to have to grow up and survive in the awful world. And your job isn’t to make them happy. Your job is to make them able to survive in
the nasty real world. Anyways, okay so that’s what happens with
Sleeping Beauty at the beginning; it’s like Hansel and Gretel. And then the Evil Queen shows up anyways,
because good luck keeping her out of your house, and she basically says, “Yeah, well
that’s all well and good. You know, there’s nothing I can do about
it but come puberty, roughly speaking…” In the Sleeping Beauty [story] she’s going
to prick her finger on a needle on a spinning wheel. So there’s blood involved there so we don’t
have to use our imagination too much to imagine what that means. It’s like, “I’m going to come back and
then all hell’s going to break loose.” And, of course, then the parents really protect
her, which is exactly the wrong thing to do, and well, that’s the Sleeping Beauty story. Of course the Prince comes along and he eventually
figures out how to solve this problem, right? She needs him, he’s a pretty good guy, then
the Evil Queen puts him in a dungeon—it’s like her basement—and then she’s going
to keep him there until he’s so old that he can’t even ride and she’s going to
laugh at him as he tries to leave. And then he tries to leave and she turns into
a dragon. It’s like, “What the hell? Why is she turning into a dragon?” But you accept that. It’s no problem. “Of course the Evil Queen turns into a dragon. What else would she do?” And then she, you know, spouts fire at him
and he fights her off. And then he has to hack his way through all
the thorns and thistles that have gathered around the castle. And then he wakes the girl up and the fountains
come back on and everyone’s happy. And you all think that’s an excellent story. So, and it is an excellent story, but it’s
a weird story because it’s an archetypal story and you understand it at an archetypal
level. I mean let me show you some of it and then
I’ll talk a little bit more about it. So let’s look at the beginning to begin
with. Oh yeah. Sorry. This is a class so I don’t want you to actually
enjoy the movie. So I’m going to play around it a bit. Okay, so tell me about the book. Is it a valuable book or not? How do you know? Gold. Hey! It’s covered with gold and jewels so you
can get a hint right there that there’s something valuable about this. Let’s see if I can do this properly. Yeah, that’ll do I guess. Yeah, it’s a valuable book; it’s got gold
and jewels. Why are—why is gold valuable? It’s rare. Yeah, it’s like the sun; looks like the
sun. What else? It’s morally pure, gold. Why? It represents wealth? It does. Well, it is wealthy. But it’s morally pure because it won’t
mix with other metals. It doesn’t mate with other metals. It’s imperishable and it doesn’t tarnish,
so it’s a symbol of purity. And jewels: why are they beautiful and valuable? Forget about rare. They’re shiny? Yeah, they’re shiny! But even crows can appreciate that. So, like what does shiny have to do with it
do you think? Sun. Sun. Yeah, it reflects light, right? So what do you want a good person to do? Well, maybe you might say that… Shine like the sun. Yeah, yeah. They reflect light. And the reason—it’s interesting, eh, because
the reason that crystals are the way they are, translucent and reflect light, is because
their internal structure. A crystal is a lattice of molecules and then
that lattice is precisely replicated everywhere in the crystal, so it’s one thing all the
way down to the molecular level. And so one of the things that you might think
is that if—especially if you think about that hierarchical model that we were talking
about—is that if you were as well put together as you could be, and had maybe been subject
to the right amount of heat and pressure, that you would be the same thing at every
single level of being. And then you would be solid and crystalline
and you would reflect light. And so anyways, you get a hint right off the
bat that this story is valuable. In a far away land, long ago, lived a King
and his fair Queen. Many years had they longed for a child, and
finally their wish was granted. A daughter was born and they called her Aurora. Sweet Aurora. Yes, they named her after the dawn for she
filled their lives with sunshine. Then a great holiday was proclaimed throughout
the kingdom so that all of high or low estate may pay homage to the infant princess, and
our story begins on that most joyful day. On that joyful day. On that joyful day. Joyfully now to our princess we come bringing
gifts and all good wishes to re-pledge our loyalty anew. Hail to the Princess Aurora. All of the sultans and orphans. Hail to the King! Hail to the Queen! Hail to the Princess Aurora! Health to the Princess! Wealth to the Princess! Long live the Princess Aurora! Hail Aurora! A son and heir to Stefan’s child would be
betrothed. And so, to her, his gift he brought and looked
unknowing on his future brother. Thou most honored and exalted Excellencies:
the three Good Fairies! Mistress Flora… So these are the good elements of the feminine
here and they give her various gifts. Sweet Princess, my gift shall be… Why, it’s Maleficent!] What does she want here?] Well, quite a glittering assemblage, King
Stefan. Royalty, nobility, the gentry, and, oh, wow
quaint, even the rabble. I really felt quite distressed at not receiving
an invitation. You weren’t wanted. Not wanted? Alright, well we’re out of time. I’ll show you a bunch more of this next
class and we’ll see what it means.