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hello and welcome to psychology 230 personality and its Transformations it's called that because there are two things that you have to take into account when you're thinking about personality and one of those is how personality stays the same across time and that's really what gives you your ident and what allows you to identify other people and then also how personality changes and we're going to discuss both those things from a very large number of perspectives to find out all the information that you need for the course all you have to do is type my name into a browser and you'll get my homepage which is the page that you see here um on the left there's a table of contents that says current courses and then up here there's also a table of contents that lists the courses and this one's this one and then this is the introductory page here and then you can get to the course page like this I don't really like Blackboard so I'm going to use this instead so this is easy to get to and everything you need to know about the course should be here um so we'll start with the very straightforward things the first is there's there's two sources for reading in this course and one is a paperback book which is called introduction to personality and its Transformations um they're book there're chapters that I selected from a classic personality textbook that does a very good job of covering classic personality theorists although not such a good job of covering more recent work uh the book was published in 1982 Freud hasn't changed much since 1982 but there has been an awful lot of Personality research and so that brings us to the second source of readings and the second source of readings is actually this web page so if you go down the web page to lecture topics and readings you'll see in the third column a whole sequence of papers now you have to pay attention to this lectures and reading table more than anything else because it tells you what's going on for the for the duration of the course and tell you what the lectures are so today for example it's January 7th and so we're doing an introduction and overview maybe I can make that a little bigger and next week no on on uh Thursday we start with this reading it's called three forms of meaning in the management of complexity and all you have to use to get that reading is click on it and then you get that reading which is a fairly straightforward process um you would probably like the lectures better if you do the readings beforehand um that's it isn't necessary you can do this any way you want but you'll get more out of the course I think if you do that um there's two Tas for this course they're also listed here one is Vanessa go and the other is Victor Swift their availability is listed here so um Vanessa is available from 445 to 5:45 on Thursdays and Victor is is available from 3:15 to 4:15 Tuesdays their office offices are listed there as are their email addresses so that you can get in touch with them my office hours are Wednesday from 4:15 to 5:45 now the way I handle that is outside my office which is office 446 which is also listed there there are a number of signup sheets that I'm just going to post on the wall I'll do that right after class because they're printed out there's a number of signup sheets that are listed on the wall and your best bet is just to take a 15minute slot um don't take a whole bunch of them because the student to teacher ratio in class is obviously quite high and so just take one for now if you would and maybe if you have a meeting with me you can check back later to see if there's time for another one um I would like to have more time than that available but 90 minutes is what I can spare this semester so anyways they'll be up today now in terms of the mechanics of the course it's pretty straightforward there's no tricks um there's two midterms the first one is February 6th and the second one is March 13th and there's also a final and the midterm and the finals essentially make up 75% of the course it's actually 77.5% of the course but and then there's two writing assignments the first writing assignment is an essay and the essay has a number of different due dates so if you're on the website you can go to writing assignments and then you'll see all these different topics that you can choose from now if you click on one of these you get to this little signup sheet here and then you can put in your name and your email address and that signs you up for that topic and as you can see 10 people can sign up for each topic so if you're in love with a particular topic then you should sign up sooner rather than later um the the due dates fall a little after the course content that's related to that topic so it'll be the next class after the lectures on that topic end and I've spread them out across the year so that the Tas don't die of frustration and so that you guys can get your essays back with a reasonable degree of promptness hopefully within a week although let's say two weeks which seems reasonable so the second um writing exercise which is worth 7.5% the essay is worth 15% is a personality self analysis it's part of a suite of programs that I designed called the self-authoring suite and I can show you those and it's at selfauthoring.com and I'll show you this video at some point but for now there's information here on these programs but I'll give you code such username and password so that you can complete these and what you'll be asked to do is to complete an exercise that's B based on a big five model of adjective description of personality so since about 1930 statisticians have been studying the structure of language at a sentence level and at an adjective level to determine how what's the underlying correlational structure of descriptive phrases as they apply to human beings so for example if you're happy you're talkative and that might not be surprising but the fact that those two things are tightly connected was one of the things that's was discovered by the factor analytic processes that led to the development of the Big Five in the big five there are roughly five traits as the name might indicate extraversion which is a positive emotion trait neuroticism which is a negative emotion trait agreeableness which is warmth and empathy compassion the other side of that is kind of a harsh coldness I guess um openness which is both intelligence and creativity and conscientiousness which is industriousness and orderliness now there are virtues so to speak and faults associated with all of those Dimensions so you can be too extroverted which makes you rather impulsive and if you're very extroverted it's more difficult to get good grades in University because you're always out having fun with your friends and partying and and that might be good in that it'll help you develop a fairly extensive social network which is a useful thing if you're associated with people who are useful for social networking purposes um but it can really interfere with your ability to sit by yourself and study if you're conscientious that's a good predictor of academic success um because conscientious people do what they say they're going to do and they seem to suffer shame and self-disgust and self-contempt and guilt and so on if they don't um if you get too conscientious though you can get quite boxed in and and orderly and narrow and orderliness by the way seems to be associated with uh right-wing political views and when it's extreme it's it starts to get repressive and so the point of all this is that there are five traits and they have positive and negative aspects especially at the extremes and these programs are set up first of all so that you'll see a series of adjectives that are Universal descriptors so it's basically a small set of adjectives 100 that kind of cover each dimension of Personality with a reasonable degree of comprehensiveness then you'll be asked to pick which ones you think are particularly relevant to you and then you'll be asked to narrow that to a final list in one half of the exercise a list that represents your virtues and then in the other half of the exercise a list that represents your faults then you'll be asked to describe a time when that virtue played a positive role for you or when that fault interfered with you and then you'll be asked to describe how you might capitalize on that virtue in the future or perhaps bring that fault under control in the future and it turns out that writing exercises of this sort um are very practically useful they have a variety of positive effects one of which seems to be an increase in academic performance and our research so far has indicated that that increase can be quite substantial among with similar programs at McGill we raised the academic performance of struggling University students by 25% so a whole grade point and at a business school in Holland where this is being studied in some depth we've studied 2,000 people they are did the future authoring program not the present authoring program which is the one you're going to do and we improved their overall academic achievement by about 30% as well turns out that articulating yourself is an extraordinarily useful thing to do you could actually you could you could also think about that in a more comprehensive way as the goal of say Psychotherapy and personality transformation a lot of what's Happening as you mature and develop as a personality is that what you are whatever that means I guess it's your behaviors and your potential and I don't know exactly what potential is but your behaviors and your potential can be increasingly organized at a high level of Consciousness articulated at a high level of Consciousness and articulation is a funny word because partly it means joint articulation you know your hands are very articulated and that's why you can do a lot of things with them and hands and speech are very tightly related which is why most people's speech centers are in the same hemisphere as their dominant hand anyways articulating yourself makes you able to do many more things with yourself and it also seems to quell your negative emotion partly because it's clarifying you you know the more you leave things muddy in your life the less defined things are around you the more active your stress response systems are because if things are murky and undefined your stress systems basically assume that there are alligators and snakes and predators hiding in all that fog and Gloom and that you're in a very dangerous environment but if you clarify that with careful attention and articulation you can clear away the fog and the Gloom and that only leaves you with your actual problems which once Define carefully you might find manageable and an example that would be you know when you go into your room and you haven't done your homework for a while and there's piles of papers piling up or maybe there's piles of junk on your computer doesn't really matter and you'll have a very powerful tendency to avoid that not even to look at it right you don't even want to look at it because it's and that's chaos it's sort of growing in your environment and there's a specific part of your brain which evolved to detect snakes that deals with such little chaotic piles of undone business and the more of those that are around you psychologically or physically the more negative emotion you experience the less hope you experience and the larger your stress response chronically and that's not good because if your stress response is chronically elevated that suppresses your immunological function it makes you overweight it predisposes you to diabetes and cancer it makes you age faster it increases the probability that you'll have anxiety disorders and depression it's a bad thing so so clarifying who you are and what you're doing is a good thing unless you want all those other things to happen which seems highly improbable although people desire some very strange things and that's part of what we'll talk about as this course progresses okay so if you want to find out about the course you can go to jordanbpeterson.com and the courses are listed there or you can just type my name in a search engine and you'll find the courses this course is py 230 obviously I mentioned that there's a reading book which you have to buy the rest of the readings are online the order that you do that reading is listed on the syllabus you also have to do two assignments an essay which is only 750 words by the way but don't let that fool you because a 750w essay can be very difficult to write um the essay and then this personality analysis now the personality analysis all you have to do is show it to the TA to show them that you completed it because we don't want to know what you wrote down and we want to encourage you to write down things that you know that you'd like to write down that are likely private unless you want to broadcast your faults on Facebook which I suppose you could do after you complete the exercise so the reason I want you to do that well there's three reasons right one is well it'll familiarize you more with standard models of Personality because you'll have to apply them to yourself and so then you'll understand yourself better too so that's a good thing and then it's also a quasi clinical intervention and some of you because you're in this course are no doubt interested in CL Clinical Psychology and so this will give you a flavor of the sorts of things that a clinical psychologist might do except a computer is doing it and then which which turns out to be fine um people will actually often tell computers things that they wouldn't tell people because the computer doesn't care what you've done particularly not yet anyways and uh the third reason is that well it should be good for you and you know education should be good for you that's actually the purpose of Education right it's supposed to make you more healthy mentally and physically that's supposed to make you more productive and so that's what education is for and that's what this class is for so that's what we're aiming at so then there's two exams two midterms 25% each approximately they're multiple choice um I'll post sample questions so that you'll know what they're like they're not tricky people get worried about exams and rightly so but these aren't tricky exams if you do the readings and you come to the class the probability is quite high that you'll do at least reasonably well um I don't ask you to memorize dates and that sort of thing I try to keep it at a conceptual level and so the questions on the multiple choice test are usually conceptual questions where I try to get you to take something that you've learned or read and to apply it to the solving of a problem even though they're in standard multiple choice format there's there's usually not a tremendous number of questions so you'll be able to complete the exam in the time allowed without any trouble so now let's see I should tell you guys who should take this course and who shouldn't take it because you need to know that since it's your first day and so this course has two or three aspects one aspect is is scientific that really occupies the last half of the course I would say and in the purely scientific part of the course or the purely research oriented element of the course the first part is scientific too because science has more science is more than mere testing of hypothesis anyways the second half of the course deals essentially with trait Theory and with psychobiology so what I want to do is to tell you about the the basic dimensions of human variability and also how those are represented in the brain so that you can make a connection and and the body so you can make a connection between the theories and and the biological and cognitive substrates and so that's sort of a unifying attempt so you you got to be interested in that if you want to take this course and and you know and and have it go well for you so there's some psychometrics that's the science of measurement there's a little bit of Statistics there's a reasonable amount of neuros pychology and some of it's complex some of it isn't but I try to only pick things that I try to only pick things to discuss with you that are relevant at three levels of analysis I want them to be personally relevant so that they tell you something about yourself I want them to be intellectually relevant but I also want them to be culturally relevant so that not when you walk away from the study not only do you know something more about you and your friends but hopefully you're a better functioning creature in the broader social millu so so everything is picked to that and including the psychobiological or neuropsychological material and the trait material um there's a fairly he heavy emphasis on clinical issues the first half of the course deals with classic theorists of personality and all the classic personality theorists were clinicians now the UV at present doesn't have a clinical program although they're starting it up in Scaro but down here at St George there's not many clinicians I think I'm probably the only one I don't know why they let me in but they did and the the the emphasis on clinici that the emphasis of clinicians is twofold right one is well who is the person or what is the person but more importantly who could the person be or what should they be and that's a very strange thing about people right I mean if you have a cat you don't really sit around thinking what could this cat be because it's a cat and you know if it has spring they're going to be cats and in a thousand years they're still going to be just cats but people well we're strange in ways that are virtually un incomprehensible and we're not only what we are but we're also what we could be and in many cases especially for people of your age you're way more what you could be than what you are and so focusing on what you could be is an extremely important thing to do and in fact there's there's plenty of research and some of it's associated with the writing exercises that I told you about earlier that if you make efforts to Define who you could be and you know in a way that you find interesting because you might as well shape yourself into something that you want to be that that increases the efficiency with which you work substantially and also makes you a better person by reasonable measures of better which sort of means happier and healthier and you know more acceptable or at least less repulsive to other people so the clinical material is very useful for that and the clinical material is grounded in observation so it's kind of like ethology ethology is the study of animal behavior but not in the lab it's observational study and a lot of the clinical stuff has this observational quality to it it's heavily influenced by philosophy if you're not interested in ideas this is a bad course for you because it's it's it's a course that primarily concentrates on ideas I I want them to have practical utility because why not you might as well put constraints on them but but the the fundamental focus is ideas and so when we discuss the clinical material clinical personality material we'll discuss the philosophical background of that and we'll do the same thing when we get to the psychobiological material so you got to decide if you're not interested in philosophical ideas then this is a bad course because you're going to be stuck with with those sorts of things half the time so and there's some there's some elements of the course they almost straight philosophy because some of the clinical schools especially those that were developed in the 1950s like existential psychology are very tightly associated with fields of philosophy existentialism and phenomenology in that case and so um I think that sort of thing is very much worth learning because it's part of the history of ideas and you should know something about it it's also very interesting it's very useful to know something about if you're going to be a clinical psychologist because you should know a fair bit about a lot of things if you're going to be a clinical psychologist but even if you're interested in research science is half Hy hypothesis testing but the other half is hypothesis generation that's the most important half you got to think up an idea before you can test it and you know most of what you'll learn in a methods class has nothing to do with generating research hypothesis they just tell you to do that first generate your research hypothesis it's like yeah that's the big problem right there the rest of it just Machinery right we just grind it through this process and the way you generate research hypothesis is by knowing something and so you have to learn a lot in order to generate a research hypothesis that well first that someone hasn't already el hasn't already thought of and disproved which is highly probable it's actually depressing to gather more and more knowledge because what you find is that everyone's already thought of everything and and most your ideas are stupid so yeah so anyways now let's see oh yes here's another reason not to take the course there's a lot of reading and there's less reading than there was last year I took out one paper that was too hard I think it was too hard for people even though it was a great paper and but I left the rest of it in and so if you're looking for a course with a light reading load this isn't that course because this has a heavy reading load now on the upside for your essays I don't require you to read outside the course you can use the material that's in the course to write the essay so it's self-contained but there's a lot of reading and it's not easy reading and partly because a lot of it is original papers all the stuff that's listed on the web is original papers and then the textbook too it's a tough textbook it's mostly text it doesn't have a lot of pictures in it it has no stories at all about celebrities I think that's the only text left that doesn't have stories about celebrities in it so if you're if you're taking a tough course semester and you don't have a lot of time to read then well this isn't a course like that it's a course where there's an awful lot to read and the thing about the reading too is that you have to think about it you know like how fast you can read something seems to be a function of how complicated the words are that would be function one but the second function seems to be something like how many ideas there are per paragraph or maybe per page there are lots of ideas per paragraph in these readings that's why I picked them so you can't just zip through them you have to think about them and well that's a good thing because if you do read them you'll know a lot more at the end of the class than you did at the beginning of the class and you'll find that that knowledge is extremely useful I truly believe that this knowledge can change your life well that's what it was generated for right it's generated by clinicians and and personality psychologists that's what they're out there to do and they're out there to take unrevealed potential that could be anything and to hammer it and shape it into something that's hard and pure and solid and you have to do a lot of reading and writing and thinking to get to a point like that but it really beats the hell out of mucking about in the MC and unfortunately that's how many people live and I've seen the consequences of that and if you spend the next 30 years like that you will be old by the time you're 50 and so I wouldn't recommend that so it's worth doing the work it's really worth it so let's take a look now well first I'll ask you if there are any questions any questions yes so you said the personality analysis will be posted soon oh yeah I'll get the username and passwords up to you pretty quick so I just had to make contact with the guy designed it with to get the code so won't be long um can you buy the at I hope so that's the plan some of you have purchased it perhaps okay so it appears that you can there's also maybe some old texts from rlock floating about you can use those too you can get a good deal on them you can often get them secondhand on Amazon for like 20 bucks if you look the old text is fine except that it has more chapters in it but if you pay attention careful attention to the syllabus that won't be a problem because all the chapters are numbered and all you have to do is match the number on the syllabus to the number in the book so other questions okay so let's take a look at what we're going to learn about lecture two so you can think of human knowledge in some ways as branching into two components you can think of those two components as has knowledge about the subjective world and knowledge about the objective world that's one way of thinking about it the other way you could think about it is knowledge about what things are and knowledge about what to do now most of what you learn in university is knowledge about what things are but that's only half of what you need to know because you really need to know well what you should go about and do this is a real problem for human beings because we're always trying to think having to think of what we should be doing doing next and like that's the fundamental question of life which is well you know what should I do next or what should I do tomorrow or what should I do next week or next month or next year because that's another problem about being human is that not only do we have to figure out what to do next but we can also see the future or multiple Futures even and then we have to determine what those Futures could be and how to avoid others that we don't want to have come into existence at all and then how to configure our Behavior so that as we navigate through the potential future futes we land up more or less somewhere we want and not somewhere we really don't want and so that's a real problem and what that that's an existential problem in fact and what that means is that we need knowledge about the subjective and about the behavioral it's part of potential how do you unravel yourself across time now it's proved very difficult for human beings to formalize that kind of knowledge now we formalize scientific knowledge which is more knowledge about what things are and about the objective world the scientific method especially the research method formalizes our knowledge about the objective world and about what it's made of but it doesn't give us much insight into what to do about that all it seems to do actually is increase our power to do things but not necessarily to inform us as to the direction in which that power should be exerted and you don't really have to look any farther than the 20th century if you want historical proof of that because as people got more and more powerful so that we could sit in this lovely classroom and all be warm and cozy while it's terrible outside we also learned how to kill each other with unprecedented Gusto and potency and so science has enabled us on both sides and that's how it is good or bad on the behavioral side there's a tradition of knowledge and it's an ancient tradition and it's grounded in for of knowledge that are likely tens of thousands of years old or maybe even older than that and those are forms of knowledge that are essentially mythological or religious and the reason that I start with those is first of all religious systems are in many ways theories of personality um and there's very tight associations between certain religions and certain fields of psychology so Judaism is been identified fairly heavily with Freud and Christianity with Carl Jung's work and also with Carl Rogers work Rogers was actually a seminarian and a lot of the ideas about what a person could be so these are ideas about the ideal are derived from religious and mythological substrates because they have to be derived from somewhere right and so you think well how do people get their ideas about what's possible or what should be part of it's through storytelling that's why you go to movies right you go there to see what people could be and you enact all those people on the screen with your bodies well it's happening and you have a little neural system that does that so it puts you right in the action it's an amazing ability amazing human ability and the reason we're so attracted to that sort of thing is because we want to know what to do with ourselves and there's a very large body of very complex information that pertains to that one of the things that Carl Jung said was that one of the things he believed was that that form of knowledge had developed quite explicitly up to about the time of the Renaissance or about to the time of bacon and decart who who founded and Galileo who basically founded the scientific method and then we sort of stopped developing that kind of knowledge and the knowledge of the objective world just leaped ahead and and like exponentially and so that's left us with the same moral intelligence we had in the 1700s but with 21st century technology not necessarily a good thing so part of what we're doing in a sense is rescuing the past you know in my other class sometimes I show Pinocchio the movie how many of you have seen Pinocchio a lot of you he so yeah it's like the most popular animated movie ever made second I think because the Lion King is more popular in there's one scene in Pinocchio where Pinocchio rescues his father from a whale you may remember that you may notice that you watched that and that was perfectly fine as far as you were concerned right that you could watch a puppet swim with a cricket to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a it's like okay so the first thing you might think about is how in the world could you sit there and swallow that and not even no notice notice that you were doing something as absurd and bizarre as any ritual you could possibly imagine well it's it's partly because we're very attracted to narrative and narratives have structure narrative through about behavior and they have a deep structure and they have a deep symbolic structure so for example the whale in Pinocchio wasn't just any ordinary whale wh right because if you remember it also breathed smoke and fire it's very strange behavior for a whale and not may even a whale that strange and that made it a dragon and so partly what that meant was that Pinocchio was rescuing his father from a dragon that's a very old story in fact that story is the oldest story that we have in written form it's a variant of a story that was told by the Mesopotamians about 5,000 years ago so part of that story means well you should rescue your father well from what well from the murky chaos in which your culture is embedded you know you guys are all inheritors of Rich cultural Traditions you know those aren't just words those cultural Traditions Orient you they keep you sane and if they're desicated and broken up and dead and archaic and lying in the bottom of the chaos then you better get them back out of there because without of them you're going to live shallow and difficult lives and that's a bad idea so starting with the historical perspectives we can situate ourselves in maybe some hundreds of thousands of years of History maybe even longer I can I can tell you in one manner it might be longer it turns out that part of the reason that we can see so well which we can human beings can really see well way better than almost any other animal except hunting birds h birds can see better than us but other than that man it's us and that's especially rare among mammals and particularly rare among primates so you might ask yourself well why can we see so well well it turns out that part of the reason is that we co evolved with predatory snakes so predatory snakes are newer than lizards by the way even though you wouldn't think so and there's a woman at UCLA named Lynn isbel who was thinking why do people see so well and so she went she had this snake detection Theory because she'd worked with primates she knew they could really see the sort of camouflage patterns that snake had snakes have and the motion that they make they're really good at detecting that plus human beings are very afraid of snakes innately plus if you take chimpanzees who've never seen a snake and you throw a rubber snake in their cage assuming they're in a cage then they jump to the top of the cage and because they're not happy about that snake but then they look at it and then if they're out in the jungle jungling around and they see a big snake then they have a specific sort of cry they make and they'll stand there for like 9 hours watching a big snake making this noise and all the other chimps depending on how afraid they are also come and look at the snake and so yeah because they want to know what that snakes up to and that's what we want to know too we want to know what the snakes are up to that's for sure and the circuit that we developed to detect snakes the visual circuit is partly what gives us such tremendous acurity of vision and partly the way is Bel figured that out was by correlating primate visual Acuity with the pre and its development over evolutionary time with the prevalence of predatory snakes in that geographical region and she found that there was a very high correlation so we can see sharply partly because we're always looking for snakes and you know that pile of undone homework in your in your in your room that's snakes as far as the part of your brain that developed to deal with snakes is concerned and so you know if you leave a lot of things undone around you then all you've got is snakes and you're their target and so that's no way to live and so that whale down there at the bottom of the ocean that's kind of a variant of a snake it's a dragon even though it's a whale it breathes fire right so let's call it a dragon because that's what it is and the idea that you have to rescue something from the dragon is an unbelievably old story and so that's partly what we're going to be doing at the beginning of this course we're going to be going way back into the MC and and mock of prehistory trying to understand what the hell we've been up to for the last 60 million years cuz that's when our tree dwelling ancestors first really started to deal with predatory snakes and my suspicions are that you're all evolved from one of those little tree dwelling Rats the first one who figured out that if you dropped a snake a stick on a snake it would probably run away so that's what we've been doing for 60 million years throwing sticks at snakes so that's the first lecture and you'll see why when you do the reading why this is broadly relevant because it also Accounts at least in part for the human tendency to demonize people who aren't like us because it turns out that we use the same circuit that we would use to handle predatory reptiles let's say we use that circuit to First process people who are straight strange to us and it makes sense because people who are strange to us who come from different cultures and who represent different ideals are unbelievably dangerous even though they might also be unbelievably beneficial you know the poor Native Americans they came out and they shook hands with the Europeans and then 95% of them died in the next 150 years right they all died of plagues they died of small pox they died of measles measles just wiped them out by the time the pilgrims came to North America which is you know fairly early in North American European history 95% of the Indians were already dead they were welcoming the Europeans because they didn't have many people to get their crops off so meeting someone who's strange is no trivial thing and even if they don't poison you with some horrible illness they'll come along with some cockamamy idea like Marxism and you'll be Chinese and then it'll be the 20th century and 100 million of you will die it's very useful to understand the Deep mythological structures that we live inside and the relationship to our brain and our body really gives you insight into how people function it's helpful the next lecture is on heroic and shamanic initiations and that brings us closer to the present than say 60 million years ago it's more like 50,000 years ago there are shamanic Traditions all over the world and the shaman is kind of the pre cursor to the to the to the to the man of intelligence to the man of intellect the man of culture and he's sort of a doctor and a scientist and a priest all wrapped up into one thing and he's often the person who's in charge of the culture many in many shamanic societies the shaman has a vocabulary vocabulary that vastly exceeds that of his peers and that's because he's been taught it in his initiatory process so that the culture within which that particular people survives can be transmitted down the generations with very little error people can remember things that are transmitted verbally in in pre-literate cultures with unbelievable accuracy and the the the shamanic initiation is very and the heroic initiations as well are very interesting processes because they involve they involve death and rebirth and death and rebirth is more or less equivalent to change so here's something to think about so if there's a mosquito and it wants to make another mosquito it basically lays 10,000 eggs right and then all those eggs hatch and 99,999 of those little mosquitoes die and then one mosquito makes it and lays another 10,000 eggs so it's pretty costly reproductive strategy right but so the way the mosquito works is that it knows that the world is chaotic and dangerous and it has no idea how to survive in that so it just makes a whole pile of mosquitoes and it hopes that one of them will sneak through and each of those mosquitoes is a tiny bit different from each other mosquito in terms of time and place and also genetic structure and maybe one's got some little advantage that allows it to survive but it's costly right it's 9 9,999 to1 otherwise we'd be covered with mosquitoes so so the way the mosquito deals with the fact that you can't figure out what's going on is by producing lots of mosquitoes but the way people figure out what's going on is by producing lots of ideas and ideas are the relationship of ideas to you and the external world is the same as the relationship of animals to the environment so there's a philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead who said human beings evolved to let their ideas die instead of them now that's a smart way of thinking thinking CU it means that you can parse off a little subpersonality of yourself maybe it's angry subpersonality or sad sub personality or an irritated or resentful or you know those aren't exactly ideas they're more like little spirits that are partly you they're kind of stupid because they've only got one direction but there's still variants of you and maybe you can present one of those to someone which you might do if you're dating someone and you want to assuming you still do that if you're dating someone and you want to press them maybe you spin off some little variant of yourself that you think is particularly attractive probably won't work I doubt if that work and if it doesn't work well then you can get all heartbroken and let it die and then maybe the next one you spin off will be a little more you know together and so that's how people progress they progress by dying and coming back to life at different levels say I mean maybe you're just making some little ratty mistake and so you can let it go and you're only ashamed momentarily and it's only a little pain when that circuit dies or maybe it's your whole damn personality that has to go you know and that happens to people when they encounter a catastrophe of one form or another so that might happen if someone Close to You dies or if you lose a limb or if you get an illness or you know any of the horrible things that plague people to very deep levels which might mean pretty much all of you has to go and maybe you'll actually die but if you don't well you can let go of what's holding you back and maybe that's your old self and then you can come back to life and I'll tell you it's a lot better to do that voluntarily before it's necessary than involuntarily in a moment of Crisis and I would say in some ways that's the lesson of Clinical Psychology confront the damn snakes first because it's really hard to get out of their bellies once they've eaten you so the shaman the shamanic initiations are death and rebirth initiations they formalize that they're often the the rituals themselves are often accompanied by the use of different classes of hallucinogens which for one reason or another seem to facilitate at least symbolically the process of transformation from life to death and back to life so they're dramatizations of the process by which people learn you learn something to really learn it some presupposition that you had before that has to crumble and then the new information comes in and you can build a new self around it but it's a painful process and that's partly why people stick to their ideas or their past selves you know when you could stick to your past self and that would be fine except that everything's changing around you all the time and so if you don't change then you just get more and more outdated you're more and more archaic none of your presuppositions work anymore and so you're like you're like this Rusty machine clanking around running into things all the time and your life is very miserable because you don't fit the environment anymore and so when I talk about personality and its Transformations something that you could ask yourself which is in some way the most fundamental question you can ask yourself is are you the thing that stays the same or are you the thing that changes and you know the thing that changes can live in a lot more places and so that's worth thinking about but the cost is well when you change you die a little bit and that's painful or maybe you die a lot and that's really painful so if you ever wonder why people don't change that's part of the reason then we the next section is on constructivism we're going to talk mostly about P he's actually a developmental psychologist um I like PJ a lot because PJ had an interesting question is which is it's not a genetic question or an environmental question and you know you might think those are the only two kinds of questions there are when you're thinking about the dev but it's not exactly that here here's why it's not clear to what degree you're specified by your genes so here's one possibility so let's say that encoded in your genetic structure are a whole variety of potential use like who knows how many all the potential use that the entire history of mankind has been able to weave into their genetic structure they're all sitting down there encoded in your genes and then that very complex structure that's r with potential pops out into a particular environment and then it interacts with that environment like a program interacts with a computer and gathers information of one form or another it takes that information and the material that it incorporates and builds the real you out of that and that's what P was studying he was trying to figure out how does a child go about taking itself from you know this thing that just lays there squats basically to something that's you know you go on YouTube and you see what people can do what human beings can do it's bloody unbelievable I mean we're so ridiculously versatile people can do things that are just impossible in in every Dimension you know intellectually physically spiritually they can even eat hot dogs at a rate that you can hardly imagine you know were very variable and P was very interested in trying to figure out how all of that embodied variability could come out of this little package of potential at the beginning of life it's very interesting so that's constructivism how does the individual construct him or herself from nothing in some ways from birth forward and so P especially his discussion of infant development sort of like the analysis of the unfolding of a human being because people do unfold too you know mean because babies when they're born they're all crunched up like this and so they have to stretch themselves out and you know get going and that was P's concern so so that's that's good and then we go from there to depth psychology you might think about that more as psychoanalysis now people have people aren't very happy generally speaking about analytic Theory especially if they're research oriented but there's a variety of reasons for that and one of them is they don't know anything about it that would be the first reason and people are often tempted to denigrate anything they don't understand and it's actually kind of hard to understand psychoanalytic thinking it's in fact it's very hard and the other thing about like scientists and research scientists who are engaged in psychological work is they're actually usually fairly mentally healthy you know at least they're healthy enough to to be scientists which you know you got to be pretty healthy to be a scientist you got to be disciplined you got to be able to get up and go to work every day you have to be able to think about complex things you have to be very orderly and persistent you know and so there's a lot of Demand on you if you're a scientific researcher so the problem with scientific researchers they hang around with other scientific researchers then they think that's what human beings are like and human beings are nothing like scientific researchers they're a tiny minority of the population and they're as bizarre as like albino buffalo and to to think of them as representative of human beings is insane first of all most of them have IQs in the 99th percentile so it's like why bother even thinking about them normal human beings are very weird especially the ones that don't function well and not functioning well is is a bottomless pit that that's why hell is a bottomless pit by because not functioning well is a bottomless pit and if you're dealing with people who aren't functioning well one of the most mysterious things is how they can take a situation that's God awful beyond your worst imaginings and then think up three or four creative ways to make it worse and if you're dealing with someone like that and you do if you're a clinician if you're dealing with someone like that good luck with your behavioral interventions man that's like throwing sticks at an elephant you're just not going to get anywhere and one of the ways I want to demonstrate this to you I'm going to show you a film called crumb crumb's a harsh film but it's the best documentary by the way of an underground comic named Robert Crum who's actually quite a genius even though he's perverse in precisely the Freudian ways that are interesting and his brothers are even worse so I'll walk you through that because I can't figure out any other way of giving you a taste of what Freudian Psychopathology is like it's not pretty and that's the other reason that sort of clean- minded research scientists don't like psychoanalytic thinking because it's really in many ways it deals with the most disgusting elements of human behavior and so it's not even that Pleasant to think about and then there's Yung who we'll talk about after Freud and Yung is so strange that he makes Freud look normal and Yung believed that as as I mentioned earlier believed that there is a universal grammar of ethics of morality it's not arbitrary it's not relative you know in the universities the theory has been at least since the 1960s that one person's ethics is as good as another person and there's no way of distinguishing reliably between them well I happen to think that's absolute nonsense it's also extremely dangerous nonsense and I also think there's no evidence for it whatsoever because we now know a lot about human universals which are aspects of human behavior that are constant across all cultures and there are a lot of them there are a lot of them and the other thing is there's just not that many ways that half mad primates can gather together in large groups and live productively it's not easy like you think of all the civilization work that went into allowing all you people from all these different cultures to sit here in peace and comfort it's mindboggling if you think there's a million ways to do that well think again maybe there's one way to do that you know and we do it well enough so here we are and no one's being knifed so so that's Yung and he's profound beyond belief really beyond belief so that's those guys all dealt with unconscious now it's it's kind of interesting to think about what the unconscious means and so I I can give you a bit of a hint it's it's partly the information that's coded in your behavior so for example there are a lot of things that you can do with your body that you don't know how you do like you don't know how you walk for example or how you ride a bike or how you talk you can talk but you don't know how you talk you just move your mouth I know but you get the point right you have no conscious apprehension whatsoever of the micro details that are necessary to allow you to move your mouth so there's a lot of information encoded in you that you don't have conscious access to and it's not only physiologically encoded it's also culturally encoded because you've been targeted and shaped by the interactions of all the people you've ever encountered and they in turn by all the people they've ever encountered including their ancestors so you're the product of this unbelievably complex multigenerational exchange of information that in some ways is all about how to make you acceptable to the public and there's only certain ways you can be acceptable to the public you know you have to be relatively clean for example at least in our society you can't be too boring or you won't have any friends you also can't be too exciting you know you can't be too violent you can't be too empty-headed unless you're associating with people who like to feel Superior you know there's there's we put a lot of Demands on each other in terms of what constitutes acceptability let alone ideal we're always telling each other about both of those what's acceptable what's ideal every interaction you have shapes you into an approximation of acceptable and ideal and that's all encoded in you too it's encoded in your behavior it's also encoded in your imagination and that's why you can go to a movie and you can instantly identify the hero and the villain which is of course the first thing you do when you go to a movie because otherwise it can't make sense out of it and so that encoding prior to articulation that's all the unconscious and that's what the psychoanalysts were interested in analyzing now the cognitive neuroscientists have kind of got there too but they're sort of diluted into thinking that what's in your head is information and then it's ideas and those are sort of cold and dead things and your head is not full of ideas and information it's full of devils and snakes and the psychoanalyst knew that and by that I mean you're alive and so are your subcomponents and all your little subpersonalities and not just ideas they see they think they hear they feel they have aims as you know for example when you get possessed by anger the aim can be entirely destructive I want to bring down the person I love half an hour later you think what the hell was I thinking about it's like yeah no kidding well you weren't thinking you're just possessed by a little subpersonality and that's what the psychoanalysts were interested in subpersonalities fantasies next we go to the humanists and the existentialists now they're interesting because they come at the problem of what's wrong with people from a kind of Universalist perspective now for Freud if you weren't sick you were healthy and that seems obvious because you we think you can make a clear distinction between sick and healthy but the existentialists they didn't want any of that their hypothesis was if you're [Music] human you're sick there's no way out of it and the reason you're sick in a sense and unlike any other animal is that life itself poses a paradoxical problem to you partly because you're so conscious and because you're self-conscious and actually a sequence of paradoxical problems a how do you live When You're vulnerable and Mortal that's a rough one because you might say well why should I bother it all or who's going to know anyways in a thousand years or a million years or why is there suffering or how do you go on in the face of Cruelty those are questions that grip at people's soul and crush it and they're not a consequence of mental illness it's like what how long should it take you to recover if your whole family is wiped out in a car accident what's healthy well we don't know the answer to that it's like should you ever recover maybe if you were halfways empathic it would just kill you you know a lot of times people can't recover from their grief because they're guilty they think how can I how can I live when all those people close to me died and they died unfairly well that's an existential problem and then so the there's one class which is vulnerability and mortality everyone's got that staring at them so how do you deal with that hard question second class of problems Well everybody's always evaluating you always and you're never good enough so what that means is that you're always in an insufficient relationship with society and history no matter how good you get it's not good enough and so history itself as well as culture always faces you as a judge and so that's the second category of existential problem then the third Pro problem is well what to do about you yourself you know there's nature you have to contend with and there's culture you have to contend with and then you've got yourself and your self-consciousness and your deep knowledge of all the things about you that could really use some repair and the thing about those problems is that everyone has them and they' always had them and as far as we know they always will and so they're built into the condition of Being Human and that's what existentialism is about it's like life is a paradoxical problem is there any possible solution to a paradoxical problem well that's that's that's in some ways the question of the meaning of life and one hint is that well what's the meaning of life and one answer to that is this is the hint is that that the meaning to life is the pattern of thought and action that you take that enables you to tolerate at least tolerate the conditions of life and then maybe you could move One Step Beyond that if you're feeling a little optimistic and say the meaning of life is the pattern of conception and action that enables you to welcome the conditions of life and then you might ask yourself well is there such a mode of being given the nature of the problem that you have to contend with is there actually a mode of being that would enable that you could say the vulnerability the Judgment the insufficiency it's worth it under these conditions and that's the other existential question and the people who posed those questions they weren't messing around you're going to read people like Frankle Victor Frankl and Alexander Sol niton and what those two people live through I mean it's unimaginably horrible and when they were wrestling with the questions that I just described they weren't academic they weren't academic issues they were embodied issues of life and culture and genocide and cruelty and so their examination of that had to be deep enough to be able to contend with questions like that and answers that are deep enough to contend with questions like that are frightening answers and we have reading week it'll be a relief the last part of the course this is when we switch over into the more scientific domain and so we're going to do two things as I said we're going to take a pretty deep look at how the brain functions as far as we know in our current state of unimaginable ignorance like we we really know so little about the brain or maybe we know a bit a bit about the brain but we certainly don't know anything yet about Consciousness and Consciousness seems to be a very well it's a relevant part of the brain right it's sort of the part that everybody cares about since Consciousness in some sense seems to be you even more than your brain is you I mean your brain it's just this thing inside your skull but your Consciousness you know that's your being we don't have a clue about Consciousness I our scientific we're not even able to conceptualize it in a scientific manner it's a real mystery so but having said that there's still plenty of things that are interesting to know about the brain and one of the things we're going to do and this is sort of associated with the Freudian idea of the ID you know the ID for Freud was the natural self and so that was your primordial you could think about them as drives or Temptations or or values values is probably the most accurate anger sexuality those are the top two Freudian concerns there's plenty others eating Freud didn't care about that we do now because everyone has an eating disorder or virtually everyone so for the victorians it was sexuality for us it's food sex doesn't seem to be a problem but we just can't eat anymore so we're going to take a look at the low level biological systems in the brain and those are systems God some of those systems are so old that even Crustaceans have them so for example this is so cool so if you give a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance fight because they fight for dominance and they might even know it if you give the lobster if you take a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance dispute he'll go back to his little lobster hole and pout and when when he's pouting he gets all collapsed and you can't even really get him out of his hole with a stick cuz he's going to sit in there and you know be upset about his dominance defeat and maybe he'll come out as kind of a new Lobster all ready to go again and maybe not if you take that same Lobster and you give him anti-depressants right after he fights he won't go back into his cave and hide and he'll fight right away again and so you think about that that means that the circuitry that underlies our defeat related depression is 300 million years old and even crustations have it so that's way down in your brain stem man cuz lobsters hardly even have brain in fact if the lobster is big and tough and he's been a dominant lobster for a long time and he gets defeated badly then when he goes off to pout he has to dissolve his whole brain because all it does is dominant stuff then he grows a new subordinate brain and he weasel around with that for a while so and that's useful to think about the next time you really get defeated because all that pain you're going through it's like you got some circuit repairs to make and if you've been badly defeated well maybe you should just let yourself collapse and and all that stuff clear away so that you could come back so that's lowlevel stuff brain stem stuff it's way down at the bottom of your being you know but we're going to talk about systems that are above that too but still low the hypothalamus for example it's a very cool brain area it's sort of responsible for all the basic drives hunger temperature regulation sexuality um defensive aggression predatory aggression looks like it's something different everyone has those systems you know so they're like these sub beings that live inside us but they're also preconditions for communication you know cuz you might say to your friend I'm angry today and your friend doesn't say well what do you mean angry he says well what happened to upset you because he knows what anger means and the reason he knows that is because he's already got it in his head he's like you he gets angry he gets sad gets afraid has the basic emotions but not only the basic emotions but the basic motivations and so we're going to look at the brain systems that underly the basic motivations and the basic emotions and in some sense those systems are equivalent to the physiological incarnation of the ID that Freud described at the end of the 19th century and so that's a nice way to look at it you'll go through the psychoanalytic thinking which which kind of puts Flesh on these systems because for the psycho analysts and this is why they're still relevant those weren't just systems they were living personal ities narrow oneeyed personalities they only want one thing but personalities nonetheless ancient gods that's another way of looking at them and things you have to contend with whether you believe in them or not we'll discuss all five traits as well extraversion as I said that's positive emotion neuroticism that's negative emotion people vary on those Dimensions agreeableness that seems to be associated with maternal behavior on one end and predatory hunting on another because human beings are hunters and mammals it's a weird combination right because if you're hunting mammal you have to figure out how not to kill and eat your children right and that happens in lots of mamalian species especially among the males so they have to be moved away but human beings have solved that more or less you know it gets complicated in mixed families because if you're the child of a stepparent you have 100 times the likelihood of being a abused so we'll talk about conscientiousness which is a great predictor of long-term life success but also associated with fascist political pre predispositions because it turns out that the way you vote has very little to do with what you think and very much to do with what your temperament is so even for high level cognitive functions like political belief these underlying systems play a determining role last two things we're going to talk about performance prediction and by that I mean well there's been in crewing evidence you might say what what what how do you have a happy life first of all I would say that's a stupid question but we'll go because happiness isn't it's not the right aim it's it's a way it's not a place to go it's a it's a manner of manifestation while you're journeying it's something like that leaving that aside what do you need to live a high quality life well we kind of know that already I mean it's it's kind of obvious you know you need friends you need Intimate Relationships you need meaningful work you know having more money than will pay your bills doesn't seem to help that much etc etc so it's like you know it's like intelligent moderation and discipline it's very boring it's exactly what you'd expect if you were pessimistic about excitement performance prediction we're going to look very carefully at the nature of the traits that make people successful in life and you know you might say well what do you mean by successful but you know one of the things I mean is not in too much pain and anxiety because that turns out to actually be more important to people than being happy you know if you say to people what do you want they say I want to be happy but if you analyze what they mean by happy they mostly mean not suffering and not terrified you get those two things under control like the worst that can happen to you is that you'll be bored so and then we'll wrap it up at the end okay so that's the course so um I'm glad to be teaching it it's good to see all of you here it looks like you kind of have a comfortable classroom so that's kind of nice um decide if you decide if you want to take the course because I don't want you to be disappointed at the end so I'm really I'm really telling you seriously you got to like ideas if you like this lecture you'll like the course and you got to do the reading and there's a fair bit of reading so we'll see you Thursday |
today we're going to talk a little bit about I guess you could call them the underlying structures of perception I picked this image it's a very old image it's it's an it's an image that that portrays man being cast up on the beach by a whale it's Jonah biblical figure and in this in the story of Jonah Jonah was out on a rough ocean storm and he had been commanded by God to do something which he was ignoring and uh the storm was sufficiently rough so that he got cast overboard he was eaten by this giant this is a whale as far as the medieval medieval people were concerned it's obviously not what we would think of as a whale but they didn't know much about whales anyways he was swallowed up by whale and then cast back up on shore a number of days later it's a death and rebirth story and the reason I use it as an image is because it represents something of psychological import that you're all familiar with but that you might not know that you're familiar with symbols are often like that um a symbol often stands for something that you know but that you don't know that you know there's lots of things that you know know that you don't know that you know almost everything is like that in fact and it's rather obvious if you think about it because if you were transparent to yourself and you knew everything you knew you wouldn't have to study anything about psychology because you'd understand yourself completely and we understand ourselves poorly and so we have to study ourselves as individuals and then you know as as as phenomena in the world as as other people and and as mammals and as animals and as living things and as political actors and so on just to get some minor notion of what's actually going on and what that means in part is that you're more complicated than you can understand and when when you hear say psychoanalytic thinkers talking about ideas like the unconscious the unconscious is actually a representation in some ways of the fact that there's far more to you than you know about and that what that means also is that there are different kinds of unconscious and we certainly know that to be the case there different kinds of memory for example so a lot of your procedural knowledge is unconscious and so your procedural knowledge is what allows you to do things like ride a bike or walk for that matter because you don't really know how you walk you it's actually a controlled fall so you lean forward and then you use your legs to stop you from falling on the ground it's it's it's it's encoded in your architecture rather than something that's apprehensible to your conscious understanding now there are lot lots of there are lots of phenomena that are procedural and unconscious and then there are sort of borderline phenomena that you have some idea about that you can represent but you still don't completely understand so those sorts of representations tend to be more imagistic and those are the sorts of things maybe that pop up in your fantasies and your dreams and those are also the sorts of unconscious sources of knowledge that allow you to understand say complex work works of literature or art that draw their meaning from multiple sources simultaneously and attempt to inform you at a deep level about how things are connected and how they're different now this particular image is a journey to the underworld image and that's a very very old idea Journey to the underworld um it's it's maybe the oldest myth it's one of the oldest mythological ideas or one of the oldest archetypal ideas and the underworld is it's a difficult it's a difficult phenomena to grasp although you you certainly encountered the concept particularly in movies so for most of you how many of you have seen all the Harry Potter movies right so right of course and so in the second movie I believe it's the second movie where Potter encounters a basilisk underneath Hogwarts is that right is that the second one yeah well that story is a journey to the underworld story and the the the architectural setup of the of the of the movie my architectural setup I mean the relationship of Hogwarts the castle to the underground structures is a symbolic representation of the representation of Consciousness embedded in culture and so that would be poter and his friends embedded in the the the realm of magical knowledge so to speak that's outside of them and that's that's represented by the castle which is you know a a a it's a representation of knowledge cast in stone so that's a form of memory to cast something in stone and so Potter and his friends are being enculturated in this enclosed environment and this safe enclosed environment it's like a university it's like the university more on the other side of the campus than on this side for for various reasons now underneath the the well in the background of course in the Potter series there's a battle between good and evil going on and that's also an extremely old archetypal idea I mean that's an idea that's probably as old as human beings and that's partly because human beings are very strange creatures and they're capable of very uh what would you call profound acts of deception and one of the things that separates human beings from most other animals is our capacity to use deception and it's associated with our imaginativeness right because we can imagine a variety of alternative potential realities and move towards them that opens the door for us to deceive ourselves and others because we can replace our accurate vision of the world in so far as it's accurate with whatever vision and representation we wish to choose one of the things you find in childhood development for example is that the smarter the child the earlier they learn to lie and and it's an offshoot of the ability to use fantasy and so the the idea of good versus evil part comes out of that to some degree because if you're dealing with people you're always dealing with phenomena that can trick you in some way they can represent reality as other than it is and that that's a tremendous problem for human beings because it makes other people extremely difficult to figure out now if you're honest and straight forward then you're easy to figure out because you don't have to be figured out I can just take you at your word which means you'll tell me something and it'll be relatively straightforward I'll be able to understand it and then you'll go do it no problem I don't have to know anything about you on the other hand if you don't do things according to what you say you'll do then you're a bottomless pit of incomprehensibility and God only knows what you're going to be up to and so that that's an archetypal problem for human beings and that's the problem of having to deal with the latent deceptive capacity of other people and of course of ourselves so that's all going on in the background of the Potter series but underneath the castle for example there's remember what's under the castle in the second in the second film what is it it's it's a basilisk right yeah and what happens when you look at a basilisk Stone right and so what what might that mean if you're thinking about it intelligently say what what phenomena might that that represent what happens to prey animals when they encounter a predator freeze they freeze EX exactly yeah so it's a representation of the fact that there are certain classes of phenomena that will freeze you on sight and you freeze because there are parts of your brain that respond to phenomena in the external world as if you are prey and the reason for that is well per first you are and second from an evolutionary perspective your your ancestry going back say tens of millions of years is an ancestry that was composed of predecessors that were continually praying upon and we have entire systems in our brain that react to the class of potentially predatory events now for human beings that system has differentiated cognitively so that many of the things that we would experience as predatory threats in the modern world don't come in the shape of say crocodiles and and bears and you know giant cats and so forth the sorts of things that would necessarily prey on you in the night but they're analogous in that the outcome is the same you can be prayed upon by many things you can be prayed upon by you know a corrupt corporation and so it's perfectly reasonable to symbolize the actions of of a corrup corporation as a form of predation and also to categorize that even more deeply as a reflection of the underlying consequences of the fact that people can deceive each other and those sorts of representations get deep very very rapidly but they're they're Act active and living representations in that they still represent something that's profoundly true which is not so much what things are in and of themselves which is what science does but what things are in relationship to you which is more like what things mean and things generally have a motivational or emotional meaning and that meaning is generally quite tightly tied to the necessity that you have to survive and to thrive and to you know to find someone to be with and to reproduce and all the darwinian things that you're supposed to be up to so a lot of these more archaic categories are they're meaningful categories they're categories of meaning that's that's a that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it now in the Potter situation which is related to this image the one that's up here the the idea is that everything that's stable rests on something that's unstable and dangerous and that's underneath in the Potter series and then the other thing that happens continually in the series but particularly in the second episode particularly in the second episode is that Potter has to go down beneath things to encounter something that's terrifying and deadly that's that's actually praying on his friends and on the community so it's uh it's very much like for example The Hobbit having to go off and and and uh steal treasure from from smog I think the dragon's name is and except that in the in the Potter sequence the dragon which is the Basilisk they they equivalent it's the same thing as this um in the in The Hobbit the dragon Hoards gold whereas in the Potter representation what does the basilis guard what's it what has it captured it's the little redheaded girl Jenny right Jenny Jenny right and that's a very that's a very old story now now Potter's kind of in love with her right now I mean it's it's they're young and sort of platonic but you know you can see the relationship sort of burgeoning now he has to confront this thing that's terrifying that exists underneath everything in order to free this virginal figure from the clutches of something terrible in reptilian now it's a very very interesting story that and what it means a whole variety of things and what it means to some degree is that uh a male human being can't really become mature until he confronts the terrible things that lie underneath the Civilized veneer of society that's one thing means uh another thing it means is that it's the capacity it's the capacity of the male in that situation to do that that makes him attractive enough to wake up the females that he might be associated with so that's like a Sleeping Beauty Motif um it has e e e evolutionary Echoes because much of what we've battled with for the last 60 million years say because I think you can trace the development of our cognitive structures quite straightforwardly back 60 million years there's been an endless battle between human beings and predators and many of those Predators were reptilian and so you know were the result of a very very long battle between mammals and reptiles and in our case particularly it appears that part of the reason we evolved our tool using capacity and our great capacity for vision was because our ancestors were continually prayed upon by predatory snakes when they lived in trees and that's a long time ago and so these these symbolic representations are unbelievably archaic and they're kind of as archaic as the underlying biological systems in your brain that that provide you with motivation and emotion and those are extremely old you share those with well you share those with any animal that you have any hope whatsoever of understanding at all and that even means lizards you know my daughter had these lizards that were called I can't remember unfortunately they're a desert kind of lizard and they make a good initial pet but they're they're very F little creatures cuz they they you know they're very lizard likee being that they're lizards and they have points all over them and uh if you put them in water they puff themselves up which is quite fun and then they Zoom around on the water but more importantly they like to stack on top of each other they're very very social and they're friendly and which is not exactly something that you'd expect from a lizard but but my my point is that even something that's as distant as that from you in the evolutionary hierarchy shares enough commonality of biological structure with you so that you can understand a fair bit of its motivation so for example it's pretty easy to tell with when one of those lizards even though they're basically friendly gets angry because it'll puff up and hiss and you know right away you don't have to have a discussion with the rest of your family to figure out that that's an angry lizard right you it maps onto your body immediately and you know the same thing applies to snakes it even applies to insects and lots of insects have developed the kind of warning behavior that will immediately signal to you that you're about to be bitten or or it's usually bitten with insects so so this is all to say that there are levels of understanding that are underneath say your your your normative mundane day-to-day comprehension that inform everything that you do with deep levels of meaning and and lot a lot of the activities that you pursue that you might regard as entertaining actually draw on those representations and you find them entertaining because they're actually deeply meaningful now the idea that a man can be swallowed or a human being because there are myths like myth of prapan where the protagonist is clearly female where they the there's an underground journey and then a reemergence and and that's the journey to the underworld that's the journey that Harry Potter undertakes continually by the way throughout the Potter series um the underworld taking different forms um as the as the series progress um now that's also a death and rebirth idea and and that's that's a very old and profound idea it's actually one of the most profound ideas that human beings have and it's the idea that um you will spend time in your life underground now you might think what does that mean well it means what the Potter movie the second Potter movie was trying to represent which is that there will be times in your life where you are faced with things that will terrify you into paralysis and that will take you underneath your normal set of assumptions because when your normal set of assumptions are functioning you don't end up facing something that's terrifying enough to to freeze you when your normal set of assumptions are working the world stays happily predictable around you and most of the time that's where you are and that's the normal world but that's blown apart whenever something that you're attempting to do fails in in a dramatic or less dramatic way the more dramatic the way the deeper you go into the underworld and the underworld is in some sense the substructures of your presuppositions now you you know this already because I don't suppose there's a single person in here who hasn't spent some time in the Underworld so to speak because this is what happens when something terrible happens to you unpredictable and terrible and you know there's sort of classic categories of events that send you to the underworld you know um the death of someone you love a serious illness of some sort either for you or for someone you you love um the death of a dream of some sort you know so you've got some goal that you think is really important and all of a sudden you find out for one reason or another that there's just no way you're going to be able to pursue it um betrayal that's a really good one people that's a really rough one and that'll send you for that'll throw you for a loop for sure so they're all they're all elements of the part of the world that you can't control that in some sense always remains beyond your control that has in some sense a predatory relationship ship to you because it can devour you at least metaphysically and when that happens you go somewhere and the place that you go is very dangerous it's underneath everything and maybe you come back out and if you come back out what that means is that you've reconstructed your erroneous presupposition so that you can function once again in the world and but maybe you don't maybe you don't so people who have post-traumatic stress disorder for example they go into the underworld they just stay there you know and if you're if you're chronically depressed or if you can't get over your grief or if you're in a state of continual anxiety and upset or if you're nihilistic for that matter you exist essentially in an underworld domain because you can't master the perceptual apparatus the culturally informed perceptual apparatus that would help you um Orient yourself in the world so that the things that you want to have happen and that you need to have happen actually happen so that's what that picture means it also means at least in principle that you know people have the capacity to die and be reborn at different levels of analysis so you know there are minor disappointments that you encounter when you have to drop some presupposition that you have and let it die and then put a new one in its place and that's painful but it's nowhere near as painful as holding on to the things when they don't work because then you just end up wandering around as sort of a clattering collection of dead presuppositions and you know nothing that you ever want will happen under that circumstance because you're you're armed with tools that don't fit the world and you know when you try to apply them the world won't do what you want it to do and then that's endlessly anxiety-provoking and frustrating so part of pain is is part of the price that you pay in some ways for being updatable you know because the world transforms around you and as a consequence you have to be able to transform with it otherwise it runs ahead of you and you get left behind and you know that happens to people to some degree anyways as they age that's actually one of the evolutionary explanations for why people die CU it's a mystery right there are elements of you that are Immortal you know the the cells that that that that give give rise to you are Immortal they're you know the DNA that produced you is at least 3 and a half billion years old it might be older than that so structures can maintain themselves over unbelievably vast expanses of time so it's not self-evident why human beings have to die but we do and we die at about after you're done being a grandparent is kind of when you're when you're done and the the hypothesis is is that at that point in some sense it's too costly to keep you updated and you have to be replaced by a younger version which would of course be your grandchildren or whatever you know you've sort of exhausted your plasticity and flexibility and uh then it's cheaper just to replace you than to update you so that's kind of a drag but yeah all right so here's a funny question for you this is the question that scientists are always devoted towards answering what's the world made of well that's a complicated question I mean the simple answer is that it's made out of matter um and that matter is made out of atoms and that theory was originally formulated by democrati but democrati didn't exactly say that the world was made out of atoms he said the world was made out of atoms and space and that actually happens to matter because the way that atoms are arranged in space gives rise to another property which is information and so if you have Adams in space you also have information and you can think of the world as being made of information just as easily as you can think of it as being made of matter now in fact I think that and and you know I'm I'm not alone in this hypothesis that it's actually more useful to conceive of the ground of reality as being something like information rather than being something like matter but we don't have to discuss that at length at the moment what we'll say instead is that one one way of looking at the world is the materialistic perspective and the materialistic perspective is a very powerful perspective and it's basically been dominant for about since the time of G Galileo that's that's about when that perspective got thoroughly going and and for many reasons bacon and dayart as well were major players in the establishment of the materialistic framework and it came about because in many ways because people were suffering from their inability to understand objective reality and so and you know we still suffer from that because there are all sorts of diseases we don't know what to do with and we age and you know things don't work out exactly like they're supposed to and so we pay a big price for our ignorance and so we're motivated to overcome it and one way we have overcome it was by developing materialistic philosophy and that materialistic philosophy enabled us to specify the structure of certain elements of the world and then to learn to predict and control it at least to some degree now you know you learn to predict and control something and sometimes you generate more monsters doing that so that's problematic but all things considered I think it's a lot better to live now than it than to live 3 or 400 years ago so or maybe even 30 years ago for that matter so it looks like the whole materialistic thing has been doing a lot of good for us but there it also has some serious problems and the problems have to do with another fundamental problem that human beings have to solve which is what you should do about what is and because human beings are Dynamic and active creatures and so we do not only we're not Machines of representation we don't just care what the world is we care what you should do with the world and the reason we care for that well the fundamental reason if you're thinking about it from a scientific perspective is essentially darwinian and I think that you can you can imagine the conflict between the moral worldview and the materialistic worldview as a battle in some sense between Newton and Darwin so Newton was the was the author the fundamental author of The idea that the world was made out of material and that it operated like a machine you know which was a pretty powerful perspective um that perspective came about during the time of clocks you know when when when Europeans in particular were starting to build things that would function in a very predictable manner once they were set in motion and so Newton in some sense was influenced by that and assumed that the entire Cosmos could be understood as a deterministic machine um and that that it would be ultimately predictable and controllable and in in a famous statement and I I don't think this was Newton although I can't remember might have been decart um anyways the idea is that if you knew the position of every subatomic or every atomic particle in existence if you knew the position and the momentum of those particles that you could then predict the entire outcome of the future it was strictly deterministic and the only thing that stopped you from being able to describe everything in terms of Machinery was your ignorance it was there was nothing at the bottom of the cosmos so to speak that was fundamentally unknowable well that turned out to be wrong it wasn't really discovered to be wrong until you know the first couple of Decades of the 20th century but it definitely turned out to be wrong we now know that in under no conceivable conditions could we gather enough information to predict the outcome of what appears to be a relatively unpredictable Cosmos there are levels of resolution that remain relatively constant and that you can manipulate but our hope for toal knowledge is is is gone and that was mostly a consequence of the development of quantum mechanics and the quantum theories have never failed in experimental tests they're the most powerful theories that human beings have ever designed so in some ways they seem well they're probably not final but they're they're pretty final so now okay so so that's sort of the materialist end of things now now there's a darwinian end of things and and the reason I'm telling you about both of these things is because part of what we need to solve in order to progress properly with this course we need to solve the problem of exactly what constitutes truth now the first thing that I might say is that truth in some ways whether or not something is true is a question that's sort of like whether or not a tool that you have does the job that it has it's not so much a question about the ultimate nature of reality because you can't get a truth that completely informs you about the ultimate nature of reality so you're sort of stuck with partial truth and so then you might ask well how do you tell a useful partial truth from a nonuseful partial truth or maybe a partial truth from a lie or from fiction it's very complicated to do that but one way you can progress towards that is to start thinking about things in terms of their tool like capability and that's a pragmatic approach by the way from a philosophical perspective the pragmatists who were very influenced by Charles Darwin by the way came to the conclusion at the beginning of the 20 Century that truth was bounded by claims of practicality so if you're trying to determine whether a statement is true the implicit question that goes along with that is true in relationship to what end so and and the question then is sort of like is your tool that you're using to represent the world or to act on it good enough to do what you're trying to do with it and then if it's good enough then your claim is true enough now this is tightly tied to darwinian philosophy and the pragmatists recognized this right away the pragmatists were American group of philosophers who worked on the East Coast particularly in Boston and they were they immediately took darwinian the darwinian hypothesis to their to their to their heart so to speak because the darwinian hypothesis is also pragmatic the darwinian hypothesis says whatever reality is is and also becomes so it's something but it's something that's changing too and changes in a way that's actually not predictable it's it technically it's not predictable it's like the stock market in that way there are periods of time over which you can make predictions but if you wait long enough no matter what you think you're going to end up wrong especially given what knowledge is for a human being because your knowledge is bounded you know and so the way the darwinian process solves that is by death essentially things that aren't good enough to solve the problem that currently presents them presents itself to them either die or fail to reproduce and to the degree that organisms can come up with truth claims that are sufficient than they live long enough to reproduce and then the the Next Generation faces the same problem and that's always the way it is is that truth chases a reality that's fundamentally unpredictable and that's transforming constantly now the reason the reason I I want to tell you that it's an important thing to understand because I'm going to make a claim here that the ways of looking at at the world that are more mythological than material are also real ways of looking at the world and it's not what people generally think because you think about fiction as not real and underneath fiction is mythology and religious claims and that sort of thing that's the domain of fiction and mythology and we don't think about that as real but that's because we think about what's real from a Newtonian perspective and not from a darwinian perspective from a darwinian perspective and this is also a claim that nche made n said truth serves life but what Darwin would say is you can't Define truth in any other way than that which serves life that's it you're not going to get past that there isn't a truth past that the truth as far as a bounded living organism is concerned and that certainly means us is the the body of knowledge conceptual and embodied that best enables survival in the face of continual transformation and that's that there's nothing under it now as soon as you know that then what happens is that it turns out that the things that mean things to you are also real now science is a funny business right because what science attempted to do and and for good and for very useful reasons was to strip everything subjective and subjectively meaningful off the picture of the world right so if you're a scientist you want to be objective and part of the way you do that is by trying to suppress your own subjectivity in the search for the obje truth but also you do that by relying on other people's observations so we kind of make a deal and the deal is if I see it and can describe it and you see it and can describe it and then a bunch of other people do the same thing and we come to the same conclusion we're going to treat that as real and that's useful it's useful because it it's it's useful to specify things precisely and to put them in the appropriate categories and in a sense that's what science does is that it continually strives to differentiate differentiate things and put them in identifiable categories and that means that increasingly we're able to use what we categorize as knowledge to help us confront the world so you know it's a it's a great it's a great process it's a brilliant process and it's even more remarkable because relatively stupid people can do it because it's a it's algorithmization with the method and sooner or later you'll produce new information and and that's that's that's a great thing you know it's like a science is like a factory that produces knowledge so well so that's wonderful but what's not so wonderful about it arguably is that it's in some sense War our our concept of what constitutes reality and it's never really solved as far as I can tell this conflict between a Newtonian perspective on what's real and a darwinian perspective on what's real and as far as I can tell Darwin trumps Newton and that's true if you're a biologist for sure because there isn't anything that's more true that sits underneath biology than the theory of natural selection and that's partly a philosophical claim and the claim is because you can't represent all of external reality with ultimate accuracy you're going to fail and everything that's bounded or even everything that's not as complex as the thing that's trying to be represented is going to fail so how do you do with how do you deal with that you generate variations and it's some has to be somewhat random because you don't know what's coming you Generate random variations and then hopefully one of those variations will work in relationship to whatever is coming and so it's it's also a kind of Truth CLA that's an embodied truth claim right you carry the fundamental truth of your existence in the shape of your physiology so you know earlier claims of philosophical truth were mostly disembodied you know there was some implicit idea that the Consciousness or the soul was more real than the body and well it's nice to think about that in some ways because it opens the door to the idea of things like immortality but it doesn't seem to be very it's hard not to associate that with a dream all right so category systems when you encounter something that that frightens you your body categorizes it and it categorizes it as something that presents a danger or a threat to you and danger is the probability that something will damage you like it'll be too loud or too hot or too cold it'll damage your sensory systems or it'll directly pose a threat to your physiological or psychological integrity and so you're designed so to speak to protect yourself against that you feel pain for that reason and instead of pain you also feel anxiety which alerts you to the fact that you might feel pain and should do something about that you should freeze or you should run away and so for example what what that what emerges from that is the beginnings of a natural category system so you could say well here's one useful category that is the category of all things that you should freeze at or run away from and that's a deep C it's a biologically predicated category it's also category that has meaning right because the meaning is what you should do when something like that shows up it's not the meaning isn't stripped out of the category at all it's actually fundamental now it turns out that a lot of our perceptions when when people think about the way they perceive the world they think well out there are a bunch of objects and you look at them and once you look at them you see them and once you see them you figure out what they are and then you evaluate what you should do and you progress on that basis right it's so object perception cognition emotion action well the problem with that is it's wrong and the first reason it's wrong is because things don't exist out in the world as self-evidently separable entities partly because everything can be segregated into smaller entities and every entity can be aggregated together with larger entities and so the boundary that defines something as a self-evident entity is no by no means clear so part of the way that your body deals with that is by categorizing things with regards to their immediate impact for you and so when you look at something so let's say you're looking at this and you say well that's a bottle and so you might ask well what is your brain doing when you're looking at that and the answer is it's molding your body to prepare to pick that thing up and that's how it understands it so your eyes perceive a pattern that's constant across some duration it's not made of smoke it's made of something that lasts so there's a pattern there a bottle shaped pattern that lasts across time you you have some sense of what it is having interacted with these sorts of things before but also its shape obviously indicates that it's a grippable thing and so what that means is that when you look at it your eyes activate your motor cortex directly even before you see the object like before you form an image of it in your imagination your retina the the pattern on your retina activates your grip right-handed or left-handed whichever hand you happen to be and part of what you're seeing when you see that bottle is what you would do with it if you were interacting with it so you see the manner in which you would interact with things and that's the case for virtually everything that you see so for example when you look at a chair your body prepares to sit in the chair or maybe to stand on the chair if you're going to change a light bulb or we know when you look at your computer you see the keyboard because that's the thing you move your fingers up and down on and so your perception is tightly tied to the implication of objects for Action immediately now you might say well that's not real that's not the reality of it the reality of it is the objective thing but as I said already it depends on how you define reality you take a newon Newtonian t on it or a darwinian t on it and from the darwinian perspective the implication of something for Action is actually its primary meaning which is don't stand around and contemplate a tiger while it's trying to eat you because the fact that it's trying to eat you is more important than the fact that it's a tiger and if you don't figure that out quick then you're not around anymore and so much for your claims to truth that's just you're just gone that's an error right and whatever was in you that enabled you to make that error is not going to be transmitted to the Next Generation or at least hopefully not so there's a domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things now most of what the psychologists have dealt with who are clinical psychologists is actually the domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things and it's actually because as far as you're concerned in your life as a as a human being you live inside a network of meanings of things right so for for example when you look at your mother you're not looking at her at her as an object and then attributing all sorts of meanings to her you see the meaning of your mother right away and that meaning is multi-dimensional it has a very long history and it affects you directly at a physiological that maybe you hate her and so the sight of your mother makes your heart race and your and your brain produced cortisol because she's categorized as unpredictable and chronic threat that's a standard thian situ a yeah no one would laugh if there wasn't sometimes that was true so those are Freudian slips by the way when you discuss something like that and people laugh then that's an admission on their part like an deeply unconscious admission on their part that there is truth to the statement and it's also a truth that is somewhat painful to admit so you can tell that you can tell that when you're listening to comedians they do that all the time right to tell you something that's absolutely brutally evident that no one will admit and everyone laughs and that is a Freudian slip technically because Freud often listened to the sorts of things that would make his patients laugh or make an audience that he was speaking to laugh because that would give him some insights into what they were repressing so to speak and what they would allow to come to light so and and jokes are often about things that are taboo right I it's hard to make a joke about something that isn't tabooed so all right so I've kind of made a classification structure of these two different ways of looking at things there's a meaning centered way of looking at things and the meaning is then the implication of the thing for action on your part and there's a more materialistic centered thing which is sort of like the world as it exists if you weren't here right that's that's the fundamental hypothesis of science is that we're there's something around that would be here and look the way it does look now if none of you were around and you know it's possible that that's true and um and it's also possible that it's it's possible that it's true it's possible that it's not true but most possible is the fact that it's true in a way that we really don't understand because the existence of things the way we perceive them is clearly dependent on our existence as a perceiver and so what the nature of the world would be with there was no one around at all to perceive it if there was no such thing as Consciousness is like that is a completely unsolved problem so maybe it would be like a field of Quantum potential or something like that but but it isn't even possible to really understand what that means so so now having established that having established I I'll give you another example of it before we move on so I said for example that when you interact with objects around you you're not really interacting with objects it's more like you're interacting with tools because your primary concern is well what the what's the world in relationship to me what do I have to avoid you know if I want to get to where I'm going and what can I use to further my Pursuits and so you're like that deeply that's why human beings are tool using creatures right we have hands they manipulate the world and those hands are they're they're built into our cognitive architecture like it's not like our brain is separate from our hands far far it's it's it's it's very opposite to that we wouldn't have the brains we have if we didn't have the hands we have that's why things like octopuses by the way or octopi are very intelligent they are even though they're invertebrates they only live a couple of years so they can't learn that much but they're extraordinarily intelligent it's partly because they're tentacled and because they're tentacled they can grab things and manipulate them and so you know they've developed an intelligence that's identifiable to us because we have little tentacles on the ends of our hands and you know we're using them to fiddle around with the world all the time so now there's the perceptual reality which is that we know about already that when you look at something and we track the way that you're interacting with we know that one of the first things that happen happens is the the relationship between the perceived object and your body is established very rapidly okay because you want to map the object onto your body so you know what the hell to do how to orient yourself so that you're safe and productive at the same time there's a guy named visual what his name JJ Gibson Gibson who who was a a psychology psychologist of perception who operated in the late 70s people thought his theories were they weren't behavioral that's for sure they were of a different classification or category and Gibson also made the first sort of claim that what you saw in the world were things like tools he called them affordances and so for example when you approach what you would call from an objective perspective a cliff Gibson would say you don't see a cliff you see a falling off place and you might infer Cliff but you see falling off place and if you think about it again from a darwinian perspective of course you see falling off place that's why you know you you might shrink from from a precipice is your your whole being perceives that as a place that would instantly make you extinct it's not a secondary derivation from your analysis of a set of objective facts it's a primary perception and it has to be because you better move quick if you're too near a cliff you don't have any time to think the same thing occurs when maybe you're being you know potentially struck by a snake you have circuits in your brain that will see that snake and make you jump way before you know it's a snake because sitting around standing around waiting for the image of snake to form in your Consciousness means that you've been bitten five or six times already because you're just not fast enough to see and then move you see move and then perceive and that's what keeps you safe and so a lot of the a lot of what you perceive in the world are the meanings that you map onto your body so so then you can think what human beings have done in response to this bifurcated way of perceiving reality is we've developed two different systems of classification to deal with it now for most of human history we only had one and the one we had was basically the meaningful system it wasn't the scientific system right we didn't get around to figuring that out even the ancient Greeks and the Romans the Greeks in particular who were unbelievably intelligent really never got around to positing something like an objective reality and if certainly the Romans didn't there was no science science only evolved in Europe and only in you know the late 1500s very strange and it's very difficult to understand so we've been elaborating out this materialistic Viewpoint for only about 500 years it's not very long the other Viewpoint that's the natural habitat of humanity and that's the Viewpoint that's made up of all the stories that people have told about themselves in the world since the dawn of human consciousness and that's really those are the knowledge forms the stories that actually constitute the base of culture because culture is not so much about what the world is and how to perceive it as it is about how you should act in relationship to the world and so when you read fiction and when you talk to each other endlessly about what your friends are up to and what their friends are up to and what they're doing on Facebook and and when you go to movies and you watch actors act out roles and and you know when you do everything you do to examine other people around you you're embedding yourself in this ancient culture that's there to tell you how you should operate yourself in the world what you should do because that's a primary question you need to know what to do human beings need to know what to do because if you don't know what to do well that's a very unpleasant emotional state and that's partly because it indicates that you're not well adapted to your current circumstances you know if you just stand around long enough not knowing what to do you'll age and you'll die it's not an effective way of dealing with the world you have to be oriented towards something and the the job of culture in part is to tell you to what you should be oriented and that's where the rubber hits the road with regards to psychology because especially in its clinical variance and personality theory has to be an element of clinical personality theory has to be a subelement of clinical Theory what psychology has to contend with as I mentioned in the first lecture is not only what you are but what you should be and the reason for that is you when you're talking about a human being you can't separate out the bare facts that present you about the person from the ideal we do this all the time what's mental health well you could say well it's the absence of mental illness well you know really if someone tells you that you should just stop the conversation because all they've done is solve one problem with an equally large problem there's no progress there it's it's a kind of a smart aliy thing to do you know it it sort of means go away and don't bother me with your stupid question mental health if if you want to understand what mental health is it's because it's very difficult to get people to Define it you have to watch how they act when they're talking about such things as mental health because then you can derive some sense of what they actually understand about it or presume about it instead of what they just say about it right so if you look at how societies use the idea of mental health they partly do use it normatively and if it's used normatively then describing it as the absence of mental illness actually works you say well you're healthy to the degree that you're normal and so extremes outside of normality start to border on pathology but there's obvious limitations and problems with that approach right because we don't think the average person is the best looking person and we'd assume that attractiveness is a is an ideal towards which we might all at least Aspire and it turns out there's deep biological reasons for that because most of the things that men and women find attractive about each other are they find attractive for deep biological reasons like symmetry for example which is an indication of sort of optimal biological development um for men for women looking at men it's shoulder to waist ratio and for men looking at women it's waste to hip ratio which should be about 68 which is pretty damn precise and you know men are always Computing that when they're when they're looking around so so so um you can't talk about what constitutes Health by merely making a normative claim you also have to take into account something like deviation from an ideal and that's a weird thing because of course the ideal doesn't really exist that that's what makes it ideal but you can't get away from that problem if you're going to do anything serious about psychology because implicit in the idea not only of mental health but of Health itself is the is the question what constitutes an ideal human being and you might think well that's not so relevant you know why would that be relevant in the scientific Pursuit and I would say well as people we're not only ever engaged in a scientific Pursuit right we're engaged in the business of living and we might be scientists sort of as a subset of that but and then I would also say that if we're dealing in the realm of health and mental health we're not being scientists anyways we're being it's like philosophical Engineers because what we're doing is we're attempting to take our knowledge however it's been gathered GED including scientifically and to make things better not worse and when you're trying to make things better you're not being a scientist what a scientist is trying to do is to describe what things are as soon as that's transformed into like engineering say it's more it's instantly becomes a variation of Applied it's like applied philosophy it's a different domain and I think it's it's not right to just skip over that and pretend that what we're studying say in a personality class is something that can only be studied scientifically because it's not maybe you can study people's conceptions of what constitutes ideal scientifically but you're still faced with the problem that the question of what is the ideal lingers underneath all the phenomena that you're trying to understand and explain so Beauty that's a good example intelligence we tend to assume that more is better right we don't think the average is the right place to stop and in fact that's you know all of you people there's not a single person in here I suspect who has an average IQ you're probably minimally at the 85th percenti and most of you are at the 95th percentile so that's also remember I told you last last class that scientists are like you know albino elephants they're very rare and you guys are like that too you know you're not normal human beings so it's true you know and as you progress up the ladder of success you'll be in increasing contact with stranger and stranger variants of humanity because the successful people who are smart and highly conscientious say are smart and highly creative are a tiny minority of the human population and that's unfortunate seriously unfortunate but um you're the beneficiaries of the lottery that determined in part your genetic the genetic structure of your intelligence and so you could I suspect I've done some testing of UFT students and the average comes out at around 126 to to 30 that's two standard deviations above the mean so and you know it's probably actually higher than that because a lot of you have English as a second language and so that tends to suppress your your you know your performance on IQ tests if they're assessing verbal knowledge in English so all right let's see here so part of what I'm going to talk to you today about is the sorts of things that Carl Yung would have called archetypes and archetype is a illd defined term that's that's partly why it's very difficult to understand you it's also very difficult to transform the sorts of things that he had to say into very precise scientific formulations but but it that doesn't change the fact that it's extraordinarily useful from the perspective of General understanding which is useful thing to pursue and also from the perspective of practical utility to understand something about these archetypal categories and the reason for that is you're in their grip now one of the things that Yung said this is a brilliant thing it's terrifying the psychoanalysts are terrifying people Freud's bad now you know because Freud dug around in this pathology of the family and like families can be great but if you want real pathology a family is a good place to look so because a pathological family is so pathological that it's unbelievable and that's actually what Freud was interested in and it's it's it's again it's hard for normal sort of healthy people to appreciate that because if you're normal and healthy and your family's kind of you know not half bad you don't have all those Freudian problems but if you do have them that's all you have you never get out of it you're trapped in their like a like a fly in a spider web and in fact the fly in a spider's web is common symbolic representation of the classic Freudian situation so um okay so I'm going to I showed you this picture because I want to talk to you about a category system that will be useful in understanding what we're going to go through during this course so what I would like to do with all of you is to start from the bottom of things and that's what we were doing today when we're talking about definitions of Truth so I I asked you to consider for a moment that there's two ways of looking at truth one is your objective sort of Newtonian way which by the way is outdated but we still hold it because it's practically useful and the other is the darwinian perspective which is the world is Meaningful in relationship to you and those meanings are real in so for in so far as they have a bearing on whether or not you actually survive so and and and then you make the claim that there isn't anything more real than whether or not you survive you can't get under that that's where you start so so you could say I could say for example if the pursuit of the nutonian theory of reality culminated in the extinction of human beings say because our technological power got so great that would be perfect evidence for its lack of truth because there are things it just wasn't taken into account right because something that's true should take things into account and one of the things it should take into account is that we're living things that we can only exist under certain you know within certain parameters and that we're also oriented towards an ideal and if your theory doesn't take that into account well maybe not only is it incomplete it might be pathologically and and and genocid incomplete all right this is a representation from ancient Egypt um I'm going to tell you a little bit about what the representations mean so this person here is Horus and this person here is oseris and that person there is Isis and oseris is the god of tradition and that's why he's sort of standing there on that pillar and so the Egyptians thought of these three there's one other there's Seth and Seth is a bad guy so Seth is the evil villain that's always whispering in the king's ear you see that story repeated in all sorts of different forms so Seth is is a negative figure and he's not included in these particular images but we'll we'll get to him Seth is also by the way Osiris's brother so and that's because the Egyptians had figured out and this is like 3,000 years BC the Egyptians had already figured out that if you put a state together so the state would be represented by oseris and Osiris is sort of like the abstraction of the patriarchal force that stands behind a tradition so if you imagine that a tradition is a way of behaving that's what a tradition is to the degree that you share a tradition you're all manifesting the same pattern and the Egyptians would say the pattern that you're imitating that's a deity that's I mean they didn't think of it that way because they didn't think the way we think but for all intents and purposes the phenomena that they described as a God was the pattern that everyone was unconsciously imitating now you have to unconsciously imitate the same pattern or you can't get along right so in in in our society for example we have a body of laws and most of it's derived from English common law and English common law emerged as a consequence of the necessity to solve disputes between people so that all hell didn't break loose so English common law was produced when one person took another person to court to say we've got a serious problem we don't know how to organize or behavior in the same space you have to make a ruling and so then the judge would assess the situation and state who had the right to do what and then that became part of the law now in so far as you are law abiding citizens and so you abide by the body of law you actually manifest the body of law in your behavior and to the degree that you do that other people like you to the degree that you don't do that you're either poorly trained poorly socialized antisocial or or downright dangerous in which case other people will put you somewhere where you're of less harm than you might be so like it or not you're a mimicker and what you mimic is the central pattern of cultural behavior that has evolved over who knows how long forever forever in so far as some of its associated say with dominant hierarchy Behavior which is unbelievably old that's Osirus that's Osirus that's God the father so to speak and it's part of the it's part of the category of culture now the Egyptians also knew that culture was not only necessarily a good thing as of course all of you know because no doubt sometimes you note that you're the beneficiary of your culture but sometimes no doubt you also feel that you're like crushed and and mistreated and molded and baned out of shape by the culture because the culture says you better act like everybody else expects you to and of course that's necessary but you're not exactly like everybody else so you kind of get mangled and crunched and you know male formed as you're socialized even though you also learn to speak and you learn to read and you learn all those things that culture can provide with you now the Egyptians knew even 3,000 years ago that although culture was necessary and it was an element of existence that human beings were always eded in that that's why it's a permanent category there's no non-cultural people you can't be a human being without a culture it's it's not possible we're we're evolved our our physiological form presumes that we're going to emerge into the world in a culture and that will inform us as we develop that's why we have such a long developmental period right we're we're born unformed and the only reason that works is because the the the lack of form has been consistently manifested in an environment that would form it so culture isn't just culture it's the environment that we inhabit because culture has been around for so long and I'll give you one example of that so a big part of every culture is dominance hierarchy right and a dominance hierarchy says who has what access to what at what given time and pretty much every creature is in a dominance Ary chickens are in dominance hieres that's the pecking order right members of wolves packs are in dominance hieres me member of members of chimpanzee troops are in dominance hieres songbirds are in dominance hierarchies you know you hear them sing in the spring it's all pretty it's not little little bird is sitting out there saying I'm healthy and loud and if you come over here I'll Peck you to death because this is my tree and so and so the song birds distribute themselves around the neighborhood by dominance and the more dominant birds get the better nesting spaces and better means they don't get rained on or at least not as much they their nests don't get blown out of trees there's not so many cats around and they're close to a good food source and so that makes them attractive to potential mating Partners but it also increases the probability that their chicks will survive and so and and here's here's a nasty bit of truth that goes along with that so let's say there's a bunch of birds in the neighborhood and some kind of bird flu that's specific to birds comes wafting through and it's killing birds well the birds die from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy up and the reason for that is the bottom birds are all stressed out because their life is hard and when they're stressed their immune system gets suppressed and you know they're all frazzled from you know being chased by cats and so on and then they die and so the top birds live the same thing happens in human populations when a plague sweeps through people die from the bottom of the dominance Hier up and so dominance hierarchies matter and so birds have them and lizards have them and fish have them so in a school of fish the dominant fish when the fish ball up they do that to make it hard for predators to eat them the big dominant fish are in the middle of that ball the little sucker useless fish are on the outside and that's who gets eaten up when the Predators come along so and we know that dominant s stretch back a very long time so we know for example that lobsters live in dominance Ares I told you a little bit about that and they're about 300 million years old so what that means is that we've been existing inside a cultural structure because the culture is predicated on a dominance hierarchy right that's the patriarchy if you want to use you know a politically correct term that's been around for 300 million years so to think about it as a permanent constituent element of reality is extremely useful because again here here's another question for you even if you don't buy the sort of meaning argument with regards to categorization there's another way you can look at it you might say to yourself what's most real that's that's a tough one because you know we we kind of accept gradations of real like rocks seem pretty real trees seem pretty real um the environment is that real that's a harder one right because it's an abstraction how about numbers are they real you can certainly do real things with them once you once you get numbers especially zero which seems not to exist at all as soon as you get zero there's all sorts of magical things you can do so anyways my point is it's not all that obvious to figure out what constitutes real but here's here's a hint the longer something has been around the more real it is okay dominance hierarchies have been around longer than trees they're real they're really really real and you live in one and not only do you live in one you're really motivated to get to the top of that one or to create one that you can be at the top of because human beings are sneaky and because if we're not doing so well in the dominance hierarchy we might think well the hell with this dominance Hy we'll just make a new one and that's what creativity is so if you're really creative you can make your own dominance Hier and you can sit right at the top of it and so that that's worked out very well for human beings you know in fact one of the fundamental traits of human beings is openness and openness is actually a trait that basically assesses the degree to which you're capable of playing around with the rules so you can come up with your own dominance heart and that's what you do if you're creative because you make a new set of rules that's what a creative person does it's very sneaky so it's very important to be up near the top of the dominance hierarchy because it means you live that's good you live without so much stress that's also good and your probability of successfully reproducing or say of having many mating opportunities goes up especially in the case of men it's it's like an e it's like an exponential Improvement so if you ever wonder why men are so competitive that's the reason it's because the loser men get nothing really that's exactly how it works and the winter men they get everything and there's actually a law that goes behind that an economic law you can look it up it's called the Pito distribution you look up the Pito distribution it's the law that describes income inequality it'll tell you something important about how the world works and pedo distribution which is almost everyone gets nothing and almost no one gets everything that's a prito dist distribution it covers the production of everything that's created money inventions art like music paintings you name it if people creatively produce it hardly anyone does all of it and almost everyone does none of it so it's a really winter take all situation and dominance Hier is set up really as a reflection of that fact we also know for example just to hammer the point home is that if you make dominance hierarchy steep like a steep one is hard to climb there's a lot of difference between top and bottom the steeper the dominance hierarchy in every any given geographical local the higher the murder rate among men because they start to kill each other and the reason they start to kill each other is because that's a good way of attaining dominance if you haven't got any other roots and so that's the relationship between in income inequality and the destabilization of society that's an extraordinarily powerful relationship so for example you can describe the steepness of a dominance hierarchy using a statistic called the Genny coefficient and the correlation between the Genny coefficient and the male homicide rate in North America is about 8 and 08 is like okay you're done you don't have to figure anything else out you know why it happens it just covers it you never see it you never see an explanation not complete in Psychology it's like the most powerful effect ever discovered so dominance haries this person he's King of the dominance haries so you can think about him as the person who who created it that's one way of looking at it and you can sort of think of him as the embodiment of it so and he's a symbol that's another way of looking at it because this this this King because he's a king ohus he's also a God he was also the Egyptian pharaoh because the Egyptians presumed that their Pharaoh was Osiris and he had to take on the being of Osiris when he became King when he was coronated it's like you're not a person anymore you're the embodiment of the state and that happens to people when they're when they turn into the president of the United States for example they're not whoever they were they're hardly them at all they're now this and that's the thing that's at the top of the dominance are and it's the thing that represents culture now the Egyptians knew that it could go astray could become tyrannical and rigid and that's why Osiris had an evil brother's set but we won't talk about them for a moment now he's the upper world this is Isis Isis is his wife and Isis is Queen of the underworld and she's the reason she's feminine as far as as far as we can tell is because from a symbolic perspective femininity represents more like possibility rather than actuality and the reason for that is that the defining characteristic of the feminine is the capacity to bring forth new forms and so if you're going to use the feminine as a symbolic representation you're going to use it to represent the domain from which new forms come emerge the domain from which new forms emerge and that's sort of the domain of the unknown known or the domain of nature which is why it's mother nature and Isis is Mother Nature but she's also Queen of the underworld and she had Isis had an immense following in the ancient world and variance of Isis they like her as a as a goddess of worship her her span of existence was thousands and thousands of years I mean even a lot of the the attention that's paid towards Mary in Catholicism is a variation of the veneration that was shown to Isis that's the often on top of her head there that's that's usually a variant of the present Moon although I think in this particular situation that's actually those are actually cow horns okay so Sirus and Isis and they are team so they're wedded together Order and Chaos they're wedded together and Order that's culture and Chaos that's nature those are the two most fundamental constituent elements of the world from the mythological or symbol perspective and what that means is there's always been culture at least always as first any of us need to bother with it there's always been an interpretive framework through which conscious creatures viewed the world you you can't be without having a structure and that structure is inculcated inside you and a lot of it's culturally transmitted not all of it a lot of it so it's it's a precondition for existence that you're a structured thing and that structure is ordered and then the other element of existence is that there are things that are outside of that order always that you can't cope with because you're a finite thing and your culture is a finite and bounded thing and outside of that there's mystery there's mystery like an outside is a funny place because it's not outside in the in the way that you think about being outside a building although it is that in so far as it's cold and dangerous out there but there's outsides everywhere so for example if you're if you know someone maybe you're in a relationship with them and you know you're kind of comfortable with them and then one day you're having a conversation with them and they tell you something shocking like maybe you you're in an intimate relationship with them and they tell you that maybe it's the day they tell you that they are having an affair or maybe that they had five and that they're still going on who knows and then all of a sudden one second you were inside a close and isolated and comfortable cultural space and the next second you're outside and that's because no matter where you are the boundaries of your knowledge only extend so far and the fact that you're very limited in what you apprehend can be made manifest to you at any moment any of your presuppositions can fail especially in relationship to other people or yourself you know because if you're all of a sudden informed by a long-term partner that they have been having an affair like that certainly says something about them but it certainly also says something about you it's like how dumb can you get right how did you not notice how are you so naive now you might think it's cruel to blame the victim and no doubt it is but it's irrelevant in this case because that's what you're going to think in any case right you know because you're wandering around thinking you're reasonably perceptive and well adapted creature and all of a sudden poof someone pulls the rug out from underneath you it's like you might doubt them and certainly you will and maybe relationships for a long time but you can also be sure you're going to doubt yourself and your past which is weird cuz you think it was already done with and your present and your future it's like all of a sudden bang you're not in culture anymore poof you're in the Underworld Order and Chaos now Order and Chaos masculine feminine that's yin and yang as well they can unite to produce some third thing and that's often the sun it can be the Sun as in the thing that shines but also in terms of the biological Sun there are complicated reasons that those two two things are interrelated this is Horus and he's The Offspring the child of Isis and Osirus now I won't tell you the entire story but I'll I'll tell you a couple of things about Horus that are worth knowing you've all seen the Egyptian eye right the eye with the way the eyebrow everyone's seen that it's kind of weird because it's really old but you all know it okay that's Horus and if you look at the Egyptian eye the eye is really open so that's an element of what Horus is Horus is in fact the open eye so Horus you could think of as the god of attention it's not the god of intellect there's a very there's a very important difference it's Horus is the god of attention and that's also why in this representation you see he's got the head of a bird it's not any old bird it's a falcon and the reason the Egyptians put the head of a falcon on Horus is because Falcons can really see they're like super observant so they fly above everything so they can see everywhere they're above everything they're even above the dominance haries they're way up there in the sky and from that position in the sky they can see everything and that makes them powerful and so the Egyptian idea was that the proper balance between Order and Chaos made you alert with your eyes open and that was what made you that's that that was an element of human Divinity so to speak that was that was the deepest expression of your soul here's the way of thinking about that so what happens to you if you're somewhere where everything is entirely predictable and comfortable what do you do lazy you get lazy you get bored what what else happens stop pay attention Well you certainly you don't have to pay attention right so what happens when you really stop paying attention you fall asleep right because you know you're by the fire you just had a nice meal you know that like nothing's going to come rampaging through your front door and so what the hell do you have to be awake for before poof asleep so now that's good you know sometimes you have to sleep but as a lifestyle it's somewhat limiting so if you're just sitting around hyper comfortable all the time it's like you get all doughy and useless and it's not helpful that's the sort of couch potato thing right it's not helpful because if anything does come along you're in trouble and plus you're nothing like you could be and so you might think well the more order the better which is exactly what fascists think by the way but the problem with too much order is that there's no utility in you even being there because everything's perfect and it's already done you might as well just be asleep there's no need for Consciousness so you want to have a little chaos around and then you might ask well how much chaos and the answer would be well how about not enough to paralyze you cuz that's too much then you're just praying and you might be awake but it's like it's terror is a form of Consciousness I suppose but we we might as well not presume that it's the optimal form it's also rather self-limiting because if you're terrified long enough you'll just die so it's not an optimal State it's also one you'll strive generally to avoid so let's say well how much chaos should you have around how much of what's unpredictable should you have around and we can say just enough to make you optimally awake right so you should be pushing yourself hard enough at each point you want to be have one foot in order yes so you're secure and stable and you have one foot in chaos so that you're not exactly sure what's going to happen next so that you're pushed to transform and change and grow at develop and you can tell when you're there because then you're alert and you're paying attention and so at that point the Egyptians would say well then you're optimally embodying Horus who's the third element of experience one order two chaos three the thing that mediates between Order and Chaos and if you're doing that optimally then you know the and yang symbol I think I've got it here actually maybe yes those are two serpents by the way the black serpent that's chaos and it's an interesting symbol because there's a white circle in the middle of it right and that means that things might be pretty gloomy and dark because it's all chaotic but at any point order can arise out of that and you know how that is you know you go through a terrible period of transformation and everything's unsteady and shaky and like it passes and maybe you're even better off than you were before it and maybe not but at least sometimes it happens and then the white serpent has a black eye and that's because well you know just when you think you're safe the rug gets pulled out from underneath you and so there's a dynamic this is what the dsts believe and what they State explicitly the world is a dynamic between Chaos and Order the the world of experience the world that human beings exist in is a dynamic between Chaos and Order and the function of a human being is to juggle those and keep them balanced and you can tell when you're doing that because you're awake and you're paying attention and not only are you healthy in who and what you are but you're moving towards something better and when that happens to you then you're possessed by a deep intimation of meaning because meaning signifies something and what it signifies is that you're in the right place at the right time and so you can learn to stay there by paying attention to the balance of Chaos and Order in your life and the the better you get at staying there this is the kickoff from the Egyptian perspective the better you get it staying there the more imper impermeable you are to Chaos and Order because you can learn to handle it so you might say well life presents you with a challenge with regards to its ultimate significance right you might say well what's the use of human striving in the face of everything that's terrible in the world including our own vulnerability as well you're not going to eliminate that but it's possible that if you balance things properly that you can learn to live with it and maybe you can even learn to understand that those two the dynamism between those two things is actually a precondition for being and that without it there wouldn't be any being because part of you is limited and part of you isn't and if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be you so the question arises it's an existential question what do you do with that set of facts and it looks like your nervous system in a sense has already set up to answer that pay attention put yourself in a situation where you're paying attention if you pay enough attention you're right in the place that you should be and that will be at least sufficient and maybe it'll be more than that maybe you'll say it's okay terrible preconditions of existence are Justified by the manner in which it manifests itself and that's a definition of mental health and that's implicit in all the clinical theories that we're going to investigate throughout the duration of the course |
I'm actually supposed to be talking to you about constructivism today but I'm not going to I'm going to continue talking to you about what I was talking to you last time and I'll collapse the constructivism lectures into one lecture so it'll keep us on track um I I want to tell you a little bit about a little bit more about this image and what it probably means and then then we're going we're going to continue with our discussion of shamanic transformation and it's relationship transformation so the first thing if you look at the picture on the right the first thing you'll see of course is that it's a tree and the tree is associated with the snake now I believe I told you guys about Lin Bell's research and the relationship between predatory snake prevalence and the Acuity of human vision is that you remember that okay that's good so so to me what the image on the right looks like is first of all it's like the ancestral home of human beings for tens of millions of years or our ancestors and so that the tree with the snake it's like the primary human environment maybe 60 million years ago it's not human at that level but it's it's it's it's part of our evolutionary Heritage and then and it's also part of why we have a sense especially that large trees are sort of sacred that's one of the senses that drives environmentalism for example because environmentalists are often very interested in protecting old growth forests which is actually kind of weird because old growth forests are ready to burn down and they're also kind of biologically dead because no light can get to the bottom and nothing grows down there so they're just trees and they're almost dead trees so you know from a from a from the perspective of biological diversity they're not really that fruit an environment but human beings still have some real kinship with those gigantic trees and we feel that there's something you know natural and sacred about so superimposed on that is I think something like the next stage of human evolution and so you know the these these representations were made by people who were trying to represent sort of the Ultimate Reality of mankind and so superimposed on the tree is a is a mountain and a mountain is a nice representation of a pyramid and a pyramid is a nice representation of a dominance hierarchy of course I already mentioned to you that human beings live in dominance hierarchies and that they're a very permanent part of our environment being at least 300 million years old and possibly older than that so when when the human imagination is trying to conceptualize what constitutes Ultimate Reality that's a reality that's often beyond what you can merely see because the things you see that are directly in front of you are not necessarily the most real things in that many of the things that you see are transforming fairly rapidly they're not permanent in any real sense I mean automobiles you see all the time but they've only been around for 80 years you know it's not like we've adapted biologically to their presence so you have the mountain in the middle and the mountain is is sort of sitting in a circumscribed territory and the idea there is that there's a dominance hierarchy that human beings inhabit and it always occupies a particular territory and the dominance hierarch is like the culture the place of culture that mankind exists within that's surrounded by the chaos outside and the chaos outside is represented by well there's two snakes in the uh in the picture on sorry on the yeah on your right um the the snake in the in the middle is an ER Rose which is a snake that eats its own tail and it's representative of the chaos that's outside of the familiarity of your culture and so that's it's a very as we've mentioned already it's a very intelligent perspective because it says well mankind always lives in culture and surrounding culture is the unknown and that's the Eternal habitat of of man so of human beings so and then I I showed you this picture briefly and that's the picture that was derived by a German researcher who was examining the visions of the Peruvian Amazonian Indians the shaman and you can see that it's it's almost staggeringly the same as the Scandinavian persp facted right down to the snake e its own tail which by the way is an extremely common ancient symbol so it's quite remarkable um now what might unite and then I talk to you about my my son's drawing I haven't didn't get to this one though now what what might unite these different Visions say that the Scandinavian vision and the Amazonian shamanic Vision are the methods that the people who had the Visions used to induce them and I'll talk to you a little bit about that but first of all I'm going to tell you about this picture because I think this is one there's a couple of variations of this picture picture that I found I actually don't know its name but I think it's one of the most amazing images I've ever come across because in some ways sums up Christianity in one picture and that's that's no easy thing to do and the reason I think it's important to uh to to talk about the this Christian representation for example though we've already talked about some DST representations is because if in so far as we're embedded in westernized Civilization the roots of westernized civilization are they push themselves down into Christianity and then deeper there's deeper substrata under that the religious structures that preceded Christianity but if you want to understand the Western Notions of the person and the ideal person as well you have to look at the structure of the systems that Western Civilization grew out of because the religious systems for example are the systems in which the idea of the ideal emerged and so you you can't come to grips with the idea of the ideal or the idea of mental health which is which is an ideal without understanding the ground out of which these ideas emerged you can't come to terms with it in any fundamental sense and the thing is if you're doing Clinical Psychology for example you have to come to terms with it in a fundamental sense because a lot of the time when people come and see you the reason they come and see you is because their their sense of life's meaning has been shattered and and they're unable to proceed without the restoration of that meaning so maybe their belief systems fell apart and they faced some sort of tragedy that's just blowing them into pieces and and they have no idea how to orient themselves because life always presents a an existential question and one that we'll deal with later which is life is difficult and it's characterized by suffering and because of that there has to be a reason to stand up against that and so the reason has to be made coherent so you have to know in some sense that you're the sort of creature that can voluntarily face the tragic conditions of existence and Prevail and that's a religious presupposition fundamentally because it's based on it's a hypothesis in some sense that human beings are like that so let me tell you about this image because it's it's a staggering image it's so brilliant so the first thing you'll notice is that of course there's a tree in the middle of it and sort of looks like the tree that you know a little kid would draw they sort of look like lollipops or something like that so it's a schematized tree and you'll see of course that the snake is wrapped around the tree the snake and the tree seem to come along together unbelievably often so Aus is Rod for example aspius is the Greek God of healing and you see the symbol of the Greek God of healing which is the asus's rod is still used to represent Physicians and it's a rod with a snake WRA around it too and the snake represents transformation because it can die it can shed its skin and sort of be reborn and and for many other reasons besides but in this representation which is partly derived from Genesis and then partly derived from the development of Christian ideas for thousands of years after that there's a particular idea that's being portrayed now you notice that up in the tree there are little things that look like fruit and one of those things is a skull right now so the idea there is that the fruit that the tree produced is in somehow is in some manner equivalent to death now in this in the Genesis story what happens is that Eve temps Adam with the fruit from the tree so she offers him this fruit now that's a very interesting thing because women historically speaking have been gatherers like men do the hunting generally speaking in archaic societies and women do the gather it and human beings have also uh subsisted for large parts of the Revolutionary history before we were human beings as FR jores we ate fruit and we the reason we have color vision by the way is so that we can detect ripe fruit and ripe fruit is also tightly associated with sexuality so like if you look through the ads in women's magazines the makeup ads the associations between ripeness and fruit and say women's cheeks and women's lips are always very much they're much put forward you know and and so there's a tight association between sexuality and food and for a variety of reasons but so Eve basically tempts Adam in some sense into a conscious relationship with her by offering him food and in the case of the Genesis story it's it's ripe fruit and so it's an enticement and she also entices him into self-consciousness which is quite interesting because number one women do make men self-conscious I mean that's like that's sort of an ultimate truth of the of the nature of the relationship between men and women and rejection in particular is something that makes men self-conscious and they're much more what exposed to that than women are in in the sort of sexual dance because women are sort of on average quite s quite successful at uh seeking out sexual encounters where men are on average very unsuccessful at doing the same thing so they suffer a lot of rejection that's a very fundamental form of rejection right it's like well you're you know you're good enough to maybe tolerate being alive and all that but your genetic material should by no means be allowed to you know move itself into the future it's a really fundamental form of rejection and the rejection is while you don't measure up and that's certainly the ground of self-consciousness and so there's a lot of weird things tangled up together in the Genesis story so Eve gives Adam the fruit and what happens is that wakes him up what the story says is that the scales fall from his eyes and then the first thing that happens is he realizes he's naked and that's a very interesting kind of realization because to be one of the very common nightmares that people have is that they're naked in front of a crowd so you might say well what does it mean to be naked in front of a crowd well it means to have your vulnerability exposed to the arbitrary Judgment of of the cultural Mass you know it's a nightmare for most people and human beings are very weird animals because most animals wander around on four legs and of course that means the armored part of their body is what shows right their spine and their ribs along the back which is pretty tough and hard but human beings are standing up so the most vulnerable parts of our body are broadcast straightforward so and so when human beings woke up during our evolutionary you know progress towards the kind of Consciousness we have when we became self-conscious that was essentially equivalent to recognizing our naked vulnerability and that's what the Genesis story is trying to relate you know and it also points out that it says snakes women and fruit played an integral role in the development of human self-consciousness and so here the the fruit that's being eaten is equivalent to death and that's why there's a skull in the tree and so because what happened was when people became self-conscious like consciously self-conscious we we started to understand the full nature of our vulnerability and so what does that mean well for human beings in part it meant that we discovered time like and that's a great thing to discover because then it means you have the future to think about but it's also an absolute bloody catastrophe because you also understand that the future is finite and that your life is bounded and that you will end and as far as we know human beings are the only creatures that have to contend with that knowledge and once you have it like once you wake up like that there's no going back to sleep like it's a qualitative transformation in the nature of experience and you know the Genesis story pushes the idea for farther it says the re the fact that we've woken up and are and are aware of our vulnerability is also what makes us Fallen creatures it makes us alienated from existence in a way that animals aren't and so what that also means and this is sort of an existential idea is that the rise of self-consciousness in that manner which is in part the knowledge of death is also what's made people um well one of the things that happens for example in Genesis is it's quite a funny story so Eve makes Adam all self-conscious and then they wander off and cover themselves up right which is sort of the the first uh entry into of cultural artifacts into the paradisal state it's right the first thing you do once you realize you're naked is cover yourself up now you know that story is often interpreted in a sexual way and there's elements of that but it's more it's more pragmatic it's like yeah once you figure out that you're naked and that you're going to freeze to death and then it's cold in the future it's like the first thing you do do is cover yourself up you know and people have been wearing clothes for a very long time we've been wearing clothes for so long that body lights are adapted to clothing and so it's been tens of thousands of years so you know and obviously human beings are also the only creatures that wear clothes which is you know and it's a human Universal by the way people wear clothes everywhere that virtually everywhere that human beings have been discovered so you cover yourself up and that's the first indication that you're aware of your vulnerability but you're also aware of the necessity of taking care of yourself as a you know as a separate entity which which animals animals don't really seem to have that notion I mean they get hungry and all that but it's not obvious that they you know that they can extend the idea of hunger into the future so that you know so so that they're they're caring about times that are not not here yet now what happens after people become self-conscious they cover themselves up and then God comes into the garden which he's always doing to have a walk with Adam and Adam can't be found and so God says you know well you know where are you we know what are you doing hiding away and Adam's cowering behind a bush this is really stupid he's there with Eve you know thinking I suppose that God can't see through the bush or whatever it is that he's thinking and you know he makes a case that God asks him what in the world he's doing hiding and he says well I'm naked and God says well you know how do you figure that out and of course Adam being the heroic figure he is immediately points to Eve and says well it was the woman's fault you made her for me but you know it was her that tempted me so it's really quite a comical story it's it's often being read being read by sort of patriarchal Christian interpreters as a story that implicates implicates Eve in the initial destruction of mankind but from for my way of reading it it's just as hard on Adam or even worse because he's such a cringing coward when things really start to go wrong I mean the first thing he does is hide because he's naked and the second thing he does as soon as he's pushed on it a bit it's like it's your fault it's your fault you know he won't take responsibility for it and that's also an extremely complex story because one of the things it implies it's a brilliant brilliant idea is that like if you can imagine metaphorically that walking with God means something like you know uh staying in close contact with the divine nature of being or something like that and having ultimate faith in the positive nature of reality things that might be damaged if you became self-conscious well why would you stop believing in that which would be to stop walking with God and the answer to that is well you become aware of your own vulnerability and your own you know finiteness and that makes you afraid so you hide and that is what people do they do that all the time it's a it's a chronic state of human existence that in many ways you hide from the best parts of yourself and I mean adolescence is usually like the painful acting out of that process over a protracted period of time and people often never really recover from that they won't bring their best forward because they're afraid no and and you know and they're afraid for good reason and so God says well now you've done it you know we can't undo this and so now out you go you're not going to be in Paradise anymore which means you're no longer going to be unconscious like a happy child it's like you've screwed up completely you know you're finite now you're going to have to work because now you're aware of the future and so you know all these things can go wrong so you're going to have to work because you realize that the future could be dangerous you have to fix things up and he tells the women that they're going to suffer dreadfully in child birth it's very well it's very interesting because there's a reason that women suffer in child birth and the reason for that is that their child's heads are too big I told you about that the last time we met you know and so the story there also Associates cortical expansion with self-consciousness and with the difficulty of birth it's a bloody brilliant story it's just unbelievable how much information is packed into it and then that's that's very characteristic of archetypal stories it also helps you see how the you know another manifestation of the kind of tree symbolism say that's characteristic of the Scandinavian Stories the provian Amazonian stories and the and and the role of the snake play no trees without snakes no Paradise without snakes no ability of mankind to ever produce a bounded environment that's safe without something chaotic managing to come inside of it there's no way you can do it it's a very paradoxical element of existence so that's pretty that's pretty interesting so that's what's happening with Eve on the right side of the of the picture you see this the skeleton at the back there representing death you know and so that's good old Eve and then on the on the on the left side here you have the embodiment of the church and and the Christian Tradition now she's also handing out things that are from the tree and so this is like that the the religious stories in general are stories about tragedy and Redemption that's sort of what makes them religious stories it's like they outline the terrible things that can happen to you like in the most brutal possible way and then they provide a theory about a motive being that might help you address that so that's the Redemptive part and so the Redemptive part here is you see in the tree there's also a crucifix it's sort of the counterpart to the skull and in the tree all these little fruits and some of them are obviously the Apple skulls that Eve are handing out but what they are on the left hand side are hosts and the host is the little thing that that Catholics eat during the mass and the host is hypothetically part of Christ's body and so that's a what it's a derivative of the last supper and so and there's an unbelievably archaic idea that that lurks underneath that because it's basically basically a cannibalistic ritual and the idea is essentially that if you could identify something that's an ideal and you can incorporate it and you do that most basically by eating because that's how you incorporate most basically then that can become part of you so you can take on the attributes of something by incorporating it and so part of the Christian drama is an attempt to inculcate in its followers the idea that you should imitate the ultimate ideal the question is well what's the ultimate ideal different religions handle that in different ways so Buddha for example is an ultimate ideal for Buddhists Christ is an ultimate ideal for Christians so then you might say well what exactly is this thing that's ideal okay so the host is part of it so partly it's the body of Christ and partly it's a wheat and wafer and the reason it's made out of wheat is because wheat was regarded as a dying and resurrecting crop because it's a it's a it's a crop that you know disappears in the fall and then comes back in the spring like most agricultural crops do so it's kind of an eternal Miracle so it's it's like the dying and resurrecting corn God and so that's a pagan idea that's sort of assimilated to the Christian idea and then there's something that's more profound underneath that which is that the idea is that the part of the human spirit that can accept death and die and resurrect itself which means to continually transform in the face of tragedy is the thing that's the antidote to the painful catastrophe of self-consciousness it's a staggering idea I I've studied personality theory for a long time and the first thing that I've discovered relationship to this is almost all the personality theories that we have that involve movement towards a state of improved Health are predicated on the idea that people transform through well through a process of painful transformation it's like disolution a part of your personality which is painful and chaotic and then the Reconstruction of that into a into a more fulfilled form and the reason that's associated with acceptance of vulnerability it's it's it's again it's brilliant this is why humility is a virtue from the religious perspective is that you cannot change until you admit that you're wrong and that part of you has to go so you have part of admitting your insufficiency is being willing to sacrifice that insufficiency to let it go so that something new can rise out of the ashes and sometimes that can be your whole personality you know to the degree that you're pathological in your fundamental structures man there may be things that you have to give up that are huge chunks of your life so the alternative is to be in pain and suffering and misery and and you know that can turn into cruelty and murderousness and and things that are much much more terrible than mere suffering so that's the idea here it's a whole the whole story of human redemption in single image mind blog brilliant and you know it took people like it took people thousands of years to think up this image or maybe tens of thousands of years so there's so much thought packed into that image that it's it's it's being Beyond virtually Beyond Comprehension remarkable image so here's here are some other representations of trees that I think are quite interesting so the first one here is a sculpture a living sculpture that's a representation of a cathedral you can see obviously how the trees the curvature of the trees makes this you know beautiful Arch that's echoed in the gothic Cathedrals and the gothic Cathedrals are Stone trees essentially the fs being the trees and so in some sense they're representative of the forest that's human beings Primal home but they're representative of something more than that too because the gothic Cathedrals are these interesting trees made out of stone that are also places of light because what the gothic Cathedrals are basically they're what they're made of are is the interplay between tree like Stone and light the St glass windows of course are the light and so there's this idea that the ultimate structure structure is some tree like column that's that's that's invadable by light and in some ways that's an analog of the body and it's and its function so and you see symbols that are associated with this well first of all you see sorry these are echoes these are echoes of the treel like structures that are within because the tree structure is a structure that many biological forms take and so you know there's the that's the nervous system tree this is really worth meditating on for a bit because most of us are convinced that our brain you know is in our head and really that's not right it's it's just not that accurate I mean look at the look at the dissemination of your nervous system throughout your body you know your brain is distributed through your body your spinal cord is pretty damn smart you know it can walk by itself so for example if you take people who have who are paraplegic but have only they've managed spinal damage at a point that doesn't they're no longer able to voluntarily control their leg if you hoist them up and put them on a treadmill and tilt them forward their legs will walk by themselves so because your spinal cord is smart enough to walk I mean you need your brain to tell it where to go but in some people who are paraplegic have been taught to to walk in a controlled fall and so it's quite interesting so you know your spine isn't stupid it's part of your brain it's just a lower part that's more associated with movement but you know your whole body is full of central nervous system there's more neurons in your autonomic nervous system which is is the part of your nervous system that controls your internal organs than there is in your brain so like you know you're s you're stuck right in your body and the idea that you're you're in your brain in some ways it's like a hangover of the Soul Theory you know The cartisian Duality that makes mind and body something separate and United I mean I believe there's something to that theory but you know it definitely underestimates the the degree to which you're an embodied nervous system and that the and that the structure of your thought is predicated on the fact that you're in a body like you're an embodied cognitive creature and you wouldn't think or be the way you are without the body it's not like an appendage to your brain you know that is how it works at all you can see the brain and the and the spinal cord as a tree and you can see the neurons themselves as a tree so the tree likee structure Echoes at different levels of the nervous system these are very interesting representation so the the the the man in the in the uh Lotus position why Lotus position that's another tree metaphor so a Lotus is a very interesting plant so what a Lotus is is that it grows on water so the water's deep and maybe the top of it's clear but then the bottom of the water is very very murky and deep and dark and so it represents the dark element say of the unconscious mind or the unknown that aren't that we aren't privy to and the Lotus grows way down into that and then into the soil below and so it comes out of the darkness the soil and the Darkness and then Through The Dark Water and then up into the into the clear light and on the surface of the water it blooms and so it opens up like like a Mandela like the stained glass window on the right it opens up like that and in the middle of that the Buddhist sits in his triangular position in the Lotus position and that represents Enlightenment and what what the whole image represents is the coherent ordering of multiple levels of structure all the way from the Primal material up to the high level of Consciousness and so the Buddha is like the ultimate flower of the of the lotus tree so to speak just as in Christianity Christ is the ultimate the ultimate what manifestation of the of the tree of the knowledge of of Good and Evil the very very analogous ideas and and there's reasons for this too and part of it is part of it is something like if you're psychophysiology was properly adjusted so you weren't working across purposes to yourself and so that you were nicely aligned straight up physically healthy and not like the defeated Lobster scuttling around the information flow through your nervous system through your body and your mind would be optimized and that would enable the reality that you're attached to and part of to flow through you sort of in an untrammeled way you know instead of you're you're all full of cricks and trouble and problems and and places that are badly aligned and you know you haven't got the opportunity as a consequence to sort of get access to to your own wisdom is you're sort of a bent representation of who you could be and so part of this and also the like the stone and glass that's represent represented in the cathedrals is a representation of the idea that there should be a balance between structure and light in you it's like it's the metaphorical idea and that you should be properly oriented physically so that so that so that you're in touch with the ground of being in a way that makes you wise and solid and that's one of the things that enables you to take on the tragedy of existence without becoming weak I mean these are these are they brilliant ideas so this is a this is an Eastern Mandela and and to me what what it is is it's a tunnel into this tree like structure it's like a crosssection of the tree likee structure and it's as if you're looking into the tree like structure down to the micro elements of being and there's a representation there about how perfectly aligned everything is at every level of of of resolution and every level of manifestation so he's that that or that's inside it that's another way of looking at it it's the same representation on the western side of things it's like that stained glass windows like a crosssection of the trunks that make up the cathedral all these buildings like the medieval people spend a lot of time building those Cathedrals you know those things were massive works of culture and some of them took hundreds of years to build I mean can you imagine modern people building anything that would take like even a 100 years it's like we want things to be up in 6 months you know at most those medieval people would work away for like 300 years on a cathedral they were really serious about what it was and what it represented you know they were trying to to produce a uh the embodiment of the highest ideal in architectural form you know and we've lost a lot of that even on the campus you can see that because if you know if you go over to the sort of classical side of the campus it's all you know Cathedral likee and beautiful and there's there's some there's some attention being paid to the aesthetic element of the wisdom that's embodied there and then you come over on this side it's a bloody like it's hideous it's a factory you know the the aesthetic is so terrible it's it's it's appalling all the buildings that you know they're built to last for 50 years and then they're outdated and they're completely cheap and hideous and you know they are they're cinder block you know and fluorescent lights it's like come on you know and they have you guys sit in these things that are so uncomfortable that you wouldn't put your dog in them and you know it's it's well it's lost lose this sort of thing you know there's a big difference between a medieval Cathedral a go the cathedral in this bloody place you know but what you're supposed to be in a university is something that's like a medieval Cathedral you know it's a it's a testament to the best that mankind has to offer you don't put it in a box like this it's appalling it's really it's appalling there's no excuse for it I actually think it's a conscious effort to subvert the values of the University because it's not a factory you're not Factory products you you know the university is here to teach you how to be human beings and that's the highest thing that you can aim for it's and to subvert that to a lower ORD it's the worst thing that can be done it's a crime against humanity there's no excuse for it and the ugliness that goes along with it is part and parcel of the subversion it's like a hatred of the highest values it's a terrible thing so you know nobody none of you are going to go home and say and feel proud that you were sitting in this room you know all right so now the shaman are very strange people and it's very difficult to know how long archaic people have been practicing shamanic rituals but we know that it's tens of thousands of years and we also know that most of the shamanic rituals and the visions that accompany them are induced by some kind of hallucinogenic substance and it depends like it depends on the culture what the hallucinogenic substance is but one of the things that's quite interesting about them is that they all have basically the same chemical structure and I'll show you that in a minute so in the shaman people who are chosen to be Shaman are basically you might think of them as the repositories of the oral tradition of the culture you know because most cultures have for it to be a culture first of all if it's a culture and it's living it's been around for a tremendous amount of time you know and non non-literate cultures have to carry the wisdom that they have with them in order oral form or in embodied form so in ritual form or in oral form and somebody has to be the fundamental repository of that kind of wisdom so the sort of the Storyteller of the tribe and The Keeper of the flame so to speak and that's usually the role that the shaman have and they're the people who are contacted when something's gone wrong with you if you're a sick or if you know you're having real trouble mediating with another tribe member someone like that or or you know when you're maybe overcome with awe because you're looking at the night sky you know it's the shaman who supposed to be dealing with the realities that are outside of day-to-day reality and so they're like masters of Sacred Space that's one way of thinking about it and sometimes they're that way because their father was a shaman or maybe their mother and sometimes it's because they're kind of peculiar you know they're people who are Visionary as as part of their temperament and we know that visionar so to speak is an element of temperament It's associated with trait openness and that's associated partly with intelligence but also partly with creativity and those things aren't exactly the same so some people are more imaginative and Visionary than others and in our culture those would be people who tell great stories like JK Rowling is a really good example of that she's been a shamanic intermediary for a you know for an entire generation of young people with these massive books that she she's written that you know have a mythological core right down to their right down to their Essence and Stan Lee who ran Marvel Comics is another person like that you know who's had an immense cultural influence because because he's brought these ancient stories back up from the depths and put them into modern form you know and the writers of these things are quite consciously aware of what they're doing with regards to the relationship with the underlying myths they're not stupid people and even if they were their readership rapidly informs them if they're deviating from the you know proper narrative Arc of the story because those all those superheroes have their you know dedicated Cults of followers and they make bloody sure that the new writers don't mess around with the story and so not only not only is it top down from the writers but it's also bottom up from the readers so they're all participating in the construction of a continuing cultural apparatus so spontaneous vocation while you're sort of designed for hereditary transmission well you know it's a familial issue and then there's the personal Quest issue too so you know that's sort of associated with spontaneous vocation so and the personal Quest element would be there's always people in every culture who are fundamentally obsessed with the pursuit of meaning you know that's their essential orientation towards life they're not particularly practical like a conscientious person would be because a conscientious person works you know and their their head isn't in the clouds but there are types of people who are are not like that at all their heads are in the clouds permanently and you know they're extraordinary imaginative and creative and they're they're thought leaders in many ways for the culture because a lot of what cultures learn in an articulated sense a lot of what they become conscious of is presented to them by artists in somewhat unconscious form long before the full meaning of the of the of what's being portrayed as articulated just like that you know I just showed you that tree image with Mary and the church you know on either side of it it's not like the person who drew that knew what they were doing they knew more about what they were doing than the people who couldn't draw that sort of thing but they were they were existing on the edge of their knowledge making this representation thinking I trying to get at something here I'm trying to get at something here but they didn't really know what it was because the idea is so complex that you know when when people are coming up with it over these thousands of years year periods they don't realize the full import of what it is that they're revealing I mean just as you don't realize your own full import by whatever this is from meria alad uh by but by whatever method he may have been designated the shaman is recognized as such only after having received two methods of instruction the first is ecstatic dreams transis Visions the second is traditional shamanic techniques names and functions of the spirits mythology and genealogy of the plan and secret language the two-fold teaching imparted by the spirits in the old Master Shaman constitutes initiation and so that that's a very interesting uh that's a very interesting representation of the manner in which personal revelation becomes knowledge so you know let's say you know you're beset by like a very frightful series of nightmares I mean what that's going to do is to drive you to try to understand how to represent what you're having nightmares about in terms of the cultural elements that you have at hand because that that's what makes you sane you know if you're having experiences that are beyond the the norm unless you can incorporate them back into your culture you're alienated from your culture and that's a terrifying thing it means like you might be the only person that's insane like you and you know it's very it's very intolerable for people it's bad enough to be different but to be so different that you're incomprehensible it's like to you that's the sort of horror you don't want to encounter so the shaman are people who are are possessed by like a rich inner fantasy life but who are simultaneously capable of taking that and weaving it into the cultural mythology that they're part of that's what makes them sane rather than insane right because a schizophrenic is someone who's has Visionary experience although it's often auditory you know they hear voices and they're possessed by Spirits in a sense you see them wandering down the street you know muttering to their to their own internal voices but they can't integrate any of that with the culture and so they're just they're gone like they're lost souls so the shaman is someone who does both you know who who has the Visions but who incorporate it at the same time so he's someone who's Master of the visions and not victim of them and so there's technologies that allow people to do that and a lot of them are associated as I said before with the use of various sologenic substances in Siberia the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior for example he seeks Solitude becomes absent minded loves to roam in the woods or unfrequented places has visions and sings in his sleep in some instances this period of incubation is marked by quite serious symptoms among the yakuts the young man sometimes has fits of Fury and easily loses Consciousness hides in the forest feeds on the bark of trees throws himself into water and fire and cuts himself with knives those are ordeals in a sense you know a future Shaman among the tongus as they approach maturity go through a hysterical or hyoid crisis but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age the boy runs away into the mountains and remains there for a week or more feeding on animals which he tears to pieces with his teeth he returns to the Village filthy and Blood Stained and it's only after 10 or more days have pass that he begins to babble incoherent words so you think from the perspective of modern human beings that this is something like descent into the unconscious structures that underly normative cognition just like you descend into that at night when you dream it's a very peculiar process that you're all perfectly capable of engaging in but have most of you have virtually no control over it I mean there are people who dream lucidly you know and who can exert some conscious control over their dreams most people can learn how to do that to some degree but in our culture at least most people dream unconsciously and it's just something that happens to you and not something that you're actively engaged with a strange behavior of future Shaman have not failed to attract the attention of Scholars and from the middle of the past Century by which he meant the 19th century several attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon of shamanism as a mental disorder but the problem was wrongly put for on the one hand it's not true that shamans always are always have to be neuropathic or neurotics or people who are not well put together mentally on the other hand those among them who had been ill became Shaman precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cure so what that means is these are people who've undergone some kind of existential crisis sometimes one that's induced you know as part of the process that turns them into Shaman but they were able to undergo that existential crisis and then put themselves back together and so that's what makes the masters of of the chaotic realm so to speak and so you're starting to fall apart and you don't know what to do well the best thing you can possibly do is find someone who's being there and come back and that idea of going somewhere and coming back is also a very very common ological story so that's the story that the of of The Hobbit for example right The Hobbit goes off on this Quest and he undergoes all sorts of Trials and he encounters the dragon that lives underneath everything and he gets the gold from the dragon which is the information that the dragon stores and then he comes back to his community and he's transformed but he's strange like he's gone off on this big adventure now he's like well put together with tough and he's also rich but he's also peculiar you know when when when Bilbo Bilbo goes back to the Shire you know know everybody no one's exactly sure what to do with him CU now he's contaminated with everything that he's gone through so he's like an agent of chaos himself you know and someone who's somewhat terrifying but you know useful if you have to have a consultation about how you might deal with the next dragon so now I said that a lot of the shamanic initiatory rituals seem to be associated with the L use of hallucinogenic drugs and so the most common ones that we know about are mushrooms so for example there's this mushroom which many of you probably seen in fairy tales right that's on the cover of fairy tales very frequently and that's called an amonita muscaria mushroom and it's generally viewed as extremely toxic and there's some there's some reason for that because it can it can make the people who eat it very sick and now and then people do die from it but mostly it's extraordinarily hallucinogenic the Vikings for example this is quite a terrifying Story the Vikings used to take amonita muscaria mushrooms before they went on their pillaging trips and they used the mushrooms to transform themselves into the equivalent of predatory monsters so they usually their their sort of Target was wolves or Bears and the the word berser which is what the Vikings used to go meant bear shirt and so they would train their young men to eat these hallucinogenic mushrooms and turn themselves into painfree predators and then they would take them before they went on a pillaging raid and so you just imagine you know you're sitting there in northern England and you're in your village and it's all peaceful and these bloody crazy Vikings come all the out of the ocean and the boats you know the open boats that they've traveled across the North Sea and and they're all like stoned out of their gourd on amonita muscaria mushrooms and all convinced that they're like predatory bears and that's exactly how they're acting and they have no pain whatsoever it's like that's not a good scene that's not a good scene you know and the Vikings come through and they just destroy everything it's like so that's they're used they were used for Marshall purposes by the Vikings but they're they're they're they're they're a drug that's used very commonly by people who are inducing shamanic experiences among themselves across the whole northern part of Europe and Asia and they grow almost everywhere so those are the original magic mushroom you know the magic red mush with the white dots and if you look in you can see these things in in drawings everywhere especially in fairy tales very common representation in Fairy Tales um there is some evidence that religions that are I suppose in some ways more articulated and sophisticated in that they're more articulated like Christianity say compared to the more sha shamanic uh religions are have also have their roots in hallucinogenic experience and this may be true to a degree that we really don't understand so for example this is something this is taken from the ID manuscript which is 11th century fundamentally 11th to 13th century because there were copies of it made at different times what you see here it's mind Walling really is that the tree that the snake is associated with is a psilocybon mushroom and that's a very characteristic representation of the psilocin mushroom and the and the fruit that Eve is feeding to AB is part of the psilocin mushroom and there is speculation you know among people who are sort of at the fringes of of evolutionary theory that part of the way that human beings levered themselves up into increased Consciousness was by the use of mushrooms and you can see in the in the representations over there some of them are absolutely remarkable like the one on the top right hand corner there that's Christ and he's standing there like like this with his hands up and then underneath the bottom half of that circle is a psilocybon mushroom with the head is in u the like the main body of the mushroom is in the same position as Christ's head and the like the offshoots of the mushroom are in the same position as his hands so well God only knows what that means so that's that's very strange and and and a remarkable thing and we really don't know what to make of it and there's a lot more investigation to be done on that this is an iasa Vine and it's the it's part of what the Amazonian Shaman used to brew their hallucinogenic mixtures and no none of the uh westerners who've gone to study the Amazonian Shaman can figure out how the hell they determined how they were going to make their mixture because it's virtually impossible to make you need to take the vine and then you need to take another plant that doesn't grow in the same place and you have to mix them together in the right proportions and then you have to cook them together for 72 hours and you have to do that without breathing in any of the vapors and you know there's thousands and thousands of different kinds of plants in the Amazonian jungle and it isn't obvious in any way how the people who are using these mixtures figured out how to make them and if you ask them they say well the plants told us how to do it and you know that for modern Western people that's not much of an explanation but it's certainly the explanation that the tribesmen seem to stick to and you know God only knows how people gather their information you know chimpanzees use medicinal plants you know they're they're capable of finding plants in their habitat they can eat that are Tic or so on that that helped them deal with diseases and it's not clear at all how they figured that out so there's lots of mysteries about the origin of human knowledge that's for sure so three sources of potential Visionary experience and this is very interesting so here's the biochemical construction of hallucinogenic chemicals so the first thing you see on the bottom right is a serotonin molecule now serotonin is in some ways it's the major brain neurotransmitter the reason I say that is because during your embryological development your brain grows out you know it sort of sort of flowers forth and it's guided in its development by the serotonin system the system that uses serotonin as its primary neurochem chemical transmitter so it's it's not only an our very archaic system and it's so old that you share it as I've mentioned before with Crustaceans but it's also the system that sort of puts you together as you emerge out of nothing and so you see its peculiar chemical structure there and then you see these are all different hallucinogenic substances um this one is psilocin for example and um they're all and DMT is a very weird chemical it's very illegal EMT it produces it's part of iasa although I is made with a plant that contains DMT and then something called an MAO inhibitor which decreases the rate at which your body breaks it down but pure DMT produces an instantaneous 10minute uh hallucinogenic high that people where people constantly report contact with aliens there's a psychiatrist who spent years documenting DMT experiences and every single person he he cont he he walked through the experience with reported the same thing they're shot out of their body they're immediately in an alien landscape so well you know what what that seems to indicate is that you know from a from a more purely rational perspective is that these chemicals produce characteristic experiences that are associated with Visionary experience they put you in something that's like a dream state now oddly the dream state seems to be somewhat similar from person to person but there are ways that in in some sense that the UN the contents of the unconscious mind could be made manifest to the conscious mind at least for for brief periods of time sometimes that can be clearly horrify Ying because sometimes people take these these these chemicals and have like the worst experience of their life and part of that seems to be associated with the sort of thing that might happen to you in Psychotherapy so for example if you were convinced that your psyche wasn't very well ordered and you were harboring sort of dark secrets and lies and all the sorts of things that might complicate your life and all sorts of familial pathology and you know cultural bagage and like the horrors that sort of live inside your brain you know in Psychotherapy you would sort of confront those on by one in a hallucinogenic experience you might confront all of those at the same time you know and for for many people that's exactly equivalent to a quick trip to hell and it's not something they'd rather repeat so now why that why things are set up that way well who knows you know I mean we don't really understand these things uh we don't understand the relationship between the parts of the brain that are articulated and conscious and then the lower parts that are sort of the repositories of traumatic information um and there's deeper Mysteries that we don't understand too so it turns out I don't know if any of you are familiar with the term epig Genesis but there there are studies of epigenetics now that show that there are certain experiences that alter your genetic structure and well we know that partly because when like if you put yourself in a new situation a radically new situation new genes will turn on inside of you and they'll code for new proteins and they'll build new structures for you so new neurological structures sometimes and that's part of how you can adapt and it's also part of the reason why banging yourself against various obstacles you know in a in a kind of what systematic way is a good way of expanding your range of capabilities so we know that experience can turn new new genetic processes on that that are sort of latent prior to that but what we didn't know was that some of those experiences transform your genetic structures in a way that you can transmit to your children so and that you know that's lamaran Evolution no one ever ever hypothesized that that was possible but you can look it up it's it's mainstream Science Now although you know people are still not really sure what to do about it how to think about it from a conceptual perspective because that sort of thing wasn't supposed to be possible so you know so we we have no idea to to what level of being your experiences can can be encoded and we really don't know how you encode experience anyways we don't know what the fundamental structures of your memory are how that associated with your conceptions of time and space or and how that's related to your ongoing experience like those things are deeply mysterious to us and what happens at least in part with the hallucinogens is that they seem to take all the horrors and Terrors that you haven't dealt with and just put them in your face now and that's part of the shamanic experience and so it's not something for people to take lightly and you know and generally generally people don't so but I've often found that it was very strange that these chemicals produce experiences that are so strange that our culture instantly deemed them illegal you know for me it's like looking at what happened back in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church went after Galileo because he had something you know strange to say about the moon it's like these experiences have tapped into something that's a very very primordial element of human existence and Associated say with the shamanic rituals that have been going on for tens of thousands of years and that human cultures have always used to orient themselves and they're so an there there there's so much antha to our current culture that you know we we we punish people severely for experimenting with them it's very very peculiar Behavior so although there's no doubt that this sort of thing is dangerous and very peculiar but you know so the shaman report relatively um what constant types of experiences when they're undergoing their transformative experiences and here's a couple of them one is climbing the world tree we've already we've already talked about the world tree and what that seems to be if you look at the reports of the shaman is that they they seem their Consciousness seems to be able to to move itself up and down levels of analysis that aren't necessarily available to you in your normal State of Consciousness now whether or not that's a real phenomenon or whether or not it's part associated with the dream isn't exactly clear so um part of it is for example that you know the shaman become convinced that they can communicate with things like plants at a very fundamental level but they are also capable of when they climb up the tree for example of entering sort of the realm of their ancestors and and communing with them and I just read a book here recently about the Revival of Mongolian Shamanism and the Mongolian situation is kind of interesting because it was a pretty archaic culture and then the Soviets came in there and like communized it you know which was sort of economically useful but socially it was an absolute catastrophe because the Soviets were murderous beyond belief and then in 1989 they just left and so the Mongolians like they were completely up in the air then because their traditional culture had been fragmented and you know the whole communist thing was a bust and they reverted back to shamanic practices and the shaman told them that part of the reason that they were all suffering was because they had lost contact with their ancestral spirits and partly what they meant by that was that the continuity of the culture had been disrupted and so people were identityless you know and it was funny because when Alexander Sol niten wrote about the Soviet Union and he wrote volume he wrote extensively about about the the Soviet experience his eventual conclusion was that the the best route for the Soviets to take after the collapse of Communism would be a return to the sort of The evolutionary process of development that characterized their exploration of Orthodox Christianity because you have to fall back to something you know because people need a meaning structure and you know modern people have a hard time with incomprehensible religious meaning structures because you know we demand a certain amount of rational Clarity but there's a problem with that because the absolute mysteries of Life cannot be formulated with rational Clarity you have to kind of encapsulate them in a mystery that's partially understandable because because otherwise they they stay completely out of your grasp you know and you have no answer to the question you know well what's the ultimate purpose of life you know well you're not going to be able to get that answer in a really tight box you know that you could open up and it's just going to provide all the answers it's going to be murky because partly because it has to apply to everyone but the fact that it's murky and symbolic in a sense and sort of multifaceted doesn't mean it's unnecessary or wrong and you know the more I've studied the theories that underly personality theory The more I've become convinced and for me convinced Beyond a doubt that the connection our connection to the to the archaic structures of the past that defined our cultures like without that you're without roots you know and that makes you weak that's the big problem it makes you weak there's nothing to you every whim can possess you every stupid political idea that comes along is instantly your God you know and you're certainly capable of going crazy with masses of people in all sorts of insane ways it has direct consequences you have to be grounded in something according to a yakoot informant the spirits carry the future Shaman to hell and shot him in a house for three years it doesn't sound very pleasant here he undergoes his initiation the spirits cut off his head which they set off to one side for the novice for the novice must watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes and they hack his body to bits which are later distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses it is only on this condition that the future Shaman will obtain the power of healing his bones are then covered with new flesh and in some cases he has also given new blood and so the the fundamental structure of the shamanic ritual seems to be the the the death of the of the experiencing person and they seem to experience that as a physiological transformation so it's it's the conscious experience of their own death and their dissolution right right to you know the the dust and Ashes from which from which human beings originally arise one of the specific characteristics of shamanic initiations aside from the candidates dismemberment is his reduction to the state of a skeleton we are here in the presence of a very ancient religious idea which belongs to the hunter culture bone symbolizes the final root of animal life the mold from which the flesh continually Rises it's from the bone that men and animals are reborn for a time they maintain themselves in the existence of the flesh then they die and their life is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton from which they will be born again and then people who undergo these experiences seem to as I said they seem to experience their own death in a conscious Manner and that's a very difficult thing to understand you know it's not obvious either for people who aren't what would you say who who aren't accustomed to those sorts of extremes of experiences it's not obvious at all how much of this sort of thing you have to become conscious of you know because death is obviously one of the things that terrifies people deeply and it's not obvious how you should accustom yourself to that so I I can tell you a story that's quite quite interesting I had a client at one point who was a vegetarian um and that actually turns out to be relevant part of the reason that she was a vegetarian was because she couldn't even go into a like a a um what a grocery store where there was a butcher Department like she couldn't even look at the array of meat it just horrified her and it was associated with something that was like a Sleeping Beauty complex for her because when she was a child her parents treated her like she was a fairy princess and they really protected her from from everything you know remember how many of you have seen Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty yeah well that's interesting he that so many of you would have you remember there's a when the girl is born when sleeping beauty is born they don't invite someone to the to the christening who do they not invite the witch right I think it's it Maleficent in in the Sleeping Beauty I think that's her name she's the one that turns into the dragon of chaos at the end of the story well there's a there's a message in there it's like do not Shield your young people from natural catastrophe because it makes them unconscious and it'll come back and revisit them when they well especially you know when they grow up when they hit puberty it'll come back with force and if they're uncon like if they're not prepared the horror of that will make them unconscious and that's what happened to this girl like she was sleeping 20 22 hours a day when she came to see me it's like she was a fairy princess until she hit puberty and then she was like an evil slot as far as her parents were concerned it was like bang things had you know things switched completely of course that was horrifying to her but it was also tangled up for her with kind of the horror of life in general and that was one of the things that made her so sensitive to say to these displays of these displays of meat which are of course quite horrifying you know it's kind of remarkable that you can wander through them you know with you know maybe a little bit of of discomfort but you know it's slaughterhouse stuff and you know to be normal is to be able to tolerate that and that's quite strange she couldn't tolerate it at all so you know I took her to butcher shops now and then because you do that with people if if they have an identifiable fear it's actually quite easy to start the psychotherapeutic process because you start to expose them voluntarily to the things that they want to avoid so you know I took her into a butcher shop and jeez you know just flipped her over you know she sat in the car afterwards and cried for 20 minutes and told me about how terrible life was and that she couldn't live in the face of all this you know dismemberment and constant death and she was also very very inclined towards identification you know with little cute animals which is generally a fairly solid feminine trait right because females are very attracted to things that are cute and cute things are basically infantile and and helpless right that's sort of what activates the cute detection you know it's part of well it's part of maternal behavior and it's really an important part you know cuz if you didn't find your babies cute you'd really be in trouble CU they're a lot of well they're a lot of trouble you know and they and they push you because they require so much care so they bloody well better be cute and smiley and you know make friends with you so so but but she like was hyper identified with like little vulnerable animals you know and and that's not good because she wasn't just a little vulnerable animal you know she was also Al partly a predator and human beings are partly predators and you know maybe you think that's terrible but that's how it is and the predatory part of yourself better be incorporated and used because otherwise first of all you'll be weak without it and second of all if you don't incorporate it believe me that doesn't make it go away it'll just go out and have fun on its own in ways that are unconscious that you don't control so she was a really good dreamer this girl and and she could she actually had lucid dreams quite remarkable and sometimes she could even ask ask her dream characters what they symbolized right in the dream you know it's the only time I've ever seen that although I've had some lucid dreamers in my practice and one day she had this dream because she was really having a hard time finishing University it was like her sixth year seventh year or something like that and that was part because she slept all the time and then she wouldn't get anything done like she was trying to sleep to avoid Consciousness right to avoid being alive because Consciousness was too painful for her and so she had a dream one day that she meant actually I'm mixing two dreams here together but it doesn't matter because it just sort of it just sort of collapses The Narrative she she dreamt that she met a gypsy that was traveling through the forest and the Gypsy told her that unless she was able unless she would be willing to work in a slaughterous she'd never finish her degree so she came and she came and told me that dream and I thought well slaughterous that seems a little bit difficult to arrange you know she wasn't sure she could handle that anyways and I said well is there anything that you can think of if you imagine something is there anything that you can think of that you know might serve as a substitute and she came back to me about a week later and she says she said I want to see an inbombing and I thought wow that's that's rough that's no no doubt about that that's rough so I phoned around to a bunch of different funeral homes and I told them that I had a client who was like so terrified of death that she couldn't even live and that you know that I wanted to bring her to the funeral home and walk through it and if it was possible to see an EMB bombing preparation and um they were very understanding it was quite interesting because of course Funeral Parlor people are kind of strange people right because they're dealing with death all the time it's like their daily life you know and they get so it's well they're not dying of horror every night you know they're able to deal with it which is a good thing CU like we'd be need deep in bodies otherwise right someone someone has to do this sort of work so and and apparently you can specialize in it and so what that all also means unless you think you know funeral part of directors are like completely nonhuman in some fundamental way clearly indicates that it's possible for a normal person to become so conversent with death that it's Daily Business and you know emergency department people are in that sort of situation and people who drive ambulances like human beings are bloody tough you know we can take something like facing death and turn it into a an everyday occurence it's like it's kind of horrifying in a sense to think that you could be that harsh in a way you know but by the same token you know you don't want to run away screaming the first time there's an emergency in your life you know what the hell good are you if you know someone close to you gets really sick and all you can do is whine and snivel about it because it's so hard on you it's like it's not your turn for that you should be strong so that you can help then and that means that you know we have to be able to face these sorts of things so anyways we went to the funeral part which is quite a weird thing for me too because I actually have rather squeamish stomach I'm kind of disgust sensitive and so it's hard for me especially odors just they're just not good for me at all but um you know so I could have never been a surgeon or anything like that but we went to the funeral parlor and that I found it extremely interesting because first of all you actually need to know how these things operate because at some point you're going to be called upon to deal with them and maybe it'd be nice if you had a little knowledge beforehand so that you know you didn't only have the grief that was knocking you over but all the novelty that was associated with trying to orient yourself in that space and so we talked to the funeral director and we talked to him about how he sort of managed his day-to-day encounters with death and you know he said he he sort of saw it as his role to Shepherd people through the grieving process and that for him it had made him in some ways more acutely aware of the finitude of Life obviously but that also made him more conscious of you know of each day of the passing of each day and you know that might be one of the things that's salutary about facing your own mortality it's like waste time like here's here's a good question for you guys how many of you waste more than four hours a day okay okay so so I would say the reason you do that is because you haven't really faced the reality of your own death if you had done that you would stop doing that you would not waste time you know and we could do a quick economic analysis I like to do this with people so what do you think your time's worth an hour guess we know it's at least 10 bucks right cuz that's well so the minimum value Society puts on your labor is $10 an hour okay but you know you're you're smart and healthy and young and so each hour is an investment in the future so it has to be considered in that matter because your one of your hours is worth more to you than one of my hours is worth to me because you have so much of your future life still depending on it so that's a big deal so I would say $50 an hour is probably reasonable for what you guys are worth it's somewhere between 10 and 50 anyways so you know let's assume 50 okay it's 200 bucks a day it's 1,400 bucks a week it's 5600 bucks a month $65,000 a year it's like you want to waste it go right ahead but that's what it's costing you at minimum you know and you know you might think well no because I'm not getting paid it's like wrong you're paid for your studies you just get paid 10 years from now it's just deferred income and there's a huge difference between people who have B's and A's you know like B's door shut A's doors open and so you know you waste that time you will bloody pay for it and you don't get it back either so you know if you're if you're awake and you know that this is waiting for you and that there's only so much time you have that can bloody well wake you up and stop you from wasting your time because you don't have that much of it this is a medieval representation of of it's a very strange representation obviously because it's a crucifix and has a snake on it it's not but it's a tree snake thing you know and it's actually an echo there's a story in the Old Testament about Moses leading people through the desert and it's sort of a you know they've escaped from tyranny so that's the previous place of order now they're in chaos because they've left tyan so they're all wandering around sort of without their heads they don't know which way they're going they're trying to run away from something that's bad and towards something that's good but they don't know where they are and so they get all kind of you know fighty and and break into factions and then they start worshiping false gods like golden Cals and so on it's fragmentation Under Pressure right and so um God gets irritated at them and throws a bunch of poisonous snakes into the desert cuz you know he's such an easy guy to get along with so he throws a bunch of poisonous snakes in there and they go around biting all these people who are you know not being faithful and so all the people who are who you know doubting Moses are starting to freak out because they keep getting bit by all these poisonous snakes and so they finally call on Moses to ask God to be like you know call off the poisonous snakes they'll behave just call off the poisonous snakes and God says to Moses to build a like a a a staff with a bronze snake on it and that if people will come and look at the snake then they'll be immune to the snake's poison or the snakes will stop biting them I don't remember which and it's it's a lovely story because it's another exposure story it sort of means that if you're willing to gaze upon the thing that is most poison to you or that you're most afraid of that that can help you overcome it and that's sort of what this is a representation of except it's more complex because this surface's tail sort of stretches down into Infinity that's what that representation is it's sort of it's sort of the manifestation of the unknown right from the beginning of time and space that's that's what that image represents and that's sort of the problem of humanity in some sense is that you know there's an infinite number of trouble stemming from an Infinite Source a remarkable representation I think you've heard about near-death experiences I imagine you know the idea that people see the light at the end of the tunnel and then you know when they get through the light they see all their ancestors there and something that vaguely resembles God and you know and that's conditioned to some degree by their cultural background but it's a very common experience and this is actually a representation of that from a 12th I think 12th to 13th century ping by herous Bosch and this so it seems to be the sort of thing also that's characteristic of the Sha shamanic experience post reduction to skeleton so the shaman dies and then as a consequence of that he ends up in a space that's characterized by the presence of the ancestral spirits whatever that means I mean you could think about those as like each of you are embodiments of ancestral Spirits right because all the ideas you have for example are all they're all there none of them are your ideas or virtually none of them it's almost impossible to have an original idea all the ideas you have are like the ghostly remnants of brilliant philosophers or theologians who've lived you know hundreds or thousands of years ago and your whole head is populated by these things and they're sort of embodied things because they tell you how to act you know they're not just cold dead ideas and you know you're you're you're a mixture of all those things and I don't know if the ancestral spirits that these Visionaries encounter are like personified representations of the spirits that live inside their head or what they are but but part of the experience seems to be um what would you call it it's like a rescuing of the dying father from the from the depths how many of you have seen Pinocchio right so you know the fundamental theme there right Pinocchio was a marionette so anyone can manipulate him and he's a wooden head he's not awake he's not conscious he's not alive and so he can be led astray in 15 different ways and you know finally his father disappears to go looking for him and for for reasons that aren't exactly clear his father ends up inside a whale at the bottom of the ocean which is you know not the first place you'd think of looking for your father but especially if you were a puppet and you like a cricket was leading you around which is all absurd stuff you know um although one thing I could tell you is what's the cricket's name yeah yeah what's the initials right so fake right yeah Jiminy Cricket is Southern us slang for Jesus Christ and you know the animators pick that up as a joke but it's not a joke because of course the cricket serves as the conscience and the spiritual guide on this on this Quest vision and it's the cricket that leads the puppet deep underground actually it's into the ocean to the deepest depths of Despair right and death like a shamanic disintegration to find the spirit of his father and why does he need that well it's because without incorporating the spirit of his father or his forefathers he can't be real and that's because human beings and puppets apparently you know we cultural creatures it's not like there's you and there's your culture it's like you are your culture and so you're either the embodiment of your culture fleshed out and made whole or you're just a fragmentary thing and you're only half alive and worse than that you can't cope with tragedy I mean the way that Pinocchio becomes real is he rescues his father from the whale which is also a dragon right the whale is a dragon how do you know that what happens to the whale he spits fire that's weird behavior for a whale you know it's because Pinocchio lights A Fire Inside him but of course you know that's how human beings have always escaped from chaos is by using fire so he's the master of fire and that brings him up from the depths and he has to rescue his father and it actually kills him right his father says no no Let Me Drown save yourself but Tokyo doesn't and he dies in the effort to bring him to shore but then the you know the Blue Fairy comes down and says well because you're such a good puppet you quick now you're away you know it's a it's a it's a remarkable story it's an amazing movie I mean it's uh it has themes in it they're thousands and thousands of years old like the idea that the hero has to Journey to the to the darkest depths to to reclaim a treasure the treasure can be lots of things it can be the dead father it can be a princess it can be gold doesn't really matter there's this idea that you know the thing you want most is to be found where you least want to look which is a lovely little that's a that's an alchemical dictum by the way that was sort of reanimated by y so anyways the idea in the shamanic Visions is that past death there's this opening up into the ancestral landscape and that's the place where you can commune with well the ancestor gods or maybe the spirit of the ancestors themselves which is something like God you know if you look at the Christian representations for for example one of the elements of God is God the father and so God the father is sort of like an amalgam of all the great fathers of the past you know because you might say well what makes person a person a great father well careful devoted attention would be part of it right that's a transpersonal thing it's like if if you're a great father and you are too there's something about both of your actions as a great father that are the same and you can think of that as the spirit of the great father and you know that sort of shines through individuals so that's a way of communing with God through the ancestors and that's part of what these rituals are about I would like even now to stress the fact that the Psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology it has an initiatory structure and signification in short it reproduces a traditional mystical pattern the total crisis of the future Shaman sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the personality and to Madness can be evaluated not only as an initiatory death but also as a symbolic return to the prec cosmogonic chaos to the amorphous and Indescribable state that precedes any cosmogony well that's a mouthful so one of the things I mentioned about this picture was that there's some inference suggestion on the part of the artist that this this chaotic monster of the depths has this origin point it's like the beginning of time it's it's it's like that's a symbol of of the infinity that stretches on before us and it emerges from that so part of the initiatory process is the dissolution of the personality the question is well what state of existence exists at the level where your personality dissolves because you're you see the world through your personality and the world is given form through your personality and then when it it starts to dissolve and disintegrate say when you sink into depression it's so you're you're sinking into a state that sort of before Consciousness so so let me tell you something that William James said about this so it's a very difficult thing to get to to to communicate it's like and we'll we'll touch on it a bit more when we move into constructivism so part of the idea here is that you that reality itself is extracted from the unknown and the unknowable and you know you do that as individuals because there's all the parts of the world that you understand and then there's the parts of the world that you don't understand you can't even conceive of but now and then you encounter them especially when you fail and then you interact with them and by doing that you make them like real and describable and experienceable and so it's like there's this latent possibility that surrounds existence that you can interact with and pull up into actuality and that's sort of the that's like the action of Consciousness on reality that's why by the way in the beginning of Genesis like in Genesis it's the word of God that produces order from chaos right and so that's the initi that's the the initiation of of reality and then later in Genesis God makes human beings and he says you're made both of you in the image of God and the question is well what does that mean well it might mean that God has two arms and two legs but what it seems to mean more accurately is that whatever it is that makes you conscious has this Divine quality and it's capable of extracting order continually from chaos and by doing that by being conscious actors in the world you're bringing about the creation of reality and that's a remarkable thing and you know there's there's nothing there's nothing mystical about that you know perfectly well that you can make tomorrow one thing or another you know and is that free will well who who knows that question will never be solved but it certainly seems phenomenologically like there's an option here for you and there's an option here for you and there's an option here for you those are all potential and you can just choose which one of those you want to head towards and make actual and that's Consciousness doing that and Consciousness is something we don't have a clue and this is William James William James is the father of of pragmatic philosophy but also of modern psychology he did a fair bit of experimentation with nitrous oxide which is this sort of inert gas that that that dentists use for example as an analgesic but that also has quite profound hallucinatory and mystical experience inducing properties and so William James used to play with this and this is a poem he he wrote um I'll read the description the description first from William James and then the poem he said pure experience is the name which I give to the original flux of life before reflection has categorized it only newborn babies and persons in semicom from sleep drugs illnesses or blows can have an experience pure in the literal sense of that which is not yet any definite what though ready to be all sorts of whats full both of Oneness and of many but in respects that don't appear changing throughout yet so confusedly that phases interpenetrate and no points either of Distinction or of identity can be caught sorry yeah well it's sort of in incoherent but what William James is referring to is is this idea that what the ground of reality is something like a potential from you know a potential full of many possible actualities from which single actualities can be drawn and that that's what Consciousness is doing when it makes decisions and it's it's a brilliant idea and I think you know and I expect you to take this with a grain of salt because I you know this part of what I'm telling you about you may think this about a lot of what I'm telling you is you know sort of out on the fringes but the quantum mechanics believe that the the most accurate way to portray the ground of reality is as something that's striving to manifest itself it's not there yet it has to be interacted with something that's a conscious Observer before it takes on tangible reality and so the ground of being seems to be something like like a multi-dimensional potential from which many things can emerge and I think I actually think that is what we see when we look at the future you know because what the hell is the future what is it you know we certainly treat it it's real the future is a place of potential well right well what does that mean well it means whatever it means is real enough so that you Orient Yourself by it you take the future seriously you believe that your choices bring future a or future B into being you don't really know the limits of that you know like if you really got your act together right down to the core you know you you have no idea what sort of Glorious future you might be able to bring into ex existence you know it's an it's an unresolved question if you diligently work with all of your effort you know to perfecting the things around you you have no idea how far you might be able to go you know and it's it's a real open question and I think that's that's part of what human beings have to bring against the sort of Horrors of existence is like you have a lot of potential and if you made the right choices and we you know awake and careful God only knows what you might be able to manage so here's his poem he sounds like a 60s hippie from Greenwich Village really it's written in like 1890 no verbiage can give it because the verbiage is other by which he means that whatever this potential is exists in a place before articulation right once it's articulated it's not potential it's all of a sudden something actual that's actually why the ancient Jews didn't want to use the name of God you weren't allowed to name God because as soon as you named God he was no longer God God was the unnamable you know and the and the and the uh and the Muslims have the same sort of idea about Muhammad in anyways it's like you don't don't want to make a concrete representation because then you take the ideal out of the ideal space and you start to make it something that you can like a human construction so you know it's it's an idea that's got its Merit no verbiage can give it because the verbiage is other incoherent coherent the same and it fades and it's infinite and it's infinite don't you see the difference don't you see the identity constantly opposites United the same me telling you to right and not to write extreme something and other than that thing intoxication and other this than intoxication every attempt at betterment every attempt at otherman it is it fades forever and forever as we move all right we'll stop there obviously [Applause] |
talk about constructivism and I'm going to primarily discuss Jean P although the readings extend to some some degree out past his thought um p is generally regarded as a developmental psychologist which is not what he thought of himself he thought that he was a genetic epistemologist which is a term that I think has over ever only been applied to him an epistemologist is someone who studies the manner in which knowledge um who studies knowledge itself and that's what P thought that he was doing and he wanted to understand how it was that knowledge unfolded across time and um more importantly than that he wanted to understand how the cognitive structures that made up an individual developed across time so that's generally why he's regarded as a developmental psychologist because of course he also studied children now I'm going to read you something that P wrote to begin this um he wrote an awful lot of books and a lot of them haven't yet been translated and some of the ones that are translated are translated pretty badly and I think this is probably an example of a fairly bad translation but it regardless of that the point that's being made is both valid and interesting so the common postulate of various traditional epistemologies which are theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge is a fact say or a set of facts so that you would go to class and learn a set of facts and that is what would give you knowledge instead of a process and if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete as we know they are because they're replaced sequentially I mean for example recently in the domain of physics physicists revealed to us that they really didn't understand what some massive percentage of the universe was made of I think I can't remember it's 75% or 95% made out of dark matter which is never been detected and we know nothing about it so that's a good example of how our fundamental assumptions can be challenged at any moment and how a fact can turn from a fact into a clear fallacy if our various forms of knowledge are always complete and our various Sciences still imperfect that which is acquired is acquired and can therefore be studied statically so the proposition there is that you come and you learn the facts and the facts themselves are solid bits of information and they don't change across time and so that once you have them you have them now of course PJ obviously doubts that hence the absolute position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types of knowledge possible as an alternative under the converging influence of a series of factors we are tending more and more today to regarded knowledge as a process more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempt to hold fast dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of this development and of it alone that we have the right to State it is a fact what he means by that is the fact that human beings learn facts is in fact a fact right so you are capable of learning things and he thinks that's sort of the fundamental fact people assimilate information and they transform as a consequence of it and so studying that as he says what we can and should then seek is a law of this process we are well aware on the other hand of the fine book by on scientific revolutions now the reason P throws that in at the end um how many of you know about Thomas Coon's book on scientific revolutions no one one just three people okay well that's probably not good um was one of the 20th centuries foremost philosophers of Science and he made a distinction between two different mod of scientific process one he called normal science and the other he called revolutionary science and normal science was the kind of science that you'll do as undergraduates unless you're un incredibly lucky or unbelievably brilliant um or probably unbelievably brilliant and Incredibly lucky and so normal science occurs when you generate Knowledge incrementally from within the confines of an already developed scientific theory so a normal science would be uh say the of big five models of personality to the prediction of some other variable like say relationship success you're going to uncover something new but it's not going to shape the foundations of knowledge itself now observed that from time to time there were discoveries that were made that shook the foundation of knowledge itself there's some well-known Revolutions in science so the Newtonian Revolution was a revolution in science uh Einstein's work produced another revolution in science dar work mle's work um those are the Revolutionary transformations of thought that people often consider did I say Darwin I certainly should have said Darwin because his was probably the most revolutionary of all um now the reason that I wanted to tell you that and the reason I kept it in here even though it seems like a funny little additional statement Pinn to the end of P's quotation is that observed that scienti science seemed to progress in accordance with the same mechanisms that PJ observed that the knowledge of children appeared to progress now one of the things that you'll learn about P which is generally all you learn if you learn about p is his idea that children go through sequential stages of development and usually people have you memorize those stages I should let you know that P really didn't care that much about those stages and when they occurred and how they could be sped up and exactly what they were he was much more interested in deep philosophical questions and that element of his work generally goes unrecognized by the the North American psychologist who purport to understand what he had to say now because he wrote dozens of books some of which are not yet translated it's not surprising that people Come Away with a partial view of T when you're that prolific he was so damn smart he was offered the curatorship of a museum when he was 10 because he had published a scientific paper on I think it was on snails and but his parents requested that he turn it down so you know PHA was a major genius and if someone puts their mind like that puts their mind to work for an entire lifetime and he lived to be an old man they can produce an awful lot of intellectual material and it's not necess especially if it can't be summarized easily as a single you know coherent theory that you could memorize in one page it's pretty hard for people to keep up so it's not surprising that his thought gets reduced to you know a set of axioms in a sense but um the devil's often in the detail with great thinkers and what that means is that to really understand what they had to say you actually have to read them because a lot of the information is at the sentence level of analysis and not at the summary level of analysis you know if you're really smart it's not that easy to summarize what you have to say because most of what you have to say is in fact informative so you can't just throw it away it's hard to compress it so anyways this initial par paragraph opens up the world of constructivism to you now the constructivists are interesting people because you know you often hear people ask is it genetic or environmental which is it's not a good question because it's a false dichotomy the the genes formulate structures in accordance with environmental Demand right from the beginning of the organism's emergence and so there's a constant interplay between the environment and genetics but the environment isn't also just a thing that's out there that's like made out of lions and tigers and moose and buildings and you know the sky it's it's an information field and the constructivist point out rightly that partly what you're doing when you're operating in the world is interacting with this field of information and incorporating its structure into the structure of your mind and body which is how you adapt so you could say in some sense that you're built out of information and matter that's a good way of thinking about it and the constructivists are very interesting interested in how you go about acquiring information and how you then transform that information into the sort of knowledge that you can apply to the world so they're also very pragmatic especially P because pH regards knowledge as um like the prequisite for adaptive action so again again he's less concerned about the facts that you know about the structure of the world then he is about how it is that you modify and adapt your behavior so that you can survive in the world work so so that's the first postulate that's constructivism and then the next postulate is that there are revolutions in the internal structures that you construct that emerge as a consequence of you acquiring new information sometimes that information can already be fit into a knowledge structure that you possess but sometimes the information is so anomalous or novel that it blows out fundamental presuppositions that you've already established and forces you to not only add some information to your repertoire of information but to reconfigure the structure you use to represent the information you don't like that people don't like it when that happens it's too dramatic and upsetting so which is often why Revolutions in science or in any other field are first resisted I mean it's very complicated the reasons people are opposed to new ideas are very complicated there's lots of theories about why that occurs precisely but briefly outline a good theory there's a bunch of them but I'll outline one so let's say there's already a scientific theory and it's instantiated in the world so people accept it and let's say that you are a proponent of that theory so you might say well that theory therefore governs your worldview and if I threaten it then your worldview is going to fall apart and that's going to make you fall apart and that's not a bad Theory but here's a here's a variant of that which is similar but which I think is better so I'm a Professor let's say I have a theory now what I'm doing with my theory is buying my right to be a professor so I would come to the University of Toronto as a job candidate and I would say here's my theory and here's why I think the facts support it here's what it's good for and they'll say okay it looks like you know enough about what you're doing so that you can occupy this position in this dominance hierarchy okay and I'm pretty happy about that because that position in that dominance hierarchy is pretty permanent that's one of the advantages to an ademic job it's like once you have it as long as you're relatively competent and relatively ethical then you can you can maintain it across time so so it's a big deal to be granted that slot and then being in that dominance hierarchy is not only a matter of what you believe obviously the fact that I'm in that dominar means I get a certain salary and that's not hypothetical that allows me to eat so I'm happy about that it's not only psychological and I can pay my housing payments with it and so on so it protects me from the cold and offers me something to eat and it gives me a certain public status and so if some other Joker comes along say they're young and they say well I have a different Theory and it makes your theory look stupid then I'm not going to be very happy about that hardly because it upsets the way that I configure my understanding of the world and that's a drag but I might recover from that but it also undermines my claim it undermines the validity of my claim to that position in the high Archy and so it sort of makes me an impostor say say the guy turns out to be right it's like poof I'm an impostor and I no no longer really have the right to occupy that position and someone might even point that out although it doesn't happen very often in the case of professors you know it happens fairly frequently in other sorts of occupations you know all of a sudden your position is made useless because somebody figured out how to automate you and poof you're gone and like that's hard on your worldview but it's a lot harder on your celery so a lot of the reasons that people cling to the validity of their Theory is because it gives them a claim to a certain kind of uh what would you call skill set and utility that then gives them a claim to occupy a certain position in the dominance hierarchy and that protects them from from you know all the horrors of reality not completely but you know I mean I have health insurance for example sometimes that's really really helpful so I don't want some Joker coming along and pointing out that my theory isn't isn't right anyway so far that hasn't happened so that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned so pH concludes and says if all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete and efficient one evidently it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy okay so PSA figures you're a information foraging machine so to speak and the process that you engage in while you're forging from information for information and then figuring out know what to do with it is typical to human beings and there's some constancy of structure across human beings okay so that's that's the first idea it isn't that we all do it in a different way even though there's individual variation obviously um the other sort of fundamental postulate of constructivism especially the pedian version of constructivism is that you sort of build yourself from the bottom up starting with your body so P this is one of the things about P's Theory that's unbelievably sophisticated I think so when people were first developing models of artificial intelligence they thought they'd be able to develop machines that sort of modeled the world and then figured out how to act in the world sort of abstractly and then would after they figured out how to act in the world would then act in the world but that proved to be impossible as you can tell because we don't have you know ambulatory robots that can like bus tables at a at a restaurant which turns out to be by the way a very complex job fast mathematical operations computer can handle that easily or easily but busing a table it's like no computer's smart enough to do that so that's pretty peculiar but it turned out after like 40 years of investigation that you couldn't build computers that would operate as independent robots by teaching them to model the world and then by having them model the potential action that they were going to undertake and then by implementing it that did not work partly because modeling the world is way more complicated than anybody ever suspected it's like infinitely more complicated and so some robotics engineers such as Rodney Brooks who worked at MIT started building robots from the bottom up he made these little Mindless robots that really didn't even have a s a central processor that were action oriented so like the first things he built were these little insect likee things that could skitter away from light that's all they could do it turn on light poof they' go find some dark and it's as if so imagine the world to that robot was a binary place it was either a light place or a dark place and then you might say well what did light or dark mean to this little robot then you have to ask yourself well what does meaning mean and that that's a very good question it's one that PJ answers meaning means to that little robot move to a different place so light to that robot meant mooved to a different place so what the what the robot in a sense was doing was transforming one form of information like verus start into another form which was skin away and so I love that because it's not easy to understand what meaning means until you relate it to the body and so P's fundamental proposition is that the the elements of your understanding are not perceptual abstractions in fact there's even elements of understanding that underly your perceptual abstractions that are more fundamental and what those are essentially are sensory motor skills they things you do with your body it's a lovely idea it's extremely profound and I I think it's absolutely correct it it does recre havoc with the idea of disembodied intelligence however because for p and also for Rodney Brooks who um is responsible by the way just so you know some of you have seen big dog you seen big dog look up DARPA DPA how many of you have seen big dog how many of you are terrified by Big Dog yes big dog is this robot that's being developed by the US Army that is about this big and it's four-legged it's got a head and it can run like faster than you and it can run in snow and it can run on ice and it can run up hills and if you kick it it balances and stands back up and hypothetically it's going to be used to transport like the heavy things that soldiers have to carry but you know don't believe that that's a stupid idea once these things can ambulate by themselves and they can already follow each other CU now they have visual systems um arming them is going to be a very simple matter and so the probability that we'll have unbelievably super fast robots that can shoot you in 10 years is like to me as far as I can tell from the development is absolutely certain I have a friend who's a computer engineer and he's a really good one and he said you know how in science fiction movies sometimes when those robots shoot at you they miss he said when the robots shoot at you not only will they shoot at where you are but they'll shoot at the sixth place that they calculate you're most likely to Dart to and they will never miss so that's a lovely thing to think about so hopefully that won't come to pass but it probably will so here's the sort of thing that PJ was interested in these are very fundamental questions and he was a very deep intellect so he tried to go right to the bottom of the structures of knowledge to find out what was down there upon what does an individual basis judgments that's a good one how do you know whether you do a or b or what the difference is between right and wrong how is that instantiated in your in your being what are your Norms how is it that those Norms are validated what's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general which which is a question like well there's a consensual reality that we all share to some degree which is why we can communicate but there's not a onetoone relationship between that consensual reality and the categories of science so PJ was interested in the similarities between our consensual Viewpoint and the scientific Viewpoint and the differences so for example people used to hypothetically assume that the world was flat um and you could say well the reason they assumed that was because it looks flat when you look at it so it was an empirical observation but obviously there were other observations that we managed to produce that indicated that the world wasn't flat and then our scientific conceptions and our interpersonal uh consensual Norms became divorced from one another and that's become a really serious problem say with branches of science like quantum mechanics which you know they're absolutely completely incomprehensible from a pragmatic perspective even to those who formulate them mathematically a p would say the reason for that is that well when we interact with objects at the phenomenal phenomenological level which is the level that we can most easily perceive they act Newtonian you know so can I take your pen so you know you can sort of predict what this pen will do because it acts like other objects of about its size and shape with mass and so your understanding of this is actually based upon your knowledge of what will happen if you manipulate this thing with your body you know it's it's solid you'd be very surprised if you could like put your fingers through this pen you'd be surprised if it broke cuz you expect a certain hardness you do expect it to write although pens often don't you expect it to be pointy you know that you can take it apart into many objects even though like you could ask how many objects is this well it's one pen right but you could take it apart you know and now it's two objects and then you can see that there's other objects in here and sometimes you can put it back together and it'll still work and so so P's point is that what we regard as understanding to say that you understand something is to indicate that you can predict what is going to occur if you interact with that object with your body okay and that's that gives you your intuitive understanding of things and so because this is material other you you already know something about other things that are material right and you can transfer it from place to place and that's again an embodied knowledge because material things are those things through which you cannot put your hand right you get some weird things like smoke or clouds and like well are they what are they are they objects is a cloud an object well no not really because an object is one of these things that you could sort of manipulate as a unit now the categories of quantum mechanics of course which deal with these incredibly tiny things that are really not particles and are really not waves they're incomprehensible to us because we never manipulate anything at that scale and so because we can't play with it we have no real way of understanding it because our understanding is based on the mapping of objects onto our body so any object we can't map onto our body is therefore fundamentally incomprehensible it's a very cool Theory you know and a very body Centric Theory so how does the fact that children think differently than we do affect our presumption of fact itself that's a very interesting question question too is like so you've got three-year-olds and of course they're pretty clueless about the world but and and you know more but there's the threey old is alive in everything and functioning and so then you have to ask yourself well if their conception of the world is qualitatively different than your conception how is it that you can both survive in the same world and what does that mean about about what knowledge means and about the limits of knowledge I mean you know I could say the same thing about you that you might say about a three-year-old which is well if I took you from this place and dropped you in the jungle you know soon you'd be dead first you'd be miserable then you'd be dead and so that sort of like the three-year-old's state of being if you you know if you were supposed to take care of them and you disappeared so obviously even your knowledge of the world is limited by what it's limited in its necessary generality by the context but that also has something interesting to say about the validity of your knowledge itself very context dependent so okay so that's the sort of thing that PJ was interested in here's some other ones what do you mean by number so that's an interesting one so you know how they say you can't compare apples and oranges well you can so if I said well what's two oranges plus two apples four fruits who said that s very good so the way you solved that was by generalizing up a level right so if I said uh um what's two desks plus two rocks what would you say Yes Man you're very good at this particular that's an IQ that those are IQ questions by the way so if you didn't get them now you could feel disappointed and depressed so if you got them well then you can p yourself on the back so that's good yeah so number is a funny thing because well as I pointed out with the pen well one can become many very rapidly and many can become one and well the whole idea of number is extremely difficult to understand you know like what is it in common between singular entities that allows you to represent all of them with one well animals don't do that they can in a sense they can sort of int it three or four which is about all we can int it too but once we get the nomenclature done properly man we can use numbers like crazy and then they enable us to manipulate reality like mad so whatever it is we're abstracting from the commonality between objects seems to be something that gives us incredible power so that's a problem what do you mean by space since we know for example from Einstein's work that you know space space is is not an absolute in any sense it is at the speeds we move so what do you mean by time and speed when is an object permanent and when isn't it and when do you learn that what does it mean that an object is the same across time that's a good one so you know I don't know if there's a single molecule in your body that was there you know 5 months ago 6 months ago there's some I don't remember what the turnover duration is but it's fairly it's fairly quick so it's weird e because there you are and you were there two years ago but none of your constituent elements are the same so how is it that you can be the same now the physicist Shing schinger of of the Schrodinger's cat Fame solved that by claiming that you were a dissipative structure it's very interesting way that's what he thought life was dissipative structures a dissipative structure is the same as a you know when you when you pull up the the uh you call that at the bottom of the sink stopper you I think so stopper if your sink is full of water and you pull up the stopper you know you get a Whirlpool right and it all the water spins as it as it goes down the the drain hole and you'll notice that that Whirlpool looks sort of the same across time even though obviously the water molecules that make it up are different he called that a dissipative structure it was a pattern that maintained itself in spite of the movement of matter through it and that's what you are by the way so it requires energy to keep a dissipative structure um intact but uh you take in energy so thanks to the Sun what do you mean by chance um why do you have moral concerns and what does it mean that you have moral concerns that you have ideas about how people should behave and how they shouldn't behave and and you have a very deep understanding of that and it's characteristic of all human beings and many many animals so where does that come from and is a developed form of knowledge what are children doing when they're playing what are people doing when they're dreaming and uh what's the significance of the fact that you can imitate other people now I I'll start with the last one briefly um you know you might think that one of the things that really distinguishes us from other creatures animals is the fact that we have a thumb and that's a big one we''ve got very good functional thumbs and hoay for that and we stand up on two feet so we get a chance to use our thumbs and hands to carry things around and to break things and to take them apart and to swing sticks and so on but there are other animals who can do that to a limited degree and then there's our ability to talk that's a major one but one of the other things that really differentiates people from other animals is you know you hear monkey see monkey do right well that's wrong monkey see that's the end of that um monkeys really can't imitate one and they certainly can't imitate any even randomly generated novel behavior that another monkey produces think about it this way you know you hear these claims that chimpanzees have culture it's like well no they don't not really and the reason for that it's easy to figure out that they don't have culture I mean let's say chimps have been around roughly speaking for 15 million years which is not a bad estimate because we diverged from them about 7 million years ago and evidence is pretty clear that the thing that we diverged from looked a lot more like a chimp than it looked like us so like we've been booting it ahead madly developing like mad and The Chimps of be laying back and eating leaves you know so so do they have a culture well they've had 15 million years you know they haven't even built a Hut yet and the reason I'm telling you that is because if you're a culture generated creature and you only imagine M you only manage say one Discovery every 100 years years between all of you if you have 15 million years to get your act together that's a lot of 100e segments and so even if the chimpanzee was building culture at the rate of 0.001% a year if you compound that over 15 million years you have the Empire State Building and there aren't empire state buildings that chimpanzees are living in and so therefore they don't have culture now they might be able to recognize their the their peers in the dominance hierarchy they can do that and they can use maybe they can use Simple tools but the tools they use seem to be dependent on the environment that they inhabit you know cuz some people say well some chimps use one tool and some chimps use another but you know if you're going to live in a rocky place then you might use rocks and if you're going to live in a place that has sticks you might use sticks but that's not because you're different it's because the environment's different so anyways chimps can't imitate one another very much um but humans man we're ridiculous like we're we're so imitated it's absolutely crazy you know and that's so cool because what it means is that once you get a pattern of behavior you you know you whip up a new pattern of behavior I can watch you and I can just instantiate it in my own body you know maybe a bit awkwardly to begin with although maybe sometimes better than you can and bang I've got that and so we're always looking around at each other seeing what we're up to and as soon as we see someone who's up to something interesting then we can do the same thing children do that cuz they imitate right but there even better at it man they generalize across instances of imitation so for example remember when you're a kid and you're playing maybe you're playing house and you're the mom or maybe you're I don't know maybe you're the house cat cuz children will certainly do that and so let's say the child is being the house cat so he or she is down on you know all fource zooming around like a cat maybe meowing and you know rubbing up against their mother's leg and looking for a melt milk in the bowl and they're not exactly imitating their cat because if they were exactly imitating their cat they would be moving exactly the same way the cat moved but no they're not what they're doing is they've observed the cat across a wide variety of of environments they've abstracted what constitutes generalized cat behavior from all of those instances and then they can instantiate the spirit of the cat which is sort of the movements that make up catness and then you because you're so smart you can watch them zooming around on the ground and despite the fact that they don't have a tail or ear ear or fur you're going to figure out pretty quick that that is now a cat and children do the same thing with their parents like if they're playing house and they imitate their father you know they may to to some degree try to imitate the sound of his voice and maybe even use a couple of his favorite phrases but basically what they're doing is trying to act like a father rather than imitating their father so it's like IM it's meta imitation right it's I watch you I watch you I watch you I watch you there's alties across all those instances I extract the commonalities I embody it and then when I play that's what I'm doing I'm figuring out how to embody the commonalities across multiple exposures and that's that's you're doing that when you're like three you're so smart and then even if you're asleep you're doing it because you're doing it in your dreams and so human beings do that no other animals do so when you're thinking about the ways that we're weird you want to put imitation way up there on the list because you can you know think about deaf people like congenitally deaf people don't have much access to language you know say they don't learn sign language because that used to happen in the past it's like they can still wander around in the world and fit in well why well because they're so good at imitating you know they get all the non-verbal stuff and that's a lot so language is you know great and all that language actually enables you to imitate across space and time that's what it's for because you know maybe whip up a new action and then you write it down in words and then you send it to someone and they those are instructions by the way because that's what instructions are you send that to someone and then they read your code for behavior and then they act it out and so language enables you to move imitation across space and time and that's a really good way of conceptualizing language because it's a pedian way because sometimes we might think that language is there to describe the world you know in a scientific sense George Kelly kind of thinks that that thought that that human beings are sort of like natural scientists but natural scientists are much more concerned with what is than with how to act so Kelly's wrong what human beings are more like is natural Engineers because we're always you know zooming around trying to figure out how to fiddle with things much more than what they are and as I mentioned to you earlier a pragmatist would say well it's an artificial distinction because things are what they are when you fiddle with them that's in fact what they are so so that's pretty smart a also says this is part of the constructivist notion because constructivism is a philosophical school he says knowledge does not begin in the eye and it does not begin in the object it begins in the interactions there's a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand and the object on the other there is no structure apart from construction either abstract or genetic I really like that I showed you some of the symbolic categories in a couple of you know previous lectures and I I mentioned for example that one of the symbolic categories is the great father and the greata kind of stands for cultural structure whereas the great mother stands for novelty and and and and sometimes the terrifying anyways back to the great father there's a precondition in constructivism that there has to be three things that exist and they map right onto that symbolic structure one is culture so when you look at something or really when any creature looks at something there's an inbuilt structure that characterizes the creature some of which would be biological built in and some of which would be acquired that they must have in order to structure their perceptions of what they're looking at so you don't come to the situation blank you know for for example you have two eyes so you're going to have stereo Vision most of the time you know and you have five senses and they're the same sense and there's more than that you have snake detection circuits for example so you're sort of primed to respond to a certain class of predators and you like sweet tastes and sour tastes but you don't really like bitter tastes and so on and so forth like right from the beginning you bring a landscape of interpretive structures in order to uh frame and simplify the world that you are exposed to now the World itself is this sort of amorphous thing it's a morphous because it's so multi-dimensional and complex there's so much of it it's like a fog that contains everything and so unless you can frame that and simplify it and narrow it it's very difficult for you to understand and interact with it at all I mean you you know you just can't deal with everything at once it's hard enough to deal with one little thing at a time and you know this internal structure is partly what enables you to deal with one little thing at a time and then so there's you and there's the the source of all information there's the structure of you and the source of all information and then there's the the process that's you and the process that's you is you using your appendages fundamentally and your senses to interact with things and to make them manifest new properties right and so those are properties that they might not manifest without you there and it's very difficult for you to tell when you're interacting with the world even at a perceptual level how much What You observe wouldn't be there if you weren't there now so because one of the big philosophical questions is well what's there when you're not there and and that is a much more complicated question than you might imagine um the the doist would say well what's there is so much an amalgam of everything at once that it might as well be nothing at all and it's sort of a and give you a way of understanding that so let's say you took every Symphony that was ever written recorded he and then you took all those recordings together and you laid one on top of the other and you'd say well now I've got like every Symphony at once on a tape and then you played the tape what would it sound like would sound like white noise it would sound like and so you could say white noise is functionally equivalent to every single Symphony that's ever been written every piece of music that's ever been written all being played at once well so what you know so and the DS would also say you have to remember that what something is is just as dependent on what it isn't as it is dependent on what it is so that's a tough one but it's very very smart so the constructivist would certainly agree with that now Bruner who is a constructivist of sorts put a little twist on P's idea which I'm going to borrow because I think it makes explaining PJ easier at least it makes it easier for me and since I'm explaining it that's that's what we're going to have to go for Bruner said we seem to have no other way of describing lived time save in the form of a narrative now the reason I think this is a pedian constructivist claim is because p is concerned with knowledge as it emerges from action and action is clearly represented in narratives right because a narrative is about what the characters are doing so narrative is the way that we represent information about doing so and knowledge for PSA is about doing so I just put the two together and that and that there's other reasons for it too and that makes it simpler to explain so here's here's a way of thinking about how we put a structure on the world so and I've mentioned I kind of introduced you to this idea before so you're headed somewhere wherever that happens to be because you're an active organism and so you're you know even if you're don't have any immediate needs you're going to poke about at things just because you're curious turns out that your dopaminergic system which is the system that drives curiosity Fires at a certain constant rate even if you're not hungry or tired or thirsty or you know even if no primary needs are clamoring for your attention so your your default comfortable state is mildly curious about everything and so that's part of what makes you an information forager because when you have nothing better to do so to speak you'll just poke around and see what happens because you never know that knowledge might come in useful in the future so anyways you're always going from point A to point B because you're and the way you get from point A to point B even if point B is an abstraction because it often is you know I'm going towards a better future well that's kind of a weird abstraction how are you going to get there well you can be sure that at the base it's going to involve movement right because to get to that future there's there's movements you're going to have to make so see see how I structured this I'm going to go ahead to something give a sec here how should I do this got the example yeah have to go forward a bit here and then back okay so we're going to look at this we're going to look at this diam then we're going to go back so um start with an abstract philosophical concept I want to be a good person well you might debate forever about what the good means right it's the sort of philosophical conundrum that you can fall into because you can think in abstractions and then you might think of it as a property of the world and as something that's subject to internal debate which is exactly what's happened in the history of mankind but there's another way of looking at it that's actually probably more accurate and I would say also more useful and this is the way it's like so you're going to try to be a good person well the pan view would be being a good person it's not a state of mind what it is is an abstraction that represents well first other Associated abstractions because the we could say well being a good person is a multi-dimensional problem that's right you can't you can't just be good and then it's done it's like being a good person might mean being good at well what well good at being a friend good at being a lover good at being a a parent good at being a child good at being an employee you know you could say good is what's the same across all those things and P would call that a scheme just so you know because a scheme is what's the same across multiple different things so and the scheme is the basis of abstraction for PHA so good person is the sum total or the or the commonalities between being a good teacher student employee Etc okay so then we'll say okay so now we can move the problem of analysis one level down and we can say okay well what does it mean to be a good parent and then you'd say well maybe you have to have a good job because you know otherwise you and your child starve but we'll forget about that one for a moment and then you might say well you have to do a good job of taking care of your family okay so you notice we're zeroing in on an element of the good here and it's still an abstraction care for your family that's an abstraction so then you might say well one of the things you would do if you cared for your family is play with the baby and another might be complete a meal so we'll take the play with the baby example and then there's three things you can do with your baby you can peek at it they like that that's object permanence say there's nothing more thrilling to a baby than discovering that you're still there when you disappear like a baby you can amuse a baby for hours with that Discovery because it's by no means self-evident to the baby that's a petan notion they lack object permanence so as far as they're concerned it's a hell of a shock when you disappear because they were just appreciating you being there and then they're just as shocked when you reappear and you can it's so interesting to watch them because when a baby gets startled like when you get startled you know you might go like that if you're really startled a baby it's like its whole body is startled right it like it makes a weird face and it moves its arms and its legs and then takes it like 5 Seconds to recover you know they really have a startle reflex so and they'll often laugh I'm sure you've seen the laughing babies on YouTube because of course there's like two billion views of laughing babies which is a good thing it shows that we like babies I think there's one that's very famous where a baby is reacting to his mother either sneezing or coughing you know you know the one God it's absolutely hilarious this baby just has a fit and what's basically happening is its mother coughs I think it's coughs or maybe sneezes blows her nose oh okay oh yeah she blows her nose so she makes this weird elephant likee noise and the baby is like shocked that mother could do this and then it gets surprised at its own startle and that makes it laugh so that's a really interesting phenomena from a pedian perspective because one of the things that P noticed the children did because they could imitate was imitate themselves that's how they got to know who they were so for example if a child would say a child would accidentally knock that off when they're eating well that's a hell of a thing to discover you know if you move your arm just a little bit that will fall off that's cool so then maybe you can do that 60 70 times well you're supposed to be eating and the other thing that's really cool about doing that is that Mom will immediately rush over and pick that up and put it back and this is an excellent game you can entertain yourself with that for like a month and basically what you're discovering is the relationship between your movements and gravity right it's like this is a major league Discovery it's no wonder you're obsessed with it so so anyways the point with regards to imitation is maybe the baby does this accidentally to begin with that startles them and then it's put up again and then they think well that was cool wonder if we can do that again then they're pretty happy about that and then they'll keep practicing that until they get like expert at doing that so instead of using like gross body movements to do it which is how they'd start they get develop finer and finer and finer body movements until they've got the whole knock a light thing off a table down and it's it could even be fascinating as an adult some of you probably played table hockey you know with the the quarter you know how to do that put a quarter on a table it's not very complicated you make little gold your your job is to flick the thing so that it just sits that far over the table end so that the opponent can flip it up that's a that's like your opportunity to score a goal my point is playing with how things move in relationship to friction and gravity is so engrossing to human beings that you can even make a game out of it if you're you know a relatively bored and stupid adult I played that game all the time with my son by the way so I put myself in that category as well now what the child is doing is it'll Accidentally In some ways Bumble into something interesting and then it recognizes that it's interesting in sense because that's a reflex action on its part and then once it recognizes that it's had that reflex action which is kind of it's pleasurable as long as it's not too intense it's at least interesting then they'll try to imitate what they just did so part of the way you Master yourself is by imitating yourself after you've accidentally do done something interesting it's so smart so that's a petan notion so anyways you're playing with the baby and you can play Peak with the baby that's a good one you're teaching it that you're still there even though you went away and you can tickle the baby which is best done in moderation because it's not exactly clear that babies enjoy that they just laugh when you do that so that you like them and don't throw them out the window when they're being annoying and then you can clean the baby too say those those are elements of the care of a baby I know that's not very sophisticated but you know those are some of the basics now the thing that's different about play with baby and tickle baby is that play with baby is an abstraction whereas tickle baby is an action right and so when you're trying to solve the Mind Body problem this is how you solve it the mind is those abstractions the body is the actions that those abstractions ground themselves in so it's not like the mind is attached to the body it's the mind is a sequence of high hierarchically arranged abstractions the bottom level of which are not abstractions they're actions there's a qualitative transformation at the bottom of the hierarchy at the highest resolution level of the hierarchy it's action now you can understand P very very easily if you understand that the way a baby develops as far as PHA is concerned is from the bottom up so the baby starts with it's lying in its crib it's a useless thing it's laying there it can't even focus its eyes you know it's just barely getting going so it's sort of floating in space trying to figure out what's going on you know and it doesn't even know that it has arms really it just sort of detects these things off to the side it'll of to Bonk itself in the face with their its arms or scratch itself because you have to cut baby's nails really short because otherwise they scratch themselves because their arms are just you know wandering around randomly and the baby sorts from a petan perspective the baby starts to learn learn that learn what its body is capable of doing and some of that it just discovers by accident now there's no doubt some natural neurological progression that's going on so the baby is learning along the paths that babies can learn but still from a pedian perspective the baby is doing quite a bit of exploring to facilitate its neurological development and more complex animals may be doing that in the womb you know trying out their legs and so on so so that they can run as soon as they you know as soon as they get out so it's not even obvious that all that sort of thing is reflexive and automatic in an animal that is more active when it's born so the baby is Begins by basically it sort of develops from the middle outward so what's the baby got when it first pops into the world Well it can't see very well although it can focus at about 12 in which conveniently is about the distance that its head is from its mother's eyes if it's breastfeeding so that's good for social communication so the mother gaze at the baby and the baby can gaze at the mother and for some reason they both find that fascinating so baby's also very wired up around the mouth so it can use its mouth quite a lot and it can use its tongue those those come pre-wired so and this is kind of a Freudian observation so at the beginning the baby really is oral because that's all that works like it can smell too you know but but it's it's it's it's voluntary capacity for Action is really centered around its mouth and you'll notice that babies infant are toddlers even love to put things in their mouth my son when he was a kid he used to go in the backyard we did feed him so that is wasn't the reason he'd go in the backyard and pick up acorns and stuff his cheeks with him just like a chipmunk and so you know then we' take him up to the bath and we'd have to like dig all the acorns out of his cheeks and he did that for oh God way longer than you'd expect any sane child to do it so but the reason that he would put things in his mouth and you think about this is there's nothing that's a better exploratory organ than your tongue I mean check out one of your teeth bloody thing feels like it's about this big to your tongue as you'll notice if you know you ever get a tooth removed it's like the Grand Canyon was just instantiated inside your mouth then of course your tongue will work like mad of its own accord to investigate every tiny little crevice in that new hole because your brain wants to know what's your mouth and what isn't so that if there's something in your mouth that either should or shouldn't be a it can tell it from you and B it can tell whether or not it's supposed to be there turns out to be very important right because well there's tooth decay that's a problem but you know there's also insects and poison and all sorts of other things that you shouldn't put in your mouth so don't underestimate the degree to which you can zoom around the world like a you know Hoover vacuum cleaner and pick up a god- awful amount of information and of course you also feed that way obviously and so you know you're checking out your mother with your mouth and your tongue in a very meaningful way too and while you're feeding at the breast you're establishing the basis of social relationships now this puts a bit of a warp into the pedian hypothesis because P sort of assumed that the baby buil builds himself from the bottom up right but one of the things you have to understand is that the baby is always picking up how to behave and see in a very very very social context even when it's so young that PJ would regard it as primarily egocentric CU what the hell does a baby know about you you know but the mother is teaching the child how to act right from the time it's a little tiny thing like if it's going to breastfeed it has to do it in a relatively civilized manner because if it bites his mother or her mother which a baby can do they can really Chomp you a good one if their minds are made up to do that it's like unpleasant consequences are going to ensue at minimum the mother is going to startle and you know stop feeding the baby and you know maybe she'll put the baby down or or God only knows one time when my son was very young I guess he was about 13 months he just learned to walk and he walked up to my wife who was wearing shorts and he bit her right here and a good Chomp he was just teething and she reflexed her shot out as a reflex and he like he must have flown 6 feet it's like that's how you socialize children against sudden bites you know so it's even the even the smallest alterations of their behavior take place within an intensely social context so even at this level the society is is helping guide and restrict the development of of the child's motor activities now children tend to develop as I said they develop gross body movements first so they kind of learn to fling their arms so maybe you put a mobile in the crib for your baby to look at by the way most mobiles you'll notice maybe they're fish so you're a parent you're standing here and this is the side of the fish and this is the bottom of the fish and that's what the baby is looking at it's like the baby is looking at lines cuz the fish are there for the adults it's like that's a stupid mobile you get the fish turned over so that baby can see the fish and then you make them out of like black and white because babies are very good at picking up high contrast and that's a baby mobile rather than a mother mobile so you got to decide whether the mobile is for you or for your baby so anyways you put the mobile above the baby and you kind of want to put it within limb length and then the baby will watch this thing who knows maybe it's annoyed to death by this thing we don't know it's like you know and then it'll it'll sort of flail about like it does in a not very well controlled Manner and maybe it'll flail an arm or a leg and now and then it'll get lucky and it will nail one of those fish and that'll startled it and so usually it'll that it might cry then because that might have just if it's a neurotic baby it'll cry it's like that's too much for today take the whole bottle away but if it's a kind of a outgoing exploratory baby then the next thing it's really going to want to do is to figure out how to make that fish move again and then it'll sit there and practice flailing its leg it's like it's throwing its leg at the fish and if it gets lucky it'll nail it a good one and then that'll make it laugh and then you know it'll practice doing that over a sequence of babies are persistent man so when my daughter was little she was about 18 months old we bought her this little cardboard box that had little cardboard Disney books in it you know and she didn't care what the Disney books were what she was really interested in is getting those three books out of the Disney box and then trying to get them back in because it turned out that was quite difficult cuz they fit tightly so this was a great puzzle for her cuz you know she was still getting the whole cord thing going and she'd sit for like 3 hours getting those those books in that box and that was like a toy for for a week till she figured it out then she was on to bigger and better things but that's a big deal right you can imagine what you're doing neurologically when you're doing that it's like first of all you got to grip that book properly second you got to orient it precisely third as you add the additional books to the Box the shape changes cuz the books flop over you know cuz they'll flop over diagonally so the shape changes you got to figure out how to adjust that and then the book itself will open and that'll get in the way so you got to keep the book closed and you know the tolerances are like an 18th of an inch so so you want to master that and like some people don't I had a client once who had a very low fluid intelligence probably 75 80 you wouldn't have known it by looking at them but uh he he couldn't find employment surprise surprise there's there's no jobs in our society for people who are at that end of the cognitive distribution I got him a volunteer job at one point and his job was to put paper in envelopes had to fold it up in three because that's how you fold up a piece of paper and then you have to put it in envelope but that actually turns out to be hyper complex I probably trained him for 28 to 30 hours to do that and because when you do it next time or you could do it now you just think about what you're doing it's first of all merely by observing the piece of paper you have to figure out how to make the first fold and it better be damn close to 1/3 because if it isn't when you make the second fold you're going to compound your error and then you're going to find to your Chagrin that the piece of paper does not fit in the envelopes because the envelope is exactly the same size as the piece of paper so if you're out by your estimate say a quarter of an inch in your first fold you're out by a half inch in your second fold it's like it's not going in there or if if you don't fold it completely at 90° you know so the edges line up say you're out by a 16th of an inch and then you do that again so now you're out by an eight it won't fit in sideways so then you have to mangle the envelope to to get the paper in there and then by the time you're done mangling the envelope not only does it look ugly but it will not go through an automatic sorting machine so and then added to that was the problem that on these pieces of paper there were often photographed Staples because he was working for a charity so then and but the photographs weren't always stapled at exactly the same place on the piece of paper so then he'd have to look at the piece of paper and he'd have to figure out where the photograph is and then he'd have to figure out how to fold the piece of paper so that he didn't bend the photograph so that it would still fit in the envelope and that just used to he just sweat himself to death trying to solve that problem because there was time pressure too so and then there's an added level of complexity on top of that and the reason I'm telling you this is because it'll give you some sense of how you know simple actions are aggregated into increasingly complex operations some of the envelopes were French and some of them were English because it was Canada and so you couldn't put a French letter in an English envelope the French ones had to go in a separate pile and then there was a huge stack say of English letters and a huge stack of English envelopes all of which hypothetically had been stacked so that each one corresponded to the other but now and then one of them would be out of alignment so then you had to figure out out whether it was the letters that were out of the alignment or the envelopes well that's a that's a high complexity working memory problem and that just bring him to a standstill so anyways you know during typical development you develop those incredibly fine motor skills e early which is part of the reason why it's kind of nice to have your baby toddler infant do something by itself you know like sit there with a box till it gets a little bored and then it'll start to figure out what to do with the box and that's part of play and that's part of the development of its embodied conceptual structure so okay so so you basically chain these things together now the way that PJ he thought well what's the motivation for doing this so the motivation is essentially is that well sometimes it can be sort of random you accidentally do something interesting and then try to repeat it but as you sort of develop the number of times that you do something accidentally that results in something interesting starts to decline now what part of what happens to you as you mature is that the opportunities that are provided for you by your body as you exercise and develop it start you know start to really ramp up and develop so that you can do a lot more interesting things with your body by the time you're two than you can when you're 9 months old for example you can zoom around which just opens up a whole universe of things to pull over and dump over and pull off tables and you know and there's things lying around that you can write on walls with and you can pull out cupboards and it's like it's it's it's you know Paradise for an exploratory B baby so but what happens is that as the child puts himself or herself together physically and develops additional skills then they can elic additional manifestations of novelty from the world so for example well here's a good example so the child finally manages to get itself upright which is like a colossal colossal amazing accomplishment you know I mean first of all that's hard to do you know like no there aren't two-legged creatures in the world except for us you know and we're so good at this you can even isn't that wonderful I learned that when I was two so you know you can do these amazing things with your body but the child is like trying to put itself together neurologically and it's a hell of an operation to get this column of bone it's like jellyfish on a bone you know on or on stock bones and you got to get the thing to stand up upright God ridiculously difficult so the child manages that there's a lot of pain and anguish associated with that right because those little creatures they just fall down you know they got these little short arms so they're not much good at protecting themselves from Impact they're just bouncing off the walls like mad in the floor when they're trying to learn to walk then they finally get themselves upright and totter along and fall and so on but then you know then the world turns into a different place because all of a sudden now you can stand up underneath a table that's the F that's a fun thing to do for the first time it's like whack so now your new body has taught you something about the world that you did not know so what P would say is well you've got this scheme worked out which is the standing up scheme and it turns out that that works pretty well if you're in an empty space but if you're in an enclosed space with a low ceiling the whole standing up thing is just not going to produ produce the results intended so you stand up and whack yourself and that's a sign that it's time to update your representational structures and so you can think of that technically as the emergence of anomaly into what would have otherwise been a conceptually protected space now P has this idea of equilibration so let's say your baby crawls and let's say it's an equilibrated crawler which means it's kind of an expert and babies get pretty expert crawlers by about say 12 13 months they can zoom around and they know how not to bump into things and you know how to crawl around without hurting themselves so when they crawl around only the things that they want to have happen happen most of the time and they're equilibrated at that point because their actions and their conceptions of the consequence of those actions match they've got no problem what they expect or want to have happen when they crawl is what happens that baby's at has mastered a developmental stage so that's the stage idea and that's the equilibrated stage idea equilibration is a brilliant idea and I'll tell you why in a minute but then all of a sudden the baby learns to stand up it's like uhoh an advance but it's like a revolutionary Advance right it's equivalent to a revolution in science which is why P mentioned it's like well now I'm a standing creature the whole crawling expertise is hardly worth it at all you know there's some transfer of knowledge but the you new universe that's made accessible to the baby by its now Dawning ability to stand forces it to revolutionize its entire cognitive structure now I I'll give you I want to tell you a very quick story because it's a very good one so this is a good indication of the function of dream in play so when my daughter was three she couldn't talk very well she she learned to speak late and we lived in Boston and when she learned to speak she developed a Boston accent which we were completely flabbergasted by because we didn't have a Boston accent and neither did any of our neighbors turns out there's a speech impediment that sounds just like a Boston accent but anyway she was it usually goes away except in Boston so anyway she she was she was three and when her brother was born there's always the possibility of sibling rivalry right because and for good reason it's like H time to get rid of that thing all it's doing is taking up all of Mom's attention you know like that's a hard reality for a child who's under three to manage CU they're still pretty dependent and it's like well what why should they be liking this horrible noisy attention grabbing interloper so we tried to we tried to teach her right from the time he came home her her her brother that the idea was she was going to lose something which was some parental attention especially from her mother but she was potentially going to gain something which was maturity Independence and the possibility of a new relationship now we could tell her that some parents will tell their three-year-olds that it's like and your three-year-old has learned to look at you when you talk but they're actually hearing you know how dogs in cartoons hear people talk it's like wah wah wah w w w that's how children hear you talk when you're talking about something like Independence like what the hell do they know about that that's way up there on the hierarchy but we tried to teach her to interact with the baby in such a way that she would elicit positive feedback from him and so that they could be friends and then we also taught her that she should take care of the baby and that gave her something to do so that worked we also didn't let them tease each other not much you know they're going to tease each other a bit because siblings often bloody well hate each other when they're when they're young and sometimes that just destroys the relationship for their whole life it's like you don't want that cuz you're stuck with your damn brother till he dies hopefully or until you do so anyway so my daughter was taking care of this little guy and you know she used to watch him on the steps and sort of Shepherd him around and she she was pretty good at it and then um one day he started to walk and she kept talking about her baby and we told her that well he wasn't really a baby anymore and we didn't realize that this was setting off a cognitive revolution of the petan sort because of course she'd kind of grown attached to this baby just like mothers do and mothers sometimes get so attached to their babies that they really don't want them to stop being babies and so they end up living in their house till they're 55 you know plotting the destruction of the world so you don't want to have that happened so but it was happening in in a microw way with her it's like well there's this baby and I spent a lot of time getting used to it and figuring out what to do with it now it's not a baby anymore what what the hell is it so she had this amazing dream and it ties back to the shamanic stuff that I taught you guys about earlier so this is the dream she dreamt that the baby crawled into a hole in the backyard now the way the hole got there was that a tree from the park beside us had moved into our backyard and then it had burned down and left this hole and then the hole was full of water and so the baby crawled into the water and it reduced him to a skeleton and then there was a bug in the water and the bug pulled him out and when he came out he was a new creature so it was it was perfect like she came and told me that I don't know like two in the morning in her little three-year-old voice saying I got it all tiped down but was absolutely spectacular because it was a straight shamanic dream like the tree burned down and so that's a transformation Motif and then water is the place of rebirth and you know the kid was dissolved into a skon and the little bug that pulled him out is like a representation of the underlying process that guides transformation her little brain was like weing like M trying to figure out continuity over change that's a tough one right because it's almost like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon it's a big deal baby to toddler that's a big difference you know she's supposed to figure out well that's the same thing well no it's not so underneath her unconscious mind you know three-year-olds are not stupid even though they can't talk they've got this brain that's like 3.5 billion years old it's not stupid so so anyways um now why was I telling you that a specific reason oh well it's another indication of how so the transformations of cognitive structure are forced Upon a Child at least in part by the development of increasing physical ability right because as you increase in physical ability and capacity then the world transforms and then your cognitive processes have to transform to keep up with that and sometimes that's a radical transformation so P's fundamental hypothesis is that part of the reason that people are motivated to undergo cognitive Transformations and learning per se is because as they mature they re they automatically come into contact with anomalous information information that they cannot process from within the confines of their current world model and because they can't process it it interferes with them getting what they want and so they're motivated to keep their cognitive structures updated so and sometimes the revolutions occur at a micro level and that might be like when you're learning the difference between this and this you know it's like it's a major difference but it doesn't you know disrupt the whole fabric of your conceptual Universe whereas a divorce might the baby transforming into a toddler might puberty does it's cuz like you just finally got used to your body you're 12 years old he so you're sort of at the Pinnacle of childhood you're like an adult child you know what you're doing and 11 and 12y olds are often lovely creatures because they're pretty mature and they've got their act together and then all of a sudden bang sex hormones kick in it's like you are no longer the same thing and neither is anyone you interact with and so it's like turbulence for three four five 20 30 years until you sort of sort that out which you never really do and so you can see how the physiological Transformations that are attended on development some biologically predicated and some an emergent consequence of learning disrupt the cognitive structures that people use to orient themselves in the world and that some of those disruptions are sort of low-key equivalent to normal science that would be assimilation and some of them much broader and that's equivalent to accommodation assimilation means you something new that you can already handle using the constructs and schemas that you have at hand you know so maybe you have to pick the thing up like this instead of like this but you already know this and you know that so who cares it's like a little minor alteration and sometimes well know you have to readapt your whole body in order to handle the next level of complex problem solving learning to drive is like that learning to ride a bicycle is like that and you can see that there's sort of a there's not normal versus revolutionary Transformations there's sort of a Continuum that that map themselves onto that hierarchy I showed you you know so if at the very highest levels of resolution it's minor Transformations and up the higher levels of abstraction you can blow out whole huge chunks of yourself so it's a Continuum but PJ and sort of conceptualized it as a dichotomy all right let's see that's a map of that which you can look up um oh yes this is the this this this is the thing I really want to get at too this is it's so brilliant and so PJ was concerned about morality and he's one of the few psychologists I think who like he nailed it it's this is like the most important thing PJ discovered and maybe it's one of the most important things that a psychologist has ever discovered it's like how do you become moral well we already mentioned that when you acquire a behavior you inevitably acquire it in a social context so what that means is that right from the time you're little and learning things the demands of society are encoded in the behaviors that you're allowed to manifest and so sence to some degree by the time you behave the way you do behave when you're three if you've been properly socialized you already act out the embodied moral structure of your entire community so you know when you talk about laws you say there's a body of laws and the body of laws used to be the king so you had to do what the king said but now the body of laws is an abstract conceptual representation but those representations are actually semantic representations of allowable and not allowable behavior and so by the time you're three and you're a law-abiding three-year-old which means you're well socialized you're already acting in accordance with the law the patterns that characterize your being the behavioral patterns that characterize your being have already been molded into the patterns that you manifest and so what that means in some sense is you're already as n would say an unconscious advocate of your culture because you're acting it out now here's an examp here's an example of how that can be transformed into actual moral knowledge so he as goes and studies kids playing a game so here's an example so there's a bunch of kids they're standing around on the playground and they're all playing helicopter maybe they've just got sticks and they're all going you know and they're flying their helicopters around and they're all doing this maybe they're diving in each other so what's happened is each kid wants to have a helicopter and each kid wants to be a good helicopter pilot but each kid wants to be a good helicopter pilot in the way that other kids appreciate well they're being good helicopter Pilots that's tough a so not only do you have to figure out how to coordinate your behavior you have to figure out how to coordinate your behavior with other people coord coordinating their behavior in such a way that the shared activity not only does not come to a stop but proceeds an enjoyable way Jesus that's tough now if your kid can play well with other kids that's what they've managed okay so you got four kids doing this and there's rules actually there's not there's rituals that the children are EMB boing that they've agreed upon while they set up the game they've just sort of bashed the ideas against each other and they came up with a solution and you can tell that because the game is continuing and everyone is having fun it's like is everyone playing nice yes that's an equilibrated play State and it's a moral organization because all the children are participating voluntarily towards a shared end and pH for pH that was the model of a functional Society that's so smart so now imagine that a kid comes along and maybe he's a popular kid so he has a reasonable chance of getting into this play group he'll still be rebuffed like 50% of the time whereas if he's an unpopular kid it's like forget they're just not going to let him into the little helicopter Circle and it's probably because he's developmentally delayed or in in some other way he doesn't understand how he has to configure his behavior so that he can enter this complex dramatic scene without disrupting it or maybe he's one of those kids who says I don't want to play helicopter we should play something else it's like no unless you're unless you're like a creative genius that's a really bad idea so what the popular kids do is they sort of side off to the group maybe they find a stick because they watch what they're doing and maybe they find a stick and they sort of start going with the stick and they're sort of looking to see if that stick helicopter behavior is acceptable to the peers and maybe you know one of their friends sort of notices that they're playing helicopters and they open up the circle and that kid gets to come in and play helicopters but he might fail at that even if he's popular because once the little play thing is going it's like a play right it's got a dramatic structure you can't just come in there and you know start playing basketball or something so now what P noticed was that when children were playing a game maybe they were playing Marbles and that's a rough game May because you you can win and lose at Marbles and you might say well children shouldn't play competitive games but if you say that that's a sure sign that you don't know what the hell you're talking about because all games are competitive and Cooperative at the same time if they share a single goal and it's really not a game unless there's a goal because go games have goals and so what the children do is they they organize themselves so they all decide what constitutes an acceptable goal and the goal with marbles is win some marbles and lose some marbles without whining about it that's that's another goal and that's an important thing to learn so the children say well here's the foundation of our local moral Universe here's the rules that we're going to abide by and a lot of those are ritualistic they might have learned them from other kids so they play marbles you extract out a kid and you say what are the rules for marbles and if the kids's like seven they don't know they can't tell you but if you put them in with a bunch of other seveny olds they can play marbles perfectly well so what that means is the morality is coded in their behavior or in the behavior of the group like a bunch of bees you know because there's knowledge in a hive of bees or maybe a school of fish so it's embedded in the child's behavior and in their patterns of action across time and then if you pull them out they can only give like a partial account of it they're not conscious of the morality it's like you pull a wolf out of a wolf pack and say well you know what's up with the wolf pack and the Wolf you know bites you because that's that's how it answers questions it's not going to tell you about the rules it's only later in development that the children become conscious of the rules and then they become very irritated if people break them and then only much later do they start to understand that the rules can be adjusted by mutual agreement and that is associated with the pedian development of higher order morality it's brilliant you learn your actions the actions are conditioned by other people the actions are integrated into a voluntary game then the actions are integrated into a series of voluntary games that's social interaction then you learn the descriptions then you learn how to manipulate the descriptions brilliant movement up to hierarchy so that's pedian Theory and nutshell constructivism in nutshell we'll see you on Thursday |
psychoanalytic thought today it's depth psychology that's a better way to think about it the psychoanalysis techic is Freud and Freud was not the only contributor to the Corpus of psycho analytic ideas Adler who we won't talk much about was certainly Adler was smart and he's he's under he's underrated today wasn't as charismatic as Freud and Yung so and he didn't have the same flare for writing I suppose but he his ideas foreshadowed the development of later cybernetic ideas which we will talk about by by a good margin so Adler really had some some some smart things to say um Yung is the person we're going to talk about today and next time and I'm going to talk about him in some ways indirectly because the best way to understand Yung is to show you what you do with his ideas rather than really presenting the ideas themselves but I can give you a bit of an overview so one of the things that differentiates the Deb psychologists from say Behavior therapists and even from cognitive scientists is that you might say in one way they're more mystical which means more from the Romantic tradition than the cognitive scientists and the behaviorists so there's a temperamental split there because people who are high in openness and both Freud and Yung were very very high in trade openness are very interested in the domain of the imagination and the domain of fantasy because they have very active imaginations and they have very active fantasy lives and they're good visualizers and so um one of the things I've noticed in my clinical practice that there's always been a joke about de psychologists that if you go see aian you have Freudian dreams and if you go see a yion you have yian dreams and I suppose that means if you go to a behavior therapist you don't have any dreams at all but I actually think there's some truth in that because the more pragmatic people the more practical people are not going to be attracted to therapists who deal with issues that have to do say with the imagination and fantasy and so there's a natural parsing and one of the things I've noticed in my clinical practice is that imaginative people so those would be open and creative people um have a dream life that bit R out to be interpreted in archetypal terms like I've had clients number of them now I have one right now I mean it's it's his dream life is is it's so Remar it's so rich it's remarkable he's a he's a genius dreamer every time he comes in there's like he has two dreams or three Dreams they're coherent they're complexly plotted they're interesting and and they chart what's going on in his life and they tell him what he should do it's like it's it's great it's but everyone isn't like that I also have clients who never dream at all and then I've also seen when I've lectured to people I see this most particularly in in medical students because I've lectured a bit to medical students is like so maybe I'll do a seminar for the for the medical students and tell them a little bit about the symbols of transformation really because they're involved in first of all transforming because they're medical students and so you have to transform into a doctor and also of course they're helping people through Transformations all the time often negative but not always sometimes positive because sometimes you get better and so it's useful possibly for them to understand those processes more deeply generally with the medical school students I do half lecture that's more on like trait psychology and more behavioral and half of it on the more symbolic stuff which is kind of like this class is um and there's always about half the medical students on whom the more symbolic stuff just Falls flat they just they just just don't it's like talking about color to people who are colorblind and I I've I've thought about this a lot and I really do think it's based in temperamental differences so you know if you have an active fantasy life and you have an active imagination and you're a good visualizer and you dream a lot then that's the sort of person you are and if you and if you're on the other end of the scale which would be that you're very conscientious let's say and very low in openness which also tends to make you more conservative in your political presuppositions by the way then dream analysis is probably not for you partly because you're just not going to come up with that many dreams and even if they even if you do they won't necessarily be informative so you know there's been a very long battle in some ways in the psychological and psychiatric Community between people who take different perspectives on how you might address psychological problems but I don't know if the the issue of type has been thought about seriously enough in that regard because we're really only starting to understand the dimensions the actual dimensions of Personality properly and to figure out what it means to be on one end of say openness and and versus the other one especially if you're intelligent you can be intelligent not open those are complicated people they've got very analytical minds they make good lawyers like lawyers are often and this is something you might think about if you're planning to become a lawyer um if you're high in openness it's a bad job for you you will not be happy you need to be really conscientious like off the scale and it helps to be disagreeable too so because if you're too agreeable well you're supposed to win if you're a lawyer you're not supposed to like nicely let the other person win you know you're supposed to fight to win and so you have to be kind of fighty to do that and if you're high in agreeableness then it's a job that's kind of greats against your temperament so anyways so you you Yung were Yung I think the best way to think about Yung is that he was a student of two people he was a student of friederick nicher and he was a student of Freud and although the freudians when they write the history of psychoanalytic thought they pretty much portray Jung as a as like a derivative thinker of Freud um it's not the right way to think about his positioning historically because in some ways what what Yung was trying to do was to answer the question n posed at the end of the 19th century and because and the reason Yung was trying to answer it was because he believed it was the most important question that had been posed at the end of the 19th century and that was you know there's a famous quote by nche right I'm sure you've all heard it and that's the quote that God is dead so what n said essentially was God is dead and we have killed him that's a different idea and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood and so it wasn't like a triumphal statement on n's part even though when you hear it quoted you always hear it quoted that way it's like it's a sort of Victory God is dead you know or something to celebrate it's not what n thought at all in fact he thought all hell was going to break loose because of it and he predicted as much like in the in the like in the 1870s I mean he predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century with in ridiculous accuracy like it's uncanny and that's partly because you know n was one of these people like Yung who are very grounded in their deep deep deep imagination and so they get wind of the currents that are moving through Society long before normal people do so in some sense you know you can imagine that in any given population even with with you guys there's some of you guys who were living like 50 years ago and there's some of you living now and there's some of you living 50 years in the future it depends on how intelligent imaginative versus how conservative you are because it's not like everyone develops that exactly the same historical rate and you get people like nche for example or Doki they're like 100 years ahead of every else and so you know people don't even know what to do with them but stendall was like that too the the the writer he wrote in the 1830s and he was convinced that he was 100 years ahead of his time and stylistically that was probably about right so and the people who were prophets regarded as prophets in in say Old Testament tradition they were the same sort of people it's like they had their ear to the ground in a sense and they could tell what was going on underneath everybody's facade it echoed in them and off often as the story go and I'm sure they have they have a mythological accuracy to them the people who were picking up the underground currents indicating often catastrophe felt absolutely compelled even at the risk of their own skin to warn people so so n so Yung was definitely one of these people and now this question God is dead and we have killed him LED n to pose another question which was well what are we going to do to replace him because n believed and I think it I think he was absolutely right about this I can't see how it could be otherwise he believed that the morality that had structured Western Society was predicated on the fundamental Axiom of divinity and so like the as far as nature was concerned the whole Corpus of morality was dependent on that on that that axium being true or at least being accepted as true and when that accident was knocked out by say the conflict between science and religion because in some sense that's what did it then the whole system no longer had anything to stand on and could become entirely questionable and so n pointed that out and then doeski who was writing basically at the same time said well if there's no God then anything is permitted and what he meant by that was really in some sense what he meant by that was morality turns into what what you can get away with because there's nothing final about it there's nothing Transcendent about it and like we've played this problem out intellectually you guys are still right in the middle of this battle whether you know it or not I mean so what happened in the 20th century was that one of the consequences of that loss of an fundamental underpinning led Europe to swing radically to political extremes you know the Nazis were to think of the to think of the Nazis without thinking of that as a religious transformation is like that's just not right it was a religious transformation and it wasn't a good one so like it was a regression in some sense to to a morality that was way pre-christian like you it was not good and then you know you had the same it was like the rise of the state as an alternative to God well we we saw what that produced It produced hundreds of millions of painful deaths and it just about destroyed the world so it was a it was a bad problem and you know we sort of skirted our way through that miraculously you know the the that all I don't really think World War II came to an end until 198 1989 you know because there was the whole Cold War period after after the Germans and the Japanese had surrendered but I mean we just went from one war to another we just went to another one that everyone was too afraid to fight it was still a war you know and that didn't end until 1989 and for by some miracle God Only Knows Why you know it never degenerated into a thermonuclear exchange and it was close man we just barely squeaked through that there was there were two times during that period one in 1964 during the Cuban Missile Crisis where they had those bloody icbms primed and so the way they worked was in the control panel which kind of looked like a Star Trek you know the old Star Trek sets there would be like a panel here and there's a little place you could put a key then about 20 ft over there there'd be another guy with a key and if he turned his key and held it for 10 seconds at the same time he turned his key and held it for 10 seconds then the missile launched and an intercontinental ballistic missile is a bullet and and I mean that technically it's not a guided missile once you launch it like you you shoot a bullet it's gone you don't get to tell the bullet to come back once it's gone you you can turn around like a cruise missile an intercontinental ballistic missile it goes where you aimed it and you don't get to bring it back and so during the Cuban Missile Crisis the keys were in the locks so we were 10 seconds away man I tell you that was a tight Keyhole we barely squeaked through that one and looks like by about 1989 that the collective Consciousness or Y would say the collective unconscious of the human race had decided that well maybe having it all end in like apocalyptic Annihilation wasn't necessarily for the best it's interesting because writers like Gira he wrote fa and Fa is this tale of a man who makes a a bet with the devil so that he can acquire infinite knowledge essentially and the devil in in FA is named mephistophiles and Gira was trying to explain what human evil or evil per se what it's motive was and he did a lovely job it's so smart what he said he said the devil's basic hypothesis and of course Gira expresses this in poetry is that life is so unbearably cruel and and random and tragic that it would be better if it had never existed at all and you know believe me there'll be times in your life where you think that you know where something has just knocks you off your feet in a completely un unjust manner you know and that thought it'll rise up and like it's a compelling thought and I think that's the thought that human beings were wrestling with well we've been wrestling with it forever but we didn't really vote on it till 1989 you know and life be one and you know life is a Troublesome business it's it's tragedy and you know everyone asks thems now and then is if their Consciousness is worth the pain well the answer to that is it depends on how you live that is the answer to that but you know that's a complicated answer and just because you know that answer doesn't mean that you know how to live anyways what's happened since 1989 as far as I'm concerned is that intellectuals who who are often possessed by the worst sorts of demons because they actually think that their intelligence can guide them properly in in in like the complex moral landscape it's not the case you see most intellectuals and this is certainly case of most intellectuals in the universities and in especially in the late 20th century they were committed marxists like way past when they should have be you know George Orwell by 1955 he was a left Winger brilliant guy he'd already figured out that whatever was going on in the so Soviet Union was not good so you like if you had your eyes open you were done with that by you know 10 years after World War II but people like Jean Paul sarra were members of the Communist Party way longer than they had any ethical right whatsoever to be you know it's a was an absolutely murderous philosophy and but but intellectuals toyed with that they still toy with it in the universities you know except it's turned into postmodernism which is Marxism under a new guise you know and a lot of the the postmodern thought is not only leftwing disguised but it's also nihilistic and that's actually the other problem that the death of God produces one is okay I I don't have a religious Foundation I don't have any foundation under my feet to butress my moral claims or even to sort of help me determine what life is worth in the face of tragedy so I need something to replace that and then poof that's the state which is a really bad replacement because if you think God's bad like you just try stellin on for tri on for size for a while and Ma as well you know and Hitler as well it's not like this was a phenomena that was only linked to one say culture of people everybody became susceptible to it and the same murderous thing happened every time people tried that so it was China Cambodia Vietnam like wherever the Communist got into Power Man people died by the hundreds of thousands so Paul pot the guy who emptied the Cambodian cities that killed 7 million sorry I think it was three million people he got his he got his graduate degree at the sbong in France and he said what he was going to do when he went back to Cambodia you know he didn't outline the whole murderousness element but he certainly had all the theory laid down in his fine French Academy so you know we mess with ideas in the universities and if we don't do it properly like people die it's important to get your ideas right so one answer to the death of God is you worship the state the other is you worship nothing it's it's nihilism There's no distinction between anything and everything is pointless and there there's a massive strain of that sort of underground theorizing in postmodernism and a psychoanalyst especially a union would look at the postmodern response which is nihilistic and the fascist response which is sort of recourse to the state as motivated by something even deeper than that and that's the sort of process that nche was describing now for Yung is he wrote a book called ion for example and if you want to have nightmares for the rest of your life that's a really good book to read I mean it's a it's that book just terrified me cuz Yung what he did in that book basically was investigate the fantasy that he believed that all of Western Civilization had been predicated on for the last 4,000 years now because you really believed that what drove human beings was and it's a pedian perspective in some weird ways was the revelation of the successive unconscious revelation of fantasies where were at the Forefront of the our movement into unknown territory so it's like there's unknown territory and then there's known territory but there's this weird intermediary space between them and that intermediary space where you kind of know but kind of don't know that's where your imagination plays and of course that's the case right because when you encounter something and you don't really don't know much about it you imagine what it might be and so it takes on the structures of your imagination and so in some sense what you're dealing with as you move through history expand your domain of knowledge into the unknown is you encounter your own fantasy anyways if you want to know about that you could read like volume 9 and N9 91 and 92 of you one's called archetypes of the collective unconscious and the other's called ion but like it'll take you a while to crack them you have to beat your head against those books quite a bit because what what Yung is outlining in some sense is so shocking it's almost impossible to grasp once you get the picture all of a sudden things flip around because you understand what he's talking talking about but before then man it's it's it's tough going it's funny because Yung has been uh there's a guy named Richard null who wrote a biography of Yung and he was a jealous guy I think and he was crooked too because his book was called the Ary and Christ and he used like Nazi imagery on the cover and it was his publisher that talked him into doing that because he thought the book would sell more it's like you don't do that well or if you do that indicates really what you're up to right because of the because of what you're willing to allow to happen to your work so anybody who would have thought about that wouldn't have used Nazi imagery to gain economic utility out of writing a criticism of Y because it's it's it's a crooked maneuver so then you have to think okay what's what's he up to why is he doing this now Yung has been so he accused Yung for example of basically starting a cult and I can understand that but what I found so amusing about no's book is that what Yun was actually up to was so much more so much more terrifying than a mere cult it was sort of like accusing a like a serial killer of stealing a loaf of bread it's like yeah well maybe he stole a loaf of bread but compared to what he was actually up to it's it's really not relevant so I mean Yung was trying to bring the primordial imagination back into the world and to make people conscious of it it's like that's something man really that's really something so that reading I read everything you wrote except the books that were like published after his collected works I read some of those it took me a long time and it just tore me into bits like I didn't know what the hell which way was up halfway through those books I mean n is bad enough because n will set out to destroy your presuppositions in fact I have a client right now who's being left like depressed for like 5 years because he wasn't particularly educated and he you know started reading nche and he had been a Christian and he thought well I'm a Christian I can take on nche it's like no you can't no no you can't like n was so smart that it's just it's mindboggling he he came up with the best narcissistic statement I think that's ever been written and this is what he was like cuz he he was a very sick man and he could only write for very short periods of time so he triy to cram everything he could into a single sentence and so each sentence is like a little bomb but one of his now and then he'd write you know something self-referential so one phrase of his is I write more in a I write in a sentence what other people write in a book that's pretty good that's a good brag but then he topped it right away after he said H what other people can't even write in a book yeah so that's pretty narcissism and then like he just punched through that like was there yeah so but it's true like that's the thing it's true so it wasn't narcissism I mean for anyone else it wouldn't be for him it was just true so yeah yeah so back to you n just sort of hypothesized that in order for people to overcome the psychological consequences of the destruction of their religious underpins they would have to transform themselves into virtually into the thing that they had killed so n's and this was believe me for n this was like a revelatory solution he came up with this in a book called thus spake zerra now everybody who reads nche starts to read thus there zerust because it's got such a cool title you know but you shouldn't read that book at least not until you've read say Beyond Good and Evil and other books that he wrote Because thus spake zerust is a weird book it's like an old Testament Revelation and it really is it's like it's a fantasy this man comes down from the mountain and he starts to spout off like Poetic Revelations and n's the rest of n's books are like this very very clear and cutting thought whereas this one is like a it's like a Shakespearean drama almost you know and the reason for that is because n was reaching beyond the grip of his intellect to try to formulate answers to questions that he could not he could not grasp because what he was trying to figure out is well as human beings have developed cognitively in some sense we've escaped from our culture and our instincts and when we're embedded in our culture and our instincts we're embedded unconsciously within a religious framework it's the framework of presuppositions from which we emerged like people didn't think up religions what there's some little weird little what you call conspiracy going on for 3,000 years it's like no it's not about power even though it can be twisted to be about power everything can be or Twisted to be about economics it's about fantasy you know that the all you look inside a European Cathedral all you see is fantasy it's in it's in brilliant lights portrayed everywhere it's trying to say something to you well what's it trying to say Well it turned out when people asked themselves that instead of just acting it out they hadn't got a clue what it said had no idea what it said any more than you guys know why you have Christmas trees so how many of you have Christmas trees yeah why oh I don't know I never noticed we had Christmas trees you know no but my point is my point is that in a culture you can follow you follow the Customs because that's what you do and but then when you wake up a bit and you think well you're just like a pedian child who is taken out of the game and forced to look at it it's like well why are you playing that game and what are the rules well i' never thought about it before well as soon as people started to think about the games they were playing was often because they encountered other people who thought apparently thought differently you know so if you're like a marauding Christian and you go into the East and all of a sudden you come up with a Buddhist and he's smart it's like you two have big problems right cuz you're smart and he's smart and you don't think the same way at least apparently you don't think the same way at all so even if you say well those Buddhist you know we should just wipe them out it doesn't matter because their thoughts are already there and they've been working know them for like a couple of thousand years and whether you like it or not they're going to make you think and once you start thinking about your religion you're in trouble and so that's the situation we're in right now so Yung took this problem that n had posed seriously because Yung was caught up quite dramatically in the events of of of Nazi Germany now you know when we think about Nazi Germany we think of course that it was perfectly obvious that the Nazis were the were the perpetrators and that you know everyone else was the victim and that if we were there we would have clearly seen that and we wouldn't have been Nazis and it's like that's not true that isn't how it worked because these things happen slowly they sort of happen piece by piece you know we started seeing a similar thing happen I think after the after the Twin Towers fell in New York you know it's like people gave up 5 10% of their civil liberties in in like a month you know and and and it was okay it was like wasn't okay wasn't okay and it just shows you how easy that sort of thing can can start you know the Germans were under tremendous stress in the 1930s their whole economy blew out they had to like take wheel barrels full of billions of marks to buy a piece of bread their currency fell to zero unemployment was staggeringly high they were paying off debts like mad because of the first world war and there was a real threat that the Communists were going to start a revolution it's like you don't have problems like that so the the the Germans had no idea what to do you know and and Hitler was a a canny canny person with a brilliant brilliant sense of drama I mean he was a real he was a master of dark fire that guy and I think his his unconscious fantasy was let's see how much we can destroy before we die in the in the what purifying Flames that was Hitler so and he was he he was a compelling person and the fantasy that he had in the back of his mind I'll tell you that developed at one point it was a very hard thing to escape from that's why the Germans became Nazis it wasn't like this was like magic that had emerged and it was black magic so Yung was very interested in this because he was in the Germanic speaking areas of the world when this happened and he felt felt himself pulled very strongly by what the nais were doing especially in the early stages of the development of the political platform because things did stabilize you know and then they stabilized before they went completely out of control and of course looking in retrospect you can see the seeds of what eventually transpired to become such a catastrophe but at the time it was by no means self-evident that such a thing was going to occur especially given all the other horrible things that were likely to occur so Yung had a had a vision at one point in on a train I think it was in Switzerland that Europe had become so covered with blood that the blood was starting to flow over the mountains into Switzerland because of course Switzerland is neutral and he said it was one of the most horrifying nightmares of his life and this was in I think 1930 it was late late 1930s anyway so it was a premonition of war and he spent a lot of time trying to understand well if you weren't going to become a fascist and worship the state and you weren't going to become a nihilist and worship nothing what in the world were you going to do exactly to orient yourself and how would you protect yourself against the attractions of blind state identification for example or the attractions of nihilism you know you might say well nihilism has no attraction at all because it says to you everything is irrelevant nothing you do has any importance because that's nihilistic basically well what's the what's the the psychoanalyst would say what's the secondary gain from that like yeah you say that's what you believe and maybe you even act it out and you also say well you've come to that conclusion through you know a rational process of deliberation but this psycho analyst would say it's kind of convenient that that also alleviates you of all responsibility isn't it and it kind of sheds a little dampness on your claim to pristine cognition as the driving force between you know behind your adoption of that theory you know it's like it's like the patriot who claims that you know the reason that he's kicking someone in the head is because he's patriotic it's like no no no you're patriotic so that you can kick someone in the head and still look at yourself in the mirror in the morning has nothing to do with rational deliberation and so the psychoanalysts and Yung was like this in particular you know they were always extremely skeptical about people's rational claims about their commitments to ideology and rightly so one of the things Yun said that I love he said some things that were so brilliant was that people didn't have ideas ideas had people and when you think that I see it's like it's like I think this is so funny it's like Dawkins idea of the meme you know some of you how many of you read Dawkins he's you know yeah okay so Dawkins has this idea of mean it's so funny to read Dawkins because he's like 20% of the way of being in Union without even knowing it and so he's produced this idea called meme which is these they ideas a meme is an idea that sort of has an independent existence in a sense because it can infect different minds or move from mind to mind and he kind of thinks of it more like a fad while the archetypes are memes except they're no fads they're memes that have lasted for like 20 20,000 years or maybe 20 million years we have no idea how old they are and Yung got where Dawkins was going like you know 50 years before and 200 stories deeper so it's so funny to read Dawkins because what he is searching for has already been figured out by Yung but he's so prejudiced against any kind of religious thinking that there's no way he'll ever find it so so one of the things Yung did was he he deeply deep deeply studied the substructures of thought so for you like you know we talked about p a bit and we said for PJ you kind of built your brain from your body upward brilliant idea it's so smart but Yung Yung has a lot of p in him it's it's more implicit but for you not only was your the substructures of your thought biological and so therefore based in your body but your body was also cultural and historical you know so partly because you're you're an evolved creature and so God only knows what's in there 3.5 billion years worth of weirdness that you can draw or that can that can move you where it wants to move you but all also you're being shaped by cultural Dynamics all the time and human beings in particular like we're just watching each other like mad all the time to see what we're up to what people think of us how we should behaving are we being boring are people attracted to us it's like we're social right to the core and and that's another way that you can understand an archetype is like part of the archetype is that we are social to the core so we're interested in other people and more if you're extroverted and less if you're introverted but it doesn't matter by by the standards of say solitary animals we're so social it's just unbelievable and so that's built in it's built in what's built in is that you find that interesting that's the archetype the archetype is whatever it is that makes you find that interesting it's beyond your control like if you're extroverted you're interested in people you didn't decide that it decided it for you the question is what is it well it's your brain your brain your lyic system whatever the hell that means like we don't know what that means you know I we have no idea how your brain produces Consciousness like I'm I'm dead serious we haven't got a clue and what that indicates to me since we've been hacking away at it for say 400 years is that the way we think about Consciousness is wrong because we're not getting anywhere like we go long ways with lots of things we're not getting anywhere with Consciousness okay so back to the archetype so because I can tell you how these things arise to some degree so you're interested in other people say and so you're interested in them because they're unbelievably useful resources right because they know things they have resources that you want plus you want even subtle things from them you want their attention you want to play with them you know you there's all sorts of things that you need and want from other people so the social interactions are incredibly valuable and informative but the information is interesting because part of what every single person is constantly broadcasting to every other person is how to behave so now if you meet someone and and let's say you find them interesting well I can tell you that the more ideal they are assuming you're not too wared the more ideal they are the more you're going to be interested in them because that actually is what defines ideal like as you become ideal you could say that is also the same as becoming High status as you become ideal then you're interesting to people so that's interesting because that what that means is that you can read off people's interest to find out when you're deviating from the ideal and they don't even know what the ideal is the ideal is that to which their attention is inex inexorably drawn and they're always telling you when you fall short of the idea always it's being broadcast at you all the time and then your imagination back there is to try and figure out just what is this ideal you know because your imagination is watching you in a petent sense noticing what you do and then trying to figure out what that is so you'll have fantasies about the ideal that that often happens in in a romantic relationship especially at the beginning of it because you know you you project your idealization onto the person that you romantically attracted to that's the projection of an archetype so Yung would say the woman will project an animus onto the man the Animus is her conceptualization of what the ideal man is it's unconscious because it's rooted in fantasy and the man will be in concordance with that projection in some areas that's those are the areas where she likes them by the way and will be discordant in other areas and that's the areas where she constantly disappoints him as the relationship develops so the the ejection is there in part to help the person understand who it is that they're dealing with because when you meet someone you have you have to assume something about them it's the same as projection you have to assume something about them and if you find them fascinating which is what happens if you fall in love maybe it's because they smell good or they're symmetrical or something you immediately assume that well those things really matter you immediately assume that they embody the ideal it's an oversimplification but the oversimplification has a basis and the basis is if it's interesting to me it must be close to the ideal well yeah except the person that you're going out with attracted to is Warped and bent and flawed and twisted and you know 300 ways and you'll find that out soon enough just as they will about you and that often just blows the relationship into bits cuz the person will say well she wasn't who I thought she was it's like well who said whoever said she was who you thought she was it's like where did you get the misapprehension that she was going to be who you thought she was God what do you know you know you're LED you're LED around by your sense of smell and your ability to detect symmetry it's like that's yeah that's not very sophisticated so those are those are so the anima and animus are two primary Union archetypes and they're very complex but that kind of gets at the surface um the ideal that I was describing so people are broadcasting information to each other which is be ideal be ideal be ideal be it's like be my ideal obviously but let's say let's say if if I took a thousand ideals and then averaged them or extracted out the common ideal the ideal that was common to all of them that would be a savior figure that's what a savior figure is and then now now and then someone comes along who acts quite a bit like that and poof you've got yourself a religion so do not be thinking that these images that people fall around like like you know like what blood hounds on a trail do you not be thinking that those things are like conscious cognitive constructs like conscious cognitive constructs like Marxism they last like 50 years and they kill 100 million people and then that's the end of that a good religious system man that will keep a culture going for like 3,000 years and even at the end of it it doesn't disappear we know that the story of Horus and osus for example drove Egypt like Catholicism drove Europe for like 3,000 years that's a long time and then it turned into Christianity so it's not like it disappeared actually it sort of transmuted into Judaism and then turned into Christianity so it's not like the ideas disappeared they didn't disappear at all and believe me you're just as possessed by them as any ancient Egyptian it's just that you're more fragmented and conflicted because what your unconscious assumes and what your conscious mind assumes aren't the same thing and so like you're all at war with yourself that's partly what makes you attracted to like moronic ideologies by which I mean any ideology because they're all they're all false idols and false gods and they're shallow they're shallow and deadly and they ruin your life they destroy your soul so that's a just a catastrophic response and that's why it's so terrible to have that discordance between your instinctual being your deep instinctual being and your little fragile you know half-witted conscious mind that sort of thinks it's in control it's like you're not in control of anything believe me best you can do is follow what's right that's the best you can do we I mean we even know this neurologically to some degree like if you look at the hypothalamus it's a little part of the brain we'll talk about quite a bit it's sort of where the Freud Freudian ID resides to the degree that it resides anywhere it's this collection of nuclei that do things like make you hungry or make you thirsty or make you you know sexually desirous or um make you defensively aggressive or make you terrified of an intruder who who who threatens your dominant status this little tiny part of your brain it's hardly even there at all has massive projections coming up into the cortex and then there's little tendrils going down to regulated and so basically as long as everything is pretty much perfect your conscious mind is in control but as soon as things deviate from the path to any degree whatsoever the really smart parts of your brain take over and then you do what they tell you to do or you suffer the consequences so you see this with people who binge eat for example or sometimes people develop a condition called polydipsia which is often a consequence of hypothalamic damage attended on a stroke and they'll drink water till they die you cannot stop them because they they're ragingly thirsty like someone who's starving and like you can say well you've had enough water it's like no that is not going to cut it it's not going to cut it you're not getting anywhere with that and you see the same thing with people who have like obsessive compulsive disorder something like that when they're not in the grip of the disorder they're perfectly normal you get those people to touch something they don't want to touch it's like they're not the same person the second they do that and whatever they thought of themselves you know the the s that was supposed to be in control that bloody thing is like it's like a wagon with a child and it being towed behind an elephant there's just it's got no control at all so you have one of the things that's terrifying about Y is that there there's no escaping the realization of the nature of the forces that are behind the puppets that we are you know in Pinocchio that's why Pinocchio is a puppet right something's pulling his strings he's a marionette and the things that are pulling his strings well they might have his best interest in mind but they might not too and so that's what Pinocchio is about actually and it's also about how not to be a Anin turns out that you have to go to the bottom of the ocean and find your father in a whale and then drown that's how you stop from being a puppet it's like and you think well you don't believe that and I would say well yes you do you went and watched the movie and you enjoyed it not only that you understood it even though you don't have any idea what it's about and also on the face of it it's absolutely absurd it's like it's not a puppet first it's a drawing of a puppet so that's weird that like that's two levels of weird and then like what the hell's with the cricket where' he come from you know and what's what's his role and why is he the conscience and why does he get like activated by a fairy and why is the fairy a star it's like you're in there you know like Cletus the slack jaw Y watching the screen captivated by it and you know you walk out and you don't even notice that you're so peculiar that it's just beyond belief you don't even notice that that's so peculiar it's like what the hell are you doing in that theater watching this marionette follow a bug around to an to a whale it's like you walk out oh that was so touching really like really people are really crazy you know and and and weird like we're like rhinoceroses or or platypuses or ostriches or Penguins we're weird right to the core and when you start to the weirdness is so deep and so ancient that even starting to touch consciousness of that just is just rocks your your boat so but but one thing or another will rock your boat so sometimes it's nice to choose what what thing it is It prepares you for things too so I'll tell you part of what Pinocchio means Pinocchio is a Marinette anybody can pull his strings I mean he's got a good heart but what's that worth nothing virtually nothing because he's naive you know you can man it's the fox and the what is it that stupid cat that manipulate him right and basically behind them you'll see the devil because that devil pops out quite quickly in Pinocchio and he's the thing that's behind all the local manifestations of evil that are trying to pull Pinocchio's strings he gets blown off the right path pretty badly almost turns into an unconsciously brain donkey who ends up working in the slave mines which is exactly what happens by the way you know to that's what happened to Devout Communists who found themselves swallowed up by stell's Nightmare in the 1940s and the 1950s it's like well we were so good we did everything you wanted it's like yeah well it turned out what we wanted is for you to die painfully so you know congratulations so you know and that's brilliantly laid out in Pinocchio which in fact was written in the 1930s brilliantly laid out it's it's way it's a way more intelligent analysis of the 1930s than anything you'll ever find that was written so Pinocchio you know he's trying to Hue the proper path and he learns that he shouldn't lie that's a that's a what do you call archetypal idea I can tell you why that is later and it turns out that in order to get out of the horrible mess that he's put himself in partly by being an an un a slavish adherence adherent to like momentary pleasure and nihilism you know he ends up half a jackass who can't speak properly without braying so that makes him an ideologue and the only way that he can get out of that is to go down to the bottom of the ocean as deep as he can possibly go deeper than anything is willing to go to find his father what's his father his father is the culture that he lost touch with you know and to the degree that you guys are lost like all human things are lost the reason you're lost is because you've never rescued your father from the bottom of the ocean you haven't gone deep enough you you won't have even known it was necessary it's necessary you're a social historical cultural creature right down to where you become a biological creature and if that isn't part of you and if that part isn't functioning properly then you're you can just be blown off course by the wind there's nothing to you you're not grounded in anything that's partly why the shaman when they go down communicate with their ancestors that's what they're trying to do they're trying to pull up the cultural under structure of their of their societies up into Consciousness to make use of it and you constantly have to have a dialogue with that because you know I say say your background just for the sake of argument is Jewish a lot of the lines of of you know the culture that you're embedded in was written down by people several thousand years ago it's like it's not easy to figure out what the hell those people were talking about or why it's relevant to you so there has to be a dialogue continually going on between the present and the past so that you can bring the wisdom forward without losing what's in it because if you lose what's in it it's like you're just nowhere you know I see this all the time in my in my practice you know often it happens to people who get divorced or who are living together and not married which you think well you're free it's like you don't want to be that free you know you want to argue with your partner about every single thing for the rest of your life well that's what you have to do if you don't let your culture guide you it's like there's no rules go ahead make up all the rules see how easy that is Christ that'll kill the average person in 10 years it's just such a weight and you only have one life you know you might as well let some tradition guide you so you have some peace some of the time or you'll end up divorced and with children it's like H you you that's cancer for lots of people they get divorced they have children they get locked into a custody battle and they're done that's the end of their life they're ruined by it so you step outside of the guidelines of your culture at your own Peril and modern people because they're so coddled think oh yeah well we can handle it it's like sure you can you wait till you get there you'll find out that you can can't handle it and it'll be too late what has what will have happened is that you know the whale that you were supposed to go confront and rescue your farther from has risen out of the water and taken you down and you're done that's chaos so these are serious issues like Yung I would say was the most serious thinker of the 20th century like he was so he was so serious that the pseudo serious people who read them just bounce off them they don't even know what the hell he's up to so and Yun was one of those thinkers who was addressing questions that most people don't know exist like at the bottom of reality and who was also answering them so he's a twofold blow to the intellect first he tells you that you're so stupid you don't even know what's wrong you can't even ask the right questions and then he answers them it's like oh boy yeah that'll that'll uh do in your intellectual tensions so and the contrast between Dawkins I think and yil is exactly the right contrast it's the contrast between the intelligent modern Dawkins and the sort of historically centered wise man and it's it's sort of painful for me to watch because I kind of watch Dawkins and you know he's he's not a happy man and he's got a tremendous resentment against the church I'm sure something terrible must have happened to him when he was a child but anyways let me show you some of this stuff because it's such fun it's such fun didn't it sound fun not really okay so I'm going to show you the opening of the lot Lion King y yeah yeah good good good good idea thanks yeah like why not use a media player that works okay so what I'm going to play for you is the opening scene the opening scene is very nicely designed you know it's uh the music I find a little bit manipulative it's a little Poppy and and and and it's manipul like it's an interesting example of how art can go wrong because it's sort of art designed for a purpose and art cannot be designed for a purpose the purpose of art is Art's purpose not your purpose and so if you're trying to bend the art to your purpose it's like you're you're like you're painting a picture of a stickman on a stained glass window like you just don't have you just haven't got the right orientation art is an exploratory process and it's supposed to take you beyond what you know if you take art and try to force it into your pre preconceptions then you're you're a propagandist and an ideologue and like you're you're bending the greater to the Lesser so and that makes it feel cheap and and and and it doesn't fit well and like The Lion King is a pretty good movie and I mean from a from a psychological perspective it devolves into propaganda from time to time that happens now and then in Disney films but you know it's it's it's still a work it's a work of Genius which is why you all know it this is where you get your religion okay so that's an archetypal image they open with it right so it's the dawn of Consciousness so it's the new day but it's also the dawn of Consciousness it's the dawn of Consciousness because you're a visual creature and it's also the dawn of Consciousness because you wake up in the morning so it's like sun rise light Dawn Of Consciousness and then the music is a celebration of that and you can feel it grips you right away I mean that that part of the music is really really nice I think that's the is that the gospel singers from South Africa I think it is the guys that played with Paul Simon I think so they're great okay so what are all the animals doing all of a sudden waking up and they're waking up and they're paying attention to a call right call is musical so then the question is well what's music well music is a representation of like the dynamic patterns of things and so you get all this complex information that's going on right off the bat Consciousness Dawns and now there's a call and everything that's sentient is to pay attention to the call that's pretty good for like 5 Seconds of [Music] film [Music] so now there's the filmmakers hit you with a whole succession of very beautiful images and you know they do that with a very beautiful music that's underneath and that's to put you like in a state of harmony with well not only with nature but with your own conceptions of nature and your sense of Aesthetics it works quite nicely it put popsy into a dream very [Music] quickly the day on the planet anding step there's see can ever be seen more to do [Music] 's roll okay so there's a lot going on there so the the lyrics are quite interesting because because the lyrics are making representation to the to that state of being that I talked to you about that William James had experienced say with his nitrous oxide Visions but that also that pH and the constructivist sort of think about as the ground of being so you know the the The Lyricist made a case that what surrounds you is informative to a degree that you will never be able to comprehend it and the implication under that is that you know the at least one of the ways of construing the ground of experiential being is as a information Rich Matrix and the music is pushing you in that direction too because the music is the music is a representation of what that information Rich Matrix is like because it it's patterned and complex but understandable but and it also evokes emotion so that's reality and there's a lot of paradise imagery in here too because it's sort of like all these animals are they're all doing the same thing and they're sort of existing in harmony it's like just elephants covered with birds and so it's in a way it's a childish view of the world because you know those elephants are covered with kcks and you know the lions are half starved because it's been a a drought and you know it's it's it's not so good out there on the African plains it's not all you know that will teach me okay so but but they're getting you the mood now the the the The Lyricist also made reference to the fact that there there's this there's a there's a paradise there's an element of Genesis in the lyricism because she she talks about our arrival on the earth so to speak and then our the dawning of Consciousness which is the step into the Sun and so that's an archetypal Motif we're placed on Earth well here we are after all and poof we woke up and that the reason that's an archetypal idea is because that's what happens to everybody right poof you're placed on the earth bang one day you wake up it's like it's the Eternal experience of human beings and there's something that's deeply real about it now that was that was cool we better watch that we better watch that again so that's a revelation right so that's a very sneaky bit of the camera work so you know first of all your your vision is obscured but then it's it's directed by the motion to this like Place what's that well that's a good question it's what Pride Rock and just what exactly is pride rocking where the king is that's right the rock is where the king is that's right that's the top of the that's the top of the pyramid now remember those remember those trees I showed you from the shaman it's so cool I just figured this out the other day inside that tree there was a mountain and the mountain was surrounded by a snake you remember that there's a circle with a snake around it that's exactly the structure of this lion came set up you remember that so you got the mountain in the middle there what's on the outside m h hyenas that's right the chaos is out there where the light won't touch right it's a perfect representation of the Scandinavian world tree so cool so okay now obviously you and other animals are supposed to lift up your eyes which is what the filmmaker made you do and focus on this thing it's a rock what is a rock what does a rock stand for structure yes exactly why balance structure why why is it Rock a good metaphor for that it's a solar that's right rocks they're they're strong even in an earthquake if you're lucky they won't lick ify so you can you want to stand on a rock right the question is what kind of rock do you want to stand on and that's exactly is it a physical Rock that's one way of looking at it or is there a metaphysical Rock that's even a better rock well that's partly what this film investigates but at the moment there's a rock it's been there forever and the King has been there forever and the king is the thing at the top of the dominant hierarchy which is why you lift up your eyes to it and the King here is a lion why does that make sense Lions aren't Kings after all but makes sense why they're they're at the top of the food chain okay so that's a good one any other possible reasons yes maybe the main sort of represents a Regal Authority yeah that's good yeah definitely and and the animators capitalize on that all the time and they're kind of noble looking you know because they're muscular and and and plus they could eat you right so that sort of indicates that there are certain circumstances under which you are at the bottom of the hierarchy and the lion is in fact at the top so cuz a lion is also an a inspiring Beast like you know the shepherds in the Old Testament around that time you know a Shepherd you think well Shepherd he's dressed this little frilly hat and you know he's he's not much of a Powerhouse at all but those guys used to fight off Lions it's like that's that's you got to be really tough to fight off a lion with a stick you know so yeah so anyways okay so there's the Rock and the sun is shining on it and what are the animals doing gathering around the rock now we accept that as a narrative possibility right you're not sitting there thinking in the theater what the hell are those animals doing gathering around the Rock and the fact that you're not sitting there thinking that is an indication that you're following the archetypal Trail of the story it makes sense to you that a diverse bunch of drawings of animals would you know come together around a rock that makes sense why well it it has something to do with our our dominance hierarchy proclivity and the fact that we can recognize a an author an authority structure and we know how to interact with it and so these aren't animals after all they're they're they're people well they're not CU they're drawings but they're certainly not animals they're not acting like animals so or they're acting like half human half animals all right now who's that little guy okay what what's he good for information yes why why is he good for information and so so what why is that relevant he can get up there way the hell up there where the king can't even see and he can see everything it's horus's eye that's exactly right that's the that's the Egyptian eye that says pay attention and so so the bird is the the bird is attenion fundamentally so and the King by the same the bird he's a little ratty bird and he's kind of funny I think he's he's that English comedian so he's a bit of a comical character but the king the king will listen to him and so that shows that this king is a properly humble King cuz it's just a stupid bird and you could like bite it in half in one bite which is kind of what scar threatens to do because scar doesn't want to pay attention cuz then he figure out who he was so but the king he'll pay attention to even you know this is also why in fairy tales it's often this the the youngest son the oldest son is usually the one who Everyone likes and admires and you know he's like the football he's like the football quarterback you know of of the fairy tale and the younger son is like well he's kind of a little weasly useless guy and the older son always fails and then usually the Second Son fails too it's usually because they're arrogant and then the third son he's so clueless doesn't even know what to do but they kick him out cuz they just assume get rid of him and and you know why not let him go you don't want him around anyways and so he wanders out in the bush and you know he comes across a gnome or something that you know it's like you just ignore it the other brothers did but he doesn't know what the hell he's doing so the gnome talks to him and he thinks well I might as well talk to this gnome and you know then the gnome tells him what to do and and then then the youngest son wins and that's an archetypical story too it's like if you don't know what you're doing don't be so sure that you know who to ignore now that's a very very useful piece of advice but then you might ask yourself how do you know when you don't know what you're doing so do you have any thoughts on that how is it that you would know if you didn't know what you were doing you're consistently failing yes but there's that's very good that's very good but there's one more thing that goes along with that I and I'll just add it because it's it's you know a bit of a trick in some sense and it's bothering you right so there's there's failure plus suffering now one of the inferences that you can draw from failure plus suffering is that nature is your enemy and you're a victim of the great father it's like very standard presupposition especially of young people because of course you're failing you're young it's like what the hell you know you know you got a whole bunch of things to learn yet before you can be successful but you know but it's an that's an archetypal situation in large part okay [Music] so great so now we see the king so what do we notice about the king he's kind of a tough looking guy he's not one of these defeated Lobster types of lion kings he's like an upstanding sort of confident okay so he's he was also in the sun right so the Sun Shines on the king and that's because the king is awake and and The Sun Also illuminates him you may not know this but you have you've seen coins of course silver coin that's the moon the head of the queen is the head of the queen on the moon and gold coins are the Sun and so are halos and the idea is that the thing that's at the top is like the sun and why is it like the sun well because the sun is consciousness and why is the unconsciousness because you're awake during the day now there's a bunch of other reasons as well there the sun is also the thing that defeats darkness and that's what the king should be and that's right in her coins and they're s they're symbols of value so there oh and the wind is blowing on it it's not bothering by the way but that's a that's a divine wind that's Numa Numa that's spirit because spirit is often wind as in inspiration and respiration that's all spirit so spirited King here comes the bird it's not lunch it's his friend [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and now who in the world is that that's Carl Young yeah who's that well that's the Virgin Mary in Christ that's the Virgin and the sun it's a way older idea than the Christian idea it's been around forever why because any culture that doesn't worship the mother and child dies obviously so it's an archetypal image of value clearly obviously you don't have to think about that much so oh yeah that's I love that it always happens he there's there two things always happen when I show this always because it evokes archetypal emotions so you all going making always and that cute noises right what kind of noises are those yeah it's oh so babies babies like that noise that's why you're making that noise it's like baby like that noise they'll smile at you and then you'll think that the baby likes you even though it's just a survival mechanism it is but the baby actually likes you so what why is that cute first of all it's not real you might notice that it's a dry why is it cute cute what makes it cute big big eyes yeah that's a good one yeah that's that's part of it aliens have big eyes too though what else cuddly it's cuddly yeah yeah so it's mamalian that's how it's not a lizard you know so that's helpful it's got fur so you can pet it sort of invites being petted and it moves like this it's like that's so cute you know that little polar bear I've been watched a little bit of that like that's like pathological cute that thing and it's you know part of it is it's sort of wobbling around it's like the poor thing it's trying to walk it's having a rough time and everybody thinks oh that's so cute if that was happening to you you would think it was cute but but you know animals animals across a diverse range of Maman species no cute you know and they they tend to respond to like big eyed symmetrical small noosed flat-faced um helpless movement cuddly and not eating it right it's it's so it's an inhibitory it's a set of inhibitory perceptual mechanisms in large part but since we're also mammals you better think that thing's cute because you're going to be taking care of it for a long time so you know it there has to be a deep deep deep biological connection it's forged almost immediately and of course that's mediated in women in particular by oxytocin which is released in tremendous quantities after birth and during breastfeeding so and it's necessary you know it turns on new circuits and there are circuits you need cuz like one day you're not a mother and then the next day you are that's not you are not the same creature at that point and you don't want to even be the same creature you're pretty happy about the whole issue hopefully so that's very interesting image because first of all he was playing with with the little lion king with those balls and there so there this sort of globe thing that's attracting them so of like representations of the Sun and you might think well you're just reading that into it but then of course this happens it's like this is this is like he's breaking open the sun to release the essence of the sun onto the Little Lion King so and he is because the sun represents gold gold is pure right gold won't mix with any other metal so that's partly why it's a symbol of value it's a noble metal the sun is made out of gold so to speak except it's like Meta Gold from a symbolic perspective ex it because it's like the gold of higher Consciousness and it's being dumped on the Little Lion King because for the tribe's sake and then maybe even for the sake of the whole ecosystem around the tribe that King better be awake so that's what this like little Carl Young baboon here is trying to get get [Music] going [Music] okay so now you notice two things lovely this is lovely very well put together scene it's very thoughtful so the animals are starting to lift up their head so you you get the sense of heightened interest and the music is starting to rise a little bit and speed up and Tempo a little bit and you know something's going to happen here that's associated with the little Pinnacle of the of the of the rock there [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I know till we find our brilliant brilliant no it's so so well edited you know so this this little thing that now represents what will become the guiding consciousness of the land is revealed and the automatic response of all the animals is first to Bow so they're in awe as they should be and then to celebrate and then that's you know that's pretty good it's pretty impressive but then you know God himself gets in the act because just at the opportune time the sun breaks and sh on the little lion at the same time they move the music up like they Chang the key of the music and so it it it causes an upselling of emotion and that's y would call that if if and when that happened that's what he would call a synchronous event so that's a demonstration of a synchronous event it's where they're very rare these things they're from a union perspective they're they're they occur in in very emotionally intense situations where the context the external context of the occurrence seems to match the meaning of the occurrence so anyways whether or not you believe such things are possible that is exactly what this little film clip is trying to [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] demonstrate the ccle of [Music] yeah pretty decent all right so you got the animals you got the stone hierarchy that's a pyramid you've got the thing that's at the top of it just like the little pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill with the eye on top exactly the same idea part of the idea is that the thing that's at the very top of the pyramid isn't part of the pyramid so it's not Stone The Little Lion King he isn't Stone he's the thing that produces Stone as he moves through time right because he's the culture producing force and so this is set up to demonstrate visually that at the center of being is culture at the top of culture is the culture producing process or force and that's the illuminated Savior and that's what all the animals worship instinctively it's like yes that's right that's how it goes we'll see you on Tuesday |
have to ask me some questions about the exam there's not much to say most of the descriptions listed on the syllabus it'll be in this class my I don't regard my exams as particularly tricky so if you come to the lectures and done the reading and people generally do you know as well in this class as they do in other classes maybe a little bit better so it's all multiple choice um and you won't run out of time so I don't that's about all there is to say there are sample questions posted on the website so you can go there and see what the questions are going to be like um I just selected them randomly from questions I've used before so they're representative of what you're going to see so all right so back to Sigmund Freud so I found a recording of Freud I think it's the only known recording it's from a BBC broadcast not too long before he died I'll play it you can listen along or read along because he has a pretty heavy accent so it's somewhat difficult too to follow my professional industry Alliance to break through mind your life and find my own action which is covered family beautiful about the unconscious life unfortunately to live and move time and out of high quality treatment of I have to any energy good thing I'm not familiarism so a few introductory comments to this lecture it's hard to imagine the degree to which Freud reintroduced biological or introduced biological ideas into the study of the human psyche Because by the time Freud came along most of the formal thought about thought and about the human human Psychology was very influenced by Enlightenment ideas and so there was a relatively widespread belief that people were rational and scientific and becoming increasingly more so and perhaps people were becoming increasingly more so but Freud put the biology back in psychology I mean he was a medical doctor and he was trained as a neurologist and he was also part of a burgeoning interest in placing human beings firmly in the category of the animal kingdom that was characteristic of the late 1900s particularly in relationship to Darwin it was Freud who most particularly established the fact that our rationality is in some sense nested inside our motivations and emotions and our unconscious mind and I I think there's no doubt that those claims are correct um psychologists have always had Anonymous towards Freud um it's not exactly clear why he was a psychiatrist he was a medical doctor so maybe that's part of it maybe it's the distinction between the different professions um I don't but I also have this proclivity to believe that psychologists tend more towards the type of person who's convinced that the primary activities that characterize human the human psyche are are rational cognitive and and we certainly have Freud to thank in large part for making a strong case that that's not true you'll encounter lots of psychologists who do their best in some sense to push Freud to one side and consider his theories outdated and unproven and you know I don't really think that's fair partly because the literature regarding psychoanalysis as an effective treatment seems to indicate quite clearly that it's at least as or more effective than other psychotherapeutic schools and it's basically showed that since outcome Studies have cycle Psychotherapy have been conducted so that's three or four decades um I don't know if there are gender differences I I've actually never looked into that with regards to outcome studies I don't think there's they're substantive so because I've never heard much made of them now the other the other issues that Freud described for example that much of our psychological life is unconscious and much of it is motivated by what our boast implicit memories so memories we don't really realize that we have anymore or basic biological drives that seems to me to be unquestioned um 30 years ago a little more than that psychologists rediscovered the unconscious and they made a big fuss about that but I have was well versed in psychoanalytic Thinking by that time and certainly didn't regard that as particularly revolutionary because as far as I could tell the psychoanalysts had been there 60 years before in fact a lot of the experimental procedures that psychologists use to examine the unconscious are derived from the sorts of word association studies priming studies in some sense that Carl Jung pioneered when he was still working with Freud so we have a lot to thank Freud for I mean he also introduced and developed the idea of psychotherapy as something distinct from medical treatment for mental disorders and you know I think there is room for a variety of opinions about the overall social and cultural utility of psychotherapy I've read interesting critiques making the claim that it's reduced the necessity for familial and friendship ties for example as it's proliferated through Society but be that as it may all of the psychotherapeutic fields that are practically applied I think have Freud to thank for their founding so it seems a bit on the ungrateful side to criticize him too harshly I've also found that Freud's conceptualizations of certain Pathways to psychological pathology are fundamentally correct and I'll discuss those in a little bit more detail as we proceed through today's lecture now because the late 1900s is now a long time ago it's useful to put Freud in his historical context um so this is partly history of psychology I suppose but it also shed some light on how the nature of psychiatric and psychological disorders transform with time because you know you tend to think of them as especially if you're more scientifically oriented you tend to think of a disorder or an illness as something that approximates a scientific category but the thing about illnesses diagnostic categories let's say is they're not precisely scientific categories in fact they might not be scientific categories at all they're informed by science sometimes and I would say increasingly as we develop the Diagnostics and statistics manual which is the fundamental book that outlines psychiatric and psychological diagnosis particularly in North America but increasingly around the world science is being used to inform the language that sits at the bottom of the dimensions along which the pathologies are defined so for example with regards to the personality disorders there's increasing emphasis although not enough emphasis yet on dimensional models such as the big five but you have to understand that medical diagnostic categories serve a number of purposes and and you shouldn't get cynical about this often people start out by thinking about diagnostic categories as scientific and then they soon find out that the idea that they're scientific can be criticized on multiple different fronts and quite severely Michelle Foucault for example has done a lot of that and his Works were regarded as revolutionary by people who didn't know anything about the history of psychiatric disorders because most of what he outlined was already known by people who took the time to know partly what Foucault outlined was the fact that psychiatric diagnostic categories like Medical Diagnostic categories play a sociological and political and economic role as well as a scientific and treatment-oriented role and that's partly because as I mentioned at the beginning of the lecture series when you're attempting to move someone from abnormality say or ill health towards normality or health and those aren't precisely the same it's not precisely parallel lines there um you're doing a lot more than science you're also involved in ethics and you can't help it and then you know you also have to think about why it is that we have psychiatric diagnostic categories for example and you know some of the critics of Psychiatry especially in the 1960s regarded as primarily an economic or political movement that was designed to categorize people who engaged in abnormal behavior and to and to prevent them from exercising their full rights in society no because it was thought of as a purely oppressive Enterprise now all you have to do is take a walk around Toronto and see all the deinstitutionalized schizophrenics wandering around enjoying their freedom to understand that the description of psychiatry as a purely tyrannical or oppressive sociological regime has a lot to account for because those people were de-institutionalized in the late 60s and early 70s and the institutions have never been rebuilt and all that happened was that they were dumped on the streets where they generally stopped taking their medication and survived very poorly so even if Psychiatry plays a sociological and political and economic role don't be thinking that that invalidates it as an Enterprise it just means that it's a very complex Enterprise that has to span multiple dimensions of it stands on many different philosophical and scientific foundations now psychiatric diagnostic categories and the symptomatology that's associated with them also transforms with time and that's kind of a strange thing especially if you think about psychiatric ill health as a biological phenomena but language transforms across time too and it's grounded in biology and the truth of the matter is that nothing that human beings do or experience exists in a cultural vacuum so for example when I was young a common schizophrenic delusion especially for the paranoid schizophrenics was that the TV was talking to them now obviously they didn't have that delusion in 1920. because there weren't any televisions so by the time it was saying 1930 it would be in the radio and now the most common focus of paranoia is the internet and there's some reason for that I mean because even if the TV wasn't spying on you the internet probably is so that's a simple example showing how cultural transformation can change the contents and the phenomenology that's associated with a given psychiatric Disorder so you can think of them as being characterized by some combination of biology biological pathology historical pathology pathology that's limited to the individual's experience and then you can think about that all as nested inside a given cultural context which in itself may be pathological or normative and so it's the interplay of all those factors that makes understanding mental illness and diagnostic categories are very challenging Enterprise especially when you also add to that the necessity for social control which would be the political economic Dimension and then also for intervention at the individual level because one of the things you want to ask yourself is well what serves Society better Society serve better by putting people who are completely unable of adopting normative behavior and who may be disruptive and frightening somewhere where they cannot disturb the bulk of the population so that's question number one and the answer to that is all not obviously that's a mistake now it may be a mistake and it certainly would be a mistake in some cases but you can't just simply say that it's a mistake all the time because you want to be able to walk around on the streets relatively unharassed and free of fear it's not an unreasonable desire for a civilized society then the next question or maybe even the first question might be well do these institutions help the individuals with whom they're directly interacted and then the right answer to that is compared to what because compared to perfect the answer is no but compared to no help whatsoever the answer is probably yes and so it's also you worthwhile to be useful in your or to be realistic in your expectations so for example most people who are schizophrenic don't like to take their psychiatric medication and the reason for that is because antipsychotic medications which were only really popularized at the end of the 1950s work on the biological axis the dopaminergic system that produces positive emotion and so if you take an antipsychotic it's going to flatten out your positive emotion and demotivate you and sort of take the color out of your life and you can imagine that that's not very amusing and then of course if you take them and you start to feel better and maybe you're feeling better for three or four months or six months or a year you're going to be thinking well maybe I'm better and then you're going to stop taking them so if you ask a schizophrenic very frequently about their medication they'll say Well they're not very happy to be taking it and they'd like to quit as soon as they can but that does not necessarily mean that the medication is not doing something that's beneficial it just means that the best they can hope for is not very good and that doesn't Point directly to a flaw in the system that's dealing with them it just points to the terrible nature of the disease and it's fundamentally intractable qualities okay so back to Freud so now a lot of what Freud saw was sexual pathology now you might ask yourself why well the first thing we could point out is that when Freud was alive Society was very highly divided by gender was divided by gender roles and men were authorities and women were by and large subordinate although that situation is more complex than the simple reading of History might lead you to conclude so for example if you read tolstoy's novels characterizing Russian Society in the late 1900s you find out that among the aristocratic women and after all only the aristocrats had power there was plenty of power being exercised the women essentially structured Society men were involved in politics and they were involved in war but women were setting up the social interactions that characterize the bulk of of society in their groups and in there and then their own interactions so it's not clear who was doing what when what is clear though is that in the Victorian times sex was a lot more dangerous for women than it is now and it's plenty dangerous now a there was no reliable forms of birth control that's a big problem and B there was tremendous risk of syphilis and syphilis for all intents and purposes was as bad or is as bad or worse than AIDS now it's controllable now but it wasn't controllable then and syphilis could also be passed on to children and it was a neurological disease that could take virtually any form so it was a real terror for European society and so the reason that the Europe that the victorians were sort of repressive in sexual matters was because the environment demanded it and we know and more research has been done on this recently it's fascinating research we know that as the rate of contagious pathogen in the environment increases the degree to which a society becomes authoritarian increases and very rapidly in fact there's recent data showing that this paper published just a few months ago showing that the correlation between infectious disease prevalence in a given geographical Locale and authoritarian political views held by the individuals in that Locale approaches 0.7 which is absolutely phenomenal it's such a high correlation that it it it it almost eats up all of the relationship and so as the risk of infectious disease Rises people become less and less tolerant in their views on interpersonal behavior and a lot of that's going to be associated with sexual behavior because that's a very good Vector for the transmission of disease we should remember that you know if we haven't been so technologically advanced in the 1980s well first of all AIDS wouldn't have spread because it spread because of air travel but apart from that you know AIDS could have taken us all out it was just luck of the draw and technological power that enabled us to keep it under control and you know there's no reason to assume that another sexually transmissible plague like AIDS won't come along so because that's promiscuity increases the rate at which sexually transmissible diseases are transmitted Rises exponentially right and in a connected world that's bad news so my point is the the freudians the victorians had their reasons to be relatively repressive from a sexual perspective um there is another problem too which for women in particular which was that thank you apart from the danger of pregnancy and the danger of sexually transmitted disease there was also the danger of the destruction of their social reputation and so if a woman got a reputation for um promiscuity at any level the probability that she was going to be tossed out of her sociological Niche into some god-awful life of prostitution for example was really quite High so now so that sets up the sociological what would you call it the sociological surround you don't repress something unless engaging in it has high costs and certainly for the Victorian sexual behavior was a high cost Enterprise especially for the women and so Freud given Freud's emphasis on biological motivation and given his belief that sex sexual drive was a fundamentally was one of the fundamental biological motivations you can see that the stage is set for in some sense for a developmental conflict now the conflict's already there when you're a child say of 11 or 10 you exist in a world where the demand or even the desire for engaging in sexual behavior is low but as soon as puberty kicks in things change dramatically then the child is faced with the problem of integrating the new demand that's placed on them by the maturation of their body into their personality and into the social surround and that's no simple matter when there's genuine conflicts between its expression and other important considerations like social propriety and health for example or maybe medium to long-term relationship stability or maybe the provision of a safe place to raise children Etc so that's the situation that the Floridian or the victorians found themselves in now Freud believed that many of the patients that he saw the female patients and had been sexually abused or molested as children he wavered in that belief throughout his life and has been called to task rather severely for that by more current critics but Freud was one of the first observers of the extreme malleability of memory and he found it very difficult when he was interacting with his clients especially the ones who were more hysterical in in their essential orientation to distinguish between memories that they had made up or fantasies and things that actually happened to them and until you encounter someone whose memory structure is extremely incoherent and chaotic it's almost impossible to realize to what degree people can wander around in the world with no sense whatsoever of what's happened to them so for example I had a client at one point who told me that she thought she had been raped five times and so the first thing you might note if you heard a statement like that is that the word thought is a very peculiar insertion in that sentence because it's not exactly all that straightforward to understand how you would have any doubt about that if it happened five times so she was a very strange woman and she was a person who was very much like someone Freud would have described in the late 19th century as a hysteric she had virtually no catalyzed identity she was as far as I could tell almost completely Hollow in that none of the things that had ever happened to her seemed to have been processed beyond the mere fact that they occurred and I think that a big part of that was because she didn't really ever have anyone to talk to and one of the things that's emerged as a consequence of Freud's work in part is a realization of the degree to which communication about your experiences is advantageous or even necessary in the maintenance of mental health now Freud believed that you needed to talk about experiences that were particularly emotionally significant partly because it was necessary to release or or abriac the emotions that were associated with the experience he called that catharsis more recent research particularly that done by James penabaker has indicated that it's actually the articulation of those experiences the verbalization and their transformation into a coherent representation that seems to be beneficial for mental health rather than the mere expression of emotion but just because Freud was only partially right about why his method work doesn't mean he was wrong about the fact that it did work now this woman was unemployed and had been for years although she dressed in a business suit and she had talked her way into hosting a cable television show in the town I was working with in in the city I was working in that was a program about fostering the entrepreneurial Spirit even though she was unemployed and never started a business in her life and she had also talked her way onto a government board that was charged with investigating the development of a high-speed rail lake in southern Ontario even though she had absolutely no experience whatsoever with business or railways so she had a reasonably well developed Persona from a jungian perspective I asked her at one point to show me her resume and she brought me in a binder you know those three ring binders that was an inch and a half thick with those little tab dividers that you use to segregate different sections of your CV and in which she had included a 20-page description of her recent dreams and a discussion or a list of all the novels she'd read in the last 10 years she was completely incapable of noting that every single thing about that CV was inappropriate even though she didn't suffer from any formal thought disorders she she wasn't schizophrenic or psychotic in any way with regards to the rape statement she told me that what happened to her frequently was that she would go to a bar in her vague and ill-defined way and she'd have a few drinks or maybe more than a few and then she'd end up back at her place with some man or at his place and then that night they would have sexual relations and then in the morning she was unclear about whether or not that was voluntary now this was a fascinating case for me because she outlined that story to me and at this point I had become somewhat familiar with the danger of therapist manipulation of patient memories because therapists can implant so to speak memories in clients but it's very very complicated because when you're dealing with someone who's as chaotic and vague as this particular person was it's virtually impossible not to implant memories just by talking about them so here's so I thought she told me this story and I thought okay I have a chance to reorganize This Woman's entire con conception of her past sexual experiences by uttering a variety of sentences so I could have said well unless you give Express consent to each stage of a sexual transaction then you're clearly being victimized and your claim that you may have been raped five times could be transformed into the claim that you were or I could have said are you completely out of your mind if you go to a bar and a singles bar by yourself and you have six or seven drinks or however many drinks you had and you bring someone home or go to their place and you end up in bed with them and that happens five times then probably you have something to do with it and making a claim of rape is absurd and then you might ask yourself which of those opposing interpretations are correct and it doesn't matter because I didn't tell her either of them because it was up to her to sort out exactly what had happened now it's not that easy to believe that people like that exist but they do and she was someone who had never reflected on any of her experiences she had no real articulated identity and a big part of that was because she was completely isolated and so when Freud got confused about whether his clients memories of sexual trauma in childhood were accurate or inaccurate the reason that he got confused was because he was frequently dealing with people who were confused right down to the bottom of their souls and who for one reason or another had never been able to engage in the process of articulation that would have allowed them to establish a well-established a well-differentiated identity the the text that I'm showing you in these slides is based upon a book by a man named Henry Henry actually Ellen Berger who is an existentialist was an existentialist psychologist psychiatrist who lived in Montreal and he wrote a book called the discovery of the unconscious and if you're interested in psychoanalytic thought and the history of psycho Island thought that's the best book that's ever been written it's called the discovery of the unconscious now the other thing Ellen Berger points out because I paraphrased his book here is that punishments for transgressions in the Victorian times were also fairly Draconian and that also sets up the situation for conflict now if you're driven by something that's a very strong drive and you're liable to encounter tremendous trouble as a consequence of engaging in it it's not a very easy thing for you to do to figure out how to negotiate that particular landscape Ellenberg says psychoanalysis evidently belongs to that unmasking Trend the search for hidden unconscious motivations characteristic of the 1880s and 1990s in Freud as in nature words and deeds are viewed as manifestations of unconscious motivations mainly of instincts and conflicts of instinct for both men the unconscious is the wild Realm of the wild Bruges instincts that cannot find permissible Outlets that derive from earlier stages of the individual end of mankind and that find expression in passion dreams and mental illnesses even the term ID does s originates from Nietzsche the dynamic concept of mind with the Notions of mental energy quanta of latent or inhibited energy or release of energy or transfer from one drive to another is also to be found in Nietzsche before Freud Nietzsche conceived the Mind as a system of drives that can Collide or be fused into each other this is from the life and work of Sigmund Freud by Jones who was Freud's biographer talking about the process that resulted in Freud's hypothesis about the unconscious Jones says in the summer of 1897 Freud undertook his most heroic feat a psychoanalysis of his own unconscious as something that's Akin in some sense to the initiatory routines that I described for you at the beginning of this course it's hard for us nowadays to imagine how momentous this achievement was that difficulty being the fate of most pioneering exploits yet the uniqueness of the feet remains once done it is done forever for no one again can be the first to explore those depths in the long history of humanity the task has often been attempted philosophers and writers from Salon to montane from juvenile to schopenheimer schopenhauer had essay to follow the advice of the delphic Oracle know thyself but all had succumbed to the effort inner resistances had barred advance their head from time to time being flashes of intuition to point the way but they'd always flickered out the realm of the unconscious whose existence was so often postulated to remained dark and the words of heraclitus still stood stood the soul of man is a far country which cannot be approached or explored Freud had no help no one to assist the undertaking in the slightest degree worse than this the very thing that drove him onwards he must have dimly divined however much he tried to conceal it from himself could only result in profoundly affecting his relations perhaps even severing them with the one being to whom he was so closely bound and who had steady his mental equilibrium it was daring much and risking much what courage intellectual and moral must have been needed but it was forthcoming now obviously Jones is a real admirer of Freud and he believed that Freud's hypothesis emerged from a careful analysis from Freud's careful analysis of his own fantasies and drives an unconscious life the Freudian model divides the human psycheon in a variety of different ways the symbolist of which is conscious and unconscious and Ellenberger points out that by 1900 four functions of the unconscious had been described there's the conservative so that's memory that's that's memory so in some manner that we don't really understand your psyche is the storehouse of representations of experiences that you've had prior to today now some of those are recallable as the stories that constitute your experience those would be the sorts of things that come up in your mind as images maybe dreamlike images or movie like images or stories that you can explicitly tell people about your past experiences where you're the actor in those experiences there's also the elements of memory that enable you to do things like to speak and you don't have conscious access to how it is that you know how to speak or for example how it is that you know how to ride a bike that's more implicit forms of memory so that unconscious contains the information or the skills or the circuitry that enables you to engage in Complex Motor acts that you've learned to do the unconscious contains habits those are those are the more procedural elements that I that I just described and dissociated elements of the personality which may lead a parasitic existence now that's an interesting idea so part of that's predicated on the notion that I showed you this hierarchy before yes you've seen this before right so now you can imagine that when you're watching when you're interacting with maybe your father your mother your sister your great aunt or that there are chunks of their personality that you incorporate into yourself sort of from Whole cloth and maybe you're doing that in the piagetian sense by imitating them and and so the and and that your your being is full of these hierarchies or sub-hierarchies Each of which is devoted towards a single purpose or maybe a singular collection of purposes and that you can switch back and forth between being dominated by one of these or the other and some of them are more straightforward like the state of perception and action that might characterize you if you're simply angry or if you're simply possessed by sexual desire but the more complicated ones would be those that make those who know you say you're acting just like your mother now or you're acting just like your father now and what that means in a sense from the Freudian perspective and I think as well from the piagetian perspective that you've Incorporated huge subsets of the habits and perceptual schemas that make up the people who were closest to you in your developmental history now Freud would believe that those things can motivate you unconsciously in that for example you might be living out your parents unconscious dreams or maybe you're living out your parents unconscious dreams that you'll be a bad child that happens very frequently I've seen families for example where a daughter was born instead of a son to the great dissatisfaction of the mother and the consequence of that was that that child was essentially demonized from day one and to the degree to which that was precisely unconscious behavior on the part of the mother was debatable but certainly if you asked her if she was out to destroy her child with every action she ever took she would say no but if you watched her carefully across months you would see that that was precisely what she was doing now you might ask well why would someone develop an attitude like that and this particular person the mother had grown up in a culture where boys were more valued than girls certainly within the confines of a given family and she'd already had a daughter so was that her was it the culture was it something that she picked up for her parents God only knows but it was this free-floating spirit in a sense that happened to inhabit her and shaped the way that she was interacting with the world without her really understanding what she was doing at an articulated level at all in fact if you ever more or less confronted her with the evidence that she was doing such a thing she did absolutely everything you could possibly imagine to refuse to take any ownership for that whatsoever or to articulate it or even to conceive that a human being might be capable of such a thing even though the situation in her family made appalling look like a vacation creative the unconscious serves as the Matrix of new ideas well here's an idea where do your thoughts come from well you know you say you think them up well you know as far as Black Box explanations go that's a prime one there's what do you mean you think them up Jung pointed out that's not even accurate it's more like they appear in your experience more or less unbidden you know it's funny thing because you can concentrate and that seems to facilitate the process of the generation of new ideas at least sometimes but most of the time it just seems like you're standing in a room by yourself in the dark and a thought comes and where does it come from well the psychoanalytic explanation for that which is more of a description is well it comes from the unconscious that is the unconscious that's producing those mythopoetic the unconscious constructs narratives and Fantasies that appear Mythic or religious in nature so what that means at least in part is that some of the dissociated fragments of Personality say that inhabit you and guide your actions are so ancient partly because of their biological basis and part of the because of the ancient historical overlay on top of that that they take the form of great myths and stories that look like they're common to everyone in one form or another so for a good example of that might be the degree to which you are possessed by rivalry with your sibling which is one of the oldest stories that you know that men that the individual members of mankind tell to one another because it's such a common experience and because the manner in which that experience is going to manifest itself has been shaped by cultural representations Freud was also very much convinced that the mind was a composite of contradictory drives this is a very interesting proposition and I think one that's true I think you could you can see it most particularly if you consider the behavior of two-year-olds and as I've already discussed with you if you watch a two-year-old they rapidly cycle from one intensely motivated state to another and I think a reasonable way of of conceptualizing that is that much of the underlying biology of the two-year-old is already in place in terms of its his or her fundamental motivations a two-year-old can be hungry and a two-year-old can be hot or cold or uncomfortable in a variety of different ways or feel pain or feel anxiety or feel Joy or feel um exhilaration or curiosity or surprise all that circuitry is there but it's not integrated at a higher level into a functioning personality because in part what the functioning personality is is a collective agreement among all those fundamental drives as to which is going to take priority win and under what conditions and the integration of that with the entire broader cultural milieu so for example by the time your two-year-old is four you would expect them to be able to self-regulate which means when they step into a particular circumstance they should be able to determine which of their motivational States is going to be allowed to manifest itself we would think about that as a form of learned inhibition even though it's really not it's more like the integration of those motivated States into a higher order game where each of them gets a chance to express themselves but only in a particular order and only under particular circumstances and then of course the four-year-old has to have learned to do that in the presence of other children and in the presence of other adults so that the fundamental motivational structures are integrated into a higher order structure that allows everybody to get along just fine and for everyone to pursue the things that they need to pursue and so part of the reason you might think that you have a cortex is so that you can take the more fundamental elements of your drives which you could think of as part of the Freudian ID which means it it's the thing that in you isn't you it's the things that you're subject to from within the reason that you have a cortex in many ways is so that you can figure out how to integrate those complex states of being that that keep you alive in some fundamental sense into a society that's characterized by hundreds of thousands of other creatures trying to do the same thing at the same time and so you can imagine that that requires particular adaptation to the particulars of the society and that and the more General functions of the of the deep end so the unconscious is partly the end which is this collection of drives Freud concentrated mostly on the sexual drives and the aggressive drives because those are or instincts the sexual instincts and the aggressive instincts it's a better term than drive because those are the most difficult to integrate into the surrounding social milieu because sex for example is a pretty selfish act it isn't an altruistic act in any sense and in some sense it's also a zero-sum game you're in competition with everyone else for your success at that particular game you can say the same thing about aggression especially if you think about it in relationship to dominance hierarchy striving because there are very few positions in any given dominance hockey that are at the top and so in some ways the competition is zero-sum and it's every person against every other person but well that's happening you have to keep the dominance hierarchy itself in place right because there's no sense in destroying the structure that you're trying to climb and so Freud points out consider constantly that this is a very very difficult process of integration he also points out that in some sense the way that people solve that problem is not by integrating what they do instead is repress now repression has two elements one might be and this is maybe more what's dealt with by cognitive behavioral psychologists one form of repression is you just don't develop the capacity so let's say if you're a sophisticated child and you're a fairly aggressive child than what you learn to do is to integrate your aggression into the games that you play with other people so maybe you turn into a very competitive and skilled child and that doesn't mean precisely that you've inhibited your aggression it means that you've developed it into an unbelievably sophisticated set of skills so that you can manifest it within the games that people play without blowing the games apart so you can be a competitive and skilled player basketball player for example which can be extremely aggressive or a hockey player or something like that but everyone still wants to play with you so that means that that that the there's been no repression of the aggressive drive or limited it's just being integrated into all the things that it can conceivably inform the alternative to that would be well let's say your parents said you're never to be angry with anyone under any circumstances whatsoever because good people never get mad now lots of people believe that identifying aggression with with evil certainly or at least with the kind of actions that only people they despise engage in which generally means that their capacity for aggression is still there in a very nascent and underdeveloped form but that they have absolutely no skills whatsoever that would be useful for integrating it into their lives so for example one manifestation of the integration of aggression is let's say that you're negotiating for a job it's an aggressive negotiation because they want you cheap and you don't want to be taken cheaply so if you're good at really drawing on your aggressive ability the first thing that you figure out is well how is it that I can say no in this negotiation and mean it which is an aggressive act if you want something for me and I just say no then at minimum I'm putting up a wall that you don't get to cross and if you're negotiating with someone and you can't do that you lose and then people walk all over you and then what's going to happen to your aggression is it's going to manifest itself in resentment which is you know a very um unproductive form of aggression and then According to Freud I think this is a very accurate observation that resentment is going to drive leakages of aggressive behavior everywhere so you'll come home from the negotiation where you didn't get the salary that you deserved and you know your husband or your wife will say some little niggling thing that's under most circumstances wouldn't bother anyone and poof there'll be a big fight which is not very helpful and maybe you don't even know why it happens and that would be part of being unconsciously motivated and this sort of thing happens all the time it seems to especially happen with things like aggression because if you get picked on you know repeatedly during the day each time that happens the mechanisms will say they're the defensive aggressive aggression mechanisms that reside in the hypothalamus they're sort of noting that you're taking dominance hierarchy blows and being pushed down the structure where it's unsafe because you don't want to be at the bottom of the dominance hockey and then that system is has a proclivity more and more to grab your behavior and your perception and react as it should because you don't want to be pushed down the dominance hierarchy and then if it's if enough darts have been thrown at you for that day then someone will push you over threshold and poof all hell break loose but it's very unsophisticated behavior and it's likely to work at Cross purposes to the end that could be achieved if those impulses were properly integrated into the personality so from the Freudian perspective the answer would never be don't be aggressive partly because you don't have that choice the answer would be if you're going to be aggressive which you need to be because that protects you then be sophisticated about it and don't pretend that it isn't there and people do that all the time that's part of repression part of what Freud described as repression can ease more simply be conceptualized just as self-deception you tell yourself well I'm not that sort of person and the truth of the matter is oh yes you are and then there's a deeper truth underneath that which is not only are you but you should be and that applies on the dimension of aggression and on the dimension of sexuality because another thing that you might think about is well how many marriages break down because of infidelity and then the answer to that is the substantial proportion often because a marriage cannot tolerate even one act of infidelity I mean if it's hidden that's one thing maybe the marriage can still survive even though you know it's on very unstable ground at that point but if the act of infidelity is exposed or admitted to then the contractual relationship at that point becomes radically unclear it's very difficult to maintain a marriage relationship after that well you might ask yourself well how is it that you stop such a thing from happening and a psychoanalytic Act a psychoanalytic answer would be well don't try to be too good in your marriage and what what the freudians would mean by that is well you don't want to be the sort of 1950s couple each of whom sleeps in a different bed because even though that might fulfill some restricted Notions of propriety and Purity the problem probability that it will satiate the more instinctive sexual desires that necessarily manifest themselves and and more importantly that also make up part of what makes life dionysian and rich instead of just rational and dull those things have to be integrated inside the marriage and that means that it's difficult I think this is often a difficult thing for men to do because and maybe this is less true than it was but I doubt it there's a difference between the category wife and the category mistress and the wife category is sort of a pure category maybe that's like mother or maybe it's like sister or maybe it's like Anna and then there's the mistress category which is more like stripper or prostitute or or temptress or something like that and well if each category is completely separate from the other then if you're in the married married category the mistress category is going to start looking pretty attractive and so the trick is to get those things integrated but that also means that the man in the relationship has to Foster the development of the mistress in his wife and often his moral propriety will stop that from happening or maybe his jealousy because one of the things that you see happening for example in in marriages if the wife starts to make herself and this this can also be reversed if the wife starts to make herself look more attractive perhaps to get in better physical shape to dress better to look more attractive in public to the degree that the husband is insecure and feeling inferior he'll interfere with that because he's afraid if she gets more attractive then she'll attract someone who will take her away from him so he'll do everything he can to unconsciously ensure that she's as oppressed and Dowdy as she can possibly be so that at least she doesn't run away from him screaming and that's a standard Freudian entanglement and something that's very characteristic of many close relationships you see the same things often say between parents and children where the mother or the father are afraid that the child will surpass them in some way or leave them and that's the Freudian eatable situation if either parent is afraid that the child will leave then the parents will do everything they can to undermine every movement whatsoever towards the child's Independence and keep them infantile and the infantile highest child becomes dependent but unbelievably resentful as they should because the parent is doing everything they can unconsciously to ensure that the best part of the child is never allowed to develop and that's an unbelievably common occurrence Freud believed that was characteristic of most families and that was partly because of the long developmental period that children need in order to become independent but more complexly it was because the Dynamics between the father and the mother may be impaired in one fashion or another sexually or from a perspective of communication or in any of the ways that people can be mismatched and maybe as well the couple's isolated somewhat friendless and so there are many things that they need to be accruing to themselves in order for their lives to be full and they're not getting them and so then they turn to their children for more attention than they should for example and encourage their children to pay more attention to them than they should and then from the Freudian perspective what happens is that the whole unconscious Dynamic and fantasy structure of the household becomes extremely pathologized so that the so that what people are acting out so to speak is this weird intermingling of mother father child and lover where none of the roles are clearly apparent where none of the roles are clearly distinguished from one another it's a mess you know in that's a situation that's very much facilitated by deceit on the part of the parents because maybe the husband asks the wife well are you happy here and she says well of course everything's always going well in our household and what she means is I'd like to take out a knife and stab you 15 times while you're asleep but she doesn't regard that as an appropriate verbal statement even though it might be something that she's fantasizing about deeply you know for for hours a day but there's no way that's going to come to light you know what you you can see these sorts of things happening if you pay attention to your fantasy life from a Freudian perspective because you'll see if you can catch flashes of fantasy especially when you're frustrated or disappointed or annoyed or something hasn't gone your way you'll have little stories Branch off in your mind and those are these underlying ID like systems that are trying to inform your behavior but they're kind of one-sided and single-minded and the fantasies that they pop up can be you know pathologically aggressive or say pathologically sexual but they're they're attempting to make a case for a mode of being that needs to be integrated into your personality now the other thing the freudians noted was to say the less sexual you are as an integrated personality the more sexuality will manifest itself as pathologized in your fantasy it's partly because in some sense it has to scream very loudly to get your attention but it's also because if you refuse to allow something that's alive a healthy path of development it's not just going to go away you put a potato in the cellar and you shine very dim light on all you get are these white spindly shoots that are hideous and and you know and appalling but the thing is trying to live and the same thing applies from the Freudian perspective to the fundamental instinctual motivations that drive human beings is like they can be deeply pathologized to the degree that they're not allowed to be properly expressed and then you can get more and more dissociated from them so that it becomes an increasing war between fantasies that are developing more and more to the pathological side and the ego which is doing everything it can to increasingly defend itself from those realizations so here's a list this is a good list this is a very good list to think about here are some of the voluntary actions that people undertake in order to ensure that the unconscious both as a repository of instinctual motivation and as a repository of memory becomes as pathological as possible and so one way of thinking about the Freudian unconscious apart from the ID element which is the Instinct part this is more to do with the memory element is well when people engage in something that's pathological are they conscious of it and the freudians would say well generally not but that doesn't mean they weren't conscious of it when they first did it it's like the decision it's like the decision to lie is conscious you may forget that you did it and only be moving forward through time the consequences of having engaged in it and the fact that you've made it habitual and that there are consequences maybe something you forget and that becomes unconscious but it doesn't mean you didn't know what you were doing when you first did it and so here are some of the little nasty tricks that people play on each other and on themselves in order to ensure that they don't accurately represent the nature of their experience and you might ask yourself what is accurate representation mean given that there's no way you can ever have a coherent and complete representation of anything that ever happens to you and so one rule of thumb for that is that well you've accurately represented something that's happened to you that was negative in the past if you've represented it such that you're not going to do it again in the future because the purpose of memory in large part is to stop you from doing the same stupid things that you've already done again in the future it's not purely representational right it's adaptive and so if you're twisting and distorting your memory so that they're more acceptable to you from a conceptual level but not developing in this direction that would allow you to become increasingly adapted well then you're engaging you're likely engaging in one or more of these processes repression well repression is that you just don't admit it I think mostly what happens when people repress is not so much that they actively repress it's not exactly that they do something and they remember it and then they push it down it's that they do something and there are some consequences and the consequences are complex and maybe they're motivated and then they just don't think about it anymore because it's easy not to think about something you just don't think about it it's easy so in some sense although this isn't a precisely Freudian idea the default position is repression you know because most of the things that you do are complex and they require articulation and not order to understand you can just avoid engaging in that and then the nasty little situation will remain sort of emotionally valent and attempting to pop up in your memory structure those are the sorts of things that maybe you remember that happened more than 18 months ago that still cause an emotional response when you bring them to mind that's a good clue that there's something there that you have not articulated sometimes it's because you don't want to and sometimes it's just because you can't you know you just you don't know how to make sense out of the occurrence you know maybe you were bullied a lot when you were 13 it still bothers you when you think about it but you still haven't been able to figure out exactly why deny it well that's just outright you know when you're dealing with a teenager and they're lying and you say are you lying and they say no that's the end of that reaction formation oh that was a sneaky one so Freud would observe that for example in sibling relationships where you know one sibling is extremely irritated at the other but the way they cover that up to themselves and other people is by overdoing it in the other direction so you know maybe a husband is having some serious second thoughts about his wife and what he does in order to stay unconscious of that particular bit of reality is act with excessive character words or whenever they go out and there's always a falseness about that I mean if your antenna are up at all that sort of thing actually when maybe it's worse for me because I've seen this so often I'm sensitive to it that sort of thing it turns my stomach you know when you see this this saccharine falseness with which people treat each other you know there's something god-awful Brewing right underneath the surface and neither of them will admit to it you know a good fist fight would do them a lot of good but instead they'll just torture each other to death with politeness for two or three decades so displacement Lori talked about that one my boss yells at me I yell at my husband my husband yells at the baby and the baby bites the cat the sort of movement of the problem down the dominance hurricane identification um you're bullied in school and so you start bullying kids that are younger than you rationalization oh this is a good one if you're intelligent so all of those of you you're all pretty intelligent if you want to be neurotic the best thing to do would be to turn your intelligence to the to the function of rationalization so that when you do something that you is clearly not in your best interest or anyone else's then you want to meditate on how to formulate a sequence of complex explanations that make that pathological Behavior look positively altruistic and then stick to that you know as hard as you can in every argument that you ever have for the rest of your life so that's uh excellent use of of intelligence intellectualization same sort of thing that's usually when you dress up your Neurosis with philosophy and so you often see that in people who instead of addressing their own personality pathologies blame them on you know the pathological cultural conditions and try to foment Revolutions of one type or another because it's pretty clear that they don't have the problem it's the whole society that has the problem and if it would just reorganize itself around them then everything would be fine I saw a good example of this in the Atlantic Monthly several months ago where a woman who had despite her best efforts in some sense not being married by the time she was in her 40s blamed the structure yeah the entire structure of Western Civilization for their continued failure of her dating attempts which you know that might be the case but I would say that before you jump to that conclusion you might give some consideration to the fact that perhaps you're integrally involved in that failure sublimation oh yes well Freud regarded this as a real driving force in culture per se so cold here is okay then I'll sculpt naked women so Freud believed that instinctual motivations like sexuality that weren't finding their expression in The Logical behavioral conclusion could be the energy could be channeled so to speak into other sorts of Pursuits and the sublimation explanation is really interesting one from an evolutionary evolutionary psychology perspective because you see these weird things happening not only in human beings but also in animals there's this animal verb called a bower bird if you look them up Bowers b-o-w-e-r they're really cool birds and so the males make this they go on the ground and then they sweep the ground with their wings and then they build this really complicated weaved thing that's Nest like and then they make little art pictures in front of it so they take like red leaves and they put them all in a pile and then they go find some yellow leaves and they put them in a pile maybe a few rocks and some seeds and some bottle caps and they make this really beautiful display and they you know there's a bunch of them in one area that do that and then the females come along and they look at the artistic display and they look at the little bird and they look at the artistic display and maybe they're happy and move in or maybe they hop off to find some other Barrel Birds little artistic production and they're really nice like these are major league efforts especially given that birds make them and if the bower bird gets visited by three or four females and uh you know the whole artistic thing isn't going very well then they erase the little thing they've done with their with their wings and they tear apart the little thing they've woven and then they're all depressed and then they start again and so and that's a good example of a complex idea called sublimation obviously the bird is utilizing its creative capacity to fill a sexual in to fulfill a sexual Instinct now Freud would say the sexual instinct is being channeled into the creative production and it's actually relatively hard to make a case against that if you're a darwinian and we know for example that one of the things that makes human beings attractive to one another is creativity you know manifested say in dress and all sorts of other things and so you know the question is is sexuality driving that at the individual level which would be a Freudian interpretation or is it tangled up in it even more deeply at a biological level in this the whole reason that people are creative is so that we're attractive to one another and so and that drives the species and it drives reproduction and so our creative Endeavor is somehow Tangled Up deeply with our with our reproductive desire and it's certainly not an unreasonable proposition projection so you're arguing with someone well you do you guys do this all the time you're making me mad it's like you think about that that's a really interesting statement it's like well you know it's true in a way right because now you're you're arguing with someone who's really annoying and clearly they're making you mad on the other hand the only reason they're making you mad is because you're accepting the you know the structure within which the argument is occurring and the fact that they're able to elicit that sort of response from you means that your interpretation of the circumstance plays a causal role so that's a complex form of projection a simpler form of projection is well you just don't think about it at all it's like you're not touchy the other person's annoying and a lot of arguments are actually about settling that you're touching no you're annoying no you're touchy no you're annoying it's like how do you ever settle that well usually you start dishing out even larger insults you know not only are you annoying but you annoy lots of other people not just me you know and that's it's a funny kind of projection because it obviously isn't it often isn't precisely clear who started what or who is in fact at fault anyways that's not a comprehensive listing of Freudian defense mechanisms but it's not a bad one foreign ideas are at the core of psychological conflict I'd give an example let's do a psychosomatic one sort of thing is extremely complicated so that a client once who she had a real fun time I'll change the story a little bit um she was at a job that she had been training at for a long period of time and she thought she was doing pretty well but they fired her and then they packed her up and put her on her bicycle to go home the same day and then on the way home she drove her bicycle down a Ravine and and you know crashed into a tree so that's real fun that's a one-two punch right so first of all your job disappears and then as you're just barely not recovering from that then bang you get hurt and she was quite hurt as a consequence of the accident so she had come to see me for was looked like post-traumatic stress disorder but there was a bit of a there was a bit of underlying thought disorder that was sort of associated with it but to make a long story short one of the things that she did when she came to see me was she was always like this and um I found this very bothersome after a while because of mirror I think it was mirroring so she'd come in here like this and that would make me uncomfortable and one day I had I had mentioned this to her and she said she was she thought she had hurt her arm and maybe she had and so I started getting her to move her arm a little bit so she'd move it like this and then she'd move it like this and then she'd move it like this and she was getting so she could move it pretty well and then the next time she came in she was still like this and I got this weird impulse and I said well come over just stand I've seen her for like years by this point I said just stand by my desk and so she stood like this and I sort of pounded my fist down her spine and uh she cried for like 45 minutes so that was pretty interesting I mean it was like like light pounding eh and then her shoulder was looser and she could move her arm more so then I kind of investigated that and she said well she was afraid to move her arm because she might damage it more and so then I looked into that and then she told me a story about how one time when she was five years old she'd gone accidentally into a wagon and gone down a hill and and cracked up at the bottom and then they put her in the hospital and then her parents weren't allowed to see her for like a month and a half which is what hospitals used to do because they were sadistic and stupid and so that left her with a permanent distrust of Institutions which was sort of associated with the kind of the paranoid edge of her post-traumatic stress disorder but also accounted for why she didn't want to move her arm because she thought if she moved it then that might hurt her more and then she'd end up in the hospital and so that's a good example of how unconscious memories and conflicts part of the big conflict there for her was she had a real problem with institutions you know and a lot of that was politicized there was something wrong with all institutions which is true but Irrelevant in most cases you know because you still have to adapt to the damn things but it had really hurt her adaptation because she couldn't trust institutions and then if she ever got hurt physically she couldn't move herself because she was afraid she'd re-damage the body part and then she'd end up in an institution so that's a good example um incomprehensible distress see if I can come up with a good example of that oh I can give you a hallucination one this is a good one so I had a client one time who uh he was a schizophrenic I met him in a behavioral outpatient inpatient ward in Montreal and I um I was doing an IQ test with him and he wasn't concentrating at all and so I said why aren't you concentrating and he was looking all distracted and he said because the war between the battle between good and evil in heaven is going on in my head which I thought was the most interesting reason for not concentrating I had ever heard and then I spent some time like getting to know him walking around with him for some hours on the ward and even though he was paranoid he opened up to me after a while and I asked him about how his illness had developed and he had been he was the third son of a first generation immigrant family and so you know there was a lot of ambition in the family and his oldest brother was a doctor and then the second oldest was a lawyer or maybe the other way around and so he was taking a master's degree in some Behavioral Science at Mcgill and he got behind and so so he faked his research data and he wrote up his thesis and then he handed it in and then that night he went home and went to sleep and he woke up in the middle of the night and the devil was sitting on his bed at the end and that was the beginning of his schizophrenic illness and so that's the hallucination manifestation of an unconscious moral conflict while unconscious to some degree he knew that he had done wrong what he wasn't conscious of was exactly how much damage that was going to do to him now you know you could say well maybe he had a predisposition to psychosis before he faked his data and that was interfering with his performance and that's why he got behind him you know who knows these things are usually complexly causally looped but there was no doubting the phenomenology and when he said that he couldn't concentrate on IQ test because the battle between good and evil in heaven was going on in his head he meant it whatever that means and when he told me that he woke up and saw the devil sitting at the foot of his bed like that was a hallucination well fair enough but that really doesn't explain it which is why people in Mental Hospitals generally don't talk to schizophrenics because they'll tell you things that will curl your hair if you listen and they're very difficult to make sense of and that's partly why Freud noted at the beginning of this lecture in the little recording that I played for you that his ideas Were Meant with incomprehension and hostility and continue to be met in that manner to this day see you soon foreign |
so we're going to continue with our discussion of clinical personality theories today moving away from the psychoanalytic or de psychoanalytic theorists or the depth psychologists we're going to start to talk about the phenomenologists and the existentialists and so I need to lay down a little bit of background first and I think we'll start with a a discussion of phenomenology and existentialism now for the phenomenologist this is a tricky concept to grasp I think I'll actually start by telling you that something you something that Carl Jung wrote about in the last book he published which was called mysterium conjunction which means mysterious conjunction um he sort of believe posited that there was some extensions of moral development past the higher levels of moral development that PJ identified um and there were three of them and he said they could be symbolized by masculine feminine conjunctions or that they were in the literature that he had researched which was mostly alchemical literature from the late Middle Ages he said that one of the goals of moral development or of psychotherapy was to produce a union between the emotions and the motivations and and rationality and you can see that that's actually been a theme for all of the theorists that we've talked about so far I mean partly what Psychotherapy or personality development seems to be about is the continual integration of the personality so that the the persons the psyche isn't at odds with itself and it can move forward with a minimum of conflict that's something related to the pedian idea of an equilibrated state so if you're in an equilibrated State you don't have the sense that there are parts of you Waring against other parts because you've been able to weave everything together into a coherent identity that covers the past and the present and the future so the first stage in yung's vision of what constituted higher development was the of the of rationality with emotion and motivation and he saw that that was symbolized in the literature that he had reviewed by masculine Spirit feminine emotions and and motivation bang together in one thing so that then would be the United Mind and Spirit in a sense and then the next stage which was symbolized Again by the masculine feminine symbolism it was the un united mind spirit with the body and so what that would mean is that once you got your act together so to speak you would implement it in your behavior so that there was no contradictions between who you were in terms of how you thought and how you felt and what you wanted and what you were actually doing and modern philosophers have describe what they call a performative contradiction which they've forly described as another type of of lie essentially another type of Deceit which is that you say one thing and do another and it and it's interesting because it's not it's not a logical it's not a form of logical deceit in a sense because your conceptualizations are abstract and your behavior is concrete but there can still be a contradiction between the two especially when you start to understand that most of what your psyche is representing are schema for action rather than for representation so the point is is that once your emotions and your motivations are working alongside your rational mind really that your rational mind is properly nested within them because that's that's a much more accurate way of looking at it then the next thing you should do is act consistently in accordance with who you are so that's stage two both of those stages are pretty easy to understand but the third stage is is actually a phenomenological stage you have to think phenomenologically to understand it so here's here's one way of thinking about it so imagine that you go home and let's say you've set up a room and uh in that room it's not a very nice room you know maybe you've got some posters on the wall and they're sort of hanging a little cockeyed and you know there's dust bunnies are Ming underneath the bed and um you have piles of paperwork that you haven't done and you know homework and you know maybe there's the odd crust of bread or so forth lying about and when you walk in there it's you in the room that's one way of thinking about it but another way of thinking about it is that when you walk in there you are the room just like you're the room when you're here because the room makes up a part of what you're experiencing and the phenomenologist would say in a sense that the best way to conceptualize the self in its totality is what you experience like everything that you experience is you and so what that would mean is that there's no difference between putting the posters up on your wall properly and cleaning underneath the bed and maybe making it and finishing your homework and putting the room in order so that you feel confident and calm there and maybe so that you even enjoy being there or maybe even so that it's beautiful there there's no difference between that and fixing up your own personality so then you could say here's another way of looking at it and I I do this I believe that this is a very profound way of looking at things so then imagine that you could extend that Viewpoint it's kind of easy to understand when you think about it as your own room CU you're in there quite a lot and so maybe let's say you're in your room 10% of the day so we could say that the experiences that characterize your room are 10% of you at least for the time being and that you can have a low quality experience in there or a high quality experience in there um then let's say that you start generalizing that to the whole house you know so then you can start thinking well are there problematic places in the house are there problematic relationships among the people in the house and those problematic relationships are also used and you can tell when there's a problem because you encounter undesired negative emotion in the in relationship to some relationship or in some physical local within the house and maybe you could fix that you know little incremental bit by incremental bit you could work on that you could note that the negative emotion that you don't want to have a rise signifies something it signifies that that situation in some sense is nonoptimal and then you could work on strategies to optimize that and you don't do that until you stop making the presupposition that there's you and then there's the house it's like well the distinction between you and where you are is a very unclear distinction so then let's say you're walking down the street or you're going into a store and maybe your manners aren't as good as they could be because you know to be be really socially sophisticated is a real art you can learn it can take you decades to learn how to do that properly and people who are really really socially skilled have a much much higher quality existence because no matter where they go they immediately establish a relationship with the people that they're talking to and then it's not an impersonal and and dead or aggravating interaction so you know maybe they'll walk into a store and the first thing they do if someone comes up and helps them is they look at the person and you know ask them how they're doing and you know how their day has been and they make a little relationship and you know the person is kind of happy about that because it sort of Pops them out of their Persona role and then they can have a little discussion about what they're doing in the store and what they want and then all a sudden it's a high quality experience and that person everywhere they go if they're skilled like that so they're awake and they're attentive and they're listening everywhere they go they can have a high quality interaction you know and people who learn how to do that learn to do it partly by noticing when they're in an interaction with someone or somewhere that if it isn't going in an optimal manner or if it's producing undesired negative emotion then there's something wrong with the way that they're being in that situation and they pay attention to that and see if they can figure out how to modify it a lot of it is attention and listening which is there are key component say to rerry and Psychotherapy is attent attention and listening so you might say well so so you can go into your room and you can identify little problems that are in your room that you could fix that maybe you would fix and so then you could start fixing them and that improves the quality of that particular environment and then you can start to generalize Beyond you know the locals that are more specifically under your control because if you're walking down blur for example and you go into a store and you talk to a clerk well the probability is pretty high that the clerk is at least reasonably functional so you should be able to get beyond their barriers in a sense and have a genuine interaction with them without too much difficulty but then maybe you're wandering down blur and you run across someone who's schizophrenic and maybe alcoholic at the same time and well that's a part of your experience that might supersede your ability to transform right the the phenomenologists and and people like Rogers aren't making the claim that you should be able to solve every problem that you come across or even that you should try because there'll be things that you experience that are so complex and problematic that you might make them worse if you fiddle around with them you know you got to be very careful not to extend yourself dramatically beyond your skill level but you can certainly start in isolated locals and if you stop presum assuming a priority that there's some radical distinction between you and the environment that you happen to be in because it's all your experience if you stop making that subject object distinction which is one of the things the phenomenologists really objected to because they concentrated on being as such which was sort of lived experience as the ground of reality rather than the objective world is the ground of reality if you if you if you allow yourself to step outside that dichotomy and you start to understand that wherever you go including the places that you're in a lot that there's no distinction between fixing up those places when you notice that there's something wrong with them and you could fix them up and and fixing yourself up it's it it opens up a whole new Avenue to getting your life together because you know people always think they have to work on themselves it's like it's not this is one of the things that the psychoanalysts I think didn't get quite right although Yung touched on it in his later work it's there's not all of you isn't inside your head and for the psychoanalysts a lot of what the the work that you were doing on yourself was on your on the relationship say between your conscious and your unconscious mind but tremendous amount of that was sort of inside your skull so to speak but the phenomenologists the phenomenological approach enables you to start reconceptualizing the psyche if as something that extends Beyond you and and always will and so that you can work on its reconstruction at any level of analysis where your own nervous system is signaling to you that there's a problem and the way it does that is well it's a variety of ways but two of the most reliable ways are negative emotion there's a new paper for example that shows that conscientiousness is quite tight associated with proness to guilt so that's the negative emotion that seems to go with conscientiousness but so guilt and anxiety and shame and no sorts of emotions which are unpleasant also simultaneously signal the presence of a problem and so you and and and what resentment that's another good one so you can instead of having those emotions as enemies you say well I just want that to go away you can think okay there's my my my being my embodied being is signaling to me that something is nonoptimal here and then and then it's not an enemy it's it's because it's it's something that's trying to improve say the quality of your present experience and your future experience and if you don't push that aside or pretend it's not happening or assume instantaneously that it's the fault of the environment or the person that you're talking to then that can be incredibly instructive negative emotion is incredibly instructive but you have to adjust your attitude so that you understand that it's signaling to you the presence of corrective information if you could just figure out what that information is and that can come from anyone a person or a place or a thing or or or yourself or you don't need to make the distinctions you know and so if you're having an argument with your partner and it's not going very well I mean it there's a tremendous tendency among people to try to win the argument with their partner but you can't win an argument with your partner because then you win and they lose and then you have a loser on your hands and and if you do that a hundred times maybe you're better at arguing than they are for example or you know or maybe they think more in an intuitive way so they can't dance on their feet quite as fast as you or maybe the situation is reversed if you win the bloody argument a 100 times you're not a winner you're just someone who's beat up your partner a 100 times what you want to find out is what the hell is it that they're talking about and sometimes that takes a tremendous amount of patients and they should be doing the same thing to you because very frequently the things that people are arguing about are only the tiny it's like the snow on the surface of of a glacier the real argument is deep deep deep underneath and unless you listen intently and for a long period of time you'll never figure out what it is you're arguing about and then if you win the person won't be able to talk about it and that problem will be there for the rest of your relationship and maybe for the rest of your life like unless you solve the problem it's not going to go away now I'm going to start talking about Rogers specifically by by going over some of the things that he had to say about listening because I think I've learned more about listening from Rogers than from any other personality theorist or or psychotherapist that I've encountered now we we could go back to the fundamentals of psychotherapy I mean really what you're doing in in Psychotherapy is trying to help the person become a better person and that's not exactly a scientific formulation better person you know and it's a tricky thing to get at because people can be better persons in lots of different ways merely the fact that you're people vary in their temperaments indicate that you know your way of being a better person and your way of being a better person wouldn't necessarily be the same way you know because you it's like maybe someone's great on the violin another person's great on the piano the great is the same but but the instrument is different and and I and that's a good way of looking at it and so partly what you do in Psychotherapy and I think you do this in any genuine relationship is not only is the dialogue about how to become a better person the continuing dialogue is also always about just exactly what constitutes a better person so you're talking about the goal and the process at the same time and what you're doing is working it out so the the people go into the conversation with a specific orientation and the orientation is generally with client and therapist is the client comes with a with a problem their life isn't acceptable in its current form and they come with one more thing which is the desire to make it better and and something that you should all know because this will stop you from tangling yourself up in your life to a tremendous degree you cannot help someone who hasn't decided that they want things to be better unless they make the decision that they want to make things better forget it you're wasting your time and all it'll do is hurt you and and I should also tell you that that was one of rogers's necessary preconditions for Psychotherapy another one was honesty and communication but the the person who was coming in for the therapeutic process had to be there voluntarily and it's a weird thing and I don't know how to account for it but I don't think that you can talk someone who doesn't want to have things be better into wanting that they have to come to that decision on their own so they come in with having made that so it's for example it's very very difficult maybe it's impossible to do Psychotherapy with someone who's been remanded by the court you know because they're there involuntarily and they'll just put up a wall you know not always but a lot of the time they'll just put up a wall and just wait it out you know you're not going to get in there with a screwdriver and cry off that shell so the person has to step forward in a sense and say well you know there's something not right about the way things are going for me and it could be better and I and someone else might be able to help me figure that out so and that's a really good attitude to have by the way when you're listening to someone because disagree with them or not or agree with them or not there's always the possibility that they will tell you something you don't know and like lots of times when people are talking what they're trying to do is to impose their viewpoint on another person you hear conversations like this all the time they're arguments really and they're often ideological arguments it's like you're right and I'm wrong or sorry that never happens I'm right and you're wrong and I'm just going to hack at you until you shut up or you agree really you'll never agree because you just don't get someone to agree that way it's it's not possible but you might be able to cow them into silence or anger but that's a dominance hierarchy thing that's not a real conversation it's just just all you're doing is establishing that you're you know a lobster with bigger claws than than the person that you're trying to pick out a therapeutic conversation which is a genuine conversation is one in which both the people in the conversation are oriented towards a higher state of being while they're conversing and you can tell when you're in a conversation like that because it's very very engaging in fact if the conversation isn't engaging then that's a sign that you're not having a conversation and that's really useful thing to know too because here's another thing I could tell you that if you take to heart will save you an awful lot of grief and misery if you're talking to someone and they're not listening shut up just stop it's like you can tell if they're not listening and if they're not listening quit saying words it'll you'll just feel like a fool anyways because you're it's like you're throwing pingpong balls against a brick wall you know you're not getting anywhere if they're not listening that's a sign that the the S the situation isn't set up to allow you to progress on the path that you're choosing and so then you have to stop and you think okay well what what's going on here why is the person not listening you know am I being too forceful am I do they not understand what I'm saying is it too much about me um do they want to talk what's going on maybe they don't want to be here there's all sorts of possibilities but that's when you have to wake up past what it is that you're trying to impose on the situ situation and explore and see what's there and that's way more interesting than trying to impose your Viewpoint another thing is that if you're talking to someone you know I like to talk to people whose political beliefs are very different from mine because I can't really understand how someone's political beliefs can be really different than mine you know because I've got kind of a coherent representation of my beliefs but it's very interesting to talk to people who radically differ because they'll tell you things that you haven't considered that doesn't mean you have to agree with them but it's it's much more informative to walk away from a conversation Having learned something that you didn't know than it is having won the stupid argument which you can't win anyways and that's especially the case when you're dealing with people who are close to you that you H that you will have around for the rest of your life you cannot win an argument with them CU all that'll happen is if you win they'll get you back sooner or later they won't listen to you the next time you have something to talk about or or they'll get resentful and then they won't be helpful or it you just can't win an argument with someone that you will have repeated contact with what you can do however is you can have a conversation that's a real conversation and maybe you can come to terms about the thing that you're discussing and that's negotiation you know it's like well what do you want but you have to really want to know it's like you're we're having an argument okay what is it that I would have to do because we're having this argument what would I have to do in order to satisfy you you know and then other person will think well there's nothing you can do to satisfy me because you know I'm so mad at you it's like that's not helpful the other person has to think okay what are the conditions for my satisfaction you know so maybe you know your partner says you're not paying enough attention to me it's like all right what do you want exactly you know do you want to talk for 15 minutes at breakfast or do you want to talk for 20 minutes at lunch or do you want to spend an hour at night watching TV or or like do you want me to act differently when I come home and I'm at the door it's like you you're feeling unattended to what do you want well then they'll say well if you love me you should be able to figure that out yeah that's wrong cuz you're stupid you won't be able to figure that out cuz you know what the hell do you know so the other person unless they want to Corner you into just being the kind of loser who can't figure things out which is why are they with you then you know they need to think about that it's like oh hm what is it that I want from this person what would constitute more attention right and that's making the argument much more high resolution and then it it gives the other person a chance to actually respond and then you have to allow your partner to be a because of course they are so once you tell them what you want you have to let let them do it badly like 10 times because they're never going to do it right the first time so sometimes when I'm I've seen I've helped people sometimes with marital problems and one of the things I often recommend is that they they go on a date you know they take each other away from the their home where the kids are usually or maybe not maybe they don't have kids it doesn't matter and they do something that's just focused on each other you know and of course first of all they tell me they don't want to do that it's stupid it's like it isn't by the way it's not stupid it's like oh you don't want to go out and have an enjoyable time with your partner you think your relationship's going to survive when all you do is snipe at each other and and do horrible things together it's like well no that's not going to work so then they'll finally say okay we'll go on a date they'll both look disgusted by the whole idea and then they go and it's like it's just miserable right they like one person says something to the other that immediately sets them off when they're out on the date because they're kind of mad about going anyways and then they come back and go well that just didn't work and we're never going to do it again it's like no so you're telling me you're never going to go out and do something enjoyable with your partner again CU it didn't work very well it's like people don't think about it you know it's like so maybe when you take your partner out and you haven't been getting along it takes you like 10 times before you have it relatively okay time but 10 times if you're going to go out with them let's say I don't know let's say you go out with them every two weeks it's 25 times and let's say you're going to be with them for 30 years if you manage to you know get your act together so that's 30 * 25 so that's 750 times so if you practice 10 times then you might be able to have 740 good times out together you know and that's an underestimate so 10 times of practicing is hardly a problem for for that kind of return so this is all part of this rogerian like following this path is all part of this rogerian process of listening and listening is trying to figure out what the hell the other person is telling you and understanding at the same time that they don't know like especially if they're upset they're not even sure what they're upset about and they don't know what they want you know cuz you can you can Corner them by saying well you want to be attended to more what do you want and they'll try some weird defense like like I told you already like if you love me you'd already know which is a cliche and it's a foolish cliche so you can't let that stop you I should I should also tell you the sorts of barriers that people will put up if you listen to them too so so for example let me let me see if I can think about it for a bit yeah well usually what happens is if you're if you're pushing someone say but this is in a listening sort of way it's like what do you want why do you want that what would be the conditions of your satisfaction you're pushing them fairly hard to clearly articulate their concerns and sometimes they're afraid to do that and if you're trying to hash out an issue people usually have like five routines they can go through one is they block you with some you know cliche or they say something annoying and then maybe they've got one other verbal trick after that and then once you push through that then they cry or they get angry and if if you still don't stop then they stomp off and so if you're going to have a successful conversation about something difficult you need a routine for each of those it's like just because the person's angry doesn't mean the conversation is over and just because the person cries doesn't necessarily mean that you're a sadist it's often often tears are a trick they mask anger so and what the person is doing in part is they're using their motions as a exploratory technique to find out how important is this what what happens if I just break down will the person shut up and if the person shuts up they think oh it's not that important right because they they've been able to use a technique I'm not saying this is conscious it's it's it's deeper than conscious it's just how people rub up against each other when they're trying to figure out how things are structured and so if you quit when they get upset then they think oh well this thing isn't so important that it's worth this much upset but if you continue well then they'll run away well one of the things you have to do if you're in any kind of relationship is you got to make a rule which is you can leave but you got to come back like we're not done with this you can't run off because it's not it's it's it's it's breaking the the contract of the conversation you got to stay and hash it out so okay now I'm going to read you some of the things that Rogers talked about all right so one of the things he talked about is this idea called unconditional positive regard now I don't think that's a very good phrase because unconditional positive regard is one of those things that can be turned into a new age cliche in two seconds it's like well no matter what you do I'll love you it's like no there are lots of things you could do that that that that that is just that's just not going to Garner a lot of love so unconditional positive regard like it's not like there's not an idea behind that because there really is an idea behind that but it like like like I said it got all new Agy after Rogers formulated it and it sounds like well all you have to do is be consistently positive towards the person and you know they'll flourish it's like first of all you're going to have unconditional positive regard for Hitler it's like no and not only that you have a responsibility not to have unconditional positive regard for yourself or for other people because what you're trying to do is to make things better and so that means that the things that make things worse are bad you right if there's better there's got to be worse and if you're in favor of better then you have to be not in favor of worse so I'm going to untangle unconditional positive regard a bit and like I said I think Rogers used a his word choice wasn't very good here's here's the different way of thinking about it so if you're in a relationship with someone and this can even be a very short relationship it could be the sort of relationship you have when you go to talk to someone in a store like I said if you get sophisticated about it but let's assume it's a longer term relationship you have to decide if what if if you're going to have that person's best interests in mind when you have the conversation you got to have that as sort of the the Top Value in your value hard the reason we're talking is because I want things to be better not better for me you know may be better for me too but but the better for me is a subordinate part of the better the reason we're communicating is because we both want things to be better and then we both aren't absolutely sure what it would mean for things to be better we got to exchange information until we figure that out and neither of us are sure about how we're going to get there and so we have to exchange information until we figure out how to get there and that's that's the initial axiomatic precondition for a true conversation and that's unconditional positive regard it's like I I regard the person I'm talking with as someone who could transform in a positive direction and who's willing to attempt that and who will communicate to that end even though they might screw up and you know there's going to be things in the way and the sorts of things that the psychoanalysts talked about as resistance and then they're going to regard me the same way and you know I'm also going to make mistakes along the way so now Rogers pointed out that in order to to communicate with someone in that manner you had to be willing to put yourself in their shoes essentially and he said there you had to comprehend the alternative phenomen field so which is okay well I'm I'm here this is my viewpoint coming out from this place and now you have a Viewpoint and they're similar enough so that we can communicate about them but they're different enough so that they're not equivalent and the differences are actually meaningful so now I got to sort of Pop myself out of my framework put myself in yours and figure out where you're coming from and that's the goal of the conversation so sometimes that can even help you figure out where you're coming from you know cuz you can say well it sounds looks to me like you're really angry and the person will say well no I'm just I'm just uh I'm sad it's like well they're all red they look like they're going to bite you and say no no it really looks like I think you might be also a little bit angry and they'll be angry about you saying that of course but it it may also be that their emotions are so jumbled together in this sort of chaotic jumble that they don't actually know what it is that they're experiencing because it's it's this terrible unarticulated chaotic bodily state that is signaling something but that hasn't been articulated and so they're kind of a mess and your careful observation as long as they trust you and they should trust you if they know that you have their best interest whatever that is in mind or at least that you're trying that then they can trust you and then you can help them clarify what it is that they're feeling you know what's sort of coming up from the body and what that's associated with and what they'd like to do with it Roger says real communication occurs and the evaluative tendency avoided when we listen with understanding now the evaluative tendency he's talking about is well let's let's simplify this a little bit let's say I'm radically leftwing and I'm talking to someone who's radically right-wing and we start talking about something like uh um income distribution and the right-wing person says well let's say the leftwing person says well there's all these people at the bottom and they don't have a lot of money and and a lot of the reason that they're there is because you know theyve they've encountered very very harsh circumstances or maybe they have an illness or something like that and uh you know there's a real distribution of intelligence and so lots of times people are at the bottom because they just don't have the cognitive resources to climb and the right way Wier goes rubbish rubbish the reason that they're at the bottom is because you know they don't work hard enough and they don't take any care with with their long-term thinking and so the left Winger says well that's just Prejudice and the right winger says well you're just a bleeding heart liberal and poof that's the end of the conversation and that's the evaluative tendency it's like you just come away the same as you were when you entered the conversation there's been no exchange of information whatsoever all there's been is a hardening of prejudice and you can walk away feeling morally Superior because you know you demonstrated what a scum rat your opponent is and how morally upright you are well that's the evaluative tendency that's not a conversation that's going to lead to progress if anything it's going to lead to like increased feelings of prideful arrogance on your part because you know everything and on their part too and like increased polarization it's not a helpful way of communicating you know and this sort of thing as we'll see when we move into the more social and political consequences of um failure to communicate it's like that's a microcosm of what goes wrong in a society when it really starts to fall apart you know when the individuals within the society who have differing viewpoints can no longer communicate the whole society shakes and trembles and you can think about this from a democratic perspective too because you might say what's the purpose of Elections well people who are aligned with a particular ology think well we need to win the election because our Viewpoint is right but then you might ask yourself well why are there these other viewpoints and why do things go so bad when one Viewpoint dominates so heavily that everyone who has the other Viewpoint you know gets shot that seems like a bad thing so what exactly is going on in a democratic State and what's going on is that there is all these different viewpoints and a lot of them are temperamentally informed so we know for example that liberals are higher in openness and lower in conscientiousness than conservatives and so the conservatives are conscientious but they're not very creative and open so they're good at running things they're really good at running they're good at being managers and administrators for example but they're not very good at being Innovative the Liberals are good at being Innovative because they're open but they're not very conscientious so like and that they they have to be less conscientious in some ways if they're going to be created because conscientiousness can constrain creativity and so for the society to work properly the people with the liberal temperament the conservative temperament have to interact with each other because the Liberals think up all the new companies and the conservatives run them so and then in the political State per se it's like conscientiousness is a virtue although it if it's it exaggerated too much especially the orderly part then it can become tyranny and openness is a virtue too but you don't want every bloody thing changing every second so there's got to be some constant negotiated piece between order and Innovation and the way that that happens is that the two sides communicate it isn't that one side wins or the other side wins it's that the dialogue stays open so that the viewpoints can be represented properly and so that as the environment moves because sometimes maybe the environment is such that being conscientious is going to be better and sometimes it's going to be the environment has moved so that openness is going to be better because the environment moves the conversation has to track those movements so the society stays healthy across time and the same thing applies in any kind of long-term relationship it's like you marry someone now you've got two brains and they don't work the same it's like you want to have two brains or do you want to have one that's the first question you're going to do a lot better with two so and then so how do you optimize the functioning of the two brains well obviously they've got a community communicate you know there's got to be freedom of expression and there has to be listening so that's the evaluative tendency which is you're wrong before I even know what you're talking about at least I should know what the hell you're talking about before I decide if you're wrong and so back to the poverty issue it's like well what predicts poverty well the sorts of things that the left Winger talks about that predicts Pro poverty so do the sorts of things that the right-winger talks about so if you're really unconscientious and that makes you kind of you makes you the sort of person that will rely on others to do the work if you're unconscientious you're much more likely to be poor and so that's a real social policy problem too because you have this horrible problem where you have to sort out what's causing the poverty you know and who's taking advantage of the attempts to alleviate it as well as figuring out so so that's more of an individual temper government problem which is what the conservatives are concerned about and then you also have to figure out how to address it on a social level which of course the conservatives don't like to think about but it's not like either side has nothing to say there's information in both those perspectives it's problematic though because when you put them together the phenomena becomes paradoxical and then it's very difficult to come up with a solution it challenges your cognitive resources and what the conservative and the liberal want to do is just simplify it down to one explanation it's sociological that's the liberal it's temperamental that's the conservative and so then they have one answer to how it can be fixed we should fix Society that's the liberal those people should just get their act together that's the conservative it's like yeah well fair enough except probably the problem is complicated enough so there's more than one solution necessary since it's not even a problem right poverty is not a problem poverty is like 10,000 problems and some of them aren't even associated with each other you know like there's the the poverty that's a consequence of alcoholism that's not the same poverty that's a consequence of say very low intelligence and that's a completely different poverty than the non-c conscientious poverty or the abuse poverty or and there's no reason to assume whatsoever that those should be amenable to the same Solutions real communication occurs and the evaluative tendency avoided when we listen with understanding understanding that's an interesting word because you might ask yourself what do you mean when you understand and it's got this sort of physical aspect to it right that's the stand and then there's the underp part which sort of implies that to understand something is to be under it and standing and so partly what happens is if if I can listen to you with understanding what that means is that I get a clear enough picture of what you want so that I could change the way that I am that I am maybe the way I look at things like the perceptual scheme through which I view the world but also my actions and if I can extract that from you then I understand I would be able to take what you told me and change myself if I felt that was appropriate or maybe it would just happen automatically because now I have a deep understanding of you people are afraid of that right because let's say you've got yourself all hemmed in with some ideology and you're feeling pretty secure about that and then you listen to some dim wit who's got completely the opposite perspective from you and you listen hard and all of a sudden you got cracks in your system you know and then you have to think oh maybe things are more complicated than I thought they were everything isn't all tied together in this neat little package and that can be unsettling it's unsettling in fact if you're listening to someone and you're really listening and you're not being unsettled the probability is pretty high either that you're not listening or that you're not talking about anything of real consequence because if it's important and you're listening it's going to shift you you know so there's this it's going to set you into that at least a little bit into that state of chaos and what you're doing then just so you know is that instead of identifying with who you were which is the person that you were before the conversation you're identifying with the person you could be as you move through the conversation and that's a way better thing to identify with you know you going to identify with your beliefs this is a pan idea are you going to identify with your beliefs or you going to identify with the process that allows you to generate beliefs and often those things are in contradiction cuz if you identify with the process that allows you to change your beliefs then you're you're you're assaulting your beliefs even though you might be correcting them but it's it's it it's demanding to do that because you're reconfiguring your physiology and there's an intermediary period of uncertainty that goes along with that what if they're right well then what it's like yeah well then what real communication occurs in the evaluative tendency avoided when we listen with understanding what does this mean it means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person's point of view to sense how it feels to him to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about so there's also Rogers is very emphasizes very much the idea of embodiment so you can listen to someone you can listen to their arguments with your mind it's a very logical process it's sort of a rational and logical process and in some sense that's what you're taught to do for example when you debate and the idea there is that you know the argument is is a cognitive phenomena and that the the logic is structured in a logical way and that the way that the argument is settled by is by the exchange of information and the relative coherence of the two perspectiv it's a very rationalist IC perspective and it's very useful to be able to debate don't get me wrong and and to have your mind organized so that you can put forward a logical arguments like that's why you're in University so to learn how to do that believe it or not and but it's not the same sort of thing that Rogers is after because when Rogers talks about the interactions between people it's embodied so like if I'm really watching you when I'm talking to you paying attention to your face you're going to be like expressing emotions with your face screen because that's what it does right your face expresses emotions so that other people can infer what it is that you're up to even more than you know cuz if you knew you could just tell them you wouldn't even need emotions but what the hell do you know about what you want that's why you're having a conversation with someone to figure it out so you're watching them like mad and you're watching their posture and maybe you're mirroring them and you can do that consciously to some degree but it's probably better if you just do it unconsciously and then when you're mirroring them with your body then you can feel what their feeling and then you can start to draw inferences about what it is that they want by noticing how you're feeling this is often one of the things that'll stop people dead in the source of a conversation because the other person will get upset and then you'll watch that and then that'll make you feel upset and then you go oh I can't deal with this anymore because it's too upsetting it's like well H maybe the fact that it's upsetting is actually an indication that you really should deal with it you know you can't just run away if it's upsetting upsetting something's being flipped over that's why it's upsetting well you don't want to bail out just because you're upset it's like you know clue in that's not the time to quit you want to maybe detach a bit from your emotions so you don't get drowned in them so you can use them in an informative manner but you don't want to stop that's you got things going then stated so briefly this may sound absurdly simple well I didn't state it so briefly but it's not it's an approach which we have found extremely potent in the field of psychotherapy it is the most effective agent we know for altering the basic personality structure of an individual and improving his relationships and his Communications with others if I can listen to what he can tell me if I can understand how it seems to him if I can see its personal meaning for him if I can sense the emotional flavor which it has for him then I will be releasing potent forces of change in H well so you can imagine like your brain is always trying to figure things out well let's extend that a bit it's not just your brain it's your psychop physiology it's your whole body is trying to figure things out right and and you can't just think about it as a logical and mental process like your emotions are they're evaluative processes they're trying to give you information but they're not very articulate you know it's like you come home and you're all angry and you're touchy and your partner says something that's you know pretty mundane and you you know you just explode it's like well they say to you why are you like that and they say well I hate it when your boots are in the way of the door it's like oh that's why you're having a fit is it cuz the boots are well they're always there it's like you could be sure that there's a big mess underneath that and it's going to be hard to approach that person because angry people are also kind of you know they're kind of well they're irritable for sure but they also have this kind of shell on them that is touchy they're touchy so you if you touch them you know they'll get irritated at you and so if you mirror that if you're listening to them and watching them then they can start to figure out that they're angry and that maybe they're too more Angry than the situation demands and if you listen to them be angry for a while which is very annoying right because maybe they'll be angry at you then maybe they'll calm down and they'll start to differentiate that emotion into articulated statements it's like well I had a really terrible day at work well what was so terrible about it then he'll tell you a little story and then they'll say well that's happening all the time and then you ask them about that and then they say well my boss is unreasonable in his demands and so then you ask him about that and you and you find out that the person e either has a tyrant for a boss cuz sometimes that happens right a real bully which when and then the answer to why they're mad about the shoes is because they should change jobs right or maybe you find out that well they have no idea how to say no to their boss they just say yes no matter what he or she says and that means they're too agreeable and then maybe you have to figure out how they can learn how to say no and how they have to sort of check with their resentment to figure out when they're being taken advantage of it's like it's very very complicated and it's no wonder people want to avoid it but you know that's another sort of truism if someone's overreacting well they're not reacting to that thing they're reacting to that thing plus a whole bunch of things that are related to that thing sort of and they don't know what it is and so then if you listen to them and they talk about it they're actually thinking because what you might think when you're talking is that you think and then you say what you think and so you you don't have to talk you could just think but that isn't right most people don't really think like they're not they don't sit down and meditate and like think logically through a whole sequence of problems the thought sort of appear in their heads you know spontaneously sort of like a revery but they're not really they're not philosophers you know they don't have that kind of command of the language and so then when they're talking to you they're actually thinking they're thinking out loud and for all we know maybe thinking is more effective when you say it out loud because maybe I'm wired up so that my brain assumes that if I'm willing to tell it to you to make it public that it's more true than those things I'd like to keep to myself and so one of the things you're doing in a psychotherapeutic session is you're just letting the person talk and you know I have clients they don't want me to do anything for the hour that I'm with them except shut up and listen and maybe now and then I can just clarify something I have one client in particular who's very isolated socially isolated and and this person has come to see me for a long time and they just wanted this person comes every two weeks and what they want to do is talk about the last two weeks and they want me listen and so I have I have to be engaged right I'm listening and and that's a communicative process listening right because your face is changing and you're nodding and you know you're reacting so you're in the communication but this person just wants to talk and then they sort themselves out you know and figure out what it is they're upset about and then that's good and they can go off and operate in the world for two weeks and that's all just listening well just listening listening is hard and people aren't taught how to do it if I can listen to what he can tell me if I can understand how it seems to him if I can sense its personal meaning then I will be releasing potent forces of change in him if I can really understand how he hates his father that that could be a conversation that go on for months or hates the University or hates Communists if I can catch the flavor of his fear of insanity or his fear of atom bombs or of Russia you can tell that this is a little old it will be of the greatest help to him in altering those very hatreds and fears and in establishing realistic and harmonious relationships with the very people and situations towards which he has felt hatred and fear so for example let's say someone comes into a therapeutic session they say geez I just I was just having a conversation my my father I just hate my father every time I talk to him it just makes me angry and like that's a that's a low resolution representation right it's like one pixel father equals anger it's not differentiated and that's a problem because like their bod is responding as if this person needs to be taken out like you might take out a prey object or something like that or destroyed because that's what anger is like right anger is sort of like you're an object to be destroyed and it's there's truth in that because it wouldn't be elicited by the father unless there was some necessity for the anger but it's so generalized and Global it's not helpful it's like okay let's talk about your father well how would you do that well what did he do recently to upset you and then you listen and you don't give the person advice about what they should have done cuz what the hell do you know about what they should have done you might have to listen for 50 hours before you could offer a helpful suggestion even then it probably won't work so you listen and then they tell you some stories about this is almost like the Freudian psychoanalytic approach they tell you some stories about what their father was like when they in their childhood and then a bunch of things that pop up in memory and you know they start laying out the story it's like they're laying cards out on a table and they just lay out all these cards there's like a thousand cards and they're all representations of the father and then they sort of exhaust themselves they're out of angry stories about their father and then maybe they say well you know there he wasn't all bad then they start laying out some things about him that you know he drank all the time but he was really he always took care of us and he wasn't he wasn't an angry drunk you know and and he stayed with my mother and you know so what's happen now is the picture of the father is getting differentiated right it's not just one pixel it's differentiated and then you might say well okay here's all these angry things how many of them are still relevant like how many of those do you have to deal with and the person will say think well these you know 80% of these anger things are dead they're in the past and you know 70% of these good things weren't good enough to make up for the rest of this mess but then you get a smaller pile of specific things and then maybe you can start figuring out ways that or the person can start figuring out ways that those might be addressed moment to moment in new conversations like it's a strategic plan what's the situation what exactly is going on here lay it out and the emotions are a great guide to that because the first thing you want to do is everything that makes you emotional those are the things that aren't dealt with yet they're not fully articulated you don't have a strategy you don't have a full developed representation system that's why it's still emotional so it's like your your body and your mind come up with emotional representations first and only as you work through them which means to talk about them essentially strategically they don't even turn into words until you do that and that that's where I think Freud went wrong it's those things aren't repressed although they can be they're not repressed they just never made it all the way up to articulated representation and lots of things are like that whenever you're in a bad mood it's like I'm in a bad mood what does that mean well you don't know why don't you know are you repressing it no you're just too stupid to figure it out and so then you got to talk to someone you I'm in a bad mood and you know well you know how are you feeling they they'll get all spiteful and tell you how they're feeling and then you know they start to differentiate it maybe they'll remember something that happened at work and then you can kind of map out the mood and that starts to loosen it we know from our research that such empathic understanding understanding with a person not about him is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people and that you have never seen such results the chances are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described fortunately I can suggest a little laboratory experiment which you can try to test the quality of your understanding okay so this is this is lovely because you don't often actually get a technique from a therapist that actually works you know you get sort of vague techniques like help the person lay the cards out on the table you know it's it's kind of at a high level of abstraction but this exercise you can actually do and you can do it a lot and if you do it it will teach you to listen so the next time you get into an argument with your wife or your friends or with a small group of friends stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment Institute this rule while you also don't have to be that formal about it you can just do it once you know the the game each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to that speaker satisfaction now that's so cool because here's the typical AR argument so we're arguing I want to win and so you tell me a bunch of things and so then I take those things and I turn them into the stupidest possible representation of those things you know I weaken your argument and make you look like a fool and then I destroy it and that's a straw that's by that you're making your opponent into a straw man that's the straw man argument right you take you take what they're telling you and you caricature it and that way you can make them look absurd and make them be ashamed and then of course youve set up this skinny little opponent that you can just demolish with one punch it's really crooked and it shows that you're a coward because what it means is you have to have an opponent that's you know crippled and and thin and starving and and inarticulate before you could possibly win before you could possibly progress It's a pathetic way of having an argument what you should do is listen to the person and help them make their argument as strong as you possibly can and then deal with that because then you're sure that you're you're taking them seriously so and to that speaker's satisfaction well that's so cool La so we're we're having an argument I don't know maybe we have an argument about who's going to be responsible for grocery shopping or for doing the dishes or for cooking or any of those domestic things that continually cause couples to be at each other's throat it's like so you'll have some arguments about why you should do whatever it is that you're going to do and in order for the argument to progress I have to tell you back what you said and you have to agree that I put it properly well that's so annoying like it just runs so contrary to what you want to do of course you want to make other person sound stupid so you can beat them this way you can't do that because you have to listen well enough so you actually understood what they said and then you have to formulate their argument so that they're willing to agree that that actually constitutes their argument well that's really it's difficult but it's so use useful because first of all it does mean that you understood them and second it indic immediately indicates to them that you're not just trying to win you're trying to listen and then they're much less likely to get all irritable and angry at you because at least you're trying to listen you're not making them into a fool and you know often when people are trying to tell you what they want because they're all afraid of telling you what they want because you know maybe they never got what they wanted in their whole life you know if they've had a history of bad relationship and poor parenting and that sort of thing they're just bloody terrified to tell you that they might actually want something and so as soon as you indicate to them that you actually heard what they said and you're willing to take it seriously enough to formulate it properly well then it's like one step towards trust I see you did listen you at least know where I'm coming from it's like that doesn't mean you agree you know just because you understand someone's argument doesn't mean you have to agree but at least you know what the argument is you see what this would mean so one of the things Rogers does continually in his therapy and I do this a lot it's like I listen to the person and then kind of go through a narrative it's spontaneous narrative often following a chain of associations as Freud pointed out they'll tell me a spontaneous narrative and I'll say okay it sounds to me like this is what you said and I'll try to you know lay out the argument and maybe now and then I'll I'll ask for clarification if there's a part I didn't understand or if I see that there's a part that seems contradictory you know they said this thing here and this thing there and and I'll tell them that you know seems to me that you said this here and this here and I'm not sure how to put those together I don't say well that makes your argument you know incoherent I say well I don't get how to understand that and they kind of go oh yeah there's because people will admit to that if if you just point it out flatly you know it's like I'm not involved I'm just listening it's not my problem it's a problem and that's another thing that's useful too the other person is entitled to their suffering you don't get to take it away it's their Destiny so you can listen to their problems without having to think that you know you have to take them on as if they're yours you have to mirror them but it's their problem it's like they have to figure it out and they and that's good you need a problem to figure out it's not necessarily a terrible thing that they have a problem it would simply mean that before presenting your own point of view it would be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker's frame of reference to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him and that's useful too because you know the way we remember things is if you tell me a long story and I tell it back to you I do not tell it back to you what happens is I listen to it and I try to figure out what the thread of the argument is and then when I tell it back to you it's way shorter and Tighter and that means in some sense it's it's got all the essentials but it's got less of the baggage right that's what you're kind of doing when you ask someone to get to the point so they tell you this long story it's like this tree that is it's full of dead branches and it hasn't been pruned and there it's standing there and you know the maybe the living branches you can hardly even see but you're concentrating on them and then when you tell it back to them you just tell them the part of the story that's alive and they listen to that they think oh yes that's what I meant and then that means you've changed memory right if they agree you've changed the memory you've you've divested it of all the excess baggage just like pruning and that's what you're doing and so that that dialogue is it's mental hygiene and that's what people do you know you got to wonder well why do we talk well it's to exchange information yeah and there's utility in it you know like if you know how to do something and I don't you can tell me but that that isn't the sort of thing that people are doing most of the time most of the time they're telling their stories this is what happen happened to me right and there and then the other person will say well this is what happened to me and there's this Mutual attempt to organize that's how people are organizing their brains we organize our brains by talking and so if you don't have someone to listen to you well especially if if it's over a few decades you're going to have a brain that's like a whole Forest of trees that need it needs a forest fire it doesn't need just some you know trimming it's really in trouble so you need to have someone to listen to you and best way to get someone like that is to find a bunch of people and listen to them because you know of course then they'll that's a friendship that's a real friendship you know because you're both trying to move towards a better place whatever that place is and it's a great relationship then sounds simple doesn't it but if you try it you'll discover it's one of the most difficult things you've ever tried to do however once you've been able to see the other person's point of view your own C comments will have to be drastically revised well that's partly because now their sort of vague complaint is tightened up to a specific problem well then you have to reconfigure how you're responding to address that problem you will also find the emotion going out of the discussion the differences being reduced and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort if you really willing to understand a person in this way if you're willing to enter their private world and see the life the way their life appears to them you run the risk of being changed yourself which is that's a good thing if you're involved in a real conversation the way that you will change will be beneficial to you but it's but it's it's a challenging thing because it'll mean that you can't stick to the little you know rigid framework that you had entering into the argument you have to loosen that up and be willing to open the door and you know change the walls of your house you might see it his way that wouldn't be good you might find yourself influenced or your in your attitudes or personality the risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face well imagine so you're trying to build yourself in to h a fully-fledged you well here's one way of doing it just hang around with people like you who think the same way you do and then whenever you talk they just reflect back what you have to say or you can start putting yourself in situations that you're uncomfortable with you know pushing yourself a little bit and you go out where there are people that aren't like you and then you think well how am I going to get to understand these people and the first thing you do is you got to pay attention and you got to listen and then maybe you'll be able to interact with them and then poof that's another environment that you've mastered and then there's more of you cuz now you can operate here and here and then maybe you think well that was kind of fun so now I'll go here and I'll try this and you go there and you listen and you pay attention and all of a sudden bang you you can operate there and if you do that over like a 15-year period you'll be someone who can go anywhere and and not fit in exactly that that's like you're invisible it's not like you're fitting in it's like you can operate there you can talk and listen you can gather information you can trade you're useful there and then you're not going to run up against people and you know risk unnecessary conflict because if you listen to people you just cannot believe what people will tell you if you listen to them it is ABS and you can if you can listen to people they will tell you profound things so fast that it just makes your head spin you know because people are really weird creatures they're like dovi characters they're they're they're peculiar they think in weird ways and they have weird experiences and bizarre dreams and ideas about the future and political theories they're just as crazy as you could possibly imagine and if you listen to them they'll tell you why they think these things and it's it's it's not boring that's another issue is if the conversation is boring you are not listening cuz if you're listening the conversation will change so that it won't be boring so you can tell if you're in a conversation that's boring someone at least is not listening and it could easily be you if I enter as fully as I am able into the private world of the neurotic or psychotic individual isn't there a risk that I might become lost in that world most of us are afraid to to take that risk the great majority of us cannot listen we found ourselves we find ourselves compelled to evaluate and the evaluation is I'm going to keep you away I'm going to pigeon hole you classify you make the classification negative describe you as irrelevant and push you aside because then I don't have to pay attention to you I don't have to listen and I can stay in my box of certainty my little narrow box of certainty the great majority of us cannot listen we find ourselves compelled to evaluate because listening is too dangerous the first requirement is courage and we do not always have it okay so true Carl Rogers he's a phenomenologist so he thinks it's your experience that's real you need to represent that experience and you need to communicate it to other people and you have to communicate it within a frame and the proper frame is we're trying to make things better here and you know in order to adopt that frame that's not just a simple statement right I mean you can tell yourself that try to put yourself in that state of mind but to do that you have to really think through your value hierarchy you have to decide like what are you up to are you here to make things worse or are you here to make things better and you know you might say well clearly I'm here to make things better it's like yeah sure sure no that's hard and people are full of resentment and fear and anger and they've been hurt in all sorts of ways and they want to take revenge and like they're just full of contradictory impulses and so to weave all those contradictory impulses together and to overcome all those hurts and disappointments and and reasons for revenge and resentment you got to do all that before you can say well I'm you know here to make things better because if you're still possessed by those sorts of experience es and contradictions you're going to be motivated to make things worse all the time just out of Revenge and spite you know you you've been hurt you're going to hurt and so to adopt the framework that Rogers is talking about is it's it's a difficult Enterprise and partly it'll come about the more you listen because the more you listen and you have the chance to exchange information the more you'll deal with those inner contradictions and that sort of collection of hurts and and irritations that that are corrupting you and twisting you in the wrong direction so the reran perspective is extremely useful I it's very useful the reason I concentrated on that one quote of his today is because that's such a useful thing you you can try it right away the next time you're talking to someone maybe you have a friend who wants to talk things over it's like listen to them and then when there's a pause say well it sounds to me like this is what you meant and they'll go yes that's exactly what I meant maybe if you were really listening they'll be real happy about that CU they didn't know what they meant they're just telling you this story about why they're annoying and so then you'll think oh wow I got it and then they'll be happy and they'll tell you something else and like they'll walk away from that conversation much lighter and you will too even though it's a weird thing because you might think well if you listen people are going to dump a bunch of trouble on you it's like well yes but if if you're willing to listen despite the fact that there might be a bunch of trouble dumped on you then you've also told yourself that you're the sort of person that can tolerate having a bunch of trouble dumped on yourself and that's like that's a that's an extremely positive attitude to take towards yourself you know and you're not just saying it you're acting it out and so that's a sign of faith in yourself and you're not Stu well I said you were stupid like you are in relationships but you're not totally stupid you know you'll be able to notice that you've you've you've been willing to expose yourself to a risk and when your body and your mind you're watching that they'll think oh I'm the sort of thing that can voluntarily expose itself to a risk well that's like the secret to making yourself strong it's exposure and so you can do that in every conversation and that toughens you up as well as informing you it's a very powerful technique so I would recommend try it see what happens it's it's also fun because it's like you're following a thread of the conversation if you're really listening the conversation will continue and it continues in a meaningful way and then you know that you're in the right place and it's like a challenge to your capacity to pay attention and then you get engaged in the conver all conversations you get engaged in them and then you're in engaging conversations all the time that's good thing so okay we'll see you there's |
we talked about phenomenology last time and I tried to make the case that phenomenology at least in part was an attempt to include the entire domain of subjective experience inside the definition of reality when Rogers talked about mental health he was speaking of something that that superseded just rational coherence I mean Rogers also touched on a topic that's become very welldeveloped since the time of Rogers which is a topic of embodied nition it's become increasingly clear to artificial intelligence researchers particularly that the enlightenment idea of rationality as uh a disembodied sort of spiritual function is is wrong in principle and I I think that's because the way the brain sets itself up with the body is the way that we discussed when we were talking about P it's that the the mind is built from motor actions up and the concepts that the Mind uses aren't abstract categories that describe reality they're more like tools that allow us to do things in the world and so they're predicated their validity is predicated on the fact that we have a body one of the things that Rogers was trying to emphasize and I think there's a long history of this in in Western thought over the last few thousand years that there's there are faculties of of apprehension that are higher than rationality and some of those are embodied so it's a varant aor Theory because the freudians of course thought that it was necessary to attend to emotions and motivational States and to integrate them with the ego but it it takes that idea further in some sense by treating the inputs of the body so motivational States and emotions but also perhaps the capacity to mirror other people as a prerequisite for mental health and so the other thing that Rogers emphasizes is to pay attention to how it is that your experiential field is manifesting itself while you speak and interact with other people and he was hoping and and and striving towards a kind of unification that was analogous to the unification that I described to you that Yung talked about in his last book there there's another practical element to this that I should tell you that that I think is unbelievable useful and we talked last time a little bit about the necessity of listening to people and and techniques that you could use to do that in the effort to improve your Communications and and and also to improve the degree to which you were gathering information that was practically useful to you and corrective but with the rogerian techniques to some degree you can do the same thing with regards to the relationship between your intellectual rationality which is sort of your knowledge as represented at the highest level of verbal abstraction and the platform on which that knowledge is hypothetically implemented so you can imagine in the the pedian mode of development you start to learn how to move and then those movements are chained in ever more complex sequences and those sequences start to become representable abstractly so that you can describe yourself for example example as a good person and hypothetically as you decompose the idea of good person down towards specific actions that whole hierarchy is internally consistent in that you're a good person in your self-representation but you also enact all the things that a good person would enact and then there's no flaws in the entire hierarchy but the weird thing about having an intelligence that's dissociable which means that you can think of things without acting them out is that you can also formulate self-representations and ideas that aren't fully integrated with the manner in which you actually act so you can have a concept of yourself and and even an ideological framework that's only vaguely related to your to the programming that's been instantiated in your body and Rogers would consider that um he has a technical term for it it's uh it's a form of internal disharmony non- congruence that's that's that's his term and the non- congruence idea is a very interesting one because in my experience you can feel it so and here's something that you can try as an experiment and I think it's as effective an experiment as the listening experiment that we discussed last time so it's very common for modern people especially intelligent modern people to identify themselves with the contents of their intellect but that's a strange thing to do in many sense in many ways because first of all obviously you're not just the context of your intellect you're also your emotions and your motivations and your body and so forth and your embeddedness within the social context but especially if you're intelligent it's tempting to identify yourself with the contents of your intellect but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that those contents are in fact congruent with the programming of your body or or even with its natural inclination and that's partly because the fact that you can abstract also means that you can learn abstractly and that means you can pull in Concepts from the world at a level of abstraction that may have virtually nothing to do with you and that's certainly the case if you're educated because you read all sorts of things and you know the reading and and all the investigating that you do at an abstract level allows you to have theories about being and theories about yourself but there's no necessity those theories about being in yourself have any basis in who or what you actually are and so that can that makes you in inauthentic that's the existential perspective and the rogerian perspective would be incongruent there are you're not a singular entity at all the multiple levels at which you exist and that can cause conflict so for example maybe you're acting out an ideology because you're convinced of its rational int integrity and coherence and utility but that util that ideology doesn't fulfill you as a individual now that's certainly an existential claim it's a fundamental existential claim in fact as we'll talk about in in the next lecture there are thinkers like Soulja niten who've ascribed the worst catastrophes of the 20th century to exactly that kind of inauthenticity which is the development of a coherent and rational ideology say like a communist ideology and then the attempt to force that on the world and and on people despite the fact that the rational formulation and the reality of the people and the world have very little in common now how would you detect your own inauthenticity or your your own in congruence well Rogers had this idea that he called subception which was maybe something that you might regard as a sixth sense it's sort of like a proprio Centric perception and that's the perception that you have of your body as it's reacting and localized in time and space and so it's sort of like touch the feeling but it's it's it's your sense of how you're reacting internally and where you are and a lot of that is subserved by the autonomic nervous system which is reporting to you about various states of being in your body Rogers believe that you could use the information that's being provided to you from your body sort of bottom up to determine when you were being inauthentic or non- congruent and I've thought about this for a long time and tried to sort it out in a practical Manner and what I've concluded is this you can try this for a couple of weeks it's it's an extremely interesting exercise so you sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and your and and what you say so you got to assume you start by assuming that what you say and what you think is not necessarily you and of course that's just the case because a lot of what you think in fact most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people they are things you've read or things people have told you and you know that that's a benefit in some ways because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating but it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you okay so you detach yourself from that you're no longer your thoughts or or or the things that you say or maybe you're no longer all of them and now what what you're going to try to find out is which of your thoughts and things that you say are you and maybe so you canot utilize the rest or maybe so that you can correct the rest because they're not representative of yourself as a as an integrated being they don't take everything into account my sense has been that you can tell when you're saying something that's not authentic by feeling out whether or not it makes you weak or strong now you know sometimes when you're conversing with people you can say something that embarrasses yourself now n said for example everyone has perjured themselves at least once in the attempt to maintain their good name something like that it's not an exact quote but I've got the gist of it right so maybe you're saying things to impress someone or you're saying things to remain part of your political group or your social group or whatever or maybe you have attributes personal attributes that might be positive that you're ashamed of and so you're not going to speak about them so there's a falseness about your self-representation watch for two weeks and see make a rule that if you start to say something and it makes you feel weak it's hard to describe exactly what that means to to me what it means is that I can feel things coming apart sort of in my midsection so I think it's an autonomic phenomena and the the subjective sense is of of falsehood it's like I've just stepped off the solid ground and onto something that that doesn't support me well and it it feels like a self- betrayal so that's existential inauthenticity you can feel it right away and then the rule is shut up if that happens stop talking and then feel around and see if you can find some words that you can say in that situation that don't produce that sensation and it's like you see this played out in different forms of drama so there's there's a scene in The Lord of the Rings for example where I believe it's Gollum and Bilbo it's the Lord of the Rings it's yeah it's Bilbo it's the Lord of the Rings not The Hobbit because the hobbit's Frodo right so it's Bilbo there have I got it wrong it's the other way around okay so Gollum and Frodo yes are going across this swamp and the swamp is full of essentially full of dead souls and they have to step very carefully in order to not fall off the track and the stones are sort of hidden underneath the surface and the implication there is that in order to follow a trail properly you have to pick your your ground very carefully and you have to test it to see if it's solid or you'll slip off into this well essentially what it is is chaos you'll slip off into chaos and that's a dramatic representation of what I'm what I'm suggesting to you it's like all you have to do is notice but and you have to pay attention and so so to some degree what you're doing in fact is you're making your capacity to pay attention superordinate to your capacity to think and to speak because you you know you might ask yourself well exactly what are you well I said you can identify yourself with your intellect and that's very very common it's sort of like the worst sin of intelligent people but that isn't all you are and there are lots of reasons for making the assumption that attention is a higher order function than intellect because attention is what teaches intellect so if by if you pay very very careful attention to what you say without having the automatic without bringing the automatic assumption that what you say is you to bear on the conversation and then also to feel like you have to defend it once you say it you'll find very rapidly that very much of what you think and say has absolutely nothing to do with you it's just it's the dead Souls that are in that little scene that I described to you sort of manifesting themselves in your head they're dead ideas that other people have created and some of them might be applicable to you you know you might have the right to them so to speak but lots of them won't and you're using the words as camouflage or self-defense or as an attempt to attain status in a status hierarchy or to make yourself look smarter than you are or there's all sorts of reasons or or to hide what you think from other people I see this in undergraduate essays all the time so because the essays are full of cliches and you know it's not all that obvious why a cliche is a bad thing but a cliche is a bad thing in the same way that being possessed by the dead is a bad thing it's like a cliche isn't you it's something else it's like the crowd it's like the other it's it's not living it has nothing to do with you and part of the reason that students use cliches is because it's easier than than using your own genuine creative formulation so you can just default to cliche use but there there's something more Insidious than that is that if you write an essay that's nothing but a string of cliches and you get criticized then you're not being criticized what's being criticized is the cliches and you can hide behind that and the the part of you that's wise but but but treacherous thinks well the criticism doesn't really apply to me because you know I didn't really say what I thought and then there's this kind of sense you get that you've gotten away with something which is a terrible thing so when I read undergraduate essays what I see very frequently is especially the first s it's just nothing but cliches it's awful it's it's dull you can hardly stand reading it because there's nothing in it that's gripping or alive and then maybe the second essay you can see there's a layer of cliche and then now and then the person will be brave enough to poke up a thought of their own it'll just sort of poke up somewhere maybe in three pages in it's like this little green Shute that's barely alive and the person is brave enough to pop it up in the hope that you know maybe it won't get wall uped down with the sledgehammer and so one of the things I try to do is to point that out it's like look you know this is something there's a real thought here it's a real original thought it's something that you have the right to because it's derived from your own experience and your own knowledge and you formulated it in an original and compelling way but the problem with that is that if you get criticized for that you're just going to pull right back into your shell right because that hurts because it's actually part of you that you've exposed and that's a terrifying thing to expose yourself like that but it it's it's an absolute prerequisite to genuine communication and thought so the ancient Mesopotamians I haven't got time to tell you this story if you want to hear it you can come to my maps of meaning class in your fourth year but the me ancient Mesopotamians had figured out 5,000 years ago or so that the the highest God in the hierarchy of God so sort of like the highest value or the thing that should be imitated most carefully was a God that whose whose head had eyes all the way around it and who spoke magic words so the words he spoke could make the sunrise and make the sun set very very powerful speaker and the reason the Mesopotamians had figured this out to the degree they had was because they realized that the capacity to pay attention which is the eyes of course because we really pay attention with her eyes and then the capacity to speak properly is in fact the highest virtue and so then you can check yourself you can see all you have to do is listen like you would listen to someone else and you have to feel you think do I actually believe that do is that actually my thought and really I'll tell you what you'll find is 95% of what you say has nothing to do with you so it's quite shocking to do this because you'll start to say something and you'll think oh that doesn't feel quite right like it doesn't make me feel solid when I say it there's something about that that I'm subordinating myself to something or hiding in some way it's very difficult to figure out exactly what you're doing but you'll find out that almost everything that's abstractly represented it has to be that way because you guys are all so young so in some sense you know way more than you can actually know right you've been taught all these things but you don't know them they're just in your head in fact they have you rather than the other way around it's like Carl Yung said people don't have ideas ideas have people and that's something to really think about because then you want to watch and see what ideas there are floating around in your head and start to figure out where they came from because it's highly probable that they're controlling you just like a marionette is controlled by the Puppeteer it's very very similar and there's an inauthenticity about that and so that brings us into existentialism so now I want to talk to you a little bit about existentialists because existentialists are very concerned with authenticity and so you could say that above all else existentialists are concerned with truth now of course we know that it's not very easy to Define exactly what constitutes truth and and I would also say there are various definitions of truth that can be used for different purposes you know because your definitions of Truth can also have a tool likee function and and and and finally that we can't come up with an ultimate definition of truth because we're not infinitely informed right so ignorance is going to underly our claims all the time but that doesn't eradicate the validity of the concept of Truth and I think one of the ways you can deal with that existentially is that you may not be able to determine what's true at any given moment but it's quite a different matter to determine what's false that's a lot easier so one of the things I of to tell my clients for example is uh here here's a way to clean up your life stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing right so it's it's a fairly it's a fairly limited attempt first of all we're not going to say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense but we will presume that there are things that you're doing that for one reason or another you know are not in your best interests there's something about them that you just know you should stop they're kind of self-evident to you other things you're going to be doubtful about you're not going to know which way is up and which way is down but there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do now some of those you won't stop doing for whatever reason you don't have the discipline or maybe there's a secondary payoff or you don't believe it's necessary or it's too much of a sacrifice or you're angry or resentful or or afraid who knows so forget about those for now but there's another subset that you could stop doing it might be a little thing well that's fine stop doing it and see what happens and what'll happen is your vision will clear a little bit and then something else will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know you should stop doing and that you could stop doing because you strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before that just puts you together a little bit more and you could do that repeatedly for for an indefinite period of time and and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad and you know that's not a bad start now Soul jiton who we'll talk a lot about in the next lecture Soul jitsen was a great Russian writer he wrote a book called the gulag archipelago which was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union and soul netson like Victor Frankl who you'll also read was very much convinced that the reason the horrors of the Soviet Union and of the of Nazi Germany and and of ma China and various other places around the world he was very convinced that the reason those Horrors took place the death and torture of hundreds of millions of people was because the individuals that made up that those societies were inauthentic in their own use of of thought and speech and so it isn't a following orders Theory it's it's it's not that at all it's a bottomup pathology Theory it's the reason the whole state is pathological is because the individuals that compos it are pathological not because they're good in following orders so I I I believe that I believe that to be the case I do believe that the catastrophes of the state are a consequence of The Amalgamated pathologies of the individuals especially their willful blindness and so another thing that you might think about because most young people do think about this is what is it that you can do in order to Aid the world let's say like you might if you were thinking about being an environmentalist well as far as I can tell the one sure route to aiding the world is to clean up your existential space first of all you're not telling anyone else what to do that's a big plus and second well the more you do that the more you're going to be able to do things you know and so you might think well if you're going to clean up the world you might start by cleaning up your phenomenological space and see how far you get with that it's a very difficult thing to do but if you do it the the better you get at it the more capable you are of of handling larger and larger problems and and that's how you should start you should start with what's right in your grasp and with what you can control and and that that enables you to practice now here's a here's an offshoot of this this is an existential offshoot so here's a hypothesis so you imagine the existentialists continually claim unlike the psychoanalysts that people are psychopathological not because say of childhood trauma or Neurosis or repression or or uh failure to integrate elements of the ID into the ego the existentialists claim that the reason that people are psychopathological is because the conditions of existence are so tragic that it's inevitable that people become psychopathological right and that's okay so what's the argument well people are self-conscious so that's a big problem so and because we're self-conscious we know that we're going to die we're aware of our temporal limitations so that's a real catastrophe cuz no other animal has that problem like elephants look like they've got kind of a dim apprehension of it but they're not articulate so they can't really get to the final stage of you know assessing their existence in relationship to its its finitude and of course everyone knows that they're prone to illness of all sorts and aging and that you know so is everyone else they know and that you can be damaged incomprehensibly by untruth and by falsehood and by by betrayal you know and then and also that there's 150 things wrong with you that you're accusing Ely aware of at almost all times so you you fall short of perfection along pretty much any axis of comparison that you wish to generate and so the existential point of view on that is that all of that's enough to make the default condition of human beings psychopathological it's like the weight of existence itself is sufficient to make normal pathological and and it's a very powerful it's very powerful AR arent because one of the things you might ask and it's certainly something I've asked when I've dealt with people who have agrob for example who are afraid to go out you know they're afraid to go out because they might have a heart attack and then that they'll be too far away from the hospital and then they'll die well they make fools of themselves that's basically the agrob sphere so it's biological mortality plus social exposure right it's bad enough to die but if you die in public while everyone's looking at you then you know you get the worst of Both Worlds and it is to me it's not such a mystery that people are agrob it's a mystery that other people aren't you know and and from the existential point of view the mystery starts to become the the ubiquity of normality given the Intolerable conditions of existence it's a much more powerful Viewpoint I think it's correct too because there's no reason to assume that the default condition of mankind is like calm rational acceptance of Fate it's like you have to have very very very specific conditions that you're in before you're calm and and and you know feeling comfortable and sort of hopeful about the future it's like that's a rare state to achieve we can assume that's normal at least to some degree in our society because it's unbelievably technologically sophisticated and we're not hungry that often we're not cold that often or you know or even sick that often but to think of that as the norm it's like no definitely not that's it's a miracle that it's ever like that now the other claim the existentialists make fundamentally is something like this is like well if the fundamental conditions of existence are tragic at at minimum because there's worse there's evil too which is different than tragedy because evil is sort of like unnecessary tragedy you know because there's earthquakes say and you know who are you going to blame about that but then you're there's you going to school and you know there's four people who've got it out for you and all they do is pound you flat every time you enter the building or make fun of you and you know try to torture you to death that's That's Not Tragedy that's it's not AC it's not your accidental subjugation to fate it's some horror show perpetrated On You by people whose only goal is to make sure that there's more suffering in the world rather than less so you also have to put up with that but we'll leave that aside for the time being you're stuck in your pathology because the conditions of existence are intolerable to a self-conscious being will say that so then you might ask well what could you do about that well here's one potential answer and that answer is see what happens if you stop doing things you know to be inadequate and wrong so the hypothesis is every time you engage in an activity like that you weaken yourself you put yourself down first you remove your own self-confidence but you also fail to take the opportunity to expand your do of competence What would life be like if you didn't do that and the existential claim is it's it's it's a it's a weak claim in some ways the claim is well it's there's two one is if you don't do that if if you don't try to fix the things that you could fix things will go from bad to worse for your life and that will spread out and it will take everyone else's life along with it so that so that's on the ative end so you don't do it because of the negative end but then there's a positive claim too which is maybe if you stopped bullying yourself the tragic conditions of existence would become bearable because you would be strong enough to tolerate them and and it's it's analogous to yung's idea of progression towards the self it's because Yung has a very strong existential theme underlying his work derived mostly from n but it's it's the most optimistic it's the only optimistic hypothesis I've ever seen in Psychology truly optimistic hypothesis because there's other hypothesis like the positive illusion hypothesis which is basically life is so tragic that you have to tell yourself you know happy falsehoods just so you don't go insane and that's what normal people do which I think is an absolutely appalling philosophy it's it's it's the ultimate in cynicism that but still that you know there's a huge literature on the supposed utility of positive Illusions and then there's also the associated sort of Terror management hypothesis which is that the purpose of your belief systems is to protect you from the anxiety of death which is sort of a variant of the Freudian idea that religion was a childish delusion designed to protect people from Terror of their own mortality it's very powerful critique of of religion although it's one that I happen to think is wrong I mean one of the problems with Freud's formulation is that it fails to deal with you know Concepts like the underworld and hell I mean if if you're going to just whip up a belief system to protect yourself against the fear of death why in the world would you envision something like an eternity of suffering worse than death if you ever step out of line it's very hard to understand how that's a defense mechanism now a cynic would say well the only reason that say Christians invented hell even though they didn't it's it's a very old idea is so that they had somewhere convenient to put people who didn't agree with them but you have to be unbelievably cynical to assume that that's the only reason and I I don't think there's any historical support for the idea that that's the only reason now I'm going to tell you some I'm going to tell you some stories or that some of the most famous existentialists in history told they their ideas and and quotations and and I the existentialists that I've read are often the most powerful of of writers so doeski is an existentialist and Solan niten is an existentialist and so is Victor Frankle who survived the concentration camps and kirkgard very weird collection of people I mean their their fundamental belief systems were often very much at odds with one another some of them are atheists and some of them are Orthodox Christians especially uh you know because a lot of the literary existentialists were Russian so you can come out existentialism from a variety of origin points but what they have in common is is what I kind of outlined is that the first idea is the essential preconditions of Life are sufficiently tragic to render the normative state of humanity pathological and and health something as something and health and wholeness is something very difficult to to uh uh aspire to or accomplish and that and that the road to that health is the reduction of Deceit and so that's a thing that's also very interesting about the existentialist because they make a very straightforward moral claim which is that lies make people sick and I'll I'll tell you in my experience as a psychotherapist I mean you know I can tell you some of the things that make people sick a lot of them have nothing to do with the psyche the things that make people sick are well they get unemployed it's like unemployment just lays people out especially if they're conscientious they just devour themselves and it's so stressful right because if you're unemployed well your finances become shaky almost right away plus you don't have any routine plus you're not involved in anything meaningful in relationship to society you know and then you start to eat yourself up with doubts and and and uh you know self-criticism especially if you're a conscientious person or especially if you're a conscientious person who's high in negative emotions like unemployment will just flatten you and then the death or illness of yourself or close relative that's really hard on people and uh there and there are situations at work that are difficult so people are bullied maybe they have a terrible supervisor or they're or they're in in a pathological social structure so that you know they're basically being bullied and oppressed with every step they take or they're in a very horrendous relationship but but then things start to turn a bit so okay so you can lose your job and you can be ill or dying and and so can people around you and that'll lay you low a lot of the time and no wonder right it's it's logical and when when people come to me with those sorts of problems the first thing I often not is they're not psychological I tell the people that that's not a psychological problem you're unemployed that's an actual problem and it's really useful to distinguish those right so so for example and this is something that psychiatric diagnosis does very very badly if someone comes to me and and they're depressed so they're not sleeping properly they feel terrible in the morning you know they they they don't have a lot of energy they're having a hard time experiencing any positive emotion it's difficult for them to move um and they have a lot of negative thoughts about the past and the present and the future I do an analysis of their life first to say well you know do you have a job that's you know all right that you know that that at least isn't horrifying you know is it okay for you to go to work in the morning do you have an intimate relationship that's basically functional do you have some friends you know um are your relationships with your family MERS okay are you reasonably healthy AP apart from the depression and do you have useful and interesting things to do that aren't related to your career and if the person says yes to all of those and they're still feeling terrible then I think okay this person is depressed right because they don't have a problem they're just depressed and in my experience those are the people who respond quite well to anti-depressant you know because their nervous system isn't calibrating it's analysis of their situ situation to the reality of the situation it's as if their lower status according to their status comparator which is a very primordial thing since even lobsters have it their status comparator isn't paying attention to their actual status and maybe that's because they're you know temperamentally high in negative emotion or maybe it's because they had been traumatized earlier in their life and so they're much more sensitive to any signs of failure it's easy it's easier to knock them down but then you have the other people who are well they don't have a job and they have they never have and maybe they're 30 or 35 no real stable employment history no real educational history it's pretty patchy one or more illnesses and then family members who are just out for their absolute destruction like families can be unbelievably pathological so they're in mesed in a familial situation where for one reason or another as soon as they get up off the ground a little bit someone knocks them back down and so and then maybe they have a drug or alcohol problem to go along with that or they have a relationship with someone who has a drug and alcohol problem or a mental illness and sometimes you see people who have like all five of those things going on at the same time it's like that's not precisely mental illness now a lot of that's associated with deceit you know they're entangled in relationships and and in relationships with themselves they're pathologically untrue so I've seen people for example who I've seen people who are in families where probably nothing they were ever told was true like it was never just true it was always twisted and bent in some way by whoever was talking to them for the purposes of that person power domination or or positive illusion or or delusion or something like all the communication within the family was motivated and so there it's so awful to grow up in an environment like that because you can't get a grip on what's real and then you know it can get worse than that in that the person will tell you that they love you and they'll act all sweet but every time you do anything that's even vaguely productive and useful they'll just criticize you to death and all the while telling you that they love you it's really horrible and that's all tangled up with deception and lies and and it's a weird thing because if you look at the Freudian hypothesis you'll notice that Freud attributed an awful lot of Psychopathology to repression right but I think the distinction between repression and self-deception or deceit is very permeable it's like what's the difference between repressing something and lying to yourself about it well Freud would say often that repression occurs unconsciously but I really wonder about that I think that what happens is that something happened or you did something that you don't like and it's bothering you and you could think it through but you just decide not to you just don't think it through so it's left vague and uncertain and you know fairly emotionally Salient but you just refuse to think it through and you practice doing that until you've built up a habit of not thinking that through and then you forget that you've built up the habit and then it's like it's being repressed unconsciously but I think that you know or at least you knew when you first did it and so you know when you meet people who are acting in a twisted and peculiar way and you ask yourself and they're very manipulative say you ask yourself well do they know what they're doing the answer to that could be well no but another answer could be yeah but they knew once they knew when they made the decision to start acting like that but after they did it a 100 times or so and made it into an automatic routine well then they forgot its or and now it runs autonomously and so now they don't know but they did know and so you know this is the sort of point and this is the real point of the existentialist where Clinical Psychology and and the claims of morality start to become very tightly aligned and it's something that the psychiatric and psychological Industries so to speak don't really tackle head on my experience has been that in these situations for example where the person has five terrible things going on in their life that there's just deception Twisted in and strewn in all of that people are betraying each other there's no Fidelity in the relationships there's no clear and genuine communication everything's manipulation no one admits to what they're really up to you know there's a lot of false and sacker and love which has absolutely nothing to do with love it's all for appearance you know and and you cannot be healthy a situation like that I don't think in my experience you know apart from terrible luck cuz you know you can get cancer diabetes or any number of awful things in my experience apart from the tragedies of Life there is nothing that hurts people more than deception lies do people in and that's an existentialist claim the claim is first while life is basically unbearable that's an existential claim and then there's the hope that with efficient caution and attention and Clarity of of thought and speech you can man you can Master it you can you can Master it to the point where you could even accept the fact that it's tragic but if you multiply its tragedy with the use of Deceit it's like forget it because you know it's one thing to be hurt you know maybe you break your leg that's one thing it's another thing to be attacked by two or three people who break your leg and do everything they can to demean you at the same time it's like lots of people break their leg and they're not traumatized it's very few people who can go through the latter experience without being you know seriously and permanently damaged here's Pascal one of the first existentialists when I consider the brief span of my life swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it the small space that I fill or even see engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not and which know not me I am afraid and I wonder to see myself here rather than there for there's no reason why I should be here rather than there or now rather than then now another thing the existentialists do that's that's very un they're Romantics they're not Enlightenment rationalists and part of the reason they're Romantics is because they actually don't believe that life is rational and and Pascal's comment on on what what the existential often call thress is a description of the fundamental irrationality of life it's like okay here you are well why you why here why now why the way you look why with your family why your gender well there's no answer to any of those questions it's just how it is it's blind and random chance maybe there's this but even if it's not that there's something arbitrary about it and and there's something that's arbitrary and not self-evidently just or fair you know because maybe you could have been born you know there are people around the world who make they're living in garbage heaps right so there's whole families and whole societies that live out in the garbage dumps and all they do is pick out you know the the the metal and glass that will enable them to sort of glean out a living it's like well why the hell aren't you born there instead of you know sitting right here so there's an irrational element to that right you can't justify it you can't explain it and you don't really even know what to do about it right I mean do you owe an existential debt to the people who were born much worse off than you or is it just okay that it's that way well it's a problem that that by the way is the problem the existentialists called thress which is you're arbitrarily here in that form and there's no explanation for it and it and it it's something that's outside of human concepts of say justice and equity and fairness and and even Sensibility and then Pascal also points to the fact that well we're rather localized things you know you're right there and there's a lot of what isn't right there around you so you're a small thing against a big infinitely large potential span of experience and that's also an existential challenge it's the challenge of the finite against the the infinite and that's also an existential problem which which is that it isn't your problem or it is it's more a problem it's just a problem that Springs out of Being Human one of the places where existentialism and phenomenology touch the phenomenologists of course make the case that reality is best conceived of as the totality of your experience even if that includes things that you wouldn't normally consider you but certainly it includes things like emotions and motivations and bodily Sensations and all the things that aren't precisely rational the existentialists would take that claim and push it a bit farther by saying and this is analogous to something I already told you that the degree to which that phenomenological field your field of experience is fractured and incoherent and paradoxical that that that occurs in PR precise proportion to the weak to the weakening of the spirit within you that necessarily has to be strong in order to remain un corrupted by the tragic conditions of existence so along with the existentialist claim which is that life is unbearable in its in its very nature it's tragic and unbearable in its very nature is the idea that that's made worse by your own set of inadequacies inadequacies that you could repair and worse that to the degree that you are rif with inadequacies that you could repair you're going to make the tragic situation that's integral to life worse again not only for yourself but also for other people so out of existentialism also automatically arises a kind of moral necessity which is that you can't just sit in isolation and be useless and resentful that doesn't work if you're useless and resentful and you refuse to address the things that you know you should address you can't help but pathologize everything around you and so you're stuck with a moral duty and the exist would would say more than that they would say that if you don't shoulder that existential burden that existential moral burden you will inevitably suffer for it you cannot get out of it you're stuck with it so existentialists are great Believers in Free Will in that you have choice but the the Free Will has parameters right there are still things that you can't get away with and one of them is you can't you fundamentally can't get away with being immoral the the structure of existence is set up well one one of the things you might say if you were thinking about it existentially is immoral things are precisely those things that you can't get away with that's why people have identified them as immoral is that they will inevitably the consequences of enacting them will inevitably be brought to bear on you or on the people you love for they'll it'll snap back in some way you know and and I I see this in Psychotherapy very often too people will engage in the same kind of behavior over and over well there's a classic definition of insanity which is insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome each time and there's an element of self-deception in that it's like people will run out a procedure that ends in tragedy and then they'll repeat that over and over and you can lay out for them the causal connection between their actions and their conceptions and the outcome and they'll listen but there's no change whatsoever in behavior and so then they run through the routine again and bang and what they're doing is immoral precisely because whenever they implemented it produces the kind of catastrophy they claim to want to avoid because you know relativists modern relativists like to think of morality as something that's just arbitrary like it's a cultural construction you know and Society one thinks that a is bad and Society 2 thinks that b is bad and when you get right down to it there's no commonality underneath all that but the existentialists sort of undercut all that and they just say well what's immoral are those things that you could change that you do that result in outcomes that are catastrophic for you that's it that's what immoral is and so that's Universal because it doesn't really matter what the details are you know like what you do that's immoral could be very much different than what you do it might be temperamental you know we're each in our own playing field in a sense but there's a commonality underneath that which is well for example you won't get away with deceiving yourself you just can't and the reason you can't is because you need a model of the world that's like the world and if you try to live in a model of the world that isn't like the world you'll just bump into the world and so the the deception brings with it its own punishment and that's why it's immoral there's other elements of existentialism that I think are extremely interesting for example the definition of Truth in existentialism is is different than the definition of truth that might be characteristic of objective materialism so truths that are truths from the perspective of objective materialism are scientific truths and they're usually descriptive truths and so the the truth claims of science go something like this I'll undertake a procedure which I'll tell you about and I'll observe the outcomes and then if you undertake that procedure and You observe the outcomes and the outcomes are the same you know and we'll do this maybe a hundred times just to be certain then we'll assume that that what that outcome is is real so it's a definition of a procedure that's that's the experiment that elicits the outcome and then the demonstration that the outcome is constant across observers so that's a lovely definition of Truth and it obviously has extreme utility partly because it helps you separate subjective fantasy which is a form of reality from other forms of realities so another form of reality would be collectively apprehensible reality you don't want to confuse those two things in fact that's actually a sign of if if not naivity and and and a state of undeveloped differentiation it can also be a sign of insanity because one of the things say that characterizes schizophrenics is they can't tell the difference between what only they experience and what everybody else experiences so the scientific definition of Truth is a perfectly reasonable definition but it's not the existential definition of Truth the existential definition of Truth is more action predicated so for the existentialists truth is a way of being it's not a collection of descriptions so it's more it's more embodied you know from the pedian point of view and so truth is reflected in in what you act so nii would say for example doesn't matter what you say it matters what you do and if I want to figure out what you believe I don't ask you I watch how you act and I assume that your true beliefs are those that are directing your actions and so truth is discovered in action and that's a very different claim you know and it's it's not the claim of a passive Observer it's the claim of someone who's actively interacting with the world and of course we are always acting we're always acting interactively with the world and and not only that if we don't act interactively with the world we cease to exist so we have to do that merely to maintain ourselves and so the existential claim would be given that's in our essential nature there are ways that you can act that are IM they're improper and and technically it's like for example let's say you want a and then you act in a bunch of ways that makes it absolutely impossible that you will get a it's like an existentialist would say well there's something wrong with that schema like it's a it's it's it's not necessarily immoral because that would only be if you were willfully blind to it but they would certainly say well it's got this self-contradiction ictory element that makes it wrong so so in so far it's like this in so far as you're acting you're acting towards an aim you want something and then in so far as you want something the fact that you want it constitutes the framework within which you evaluate the utility and truth of your actions right so it's like you come up with a theory of Truth just because you're doing something and the theory is a that what you want is acceptable to want and you know that can be true or not but it doesn't matter you just assume that and B that those things that will get you to that end are appropriate you can't get out of that if you're doing something you're making a claim about the structure of the world and what constitutes appropriate action as soon as you make any action you you can't get out of that n said can one live it all truths are bloody truths to me and that's an that's one of the things I really like about reading the existentialist too it's not there's no there's no abstract disembodiment in their philosophy you see that the people who are writing as existentialists are committed to what they say they they want to they want to enact what they say in the world it's and it's romantic because it does involve emotions and motivation it's it's see with reason alone Enlightenment view of reason was that reason and the passions were antagonistic that all the passions could do would be to Cloud reason and that it was reason's job to lift itself up above the body and the emotions and clarify the nature of the world the the existentialists would deny that completely they would say no no no it's that the purpose the the appropriate mode of being is to act properly and rationality can be a guide to that but can also it can also deceive in all sorts of ways the the passions inform you they don't Cloud your reasoning although of course they can because they tend to be kind of single-minded you know they can take you off course but that doesn't mean that they're enemies of rational Clarity per se and when the existentialists write you can tell they put their whole being into it so it's it's it's gripping and passionate the existentialists have also identified sort of classes of pathology that are unique in some ways they they're outside the purview of standard psychology and Psychiatry so you you see often if you're looking at debate say between atheists and religious people one of the things that tends to set the atheists back on their heels is the observation that the religious people make that if there's no final meaning to anything then there's no meaning to anything and so that immediately lists it's a kind of nihilism it's like if nothing means anything why do anything and it's a reasonable argument because doing things requires effort and you can say to yourself well why should I do X or Y especially if x is difficult if Who the hell's going to know in a thousand years or Who the hell's going to know where in a hundred years or why does it matter anyways and then the atheist will tie themselves up in knots trying to address that issue but the existentialists take a different perspective n said for example he was he viewed the emergence of nihilism as a kind of cultural pathology and so you remember of course that it was n who said God is dead right you see that scrolled out in like washroom graffiti from time to time you know it's it's it's it's like a truism but that isn't what n said he said God is dead and we have killed him and we never find enough water to wash away the blood which is a very very different statement it wasn't like he was proclaiming it triumphantly it was more like a catastrophic loss of meaning you know the sort of loss of meaning that the terror management theorists would say would would produce like a traumatic pathology now what nche observed was that there you know of course you all know this to some degree that in the course of the development of of scientific knowledge and rationality that a contradiction between our historical moral knowledge formulated in religious terms and our descriptive rational knowledge emerged conflict between science and religion now part of that conflict is auser because the purpose of religion is to tell you how to act and the purpose of science is to provide clear descriptions of of what universally apprehensible reality they're not working in precisely the same domains it doesn't matter nich's observation was this he said well it's pretty clear that the scientific rationalists are going to demolish the substructure of Western religious belief and then of course the substructure of that sort of belief all the way around the world and there's going to be consequences to that and he said there's going to be two consequences and he predicted this say in 1850 it's something like 1850 in Will To Power it's unbelievable he said that what's going to happen in Europe is that there'll be the rise of socialist/communist utopian schemes that will possess people and that will produce a war and the consequence of that war that will be that hundreds of millions of people die and he predicted that like 80 years before it happened well maybe less if you think of the Russian Revolution as a precursor of that which dovi would have certainly viewed it as a precursor of that now so there's totalitarianism on one side that's that's one of the dangers and another danger is nihilism and the nihilism emerges because you shatter the meaning structure within which action is conceptualized and so those are like two emergent pathologies that threaten people now if you talk to someone who's nihilistic and rationalists are almost always nihilistic especially if they're depressed they'll say things like like I already told you what difference does it make anyways now dovi played out those themes for example in a really in a very very powerful way in a number of his books so the possessed for example it's funny because Doki and n wrote at the same time and doeski wrote literature and N wrote philosophy but they were doing exactly the same thing in dov's the possessed he talked about description of the Russian political economic ideological scene and what he saw happening was that as people moved away from their enmeshment in a historically conditioned meaning system so that was say judeo Christianity that they started to become susceptible to utopian rationalist utopian ideologies it was so out with one system and in with another and the the the other was more dangerous because like the religious system sort of emerged from the bottom up and and they were weird and mythical and difficult to understand from a rationalist perspective whereas the utopian schemes were rational constructions ideologies very narrow and they're just imposed on people so for the example the Communists would say from each according to his ability to each according to his need which sounds wonderful but if you put it into practice it's like it's instantly genoci idle so n said well as the modern world suffers through the contradiction between scientific rationality and ritual religion historically conditioned the consequence of that is going to be that two pathologies will emerge one is reliance on totalitarianism and so I would say to the degree that any of you are ideological then you've succumbed to the one pole of of post-religious pathology and all you've done is replace adherence to one set of beliefs even though religious beliefs are not precisely beliefs with another that's rationally constructed and Incredibly dangerous he said well if it isn't going to be totalitarianism it's going to be nihilism but the thing that's so interesting about the existentialists is they make a forthright claim that regardless of whether or not the fact that people will turn to those Alternatives is a rational can be rationalized it makes sense that it would happen it's still pathological it's like a it's it's like an a prior statement so I could say well let's say you're nihilistic you know you you lack you have a lot of doubt about life's meaning and purpose and it's like it's eating at you it's it's it's a disease of the soul and you come to me and you tell me 30 logical reasons why what you say has to be be true and I would say those are excellent logical reasons and you're making a very powerful argument but it doesn't matter it's irrelevant the fact that you're nihilistic means that you're infected with a pathology and whether or not you can justify it rationally is completely irrelevant all it means is that your rational mind is capable of spinning off a sequence of logical tricks and the ultimate truth is it's undermining your ability to live and so it's wrong why is it wrong I don't care why it's wrong it's not relevant why it's wrong what's relevant is you can't live like that and that's an existential claim because the existentialists are interested in a different kind of Truth they would say that a truth you cannot live is not true because their definition of Truth is different it's predicated on action and then the totalitarianism claim is the same thing so let's say that you're an Ardent right-winger or you're an Ardent socialist or you're an Ardent feminist or an environmentalist or who cares what the ism is you've abstracted out a bunch of axioms you develop a coherent representation of the world and it's pathological it doesn't matter what the content is it's pathological because it's not you it's not you if it was you then a million other people wouldn't believe it so the existentialist would say if a million other people believe it it's definitely false and they're not talking about scientific claims that's a whole different that's a whole different order of of discussion and description they're merely making the point that you're an individual thing and if you've been unable to particularize your experience and you've replaced that with adherence to some sort of arbitrary and Universal call to action or representation you you're pathological it's a form of mental illness and you might say well what's the evidence for that Well what we'll find out in the next lecture is the 20th century was evidence for that not so much for the nihilism nihilism aspect I think that we're still in for that because I think we swung to totalitarianism first and that didn't work and so now you see this in postmodernism for example it's an unbelievably nihilistic philosophy because it it claims that all meaning for example is reducible to motivations of power which is like intellect it's intellectually simplistic beyond belief and it comes straight out of like 1950s Marxism and you know it's it's pretty much permeated the humanities and the study of literature at universities all over North America it's it's it's sick beyond belief to teach young people that all meaning is relative it's the last thing you guys need to hear when you're like 20 it's and the reason that people teach it is because they're more afraid that things might have meaning then they are afraid that things might not because you might ask yourself well here's two options one is it doesn't bloody will matter what you do who the hell cares who's going to know in a thousand years and Everything's Relative well you think God nothing could be worse than that well I can tell you something that would be worse than that it's easy let's take the reverse everything you do matters okay so what's the downside of that it's like you don't get to get away with anything everything you do is important it's linked to everything else it's like okay now choose you you got a choice you can either choose to believe nihilistically that nothing has any meaning well you get to be depressed and anxious and you maybe you're impulsive because that's the only kind of pleasure you can find but the advantage is you don't have any responsibility you can do whatever you want and if a psychoanalyst would say hm maybe that's why you believe it that's a secondary gain right you think you believe it because you've derived it logically it's like yeah sure no no you believe it because it's in the best interest of the worst aspects of you to believe it because it it justifies sloth and cynicism while the opposite is yeah what you do matters it's like well why not believe that well try believing it seriously and see what happens you take the existen poal claim seriously one of them is you make a mistake especially one that you know is a mistake you will absolutely pay for it and worse you'll never get away with it and worse than that it'll Domino out into the world so not only will you pay for it but the people that you're connected with will pay for it there's always a price it's like well you decide which of those two things is more terrifying you know when you you read Freud and Freud says religion is a defense against death anxiety well that's a good argument but it is not by no means clear to me at all that the reverse of that which is the idea that things have intrinsic meaning and that you have a like an intrinsic responsibility it's by no means clear to me that that's a comforting idea it could easily be that the more comforting idea is that you know you're just a spec in a collection of specs and what you do doesn't matter well you can sit and play video games for the rest of your life and it isn't going to make any difference it doesn't have any significance well if the opposite is true you know every time you do something pathological especially if you know it's pathological you tilt the whole world towards pathology and so the existentialists would say of the 20th century we just about annihilated ourselves once in 1962 and then once again in the early 80s we this far away from nuclear Annihilation you might ask yourself well why didn't we do it and the existential answer would be as a collective human beings decided that it would be better to continue being than not to and the way they decided that was by Shifting the ratio of their pathological to honest behaviors a little bit more towards honesty and you know you might wonder about this sort of thing if this kind of thing could possibly be true well that's why I have you read Frankl and soul nen you know they're not classic personality theorists but it doesn't matter to me because they're getting at something that's deeper than the terror management theorists or the people who deal with positive Illusions they're trying to make a case based on the analysis of an entire bloody century and the case is societies become carnivorous and pathological in precise proportion to the degree that the individuals who make up that Society become deceitful and irresponsible and I've never encountered a political or economic analysis or claim that has anywhere near the power of that but it's a terrifying proposition even though what you get out of it is well your life is Meaningful your life is Meaningful and then if all of a sudden you find that you're suffering unnecessarily this is a weird thing too about meaning claims you know someone's nihilistic they come and talk to you they say well my life has any there's no meaning in my life and I say well how do you feel about that and they say well I'm really feeling bad and then you say well that's a meaning feeling bad being anxious hurting those are meanings they're just not very good meanings and so then you might also ask yourself if your philosophy throws you in the direction of overwhelming negative emotion anxiety and pain and that's a meaning a you might note you're not going to argue yourself out of that you know which shows that there's a meaning basis you can't just all of a sudden decide you're not hurting or not anxious you don't have control over that the meaning of your pain is is completely impenetrable to your rational mind so it even if you're nihilistic you have to admit to the meaning of negative emotion well then what do you do you just deny the existence of anything positive well why is that reasonable maybe it's just that well you could be unlucky and maybe you're not well you know and maybe you have reasons to be suffering that have nothing to do with the way you're construing the world because people do get unlucky but there's always the possibility that the reason that things are so terrible for you is that you're inhabiting a pathological perspective that's an existential point of view can somebody tell me what time it is it's what well good then we can stop we'll see you after reading week |
we're going to talk some more about existentialism today and I'm going to talk to you about a couple of Swiss psychiatrists bin swanger and boss just as a starting point their psychological Viewpoint was influenced to a large degree by a philosopher named heiger and heiger considered himself a student of being and for piger the the main mystery of the world was why why it existed and the the best way to think about the Phenom he was a phenomenologist and the best way to think about phenomenology and existentialism is that phenomenology is the study of experience as it's lived and then existentialism puts a Twist on that because existentialists assume that being has a implicitly moral Dimension and the existentialists psychologists presume that pathology at least in part is a consequence of a disturbed relationship a disturbed moral relationship with the self and being it's very tricky thinking and it's not often handled in personality courses anymore but I I think that's a big mistake the phenomenological element in particular the thing I really like about it is that it's a really good counterpart to Modern materialistic Viewpoint because it puts Consciousness at the center of being instead of treating it as if it's something that's a secondary phenomena that emerges from something else and our modern presuppositions especially the scientific presuppositions are what pass for scientific presuppositions are generally extremely reductionist and they assume that Consciousness is in some manner that's not yet being determined like a secondary byproduct of fundamentally material processes and it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis but I wouldn't say there's any real evidence for it I mean it's hard to over State how mysterious Consciousness is as phenomena for heiger Consciousness was a mystery that was in some sense equivalent to the mystery of being and the way that the reason for that was that he couldn't conceive of existence without a sub without a subject so you could imagine if the world was stripped of Consciousness it's very difficult to describe what would be left I mean if you take a very straightforward materialistic Viewpoint you could make the presumption that if everything that was conscious was eradicated then things would be just the way they are now but that I think that's a shallow Viewpoint because Consciousness is what gives everything a perspective gives it a size it gives it a duration and it gives it colors and and all the qualities that we associate with being and without that Consciousness all that's at least incomprehensible and and then there are deeper problems that are dealt with by people like John Wheeler who's a Quantum physicist who believes that Consciousness is necessarily is necessary for Quantum indeterminacy to resolve itself into something that's concrete and actual so wheeler and and many physicists like him put consciousness at the center of the process that turns potential into actuality now at the same time these Quantum ideas were being developed these philosophical ideas and psychological ideas that I'm describing were being developed and they provide such a different take on the structure of reality that that I think they're indispensable I also think they're they're they're interesting in Rel ship in particular to P's thought because the phenomenologists have a constructivist element to their thinking in that they believe that Consciousness plays a constructive role in the establishment of being so we're going to look at being so again the way to think about this is you got to flip your Viewpoint in a sense is you have to think about your experience as reality and that everything that's inside that experience so to speak as a subcomponent of that reality instead of thinking of material things as the reality and your experience somehow emerging out of those it's it's an inversion of what constitutes the fundamental reality and so you can think about it in sense as an intellectual exercise I mean most of the way that people think is predicated on some kind of implicit set of axioms and if you change the axioms you can ALS you can often shed light on reality in a new and interesting way and so we're going to walk through the phenomenological Viewpoint and we're going to see why and how that might be interesting the phenomenological and existential viewpoints and then I'm in the next lecture I'm going to put a Twist on that because what you think about the nature of reality appears to have some powerful relationship with how that reality unfolds holds itself and the existentialists the phenomenologists were very big Believers in the reality of subjective experience and the existentialists were very big Believers in the ethical responsibility of the individual and I'm going to talk to you about what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 which is a period of world history that isn't well covered in our culture I mean everybody knows about the Nazi Holocaust but very few people know that between 30 million and 60 million people were killed as a consequence of internal repression in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 that's a figure that's five times as big as the commonly held figures for the Holocaust and the reason I'm going to introduce that to you is first you should know about it because it's the Stellar example of what happens when people abandon their individual responsibility and second and related to that it's an object lesson in why in what happened happens when the presuppositions that the phenomenologists and the existentialists held about the nature of reality were completely dismissed in in favor of a rationalist utopianism and rationalist Utopias ideologically rational Utopias killed millions and millions of people in the 20th century and it seems to me that you can make a fairly powerful case that if uh if if your view of reality when it's played out in the social World Turns genocidal time and time again there's probably something existentially wrong with it and then a second derivation of that might be if there's something that existentially wrong with a Viewpoint in in what way can you consider it tenable even if it makes sense and it's rational if the outcome is genocide and deceit and misery it's perfectly reasonable to presume that that's evidence that it's wrong now most of you and this is particularly true I think of universities are taught a kind of at least a kind of implicit moral relativism you know that it's that it's and that's fair that's reasonable from a scientific perspective at least to some point but there's a problem with that because there are forms of moral presupposition that seem to lead to horrendous ends and it's always struck me because I grew up like you and under the shadow of nuclear destruction so to speak it always has struck me that if certain viewpoints lead to genocidal outcomes and if they do that consistently then it's extremely dangerous for us not to act as if that's wrong and of course if something's wrong then that also implies that something is right right because the opposite of wrong is right and so even if you can't necessarily figure out what's right you might be able to ground yourself to some degree by figuring out what's wrong and so we'll walk through the philosophy and the psychology first and then we'll walk through the sociological consequences of its abandonment in a sense and well then you can see for yourself if you think that this perspective is worthy of some consideration it's very complicated well we'll look at this first phenomenology in part is based on this idea of dazzine and dazzine means being there and again this way of simplifying that is to think about it as your experience and then this is a map I've made of people's experience which I think is at least roughly equivalent to the phenomenologists dine and it has the advantage that I can explain it well so I'm going to use it and so the phenomenologists believe that the past and the present and the future are all tangled up together in your current experience in that say everything that you're doing is related to the Future which it of course is because you're sitting in this class and that has some consequences for whether or not you graduate and that has some conse consquences for your status and your career moving forward and you're perfectly aware of that so that you experience the meaning of the the lecture say in the context of your conceptions of the future and of course the same thing is true of your experience now because of your past and so the past and the future in some sense are here now it's partly because when you're experiencing things things you consider your current situation and you consider where it is that you're headed and so design also has this element of becoming in it there's you're not just a static thing and you don't ever experience anything that's in your environment as something that's merely static you always experiencing you're always experiencing it in relationship to your plans for transformation and that might be short term like maybe you're bored of the class because you need to go get a cup of coffee and then that colors your current experience or maybe it's longterm or it's medium-term it doesn't matter the point is is that your Viewpoint of the future conditions your experience in the present so in some sense the future is already here it's also the case that what you do now is going to have effects and consequences into the future here's a here's a more complicated consequence so you're somewhere now and you're going somewhere in the future and one of the consequences of that is that your nervous system it's one way of looking at it parses up the world in relationship to the relationship between those two polls so for example when you walk into a class and your plan is to sit down then you're immediately going to perceive an array of chairs imagine you were coming in here to clean up the room instead of sitting down for a lecture well then the things that would manifest themselves to you would be qualitatively different so maybe you'd only be looking for the things that were out of place or maybe you're coming in here because you're spectacularly Lonesome and you think that you know there's somebody here who might be a potential partner then the world's going to array itself in front of you in a different Manner and the degree to which what you're pursuing in relationship to where you are determines even how the objects of the world manifest themselves to you is indeterminate it happens to a tremendous degree and it's not only that things manifest themselves to you as objects in relationship to your conception of your current situation and your goals but your emotions are also hang on that platform so for example if you're writing an exam and you expect to see you're hoping for a c and you get a B then you're going to be extremely happy about it but if you are hoping for an A and you get a B then you're going to be extremely unhappy about it and what's interesting about that is that in some sense the stimulus as the behaviors would have it is the same but the emotional consequence is actually reversed it seems to me to be sort of related to the idea of Maya which is a Buddhist idea which is that people live inside a framework that's conditioned by desire and as a consequence it's not actually real and the the unreality the unreality of it is that you can change what manifests itself to you and the importance of what manifests itself to you by changing your conception of your of your goal your future or also by changing your conception of who and where you are right now and so in that sense being your experience is malleable and it's it's it's malleable at least in part as a consequences of the choices that you make and so what that implies from a phenomenological perspective is that free will and the manner in which the world manifests itself are integrally related and from an existential point of view it implies that you actually Bear a fair bit of responsibility for the ongoing quality of your experience and the existentialists would presume that that responsibility is built into the nature of being there's no way out of it it's like a precondition for being the the word phenomenon is from a Greek word and the Greek word is FIS thigh and what FIS thigh means is to shine forth now one of the presuppositions of the phenomenological Viewpoint is that reality in in some sense is composed of what shines forth now this is a very difficult thing to explain but I I can do it partly this way way so when you're moving from point A to point B you can parse the world up into tools and obstacles I showed you that in the last slide tools are things that get you to where you're going and so what the tools are depends on where you're going and obstacles are the things that get in your way and so if you perceive tools then that makes you happy because happiness at least in part is experienced in relationship to movement towards a goal and if you experience nothing but obstacles that's going to produce negative emotion so this is a variant of that and the variant is when you're moving from point A to point B you can experience things that you predict or desire and those make you hopeful and happy or you can experience things that are unpredictable and those make you those are threats and they make you anxious but it's broader than that they disinhibit negative emotion in a more General sense but sometimes you can experience something that's so unpredicted and so shocking that it blows the framework that you're using it it it what would you say the phenomenologists called that loss of world the framework the thing that you encounter is so unexpected that its appearance blows the structure of being a part and that happens for example when people are betrayed by someone that they love or maybe they're very seriously hurt or they develop a very serious illness or or a dream that they've been pursuing for a long period of time is rendered Impossible by some failure or or some unexpected natural occurrence now part of the question is what do you experience when your World falls apart your world emerges from something and then when it falls apart it falls back into that something that chaotic state and the the phenomenologists say that what you experience most basically is meaning so from from a phenomenological perspective when when you're looking at the world you perceive meaning and then you derive objects from that and you derive the objects in relationship to your representation of your current state and your future state so from a phenomenological perspective the base of the world is meaning now I I can give you some hints about how that plays itself out so so so one interesting phenomena is how interest guides your ability to concentrate okay so let's say that you've got an array of difficult papers on your desk and you have to read them now some of those papers independently of their difficulty some of those papers will will presume that you're actually interested in and some of them you're not interested in and so some the papers that you're interested in come with this quality that the phenomenologists described as shining forth there's something about them that grips your attention that enables you to concentrate that enables you to learn and that enables you to remember and in a relatively effort effortless way whereas the other papers that you're not interested in assuming they're of equivalent difficulty it's very difficult to focus your attention on and they lie there in sort of an inert manner so the F fenes thigh phenomena is partially apprehendable by considering what the difference is to you between something that you're interested in and something that you're not now someone like Yung would think of that interest as a consequence of an internal process a psychological process that's guiding your attention but the phenomenologists at least in It's tricky because they go both ways on this would consider the fact that some things are illuminated so that they're easy to concentrate on is actually a function of being itself it isn't something that you apply to the world it's a characteristic of being some things shine forth as meaning ful and some things don't now the existentialist would say at least in part that you have a duty to follow the things that shine forth that's where the moral element of this comes in now bin swanger said for example what we perceive are first and foremost not impressions of taste tone smell or touch not even things or objects but meanings and then bin swanger and boss split on the reason for why some things manifest themselves as compelling and some things don't bin swanger would say that you come equipped with an it's like it's a Canan idea with an a prior ontological structure and that's imagine you're reading a book so then you might say and the book obviously has meaning you're reading it and you're you're into it you might ask yourself where is the book and you could say well the book is the physical object that I have in my hand I mean that's that's what people act like in some sense or at least that's what they say they act like the book is the physical object but then person a might read the book and say I thought that was a terrible book and person B might read that book and say I thought that was a great book and person A and B might might differ on how they responded to the characters and they're going to differ in terms of how they imagine the situation and like there's a tremendous amount of flexibility in exactly what constitutes the book and so you'd say well the book is an artifact and the artifact is produced by the the author but of course it's not just produced by the author because it's produced inside a cultural context that shaped the author and that shaped you and then you bring something to bear on the book which is the sum total of your individual knowledge and your enculturated knowledge and so what that means is that it's almost as if there's a pattern that constitutes you and there's a pattern that constitutes the book and when you put the two of them together you get a juxtoposition of the two patterns and it's the juxtoposition that's the book and it's it's the realization of it this in some part that's led to The Oddities of postmodernism and and to the claim that there's no canonical meaning to Any Given text because it's a matter of interpretation it's like yeah well just because it's a matter of interpretation and even maybe just because the interpretations are very wide in potential scope that doesn't mean that the text doesn't have any meaning but you can understand how that idea might have come about now for bin swanger the reason the book would be meaningful at least in part is because you're imposing something on it and so that would be your individuality boss would say the opposite he would say well no the book itself is manifesting it its meaning to you in some sense of its own accord and that's because boss doesn't necessarily make a distinction between the thing the book and the entire context within which it's embedded and he would consider the meaning emerging as a consequence of that entire context you can't separate the book out from the situation in which it's embedded here's a map that I made a while back that helped me understand this at least to some degree the phenomenologists talk about three elements of of being of desine one is the umw the other another is the mitw and the third is the igen wel and there are various way to conceptualize these and I can give you a couple now the umwelt is the natural world so when we say nature that's what we mean we say well human beings live in nature we have a natural environment so the idea that there's a natural environment is like a canonical idea and and you know we we even think of the natural environment sometimes as the unspoiled natural environment as if there are natural environments that exist in the complete absence of human Endeavor and then we also have a social world and the social world is the world of culture so there's nature and culture and that's umwelt and mwth and then finally other than that there's the world of the self which is the part of being your being that's only accessible to you so it's you in in the middle of culture in the middle of Nature and so those are the elements of daid and for bin swanger it's the mittelt that contains most of the meaning or at least that structures the meaning so if you're reading a great novel the degree to which you can extract meaning from it is a consequence of your previous education and your own inculturation but that isn't necessarily the only way to look at things like if you walk into a bookstore say and a book catches your eye you might say that that book caught my eye well you think what exactly does that mean well it means that out of all the innumerable entities in the bookstore that could have your eye only that one did and then you might ask why well in boss would say well the world is disclosing a particular meaning to you why well that has something to do with the way that you're playing out your individual destiny going to show you this first so this is both a constructivist and a phenomenological perspective and so here's the idea that the thing that's at the center of reality is the domain that's not yet mapped so you're in a relationship the relationship is betrayed before you're betrayed you're in one place and after you're betrayed you're in another place before you're betrayed your world is all structured and you know where you are and what you're doing and who you're with and what everything is the second after you're betrayed none of that's true and so the second after you're betrayed nothing is structured it's like everything reverts to to a chaotic place and so in some sense the only time that you encounter a peer view of what the world itself is made out of what the ground of being is is when you encounter an error that's so overwhelming that your current framework of meaning is no longer applicable so the framework blows apart but it isn't as if nothing happens when the framework blows apart like if you're in a committed relationship and you find Security in that and you believe that the security is genuine and that's blows apart then everything that you presumed is wrong that's your midw but when that disappears there's something underneath it and what's underneath it that's the that's the ground of reality and the ground of reality is what you explore to put yourself back together and to put the world back together so you're betrayed and you fall fall into a depression and you're anxious but you know there's always the possibility of a new relationship that beckons and perhaps your previous relationship wasn't perfect so the chaos that you fall into is depressing and anxiety-provoking so it generates a lot of negative emotion but sort of lurking behind that are the sort of dim remnants of Hope and then as you proceed forward with your grief and your misery and you're attempting to reconstruct a stable mode of being you take out of that thing that's anomalous you and the world so another way of thinking about this is that for the phenomenologists and this is where they're similar to the constructivists the ground of reality isn't so much matter as it is information and when you're when you're living in in your constructed world and things are going the way that you want them to go then you've constrained that information in a particular way constrained and narrowed it in a particular way that serves your particular narrow end and that that makes things much more comfortable because then you don't have to deal with the the information that constitutes the entire world you can remove most of it and say well all that's relevant to me all that necessarily makes up my world of being are these Circ IRS cribe is this circumscribed set of phenomena and that works well when it's working but when it doesn't work and it blows apart that puts you somewhere else and that that being put somewhere else can be well revelatory sometimes I mean sometimes people make new discoveries that blow their previous frames of reference and it's like awe inspiring and overwhelming to them in a positive way sometimes you can come across something new that helps you reconfigure the the way that you're living almost instantly in a more comprehensive and Fuller way but more common is the traumatic response which is when the presuppositions of your world are shifted dramatically and you fall into the surrounding chaos then it's so hard on you that you know it actually does you psychophysiological damage now you remember that drawing I showed you with the little ovals at the bottom and the bigger ovals at the top the hierarchy you remember that does everybody remember that I decomposed say good person which is a very high order abstraction down to put a fork on the table which is a motor movement that's part of making dinner which is part of being a good parent which is part of being a good citizen which is part of being a good person so the idea was that the higher order abstractions can be concretized down to the motor behaviors in a hierarchy okay now if someone goes after you at the good person level of analysis and they just demolish you you know in the course of say a three-year relationship hacking away at the idea that you have any moral worth whatsoever this is what happen s when you're abused then that's going to knock you into pieces at a very complex and high level of abstraction so that can undermine your entire world view if the person instead helps you retool the little behaviors and the little micr structures that make you up and if you're willing to participate in that and if you're open to corrective feedback from the world then you can continually adjust yourself at a small level and then that makes the things in the hierarchy a little higher a little healthier and then that makes the aggregation of those things a little higher in the hierarchy a little healthier and a little more complete then you can do this bit by bit retooling without ever having to suffer the demolition of huge chunks of your personality so let's go back to the relationship where there's a betrayal it's like virtually every time someone gets flipped upside down because of a betrayal in a relationship after the Betrayal happens they say to themselves there were all these signs I didn't pay attention to so and maybe the first sign is who knows your partner starts to flirt a bit more when you go out on a social occasion it's and not a lot more just a bit more and you decide because maybe you're timid that that that's okay you're not going to do anything about it but it but it's it's interesting that it happens it grabs your attention and it means something but what you decide is it's not worth paying attention to and so maybe the next eight times that you go out the same thing happens but it happens at a somewhat accelerated rate and then maybe the person starts to go out without you and so on there's this progression towards the end state of betrayal and every time you get a little hint the world tells you that something's going on you put it aside and you fail to take it into account well you're forgoing your opportunity to adjust the relationship at micro stages because maybe what you should have done the first time that happened is you should have gone home with your partner and said um what the hell's going on like this is what was happening why are you doing that um here here is how you should have behaved and of course that's going to be a fight there's absolutely no doubt about it but it might be a micro fight instead of a the relationship is over fight and in order to keep a relationship healthy it needs to be retooled at micro levels constantly and the same is the case with your own character when you encounter something that's unexpected especially if it's small enough to handle you need to extract the information from it rebuild the world and rebuild yourself and then maybe if you continue doing that every time you get evidence of an anomaly or an error or every time the world manifests some meaning to you then you won't have to fall apart because the structure that constitutes you is going to remain viable and healthy from the bottom up and if you don't do that then those errors are going to accumulate and when they finally do manifest themselves as unavoidable like when your partner says I don't want to be with you anymore or I've been with someone else for the last year there's no ignoring that then the whole thing comes crashing down you're no longer in a relationship you're no longer in a good relationship and then all the other things become questionable so meaning manifests itself so that you can retool being itself on a continual basis while simultaneously minimizing the risk of total collapse and morality then becomes the act of paying sufficient attention and reacting sufficiently so that that corrective process occurs now so you're inside one of these you're going from point A to point B and as you do that things you want to have happen happen and things you don't want to have happen and things you don't understand happen and let's say that you investigate the things that you don't want to have happen and you investigate the things that you didn't expect and you do that as soon as they come up so then what happens well partly what happens is you're going to change your perceptions a bit and you're going to change your actions a bit and what that'll culminate in over time is that this whole structure will change so instead of going from point A to point B maybe you start shifting so that you're going from point A to point C because as you're gathering information as a consequence of the inadequacies of the way you're looking at the world not only are you improving your ability to perceive and to act but you're also gathering information that helps shift your perspective to a better point B because you might say well where are you going and why and the answer to that is well you have a plan you're going to get your degree I don't know what your long-term plan is but there's no reason to assume that your long-term plan is correct even though there's no reason to assume that you can do without one so you're in this weird situation where you have to live within a bounded space and the bounded space is going to produce errors and it's also going to be wrong but at the same time if you use the bounded space then you can transform it continually across time even what it's aimed at and you can minimize the probability of precipitous collapse now I want to show you how this is being represented it's very complicated and difficult so on the right you see that the Harry Potter snitch thing right and then on the left here you see this incredibly peculiar alchemical image and the image is something like this this is what this image means it means at the base of the world is this weird combination of matter and spirit so this is matter and this is Spirit the winged element represents spirit and then out of that comes something that's like primordial and reptilian and then out of that comes something that's associated with Consciousness so it's it's like a it's a map of the way that Consciousness emerges from the base of reality now you'll see that this thing and that thing the snitch and that this thing is called the round chaos this thing the snitch and the round chaos are the same thing now in in Harry Potter when he plays quidditch remember PJ had such an emphasis on games right psj believed that games were the subelements of human culture and quiddit is this weird two-level game where on one level it's sort of like soccer or basketball and then on another level you have two players that are Seekers and what they seek is this snitch and the snitch is this thing that captures your attention that's why it's gold and winged and it moves around very fast it's like Mercury the spirit Mercury cuz Mercury the God had winged feet and he was the messenger of the Gods that's that's how Mercury was conceived of and I'll tell you something else that's weird about Mercury so Mercury is a metal as well and if you mix Mercury with sand and the sand has gold in it then the Mercury will pick up the sand and then or the gold and then you can heat up the Mercury and all that's left is gold so Mercury will will lead you to where the gold is and the spirit mercurious the Mercurial Spirit was the messenger of the Gods and if you paid attention to Mercury the God then you'd gather the gold but it wasn't the gold of fools it was the gold that made your life valuable and that's the same thing that's played out in this weird Quidditch game the two best players the fastest the ones that are most awake aren't playing the normal game they're playing a superordinate game and the superordinate game is pay attention pay attention and if you pay attention then you'll get the thing that's most valuable you win the game but there's more than that because in the Harry Potter series for example there was a piece of soul in that and that's related to the idea that if you pay attention to what interests you what manifest itself is Meaningful not only do you build the world out of that because you're differentiating something that's undifferentiated into something that's comprehensible and usable but at the same time you're doing the same thing to yourself CU and that's the constructivist idea right is that well where do you where do you come from well you come from exploration and the generation of information and exploration what should you explore well the things that shine forth to you that's the phenomenological idea and the existential idea idea is if you refuse to explore the things that shine forth for you that capture your interest and your attention then that will lessen you as a being it'll make you weaker and progressively weaker because not only do you remain unformed but the ratio of chaos to World in your domain of being becomes too intolerable too much chaos not enough order not enough of you then the whole thing is unstable then you've only got two options one is that you lose belief in being itself and that's like a nihilistic reaction and the other is you turn to some sort of totalitarian or ideological solution that fills in for where you're not and that's an abdication of your individual responsibility and the consequence of turning to totalitarian ideologies like that is that they stagnate and become brittle because there's no transformation in them anymore because all of the people inside of them have decided that transformation is unnecessary and so they become increasingly outdated and corrupt and then that's the first step on the way to having everything fall apart in the most horrible possible way and that plays out at the state level just like it plays out at the individual level I'll tell you a dream I had about this since we're just out of the psychoanalytic domain I can show you using this how dreams often solve problems I'll just read it to you because I wrote it when I just after I had it I'll just tell it to you so the first thing I saw was it was like a view from a space shuttle so it was a global view and I could see the Atlantic Ocean and on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean there were four hurricanes and they were in a quadrant like this so there was a circle here and a circle here and a circle here and a circle here and they were very large hurricanes I mean one Hurricane's quite good but four that's a lot of hurricanes so it was impressive and so then the next thing I saw was a bank of scientists in kind of a dark room watching TV screens focused on this hurricane storm event and wondering what was going on and then the next thing I saw was this little ball about this big hovering over the surface of the ocean so now I was in the eye so the four hurricanes had an eye in the middle of them you know a calm place and so this little ball which was about 10 ft above the surface of the water was in that calm place and the storms were its accompaniment so and it was zooming along at a very rapid rate and it was bringing the storms with them and and so all of the scientists with their satellites were trying to figure out what this little ball that was 10 ft off the ocean surface and then needed like four hurricanes to accompany that accompany it they're trying to figure out what this thing was okay so the next scene was I was a third person Observer and I was in this room it was a small room about 8 by8 say and in the middle of the room there was this display case like a Museum you know like a Victorian Museum so it was made out of wood the top it had this glass and inside the case was this ball and it was just floating and inside the room was Steven Hawking you know the physicist in the wheelchair and a faceless president of the United States didn't matter who he was it just mattered that he was President of the United States and then the room itself I remember from the dream was made out of titanium dioxide and I woke up and I after this dream and I thought what the hell is titanium dioxide and the walls were 7 feet thick so the the idea was that little ball which had caused those four storms was going to be they caught it and they put it in that room and it was going to stay there titanium dioxide turned out to be the metal that the hull of the Starship Enterprise is built out of so it's it it represented like an impermeable substance and so inside the so there was this box made out of this Hightech metal and then inside the the room the American president was there so he's sort of representative of the mitwelt you know the social environment he's sort of King of the social environment and then step Hawking well Steven Hawking is disembodied rationality right obviously so so the room was a classific ation system in a sense and this ball whatever it was was stuck in there and so it was going to be a thing that you could look at in a museum and it wasn't going anywhere so it had been fixed and so I was watching this thing and then when I was watching it it did two weird things in the museum case the first thing it did was turned into a chrysalis and you know what a chrysalis is it's the like a cocoon that a butterfly comes out of and you may not know this but the word the Greek word for butterfly is psyche and the reason the psyche is a butterfly is because the psyche is something that transforms and it transforms towards something that's like an aerial spirit so this ball was transforming it transformed into a chrysalis and then it did a really strange thing it transformed into a pipe like a smoking pipe it was a Miram pipe which is a a carved pipe I think it's Irish sort of looks like a little saxophone thing but it was definitely a pipe and so that was the whole dream and I woke up and I thought I got the chrysis idea this whatever this ball was was the thing that's capable of transforming but then I thought what the hell what does that pipe mean what could that Poss pipe possibly mean one other thing transformed into chrysis and then back to a bowl and then it transformed into a pipe and then back into a bowl and then it went and shot out of the case and shot right through the S feet walls and it was gone and it just left a hole like there was it was moving so fast there was just a hole in the case and there was a hole in the wall and that was the end of that so it it was a ball it did its Crysis thing did its pipe thing and then it was gone that box was not going to hold it so after I had that dream quite a while later two years later I read this little poem from Dante it's from The Inferno The Inferno is an interesting book because it's Dante's attempt it's a it's a book about hell and it's Dante's attempt in a sense to turn the old idea of Hell into something that was psychological so Dante has this of hell as this place that has multiple depths with something that's the absolute worst right at the center so in some sense it's his attempt to come up with a a category structure of of evil he actually puts betrayers right in the center he figured that was the worst form of of moral error anyways here's part of the poem Virgil and Dante are going into The Inferno Virgil's the guide suddenly there broke on the dirty swell of the dark Marsh a Squall of terrible sound that sent a Tremor through both shores of Hell a sound as if two continents of Air One frigid and one scorching clashed head on in a war of winds that stripped the forest bare ripped off whole boughs and blew them Helter Skelter along the range of dust it raised before it making the beasts and shepherds run from shelter run for shelter that's a messenger from God comes down and that's how he makes himself manifest and I thought wow that's very much like this dream I had two continents of air and there was the this similar idea that there was something at the center that was that couldn't be encapsulated in a what a conceptual structure at least not for any length of time and you know being is like that you can't encapsulate it in a conceptual structure for any length of time no matter what you think you're wrong and even if you're right enough for the time being being is transforming and you have to keep up with it because otherwise the structure that you were inhabiting becomes dead and decays and then you fall apart and so you need a conceptual structure because it orients you but it can't be static and that's the problem with totalitarian ideology is that totalitarian ideology is predicated on the idea it's utopian that you can finally model things once and for all and so once you do that it's perfect and then it never has to change and that's that's wrong technically it's not wrong arbitrarily it's not a kind of relative wrong it's just wrong and it's because whatever being is is not static and so whatever it is that you inhabit to allow being to work in your favor also can't be static even though it has to be a structure then I figured out why it was a pipe and that took about 3 years for me to figure that out this is a famous painting by mcgree right and so it says this is not a pipe so what does that mean what does he mean the first question is is it a pipe what do we think kind of idea that's an image of pipe it's certainly It's actually an image of an image of a pipe right because we're projecting it but yes you're exactly right it's not a pipe and so what what's mcgree trying to communicate what's the idea the idea is the conception is not the object or another way of putting it is the map is not the territory and you live in the map in some sense but the territory is always underneath it and the reason that little ball turned into a pipe was to make that case it's like it was in this box and it was being transformed into a an entity that was defined and static and it it it said two things it said everything transforms that's the Chrysalis and everything transforms into Psych because the butterfly is psyche and then it said don't mistake the map for the territory and then it left and the being that manifests itself the being that shines forth in the phenomenologists sense is the thing that cannot be encapsulated inside any conceptual structure it's always outside of it it's always out side of it and you have to keep up with it well that's why in the Harry Potter book for example the best players don't play the game they chase the snitch and what that means is that they follow what manifests itself to them as most meaningful at any given time now Yung would have thought of that as the manifestation of the self cuz he he would say and it's like I can never remember who I can never differentiate these two thinkers yung's like B swanger he assumes that the meaning is a consequence of the action of some internal structure more less that he characterized as the self boss's perspective is more in some sense it's more like a classical Rel religious perspective although he dispenses almost entirely with any religious language and makes the claim that meaning is the fund fundamental element of being and that if you lose touch with meaning then the quality of your being is going to collapse and not only yours but also the meaning of the society that you're part of because not when you're updating when you're paying attention to what's meaningful not only are you updating yourself are not not only are you improving the quality of your own being but because you're embedded in this midw and you're like a node in a network your Transformations affect the transformations of the people around you and so you can't only transform yourself or fail to if you transform yourself you also transform society and if you fa fail to transform yourself then you also fail to transform society and if you fail to transform Society then it stays static and if it stays static then it dies and so that's the relationship between the phenomenological Viewpoint and the existential Viewpoint the to me what the phenomenologists force you to Grapple with is the phenomena of meaning because it seems to me and and this is basically haider's point he said well what's self-evident well one answer is objects the other as answer is is is predicated on a different perspective meaning is self-evident in that you can't escape from it you can you can escape from the positive elements of it by being locks but you cannot escape from the negative elements of it you can't argue your yourself out of it and and and you act as if there's nothing more real so if you if you think about it this way if someone's terrified they're going to act it out and and you cannot calm them down using rational means if someone's in pain it's the same thing both anxiety or Terror and pain are forms of meaning and they're not they're underneath rationality in a sense in that rationality is powerless Against Terror and pain and if you're terrified then you'll act that way and if you're in pain then you'll act that way and you might do everything you can to say there's no such thing as meaning but if you're be if your state of being is one of Terror no matter what you say you're going to act like that's real and then you have to ask yourself another question is what's more reflective of real what you say or how you act and it it matters because what constitutes real changes with whether like what what defines real changes on depending on how you answer that question and the existentialist would say well how you act is what's real how you act reflects what's real mcgree played with this a lot so there's another painting by mcgree and he often uses men in suits like a suit is representative of a certain kind of a certain mode of being and it's a mode of being that's focused on that's focused rather narrowly on whatever a business suit represents dominance hierarchy success um materialistic possessions that's the at least the cliched and satirical version of business it certainly represents Conformity and M mcree's Painting is a representation of blindness induced by conformity these people can see but they're only seeing what's right in front of their eyes and what's right in front of their eyes that they see blocks them from seeing everything else yes in the in the first quarter of the 20th century could be something more like kind of a person sure it's that it's it's it's Conformity essentially yeah and and it's not only that it's it's like it's moral Conformity you know I'm not saying that it's right it's it's that it it's in the guise of moral Conformity if you wear a suit you're you're representing what the culture perceives to be associated with citizenship and responsibility a lot of what mcgree did was to try to dissociate the structure from the underlying reality and he does that for example in the painting on the right where he takes an image and then juxtaposes it with the wrong signifier I suppose those in some sense those are almost like that that painting is almost like a poem in that the Ju the position of the label and the entity forces you to imagine more than either of them would force you to do alone because you might say well in what Manner is a horse like a door and what in what Manner is the clock like the wind or a pitcher like a bird well and he returns to normal in the last one time flies like the wind I mean a horse is something that takes you places it's like a door a bird it isn't exactly clear to me how a vase is like a bird this is another dream that's attempting to lay out the same idea so you are aw you know I believe it's da Vinci V Da Vinci's vitrous man it's this figure presume you've all seen it it's very very famous image so it's the man is in a square and then the square is in a circle yeah um in this dream this dream had that image except the square wasn't a Square it was a cube so the figure inside the there was a figure inside the cube which was a a man sort of a generic man or an idealized man and the cube was about 9 ft maybe or 8et by 8T by 8 ft and the man was suspended in the middle of the cube so he was about a foot and a half off the floor floating and then from his hands to the wall was about a foot and a half and he could reach close to the wall that was in front of him and then the inside of the cube no matter where the man looked was covered with these squares with a circle in them and inside the circle there was a little dragon's tail and if the man walked forward then the cube went with him and if the man walked backwards the cube went with him and so it was a representation of what surrounds you in reality and then the man could reach out to any of these squares with the circle with the tail and he could pull on one of the taals and that would pull something into being and there were all these choices in front of them that represented different Paths of being so so what that dream represented was this you know you might say well what is it that's right in front of you and then you could say well chairs and the floor and students and light and and that's true but there's another way of thinking about it which is that what's right in front of you is a landscape of possibility to which your conceptions of objects blind you so no matter where you're going in your life the things that present themselves to you offer an array of almost unlimited possibility and so when I look ahead and I see a student or students then that makes all of you one bit of information in a sense right because I've generalized across all of you and there's some utility in that in that part of what you're doing here can be conceptualized as being a student but the loss in that perception might be far greater than the gain because it reduces all of your complexity to a single utterance and makes you flat and so then you think as you wander around the world are you seeing this or are you seeing a wall in front of you that from which you can pull anything you want the the standard Viewpoint would be that this is real but it seems to me that you can make a reasonable case that what you interact with is not so much reality as it is possible possibility and so the possibility is what lurks behind your conception of what's there and that possibility is also the thing out of which everything emerges so if I if you come to my office and I sit and talk to you and I try to approach you without any preconceptions which would be say a rogerian approach then all sorts of things can emerge into reality that wouldn't emerge at all if I stayed rigidly in a prescribed role now there's some utility in the prescribed role don't get me wrong because it gives people structure and it and it it helps them manage their expectations and it protects them from being exposed to Too Much possibility at any one time because that can be overwhelming but the danger is at least in part that you'll blind yourself to all the things things that are there by only allowing yourself to see what you can immediately see the Buddhists talk about desire as something to push aside and I think that's their attempt to warn people about the danger of substituting their own preconceptions about what should be or what is for for attention to what's behind that so imagine that you're depressed and you're bored and all the positive meaning has gone out of your life well perhaps it's because you've substituted your a priority perceptions for possibility and you're in this C AG that that's in part a mirror and all it does is reflect back to you your sterile preconceptions well behind that is the possibility and it's conceivable in that possibility which is maybe infinite possibility that what it is that you lack now that's making you so rigid and bored could be pulled out of that possibility boss said man's option to respond to this claim or to choose not to not to do so seems to be the very core of human freedom all right so I'm going to return to a theme that I developed partway through this lecture if being doesn't manifest itself to you as structured then it's as if you're falling endlessly you need structure structures like a set of tools that that you have at your disposal now the problem with structure is that it can blind you to possibility and the possibility might be more important than the structure and that means that partly what you have to do is balance the possibility and the structure one possibility is that the things that manifest themselves to you as meaningful are constitute a Gateway between structure and possibility so that if you follow that which shines forth then you stay sufficiently within the structure but at the same time you're pulling in enough new possibility so that the structure stays Dynamic and alive instead of static and dead if if you're n nous system huh if you pay attention to the cues that being is offering you showing you where to look and you actually look then maybe you can stay flexible enough so that as things shift around you you don't grow a huge gap between yourself and the world and fall maybe you just into interact in a like in a dance that's that's of acceptable emotional significance it's it's anxiety-provoking enough to keep you awake and it's compelling enough to keep you interested and so those two things in some sense constitute like the core of meaning in order to interact with the world in that way you have to flip your preconceptions upside down and make the presupposition that the material elements that people modern people regard as most real are actually secondary and limited derivations of something that's more fundamental and the thing that's more fundamental is possibility and possibility shines through structure with meaning that's the phenomenological perspective and the existential perspective is follow that meaning or suffer the consequences that's that we'll see you [Applause] Thursday |
it's possible that you guys have been following this political and economic news from the Ukraine so says here that this is off CBC in a clear warning to Ukraine Putin on Wednesday ordered massive military exercises involving most of the military units in Western Russia on Thursday as part of the exercises fighter jets were put on combat alert and were patrolling the Border Russia's defense Ministry said in the statement it didn't specify the areas where Patrol missions were being conducted the military also announced measures to tighten security at the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean peninsula in Southeastern Ukraine there's a rumor that I believe I believe it was brev gave the Crimea to the Ukraine when he was drunk the military Maneuvers prompted a sharp rebuke from us sec Secretary of State John Kerry who warned Russia that any military intervention in Ukraine would be a grave mistake so why did I tell you that well it's it's for the same reason that I've been conducting these last few lectures on phenomenological and existential ideas in Psychotherapy and I I think I mentioned to you that these ideas are often not covered anymore in personality classes but I think that's a big mistake because I think that these theories have more to tell us about what happened in the 20th century than any other theories that I've ever come across and that's very important because the the terrible mass movements of the 20th century occurred be because of the nature of people's personality and it's a mistake to concentrate on it's a mistake not to concentrate on factors that play that massive a role in determining the destiny of the entire world and you know it it may seem to you that the Soviet Union is a long ways away since it collapsed in 1989 but there's no evidence that we're done with it yet I mean Putin was a KGB officer and the kg B was the Soviet Secret Service and the Soviet Secret Service was one catastrophically awful organization and the tension that's occurring in the Ukraine right now that looks like it might explode into Civil War and hopefully not is still a consequence of the remnants of the pathologies that dominated the Soviet Union for for most of the 20th century it isn't clear to me that we've really learned what we had to learn from what happened in Nazi Germany say and in MA China which is obviously still run by the Communist party or in the Soviet Union even though there's been a reprieve for the last 35 years or so nche in particular predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century I'm going to read you something that he wrote I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century happened so the mass genocidal movements in particular which were probably the defining characteristic of the 20th century and then also what that has to do with individual psychology my first degree was in political science and I was interested in political science because I was interested fundamentally in the reason that human societies went to war and when I was studying political science which is quite a long time ago the fundamental theory that underly political scientists explanations for conflict were economic people fight over resources and that never seemed reasonable to me because first of all obviously many wars are fought for other reasons than resources um two Central American countries I think it was Guatemala and the hondurus if I remember correctly went to war over a soccer game so the outcome of a a disputed the disputed outcome of a soccer soccer game and even if you do think that the reason that people groups of people engage in Conflict are for economic reasons that doesn't exactly explain much because that doesn't explain whether they're fighting for because of absolute differences in wealth or because of relative discrepancies in wealth and those those are very very different causal elements and then even if people do fight for economic reasons which means they're fighting for things that they value it isn't exactly clear why people people value what they value because different societies value different things so economics in the final analysis ends up being a shallow explanation and I pursued economic and political and sociological explanations for social conflict for a long time but eventually they became untenable to me and that's partly why I went and studied Clinical Psychology because it struck me that the right level of analysis for understanding mass movements like the Nazi movement or the or the the ideological possession that characterized the stalinist Soviets or or ma Communists or or or Paul Pott's Cambodian Communists or any of the dictators that you can talk about who were on the far left or the far right during the 20th century to me those were failings of individual personality and the most astute writers that I've ever read who described what they assumed to be the causes of these terrible conflicts made the same point which is why I'm having you read Victor Frankl and Alexander Solan niton because Solan niton is not generally regarded as a personality psychologist but he of all the people I've ever read he's the one who lays out the connection between the existential failure of the individual and the mass catastrophes of society and to me that's too important to link to overlook and it it also strikes me that it's the primary lesson of the 20th century I mean what one lesson for example is beware of ideologies and the reason I'm going to walk you through n and a bit of kard today is because these people in the late 19th century with their antennas up knew that the collapse one way of looking at it is the collapse of traditional Western values that's one way of looking at what set up the preconditions for the people's Humanity susceptibility to theologies in the 20th centuries in the 20th century the other way of looking at it in some sense is that as the world came together in the 19th century and ideas were passed around from culture to culture more rapidly than they had ever been passed around every culture suffered deculturation in some sense because if I believe something and you believe something and there's a long history behind both of our beliefs when we come into contact we'll we'll either fight and I'll try to destroy you or or if I don't if I take you seriously and you take me seriously then that's going to leave us both wondering exactly what's what's Rock Solid underneath us that's what n comments on on in this particular quote of what is great one either must be silent or speak with greatness with greatness that means cynically and with innocence what I relate is the history of the next two centuries I describe what is coming what can no longer come differently the Advent of nihilism nihilism is the belief in nothing or the belief that things have no meaning our whole European culture is moving for some time now with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe restlessly violently and headlong like a river that wants to reach the end that no longer reflects that is afraid to reflect he that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect as a philos philosopher and solitary by Instinct who has found his Vantage in standing aside outside why has the event Advent of nihilism become necessary because the values we have had hither to thus draw their Final Consequence because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value those values really had we require at some time new values nihilism stands at the door whence comes this uncanny of all guests Point of Departure it's an error to consider social distress or physiological degeneration or Corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism ours is the most honest and compassionate age so n dispenses right away with sociological explanations for people's lack of belief in meaning in life you know and what a lot of what you're taught in universities is is sociological in its causal thinking and and the causal path is often that's it's the social conditions that people find themselves in that determine their response to the world but n stands violently against that perspective and this is 150 years ago even before in some sense it was thoroughly welldeveloped and the reason he stands against it is because he points out that wherever you're positioned in society your position can be made subject to any number of individual interpretations it's it's meaning like the meaning of being poor say or the meaning of being comparatively poor isn't a meaning that's etched in stone and so it has to be interpreted psychologically before it can become a causal factor and if it can be interpreted psychologically then it's not a fact like the existence of a mountain is a fact it's still an interpretation he says distress itself whether psychic psychological physical or intellectual also need not produce nihilism so he also rejects suffering itself as a cause of nihilism need not at all produce nalism that is the radical rejection of value meaning and desirability such distress always permits a variety of interpretations rather it is in one particular interpretation the Christian moral one that nihilism is rooted the end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality which cannot be replaced which turns against the Christian God the sense of truthfulness Highly developed by Christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of History it's a rebound from God is the truth to the fanatical Faith all is false an act of Buddhism so it's a strange interpretation because niichi although he was violently anti-christian in his in his in his what in his self-presentation to the public was more like uh in my opinion was more like a beneficial critic of of the of the Western Christian tradition and because the first thing he realized was that the domination of the west by essentially by the Catholic church for something like 1900 years was necessary in order for for the European mind to become trained and focused so his his point was that you unless you learn to place an interpretive scheme on the world and interpret that world in a coherent manner through that scheme you don't have a trained mind and and and for ni in some sense it didn't really matter what the interpretive scheme was it was just that at some point you had to discipline yourself this would be something like a post-adolescent process you had to discipline Yourself by developing an adherence to some sort of coherent deep coherent View and the consequence of that at least in principle could be that you would be this you could come to be the sort of person that would that would be um respectful of the truth and also someone who was who regarded truth as a as a moral virtue as a higher order moral virtue but then n's point was that Christianity developed that sense in Europe to such a degree that the spirit of Truth seeking went after the axioms of Christianity and demolished them that was his view of what happened during the Enlightenment as a consequence of the interaction between science and religion so n's view was that the modern mind will say because we're speaking 150 years later the modern mind had been trained rigorously to interpret things through a coherent structure and then once that training had occurred then it could use any number of coherent structures and then it could also use its its ability to form a relationship with the truth truth to criticize the very thing that gave rise to that mind and that and that nich's diagnosis of the 20th century individual a Pursuit Of Truth itself had undermined the structure that gave birth to The Pursuit Of Truth and that left people wide open it left them wide open on the one hand to nihilism and nihilism is the belief that nothing has meaning nothing has any final meaning and you the best way of expressing nihilism is what the hell difference is it going to make in a in a thousand years what we do today or in a hundred years for that matter and it's a it's a rational reduction of of all of the experiences of life to to to rational insignificance nothing has any final meaning and so the question of course that emerges from that is well why do anything and a deeper question that emerges for that from that is well why bear suffering and but that's not the only problem from an existential point of view because the existentialists and and and nich as well also believed that nihilism was actually unbearable because people suffer they have to have a framework of meaning in which to place the suffering because otherwise it undermines their ability to live and then and and and people can't move forward in that condition and so another one of n's prognostications was that nihilism would produce its counterpart which was totalitarianism and people would leap from their immersion saying in in in evolutionarily emergent systems of faith and jump headlong into rational utopian constructions of reality because you because people can't do without an interpretive framework so it wasn't as if the consequence of moving beyond religion was going to be a step into Enlightenment which is what materialist rationalists always presume they presume if you could just shed the superstitious clap trap that's a associated with your religious Heritage you'd instantly be enlightened but n's point was that is not what's likely to happen what's likely to happen is two things people will either give up on life completely and become cynical prematurely cynical which is certainly a disease of of young people and maybe it's always been a disease of young people but it's certainly been a disease of young people since say the end of World War II so they become nihilistic and not believe that anything has any meaning and that undermines their ability to strive or they'd fall prey to some sort of rigid ideology and nii also understood that if people fell prey to a religion to a rigid ideology or several rigid ideologies that the only plausible outcome of that would be like ex exceptionally intense Warfare and of course that's exactly what happened in the 20th century now ni also says this can't be reversed skepticism regarding moral it is what is decisive the end of the moral interpretation of the world which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some Beyond leads to nihilism all lacks meaning then he says the untenability of one interpretation of the world upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false so it's a brilliant observation because his point is I've seen this in in fundamentalist Christians for example who who I've taught in the past because I have a very biological view of things and these people I met more of them when I was in the United States they were more intelligent than than they were wise meaning the constraints within which their intellect was forced to operate which would be the Christian fundamentalist constraints were not sophisticated enough to encapsulate their intellect they were too smart for their own theories so they come to University and and and be exposed to ideas that were outside the scope say of Christian fundamentalism would just blow their fundamentalist presuppositions into bits and so then of course they fall into nothing but n says it's even worse than that it's not only that you fall into nothing it's that once one of your systems of belief has been destroyed you also learn that systems of beliefs themselves are unreliable and so you can't just move easily from one to another because it's like well you're in a boat and it's sunk and now you know that if you jump to the next boat that boat could also sink so it's it's not only that your boat has sunk It's now you know that all boats can sink and so that's part of the position of the modern person as far as n was concerned is that every one of us knows at least in principle that all the boats that we want to jump into could potentially sink and so n saw nihilism as the inevitable Consequence the inevitable rational consequence of that realization now I told you guys before Nisha was a very very influential person he influenced influenced haiger and haiger influenced Bing swanger and boss but Nish also influenced young as much as Freud did and Yung spent his whole career trying to solve the question that n posed one of the questions was because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had so the collapse of a belief system makes all the values within it no longer tenable that that's the meaning of n's statement that God is dead he said if you take the central axom out of a system of belief you can't hold on to all the the things that were derived from that Axiom so here an example is this so for example in in modern Western Law there's a presupposition and the presupposition is that in some weird sense everyone is equal before the law and that's predicated on the idea that that even applies to someone who's a murderer or you're a m murderer and you and it's known you have to be treated with respect you know you have to be treated with respect by the legal system and that's a very very strange it's a miracle that that something like that ever emerged because it's so unlike so then you might ask well what is the idea that everyone has worth before the law grounded in where does that idea come from it comes from the idea of natural rights that we have natural rights and then you might ask well where do the idea of natural rights come from well then you're then you're starting to move beyond the realm of rational philosophy because natural rights the idea of natural rights has been something has been an idea that's been emerging for thousands and thousands of years you know it's it's grounded in Christianity at least to in the in the ma it's grounded in Christianity to the degree that one of the things that distinguishes Christianity is the idea that there's a universal faith and that everyone whether they're in that Faith or not has intrinsic value and so natural rights are grounded in the idea of the intrinsic value of the soul and then that's grounded in the idea that Consciousness itself participates in cre creation and say that's an idea that's embedded in Genesis and also in most creation stories so when you get rid of the religious underpinnings which which which ground the entire system in in a kind of dreamlike Mythology when you get rid of that there's no reason that what's left over rationally can survive and and and you can see that if you look at what happened in the 20th century because there were at least two major challenges to the to the civilizations that evolved and they weren't only Christian or Jewish civilizations the same thing happened in China there there was a replacement of these evolved moral systems that emerged over a tremendous amount of time that no one rationally created once people started to criticize them and to destroy the axioms on which they were built and move them aside then there was a gaping hole left and the hole was filled well it was filled most particularly either by naism which you know spread like mad throughout Central Europe or by communism which still possesses China so you know even though China came from a from a from a historical culture that was substantially different from say that of Western Europe once once once rationality emerged to the point where it could be used as a critical Force which happened in Europe that spread like mad and it it undermined the societies of China just like it undermined the societies of the West I mean Russia you can re you can read this if you read Tolstoy for example in tolstoy's confessions Russia was really the last country that underwent the the Transformations that were associated with the enlightenment so when Tolstoy was a young person in the late 19th century he L he said he could literally remember when the announcement spread through his school that God was dead now the E the Western Europeans had been working on that idea for a couple of hundred years you know with the dawn of the dawn of scientific thinking but the Russians were very backwards in some sense and they never they never they were never affected by the conflict between rationality and religion until it happened all at once and it happened all at once at the end of the 19 century and the consequence of that it's complicated but the consequence of that was that the monarchy exploded and then the consequence of that was that the Russians were left with nothing and the consequence of that was the bolik Revolution and then that was what started the entire Soviet nightmare you see very frequently that when a society loses its grounding say in its historical truths that it turns to something as an alternative you see the same thing happened in Quebec because Quebec didn't undergo the modern transformation until the late 1950s it was probably the last European Society to to go through the Enlightenment Revolution because the Catholic church was an incredibly dominant force in in in in Catholic Quebec until the late 1950s I mean the average family size during that time must have been in the neighborhood of 10 children and then all of a sudden in the late 1950s the quebecers just lost their Catholicism it was just gone and now for example the the kqu have the lowest marriage rate in the in the western world and and one of the lowest reproduction rates as well and there was a Gallop poll that was conducted I heard about this about must be 10 years ago now I don't know if this information has ever been made public but there was a Gallop poll that indicated that if you were a Catholic who had lost your faith so you you left the church you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist so you can see see the consequence of it is is that if one belief system disappears well nihilism is one possibility but another possibility is that you just adopt the next thing that's close that gives you structure and and nationalism of course is one of those things so n diagnosed the disease fundamentally and then the psychoanalysts like yung in particular they were trying to see n believe that if God died because God died people were going to have to take on the responsibility that was once God's so to speak as a personal problem so and thus spake zerra n said God is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood but he also said in order for people to withstand that catastrophe they would have to become Gods themselves essentially and well you can see how that might go wrong if you think about people like Stalin and Hitler but but the psychoanalysts also like the psychoanalyst especially Yung and then for for his part took that idea seriously and they Yung Yung said was trying to figure out well if we lose our historically conditioned values we no longer believe in them and if nihilism is the outcome on one hand and totalitarianism is the outcome on the other hand what's left and the Yan idea was well the revelation of the self is that the individual could not as a rational mind but the individual as a totality it's something that also believed the individuals at totality would be capable of bringing forth genuine values as a consequence of self-exploration and honesty something like that and that's associated with the existential idea of individual responsibility so the one of the upshots of of the Union theory is that to the degree you don't bear the responsibility for your own actions to the degree that you avoid responsibility or shunt them off onto say totalitarian or ideological system so by when you avoid responsibility for your own thought because if you're the follower of an ideological system you have avoided the responsibility of thinking for yourself and the consequence of that was continual catastrophe as those pathological rational systems unfolded themselves Sol niton wrote the gulag archipelago in a in published it in the early 19 7s and there were two things that made that book very striking one was the stories that he told were so unbelievably powerful that you couldn't read them and not believe it was true and that was even the case if you were a devoted Marxist and at that time in the universities and in many ways it hasn't changed that much the universities in the west were dominated by marxists and and to some degree that was ethically inexcusable because people had known since the 1950s especially since George Orwell wrote people had known since the 1950s that the stalinist state was murderous beyond belief so stellin for example killed 6 million ukrainians in the 1930s he starved them to death he took because all of the farmers had been collectivized at that point and what that meant was all the good Farmers had been killed and all the resentful Farmers had been given the land and then they collectivized the farms and then stellin took all the food to feed the cities or to or to starve the ukrainians depending on how you look at it and the edicts were so harsh that if you were a Ukrainian and you had a family and they were starving and you went into a field after it had been harvested and you picked out individual grains from the dirt to gather in a bowl to feed your family if you got caught then they would shoot you soier niton observed this and he he was very interested in how this system developed and his conclusion after Decades of thinking was that the reason the Russian system was able to maintain itself fundamentally was because individuals were willing to give up the responsibility of their own relationship to the truth to the state and constantly lie to themselves about everything and that if the if the individuals that composed the state had refused to accept things that they knew full well to be untrue that the state wouldn't have been able to survive and you know soit's case is very strong because in some sense he was the first person who told the truth about the gulag archipelago which was this chain of prison camps that the Soviets had erected on which their economy was essentially based he was the first person who really told the truth about that and he hit the foundations of Marxist theory so hard that well partly it collapsed and partly it went underground into movements like postmodernism so his his proposition it's a dovian proposition actually that one person who stopped lying could could overturn a tyranny it's a hard thing to believe but there's been multiple examples of that sort of thing in the 20th century it happened with Gandhi happened with vov of havl in Czechoslovakia happened with Nelson Mandela it happened with Soulja niton you know so those are pretty powerful examples of of the power of a single individual who refuses to accept the convention the conventional lie doeski was writing about the same time as N and doeski is a very interesting person he was an Orthodox Christian although he's a very intelligent man and doeski and N are twins in some sense so what nii wrote in philosophy doeski wrote in literature and do one of doss's primary statements was that if there's no God everything is permitted so it's it's a take on n's discussion of nihilism it's like well if there's no ultimate value of any sort then why can't you do exactly what you want and that's a themi explores to Great purpose in crime and punishment NE dov's conclusion was that the reason you can't do anything you want is because you actually come equipped with an inherent set of values that are real and that if you violate them to too great a degree you'll destroy your own structure as well as damaging the society that's around you so dovi was a big believer in some sense like the yans and the rogerians that there are the Locust of values within the human being and and and that it's an actual thing you can't disregard it without damage Doki was also a very powerful critic of reason and the reason for that was it was reason in some sense that brought down the house of cards so to speak that constituted classical faiths but the consequence of that rational destruction of values was the emergence of nihilism or totalitarianism and the consequence of those two things is either the inability live or the emerg emergence of the murderous state so doeski looked at that and thought okay well perhaps our belief that reason itself is the proper guide to reality is wrong and so this is one of the things he wrote in Notes from Underground when he was exploring this idea Notes from Underground by the way it's a very short book and it's very much worth reading it's a it's it's doeski wrote five books that are incalculably great and what happened to dovi I don't remember if I told you this or not but he was a student radical and he was he was arrested by the Zars men because of a riot or or a protest that him and his compatriots had come up with he was sort of a bit player in it but they put him in in prison when he was a young man and then he was in prison for quite a while and then one day they took him out into the courtyard and they shot him at dawn you know they had the soldiers line up and put them by a post and shot them but they used blanks but he didn't know that and it scared him so bad he had EP epileptic seizure and then he had epileptic seizures for the rest of his life and the kind of epileptic seizures he had were associated with mystical experience so dovi before he got a seizure would have this sense that he was experiencing the world in a more and more meaningful way until he was on the very dawn of sort of omnip omniscient knowledge and then he'd have a seizure but it wasn't until he was shot with blanks and then put in this terrible prison for a long period of time and had epilepsy that he became a great novelist it changed him in some way his early writings are really they're not good they're they're sterile and dry and his later writings the five Great novels in particular are they're in a they're in a class of their own so doeski the first thing doeski tried to come to grips with was the fact he didn't believe that life itself was rational that's an Enlightenment proposition that the structure of reality is in and of itself rational so it can be help it can be dealt with by rational means and that's been a very powerful Theory because it's enabled us to develop this the scientific Viewpoint and the technology that goes along with it but rationality is not the only mode of human knowing there's all sorts of other modes of human knowing and many of them those are associated with emotion and motivation they're more biologically instantiated say and less computational and rationality has a very difficult time even conceptualizing how those other modes of knowing might be real and so what it tends to do is denigrate them as mere opponents to rationality but the dovian perspective and this is also something that Rogers followed up on and Yung was that life itself is so irrational or experience itself is so irrational given its suffering and its and its absurdity that a mirely rationally formulated representation of life is insufficient it can't it can't manage the job and what rationality will there therefore do is cut away everything from Life cut away everything from its definition of reality that it can't actually encapsulate dovi said in short one may say anything about the history of the world anything that might enter the most disordered imagination the only thing one can't say is that it's rational the very word sticks in one's throat and indeed this is the odd thing that is continually happening they're ently turning up in life moral and rational persons sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible to be so to speak a light to their neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world and yet we all know that these very people sooner or later have been false to themselves so that's a precurser of Freudian ideas playing some queer trick often seemly one now I ask you what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities shower upon him every Earthly blessing drown him in a sea of Happiness so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface give him economic Prosperity so that he should have nothing else to do but sleep eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of the species and even then out of in gratitude and spite man would play you some nasty trick he would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish the most uneconomical absurdity simply to introduce into all this positive Good Sense his fatal fantastic element it is just his fantastic dreams his vulgar Folly that he will desire to retain simply in order to prove to himself as if that was so necessary that men are still men and not the keys of a piano which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing except by the calendar and that's not all even if man really were nothing but a piano key Even If This Were proved to him by Natural Science and Mathematics even then he would not become reasonable he would do purposefully do something perverse out of simple ingratitude simply to gain his point and if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos and suffering of All Sorts only to gain his point he will launch a curse upon the world and as only man can curse it's his privilege the primary distinction between him and other animals Maybe by his curse alone he will detain his object that is to convince himself that he's a man and not a piano key and if you say that all of this too can be calculated and tabulated in chaos and darkness and curses so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all and reason would reassert itself then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point I believe in it I answer for it for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he's a man and not a piano key it might be at the cost of his skin it might be by cannibalism and this being so can one help being tempted to Rejoice that it has not yet come off and that desire still depends on something we don't know you will scream at me that is if you condescend to do so that no one is touching my free will that all they're concerned with is that my free will should of itself of its own free will coincide with my own normal interests and the laws of nature and arithmetic good Heavens gentlemen what sort of Free Will is left when he when we come to tabulation and arithmetic when it will all be a case of twice two makes four twice two makes four without my will as if Free Will meant that that was written in the late 18 late 1800s as well and dovi had already figured out by that point that the consequence of the new ideas swimming into Russia and undermining Orthodox Christianity which was the say the natural culture in some sense of Russia was going to be either nihilism or totalitarianism and he examined the propositions of total tarianism and the propositions of totalitarianism were essentially utopian the idea was accept it's like a cult accept this mode of being accept this interpretation of the world and Society will advance towards a point where well say in the case of Communism wealth is equally distributed and everyone is free it's a very very powerful idea obviously because it attracted hundreds of millions of people each according to each according to his need from each according to his ability sounds fair you get what you have you get what you need to live and you contribute what's in it what's in you to contribute and when it was laid out in the world it was an absolute catastrophe and doeski criticized this before it even happened he said look human beings do not want Utopia we're too insane for that if you if you had Comfort sterile Comfort if you had everything you wanted just given to you all you do is go crazy just so that you wouldn't have to be bored by all that Perfection you destroy it so that the irrational element that's inside of you this dionan element could leap out and live and so whatever Utopia is it's not the permanent solution to all of your problems you don't even want to live without problems kard writing at a a little earlier on but along the similar a similar track of ideas he's also criticizing the idea of Utopia believing at least in part that the meaning in in life is to be be found within the struggle that constitutes life and not in the solution to that struggle which maybe is equivalent to death and not to Utopia it is about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author I remember it quite clearly it was a Sunday yes a Sunday afternoon I was seated as usual outside at the cafe in the Fredericksburg Garden I'd been a student for half a score of years although never lazy all my activity nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality and for which perhaps I even have a little genius I read much spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking or thinking and idling but that was all it came to so I sat there and I smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought among other thoughts I remember these you were going on I said to myself to become an old man without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything on the other hand wherever you look around you in literature and in life you see the celebrated names and figures the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier some by Railways others by omnibuses and steamboats others by the telegraph others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recital of everything worth knowing and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier yet more and more significant and what are you doing here my Soliloquy was interrupted because my cigarette was smoked out and a new one had to be lit so I smoked again and then suddenly this thought flashed into my mind you must do something but in as much as with your limited capacities it will be impossible for you to make anything easier than it has already become you must with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others undertake to make something harder this notion pleased me immensely and at the same time it flattered me to think that I like the rest of them would be loved and esteemed by the whole Community for when all combin in every way to make everything easier there remains only one possible danger namely that the ease will become so great that it becomes allog together too great then there's only one want left although it is not yet a felt want when people will want difficulty out of love for mankind and out of Despair at my embarrassing situation seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere KAG guard is often regarded as an existentialist and one of the ideas that runs its way through existentialism is the idea that to be human is to simultaneously be saddled with an intrinsic responsibility a moral responsibility that you are responsible not only to yourself to your soul say but also to the people around you and that that isn't an arbitrary imposition that's imposed upon you by rationality or by your fellow man for that matter but something that's right at the heart of the reality of existence itself such that if you thwart or fall short of bearing that responsibility you'll pay a price in guilt and in shame and in suffering bin swanger and BR boss working off haider's lead said that guilt and fear are debts to possibility if you're guilty about something well it's because you're not upholding your responsibility whereas for Freud that was often a form of pathology excess guilt and of course excess guilt can become pathological but KAG guard's point is that guilt itself isn't something to be cured it's it's it's it's an integral necessary part of reality just like disgust and despair and fear and all the negative emotions they alert you to your place in the world and guide you towards the unfolding of your spirit failure to shoulder your existential burden is what results in neurotic guilt and fear Ben swanger and boss also believed that like existential anxiety and that's the feeling of of nothing nothingness is fear of loss of world that the world that you inhabit the conceptual world that you habit inhabit can be destroyed at any moment and that you're aware of that at some level it's the same comment that n made and and and N believed that this was something that modern people were particularly susceptible to because our rationality is always capable of sawing off the branch that we're sitting on because no matter what you're doing even if you're engaged in it deeply the critical part of your mind can always saywell what makes you think that's so worthwhile and you know an answer could be well it manifests itself as being worthwhile and why should I pay attention to those rational doubts but that's not how we're trained we're trained that rationality is the thing that encompasses everything instead of being trained that rationality is something that's encompassed by something else and so if doubts come up that are rational we immediately believe them because they're rational instead of asking ourself well if the rational doubt is undermining the meaning in my life and making it difficult for me to proceed maybe the thing to do is to question whether or not that doubt is valid now it depends in what you regard as real because if it's re if it's the rational argument itself that's real then you can't dispense with the doubts but if you say well rationality is too Limited in its apprehension to deal with the absurdity of life there are other sorts of answers like music for example or or art or or the kind of Engagement that you that you experience when you're involved in something that you're incredibly interested in those are forms of reality that are that you can regard those as forms of reality that transcend rationalism instead of being something embedded inside rationalism that can be destroyed by doubt and the problem with doubt is that it can undermine you completely that's nism but even worse than that it can lay you open to ideological possession and that's that's satanic in its in its in its catastrophe well I'll talk to you a little bit now about the Concentration Camp concentration camps were established there they were established in England Germany Russia China Cambodia and Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union the estimates these are estimates that were derived by Soulja niton were that 66 million people died in internal repression in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 that's a figure that's 10 times as great as the figures that are commonly used to describe the the genocide rate in the Holocaust which was more like six million and Soulja niton also estimated but no one knows that 100 million people died in China during Ma's cultural revolution when Mao decided that he was going to wipe out all of Chinese tradition and destroyed much of the much of the ancient artifacts that characterized that tradition in a in a like a riotous catastrophe that lasted more than a decade soier niton says the imagination and strength spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses because they had no ideology ideology that's what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination that's the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own eyes and others this was how the agent of the Inquisition fortified their Wills by invoking Christianity the Conqueror of foreign lands by extoling the Grandeur of their motherland the colonizers by civilization the Nazis by race and the Jacobin early and late by equality Brotherhood and the happiness of future Generations without evildoers there would have been no archipelago the archipelago the gulag archipelago is solon's metaphor for the for the prison camps like the prison camps that exist now in North Korea in which millions of people are starving and dying for the for the prison camps that littered the entire Soviet Union and those cultures became so pathological that in East Germany for example before the wall fell down and East Germany was arguably one of the more civilized parts of the Soviet state one person out of three was a government Informer so if you have a family of five people there's a reasonable probability that two of them are going to tell a government agent what you say and think and that that was also portrayed as the highest possible moral virtue because it was much better for you to be a admirable citizen of the state than say a loyal daughter and that's what children were taught in school that the family was a defunct unit and that individual relationships were secondary and that all that mattered was adherence to the Dogma that constituted the central axioms of the state this is soul nen's description of how communist ideological uniformity was enforced in the prison camps an anonymous author is told how executions were carried out at adak a camp on the Petro River they would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp Compound on a prisoner transport at night and outside the compound stood the small house of the third section The Condemned men were taken into a room one at a time and there the camp guards sprang on them their mouths were stuffed with something soft and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs then they were LED out into the courtyard where harnessed carts were waiting the bound prisoners were piled on the carts from 5: to 7: at a time and driven off to the Gorka the camp cemetery on arrival they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive not out of brutality no it had been ascertained that when dragging and lifting them it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses but the work went on for many nights at adak and that is how the moral political Unity of our party was achieved if you have a rigid belief system and that's what an idiology is because it its axioms are such that it encompasses all of reality and then there are details left outside that don't seem to fit into that reality well then you ignore them but what if they're embodied what if they're people who are objecting to the way you think well the equivalent to repressing evidence that runs contrary to your theory is the murder of people who object to what you say and those two things are linked much tighter than you would think you know you might think well I would never do something like the Communists did in in in in in the what the the evangelization of my beliefs but the truth of the matter is is that in general people will do such things if they're granted the opportunity and provided with the proper apparatus this is Frankle from his accounts of the concentration camps under Nazi Germany the most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of Camp life was The Awakening when at a still nocturnal hour the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams we then began the tussle with our wet shoes into which we could scarcely Force our feet which were sore and swollen with edema and then there were the usual moans and groans about Petty trouble such as the snapping of wires which replace shoelaces one morning I heard someone whom I knew to be brave and dignified cry like a child because he finally had to go out to the snowy marching fields in his bare feet as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear in those ghastly moments I found a little bit of comfort a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed light so niten many of the gulag camps contained two classes of prisoners rapists murderers and thieves who were very well organized in Russia and the Soviet Union and political prisoners and because the Soviets believed that the reason that people were thieves murderers and rapists was because of the appalling sociological conditions that they grew up into they believed they were socially friendly elements who could still be redeemed so they put them in charge of the camps and so the political prisoners were at the bottom of the hierarchy the prisoners ran the camps with minimal supervision and the camps were often forced labor camps and forced labor meant do something difficult and pointless until you die it didn't mean it meant only secondarily produce something of potential value to the state you saw this this with Nazi Germany too the Nazis when they started to lose the second world war they could have sto their Holocaust machinations and used the people they had imprisoned to build Implements to further the war effort which they did to some degree so they could have used them as slaves so this would be the logic take the slaves make the Munitions win the war then after you've won the war you can run around and mop everybody up but that isn't what the Nazis did when they started to lose instead of doing what you think would be rational in the pursuit of what was hypothetically their goal they amped Up The Killing and and took resources away from the war itself and so the conclusion that's reasonable to draw from that is that the killing was the purpose of the war all the rest of it was just window dressing and exactly as a soliton described in the earlier quotes that I told you was that ideology was only there to allow the people who were fund Mally Mo motivated towards genocide and destruction to pretend to themselves that they hadn't become rot to the absolute core but when push came to shove and they had to show where their allegiances lie they weren't even they weren't even valid followers of the Nazi party because they put the continued Pursuit Of Death above their own Survival even as an ideology and that's how ideology degenerates and part of the reason for that is that the narrower the box that you stuff yourself into the weaker your character becomes because there's nothing left of you you're just a shell that has demons in it and but you're still the sort of thing that can suffer and so if you cram everything you are into a a box a small tight box and you get rid of everything that doesn't fit you get rid of everything in you that makes life bearable and then life becomes unbearable and then if life becomes unbearable well then of course you're motivated to do nothing but to take revenge on it because why wouldn't you if all you were doing was suffering stupidly and meaninglessly how could you positively how could you possibly show a positive face to yourself and to the rest of humanity in cold lower than 60° below zero work days were written off in other words on such days the records showed that the workers had not gone out to work they were often digging canals on the Frozen Siberian Prairie by hand there was one Canal I think it was on the vulga river but I I can't remember precisely so Stalin killed 300,000 people in a single winter digging it by hand and when it was done it was so shallow that no ships could use it the record showed that the workers had not gone out to work but they chased them out anyway and whatever they squeezed out of them on those days was added to the other days thereby raising the percentages and the cile medical section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis and the ones who were left who could no longer walk and were straining every senu to crawl Along on all fours on the way back to Camp the Convoy simply shot so that they wouldn't Escape before they could come back to get them this is from William Blake oh Rose though art sick the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm have found out thy bed of crimson joy and His Dark Secret Love does thy life destroy this is Soulja nson fire fire the branches crackle in the night wind of late Autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth the compound is dark I'm alone at the bonfire and I can bring it still some more Carpenter shavings this compound here is a privileged one so privileged that it's almost as if I were out in Freedom this is an island of paradise this is the marfino shashka a scientific Institute staffed by engineers staffed with prisoners in its most privileged period no one is overseeing me calling me to a cell chasing me away from the bonfire and even then it is chilly in the penetrating wind but she who has already been standing in the wind for hours her arms straight down her head drooping weeping and then growing numb and still and then again she begs piously Citizen Chief please forgive me I won't do it again the wind carries her moan to me just as if she were moaning next to my ear The Citizen Chief at the gate house fires up his stove and does not answer this was the Gat House of the camp next door to us from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and repair the old ramshackle seminary building across from me beyond the artfully intertwined many stranded barbed wire barricade and two steps away from the Gat house beneath a bright Lantern stood the punished girl head hanging the wind tugging at her gray work skirt her feet growing numb from the cold and a thin scarf over her head it had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory and another girl slipping down into a ravine had crawled her way to the vadino highway and escaped the guard had bungled and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway when they caught on it was too late to catch her they raised the alarm a mean dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl the entire Camp would be deprived of visits and Parcels for a whole month because of her escape and the women briers went into a rage and they were all shouting one of them in particular who kept viciously rolling her eyes oh I hope they catch her the I hope they take scissors and clip clip take off all her hair in front of the lineup this wasn't something she had thought of herself this is the way they punished women in the gag but the girl who was now standing outside the gate house house in the cold had sighed and said Instead at least she can have a good time out in Freedom for all of us the Jailer overheard what she said and now she was being punished everyone else had been taken off to the camp but she had been set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gate house this had been at 6:00 p.m. and it was now 11: p.m. she tried to shift from one foot to another but the guard struck out his head and shouted stand at attention or it will be worse for you and now she was not moving only weeping forgive me Citizen Chief let me into the camp I won't do it anymore but even in the camp no one was about to say to her all right idiot come on in the reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday and and she would not be needed for work such a straw blonde naive un uneducated slip of a girl she had been imprisoned for some spool of thread what a dangerous thought you expressed there little sister they want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life fire fire we fought the War and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of Victory would be the wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire to that flame in you girl I promise the whole wide world will read about you from Milton this is from Paradise Lost Milton wrote Paradise Lost just before the rise of the nation states and Milton also had the intuition that there was something wrong with rationality and he identified rationality with the mythology of Satan and in the mythology of Satan Satan was represented as the highest angel in God's Heavenly Kingdom so you can think about that as the highest psychological function who had rebelled against God and that and was then cast into hell and the idea there's an idea that's being expressed by Milton he was he was one of the most he was one of the foremost poetic Geniuses of the English language Milton and Shakespeare and what Milton was trying to understand was what is the nature of evil and his representation gathered up the dreamlike theories of evil that had been collected around all of Western Civilization for thousands of years and his hypothesis was this evil is the force that believes that its knowledge is complete and that it can do without the Transcendent and as soon as it makes that claim it ex instantly exists in a place that's indistinguishable from hell and it could get out merely by admitting its error and it will never do that for whence but from the author of all ill could spring so deep a malice to confound the race of mankind in one root and Earth with hell to mingle and and involve done all to spite the great Creator this is from Richard the thir Shakespeare I shall despair there is no creature loves me and if I die no soul will Pity Me Nay wherefore should they since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself soier niton describes the reactions and actions of Communist party members who were devoured by the system because that of happened the the the the prison system the gik system was very indiscriminating you could land there for good reasons or bad and the bad reasons were probably better because the punishment was more severe if you were imprisoned for your innocence and Communist party members often got vacuumed up and this was ontologically and existentially intolerable for them because they committed their whole soul to the ideological dogma and then it's its tyrannical aspect picked them up and destroyed them like they were worth nothing to say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing they were incapable of assimilating such a blow such a downfall and from their own people too from their own dear party the typical arrest was you're at home with your family in your bed and it's 3:00 in the morning and the doors kick down and they take you out of your bed and whatever you happen to be wearing and they tell you to say goodbye to your family and give you like 25 seconds to pack and then you're gone and no one no one sees you again they take you to the prison they take off all your clothes they shave your head they have you pick out some random clothes from a pile of clothes hopefully they don't fit and then you're tried you confess if you will and you're off to the prison camp to say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing they were incapable of assimilating such a blow such a downfall and from their own people too from their own dear party and from all appearances for nothing at all after all they had been guilty of nothing as far as the party was concerned nothing at all it was painful to them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them uncom radly to ask what were you imprisoned for H they were the only squeamish generation of prisoners the rest of us with our tongues hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer we met and to the whole cell as if it were an anecdote here's the sort of people they were Olga seberg's husband had already been arrested and they had come to carry out a search and arrest her too the search lasted 4 hours and she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the Congress of the bristle and brush industry of which she had been the secretary until the previous day the incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children who she was now leaving forever even the interrogator conducting the search could not resist telling her come on now say farewell to your children here's the sour sort of people they were a letter from her 15-year-old daughter came to yelizaveta tetova in the Kazan prison for long-term prisoners Mama tell me write to me are you guilty or not I hope you weren't guilty because then I won't join the Comm all which was the young communist organization and I won't forgive them because of you but if you guilty I won't write you anymore and I will hate you and the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp grave likee cell with its dim little lamp how could her daughter live without the commum wall how could she per be permitted to hate Soviet power better that she should hate me and so she wrote I am guilty enter the cumal how could it be anything but hard it was more than the human heart could bear to fall beneath the Beloved Axe and then to have to justify its wisdom but that's the price a man pays for entrusting his god-given soul to human Dogma even today any Orthodox communist will affirm that set kovak acted correctly even today they cannot be convinced that this is precisely quote the perversion of small forces that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul here's the sort of people they were YT gave sincere testimony against her husband anything to Aid the party oh how one could pity them if they at least had come to comprehend their former wretchedness this whole chapter could have been writing qu quite differently if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views but it happened the way Maria danielin had dreamed it would if I leave here someday I'm going to live as if nothing had taken place loyalty in our view it's just plain pigheadedness those devotees to the theories of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation to any personal development whatsoever as Nikolai adamovich villan chuk said after serving 17 years we believed in the party and we were not mistaken is this loyal y or pigheadedness no it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy hypocrisy that they argued in the C in defense of all the government's actions they needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness otherwise Insanity was not far off this is from Paradise Lost so in this scene Satan is cast into hell and it's because of his Rebellion against the transcend his idea that he himself is sufficient this is his statement to his crew farewell happy Fields where Joy forever dwells hail Horrors hail infernal world and thou profoundest hell receive thy new possessor one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of Hell or Hell of Heaven what matters where if I be still the same and what I should be all but less than he whom Thunder hath made greater here at least we shall be free the almighty hath not built here for his Envy will not drive us hence here we may Reign secure and in my choice to Reign is worth ambition though in Hell better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven the existentialists of the late 19th century attempted to diagnose the pathology of the human personality at a deeper level I believe than anyone else had ever attempted and their fundamental conclusion was that the destruction by rationality of the evolved systems of meaning that people had previously lived within had undermined the psychological strength of each individual divorced from their own history that led them to be to gravitate towards either n ISM or as a counterposition to gravitate towards totalitarianism the whole 20th century played out the pendulum swing between nihilism and totalitarianism and in the background the existentialists and the psychodynamic theorists were putting forward a theory which was that if people lived up to their own possibility and held on to their own experience as if it were true and did not substitute for that ideological and consensual beliefs that it would be possible for each person to find a Wellspring of meaning that would be a sufficient replacement for what had been lost historically without having to fall into the pitfalls of nihilism or totalitarianism and so you might say well nihilism well that's one thing because mostly that affects you although if you're nihilistic then everyone around you is going to be pulled down as well but totalitarian ism is a whole different issue because what we know now is that once Things become ideologically totalitarian the next step is mass murder and and it it's the next step is mass murder in in a manner that makes it appear that the purpose for the ideological rigidification to begin with was the opportunity to participate in mass murder so you know how Hitler died Hitler lost faith in the German people because they were losing the war and so he concluded in the waning stages of World War II that Germany should just be destroyed in Fire and everything else that he could possibly consume would go with him and so he died in a bunker underneath Berlin when it was in Flames he committed suicide when Europe was in flames and Hitler was a worshipper of the kind of fire that purifies he used that mythology of cleansing fire to to enter into a terrible PCT with the with the entire nation that he followed and led and Stalin Stalin just didn't just kill individuals that he pulled off the streets he killed like all the engineers and all the doctors because he believed they were Wreckers they killed all the good Farmers they killed six million ukrainians they moved whole nations of people into Siberia and let them die and there's every EV every bit of evidence that is suggests that what Stalin was doing was practicing murderous genocide on an Ever larger scale and hoping that it would culminate in a a thermonuclear war and we escaped that just by a thread the existentialists make the claim which I think is a remarkable and Powerful claim that the way out of those catastrophic situations is not through political action per se or it's not going to be resolved by one party defeating another or one position defeating another that's a continuation of the same process that produces the problem the existential and the psychodynamic answer to this problem is that it's more a disease of the Soul than a disease of the state and that the way to address it is to ensure that you live in a manner that makes you neither nihilistic nor susceptible to ideological possession Soul Jetson and and other other thinkers like him like Frankle believed that this that Society was a macrocosm of the individual not the other way around not that the individual is a subelement of society believe believ that the choice that each individual made was potentially so powerful in relationship to pathological Behavior or or honest or honest and thoughtful behavior that a a single individual properly developed could stand up against a tyranny and win and it seems to me and I thought about this for a very long time that the lesson of the 20th century is that a single individual can stand up against a tyrant and win and each of us are single individuals and the danger of tyranny and the danger of nihilism are not passed and so as inheritors of the catastrophic Legacy of the 20th century and as inhabitants of the New Millennium part of your responsibility is to live your own life and to live it honestly and to pay attention to your own experience and not take the easy way out that ideological systems offer you they're destined to transform themselves into rigid and murderous pathologies and you offload your responsibility for thinking and acting to them and then you have to ask yourself well what are they well all the evidence suggests that they're not the sort of thing that you want to have in your head the grades are up we'll see you on Tuesday |
the first thing I already explained to you that about the shift in our emphasis from here on in and I suppose in some ways we're we're switching from the part of the P the course that has to do with transformation into the part of the course that has to do with stability at least relative stability now the idea behind the work that we're going to talk about now is that personality has stable and identifiable features across time and I suppose it's traits that you're referring to when you say to yourself or to someone else I know that person and when you say that you know that person it seems to me that you're presuming that there's something stable and identifiable about them that you can track over time you might consider that who they are and so trait theory is the study of who people are now if there's 177,000 trait descriptors in the English language that suggests in some way that there are 17,000 ways that people can vary or be the same you know vary from each other and be the same across time but 177,000 seems like an un UNM manageable number and it's possible that a very large number of those words are variance they're synonyms in some sense and trait theory in some ways is an attempt to find the clumps of synonymous words that are encapsulated within language that apply to people the basic hypothesis is something like this this because tracking the behavior of other people is extremely important to us and because we want to communicate about that tracking and because we're studying each other all the time there's at least a reasonable probability that the fundamental dimensions of Personality are going to be encapsulated within the language and what that means in some sense is that you may be able to use the language as a tool if you use the appropriate statistical techniques in order to extract out the fundamental dimensions of personality and so you could say those are the basic imagine there's five or six canonical words or 10 canonical words within that collection of 177,000 and then all the others are slight variants of them or mixtures of them or or something like that so perhaps there's a simple structure underneath the apparent complexity um the first people who tried this as I said were all part alport and odbert but they really didn't have the statistical techniques that were necessary to do a particularly good job so uh all port and a tried to reduce their 18,000 trait terms to 4500 descriptors of what they figured were stable traits and then catel came along in 1942 restricted those to 171 by judgment and then further to 16 by factor analysis these are cel's 16 traits the first three were the most important you could be reserved versus outgoing less or more intelligent emotional versus stable humble versus assertive sober versus happy go-lucky expedient versus conscientious shy versus venturesome tough tender-minded trusting suspicious practical imaginative forthright shrewd Placid apprehensive conservative or experimental group oriented or self-sufficient casual versus controlled and relaxed versus tense and cel's 16 personality theory dominated the field for for quite a long time really until the early 1960s um now I'll go back tell you a little bit about how these things are measured so here's some here's some definitions of what a trait might be this is the theoretical these are theoretical propositions the tradeit has more than a nominal existence what does that mean well it refers to something that's outside its linguistic marker so hypothetically there's something about a trait that that makes it real that might be physiological or biological or at least behavioral that that that can be examined outside mere subjective analysis although that's often proved more difficult than people originally expected traits are more generalized than particular habits well God only knows how many habits people have you know and you kind of maybe you run into the same problem with habits as you do with with 177,000 words there's so many of them that you know you can drown in the description and again you have to look for something that's more fundamental their Dynamic and determined Behavior so there's something about a trait that in some sense acts as a causal agent traits may be identified empirically we covered that traits are relatively independent of other traits they're not synonymous with moral or social judgments and acts and even habits that are inconsistent with a trait are not proof of the non-existence of that trait and then the more complex one traits May either be viewed idiographically in light of the personality that contains them oretically on the basis of their distribution in the population measurement techniques so imagine that you collect your list of adjectives and then you transform them into a very simple questionnaire and so the questionnaire would look like a list of adjectives down the left hand side and then on the right hand side there'd be maybe a scale that's yes or no or maybe a scale from 1 to seven and so if the descriptor was intelligent you could ask the person apply that descriptor to yourself on a scale from 1 to 7 or you could ask the person to rate someone else and describe that person as intelligent on a scale of 1 to 7 and then you can have let's say A large group of adjectives like that three 00 or so and then you can have a large number of people assess themselves with all those adjectives and you can apply statistical techniques that then allow you to determine how the data is patterned so for example if two of the 400 words were intelligent and smart then you might find that within the entire population of Raiders if they were rating themselves if they rated themselves as high on intelligence they're also going to rate themselves as high on smart and maybe high on quick and maybe high on insightful and then you may also find for example that if they rated themselves as nice highly they might also rate themselves as kind highly or empathic highly and so by analyzing the groups of words that Clump together in the same direction across many many people you can start to in and you can do this statistically you can start to infer what the fundamental dimensions of variation are now it's taken a long time for people to get the fundamental dimensions of variation right and part of the problem is well how do you reduce the pool of adjectives to begin with to something that's because you're not going to have you know a thousand people rate themselves on 177,000 adjectives that's just not going to go very well so you have to reduce that in some way that's not exactly biased and then you have to get enough people to fill it out so that your sample is going to be reliable across time and then you have to have statistical techniques that are powerful enough to handle those operations and that all really didn't come together until probably the early 1960s something like that when when cel's 16 factors were finally reduced to something approximating five now I'm going to tell you a little bit how you would go about making a questionnaire because that's part of what you need to know in order to do experimental psychology especially social or personality psychology and so we'll step into method a little bit before we return to the to the trait theories so if you wanted to measure something let's see someone think of a potential personality trait don't don't use the standard Big Five how give me a word that you might use to describe someone fun fun okay good so now now we have to figure out so now we've got a problem hey and the problem is well you can use fun as a marker in a linguistic exchange Joe is a fun person to hang around with and then part of the meaning that you attribute to fund is a consequence of the words that you surround it with and then of course the context in which you utter the sentence and your determination of whether or not the person you're talking to knows who Joe is and and so you're always providing the person that you're communicating with when you use a word like fun with a bunch of information that sort of surrounds the word so that they can infer what you mean but if you're going to use that word and infer that it actually ref refers to something that's objective outside language then you have to go about it in a different way and so the first thing you try to do is to figure out okay what do you mean by Fun exactly so let's have some characteristics of a person who's fun what do they like we can't use big five descriptors that's that's okay but that's that's right by the way but but I want to stay away from that just just for funny okay okay so a funny a fun person is funny and so a funny person is someone who makes you laugh I presume and who's witty and so you could start generating Associated words okay what else makes a person Fun interesting they're interesting okay so they're funny and they're interesting what else friendly friendly okay enthusiastic enthusiastic talk cative lighted light-hearted all right you guys are really getting into this now okay so you're starting to surround the word with a cloud of add additional words that you believe in some in some ways have some important similarity with that underlying word right they they seem to belong in the same category okay what are some words that that indicate that someone's not fun boring okay so they're boring miserable miserable what's the difference between boring and miserable that's a good one yeah misery can be interesting yeah yeah yeah okay so other differences between boring and miserable that's probably an open answer by the way just just so you know any other differences come on you guys know the difference between boring and miserable for God's sake yeah miserable usually take people down boring just okay so boring sounds like it's more neutral in some sense miserable was that PO is that a positive thing or negative thing negative okay so and what sort of emotions might it be associated with depression sadness depression what else anxiety hate hate fear cynicism cynicism Okay so now we've got the fun person sort of identified with regards to a positive poll and a negative poll right all right so you can conduct a brief statistical investigation to determine whether or not your characterization of fun had any utility was was was valid in some sense reliable and valid so the first thing we might do is write down all those words on a on a little questionnaire so we probably generate about 20 of them a and then we might ask everyone to rate themselves according to that questionnaire and then we we might submit the data set to factor analysis which is a complicated form of correlation analysis and then we could find out what words Clump together now what we would find if we analyzed all the words that you guys generated is that we'd have one little Clump that was associated with interesting and we'd have another Clump that was associated with negative emotion and we'd have another Clump that was associated with positive emotion and so you guys actually Define fun as a three-dimensional construct from given what we know about personality because we know that there's a positive emotion Dimension and a negative emotion Dimension and then another dimension that's associated with creativity and so from for at least in so far as you all characterized it fun is not a unidimensional word it it crosses a variety of different domains now so if you're if you're trying to get at how to measure fun the first thing you have to do is Define it and that's what we were trying to do when we were collecting up all these words I'll show you how catel in 1965 characterized conscientiousness so he says well this thing exists and in its existence it manifests these characteristics conscientious is conscientiousness is that disposition governing persevering unselfish Behavior and impelling the individual to duty as conceived by his or her culture a conscientious person is honest knows what is right and generally does it even if no one is watching him or her does not tell lies or attempt to deceive others respects others property an unconscientious person is somewhat unscrupulous not too careful about standards of right and wrong where personal desires are concerned tells lies and is given to little deceits and does not respect others property so you could imagine how you could transform that that definition into a questionnaire you could use the adjectives that are in it and just have people rate themselves by the adjectives or you could use little phrase phrases like do you respect others property one to7 um do you have a strong sense of the difference between right and wrong if you know what's right do you generally do it are you a persistent person are you unselfish so you can extract out individual items from your sort of global definition of what constitutes the the hypothetical trait and there's some of the examples do usually keep emotions under control are you a person who is scrupulously correct in manners and social obligations and likes others to be the same are you cautious and considerate so that you do not hurt people's feelings by unconsidered conversational remarks I like the adjective approach in some ways because you might notice that the last question there clumps a number of descriptors together and it isn't absolutely certain that all those descriptors belong in the same question and so I would say this is was constructed quite a long time ago and I would say if you're going to construct questions you should try to answer you should try to ask as close to one thing as possible because otherwise the question gets confusing so I would say the you know the second question also has the same problem all right so if you're going to make your questionnaire and let's say you're you're trying to figure out how fun someone is and simultaneously figure out whether or not investigating fun is actually a reasonable thing to do like is it is it a scientifically valid category um then you might want to generate a whole bunch of items and also put some in there that don't obviously measure fun so let's have some descriptors that don't seem to fall on the fun nonf fun dimmension what's outside of that okay which one I would Sayo okay and Define stoic being quite careful with your words not having an excess of emotion okay so so you think you could you think you can be fun and not have an excess of emotional response I'm not trying to put you on the spot I'm just I'm just wondering if that's what you're claiming I think because just because you're in a social situation and not okay okay okay so what what other what other descriptors look I mean fun can't mean everything right because if it means any everything then it's it's not a useful word because a word has to mean some things and not other things that's um convergent and Divergent validity in a sense a word can't mean everything it has to mean something specific so what does what's outside of the fun non-f fun domain intelligence yeah so you can be fun and stupid fact fact that might even be easier all right so intelligence might be outside of that what else might be and you could be envious and fun still seems least probable how about mean can you be mean and fun yeah so that's kind of interesting so so okay okay so now we're starting to get the idea that fun circumscribes one dimension but there are other potential dimensions of variation outside of that that might be interesting to look at and so we've sort of thought about we thought sort of thought about mean and we thought about intelligent what else did we come up with what else is sort of outside of the fun realm patient okay so you can be impatient fun or patient fun all right seems reasonable fashionable yeah okay is that you think that's a person who said that you think that's a personality trait um I think it means yeah okay so so you you definitely do think it's a personality characteristic and that that's fine it could well be you know um is there a difference between a personality characteristic and an emotion you think you think emotion is inside personality so it's nested inside it the personality is the larger category and emotion is the smaller category yeah it's a it's a funny thing a because there's lots of there's lots of a priority suppositions in Psychology that you have to watch out for and one of them is that just because there's different words for different things that doesn't mean those different things really exist separately as separate things do in scientific terminology so for example the relationship between personality traits and emotions and values is relatively unclear whether those things belong in the same or different categories is by no means clear and people will claim that they do but um the overlap is substantial so okay yes we also usually think of emotions as being more kind like we're all we all experience sadness at some point that doesn't mean that that's a fundamental tra of our personality it's like we're all able to experience it but it doesn't usually we are unless we're right and so and so okay and so that's part of the definition of a trait as something that's enduring rather than transient okay so you could say that's actually a hypothesis your hypothesis is that what we refer to as emotions are brief flareups of some of the phenomena that we would consider traits if if they were enduring yeah and that I mean that's a reasonable hypothesis although if you if you describe a person as sad you think you're describing their their personality or their emotion it could be either I would yes yeah okay okay yeah it's it's a trick It's Tricky business okay so the reason I had you generate all these additional words is because you you need to find out that your category fun has a bunch of things that it doesn't cover as well as a bunch of things that it does and so we've hypothesized a number of things that might constitute additional domains of variation and so you might want to throw those in your questionnaire to okay now you might say well what are you going to do with your scale so you've now you have a scale and you can give it to people and you can tell the difference between the fun people and the not fun people and so what might be some practical purposes towards which you could put that knowledge you don't have to be too serious about it I mean what are you going you could invite all the non-fund people to a party that would seem rather counterproductive your your hypothesis would be that maybe you'd have two parties you'd have a party with all the fun people and you'd have another party with all the non-f fun people and then you could get the attendees to rate how fun the party was and then that would help you determine whether or not your measurement of fund was actually practically useful for something that's called Criterion related validity by the way so and Criterion related validity if a scale possesses Criterion related validity you can identify something that it might predict that isn't like completely obviously associated with the initial measure although you know fun and fun at a party probably are so that's bad example but you can use it to predict something that might be of value so I can give an example of that is that conscientiousness for which is a trait is is frequently used to EV valuate how good an employee might be If you hired them or even how good a student might be because conscientiousness turns out to be a pretty good predictor of academic achievement okay so if you're going to make a if you want to make a questionnaire and some of you do this when you do your honors thesis or if you're involved in research at all and people tend to think about developing a questionnaire of something that's relatively straightforward um it's not you need to figure out what it is that you're after you know what's your central construct of interest and then you have to figure out well how do I generate a very large number of items that hypothetically measures this or it's reverse or it's opposite it doesn't really matter and then a bunch of items that don't measure it because again you have to show that it's good for something and not good for everything so and then you have to demonstrate statistically that your your concept is coherent and then you have to show that you can use it to predict something and it gets worse than that actually then you have to show that it predicts something better than some other thing that someone already invented so you know if if you came up with a fun scale it's it's probably primarily extroversion that as as you mentioned that a scale like that would measure although it' be a little complicated because generally fun people also have less negative emotions so what you'd end up with as we mentioned before your fund scale would be a mangling up of a couple of different categories and so it probably end up not being a very good questionnaire at all so it's a tricky thing to make a questionnaire it takes an awful lot of work and you you you you can't start with the assumption that just because you've been able to think up a concept that it actually constitutes a concept that meets the criteria for scientific um evidence or for for scientific category so we should also talk maybe a little bit about some different kinds of categories because it's not all that obvious to people that there are different kinds of categories so I can I can name three very rapidly there there are many others uh the first category and these are usually the categories that scientists do investigate they are technically called proper sets and so a proper set is like the set of all triangles and triangles are clearly not squares we we' all agree on that so what makes a triangle different than a square which one okay I was trying to trip you up there so okay so and is that true of all triangles right right right what about a triangle that like is open on one line does that qualify as a triangle no it just looks like a triangle it's like an impostor so okay so a proper set has this interesting characteristic which is it has absolutely clear inclusion and exclusion criteria and there are no exceptions and so or or almost no exceptions so you might say well um is the set of all helium atoms a proper set and the answer to that fundamentally is yes and is and it's distinguishable say from the set of all hydrogen atoms or the set of all Iron atoms there's there's there's characteristics that you can Define that precisely indicate the boundaries of the category and those sorts of things are are relatively easy to study scientifically because they tend to behave similarly in different circumstances so here here's another category um it's called a familial resemblance category that's a little harder to understand but um a familial resemblance category is a category that that imagine that the prototypical example is the Smith Brothers so the Smith Brothers here's some things that could characterize the Smith Brothers um large ears large nose floppy lips uh glasses mustache beard and bald so they're obviously not very attractive these Smith Brothers and then you can tell the smith brothers are related to each other because they all look like each other of course they don't look exactly like each other so one Smith brother brother is bald with glasses and floppy lips but he has little ears and then another Smith brother has hair but he's got you know large glasses and large ears and floppy lips and then there's another Smith brother that has a big nose and glasses but he has nice hair and and no and no mustache but a beard and you get the picture so so what what uh a familial resemblance category how a familiar resemblance category works is that there's a list of say 10 attributes and in order to be a member of that class you only have to have say four of the attributes any four and or maybe five whatever the weird thing about a familial resemblance category is that one person could have four of the attributes and another person could have four different attributes if there were 10 attributes in total and they'd still be members of the same set even though they don't share any attributes in common and what a familial resemblance category works because each of the members of the category are related to a central prototype and the Prototype has all the features and the Prototype might not even exist so there could be a prototypical Smith brother who would have all the characteristics of the smith brothers that I described but he doesn't even exist he's like he's like an amalgam of all the smith brothers and then each of the smith brothers are related in some way to that Central prototype so that you could tell that they belong in a family and that's not a proper set and one of the things you know you you might be asking well why should you know this and one reason is is because it's useful to know that there are different forms of categories but more particularly for psychological purposes psychiatric diagnostic categories are familial resemblance categories they're not proper sets so if you go into the Diagnostics and statistical manual which is the sort of APA American Psychiatric association Bible for doing diagnosis you'll see that if you list the symptoms of something like a personality disorder there might be 10 symptoms and in order to have that personality disorder you only need four of them and so there can be wide variation within the category and of course then that begs the question of whether or not it's actually a category certainly whether or not it's actually a scientific category so um guy named Barcelo talked about a different kind of category he called them ad hoc categories and these are strange things like here's here here's an ad hoc category for you um things to take out of your apartment when it's on fire so what things would those be pictures y pets pets yes children you forgot about that okay what else what's that seniors yes hopefully or yeah Insurance ID maybe what's that anything else okay now you might say well what do all those things have in common since they're apparently a category about they're things you care about yeah yeah ID you care about that you about it you need it yeah so they're necessary or emotionally valuable or or what or valuable yeah or irreplaceable in some ways okay so that's a funny category and one of Barcelo claims was that ad hoc categories can become Auto automatic categories perceptual categories if you practice them enough so Barcelo would say a fireman has a better ad hoc category of what to take out of an apartment during a fire than you do because he's practiced that using that category frequently so those are categories that sort of have pragmatic utility and that's another kind of category okay so I mentioned family res resemblance proper set and ad hoc categories that's all I can sort of spin off in in in real time here so um generally what you're trying to do when you extract a word out from the language you have to demonstrate it that it has the characteristics of a proper set before you can think of it as having some genuinely objective existence and that turns out to be a very difficult thing to do so and it's one of the things that throws psychologists for a loop constantly because we make the presupposition that just because a word two different words exist for something that that signifies two different things or two things at all and so it's it's it's it's difficult to disentangle your description of the world from the world itself but hypothetically this construct validation process with regards to questionnaires is one of the ways that you can step forward towards doing that I mentioned convergent and discriminant validity before um once you get your scale established you have to demonstrate as I said that it measures something that that that exists in some real way and that it also has to be separable from measures of other things so for example if you generated up a scale that measured fun and you found out that it was highly correlated with SC other scales that measure anxiety then that would cast some doubt on whether or not you You' had appropriately extracted out your scale for fun other people would have been looking at similar things over the years and hopefully your scale would correlate positively with those similar things and negatively with the things that you assume to be different and that's convergent and Divergent validity and then the Criterion related validity we already talked about okay so now I want to show you a different uh PowerPoint presentation just for the yeah so this you might think about this as the current arguably standard model of human personality and it's a model that this is only half of it by the way there's another slide that has the other half this shows the personality of a person laid out in in hierarchy from most General to most specific it's sort of analogous to that little drawing I showed you of behaviors at the bottom and then higher order descriptors at the top although they don't map onto each other one to one and that's actually one of the things I'm trying to figure out um it's very difficult to it's very difficult to map the trait theories directly onto the narrative and the clinical theories all right so at the highest level of resolution here's how people can differ from one another they can be industrious or orderly and that those two aspects are quite highly intercorrelated but in sufficiently differentiable so that the differences are interesting industriousness and ordin seem to predict different things so for example industriousness seems to be a better predictor of academic achievement and orderliness does even though they both both Clump under conscientiousness and then there's volatility and withdrawal for emotional stability or neuroticism it's described different ways if it's you're neurotic if you feel a lot of negative emotion and you're emotionally stable if you don't neg the negative emotions that are associated with neuroticism we thought for a long time it was all negative emotions that were associated with neuroticism but it seems to be more like pain and anxiety and and and pain is somewhat equivalent to the emotion you feel if you're frustrated or disappointed or grieving and anxiety seems to be the emotion you feel when you're subject to uncontrollable or unexpected circumstances or when you're subject to cues of frustration disappointment or grief so volatile people don't really seem to avoid because of their negative emotion although their emotion their their emotions bounce a lot especially their negative emotions so if you're associated with someone who's volatile what you would observe is that they seem to overreact to things they get more irritated than the circumstance might seem to indicate and their emotion emotional response to things is on the negative end is relatively unpredictable day-to- day so there's a lot of variability and a lower threshold for the experience people who withdraw are people who who appear to be stopped by their experience of negative emotion so if they're afraid of something they won't do it where the volatile person they might do it but they'll complain a lot while they're doing it you know so we don't know a lot about the difference between volatility and withdrawal yet because those have been recently extracted out using statistical means and they seem stable but exactly what they predict yet apart from the few things that I've tentatively suggested to you isn't yet clear agreeableness sounds like a positive thing politeness and compassion we know that Liberals are more compassionate and conservatives more polite but we don't know a lot more about the distinction between politeness and compassion um and we don't know why conservatives are more polite and Liberals are more compassionate but we do know that that appears to be the case we also know by the way that conservatives are more orderly they're less open as well which is the dimension we'll talk about in a moment those three those are three of the five big five traits conscientiousness emotional stability and agreeableness they Clump together to make a super Factor called stability and stability looks like it might be associated with higher levels of Serotonin so serotonin is a major brain neurotransmitter that seems to regulate broadly speaking emotion and motivation and if your serotonin levels so to speak are relatively High then you're a relatively stable person and if your serotonin levels are low then you tend to be impulsive and prone to negative emotion now one of the things that's quite interesting about serotonin is that it tracks your position in the dominance hierarchy as well so the higher you are up in a given dominance hierarchy the more serotonin your brain brain produces and that makes you more confident and less unstable and the lower you are in the hierarchy the lower your brain serotonin levels and the reason for that seems to be that if you're low in the dominance hierarchy well you should be afraid because almost anything can knock you into Oblivion because if you're right at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy you're barely you're barely hanging on and you just can't tolerate any more threat and conversely it might also be appropriate for you if someone dangles a reward in front of you for to grab it because it's not exactly clear it's going to be the next there the next day whereas if you're up high in the dominance hierarchy it's like you can take a lot of blows and you're so well situated socially that it's probably not going to overwhelm you that much and you don't have to be impulsive because the micro environment that you inhabit is very stable so the negative emotion Dimension emotional stability is particularly associated with serotonergic function but we think that the whole super factor of stability is a associated with serotonergic tone so some of this lot like I mentioned already all of these different F aspects traits and super factors were all derived statistically but evidence has continued to AC over the last 20 years with regards to the biological substrate of the traits and so as we progress through them one by one we'll also talk about hypothetically what constitutes the underlying biology agreeable people um I think the easiest way to conceptualize agreeableness as is as um a negotiating strategy in some sense so you know you're always attempting to divide up resources between you and other people and a disagreeable person will make a pretty damn strong case that the resources should go to them whereas an agreeable person will be much more likely to under represent their own interest and over represent the interest of others and so you know in some ways people like that are very pleasant to be around you know because they're always doing things for other people unfortunately they're often not doing enough for themselves in my clinical practice I can always tell who the agreeable people are because when they come and see me they bring me coffee the disagreeable people bring themselves coffee so yeah pretty sad animation the aspects here so openness remember you guys hypothesized that intelligence was unrelated to fun well fun is pretty much an extroversion sub element and intelligence is associated with openness and it roughly breaks down like this so um IQ is probably a better measure of the aspect intellect like IQ tests are a better measure of the subscale intellect than personality measures are so what it means is that for for intellect for intelligence we have a measure that isn't merely self-report and it's a good measure and we'll talk a lot about intelligence it's actually a very easy it's a simple thing to conceptualize so um it's a it's a more difficult thing to try to explain but conceptually it's fairly straightforward um the other aspect of openness is openness proper I I put creativity here and and what that seems to be associated with is the degree to which someone there's a variety of things but one of them seems to be the degree to which a given idea if you throw someone an idea or you offer someone idea there's some probability that that's going to make them think of other things the more open someone is the more likely it is that any given idea is going to make them think of more things and also the open person has a more diverse range of things that that idea might bring about and so often the speaking style of someone who's open is associated is characterized by relatively loose associations I mean like my lectures for example so it's a measure of creativity but it's also a measure in some sense of lack of con constraint on on the propagation of ideas through the idea Network and I don't know exactly what that means neurologically I do know that you can be relatively high in intelligence and relatively low in in openness or creativity but the two things do tend to coary so for example it's very rare for people to make any major contribution to a creative sphere unless they have an IQ of over least over 120 so it's a pretty it's pretty selective one in 12 20 that's about the 90 91st 92nd percentile so it's pretty high so openness is creativity and intelligence it's a bit broader than that too though because open people are also more capable of aesthetic experience so it's not only that they are more creative but they also enjoy the products of creative Endeavor more than non-open people so open people are going to be interested in dance and music and poetry and philosophy um they're characterized by the capacity for aesthetic experiences you know so some people can listen to music and the hair on the back of their neck will stand up or maybe they get the same sensation when they're watching someone dance or so um just out of curiosity if you're inclined to answer how many of you have had the experience of it's called pyo erection actually because sometimes the hairs on your arms will stand up too as a consequence of watching you know something that's aesthetic movie or how many quite a lot of you how many haven't okay okay so well there's a lot of you know by that measure anyways there's a awful lot of open people in this class so um that sense by the way of having your the hairs on the back of your neck stand up that's sort of a the remnant of the pyo erection reflex so you know let's say you you you're watching a cat and the cat comes around a corner and all of a sudden there's a dog there what what happens to the cat goes right it Puffs right up even so now it's tales about this big around right and I mean it's startled but it Puffs right out and it's like that's an automatic Reflex on the part of the cat now it's trying to look like it's big you know of course the dog will do the same thing so it's a bit counterproductive but whatever the cat's trying to look like it occupies a lot more space than it actually looks like and but there's also at least in principle an emotion associated with that which is one of it's sort of a combination of Terror and awe and maybe that's what the cat feels but that's what the our experience of awe even filtered down is still associated with that you know experience of pyo rection so that's pretty interesting so extroverted people or at least I think it's pretty interesting extroverted people are assertive and enthusiastic and so the enthusiasm Dimension seems to be associated with a lot of overt positive emotion and so extroverts in many ways are more fun they laugh more they talk more that is not necessarily more fun they're very gregarious they like to hang out at parties they plan parties they tell jokes in fact telling a joke is actually a real marker of of extraversion so how many of you here tell jokes yeah how many don't okay okay so um how many of you tell good jokes anyway so yeah um also one of the behavioral markers we found for extroversion was that extroverted people also tell dirty jokes so how many of you are capable of that particular act yeah so you in particular you all right so yeah so the assertiveness element of extroversion that's I guess sometimes that's the part of extroversion that maybe isn't so much fun because extroverts can be very verbally dominant one of the things I do in my fourth year undergraduate at personality seminar is I split the group into introverts and extroverts so because I often have the class do debates and if if you put an extrovert in with a bunch of introverts and there's a debate so there's one extrovert here and three introverts and one extrovert here and three introverts then the two extroverts have the debate and the introverts don't say anything and introverts are interesting because it's not like they don't have anything to say because if you point at an introvert and say do you have something to say then they'll say something that they're thinking but they'll very rarely especially if they're very introverted they'll very rarely offer it spontaneously and so if I found that if I divide the class into two groups of introverts and two groups of extroverts and then I have them do like a four-way debate the introverts will talk like mad in in their in their own group you know because they're not being overpowered by an extrovert and the extroverts seem to have a much lower threshold for for speaking it doesn't take much of a stimulus to get them talking or they have a real impulse to talk like my daughter is super introverted or extroverted it's impossible for her to think something without saying it so you know which is not always to her benefit but I but I I extroverts have a real impulse to speech you know and whereas introverts they have to be sort of prodded into it extroverts also seem to be sort of um what would you call it energized by social interactions you know they'll go to a party and they get more and more and more energy whereas an introvert will go to a party and it's like they'll be there for an hour and then they've had enough people and they want to go home and sit in the room and recharge and it isn't exactly we really don't have any idea why that is but it seems to be a pretty reliable marker of the difference between the two groups here's some what um let's see yeah here's some items so you guys can do a quick Big Five on yourselves and I'll tell you the upside and downside of it so if you're orderly you follow a schedule how many of you follow a schedule okay how many of you don't okay so one thing I would recommend is that you do and I'll I'll tell you why like intelligence is a very good predictor of academic Prof performance and there's not a lot you can do about your intelligence I mean you can squander it but it's very difficult to improve it conscientiousness well it's a trait too so it's hard to work on but we know that conscientious people get better grades and it's reliable and it's a powerful effect and so if your time use is organized then the probability that you're going to be successful is very high so one of the things you might think about is make friends with a calendar like Google Calendar or something that and I can tell you some tricks about that because really it is important like and I'm not kidding around about this if you're low in conscientiousness it's really going to trip you up as you walk through life there's not very many advantages to it that I've been able to see and I'm not assuming that just because you don't follow a schedule you're low in conscientiousness but it is one of the items that Mark it um the only Advantage I've seen so far to being unconscientious is that if you become unemployed it doesn't bother you as much and I mean that that actually turns out to matter in some situations so like you know if a big company has to shed 50% of its employees it's the conscientious people are going to suffer themselves to death for it and the unconscientious people they're not going to care anyways because they weren't working anyways so doesn't matter if they have a job or not so here's one way of thinking about making use of a schedule often people are afraid of schedules because they think of them as a trap you know you make a schedule and it's like this little prison that you have to live inside and you know and all doing in your schedule is putting down things you have to do or should do and so you know there's not a lot of fun in that and so not only is it a trap or a prison but it's kind of an unpleasant one but a way to work with the schedule in a lot more sophisticated way is to to think well I'm going to plan the next week say because you plan it day by day but we'll take the week as the unit level of analysis and think well I'd like to plan a week I'd like to have and then your schedule all of a sudden becomes a tool for increasing the quality of your life and that's a whole different issue you know because you might think what what's the emotion that you suffer assuming you suffer one of these emotions if you have an essay that's due and you're not doing it like would you regard that as a pleasant emotion or unpleasant emotion UNP okay so is there anybody who is disagreeing with a statement that having an essay do or overdo that you're not doing is unpleasant everyone agrees with that okay do you think you can characterize the unpleasantness like what kind of emotion is it guilt it's guilt okay anything else frustration frustration frustration with what you feel like failure like you're unable to yeah so you're sort of frustrated with yourself yeah yeah you need a slap right you think I need a slap and so okay so guilt anything else aniet anxiety Restless restlessness so that's kind of an agitation yeah it's because your body knows you should be doing something but it you know you're not pointing it in the right direction so it's anxiety you're going to fail yeah shame is that reasonable so okay so the reason I was asking you about that is because you know most of the negative emotions are associated with neuroticism but some of them seem to be associated with conscientiousness and the conscientious negative emotions seem to be guilt and shame fundamentally and so Recent research and really recent I only got this paper like a week ago I think it's about four months old seem to indicate that conscientious people feel less guilt but they're more guilt prone so if they don't do something that makes them guilty but they organize their time so they are doing the things they're supposed to do so then they don't feel guilty so anyways back to the schedule so all right you think about your week and you think about your day and you think well how would you improve the quality of a given day or a given week well one of the ways of improving it is to not put yourself into the situation where there are things hanging over your head that you have to feel guilty and ashamed about because that's a very unpleasant way of being and you know if you have an essay that's due in a week and you're procrastinating then the fact that you have to do that essay can ruin the whole week and even when you're doing something that's positive hypothetically it's kind of that horrible kind of positive that you experience when you know that you should be doing something else and so that's when you end up watching YouTube videos about like dancing cats or something like that you know and it's it's a it's at best it's a guilty pleasure it's not a pleasure at all you think like what the hell am I doing watching videos of dancing cats you know but then you know that you're procrastinating and that's low quality very low quality existence so if you use your schedule you can think okay well here's some times that I'm going to do this work and then you can also sort of ask ask yourself about that when you're designing your schedule because you don't want to design a schedule like your Adolf Hitler telling yourself what to do you know because you're not going to comply with it then what you have to do if you're going to design a schedule is you have to ask yourself all right I'm going to set aside some time to study over the next week or to do this essay or whatever it is how much time would I actually spend studying and you know I'm going to go to the library for four hours a day it's like how many of you go to the library for four hours a day you do how much work do you do during those four hours you do that's very impressive is it more than four hours and so what proportion of the time you're spending there do you think is actually efficient H that's good that's good my suspicions are that you're conscientious so that's that's exceptional I mean people usually don't manage that so but you know an hour or two a day might be a worthwhile thing to schedule in and I would say won't schedule in more than that to begin with because then you'll fail and then you'll stop using the schedule and so the other thing you want to do is you want to schedule in things that you want to do and then you want to look at the day or the week and you want think you want to think hey that's a week I'd like to have if I had a week like that it would be good you know I'd be caught up so so that all that negative emotion doesn't have to acrew and I want have done a bunch of things that I'm interested in doing and at the end of the week I'd be in better shape than I was at the beginning and if you treat a SK like that so that what you're using it is to design the days and weeks that you want to have instead of using it as this little you know jail that you have to put yourself in that you're not going to do anyways then you can learn to use them and that's one thing you can do to make yourself more industrious or or uh more conscientiousness more conscientious follow a schedule am not bothered by disord so how many of you people are not bothered by disorder okay okay and how many of you are bothered by disorder yes so some of those of you who are bothered by disorder probably have an eating disorder that would be my guess I'm not going to ask but that would be my guess because one of the things that does characterize people who are who have Eating Disorders is they tend to be very orderly and orderly people tend to be quite sensitive to disgust and disgust seems to be the driving Factor behind Eating Disorders because people who have body dysmorphia or eating disorders tend to be relatively disgusted by what they see as you know inade AES in their own body so orderliness can get out of hand a lot we we have some suspicions that it's may be also associated with authoritarianism in in political viewpoints because conservatives are more conscientious than liberals but specifically they tend to be more orderly so and that doesn't mean orderliness is a bad thing it just means and this is something to think about with regards to all the traits that any trait exaggerated too far starts to become negative so the the big five traits at least in principle don't have any what would you call it intrinsic moral value and that's partly because too much of a good thing seems to turn very rapidly into a really bad thing so having a healthy personality seems to be more like something like the balance between the different traits and maybe also something like your ability to increase the breadth of your traits you know so maybe if you're like hyper orderly one of the things that would be good for you to learn is to not be hyper orderly in every situation all the time it's too rigid so okay so orderly people are bothered by disorder and they follow a schedule and so uh industrious people do not waste their time and they know what they're doing so how many of you people um don't waste your time so two people okay have I played how much time do you waste with you before I have okay that's too bad because I love torturing undergraduates with that game okay so that's another advantage to a schedule you know because it can it can really help you with time wasting and that's something that'll kill you AC kill you over time um how many of you have good goals and you know and know what you're doing yeah so that's better how many of you don't how many of you don't know really what you're doing or where you're going okay okay so okay so that's conscientiousness this is neuroticism volatile people get angry easy and they don't keep their emotions under control that should have been reversed by the way um withdrawal seldom feel blue it's the opposite and filled with or sorry seldom feel blue is the opposite and filled with doubts about things that's seems like more of a depression trait withdrawal so that's a negative emotion Dimension so people reliably differ on the degree to which they experience negative emotion and the degree to which they experience positive emotion and those two things are actually different because the circuitry that operates positive emotion is a particular circuit and the circuits that operate negative emotion are particular circuits and they're not merely opposites so you can be highly neurotic and very extroverted and so that means you're always at parties but you're continually worrying what people are thinking of you so it's people like that are actually quite complicated you know so it's it's it's a complicated uh combination of traits agreeableness polite people respect authority and they do not believe that they're better than others and compassionate people are interested in other people's problems and take time for other people so I'll tell you this after we do it extraversion open people we talked about this already if you're creative you believe in the importance of art you love to reflect on things if you're smart which is sort of the intellect category you're quick to understand things and can handle a lot of information and then extroverted people are assertive they take charge they're able to influence people so they're kind of charismatic and if they're enthusiastic they make friends easily and are easy to get to know um it might be of some interest to you that disagreeable people who are extroverted are narcissistic so because a disagreeable person doesn't isn't particularly polite they don't really care about your feelings and they're very dominant so and uh so if you're like that it would be useful to learn when to be quieter in social situations and how to attend more to other people one of the things that seems quite useful for people who are disagreeable and narcissistic for that matter is to try consciously on a regular basis to do something for someone else it also actually seems to make people who are narcissistic happier to do that interestingly enough okay so I'll just briefly also talk about General cognitive ability this is sort of an excuse me it's an overview of where we're going to head over the next few courses this is a Ravens Progressive matrices test I don't think this one is very difficult although I'm I'm going to look at it before I certainly tell you that because I don't want you to feel bad oh and the answer is there anyway so it actually turns out to be extremely easy so why is seven the right answer okay say that again it has to be the lowest why why does it have to be the lowest ccle and then the squar is at the top right so there has to be there has to be an item at the bottom at the bottom okay and be a little circle and it has to be a triangle why does it have to be a triangle because it's the only um thing missing right because every other row has a triangle so you inferred all that by analyzing the 3X3 Matrix okay the faster you can do that and it's an interaction between speed and complexity you can make these questions much more complex than this one this one's you know reasonably complex but they can get really vicious because maybe there's what two dimensions A variation here there's whether or not it's an oval a triangle and a rectangle and then where the thing is that's it but you could imagine you could make a matrix with like four dimensions of variability and so these tests turn out to be the most accurate tests of General cognitive ability Raven Progressive matrices that's not verbal intelligence it's non-verbal intelligence but um and I can tell you why it is that these tests turned out to be that way later um and I will General cognitive ability is a very good predictor of Life success and it seems to be very much biologically um what would you say biological factors play a large role especially in modern society in determining relative levels of intelligence which is a relatively rough it's a rough fact okay so we'll sum up briefly it looks like there's five basic dimensions of variability that characterize the human personality conscientiousness emotional stability agreeableness openness and extroversion and what we'll do as we progress through the rest of the or at least the next roughly little more than a the third of the classes we'll delineate each of these variables try to understand precisely what they mean see if we can analyze their effect on society and maybe also provide you with the opportunity to get some more insight into the personality traits that you have the exercise the personality self analysis the adjectives that were in there were taken from the big five models and so you know that sort of gave you an opportunity to assess yourself roughly on a big on the big five dimensions and see what you could do to to improve so we'll see you on Thursday |
there'll be an exam on Thursday I presume it'll be multiple choice like the last one was um you you've already taken one exam so you you just kind of have some idea about what they're like so um it'll be here like the last one was um and this lecture will be covered so okay so we talked a little bit about motivation last time or quite a bit about motivation and what I I told you that I was basically teach you teaching you a personality Neuroscience approach to personality and um part of the reason that I have to go into the biology to give you is to give you the kind of foundation that you need in order to understand I would say what's essentially The Cutting Edge in personality research you know I mean I I know that what we're going what we covered last lecture and what we're going to cover today are relatively complicated but if you get them right then you're right at the Forefront of of of our ideas about brain function and emotion and about personality so you get all that at the same time and today you'll get a little bit of learning theory thrown in as well so learn learning theory is basically what used to be what's what's alternatively described as behaviorism and I don't I used to teach behaviorism in this class but I've subsumed it underneath the biology because the old a lot of the old behavioral presuppositions although they were extremely useful were not right is which is exactly what you'd expect they were formulated in the 1950s um and it's actually the sign of the progress of a science that theories that are 60 years old are no longer right so um we'll also cover a little bit of Behavioral Theory today too so okay so the hypothesis we've been working on so far or we'll call it the working theory is that motivations set goals or more accurately that they Define a conceptual space within which you perceive the world and within which you act towards some goal and or to some end point and the end point in some sense is specified by the motivational system it's a hypothalamic system often but not always but not only is the goal specified but they the underlying motivational systems also tune your perception so you're only looking at the things that you know to be relevant to the pursuit of that goal and they also either disinhibit or activate the behavioral schemes that you would normally use to pursue the goal and sometimes those or let's say the motor schemes because that would be more accurate when you think about Behavior you tend to think about voluntary Behavior but a motivational state will disinhibit or activate depending on the situation autonomic responses so for example when you when you're food deprived and you start to think about food and start to organize your behavior towards food as an end and to perceive the world that way your body also prepares for food and and so the motivational state is an all-encompassing psychophysiological phenomena it's not something as simple as chain Behavior which was an early be behavioral Theory or as simple as something that's merely setting a goal it's much more complicated than that it's it's useful to think about as we've already talked about with regards to psychodynamic Theory it's useful to think about a motivated State as a micro personality I mean it's it's got one aim in mind fundamentally so it's it's not particularly sophisticated but it has all the other elements of a personality so now so motivation establishes the framework within which goals are pursued and the goal itself and then roughly speaking emotions or at least many of the emotions track progress towards goals and so they kind of tell you whether you're on the right track or not so that's a reasonable way of of distinguishing them even though there is no single motivation system or single emotion system here are some basic motivations um these are the sorts of things that Freud would have Associated fundamentally with the ID so and he thought of those as primordial and that's exactly right because pretty much all of these motivational systems we share certainly with other people also with other mammals and then of course with animals that are farther down the evolutionary chain than mammals so some of these systems are extraordinarily old in fact all of them are extraordinarily old Hunger consequence of food deprivation obviously thirst obviously people are very dependent on water um pain Pain's complicated there's there's physical pain and then there's it's mental equivalents and the mental equivalents of pain are grief disappointment frustration roughly speaking and so you can the way you can think about that is you you know you saw the picture of the nervous system that I showed you last time with the branches going up into the brain obviously but with all the branches or the roots say going down into the body so we discussed the central nervous system as a sort of all-encompassing system distributed throughout the body imagine that part of that Network throughout your body is associated with pain reception and that would be roughly equivalent to systems registering levels of input that are high enough to potentially damage them that's that's where pain seems Seems to come in and that different pieces of that can be activated at different times so if it's psychological pain as I said grief frustration disappointment seems to fall into that category uh loneliness is another one um then maybe it's primarily the cortical circuitry for pain that's activated and although people who are depressed for example or who are grieving often have somatic pain as well and depression really looks like it's a pain State um we know loneliness is because if you you take like little chicks or little kittens and you make them Lonesome and they'll cry you know which is a or or or peep if they're chicks and you can stop them from doing that by using opiates and uh it's not because it stops them from vocalizing because that would be a possibility just get them so stoned on you know morphine that they can't Peep and you think well they're now they're they're not Lonesome anymore so that's the experiments have been done carefully enough to factor out the effect of the opiates on the vocalization so and that's also led to some suspicion that people who have have had a a history of extraordinarily painful personal relationships might be those who are more prone to opiate use and so opiates analgesics are they basically dampen out pain and frustration and disappointment and grief and loneliness so there's an anger and aggression system it's complicated there's probably two of them one is defensive aggression that's probably more associ iated with neuroticism technically the other is probably predatory aggression and you know human beings are definitely Predators we're meat eaters and you know our closest relatives chimpanzees for example they're they're pretty good Hunters um they they'll they'll pack gather together in packs and bring down 30 PB cbus monkeys and and the meat is very popular Among The Chimps and so predatory aggression seems to be a separate circuit and as we'll discuss further along I think the predatory aggression circuit and the maternal solicitude circuit because there's also a Care Circuit have evolved to be at opposite ends of the same distribution I think that's the agreeableness distribution in the big five so on one end there's maternal solicitude and the other end there's predatory aggression and you can imagine how those things have to inhibit one another um because well with with many mammals bears for example the the males are so predatory that you have to keep them away from the the Cubs because they'll kill them the human beings I mean there's some aggression towards children especially if the children aren't biological relatives but men are pretty caring for male mammals and and women are actually quite predatory for male mammals so thermal regulation your hypothalamus takes care of whether you're hot or cold panic and Escape that those are circuits that also seem to be associated with with pain fundamentally although threat can maybe trigger them as well and the Panic Escape system doesn't exactly seem to be the same system as the anxiety and fear system even though they sound they sound roughly equivalent right you might think of panic as just the extreme level of fear and I think fear can trigger panic but Panic seems to be a more primordial circuit and if you're panicking there's an immense impetus to to escape so that's a different circuit affiliation to care we covered sexual desire exploration and play both both of those seem to be separate circuits so Jack PP Yak PP actually who wrote a great book called affective Neuroscience by the way if any of you are interested in like the psychobiology of behavior and motivation Yak pp's book is one of the best we I don't have a paper by him in in our collection but he's a very smart guy he wrote this book called affective neuroscience and it's actually given its title and the relative complexity of its of its thoughts it's actually quite readable even though it's a text it's more personal than your typical text might be and PP is also very interested in uh psychodynamic and personality ideas so he's a very broad thinker and so if you're interested in a you know an approach to psychology that sort of crosses the threshold from personality into emotion and biology panp as well as gray there's a gray paper that you're reading are pp's a very very good source he's a very he discovered the play circuit for example um and he also discovered that rats laugh so if you tickle a rat it laughs you can't hear it though because it it laughs ultrasonically like a bat but if you record the rat giggling and then slow down the tape then you can tell that the rat laughs and rats need to play and most mammals need to play in order to uh socialize them so so one of the things you can think about this when you're parents too and this is probably especially relevant for the man because one of the things you might ask is what role do men play in the socialization of children and one thing that men really do seem to do with kids is to engage in rough and tumble play especially once they're a little older than two say two to five or something and kids love that they absolutely love rough and tumble play gets them so excited that you know they get out of control fundamentally but Rough and Tumble play is an excellent mode of socialization because it teaches the child the the distinction between aggression and too much aggression right because if you're wrestling with a kid the kid has to keep their behavioral output under a fair degree of control to keep the game going to make it rough enough to be exciting but not so rough that they get hurt or you know that they stick their thumb in their dad's eye or something like that and you you can think of that from a pedian sense too because it's a game but imagine that if you're trying to figure out how to configure yourself around other people if you haven't had that rough and tumbled play you don't really know where the bound boundaries of your body are you know and and you don't know how much you can take and how much you can be stretched and how much you can be thrown around and when something actually hurts rather than is frightening and so all that intense sort of play that that um that boys in particular are likely to engage it although girls also like it um seems to be very useful for teaching children about how to engage with the world but and with other people in a physical way and that's one of the phys ological foundations for higher order socialization so it's very useful I mean I've I've often noted that children who haven't had the opportunity to engage in physical play they're kind of awkward you know they're not they're not seated well in their body and it's like they're kind of vague physically whereas the ones who've been twisted around and bent and thrown up in the air and you know wrestled in general they're a lot more conscious of their limits and their abilities in their body and they're also much more able to invite other kids to play you can think about this with regards to dogs you know if you have a dog you know the dog you can tell when the dog wants to play right what does the dog dos around yeah it jumps around and it puts its rear end in the air often and its head down and it looks up which is a little bit submissive and a little bit friendly and it wags its tail and it might bark and it moves back and forth and like little kids that want to play do well they don't put their tails in the air obviously but they they they they engage in like play invitation behaviors like that you know little bit of teasing sometimes and they're trying to get some play initiated um it's also practice for later dominance um when chimps play the males in particular as they approach adolescence the play Behavior because they'll all they'll throw sticks at the old chimps who are laying down and sleeping or come up and poke them or you know tease them and then as they become more and more powerful and more and more adolescent say into adulthood then that play will become full-blown dominance challenges as you don't no doubt noticed if you were in junior high school because that's exactly what happens to teachers right the little elementary school kids they're kind of cute when they misbehave they're sort of playful but by the time grade eight or grade nine comes around the pushing on the teacher is a lot harder and so you can see how play Shades into dominance dispute but it is a separate circuit exploration that's a separate circuit and one of the things that we'll talk talk about today is Swanson's elaboration of the fact that half of the hypothalamus is fundamentally devoted towards exploration which is quite cool it means exploration is a really really really old system and it's sort of like if you haven't got anything else to do so you don't want to play you're not hungry you're not thirsty you're not angry you're not too warm or too cold etc etc your default isn't sort of quiescent sleep right you don't just run out of batteries and lie on the flooor unless you're of course obviously unless you're very tired what'll generally happen is if the other fundamental motivational states have been satiated then you'll engage in Exploration and some different people at different rates if you're extroverted you'll engage in exploration in the social environment and if you're open then you'll engage in Exploration at a more cognitive level so that would be with regards to artistic creativity or to fiction or or the expr ex of some sort of intellectual or philosophical Pursuit and the reason that you're wired up that way is because if you have a little extra energy you might as well use that to map out more of the environment so that when push comes to shove somewhere down the road you'll be in possession of more information and more flexible and more knowledgeable in your in your in your conceptual and perceptual structures and also in your actions so people have a pretty strong tendency to default to exploration but there's variability in that um you can also sort of divide up these motivations as ingestive or defensive that's not a bad way of looking at it and then there's reproductive motivations as well that's unlikely to be a full map it kind of depends on where you put the emotions because we know for example that there's a separate disgusted circuit and that doesn't seem to load with anxiety or with pain it's it's it's its own biologic iCal um system and and it seems to be associated with trait conscientiousness maybe and also with political conservatism and orderliness so those things are all quite interesting they all kind of Clump together and but whether that's an emotion or motivations not exactly clear but um we'll talk about a little bit more so there's the hypothalamus and as you can see um it's not one thing of course nothing at the macro level in the brain is one thing obviously it's this layered thing just like everything else in the world except even more so because the brain is so incredibly complicated and you can see by looking at that there's all those little all the things that are colored there basically hypothalamic um modules I guess would be a reasonable way of putting it and you can tell they're even an anatomically distinct so obviously they're not doing exactly the same thing so you might think of brain and to be a sort of a fixed what would you call something that we've already managed quite well and we have all the category systems down and the structure of the brain's quite well known and that's really not true at all like the brain is truly Terra incognita and it isn't even like our naming uh rituals let's say or conventions are not necessarily appropriate for onetoone mapping of say structure onto function so um they're they're they're sort of anatomical they're markers for anatomical conv venience in some ways okay so so here's a way of thinking about it so you have your frame which specifies your lack say I'm hungry and then a goal pops up which is well I should have something to eat and the hypothalamus is modulating perceptual and cognitive circuits so that you think that and so that you start to parse up the world into a place where a hungry person like you could become satisfied and then the behaviors kick in that are relevant to that um Pursuit and so you can think of yourself as popping through these sorts of frames on a fairly cyclic basis throughout the day you know obviously you get hungry you get thirsty you get tired and so your Consciousness is being modulated by subcortical circuitry that is basically charged with your self-preservation and in some ways you come along for the ride I mean your Consciousness is mostly there in some sense to detect deviations from not so much expectation but from desire right because you lay out one of these little maps on the world and then you want something to happen and what your Consciousness does more or less is Mo Monitor and if something that you don't want to happen happens then Consciousness will take a look in some sense remember that hierarchy of goals that I showed you from you know motor output up to high order goals your Consciousness kind of moves up and down that thing if if you've made an error trying to figure out at which level of abstraction that error should be rectified which is sort of what you do when you think and so that process is going to kick in whenever you're moving towards your desired end and something that you don't want to have happen happens right you usually stop that sort of an an anxiety response the stopping and then if nothing else happens that's too bad well then you you'll start to explore animals often do that by moving around but people will do that just as with with equal facility just by running simulations in their mind and trying to calculate what went wrong right try to think about it that's a form of exploratory Behavior as well that would be more associated with trait openness and with intelligence so so there's how um Swanson divides up the hypothalamus see the uh little pink things there on the left are part of the defensive circuits and then the red things on the left are part of the reproductive circuits and you know obviously those the fact that those circuits exist lays onto darwinian Theory quite nicely the defensive circuits obviously protect you from dying and the reproductive circuits you know facilitate your reproduction it's not much of a what fairly obvious conclusion and so those are all you located in this in this you know essential part of the brain the the hypoth hypothalamus now this is something a little that's a little more complex so I'll go through it a little bit more carefully so if you look on the right this is where Swanson Maps perfectly onto p and I I put this Swanson paper in as a optional reading but if you're interested in the sorts of things that we're covering this class that's a great paper to hack your way through even though it's very hard because you you learn a lot about the underlying biology of some of these more complex clinical and developmental theories that we've covered so basically what Swanson is pointing out is that at the lowest level at the highest resolution level of your central nervous system your your you have motor output circuits that are enabling you to move move and those are communicating in large part with your spine but also with lower parts of your brain stem so those are fundamental movements of the sorts that PJ would call reflexive and then the locomoter pattern generator I think the best way to think about this from an analogical perspective and actually Alexander Lura used this analogy he called behavioral patterns kinetic Melodies it's a lovely phrase because you know how obviously a song is made out of notes and then the notes combined into phrases and the phrases combined say into passages and then well even more interestingly then if it's an orchestral piece of music multiple instruments are playing at the same time so it sort of extends right into the social domain but your your actions are sort of like that they're made out of micro routines and then those are chained together and those are chained together in higher order abstractions and so on all the way up to the cortex and so Swanson points out that the the motor system has three sets of inputs so the cognitive system that's sort of way up that's a level of abstraction that's way up in the brain so the cognitive system is where you know you might do a voluntary action so you look at something you say well I'm going to pick up this piece of paper and so that's top down cortical control and then the state system input to the motor system the state system is your body monitoring what's going on inside of itself and the autonomic nervous system is part of the motor output system and so the state monitoring system takes a careful look and the hypothalamus does a fair bit of this takes a careful look at what's going on inside you and then activates different parts of your digestive and you know the the gut system fundamentally that that you have no conscious control over and then obviously there sensory system inputs too so so those are the three main inputs into the into the motor system and that act on the environment and then the motor system has this hierarchical nature that's built from the spine upwards and so you can think of like the brain as a collection of ever expanding control systems that that allow you to what learn and undertake ever more complex motor schemes of action you know and one of the things that people think about human beings is that we're very good at thinking right but we're not just good at thinking like we're we're crazy crazily adaptable in terms of our motor output I mean if you watch the watch the Olympics you know and you see human beings can do things that no other animal could even think of doing I mean we're completely crazy when it comes to the sorts of things we can do with our body like we're good on ice we're good in the water we can ski people are really good at jumping they can climb across buildings like people who train themselves can climb like mad I mean human beings are unbelievably variable in terms of their motor output so that's another part of our intelligence that's not just abstract and so in part that's because we have this very welldeveloped cortical area that enables us to chain ever more complex P patterns of behavior together and also to develop patterns of behavior that are sort of outside instinctual specification so imagine with an animal that has a less complex brain a lot of its behavior is going to be limited to those quas instinctual patterns of behavior that are devoted directly towards the solution of basic biological problems but you know we can kind of solve those without too much effort and then we have all this spare motor capacity left over and people do the weirdest things with it you know and and really remarkable absolutely remarkable things so that's that's pretty cool we're pretty cool that way we don't get enough credit for it I don't think because human beings if think about human being as an animal which you know people are kind of loathed to do we are definitely the most interesting animal I mean if you saw like a what a pygmy hippopotamus skateboarding you'd think that was pretty remarkable you know but people they do those sorts of things all the time and you know we just take it as a matter of course the lowest somat motor neuron pools the lowest level of the locomoter system it's Locomotion and and action is formed by a subset of moto neuron tools that's wrong moton neurons in the spinal cord ventral horn that innervates the limb muscles responsible for locomotor Behavior I dictated this with dragon dictate and now and then it does weird things say so tools God only knows where that came from so a set of motor neurons in the spinal cord ventral horn so it's way down in the spine that inate the Lum mus limb muscles responsible for locomoter behavior when you start to think about the brain as something that moves your body it's a lot easier to conceptualize the brain as something that's distributed through the body you know and your spine is actually quite smart so even though in some sense you don't think with it it's capable of very complex sensory detection and also motor mapping and so um mostly relatively automated and relatively reflexive one level up the existence of a spinal locomoter pattern generator so this shows that the spine isn't responsible just for the most basic of motor outputs or sensory inputs it can actually generate patterns is demonstrated by the fact that whereas a spinal animal displays no spontaneous locomoter activity so if you sever an animal its nervous system so it only has a spine it'll just lay there you know you'd think it's paralyzed that's what you would think but coordinated limb movements characteristic of locomotion may be elicited when the limbs of such an animal are placed on a moving treadmill thus providing sematic sensory put to the pattern generator and so they've done this with people who are paraplegic if you take someone who's paraplegic and so they can't obviously walk and you hoist them up and you put them on a um treadmill and you lean them forward their legs will walk and that's spinal controlled so that's what you're doing with your spine you know because you're not thinking when you walk or you're not thinking about walking unless you know unless you're one of those people who can't chew gum and walk at the same time so anyway so it just shows you how complex you are even at the you know the sort of the base levels of your of your intelligence hierarchy level up locomoter pattern controller so it's controlling the locomotor pattern generator in contrast undisturbed chronic hypothalamic animals okay so now one of the ways people figured out how the brain works was by sectioning animals nervous systems when they're alive at different level of complexity so a spinal animal is one that's basically paralyzed its brain is separated from its spinal cord but then you can separate the hypothalamus with the intact spinal cord so it's one unit from the cortex and even from the memory systems and even from most of the emotion systems and so the animal in some sense hardly has a brain at all you know I mean the hypothalamus as you saw it's a little tiny thing and everything that's on top of that can be separated from it and the animal can um still act spontaneously so so here's an example if if this has been done with cats and if you have a female cat and it's in a cage and it's only a hypothalamic animal it can basically manage like it can't learn new things very well and it can't remember anything like it doesn't have episodic memory and so but it can it can maintain its temperature it can eat it can engage in sexual activity it's got defensive aggression like most of the animal in some sense is still there from an from an input output perspective um it's also hyper exploratory which is quite interesting he because you wouldn't think well animal with no brain is the most exploratory kind of animal well it happens to be the case as long as it has a hypothalamus so that shows you a how old exploration is but it also kind of gives you some clue about what the rest of the brain is doing I mean you you explore new things we'll say say so what that means is you have to be able to tell the difference between what's new and what isn't and so what you need to tell the difference between what's new and what isn't is memory and so a lot of what the higher order parts of the brain are doing is basically keeping track of where you've been and so if you've been somewhere before then the exploratory circuit is basically shut off as long as everything that you're doing there is working and you need the whole brain basically to shut off the hypothalamus in some sense that's how the thing works it's like you're kind of a default on system you know your your motor systems are ready to go and you're kind of you're alive and you're ready to go like a wild animal but the cortex dampens that down and it does that by only allowing the activities that are relevant to that area that might be none of them to function at any one time so you take off the cortex while the animal can still do a lot of things but you know its ability to match Its Behavior to novel situations and to learn new behaviors is very very limited so it it becomes hyper exploratory but it can't remember anything and it becomes very limited in the flexibility of its behavior and so as you move farther up the hierarchy of complexity then you're able to do more and more novel and more and more complex and more and more situation specific things so in the sense of providing a certain level of endogenous activity which means self-generated activity so the hypothalamic animal will move by itself without being stimulated the hypothalamic Lo locomoter region can be thought of as a locomoter pattern controller which generates spontaneous inputs ultimately to the spinal locomoter pattern generator so there there's hierarchy um I already talked about behavioral State inputs there's another picture of the nervous system just to remind you of how it looks um how it's distributed through the body oh this is very interesting too I I didn't learn this till I read this paper by Swanson I thought that's so dumb how could I've have not learned that like 30 years ago Swanson said that um let's go back one did I yeah rayon K was like the world's greatest neuroanatomist he was the guy who really established the field so did a tremendous amount of Investigation into the fine structure of the brain like 10 years ago a long time ago and he pointed out that sensory systems have a dual projection within the central nervous system I told you guys about Blindside already you know and the fact that your eyes map on to different levels of the hierarchy say of sensory input and motor control Kyle basically outlined the circuitry for that one branch goes directly to the motor system so it's that's for I to Output mapping So that's fast because there's not a lot of thinking in between and you might think that's bad because you want to think but it's good because sometimes you know what to do and you don't want to think you just want to execute it as fast as as you possibly can so these lower order simpler inputs are good for that sort of thing one goes directly to the motor system and the other goes more or less directly to the cerebral cortex where Sensations and perceptions are elaborated and voluntary motor impulses are generated so this sort of explains for a long time experimental Psychology was dominated by behaviorists who thought of the animal as a stimulus response machine and and never paid much attention to the function of things like thought or emotion or complex internal States and you know the behaviorists got an awful long way with their idea of the animal as a sort of simple stimulus response machine and that's partly because of this hierarchy that we're describing you know because you you can treat an animal as if it's a pretty simple machine because it has all that simple Machinery in it it's just that on top of that simple Machinery there's a lot more complex machinery and so but the simple Machinery does a lot more than people generally think and can do more than people think and so the fact that there are these at least two projections they Branch more than that gives you right away a sense of why the behaviors could have been right and the cognitive psychologist could have been right and even the psycho dnamic thinkers can be right because they're analyzing the system at different levels of hierarchical complexity and extracting out slightly different um what would you call uh observations and and some of these things are even the like the simp systems can have quite complex output so so one of the things that the simpler sensory motor system does is detect snakes because primates don't like snakes in fact there's a a woman named uh Lynn Isbell wrote a nice book on primate vision and snakes and she was very curious about why human beings could see so well and uh she also noticed that we're very good at detecting um the sort of camouflage patterns that snakes use especially in the lower half of our visual field and she did this cross-cultural survey around the world and found out that where there's more predatory snakes the primates have better Vision so we sort of coevolved with snakes and snakes gave us Vision just like it says in Genesis which is pretty damn funny as far as I'm concerned and it was snakes and trees even so and fruit of course gave us color vision so the whole Genesis story nailed it pretty well but you know snakes have been around long enough and have been our enemy or say predatory reptiles you know if if you don't really want to go with the whole snake thing that are we've we've evolved we've co-evolved with them it's like 60 million years it's a very very long period of time so Darwin used to amuse himself in a darwinian way he'd go to the there was a a zoo or a a rep place that shows reptiles I don't remember what they're called but they had one glass cage where there was some kind of poisonous snake I think it was a cobra and Darwin would put his face right up against the glass and the Cobra would go whack and he'd jump back back and he he did that many times cuz he was curious about whether or not he could actually bring the snake avoidance reflex underc conscious control and he couldn't every time the snake jumped he'd jump backwards he couldn't control it and so that's because all the primates that could control it when there were snakes biting them are dead so it was Darwin was the beneficiary of the darwinian process in that in that sense so so the point is your body's conserved all these lowlevel f fast operating circuits and so you're a simple machine and a sort of complex machine and an extremely complex machine and then something that's so complex that you can't even think about it as a machine and you're all those things at the same time and there's Swanson's take on how the motor system and the hypothalamus are integrated so it's quite nice he shows that the hypothalamic controller so that's one of the circuits that we've been talking about that are responsible for a basic motivated State get sensory input behavioral State input that's about the body and input from the cerebral hemispheres hypothetically that's thought or or voluntary action plan something like that and then it has output to the motor pattern initiator the generators and the motor neuron pools and then you act lovely it's beautiful beautiful model and so you can see that it Maps very nicely onto that with the sort of higher order levels of the of the hierarchy of sensory motor framing associated with cognitive abstractions and the lowest levels associated with the sorts of things that you do with your spine and this I flip this upside down here because it's I I've been very interested in how people get traumatized and it's easier to think of trauma when you flip the thing because once you develop the higher order abstractions cortically you know you say well I'm a good person let's say then that sort of the the fact that you're a good person or what constitutes good starts to become a box the box within which all the things that are associated with it are put it's one of the dangers of abstraction right and categorization because if you couldn't think of yourself as a good or bad person let's say you didn't have that capacity for that level of abstraction which is like a binary abstraction right good is you know one and and bad is zero so it's a really it's a really simple abstraction and so if someone if you do something that a good person wouldn't do well clearly you don't fit into the one category because a good person wouldn't do that so maybe you fit into the zero category and that's that capacity for abstraction is also precisely the sort of thing that allows human beings to undermine themselves with thought because once you have that capacity for abstraction you can make these ridiculous overgeneralizations in fact they're really simple I'm not a good person I'm a horrible person it's like that's what how someone who's really depressed things whenever whenever anything goes wrong and so it's the danger the powerful danger of abstraction is that you can make a terrible mistake in overgeneralization this is partly because well let's say uh I don't know you're out with your girlfriend and you flirt with someone else um so what does that say about your character well she might think that puts you in the zero category like now right you're not a good person it's like well it's complicated is that are is that true do you do you belong in that zero category she might treat you like that for a week or two I mean should you be taking yourself apart completely because you've made that error or should you seek farther down the the chain of abstractions for a more specific mistake and or should she help you do that it's like well you're not a complete zero you're more like a you know 0.1 she could help you figure out exactly where in your personality hierarchy you have this fault assuming that it's a fault you know maybe it's an indication that the relationship is over who who knows so anyways I wanted to show you that because then you can develop a sense of how this hierarchical system can also lead to cataclysmic overgeneralization and that's associated with lots of different mental illnesses especially depression because depressed people generally go from a small mistake well a mistake hard to parameterize right to the highest level of abstraction say well I've made error a therefore I'm useless you know or therefore I'm bad it's not good it's uh too undifferentiated I put that in there to remind you that all these little things are um informed by the underlying hypothalamic circuits so you know that whole hierarchy has to be imagine how it's conditioned that whole hierarchy of motor output part of it is conditioned by and this is sort of like an output or an input system that Swanson didn't talk about sort of sensory that whole motor sensory sensory motor hierarchy sensory motor perception action hierarchy will say has to be constructed so that your basic motivational States stay satiated right because otherwise you get thirsty enough and you die or you get hungry enough and you die it's like you have to organize your behavior so that those basic motivations stay fulfilled so each of the little ovals that make up that hierarchy have to be organized and laid out with that set of limitations in mind but then of course there's a higher order limitation which is more the one that PJ talked about which is that not only do you have to or organize your internal hierarchies to take care of all of your basic motivations but you have to do that well everyone else is doing the same thing and so in some sense the hypothalamic system that's generating the impetus for these layers and layers of motor output also has to do so in a social context because otherwise you know you fight to the death over a stick of bread which seems like a very counterproductive thing to do so I I'm trying to point out to you how many parameters those that hierarchical organization has to meet simultaneously also that one of the implications of that is that it's not an arbitrary system this is one of the problems I have with the radical moral relativist stance it's like wait a minute wait a minute for you to set up your perceptual and behavioral system it has to solve a whole bunch of problems like and they're really complex problems and they're they're kind of arbitrary in some sense like you get hungry and you need to eat it's arbitrary so what that means is you can't fill that hierarchy with just any old thing you know not only does it have to work to keep all the complex parts of you functioning here and now but it has to keep them functioning here and now in a way that doesn't disturb them functioning tomorrow or the next day or the next week or the next month so that's integration across time spans that's a killer right because you can't just go out tonight and drink 40 o a vodka and then you know write the test on Thursday so there's a probably not so some of you might try so but then you also have to organize your behavior in the Here and Now with your behavior spread across time frames in the presence of other people who are also organizing their behavior across time frames it's like once you put that many parameters on the organization of a personality you can see right away that it can hardly be arbitrary you know it's tightly constrained okay so here's some basic emotions we talked about basic motivations and so the what we're going to do in a simple way is we're going to divide them into two positive emotions and negative emotions okay and that basically gives you extroversion and neuroticism so positive emotions they kind of fall into two classes the one class is the positive emotion you feel when you when you run a motivational frame to its limit so you're hungry you go have a peanut butter sandwich and then you're no longer hungry okay so what's the state how do you define the state after you've eaten your peanut butter sandwich and you're no longer hungry well you know you're not jumping up and down and cheering like someone who just made a touchdown right so it's it's not that kind of enthusiastic positive emotion that you see when people are celebrating you know it's more like satisfaction and and that's actually technically what it's known as satiation and so when a motivational routine runs successfully what happens is it eliminates it's it eliminates the necessity for it to exist temporarily so basically what happens is you run a a framework to its logical conclusion poof it disappears because it's done and you know you might be satisfied about that but that the next thing that happens is another motivational framework pops up and you're you know you're in the same game it's Copus fundamentally so anyways it's satiation that is TE the term satiation is technically used to describe the state of being that's characteristic of the successful execution of a motivated frame it's also known as consumatory reward consummation consume and that's associated with unconditioned that's an unconditioned response it which means you don't have to learn it so it's a it's an unconditioned positive response so and that means that satiating stimuli when delivered to a creature in the proper motivational frame have the properties of unconditioned rewards so you get three things there you know the satiation brings the mo frame motivated frame to an end the satiation is also known as consumatory reward consumatory reward is very similar to what the behavior described as unconditioned reward unlearned so you can you can stack each of those things to know on top of each other and then you've got them the other kind of positive emotion is the positive emotion that you feel when it looks like you might get a consumatory reward right right hope curiosity anticipation excitement enthusiasm all of the positive emotions that we think of as really like happy happy usually has to do with evidence that your pursuit of a valued consumatory reward is going well okay now that that's incentive reward and the reason it's called incentive reward is because you're incentivized to move forward to the reward and the moving forward the impulse to move forward towards a desired goal that's what your positive emotion systems the dopaminergic systems that are nestled have the roots in the hypothalamus that's what they motivate you to do that's what positive emotion is fundamentally positive emotion is there something good I'm going to go get it it's the I'm going to go get it part that's associated with excitement and positive emotion it's what you feel maybe you're at extrovert you want to go to a party and so you're probably more excited about going to the party than you will be when you get there you know because it's the it's the apprehension of the reward that's with human beings because we're such weird creatures so often the apprehension of the consumatory reward is a more powerful emotion than the emotion that's actually felt as a consequence of gaining the reward itself and that that's partly and this is where it gets a little more complicated that's partly because we're so bloody exploratory you know so there's things that you can learn about that are associated with a consumatory reward those are conditioned rewards so an incentive reward and the conditioned reward are in the same category although not all incentive rewards are learned this is where the behaviors went wrong because the behaviors thought there are consumatory rewards those are unconditioned rewards to a conditioned to if you condition a stimulus to an unconditioned reward you get a conditioned stimulus with a conditioned reward as a response but the problem with that line of thinking is that there's actually incentive reward circuitry it's not just secondary learning it's like incentive rewards have been around so long so those are things that indicate that a consumatory reward is coming they've been around so long that your brain has developed its own circuit for that and that's the one that produces positive emotion and so that's all also produced by the way if you when you're taking a drug of some sort that you really like that's because it's activating this dopam energic incentive reward system if you take a drug that activates consumatory reward you just like lay in front of the fire like a sleeping dog you know it's it's not exciting it's cocaine amphetamines alcohol for lots of people nail the incentive reward system and that's the dopaminergic exploratory system that emerges out of the hypothalamus and it's also the thing that learns what to ass associate with consumatory rewards so I know that's a lot to take in but well it doesn't matter that's how it is so so the approach systems respond to cues of consumatory reward and they also they also respond to a large set of um biologically prepared stimuli smells for example so now you should approach good things but if a bad thing happens what should you you do well one thing you should do is stop another thing you should do is get the hell out of there so there's a constellation of negative emotions that are associated with defense and avoidance and we kind of ran through those already pain grief frustration disappointment and then fear which is sort of what you learn you learn that things to be feared signal primary pain stimulus you know so a child's going to be afraid of a needle especially if a child's got a needle before most children are smart enough to figure out they should be afraid of the needle even when they haven't had it but the the thing is is that if you come into contact with something that's already caused you pain and now there's something that only signals that that's likely to happen that's when you experience fear okay and fear is its own circuit again which is where the behaviorist in some sense went a little bit wrong too because they thought of unconditioned punishment which produces pain as the primary motivational system so it would be unconditioned punishment unconditioned reward then there were things you learned about those that produced conditioned punishment conditioned reward okay but all of those have circuits independent circuits so the defense and avoidance negative emotions seem to be roughly pain anxiety and fear but then there's disgust and people have been looking at disgust a lot lately and it doesn't load on neuroticism it doesn't seem to load on neuroticism so it's its own circuit so okay so here's another one other complexity that you need to Grapple with which is there are things that hurt that cause you pain there are things that are satiating and that are consumatory reward then there are things that signal each of those but there's one class of stimuli so to speak or things that you're going to encounter that are paradoxical and that's the class of things that you don't understand that's novelty and Novelty it's it's it's novelty itself that's sort of associated with with what the phenomenologists are primarily concerned about the idea of the revelation of meaning because the revelation of meaning is mostly associated with you encountering something that you haven't already understood right you explore that new information comes out of it a new you comes out of it okay so you're going from point A to point B what might happen well things might happen that it that appear to demonstrate that you're on the right track so that makes you happy that's the yellow box positive emotion you know your your pathway is being facilitated so that's why tools are s sort of in that category or you can be moving towards point B and you get something gets in your way and that might be something that hurts you that'd be and that hurt would be pain or disappointment or frustration or grief or something that signals that you might get hurt which is threat and that produces fear and so the positive emotion is moving you towards the desired goal and the negative emotion is protecting you and so if a negative things happens you'll stop and then you'll reconfigure the behavior that you're using or the framework in order to get around the obstacle and to continue or if it's a bad enough obstacle you'll you might say well I'm not I'm too tired to eat and I'm too hungry to sleep that happens to people right it's a conflict of motivations and so if you get up and you go into the cupboard and you find out there's nothing to eat you might say oh to hell with it then I'll just go to sleep you know so sometimes the way you solve a problem is by flipping the problem it's like we're not going to solve that problem right now we'll turn to another problem some and that's an exp that's an exploratory move sometimes you operate within the frame you know you go to the cupboard the cupboard is bare but you're hungry so you walk down to the corner store and you get something to eat and so that way you've sort of stayed within the frame and altered you know you've altered your behavior to to you've thought up another path and altered your behavior so that that motivated State can run to completion here's another way of looking at it you can be moving from point A to B and what you predict or want is happening that's a good thing that keeps your mood straight and you happy and that makes you hope that's a promise which the promise is you're going to get what you want and that fills you with hope that's positive emotion or you can have an unpredicted outcome when you're you know you uh I don't know you're supposed to be going out with your friend you go to the door you knock and there's nobody there so it's like what's up with that and so it's in a sense when that happens there's like a hole in your framework you know because your framework was predicated on the presence of your friend right it was a presupposition and so now and then you'll run out of Behavioral routine and one of your presuppositions is wrong and sort of like there's a hole in your theory and the hole you sort of drop into it and when you drop into that hole you get anxious CU you don't know exactly what this unexpected thing means and behind that you get exploratory so with most people they're going to get afraid first they're going to have negative emotion first when their little plan is blown and then if nothing additionally awful happens and if they don't drive themselves crazy with some hypothesis about he doesn't like me anymore and so no one likes me anymore so I'm a terrible person you know then the once they calm down a little bit the exploration circuit will come up and maybe they'll walk somewhere else go to a bar or maybe they'll stand there and think well you know this didn't work out so what else could I do an emotionally stable person say a non-neurotic person they'll flip to that really fast especially if they're extroverted and open whereas someone who's heavy a negative emotion you know the fact that their friend wasn't there when they told him they would be that might just produce a hole that they fall into and it's you know so deep and painful they just go home and cry so so the the neuroticism and the extraversion are in some sense they vary with the degree to which the negative emotion system is strong or the positive emotion system is strong and they're two different systems and so you can think of them in some sense you can think of them as units of positive emotion per unit of promise I mean it it's a weird thing to try to quantify or units of negative emotion per unit of threat so you know if someone maybe someone there's a rumor going around that you're going to lose your job well how much should you worry about that well God you don't know so how do you decide well you don't you're your wiring decides so if you're high negative emotion you're going to get all anxious and freak out about it which might be the right thing to do maybe you will lose your job and if you're emotionally stable you're going to think ah I probably won't lose my job but even if I can even if I do I'm I'm not going to worry about it it's innate or a lot of it's innate so okay so to recapitulate learning theory behaviorism there are unconditioned rewards those are rewards you don't have to learn those are the things that bring a motivated state to its closure roughly speaking and that makes you satisfied satiation that by the way is associated with serotonin serotonin is a satiating neurochemical so if your levels of Serotonin are high you're kind of satisfied which means you don't experience a lot of positive emotion or a lot of negative emotion you're just kind of satisfied it's a high dominance thing it's like all the consumatory rewards are there when you need them you don't have to worry and you don't have to get too excited conditioned Rewards or incentive rewards indicate progress towards a consum consumatory reward they can be learned or conditioned but they can also be innate and they're associated with dopaminergic activation and that's the exploration circuit that com comes out of the hypothalamus half the hyp hypothalamus does goal specification and the other half does exploration and so again if you're pursuing something that's an identifiable goal and you fail well then you're going to back off that's negative emotion then you're going to start to explore and that's that dopam energic circuit what's associated with dopaminergic activation exploration extroversion happen play enthusiasm assertiveness and the positive element of novelty okay soes that make sense anybody have any questions I know that's a lot of information but I I kind of designed this part of the course so that at this point the levels of analysis would stack up so that you could understand them simultaneously so the hypothalamus sets up your frames of motivation running one of those to the to its positive conclusion that's satisfying that's innate it's cons it's consumatory reward you'll work for that anything that indicates that that might happen that's incentive reward you can learn that but some of it's also innate which is where the the behaviorist didn't know that because they thought of all all the the secondary stuff the condition stuff has learned it's not all learned some of it's already prepared you see a snake that's a threat you don't have to learn that so fire is sort of like that as well um blood is like that teeth are like that staring eyes are like that predatory postures are like that um loud loud vocalizations especially if they're like low low in uh frequency they indicate a large animal all those things are things you don't have to learn to be afraid of because they've been so consistently dangerous in the past that you've built up a circuit that responds automatically to them question the EXT of neoism it seems like they're at least in the example that you that mutually exive do know yeah it's complicated you know because they do play a bit of an inhibitory role but they're separate circuits you know so you can be very extroverted in very high negative emotion okay so and you can be very emotionally stable and very low in extra verion too so but they are definitely separate things now it's hard you know you can flip from laughing to crying very rapidly you know so people are very much capable of experiencing mixed states of positive and negative emotion plus there are forms of manic depressive disorder where people are Manic and depressed at the same time which I wouldn't recommend the people I know that have had that they they seem to think that is certainly not fun so agitation tremendous agitation So you you're probably sort of like that when you're deeply confused and you're really bothered by it because then the threat circuits are going but you're also sort of wandering around going oh what am I going to do that's all that's all like approach Behavior approach motivation isn't always positive E I mean most of the time it is but intensity matters and controllability matters too so okay unconditioned punishments fundamentally they produce pain they also tend to if you run a behavioral routine or motivated framework that results in punishment you're less likely to run it again in the future that's learning if you run a motivated frame and it works you're more likely to run it in the future that's learning too so unconditioned punishments decrease the probability that you're going to run a given motivational frame because it it failed right you ran it and you got hurt it's like don't do that again that's part of the purpose of memory and the pain like emotions just to say again are pain frustration disappointment grief sadness is in there as well so those are pain-like states of emotion condition punishments those are things that indicate that a punishment is likely some of them you can learn some of them you don't have to because they're already built into you the negative emotions are dampened by serotonin that's the fundamental brain system fundamentally the serotonergic system is like a conductor of the orchestra it keeps every in in balance and Gaba Gaba is a anxiolytic it makes people less anxious it's endogenous your brain produces it if you take valium or barbituates they act on the Gaba system and so does alcohol that's part of the reason why people like alcohol because it dampens anxiety now for some people alcohol also produces dopaminergic Activation so they really like alcohol because it calms them down like they're not anxious anymore and it it also feels it produces incentive reward activation Like Cocaine so for some people alcohol is an absolutely deadly drug you can probably find out if you're susceptible to alcoholism quite straightforwardly if you want to find out sit in a bar take your pulse down five shots four shots if you're little you got to get your you got to get your blood alcohol level above legal intoxication or you won't be able to tell and then take your pulse again 10 minutes later if your pulse is gone up8 beats or more watch it because you're probably producing an opiate response to alcohol secondary consequence of the opiate response is a dopaminergic response reasonable probability that you'll like alcohol enough to find it difficult to stop drinking once you start some of you are probably like that right you have a few drinks it's like yeehaw that's how we do it in Alberta anyways so so part of that's queuing the incentive reward system and because it's an approach system and it's being queed by the alcohol you just continue to hit it and the dopamine kicks only occur as your blood alcohol level is rising so you have to keep nailing it nailing yourself with alcohol because otherwise your blood alcohol level won't keep rising and you won't get that nice enthusiasm and assertiveness that goes along with the Positive element of alcohol neuroticism so this is the neuroticism dimension um there's a gender difference in neuroticism women are about half a standard deviation higher negative emotion than men It's seems like a cross-cultural universal the difference is more enhanced in egalitarian States like Scandinavia which is exactly the opposite of what you'd presume right if you were a say as u a radical I can't remember the name if you're someone who believes that everything occurs as a consequence of socialization as you equalize a society the gender differences in personality become larger rather than smaller so which is you know not what anybody expected but that's what happened so boys and girls seem to have about the same level of negative emotion but as soon as puberty hits women become higher negative emotion than men on average there's still a lot of overlap between the genders and it never goes away again Across the Life Course once it kicks it in puberty and the reasons for that women are smaller they're they're upper bodies are weaker so they're more physical they're they're at a physical disadvantage if they're in a dominance dispute they're sexually vulnerable plus they have to take care of infants so I think those four things are probably enough to tilt the nervous system of women more towards negative negative emotion I've often thought maybe that women's NE emotional systems the negative ones in particular are actually not tuned to the woman I think they're tuned to the woman infant combination so you know if you think about it from an if you think about it for a bit it almost has to be that way because an infant has to be carried around for like a year and a half and so at that point when you have an infant and maybe you're going to have 10 you know you guys won't but in the evolutionary past that would have been the case you'd have an infant for much of your life and then you'd be a grandmother and have an infant it's like why wouldn't your nervous system be tuned at puberty for the two of you instead of one of you so how how could it be any other way anyways all right I'll give you one more what time is it this clock says 146 is that vaguely correct okay 148 fine okay now I'm going to run you through a problem that took me like yes yes 248 yes so let's see here oh yes okay two things so you've got your hypothalamus and then on top of that you've got some circuits that deal with memory and emotion so I'm going to run you through the hippocampus and the amigdala relatively quickly so this is a theory that was basically put together by soov who was a Russian neuros psychologist back in 1962 but it's a variant of a theory that Norbert Wier developed back in the 40s so here's the idea you wander through the world and you if you're in a place that you know your memory systems the hippocampus looks inside your memory systems to see what it is that you want to have happen based on your understanding of the world okay so you're in a motivated state but you have certain expectations that make sense within that state so the hippocampus is watching what you think is going to happen but remember that's motivated it's not just expectation and then the hippocampus is also looking at the world now it it's looking at an interpretation of the world because you can't help but interpret the world but fundamentally the hippocampus is looking inside you and outside you and then it's seeing if what's happening inside and what's happening outside are the same which means you know what you're doing and you know where you are and if they're the same so if it detects a match then the hippocampus inhibits the amydala and the hypothalamus roughly speaking now what it actually seems to do there's a little circuit in your brain stem called the reticular activating circuit and it's the thing that turns your brain on at night if you're sleeping and you hear a noise that you shouldn't hear it's like bang you're awake it's the reticular activating system way down in your brain stem puts your cortex into a high arousal State and poof you're conscious now the hippocampus tells the reticular activating system to basically remain calm as well as as long as what it's what you're expecting and Desiring and what's happening are the same thing so it's sort of like it's saying I know you could jump up and freak out and run about but you don't have to right now because everything's going according to plan but as soon as there's a deviation that's an omaly say then the hippocampus says Whoa something's wrong here and the IT disinhibits the reticular activating system that turns on your emotions especially your negative emotion but it primes your positive emotion and it primes some of the hypothalamic circuits too or disinhibits them because one way of solving the fact that something isn't going well is to switch to something else so it's sort of like there's a bunch of circuits on underneath you but they're being held back like horses in a racehorse and then something that you don't expect happens and the gates come up a little bit because then you're prepared now a lot of that's negative emotion uh oh you don't know where you are but a lot a lot of the rest of it is be prepared to do whatever the hell you might need to do next and so anomaly the hippocampus detects anomaly that's something unexpected and then it disinhibits your lower circuitry and it gets you ready to go now the problem is this one how how worried should you be when something that you don't expect happens and the answer to that is you don't know that's a big problem with life because now something went wrong here's the possibilities you're not looking at the world right so it's actually a perceptual problem right gray for example believes that you just see the world just like it is because he's sort of a behaviorist it's full of stimuli you don't have to interpret them that's wrong you have to interpret them so if something goes wrong it might be that you're looking at things wrong your perceptual systems are out it's unlikely but sometimes it's the case but forget that let's say that you're looking at the world correctly and you know your inferences about what went wrong what went wrong isn't the consequence of you misperceiving it's a consequence of some stupid problem with your stupid plan the problem is you don't know where the error is located and that's why I think there's temperament sometimes if something unexpected happens you should really freak out other times you should ignore it but you can't tell which of those is true right away so what happens is there's a distribution when a little thing happens some people really get upset about it and other people hardly care at all and sometimes the people who get really upset about it are right and sometimes the people who don't care at all are right and that's why there's variability in neuroticism okay now what you do when you're exploring is you start to decompose your plan right if you're if you if you can manage it if you're not so like gripped by anxiety that you're paralyzed then you go into your plan and you think well am I a complete like loser or is it some micro thing that's going wrong and then you can start to decompose it and reconstruct your plant okay so now there was something else I want to tell you about that yeah the other the other thing that this little diagram helps you understand it's like look what happens is when you're laying out a plan a motivated plan and a hole appears in it you have to figure out why you fell in the hole and then what you have to do is you have to take that motivated plan that's kind of running on automatic and you have to remember what it's made out of and so what opens up underneath you when when you've made a mistake is the complexity of the plan and then also potentially the complexity of the world on the off chance that you misperceived it right you're just someone might say you're not understanding me properly you know maybe there's something wrong with you that's interfering with the perception and then you have to do this massive search to try to figure out where the error lies now part of the reason I believe that people stick to their beliefs so hard is because people don't like it when a hole appears in one of their big abstractions right so they've got these high order representations of the world that are shorthand ways of representing something they're sort of like axioms of faith and if they if a hole appears in one of their axioms of Faith then all this complexity comes rushing up and it's overwhelming and so people hate it when you undermine one of their high order abstractions and so I think I told you this before don't do that in relationships right it's best not to do it to yourself as well okay I'll stop with this these are medusas and what what happens when you see the Medusa okay so what what what might that mean you bet it's a it's a prey response and so that's a sort of that's the sort of thing that occurs when you're moving towards your goal in your frame and the bottom drops out it's like uhoh what's there you don't know so what's the logical First Response well if you're high neuroticism it's going to be this you're going to freeze and then and only then if nothing else terrible happens to you you'll start to relax a bit and then maybe you'll start to investigate this structure of your planet maybe you'll start to investigate the structure of the world and then from a constructivist perspective say once you start to do that you gather information from the world and then you remake your plan and You remake your conception of the world and then you could move on so you do that under the guidance of the positive and the negative emotions okay that's good we'll see you Tuesday |
so in in the first lecture I already told you guys a little bit about this about this figure and I mentioned that the idea of being swallowed up by a beast of some sort and then cast back up is a very ancient and archetypal idea and an archetypal idea you might think of as an instinctive idea this is this is an idea of Carl Jungs by the way although it had its precursors and other intellectual U systems of thought you might think of an archetype as an idea that you can understand without being pre-exposed to it no now Blank Slate models of human cognition assume that all of our knowledge comes from our sensory experience but first of all there are very many problems with the blank slate model first of all Blank Slate models are just wrong like they're you know they're they were useful conceptual structures a couple of hundred years ago and there were situations where they could be applied in part to to systems of thought like um behaviorism but fundamentally we know perfectly well that the human being is not a blank slate and we also know that you couldn't be a blank slate and the reason for that is that there is so much information so to speak surrounding you and making up your experience that without some a priority structures to handle that experience for you and present it to your Consciousness in a in a pre-structured manner there's just not a chance that you could ever make sense out of it so plus we also know you know that your biology and your neurobiology is very much similar to that of all life on Earth really for that matter but extraordinarily similar to that of mammals and we know things for example that are quite interesting like um the systems that make up the deepest part of your brains and partly the part say that keep track of things like dominance hierarchies are hundreds of millions of years old and you share structure and function of those neuros neuros psychological elements with animals as distinct from you as Crustaceans so for example Crustaceans use the serotonin system to keep track of their dominance hierarchies and you do the same thing and drugs that work on people for dominance hierarchy Related Disorders like depression also work on lobsters and so so if you if you have a lobster you know that's a friend of yours and it's feeling depressed then you could recommend recomend that it uses serotonin reuptake Inhibitors and that'll make it you know a happy stretched out sort of confident Lobster instead of a you know bunched up and insecure Lobster and the reason I'm telling you that it is pretty comical and um but the reason I'm telling you that is because it indicates something of tremendous importance which is that you are one old thing and there are elements of your structure that are you know that are importantly hundreds of millions of years old and they structure the way that the world appears to you and so an archetypical idea in some sense is a is an idea that you can understand because you're a human being and you know if you think about this even for a few moments you can understand how this might be you know if someone comes up to you and says I'm angry today especially if you've been conversing them with them for some time it isn't generally necessary for you to ask well what do you mean angry you might ask well why are you angry or what happened but because the person who's making the statement has a nervous system like your nervous system you can both mutually assume that you know you've understood and experienced the emotion of anger and so instead of trying to describe what that's like you can just describe the particular situations that elicited it and you know there's lots of evidence for basic emotions I mean the list of basic emotions varies from thinker to thinker although they congregate around a pretty definable set and part of the reason that they differ at all is because well it isn't obvious how you distinguish an emotion from a motivational system and it's not even obvious that that you know the class of emotion is a reasonable class but there are certainly um subjective phenomena that emerge as a consequence of the active activity of fundamental brain systems that everyone shares so you know people understand what fear means means people understand what pain means uh disappointment frustration people understand what surprise means they understand Joy um they understand disgust I think I hit most of the major ones there and then there's you know there's other systems that don't look so emotion likee that are maybe more motivation like like hunger and thirst and and you know uncomfortable heat and uncomfortable coldness that people also understand and the reason you understand that is because you are a certain way and you are a certain way because for the same reason you have two legs most of you and two arms and two eyes and all of that you know you're you don't just spring out of the Void as a completely unstructured organism and you know it's difficult to say exactly what elements of human experience and behavior and cognition and thought and all that are inbuilt precisely because we're also quite modifiable from a cultural perspective you know so it's it's structure plus the capacity for tremendous modification but and it's hard to exactly say well how much is structure and how much is modification and partly the reason it's hard to say that is because it depends on how much effort you put into the modification right the more effort the more modification but having said all that the fact that we're similar in a priori structure is actually one of the preconditions that allows us to communicate with one another so there was a thinker a Harvard thinker named eel Wilson some of you may be familiar with that name he he's a famous biologist and he basically studies ants um which you know ants ants are very complicated and they're very successful there are more there are more ants by weight than there are people on on the earth so even though they're not necessarily concerned with overpopulation and environmental degradation there are in fact more ants so but one of the things eio Wilson pointed out was that you know even if we could talk to ants we wouldn't have anything to say to them and the reason for that is because ants concern eles with things that human beings have no intrinsic interest in so their fundamental value structure so to speak is so different from our value structure that there wouldn't be anything to talk about because you talk about with your friends and with your family you talk about shared human experiences you you talk about variation in shared human experiences and you just take for granted that the shared element of that exists and so you can think of the shared element of human experience as archetypal and then you might think well part of the shared Human Experience is archetypical because we share an underlying biology and also to some degree a culture but then there's this weird um what no man's land in some sense between the biological system per se and the system of subjective experience and ideas and you might say that the biological systems are ideational to some degree so you can imagine if you get angry you think angry thoughts and so what that means is the system that mediates aggression is also capable of thinking it thinks in abstractions and so there's a there's some relationship between the biological function which prepares your perception and your body for action and your capacity for abstract thought the the system that produces anger in some sense thinks within you is really more accurate way of thinking about it because as you all know if you've become particularly angry during an argument or a discussion with someone you may say things that you whatever you are comes to regret very soon after the conversation and so it's as if in some sense the system is speaking within you and if you start to think that way you can also develop much more understanding right away of what the psychoanalysts were about when they started to talk about unconscious processes so you could say and and this is a realistic way of thinking about it is that what the psychoanalysts um identified as unconscious processes in some sense were the thought patterns in Word and image and sometimes in Behavior as well of fundamental biological systems working within you and so even someone like Freud for example would say approximately look you know you're a relatively loose con collection of somewhat integrated biological subsystems and each of them posits a goal that's worth attaining but the problem is is that many of those goals exist in contradiction to one another and your problem problem as an organism is to unite those diverse biological goals that would be the ID for example from a frudia perspective to unite them into something that's relatively coherent and non internally contradictory and then also to express that Union in the social sphere where hundreds of thousands of other creatures more or less like you are trying to do the same thing it's a tricky Balancing Act and so but these these systems inside of you so to speak are informing you constantly and some of that they do with direct physiological sensation because there are generally Sensations that are associated say with motivational States or with emotions so and we kind of think of those as feelings whatever that means and then um there are ideas that are associated with it too and some of those ideas are well they're often fantasies so I can give you an example of that so it turns out that the interest that women have in and sexual behavior is dependent to some degree on their blood levels of testosterone and that varies across the menstrual cycle and so women tend to be most interested in sexual activity when their fertility is at a peak which is just after they ovulate and but it doesn't look like testosterone produces an increase in sexual behavior in a causal sort of manner like a drive what seems to happen is that the testosterone produces an increase in sexual fantasy and the fantasy produces the impetus for the action so that's a very interesting way of thinking about it you know because what happens in some sense is that the biological system that's underlying sexual desire sets up a world in imagination that is more likely to contain images of sexual gratification and the organism so to speak follows in its wake and you know you can see this if you pay attention to the structure of your own imagination you can see this sort of thing happening all the time you know if if you're in an argument with someone for example and they humiliate you or put you down and that produces feelings of resentment if you watch your imagination like it might be quite conscious and it might be quite fleeting you'll see that fantasies of Revenge for example and different scenarios of Revenge play out in the landscape of your imagination you know and when you're hungry you're studying away and you're concentrating on something and you know your blood sugar level Falls enough so your hypothalamus notes that maybe it's time for a few calories and so it starts to pop up you know an alternative sequence of ideas you know it's like well you know maybe it's time for a pizza and you know you think about a pizza and it's got some mushrooms on it maybe if you happen to like mushrooms and you know sooner or later the fantasy that's associated with The Hunger becomes sufficiently demanding sufficiently likely to take up the space inside your subjective experience that you'll switch activities from what you're studying especially if you're not that interested in it you'll you'll switch activities so that you pursue the new goal that's been put forth as a as a as a possibility by the action of one of these underlying biological systems now one of the things that Freud proposed and you know it's an interesting idea is that if you interfere with the activity of one of these systems especially the more Troublesome systems like sexual desire and aggression and those are Troublesome because in some sense they're the most social of emotions right because generally speaking and at least sometimes you need a partner for sexual activity although that seems to be less frequent than it used to be in the past and you know and anger is something that also is very socially disruptive and so one of Freud's claims was it's it's particularly difficult for individuals to integrate sexual desire and aggression into their personality and into the social world because those emotions are either socially disruptive or require a tremendous degree of coop operation from someone else and you know that was es sexuality that was especially true before there was reliable birth control and also when there was a lot more stigma associated with sex outside of marriage and also with childbirth outside of marriage so you know I don't in my clinical practice for example now I don't see that many people who have the sort of sexual repression problems that Freud found so common among his Victorian clients I mean in our culture it's more likely that people are having a terrible battle with the Demons of of hunger and you know they have some sort of eating disorder because they're starving themselves and then binging and starving themselves and then binging or eating some you know god- awful combination of pure carbohydrates and sugars on a sort of a random basis and so they disregulated their their hypothalamic systems because the hypothalamus controls hunger and then they get into a vicious battle with it and you like you don't win against your hypothalamus because mostly As far as it's concerned you're just an appendage to it so and it's much more powerful than you are as you'll find out if you ever have a scrap with it so you know people who have Eating Disorders they Gorge and binge completely against their will and they don't seem to be able to control it and that's because your hypothalamus won't let you starve it's not it's not into that sort of thing and so no matter how thin you want to be it would rather that you were alive and it's more powerful it it has the capacity to exert more control over your behavior than you do generally speaking the same thing often happens to people who develop addictions and the addictions an addictive substance in some sense harnesses a fundamental motivational system and if you if you train that motivational system over a long enough period of time to to seek out to successfully seek out the addictive substance and you train it and reward it by using the addictive substance when you are able to you know come across it you'll create this little biological monster in your brain you turn on at the drop of a hat and then you have very little control over when it's activated so and you see one of the things that happens when people go into rehab for drug addiction is that pretty easy to get them um through the withdrawal phase even if it's something like heroin you know and heroin withdrawal although people are always you know writing movies about how awful it is it's about as bad as a bad case of the flu and people you know very seldom die during heroin withdrawal they die during alcohol withdrawal all the time but you so you can get someone through withdrawal but as soon as you put them back in their natural environment where their friends are and the cues that are associated with the addiction are still in place they start taking the drug right away again you know regardless of all their good intentions and you know you can see that as well in your own behavior because I mean I doubt if a day passes where you don't do something that you swore you wouldn't do you know and you do it and then you think hm why did I do that it's like well what do you mean I precisely and that's the fundamental Psych analytic question cuz I you know even the the way the word looks it's one letter you know it's like a one ey it's like well is there an eye there well not really you know what there is generally speaking is a loose aggregation of systems that are more or less going in the same direction that's duded into thinking that there's a unity and that's that's a that's a prime psychoanalytic theory and the part of the reason that people suffer is because those systems first of all don't necessarily have your well-being in mind you know your your your pleasure your freedom from anxiety your freedom from pain like the system that mediates individual reproduction the sexual system like it doesn't really care about you so to speak it cares about whether or not you reproduce and you know one of the things you might think about if you think why is there so much conflict in human Intimate Relationships it's because the demands of sexual reproduction and the demands of individual happiness are not the same thing and you know you have to you have to try to integrate both of them but there's no reason that you would necessarily find the partner who would make your life most fulfilling also the one that you're sexually attracted to you know you'd hope that would be the case but like good luck with that you'll end up with some jerk you can't stand because you know you get so hot you can't stand it when you're anywhere near them so you know you might think well wouldn't it be nice if you could bring that under voluntary control it's like well good luck with that so you know so these are the sorts of things that you need to think about when you're thinking about what the psychoanalytic thinkers we thinking about as the unconscious in some sense the unconscious is the the ideational and motivational activities of all these underlying biological subsystems that make up your make up your being that make up the substrata of your psyche you know like you tend to think of your yourself as I so that would be the Freudian ego you know as the part of you that subjectively experiences and maybe also the part of you that has continuity of memory across time and for one reason or another we we tend to experience that as something of a Unity it's it's not obvious why exactly I think part of it is that we can separate ourselves out as a unit from the rest of the world including other people you know and we're aware of our boundaries physically and also temporally but I also think it's because for one reason or another we only seem to be able to do one thing at a time and so the limitation which is like a motor output limitation seems also to to imply to us that there's only one thing there but you know it's not that it's not that unreasonable to think about ourselves as something more like an antill than as something that's you know a completely unitary structure because obviously our physical structure is far from homogeneous right you're made up of all sorts of different subp parts and they're qualitatively different so anyways what I want to talk to you about today as far as as far as I can manage it is to to give you some insight or at least the insights I've been able to develop about how it is that your physiology speaks to your mind and I think the way to conceptualize that I'm trying to give you some sense of what symbols are now what Freud thought about symbols was that well let's say that you were in a society that was very sexually repressive and you were still stuck with the problem of a fairly powerful sex drive and your culture had taught you that that needed to be suppressed and repressed and controlled and Freud's idea was that well that thing like the monster in the basement doesn't really like to be pushed around and controlled and it's going to manifest its desires and its and its wants and its view of the world in sub subversive form so and for Freud the subversive forms would be different sorts of symbols so if you weren't um satisfying the system that was underlying sexual um interest then it would start to insert itself in random ways into your behavior perhaps when you're interacting with someone of the opposite sex or maybe into your dreams and your fantasies and it would do that in a disguised form because well because the part of you that was the integrated part the ego part in some sense wasn't really willing to communicate with it so it had to sort of sneak its message up and through well the yungi intake on that was slightly different uh Yung was perfectly willing to assume that Freud knew what he was talking about in some some domains especially those that were associated with Psychopathology but for Yung the realm of symbols was something different and for Yung the realm of symbols was where knowledge had its origin and so you can imagine that there are things that you know absolutely nothing about and of course you you don't know what those things are cuz you don't know anything about them but there's lots of them around and then you might imagine and there's also lots of things that exist that the people as a whole don't know anything about not just you they're beyond our comprehension as a species for Yung this symbol was a mediator between the absolute unknown and the relatively known and so as the human imagination expanded out and and mastered more and more territory there was like a periphery around the island of knowledge and that periphery was made up of symbolic representations that were that were pre- articulate knowledge so they were like things you might act out here's here's a way to think about that so you know you might watch a child who's engaged in pretend play okay and often children will pretend to be a mother or a father for obvious reasons you know and what they do is they observe their mother or their father and then they act them out but it's very interesting form of acting out because we think of it as imitation oh look you know she's imitating her mother but imitation means you move your arm like this and I move my arm like this and that is not what children do when they're playing what they do instead is a very complex form of generalization and they watch the mother and they extract out something like the pattern of the mother and they don't really understand what that pattern is because they don't have the articulation and the cognitive capacity to generate a fully articulated and verbalized model of the mother but they acted out in behavior and so it's a in a sense they're incorporating the spirit of the mother that's one way of thinking about it into their behavior and then they can act out things they don't understand or at least they don't understand in terms of being able to articulate them and you know lots of things you know you can't articulate you can't articulate how to walk you can't articulate how to ride a bike you can't articulate anything complex like how to engage in a successful relationship a lot of that knowledge is embodied assuming you have it at all so so it's it's dramatic action and and you could also think about the symbol as a mediator between dramatic action and full cognition so for example um imagine a child is playing at being a mother and then you stop them and you say well what are you doing and the child might say well I'm you know we're playing house I'm pretending to be mom and then you might say well how do you go about doing that and then they're going to try to articulate what they're doing you know and while they're doing that they're going to be using using their imagination and representing the things that they're trying to understand and then you can see how the symbol which would be the visual representation of the mother's action like a little movie that you might run in your head you can see how it might lay itself on top of the dramatic action as a precursor to articulation and so that's that's a good way of thinking about it is that the symbol is a precursor to articulation and that you use symbols of one form or another whenever you use imaginative representation as a precursor to understanding and so that happens for example when you're fantasizing about something so now for the psychoanalysts particularly psychoanalysts like Yung the imagination was something that had a spontaneous operation it would just go along on its own and do things and of course you also experience that if you first of all when you dream obviously because you're not in control of your dreams something's in control of them and they happen but it's not you or it's not the you that you normally think of yourself as and then if you're daydreaming the something analogous happens you know you find that maybe you're trying to concentrate on something and something that's of interest to you for one reason or another starts to creep into the theater of your imagination and lay out different scenarios of one form or another and it's sort of like the natural language of the psyche because it isn't obvious that the natural language of the psyche is in fact language right because we don't really know how long human beings have been using formal language you know the estimates 150,000 years that's one estimate I doubt if it's more than 2 million years 2 million years seems to be about how long we've been using fire so it's somewhere between 2 million and 150,000 years but compared to the entire history of our cognitive development you know which you can stretch back well to the beginning of life itself if you want or at least to the point where things had nervous systems that's more like 500 million years and so the psyche was operating without language for a much longer period of time that was operating with language and it was doing something to organize its conceptions of the world that were pre-linguistic so what we're going to talk about today or what we're already talking about is what the structure of those pre-linguistic cognitive forms might be and I'm I'm offering that to you partly as an element of the integrating theory that I told you I would try to deliver in the first lecture and also as a a means of giving you a a schema or a language to start to understand what symbolic representation means from a psychoanalytic perspective and I I hope that'll be very useful I mean it's it's been extraordinarily useful for me because it offers a key to understanding symbolic literature and symbolic modes of cognition so for example religious systems are symbolic modes of cognition par Excellence that's what they are and they're not object they're not primitive theories about the nature of the objective world that's a foolish way of looking at religious systems and it sets up an artificial dichotomy between religious belief and scientific belief and all that does is confuse people so religion religious belief is primarily about morality and morality is about how to act and religious symbolism is about how to construe the world as a forum to act in and that's what you you have to solve that problem because the big Pro biggest problem you have in your life and the biggest problem you always will have is how the hell should you act and you know that actually might be the fundamental question of existence to to the degree that action is the primary reality now you know if you're a materialist you don't really think that way because you think of the objective World stripped of its subjective importance as the ground of reality but it's not the ground of reality the ground of reality is whether or not you survive and reproduce at least from a darwinian perspective and that means that the most important element of reality is how you act that determines how whether or not you're going to be selected so to speak for reproduction and people are like evaluating each other on the basis of their Fitness for reproduction nonstop it's like almost almost all of social Congress has to do with that you know men organize themselves into very strict dominance hierarchies by competing with one another and women peel the men off the top and almost everything that you're doing in your day-to-day interactions with other human beings is an element of that fundamental process so that's all action oriented so so it's very much important to get these things right so I'm going to tell you you know how I piece this together to some degree and so we're going to start with the hypothesis we'll take a look at this there we go so one of the things you might ask is what do our immediate mamalian relatives how do they conceptualize the world and so we're going to assume that those are higher order primates because you know the evidence seems to suggest that we're relatively genetically similar to chimpanzees in particular and also to Bonos which are more or less a form of chimpanzee although their behavior differs and it looks like we diverged from the precursor to chimpanzees Bonos and human beings about 7 million years ago so we didn't come from chimps chimps bonabo and US came from something that was the precursor to all three and we know you can calculate how similar you are from a genetic perspective to another organism by measuring if you split your DNA into its into its halves and then you mix those DNA halves with the DNA halves of another animal they'll join up and the more related you are to that animal the more more energy it takes to pry them apart once they've joined up because they're a tighter match and so it turns out that we're you know extraordinarily tightly matched with chimpanzees so um so when you know you're wondering why you're so erratic it's and and uncontrollable and unpredictable it's because you're basically a chimpanzee that's been driven insane by self-awareness so you know what the hell do you expect from something like that you know it's amazing that we can even all sit in this room together so anyways you know you might ask what a creatures like that know and one of the one of the things that we've been able to determine are some of the precursors or Associates of of cortical development of brain size and there's various things that seem to be tightly associated with the development of larger brains but one of them in primates in particular is size of group so the bigger your group The more you have to keep track of the more social information you have to keep track of and if that's driving brain development at least in part because it's certainly not the whole story if it's driving behavior in part one of the things that that implies is that one of the most important sources of information that you have to contend with if you're a social primate is the social structure and so what you can infer from that is that your brain is primarily set up to assess social information now you can take that a little bit farther and then you might think well that means that may imply that the primary categories that you use naturally so to speak to understand the world are in fact social categories and then you could think well you know we've we've elaborated our cognitive systems up into the abstract far farther than our primate relatives have but because evolution is a conservative process new structures have their roots in Old structures right it's a necessary part of evolution because once an organism walks down a certain psychophysiological Road in some sense it's destined by that road which is why you have the same basic bodily platform as virtually well not only mammals but vertebrates in general you know four legs two eyes it's a very very standard form so you know once it's developed that's it that's the platform upon which further variation takes place now you might ask well first of all think think of your own situation in in relationship to the primate situation how much of your time during the day are you spending interacting with other people in one form or another now let's assume that that also means books movies all the artificial representations of people we're going to consider those representations of people as well and so then you might think well not when you're asleep except you're dreaming and you're almost inevitably dreaming of people but when you're awake well what is it is it 80% is it 90% I mean it depends to some some degree on how extroverted you are like if you're sufficiently extroverted you're going to try to drive it up to 100% you know and if you're really introverted maybe you you know you go hide in a closet now and then because you can't stand being around people but nonetheless most of your environment is a social environment you know like we like to think of the environment as a forest or a landscape something like that but the environment is actually the niche in which you live and the human Niche is highly social and then you add to that the fact that we're par bonding creatures and we have very long lasting relationships and our familial relationships are extraordinarily longlasting as well plus our period of dependency is extraordinarily long and and and and serious so you know we're for all the for the all the ideas mostly Western ideas about you know radical individualism we're unbelievably social creatures and we can't really survive outside of a social context and what that implies is that the fundamental categories of our perception are likely social and that we've taken those fundamental categories and applied them to other things so then imagine so here's some of the things that we know that that higher order primates can track um they can track dominance so you know primates live in hierarchies there's a female hierarchy and a male hierarchy and you know and the nature of those hierarchies depends on the primate but there are hierarchies and the hierarchies are extraordinarily important because if you're at the bottom of a hierarchy and you're a social primate like you're a whipping boy you're going to get kicked around your children are going to get kicked around if a if a disease comes whipping through your your tribe or your troop then if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy you're the one that's going to die because you're already stressed and full of parasites and poorly nourished and you don't have a good place to live and so you're going to get wiped off the map and even if you don't get killed by some disease if we track life expectancy across time if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy you're going to die way earlier and you're going to be old much younger than the people or the creatures that are at the top because the ones at the top get the best of everything and the ones at the bottom don't and so it turns out that your your place of of of position in the dominance Hier is an unbelievably important determinant of your probability of reproduction especially if you're male most females reproduce regardless of where they are in the dominance hierarchy but that isn't the case with males what happens in males is you get something more like a Pito distribution where there's a few males at the top who are unbelievably successful and then half the males at the bottom who are not successful at all and so that's one of the you know that's one of the chronic stressors that civilized societies have to deal with because well it for obvious reasons so so it turns out that primates are very very sensitive to dominance hierarchy structure and they know who's at their level and they know who's below their level and they know who's above and they track that across time and they track it across families and sometimes they track it across Generations because it can last Generations does in human beings it does in chimpanzees so our brains are pre-wired for dominance hierarchy comprehension and okay so that's one domain the dominance hierarchy now you can think about that in a variety of different ways you can think about that as the social organization you can think about that as the nature of the tribe you can think about that as the state or the nation or the people all of those things are dominance hierarchy variant in some sense um you can think about that as the father and or you could even think about that as God the Father with God being the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy in some sense and I think part of what religious ideation actually does is take the idea of the thing that's the top of the hierarchy whatever that is and make it into a deity now that the we know that people are much more likely to imitate those who are close to the top of the hierarchy because they want to pull in the behaviors and the attitudes and the ideas that made those people successful then you might think with regards to human beings that because we're extraordinarily intelligent and very much able to abstract that what we can do is we can look across dominance hierarchies because there are multiple sorts of dominance Ares among human beings and we can say okay well this person's at the top here and then this person's at the top here and this person's at the top here and all those top people share things in common that make them the top and then we can abstract out what the top means and we can say that's the top thing and I think that's partly what people are doing in the multigenerational process that they use to extract out religiously significant figures of adulation and admiration so they're like the best of all possible people across all possible circumstances okay but we'll leave that aside for a moment it looks like the fundamental symbolic structures that people use to represent the structure of the dominance Ary are paternal so the dominance hierarchy is like the great father and I think part of the reason for that is that among human beings and among chimpanzees although it's not so true with babos the male dominance hierarchy is the dominant hierarchy and you know this is a claim even that feminists make right because the feminists say that well that our culture is basically a patriarchal construction and you know they're not very happy about that but that's a whole different issue okay so one idea now the other thing you can think about here is that your brain has got to be organized so that it's capable of understanding the things that are most constant about the environment right and you might think well the things that are the most constant are the most real that's a way of defining real it lasts a long time and it's evident everywhere okay so then you might think well what are the most real things that human beings have to deal with you know and and one one answer to that is well there are certain kinds of objective realities that are the most real so you might say well things like trees are extraordinarily real but one of the things I'd like to point out to you is that despite the fact that trees are quite real they're not as real as dominance hierarchies because dominance hierarchies were around for a couple of hundred million years before there were trees and so one there have been dominant SES around for 400 million years long before there were vertebrates of our type and so the dominant s is an extraordinarily constant feature of life and part of the reason that we're wired up to be able to detect variations in dominance hierarchy status is because that that the fact of that structure is constant across all times in all places and so it's built right into our nervous systems and the fact that we share the ability to assess our dominance hierarchy position with Crustaceans and that this and which have a very simple nervous system and the fact that the same pharmacological substances work on Crustaceans that work on us for the same reasons at least with regards to dominance hierarchy indic Ates that the dominance hierarchy counter that you have functioning at the very base of your brain so to speak is an unbelievably potent mechanism and you're using it all the time one example is you know you might ask yourself why people are so obsessed with fashion and why Fashions have to change every year and part of the reason for that is that by attending to fashion and keeping up or being even on the avangard you show that you're ahead of the curve and the curve is always changing right it's like a technological curve you have to stay ahead of of the it isn't so much that you master the technology it's that you stay ahead of the technology and master the new and that indicates that you're conscious and alive and aware and capable of competing and that's one of the things that makes you more attractive at least in Principle as a mate or at least more competitive with the other creatures with whom you're competing for the attention of potential mates so that's just another indication of exactly how possessed You Are by the operation of these deep-seated biological systems and we know for example that there's very very little difference between a severe clinical depression and a very severe dominance defeat it's the same biological process fundamentally what what happens often with people who are clinically depressed is that their self assessed dominance is much lower than their actual competence and it's actually the gap between their competence and their and their selfworth assessment that constitutes the pathology so you know so you have someone when I assess people for depression I say well look you know do you have a job is it a good job you know do you have a do you have a family do you have an intimate partner do you have interests in various things in your life you know outside of your work um you know do you have the sort of Education that you want how's your physical health do you have a drug and alcohol problem and if the answer to all those is the the proper answer and they still feel really terrible then you might think oh well that person suffering from clinical depression because their self- assessed dominant status is not in keeping with their actual social status you know as opposed to people who come in and you ask them the same questions and it's like their family's completely insane they're alienated from them you know they they had a brain injury when they were four because their father hit them against a wall they've got no education at all they've got an alcohol problem you know they've been unemployed for seven years and they have a personality disorder it's like well they feel terrible but they're not depressed they just have terrible lives you know and it's not like you're not going to suffer if you have a terrible life but if I give someone like that an anti-depressant or suggest that they take one you know it might stop them from cutting their wrists but the probability that it's really going to improve their situation is relatively low because like what the hell are you going to do with that it's just too overwhelming a problem to even address all right so it looks like the dominance hierarchy as such seems to be represented by masculine symbols and it's something to keep in mind when you watch movies because symbols es especially that are associated with the father like the king for example are are representations of the dominant structure so so that's one fundamental symbol um let's look at another here all right so this is a rather complicated shift in argumentation so so perhaps you can accept for a minute the association between the dominance hierarchy and culture you see how those are the same thing or at least that they're similar our culture is actually made up of a variety of overlapping dominance hierarchies right because different professions and different Specialties have their own dominance hierarchies and they're sort of integrated into a meta hierarchy but so but regardless the culture is a dominance hierarchy a complex dominance hierarchy so then you might ask yourself well what exactly makes up the culture what is it that we're talking about when we're talking about the culture and the dominance hierarchy and so that that that leads into questions like what exactly constitutes a law you know so we have laws and you might think well what does it mean that there's a law well we can we can look at the obvious things there's a rule of some sort that's been written down that's one there's a rule that's been written down that if you transgress against you'll be tracked down and punished that's another example of a law another example is well it's a custom right most of the things that we have as laws are Customs that people have adopted at least in principle to regulate our interaction so that the probability of mutual cooperation is high and the probability of mutual aggression is low and so you might say well why do we all go forward on a green light that's arbitrary why is that law and the answer is well because everybody decided that that would be a law and then they decided they would act it out so it's a custom and you can see why it's an extraordinarily useful custom because if we didn't have it then we'd be crashing into each other at every intersection and none of our vehicles would be good for anything so that's another example of a law so if you think about a law as a set of Customs then you start to see the law as as the codified version of a behavioral contract right there's ways that we have all agreed to act or even if we haven't agreed to act that way we've agreed that there should be a structure that describes how you should act and that's what the culture is you know unless you're a nihilist or an anarchist or a criminal or or a terrorist or something like that you basically accept the fact that this structure has to exist and then you try to position yourself within it okay so then you can think well the culture and the dominance hierarchy is is two things at the same time or maybe even three things one is it's the way you act so when you say that you're a citizen of a given country what that essentially means is that you imitate the body of laws that that country has erected you're a behavioral manifestation of those rules roughly speaking or reverse you could say the law is a codified representation of the way everybody in the culture is behaving there's a like a dietic interaction right and so the law and the culture is actually a pattern of behaviors and expectations around those behaviors that everyone shares and you could also say it's the cumulative knowledge that the culture shares so the culture as a whole has a body of knowledge some of which is objective and some of which is moral and behavioral and you as a fragment of that also have have that at least in fragmentary form right you're a partial representation of the entire culture that would be something similar to Freud's idea of the super ego right because for Freud there was an ID and an ego and a super ego and the ID was basically you know biology and its ability to control you and the ego was poor little you and the super ego was the terrible force of culture crushing the little ego between the terrible force of biology and itself and so the super ego in some sense is culture and that's represented by masculinity now or by by by the farther figure most generally speaking now you could also Imagine the culture as the collection of all knowledge now that's fine now then you got to think about what knowledge is and that's a tough thing to get a handle on so because there's different definitions of knowledge we in many technical situations in our culture we privilege factual knowledge and we think of that as knowledge so for example if you're going to be an engineer or a physicist someone who's really dealing with things there are certain rules that apply to the operation of things and you have to know what those are and those don't NE necessarily have much to do with how you behave you know if you're an engineer and you go to work you work with things and you have to know how the things work now you also have to be part of a culture because if you're not you're going to not get along with the rest of the engineers and they're going to toss you out so you have to have both forms of knowledge but we're not interested it in the moment precisely about the factual knowledge we're more interested in the knowledge that makes you acceptable to other human beings and that enables you while you're operating in your own life to negotiate the social structure in such a way that you can be successful and successful would mean well you get to live that would be one definition there's some probability that you might find an intimate partner that's another element of success you're not suffering to the point where your own existence is intolerable you know and you're going to survive for some prolonged period of time with some amount of security and so that's what you're you know that's what you're trying to do and I would say to the degree that you're well inculturated which is that you're a good representation of your your cultural cultures knowledge in so far as it's relevant behaviorally then you're much more likely to be successful okay so we're going to we're going to equate that form of knowledge with the possibility of succeeding that makes you well you could call you could call it no you could call it emotional intelligence although I never would call it that because there's actually no such thing but it's more it's knowledge about how to act you know and and it's it's very very important that knowledge so just think about what you're all doing in this class right most of you don't know each other there's maybe 200 people in this class three of you are pretty damn crazy really you know and and probably about 10 of you are like on the edge so but there you all are sitting there peacefully right you're following a rule code and you're really following it first of all you're all sitting in your own chair right you're not sitting on the lap of someone next right and that makes you laugh right because what would happen if someone did that what would happen well you know a little flurry would break out because all of a sudden a primate is doing something that a primate's not supposed to do and that opens up an area of of un of the unexpected and the crazy right and God only knows what's going to happen when a little spot opens up where the unexpected and crazy emerges you know we don't like those spots and you can you can see this in your own behavior so for example if you're walking down blur Street Street and you happen to come across someone who's self-evidently homeless and they're wandering down the street and they're gesturing and they're talking to themselves there's a bunch of things you're going to do the first thing is is you're going to glance and look away and then you're going to make a relatively wide birth around the person and you're going to try not to make eye contact generally speaking and the reason for that think about that the reason for that is the space that that person inhabits is undetermined by cultural agreement right you don't know what the person will do and so all you do is walk around that space because God only knows what happened what might happen if you don't probably nothing because the person is preoccupied by whatever demons happen to be chasing them but you're not going to take that chance and so you all come in here and I mean look look you're pretty much all dressed the same you know roughly speaking acceptable variation but nothing outlandish so you get to be individual but not peculiar I think let see so far it looks okay right and you know where you're supposed to sit and I bet you how many of you sat in the same seat you sat in the first day yeah so so a good proportion of you how many didn't okay well you will soon because because you you'll have you'll have established your little territory you know and it will be it will be familiar to you and you'll gravitate towards it and you'll be happy about that because you'll start to become familiarized with the people in your immediate vicinity and they didn't kill you the first time so they might not kill you the second time right and so and you're all participating in a in a kind of collective drama right so what's the nature of this room what does it look like what's it called it's a lecture theater right why because there's a drama going on right and you're the audience and I'm hypothetically supposed to be providing the drama and we all know that because that's how the room is set up and when you come in here you obey the room you do what it tells you there's chairs and you sit in them and when I'm talking generally speaking you don't maybe you want to hopefully if I'm speaking properly then you don't care because you're happy to listen and the rule is you're supposed to look at me and listen and you're all following that rule and you know all of that is because you're very much inculturated and you're sane enough to follow the damn rules and one of the things you might think about this and this is where I thought the psychoanalysts kind of went astray is that the psychoanalysts tended to think that you were sane if your interior psychological structures were integrated and well put together so your psyche was sort of something inside your head roughly speaking and Sanity was something that was an individual issue but I think you know another way of looking that at that and it's it's a more powerful way of looking at it I think is that you're hardly self-regulator at all all you have to do is behave well enough so other people can stand being around you and you can Outsource the problem of your own sanity because as soon as you get a little weird if you have people around you they'll just tell you and so you don't have to remember how not to be weird you just have to pay enough attention to other people around you so that when they indicate by not listening to you or by not laughing at your jokes or by raising an eyebrow or by saying something smart about what you just did that you stop and reconsider and go on in your sane manner so it's also why people who are tremendously isolated often you know there's a loop there they're a little queer to begin with so to speak because you know there's something wrong with their ability to behave and then they get isolated and things just go seriously astray as a as a consequence of that so anyways the point I'm trying to make is that a lot of your knowledge is actually knowledge about how to behave right and that's the sort of knowledge that's really critical for psychological stability it's it's not related in any real sense to the world to the knowledge you have about the structure of the objective world and you kind of know that because animals are perfectly capable of surviving even complex animals like chimpanzees what they don't know a damn thing about the objective world right and their primary reality is social okay so one domain of symbolic representation is the dominance hierarchy and culture and I said that was associated with the paternal and there's reasons for that now here's here's another thing that needs to be conceptualized when you're walking down BL Street and you make a detour around the person who happens to be talking to themselves where are they because wherever they are that's not the same place you are if it was the same place you wouldn't have any trouble walking right by them wherever they are that's somewhere seriously different now it turns out that we also have the capacity to represent that and I would say an easy way to think about that is that we have there are two domains that are characteristic to experience and one domain is the domain of the known and the domain of the known is where when you act in a certain way what you want to happen happens got it and the reason that's the known is because if you act in a certain way and you get what you want that means that you know what you're doing it's actually the definition of knowing what you're doing and that that's a different definition than I know a fact about the objective world you know so if you tell someone a joke or you tell a group of people a joke and you know they laugh and maybe they want another joke it's like good for you you know what you're doing but if you tell them a joke and they sort of you know look uneasy and glance at each other well you know it's time to rethink your sense of humor and what what you just learned is that there's some mismatch between the manner in which you configure social reality and the social reality itself now imagine what happens if you do tell a joke or maybe a couple of jokes and they flop badly how do you feel when that happens if you have any sense how do you feel embarrassed embarrassed yes yes so maybe you turn red for example what what what might happen if you feel embarrassed what what would what would you do I tell as many jokes well hopefully right it's like you know that's right you'd re-evaluate your knowledge and you might think well what the hell is wrong with me or you might think what the hell's wrong with them which I would say is not a good starting point yeah but seriously though you know because you got to watch that because if it's 10 people in you maybe you're right maybe you are funny but if all 10 of them think you're not well either you're not funny or you're telling your jokes to the wrong people right and sometimes it is the case that it's everyone else that's got the problem but that's definitely not the first hypothesis that you might want to generate okay so there's a place that there's a place that exists that manifests itself when things that you don't want or expect happen and I would consider that unknown and the unknown is a complicated place because it's a place where unexpected things happen and that's also symbolically represented and that's generally symbolically represented by feminine figures now the reasons for that is extraordinarily complicated and it's going to take a very long time to explain it partly it's because the masculine as a symbolic realm is already used up that's the dominance hierarchy and because we're basically social cognitive organisms we're going to use representations that are basically human in order to start representing things that aren't precisely human because we have to start somewhere we have to start with our basic primate primate cognitive system and it's not like chimpanzees have culture you know they have dominance hierarchies and troops we have dominance hierarchies and troops and culture and we have to represent that some way and what the way we represent It Is by using the same systems that we were representing the simple structures with but generalizing with them to Encompass broader phenomena so so things that are permanent across time things you know or the fact that there are things that you know things that you don't know or the fact that there are things that you don't know that that's permanent and then there's one other thing across time that's permanent you the fact that there's an i in the equation right so you think well what are people's experiential Fields fundamentally composed of places you're secure in and that you understand so that's your territory and your territory is a very complex thing it might even be an ideological territory your territory things that you don't understand that's not your territory that's unexplored territory and you don't know what the hell is going on there and that's the unknown and then the last common element is you and so basic symbolic structures tend to represent those elements of reality known the unknown and the thing that mediates between them and the thing that mediates between them is you or more precisely the thing that mediates between them is your individual Consciousness and that's like mediating between Chaos and Order if you look up at the at the screen there look at the the Christian image on the left that's called the open virgin and there there were quite a few statues of this sort that were created in medieval Europe in the 13th 14th century and uh I want to sort of tell you what that sculpture means using the analytic schema that I just laid out for you so that you can get a sense of how this symbolic representation works now and this is a strange representation from a Christian perspective because well the representation is the Virgin Mary right that's the superordinate figure the female and inside that is God the father and inside that is Christ all right now the reason it's a strange Christian representation is that it's rare to see Mary represented as a figure that's superordinate to God and but we'll just leave that aside for now I think part of the reason that that happens that happened for these sculptures is because they were trying to express the relationship between these three fundamental elements in a way that was slightly different than the canonical Christian representation but here's how to read it well the outside that's the unknown that's the mother of all things now you might say well why is the unknown the mother of all things well where does new information come from new information comes from what you don't know you already know what you know everything new comes from what you don't know and so what you don't know is terrifying certainly because God only knows what's going to happen when you encounter it but it's also unbelievably potentially productive in fact you might think of it as potential the unknown is potential itself and so you need to know how to deal with potential because potential manifests itself in all sorts of places that you wouldn't necessarily that technically you wouldn't expect so almost by definition so you have the unknown on the very outside and then inside that you have culture it's like and so that's like nature and culture as well it's like unknown territory and known territory and then inside the culture holding the the holding you up so to speak is the individual and you might say well why in this representation is the individual crucified and the answer to that is quite straightforward life is mostly suffering and there's more to it though than that the other element too and this is part of a this is part of the complex representational system that underlies the symbolic representation of the individuals the individual is also something that can die and be reborn and that symbolic representation already showed you in the figure of Jonah right because the idea was there that some terrible thing swallowed this creature up pulled it down Into the Depths and then let it reemerge and I would say that's happened to you people many times already even though you probably don't know it so think back on your experience you know so so let's lay out a couple of things that everybody knows about someone close to you died someone close to you got a serious illness you got a serious illness you were completely heartbroken because a relationship failed catastrophically you were betrayed by a friend well I'm sure that for most of you at least well let's find out how many people in this room have had at least one of those things happened to to them right right and are is there anybody in here who's got off free from that so far oh well that's that's good that's amazing but you can see how you know unbelievably rare that is I'm sure you must have had some other terrible thing happen to you with any luck so so okay so you you perfectly well understand what those experiences are like so then the question is where do you go when an experience like that occurs Cs and you might think well what do you mean where do you go you're in the same place and I would say to you well no it depends pretty much on exactly what you mean by place you know places are times too and you can be one person at one moment in the same place and a completely different person in the next moment in the same place and that means you're really not in the same place at all and when something comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath you and you fall what you fall into is the unknown and a completely different place and that's the underworld of classical mythology and it's also the unconscious and part of the reason that it's the unconscious it's so complicated when the rug is pulled out from underneath you and you're somewhere you don't want to be and didn't expect and didn't like what starts to structure how you respond is the fundamental biological systems that make up the substrat of your psyche so for example the first thing that might might occur is that you experience it as a terrible shock and that's a physiological response and then maybe right afterwards you're angry or you're afraid or you're confused or you're depressed or you know it's another emotional response and then you start to imagine alternative scenarios or reasons why this thing might have occurred there's a whole set of processes that are automatically undertaken when you encounter something that's outside the realm of your expectation and your desire and if you understand that you see if you understand that and this is why I've told you all these complicated things today if you understand understand that that's a different place and that you cycle through that place and then back up to normal reality and through that place and then back up to normal reality multiple times throughout your life you can see that one it's inevitable that the individual is something that suffers two the individual is something that can suffer and then reconstitute itself as a consequence of that suffering it doesn't necessarily happen you know now and then something can come along and take you off at the knees and just never get back up but the general Human Experience is that you learn as a consequence of your failures and the reason for that is that the place that you go when you fail has a tremendous amount of information in it so for example it might be that if you were betrayed in a relationship that you're just too damn naive and there's a lot of things that you should have paid attention to in the world and maybe even within the person the person who you were attracted to with regards to their character or your own character that you should have known more about and if you would have known more about it well that would have been a particular hole you wouldn't have stepped it you know and so the so the appropriate reaction to a catastrophic failure and this isn't always possible is to react as how you're going to react which is usually it with shock and dismay and then to learn from the experience and to gather whatever information there is in the failure so that you can extract out that information and rebuild yourself out of it and restructure your conception of the world so it's richer and more dynamic now let let me just give you an example of that remember the The Hobbit right I don't know we spent a couple of hundred million dollars on that movie and you know it was written in the 1960s but it was based on very very old stories including some of the north sagas remember the The Hobbit at the beginning I think we established that that was Bilbo right so he lives in this little area called the Shire that's really protected and he's kind of a little guy and all the people in the Shire are kind of naive it turns out in The Lord of the Rings that they're actually protected there's these people called Striders that walk around the Border who happen to be the sons of ancient Kings who keep all the bad guys away and the Bloody Hobbits don't even know it and they're even kind of contemptuous of the Striders but they're keeping these hobbits so that they can be naive and self-satisfied and somewhat ignorant and you know a bit on the Arrogant side without even knowing that they're being protected okay well that's you that's why you were hooked into the story right off the bat and then they extract out one guy from this whole scenario who's you know got a little bit more going for him than the typical Hobbit and he wants to go outside of this paradise so to speak to encounter the actual world and so interesting because what's his what's his role what do they hire him as a thief yeah you think geez this pretty weird this guy's going on this developmental Quest you know he's going to turn into a hero and what does he start by doing he starts by becoming a criminal right but that's that seems to be part of the story it's actually part of the his heroic transformation and you know one of the things Yung said about heroic Transformations was that the first thing that happens when you put yourselfself out of side your zone of comfort if you do that voluntarily is that you encounter Your Shadow which is the part of you that is fundamentally in some sense antisocial and criminal and then you extract from that element of yourself those personality attributes you need to survive when you're outside where everything is comfortable and predictable and then what happens with billb while he encounters a dragon right that's the dragon we talked about already that's the thing that swallows you up when you don't know where you are and he and he gets a treasure as a consequence of that well you see what the story means is that if you go outside your zone of comfort if you go outside of what you understand and you do that voluntarily and you develop the skills that you've rejected that are necessary for your proper survival as an integrated human being you can encounter the thing that most frightens you and you can extract something of value as a consequence and that's the human story that's the fundamental story of mankind because we're always the thing that goes outside of what we understand to confront what we don't understand that frightens us so that we can get whatever that thing has and so that's part of the symbolic representations that you need to understand in order for us to continue to develop our investigation of phenomena like unconscious symbolism so that's that we'll see you next Tuesday [Applause] |
okay so today we're going to talk about p and p is a constructivist and a constructivist is someone who's attempting to answer the question where does your personality come from now for PJ it would be more something like where do your models of the world come from but his idea of model of the world is so broad that it's perfectly reasonable to use personality as a proxy so here's one of P's initial propositions the common postulate of various traditional epistemologies epistemologies are theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge is a fact and not a process and that if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete and our various Sciences still imperfect that which is acquired is acquired and can therefore be studied statically hence the absolute position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of factors we are tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempt to holds fast dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of this development and of it alone that we have the right to State it is a fact what we can and should then seek is the law of this process he par he puts in parenthesis we are well aware on the other hand of the fine book by Thomas on scientific revolutions the first aim of genetic epistemology because that's what he called his field is therefore if one can say so to take psychology seriously and to furnish verifications to any question which each epistemology necessarily raises yet replacing the generally unsatisfying speculative or implicit psychology with controllable analysis to know means to act human knowledge is essentially active to know is to transform reality in order to understand how a certain state is brought about knowing an object does not mean copying it it means acting upon it knowing reality means constructing systems of transformation that correspond more or less adequately to reality knowledge is a system of Transformations that becomes progressively adequate in fact if all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete an efficient one evidently it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy so here are the sorts of questions that P addressed himself to they're very fundamental questions um upon what does an individual basis judgments what are his Norms how is it that these Norms are validated what's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general and how does the fact that children think differently affect our presumption of fact itself more problems how do children conceptualize number in space and time and speed how do they understand that objects hidden from view are actually still there how do they understand that entities that can transform from one place to another are the same entities how do we understand chants or moral concerns play patterns and dreams or and how do we how is it that we imitate others and what does it mean that we can now here's a definition of constructivism this is from p as well knowledge does not begin in the eye and it does not begin in the object it begins in the interactions there's a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand and the object on the other there's no structure apart from construction either abstract or genetic now so let's take some of that apart the first thing that P is pointing out is that trying to understand what knowledge is by referring to a body of facts seems to be somewhat problematic because sh facts shift with time and people understand facts differently at different stages of development even though hypothetically we all live in the same world it it turns out that we can get by in some sense with structures of knowledge that differ from one another I think the easiest way to understand that is actually to take something like a pragmatic perspective and pragmatist and I think p is a pragmatist and pragmatic people basically say that because they're interested in what constitutes truth and of course we know that we don't have absolute truth about anything so the question is if you don't have absolute truth about anything how do you know when what you know is enough and the pragmatic answer to that is you set your own conditions for truth with each of your actions and the way you do that is by specifying an outcome so if you tell a joke and the outcome is that people should laugh you know even if 70% of the people laugh then that's probably good enough and so you could say that you've done a good enough job of matching your social knowledge to the circumstance to obtain your desired end and so PJ's P P's Notions of what constitute knowled valid knowledge structures seem to be very much pragmatic in origin and it's also partly because PJ is a thinker who's who's deeply considered the fact of human embodiment and and in fact I think PJ has done that more than any of the thinkers that we're going to we're going to talk about and so for psj truth is determined in action the next proposition is that when you're trying to understand knowledge you should understand the process by which it's generated rather than the outcome of the knowledge process itself because the outcomes transform across circumstances but the nature of the process that you engage in to produce knowledge seems to be constant across situations so and what is that process well that's the that's the next part of constructivism for p you can think of for p in some sense the reality is a field of latent information and in interacting with that information you code some of it both physically physically and abstractly and out of that coding not only do you generate yourself but you also generate well if not the object itself so to speak at least your perceptions of the object so when you're continually engaged from a pedian perspective in trying to trying to produce certain transformations in the world and as you produce them in an embodied sense because you're acting in the world you map the Transformations that occur onto the transformations of your body and that mapping constitutes your practical knowledge so for as I said for PJ the body of of knowledge that guides you is always action predicated now I want to provide you with another way of understanding P so that as we go through what he has to say we can not only understand what he has to say but we can link it to the other things that we're going to talk about now there's a man named Jerome Bruner who talked about narrative constructivism and Bruner said we seem to have no other way of describing live time save in the form of a narrative so I'm going to review a little bit for you what might constitute a basic narrative and then I want to talk to you about the way that narratives transform because one of the pedian propositions is that at a given time in development you might have a way of interacting with the world say a schema that is good enough for the aims that you want to pursue at that particular point in time but there may come a time when there are transformations of one sort or another that could be specific to you or that could actually happen in the world where if you continue to perceive and act in that manner you're not going to get what you want and so for example one here's an an example from a developmental perspective when you're 8 years old it's probably okay for your mother to arrange play dates for you but if that's still happening when you're 15 there's a problem and and so you you can see that the manner in which someone interacts with the world even if it's successful at one point isn't necessarily successful in the next and sometimes there are qualita transformations in the world that mean that the structure that you're looking at the world through has to reconstruct itself to take in more information and then you have to act out that new body of knowledge that would be accommodation from a pedan point of view PJ assumes that there's two things happening when you're interacting with the world one is that your current body of knowledge is sufficient and all you have to do is add to it in a ra rather normative way and if any of you know anything about Thomas that is roughly equivalent to Thomas Coon's theory of normal science so normal science occurs when the body of theory within a g given scientific domain is quite sketched out and what people are doing is basically um mopping up the details so you might say that uh right now in personality theory the psychometric big five models are paradigmatic and what people are doing is not so much arguing about whether or not that structure exists but are arguing about something smaller which is H what information can you derive from the world if you take as your set of assumptions that those five dimensions exist and you can see that that's a less comprehensive question than do the five Dimensions themselves exist so assimilation is when you have a notion of how to act in the world so that things happen the way you want them to and you can just add more to that an accommodation occurs when instead the the novelty and the Transformations that you've encountered are so large that you have to reconstitute the theory itself in order to progress so for example in the in the example I used where when you're eight or nine years old you can have play dates arranged but you can't when you're 15 the reason for that is that you're undergoing a series of maturational changes a lot of a lot and a large number of them are physiological and so you have to change the assumptions that you use to deal with the world and so one of the Prime assumptions might be when you're a child that it's okay okay for one of your parents to serve as a mediator of your social interactions but by the time you've hit puberty then all of a sudden that becomes inappropriate and if you continue to use the same schema then well then you're not well then you're stuck at a developmental stage that you shouldn't be stuck at that'd be roughly equivalent to Freud's idea of uh fixation it's a a similar idea so we're going to go back to this little schema here and I'm going to recapitulate the idea that when you're looking at the world this is a pragmatic frame of reference it's also a cybernetic frame of reference and I think it's one of the easiest ways to understand a pedian schema or and the beginnings of a schemata so a schemata is sort of like an arrangement of schemas and schemas are like tools to deal with the world and the tool that you're you're using to deal with the world is the tool that gets you what you want when you act it out so here's some propositions with regards to how those schemas might be formulated one is is that you're somewhere that's point a and the next is you want some transformation in the world to occur otherwise you wouldn't be acting right so you have some vision of the outcome that you wish to obtain and then you have a sequence of behaviors at the most fundamental level of analysis you have a sequence of embodied behaviors that you can apply to the world and hopefully that produces the transformation that you want now now you can take a page from biology and you can say well a lot of these schemas or or brief narratives are embedded in biological systems so for example if you're hungry then that's going to set up a particular schema and if you're thirsty that's going to set up a particular schema and so on but human beings are capable of high levels of abstraction so that instead of pursuing direct biological goals we can perform operations that are in some way conceptually linked to the Fulfillment of biological goals in a social environment across large spans of time which is a much more complicated question you know because I might say well why are you guys sitting here what does that have to do with biological necessity and the answer is well in some sense it's rather tenuous and that it's multiple stages removed from absolute necessity but your hypothesis is instead of foraging around in the frozen ground for nuts it might be better to adopt a career because that'll solve all of your bi logical problems simultaneously and so again I'm going to repeat that so the animal's problem is how to fulfill a motivational state will say your problem is how to fulfill multiple motivational States in a social environment that's composed of many other people doing the same thing in the short term the medium term and the long term and you want to come up with a solution that will satisfy all those constraints simultaneously now PJ would regard a a solution like that that is an equilibrated State an equilibrated state is a is a solution that um isn't producing anomalies or Novelties when it's enacted in the world and so it's important to understand this because it forms part of the pedian uh theory of morality now P he was a kind of a strange guy he was a childhood Prodigy um he was studying animals in depth when he was a small child he published his first scientific paper when he was 10 which was on the behavior of mollusks and the next year he was offered the curatorship of a museum in Switzerland but his parents given his developmental stage had to tell the people who wanted him to take over the curatorship that he was only 11 and that it probably wouldn't be appropriate now when P was an adolescent he went through what you might describe as a Messianic crisis he actually regarded messianism messianism as a developmental stage that often characteristic characterized late adolescence and so at that stage people are concerned with the relationship between their individual lives and the broader social community and when he was in that messis stage and very much concerned about morality he was also suffering from the tension between scientific and religious points of view and one of the things that he wanted to do as an adult was to reconcile values with science or broad more broadly speaking religion with science but we'll stick to values and morality with science and I think he got farther Along on that than anyone else has and the equilibrated state is one of his most intelligent proposition so an equilibrated state would be something like it could be two things it could be you in a happy family and it could be the happy family it depends on your level of analysis but you in a happy family are going to be equilibrated because assuming that you're as happy as the rest of the family what that means is that you found a mode of operation that simultaneously works for you and for your family and a higher order equilibrated state would be happy you in a happy family in a happy City let's say and so there are multiple levels of potential equilibration and PJ's one of PJ's fundamental claims was that an equilibrated state was preferable so there's a value judgment there to a dise equilibrated state and the reason for that was that it took less energy per unit of work to maintain an equilibrated state so think about it this way so there's family a and there's family B and they're competing in a in a local environment and family B is very disharmonious and so in order for the family to get anything done or any of the individuals within the family there has to be a tremendous amount of conflict and so the load is whatever they have to do plus the conflict they have to go through in order to to do it and in many cases if the situation is disequil enough then the conflict that you have to go through to do whatever it is that you want to do actually requires more energy than the thing itself and so P's point was then whereas in a happy family we'll say an equilibrated family both the individuals and the family as a unit can move forward without wasting a lot of time in conflict and so P's idea was that you know in a in a race for Success however you happen to define success the equilibrated system is going to outperform the dise equilibrated system because the dise equilibrated system has to waste time and energy on enforcement that's a lovely idea it's it's a profound idea because what it does is it set up it sets up the preconditions for starting to understand how value judgments so to speak and value judgments are outcroppings of theories of action because a theory of action has to do with what you should do and that's a value judgment P would say that the the patterns of action and the value judgments that lead towards a more thoroughly equilibrated state are better now you can take that a bit further and you can say that and this is sort of akin to PJ's ideas that children go through stages of development that are somewhat identifiable across cultures although there's a fair bit of debate about that it's it's a quasi pedian notion that there only might be a finite number of equilibrated solution solutions to a set of given problems so you can imagine well you pop up on the horizon you're born and you're a particular kind of entity now there are some things that you can do as an entity to continue your your existence as an entity and there's other things that you can't do so you're bounded by a set of limitations and possibilities one of the limitations seems to be is that your family has to be sufficiently well integrated so that you get a certain amount of attention so for example if babies don't get a certain amount of physical attention in the first year of their life so nobody literally touches them and plays with them then they'll often die because their gastrointestinal systems will shut down and even if they don't die they're so impaired afterwards as a consequence of that lack of initial stimulation that they never recover and so you can see right off the bat that one of the preconditions for even for existence as a human being is that you have to be born into a familial environment that that has certain structures in place now some of them are obvious like well you should be fed and you have to be fed what you need to be fed and you have to be protected and sheltered and and you know you have to be exposed to a certain amount of information flow and so on so your physical obvious physical needs have to be taken care of but then there are less obvious things that you need from your local environment like physical attention literally touch and play and social interaction and language because if any of those are lacking in the initial developmental stages depends on the stage then you're going to be so crippled that you won't be able to you won't be able to survive and thrive in the world so then you can think that you know imagine that there's a set of constraints that Define the system within which you can Thrive as an individual then you might say well there's a of constraints within which a family can survive as a family without blowing apart and then if you put multiple families together in some sort of community there's a set of constraints that have to be met for those families to live together in relative Harmony and so on all the way up the levels of complexity and a properly equilibrated State as I said would be one where you're thriving in a thriving family in a thriving community and so forth all the way up the all the way up the chain of complexity so it's a very very very smart idea and you can also imagine that one of the things that that means is that representations of moral systems might have some similarities across cultures now we know this is true already because there are a number of human universals but if you take individuals and you put them in geographical area a and you take different individuals and you put them in geographical area B because of the nature of the constraints and the fact that there's some relatively limited subset of solutions that will satisfy everyone at each of those levels of analysis you're going to expect relatively similar moral systems to develop in different cultures and so it's also a powerful argument against moral relativism now you know relativism is a tricky thing because you know you can ask yourself well are people the same or are they different and the answer to that is well it depends on what you mean when you ask the question you know and I'm not being uh sarcastic about that that question is not answerable without some additional information about what you're up to because it's like saying well are human languages the same or different and the answer is well they're the same and different there are levels of analysis at which they're the same and there are levels of analysis at which they're different and whether you consider the levels of analysis with the similarities more important than the levels of analysis with the differences is going to depend on what you want as a consequence of asking the question so we do know that there are Broad and identifiable similarities across people that don't seem to be merely biological they're also biological and cultural and you know you can see examples of that pretty quickly by the fact that you know I think there are going to be more smartphones in the world next year than there are people and so it's pretty obvious that there's a universal market for smartphones and that says something about you know that says something about the makeup of people themselves regardless of culture because people find tools that facilitate social communication desirable and they find tools that facilitate information gathering desirable and they don't have to be taught to desire that they are just like that so anyway so like I said PJ is a good antidote to moral relativism because the idea that it's like this think about it this way because this is another way to understand it um I'll give you two examples there were multiplayer online games in the early stages of multiplayer online games that collapsed into Anarchy and then they had to be shut down and the reason for that was that they weren't playable games there was there was some flaw in their underlying set of assumptions that made them unsustainable as a meeting place for multiple human beings across large periods of time others are more others are more equilibrated and people will play them and so you can also think about a game as an equilibrated state for example and psj is quite smart about this sort of thing so let's say a Monopoly game well is it an equilibrated State well the answer to that is yes in so far as all the players finish the game and then you might say well all the players finish the game and they're still friends you know because that would be another level of specification or constraint that you could put on it but it's also interesting if you consider something like an enjoyable game as an equilibrated state that you can have competition within an equilibrated State a social Community with no problem as long as everybody agrees on what the rules for the competition are you know and so PJ actually regarded competition as necessary element of games because he said that a game it's very so interesting he he actually thought of competition in some sense as a necessary as necessarily tied in with with cooperation so here's an example um take a hockey game so then we could say well are people in the playing hockey are they competing or are they cooperating and the answer to that is well it's pretty hard to distinguish because all the players within a given team are cooperating in so far as they're a given team and what that means is that each player is trying to climb the hierarchy of competence within the team but at the same time maximizing the probability that the team will be successful across multiple games and and so that means that there's a set of constraints around how that player has to interact with his teammates right he has to work in a manner that enables the development of his teammates because otherwise it's a it's like a psychopathic strategy it's a bad long-term strategy and then you might say okay fine fine people are cooperating within the team but what about between teams and then the answer to that is well they're cooperating in so far as they follow the rules you know and that they don't bring a basketball to the hockey game or a a set a chess set to the hockey game because obviously you can't play chess and hockey at the same time and so everybody's agreed to act out a certain set of Behavioral constraints and in so far as they're doing that that's a Cooperative that's a Cooperative maneuver so that's pretty that's pretty interesting too P actually believed that children couldn't become social until So at their earliest stages of development as far as P was concerned children in some sense were playing by themselves and the reason they're doing that is because they're not very organized yet their bodies are sort of not completely under their control so you could think of a child as a non-equilibrated set of Quasi functional and quasi unified knowledge subsystems so for example when a child is born and they're laying on their back their arms are kind of floating around like this and the reason for that is there arms aren't melinated yet the baby's kind of melinated from a nervous system perspective in the center of its body and its mouth is pretty wired up but the rest of it isn't very formed and so what the child has to do is integrate him or herself as an individual entity and bring all those subsystems online and into something that's sort of integrated across reasonable lengths of time and then the next goal is to do that with someone else and that's about 3 years old when social play starts so then if if you and I are playing and we're playing say pretend play we're going to say well we're going to do X you know we'll lay out the ground rules we're going to do X and we can compete to get to towards X but if we couldn't have unified our goals so unified these frames of reference we wouldn't be able to compete in the same space and so one of the things p is pointing out is that it's clearly the case that a competitive game can can facilitate cooperation and in fact the establishment of such games might actually be absolutely fundamental to socialization itself so you know because well you don't just want a game that everybody can play I don't think so I don't think that's sufficiently motivating for people you want a game that everyone can play that everyone has a chance at winning because playing is something that's for sure and if it's a good game just playing it is interesting but winning is also something and so that places another constraint on those games that people find that people are willing to voluntarily play you know and one of the things that you can think about with regards to the 20th century is that the 20th century was an experiment in producing games that were predicated on rational assumptions about the nature of mankind so for example the Communist said well from each according to his ability to each according to his need which sounds like a pretty reasonable proposition right so you should work as hard as you can and and give what you can to the community and if you need something something from the community then it should be given to you and you think well you know that seems like a pretty positive presumption you know and there were other presumptions that went along with the theory as well like the fact that private property was something that was um a Scourge and and and to be eliminated and so you know lots of societies set that game up as a experiment in some sense and we found out very very rapidly that it didn't work so all games are not equally playable and that's a that's a a proposition that you can use to orient yourself in a world where people talk about the relativism of different moral beliefs now obviously there's some relativism because in our society for example you can do perfectly well playing the plumber game or playing the lawyer game and the plumber game and the lawyer game are obviously different at all sorts of levels of analysis and you know those are modes of being you could think of them in some sense as moral systems and both of them can operate in the same environment so even in an equilibrated State there's room for a fair bit of variability but its variability within boundaries just like the play when you're playing a complex game is variable within boundaries you know in most games that are enjoyable to play multiple times set out some pretty serious constraints but within that system of constraints they enable a lot of freedom so all right so you know that's that's an overview of P pH jedan Theory I mean I'm particularly interested with regards to this course in PJ's theories of moral development and I outlined them in some sense right there so you know one of the things that would happen is that once an equilibrated state is set up at multiple levels of analysis the child's job is to interact with the environment in a manner that doesn't that this class can go ahead without interruption is that you're all playing an equilibrated game roughly speaking you don't have to be here but you are and there's a whole large number of Unwritten procedural rules for being here and you're all following them you know and you can think about that as a consequence of some degree of tyranny and people have made that comments about classrooms and sometimes it's true but you can also think about it as a pretty successful equiv cated State because universities have been around for Thousand Years you know and they've continued to cross time so it looks like a it looks like a pretty good game so yeah the trick is is that the value systems emerge as a consequence of multiple constraints laid down by the fact that there are multiple levels of reality that have to be harmoniously working simultaneously and you know you're biologically equilibrated system in so far as you're healthy right because well none of your none of your DNA has decided to make a go of it on its own which is basically what happens when you develop cancer and so it's a stacking of systems on top of one another so that each is nested in the other and they're all working together and it's a you can imagine that's a very very tight set of constraints and there's certainly lots of situations where none of those are going to be met so what's your motivation for learning this fits very well into cybernetic models of of learning as well well you're motivated to learn when what you do doesn't produce what you want it to to do so that's another um that's another description of pragmatism fundamentally so remember this is an action-oriented Theory you're specifying the outcome and then you're acting on the world in order to bring it about and if it doesn't work then you have to reexamine your assumptions and then or it's funny you have to reexamine your assumptions which would be part of accommodation because you'd be shifting around the assumptions of the theory within which you're operating but you're also going to be assimilating new information too so for example you know if you maybe you're 15 or 16 and you've tried to establish a relationship with someone that you have a romantic interest in and that's failed multiple times well the first thing is it's obvious that you're the set of assumptions that you're bringing to bear on the situ situation are are inaccurate and you might say well what's the evidence that they're inaccurate and the answer is well you aren't engaging in any romantic relationships and that's the whole point of the theories so they're inaccurate in so far as they're not producing the desired outcome okay so then you might say well what could you do about that and one would be well you could gather some more information so one of the things I do with my clients for example if they happen to be terrified of the opposite sex which is you know generally is a is a that's a very high probability um situation I often get them to go to speed dating games because they can interact with 20 people in the space of an hour or two and it expands their knowledge of interactions and also their knowledge of the variability of the people that they're dealing with and so it's it's a form of exposure so you could say if you're using the old kind of habituation Theory you could say Well they're just getting accustomed to the situation but that's rubbish that isn't what they're doing at all what they're doing is going in there and they're interacting and each time they interact they gather more information and then what do they do with that information well they build it into themselves and that means that they start behaving differently and they start conceptualizing themselves in the world differently and so some of it's built in at a procedural level which means maybe they become more fluid and less awkward in their non-verbal self-presentation but at the same time they're also incorporating abstract knowledge that's going to help them expand their domain of competence and so for PJ the motive is if it doesn't work well then you should be motivated to fix it now you know that doesn't work under all circumstances because sometimes if it doesn't work it crushes you you know and so well that's something else we'll talk about here so okay so this little diagram kind of points out a little more complicated version of that so you're going from point A which is the unbearable present to point B and there's more or less two things that can happen and one is what you want to have happen and the other is something other than you want happens now sometimes the thing that you that happens that you don't want to happen is minor in which case you can just modify you don't have to change your whole Theory you can just modify one tiny sub element of it and you'll get where you're going so for example if I wanted to walk towards that set of doors there and I was going to do it blindfolded and I wasn't aware of this environment I would walk forward until I encountered a desk say and then I could just feel my way around the desk and continue forward so I wouldn't have to disrupt the whole plan I would just have to alter microelements of it but if I'm going to med school hypothetically and I write the MCAT and I get 30th percentile which 30% of the people get or lower right then you're not going to medical school and so that requires a radical read vamping of the of the system that you're using to schematize your world and you know you might say well that would be motivating to that would motivate you to see what you did wrong and to change it so you could go to medical school but sometimes it's just hopeless what you do this is a radical Act of accommodation is you do something else you know and you might go through an intervening period of tremendous chaos well everything has fallen apart into its subsidiary elements and you have no idea how to unify that once again into equilibrated state so so the diagram here shows you point a and point B it says when you're going to point a then what you want can happen and that's great because you move forward plus you validate the whole Theory or you can move forward in something that you don't unexpect H don't expect happens and you don't understand it and that stops you and if it's bad enough it invalidates the whole Theory now you might ask well what's the difference between a small dis ruption and a large disruption and that's a very complicated thing to figure out but and it took me a long time to figure this out I would say it probably took 20 years is that you could imagine that each of your your schema your systems of adaptation work in a given area and across a variety of circumstances okay then you could say the most fundamental assumptions that you have are the ones that for you have worked across the broadest possible range of situations and time spans so they work when you're alone they work with when you're with other people they work in the short term and they work in the long term if you disrupt a schema that's a schema that has oriented you across wide swaths of time and space then that's really going to disregulated you emotionally whereas if you disrupt a schema that's only locally operating like the table example that I gave you well it doesn't spread much it's you can make a minor adjustment that's only relevant to this time and place it'll produce a little burst of emotion sometimes even positive emotion because you just get curious about it instead of frightened so and I I can I'll show you as we proceed a little more formal way of schematizing that because when you're reading P you might ask well at what point does assimilation become accommodation and the answer that I just provided which I hope is reasonably comprehensible is is the best I can provide here's a more concrete way of looking at it you're a Premed student or let's do pre-law because let's pick on the pre-law students instead you're a pre-law student so you can imagine that there's assumptions that go into that think about them all um you're reasonably intelligent you're reasonably verbally intelligent you're you're going to do well on the elsat uh there's going to be a career as a lawyer waiting for you if you do well um being a lawyer lawyer is a perfectly valid way of being in the world from a moral and practical perspective being a lawyer is better than any other way of being in the world because other for you anyways because otherwise why why wouldn't you pick that okay so those are pretty fundamental assumptions and then you can think well how much of your schema do they underly well your judgment about your intelligence and let's say also your relative ability cuz you know ability isn't only intelligence that's a big one right you bring that with you pretty much wherever you go there may be some domains where you think well I'm not as smart as I could be there but it's usually quite a general assumption and so let's say you write the elat and you just bomb out it's like looks like you're not as smart as you thought you were and so then what do you do about that well it's rough because you not only do you have to reconstitute your vision of the future but you have to reconstitute your vision of the present and the past all those times that you thought you were so smart turns out you weren't so you can see that that's because those those presuppositions are so fundamental that disrupting them is going to produce a a fair degree of negative emotion so and you can tell from from this diagram you imagine that when you're moving forward from point A to point B there are there are obstacles that you can encounter that you know of and you can just put a detour in place or there are obstacles that emerge that you have no idea how to conceptualize whatsoever that often happens to people if they develop the symptoms of a very serious disease disease or if someone they love develops the Ser the symptoms of a very serious disease because not only are you not going where you thought you were with the person that you thought you were going but you don't know what's going to happen the interim so it's very very difficult to accommodate to that and so one of the things I think that PJ missed at least to some degree is that there's often catastrophic discontinuities in the stage progression you know and he was looking at little kids and how they put their cognitive schema together and generally they're not completely distraught and destroyed by the necessity for transformation in the purely cognitive realm but uh well I told you I think I told you my nephew's dream about the dragon did I tell you that yeah okay so he was going through a stage transition at that point because well there were two things happening one was that he was going off to kindergarten that's a big deal and then there was some instability in family and so he had to figure out how to cope with both of those and one of the ways of coping was to become more of an individual and his dream first of all laid out for him the problem the problem was there were problems those are all the little bitey things that were jumping up on them they're problems but that's not the problem the problem is is that the problems keep coming so not only are there problems but there's an indefinite number of them and there's something that gener Ates them it's like the Hydra you remember the Hydra in ancient mythology it's got seven heads you cut off one head seven more heads grow it's like that's life so you know what do you do under those situations and he had the symbolic notion first in the dream although I triggered that with my questions which was well you go right for the source of the problems and you do something about that now part of the reason that P thought that the study of knowledge was best construed as the study of the acquisition of knowledge is because you could say well here's a situation do you know what to do and you say yes I say great no problem in that situation but then I could say here's a situation and you don't know what to do well that's a problem but that's also the problem of life and so what's the solution to the set of problems that you have no answer to and the answer to that is assimilation and accommodation exploration assimilation and accommodation now when the little guy in the dream went down the dragon's throat he went to where the fire came out and you can imagine that if a dragon is belching fire and smoke and that's turning into little you know beak demons that the fire box which is a place of transformation seems to be the core of the problem well he went to the core of the problem and he cut part of it out and then he used that as a shield now that it's a brilliant solution because basically what it proposes is that there's enough information in the world and you're a good enough information processor so that if you use all the information that's lying latent in the world against the set of all possible problems it will work and I would say you know we have lots of clinical evidence that that's the case because one of the things we do for people in Clinical Psychology all the time is well they have a problem we unpack it into the things that are stopping them that they don't think they can master and then we put them in a situation where they're asked to develop Mastery over just those situations and it works and if you do an analysis of why it works it's not exactly that they become less afraid so let's say somebody's agrh obic and they don't want to go in an elevator and you teach them to go into the elevator you might say Well they're less afraid of the elevator but it's not exactly right what they are is more confident in their ability to be the sort of creature that can overcome fears and Prevail and therefore go in the elevator so instead of the world getting less dangerous they get braver which is a much better solution because the world is just not going to get any less dangerous so so the knowledge acquisition process is explore in the face of novelty and the novelty is Technically when you lay out something that you think you know and something else happens instead so this is a set of ideas that's in keeping with with uh PJ's pragmatic Viewpoint because uh let's see sorry about that so you might say well if you're if you're if you're basing your theory of knowledge on action what are the elements of that theory of knowledge because they're not exactly objects because objects are something that sort of exist outside the realm of what you're going to do with them at least in principle one of the presuppositions of science is that the object exists independently of its value but if your cognitive scheme are more or less action predicated then that isn't exactly how the world manifests itself to you not as an objective reality and here's a way of looking at it you're going from point A to point B and what do you see well you can look at it in different ways uh these are ideas that are taking taken from uh an ecological approach to visual perception which was written by JJ Gibson who's who has constructivist elements in his thinking so he would say that when you when you look at the world what you see are things that will facilitate your movement forward roughly speaking those are tools although he would have called them affordances it's kind of a broader category but no one knows what affordances mean so I'm going to use tools and the later scientists like Jeffrey gray pointed out that if you see something that facilitates movement forward that produces positive emotion so for example if I want to go up to that exit sign and I see see that pathway clear as it is now that's going to produce a little approach activation in me and make me feel good whereas if people have put six or seven pack sacks in the way and I look at that that's going to produce a bit of negative emotion right away because the other thing that you see in the world are obstacles tools facilitators affordances depending on how you look at it and obstacles and you manifest positive emotion to the tools and negative emotion to the obstacles and then there's class which is things that you don't know things you don't things you aren't able to classify as tools or obstacles but that aren't irrelevant and that's the class of unexpected things now along with tools and obstacles there's another rule which is you ignore almost everything right you ignore almost everything so most things have no value at all and the value is actually dependent to some degree on the schema that you lay on the situation so all right so I might as well tell you about this too so here's a here's a more elaborated description of what happens to you when you run into something that you don't know what to do with because remember you have to deal with the things that you don't know how to deal with which is a very peculiar problem because obviously you don't know how well what happens is that your body has default responses and one of the default responses is that you freeze because you tend to respond to anything that's unexpected as if it has a predatory impulse you know so you're back on the velt you know six million years ago and you hear something rustling in the bushes it's probably a or in the grass it's probably a pretty good idea to freeze because perhaps it's a predator and you don't want to attract its attention so one of the things that your body does to things you don't expect is to treat them as if they're predatory and you as if you're prey so you freeze and then you ramp up your physiology so your heart rate will go up for example and you might say well your heart rate goes up because you're afraid it's like well no that isn't why your heart rate goes up your heart rate goes up so that your heart pumps blood to your muscles and when you're afraid you want to have blood pump to your muscles because you want to use the damn things for running away or fighting if you have to and so that's why for example if you do psychophysiological experiments you can't just assume that raised heart rate rate means fear because it might excitement or any number of other things what it really means is that you're preparing to act well and so how do you prepare to act if you don't know what to do and the answer is you're pretty much prepare to do anything and that's really hard on you and if you stay in the if you stay in the mode of preparing to do anything for a long period of time then you age and you're more likely to become diabetic and you're more likely to become obese and you're more likely to get cancer and infectious diseases and so on and so forth because well partly because your body suppresses your immune system while you're in the state of not knowing what to do next because you know if if you have to fight with a tiger the next five minutes doesn't really matter if you're going to die of small pox in a year so your body just shuts off everything that isn't useful so and you might think about that as stress and that's a pretty good way of thinking about stress and then you might assimilate that to dominance hierarchies and here's how you could do it at the top of the dominance hierarchy everything you do works that's why you're at the top of the dominance hierarchy at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy nothing you do works that's why you're at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy now that might be the fault of the dominance hierarchy but as far as you're concerned it's irrelevant because the point is what's it doing to you and the answer is if you're at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy you don't know what's going to happen next and so you're always in a state of chronic preparation for activity and that's why you die sooner and you're more likely to develop infectious diseases and all sorts of things and that's even true if you control for absolute income so all right so that's kind of what this diagram indicates so this is a this is similar to the initiation rituals that we talked about before if you're in a schema and something comes along and knocks out one of the Pres supposition so what you're doing doesn't work then you're going to fall into an intermediate period of chaos and the chaos is going to be proportionate to the importance of the proposition that that was disrupted and the importance is going to be proportionate to how much you use that Axiom across multiple situations so you know I can give you a scientific example you may remember perhaps not a couple of years ago there was a report from someone in Europe that they had managed faster than light communication now the right response to that was no way because that means the most fundamental physical Theory we have that's passed like 50,000 other tests is wrong so and they say well extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but had it been true it would have been Earth shattering because it would mean that the physical theory that physicists used not only to ramp up their career but to actually deal with the world had a fundamental AC atic error you know it turned out that there was something wrong with their measurements which is you know one of the problems when something unexpected occurs right you don't know if it's some damn trivial thing because you haven't calibrated a machine properly or whether you've just discovered you know a new part of the secret to the universe so generally you should assume that you've calibrated your machine improperly and I should also tell you something about something that's akin to that from with regards to a self-protective mode of reconstructing your schema so one of the things that happens to depress people is something like this so maybe they go out and you know they try to have a conversation with someone in a coffee shop and you know maybe that person's having a horrible day or maybe you know they're very disagreeable and extroverted which makes them kind of narcissistic and so they're rude and the depressed person thinks um I can't talk to people it's bad people that can't bad useless people can't talk to people I'm a bad useless person I've always been a bad useless person and as far as I can tell I'm going to be a bad useless person as far as I can see into the future well you could say well what's wrong with that because it's TR maybe it's true maybe the reason the person won't talk to you is because like you're just wrong in a million different ways but let's not jump to conclusions so the rule there the mental hygiene rule is pick the simplest possible explanation and until you disprove that accept it and one of them would be well you that person's probably not having such a good day or maybe that person's not having such a good day you know or maybe if I smiled at them a little more brightly and somewhat less pathologically they would have talked to me you know so this it's important to remember when you make mistakes in your life don't start out with generic highlevel criticisms you know it's a pathway to self-destruction assume minor alterable changes until proven until it's proven otherwise so anyways it's a big problem because it's not that easy to figure out why where the mistake is when you make a mistake that stops you from getting what you want yes is that similar to the concept of a yes it is it's the aam's razor on the value on the value side of the equation assume a small error assume a small reparable error and then if that doesn't work out then assume a slightly large reparable error and I'll show you a schema for understanding that in a minute that's akin to PJ's construction of World from the bottom up so let me show you that here this is a very helpful diagram I think if I can find it all right we're going to go at this a couple of different ways so look at the top diagram it's a hierarchy all right so you might say what does it mean to be a good person and you might think well you know that's an empirical question but from the pedian or the pragmatic perspective that's not exactly right because what being a good person is is an abstract representation of an aggregation of action oriented behaviors and presuppositions that have a similarity across context now we're going to decompose it so this is for say an adult of about 35 what's one element of being a good person well you might say being a good parent it's not a necessary element but you know it's one of the ones that would fit there so what does it mean to be a good parent well you could say roughly speaking that you have a good job and that you take care of your family and then you might say well what did do it mean to take care of your family now one of the things I would like you to note is that these are abstractions right good person good parent take care of your family they're abstractions the question is what do they represent or what are those abstractions made up of now lots of the abstractions that are that we use are made up of descriptions of the world so scientific categories are like that but these aren't scientific categories they're pragmatic categories so they're actually made up of action not of object facts objective facts they're not made out of objective material at all they're a whole different thing good person good parent take care of your family okay what does it mean to take care of your family well there's a bunch of things it means but one of them might be you cook meals and you play with the baby okay so then well what is it mean to complete a meal well it looks like in this example you're cooking corn so what do you have to to do you have to cut it you have to set the table you have to do dishes now you can imagine you could decompose those too what do you have to do if you're doing the dishes well you have to grip a dish you have to move your hand in a twisting motion you have to push this arm forward and turn on the tap okay so what's cool about that is you can see where the mind which is the the part of us that's capable of abstract considerations meets the body right because people people are always wondering well how do you solve the Mind Body problem well this is one of the ways you solve it you assume that abstract categories are actually abstract representations of patterns of action and then you decompose them till you get to the action it's like how do you go underneath this what's next on the hierarchy well it doesn't matter because you're not conscious of it anyways it's muscle movements it's cell it's electrical information that you're cells are sharing it's completely irrelevant to you it's not part of your Consciousness this is you can do this you can't move a f you know you can't move an identifiable finger muscle because you don't know which ones they are so one of the things P would point out is that one of one of the characteristics of a baby when the baby's first born is that it has it can do these sorts of things it comes equipped to do these sorts of things those are basic reflexes now they're more basic than this but a child can do this it can stick out its tongue which is really helpful because that means that it can mouth everything in it vicinity which is exactly what a child does and the reason it does that is because this little exploratory apparatus here is quite wired up and so what the child assumes so to speak first is the world is a place to put in your mouth and that's why babies are always putting everything they can in their mouth now you know the tongue is absolutely covered with sensory and motor neres so it's unbelievably an unbelievably fasile exploratory tool and so the child starts to extract out information about the world by using its its oral reflexes to a large degree to begin with now it can also move its eyes although it's not really quite so good about that and you know because its eyes cross a fair bit it takes a while to get both of them coordinated you know it can hear things and so on it's got a sense of touch so but it's equipped to start operating on the world at the highest resolution level of analysis so we could say think about it this way as you move up a chain of abstractions your representations get lower and lower in resolution understand so for example being a good person is a much lower resolution description than picking up a fork prior to setting it on the table although picking up a fork is a microelement of being a good person so that's a high resolution description so another thing that you can know is that if you make a mistake try to decompose the problem into high resolution representations it's lazy not to not only that it's insulting so you know you come home and maybe your partner has agreed to make a meal and the thing is like scorched to death you know and so you say you are not a good person you've never been a good person and you're never going to be a good person it's like well they're not a good person in so far as they weren't able to you know make the meal but you could start with a microanalysis it's like why exactly did that burn since that's not the desired outcome you know and then you can help the person disentangle the sequence and you can find out where the error occurred now maybe they were distracted by something else or whatever but it's it's a very difficult analytic process but I can tell you if you're going to maintain an equilibrate state with yourself and with people around you stay away from the low resolution abstractions when you're discussing something important go down to the micro level you know so here's an example that you might consider with regards to children as they develop so the baby's laying on its crib on its back you know and it's trying to get its act together and it's got to organize its arms and it's got to organize its legs and it's got to figure out how to move them because it's just hitting them hitting itself in the AR head with its arms PJ would say child will be laying there and go like this and that'll sort of startle them and then one of the things he'll do is try to do it again so in that way the child uses imitation of itself to start building up the basis of predictability it's bloody brilliant idea you know so so that's part of the groundwork that the child lays to start understanding the world it's going to be putting things in its mouth and then it's going to notice similarities between the way something feels and how it it feels when it's in the mouth and it's going to notice that this motion is good for grabbing bottles but it's also good for grabbing like teddy bears so maybe teddy bears and bottles are in the same category to begin with and the category is things you can grab and bring close to you you know which is a perfectly reasonable category though it's not an objective category and the child is chaining all these things together and developing more and more sophisticated abilities with its body and at the same time because it becomes more fasile with its body it can analyze the world at a higher and higher level of resolution and so it's the circular process information in development of tools expansion of knowledge information in development of tools expansion of knowledge you sort of boot yourself up fundamentally and you do it from the bottom up now let's say you've got a three-year-old this is a good example of how children differ at different developmental stages so maybe you have a 15-year-old you say clean up your room now that is a low resolution representation now when you use that low resolution representation on the 15-year-old you assume that they know the following things so we're going to put that aside for a moment now you're talking to a three-year-old and you're in their room and the room is scattered with with junk because they've been playing and you say now it's time to clean up your room and then you leave and then you come back in 20 minutes and what's happened no the child's playing with some toy and you say you know didn't you hear what I said and the answer to that is well I heard it but I didn't have any idea what you meant and the reason that I didn't have any idea what you meant is because I don't have the microprocesses embodied in me so then you take the three-year-old and you say do you see your bear and the child goes yes because they've got seeing down you point they can see what you're pointing at great that's a little micro routine and then you say could you go pick up that bear and they know that one too so then they'll go pick up the bear and then you might point to a space on the Shelf that's empty and you could say well could you put that bear in that space and they've got that too so then you want to help them clean up the room but you don't want to do it for them well what do you do you build up all the micro routines it's painstaking hey if you're a parent you're just going to think well go play I'll clean up the room but then you'll be cleaning it up until the child is 15 because they won't develop the micro routines so you might as well just start right off the bat and go through the painstaking process of building up the procedural knowledge as the ground for the abstract conceptions because the next time the child you want the child to clean up the room you could start by saying pick up the toys on the floor and put them where there is space on the shelf and maybe they've gener ized across those you know more concrete instances of cleaning up so that they can use the abstract representation to govern themselves so this also helps you figure out what it means for something to mean something you might say well that's meaningful what what does that mean well it means that partly it means that you have the underlying structure so that you can take the abstract utterance and decompose it into actionable sequences in the world now now sometimes meaningful also means you could use the information to reconfigure the abstractions that you use to guide action in the world so that's a bit more complicated but you get the point now part of the reason we can communicate and this is quite interesting and this is sort of in keeping with PJ's ideas is I kind of know what you know now why do I know that well it's because I it's not cuz I know you cuz I don't but it's because you're like me a lot I mean physiologically we're you know not clones but the similarities are obviously there so I can assume that you have some relationship with your body that more or less parallels the relationship I have with my body and then I can also assume that since that the environment you grew up in was sufficiently similar to the environment that I grew up in so that the schema of actions and abstractions that constitutes your personal ity is similar enough to mine so that I can use abstractions and you'll know what they mean and so it's a very complex and sophisticated theory of communication right because it assumes that well where is the meaning in a word well the word is embedded in a phrase and the phrase is embedded in a sentence and so on so that's complicated but the meaning is is that I compress a whole sequence of action strategies and representational schemas into a phrase and I toss it to you and you decompose it and then you've got the meaning you know and some of some like you can't do something like well how do you play the piano well you sit in front of it move your hands up and down the keys right that's too low resolution to be useful but especially if I know that you don't know how to play the piano but if if I can assume sufficient shared experience and shared biological commonality then I can use high level abstractions and we can exchange information so all right so the petan notion at least in part is that you're interacting with the world constantly and you're doing that in order to extract out from the world what you need and to increase your competence at getting what you need right so that's a cool idea too so and here's a way of understanding that way of understanding equilibrated States at a high level of abstraction so think about this so your kids in a soccer game and uh let's say he trips someone and elbows them and the referee doesn't catch on and their team wins the game and maybe their team wins the game because he tripped them and elbowed him and the kid comes off the court the pitch yes and says we won and what do you say well if you're like 30% of the soccer parents I saw you say good job you should have kicked them again but that that isn't what you should say right you should say that's no way to win and then the question might be what in the world do you mean by that because as far as the child's concerned hypothetically They just won and that's the point of the game so when you say that's no way to win what do you mean well think about it this way what's the definition of winning at soccer well one question is well winning the game well yeah that's kind of that's a little too high resolution for the current purposes like how about um developing your skill as a physical being Ah that's a good one developing your skill in a physical being as a physical being in a manner that will translate into success in other domains of the world ha that's even better you get to be well-developed physically and it works more places how about developing your physical abilities in a manner that ensures that lots of people invite you to play games for the rest of your life that's a really good deal and so when you say well it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game what you're saying is the proper equilibrated state is not Victory within a game it's the ability to play many games and to extract out value from each instance of playing and then you went across huge swath of time instead of sacrificing that to some trivial local Victory and that's another example of how morality emerges from the bottom up from the games that people play so there's actions and then there's the integration of actions and schema within yourself as an individual then you kind of got your act together as a two to four year-old and you better have your act together by the time you're four enough so that other children will play with you because otherwise you're basically screwed for life you cannot be fixed after that and there's endless amounts of evidence showing that so you kind of got yourself together by the time you're 2 to four enough so that other people can tolerate you and then you start playing games with them and the games are cooperative and competitive and if you're good at playing which means you're Fair across multiple instances of the game then you'll have lots of friends and you'll be able to play with them and then you'll have a whole network of games which is all the games you play with all your friends in all the different circumstances and then you're going to learn how to be a good player across all those games and hopefully the environment that constitutes the shared elements of that set of games is similar to the adult environment that constitutes a whole set of things that you'll do when you're an adult and that'll mean that you're socialized enough to start to develop some autonomy and individuality and Independence and that's all emerging from the bottom up it's not a top down it's not instantiated from the top down it's a natural progression of moral systematizing in society as a whole and also a natural progression of your adaptation to that system as you mature and that in 90 minutes or thereabouts is the essence of pedian theory and there's some elements of a lot of what you learn if you take P generally speaking is stage Theory and compared to what PJ was really up to Stage theory is pretty much irrelevant because what I laid out for you today was really what he was up to and all the things that he was doing in the multiple Publications that he laid out were attempts to determine how does society organize itself from the bottom up and how does the individual do the same thing and it's an extremely useful way of thinking you know so and we'll close with this from a practical perspective because I try to only teach you things that I think have practical utility so that means if you know them you'll understand yourself and others better and you'll get along with with them better and that the net consequence of that will be that you're better placed in the social world and that'll make the social World somewhat better so what's the take-home message from this well one is the most important one I think is don't use highlevel negative abstractions to characterize your behavior or that of others what you have to do is the the the thing is is that if you have someone for example maybe you have a roommate who can't cook or maybe you are that roommate it's like in order to help someone like that you have to decompose the process until you hit the level at which they're competent and then you have to teach them how to integrate those things that they know into the next stage of development so it's a complex decomposition and then you're actually helpful and now you'll find when you have an intimate relationship with someone that you want to last over the long run I can give you a couple of hints one is do not use high level negative abstractions they'll hate you and for good reason because you're criticizing them in a generic and stupid manner what you want to do is first of all help them identify the problem at the highest level of resolution necessary and then Implement a solution that will actually solve the problem now that often takes a fair bit of conflict and a fair bit of immediate analysis it's difficult and so people will avoid it but if you do that every time you do that and it works that's a problem you'll never have again in your life that's a really good deal so it beats the hell out of ignoring it and hoping that it'll go away so all right so we'll see you Thursday [Applause] |
So, today we're gonna talk about Jung, and I find that tremendously entertaining I am not sure I've ever read anyone as intelligent as Jung Except, maybe Nietzsche. It's funny, he is accused of many things, such as starting a new religion by some rather unscrupulous biographers But what he did was actually far more radical than anything he's ever been accused of. One other thing I should tell you too, is Jung is often been accused of antisemitism, but one of things that came into light last year, is that he was working as an agent for the American government during World War II and frequently set updates on Hitler's psychological condition to the highest levels of the American government He never told anybody about that So, you know, that's a little hard on the old accusations on antisemitism, I think which I never thought held any merit anyways So, Jung He (Jung) was a strange guy, in many ways. Extraordinarily imaginative He could get lost in daydreams and was a tremendously powerful visualizer and a lot of what he discovered was a consequence of engaging in long-term elaborated fantasies and in these fantasies, he could have conversations with figures of his imagination and communicate with them. I had a client at one point who was a very prolific dreamer and she can talk to her characters in her dreams and ask them what they meant symbolically and they would tell her That was really something I've only seen one person who was capable of doing that I don't know if it helped her that much, in the final analysis but she could do it Jung was very very interested in the depths of the human imagination his body of work can be viewed as an amalgam of many things, but he had deep knowledge of Latin and Greek and he had studied alchemical manuscripts for many many years as an older man so he was very interested in the emergence of the idea of science from what he considered the collective imagination but in many ways his primary modern intellectual influences, I would say, were Nietzche and Freud. And Jung really set out, somewhat like Piaget, to address the gap between religion and science but he did it for different reasons than Piaget. Jung took Nietzsche's comments about the death of God very seriously and one of the things Nietzsche predicted at the end of the 19th century was that there were going to be two major consequences of the collapse of formal religious belief he believed that that would lead people to a morally relativistic condition that would prove psychologically intolerable because if you adopt a moral relativist position and you take it to its final conclusion then everything is of equal value and there's no gradient between things there's no better, and there's no worse. And, in the final analysis, you might say, well, there's no good and there's no evil and the problem with that is you can't actually orient yourself in a world that has those properties because in order to act, as we've already talked about with regards to the cybernetic models, you have to be aiming at something that's better than what you have now or there's no reason to expend the energy and so you need the gradient, you need a value differentiation in order to act and Nietzsche's analysis was predicated on the idea that if the value hierarchy collapsed well not only would people not be motivated to do anything anymore but they would also be extraodinarily confused and depressed because the value would go out of their lives and the consequence of that would be that they would become somewhat nihilistic or maybe absolutely nihilistic or that they would turn to ideological, rigid ideological systems as a replacement. Now, what Nietzsche offered as an alternative to that was that human beings could create their own values and so his idea was that the Superman, the Overman -- depending on how you look at it would be the person who is capable of transcending the valueless universe that the decline of religion had left with us and creating their own values as a conscious act. The problem with that is that it isn't obvious that you can create your own values as an conscious act because it's not obvious that values are consciously created And I think this is why the psychoanalysts had so much to add to the philosophical debate at least the philosophical debate that developed to the point of Nietzsche's observations. When Freud entered the scene, the idea of the unconscious was in the air, but Freud formalized it to a much greater degree than anyone else had, and Freud's theory really is deeply biological it's biological, it's social as well, but his proposition, the proposition that there is an Id is fundamentally the proposition that you're not necessarily... Your consciousness, for sure, is not the master in its own house. Now, I think part of the reason that people like to go after Freud --there's a variety of reasons-- but one of them is, that modern people basically accept radical Freudian presuppositions more or less as givens now So if you are a brilliant thinker and your thought permeates the society to the point where your most radical propositions are accepted by everyone, all that's really left are your errors. And so it's easy to concentrate on Freud's errors because we've already digested everything he had to say that was particularly profound. I don't imagine --perhaps I'm wrong but I don't imagine that there's anyone in this room to whom the news that many of your motivations aren't conscious comes as a surprise. I mean, even psychologists have admitted that in the last 20 years They talked about the cognitive unconscious which I think is a real slight of hand maneuver to stop them from having to credit Freud with his discoveries and I also think that Freud's notion of the unconscious is far more sophisticated than the cognitive scientists' notion because Freud viewed the unconscious as a place that was bascially populated by fragmented personalities not cognitive schemes of one form or another or not processes but things that were like living beings. You know, you think, 'Well are the living beings in your unconscious?' And the answer to that is, well, 'are you alive or not?' And you're alive so you're composed of living subcomponents and they're not machines, or at least not in any way that we understand machines They're fragmentary sub-personalities and each of them has their own worldview and rationalizations and emotional structure and goals And so that's why when you're hungry you see the world through the eye of a hungry person and you think thoughts about food And your emotional reactions depends on whether the food is available or whether it isn't and maybe whether not the food you want is available and whether it isn't and that's nature, so to speak, imposing its necessities on you as a living being. For Freud, that was the Id and Freud thought of the Id really as something that was primordial and primitive and that was one of the things that really separated him from Jung. I think Jung is much more accurate from the perspective of evolutionary psychology In fact, I think he's radically underestimated as a thinker whose thought was unbelievably deeply grounded in biology and Jung was a remarkable person because his notion of history and the relationship between history and the human psyche covered spans of time that were really until modern historians and evolutionary psychologists started to talk about 'deep time' and the fact that, you know, the entire 4-billion-year history of the world is in some sense relevant to us as beings or at least the 3-billion, 3.5-billion-year history that there's been life on the planet. Ancient history for European philosophers was like 500 to 2000 years ago and Jung thought way past that, way back farther than that. and started to take into serious account the fact that the origins of our psyche, the ground of our psyche, is deeply biological and that it's an emergent property, so for Freud, Freud's idea of the unconscious is somewhat difficult to understand because there's sort of two elements to it. There's the ID, which is the source of primordial motivation and Freud concentrated mostly on aggression and sexuality and the reason he concentrated on those two --although he concentrated on what he called the death instinct later in his life-- the reason he concentrated on those two primarily wasn't because he regarded them necessarily as the most compelling of motivations but he regarded those motivations as the ones that were most difficult, for most people to integrate successfully into the social world So he thought that they were most likely to be repressed and therefore underdeveloped and immature. And I think that's that's a reasonable proposition I think that modern people would have to add eating to that because since the time of Freud we've gone, I would say, from a high proportion of sexually related pathologies to a very very high proportion of eating related pathologies but that's in some sense beside the point. So that's one part of the Freudian unconscious, sort of an implicit unconscious, and then the other part of the Freudian unconscious is those things that have happened to you that you've repressed because you don't like what they imply. And, you know, those are very different kinds of unconscious because one of them is dependent on your experience and the other isn't You can think of Jung, actually, as a deep archaeologist of the Id And Freud though about the Id in sort of primordial terms so his angry Id would be like a beast that's out of control but Jung recognized that the unconscious was far more sophisticated, in many ways than the conscious parts of your being. And that it guided your adaptation in ways that you didn't understand and that the ways in which it guided your adaptations and structured your understanding were universal, hence biological, and far more sophisticated than a somewhat primordial notion of biological drive might indicate. One of the things that you might consider, for example, is that from the Jungian perspective a lot of the forces that ancient people considered deities were personified representations of instinctual systems so here's a way of thinking about it --and this is a way of thinking about the collective unconscious which is Jung's, in some sense, replacement term for the Freudian Id. So Mars, for example, was the god of war, Roman god of war and you might say, 'well, what does it mean for there to be a god of war?' or Venus as the god of love, actually of sexual attraction, more particularly or of sexual possession, which is even a better way of thinking about it And you say, 'well why would people conceptualize of those phenomena as gods?' The Greeks said, for example, that the humans were the play things of the gods No, that was Shakespeare! I'm sorry, that was Shakespeare who said that Well, here's one way of thinking about it: what's older, you or aggression? And the answer to that is, well, you're 23 and the system that mediates biological aggression in mammals and their progenitors is tens of millions of years old. And if you think you control it, rather than the other way around you're deluded about your central nature Part of it is that you don't control it at all What happens is that you never go anywhere where you need to use it And so one of the things that happens to soldiers in wartime, for example, is they go somewhere where they could use it and out it comes, and the consequences of its emergence is so traumatic that they develop Post-traumatic Stress Disorder because they observe themselves doing things that are hyper-aggressive, that they could have never imagined that someone like them could have manifested. And then you think, well, what about Venus as a goddess? Well, if you fall in love with someone is that a choice? It doesn't look like a choice I mean, if it's a choice it's often an incredibly self-destructive and idiotic choice it's often one that ruins people's entire lives It's more like a state of possession and then you might say, well, possession by what? Well, it's a dynamic, living system and it's also immortal in some sense which is another reason why conceptualizing it as a deity makes sense I mean, the phenomena of love, which is a manifestation of a complex biological system will be around long after you're gone, and was there long before you showed up. And when it manifests itself, so to speak, within you, you're possessed by it and you do it's bidding and you might do its bidding despite what you most deeply want You know, modern people tend to think that the conscious parts of their brain the, say, the more newly evolved elements of their brain because we don't actually know what the relationship is between consciousness and the newly developed parts of the brain --and the assumption is often made, that the reason we're conscious is because we've developed a very spectacular cortical cap but consciousness appears to be far older than that, so that's an erroneous assumption. But we do tend to believe that the most complex and sophisticated parts of our brain are the cortical cap --the complex cortical cap-- that's quite enlarged in human beings relative to our body size because it's the newest systems and it's also part of the systems that allow us to do such things as communicate with language and think in abstract symbols. But there's a different way of thinking about this from a biological perspective and that is, what makes you think that the newest system is the most sophisticated one? Why don't you assume that the oldest system is the most sophisticated one. Because it's been around for... Well, for example, the mechanism in your neurological... The mechanism that underlies your conception of your relationship to the dominance hierarchy, for example, is at least 300 million years old and the reason it's lasted 300 million years is because it knows what it's doing. It's far older than the parts of your brain that make you conscious in the specifically human way and it's so deeply embedded in your brain in some sense, that you have almost no voluntary control over it. And that's why, for example, one of the things that happens to people who are depressed is that the system that reports their dominance status reports that they're low. Now, sometimes that's true because they're not depressed, they just have an awful life and they're actually at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, and that's not the same as being depressed. But sometimes it malfunctions, so someone who's competent and well situated in life and who appears to have everything that a person could possibly desire in order to have a decent and meaningful and positive life are still catastrophically depressed. And what seems to happen in those circumstances is that the dominance counter, for one reason or another, is acting as if they're actually incredibly low status when they're in fact not. And I think that's a good definition of clinical depression. I also think that part of the reason that there's mixed results with regards to anti-depressants trials is because anti-depressants don't help you if you're at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. How could they? You're not depressed, you just have a terrible life! That is not the same thing! And they need to be carefully distinguished because if you're unemployed and you're facing the loss of your home, and maybe your partner's going to leave you, and your children hate you, an anti-depressant is very unlikely to fix that. Now, to the degree that misbehavior on your part caused by impulsivity and increased aggression and decreased mood because of your reaction to that circumstance is making it worse, then the anti-depressant might help you, and maybe the anti-depressant will help you regain enough cognitive control so that you can plan your way out of the situation but as a medication in and of itself, there's no possible way it can lift you out of those often catastrophically complex and disintegrating circumstances Whereas, if your life is fine but you feel terrible, well, it's much more likely that an anti-depressant can help with that because in some sense what it's going to do is to readjust the reporting of your dominance counter, so to speak to the level that's appropriate for your level of competence, which is really what you want You know, people say you should have self-esteem I would say, idiots say that you should have high self-esteem it's an unbelievably corrupt construct in many ways because it's actually very very highly correlated with baseline levels of neuroticism, negatively, which is a fundamental personality trait, and baseline levels of extroversion so someone with low self-esteem is generally someone who's introverted and has high levels of negative emotion, it's a trait-like phenomena It isn't clear at all that calling that low self-esteem has any utility whatsoever But then you also might ask yourself, 'well, how much self-esteem should you have?' Well, and that's a very complex question because you can clearly have way too much That's what would make you a narcisist. So I would say your self-esteem should be roughly equivalent to the esteem to which you're held by members of your society You know, your family and your society, because they're judging you, at least in part, on your competence. And you shouldn't think that you're more competent than you are, and you shouldn't think that you're less competent than you are. You should think that you're as competent as you are. And sometimes that means that you're not competent at all because you don't know what you're doing and sometimes it means that you're quite competent Now, I think it's complicated by the fact that you should also regard yourself not only as who you are but as who you could be And so if you're of lowly dominance status, which for example in some sense you guys are because you're young and, you know, you're starting your lives the fact that there's a lot of potential that you still are able to manifest should tilt the self-assessment balance in your favor, to a fair degree. Anyways, Jung was very interested in the depths of the psyche and for him the unconscious wasn't a repository of repressed experiences, and it wasn't a repository of underdeveloped and irritated biological systems It was instead the underlying structure of consciousness itself. So Jung believed that human experience, as it's consciously manifested, was structured by underlying patterns of behavior that were specific and unique to humankind although shared to some degree with other animals And then on top that a realm of imagistic and symbolic representation that in part was a consequence of representation of those underlying behaviors So here's a way of thinking about it: We act in a human way, whatever that means and we've been acting in a human way for as long as there's been human beings and we've been acting in a mammalian way for as long as there's been mammals. Now, human beings are quite peculiar creatures because, not only do we act, we also watch ourselves act and we represent those actions And Jung believed that as a consequence of us manifesting a specific set of typically human behaviors over hundreds of thousands --or perhaps millions of years-- we also evolved the cognitive apparatus that was capable of representing those patterns of behavior and that cognitive apparatus expressed the representations of those fundamental patterns of behavior in imagistic and symbolic form and the basic imagistic and symbolic form is something like drama. Now, why would that be? Well, it's obvious in some sense What is drama? Drama is the representation, the abstract representation, of patterns of behavior That's what you do when you go to a movie You watch people manifest their characteristic behaviors. And then you might note that there is characteristic, quasi unique patterns of behavior that are portrayed in drama. So, for example, there's the bad guy, and he wears a black hat in a cowboy movie and whenever you go to a movie it's pretty clear to you right away who the good guys are and the bad guys are and you accept the distinction between good and bad guys as an apriori acceptable distinction. So Jung would say, 'well, that's the action of an archetype' what underlies that is the archetypal story of the hostile brothers and hostile brothers, for example, are Cain and Abel The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis, by the way, is really the second story that's in that origin myth and it's the first story about real human beings, right? Because Adam and Eve, so to speak, were created by God, whereas Cain and Abel were born. The first brothers. Well, what happened? Well, one of them became insanely jealous of the other and murdered him. So that's a pretty harsh story when you think that the monotheistic religions of the West, roughly speaking, put as one of their foundational stories the idea that there is a twin pair of forces operating in the human psyche that can be conceptualized as brothers who are murderously opposed to one another |
so here's how to conceptualize yourself in union terms the part of you that you consider you roughly speaking jung considered the ego and you might think about that as the most individual part of your psycho physiological being i mean the difference between individual and collective in that sense is that you share very many attributes with other people obviously your physical form is very much like that of other people and then you share attributes with other living creatures way back down the phylogenetic chain and so in that regard there's nothing specifically individual about you but the part of you that you identify with most completely and that you regard as unique that's the union ego now jung sort of conceptualized your psyche as a as a i would say as a place i suppose that many spirits could inhabit and you might think about a spirit from from the union perspective as a personality that can inhabit the psyche and so like all the psychoanalysts jung regarded the psyche as a relatively loose collection of partially integrated personalities and each of those personalities had their own perspective their own thoughts like their own way of looking at the world that would be the perspective their own thoughts their own emotions their own habits their own actions and those are roughly aggregated into some sort of unity and that was the that was the ego now the ego has a public face and the public face young called the persona persona means mask and the persona is both that part of you that you show to other people instead of the part that you hide and then also to some degree it might be the form that your ego takes even to you so for example if you're a naive person you might think that your public face is all there is of you the the rough difference between the ego and the persona might be conceptualized this way that you know there are things that you think that you won't say in public maybe not even in private some of those things you're pretty aware of and those would be thoughts that are relevant to the ego but not the persona and then some of them you don't even really want to be aware of and jung would consider those more associated with the shadow now the shadow the existence of the shadow first of all you might want to remember that the best way to conceptualize jung's archetypal constructions is in some sense as metaphors so you could say that well jung thought that it was useful to separate up the psyche into persona in ego and then shadow it isn't that there aren't other ways that it could be broken up but breaking it up this way is useful for certain purposes and jung regarded this terminology as particularly useful from a psychoanalytic perspective and also from a historical perspective so perhaps the divisions could have been made could be made otherwise and there are many ways of looking at archetypes but this is sufficiently useful to progress with now people's personas are generally somewhat harmless and somewhat socialized if you don't know how to act in public you don't have a well-crafted persona you know some of you are going to be the kinds of relatively deep thinking intellectuals who think that small talk is nonsense and uh there's some utility in that thinking because in some sense from a philosophical sense obviously it's nonsense but if you don't know how to make small talk basically what that means is that you have a poorly developed persona and what that'll mean is that you're not going to do very well at least at the beginning of social in social engagements because you need to be able to convince people that you're basically civilized and social before it's even reasonable for them to go beyond pleasantries with you and the ability to exchange pleasantries in a relatively banel way in a variety of different circumstances is part of having a persona and you don't want to denigrate the utility of that because you need it you know as you progress in your careers for example you're going to be thrust into situations where you don't really know anyone and the purpose of the gathering is to familiarize a large number of people with one another and there's a skill that's associated with that that's somewhat glib social ability the unions would say well you shouldn't if you don't have a persona you're just a disaster but by the same token you shouldn't be only persona because one of the possibilities is that the ego can identify with the persona and then the person thinks that they are what they show the social world and the problem with that at least from the union perspective is that um a people are a lot more than the persona they're a lot more than the ego and b a lot of the things that make them more than mere persona or mere that more than mere ego are not necessarily things that are acceptable in casual public gatherings so for example because of your psychophysiological makeup you all have the capacity for aggression now a lot of you especially the ones that are more agreeable you could say that even it's either that that capacity for aggression has been underdeveloped because you've identified with a certain mode of social being or you could say perhaps if to the degree that agreeableness is temperamental that the aggressive tendency isn't as powerful in you as it is in other people that might lead you to make judgments like and i'm sure some of you perhaps some some of you who had an angry parent or particularly an angry father have decided at some point in your life that to be aggressive is wrong to be angry is wrong for example or to be aggressive is wrong it's morally wrong one of the things that happens in psychotherapy very frequently though is that people come into psychotherapy for a variety of reasons some of them are merely practical they're having problems in adaptation because their lives have got very very complicated and they really don't know what to do about it sometimes they go into psychotherapy because they have very high levels of negative emotion and that can be associated with the first problem but very often they come into therapy because they're getting pushed around constantly and they really don't have anything that's a sufficiently well-developed personal identity and generally those that happens by the way most more often with women than it does with men and that's because women are by temperament more agreeable than men and perhaps also by socialization temperament certainly plays a big role often then the the goal of therapy is assertiveness training and assertiveness training you could think of as the behavioral psychologists equivalent to incorporating the shadow so you know you may think well it's it's a necessary part of existence to be nice to other people and there's some truth in that not really it's a very shallow way of looking at the world because nice is not a very sophisticated word but even if that's the word that you do use you should also be nice to yourself and sometimes what that means is that you have to put forward your own wishes and desires in a manner that causes a certain amount of conflict and in order to to withstand that conflict you have to have you have to be able to draw on the the sources of aggression that in some sense are are are are a deep part of your your inbuilt set of possibilities now the reason that's necessary in part from a biological perspective is that people are often afraid of engaging in conflict because they're afraid because because because conflict can be real trouble and anger inhibits fear so if you don't have a well-developed capacity for well we could say rage then you can't overcome your fear and then you can't stand up for yourself and then you're going to get run over now the problem with that is is that if you get run over enough it'll make you resentful and then that will make you aggressive except it'll make you aggressive and sneaky underground and somewhat unconscious ways that are much less likely to be productive than you know a frank exchange of viewpoints and some conscious negotiation so one of the things i do in therapy for people who need assertiveness training is i get them to pay attention to their resentment and resentment is often a good avenue into the shadow because first of all resentment is a pretty destructive emotion it's extremely useful emotion but it can be very destructive because it gives rise to well first of all sense of victimization and second then the underground growth of all sorts of ideas of revenge and vengeance and and also a kind of stubborn non-cooperativeness because who wants to cooperate when they feel taken advantage of and so part of jung's idea with regards to the shadow is that obviously the social world wants you to be peaceful and predictable and maybe even easy to get along with but that doesn't necessarily mean that peaceful predictable and easy to get along with a are the only virtues because they're certainly not and one thing we know about virtues is that if they're taken to too great and extreme they become vices and b they're certainly not the only virtues you know there are what you might call darker virtues so to speak they're they're more dangerous virtues in some sense because they harness forces that can be very destructive if they're not utilized consciously and aggression is a certainly an example of that so here's some fundamental rules about the shadow that you might think about as you move forward through your life so a lot of times you're going to have to negotiate on your own behalf and so what that means from the perspective of agreeableness and aggression is that you should be able to stand up for yourself at least as well as you would stand up for someone that you care for so the problem with the idea of being nice to other people is that it doesn't take you into account and that's supposed to be an equation even though it's as i said nice is a pretty weak philosophical term but the fundamental rule is that you should certainly include yourself in the circle of people who deserve respect and care and that means that you have to be willing to advocate for yourself and if you're willing to advocate to yourself for yourself and you want to do it you have to be able to say no you have to because otherwise you have to say yes and then you can't negotiate and in order to say no you have to have armed yourself with strategies and plans that enable you to say no you can't be dependent you can't be afraid of potentially searching out new opportunities etc you have to be willing to stand your ground and it's very difficult to do that without drawing on some of the deeper sources of psychological energy that are part of our psychophysiological heritage so young would say well there's the persona and the ego and you can identify with your persona and then your you're you're kind of a shallow puppet of culture so pinocchio as the marionette is a persona pinocchio himself is an ego but as a marionette he's the persona so anybody who's ideologically possessed by the way is a persona although they're also possessed by the shadow even though they don't know it and you can tell when someone's ideologically possessed because you can predict whatever they're going to say once you know a few axioms of their particular ideology so a given ideology probably has four or five explanatory axioms like everything is caused by economic disparity that might be one or success is due to hard work that might be another and those are broad enough statements even though they're in opposition to one another both of those statements are broad enough so you can virtually explain everything with them the problem with it is is that you can predict what the explanation is going to be before you even have to talk to the person and whenever you're talking to someone and you can predict exactly what they're going to say because they're using some ideologically mediated structure then you know perfectly well that they've identified with the persona you also know that they're likely to be possessed by a pretty vicious shadow because we know that the shadow of ideological possession is repression and death so one of the things that's always interesting about the psychoanalysts is that whenever they see something good they're always looking for the dark side of it and vice versa by the way whenever they see anything dark they're looking for the good side of it and so they're very unlikely to take anything at face value and so if someone comes up to you and says i stand for some good thing the thing that you ask if you're psychoanalytically minded is well what does that mean that you hate because there's a reasonable probability that even though you think that you're standing for something that a lot of what's motivating you is the desire to be against something and that's particularly the case when you're dealing with with negative emotions because they're more powerful than positive emotions so it's one of the things george orwell who is one of the 20th century's great anti-ideologues published a book in the 1940s 30s 40s called road to wigan pier where he went to stay with some coal miners in the north of england and those coal miners man they had a hard life like some of them had to crawl three quarters of a mile to work in tunnels in the morning in tunnels where they couldn't stand up just to get to work so and then they do their like 10 hour shift in the coal mine digging out coal then they'd have to crawl back three quarters of a mile underground you know so they they had very very hard lives and so you know orwell was pretty um unimpressed by the conditions in which they were forced to work so he wrote an essay for the english left book club and they were so that was a socialist publishing house but he appended another essay to it where he criticized the socialists who were most likely to read that sort of book as much more oriented towards hating the rich than than loving the poor that's devastating criticism and the left book club didn't even want to publish his book but they ended up publishing it's become a very famous essay but it lays out a general principle it's like if you have identified with a given persona which is like a a social machine in a sense and you think you're all good because of what you think then you might ask well where'd all the parts of you that aren't good go because unless you think that you're a saint and that everyone who thinks differently than you is satan himself then you're missing a chunk of yourself you're not taking a chunk of yourself into account and that's the part that is nowhere near as well behaved or as benevolent as you might think or that you actually have any reason to believe you know and so one of the things that that has struck me as a consequence of analyzing 20th century history and and often through a union lens is that there's not much evidence that the sorts of atrocities that characterize the soviet union um and and nazi germany were the result of a few extremely corrupt people at the top of the hierarchy forcing everyone down into slavery and then making them do terrible things i think that's a very weak explanation in fact i think it's i think it's wrong i think the historical record is quite clear that it's wrong i mean in east germany for example one third of the people were government informers so that means if you had a family of six two of your family members were reporting on you to the government so when you look at human capacity for destructiveness if you don't regard yourself as one of the agents of that destructiveness or at least one of the potential agents of that destructiveness then from the union perspective at least there's a high probability that you're part of the problem rather than part of the solution now that doesn't necessarily mean that you should be blamed for it because blame has to come from another person and it isn't obviously clear that like i get to blame you for being potentially violent that's i think is a complete mistake but if you if you familiarize yourself with the realm of human capability and then you regard yourself as human what that means is that you have to regard yourself as a creature that's capable of what human beings are capable of and human beings are capable of a lot of things and some of them are absolutely wonderful i mean there's nothing more remarkable than a human being on the planet i mean people can do amazing things but the downside of that is that we can do absolutely horrible things and it's not obvious that it's only the pathological people who do that in fact it's it's that it's not reasonable to assume that so the shadow for jung was a very big deal you know and he believed in some sense and this is where the ideas get archetypal he believed that the ideas of of uh the evil twin of the king or the evil twin of god for that matter so that would be satan and christian theology that was a that was as real a representation of the human and transpersonal human capacity for evil as there was and he believed that if you look deep enough into your own foul motivations and if you look far enough down that you'd be looking so to speak into hell itself and you'd find the main controller of hell deep inside your psyche so it was no journey for the timid and jung also believed that and this is what separates him from a new age thinker because he's often accused of being a new age thinker new age thinkers tell you things like follow your bliss and you'll you know you'll run into utopia you're on counter utopia but that isn't what the unions especially jung said about his process of individuation at all he said that if you follow what's meaningful and you do it honestly it will take you somewhere you really do not want to go and until you go there you'll never be able to climb up higher on the other side and so that provides a real impediment for enlightenment because for enlightenment there's a price to be paid and if you look at archetypal representations of the cost of enlightenment you often find that the person who becomes enlightened has is damaged in some profound way before it happens so for example in the ancient egyptian stories of horus and osiris horus loses an eye when he has to encounter seth who's the ancient egyptian equivalent of satan so it's no joke it's seriously no joke you know and it's you know one of one of young's propositions essentially was that the human race will continue to be plagued by phenomena like the outbreak of the genocidal nazi and soviet ideologies until people realize that the nazis and the soviets are them that it isn't someone else's problem it isn't other people who aren't you it's you if you were there it would have been you and you might say well no i would have been a hero it's like no probably not because they were rare and i mean unless you have real reason to think that you could have done it then it's safer to think that you couldn't have and wouldn't have and so then there's a responsibility that goes along with that and the responsibility is to broaden your capacity of who you are so that you have the possibility of controlling the parts of your psyche that are very dark now let me give you some examples of this so you know there's a philosopher named russo and most of you are russoians without knowing it and rousseau basically made the following propositions he said that human beings were basically good but they were corrupted by culture so human essential human nature was good and the corrupting influence was was society now that's true but it's only half true and there's a philosopher named hobbs who said exactly the opposite thing he said no human beings are base and violent and uncontrollable and unless we have society structuring their interactions he was more like freud structuring their interactions they would be constantly at one another's throat and then if you think well who's right rousseau or hobbes first of all they're both right even though they say the opposite thing and second well you look around the world and you tell me whether there are more hobbesian states or resilient states an answer that's pretty clear most countries are disastrous authoritarian dictatorships in which people where people live and suffer and the places where civilization has has become stable enough so that people can live peaceful relatively peaceful and productive lives are very rare they're more common than they were in the past and they seem to be getting more common all the time thank god but it's a lot easier to be disorganized and brutal than it is to be organized productive and free so now jung believed that the the shadow is something that kind of comes apart when you when you face it so it's a blurry black mass and so in in a sense before you start to differentiate it and so you can you can tell what the shadow is as far as any one of you is concerned because you you can start to notice how you aren't like you act especially when you act around act around people that you're trying to impress or people whose opinions you think are important to you you have to pay attention to it though and you you'll be able to see that there's a distinction between what you say because you're saying something in order to make something turn out the way you want it to turn out and what you actually think and the shadows at work in two ways there one way is that it's convincing you that using your speech and actions to manipulate the world in a conscious manner is a good idea and it's not and the second is that you'll see that there are counter thoughts to what you think so if you for example if you find yourself in the position of being too nice to someone maybe it's a boss for example who's a bit of a tyrant you know and you don't feel that you're in a position to say anything um in your own defense against his or her bullying tactics the consequence of that is that you'll think all sorts of dark and dangerous thoughts about that person in your own fantasies when you're not interacting with them and if you catch a hold of those fantasies and you let them play themselves out consciously you'll see that they take you to very dark places now or at least to places that you regard as very dark so jung's notion essentially is that when you start to uncover those elements of yourself that don't fit comfortably within your ideas about yourself is that you discover things about yourself that are also potentially very useful it's as if you threw the baby out with the bath water when you were setting up your personality so for example earlier i talked about people who may have decided very early in their life that they're just not going to get angry it's like well it's not necessarily something that you want to throw away it might instead be something that you want to bring within the realm of your personality so that it it can express itself consciously and in an articulated manner because without anger for example you don't have any power which basically means that no one needs to be afraid of you and you might think well people shouldn't be afraid of you and then a union might ask well what in the world would ever lead you to believe that i mean the distinction between being respected and being feared is not clear but i would say that you don't respect anyone whom you couldn't imagine fearing if they decided to make that their priority so without the capacity for aggression you're not going to get any respect that doesn't mean that people have to fear you but it does mean that you have to incorporate your capacity for aggression enough so that they would fear you if you wanted them to and if you think about it that makes a lot more sense from a moral perspective than the argument that you should be nice to everyone because if you're nice to everyone because you don't have any choice because you're weak and ineffectual and harmless then that's not a virtue that's just you just can't do anything else you're you're you're harmless by default and harmless and virtuous are by no means the same thing if by contrast you're capable of causing all sorts of terrible trouble and you know it and you know how and then you decide not to do it because you can articulate carefully articulate a different route well then you have the possibility of virtue because without the capacity to sin so to speak there's no virtue in not doing it so if you're a if you're a young man who feels that sleeping around is wrong but never has the opportunity to do it then you can hardly attribute that to your virtue so a good union would say well you're just making a virtue out of a vice it's just rationalization it has nothing to do with with virtue now if you are attractive to people and you decide that that attraction should only manifest itself within certain tight boundaries and that's a voluntary choice that's a whole different issue now when jung claims for example that you throw the baby out with the bath water when you're trying to develop and become a socially acceptable personality that happens in a different way as far as he's concerned for each of the genders and so one of the prices jung would say that we pay and that this is a very modern idea in some ways for growing up as a distinctly gendered society is that it's very easy for men to suppress and fail develop to develop those elements of their character that might be considered classically feminine and it's difficult for women to develop and express those aspects of their personality that might be classically considered masculine and but so jung believed that nested inside the shadow in some sense were the contrasexual capacities so for example for a man given what we know about the temperamental difference between men and women it may be that men could be more could develop the capacity for true compassion and care if they they could find that ability within what they've thrown out in the shadow and women for example could find the capacity to be aggressive and assertive because that's part of what they threw out during their stage of their course of development because of because of its a priory categorization as inappropriate behavior now that doesn't mean that jung thought that there was that people should be raised without any gender identity that issue never came up for him he just thought that once you had established a personality that was sufficiently developed to be acceptable socially and functional on the individual level then you could have the opportunity to expand that personality and to take into yourself elements of of perception and thought and behavior that you wouldn't have had the sophistication to be able to handle at an earlier stage of development so jung would say perhaps that if you're a male you have to become masculine before you could become feminine and if you were a female the reverse is true but that if your development only star stops with a narrow and categorical gender identity then there are elements that of of of being that you could draw on that aren't at your disposal and that will make you weak so the shadow breaks up into the anima and anonymous and the anima is the female inside the male so to speak and the animus is the male inside the female and jung believed that he could see those partial spirits manifesting themselves in people's behavior and so he talked about a couple of typical behaviors that he thought were associated either with anima possession so that would be in the case of a man or animus possession in the case of a woman and so he would regard if you ever talk to someone who's female who seems to respond to all of your propositions with nothing but argumentation for the sake of argumentation you would regard that as a manifestation of possession by the animus and if you ever talk to a man who is irrationally possessed by rate and futile emotions then he would regard that as possession by the anima so and you can see that if you watch for it and if you believe in such things um the best thing to do when confronted with someone who's animus possessed is just shut up because you're not going to make any headway because the point of the argument of an animus inspired argument is to get you to argue not to win because by getting you to argue the animus wins so and then behind those two things behind the shadow and the anima and the animus there's a final archetype which is the archetype of the self and that's jung believed that the self was what you were as a totality and that's a hard thing to understand but but you could think about it this way you could think about the self as the as the total of what you are now plus the total of all those things that you could still be so it would be you as a reality plus you as potential and that's a strange idea right because we don't really know how to understand the idea of potential as modern empirical people because potential virtually by definition is not yet manifest and also not a straightforward thing to either measure or conceptualize by the same token everybody acts as if they're they have potential unrealized potential and so jung generated up a category to account for that which he felt was expressed in all sorts of symbolic ways so for example the wise old man like like the wizards in in the movies that all of you have seen in the last five years it's always the same wizard sometimes it's even the same actor it's like that's an archetype of the wise old man and for young christ was an archetype of the self as well and i i told you why that was to some degree and it's partly because the phoenix is also an archetype of the self because the phoenix is something that can die and be reborn and so the phoenix stands for the part of your personality that can let one thing go one part of you which is an alive part can let that go and burn up so to speak so that something new can be born because you very seldom gain something before you let something else go because that's partly because what you already assume can be the worst impediment that you have to toward to learning something new and it's complicated because sometimes what you know worked in the past you know so you can think about that maybe you're a perfectly well adapted 11 year old and you're still acting that way when you're 15. it's like well it's hard to let that go because it worked and you put a lot of effort into it but unless you let it go the new personality isn't going to be able to manifest itself so you have to stop being a child before you can be an adult and there's a sacrifice that goes along with that it's also a sacrifice that parents have to make right because in order for a parent to encourage you to adopt the responsibilities of an individual they have to allow you as a child to die and freud's observation on that phenomena was that many parents and he believed this was particularly characteristic of mothers because of their tight bond with their children and the dependency that that implies that it was particularly difficult for a mother to let her child die so that an adult could manifest itself in that child's place and that's fundamentally in many ways the edible complex okay so now i'm going to show you some of these things again because the thing about young is that it's not easy to understand what he has to say and it's not a simple thing to explain it and his books are complicated although i don't think they're any more complicated than they have to be like i don't think jung is obscure i think he's just difficult and then beyond difficult he's actually frightening so there's lots of reasons that people don't like you and the fact that he's difficult and frightening are probably the two foremost objections i think the other thing that happened to jung that maybe slowed his acceptance as an intellectual was that many of his students were women like his primary students and the people who developed his ideas many of the people who identified continued to develop his ideas after he died were women and that was perhaps not the most effective way of making headway in the academic world at at the time that he was alive so let's look at some things i'm going to show you some things from the lion king because the lion king shows you archetypes everywhere so let's do this first so okay so the first thing that i would like to point out here is that this takes place at daybreak and daybreak is when the sun re-emerges and from an archetypal perspective the sun re-emerges from a terrible battle that it had with the thing that devours the sun at night and it comes up again triumphant in the morning and so it's the dawn of consciousness and that that idea that the sun undergoes this battle is associated with the idea that you descend into unconsciousness when you sleep and magically we re-emerge from it in the morning and you do that in accordance with the sun so for you darkness is a time of unconsciousness and there's a tight relationship between unconsciousness and darkness and so jung would say people projected that idea it was an idea that was it they're in their imagination that unconsciousness and darkness were tightly aligned and so they use their imagination to explain the world and conceptualize the sun in those in those terms of imagination so that if you analyze the terms of imagination you can get some understanding into the structure of the imagination and so that's one of them consciousness and light are the same thing illumination enlightenment all of those things and that's because we're primarily visual creatures and we're conscious during the day and so this is a new beginning the new day which is something that everyone also experiences because sleep washes away the cares of the previous day and it does revitalize you we know perfectly well that if you deprive people of sleep for any length of time it's not good for them it it dera it derails them entirely deranges them entirely so there is a reason that this movie opens with the dawn of the day okay so there's another re casting of the same idea right except the lyrics also indicated that there was an association between the dawn of self-consciousness and the emergence of the light because the lyrics were when we stepped the day we stepped onto the planet and stepped out blinking into the light there's a there's a transition from unconsciousness to consciousness metaphor underlying that and so one of the statements the film is making or one of the ways that the film is trying to set you up to understand this as a story about the emergence of consciousness into the light now you might say well did the filmmakers know all this the answer to that is a it depends on what you mean by no which is really a critical factor in this sort of discussion and b well yes and the re the way they manifested the fact that they knew it is because they knew when things fit together so you know when you're writing a story or something like that or reading a story you know when the story is going well you think yeah that makes sense in fact you don't even notice it right you just assume that everything's fine because it makes sense it doesn't jar you out of the narrative and so people are perfectly capable especially if they concentrated on it for long periods of time of assembling a narrative with images that make sense now they may not know why it makes sense in fact if they're actually artists they don't know why it makes sense because they're they're ex they're expanding their capacity to comprehend and explain things while they're producing what they're producing they have to be moving beyond what they know because otherwise they're just producing propaganda you know and there are elements of many disney films that sink now and then into propaganda sort of conscious moralizing but when the films are really working they're not doing that at all and when when when they are consciously moralizing they're boring very quickly plus they date extremely rapidly there's far too much [Music] okay so that's a brilliant piece of film editing there because the the filmmakers sweep your eye along and then make something appear as a revelation and they do it at exactly the same time that the music swells to a climax and that's indicating to you that something of tremendous importance is about to be revealed and so you see two things here the first thing you see is what's called pride rock which is a is a roughly pyramidal shape at least a triangular shape that emerges in the middle of the landscape that actually serves symbolically as the center of the kingdom now you can think about that as an egyptian pyramid or you could think about it as a dominance hierarchy it doesn't really matter it's both of those things it's also the thing on which the thing that the animals are subjugated to stands right because that's where the king is and the king happens to be a lion and the lion is a solar beast it's always been a solar beast it's associated with the sun and it's the king of beasts because it's an apex predator it's at the top of the hierarchy and for whatever reason although obviously the lions in the animated movie are they're not actually lions it's important to remember that while you're analyzing the film because it's very easy to just think of them as lines even though clearly they're not now you also see this little character up in the right hand corner left hand corner and that's zazu right and zazu is the eye of the king and so the king is on top of the pyramid but the king's eye is free from the king and the kid go we're all over the place even where the pyramid can't see and that's the eye on the top of the pyramid you've seen that symbol everywhere no doubt it's the symbol that's on the back of the american dollar bill and there's a reason for it it's because the eye of the king is not part of the hierarchy the eye of the king is something that's always free of the hierarchy and can can fly over all hierarchies and that's that's equivalent to the thing that could make its way up any hierarchy in some sense it's also the same as horus the the god of vision in the ancient egyptian stories okay so there we've got the king and we'll see that he's on top of the rock which is where the king belongs he's also in full sunlight even though that's not characteristic of any of the other animals he's got his little bird there that tells him things because the king is someone who pays attention because the king who doesn't pay attention is a tyrant and then the wind is blowing through the king's hair because the wind is spirit and so the king is also something that's associated with the everlasting spirit pneuma pneuma is the breath of air and it's also the the essence of life from an archetypal perspective so to be inspired is like ris respiring to be inspired as to take in spirit and the kind of spirit that the king takes in is associated with the image of the wind now you've got to look at his face you remember before i was saying because the animators do a very good job of this they gave him a very mature face and a mature face is something out of which something is coming instead of something into which something is coming and you'll see that the king mufasa is always looking like this he's very intent and focused and and um intimidating whereas his son right up until he becomes um initiated is like this always as soon as he becomes initiated and i'll show you that in the film his face hardens and it isn't until his face hardens that he can go back and fight scar who's basically a figure of the shadow now originally this character rafiki was going to be one of those typical sort of disney sidekick buffoons that didn't work out so well in the narrative and he ended up as a symbol of the self instead and rafiki is obviously a shaman and he's the part of the psyche that guides its transformation so here's another way of looking at the self it's very interesting idea so you know as you go through life there's going to be triumphs and then catastrophes and when there's a catastrophe the psyche falls apart and then maybe it gathers its resources back together and pulls itself together it's going like this well jung would say the self is what's guiding that process so the ego feels it like this so that's triumph and catastrophe and triumph and catastrophe or tragedy and comedy but the self is the thing that's underneath all of it allowing those transformations to take place and that's rafiki and that's why he's associated as well with the sun so and he's a good king because he's in touch with the self so that makes him not something that's either serving his persona or his ego but you could say that what he's serving is a manner of ruling that allows for the appropriate amount of stability and transformation to take place in the kingdom so that it remains stable but also adapting to change and the king is guided in that by the little bird who tells him what's going on in those places he can't see now that's clearly a madonna and child image and the reason for that is quite simple i mean you might think well why would the idea of the madonna and child which by the way is a far older idea than the christian representation of it there's lots of figures of madonnas and madonna adonis and children yeah in ancient egyptian art for example now be isis with horus well the reason that that's an archetype is because any society who doesn't regard the dyad of mother and infant as something sacred which would mean of highest value is doomed obviously because without that being held as a value the society will cease to propagate and that will be the end of it so if the society isn't structured so that that's that that dyad is up among the highest of values then the society has become ungovernably corrupt so you see rafiki there just anointed the little king with something that was orange and that was something like the sun so the idea that the film is expressing is that there's some sun-like substance that's being associated with the with this newborn son of the king and that that's uh a dramatic manifestation of his destiny and an indication that he has to also be in cultured because what rafiki is doing is a cultural act before he's going to be complete now the sand is also an indication that he's mortal now watch what happens here because the filmmakers i think they just nail this part so they're going to do the sweeping thing again and the music rises to the ultimate climax of the song and what's happening here is that the self is presenting this the sun and so it's a it's a presentation of the savior fundamentally and that's the thing that has just been born that's the hero and when the hero is presented and the sun breaks open wide and shines on them you would call that a synchronous event and what happens is there's an emotion associated with that which you will feel and it's at that time that all the animals bow down and they do that spontaneously and the idea is that there's a hierarchy here and the little boy in the sun is the highest element of the hierarchy and when that manifests itself and you can see beyond the facade facade to something that's divine behind it the consequence of that will be a spontaneous bursting forth of awe and i really think the filmmakers nail that here [Music] me [Music] yeah so they hit that pretty hard there so there's also a nuclear family thing going on in the background that you might have noticed because of course the little king has a mother and a father and that's partly because that works better but also partly because the the archetypal hero is the son of culture and nature so okay so here's a here's a shadow figure here he he's represented here not so much as simba's shadow although he's part of simba's shadow he's represented as mufasa's shadow and so it's quite a complex idea because what it says is when when a king-like organization grows up which means any organization anything that's a hierarchy and that's powerful there's a shadow element to it that tends towards totalitarianism and tyranny and that's represented often by the king's evil brother it's a very common motif in in mythologically based stories and the king is generally blind to his brother so often willfully blind although that doesn't really seem to be the case in the lion king it's it is clearly the case that mufasa underestimates the danger posed by his usually older and smarter brother it's and and the myths very often make the case that the evil king is the older one and also the one that's more intelligent and the reason for that is that as far as i can tell is that intelligence is something that can go very wrong if it goes wrong and one of its big temptations is that it produces models of the world and then falls in love with the models and when it falls in love with the models that makes it totalitarian because it believes that its constructions are good enough so that there doesn't need to be anything else so it eliminates the necessity of the transcendent and that's definitely a characteristic of any totalitarian system it says this is everything we need and then you know if you happen to suffer or if you happen to openly rebel against the system then you're regarded as an enemy of truth and then it's fine to do with you whatever might be done because everything worth doing has already been done now he's got an interesting facial expression and it's really worth watching facial expressions in animated cartoons because they're not faces right what they are is the consequence of the observations of extremely talented artists about how people's faces configure themselves over very long periods of time because these people are high level artists they know what they're doing and so they're able to distill down certain facial expressions to describe a character now this guy's obviously he's whiny he's got this super silliest and arrogant voice so he's he's he's arrogant beyond belief and he is also hard done by and resentful and that's a really good and maybe he has a reason he's got a scar something happened to him that wasn't good but he's taken on this attitude as resentful victim who really deserves to rule if only everyone could see how wonderful he was and then he has all sorts of reasons why the fact that he isn't powerful has nothing to do with his own shall shortcomings be king and you shall never see the light in another day and you didn't your mother ever tell you not to play with your what do you want i'm here to announce that king mufasa's on his way so you'd better have a good excuse for missing the ceremony this morning you'll lose more than that when the king gets through with you he's as mad as a hippo with a hernia why quiver with fear now scar don't look at me that way well as we can tell the eyes of the king and scar are not friends and that's because scar doesn't really want to see what's going on now here's an interesting little archetype okay so that's quite interesting there's a variety of statements there that are very very cool so one of them is the the kingdom is a bounded place and so that's playing off the idea of explored territory versus unexplored territory or the known versus the unknown and the proposition there is that whatever the dominance hierarchy happens to be it has a limited domain of a limited domain of competence and the domain of competence is defined by everything that the light touches now this is actually something that you can notice in your own life it's it's quite interesting you'll see that if you move into a new place or a new neighborhood or if you do anything new at all that nothing that you haven't attended to is actually yours it will it will stay foreign in a sense and unfamiliar to you until you interact with it with a substantial amount of attention and that's partly because while you're attending to it which is an act of conscious will you're you're you're modifying your perceptions and your thoughts and your actions and your emotions to take it into account as a phenomena and that means that you're competent there and it takes conscious effort to be competent because you have to practice being competent at a new domain and until you've practiced being competent in a new domain it's not yours and so this clip is showing what's basically an eternal truth which is that your territory is whatever you've mastered and it's demarcated by everything you haven't mastered and in this particular representation that's associated with with death it's also associated in some bizarre sense with paradise because of course simba encounters the elephant's grave out in no man's land so to speak but when he runs away across the desert he also finds paradise and so there's a paradoxical idea there that the unknown contains death and everything you need to make your life worthwhile here comes the anima that's okay so you see that cocky he's a cocky little rat here okay so he's very confident but that's egotism and also persona well it's no wonder he's confident he's the son of the king you know and the fact is that he has a position of dominance that he doesn't deserve merely because he was born into it and that's made him shallow and arrogant and possessed by a persona now this little figure who is basically an anima figure always knocks him down a peg continually knocks him down a peg how many of you have seen groundhog day yeah yeah you remember in groundhog day bill murray's character is a real he's a jackass at the beginning he's very arrogant and he's very unskilled and then he gets stuck in the same day which is pretty funny because that is what happens to you if you're arrogant and unskilled you end up in the same damn day that's not fun and then in that day he becomes attracted to this woman who's an anima figure and for for years as far as the film's concerned every time he approaches her in his arrogant and clumsy way she slaps him so there's one scene in the movie where i think it lasts for about 30 seconds and it's nothing but clips of her slapping him probably 30 times at that point you've seen him go through the same day in the continually painful way that he does and she slaps him in those longer clips and after a while the filmmaker gets tired of that just shows you nothing but the slaps you know eventually he's brought so far down as a consequence of being stuck in the same day and continually being slapped that he falls completely apart right then he tries to kill himself one of the very comical things about that movie is that that doesn't work either he just wakes up at the same day again and you know what that means in some sense is that if you're too damn stubborn to change you will keep running into the same thing over and over continually and that's why you're in the same day because you won't let go of it and that might drive you even to question the value of your own being but that's also not a very useful adaptive strategy you know and it is until he starts to take his rejection seriously that he starts to actually build some real character right and then he starts paying attention to the day and finds out that there's all sorts of things that he can do during that day to make it rich and meaningful and as soon as he does that enough and becomes an expert at it poof he gets out of the the day the same horrible day and so that horrible day is also a representation of the tyranny of the state because the state is something that's static so anyways nella she's hey yeah and while they're not paying attention they end up in the shadows outside the kingdom so here's here's an image of scar transforming himself essentially first into hitler but because there's a lot of nazi imagery in this in this particular clip but also into a satanic figure at the end you'll see he's associated with the crescent moon so he turns into the horned demon of the night essentially now you can see that's all images of hell obviously see one of the things that happened to people like stalin for example is stellan had nothing but contempt for people and he thought all they ever did was lie well what happened to stalin is that he's he became surrounded by people with to whom he could demonstrate contempt and who never did anything to him except lie because the reason for that was they were so terrified of them that they would never tell them the truth about anything and so he got into this spiral which is kind of the spiral of the of a paranoid psychopath where i distrust you so badly and set things up so that you'll be punished so hard if you ever deviate from the appropriate line that you'll do nothing but lie to me and so then i'm fully justified in my contempt it's sort of it's like peter pan in some sense king of the lost boys it's like well who do you want to be king of well the root that scar took which is the negative archetype the shadow root means that he's king but you know he's king of hell and all he's got are these brainless minions and so you know he's king of people he wouldn't want to associate with it's not exactly a it's not exactly an attainment you you you may remember or you may not remember that or may not know that hitler of course set up the work the biggest meeting arena that the world had ever seen for the nuremberg nazi party rallies and there's there's something to see they were filmed quite brilliantly in a film called will to power i think that's what it's called leaning riff and stall and what hitler has a raid in front of him are blocks of thousands of soldiers everywhere as far as you can see an absolutely perfect uniformity and that's the idea because if you're already right nothing has to be different everything can be the same as the perfect thing the problem with that is you're not right and things have to change and hitler he was a master of the use of fire as well and also put his displays on at night and so he took all the luftwaffes air craft spotting uh spotlights which were huge massive lights maybe they must have been 20 feet across and he had them all lined up behind him on the stage and they would shine miles up into the sky and so he would address these thousands and thousands of people in this nighttime ritual with a curtain of light behind him that was several miles high it was an unbelievably powerful pageant and the people who made this film are drawing on on that to produce these images is saluted [Music] you know and modern people will say things like well the idea of hell is just a superstition but then you watch this and it makes sense and then you think well hell is where satan himself rules and nothing happens but the bodies burn in death and that's exactly what happened during the holocaust and so thinking that these sorts of archetypal ideas are superstitious is it's extraordinarily foolish and naive because they represent possibilities of being that continually manifest themselves and everyone knows about them so you know the the the implicit idea here is that if you take the path that scar took which is one of resentment and deceit as well as arrogance which are three major motive major major shadow motivators then you'll end up at best ruling over hell and it's no joke like it's not a superstition the stories are trying to tell you something that that his mode of being is the pathway to perdition and that and that the things that happen there are so terrible and so deep that the only way you can really express them is using the kind of imagery that we've come to associate with religious and religious imagery in a sense is imagery that cannot be made more powerful that's what makes it archetypal it's like a limit you can't go past it in terms of the representation and so when you represent the ultimate destiny of evil as eternal hell where all the bodies burn forever and there's nothing there except demonic chatter that's about as far as you can go in terms of your capacity to represent something but it's representing something so and you can say well it's an eternal place well that's because this possibility is always there it never goes away it's always there and that's also what makes it archetypal and you know that because otherwise you wouldn't be able to understand the story and everyone knows it otherwise this story wouldn't be i still believe it's one of the top 10 grossing films of all time so obviously it makes sense okay well i'd like to show you a lot more but but i can't [Applause] so we'll see you thursday i'm going to post some sample questions on the website very soon tonight possibly tomorrow morning possibly somewhere around there so check it out and you'll get some sense of what the exams will be like |
So today we're going to talk about Freud um Freud is probably perhaps the most controversial of the psychological theorizers that we're that we've been discussing in the in the first part of this course um I don't know what it is about Freud exactly people really like to give him a rough time even though it's quite clear that many of the things we take for granted as psychologists today were first introduced into the public realm of knowledge by Freud now Freud would say that the reason that people are so upset with his theorizing is that they don't like the implications of what he says and that he could have predicted that as a consequence of his theory because Freud talks about things that people don't really like to talk about and uh I think there's a lot of Truth to that I also think that Freud was one of those people who was right at some levels of analysis and not so right at others but but I would say that even where he wasn't right he was helpfully wrong and a theory can be helpfully wrong if it's better than the theory that it replaced just like a a hammer is a better tool for chopping down a tree than a wrench it's not as good as an axe but but if you conceptualize conceptual schemes as tools then you can also Al understand how a better tool is an improvement even though it's not necessarily right and a lot of the clinical theories are quite tooll likee given that they're applied to the problems of of poor mental health so and I don't really think of Clinical Psychology precisely as a science because it's an applied science and that makes it more like a form of engineering I mean it can be based on scientific um Insight which and it appropriately is but it straddles as we've discussed the space between value and Science and so the theories have to be a hybrid a strange hybrid now I'm going to play you a little recording and this is the only recording that was ever made of Freud strangely enough I mean the Recording Technology was there but it's only a minute and 23 seconds long so I'll play that and then we'll do a fairly comprehensive job of walking through Freud's theory and then on Tuesday I'm going to show you some movie clips because it like as with Yung one of the best ways to understand Freud is to actually see some examples of what he was talking about now those examples are hard to come by as it turns out but I have a movie that there is a movie I should rephrase that that uh does a great job of it really a great job so okay so here's the recording I the [Music] my UNC as the new meod of treatment of I to okay so I'm going to get you some historical background so that you can understand the context within which Freud was operating now the reason I'm going to do this because you might think well why is the history necessary and part of the reason it's necessary is because mental disorders such as they are have a sociological element and so you you might think about it this way the human brain is obviously predisposed to learn languages so there's a biological substrate for language learning we don't really understand it you can think of it as a capacity although that doesn't help but when you launch a baby into the world and the baby encounters a linguistic Community he or she learns to speak very very rapidly but the languages are different depending on the culture and mental illnesses are like that so you could think well there can be biological disruption at one level of analysis sorry about that guys there can be biological disruption at one level of analysis and maybe that biological disruption in some sense is somewhat constant across cultures but then the manner in which the disturbance manifests itself the specific manner is going to be shaped by the culture and then of course and this is a Freudian idea because culture battles against the individual to some degree and so that's sort of the idea of the super ego against the ID then the battle between the individual in culture is going to take forms that differ with the culture because sometimes in some epochs there's going to be trouble in the society with regards to incorporating one set of drives and other times there's going to be trouble incorporating another set of drives and so for Freud in Freud time sexuality was very heavily was very problematic I don't think it's exactly appropriate to say that it was repressed I I would say that mo more that it was extraordinarily problematic and the reason for that is that sex is extraordinarily problematic for all sorts of reasons when one of the main reasons is apart from pregnancy apart from unwanted pregnancy um apart from the passions that sexual attraction inflames it's also an incredibly effect Ive Vector for the transmission of disease and so part of the reason that people have mixed motives and with regards to their sexual behavior is because like eating sex is one of those activities that can also potentially be contaminating and one of the things that happened in the Victorian era was that when the when the Europeans came to North America They Carried a variety of different NES measles MPS smallpox those were very very hard on the Native American population and wiped about 95% of it out there is a theory that syphilis was the reverse gift and then it was brought to the Old World by the new world it was the only illness as far as anyone knows that had that particular characteristic anyways it was a devastating illness civilus I mean um it was certainly the syphilis problem in Europe in the late 19 1900s was certainly as serious as the AIDS crisis in the 20th century which is still to some degree running out especially in developing countries but is has been somewhat controlled and so were also very very rigid gender roles you know and that was pretty true I would say around the world until the 20th century and probably really until the 1950s or there whereabouts when because it it was at the end of the ' 50s that the birth control pill was invented and the birth control pill was what propelled the political movements that facilitated the movement of women into the workplace on mass by the 1970s I mean people like to attribute that to political to political pressure but without the biological transformation the political pressure would have been pointless so so I think it's hard for modern people to understand how problematic sex was for the victorians um there's a conflict between propagation of the species and the happiness and health of the of a particular individual and it's a difficult problem to solve especially because children are dependent for so long so this is from HRI alen who wrote a great book if you're really interested in psychoanalytic thought this is the best book you can read as an introduction it's called the discovery of the unconscious um and a lot of what I'm going to tell you about Freud although I've read a fair bit of Freud I took from the discovery of the unconscious because it's it's regarded as the best scholarly work that was ever done on the history of the psychoanalytic movement and also on Freud and Jung and Adler and so Ellen B who was an existential psychotherapist who lived in Montreal at least when he was older produced a very evenhanded historical representation of the precursors to the idea of the unconscious and then of Freud's theories and yung's theories and Adler's theories so so here's what the world was like it was a world shaped by man for man in which women occupied the second place political rights for women did not exist the separation and dissimilarity of the Sexes was sharper than today women who wore slacks or wore their hair short or smoked were hardly to be found the universities admitted no female students until the early 1890s man's authority over his children and also over his wife was unquestioned education was authoritarian the despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel laws were more repressive delinquent youth sternly punished and corporal punishment was considered indispensable sexual repression a supposed characteristic of the Victorian psyche was often merely the expression of two facts the lack of diffusion of contraceptives and the fear of venial disease now there's another issue as well because because employment opportunities were extraordinarily limited for women for a variety of reasons it was also very very problematic if a woman became pregnant outside of wedlock and the other thing that's really necessary to understand is that people in the late 1800s didn't have very much money you know um even in the Civilized world so to speak in the late 1800s the average amount of money in today's terms that people lived on was about a dollar a day so it's almost impossible for us to imagine how much wealthier we are now than than people were only 120 years ago so so there were three factors that made sexuality difficult to integrate one was the the sheer danger of pregnancy for women um and then disease and then the fact well the the fact associated with that that there were no contraceptives venial disease was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost invariably contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection we can hardly imagine today how monstrous syphilis appeared to people of that time made worse by the fact that it was likely to be transmitted to the Next Generation in the form of hereditary syphilis which in turn had become a nightmarish myth and to which many Physicians attributed all diseases of Unknown Origin well en syphilis was was and is a particularly problematic pathogen because it produces a massive range of symptoms and so there's no telling what form it will necessarily take in one victim compared to another so the victorians had no shortage of reasons to be in serious conflict about sexuality now Freud was also very much influenced by nche elen bie says that psychoanalysis belongs to that unmasking Trend the search for hidden unconscious motivations characteristic of the 1880s and 1890s in Freud as in n words and deeds are viewed as manifestations of unconscious motivations mainly of instincts and conflicts of instincts for both men the unconscious is the realm of the wild brutish instincts that cannot find permissible Outlets derived from earlier stages of the individual and of man kind and find expression in passion dreams and mental illness now you know it seems to me and and I I don't know if this if it also seems to you that these are sorts of things that we take for granted now that people don't always say what they mean that their speech and their actions are unlu influenced by factors that they're not necessarily conscious of that some of the drives or the motivational states that people that are are characteristic of people um influence the manner in which they speak influence their dreams and influence their actions in ways that are difficult to discover and that passions and dreams and mental illnesses are manifestations of the unconscious and so you see what happens to a thinker whose ideas are rapidly integrated into the culture and that was the case with Freud despite the fact that he said there was great resistance and there was but I mean the ideas that he put forth were integrated into into Western culture during his lifetime which is staggeringly fast from a historical perspective I mean when when you absorb a great thinker's ideas and those become axioms now they're they're they're what people assume then all that's really left of what they're they think is what's the error right because the errors of course don't become Incorporated and then the Thinker just gets blamed for his errors so and that's certainly something that happened to Freud even the term ID which actually means it originates from n the dynamic concept of mind with the Notions of mental energy Quant of latent or inhibited energy or release of energy or transfer from one drive to another is also to be found in nche before Freud nche conceived the Mind as a system of drives that can Collide or be fused into one another in contrast to Freud however nche did not give prevalence to the sexual drive whose importance he duly acknowledged but to aggressive and self-destructive drives nii also understood those processes that the Freudian called defense mechanisms particularly sublimation to sublimate something is to take a form of energy like Sexual Energy let's say and and and pour it into something else now the sublimation idea is a very interesting one because for Freud it was more of an individual issue so if a if a one one he thought of Sexual Energy libido as as a kind of in some sense a free energy was a source of energy that the psyche could use and because it was in some sense a free source of energy it could be channeled into other activities and so you know one of the obvious examples of that would be paintings of nudes for example um or into creativity in general and and frud actually believed that the reason that people became civilized was because we learned how to sublimate our instinctual energies into um forms of activity and thought that were that were acceptable in the social community now the funny thing about the idea of sublimation is that I think it actually works better as a philogenetic um hypothesis than as an ontogenetic hypothesis so and here here's why um it is certainly the case that one of the reasons that people are creative especially one of the reasons that men are creative is because if a man is successfully creative and that makes him successful the probability that he's going to have a wider choice of mates or at least the possibility of what he might consider a higher quality mate goes up immensely and that's partly because women unlike their closest biological relatives which are the chimpanzees are extremely selective maters and women tend to mate across and up dominance hierarchies and and this looks like a biological propensity it's the case for women all around the world it's also as far as we can tell the source of the rapid expansion of human creative ability and intelligence it's it's true just as much in egalitarian societies as it is in societies that are extremely unequal um and it's also one of the major causes now of income inequality because one of the things that's happened is that as women have become educated like educated men will marry uneducated women but educated women will not marry uneducated men and so one of the one of the one of what's happened as we've transformed our society increasingly into an intellectual meritocracy that also allows the contribution of conscientiousness is that we're getting assortative mating between smart and conscientious people at the upper strata of the socioeconomic distribution and the estimates now are that about 25% of income inequality in North America is a consequence of of of the fact that women will only mate across or up dominance hierarchies so they won't they're looking for someone who's at least as competent as they are or more competent so depending of course on what you mean by competent whereas men are not the correlation between women's socioeconomic status and their mating opportunity is slightly negative the correlation between men's socioeconomic status and they're maing uh potential so to speak is about 0.5 6 like that's a massive difference it's an unbelievably massive difference it has very powerful sociological consequences n well understood those processes that have been called defense mechanisms by Freud particularly sublimation repression and the Turning of instincts towards oneself both give a new expression to dito's Old assumption that modern man is Afflicted with a peculiar in illness bound up with civilization because the civilization demands of man that he renounce the gratification of his instincts now so for Freud and and for Nicha they they both they both adopted a perspective that was different from that of P and I I think PJ is actually correct for Freud the individual is striving upwards to manifest their true nature which is in some ways can be quite brutish and what the super U is doing what Society is doing is actually inhibiting it it's stopping it from happening so it's basically it's it's as if Society puts each individual into a jail cell of sorts and only allows them to do certain things within that cell now you can certainly understand that and I I think that is true the more tyrannical a society becomes and as Ellen B pointed out Victorian society was quite authoritarian and the more authoritarian a society the more there is a struggle between the individual attempting to be an individual and the culture attempting to turn them into an absolutely predictable Cog in a machine but you know P so Freud of course viewed the primary conflicts in mental life as the ego tortured by the in some sense right being driven by underlying biological forces but also severely inhibited and repressed by the super ego um you know it's a it's it's a it's a it's a perfectly persuasive model and there are situations under which it's more applicable but P's idea that the fundamental conflict within people isn't necessarily social versus the individual for p the fundamental conflict was between motivational systems and then between their expression across time within the individual and then between their expression across time within the individual in relationship to all other individuals and to society so it was more like a complex problem that could be solved by a civilized game than it was a massive force that being the super ego crushing the individual into submission now you might say that for neurotic people and neurotic is a strange word but we'll say for the sake of of of argument right now that a neurotic person who is is suffering sufficiently from the conditions of their life for psychological reasons that their life is not bearable in its current form they're suffering enough to interfere with their own movement forward um what Freud says about the ego versus the super ego might well be true in the case of people who are aren't well adapted because they haven't been able to organize their own motivational drives in a stable manner within themselves and then they haven't been socialized effectively so that they can fit into the broader Community like like a dancer might in a complex dance then they're much more likely to experience the social World versus them especially if they're rejected and and and they can't gratify any of their fundamental needs because their because of their inability or their awkwardness so I would say to the degree that you're suffering from from failure so to speak for one reason or another you're much more likely to see the the social rules as a harsh and repressive super ego obviously they're not doing you any good I would say that's probably more likely to happen if you're somewhat near the bottom of a given dominance Archy and that also means if you're at the bottom of a given dominance hierarchy that you're more much more likely to consider the spirit of the structure as an authoritarian spirit and a repressive spirit because obviously it isn't making room for you and and sometimes of course that's the case you know I mean there's lots of societies where everyone at the bottom has nothing and only the people at the top have something you know and it's it's hard to see how you could not view the culture SL super ego as something that was harsh and repressive and and authoritarian and crushing under those circumstances so I also think that it was probably an idea that was more relevant during the initial during the the mid to late stages say of the development of the Industrial Revolution because to work in a factory meant something very different than to work as a peasant first of all if you were working in a factory you you became Bound by time in a way that human beings had never been bound by time you know we we time everything seconds mean something to Modern people you know but it took a long time for the idea that that the time was of the essence for the organizing of organizing of human life and a lot of that occurred as people moved into the factories and so you can see for example the the legacy of that in in the modern Elementary in the modern pre-university school systems because the school systems that most of you attended with their rows of desks and their buzzers and their bells and their recesses are basically Factory structures that emerged from the Industrial Revolution that were characteristic of the way that working people who worked in factories organize their lives so the the bells that go off between periods and to announce that it's noon and to tell you that school's out those are Factory bells and so you can see you can see Echoes of Freud's idea that the super ego and and the ego and the ID are in Conflict by imagining for example how difficult it is for a very active six-year-old especially if they're male to sit quietly and regulate themselves by the Bell for six or seven hours you know when they first go to grade one and the fact that you know Freud would say if he was alive that the reason that so many people have attention deficit disorder is because the demands of the super ego so to speak in the school system are so excessive that there's that The Clash produces pathology now the pathology is obviously defined by the situation if you Define pathology as being unable to sit down and pay attention to things that are deadly boring while you should be running around playing and having fun and wearing yourself to a frazzle then that's pathology that's attention deficit disorder and you can treat it with rlin but that's only because you can treat anybody with rlin you know as I'm sure many of you know so you know Brin is an amphetamine and it makes you focus more on whatever you happen to be focused on though there's no real evidence that it provides any boost in academic achievement over any reasonable amount of time but if you think about it that way you see you can understand what Freud meant by this super ego versus ego conflict or the super ego ego id conflict attention deficit disorder is a perfect example of that and then the pathology is defined by the circumstance if we didn't have schools that are like the schools we have we we wouldn't have attention deficit disorder as a as a as a pathology now and people like to think about it as a scientific category you know it's a disease and it's it's a disease is like an objective entity it's like well no it's not a disease and it's not an objective entity it's a social cultural construction however there are certain people who are going to be more prone to be diagnosed with it than others and that would mostly be um extroverted open extroverted kids because they're not going to sit down and shut up because they can't they're extremely curious and mostly what they want to do is talk to everyone and play now PP Jack PP Yak PP actually has done really interesting experiments with male rats and he showed that if you deprive male juvenile Rats of rough and tumble play they um their prefrontal cortex doesn't mature which is also a real hat off to PJ's theory of play as critical for higher levels of development and that you can you can also inhibit their tendency to play using Ridin so it's pretty sad it's in fact it's appalling really so and I see people in my clinical practice fairly frequently who come in and said well they were diagnosed with ADHD when they were like four or whatever it's like great you know pathetic it's pathetic that that happens okay so a lot of what Freud did was an analysis of his own fantasies and of course we wouldn't consider that necessarily an appropriate methodology from the scientific perspective but there's something that you need to know about the scientific perspective that people never talk about mostly what you learn about in Psychology when you're being taught experimental techniques in Psychology is hypothesis testing right but no one ever talks to you about hypothesis generation the the idea there is that well you have a hypothesis and then you lay out an experiment and test it it's like well yeah but coming up with the hypothesis to begin with is like you just don't find them lying around on the street you know you have to think them up and so the scientific process is hypothesis generation that's the first part and then hypothesis testing and then the third part of it is um generalization from the test to the real world and psychologists never talk about the first step they concentrate obsessively on the second and they ignore the third almost completely so because we just assume generalization from the lab to the real world we never actually check to see if that's true and it's very seldom true because the real world tends to be a lot more complex and difficult and ordinary and and uncooperative than the lab does but you don't have to discuss your hypothe it's so funny because if you're writing a scientific paper you actually generally falsify your you you lie about how you came up with your hypothesis basically because you know you you do a literature review and you show how your hypothesis is extracted as a logical conclusion from all of this reading that you've done and the truth of the matter is is you were sitting with your graduate students in the bar drinking beer and someone said something funny and then maybe you thought up something you could test it's like you're not going to write that down in your intro but no but it's quite funny a because you it's it's quite amusing because we really don't talk about how we generate hypothesis in our paper we act as if it's a consequence of logical of induction or logical deduction and it's not it's it's very seldom that I mean sometimes you're reading along and you think oh yeah that idea and this idea fit together but even then you rarely like I've found that often when I have an idea it's what comes from this literature here and then from this literature over here and trying to actually explain how I got that idea in introduction it's like you can't it's just you don't have the space and so it's quite funny I I I mean I don't think that it's I don't really think that it's a lie it's a format you know what I mean it's a it's a it's a mode of doing things it but but it has nothing to do with hypothesis generation and Freud you know Freud used his imagination and he and he and he used his ability to think and so that's both imaginative production which is basically creativity and then rationality which is logical thinking and he generated all sorts of hypothesis and his test wasn't a lab test it was a test in practice so his idea was well I've got this notion I'll try laying it out in in in the therapeutic process and I'll make observations about how that plays itself out now you know you could consider that relatively weak methodology from a scientific perspective but I got to tell you something about that too so you know you may know you may not know that there were two streams of animal experim animal Behavioral Science in the 20th century they still exist one was behaviorism and other was ethology now there's some pretty famous ethologists um Conrad Loren was an ethologist Nicholas tinbergen was an ethologist France dewal now who studies primates in mostly primates in the zoo mostly chimpanzees Jane good all those people are all ethologists and what they do is they go out into the natural habitat of animals the blanchards who study rats in their natural habitat or another example um it's fossy I think who who studied gorillas there seem to be women all the time who go out into the Wilderness and observe primates you know it's quite interesting um maybe they're more interested in the social behavior something like that but it is quite striking anyways the ethologists what they do is they go look at animals behave in their natural environment and the thing is is that you kind of end up with a narrative description of their behavior so it's not as technical as the observations that you produce if you're working on lab animals right but a lab animal and a normal animal are not really very similar at all so so one of the things you probably don't know is that when when when Skinner was experimenting on rats and Skinner he was a smart guy man we learned a lot thought from Skinner he kind of laid the groundwork for the methods that are used by sophisticated neuroscientists especially those who work with animals and they're really the ones who do the work he laid down the groundwork for that sort of Investigation so it's not like I don't have any respect for Skinner it's like he he knew exactly what he was doing he starved his damn rats down to 3/4 of their normal body weight so the skinnerian rat was first of all bitterly Lonesome because he lived in a cage all by himself and that isn't how rats live and then he was like starving to death so he would work like mad for food and so what what Skinner did in some sense was take a complex animal and simplify it simplify the hell out of it by making it isolated and starving and then he could observe Its Behavior under those conditions and you could extract a tremendous amount of information out about how animals behave By Us by using a simplified animal but you lose a lot too so for example it's pretty easy to get starved bored Lab Rats to take cocaine they'll do it or so if you give them free access to cocaine man they'll just take it all the time they they won't even eat but if you have a rat out there in rat land you know so you give them a social environment and it's it's a setup so that it's like a normal rat would have the rats aren't that interested in cocaine so you know you can see how the the context there is a major determinant of the outcome so Freud I would think of Freud and all the other clinicians more as ethologists than as behavioral scientists you know and France dewal for example he's a great person to read if you haven't read anything by France dewal it's f r NS d w a l and he's he's like a pedian for chimps and what he's observed over a series of books mostly making observations at the arnam zoo in the Netherlands is the emergence of morality among chimpanzees as a consequence of their social interactions now it's not that simple because the moral the ground for Morality emerges as a consequence of the way the chimps organize themselves into dominant structures so there's a sociological element but but by the same token The Chimps are biologically prepared to inhabit dominance hierarchies so there's a continual interaction between the social the social structuring of the behavioral patterns in the dominance hierarchy and The evolutionary success of the chimp because think about it this way the higher you are in a dominance hierarchy the more likely it is that you're going to leave Offspring well so obviously obviously what that means is that the more prepared you are biologically to succeed in a dominance hierarchy the more likely you are to be successful and in human beings it's a major issue especially for men because if they're not successful in the male dominance Archy they do not leave any Offspring so for example a lot of you won't be able to believe this but if you sit and think about it for a week you'll figure it out cuz it's true you have twice as many female ancestors as you do male ancestors now you think how can that be possible and the answer is the a your average forefather if every woman has a child but only every second man has a child then that's exactly what you end up with every second man man in that case would have two children right but that can easily happen so for example if if you could imagine a situation where one man made 10,000 women pregnant and you know that's not as much of an impossibility as you might think then you obviously under conditions like that you'd have far more female ancestors than you would have male ancestors so anyways so Freud and Yung and the other clinicians are basically ethologists and what they're doing is studying human beings in their ra relatively natural environment and trying to figure out how they work and it isn't obvious to me that prolonged observation over multiple years of many people in a clinical setting where you talk about everything is a less realistic way of gathering information especially for generating hypothesis than assessing 40 undergraduates for 20 minutes in a lab you know now I think what you get what happens is that you can be more specific in the lab so you can do high resolution work in a lab but you can do low resolution work as a clinician and I do think that it's at the low resolution levels of theorizing that most of the hypotheses are generated right so these things have to play against one another and it's it's not reasonable to presume that one mode of evidence Gathering is superior to the other in all situations so this is by Freud's biographer Ernest Jones who was a great admirer of Freud and who really established the ground on which the history of psycho analysis was going to be written um he's been accused of being too much of an acolyte and I think there's some truth in that but I guess you pretty have to be pretty interested in someone before you're going to write their biography so we shouldn't be too hard on them in the summer of 1897 Freud undertook his most heroic feate a psychoanalysis of his own unconscious it's hard for us nowadays to imagine how momentous this achievement was that difficulty being the fate of most pioneering exploits yet the uniqueness of the feat remains once done it is done forever for no one again can be the first to explore those depths in the long history of humanity the task had often been attempted philosophers and writers from Solon to Montaine from juvenile to schopenhauer had essayed to follow the advice of the delic Oracle know thyself but had also come to the effort inner resistances had barred Advance there had from time to time been flashes of intuition to point the way but they had always flickered out the realm of the unconscious whose existence was so often postulated remained dark and the words of heraclitus still stood the soul of man is a far country which cannot be approached or explored Freud had no help no one to assist the undertaking in the slightest degree worse than this the very thing that drove him onward he must have dimly divined could only result in profoundly affecting his relations or perhaps even severing them with the one being to whom he was so closely bound and who had steadied his mental equilibrium it was daring much and risking much what indomitable courage both intellectual and moral must have been needed but it was forthcoming well you know yeah really I mean I would say that prior to Freud and N Western civilization in particular Western philosophical the Western philosophical tradition absolutely overvalued the role that rationality played in the realm of human behavior you know emotions and people still think this way emotions were often considered the enemy of reason and motivations also the enemy of reason and you can understand that right because your your observations of a given phenomena are going to be biased by the emotions and the motivations that you bring to the Forefront and a lot of what scientists were trying to do as they learned how to be scientists were to get the damn emotions and the motivations out of the way and the personal biases biases and the demand to to elevate your career and to be right and to beat the other primates and so forth and so on they're trying to clear that out so that you could you could tend clearly to certain classes of phenomena and then of course it was a post Renaissance phenomena to identify the the central being of human beings with rationality and furthermore there was also a deeper idea than that which which we all still fall prey to in many ways and that idea was essentially that human beings had a soul that was separate from the body and so the central nature of the Soul when it was operating properly was rational now I can understand why Humanity has always had the idea that people have a soul and that there's a body you know I mean I think it's an obvious reflection of the fact that we have an identifiable Consciousness that seems unique and individual and it's wandering around in a body you know and they seem separable in some way but it wasn't until Freud that that people I think intellectuals people who are serious about understanding the human psyche had to really grapple with the fact that we were embodied and that our our rationality because the way our rationality really works is that it doesn't even get to work until it's pre-filtered by emotions and motivations and the body you know so you could think about rationality as the master of the ship but and and perhaps that was the way to think about it before Freud but after Freud and and this is how we think now it's like no no no first you're a boy and that screens out most everything and structures what you see and then inside that you're a set of motivations you're always motivated one way or another and then inside that you're emotionally evaluating things before they even reach your rational Consciousness and then inside that there's a little rational guy who's you know trying to zip around and make Intelligent Decisions but without all that underpinning he wouldn't even be able to operate and this is this is right this is why the farthest that people have got in in the pursuit of AR artificial intelligence is with embodied robots embodied cognitive agents it turns out that you can't have pure rationality without the body and so and Freud is you just can't escape the fact that Freud was the person who was beating the drum for that perspective for for 50 years and he did it extraordinarily successfully after Freud you you could never pretend that you weren't a sexual being or an aggressive being or a biased being or an un conscious being or a defended being or repressing being or a lying being while you were doing whatever it was that you were doing and those things had to be taken into account and you know it it wasn't much before Freud that Darwin came up with his darwinian hypothesis and so you know it was it was exactly at that time that it was necessary for us to to understand our evolutionary kinship or in some sense even identity with with other creatures ranging from those that were quite like us to those that were are very much unlike us all the way down the philogenetic chain there's tremendously important inter relationships and so Freud's idea fit into Darwin's idea like mad you know all of a sudden human beings were animals they weren't a Divine soul in a body now the Divine Soul idea has its merits but the animal idea has its merits too and it was Freud who sort of rubbed people people's noses in the fact that they were animals along with Darwin and that was part of the reason why he faced such resistance so Freud was definitely an ally of the Evol of the of the idea of evolutionary biology and I also think he was a real precursor in many ways or perhaps the groundbreaker for for the development of fields like affec of Neuroscience which which you know is a relatively new field until well until the 1960s in Psychology you weren't even allowed to think that people thought wasn't until the cognitive Revolution that psychologists were willing to think that people thought and that maybe animals did I mean everyone else on the bloody Planet knew that people F but the psychologists were refusing to admit it and that was because they were using strictly behavioral propositions in their lab work and there was some real utility in that and the cognitive scientists came along in the early 1960s and said well hold on a minute we're not just stimulus response machines even though there are levels of analysis at which we are and then it wasn't until much later 40 years later really 30 years later a lot as a consequence of the influence of Russian neuros psychologists as it turns out that it became self-evident that well yeah yeah Cog cognition but you know what about emotion and what about motivation and you know can we actually study those as biological properties and the answer to that turned out to be oh yeah yeah we certainly could and not only that that it's obviously it's obvious that our higher order cognitive functions are nested within fundamental emotional and motivational systems and it's also obvious who's in charge and it's not the higher order cognitive functions unless you're blindly naive you know if even if you look at the brain from a neuroanatomical perspective the strength of the projections reaching up from the base of your brain from places like the hypothalamus which is the ground of fundamental motivational systems like aggression and sexuality those are like tree trunks the little tendrils coming down from the top of your brain that that do the regulation you know the conscious regulation those are like little Vines you know so as long as you're reasonably satiated and everything's under control you can pretend that your rational mind is running the show but when push comes to shove it's like well no you know and it's also pretty obvious that you don't even really like it when your rational mind is under control too much because and this is again a reflection of the super ego versus ego dichotomy is you're always running around you know consuming great amounts of alcohol and other sorts of um you know Consciousness altering substances which usually alter it for the worst so to speak so that you can do impulsive and crazy and idiotic things that are really really entertaining and fun so we don't want to forget about who's in charge and Freud was and and still is a very good corrective for people who are convinced that their rational intellect is the fundamental element of their being now the the the creative illness that that Jones talked about and that hre Alber talked about is a variant of the initiation process that we've been describing and one of the things that um people like Alam B pointed out is that it's often the case that people who make great discoveries go through a protracted period of chaos while they're making their discoveries before they put the discoveries together and that happened to Darwin for example you know because Darwin per knew perfectly well you know he's a pretty straight-laced Englishman old Darwin he knew perfectly well that he was lighting a bomb it was a big bomb I mean I think you could safely say that Darwin was the most revolutionary scientist who ever lived you know when I was growing up it seemed to be Einstein but the old Darwin man he's he's making a he's making his move and it's especially the case because Darwin not only outlined natural selection which you know kept biologists busy for a whole 100 years but he also outlined sexual selection and all the biologists ignored that for 100 years and they're coming back to it now so I was hard on Old Darwin because he knew that the world was going to go from 8,000 years old and created by God to God only knows how long and the consequence of somewhat random biological processes I mean that's a major league shift in the old world view and you know so to the degree that Darwin Darwin's personality was structured both explicitly and implicitly by um Protestant religious presuppositions which it was because in many ways he was a conventional person you know he was taking a mighty axe to the basic trunk of his the to the thick trunk of his being you know and he suffered for that he had anxiety disorders and it's no bloody wonder you know I mean if you were Darwin and you weren't nervous you wouldn't have had any idea what you were launching on the world it was a massive Revolution you know in Freud's notion that we were deeply embedded in our animal selves also was was the precursor to having people start to comprehend themselves not in terms of you know the last 100 years of history or the last 500 years of history or maybe even the entire 5,000 years of recorded history but the 7 million years since we've been separated from our common ancestor with chimps and the 60 million years since we were living in trees and the 220 million years since there were mammals and the 400 million years when our ancestors were basically lobsters and that's a completely different way of thinking about the world and like it's something that we haven't digested yet and I would say for Freud was in the Forefront of the of the revolu ution that produced that transformation in thinking it was also hard on Freud and that's what Jones is pointing out you know I mean Freud was definitely an anti-religious Destroyer like n you know he was another announcer of the death of God and Freud's idea about religion was that it was a defense anxiety against death a sorry a defense mechanism against death anxiety you know and to the degree that you guys are being taught Terror management theory for example it's like that's Freud straight and simple I mean Terror management theory was developed by Ernest Becker and Ernest Becker was a psychoanalyst even though he was a so sociologist and he wrote the denial of death in an attempt to update Freudian presuppositions so Freud is by no means dead and the idea of associations you know that people people's thinking is associational and that the associations are actually linked together by emotional similarity it's like well the implicit attitudes all the implicit attitudes research is predicated on that idea they don't ever credit Freud with it but it was Freud's initial Discovery you know he discovered that that people's thoughts wandered in a sense you know and that you could you could see why they wandered if you paid attention you could track the underlying rationale for the connection between sets of disperate ideas by paying close attention and you could interpret them and that's really what he did with free association and you know I would say that I don't really think Freud discovered free association I think what he did is observed that many of his severely damaged clients who I think would have had some variant of borderline personality disorder if we would have seen them today if you just let them talk they would free associate and what that was in some sense it was the it was the consequence of the fact that their personalities had never really been organized and maybe that's because no one had ever listened to them you know so I can tell you as far as I can see that people organiz their personalities by talking and if you don't have someone to listen it's like well you've got all these ideas rattling around in your head that are basically rooted in emotion and they're not linked together by any coherent narrative and they're not pruned that's another thing you need other people to say you know that's a really stupid way of looking at things you know and if you don't have that well then especially if you've got a reasonably creative mind you're going to generate a whole mass of counterproductive you know but but reason but potentially founded ideas that you just can't call so and Freud figured that out with his idea of free association so he'd let people come into his office and he wouldn't really look at them he' just let them lie on the couch and see he'd say well just say whatever comes to mind and they'd go wandering around on some quasi random path and Freud would note the connections between the things they said and infer what the underlying structure was and and what he was doing was this essentially so look if let's say you go see a movie and then your friend says well what was the movie about you don't say well the first thing we saw were the credits and then you know and then you say to your friend all the credits and then you describe every single movement that all the characters make including when they blink their eyes and how they move their arms and it's like you don't do that you do something really weird and mysterious which is you take the movie and you break it down you boil it down to its gist whatever that is it's like well here's the important features of the movie you say that here's 5 minute summary it's like you might ask well why don't you just listen to the five minute summary instead of going to the damn movie but the weird thing is is you can do that you know and you do it without even thinking about how insanely complex It is Well Freud was doing that with his clients they'd come in there and like lay out this massive kind of incoherent verbal chain and he'd listen and and he'd hint at them perhaps what it meant and he'd he'd extract out the gist of the story and then if the if if the advantage to having your memory reduced to gist is that you can only only have to remember the important things then all the things that aren't important you can let go of you know and you see this happening if if you ever have a fight with someone especially someone that you love you know how how it happens all the time is you'll start fighting about something that's trivial and then both of you will figure figure out well we're really not fighting about that at all and then the question is well what are you fighting about and one answer to that is the person who was the irritating person who started the argument provoked it say because that happens might not even know what in the world it is that they're irritated about you have to kind of torture them to death for an hour before they can figure out what it was that drove the irritation and manifest it in some articulated form so in a sense that's bringing things up from the depths of the unconscious you know now Freud would have thought of those things as repressed you know I don't want to talk about that with you because I repressed it I don't really think that's right often I think what happens is that irritation manifests itself in vague moods and you have to investigate the mood and the emotion using different articulated Frameworks which is kind of what an argument is about until you stumble across the actual articulation you know and so you're being tortured by your partner for one reason or another maybe it's because for the 50th time you left the dish rag on the coun or something and after fighting with them for an hour you figure out that they had a really bad day at work for reasons that they didn't really notice and don't want to talk about so that's Freudian psychoanalysis I mean you guys are to the degree that you're sophisticated communicators you're going to be doing that all the time I mean how many of you actually believe that everything a person says is what they mean or that they have perfectly transparent self- knowledge I think No One Believes that anymore or you know if you do believe that well yeah haven't been paying attention I would say that's really the the bottom line so these creative illnesses are a consequence of this dissent and rebirth process that we talked about before and that's much more likely to happen you see I marked revolutionary at the top you know when you when you're a genius you blow apart the basic presuppositions of an entire culture and to the degree that your personality is predicated on those assumptions and maybe even your place in the world when you chop that over it's like you fall too you know and the whole idea that Darwin had that that the environment itself could modify biological forms through selection God it's such a brilliant idea because well because it precisely because it accounts for why complex forms can emerge in the absence of an intelligent designer now you know no doubt there are holes in darwinian theory you know I don't know how many of you know this but there's a whole new field of science that's popped up really in the 21st century called epigene epigenetics it turns out that you can that Lamar who was really the the prime um what adversary in some sense of Darwin Dar Lamar believed you could inherit acquired characteristics right for a straight darwinian it's like no that doesn't happen there's lots of evidence now that you can acquire inh that you can inherit acquired characteristics so they've showed for example with rats that if you produce a certain amount of Terror Laden phobia in a rat the rat pops three generations down are still predisposed in that manner and you know we just scratched the surface of epigenetics it turns out that your experience can alter the structure of your DNA it does that by a process which I don't understand called methylation and methylation apparently is the modification of the DNA structure by additions of little uh clumps of you know little chemical units little molecules to some in some way we don't get that encodes actual environmentally relevant information so you know that's pretty mindboggling so the my point is the final word on how we evolved is not yet in but Darwin popped up this idea that while you didn't need an intelligent designer it's like uhoh that's a big problem for a for a world whose primary notion before then was that everything was the creation of something that was not only intelligent but benevolent so it's a little hard on people to come up with those ideas and there's no reason at all for them not to think that they're completely insane when it first happens because they think something that's really deep and revolutionary that no one else thinks or has thought up and so the probability that you've done that instead of just going Stark raving mad is like zero right so for every actual genius there must be 10,000 people who are convinced in some bizarre manic paranoid manner that they are genius and they're not so it's rough Freud was also one of the first people to really go after the idea that we could represent ideas in symbolic form in a manner that was in fact represent presentational but that we ourselves didn't understand and I mean that's a that's another revolutionary idea right is that we could express that it was possible to express Concepts especially those that were associated with emotion and motivation using non-linguistic representations that needed to be deciphered now Freud's initial theory about that was that the reason that happened was because and this is where I think he got something seriously wrong but whatever like you know you have to say that with respect Freud appeared to think of memory in a way that we wouldn't think of memory anymore like he he seemed to think something like when you made a when you experienced an event the event was as if you experienced it that that was the event so what you experienced was the reality of the event and then sometimes you didn't like the implication of that event or perhaps you couldn't understand it but you could understand it enough to know that it was horrible that'd be a traumatic event and then just shove that sucker down into the depths of your being where where where you didn't have to think about it anymore and then it would poke itself up into the nether regions of your Consciousness partly in dreams partly and interestingly enough in slips of the tongue you know we still call those Freudian slips and I'll tell you one of the things that's really cool about doing dream analysis and Psychotherapy is that people make slips of the tum tongue all the time tum e slips of the tum yeah well I won't interpret that for now but if you listen to people make Freudian slips while they're talking to you about their dreams they're often telling you exactly what the dream means and it's so cool I've seen people you know how words can have two meanings right or sometimes three meanings sometimes when someone is telling you about the their dream they'll use a sentence to describe part of the dream that simultaneous ly accounts for the other part of the dream without them even not noticing and then all I'll do because we're trying to puzzle out the dream is I'll tell them back what they just said and they'll go you know they'll have a little startle it's like oh yeah that's obviously what that means and how in the world people are smart enough to do that on the Fly is beyond me you know it's like it's hard enough to talk about one thing at a time but to manage to talk about two things with the same sentence in a coherent way it's like way to go brain and I think what's happening is we kind of know that you know the left hemisphere roughly speaking is a linguistic hemisphere right but there's a corresponding area in the right hemisphere that's more or less in the same physiological location that this part inhibits tonically it's it inhibits it all the time and it kind of seems that what happens is now and then that other part of the brain can get access to speech now it's not very linguistic so it sort of stumbles around and maybe it does it in more symbolic terms cuz it thinks imagistically but now and then it's got something to say and then poof both of them are talking at the same time and that is the coolest thing like the problem is it's very I can't tell you about it you know because and this is one of the problems with psychoanalytic phenomena is that you can't really understand them in the absence of the context that a lengthy therapeutic interaction provides you know it's like you know how if it is if you have an old friend it's like you you can just say the number of a joke you know it's like that's joke 42 and they'll laugh because they know the joke you know you have this shared history that enables you to make reference to things just using fragments and you can't explain how you do that to someone else well the same thing happens in therapy it's like you've talked to this person for Endless hours about the most important things that are going on in their life and then there'll be communication communicative phenomena that emerge within that context and there you know they strike you with the force of Revelation but you can't communicate them to anyone else CU you can't conjure up the entire context which is partly why I want to show you this movie on Tuesday because it's the only thing I've ever seen that actually manages to do this it's it shows Freudian Psychopathology because it gives you enough contextual information to actually infer it so so that's really smart all that whole free association thing man that's his idea that it was emotional systems repressed or not part of the ID or not cuz his idea of the unconscious was somewhat it was somewhat confused in a sense it depended on when he was thinking about it I mean first of all the unconscious was a place to put things you didn't want to pay any attention to but then later it sort of became the ID and the ID was the place of these primordial drives and emotions and so it's not a bad model of the unconscious you know especially if you think about it as something alive and the unconscious is alive it is not a cognitive machine and you know modern psychologists talk about the cognitive unconscious it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah right there's a cognitive unconscious it's like well what about the rest of them you know the motivational unconscious and the emotional unconscious and those things so the affective neuroscientists are on to that anyway so it doesn't really matter but you know Freud got there way early and you know he would he would note that you see this all the time you're talking to someone they're mad at you you know and you say well you're mad at me and they go well no I'm not and you know and their face makes it perfectly evid evid that they're mad at you and so does their tone of voice it's like okay are they lying are they repressing or are they just more than one thing at the same time well you know each of those ideas is a perfectly good idea but it's certainly clear that the thing you're facing is by no means a unified phenomena you say well you're mad at me and they go no I'm not it's like sure you're not you know and if you poke and prod them and irritate them and get them to talk eventually they'll probably figure out why they're mad cuz maybe they don't know or they weren't willing to admit it to themselves or they hadn't fully articulated it and then maybe they'll tell you usually they'll cry first and then they'll tell you well that's how it is right if you you watch how these things progress It's like it isn't until something collapses in some sense in the person that and they sort of soften I guess they let their Persona drop or something like that until they soften they're not going to tell you what's going on so they're defendant you know and that's another Freudian idea you defend yourself against certain phenomena and certain truths it's like yeah you certainly do that and you know you do it about you pretend that other people are other than you know them to be people do that all the time when they're in a relationship that they should have ended like a year ago if they had any sense at all and they know it it's like oh no you know this is going to work out they use that stupid voice which means that you're only talking from here right cuz they're ignoring the entire rest of their body and what it's saying they know perfectly well that's absolute rubbish they have no way of explaining to you why they're doing it they don't know themselves it's like Freud he knew what he was talking about you know and if you You observe in your own behavior your proclivity to do absolutely absurd and self-destructive things at the drop of a hat and be entirely unable to control it you know I mean we talked a little bit about eating disorders it's like there's like 80 or 90 of you in this room that means at least 30 of you have an eating disorder so you're like having this horrible battle with your hypothalamus for all sorts of weird reasons and you know that's sort of the modern equivalent of Freudian sexual Psychopathology because you know we can sleep around but we don't know how to eat anymore so I don't know if that's much of an improvement so this is Freud the mind is a composite of contradictory drives um and Freud actually wasn't he wasn't really a drive theorist because he was more sophisticated than that you know because really when he talks about drives in the broader context of his writing it's clear that he's talking more about subpersonalities because these drives manifest themselves as living entities with their own emotional systems their own thoughts their own impulses even their own ability to speak and you know that's true because now and then you say something when you're angry you think well I wish I wouldn't have said that it's like who's doing the wishing there exactly you know it's like it wasn't you that said it well only said it was because I was angry well that means you're not your anger well that's Freud's Point ego id id is anger it is the thing that bubbles up all these impulsive actions and statements and you're going to detach yourself from that sucker as soon as you can and you're going to expect people to forgive you for it like I wouldn't have said that if you wouldn't have made me so angry it's like which is like the worst kind of apology right it's like I did something rude to you because you're a horrible and I'm your victim it's like that's a great apology so Freud was also pretty damn sophisticated in his approach to the unconscious so here's some here's some functions that he had identified as early as the 1900s so he said the unconscious has a conservative faculty it stores memories often unaccessible to voluntary recall it's like it's an interesting idea right so where are those things that you remember that you could remember but that you aren't well that's a hard one right it's like well I don't know where they are but they seem to be somewhere when I want to recall them and Freud would say Well they're in the unconscious now it's obviously a black box hypothesis right you know because it's not very explanatory but at least he had the sense that it was reasonable to think of them as somewhere dissolutive the unconscious contains habits once voluntary now automatized and dissociated elements of the personality which may lead a Paras itic existence man that's smart you know the idea that that if you did something habitually that that would produce an an automatized system you know we didn't get there with with uh with Neuroscience until maybe the last 20 years when we actually figured out that is what happens you know when you first start doing something it's complicated your whole brain is involved in that that's why it's so exhausting because you're really not good at it right so you're stumbling around like you're trying to learn a piano piece for example you know you make mistakes and you're just a clutz at it and then you practice and practice and practice and as you're doing that less and less of your brain is involved interestingly enough and the parts that are active move from the right to the left and then they move back and as they move back they get smaller and smaller and smaller until you have a little habit machine that enables you say to play that piece of piano uh music or that is really good at liking cocaine depending on what you've been practicing you know and then that's little monster in your head especially if it's associated with something like cocaine and good luck getting rid of that because you've a you've automated it and built it into your biology and Freud would say well then the thing just runs as an autonomous unit it's like yeah that's right he nailed that exactly right creative the unconscious serves as the Matrix of new ideas that's smart that's smart often when you're coming up with new ideas you actually free associate as well people call that brainstorming so good work Freud that was real smart mythopoetic the unconscious constructs narratives and Fantasies that appear Mythic or religious in nature it's like well Yung took that and just ran with it right but Freud never quite made the connection there unfortunately because he was so interested in hammering home the point that human beings were biological creatures he never really was able to Grapple with the idea that well yeah we're biological creatures but the mythopoetic function is a biological function and so to say that religion is only a death a defense against death anxiety is actually it actually contradicts his own Theory now Yung pointed that out to Freud he said well you know there's a bit of a logical problem here and Freud said to him and this is what caused their break it doesn't matter if we don't go down the biological determinist route so to speak then we'll be overwhelmed by a tide of occult nonsense and of course well that happened there was the Nazis first they're pretty good at cult nonsense and then there's the whole New Age movement so and you know young is Yung is Tangled Up in that even though I don't think he's responsible for it so Freud wasn't going to go there and he had his reasons you know but Yung thought well that's just not I'm going there and he that's because Yung had a mythopoetic imagination of incalculable complexity and that was just where he was headed but but Freud figured that out it's very very smart and you know a lot of modern neuroscientists and and modern psychologists haven't even haven't got anywhere near this yet you know the idea that the UNC unconscious has a mythopoetic function it's like I don't think you've learned that in any of your Neuroscience courses yet but it's coming you know I mean it it's it's the case obviously since we have mythopoetic structures they came from somewhere and they're not just stories you know that's that's a that's a that's just not a sophisticated way to think so okay what time is it it must be getting close because you're all getting rustly two minutes two minutes okay well that's good then so what we'll do with the next class is we'll go a little farther with Freud and then I'm going to show you some I think they're shocking so be prepared that what I'm going to show you is a shocking movie and it if it doesn't make you uncomfortable in many ways and squirm around then you're just not paying attention so be be warned okay and psychopathology is not pretty so and it's another reason why people don't like to admit that it exists see you soon |
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 |
This lecture, and the next, are probably the
most explicitly philosophical lectures of the course. Then, we move into psychometrics, and biological
psychology. Those are going to be the most scientific
lectures of the course. I was thinking, this morning, while I was
preparing this lecture, about why I approach these topics this way. Part of the answer is, probably, that it is
not clear that the study of personality - at least, insofar as the concern is to further
the development of personality, which is a term associated with the desire for mental
health, or "subjective well-being," a term I really do not like, or "meaning" - can be
strictly scientific pursuits. So, then, if they're not strictly scientific
pursuits, what should you do about understanding them? If you look at studies, after studies, the
problem is you get a very narrow slice of the domain. It's often not very comprehensible because,
in order to understand the results of a study, you have to have the knowledge - the underlying
knowledge - that is necessary to put the study in some sort of framework. That framework is going to be developed by
studying the relevant scientific literature and psychological literature. Behind that, the framework has to be expanded
to include the relevant philosophical assumptions. I do not really think that you can understand
the details without understanding the assumptions. I also think you are relegated to memorization
if you do not understand the fundamentals. Memorization has very little to do with knowledge. You might be able to memorize procedures that
would enable you to act on something, perhaps to fix an automobile or to play a piece on
the piano. It is not like those things are not worth
doing. But for these ideas to take root and have
affect and meaning, you have to understand them at the right level of analysis. One of the things I really like about personality
theory, especially the clinical end of it, though not exclusively the clinical end of
it, is that the people who were conducting clinical practice and writing clinical theory
during the 20th century were in fact dealing with the most profound problems that affect
people. I started my academic career as a political
scientist, while in so far as you're any sort of political scientist when you are an undergraduate. I was not interested in it at all by my third
year because what I found was that, at least at this time - and I don't know how much it
has changed - the political scientists had already decided that people were basically
motivated by economic concerns. To me that was no use at all because I wanted
to know why they were motivated by economic concerns. It is easy to understand people in some sense
if you already decide what they value. But if you can't figure out what they value,
or what they should value, that is a whole different issue - and that's psychology. It is a deep question because it isn't even
obvious whether the question "are there things you should value" is a reasonable question
or that it can be reasonably answered. The thing I can tell you about that is most
closely allied with my own experience. I do not mean personal experience, but say,
experience as a clinician, is that aimless people are in real trouble. Now I do not necessarily know why that is. And I do not necessarily know what that means
for what your aim should be, but I have certainly seen, for example, if you had to make a choice which
all of you will in the next five years or so between pursuing something diligently and
establishing a fixed identity because of that, or remaining bereft of choice and drifting. I can tell you that if you drift, by the time
you are 30, you are going to be one miserable person. Now I am not sure why that is exactly, and
I am not exactly sure that that necessarily means that picking something and sticking
to it, which is a form of apprenticeship, is better than drifting. It depends what you mean by better. But I can tell you that not catalyzing an
identity seems to be a mistake, and it is a fatal mistake by the time you are 40. It is very difficult to recover from it at
that point. because you are not young anymore, at that
point. If you try to catalyze an identity at that
time, which sometimes can happen, you are competing with all these young shiny people,
who are fuller of potential from the perspective of an employer, for example, then you are. It gets pretty dismal. Anyways, today we're going to go deeper into
philosophical presuppositions than we have in the past. I want to familiarize you with what I think
are the great philosophical and psychological movements of the 20th century because they
shape you and they shape the world you live in, in ways that are incalculable. If you do not understand them, you do not
really know where you are. You do not know where you are in history and
you do not know what ideas you are possessed by. I think I told you when we were studying Jung,
that Jung said that - people do not have ideas, that ideas have people - which I believe to
be true. One of Jung's lasting contributions in some
sense, was that you should know what ideas possess you because otherwise you will not
know what the hell they are doing with you. When you think about all the irrational and
apparently counterproductive things that people do as individuals and also in a mass, you
have to ask yourself if you want to be caught up in that sort of thing. If you could be free from it, if you are caught
up in it, just exactly where is it that you are headed. Which was also something that Jung thought
you should figure out in case where you are headed was not necessarily where you would
go if you were making a fully informed conscious choice. I think that material that we're dealing within
the next two lectures, is the most relevant of all the material were going to cover with
regards to the possession of people by ideas. The existentialists, who are tightly aligned
philosophically with the phenomenologists, basically emerged as a psychological movement
after World War II.There are reasons for this. One of the reasons was that it was quite obvious,
not only that World War II was an ideological battle fundamentally between Fascism and Western
democracy roughly speaking, and it was immediately supplanted by another
ideological battle, which was the one between communism and liberalism, roughly speaking. The issue of ideological possession and the
relationship between the individual, who is ideologically possessed, and their responsibility
and the actions of the state, became paramount concerns in the 1950s, as they should have. One of the lasting questions that remained
after World War II that still has been insufficiently answered is, when the mass goes insane, what is the culpability
of the individuals who compose the mass? Now you can circumvent that question with
regards to what happened in Nazi Germany by assuming that it was top-down coercion that
turned the mass of ordinary German citizens into majority Nazis. I do not think that there is any evidence
that those sorts of ideas are true. There is research bearing on people's willingness
to conform to authority figures. You know the famous experiments on the prison
experiment. For example, at Stanford, where undergraduates
were divided arbitrarily into guards and prisoners, and then they ran a simulation of the prison,
and of course the guards turned into sadistic psychopaths, some of them did anyways. The prisoners turned into cringing victims
in no time flat. There is obviously an element there that demonstrates
that people are very responsive to situational cues and that they can go out of hand very
rapidly. But that does not necessarily mean that you
can use your tendency to be accommodating to authority or the human tendency to be accommodating
to authority, as an explanation for the rise of mass movements like Nazism or communism,
because the explanation does not really help. Okay, some people in the mass were mere followers. What about the leaders? Well, maybe they were all followers' right
up to Hitler, so it is Hitler's fault. It is all Hitler's fault? You are elevating the guy of the status of
a God at that point. Now an evil God, but still, if he has got
all the motive power, you cannot separate him from the idea of Lucifer. He has become an archetypical figure of evil
at that point. It's the same with Stalin and Mao. We know that they were very, very bad men. There is no doubt about it. But to localize all the evil in them and to
consider everyone else victimized followers, is a convenient idea, but it is not helpful. That just makes the followers pathetic for
a different reason. They're not actively self-engaged in cruelty
for their own purposes apart from conformity, but they are just as pathetic and evil as
they would be if they were doing it on their own volition. I do not see the difference between a bully
and a bully's henchmen. In fact, I think the bully probably has more
courage than the henchmen. It is courage of a fairly peculiar sort. This is what the existentialists were concerned
about. The locus of their concern was
basically Nietzsche. You all know that the reason I concentrate
on Nietzsche and also on Dostoyevsky's because I think those two people summed up the 19th
century. I really think that. The problems that they laid out and predicted
would unfold in the 20th century, were the problems that unfolded in the 20th century. They got their predictions right and I think
they got their causality right too. Given the inability of social scientists,
including psychologists, to predict large term mass events, the fact that these two
people managed at 30 to 40 years before the events unfolded and even longer that not seems
to me that it is pretty much worthwhile to consider them psychologists. Certainly Nietzsche thought that of himself. And so did Dostoyevsky for that matter, and
they had immense influence on people like Freud and Jung and Rogers, all the people
that we have been studying. Their thinking is lying underneath every issue
we have discussed. This is one of Nietzsche's great statements. Of what is great one must either be silent
or speak with greatness. With greatness, that means cynically and with
innocence. What I relate is the history of the next two
centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer
come differently, the advent of nihilism. Our whole European culture is moving from
some time now, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward
a catastrophe restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end,
that no longer reflects. It's afraid to reflect. He that speaks here has, conversely, done
nothing so far but to reflect as a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who was found his
advantage in standing aside, outside. Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus
draw their final consequence. Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical
extension of our great values and ideals. Because we must experience nihilism before
we can find out what value these values really had. So one of Nietzsche's claims, for example,
was that as Christianity in Europe transformed itself into science, he felt that one of the
advantage to the Catholic domination of Europe for so many centuries, was that the mind of
the Catholic adherents who took the discipline seriously, or the dogma seriously, learned
to interpret all events under the under the schema of a single theory. He thought about that as a form of discipline. Imagine that if I want to teach you how to
theorize, I might teach you a theory and have you adopt it. Nietzsche's point would be that while you
know a theory, but it also means something else. It also means that now you know how to theorize
and the important consequence of learning a theory may not be the theory. It may be that you learn to theorize. Nietzsche also pointed out that once you learn
to theorize, you can separate yourself from the theory that gave rise to that knowledge. And so you can start to theorize even about
the theory that you mastered, and he thought that is what happened to Europe as a consequence
of its domination by Christianity, especially because of Christianity's essential insistence
on the utility of the truth. He thought that was transformed after Catholicism,
into scientific investigation, but that the Spirit of theorizing in truth, remained intact. The consequence of that was that the European
mind was disciplined by a dogma. That it freed itself from the dogma, that
it turned its power on the dogma, and noted that the dogma itself, seemed to be grounded
in nothing that you could get a grip on. The way you grip things with an empirical
mind. And so it fell apart. That's not saying much more than science posed
a fatal challenge to religion, but it's saying it in a much more profound and interesting
way. It also explains why he makes this claim,
that nihilism is the logical conclusion of the great values and ideals. He did not think about nihilism as a counter
proposition, say to dogmatic Christianity. He thought about it as the logical outcome
of that. Is that relevant? Why is that relevant? Well think it's relevant for a lot of reasons. The first observation might be that a tremendous
amount of mental illness, this is an existential claim, is grounded in nihilism. When someone who is depressed, comes to see
you, what they often say is, I cannot see any point in life. That isn't what they mean. What they mean is, they see the meaning of
life as suffering, which is a meaning, right? And that is not bearable. And then the question is, why bother with
it? And that is the fundamental question of suicide. It is a philosophical question. I think it was Camus who said, the only real
philosophical question was whether or not to commit suicide. Now you know, that is a little dark, coming
like well maybe Camus could use some SSRI's, but you get the point. And it is inappropriate, in my estimation,
to even discuss depression with someone who is depressed, especially if they are intelligent
and open, and therefore more tilted towards philosophical wanderings without actually
addressing the issue. Why live in the face of suffering? Okay, so that is one problem.To the degree
that you will find it difficult in your life to build anything solid under your feet that
you can stand on and believe, have faith in, let's say, you are going to be adrift. The reason for that is a lot of the things
are going to have to do will be difficult and they will involve suffering, which is
also an existential claim. So, the existentialist for example, they do
not make the same claim Freud does. Freud claims that, in some sense that the
normal person is mentally healthy apart from the mild distress of normal life, and in order
to be psychopathological, you have to have been hurt, maybe multiple times or, there are other things
that could contribute to that the existentialist would say no, no, let us just wait a minute
here. Maybe the fundamental condition of human beings
is nihilism and suffering, and that something has to be produced to counter that in order
for life to be tolerable. Well, I think that is a perfectly reasonable
proposition. It's a strange proposition because I have
seen in my lifetime, people who are tormented by existential ideas who cannot get them out
of their mind. You know, ideas that relate to the meaning
of life, other people and concern about death, for example, and the extinguishing of everything
that seems to have any value. It is a primary concern with them. I have seen other people for whom those questions
never seem to arise. Now, I think those people are conservative
people, not very open and probably rather low with neuroticism. They are not philosophically curious. They do not go up chains of abstractions. Even if they do, they do not necessarily get
disturbed in the most profound areas of their being by the questioning. That still leaves plenty of people in the
other category. Nihilism and atheism are closely related. They are not identical by any stretch of the
imagination. Although I think it is difficult for atheism
to describe why it is not essentially nihilistic. That is Dostoyevsky's big criticism. Dostoyevsky's claim was that without any fundamental
value assumed, then there is no reason why you cannot do anything you want. And that is his famous line. "If there is no God, then everything is permitted". All of Dostoyevsky's novel writing is an exploration
of that idea. Sometimes it is an exploration of what that
idea might mean if it was acted out in the life of the given individual, Crime and Punishment. Another would be, in his book, The Devils
or The Possessed. It is an examination of what that idea means
if it is gripped by an individual who has social and political ambitions. That is when Dostoyevsky basically prophesied,
so to speak, that one of the consequences of the death of God would be the rise, basically,
of Communist of totalitarianism because essentially, that is what he predicted in The Devils. It is pretty dead on accurate prediction. It was really quite stunning to me when I
came across it. Nietzsche made exactly the same prediction,
by the way. For those two men, the death of an ultimate
meaning system, especially one that you see when you think about something like European
Christianity at its misleading, in some sense, because the system of beliefs that that constituted
European Christianity and other great belief systems wasn't 2000 years old. It was 25,000 years old. You know you can think about it as beginning
at year zero but it is a mistake from a historical perspective. The ideas that profound religious traditions
are predicated on are generally grounded in ideas that are much older than the traditions
themselves. In some sense when at the end of the 19th
century when things fell apart for us and we can no longer rely on our history predicated
morality to guide us. It wasn't merely that we lost an overlay,
a psychological overlay that it be laid on humanity for 2000 years. It was way deeper than that. We do not even know how old those how will
those ideas are. We know we have some idea about how old they
are there. They are at least as old as written culture. But we also know that the people who have
been brought into the main streams of history, you know, as the world has united people who
were not literate had mythologies that drew from the same themes. Some of those people, as far as we can tell,
had lived a lifestyle that was essentially unchanged for 25,000 years. Australian aborigines are like that. There is plenty of evidence that these ideas
are extraordinarily old. What that means is, when we separate from
them in some sense, not only do we separate from our philosophical presuppositions, but
we separate from the historical consequences of our biology. It is a serious problem. I think that is partly why it is very difficult
to distinguish between someone who is nihilistic and someone who is mentally ill. It is not a radical claim. People, especially those on the depressed
side of the distribution, will tell you that they are nihilistic. They may not use that terminology, although
they often do. I just cannot see any point, what why does
that matter or why does it matter. It seems to be a fact that it matters. It is an interesting fact, that is a phenomenological
fact in some sense, because one of the things that Heidegger pointed out, he was a founder
of the phenomenological school, was that your primary orientation to the world, he thinks
in a strange way, that your primary orientation to the world was one of care. You could say, what characterizes your experience? What sort of creature are you? Heidegger's answer would be, you are a creature
who cares about things, in so far as your engaged in the world, your primary orientation
is one of care. You can think about that as a value. It is a consequence of your value orientation. God only knows where that comes from. Part of it is biological, part of it is developmental,
part of it is historical. It is very, very complex. But if you stop caring about everything, you
are in trouble. That is one of the things that seems to indicate
that caring is actually a fundamental reality. You stop caring about things, you do not stop
suffering. It seems that unless the caring counterbalances
the suffering, you cannot maintain an even keel. That is partly because it does not seem just. When terrible things happen to people, they
always say two things. How it is that being could be constituted
in this manner? What the hell's going on at the fundamental
levels of reality, that such suffering has to be the case? You will certainly ask that if you have a
child was diagnosed with cancer, for example. Or you might think, why is this cruelty as
it appears necessarily aimed at me right now in this place, when hypothetically it could
have not happened at all, or perhaps been visited on someone more deserving. Which is the good remain the good are punished
and the evil remain unpunished something like that. For human beings that produces a
cry for justice. How can the world be constituted that way? That seems to be built into us. Those aren't questions we can just avoid. They're questions that will arise in your
psyche. They will arise as fundamental questions when
sufficiently terrible things happen to you. So the existentialists would say, those are
conditions of existence, you are just stuck with that. It's part of human nature. It's part of human being to be perplexed by
those questions. Then the question is, at least in part, is
there any way of answering them? Nietzsche said, we required some time, new
values. Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure. It is an error to consider social distress
or physiological degeneration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism. Now that is a typical Nietzschian phrase because
there are three profound ideas in that sentence. Each one is in a different phrase. Nietzsche said at one point, I can write in
a sentence what other people write in a book. Then he said, what other people cannot even
write in a book. This sentence is a good example of that. So what is he say? if you see that people are suffering and in
trouble, one thing you can say that is that the reason for that is that the economic system
is unjust and they are layered along the bottom and that is the fundamental cause of their
suffering. But Nietzsche does not allow that to be a
causal interpretation because he says there are multiple ways of interpreting your position. Near absence of material luxury does not necessarily
destine you to one perspective or another. physiological degeneration. People are unhappy or suffering because they
are ill in some manner. You could make that a matter of definition
by saying, that if you're suffering or unhappy, you are ill. But that is not a causal argument. It is just a different way of categorizing
the data. Nietzche would reject that because he would
also note that there is some correlation between physiological health and meaning in life. But the correlation does not imply causality. Even if it did, the relationship is by no
means perfect to the degree that you would want a relationship to be before you accepted
it as relevant. Or corruption of all things, that would be
the idea that being itself is evil, like an evil trick, which is what Tolstoy said, by
the way, when he wrote his confessions. Tolstoy, at the height of his intellectual
power, he was the most famous novelist in the world and unbelievably well regarded well
throughout the world, but particularly in Russia. He was a very socially benevolent man and
well regarded for his wisdom. For years he was afraid to go outside with
a rope or a gun because he thought he would either hang or shoot himself. The reason for that was that he had been struck
by the idea that life is so unbearable, that it should be eradicated. He could not think his way out of that. it was a form of thought that was actually
very characteristic of intellectuals in Russia during his time and in his place. Dostoyevsky wrote about exactly the same sorts
of things. Even Tolstoy noticed that merely observing
that the world was a corrupt and evil place was not necessarily enough to tilt people
towards nihilism because there seem to be people who weren't nihilistic despite the
fact that that seem self-evident to him. Tolstoy actually turned to the Russian people,
you know what he was very entranced by the idea of the folk and folk wisdom, and he turned
to the Russian people as a source of new inspiration like the peasantry. Tolstoy actually fought for the freedom of
the peasantry and he felt that their simple faith, so to speak, was something truly admirable
rather than something pathetic and weak from an intellectual perspective. He strove to emulate that criticism-less faith. But of course he could not do it because once
you taking a bite out of apple, there is no going back, so to speak. Nietzsche says, distress, whether psychic,
physical or intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism. That is, the radical rejection of value, meaning
and desirability. Such distress always permits a variety of
interpretations. Rather, it is one particular interpretation,
the Christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted. The end of Christianity, at the hands of its
own morality, which cannot be replaced. Which turns against the Christian God. The sense of truthfulness, highly developed
by Christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations
of the world and of history. It is a rebound from God is the truth to the
equally fanatical faith. All is false. An act of Buddhism. Scepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the
world, which no longer has any sanction after it's tried to escape into some beyond, leads
to nihilism. All lacks meaning. That is rooted in Nietzsche's criticism of
Christianity because he believed that Christianity was exceptionally morally flawed because all
it offered its followers was the possibility of salvation and redemption from their suffering
after they were dead. It was projected into some other world. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, alleviated
people of their local responsibility to try to improve things here and now and Jung's comments about that were essentially,
that it was the proto-scientists recognition of the fact that the spiritual salvation that
Christianity promised was no longer sufficient, that motivated the development of science. So, for the early Christians this is part
of the tension between Christianity and science. For the early Christians, the idea was that
the earth in some sense was ineradicably corrupt. That all you can hope for in your earthly
life was suffering and that you should accept your suffering and hope for salvation in the
future after you're dead. Obviously that philosophy appeared insufficient
for people. In Jung's hypothesis about the development
of science was that a counter fantasy developed in the unconscious of the Europeans which
was that the material realm, which had been defined
as evil, and therefore not worthy of any study or any pursuit whatsoever actually held the
seeds of the redemption that was lacking. That was Jung's commentary on the idea of
the philosopher's stone because the alchemists, who were proto-scientists, were trying to
find a material substance that would be the philosopher's stone that would offer its holders
wealth, health and eternal life. Why are we pursuing science? Well, hopefully, because we think it will
do us some good here and now, in our bodies. Jung regarded science itself as stemming from
that compensatory dream, brilliant idea. It is actually the only idea I have ever read
that seems to do a reasonable psychological account for the emergence of science as a
discipline. It is a very strange practice. You have to narrow your interests tremendously
to be a scientist. You have to focus on one set of phenomena
that might appear as useless to contemplate as how many angels can dance on the head of
a pin. You have to devote decades to the study of
that thing to make incremental progress. Why in the world would people ever be motivated
to do that? Jung's interpretation was, there was a deep
counter movement towards the over spiritualisation of the psyche and that was the revaluation
of matter and its possibilities. While Nietzsche believed that Christianity
as it stood, at the end of the 1800s, was an untenable philosophy because he thought
it had abandoned its moral obligations by escaping into some beyond, and therefore damned
life as it was actually lived by human beings. He felt that the demise was a good thing. He points out one other thing. This is the difference between having a theory
and then learning to theorize. He says look, if you have been raised in the
tradition, whatever that tradition happens to be, you have a belief system, whatever
that belief system happens to be, and it falls apart on you, at any one point you suffer for two reasons. The first is, your belief system fell apart
and that is not a good thing. It leaves everything unfixed and open, and
you drown in possibility, in a sense. That is a Kierkegaard phrase. But the second consequence is even worse. Once you've learned that one belief system
that is solid could be demolished and fall apart, then it's very difficult ever again
to have any faith in any belief systems whatsoever. Not only do you become a doubter of your own
creed, you become a Meta doubter, which is the doubter of all belief systems. The step from that to nihilism, maybe those
are exactly the same thing. You could think about that in some sense as
the disease of the critical rational mind. It can saw off any branch that it is sitting
on. And you know the utility of that is? Leave no stone unturned, right? You are supposed to question things. The utility of that is, you learn new things. But the price you pay for it, is that you
are not necessarily ever certain about anything. You could say, maybe you shouldn't be certain
about anything but you can forget that. You are going to have to act as if you are
certain many times in your life. When you choose a permanent mate, for example,
if you do that which you probably will, because you're university educated and university
educated people still do that. Although no one else does. So, you are going to pick a career and you
are going to make decisions, one after the other about which, if you are not certain,
you cannot make. In which case you have no life. You are just a whirlwind of chaos, so you
are stuck with the necessity of following a course of action, which is acted out certainty
that your intellect cannot regard as appropriate. And that is hard on people. Why should I choose this instead of this? Why should I act this way instead of that
way? I do not know is not a very useful answer
when you are a creature that is cognitively able, as we are. This is something absolutely brilliant. It is very difficult for me to believe that
it was written so long ago. So this is Dostoyevsky's criticism of communism
forty years before communism was a political force. Dostoyevsky's thinking really hard about this
nihilism problem. By the way, Nietzsche read Dostoyevsky quite
extensively. He is thinking about it. He thinks well, there seems to be two alternatives. One is this superhuman nihilism, which is
sort of a variant of what Nietzsche proposed, because Nietzsche proposed that it would become the responsibility of every
human being after the death of their religious tradition, to establish their own values. He did not think people could do it. He thought there'd have to be a new kind of
person who could manage it, because you know, he is basically asking you to generate a coherent
and pragmatically applicable philosophical structure, out of nothing, during your lifetime. Good luck with that. You know, plus, he assumed that people create
values or that they could create values. That is true to some degree. We'll talk about this more when we get into
the phenomenological end of things. But it is not self-evident, right? Because one of the things you may notice is
that you cannot force yourself to love someone, right? But you cannot just decide to value someone
and then, poof, that happens. In fact, you may want with all your heart,
or at least with all your mind, to value someone because they deserve it. They had never mistreated you. Maybe you've said you would be loyal to them,
and poof, someone comes along and you're tremendously attracted to them and off you go, like someone
who is possessed. Well, did you create that value? And then, closer to your own experience, can
you actually make yourself interested in something you are bored about? Good luck trying that, you know. You'd rather clean up underneath your bed
than read a paper you do not want to read. You cannot just tell yourself, well, I need
to read this paper for the following reasons, and proof, it becomes interesting. No no, your value systems, whatever they happen
to be, are off doing their own thing. The reason for that, in large part, is because
they're possessed by ideas that you do not know about, that have these historical roots and that
play you in some sense, like they play puppets and the stuff is no joke. Okay so this is what Dostoyevsky said, way
back in the late 1800s. This was in a book called "Notes from Underground",
and it is about a man who is like Hamlet. In some sense, he is a modern man. He's a 20th century man really and his problem
is, he is hyper- intelligent and he cannot figure out what the hell he should do with
his life. And it is really bothering him and it is worse than that, because not only
is it really bothering him, that he cannot get his act together, and act with any degree
of consistency in character, but he knows, that he cannot do that. And he tortures himself about his weakness
at the same time. So he is a very neurotic character. But he is a sophisticated and intelligent
neurotic. And so he has run through all the arguments
that you might conjure up, to sort of, talk yourself out of being neurotic and suffering. He has nothing but contempt for his own character. He thinks he is much weaker than people, who
can just act without thinking. And he's in this pit, this horrible pit. And it is a wonderful thing to read. It is quite blackly comical and it is a great
philosophical and psychological study. Anyways, in one of the sections of this book,
Dostoyevsky's protagonist, starts to talk about alternatives to his nihilistic hopelessness.
and he thinks about utopianism as a potential alternative. So what is utopianism? Well, in some sense, medieval Christianity
promised people redemption after they died. While a utopian creed does the same thing,
except it promises it, here and now. Communism was a particular utopian creed and
fascism had the same element. Although it was, I do not know how to describe,
it was less intellectually sophisticated than communism. Communists basically said look, if you guys
just stop being selfish and share, we can transform the world into a place where everyone
will have enough of everything, and everyone will be able to do what they want to do. And because of the natural goodness of people,
if selfishness can be overcome, that will be the next best thing to a paradise. It was a powerful idea for people, you know? 80 years of our history was spent assessing
and battling out the validity of that idea. Hundreds of millions of people died as a consequence
of it. And you can understand why it was so attractive. I mean, still utopian ideologies are attractive
to people and it is hard to read radical Islam as anything other than a utopian ideology. You know, the idea is, once you establish
rigid sharia, then poof, you know, you got the kingdom of God on earth. And part of the reason that the radical Muslims
are fighting against the West, is because they see what they are doing as a counter
position to Western nihilism. And is partly because they do not want to
fall into that, you know. We would say well that is progress. Yeah, it is progress, by our standards, and
it comes at a price. and also we do not even understand how it
was that we paid the price. So the reason I am telling you this, is because,
you do not be thinking, for any time at all, that these sorts of issues have disappeared
or that they are not relevant. They're relevant. Now the guy who is advising Putin. His name is Alexander Dugan and he is no admirer
of Western liberalism. He thinks about it as fundamentally nihilistic. He thinks that its universal application would
result in the dissolution of all local culture and the production of this sort of materialistic
hyper- individuality. He's an admirer of tradition. And you know, specifically Russian Orthodox
tradition. And he believes that the cultures, India,
Russia and China in particular, should develop their own local cultures, keep the West the
hell out, and act as a counter position to nihilistic liberalism. Now you know, you can say what you want about
that. I think Dugan's biggest problem is that, you
know, he does not want that the diverse ideas that characterize the West to bump up against
Russia and dissolve it. But what he fails to understand is those same
ideas are going to emerge within Russia, anyways and if you know, if you want to keep them
away outside, you have to keep them away inside and the Soviets already tried that for 70
years with pretty dire results. So I don't think he can get around the problem
merely by putting up walls, but he is going to try. And that is what Putin is doing. So these ideas haven't disappeared at all. They underlie all of the great conflicts that
characterize the modern age. Dostoyevsky criticized utopianism and it its
brilliant, his formulation, so I am going to read it to you. In short, one may say anything about the history
of the world. Anything that might enter the most disordered
imagination. The only thing one can say is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one's throat, and
indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening. They're continually turning up in life, moral
and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity, who make it their object to live
all their lives as morally and rationally as possible. To be, so to speak, alike to their neighbours,
simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that these very people,
soon or later, have been false to themselves playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly
one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man
since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing. Drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing
but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface. Give him economic prosperity, such that he
should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation
of his species. And even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer
spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately
desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this
positive good sense, his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar
folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself, as though that
were so necessary, that men still are men, and not the keys of
a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control completely, so completely, that
one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. Clearly that is Dostoyevsky's criticism of
materialistic determinism, which he felt as a spiritual threat fundamentally, its proposition
being that animals and human beings were deterministic machines. It is a Newtonian worldview and because of
that, everything could be calculated and planned ahead of time, because it could be predicted
and measured, and that is not all. Even if man really were nothing but a piano
key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would
not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude,
simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means, he will contrive
destruction and chaos, sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point. He will launch a curse upon the world, and
as only man can curse, it is his privilege, and the primary distinction between him and
other animals, maybe by his curse alone he will attain his object and convince himself
that he is a man and not a piano key. If you say that all this, too, can be calculated
and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating
it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely
go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it. For the whole work of man really seems to
consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano
key. It may be at the cost of his skin. It might be by cannibalism. And this being so, can one help being tempted
to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we
don't know? You will scream at me, that is, if you condescend
to do so. That no one is touching my free will, that
all they're concerned with is that my will should of, should of itself, of its own free
will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature, and arithmetic. Good heavens gentleman, what sort of free
will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic. When it will all be a case of twice two makes
four. Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that. So what's his point? It's sort of a Garden of Eden point, you know? What are people like? Imagine you can reconstruct a paradise on
earth? You know? Hypothetically that's what everyone wants. We can go live in a paradise, and that would
be the end of the problem. We'd all live happily ever after. But in the original paradise story, that's
what people were provided with. And the first thing they did when they were
put there, was to do the one thing that they were told not to do, that would bring it all
crashing down. And that was immediately what they did. And so Dostoyevsky's stories are actually
a retelling of that idea. The idea was that people aren't like the utopians
think. We don't want it easy. We don't want it comfortable. We don't want it good. And the reason for that is, we'd be bored
stiff. And so that if anybody ever did put us in
the kind of nursery, that would require us never to exert any effort to do anything at
all whatsoever ever again, even if it meant going insane, we'd destroy it. And then he takes that further, he says, and
that is a good thing. Kierkegaard writing earlier, about 40 years
earlier, said something quite similar. It is now about four years ago that I got
the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author I remember quite clearly, it was on
a Sunday. Yes, that is it, a Sunday afternoon. I was seated as usual, out-of-doors at the
caf� in the Fredericksburg garden. I had been a student for half a score of years. Although never lazy, all my activity, nevertheless
was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have great partiality
and for which, perhaps, I even have a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day
idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I
lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts I remember these. You are going on, I said to myself, to become
an old man without being anything and really without undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look about
you in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious
and much heralded men, who were coming into prominence and are much talked about. the many benefactors of the age who know how
to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier. Some by railways, others by omnibuses and
steamboats others by the telegraph, others quite easily apprehended compendiums and short
recitals of everything worth knowing. Finally, the true benefactors of the age make
spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier yet more and more significant. And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted for my cigar
was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this
thought flashed through my mind. You must do something, but inasmuch as with
your limited capacities will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become. You must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm
as the others, undertake to make something harder. This notion pleased me immensely and at the
same time, it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and
esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine in every way to make
everything easier, there remains only one possible danger. Namely, that the ease become so great, that
it becomes altogether too great. Then there is only one want left, though it
is not yet felt want. When people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind and out of despair
at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing, and was unable to make anything easier than
it already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy,
I conceived it as my task to create difficulties, everywhere. Now, one of the things you might ask yourself
is, sometimes you come to University and people talk about happiness. For example, they talk about positive psychology. I am not a fan of positive psychology, by
the way. Because happiness is basically extraversion
minus neuroticism and we knew that 15 years ago. So we didn't need to make a lot of noise about
it. So anyways, one of the things you might ask
yourself is, well, why did you come to University? Did you actually come to University to make
yourself happier? Well, let's think about that for a minute. Here's one thing to think about? We know that if you put animals in a relatively
boring situation, like rats, in a boring situation and you give them free access to cocaine,
they'll just take cocaine until they are dead basically. Now rats in a normal environment won't do
that, but bored rats that are sort of isolated, cocaine is really an excellent thing, as far
as they are concerned. They'll ignore sex, they'll ignore food. I think they'll still drink water, if I remember
correctly. But it is cocaine all the way. And if you could inject an electrode into
their minds, their brains, which people have done, you can inject the electrode down into
the hypothalamus, into the part that is associated with the reward centres. It is the source of the dopaminergic tract
and you can set them up so that if the rat pushes a button, they get a jolt of happiness,
basically, and the rat will sit there and push that happiness button in a rather frantic
way, as if it is looking for something else, in some sense. But it will certainly do it, because it is
a peculiar kind of reward. Now the question might be, would you allow
yourself to be wired up like that? Now you might think there might be some times
in your life where you think that might just be perfectly fine idea, but most of you, I
suppose, I presume, wouldn't do that for second, for the same reasons, perhaps, that you do
not avail yourself of unlimited access to cocaine. Which is a stimulant that is very good at
producing positive emotion. It is a powerful psychomotor stimulant and
so it affects the parts of your brain that are active when you are doing something that
you think is worthwhile and productive. So why not just do that all the time? That is the question that Aldous Huxley asked
in Brave New World. You've got everything you want, take a drug
to keep you calm and happy, poof; perfect. Well, is that what you want? And if answer is no, then you might ask yourself,
what the hell do you want? You know, one of the things I thought a lot
about lately is, lately being 10 years, I suppose is there are these statues that I've seen. I've looked at pictures of them online. There are statues of Atlas, and you know Atlas,
he's this God who has the world on his shoulders. And that is his destiny or his curse, to have
the world on his shoulders. And he might say, well, you know, poor Atlas. Maybe he should just put the damn world down
and you know, go out for a beer or something. But then you might also think, well what is
that figure trying to, what is that that idea trying to indicate cause it's an old idea. It is a profound idea. There's something divine about a figure with
the world on its shoulders. Well, I might say that's the reason you are
in University whether you know it or not. You are here to take the world on your shoulders,
because that is a sufficiently profound and worthwhile exercise, so that all the suffering
that you are going to have, might be regarded as worthwhile. Because the value of what you are doing is
so high, because that is something you might ask, is there something that you could do,
whose value is so high, that the fact, for the existentialists, it's a fact, that
you're mortal and vulnerable and prone to suffering, inescapably. That you would find that not only acceptable,
but desirable. You might say that you would pay that price. You might say that is the existential question. And one of the things it is very interesting
about that question. I am going to talk about this a lot next class. What happens if you make the opposite choice? I think the 20th century actually showed us
what happened when people made the opposite choice. Because as far as I can tell, when people
abandon their Divine responsibility, let us say, to the utopian claims of a totalitarian
state, or to hopeless nihilism, the consequence on the one hand, with nihilism
was despair and illness, and the consequence on the totalitarian end of things, the utopian
end was that you might not die, but you are certainly going to have a hand in making sure
that a lot of other people do. And so, to some degree it depends on what
you want for proof with regards to what you should do. Now, the conclusion I have drawn from all
this, from reading the existentialist is that, if it is the pointless suffering of humanity
and the inability to extract meaning from that, that makes you a nihilist and that justifies
it, let us say. You are making a claim right? The claim is, the implicit claim is, that
suffering is bad and should be halted. It is something like that. And so maybe you will do that by becoming
suicidal or maybe you do that by becoming ultimately genocidal, which is also an option
that's open to more than a few people. But there is a logical inconsistency in that
as far as I can tell which is that your initial presupposition is that the suffering is actually
bad. It should be mitigated. That should be it should be reduced. It should perhaps even be eliminated. If you pick up the cloak of nihilism, or maybe
you pick up the cloak of ideological totalitarianism, then we know what the consequence of that
is. The consequence is that everything that is
already really bad, becomes so much worse, that it is almost unimaginable. And so, even by the standards of the nihilist,
who says that the suffering of being should result in its elimination. The consequences of thinking that way, or
flipping to the other side and adopting some sort of defensive ideology is that, things
go from being, you know, merely the sort of bad state of the earth as it is now, to something as hellish as the Soviet gulags,
or the Russian concentration camps or Mao's great experiment in the cultural Revolution,
which probably killed 100 million people. You know, about which we generally hear nothing. Now you know one of the things the existentialist
would say is, what is the relationship between mental health and responsibility? Now that's a good question because it also
has to do with something like the definition of mental health and responsibility. It is like, if you want your life to be well
constituted, let us say, whatever that means. And it does not mean being happy. The reason it can't mean being happy is there's
going to be times in your life or you're to be called on to act, when you are not happy. So, for example, when one of your parents
dies, you're going to make a choice. You are not going to be happy. Hopefully, you won't be. Otherwise you are tangled in some sort of
Freudian nightmare. But let us assume that that is not the case. You are not going to be happy about it. You're going to be hurt and maybe even partly
broken. So what the hell you supposed to do, then? Well the answer is, you should be more use
than trouble. Under some such circumstances, that's a good
thing to strive for, you know? Because your mother would be, if it is your
father. And your mother's to be equally distraught
and so are your siblings and everyone else you care for. Maybe by that time, you should be tough enough
so that in that situation, you are good for something. Someone has to make the damn funeral arrangements. Someone has to settle out the will. Someone has to make sure the family does not
degenerate into horrific squabbling, which is something that often happens after the
death of a parent. And you are not going to be motivated to do
that by happiness. And what if you have a sick child, when you
are a parent. Maybe it is a chronic illness. You are not going to be happy about that. You know it will be a weight that you carry
with you all the time and it is one of those things. It seems particularly unjust. Then, you are no longer happy. If being happy is the purpose of life, then
you are basically, that is pretty much it for you. And you know these catastrophes that I am
speaking of. You can be certain that you are going to be
exposed to many of those during your life. You know. It will be a rare period, I think it is rare,
in anyone's life where one or more of such things is not going on chronically. It is not you, with some terrible health problem,
or some other terrible problem, then it is a parent or a sibling or a child. Because you know, you are connected to other
people and their vulnerable to so that is the law of human beings. And so if it is happiness and this is what
Solzhenitsyn said about happiness too. He said happiness is a philosophy, who's brought
to ruin by the first blow of a guard's truncheon. Like yeah, that is about as bluntly as you
can put it. Here is another, I have time to read both
of these. I think this is from Kierkegaard as well. Kierkegaard, by the way, was really the first
thinker who identified what we would describe in modern terms as anxiety, especially as
existential anxiety or angst. And it would be associated with the condition
of questioning the nature of existence, the utility of existence, and so Kierkegaard was
really the first person who formalized that into something resembling a philosophy or
a psychology and that he was trying to think about how
that might be overcome. Given that it seemed to be rooted in fact,
the factual observation. That is the observation of suffering and this is a corollary to Dostoyevsky's comments
even though Kierkegaard's comments were written decades earlier. Dostoyevsky's critique basically said, you
cannot solve the problem of suffering by formalizing a utopia and then enjoining it like a mass
animal. You cannot do that because you are not that
kind of creature. Even if it was possible, you would not accept
it, you cause trouble because you are interested in trouble. You are probably more interested in trouble
than you are at being happy. So I mean, you know people like that. That is another marker of serious personality
disorder, right? I have clients, have many of them, who are
way more interested in causing trouble in some dramatic way than they are in being boring
and stable. They will take any form of suffering and inflict
any form of suffering on any number of people they can possibly get their hooks into in
order merely to escape, you know, drab and secure normality. You know, you call those people dramatic,
overly dramatic. That is one way of looking at it. And they make, as far as I can tell, a relatively
conscious choice. Trouble is more interesting than safety. Kierkegaard says something similar. But in
a manner that is more constructive, in some sense, with regards to what you should do
with all that insane energy that you are not going to be able to encapsulate inside a utopia. And it has to do with individual responsibility. There is a view of life, which conceives that
where the crowd is, there is also the truth. And then, in truth itself, there is need of
having the crowd on its side. I was on a panel at one point about. I think we were discussing gender differences
between, obviously between men and women and there are lots of people. The social constructionists, in particular,
who think that all the differences; there is biological sex and then there is gender
and gender is socially constructed and that all gender differences are socially constructed. And there is no biological differences in
gender between the two sexes. Now, virtually no evidence supports that proposition. If you look at the hard-core psychological
evidence, in fact, it is completely the opposite. And not only that, as you make societies more
egalitarian, men and women get more different, instead of more the same. Now the reason that happens is because, once
you iron out the environmental variability, by equalizing everything, all that is left
is genetic variability. So it springs to the forefront. And so the biggest gender differences in the
world are between men and women in Scandinavia. and those are partly personality differences. Women are higher in negative emotion and more
agreeable, among other things, but more particularly, the differences seem to be those of interest. So the biggest differences between men and
women seem to be, what they are interested in. and roughly speaking, women are more interested
in people and roughly speaking, men are more interested in things. And so in Scandinavia, for example, you have
20 to 1 proportion of women to men in nursing, and a 20 to 1 proportion of men to women in
engineering. And so, you know, the Scandinavia governments,
now and then, try to move that, so there are more male nurses and more female engineers. And if they really push, they can move the
ratios somewhat, for a few years. But as they relax, they snap right back to
20 to 1. So anyways, I was sighting some of these studies,
and one of the people that I was discussing said, what are we supposed to do with that? And I said, I do not know what you mean. Those are scientific findings. He said that, yeah, truth has to be established
by consensus. And I thought I do not want to live in whatever
world you are going to end up ruling, because truth is not merely established by consensus. or if you think it does. If you think it is, then while you are in
a position that Kierkegaard describes, which is that, as long as everyone else believes
it, then the appropriate thing is for you to believe it, and also that is the truth. Like, it is a pretty damn dismal philosophy
and it gets people into tremendous trouble because no matter how many people think there
isn't a wall there, anyone who runs at it head first, is in for a vicious surprise. There is a view of life, which conceives that
where the crowd is, there is also the truth and in that truth, is in truth itself. There is need of having a crowd on its side. There is a view of life, which conceives that
wherever there is a crowd there is untruth. So that to consider for a moment, the extreme
case. Even if every individual, each for himself
in private, were to be in possession of the truth. Yet, in case they are all to get together
in a crowd, a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed; avoiding, voting,
noisy, audible crowd, untruth would immediately be in evidence. For a crowd is the untruth. In a godly sense, it is true, eternally, christianly,
as St. Paul says that only one attains the goal. Which is not meant in a comparative sense. For comparison takes others into account. It means that every individual can be that
one. God helping them therein, but only one attains
the goal. And again, this means that every man should
be careful about having to do with the others. And essentially should only talk with God
himself. For o
nly one attains the goal. and again this means that man or to be a man is akin to deity. In a worldly and temporal sense, it will be
said by the man of bustle, sociability and amicableness, how unreasonable, that only
one attains the goal. For is far more likely that many, by the strength
of united effort, should attain the goal. And when we were many success is more certain,
and it is easier for each man severally. True enough, it is far more likely, and it
is also true with respect to all earthly and material goods. If it is allowed to have its way. However, this becomes the only true point
of view. For it does away with God in eternity and
with man's kinship with deity. It does away with it, or transforms it into
a fable. And puts in its place, the modern, or we might
say the old pagan notion, that to be a man is to belong to a race, endowed with reason. To belong to it as a specimen, so that the
race or species is higher than the individual. This is 100 years before Nazism. Which is to say, that there are no more individuals,
but only specimens. But, eternity which arches over and high above
the temporal. Tranquil as the starry vault at night. And God in heaven, who in the bliss of that
sublime tranquility, holds in survey, without the least sense of dizziness at such a height,
those countless multitudes of men, and knows each single individual by name. He, the great examiner says that only one
attains the goal. Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist
Protestant. Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian existentialist. And Nietzsche, who was also an existentialist,
was a, perhaps the most effective anti-Christian philosopher who has ever existed. And he made it one of his conscious aims,
to take a hammer to everything that was foundational against what was left of Christianity at the
time that he existed. The reason I am telling you this is because
existentialism is a strange philosophy. It brings people with very divergent fundamental
assumptions together. They share certain assumptions. And one assumption is that life, in its essence,
is suffering. And the second is that the individual has
a responsibility to adopt responsibility in the face of that suffering. And that is the proper response the proper
response in the nihilism or ideological possession. It is something else at something that depends
on the person themselves. Nietzsche draws the same conclusions as Kierkegaard. A traveller who had seen many countries and
peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere, and
he answered, men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with
greater justice. They are all timid. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well
that he is in this world just once, as something unique and that no accident, however strange,
will throw together a second time into a unity. Such a curious and diffuse plurality. He knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience. Why? The last lecture, when we were talking about
Rogers, not the video lecture, but last time I talk to you about Rogers, I was talking
about instrumental speech. And that is the speech that you engage in
that is inauthentic from Roger and existentialist perspective. When the goal of the speech is to extract
something from someone or something. The goal is not mere clarity of communication. And so what that means is that, the speech
becomes separate from the person. And the speech is being used as a tool for
what some element of the person requires. And that's the hiding behind convention that
Nietzsche's talking about. Because, when people use instrumental speech,
they're almost always pursuing something that other people have told them that they should
want. It might be status. It might be career promotion. Those are two of the major, it might be material
progress of other sorts. But the problem is that it is only part of
the person talking. And that part, is the part that is fixated
on that local achievement. It's not the part that is attempting to inquire
about what the truth might be in this particular situation, and to describe it as carefully
as possible. And that is the clearest speech of the individual. Now one of the premises of existential psychotherapy
is that that is the only way you can be healthy. You have to learn to speak and act as a whole. And you have to be directed towards responsibility
and truth. And the consequences of not doing that will
be A. that you will suffer pointlessly which
is the worst kind of suffering and B. which is worse, you will bring rack and
ruin onto everyone around you. And it gets worse than that, actually, because
if you do that long enough. Not only will you bring rack in ruin on everyone
around you, you will want to. And that seems at least potentially like a
bad outcome. Well, you can say, if you adopt a firm belief
system that will protect you from that. It is like the terror management idea of ideology
protecting you from death anxiety. Which is a, it is a very hopeless philosophy,
that. Because it basically suggest that the only
reason people have beliefs is because they are terrified without them. And that if they engage in any sort of heroic
behaviour, it is merely a fa�ade, which in the final analysis is empty, although necessary. That is where the idea of positive illusions
came from, essentially, you know? That life is so terrible that unless you lie
yourself into tranquility. You will be mentally unstable and unhealthy. A doctrine for which by the way, there is
no real evidence. Anyways, from fear of his neighbour who insists
on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual
human being to fear his neighbour. To think and act herd fashion, and not to
be glad of himself. A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for
comfort. Inertia, in short, that inclination to laziness
of which the traveller spoke. He is right. Men are even lazier than they are timid. What they fear most is the troubles with which
any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed
manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everyone's bad conscience. The principle that every human being is a
unique wonder. They dare to show us the human being as he
is down to the last muscle. Himself and himself alone. Even more, that in this rigourous consistency
of his uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as
every work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises men, it is their
laziness that he despises. For it is on account of this that they have
the appearance of factory products and appear indifferent and unworthy of companionship
or instruction. The human being, who does not wish to belong
to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself. Let him follow his conscience, which shouts
at him. Be yourself. What you are presently doing, opining, and
desiring, that is not really you. That is s good place to stop, see you Thursday. |
Okay, so, now we are going to talk about the
phenomenological, existential/phenomenological psychiatrists and their theories from the
1950s, and, as I mentioned to you before, a lot of their thinking was motivated by what
had happened in World War II. When I lectured to you last, I pointed out,
I described Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’s summation of the world’s situation and really the
world’s psychological situation at the end of the 1800s and that was that, our new modes
of thinking had undermined our faith, and our old modes of thinking –and that was
a problem, because people need something to stand on and orient themselves and to move
forward – so Nietzsche and Dostoevsky basically both prophesied that the consequence of that
disillusion would be, increased probability of nihilism, and everything that went along
with that. And Dostoevsky wrote about that actually quite
extensively in a book called “Notes from Underground,” which, if many of you are
interested, especially in clinical psychology, this is a book you should really read, because
this is one of the most brilliant psychological studies of a psychologically disturbed man
that has ever been written. It is very accurate, and there are sections
in “Crime and Punishment” that are like that too. I think they are unsurpassed in their representation
of psychological phenomena. I don’t know how he managed it – I mean,
Dostoevsky was epileptic, I don’t know if you know that, but he was arrested by the
Tsar’s men in late 1800s for being a student radical and they threw him in prison in Moscow,
and then, one day, they took Mao in front of a firing squad and shot him at 6 in the
morning, but they only used blanks, which, of course, he didn’t know about. That scared him so badly, he developed epilepsy
– that can happen, by the way – then he had the epilepsy for the rest of his life,
but he had this strange kind of epilepsy, which actually not all that rare, sometimes
when people have epilepsy they experience this phenomenon they call an aura, which is
an altered state of consciousness before the epileptic seizure heads, and they can be very
strange, these auras. I read a case once about a guy who, his aura
was that his hand was being possessed by devils from hell and he could feel the possession
move up his arm, and into his shoulder, and, once it hit his head, he’d have an epileptic
seizure. So there is another case, where this man,
his aura was that exact double had appeared behind him, but if he turned to look, then
he would have an epileptic seizure, but if he didn’t turn to look, then he wouldn’t. These brain disorders are very strange things,
because they’re, well, the system that is disordered is a lie, and is capable of any
number of extraordinarily peculiar misbehaviours. Anyways, Dostoevsky’s aura was a world revealing
aura and, so, what Dostoevsky would experience was that, the meaning of things got deeper,
and deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and, then, just as he was on the verge of
discovering the secret to everything, he would have an epileptic seizure. But he said that the quality of experience
during the aura was so high, so overpowering, and so deep, that he would have traded all
of his normal experience just to have had those experiences, and he had them repeatedly. I really do believe that it was this broadening
of his vision and concept by his epilepsy that transformed him, among other things. He went through some pretty damn rough experiences
because he was in prison with rapists and murderers for a long time in Siberia, even
though he was kind of an aristocratic guy. He had a rough time of it, and I imagine that
that also broadened him tremendously, given that it didn’t kill him, but I really do
believe that the epileptic insight was key to his unsurpassed genius, and so, his aura
– and other people do experience epileptic auras, symptoms like that, by the way – and
some people are so enamoured of the aura that they would not take the antiepileptic medication,
because they don’t want to forgo the experience that precedes the aura, or the actual epileptic
seizure. And Dostoevsky’s experiences, they all are
an element of the aura, is also relevant to what we are going to talk about today, because
both Binswanger and Boss were very interested in how meaning revealed itself in the world. And they had opposing explanations. I actually think they are parallel explanations,
but, the meaning that Dostoevsky experienced is an amplification of the normal manner in
which meaning reveals itself in the world. And people experience that sort of thing in
various altered states of consciousness. Anyways, Binswanger and Boss, they worked
mostly in the 1950s, and as I said, they were very concerned with what had happened in World
War II. So Dostoevsky and Nietzsche basically predicted
that it was going to be nihilism, or ideological totalitarianism, and that is basically exactly
what happened, by the time the 1930s appeared on the horizon, the Germans had been, they
had gone through an absolutely brutal First World War. And then, they went through hyperinflation
of insane proportions. So, in the 1920s, Germany underwent this partly
because they had such heavy war debts to pay for World War I. The German inflation got to the point where
it was literally upwards of a hundred million Marks to buy a loaf of bread. So, they were taking wheel barrels full of
money to the grocery store. What happened was that their currency devalued
to zero, and, that actually happens to economies more often than you might think. The thing just hits zero and that is that,
and then it has to be rebooted so to speak. So, they had been… the war was dreadful
and hundreds of thousands of men were killed or brutalized. Then, their economy just absolutely fell apart. And, then, of course, at the same time – well,
a little bit earlier – the revolution had taken place in Russia, right at the end of
the First World War, and the communism had come to power, and the Communists were agitating
all over Europe, and in North America, and their goal was to produce a Communist revolution
that was worldwide and so, the Germans were all shorted out that the Communists were going
to take over the country, which was a perfectly reasonable fear, and, instead of that, what
happened was that Fascism rose, and was a form of state totalitarianism and I think
the Germans were so desperate for order by that point. And that is what the Fascists basically offered
them, at least in theory. Unfortunately, as it turned out, they offered
them a little bit too much order, or maybe a lot too much order, and things went dreadfully
south. So, then, the whole world had to walk through
the horrors of World War II, and it was shocking, in a variety of ways, not only because of
the brutality of the warfare, but because of the genocidal actions that took place consciously
by the Nazis. And those actions were in many ways very difficult
to understand. I mean, here is why they are particularly
difficult to understand: there were certainly times where the brutality that the Nazis employed
in their eradication of their theoretical enemies, far surpassed the necessity for the
mere eradication. But even worse than that, so it went past
eradication into real torture, constantly, and, not only that, there are many situations
in which the Nazis, especially near the end of the war, they had to decide, really, whether
they were going to continue exterminating Jews and gypsies, and homosexuals, and all
the people they felt didn’t fit into their culture, or whether they were going to win
the war. There were decisions they had to make about
the distribution of resources. If they were going to pursue the homicidal
extermination, that would mean it would decrease the probability that they would win the war. And that happened a lot, especially at the
end of the war, the Nazis always continuing the extermination. Now, that is pretty damn interesting, because,
you can think, well, on the one hand, if they are serving a creed and the creed is world
domination, then this is the extermination processes are considered a step towards the
actual end point, which is the establishment of a world state, the Fascist world state,
or at least, the Fascist European state, then you would think that the extermination attempts
would be subordinate to that goal, if they were actually pursing the goal that they said
they were pursuing. But there is an old psychoanalytic idea, which
is really worthwhile, it is like a surgical tool, and I would say, that if you were going
to use it in your own life, use it carefully, because you don’t want to do unnecessary
surgery. And the rule is – and I think this is a
Jungian rule, but I can’t remember exactly where I read it – if you can’t understand
why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever those
might be, and then infer the motivation from the consequences. So, if you see someone who seems to be doing
nothing except making everyone around them and themselves miserable, and you can’t
understand why, one of the hypotheses that you might entertain is that they are trying
to make everyone around them miserable, as well as themselves. And that is actually their goal. And it is hard for people to understand these
sorts of things, because when we see phenomena like the Columbine shooters, we always assume
that the reason that these people are doing these sorts of things, is for others reasons
than the reasons that appear to motivate them, or even the reasons they say they are doing
it, because the Columbine killers, especially the more literary one, he said exactly why
he was doing what he was doing. It is as clear as it could possibly be. All you have to do is go online, and read
what he said, and he tells what he was up to. But people don’t like to think that way
because they don’t believe that anybody could be consciously possessed of that much
malevolence without there being some other kind of cause, like he was bullied at school,
or he was an outcast, and, those things were only vaguely true and certainly they weren’t
more true of him than they were true of how many people in high school are bullied and
somehow outcast. It must be 10%, probably more like 30.That
doesn’t mean that schools are blowing up all over all the time. It is completely insufficient explanation. Anyways, for whatever reason, people turn
to possession by very, very strict ideological ideas. They were willing to be possessed by those
ideas to the point where they would undertake actions that you would think would be completely
impossible for theoretically civilized people. It turned out that those set of actions were
not only, were not impossible for civilized people, but that the people themselves, especially
in Nazi Germany, they pretty much knew what the hell was going on. You don’t take several million people out
of your population without rumor spreading let’s say, and so we should never forget
that Hitler was elected. He was elected by a large majority too. It was a landslide vote, it was the kind that
no modern democratic leader ever gets. So, although it is difficult to, it is difficult
for people to swallow, it is hard not to assign culpability for what happened in Germany to
the society at every strata. You can’t just dup it on the leaders and,
in fact, one of the things…here’s something to think about with regards to Hitler, because
one of the things you might ask is how the hell could he be so absolutely compelling
to his audiences. I will give you an explanation. Let’s make a few assumptions. The first assumption is: there are a lot of
modern resentful Germans kicking around. Why? Well, they lost the First World War, that
wasn’t so good, and then, there were a lot of brutal men left, because they had been
in the trenches, and they had been shooting and fighting and shooting at each other under
absolutely abhorrent conditions for like years, and years, and so there were plenty of utilized
men around. And then there a whole damn economy collapsed
because they were forced into signing what his stories regarded as a very punitive peace
treaty, so like…everything had fallen apart, to a degree that we cannot even begin to imagine. So, in the 1930s, the Germans were starting
to get back on their feet and when Hitler came to power, he started not only to rearm,
but to re-industrialize the economy, and he was actually pretty damn good at that. Now, Hitler was a good orator, but he, it
isn’t exactly clear that he was a coherent philosophical, theorizer, although to think
of him as stupid is completely missing the point. He was by no means stupid. I wouldn’t say that he was particularly
educated, but he had a very powerfully developed aesthetic sense, and he spent a lot of his
time designing the cities that would be built after World War II was over, and those cities
were generally conceptualized by him as places where the arts, or at least the Nazi version
of the arts, could flourish. So, there is no real evidence that what was
wrong with the Nazis was that they were civilized. There’s more evidence actually, I think,
that they were too civilized. I will talk you about that later. But anyways, you think: how did Hitler get
all these people under his spell? Well, here’s a hypothesis that is basically
derived from Jungian thinking. And I should let you know, by the way, because
Jung has been accused of being an anti-Semite, and there is various reasons for this, partly
because what happened during World War II, and partly because his theory drew heavily
from Christianity, although from many other sources as well, and he did believe that there
were differences in the psychology of people with different ethnicities. Now, whether that is racist or not, depends
on whether or not you like the person you are talking to. Because the leftists think that there are
cultural differences and they are important, but if you are talking about them in the wrong
way, then, you are racist. And the right wingers, they just think there
are ethnic differences to begin with. So, it’s a tricky issue. If there are differences that are important,
then who the hell cares about multiculturalism? It is not even worth preserving. If there are differences, you are stuck with
having to deal with the differences, so you are basically screwed either way. So, anyways, Jung has been the target of many
accusations of anti-Semitism, particularly by biographers who were resentful, and clueless,
and historically uninformed, and I would say malevolent, fundamentally. He worked as a CIA agent, it was just revealed
last year. He provided psychological reports to the American
government on an underlying psychological structure of the Nazi leaders for years. And he never told anybody about that while
he was alive, it only came to light, as far as I know, last year, perhaps the year before
that. So, anyways, the Germans they weren’t very
happy about the whole damn situation and so when they were aggregating on mass, you think,
what happens when all people get together in a group? We talked about last time when we talked about
Kierkegaard’s idea that, as soon as you get a bunch of people together, no matter
how truthful they are all as individuals, instantly, the crowd is not a truthful thing. There are real reasons for that, real psychological
reasons. There is the famous Asch experiment – I
hope that these are the right experiments, A-S-C-H – about line length. So, you draw two lines on the board, and they
are the same length, and you get the crowd to collaborate with you when you ask some
poor sucker who doesn’t know about the game to play, and you ask one person, and they
say “no, those lines are different in length.” And you ask another person “well, they are
quite different in length.” And another person says “yeah, sure, I can
see the difference in length.” And then you ask the poor pigeon “are they
different in length,” and then he says “yes.” And you can understand why. If all those other people are saying it, it
is either something wrong with all of them, which seems unlikely. Or he is the victim of a conspiracy, which
is a little on the paranoid side, but happens to actually be true in this case. Or, he is just not looking at it right. And you might think that the humble thing
to think is he is wrong. So, the fact that somebody might go along
with the crowd, you can blame that on their ability to be social and conventional, which
in many ways is a huge advantage, because if you were all antisocial and unconventional,
there would be a good chunk of you in jail and you certainly wouldn’t be having this
delightful, peaceful conversation that we are having. You don’t want to underestimate the utility
of conventionality to too much of a degree. Anyways, so, there is this funny story I read
once, I don’t think it is true, but it might be, where a psychology class got together
and decided they played trick on the professor. And the trick was that, he would walk back
and forth, and the trick was that they wouldn’t pay any attention at him at all if he was
on the left side of the room: they would talk and look up. And if he was on the right side of the room,
then they would really focus in and pay attention. The story goes that, by several weeks of this
little trick, they had him right lecturing right beside the door. He wouldn’t move from that spot. The reason I am telling you that is that it
is pretty obvious that people can respond to the cues that the crowd is delivering. A good speaker does a variety of things. One is they never talk to the crowd. You pick out specific individuals and talk
to them, and they’re reflective of the crowd. Then you can tell if everyone understands,
and the other thing that a good speaker does is pay attention to the responses of the crowd. If a lecture is really a dialogue, even though
the audience is only emitting the non-verbal elements of the conversation, those non-verbal
elements are important. You want to stay in touch with the non-verbal
communications. Now, Hitler, he is kind of a chaotic guy. He is very angry; he is angry in part because
he is a frustrated art student. He tried to get into art school four times;
so really the person to blame for World War II was the four person committee that wouldn’t
let poor Hitler into the Viennese School of Art. He really wanted to go and had some artistic
talent. He was a little on the conventional side by
all appearances, but I’ve seen some of his sketches, and he wasn’t a complete piker. H felt maybe it was okay to go to university
because he just been through World War I, and that wasn’t much fun. There is this story about Hitler where he
was out in the trenches, and he was there with all these buddies, and he wandered off
to do whatever he wanted to do, and when he came back they were all dead because a bomb
landed in the middle of them. You think that would do something to your
psyche because after an experience like that, you’re either going to think, “Oh man
things are pretty random and horrible” or “there is something pretty special about
me because I wasn’t killed by the bomb”. Maybe God has saved me for a higher purpose. You can be absolutely sure that if you went
through an experience like that, then something like that would be rattling around in your
mind. He won a medal for bravery, and after World
War I, he kind of wandered around like a lot of men unemployed and like a trap. He wasn’t very happy about that. No wonder, so anyways, he didn’t get into
art school. Now he didn’t really have a fully developed
political theory, but he was pretty good at speaking and there were a lot of people to
hear him speak because people were trying to figure out what the hell to do about all
the chaos. So then you think well what was Hitler good
at? Well, now I’m going to switch to a slightly
different story and get back to this one. I don’t know if you guys know about the
daycare scandals that were very common in the 1980’s. It was so horribly common actually, and this
infested many towns. Usually what would happen someone who was
a little on the paranoid side or a lot on the paranoid side would send his or her children
off to daycare. That was the new thing in the 80’s because
women were moving into the workforce like mad. They were handing their infants (kids below
three) to total strangers. For some of them that set off a fair bit of
worry, like it still does, and sometimes that worry got out on the hand, especially those
who were predisposed to paranoia and schizophrenia and maybe some had previous episodes. The kid would come home and the mother would
observe something or note something particular about their behaviour and would fantasize
about what that was. Was the child being touched in any particular
way? She would keep this up for a good length of
time. Soon the child would start having nightmares,
and then the child would start to tell the mother what the nightmares were and that would
freak her out so she would ask deeper questions, and soon her children were telling her that
horrible things were happening to them at daycare. Then she would go to the police, and they
would look into her psychiatric background. The police would start to interview other
children, and if they interviewed them properly, the other children would develop other stories. How did that happen? Well, a bunch of ways. The first is the police would ask leading
questions, like did anyone touch you? Well of course someone touched the kids, everyone
touches kids. Did anyone touch you there? Well that’s not a question, that’s a piece
of information. The piece of information is that if someone
touched me there, then an adult would be really interested in that, right? What is a child doing when the child is answering
the adult’s questions? What do they know? They’re three-years-old. They can hardly organize their story. If you’re talking to a kid, and you want
them to give you an account of their day, you have to really guide them through the
organization of their memory, and partly what they’re doing when you’re doing that is
that they’re looking at you trying to figure out if they are telling you the right things
which is what they should be doing because what they are trying to do is tell people
things in a way that they’ll understand. This makes the child very responsive to the
nonverbal and verbal cues of the adult. Think about how fast those little rats try
to pick up language. It’s really fast and no one really teaches
them; they’re just they’re paying attention like mad. You get a bunch of cops who are on an adventure
that they think there is some serial sexual perverts in their midst. They interview 15-20 kids; they do it a lot
with these little dolls, and they do it a lot. Sooner or later all the kids start having
nightmares, and then start telling the cops these terrible things happened like they’re
being taken down to an under cabin and take their clothes off and forced to play leap
frog. You can’t believe it. It’s all documented in a book called Satan’s
Silence, which was written by a social worker and a lawyer. It’s mind-boggling. The longest prison sentences in American history
were handed out to a series of middle-aged women who were taken care of little kids. The FBI even came up with a whole new criminal
category: Late Onset Female Sexual Offender. Why didn’t that category exist before? It’s simple; there are no late onset female
sexual offenders. That’s why we didn’t need to category. Once all these accusations came up, you needed
some category for these women. Some were thrown in jail for 350 years, which
seems a bit excessive seeing as they’ll only last 40. They get 12 consecutive life sentences. There is actually a situation where one town
went so far as to start digging underneath the town to find these underground satanic
layers where all these weird rituals would be going on. Along with this was not one shred of concrete
evidence. The eventual conclusions, and this affected
thousands of people. The eventual conclusion was that there actually
isn’t anyone whose satanically torturing children in daycare centres. Why am I telling you this? Well, what the children were doing, if you
think about it, how did they come up with these weird ideas? You should know that the children are not
stupid, and they can also dream up about the most horrible things. They have an imagination that is capable of
extending itself out into the terrifying. Everyone knows that because all you have to
do is remember you are a kid when you were hiding under the covers because there were
horrible things in your dark room. You could populate the darkness with monsters
with no problem, and you should be able to because there are monsters in the darkness. Even though your parents might tell you they’re
not. There might not be any monsters in that particularly
piece of darkness and that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to tell your children. Darkness as a whole, that’s a different
story. The children aren’t stupid. Now the adults start to question them and
the back of the kid’s brain, the imaginative part what do these people want? They throw them out a little bit of information,
and the adults will perk up, and they will focus on that piece of information. Maybe it’s a cop who really hates child
Satanist doctors which is perfectly reasonable stance. So when the child offers any information about
the existence of such a thing, the cop will perk up, and the child will say something
related is occurring. Their imagination is working. How do I model the reality that’s being
presented to me? That’s when the dreams start to kick in. By speaking in the appropriate way, you can
get all sorts of things churned up in the unconscious minds of your listeners. By watching them as well, you can extract
out their unconscious desires. Now I am speaking to you all, and you’re
all are irritated because your life has been really awful for 15 years. I’m saying this and that, and then I say
something initially dismissive of Jews. You’re all mad, and there are two or three
people who go “yeah”. I think that’s an interesting response,
and then I lay out a couple more ideas and some don’t get any response and others people
perk right up. And I am not stupid and I am trying to get
the bloody attention of the crowd. And, if I do that fifty times, the crowd is
going to tell me an awful lot about what they want, especially if I am willing to follow
them. And I can do that easily, especially if I
start to work the crowd a little bit, because I can capitalize on their emotions and the
display of that emotion, and I can learn to play that, and then that turns into a positive
feedback loop. And, so, Hitler is informing the audience
and the audience is informing Hitler, and that is why Jung believed Hitler embodied
the shadow of the German people. So, that is another reason why you should
be careful what you say, why you are saying it, and why you are looking for attention,
and all of those things, and naturally what is motivating you, and actually what is motivating
the people who are listening to you, because God only knows where you might go if you are
not careful. Actually, we do know where you go if you ae
not careful, and it is not pretty, that is for sure. And to think that we have learned anything
from that it’s like no, that is not right. We haven’t learned a damn thing from it. So, because we don’t want to understand
it. Now these guys are not concerned with that
sort of that thing, they are highly concerned with it. Now, Binswanger and Boss, they both had been
influenced by Freud and by Jung. You can see in the bottom right hand corner
there, that is Bass with Jung, and that is Binswanger on the left, and Bass at the top
there. So, they are pretty thoughtful looking guys
and they were pretty damn smart, and they were quite philosophically oriented, and they
had both studied Heidegger and Husserl, who were German philosophers. Heidegger actually got tangled right up in
the Nazi movement, and his philosophy has been cast under a cloud of suspicion – perhaps
a well-deserved cloud of suspicion – as consequence of his cooperation with the Nazis. So, it wasn’t only stupid people who got
tangled up in this. It was pretty much everybody who got tangled
in it. And one of the things you might think about
is: if you were there, for any one of you, there is a 90% chance that you would have
got tangled up in it. You wouldn’t have been a person who rescued
the gypsies, forget that. Unless you think that you are heroic far beyond
the average, and I would be very, very careful about assuming that, you could assume instead
that you have been swapped along with the crowd, just like everyone else, because everyone
else was. Part of what these guys were trying to figure
out is: in some sense, there were two things. There was the function and structure of belief
systems; and then, the nature of that which transcends the belief system. So, what transcends the belief system is what
you don’t know if you use the beliefs, because there are things outside of your belief system
and they have a nature as well. Usually, you run into those sorts of things
when you make a mistake, and things don’t happen the way you want them to, or desire
them to. So, and then the other problem you are trying
to solve in some sense is: what is the appropriate mode of behaviour for an individual in relationship
to belief systems and to the world that transcends the belief systems? And the reason they were interested in that
it is because they thought “well, maybe it would be a good idea if our belief systems
didn’t get so damn pathological.” Because, if they do, then, six million end
up in ovens, and a hundred twenty million people end up dead in battlefields. That doesn’t count the Stalin massacres
or Mao who made Hitler, in a sense look like an absolute amateur. Stalin starved 6 million people to death in
the Ukraine in the 1930s, and he was just warming up. How many of you have heard of the Ukraine
famine? How many of you haven’t? Yes, well think about that, how many of you
knew Mao killed a hundred million people? How many of you didn’t? You might think about why you don’t know
that. You know about the damn Nazis, but you don’t
know about the horrors that the Communists perpetrated. It is worth thinking about why, because the
communists, especially the Maoists, those people were brutal. It is really important, of all the things
that you can possibly learn psychologically from the twentieth century – and it is what
these characters in the ‘50’s were concentrating on. Things can go powerfully sideways, it is a
great shock to everyone because, in some sense, everyone was pretty thrilled that beginning
of the 19th century that religion, classical religion beliefs, had crumbled. The Marxists said the damn religion was there
to depress the poor and depressed anyways, and to keep the priests in aristocracy in
power, I am sure you learned plenty of that in your classes, that sort of thinking, power,
economics-related thinking and it is typically of
intellectually manipulative left-wing thinkers. That is basically their routine. They reduce everything to a single damn motivation,
and it is usually economics or power, then they explain everything from that perspective. It is so boneheaded, it should be illegal. The Marxists were happy that religion had
collapsed because they thought that that would eliminate an entire strata of oppression. And, you can see that, it is not like the
Catholic Church was free of corruption. In many ways, it is a corrupt enterprise,
and you can read it as solely a corrupt enterprise. And the hell with it, it’s good that it’s
corrupt. And, the Freudian basically thought the same
way and so did most intellectuals. Freud thought that religion was nothing than
a childish delusion that people identified with because they were afraid of dying. It was a defence against death anxiety. Look, the Marxist argument in and the Freudian
argument those are bloody powerful arguments, because you can see it: do people use their
religious beliefs as a defence against things they are too terrified to confront? Obviously. Does the church oppress people, did it engage
in conspiracies with people in power across centuries? Obviously. The question is “well, what do you make
of that?” Well, partly you make of that all sorts of
structures do that. You can’t just damn one structure and think
the others are going to know. It is like, the right wingers they always
go on about big government, how terrible that is, and the left wing they always go on about
how big corporations are terrible. Well, bank is terrible, doesn’t matter if
it is government or corporations, because things tend to tilt towards corruption across
time, and that has to be taken into account. So, the Freudians and the intellectuals, and
the Marxists were all pretty happy when the religious streams started to come apart and
they believed that the new edifices that they were going to construct: fascist and communist,
would be so much better than what they replaced that everybody would be drowning in utopia. And, it is too bad this isn’t how it turned
out, but it certainly is not how it turned out. How it turned out was: Sometimes, when you
tear something down, even if you think it is terrible, you end up constructing something
on its roots that makes the previous terrible look like the work of an amateur, and that
is certainly what happened in the twentieth century. I mean, no matter what you say about the Catholic
Church and its basic barbarism, especially when they were involved in the witch hunt
in the Middle Ages. Those guys…they are amateurs compared to
the Fascists and the Communists. They recount their victims into tens of thousands,
not in hundreds of millions. So, anyways, things didn’t go so well. And, by the 1950s, especially because the
Cold War started and the day that Second World War, and it ended with the atomic bomb in
Japan, and the Russians had the damn atomic bomb tomorrow, fundamentally, and both the
Russians and Americans had the hydrogen bombs by the early 1950s. And I don’t know if you know this: do you
know that a hydrogen bomb uses an atom bond for its trigger? So, in the hydrogen bomb, the atom bomb stands
in relationship to a hydrogen bomb, like the ignition cap on a shelf stands in relationship
to the gunpowder. The atomic bomb blast just gets the explosion
going. So, hydrogen bombs, they are like way, way
more explosive than atomic bombs. So, by the middle of the 1950s, we pretty
much put ourselves in the position, where they were building some mighty big bombs,
I mean really, and unbelievable, unbelievably big bombs, four hundred times as big as the
one that wiped out Hiroshima. Huge, huge bombs, and they get pretty damn
good at it. By the mid-1950s, it was like, we developed
enough fire power on both sides of the Atlantic, along with the missiles necessary to deliver
them, which the Nazis had basically invented in World War II. It was all Nazi scientists to invent rockets,
and they were all taken by the Americans after World War II, the work on the American space
programs, basically. And, so, by the 1950s, we had the missiles
deliver the damn things too. So, not only were the psychologists who were
thinking about things sort of shortened out about what happened in World War II, for good
reason, and then of course all the Stalinist horrors were starting to be revealed at that
point. Although it took Western intellectuals like
thirty years before they gave them any credence at all. I think Jean-Paul Sartre was still a member
of the Communist Party up until 1970. It was very common, particularly among French
intellectuals, even though the news was getting out. Careful observers like George Orwell had pretty
much figured out by the late ‘30s that not all was right in the paradise of Stalin. People thought he was a right-winger, and
didn’t listen to him much, even though he was a left-winger. These existential phenomenologists, they’re
trying to figure out “okay, we’ve got a big problem here: the belief systems are
seriously going sideways.” There’s some indication that there’s some
individual responsibility for that, of some indeterminate nature. If you live in a country where everyone has
turned into a fascist murderer, is that your fault? Well, it’s not obvious that an individual
should be held responsible for the action of an entire country, but then again, the
country is made up of individuals so it’s a very difficult problem to solve. One of the tenets of Western law is that you
don’t hold an individual responsible for the actions for the group even if he or she
happens to be a member, willingly or unwillingly, of that group. But you can’t ignore the fact that all these
things were made up of people, and then you also can’t ignore the fact that it was individuals
who were doing the terrible things that were being done to people. In Auschwitz, for example, one of the little
tricks that the guards used to do was to bring the Jews off the freight cars— a lot of
them had died in the freight cars¬ because they were packed in like ‘this’, so lots
of them would suffocate, or the old ones would die, or the little kids would die and that
was okay. Then along the outside of the freight car,
especially if it was winter, it’s 20 below and the ones on the outside would freeze but
you’re going to get rid of them anyway so that was just convenient, mostly. Then, you’d take them to Auschwitz and they’d
all spill out, speaking different languages, torn up from their family, as miserable as
people can possibly be. One trick was to have someone who was not
quite dead enough pick up a sack of wet salt, so that’s 100 lbs., and carry it from one
side of the compound to the other– and then back. One side and then back. You don’t want to be thinking about these
camps like a football field; these bloody things were cities. They were big: they held tens of thousands
of people, and so there’s some guard and he thinks that’s a pretty good joke. It’s not just a few people who are like
that. We found out from the Stanford Prison Experiment,
which every psychologist likes to think of as immoral because we actually discovered
something with it, that if you gave ordinary people the opportunity to be fascist barbarians,
in 6 days, 30% of them would be. What we learned from that is social psychologists
shouldn’t run the Stanford prison experiment. That’s not the right conclusion to draw. These phenomenologists were all concerned
about this, thinking “what the hell should we do about that?”. They’re starting to think about how belief
systems are constructed. The first proposition that they make is that
we should treat the reality that we’re dealing with, as psychologists; we should treat human
experience as that reality. The reality, for you, from a phenomenological
perspective, is that everything you experience is real, and they also assume that you can’t
get more real than that. Your consciousness, whatever that is, is real,
and your dreams are real, and your emotions are real, and your pain is real– which is
a really useful thing to think if you want to make sure that you’re not going to hurt
people. You kind of have to think that maybe pain
should be treated as a fundamental reality instead of as an epiphenomena of some material
substrate. That’s their first perspective. They took that from Heidegger because Heidegger
thought that Western philosophy had gone off on the wrong track 3000 years ago because
we didn’t really concentrate on being itself as the fundamental mystery. The fundamental mystery is: why the hell is
there anything? Since there is some experiential being, what
are its fundamental elements? That’s the phenomenological stance; it’s
not the same a scientific approach because it starts with a different presupposition. The scientific presupposition, roughly speaking,
is that the objectively real elements of things are the most real elements. There’s no sense complaining about that
because it’s an approach that works tremendously well for many, many things—including making
hydrogen bombs, for example. But it’s also reasonable to think that it
might not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Maybe you could also suspect that the fact
that we can manufacture hydrogen bombs might indicate that there’s something a trifle
off with our fundamental belief systems, scientific though they may be. That was certainly something that concerned
Heidegger, even though he got all tangled up with the Nazis. The phenomenologists were trying to take apart
the experience as such, and they made some hypotheses, and then some observations. The first is that: we’re going to assume
that your experience– that experience itself– is real. Now, just because dreams are real and pain
is real, and objects that we can all perceive are real, doesn’t mean you should put them
all in the same category. My dreams are not in the same category of
reality as this table because you don’t have access to my dreams, and you have access
to the table. But that doesn’t mean that my dreams and
my pains and my emotions aren’t real. They’re real. That’s the first, and you should note that
this is a proposition. What they’re saying is: let’s act as if
that’s true and then work from those premises and see what happens, see where we can get
with it. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do
because at the bottom of a theory you always have to put an assumption. Otherwise, your theory would be one hundred
percent right, and would cover everything– and it doesn’t, so you have to throw an
assumption somewhere in there at the bottom and say “okay, we’re not questioning that,
that’s the starting point.”. You have to do that because you’re ignorant,
you don’t have a full theory. They (the phenomenologists) don’t like the
idea that mind can be reduced to matter, they’re not playing that game. They’re not playing the game that the subject
is only epiphenomenal and the object is real, they’re not playing that game either. It’s partly because, as Boss says, “Without
a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such”. True, this implies that every object, everything
objective, is merely objective in being merely objectivized by the subject, is the most subjective
thing possible. It’s a radical claim, but here’s something
to think about: when I look at that coke can, you might say I perceive the object and then
make inferences about its use, and then I evaluate it and then I use it. That is not actually what you do. In fact, it’s not obvious at all that what
you perceive are objects. If you think about it, people weren’t perceiving
scientific objects until about 1500, 1450 A.D. There was no “objective object” before
then. Obviously whatever we were perceiving was
not precisely that because we would have been scientists right off the bat. George Kelly claimed that people were natural
scientists, that we’re always investigating hypotheses and trying to disprove them and
so on. It’s an interesting theory and it’s right
in a sense but fundamentally, it’s wrong. We are not natural scientists, we’re natural
engineers. When we look at the world, we don’t see
objects and then infer their use, what we actually see is the use. For example, when I look at that coke can
my visual system activates my motor cortex directly. It can do that without me seeing the damn
can consciously– to some degree. There are people with blind sight, I’ve
told you about those people, they say they can’t see but if you ask them which have
you have held up they can tell you. They might not be able to see, but they can
map patterns from their visual system onto their motor output. That’s basically what Piaget said we do
when we deal with the world. We’re embodied creatures, so what we see
when we look around aren’t “objects”, they’re things we can use and things that
get in our way. That’s a theory that was derived originally
from J.J. Gibson, who wrote a great book on that called
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, and his science was a brand of pragmatism. Pragmatists basically claim that things including
theories and perceptions have a limited range of truth, and the limited range of truth is
determined by the match between your actions and the outcomes. So, I think this is a coke can. Is that what it is? No, but it’s good enough for me if I want
to drink a bit of coke out of it. God only knows what it is. If you go into Communist China and you start
advertising these things, then what are they? This thing tells a story– what’s the story? Really, do you need Coca Cola? No. It’s a bit of frippery; it’s an unnecessary
luxury. It’s not even very good for you, but it’s
kind of fuzzy, and it’s sweet, and you get to buy it. Why is that? No matter how stupid you are in your nutrition
choices, as far as our society goes, you have the right to poison yourself in whatever way
you think best befits you. And so, when you send this little coke can
off to communist China, this thing screams stupid individuality all over. And God only knows how it undermines the state. And if you are not thinking about that, you
are not thinking. Think about what happens when we export cars. What does a car say? it says “hey, you can go wherever you want
whenever you want, you don’t need to tell anybody at all, and you can do it in a really
dangerous, high speed manner.” It is like, you want a political statement,
wrap it up in metal and ship that thing off, and everybody goes like “I would really
like to get one of those.” And, puff, communism disappears with that. There is nothing that says individuality and
capitalism like a personal automobile. You even get to pollute the atmosphere and
ruin the planet with the damn thing, but if you have to drive to the corner store and
pick up your damn coke, the hell with the atmosphere. So don’t be thinking that what appears in
front of you are only objects, because they are not. I started thinking about this for example
when I was thinking people going down Graceland to look at Elvis’ guitar. You think: what exactly is that it makes a
guitar Elvis’ guitar? It is not exactly the guitar, because it is
just sitting there, like any object does, and maybe you could be able to think about
it. You could take that guitar out and put a guitar
just like it, and it would still be Elvis’ guitar because they wouldn’t know. So you might think that this is not really
Elvis’ guitar. That is a funny thing because you would only
think that if you thought that Elvis’ guitar was the thing that was made out of material
that was sitting right in front of you. And that isn’t what it is. That is only one tiny little bit of it. That bloody thing is a part of an incredibly
layered reality. I mean, the people who want to go look at
that, they are looking at it in some sense because of the magic that is emanating from
it, but the magic is actually real. The magic is the effect of that guitar, let’s
say, on the entire culture. And those effects are the damn guitar too. And it is weird, because when you go look
at Elvis’ guitar, you are not looking at the guitar, you are looking at the magic. And, weirdly enough, the magic is actually
real. Well, you can’t think that way if you are
a materialist, because you think the thing is the material, it’s like “yeah, right.” I can tell you another story: When the Americans
and Europeans came to the South Pacific Islands, the South Pacific Islanders, because there
weren’t that many of them, they didn’t have a highly technical society. So, if you were like Joe, dominant guy, in
the Pacific Island culture, you might be able to have stone ax, la well-made stone ax. Go make a stone ax, and see how long that
takes you, that is a bit of work. So, if you are a high status guy, if you really
worked your whole life to be at the top of the pyramid, you maybe get two axes, it is
like a red letter day. You’ve got two axes, which is more than
any other animal has, by a lot. So, it is not trivial. And then, the damn missionaries come in, and
they set up a shop, and what do they bring? Steel axes. That’s kind of a downer, you have worked
your whole damn life to get these stone axes, and that makes you head tribesman, and then
your kid goes down to the local missionaries, and they say “we have an extra steel ax
here, why don’t you take that back home”? And it is so shocking, because not only did
the missionaries have this thing that was so much better than the steel ax, it is like
a jet plane compared to a wheel cart, like they are really, really different. But the missionaries, they don’t even notice,
that is the horrible thing about t. They give away this thing that virtually has
this infinite value, because it is okay, we have a couple of those in the store room,
we are just willing to hand them out. It is a little demoralizing. It is a little demoralizing for the Pacific
Islanders. And, so, what, was it an ax that missionaries
gave away? It wasn’t. You’d think that if you were a Westerner
and you’d have a bunch of axes, you would think “yeah, right.” It is a lot more than an ax, a lot more. It is a weapon that can bring down a whole
culture accidentally. One of the things that the phenomenologists
claim, this is a cool claim, I didn’t know they claimed this. It took me quite a long time to figure this
out, because I thought I figured it out on my own, but it turns out that it is very difficult
to figure out anything on your own. So, when I was doing my investigation about
how the brain works from a neuropsychological perspective, and that was informed a lot by
Jeffrey Gray, who we are going to talk about later, one of the things I noticed was that
you don’t actually see things when you first see something. In fact, when you first see something, you
don’t even see it, you react to it. You react to it with your body. So, I can give you an example. So, here you have a partner and you have a
trusting relationship, and then you find out that, they tell you or you figure out from
their phone or something, they are having an affair. And you look at them, and you think: what
do you see? No, you don’t, you do not see the person,
that is wrong. What you see is a huge pit that you are going
to fall into, and you don’t even know you see it, but your body knows, as if your blood
pressure goes through the roof and your heart starts pounding and you sweat. And the reason for that is: your body sees
what you can’t see and what it sees is something that you can seriously not understand, it
does not understand it. It sees the territory behind the map, because,
when I look at you, for all intensive purposes, really what I am looking at is my presuppositions
about you and because you are polite and well-behaved, you are gracious enough to act in accordance
with those presuppositions, so I don’t even really have to look at you, and thank you
very much for that. Because it is very difficult to look at people,
because they are horrifying and profound creatures. And so everyone walks around behaving so we
don’t terrify the hell out of each other all the time. Now, when someone betrays you, it is like
poof, presuppositions gone. Okay, what is there? God only knows. And that is what your body reacts to. And that is partly why the phenomenologists
said that we react to meaning first, we don’t react to objects. It takes a long time to see the damn object. So, for example, let’s say that this person
has betrayed you. Now, you think you knew who they were, and
you thought you knew who you were. Guess what, you are wrong! You don’t know who they are, and, because
you are such a moron, it means you don’t know who you are and that you can’t trust
any memories with that person, and maybe none of your memories in any intimate relationships
at all. Plus, what about the future? Well, so, when you look at the person, what
do you see? You see all that, like chaos. That is what you see. And that chaos is the meaning behind your
presuppositions and that is why the phenomenologists would say: meaning shines forth. And that is the primary thing we encounter. It is like: that is smart. And you know what is really weird? That is how your damn brain is organized. And that is weird because you, let’s think
about it: how do you define reality? Now, that is a tough one. I would say most of you define reality like
you are Isaac Newton. Or maybe you are like Democrates, who was
the first person who hypothesized atoms. And so, in a Newtonian world, it is like a
billiard ball, everything is made out of billiard balls and they bang together in a causal way
and you can predict the consequences of their banging together, and, if you extend it enough,
you can conjure up an entirely deterministic world. A happens, causes B, B causes C, always the
same way, and everything runs like a giant clock. That is Newton’s model. And it was a clock model, because, back at
that time, clocks, those things were pretty damn impressive. Clocks got the whole industrial revolution
on their way, and medieval cities were put an awful lot time and work into their clocks
and they thought those damn things were really cool. They could keep track of where the planets
were moving. That is a big deal, a clock, and if you want
to think about an invention that changed the world, it is like, the clock is a big one. Now, we can measure time. In the same way, everyone can measure time. It is a big deal, so the idea that the universe
is like a clock, given that the clock can predict the universe, it is a pretty damn
powerful idea. It turns out that it is wrong, because, causality
is a mess, no one really understands it, and there are levels of analysis at which causality,
in the way we experience it, doesn’t seem to apply at all. You go down to the subatomic level, it is
probabilistic, you can’t predict single events and I don’t believe that you can
predict the future. You can predict parts of the future in an
extremely limited way, for some purposes, for some span of time, and you can’t even
predict how long that span of time is going to last. And some things seem to be more stable, across
more situations, and across more times than others, but they are still…there is instability
everywhere, it makes the predicting thing a very difficult thing to do. So, that is one idea about reality, that is
the idea really that you have, and that is the reality that you have been educated to
have. The idea of reality that you have been educated
to have. Even though we know it’s wrong, Einstein
blew that world up in the early 1900s, along with the various people that Einstein depended
on. That’s gone, it’s wrong, and then there
are all sorts of other extremely complicated problems like how to model positive feedback
loops, that sort of gets you into chaos theory, and it’s really hard to model positive feedback
loops. They can go wild in 50 different ways you
can’t really and predict them as they depend on initial conditions. So, the deterministic world is like no, that’s
wrong. I think part of the reason we have to have
free-will is because we can’t act deterministically. A deterministic system is only going to work
in a system that stays the same. So, you can wind up a little clock, one of
the little clockwork toys and it’ll walk. But if you put a cliff in front of it, it
just walks off the cliff. So when cliffs are appearing in front of us
randomly all the time, I can’t even see how a deterministic system could possibly
work to guide us. It would assume that our knowledge, the knowledge
that we derive from the past is sufficiently accurate to causally guide us into the future. It’s like no, that’s not right; it doesn’t,
so maybe that’s why we have consciousness. No one knows that that’s a good theory if
there’s a why. Anyways, here’s an alternative, this is
a Darwinian alternative, so the alternative is that the world’s a complex and dynamic
place. It’s full of weird things. Basically it is made up of patterns and patterns
and patterns, that’s what it is, and they shift and dance around. Then you throw something that’s alive in
to that. It’s programmed by DNA and it has to keep
up with patterns and they’re changing all the time. Some of them are kind of stable but they’re
pretty fluid. Then you throw the DNA in there and it produces
a million variants of whatever it is going to produce. Most of them are wrong. You’re a mosquito and you lay a million
eggs. So, that’s a million bets about how the
future will causally unfold and the bet is the future’s going to unfold so this egg
can turn into a mosquito. Then you might say, how often is the mosquito
that lays the eggs wrong? The answer to that is if it lays a million
eggs in its lifetime, I don’t know how many eggs mosquitoes lay but they lay a lot, all
of those eggs are going to die except one if the mosquito is lucky. You know that because we are not knee deep
in mosquitoes. If it wasn’t the case, there would be mosquitoes
everywhere, but there aren’t thankfully. So, basically what’s the bet? The bet is that mosquitoes match their environment. The answer is wrong except once in a million. So how do you overcome that? Million mosquitoes, million eggs and it’ll
do the trick. It means that the fundamental hypothesis that
the mosquito structure matches the structure of reality is wrong at a one in a million,
a 999 999 level of error. You might just think that’s just completely
wrong, but it keeps the mosquitoes going. So then, this propagates across time, and
what really propagates across time is really a massive wave of death. Virtually everything fails, 99.9% of the species
that ever lived are extinct. We are doing a fair good job of making sure
that a good chunk of the ones that exist now are going to go extinct. Failure and death is the norm and it’s going
to happen to all of you. So if the underlying structure of reality
is mutable, which it is and the only way that you can adapt to it is by generating variance
and having most of them perish, except for the ones that manage more or less by chance
to keep up how do you define real. A Darwinist would say, as well as a Pragmatist,
you embody real to the best degree that real can be attained. It’s not very good. Your real is good enough for about 80 years. They say that it’s as real as it gets. Reality is so complicated, this multilayered
pattern array that you can’t even model without using death as the mechanism. You can’t do it and even if you do use death,
it is almost all death. Even for the parts that aren’t all death
which is hardly any of it, the solution isn’t that good. You are going to wear out in 80 years and
you’ve got 3 billion years of trying behind you and that’s the best you can do. Maybe if you’re a parrot, you can get 150
and apparently there’s an immortal jellyfish, figures it wold be a jellyfish that would
be immortal. So, there’s a whole different way about
thinking about real. Neches said life is truth, truth serves life,
and that’s a Darwinian idea. Although he didn’t take it from Darwin,
there isn’t anything truer than what evolution reveals as the model for reality. That’s as true as it gets for us. That’s not a Newtonian reality. It’s a multilevel, patterned, chaotic reality
that we’re trying to keep up with. So what that might mean is that the implications
for actions that I derive from that phenomenon might be more indicative of what it is than
an objective analysis because your truth, the degree to which you embody truth, is so
far as it can be determined with a Darwinian framework is entirely measured by your success
in living and propagating. That’s it and there isn’t anything under
that. Maybe there is but if you’re a Darwinian
that’s it. I think Darwin is right all things considered
and newton is wrong plus we also know that Newton is wrong. The whole Darwinian thing is more complicated
than we thought because, you know what epigenetics are? How many of you know about that? That’s pretty good, so your biological education
demolishes your historical education. How many people don’t know what epigenetics
is? It’s okay as it is relatively new. Anyways, it turns out that your parent’s
experience can alter their genetic structure in such a way that it alters your genetic
structure. That’s something we didn’t expect, that’s
for sure. Nobody knows what the final consequence of
that will be but it looks like there’s more to the evolutionary story than near random
production and natural selection. There’s more to it than that, who know how
much. So, when the phenomenologists say we react
to meaning first, that opens a question, is the meaning real? And that opens up another question, which
is what do you mean by real and that opens another question, is it Newton real or Darwin
real? Well Newton is wrong, so that leaves Darwin
and Darwin real, that’s about as real as it gets. If a partial entity is trying to model a complex
totality, all they are ever going to be able to do is embody a partial representation of
that and it’s not going to be that good but it’s going to be as good as they can
get, as that’s as true as it can get. So the phenomenologists, they have this weird
idea that we perceive meaning. Guess what, that’s how you brain is set
up. You first perceive meaning, and then with
a lot of work you turn that into an object perception. God only knows how much exploration you have
to do before you do that. How long do you think it takes a child to
handle its soother before it builds up an accurate representation of the soother? It is going to be chewing on that thing like
mad, taking it out, checking it out, turning it around and banging it against things. It has to do all that including the tactile
interactions. The experimentation with the thing across
situations establishes object permanence. It has to do all that before it can see the
thing. Early eye researchers who were under the influence
of behaviourists basically said that the object is given so they can treat the brain like
it doesn’t exist. The object is just there and you can just
see the world. Well that turned out to be seriously wrong. It is difficult to get a computer to see the
world. It turns out you have to put them inside bodies
before they could really do it because you really can’t perceive the world without
a body. Perception is for bodily action. Without the framework within which, really
what you’re doing is a Piagetian idea. This is a pattern; this thing and the pattern
exist at multiple levels including the advertising level, your memories of coke and all the jingles
you know. But this, when I look at that, I map its pattern
onto my retina and the pattern is a pattern because it’s extending across time. It’s not like smoke which is dissipating. It’s staying there across time. I map that onto my retina and then the retina
matches it onto my hand. That’s the coke can. The coke can is all of this. And you might say that’s not what it is
because it is made of aluminum. “Yeah, yeah it’s made out of aluminum”,
but that is only one part of what it is and it’s not necessarily even the most important
part. That’s only one part of what it is. And it’s not necessarily even the most important
part because it could be made out of plastic and what difference would that make? It’s pretty weird when you start to think
about it. People make the claim that meaning is epiphenomenal,
as if there is no real meaning and the universe is this dead thing, and if we all went instinct
tomorrow, there would just be a bunch of meaningless marbles rotating in space. First of all, even this is not true because
we cannot know what is out there if there is nothing to perceive it. The physicists tell us it is more like vast
potential fluctuating quantum fields and maybe it doesn’t even turn into stars and planets
until there is someone to look at it. You may think that’s ridiculous but if you
think about it for a while, you’ll see that there’s really something to it. You are the thing that specifies the level
of analysis. With the way you look at the world, you don’t
see the atoms, you don’t see the sub-atomic particles, and you don’t see the little
rocks. You see planet-sized things when you look
out into space, and you see it at a particular slice of time. Maybe your refresh rate is something like
60 hertz, so what you see is the universe sliced into 60-hert-slices and you think that’s
real. But so is all the rest of it, including its
huge expansive time, from beginning to end. You don’t see any of that, but it’s there. All those things are there at the same time. What does all that add up to? The physicists seem to tell us it adds up
to a pool of quantum potential that isn’t realized until there is something conscious
that interacts with it. Now, you’ve got your meaning shining forth
like math and part of the reason children are so attractive is because for them, the
meaning is just shining at them like math. That’s why they are always wandering around
like this [looks around in wonder]. It’s really fun to watch kids because they
give you a taste of that again. Kids have to pay you so you don’t throw
them out the window. They’re very annoying; they’re always
crying, they’re completely useless, they just lay there and don’t do anything, and
they wake you up at three in the morning to annoy you. Because you’re selfish and mean, you need
something in return. So they smile at you. But they do other things as well. They’re really [x6] comical so they’re
a blast to watch and play with. But one of the things they really do is they
remove the blinders from you while you’re around them. You go out in a forest with a two and a half
year old and it’s very annoying. The bloody thing just wanders around randomly. You’ve got no goal direction. Nothing goal-directed is going to happen with
a two and a half year old, but that’s kind of cool because it frees your mind from your
goal-directed narrowness. You can watch the two year old look at all
these things that you haven’t looked at for twenty years because you’ve already
looked at them once and you just have to see your memory. And then you think “wow that really is cool”. They’ll bring you something and they’ll
tell you it’s cool. Maybe it’s a shiny piece of aluminum or
gum wrapper. You think it’s a gum wrapper because that’s
what you see when you look at it; you’ve already built a gum wrapper representation
and you just lay this on that. That isn’t what the kid sees. God only knows what they’re looking at. Maybe how the light reflects off the aluminum
prismatically and how it glitters, or how cool it is that it can be folded up and how
light it is. They are looking at it like this [makes wide-eyed
expression], and I think it’s because their cortex isn’t very well developed and they
haven’t built the inhibitory structures that stop them from seeing meaning shining
forth. You might think “is there any evidence for
that?” There actually is quite a bit of evidence
for that. One piece of evidence is that if you take
a cat’s brain out and you leave it with just a hypothalamus and a spinal cord, it
is hyper-exploratory; it runs around like everything is interesting. It is weird behaviour for a thing that doesn’t
have a brain. You would think that once you don’t have
a brain, nothing would be interesting. It depends on how much of your brain you have. There are people who have experienced that. There was a famous case of a conductor who
had a very serious brain injury. It basically blew out his hippocampus so he
could not put any more information from short-term attention to long-term storage. He wrote these articles, these massive multi-page-long
journals. All he would write is “it’s as if I’m
seeing everything for the first time”, over and over. He was wandering around in a constant state
of awe. His wife would come to visit him. He couldn’t remember any of the things that
had happened to him. He would be blown out of the water to see
her because he didn’t see his memories. He would say “it’s just like I’m seeing
you for the first time”. And he was; he was seeing her for the first
time. The access to the inhibitory structures that
were directing his attention was gone. He was an interesting case because now and
then, he would sit down to play the piano. He’d have an epileptic seizure and then
he could play just like he used to play. It was as if he had to switch brain modes
and the mechanism for switching was damage. He would have to have a little seizure and
then he could lay out these Beethoven Sonatas like a mad dog. At the end, he would have a little seizure
and come back to “it’s as if I’m seeing everything for the first time”. I think part of the reason psychedelic drugs
proved so attractive to people in the 60s and to people since the beginning of time
is because in some sense, that is what they do. With a poof, your memory representations are
gone. Now what are you seeing? God only knows, but it is not what you expect. And perhaps it is what’s there, but maybe
not. I’m going to sum this up a little bit. What do you think drives people to extreme
forms of pathology? This may be your pathology: your misery, your
suffering, and all that. Or it may be your social psychopathology,
which is your murderous desire to exterminate. Here is a phenomenological theory. The terror management theory is that you must
build these structures in your head to get yourself away from death anxiety, so really
what the terror management people are saying is that the blinder you are, the better off
you are. That’s what the positive illusion people
think too. The phenomenologists were going at this from
another direction. They were saying that the meaning that constantly
reveals itself is nourishing and revitalizing, although it’s so powerful that it can just
blow you apart. It is a dangerous thing to be messing with. It’s like the burning bush. You have to build this structure in order
to be able to cope with that because you have to minimize it to what you can handle. But you need to build this structure properly
and carefully so that the meaning that reveals itself can be shaped by you into a world,
conceptual and practical, that allows the remaining meaning to shine through in a way
that you find sufficiently revitalizing so that you don’t become corrupt enough to
become genocidal. That’s a good theory and that’s what the
phenomenologists were on about. That’s part of the reason why the existentialists
and the phenomenologists both say “don’t deceive yourself about what manifests itself
to you. Don’t use language instrumentally”. Why? Because if you do that and twist up the structures
that you are using to interpret the world through, the world will twist up on you and
all that will be revealed is its horror. And if horror is all that is always being
revealed to you, you will not stay good because you cannot endure that sort of pressure. You will get bitter and resentful. Everything will fall apart around you because
you’re not actually modeling the reality in a way in which positive meaning can shine
through. You will fail and become resentful. And you will become bitter. Then you’ll be looking for someone to hurt
and you’ll have plenty of justification for it. And worse, and this is Jungian contribution
to this idea, this won’t happen all at once, it’ll happen as a consequence of a hundred
thousand micro-decisions that you hardly even notice, where you can be truthful about something
or not in this tiny way that hardly even seems to matter. But the consequence of iterating that across
time, say three hundred decisions, is that you can build yourself into the sort of monster
that you would never want to see in the mirror. And one of the things the phenomenologists
would also tell you, and this is something Jung said as well, is “that is the sort
of monster that you probably are”. If you want to deal with that, you have to
start taking things seriously. There are two things you have to take seriously. One is the meaning that reveals itself to
you and the other is the stance of truth that you adopt while you’re interacting with
that meaning. The final consequence of that would be that
your health, the health of your family and your society, and the health of the entire
society at large pivots on that. The way the world moves is the sum total of
the decisions that all of us are making, all those little micro-decisions. Those things echo like ripples in a pond so
when you do some little crooked thing that you know you should not be doing, you are
actually warping the entire structure of reality. And what’s really interesting about that
is now we know what happens when you do that. What happens is we end up with the Nazis and
the communists and the hydrogen bombs. And we haven’t escaped from that yet. Hopefully we will, but we won’t if people
don’t learn what the 20th century had to teach them. |
I didn't quite get through what I wanted to in the last lecture so I think I'm going to steal half an hour from this lecture and do that and then we'll go to this lecture so because I didn't get a chance to read you some of the things I wanted to read you um and but they're really worth read they're really worth hearing so I think I'm going to do that so one of the things that I've spent a very long time trying to figure out is what motivated people to do the terrible things that they did in the concentration camps particularly in the 20th century and the Concentration Camp was a pretty widespread phenomena I mean it's still being used extensively in North Korea for example and most of the popular population there is starving um so it's not like it's done with yet anyways the the best authors that I've ever read with regards to insights about the kind of totalitarian possession that leads people to commit EXT extraordinarily brutal atrocities in the service of their belief have been while Soul niten who is not normally considered a personality psychologist but also Victor Frankle the reason I have you read Soulja niton is because I think Soulja niton is a more I mean Frankle is an amazing thinker but soliton is one of those Geniuses that comes along about every 100 years so and I think soliton wrote the most the most pertinent analysis of the relationship between individual cowardice and the propensity to adopt totalitarian beliefs and then the propensity to commit acts of Cruelty in the name of those beliefs now it's a really tricky issue I mean it's it's it's commonly being assumed for example that people who are right-wing authoritarian people are right-wing authoritarian because they're afraid of people who aren't like them or they're afraid of ideas that aren't like their ideas is or something like that it's it's often a fear-based explanation and it seems to me that there's something to that you know it's it's hard for me to imagine you know if your if your belief systems are disrupted by a piece of information that you don't particularly want to receive it certainly does expose you to a tremendous amount of chaos and so you know we've talked about situations for example where perhaps you receive the information that you know a loved one has been unfaithful to you betrayed you now part of what you're going to feel in relationship to that is anxiety and it's because it destabilizes your past and all your memories and it destabilizes your future and it destabilizes your your present and so that presents you with a whole bunch of uncertainty where at one point you had a pretty functional map and you knew how things related to one another and how you should act and so it's reasonable to presuppose that that produces fear especially because we know from from work by someone people like Jeffrey gray for example who we're going to talk about in the next lecture that if you expose laboratory animals to novelty which is certainly an unex something unexpected is something novel or something anomalous is something novel that they react they you can you can conceptualize the reaction roughly in two ways and you can say well they become afraid they manifest anxiety which you can dampened down with anti-anxiety drugs like Valium benzodiazapines barbituates and alcohol um but they also manifest curiosity but the but the anxiety usually supersedes the Curiosity so the anxiety has to wear off before the Curiosity will come forward and that depends to some degree on the magnitude of the novel event and calculating how large novel event is turns out to be extraordinarily difficult but we'll talk we'll talk through that as well and so the anxiety models and so those would be so things things like Terror management theory for example the anxiety models are pretty good but they're missing things they're missing things and there's a so here's a couple of things that they might be missing I've pursued the idea that um when you encounter a um a datam we'll say because it could be a stimulus or it could be an idea or it could be a person but let's call it a piece of information that contradicts your axiomatic presupposition so your theory then what might happen the hippocampus is a brain area that seems to do something something like detect M mismatches between what you expect or want to have happen and what actually happens and it seems to send a signal down to the reticular activating system which is the part of your brain that actually governs Consciousness so it's what wakes you up in the morning and puts you to sleep at night and also what makes you wake up very suddenly if you hear an unexpected noise at night it stops it stops it it releases the reticular activating system from inhibition and so it's basically the hippocampus does something like tell your reticular activating system to take it easy as long as everything's going the way you want it to go and if it doesn't go the way you want it to go then it releases the reticular activating system from inhibition and what that seems to do is to release a whole variety of underlying neurological circuits from inhibition so then you become anxious but you also become curious but it's possible that you become a lot of other things too and this is this is part of the generalized stress response as far as I can tell and what happens when when you manifest the general stress response is that your body prepares for everything why well because you don't know what to do when something you don't expect happens it's like the definition of not want knowing what to do and so because your body is pretty smart it just ramps itself up in terms of its preparation which is very stressful technically speaking it's stressful because you're burning a lot of energy and resources that you could devote to other things suppresses your immune system and gets you ready you know so and and at at you know for any length of time that can be fun in small doses in fact it is because people like novelty in small doses but in large doses and chronically it's like that's death itself you know so it seems that people really don't like to have their their expectations dashed or or more accurately they don't like it when what they want to have happen doesn't happen which isn't exactly the same thing so the question is then what does happen when what you want to doesn't happen how exactly do you characterize it one way of characterizing it is fear and another way of characterizing it is something like generalized disinhibition of potential that's another one and I think that one's more accurate I think it's more accurate because it's more comprehensive and it's deeper but then there's a third variable that we're going to talk about quite a bit that that everybody's just sort of coming to terms with now which is that it turns out that people who are tilted towards right-wing Authority arianism first of all they're high in conscientiousness and they're and they're low in openness and if you fractionate conscientiousness which you can you can break it into two things you can break it into industriousness and orderliness and industriousness is a bang dead on predictor of how well you guys do in University it's it's damn near as powerful as intelligence it's not as powerful but we can't measure it as well either and and so that's industriousness we don't have we don't know anything about industriousness you know we know how to measure it through self-report and we know how to correlate those self-reports with life outcomes we have no neuros pychological model for it we have no conceptual model for it we have no pharmacological model for it uh did I say animal model we have no animal model for it it's like we don't know anything about it except that it predicts long-term life success better than anything else except IQ in managerial administrative and academic positions like grades so but orderliness that's a whole different story because it turns out that orderliness we haven't published this yet but orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust and that's a weird thing because for a long time we thought that all the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism so this is Big Five speak fundamentally that you know pain and anger frustration disappointment shame guilt anxiety and fear we all if you were more likely to feel one you're more likely to feel all of them and all the negative emotions Clump together and that's basically what neuroticism from a big five perspective but it turns out that disgusted sensitivity loads on orderliness now I tell you man that is one major finding it's like I think because we know we know a fair bit about discust sensitivity Now give me one second and that's mostly at least in part through the work of Jonathan ha who's a very very very smart guy and who started studying discussed before anybody else figured out that it was worthwhile to discuss or to to investigate roughly speaking you know and he he found that people who were disgust sensitive were very obsessed with moral Purity you know it turned out to be the same thing so bodily contamination and moral impurity are roughly the same phenomena and then it turns out I I really figured this out when I was reading Hitler's table talk because Hitler's table talk by the way was a book that was put together of Hitler's spontaneous speeches discussion while he was eating dinner for like three years you know it's a fascinating book because it it really gives you some insight into how he thought and he was a very he's a very peculiar person because he was very high in openness which is a creativity Dimension and very high in orderliness and people like that aren't very common but anyways his whole metaphor for for for German for the Aryan race the whole metaphor was body it's like the Aryans were a pure body with pure blood and they were under assault from parasites and so it was a disgust metaphor you know wasn't fear you know it kind of sounds like fear because you could say well Hitler was afraid of the gypsies and he was afraid of the Jews and you know he was afraid of non- Arians but but well first of all I don't think it's reasonable to say that the Nazis were precisely possessed by fear that isn't exactly how they looked and if you look at conservatives I'm not calling conservatives Nazis by the way but they're you know the Nazi philosophy is an extension of political belief on the right just like totalitarian communism in his extension of political belief on the left so you can fall all into a pit either way you know but the Nazis were first of all they're German and the Germans are a conscientious people so to speak you know they have a very Advanced industrial society their engineering is very precise to what degree that's a national trait God Only Knows to what and to what degree that's a consequence of of uh you know sociological pressure we don't understand anything about those sorts of things but um Hitler was absolutely obsessed with with Purity and with willpower and those things go together so orderly people seem to be very enamored of their own willpower something like that they sort of worship it as the top God so to speak and like uh anorexic people tend to be very orderly and they get disgust I think anorexia is a disorder of disgust anorexic girls they get completely disgusted by their own bodies you know and that's a very think about that that's a very tight line because there's any number of disgusting things about bodies and you have to attend to that because if you don't then you end up contaminated in a variety of ways you know you can catch a sexual disease for example or you can just catch a disease or you can be develop an infection or any number of things that will take you down you know so it's it's very difficult for human beings to get the calibration right with regards to you know their own bodies and their feeling about their bodies and the fact that you also have to keep the damn thing clean and organized and otherwise you know all hell breaks loose and it's it's no joke when Hitler was before Hitler you know started the concentration camps and and went after went went after things in a big way is very very concerned with the hygiene of the German people you know and he did things like uh his first here his first uh policy implementations were tuberculosis screening and had people go around in Vans and x-ray everyone to try to get rid of tuberculosis it's like yeah you know let's get rid of tuberculosis and then they started cleaning up the Factory so they'd you know get rid of the bugs and the rats and sweep them all out and plant flowers out front it was like a beautification campaign and they used cyclon B to do that and cyclon B was the gas that was used in the concentration camps so like that's quite interesting he that that movement from insects and rats to human beings and that there was an intermediary there which seemed to be Mental Hospitals because the next thing they did was go and clean up the you know the the people that the Nazis Hitler in particular but the Nazis and General felt were inferior or contempt or something like that and like contempt and disgust seem to go very tightly together and contempt that's a vicious emotion so like if you're in a relationship with somebody a close relationship and they start to become contemptuous of you and you can tell that because they roll their eyes the probability that you're going to divorce them or separate from them is extraordinarily High contempt is a very corrosive emotion and anyway so you know that the the transformation and Purity campaign of Hitler just extended and extended and extended and extended and extended and you know God only knows where it would have ended and I also think that's why he was a worshipper of fire you know because fire is a purifying substance and the Nazis really used fire as a symbol of their of their movement because Hitler would have these massive nighttime political rallies you know with 150,000 people all put in perfect squares you know with this massive background of fire and Light you know and it it all seems to boil down to the fact that he was extraordinarily disgust sensitive and that became a cardinal element of his political platform and then that was associated with orderliness and that you know you can track you can track it all the way down to the biology and there was a paper published in plause one which I should really put on the website about a year ago unfortunately I don't remember who published it but they were looking at you know let's say I assessed your political attitudes I could do that say with an authoritarian scale authoritarian belief scale CU authoritarianism has been studied quite a bit since the end of World War II nobody really knew what to do with it in relationship to personality doesn't matter you can you can assess it you know to with a reasonable degree of accuracy and these people went to they did two things they did a CrossCountry survey and then within country surveys so you imagine you could if you were looking at a phenomena you could look at the country level US versus Canada or you could go into the us and then you could look at a state level it's nice to do the analysis at both levels to see if it replicates itself across the two different conceptual you know two different conceptual strata and what they found is mindboggling it's Nobel prizewinning stuff as far as I'm concerned is that the correlation between the prevalence of infectious disease in a local and the degree to which authoritarian beliefs were held in that local was about7 it's like you never see that in the social sciences that's higher than the correlation between IQ and grades which is about as good as we ever get in terms of prediction so it's like really it's that high you know and one of the things that that implies is that one of the ways to get rid of right-wing authoritarian attitudes assuming that you want to get rid of such things is to is through Public Health you know it could easily be that the reason that we're all tilted fairly hard to the center and even to the left is that everybody's clean you know we've got s we've got functioning sanitation it's like oh don't have to worry about that anymore so and believe like people used to have to worry about that before they antibiotics it's like you get an infection man you're dead and that's on its way back by the way CU we keep using antibiotics for everything under the sun which is very very very stupid anyways so I I gave you all that background because you know it's a tangled mess the the authoritarian personality issue there's a sociological element to it which is the disease element and then there's the E existential element that we've talked about in in detail where there seems to be also something about people's unwillingness to stand up for themselves and develop their own beliefs and adhere to the truth and to adopt authoritarian you know extremely rigid authoritarian belief systems and then go persecute people for them and we don't know how to separate all those things out but I thought I would read you some things that were written both by Soulja niten and by Frankle about a the concentration camps in Germany cuz Frankl was a concentration camp survival Survivor and be the concentration camps in the Soviet Union because soljan ninen was a concentration camp Survivor he was a rather fortunate concentration camp inmate in so far as there is such a thing because he had he had some specialized knowledge that made him sufficiently valuable not to starve to death so so here is one of Sol nen's descriptions of one of his experiences or that some firsthand Observer told him because when he wrote the gulag archipelago he he wrote a lot about his own experiences but he also wrote a lot about the experiences that other people had related to him while he was in the camps so one of the people he met told how executions were carried out at adak which was a which is a Work Camp um a destructive labor camp on the pachura river they would take the opposition members so these were people who weren't Communists a lot of people who got thrown in the gag prisons in the Soviet Union were basically political prisoners right you didn't have you weren't a staunch communist or you've been turned in for for some you've been turned in for political uh what would you call it um treason you know by a neighbor who really wanted your apartment and so they' turn you in and You' get hauled off to concentration camp and then you know your neighbor would get your apartments very pretty arrangement for everyone concerned so the the gags were full of political prisoners they were also full of normal criminals murderers rapists thieves and those guys basically ran the camps and because the stalinists thought that murderers rapists and thieves that they were um what would you call those you could rehabilitate them because they were actually victims of an unjust class structure so you know hypothetically you could save them whereas if you had Rich parents or maybe your parents owned farmland or maybe they just had a bloody house God Only Knows then you were a socially suspect element because you came from the Bourgeois and not the proletariat so you got thrown in jail alongside the murderers and the rapists and the thieves and you know they were regarded as morally Superior to you which is you know something that only bloody communist could think through and come to that conclusion you know it's mindboggling so anyways a lot of what happened in the camps was you know political murder essentially and so this is what Sol niton is talking about in this particular case so he says this is how executions were carried out at adak a camp on the pure River they would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp Compound on a prisoner transport at night and outside the compound stood the small house of the third section The Condemned men were taken into a room one at a time and there the camp guards sprang on them their mouths were stuffed with something soft and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs then they were LED out into the courtyard where harness carts were waiting the bound prisoners were piled onto the carts from 5 to 7 at a time and driven off to the Gorka the camp cemetery on arrival they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive not out of Brut ity no it had been ascertained that when dragging and lifting them it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses the work went on for many nights at adak and this is how the moral political Unity of our party was achieved now you see what seems to be happening there is that the people who are engaged in these activities are classifying those who oppose their political beliefs as contempt and therefore worthy of Destruction and that that seems to be partly a fear response you know that which is not us but it's also it seems very much also to partly to be tied very deeply into this disgust and contamination system about which we don't know much about the cognitive elements of that system although one of the things that's that's worth considering you know this has gone through my mind is that you know you might ask why the hell do human beings categorize things because other animals don't really do that the same way we really categorize things like mad and uh you think well we're all first of all we're omnivores right that's a kind of a weird problem because if you're omnivores you can eat anything except the things you shouldn't eat you know and making a clear and that's a real problem if you're a koala bear and all you eat is eucalyptus leaves it's like poof problem solved unless the eucalyptus leaves aren't around and then you die but if you're an omnivore you have to run all over the place and you can eat damn near anything but you have to keep track of the things that will kill you and the things that are poisoned and the things that are contaminated and the things that are good for you and it's it's not an easy thing to do that so it seems like part of our classification system the cognitive elements seem to actually have emerged out of out of contamination and disgust concerns and that seems to be grounded in some sense in what you know our our ability to make decisions about what we're going to put in our mouths and not you know like people don't like to put disgusting things in their mouths generally speaking you know you can overcome that so people will lead you know moldy cheese but you really have to work to overcome that and you have to work to overcome your your disgust at eating bitter substances so you have to develop a taste for coffee and you have to develop a taste for olives because a lot of things that are bitter are actually poisonous so so the the idea that there are things that you can put in your mouth that are good for you and there are things that you can't put in your mouth because they're bad for you is rooted somehow very deeply in our in our ideas of categorization and also in our ideas of moral morality right and you think of morality as a higher order cognitive function but think about you know modern people are as obsessed with food as the as the victorians were obsessed with sex and people are making divisions primary divisions of morality based on what each other eat all the time you know the vegetarianism movement or the vagan movement is a really good example of that I mean those sorts of concerns have been present throughout human history as far as I can tell because there's lots of ancient sects that don't that are vegetarian there's lots of people in India who are vegetarian primarily and often for religious beliefs you know so it's a matter of and it it also seems that we divide we tend to divide people into groups even ethnic groups on the basis of what one group is allowed to eat and what another group will eat and so you know um Christians will eat will eat swine and that's something that uh you know more more conservative Jews and Muslims in general won't touch it's disgusting and it's contaminated you know and it isn't fear exactly it's something other than fear it's more and the danger of conceptualizing it in terms of contaminated and disgusting and you see this a lot in the language that the say the owitz campg guards used with regards to the people that they were putting in the ovens for example they weren't people they were rats and insects that was the language it's not like people are afraid of rats and and insects you know I mean it's a rat that's not a big problem but you can easily hate it and it is something to be destroyed you know and so we also don't know to what degree when you use the discust system to classify someone whether you're automatically putting them into the category of disgusting thing that should be destroyed and there there's a woman named Martha nasom who's a legal scholar and she suggested she's a liberal and she suggested that our legal decisions should never be based on discust you know but then I read nusom and I think well yeah it's easy to say that except the disgust system is what stops you from eating things that will kill you and you can't just shut the damn thing off because you know it's a fundamental biological mechanism and it orients you in the world now and so we don't know how to control its spillover say into radical political belief but just saying don't do that or you know you know what I mean it's not wrestling with the problem because first of all you don't want to be not disgusted by things that's a really bad idea but by the same token you know if you get too radical about that you get tooo orderly then not you know if you're anorexic you can't even stand your own body that's really not a good thing you know because the anorexic I've worked with they often talk about their fantasies and they look at their body and what they see is like corruptible flesh basically and they have fantasies about purity and the Purity is they want to reduce themselves to Bone you know because bone is white and it's pure and it doesn't have this sort of corruptible flesh hanging off it and you know that go that's seems to go along with fairly severe perceptual aberration so because anorexics don't really see seem to be able to look at their body as a whole what they seem to do is focus obsessively on parts and they can never really get the parts together so you know and I don't exactly know how that's associated with disgust either except that that hyper you know that hyper alertness and hyperconcentration could easily be associated with analysis of things that that might be disgusting in dangerous anyways Franco the most G this is from the Nazi concentration camps the no most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of Camp life was The Awakening when at a still nocturnal hour the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams we then began the tussle with our wet shoes into which we could scarcely Force our feet which were sore and swollen with edema and there were the usual moans and groans about Petty troubles such as the snapping of wires which replaced shoelaces one morning I heard someone whom I knew to be brave and dignified cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear and these ghastly moments I found a little bit of comfort a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed Delight a lot of what happened in the gag camps was that you know these people that were put in the camps were were put into work brigades and you know so there was a huge Canal that was dug in the Soviet Union I believe it was in the 30s and un I believe I I don't remember the Canal's name at the moment unfortunately but they killed 300,000 people in 3 months building it and because they were pickaxing dirt in the in the brutal cold to build this canal you know because it had to be done now and you know according to Soulja nen's description by the time they finished the canal well 300,000 people had died but it was too shallow to be useful for the for the purpose they wanted to put it to and so basically it was built but never used and so then you think well what was the purpose of the canal if it was never used and the answer to that is the purpose of the canal was to kill 300,000 people while they were working on it you know and if you think that people can't have such purposes then you're not thinking very hard because they certainly can't and stellin certainly did here's Soul shit's comments about about work camps during the winter and this is Russia right it's like Russia has Winters in cold lower than 60° below zero work days were written off in other words on such days the record showed that the workers had not gone out to work but they chased them out anyway and whatever they squeezed out of them on on those days was added to the other days thereby raising the percentages and the servile medical section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis and the ones who were left who could no longer walk and were straining every senu to crawl Along on all fours on the way back to Camp the Convoy simply shot so that they wouldn't Escape before they could go come back to get them when I was studying this material I was also looking at poetic representations of contamination and Corruption and evil and so I'm going to read you a poem from William Blake that seems to sum up the attitude that's necessary to Harbor before you would be capable of doing such things this is from the complete works of William Blake oh Rose Thou Art sick the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm hath found out thy bed of crimson joy and His Dark Secret Love does thy life destroy this is something I took out of the gulag archipelago the volume two of the gulag archipelago which is an amazing book the gulag archipelago itself is an unbelievable work of literature it's it's it's it's phenomenal it's it's an immense book I think it's 2700 pages long and it's written in little little tiny type so it's it's 2700 dense pages and it records soulj nen's uh experiences of the concentration camp and the concentration camps and the stories that he gathered the individual stories that he gathered that describe it qualitatively but Solja niton also made an attempt to put the the camps to write a history of the camps and also a history of the political and social institutions that gave rise to them but at the same time a psychological analysis of the conditions that made these camps possible and probable and he identified the fundamental problem in the Soviet Union as the willingness of the Soviet citizens to lie to themselves and to each other on a constant and ongoing basis so to some degree it's a reflection of the idea that I told you about before of the instrumental use of language language was something to hide your true self behind not something to communicate about and people were very unwilling to discuss anything that might be considered a shortcoming of the system in any way possible no matter how bad the system got and no matter how bad they were suffering because by definition the system was always already Perfect Right Utopia had already come and what that meant was that if you were suffering and and it was Utopia there obviously was something seriously wrong with you and the best thing to do with a creature that was as seriously gone astray as you was to get rid of them and often in the most brutal way that could possibly Be Imagined and so that happened to lots of people you know in East Germany they estimated that one out of every three people was a government Informer so the LIE this is soljan nen's analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union he didn't believe that any of that could happen unless the entire citizenry had made an unspoken pack that they were never ever going to say anything that was true to each other or to themselves under any circumstances whatsoever and he believed that that was the precondition you know I've already mentioned these sorts of phenomena are very complicated but he believed that that was the precondition for the absolute Corruption of the state and that's really worth thinking about you know and soja niten also said I think this was in his in his Nobel Prize speech but it might have been his Harvard address because he was invited to speak at U graduation at Harvard and the newspapers ripped him apart by the way because he was quite critical of of Western Society despite the fact that he had been granted asylum in in Vermont you know and it was so interesting to read the criticism because you know people Bas even people who should have known a hell of a lot better you know like smart people were very irritated at Soul nit and for daring to say that there was anything wrong with the West given that he had been granted Asylum you know by the Americans in Vermont I personally thought they were lucky to get him you know and I think that's the right attitude towards someone like him but um anyway so the the book itself the gulag archipelago the second volume is most mostly personal experiences of one form or another and it's you know enough to well you've read some of it hypothetically you know it's an unbelievably brilliant book but the three volumes together you know 2700 Pages it's they're they're almost unbearable because they they're written by someone who's basically screaming at the top of his lungs for like 2700 Pages that's pretty impressive you know I read this study once about rats so if you put rats in a in a normal environment not not like your single aged rat but your family loving hierarchy inhabiting exploring sort of rat if you make a natural habitat for them maybe you put all the family things at one end so the rats can hang out with all their kith and kin and then at the other end you you place a place where they can go explore and maybe that's where you feed them hey so so they get used to that and that's home and then you put a cat in out there where they're feeding and you know a rat goes out there and he sees the cat and like that's hell for rats man he's back in his rat burrow and like now and then what he does is he Peaks his head out of the burrow and he screams you know rat rat screams ultrasonic screams for the equivalent of three weeks in human hours it's like that rat that's one freaked out rat and none of the other rats go anywhere when that rat is screaming and that's really like I think of that as the equivalent of Soul nen's book it's like it's it's a hair raising uh Endeavor to plow your way through that book but it's it's an indictment of of of 20th century morality and a and a very clear indication of what happens at a sociopolitical and economic level if people abandon their claim to existential Truth at an individual level and that's something really worth thinking about because one of the things I derived from this was that if you want to protect yourself against the possibility that you would become as corrupt politically or sociologically as the Nazis for examples or maybe the Soviet Communists or maybe the maist communist or we could or the North Koreans I mean we could go on and on you might ask well you know if you're smart enough to assume that you're not already protected because you're not you know one of the things that's really worth thinking about is there does seem to be a direct causal relationship between people's willing to willingness to falsify their own personal experience and the spread of unbelievable political and economic corruption and one of the things we do know is that if you want to make a country Rich the one thing you absolutely have to do is make sure that the people will in fact trade honestly with one another so unless the default presupposition between people is trust which is a damn hard thing to implement you know and I don't even understand how any country's ever Managed IT ever if the default presupposition is that if we trade you won't screw me over we can get rich but if the default assumption is God only knows what's up for with you it's like forget it man I don't care how many natural resources we've got we're going to stay poor so there's something that's incredibly like true truth I think is truth might be the only true natural resource you know the Japanese are a good example because their culture their trading culture is fundamentally honest they don't have any bloody natural resources at all but they're rich you know explain that it's not an easy thing to do but anyhow another story from Soul niton fire fire the branches crackle in the night wind of late Autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth the compound is dark I'm alone at the bonfire and I can bring it still some more Carpenter shavings the compound here is a privileged one so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in Freedom this is an island of paradise this is the marfino sharka a scientific Institute staffed with prisoners in its most privileged period no one is overseeing me calling me to his cell chasing me away from the bonfire even then it's chilly in the penetrating wind but she who's already been standing in the wind for hours her arms straight down her head drooping weeping then growing numb and still and then again she begs piously Citizen Chief please forgive me I won't do it again the wind carries her moans to me just as if she were moaning next to my ear The Citizen Chief at the gate house fires up his stove does not answer this was the Gat House of the camp next door to us from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building cross from me beyond the artfully intertwined many stranded barbed wire barar barricade and two steps away from the Gat house beneath a bright Lantern stood the punished girl head hanging the wind tugging at her gray work skirt her feet growing numb from the cold a thin scarf over her head it had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory and another girl slipping down into a ravine had crawled her way to the vadino highway and escaped the guard had bungled and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway when they caught on it was too late to catch her and they raised the alarm a mean dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl the entire Camp would be deprived of visits and Parcels for a whole month because of her escape and the women brigadiers went into a rage and they were all shouting one of them in particular who kept viciously rolling her eyes oh I hope they catch her the I hope they take scissors and clip clip clip take off all her hair in front of the lineup this wasn't something she had thought of herself this was the way they punished women in the gag but the girl who was now standing outside the gate house in the cold had sighed and said Instead at least she can have a good time out in Freedom for all of us the Jailer overheard what she said and now she was being punished everyone else had been taken off to the camp but she had been set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gate house this had been at 6:00 p.m. and it was now 11:00 p.m. she tried to shift from one foot to another but the guard stuck out his head and shouted stand at attention or else it will be worse for you and now she was not moving only weeping forgive me Citizen Chief you let me into the camp I won't do it anymore but even in the camp no one was about to say to her all right idiot come on in the reason they were keeping her out there for so long was that the next day was Sunday and she would not be needed for work such a straw blonde naive uneducated slip of a girl she'd been imprisoned for some spool of thread what a dangerous thought you expressed there little sister they want to teach you a lesson for the the rest of your life fire fire we fought the War and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of Victory it would be the wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire to that flame in you girl I promise the whole wide world will read about you this is from Milton Paradise Lost Milton when he wrote Paradise Lost he was trying he was trying to you could say you could think in some sense that that a huge part of the mythological religious and philosophical Enterprise of the human race over the last five or 6 thousand years and perhaps long before that has been an attempt to segregate out what is the good the good way of existing and what the evil way of existing now why we're obsessed with good and evil is a very difficult thing to understand I think it has something to do with our self-consciousness um I think that because I don't really if you're an animal you can be a predator but if you're a human being you can take it past that because if you're self-conscious you can understand your own vulnerability you know what will hurt you as soon as you know what can hurt you you know what can hurt other people and as soon as you know what can hurt you and what can hurt other people then you can make a choice between good and evil because because you can start to hurt other people just for the sake of hurting them you know and that's as close to evil as I think it gets and people have been trying to conceptualize that for and because they are trying to conceptualize as well how it is that human Affairs can go dreadfully wrong in so far as that can be laid at human feet you know sometimes it's earthquakes and sometimes it's floods but sometimes it's not sometimes it's people causing trouble for the sake of trouble and the the human race has been trying to understand the personality characteristics of that mode of action for thousands of years and a lot of that's emerged up in mythology and stories and and more than in philosophy it's it's it's like the bad guy in in in a movie it's like uh Loki you know that's a good example that's a good example of that sort of thing popping up in in relatively modern culture you know what's the what's the embodiment of evil and that's what Milton was trying to figure out when he wrote Paradise Lost you know and he was taking all these stories about satanic forces and hell that had collected in in human culture for thousands and thousands of years and trying to sort them out and make some sense out of them some narrative sense you know and he uh he believed that the the fundamentally evil impulse the most evil impulse which you could characterize evil as a meta personality that exists across people because if you do something evil and you do something evil and you do something evil it's like there's some commonality across that you can extract out the commonalities and you can say well that's what this personality is like but then you can also say well that's a very powerful it's a metap personality it's something that will never die and it's something that can actually possess people you know and if you don't think that you know that that's possible then you know you probably don't know that serial killers tend to compete with one another you know these sorts of things they're not they're not U they're not fictions and the people who shoot up high schools they're pretty damn informed about the last person who did did the same thing and generally they're trying to do a better job so you know this is serious this is serious matters and Milton's analysis you know he wrote what was considered the greatest poem in the English language which roughly speaking is Paradise Lost and what what what Milton what Milton concluded and this is like a phenomenological statement you know when we talked about the phenomenologist we talked about them trying to wrestle with the with the question of what constituted being you know and human being what's the nature of your experience and when then what's your relationship to that experience you know and the phenomenologists and the existentialists claimed that the proper relationship was one of Truth fundamentally Milton basically conceptualized Satan now that's his personification of evil as the either the embodiment of or the force behind you can read it either way of the the mind that has made its decision that being itself is evil and should be eradicated if you read the Coline Killers the literary one if you read his his writings it's exactly what he concluded he concluded that being as such was flawed you know people were contemptible being itself was unsupportable ethically because there was too much suffering it was too flawed and the best thing to do would was to eradicate it and so Milton conceptual IED evil as resentment against being now in Milton's language that was resentment against God but it boils down to exactly the same thing you know and you can you can understand this so that would be like the archetypal roots of resentment that's the way a union would look at it and you know you can see you'll see in your life that resentment will emerge like it'll emerge anytime something you regard as unfair happens specifically to you you know and if it's bad enough you'll not only be irritated and angry and hostile and self-pitying and destructive um and looking for Revenge because of it all those things that will will happen and it's almost inevitable but um if you take that far enough then you get to the bottom of that and the bottom of it is that it would be just as well in your estimation if everything that lived ceased to exist it's interesting because not only did Milton come to that conclusion um the great German philosopher and author and poet girtha came to exactly the same conclusion he believed when he when he wrote fa and F starred mephistophiles among others so mephistophiles was a an avatar of evil fundamentally his basic Creed was that existence itself is so terrible in its fundamental nature so tragic and flawed that we'd be better if we just brought the whole thing to an end now you think that's a pretty damn powerful philosophy actually and believe me there'll be times in your life where think that especially when something really terrible happens to someone really close to you in some arbitrary way you know maybe you'll have a child that becomes extremely ill in some painful manner you know and that'll be enough to make you sh shake your fist at Heaven the problem with that attitude as far as I can tell because I've traced it I've tried to understand what are The Logical conclusions to adopting that attitude and The Logical conclusion is that you take a bad situation and you make it worse and that to me that means it's logically incoherent if the problem you're trying to solve is the fact that being is flawed in a deep way and it's tragic and that people suffer and that they suffer unjustly you're making the presupposition that that's wrong that it shouldn't happen the fact that it's happening is what it what undo the whole project of being so to speak and so what that means is that if you actually believe that and you're acting in accordance with that then the one thing you should not do is make it worse and I can tell you the one thing that will make it worse is that is if you adopt that attitude it will get worse it'll get worse and at some point you'll be happy that it's getting worse and at some point after that not only will you be happy that it's getting worse but you'll be doing everything that your imagination allows you to conceive to make it worse and worse and worse faster and faster you know and there's a mythological conception of hell and one of the elements of that mythological conception is that it's a bottomless pit and the reason for that I believe is that there is nothing that is so awful that you can't make it worse if you just try so and I've seen situations like that a lot I've seen you know families locked in absolutely homicidal unconscious battles where every single person in the family was doing absolutely everything they could to make sure that no one was going to escape from that and that it was going to get a hell of a lot worse so Milton wrote for whence but from the author of all ill could spring so deep a malice to confound the race of mankind in one root and Earth with hell to mingle and involve done all to spite the great Creator this is Richard III from Shakespeare I shall despair there is no creature loves me and if I die no soul will Pity Me Nay wherefore should they since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself this is SOL SOL nen's description of the staunch party members see I guess part of the contamination issue is something like this is that you know you might say that one of the preconditions for existing as a human being is the ability to tolerate contamination and anxiety and imperfection you know that certainly something Yung would say he believed that in some sense you had to make a PCT with that in order to tolerate existing you had to come to terms with that but you can fly from that in some sense you know and then then there's nothing about you that's contaminated or strange or disgusting that's all out there it's all somewhere else it's not you you know and then you build a wall between you and that and then because that doesn't work at least in part there's no way of getting rid of the contamination that the wall gets higher and higher and more and more people are on the outside and fewer and fewer of you on the inside and you know the impulse is to burn up everything that's contaminated you know and and part of the problem with that and I think that this is why you can't just conceptualize it as disgust you know because you can think of that as a natural territoriality you can think of as natural and disgust you can think of as natural but there's something about people that takes just that step further and I think that's the intermingling of the of the contamination disgust and fear response with revenge and resentment and the desire to hurt and if you get those things going together especially if you also add in the propensity to lie man lie if things are going to get really really ugly they're going to get really bad and so you know you have to come to terms with the fact that you carry the contamination around in you to so to speak everywhere you go and that that's an ineradicable part of of limited being and then you can't be resentful about that or hateful about it because if you are then you act in a manner that will definitely make it worse so these this is soci n stories about Communist Party loyalists who were arrested by the goolag system and thrown into prison not happened to them all the time because no it wasn't like the system was playing by any real rules you know in fact it was probably even better as far as the fundamental motives of the system were concerned that you were innocent when you get arrested because that made it even more miserable and it would be even funnier if you were arrested for supporting the system that was going to arrest you it's like that was the perfect form of vicious irony and so that happened a lot to say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing they were incapable of assimilating such a blow such a downfall and from their own people too from their own dear party and from all appearances for nothing at all after all they had been guilty of nothing as far as the party was concerned nothing at all it was painful for them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them uncom radly to ask what were you imprisoned for the only screamish generation of prisoners the rest of us with tongues hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer we met and to the whole cell as if it were an anecdote here's the sort of people they were Olga slosberg husband had already been arrested and they which was usually the KGB and usually in the middle of the night and they had come to carry out a search and arrest her too the search lasted 4 hours and she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the Congress of stanit of the brushel and brish wh bristle and brush industry of which she had been the secretary until the previous day the incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children who she was now leaving forever even the interrogator conducting the search could not resist telling her come on now say goodbye to your children here's the sort of people they were a letter from her 15-year-old daughter came to yveta tetova in the kadan prison for long-term prisoners Mama tell me why write to me are you guilty or not I hope you weren't guilty because then I won't join the commum All so that was a Soviet youth group sort of like the boy scouts or the brownies except it was the Communist version because then I won't join the commum all and I won't forgive them because of you but if you are guilty then I won't write you anymore and I will hate you and the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp grave likee cell within its with its dim little lamp how could her daughter live without the commo how could she be permitted to hate Soviet power better that she should hate me and so she wrote I am guilty enter the commo how could it be anything but hard it was more than the human heart could bear to fall beneath the Beloved Axe and then to have to justify its wisdom but that's the price a man pays for entrusting his god-given soul to human Dogma even today any Orthodox communist will affirm that set kova acted correctly even today they cannot be convinced that this is precisely the perversion of small forces that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul here's the sort of people they are they were YT gave sincere testimony against her husband anything to Aid the party oh how one could pity them if at least now they had come to comprehend their former wretchedness the whole chapter this whole chapter could have been written quite differently if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views but it happened the way Maria Daniel and had dreamed it would if I leave here someday I'm going to live as if nothing happened loyalty in our view it's just plain pigheadedness these devotees to the theory of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation of any personal development whatsoever as Nikolai adamovich villanu said after serving 17 years we believed in the party and we were not mistaken is this loyalty or pigheadedness no it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government's actions they needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness otherwise Insanity was not far off you know people build memorials now they build Holocaust memorials there's a Holocaust Memorial in Washington and there's a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and you know the The Motif or the slogan of those memorials is we shall never forget and I think you you can't remember something you don't understand you can say you're not going to forget all you want but unless you understand what happened you can't remember it and we don't understand what happened you know and as far as I can tell you know the most important thing that happened in the entire 20th century with regards to evidence for for you know absolute existential catastrophes that threaten the human race at the individual level and at the and at the state level and at the international level it's all whatever it was that produced the Nazis and that produced the Soviets and that produced the maist and that hasn't gone away and that's partly because we don't understand it you know and from what I've been able to tell and this is partly why I teach you guys about the existentialists and the phenomenologists because they're not covered very often in personality classes anymore it's because I do believe I do believe that there's I do believe it was demonstrated by those who thought it through most carefully that there is a direct causal relationship between individual ethical corruption and I I can Define that the corruption is when the individual does something that they know themselves by their own standards to be wrong it's not a relativistic claim at all and it doesn't really have much to do with the truth it has to do with falsehood because I don't think people can identify the truth but I know they can identify false Hood so and I think that people become corrupt when they act out actions that they know by their own moral standards to be wrong and they they do the same thing in a pedian sense when they refuse to accommodate to what they've assimilated so if I pick up a piece of information and it contradicts a dearly cherished belief and then I refuse to take that piece of information and transform my perceptual and belief structures to account for it then I'm doing the same thing that's willful blindness and that makes you smaller and smaller and the world more and more out of your control and you weaker and weaker and more likely to be paranoid and angry and hurt and I also don't think that the connections between people and the society are as abstract and distant as we think because you might think well what the hell difference could it possibly make you know the way I behave it's like well you're a node in a network you're not an individual ual connected by a linear line to another individual connected to a linear line by another individual in a line that's 7 billion people long that make you nothing you just pull you out and you know the line would reclose and that would be the end of that you're a node in the network and the Network's communicating and we know for example that you know you're roughly going to interact with in some serious way a thousand people in your lifetime that's a minimum minimum estimate you know so and all those people know a thousand people so that's a million people that are one person away from you and two people away from you is a billion people and you know as soon as you get to three well that's far more people than there are so you know you're only three or four or five connections away from everyone and so it's very very difficult to know exactly how your behaviors and misbehaviors Echo and ripple you know and we know that people can be tremendous forces for good we know that because we do see people like that from time to time and we certainly know plenty about the reverse and so God only knows what what role you play in determining you know whether the the part and the whole of mankind goes seriously wrong or seriously right but I wouldn't dismiss it as a fantasy from everything I've seen you know what you do definitely definitely affects your family what your family does definitely affects the community and what the community does definitely affects the state like it doesn't take much Rippling for these things to start to have effect you know it doesn't for example it doesn't take that many people in a country to cheat on their income tax before the whole damn economy falls apart I doubt if it's more than 10% you know and it's pretty it's a miraculous that there are countries where that doesn't happen but there are and God Only Knows Why So anyways it's worth thinking about you know because people ask questions like well what you know does life have any meaning I can tell you one meaning that it has like it's perfectly reasonable for you to devote yourself to not producing any more suffering than is absolutely necessary because I don't care what you think about meaning and the absence of positive meaning it's pretty damn hard to deny pain and you know you could at minimum live in such a way that you're least likely to create Mayhem and misery so you know maybe that's not enough but at least it's a start and I certainly know that if you don't decide to live that way the probability that you can cause serious trouble is extraordinarily high and so you got to ask yourself is that what you want you know cuz it is sometimes what people want so I think it's an abdication of responsibility and I think it's resentful and weak to do that so I think there's no there's nothing in it but misery and weakness okay so that ends the philosophical part of the course ly speaking because you can't separate Philosophy from anything because philosophy is about what things mean and even though we're going to go into psychometrics now and we're going to go into biology it's all building the same edifice so I'm I'm going to I'm going to start to talk to you a little bit today about psychometrics now I doubt very much that any of you decided to go into psychology because of psychometrics like that's the theory of measurement basically it's you know it's kind of dry the theory of measurement it certainly wasn't something I was enamored of when I was a an undergraduate or or a graduate student you know um but then as I started to dig into things and started to try to really understand them and you know understand means that you can use the knowledge that you have to do something valuable with that's sort of what understanding seems to me to be the thing I kept running into was the fact that measurement is everything in in psychology as a science it's everything because if you don't know what you're measuring you have no idea what you're up to and then it gets worse because it turns out that measuring things especially psychological things is really really really hard and so psychologists do it badly all the time and sometimes it's because they just don't know what the hell they're doing and sometimes it's it's willful blindness and sometimes it's blind careerism and it's those two things a lot and so one of the things I want to do with you and for you for the remainder of the course is to well teach you some biology you know some neurobiology because actually there have been some real biological psychology Geniuses and they've outlined you know the the the schema of brain function quite nicely and in a way that I think is really interesting to know about and that's important and useful but also to to familiarize you with the basic concepts of psychometrics because you'll be armed against stupidity that way and it's really useful to be armed against stupidity and that's especially the case if any of you are interested in science or if you're interested in psychology as a science now how many of you are interested in psychology as a science okay so there's a substantial number of you and I presume that some of you are interested because maybe you hope to make a career of it or you know or at least to finish your degree as a you know a psychologist with biological orientation so either way you need to know you need to know what we're going to learn in the next couple of weeks and the first thing you have to really come to terms with is how the hell do you know something is real that's a measurement problem you know now the people that we've been talking about have been concerned about that too and they argue about it because some of them are more like objective materialist scientists and some of them are more like phenomenologists and so everybody's sort of concerned with well what's the nature of the real but scientists have an additional concern which is well how do you measure it and it's not a secondary concern the measurement is everything it's everything you can't get anywhere without the meas measurement so then you think well what are people like you know what are people like do they have beliefs do they have attitudes do they have values do they have personalities do they have emotions do they have motivations do they have cognitions do they have behaviors how do you separate those from one another it's like good luck with that and then like how do you how do you assess them at at micro and macro levels how do you conceptualize them like what's a unit of behavior that's a really difficult thing to figure out or what's a value and is what you value independent of your personality well what's your personality or what's a trait you know and it's it's a complete mess it's it's it's something that's chasing its own tail constantly it's been very difficult for psychologists to come to terms about this now so I can tell you something about measurement Theory first so one thing you might ask yourself is like how is it that you determine what's real in the world okay so the first thing you might think of about is well this is an empirical idea you have senses and so a radical empir empiricist would say you get all the information about the world from your senses so it's sense data okay so so then you might notice and you might think well okay let's say sense data provides you with a picture of the world and let's even go one step further and let's say Well it it provides you with a picture of the reality of the world then you might say well how many senses do you need and is one eye enough well we have two eyes so one eye doesn't seem to have been enough for people and then okay it's two eyes and then but it's not just two eyes it's two eyes in hearing and then it's not just two eyes and hearing it's two eyes hearing smell taste and touch okay so that's interesting so what that means is evolution has calculated that for a for a beast like you you you need five dimensions of evaluation before you can be certain that something is real you can't rely on one you know you can't rely on two now if you can see something and hear it it's much more likely to be real than if you can just see it or just hear it but if you can see it and hear it and touch it it's like at that point it takes a pretty damn sneaky thing to fool you and then if you add taste and smell to that it's like well what we' figured out is that's enough if you could if you get those five things working you probably won't die and that's a good measurement of whether that's sufficiently real okay so that's interesting he so your your sensory apparate ey are measurement devices but you don't just need one you need five and then you think well are those five the same or different now it turns out that's a complicated question because although this may not seem obvious two things can be the same and different in an infinite number of ways so one of the things you might say is well what makes why do you put two things in the same category and you'll say well because they're similar it's like well actually that turns out not to be why because they're similar and different in an infinite number of ways and so you can't use that as a basis for categorization plus it's just circular you put similar things in a category because categories contain similar things not helpful not helpful so when you're trying to zero in on something not only do you need to sense it but you need to use senses that in some sense are qualitatively different from one another so you might you might almost think about them as uncorrelated isn't exactly the right phrase but they're different methodological techniques so for example your eyes re rely on light waves right and then your ears rely on sound waves and th those are quite different they don't even interfere with each other to any to any real degree and so that means what you're getting is information from two independent sources so that's helpful but then if you if you smell something or more accurately if you taste something I I don't know if you know this but it seems to be the case that taste is a molecular phenomena that you know that when you taste something you're actually assessing it at a molecular level and there might be as many tastes in some sense or at least as many smells because you're sensing that at a molecular level and smell is more complex as there are substances now people aren't quite sure about that but it's you know it's pretty it differentiates a lot and so you're detecting molecular signatures with your nose and then with your hands you're detecting the electron shells on the outside of your fingertips are pushing against the electron shells of solid surfaces and they can't push through and so that's basically what you're detecting you're detecting the surface of electrons more more or less and you can't push through it and so that's that's a different way of that's a different way of determining whether or not something is real and so the reason I'm telling you this is because there there was a famous set of papers published in the 1950s by a researcher named kronbach and another researcher named meil and they were trying to figure out how in the world should psychologists figure out what a phenomena what phenomena is real you know it's the same question in some sense that the chemists had to sort out but they sorted that out they got the periodic table of the elements and that was the end of that that was a big that was a big step forward cuz they got their basic they got their idea about what the world was made of nailed down pretty damn tight and then they could move from that but in Psychology it's like we have this problem what are the basic phenomena okay so what meal and kronbach were trying to figure out is not so much what the basic phenomena were but how it would be that you could go about figuring out what they were if they existed and they basically came up with a strategy that's very similar to the sense strategy so their hypothesis was was you can't really tell if something is real unless you can measure it using a variety of different methods and get the same answer now the first thing you should remember is that every psychologist knows this unless they've been trained extraordinarily badly because this is a key paper okay it's the key paper of what's called construct validation and a construct is a measurement you know and so the issue with construct measurement is how do you construct your measures so that you know they're measuring something real it's not something peripheral you got to get this right and the rule from cback and meal was multi method multi method now there's a bit of a problem there because it's not exactly clear when you're using the same method and when you're using a different method you know like if I if I say I filled out a questionnaire about your personality and then you filled out a questioner about your personality is that the same method or a different method well there's some similarities and some differences maybe if I had you fill out a questionnaire you know maybe I gave you an electric shock and I had you fill a questionnaire out about uh how you felt about that and at the same time I measured changes in your skin conductance because those occur because you sweat a bit if you've been stressed maybe I measure your heart rate acceleration you know I might notice that when you report you know being unhappy or miserable or angry or frustrated or disappointed or stressed you also show a skin conductance increase CU you're sweating a little bit and your heart rate goes up and then I think well I've kind of triangulated on the phenomena we don't know what the phenomena is but at least we can measure it three different ways it turns out that with heart rate for example it's been damn tricky you know because you might think well heart rate's an objective measure so you could get at what it indexes quite easily so you know if you get afraid your heart rate will go up but if you get excited your heart rate will go up it'll go up if you take cocaine and it'll go up if you run it's like so it's not exactly clear what heart rate index is indexing it turns out that from the psychological perspective the theory has developed to the point where we we we assume that when I measure your heart rate increase to a phenomena that isn't associated with exercise say that what I'm actually assessing is your body's um the the intensity of your body's prep preparation to do something what makes sense right why does your heart rate go up to get more blood to your muscles why so that you can go and do something so if your heart rate goes up it's because you're preparing to do something what well it depends on the situation so it's not that fine grain to Tool you know so that's that's a measurement problem um so you want to measure the thing multiple ways and you want to hope that you get the right answer now that's what a real scientist does a real scientist looks to see that they've got the damn thing they want to measure they've identified it and that it will manifest itself across multiple levels of measure me CU then they can sort of be clear that it's there now this guy Jeffrey gray who you're going to read about for the next lecture he's a brilliant scientist and gray I love gray because gray when gray uses a word you know exactly what it means and he's a behaviorist and those people are known for precision you know the philosophers that we've been talking about in the clinical psychologists they take a broad overview of the world and that can be really useful you know but gray is a master of the reverse which is zeroing in on what something means so when he says anxi iety he usually talks about animals he means something specific about it he means that there's a particular biological circuit that gets activated you can measure that a variety of different ways that it will respond to the administration of barbituates benzo aines or alcohol because those are primary anxiolytics and that there will be certain behavioral concomitants that are associated with that so the theory has to work across multiple levels of analysis pharmacological physiological psychological Behavioral and then he thinks okay we kind of zeroed in on this maybe we can cautiously move forward it's a beautiful beautiful way to proceed and you get results that way I mean he wrote a book called The neuros pychology of anxiety in 1982 and he updated it in 1999 and you know that thing that thing stood the test of time because he was absolutely rigorous in his definitions and the behaviorists were very good at that when they measured something and defined it you knew what it was very good now now it turns out that for a lot of the things that psychologists study it's not so straightforward you know you you can't get multiple measures of the same thing and so you have to often you have to proceed forward with what you've got in the hope that you can cre acrew additional evidence later and I'm going to talk to you in detail about one such approach and that's been the psychometric approach with in relationship to the establishment of the basic personality traits so so what happened with the statistics approach because that's primarily what we're going to talk about is that the initial discovery of the basic traits was done only at a statistical level and then what happened was that as the traits were established statistically and people got more comfortable with the idea that they might be real then the way they manifested themselves across different levels of analysis started to become understood so for example once I knew that there was such a thing as extroversion I could start to associate certain kind of behaviors and certain emotions with and then I could start to document what the neurological systems were that that underpinned it and then I could start to understand the neuropharmacology and all that stuff started to stack up and that's sort of where we are with psychometric personality theory and the first element of psychometric personality theory is a hypothesis and here here you think this hypothesis through so this so imagine that one of the things that human beings communicate about with their language is person it I'm really interested in describing what you're like to someone else and you're interested in describing what I'm like to someone else it helps us keep track of our of everyone's relationships and and reputations but it also helps us understand their behavior and we're obsessively curious about each other and it's no wonder because you know we're weird and unpredictable things but we're kind of useful too so the so the linguistic hypothesis and this is what started the psychometric the psychometric movement forward in the domain of Personality there's a linguistic hypothesis and the linguistic hypothesis is the important variation in human personality will be captured by the language okay so that's like a hypothesis that the language is a good measurement device we're trying to use the language to assess and communicate about each other and roughly we've we've nailed the structure within that language if we could figure out how to extract it now people debate that he cuz it's not self-evident that we would have captured all the important variation in personality in our language but it's not a bad hypothesis and you can test it and the way you test it is by deriving personality-based descriptions from an analysis of natural language and then seeing how those derived descriptions do in the real world do it predicting things do it being correlated with different physiological structures due at predicting responses to pharmacological interventions and so forth and so on and the answer to that is being hey it's done pretty well so so the first hypothesis is that important trait variation is encapsulated in the language but there's another hypothesis and I'll leave you with this and you really need to think about this because psychologists do not get it right and they should it's a sin it's a scientific sin not to get this right the big five theorists and they're the psychometric guys who did the language analysis they make a claim they make a strong claim and a weak claim the strong claim is you can extract out information about personality from the language it lays itself out in five Dimensions we'll we'll talk about what that means extroversion neuroticism conscientiousness agreeableness and openness and that is where all the important variation in personality lies okay that's the strong claim the weak claim is this we're going to forget about the strong claim because you guys can evaluate that as we go through it the weak claim is this in so far as you can measure personality with language and so that means with words or phrases or sentences in so far as you can measure it with language you're going to measure one or more of the big five traits well or badly now the reason I'm I'm stressing this is so many of you have taken many psychology courses so far and you may have noticed that people measure all sorts of things with questionnaires they measure self-esteem for example they measure self-efficacy you know they measure authoritarian personality they measure any bloody thing you can think of there's going to be a questionaire with a name on it but the big five theorists say hey hey wait a minute we've got a hypothesis going here if you're using language and you're measuring traits you're measuring one or more of the big five traits bad ly or well and so what that means and no one's challenged this by the way the the challenge is well do five traits completely cover it or do we need six or seven and then maybe what's the hierarchical structure there's questions about that but no one seriously questioned the weak hypothesis and so what that means is that all those things you read about that are measured by questionnaire that have all sorts of different names are elements of the big five that have either been measured well or badly and so what that means is whenever you read a psychological paper and this is something that's particularly endemic in social psychology no matter what they name the damn measure if it's a questionnaire it's extroversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness or openness and it's incumbent on the researcher to prove that that's not the case and they don't now the reason they don't in part is because they don't know the psychometric theory then the next reason is they do know it but they ignore it and the next reason is if they know it and ignore it then they can invent a construct and name it something and they can conjure up a whole career on it you don't get to do that we know some things exist in Psychology IQ extroversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness and openness they exist in so far as you can encapsulate personality and language and use statistical techniques to derive private maybe other things exist but I don't think there's any credible evidence that they do so all right so we'll pick that up on Thursday |
so i i know you can't tell but you're looking at a new and improved version of me today because i just finished the canadian government's online ethics course and so my my capacity to manifest ethical behavior has been improved by an immeasurable amount so okay so today we're going to talk about something that's actually quite controversial although i guess what we talked about last lecture was rather controversial too people hate this topic generally speaking and it's because like there's nothing ever there's never any guarantee that if you investigate things from a scientific perspective that you're going to learn things that you want to learn or that you're happy about knowing or that you wish were that way i mean i would say one of the big advantages to the scientific method is that it presents you with data that you don't like i mean most of the time when you learn something it's because you're running into something that you don't like or don't want right because otherwise when the world is unfolding in front of you exactly as you predict and hope there's nothing to learn you almost always run into an impediment of one form or another before you ever learn anything so we're going to talk about openness today now that sounds rather innocuous in and of itself but the problem is is that openness is the place in the big five where iq hides especially non-verbal iq which is most specifically associated with fluid iq now the thing about intelligence is that it's not like the big five it's unidimensional in most regards so you know if you do the proper factor analysis with the entire corpus of trait descriptors in language you end up with five dimensions there's no superordinate single dimension you can make a case for plasticity and stability but the actual utility of that higher order factor structure has yet to be demonstrated in in a multiplicity of situations we have some evidence for with regards to plastility and stability that plasticity is predicted more by what people do and stability is much more predicted by what people don't do now i don't know how useful that is i mean it's kind of an interesting fact it was an incredibly powerful effect but and plasticity seems to be associated more with exploratory behavior and perhaps with dopaminergic function and stability perhaps more with the control and constraint of behavior and serotonergic function but it's still pretty vague so you can certainly make a case for the for the hierarchy of factor structure with regards to trades to sort of top out at the five factor level with some possibility of it of an informative level above that iq isn't like that it's pretty damn unidimensional and it's complicated because there does seem to be some utility in in distinguishing between verbal and non-verbal intelligence or fluid and crystallized intelligence depending on how you look at it and i think the distinction is basically this is that fluid intelligence roughly is a measure of how rapidly you can learn things and then crystallized intelligence roughly is an indication of how much you've learned and then you can see why those two things would be very highly correlated right because how much you know is obviously going to be a function of how fast you can learn but you could also see that there would be some circumstances under which those two things could be dissociated so one of the things that happens for example as you get older your fluid iq drops quite precipitously and it starts doing that somewhere in your mid-20s so there's some of you are already getting stupider which is kind of annoying at least from the perspective of the ability to learn but your crystallized iq or your verbal iq depending on how you look at it can you continue to rise for the rest of your life as you put more information into yourself so to speak and some of that might be a measurement artifact somewhat because the way that you test verbal or crystallized intelligence generally is by asking people about their knowledge of something maybe it's their vocabulary for example which is an excellent measure of verbal intelligence as you might expect probably because it's an index of how much people read that would be my guess or general information tests which is what a sample of your required factual knowledge and so forth um that sort of thing can increase as you as you age as your ability to learn decreases the best way by the way if you want to keep your intelligence intact the best way to do that is to uh to exercise just so you know it both weight lifting and cardiovascular exercise can maintain your fluid intelligence to quite a remarkable degree across the course of your life and the reason for that likely is that your brain is a pretty vascularized organ and it use uses a tremendous amount of your body's oxygen and energy and so if your cardiovascular system isn't in that good of shape then what seems to happen is that it's harder for your brain to get rid of waste products that are produced during its during its metabolic processes and so you can't work as efficiently there's not a lot of evidence that brain games of one form or another can produce any real positive effect although there's scattered reports in the literature that video games can improve that can improve spatial intelligence which is a subset of intelligence even though it's very highly correlated with fluid intelligence in domains other than the game usually what happens if you if you get people to develop expertise at a game that requires abstract ability like a video game what happens is they get tremendously better at the thing that they're practicing but there doesn't seem to be a lot of transfer of ability to different games and and what fluid intelligence is in large part is what's common across multiple the ability that's common across multiple complex tasks whatever that ability happens to be now we don't know exactly what that ability is partly because we don't really know very much about how the brain works but we definitely know how to measure it and that irritates people so iq fits under openness and the terminology is still a little bit i would say awkward um for a while when people were trying to sort out what the fifth factor was the openness factor some people thought about it as intellect and some people thought about it as openness and it ended up being named openness when we did our aspects study back in 2007 we broke it up into openness to experience proper and intellect so those seem to be aspects of the higher order trait and the aspect level differentiation actually turned out to be rel rather useful at least at least so far so one of the things we just published a study for example showing that if you were higher in openness to experience the aspect you were more likely to be in the humanities and if you were higher in intellect you were more likely to be in the sciences for example so anyways what we'll do first is we're going to talk a little bit about intelligence per se and then we'll talk about the trait the reason i want to talk about iq really because really that's what i'm talking about is because the best measure of the intellect aspect isn't a big five personality questionnaire it's actually an iq test and so and it's very very important to understand iq and there's a bunch of reasons for this and first reason is is that iq is more powerfully predictive of long-term life success than any other phenomena that can be measured among human beings and not only that the statistics that were derived statistics that were used to derive iq tests and then used to predict future performance are exactly the same statistics that every social scientist particularly psychologists every social scientist uses to do all of their statistics so you can't criticize the derivation of iq tests on statistical grounds without criticizing every single finding in psychology that's ever been made by anyone ever since we started to use statistics and i would say not only that the best statisticians that psychology has ever produced are the people who invented and promoted and developed and tested iq tests so there's no getting out of it by saying that there's something something faulty about the statistics so for example stephen j gould who's a famous evolutionary biologist and pretty radical left-wing thinker he debated he had a public debate at one point about what he called the mismeasure of man because he wasn't very much of a fan of iq tests and he claimed that iq tests were faulty because they relied on factor analysis and because basically what iq is is the first factor that you draw out of a huge battery of questions that require abstraction any kinds of questions you'll find that if people do well on one question they tend to do well at all the other questions that's the general factor and he said well that's just a factor and that's means it's a mathematical abstraction and that means that it's not real it's like well first of all the first factor that you derive out of the performance indices for a very large number of answers to abstract questions is almost perfectly correlated with the average the mean and so that's tantamount to saying that the mean is a mathematical abstraction and therefore doesn't really exist and well then you have a problem which is well exactly what do you mean by exist because you can certainly make a case that mathematical abstractions are more real than the thing that they're abstracted from if that wasn't the case then mathematics wouldn't be so powerful so basically gould's argument boiled down to the idea that there's no such thing as an average well this is part of what makes me a pragmatist philosophically i mean there's such thing as an average in so far as calculating the average and then using it produces certain results that you desire in order to deal with the world right so the average of a group of numbers is a tool of some sort it you know which obviously doesn't contain all the information that the entire set of numbers contained you need at least a standard deviation to get that as well because that talks to you about the the range know the variability but the idea that the average isn't a real thing is you know is silly it's a it's a shallow criticism it's also based on complete lack of knowledge about exactly what factor analysis does and doesn't do so now here's a list of some intercorrelations here between the various facets or the various aspects just so you know how tightly associated they are so industrious and industriousness and orderliness are correlated at about 0.4 that's from conscientiousness volatility and emotional still stability at about 0.59 politeness and compassion at about 0.44 assertiveness and enthusiasm at about 0.47 and openness and intelligence about 0.35 so openness and intelligence seem to be somewhat maximally differentiated as far as aspects go so the average correlation between the big five is r equals 0.22 and the correlation between the big two is r equals 0.24 so that just gives you some idea of how much segregation and how much overlap there is between the different aspects underneath the trait level let's see so what i should really tell you first i guess is how is how to conceptualize iq yeah this is a good one so you want to follow this carefully so that so that you you you can explain it to yourself and so that you can explain it to other people so here let's say you want to make an iq test so this is what an iq test is the first thing you might imagine that is that you have a huge library of questions and there be questions that could be formulated in language or some other symbolic manner often they don't have to be but often and then they require skill or knowledge to answer so here's some typical questions and you could generate multiple exemplars of questions like this what's 2 times 68 what's the capital of georgia how do you find how do you define hypertrix anemia um complete the pattern 2 4 8 16. remember these numbers 2 4 then you tell them back to me 6 12 15 14 18 20 22 you tell them back to me that's a working memory test by the way but working memory is basically indistinguishable from intelligence in many many ways so then you know another thing i might have you do for example is i might show you a pattern made out of squares and then give you some blocks and so that you could make the pattern out of the blocks and then time you to see how long it took you or maybe only give you a certain amount of time and if you didn't do it then you either pass or fail i might show you some patterns this is like a ravens progressive matrices test which is one of the most tests that is the most accurate at assessing nonverbal intelligence or fluid intelligence so i might show you six patterns six designs and each design changes sorry eight designs imagine a three by three array three here three here two here and a question mark and then over here i'd show you a bunch of options of patterns and one of the patterns would complete the sequence and usually you could calculate the sequence going down or across and and diagonally as well and that looks somewhat like a working memory test in that usually the raven's progressive matrices patterns involve a couple of different variables like it might be color and shape or something like that and so in order to complete the the test you have to figure out how the color is transforming and figure out how the shape is transforming or maybe in a more complex ravens matrices question it would be color shape and position on the page or something like that so you're increasing the number of dimensions that have to be attended to simultaneously in order to solve the problem so so one of the things that's quite interesting about the iq test it really doesn't matter what the questions are and so so anyway so imagine you have a whole pile of these questions lying around like a universal pile a universal library of potential questions that require abstraction to solve and then you take a random set of a hundred of those and then you give that to a thousand people and then you just score some up there you just sum up their scores and then you rank order them in terms of their performance and that's iq it's as simple as that now you could do some other things you could correct it for the age of the participant now sometimes that's useful and sometimes it's not um but you could do that and generally if you standardize the score and you correct it for age then what you get is an iq score i would so actually the the the total would just be an indicator of general cognitive ability an iq score would be the indicator of general cognitive ability corrected for age and that's it that's all and so here's some of the strange properties of of of that set of scores if you factor analyze the data set you'll pull out one factor and a few little bitty factors after that and that factor will be very very highly correlated with the sum so correlated at 0.9 0.92 0.93 like really highly correlated far more highly correlated than most tests are far more highly correlated than most tests are reliable now another thing that's very interesting is you take another set of 100 questions and you give them to the same thousand people and then you re-rank order the people and then you correlate the rank orders you get what i'm saying the correlation between the rank orders will be like 0.95 so what it means is no matter which set of 100 questions you take out of this universal library of questions people are going to score in the same order that they scored when they did the first hundred questions and that means that iq is extremely reliable test retest reliability this is actually an even more stringent form of reliability which is alternative form reliability so that's all there is to iq it's very simple now why it is that the ability to do well on one of those questions is highly correlated with the ability to do all the rest of them that's something that nobody really understands i think it has to do with the human capacity to abstract like we can abstract and we can manipulate abstractions it's not obvious that there's any other creature that can do that and it seems to be in some sense modular anything that can be abstracted and then manipulated draws on exactly the same set of underlying skills whatever those happen to be now you might say well so what which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say and so what is if you then take that rank order then let's say you take the same thousand people 20 years later and you rank order them in terms of how well they're doing at their job you could just use income say as a marker there's other markers you could use but for the sake of simplicity let's say income the correlation between their original rank order and the rank order of their performance will be something around if you had a full sample of intelligence be something around 0.5 which is 0.5 is a staggeringly high correlation so you know you'll hear that when you hear people talk about effect sizes you'll hear them say that 0.2 is a small effect size and point three is a medium effect size and point oh sorry 0.5 is a medium effect size and so forth what you find out if you look at the literature empirically is that point effect sizes of 0.5 correlations of 0.5 are vanishingly rare in the social sciences if you ever do a study with a reasonable number of people with a novel measure and you're predicting something with it if you get a correlation of 0.5 boy you're jumping around the room because that's only going to happen like once in your life unless you're measuring something that someone has already measured and you just don't know it and so it's it's fair it's a it's a reasonable to point out that the correlation between iq say and academic performance or the correlation between iq and long-term career success the size of that correlation is bigger than the correlation between virtually two two of virtually any other things that social scientists have ever discovered and the thing about it too is it's very straightforward you know what the procedure that i just told you anyone can replicate that you know you're not going to come up with a universal library of questions obviously but you can use the internet as a reasonable proxy so not only is iq easy to understand from a measurement perspective it's also the tests are very very easy to replicate and they're extremely powerful predictors now it turns out actually that iq is correlated more strongly with how rapidly you learn a task than it is with your performance per se so the correlation between rate of learning of something novel and iq can be as high as 0.6 or 0.7 which you know the other bit of that would probably be taken up by something like conscientiousness or openness or negatively with emotional stability so you're picking up a tremendous amount of the variation between in people's performances with that single measure and you can derive a pretty decent indicator of iq in 20 minutes which is also pretty frightening you know so well so that's our cue does anybody have any questions about that yes well you have to formulate them in language that's all yeah now a lot of people have complained about the idea of intelligence because they don't like the idea they don't really mind the idea so much that there are smart people but people really don't like the idea that there are dumb people and you know it's it's it's it's really not reasonable from a logical perspective to have one without the other and it's easy to see why people object to that because whatever term you use to refer to the low end of the intelligence distribution rapidly takes on a pejorative nature so and so what happens is the culture cycles through various words decade by decade trying to describe the lower end of the intelligence distribution but all the words end up being pejorative and so they're they're changed decade after decade but you and you can understand that because first of all there's great danger in labeling someone unintelligent perhaps period but certainly if there's measurement error you know so if you're labeled unintelligent let's say and you're not that's going to be real catastrophe so there's measurement error problems but then you know you have to think about the problems of not doing the measurement so this is something i've thought about for a long time so let's say that i assessed your verbal iq before you came to the university of toronto forget linguistic differences assume we could control for that which is very difficult at the university of toronto because there's so many people who have english as a second language but forget about that for a minute let's say i got a entire population distribution not only of the applicants from the university of toronto but of the entire population and i said categorically that the bottom thirty percent of the people in that distribution would not be able to graduate from the university of toronto am i doing them a favor by not letting them apply or am i harming them well we know perfectly well i mean the probability that there's anybody in this room that has an iq of less than 115 is pretty damn low and if if there is someone in the room whose general intelligence level is at that level you can bloody well be sure they're working like mad dogs in order to keep up and i'm not saying that all of you who have to work like mad dogs to keep up you know are are necessarily lower than you might be in iq i'm just saying that because iq in part seems to be a measure of something like processing speed or rate of understanding or something like that if you're not in the upper echelons of the distribution and you're tasked with extraordinarily difficult tasks that require abstraction and quick learning the only way that you can compensate for it is by working to an incredible degree and you can do that and that's also why at the university of toronto we know this perfectly well and it's true in other educational institutions conscientiousness is almost as good a predictor of grades as intelligence and that only makes sense to me it's like who the hell is going to get the good grades the smart people who work hard and i mean would it wouldn't be good if that wasn't the case as far as i can tell because hopefully what you get when you get a grade is an indicator of how fast you are how well you know the material and how much effort you've put into learning it something like that the relationship between creativity and grades at the university of toronto is zero by the way once you control for iq which is you know perhaps rather appalling but the problem is is that it's very difficult to assess creative people right because they're annoying creative people do things in a new way and the problem with trying to assess whether or not someone has done some something in a new way is that you have to come up with a new scheme of grading for that and you can believe that's not going to happen you know and then it's worse because if you're a creative person and you're graded by someone who isn't creative they're not going to think you're creative they're just going to think that you're wrong and so and you might be because lots of times if you're creative you're also wrong because it's not that easy to come up with a novel way of doing something or a novel hypothesis that actually is going to be an improvement over the previous hypothesis right most of the time you're off on a tangent and it's an incorrect tangent now various people have criticized the idea of a single intelligence and so they've made i guess the most famous ones probably in the last 15 years or 20 years of being robert sternberg and martin gardner martin gardner is not a scientist by the way at all um he claims directly that he doesn't really care if his intelligences can be measured well that's not that helpful because if you're working as a scientist if what you're talking about can't be measured then it doesn't exist and you can even make a philosophical case i think that if what you're talking about can't be measured in any possible way that there's no sense in assuming that it exists now gardner is posited intelligence is like linguistic musical logical mathematical spatial body kinesthetic intrapersonal and interpersonal um one thing you might note is that we already have a perfectly good word for all of those performance variability across all those domains insofar as it actually exists and that would be talent so there's no reason to confuse the word talent with the word intelligence and the next thing that you might note is that a lot of these so-called intelligences are likely captured not so much by intelligence but by variability and personality traits which we already understand and so to throw a bunch of new terms in like linguistic musical logical mathematical spatial body kinesthetic interpersonal and interpersonal all that does is muddy the conceptual waters it adds now there's a reason for that the reason is fundamentally political and the political reason is is that um it is uncomfortable for people to admit that there might be something like actual differences in ability that are important and unerraticable now i can understand why people would have trouble with that but consider the alternatives we know part of the reason that you're here and will perhaps stay here and will perhaps be successful in so far as you can define success along the dimension of career attainment say in your life as it unfolds from this time onward is because you work hard okay but we also know that part of the reason that you're here is because you're smart now the question is what should you do with that from an ethical perspective exactly should you say no i'm no smarter than anyone else which means that maybe you're much more hard working than everyone else so you're still you know denigrating the non-achieving end of the distribution or do you say i've been blessed by something that's actually beyond my control and am privileged as a consequence of that and then decide what exactly that means in terms of your responsibility those are your choices but but to not take into account the fact that you've been blessed at at least one level of analysis with a favorable role of the of the randomness dice seems to me to completely misstate the nature of the causal sequences that propel you into what's essentially a position of privilege so but that by denying that the differences the innate differences in people with regards to important abilities all you do is attribute all your success to your own particular individual controllable actions and i mean i'm not saying that you don't deserve credit for your work it's like more power to you and all of that but the idea that some people are smarter than others that's not an idea that's a fact and it's an uncomfortable fact and the fact that we won't deal with it means that people suffer unnecessarily so let's go back to those people in the distribution i say the bottom 30 percent of the distribution isn't going to be able to get a degree at the university of toronto um unless they are they're capable of working to an insane level and even then likely not um so let's say that you have a ability blind admission process it's random so everybody's name is thrown into a hat and if they get pulled out they get to go do you think that you're doing the people who are going to fail a service or not you know now you can make a case that you are because it's likely that there'll be a couple of individuals in the bottom part of the distribution who will make it through partly because of measurement error right because you're not going to measure this perfectly and partly because well people are surprising and amazing creatures and you never know exactly what any given one of them is going to do but you're going to torture a lot of them to death at the same time you know i've been struggling with this because i've developed tests that help employees employers decide who might be competent more competent than who when they're hiring and that's partly dependent on general cognitive ability and we think based on the statistics the relevant statistics that we can improve the probability that a given employee employer will hire an above average worker in a cognitively complex um for a cognitively complex job position from 50 50 to 75 25 or 80 20. it's quite a lot but it's not obviously there's still a there's still a fair margin of error there but you know having half as many employees below average is definitely going to be of tremendous benefit to your company and you might say well that's unfair because there's going to be measurement error too and that's not the question the question is it is is it is it more unfair than to do it any other way well you could use interviews but tall good-looking extroverted people tend to do much better on interviews than short ugly introverted people especially if they're a little bit on the disagreeable side as well because agreeable people also do better in interviews so not only are they tremendously biased in all of those dimensions they actually don't predict performance in the long run very well at all so actually that means in the states they're illegal you know although companies lawyers haven't woken up to this fact yet but you're mandated by law in the united states to use the most accurate valid and reliable current means of hiring available and interviews are not that and neither are letters of recommendation which are pretty much as bad they're not so much biased the letters of recommendation they're just useless because you know except insofar as if you can't get anyone to write you a letter of recommendation at all well maybe that's an indication that you're very you're not very socially skilled or that you don't have a very good social network or whatever so maybe as a really blunt indicator of isolation you could derive some information out of letters of recommendation but as far as valid indicators of future performance they're just not valid at all it's partly why i hate writing them it's they're they're they're they're also illegal at least they they are in the us even though people don't understand that yet but i know the law and i know the validity statistics so and what you're required to do so then you might also ask so the so the other selection methods are also biased and unreliable you could say well you could hire someone based on their academic history but roughly that's an index of intelligence and conscientiousness anyways it's just not a very good one especially because there's tremendous variability between schools so if you have a you know a gpa of 4.0 from school x and this person has a gpa of 4.0 from school y there's no reason at all to assume that those are comparable so you can use grades but that's full of measurement error so that's not very good either so you could guess that'll give you 50 50 in terms of your probability of hiring someone who's above average versus below average but that doesn't seem to be a very intelligent way of going about it either because and here's here's something to think about so let's assume that there are 10 people working and inappropriate selection method places an incompetent manager above them so maybe the manager is less intelligent than the workers that might be one possibility or maybe the manager is less creative than the workers are maybe the manager is less conscientious or whatever it doesn't matter some dimension of competence is not well matched with the demands of the job well then one of the questions is what exactly are you doing to the manager well you're basically setting them up to fail and the tremendous number of managers fail in the first two years of their of their promotion it's it's well above 50 percent and so that's not so good for them but then you're also dooming the 10 people that they're supervising to a kind of horrible per you know perdition for the time it takes for everyone to calculate that the manager is actually failing and what that means generally is that the very highly qualified people in the worker pool will just leave because why would they put up with that so then you might think well is it unethical to select properly or is it ethical to select randomly or exactly how should you solve that problem and the answer is well we do try to solve it because we use selection methods but we usually use ones that aren't very accurate it's funny too because i tried selling accurate selection tests to corporations for a very long period of time and one of the things i learned is they didn't want them that was mind-boggling to me because the economic utility in hiring people who are competent compared to people who aren't is so high it's absolutely mind-boggling because the difference in productivity between people isn't even it isn't normally distributed it's paredo distributed some people are staggeringly more productive than other people so tilting your selection criteria so that you pick from the more productive end of the distribution means incredibly powerful economic benefits for your company but um at least when i was doing this to begin with human resources people who were usually the ones evaluating the tests weren't necessarily the most competent people in the corporate environment which is something that hasn't changed very much they were very badly trained and they believed that there were no differences between people that couldn't be eliminated with training which is like yeah no no that's wrong as anybody if you have any sense at all and you think about it for 15 or 20 seconds you know that's the case you know i don't know what it was like in your school but in the school i went to which was way the hell up in northern alberta in the middle of no man's land you know there was at least 15 percent of the students i would say it was probably higher who were still functionally illiterate by the time they hit grade 10 functional illiteracy being they had never read an entire book and that's way more common than you think like i don't know how common you think that is but the stats basically indicate there's as many people with iqs of 85 and lower as there are people with iqs of 115 and higher so and i already said that the minimum iq level of anybody in this room is likely to be something around 115. so the person in this room who has the lowest general cognitive ability is smarter than 85 percent of the general population at 85 and lower which is there's just as many people there as there is at 115 and higher at 85 and lower then you don't get literacy so people with iqs of 90 or less have a difficult time translating written words into action so they can't really read instructions so and that's like ten percent of the populations fifteen percent of the population actually fifteen percent of the population and it's so you might say well no way it's like well you don't get to have an opinion on this by the way because the science has already been done but i can tell you one fact it's pretty unsettling so the united states army has been doing iq testing on its recruits for since before world war one they actually did a lot of the research that established iq tests and validated them and indicated that they were reliable and so forth and they had a variety of reasons for doing that um partly i guess they didn't want to put incompetent people in charge of deadly machinery which you know does seem to be a reasonable proposition i would say but what they found as a consequence of their hundreds hundred years of testing was that you couldn't teach anybody with an iq of 83 or lower anything at all that would make them anything but an obstacle to the um tasks that the armed forces had to complete on a regular basis so that's 83 so now in the united states it's actually illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces if they have an iq of 83 or lower and that's more than 10 of the population now you've got to think about that because what it means is that approximately 10 percent of the population is sufficiently um has sufficiently low general cognitive ability that one of the complex enterprises that's chronically most desperate for manpower has decided that there's no point in even trying now that's a dismal outcome but i don't know exactly what you're supposed to do with that fact but ignoring it doesn't seem to me to be the right thing because it doesn't solve the problem and this is going to become an increasing increasingly present and and and unavoidable unignorable problem because you know already that's what's happening in developed countries less so in underdeveloped countries but in developed countries the gap between the rich and the poor is is increasing so for for example almost all of the increases in wealth that have accrued to people in the last 20 years have accrued to people who are in the top one percent of the distribution of wealth and that's not going to stop by the way and part of the reason is is that cognitive power has become even more valuable than it was four years ago and the reason for that is computers basically because if you're really smart and you're good with a computer you're way ahead of someone who isn't very smart and who doesn't know how to use computers at all and you're not just a little bit ahead you're leaps and bounds ahead and worse than that you're getting farther ahead all the time and the reason for that is that computational power keeps increasing and it increases a lot it's doubling about every 18 months so part of the problem that the human race is going to have to face in the next 30 years along with many other problems is what are you going to do with people who have neither the cognitive ability nor the conscientiousness to find a niche in society that's actually that that other people will value enough to pay for because that's really the question what do you do well the conservative answer to that is well there's a job for everyone it's like no that's wrong there isn't and the liberal answer is well everybody's the same so it's just a matter of training and that's also wrong they're both both of those positions are there the scientific research has rendered them permanently outdated well you know there is the possibility of providing a minimum income the the the question what will that do is completely unanswerable we have no idea what it'll do you know and i mean it might stop people from from starving to death although i wouldn't say in north america that's generally not a problem people have anyways but we don't know see i think of that i think of human beings as pack animals fundamentally you know and i and i this is just it's a metaphor in some sense i don't think that people can be happy unless they are burdened down with something like a sled dog is burdened down with something you know you you have to have a responsibilities they have to be important responsibilities you have to be sequenced in your time you know most of the people i have in my clinical practice if they're not employed they just fall apart and the conscientious ones fall apart because they eat themselves up with shame and and guilt and the unconscientious ones fall apart because their sleep schedule goes all over the place they don't eat regularly regularly anymore they do all sorts of impulsive things that are counterproductive and you know they just sort of spiral into a pool of meaninglessness so human beings are pretty social and we're pretty altruistic you know in in some weird manner and it doesn't seem to me that people can live a life that's acceptable if all they have is enforced leisure so maybe that'll be wrong if you provided people with a base salary maybe people would figure out what to do with their spare time but um i doubt it i don't think people are i think it's very very difficult for people to regulate themselves in the absence of a certain minimum of of social structuring and guidance i've seen very very few people who can conjure that up on their own and manage it for extensive periods of time i think i've only met one person i would say in my whole life who's actually managed that and that particular person has a very large array of talents and is extremely intelligent so all right so you might ask well what what what exactly is intelligence and maybe what exactly is the ability to abstract and i think it's something like this the world is made out of the world is a very very high resolution place no matter how much you zoom into something you can zoom in more there's information that more and more and more and more levels of detail and then also no matter how far you back away from something there's more and more and more levels of detail so you know you guys are composed of a whole variety of subsystems complex functioning subsystems all the way down to the subatomic level and then above your phenomenological level of perception your members of families your members of cities your members of provinces and and nationalities and international organizations and ecological structures and so forth and so on and all of that's characteristic of you all the time and in every situation but you don't deal with all that information and you can't and so one of the things that people seem to have learned how to do is to abstract from that and i'm not exactly sure what it means to abstract but it seems to me that it means something that's similar to producing um a low resolution representation like a thumbnail and so actually when i look at each of you what i'm actually seeing is a thumbnail of what you are you know first of all obviously i don't see the other side of you that or or either side for that matter i only see you face on so in some sense it's a two-dimensional um thumbnail and then i have no idea what's going on in the subsystems that that constitute you at levels outside you know underneath your mirror surface that's a complex diagnostic problem for example if there was something wrong with you and i can't see your families or except in very you know low resolution ways your nationality or any of the systems that you're identified with and embedded in so just looking at you is an act of abstraction you know and part of that thankfully is done by the fact that our sensory systems just aren't that good so there's a whole bunch of things we can't perceive and that simplifies the problem now what we're hoping is that i can perceive enough of you at a given time so that if i interact with you i get what i want and you get what you want roughly speaking it's something like that so what we hope is the model the abstract model even of perception itself is sufficiently accurate so that it's sufficiently it's a sufficiently unbiased sample of the reality that it reflects so that if i interact with it things work out the way that i would like them to work out but there's lots of times when that doesn't happen at all right it doesn't happen when you're sick the fact is that you're the resolution of your sensory apparatus is a huge impediment to figuring out why you might be ill you know and it doesn't help much either when people are engaged in struggles that go beyond the merely personal so if we happen to be if i happen to be the member of one ethnic group and you happen to be the member of another and there's strife between those two ethnic groups then the fact that i can perceive you at this level of resolution might have very little to do with my ability to solve that particular problem now obviously people can abstract you know part of that's just built into us so that we abstract the phenomena that we see but then human beings i think in some sense are capable of meta abstraction so i think what happens is you can imagine that there's the phenomena in and of itself whatever that is that complicated multi-layer thing that's always in front of you and then there's your representation of it which is what you perceive which is already extracted to a tremendous degree and limited to a tremendous degree and then there's abstractions of that so what seemed what it seems to me to be is that language is a thumbnail of images that are a thumbnail of the reality of things it's something like that so it's a dual compression so if i say cat to you you'll what what the word cat does for you is produce the image of a generic cat which is already a kind of abstraction and then that's attached to your understanding in some sense so that you can you can generate the understanding that would go along with at least in part with perceiving or interacting with a real cat so in some sense what you're doing is i'm compressing the information down to a tremendously low resolution thumbnail and i'm throwing that at you and you decompress it into a low resolution image and then you decompress that into something that's roughly equivalent to reality that's what you're doing when you're reading a book for example right because when you read the book you can conjure up images of the places that the author is talking about you conjure up images of the characters themselves so to such a degree that if you go to see a movie that's made of your favorite book you might be irritated because the person in the movie looks nothing like the person that you read about at least as far as your imagination was concerned now intelligence in general seems to be whatever underlies the ability to generate those low resolution representations to and to utilize them so that would mean to manipulate them in your own mind but also to communicate them to others a big part of intelligence is working memory and working memory is well while you're sitting there thinking if you're thinking how many of you think in words primarily as far as you're concerned so how many of you don't think in images anybody images well that's another possibility how many of you think in words and images okay okay so so okay well that's fine you know the images are already a representation and in many ways the words are a representation of the images and so your ability to abstract and then your ability to manipulate those abstractions seems to be at the core of whatever intelligence is and that's what iq purports to measure um your working memory so when you're if you sit there right now um so let's do this here is the sentence to think about okay now think about that sentence okay so the faculty that you're using to represent that sentence to yourself is working memory and it's not very powerful you can't contain very much in your working memory seven digits is about the maximum now people vary some people think that four bits of information is actually the limit to working memory some people think it's closer to seven but it's not very much that's why telephone numbers tend to be seven digits long so you can kind of easily remember seven things which is not very many things you know so part of what your intelligence is is the breadth of that working memory and then the speed with which you can run abstractions through it so now you know i've put a little map here up so that the thing on the top left well that's sort of a multi-dimensional it's a schema of a multi-dimensional reality and i you know if you look at that what it is it's a collection of dots or circles arrayed in a variety of different arrays my proposition is that you can represent that array in a variety of different ways i've called them object one you can't see object two slide error object three object four and object five those are all low resolution representations of the thing that's in the top left hand corner and you can see that in some sense they capture something important they capture some important element of the thing in the top left hand corner but they don't capture all of it now it might be that not capturing all of it is a good idea because you don't want to use any more information than you have to and then at the bottom well those are words or semantic symbols of one form or another and they represent the representations um i saw temple grandin speak once i don't remember if i told you about this but she's a very famous autistic researcher um she's quite autistic and she's very fun to listen to she's quite a good public speaker which is quite remarkable she's trying to figure out she thinks that autistic people think like animals and and she actually works with animals and she seems to be very good at understanding them she believes that what things that frighten her are the same thing that frightens animals and for the same reasons and so her proposition for example is that if i say the word church all of you people are going to have what you might describe as a schematic abstraction like a hero glyph that's more or less representative of the class of churches and so or maybe i can say house kids are good at this you see this house it's like it's got a little rectangle on the top and it's got a kind of a square on the bottom it's got a door and two windows and the windows have crosses in them and there's always a chimney on the top with smoke coming out which i think is quite remarkable because you actually don't see that many houses now that have chimneys with smoke coming out but still that's the canonical image for a child temple grandin's claim was that she cannot see house she can only see a house and so if you say to her something like house then what comes to mind is a particular house that she's actually experienced she can't take the next level of abstraction past that which seems to be something like a deficit in generating like a hieroglyphic image one one of the ways to think about children's drawings you know how they draw people with sticks and circles you know you think oh that's so primitive it's like no it's not it's unbelievably sophisticated because those aren't pictures they're hieroglyphics and the child automatically produces them and that's a proto-linguistic development so some autistic kids can draw like leonardo da vinci with no training whatsoever and that's partly because they don't use hieroglyphics and that means that they don't really conceptualize the thing they're looking at as an abstraction they see nothing but detail and if you're training yourself to be a visual artist you have to stop looking at the abstraction and you have to start looking at the thing and that's very unsettling so if you take your hand for example and you look at it and you snap it out of hand representation when you do that property it all of a sudden looks like some kind of like octopus claw it's a very bizarre looking thing and as soon as you see it that way you can draw it but as long as you're seeing it like a hand you're going to put you know a balloon with four balloons on it or something like that and that's going to be the hand so all right this guy's name is john carroll carol's a real scientist um he looked at the structure of iq for a very long period of time wrote a very thick book on it which nobody likes to read because it's almost entirely technical so it's really more of a reference book but what what carol hypothesized and i think his hypothesis is as close to state of the art as as any is that there's a stratum three level which is fluid intelligence g and it's the main factor that unites all these other tests and then that stratum one you get fluid intelligence crystallized intelligence verbal intelligence i don't remember what the rest of them stand for and then each of those can be sub divided into specific tests and each of the tests can be subdivided into somewhat particularized individual cognitive abilities now they're not that individual because there's a single factor that accounts for most of the variability in the performance so in a sense what this theory says is that the intelligence is sum up to one intelligence and that seems to be essentially correct this although you can't see it very well um if you look at g there on the left the lines leading to the first or i think that's the second strata the next strata anyways show you the correlation between g and each of the individual intelligences and what you see is the correlation between g and fluid intelligence is 0.94 which is such a tight correlation that it might as well just be the thing itself between g and and crystallized intelligence is 0.85 all of the first order correlations there are above 0.8 that's exactly and then at the far right you get concepts that you might think about as particularized and so those include concept formation analysis and synthesis number series number matrices spatial relations picture recognition block rotation visual matching decision speed block rotation crossout visual and auditory learning memory for name sound blending incomplete word that would be incomplete word completion sound patterns auditory attention etc etc and you can think of those each as individual tests in that you could make a test that theoretically only individually assessed that thing but you couldn't help but be testing all sorts of other things at the same time because that they're not actually individual one of the things you will learn is that there are neuropsychological tests and the neuropsychologists like to think that iq is something that's primitive and that they've already what would you say advanced past and so they have specific prefrontal tests say that hypothetically assess specific prefrontal abilities and then they'll note that if you take a single test of prefrontal ability and correlate it with iq it'll only correlate at about 0.3 or 0.4 and then they'll assume because it only correlates that low that it's measuring something other than what iq is measuring but really what happens is that it's just not a very good iq test and the reason that the correlation is so low is because of measurement error so if you gave the same test to the same person 20 times and then you varied the test so there were 30 variants of it you gave those all to the same person 20 times then what would come out would be a score that would be much more highly correlated with iq and probably indistinguishable from it and so you'll learn from neuropsychologists that there's such a thing as prefrontal ability and that's associated with executive control and that's associated with self-regulation which would be control over your impulses and as far as i can tell that's all completely wrong and it took me like ten years to figure that out because i was taught that it was right and it wasn't until i plowed through it painfully to and understood that there was no evidence for that so i can tell you how that works so for example we gave a neuropsych battery that consisted of dorsolateral prefrontal tests to 3000 people it was a 90 minute battery so it was exhaustive and when we factor analyzed it when there was only about 200 participants we got four factors but then when we factor analyzed it after we had three thousand participants we got two factors and one was one on which almost all the tests loaded and it was undoubtedly fluid intelligence so but it's worse than that you know because you hear about how the prefrontal cortex regulates behavior well here's a problem with that what's the correlation between iq and conscientiousness zero roughly speaking it's probably a little off zero although it might not be and you know that because the dimensions of the big five are roughly orthogonal i showed you at the beginning of this that each trait of the big five traits is correlated with the other trait on an average of about 0.2 now why that is it's probably because of something like um what would you call it's probably a halo effect if you tend to rate yourself as positive on one trait more conscientious more agreeable more emotionally stable you're going to tend to rate yourself as more positive on the other traits so that would artificially inflate their correlation that's one way of looking at it anyways weirdly enough the correlation between conscientiousness and iq is essentially zero now that's a big problem isn't it because it's unconscientious people that seem to be behaviorally dysregulated right they can't stick to a task they they they jump about they're they're not on track they appear impulsive although we don't know how to define impulsive by the way but your heel psychologists use that all the time it's like well if prefrontal ability regulates behavior how come the correlation between intelligence and other forms of executive control are correlated with conscientiousness at zero right zero is a very bad number when you're testing out a hypothesis so and you know if you think about it it has to be that way and the reason it has to be that way is this like so if you're dreaming you're going to just lay there and dream but your eyes are going to move back and forth now you might say why aren't you running around acting out your dreams while you're dreaming and the answer to that is there's a little switch in your head roughly speaking that shuts off your motor apparatus when you're dreaming and so what happens is you can't run around and act out all your dreams because you're paralyzed and sometimes people wake up in that state it's called sleep paralysis they wake up they're sort of half awake and they can't move and then they often hallucinate all sorts of weird things and thinks aliens have come and abducted them and various peculiarities but if you take a cat and you take out that little switch then the cat will run around while it's dreaming until it runs into something which is the problem with running around acting out your dreams so what does that allow one to conclude well if you couldn't abstract away from your behavior you couldn't think right because what thinking means is to represent an alternative world or maybe just a tiny little fraction of the world whatever to represent it abstractly to manipulate it around but not to simultaneously act it out then it wouldn't be abstracting at all it would be fiddling about with the world through trial and error so you have to be able to pull what you think about out of your body so to speak play with it and then implement it back in now it looks maybe like the ability to implement a plan is associated with conscientiousness but we don't understand that that would be industriousness and we don't know a bloody thing about industriousness like it's just a black hole but the idea that it's your ability to think that allows you to regulate your behavior strikes well there's no evidence for it there's no evidence for it smart people are not necessarily better at regulating their behavior so because for you can have a very unconscientious smart person and you i see them in my clinical practice now and then they come and say well i'm really smart and here's the evidence but i'm doing very badly in everything they're underachievers roughly speaking you know so they can't implement their thoughts not in any stable manner so the fact that they're smart you know on average across their life smart people are healthier mentally and physically than people who aren't as smart but the reason for that isn't because their intelligence allows them to regulate their health the reason for that is because their intelligence allows them roughly speaking to succeed so they're higher up in the dominance hierarchy and if you're higher up in the dominance harkey then your life isn't stressful and you don't get sick as often but that doesn't indicate that there's a direct control between your intelligence and your behavioral output there's very little evidence for that well i think there's no evidence for it so that's rather shocking so you know to me that just wiped out a whole a whole substrate of psychological theorizing and it's i'm sure how many of you have come up against the proposition that prefrontal ability was associated with behavioral control yeah yeah well it isn't so you know not any more than i first of all it's not differentiable from iq regardless of what the neuropsychologists say because they don't know anything about psychometrics generally and they don't like iq because if they studied iq then what they'd find is all the things that they're studying are basically variants of iq and that would suck because other people have already figured out iq and then there's the big problem which is well variation in prefrontal ability which is equivalent to variation in iq isn't correlated with behavioral control it's a really big problem so and so i would like to say well what is correlated with behavioral control and then but the problem with that is well i don't know what you mean by behavioral control i don't know how you're going to measure it and if you do measure it the probability that you're going to come up with something like conscientiousness is pretty much 100 so all right let's see yes effect sizes this is from a very important paper by a guy named hemphill called interpreting the magnitudes of correlation coefficients from the american psychologist number 58. what hemphill did was look at a whole he didn't guess it how big an effect size had to be for it to be a big effect size what he did was go into the literature and study a whole bunch of papers and then empirically rank the effect sizes so that would be the standard deviation difference or the correlation or the r squared you can convert those and then decide you know what proportion of papers had which effect size and decide that well you could empirically rank them and then you'd know how big your effect size was and what he found was that um about three percent of social science studies showed a correlation coefficient of 0.5 or above and that's about the correlation between iq and and general life success in relatively complex conditions point three five to point five only about one in four papers to one in ten an hour 0.15 to 0.35 25 to 57 percent of papers and then r of less than 0.15 was about a quarter of papers so what that means is the ability of iq to predict whatever it is that you want to predict with it is way the hell up in the in the rare rare what would you call it well it's up in the stratosphere with regards to effect power okay so what does it mean practically speaking this is from a company called the wonderlic company in the wonderlic wonderlic sells iq tests to businesses now it's actually illegal for businesses to use iq tests in the united states so actually it's illegal to do anything to hire employ employees in the united states as it turns out because you have to use a test you have to use the test that's the most valid and reliable available that doesn't produce any ethnic or gender differences well there's no tests like that so it's illegal it's also so it's illegal to use interviews it's illegal to use letters of reference it's illegal to use ability tests you might be able to use conscientiousness tests because conscientiousness tests do seem to be completely free of not exactly because older people are more conscientious than younger people so that's also a problem so anyways wonderlic it's a good company it makes really it's iq tests are genuine tests but they are iq tests and people do use them in business even though they're not supposed to but so but what they've done over over a long period of using the test is to come up with approximations for different forms of employment opportunities so how smart do you have to be in order to be placed in a given occupation with a reasonable probability of success so we can tell you here so um let's see is that we got it exactly the right place okay so if you have iqs of 116 to 130 that's pretty much you guys although i would suspect there's a fair chunk of you that have an iq of over 130 because 130 makes you 115 makes you 15 130 makes you about 98 percentile 145 makes you 99th percentile 160 makes you 99.9 percentile something else to think about percentiles are strange things because you might say well there's no difference between someone who scores 95th percentile on an iq test and 99th percentile because it's only four percentiles different but that's not four percentages the person who scores 95 is one in 20. the person who scores 99 is 100 the person who scores 99.9 is one in a so thousand you might think well it doesn't matter because as you you know once you get to a certain degree of smart that's smart enough and now that's wrong in fact it's it's probably radically wrong in that the differences between people actually increase as you go up the iq scale so and that's because performance isn't distributed in a normal distribution it's distributed in a pareto distribution such that almost no one does anything and a very small number of people do everything so which is also a very dismal fact okay so anyways if you're in the upper echelons of the of the cognitive distribution so from 116 to 130 you could be an attorney a research analyst an editor an advertising manager a chemist engineer an executive a manager a trait manager trainee a systems analyst or an auditor from 115 to 110 110 to 115 so that's that'd be in the upper half of a high school graduating class roughly speaking upper quarter copywriter accountant manager supervisor sales manager sales man programmer analyst teacher adjuster general manager purchasing agent registered nurse sales account executive 108 203 administrative assistant store manager bookkeeper credit clerk drafter designer lab tester secretary accounting clerk medical debt collection computer operator customer service rep automotive salesman clerk and typist 102 to 100 so that's pretty much right at the mean dispatcher general office dispatcher police patrol officer receptionist cashier general clerical work inside sales clerk meter reader printer teller data entry or an electrical helper for iq from 95 to 98 machinist quality control checker claims clerk driver delivery man security guard unskilled labor maintenance machine operator arc welder mechanic medical dental assistant from 87 to 93 messenger factory production assembler food service worker nurses aid warehouseman custodian janitor material handler and packer and then that's it so you see that things are getting pretty damn dismal for the people who are have an iq of 85 and below so now what's the difference between intellect and openness proper well one difference is that men seem to be higher in intellect the trait and women seem to be higher in openness and openness seems to be associated with verbal intelligence and with imagination and with fantasy and with aesthetic experience and it seems to go along with the fact that women read more fiction than men so men read non-fiction roughly speaking and women read fiction you know it's obviously there's a lot of overlap but fundamentally that seems to be how it distributes maybe that's also partly because women are more agreeable and so they're more interested in human relations and characters and you know that's the central that's the central theme of fiction um people who are high in openness think divergently here we can do a quick little divergent thinking test so why don't we do that take out a piece of paper in a pen and or or you can type on your computer i don't care you can scratch it onto the desk for all i care it's law but get out a piece of paper something you can write on and we'll do this so um i'll only give you a minute since you're all so fast then we only have six minutes left so write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick you have one minute so so so okay that's all the time you get okay so the first question is i'm just going to ask you i'm going to point at you and you can answer how many how many uses did you come up with thirteen five eight you two it's okay eight that's all right seven seven okay did anybody come up with more than thirteen how many fourteen did anybody come up with more than fourteen okay so you two are the most idiationally fluent people in the class and fluency is a matter of the rapidity with which you can generate exemplars from a category so one of the things that we might ask just as much would be how many words can you write that begin with the letter s in a minute and they'll be you wouldn't believe the bloody range of that there'll be people who'll be people who get six and there'll be people who get fifty you know so ideational fluency is actually a pretty decent predictor of creative ability now you know that's not a great test right because it was very short and i do that multiple times with multiple time durations and just different exemplars and some across that but the correlation between aviation fluency and long-term creative achievement is about 0.3 that's pretty major okay so let's hear a use for a brick how about you oh you could draw on the sidewalk with a brick how about you a paperweight how many people got paperweight yes that's a low creative response now why that doesn't mean that all your responses are but it's a technical definition right so here's what makes a response low creative everyone has it now it's a perfectly reasonable response but for it to be creative virtually by definition it has to be a low probability response that actually makes sense so draw on sidewalk is is is is a more low probability response somebody got a weird use for a brick ground into dust and used okay okay all right anybody else have that they ground their brick into dust for something no yes you could kill someone with a brick anybody have that yes low agreeableness low creativity yeah yeah okay so anybody else go to like a peculiar one for a brick yeah yeah anybody else have that okay so you know it's kind of a lousy musical instrument but in a pinch it would work yeah well that's a good one first of all you can kill it and then you can drown it yeah yeah so the way you would score this by the way it's quite straight it's not that straightforward actually first of all you count the number of responses and you get rid of ones that are um repetitive and then you also get usually a couple of people to throw at once that are just like they're neither original nor practical the best responses are original and practical now there's a bit of a judgment call there you know what i mean but if you get a number of people to do the rating you can get pretty decent integrated reliability and so then you score originality and the way you score originality is merely by summing like listing all the responses and then calculating how probable or frequent the responses are and the more infrequent responses you get a higher score for so it's def it's basically a population sample so and those things actually work those those tests just so you know now i'll stop with this this is a this is a a measure that i derived with one of my students when i worked in boston her name was shelly carson and this thing has actually become one of the standard measures of creativity in the creativity literature which is quite fun and it's a creative achievement questionnaire so what i gave you just now was a creativity test it's one of many creativity tests but it wasn't a creative achievement test because you can generate uses for a brick without running out and becoming a brick entrepreneur you know so there's a difference between being able to think divergently and with loose associations and then also being able to put that into practice so you achieve something and so here's some levels of achievement so there's the scientific discovery domain i do not have training or recognized ability in this field i often think about ways that scientific problems could be solved i have won a prize at a science fair or other local competition i've received a scholarship based on my work in science or medicine i've been author or core author of a study published in the scientific journal i've won a national prize i've received a grant my work has been cited by other scientists in national publications okay and then the same thing for say theater film and culinary arts zero is i do not have training or recognized ability and theater and film number seven is my theatrical work has been recognized in the national publication for culinary arts i do not have training or experience and the highest one is my recipes have been published nationally okay so there's 13 different domains and that's the distribution it's not normally distributed so what you see there actually it's not quite right because the the median answers about 66 percent of the respondents to the creative achievement questionnaire have a median score of zero right zero they do not have training or talent in any of the 13 areas and then there's some people who are way out on the right hand distribution because you can imagine that once you have national exposure in one magazine as a writer the probability that you're going to get national exposure again for your second novel starts to go up pretty damn high right and so you get this terrible step down function so that almost everybody aggregates at nothing and then a few people are way out in the distribution and they just get everything and there's actually a law it's called the matthew principle that economists use and it's from a statement in the new testament from matthew and it's a statement where christ says from those who have to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken away and that seems to be how creative resources are distributed in the population and to a large degree that's dependent on intelligence openness and conscientiousness so you can understand why none of that's very popular with people since you're all smart and conscientious though it's going to work out well for you see you on tuesday i'm going to post your midterm marks what we're going to do after that with regards to this strike i don't i can't i don't know yet |
so the first thing I want to show you is this thing called a gon board now the the this was worked out by Francis gton who's actually quite an interesting person you'll you'll if you hear about Francis gton you'll often hear that he was the first person who tried to measure human intelligence but that's actually not true what golden tried to do was measure human Eminence and he thought of eminence as I suppose something like High position in the cultural dominance hierarchy and this was back in Victorian England in the late 1800s and so Eminence would have been intellectual achievement Financial achievement um cultural achievement achievement broadly speaking but really considered within the confines of a dominance hierarchy so at that point in time the English regarded themselves as the prime nation and ethnicity on the planet and then the aristocratic Englishmen regarded themselves as the prime human beings in that Prime country and ethnicity and so it was really an idea that would be more associated with with dominance hierarchy uppermost dominance hierarchy position than anything we would conceptualize as intelligence today and gton got gton was a a polymath he was a genius in many many fields and he got very interested in the idea of measuring human differences and uh he tried to determine whether the differences that he could measure and some of those things were like reaction time and height and and uh um physical fitness and um I can't remember all the other things that he attempted to measure but he wanted to see if any of those things could be used to predict Eminence um turned out that they couldn't partly because Eminence is not the kind of category that you can make into a scient ific category um and partly because his measurement instruments in many ways weren't sensitive enough he didn't make enough measurements and the statistics weren't sufficiently sophisticated but the idea that you could measure Elementary attributes and that you could use them to predict something important was still an important idea and it's one of those examples in science sort of like phenology I mean everyone makes fun of phenology now you know the idea that you could read someone's character by mapping out the protrusions and dips and so forth on the on their skull it sounds ridiculous to Modern years but there was again there was some idea behind it and that was the idea that cortical functions could be localized and that cognitive functions could be differentiated into separate functions we still do that we think of emotions and motivations and personality traits and intelligences even though intelligences is not a very good idea the idea that that you can differentiate um human psychological function and and then that would be related in some way to the underlying neurological and physical architecture that's not a stupid idea so an idea can be very intelligent at one level of analysis and not so intelligent at the other so I would say the problem with the phrenologists was actually a problem of operationalization they had the theory right in some sense but they didn't have the measures right um now one of the things gton came up with was the normal he came up with this thing called a gon board and a gon board demonstrates how a normal distribution is produced now basically what you the normal distribution is a an axiomatic it's an axiom of modern statistics and every system has to have its axioms and the Axiom of normal distribution is basically the idea that around any measurement there's going to be a set there's going to be variations in measurement and those measurements are basically going to be random and then another axum is that extreme outlying measurements are going to be rare and small outlying measurements are going to be more common so you can imagine um if I measured any one of you 100 times with a with a let's say with a tape measure I'm going to get a set of variables that are not always exactly the same and so there'll be an average and then there'll be some deviation around that average and if I looked at 100 measurements that I took of each of of one of you then I would get a normal distribution around that that distribution and that's sort of the fuzziness of the mean now that might be partly because my measurement instrument isn't very accurate it might be partly because at some point when you're being measured for the 50th time you're slouching a little bit or maybe other times you're standing up a bit straighter or maybe I measure you in the morning sometimes and in the evening at other times and you're actually taller in the morning than you are in the evening because you're spine has a chance to decompress at night so maybe that adds half an inch to your height in the morning and so there's there's going to be shifting and movement around the around the central tendency around the average now if I turns out if I measure all of you the same thing's going to happen what we're going to get is an average height which would be the average height of the people in this room and then there's going to be a distribution and basically a normal distribution those of you who are much taller than the average are going to be much fewer than those of you that are close to the average and those of you that are much shorter than the average are going to be there's going to be far fewer of you than there are going to be those of you who are just somewhat smaller than the average now generally the idea of a normal distribution is predicated on the idea that the variation around the average is actually random and that's an important thing because the variation around an average is not always random now psychologists will tell you and and so will most social scientists who use classical statistics that the normal distribution is the norm or maybe they'll say more than that is that it's the standard case that whatever set of variables you measure is going to come out in a normal distribution and that means that you can apply all of the stats that you're going to learn to decompose the world and reconstruct it to your data sets because the data sets will fit the assumptions of the of the um statistics the problem with that is that it's often wrong now I ask you guys to buy the Black Swan and we haven't talked about the Black Swan much yet and I'm not going to test you on it but I would recommend that you that you read it especially if you're interested in Psychology because you got to watch your axioms and the idea that the normal distribution might not always be correct and certainly might not be a correct description of your data is a fundamentally important idea because if it's wrong if your data isn't normally distributed then the phenomena that you're looking at isn't what you think it is and the statistics that you're going to use aren't going to work now this came as quite a puzzle to me at one point because it turned out that when we when we produced The Creative achievement questionnaire um you know and you'd think I would have known better by this time because it was it wasn't that long ago it was like 15 years ago the data never came back normally distributed it came back distributed in a in a what they call a Paro distribution which is everyone Stacks up on the left hand side and the the curve drifts off to the right and that's one of those curves where almost everyone has zero or one and a small minority of people have very high scores now when you get a Pito distribution there's something going on that's not random and that doesn't mean you can ignore it now one of the things that psychologists will do sometimes if they get a distribution that's not random is they'll do a mathematical transformation like a logarithmic transformation to pull in the outliers and to try to make the data fit the normal distribution again assuming that there's some kind of measurement error or that the scale's got a logarithmic function um it isn't always obvious that that's a useful and appropriate thing to do because it's the case in many situations where the extremeness of the distribution is actually an accurate representation of of the way that that phenomena behaves in nature now I want to show you how a normal distribution works Works um have any have you ever have any of you ever seen a demonstration of why a normal distribution is normal and why it takes the shape it takes has anybody ever seen that no it's weird e because you'd think that given its unbelievable importance especially in Psychology where everything we do is measured and has an average and a standard deviation that there'd be some investigation into why we make that presupposition there's a great book one book I would recommend for those of you who might be interested in psychology as a career there's a book called a history of statistical thinking now you'd think Jesus if there's not anything more boring than statistics it's got to be the history of Statistics but it turns out that that's really wrong I mean the history of Statistics is actually the history of the social sciences and not only of the social sciences because statistics became not statistics was actually initially um invented by cosmologists who were measuring planetary position and then the statistical processes that have been used to underpin modern science have been tossed back and forth weirdly enough between social scientists and physicists over about the last 200 years because the physicists ended up having to describe the world from a statistical perspective right because if you go down into the realm of the atomic and subatomic particles what you find is that things behave statistically down there they don't behave deterministically and it's the same at the level of the of the human scale you know we behave statistically not deterministically so you know sometimes you hear this old idea that that psychology has physics Envy or something like that but it turned out that for much of the history of the development of statistical ideas physics had psychology Envy which I think is quite funny so anyways if you look at this book histo history of statistical thinking you can see how the idea that populations could have behavior and that populations could be measured and that the idea that states like political States could be measured and that human behavior could be measured and I didn't realize until I wrote I read this book that um how revolutionary the idea of Statistics actually was because of course it's part of the idea of measurement so I had this very interesting client at one point he was an old guy and he'd been a psychologist and a financier and a statistician and he was in love with mathematics you know he was one of these guys who who for whom mathematical um equations had this immediate glimmer of Beauty and he made this very interesting little gold sculpture that I have up at my office that that's a representation of what people claim to be the most perfect mathematical equation ever constructed and he so he made this little Gadget it's like a religious icon almost and and that's really what he thought of it and um uh I'm afraid foolishly enough that I can't tell you the name of the equation some of you might know it it it relates i e and Pi is there anybody in here who yes what is that e to the I pi yes and what is that equation okay and do you do do you know why it's such a remarkable equation says e in one equation right so he thought that that in some sense this equation summed up the magnificence of the mathematical universe and so was so funny because he also made little pins that people could wear of this of this equation that were also made out of gold and there was another person in our apartment at that point and uh I was wearing this pen around and she said oh well she told me what the equation was she pointed at that and she got all excited because it was this perfect equation that related all these fundamental constants to one and zero so anyways he taught me a lot of this while he was a client of mine he was very much obsessed with ma mathematical ideas he couldn't get them out of his head and it was a true Obsession and a useful one but he had he taught me a lot of things about statistics that I just never knew at all and uh one of them was the Pito distribution which which just it just staggered me that I didn't know it I only learned this stuff about five or six years ago and it just made me feel like a complete because I'd you know gone through me immen immense amount of psychological training and I was measuring things like prefrontal ability and intelligence and personality and creativity and then in the creativity measurement I stumbled into these Pito distributions I thought they were bloody mistake I didn't know what the hell they were you know and I've also found economists who didn't know about the Pito distribution which is pretty bizarre thing like it really is a strange thing so anyways one of the things he showed me is how the normal distribution comes about and uh I had a student who did a PhD thesis on gton so I knew something about gton at this point he was he was doing a part of his thesis on the history of the measurement of intelligence and uh gton was a key figure in the establishment of that sort of measurement so um but this is one of the things gton invented so let's take a look at it [Music] here okay so that's your basic rock and roll go gon board apparently so let me show you a picture of of a gon board so you get a better sense of exactly what it is doing so there's a good one right there uh let's see if we can make that a little bigger Yeah so basically all that happens with a gon board is that you have a you have a bunch of pegs on a board it's board is horizontal and you drop balls down at marbles or whatever it is and the marbles come at in one place and then they Bounce Down the pins and they distribute themselves in a normal distribution now the reason they do that is because there are far more ways of getting down the middle than there are of getting to either side now see see because to get to the only to the right side say the ball has to go right right right right right right right right and then fall in the little cup and then on the left it has to do exactly the same thing there's only one way it can do that right right but to get into the middle it can go left right left right left right right left Etc there's a there's a far greater number of Pathways for the ball to go from the middle down to the middle than there is for the ball to go to the sides and so all that means fundamentally is that the probability that a given ball is going to land in the middle or near the middle is much higher than the probability that a ball is going to land in the extremes and so it's just a description of how random processes lay themselves out around a mean okay so that's a normal distribution now if you have normal distribution one and you have normal distribution two you can overlap them right and if they overlap perfectly the mean and the standard deviation are the same then there's nothing different about them you know because one thing you want to ask is well are how do you know if two means are different and the answer is you don't know unless you know what the means are measuring and you don't know what the means are measuring unless you know the variation of the measurement and so you have to know the mean and the standard deviation so the standard deviation is like the width of the mean in some sense and all statistics do generally speaking is take one normal distribution and another and slap them on top of each other and then measure how far apart they are how much they overlap and correct that for the sample size and then you can tell if the two distributions are different significantly different so what you would do is you'd run a whole bunch of normal distribution processes by chance and you're going to get a distribution of distributions in some sense and then you can tell what the probability is that the normal distribution that you drew for group a is the same as the normal distribution that you drew for Group B and that's all there is basically to to Standard Group comparison statistics and that's how we decide when we have a significant effect if there's a significant difference between two groups or better still if you randomly assign people to two groups and then you do an experimental manipulation and then you measure the outcome the means then you can test to see whether your experimental manipulation produced an effect that would be greater than chance and then you infer that well the there's a low probability one in 20 that you would you would um produce that effect if you were just running random simulations and therefore you can say with some certainty that there's an actual causal effect that's with an experimental model now you know why do you think all right let's say let me give you a conundrum so I used to study people who were sons of male alcoholics okay now there was a reason for that we didn't have women why might that be we didn't use women why confounding why why would they be confounding apart from the fact that they're women that's supposed to be a joke you know Jesus it's a better joke than that okay well it could be that there's some sort of like a emotional cing mechanism that differ between the way that men deal with father daughter relationship is different than father okay so that that's a POS that's not a bad answer but it's it's not the answer that was appropriate for our research and I'll tell you why because you couldn't infer it from the question we were interested in what factors made alcoholism hereditary because it does seem to have a strong hereditary component and what we basically concluded after doing a tremendous amount of research was that people who are prone to alcoholism at least one type of person who's prone to one type of alcoholism got a very very powerful stimulant effect from the alcohol during the time that their blood alcohol level was ascending in the 10 or 15 minutes after they took a drink especially if they took a large drink fast or multiple large drinks fast you can probably tell by the way if you're one of these people if you want to go do this in the bar the next time you go go on an empty stomach take your pulse write it down drink three or four shots fast wait 10 minutes take your pulse again if it's gone up 10 or 15 beats a minute look out because that means alcohol is working as a psychom motor stimulant for you and we found that for many of these people that was an opiate effect what seemed to happen was that when they drank alcohol fast they produced probably beta Endor although we were never sure we it can be blocked with an El treone which is an opiate antagonist anyways the other characteristic of that pattern of of of alcohol consumption is that the the real kick only occurs when you're on the ascending limb of the blood alcohol curve so you know first of all your blood alcohol goes up and then it goes down and generally when it goes down it's not pleasant that's when you start to feel hung over and a hangover is actually alcohol withdrawal by by the way so it's like heroin withdrawal except it's alcohol withdrawal and it's generally not pleasant for people so they usually sleep through it or it puts them to sleep but if you're one of these people who get a real kick on the ascending limb of the blood alcohol curve then you can just keep pounding back the alcohol and it'll keep hitting you and keep you in that position where you're you know on the on the ascending part of the blood alcohol curve and you can probably tell if you're one of these people if you can't stop once you get started you know so if it's like you have four drinks quick and it's like man you're gone until the alcohol runs out or until it's 400 in the morning or till you spent all your money or you've been at the last bar in town or that you're sitting on your friend's bed after everybody's gone home from the party and you're still drinking you might suspect that you're one of those people and if you are one of those people well then you should watch the hell out because um alcohol is a vicious drug and it it gets people in its grasp hard and it's hard for them to escape once they do people also drink to to quell anxiety so now the problem because we were looking at the genetics of alcoholism it wasn't easy to study offspring of alcoholic mothers and the reason for that is they might have consumed alcohol during pregnancy in which case and that's a bad idea especially there's certain key times in pregnancy where even a few drinks are not good and that's turns out if I remember correctly that turns out to be the times when the fetus is producing the bulk of its hippoc cample tissue and so anyway so if it turned out that daughters or sons of female alcoholics were markedly different from the general population in some manner we wouldn't be able to tell if that was a consequence of alcohol consumption during pregnancy or if it was it was a genetic reflection so what we wanted to do was study sons of male alcoholics and so their mothers actually couldn't be alcoholic and we wanted their fathers the best subjects had an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather and at least one or more alcoholic first or second degree male relatives and they couldn't be alcoholic and they had to be young so because obviously if they were 40 and they still weren't alcoholic then they probably weren't going to be alcoholic so we wanted to catch them you know between say Well it had to be 18 which was it was in Quebec that was even a little late probably but you know that's best we could do from an ethical perspective so we used to bring these guys into the lab and get them quite drunk um the National Institute of alcoholism and alcohol abuse pretty much put a stop to that research because we used to bring them in and you know we'd get their blood alcohol level up to 0.12 or 0.10 it had to be pretty high actually looked like the real physiological effects seemed to kick in when uh when people hit legal intoxication so you don't really get the opiate effect till you pop yourself up about 008 which was the legal limit for driving at that point um so we used to get some of these guys were pretty big they'd come in there maybe 230 lb guys and to get them up to you know 0.1 or02 you had or 0.12 you had to give them quite a bit quite a whack of alcohol and then what we usually do is we let them sober up till 06 about that and then we'd send them home in a cab well when the niaa got all ethical on the whole situation they wouldn't let us send them home until they hit 002 was like well if you're 240 lb and we've just nailed you with alcohol so that your blood alcohol level hit 0.12 you're going to be sitting in our bloody lab bored to death feeling horrible for like 6 hours or 7 hours and You' be pretty damn irritated about it it's like wasn't obvious how we were supposed to keep the people there it's like well can I leave no I'm not paying you if you leave it's like that's going to produce real positive outcomes with like drunk people in the lab that's going to work really well of course then they'd never come back either because it was such a bloody awful experience so I stopped doing that research partly because because it became impossible anyways we did find a lot we found out that there was this one particular pattern of of alcohol abuse that seemed to be hereditary so and we couldn't study it women anyway so now there was a problem with this line of research and the problem was well alcoholism comes along with other problems so this was correlational research right we' take we we we' pick a group of people and match them the sons of male alcoholics we'd match them with people who weren't sons of male alcoholics so they were still Sons they were still the same age but they're fathers who weren't alcoholic now here's the problem what should we match them on age gender well you can't match them on number of drinks obviously because you want the people who are alcoholic in one group not to be you don't want alcohol I in the second group so do you match them on number of drinks well if you don't then you don't know if the effect that you're measuring is a consequence of the genetic difference or on the number of drinks per week or drinks per occasion that the people had right that would be a confounding variable if you match them for antisocial personality or anti person antisocial personality symptoms because lots of people who are alcoholic have they tilt towards the antisocial side of the spectrum so do you control for that well you don't know because you don't know if antisocial personality is part of alcoholism like it's part of the same underlying genetic problem or if it's a secondary manifestation or if it's a consequence of drinking you don't know any of that do you match them on depressive symptoms do you match them on schooling do you match them on education do you match them on personality do you match them on other forms of Psychopathology do you match them on what they drink do you match them on how many drinks per occasion they drink when they drink Etc well the answer to that is you don't know and so what that means is there's actually an infinite number of potential covariants because you don't know what differences there are between the two groups are the differences that are relevant to the question at hand now that's actually one of the big problems with psychiatric research in fact it might be a problem with psychiatric research that's so serious that it cannot be solved you know so if you take kids who are attention deficit disorder say which is a horrible diagnostic criteria and you match them with kids who aren't and then you look to see what the what makes the ADHD kids different what do you match them on well you don't know and that is so usually what happens is the people who do psychiatric research finesse this a bit they match them on the important variables age physical health maybe education but the PO the problem is you you actually have no idea what the important variables are and there are an unlimited number of them and so that's actually why random assignation to groups is so important now if I take all of you and I say well um let's look at the effects of alcohol so what I would do is I'd say you'd come towards me and I'd do a g and board sorting you go to the left you go to the right you go to the left you go to the right this is non-biased separation of the two populations and then maybe I'd give one group 2 ounces of alcohol in water and the other or in Coke say and in the other group I'd put a few drops of alcohol on the top of a glass of Coke so it smelled like alcohol and tasted like alcohol when you had your first drink and then I put you through a whole battery of neuropsychological and personality tests which I did by the way to a bunch of people when I think it was the first publication I had back in about 85 or something like that um random assignation gets rid of the necessity for the infinite number of covariant right because you're all different in a whole bunch of important ways but we could assume as long as I threw half of you in this group randomly and half of you in that group randomly that all your various idiosyncrasies no matter how many there are would cancel out and that's the massive advantage to rad mass sination now one of the things you're going to notice when you go through psychology especially if you do psychopath logical work is that the studies are almost always correlational and they do they'll do they Co they'll control for Relevant covariants that's what it'll say in the paper but the problem is you don't bloody well know what the Rand the relevant covariants are if you did you'd already understand the condition you wouldn't have to do the damn research so you can make a pretty strong case that all psychiatric research that is studying psychopathological groups compared to at control it's all not interpretable and it turns out in that kind of research that who should who who the control should be is the killer cuz you don't know picking the the psychopathological population is easy you just pick them according to whatever diagnostic checklist you happen to use but when you figure out who to control them against it's like siblings I mean what do you what do you do what do you how do you match a population the answer is you can't so anyways the reason that we didn't include women was because of the of the um un the uncontrollable potential con confounding effects and the only way that you can do that is to assign randomly and that's an important thing to remember it's why experimental designs are way more powerful than correlational designs and the problem is frequently in Psychology what you see are correlational designs now I think if you're careful and you dig around and and you know you're obsessively careful you can extract information out of correlational studies but it's no it's no simple thing to do you see this problem come up too when you hear about studies on diet you know it's like well you should eat a lowfat diet or you should eat a high fat diet or usually what happens is they track people across time who hypothetically have been having one diet or the other but the problem is you don't know what the hell else makes those people different and the problem with that is there is an infinite number of potential things that make them different and that's a big problem the probability that you've picked the one thing that makes people who have a high fat diet different from other people and that it happens to be that they have a high fat diet and that's the only difference it's like yeah no not not at all definitely not so okay so anyways random assignation gets rid of the problem of the infinite number of covariants and that's worth knowing and then the other thing that we've just figured out is that you know if you make a measurement you're going to get a distribution around the measurement and if you do that in two groups you can check out the overlap between the two groups groups and you can determine what the probability is that that overlap is there as a consequence of chance now you might say why not set your probability level to like one in 10,000 so you could be absolutely damn sure that the two groups don't overlap you know so why wouldn't you do that why wouldn't you set P equals 00001 instead of P equal 005 so that would be 1 in a th instead of 1 in 20 yes you guys conclude that know that that's when is that's exactly right so you're basically damned if you do and damned if you don't which is a very important thing to remember about life because generally when you make a choice of any sort there's error and risk on both sides of the choice right it's really really useful to remember that because people always ask act like their current situation is risk-free which is never ever the case yeah so people we trying to figure out well how do we balance the risk of finding something that doesn't exist against the risk of not finding something that exists and the reason it's one in 20 and why is that it's because someone made that guess 40 years ago or 50 years ago and it's just stuck there's no reason and so the other thing to notice is that you want to be careful about the P equals 05 phenomena because one of the things you'll see is that people treat any experimental result they get like it's significant if the probability is 005 or less and it's not if it's 006 or greater and that's not not smart because the cut off is the cut off is arbitrary you need to know three things to interpret an experimental result it's like you it's like you can't calculate the area of a triangle without knowing three things I think it's three things anyways um you need to know the number of people in the study you need to know the size of the effect so that would be the relationship between two or more variables that you're interested in looking at and then you need to know the probability that you would find that effect size among a population of that size by chance and you cannot interpret one of those numbers without the other two it's not possible and now psychologists the stat statisticians among psychologists who have a clue have been jumping up and down for 50 years trying to get psychologists to report all three of those every time they report anything effect size which seems logical right the effect size is the difference between the two means divided by the standard deviation of the entire of of the of the pool Group Well you need both of those because it's the standard deviation that tells you how damn big the me the numbers are because what does 70 mean well it doesn't mean anything 70 it's like if I just came out here and said that you I could say 70 and 40 are those different well what the hell does that mean it doesn't mean anything you need to know what the units are and the distribution gives you the units and so once you know the units are you can say well here's how big the difference is between these two groups and here's the probability that that would be acquired by chance and so that's how confident you could be that it's an actual difference and so you want to always report effect sizes and most of you are going to be taught to look at the damn probability and that's stupid it's like when you want to know how how tall how much difference there is in height between two people you want to know how much difference there is in height you also might want to know to what degree that's there because of chance but it's the effect size that's the critical variable now you can't understand the effect size without understanding how many subjects were in the experiment and also the probability that you would acquire that by chance so you want to keep that in mind and when you're reading scientific papers you want to be looking at the effect size how large an effect size is this now I all the effect sizes are you can transform one into another so you have correlation coefficients which go up to one you have the square of the correlation coefficient which is the amount of variance that's accounted for and that also goes up to one and you have your basic correlation your basic correlation coefficients or sorry your your standard deviation effect sizes which is mean one minus mean2 over the standard deviation of the entire group and so large effect sizes in Psychology I've talked to you about this before our correlation coefficients of about 0.5 or above or R squar of 25% of the variance which is. 5^ squar or um uh mean 1 minus mean 2 of say half a standard deviation or greater and you can derive the conclusion that those are relatively large effect sizes by looking at the distribution of the effect sizes across the published literature and most of you will be told estimates for effect sizes that are actually way too large because those were guesses too how big's a large effect size well some statistician guessed 50 years ago so it's just like the 05 rule it's arbitrary it doesn't mean it's stupid but it's arbitrary and you don't want to get stuck on it like it's like it's some sort of fact okay so now let's look at um parito distributions I do okay the first thing you're going to see about a Pito distribution is it's definitely not normal now one of the things that I mentioned you before but I want to hammer this home because it's it's unbelievably important for determining how to understand the way the world lays itself out and how to interpret the way people distribute themselves in terms of their success across time now this is a this is a fundamental law and I I'll show you how it works okay so the law is most of you get nothing and a few of you get everything okay so that's the law now you might say well that's because of you might attribute that to various things so for example if you're a left Winger you attribute to it to the inequities of the social structure and if you're a right-winger you basically attribute to the fact that well most people are you know not that good at anything so it's no wonder they end up with nothing so they're not very smart and they're not very hardworking so they don't get very much of whatever it is that they're after okay so we'll take that apart a little bit but before we do that I want to show you an animation now you got to watch this one carefully oh yes that figes okay yeah this thing moves very very quickly so we'll go back to the beginning and all right now so here's the deal each of you gets $10 okay so that's a non-random starting place right you're all starting in the same place that's definitely not random okay now here here's how you play this game you flip a coin you turn to your partner and you flip a coin and if uh it both comes up heads then you win and they lose and if it comes up tails and heads then you lose and they win and if the winner gets a dollar from the loser okay and so you can imagine that this is a simulation so basically it's like your Apes trading bananas and if you if you if you uh give away a banana then you're done with the banana so one of you will walk away with 11 and one of you will walk away with nine and then you turn to someone else you just wander around the room and randomly trade okay so what happens well the first thing that happens is this okay so we started the graph with everyone at 10 now you've done a bunch of Trades um we don't know how many trades you've done but a fair number and so what happens what you see happening is some winners are starting to emerge right on the right hand side those are the people who won every single trade maybe they've traded 10 times so now they have 20 and then there's the people on the other side who've lost nine out of the last trades now what what happens when you lose nine what what's the big problem that you have what happens you only have one dollar left so what happens if you lose another trade that's right you hit zero and zero is not a number like any other another number zero is like the black hole of numbers you fall into the zero hole and that's it you're not in the game anymore and poverty is like that it's like that it's a kind of a trap it's very very difficult to get out of so and it seems to be in part because once you fall off the charts enough a bunch of things start conspiring against you so for example um you don't have enough money to buy a large amount of decent food cheaply so you have to buy expensive junk food in the short term so that might be one possibility or let's say you end up on the street well you can't even get a job then because you don't have an address and you can't get Social Security because you don't have an address and like things start to conspire against you very badly or maybe you're unemployed and you've been unemployed for a year and a half because it's been a prolonged downturn in the economy well if you're 17 who the hell cares but if you're 50 that might be that for you right you've hit zero you've been out of the market for 18 months nobody's going to hire you and so you've hit zero and the problem is we don't know what the hell to do when people hit zero it's difficult to pry them out of zero and throw them back in the game now you could say well what if you just rearm them with money and that would actually work if the game was truly random but it isn't obvious that the game is truly random and that's where things get weird Okay so anyways by this point in the game there's some winners piling up and there's some losers piling up what what's the difference between the people who have 19 and the people who have one well we know the one people they're going to be wiped out they got a 50% chance of hitting zero what about the 19 people uh uh they've got a much better chance of not hitting zero because they they' have to fail a l more right exactly so they're in this place where they're basically sitting pretty they can failed nine times and that just puts them back to where they were to begin with so okay so we keep playing well so you see what's happening is the with repeated random play the normal distribution turns into a pital distribution and most of the population Stacks up at zero okay this old guy I told you about he had a theory of social structure that was predicated at on this there's a bit of a Marxist twist to it he thought that what happened is that so if you ran a game long enough most people will stack up at zero and a few people have everything okay so let's say now you're down at zero what's your best strategy well you might say well we should reset the game right because if you're at zero and it's basically a random game if you wipe out that game and you put a another one in place there's some probability that when the next game starts playing you're not going to end up at zero and that was his theory of revolutions fundamentally once the once the game had played itself out until resources were maximally distributed it didn't cost the people at the bottom anything to be revolutionaries because they had already hit zero and so one of his hypothesis was that one of the things that political and economic systems have to do they have to figure out how to do is to make sure that the people who end up on the zero side of the distribution don't have nothing to lose because if you have nothing to lose God only knows what you're going to do next now it's a big problem because merely shoveling money down there is not likely to change the outcome very much yes yes I was about to say that sounds a little bit like the gambling policy though like if you just once you reset the game your probability of ending up at zero is exactly the same the first time yeah but the the probability that any given person will end up at zero is the same but the probability that you'll end up the same isn't because at the beginning of the game you have just as much probability of moving up to the top as you do of moving down to the bottom once you're at zero though you don't get to play anymore so at zero your probability of moving up is zero whereas at the beginning your probability of moving up is 50% so when the gambler's fallacy is merely that if you keep dumping good money after bad you'll win it back you know because let's say you've lost 10 times in a row you think well I've lost 10 times in a row it's 50/50 I must have a virtually 100% chance of winning the next time it's like well no you don't because probability doesn't have any memory that's the gamblers fousy so all right now one of the things we might ask ourself is this is something that I that I discussed with him in length because he really thought of this as a random process and you know because he he thought here it's very very interesting and very complicated it's like we know for example that the IQ distribution in this room is approximately normal and so we could assume that it's a consequence of random factors okay so what what do we mean random factors well there have been random genetic things going on in your lineage since life began and here you are you know you're smarter than him perhaps why well we're going to eliminate the environmental effects for now just forget about them we're going to assume that everybody's been raised in an environment where they had enough to eat and where they have enough resources um informational resources so that their intellect can capitalize so none of you people have been starved for information or food so I would say in many ways the important variation in the environment has already been ironed out for most of you not completely okay so it's random occurrences in the past in the evolutionary history that's put you wherever the hell you are in the IQ distribution so you're the Ben beneficiary of random forces so he thought of the problem as being random all the way down to the bottom now the problem I had with that is wait a second we have evidence that some things predict where you're going to end up in the distribution and so what are those things well IQ conscientiousness emotional stability openness if it's a creative product and then some other smattering of Personality features depending on the particular domain so for example if you want to be a salesperson some extroversion is you is useful if you want to be a manager it tends to be better if you're disagreeable to some degree rather than if you're agreeable if you want to be a nurse or a caretaker then agreeableness is useful but the big performance predictors across time are intelligence and conscientiousness now if the damn game is random which the statistics seem to indicate or at least that you can model it using processes that model random processes why in the world do IQ and conscientiousness we'll just stick with those two for now why in the world do they predict success so does anybody have any ideas about that let's start with IQ I mean for example if you apply your IQ to the stock market if I distribute you all a bunch of money and I and I measured your IQ and I said okay put together a portfolio you get to pick 30 stocks you can't sell them for a year you get to sell them at the end of the year um what's the probability that the high IQ people would pick a better set of stocks than the low IQ people the answer to that as far as I can tell is zero it's not it's not going to because you can't pick stocks as it turns out all the information is already eaten up so I and and the stock market's an interesting analogy of the environment right you know what I mean because the stock market is basically an index of the continually transforming human economic and social environment it's basically random you can't predict the damn thing even if you're smart so why is it that smart people win across time and then again why is it that hardworking people win across time if we imagine each Peg on the gon board as like a choice point in life then I think the people with a higher IQ are more likely to choose the choice point that will lead them you know no but that's only a restatement of what I just said it's not a causal account you're basically saying that the high IQ people make better choices yeah but that's if it's a random environment how can they I'm thinking instead of money we can view it as opportunities and genetics which make somebody adoptable in multiple environments and each coin flip as each subsequent generation of that lineage so that there is an increase like the more good adaptable genetics emotional stability and situational wealth you have the more likely your next generation has you know like they have to lose a lot more to get to the zero okay so what what about a given individual though forget about forget about it playing across time and that's also a weird thing e because some of the single- celled organisms that you that were your ancestors 3 billion years ago are still single celled organisms whereas here you are you you know same environment roughly speaking so there's this tremendous branching of possibility across time and you might say well IQ is adaptive which is a terrible word word adaptive it's like yeah okay so how do you account for all the single- celled organisms they're just not that bright but there they are there's there's more of them by weight than there are of us people by weight so I puzzled this out a bunch of different ways and you can you can think about this and see what you think I mean the first thing that seems to me to be the case is that you don't have to play one game you know like imagine that you're sitting around with your friends and there are 50 board games going on and you can keep a hand in in each of them well then at some point in one of the board games you're going to start to amass some success right just by chance and if you're playing 50 board games and 25 of them after playing for some time you're going to be at the top of the you know you're going to be moving towards the top 50% rather than the botom we might say Okay Play 50 games play 20 turns throw away the ones that you're doing the worst it the 5% that you're doing the worst it and then just keep doing that until you end up with the one game that you win and maybe you can do that better if you have high IQ CU you're faster so maybe you all you can all that happens is that if you're smart is that you can play many games faster and as a consequence of that you can choose the ones that you seem to be winning and stick with those and then maybe what happens with conscientiousness is that you actually stick to them so that means that you actually don't have to predict the future in order to master it it means that you have to simulate multiple futures keep your options open and sort of play dynamically as the environment unfolds so now it might be more complicated than that because it's also possible that in some environments at least for local periods of time the the game is actually not random you know so it's it's funny like do you think is Monopoly random what do you think you've all who everybody here has played Monopoly I presume right is there anybody who hasn't okay so what do what do you think do the smart people win monopoly more often I think it's the people that ahe you do you think so you would say it's the conscientious people that win more often what each move will be to yeah well it's pretty clear that you can you can lose stupidly in Monopoly right although I'm not sure if you can win intelligently you know you can avoid obviously bad choices like one choice would be don't buy any property and just hold on to your money that seems to be a losing strategy right so that'll wipe you out so maybe another thing that smart people can do is that they don't do things that are self-evidently that that make it certain that you'll lose it might be something like that so all right so one of the things we might ask ourselves too is given that IQ and and conscientiousness do predict success how much success do they predict across time and the answer to that that is they predict a substantial amount if you combine IQ and personality I'll show you the equations these were formulated in the 1990s so we're going to look at this here so um let me walk you through it a bit so this is a spreadsheet I put together quite a long time ago get this a little bigger so can see it all right so here's wh here's the elements of the of the equation so you need to know first element in the equation how many people so we're going to say well how powerfully can you predict the performance outcome of people across time and the the the value we're going to use is dollar value and dollars are basically they're sort of like a they're obviously they're the universal currency because you can trade money in for virtually anything so we use dollars as our standard of value um the first question might be well how many people do you want to predict for so let's say we're going to take 10 so we put that in this part of the equation here 10 people then you might say well over what period of time do you want to calculate their success and one decent answer is five years because people seem to stay in the same job position or career position for about 5 years Al although that's shortening okay so that's another thing that you guys should keep in mind you're probably not going to be in the same position in your life for more than about 5 years at a time and so you have to plan and plot for dynamic transformations in your career and you have to do that in a way that um that that works to your advantage which partly means you have to keep op options open and you have to be able to say no so okay the next thing you might ask yourself is well how high a predictor what's the r for your predictor what's the correlation coefficient and we put together a neuropsychological battery um I published the results of this with a with a with a someone named Dan Daniel Higgins quite a long time ago we used neuros pychological battery looking at dorsal lateral prefrontal ability which we thought of as something potentially separate from fluid intelligence which proba but which probably just turned out to be quite a good measure of fluid intelligence and we also used conscientiousness and we found that when we validated that in a we we we validated it in a factory and and we looked at the performance of the administrators and managers in the factory because they had relatively complex jobs and we had access to seven years of their performance records which someone else had gathered independently of us and what we found was that for those people who had performance records that were more than 4 years old we could predict their performance at about 0.59 about about 6 tremendously powerful prediction now one of the things we found was that the degree to which our predictions were accurate increased with the increase in the number of years of performance data we have so for example if I want to predict how you do next year and I get a performance in you you enter a new job and I get a performance index after your first year I'm not going to be able to predict that very well well from your intelligence and your conscientiousness because the measure of your performance actually won't be very good because it turns out that you can't even figure out how well someone is performing in a job until about 3 years so it turns out that if you take a complex job on you get better and better at it over 3 years if you're going to get better and better at it and so we can't tell how well you're doing until about that period of time so that's another thing that's useful to know by the way when you guys go off to find your next complex role in life you you can't really expect to be good at what you're going to do until about 3 years after about 4 years additional experience doesn't seem to matter so that's also worth knowing so you're going to feel like a bloody for the first bit of your new job and that's because you are but you you if you keep at it you'll acrw um experience and and and expertise quite rapidly over a threee period and that's probably the right amount of time over which to evaluate your performance cuz you need know that right should you be freaking out if after 6 months you're not doing a good job well you got to see how you're doing compared to your peers hopefully you're not doing a worse job than them but if it's a complex job it's going to take you a long time to master it so okay so anyways our predictor was 0.59 which we're pretty damn thrilled about and we comparing that we're going to compare that to a a comparison predictor of zero for now zero Is Random so if I was going to predict your trajectory trory through life let's say I want to predict your industrial productivity I'll take 10 of you I'm going to I'm going to predict your industrial productivity over the next five years that's that'll be the goal um or we can do this we'll do this a slightly different way um let's see so that's the selection ratio the last one is the selection ratio so let's say um I wanted to select you guys for a position that a well let's say you're going to be managers in a in a in a relatively complex corporate organization there's about 10 of you or something like that in here now maybe let's say 100 say I'm going to pick 10 of you that means my selection ratio is right there it's one it's it's 1 in 10 that you can transform that into a standard score of 1.76 now it's important to know how many people you get to choose from because if you're going to hire one person and you only have one applicant there's not a lot of sense doing any selection because you only have one applicant so I don't care how much you know about that person it's not going to be helpful if you have to hire them but in this situation we're going to assume that I can screen all 100 of you and only recommend 10 okay so we're going to assume you have to put in a variable for job complexity because the relationship between intelligence and conscientiousness increases the relationship between intelligence conscientiousness and predictive power increases as the job becomes more complicated which is exactly what you'd expect right so if you can do a job by rot all that IQ and conscientiousness will predict is how fast you can learn it but if it's a dynamic job where you have to make decisions on a Non-Stop basis then IQ and conscientiousness are going to predict your performance over the long run so we're going to assume that you're in a complex job we're going to assume that you have an annual salary of $75,000 so then the question is armed with that knowledge how much money would the company that's using my products obtain by using the selection compared to with if they just pick 10 of you randomly and the answer is right there in five years they would have made $4 million more than they would have if they would have just picked randomly and that would be a productivity increase of 104% so there that's graphed here so with random selection 50% of the people you hire are going to be above average and 50% are going to be below and using a good psychometric battery you can get that to about 8020 and the consequence of that is $4 million in increased productivity so now we're going to turn that into one person so over five years if you use selection processes properly you make $400,000 more by hiring one better person right it's $40,000 it's what is that it's $100,000 a year it's actually more than you're paying them in salary and now the reason for that there's a bunch of reasons the first reason is is that there are tremendous amounts there's tremendous differences in individual productivity now one of the things that's weird about these formulas is this formula is predicated on the idea that productivity is actually normally distributed but actually productivity is pedo distributed so what that means is that the basic consequence of using this sort of prediction is probably higher than this formula indicates now there's a variety of reasons to know this one is obviously the Practical idea the Practical idea is of what use is it knowing something about the people that you're going to hire and the answer or work with and the answer to that is it depends on what you know but if the things that you know are valid and they include personality and intelligence it's not only valuable to know it it's virtually vital because the success of your Enterprise will depend on the people that you hire and associate with the second thing is I think that knowing this should change the way that you look at the world if you understand that the outcomes in life are distributed on a pedo distribution and that there are inbuilt temperamental factors that play an important role role in determining that one of the problems that you have before you as modern people is what the hell do you do about that from a conceptual social political and economic perspective because nobody who's currently considering how societies are structured pays any attention to this sort of thing they don't assume that there are differences between people with regards to their life outcome chances not of this sort of magnitude and so none of the social policies that we have in place reflect any of this and so I would say like our psychometrics are 21st century and our political and economic theories are basically 17th century and it's not a good thing and you guys are going to suffer for this or benefit from it because as Society becomes more technological and as it transforms more and more rapidly the degree to which the Pito distribution is going to kick in is going to increase now you already see that that's why the the separation between rich and poor in industrialized countries is becoming increasingly severe now that's Modified by some degree to the fact by the fact that the middle class worldwide is growing like mad and so that's a really good thing but still the long-term play is the Pito distribution and it's partly because an intelligent person is one thing but an intelligent person with infinite computational power that's a completely different thing and that's where we're headed so I don't know exactly what to make of all this sort of thing politically but I know that to the degree that we ignore it we're going to have very unhappy and and unstable societies so we'll see you Thursday on that happy note we'll see you Thursday |
we come to the end of the year so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the whole course today I guess and try to sum up what might be most useful to remember about it and when we started at the beginning I made it the case to you that people have been studying personality and its Transformations for a very long period of time and that the earliest forms of knowledge that we have about what people are like and how they change come to us from stories and from very very old stories and those stories represent how people act in the world fundamentally rather than what the world is made of and the fact that people are confused about that is part of the reason that there's still tremendous confusion about the proper relationship between science and religion or science and ethics almost all of the forms of information transfer that we regard as engaging our narrative in their format we love stories and the reason for that is that stories tell us how what people are like and how they behave and they present the world as a place in which people behave and so the stories help us understand how people behave but they also help us understand how people must and should behave given that they have a certain nature and that they have to organize their behavior with other people and so that puts a set of very serious constraints on how it is that people can exist in the world the stories basically take two forms and one form is the description of people acting in motivated states of one form or another and those are usually motivated states that everyone is familiar with most stories whether they're archaic or modern have to do with exploration and Adventure or romance and the reason for that is that we're we're biologically constructed so that were adventuresome exploratory and and interested in Intimate Relationships and so the stories reflect that and they help us understand how those fundamental motivations could be manifested in behavior in a manner that's productive partly for each individual and then partly for the individuals in relationship to other individuals and to families and to broader communities the other form of story that seems to be of critical importance from a historical perspective is stories that describe transformation and transformation tends to be represented as um using symbolism that's associated with death and rebirth and the reason for that seems to be that almost inevitably when you learn something new you learn it because something that you're doing or something that you're using to structure your perceptions no longer works and so prod produces a result that you don't intend and because of that before you can learn to restructure your behavior you have to allow yourself to let go of the things that you're doing that are in error and those can be small things in situations where only a small direction is required but sometimes they can be very large things and if they're very large things then it's as if there's a large element of your personality or yourself that has to degenerate and transform itself into chaos and then reemerge hopefully restructured and the archaic stories about death and rebirth and the Transfiguration of the Soul are stories about the necessity of disolution and disintegration preceding ascent and it's a very useful thing to know because it means first of all that you're going to be resistant to learning things as you progress through life because every time you learn something you have to let go of something that you hold dear before you can reconstruct yourself and so that accounts for people's unwillingness to learn things and unwillingness to face facts that don't that aren't in accordance with their current view of the world um but it also helps you understand that it might be worth letting go of the things that you're doing that aren't productive because even if it's painful in the short term the consequence might be the kind of personality transformation that stops you from having to suffer stupidly As you move through life andan one of the reasons that I entitled this course personality and its Transformations is because the transformation part of the study of personal ality is probably more important than the study of personality traits themselves this is part of the reason why for example PJ thought it was much more important to learn how it was that people learned things than it was to learn what they were learning so he was more concerned about the process by which people generate information and transform their personalities than he was in determining the nature of whatever Theory it was that people happened to be using to interact with the world at a particular historic stage or at a particular developmental stage and I think one of the things that's most important to learn from archaic stories which is where we started this is that um it's much more it's much more useful to Envision yourself as something that can continually transform in response to challenge than it is to view yourself as the static embodiment of any particular strategy of knowledge or perception and you know one of the things that you'll see quite frequently and you certainly see this in universities now I think perhaps you see that universities more than you see it anywhere else is that people adopt a static ideological stance on the world and they try to interpret everything that happens in the world through the lens of that static ideology they try to compress the entire world into that particular theoretical framework and become extraordinarily upset when the phenomena that confront them don't fit in accordance with the ideology and the reason that people do that is because they identify themselves with their ideological beliefs and their static ideological beliefs instead of identifying themselves with the part of their personality that's capable of continually assimilating new information and accommodating to it or transforming and you're much more powerful person if you can if you can understand that what's most essential to you is your capacity to transmute and transform as challenges come towards you rather than your ability to to develop a coherent and all-encompassing totalitarian Theory and attempt to impose it on the world uh I think one of the most tragic mistakes that modern universities make especially on the Humanity's ends of the distribution is that people come to University looking for orientation in the world looking for ways of understanding it and essentially they're taught two things and one is that there is no fundamental meaning to things and so that if you're rationalist if you're ra a rational and intelligent being that your only reasonable Outlook is nihilistic and then what seems to go along with that is some insistence that you do adopt a particular ideological stance as some sort of counterposition to that and to me that has nothing to do with education at all that's just that's a that's that's corruption from both directions because there's no real utility in nihilism and there's no reason to assume that it's the appropriate stance on life and everything we've learned from the 20th century indicates that there's virtually nothing that you can do that's more dangerous personally and socially than to grasp an ideology and to attempt to apply it to everything that comes your way and so the fact that universities teach people how to do that in some reasonable reasonably rigorous way is I think nothing short of appalling and I think the only way that you can that you can transcend that is to understand that what you know is not as important as what you yet what you have yet to learn and what that means is that you can people often find strength in regarding themselves as the sort of being that can comprehend everything and that's that the sort of being that's competent and and and what would you say sufficiently welldeveloped at the current point so that they have the appropriate answers to the appropriate questions but the thing about that that's wrong is that you don't have the answers and often you don't even have the questions and so so if you can identify with your capacity to learn that means that you don't have to be afraid of the things that you don't know and that means that you can listen to people and you can discover new things and that you can continually make your personality expand and transform and we have no idea what the limits are to the human capacity to trans to expand and transform and you're you're much more powerful from an existential perspective if you regard yourself as the sort of person who can surf on change rather than someone who has to make everything static and unchangeable just so that they can adapt to it so I learned a lot of that from Reading archaic stories and trying to understand exactly what it was that they were trying to to communicate to people and the fundamental communication is that it's it's reasonable to conceptualize the world as a place of action rather than a place of objects and then to regard the central problem of human life the existential problem as how is it that you should look in the world and look at the world and act on it you know and and from a from a scientific perspective that's generally regarded as something that's epiphenomenal because behavioral you know analysis of appropriate behavior falls into the domain of ethics and philosophy but that's foolish for people because everything we do revolves around how we have to look at the world and how we have to act this is part of the reason that I talk to you about psj because I think psj had had had cottoned on to something that was unbelievably profound and it's it's an element of P thinking that generally you don't hear much about if you take courses on PHA especially in relationship to developmental psychology especially North Americans like to reduce pH to a list of Developmental stages and that is something that P really wasn't all that concerned about he was interested in how the process processes that people use or how the structures that people use to interpret the world transform across time but he wasn't particularly interested in exactly what those stages were and how they sequentially followed one another and P's fundamental idea was that there were ways of organizing complex systems that could sustain themselves with very little input of energy and effort and resources um and the fact that those forms of organization existed meant that some forms of organization were better than others and the reason that that's so important is because P for example is one of the only thinkers I've ever come across that managed to transform what you might think about as a qualitative evaluation so an evaluation say of the appropriateness of a solution to a problem like a moral problem he managed to transform the discussion of that into something that was virtually quantitative and so PJ's idea of the equilibrated state was the notion that you could set up a complicated system so that all the parts of the system were operating in some kind of harmonious balance so the system wasn't continually fighting itself either at any given moment in time or in multiple situations across time and so for p an equilibrated state was a state was a state that was relatively free of conflict and so it's it's I started with P instead ofe fre because because people often start personality courses with Freud because I think psj actually had the model for how people organize themselves I think he had a more accurate representation of the model of how people organized themselves than Freud did now you know that Freud conceptualized people as an ego right with tremendous id-like forces underneath pushing the ego around and we would think about those as classical biologically motivated or biologically predicated motivations like aggression and sexuality and all of the other elements of our motivated behavior that make us animal likee Freud thought of the ego is trapped between those and the demands of the social world and so he thought of that as an intrinsically conflict Laden process where you know you're trying to manifest all of your animal instincts as a as an animalistic individual and Society is attempting to hem that in and and repress it and and inhibit it because as a pure manifestation of biological animality you're dangerous and not properly you know you're you can't fit into a social environment without inhibiting that or sublimating it or transforming it in some in some manner whereas the pedian perspective is is is is more something that's predicated on the idea of a game and I think it's it's a more sophisticated way of looking at it because what when you look at how children organize their personalities especially between the ages of 2 and four it's certainly the case that to some degree they learn to inhibit their impulses as a consequence of social pressure but it's much more it's much more appropriate and accurate to notice that actually what they mostly learn to do between the ages of two and four is get along with themselves and get along with others and so what's happening is you know they they burst onto the world with a set of sub personalities that are predicated in biological reality so they're hungry and they're thirsty and they have to maintain their body temperature at a certain level and they have to learn how to cope with all of the demands of being a biological entity like like toilet training and and uh learning how to share and learning how to play with siblings and establishing a relationship with parents and so forth and so on but the way they seem to do that is by organizing their behavior into more and more complicated and sophisticated games that stack back on top of one another you know so the child learns how to regulate their biological rhythms and go to sleep at the appropriate time and wake up at the appropriate time and if the parents scaffold them properly then they learn to eat at the proper time so that so that the so that the the they're not disregulated by by by starvation or hunger or thirst and they're not disregulated by temperature extremes and they learned how to incorp orate their aggression into Cooperative games rather than how to inhibit it and they make their personalities more and more sophisticated as they're doing that and they learn how to play a larger and larger number of more and more complicated games with more and more people and that's a kind of hierarchical organization that extends inside the person in so far as they're organizing their fundamental biological motivations and their emotions and then starts to extend beyond the individual as they start to organize their fundamental motivations and their emotions while other people are doing the same thing and it's out of that continual interplay of game likee cooperation and competition that it that Society itself emerges and that's not an an inhibitory or conflict Laden model the conflict between society and the individual in the pedian model only occurs when the when the game likee structure of the personality is not sophisticated ated enough to interact properly with the environment at that point and so you can see that the the idea of a petti an equilibrated state is that you could imagine an individual at all the levels of existence that the individual exists at from you know the microcosm the Micro World way down at the subatomic and the atomic level stacked up on top of each other all the way up to the societal level so that everything in that hierarchical organ organization is working to make every level work properly and that's I think I think it's a really good model for for what you might conceptualize as as as mental health broadly speaking because your mental health is of course dependent on the appropriate organization of your psychophysiology but it's also dependent on the or and the integration of that organized psychophysiology into an intimate relationship and then into a familial relationship and into a relationship with the community and then into a relationship with the structures that are beyond the community and you know the fact that many of you are concerned for example with environmental issues means that you understand at some level that in order for your being to be optimized you also have to exist in some relatively harmonious manner inside large biological ecosystems so economic ecosystems and political e ecosystems and social ecosystems and bi biological ecosystems and all of those levels have to be stacked on top of one another so each level supports and fosters all the other levels and that's a very complicated that's a very complicated thing to attain and it's also something that has to be continually negotiated and transformed because of course you're trying to stack all these processes in a hierarchical manner in a self-sustaining hierarchical manner in an environment that also continues to shift and move so not only do you have to back up this structure to begin with and and organize it but you have to transform it at whatever level needs to be transformed As you move throughout the dynamic environment that changes from day to day it's a very complicated process now it seems to me that that one of the things that you can come to understand and this is something that I took at least in part from from Reading Y is that the the process that you engage in when you're organizing ing your personality in this hierarchical structure and the process that you engage in while you're updating it actually manifests itself as intrinsically meaningful so there's there's there's an element of your of your intrinsic being that's actually devoted towards fostering that process and when people talk about the idea that life might have some meaning it seems to me that you can actually experience that meaning when you're engaged in the process of producing this hierarchically organized structure and balancing and maintaining it across time and I think and this is yion idea too I think that what you experience that as is engagement when you're very much interested in something that you're doing and you're sunk right into it so that you're not even self-conscious and so that time itself isn't ticking away in a painful manner but but something that you're not even really aware of you're not even aware of time progressing when you're in that sort of State then that's a signal from your from your I wouldn't say from your nervous system but from being itself that you're in a position where all the levels of being are properly organized and I think that people experience that as a deeply meaningful state of being and I don't think that that has anything to do with rationality you know because you can as n pointed out when we talked about the existentialists you know you can make a very strong case that from a rational perspective that life is devoid of meaning but the problem with that is that it starts out with the presupposition that the rational analysis of the situation that brings that question to life is the proper level of analysis and I don't think there's any evidence for that at all you know one of the things that Carl Rogers continually pointed out in his phenomenological approach was that to evaluate how you're progressing through life you cannot only rely on your rationality it's a mistake State because you're an embodied creature and you're constantly being informed by all sorts of processes that can't be reduced to straightforward rationality and that it's a mistake to assume that the rational mode of interpretation of experience from moment to moment is the one that should actually be superordinate and it's it's a mistake partly because you're more complicated than your rationality and so is existence itself is being itself you know and and for the exist cialists and the phenomenologists especially following heiger the question was the nature of being and I think that's the proper question to pose to yourself when you're trying to assess exactly what constitutes the human personality you know and these things to me is part of the reason that I was so interested in the existential approach because the existentialists take the idea one step further and it's in a very complicated and sophisticated way now they they make the case that you have an ethical responsibility to being and so that would be to your being but to being in general in the ethical responsibility is that you have to confront it straightforwardly and honestly and the way the the 19th and 20th Century existentialists came to that was really twofold it was mostly from the negative Direction so people like franker and Soulja niton when they were pushing the idea that it was necessary to have a truthful relationship with being the reason they came up with that inclusion was by observing those circumstances where people clearly did not do that and so for Frankl that was basically that was basically his observations of what happened in Nazi Germany and for Solja netson it was his observations of what happened in this in the stalinist Soviet Union and in other places that were directly committed to a comprehensive totalitarian view of reality and their observations were that as soon as that totalitarian Viewpoint was imposed and everyone acted as if every problem had been finally solved the immediate consequence of that was that everyone had to lie about everything they did in order to support the system and the next consequence of that was the system became radically genocidal and murderous and so for Frankl and Soulja niton there there their diagnosis of that was that it was necessary for individual people to adopt a truth relationship with being because the consequence of not doing that was the degeneration of everything into something that basically resembled hell and so you can align that idea with the pedian idea of the game likee hierarchy and you can say something like and that this is also drawing on the ideas say of Rogers and the ideas of of he described it as authentic being is that the pathway to the appropriate hierarchical organization of the person personality from the microcosm up to the macrocosm is actually fostered by a relationship with truth you know and for for Rogers he talked about the physiological psychophysiological manifestations of that for Rogers that was partly the the willingness to enter into a dialogue with your physical being which which is also a notion that the psychoanalysts pushed in a slightly different direction because people like Freud regardless of the fact that his notion of what constitutes socialization was too was too predicated on conflict one of the things that Freud certainly continually pointed out was that it was necessary for you to bring all of the diverse elements of your personality into into the game right you weren't to repress things you weren't to forget things you weren't supposed to leave elements of your being that were that were Troublesome and difficult to integrate you weren't supposed to leave those lying out where nothing could be done with them and because the consequence of that would be that those dissociated parts of you would become would become pathological and dangerous and so they would pose a threat to you but also because if you didn't incorporate those castoff elements of being then your personality would be too weak to Prevail you know and for Freud of course those the the probability was very high that the castoff elements of being would be those that were associated fundamentally with aggression and with sexuality because you might think that those are the two most dangerous motivational forces that people have at hand but you know you're a pretty Hollow and thin person if you're not capable of aggression and if your sexual morality is continually is is only predicated on well your inability to engage in sexual activity because no one wants you or because you're repressing it and very awkward and unskilled at it and so that the question never even arises you know that's that's the that's the approach people take when they try to make their children so naive about sexuality and so protected that they're terrified to have anything to do with it whatsoever and that might work very well as long as they're in a situation where they're they're so underdeveloped and repressed that no one has want to have anything to do with them but as soon as they get out into the world where sexual behavior for example starts to become a possibility all that does is leave them completely open to their own pathologies and to the predatory behavior of other people it's not much of a solution now the the the existentialist idea and that's the idea of authentic being is that the most appropriate way to interact with being as it emerges is is by maintaining some relationship with truth that's a very difficult concept to to really come to grips with because it's of course as as is famously known it's not that easy to identify exactly what constitutes truth I think that's part of the reason why Frankle and solia niten when they were talking about the existential approach to being we're more likely to concentrate on falsehood rather than on Truth per se because I think it's easier you can think about this yourself but I think it's easier for each of us to identify when we're doing something wrong than it is for us to determine whether or not we happen to be on the right path because the the issue of whether right now you're doing something wrong is simpler in some sense than the question than than trying to understand whether the sum total of all your actions right now are those that will put you into the appropriate Place into the future so I think that as you establish a relationship with truth the first thing that you try to do and is to stop lying and that's not exactly the same thing is telling the truth because I would say you can't actually tell the truth because you don't know what it is but you can certainly strive not to talk not to speak or act in ways that you know to be false and I think that by doing that that's part of how you you you integrate your personality and you strengthen your personality across time and also how you learn to understand larger and larger sections of what might actually be true rather than what than instead of only being able to identify from moment to moment what's false know kard would say well there's there's an element of faith in a decision like that and I I can tell you a little bit about what he meant so you know when we were talking about Carl Rogers we talked about inst instumental use of language right so the idea there would be that I'm using language constantly to get what I want from the world in any given situation and the that instrumental use is predicated on the idea that I know what I want and that I know what's good for me and the problem is is that's a very um it's it's very unlikely that that's true because you don't know what's good for you in the final analysis because you're too ignorant to know and so if you're using language to manipulate the world to ensure that things turn out the way you want them to right now then you're acting as if your knowledge about what constitutes the good is sufficiently welldeveloped and final so that you can rely on it as a guide to what you're going to say and do now the alternative to that is something there's an alternative to that but it's a very complicated alternative and the alternative to that is something more like it has more to do with Reliance on your capacity to transform because here's an alternative to that kind of rigid and manipulative approach to life and the alternative is to try to act out what you think is appropriate and to say what you think is true as carefully as you possibly can and then to see what happens and that's a completely different way of approaching the situation and it's a lot more interesting you know I mean one of the things I've been thinking about is I I truly believe that the idea that that people speak potential into being is accurate I think that what we face as we move through life is a realm of potential that's in front of us that we can continually interact with and I think that that's actually how people think about the world when they think about it because we think of the future as a place of diverse possibilities and we think of the future as something we can maneuver through and turn turn into actuality know that's what we think about when we when we think about potential and and about realizing the potential in things and the potential in ourselves and the potential in other people well then you ask yourself well what do you think what's the best technology that you have at your disposal for transforming potential into the kind of actuality that you actually want to see around you and then you might ask yourself well is it more likely that you're going to get the actuality that you want by trying to trying to Grapple with potential in a truthful manner or is it more likely that you're going to get the kind of actuality that you want if you grapple with reality in a manner that's Rife with falsehood and I would say well if if bringing potential into actuality is like building a house then I would say if you build a house out of the proper materials then it might stand but if you build a house out of Cut Rate materials and you you take shortcuts wherever you can and you pretend things are other than what they are then as soon as the ground shakes your house is going to fall and that seems to me to be something that's fundamentally undeniable you know if you mix too much sand in your cement then your foundation is going to be weak and you can do that merely By ignoring what you know and so I think that the root out of inauthentic being and the root out of our proclivity to identify with with ultimately genocidal ideologies is to attempt to establish a relationship with being that's predicated on at least not on falsehood at least that you know and one of the things Rogers would say and I think he's right about this is that if you consult the totality of your being when you're acting and you're speaking you can tell by paying attention to the way that you're responding to your actions and to your and to your words whether or not what you're doing and saying is pulling you together and making you integrated and making you strong or whether it's pulling you apart and disintegrating you and making you weak and one of Rogers claims was that that's actually a psychophysiological sensation he called that you know he described that in association with the wisdom of the body and I really believe that to be true I mean I can see this when I'm talking to people when I'm talking to my clients or when I'm talking to other people I can see as soon as they start to misuse their words or start to use them in an instrumental manner like the strength goes out of them completely and you can detect that there's something shallow and false going on and you know if you call people's attention to that fact when it's happening they're often rather resistant to noticing it but if they do open their eyes and pay attention to it they can see right away that that's what's occurring now now when we moved into when we moved towards Freud and Yung well I mean I was extremely interested in Yung and I have been extremely interested in Yung because he's one of the few thinkers that I've ever encountered who takes culture seriously you know and he believes that it's necessary because we're historical creatures and we're we're shaped by historical facts that it's necessary for us to understand our culture and our past because we're embodying it because we're historically con instructed creatures and so the reason to study history is because history is you and if you don't understand history then history is going to have its is going to have you in its clutches and it's going to be moving you from place to place you know because it was Yung who formulated the idea for example that people don't have ideas that ideas have people and I think that if you take that notion seriously it's one of the most frightening things you can ever realize because of course everyone thinks that they have ideas but if you look at people for example who are possessed by an ideology obviously the idea has them because you can predict exactly what they're going to say and do in every situation you can predict exactly what solution they're going to bring to the table whenever you discuss any problem and if you come up with an idea about a problem and you come up with an idea about the problem and it's the same idea the probability that it's you coming up with it or you coming up with it is zero it's whatever it is that's coming up with the same idea is the thing that's got control you know and you see this with people all the time when they arbitrarily divide the world for example up into those things that are good and acceptable and those things that aren't you see this with right Wingers and you see it with left Wingers because the right- Wingers make the claim that government is evil and the left wing makes the claim that corporations are evil and if you take five left Wingers you can tell exactly what they're going to say about any given problem and if you take five right Wingers it's exactly the same thing so then that brings up the question who exactly is doing the talking and the thinking of course the people who are spouting those ideas think that they're doing the thinking but there's no reason to assume that that's the case at all and I can tell you something else that you can determine right away people are dead boring when they're spouting ideological clap trap you can hardly even listen to them but you can take virtually anyone educated or uneducated and if they start to tell you the truth about their own experience even if they do that in a stumbling way in a halting way they become fascinating instantly because they're the only people who have access to that information and it's rich and deep information and you know that it's personal it's it's it's it's it's material that they have a right to you know and they can intermingle that with the ideas that that culture has produced even ideological ideas and come up with something that's richer and and more brilliant as a consequence of that but if they're not speaking their own words well first of all there's something else is speaking through them and second there's something about it that's dead so I don't remember if I told you the the um origin of the word slogan so slogan comes from two Welsh words and one is slag which is s l u a g h and the other is g g h a i r m so it's slag garam and SLU garam means garam means the battlecry of the Dead and that to me is it's a perfect example often it's a perfect example of how fascinating the process by which he words emerge actually is but it's also a dead accurate um description of what's speaking through a person when their language has been reduced to slogan and they're not paying any attention to their own individualized being and what it is is that it's the army of the Dead in some sense speak speaking through them there's no Spirit there there's nothing that's alive and I don't think that being possessed by the army of the Dead is a very good idea I mean it's that's all wisdom that was useful for the past and that's lost its ability to be applicable to the present one of the other things that seems to me to happen to people in university is they don't really get educated about how important what they do actually is and you know and I think that goes along with the the nihilistic cast of Modern of modern people you know it's easy to view yourself as one little dust moat floating around in a uh you know in a stadium full of dust Moes and air so you're all disconnected with each other and none of you have any causal impact on anyone else or on the whole but I don't think there's any reason to conceptualize yourself using that model at all because the first thing that is very easy easy to notice is that you're very much networked you know and so over the course of your life you're going to have direct and relatively profound influence on several thousand people and some of you maybe more and some of you less but we could certainly say a thousand people you know and each of those thousand people will know a thousand people and that's a million and one step past that is a billion and so you basically sit in the center of a network that with very limited extension covers virtually everyone on the planet and that's becoming more and more true rather than less and less true as everyone becomes increasingly networked and connected and so what that implies is that the things that you do that you choose to do or the things that you choose not to do are going to have effects that Ripple far beyond your particular individual existence and so part of what that means is that all of the choices that you make as you're confronting the unstructured future As you move through your life are going to alter the structure of being itself you know and one of the things that you know i' I've showed you guys repeatedly that hierarchy of action right the with the highest resolution level being the things that you actually do with your body the muscle movements that you manifest in the world and and showed you how those are hierarchically organized into higher and higher systems of value you know and when I showed you that hierarchy the thing I put at the top was be a good person well I think that that can be elaborated out in a reasonable manner so that it's possible to understand more and more what being a good person is about part of it is that you have to have organized yourself into something that's well structured and useful and I think you do that by disciplining yourself and by adopting some role in the world that's that's meaningful and and and profound so that you you have to so that the so that the stress and demands of of that organize you into something that's that's strong and flexible and productive and so that's one element of it I think of that as a kind of apprenticeship element and I think I learned that mostly from nche because one of n's claims was that in order to become properly developed as a human being you had to undergo a position uh you had to undergo a process of voluntary slavery in some sense you had to um you had to give yourself over to some sort of role perhaps it doesn't even matter what role so that you became an expert at that and that was going to cost you in that you're going to be bent and twisted into that role but it's also going to discipline and organize you and the alternative is to become nothing you know and that's not a useful alternative so you want to become something and then once you become something well then you want to be able to transform that something into into whatever is necessary at that particular point and I think that that's where the ideas that are associated with hero mythology start to become particularly relevant to considerations of higher order ethics because the hero the hero in mythology is the the hero in mythology is the representation of the human being in so far as mankind understands what it is to be human and what the hero does is confront the things that he or she does not understand and take what's valuable from that confrontation and then reintegrate it into the personality and the society that's why the hero goes out to where the dragon is and takes the gold and then brings the gold back to the community and distributes it and so I would say well part of being a good person is being good for something and then another part of being a good person is being better than being good for something because you want to be not only good for something but you want to be able to be good for something in a way that keeps making you better and better at being good for something and that means you can't just be something it means that you have to become something constantly and I and I think that the a tremendous amount of what constitutes the intrinsic meaning of life can be found in that attempt to continually expand and reorganize as you're expanding because this is a union idea I mean human beings are cognitively Dynamic creatures and we find intrinsic worth in participating in that cognitively Dynamic process so and then I think outside of that there's another question which is well what it is what is it exactly that you're aiming at and my my experience has taught me and this is partly a consequence of studying archetypes for a very long period of time I think the fundamental question that's on the very outer reaches of the hierarchy that's associated with ethics and morality is are you trying to make the world a better place or a worse place and I believe that every time you make a decision when you could go One Way Or you could go another that in some sense you're acting out your conviction in relationship to that highest order question you know and you say well would people really work to make the world a worse place and the answer to that is well if you have to ask that question then you should open your eyes because we know the answer to that the whole 20th century was full of of decades and decades in fact the primary I think the primary the most important information that you can derive from an analysis of the 20th century is that it's pretty damn certain that people are willing to work to make everything as terrible as they possibly can and that's definitely worth considering because if people are willing to do that and motivated to do that that probably means that you're willing to do that motivated to do it too and I think it's fairly easy to understand why I think the reason that people are motivated to do that sort of thing is to do terrible things is because they're angry at the conditions of their life they're angry at the conditions of being because being is is composed of suffering and vulnerability and people people lose and they suffer and they get resentful and angry about that and they feel hard done by and that the entire structure of the world is aimed against them in some unfair Manner and then they get revengeful and corrupt and feel that everything that they do is justifiable given how much torment and suffering they've been living through and from once you make the once you move into that particular realm of thinking your ability to start to make things worse starts to accelerate exponentially and I don't believe there's a single person on the planet who hasn't been in a situation where something has happened to them that's sufficiently disappointing and tragic so that their thoughts turn to revenge and destruction I think that happens to people all the time and it's understandable but the problem is it seems to be extraordinarily counterproductive and all it does is make the situ situation that everybody's complaining about worse instead of better and so what seems to be the case is that you have to bear the fact that you're incomplete and and um vulnerable and underdeveloped and and weak in many ways without becoming vengeful and corrupted by your knowledge of that and and while still trying to do everything you can to make the to make being better rather than worse and I think the upside of that mode of thinking is I don't believe that there's anything that's more engaging and interesting than continued attempts to make things better the problem is it requires the adoption of a tremendous amount of responsibility right I think that it's the unwillingness to accept responsibility that stops people from waking up and becoming enlightened you know if if you want to make the world a better place then you have to take responsibility for all of all of the ways that you look at the world and everything that you act out and all the the things that you say and it means you have to pay a tremendous amount of attention to what you're doing as a consequence and that's that's very difficult and it's also frightening because it means that you have to entertain the hypothesis that the things that you're doing are important and I think part of the reason why why our culture has taken such a nihilistic bent is because people have actually decided that life would be a lot easier if it didn't have any meaning people run around and complain about the fact that life is meaning lessness or that life is meaningless and we've you know we've drawn that conclusion from both a rational and empirical perspective and people will tell you that they came to that clusion purely logically and scientifically but when I look at that claim I think well maybe you want life to be meaningless because it lets you off the hook if everything you do hasn't got any value then why do you have to pay any attention to it you can do whatever you want and if it's the opposite if everything you do has meaning and it's important well then you better be be awake because what you do matters and then you get all the meaning you want but the price you have to pay for that is that you have to take responsibility know and if you start to seriously entertain the idea that with every decision you take you're tilting the world either towards heaven or towards hell then that can instantly start making you a lot more serious about what you choose to do and not do and my my understanding of personality development and personality development in relationship to history is that that is exactly what what is the case when you're making decisions in your life you face a a field of infinite potential and you use your will for good or evil in order to shape it into what it's going to be and that's really what a human being is a human being is the sort of creature that can do that and you know one of the things I found that's extremely interesting is that there's an idea at the very core of most modern legal systems it's certainly the case for English common law which I think is the most sophisticated legal system that's ever been developed and it's predicated on an idea that every single person has intrinsic worth you know that's sort of the ground of the idea of natural rights and so I spent a lot of time looking into that idea is why is it that why is it that the idea that each person has intrinsic worth ever developed especially when you look at the situation and you see that well some people are clearly doing everything they can to make the world is an absolutely terrible place you know under English common law for example even if you're a serial killer and everyone knows it you still have rights before the law and there's an idea there that no matter how corrupt you've become there's still something that's intrinsically valuable about you and you know people in the modern world claim that they don't have any metaphysical beliefs but in so far as you're an advocate of the legal system that claims that people have intrinsic worth then you're acting out the idea that there's something of value about every single person and then you might ask well what is it that might be of value of every single person and if it's it might easily be that it's the faculty that each person has to turn potential into actuality and I would say that if you do an analysis of the fundamental basis of modern law then and you and you and you go down into the underst structure of the ideas that gave rise to that entire body of law what you find is that is the idea at the bottom of it you know it's the idea in some sense that people are made in the image of God and it's God who makes order out of chaos and sometimes turns chaos into and sometimes turns order into chaos when that becomes necessary and people are capable of doing that so I think that we're continually involved in the co-creation of reality and that we can choose what sort of reality we want to bring into existence so and you can do that in a resentful and murderous way and you have every reason to do it but it's seems to me to be the wrong choice and you'll pay a big price for doing that you pay a big price for doing that every second of your life the things that I've been talking to you about for the entire course you know they are things that I've tried to put into practice in one way or another you know when I'm when I'm engaged in therapy with people what I'm really trying to do is to listen to what they have to say you know I don't I don't really want to give them advice because advice isn't that helpful but usually what we try to do is we try to lay out what the problem is you know and that's a consequence of mutual discussion because often people don't really know why they're troubled you know they have some ideas about it and they can talk about the situation in their family and the fact that the relationships aren't going well and so forth but it's no easy matter to actually specify the problem because if things aren't going well for you it's not necessarily the case that you know why you might know some of it you might even know that there's some things that you're doing that you should stop doing but you can't stop doing them so a lot of the initial discussion is mere delineation of what the problem constitutes and then the next part of the discussion is well if that's the problem what would a solution look like which would how could things be better than they are now what would that what would that actually look like and then the next issue is well what steps could you put into place to start moving towards that goal and that's all an exploratory process you know and I think it's a process that's basically grounded in a search for the truth and I what I found in my Psychotherapy practice is that in so far as that's happening during the discussions then the process itself is extraordinarily gripping you know and you you you I think you also experience that whenever you sit down with someone and have a conversation that's serious and meaningful you know a conversation like that grips you and I think the reason for that is because you are in the right place at the right time so to speak and what you're doing is important and meaningful it's difficult though because you have to face up to what the problems actually are and you have to pay careful attention and you have to run through all the options and you have to plan strategically and you have to be careful about what you say and you can't get too self aggrandizing or egotistical and you can't offer Simple Solutions but it's an incredibly engaging process you know it's it's like reading the highest quality fiction in some sense and so a lot conversations between people can be like that if both people who are engaged in the conversation and this is something Rogers pointed out you know are willing to admit that there is in fact a problem and then to do whatever is necessary to lay out the structure of that problem meant to solve it and that's that's admission of vulnerability to to a large degree and it seems to me that that process actually works you know it facilitates trust which is extraordinarily useful I mean with some of my clients it's taken me years before we can actually have a genuine conversation because they're so afraid of engaging in a discussion that's actually real and genuine and and exposing their their actual problems that that you know they hide often behind the sorts of things that Yung described as a Persona you can't get to the real person because they're so covered up by a shell that that you can't have a genuine discussion and the reason that's the case is because you know they've attempted to engage in genuine interactions with people in the past and have been betrayed or hurt or undermined in some way that's really profound and so they learned that that's very dangerous to do that which is exactly true but it's a lot more dangerous not to do it so one of the things that I hope for when I teach this class and the other classes that I teach too is that people can come out of the classes with a different conceptualization of what they might actually be like you know and I really do believe that people are remarkable creatures you now the extent of our capacity is by no means known and there's so much about what we're like that we don't understand we have no idea what it means that each of us is a locust of Consciousness you know and obviously you know I don't know if you know this but the word Genie is the root word of genius and the idea of the genie is a very interesting idea right because with a genie you have this incredible capacity for Magical Power in some sense all collapsed into this incredibly tiny container so there's this weird constraint between the Divine possibility of the genie and the fact that it's encapsulated into this unbearably tiny space and and in some sense is trapped inside that but the reason that Genie is the root word of Genius is because that's exactly what people are like and we have this incredible capacity for imagination and for speaking things into being and for acting things into being but at the same time we're limited by our frame in time and space it limits us but it also allows us potential it's a very strange set of limitations one of the things I've wondered very deeply over the last 20 years is you know that people are often upset about the structure of being there's a good argument in the brothers karamazov um they the brothers kov features a very a very large number of characters it has a very freyy and eatable subplot but one of the one of the continual battles between characters in The Brothers caram of is a battle between a young man named osia who's going to be a monk at a monastery and he's trying to live a classically good life you know a traditionally good life as it might have been conceived of in the 1880s and 1870s and his brother Ivan who's an older brother who's extremely intelligent charismatic and very um rationalistic and arrogant and and um creative and intelligent and he likes nothing better than to go after alosia with all the stories about the horrors of the world to try to undermine his faith in the Divinity that he's attempting to establish a relationship with and so he tells stories like this is a story that dovi took out of the newspaper in you know at approximately the time when he was writing the brothers kov and it's a story about this this family this father and mother locked their three or four-year-old daughter in a freezing out house overnight and she was screaming the entire time to have someone let her out and they let her freeze to death in the out house and of course that produced a big Scandal and one of the things that Ivan Ivan uses that story or Doki uses that story in the brothers karamazov so that Ivan can torture alosia about the fact that you know there's no way that you could possibly Envision that being itself could be good or that God could be good if you want to put it a different way when that sort of thing can happen in the world and that it happens over and over and over all the time everywhere you know and and dovi because he's no perer when he sets up an argument between two positions he sets up the argument as powerfully as he possibly can and so he has Ivan T loia endless stories like that and make the claim that as far as Ivan is concerned that the mere fact that any of those things could have ever happen even once a sufficient reason to never con never allow yourself to conceptualize the idea that being itself might be good fact Ivan's presupposition is that it's evil enough so that it should be eradicated you know any any any game that has that element of play and it is a game that should never be played that's basically Ivan's stance and that's a very um that's a very archetypal stance by the way it's the same stance that mephistophiles adopts in girus F and it's the same stance that um Lucifer adopts in Paradise Lost it's the rational opposition to being and and it it's a very powerful idea but there's something wrong about it because if you pursue that and you act it out rigorously and consistently then all that happens is you turn into someone who adds to the misery rather than putting an end to it and one of the things I've wondered is and this is something that's worth thinking about if everybody abandoned their pathological nihilism and despair and did what they could to make things better wherever they could then maybe we could turn the world into a place where that sort of thing didn't happen and then what then what would that be like no cuz you ask yourself well have you done everything you possibly can to put your life in order and if the answer to that is no then what makes you think you have any right to complain about the conditions of your existence there's a story in TS Elliot's play the cocktail hour and the story involves a woman who's thinking about seeking psychiatric treatment and she approaches a psychiatrist and she basically says I really hope there's something wrong with me and the psychiatrist says well why do you hope that there's something wrong with you and she says well I'm having a really miserable time of it and as far as I can tell that means that there's only two options either I'm doing something wrong and there's something wrong with me and that's the reason that all this pointless suffering seems to be occurring or there's something wrong with the structure of being per se that makes all of this inevitable you know and that's a perfectly reasonable laying out of two options and so she says well I hope that we can start to discover what it is that I'm doing wrong because it would be a lot better better if the reason things weren't so good was because I was doing something wrong than it would be if the reason that things are wrong is because they're just wrong and there's nothing you can do about it well it's an easy question to answer because that's an existential question you know what's the sort of thing that you can only answer over the course of your entire life and it's the sort of question that no one else can answer for you but one thing you can find out is just exactly what your life would be like if you stopped making it unnecessarily miserable you know and to do that you have to abandon your dissatisfaction and your vengefulness and your resentment and your arrogance and your willful blindness and all those things that stop you from seeing what's right in front of your face and try to make things as straight as you possibly can in those places that you can make them and as far as I can tell if you do that I think it's what I teach my clients to do in Psychotherapy if they do that their lives get a lot better and I don't know exactly how good your life could get but I don't think that there's any necessary upper limit so people can figure out how to set things right and the you know the more you practice that in the places you can actually practice it the better and better you get at that and the more things that you can set right you know and then you're also not setting other people right which I also think is something extremely useful because my suspicions are that you have enough to do just setting yourself right without having to worry about all the other people who are running around mucking up the plan which and you don't know what to do with them anyways or what they should be doing so it's just as well to start with yourself it's an extremely useful adventure and it's something that will never allow you to become bored even for a moment and that's worth something too you know because even if life is fundamentally suffering and there's nothing that can be done about that which is a possibility there's always the possibility that you could learn to live in a manner so that that suffering was actually justifiable even to you because you might say well what I'm doing is so much worthwhile that even if I have to suffer to do it it's worth it and I would say that's actually the ethical imperative for your life is that you're obliged to find something to do and some way of doing it that's so deeply meaningful that the fact that you have to carry around your mortal vulnerability is something that you can accept and even be happy about because the alternative is gloomy and dim and it's worse than that it's not just gloomy and dim it's gloomy and dim and then it's vengeful and then it's murderous and then it's genocidal and that seems to be something that we could really do without so I'm hoping that as a consequence of having taken this course that you have some expanded idea of what it might mean to be a human being and that you can carry that with you as you move forward in your life and find out what you really like and find out what you could do if you put your mind to it because God only knows what you could do if you put your mind to it you know and the more people who are doing that the better things are going to get and that would be a good thing because things aren't so bad but they could be a lot better and it's hard to say just exactly how much you could contribute to that if you decided that that's what it was that you could do and I do believe that is what you can do I also believe that you are doing that you're shaping the world For Better or For Worse regardless of whether or not you decide to do it and take on the responsibility you're basically destined to do that so it seems to me that you should make that conscious and decide if you're going to do it properly or if you're going to make things worse so well I guess the other thing I have to say is that I wish you luck as you proceed through your University career I mean this is an awkward institution in many ways and you're you're faceless and numbered while you're here but it's also a place where it's the fact that you're engaged in this University means that the social Community has given you an identity that's acceptable you're a student and that's an honorable thing to be and that means that you can spend a few years trying to learn the most important things that you have to learn and that you're you're granted a role that makes that acceptable and justifiable and I would say well you've got a couple of years here you know and the wisdom of the world is collected at the University of Toronto and it's going to be discussed and displayed awkwardly by your professors because they're incomplete incarnations of historical wisdom but you should forgive them for that and try to do everything you possibly can to extract everything you possibly can out of this place while you're here because if you do it properly then it's going to make your life a lot richer and more productive than it could otherwise be and you might say well what about getting a job and I would say well if you learn to think and you learn to speak and you learn to act properly and you learn how to be articulate and you conduct yourself with a certain amount of wisdom and Grace you'll never have to worry for one minute in your life about what you're going to do that will sustain you and be productive because people like that are in unbelievably short supply and all the people out there in the world who have some and there's quite a few people like that are desperately looking for people like that and if you happen to be one of them you will have more opportunities in your life than you possibly know what to do with so I don't think you have to worry too much about exactly what you're going to be or what role you're going to play when you come out if you prepare yourself and you turn yourself into an articulate and honest and educated person people like that are incredibly valuable and as I said already if you transform yourself into someone who's like that the world will open doors for you in ways you can't possibly imagine it will happen in ways you don't even understand I mean I see this with students who do the opposite you know so with my graduate students and sometimes with undergraduates as well I'll give one of them a job to do you know and they'll either do it and do it well or they'll come back and tell me why it was impossible for for them to do it and how many things got in the way and the consequence of that is that for the person who comes and tells me that that they don't get another opportunity and for the person who comes and does and has done what I asked them to do or maybe gone over and above the you know the the Call of Duty then I have six more opportunities for them or maybe 20 more opportunities for them or maybe 50 more opportunities for them because I have more opportunities than I know what to do with and so it turns out that if you're the sort of person who's useful and direct and honest then invisible doors will open for you everywhere and if you're not then invisible doors doors will shut until no doors are open and you'll think you'll curse fate for that and complain about the structure of being but the reason it's like that is because you didn't take the opportunities when they were offered to you and you didn't do things properly so you can learn how to do things properly at University and you can turn yourself into someone who's a lot wiser than you were when you first came here and there isn't anything that's more valuable than wisdom and truth and so I would say you take the next couple of years as while you're here see if you can turn yourself into something that's useful and honest and you'll be so prepared for life you won't be able to believe it and there's absolutely no reason to be cynical about that because I've seen how the world works and that is how it works so so I wish you well while you attempt to do that and I hope that you've learned something in this course that enables you to do that in a manner that's more powerful and richer and more worthwhile and less nihilistic and less cynical and more meaningful because that would be a good thing if it happened and so it was a pleasure to teach you this year and I wish you the best of luck as you proceed through your [Applause] [Music] education |
Well, after all that. So, welcome to Psychology
230. Nice to see you all here. So, what I’m going to do today—how I’m going to start—is
I’m going to give you an overview of the content of the course and then I’ll give
you an overview of the class requirements right at the end. But I think we might as
well jump right into the content to begin with. So, there’s a website—I don’t really
like Blackboard so I have my own website. You can go to jordanbpeterson.com and underneath
there there’s a menu that lists all the courses and the full syllabus is listed there.
So, all the information that you’re going to need about the course can be found there,
including most of the readings, although there is also a textbook, which I presume the majority
of you have already purchased. So, it also lists the other things you need to know like
what days the tests are going to be and what the assignments are and I’ll go over that
anyways at the end of the class. So, but to begin with I’m going to tell you what the
course is about so you can decide whether you’re in the right class or not. So, personality is a somewhat peculiar field
of study in psychology because it spans a number of subdisciplines that aren’t particularly
well suited to one another. So, for example, it spans clinical psychology and experimental
psychology. And it also spans an approach that is associated fundamentally with single
individuals with an approach that analyzes individual characteristics in large groups,
which is generally what you have to do in experimental psychology. It’s also a relatively
strange admixture of philosophy and, I would say engineering and medicine, as well as science.
And you might think of medicine as a science but it’s not, and the reason that it’s
not is because it’s concerned with the promotion of health and health is not a scientific category.
It’s a category that can’t help but be value-laden because you have to decide what constitutes
health and what constitutes illness, or what constitutes wellness and what constitutes
pathology. And there’s no way you can do that without bringing value judgments into
the equation. It’s particularly true in psychology because
when you’re thinking about what a healthy personality might be, you generally don’t
merely think in terms of the absence of pathology. You think in terms of the presence of positive
traits, right, and someone who’s fully healthy mentally and physically. While the psychologists
and especially the humanistic psychologists from the 60’s might consider someone who’s
truly psychologically healthy self-actualized, which would mean in some sense that they’ve
been able to develop the entirety of their positive potential, whatever that is. So because
of these peculiarities, personality psychology the course, a course in personality psychology
has to be pretty wide-ranging. And so this course is in fact wide-ranging. It brings
in elements of cultural history, elements of moral philosophy, and then elements that
I would consider are almost completely biological. And it does that in order to provide you with
a multidimensional view of what it means to be a human being. I have some other principles that I abide
by while I’m teaching this course as well and one of those is that I don’t really
want to tell you about anything that I don’t you will find useful. And useful, like there’s
a difference between a fact and a useful fact, right? There’s lots of facts, you can go
on Google and you can drown yourself in facts—I’m sure you do that everyday. But a useful fact
to me is one that transforms the way that you look at the world or the way that you
act in the world in some manner that you find beneficial. And so another way of describing
useful from that perspective is relevant. And so one of the principles I abide by is
I don’t really want to teach you anything that isn’t relevant. And my criteria for
relevant is, first: Is it going to make a difference to you personally. So are the things
that you learn immediately meaningful to how you interact with the world? And then the
second is: Is there some evidence that the facts that you’re going to be presented
with actually have some social utility or some political utility or some economic utility?
So that the fact that you know them makes a difference to the way that you act in a
way that also affects the people around you. And so it’s for those multiple reasons that
I brought together the material that I have brought together. Now that means that there are some factors
that you have to take into account before you take this course. And there’s another
personality course being given at exactly the same time, well I don’t—this semester
anyways—and so it may be that that one is more suitable for you than this one. I don’t
know, but I can tell you what this one is going to be like. And so if that isn’t what
you want or if that’s not what you’re interested in then you probably shouldn’t
take this course. So the first issue is that there’s a lot of reading. There isn’t
as much reading as there used to be in this course, by the way, but there’s still a
lot of reading and a lot of it’s original source material both from the personality
theorists themselves and then also original source material from empirical papers. So
I would say that not only is there a lot of reading, but the reading is actually quite
difficult. I think it’s useful, given the way I already defined utility to you, and
so I believe that reading what I present to you is going to be good for you, but if you
don’t have time to do a lot of reading then you’re going to find this course frustrating. So, there’s also, because of the emphasis
on clinical theoreticians which is a major part of personality theory—especially the
more classical personality theory, which by the way is generally the elements of personality
theory that most students are most interested in—there’s a lot of what I would consider
philosophical material. And the reason it’s philosophical is because it’s concerned
with how a person should live and that’s a much different question than what a person
is. So it’s how a person should live or perhaps how a person might transform themselves
or act in order to transform themselves so that there personality is, well for lack of
a better term, better. Now, you can substitute healthier for better but in a context like
the one we’re discussing the difference is trivial really. So, then the last thing that I would caution
you against is that I don’t lecture from the reading material. So, often I’m not exactly
sure even what I’m going to tell you when I come to class. I know the material, but I
don’t what to stick to a prescribed outline; I want to talk to you about the things that
I think are important. And so, with luck, that’ll make the lectures worth attending
and worth listening to. But, if you’re more inclined from a temperamental perspective
to want a course where things are laid out in a very orderly fashion and they progress
in a linear fashion and it’s predictable and the lectures reflect the reading material,
then this is not a good course for you. And so I would presume that would be the case
if you’re orderly, and by the way, that’s one of the subdivisions of the Big Five Personality
Trait Model, and orderly people tend to be conscientious. But they like things cut and
dried and laid out in a linear fashion. I’m not that orderly; I’m higher in openness
and openness is a creative dimension. And open people tend to use relatively loose associations
when they speak and to cover a wide amount of territory. And, so, some people will like
that. If you like reading literature, for example, you’d probably like this course.
If you don’t, then you probably won’t. So, anyways, that’s pretty much enough for
the warnings. So, now I’ll tell you what we’re going to talk about. One of the things that makes human beings
unique is the fact that we’re self-conscious. Now, you’ll see ethologists, or people who
study animal behavior, do relatively elementary tests of self-consciousness on animals. So,
one of the most famous demonstrations of such self-consciousness is the mirror test. And
so in the mirror test what you essentially do is you take an animals, maybe a chimp or
maybe a three year old child, and you put a lipstick mark on their forehead or on their
nose and then you show them a reflection of themselves in the mirror. And if they wipe
off or gesture towards the lipstick mark then can make the presumption that they understand
that it’s them that’s being reflected in the mirror, or at least they understand
that well enough so that they can use the mirror as a guide to action with their hand
or whatever it is that they happen to be pointing with and the reflection. Now, dolphins seem
to be able to manage that, there’s some members of the corvid family, so those are
basically crows and ravens—those things are really smart and they seem to possess
rudimentary self-consciousness—I said dolphins, cetaceans in general, so whales—although
I don’t know if all whales are self-conscious because it’s for example difficult to get
a mirror big enough to show a blue whale—human beings, and that’s about it. Now, I don’t
think that’s a very good definition of self-consciousness really, because the mere fact that you can
recognize yourself, it’s also not fair to some animals like dogs, right, because dogs
would need a smell mirror really, because, and most animals are very very smell predicated.
Most of the brain is structured with the olfactory system as its core, unlike us really because
our brains are structured with the visual system at the core and that makes us rather
peculiar. So it’s a little unfair to animals like dogs or any rats that rely primarily
on olfaction to orient themselves in the world. But the thing is I don’t think that’s
really a very good definition of self-consciousness; it’s very rudimentary. You might say well that’s the first sort
of step to being self-conscious because if you’re fully self-conscious I think you
need to two more things. You need the capacity to imitate, which is a much more important
capacity than people generally realize. In fact, I would say it’s of equivalent importance—it’s
of equivalent importance to language. In fact, I’m not even sure that you can use language
if you can’t imitate. First of all, obviously all the words you use are also the words that
other people use. Otherwise, you’re not going to be very comprehensible. So, even the
mere fact that you do speak means that you’re relying on imitation to get your point across.
So, you need imitation and the reason you need imitation is because once you can imitate,
you can use your body as a representational structure to represent the world and other
people. You can even use your body as a representational structure to represent yourself, which you
might do, for example, if you’re telling a joke at a dinner party and then you, you
know, act out a self-parody and everyone laughs. So, and then with regards to language, well
language obviously enables you to build sophisticated models of the world that are well-articulated,
to exchange those with other people, and to think. Ok so, in order to be self-conscious you have
to be able to recognize that you exist in this physical envelope, at least here and
now; you need to be able to imitate, because that’s partly how you come to understand
yourself and other creatures like you, which is a very important part of being self-conscious,
right—I mean everything I learn about any of you is also going help me understand the
sort of creature that I am, whether that’s for good or for evil—and then with language,
well not only can we articulate our representations about others in the world, but we can also
store those articulated representations over very very very very long spans of time. And
we do that partly in ritual, which is the acting out of a representation, and we do
that partly with regards to stories, which are in some sense an articulated representation
of an acting out, right, because you can think of a story as a drama. So a drama is behavior
representing behavior and then a story is an articulated representation of a drama.
Now we have very old rituals and we have very very old stories. And so, part of what we
do in this course is we go back to as close to the beginning as we can possibly manage
to start to understand how people have understood themselves and represented themselves across
the span of human history. And we’re doing that because we want to be able to put our
current knowledge in some kind of historical context. And part of the reason for that is, well one
of the things that characterizes a human personality is that it’s a historical phenomena. You
know I’m sure you’ve heard in many classes that much of what makes up your personality
is a cultural construct. Well, whether or not much of it is or not isn’t really the
issue. Certainly some of it is, and an important part—you’re a cultural creature. And that
means that you have emerged from a tradition that has been shaped in any number of ways
by an extraordinary lengthy historical past—well historical and biological. And so what that
means in part is that if you don’t understand your history, and that’s your history as
it matters, not necessarily some collection of facts, then you don’t understand yourself.
So, you know, human beings in their self-conscious form, we don’t really know how old we are.
More or less biologically or genetically identical creatures to us existed at least 150 000 years
ago but we seem to have discovered fire and were able to master it maybe 2 million years
ago. You know and that requires a fair bit of intelligence. And there are artifacts that
indicate a fairly high level of cultural capacity that are at least 50 000 years old. So, we
can’t really say when we got fully self-conscious, and perhaps we might also say that we’re
not even fully self-conscious yet because you know, really, what the hell do you know
about yourself. You know, you’re really really really really complicated. And at best
you have a partial model of who you are and that thing fails all the tail, which as you
can tell because you’re always doing things that surprise you and often not in a particularly
positive way. So, there’s no end of mystery. Anyways, the upshot of all of this is that
we’re going to establish the context first that’s a historical context and I want to
do that two ways. The first thing I want to do is to talk to you about mythological representations
of personality. And that’s more important than you might think. In fact, it’s probably
more important than you do think. By myth, what I mean is the representations of human
beings in extremely long-lasting and persistent stories. And so some of those are the stories
that are found in various religious traditions, but there’s oral traditions that surround
those religious traditions, you know assuming that the religious traditions are written
down; and there’s fairy tales and that sort of thing; and standard narratives that people
used to guide themselves as the moved through the world. And most of the clinical theories
that we’re going to discuss, so Freud’s theory and Jung’s theory and the theory
of the Existentialists and the Phenomenologists and the Humanists and so forth, are variants
of those mythological stories. Now, part of the reason for that is that Nietzsche
said once that a philosopher was seldom anything other than the unconscious advocate of their
cultural worldview. So, what he meant by that was you already come to the scene with a set
of presuppositions. Now, some of those are embedded in your behavior. So, for example,
when you walk—when you attend a funeral you know how to behavior. Generally, you’re
quiet and solemn. You might not be able to explicate the rules a person should follow
at a funeral, but you can do it. Now, you could perhaps articulate them if pressed, but it’s
not like you’re following those rules when you go to a funeral; you just know what to
do. If someone pressed you, you could turn it into a list of rules but it’s really
more encoded in you’re actual behavior. You just automatically know what to do. You
can tell, you know, whenever you interact with someone who’s really socially fluent,
you can tell that they’re not consciously processing the way that they’re acting—otherwise
they’re self-conscious and awkward. They’re very fluid. It’s automatized behavior and
it’s coded right into them. So, if you’re a great philosopher, according to Nietzsche
at least, what you do is you take a look at how you act and what you think and then you
say “Well this is what it’s like.” It’s not so much that you’re inventing new ideas;
it’s that you’re articulating the nature of structures that are already there. So, you can imagine, for example, imagine that
you’re particularly interested in wolves. And so you go out and you study some wolves
and one of the things you see is that the wolves have a dominance hierarchy. So, there’s
a leader and then there is struggle in the pack to see who’s going to be the dominant
leader. Now, there’s a couple problems with that which is that, you know if Wolf A and
Wolf B fight and they’re pretty evenly matched and they tear each other to shreds, then Wolf
C is going to come in and pound both of them and that’s not a particularly useful strategy
for Wolf A or for Wolf B. Plus then the pack loses the power of Wolf A and Wolf B, so that’s
hardly useful at all. So, what’s happened is that wolves have evolved dominance and
submission strategies so that they can figure out who is going to lead and who is going
to follow without having to engage in the kind of physical combat that’s going to
result in damage. And so usually what happens is that two wolves
face off—you’ve probably seen cats do this when they encounter each other you know
out on the street—the first thing they do is sort of turn sideways and puff themselves
up, right, and they dance back and forth; it’s quite comical. But what the cat’s
trying to do is look big and it’s supposed to—it’s trying to make the other cat nervous
enough to leave. And so what wolves do is roughly the same thing. They puff out so they
look big and they make all sorts of ferocious noises and they threaten each other and usually
what happens is one wolf will lose his nerve, flop down, roll over, and show his throat.
And that basically means something like “I’m useless and, you know, and pathetic and you
can tear up my throat if you want because of that,” and the other wolf thinks “Yeah,
you are pretty useless and pathetic, but you know, we’re going to need you tomorrow to
hunt down a deer, so you know, you can get up and protect your miserable self and that’ll
be okay.” Now, if you were watching that, you might say, “Wolves follow rules,”
but of course they don’t; that’s just how wolves act. When you describe what the
wolves are doing then you turn it into a rule, but it wasn’t a rule to begin with; it was
just a pattern of behavior. Now human beings are like that. We’re chalked
full of patterns of behavior. And they’re the consequence of our biology, which is something
we’ll talk about in depth in the last half and the course, and they’re a consequence
of our culture. And they’re built into our bodies. Like every time you interact with
another person, they’re telling you how to behave, right? “Don’t be too obtuse.”
“Try to be a little bit witty.” “Have something interesting to say.” “Don’t
be too annoying.” “If you’re going to say something funny make sure it’s funny.”
“Take turns while you talk.” “Play nicely.” “Take your turn.” “Don’t eat all the
bread.” Etc, etc. You know, and so if you don’t abide by those rules then people lift
their eyebrow at you. Or they don’t smile at your jokes. Or they don’t look at you.
Or they roll their eyes when you come in, which is really not a good sign by the way.
And you get punished severely for it. And then if you do act like they would like you
to act, you know, then people smile at you and they invite you to their place for dinner
and, you know, maybe you have an intimate relationship and some people that like you.
And so we’re exchanging information about how we should manifest ourselves in our bodies
with every possible interaction. And what that means is that shapes the way that we
act. Now, the problem is—or partly is—is that
you don’t really understand the consequences of that. Like, you can act it out more or
less depending on your social skill and the degree to which you’re been exposed to other
people, but that doesn’t mean that you’re conscious—that you can consciously articulate
all the rules that underlie that and if you think that maybe you can well fine. You know,
imagine a well-behaved four-year-old. You know, by four, you’ve got a lot of the social
rules down because by four you can play with others. If you’re ever going to be able
to you can already do it by the time you’re four. If you can’t by the time you’re
four you are in serious trouble because other kids won’t play with you and then they won’t
teach you how to act and then you stay immature and isolated and, you know, off in you’re
little corner dejected and bitter for the rest of your life. Now, you know, you might
that that’s a little rough but it’s not; that’s what the data indicate. So, anyways, what this means in part is, well,
we’ve been shaping how all of us behave as long as we’ve been social. Now you might
say “Well how long have we been social?” Well, crustaceans are social. So, lobsters,
for example, organize themselves into dominance hierarchies and they modify each others’
behavior. And that’s 400 million years. So, we’ve been social and living in groups
since our ancestors departed on the evolutionary timescale from the ancestors of lobsters.
So, that’s a very very very long time. There weren’t any trees around back then. So, social
life is older than trees. So, you can be sure that you’re adapted to it in a major way.
So, it’s built into your biology but then there’s the historic element of it too.
And it’s quite—we’re quite flexible from a cultural perspective. So, there’s an example: this guy named Robert
Sapolski, who I really like; he’s a great scientist. He went off to Africa to study
baboons. And baboons are not pleasant, generally speaking. They fight a lot; they’re bullies.
They bite. They can really bite. A baboon, like a predatory cat will think twice about
taking on a baboon. They’ve got major teeth and their temperament is not particularly
positive. Sapolski went and studied a group of baboons and they were engaged in typical
baboon behavior, grasping each other all the time and bullying each other. And they were
all stressed out because—Sapolski knew that because he measured their levels of stress
and testosterone and so forth. And so it was a pretty miserable baboon existence, but then
what happened was that the baboons went to feed somewhere that I don’t remember and
they—a lot of them contracted tuberculosis. And it turned out that almost all the hyper
aggressive males got tuberculosis and died and all that was left was the beta males,
roughly speaking. And then the whole baboon culture transformed so that it because much
more agreeable and much more cooperative. And then when aggressive baboons would move
into that territory, you know singly, on their own, then they’d get all placid and calm
too. So, it’s interesting because obviously baboons aren’t social to the degree we are
but it does indicate that even at the advanced primate level—you know their brains are
pretty big but not as big as ours—that cultural transmission of behavior expectation can be
quite powerful and it can transform quite rapidly. So, anyways we’ve been shaping
each others’ behavior for a very very very very long time. And a lot of that’s encoding
deeply in biology and in culture. Now biologically, and we’ll talk about this
a lot when we get to the biological section, one of the ways you can know how social you
are is by how hurt and ashamed you get when you make a serious social error. You know,
so if you’re at a party and you make a fool of yourself, you know, depending on your level
of neuroticism—which is also a Big Five Trait that indexes how sensitive you are to
negative emotion—you might obsess about what an idiot you are for the next three or
four months, or maybe even for the next five years. You know, people do not like social
exclusion. You know, and you have a little counter that’s more or less built into the
back of your brain that roughly, first of all it estimates how successful you are—there’s
an estimation that actually seems to occur right at birth where when part of your neuroticism
levels are set. And then that can be modified to some degree by learning. You know, and
if you’re a top baboon, well you’re going to experience less negative emotion and more
satisfaction than you are if you’re a bottom baboon and it’s exactly the same with people.
So, you know, we like to be climbing up dominance hierarchies and we like to be near the top
of dominance hierarchies. And if the little counter at the back of your brain notices
that, you know, you’re doing a good job of climbing towards the top of relevant dominance
hierarchy then its going to produce more serotonin and you’re not going to be in as much pain,
you’re not going to be as depressed, you’re not going to be as anxious, you’re not going
to be stressed, and so forth. So there’s a biological basis for our social being and
it’s extraordinarily important to us how we fit into social groups. Ok, so we’ve also been trying to figure
out what the hell we are, who we are, for thousands and thousands of years, partly as
a consequence of imitation, you know, because I can act you out and that’ll sort of help
me understand what you’re like; and partly as a consequence of articulated communication.
A lot of that’s storytelling. Now people have been telling stories for we have no idea
how long. I mean, if you go and visit peoples that have no written language and who have
been isolated from the rest of human society for let’s say tens of thousands of years—and
such people still exist—you find that they tell stories, they dance, they act each other
out, you know. So, we know certainly that the propensity to tell stories and to engage in
ritual behavior is far older than our ability to write. I suspect you can push it back at
least 50 000 years, although I suspect it’s a lot older than that. And so, what’s happened
is that across those timescales, we’ve started to tell stories about one another that represent
how we act. And then you might think well some of those stories are interesting and
memorable and some of them aren’t and then we tend to remember the interesting and memorable
ones and pass them on. And so you can also imagine human beings aggregating
together in groups of thousands and thousands of people over thousands and thousands of
years telling their stories to one another and hammering those stories into some sort
of mutually acceptable and comprehensible form. And so, for example one example of that
is that if you look at the creation stories—the creation story that say occurs in Genesis
in the Old Testament—it’s a member of a class of creation stories that characterized
Middle Eastern mythology and it seems to have arisen out of the organization of separate
Middle Eastern tribes thousands and thousands of years ago, each with their own traditions,
into a relatively homogenous story that characterized a large group of people’s central beliefs.
So, we have information about how we act from the representations that we’ve made of those
actions that we’ve passed forward and a lot of those take the form of myths—religious
stories. And, so, part of what we’re going to do is we’re going to begin the course
with two foundation-establishing themes. One has to do with the structure of mythological
representations and the second has to do with a set of rituals and processes and beliefs
that have been identified more or less worldwide that have to do with shamanic transformation. Now, the title of this course is “Personality
and its Transformations,” and the reason it’s titled that way is because you aren’t
just who you are. You’re also something that changes all the time. You’re more like
a river than like a rock. You’re constantly transforming. What’s the name of? The physicist
Erwin Schrödinger thought that people were dissipative structures. It’s a very interesting
idea. So, a dissipative structure is a structure that maintains its structural integrity while
its elements transform completely. So you know when you let the water out of a sink
you get a whirlpool, right? And the whirlpool is a fairly stable entity, but the water that
the whirlpool is made of is constantly changing. That’s a dissipative structure. Well, that’s
what you’re like. You maintain your form across time but your elements are constantly
transforming. And people are very very transformative creatures. You know, we can, unlike animals
really because animals are sort of what they are and that’s it. I mean they have some
capacity to learn but not much. Your typical beaver is acting more or less today like,
you know, his great great great great grandfather was acting 5000 years ago. There’s no real
accretion of culture, whereas with human being, we transform like mad. I mean we do that culturally,
things aren’t much—there’s so many things, for example, that are different now than there
were twenty years ago that it’s almost impossible to imagine. And then, so we transform on a cultural scale
quite rapidly but we also do that individually. I mean you guys have all just made the transition
to university, just roughly speaking. You know, I’m sure that you’re like you were
in some ways when you were at high school, but well hopefully you’re better than you
were in high school a whole bunch of ways as well. You should be more mature but your
personality may have transformed substantially. You know, and with any luck you’re not done
with your sequences of transformations. You know, that’s going to be something that
characterizes you for the rest of your life insofar as you’re a dynamic person, your
eyes are open, you pay attention, and you can learn. And so one of the things you might
say is that the most stable thing there is about you in personality is its capacity to
transform. And that’s really something that’s worth knowing, you know, because one of the
things I can tell you about the great myths of mankind—there’s lots of them and they
have different themes—but one of the most powerful themes is the way you get yourself
out of trouble is to transform your personality. Now you think, you kind of do that every time
you learn something, right, because you learn something and you’re a little different
than you were before. Hopefully different in a significant way and hopefully different
in a way that helps you solve problems that you couldn’t solve before. So, you could
say that one of the leitmotifs of being human is, “well if I encounter an obstacle I can
just transform and I can figure out some way of getting around it,” and that’s something
that makes us quite remarkable. Now, and one of the things that I could suggest to you,
and I think this is one of the largest ideas that exist—especially communicable in this
short of time—is that it’s much better to identify with your capacity to transform
than it is to identify with who you are now. And that can get you out of an awful lot of
trouble. I mean one of the things that characterizes ideologues, for example, or people who are
trapped in fixed belief systems is that they worship who they are now. And that’d be
all fine if everything was going a hundred percent for them but it’s seldom the case.
And so, unless you’re life is perfect—and that seems highly improbable—maybe if you
were someone else it would be better. And you know, that’s all you’ve got in some
sense because changing the world in some way that’s going to make you feel better about
it, well you know, you might be able to do that in some small way but the probability
that you could or should try to do that on a large scale is—it’s pretty low. So, in the mythological representation section
I’m going to talk to you about the fundamental elements of narrative. And the reason that
I think that that’s necessary is because there’s sort of two things that you have
to consider when you’re talking about people and one is: objectively, what is a person
like? The same way you might think about what a rat is like or maybe even what a rock is
like. So, that’s a scientific question in some sense. But then there’s another question
which—or maybe two questions: how do people act and how should they act? And maybe the
first one is a scientific question but the second one certainly isn’t. And the way
that we explore how people do act and how they should act has a lot more to do with
narrative than to do with science. And you know, you know this; all you have
to do is think about it. You know, you think about where do you get most of your information
about what people are like when you’re not actually just interacting with some people.
And the answer to that is quite straightforward: you read novels, you read literature, you
go see movies, you watch Game of Thrones, you binge on Game of Thrones you know, you
go watch Star Wars, you know maybe you line up for three days if you’re completely insane
to go see Star Wars. You know and you might ask, “Well, what in the world are you doing?”
Well, people are hungry for information about how people do act and how they should act.
And we’re absolutely compelled by narratives. And there’s a reason for that. Well, and
you kind of know what a narrative is and what one isn’t, right? You go to a movie and
you think, “Ah, the character development’s pretty good but, you know, as a story it was
terrible.” And then maybe you talk to your friends about why it was a terrible story
but the funny thing is you kind of know, right? It’s like, some things are stories and some
things aren’t and laying out what actually makes something a story, that’s very difficult.
But you still know it and you can have some consensus even. You know, if you look on IMDB or Rotten
Tomatoes, you know, people form large-group consensus about what constitutes an acceptable
narrative pretty damn quickly. And there seems to be at least a certain amount of agreement,
you know, barring individual differences. So, the mythological and the shamanic discussions
that we’re going to undertake have a couple of purposes and one is to provide you with
the foundations of a language that you can use to understand narrative. And that’s
going to prove very very useful because most of the clinical theories that we’re going
to talk about are really narrative based. And once you understand their mythological
substructure so to speak, it gives you a framework within which you can slot the theories. You
know, because one of the things that’s complicated about personality theory is that there are
a lot of personality theories. And you might think, “Well, how the hell can that be?”
Because if it’s a theory, theoretically there can only be one. Like, there’s only
one Theory of Relativity, roughly speaking, because it’s a little fuzzy around the edges
but people agree on the core elements. While with personality theory, there’s many many
different personality theories. And, so, then you might think, “Well, how are you supposed
to make any sense out of that?” And well there’s two ways. One is to put of all of
them into a more fundamental underlying structure, and that’s something that I’m really going
to strive to have you guys do while you’re taking this course. And the other is to actually
adopt a slightly different set of presuppositions about personality theories. And so you can say, “Well, there’s only
one Theory of Relativity,” but then you might say, “Well yeah, there’s only one
Theory of Relativity but then consider a toolbox.” So maybe some of you are relatively handy
and you have a toolbox. What’s in a toolbox? Hammers—or a hammer—saws, wrenches, pliers,
vise grips, etc. You know and you might say, “Well, they’re tools. Why do you need
all those tools?” And the answer is well, you can hammer a nail in with a wrench but
it’d be a lot better if you could use a hammer and you can probably bang a bolt off
with a hammer but it would be a lot better if you have a wrench. And, so, then you might
think, “Well, if you’re trying to do something complicated and sophisticated, why not have
a bunch of tools?” Now, we don’t generally think of scientific theories as tools, although
that is what they are. Above all else, they’re tools. And then when we’re dealing with something
as complicated as a human being, well we may need more than one tool to get to the bottom
of it. And it’s also the case, you know, that to say understand a human being, well
that’s a complicated thing. It’s like—because you might say, “Understand to what end?”
You don’t mean comprehensive, universal, omniscient understanding. Obviously, you mean,
“I want to know X about someone because I have some desire in relationship to my interactions
with them.” And so, there’s all sorts of tools that can facilitate that. So what
I would say is that, you know, Freud’s a microscope and Jung is a telescope; that’s
one way of thinking about it. I mean there’s no particular reason I associated either of
those with those two tools, but the point is is that if paid careful attention to personality
theories they can expand your capacity to represent yourself in ways that’s extremely
useful. Because, you know, you should understand who you are and why, and what implications
that has for you. Because you’re a transformable creature but you also have a fairly stable
underlying substructure, right? Otherwise you’d just melt like an octopus. So, you’re
this weird dynamic combination of relatively permanent structure and then embedded capacity
to transform. You have a nature and so understanding your nature is extraordinarily worthwhile.
And so hopefully what we’re going to do during this course is give you a whole bunch
of tools to understand yourself and other people with. Tools that will really be useful;
things you can use day to day to understand yourselves and your families and so on and
to improve your future—with any luck. And then also cover the elements of you that are
stable, most of which I would say have been discovered—at least in the more objective
sense—by biological psychologists. So, mostly animal researchers peculiarly enough. Okay, so mythological representations—we’re
going to take a trip back through time. We’re going to look at archaic and ancient stories
of mankind told by members of our species to each other. And I’m going to concentrate
on stories that have lasted—we don’t know how long. You know, we have stories that in
the written form are 4000 years old, but all the evidence suggests that those stories are
based on traditions that go back far far beyond that; at least 50 000 years—and maybe way
before that. So we’ll take a look at those and that will give us a foundation that we
can use to build on. And then we’re going to look at shamanic rituals and descriptions
to get some sense of the archetype of transformation, which sort of means, well, what is it that
you have to undergo when you’re changing and what are you likely to experience when
that happens? Now I can give you a bit of a preview: um, it’s not always the case—maybe
it’s seldom the case—that if you learn something important that it’s pleasant.
You know, this happens to people all the time. So maybe, I don’t know, maybe you had a
recent relationship that went seriously sour. And you know maybe it was because you were
going out with a jerk or maybe it’s because you’re just not very sophisticated. And
no doubt you’re trying to figure out which of those happens to be true while you’re,
you know, considering the relationship. But generally what happens to people when they’re
moving towards something and the bottom falls out, because something occurs that they didn’t
understand and couldn’t predict, maybe in their own behavior—maybe you had an affair
while you were in your relationship and you didn’t expect that—well, what happens
is your current model of yourself, and perhaps even of the world, is demonstrated as insufficient.
And that rattles you up badly. And then you’re rattled up for some good length of time—not
very motivated, somewhat depressed, fairly anxious, you sort of fell apart, you don’t
know which way is up. And then maybe if you’re lucky you think about it and talk about it
and put yourself back together. And when you come out the other side you’re a little
smarter and a little more together than you were to begin with. Now, if you’re unlucky, you just stay in
the little pit for—people can stay in the little pit for a very very long time and that’s
not so good. And so, you know, the process of transforming is actually quite dangerous
because it doesn’t necessarily have to be completed in a successful manner. But it does
have a pattern and the pattern usually is you think you know what you’re doing and
then something happens to demonstrate that you actually don’t know what you’re doing.
And that puts you in a spin. And then through careful analysis and support and discussion—and
other processes that we don’t really understand very well—you come to incorporate the anomalous
knowledge that knocked you on your back, you reconstruct your personality and your representations
of the world, and then you move ahead, hopefully, more than you were before. But it’s an interesting
thing to know, you know. One of the things Nietzsche said, again was that you could—you
could tell the character of a human being by how much truth they’re willing to tolerate.
Now that’s an interesting phrase, eh, because you generally think of people, because they’re
optimistic, they generally think of truth as something positive; obviously it’s better
to know the truth. It’s like, no, if you pull the wool over your eyes as a general
rule learning the truth is not a pleasant experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean
that it’s something—not something you should do, but the idea that the path to enlightenment
is blissful: that’s not a very smart idea. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. So, the shamanic rituals basically manifest
in an archetypal way. So, one of the things you see happening with the typical—the shaman,
by the way shamanism is a worldwide phenomena and it seems to be associated with primordial
or archaic psychology of transformation. It’s often drug-aided. And generally what happens
is that the shamanic transformation is accompanied by the descent into something approximating
psychological death and then a rebuilding and a rebirth that puts the person out on
the other side. It’s like an initiation ritual and that’s another way of thinking
about it. Or you might think about it as the depressing that possessed you during your
first semester of university which either knocked you out of the university altogether—because
that happens to a lot of people—or which you recovered from and finally became a university
student, although perhaps that wasn’t a particularly pleasant transition. You know,
we’ve done some testing with U of T students and it’s interesting to note that about
a third of you meet criteria for clinical depression your first year here. Now what
that indicates to me is that the criteria for clinical depression are a little on the
sensitive side, but regardless—because if a third of people meet the criteria you think,
“Yeah, well that’s a little sensitive.” But by the same token, you know, it’s not
an easy adjustment and the old you has die. And generally that’s not very pleasant.
So, and it’s a good way to think about the impediments to learning because you hardly
ever learn something without having part of you die first. And that’s part of the reason
that people are rather resistant to learning anything new that’s important. Okay, well so you’ve got that. Now, after
that we’re going to talk about Piaget. And Piaget isn’t necessarily known as a personality
psychologist but that’s okay. Piaget published a very—he was a developmental psychologist,
maybe the greatest developmental psychologist. He published a very large number of books—many
of which haven’t even been translated yet, some of which haven’t even been published
yet. So, Piaget thought a lot of things about a lot of things. And he’s generally known
for his stage theory of developmental but he really wasn’t all that into that stage
theory. It just seemed to be the part of his theory that I would say rather dimwitted Western
intellectuals could grasp onto most easily and so that’s generally what you hear about.
But Piaget was a very very sophisticated thinker. And one of the things he was interested in
was, well he was interested in how the child in some sense boots itself up. That’s a
reasonable way of thinking about it, because you know when you turn on a computer, what
happens is a certain number of primitive functions—primitive fundamental functions—come online first.
And then those functions enable more complex functions to emerge. And then those functions
enable more complex functions to emerge. And soon there your computer is, waiting for you.
And human beings are kind of like that. So when we’re first born—we’re very primitive
when we’re first born. We’re very immature; that’s a better way of thinking about it.
We’re not precisely primitive; we still have very large brains and there are more
connections in those brains at birth than there will be for the rest of your life, which
is quite interesting. You actually die into your personality. Because what happens isn’t
so much that you make new connections; it’s that a whole bunch of the ones you already
have that you don’t use disappear. So that’s pretty peculiar. Anyways, when you’re first born there’s
not a lot to you in terms of capacity to engage with the world. Your moth is pretty wired
up, your lips and your tongue—which is a good thing because you have to breastfeed
and that’s actually not very simple. You have to have a clue to do that and it’s
the first complex social interaction that you’re likely to engage in. So, you—you’re
born with a bit of a priori sophisticated wiring already in place, but the rest of you,
man, it’s not there much at all. You can’t control your arms; you know if you watch a
baby in a crib—a young baby—and it’s not swaddled up, you know their arms sort
of float around in space and so do their legs. And now and then they might hit themselves
and generally that seems to come as quite a shock to the baby. It’s not—its peripheral
nervous system, the peripheral elements of its central nervous system are not well developed
at birth. And so it’s almost as if the baby has to discover its limbs—it sort of expands
from the middle outwards—it has to discover its limbs and then start to figure out what
to do with them. And so what Piaget attempted to do was to
lay out the processes by which a child unfolded into the world. Now, some of—there’s a
biological basis to that because you come into the world at birth with a set of reflexes
at hand. And those reflexes are enough to get you started. And so Piaget—here’s
one way of trying to understand Piaget. I like it quite a bit. It’s a bit of an oversimplification
but it’ll do. There’s lots of different ways of thinking about what the world is made
of. Now, you know, if you’re classically—if you’re a classical scientist—you tend
to think that the world’s made out of matter. You know and then matter is made out of atoms
and then atoms are made of—god only knows what atoms are made out of, right, because
by the time you get under atoms you just have no idea what’s going on down there. But,
you know, we generally don’t think about that too much and we sort of assume Newtonian
reality and that everything is made out of hard little particles like dust and that’s
the scientific model. But there’s other ways of looking at the
world that are not only equally valid but equally necessary and equally powerful. One
of them is that you can look at the world as a matrix of information. You know, and
so information generally has significance and meaning—at least insofar as information
is conceptualized by human beings. And so, for example, if you’re ten years old and
you’re crawling around on the floor and the dog has a ball and you grab it and the
dog nips you, that’s informative. And so, what Piaget claims is that children come into
the world with an information-seeking structure and that as they interact with the world phenomena
emerge that they can model with their bodies. So, for example, if I’m going to drink this
then I have to model it with my hand before I can do so. And so it turns out, for example,
when if this thing’s sitting here—especially if I’m thirsty—and I look at it my eyes
tell my hands to get ready to grab it. And so when you say you understand something what
you mean is that—part of what you mean—is that when you perceive it, it maps itself
onto your body. And so this happens at pretty low levels of your nervous system. So, for example, there are people who are
blind. They say they’re blind; they can’t see anything. But if you move your hands up
like this and ask them to guess which hand you’re lifting they can do it with almost
a hundred percent accuracy. And you think, “Well how the hell can that possibly be?
They’re blind!” Well, the reason that happens is because your eyes are detecting
patterns in the world, some of those patterns you perceive as conscious reality, but other
patterns are just mapped onto your spine or onto your emotional system. Doesn’t—you
don’t need the perception of the object in order to have that activated. Because,
you know, you probably think, “There’s the world,” you see it, you think about
it, you evaluate it, and you act. It’s like, that isn’t how it works. It’s very seldomly
how it works. Partly because it’s just too damn slow. You know, if you had to think about
everything you’d be running over pedestrians nonstop, right? You have to be able to react
very very quickly and part of the way you do that is by having your sensory systems
map right onto your motor output systems. So, Piaget. Well, for Piaget, part of the way
that the personality emerges out of the doldrums of infancy is that the child encounters the
world and incorporates the information that they gather as a consequence of bumping up
against it. And, then, they build themselves in some sense from their bodies and the ability—the
abilities that they’re practicing with their bodies like the gripping mechanism and the
pointing mechanism and the scratching mechanism and all those things that they can build—they
build those up to the point where the can start to use abstractions. And so the baby
sort of spirals out of nowhere using its exploratory capacity, absorbing information from the world,
and creates its personality that way. It’s a lovely model and we’ll cover that in some
detail. The depth psychologists. I concentrate primarily
on Jung and Freud. And you know if you take a personality course, generally you’ll be
introduced to Freud first and then you’ll be introduced to Jung and maybe Adler and
some of the neo-Freudians, more or less as afterthoughts to Freud. But I don’t really
think that’s appropriate. First of all, I think you can make a strong case that Jung
was—that the utility of Jung’s theory is particularly evident when you’re talking
about radical similarities between people. So, Jung was very biologically orientated.
In some ways he was way ahead of biological psychiatrists and psychologists because when
Jung was beginning to formulate his theories, in the West—in North America anyways and
in the United States—most of the people who were studying human beings were behaviorists.
And behaviorists basically presume that you were a blank slate at birth and that you learned
how to do everything that you know how to do. Well, that’s not true at all. First of all, you can’t learn everything
that you know how to do because you have to know something to start the whole process
off, and second, you know, you don’t have to learn really to understand what a dog’s
growl means. You know it’s kind of wired into you. And you really don’t have to learn
to be afraid of the dark, man. You’ve got that down by the time you’re about three.
You know, so there’s lots of things that are built right into people and what exactly
that means we’re not sure about. I mean it does look, for example, like snake phobia
is innate and even if the actual phobia isn’t innate—and it probably is—you
can learn to be phobic of snakes in no time flat, whereas like trying to become phobic
of pistols is very very difficult. Now, Jung was very interested in the—I think
what the best way to think about it is the substrata of human cognition. You know, because
human beings are a particular type of thing. It’s not like our souls are disconnected
from our bodies and that our knowledge is somehow appropriate or universal in some way
that would make sense if we didn’t have bodies. We’re not like that at all. We’re
in our bodies. Our brains are adapted to our bodies. Our minds are adapted to our bodies
and so is our knowledge. And that means that our cognitive abilities—our theories of
the world—have biological substructures and those are presuppositions in some sense
for our knowledge that we don’t have to learn. So, for example, you don’t really
have to learn that being punched hurts; you just discover that. You don’t really have
to learn what a smile means. You don’t really have to learn what anger means. You know,
you’ll experience it. So it’s right in you. You watch little kids, little babies—when
they’re crying they’re often angry. So, for example, by nine months of age a baby
can more or less identify its mother. So, someone walks into the baby’s room and takes a look
at the baby and it’s not the baby’s mother and the baby starts crying and you think,
“Oh, poor baby.” It’s like, fair enough, that baby is not sad; that baby is angry.
And you can tell if you look at the baby because it’s turning all red and that’s what people
do when they cry when they’re angry. And so it’s a good thing to know when you’re
arguing with someone and they get upset and maybe they start to cry. You think, “Oh,
the poor person,” but then if you look you’ll see that they’re all red. And that means
that they’d like to strangle you but their, you know, their social niceties is hopefully
preventing them. So, and that can certainly change your attitude towards whether or not
you should be feeling sorry for them when they hurt their feelings. So, there’s all sorts of things that are
universal about human beings and Jung was very very interested in what those universals
are and how they played out in patterns of behavior. So, you can imagine—you can imagine
that you have an instinct, say like anger. And thinking about it that way, it’s like
a cross-section: that’s person’s angry. You know, and you can imagine the facial configuration
that would go along with that. But in a more sophisticated way if you wanted to represent
anger maybe you’d represent it like a drama—like a story. You know, and that’s actually what
you want to know if someone gets angry, right? “What happened?” Well, imagine if you
took a thousand stories about angry people and you boiled them all into one story so
that everything that was common about all the stories about anger were encapsulated
in a single story. Well, that would be the archetypal story of anger. And everyone would
recognize it because it’s like anger represented like a movie in some sense in it’s purest
form. Well that’s an archetype and that’s the sort of thing that Jung was extraordinarily
interested in—understanding and documenting. And it’s a tremendous amount of fun. So
one of the things we’ll do is I’m going to show you some movies—probably the Lion
King, at least parts of it—and I’m going to show you how the archetypal structure manifests
itself. And that’s really worth knowing. It’s kind of a pain because then from now
on you’ll go to movies and you’ll think, “Oh well, that’s that archetypal structure,”
and “That’s what that symbol means,” and you’ll really be annoying to your friends.
But it’s very entertaining and it’s very illuminating. And partly because what’s
really cool about these archetypal story structures is not only do they tell you who they are
but they tell you in some sense who you should be. Now, that’s cool, because one of the things
that modern people have a real problem with is trying to understand whether or not life
has any meaning, you know. We look at the world from a scientific perspective and we
say, “Well, it appears that all this is, you know, without meaning; it doesn’t mean
anything with any cosmic sense.” It’s a pretty dopey conclusion as far as I’m
concerned because the originators of the scientific method excluded subjective meaning from the
doctrine at the outset. So, you know, if you look at the world scientifically and you say,
“Well, it’s without subjective meaning,” it’s like, “Well, yeah, obviously,” because
science was set up so that all the subjective meaning would be stripped away from the phenomena.
So, you know, it’s not something to be really shocked about afterwards and it also doesn’t
mean that there’s no such thing as subjective meaning. It just means that it’s very difficult
to get a grip on from a purely scientific perspective. And one of the lovely things about archetypal
stories is they tell you in a way that’s universally believable who you are. And that’s
very cool. And, you know, because you think—you learn this in university too and it just tears
me up, you know. You learn implicitly or explicitly in almost all of the fields of study that
you’re going to undertake—especially on the humanities end—that morality is relative
and that there’s no ultimate meaning, which is a really rotten thing to be teaching people
of your age. You know, because you’re too damn young to be nihilistic. You know, you
can be nihilistic when you’re 85—you’re all done by then—but to be nihilistic now
that’s a bloody catastrophe. You know, and it’s completely pointless because the notion
of—the notion that things are meaningless in some ultimate sense: it’s an extraordinarily
primitive philosophical theory. And it does not serve people well. It makes them sick.
And so one of the things that you might consider is that if your stupid theory makes you sick
maybe there’s something wrong with it. It might be a criteria for the utility—or perhaps
even the truth of the theory, you know. Depends on how you think about these things. You know,
you might say, “Well, if a truth makes you sick that doesn’t mean it’s any less of
a truth.” Well, maybe. Maybe it really does mean that it’s much much less of a truth.
It depends to some degree what you mean by truth. So, anyways, Jung’s very very very very useful
for that. He’s a terrifying thinker. Really, like I read—when I was about 23 or 24 I
spent two years and I read pretty much about everything Jung wrote; it’s about twenty-three
volumes. And it just blew me into bits. I had no idea what the hell was going on—my
dreams changed. Really, it was really rough. I was reading Nietzsche at the same time and
he’s just about as bad. Like Nietzsche said he philosophized with a hammer. You know,
and that’s great unless he’s taking a hammer to your skull and that’s not nearly
so pleasant. So, you know, Jung—he’s a completely different sort of creature and
I think that’s part of the reason that you never really learn about him in university.
You know, if you don’t understand him he looks weird, and if you do understand him
a little bit he’s terrifying and you’re bloody well going to stop. You’ll think,
“Ah, no that’s okay. I don’t—I don’t really need to know that.” So, Freud. Freud’s a nice whipping boy for
psychologists, which I also think is pretty pathetic because ungrateful to begin with.
You know, Freud was really the person who formalized the idea of the unconscious. You
know, and everyone takes that for granted, that there’s a cognitive unconscious. That’s
what the psychologists discovered in what, the 1980’s. “There’s a cognitive unconscious.”
It’s like, “Yeah, good work guys. They’d figured that out back in 1910.” You know,
but you don’t see credit being given to Freud for making that sort of discovery if
you look at experimental psychology, which I think—like I said—I think that’s really
ungrateful. Freud’s a strange guy. And, you know, you
can take issue with—especially the details of his theory. You know, like the Oedipal
complex, for example, or penis envy, those sorts of things. It’s like, you know, in
some ways they seem laughably anachronistic, but you know sometimes someone can be wrong
in the details and right in the overall conception. You know, because theories are multilayered
things, right? So, sometimes I read a student essay, you know, and the sentences are just
awful. This person, like God only knows where they learned to write—probably in a high
school somewhere. And, you know, it’s incomprehensible, but if you read the whole thing you think,
“Man, there’s an idea in here.” You know, the person is smarter than their ability
to write. And so then you can write—you can say, “Look, you can’t write worth
a damn but, you know, you’re pretty smart and you’ve got some ideas in here that if
you could articulate might be of really high quality.” So, you can be wrong in the details
and right in the overall picture and Freud was like that all the time. And Freud was also unbeatable in relationship
to familial pathology. So, from Freud’s perspective, the fundamental task of the emerging
human being was to extricate themselves from their family. Now, you might think, “Well
why is that such a problem?” Well, here’s a couple of reasons. Well, first, your parents
take care of you so like maybe you don’t want to dispense with that too early, especially
if they really really take care of you. And that’s the Oedipal situation from the Freudian
perspective. It’s like, the Oedipal’s situation arises when you have a parent—or
two parents—who do so much for you that you’re no longer able to do anything for
yourself. And that is not a good situation; it’s extraordinarily pathological. And there
is nobody like Freud who lays out the details of that pathology. And we’re going to watch
a movie, “Crumb” it’s called, which is a very disturbing movie—which I suppose
is a trigger warning for those of you who think you need trigger warnings. It’s a
very very distressing documentary but it will show you Freudian psychopathology like you’ve
never seen it—unless you happen to live in a thoroughly Oedipal family. Alright. So, look, I didn’t get through the
whole outline. I’ll tell you very briefly what you’re going to be required to do and
then we’ll continue this is the next lecture. So, there’s three exams: two midterms and
a final. They’re multiple choice. Okay, I’ll post some of the questions before the
exam so that you know what you’re getting into. I don’t think they’re particularly
difficult; some of you will beg to differ. There’s pressure on us this year to curve
the grades so beware. I may have to do that okay just—and you need to know that. You
have to write an essay: 750 words. That’s not a very long essay but that makes it actually
more difficult. The sign-up for the topics of the essay are on the website. You can just
go there and sign up. There’s twenty different topics and there’s fifteen slots for each
topic so I would recommend that you do that quite quickly. You have to do a personality
self-analysis: 7.5 percent of your grade. The link to that is online too. You can get
started on that whenever you want. Your TA—one of them—that’s Christine
Brophy; she’s over there in the corner patiently waiting for me to introduce her. She has office
hours; they’re posted online. You can sign up for her office hours online. You can also
sign up for my office hours online. So, well that’s halfway through what the course is
going to be about. So, we’ll see you on Thursday. |
I talked a little bit last time about what
we were going to cover but we didn’t get quite through it so I’m going to finish
that. For those of you who weren’t here last time you can watch the lecture because
it’s online. So, we stopped at the depth psychologists, really, and those are the psychoanalysts.
And psychoanalysts are people who are concerned with—well, for a psychoanalyst, roughly speaking,
you’re a collection of loosely integrated spirits. That’s one way of thinking about
it—or sub personalities. You’re not a unity. And those subpersonalities have their
basis in, well in all sorts of things. They might have their basis in past especially
traumatic experience or in patterns of socialization that characterized your family, but they might
also have their basis in fundamental biological motivational systems. So, for example, a psychoanalyst
would contextualize anger, or perhaps sexual attraction, as a subpersonality. And the reason
for that is that—well you know what it’s like when you get angry. You get angry at
someone you love and you know, first of all, you know, and it’s some level you’re wishing
harm. Now, that might only be that you want to win the argument and you want them to be
nicely crushed while you do it, but so there’s a desire that comes along with the anger.
But there’s a lot of other things that happen too. So, for example, if someone’s annoying
you, even if you love them, the probability that at that moment you’re going to be able
to easily access all the memories you have about how annoying they are and have difficult
time accessing the memories about how wonderful they’ve been to you is quite high. You know
and you know that because sometimes you get angry with someone and you have an argument
with them and you sort of clue in later, you snap out of your more or less possessed state
and you think, “Yeah, well you know, I really wasn’t taking the context into mind and
I was kind of harsh.” So, well so and so then you think, “Well, who’s in control.”
And that’s the question the psychoanalysts are really interested in and their answer
is it’s not generally you. And so it’s very terrifying reading in some
sense because, you know, people like to think of themselves as masters of their own house
so to speak and it’s just, it’s only vaguely true. And, you know, people—you know that
too because you make maybe New Year’s Eve—ah, what do you call those?—resolutions. How
you’re going to be a better person. I think the most common ones is man, you’re going
to hit the gym three times a week. It’s like, “No, you’re not actually!” And
so very few people do and that’s partly because, well it’s hard and so you don’t
want to do hard things. And the reason for that is because they’re hard, so it doesn’t
take much explanation. But it’s also because you can’t just tell yourself what to do.
And that’s annoying too because life would be a lot easier if you could just say, “Okay,
well you know, sit down, study for two hours, don’t watch cats on YouTube—or whatever
it is that you’re watching.” And no, no, no, that isn’t what happens. You sit there
and you study for a while and then, you know, you’re thinking about cats and the next
thing you know you’re watching haunted mansions in London or some damn thing. You know, so
and it’s a scary idea in some sense because if you think well, if you’re not really
master of your own house, you know if you don’t know yourself under full voluntary
control—and you certainly don’t—then what does? And you know Freud is interesting in that
regard because he really talked about the motive powerful of fundamental motivational
systems. Mostly for Freud it was aggression and sexuality. And you know those are—those
are big motivators; let’s make no mistake about it. And so he thought of you as—that
the conscious part of your personality maybe as the—it’s like the caption of a ship
with a very unruly crew. It’s a nice metaphor because of course the ship’s on the ocean
and the oceans can be very stormy. And so you can only sort of plot your course and
you have to work with what’s thrown at you. And then the unruly crew is—well, it’s
all your drives. Drives is the wrong way of thinking about it. I like the psychoanalytic
notion of subpersonality because a subpersonality has a viewpoint, there’s things it wants,
and it plans. So it’s a living entity; it’s not some dead cognitive system, you know.
So Freud was interested in some sense more about, I would say, the biological underpinnings
of the subpersonalities, you know. Because he was quite biologically oriented and he
realized that sexuality and aggression were very fundamental subpersonalities. And then there’s Jung and Jung is much more
terrifying than Freud, which is really saying a lot because Freud’s quite terrifying.
But Jung, he’s just terrifying beyond belief. And, you know, for Jung the subpersonalities
that make you up are thousands and thousands of years old. They’re cultural constructions
that are thousands and thousands of years old and they have you in their grip. So, for
Jung, for example, one of the things he said and I don’t remember where it was—I love
this phrasing, it’s so true. And you can think about this for like five years and you
can still think about it after that. One of the things that Jung said was that people
don’t have ideas; ideas have people. And that’s really something to think about because,
you know, just think about your own situation. So no doubt you have political views and you
think, “I have political views.” It’s like, “Well, no you don’t,” because
you share them with a lot of other people. So, they’re certainly not yours. And not
only that, they’ve had a very lengthy historical development far before you ever showed up.
You know, so they’re rooted—they’re rooted right at the depths of your culture,
but then of course they’ve been elaborated by one philosopher or another extensively
over the last two or three hundred years and there’s this whole system of thought and
poof! It inhabits you brain and then you think, “Well I’ve got political views.” It’s
like, “No. The political views have you.” And that’s a very salutary thought because
it’s one of the ways to stop yourself from being possessed. Because people get possessed
all the time by ideas, right? That’s what happened in Nazi Germany; that’s what happened
in the Soviet Union. It happens everywhere all the time. And you might think, “Well,
possessed is a little strong,” but no it’s not actually. It’s a very nice—it’s
a metaphor obviously, but it’s the right kind of metaphor because a body of ideas like
political ideas, they’re a living thing, you know. They’re not some dead, dusty words
on a bookshelf somewhere; they’re an integral part of a dynamic society. And the motive
force those ideas have motivates you. You’re in their grip. And so, you can tell when you’re
talking to someone who’s completely possessed by an idea system or an ideological system
because they’ll just bore you to death unless you happen to belief exactly the same thing.
So, they’ll spout out a few of their fundamental belief axioms and then you can identify which
system they’re part of. And then they just speak in clichés from that point onward and
you can predict everything they’re going to say if you know the axioms of the system.
So, it’s very—it’s very non-authentic speech and that would be a way that say someone
like Rogers or Abraham Maslow, who were humanists of the 1960’s, might talk about it. Because
the person isn’t speaking from the depths of their own experience or from even their
embodied knowledge. You know, they’re just mouthpieces for abstract ideas. And so it’s very frightening to realize
the extent to which you can be the mouthpiece for abstract ideas, you know. And it’s actually
one of the dangers of becoming educated, especially in a mass system like the university system,
because a lot of what happens when you come to university is that you’re fed a set of
predigested ideas—I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it, you know. And it’s
very easy for you to think well that those are now you’re ideas; they’re not. They’re
not. Lots of ideas you have to earn and if it’s a great idea then you really have to
earn it. Because why should you be able to come along and like pluck up a great idea?
That’s not how things work. You have to earn things that are valuable. So anyways, the depth psychologists, man they’re
so good at that. It’s lovely to read them. And the problem too is with a lot of people
we’re going to talk about it’s very difficult to summarize their work. You know, because
often the devil’s in the details. So, you know, you might look at someone like Piaget
is a good example—the constructivist that we talked about briefly. Man, the guy wrote
dozens of books; you can’t just summarize those suckers. It’s not one coherent theory
that you can boil down to, you know, ten axioms and then you can read it while you’re flying
from Toronto to Montreal and poof you’re a Piagetian psychologist. Like, it doesn’t
work like that. The people who formulated these theories were extremely intelligent
and they were often great writers. And so a lot of the knowledge is actually in the
writing itself and not in what you can extract out from the gist, you know. And most of the
theorists: Freud—Jung it’s harder—but Freud, Rogers—people like that. You can
extract out the gist of their theories and then you can—ah, what would you say?—you
can stereotype it or you can caricature it and then you can point out how your caricature
is absurd and you can feel like you’re even smarter than Freud. And, you know, you’re
not. So, it’s not a good idea. And so these people should also be approached with respect
because man they have so much to tell you. It’s so useful. Okay, so we talked about the depth psychologists,
we talked about the constructivists; we didn’t talk about the humanists and the existentialists
and the phenomenologists. It’s a mouthful of words, you know, so let’s put a little
bit of foundation under those. So, if you’re a humanist—to be a humanist means really
to be a creature of the enlightenment. And a humanist thought in some sense—at least
this is what the humanists think—they think of it as post-religious. You know and they
think of humanistic thought as putting the value of the human being at the center of
the cosmos in some sense, valuing the person as they are, and then also valuing the person
that they could be and promoting the pathways of development that would allow people to
become what they could be as creatures that are valuable in their own right. So, a humanist,
for example, would be very skeptical of claims, so let’s say standard Christian claims—and
I use that example because the realm of ideas that these thinkers emerged out of was almost
always Judeo-Christian. And, so, you know, the roots of their thinking are in those systems
and you can’t understand their thinking without understanding that. So, part of humanism
was a rebellion against the idea that life on earth so to speak was of limited value
because anything of any importance was going to happen in the afterlife after you die.
So, it’s like, “No, it’s here and now. It’s right now that matters. And you know,
life in the present is what’s important, and you don’t need some kind of afterlife
or some kind of belief in a transcendent reality in order to find value right here and now.”
So you know, fine. There’s a lot of good things about that idea. You know and the whole idea that you can improve
yourself in some sense is a humanistic idea. And most of you—I mean how many of you believe
that can improve yourself? So, is there anybody who doesn’t believe that that’s willing
to admit it? So, usually people only don’t believe that if they’re very depressed or
hopeless. But it’s not self-evident, you know, I mean and in many cultures—you could
think of medieval culture, for example, in Europe where you know you were sort of stuck
in your position—there was no real idea of self-improvement. You could try not to
sin but you weren’t going to get like radically better in some way; you were just who you
were and that was that. But that’s not the case with the humanists. Now, existentialists, they’re kind of a
different kettle of fish. So, you know, when Freud talks about psychopathology—because
a lot of personality is about pathology, right, how personalities can go wrong—Freud kind
of thinks of the normal person, roughly speaking, as healthy in their normality, but perhaps
transformed into a pathological version of themselves by some sort of past trauma. And
that might often be an abusive childhood, you know, or maybe a sexually abusive childhood
because, you know, Freud talked a lot about that and it happens fairly frequently. So
for Freud, all things considered, if you weren’t healthy there was a reason for it. You know,
something terrible has happened to you and you needed to come to terms with that terrible
thing, however you might do that, and put yourself back together and then you could
wander along being a healthy person. But the existentialists, that’s not how they think
at all. They think the standard human being is pathological. And the reason they think
that is because they think that self-conscious existence, so life—the life of a creature
who knows it’s bounded in time and space, right? Knows it’s vulnerable to disease
and illness and death and the loss of things that they love. And the disintegration of
all things in some sense is—that’s enough of a problem to give you problems without
having to have been abused by it. And so the existentialists view life itself as a problem
of sufficient magnitude that it can destabilize you mentally merely be being aware of it. And, so, they also believe that often what people
do as a consequence of that is flee from their own awareness. You know, so how do you deal
with the fact that life is suffering? Well, you don’t think about it. Well, for an existentialist,
that’s not a very good answer. And I would also say, generally speaking, for clinical
psychologists that’s also not a very good answer because the literature suggests pretty
damn strongly that the harder you run from something that you’re afraid of the larger
it becomes and the faster is chases you. So avoidance of–avoidance is generally a very
bad strategy. Now it’s not always the case because sometimes you can’t do anything
about something, really you can’t. Well, there’s not a lot of sense spending a lot
of time planning and struggling against it, you know. And sometimes people are in generally
genuinely hopeless situations but often not. So, I really like the existentialists, man.
I think their—well all the people that we’re going to talk about—their thinking is extraordinarily
valuable. You know, it helps situate you in your own life. It helps clarify the nature
of your relationship to other people in the world. It helps you lay out what your future
could be if you were the creature that could be. It’s really wonderful. Phenomenologists: they’re a tricky bunch.
The fundamental phenomenologist was Martin Heidegger, who was also somewhat tangled up
with the Nazis, you know, which was clearly not a good thing. And, you know, people debate
about whether or not you can separate his philosophy from what tangled him up from the
Nazis and I think you can. You know, so anyways, Heidegger wanted to take a fresh look at the
nature of reality. And, so, Heidegger’s idea was we made a fundamental philosophical error
way back when we were Greek—Ancient Greek roughly speaking—and that we started concentrating
on the wrong elements of—he doesn’t really call it reality; he calls it being. So a phenomenologist
is someone who’s concerned with being. And you might think, “Well what’s the difference
between being and reality?” And the answer to that is it depends on how you define being
and it depends on how you define reality. So, Heidegger’s observation was that, for
modern people roughly speaking, reality was sort of a deanimated material objective substrata.
It’s dead in its essence, roughly speaking, and the things that are most real are precisely
those things. You could think about that as objective reality for all intensive purposes.
But what Heidegger tried to point out is it’s a choice in some sense, because your knowledge
is finite, because you’re fundamentally ignorant about most things, you have to decide
that certain things are true and then act from that point. And, you know, Heidegger’s
point was: there’s a lot of things that you can decide about at the very fundamental
level of axiom. And so one of the things you can decide, for example, is whether or not
the objective world is what’s more real or whether or not your lived experience is
what’s more real. Now, you might think, “Well what’s the
distinction there?” And I would say the distinction is probably something like watching
someone in pain on a video and being in pain yourself. You know, so pain’s a good example
of an element of being because it’s obviously—you experience it with your own…it’s hard
to talk about just because he uses different terminology. Pain is an element of your being.
And it’s not something—the pain itself is not something that you can even conceptualize
in objective terms. Like you can measure it. You know, maybe your heart rate goes up when
you’re in pain or something like that. Or your facial expressions change. You know,
so you can index it but the indexes are not the phenomena; that’s hence phenomenology,
right? And so phenomenologists have built up an entire system of thinking predicated
on the initial axiom that the best way to approach life is to assume that being is the
fundamental reality rather than the objective as the fundamental level. And then you might think, “Well, why do
people bother with that sort of thing?” And part of it is: one of the—this is an
existentialist claim—one of the consequences of developing the objective theory of existence
was obviously all the amazing technology we have around us and, you know, great, thank
God for that. Otherwise we’d be sitting outside freezing. But one of the consequences
of that is once people established objective reality and then defined it as ultimately
real, terrible questions of the meaning of life arose. You know, if the world—the universe—is
made out of nothing but dead matter, it’s eternally existing, we’re nothing but a
candle flash in the wind, the idea creeps into your mind that perhaps all the damn suffering
isn’t worth it. Or to put it another way, you know, does your life really have any real
meaning or is that just an illusion. Well, Heidegger would say the reason that you have
that problem is because you’re approaching the entire problem wrong. Clearly, things have
meaning; they just don’t if you make the hypothesis that what’s objective is ultimately
real and everything else is merely a secondary consequence of that. So, anyways, it’s complicated.
It takes a while to get your head around it. The humanists and the existentialists and
to some degree the phenomenologists: they all came out of—there was a variety of sources
for their thought and I would say one of them is the clash between religion and science
or between value and objective truth. And they’re trying to rectify the division.
And Piaget himself was trying to do some of that as well. So was Jung I guess. And the
other thing is a lot of the existentialist and humanist work was post-World War II and
so, you know, after World War II happened with its immense catastrophes, of course people
who were thinking about human nature were very interested in why such a thing could
happen. And existentialism, at least as a psychological school arose in part as a reaction
to the horrors of World War II. It’s a very serious branch of psychology and it mostly
characterized thinking in the 1950’s before the hippies came along and, you know, made
everything sweetness and light, so—which is more where Rogers and Maslow fit. So, we’re going to talk about them a fair
bit—the three different categories. It’s kind of a strange approach in some sense that
this class takes because I talked to you about some psychologists in that period but the
other people I talked to you mostly about, they’re not technically psychologists—depends
on what you mean by psychologist after all. I talk a lot about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
and also a lot about a Russian literary figure, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote a book called
“The Gulag Archipelago” which was one of the—there was a few cataclysmic events that
brought the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union to a halt. And you can argue about what
they were but one of them for sure was Solzhenitsyn’s publication of “The Gulag Archipelago”
which is a 2700 word book—2700 page book, got to get that right—that describes what
it was like to be there and how many people died. And it’s a searing book. He won a
Nobel Prize and he deserved it. I mean, Solzhenitsyn: a remarkable person. He’s like the Dostoevsky
of the twentieth century and that’s really saying something. And Dostoevsky’s another
person I use a lot in that section. And both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche regarded themselves
as psychologists fundamentally. And, you know, it’s funny because when you
think about scientists, you know, you usually think about people who are conducting experiments,
right? But, then, one of the things—and you’ll notice this if you think about it because
a lot of you have taken a fair number of science courses of one form or another. And, you know,
a lot of what you’re taught when you’re taught how to do science is how to generate,
you know, how to lay out an experiment properly, how to get the methodology right, how to do
the analysis properly, maybe how to structure the revealing of your findings in proper scientific
format, you know, and how to test a hypothesis. But one of the things that you’re never
really told about is, well, how the hell do you generate the hypothesis to begin with
because, you know, really that’s a least half the problem and it’s probably a lot
more than half the problem. And, so, part of being a scientist is the ability to be a hypothesis
generator, not just a hypothesis tester. Maybe you need to be both to be a true scientist
but maybe not. Maybe you can just generate extraordinary hypotheses and it’s certainly
the case that people like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were unbelievably good hypothesis generators. And so, you know, their thinking in many ways
underlies the entire development of thought—the sort of thought that you guys are going to
encounter in university anyways—their thinking underlies the entire development of the edifice
of I would say both scientific and nonscientific thought across the entire twentieth century.
And, so, it’s quite entertaining to go down there and, you know, wander around the roots
of these sorts of things because you find out how things are linked together and why
they’re linked together and how they developed and what that means. And, also, what it means
for you to have those ideas and why you have them and what role they play in your life. So, okay, so, after that, that’s pretty much—in
some sense, you might think that’s where the clinical and philosophical part of the
course ends. Now, I’m a clinical psychologist and most of the people who were great personality
theorists were clinical psychologists. And that explains to some degree why the first
part of the course is philosophical. Because the thing about clinical psychologists and
psychiatrists and medical doctors for that matter is that they’re not exactly scientists;
they’re more like engineers. So, what an engineer wants to do—an engineer might use
scientific knowledge and, you know, good for them; they should. But really what they want
to do is make something change. They want to build something, they want to transform
something, they want to act on a beneficial—generally—in a beneficial way. Well, the same thing is
the case with the health domains. It’s like someone comes to you with a psychological
problem. What you want to do is you want to make it better and better is not a scientific
category. So, to the degree that you’re a—like you can say well it’s scientific because
worse means abnormal. It’s like, that’s not right. You can make that case but it’s
shallow because there’s lots of times when you don’t consider normal healthy. You know,
you consider exceptional healthy, right? Or maybe you consider exceptional desirable and
desirable might even be better than healthy, right? So, you can’t get out of the value domain
when you’re trying to interact with people and sort out their lives. Because partly what
you’re always asking is: “What’s wrong?” “What’s the matter?” “Why are you
dissatisfied?” “Why are you suffering?” “Why aren’t you productive?” “Why
do you fight with everyone?” You know, “Why can’t you sleep at night?” “Why do you
wake up screaming?” You know, “Why can’t you pursue anything that’s to your own benefit?”
“Why do you hurt everyone that you know?” You know, those are moral questions. And then
the next problem is: “Okay, well what are we going to do about it?” “What do you
want?” “How would you like your life to look if it could look the way you wanted it
to?” And then, “How are we going to get from where you are to that?” And those are
all—they’re engineering questions in a sense but above all they’re ethical questions
because they deal with how to act. So, you know, I don’t want to just slide over that.
Because that’s generally what happens because physicians and clinical psychologists and
say psychiatrists—even though they’re physicians—they like to think that what
they’re doing science and that’s not right. It’s informed by science, but that’s not
the same thing. It’s particularly true with doctors because they’re not even trained
to be scientists. So, okay so that’s that. And then the next
part of the course—the last half—it concentrates on two elements of personality theory; more
modern elements I would say although not more valuable necessarily because of that. Partly
very neurobiological, because we’ve made a lot of strides in the last 50—100 years
let’s say. In understanding the structure and the function of the brain. Like the things
we don’t know about the brain, man, it’s—there are lots of things we don’t understand about
the brain. We have no idea, for example, what its relationship is to conscientiousness except
more or less it seems necessary. You know, so even that you can dispute to some degree
because there are great case histories of people who were born with hydrocephalus. And
so that means that your skull basically fills with water. And the most famous case of that
was a French guy who went for an MRI for God only knows what reason—it had nothing to
do with what was eventually discovered—but he only had five percent of his cortical tissue.
His whole brain—his whole head was filled with cerebrospinal fluid and the brain was
just a little skin around the side that was like a little balloon. And as far as they
could tell there was nothing wrong with him. It’s like, “Hmm, well isn’t that interesting?
What the hell’s all the rest of that brain for?” And then you get the other issue—like
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of (can’t remember her name…I think it’s Pepper…)
She had a famous parrot—an African grey. You can look it up: talking African grey parrot.
And that damn parrot, man, that thing could talk like a four-year-old kid. Way better
than any chimpanzee. Full sentences, it seemed to know what it was doing. It’s like, it’s
a parrot, right? Its brain is this big! So, how is that even possible? So, okay so there’s lots of things we don’t
know about the brain really. And it’s unbelievably complicated. So, but we have learned a lot
of things that are interesting. We kind of understand the existence and the location
of the fundamental reward and pain and anxiety circuits. That’s a big deal. Those are like
discovering major continents, you know? We understand to some degree how people learn
and under what conditions they learn and we understand, I would say to some degree, what
the fundamental motivations and emotions are. Now those are not scientific categories: motivations
and emotions. They’re linguistic categories but we’re stuck with them. So, but we know
a fair bit about their underlying neurobiological basis and I want to take you through that
in some detail because for a bunch of reasons. Partly, because it’s provides a nice scientific
underpinning to a lot of the hypotheses and presuppositions of the psychoanalysts, you
know? So, for example, Freud hypothesized the existence of the id. Now there is no id
in your brain but it doesn’t really matter because the id—the idea of the id—is a
functional category; it’s like a tool. But there are lots of id-like structures in your
brain. You know and one of them in particular is the hypothalamus and that thing—like
human beings like to think that their really impressive cortical cap is the thing that’s,
you know, in charge of things. But your hypothalamus, which is this little tiny thing that sits
at the top of your spinal chord, man, that’s what running you. You know, as long as you’re
not hungry or not angry or not chasing after sexual excitement and not gambling and not
addicted; so, as long as you’re completely well fed and warm and comfortable, then you
can think and you’re more or less in control. But as soon as any of those things go astray
it’s subcortical all the way. You know, and you can see this, for example,
in conditions like anorexia. You know, because anorexia—you could think of anorexia as
a war between the cortex and they hypothalamus. And I’ll tell you man, the only time the
cortex wins is when the anorexic dies, because other than that it’s the hypothalamus that
wins all the time, which is why anorexics cannot stop themselves from binging. So, you
know, so they’ll cut their body weight down to say seventy five percent of what it should
be and that’s hard. Like you really—it’s not easy to starve yourself like that. But
they’ll still binge like mad and, you know, eat a whole gallon of ice cream and two bags
of bread. And they can’t stop themselves and that’s because your hypothalamus, it
would rather you didn’t starve to death. And if you’re not paying attention, if you’re
not on top of the game or maybe if you’ve been hurt recently and so your resources or
your—what would you say?—the negative emotion has been interfering with your cognitive
capacity, the hypothalamus will come up and grab you and say, “Man, you’re hungry
and it’s off to the fridge with you.” You know, so two in the morning you’re going
to be eating everything in there in a kind of a daze. And you’ll snap out of that and
think, “Wow, what the hell was that?” It was like well, that’s the id, folks,
and it’s no trivial thing. And it’s a good thing too because if it didn’t tell
you what to do all the time—like think about how foolish you are. If you had to breathe
voluntarily how many days do you think you’d go through? Eh, it’s like you’d wake up
one day and an hour later you’d forget to breathe and then you’d be dead. So, like
your brain doesn’t let you do anything important; it takes care of all that in the background,
you know, because you’re just not that smart. I mean, you don’t know how to digest things,
for example. You actually don’t know how you walk even though you can do it. So, there
are fundamental subsystems, some of them aren’t even conscious, weirdly enough, even though
they’re neurological: they’re doing all the heavy lifting. And like your cortex is
along there—it’s along for the ride in some sense. And it sort of thinks its in control
but yeah, no. Not really. Okay, so we’re going to talk a fair bit
about fundamental brain structures and the function of those structures because I like
functional neuroanatomy. I like—I don’t want to know just what the brain is made out
of but I want know what all the parts are doing. And so, there’s difficult papers
in there; Swanson, that’s a hard paper, and the paper by Gray. Those are papers that
were written by I think genius-level neuropsychologists and, you know, they put their whole life’s
work into a paper and so, you know, you’re going to pick it up and you’re going to
think, “Wow, this is hard.” It’s like, “Yeah! Some genius spent thirty years writing
it. It’s going to be hard.” But they’re so informative; they’re worth the struggle
if that’s the sort of thing that you want to struggle with. So, that’s the biological end and then there’s
the psychometric end. And psychometrics—very unpopular field of psychology, even among
psychologists, and the reason for that is that psychometricians, I guess, have actually
discovered things and people hate what they’ve discovered. So, and no wonder. So, for example,
it was people who do psychometrics, engineers actually who entered psychology, who discovered
intelligence. Technical psychometric intelligence. IQ. And people will tell you there’s lots
of kinds of intelligence. It’s like, “No there aren’t. That’s wrong.” And it’s
wrong in this way: the statistics that psychologists use were invented by the people who discovered
IQ. And that means that every single thing that a psychologist has ever claimed that’s
been verified in some way using some statistical process has been verified the same way that
IQ was verified. And so you don’t get to say, “Well the IQ stuff’s invalid,”
without saying all of psychology—and a lot of other fields—is invalid too because it’s
the same methods of proof. And it’s even worse than that because like the relationship
between IQ and life success is way stronger than the relationship between almost any other
psychological phenomena and almost anything else. So, for example, for you guys, even
though, you know, you’re all far above average in intelligence—because otherwise you wouldn’t
be here—like at least eighty-fifth percentile. And that’s something to think about because
a lot of that is determined by biological factors so, you know, so a huge chunk of the
reason that you’re here is because, you know, you won part of the genetic lottery.
So like hooray for you. And no one screwed it up too badly as you were growing up. You
know, but even among you guys, the correlation between your intelligence and your grade point
average is quite high even though it’s a truncated sample, right, because you’re
all pretty bright. And even though there’s a lot of error in the grade measurement system
because it doesn’t only index intelligence, it’s still very powerful. And, so, if you
controlled for conscientiousness and other elements of personality, which you can do
statistically, in twenty years the ten percent of the people in this room who have the highest
IQs will have the highest income virtually certainly. You know, unless some terrible
thing happens to them. You can overcome it to some degree if you’re really hard working.
And that’s conscientiousness, you know, but that’s also a trait which seems to have
quite a heavy biological loading. So, well so that’s the sort of thing that
people hate about psychometricians because they come up with these facts and they’re
facts that are really dismal. And I can give you an example: so you guys all have an IQ
of over 115 roughly speaking. 100 makes you about as smart as the typical high school
graduate. You know, 115—that’s kind of the low end for managing the rigors of a fairly
high-end university. You know, 115, you’re still going to have a lot of trouble; you’re
going to have to work like mad. So, but okay so 115: now, that’s one standard deviation
above the mean. One standard deviation below the mean is an IQ of 85. Now there’s just
as many people out there in the world who have an IQ of 85 as there are people who are
able to go to college. Okay, so then you think, “What can you do if you have an IQ of 85?”
And, well, here’s one answer: so, the US Army has been doing psychometric testing for a
hundred and some years for a whole bunch of reasons but they’ve done a lot of the basic
science, you know. And one thing about the US Army is they like to have recruits. And
you can understand why because do you really want to go off somewhere and get shot? And
the answer to that is generally no. So it’s not like there are people lining up to get
into the army. Even in peace times it’s hard to get people. And also, the Americans
have used the US Army as a—you know, imagine you have an underclass of people who aren’t
doing well, which is the case in every society, and you want to boost some of them up, you
know, into something resembling the middle class. You can do that fairly effectively
by inducting young men in particular into the army because they get some training and,
you know, they get some discipline and maybe they can kind of clamber up into the middle
class. And so there’s a lot of policy reasons A) why the American Army armed forces want
people, and B) you know, just to be in the army but also for social reasons—positive
social reasons. So, they’re not likely not to let you in. The consequence of hundred
years of IQ testing was the establishment of a law in the United States: you cannot
induct anyone into the army; you cannot accept them into the army if they have an IQ of less
than 82. That’s ten percent of the population. So you think about that. That means one person
in ten cannot do anything that is of positive value in an organization that’s rather complex
but not more complex than other organizations that’s desperate for people. Nothing they
can offer has positive value. It’s worse to have them in the army than not to have
them there at all. Really, now, you know, that’s a terrible way of putting it but
it’s a horrible statistic. Because it also means, you know, if you think about the army
as roughly equivalent to world in some sense in terms of it’s complexity, it means that
there’s ten percent of the population who just cannot really exist well in a complex
cognitive society. So, and you might say, “Well, you know, something should be done
about that.” It’s like, “Good luck”. People have been trying to do something about
that for a very long time. Like, there’s been billions, if not trillions, of dollars
poured into attempts to do cognitive remediation in the United States. Well, not to mention
that we actually have an education system and the goal is actually to make people smarter. So, we’re going to talk a lot about psychometrics
and the thing about the psychometricians is they’re basically brute force statisticians.
In some ways they’re atheoretical. You know, and they use computer power, roughly speaking,
and advanced statistical techniques to look at large data sets and extract out patterns.
And, you know, I was—I hated the Big Five when I first came on it. I thought, “Oh
God, this is boring.” It’s like, there’s no theory behind it; it’s not prescriptive;
it’s not interesting in any literary manner, like it doesn’t have a good story; it came
out of—it’s so dry. But, you know, it works and that’s how it is. So, we’re going
to spend a lot of time on psychometrics and, you know, my lab too has done a fair bit of
work over the last ten years elaborating out the Big Five Model. So one of the things we’ll
talk about is the Big Ten Model and what it does, roughly speaking, is break each of the
five into two—we call them aspects. And they’re pretty interesting. Like they predict
political belief, for example, quite nicely. So, conservatives tend to be more orderly,
which is part of conscientiousness and less creative, less open. And liberals tend to
be more open and less conscientious. Which a cynic would say that’s why they’re so
into income redistribution: because they actually don’t work. So, you know, the conservatives
work like mad and the liberals say, “Hey hey, how about some of that money?” You
know, and, “The system’s unfair.” And the conservatives say, “Well no. We worked
hard and we’re not giving you any.” Well, you know, they both have flaws in their theories.
The liberals, by the way, make very good entrepreneurs. Like, no let me rephrase that. Most entrepreneurs
are liberal in their political outlook and that’s because they’re high in openness.
So the way it really seems to work is that liberal-minded people start businesses and
conservatives run them. So, they’re necessary for one other. Yeah, well because the liberals,
being open, they’re off to the next idea, you know, and they don’t want to attempt
to the damn details; they get bored of that. They’re not particularly orderly, you know.
But once you’ve established a process and it works you need someone to watch to make
sure the process keeps working. Well that’s not very interesting if you’re a creative
person. So, okay, so, that’s basically that. That’s
the course. So, now, what have we got for time here? So I think what I’ll do now is I’m
going tell you a story and you’re going to think it has absolutely nothing to do with
what we’ve been talking about, but that’s okay. That’s okay. So I picked this weird
picture. It’s a picture of Jonah—biblical character. It’s a 2500-year-old story so
that’s a pretty old story. And generally if a story is 2500 years old it’s a lot
older than that. You know, it just happened to be written down 2500 years ago, but, you
know, that long ago it wasn’t like there were novels and books and that you could find
fifty different stories, you know, at your fingertips. There were a few stories and everyone
knew them. And God only knows how long they’d been around but it was a very very very very
long time. So, this was written down 2500 years ago but we don’t really have any idea how
old it is. And, in some sense, it’s almost infinitely old, at least on any human scale.
Now, you see this picture and what you see is this thing that—what would you call it?
Well, it’s a medieval idea of a whale is what it is. You know, and you might think,
“Well, that isn’t really what a whale looks like,” and that’s kind of right
but a medieval whale wasn’t the whale that we have. Like, whale in medieval times meant
large terrifying underwater thing. You know, and, so, maybe that was—maybe a giant squid
was a whale and a whale was a whale and a shark was a whale and, you know, the category’s
not the same. So, that kind of accounts for the—that in pure ignorance is what accounts
for the kind of strange mythologized representation. But it’s still a representation of something;
it’s just a little generalized. Now what he’s doing is vomiting Jonah up onto dry
land. So, and you think, “That’s pretty damn weird.” How many have you seen Pinocchio? That’s
a lot, eh? How many of you haven’t? Really? You haven’t seen Pinocchio? What kind of
parents did you have anyways? [Students’ laughter] Okay, well, you remember in Pinocchio that
Pinocchio’s father is stuck in a whale, eh, and then Pinocchio has to go down there
and rescue him. And one of the things you didn’t notice when you were watching Pinocchio
is just how daft that is. There you are sitting there, you’re watching a puppet go down
into the ocean to rescue his father from a whale. And you think, “Oh, that makes sense.” [Students’ laughter] It’s like, well also that’s interesting,
right? That’s interesting. Why does that make sense? Why does that make sense? Because
it doesn’t make any sense. But see that’s a good example of the grip of any archetypal
idea because an archetypal idea is a very deep and old idea that makes sense to you
even though if someone points out to you that you believe, which you more or less do while
you’re watching a movie, you think, “Oh yeah, it’s really weird that I believe that.”
It’s like, you know, and that isn’t a puppet going down into the ocean to rescue
his father from a whale either, just so you know it. It’s a drawing of a puppet going
down into the ocean to rescue his father from a whale so it’s like divorced from reality
in all sorts of ways. But what’s so interesting is you go into the theatre and watch something
like that and if someone taps you on the shoulder and say, “Hey hey, do you know what you’re
doing?” You say, “Why don’t you shut up and let me watch the movie.” [Students’ laughter] Right, you don’t notice, “Oh yes I’m
very peculiar. I’m a very peculiar thing sitting here watching this and not noticing
how strange I am.” You know, and so well, that’s partly why I’m going to tell you
this story, because it’s true even though it isn’t. You know, and that’s a funny thing. I had
a very very strange professor at the University of Alberta. He died a few years ago. He got
on a bus, I think it was in Winnipeg, and he never got off the bus and no one ever say
him again. So, he had been a prison psychologist. He worked in the maximum-security prison in
the University of Alberta so who knows, maybe he met one of his old clients. You know, it’s
possible but it’s very strange—very strange ending. Anyways, one time we were talking
about fiction, you know, and he said, “Fiction is a lie that can tell you the truth.” And
that’s a very interesting way of thinking about it, you know, because you read fiction
and, you know, it’s true. But it’s not obviously because it’s not really about
a thing that actually happened. But it’s more than that in some ways because if it’s
good fiction it’s about a whole bunch of things that happened sort of like that. Right,
it’s a distillation. It’s like someone tells you a long story and then, you know,
you talk to your partner and they ask you, “What was that all about?” And then you
tell them in two sentences what it was about. You boil it down to the gist, right? Well
a really good story is the gist of something. And some of the really old stories, the really
weird ones like Jonah and the Whale, for example—which as I said is told to some degree in the story
of Pinocchio—they’re the gist of a lot of things and people have been boiling those
damn stories down for a very very very very very very long period of time. Thousands of
people over thousands of years and they come up with these weird stories that people remember.
And then people think, “Well, they’re real.” It’s like, “Yeah they are but
they’re not real in the way a scientific story is real. It’s a different kind of
real.” So here’s the story of Jonah. And so it’s
an old Jewish story. There’s probably a variant of it in the Quaran, but I don’t
know that variant so and maybe there isn’t. Anyways, Jonah lives in 500 BC and God has
a chat with him one day and he says, “Look Jonah, there’s this city, Nineveh, and people
there, you know, they’re really not on the straight and narrow and things are going to
go to hell in a hand basket very rapidly if someone doesn’t do something about that.
So, I think that you should go to Nineveh and you should tell the king and all the people
that are there that, you know, really they’re just not doing the right thing”. And Jonah,
being a perfectly intelligent person, says, “You want me to go to a city and you want
me to go tell the king, like this authoritarian guy who has absolute power over everything,
that there’s something wrong with what he’s doing that all his citizens are corrupt? That’s
what you want me to do?” And Jonah says, “There’s no way I’m doing that!” because
as I said he’s a smart guy. So he runs off and he goes to this town and as he’s running
off he rents a boat more or less. And it’s a big boat and there are fishermen on it.
And they’re going to like row him something that God can’t find him, which is not going
to be an easy thing. And, so, God of course can’t be fooled by such relatively poor
strategic choices because he’s omniscient and all that. And, so, he’s out on the water, Jonah, and
there’s the fisherman there and then so God calls up this big storm. And the fisherman
are shorting out about this because they’re going to swamp the boat and then they’re
all going to die and they’re not that happy about that. So, what they decide to do is throw
everything overboard so that the boat is lightened. But that doesn’t help much because the storm
gets worse. And so then they all of them start praying. And they all have different gods
so, you know, it’s like a little god competition. And one fisherman talks to one god and another
fisherman talks to another god and nothing’s happening. So, Jonah happens to be asleep in
the hold of the ship. Now, he’s already told them that he’s been running from his god
and so they think, “Ha, we better go wake up Jonah because maybe he’s the guy that’s
causing all the trouble.” So, they go down there and they wake him up and they ask him
about his god. And he says, “Well my god made the heavens and the earth,” and their
gods, they weren’t doing anything that magnificent so they’re pretty freaked out about this.
And so they told Jonah it’s like, “What the hell are you running away from this guy
for? It’s not a good idea.” And Jonah says, “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it’s my fault
that this storm has come up so why don’t you just throw me over.” And they say, “Well
we can’t really do that because, you know, you shouldn’t run away like that, but you’re
not a murderer or anything; we can’t just toss you over.” And so they decide to try
to row to shore but God’s not having any of that. So, he raises up a big storm and it’s
getting worse and worse and finally the fisherman say, “Ah, you know, over you go.” And
Jonah’s into that because he knows he’s a bad guy. And, so, a whale swallows him. Now
you think, “Hmm, that’s probably not exactly right because first, if a whale swallowed
you then you’d be dead.” And it was probably a shark anyways. It’s not like you’re
going to be thriving down there. It’s not a big cavern like, you know, like the Pinocchio
whale; it’s solid and there’s no oxygen and so you’re dead. But that isn’t what
happens. Jonah’s in the whale and he’s kind of freaked out by this because now he’s
in a whale and there’s a storm and God’s angry at him. So, the first thing he does is
pray and tell God what an idea he his and that, you know, he’d like to be forgiven.
And so the whale zips up to shore and vomits him onto the beach, which the very very undignified
mode of arriving anywhere. [Students’ laughter] So, that’s the Jonah story. And, then, of
course Jonah picks himself up and he thinks, “Yeah yeah, you know, that wasn’t so good.
It was a little rough. I think maybe I’m going off to Nineveh to tell the Ninehvites,
or whoever they were, that they’re just not living properly because that’s a lot
better than making God angry. You know, because what with the storms and the fisherman and
the whales and all that.” So, then, he goes off to Nineveh and, you know, he tells them
what’s going on and it seems to more or less work. So, that’s a very interesting
story and you think, “Well, how did people believe that?” I mean, and one question
might be: well, do you believe that story? And then you think, “Well no,” but then
you think, “Well maybe that’s more complex question than you might think because it turns
out that I believed the Pinocchio story.” And you say, “Well, no I didn’t really
believe it,” and then I would say, “Well it kind of depends on what you mean by believe,
doesn’t it?” Because you watched it and while you were watching it man you were into
it, you understood it, you didn’t want it to be interrupted, you followed it. So, it’s
like, did you believe it? No, you were like a four-year-old skeptic sitting there thinking,
“Well, you know, puppet, whale. No, it doesn’t add up.” You’re not; you’re acting out
your belief in it by being engaged in it and if someone taps you on the shoulder and wakes
you up thirty years later or twenty years later you say, “Oh no, I don’t believe
that.” It’s like, you know, it’s kind of remarkable what you’ll believe. I mean, how many of you are Star Wars like
aficionados? You know you won’t admit it, will you? [Students’ laughter] Yeah, but there’s lots of you in here.
I know. You know, and so that’s all mythology. It’s all mythology. You know that of course,
the person who What was his name? The guy who came up with the Stars Wars idea. Lucas.
Lucas was a student of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell was a psychologist/mythologist and
the Star Wars stories are updated mythology just like Harry Potter and all the other things
that capture people’s imagination. So, you bloody well do believe this. And there’s
a reason for it too. Now what time is it? Ah, we’ll stop there. I’ll tell you the
reason the next time we meet. [Students’ laughter] |
So A couple things I want to tell you about today Many things I want to tell you about I want to tell you Uhm I want to give you a schema that is going to enable you to understand I think it will enable you to understand stories Like the one I told you last time, you remember Jonah and the whale I want to provide you with the schema so you can understand stories like that But many many more stories like that Partly what I am telling you about today In some sense are archetypes And an archetype, it is an idea that was made most popular over the last 100 years by Carl Jung But it's a much older idea than that It's really a platonic idea in some ways And it means something like fundamental pattern And so an archetype manifests itself in different ways It could be a pattern of emotional response Like it can be something you are feeling It could be the way that emotional response displays itself On your body, on your face It could be the way that emotion feels and displays itself on your face And plays itself out as a drama in your local environment So like an angry argument is an archetypical phenomenon And the reason it's archetypical is because Well, you have them, you have them, you have them, you have them, everyone has them and so you can't really think about them as individual, you have to think about them as universal and you can't think as about something that you created in a sense although, in a sense you do but it's also as something that happens to you now, when you read about Jung and archetype is quite confusing because you can never be sure whether it's talking about an instinct, an emotion, a motivational system, or a sub-personality or a sub-personality in which these things manifest itself, or even the social drama that's being played out in time and space in the social world but a real archetype I would say is all of those things at the same time. Now, we use archetypal means of expression to represent how we act And that's not the same thing as we think representing what the world is made out of It's a very different thing, so you could say in some sense we tell stories and understand stories so that we can figure out how people act and how they should act and then we conduct science so that we can figure out what the world's like from a material objective perspective and the two things coexist uneasily I think the more primary form of knowledge is actually how to act with a scientific model nested inside because the most important question you have to solve as a living organism isn't what the world is made out of it's how you should act in the world say from a darwinian perspective even so that you can live long enough to reproduce. that's basicly from a strict biological perspective in some sense that's what you have to do in order to be successful it's kind of obvious first of all 'cause you are not very successful if you just go and die and then, of course, death from a genetic perspective and failing to leave offspring are much the same thing Now, one of the questions might be how is that we conceive of the world as a place to act in and that's partly I'm gonna tell on the hypothesis for you and then explain the significance of that hypothesis and the hypothesis involves the description of what you might consider consitituent elements and also transformation processes as far as I can tell, the constituent elements of the stories that we tell about how the people act and should act are characters Now that makes sense, right, because you really can't have a drama or story without characters Now, the thing is that characters have to be understandable and so, for them to be understandable they sort of have to be like you or they have to be like someone you know, but they have to be human but than again it's not exactly that they're human, because even when you're telling a story about what happened to you today it's interesting to think about what you do so someone might say "well, how is your day?", and you say "fine" i mean, maybe it's the lowest level, lowest resolution highest abstract srory "my day was fine" It's pretty boring story, it's better then terrible, I suppose it's not interesting, it's not detailed but person gets the notion that things went according to plan or, more specificly, that things unfolded the way you wanted them to |
okay so we're going to talk about Piaget today and as I believe I mentioned to you before Piaget was perhaps the 20 20th centuries foremost developmental psychologists he didn't really regard himself as a psychologist however in fact a lot of the people who've been great psychologists have come in from outside the field it's often Engineers for example Engineers have helped us establish most of our statistics anyways Piaget I suppose would have regarded himself more as a biologist he called it called himself a genetic epistemologist and by genetic he didn't mean the genes that organize your cells and spin you up out of nothing he meant beginnings as in Genesis and and then an epistemologist was someone who was interested in how structures of knowledge emerge and how they were constituted so he actually thought of himself as a biological philosopher now you know one of the things that's kind of sad about learning about great theories is that you hardly ever learn about how peculiar the people who formulate them are because generally they're extraordinarily interesting people you know and that that in some ways that often they get sanitized in some way once they've become respectable and that's really quite unfortunate Piaget was really a genius um he was offered a position at a large Museum and and I remember I remember correctly it was perhaps it wasn't director but it was a position of approximately that stature he was offered that when he was 10 years old he'd written a paper on mollusk Behavior which was published and his parents told the museum people that he of course they didn't know he was 10. you know that he probably wasn't up for the job at that time so but that gives you some example some idea about the magnitude of his intellect and Piaget wrote a lot and you know usually what you hear about if you study Piaget in North America if you hear about Piaget you hear about his stages of development sensory motor Etc and uh that really wasn't what PSJA was all that interested in um there was something about the idea of countable stages that seem to appeal to North American developmental psychologist but PSJA didn't really regard that necessarily as either the central or the most important part of his theoretical edifice and you know part of what PSJA has been criticized for in recent years is that the stages don't necessarily occur either as he described or in the order that he described but in some ways he wouldn't have found that particularly distressing because it was more of an attempt to explain how the personality emerged out of nothing in some ways because in some ways you kind of emerge out of nothing you know and it's not that easy to figure out for Piaget in some ways you sort of booted up although he wouldn't have used that metaphor obviously having existed in the time before that was a commonly known phenomena so he also was concerned about high level metaphysical problems and so one of the things that really motivated Piaget was the contradiction between science and religion that was very painful for him and one of the things that he had set out to do as a Young Man was to bridge the gap between science and religion and in some ways you might think about that in relationship to the sorts of things we talked about last class is that he was attempting to bridge the gap between a description of the world and a prescriptive description of the world which means what the world is and how the world should be or what the world is and how you should act and I think that's the most straightforward way of thinking about the division between religion and science because you need to know how to act you can think about it as a division between morality and science or you can think about it as a division between behavioral wisdom and science which I think is even a better way of thinking about it because it it takes the specifically religious element out of it so but anyways Piaget wanted to devote his life to solving that problem and I would say that's what he did um he also identified an interesting stage that you also hear very little about but seems to be to be something worthy of note and also worthy of consideration he thought that many people in their late adolescence went through a Messianic stage and what he meant by that was that when late adolescents or young adults were trying to orient themselves in the world they were trying to figure out how they might plot their path forward in life so that they actually made a difference you know so they started to become concerned about the state of the world and about their role in determining that state and and getting interested in and perhaps involved in large-scale political or social movements and he was the only psychologist that I've ever seen who actually identified that as a stage but it's worth because it certainly is the case that many young people do pass through a stage that's something like that and it's interesting to speculate it on it as a you know standard part of human development now I think it's probably more characteristic of people with certain personality types so I suspect if you're more extroverted and you're more open um particularly more open which is the creativity dimension in the big five that you're more likely to be politically and socially compelled you know so we know for example that openness is a very good predictor of things like political liberalism and uh you know certainly a lot of the Millennial movements and the religious like movements that you see on campus that have what would arguably now be a political base seem to be associated with high openness so maybe that stage doesn't occur in everyone's life but it certainly seems to occur in many people's lives Okay so now you might ask yourself well what was Piaget up to and well he wanted to figure out a lot of things and he was interested in very very fundamental issues so for example his theories dealt with things like number and space you probably can't see that very well it doesn't matter I'll tell you what it says time and speed permanent objects how did how did a person develop the notion of what constituted a permanent object how do you know when one thing is the same when it changes into something different so for example if you pour one bit of liquid from one container into another how do you know that the amount of liquid is the same how do children develop their ideas of chance and causality how do they develop their concerns about morality and their moral knowledge what what are they doing when they're playing and I think actually Piaget's most fundamental contribution as far as I'm concerned came in his studies and Analysis of play and also to some degree his his analysis of dreams and he also spent a a lot of time giving serious consideration to the role that imitation played in in the scaffolding of the human personality and so um some of the so a PSJA believed that oh I think this is the easiest way to talk about it actually we'll use this little diagram here so oh fire it took me a long time to construct this diagram so not because it's all that technically difficult but it took a while to think it up so I want to give you a little bit about background to it so imagine that one of the things that distinguishes a human being from a computational device say or at least the standard sort of computational devices that our primary cognitive problem is how to perceive the world so that we can act in it so that we can get what we need to have or want okay so all three of those things are roughly of equivalent importance right you have to be able to perceive and you have to be able to act because if you can't act then you can't get what you need and if you can't get what you need then of course there isn't and you and so we're trying to always solve those problems simultaneously and we're also trying to do it in a way that's sustainable now what that means in part is that the knowledge structures of human beings are organized or or they're organized along those three dimensions and those three dimensions also constitute the problem space in some sense that has to be addressed for a solution to be useful so not only do you have to be able to perceive in some accurate manner but the accuracy is determined in part on in terms of whether or not the way that you're perceiving helps you pursue something that you want to pursue and then the utility of wanting to pursue something is dependent to some degree on the relationship between the utility of that and the things that you need to continue to survive now some psychologists have addressed that by thinking about such things as fundamental drives you know and and that was mostly a behavioral idea in some ways and a drive might be hunger and the idea of a drive would be that hunger is a motivator that helps you put together strings of motor behaviors that are sort of run out in automatic sequence so that you can you can get the end that you want and continue on perhaps to fulfill another Drive but the idea of Drive is a little bit on the oversimplified side although it has its place I think that you can conceptualize the relationship between all of these by thinking in the following manner so imagine first of all that people are after something generally speaking now if you look at us you can kind of tell that we're the sorts of creatures that are after things and the way that you can tell that is first of all that we can move and and do so frequently so we're always on a voyage of some sort of a journey of some sort from point one to point two or from point A to point B I would say as well that that's also the um Hallmark of a simple story if you're telling someone a story generally what you do is you tell them about a time that you were somewhere and then you did some things and you went somewhere else it's a very very simple story now the advantage of thinking about it as a story is that it helps you understand that the entire cognitive structure can't be reduced to necessarily anything that's for example that's drive like you have to think about it as more personality like and so you want something you Orient yourself towards it now the way you do that generally speaking is with your sensory and your conceptual systems right so for example if you want to walk towards the door then you turn your head and you make yourself a model of the door and that model has to um be bounded by its relevance to your actions so you know the things that are going to be relevant to you about the door for example might be whether or not it's tall enough for you to walk through or whether or not the door is open or closed so that you can as you're walking towards it you can organize your body so that you can interact with the object as you see fit now you pick your goals in all for all sorts of different reasons and some of those reasons are more fundamental than others so for example fundamental by fundamental I would mean likely what I mean by fundamental is something like evolutionarily ancient you know so the the older the necessity or the older the system that's evolved to to allow you to pursue the necessity the more fundamental it is and there's there's ways of identifying what constitutes the fundamental elements of goal seeking behavior and you can do that in part by comparing yourself to other animals you know and so mammals for example all seem to gen to experience something that you might regard as anger or at least defensive aggression they're all hungry you know they all have the the they all act as if they're they're they're uh they highly value sexual behavior and so forth and so those you can't really think of those things as specifically human they're lower level than that now so at a fundamental level you have biological systems that are setting forth what might constitute a goal and you can think about that you can think that what the system is doing is setting the goal or you can think that the system is driving behavior but a better way of thinking about it is that the fundamental motivation motivational system sets up a framework that's like a personality that then acts in the world and so this personality has something in mind that it wants it has a collection of perceptions that organize itself around that thing that it wants and then it has a plan or Associated motor behaviors that it can lay out in the world that will take it from the point where it is to the point that it wants to be okay now so once you know that then you can start to think about these plans or these goals or these stories or these Frameworks I think those are all you can even think about them as games in some ways you can think about them at different levels of complexity now what Piaget was trying to do in part was to describe how a framework of this sort or a sub a sub element of Personality might develop itself in complexity over time so so the the diagram I have here before you shows these little oval like figures and in the bottom left-hand corner there's a box that says what is and in the top right hand corner there's a box that says what should be and then there's some arrows showing a planned sequence of behavior and the idea is that you have a sense of where you are and you have a sense of where you're going and that constitutes the framework within which you're looking at the world and then within that framework there's different things that you can do with your body in order to advance from the first point to the second point now it's it's important to understand that this sort of thing is grounded in behavior and not in conception because it helps you also understand the nature of these fundamental elements of personality the fundamental elements of Personality are not descriptions of the world they're tools for acting in the world including the associated behaviors now whether they're Behavioral or conceptual to some degree depends on their level of abstraction so so here's how you how to think about that so imagine that you say that someone's a good person and you might say well that's a description of them and that and when you think about description you tend to think about description the way that you would describe an object in the world like a scientific description but when you talk about someone as a good person you're actually not describing them as an object in the world you wouldn't even describe yourself as an object in the world that way what you're doing is using a shorthand to represent a higher the hierarchical arrangement of their personality and you can get away with it because when you say good person to someone they already have an understanding of good person and they know what that hierarchy is and so you don't have to explain the whole thing to them and you can understand each other without even necessarily knowing exactly the details of what you're talking about but I'm going to tell you now what I think you mean when you say that sort of thing so imagine that a good person is a description at the very at the top end of a hierarchy okay because good the good is a very high level philosophical abstraction it's a high level value be good okay so what does that mean if you decompose it well we'll do it in a relatively straightforward manner one that isn't really it's more observational than philosophical so let's say you take you take someone who's uh 40 year old mother for the sake of argument and who will say she also has a job so if she's a good person and she's a mother you might think that's one sub element of her personality if she's a good person is being a good parent right and I think you put person above parent in the hierarchy because to be a good person you can be a good parent without being a good person but it's hard to see how you could be a good person without being a good parent so and maybe if you're a good person you're more than a good parent you know you're probably a good partner and maybe you're good at your job and like there are there are large domains of activity that you're good at or good in and if you sum your behavior across that or average your behavior across that or something like that then you end up reasonably being described as a good person maybe you're a good friend as well and so good person has levels of hierarchy underneath it and then each of those things that have levels of hierarchy each of those entities at the level of hierarchy right underneath good persons can also be decomposed so we're going to decompose them and we're going to see what happens because partly what happens is if you decompose them you get right to the bottom it's not an infinite decomposition and so I also think this is one way that you can think about the relationship between the mind and the body because the relationship between the mind and the body is a very tricky thing because the mind seems to be made of stuff that's other than the body and I think there's some truth to that partly because we don't really understand Consciousness but there are but that's a complex problem and I think you can get a fair ways in addressing the mind-body problem without having to drag in the problem of Consciousness so okay so we could say well good person sub element of that is good parent then you might think well what is it that you need to be doing to be a good parent and we might say well um you have to have a good job maybe that's one up in the hierarchy but whatever you have to have a good job because otherwise you can't provide for your children and you have to be able to to care for the children you might say well someone's good at caring for children and then you might ask them well what does it mean to be good at caring for children and then you have to sort of think of the sub elements that would go into caring for children and so one of them here is uh you have to know how to cook a meal or complete a meal and then you also have to know how to play with the baby so we could concentrate on playing with the baby and so what do you do when you're playing with a baby you might play peekaboo you might tickle the baby and you might clean the baby okay now you start thinking well obviously once you're starting to get down to that level of detail so that's a high resolution model right you're you're starting to move from a low resolution model good person to a high resolution model which are what are precisely the multitude of elements that make up being a good person well if you're playing peekaboo with a baby for example all of a sudden you're doing something that's not exactly conceptual being a good person is conceptual but playing peekaboo isn't conceptual and the reason it's not conceptual is because you actually have to move your hands to do it so if you get to a high enough level of resolution in the description of a personality what you start describing are patterns of Behavior now they have Associated you know they have an Associated motivational framework and a Viewpoint that goes along with them so that I would say well even while you're playing peek-a-boo with the baby the the element of you that's playing peekaboo is best described as a sub personality it's a playful sub personality and then it's the sub personality that specifically knows how and is motivated to play peekaboo but what is composed of is no longer a sub personality it's starting to be composed of actual movements so and then underneath that if you go to higher resolution like okay what's the movement composed of well obviously you start to have to talk about musculature and then if you go below that it's molecular movements and so on but but once you're down below voluntary movement there's really no you there anymore right you sort of Fade Into unconsciousness because you know how to go like this but you don't exactly know how to move the specific muscles that enable you to go like that or even if you do you don't know how to Twitch the muscle fibers or something like that right there's some let you don't know how to operate the cells there's some level of resolution underneath the voluntary motor control that that basically runs on automatic and to some degree you're capable of like steering it but you're not really capable of you're certainly not capable of being conscious of it so the the abstract moral conception which is also a description good person hits the world at the level of motor output now and a lot like even your sensory movement a lot of that's motor output right because a lot of what you're doing with your eyes is moving them so all right now what does that have to do with Piaget well one of the ways of understanding Piaget is that he built he was really interested in understanding how that entire system came to be and his theory is a bottom-up theory he says okay yeah this is this this is he hasn't said this but it's a very useful way of thinking about it because Piaget believed that you started with small elements of what he called reflexive behavior and then you learn to chain them together in increasingly complex structures and then you chain those complex structures into more and more complex structures and so on and so forth until you built up the entire hierarchy but you tended to start from the bottom so Piaget was particularly interested in what the minimum conditions were for something to emerge into the world so that it could build itself out of nothing and that's really what he was interested in when he was starting to talk about infant development and so Piaget's hypothesis was something like this um well Kilt babies are born very very immature you might even say that they're born premature so um a human baby if you took a mammal of about human size and you said well what's its average gestation period across the animal kingdom you'd find out that for a Manimal of our size we should have a gestation period a pregnancy period of two years so we don't we have a gestation period of nine months and so you might ask well why is that and the answer is complicated obviously but here's some of the reasons as far as people can tell um we have big heads and they've really been expanding rapidly over particularly over the last two million years but let's say since we split off from chimps that's about six million years we have very very large heads and you know if you look at a baby a baby's head is pretty damn disproportionately large compared to its body like that a baby's like a third head and so even when the baby's little nine months old well nine months after conception and maybe a year and three months before it's supposed to be born its head is already extremely big now you think well what's the problem with that and the problem with that is well the bigger your head is the harder it is to be born and you might say well why haven't the pelvic areas of human beings adjusted females in particular adjusted so that they could handle the birth with a larger head and the answer to that is well they have to some degree which is why women have wider hips than men do but the problem is is evolution is a conservative business and it can only in some sense Tinker with what it's already got and so if you look at the basic bought your basic body plan your basic body plan at most in its most fundamental levels was established some some tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago and then the basic mammalian body plan was established say 60 million years ago and so if you go I went to the Smithsonian once and they have a skeleton museum at the Smithsonian it's sort of like a zoo for for skeletons and it's really interesting place to go because you can see much more how alike mammals are when you see their skeletons so for example if you see a bat skeleton it looks just like a human skeleton except the fingers are really really long but it's the rest of it's like yeah that's basically the same skeleton as a human being it's just that the pieces have blown up in size or shrunk or or contorted or something like that but it's exactly the same damn structure so as as the brain was growing and the skull was getting larger and women women's bodies had to adapt to that while there was parameters within which the body had to work and it turns out that if you make the hips any wider and you make the hole in the middle of them any bigger then the hips start to lose structural integrity and the other thing that starts to happen is the woman can't run so there's this weird you imagine that Evolution takes place within this set of constraints and so what's happened is the baby gets born way earlier the women's hips are wider with a larger pelvic hole but not so wide they can't run and not so wide they're not strong and the baby's head is collapsible roughly because the bones aren't completely fused at Birth and so generally especially if it's larger maybe if it's born when it when it emerges just after birth its head is quite compressed cone-shaped even so and that's hard on the baby but it's not nearly as hard on the baby or the mother as not being born at all so anyways babies are born pretty premature and you know that puts a tremendous burden on human parents because of course the child is you know can't even walk for the first year whereas you take a deer when a deer is born or an animal like that you know it's three minutes later it's wobbling around on its feet and then it's running away from Lions the next morning it's like that's that's not us you think why not it's well we're born very very premature and very very vulnerable and you know it's a major load on the on the parents anyways one question Piaget was interested in is well what exactly is a baby born with and he thought well they're born with a couple of things one is here's three things in a sense you might think they're born with a couple of reflexes and what you might think of a as a reflex is that it's a built-in module of sensory motor capability and maybe it it and you know maybe there's a motivational element to it as well so I would say it's a built-in sub personality that's a very narrow sub personality has a very narrow task and so one thing's one thing babies can do is root so if you touch them on the side of their cheek then they root and basically what that means is that they use their mouth and their head to search for something to latch onto with their mouth and that would generally be a nipple so they come pre-wired to be able to use their mouth and their tongue and certain muscles of their head in order to figure out how to feed and that's actually a very complicated behavior and so one of the things you see with babies is that their mouth and their tongue is all quite wired up already so if you're looking at a newborn baby the intelligent part of the baby in some sense like the part It's Already There is very much oriented towards its mouth and its tongue and that's sort of like Freud's idea of an oral stage in some sense although you know you could debate that but that's partly why Freud thought that way he knew that people these were very mouth-oriented and once they can start using their hands and they can pick up objects what do they do with objects they put them in their mouth right why well because that's what babies do partly but that's not the only reason is like if you look at the okay so back in the 50s 40s maybe even earlier than that there was a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield who worked at the Montreal Neurological Institute and he was one of the people who first did surgery for example for epilepsy so if you have epilepsy what happens is generally you kind of have a short circuit there's a malfunctioning set of neurons usually in the hippocampus and they produce like a positive feedback electrical circuit and it's like a little electrical storm and it'll start in damaged tissue and then spread across the whole brain and one of the things the early neurosurgeons were doing was dividing the brain in two to stop the hemisphere that had the damage from being able to spread pathological electricity across the entire brain now when you're doing brain surgery you don't want to take out anything that isn't absolutely necessary and so one of the things the brain surgeons do and still do did and still do is that they do brain surgery when you're conscious which is quite a horrifying thought really because you know your head is stuck in this little machine that doesn't let it move and then they're poking around in your brain and you have to tell them what's going on while you're doing it and if you stop being able to respond then I presume they assume that they've made a mistake and you know tough luck for you but anyways Penfield was interested not only in you know conducting his surgery properly but also in mapping out the brain to figure out well what parts of it could you use and you know what do you have to keep in what parts can you maybe get rid of and part of that was because there was an idea for a long time among neurologists called equal potentiality which meant that the the cortex was an undifferentiated massive tissue and you could take out parts of it without really much loss of function at all um which that turned out not to be exactly right although it wasn't as stupid as an idea as it might seem because the cortex is less differentiated than other parts of the brain but it turns out that if you take out parts of it like the prefrontal cortex the damage that it does is not immediately evident but if you watch the person for any length of time well usually their lives fall apart if their prefrontal protest is being damaged enough anyway so Penfield was trying to figure out what the brain does and so he was using electrodes to touch the surface and what he found if you imagine that this is the frontal part of your brain here and it's called that because it's at the front right and so there's a the back part of it has to do more with sensory uh processing and then there's a fissure down the middle and on the front side of the fissure there's an area that's roughly triangle shaped on the back of the fissure there's another area that's roughly triangle shaped and the front part if you touch it with a with an electrode like of the right current obviously then people will report feeling something on different parts of their body and then if you touch the part that's behind the fissure so roughly about here so then they'll they'll be inclined to move or feel the impulse to move and so what what Penfield did was draw a little map of what parts of the brain were connected to what sensory Sensations in the body and what parts of the brain were content connected to what motor Sensations and he he built this thing called a homunculus it's a little it's a little picture and the picture is of this creature that's laid out on the cortex it's sort of like a dismembered body in some sense and the size of each part corresponds to the amount of tissue that's devoted to processing that brain or that bodily area and what you see is very very interesting because if you look there's a sensory homunculus that's how your body looks to your brain from a sensory perspective and there's a motor homunculus which is how your body looks to your brain from the perspective of being able to operate it what you see for example is with both the sensory and the motor cortex the hand is as big as the whole body and the thumb is as big as the rest of the hand and then the mouth and the tongue are also that big and so is the face so you've got this little itty bitty body because what are you what are you going to do with your back you know you you can't pick up anything with your back and you're also not very good really your your sensory perception on your back is not very high resolution so if I had one of you stand up and I put three fingers on your back this far apart and I said how many fingers were there you wouldn't be able to tell you'd say one probably but you can't tell even if you space them out quite a bit if you push simultaneously whereas on the surface of the hand you can tell immediately because this is a high resolution part of your body and of course you know you can really move your little tentacle appendages here and they're highly wired up to the brain as well and very very sensitive but the reason I told you all that because it's also particularly true with the mouth and the and the lips and the tongue and then also the entire face that's because your face is extraordinarily mobile and you know you broadcast emotion with it and so it's a it's a communication device of the highest order and so it has to be really wired up you have so much neural control over your face that you can actually teach yourself to fire single neurons in the tissue underneath your eye so which you certainly are not going to be able to do with your back and then of course well why would you anyways so now so what I I'm telling you that in part so that you get some more understanding of how the child is wired up because that mouth tongue uh lip sort of arrangement that that that the baby is born with is a very very powerful learning circuit and it's established quite nicely right at Birth and so then the baby can start exploring the world using parts of it that are already there and a big chunk of that is the mouth so and you know you know how this works some of you have recently had dental surgery of one form or another or at least you can remember when you had it maybe you had a tooth pulled or a filling or you had braces put in or something so one of the things you'll notice you lose a tooth is it your damn tongue is in there where the tooth was for the next six months right fiddling around and you can do it consciously which you will sometimes but even if you're not attending to it your tongue will be in there checking out every tiny little crack and crevice in the new area and what it's doing is updating your map of the map of your body because your mouth wants to know what part of it's you and what part of it isn't because first of all you're not supposed to chew the parts that are you and second of all if there's any foreign body in the mouth obviously you want to get that out of there for for endless numbers of reasons so you can detect surface variation with your lips and tongue with tremendous accuracy and of course you know there's all sorts of uses that people put that ability to it's also one of the ways that people uh test each other out for sexual compatibility right because that's all mouth and tongue work rough not all of it obviously but at least some reasonable proportion of it and so that's also a part of exploratory Behavior so you're testing for things like Health with with with kissing and with smell so anyways it's a major part of you you know and not only is it a part that you that you explore the world with so that you can figure out what to eat and what not to eat which is a big problem for omnivores right because we can eat damn near anything and that's a complex cognitive problem but you also can use it as a tool for exploring the Contours of the world now animals really do that with smell right because your typical animal is a smell-based creature whereas human beings aren't really so much that probably because we became upright and for a bunch of other reasons but smell is a tremendously powerful um modality and it's pretty much fully there at Birth as well and you know mothers report that they can distinguish their baby by smell virtually you know a day or two after they're born they know the smell and babies can certainly smell their mothers and their fathers as well it doesn't take very long at all so anyways the baby's got its mouth and so it can start getting somewhere with that and then it's also got basic reflexes you know and now what a baby does in some sense is it's it's it starts developing from the middle and the top downward and outward so the mouth and the nose are all wired up the eyes start to get wired up fairly quickly they're not much to begin with because a baby will move its eyes independently and it's not very good at focusing although it's focal length is actually it's natural focal length is pretty much exactly the distance from breast to Mother's eye which makes perfect sense right because the baby wants to be able to communicate extraordinarily well to produce a bond with the mother and that happens most frequently with during breastfeeding which is also extremely good for the baby because the baby gets touched and babies really really really really need to be touched they if you don't touch them they die so even if you feed them and shelter them and all those sorts of things they have to be touched and it's it's very good for the baby's development so anyways the baby starts out with it's it's uh its ability to explore with its mouth and its tongue and its and its ability to smell and then it starts to develop its eyes but it does that in concert with developing other parts of its body you know and so the baby if you put the baby on its stomach then it starts to exercise its ability to lift up its head and so it kind of gets that going and it starts to learn how to use its arms and its legs and um so one thing you can do for a baby for example to help it get going so let's say the baby's in its crib it's laying face upward okay you can give it a mobile now if you go into a baby store and you look at mobiles what you'll see is maybe the top part is like two coat hangers right it's like a cross and then there's things hanging from it and the things will be I don't know maybe they're cute who knows Hello Kitty things are some damn thing like that you know and they're facing you well that's a stupid mobile because you aren't the person who's supposed to be looking at the Hello Kitty things the baby's supposed to be looking at it so those should be facing down and they never are they're always facing sideways so when the baby looks up all it sees is a bunch of horizontal lines but so let's assume that you're reasonably bright and you get one that the baby can see and then maybe it should be black and white or at least really really bright primary colors because it's easier for a baby to detect that black and White's really good because baby's pretty good at detecting edges and so that thing will move around the baby will lay there and watch it you know and babies they I think they kind of look like they're Stoned on LSD you know and I actually think that's technically correct because one of the things that hallucinogens do is reduce the um inhibiting Power of memory on perception and of course babies have no inhibiting power of memory on perception because they have no memory so they're pretty much you know completely overwhelmed by the world all the time so they're laying there watching this mobile and you know you can shake it and maybe they'll have a little reflex at that or or you can interact with some way and the baby will start checking that out it'll watch it and watch and watch it and it'll watch partly so that it can get its eyes organized and it does that in concert to some degree with its motor ability you know because you might say imagine your cross-eyed a little bit like a baby and you're looking at that thing and there's two of them and you might think well how do you know there's not two of them and the answer to that is well you have to whack it with your hand as soon as you walk it with your hand you're going to find out if it's one thing or two things once you figure out whether that's one arm or two arms you know and so the baby is starting to to whack itself against the world and watch the consequences to help it start to build up its ability to interact with the world and its ability to model the world and so one of the things you'll watch for example if you put a baby in a crib and it's got a mobile there you want to kind of move the mobile down so that it's close enough so that the baby might be able to bump it because babies if you if you don't swaddle them they lay there in their hands and legs sort of float in space like this and it's because they're not really very well connected to them and that's why a baby will poke itself in the eye now and then with its thumb and it's rather amusing to watch in a kind of clique manner so a baby will lay there and it'll poke itself it'll go like that and what it's just discovered is that there's some relationship between that random movement and that sensation okay now okay so let's say it's laying there and it's floating around in space and it's fortunate enough so that its leg comes into contact with an element of the mobile well that'll make the mobile do something interesting and novel and when the main when the mobile does something interesting and novel that triggers a reflex in the baby and the reflexes that the baby will Orient towards it and look and so for Piaget that was the circuit that was the beginning of the baby's ability to sort of start bootstrapping it up in the world and he thought what you needed was the ability to move a little bit at least so that'd be the reflex say or even Randomness and then you needed the ability to refine that movement so that you needed to be able to practice it and you needed to be able to improve with practice and you needed to be able to imitate and one of the things that Piaget thought which I think is so smart it's so smart is that what a lot of what babies did was imitate themselves so for example maybe they're they're laying in in bed and they're starting to get some sense of of the connection between of how their arms and legs work and so they can maybe make start to make sort of broad gestures and that's it but now and then they they're lucky and they're sort of flinging their arms around and they hit the mobile and they get a little reflex out of that it's a startle and an indication of interest and then they'll sit there and practice how to whack that thing with their hand and so then what so what they're doing is they kind of accidentally produced a phenomena of Interest and they noted the consequence and then what they do is try to reduplicate the phenomenon of Interest so basically what they're doing is manifesting different patterns of quasi-voluntarily reflex quasi-voluntary reflexive behavior and then if that produces something of note they'll practice imitating it so when my daughter was about 18 months maybe not even that old 13 14 months maybe old enough to sit up anyways and old enough to start to do some things by herself we bought her these books they were Disney books hardcover cardboard books you know five pages long or something each of the pages was quite thick because it was made out of cardboard and they four of them would come in a little box which is about four inches high and about an inch and a half wide and if you were really careful you could take out the books and then you could put all of them back in it wasn't that easy because the first one wasn't too hard but they got consid you know consistently more difficult as you kept putting each of them in because the parameters of the exercise changed and she must have spent I don't know 150 hours dumping those out picking them up putting them in and you might say well what was she doing and you know you'd say well she was putting books in a box that's not what she was doing first of all they weren't books to her and it wasn't a box because she didn't know what a box was what she was doing was practicing going like this you know and matching the size of something to a to the size of something else and that's very complicated and maybe you know so there's a a jar of apple juice okay so you might say well pick that up okay well you can pick it up like this you can pick it up like this you can pick it up like this you can pick it up like this like there's a lot of things to practice and each of those movements is a different sensory motor capacity that has an incredibly wide range of potential applications so a child will sit there and Fiddle about with their hands and their arms and the rest of their body for Untold hours because what they're doing is building up these basic sensory motor systems from the bottom up so that they can you know so so they practice them in one domain where there's some Challenge and then they're starting to build new exploratory tools that they can go out and practice on the rest of the world so you know once you can grip uh let's say once you can grip a mobile and you can let go which is something babies actually have a hard time doing because they have a grip reflex and they're quite strong when they're first born if you put your fingers in their hands you can lift them right off the ground they'll cling to you and that's probably old chimpanzee gripping Behavior because chimps grab to their mother's fur and then they're like carried around like that for about three years now since you don't have much fur it's kind of useless for the baby although they're pretty good at getting your hair and your glasses and your nose and so and you got to get them to let go so anyways they'll sit there and practice all these little subroutines and so you'll see this too if you have a baby you've got your baby in the high chair maybe it's nine months old and you're trying to feed the baby which is often very uh challenging because babies are very curious and annoying and Troublesome and tough and ornery and exploratory and and misbehaving and provocative and all those things because they need that to learn about the world and they'll they'll do something like maybe they'll eat and they'll drop the spoon and a mass will go on the floor and they think wow gravity that's interesting so then you'll give them their spoon again and the first thing they'll do is take their food and put it on the floor and then they'll do that launch because they're kind of interested in this hole twisting the spoon and having Things fall on the floor phenomena and so it's part of the reason why it's often hard to feed babies is because even if they're hungry you feed them three things and then they're not starving and then they're so hyper curious that they're gonna you know try to do something else so but what they're doing is they're they're continually utilizing their basic reflexive behavior and building more and more complex structures up on the basis of that and with each time they do that it opens up a new toolbox for them and they you know expand outward and start to interact with the world and so that's one way also of understanding where a baby's personality comes from now this is complicated because there are things about babies that are sort of they're parameters of Personality are somewhat determined at Birth so I'll tell you how I've I've conceptualized this it's it's how you might conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture I don't know if this is a good metaphor or not it's not the most elegant metaphor in the world but it's worked for me so imagine for example that a baby at three months of age can be a calm baby or a nervous baby now that is the case we we know that even right at Birth you could kind of figure out whether a baby is a calm baby or a nervous baby that's neuroticism that's the fundamental dimension of negative emotion so you might say that one baby's nervous Behavior might have this range and another baby's nervous Behavior might have this range and another baby's nervous Behavior might have this range and most of the time it's sort of in the middle of that range and now and then it'll manifest behaviors that are associated with what's extreme for it so even if you have a calm baby sometimes it'll get upset and even if you have a baby that's always upset sometimes it will be calm so then you might ask yourself well to what degree can you modulate the baby's nervous Behavior so let's say you want to have more calm baby and so you're going to do some things to make that baby calm the question is how much transformation can you make and the answer to that to some degree is it depends on how much effort you make so changes that are close to the average of the baby's natural curve of responses are fairly easy to make so you can shift the baby a little bit towards being more calm without too much work but if you want to shift it more towards being calm then that's going to take more work and if you're going to shift it more to be calm that's going to take more work and it's not linear so what happens is at some point you kind of reach a practical limit you're not going to make your baby more calm than you know maybe you could move it one standard deviation or two standard deviations from its its natural resting place when it was first when it first emerged as a creature but if you're going to move it three to three standard deviations like from the fifth percentile to the 95th percentile you're going to be working up you're not going to be doing anything else with the baby so you can sort of conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture as a cost relationship so for example IQ is quite stable but you can move IQ but it's really expensive so there's a practical limit to it so I think if you take twins that are adopted out at Birth in order to get a 15 Point difference in IQ between the Twins by the time they become adult one twin has to be at the 95th percentile for wealth in their family and the other twin has to be at the fifth percentile for wealth so that's a massive difference right it's huge and so it's such a big difference you're not going to produce that with any degree of ease in the real world but so environmental transformations of biological parameters cost that's a very useful way of thinking about it so so anyways back to the baby now the baby is starting to organize itself from the bottom up and so here's here's kind of a way to think about how that works Piaget pointed out that and this is quite well known in the development literature that babies that are younger than three don't really play well with others and it's complicated because they can play some things with others so for example you can play peekaboo quite well with the nine month old you know so there's some sorts of simple games that that babies can play with you pretty much as soon as they get their eyes focused and one of the funny things about babies when they're very young even below nine months is that they already have a sense of humor which is something I've never been able to figure out so they can play little comical games with you as soon as you're smart enough to figure out what the baby's up to roughly speaking because they they appreciate humor absurdly early and it's very difficult to understand why look anyways it doesn't matter the piagetian idea was in some sense that what the baby does to begin with is first plays games with itself so it's exploring you know and then it produces some phenomenon of interest and then it replicates that until it Masters it and then you know it just keeps doing that and it gets to be more and more and more complex and then by the time it's about three it's complex enough so that all of its little Microsystems are kind of integrated into one thing you know so it's got a set of routines for being hungry it's got a set of routines for being anxious it's got a set of routines for being exploratory it's got a set of routines for seeking um attention from its parent and so on and then it's starting to build some overarching Unity among all of those micro processes so that it can segue smoothly between them and you can really see this starting to happen at two because you know you've heard of the terrible twos and what happens in the terrible twos is that the child's still fairly unintegrated and so they'll go they're quite a riot to be around because they're staggeringly emotional you know they'll go from giddy beyond belief to crying outrageously to so angry that if you ever saw an adult that angry you'd immediately run away and call the police and they can do that like in 15 minutes they just cycle through these things very very rapidly so and and weirdly enough adults will notice behaviors or they'll see behaviors in children that would be absolutely outrageous in adults and they don't even really it doesn't phase them at all it shows you how well adapted we are to children because you know a child who's having a tantrum if the child's good at it you know they'll fling themselves onto the floor which you rarely see an adult do and then they'll pound and kick and scream and then if they're really good at it some of them get really amazingly good at it they'll hold their breath until they turn blue and pass out it's like try that one night when you're you know when you don't have anything to do and you're and the power is off you know just see if you can kick and scream on the floor for a while and then hold your breath till you turn blue and pass out you can't and that just shows you how you know committed to the Tantrum a child can be so it's easy to stop that sort of behavior by the way um so if your child throws a tantrum it's at home just go away and then eventually the child will turn blue and you know pass out then they'll come too and there isn't anyone there and that's not really an exciting outcome so if you do that two or three times the child usually figures out that it's really not worth the hassle if you want the child to continue wait until they turn blue and pass out and then really freak out especially if you can do that randomly a few times man you'll get that child just having Tantrums turning blue and passing out pretty much everywhere yeah so don't don't do that that's a bad idea so all right now so the piagetian ID in some sense is the child builds up these little reflexes and these little we'll call them sub personalities because it's a better way of thinking about it and it starts to build them around modern psychologists would think more that it starts to build them around motivational systems Piaget wouldn't have necessarily said that but and then at some point the child starts to enter the social world now it's simple in some ways to think of the child before three as not social and then the child after three is social but it's not really accurate right because if you think about it the child is being social right from the beginning of its development because first of all it has to figure out for example how to feed even if it's not being breastfed it has to figure out how to participate in a playful and social manner around feeding and that's particularly the case if the child has to breastfeed because breastfeeding is very complex process first of all you have to get the mother to cooperate and you can't bite her for example and so there's all sorts of rules about breastfeeding that the baby has to follow and so the baby's actually entering into fairly complex social relationships and games right from the beginning and that's especially true if it also has siblings because if you know if you have a baby and maybe you have a two-year-old the two-year-old and the baby are playing right off the bat and their two-year-olds are amazingly good at playing with new horns it's quite staggering to watch them and so if you're thinking about having children I also recommend not just having one because one child is way more work than three because you have to amuse one child all the time whereas if you have three you can ignore them completely and they'll just raise each other it's actually much better for the children you know as long as you're there not to make sure they don't light each other on fire and that sort of thing which is you're basically your job so okay but we'll act for the time being as if the child isn't social till three because that's a simplification but it's a useful one so PSJA was also extremely interested in how the child became social and I think apart from his ideas about you know the the self-generation of the baby from the bottom upward using its own reflexes and its own capacity to explore the other thing that Piaget was extraordinarily good at laying out and and remarkable at discovering was the role of games and so Piaget was the first psychologist I would say who discovered just how important it is to have kids play now the problem with play is that it's fun and so utilitarian people especially ones that are really conscientious have this idea that if it's fun it can't really be good for you and so because of that the role of play in children was not and still isn't appreciated in the full dimensions of its importance so for example you know we take little kids that are in grade one they're like six you know and what do we do with them we put them in chairs like the ones you're in you've been in that damn chair for like 16 years you know it's like we take those little characters and we put them in chairs and we expect them to sit there and listen to adults for six hours a day well it's it's so idiotic that it it's beyond comprehension it's no wonder the little blighters are hyperactive you know that just means they're alive they should be taken out into the schoolyard and supervised while playing until they're completely exhausted then they should have a little nap then maybe you could teach them something for a while but stopping them from playing and or or not facilitating play among them is absolutely crazy because that's exactly how children come to become social in the world and the reason for that is that the game's children play are analogs of the activities that adults engage in well it's not that hard to figure it out figure that out if you think about it I mean think about playing Monopoly or you're a teenager you play Monopoly how many people have played Monopoly great everybody's played Monopoly well what are you doing it's like evil capitalist Pig game right so and you know if you're gonna grow up to be an evil capitalist Pig then you can get a good practice good good practice going by playing Monopoly and you can you can become part of the one percent which is what you have to do to win right you need to have all the hotels and so no one else has any hotels and you know you play that and it's fun it's fun so it's an analog of real life now it's an analog of real life in many ways because most of the things that you do with other people involve adhering to a set of shared rules and most of the things that you do with other people involve cooperating and competing with them so if you're playing Monopoly are you cooperating or competing how many people think competing okay how many people think cooperating okay you're cooperating are you playing the same rules are you playing by the same rules well yes unless you're cheating if you're cheating you're not playing Monopoly right you're cheating that's a different game so to play a monopoly you have to cooperate because you have to all agree to sit in the same place you have to agree not to steal the money you have to agree that the stupid rules which are completely arbitrary are the ones that are going to govern your life for the next you know two hours you have to agree to try you have to agree to try to have fun you have to agree to try to be like a good player which means you don't get all snively and whiny when someone when you land on someone's boardwalk and they completely bankrupt you you know so you're cooperating like mad and another thing Piaget pointed out which is absolutely lovely is that you can't have a game without cooperation and competition at the same time so there's no such thing as Cooperative games you have to have for it to be a game it has to be competition within cooperation or it can be cooperation within competition within cooperation you know these things are very complexity nested so if you're playing hockey for example is is hockey an aggressive game or a com or a Cooperative game well you have to play by the rules so both teams agree to that you're on the ice at the same time you don't bring a basketball you don't bring a chess game you're there to play hockey are you cooperating or competing with your teammates well both right you're cooperating with them because you want everyone to win plus you want everybody to get better at playing across time but you're competing with them because maybe you could be the star of the game and everybody's happy about that and then with the other team well are you cooperating or competing with them well as long as you're playing by the rules you're cooperating but there's obviously an element of competition now almost every human activity has those elements there's a body of rules underneath it or if they're not rules they're at least social conventions right they're things that people understand are allowed and not allowed and then there's a competitive and a Cooperative element all right so that's what children start to become particularly exposed to when they're about three how Piaget pointed out that there were in some sense two classes of children's games there was the games that have a really clearly defined aim and that'd be the goal and that'd be like you know in the little circles that we were talking about that's where you're trying to go now the thing about it being a game is that all of you have to be trying to go there at the same time and so what Piaget realized was that just as the child is trying to integrate all their little micro games inside them into some sort of unified thing which would be the child a stable personality across time and capable of weathering the storms of life when a group of children get together they build another one of those routines but it it includes all of them and so the kids might say well let's play um hide and go seek that's a good one and everyone knows the rules to hide and go seek and you can win or lose at height and go seek but what you're trying to do is you have to bring your sub personalities all the way up to their integrated State underneath a meta structure that's organized by the collection of children so the child would say well do you want to play hide and go seek and you're supposed to say you're either supposed to say Yes or perhaps pause it another game you're not supposed to freak out or get angry or say that that's a stupid game or run back to your mom because then you're not going to be very popular and you're not going to get to play and if you don't get to play well then you're you're ruined because if you don't learn how to play with others between two and four you never learn and then you're some poor Outcast and maybe you end up in jail or at least you end up like isolated and and awkward and and poorly socially integrated and that's not good because if you don't get into the kids games at three all of them start moving ahead and you don't and the farther they've moved ahead past you the less likely it is that they're going to play with you so one of the things that's really worth thinking about if you're going to have kids is you have a job as a parent and your job as a parent is to make your child socially acceptable especially to other children by the time they're three and if you don't do that well that's not very good you'll pay for it and so were your child and you know there's been lots of long-term follow-ups on this sort of thing and it seems pretty evident that if the kid isn't socialized by four then good luck there's no evidence at all from the developmental literature which is quite a dismal literature that you can fix that so anyways all right so the children all get together and they say well here's what we're going to do and everyone says yes and so they Orient their personalities towards that goal and then they interact in a cooperative and competitive way in pursuing the goal and that's a game and what they're doing is practicing being social human beings and so and they do that with all sorts of different games and then you might say well here's something really worth thinking about what does it mean to be a functional human being it to me it means to be the sort of human being that can be a good player across multiple games so you might think for example you tell your kid I'll tell you the story about a hockey game that I saw once Harkey parents say 10 of them should just be jailed as soon as they enter the arena so when my kid played call it a level high level hockey for a while when he was a kid anyways he was a good he's a good hockey player but it was really unbearable so we didn't do it for very long for a variety of reasons but anyways on his way to learning how to play hockey he was in one of these uh local leagues we had a Arena just around the corner fortunately enough and he wasn't the best player on the team there was a another kid on the team who was who was better I would say and uh he uh he was in a championship game at one point he hadn't been in very many championship games because his teams often weren't very good but anyways it was the local championship and we went and watched and it was a really fun game you know like it was really close I think it I think it was 3-3 till the final 15 or 20 seconds and then some kid from the other team scored a really good goal you know it was wasn't one of those things where they accidentally kicked the puck into the net or something it was a really nice play and so it was a tight game the teams were well matched the local League had made sure like they'd set up teams together and then if one team kept winning too consistently or one losing too consistently they'd sort of revamped the team so they were roughly equal which I really like because you know all the kids got a reasonably equal shot at it and everybody got to develop so anyways we were watching that it was pretty fun and uh the the star kid he was skating around out there and the game ended and he went off the ice and he smashed his hockey stick onto the cement because he was all irritated and you know which was pretty pathetic and then his father came running up to him and said oh you got robbed it was really terrible um you know the reffing was bad and you played very well and you should have won the game and he didn't say you know stop being a little rat and smashing your hockey stick onto the cement like your three which is what he should have said he he basically rewarded his child for narcissistic uh immature misbehavior so it was pretty pathetic it was child abuse as far as I'm concerned sort of up the side really man that's stupid what are you gonna do you're gonna train your child to be a narcissist it's like that of course that's child abuse it's moronic of course it was due to his own foolishness but I don't know if that's criminal right but it was really pathetic so but no but think about this now for a minute so you might think well what did that kid do wrong it's like well he wanted to win so that's okay you should want to win if you're playing a game I mean you're not any fun if you're playing a game and you're not trying to win and there's nothing more miserable than playing a game with someone at the end they say well you won because I wasn't really trying it's like you know you're not gonna play with them again if they do that and that's kind of interesting because it means they've done something wrong you know and even a kid can figure that out and so you might tell your kid be a good sport and it doesn't matter whether you win or not it matters how you play the game now what the hell a kid doesn't know how to what to make of that and you hardly even believe it right you think yeah it does matter if you win so I don't know what this means but you'll tell the child that and so then you might think well what does it mean to be a good sport and and that and that how you play the game is more important than whether you win or lose okay so think about it this way what's your goal well you might say to win the hockey game but that implies you're only going to play one hockey game but if you can play a hundred hockey games and then forget about that what if you're going to play a hundred hockey games in 200 basketball games and 50 chess games and you're gonna have a bunch of jobs and you're gonna have a bunch of friends and you're gonna have a bunch of relationships and all of those have a game-like structure and let's say that you're a real son of a when you play hockey and so no one ever invites you to do any of those other things it's like well you win the game but you lose the meta game and the metagame is the game that's made up of all the games you're ever going to play and what a parent means when they say doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game is that the metagame is more important than the game and you should learn how to play games so that whether or not you win or lose people really want to play with you because if they want to play with you man you're set right so here's here's a cool game so okay you two are gonna play this game are you ready okay so here's the deal I'm Gonna Give You twenty dollars you have to give some of that to him you want to get the offer once if he rejects it neither of you get anything okay how much you gonna give them 10. would you take that okay okay what why first is better than nothing exactly yeah it's fair right yeah yeah so here's this experiment is being done all over the world and so basically what they find is that people pretty much offer 50 50. now here's something cool let's say you go play this game and use 20 bucks and you're playing it with a really poor people and so you you set the game up so you say look offer him two bucks he's poor he'll take it so you offer him two bucks what does he do tells you to screw off right and he's more likely to do that if he's poorer so that's pretty interesting because like a classical Economist would say look what you should have done was offered him a dollar it's like you get 19. you get 19. he gets a dollar he's going to take the damn dollar because it's better than nothing but that isn't what people are like it's like you give them a dollar and you get 19 they want to punch you right they're not going to take that and that's because they don't want to play the game that way they want to play the game so that it's fair across multiple games now you might say let's say you're playing that in front of a whole bunch of people like we were now and let's say all these people are going to be able to invite you to play the same game and so maybe you're going to be able to make 400 in the next hour so then you might say well what should I do if I wanted everybody to invite me to play this game as much as possible then how much would you offer 15 exactly that's cool so that means actually you lost the game the one game right because you only get fifteen five and he gets 15. but like everyone's thinking hey I'm going to play an escape with her well that's that's what it means when you tell someone to play the game properly you say act as if while you're playing a specific game that there's a higher order moral principle that has to do with the total number of games that you're going to play across your entire life and play that game properly yeah well that's the evolution of higher moral thinking in part from a piagetian perspective it's bloody brilliant so all right we'll see you Tuesday [Applause] |
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. |
Okay, so we’re going to wrap up Freud today.
So Freud occupies a strange position in the history of psychology, because Freud wasn’t
a psychologist, he was a medical doctor. And many of the people whose theories we’re
discussing were clinicians, were MDs, not psychologists. Well of course when Freud was
around, at least when he was training, psychology hadn’t yet become an independent science.
Now the same was true of Jung, and part of the consequence of that was that when the
new science of psychology developed into what you’re studying today, the psychoanalysts
and the medical community basically stayed outside of that. And there’s never really
been a meeting of the minds between experimental psychologists and psychoanalysts. Although,
by the 1980s, the cognitive psychologists were promoting their discovery of the cognitive
unconscious, which always felt to me a little bit ungrateful, given that Freud had actually
laid the groundwork for the theory of the unconscious and elaborated that in quite great
detail, you know, almost a hundred years before. There’s some resistance (and that’s what
a psychoanalyst would say) among the experimental psychology community to credit Freud with
any of his real discoveries, and I think that’s very unfortunate, partly because a) he did
make the discoveries, and b) the psychoanalysts still understand more about the nature of
the unconscious than modern experimental psychologists. Because modern experimental psychologists
insist on viewing the brain as a cognitive process, or something like a computer, and
that isn’t what it is. It’s a living system composed of other living subsystems. And that
means that, as we’ve discussed already, the human psyche and its subordinate components
are better conceived of as personalities and sub-personalities than in any other manner,
than in systems or than in information processing machines.
It’s… I think perhaps the most fundamental accomplishment of psychoanalysis, following
Nietzsche, actually, to view the human mind, the human psyche, as a place of relatively
integrated sub-personalities. I mean, even when modern people talk about themselves,
they talk about the ‘I’ (which would roughly be the ego, in Freudian terms), they tend
to think of themselves as a unitary phenomenon. But the problem with that notion is that people
continually do things… they find themselves doing things that in principle they don’t
want to do, or things that they’re ashamed of, or lying when they don’t want to lie,
or generally misbehaving. And it’s also, of course, everybody’s observation that
you can try to tell yourself what to do, but that doesn’t work very well. So you know,
you’ve experienced this, undoubtedly in your own life many, many times, when you’re
sitting down and you’re trying to study for something, particularly if you’re not
very interested in it, then all sorts of alternative possibilities will make themselves manifest
in the theater of your imagination. And in a sense what’s happening in those situations
is that parts of you that are organised around other goals or, from the Freudian perspective,
say, driven by other desires, are trying to hijack control of your motor output. And that
frequently happens, so that you find yourself, for example, procrastinating, or rationalising,
or displacing (those are all Freudian concepts). A displacement would be, instead of doing
the work you’re supposed to do you go off and do some other work. You know, it’s not
a bad way of procrastinating, but it’s not great, because you’re not focusing on what
you should be focusing on. And so, in some sense, you’re at war with yourself. And
the major player in the war, at least in principle, is the ego, and that would be equivalent to
Freud’s conscious mind, at least in the initial stages of his theory.
It’s somewhat complicated to talk about Freud because of course his theory developed
across time, and in the beginning, he basically broke the mind up into the conscious mind
and the unconscious mind. And you can think of the conscious mind, well that’s you,
essentially, that’s the you that you can refer to during day to day experience. And
then the unconscious mind is a storehouse of two broad classes of phenomena. And one
would be drives that are grounded in instinct, that are either at odds with your current
goal, or memories, often traumatic, that you haven’t been able to integrate into your
conscious framework. And so those pesky things take on their own life.
You know if you take an animal and you take out increasingly large segments of its cortex,
say, the animal still organises itself into that animal. Like it starts to lose function,
especially if you go deep into the brain (and you can kill an animal if you go deep into
the brain), but if you stay on the cortical surface, you can take an awful lot of brain
tissue out without interfering with a lot of the animal’s ability to sustain itself.
And what that shows is that the brain is organised in such a way so that isolated components
of it will take on a function of the entire personality. And that’s demonstration, in
some sense, that the sub-elements of the psyche, or perhaps sub-systems of the brain, can organise
themselves into functional living units. And it stands to reason. I mean, if you lose an
arm you don’t stop functioning. You just reorganise your personality minus the arm.
And if you have only managed to integrate a certain subset of the potential psychic
manifestations of your mind, then that subset is going to formulate the main personality,
but all the other things you’re ignoring or can’t integrate, they’re going to have
a life of their own. They don’t just disappear. And so, Freud offers the unsettling idea that
you’re by no means master in your own house. And one of the ways you can determine that
is by watching yourself do things that you don’t want to do. And those are things,
for example, that you’d have a hard time facing up to, because of course most of the
things that you don’t want to do are things that you might be ashamed of or anxious about.
And then of course there’s the defeat that you suffer when your ego is hypothetically
in control of the circumstance and you find your behaviour or your thoughts directed in
some direction under the control of something that you think that you’ve mastered.
You can really see this in conditions like anorexia. Especially if it’s accompanied
by bulimia, which it often is. So anorexia is an eating disorder that causes people,
I think essentially, to become extremely disgusted with their own physiology, with their own
physical being. And it warps their perceptions terribly. So I had an anorexic client at one
point, and she was a rather small woman, maybe 5’2” or something like that. Quite thin,
obviously, she had anorexia. And I asked her when she was in my office if her thigh was
bigger or smaller than mine. And she said well it was about the same size. So I took
a piece of paper and I sat on it and I drew the outline of my thigh on it, and then I
had her sit on the same piece of paper and she drew the outline of her thigh. And of
course, there was probably that much space on both sides between the two outlines. Well
she probably looked at that for fifteen minutes. You know, she could not believe that that
could possibly be the case. And I think what happens in anorexics is that
they stop being able to look at their whole bodies. So when you look at yourself in the
mirror, you kind of have to look in a Gestalt manner, you have to get a picture of the whole.
Alternatively you can focus on small parts, but the more you focus on parts, the more
difficult it is to see the parts in relationship to the whole. And anorexics get unbelievably
focused on small elements, and they confuse themselves. So for example, if they’re looking
at their arms and there’s some flesh on it, they are unable to make a distinction
between flesh and fat, and they want no fat, they want to go right down to the bone. And
they can’t… because they’re concerned about that tiny little part or maybe this
tiny little part, or wherever they happen to be focusing, they get completely unable
to perceive their own bodies. And it’s quite striking how far that can go.
And then the bulimic end of it is, well, the person will starve themselves for a long period
of time, and of course, we’ll think about this in modern physiological terms, feeding
behaviour is regulated by the hypothalamus, and that’s an ancient brain region that
controls fundamental biological systems. And it’s right above the spinal cord and it’s
a very, very, very powerful centre of control in the brain. It’s functional enough, and
I think I told you this before, that if you take a cat and you cut off its entire cortex,
and even most of its emotional systems, if you leave it just with the hypothalamus and
spinal cord, which means it almost has no brain, it can organise its behaviour almost
perfectly, as long as you keep it in a simple environment.
So anyways, the anorexic attempts to starve but… so that’s a conscious goal, you might
say, or an ego-related goal, or you could even think about it as a goal that’s motivated
by other unconscious forces, because she doesn’t know why she wants to starve, but in any case,
what generally happens is, she’ll run into an emotionally upsetting situation. Now emotional
upset, it makes you anxious, or puts you in emotional pain. That activates higher brain
centres than the hypothalamus, but they’re still pretty low, they’re still pretty primordial.
And one of the things that kind of emotional upset does (let’s call it stress) is shut
off your long-term planning. And the reason for that is that if you’re stressed in the
immediate now, your body and brain presume that you should devote… divert resources
from the hypothetical future to solving the problem that’s right in front of you, and
that’s often a more behaviourally oriented solution, like freezing or withdrawing, or
something like that. So it shuts off your pre-frontal cortex.
Well as soon as that happens, then the hypothalamus, which is, as I said, a very powerful system,
just reaches up in some sense and dominates the person. I mean, it’s been there for
God only knows how long, you know, tens of millions of years, and its job is to stop
you from starving to death. And you know, you can imagine that over the course of evolutionary
history anybody who had a relatively weak feeding instinct died. And so they weren’t
our ancestors. And so what happens to the bulimic is, something will upset them, and
then they’ll get an uncontrollable desire for often something that’s high-calorie
and sweet and full of fat, logically enough, because they’re starving, and then they’ll
eat a whole quart of ice cream and two loaves of bread.
And you know, they describe the state that they’re in while they’re doing that as
dissociative. You know, it doesn’t feel like them. Well you can imagine why, in some
sense. It partly is the whole realm of eating behaviour. And eating is a sub-personality,
it’s not just a behaviour and it’s not a drive. When you think about when you’re
hungry, it’s not like your brain is moving you literally step by determined step. It’s
that you start fantasizing about food and you start thinking about what you maybe want
and then you start to make plans about where you’re going to go or how you’re going
to cook it and what social surround there’s going to be and a whole bunch of things, and
that’s the hungry you. Well in an anorexic or a bulimic, the hungry part of the person
is so dissociated from the ego part, that they’re basically in a war. But one of the
problems with being in a war with your hypothalamus is that it almost always wins. And it’s
a good thing, because otherwise you die. And lots of anorexics do manage to starve themselves
to death. And so that’s a good example of just exactly
how dissociable the mind can be. And the mind is also… the brain is dissociable in the
strangest possible ways. So here’s an example. I don’t remember the name of this syndrome,
it might pop into my mind. So you can have a particular kind of stroke, and here’s
the effect of the stroke. You develop the fixed delusion that a person who’s very
close to you (Capgras syndrome) has died or been kidnapped, or somehow disappeared, and
has been replaced by their exact double. And so it’s obviously something… it manifests
itself as something akin to psychosis. And what happens is that the stroke damages the
relationship between, generally, the visual systems that identify faces and the emotional
systems that tag the identified face with familiar emotion. So basically what happens,
let’s say it happens to you and it’s your mother… you look at your mother, but it
isn’t your mother. You know, your mother comes with a whole complex of memories, and
you know, she’s set in a very broad context of memory and emotion. And then you look at
this person, and it looks like your mother, but none of that is happening. And so then
you develop this idea that well, if it’s not my mother and looks exactly like my mother,
well then what could possibly be going on? And the answer is well obviously she’s been
taken away and replaced by her exact duplicate. People get into real trouble with this sort
of delusion, as you might imagine, because they get obsessed with trying to solve the
problem: what did you do with my mother? And you can understand why but here’s a weirder
thing, which is that it’s modality-specific. So that if they listen to their mother on
the phone, that’s their mother. So you see exactly how dissociable the brain is, the
mind is. Even down to small sub-functions. So there are people with strokes who can sing
but who can’t talk. And there are people who lose nouns and there are people who lose
only verbs. And there are people who can identify things but they can’t name them. So the
idea that the brain is a dissociable entity is obviously correct. And here’s another
example of it. Well you dissociate all the time. Now if you
look at the way the brain is structured. So there’s a strip right about here called
the motor strip. And if you’re doing brain surgery and you touch someone with an electrode
on that strip they’ll move the corresponding part of the body. And the hands are very,
very over-represented, and so is the face and the lips and the tongue, for obvious reasons.
We fiddle around with the world a lot, we move our arms and our hands a lot. The feet
are over-represented too. And then we communicate about that with our face and our tongues.
So there’s huge representation there. And if you touch that you get motion, or at least
the person will describe a strong impulse to move. Well out of that grew the pre-frontal
cortex. And the best way to think… people think about that as the substrate of abstract.
It’s not really a good way of thinking about it, because you’re not really out to think.
You’re out to act. And the reason you think is so that you can try out some actions in
a little world of fantasy before you implement them in your behaviour. So to think things
through means to conjure up an abstracted world and then to conjure up a representation
of yourself acting in that world to calculate the consequences and then to decide whether
you’re going to implement it. Well that’s another form of dissociability. Because you
could think without acting. Now, you know, it’s certainly that part
of you that’s able to conjure up the alternative worlds that human beings seem to particularly
identify with, you know. That part that’s thinking… at least modern people really
think of the part that’s thinking as them, or the part that’s capable of conjuring
up abstract ideas. And if it wasn’t dissociable you’d just act out everything you thought.
Well that wouldn’t work very well. So the brain is actually designed, in many ways,
so to speak, to be dissociable. So if you understand that, and then you understand the
two sets of phenomena that are likely to be dissociated, then you kind of got the essence
of Freudian theory. And the things that are likely to be dissociated are 1) memories that
were traumatic, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, and 2) impulses… they’re
not impulses, they’re not even drives, which was the Freudian way of thinking about it,
they’re sub-personalities… troublesome sub-personalities. And you can imagine that
those would be linked to complex positive and negative emotions. One might be resentment,
guilt, shame, anger, anxiety, jealousy, rage, lust, all of those emotions are difficult
to integrate into a personality properly, partly because, in their pure manifestation,
they’re not… they disrupt the social order. So like, think about how well regulated all
of you are sitting here. You think, well you’re… it’s six million years since you diverged
from chimpanzees. If we took a bunch of chimpanzees that knew each other as well as you know each
other, this place would be an absolute brutal massacre. So, you know, for whatever reason,
you can control your primordial instincts, that’s one way of looking at it, that’s
how Freud would look at it, you learn to control them. And Freud’s theory, and this is where
it differs from the theories that we talked about earlier, say with regards to Piaget,
Freud’s theory is really more about control. He thought of all these potential sub-systems
and memories conflicting with each other. Like a war. Like a Hobbesian war. So Hobbes
was the philosopher who said that life is nasty, brutal, and short, and that in this
state of nature everyone is at war with everyone else. And so you need a Leviathan, a top-down
control system, who will punish any deviance from the social contract. Well that’s the
Freudian super-ego. Now Freud thought of the unconscious and the conscious mind to begin
with, but later he dissociated that up into id, ego, and super-ego. And then he thought
that each of those had their unconscious elements. So you, if you’re under the grip of an id-related
sub-personality, let’s say, you could be conscious of that, but there’s the possibility
for all sorts of other id-related sub-personalities to emerge, so those would be in your unconscious.
And it’s also possible, and highly likely, in fact, that the way that you’re perceiving
the world and the way you’re acting in it, and even what you state as your goals are
influenced in ways that you don’t understand by the action of these unconscious systems.
So for example, maybe some of you are headed for medical school, and if I ask you why you’ll
give me six humanitarian reasons, but the actual reason is because your grandmother
would be disappointed if you weren’t. And she might not even be alive anymore, you know,
she may have… your mother may have imitated your grandmother so that that ideal is firmly
embodied in her, and that set up the unspoken expectations about your behaviour ever since
you were a tiny child. So that’s an interesting sub-element of
psychodynamic theory too, and it’s really something to watch for in your personal relationships.
It’s very, very frequently, if you watch carefully, that you can see someone, especially
someone you love, because you have to know them well, being taken over, in some sense,
by the spirit of one of their ancestors. And I don’t mean this in a metaphysical way.
I mean that the thought… the personality of the grandmother or the personality of the
mother has a structure that’s well-known to the individual in question, and that individual
spent a lot of time imitating them in all sorts of ways. And those imitated structures
can be passed down generation to generation. I mean in fact, that’s partly what constitutes
your culture, right? It’s the imitated personality of all of your ancestors that constitutes
your culture. And those things can possess. Ideologies possess you in… not exactly the
same way, but in a similar way. Okay, so you’ve got the id, and you’ve
got the ego and the super-ego. And, as in the Hobbesian worldview, there’s real tension
between them, so that the id is always trying to get its base gratifications, its base desires
gratified. Now, in Freudian times, that was mostly problematic in relationship to sex.
And the reasons for that are quite clear. There was no valid birth control, there was
very little employment option for women, so their sexual behaviour had to be very, very
tightly regulated or they’d fall outside of the social structure into prostitution,
or something like that, and then there was the threat of various venereal diseases, most
particularly syphilis, which is as awful a disease as you can imagine. It can imitate
or mimic all sorts of other diseases, and it’s transmissible from mother to child.
So it’s a nasty one. So it was very difficult for the Victorians to integrate sexuality,
because well, exactly how did you do that? The one pathway to potential integration,
something the super-ego would approve of, was a martial pathway. But you know, people
back then, back in the 1960s, people were getting married around 19 or 20, but that’s
actually a historical anomaly. I mean, typically speaking, in the Victorian age, a man usually
couldn’t afford to get married till he was in his mid-to-late twenties, he just didn’t
have the resources. Women were married usually younger than that.
But so there was a long period of time, for men particularly, but also for women, where
the sexual drive, from a Freudian perspective, was fully flourishing, fully manifesting itself,
but there was no socially approved mode of expression. And so, under those conditions,
there’s a war between the id and the super-ego, and the poor little ego is crushed in the
middle. Now you could certainly see that when we were watching the movie, the Crumb brothers
movie, because they were basically in the same situation. There was no socially approved
way that they could manifest any sexual or any aggressive behaviour. And what happened
as a consequence was that both of those fundamental sub-personalities, let’s call them, become
incredibly pathologised. Particularly characterised by resentment and the desire for revenge.
Because remember these systems think… if someone’s excruciatingly sexually frustrated,
let’s say, and let’s think about it in the broader scheme of things, because sexuality
isn’t really… it’s not a narrow uni-dimensional drive. You know, it’s associated with playfulness,
and it’s associated with the desire for social contact, and the desire for communication,
and the desire for touch… like it’s a complicated, multi-branching phenomenon. Well,
in the case of the people who we were watching in the movie, none of that was either integrated
into their personalities, let’s say, or permitted by society. And so it was bent and
warped and frustrated and then generated all sorts of ideas about resentment and revenge
around it. So you can develop an incredibly pathological sub-personality.
In the one cartoon if you remember, it was the one that was most disturbing, where Mr.
Natural brought Robert that headless woman. So he wanted pure gratification without responsibility.
So it’s a really id driven phenomenon. So he had intercourse with her and immediately
after that was unbelievably guilty. And you can see… so you think about what that must
mean. It’s like someone is under the grip of one sub-personality, and it’s shaping
all of their thoughts and their memories and their emotions. And all of a sudden that becomes
gratified, so it’s satiated, it disappears and bang, up comes the other one. And in this
particular example it was guilt and shame and anxiety, terror even, and self-loathing,
all of those things. And if you read about the experiences of people who commit particularly
atrocious crimes, it’s very, very common for them to experience exactly that. They’re
driven by sexual/aggressive impulses, because those are the ones generally that culminate
in particularly atrocious individual crimes. And then they’ll commit them and instantly
flip back into their normative personality, except they’re absolutely terrified by what
they did. And you know, it’s… more than one person is inhabiting the same psyche.
Now, they’re tied together by memory, generally speaking, although Freud would say you can
also dissociate memory. And so Freud talked about memories being repressed. And that’s
caused an awful lot of trouble, for a whole variety of reasons. Because memory is not
the objective recording… it’s not the objective unbiased recording of actually occurring
events. First of all because you can’t objectively record certain kinds of events, like we talked
about this before. You can’t really objectively record a discussion between a man and a woman
who’ve been married for 20 years about anything important because for them, each word and
each phrase and each sentence and each facial expression has to be interpreted within the
context of the entire relationship in order for the meaning of the utterances to be extracted.
And there’s just no way you can record that in a video. You’d have to have videoed the
entire relationship. And so you’re not going to do that. And so memory is a very, very
peculiar thing, and the idea that you could have an objective record is not a very sophisticated
idea. Anyways, Freud idea, in some sense… he had
a somewhat… I hate to say… it was an insufficiently sophisticated notion of what memory was. Now
I hate to say that, because Freud was a very sophisticated person. But he did, in some
sense, believe in the existence of an objective interpersonal world. And so he thought that
if something terrible happened to you when you were a child, that you had a record of
the memory. It was there, as the memory, as the event. And then you needed something that
would, like a censor that would repress that, and then you needed a place for it to be repressed
into, which would be the unconscious. But if you take apart a traumatic memory, generally
speaking, with someone… sorry, he [Freud] also thought that repressed memory might be
represented in a symptom, a symbolic symptom. So I think that the repression theory suffers
from the inadequacy of its representation of memory, because here’s a different way
of thinking about it. It’s more in keeping with the layer model, a hierarchical layer
model that we’ve been entertaining as we’ve progressed.
So imagine that you’re molested by your uncle, because it’s usually a family member,
when you’re four. Sexually molested. Okay, the first thing you have to ask yourself is
just exactly what kind of memory do you have? Imagine you’re completely sexually naïve,
which basically means you know nothing about the sexual act, and its implications, or the
mechanics, but this happens to you. So the first question is, how do you represent that?
Because to remember something you have to represent it, that’s the thing. Because
you don’t just have a memory of the event. It’s always interpretation, because there’s
so many things going on. Well so, maybe your representation is pain and confusion, something
like that. And then there’d be another layer over that, which would be the necessity for
secrecy. Because of course, the person who does the molesting is going to tell you, well
one of two things, three maybe: it’s good for you, you asked for it, don’t tell anyone
or they’ll think you’re a bad person, this will be our little secret. Something
like that. So then there’s that whole overlay of secrecy and inadmissibility, and what are
you supposed to do about that when you’re four? How are you supposed to understand that
soemthign has just transpired that you’re not allowed to share with anyone? You don’t
have a model of the world that’s sophisticated enough to account for all that.
And so then perhaps from then on what you do is avoid thinking about it. Now that’s
not the same thing as repression. Avoiding thinking about something is not the same as
repression. Because it doesn’t require an act of repress in order to do it. And then
maybe, you know, years later, you start to recall what happened. But what you recall
is an unclear mess. And maybe most of it… because you might say, well how are things
represented as memories when you can’t develop a sophisticated representation? And what seems
to happen, and this is in a sense, the reverse of Freudian theory, is that the event is represented
in the body. And so you can think about the representation of event as a multilayered
neurological phenomenon. And so if you encounter something that’s unexpected or frightening,
the first thing that happens is that very, very ancient reflexive systems act first.
And those things are fast. And so that’s the sort of thing that, for
example, might protect you against a snake bite. If a snake jumped out at you you’re
going to jump backwards, and believe me, you do that before you even see the snake. Because
it probably takes you a quarter of a second to produce a complex visual representation
of the snake. And if you wait around for a quarter of a second, then you’re dead. And
so what’s happened is that your nervous system has conserved basic reflexes that are
only a few synapses long. And so maybe those work between your retina and your spinal cord.
Your retina and maybe a very primordial emotional system, like the amygdala, is wired up to
detect things like snakes and it just sends a message down to your spinal cord, or slightly
more sophisticated motor control systems that says “jump backwards now’. And then maybe,
you think about it, it isn’t even till after that that your heart rate goes up and your
blood pressure goes up and you start to breathe heavily, and then there’s a wave of fear
and revulsion, which is perhaps there to teach you not to do such a stupid thing again. You
know, we don’t exactly know why you would experience negative emotion, you know, or
what function a negative emotion has, except that we do know that a pattern of neurological
behaviour that’s followed by a punishment, or a threat, is less likely to be re-implemented
in the future. Okay, so the reaction to the anomalous thing
is body, and then maybe it’s emotion, and then maybe it’s image, like imagination,
you know, what just happened? And then maybe it’s articulated speech. But lots of things
don’t get past image to articulated speech, and some things, I think, don’t even get
past body. [Dr. Peterson’s phone rings] Sorry about that. So I don’t think that
these traumatic memories are so much repressed, as Freud had it, as never brought forward
for development. So I’ll tell you a story about how this
might work, okay? So one time I had this client, and she was 27, and I only saw her once. This
was when I was just training to be a psychotherapist. And she came in to see me and she said that
she had been plagued by these thoughts of being sexually abused when she was a child.
And I said, well, who was doing this to you? And she said, well it was my brother. And
she said, he was a lot older than me. And so I formulated this mental model of her being,
you know, somewhere between 10 and 13 and her brother being somewhere between 15 and
20, because the way she described it was that she was overpowered by a physically larger
male. So we talked for a while. And then she finally told me… I said well how old were
you when this happened? And she said well I was four. Okay, and then I said, well okay,
how old was your brother? And she said well he was six. And so I said well look, you know,
here’s one way of looking at it. Like you’re looking at it from the perspective of the
four-year-old. It’s a regression, in some sense. That’s still how old you are as far
as experiencing the memory. Here’s an alternative hypothesis. Your brother wasn’t a predator,
you were both terribly supervised children. Well, you know, that made the lights go on
in her mind. Because she never thought about it that way. Like she’d never taken that
representation, which would be her emotional experience as a four-year-old related to a
six-year-old… a six-year-old is a lot bigger and more powerful than a four-year-old, right?
It’s like 50% older, so it’s a big deal when you’re four. But if the issue for the
memory is its relevance to current conceptualisation and behaviour, it was much better for her
to update the memory, in a sense, and think, well, yeah, like a six-year-old’s this high,
and a four-year-old’s this high, and what the hell were my parents doing anyways? And
that’s an entirely different story than the one that she had come in with.
And you know, that seemed to be a great relief to her, and that’s partly because, you know,
if you’re bothered by a traumatic memory, it keeps resurfacing on you, which it will,
and it’s actually one of the ways of identifying a traumatic memory, it’s that the thing
won’t leave you alone. It’ll keep coming up in dreams and when your mind is wandering,
it’ll keep coming up when your mind is wandering, and maybe it’ll come up when you’re going
to sleep at night, like it invades your mind. There’s a reason for that, and the reason
is is that the underlying emotional systems that are associated with anxiety, so those
are mostly the hippocampus and amygdala duo, in some sense, that are mediating those, they’re
an alarm system. And the alarm is something that’s potentially dangerous has happened,
you need to figure out what it means so you can stop that from happening in the future.
Okay so you need a plan. And to get a plan you have to do a causal analysis of the relationship
between your behaviour and the traumatic outcome. That would be the first thing. And then you
have to come up with a way that that won’t happen again. And, of course, for my client,
that happened pretty much right away, because now she was a 27-year-old woman and the probability
that she was going to be subject in any serious way to a situation the same as the one she
was remembering was zero. And I’ve seen this in other clients too,
is when they’re… okay, I had another client, who, when she was, I think I told you about
her briefly, when she was young, four years old, she jumped in a shopping cart and went
down a hill, like a paved hill, in the shopping cart and spilled out at the bottom and hurt
herself. And they took her to the hospital. And then, you know, she’s all primed for
being threatened. So that kind of means you’re open to rewiring. And so then when she’s
in the hospital they don’t let her parents come and see her for a couple of weeks. So
the trauma, the pain and the anxiety and the threat and the ambulance ride and all those
things, which sort of puts her in a state like this, which might be a, like a, state
that’s particularly conducive to learning, because if something traumatic is happening,
you should be learning about that, what the world’s like around that right now. And
she developed a permanent trauma-related paranoia about institutions, which turned, by the time
met her, had turned into a whole philosophy of institutional oppression. But its core
was that, and you know, rightly so, its core was that combination of physiological trauma
and psychological trauma. And you know, mishandling of the situation by people in authority.
So you can see under those circumstances how a traumatic memory can become a core of a
whole large sub-personality, and that has to be taken apart very carefully, especially
if that subpersonality isn’t the kind that can be easily integrated into the world. So
for example, if you’re paranoid about all institutions, you’re in real trouble, because
in a modern world, you’re faced with the necessity of dealing with institutions all
the time. And if you’re more distrustful and paranoid about them than you could be
if you were sophisticated, all that’s going to happen is they’re going to continually
mistreat you. Because I mean if a dog comes up to you and it’s looking suspiciously
and it’s barking and growling, you’re not going to pet it. The way that you interact
with the system depends… the reaction of a system to you is dependent, to a large degree,
on how you approach the system. So anyways, the dissocaibility idea is a really
good one. I mean, if you want to get to know yourself better, and this is sort of a combination
of Freudian and Jungian ideas, one of the things to do is to… so imagine that you
have some sort of goal in mind. The first question that you might ask yourself is, why
do you have that goal? What are the influences on you that have set that goal up, because
it easily could be conscious or partially conscious, or poorly explained, or implicit,
any of those things. So you want to know that, why are you doing what you’re doing? And
the second thing is, if you find yourself avoiding things on the way to that goal, the
next question is, why are you avoiding them? And you know, that’ll mean delving into
parts of yourself that are quite hidden and quite uncomfortable. So for example, if you
discover that the reason you’re pursuing a particular goal is because it’s what your
parents want you to do, one question that immediately arises is, yeah but is that what
you want to do? And, you know, that’s a very complicated
question. Because you’d have to dissociate the part of you that’s ‘the you that doesn’t
want to do it’ from the part of you that’s ‘the you that does want to do it’. And
then you’d have to figure out why in the world you’d be avoiding. So you know, it
might be that you’re unbelievably angry that you’ve been tilted towards this particular
goal for reasons that have nothing to do with your choice, and so that every time you have
the opportunity to study, or accomplish something that would move you farther to that goal,
you’re either not motivated, so you can’t pay attention, you can’t study, you can’t
learn, and you procrastinate all the time, or you do seriously counter-productive things.
So people for example, people can be… I just had someone write me here a while ago,
because he was watching the YouTube lectures, and he said that he had dreams for six weeks
that he drove his car off a cliff and crashed it. And then, at the end of the dream series
he drove his car off the cliff and crashed it. And he asked me what that meant. And I
said well, the dream is telling you that you’re being far too careless with your life. I mean,
that’s what driving a car off a cliff repeatedly means. It’s like, you know, that’s a good
descent, unconscious descent, into the underworld. Well, and he was being warned, the psychological
reality was such that the warning was extremely serious and so was the danger. And so then
you might say, well why would he drive himself off a cliff? Well, you know, that’s a suicidal
gesture. And then you might ask, well why would somebody be suicidal, and that could
be, well they’re out for revenge against their parents, or they’re out for revenge
against the whole world, or they’re out for revenge against themselves, or they just
want to make their painful consciousness go away, or they’re living a messy and pointless
and painful life, and they want to punish themselves for it. You know, it’s very,
very complicated and tangled down there at the bottom of things, and people don’t really
like to look into it, and I suppose to some degree that’s the shadow element. Because
what you find there is seldom what you want. I mean one of the prime dictums of Jungian
psychotherapy, and most psychotherapies are predicated on the idea that you should find
out what you’re avoiding and then you should figure out how to voluntarily face it. Now,
you might add to that, you should find out what you’re doing and why, and see if that’s
actually what you want to be doing. And if those reasons are reasons you like. That might,
you know, in some sense sum up therapy in a couple of phrases. But in order to manage
that, then you have to look at all the things you’ve been avoiding. Well, what do you
avoid? Well, it isn’t rainbows and cookies, right? The things that you avoid are the things
that no one wants to look at. And so, Jung’s primary dictum for his psychotherapeutic practice
was a Latin phrase, which is ‘instercuilinis invinoteur’ which I’m probably pronouncing
wrong, which means either ‘in filth it will be found’, or ‘where you want most is
to be found where you least want to look’. And you know those… that’s a horrible
philosophy. But you can see that it’s almost self-fulfilling, because of course the things
you’re going to avoid are the things you don’t want to face. Obviously.
Now, the shadow element of the psyche, in some sense, when you were watching the movie,
for example, you saw these drives, mostly sexual and aggressive, that were manifesting
themselves in all sorts of ways. And so that would be maybe the repressed or unincorporated
elements of the id. But then there was another more complex side of that, where the… people
were reacting to that, because they felt downtrodden and oppressed and anti-social and critical
of social structure and all of that. Because they were unable to manifest themselves properly
in the world. And that produced fantasies of extreme destruction, exceptional destruction.
And for them they were mostly sexually related. But for other people that can manifest itself
in incredibly violent fantasies about the destruction of society as such. So if you
can’t invite all the parts of you out to play, the parts that get left behind are not
very happy about it, and they don’t just sit around having a tea party. They turn into,
especially as you mature, they turn into these warped monsters. And their mode of action
in the world is anything but positive. And a Freudian world… like the world of
the psychoanalytic unconscious, is quite a terrifying place, because it makes you second-guess
everything. It’s like, it’s not a paranoia. It’s very, very difficult, once you’re
trained psychoanalytically, to ever assume that someone’s benevolent motivations are
only what they claim they are. You’re always looking for the other missing piece. And I
think it’s extremely useful, you know, because you run into people, particularly ideologues,
who will claim that they’re acting on the world’s behalf. It’s like, yeah, who made
you a saint? And why should I believe all the good is on your side? Like, what is it
that you’re not talking about? What is it that you’re not revealing? I got something
from Greenpeace once, for example, that was asking for donations. And the brochure was
just photographs of all the people who were on the board. I thought, why do I want to
see photographs of all the people who are on the board of Greenpeace? Or, the other
question is, why do they want to show them? Well, you don’t have to think very hard
to figure that out. You know, it’s a status manoeuver. What you’d expect in a mail-out
like that is “here’s six things that we’ve done in the last six years that have improved
the planet, and here’s what we spent, in relationship to administrative costs, and
here’s why it was a good idea”, not “here’s our leaders”. Now there’s something wrong
there. And I mean, I picked Greenpeace because it just happened to pop in mind but it’s
the case for all sorts of organisations. Alright, so Freud, by 1900, had identified
a lot of different functions of the unconscious, and so, here’s four of them. One was the
unconscious had a conservative function, which meant that it stored memories, often inaccessible
to voluntary recall. Now we don’t really know how memories are stored in the brain,
but here’s a guess. So when you have an experience, imagine that that produces a pattern
of neural activity. It’s not just neural, but a pattern of activity in your brain and
in your body. At least part of how you remember is to reactivate that pattern, but it’s
not that simple obviously, because otherwise you’d act out all your memories precisely,
and we don’t know exactly how that initial pattern of experience gets edited down to
the thing you remember. But we do know that it gets edited down in some ways as a consequence
of its relevance to your current goal structure. How that happens? [shrugs] It seems computationally
impossible. We really don’t understand how it happens at all. We don’t understand how
you can compute what’s relevant and what isn’t. It seems that the world is too complex
for that to even be possible. So conservative. Dissolutive. The unconscious
contains habits, once voluntary, now automatized, and dissociated elements of the personality,
which may lead a parasitic existence. So I talked a little bit about traumatic memories,
and how they might form the node of the development of the sub-personality, but there’s something
else that’s worth understanding too. So let’s say you start practising a new minor
mode of being, a new attitude, or a new personality attribute, or a new habit, let’s say. It
can be a fairly small thing. When you first start practising it, you’re not very good
at it. For those of you who are musicians, when you first start to play a piece, you’re
very inefficient at it. And then the more you practice it, the more efficient you get.
It’s very weird. I’m not a very good pianist but I learned to play one really difficult
song. But the terrible thing is that I’ll learn to play it, and then at some point I’ll
realise I don’t know the notes any more, and as soon as I realise I don’t know the
notes, I can’t use those habit patterns anymore. And then I have to figure out the
notes again, it’s very, very annoying. But anyways, when you first start practicing
something, it’s effortful, it requires a lot of brain activation, that’s what the
scanning studies show. But as you practice it more and more, the amount of brain that
you use starts to shrink… it generally moves left because the right hemisphere is more
involved in novelty processing. It generally moves left and then it moves back, and the
area gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until you’ve generated up a little machine.
Or it’s a little hard-wired sub-personality that takes care of that particular operation.
Now that’s worth thinking about too, because what that means in some sense is that your
brain is full of the things that you’ve practised. And that’s not exactly psychological,
right, it’s psychophysiological. It’s part of your psyche but it’s also hard-wired
into your brain. If you want to overcome one of those habits you have to build a new machine
that shuts it off. You can’t just get rid of it. And then what happens if you get stressed
often, that new machine will get… I don’t know exactly how it happens. The stress will
reduce the functioning of the new machine and the old habit will pop back up.
Some of you will have noticed this. How many of you have moved away from home? Okay so
how many of you notice, when you go to your family of origin, that all sorts of personality
traits that you thought you abandoned immediately come flooding back. So you know that sensation,
right? You go back there and it’s like bam! There’s a groove, and you’re right in
it. And you know, maybe you’re as mature as a 30-year-old when you’re at your own
house but as soon as you come home, it’s like poof! You’re fourteen again. And it’s
partly because of that expectancy situation set up by your parents, but it’s also partly
because you just don’t understand how much of your behaviour is automatic and cued by
ongoing events. It’s habitual. And so, those, you might think of those as somewhat dissociated
elements of the personality as well. Creative. The unconscious serves as the matrix
of new ideas. So that’s a more Jungian idea and the way that seems to work… you might
think, how in the world can you come up with a new idea? It doesn’t make sense, right?
Because what, are you conjuring something out of nothing? Well, and you can say well
they’re combinations of old ideas, but that’s not that helpful because you can’t just
take a bunch of old ideas and then shuffle them and come up with some new, spectacular
ideas. It’s a lot more complicated than that. So here’s one way to think about…
Freud investigated, in some sense, the surface of the creative unconscious, and he was more
concerned about the… Jung called Freud’s unconscious the personal unconscious. So that
might be the unconscious that you have that’s related specifically to your experiences,
conscious and unconscious. Like it can be deep. Jung had a dream once, for example,
(I hope I’ve got this right) that Freud and him were excavating the basement of a
structure, and that Jung broke through and found another huge structure underneath that.
And that’s just about exactly right. And so there’s the personal unconscious and
then underneath that, in theory, there’s what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’.
And that would be, God only know what that is. But in part what it would be is whatever
it is that makes you human from an evolutionary perspective.
And we don’t know… like you have a specific mode of being that’s a human mode of being.
I think it was E. O. Wilson, who’s a great entomologist and also the originator of sociobiology,
which is like a branch of evolutionary psychology, he studied ants forever, and social behaviour
of ants. And he once said if we could talk to ants we wouldn’t have anything to say
to them. And what he meant by that is that, like ants are interested in a bunch of things
that you don’t care about at all. Like they’re not jealous, they don’t get jealous, they
don’t fall in love, they don’t have sexual feelings or behaviours. They’re not a cognitive
creature. It’s like, what the hell are you going to talk to an ant about? “How’s
it going, carrying that grain of sand?” An ant doesn’t even care about that. And
so it’s interesting, it’s really a profound observation, because what it indicates is
that you couldn’t even communicate with someone unless you were 99% the same as they
are. Because to communicate with someone means you have to share a whole massive immense
set of presuppositions. So for example, if I say I got jealous at a party last week.
It’s like, you’re not going to say, what do you mean, jealous? That isn’t going to
be your question. You’re going to say, well what were the particular circumstances that
elicited that response? I don’t have to explain anger, I don’t have to explain playfulness,
hunger… you know, all the basic human motivations that you see displayed say, in the typical
adventure movie or romantic comedy. It’s like, those don’t need explanation, because
we’re the same. And it’s that sameness that constitutes the essence of the collective
unconscious. Now, Jung’s hypothesis was that you’re
not only biologically structured, you know, in terms of your morphology and your physiology,
but that that extends right up into your brain structure and even above that, into the contents,
either the contents of your psyche, or at least into the way that your psyche becomes
organised across time. And you know, it seems like a hypothesis that’s so bloody obvious
that you can’t believe that people would have disputed it for so long, but experimental
psychologists were very strongly influenced by behaviourists. And the behaviourists assumed,
partly for ideological reasons, and partly for the sake of scientific simplicity, that
human beings were blank slates, and that all we were was what we learned.
Well, there’s a book out now called ‘Human Universals’, unfortunately I can’t remember
the name of the author right now [Donald Brown] but it’s a book, it’s a work of sociology/anthropology,
and this person has collected human commonalities, so what’s the same about people everywhere.
Well, we pretty much all wear clothes, sometimes for protective purposes, but if not, generally
at least for ceremonial purposes. There’s pair-bonding in societies, people fall in
love. The basic emotions are the same. We use fire, that’s a big deal, you know, because
no other animal can manage that. There’s literally dozens and dozens of universal commonalities
across people, and that’s part of the substructure of the collective unconscious.
So anyways, back to the creative idea. Well, partly your creative act is going to be a
consequence of your attempts to integrate the peculiarities of your own experience with
the peculiarities of your culture, and the more general phenomena and states of being
that you share with other people. So because you come into the world and have your own
viewpoint, you have access to information that no other person has access to. And so
to some degree, that can be the basis of your creativity, just that information. But then
in order to communicate it, which is also part of being creative, right, because you
can’t just be… if you’re creative but no one can understand you, it’s more like
you’re schizophrenic than you are creative. You have loose associations and so forth but
you can’t put together a coherent story. So then you have to take that unique information
and integrate it with your cultural knowledge, your cultural narratives, and ground it in
universal human biology, and then you can present that as a creative act.
Now, that’s one possible place for the origin of new ideas, but here’s another. So remember
we talked about Piaget. And Piaget basically said that to begin to understand something
you act it out. So you represent the world with your body. By sitting on a chair you
represent the chair with your body. By walking through a doorway you represent the doorway
through your body. By grabbing a glass you do the same thing. So you’re matching…
you’re imitating the world all the time. So you’re mapping it onto your physiological
structure. Okay, so that you get a sense, that would mean, that’s kind of what understanding
means. You know, because that’s a complex term to sort of understand. What does it mean
to understand something? It means to get a grip on it. And you know, we use those terms
for a reason. You know, you’re standing firmly in relationship to it. You can handle
it. All of those things. So that’s one… so that’s the beginning,
but then also you’re capable of imitating, so you can imitate yourself, which is what
you do when you repeat experiences that have a positive outcome, but you can also imitate
other people. But then you think, okay, well who are those people imitating? Well the answer
to that is, it’s like we’re LED screens, and we’re constantly rippling imitations
of imitations of imitations of imitations across our physiological landscape. I mean,
you guys are the sum total of a very long evolutionary process, but you’re also the
sum total of an incredibly long process of mimicry. And so, what you mimic is your culture.
So you could think of your culture as something with a personality. It’s a complex personality.
And it’s the personality of your ancestors, a perfectly reasonable way of looking at that.
And you imitate that. You know, that’s why we call our laws a ‘body of laws’. And
you could say that the legal system, especially with English common law, is the articulated
representation of the imitative customs and rituals of the entire society. It’s been
brought right up into full articulation. But it was there to begin with.
So part of where you draw your material for creativity is that you observe the behaviours
and interactions of all people who’ve been imitating all people since the beginning of
time. And that’s unbelievably informative. It’s way more informative than you could
ever represent. You know how much information someone can indicate with just lifting your
eyebrow a quarter of an inch, right? That can indicate irony, that can indicate the
relationship of the joke to another set of jokes that that person knows that you like,
and it’s very complicated. You can’t articulate all that. But in some sense you know it, right,
you’re a player in that game. Well now and then… so then imagine, okay, you’ve got
all that embodied, to the degree that you’re a sophisticated player. Then your imagination
is representing you, and it’s representing the world. So that’s an abstraction, right?
Because your imagination is not the world, it’s a representation of the world. And
then what you can do… so that means in the imagination, there’s all sorts of information
that’s about the imitated behaviour. And then, then you can talk about the image.
That’s sort of what you do when you interpret a dream. So what’s your dream doing? Your
imagination is watching you wander around in the world. And you have your category systems
and your theories and so forth. And so then your dream puts forth what that… like an
imagistic representation of what that might signify. And it’s in this weird language,
which is an image-laden language. It can range from completely incoherent, just juxtaposed
images, to unbelievable complex and sophisticated full-developed narratives. And that’s part
of the process by which the information that’s embedded in you and the culture at a behavioural
level moves up to the imagination and then pops up into articulated space. So you have
a dream, the dream is about you. And then you talk about the dream, and what you’re
doing. You’re trying to translate the images into articulated representations. And that’s
also a good way of thinking about how memory moves from the bottom up.
And what’s interesting… you know how sometimes you have a realisation or a moment of insight?
And that… there’s a feeling that goes along with that, it’s like a charge. And
I think it’s a charge that you get from simplifying something but also from experiencing
the new possibilities that emerge as a consequence of that realisation. What seems to happen
is that you have the behavioural realm, let’s say, the things you act out, and all the things
you imitate, very, very, complex. And then on top of that you have the image of that,
right? And you’re trying to get the image right but it’s really hard because this
changes and this floats around. So you’re trying to get those lined up, and then on
top of that you’re trying to get your articulated representations lined up, so that you can
say about what you know about who you are. And when all those come together, you think
man, I’ve got my act together. But now and then you’ll have an insight, you know, you’ll
think… well, like this women who I told you about who had been molested. The insight
was well, I was a little kid but so was my brother. Bang! It’s like, wow, all sorts
of things that didn’t make sense anymore just fall into place. You get this articulated
representation that can sum up a whole bunch of… what would you call them? Divergent
and apparently unrelated image representations. And then all of a sudden your path forward
is clearer. Because you know more about who you are and you know more about how you…
where you’re going. And that is in large part what’s happening
in psychoanalysis. It’s certainly something that happens in dream analysis, which is something
that Freud also pioneered. You know, Freud believed that dreams were wish fulfillments.
And, you know, he believed that the function of dreams about wish fulfillments were to
protect sleep. So for example, maybe you’re really thirsty, and you go to sleep. And you
dream about drinking water. Some of you who have consumed too much beer the night before
might be familiar with those sorts of dreams. And so you’re dreaming that you’re searching
out fountains and you’re drinking, and Freud’s interpretation of that would be, well, you
should stay asleep. And so the dream is providing your underlying id-related motivational system,
say the one that governs thirst, with the fulfillment of its desire. But I think that’s…
I really think that’s wrong, although it’s weird because dreams of course could be doing
all sorts of things. But what seems to happen instead… I realised this most particularly
once I heard about a study about the effects of testosterone, cycling testosterone on female
sexual activity. So the plan is this, is that in women testosterone
levels vary across the monthly cycle, and so does sexual desire. And what seems to happen
is that as testosterone increases, the frequency of sexual acts doesn’t necessarily increase,
but the frequency of sexual fantasy increases. And so the hormone is driving the fantasies,
and then the fantasies drive the behaviour, it’s something like that. And so, the dream
isn’t fulfilling a wish, what it’s doing is… that’s how the motivational system
manifests itself in a plan for action. It’s like well you should be going to look for
sources of water, if you’re thirsty. And so, because the… you know the hypothalamus
has to communicate with you somehow. It doesn’t just grip your behaviour and move you around
like a robot. You know, it has to indicate what the state, what your state is, it does
that all sorts of ways, and then start tilting you towards solutions, using your memories
and your skills and everything that would be related to successful outcomes of that
form in the past. The other thing I should say about creativity,
and this is I think something very useful for understanding people’s reactions to
psychoanalysis. I have a lot of creative people in my clientele, for a variety of reasons,
and some who aren’t creative. And creativity is a trait. And most people aren’t creative.
It’s not common. And some people who are creative are so creative it’s just absolutely
beyond comprehension. So Picasso for example, created 65,000 works of art, three a day for
65 years. Now that guy was creative. So anyways, lots of people aren’t creative, and they’re
not interested in psychoanalytic ideas, they’re not interested in archetypal ideas, they’re
not really gripped by narrative. So if you happen to be… one marker for creativity
by the way, for openness, is really liking fiction. And women actually like fiction more
than men, because women are actually slightly higher in part of openness than men are.
So what else… if you like poetry, you know, and it gives you an aesthetic experience,
if you really get deeply involved in music, if you’re able to produce things that are
creative. If you have the kind of mind that works in associations. So for example, if
I told you guys alright, write down as many words as you can in the next three minutes
that begin with the letter L. Those of you who are more creative would come up with more
words. So there’s a verbal fluency component. I could say, okay, how many uses can you think
of for a brick? And then I would score that. The first would be how many uses you came
up with, that would be the sheer number, I’d throw away the stupid ones that make no sense,
and often you have to get a panel of people to make that judgment, right. You know, you
could say “well, you could use it as a thing”. It’s like no, X, you don’t get a score
for that. So then, you get another score for how uncommon your response was. And that’s
an originality dimension. And actually if you calculate those two dimensions, fluency
and originality, from a divergent thinking task, which is the one I just told you about,
you can predict how creative people are quite well.
Anyways, the really creative people seem to have a deep well-spring of unconscious ideas
that are always flowing forth, and some of those people dream like mad. And they have
extremely sophisticated and complex dreams, and those dreams seem to guide their behaviour.
And that’s quite entertaining when you see that in psychotherapy if you have an interest
in such things. And you might say well, how do you know if your dream interpretation is
true? And the answer to that is, well how do you know if how you interpreted the last
book you read is true? And the answer to that is, you don’t, and even if you did, you
don’t know how you know it. Because lots of people can read a book and they come away
with slightly different interpretations of it. And that’s because, you can imagine
that the book is a multi-level pattern. And then the reader is a multi-level pattern.
And then if you put those two together, you get a multi-level pattern that’s made out
of the reader and the book, and that’s going to be unique for every single reader. Except
that we have commonalities of structure so that we can communicate about it.
So you read a book and it strikes you, certain things strike you and certain things seem
right. If you do a dream interpretation, it’s a collaboration between you and the client
about the interpretation. So usually what I do is I have people, first of all they’ll
tell me their dream, from beginning to end. Now Freud would say, already you’re introducing
all sorts of bias, because they’re not telling you the dream, they’re telling you the dream
as they interpret and remember it. It’s like yeah, that’s a problem. But you do
what you can, you know? And I tell people just write it down as fast you can and try
not to think about it too much, because we don’t want post-dream editing. And so then
I’ll listen to it, and then they’ll tell it to me again, slowly. And then I’ll listen
to a sentence and then I’ll let my associational network work on it, and then see what that
reminds me of, and then I’ll ask the person what it reminds them of. And then we’ll
talk about… those are the direct associations, those are the things Freud would call ‘free
associations’. And you could say, well, around every utterance, like a sentence, there’s
a collection of potential meanings, right? And those meanings might be direct meanings,
like really tightly associated with it, to sort of loose meanings. And so you can hit
back and forth with client and therapist, until you think, oh yeah, okay, that seems
to be where that’s going. And you’re also thinking about it in relationship to the person’s
current life experiences and the rest of the dream and maybe all the dreams they told you
about before. So it’s insanely complicated. But it’s what people do when they listen
to a conversation. You know, how do you know you’re interpretation of a conversation
is true? Well, you know, there’s a variety of ways that you can approximate that, but
you don’t know. And there’s lots of different ways of interpreting a conversation. That’s
why the post-modernists ended up in their little hole with regards to literature. They
realised that there’s no limit to the number of ways you can interpret a book. But then
they took the next step which was that therefore it has no meaning. It’s like no no no, wrong,
wrong. It’s very unsophisticated thinking. It just means that the way the book portrays
meaning is exceedingly complex, and you can’t describe it using normal, linear rationality.
It doesn’t mean the meaning isn’t there. That’s so pathetic. That’s such a pathetic
theory. It’s dangerous too because it means that nothing has any meaning and that’s
the most dangerous theory, that. So anyways, you talk to the person about the
dream and the dream image and about what that triggers off in their memory, and you also
watch what they say, because sometimes… so for example, someone (this just happened
recently) might be describing a dream where they, where they’re wandering around somewhere,
and they’ll say “and I’m taking the wrong road”. You think oh, okay! Well now
we know what your dream meant because you just said it. I’m taking the wrong road.
And that’s a Freudian slip, and it’s so interesting, because if you listen to people
tell their dreams, you have to kind of listen… it’s like they have two minds talking at
the same time. And one is describing the dream, but the other one is describing their life,
and they don’t even notice the connection, and you point it out and they go oh yeah!
Right, right I didn’t know I said that. And that’s a Freudian slip. And I think
what’s happening, in part, is the right hemisphere, which is an image accumulation
and aggregation system, it’s kind of a low-resolution pattern collection system, uses mostly images.
And tries to put them together in meaningful ways, but the meaning is vague and comprehensive.
And then the left hemisphere, roughly speaking, which is the linguistic hemisphere, is trying
to state what that says in words. And it’s very difficult to make that transformation,
but that’s why dream analysis works in part. It’s because you’re facilitating the movement
of the information in the images into the articulated part of the personality. You’re
moving information up the abstraction hierarchy to the point where it can be well utilised.
Now, I’ll end this with… I’ll end this discussion of Freud with a description of
some research that was done recently by… relatively recently, let’s say the last
20 years, by this psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, whose name is James Pennebaker.
And Pennebaker is a particularly smart psychologist. And he had this idea… Freud had another
idea that was related to therapy, and he thought that what happened, if you came into therapy
and you talked about a traumatic event, was that you were cured by catharsis, which meant
that the trauma had a bunch of emotion associated with it, and that was repressed but it was
down there kind of struggling to get out, and causing you all sorts of stress and misery
trying to hold it down. And then if you could just tell someone about it, and express your
feelings, then that would help you. Expressing your feelings does not help you, by the way.
That turns out to be wrong, but it turns out to be wrong in an interesting and useful way.
Because it’s sort of… it’s almost right. So what Pennebaker did was he took undergraduates
and he had them come in to the lab for three consequential days, and he had them write
for fifteen minutes each day about the worst thing that they had ever done or the worst
thing that had ever happened to them. Often people are traumatised by something they did,
not something that happened to them. In fact, more often, because someone watches themselves
do something absolutely horrific, and then they think, ‘oh my God! I did that! Who
am I?” They don’t know, and then that’s… you know, things start coming unglued.
So anyways, Pennebaker had them do that, and then for the next two weeks they felt pretty
wretched about it. And so, that’s interesting, because if they would have only measured the
result of the intervention in the two week time-span, everyone would have said never
write down your traumatic experiences because it’ll make you worse. But over the next
six months, what happened in particular was that their physical health improved. They
went to the doctor less, they reported less illness, and so forth. And it’s because
their overall level of stress decreased, for complex reasons that we could talk about later.
But then Pennebaker, being an excellent scientist, he thought okay, well catharsis works, you’re
expressing your trauma and poof! You’re fixed. But he went back and he thought, well
wait a second. Maybe how you express it matters. So he went back and he counted all the words
that were associated with emotion, and all the words that were associated with understanding
and cognition. And what he found was two things: one was the more words that you use, particularly
as your narrative developed, that indicated comprehension and understanding, the better
you did over time. And so what happens is, it’s not the expressing
of your emotion, it’s the expressing of your emotion and then the weaving of the memory
into a new coherent representation from which you derive a moral. So what’s the moral
of a trauma? Don’t let it happen again. That’s the moral. And the threat systems
are going to be throwing that thing up at you constantly until you figure it out. How
did I get into this, how do I avoid it in the future? That doesn’t mean it’s your
fault, but your anxiety systems, they don’t care about that. They care about how you’re
not going to fall into the same hole. And the only way to do that is to analyse the
causal pathways that led to the hole to begin with, and see if you can either reconfigure
your behaviour and your attitude, so that doesn’t happen again, or maybe you just
don’t go those places anymore. Either way. And your… the trauma threat systems, as
soon as you come up with a comprehensive representation that you believe in, they’ll leave you alone.
And this can happen very, very rapidly. Like with nightmares, I’ve cured people’s nightmares
in one session, no problem. I ask them to bring the nightmare up into
their imagination. Maybe someone’s chasing them. Okay, think about them chasing you.
You’ve got to visualise it, really visualise it. The more real you make it, the better.
Okay, they’re being chased. How are you feeling? “I’m all anxious and afraid”.
Okay, turn around and look at the thing that’s chasing you. So they do that. Then maybe they
say what it is or whatever, but maybe they don’t even do that. And then I say okay,
before you go to bed at night, just when you’re almost falling to sleep, you’re in a hypnogogic
state, where images are starting to come, you run that. So they run that, poof! That
nightmare’s gone. And the reason for it is that they’ve now reconfigured themselves
as the thing, not the thing that’s being chased, that’s a prey animal, they’ve
configured themselves as the thing that can turn around and face the thing that’s chasing
them. And that’s the same motif as the dragon hunt in the Jungian archetypes, right? Face
what you’re afraid of and that will cure you. And that’s really one of the fundamental
motifs of Freudian psychoanalysis. So, you know you have an exam on Thursday.
I’ll post representative questions of the exam when I get home after this lecture, probably
this evening. The test is here, it’s multiple choice, you’ll have no problem finishing
it, it’s not that long. And if you’ve done the readings and come to the lectures,
you’ll probably do fine. It’s not a tricky test. |
Alright. Welcome back. So, the next four lectures are also oriented
towards discussion of primarily clinical theories of psychology and psychopathology. We’re going to talk about lines of thinking
that, in some ways, run parallel to those of the psychoanalysts because the thinkers
we’re going to discuss now, with a few small exceptions—well, all of them—all of the
thinkers we’re going to discuss in the next four lectures were either influenced heavily
by Freud, Jung, and Adler or were themselves thinkers who influenced Freud and Jung. So, there’s an intellectual continuity stretching
over—with people who are deeply educated and who very thoughtful there’s intellectually
continuity of ideas stretching over exceptional spans of time. And so that sort of relationship is exactly
what you would imagine. Rogers had a variety of influences—so let’s
say Freud and Jung and Adler—but he was also very much influenced by phenomenological
ideas. And the phenomenologists were, and are—phenomenology
is a brand of philosophy, which I’ll explain more deeply, and the other primary domain
of influence on Rogers was Christianity likely and then Christianity also via probably Northern
European culture as far as I can tell. The reason I’m talking specifically about
Christianity in relationship to Rogers is because as a young man he was a fundamentalist
Christian and he was a seminarian. So he was quite oriented towards mainline
Protestant Christianity, but when he was in university he had a crisis of belief I suppose. He was even going to go to China as a missionary
at one point. But he had a crisis of belief in university
because he had also been scientifically trained. His father was a farmer who used rather advanced
farming techniques, and so Rogers was trained to think scientifically from a very young
age. And he experienced the conflict between his
religious belief and his scientific presuppositions quite intensely, and in that battle his formal
Christian belief was the loser. However, his thinking is very much influenced
by fundamentalist Protestant presuppositions and the effect of those I’ll describe as
we walk through Rogers’ thinking. Now, it’s important to understand the philosophical
underpinnings of a global personality or psychology theory because every theory is set within
a set of assumptions—things that you have to assume to be true in order to proceed with
a theory. They’re like the axioms in classical geometry. You can’t prove the axioms; you have to
accept them. Once you accept the axioms then you can move
forward and use the whole system. I think the reason that systems have to have
axioms, which are elements of belief, is because every system is incomplete, right? It doesn’t cover the entire world. And so, in some sense, you need a place to
dispense with your ignorance and the way you do that is by making assumptions. We’re going to act as if the following is
true. And then you can proceed with a partial theory
and you’ll have some success with it. But it’s useful to understand the presuppositions
because it orients you properly towards the theory. Now Rogers is a phenomenologist, and phenomenology
is a brand of philosophy, which I believe started with Edmund Husserl but was probably
made most influential by his student Martin Heidegger. Now Heidegger was a philosopher I suppose
somewhat like Nietzsche in that his thinking ran very much counter to what you might describe
as general academic philosophy. For example, Heidegger believed that ever
since the time of Plato, which is when people think philosophy began more or less, Western
philosophy had taken an erroneous direction: it had become too concerned with the nature
of structures of thought and not concerned enough about the nature of being. And so you can determine those two things. Being is how things are and thought, of course,
is how you represent things. And one of Heidegger’s missions was to reestablish
being as the central reality of philosophy. Now that begs a question, which is: “What
is being?” Well, to conceptualize reality as being is
not to conceptualize it the same way that you conceptualize it in terms of modern Western
thought, because one of the presuppositions at the basis of modern Western thought is
that the most intelligent way to divide up the world is in terms of subjective and objective
experience or subjective experience and objective world. So the fundamental scientific presupposition,
you might say, is that there is an objective world; it’s the real thing. You come to that by performing certain procedures,
documenting them, describing the outcome of those procedures, documenting them, and then
allowing other people to do the same thing operating under the presupposition that if
they experience the same outcome from the procedures, then what they’re experiencing
is real. That’s basically the scientific method,
right? Method. Results. You detail the method, which is how you act
on the world; you get the results. You compare them, maybe across multiple observations
that you do; and then other people do multiple observations; you come up with a consensus,
but it’s a method bound consensus. And then of course you abstract out general
principles from that and it works very powerfully, right? Make no mistake about it. The idea that there is an objective external
world and that that’s the best way to conceptualize reality is an unbelievably powerful tool. Now, whether or not it’s an accurate description
of reality: that’s a much more difficult question. And it’s partly a matter of definition,
actually. You know, it’s the case there are different
forms of geometry; you might know this. You can start from the presupposition that
reality has a three-dimensional structure—and then you’re basically within the realm of
Euclidean geometry—but you can also start with the presupposition that reality has a
four-dimensional structure. And that kind of geometry was invented in
the late 1800’s and it turned out to be the perfect geometry to describe the universe
that Einstein conceptualized when he came up with his great theories in the second decade,
thereabouts, of the twentieth century. So it’s interesting because can start from
different assumptions, build tools on the basis of those assumptions, and sometimes
you find out that those tools work very well indeed. Now, it’s not that easy to think of flaws
in the subjective experience/ objective world conceptualization, and that’s partly—for
us as modern people it forms the basis of so much of what we think that we just think
about it as axiomatic. It’s just true. It doesn’t bear any question. But I’m going to offer you a couple examples
of why it might bear some questioning and you can think about it. The first problem is is that the classical
scientific view of the world has a very difficult time accounting for certain things. So, for example—these are called “qualia”
often by people who are interested in consciousness—knowing the wavelength of light doesn’t seem to
tell you very much about the subjective experience of color. You know, we experience color, for example,
in a non-continuous fashion, right, because we see discrete colors like you’d see in
a rainbow. I mean they shade into each other to some
degree but it’s not like they go from light red to dark red in a continuum. There are clear demarcations of color. Well, that’s because of the way your brain
is wired. You know, it seems like, over the course of
evolution, what we’ve learned is that parsing up that wavelength fragment in terms of categories,
which would be the different colors that we see, has substantial practical utility. Now one of the things you might ask is, “Well,
do those colors exist?” Well, objectively they don’t seem to exist
as colors, partly because the wavelengths that we see are actually continuous. So when one color shades into another, there’s
no radical transformation in wavelength. It’s a continuum but we see it categorically. Okay, so is that real or not. Are the colors we see real or not? Well, that’s a good question. You can’t get a collective experience of
pain. You can get a collective experience of the
blackboard, but pain seems to be something that’s limited to subjective perception. But it’s very difficult—no one acts as
if pain isn’t real. I mean I would say that of all the things
that you might consider real we act as if pain is the most real thing. You certainly can’t argue out of it for
example. It seems like a fundamental element of experience. Okay, so that’s two places. We also have no account in the subjective/
objective breakup bifurcation of the world—we have no explanation whatsoever for consciousness. And that seems like a big problem, right,
because you can make a case that there is no being without consciousness. Like, “Is there something if there’s no
one there to perceive it?” By the way, that is not the same question
as, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It’s not the same question. It sounds superficially the same, but this
is a much more complex question because we don’t know, for example, if—we don’t
know the relationship between time and consciousness. We have a certain perception of time. We have a certain temporal realm in which
we exist. Our refresh rate for our vision, for example,
is about sixty hertz, which is why you can see computer screens flicker if they have
a refresh rate slower than that. So sixty hertz to us looks continuous but,
you know, there are a lot of microseconds in a second and for a computer—especially
a fast-processing computer that can do maybe a trillion operations a second—if it was
watching, so to speak, a movie it would just see a still picture that was there forever
and a another still picture that was there forever. And it wouldn’t have the impression of continuous
movement. So there’s this weird subjective element
to time that’s very difficult to understand. And then here’s a more complex criticism
of the subject/ object idea. I thought about this for a long time. So, the best example I know of it is: I read
this book a while back written by a KGB officer and it was published after the fall of the,
you know, wall in the Soviet Empire. And this KGB officer claimed that he had worked
in a biological warfare unit in the Soviet Union, and the purpose of the biological warfare
unit was to turn infectious diseases into aerosols so that they could be sprayed on
enemy populations. And so they were working on two things: developing
a very virulent infections—and a virulent infection is one that’s severe but also
very transmissible, because those things are separate—and also one that could survive
being aerosolized because it turns out that that’s quite difficult, which we should
be all be very thankful about. And one of the products they were working
on was an attempt to cross Ebola with smallpox. Now Ebola is—you all know about Ebola I
presume—it’s very very fatal, although they’ve learned ways to treat it now and
maybe have a vaccine. But at that time it was very very fatal. And smallpox is incredibly contagious, and
so they were hoping they could develop something that was very very contagious and very very
deadly that you could spray on civilian populations. Now, you know, here’s where it gets tricky,
and it gets tricky here because how you answer this question inevitably depends on how you
define truth. And truth is actually something you have to
define before you can have a conversation about it, which is a kind of a strange thing. Anyways, you can make a case that determining
how to cross Ebola with smallpox and aerosolize it is a perfectly valid scientific question,
and because science is value free it’s very difficult to make an argument that that’s
any worse experiment than any other kind of experiment or any other kind of investigation. And you can also imagine even that if didn’t
go to the aerosolization stage that positive things might come out of it. Maybe you’d end up with a more detailed
understanding of DNA or something as a consequence of the investigation that would have positive
consequences. But it still seems that—the idea of doing
scientific research to cross Ebola with smallpox—there seems to be something wrong with that, and
it’s maybe that sense of wrongness as well that can’t be captured within scientific
models. And so one of the things that Jung claimed—and
Rogers and the phenomenologists—is that, in some sense, is that the scientific reality
has to be encapsulated within an ethical reality rather than the other way around. Now Rogers would say, “You know that feeling
that you have when you hear about someone crossing Ebola with smallpox; that feeling
you have in your body. That’s a real thing, that feeling, and that’s
part of being.” Now, for the phenomenologists, being is actually—it’s
complicated to define and it’s hard to understand. But what the phenomenologists do is start
with a different set of assumptions. They don’t assume that the best way to approach
reality is to break it up into the subjective and the objective. They presume instead that the way to approach
reality is by assuming that all your experience is real. All of it. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t different
categories of experience, you know, because you could still say that a dream and the experience
you have walking—dreaming of walking down the street and walking down the street are
still different things, and the phenomenologists would say, “Yes, you can keep your categorical
distinctions intact, but you have to say that they’re both real.” Now, this is an assumption and I told you
why the assumption is generated. Part of the reason the assumption is generated—the
alternative assumption—is because there are problems that emerge with the set of assumptions
that make up the scientific worldview. Now it’s not that surprising that the scientific
worldview can’t encompass the subjective because the scientific worldview was actually
established—by Bacon and Decartes say and by other thinkers of that time—it was set
up to exclude the subjective from the conceptualization of objective reality. So you can’t really criticize science because
it does that, but you can say the fact that the subjective is excluded is a fault, or
at least an incompleteness, and that incompleteness sometimes has extraordinarily serious consequences
that you can’t just dismiss. Because you might say, “Well, had the Russians—the
Soviets—been successful in crossing Ebola with smallpox and aerosolizing it then we
might all be dead,” and then you might think that any theory that leads everyone to be
dead might reasonably be criticized for its assumption to universal truth. Now, you can debate that and rightly so, but
all I’m pointing out is there are reasons to go at this from another approach. Now, it was Rogers’ basic assumption that
you were more likely to be properly oriented in life if you adopted a phenomenological
approach to your experience and to break up reality in that manner. So let me give you an example. When my daughter was about three, she had
a nightmare and she came running into her parents’ bedroom. And she told me her dream and she was all
upset by it. She might’ve even been younger than three
at that point. And she had dreamed that there was a clear
stream and that it was quite beautiful and that there was garbage littering the bottom
of it. Now by that time, you know, she—kids are
quite sophisticated in their ability to categorize, you know. By that time she’d already learned the difference
between kid things and adult things, and you think, that’s a bloody complex form of discrimination,
you know, because what objective features do adult things share in common that differentiates
them from kid things? You can’t actually come up with a set of
objective criteria that allows that distinction to be made, but kids, by the time they’re
three, have got a pretty clear grasp of that. So they can come up with very sophisticated
classifications. About the same time, one of my friends had
a two-year-old who went outside their house one day, looked down the street, and there
were a couple of garbage cans knocked over. And the kid said, “Uh oh.” And, you know, that’s also extremely sophisticated
because you think, you know, a whole street is a very complex set of visual stimuli and
to be able to glance at that and then to note that something is out of place and then to
make an utterance of it to draw people’s attention to it is a ridiculously sophisticated
cognitive act. And my daughter was doing the same thing within
the context of her dream. So she was upset about this. Now, it’s quite interested, eh, because
you think, “Well, why would someone who was three be upset about the fact that a stream—a
beautiful, clear stream—had garbage in it?” You know, it’s a really—it’s like innate
environmentalism or something like that. Innate concern for the environment and that
could easily be the case, you know. I mean if we fouled our environment up continually
during our evolutionary history that was likely to have very negative consequences. Even birds clean their own nests and so do
bees and, you know, they keep their hives clean and all that. So it could be a very primordial instinct. Anyways, she came in with this dream and she
was quite upset. And then you think there are a couple of things
you could do about that. You could say, “It’s just a dream. Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep,” but, you know, that’s
a philosophical statement, right, and it’s a misleading one, or you could argue that
it was a misleading one, because what does “It’s just a dream mean?” Well, it means that it’s certainly not something
to take seriously like you would take something that occurred during the day seriously. It’s a mere fantasy but with the definition
of fantasy being some fundamentally useless act of play, I suppose, that you can ignore
with no consequences, and not only that that you should ignore it. And, you know, that’s not necessarily true
because then you’re making the case, or you might be making the case, that you don’t
have to pay attention to products of your imagination. That seems like a pretty dopey thing to tell
a child given A, that anything creative that you ever produce is going to come out of your
imagination and B, the way that you set goals and plans for your future is by imagining
them—dreaming about them, right? Everyone knows what it means to pursue a dream. And, you know, you might say, “Well, if
you’re depressed it means all you dreams have disappeared.” It’s like, so maybe you shouldn’t be telling
your child that it’s just a dream and so you can ignore it and go back to sleep, you
know. You don’t know exactly what you’re doing
when you do that. You’re certainly not paying attention to
the child’s experience because she did have that image and it did make her upset, and
those are facts. And as far as people like Rogers would be
concerned, those are facts about reality, or they’re elements of reality, and they
should be dealt with as such. So, I told her to close her eyes and to bring
the dream image up in her imagination, which she could do very well, and then to imagine
that she had some rubber boots on and that she could go into the stream and pick out
the garbage and put it in a garbage bag and that there was a garbage can nearby and that
she could put it in the garbage can. And so we went through that and that calmed
her down and then she went back to bed. And then you might say, “Well, what am I
doing doing that?” Because you might say, “Well, that’s just
a fantasy, just like the dream, and because they’re just fantasies neither of them have
anything to do with reality.” But, you know, that again is not a very sophisticated
way of thinking because the dream presented my daughter with a problem, or you could even
say a class of problems. And the class of problems includes all of
those things that people do, and other animals, of course—all the ways that the environment
can be defiled. Well, that actually is an existential problem. And then you might say, “Well, what should
you do about it?” and the answer to that might be, “Well,
maybe you should do something about it insofar as you can do something about it,” because
then you’re conceptualizing yourself as an active agent and not just a passive victim
or a passive recipient of the problem. You could actually do something about it,
and that’s a way different message than “It’s just a dream; you can ignore it
and go back to sleep.” You know, maybe you shouldn’t actually tell
your child to be ignoring reality and go back to sleep. Maybe you should be telling them to wake up,
and see reality as clearly as they possibly can, and not ignore any of it including their
fantasies and their dreams. And that doesn’t mean that their fantasies
have the same reality as the reality that you experience with everyone else, but that
fact that it’s not the same reality that you experience with everyone else doesn’t
mean it’s not reality. Now Rogers would claim, for example, that
to ignore a private experience warps you fundamentally. So, here are the basic outlines of his view
of the world. So there’s first of all: You exist within
phenomenological field. Now, phenomenon comes from the Greek word
“phainein” and phainein means to shine forth. And so phenomena are those things that shine
forth for you. Now, the way to understand that is to imagine
that you’re reading a book and maybe a passage of it really strikes you as meaningful. Well, then you might say, “Well, why?” There are lots of passages in the book. If someone else was reading the book it’s
not obvious that the same passage would strike them. And then you might say, “Well, is that a
consequence of the structure of you as an interpreter of the book or is it a consequence
of the contents of the book?” and the answer to that is you actually can’t tell, because
the book is neither the thing that’s printed nor the reader. The book is the interaction between the reader
and the book, and that interaction is actually unique for each person even though there are
some commonalities across people—because otherwise you wouldn’t even be able to talk
about a book. Well, regardless, when you’re interacting
with someone some things announce themselves on your field of consciousness and some things
don’t and so the phenomenologists would say, “Well, some things shine forth for
you while other things don’t.” It’s a little bit like one of Jung’s ideas
about the development of the self. Jung believed that if you followed things
that if you followed things that announced themselves to you as meaningful, that they
would take you through a descent to begin with—where you would encounter things you
were afraid of or terrified of and disgusted by and wanted to avoid—and then the consequence
of that would be that you would incorporate a lot of new material into your personality. And the consequence of that would be you’d
be reborn, roughly speaking, as a stronger person, and then if you just kept doing that
all the time for the rest of your life in small or large ways that you’d become more
and more and more fully differentiated and developed. And he would have said that the ultimate potential
target of that kind of development was what he described as the self. The self is a multi-faceted conceptualization,
so that’s not all there is to it, but the self, from the Jungian perspective is who
you could be if you could be who you most deeply are; if you didn’t shy away from
anything; if you accurately encountered and then integrated, even in the Piagetian sense,
your experience. Now that’s exactly the same idea that Rogers
had. He believed that there’s a phenomenal field
and it’s full of experience. All of your experience manifests itself as
the phenomenal field. It’s quite interesting because that means
also that other people are part of your phenomenal field—part of your experience. And then within that field there’s a circumscribed
area that he described as the self. Now that’s different than the Jungian self. So it’s a little terminologically confusing. Rogers’ self is more like Freud’s ego,
but Rogers would define the self as though aspects of the phenomenological field that
you call “I.” “I felt like…” I’ve had clients who tended to talk in the
third person about their emotions, or they would say, “The body.” They wouldn’t say I. Maybe they’re describing
cutting themselves and they would say, “Well, the body needed to be cut.” And what Rogers would say about that was that
the person existed in the phenomenological field and part of that phenomenological field
was demarcated by the self but the self hadn’t expanded to incorporate as much of that phenomenological
field as it should’ve. Another concept that he had was the concept
of the organism. Now, you could think of the self as what you
identify as “I,” and then you can think of the organism as all those things that are
unique to you that you might identify as the “I.” Now it’s tricky, eh, because imagine that
you get angry during a fight with someone—argument—and they say, “You’re angry,” and you say,
“No, I’m not.” It’s like, what exactly are you doing there? The other person—we’re going to assume
the other person’s right for the sake of this argument—they can clearly see that
you’re angry but you’re not allowing the organismic manifestation of that motivational
state or that emotion to be incorporated with those things that you identify with. Rogers would call that incongruence, and he
believed that incongruence was roughly equivalent to psychopathology so that part of your goal
was for the organism to respond appropriately to the broader phenomenological field—now
we can talk about what appropriately means, but we won’t do that yet—and then what
the self was supposed to do was accurately symbolically represent organismic responses
to the broader phenomenological field. So, now you can see that there are similarities
to that concept as say Freud’s idea of the ego and the Id. You know, because the Id was this sort of
external thing, which was home of motivational and emotional forces that couldn’t be easily
integrated into the ego and partly because the superego said, for example, that they
were wrong. So there are these sets of phenomena, you
know, that all of the different clinicians are talking about, but all of them are talking
about it starting from different initial presuppositions. It’s like a group of people in a room shining
a flashlight on a very complex object. You know, they’re all standing in a slightly
different position. The complex object is the same thing but you
can only see parts of it so you need multiple different ways of looking at things so you
can come up with a cohesive and coherent account of something that’s actually beyond your
understanding because, of course, not only can you not accurately symbolically represent
the phenomenological—the entire domain of your being—you can’t accurately represent
even the aspect of that field that’s related to the organismic you. There’s part of you on top that you identify
with “I,” roughly speaking, and it’s trying to model a model of something very
complex and, of course, that’s extraordinarily difficult. Now, why is it doing that? That’s the central mystery of consciousness,
you know. There’s this problem that consciousness
researchers always refer to. It’s annoyingly termed I think. It’s called the “Zombie Problem,” and
the Zombie problem is: Why is consciousness necessary? Why is it necessary for something complex
like a human being to actually have awareness and self-awareness? Why couldn’t it just wander through the
world reacting in pre-determined, deterministic fashion zombie-like. No awareness—robot-like, let’s say. What’s consciousness for? Rogers doesn’t really discuss that and so
we won’t at the moment although I think there are some reasonable ideas. Consciousness, for example, allows you to
generalize between certain phenomena. Anyways, regardless, there are the self, the
organism, and the broader phenomenological field. Let’s say you go into a pub—bar—and
you’ve been there many times and so you know the people in there, you know where to
sit, you know what’s going to happen, you’ve met friends there. You might say that your organism exists, at
least in part, as a very accurate model of that broader phenomenological world. And then, inside that, you’re aware of your
knowledge of the bar, and so if your organism is properly adapted to the broader phenomenological
field, when you go into the bar or other familiar place, things that you expect and want happen
instead of things that neither expect or want. And you could say, “Well, perhaps that’s
a reasonable definition of adaptation.” Now, this isn’t biological or evolutionary
adaptation; this is personal adaptation. They’re similar in some ways but importantly
different. I mean you could be adapted to an environment
without that in any way having any effect whatsoever on your evolutionary adaptiveness. Now, if maybe you’re not very well organismically-adapted
to the environment—you have a model of it—and because of that when you go somewhere familiar,
people don’t like you as much as you think they do and you’re not nearly as much of
a master of that situation as you think you are. And one of the consequences of that—so that
would mean that your self-representation is too rigid and simplistic and full of defenses
to notice the discrepancy between your organism and the broader environment, and that’s
pathological. And the way that that’s going to be marked
is, first, by anxiety. You know, maybe you tell a joke—there are
some people sitting around you—you tell a joke and you see people kind of, you know,
making that face, and maybe rolling their eyes. It’s like, well that’s not exactly—you
might think, “Well, they’re joking. You know, they’re just teasing me.” Well, maybe they’re not; maybe they’re
damn sick of your stupid stories, and you’ve told them fifty times, and you’re not very
funny, and they’d rather you weren’t in the bar at all. And it may be that you’ll actually notice
that, but you don’t necessarily notice it in a fully symbolically-developed way. Now, what that would mean is maybe you start
feeling anxiety, and Rogers identifies different levels of feeling. It might start with the subception, and to
subcede something, which is a word that I guess comes from general semantics, is to
have the event affect the way that you’re interacting with the world in ways that you
don’t necessarily notice. So it’s sort of equivalent to the idea of
subliminal when you talk about advertising. A message is flashed at you and it subtly
changes the way that you interact with the world but you don’t notice that. And that happens to people all the time. I mean it’s actually a part of our normal
cognitive structure. I mean when you walk into this room, the room
tells you all sorts of things about how to behave, and you don’t notice that the room
is telling you those things because you know what it’s telling you so well that you just
act it out. You don’t need to go through all the complex
processes of actually perceiving and thinking about it. And so Rogers’ point is that you can detect
things organismically that will affect the nature of your experience without necessarily
either even perceiving that or definitely not symbolically representing it. Now, maybe the social discomfort that’s
inherent in the situation rises up to the level of perception. That’s not symbolization yet. Then you might think, “Well, what does it
feel like to be anxious?” Well, and I’m not asking, “What are the
objective markers of being anxious?” because we actually don’t know those. We can kind of infer them. Sometimes people’s heart rate goes up, but
sometimes it decelerates, and then there are facial expressions that are associated with
anxiety but you have to use those to infer. If you get anxious, I don’t feel your anxiety;
I have to infer it. But if you get anxious, you feel your anxiety. And so then the question might be, “Well,
what does it mean to feel anxious?” Well, that’s a hard question, and the reason
it’s a hard question is because you never have to answer it because if you tell someone,
“I feel anxious,” then they refer to their own feelings of anxiety and then they know
what you mean. And you never have to come up with an explanation
of what it feels like. The idea that the feeling is an element of
experience is something that we just take for granted, you know. “I got angry today.” Everybody nods. Or maybe I tell a little story and I say,
“Well, you know, I got on a bus and I was missing like two cents, and I asked the bus
driver if he would let me get on the bus and he didn’t. And that really annoyed me because I take
that bus everyday and the driver knows me. And I got angry,” and everybody’ll nod. And the reason they nod is, well partly because
they can imagine that that’s how they would’ve reacted in that situation, but even more importantly,
they accept the reality of angry as a response and they know what it feels like. So, but explaining it: that’s a much more
difficult thing. So the point is is that you can have experiences
that you know of—first of all you can have experiences that you don’t know of. That would be the subceived experiences. Then you can have experiences that you perceive
but that you haven’t symbolically represented, and those might be emotional or motivational
experiences. And then you can have experiences that you
have symbolically represented in a way that captures their gist accurately in a way that’s
reflective or your adaptation, or lack thereof, of the broader phenomenological world. And Rogers would say that latter state is
preferable. You know how to act or you know that you didn’t
act properly and you know how to fix it, which is almost as good, and you represent that
accurately. Now, you might imagine that you could concentrate
on the mismatch between organismic responses and the environment. That’s what behavior therapist really do. They say, “Well, how are you acting and
what are the consequences?” But that isn’t really where Rogers goes. Rogers is more psychoanalytic than the behavior
therapists, and what he seems to be primarily concerned about is whether or not your self-representation
is an accurate representation of how your organism is responding. In some sense, for Rogers, the organism takes
the place of God. It’s more or less omniscient. So your organism is going to tell you the
truth in every situation and it’s up to you whether or not your going to pay attention
to that and make sense of it or whether you’re going to engage in any of the different kinds
of shenanigans that you might engage in to stop yourself from going through the complex
process of symbolization. Because you might say—well, you’re back
in the bar—and you might say, well, you noticed the anxiety and then, you know, different
ways of symbolizing it come to mind. “These people are all just jerks,” and
then another thing that comes to mind is, “Well, maybe nobody likes me.” And then maybe another idea that’s associated
with symbolization comes to mind that is, “Well, maybe there are elements of my social
behavior that I should adjust,” and I presume that if Rogers was having a conversation with
one of his clients he would assume that that was the most fruitful potential step towards
accurate symbolization. Now, Rogers felt that anxiety emerged when
the self-concept was not accurately symbolically representing the organism’s experiences,
and so that would be, in some sense: If you’re a house divided within yourself then you’re
pathological from a Rogerian perspective. And you can think about that, in some sense,
as a move away from necessary simplicity. I mean if your self-concept is set up properly
it doesn’t contain contradictory and misleading bits of information; everything works seamlessly
together. And so what that would mean is that you think
about something, you act it out, and it works. And then that’s an indication that the organization
between, say, these three different levels of being is—well the right word is isomorphic. Each represents the other with sufficient
accuracy. And so that means that you’re congruent,
and if you’re congruent then the world is treating you not only in the manner that you
want to be treated but also in the manner that’s most likely to further your action
in the world as an organism. And so that’s partly why Rogers believed
that the organism had wisdom: it’s because its natural proclivity was to operate in the
world effectively and to expand its competence at the same time. Now, a self-actualized person—because that’s
one of Rogers’ phrases—is someone whose self-concept accurately represents their organismic
being. Now, Rogers was primarily a clinician as well
and his theories were derived from his clinical experience. And his theories informed his clinical practice. And Rogers invented, or developed, what he
believed to be a new kind of therapy and he called that “client-centered therapy.” Now you’ve probably heard about student-centered
education. I mean Rogers’ ideas have had a tremendous
amount of influence, certainly not least in educational psychology—also in conflict
reduction of various sorts. If you start with Rogers’ initial assumptions,
which are, first of all, that you should regard your experience as real; second, that your
organism will give you accurate information about the totality of experience; and third,
that your self-concept should accurately encompass your actual experience, there are implications
of that theory for therapy. And one of the implications is that you can
figure out what you should do if you want to because your organism will tell you, or
at least hint at you, about which directions are correct and which directions aren’t,
and if you follow those then you’re going to naturally gravitate towards a state of
being where you’re more and more accurately represented by yourself but also that your
representation and your organism are going to act more effectively in the world. They’re not bumping up against each other
all the time. And, you know, they’re not in conflict anymore,
and so that’s the goal of the self-actualized person. And therapy, in part, is the art of furthering
that process of self-actualization. Now, Rogers was opposed to diagnosis because
he felt that it didn’t sufficiently represent the vital minutia of the client’s individual
experience, and I think that his claim was extremely important, you know, because medicine—psychiatry—tends
to classify everything. And you might say, “Well, are the psychiatric
diagnostic classifications real?” and then the answer to that is: It depends on what
you mean by real. And you might think, “Well, that’s an
annoying answer,” but it is still the answer. And so I could say if I was being cynical—although
I don’t really think it’s a cynical response—if I willing to sound cynical, that the only
reason that psychiatrists diagnose their clients is so that insurance companies pay the bills. And I actually believe that that’s more
true than the claim that the psychiatric diagnostic categories actually capture the essence of
the person’s problems. In my clinical experience, classification
has had almost zero utility, and the reason for that is because it’s too low resolution. It doesn’t capture the individual properly
because the thing about a client—a clinical client—is that it’s precisely their individuality
that’s the fundamental issue. It’s like, they have to make their way through
the world in their body, in their time, in their position in culture, with their advantages
and disadvantages, and that requires a solution that’s unique in many ways and one that’s
also personal. And Rogers also wasn’t a particularly great
fan of the psychoanalysts’ tendency to look for the causes of present behavior in past
events. So he didn’t regard fishing in the past
as a necessarily useful expedition, or as a necessary expedition, although if issues
of the past came up in therapy he was perfectly willing to deal with them. He didn’t accept the Freudian theory that
the fundamental cause of psychopathology was, say, traumatic past experience. Now, this gives Rogerian therapy a particular
flavor. You could also call it “Non-directive therapy.” Now, if you’re a behavior therapist, you
might actively strategize with your client about what they’re going to do in the next
week and once they establish their goals you might offer some hints about what strategies
they could use to monitor themselves and to attain those goals, and maybe you’ll even
have them keep track of it. Rogers, generally speaking, wouldn’t do
something that directive. In fact, he strove not to unduly influence
the client’s decisions about important future events, and in that way he was quite similar
to Freud, because Freud would sit so the client would be laying on a couch and Freud so that
the client—his patient actually—couldn’t see him. And then he would listen to the person free-associate,
which in some sense means that they would ramble on, and he was attempting by doing
that to facilitate the self-realization of their own memories. If things happened to you in the past and
they still cause you emotion—let’s say they’re more than eighteen months old for
the sake of argument—Freud would assume that if you kind of wandered around that memory
somewhat haphazardly and in an associational way—the way conversations naturally unfold—that
you would bring things to light and that would allow certain kinds of emotional expression,
and that, in fact, in itself would be curative. But Freud didn’t want to interfere with
that process or guide it to any great degree, and Rogers was like that; he wanted you to
make your own decisions. And so he believed that the therapeutic endeavor
could not occur unless certain conditions were met, and the conditions were: Willingness
to tell the truth. So when a client comes to see me, one of the
first things I tell them is: “You can tell me anything you want—although you’re perfectly
within your rights to maintain your privacy—you can tell me anything you want but tell me
the truth as clearly as you can because if you don’t I don’t know what’s going
on with you and there’s not any possibility at all that this process will be useful if
we’re talking about things that don’t exist. So one condition is the person is willing
to come and see you; so that means they want to transform. The second precondition is that they’re
going to communicate with you, and communication means they’re going to do their best to
tell the truth but the therapist takes the same vow, in a sense. And so one of the things that I tell my clients
is that I will never let them do anything that makes me resent them. So if I’m asked to step out of my way for
some reason to take an additional session or maybe to meet them somewhere and I do it,
they can be assured that there won’t be a price that will be extracted from them later
for interfering with the smooth flow of my day. So, and the other thing that I do—and I’ve
learned this from Rogers and from the other people that I’ve read—is that I’ll listen
to people talk and then sometimes something will occur to me. And I don’t think about it as I thought
something because I’m actually somewhat a follower of Nietzsche’s dictum, which
is that the fact that you think is no proof that—the fact that you experience thoughts
is no proof that you thought them. They just appeared. Well, you don’t think that you think up
your dreams, right? You have your dreams. There you are in bed; there are the dreams. Are you having them? Well, it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like you’re experiencing them,
in some sense, the same way that you experience the external word. You’re not voluntarily creating them. Well, why do you think anything different
about your thoughts? And that’s a very useful thing to realize,
by the way, because otherwise you think you’re your thoughts and then if you have negative
thoughts, well then you assume that they’re true and they’re not true just because you
think them. They’re just thoughts, and maybe they’re
true and maybe they’re useful and maybe they’re not. So stepping back from them a little bit is
incredibly—it’s like Buddhist detachment in a sense. It’s an incredibly useful thing to do. I mean that’s another thing that’s really
characteristic of modern people, especially if they’re smart. They think they think, first of all, and second,
they think that the things they think are true, and neither of those things are necessarily
true. And abandoning your belief in them makes you
much less rigid and much more able to expand your preconceptions or even radically change
them when the circumstances demand them. So the person has to be wanting to change,
in principle in a positive direction; they have to be willing to tell the truth. Then the next element of Rogerian psychotherapy
is something that he called “unconditional positive regard,” and unconditional positive
regard, in the Rogerian tradition, is something like radical acceptance. It’s actually a hallmark of modern child
rearing techniques. You should wholeheartedly accept all aspects
of the person’s being. Now, Rogers believed that, or posited that,
partly because he also believed in—what was it called—conditions of worth. Here’s a condition of worth: “I don’t
like you when you act like that.” So imagine you tell a child that—“I don’t
like you when you act like that”—and maybe you tell them that about a bunch of things
that they do. But maybe those are integral parts of the
child’s being and by making your lack of acceptance known you make it impossible for
the child to incorporate those aspects of his organismal experience into his self-concept. You can see echoes of the superego/ego idea
there. And so Rogers would say, “Well, if someone
comes into psychotherapy and experiences unconditional positive regard, that means that they’ll
be able to reveal those elements of their organismic experience that had been rejected,
say, by the social world and themselves; experience them; and then potentially incorporate them
within the self concept and that that’s going to be a good thing, because Rogers is
a great believer in the natural inevitability of positive transformation if you set that
up as your goal. He also believes that that should be your
goal and that it’s actually your natural goal if, for example, you haven’t been subjected
to arbitrary conditions of worth. Now, I’m going to read you something that
Rogers wrote, which is quite interesting, and I think I found it extremely effective. Oh yes, that’s another thing I should mention. There is one other important assumption in
the idea of self-actualization. The other thing that Rogers tried to ensure
that his clients developed is autonomy and independence. Now, for Rogers, there was very little difference
between the move towards autonomy and personal independence and the process of self-actualization. Now, given that we’re looking back at Rogers’
work fifty years later, you might ask yourself if autonomy and independence is a necessary
precondition for psychological health, because you could make the case that productive interdependence
and more communal orientation is equally healthy—but that’s not a Rogerian presupposition. So his ideal is the fully-functioning individual. So here’s his hypothesis with regards to
psychotherapy: “Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive
communications, we may say that the greater the communicated congruence of experience,
awareness and behavior on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing relationship
will involve a tendency toward reciprocal communication with the same qualities, mutually
accurate understanding of the communications, improved psychological adjustment and functioning
in both parties, and mutual satisfaction in the relationship.” Okay, so let’s unpack that. “Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to
be in contact and to receive communications.” Well, the first thing you might say is that’s
pretty much the hallmark of a relationship, right, because if you’re not in contact,
well clearly you don’t have a relationship, and if you are in contact but you’re not
communicating you probably don’t have a relationship either. So and, you know, that also begs the question
of exactly what a relationship is for, and that’s something that’s very much worth
considering because people don’t really usually know what a relationship is for. They certainly know that as a general rule
they’re going to pursue them but they don’t really have any idea, in some sense, what
the optimal state is or what the desired final state should be. Now of course the desired final state fifty
years ago was marriage, but it’s certainly the case now that most people who are couples
aren’t married. Now, you might ask yourself, “Well, what’s
the utility of a relationship and what’s the utility of a long-term relationship?” Well, a Rogerian answer to that would be:
The more based on trust the relationship is, the more likely that you’re going to be
in contact and receive communications, and then, as a consequence of that, you’re going
to become better and better at representing your organismal experience within your self-concept
and that’s going to facilitate your moment towards self-awareness and self-actualization. It’s a two brains are better than one idea. So we say, “Well, we established a relationship,
okay, and the goal of our relationship is to make things better.” And the way we make things better is by telling
the truth as you see it. So, remember, this is a phenomenological theory
and so the truth that Rogers is talking about isn’t object truth, and I suspect that that’s
at least in part because establishing objective truth within the confines of a relationship
is—I think it’s technically impossible. And we talked about that before, because each
interaction between the members of a couple, or people in any relationship is contaminated,
in a sense, by all of the other interactions they’ve ever had plus everything they bring
to bear on the situation, and there’s just no untangling that objectively. You know, “What did you mean when you said
that?” Well, God, you know, you can argue about that
until the point of divorce and ten years afterwards, you know, without ever coming to a satisfactory
conclusion. Alright, “The greater the communicated congruence
of experience, awareness, and behavior on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing
relationship will involve a tendency toward reciprocal communication with the same qualities.” Okay, so here’s the idea: You go see a psychotherapist—a
Rogerian psychotherapist. At least in principle, this is someone who’s
mastered, or is attempting to master these basic modes of being. So what they’re going to do is they’ll
tell you, “I’m going to tell you the truth as I see it,” and so they way I see that
happening in psychotherapy is that when someone comes to see me I listen to them, and that
means that I’m not distracted by anything else. I’m not thinking about anything else. I’m not thinking about what I’m going
to say next. I’m not thinking about the things I have
to do today. I’m not thinking about the last time I saw
this person. I’m not allowing my attention to wander
away from the person, and then I’m watching them and listening to them at the same time—and
those are the same things because to really listen to someone you also have to watch them. Because then you subceive perhaps, or perceive,
all the non-verbal elements of communication that go along—well, partly with voice tone
but partly with eye direction and partly with very subtle transformations of facial gestures. So sometimes, for example, I see on my clients
that they’ll all of a sudden turn into a child. It’s very interesting. It’s like they’ll be recounting some experience—it’s
like fixation from a Freudian perspective. They’ll be describing some experience from
the distant past and for a second their expression will approximate who they were when they were
six-years-old. It’s really something remarkable to see,
and you can see these things if you really pay attention. And then as they talk I’m watching what’s
happening inside me as I listen to their words, and all sorts of things will happen. Sometimes I’ll get an image or sometimes
I’ll get a memory of something we talked about before. Or sometimes I’ll notice that what they’re
saying right now is different than something they said five minutes ago and so then I’ll
say, “Well, wait a second, you know. I’m trying to understand what you’re telling
me and I noticed that you just said this, and it seems to imply this, but then, you
know, a couple of minutes ago, when we were talking about that, then you said this and
I don’t see how those two things are the same.” And I’m not doing that because I want them
to rectify the paradox; I’m doing that being I want to understand what they are saying. And if someone says A to you and then they
say B, you don’t know what they’re saying. And so the question is for clarification. There’s no other direction than that. And then maybe, you know, I’ll have a little
image, like maybe the fragment of a dream, and I’ll say, “Wait a second. When you said what you just said this is what
I experienced.” And then maybe we’ll talk for a while about
what that might mean and I can say to them what—so, for example, sometimes people will
come to my office and they’ll do all sorts of strange things. Like I had one client who had psychosomatic
epilepsy, and one of the first times I saw her she had a seizure in my office. And I was watching her and it didn’t really
matter to me that she was having a seizure. And I thought, “That’s pretty weird,”
because normally when someone’s having a seizure it’s like you get affected by it,
right? I mean there are sensations that emerge in
your midsection, and there are thoughts of emergency, you know, because your body, in
some sense, is mimicking their body—which is what your body does all the time when you’re
talking to people—and that produces a sense of urgency. And I sort of just watched her have this seizure
and I thought, “Oh, it’s not real; it’s not a real seizure.” But she was very good at it and, you know,
as far as she was concerned she couldn’t tell if the seizures were real or not. And sometimes if you have psychogenic epilepsy
you’ve had an epileptic seizure at one point that was genuine. Well, it’s exceptionally complicated and
it’s not easy to develop psychogenic epilepsy, but she had developed it and part of the reason
was that she thought that—she was toying with the idea that existence as a psychiatric
patient would require less effort and responsibility. And so she got tangled up at one point with
one of the mental hospitals and they diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia, which is
not something I would recommend—especially if you don’t actually have it—because
once you’ve got the diagnosis, well are you really going to know? What’s going to happen, eh? You do something like that—you have a psychogenic
epileptic seizure and a variety of other symptoms—they’re the consequences of a very complex complex
in Jungian terms. There’s a secondary motivation in Freudian
terms. You go through with the whole routine then
you end up in a psych hospital, and you see four experts and they tell you you have paranoid
schizophrenia. Do you really think you’re going to not
believe that? Or at least ten percent of you is going to
believe it. You’re going to wonder after that. And if another twenty people tell you that
and you’re put on medication, which you could easily be, then a year later, well,
you might still not have paranoid schizophrenia but you are not going to be doing very well. So, well that’s a good example of what happens
when your self-concept and organismic valuing systems aren’t working carefully in tandem. Anyways, so someone might be telling me a
story that’s, you know, about something terrible that happened to them and I’ll
just be sitting there like a brick wall. It’s like, “You’re not affecting me.” And sometimes I’ll tell people that. It’s like: “I don’t know why, you know,
that’s a pretty terrible story but I’m having no emotional response to it at all. Do you have any idea why that might be?” Well then, you know, often people aren’t
very happy when you tell them that, and that’s fine. They can be unhappy with that. That’s perfectly okay, but the thing is
now they know that there’s at least one person that they’ve communicated with that’s
actually telling them the truth who is actually not affected by their story. Because, look, if someone sits down beside
you and they tell you a terrible story, the probability that you’re going to tell them
that that had no effect on you is basically zero because it’s really rude not to be
negatively affected by someone who’s telling you a very sad story. But if you’re negatively affected by it
and it’s not true then you’re not doing them any good at all; all you’re doing is
providing them with evidence to maintain what could easily become a delusion if they worked
on it long enough. By contrast, sometimes people will come into
my office and they’ll tell me something that just seems trivial and it’ll make me
tear up, which mean I can actually feel emotions. It’ll make me tear up and it’s just some
thing that they barely allude to, you know. Like a client a while back told me that—we
had had a session, a family session, where I had suggested to some of the members of
this person’s family that things might go better for them and their child, who was one
of my clients, if for the next two weeks what they practiced doing was watching each other’s
behaviour during the day and finding one thing that they could make a positive comment about. Now, and this isn’t a game. Like if you play it as a game then it isn’t
going to work. If you’re going to do this properly, what
you do is you watch and then you notice when a person does something that actually makes
you feel positively towards them, and then you tell them, “You did this.” It has to be specific. It can’t be at the end of the day: “Well,
you were pretty good today.” It’s like: “No, that’s not going to
work, man.” You have to notice something they actually
did. It’s usually something trivial like: “I
really appreciate the fact that you took your dirty dinner plate off the table and rinsed
it off and put it in the dishwasher.” It’s like, you think that’s so damn trivial
it’s hardly worth commenting on. It’s like, no no no, it’s not at all;
it’s exactly the specific thing that you comment on if it did in fact make you happy. You know, and you can think about that in
behavioural terms. You could say if you something to do something
that you like you should tell them when they do things that you like so that they what
you like. But, of course, that means that you’re putting
yourself on the line too, right, because if the person knows what you like then they can
withhold it from you so you’re not going to do that unless you trust them. You’re really not. So, you know, you might be in a relationship—you
might be in a marriage—where never once during the whole bloody marriage do you ever
tell the other person what actually makes you happy. It’s like, that’s stupid by the way. So, like if you want have a really miserable
time of it that’s an excellent way to start. You could also add to that the presumption
that if they really loved you they’d know what you liked, which is also—
Your partner’s no smarter than you, generally speaking, and you don’t have a clue what’s
going to make them happy so I don’t know why you’d expect them to—especially if
they’re male—why you’d expect them to return the favour. So then you teach them, you know. Like it’ll probably take four years. It’s like: “I like it when you do this,”
and then, of course, they won’t so you might have to mention it again in a month. You might think, “Well, it’s going to
take eighteen months to train this person, at least.” I mean they’re smart; they’re smarter
than a dog but not much smarter. So you have to use repetition and you have
to be judicious about. And if you do that, and the other person is
also doing that to you, and you both know that you’re doing that, and you’re both
trying to make things better, then you’re going to communicate about it and then with
any luck things will get better. But that means you actually have to want things
to get better, and that’s part of the problem, of course, because not everybody wants things
to get better and there’s a part of everyone that would be just as happy if they didn’t
get better. So anyways, Rogers’ idea is that if you
communicate properly with the person that you’re in the relationship with that you
can model proper being, in some sense, and that at least you can attempt to model. And then as you attempt it you’ll get better
and better at it and as you get better at it the other person will get better at it. And that works too. So I had a client who was a very anxious person
so when the person first came to see me they couldn’t even talk on the phone, and now
they’re acting publicly—they’re acting in public. And that’s been the consequence of about
seven years of, I would say, Rogerian conversations where almost all that I did was listen. Now, I don’t quite get the unconditional
positive regard thing, although I know why Rogers said it, and his idea that arbitrary
conditions of worth can make someone pathological are true. But I think a more nuanced sense of unconditional
positive regard is what happens as you watch the person and they tell you something, and
as they’re telling it to you you can see a little part of them sort of come alive. And that often happens when their face loses
a fair bit of its rigidity and you can see more of what they were like when they were
a child sort of peeping through. So their face sort of opens up. You can think, “Aha! That was really good for that person. Whatever they’ve been telling me that they’ve
been doing, that was right on the right track,” and then you could say, “Look, I noticed
when you talked about this, you know, your face relaxed, you didn’t look as anxious,
you were smiling—and it was genuine smile—for like a second or two there it looked like
you were doing well and you were happy.” It’s like: “Let’s do a bunch more of
that,” because you know if you see in somebody that they’re capable of experiencing that,
then you could help them experience that more, and that’s the purpose of a long term relationship. It’s that you have your weaknesses and inadequacies
and you can’t think yourself out of them by yourself, partly because they color the
way that you think, and so you need somebody else to bang yourself up against—to contend
with—so that all the knots in your soul can get ironed out. And hypothetically you’re doing the same
thing for the other person and then both of you are on an upwards spiral, and, in some
sense, that’s the core theory of Rogerian psychotherapy. It’s like: Genuine, honest communication
can heal people, and genuine dishonest communication can make them pathological. And in some sense I think Rogers got closer
to the truth—if you inferred Rogers’ presupposition, that’s as close to the truth as any psychotherapist
has got. Deceit makes people pathological, and that’s
true. A lot of—and Jung noticed this as well—a
lot of what you’re doing in psychotherapy and in any genuine relationship is a moral
endeavour. You’re trying to make things better, and
if the other person is deceiving themselves, or lying, or failing to become aware of things
that they should become aware of, they’re going to get bent and twisted out of shape
and then they’re not going to be congruent with their body or the broader world. And then they’re going to suffer, and then
that will cascade then all sorts of things will start to happen. And, you know, that’s the path to perdition
and an involuntary trip to the underworld. When we meet again I think I’ll show you
a little clip of Rogerian psychotherapy because a woman in the 1950’s agreed to be filmed,
which had a dramatic effect on her life by the way. But it provides a nice real world illustration
of what Rogers is doing when he’s trying to listen to people. |
Okay, so we’re actually going to take a
step back historically. We talked about Carl Rogers last time as a
phenomenologist. So we started our brief foray into the ideas
behind phenomenology, but now we’re going to go back in time a bit and we’re going
to talk about the end of the 19th century, and we’re gonna discuss Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky,
and Kierkegaard in some detail, and the reason we’re going to do that is because those
three men - I would say more than anyone else in the 19th century - laid the groundwork
not only for what would become psychoanalysis and then later personality psychology and
clinical psychology, but they also described the broader social, political, and cultural
situation that modern people find themselves in now, and their thought is exceedingly sophisticated
and it’s really worth grasping because if you can get - you know we’re going through
these personality theories one at a time, and we’re making forays into biology and
neuropsychology, you need a structure underneath that. You need to understand a structure underneath
all that to slot in everything into because that way you can understand it in more detail,
and so, partly because ideas develop historically, you know, so an idea’s a seed and out of
the seed, other plants grow and so forth, and the plant grows and so farth and branches
off. If you can get back down to the origin point,
then you can often understand the entire structure more straightforwardly, and also these three
men, they're so brilliant that it’s a joy to encounter their thinking even though it’s
very, very subversive - seriously subversive. So, we’re gonna start with this diagram
which you’ll remember. Okay so think about this from the Piagetian
perspective, like we made the point that as the child points itself, let’s say, together,
it starts by practicing micro routines - micro motor routines - and those are accompanied
by perceptual frameworks and also they're incorporated into a motivational value system
because they’re motivated actions, and then the child practices sequencing those micro
personalities, we’ll say, together to make ever more and more complex and ever more and
more integrated macro personalities. So that’s basically what this diagram describes. We were looking at it from an adult perspective
so, you know, if you're going to be a good person, you can decompose being a good person
into sub parts of being a good person, and - so being a good person is an abstract ideal,
but as you move closer and closer to the point where goodness is manifested in action, you
move closer and closer to actual movements in the world. So the abstract category, good person, is
actually made out of you can think about it as a very complex melody of motor actions
and perceptions, and perception is very tightly linked to motor action because whenever you
perceive anything, you're doing it in part by actively investigating the world. It’s partly why your eyes are moving around
all the time, and if you're listening you move your head, and you know, to touch something
you have to actively investigate it so it’s always an activity of exploration. Now, in some ways when you think about the
child piecing its being together from the bottom up, you can think about that as a biological
process unfolding, you know, and you can think of the child as crawling and then learning
to walk as a biological process unfolding, but that’s an oversimplification because
human beings exist from day one in a very, very social world. And so what that means is the way that those
behaviors or micro personalities start to organize themselves is always under the influence
of the society in which they're embedded, and so you know, Piaget talked about the child
as being - as having reflex, basic built in reflexes at birth, and that those reflexes
are then elaborated up into more and more complex structures, but you can think that
even the elaboration of those basic reflexes, even right from the beginning, like there's
a rooting and sucking reflex which you can elicit from a child by tapping on the side
of its cheek when it’s very newly born, and it’ll start to try to put what's tapping
in its mouth, and that's part of the reflexive process, the built in perceptual motor unit
that allows the child to begin to suckle. Now the thing is though, what it’s suckling
isn't a static and objective entity. It’s a person, and part of breast feeding
is the establishment of a relationship, a complex relationship because it’s also not
only a feeding relationship. It’s a caring relationship. It’s a relationship that's based on tactile
interaction. There could be nervousness associated with
it, and often is especially for a new mother. It’s a very complex dynamic social act,
and so what that means is that right from the beginning, in order for the baby to engage
in that process properly, it has to allow its initial reflexive movements to be modified
by social necessity immediately. So for example, if a baby is breastfeeding,
it can't bite, and you know it doesn't have any teeth so being bitten isn't necessarily
a catastrophe, but it’s not pleasant. So what will happen if the baby bites the
mother is that the mother will pull away and startle the baby, and the baby will cry and
you know, the mother will be at least startled by the error. So the baby has to learn to - it has to learn
to be civilized in some sense right off the bat. Now you know, when Freud was talking about
the process of socialization, he tended to concentrate more on toilet training, you know,
because he thought of that as the first place where the - the first major place where the
id of the child, which Rogers would regard as an organismic, as the organismic experiential
domain is brought under control of the superego, right, because the baby, obviously its fundamental,
biological function is to relieve itself, but that has to come under very very strict
social control, and it’s a complex form of learning, you know. It’s basically the acquisition of all voluntary
control over what was here before an involuntary reflex essentially, and so that can go well
or it can go badly and it can go very badly. So I knew a family who had a daughter at one
point, and that daughter would only defecate in her diaper when she was three. So that meant she had full, voluntary control
over her bowel function but there was no way she was going to participate in the social
ritual that surrounded proper toileting. There was a war going on, like a serious war,
and that sort of thing happens well not infrequently, and of course you remember in the Crumb movie,
the mother - the boy is accusing the mother of giving them enemas and her, of course,
denying that any such thing happened which was something that made both of them roll
their eyes, and you know, they all laugh but it’s really not particularly amusing. So, anyways my point is is that even at the
micro level, the manifestation of what we’ll call micro personalities expands and organizes
into an environment that’s conditioned by social expectation. Okay, so then - then, and this is something
we haven't talked about before. One thing you might ask is okay where does
the social expectation come from? Now, that's a very complex question because
in some sense, that's the same question as where does culture come from, and that's partly
a complex question because you have to take into account evolutionary history which provides
the substrata for the development of culture, so that would be human biology. You'd have to take that into account, and
then you have to take human history into account, and what you don't have to take into account
is not clear, right, because it’s very difficult to track the origins of the social routines
that make up the fundamental social contract, you know. We know how to behave properly, roughly speaking. We have a set of expectations, and a set of
wants about the way that other people are going to behave with regards to us, and they
return the favor, and everyone is participating in this, and everybody basically knows it
nless they're very poorly socialized and you can usually tell that right away. You know, kids can tell that because if a
three year old is playing with another three year old, and one of them is poorly socialized
and so maybe has the behavioral repertoire of a fairly badly behaved two year old, the
other three year old, being socially sophisticated will, say, will not play with the first one. So, even though they might be perfectly happy
to play for a time with an actual two year old. So, it doesn't take very long. It’s really at about the age of three that
children are already sophisticated enough to have embodied the rules that constitute
appropriate cultural behavior, and those rules - or they're patterns exactly for the, they're
not exactly rules for the child because the child couldn't explicitly state them, but
they can act them out. Now you remember, now Piaget talked about
this a fair bit right, because he said that part of the way that the slightly larger micro
personalities, say of a two year old, are integrated into the broader social world is
through games that are played with peers and with older children, and the games are ways
that - like a game is fundamentally a negotiated...it’s a negotiated sphere of action and perception
that has a particular goal and the goal is defined by the players, and the sphere of
interaction is defined by the players and so then if you're a good player, what happens
is that you become part of a higher order structure and the higher order structure is
the game. So if you're playing soccer, all of a sudden
if you're civilized, what you do is you manifest all those behaviors that are appropriate for
playing soccer, and you subordinate - voluntarily - subordinate your individuality at that point
to the higher order structure of the game that's a communal agreement, so it’s a basic
social contract. So you practice being part of basic social
contract by playing games, and you can do that with games that are in some sense relatively
straightforward and regulated by strict conventions and articulated rules, so that’d be like
a soccer game, or you can do it in a more complex way and a less structured and less
articulated manner by engaging in dramatic play. So what children usually do when they're doing
is that they'll gather around a little group and they'll lay out the drama so the drama
would be “We’re going to simulate x. We’re going to simulate a family.” And then everybody is assigned a role, and
so you're supposed to act out your role, but exactly how you're supposed to act it out
is left open during the game, so you can riff and improvise, and basically what children
are doing when they're doing that is acting out the family because, you know, they need
to get the family in their bones because being a parent isn't a set of ideas about parenting,
it’s a set of behaviors. It’s a dance that you learn to have with
your children and with your partner, and it’s very complicated, and the rules go far beyond
what you could ever articulate, you know, cause you can ask yourself a question like,
“Well how should you discipline a child?” Well first of all, you can argue about that
forever, but second of all, you cannot actually elaborate a set of principles that will guide
your behavior in every situation where a child is likely to disrupt the social circumstance. So you have to be smarter than you can say
in order to be good at doing something as complicated as discipling a child, you know,
because discipline also means encouraging, right, because part of discipline is well
you shouldn't do those things, but another part of it is you should definitely do more
of those things, and so it’s the inculcation of a moral code, and a lot of that is done
through nonverbal behavior and through providing a role model through spontaneous imitation,
and all sorts of things that aren't verbal. Okay now, so Piaget talked about the game,
and then you could think that games become more and more complex and more and more abstract
and more and more like real life as you mature until they maybe the games transform into
what sociologists would refer to as roles. So the role you're playing at the moment,
at least in principle, is student, and you know, it’s a game and it’s a game because
it’s a fiction in some sense. It’s a dramatic fiction in some sense. The only reason that it exists as a role is
because society is structured in such a way that enables this to - enables you to do what
you're doing and to live at the same time. So it’s not exactly adaptation to the natural
world, in any sense of the word, but it’s also real life or maybe it’s almost as close
to real life as you’d ever get because almost everything that modern people do, and maybe
this is true for a long time into the past, is game-like in its structure. So the games just get more and more and more
- they're more and more and more encompassing in some sense, but you can almost say that
it never comes to the point where what you're doing is no longer playing a game. Now that's a bit of an oversimplification
because there are games and metagames, but we won't talk about the metagames at the moment. Okay so now, you can understand some of the
lower order games, and you can even understand some of the higher order roles like you could
basically articulate in some sense what it means to be a student. But if you go up the hierarchy because you
know, good person - a subset of good person could be good student. You can kind of articulate what it means to
be a good student, although you can't fully articulate it, but if you go at levels above
that like be a good citizen or be a good person, it gets more and more difficult to fully articulate
because of course, it’s more and more abstract, and it encompasses more and more territory,
and so by the time you're at the top of the hierarchy so to speak, “be a good person.” Well, it’s a much more phenomena than you
can articulate. It can't be fully articulated. Now, I want to read you something that Nietzsche
said. Now you have to listen to this carefully because
there's some very interesting things about the way Nietzsche writes. He writes aphoristically, and an aphorism
is a short statement, often only a sentence but more typically a paragraph, that's very,
very densely packed with ideas, and I think you can say in some sense if you read Nietzsche
- and the stuff that I’m going to read from right now is from “Beyond Good and Evil”
- is that every single sentence has an idea in it, and it’s often an original idea,
and that's a remarkable accomplishment. I mean, I’ve often gone through books and
marked - I usually fold the top of the page over - and marked where I think there's an
idea worth keeping. It’s an idea I haven't run into before so
it’s an original idea. And I would say in the typical book I read,
there's none of them. There might be one or two, but with Nietzsche
there’s probably twenty on a page, and so it makes it - he’s packed a tremendous amount
of information into a very, very small space and he tried to do that and there's a bunch
of reasons. One was, his health wasn't very good, although
he was an early age genius. He was a full professor in Germany at - I
think when he was 22 or 23 which is impossible because you don't become a full professor,
especially a hundred and thirty years ago, a hundred forty years ago in a German university
at the age of 23, it just isn't impossible. But he was a spectacular genius, but his health
failed him so he had a very difficult time writing, and so what he did was spend an awful
lot of time thinking and a very short period of time writing, and so what that meant was
that he would take a tremendous amount of thought - genius level thought - and then
compress it into like a single sentence, or a single paragraph, and he said that he liked
to philosophize with a hammer, and in some sense - you know that hierarchy that I just
showed you, you know we talked about the idea that if you hit something disruptive in your
life that the magnitude of your response is proportionate to the elevation of the level
right. It’s much more damaging to be accused of
being a bad person, you know seriously, than it is for someone to complain about, you know,
on which side of the plate you happen to put the fork on. And I think you could say that you can sort
of think of those nested hierarchies of value as nested hierarchies of - they're almost
like maps in a sense. They're little units of ways that you know
how to maneuver in the world, and what that means is that as you go up the hierarchy,
the map is larger and larger and more comprehensive, and so if you blow up someone’s map of which
fork to put on the table, that's not so bad. They can just rectify that in no time flat. It leaves 99.99% of their personality intact. But if you fail a crucial exam for example
and part of the reason that you're a student is you want to go to medical school, that’ll
blow out like fifty or sixty percent of your personality, or at least it’ll feel that
way, and that's because what's happening is that the structure that you use to regulate
the relationship between you and the world has become damaged at a high level, and that
invalidates - like if you're not a student. If you're not a good student anymore, then
all of the subfactors that make up being a good student might be invalid, and you know
you might have put a lot of effort into being a good student, and so if all of a sudden
you're not that, you have to ask yourself, well what exactly am I and where are all the
errors? Well that's an extraordinarily difficult cognitive
problem because you've built that structure, who knows over what period of time. It might be fifteen years or something like
that, and you've been practicing building that structure, and it’s a huge part of
your identity because someone might say well what are you even? And you say a student. You know, they might say what do you do, but
they can easily say what are you? I’m a student. Well if you're not a student, at least insofar
as you define student, then just exactly what are you? Alright so Nietzsche, you know, when he packed
a lot of information into a sentence or a paragraph, you have to be very careful reading
him. Jung is like this too because he’ll throw
some information at you that's packed into a paragraph and it’ll be the kind of information
that disrupts high level structures. You won't even notice it, and that's because
it’s so subversive, and he wanted to do it. It was an aim of his. He had his reasons to do it. He would say that you have to be broken down
to nothing before you can be rebuilt. So it’s like a trip to the underworld thing. So, and I suppose that’s what philosophy
is. You don't learn a new principle without allowing
old principles to disappear because you can't have the new principle and the old principle
at the same time. So almost always any radical learning involves
the destruction of old habits and actions and perception, and that's a kind of death,
like it’s an abstract death, you know, but that doesn't make it not painful, and the
thing is if the abstract death is of sufficient intensity, it can drive people to suicide
because they regard killing themselves as easier than making the reparation, you know,
facing the anxiety and the suffering and going through the intolerably difficult task of
retooling. They may well regard that as more emotionally
threatening than death, and so - and that's not that rare. I mean, suicide is rare, but it’s not that
rare. So, you know and it’s certainly a behavior
that everyone is - I suspect - is everyone here has known someone who was touched by
suicide in some way, you know. It might not be your family member or even
your extended family member, but the probability that you know someone who knows someone who
has committed suicide is extremely, extremely likely. So Nietzsche is a very dangerous, dangerous
thinker. The only person I know who kind of approaches
him in that regard is Jung, and Jung is actually less troublesome because a lot of what Dostoevsky
offers is destruction. It’s intelligent, brilliant destruction,
but he doesn't really offer a solution. He sort of sketches out the possibility of
a solution, and he died young, and then in many ways what happened was that Jung picked
up where Nietzsche left off and tried to solve the problems that Nietzsche left unsolved. So it was Nietzsche for example - in some
sense along with Dostoevsky who really definitively announced the death of God at the end of the
19th century, and that left people in some ways bereft of belief, and we’re going to
talk about why that was so important in a moment. What Jung was doing was trying to - well he
was trying to rescue the father from the underworld in a sense. He was trying - he tried to go back to the
religious traditions that Nietzsche had described as fatally anachronistic and demolished by
the claims of science. He had attempted to go back to those religious
traditions and reassess them from a psychological perspective to pull back the necessary meaning
that was embedded in them so that people could reunite with their culture and in principle
not be so prone to pathological belief systems like ideology that tend to rush in when there's
a gap. And you know, Nietzsche said very clearly,
and Dostoevsky knew this as well by the end of the 19th century, is that the death of
God would mean that people would turn en masse to rationalistic ideologies and that would
be murderous. They knew that was coming, and that’s an
amazing prediction. It really is an amazing prediction. It just shows you how thoroughly they understood
the structure. Okay, so I’m going to read you something
by Nietzsche and we’re going to return to the hierarchy so you can kind of understand
something deeper about the way the hierarchy is structured. Okay, now he's talking about philosophical
ideas here, and he’s actually talking about articulated ethics. So, one way that you might think about philosophy
is that philosophers originate articulated moral principles, and that is often the way
that people think about especially moral philosophies. It’s like it’s the philosophers who come
up with the ideas, but that isn't what Nietzsche believed. Here's what he said instead. “Separate philosophical ideas are not anything
optional or autonomously evolving. They grow up in connection and relationship
with each other however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought,
they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna
of a continent.” Okay so, it’s a very interesting idea. So the first idea that he’s putting forward
is that you could -- the best way to think about a philosophical system, say a philosophical
system of ethics, is as if its different statements are animals related to one another in an ecosystem. So he has a biological metaphor, in some sense,
for the emergence of the philosophical system. It’s quite an interesting way of thinking,
of course, and it makes sense because if a philosophical system of ethics - which is
a philosophical system that tells you how and why you should behave a certain way - is
about how you should act and you're a biological being, then of course it only makes sense
that the concepts themselves which are guides to actions can logically be considered biological
entities. They're abstracted biological entities but
they still have the same nature as biological entities, and that means, according to Nietzsche,
that they're subject to the same rules. Now this is the sort of place where he foreshadows
Freud deeply. So Nietzsche says, “They nevertheless belong
just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a continent. This is betrayed in the end by the circumstance;
however, unfailingly the most diverse philosophers always fill in, again, a definite fundamental
scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always resolve
once more in the same orbit however independent of each other they may feel themselves with
their critical or systematic wills. Something within them leads them. Something impels them in definite order, the
one after the other, to wit the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery
than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return, and a homecoming to a far off ancient common
household of the soul out of which these ideas formerly grew. Philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism
of the highest order.” Okay so, here’s the idea. There's two fundamental ideas that are embedded
in this which actually Nietzsche differentiates. Alright I’m gonna read you another section
that illuminates the first one. “It has gradually become clear to me what
every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator,
and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral
(or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which
the entire plant has always grown.” Okay so this is a very radical statement because
what Nietzsche is saying is that philosophies, even when they declare themselves rational,
are deeply personal, and they're also necessarily embedded within a motivational structure that
is either pro-life or anti-life, something like that. So there's no value free philosophizing. What there is is the expression of biologically
and culturally conditioned being, which is conditioned by, let’s say the same sort
of fundamental forces that Freud described in the biological realm, and then that’s
conditioned by the cultural processes that we just described in relationship to Piaget,
and then what the philosopher does is observe that all of those things are happening, allow
that to be articulated, and confuse that with his own thought. It’s a brilliant idea. Now here's a way of thinking about it. Now, one of the things Piaget said was that
once children start to play games - when they're young - collective games, you can watch the
children play the collective games, maybe like eight kids are playing marbles or something
like that, and then you can take the young kids out of the game and you can ask them
what the rules are, and what’ll happen is you’ll get a diverse set - a diverse and
paradoxical set - of articulated rules, and what that means is that the children can play
the game when they're in the game and when they're in the context of all the other people
because in some sense, the game is embedded in pieces in all of them, and as long as they're
all there, that all works, but if you pull the child away they don't have the intellectual
wherewithal to describe the patterns of behavior that make up the game, and that's only to
say that they know things that they can't say because you might say, well the game - the
rules of the game come first and then the game emerges, but that's wrong. It’s the game comes first, and only after
that do the rules emerge, and of course there's a reciprocal relationship between them because
once the rules are somewhat articulated, then the game becomes more structured, you know,
and then the rules can become more structured and so on. So the articulation changes the rules. What Nietzsche is saying is that the same
thing applies to societies. He says like, insofar as you can consider
society a collective game played by millions of people over vast spans of time, it’s
a game of games in some sense, and it emerged from the bottom up. It emerged out of biological impulses and
interpersonal and social interactions conditioning and shaping everyone’s behavior and perception. And that happened way before anyone could
articulate what those rules were. Now remember, when Nietzsche was writing,
there was no real sense of how old the Earth was or how old the universe was. I mean, people thought - even the radical
people thought - maybe in terms of hundreds of thousands of years, you know, and now we
know that the universe is 14 billion years old and that the Earth is 4 billion years
old, and that life has been plentiful for 3.5 billion years, you know. So the historical context within which we
originated has expanded by orders of magnitude since the last nineteenth century and so then
what you think that means is that the way that our games have been organized stretches
impossibly back in time. Now I already told you - I believe - the story
about lobster dominance hierarchies right. So even lobsters - that’s 400 million years
ago. Lobsters arrayed themselves in a social space
and they regulate each other, and that means the lobsters essentially have a lobster society,
and you know each lobster has biological predispositions that are quite determined. They're quite - the lobster’s quite a deterministic
creature, but nonetheless, the way those biological predispositions manifest himself is conditioned
and shaped by the social surrounding, and so you think well lobsters started to play
games 400 million years ago and you know, as we’ve taken the tremendously long evolutionary
journey across that time, we’d been playing social games the whole time and that means
that the way that we interact with each other has evolved, and it’s even shaped the way
that our biology manifests itself because that's how old culture is, and then out of
that as we became more capable of abstraction, and maybe that's - you know, that's something
that really took off probably seven million years ago with modern human beings emerging
about 150 thousand years ago because we separated from the common ancestor of human beings and
chimpanzees about seven million years ago. You can tell that by doing analysis of genetic
differences. So the brain expanded very rapidly after that
point, and our culture became more and more conscious and articulated and complex and
larger and more technological, you know. So it became, in some ways, more dependent
on social norms and less dependent on deterministic biological predispositions, but we’ve still
been doing that for a very long time. There’s good evidence that, you know, we
started using fire about two million years ago, and - forgive me if I’ve told you this
already but - you know if you look at a human being, and you look at a chimpanzee, there’s
a bunch of things you can see that are very different morphologically. The chimp is much shorter, much much wider,
and way more powerful. So like a normal male chimp is about as six
times as strong as the strongest Olympic athlete. So, don't mess with chimps. They’ll tear you apart. They're really, really strong and dangerous. But, the chimp is shaped sort of like this,
you know. They have a huge gastrointestinal system,
roughly speaking, and the reason for that is mostly what they eat is leaves, and leaves
have no color or content, and so they have to eat immense numbers of leaves, and leaves
are hard to digest so they have to chew them like mad. So the the typical chimp sits around eight
hours a day chewing, and then they have this tremendously long gastrointestinal system
because it takes that long to extract any nutrients out of leaves. Well, we circumvented that man, as soon as
we invented fire, and fire allows us to outsource our digestion because if you cook most things:
vegetables, but most importantly meat. If you cook them, they become much more bioavailable,
and it takes much less energy to digest them. So that way you can shrink your gut and grow
your brain, and so that’s apparently what we did because here we are, relatively slim
at least compared to chimpanzees. And so, fire popped up two million years ago. It’s a real cultural revolution, but you
know, that’s so old, that cultural revolution, that it completely reshaped our bodies, and
so this interplay between biology and culture has been going on for an unimaginably long
period of time, and it conditions everything we do. Now, here’s a complicated idea. Okay, so imagine a wolf pack. Now, a wolf pack is a pretty complicated social
group. It’s a fair bit like a primordial human
group which is why dogs have been with us for 25 thousand years. Maybe they were wolves that first started
to follow us around and scavenge, or more likely I think, someone went out - some primordial
hunter - went out hunting, killed a wolf female, found the pups, and brought one home for the
children to play with, you know. And that was the origin of the dog. I think it was something like that because
dogs are basically - they're basically genetically identical with wolves. Now, the thing is, we can get along with dogs,
and the reason we can get along with dogs is that dogs have a social organization. You can call it a dominance hierarchy, that’s
a fair bit like the human social organization, and so you can see that part of what it means
to be human is the same thing that it means to be a pack animal like a dog or a pack animal
like our domesticated animals like horses and cows for example, which we can domesticate
partly because they're social. So some of the structure of our social organization
is the same sort of structure that an animal dominance hierarchy has, like the chimpanzee
dominance hierarchy, for example. And so we know that chimpanzees and other
primates, monkeys for example, are acutely aware of the levels of hierarchy in their
social structure, and there are - I think it’s vervet monkeys. This is a very funny experiment. So imagine that the top vervet monkeys are
like celebrity monkeys, you know, and the bottom vervet monkeys are like dissolute street
people, and so then you take some picture of dissolute street people who are just at
the bottom of the hierarchy, and you take some pictures of celebrities, and you show
pictures to a human audience, and the human audience will look at the celebrities longer. Well, if you take the vervet monkeys, and
you take photographs of the top ranking vervet monkeys and the bottom vervet monkeys and
you show them to vervet monkeys, then the vervet monkeys will look at the top ranking
vervet monkey photographs more than the bottom ranking vervet monkey photographs. So in some sense, they're transfixed by the
individuals who are higher up in the social order, and that makes sense, right, because
what you should feel - especially in a fairly aggressive dominance hierarchy - what you
should feel the closer you are to the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, the closer what
you should feel for whatever’s at the top of the dominance hierarchy, it should be closer
and closer to awe. Now, when people feel awe, they get chills
running up and down their back, their neck. Well why - the reason that happens is because
it’s an atavism. It’s a hangover from the time that you were
threatened by something awe inspiring, let’s say a snake or a bear or something like that. Your hair - your fur would stand up and the
reason for that is so that you look bigger, and you still see this happening all the time
with cats, right. Two cats will - normally cats face each other
this way, right. But if they start to fight, they turn sideways
and that's so they each look bigger, and they puff up their fur and their tail, and that's
to show the other cat that they're really a lot bigger than the cat first thought. Now of course, they're both doing that so
it’s a little bit pointless, but they're just cats so you know, you can give them a
break, but the point is that they pilo erect, and that's the same thing that happens, for
example when you're listening to very powerful music and it deeply affects you and you get
chills. It’s like the hair stands up on the back
of your neck, and that's a signalling of awe. Now the reason you should feel awe towards
something that's higher up in the dominance hierarchy is because that thing has power,
like - well there's more than one reason. A, that thing has power. You better be careful of it because it will
put you in your place, and fast. And part of the reason that dominance hierarchy
exists is so that everybody knows their place and they don't have to be reminded of it by
being half killed on a regular basis, you know. So maybe you're nine on a scale of one being
the top, maybe you're number nine. It’s not so good, but number nine and not
hurting is a lot better than number nine and lying there bleeding on the ground, and so
what happens with dominance hierarchies is they usually arrange themselves in part by
power, but by no means only power. Everybody knows where they are, and pretty
much everybody stays there, and that even happens over multiple generations, say in
complex primate dominance troops. Status is heritable. So you know, there's not much of a leap between
that and heritable monarchies among human beings. It’s a reflection of - you know, it’s
much more complex among human beings because it’s articulated and structured, but it’s
the same basic thing. Now, Nietzsche’s point was - so now imagine… Here’s another problem. So, imagine that… Okay so you've got a dominance hierarchy,
and it’s fairly stable, and one of the things that you wanna do is climb to the top of the
dominance hierarchy, and the reason you want to do that - there's all sorts of reasons:
high quality mates - that's the primary reason. That’s particularly true in humans if you're
male because males are much more differential reproducers than females which means a lot
of males fail to reproduce completely, and some reproduce a lot whereas the typical woman
reproduces at least some. So that means competition is more intense
among men, and that's part of the reason why dominance hierarchies tend to be tilted towards
male power because competition means more to them. The outcome is more crucial. So, now part of what happens is that as people
compete within the dominance hierarchy, what they're doing is to try to figure out who
it is that is fit to be on top. Now, you might think that that’s a matter
of power, you know, and in fact your basic social leftie, social constructionists would
have you believe that was all there is to it, is that the whole dominance hierarchy
is nothing but a power system, and the people on top are there because they have power,
and what's there is power, and by that they mean the ability to enforce their will on
other people. Well that's a dopey theory, and the reason
for that is it’s unidimensional. We know that people are multi-faceted. There's no single motivation that's king. You know, for Freud it was sex and aggression,
and like if you're gonna come up with a couple of potent candidates, those are two, but there's
lots of other ones. People are playful and play is a primary biological
circuit, you know. We suffer. We’re hungry. We’re thirsty. We’re affiliative. Like, there's a lot of biological necessity
driving the makeup of our personalities, and there are biological subpersonalities and
to arbitrarily call one of them the source of something as complex as social organization
is - it’s a false form of monotheism. It’s a crazy idea, and it’s the kind of
idea that only people who really don't like to think would have because once you come
up with that idea, it’s all power, you don't have to think anymore. Someone can say to you, “Well why is complex
phenomena X the way it is? Why is the economy arranged the way it is? Well, it’s so the people at the top can
maintain their power.” Well, yeah sure, but maybe that accounts for
ten percent of the reason. It doesn't get close to a hundred percent. There's lot of reasons why hierarchies are
structured the way they are and sheer physical force is one of them, but it’s unstable. So, Frans de Waal who was watching chimps
organize their dominance hierarchies in the Arnhem Zoo in Holland, noted quite quickly
that it was fairly typical, or at least possible, for the meanest, ugliest, strongest male chimp
to be the dominant guy. Sometimes it was the chimp who learned to
pick up a garbage can and whack the hell out of it with a stick because that intimidated
his enemies, you know. So there's a bit of creativity there, but
what De Waal found was that the stable hierarchies were never run by barbarian chimp dictators,
and the reason for that was that coalitions of other males would take them out because
you think, well if you're one anti-social, aggressive male, and you're tough, it’s
like okay you're tough, but three lesser, friendlier males who are bound together in
a friendship pact which chimpanzees form quite intensely. It’s like as soon as that guy turns his
back or has a bad day or gets hurt, they're going to jump in there and tear him to pieces,
and that's exactly what happened. So what De Waal found was that the stabler
chimpanzee dominance hierarchies were run usually by males, who were affiliative and
gregarious, who remembered their social obligations, so that meant with regard to their friendship
network, and who were also very good to the females and the infants in the troop even
if they weren't his, and the idea there is that power is an unstable basis for the maintenance
of a dominance hierarchy across time because in some sense, even among chimps, you have
to have the consent of the governed because you'll get a revolution otherwise. So you know, you're going to get a revolution
if you put people, or animals, in a situation where they have nothing to lose, and so what
that means is there are constraints on how you can act while you try to move up the dominance
hierarchy system because if you're too aggressive and selfish and you're not grooming anyone
else, and you're not communicating with the other creatures in the troop, they're gonna
gang up on you and take you down, and so if you're gonna maneuver your way up the troop,
you have to do it in a manner that's civilized enough so that you don't get everyone against
you. So what it means is to maneuver up a power
hierarchy, especially a complex power hierarchy, you have to be a lot more than powerful. So, okay now. So, now we’ve got this idea that there are
principles governing the movement of creatures up a dominance hierarchy, even among the animals,
and one of the defining characteristics that - one of the characteristics that necessity
makes delimit that process is that over time, the troop can't let anybody climb the dominance
hierarchy who will destabilize the whole dominance hierarchy because then that's it. Game over. So at the very least, you have to learn how
to climb up the hierarchy so that you don't destabilize it while you climb because otherwise
you get to the top and there's nothing left. Well, and animals know this. They know this instinctively. So for example, when wolves go at it, you
know, first they puff up and they growl at each other, and they put up their shoulders,
and like they get more and more aggressive until attack is imminent, and often one of
them will back up. There's no fighting. No one gets damaged, and so that's the typical
situation. It’s like one says, “Yeah okay, I’m
out of here.” And god only knows why that is. Often I suspect the wolf with the higher serotonin
level wins because it has less negative emotion, and serotonin levels go up as you move up
the dominance hierarchy. Now and then, they'll actually have a fight
but the fight usually doesn't last very long, and then the loser will roll over, show its
throat to the winner, which is quite a behavior because wolves tear the throats out of their
prey, and the top wolf will back off, and you know you think about it. That’s unbelievably sophisticated morality. There's echos in there of the New Testament
in junction to love your enemy because that's exactly what the wolf is doing, and you know,
it doesn't know this because it can't articulate the rule, but what it’s doing is acting
as if even the thing that attacked you is valuable in its own right if its a part of
your troop. And you know, you can see there the ancient
biological origins of the idea, you know, of the equality and value of each individual. So these things have deep, deep, deep, roots. They're not arbitrary. They're not arbitrary, and no one invented
them, and that's exactly what Nietzsche is saying here. “To understand how the abstrusest metaphysical
assertions of a philosopher have been arrived, it is always well and wise to first ask oneself,
what morality do they or does he aim at? Accordingly, I do not believe that an impulse
to knowledge is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere,
has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever considers the fundamental impulses
of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as INSPIRING GENII
(or as demons), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another,
and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate
end of existence and the legitimate lord over all the other impulses.” So what is he saying there? Well, you know, Nietzsche makes this explicit
in passages that are related to this one. He viewed the human being as a collection
of subsouls, and the subsouls were grounded in their existence in biological underpinnings,
and that was the case for every human being and that made us roughly similar. It certainly made our groups roughly similar,
and so these - each of these biological subsystems conceptualized as a subsoul was something
that had its own viewpoint, had its own rules, had its own games, and they jockey for precedence. You know, you know that because sometimes
you're sitting there reading and you're trying to concentrate on a higher order goal like
completing your classes, and you know, some biologically determined subsystem pops up
and says you know, “This would be an excellent time to go have a coffee.” You know, and you might do everything you
can to not allow that thing to take over, but often it does and often that's despite
what you think you might actually want to do, and then later you're all upset about
it because you've procrastinated yet again, but you know, Nietzsche viewed the psyche
as a place - you could almost think of yourself as a set of abstract, it’s like your brain
is a set of animals, and the animals are all dependent on one another but each animal needs
to be bossed from time to time, and each animal wants to be bossed more often than it should
be, and then you know, the higher order cortical systems are there to figure out how to sequence
all the other animals so that they all get what they need without interfering with each
other across large spans of time in the presence of many other people in a manner that's sustaining. It’s very, very complicated. Okay now, so let’s go back to the hierarchy. So, you have the hierarchy and over time - now
remember, this hierarchy stays there for a very long period of time, and remember as
well that the people who climb to the top of the hierarchy are much more likely to leave
offspring than the people who don't, and so then what that means is that the hierarchy,
in part, is one of the primary selection forces operating on humanity, and what that means
is that we evolve towards the thing that can most successfully evolve the dominance hierarchy,
and so that means that we evolve towards the thing that has the best probability of ruling
properly, and that that’s not just cultural. It’s cultural because it’s the continual
interplay between culture and biology going back, we’ll say, four hundred million years
or more. Okay now, but it’s even more complicated
than that, and this is - one of the things that you have to understand if you really
want to understand what Nietzsche meant by the death of God because that's his most famous
pronouncement. “God is dead and we have killed him, and
we’ll never find enough water to wash away the blood.” So he wasn't announcing that in triumph. He was announcing it in terror. Okay now, imagine this. So as human society becomes more complex,
and as our brains become larger and larger so that we could track larger social organizations,
and we can organize more complex communities, what happens is that heretofore isolated tribes
of people come together, and then they have to engage in conflict and negotiation, and
partly what they're in conflict about is what is the way that you should act, and what should
the values be. Now there's an old mythological idea that
the gods fight in heaven to see who is the dominant god. Well you can imagine all of these individual
tribes, they had their ideals, and those were creatures of their imagination, but those
were imagined representations of proper behavioral patterns, and they saw those as transcendent
and superordinate, and so then tribe A would come into contact with tribe B and the gods
would clash, and out of that and all the death and destruction that went with it, the two
tribes would integrate, and maybe that would take, you know, hundreds of years, and the
religious system that sat above that which was the representation of the dominance hierarchy
would also transform. So you take tribe A, and then you take tribe
B, and then you take tribe C, and then you take tribe D, and they all accumulate across
time and sort out and articulate and represent all of their beliefs, and what happens is
that this tribe has a game, and this tribe has a game, and this tribe has a game, and
then if you put all of those games together, they tilt so that a metagame emerges out of
it. It’s like - if it’s fortunate - the best
of all three games gets put together in a larger game, and it has to be the best because
otherwise it won't work. The thing will fall apart right, because if
your family unit isn't functional, it'll disperse, and you know maybe people will die because
of it. It has to have the - it has to be iteratable. It has to be playable across time without
falling apart from internal pressure, and without getting wiped out from the outside. So it’s very tightly constrained. So then let’s say this happens over tens
of thousands of years. We could say, well it happened in the Middle
East because we know that. As Mesopotamia came together, for example,
it was the aggregation of multiple tribes and all of the gods of those tribes, and we
know the Mesopotamians organized all those gods into one god, his name was Marduk, and
that the story that they tell about the aggregation of the gods into one is the story of the gods
getting together, and voting on which of them should be at the top, and then we know that
the Mesopotamian emperor was charged with the responsibility of acting out that top
god, and that that's what made him a good emperor, and he got reminded of that every
year with the New Year’s ceremony. He had to tell all the ways that he hadn’t
been a good Marduk and then he’d get punished for it, and then they would reenact the battle
of the gods and recreate this Marduk character. Okay, so you can understand how that might
have come about. Now you can say that the idea of that emergent
ideal, that wasn't rational. It was the consequence of conflict and cooperation
in the real world across time. The representations of that were, you know,
we might think about them as narrative representations or if they're deep enough, even as mythology. We can think about those as the soil from
which religious presuppositions emerge, and so what happens is that what you have at the
top of the dominance hierarchy as your representation of the good person is no different in its
totality than the idea of the sovereign god that has emerged across thousands and thousands
of years of human history. So the whole structure has this thing at the
top, and it’s regarded in imagination as divine. It’s the consequence of the - it’s the
consequence of the battle of representations of morality in imagination across thousands
and thousands of years, and that’s a reflection of the actual conflict and restructuring of
societies across all that time. So then you have this thing at the top. So we can say in the West, in Western Europe,
that thing at the top is Christ, and that's the dying - the dying, and the revivifying
hero. We talked about reasons for that. That's the thing that can go to the underworld
and then come back up. Okay, that’s at the top. What happens when it disappears? Well, we’ll turn to Dostoevsky for that. This is from “Notes From Underground.” So this is someone who’s in the underground,
and that's where you go when your value systems collapse. “I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease,
and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never
have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently
so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely
that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay
out" the doctors and extract revenge by not consulting them; I know better than anyone
that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it
is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!” Now, he’s a civil servant -- a low ranking
civil servant, and he’s retired because he got a little bit of inheritance. He says, “When petitioners used to come
for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and I felt
intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost always succeeded. For the most part they were all timid people—of
course, they were petitioners. But you know gentlemen what was the chief
point about my spite? Well, the whole point, the real sting of it
lay it in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was
inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not spiteful, but not even embittered,
and that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I was lying when I just said now that I was
a spiteful official. I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners
and with the officers, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of
many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these
opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me my
whole life, and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them out -- would not
let them purposefully, purposefully would not let them out. They tormented me until I was ashamed. They drove me to convultions, and sickened
me at last. At last, how they sickened me. Now, you're not fancying gentlemen, that I
am expressing remorse for something now. That I am asking for forgiveness for something. I am sure you are fancying that; however,
I assure you I do not care if you are. It was not only that I could not become spiteful. I did not know how to become anything, neither
spiteful nor kind. Neither a rascal or an honest man. Neither a hero, nor an insect. Now I am living my life out in my corner,
taunting myself with the spiteless and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot
become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.” “A direct person, I regard as the real,
normal man as his tender mother nature wished to see him, when she graciously brought him
into being on the earth. I envy such a man until I’m green in the
face. He’s stupid. I’m not disputing that, but perhaps the
normal man should be stupid. How do you know? Perhaps it’s very beautiful in fact, and
I am the more persuaded of that suspicion - if one can call it so - by the fact that
you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is the man of acute self
consciousness who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort. This is also almost mysticism, gentlemen,
but I suspect this too. This retort made man is sometimes so nonplussed
in the presence of his antithesis, the normal man, that with all his exaggerated self consciousness
he generally thinks himself a mouse, and not a man at all. It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet
it is a mouse. Well the other is a man, and therefore etc,
etc. And the worst of it is, he himself -- his
very own self -- looks on himself as a mouse. No one asks him to do so.” And that's an important point. “Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose for instance that it feels
insulted, and it almost always feels insulted, and it wants to revenge itself too. There may even be a greater accumulation of
spite in it than in the man of nature and truth. The base and nasty desire to vent that spite
on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in the man of nature and
truth. For through his innate stupidity, the latter,
the normal man, looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple. Well, in consequence of his acute self consciousness,
the mouse does not believe in any justice of it at all. To come at last to the deed itself, to the
very act of revenge, apart of the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating
around it, so many nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions adds to the one question
so many unsettled questions that there are inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal
brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it
by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing
at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to
dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which
it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground
home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant
and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember
its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself,
details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own
imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings,
but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent
unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might have happened, and
will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too,
but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without
believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing
that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom
it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over
again, with interest accumulated over all the years.” Now, the idea that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
were developing was that the dawning consciousness in Western society of the mythological substructure
of the value system and the impossibility of conceptualizing that or proving the validity
of its structure from scientific means doomed it to - doomed the people who were encapsulated
in that system to formal disbelief in it, and what they concluded from that was exactly
what Dostoevsky just described which was that someone with that level of acute self-consciousness
and culture self knowledge would immediately become fragmented beyond belief, unable to
act, unhappy, resentful, and dangerous. And both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, in their
works, and Dostoevsky developed this idea mostly particularly in a novel called “The
Devils,” said that once that you had got to that point, which was inevitable if you
were smart enough to take seriously what was going on, it was only a tiny step to identification
with a murderous ideology. Now, some of the existentialists started to
work up what you might regard as a solution to this problem. And I’m going to read Kierkegaard’s solution. “It is now…” Kierkegaard was a Danish existential philosopher
and he lived earlier than Nietzsche, and he was, in some sense, you might think of him
as the first modern psychologist. He was the first person to conceptualize,
for example, of the separate entity of anxiety and despair. “It is now about four years ago that I got
the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I remember it quite clearly. It was on a Sunday. Yes, that’s it. A Sunday afternoon. I was seated, as usual, out of doors at the
cafe in the Fredericksburg Garden. I’d been a student for half a score of years,
although never lazy, all my activity nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of
occupation for which I still have a great partiality, and for which I perhaps even have
a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day
idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. So I sat there and smoked my cigar until I
lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts, I remember these. ‘You are going on’, I said to myself,
‘to become an old man without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look around
you in life, and in literature, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious
and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and who are much talked about. The many benefactors of the age you know how
to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses
and steamboats, and others by telegraph. Others by easily apprehended compendiums and
shortly recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age
who make spiritual existence easier and easier, yet more and more significant, and what are
you doing?’ Here, my soliloquy was interrupted for my
cigar was smoked out, and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this
thought flashed through my mind: “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited
capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with
the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.” This notion pleased me immensely, and at the
same time it flattered me to think that I like the rest of them, would be loved and
esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine in every way to make
everything easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes
so great that it becomes altogether too great; then there is only one want left, though it
is not yet a felt want, when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind, and out of despair
at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable
to make anything easier than it already was, and moved by a genuine interest in those make
everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.” Same idea, in different words. “A traveler.” This is Nietzsche, and this is part of the
development of the answer to the conundrum that he raised. “A traveller who had seen many countries
and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere;
and he answered: men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with
greater justice: they are all timid. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, however, very human being knows
very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident,
however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse
plurality: he knows it, but he hides it like a bad conscience why? From fear of his neighbour who insists on
convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual
human being to fear his neighbour, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of
himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for
comfort, inertia - in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they
are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty
and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed
manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience, the
principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being
as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone even more, that in this
rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel
and as incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull.” “When a great thinker despises men, it is
their laziness that he despises: for it is on account of this that they have the appearance
of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong
to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience
which shouts at him: ‘Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and
desiring, that is not really you.’” That’s Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, and existentialism. That’s the bare beginning of the thinking. |
So last time, we talked a little bit about
the state of the world of belief, I suppose, by the end of the nineteenth century and I
talked to you a little about Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard. Um, a very large number of the clinical theories
that we’re going to be discussing for another two lectures after this one have been influenced
by philosophers, and that's partly why I’m also talking to you about the philosophers. It’s almost as if in some sense the great
philosophers have - are tapped directly into the lower strata of our cultural systems of
meaning as they move forward in time, and they can outline what those structures are
and also describe their weaknesses, and their strengths, and their likely transformations
moving forward. You know, I mean obviously people can be behind
the times, and it’s just as probable that some people are ahead of the times and we
would assume, if you're thinking about it, say, from a Big Five trait perspective that
the people who are ahead of the times often are very, very intelligent and very, very
open, and of course that's a pretty good definition of a philosopher. So, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, more than any
other two thinkers had their finger on the pulse of the transmutation of cultural systems
of meaning at the end of the nineteenth century, and they were both concerned about the fact
that the systems of meaning within which Western civilization at least had taken shape, had
been fragmented for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was likely the
rise of the scientific worldview, and as I detailed to you in the last lecture, both
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche believed that that had left modern people because I think in
the early twentieth century, it was Western people but I now think it’s reasonable to
say that it’s modern people in a state of - they're - of cultural discontinuity. The things - belief systems but also technological
systems now have transformed the world so radically that the conflict between modernism
and traditional forms of belief is acutely felt everywhere. It’s certainly, I think, one of the forces
that have given rise to the battle between Islamic fundamentalism and modernism because
it’s more than a battle of Islamic fundamentalism against the Western world, and the problem,
fundamentally, is that people typically exist within cultural constructs that are very,
very ancient, and that have - that are grounded in evolved systems of meaning that are even
deeper than the ones that are articulated and explicit, and when there's a period of
very, very rapid cognitive and technological change, then the integrity of those systems
starts to… it starts to become questionable from an explicit perspective but it also starts
to become insufficient from a practical perspective. So, one example that you might give some consideration
to is the fact of the introduction of the birth control pill, for example. If you listen to politically minded people,
they make the case that the emancipation of women was essentially a political matter,
but I don't think that's a very reasonable way of looking at it at all. Of course, everything feeds back onto itself
and there are multiple causal pathways to any end. The radical element in the emancipation of
women was of course the development of efficient forms of contraception, most particularly
the birth control pill, and it’s the case that as soon as you educate women anywhere
in the world, not only does economic productivity arise dramatically, in fact it’s actually
the best predictor of increasing economic productivity in a modernizing state is the
granting of rights to women. Now whether it’s directly because of the
granting of rights to women or because of the existence of an underlying belief structure
that allows the concept of right to expand quite rapidly is a very difficult to be sure
of, but in any case that exists, and then of course the other thing that happens is
that women stop having children unbelievably rapidly. So for example, I think - I believe it’s
Iran where this has been most marked over the last two generations, so from family sizes
far greater than replacement to family sizes well below replacement in basically one or
two generations. It’s a massive transformation, and it’s
not necessarily something that anyone expected. It’s part of the sequence of forces that
are rapidly allowing our population to reach a peak and either stabilize or decline. Now I don't know how many of you know this,
but the projections are there’ll be nine billion people on the Earth within thirty
to fifty years, and that’ll be our peak population. After that it will fall rapidly, and you know,
you can see that sort of thing happening right now all over the Western world, and it’s
happening a lot in China, and it’s happening a lot in Japan where, you know, there are
more older people than there are younger people because the younger people aren't having enough
children to actually replace the population. So the probability that we’ll peak at about
nine billion and then start to fall, it’s not certain but that’s what the best projections
seem to indicate now. So what happens anyways with in periods of
very rapid technological and cognitive transformation because those things go together that the
certainties upon which people base their interpretation of the world and even more importantly, base
their judgements about how to act start to become uncertain. So for example, if you introduce the birth
control pill into a population, and you put women’s reproductive faculties under their
own voluntary choice, then you radically transform virtually all of society’s fundamental social
structures, not least marriage, and marriage of course has been regarded classically as
the foundation of civilization, and of course, increasingly there are more people who aren't
married than there are people who are married. Now, it’s very difficult to know what to
make of that because of course there's no setting the clock back, and it’s not even
clear that you would want to set back the clock if you could, but expecting cultural
constructs, which take centuries or maybe even thousands or maybe even tens of thousands
of years to develop, to keep up with change of that magnitude is...it’s not possible. You know, I mean and you guys face technological
transformations that are earth-shattering on an almost yearly basis, and you hardly
even notice it. I mean, Tinder is a good example of that,
you know. I don’t know if you know, but Tinder has
produced quite a spike in sexually transmitted diseases, but you know, it’s a radical technology
because it’s the first technology that’s ever been invented that enables men to find
partners with no fear - with virtually no fear of rejection, and of course that's been
a limiting factor for… that’s been a defining feature between the interactions between men
and women ever since history began, and so these things are occurring at an extraordinary
rate, and of course it’s not reasonable to expect our more slower moving cultural
constructs to keep up with them, and that’s partly because as well that, you know, people
talk for example about the divisive nature of religion. You often hear people who are critics of formal
religion in particular talk about the fact that religion underlies a tremendous amount
of destruction and warfare and conflict, and you know, first of all it isn't religion that
does that by the way, it’s tribalism, and tribalism characterizes even chimpanzees,
and I don't think chimpanzees go to war with each other for religious reasons. So, you know, the religious groupings of mankind
are large-scale manifestations of the same phenomena that produce dominance hierarchies
in the wild, and of course, large-scale religions unite people within the religion just as much
as they divide people on the outside of it, so part of the accumulation of religious tradition
across time is a process that allows thousands, and ten thousands, and even millions of people
to exist within the same hierarchy of values and exist relatively peacefully as a consequence. Now I’m saying relatively peacefully. You know, a hundred years ago, it was thought
that pre, let's say archaic people, so those would be people who are still living a fairly
isolated tribal life in small groups - pre - you know, basically operating at the level
of stone age technology, let’s say. The idea was - there was a very popular idea
for a long time that those cultures were communistic and violence free, and that's wrong. They're not violence free at all. If you track the homicide rates in stone-age
cultures, they're way, way higher than they are in civilized cultures, like orders of
magnitudes higher, and there's a variety of reasons for that, but I’m just telling you
that because you want to dispense with the idea that along with complex civilizations
and the spread, say, of unifying religious beliefs, there was an increase in baseline
violence because there's just no evidence for that at all. Now, the problem with these large-scale belief
systems is they're not very fast, and part of the reason for that is that in order for
a large-scale belief system to manifest itself in any reasonable form, it has to be predicated
on the mutual agreement of the people within who...within - who operate within its embrace,
you know. So, for Toronto to exist as city, as a peaceful
city, basically what has to happen is that the vast majority of us have to agree that
the rules that govern the city, and the social interactions within the city are useful and
just, and because if you don't agree with that, then splinter movements of all sorts
start to occur and people become more revolutionary in their modes of action and then they become
more violent and the whole system starts to break down. So it’s not easy to establish a collective
norm because people have to agree to it, and you can imagine that hammering out agreement
with anything, with even a small agreement that affects many, many people, is a process
that takes a tremendous amount of time. People can argue forever about the smallest
alterations in the systems that regulate our behavior. Now, you know, some of you might be familiar
with the terror management theories. How many of you have heard of terror management
theory? Okay, well the terror management theories
are predicated on the idea that our belief systems protect us from our fear of death. Now exactly how they do that isn't specified
particularly well in the terror management theories but the originator of the theory
- his name was Ernest Becker who was a sociologist, by the way, and a Freudian - believed that
cultural systems enabled us to attribute beliefs to our actions, finite and infinite, so that
we could consider ourselves in relationship to mortality and in some sense, hide from
the truth of the finitude of our existence. Now, one of the things that terror management
theorists don't really give any credence to is the fact that belief systems are not only
systems of beliefs, they're systems of action regulation, right. So we talked about the Piagetian notion of
a game. I mean, the game exists first as something
that everyone can play and only later as something that people represent, and a social culture’s
the same way. A cultural… A culture regulates the way that you interact
with each other, and what you expect from each, and how you can fulfill your mutual
- your needs in relationship to one another and then it’s represented, and the representation
might help you find meaning in your life, but the fact of the initial social contract,
which is the phenomena that regulates your interpersonal behavior, doesn't protect you
from the fear of death, it protects you from dying, and that's a very important thing to
note. I mean, you know, all of you know, of course,
that it’s very cold out today, and yet here you are in this classroom where it’s, you
know, ridiculously comfortable, you know, by classroom standards and of course by standards
around the world. You're not freezing to death in here, and
that’s not your belief that’s protecting you. It’s the fact that you're embedded in this
insanely complicated system of cultural interactions and it just so happens that you get to sit
here and listen to a lecture while there's thousands of people beetling around, many
of them outside in the cold, making sure that the power grid, for example, that keeps this
place warm is properly maintained and functional which takes a tremendous amount of work. So, in during periods of rapid transformation,
it’s hard for the social contract to adjust itself so that everyone knows how to behave
in relationship to one another, but then it’s also very difficult for the description of
that, so the articulated norms that constitute a society; it’s very difficult of them to
transform rapidly enough so that they can keep track of the changes and help people
decide what they should do, so let me give you an example. So, I had a client a while back who had been
raised as a fundamentalist Christian, and she was very… she had been socialized and
had come to believe that sex before marriage was wrong, but the probability that she was
going to get married before she was 27, or 28, was low for a whole variety of reasons. So then she faced this conundrum, and it was
an interesting conundrum from my perspective because, you know, I think that in a well-regulated
psyche, sexuality is integrated into the personality so that it plays its role in the - what would
you call - in the polity of the self. It’s integrated properly inside, and so
it’s under moral control, roughly speaking because it serves its own function plus the
function of keeping the person well situated in the present and developing properly in
the future, and maintaining proper relationships with everyone around them, but it was quite
obvious to me that a lot of the constraints that had been placed on her behavior, as a
consequence of her relatively rigid belief were actually interfering with her development
as a person, you know, and so one of the things we had to puzzle out was well, exactly what
are the moral guidelines that you should use to regulate your sexual behavior outside of
marriage if you're not planning to be married for, you know, maybe until your late twenties. Well, you know good luck trying to figure
that out. Like it’s a really - it’s a really, really,
really, really complicated question, and it’s certainly not obvious that any one person
can figure out the answer to that in a single lifetime, you know, even if they thought of
nothing else especially because the landscape itself is transforming as you're attempting
to adjust to it, and you know, we eventually concluded - although it was a very individual
solution - we eventually concluded that there were things that she had forbidden herself
to do that were stopping her from establishing any kind of long term relationship at all,
and that was interfering with her development, you know, as a mature person, and that the
morality that she had used to structure her behavior appeared to be counterproductive
at least in, you know, some - in some areas. So, it’s one thing to, you know, to regulate
sexuality in the hopes of marriage when you get married when you're, you know, 19 or 20
or 21. It’s a completely different thing, perhaps,
when it’s not going to happen until you're in your late twenties. So now, Nietzsche talked a lot, and Dostoevsky
talked a lot about the collapse of meaning systems in the late nineteenth century, and
you know, that was followed by a very, very rapid period of technological transformation,
like that really kicked in in the late 1800’s, which was the, you know, well it was the height
of the industrial revolution, particularly in England, and there were modern technologies
being thrust out of the industrial revolution like mad, like the automobile, and the airplane,
and the electrical light, and the recording devices, and all the things that we’re still
elaborating on now, and then of course, apart from the collapse of classic, say, Christian
belief, and the introduction of all these new technologies, when World War I hit, the
entire monarchical structure of the Western world collapsed and that also occurred, say,
with regards to the Ottoman Empire, and that was partly what led to the creation of the
modern Middle East, and of course, that still hasn't been sorted out to any greater degree
at all. So the monarchical structures collapsed, these
ancient civilizations. The Russians underwent their revolution, and
were transformed into Communists, and then after World War I, the stress between the
potential different ways of structuring societies after the monarchical societies had collapsed
was almost unbearable, and people didn't really know what to do. Now, what happened at the end of Nietzsche’s
period and Dostoevsky’s period was that the question that both of those people...what? The most important question both of those
people asked became the central focus of the development of philosophical idea of ethics
in the twentieth century. So you could think about those - about that
as a post-religious ethic. Now, the reason I’m telling you this is
because, among other things, is because a lot of what psychoanalytic, or psychotherapeutic
treatment is about, is about ethics, and that can't be stretched too much because ethics
is about how you see the world and how you behave, and so even behaviorists who are technically
embedded in the scientific world are still practical ethicists because what they're consistently
doing with their clients is breaking down whatever the problems are that are causing
them misery, breaking them down into subproblems and trying to figure out solutions that improve
their quality of life, like practical, implementable solutions that improve their quality of life
not only now, but as they propagate into the future, and that is not a scientific issue. It’s a how to live issue. So, the entire history of the twentieth century,
in some sense, political, economic, psychological, was a sequence of attempts to answer the question
“When your fundamental systems of ethics collapse, how is is that you should live?” Now, Nietzsche said, very clearly, that there’d
be two consequences to the collapse of these systems, and one would be nihilism, the belief
in nothing at all, which also regarded as a form of escape from responsibility, so it’s
a logical consequence of the breakdown of classical belief systems, but it’s also
a cop-out and it’s the kind of cop-out that Dostoevsky explored very deeply in his small,
brilliant novel, “Notes from Underground” which describes a person who’s basically
slipped -- an intelligent person, and an irresponsible person, who has basically slipped into a pit
of meaninglessness where he experiences hatred and resentment and the desire for revenge,
and all of the sorts of things that would -- that afflict someone in the underworld
who’s got nothing to hold them together, and then of course, Nietzsche also talked
about the likelihood that people would turn to totalitarian belief systems, and he particularly
discussed Communism as a replacement for religious belief. I can give you a Canadian example of that. So, I heard a Gallup pollster one time. I was at a conference in Ottawa. It’s the only time I’ve ever heard this,
and I think it’s an amazing -- it’s an amazing fact. They were looking at the probability that
people would be separatists in Quebec, and if you were a lapsed Catholic, the probability
that you would be a Separatist was increased ten times, and the reason for that is, you
know, Catholicism fell apart in Quebec in the late 1950s. It was one of the last places in the Western
world, roughly speaking, where the feudal, in some sense, structures of Catholicism had
maintained themselves right up to that point, right up to the 1950s, the late 1950s, and
that collapsed precipitously just like belief in Christianity had in Russia, you know, in
the late, say, 1880s, and what happened in Quebec was, well first of all, the birth rate
plummeted. I mean, I did genetic research in Quebec,
and in the 1950s and before that, it was very typical to see families of nine to thirteen
children, and of course - but now Quebec has the lowest birth rate, I believe, in the Western
world. It’s way below replacement. Everybody bailed out of the church. Nobody gets married, and if you were a separatist
- if you were a lapsed Catholic, you were ten times more likely to be a separatist. All that meant was that when Catholicism fell
apart, you know, people who still needed to have very structured belief systems just turned
to Nationalism as a natural alternative, and that's part of what a -- that’s part of
what accounted for the rigidity and utopian… the utopian nature of the Quebec movement
towards independence. You know, I remember talking to one of my
colleagues, very, very intelligent person, and you know, I asked him because at that
point, they were predicting that if Quebec separated, the Canadian dollar would fall
to forty cents, forty-five cents US, something like that. It’d be a complete economic catastrophe. I said, well you know the predictions are
that if Canada separates, or Quebec separates and no one would know how to do that, is that
the Canadian economy will collapse, and of course, that'll collapse the Quebec economy
too, and he didn't deny that. He said, yeah but it would be worth it. And I thought, well there's just no way of
having a conversation under those circumstances because from my perspective, total, you know,
severe economic collapse is a good reason not to do something, but if you believed that
the future potential is such that that’s justified, then well there's no arguing with
you. It’s just something that decided, and that's
the end of that. When I lived in Quebec, as I did for a long
time, I learned very quickly never to have a discussion about politics with anyone who
was a separatist because it was just absolutely counterproductive, you know. They had axioms of belief that weren't movable,
like the future will be good enough so that no matter what price we pay in the present,
that will be justified. It’s like, well that's not an idea right. It’s a statement of faith, and you saw exactly
the same thing happening, not with the same principles, I’m not saying that, but you
saw the same thing happening from a psychological perspective in Russia when the Communists
really started to become active in the 1920s when any matter of horror whatsoever was fully
justifiable because it was going to bring about some future state that was basically
equivalent to paradise. So anyways, and then you know, Dostoevsky
pursued the idea of nihilism even farther because Dostoevsky was certainly someone who
was willing to go to the ends of an argument, and one of the things he proclaimed was that
if there was no god, then anything was permitted, and his basic hypothesis was well if there's
no ultimate arbiter of values, if there's no transcendent arbiter of values, then you're
radically free. Now, you know, the existentialists would say
you could use that radical freedom to find meaning in your life, but one of the things
Dostoevsky realized was that you could use that radical freedom for anything that you
wanted. So in his book “Crime and Punishment,”
for example, he explores the actions and beliefs of a student who was named Raskolnikov, and
Raskolnikov is a starving student. He’s a law student, and he doesn't have
enough to eat so of course his cognition is a little bit on the addled side because he’s
going through periods of starvation and drunkenness, so it’s not like he’s thinking that clearly. He wants to become a law student so that he
can help society, and he finds out that his sister is basically willing to enter into
a loveless marriage and more or less prostitute herself so that she can generate enough money
to share with her mother so that they can fund his continuation through law school,
and he thinks that wouldn't be a very good deal. At the same time, he’s indebted to a pawnbroker
who everyone hates, who’s an absolutely miserable person in every possible way, and
Dostoevsky sets up the situation like that, so the pawnbroker has a niece, if I remember
correctly who she basically enslaves and mistreats, and she squirrels away all sorts of money
but never does anything with it, lives in absolute poverty, and anyways, he considers
her the sort of person without whom the world would be a better place. So having all these things co-occurring in
his imagination, he decides that because there are no ultimate arbiters of value, that all
morality is essentially cowardice which is kind of the reverse of what nietzsche concluded. He said most people were cowardly and justified
that with their morality, but Raskolnikov took the other idea which is “Well why do
I have to obey any rules at all. If there’s no ultimate source for all of
these rules, it’s just convention and cowardice, and if I have enough strength then I could
leap outside of that framework and I can do whatever I want.” So he decides to kill the pawnbroker which
he does, and quite successfully, and not only that, he gets away with it, and that's about
the first third of “Crime and Punishment,” and the rest of the book is the discussion
of the manner in which he comes unglued as a consequence of having performed this act,
and it’s a brilliant - it’s an absolutely brilliant study of the way that a value system
holds you together even in ways that you don't know, and then if you step outside of that
and violate your relationship to it in some really intense way, then there's going to
be catastrophic psychological consequences that’ll echo through your whole being. We know that this is more than theory because
many people, soldiers in particular who develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, develop Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder when they observe themselves doing something that they regard
as tremendously cruel, or vicious, or immoral, you know, and they're in this situation where,
you know, acting in that manner is highly probable. It’s a war situation. It’s usually very intense, and you know,
they don't have a lot of time to make decisions, and god only knows, you know, what the specifics
are of the particular event, but many, many people come to be so shattered by observing
themselves do things they can't believe that a human being would be capable of doing that
they never recover, and it’s partly because, you know, that they violate their ethical
-- the ethical structure that holds them together, holds all their ideas, and their plans, and
their perceptions, and their interactions with other people. That's a unifying field in some sense, and
if you violate it and it fragments, then you're left absolutely fragmented and that's not
-- that's not even a psychological observation, it’s a psychophysiological observation. You can stress yourself so badly, raise your
stress levels so high that your brain starts to become damaged by the stress hormone and,
you know, so it’s not just a psychological state, it’s damage to the core of your being
in some sense. Now, the collapse of these belief systems
and their destabilization was well thought through by these thinkers by the end of the
nineteenth century, and then we have the technological transformations, and the sociological and
political transformations of the early part of the twentieth century that leaves everyone
in a state of confusion, in some sense, like in Germany in the 1920’s. Of course, the Germans had gone through this
terrible period of trench warfare, so all their men were brutalized. Some of them had been on the front for months,
and that was in the trenches, and then, you know, their political system had collapsed
and they put a weakly rooted democracy in place, and the economic system collapsed and
Germany went through a period of hyperinflation so that the value of their money basically
dropped to zero. So that meant if you were 65 years old, and
saved up your whole life to have enough money to retire, and you were a good citizen, you
know, and prudent and careful, every single thing you ever owned disappeared, and so at
the same time, you know, the Communist revolution had taken place in Soviet Russia, and there
was great concern within Germany that the same thing was likely to happen there, and
certainly the Communists were always pushing for that because they had the common term,
which is the international Communist movement which was devoted to destabilizing, you know,
non-Communist governments and producing the preconditions for the revolution, so it wasn't
like it was just paranoia, it was a real threat, and it was out of all that mess that came
the emergence of the fascists, and the Nazis, and it’s not that, you know, it’s not
that surprising because chaos breeds the desire for order. So that was one direction that people could
go, you know, instead of following some abstract Messiah, let’s say, the sort of idea that
was embedded in classical Christianity, they realized a new Messiah, and that was Hitler,
and that certainly didn't seem to be any improvement, you know, because Hitler was really a messiah
of destruction and fire, and you know, the World War II killed about a hundred and twenty
million people, and of course, it left Germany in absolute ruins, and Hitler killed himself
in his bunker underneath Berlin while it was burning and the Russians were advancing into,
you know, into Germany, and they were not happy. You didn't want to be a German national while
the Soviets were advancing towards you after your country had invaded theirs, pushed them
back halfway across the Soviet Union, you know, and produced a tremendous amount of
damage and distress. It was an awful situation, you know, and the
messiahs that the Russians turned to: Lenin, and Stalin were barbaric and brutal beyond
comprehension, and you know it’s a strange thing, you know, we’re not very well educated
in what happened in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. We know far more about what happened in Germany,
say with the Holocaust, and you know, it’s very important that people should know about
that, but there were tens of millions of people brutally destroyed in the Soviet Union, and
you know, partly because they were murdered by people who were, at least in principle,
motivated by left-wing utopian visions. We seem to… our education system seems to
regard that as somehow more forgivable which it certainly isn't. So, you know, the whole generate secular alternatives
to religious belief issue didn't seem to work out very well, and then the nihilism alternative
-- well that has its own problems, you know. One problem is the sort that Dostoevsky talked
about, you know, and you see the kids who go up and shoot up high schools and explode
in rage, you know. They're often people who feel that they have
no meaning in their life, that life itself is contemptible and that suffering is too
extreme and that they bear the brunt of unfair reality, and you know, they develop unbelievably
dark and destructive theories of revenge and mayhem over, sometimes over the period of
years and then they go out in the world and lay those things out, and it’s not like
their thinking is irrational, you know. It’s coherent. It’s just predicated on principles that
you might not agree with, such as, you know, the principle that “everyone I don’t like
deserves to die,” but you know, in the absence of a really formal way of demonstrating that
such thoughts are not only immoral, but wrong, you know, in some absolute sense, it’s very
difficult to come up with ways of defending ourselves against those two extremes, you
know. The extreme of destructive nihilism, and the
extremes of ideological possession. Now, Nietzsche started to work out some solutions
to this, and I just started to touch on those at the end of the last lecture. You know, Dostoevsky’s solution was a return
to Christianity, fundamentally, and its revivification, and that was the same tact that Alexander
Solzhenitsyn attempted to lay out, and also Tolstoy in Russia, you know, and I’ll talk
to you about that a little bit more in the next lecture. Dostoevsky -- or Nietzsche’s idea was that
people would have to… he said, you know, in his quote about the death of God, that
people would have to become like gods just to be able to tolerate the consequences of
this dismemberment of the previous civilization, and he believed, well his thinking on this,
I would say, is somewhat fragmentary. I mean, Nietzsche was a great critic of Christianity,
institutionalized Christianity, and a great diagnostician. He could say what was rotten at the core of
Western civilization, we’ll say modern civilization, but when it came to actually describing what
to do about it, well he didn't live that long, you know. He died a fairly young man. There's actually a video of Nietzsche in the
mental hospital online. I just found it the other night. I had no idea that he was ever captured on
video, but there's video from -- movie from about 1899 showing him in a mental hospital
where he ended up in his early forties. So he talked about the development of the
being he called the overman, which is often translated as superman, and his idea was that
people would have to take onto themselves the burden of creating new systems of meaning
and new moralities that were suited to them, that they would have to create new values. Now, Jung took Nietzsche’s diagnosis very,
very seriously, and you can certainly say that Jung was as much influenced by Nietzsche
as he was by Freud, and I would say in some ways, he was influenced more because one of
the things that Jung was trying to do was to identify where the loss values had gone. So the Nietzschean idea is that it’s possible
for human beings to create their own values. Now, there's a problem with that, and there's
a variety of problems with that, and one is that it doesn't seem exactly true in that,
you know, and a lot of the existentialists who followed Nietzsche, like Jean-Paul Sartre
for example, believed in the radical freedom of human beings, that we were doomed to be
free, in a sense, and it was absolutely necessary for us to conjure up our own meanings and
values because fundamentally, we face the void and, you know, life was nasty, and brutish,
and short, to use Hobbes’s terms, and that we had to be able to confront that and live
despite it, and well, there's a variety of problems with that solution. The first one is, well, if you come up with
your systems of values, there's no reason -- and I come up with mine, there’s no reason
to assume that they're going to be sufficiently integrable so that we don't have to fight
each other to the death. That's a big problem. So, you know, you have every single person
with their own system of beliefs. Well, fine, except how do -- in a sense, that's
a structured, kind of philosophical anarchy. Well, okay, maybe that's good if you happen
to live alone on an island, but if you're stuck with all these other people, then that
becomes a very difficult thing to manage, and I think it’s partly for that reason
that Sartre famously said, “Hell is other people,” you know, because he thought of
the other, in some sense, that which was not him, as a suppressive force that stopped him
from manifesting his destiny in the way that would have been best for him. Well, you know, hell might be other people,
but that doesn't mean that -- first of all that's a very one-sided way of looking at
things because, of course, hell is other people. Hell is you too, and you know, hell is nature. There's lots of places that you can find hell,
but by the same token, you know, the most meaningful elements of people’s lives are
often in their social relationships, and you can't lay everything at the door of pathological
society, you know, and we shouldn't forget as well that Sartre didn’t… what -- come up with any reasonable critique
of the Communists until the late 1960s, and you know, that was a little late. People with any sense, like George Orwell,
had figured out that the whole Soviet experiment had become radically murderous by the early
1940s, and so Sartre, you know, proposed radical freedom as a… as the existential response
to the unveiling of no meaning, but when it came right down to it, he couldn't resist
identification with a totalitarian structure, so I don't see any reason why we should really
pay any attention to what he had to say. So… and now there's another problem with
the idea that people should create their own values, and that is that it’s not so simple,
you know, and the problem seemed to be that you don't obey yourself very well. You know, you can say, “Well here’s my
code. I’m going to live by it.” So, and let’s do that simply to begin with. You say, “Well I’m going to study very
hard and do well at my classes,” just for the sake of argument, you know, but you don't,
you know. You procrastinate, and you have a paper you're
supposed to read, and you know you're supposed to read it, and you need to read it for reasons
that are hypothetically important to you, but there's no damn way you can get yourself
to sit down and read it. Your attention wanders, and you go to do three
or four stupid things, and you feel terrible about it, like you feel like you're betraying
yourself, and maybe this is a continual pattern in your life, but one of the things you find
out is that you don't get to create your own damn values because, for some reason, you're
not in charge of yourself, and of course that's where the psychoanalytic idea started to come
from, you know, Freud notices -- this is in the aftermath of Nietzsche -- that you're
not the master of your own psyche, you know, that there's many sub-yous inside of you and
that they don't all want the same thing, and so the idea that you can generate your own
meaning is very -- it’s an insufficiently developed idea because there's a lot of meaning-making
generators residing within you, and not only do they not all point in the same direction
which is a huge problem, but they don't even necessarily -- they don't necessarily lay
themselves out in some integrated fashion across time, and they don't necessarily operate
together in a way that's going to enable you to find your place with other people and in
society. So, you know, make your own meaning. Well, which part of you, you know? You're not a unified thing. So that's a big problem, and then well these
other problems just remain unaddressed completely. Well, one answer to that, and this is the
answer that the more radical existentialists took is that well, society has to be reconfigured,
but you know, we kind of know where that leads too. When people are doing radical societal reconfiguration,
at least as far as we’ve been able to tell, most of the time that's an absolute, murderous,
catastrophe. So, you know, it’s reasonable -- it seems
reasonable to me to presume that those experiments have already been run. Alright so, now Jung, like Dostoevsky, was
very interested in returning to sources of meaning from which he believed that our original
religious ideas had emerged, and this is partly his notion of the collective unconscious. So, you know, part of the radical critique
of religious systems is predicated on the idea that there's something like conscious
beliefs, you know, there are articulated beliefs that you could lay out in a credo, but that's
not right. It doesn't seem to be correct at all, and
Nietzsche actually knew this, you know. He knew that a lot of our social institutions
had emerged from the bottom up and had only become articulated after they had been embodied
and danced out essentially, you know. You -- a tribal group learns how to organize
itself over thousands and thousands of years of trial and error and pushing against each
other, and so forth, and they come into that tribal grouping with a biological substrate,
and their sociological and political interactions are constrained by all of those things, and
then maybe they come up with a description of that, over time, a self-description, and
an articulated representation, and that's the religious system. It’s not that the religious system is thought
out first, as a system of metaphysical presuppositions, images, and dreams, then turned into rules,
then imposed on the population who then obeys it, and generally speaking, when people criticize
formal religion, they criticized it assuming that that's how it developed, you know, and
that's kind of a Marxist idea, for example, that religion is the opiate of the masses,
and that you know, the religious structures were laid out so that a small elite could
control the population. Now, you know, in virtually every domain,
a small elite emerges that dominates the population. I don't care what domain you look at. So Marx is accurate in that way, in that,
you know, there's always a power imbalance between elite minority and a non-elite majority,
but to say that that's the cause of all the systems that people interact within is, well
it’s unsophisticated beyond belief. What it does is that it takes phenomena that
are complex beyond comprehension and reduce them to one thing. It’s not helpful, like you know, here’s
an example. If you sampled popular songs on YouTube, let’s
say you made a graph of how popular songs were. What you find is that about ten songs, at
any given time, are played -- half of all the songs played at any given time are going
to be one of ten songs. Well, and then what the other thing you’d
find is that half of all songs played are played by one or more of ten musicians, and
that's true no matter if you look all the from the 1930s to now, if you look at popular
music, you see the same thing. Almost everything that almost everyone listens
to is created by very few people, and then there's millions of musicians, but you've
never heard of most of them and you'll never hear a song from most of them. It’s a small minority, and what you see
is in any field of creative production, this happens. A small elite emerges, and dominates the entire
landscape. Now, you know, it would be kind of ridiculous
to assume that the ten most popular singers and musicians that are currently operative
were those who gave rise to the system that allowed them to thrive. I mean, obviously that's a dopey idea, and
it’s no more an intelligent idea when you look at any other domain where there's tremendous
variation, and the emergence of an elite. It’s a very common phenomena. It happens, as I said, it happens anywhere
there's creative production, and so that's why one percent of the people, you know, roughly
have fifty percent of the money. It’s no different in other creative domains. Now, we’ll talk later in the course about
why that happens, but to think it’s because those people set up the system so that they
could thrive is -- well there’s an element of that, obviously, because once you're rich,
you're going to prefer political policies that help you stay rich, but that doesn't
mean you set up the whole damn system that made you rich to begin with, plus it’s not
the same people over any reasonable span of time. So, the one percent of people who have most
of the money, it’s always one percent, but it’s not the same people, you know. Each individuals tend to hold on to money
for very short periods of time, and big companies don't last very long, you know. They last on average about 30, 35, 40 years,
and that's it, then they disappear. So, and it’s because, you know, the economic
landscape is just churning like mad. It’s very difficult for a company to -- you
know, there's not that many big steam coach companies anymore, you know, and nobody make
zeppelins, and nobody makes typewriters. You know what I mean, it’s things move quick,
and just because you dominated the landscape at one particular moment doesn't mean you're
going to be able to do it at the next. Alright, so the create your own meaning thing
is a rough one, and then there's another problem too which is “What makes you think you have
enough time?” You know, lots of times people come to me
and they have relationship problems, and part of the problem is that they've set their relationships
up outside of social norms, and they do that, so they'll say something to me like well we’re
not going to get married because marriage is just a piece of paper, which is really
a stupid thing to say, like it’s an incredibly stupid thing to say, but underneath that,
there's this idea that they want to remain free of social constraints so that they can
negotiate their own way, like if you're giving them credit, for you know, wanting freedom
instead of just escaping responsibility, but the problem with that is, it’s like okay,
good luck. Try it. I don't know why you would assume that you
have enough time in the thirty or forty years that you're going to be pursuing relationships
to actually figure out how they should run. You don't have a hope of that, and it’s
worse too because very, very few people can negotiate, you know, because here's the way
it works. You either adhere to the social order, or
you stand outside it. As soon as you stand outside of it, you're
in a chaotic place because there's no guidelines, and then you either live chaotically because
there's no guidelines or you start to formulate order, but to do that, you have to know what
you want, and you have to know how to express it, and then you have to figure out what your
partner wants, and then help them express it and then you have to negotiate a solution. Well, I would say one in twenty people know
how to negotiate. It’s really, really difficult. I mean, just think of the steps. First of all, you have to know what you want,
and then you have to admit it to yourself. Well, yeah right, like you're not even gonna
get to the first one in all likelihood. What do you want? A lot of what you want can't be articulated
even, you know. I’ll give you an example. So, there's a great study done awhile back
on prediction of relationship longevity. Okay, so here was the question. “How many negative interactions do you have
to have, per set of positive” -- sorry. “How many positive interactions, per negative
interaction, do you have to have with your partner in order for the relationship to remain
stable?” Okay, so let's say you have one negative interaction
to every one positive interaction. Okay, or maybe you have ten negatives to every
positive, then you can imagine a different situation where you have a hundred positives
to one negative, right, spanning the whole potential continuum, and you use that to predict
relationship satisfaction and longevity. Well, you might think, well god obviously,
a hundred positive to one negative is where the preferable ratio and so it’s those people
who, you know, their relationship is nothing but constant compliments and bliss. They're the ones who last. It’s not true. What you see is that there's an optimal…
an optimal ratio domain. If it falls below five to one positive to
negative, then your relationship falls apart. It’s too negative, and it’s partly because
people feel negative emotion more than they feel positive emotion because you can be hurt
more than you can be pleased, and so one that's only five to one is too punishing, and people
won't stay in it, but if you get above to eleven to one, it gets not punishing enough,
and then you think well what does that mean exactly? Well, what do you want in a relationship? Well you think, bliss. It’s like, that isn't what you want, as
it turns out. It’s more like you want someone to contend
with, you know. You don't want a pushover. You don't want everything just to be easy,
you know, and this is the sort of… the sort of phenomena that Kierkegaard was talking
about when he talked about deciding to make things more difficult for people because that's
what they need. You know, you know this perfectly well because
if you go outside with someone and they worship you, and they dolt on your every word, and
there's nothing but positive feedback coming from them, you lose respect for them almost
instantly, and you go wander off and find someone whos more interesting, and part of
the reason for that, I think, is that you want the person that you're with to challenge
you so that not only do you do reasonably well day to day together, you know, so that
you can co-exist in the same space with a reasonable amount of peace, but you also want
there to be enough tension in the relationship so that you're both involved in a process
of mutual transformation. Well, try specifying that in an articulated
way, you know. Good luck. You know, and it also explains strange things
about people like the fact that they'll stay in pretty negative relationships, like what
the hell are you doing there? If you’d articulated it two years ago, and
you said, “Well I want to be with someone I’m miserable with half the time,” of
course, you're never going to say that, but it could easily be that that's what you're
after. So well...so alright now, Heidegger is another
philosopher who was attempting in some sense to solve the problems that were laid out by
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and the way that Heidegger began to resolve them was by taking
a radically new look at philosophy itself, and he was one of the prime phenomenologists,
and I told you awhile back that the phenomenologists decided to reconstitute Western philosophy
so that it was focusing on being instead of knowledge, and so the hardest thing to grasp
about the phenomenologists is what exactly they meant by being, and -- so I’ll give
you a… I’ll give you an overview of that. So that's where the term “da sein” comes
from, and that's a German term, and it means “being there.” So right now, you're encapsulated in a da
sein, and the da sein is the totality of your experience, and that experience would be an
experience of an extended world, the natural world, and then the social world, and then
inside that, the world of your subjective experience, and that constitutes being, and
the phenomenologists make the case -- they're not playing the subject-object game, they're
standing outside the division between subject and object that's part of the scientific worldview. So it’s a real paradigm shift in that you
can't use the rules from the old way of looking at things inside the new way of looking at
things. You have to start with new presuppositions. So we might say, well, one of the things that
you're going to do if you look at things phenomenologically is to assume that everything that you experience
is real. So then, we would say that there's no attempt,
in a phenomenological world, to reduce pain to something material. Pain stands as -- stands itself as a phenomena. So does anxiety. So does joy. All the things that the scientists of consciousness
call qualia, which are viewed by them as qualities of the objective world, aren't viewed that
way by the phenomenologists. They just say those are primary elements of
being. So -- and it’s a very interesting way of
looking at things because it kind of allows you to reclaim the validity of your own experience. You can no longer say, “well that only subjective.” Now that doesn't mean that everything you
claim subjectively is true, objectively or for other people. What it does mean is that everything that
you experience subjectively is real. Now that doesn't mean you have to not think
about it or take it apart or categorize it properly, you still have to do all of those
things, but you're put into a place where there's no need to deny the reality of your
own experience, or to subordinate it to something else. So, for example, if I’m doing dream analysis
with someone, which I do often, if people dream, because dreams, as Jung pointed out,
are… they're manifestations of being. You don't come up with them. They appear to you. They sort of appear out of nowhere, in some
sense. They manifest themselves. They do it strangely, and I think the reason
for that is that they contain unarticulated thought, but if you can get a handle on them
and assess them, then sometimes they can tell you things that there's no other way you can
figure out, and what's really cool about them is that they're -- they have the same personality
as phenomena in the, like the broader world of experience have, you know. You don't ever think about the truth of a
chair. It’s just there, and dreams are like that. They're just there, and if you can untangle
what they have to -- what they indicate, then you can get a take on your own experience
that's not altered by any of your local subjective wishes and desires. I hate to use the word subjective in this
sort of context. So, phenomenology is the study of being. Now, and -- in being, there are variety of
aspects, and so one aspect -- I’ve never remembered the names of these, but I’ll
get it here right away. Oh yes. Heidegger broke the world of experience, being,
into three basic categories. There was the umwelt, which I think is basically
the world beyond culture and the individual. There's the mitwelt, and that's the world
that we share with everyone else, so that's roughly the social world and the social structures,
and then there's the eigenwelt which is that domain of experience that's unique to you,
that other people can't partake in. So those are the elements of being, as far
as the phenomenologists were concerned, and in those domains of being, different experiences
manifest themselves. We talked about some of the ones that would
be manifestations of the eigenwelt. Scientists would call those things emotional
or motivational states. Normally, people think of them as feelings. I would say, “I feel thus. I feel such and such,” and those are experiences
that manifest themselves to you or that you have, depending on how you look at it, that
are indicative of the manner in which you act in relationship to being. Now, one of -- part of the reason that this
is relevant to psychotherapy in particular is because the phenomenologists were very
interested in the manifestation of meaning. So you could say, well, nihilism is the absence
of meaning, and totalitarianism is the fixedness of meaning, right, if you're a totalitarian,
what you do is say, “All meanings exist in relationship to this structure.” It’s almost as if -- the phenomenologists
would say you're trying to reduce the umwelt, which is the natural world, the mitwelt, which
is the social world, and the eigenwelt, which is your own world, you're trying to reduce
all of that to the mitwelt so that everything falls under an explanation that's granted
to you by some higher authority, and then of course, the nihilists are having none of
that. They see -- they use their eigenwelt, I would
say, their own world to invalidate meaning in any domain. Now the phenomenologists would say, well it’s
a mistake to use your rationality to undermine the sense, the manifestation of meaning, and
I can give you an example of that. So let’s say you're a good nihilist, and
you think maybe you're going to go do something difficult like put yourself through university,
and then you think in a relatively depressed state of mind, maybe you encounter some obstacles
of one form or another, and you think, “Oh to hell with this. Who’s -- What difference does it make anyways? Who cares if I go and get my degree, you know. None of this knowledge is particularly relevant
or meaningful and who the hell’s gonna know the difference in a million years?” And so you think, well that's a perfectly
rational dismissal because who is gonna know in a million years or let’s say, well even
if you can make case that someone might know, there might be some effects left of you in
a million years, then we’ll just multiply it by a hundred thousand and go to a trillion
years. So here you are, you're this little tiny speck
on a slightly bigger speck in the middle of a galaxy that has god only knows how many
billion stars, and then there's a billion of those galaxies, although there's way more
than that, and they're spread across this tremendous expanse of time, and in the face
of all that, who cares what you do? Well, what a phenomenologist would say is,
okay, let’s look at how meaning manifests itself when you alter your own private world
in a variety of manners. So let’s say, you're trying to do something
-- maybe you're working in a -- maybe you're working as a volunteer in a hospital helping
sick kids, you know. You're reading to them so that they're distracted
from their pain, and you say well, in a trillion years, who’s gonna know the difference and
so you think, well it’s meaningless to do this, and the phenomenologists would say,
if the frame of reference that you're using, like if you're imposing -- if you're transforming
the way your being manifests itself so that it becomes meaningless and absurd, then you
should try experiencing it in a different manner. So, it’s a -- see, because a rationalist
in some sense, the phenomenologists would say, a rationalist can't deal with the argument
“What difference is it going to make in a trillion years, and here you are, a little
dust speck among all these other dust specks. It’s ultimately meaningless.”A phenomenologist
would say, “Maximize the meaning. That's the marker of truth.” It’s a completely different way of thinking
about it. So he would say, for example, that if you're
going to a hospital and you're reading to sick children, that the frame of reference
that you should use, the way that you allow that experience to manifest itself, should
be such that the experience manifests itself so that it’s as meaningful as possible rather
than as meaningless. The idea being that just because you can twist
your own experience so that certain elements of your being become meaningless does not
mean that that’s right. The fact that it becomes meaningless actually
means that it’s wrong because you think, you see, it all depends on what you allow
to be primary, and this is the phenomenologist point. If you allow your strict rationality to be
primary, then if it can attack something and destroy it, then that thing is worthy of being
attacked and destroyed. But if you flip it around and say, well what
you should be doing is allowing -- is interacting with your experience or allowing your experience
to manifest itself in a manner that situates you most meaningfully in the here and now,
whatever framework you're using to do that that works is right. Well it’s a completely different way of
looking at things and it’s a real -- it’s a real escape from the pathology of rationalism,
you know, because it isn't obvious that what you think should take priority. Now, the phenomenologists would go farther
than that. They would say that -- and this is something…
so here's a way of thinking about it. So Binswanger said, “What we perceive are
first and foremost” -- Binswanger was a psychiatrist who was very much influenced
-- Binswanger and Boss are the people we’re going to talk about mostly -- were very much
influenced by Heideggerian ideas. They say, “What we perceive are first and
foremost not impressions of taste, tone, smell, or touch, not even things or objects, but
meanings.” Okay, so the idea for the phenomenologists
is that what being is made out of is meaning. It isn't that the objective world is made
out of things, it’s that being is made out of meaning. Now some of those meanings can be positive,
and some of them can be negative, and some of them can be neutral, but the fundamental
constituent elements of being -- the fundamental constituent element of being is meaning, and
then there is an argument between Binswanger and Boss about how that meaning manifests
itself. So Binswanger would say that, “You endow
meaning on the world.” So that's kind of a Nietzschean idea, that
you create your own values so that you have within you something that he called an a priori
ontological structure. It’s a world designer, a matrix of meaning,
that determines how the world manifests itself to you. Now, the easiest way to think about that is
that, you know, you're thrown into a particular time and place -- that's another existential
idea and that's part of the absurdity of your life, is that you're here, now, in this particular
context and situation. It’s something you have to contend with,
and that's true for everyone. There are arbitrary preconditions to everyone’s
being, and one of those arbitrary preconditions is the structure through which you look at
the world, and that structure enables some things to be highlights and some things to
be ignored, and so, the way that meaning manifests itself is a reflection of this a priori ontological
structure, the a priori mode of being. So, there can't be being, which is to say
your experience, for the sake of argument, without the structure that consists of -- that
you consist of, and so that's a given, and it’s the action of that structure that determines
the meaning of things. Now, Boss would say exactly the opposite. He would say, that's the wrong way of looking
at it. You should look at the totality of your existence,
which is partly the broad natural world, the cultural world, and your own world, and you
should note that meaning arises in different places of its own accord. You can't -- you can't reduce it to the action,
say, of this ontological a priori, ontological structure, and so one example would be, well
what about the meaning of things you don't understand? Well it’s hard to understand how the meaning
of things you don't understand can be attributed to what you understand. The meaning seems to be there, to begin with. So here's an example. You're - you have a relationship with someone,
and you discover that they have an affair. Well, the discovery of the affair is going
to be something that's going to be meaningful. Now, you don't know what the meaning is. You're going to interpret it to begin with,
likely very negatively, except to the degree that part of you would like to escape out
of the relationship, right, because sometimes if you're betrayed, you're happy about it
because it’s time for that to be over with. In any case, there are things that you can
encounter that you don't understand that are meaningful in and of themselves. So, I think that you actually can't separate
your structure from the structure of everything. They’re always interacting, and meaning
emerges out of the interplay of them. So, here’s another way of thinking about
it. You're reading a book. The book is meaningful. Where is the meaning? Is it in your head? Is it in the book? Well, it’s very difficult to say, right,
because obviously there's a subjective element to it. There's an element that's unique to you, but
just as obviously, that meaning wouldn't manifest itself if it wasn't for the book, and of course
the book wouldn't be meaningful if you and the book weren't embedded in this complex
structure, and so the meaning is an emergent property -- the meaning is an emergent property
of the interplay of all of the elements of being. That's a very interesting way of looking at
things, so you have all these elements of being, and their dance produces meaning of
one form or another. Now, you might say, if you were a phenomenologist,
that some of that meaning is going to be life sustaining, and some of it is going to be
life destroying, and the phenomenologist would say from a clinical perspective, that you’re
-- if you’re… if you exist in a system of meaning revelations that are life destroying,
that you should turn your attention away from them towards meanings that are life affirming,
and you know, one of the things that’s quite interesting about the phenomenological perspective
is that you could experiment with it quite easily. So I could say to you, for example, a couple
of phenomenological experiments, one would be, for the next two weeks, you want to detach
yourself in some sense, so that you're a curious observer of your being. You're not necessarily trying to direct it,
you know, you're just trying to let it unfold, and then what you might want to watch for
is when the meaning that manifests itself as things flow around you is clearly meaning
of the life affirming type. Now you’ll see that, you know, it depends
on how well situated you are in some sense because if you're -- if you're surrounded
by -- if your experiential field is primarily negative, these are going to be relatively
rare events, but they will still not be non-existent. That might only happen for a few seconds,
or a few minutes everyday, or every two days, but so say, okay you notice all of a sudden
that you're in a place where things are the way you would like them to be. So you could say you're in a place where being
is manifesting itself as acceptable. Okay, so that's a place where nihilism is
not appropriate. It doesn't apply because the quality of the
experience is such that it’s life affirming. You have to notice that. It’s something that happens, and then you
might ask yourself, well okay, what are the preconditions that enable that -- what are
the preconditions that enabled all of the different subelements of being to work harmoniously
together at that time and place so that that was the meaning that emerged? And then the next question might be, how would
it be possible for me to allow that to happen more frequently? And so you can tilt yourself towards life
affirming meanings and away from… from, say, meanings that are associated with despair
and nihilism, but you do that partly -- it’s almost like you're navigating in a boat. In fact, I think you are. I think you're navigating to find the line
between order and chaos because that's where the meaning is. That's exactly where the meaning is, and you
could feel it like it’s a place, and that's the other thing that phenomenologists are
trying to get across. These things are real. They're not secondary manifestations of some
deeper reality. They are reality itself. I also think, and we’ll talk about this
more when we get to the neuropsychological portion of the course, that your brain is
actually set up first and foremost to detect meaning. You detect meaning before you detect object,
and it’s partly because you have to detect meaning so that you know what to do when something
happens very rapidly, and there are times when you have to figure out what to do before
you have enough time to even see what’s there. You just don't have the time, and so you know,
part of the question is well, what exactly do you mean by meaning, you know. I think meaning is significance for behavior
or significance for the structure that governs behavior, but those are very, very basic fundamental
perceptions. They're not -- you see the object, and then
you derive the meaning. It’s exactly the opposite in many cases. You perceive the meaning and derive the object,
and there's plenty of neurophysiological evidence for that. For example, you have lots of, you know, your
retina is a pattern detector, and the retinal information is transmitted to your brain along
the optic nerve, but the optic nerve branches and it goes lots of places in your body. Some of it maps right onto your spinal cord,
so that your eyes can make your body move. Some of it maps onto your amygdala so that
what you perceive are the meanings of facial expressions, without even perceiving the face. So you can have people who have blindsight,
a damaged visual cortex, you can show them angry faces which they say they can't see,
but they'll respond to them electrophysiologically as if they're being exposed to something negative,
and it’s because the retinal pattern is manifesting itself right onto the system that
maps one form of meaning. So you can clearly have meaning without object
perception, and so the idea that you derive the meaning from the object -- you see the
thing, and then you attribute meaning to the thing -- that's right at some levels of analysis,
but it’s wrong at many other levels of analysis. And so, the other thing that I think that
you can try that’s phenomenologically informed. This is quite an interesting trick. It’s really hard on you though, so be careful
if you try this. So, one other thing that you can try for two
weeks is to watch what you say. You got to detach yourself again. You have to remove the belief that your thoughts
and you are the same thing, and then you have to watch mostly what you say, and then you
have to see -- and this is something that Rogers would also be an advocate of -- you
have to see if what you say makes you feel -- you have to see if what you say improves
the quality of your being or makes it worse, and you know, if you stop believing in what
you say and watch what the consequences are instead, how it manifests itself in terms
of a transformation of being, then you can also learn how to only say things that improve
the quality of being. Well, that's a good thing if you can manage
it, but it’s terrifying in some sense because one of the things that you’ll find is that
hardly anything that you say does that. Most of it is neutral, but a fair bit of it
has exactly the opposite consequence. It makes things worse. So, I think I mentioned that the word phenomena
-- that's where the phenomenology, the term phenomenology comes from, obviously. The term phenomena means -- it’s from the
Greek word, “phainesthai,” and phainesthai means “to shine forth.” And so, the phenomenologists’ argument is
that being is made up of meanings that shine forth for you and that those different meanings
attract you. They're like -- they're like guideposts that
you can follow. So you know, one of the -- I’ve noticed
this, for example, in relationship to reading. So I’ll be reading a complex text, and some
passage will really strike me. So it manifests itself as meaningful. Why is that? Well, you know, one of the phenomenologists,
which would be Binswanger, would say, well it’s because of the way that I’m structured,
but Boss would say, well no, it’s a dance that's occurring within the structure of everything
and the consequence of that is the manifestation of this meaning. Well, what I found is that I can follow threads
of meaning through books, you know, that it’s like it’s something that's guiding me, that
sense of meaning, and often if I find something within a book that's meaningful, then I’ll
read the other things that that person wrote, and I’ll see that some of the people that
they read have meaningful things to say, and then I can branch out that network, and it’s
following a pathway that's laid out for you, in some sense it’s laid out for you in the
world, and you know, the phenomenological idea is that if you follow that pathway, then
what happens is being becomes more and more integrated around you, and those experiences
of intrinsic meaning start to multiply and increase in intensity, and you know, if you're
able to do that over a long period of time, then you can get more and more of the totality
of your being revealing the kind of meanings that's stopped you from being either nihilistic
or totalitarian. And so, well, that's the basic -- that's the
fundamental theory of phenomenological psychotherapy, you know. You might first say, well you know, you're
depressed and anxious and your life isn't going very well. What keeps you afloat? It’s something to observe, and then we might
say, well are there ways that we can expand that small area that's keeping you afloat
so that it starts to occupy more and more of your experience and push back the parts
that are either neutral or negative, and you know, it’s a -- it’s in large part a consequence
of attention, and willingness to first of all, treat things as if their meaning is real,
and then second, to allow that reality to transform the way that you experience the
things in the future. See you Thursday. |
Hi, guys. So we’re going to talk about the brain today. Last lecture I talked to you a little bit
about construct validation and what it means to measure something and so, we’re going
to take a bit of a detour. So I told you about measurement problems last
time. If you do your measurement properly in psychometrics—if
you’re studying personality, if you’re studying individual differences—there are
roughly six things that you can discover and they can be broken up different ways. That’s the big five model: extraversion,
neuroticism, agreeableness, contentiousness, openness, and they can be subdivided as you
should know because, in principle, you’ve read the paper that subdivided them into ten. That turns out to be quite useful, but for
now we’ll just presume that there are five, and then the other factor of human function
that’s pretty easy to derive and measure is IQ. Now, IQ likely nests under openness because
openness looks like it’s something roughly like intellect which is interest in ideas,
but—that’s probably an ability with ideas—but that’s probably measured better by an IQ
test, so if I ask you how smart you are and you say you’re pretty smart that would give
you a relatively high score on the intellect scale, but if I tested your IQ I will get
a better measure than that so in some sense IQ nests inside the big five model. But you can think about it as a separate thing
and I think it’s reasonable to do that so, you know, it depends on what you’re up to
fundamentally. Now, when the big five was first invented—invented
or discovered, depending on how you look at it—as I mentioned briefly, as well, it was
brute force statistics basically, so the idea behind the big five is that the—it’s called
the lexical hypothesis—and the lexical hypothesis is that, because human traits are so important
to us because we want to understand ourselves and, perhaps even more importantly, we want
to understand other people, and because we have language, there’s a reasonable probability
that we’ve encapsulated the structure of human personality within our language. And so, if you analyze the linguistic representations
properly, then perhaps you can extract out the central personality features, and that’s
basically what the lexical hypothesis is. And it’s important to know the lexical hypotheses. And it’s a bit more sophisticated than that
because it basically presumes that you can extract out relevant information about personality
from adjectives—descriptive adjectives—from phrases and from questions, and you’ll get
the same basic dimensional structure regardless of which of those techniques you use. And that turns out to be true for all intents
and purposes. Now, the lexical hypothesis depends on its
validity, depends for its validity on the initial claim that personality is accurately
represented within the structure of language. And so one of the things I would say is that
there’s a weak big five hypothesis and a strong big five hypothesis, okay? The weak big five hypothesis is that, insofar
as you use language to describe personality, personality has a five factor structure that’s
reliably extractable. Now the strong big five theory is that, no
no, personality has a five factor structure, and it’s accurately represented in language,
but when you pull out the structure from language, what you’re pulling out is actually representative
of genuine personality. Now, the weak hypothesis, I would say, is
established. And it’s worth knowing because what it means
is that if you invent a questionnaire that has anything to do with self description,
it might be self description at multiple different levels of analysis, like values for example,
instead of just adjectives, or attitudes instead of just adjectives, I mean, these categories
are sort of unclear. What’s the difference between your attitude
and your temperament? Well, it’s usually defined by the sentence
that you use the words in, right, you extract out the words, they sort of stand there alone—it’
s very difficult to clarify their meaning. Anyways, the lexical hypothesis I think is
one of the most well established—it’s one of the most well-validated claims in psychology. I think it may be the most validated claim,
apart from maybe the work that has extracted IQ out from cognitive questions. And basically it was brute force statistics,
you know, people developed different lists of adjectives and you can complain in some
ways about how they did it, and we’ll talk about that a bit later, but, because they
tried to throw out evaluative words like good and evil for example—those aren’t in the
big five—so they tried to only use adjectives that didn’t necessarily seem to be, like,
valued or devalued. So introvert and extrovert, well, they’re
opposites, but is it better to be an introvert? Is it better to be an extravert? Well, it’s not obvious so all the words
that cover that dimension can be kept in because there’s no value judgments associated with
it and the originators of the big five theory wanted to keep it as free of values as possible. Now that’s already a hypothesis right? It’s a hypothesis that you can come up with
an accurate description of human personality even if you eliminate all the words that are
clearly valenced. And we did an experiment here a while back
that was pretty interesting. We got hold of a data set of descriptive adjectives
and we put all the evaluative words back in. So, like nasty and horrible and awkward and
cruel, and then the good words as well: moral, pleasant, uplifting, all those things. And then we had people rate people they liked
and people they didn’t like using that expanded list and we got a real archetype in some sense
of the hateable person and a tremendous number of the words that were used came from the
evaluative dimension. So I think that when you throw out the evaluative
words you actually throw out a lot of what people actually use, descriptive words to
describe, because when you like someone or don’t like someone, if someone’s likeable
or unlikeable that’s a pretty important phenomena. I mean, you hang around the people you like
generally speaking and you don’t associate with the people you don’t like, so it’s
a fundamental choice. But we’ll talk about that later because
there’s reasons that happened and the reasons were valid, and it’s not that easy to fix
it. And besides that, the standard five factor
model has all sorts of utility. But you need to know what its strengths are
and its limitations are. Now, hypothetically, what you do to draw out
the five factor model was you take, imagine a set of all descriptive adjectives, okay,
and then you take a random sample of those descriptive adjectives, so that it’s not
biased—you’re not going to use all of them because, you know, if you asked someone
to describe themselves on a questionnaire using all the adjectives we have to describe
personality they’d be there for like a day. And so that’s not every efficient. And so you want to take a random sample. Maybe you only sample the words that people
are most likely to use. So for example if you go online you’ll find
that there are word frequency tables. You know, most of your language, about 500
words covers about 80% of what you say. You know, and I don’t remember what the
lexicon of the typical person is, I think it’s in the neighbourhood of 3500 words,
but that might be wrong, but there’s like 750,000 words in the English language. It’s an omnivorous language, it just pulls
words in from all over. And so we hardly use any of those words, and
you know, there’s ones that are used extraordinarily infrequently. So what you could do is you could look at
the total set of adjectives and then you could pull out, you know, identify the ones that
are used,, you know, the thousand most frequently used words and that’d probably cover 95%
of the territory, and then you can pick out a random set of 100. Then you could administer it to people, and
then you could factor analyze it—you’d administer it to lots of people—then you
factor analyze it and you get five relatively clear and stable factors. And the one that comes out first, it’s the
dominant factor in some sense, or the easiest measure or maybe the best represented in language
or something like that, it’s extraversion versus introversion. And the extraversion is a positive emotion
dimension. And it’s associated with enthusiasm and
assertiveness. And assertive people will say, they’ll dominate
the conversation with language. Or, well basically that’s the way to think
about it. Enthusiastic people, they’re up for anything,
you know, they’re the ones they’re always smiling and telling jokes and having parties
and that sort of thing. And generally extroverts really like to be
around people. So they’re happy, they’re gregarious,
they’re assertive, they’re enthusiastic, they’re noisy, they blink more than introverts—now
why that is I have no idea, but apparently they do [student laughter]. So if you notice someone blinking a lot you
can assume that they’re extroverts. If they’re not conscientious , you know
there’s this idea of people being impulsive, it’s a very badly defined term so when you
hear a psychologist talking about impulsivity the first think you could realize is they
don’t know, you don’t know what they’re talking about because probably there’s no
such thing as impulsivity. But extraverted people who are not very conscientious
tend to--that's one of the things you might think about as associated with impulsivity. There's all sorts of other things though to,
so--okay there's a positive emption dimension and that's extraversion and there's a negative
emotion dimension and that's neuroticism. And neuroticism seems to break down into something
like withdrawal and volatility. And volatile people are touchy. So, you know, they'll react quite a lot if
something negative happens. So if you tease them they might get upset
or if you start fighting with them in a sort of provocative way instead of sort of calming
everything down, they'll just ramp it up. And if there's two of you that're volatile
and you're having a conversation and the conversation goes a little bit, you know, into unpleasant
territory, you can really get each other going. So, yes? Student: "Is it like, in terms of the hero,
like internal states?" Both. Both, yeah. I mean, that's part of the problem with using
the word emotion because, you know, is an emotion an internal state or a set of behaviours,
and the answer to that is, as far as we can tell it's both. So now, I'm going to start talking about extraversion
and neuroticism, and part of the reason for that is because I think the evidence for the
relationship between those traits and the way the brain functions is, in some sense,
the clearest. Now, you remember the big five were extracted
out using statistical procedures, right, so there's no reason to assume necessarily that
the traits would bear any straightforward relationship to brain function. Because they weren't derived from analysis
of brain function. At least not directly. They were extracted from analysis of linguistic
representations of other people's and your own behaviour. But it turns out that there's quite a concordance
between certain elements of neuropsychological theory and the positive and negative emotional
traits: extraversion and neuroticism. And so what I'm going to do today is, I'm
going to talk to you about how positive and negative emotion are instantiated in some
sense, neurologically. But I'm going to put that in a broader picture
of brain function because, well first of all, why not? And second because a lot of the things I'm
going to tell you about the brain today will sort of retroactively shed light on some of
the clinical theories we've already talked about. So, which is nice, you know, because, one
of the ways you find out if something is true, and this is something we also talked about
during the last lecture, is that it manifests itself even when you use different measurement
techniques. And so you have statistical derivation, you
know, which basically took place, it really started to accelerate I would say, first in
the 1960s and then in the 1980s--it made a big comeback in the 1980s. But paralleling that were theories of brain
development. And they weren't really--the scientists that
were doing the one sort of research weren't really communicating with the scientists that
were doing the other kind of research. So they were methodologically separate. They used different techniques as well. They weren't talking back and forth much and
they were using different measurement techniques. So if they both come up with the same thing
then you think, oh well there's probably something to that because, you know, the sighted people
discovered it and the people who could hear discovered it. It's the same kind of idea. So, and you know, this has been worked out
in a fair bit of detail over the last 30 years really. And so the papers that you're supposed to
read with this, they're difficult papers. I believe you're reading Grey, which is a
model of the limbic system and basal ganglia, applications to anxiety and schizophrenia. And I think you have goals and behaviour,
that's the Carver&Scheier paper. I put the Swanson paper in as optional. That's cerebral hemisphere regulation and
motivated behaviour. That is a tough paper. And so is the Grey paper. And it's partly because these guys, both of
them, Grey's paper is a distillation of a very very thick book that's very very difficult. And that's been written twice. It was published first in 1982 and then again
in 1999. It's a brilliant book. It's had a tremendous impact on psychology. Grey was one of those people who, he was so
damned smart it was just painful. His reference list--I don't know how many
papers are in his reference list. Like 2,000. And one of the really weird things about Grey
that makes him stand out among scientists is, he actually read all those papers. And more than that, he understood them. And so that's really something. And so Grey's book on anxiety--he did a lot
of work on animal behaviour and, I'll tell you, if you want solid psychological information
about how the brain works, the people you pay attention to are the people who are studying
animal behaviour and animal brains. They know what they're doing. They're so methodologically careful. They're very very reliable. And the human neuropsychologists and the people
that use PET scanners and MRIs and all those things, they're way way way behind the animal
researchers. Because the animal researchers can just get
in there at a lot higher resolution and they can do much more stringent experiments. And they tend to be more methodologically
careful and more scientifically-minded. So anyways, the Grey book is a brilliant book. It took me like four months to read that damn
book. And I mean I really had to take it apart because
he probably poured 30 years of work into it, something like that. He worked a lot in 30 years. You know? He did a lot of experimentation and he read
a lot and so he built a model of the brain's function that was based partly on Russian
neuropsychology, partly on cybernetic theory, partly on animal behaviour, partly on neuropsychopharmacology,
and so that's the study of how drugs affect behaviour and cognition, and then partly from
a higher order conceptual perspective. And then he stacked all those things up, one
on top of the other, to make sure that the picture was the same at every single level
of analysis. It's absolutely brilliant work and it took
the social psychologists like--they really started about Grey, although he published
his book in 1982--they probably started thinking Grey seriously in about 2005. So it took 23 years for his book to start
to make its wide-scale entrance in the more general psychological community. Anyways, and so you're going to read this
paper which is a model of the limbic system and basal ganglia. And 30 years were distilled into the book
and then that was distilled into this paper. So you know, it's rough going. And then the Swanson paper, he's another guy--same
kind of guy--he's a developmental neuroanatomist and if you're really interested in psychology
I would really recommend reading those papers because they're hard going, but if you get
it, you have this substrata of knowledge underneath you that's really firm. And I really like Swanson's paper--the guy's
a genius. And what's so cool about Swanson's paper is
that, if you talk to human neuropsychologists you'll find that they're biased toward the
cerebral cortex. And they're sort of, I think there's sort
of an anthropomorphic pride that goes along with that. It's like, well how are we different from
animals. Well, you know, we've got thumbs and that's
great--hurray for the thumbs--and we stand upright, but if you look at us neurologically
the big difference is that we have this tremendously expanded cerebral cortex, especially the prefrontal
cortex, and so then people think--well because, you know, because that's one of the things
that differentiates us from animals and it's relatively evolutionarily modern, because
the human brain really really developed rapidly over the last two million years, that it's
like king of the brain in some sense. And it's the place where all the complicated
things happen. And that's just not right, because like, breathing--that's
complicated. That's why you don't get to control it voluntarily. And keeping your heart going, that's complicated
too, and so you don't get to have a decision about that. Your brain has made that automatic. Like millions of years ago because there's
just no way you're going to get voluntary control over something that's that vital. You know, so, assuming that newer brain areas
do more complex things, in some ways I think that's actually precisely backwards. It's the old brain areas that've been around
for, you know, a hundred million years, those things are smart. And that's why they survived for so long and
why they're distributed in so many different species. Your brain is somewhat like a lobster's brain--it's
a lot like a mouse brain. And it's a lot like a rat brain. And you might think a rat isn't a very good
model of a human, because after all, they're rats, but one thing I can tell you is that
a rat brain is a way better model of a human brain than your model of human brain is a
model of the human brain. You know what I mean? It's like people think of the brain. Well, they have a dopey model. Use a rat as an example, of course it's off
in some ways because rats can't talk for example, but there are so many levels of analysis where
you might as well be a rat, you know? Technically speaking. The pharmacology for example is very very
similar. The function of the neurotransmitters, the
basic anatomy of the structures. There's a tremendous amount of overlap. And so you might as well go for the commonalities
among brains before you focus in on the differences, because in some sense that way you get the
basic architecture right. Now one of the things that's really interesting
about Swanson, and he's not a neuropsychologist and he's not really even a psychologist--he's
a developmental neuroanatomist. And so, there's lots of ways of chopping up
the brain, you know, to look at it, because it's a really complicated thing. It's like saying, well how many ways can you
divide up a city to analyze it. Well, there's endless number of ways that
you can divide up a city to look at it. It's the same with the brain because it's
infinitely subdividable, in some sense, certainly all the way down to the molecular structures. And then even at higher order levels, you
know, because it's so complex and it's hierarchically structured you can just divide it up in all
sorts of different ways and so, at higher levels of resolution there isn't even that
much agreement on how to name the parts. Now, what the developmental neuroanatomists
do is that they look at how the brain develops in utero over time. Because it's a developing thing that sort
of unfolds like a flower unfolds, you know? And you can track which part of the early
brain turns into the later brain and you can get some sense of the--it's like an evolutionary
tree you know? If these three parts grew out of this part
then you can assume that there's some commonality between them. And that can also help you figure out how
to divide up the brain. And so that's one of the things that Swanson
does. But the other thing he does that I really
like is that, instead of looking at the brain from top down which is what human neuropsychologists
tend to do because they concentrate on say language and higher order cognitive functions,
which we think of as complex but you think, they're not that damn complex, you know, like
a computer can do mathematics so much better than you that there's not even any comparison,
you know. And it won't be very long before a lot of
the things that we think of as abstract cognition are things that computers are going to be
able to do. They just won GO tournament, for example. And the computers are now better--even your
PC is better at playing chess than probably anyone in this room. And the really high end computers are better
at playing chess than anyone who lives. And so computers are catching up damn fast,
but you'll notice that they don't do things like bus tables in restaurants, because it
turns out that's really hard. [Student laughter] Well, I mean think about
it. It's hard. You're carrying different sized loads all
the time. You have to interact socially with people
properly. You have to stay the hell out of the way. You have to exactly time when you're going
to come to the table. You have to move extraordinarily efficiently,
especially as the place gets busy. You know, there's a lot of demands on you
to do that job effectively. And you know, we think about it as a low end
job but it's not automated. The low end jobs are the ones that are going
to be automated first. And it's not obvious that they're going to
be the things that we associated with low-end labour. It's just that--well. Now, what Swanson did with the nervous system--I
was so happy when I found this paper because--he did exactly with the nervous system what Piaget
did with children. He showed how the nervous system builds itself
from the bottom up. And so Swanson lays right on top of Piaget--it's
lovely. And then the other thing that Swanson does
very very nicely is, he elucidates a lot of the Freudian presuppositions. So Freud of course talked about the id, and
the id is this, it's sort of like the archaic brain in some sense, you know. It's where all your primal impulses lurk. And you know he called that one thing the
id. Well you might say, well is there an id in
the brain and the answer is, well, vaguely. Vaguely. The brain does differ in terms of the age
of its subcomponents. And as you go deeper into the brain and closer
to the spine, the brain areas get phylogenetically older, and the more phylogenetically older
areas of the brain, which are underneath the cortex, they have their own little circuits. And there's some commonality between them,
and they do govern primal--I think of them as primal sub-personalities. We've talked about that before. It's better than thinking about them as drives
or goals or anything like that because not only do they--they're like sets of associated
behaviours, but they're not just that. They're also ways of looking at the world
and ways of thinking about the world. So, you know, if you're angry, it's not like
you're being driven to use your fists. That's not how it works. What happens is that the angry subpersonality
comes out and, you know, it does a whole bunch of things. It's got its own state of arousal. It's characterized both by positive and negative
emotion, which is something that's quite peculiar about anger, because it's both a defensive
action and an aggressive, forward moving behaviour. And it has a viewpoint. Like it's a biased viewpoint. If you're angry with someone, all you can
see about them is how damn irritating they are and how much they need to be defeated. You know, roughly speaking. And so it's a whole personality. Now, it's a one dimensional personality because
all it's really got is anger, and that's not enough to solve every problem. But you can't think about it as a drive exactly
because it's not deterministic. You know, even when you're angry, you have
a range of choices to make. Now, they're circumscribed by the fact that
you're angry, but it's best to think about it as a sub personality. I think you just get a lot farther that way. Now, what Swanson did--you know how Piaget
talked about children/infants, they start out with a few fundamental reflexes, right,
that they're sort of born with, including the ability to use their mouth and their tongue
as an exploratory device. And then they have certain reflexes that they
can manifest right away, and then they have the ability to modify those reflexes. And so, as far as Piaget was concerned, that
was enough to get the ball rolling. It was sort of like the child was like booting
up across time. It's got some, you know, outside of the operating
system you've got some bare processes in your computer that get it started enough so the
operating system can turn on. It sort of unfolds up into something complex. Well that's sort of what human beings do across
time. They start out with these basic reflexes that
are simple movements and then they earn how to modify the movements and then they learn
how to chain the movements together and then they learn how to use the chained movements
as tools, in some sense, as embodied tools, to allow these biologically determined sub-personalities
to operate in the world with some chance of success. Okay, now you can layer that onto the nervous
system, so part of what's happening when you get these basic movements down, the ones that
are not automatic like your ability to grip and the ability to do this with your hands
and all the basic subroutines you have with your body--those are automatized, they're
made into little machines, and a lot of them run spinally. You know, because what you think in some sense
is that, if you're walking, you're thinking about walking in some way--that's how you
walk. And it's like, that's not right. What happens is your orient yourself to a
goal, and in some sense you just disinhibit the system that knows how to walk. And then it more or less does it automatically,
and you know, you direct it. And you can modify what it's doing if there's
an error. But you kind of know that, right? You drive to school or you drive somewhere
you're familiar to, you don't even necessarily remember the drive if you've done it 50 times. It's because you're basically--in some sense
you're just sequencing automated behaviours. And, a good thing too because, if you didn't
have those automated expert behaviours at hand, you wouldn't know how to drive. Because, you're just not smart--the time that
you drive most consciously is when you first learn how to drive. Well, you don't want a conscious driver, you
want an unconscious expert driver whose consciousness is monitoring the world for anything unexpected. That's what you want. So, and that's the case with almost everything
you do. If you have to become conscious of what you're
doing, the probability that you don't do it very well is really high. And you know that because maybe you're talking
to someone, it happens when I'm lecturing sometimes--if I'm not really on top of things
I'll get self-conscious--and that's a terrible thing to have happen when you lecture, you
know, it just makes you stumble. If it's going well I know where I'm going
and I have all these little routines that're stories and things that I know that--they
just automatically sequence. All I have to do is point the lecture in the
right direction and, you know, the things that are logically associated with the direction
of the lecture will--they'll come up. They're primed in some sense. And so, Swanson helped me understand the functions
of the lower part of the brain quite well and then to map that onto Piaget. And one of the things he helped me understand
was just exactly how sophisticated the lower parts of the brain are, the more automatic
parts. Now, the behaviourists used to believe that,
or did believe and still believe to some degree, that a lot of your behaviour is reflexive. And the radical behaviourists, the guys from
the 50s, more or less made that case that even complex behaviour among animals is nothing
but the chaining together of automatic reflexes. So it was a deterministic chain of reflexes. Well, you do have reflex actions, you know,
so if you touch a hot stove you'll jerk your hand away, and your brain isn't involved in
that--it's just your spinal cord that's involved in that. Now, your brain is involved when the pain
hits, and maybe that's so you stop doing it in the future, but the conscious part of your
brain is too slow to get your hand away from the stove in time. And so, what's happening in your body in some
sense is that you have these multiple layers of neurological organization and some of them
are quite fixed--they're automatic deterministic systems and those are things you've really
really practiced and that you can just can run as a routine. And above that are those things that you've
chained together, but they can be chained together in different ways so they're less
automatized. And then if you keep going up they get more
and more complex and less automatized, until at the top, which is where your consciousness
is, roughly speaking, you have to program what you're doing, you know. You have to pay very careful attention to
how to go about doing this because you don't have the systems built into you. So you know what that's like if you're trying
to learn something new, it takes a lot of energy and you really have to pay attention. And then once you start to get it, well, what
really happens is there's things you don't have to think about any more. And thank god for that, because first of all,
you can't think that much because you're a limited capacity processor, and second, the
programming is quite difficult. Okay so if you look on the right there, there's a
little diagram that's a hierarchical--or a little table really and it's talking about
the motor system. Now the motor system is what allows you to
output action. And you're outputting action at all sorts
of levels that you don't even realize because, you know, you might think that sight is a
sensory activity, for example, but there's a very tight relationship between sensory
activity and motor activity. So, for example, when you're looking at a
scene, even though you don't know it, your eyes are going like this. And the reason you're going like that is because
if you held your eyes absolutely still, and you can actually learn to do this, if you
hold your eyes absolutely still your vision will fade right out and you won't be able
to see anything. And it's because the little retinal cells
that are picking up the light get exhausted and then so they stop transmitting. And so part of the reason you're zipping your
eyes back and forth is so that different parts of your eye can process the scene and it doesn't
get exhausted. And plus, you're also looking around and you're
looking at when things move, you know, you direct your attention to that, or if someone
makes a gesture. And so, you're actually kind of using your
eyes like tentacles, you know, to check out the information that's coded in the light. And even when you hear and that sort of thing
there's a fair bit of motor activity associated with it--you turn your head unconsciously
and there's all sorts of little motor actions in your ear that also help you tune in, and
so those things are tightly associated. But roughly speaking, the motor output is
action. And then Swanson shows that there are these
layers in the nervous system that go from the spinal cord upward. The first ones are the somatomotor neuron
pools, and the second are locomotor pattern generators, and the third are locomotor pattern
initiators and then the forth are locomotor pattern controllers. It's a hierarchy. And so, the way to kind of lay Piaget on it,
in some sense, is to think of the somatomotor neuron pools as simple actions that can be
implemented automatically. And then the locomotor pattern generator has
taken those simple actions and chained them into relatively more complex melodies of action,
so kinetic melodies, and then the locomotor pattern initiator more or less decides when
those kenetic melodies should be implemented. And even that can be unconscious. So it's still at that level of brain organization,
it's still more or less automatic. Even stimulus-response is a way to think about
it. And then you go one level higher and that's
when you get the ability to voluntarily use these automated things. So I can show you an example of how this works. This is called a ballistic movement. So, I'm going to take my hand and I'm going
to bring it down really fast right toward that edge. Okay so--alright now, so that's very fast
movement. Now one of the things that's cool about that
movement is that I don't have time, once that action starts, it happens so fast that it's
done by the time that the information about that action actually gets to my brain. Once I let that go, I can't control it. What I basically am doing is disinhibiting
the motor control systems that I already have established in my psychophysiological being. I'm disinhibiting one of those and then it
runs automatically. And so that's what you're doing all the time
when you're acting in life. It's kind of a neat--I wrote a paper a while
back with an undergraduate student of mine, he was a pretty bright character, and we got
invited to do a paper--I got invited to do a paper--on free will, and so we were thinking
about free will and, it's very interesting to think about free will in relationship to
these hierarchies because it sort of goes like this: it's that, out there in the future,
you've got free will. But as the future moves towards the present,
you don't. Once it gets close enough to the present you
have to have initiated something automatic that will happen. And so I can give you an example. People who play the piano very well, they
look ahead of where they're playing in the music. Because they know how to do this, they don't
have to think about it. What they have to do is look ahead so that
the part of them that knows how to do this gets ready to do it. And all of you are experts in that way likely--all
of those of you who drive--you're also experts that way. Because when you're driving, where do you
look? If you're a good driver, on the highway, you
look at least half a second or a second ahead. Why? Well because 50 feet ahead has already happened. Right, it's too close in time for you to do
anything about it, so basically what you're doing is you're looking at the road and then
you're disinhibiting sequences of actions--the ones that are going to correspond to what
you want to do with the road most adequately. And the closer you get to executing one of
those motor behaviours, the more automated it is. SO by the time you manifest the action, there's
no free will there at all. But you set it up to be released in some sense. So I can say, well, there's no free will in
that, but there was in deciding to do it at that point. So and that's sort of how your automaticity
meets your freedom. You've got to think about it as something
extending across time. Okay, so having established that then we're
going to get into the neurological localization a little bit. So you might say, well you collect all these
patterns of behaviour and then you automate them into routines. I can give you an example, so, for a child,
you know, when a child is first born, if you tap on its cheek it'll go like this. It's called a rooting reflex, and it'll move
its mouth and tongue. Well what it’s doing, roughly speaking,
is its searching for a nipple, and if you just put your finger there it'll clamp onto
that and start to suck. And so the child comes out with that ability. And that's a reflex, it's sort of built into
the neurology. But then when the child starts to interact
with the mother to actually breastfeed, well then that initial reflex has to be modified
quite substantially in the context of the relationship with the mother because the bare
reflex, it's enough to get the thing going but it's not enough to make it work. And so often mothers take a fair bit of time
to learn how to breastfeed, but it's also because the baby is taking a fair bit of time
to learn how to do it. So they have to establish the dance that goes
with that. And one of the things that's quite cool about
that dance, so to speak, is there's been studies done of depressed and non-depressed mothers
interacting with their infants. And so if you take a non-depressed mother
interacting with her infant and you just film them, and you speed up the film, you can see
the baby reacts and the mother reacts and the baby reacts and the mother reacts and
it's like a dance, you know, there's this continual flow of information between the
two of them. And if the baby's with a depressed mother
that doesn't happen. It's jerky and discontinuous. And so if you think about that you can see
how the dialectical interaction between the mother and child is building up the child's
repertoire of complex abilities--within a social context. I know I told you guys before, roughly speaking,
that kids really get socialized to play with each other between two and four. But that's not exactly true because even at
the lower level, more automated, and more primordial reflex behaviours, like the ones
that are associated with breastfeeding, even those develop under the constraints of social
guidelines. So society's always there, right from the
reflex level up. But you know what happens when kids are between
two and four, they have to learn to actually play, they have to learn how to play complex
games with other children and so that involves communication and negotiation at a verbal
level. And also with people their own age. So you know, it's continuous in some sense
and discontinuous in another sense. Okay so anyways, you might say well why do
you bother stringing all these things together, and well, you think about the breastfeeding
issue. Why does a baby bother to learn how to breastfeed? Well, that's pretty obvious isn't it. I mean, first of all, if it doesn’t then
it doesn't live. And there's a bunch of reasons for that--one
is obviously it's not going to be nourished properly, although, there are things you can
do to substitute for that. Although still, breastfeeding still seems
to be the best thing you can do for your baby. Although, you can work around it, but fundamentally
it seems to be the best thing you can do. But then the baby's also learning all sorts
of other things, like it's got skin-to-skin contact and it's snuggling and it being comforted
and doing eye gaze to eye gaze and it's cooing and the mother's imitating it and there's
just a lot of things going on there. And so the child is organizing all that, partly
to fulfill a basic biological need, which is two needs, both thirst and hunger, but
it’s also fulfilling its need for play, for example, because children have a circuit
for play. So you could say play is part of the id--it's
a fundamental biological need. And Jaak Panksepp was one of the people either
discovered that or worked on it, and that word was extended by Tiffany Fields in a hospital
in Florida--some really brilliant work. She was looking at Panksepp's work on the
necessity of tactile stimulation and she thought, hey I bet we could try that with premature
babies. Because if a baby's premature, a couple of
things are problems. I mean, first of all, at the need of the term,
pregnancy term, that's when babies lay on fat. You know, so they come out and they've got
some storage there in case things don't get going very well. And they're gaining a lot of weight in that
last period of pregnancy, so if they come out premature then they're really skinny. And then what happens often is they start
to lose weight and that's not good because they should be ramping up the weight gain
really quickly. A newborn baby will outgrow its clothes in
one week, you know, they're gaining weight quickly. The premature babies lose weight, and it's
hard to keep them going. They put them in an incubator, they feed them,
but what Tiffany Field did was, she had the nurses go in there with gloves and massage
the babies for three minutes ten times a day. And those babies gained weight as fast as
babies that were still in utero and you could still detect the differences in their development
six weeks later. Which in baby terms is like forever, right. I mean you change as much from zero months
to six months as you probably do from six months to 20 years old. It's such a radical transformation. Okay, the reason I'm telling you all this
is because, you lay out these hierarchies of behaviour that are well practiced and automatized
and brought under the control of social conditioning, but you really do them in the service of--well
that's the question. In the service of, we'll say, biological necessity,
for the sake of argument. Well you have to eat and you have to drink,
and so one of the reasons you lay out the hierarchy that's associated with breastfeeding
is so that you can do that directly, but also so that you can establish a relationship so
that not only are you doing it directly this day, but you're also going to do it tomorrow
and the next day and the day after that. And so the hunger system is integrated with
these other systems of biological constraint in some sense, and they're trying to come
up with an answer to the continual problem. So you have dedicated biological systems that
help you address problems that are associated problems that are associated with your biological
nature that are universal. And those would be the things that Freud would
describe as the id. So you can think of these hierarchies of motor
behaviour, which sort of develop up into sub personalities, as nested in some sense inside
of motivational states. So there's the motorbehavious hierarchy that
you use when you're angry, there's the motorbehaviour hierarchy you use when you're distressed--and
kids get very good at that, you know, so they'll cry, which is a reflex, but by the time they're
about two, they're pretty damn good at crying. You know, they've got a cry that sounds like
they're sad and upset when they're really angry. And so if you really listen you can hear the
difference. Because an angry baby sounds different than
a sad baby. But if you don't listen, the baby will have
you thinking it's sad no problem. Then you'll feel sorry for it and go help
it out, and really it's just thinking "up yours" [Student laughter]. So we know this partly because--so let's say
you've got a baby and it's under nine months, six months old, and it's crying in its crib. You think, well what should you do? You go in there and you pick up the baby and
you comfort it and you probably do that pretty much non-stop when the baby's that young because
they're so young they should really still be in utero--they're very young. But by nine months that baby's starting to
get smart. And so it's about nine months when it can
visually recognize people it knows and people he/she doesn’t know. And then, so the baby's in there and it's
squawking a bit and so, it wants some attention, and then someone walks in and it's not the
mother. And the baby bursts into tears and people
think the baby's all sad because its mother didn't show up. It's not sad, it's really irritated that the
wrong person showed up. And you can tell that because people have
done facial coding of the baby's expression and also its skin tone and an angry baby looks
angry. First of all it turns all red, it's really
angry. And you see that behaviour later too in temper
tantrums. Like a two year old that's having a temper
tantrum is just having a fit of rage. The rage system, because there is a rage system,
is just completely out of control, it's just absolutely dominating their behaviour. You don't really want to encourage that because
the rage system should start to be modulated by other systems and other higher order control
systems. Not so much suppressed or repressed which
is sort of how the Freudians would think , but integrated into more complex and sophisticated
modes of action, so the child can use its anger--which is an extraordinarily useful
capacity, because it allows you to defend yourself--so the child can learn to use that
in a sophisticated way so it can solve the problems that would lead to a rage attack
without ever getting to the point where it has to be enraged. That's a functional child--it's not like it's
learned to repress its anger, it's just that it gets along with people and never has to
get angry. So, now some kids learn to repress their anger
because they're in a household where any manifestation of anger is dealt with very very harshly. And maybe there's a rule that everyone has
to be nice to each other all the time, or else. Sort of a paradoxical rule. But anyways, you can imagine there's a lot
of these biological systems and so I want to show you some of their instantiation here,
so let's look at this one. When you get up above the spinal cord, there's
a little brain area, I'll show you about how big it is. There it is. So there's your brain, the top-on part, the
part on top, that's the cerebral cortex. That's the part that people are really proud
of. It's like, oh wow, look at our cerebral cortex. Doesn't it have a lot of neurons [student
laughter]. Then, in the middle there, there are older
brain area--phylogenetically old--and then as you go down toward the spinal cord they
basically get older and older and older and older. And more and more critical to your development. So the serotonin system, we talked about it
a little bit in lobsters, right. The serotonin system determines where a lobster
is in a dominance hierarchy, it determines whether it stands like this or whether it
stands like this. That's an old system. And when your brain is developing in utero
it's the serotonin system that guides its development. So that's how important it is, sort of like
the conductor of the orchestra, but it's also the thing that controls the entire unfolding
of the brain. And it's a really really archaic system, so
in some sense your being is controlled by these things that are ancient, beyond comprehension. Anyways, you look at the hypothalamus and
you think, well that's not very big. And yeah, it's not. But, if you take a cat and you--so a cat brain
looks something like that--if you take off all the stuff that's in light orange and most
of the top of the stuff that's above the hypothalamus that's in white--you just take all that out,
and it's a female cat and it's in a cage--you really can't tell the difference between it
and a cat that has all the rest of that brain. Now there's some things it can't do. It doesn't do very well if you take it into
a new situation because it can't learn. More importantly in some sense, it can't remember. So it's in a perpetual sense of everything
happening for the very first time. But it's still capable of a lot of the reactions
that would be necessary for you to stay alive. SO it can regulate its liquid intake, it can
regulate its food intake, it can react sexually, it's capable of defensive aggression, although
it'll really fly into a rage so it's kind of like a disinhibited two year old in some
sense. And as long as you keep it in the cage and
provide it with food and water it's like the way it lives. And it's hyper exploratory which I think is
just weird beyond belief. You know, you take the brain off a cat and
then all it wants to do is explore. Which is not what you think at all. It's like, a cat with no brain is really curious--it
just doesn't make sense. But it does actually because the systems that
drive your exploratory urge are rooted in that hypothalamus and they're actually the
same systems--it's individual differences in the functions and sensitivity of those
systems that are in part associated with individual differences in extraversion. So extroverts are sort of hyper exploratory
in social situations. Whereas introverts aren't. And the exploratory circuit that has its origins
in the hypothalamus runs on dopamine, roughly speaking, and then it runs through the base
of your brain and then up into your prefrontal cortex in particular. And it's also the system that responds to
cocaine and amphetamines and other drugs that people like to take because they heighten
positive emotion. So it's variability at a very very low level
in the brain that determines things like the differences in extraverts and introverts. Anyways, it's this tiny little part of the
brain and if that's all you have you can get along not too bad. But that's also because it's tiny from one
level of analysis, but it's really big from another. I mean, you can increase your resolution when
you're doing brain analysis all the way down to the molecular level and still be looking
at the brain, you know. Below the molecular level, at the atomic level,
well everything's made out of atoms. But the brain is already there at a molecular
level and it's insanely complicated at a molecular level, and the hypothalamus is way bigger
than a molecule. And so even though it's small compared to
the rest of our brain it's still a whopping big structure by atomic standards and so there's
a hell of a lot going on down there. And you notice the hypothalamus, you might
say, is there such a thing as the id. Well, yes and no. Is it in the brain? Yes and no. A really low resolution representation of
what's in the brain, that's one way of thinking about it. But then you might say, is there a hypothalamus? And the answer to that is, well, yes and no. Because there's the hypothalamic structure,
and you see it's made out of a bunch of things that are different. And so you could say, well should you even
group those things together. And the answer to that is, it depends on why
you're grouping them together. If it's useful for some purpose of understanding
or control, to group them together--they're similar in the way that they emerge in the
course of brain development, and they're roughly of the same phylogenetic age--but there's
lots of reasons to treat them as the same and there's lots of reasons to treat them
as different. It depends on what you're trying to do. Anyways, the hypothalamus has all these little
sub-structures that are really in some sense at the core of the sub-personalities that
we talked about. So, for example--okay so this is Swanson again
and he's showing you--this is a rat's brain from the bottom--and he's showing you the
layout of the hypothalamus. You see it's got all those different nuclei. It doesn't look like one thing, it looks like
a bunch of things. And so here he says, the descending paraventricular
nucleus is involved in the control of eating and drinking, and that's shown in green. So that's the thing that--when you get hungry
or thirsty--that's the thing that sort of turns on your hungry and thirsty sub-personality. And then the rest of the cell groups play
a major role in controlling two classes of social behaviour, that is, behaviours involving
interactions between animals: reproductive--that's the red areas--and defensive--the purplish
areas. So now what you can think is, you have all
those little subroutines that we talked about, that're sort of at hand and ready to go, and
then they're organized underneath these major classes of motivation so that, you have to
do something--like eat--and so it's like there's an eating robot in you, that's one way of
thinking about it, except it's smarter than that and it's alive and conscious. These things are alive, they're not machines
and they're not deterministic. You can think of them as low-resolution personalities,
or uni-dimensional personalities because the only thing the eating system really cares
about is whether or not you eat. And the drinking system is the same thing. You know, you see malfunctions sometimes in
people of these singular systems, so you can develop a condition if you have hypothalamic
damage where you'll drink water til you die and no one can stop you. They can lock you in a room away from sinks
and that would stop you, but you'd be raging away inside trying to claw through the door
to get to the damn water because you're so hyper-thirsty that it's all that there is
left of you in some sense and if you're allowed access to a tap, you'll just drink and drink
and drink and drink and drink until you drown. And, you know, people can say, hey you've
had enough water--it's like, forget that. The hypothalamus is a major league system,
and when push comes to shove, it's the thing that's in control. And one of the ways of thinking about the
way that you organize your life is that, the hypothalamus controls the major motivation
systems--we just talked about those--and so those are the things that people would think
about as drives. Although they're not drives, they're too complicated
to be drives. And then there's other systems that come up
later that we'll also talk about that govern emotion, like anxiety and a different system
that governs pain. Partly what you're trying to do as your organize
your life is to make sure those systems stay shut off. And then you think, well I'm in control. Well no, you're not. You just satisfied all the things that could
take control from you, and so now you have a modicum of choice. And basically what you're doing when all these
things have had what they need is you're running around exploring. You know, and that's also another one of these
circuits because the hypothalamus, as I already said, governs exploration. So, a lot of--see, psychologists often get
things backwards and they ask silly questions like why are people anxious. That's a stupid question. It's why are people ever calm--that's a question. Why are you anxious? Well, hmm, think of all the terrible things
that can happen to you. And they will happen to you, even worse, and
there isn't anything you can do about it. It's like why aren't you quaking in your boots
just sitting there. Well, that's a mystery. You know, and then, here you are in your normal
state--it's like, well no, this is not a normal state. People have been trying for seven million
years, as people, to create a situation so complex and comfortable that a couple hundred
of you can sit here without having your hypothalamus driving you toward something and actually
just listen to something for a few hours. That's not normal. That's so staggeringly abnormal that it's
a miracle. The typical person--and for most of human
history--it's like, you are hungry, man. And that's not the same. Like you people--well some of you have probably
been hungry in your life, but--is there someone here who's gone without food for more than
one day? Okay has anybody here gone without food for
more than a week. Okay, how about three days? Okay, so like, are you hungry? No. You're hungry when you haven't had anything
to eat for twenty days, then you're hungry. And the same goes for thirst and cold and
all the things we're just never exposed to. So we think civilized people are all calm
and nice and easy to get along with, it's like, yeah well you have absolutely everything
you need all the time and that makes you as easy to get along with as any completely insane
primate ever gets. Okay, so you might say, well god, if you can
survive with just the hypothalamus, what good is the rest of the brain? And the answer is, well, if you're thirsty--let's
say you're angry, the hunger system isn't going to be able to take care of that, right. So you're hungry, okay, that works. You're angry, that works. But then you have another problem, which is
you're hungry now and you're angry now, perhaps, you can move through those states. If you watch that, you'll see that in two
year olds--it's part of why they're so fun to be around. First of all, they're really excited and they're
running around playing and then they trip and they're crying like made and then you
poke them and they laugh and then they want something to eat and then they fall asleep
[student laughter]. You know, they're just run by their hypothalamus
and it's really fun to see because they're so alive and so enthusiastic and spontaneous,
but they're completely clueless. It's like, you take one of those creatures
to the mall and leave it there and it's just not happy at all. And the reason for that is, well it doesn't
know how to sequence any of its actions, right. It runs through these states of need, but
it isn't complicated enough to figure out how to address those needs in any consistent
sense across multiple environments in a social world. You need the rest of your brain for that. And that again fits in with the Piagetian
idea--is that what you're doing is you're taking these micropersonalities that are basically
instantiated within the hypothalamus and then you're organizing those into more and more
complex games. And you need the cortex to do that because
the cortex is partly what enables you to think about time. You know, because the hypothalamus, it's a
here and now thing. The hypothalamic cat lives in the present--there's
the present, and that's it. You can probably get some sense of that--like
one of the things that happens to people if they take amphetamines or if they take psychedelic
drugs is that some of the inhibitory control, some of the more complex control systems that
are cortical, shut down. And so then they enter a state where it's
all now and you know, the now just comes at people in that state. It's a transcendent experience, but of course,
despite that, you're not functional. And so in some sense you trade that transcendent
relationship with reality for a narrow functionality. And that's too bad and that's life, but it's
a tradeoff. So anyways you're organizing these sub-personalities
and you're using your cortex to do that because you don't just have to think about eating,
you have to think about, how am I going to get the food? When is the food going to come? How am I going to cook the food? What about all the other people that want
to eat? How do we regulate that in our family? And then how do we regulate that with the
fact that we also need to sleep and we need to work and we need to get along with other
people and we need to have something interesting to do and--it's ridiculously complicated. And there's no end to the complication because,
maybe you're just solving the problem for you, and then you're two. Or maybe you're trying to work it out within
your family. Well then that's sort of like the Crumb brothers,
they never get out of their family because they never come to an arrangement that works
well enough so that they can, in some sense move into the broader world. Then you solve the family problem but then
you've got the tribe problem and, maybe you can solve that to some degree, but then you
have the broader political problem and it's like--there's an infinite problems that crop
up for you to solve so there's plenty for you to do with your big cortex. And you know we paid a big price for that
thing because once we discovered time, we can make a bargain with the future, which
is basically what you do when you regulate your behaviour, right. You're making a bargain with the future. You say to yourself, if I forego so and so
now then, later, it'll pay off. And that's real useful. You can conceptualize the future, and you
can conceptualize the future as something you can bargain with. But there's a lot of cost to that. One is you don't get to do just what you want
right now, and of course that sucks--it's partly why people drink alcohol. Because alcohol is disinhibiting, it stops
you from--it actually doesn't stop you from thinking about the future--it stops you from
caring about what you think about the future. And that's just as good. And so then you can go out and have fun because
fun is impulsive and often extremely dangerous, because the long term consequences can be
really devastating. But it's a real pain to keep yourself controlled
all the time because you're foregoing direct reward constantly. I think it's part of the reason why people
in heavily industrialized complex countries aren't necessarily happy. You know, it takes a lot of grinding away
to keep all the machinery that keeps all of this in place going. So you're not getting typhoid and tigers aren't
tearing you apart, but by the same token, you have to be unbelievably disciplined and
ready to act constantly to keep everything that's so complex around you working. And that's not necessarily fun. Okay, now, let’s look at something else. Now you can tell me if I showed you this--I
hope I didn't show you this. You see that? Okay, good. Now some of you know this, and so you just
don't say anything. Although you probably don't know this specific
version. So if you've seen this sort of thing before
you're going to think you're smart while you're watching it, but it'll probably still trip
you up--I hope. Give me a sec here and we'll see if we can
actually get some sound out of this thing. Yeah, so that's quite the illustration. So one of the questions you might ask is,
well okay first of all, how many of you didn't see the gorilla? Okay, how many of you have seen this sort
of video before? Okay so you knew about the damn gorilla [student
laughter]. Of the people who didn't know about the gorilla,
how many people didn't see the gorilla. Well, some. Okay, fine. How many of you got the other things? Both of them? Okay, well so you get the point. The point is--and it's a brilliant experiment,
it's an insanely brilliant experiment--that you're blind to a ridiculous degree. And your visual system and your brain are
constantly coping with the fact that you're blind. And you can kind of detect it to some degree
if you look at someone, but you pay attention to the things that surround them, you'll see
that--so, I'm looking at you. I can't see your nose for sure, it's gone. I can’t even see your face. I can see your glasses. I can't see any features in your face at all. Can you smile? No, the one behind. Well one of the things I've noticed when doing
this is that if you look here--look at my finger--but pay attention to my face, it's
really hard. Because normally when you pay attention you
move your eyes to what you're paying attention to. Okay so here's what you might see--the first
thing you might see is that you can't see my nose [student laughter]. The second thing you might see is that you
can really see my eyes, especially if they move [uproar of student laughter]. Weird eh? Isn't that weird? God, it's so weird. It's like all of a sudden these eyes pop up
and they're going back and forth like this. Yeah, so we'll try this too. So look at my finger again. You can also see teeth. Well, why? Well, if you're looking here and there's something
there with eyes and teeth, you should probably be able to see it right? So what that basically means is that you've
got this tiny little fovea, which is right in the centre of your retina, it's just densely
packed with cells and then those cells transmit information along the optic nerve, and they're
just connected like mad to cells in the visual cortex. But you don't have that much room, so you
can't connect all the cells in your retina to like 10,000 cells at the first level of
connection. You'd have to have a brain this big you know,
and you don't. So you get by, and part of the way you get
by is you're always moving your eyes around. And so it looks like you can see everything,
but you can't. In fact, out here, like if I'm looking at
you--now I can tell my hands are there, although if I didn't know they were hands I probably
couldn't figure it out--they're kinda blurry I would say. And they're in black and white, but I can't
tell that. So out here, who cares what colour it is. So you just don't see the colour. But you don't know that you don't see the
colour. Now of course, I can have my hands here, and
then I put them here--I can hardly see them--and then oop, they're gone. They're so gone it's like they don't even
exist. It's not even--because you'd think in some
sense that what is behind your head would be black, like when you close your eyes, that's
nothing. But no no, what you can't see behind your
head is so not there that it's literally--it isn't even not there, that's how gone it is. Okay, so part of the way your eyes work is
that the periphery is attached to devices, in some sense, and some of them detect lines
and some of them detect movement. You remember Jurassic Park? "Don't move. The dinosaur can't see you unless you move." It's like, yeah, frogs are like that. And cats are like that to some degree. They can really see things move this way. Partly because their eyes are slitted, makes
it easier for them to see things moving like this. They're not so good at things moving like
this. Well, it's because they chase mice, right. Mice will--most mice, except ones that hop
[student laughter]--they move this way, and so cats are specialized for that. And so you're also specialized to see teeth
and eyes because you want to know if something's looking at you, and you want to know if it
has teeth. And so what that means in part is that the
surrounding tissue in your eyes reports to some degree to your visual cortex, which is
what you use to actually have conscious vision with, but a lot of it just dumps down into
some of the brain areas we haven't talked about. Not necessarily directly down to the hypothalamus,
although I suspect it has inputs there, I just don't know. But your eyes talk to your spinal cord directly,
so that you can see something snake-like, for example, and jump. Just like you jump if your hand touches a
hot stove. You don't even see the snake, it's like snake-jump. And the reason for that is if you wait around
to see the snake, it's like it's bitten you 15 times and you're dead. So you can't wait around and see this, like
"oh look. A snake." And then you jump. It's like, no. That doesn't work. Your body has conserved all these layers of
reflex and movement, all the way up to higher order voluntary movement, because otherwise
you just wouldn't be fast enough when something super fast happens. And then, the way your eyes are built, your
eyes can tell your body to jump. It's no vision, right. It's just pattern. Snake-pattern, jump-pattern. Snake-pattern, retinal-pattern, optic-nerve
pattern, brain-pattern, muscle-pattern. No vision. No seeing. Because you don't need the seeing. You just have to do pattern matching. It's a weird way of thinking about it, but
it's not much different than touching, you know. You can feel the pattern, you can build a
three-dimensional representation of it, you can really see well with your eyes--it's like
the idea that blind people can't see is a really dopey idea. They can't see colour. And they're not very good at detecting things
in the distance. But they have a visual world, it's just built
out of things that don't have colour. You know perfectly well that that's the case
because I can hand you an object and you could fiddle around with it behind your back and
after some fiddling around you'd know exactly what it looked like. And you know you might pull it out here and
say , well I didn't know it was blue. It's like, yeah okay, you didn't know it was
blue, but you still saw it. And you get pretty god-damn good vision with
your ears. So there are kids who're blind who've learned
to echolocate. So they go click-click-click, they don't make
that noise exactly, but they do click [clicking sounds] and they can detect the clicks bouncing
off of things. And they can do that well enough, not only
to walk, but some of them can actually ride bikes. It's like, hey that's impressive, man. Yeah, there's one kid--I saw a kid on youtube
who's blind who could shoot baskets, yeah, which is--that's impressive, man. But my point is that a lot of the neural tissue
is--it'll take whatever input it gets. So if you're born blind, your auditory systems
will invade your visual system. And then you have twice as much brain devoted
to your hearing. So, and then you know, you can use that quite
effectively. So I think we're probably pretty much out
of time. One thing I want to tell you before we go
on to the next part though is that--so now we've sort of built up the idea of these underlying
motivational systems. And now you can kind of see how they work,
so you might say to yourself, why didn't you see the gorilla and the curtain and the person
leaving. It's really complicated, it's really complicated. Well, the first answer is, you did what I
asked. And then you might ask, well why? Why did you do what I asked? I mean you missed the damn gorilla, right. It's like, obviously that wasn't a very good
decision. So you think, well why did you do what I asked? And the answer would be--well, it's sort of
like the Milgram obedience experiment except at a way lower level. It's like, we've got an agreement going on
here. You guys are all very sophisticated and complex
game players, otherwise you couldn't sit here peacefully for an hour and a half. So you're very well socialized, all of you. And so that means you've organized all your
motivations into a hierarchy, and that hierarchy is guiding your behaviour here. It might be something like, well we need to
learn something and hypothetically, you come here and you learn something. And so you're playing that out. And because that's the motivational state
that you're in, when I ask you to do something, you're just going to do it. Well then, what's so cool is that as soon
as you decide to point your attention at something, what you see in the world radically transforms. So I say, well count the basketballs and all
of a sudden all you can see are basketballs. And you think, no no, I see--I'm not blind. It's like well, you're pretty damn blind. And so, that's partly how you can understand
how motivation is a sub-personality. Like it has its whole sets of perceptions
and values. It's like, all of a sudden, I set you up in
a little motivated state--it was a complicated one--but it was just like, here's a task. And so you're all motivated, you're going
to do the task properly, for god only knows how many reasons, and then all of a sudden,
all that exists in the world are basketballs. And so, it's as if your goal-directed attention
has transformed the phenomenology of the world. And that's something that's really cool because
one of the things it implies is that what you see of the world depends on what you're
aiming at. And in a real sense--this isn't some trivial
sense. It means like literally what you're aiming
at--I'm going to count the basketballs--it means, well you're not noticing the gorillas. So one of the things that you might ask yourself,
and this is partly what the phenomenologists were on about is, what're you aiming at? And what is it that what you're aiming at
allows you to see, and what is it that what you're aiming at blinds you to. And it blinds you to a lot more than it allows
you to see. And so another thing that you can think about
is like, if everything you see makes you angry and bitter and resentful, you might think,
well hmm, what exactly am I aiming at that's making the world organize itself around me
in that manner? And that would be a complex, for a Jungian
perspective. A complex would do that. So it's a set of values, they're sort of economist,
they inhabit you, it's a sub-personality, it's quite complex, it's got something it's
aiming at. You might not even know what that is because
you're acting it out instead of understanding it. And because you're inside of it, it lays the
world out for you in a particular way that makes the world look like it's showing you
that what you think is right. But if you're--what do they say-- to the man
with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's one of the things that's so damn
cool about that experiment. It's like, really? I'm really that blind? I can miss something that radical just when
I'm involved in some dopey task like counting basketballs it makes me so blind that it's
almost beyond comprehension. Well, so in some ways you skip between different
states of blindness. A lot of them are biologically motivated. And you turn those into a hierarchy and that's
sort of your higher value system and then that thing points you at something, and the
whole world lays itself out around that. And the way it does it is divides the world
into irrelevant things--and so those would've been the curtains in this particular example,
or the gorilla or even the player in black who left the game--irrelevant, because it
didn't interfere with you counting. So what you look at makes most of the world
irrelevant. It makes some things , things that serve you. And that makes you feel positive emotion. And it makes other things things that get
in your way. And that's what makes negative emotions. And so you've got the hypothalamic systems
that point you in biological directions. You organize those, and then, as you're approaching
the things you're aiming at, the positive emotion systems tell you you're on track and
the negative emotion systems tell you when something's interfering. And those are actually different neurological
systems. So they're not in the hypothalamus. The positive emotion system is in some degree. But the negative emotion system, that evolved
later. And there's a couple of them. There's one that produces pain, we'll talk
about it more. And there's another one that produces anxiety. And so, now you kind of understand--roughly--the
relationship between motivation, perception, and emotion. They all act together. And they're all dependent in this weird way
on what you're after. So you can think for 50 years and you won't
get to the bottom of it. You know the Buddhists say that everything
is illusion. Maya, right, people live in illusion. Because what you're aiming at determines what
you see. |
The last time we talked, I started to walk
you through the nervous system a little bit and we started with the monkey business illusion,
and one of the things that's really remarkable about the monkey business illusion is that--and
change blindness illusions in general--is that demonstrate to you just to what degree
you could either describe yourself as blind or focused. And I think focused is actually better than
blind. You know, a laser beam doesn't cover much
area, but it really illuminates what it strikes. And people are sort of like that, we're really
beamed into a single point and there's something metaphysically spectacular about that, I think,
because that single point that we're narrowed down to is in some sense the thing that writes
the world, you know, because as we interact with the world we're able to turn it one way
or another in all sorts of complicated ways. And, I mean, I know our powers of doing so
are obviously constrained to a substantial degree, but by the same token, that focal
point of concentration enables us to interact with the world and then, at least seemingly,
to change it according to our will. It's like we take a future that's potential,
we interact with it at a focal point, and then it transforms itself into a past that's
in some sense fixed and real. So that's pretty strange. So I guess you don't want to underestimate
the utility of a point. I want to talk to you a little bit first more
about what you're blind to and then what the consequences of that are. So, this here is a little diagram of a computer,
believe it or not--a conceptual diagram of a computer--and it's predicated on... I'll tell you a quick story. If I've told you this story please stop me,
but I don't think I've told you guys this story. So one day back in about 1987 I was working
on my computer and I was typing some long essay in DOS and, you really had to back up
in those days because the programs didn't do any back up for you and so if the program
shut off and you hadn't been super careful you were just going to lose all of it. And so that's what happened--I was typing
when the computer went off and so, I had an emotional reaction to that. Right, now an emotional reaction to that is
kind of an interesting event because, I would say that you're not even working with the
computer until it quits. And the reason I would say that is because,
if you think about it, when the computer is functioning the fact that it's an extraordinarily
complicated device is basically irrelevant to you. What you're working with, roughly speaking,
is the screen, but not really, not even the screen. You're working with maybe a phrase or even
the word that's presented on the screen. You know, you're typing the word/phrase/sentence/paragraph/essay,
and only out past that domain of consideration do you start thinking about the hardware technology
that underlies what you're doing. You don't want to think about that at all. When something's working, you don't have to
see it. And so that gives you a clue as to consciousness. Consciousness is an error detecting and correcting
phenomena, and you're not conscious of things that are going well. You know, which might explain to some degree
why a lot of our life seems to be made up of suffering. If things are going well, it isn't exactly
like you're happy if things are going well, you just don't notice when they're going well. Sometimes if they unexpectedly go well, then
that makes you happy. But otherwise it's just the same old thing,
even if it's amazing. I was--yesterday--I was eating breakfast with
my son and I was complaining about the fact that I had to eat canned-smoked tuna because
I don't really like fish, but I have to eat fish for a variety of different reasons. And I thought, Jesus, what're you complaining
about? I mean, really, do you know what a tuna is
like? Those things are like small whales, right;
they weigh like 600 pounds, they're impossible to catch. So there's some poor characters out there
hauling in tuna, which is impossible--and then they have to clean them and freeze them
and smoke them and can them--and all I have to do is go to the store and pick up this
can of tuna and then I can complain about it for breakfast. It's really quite staggering, the fact that
I can ever eat tuna is a complete bloody miracle. But it's not the sort of thing that makes
me happy because I just expect that. Which is very pathetic, but that's how it
goes. So anyways, back to the computer. So, it stops working--well, and that's what
I would say I notice the computer. And there's nothing more annoying then noticing
a computer when you're in the middle of writing an essay because, what the hell do you know
about computers? Nothing. What're you going to do? Turn it on and off? Well that's like problem solving process number
1. It usually works--thank god--but if it doesn't
work you're into either the software or the hardware. So anyways, I turned it on and off and that
didn't work, and so then I turned on a light to see if I could see if something had happened
at the back of it. But the light didn't go on so I thought, aha,
the power probably went out or I blew a fuse, so I went out to see if the fuse was burnt
out, but it wasn't. And then I noticed that all the power in the
house was off, and then I noticed that--I went outside to go to the corner store to
get something, I don't remember what, and when I went outside I noticed that all the
streetlights were off. And then the entire power grid in Montreal
was out. And then the entire power grid for like half
of Quebec was out. And a big chunk of Eastern North America. And do you know why? Have I told you this story? Good. Because there was a solar flare. And so the sun is a big hydrogen bomb, right. So I don't know if you guys know this--a cheerful
piece of information for you if you need to be cheered up--but if you happened to have
a hydrogen bomb and you exploded it--you know a hydrogen bomb has an atom bomb for its trigger,
did you guys know that? You need to know that because it's important. Because an atom bomb is a big thing, but it's
just a trigger for a hydrogen bomb, so a hydrogen bomb is unimaginably bigger than an atom bomb. Anyways, if you blew a hydrogen bomb in the
atmosphere over Central North America, you could probably wipe out maybe all of the electronic
equipment in the entire continent permanently. Because what happens is when a hydrogen bomb
goes off, there's an electromagnetic burst, and as the propagates it'll hit your electronic
equipment and propagate across the wires and produce a big spike in current, voltage I
think, and it'll just blow it. So your cars won't work, your tractors won't
work, your subways won't work, your cars won't work, your computers won't work, your satellites
won't work. It's like, done. And also, just to cheer you up even more,
back in the late 1800s, I think it was the 1860s, there was this--oh let's go back to
the sun. So the sun's a big hydrogen bomb and now and
then it freaks out and emits a big solar flare, which is something that's gone wrong on the
sun. And maybe it blows out this solar flare almost
to the orbit of mercury, and then that burst of radiation comes zooming towards earth and
then 9 minutes later it hits and, if it's a decent electromagnetic pulse it'll wipe
out the power grid in Quebec. And that's what happened. So the reason my computer didn't work is because
the sun was misbehaving. And so, I like that. It was very illuminating to me because it
just shows you how many things need to be stacked on top of each other, working perfectly
for some thing that you're doing to actually function. So anyways, back in the late 1800s in the
1860s, there was a massive solar flare and it produced a bust of power on telegraph lines
and it lit some telegraph operators on fire. And so this does happen--it happens about
once a century, and we just missed one last year. So while you're worrying about global warming
you can be considering the much higher probability that a solar flare will knock out all of our
electronics and send us back to like 1860. So the point is that, first of all, there's
a lot of things going on to make up an object that you don't detect with your vision. You never think that the reason the computer
works is because the sun is acting properly. But it is of course the case that endless
number of things have to be stabilized that you don't see. And you might say, well the sun isn't part
of the computer but well, that's wrong. It's not part of the computer in some sense
when it's behaving, but as soon as it stops behaving it's instantly part of the computer. So here we've got--you might say, well let's
say the power hadn't gone out and the computer stopped working. Well then you might think, well I'll never
buy that brand again. And maybe the brand is associated with operation
in some country where corruption is rife and things are made improperly and the parts don't
work very well. So you might think, well I made a stupid purchase
decision. And of course that's connected to the political
system of that place and the economy. And then weird little things can happen down
at the micro level as well as the macro level. So computer chips have now got so small--you
know they have little wires in them right, the chips--the wires are now so small that
because of quantum uncertainty. So quantum uncertainty basically tells you
that you can't really tell where an electron is if you want to know how fast it's going. And you can't tell how fast it's going if
you want to know where it is. But more than that it says you can't really
know where the thing is, and so what that means is that once you get your wire short
enough, some of the electrons might not be in the wires where they're supposed to be,
and they actually cause short circuits. So that's another issue. There's other levels of reality that are micro
levels that you can't detect at all. So there's macro levels that are way beyond
you, you know, political systems, economic systems, biological systems, physical systems
outside of that. And then there are these Microsystems layered
all the way down, and things can go wrong at any one of those levels and a lot of that
is invisible to us. The same thing happens when something goes
wrong with you. It's like, what's wrong with you? Maybe you're malfunctioning at the molecular
level. Your DNA isn't working properly so you get
cancer. Or maybe some virus which is even smaller
than the DNA comes in and takes up residence and that's really not so good. Or maybe you're eating something wrong and
you have an organ malfunction. Or maybe your family's screwed up and you're
stressed half to death and the reason they're screwed up is because you live in, let's say
a society that's not friendly to your particular immigrant type, and so the real reason that
you're sick is because of people's inability to get along with one another. And so on and so forth and so on. And so god only knows where you're supposed
to focus. But, focus we do. And one of the things that motivation allows
you to do is to figure out what you're going to focus on. Now you think, god, there's all these things
to focus on. There's an infinite number of things to focus
on. How in the world do you ever figure out how
to focus on anything? Well the answer to that is evolution, fundamentally. You can view evolution in the following way. You can kind of think about the background
of reality--I think the best way to think about it is as this interplay of patterns,
complex patterns sort of like music. And those patterns are always changing in
a sort of dynamic way, and they exist at multiple levels, just like complex music does. So then imagine that what you're trying to
do is to dance to the music, to align yourself to the music. And it keeps changing on you so, well, what
do you do? Well if you can change then you can change
the music. But if you can't change then that's it. You're not dancing anymore. Okay, so let's assume that there's two ways
of solving that problem. One way is just sheer number. You're a single celled organism or a mosquito
and you don't have that much neurocapacity for transformation and so you don't know what
the melody is going to be when you lay your eggs if you're a mosquito and so you produce
like a million eggs and some of them can dance to the current beat and the others can't,
and so they all die. And so that's what happens over the course
of evolution for a very very long time. The melody keeps changing and then what creatures
do is propagate a whole variety of variants of themselves, and in the case of small animals
or fish even or crayfish or that sort of thing, they just overproduce offspring like mad in
hope that one of them can dance to the current tune. And then you know, we get three and a half
billion years later, roughly speaking, here we all are and what we've got is this dynamic
nervous system. And it enables us to take an external pattern
and map it to a neurological pattern, or multiple neurological patterns--because we can interpret
things, right--and then to output that to multiple behavioural patterns. And so in some sense, what we've done is we're
internalised the process of evolutionary variation into ourselves. And the more complex, roughly speaking, the
more layers your nervous system has--imagine there's a pattern on your skin, and then that's
interpreted by a pattern of nerves, and then those nerves have an output, they're sensory
nerves we'll say, and then those have an output to motor nerves, and then those have an output
to muscles. That's you, roughly. You're maybe a four-layer thing in that regard. But then you grow all these extra layers of
neural tissue, so that the layers are hundreds of cells thick. Hundreds of layers thick. And then you can map a whole bunch of patterns
in the external world onto a whole bunch of patterns in the neural world and then onto
a whole bunch of patterns in the motor world, and so that makes you dynamically adaptable. But you learned all that through this incredibly
painful process of evolution which basically consisted of the death of like 99.999 percent
of everything that ever lived. Species and individuals alike. Now, why is that relevant? Well, how do you figure out how to focus in
on something? Well, a big part of that is actually--let's
see how we do it. Well first of all, what are you focusing in
on here? Well not poisonous snakes, and rampaging lions
and chimpanzees. Because they're not in here. And the reason they're not in here, roughly
speaking, is because you live in a culture that's very very highly advanced and it's
got walls like mad. This is a--Carcassonne I think, a French city,
medieval city. It still exists. Beautiful city. You see how the medieval people solved this
problem. It's like, well you can't deal with much. Well what do you do? Build some walls, keep a bunch of stuff out. You don't have to worry about the rampaging
barbarians then because they just can't get in. And so a lot of the reason that you can handle
the insane complexity of the world is because it's not even neurological. It has virtually nothing to do with your physiology. It's just that you're in a university. And the university is protected by the city
and the city is protected by the province and the province is protected by the country
and the country is protected by all of its multiple entanglements. You're inside walls inside walls inside walls
inside walls and so on. Your world's pretty simple. You can just sit there in relative warmth
and comfort and not have to worry about anything. And so there's one solution: there's a cultural
solution. Then inside the cultural solution obviously
there's architectural solutions of various sorts. And then there's political and economic institutions
that are pretty stable, and they keep you from having to deal with chaos. I mean you can see that chaos breaking out
a little bit in the previous weeks, in the American election. Because the trump people and the left wingers
are going at it at the Trump rallies. And you can see that's just tinder, that could
just blow up at any point and all of that protection that's there because all of these
very complex games that we've agreed to play--like the democracy game--that just all flies by
the wayside. And all of a sudden you have to contend with
what people are like, and that is not something you want to do. There's people, man--they're capable of anything. Which is good, but also really bad. Well then the next thing is, you've got a
body. Now that's where the evolutionary process
really kicks in. And so the reason your body is the way it
is, roughly speaking, is because it's mimicked the external environment. Just like Piaget talks about children using
their bodies to mimic the external environment voluntarily, you know, your body is set up
through this evolutionary process so that you can focus on precisely that subset of
things that seems to keep something like you going for long enough for you to make another
one of something that's more or less like you. And it only really works for about a hundred
years. That's pretty much where it tops out. And so you don't solve the problem very well. You don't solve the problem of radical complexity
very well. But you solve it well enough so that you live
long enough to reproduce, speaking strictly biologically. And that appears to be good enough. And part of the reason why you seem to expire,
because you might think, well if I--why don't people just live for like 500 years instead
of 100 years? Because you'd think that someone who could
continue to reproduce for 200 years instead of 100 years would have it all over for someone
who could only manage it for 50 years, say. Turns out that your genes have a better time
of it if you just put them into a new body and shuffle off this mortal coil so you're
not using up too many resources while your children and grandchildren are trying to survive. And so that's an evolutionary solution. Death is not technically inevitable. There are creatures that are roughly immortal. Goldfish, for example, which is really annoying. It's like, really? Goldfish? Because they're a carp and carp basically
just keep growing. It isn't obvious that they senesce or age--they
get killed because they get diseases and these sort of thing, but there are 300 or 400 year
old carp. And some turtles seem to not age really. And then of course your DNA has been there
ever since life started, so it doesn't really age either. And it corrects itself. So things can last a very very long time. But not us. Anyways, we're put inside this body that frames
things for us and starts narrowing things down. And our psychophysiological selves have a
limited range of interests and desires and needs--however you want to construe that--and
then that gets instantiated more into the nervous system. It's a mistake to think--people always think
your brain is in your head, and that's really not a very bright way of thinking about it. I don't know exactly why we think that way
because, well there's the nervous system--you can see it right there. There's a lot of your nervous system that's
not in your head. The motor and sensory systems are distributed
throughout your body. Your spine is smart enough so that if it gets
severed and we put you over top of a treadmill--suspend you--you can walk. You don't know you're walking and you can't
control it, but your legs will do a perfectly good job of walking without you being involved
at all. So your spine is brain tissue for all intents
and purposes. Your brain is distributed through your body. And so, it's evolved so that it's pretty good
at going around specifying what it needs. And so we talked about the hypothalamus the
other day and how it accounts for what I called sub-personalities that are motivated towards
particular ends. And those ends are obviously the things that
we would identify as fundamental biological necessities. But then they transform themselves as we interact
socially into more and more complex fundamental biological necessities. It's a tricky thing because people talk about
needs as if they're biologically instantiated, like they're the fundamental building elements
of motivation. But it's not really that obvious, because
you might say, well being hungry is a biological need but being a doctor isn't. Well, not really because if you do end up
being a physician you pretty much solve the food acquisition problem permanently, right. So it's just a higher order manifestation
of the same thing. And it's higher order because instead of just
eating once you eat every day for the next 40 years. And instead of just feeding you, you feed
you and your family and maybe some other people too. So, thinking of that as something that isn't
rooted in biologically is not accurate. It's kind of a continuous complexification. From the simple local time-bound immature
subpersonalities that can only fulfill themselves in this moment and with help, to the development
of those circuits--which I would say is your personality--that are capable of providing
you with what you need in order to live and to be attracted to other people across very
large spans of time. It's like a tree, you know. It's a like a tree expanding upward. It's a good metaphor. Alright, so that's fine. Motivation sets up your perceptual frame. And so people often talk about motivation
as if it's a drive or a need--not as if those terms are particularly well-defined. A drive I suppose is a deterministic sequence
of motor outputs, something like that. But it's not accurate because the motivation
actually specifies what you look at. It specifies right what you see. And then it specifies as well what you're
going to respond to emotionally. So just imagine this, say I'd offered a 10,000
dollar prize to the person who counts the number of basketballs correctly. And then you're doing your best to count the
number of basketballs in the monkey illusion and then somebody stands up in front of you
like this, and blocks your view. Well what emotion are you going to feel? It's a negative emotion, right? In all likelihood. And so that might be anxiety, because you're
not going to win. It might be fear--it's like anxiety because
you're not going to win, but also like--fear because what the hell is this crazy person
doing. Anger. Right, that's another negative emotion, although
there's a positive attack element to it. Frustration, disappointment, maybe some grief--a
whole undifferentiated mess of negative emotions. Well why? Well, in some sense the motivational system
specifies the map and the goal. It's a little more complicated than that because
it also specifies where you are. But you can think about it as a map with a
destination. That's why stories are like that, because
we inhabit them. A map's like that all the time. And then what emotions do, roughly speaking,
is tell you whether or not things are going the way you want them to as you're on that
path. And so the emotions in some sense have to
have a motivational specification before they're properly functional. Like, what should you get angry at. Well generally you get angry at things that
either interfere with your progression towards a valued goal or upset the entire sub-personality
that contains the goal itself. That's a more--what could you call it--that's
a more serious failure. It's one to fail when you're trying to do
something, it's another thing to fail so hard you have to give up the whole project. We would rather just fail at some sub-element
than have to give up the whole project, right. It's one thing to fail an exam, it's another
thing to fail at university. And I think the reason for that--I thought
about that for a long time--why is it worse to fail out of university, assuming you want
to be in university, than it is to fail an exam? How does your brain compute that? Because you can't tell all the consequences,
right, so it's not self evident. But it seems to me that it's something like,
you think about these functional sub-personalities as having a temporal and spatial range of
application. So if you're a university student you're sort
of stabilized for four years. Wherever you go, people say "what do you do?" and you can say "I’m a university student." And everybody's happy about that. From an economic perspective it's probably
worse than being unemployed, in some sense, but you can't just go tell people that you're
unemployed and then you have a nice little high-status slot in society. It doesn't work that way. But you can do that as a university student,
you know, so it fulfills your social obligations and it makes you feel like you're doing something
at least vaguely useful--I mean apart from the learning and all the other things that
are positive about it. So what happens is that that map basically
covers that space and time--the time is four years and the space is everywhere you go during
those four years. Then if that map burns up it's like you're
exposed on all fronts for that entire four year period. And that might even be the two years previously. For example--strange to think that, but if
you bail out of university half way through your third year, you've also destructured
the map that you used to organize your memories, in some sense, of the previous two and a half
years. Because first of all they were the memories
of somewone who was doing just fine and going through university, and now all of a sudden
they're the memories of someone who failed. Those aren't the same memories. And so it's weird that an error can alter
the past, but it can and often does. I mean any relationship breakup that's of
any significance will do exactly the same thing, especially if you were betrayed, right. It's like, it's not just the present and the
future that dissolve into chaos and take you on a little trip to the underworld. It's also your revision--the necessity of
revising your past. So anyways, so then I would say well--failing
a class--well the class restructures you in some sense and focuses you for a certain subset
of the general going-to-university map. So it's going to be less traumatizing to do
poorly on a class than it is to fail out of university because the amount of space and
time that those respective maps covers differs. So what you're trying to do always is to lay
out a functional game--that's a good way of thinking about it--on the space-time territory
that you inhabit. And if you understand that then you can start
to understand a little bit about emotions. Now, okay, I have to put a little coda in
there and that's: motivations and emotions are not technical terms. They're sort of like id and ego. They're terms that you can use to structure
a debate. I showed you the hypothalamus and you see
it's made out of all those little nuclei--they're not the same, so you can't say that every
part of the hypothalamus is doing something that you can fit into a class: motivation. And motivations and emotions overlap, so,
I would say hunger--some of them oversee more purely motivation. If you have an unsettling altercation with
someone, it tends not to make you hungry. Whereas it might make you angry, it might
make you happy, it might make you sad. So hunger is something that seems to pop up
one of these maps and then emotions guide your way through it or tell you where you
are on it. But then you have complex motivation-emotions
like pain, and also anger. Because pain has a goal in it, right--get
away. Or stop, or get away--it's usually get away--but
it also has an emotional feeling, right. It feels bad. So it feels like an emotion, pain. Grief is like pain. Disappointment is like pain. Loneliness is like pain. And I mean this technically--all of those
things can be addressed rather successfully with opiates, by the way. So technically they're the same. But pain--is being hurt an emotion? Well people will say that, "well I feel hurt." Whatever. And anger is another one of those that's sort
of ambivalent because anger has a goal, right: remove obstacle. Remove or destroy obstacle. In a sense, that's the goal of anger. But people talk about it as an emotion. So we're oversimplifying. But it doesn't matter because it's a useful
oversimplification and that's sort of what a theory is: a useful oversimplification. Alright, so
I kind of laid out what I think are the basic motivations there. Hunger, thirst, pain, anger, thermoregulation--you
don't want to be too hot or too cold--panic or escape, affiliation or care, sexual desire,
exploration, play. And you can kind of divide those into self-maintenance
motivations and self-propagation motivations, roughly speaking. Sort of just a way to keep track of them. And then emotions--so the hypothalamus is
involved in a lot of that. It's not the only thing but it's involved
in a lot of that. And so here's sort of how I've conceptualized
one of these maps. And we've seen this thing before. You're at point A because if you're using
a map, or if you're in a game, there's a starting point or you're a player--either way there's
you there--and then you're going somewhere and you have to do something to get there. Okay, so that's the little map, and maybe
you have to go make a peanut butter sandwich or you have to go turn the thermostat down
or you need to call your friend or whatever. But it's the same kind of structure that you're
using in all those different situations. And they switch, you know. Now you're finished being hungry. Now you're thirsty. Then you're lonesome. It's like Sisyphus. It's one damn thing after another, roughly
speaking. And so that's what keeps you alive. And you have to be chasing things all the
time because your natural tendency is to run out of fuel and decay. That's entropy--you have to fight that. And so that's a continual battle because you're
pretty organized and it's really hard for something that organized to just stay organized. It's a lot easier--there's a million ways
to mess up your room. There's like one way to clean it. Or maybe 10, you get the point. And it's the same with anything that's extraordinarily
complex. There's not that many ways it can stay in
order and there's a lot of ways it can fall apart. That's why you're running all the time on
a treadmill. You're fighting the second--is it the second
law of thermodynamics. Is entropy the second law of thermodynamics? I think so. That's a major one, so good luck in your scrap. Because you're going to need it. So these little underlying biological systems
pop up the primary maps and then those are elaborated upwards into maps that are more
and more complicated. And the more and more complicated maps maybe
solve two problems at the same time for a week. Or they solve 10 problems at the same time
for 20 years. That's why you want a job or a career: a whole
bunch of problems are solved immediately as soon as you're employed. I mean, you have some other problems, but
that's inescapable anyways. Okay so you're inside one of these so you're
always motivated. You're always running around after something. And that's another thing to know too because
the basic state of human beings is not quiescence, you know. You're not napping in front of a fireplace. If you're not pursuing something that you're
motivated to pursue, then generally what you're doing if figuring out how to pursue other
things that you're motivated to pursue. And that's exploration. And so if you're not actively motivated by
biological necessity, we'll say for the sake of simplicity, then the next motivation kicks
in, which is well, prepare for the next time that you are so motivated. And that really accounts for our capacity
to explore. We're always zooming around the world trying
to figure out what to do with it next, you know. Acquiring more information or--even when we're
entertaining ourselves because we're almost always looking at stories when we entertain
ourselves. We're still acquiring information that has
functional significance and so attractive to us that we find it innately rewarding just
to observe that sort of thing. It's even in strange situations, like people
will go to horror movies. What's wrong with them? Why do you want to go and get scared? Or disgusted? Because that's horror, right--fear and disgust. Plain uncertainty horror movies like The Blair
Witch Project, that's pretty much all fear. And then the slasher movies and that sort
of thing, that's pretty much all disgust. And you might say, well why bother exposing
yourself to that. And part of it is: to get over it. You know, it's exposure. Because life has terrifying elements and it
has disgusting elements, and you're going to have to learn to maintain yourself in the
face of that. Certainly illness is going to challenge your
capacity to deal with disgust. There's any number of reasons to be terrified
so, you go to movies and you practice facing it. And you observe that you can. I mean there's other motivations too, but
those are sort of the healthy ones that go along with people wanting to expose themselves
to dangerous situations. So even in that you see exploration and preparation
for what's going to happen next. And the exploratory circuit is a very very
fundamental circuit. It's also hypothalamically mediated. So, the way the hypothalamus works--it's quite
cool--is that, on one hand it pops up all these little maps that you can occupy that
have their core in, we'll say, biological necessity--so roughly Freud's id--but when
those things all shut down because they're satiated, that's a technical term by the way--satiated,
it means satisfied--it's a form of reward. So it's sort of how you feel after you've
eaten a good meal and you're in a warm room and your friends are around you and maybe
you go to sleep if it's your family. Because--I'm thinking of thanksgiving or something
like that--everything is just taken care of and so you fall asleep. That's satiation. You can see that in animals all the time because
they spend a lot of time satiated. Dogs: they sleep a lot. Cats: they sleep a lot. Because they've already attacked their cat
food and so that's pretty much it for the day. Human beings, we tend not so much to enter
into states of satiation. Now what happens when you're in one of those
little units--one of those little motivated things--there's a couple of things that can
happen. [Muttering]. Okay so we talked about motivations as sort
of setting up this little frame. And then we can talk about emotions. So, there you are going somewhere. And there's this little straight line that'll
take you there, this nice efficient way to get there. Now why do you want to do it efficiently? Well, because you use up the least amount
of resources like that so you can maintain some resources for doing the next thing you
need to do. So you care about efficiency and simplicity. So you want to go like the crow flies to the
destination. So then, what happens along the way? Well, let's say you just get to go straight. Well basically what happens is that you're
motivated by your perception of the goal or intermediary goals because the goal can be
linked together, and then as long as things are going according to plan, as you move towards
the goal in an untrammelled way you're going to feel mild positive emotion. And the reason for that is that you're turning
the environment--the environment almost never has... most of it (the environment) is irrelevant. The rest of it has a positive or negative
valence. And if things are going according to plan
it has a mild positive valence, right. You think things are okay, and really what
you're doing is you're observing two things. You're observing that the things that should
be happening, if you know what you're doing while you're acting, are happening. And so each step forward is an indication
that you're getting closer to your goal. That's incentive reward. And that's the sort of reward that you actually
think of as fun. An incentive reward is produced by activation
of the exploratory system that's in the hypothalamus--it has its roots in the hypothalamus--and that's
the dopaminergic system. And that's the system that cocaine and amphetamines
and all those drugs that people really like to take hyperactivates, making them feel like
they're doing something important and useful. Even though, in all likelihood, they're not. So the dopaminergic drugs in some sense hijack
your incentive reward systems. And it's incentive reward because you're incentivized
to continue moving forward. Anything that you look at that makes you want
to touch it or move forward to it basically activates the dopaminergic system. Now, so you say, well what happens when you're
on your way to somewhere. Well, roughly what happens is neutral things,
which is okay. You can ignore them. Positive things or negative things. Positive things happen when things are going
according to plan or even better than according to plan. You're walking to school, it's raining, somebody
you know stops and offers you a life. It's like, well you're doing okay getting
to school and that was fine, but all of a sudden you're getting there a little faster
and you're not getting wet. So that cheers you up. It's an indication that you're able to save
resources while you're moving towards a goal--dopaminergically mediated. You know, and then we can imagine a different
scenario where you're walking to school in the rain and someone drives by you, maybe
it's even the same friend, and they don't see you and there's a puddle right beside
you and not only do they not stop but they completely cover you with oily and frigid
water, and so that's not so good. You're angry about that and upset. Why? Well, you might say, "my day is ruined." What does that mean exactly? Well it means that you had a little map on
top of your day and you were hoping that the day and the map would correspond, and then
all of a sudden the map burned up and god only knows what's going to happen to the day. And so it's like the bottom has dropped out
of your map. And so then you have to worry about your clothes
and catching cold and all those things. And turning around and going home and what
it'll mean if you miss class and so on and so forth. So basically that's the domain of chaos that
we talked about. So that's a negative thing, but it's also--the
thing about negative things is they're sort of hard to disentangle from unexpected things. You know, because most of the things that
happen to you that are negative are also unexpected because you don't go around trying to make
negative things happen. So well, what happens when something negative
happens? Well, you get a negative emotion. Pain, anxiety, disgust. Those seem to be the big three. And they're mediated by different systems. We don't understand the disgust system very
well. It doesn't load with neuroticism because all
the other negative emotions load with trait neuroticism. Pain--pain seems to be what you experience
if your receptive surfaces are--you know if your physiological self is subject to stimulation
of an intensity that's sufficient either to damage it or to damage the receptors. You know, but pain is complicated. It's not just physical pain from physical
damage. It depends on how you define physical damage. If someone dies, that's pain. If you're alone and isolated, that's pain. If you're depressed, that's pain. If you're frustrated or disappointed, that's
pain. Frustrated might mean something gets in the
way of you moving towards a goal, and disappointment might mean the whole damn structure just collapsed
on you. Either way, that's pain. Now the behaviourists would have called that
an unconditioned--like a painful stimulus--they would've called that an unconditioned stimulus. You don't have to learn for it to be bad. It's sort of built in bad. And they would think about anxiety in response
to the unexpected as learned. The behaviourists would think that you need
to learn what predicts something painful. And if you learn that something predicts something
painful then you get anxious to it or afraid of it. But it turns out that it's more complicated
than that. So what the behaviourists would think is that
pain in some sense is the fundamental negative emotion. And then maybe you're a kid and you stand
up underneath a table and you whack your head on it when you're learning to walk. And then when you go under the table now you
get anxious because you've learned that if you stand up under the table, you bang your
head and that hurts. So anxiety under those circumstances is a
learned behaviour. It's a conditioned response. Got it? Okay, but it's more complicated than that
because anxiety can also be an unlearned response. So if you just encounter something you've
never seen before, it's going to make you anxious. There's actually a circuit that mediates anxiety. It's not just a secondary derivation of the
pain circuitry. It's its own little unit. And it's sort of like you've figured out over
time--evolutionary time--not to get hurt because you don't want to be damaged. But then, you've learned how to detect the
probability that you will get hurt for so long that you've also evolved a system just
to respond to that. And so some of that responds to things that
you have learned are dangerous. Some of it responds to things that are generally
just dangerous. Blood, spiders, insects of various sorts,
facial expressions that indicate fear or disgust or anger, broken limbs, bodies--especially
mutilated ones. You know what's in horror movies, that's all
sort of primary fear stimuli, right. And it's built right into you. Now psychologists debate about whether it's
built in or whether you can just learn it really easily. But I would say that there's sort of a continuum. Some of it seems pretty damn built-in. Snake-fear, for example. Chimps who've never seen snakes, you bring
one into their cage--if it's a rubber snake--poof, they hit the roof. And then they look at it. And snakes in the wild, a chimp will go up
to a big snake in the wild and hoot at it. They have a special snake--they call it a
snake [rah?]--and they'll look at the thing, and some of them will just look at the snake
for like 24 hours. So, partly they're afraid of it. Partly they want to explore it. So what they do, they get close to it and
the fear increases, and then they back up and the fear decreases and the curiosity increases. And so what happens is that they move back
and forth until they're right on the line where they're afraid, but they're curious. So then they're stuck, and they're looking
at it. And you experience that all the time actually,
because when you are engaged in something that's meaningful, that's where you are. And that's like the line between order and
chaos. You know, because you want to solve it--it's
important. Maybe you're reading papers about some illness
that you hope to work on or study. It's like, well you're worried about the damn
illness, you know. All you're doing is confronting it through
the papers so, you know, you're fairly well sheltered from it. But you don't want it to exist and you'd rather
it wasn't around, but you're curious so you're going to get engrossed in it. And most of you, to the degree that you're
immersed in anything, are partly immersed because you perceive it as a problem. So that's like existential anxiety in a sense. It's just part of being. There's problems that have to be solved. They produce anxiety, they're complicated. You find this--you find a way of approaching
them so that the anxiety doesn't overwhelm you and so the curiosity is optimized--that's
an incentive reward activation--and then you're awake. Because the anxiety keeps you awake and so
does the curiosity. And you think, yeah, this is a good place
to be. And it is a good place to be because you're
optimally protected right there and you're optimally learning. So yes, that's a good place to be. You can think about that as an answer to the
Nietzschean problem of how you create value. You don't exactly create it--you find it. There's problems that need to be solved, they
automatically engage your emotions--both positively and negatively--you've got to find the right
balance. And it's something like contending, you know. It seems to me like humans beings have to
have something to contend with, or they can't tolerate themselves. Because life seems like a stupid joke if you
don't have something worthwhile to do. But you can have something worthwhile to do. And so then maybe it's not so stupid and absurd
and tragic. And that's at least a good way to think about
it. (00:48:00)
So you've got satiation on the one hand, on the positive side, and the behaviourists would've
considered that an unconditioned response too. They really thought about that as a reward
initially. You know, so you take a rat--he's hungry--and
you feed him something: reward. Now Skinner, he used to train rats, right,
and he was a very--what would you call it--very well renowned behavioural psychologists. And he could train rats to do damn near anything. And what he would do is starve them to three
quarters of their body weight--they were basically hungry rats. They were hungry lonesome rats because they
lived an isolated existence, which rats don't like, and then they were starved down to three
quarters of their body weight. When the behaviourists used rats as a model
for people, they actually used hungry lonesome rats as a model for rats as a model for people. And you might think, well what kind of model
is that? But it turns out it's a pretty good model,
because you're a lot more like a scared hungry rat than you'd like to admit. Which is partly why you can empathize with
one, right. Everybody's sitting there thinking "oh the
poor rats". By the way, the more you thought that, the
more agreeable you are. So how many people were feeling pretty sorry
for those rats? Yeah. How about men? How many men were feeling sorry for those
rats? Oh yeah, about three. There's a big gender difference in agreeableness
between men and women, by the way. Just so you know--we'll talk about that more. So now the behaviourists also thought that
you have this primary set of rewards, call them unconditioned, and then you had to learn
that some things predicted them. Like, classically maybe, a rat would push
a lever and get a pellet. Soon he's pushing that lever like mad. He's pretty happy about pushing that lever. And he learned the conditioned association
between lever pushing and getting a reward. But it turns out that because that's been
around for so long, you also have a system for it. So it's not just a learned association to
what satiates you--it's a whole system. And that's the dopaminergic system. The serotonin system seems to be the thing
that satiates. So you know, if you have a big turkey dinner,
up goes the serotonin levels--you don't have to do anything. And serotonin is a calming and regulating
neurochemical. Which is why antidepressants stop your neurons
from taking up serotonin before you've had a real chance to use it to regulate your nervous
system. But dopamine tells you, hey, good things are
on their way. And that's pretty much what people run on. And you can think about that as hope. So incentive reward is sort of like hope,
or promise. I think promise is a better term. So there's pain and satiation, and those are
really ancient systems. And then there are newer systems that are
anxiety and promise. And those are related to those more fundamental
negative and positive emotions. And those things regulate you while you're
on your path. Now, there's one more level of complication,
because you think, well what can happen on the way to your goal. Nothing? Irrelevant. Okay, so that's the irrelevance that enables
you to not see the gorilla. And almost everything around you is irrelevant. And I think that's partly why I think people
don't like to have their little maps of the world destroyed. Because if your map of the world is thoroughly
demolished everything becomes relevant. And you do not want everything to become relevant. It's just too much for you. So you wake up and you're naked and it's dark
in the middle of a jungle. It's like, everything's relevant! You're not going to like that. It's going to burn you out quick. And so most of the time you have to be protected
so that almost everything's irrelevant. And then you can focus on the few things that
you're capable of handling, and you do that. So you're in your little map, and then as
you move towards it your emotions play. And the negative emotions appear when things
are not going well and the positive emotions appear when things are going well. That's basically how your emotions work. Now, you've got your satiation and your pain. Then you've got your threat and your promise. Then on top of that you've got a more complicated
thing which is novelty, because that's the other thing that can happen when you're on
the way from point A to point B. Something you didn't expect--and you don't understand. So you're walking down the street and there's
someone laying there face-down on the sidewalk. And you know, they're dishevelled, and so
well, what's your emotional response? Well you didn't expect it, so you're going
to be taken aback a bit: that's anxiety. It's like, you're moving towards your goal
and anxiety stops you. Now you can think of the space-time area around
that person as unexplored territory. Now you don't want any unexplored territory
in your map because god only knows what's going to happen there. So what're you supposed to do? Well maybe you cross the street--you think
well that person's drunk or maybe you think, well they're a homeless person. Maybe they're lying on a sleeping back--you
think they're just asleep. You're going to stop and then you're going
to observe, and then you're going to use little cues to try to put your map back together. And your map is, what’s going on here and
what should I do about it? And so, it's partly this interplay between
anxiety and curiosity. Now you can just step around it and continue,
but maybe that'll upset your moral map--what kind of person am I? Maybe I should have done something about it. Or maybe you think, there's no damn way I'm
going to get involved in this because, who knows what'll happen if I step in there. And you know, fair enough, because, who knows
what'll happen if you step in there. The point is that, it's like your map which
has made everything irrelevant has got a hole in it and now some of what's complicated is
shining through. And that thing that's shining through--so
that's like what the phenomenologists talked about as shining forth--that thing that's
shining through, it's like you don't know what to do about it. What should you do? Well, you should do what you do do, and what
you do is, you prepare to do everything. And that's an emotional response to novelty. Well, if you don't know what to do you should
prepare yourself for anything. And that's stress. You could prepare that something good will
happen. Let’s say you're in an ambivalent. |
I don’t know how many of you got my email
this morning, but this is the last class. And so, I sent in my email a link to the other
lecture that was supposed to happen, but I have to go to a conference on Thursday and
Friday and so I’m going to do the last lecture today, and you can watch the second-last lecture
from last year, which will cover the territory, hopefully, sufficiently well. So, I usually use the last lecture to sort
of sum up where we’ve been and also to talk to people about… let me open it up here
first… about my more specific thoughts on personality. So I think that’s probably what I’ll do
today. I’ll start with what we’ve… where we’ve
been. So I started talking to you about mythological
representations of personality, and I wanted to do that for a variety of reasons, but the
most important was to place the rest of the course in a deep history context, essentially. Because personality is the consequence of
very many things. And many of them are grounded in our biology
and therefore grounded in evolution. And I generally think that in some ways, the
social sciences don’t take evolution seriously enough. They don’t take the fact that we’re 3.5
billion years old seriously enough. It’s a serious thing. And some of that is evident in a relatively
straightforward way conceptually, in that we share so much of our biological platform
with other creatures. You know, there was a recent genomic analysis,
I think, of gorillas. And I don’t remember what percentage of
our DNA we share with gorillas, but it’s like 99.2% or something like that, which,
you know, is quite shocking, until you realise that we share about 70% of our genetic make-up
with yeast. So, you know, yeah, obviously we’re a lot
closer to gorillas than to yeast, but we’re still pretty damn close to yeast. And it also indicates not necessarily just
how similar we are to gorillas, but how minor modifications in a genome can also make substantial
differences, because alike as we are to gorillas, we’re a lot different from them too. So there’s the biological aspect, which
is really important. But then there’s what you might describe
as a quasi-biological element, which seems to be operating in the space between biology
as evolutionarily determined, and culture. Those things are often… you know, we have
an archetypal tendency to consider culture as something in opposition to nature. And there’s utility in that, from a heuristic
point of view. You can do a lot with that division from a
conceptual perspective. But in a lot of ways it’s misleading. Because some of the primordial elements of
culture are biological. And I think the most striking example of that,
fundamentally, is… there’s two striking examples. One is the existence of structures of power,
or structures of authority, or structures of influence; hierarchies, which are incredibly
old, at least 400 million years old. And which have in consequence been around
for so long that you also have to think about them as part of the environment, part of nature. Because we tend to think of the hierarchical
structure as cultural, and also as easily alterable, in some sense. But there’s no reason to think that, given
that it’s been around, as I pointed out in one lecture, longer than trees. It’s a very, very permanent element of the
environment that human beings find themselves in. So much so that… you know, you can think
of a dominance hierarchy as the prototype of culture, but because it’s been a constant
environmental feature for so long, our nervous systems are built for operation within a hierarchy,
and they’re really built that way, and it’s not a trivial matter. Because the serotonin system that regulate
our emotions (because the serotonin system does that, fundamentally), is also the system
that sets up your brain during fetal development. The serotonin system is above all, perhaps,
concerned with calibrating your nervous system in accordance with your position in a hierarchy. And its basic rule is, the higher in a hierarchy
you are, the less negative emotion you have to feel. And the lower in the hierarchy you are, and
the more tenuous your actual life (because there’s a direct connection between the
tenuousness of your life and your position in a dominance hierarchy), the more negative
emotion you’re going to feel. And then that has drastic consequences and
those are best exemplified in longevity. So there was a famous study called the Whitehall
study, which was done in Britain. And basically what they were looking at was
health, including mortality, of English civil servants. And the first study was done 50 years before
the second study. I think the second study was done in the 80s. Anyways, in the first study, you have a power
hierarchy, with the top civil servants at the top, obviously, and the bottom civil servants
at the bottom. And you might ask yourself, what constitutes
top and bottom, and some of it might be regarded as autonomy over choices. So that would be part of it, you can make
choices so you have a bit more control over what’s going to happen to you. But also, the probability that you have a
stable and productive place is higher the higher you go and lower the lower you go. And the consequence of that, all things considered,
is that the civil servants at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy died younger and more
frequently than those at the top. Now you could attribute that to poverty, right,
because the people at the bottom, especially in the 1930s, were materially deprived in
comparison to the people at the top, although they certainly weren’t materially deprived
in comparison, say, to UK citizens a hundred years before, or to most people in the world
at that time. So, a poverty argument is hard to make, although
a relative poverty argument is easier to make. But then, 50 years later, Britain was a lot
richer, and so the absolute level of wealth of the entire hierarchy moved up substantially,
so that the people at the bottom were richer than the people in the middle in the previous
study. But the pattern of overall mortality remained
quite similar. And you know, the importance of studies like
that, as well as studies that indicate the consequence of income inequality on behaviour,
are so important that they should be put front and center in university curricula. I mean one of the things that really bothers
me about the humanities education in particular, although some of the social science education
too, for modern university students, is that there are some things we know that you’re
never taught. And it’s really appalling, especially the
relative poverty issue, because most of the phenomena that people tend to attribute to
poverty have nothing to do with poverty. It’s relative poverty. And that is absolutely not the same thing. Because the first one is a material deprivation
hypothesis. But if you think about it, there’s almost
no one in America who’s materially deprived. Now you know, you could become… and I’m
not saying there’s no one. I’m saying there’s almost no one. And you know, it also depends on your definition
of material deprivation, but most people, the vast majority of people, have too much
to eat, and a place to live. And, you know, once you have plumbing and
heating, and food, and access to information, you’ve pretty much got everything that wealth
can give you that isn’t relative. The privation part of it is gone. But relative poverty, relative position, is
an unbelievably powerful determinant of almost everything that you could imagine. So, longevity is one, health is another. And a lot of those are stress-related. It’s a lot more stressful at the bottom
than it is at the top. I’ll tell you something interesting we found
out about conservatism. And this is… when I wrote… I wrote a book called Maps of Meaning a long
while back, and I realised that I was trying to account for why people are prone to identifying
so strongly with their belief systems, you know. And part of it, in some sense, was a control
over negative outcomes hypothesis. So partly, if you have an ideological theory,
it’s a set of tools that you can use, with quite a bit of proficiency, to operate in
the world, right? Simplification strategy enables you to control
uncertainty. It also enables you to communicate with people. But even more importantly, to the degree that
we share a cultural system, we can predict each other. And that’s not psychological, it’s you
act out the game and I act out the game, and so, I don’t really have to know much about
you. And I don’t have to assume that you’re
a barrel of snakes. I can assume that you’re more or less like
me. And so if we interact I don’t have to be
on constant alert. And so that’s not a psychological function
of a belief system. That’s a direct, real world function. And if you listen to people like the terror
management theorists, they’re always telling you how belief systems protect people against
psychological uncertainty, or maybe the fear of death. They never tell you that shared belief system
actually prevent from death, which is even more important than protecting you from the
fear of death. So, there is the stabilisation of society
aspect that’s a motivator for maintaining a set of shared beliefs. Because it kind of makes us identical. Which you might say is bad on the side of
individuality. It’s like yeah, yeah, individuality. It’s really good on the side of not having
to assume that the next person is going to kill you. And that’s way more important than individuality. You know, the other thing that I’d like
to make a case for briefly is that, you know, in the West… people think that Western people are individualistic. That’s the stupidest theory ever I think. Except for maybe the theory that poverty is
at the root of all these social problems that we see. Western people are hardly individual at all. All you have to do is go out and look at traffic
patterns to figure that out. Everybody stops at a red light. Everybody crosses when the walk signal turns. Virtually everybody waits in line when there’s
a line-up for some restricted access event. We all dress the same way, men and women alike. You know, we follow the rules like mad, like
crazy. And then on top of that there’s a bit of
fluff, which is the things we could do if we were free, which we could talk about and
dream about but which hardly anybody does. And that’s what looks like individuality. So you get that freedom, but the cost of it
is incredible obedience. But you know, the fact of the obedience is
that, well, you can sit here for example, and look at this, it’s all safe and everything. And you can come here with all these other
weird primates and you don’t know a damn thing about them, and they come from all sorts
of different places but there’s a shared social structure and everybody participates
in the game and then all of a sudden, it’s basically safe. Fine. That’s one reason for conservatism and for
identification with a belief system. It’s like stabilise the damn game so you
can predict the other primates. And a lot of people who talk about conservatism
as a political belief make the assumption that that control element is the fundamental
motivator for right-wing political belief. But weirdly enough, the other thing that happens
when you stabilise a game, let’s say, which would be a shared belief, is that you provide
a goal. Because a shared value system is always oriented
towards a goal. Otherwise it’s not a value system, it’s
not a belief system. And the things is, and this is a Piagetian
point, as soon as you organise something around a goal, you give the people opportunity to
do two things… three things. Cooperate within the rule framework, compete
within the rule framework, so that brings in the possibility of victory and loss, and
also to experience some positive emotion. Because if we haven’t unified our game (which
is basically the job of a bloody three-year old), and so we’re each playing our own
games, there’s no way that we can collectively aim at something and there’s no way that
you can progress. So you know one of the things that, when you’re
taught about the oppressive structure, say, of the patriarchal system, one of the things
that’s never noted is that because that’s a hierarchical system, it’s also a pre-condition
for any kind of victory. And that would even be victory over yourself. If you want to be better tomorrow than you
are today, basically what you’re doing is aiming at a point that’s defined by the
value system, so that’s aiming up, and trying to move yourself towards. If you get rid of that shared value system
there’s no structure for positive emotion anymore. So, part of the reason people want to stabilise
their belief systems is so that the environment (mostly other people, but also the environment)
remains under control, and thank God for that, because otherwise it’s just outright bloody
chaos. But the other reason is, no game, no winners. Nothing to do. And that’s, I think, why there’s an orthogonal
relationship between agreeableness and conscientiousness. You know, conscientiousness seems to do something
like stabilise rule structures across long periods of time. So it kind of defines the game explicitly,
and that lays out the possibility of a hierarchy and a value system. And then agreeableness says hey, don’t get
too carried away with that. You know, you don’t want to make the game
so damn tight that the losers stack up at zero and die. You know, it’s egalitarianism versus justice… I mean, that’s not exactly it, but it’s
something like that. You know, everybody should go to university. Fine, egalitarian presupposition. The people who work hard and study should
do better. Well that’s a presupposition of justice. And those aren’t the same thing, right? Actually they work somewhat in opposition
to one another. So you could say let everyone into university
and fail half of them in the first year. And that’s kind of what they do in places
in Holland, whereas we have fairly structured admission criteria. But you know, we can see the tension there,
because if you let everybody into university, then the really smart people are being dragged
far… they’re being put into a position where
they’re able to advance much more slowly than they would otherwise. So that’s a real price to pay at the top
of the distribution. On the other hand you’re opening up opportunities
for people who for one reason or another might have not done well in high school or previously
but could actually thrive in university. But you see that those things… you know, there’s two value structures there
and it’s not easy to optimise them and that’s exactly why I think we have those two parallel
personality dimensions. And it’s real hell when one of them gets
the upper hand. You know, part of it is balance. Inclusion and hierarchy. You need to have those things operating at
the same time. So, back to the mythological representations. I mean, partly what you see in mythological
representations of reality, and we have to talk about reality a bit too, is the presence
of something that represents the hierarchy. I would say, you know, in fairy tales that’s
often the king, wise king or otherwise, and then in religious mythology it’s usually
something that represents the king or the Father. And I think that’s because the primary social
hierarchies among human beings are masculine in nature. And I think that’s probably because, well
men are more like pack animals. And why aren’t women? Well, I think the reason for that is that
the things that men did historically had a communal element, like a goal-directed communal
element that wasn’t as prevalent in female dominance hierarchies? It’s something like that. So there’s a representation of the hierarchy. But then there’s a counter-representation,
which is a representation of the individual. And that’s another really tight balance
that societies have to manage… “I don’t want you to be too different,
because if you’re too different, I can’t predict you”. And you may actually be a threat to the integrity
of the society, because you might come up with something so wild and so unconstrained
that it just blows the entire game into pieces. On the other hand, to the degree that I’m
a rigid hierarchy, I’m going to fall behind as the environment transforms. And the environment, the natural environment,
let’s say, or the environment that’s outside the dominance hierarchy, is also something
that is stably represented in mythology. And so one of the things that you see happening
is there’s a hierarchy, and the other thing is there’s a force outside the hierarchy
and it’s often represented by an eye. So you see this in a variety of ancient myths. And that represents the capacity of the individual
to pay attention and to maintain and update the hierarchy. So you’ve this dance between the individual
and the hierarchy. The hierarchy structures the individual and
disciplines them, and produces a cultured being, but then hopefully the cultured being
kind of pops up above the hierarchy and then can start, you know, altering it, hopefully
relatively minimally, where it’s necessary. It’s very much akin to Piaget’s idea that
once children hit higher levels of moral development: first of all they play alone, then they can
play with others, then they know the rules, and then morality is following the rules,
and after that, and not every child gets to this point (at least according to Piaget),
the child starts to guard him or herself as something that can make the rules. So you could think about that as the (and
Piaget did), as the pinnacle of ethical development. And whether or not that’s the pinnacle is
debatable, because I think Jung… see Jung extended that idea, although people never
think of this as a variation on Piagetian theory. So, for Piaget, once you hit individual status,
you pop out of the group and you hit individual status, it’s not like you’re a rule-breaker,
because you can follow the rules, and usually do, but you can observe them and modify them
when necessary. It’s almost exactly what your consciousness
does to your own internal neural structure. So for example imagine you’re playing a
piano, and you’ve automatized most of it. So you’ve built little machines in the back
of your head to take care of the trills, let’s say, and the arpeggios, and then you make
a mistake. Well your consciousness picks up the mistake,
and then you slow down what you’re doing and observe yourself for the motor errors. And then you correct them, which is difficult,
and then you practise and practise and practise and practise, and you automate the new routine,
and then you go on. And so what consciousness is doing is watching
output, and when there’s a mismatch between what you’re aiming at and what happens,
you stop. That’s basically anxiety. You make your error correction, and that fixes
the hierarchy, and then you go on. Well that’s really the relationship of the
individual to society as well. Now Jung pushed that idea a fair bit further. And I might as well tell you about this, we
never discussed this in our section on Jung, but it’s pretty interesting. Let’s see if I can get this right. Okay, so Jung basically presumed that as you
were socialised, you developed a persona. And the persona was you insofar as you’re
socialised. Now you can see personae when you listen to
someone who’s very, very concerned with their appearance and whose speech is somewhat
false as a consequence. You know, so they don’t seem genuine, they
seem too polished, let’s say, or something like that, you know. There’s not a lot of emotion, for example,
in their speech. They’re very self-contained and concerned
with their public appearance, which seems also to be a very undesirable consequence
of spending too much time on social media. Because it’s all persona development, eh,
it’s not necessarily a good thing. It does seem to be associated with higher
rates of depression. Anyways, your persona is you as socialised
being. And so Jung would say yeah, obviously you
can be socialised. And what that means is that some of you is
invited out to play and to develop, but a lot of you is left undifferentiated, or even
forbidden. So for example, this happens with agreeable
people. Agreeable people think aggression is wrong. Well that’s not very useful, because first
of all it’s not wrong, and second of all because they have the capacity for aggression. And so if that isn’t brought out to play,
it sits at home in its closet and gets all warped and bent and only comes out at night
to cause trouble. And so one of the things Jung would say is
well (this is part of the exploration of the shadow), there’s going to be you as persona
and then there’s this mesh-mash of undeveloped and resentful potential, roughly speaking. And your job is to transmute your moral system
and integrate all that stuff that was rejected into your personality. And that often involves a descent into the
underworld and a rebirth. And that’s another mythological motif. So his idea was… you could think about it
this way. So Piaget said at the utmost step of moral
development, you view yourself as someone who could alter the rules. And Jung would say wait a minute, there’s
another point in that. Not only do you alter the rules, you alter
them so you can include things that were denied or forbidden by the previous system of rules. And so it’s a more inclusive game. And part of what it includes is those parts
of you that you’d cast off because they were socially inappropriate. And often… Freud’s comment about that sort of thing
was that that was often sexuality and aggression, partly because those are kind of individual
in nature, and they’re kind of integrate into a social group. And people will take offense to them. I mean, look what’s happening on college
campuses. Universities are spending more time worrying
about sexual assault than they are worrying about education. And the reason for that is, the reason we’re
just describing. It’s that sexuality and aggression are very
hard to integrate. So they remain on the outside. Now you might say, suppress it, for Christ’s
sake. Get your sexuality under control and eradicate
your aggression. That’s a stupid idea because we know what
happens when you do that. You turn into a little milk-soppy sort of
creature with a tremendous amount of resentment, and then you sporadically explode. Plus you’re denying yourself immense depth
in your personality. You know, like a person who has repressed
their aggression and their sexuality, generally, is just dull as you can possibly imagine. You don’t even want to talk to them. Whereas someone who has that integrated, they’re
far more interesting, you know, because there’s a provocative element, and a teasing element,
and a dangerous element, and a colourful element, and all those things that make, you know,
social interactions much more interesting. It’s… you know, you’re playing with
fire, at that point in your personality development, but human beings are born to play with fire. So you don’t want to deny yourself that. So anyways, so Jung’s idea of continued
moral development was, you know, haul the oppressed self out of captivity, so to speak. Notice what you’re doing, partly to refuse
to take responsibility, but also partly just to tame yourself so that you’re at least
not annoying, and get that other stuff up into the game. So he would think of that, at least in part,
as the union of the articulated self with the unarticulated self, a lot of which would
be grounded in emotion and motivation. So that’s… he thought of that as a conjunction. That’s conjunction #1. So that’s the bringing together of spirit
and soul, or articulated and self and inarticulated self, something like that. So now you’re an organised, from the perspective
of your psyche, but then there’s another step. So now you think of that as an organised thing. The next step is to integrate that with your
body. And that basically means, not only to have
that integrated state of being as a belief system, and system of representation at perception,
but also to act it out in the world. Because it’s one thing to know something,
it’s another thing to do it. But if you really know it, there’s no difference
between knowing it and doing it. Okay, so then your mind and your body are
unified. And then there’s a third step after that,
which is really quite complex, and this is where Jung starts to shade into phenomenological
perspectives. So you know, when we were talking about phenomenology
one of the things I pointed out was that the phenomenologists are playing a… you can
say they’re playing a complex philosophical game, and the game is ‘what if?’ And the what if is: okay, forget about the
idea of subjective and objective, just forget about it for a moment, okay? We’ll start with a new set of presuppositions. The presuppositions are that everything you
experience is real. And everything you experience is you. So you say, reality is experience. But there’s an implication to that, and
the implication is that, insofar as you’re part of my experience, the separation between
us is illusory. And so the next stage that Jung proposed was
that the integrated self eliminates the distinction between self and other. So that would be recognition, for example,
and everyone already knows this, that it’s pretty hard for me to be stable and happy
if I see you miserable and suffering. Well why is that? Well, it’s because, insofar as I encounter
you, at least, your misery and suffering is my misery and suffering. You know, unless I’m psychopathic to the
nth degree. And so the idea that… and that has to be
taken care of. Well I mean, you certainly see this in the
realm of the family. If you’re in a family and one of your family
members is, you know, not doing well in a manner they can’t help, or not doing well
in a manner they can help, the probability that that’s going to have a direct bearing
on your quality of being is 100%. In fact it might be the prime determinant. And so then you have to seriously ask yourself,
what makes you think you’re separate? And you know, a phenomenologist would say
well, you know, that’s your assumption that the subject/object divide is absolute, that’s
what makes you think you’re separate. And so, the final step… it’s kind of akin to a Dostoyevsky idea. Dostoyevsky posited, in one of his weird sort
of transcendent moments, that everything that happened to you was not only your fault, but
everything that happened to everyone was your fault. And he didn’t mean it precisely like that. He meant it more like, everything that happens
to you is your responsibility, and everything that happens to everyone else is also your
responsibility. And that’s a… well it’s an insane claim, to some degree,
because it broadens the realm of your responsibility out to unlimited reach. But life is an insane thing, and so there’s
no reason to assume that just because that, you know, seems exaggerated to the point of
irrationality, that it’s wrong. There’s lots of things about life that are
exaggerated to the point of irrationality. Like the fundamental structure of life is
irrational. You’re born arbitrarily, there you are in
your particular time and place, you live in accordance with your talents and limitations,
and then at the end of that, there’s no you anymore. It’s like, good luck making that rational. Like it’s intrinsically irrational. And one of the things that really advanced
theories of human development posit is that to answer an irrational question, you need
an irrational answer. And I think that’s exactly right. If life is an impossible burden, which is
clearly the case, then you need an impossible goal to set against it to justify it. And part of that might be well, you know,
get your act together, improve the quality of being around you, but then that starts
to stretch its tentacles to include more and more people. And so… you know, one of the things I’ve
thought about for a long time is, there’s this proclivity of people to flee, into let’s
say, nihilism, for every good reason under the books, or ideological possession. And the alternative to those two things you
might think of as chaos. Well, nihilism is sort of a form of chaos
anyways. It’s not surprising that people become nihilistic. Plus it’s easy. And it’s not surprising that they become
ideologically possessed, plus it’s easy. The question is, is there any reasonable alternative
to that? And if you read people like Ernest Becker,
who wrote a book called The Denial of Death (he was a hyper-Freudian, really), his whole
hypothesis, like the terror management theorists (who derived their ideas from Becker, by the
way), is that everything people do is illusory. You know, no matter what it is, it’s an
illusion. And so the fundamental underlying reality
of human life is that it’s hopeless. Well, God, you know, that’s a hell of a
conclusion to draw. And I think it’s clearly the wrong conclusion,
because it leads to places you just do not want to go. And for me, that’s enough evidence that
there’s something wrong with it. You know, like if you’re following a path
and it’s leading to Auschwitz, I would say hey, there’s something wrong with that path. And you might say, well all paths are equally
absurd. It’s like yeah, okay, but some of them really
hurt, and maybe we could do without those. I think it’s very difficult to dispute that. I mean you can, but what you have to say then
is, all the pain and suffering in the world doesn’t matter, you know, along with all
the good stuff. You can make that irrelevant right away, just
by doubt. But you’re really going to take the next
step and say, all that human-induced and unnecessary pain and suffering is actually meaningless
and irrelevant? It’s like, I think yeah, put that person
in jail now, before they do something really dangerous. Well I don’t really mean that but you get
the point. You draw a conclusion like that, which is
a logical conclusion of nihilism… it’s like, all bets are off for you. So there’s something that just seems to
be wrong, it just seems wrong, that conclusion. And so, then one of the things you might ask
is okay, that doesn’t seem very good, what’s the opposite of that? So one of the things that I’ve really been
trying to figure out is, what is the opposite of the path that leads to Auschwitz? You know, once we can agree that that’s
a bad path. Okay, fine, we’ve got a ‘bad’ identified. That implies the reverse, a good path. It doesn’t define it though, right? It just implies it. So the implication would be, whatever is least
likely to lead you there is de facto good. Or at least you’ve basically identified
the territory. And it seems to me that the opposite of not
caring about anyone, and wishing, perhaps, for their painful destruction, is something
like caring for everyone and wishing for their universal betterment. Something like that. And that seems to me to be associated with
the idea of improving being itself. And that means yours and your family’s and
your community’s and as far out as you can reach, probably starting with the local, you
know, till you get yourself all practiced. And so, that seems to me to be an impossible
aim, in some sense, and that’s actually a good thing, because the psychological consequences
of pursuing an impossibly good goal are that everything you do seems to become meaningful,
because it’s related intelligibly to that goal, and you have a structure within which
you can grapple with uncertainty. You know, because if someone, even you, says
that well why do you bother with that? You can say well, because of this and this
and this and this, and then it leads down to Auschwitz, and we’re not going there,
and that’s why I’m doing this. And that’s a hell of a tough argument to
argue yourself out of. And you know, one of the things you really
need in life is an argument for life that you cannot dispute. You know, because otherwise you’re plagued,
like the existentialists would say, with this constant recurrence of existential doubt. And that paralyses and cripples you. And it makes you weak. And worse, you know. It’s worse. You can end up with so much self-contempt
just because of who you are as a creature, that you’re unconsciously wishing for, you
know, absolute annihilation. I see this in many, many places, but one of
the things I’ve seen… most frequently probably in the last 30 years,
is the insistence, on the part of certain parties who are at least in principle concerned
with environmental issues, that the planet would be better off with no people on it. It’s like, I think, well the first thing
I think is, well let’s start with you, but the next thing I think is really? That’s really what you think, eh? It’s like you know, you don’t have to
go very far down, from a psychoanalytic perspective, into the dream underlying a statement like
that, before you see that it is the sort of dream that you do not want to have anything
to do with. Because there’s an actively genocidal component
to it. And it’s based in loathing of humanity. Self-loathing, but also loathing of the entire
species. It’s like, better beware of that sort of
thinking. Which is not to say that we have some things
that we could clean up, you know, but a little sympathy for humanity wouldn’t be a bad
thing. We do have a relatively hard time of it, after
all, which is also something the existentialists… you know, they’re a nice corrective to Freud,
because Freud says hey, you’re probably healthy unless something terrible has happened
to you. And the existentialists come along and say
yeah, but something terrible happens to everyone. So you know, existence itself is sufficient
cause for human insanity. And you know, I basically buy that. I think everyone has an impossible existential
and moral burden. It’s a condition of life. And so, when you see a creature like that,
you think yeah, it’s no wonder you’re cracked and maybe somewhat dangerous, but
man you’ve got the motivation for it, so, you know, a little understanding might be
in order. You know, when I see people who are agoraphobic,
they come to me and they say, well I’ve become afraid of everything. I think, yeah that’s easy to understand. I just can’t figure out how the hell it
was any different than that. How did you ever manage to not be afraid of
everything? Because that’s the question. And that’s the fundamental existential question
too. When you’re surrounded by infinite vulnerability,
how the hell can you stay calm? Well, you know, there’s a bunch of answers
to that, we’ve explored some of them. Partly is, well you organise yourself with
everybody else so that the chaos is at least held at bay. You know, you’re not confronted at every
single second with the possibility of insanity or disease or death. You could put some distance between you and
that. And that’s not an illusion, it’s like,
you know, you don’t want to spend the night in a hospital room where an epidemic of Ebola
is raging. And that’s not a psychological problem. You just don’t want to be there, and intelligibly
so. So even putting any distance between you and
that outcome isn’t illusory. But then, you know, there’s the other things
that we do too, which is try to find meaningful things within the confines of our own life. And the destructive and nihilistic philosophies
basically always claim that that’s delusional. And I don’t believe that, I think that’s
wrong. And I think it’s dangerous, and I think
it’s almost everything that students are now taught in universities. And so, over the last ten years, it seems
to me to be, and maybe this is an overstatement… but the university education in the humanities
and often the social sciences causes more harm than it does good. Because this is basically what it teaches
students, at a point in their life where instead of confronting the radical uncertainty underneath
everything, is that, you know, you should be invited into life, helped find a niche
that’s fulfilling from a human perspective, master that, and then you know, maybe start
thinking about extending yourself a little bit beyond that into the unknown. But to take people who hardly know what the
hell they’re doing to begin with, and then expose them to you know, post-modernist, ultra-rational
fundamental critique of everything, it’s like, what do you expect is going to happen
when people have that experience? Plus I think it’s wrong. That’s the worst of it. I don’t think it’s factually true, I don’t
think it’s philosophically true, and I think it’s dangerous. That’s a bad combination. And, you know, part of the reason I think
that people do this, and are such admirers of post-modern nihilism, is that it abdicates
the necessity of responsibility. You know, because people say, well I’m just
thinking it through. It’s like, you’re never just thinking
something through. The probability that motivation has nothing
to do with that is zero. Because we already know, just from the things
we covered in this class, that motivation frames your perceptions, you know. You can’t even see the damn gorilla when
you’re counting the basketballs. And so, you know, if you’re forming a rationalistic
critique of everything, and then you say, oh well, I’m not motivated, it’s like,
well you’re motivated when you count the basketballs, and so the probability that you’re
motivated when you’re doing something far more extensive and difficult than that is
100%. You know Jung would say, you know, this is
when we get back to the mythological underpinnings of things as well… in the Egyptian myth
of creation and reality, Osiris is the figure of tradition. So he sort of represents the dominance hierarchy,
roughly speaking, in all of its manifestations. And he has an evil brother named Set. Set is a typical figure in fairy tales. You know, in The Lion King you see Scar, who’s
exactly the same figure, and the Scar/Set figure stands for the proclivity of bureaucracies
to degenerate into malevolent totalitarian states, which is always a problem, right,
because they rigidify and then oppress. That’s the price you pay for existing within
a hierarchy. And then they rigidify and oppress sometimes
because that’s just what happens as they age. And sometimes because there’s a voice recommending
that as a mode of being. “It’s okay if you do this, it’s okay
if you break this rule, what the hell difference does it make anyways?” You see some of that being played out right
now with the revelation of all those Panama papers, right? Which is a huge revelation of corruption (hardly
surprising) at high levels of power all around the world. Now I see the… you know, at the bottom of
everything, so this is the archetypal depths, I see this battle in the human soul, basically,
between an attitude that says “despite its limitations, life is valuable and worth preserving
and improving”. That’s proposition 1. And the other proposition is: “the suffering
that life involves renders it ethically untenable and physiologically and psychologically unbearable,
and as a consequence of that, it should just be eradicated”. And so it’s a binary choice, in some sense. Yes to being, or no? And you know, you can conjure up powerful
arguments on both sides of that. But to some degree, your whole being is an
argument between those two questions. You know, and one of the things that Jung
said, which I think is extremely worthwhile, is that you should figure out what archetypal
forces are in charge of your being. Because they’re there whether you know it
or not. Now, you know, we’ve walked through that
in some detail. You can look at it… in a sense, from a biological
perspective, it’s more mechanistic. You know, you’re a tool of hunger and anger
and fear and love, and lust and all those primordial forces that make up your field
of experience. That’s a purely biological way of thinking
about it. A more archetypal way of thinking about it
is that those things are actually characters, or personalities. And they’re organised into hierarchies that
are also characters and personalities. And anger and fear and resentment and hatred
and the carnivorous soul of human beings and all of those things aggregate into one form
of meta-personality. And all the things that you might think about
as existing in opposition to that aggregate into another. And then the top-most struggle for integration
is the struggle between those two things. That’s a very common mythological theme. That’s basically the battle between good
and evil in heaven. And that’s an unbelievably old… it’s as old an idea as human beings have. You know, the battle of the gods for dominance
in heaven. Even if it’s not strictly between good and
evil, even if it hasn’t been developed to the point of that ultimate opposition, it’s
still a battle, at some level, between titanic forces for domination. Well, that’s partly a description of your
own psyche, and partly a description of the organisation, or lack thereof, of societies
across time. Well, and it seems to me that… one of the
things that Jung was insistent upon, because he was trying to… and many of the thinkers
that we’ve covered in this series, they were trying to answer the question (this was
especially true for the clinicians) of how it is that an individual should conduct themselves
so that their mode of being is optimised. You can say well that’s mental health, but
that’s a radically insufficient way of describing that, because, well it’s not merely the
absence of pathology, it’s something much more complex. It’s something active and it’s not even
individual, it’s individual and social. You know, because you’re not going to be
mentally healthy unless you’re integrated into a functioning social community. You just can’t do it. Because other people are part of what keeps
you safe. Because they’re always wacking you when
you get out of line a little bit. They just tap you with sarcasm or raised eyebrows
or frowns or smiles. They’re constantly tapping you into being
a proper person, whatever the hell that is. But they’re telling you all the time what
it is. So Nietzsche’s idea was that the modern
world had landed itself in hot water, because its own proclivity for searching out the truth
had undermined its faith in traditional axioms of morality. Fair enough. That seems about right. And his cure for that was that people became,
he called it ‘overmen’, often translated as supermen, which were people who created
their own values to fill the void left by the absence of traditional values. But there’s a bunch of problems with that
idea. One is individuals probably can’t do it
because they don’t live long enough, and second, it’s really hard. I mean, just from the perspective of “what
are you going to be, the best philosopher who ever lived?” because that’s really
what it requires. And then the third problem is, what makes
you think you create values? Like it isn’t phenomenologically obvious
that you do. It’s more like you experience them, and
sometimes you don’t even know where they come from. You get angry. Do you know why? Maybe you’ll have to think about it for
like three days. So in what way you created that is, well,
it’s not self-evident. And Jung’s idea was well, the forces that
we had regarded as traditional sources of values were actually spontaneous constructions
of the human psyche. They weren’t arbitrary systems of rules. They were way deeper than that. And I think, if you have an ounce of biologist
in you, you immediately read that and think, yeah obviously. Obviously. Even the social rules that govern a dominance
hierarchy, they’re instilled in you. You know them. They’re right in your body. And so there’s a biological basis for your
understanding of culture right at that level. That’s damn near spinal. Like it’s old. So Jung’s secondary proposition, and this
is quite an interesting one, was that by attending to your fantasies and your dreams, and your
daydreams, for that matter, you can come into contact with some of the primordial psychic
forces that originally produced religious revelation. So that you can find what’s lost by looking
within. And that’s basically the entire point of
Jungian psychotherapy. And part of the reason I’m concentrating
on Jung is because guys like Rogers, you know, and the phenomenologists, they’re moving
down the same trail of thought, but they didn’t get as far as Jung as far as I can tell. Like, they never took it to its ultimate conclusion. You know Maslow, for example, talked about
a hierarchy of needs, and the self-actualised person was someone who had accomplished all
those basic needs and popped out at the top. It’s like, kind of true, but sort of primitive. Because it is by no means obvious that you
have to take care of all your basic material needs before you can act morally. It’s a foolish idea. It assumes that people are going to become
more moral as they get richer. Now, I’m not saying that they become less
moral, because I don’t believe that, but I don’t see that there’s any positive
association. It’s just that you can use your wealth well
or you can use it badly. Just like you can use your poverty well or
you can use it badly. So Maslow, it’s like yeah, there’s a hierarchy,
yes something emerges at the top, no it’s not a consequence of the fulfillment of needs,
it’s way too materialistic, it’s basically like a utopian socialist idea, right. If you feed people enough cake, all of a sudden
everyone will get along. It’s like, people aren’t like that at
all. So Jung took this idea of personal development,
as far as I can tell, to its ultimate extreme, to its logical conclusion. And that where he ran into the archetypes,
because what archetypes are, in some sense, is the ultimate instantiation of an idea. You can’t go beyond it. That’s why it’s an archetype. So there’s an archetype of death. Well, why? Because you can’t go past that. Words fail when you’re confronted by that. And there’s an archetype of love, and there’s
an archetype of evil, and all those things are beyond articulation in their archetypal
form. And they’re the place where your articulated
thought ceases to be relevant. So, for Jung, you know, the self-development
route was the confrontation of those things that you had abandoned within. Now, I’ve been thinking about Jung for a
very long time. And I think that one of the things that struck
me about the psychoanalysts is that they’re much too concerned about the idea that if
you’re properly organised as a human being, that organisation is intra-psychic, like it’s
in you somehow. So for Jung, the hero’s journey was a journey
into the unconscious. An individual journey into the unconscious. Now he started to see flaws in that idea as
he moved forward with his thinking, but one of the flaws in that idea is that you’re
not only individual, not at all. And if you’re situated properly, we’ll
say in being, your familial relationships are healthy, as well as the proper balance
being struck inside you, between the competing sub-personalities that make you up. And those things are actually not different,
you know what I mean? You can’t have one without the other. So to think about them even as separate spheres
is improper in a sense, because you’re limited in your well-being by the well-being of those
people who are in concentric circles around you. And no matter how well-organised you are internally,
it’s insufficient. You know, you see that reflected in stories
like the story of the Buddha. Because at one point, the Buddha, after being
walloped by knowledge of old age and sickness and death, because that’s really what does
him in, he attains enlightenment under a tree (for a variety of reasons we won’t go into). So he’s attained a perfect state of primarily
subjective being. And that’s sort of like, it’s a temptation,
there’s a temptation to remain there. But he shuts that down and then goes back
into the world and teaches people, because his realisation is, Nirvana attained individually
is not true Nirvana. You can’t be not suffering in a sea of suffering. You know, all that means is that you’ve
got a particular kind of blinder on. So he goes back, so to speak, and then suffers,
mythologically speaking, suffers a normal, human death. And in some sense that’s portrayed as voluntary. Sometimes I show people Pinocchio in this
class, I think we did a little bit of that… did we do a little bit of that? Well, you know, in Pinocchio, Pinocchio’s
trying to become a real person. And he has to do a variety of very strange
things to manage that, one of which is to go down into the depths of the ocean and confront
the most frightening thing, roughly speaking, and simultaneously rescue his father. Which is a very, very strange set of ideas,
you know. It’s definitely a descent into the Underworld,
there’s elements of Jonah and the Whale in there, which is a very, very old story. But there’s an idea that’s very much associated
with Jungian thinking too, and that is that in the background chaos of your mind, there
are depths. And in those depths are the forgotten or non-articulate
structures of your culture, but more than that, the forgotten or non-articulate parts
of your psyche that would make it a culture-creating entity. And that that has to be discovered in order
for you to have the courage to be an individual. And there’s nothing delusional about that,
you know, because the idea there, as opposed to say, the typical nihilistic or terror-management
theories, is that if you got your act together, the fear of death would no longer be the thing
that fundamentally rules you. Like that that’s actually possible. So there’s a weird idea there, and the idea
is not that fear of vulnerability and death is irrelevant, or not even that it’s not
central, but that people are so God-damn tough, that it’s possible that they can face that
directly and say: “that’s not going to be what rules my life”. And I believe people can do that. I’ve seen people do that, certainly, in
their careers. You know, even if they can’t articulate
that philosophy, you put them in a situation where they’re dealing with nothing but death
and destruction, and, you know, they can do it, which is mind-boggling. And a great thing to be able to see. And it’s… you know, you search in vain
throughout the annals of psychology for optimistic ideas. And I think that’s particularly true with
regards to, like, the more experimental brands of psychology that are associated with being,
like social psychology. Personality we’ll leave out of this for
the time-being, because it’s become more statistical, you know. But the idea that there is enough in you,
so that if you don’t flinch from life, you can become strong enough to master it, that’s
an amazing idea. It’s the only optimistic idea that I’ve
ever seen that’s profound that I actually believe. Because of most of the profound ideas that
are easy to believe are terrible ideas. You know, they have to do with the inevitability
of malevolence and death and insanity and suffering and all of that, you know, those
things trying to blow through your persona. But trying to find something optimistic to
counter-balance that, that’s tough. But you know, the other thing we know about
people now that we didn’t know a few years ago, is that if you put yourself in new environments
you actually change yourself genetically. You know, so if I take you out of your safe
environment and start you to expose you, say, to situations that you fear, you could say
that one of the reasons that you transform is because you observe yourself mastering
those situations. So you get bigger, so to speak, and the situations
get smaller. Lovely. You can account for that by learning. But there’s an additional dimension that
might be related to the learning, which is that if you put yourself in a new situation,
then different proteins start to be encoded in your brain and in the rest of your nervous
system. So you actually transmute, literally speaking. And the total range of human transmutation
is unexplored. So there’s this idea, let me show you, this
is a cool thing to know about. Okay so that’s a picture of a labyrinth
in the Chartres Cathedral. Now a cathedral is shaped like a cross. And then the focal point of the cathedral
is right at the middle of the cross. And the cross is an X, so to speak, and the
centre of the X is where you are. And the reason it’s a cross is because the
centre of that X is suffering. And so the central aspect of consciousness
of being is integrally associated with suffering, betrayal, all of those things. That’s the nature of the centre of the world. And so then the question might be, well how
do you cope with that? Well, the typical religious idea is that you
identify with a hero figure of some sort, although that’s often warped and morphed
into the idea that you believe in them. It’s not the right idea. The right idea is that you identify with them. So I can give you an example of that from
the Christian mass ceremony, which is actually a cannibalistic ritual. And it’s a very, very old idea. And the idea is that you become what you ingest,
right. And so, it’s… the mass ceremony, which
is in principle the eating of the flesh of a God, is not a ritual to instantiate articulated
belief. It’s a ritual to instantiate embodied transformation. You’re supposed to become what that represents. Question is, what the hell does it represent? Well we know some of that. It represents, for example, the ability to
pay attention. That’s one thing that for sure it represents. Because, you know, Christ is an analogue of
Horus, a very tight analogue of Horus, as a matter of fact. So… but what else does it represent? Well I can give you some suggestions. One of the things that is often required of
the believer in a traditional religion is a pilgrimage. Now, that was quite common in Christianity
in the Middle Ages, that’s kind of disappeared. You see bits and pieces of it in Judaism,
modern Judaism in particular, with the idea that, you know, every North American Jew,
for example, should go to Israel at least once. And then of course it’s a massively featured
element of traditional Islam. So you think, well what does a pilgrimage
do to someone? Well partly it’s a journey to the holy city,
whatever that means. The holy city is a symbolic representation
of an ideal mode of being. So you’re making a symbolic journey to an
ideal mode of being. Okay well let’s say you’re some ratty
villager from somewhere and you’ve never been more than a mile away from you’re village
and you’re functionally illiterate and you don’t know anything about the world. And one day you decide to take that 1500 or
3000 mile pilgrimage. The probability that you’re going to be
the same person when you come back as you were when you left is zero. And the reason for that is, well a lot of
things are going to happen to you along the way. God only knows. It’s going to be a big adventure. And you might say, well what’s the utility
in that? And the utility is that with each stressful
situation you encounter, and master, your capacity grows. And so maybe you’ll encounter five hundred
of those on your pilgrimage. Maybe it’s dangerous enough so there’s
a reasonable probability that you won’t even come back alive. But if you do come back, you’re not naïve. You’ve seen the world. You’re going to be someone who’s much
more difficult to contend with. And you’re going to be a bit of a foreigner
to the people in your village. That’s the price you pay for that. Remember in The Hobbit when Bilbo goes out
to confront the dragon and then he comes back, no one really likes him anymore. Like they respect him, but they think, well,
here’s this weird guy that transformed himself into a thief, and then went and confronted
a dragon. He went way the hell away from his home, so
he’s sort of contaminated by the foreigner, and he made it back. You don’t want to mess with him. But he’s not the same thing that he was
when he was there. And that’s all to the good. I mean, what happens in the next series of
books makes it quite evident that if Bilbo hadn’t undergone his adventure, then the
battle between good and evil would have gone to the evil side. That’s the entire plot of The Lord of the
Rings. It’s this massive fantasy of good versus
evil. Just like Harry Potter. And those ideas never go away. You see that with The Avengers too. In the… one of the scenes in there is extremely
interesting. So there’s this scene where… what do they call those foreign aliens? Is it Katari or something like that? You know, the big monsters that come through
the portal and invade New York? Anyways I don’t remember what they’re
called. But there’s a very interesting scene in
there where the armed forces send a hydrogen bomb to take New York out because of the descent
of these terrible aliens. And Iron Man, who’s this weird android-like
thing (so he’s a human being that’s transforming himself to something that’s more than a
human being… one of the things that happens with Iron Man is that his suit gets increasingly
gold as the series continues, there’s a real reason for that), he makes a personal
sacrifice to avert the hydrogen bomb, and then it blows up all the bad guys and then
he falls to Earth, just like Icarus. That’s pretty cool. And then, what’s really interesting is that
when he falls to Earth and he’s dead, it’s The Hulk who wakes him up. And the reason for that is that The Hulk represents
masculine energy that’s completely unbound. And then Tony Stark is sort of this tightly
constrained intellect character who’s half-machine… he’s not enough savage, that’s one way
of looking at it, and so when he’s lying there half-dead he’s missing something. And so The Hulk comes along and yells him
into being again. And he’s already made a relationship with
The Hulk. And these things are genuine myths because
they’re co-created with their audience, you know. All of these stories have a back-story. And if you’re a comic book writer and you
deviate improperly from the back-story then you’re going to get like ten thousand letters
from fans saying “well what about issue #118 on page 13? That’s part of the necessary plot.” Well, alright, keep Tony Stark in mind for
a minute. Now, you see this labyrinth here, so I’ll
tell you what you do in the Chartres Cathedral. So you’ve got this cross, and then this
thing is at the point of it. Now, if you go on a pilgrimage, you go out
there and expand your personality by visiting the North part of the world and the West part
of the world and the East part of the world and the South part of the world. You go everywhere. You’re a wanderer that’s gone everywhere. But maybe you can’t go to the damn pilgrimage
for one reason or another, so you do a symbolic pilgrimage. You go to the cathedral, and you go to the
point of suffering, so to speak, and then you enter this maze, and to get to the middle
of the maze, which is very much like the flower that the Buddha sits in, because it’s a
flower. To get to the middle, you can’t just walk
straight to the middle. You have to wander the entire maze and cover
every square foot of it. And only once you’ve done that (so that’s
a symbolic journey to North, East, West, and South), only after you’ve done that do you
get to the middle. And the middle signifies the point where the
suffering that’s represented by the entire structure of that building can be withstood. And you know, you’ve got to understand,
this idea is so… you think about what those damn Europeans were doing when they were building
those cathedrals. You know, some of those things took five hundred
years to build. You can’t even imagine a modern society
building something that would take five hundred years to build. It’s unimaginable to us. And these cathedrals were so expensive, they
were like the trip to the moon in the 1960s. The whole damn culture was devoted to producing
these fantastic structures of stone and light that had this particular message embodied
in them. It’s like, why were they doing that? Well, you know, you can get cynical about
it, although I think that would be a little premature, but this is part of the answer. It’s like, the culture was trying to figure
something out. And what they were trying to figure out was
where you should be. And how you should get there. And to point out as well how massive the consequences
were of failure versus success. Because failure, that leads to hell. And success, that leads to heaven. And you know, you can think about that as
something projected into the future life, which Nietzsche called ‘the biggest error
Christianity ever made’. But if you dispense with that, at least provisionally,
the reality of that becomes clear right away. What happens if you don’t take the voyage? Well you become corrupt, because you’re
weak. It’s as simple as that. And you have every reason to become corrupt. Like you could say the conditions of existence
are such that if you cannot tolerate them, you will become corrupt. And I just can’t see, in any way, how that’s
not self-evidently true. And so, if you don’t take the voyage, well
what happens is everything tilts towards hell around you, but you have a lot more influence
than you think. So you don’t know exactly what waves of
causality are emanating from your decisions. You have no idea. And then if you do decide to go everywhere
and to pick up your responsibility, then what emanates from you, maybe in receding waves,
is the idea that it’s possible to live life properly and to make things better. And that’s an idea… like I think that idea is more powerful than
death. And it would be really good if that was the
case. You know, the existential element comes in,
and I guess this is also the element of faith, is that the only way you’re ever going to
figure that out is if you try it. Because no one else can demonstrate the truth
or falsity of those two branching pathways except you, because you have to test it in
the conditions of your own life. And at some point… by the time you hit about
30, nobody can tell you what to do. And you think, well, hooray. It’s like, let’s go a little easy on the
celebrating. You know, it’s quite a relief when you have
a problem and you go to someone and they say, well here’s what you can do about it. But by the time you’re fully adult, your
damn life is so individualised that, you know, you could use moral guidelines and you should,
for sure, but you’re basically stuck with the choices. All these old ideas, they suggest that if
your choice is to voluntarily confront and to improve and to repair, that not only do
you repair the things around you (they don’t have to be within you, they can be anywhere
around you), you continually heal the structure of being. Well, that would be a good thing to try, you
know? It’s a big deal, it’ll keep you busy. It’ll provide your suffering with some meaning. That’s a big deal. And the alternative looks dreadful. Well, you know, I walked you through all these
various theories, some of them about behaviour, and some of them about personality, and some
of them about philosophy, and some of them about clinical psychology. And it’s an attempt to allow you to take
multiple snapshots of what a human being is and how we might manifest ourselves. For me, knowing all those things has been
ridiculously useful, ridiculously useful. Far more practical than anything else I ever
learned. And one of the advantages to knowing about
personality is that, you know, instead of reducing the individual to some set of measurable
phenomena, which I’m all for by the way, it also expands your conception of what the
individual can be to an almost unlimited degree. So instead of a human being being something
that has to waver and be crushed under the weight of its own being, a human being could
easily be something that could stand up and say, yeah, well, I can handle that. And I think people can do that. People are so damn tough, it’s unbelievable. I’ve seen people go through things that
are just grinding, terrible, and not only come out the other side, but actually put
themselves together enough to clearly be a force that rescues the culture and tries to
improve the structure of being. And so hooray for us. If we can do that, that more than justifies
whatever horrors might be laid at our collective feet. So, I would say, don’t underestimate yourself. You guys all have a lot going for you. You’re smart, you’re young, you’re reasonably
conscientious, a number of you are creative. You have access, tremendous access, to technological
power. So God only knows what you might manage to
hammer yourself into over the next thirty years or so. But the more people that try to make things
better, consciously, rather than worse, the better off everything is going to be. And that would be a hell of a fine thing to
aim for. That’s mostly what I’ve learned from studying
personality. So thank you very much for attending the course,
and good luck with the final! |
[Music] well you might as well start by writing
down that URL I'll show it to you again at the end of class that's where the
syllabus is the syllabus will tell you pretty much everything you need to know
about the class the there's a text this is it it consists of readings from a
larger text I use it because it's old but a lot of the theorists that we're
going to talk about are also old and so I found this particular text accurate
and many of the people that we're going to talk about are very a very
sophisticated views of personality and I think that it does you a disservice
unless you read something that's sufficiently sophisticated so that you
actually understand at least to some degree what the people that were going
to study we're talking about we might as well start I suppose with a definition
of personality it's hard to define something that's that general because
when you're speaking about human beings it's not that simple to figure out what
constitutes personality and what constitutes something else but so I'm
going to hit at it from a couple of different perspectives and while I'm
doing so I would like you also to consider the nature of what you're going
to learn a human personality is essentially unfathomable human beings
are unbelievably complicated and and we're nested in systems that are also
unbelievably complicated there are more patterns of connections between neurons
in your brain then there are subatomic particles
in the universe by a substantial margin you can look up Gerald Adelman if you
want to find out about that and so it's not unreasonable to point out that
you're the most complicated thing we know of by many orders of magnitude and
the probability that you can understand yourself in anything approaching
totality is extraordinarily low so this makes the study of personality something
very daring and hopeless and complicated now we're going to cycle through a very
large number of theorists and what you'll find is that although there are
commonalities between them there are market differences and so then you might
ask yourself well what's the point of studying this sequence of theorists and
ideas if there's no point of agreement between them and I would say first there
are points of agreement between them although personality hasn't advanced to
the point where I would say that we have a homogeneous theory that's free of
internal contradictions but I would also say that personality is a hybrid
discipline it's partly science but it's partly engineering the clinical element
of it I would say is more like engineering and what engineers do is try
to do things they try to make something happen and they are informed by theory
but the point is still to build something and when you're working as a
clinical psychologist and most of the initial fears that we'll discuss for the
first little more than a third to a half of the course or clinical theorists
they're trying to build something and they're dealing with very very difficult
conceptual problems because they're either trying to cure
mental disorders or maybe even unhappiness and trying to bring about
health and the problem with that is that it's not a straightforward thing to
define a mental disorder from a scientific perspective because what's
healthy mentally and what's not is partly social judgment and it's partly
socially constructed and it partly has to do with norms and it partly has to do
with ideals because you might also say that to be healthy is to be normal but
you could also say that to be healthy is to be ideal and then of course you run
into the problem of having to conceptualize an ideal and it isn't
self-evident that science is capable of conceptualizing an ideal because ideals
tend to fall into the domain of moral judgments say or philosophical judgments
rather than scientific judgments per se so what I would say to you is that it
would be worthwhile to approach this course as if you were an engineer of the
human spirit an engineer of your own spirit to begin with but also an
engineer of the spirits of other people because as you interact with other
people you inevitably tell them what you want and what you don't want when they
give you what you want and what you admire you respond positively to them
you pay attention to them you smile at them you focus you focus your thoughts
on them you interact with them and you reward them for acting in a particular
manner and when they don't respond the way that you want then you punish them
with a look or by turning away or by rejecting their friendship or when
you're a child by refusing to play for them play with them
and so we're engaged in the co-creation of personalities our own and others and
that also brings up the same question what is it that we are all collectively
trying to be and trying to create I suspect that you all have the experience
of falling short of the ideal an ideal that you hold for yourself or an ideal
that other people hold for you I suspect that you all feel the negative
consequences of falling short of that ideal Freud would conceptualize that as
the super-ego imposing its judgment on the ego you being the ego the super-ego
being a hybrid I suppose of external forces and also your internalization of
those judgments and forces now personality per se I would say has these
elements of ideal and has structural elements of the way as well and we're
going to talk about those more in the second half of the class the structural
elements can be lined up and outlined more scientifically the second half of
the class concentrates more on physiology brain physiology and on
statistical approaches to the description of personality I suppose you
might say that that outlines the territory the course is called
personality and its transformations because we have personalities that's who
you are now but our personalities are also capable of transformation of change
I mean obviously we think about that is learning some of that might be regarded
as factual learning and some of it might be
regarded as learning how to perceive and behave and I would say that the clinical
psychologists that will cover to begin with are much more concerned with the
nature of the implicit structures that shape your perceptions and also the
implicit structures that shape your behaviors and how they're integrated in
relationship to your negative emotion health and well-being whereas the
thinkers in the second half are more concerned about laying out the
structural elements of those features and relating them to underlying se
mechanistic phenomena making the Assumption which seems warranted that
there's some relationship between your personality and the manner in which your
brain functions I'm going to try to provide you with a meta-narrative that
will help you unite these different theories I've often found it useful when
I'm trying to remember something to have a story to hang the facts on otherwise
you're faced with the necessity of doing nothing but memorization and it isn't
obvious to me that memorization actually constitutes knowledge what constitutes
knowledge is the generation of a cognitive structure that enables you to
conduct yourself more appropriately in life and so I suppose you might say that
of course in psychology you could argue that a course in psychology especially
in personality is a course in Applied wisdom as well assuming that wisdom is
in part your capacity to understand yourselves so that you don't so that you
don't present too much of an intolerable mystery to yourself and also to
understand others so that you can predict their behavior understand their
motivations negotiate with them listen to them and formulate joint games
with them so that you can integrate yourself reasonably well with another
person and with a family and in society well the structural elements of
personality might be regarded as the implicit structures that govern your
perception and that tilt you towards certain kinds of behaviors I can give
you some examples we can talk about the Big Five model just briefly the Big Five
personality model is a statistical model which we'll cover in detail trade by
trade partner partly during the second half of the course the way that the Big
Five was generated was that its tread being generated over about 50 years that
personality psychologists gathered together adjectives with in the English
language first that were used to describe human beings as many adjectives
as they could collect and then subjected them to a process called factor analysis
and what factor analysis does is enable you statistically to determine in some
sense how similar adjectives are to one another so for example if you gave 1,000
people a list of adjectives to describe themselves with and one of the
adjectives was happy and another of the adjectives was social you'd find that
those who rated themselves high unhappy would also rate themselves high on
social and those who rated themselves low unhappy would also rate themselves
low on social and by looking at those patterns of covariation you can
determine what the essential dimensions are of human personality one of the
dimensions is roughly happiness that's extraversion another dimension is
neuroticism it's a negative emotion dimension so if you ask someone if
they're anxious and they score high say on a scale of 1 to 7 they're also likely
to score on another item that says that they're
sad and it turns out that negative emotions clump together and so that
people who experience more of one negative emotion have a propensity to
experience more of all of them there's another dimension called agreeableness
and agreeable people are self-sacrificing compassionate and
polite if you're dealing with an agreeable person they don't like
conflict they care for other people if you're dealing with an agreeable person
they're likely to put your concerns ahead of theirs they're non competitive
and cooperative it's a dimension where women are women score more highly than
men on agreeableness across cultures including those cultures where the
largest steps have been taken towards producing an egalitarian social
circumstance like Scandinavia actually the gender differences in personality
there are larger than they are anywhere else another trait is conscientiousness
conscientiousness is an excellent trait if you want to do well in in school and
in work especially if you're a manager an administrator I can't say we
understand a lot about conscientiousness although it it reliably emerges from
factor analytic studies of adjectives groups across different countries
conscientious people are diligent industrious and orderly they're
orderliness tilts them towards political conservatism by the way because it turns
out that your inbuilt temperament your inbuilt personality
which constitutes a set of filters through which you view the world also
alters the manner in which you process information and influences the way that
you vote and so you might say and I do believe that this is true or we've been
doing a lot of research on this as of late the more accurate a measure you
take of someone's political beliefs the more you find that personality is what's
predicting them and I think that's a reasonable thing to think about because
you know you have to you have to figure out ways of simplifying the world right
because you just can't do everything and so
people are specialized they have specialized niches that they occupy you
can think about them as social niches can niche is a place where your
particular skills would serve to maintain you and so if you're
extroverted you're going to look for a social niche because you like to be
around people and if you're introverted you're going to spend much more time on
your own and so if you're an introverted person for example you're going to want
a job where you're not selling and where you're not surrounded by groups of
people who are making social demands on you all the time because it'll wear you
out whereas if you're extroverted that's
just exactly what you want and so the extrovert sees the world as a place of
social opportunity and the introvert sees the world as a place to retreat
from and spend time alone and it turns out that both of those modes of being
are valid that the issue at least to some degree is whether or not you're
fortunate enough to match your temperament with the demands of the
environment and I suppose also whether you're fortunate enough fortunate enough
so that you're born in an era where there actually is a niche for your
particular temperament because it isn't necessarily the case that that will be
the case imagine that all of these temperamental
dimensions vary because of evolutionary pressure right so there's a distribution
of extraversion a normal distribution most people are somewhere in the middle
and then as you go out towards the extremes there are fewer and fewer
people and what that means is that on average across large spans of time there
have been environments that match every single position on that distribution
with most most of the environments matching the center because otherwise we
wouldn't have evolved that way and so sometimes being really extroverted is
going to work well for you in a minority of environments a minority of niches and
sometimes it's just going to be a catastrophe I suspect for example that
if you live in a tyrannical society where any sign of of personally oriented
activity is likely to get you in trouble that being extroverted and low in
neuroticism would it be a very good idea because you're gonna be mouthy and happy
and saying a lot of things unable to keep your thoughts to yourself and
you're going to be relatively fearless now I don't know that for sure
because we've haven't done the studies that precisely match temperamental
proclivity to environmental demand but you get what I mean
so conscientious people anyways conscientious people are industrious and
orderly we know a little bit about orderliness it seems to be associated
strangely enough with disgust sensitivity which I suppose isn't that
surprising you know if you take an orderly person then you put them in a
messy kitchen they respond with disgust and want nothing more than to straighten
it all out and organize it and clean it and there's tremendous variability and
orderliness and as I said orderliness predicts political conservatism it's not
the only thing but it's certainly one of the things the correlation between
conscientiousness and and grades is about 0.4 it's about 16% of the variance
it's it's the second best predictor of university grades after intelligence and
we'll talk about intelligence during this course too intelligence is actually
a relatively straightforward concept I don't think I'll get into it today but
conscientious people they're industriousness and they're orderliness
makes them schedule their time so they make efficient use of their time they
use schedules and that sort of thing we haven't been able to figure out anything
about the underlying biology or psychology of industriousness we've
tried really dozens and dozens of tests attempting to find a laboratory measure
on which industrious people do better and we failed completely and there's no
animal models of industriousness either and so I would say it's a great mystery
that remains at the heart of trait psychology and maybe it's a human
specific category you know I mean you can think of sled dogs maybe of being
industrious and maybe and maybe sheep dogs and animals that work like that but
of course they've been trained by human beings so but it isn't obvious that
animals are industrious the same way we are
I mean industriousness involves sacrificing the present for the future
something like that and you seems like you have to be able to conceptualize
time in order to sacrifice the present for the future one of the things that I
would recommend that you do as students in this course and maybe in every course
speaking of industriousness is come up with a plan of attack for the course and
use a scheduler you know if you treat your university career like a full-time
job you're much more likely to succeed and if you keep up on the readings and
you keep up on the on the essays and all of that then you're much less likely as
well to fall into despair when you get too far behind using a Google Calendar
or something like that to organize a schedule for the entire semester at the
beginning of the semester can be invaluable especially if you're not very
industriousness very industrious because it can keep you on track and one of the
things we know about industrious people is that they are very good at using
schedules and at planning the use of their time and so I would like to say
that you should all be smarter but I don't know how you could be smarter we
don't know anything about how to improve intelligence and I suppose we don't
really know anything about how to improve industriousness either but I can
tell you that people who are industrious come up with a strategy for solving the
problem that's ahead of them and then they do whatever they can to stick to
the strategy and so for example if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple
of hours three hours and you filled in a google calendar whatever you happen to
use with a strategy for studying and a list of when all your assignments are
due and all of that and when you're going to sit down and study then you
won't be in a position where you have to cram for 10 hours a day hopelessly right
before you know an important exam it's also a very ineffective way of studying
by the way I mean first of all people who cram for 10 hours say they're
studying for 10 hours but they rarely are because well I can't study for 10
hours I don't have the power of concentration that would enable me to do
that for that prolonged period of time I can manage about three hours of
intense intellectual activity before I'm pretty done and it's also the case that
if you study and then sleep and then study and then sleep and then study and
then sleep you space it out then you're much more
likely to remember it's also much more likely that you're you're much more
likely to remember if you try to recall the material and so highlighting and
that sort of thing isn't very useful but reading closing the book summarizing
what you've read without opening the damn book that's useful and the reason
for that is that you're practicing remembering and that's what you have to
practice if you're practicing memorization you have to practice
remembering you don't just go over the thing over and over
that'll help you with recognition memory but some but it won't help you with
recall memory so anyways the last trade is openness openness is a creativity
trait it's also associated with intelligence in that intelligent people
and I'm speaking technically of IQ tend to be higher and tend to be more
creative which is hardly surprising creative people are more likely to be
liberal politically by the way they like novelty they like aesthetics they like
fiction they like movies they like art they like poetry there is something
about them that grants them an aesthetic sensitivity and and that's a that's an
inbuilt trait and it's not the case by the way that everyone's creative in fact
far from it we've used the creative achievement questionnaire to to measure
people's creativity I'll talk to you about that later in the class and the
creative achievement questionnaire takes 13 dimensions of creativity so you know
writing dancing acting scientific investigation entrepreneurial activity
architectural activity cooking there's a there's a handful of others singing etc
you know the sorts of things that you would assume that people could be
creative about and then it asks people to rate themselves on a scale from one
to ten on their level of achievement with regards to all those creative
domains with zero being I have no training or proficiency in this area and
70% of people score zero across the entire creative achievement
questionnaire a tiny proportion of people are outliers way out and they're
creative in many dimensions simultaneously and it
exceptionally creative and it turns out as you'll find out that that pattern
which is called a Pareto distribution where most people stack up at zero and a
few people are way out on the creative end characterizes all sorts of
distributions like the distribution of money for example which is why 1% of the
people have the overwhelming majority of the money it's a different 1% across
time it like it churns and you're much more likely to be in the 1% if you're
older logically enough because one of the things you do as you age is you
trade youth for money if you're fortunate I don't think the trade is
really worth it but that's the best you've got so anyways those particular
traits you can think of those as ways that you simplify the world right
there's lots of different places that you can act in the world and there's
lots of different ways you can look at it and survive that's why you can be a
plumber and a lawyer and an engineer and those all work right even though they're
very different modes of being and you can have different personalities and
survive as long as you're capable of finding the place where your particular
filters and behavioral proclivities match the demand of the environment and
a huge part I would say of successful adaptation is precisely that now there
are other elements of personality too one of the things that I've been struck
by and this is actually one of the criticisms I have of the psycho analysts
and the clinicians in general even though I have great admiration for them
and would say that what they have to say is very much worth listening to is that
it's not obvious that your personality is inside you you know what you think
you know a human being is a strange multi-level thing and you might ask
yourself well for example know is your mother more a part of you
than your arm or maybe even more precisely is your child more a part of
you than your arm it's certainly people will do drastically self-sacrificing
things to maintain the lives of their children and so you're you're a person
and you're made out of all sub sort of subcomponents of a person none
of which you could see when you look at a person all the complicated machinery
inside you that makes you who you are and then outside of that of course
you're nested in all sorts of complex systems so you're part of a family and
and you're part of a community and that's part of a province and that's
part of the state and that's part of an international consortium of states and
that's part of an ecosystem and how you make a distinction between you and the
systems that you're embedded in is also of extraordinary difficulty and when it
and one of the things that you have to do as a clinical psychologist for
example if you're trying to diagnose someone with depression you think you
think well this person's dreadfully unhappy well you can think about that as
a problem with their psychological adjustment you know the way that they're
looking at the world but if you look at the epidemiological literature for
example one of the things that you find is that very many people have a first
depressive episode after something genuinely terrible has happened to them
right they've lost someone or they've become injured or or they've become
unemployed because unemployment is a terrible shock to people and it's not
precisely self-evident that you can consider someone who's unhappy and
desperate because they no longer have a job depressed they're certainly sad and
they're not doing very well but the fact that they no longer have an income is
actually something with dramatic practical consequences and treating that
as if it's a mental disorder seems to be counterproductive it's also the case for
example that if you're if someone comes into you to talk to you and they're very
upset and they may manifest the signs of say an anxiety disorder or again
depression or other other clinical features for that matter you have to do
a careful analysis of their manner in which they're embedded in their family
because and this is something that we'll talk about quite thoroughly when we come
to discussing Freud is that well you know it's not like everybody's families
are necessarily particularly happy places to be
you know I mean human beings are very dependent we have a very long period of
dependency partly because we're so cortically hyperdeveloped it takes a
very long time to program us into something that's vaguely capable of
maneuvering on its own and that produces of course the very tight familial bonds
that we all that we all desperately require because who wants to be alone in
the world but it also it also exposes us to the probability of becoming entangled
into even multi-generational family pathology and it isn't obvious always
uncertainty hasn't been to me when I've seen my clients that the fundamental
problem with the client is the client sometimes the fundamental problem is is
the family and and perhaps that person has been identified as the problem
person it's rather convenient for everyone who's involved to make that
presupposition it's also the case that this is the Freudian idea fundamentally
this is the Oedipal idea that it's very easy for people to become over dependent
on their parents and and for the parents to facilitate that and then for the
primary developmental problem for the individual in fact to become free of the
interfering elements of the family so that they can exist as independent
individuals well and then of course there are cultural variations in that
that make that proposition complex but that's a fundamental tenant say of
Freudian psychology a lot of the clinical psychologists all of whom that
we're going to study have a pronounced Western orientation one of the
fundamental presuppositions is that part of the hallmark of positive
psychological development is the creation of an individual that's capable
of acting independently and that's I would say an implicit ideal that lurks
at the bottom of the clinical presuppositions of all the theorists
that are classic psychologists so now it's a very old picture it's
Jonah emerging from the whale it's a variant
of a myth the myth is the dragon myth I suppose the dragon myth is that there's
a dragon that lives under the ground that's eternal and now and then it rises
out of the ground to threaten the state and someone within the state determines
to go confront the dragon voluntarily and does so and then brings back
something of great value sometimes if the the the hero is generally male
sometimes the thing of great value is a female that the dragon has kidnapped
that's a st. George story and sometimes it's gold another treasure like in the
story of The Hobbit and story that you all know very well it's a classic hero
story and the hero story is another fundamental element of the clinical
theories I would say it's predicated on the idea that you learn through
voluntary contact with that that frightens or disgusts you and that's a
hallmark of psychoanalytic theory Jung, Carl Jung who we'll discuss in detail
said his primary dictum was“In sterquiliniis invenitur” which I'm sure I'm massacring because it's Latin but it
meant ”in filth it will be found” and one of the hallmarks of the clinical
theories is that within the confines of everyone's experience and you can think
about this as experience out in the world or experience in the unconscious
mind there are dirty little secrets let's say and skeletons and dreadful old
fears and remnants of abuse and memories of pathological behavior and failures of
courage that you leave you undeveloped perhaps out of avoidance and that the
psychoanalytic process is precisely the careful encounter with those forgotten
and and repressed elements of the self in the hope that a clear encounter will
redeem them unites them with the remainder of your personality and make
yours make you stronger in consequence and I would say that that's just a
variant of the manner in which human beings learn and we'll talk about this
more in relationship to Piaget because you always learn when you're wrong which
is very annoying now what do you learn when you're correct you you're walking
in the world you're operating in the world you have a sense of what you want
to have happen you're always looking at the world through this sense of what you
want to have happen you're acting so that what you want to have happen will
happen and when it happens well then you're happy because well first of all
you get what you want and that's good maybe depending on what you want but
it's also good because if you get what you want when you act then it turns out
that your model of how to act is valid right the outcome that you get what you
want indicates no error on the part of your
model but it's very frequently the case that when you act to get what you want
you don't get what you want and then that's unpleasant because you don't get
what you want but it's even more unpleasant because it brings with it the
hint of a suggestion that the manner in which you're construing the world is
incorrect at some indeterminate level so for example if you tell a party tell a
joke at a party you presume that people will attend and then when they hear the
joke they will laugh and then if you tell the joke and it goes flat or even
worse disgusts and offends people then you're going to be taken aback and
that's partly because you didn't get what you want and that's not so good but
it's but it's more because there's something wrong with the way you
conceptualized the situation and then you're faced with a problem and the
problem is the emergence of a domain of the unknown it's like well what kind of
mistake did you make maybe you're not as funny as you think
you are not that could be a big problem maybe you're not around people that who
are the way you think they are maybe they don't like you as much as you
thought they liked you I mean the potential for various paranoid thoughts
of increasing severity to come welling up at you in a situation where you make
even a trivial social mistake is quite broad and when you make an error of that
sort you have to face it and sort through all the possibilities so that
you can find out what it was that you did wrong and how to retool it so that
in the future you don't make the same mistake and that requires well that
requires in some sense what you might describe as a journey into the belly of
the beast the beast being that place where things have fallen apart and where
you're overwhelmed with negative emotion and chaos and confusion and that's a
very old story that's the story of the journey to the underworld and the hero
is the person who makes the voluntary journey to the underworld to collect
what's been languishing down there and that's the basic motif of psychoanalytic
theory I would say it's the basic motif in some sense of clinical practice
because one of the things that you do as a clinician is find out what people are
afraid of and what they're avoiding and that can be in their past or in their
present or in their future break it down into smaller pieces and help them devise
strategies of approach and mastery and that improves the quality of their
personality and helps develop them into people who won't make the same mistakes
over and over again all right so well why these this plethora of tools well I
said in some sense being a personality psychologist is like being an engineer
you're trying to build better people when you might say that if you're a
carpenter or a mechanic that your ability to fix a vehicle or build a
house is dependent on your proficiency with regards to the use of a multitude
of tools and so then you might say well the more tools you have at your disposal
the more likely it is that you're going to manage things properly and so what I
would like to offer you is the possibility that what you're going to
encounter in this course is a series of sophisticated conceptual tools that will
help you understand yourself better and therefore better orient yourself in the
world I regard this course as intensely practical and that's because I believe
that you have nothing to rely on in your life that's more crucial to your success
as you move through life than your character and your personality that's
what you bring to every situation and the more sophisticated you are in
relationship to yourself and others the more you understand people the deeper
you understand the nature of your own being the more likely it is that you're
going to proceed through your life in a manner that will make you pleased to
exist rather than displeased to exist I've collected the writings of people
that I regard as of incomparable brilliance they're difficult to
understand their concepts are complex but it's not surprising because the
subject matter is complex and vital and so it requires work and I would say try
to keep up on the readings if you would it's going to make the course much more
much richer for you and I would say because people often ask me well how
should I read for this course because there's a lot of reading and the answer
is read as if it matters that's the right answer
don't be thinking about how it's going to be tested if you do the readings and
you come to the lectures then the tests aren't particularly difficult
but you should read the readings as if the person is writing about you and you
should try to understand what the person says because it's another tool for you
to use and I would say well with my clients you know I used the approaches
of one theorist for one client and the approaches of another theorist for
another client it seems to me to depend to some degree actually on the
temperament of the client I found for example that people who are very high in
openness which is the creativity dimension are quite amenable to a
Jungian approach whereas people who are more practical conscientious lowe and
openness are much more amenable to a behaviorist approach we don't really
know enough about psychology yet to match treatment to temperament but those
are the some of the things that I've experienced ok practicalities well
there's a website I gave you the URL I'll put it up again at the end of class
the URL lists all the readings that aren't in the textbook and so the
textbook contains the classic readings readings from people like Jung and Freud
and Piaget and so forth Rogers and as I said I picked that particular textbook
because I believe that the author did a very credible job of summarizing what's
very difficult to summarize so and then also on the website there are links to
papers because much of the more modern material that pertains say to
neuroscience and also to trait personality I think it's better just to
read the original papers and I'll detail them out with you as we go through and
that'll also give you some familiarity with original psychological papers which
are again there's a there's an idiom that you have to master in order to
understand them but you might as well practice it especially if you're
interested in continuing with psychology in your educational practice or as a
career it's good to get accustomed to it so there again is the URL for the class if
you go to Jordan be Peterson comm which isn't too hard to remember
assuming you can remember my name then classes are listed on the left hand side
you can just find the syllabus there alright so here's what we're going to
cover well today obviously this is the introduction and overview the class is a
little strange this year because one day it's an hour and the next day it's two
hours so not exactly sure how we're going to negotiate our way through that
but we'll figure it out historical perspectives mythological
representations well I told you that I would try to provide you with a
meta-narrative that might enable you to link the theories that we're going to
talk about together so I'm going to describe to you what you might regard as
a conceptual language and as far as I can tell it's that imagine imagine that
there are two kinds of things that you need to know and I believe this to be
the case I believe that you need to know what the world is made of and I suppose
that's the proper domain of science but then you need to know how to act and
that's a whole different thing and you need to know how to act that's the thing
you need to know most of anything anything because of course you're a
living creature and action in relationship to desired goals is is
everything to you and you can think about that from a Darwinian perspective
you have to act at least so that you can survive at least so that you can find a
partner that's that's life and so part of the question is well how does the
world look if you think about it as a place to act and the answer isn't a
place of value free objects that's not what the world looks like and you can't
act in a world of value free objects because there's no way of choosing
between them if everything has zero value why would you choose one thing
over another you live in a world where things present themselves to you as of
different value and that's partly a consequence of your temperament although
it's a consequence of other things and so what I'm going to try to do is to
provide you with schema that describes the world of
morality roughly speaking which is how to act and tell you a little bit about
what I think the languages which I think was derived from Darwinian processes and
I believe that it's within that structure that the clinical theories
logically nest and so that'll give you a way of linking one theory to another
from a conceptual perspective without having to rely so much on sheer
memorization then we'll talk about heroic and shamanic initiation and the
reason we're going to do that is because well people people used shamanic
initiation for tens of thousands of years all over the world and they have a
particular kind of structure the paper by merchant Le ADA which is linked on
the site is a very interesting one and details out some of these processes
there have been intelligent commentators like Andre Ellenberger Burge a who wrote
the discovery of the unconscious which i think is an outstanding book who late
the processes that the psychoanalyst psychoanalysts uncovered in the late
part of the 19th century an early part of the 20th century back to these more
primordial rituals of personality transformation and so we're going to
situate ourselves in some sense in deep history talking first about the
underlying mythological landscape then talking about archaic modes of
personality conceptualization and transformation and then moving from
there into constructivism and and we're going to concentrate mostly on Jean
Piaget who is a developmental psychologist constructivists believed
that you make yourself out of the information that you gather in the world
so you're an exploring creature you explore specifically when the maps that
you're using in the world are no longer orienting yourself properly when they're
producing errors so you go out and gather information and assemble yourself
from the information that you discovered then the depth psychologists Jung and
Freud I think I'm going to with Jung I'm going to walk you through some films I'm
not going to use the film's per se I'm going to use Clips stills from the film
but in you know the film so in in
chronological order and I'm going to try to explain to you how you might use
Union presuppositions to understand what the films are about you know if you
think about a film say like The Lion King which is an extraordinarily popular
film it's a very strange phenomena that you go and watch it right I mean think
about it it's drawings of animated animals that
in some sense represent you they're very low resolution but you perceive them
immediately as living things and you attribute to the motivation and and and
motive power and understanding you do it automatically without even thinking
about it and there's a classic plot that lies underneath those stories and the
plots are very very very very old and that's why you can understand them and
the reason you can understand them is because life has a plot or maybe it has
a couple of plots a multitude of plots but life has a plot and if it didn't we
wouldn't be able to understand each other and so I'd like to illustrate that
for you by analysis of some of these films I think it's the best way to
understand someone as sophisticated as young who is very difficult to get a
handle on Freud I'm going to do the same thing all the way I'm going to show you
a film with Freud I'm going to show you a film called crumb which is a
documentary and it's about a very badly enmeshed family and the attempts of the
family members to I suppose escape that I'll talk to you about Freud I'll show
you the film that should give you a sense of Freudian psychopathology which
is a very difficult thing otherwise to understand then there's a midterm a
midterm is multiple-choice you'll do it in class you'll have lots of time to
finish it it'll cover the material that we took that we studied up to that point
then we're going to talk about Rogers Carl Rogers who was a humanist Rogers
has a body-centered philosophy I suppose and he's interested as well in optimal
personal development and the role that interpersonal communication plays in
that Rogers hypothesis fundamentally and it's a very interesting one is that
honest communication between two people can produce personnel
transformation and and you know you might think well you kind of know that
already because there's something very engaging about a deep honest
conversation where you're able to say things that you wouldn't normally say
where you're being listened to by someone who's actually listening to you
and you're listening to them and in the conversation you're moving both of you
further to a different point that's different than a conversation where
you're right and you're trying to convince me or I'm right and I'm trying
to convince you which I would say is the typical conversation the the healing
conversation is more well what's up with you you know how are you doing what how
is your life going where what sort of problems are you facing what do you
think about those problems can you conceptualize what a solution might be
is there a way we could figure out how to get there you know what's so it's a
problem-solving conversation and it's predicated on the presupposition that
the person that you're conversing with has the capacity to grow in a positive
direction if they so choose that's the fundamental that's the fundamental
presupposition of Rogerian psychology man Frankel are also humanists all
finish tell you what the rest of the the rest of the material is the next time
that we meet I should show you let you know a little bit more about the
structure of course the second midterm is March 14th the and there's a final at
the end as well so the mid the multiple-choice tests are graded in that
manner 25% 25% in 27.5% they're not cumulative each test only covers what
you covered before since the last test including the final you'll be required
to write an essay of 15% it's a thousand words sorry not 750 words and you'll
also do an online exercise a personality analysis which is pass/fail all you have
to do is complete it and show proof of completion it helps you do a modified
Big Five analysis of your own personality concentrating on your
virtues and your faults so that so so it's a it's an active exercise in the
application of personality theory to personal development and so that's the
that's the structure of the course I can tell you there's a sign-up sheet on the
on the syllabus we I've broken the essays down into multiple types across
the entire semester I would highly recommend that you go there and sign up
there are limited slots for each topic and the reason for that is well I don't
want my TA to have to grade 200 essays the last week of classes we have to
spread them out across the year so figure out a topic and sign out please
and please do that sooner rather than later it's it's an industrious thing to
do it'll help you organize yourself I'll post something that's quite useful about
how to write especially a thousand word essay and I'll close the essays are due
one day before class I'll close by the way by telling you who shouldn't take
this course okay first of all if you didn't like this lecture and don't take
this course because this is what the lectures are going to be like so and
it's they're not for everybody oh you used a lot of loose associations
and try to gather them back in and I kind of wander around that way I can
talk directly to you which I like doing but I sacrifice a certain amount of
organization for that but my sense is that it's worth the sacrifice the second
thing is there's a lot of reading a lot and a lot of it is I would say a lot of
it's hard science the last half in particular but the first half of a lot
of its philosophical in nature philosophical / psychological and so if
you're not interested in that like if you're a pure science type and
you're not interested in the clinical elements say of personality and in the
end in investigating the philosophical underpinnings of those clinical theories
then I would say this isn't the course for you and so you should take that
seriously because the readings are hard there's a lot of work involved in this
course and it would be better if you took a course that you actually wanted
to take so well welcome to psychology 230 and we'll see you in a bit
you you |
[Music] now you know I used this picture to represent my class and you might not know anything about this picture it's it's a picture of Jonah being thrown up out of whales belly after spending three days inside it it's an old biblical story it's a myth it's a fairy tale that's that's one way of looking at it and and I don't mean that derogative manner we know for example that some of the Grimm's brothers fairy tales are perhaps fifteen thousand years old they've been traced way back they're really really old and old stories are strange and they're strange because well they've been told generation after generation after generation and so you could imagine that something retold over such an expand of expansive time has been reduced to its gist many many times and nothing that's in the story anymore is superfluous it's all meaningful in some sense it's sort of like a meta story that's one way of thinking about imagine that you took a hundred books hundred adventure books and you had to extract out the central features of an adventure book now it's hard to do that it's like you're averaging across them or something like that distilling them in some manner then you get a meta adventure and it would be like a myth upon which all adventures are based and this story is actually one of those stories and I'm going to tell you what I think the story means and I'm not saying that this is all it means because most stories of this sort are in some sense inexhaustible just like great works of art are inexhaustible there there's more information in them than you can possibly articulate that's what makes them profound that's why you go look at them otherwise someone could just tell you about the painting and that would be the end of that but that doesn't work so so that Jonah is being spit up by this whale and of course on the face of it that's an impossibility because well you can't live inside a whale that's why it's impossible now you may remember and likely do that you all know a story about someone who is inside a whale that's Pinocchio right and you know you go to that movie maybe even as an adult you watch that movie and Geppetto is down there in the whale in his little boat you know it's big cavernous inside you don't really care that that's there's a bunch of things you don't care about you don't care that those are drawings and not real people you don't care about that and you don't care that the inside of a whale isn't a cavern and you don't care that Pinocchio is a puppet for that matter none of that matters to you at all and that's because you're really strange creatures and you don't even notice when you're doing something absolutely absurd and that's one of those times when you are but if someone taps you on the shoulder and says you know you're just watching drawings of a puppet puppets can't really move autonomously and now he's at the bottom of the ocean you have no idea why he's going to rescue his father and you're just sitting there annoyed and you're okay with that and you'll say shut up because I want to finish watching a movie and so that's interesting you see that tells you something about your unconscious if you're psychoanalytically minded because you're doing something that you cannot account for now you might say well it's it it's enjoyable well that's deep man you're really really going a long ways with that the question is a why is it comprehensible B why is it enjoyable see just exactly what are you doing there and you think that whatever you are doing there is so valuable that you'll actually pay to do it weird very very weird and you know when you read about let's say the archaic rituals of tribal people and you ask yourself just what are they up to you might think well they're up to the same thing that you're up to when you go see a movie so and then you might also notice that the most expensive artifacts or among the most expensive artifacts that human beings create our movies they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on them and we consider that a good deal and you know it drives our technology to because the high-tech movies like the Marvel movies that require so much computer animation they actually drive the demand for high-end graphics chips so our technological advance forward is actually motivated in part by our desire to represent things fictional II in ever more spectacular manner so Jonah well let me tell you the story of Jonah and I'll tell you why I'm gonna tell you it this is from Camille Paglia who's a critic of the modern University and a very brilliant woman I would say very controversial incredibly rapid speaker and she can think so fast it's just unbelievable she's really fun to watch if you like that sort of thing vicious adversary in an argument she says the number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors who have substituted narrow expertise and theoretical sophistication a preposterous term for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought art is a vast interconnected web work a fabricated tradition and over concentration on any one point is a distortion here's here's a problem I had I wrestled with this when I was trying to understand some of the things that I'm going to teach you about there's some things that you kind of have to grasp as a whole you know sometimes you have a flash of insight and a bunch of things that you didn't know we're related fall together that that's supposed to happen in psychotherapy when you link different disparate patterns of behavior together because you've linked them say with a single cause and you get this like excited feeling of illumination and possibility and there are forms of communication that require the simultaneously the simultaneous realization of a multitude of disparate phenomena like a movie can be like that you know you you listen to a movie you watch movie and then you don't know what the hell is going on and then something happens near the end and bed everything clicks together and it's cuz you've sort of seen the thing as a whole and a lot of the things that we a lot of the ways that we interact with the world that are mysterious are like that there and this is what peg lay is referring to is that and this is a psychoanalytic proposition I would say or a romantic proposition now the idea roughly is that way out in the periphery of reality are all those things that not only do you not know but you don't even know you don't know right there you're completely blind to their existence and then there's unknown things that you have some suspicions about and then there's unknown things that you can start to imagine and and act out and dramatize and so all of that is on the periphery of our knowledge that's a psychoanalytic dictum where the thoughts come from well partly they're nested in dreams dreams are the birthplace of thoughts fantasy it's not that surprising fantasy is the birthplace of ideas you know if you're thinking about what you're gonna do in the future you enter into a reverie a dream state and you contemplate multiple possibilities and then you start thinking them through use your imagination to search beyond where you are and the collective human attempt to do that is our mysterious humanistic artistic tradition which is very difficult to justify from a formal articulate point of view what good is dance like what is it that you're doing when you're dancing well you don't care because you like to dance why well you don't know what you do it's built into you music musics a human universal cultures use music to organize themselves right they use music to catalyze their identities they use music to unite around you know in in more archaic societies less differentiated societies let's say no a mask that represents part of the family tradition will have a particular design and there'll be a particular song written for it and there'll be a particular dance about it and the song and the dance or something like the symbolic representation of a mode of being in the world like maybe the mask is a wolf mask and so you act out the wolf and there's music that goes along with that and you think well what are you doing when you're acting out the wolf and part of that is what you're trying you're trying to understand wolves you know it's an image it's imitation in part and you know if you live in the natural world and if you hunt and if you're preyed upon then understanding the things that you're hunting and preying upon is useful and there's also pull out perhaps useful things to learn from them and so we play this strange symbolic game with the world like children pretending that's another way of thinking about it and we do that to act out and to begin to understand things we don't understand like how to act that's now for me the most important question in life is not what the world is made of and in fact I would say that's a relatively new preoccupation of humankind you know we didn't really formalize you could say that the ancient Greeks originated laid the groundwork for the emergence of an empirical science and then it emerged more formally with bacon and Descartes and Newton five six hundred years ago not very long like a blink blink to the eye in human terms before that people were engineers they could build things and so forth but they didn't know how to they weren't scientists they didn't really conceptualize the world as an objective place we do that automatically because science has seeped so far into our set of presuppositions that doesn't make us good scientists by the way but it does make us believe that the fundamental reality of the world is an objective reality and I'm not going to dispute that particularly but leaves one set of questions unanswered probably by its nature because it wasn't designed to answer the question then that question is how should one conduct oneself in the world and that's an important thing since you're alive and hypothetically you'd rather stay alive and well you're alive you probably don't want to suffer any more than you have to and no more stupidly than you have to and it might also be good if some of the things that you want it actually happened and so you know you're motivated to know how to act and and people are always telling each other how to act we're sending each other information all the time about how to act we do that with our the expressions on our face and of course when we talk to people we always look at their face and that's because their face tells you what they're up to you know if they're smiling and paying attention to you well then you can assume that you're doing something right and if they're looking annoyed or disgusted that's a particularly bad one then you might think you might take a hint from that especially if you know three or four people are doing it at the same time and so we're reflecting we're reflecting some ideal to one another constantly and the more attentive you are the more likely you are to act in accordance with that ideal and the more like you likely you are to move towards it you may not even know what the ideal is in an articulated sense in fact you probably don't you know you could come up with a well you know a good person is nice and friendly and you know cooperative and yeah yeah you know that's all just cliche but you don't you know your conception might be very Hollow it's very likely that it's very Hollow even though you may be able to act in a very sophisticated manner alright so anyways this is a story I'd say oh it's a meta story it's it's what would happen if you collected a bunch of stories and then you extract it out a story from them and it's sort of a story about destiny and it's couched in a religious language but that's okay because most of these distilled stories are form the foundation of religious texts and religious texts and myth and myths and stories are as I said part of the outer perimeter of our society they have a they have a coherent nature and it's all and they form a foundation and it's on that foundation that everything that you take for granted rests even if you don't understand the foundation so I can give you an example there's a metaphysical idea that underlies Western civilization and that metaphysical idea is that the individual has transcendent worth that's that's the idea from which the notion of natural rights is derived and of course our legal system is predicated on the idea that you have certain natural rights they're enshrined in the Bill of Rights for example and in the in the states when the bills Bill of Rights was being formulated when the legislation Ridge the legislation that found that the state was being formulated the formulators said we hold these truths to be self-evident what does that mean they're axioms of faith right there they're propositions and there's no proof for them there they're a mode of operation in the world and so the hypothesis is something like well if I treat you like there's something about you that has transcendent value implicit intrinsic value whatever that might be and there are stories about that and we'll talk about that and you do the same to me and then we set up a body of laws that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual so that the law itself has to act with respect towards every individual even if that individual has done something reprehensible which is very weird if you think about it then our society will work better and well perhaps that's true but for better or worse that is what this society is predicated on and that's a very very very very very very old idea and it's an idea that people came to with great difficulty because it was over thousands of years that people learned how to take their little tribal groups which are always squabbling with one another right because there's human beings they're very violent and tribal groups are by no means civilized it's there's no noble savage like the Europeans thought if you study tribal groups in the world today the murder the death rate by violence is unbelievably high so something unites a tribe within a tribe it's often kinship but then tribes come together to form larger civilizations and they have to determine some sort of meta principle that guides them so that they can cooperate and come together without destroying one another and they have to extract out a principle by which the society might function and that has to work and then as societies get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger they have to bring more and more of these diverse traditions together and extract out something from them that has power and functional utility and that allows people to unite and so this is one of the stories that talks about that it's a story about individual responsibility and what happens when it's not heated so you know because we could say you are a social creature right to the core and most of your environment is other people and those other people want something from you and you want something from them so you're gonna play games with them you're either gonna be good at it you're gonna be bad at it but you're gonna play games with them and so the game might have rules really sophisticated rules in fact and you'd expect that because as your behavior more and more approximates an ideal assuming such a thing exists then you're more and more sophisticated and the nature of the ideal is perhaps more and more complex and and difficult to understand you get a hint of this though you can get a hint of this because you will see if you pay attention to your own soul your psyche your unconscious you'll see that there are people that you admire and that there are people that you have contempt for and that's and it isn't necessarily that you're a hundred percent accurate in your judgment you know it's not such a bad idea to criticize your first impressions but those states exist and so there's a reason you admire someone and there's a reason you have contempt for someone there may be multiple reasons and that's a hint to your intrinsic value structure it's a hint about your intrinsic value structure right you wouldn't admire someone unless there was something about them that you valued and perhaps that you would also like to be able to do and he wouldn't despise someone or have contempt for them if you didn't feel that something they were doing was wrong and that it would be wrong if you did it too and so you're bringing to bear on the situation an implicit morality and you have to do that because as I said you can't act without a morality because if you're gonna act you're gonna try to make things better that otherwise why bother and if you're acting to make things better than some things have to be better and some things have to be worse and that's a value structure so you have one all right so Jonah he gets a call from God and God tells them that there's a city Nineveh that's falling into moral disarray now what does that mean well it's a universal story it's like all cultures are always falling into disarray it's their nature just entropy does that right things change the world changes the environment changes and the culture doesn't keep up very well and then of course it has corrupt elements and so it's an interior eternal story the individual is always placed in relationship to a culture that's somewhat corrupt and then the question is well what do you do about it and if the answer is nothing well then it'll just get more corrupt and if the answer is be corrupt - then it will just get more corrupt so the answer has to be to oppose the corruption because that's the only way it's going to stop now god threatens to destroy this city because of its corruption and I don't think you need to presume anything particularly metaphysical about that to understand it it's very straight forward that the more corrupt the culture is and the less Trust is possible between individuals the less productive of the culture is going to be because why do anything if some corrupt person is just gonna come and take it you know it might even be that the culture is so corrupt that if you are good for something and you produce resources you're actually more likely to get killed because you have something of value so like this just you're just not going anywhere with that and why would you work if you didn't have any sense that you know you store up the value of your work for some reasonable time in the future so if the society is corrupt and there's no trust its degenerating and you know it might live for a while but isn't it last very long and so that's the idea corrupt societies collapse that leaves open what corruption means anyways Jonah thanks no no bloody way I'm not going to that City they can go to hell as far as I'm concerned and that's really what he thinks and why in the world should I do anything about it anyways and these are good objections it's like why would you do that and you'll face this believe me in your life you will face this in fact you already do always constantly continually in small ways perhaps when you're interacting with people who aren't treating you properly and when you're acting and those might be your parents they might be your friends they might be people at your workplace they might be professors they're playing a crooked game and you don't like it and you know it's crooked and so then the question is well what should you do about it well if you know you're correct know it's crooked it's not so good to play along with it I mean we'll say that you know it's crooked by your own standard of values it D degrades you to play along with it you're gonna stand up and oppose it well no probably not you're probably gonna do what Jonah did jump on a ship and get the hell out of there and you know that's a logical thing to do but it doesn't solve the problem and I think this has something to do with human ethical responsibility because there are other old stories and I'll tell you one likely where the son of the king the Lion King the son of the king he goes off and he's some pathetic adolescent and then he's shamed by the reappearance of his old girlfriend into turning into something vaguely useful and he opens his eyes and he goes back and he fights scar and you know it's a scene of hell right because there's fire everywhere and he fights scar finds skaar killed his father he casts him into the pit roughly speaking and then the rain comes and then you know the movie returns to its beginning fundamentally it's a paradise paradise lost' Paradise Regained that's the movie and and I mean that's the story of human beings you know you're in a place that's working out pretty well something happens to knock you off your perch you're down in the chaos for a good amount of time and maybe you never get out but maybe you learn something down there maybe a strength in your character then you pop up to a new place and maybe it's better better aim better you now I'm not being overly optimistic about this I know perfectly well that people encounter impediments during their life that they find almost impossible to recover from but it's the best shot you have so anyways Jonah runs away but God isn't very happy about that because it's actually Jonah's destiny it's necessary for Jonah to repair the city so God sends a storm and you know the waves are high and and and I think what that means is because the water is often a symbol for the unconscious and that's because things lurk down there in the water and that you could pull up that that are useful monstrous things that you can pull up they're useful you can fish for them you can go fishing in your own being for answers which is what you do when you try to think right you ask yourself a question and you wait maybe an answer appears it's like where did that come from you didn't know what the answer was before it appeared but it just popped into being out of nowhere who knows so you fish so anyways the waves come and the boats gonna be knocked over it and that's what happens I think when you know when you know you should do something I mean everyone has the this experience I believe perhaps you would be willing to put up your hands if this experience is foreign to you okay just part of your telling you you should do something and it's hard to do it effortful and maybe you're afraid of it and so you don't do it you just procrastinate right and so how do you feel about that good I mean so what do you feel that you're betraying yourself your anxiety actually gets worse not better even though you know you can put it off moment to moment but that doesn't help because every time you put it off the anxiety just grows a little bit you're not proud of yourself you have a sense that you're making things more chaotic than they should be you know and if you do that long enough and I'm sure many of you have had that experience if you do that long enough if that becomes habitual things will get so stormy around you that you'll fall right into the into the chaos into the watery chaos and maybe you'll drown so it's not a very good idea to run from your destiny let's say whatever that might be and you need a destiny you need a place to aim at because that's what gives your life meaning and you need meaning in your life because life is hard so you know you need something to buttress yourself against that so anyways they wake joan up and jonah says that's probably my fault because like i'm running away from something i'm supposed to do and you know god isn't very happy about that so why don't you just throw me over to overboard and the crew isn't very happy about that but the waves are really starting to come up and joan is pretty insistent that he's the cause of the problem and so they draw they draw a lot and and jonah is chosen and so they decided to toss him into the ocean and immediately everything's calm so he's a center of chaos because he's not doing what he's supposed to do fine well then that whale comes up and swallows him and then he's in the whale for three days now that's a weird thing the whale that's the way all that Gepetto's ian that's a dragon it's the thing that you have to go out there and conquer to get something of value now when you've made an error when you've fallen off the pathway when you deviated from what you know you should do it produces a state of internal chaos and worry and concern you're you're thrust into the unknown you're thrust into unknown territory and chaos you don't know what to do and that's often symbolized by the encounter with a with a monster like a dragon something that lives under the water that's and I think the reason for that is as far as I've been able to tell is that human beings because we've been prey animals for forever in our battle with carnivorous lizards for example and alligators and even dinosaurs because there were dinosaurs around at the time of our most distant ancestors there was even a cat at one point that was that was adapted with teeth to pierce human skulls so it had a head that was exactly shaped to grab you here and put a tooth through the back of your skull so like we've come through some rough times man and we have a system in our mind that's a threat predator detection system that's the thing that makes little kids think about monsters in the dark right because well there is monsters in the dark parents always say well there's no monsters in the dark it's like that's not true the dark is full of monsters there might not be any in your room right at that moment but that doesn't mean there aren't monsters in the dark and crimes take place like criminals don't get up at 6:00 in the morning and like you know have breakfast and go rob a bank they do it they do that sort of thing at night people do the things that are fit for the night in the night and lots of predators are nocturnal and you can't see very well in the dark and kids aren't stupid you know they've evolved to stay pretty damn close to the fire because the kids that wandered away from the fire got picked off by hyenas and lions and you know crocodiles and whatever else the hell was out there to eat the unwary so the circuit that we use to to defend ourselves against predators as we've evolved cortically that circuit has has come to represent what we don't know in general because the Predators of course inhabit where we don't know and so evolution is a conservative force and we use the circuits that we've evolved to represent new things and so the unknown the chaos is often represented by a monster that swallows you up and pulls you down and you know when you're feeling terrible you don't say well I'm feeling up you say I'm feeling down well why is that well down is worse I guess you're flat on the ground when you're down or you're in a hole or something like that you're hiding in a hole you know it's down and you're threatened by something you know maybe you're threatened by your own inadequacy that might be part of it maybe that's partly what you imagine as a monstrous force because you know your proclivity towards procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld and that's the underworld the mythological underworld that's where you go when things fall apart and if you understand that if you know that that's what that means then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you and you understand things you could live can be an organized going very well and then something comes up and poof everything changes some axiom that you were living by and it might be the existence of a partner might be a job it might be your health any of those things go on and you go somewhere when that happens you go somewhere it's a state of being you're still in the same world but it's not the same at all anymore everything about it is different it's all negative and dark and you don't know what to do you're confused and so what do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart especially if oh if it's the worst possible case scenario and you realize that you actually had something to do with your demise that's really annoying you know when something bad happens to you and then you know you grind yourself into bits trying to figure out what the hell happened and then you realize that well you were playing a causal role now sometimes you're so depressed you assume you're playing a causal role and you work it's not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination and it isn't that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it but sometimes you find that you are off the path somehow and maybe even that you knew it and they didn't attend to it and that's why all of this hit the fan and so then down there in that chaos you decide that you're going to do what you're supposed to do instead and then maybe you get to rise up again renewed if you're lucky and then you can go fix the city and that's what this story's about and that's why I picked the image to represent the course because really what happens you see with the psychoanalysts the road due to health if you're not doing well which means that as you act in the world you're not getting what you want there's something wrong with your the match between your presuppositions and your actions habitual and the way the world is responding to you and so it's not turning out for you and the question is well what can you do about that and one answer might be to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well and to find out what they are and what to do about them and maybe some of that is maybe you're not moving forward because of fear and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you've never been able to understand and maybe one of the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could in fact live properly in the world is to go back to those terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them and that's what psychotherapy is about in large part psychoanalytic behavioral doesn't matter what are you afraid of what are you avoiding what are you failing to develop maybe from fear maybe from avoidance god only knows maybe from disgust how can you get over it how can you reclaim those parts of your self now I said in the first lecture that I was going to try to provide you with a schema into which you could place the theorists that we're going to discuss and it requires going down deep to do that and there are presuppositions in my presupposition and this is a psychoanalytic presupposition it's predicated on a poetic tradition I would say don't an ancient tradition I learned most of it from reading Jung it was Carl Jung that helped me understand that we're nested inside a dream that we have to be because we don't know everything we have to take things as Givens and the things that we take it as Givens are nested inside stories and we accept the stories as valid and then outside the stories is the absolute unknown you know and that's partly the stories are tricky you know that one of the classic stories it's a variant of the the Jonas story I would say is st. George and the dragon and that that story was represented in during the Renaissance and during medieval times thousands and thousands of ways it's like the story of st. Patrick who chased the snakes out of Ireland same idea and that the typical st. George story is the Hobbit or Harry Potter so in the second volume of Harry Potter correct me if I have any of these details wrong you remember there's that snake the basilisk so this is Magic Castle right you guys have no problem without Magic Castle no problem there's an or if he's an orphan he goes to the Magic Castle to learn how to be more than normal right the muggles he has a muggle family we're not too happy with the muggle family like as representatives of normal people they they have some blacks now of course the reason for that is that well that's what teenagers often feel about their parents right they fail Jesus these couldn't really be my parents I must have some other parents who are like together those are like magical parents right parents that live in the sky and of course Harry Potter has earthly parents that's the muggles and Dursley I think is the kid he's at one he's a wonderful piece of work and you know ill-formed a spoiled ill-formed selfish very far from the ideal he's a foil for Harry and of course he's appreciated and doted on and Harry is actually punished for his virtues that's a classic story right to to be punished for your virtues I mean if you look at the story the central story in Christianity the central story and Christianity is about someone who is precisely punished in the worst possible way for the highest possible virtues that's what it makes it an archetypal story because there isn't anything more unfair than that and so it's a limit in a sense you it can't be worse than that being punished for being you know unworthy it's like yeah yeah well at least makes sense but to be punished because you have your act together and you're a good person that's real punishment and that's what happens to Harry so luckily he finds out that he's magical which is quite convenient and off he goes to Wizarding school and you know that's actually like taking that's actually like going and studying the humanities I mean it was when they still were you know because you it's through the humanities that you that you make contact with the magic of your culture and that makes you more than merely the child of your parents because you are more than merely the child of your parents you're the child of nature and you're the child of culture and until you understand what that means understand that you have two sets of parents like the divine hero always has two sets of parents you you can't construe yourself properly as an individual you're not situated properly in the world you don't know what your responsibilities are you can't orient your values properly and you will suffer for that because as far as I can tell because life is so difficult you have to do something that's truly worthwhile in order to justify it and so well that's what all these stories tell you that's what the story of Jonah is telling you it's like you have an ethical duty to straighten things up and if you don't do it you're gonna be sorry and that stories echoed everywhere while now st. George well let's go to Harry Potter well that's what we were talking about so he goes off to the Magic Castle and he's learning to be a wizard and he's kind of an interesting character a because he's not really good and we find out I think that's because does he have a piece of gold amarti in him he's not what happens yeah and that's what that means is that to be good truly good you can't just follow rules that's that's very clear in the Harry Potter story and you also have to be able to understand and malevolence and in order to understand malevolence so that you can withstand it you have to understand that part of you that's malevolent because if you don't you're naive and if you're naive you're easy pickings and so that's a union idea too and the Union idea is that part of personality development is to understand your shadow and the shadow is those things about you that you do not want to admit to and you can learn about your shadow by reading history you know you can read about Auschwitz you can read about the concentration camps in Russia and you can imagine yourself as a guard instead of as a heroic rescuer of unfortunate victims which would be very very unlikely and once you can imagine yourself as a guard which is a terrifying thing to do then you understand something about yourself and I actually think and I think this is also from students studying young that you cannot have proper respect for yourself until you know that you're a monster because you won't act carefully enough you know if you think well I'm a nice person I'd never do anyone any harm it's like you're no saint you can be sure of that and the harm that you do people can come in many many ways and so if you regard yourself as harmless inoffensive nice well why do you have any reason to be careful you're like a teddy bear sitting on a shelf even if you throw it at someone no one's gonna get hurt but that isn't what you're like because you're a human being and human beings are some vicious creatures and there's utility in knowing that because it's also the case you know in the Harry Potter series Harry could stand up against full-dome art and understand them and speak his language because he was infected by him to some degree a very very interesting idea anyways in the second 10 the reason I'm telling you this and this is worth thinking about it's like how long were each of those books like 500 pages they're long eh and there was how many of them seven and how many of them were sold I mean how many of you read every Harry Potter book right that's how many of you read at least one okay how many you saw the movies it's like you're all in a cult you are I'm telling you really that's the truth it's really the truth so in the second volume there's this snake that's zip it around there the basilisk right and it lives in the underground that's chaos that's chaos and that's because wherever you are you're on thin ice and underneath you're thin ice is chaos and here we are in this unbelievably civilized environment and everyone's getting along so perfectly but you know we've got hot guard lights with electricity the sewage system is working no one's hungry it's like we can be peaceful but if any of that fell apart and it could easily fall apart because it's a bloody miracle it ever works at all then the chaos that's just underneath the surface is going to come up right now and it's useful to know that because it makes you properly grateful if you really understand it it makes you proper be grateful for the bloody miracle that it is that you can be here in peace so anyways there's this snake that's underneath the surface and it's you know no joke that thing it's big and it's ancient it's always been there and what happens if you look at it it turns you to stone right it paralyzes you well that's the more that's the Gorgon that's Medusa the woman with the head of snakes and if you look at her it paralyzes you what does that mean well you're walking through the jungle and big snake appears what do you do you freeze and no bloody wonder because you're a prey animal and that's what they do when they see things that are going to eat them and so the snake well lots of people still die from snakebite and our ancestors were and I mean our ancestors like you know tens of millions of years ago when they were living in trees and weren't very big they made a nice snack for a snake and there's a woman named Lynn Isbell who's an anthropologist at UCLA who's correlated the presence of carnivorous snakes with the acuity of primate vision and what she found was that the more snakes around the better the primates could see so and we're particularly good at picking up patterns like snake camouflage in the lower half of our visual quadrant you know and people generally don't like snakes you can learn to handle them but no snake fear appears to be an eight to Nate in chimpanzees and it tends to increase as you age rather than decreasing you can overcome it but well my daughter had snakes and one day her snake bit her it was a fairly big snake and she hadn't paid attention to it for a while so it nailed her and from then on she had very difficult time grabbing the snake it was like bitten once you know shy permanently she also told me years later she had nightmares about snakes all the time when she had a snake in her room it's like you know and I think it was probably the smell so anyways so Harry Potter decides he's going to go after the basilisk rake he's gonna go out there and face the thing that he's most afraid of so he does that wait out in the depths so it's like Jonah going down into the depths and he faces the basilisk and it bites him and you know that's a that's right because if you go down into the depths you can get bitten like it's no joke and this is a hero story but the thing about the hero stories it's actually real the thing that you're facing is actually dangerous and even though facing it voluntarily might be your best bet and is likely your best bet because that's the central story of humanity that doesn't mean you're going to succeed it's the real thing so anyways he gets bitten right and he's gonna die now he's rescuing Ginny so that's the st. George story if you go after like dragon dragons like to capture virgins god only knows why I think it's because I think it's because one of the things that male humans have done from the beginning of time is chase the damn predators away and I suspect that the males from god only knows how long ago who were particularly good at that were rewarded with female attention and why the hell not so it's deeply rooted inside of us that idea of facing the unknown and freeing the woman so the idea there is that if you it's a male idea and in large part I can talk about the central female myth and I will as we proceed the idea is that if you're this sort of person who can stand up against the unknown and the frightening then you're also likely if you develop into that sort of person then you're also likely to develop into the sort of person that other people will find attractive so you know and that's why young believed that the inside the shadow was the anima which is like a female figure and so his idea was something like you know if you look watch movies there's always this beta male guy if there romantic movies and he's a nice guy and he's the friend and you know the woman tells him everything but she doesn't like him a bit she likes the guy who's like God an edge and and who's capable of I would say mayhem but at least of aggression now that doesn't mean she wants them to be aggressive but what it does mean is that she wants him to be able to be aggressive that would be good and so he's the romantic target and so he's the person that's incorporated the shadow and he's someone that is respectable and perhaps useful and so well that's a very old story so let's let's think about this for a minute I've already offered you a proposition and I think it's an important proposition and I'm I'm offering you this proposition so that you can make sense of art and literature and mythology and religion and dance and all those strange ritualistic things that human beings do which seem central to us including including not least the in eradicable tendency of us to seek out stories of heroes I should finish the Harry Potter story so Harry Potter goes down there to rescue Virginia no it's that's not her name what is it Ginny yeah but there's a there's a formal name for that it's a variant of Virginia anyways which is a very divergent so um and it gets bitten didn't yes Ginevra that's it he gets bitten and the bite is poison and so there is dying which doesn't seem to be so good and then what happens and again you guys swallow this it's no problem so what's his name the Dumbledore character he's got a bird right so he's the wise old man he's the ruler of the castle he's the ruler of the Magic Castle he's the Magic King you know he's like God the Father as far as Harry Potter is concerned and he has a bird what kind of bird is it it's a Phoenix right and one of the things that's very strange about a Phoenix is that well it's immortal but in a strange way you know it lives and lives I think a hundred years and it gets older and older and then one day poof it bursts into flames and turns into an egg and then you get a new Phoenix so that's a symbol of transformation it's a symbol of transformation the bird is a spirit or psyche and so here's what it means in part you know you know how when you learn a lesson in your life that that's not very pleasant right it's not like when you learn something important it's best day of your life it's often the importance of what you learn is often proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it you know you learn things the hard way you learn things by getting hit because obviously if what you're doing is working you get where you want there's no learning in that and that's happy it's when you're doing something and you hit an obstacle and maybe yeah bloody well hit it hard and then you know you recoil and then you down into the depths you go and you have to sort yourself out and you realize that you're you know this particular kind of idiot and that you should probably fix that and that's really annoying and difficult and you know and maybe you're down in the dumps and anxious for quite a while and then you get it repaired more or less and you know you put yourself back together that's the Phoenix poof into flames bang egg new you and so you know that's the ability to learn now human beings are very strange creatures right because we're very malleable compared to most animals you know like grizzly bears now and grizzly bears a thousand years ago it's like whatever they're the same thing they do the same thing there's no transformation about human beings we have this massive brain and you know it's a pain because it means you have to take care of human children until they're 40 and and that's a big burden and so you know we pay a big price for it it also makes childbirth very difficult and and it's costly you have to eat a lot because you have a big brain because it uses up a lot of energy and so you know you pay a price for it but the advantage is your plastic you can learn now learning is a strange thing because you can think of it as just acquiring more information but you could also think of it and this is more accurate as finding out something that you're doing wrong so that's sort of built into you like a character a character element of your character a presumption of your perception or a deep habit it's really built into you it's a neural structure right it's a little I've and you have to kill it because it isn't working properly and the pain that you go through in part when you're suffering because you did something stupid is it's something like your your the neurology I can never get this quite right it's the pain of the death of that structure and that could be a huge chunk of you you know if you really have to go through a massive revision it's like the person that comes out the other end might hardly be the same at all you know that happens for example if you're trying to combat alcoholism which is just you know a wretched thing to do because well all your friends are alcoholic all your family drinks too much the only thing you know how to do when you're socializing is to go to the bar and drink too much you know and you spend like 20 hours a week on it it's like it's not just that you're addicted to the substance it's like that's how you live and so if you want to stop being an alcoholic not only do you have to stop drinking alcohol but you have to stop seeing all your drunk friends and then maybe you've had them for your whole life and you have to have continual battles with your drunk family and then you have to figure out something to do with that 20 hours that's now like hanging around your neck like an albatross and so you have to let that whole part of your personality die and a new part has to spring forth and that's what the Phoenix is and the Phoenix is the capacity of the person to transform and so when Harry gets bit by the snake that freezes him he gets seriously injured the Phoenix comes in Christ some tears in his wound it prepares him bang he's back to life and the strange thing is that that's okay with all of the viewers now why would that be there's nothing about it that's rational nothing right Magic Castle that's not rational giant snake underneath it that's a little more irrational turning you to stone going down there to face it being rejuvenated by a Phoenix it's like yeah yeah that's okay we can we'll watch that clue well swallow it will be completely engaged in it and the reason for that is because it's a myth it's about how people it's a meta story about how to act about how to conduct yourself in the world to face the things that you're afraid of that would otherwise paralyze you to let the death of what is insufficient about you occur and then to wait for the rebirth okay so science is about what the world is and myth and drama and dream and the unconscious all of that let's say the aesthetic and artistic and fantastic side of humanity that's more about how things should be it's more about how to act they're there lessons in how to act and they're abstract lessons people are capable of abstraction right so you say well there's something good about you and there's something good about you and there's something good about you and and there's some bad about you and you and you and so we'll take all the good things and make one good thing out of that we'll take all the bad things and make one bad thing out of that and then we sort understand the difference between good and bad and we get better and better and better and better at that over the centuries as we distill that and then we have a figure of ultimate good and a figure of ultimate evil and that helps us understand what those two things are those are the hostile brothers that's a very common mythological motif and you could say well they're at war inside you and and I think that that's a universal truth it's an existential truth the domain of ethics and morality is how are we in the world and what how should we be what's the good and the reason I'm telling you all this apart from the fact that you should know it because this is what you should know if you go through university is that it bears directly on issues of health you're trying to accomplish something say if you go see a psychotherapist you know you could say well I'm trying to get healthy but you know that's not really right what you're trying to do when you go see your therapist just get your life together and that's not the same thing you know like mostly when I'm acting as a therapist it's not like I'm directly treating mental disorder like mental disorders aren't there just not neat little boxes it's not like someone has a fully functioning life but they have an anxiety disorder and then you bring them and you treat the anxiety disorder and they go back to their fully functioning life it's like it's not like that at all the disorder is tangled out into their life you know if you're depressed well usually your your workplace isn't going very well and your relationships with the people around you are damaged and you know you're connected in the actual world with all of these things and so when you come to see a therapist you have to work on putting your life together in a sustainable manner and that's certainly not just removing the mental illness is very rare now and then you see someone who's depressed whose life is together and they're just depressed something's gone wrong probably biochemically and so with someone like that you can often give them in SSRIs I can't give them to them but I can recommend them recommend they go see a doctor anyways and that sometimes just does the trick because you know their life is actually pretty good they just can't see it but that's bloody rare man it's usually the case that someone comes and sees you and things are in a serious state of chaos and all of that has to be addressed and some of its psychological and a lot of it's just practical its embedded out there in the world that's what the behavior cycle behavioral psychologists are particularly concerned about so anyways psychology especially the clinical end is predicated on it's necessarily predicated on the question how is it that we obtain the good how do we aim at the good and what would that be when my clients for come to see me one of the things I often ask them is okay well let's say you look a year ahead what do you want what are we aiming at what would what wouldn't your life isn't the way you want it to be how would it look if it was the way you wanted it to be or at least partly that way and we aim at that right we look for impediments psychological impediments fears avoidance strategies that sort of thing and we develop strategies and we try to move towards that I would say ideal all right to understand the categories of myth we'll say you we have to understand something about the nature of categorization now categorization is a tricky thing and we're gonna run through some complicated ideas relatively quickly you know you think you put things in the same category because they're similar but the problem is is that first of all that's not an answer it's just a restatement of the initial proposition and second of all you can put things in the same category that are by no means identical and you often do that and third it's things are things that are similar are often also importantly different and so picking which element of similarity you know like let's say oh if you have a group of books well are they the same well obviously no because well unless they're you know all the same book but the category of books is a pretty strange category because the content of the books differs completely well you could still make a group of books and you pick some arbitrary element that unites them and consider that grounds to make a category there's other categories more scientific categories and scientific categories tend to actually contain things that are very very similar in across multiple dimensions like protons are like that as far as I can tell there's nothing that distinguishes one proton from another and the same with electrons and you know the set of triangles is like that because you can define it precisely but most of the categories that human Jews aren't so neat and the problem with that is that unless the categories are neat like scientific categories it's very difficult to investigate them scientifically so for example you might do research on a group of people with anxiety disorders but the problem with that is that the anxiety disorder category is so heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to identify the commonalities across all the people who are in that category and that's partly because the category isn't actually a scientific category it's a hybrid category it's a practical category I can give you an example of that no I can't because I must not have saved it anyways many of the DSM categories so these are categories for psychopathology require if you're part of that category imagine there's seven symptoms that you could have or eight symptoms that you could have that would put you in that category like antisocial personality eight symptoms you steal you kick you hit you bite you you know you're abusive I don't remember the category categories precisely but you can be in the category if you have symptoms two through five and you can be in the category if you have symptoms six through eight they aren't the same symptoms but you're in the same category and you think well how the hell can that be well that's a family resemblance category roughly speaking and lots of the things that we use our family resemblance categories there's a prototype and then if you have enough of the features of that prototype imagine the prototype has ten features and if you have an six of it those pro features you get to be in that category but it means that the categories are actually quite diverse and that's one of the problems that plagues psycho psychiatry as a science in clinical psychology as a science it's a really big problem because if the categories aren't homogeneous then it's very difficult to draw conclusions about the members of the category and the psychologists and the psychiatrist's claim that those are scientific categories but but they're not and they can't be partly because they're aimed at the classification of health or ideal versus non health or non-ideal and partly because they play multiple roles say I mean the category isn't there just to provide neat demarcations for scientific study the categories there to give people a language to talk about certain sets of symptoms to diagnose because you know when you come in and you have a set of symptoms you might want to know what what they are so that you also know what they aren't it's really a relief often to find a diagnosis and then of course the diagnosis has certain implications for treatment and and for billing and for all of that so the category has to play all of those roles so there's multiple types of category and the categories that were talking about in relationship to ecology aren't scientific categories they're categories about the world construed as a place to act so here's a way to think about it you're always looking at the world through a framework of reference and you have to do that because there isn't very much of you you can't see the whole world at once and in fact the amount of the world you actually see is so small you can't believe it the central part of your vision is zipping around producing a pretty high-resolution representation of exactly what you're looking at but outside of that center like if I look at you I can't see her eyes I can see her glasses but barely I can't even tell whether you're male or female the person past that I can't see it all now you don't notice that you know you don't notice that you're that blind because you're your central vision is always popping around illuminating that tiny space but you're so damn blind it's just mind-boggling and I'm sure some of you have seen the invisible gorilla video you know where a gorilla comes into the video and you don't notice which is somewhat shocking because you would think that you would notice a gorilla but what happens is that you actually don't notice something unless it interferes with what you're doing and because what are you gonna do notice everything you can't do that you can hardly notice anything so what you do is you pick something to focus on it's usually something that you value because why else would you focus on it so that means that your value system determines the direction of your perception bloody well think about that for a minute that's a Buddhist idea right people people live in a kind of illusion and sometimes that illusion causes suffering and they can transform the way they look at the world and that can release them from their suffering but the idea that you do live in an illusion well I don't know if it's exactly an illusion but you certainly do live within a framework of perception that's determined by your values now that is so weird you know because we never think of the world as something that reveals itself through our values but of course it of course it because you look at what you want you aim at what you want and once you've aimed the world lays itself out for you and that's exactly how perception works that's why I represented it this way you're always somewhere that's point a that's somewhere in some place and some time and you always have some notion about what you want to have have happened next you know you're gonna go to the next class maybe you've got a plan after this in this class you have a plan you're hoping to learn something I presume and maybe you have a goal with regards to a grade and that's nested inside your desire to get a degree and that's nested inside your desire to be educated and to have a career and and and and have a successful life so attending to me at the moment the reason you're doing that is because all of those values exist within you simultaneously focusing your attention and so you're attending to me and not to something else assuming that all of you with your computers open aren't surfing the web which you might be but assuming that you're focusing whatever you're focusing on is directed by what you value and some of that can be unconscious in fact a lot of it is unconscious because you know it's very difficult for you to get control of what you pay attention to you know what that's like you're trying to study it's kind of a boring paper christ' your attention it's just like everywhere you know maybe you'll vacuum under the bed instead of doing the Pape reading the paper you know you can't get a grip on that thing so your attention has an autonomy and that's another psychoanalytic idea you know because you kind of think well you're in control it's like really you ever try telling yourself what to do does the how does that work for you I'm going to go to the gym three times a week right sure heard you who are ya I'm gonna quit eating sugar for a month it's like how long does that lasts like 15 minutes and you're eating like three chocolate bars so you're this is and this is Freud central insight I would say you're an autonomous group of spiritual agents let's say personalities and they don't really get along very well and you the ego will say is by no means necessarily in charge and that's a very strange thing to realize but you can really realize that by noticing how little control you have over your attentional focus okay so you've got your point a you're going to point B you're always doing that you inhabit a structure of value and it changes what the point a is and what the point B is but the structure itself doesn't change when you're looking at the world what you see is not objects you see tools and they make you happy those are things that facilitate your movement forward and you see obstacles and those are things that make you unhappy and when you encounter in an obstacle one of the problems is as well you don't get to where you're going and that's a problem but the other problem is if you encounter an obstacle the frame might be wrong right because you never know it might be just something that you could Ditu around real easily might be a fatal flaw in your whole plan and so obstacles have this dual nature they get in your way but they can also take your plan down and so they can produce anxiety so my point is and this there's a book called visual an ecological approach to visual perceptions great book by Gibson JJ Gibson if I remember correctly and this is although I thought of this a while back I realized eventually that it was a variant of his theory and when he believed was that when people looked at the world they saw a value first and an inferred object second so for example for Gibson if you're standing by a cliff you don't see a cliff and then think about the fact that you might fall and then feel frightened you see a falling off place and part of the seeing of that part of the act of seeing is being afraid of that because your eyes are connected right to your emotional systems and part of what your eyes do is tell you what the object is but your eyes do all sorts of other things like they prepare you for action they prepare you for gripping they prepare you for emotion and and none of that actually requires the the existence necessarily the existence of your perception of the object so there are people who have blind sight and if you show them so they think they can't see but if you flash them in angry face they'll show a skin conductance response and that's because the visual pathways to the amygdala which does face a most facial emotional processing can still be active these are people who've usually had a stroke so their eyes are okay but they've destroyed the visual cortex so so anyways it's perfectly plausible that at least at one level of analysis when you look at something you see it's utility first so you see a chair and you might say a chair is an object but I wouldn't say that beanbags a chair and a stump is a chair and they don't share much in common except that you can sit on them and so you know the chair is just the chair is basically conceptualized by its functional utility and when you look at a chair what you perceive its is its functional utility and the chair tells you what to do it says sit on me and so that and there are people who have prefrontal damage and they engage in something called utilization behavior and if they're walking down the hallway and there's a door opened they have to walk through it they can't not do what the object tells them to do that's called utilization behavior so that's how the world is laid out and I would say inside that domain you're in the predictable world you're in the world that you understand it that you know and that if you hit an obstacle or if you're outside that domain you're in the unknown you're in unknown territory in the mythological world in the world for action you could conceptualize the world as a stage for action and this is a Shakespearean quote that sort of sums it up quite nicely all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players they have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts and you might say well is that really true and the answer to that is well it depends on what you mean by true and and that really is the answer because there are different ways of defining true so and it isn't self-evident that there's only one way of defining true that's appropriate you know the definition of truth might be more like a tool and you know we are tool using creatures and really what we're trying to do with our conceptions of truth is to work through the world successfully so even science is subordinate should be subordinate to our use of the world as a tool because if it isn't useful tool like what are we doing with it you know just generating technology that might destroy the world that seems like a bad idea so so I think that that the world as tool is actually the fundamental sword of truth and I think that that's a Darwinian idea right that that our notions about the world have evolved through a Darwinian process and that it's appropriate for us to regard as what is most real those things that reliably ensure are the continuation of our life and the probability of our propagation and if you're a true Darwinian I don't think there's a way out of that argument and it isn't self-evident by any stretch of the imagination that seeing the world as all as objects is the way that our brain works in fact I don't think it's the way it works at all and I think that that's why we're so wired for stories right it's a mystery you know like you won't line up for two hours to go see a lecture but you'll line up for two hours maybe you'll even camp overnight if you're mythological imagination has been seized for god only knows what reason by Star Wars and you know that's the source of mythology it's the mythology of the modern person and it fills a gap and that's why people do it so that to me speaks of men the manner in which our psyches are constructed and that's a union idea that's the idea of the archetype essentially that to be human is to participate in a certain pattern of being and that that pattern of being is socially it's acted out individually but it's also part of your structure even your perceptual structure as a as a living organism of your particular type and it would be the case at least in part that the hero myth which is go out where no one has gone before face they terrors of the unknown gather something of value and return is the central story of humankind it's not the only central story but it's it's up there in the top three and many of the dramas that you engage yourself in are variations of that story and you watch it over and over and over because you're trying to learn how to do that because that's what you need to do to live okay here's the here's an idea what's common among people well we're self conscious so we know of our own existence and we know of our own limitations and so that means that we have a certain innate terror and fragility our existence is a problem to us and in some sense what we're trying to do when we search for meaning is to search for a solution to that problem and that can be security but it don't can also be mode of being you know and so for example being engaged in something worthwhile seems to be a good medicine for being fragile you know because you think well I'm doing this it seems worthwhile and the fact that there's a price to be paid for it and that things could befall me that aren't good I'm willing to put up with that because what I'm engaged in seems to be of appropriate of sufficient significance to justify all that we all become self-conscious and we're all trying to do something about that figure out how to deal with it so there's a landscape that we inhabit I would say within which that takes place so there's a human being self conscious doomed to tragedy and doomed to be aware of that the human being has two elements and that's the element that seeks the good and there's the other element that seeks I would say revenge and destruction and we have our reasons you know if something tragic happens to you it's tragic and unfair and it really brings you low the probability that you're going to become resentful and want revenge is extraordinarily high at no wonder and you know the archetypal representation of that is evil itself and the archetypal representation of the good that you could do is is the hero and so those things inhabit us they're they're permanent elements of the human psyche and then what else is universal to us well we live in a society you could say and that's deep that's deep it's not just human society like we've lived in a society forever so you know lobsters live in dominance hierarchies and they use their serotonin system at least in part to keep track of their dominance position and so you can use antidepressants on lobsters when they get defeated and they don't feel so bad from being defeated in a fight and so you just think about that because the antidepressants do the same thing to us we're so bloody social that the circuits that evolved 300 million years ago when the lobsters in us had a shared ancestor are still operating at the base of your brain that's why status is so important to people and reputation I mean that serotonin system governs your emotional regulation how people respond to you and what they think of you man that matters that's why you're on Facebook all the time and checking your texts and and obsessing continually about your online presence and assuming that you're doing that and you know contacting people frantically and seeing what the updates are it's like where where how are you held in the esteem of others very very important and that's because it determines your emotional regulation it's really important so we exist in a society always and the society has two elements the tyrannical element of the society that would be the tyrannical king roughly speaking a very common mythological theme you see that in the Lion King - right because that's scar and of course you see it in the real world with almost continually and then the benevolent king who is the source of all the good things about culture you know and and you can see these things play out as mythologies in political terms so I would say for example the continual harping about the oppressive nature of the patriarchy is part of a myth and the myth is that society is oppressive it's like well yeah obviously you know because you have to be quite a bit like you and you have to be quite a bit like you even if you're not so that you can get along right everybody sacrifices a tremendous amount of their individuality to the common to the common mode of being that's there's a tyrannical element to that but you know by the same token it's the basis of cooperation and the stability of society and the the final element is that's often represented met in a masculine manner by the way society and I think that's because our primary dominance structures given the creatures we are like chimpanzees the primary structures of dominance are masculine and then outside of what's known is the unknown and we always have to contend with that and it's wonderful in that it's the source of all new things and it's terrible in that it's the place where all the things that destabilize you come from and so this is a good representation although not the only one so that's the feminine nature that's the masculine order and that's the individual who's destined to suffer in the grasp of those two things and I'll finish this next time what have we got here yep all right good enough we'll see you next time so today to begin with we're going to finish the last lecture and then with any luck we're gonna start the next one there somatically linked anyways well you know what all the lectures for the next well for the whole course hopefully will be thematically late to some degree given that nominally they're about the same topic but some are more tightly linked than others so I started telling you last week about this idea of the voyage to the underworld and I want to tell you a little bit more about that young in particular conceptualized the voyage to the underworld as a journey into the unconscious and the unconscious for the psychoanalyst is a place of fantasy and dream an implicit presupposition and habit and that's all correct you know we there is an unconscious and it's perfectly reasonable to conceptualize it that way that the big difference I think between the psychoanalysts and the later more empirical scientists is that the psychoanalyst sort of envisioned your psyche as a place of living partial personalities instead of cognitive computational systems you know they took into account the fact that you're alive and that the parts of you are alive and you know there's there's a neuroscientist named gives that Gazza Nick I don't know how to say his name Gazza nigga that's wrong is that Gazzaniga yeah I think that's it anyways he did some of the earliest experiments on split brains and so sometimes if you have intractable epilepsy which I wouldn't recommend by the way one of the surgical procedures for mediating its negative effects is something called a you cut the corpus callosum and it's very large number large structure in the brain that connects the two separate hemispheres and you know it's not obvious why we have two separate hemispheres although I'll tell you a little bit about why I think it is but anyways they do communicate and what Gazzaniga demonstrated was that you could tell one hemisphere something without the other one knowing that both hemispheres were conscious and that the consciousness was somewhat independent it really strange it's very interest makes very interesting readings reading you know because it suggests that fragments of ourselves you could think of you have fragments of yourself within you that are like low resolution representations of you you know and that and the psychoanalysts would think of those more as they're kind of like they're kind of like one-eyed Giants that might be a way of thinking about it if you were thinking about it in a fantastical way so there's the angry you and you know you've all come in contact with the angry you it's a rather rigid that's the first thing you might say about it it's impulsive and short-term it doesn't think much about the past unless it's bad things about whoever you're angry at in which case it thinks about them a lot it's not too concerned with long-term future consequences and mostly it wants to be right and you know when angry you disappears and normal you assuming such a thing exists reappears you can be perfectly shocked about how angry you behaved and in fact sometimes if angry you really gets out of hand like it might in a battle like a war it might do things that you just can't imagine that you would do and under those circumstances you can reveal parts of yourself to yourself that are so foreign and so horrifying that it will leave you with post-traumatic stress disorder because it is the case that many but not all people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder especially if it's battlefield related get it because of something they did rather than something they saw or something that happened to them and that's really we're thinking about you know I mean there's a lot of weird potential nested inside people and you know you don't see it under normal circumstances because the circumstances are normal and part of the reason that we like the circumstances to be normal is precisely so that we don't see those parts of people we don't want to see and that's really worth knowing it's really worth knowing because that's why people are so identified with their culture and why they need a culture you know the terror management theorist types they kind of think of culture as a mechanism that inhibits anxiety and they think about it psychologically like it's it's something inside your your head let's say and it gives meaning to events and stops you from collapsing into chaos and protects you from death anxiety but that isn't that's not right it's sort of right but that isn't what your culture is your culture is a set of value Laden presuppositions that you orient yourself in the world that match the set of value Laden presuppositions that everyone in your culture has and acts out and so what that means is that when you believe something and you're among your own people you believe something implicitly it's the way you look at the world it's the way you act things out you act about everyone expects you to act about they're happy about it in fact so there's a match between what you're doing what you see and what you're doing and what other people expect and it's that match that regulates your emotions it's not the belief system it's the match and so part of the reason that people are so tied to their cultural identity is because their cultural identity regulates their emotions and in a profound way like this is no joke you know I mean one of the things that stabilizes human nervous systems is imagine that you have a domain of competence there's many domains of competence and of course in some of those domains you're completely incompetent but they met me not matter because you don't go into that domain so you have some area of specialization which you might think of as your sub-tribe you know your university students and so some of you are lower status by the rules of the university game and some of you are higher status by the rules of the university game by the tribe and so the higher status people tend to be the ones who fit into the academic environment you know and and find it conducive to their mode of being and all who also do well and their serotonin levels rise and you know the neuro chemicals that moderate mood particularly are serotonergic its serotonin it's lots of other things it's an oversimplification but that'll do for now as you become dominant in a hierarchy your serotonin levels rise and what that means is that happy things make you happier and sad things make you less sad it Tunes your nervous system so if you're down at the bottom of the hierarchy and you're failing it's like hey hardly anything makes you happy and everything makes you nervous and it's no wonder because it's it's not very good down there so the the societal structure which which is an elaborated dominance hierarchy regulates your emotions because of the match between your expectations and the behaviors of the people within that structure and then your position within the hierarchy regulates the rate ratio let's say and the intensity between positive and negative emotion so you mess with people's status at your peril and you disrupt their culture they don't like that and no wonder because when it's disrupted they fall into chaos and chaos isn't just anxiety the anxiety is bad enough but it's not just anxiety because when you fall into chaos when things fall apart for you of course you're uncertain and anxious because you don't know what the hell is going on and you don't know where you are and you don't know what to do Pat's anxiety-provoking and maybe you can't even understand your past properly anymore that as I said that happens when people get betrayed and so you fall into this state where nothing is certain the way you construe the world isn't certain and even the way the world is is no longer certain because you don't know how to act or your actions aren't working and so the world is presenting itself as something that's chaotic it's not just psychological the chaos is a weird intermingling of the chaotic world and the chaotic self I mean that's what happens when you get unemployed it's like it's devastating right it's devastating to people and it you could say well that's psychological it's like well yeah but they're unemployed that makes the world far more incomprehensible and uncertain it's not just psychological it's psychological and that's bad but it's also real and that's even worse and then those two things can spiral which they often do because you know if you don't set your expectations properly for a job search and assume that you're gonna get 49 rejections for every interview which you really need to know because if you get 49 rejections it's not because you're useless it's because the baseline for rejection is 98% and that's okay because the base rate for rejection for everything is 98% no matter what you do but you need to know that so that you don't feel that it's like something wrong with you and of course you only have to get it right once that then you have a job it's a lottery but you have to set yourself up you have to think okay well I'm gonna look for a job I need to how many resumes can I tolerate sending out a day you know it has to be enough so you don't feel like a useless moron and it can't be so many that you're overwhelmed by the burden so and I help people do this sort of thing all the time so maybe you decide well you're gonna send out ten a day and you're gonna work two hours on it and it's gonna take six months and then you know you've got your parameters set properly and you would know what to expect in the world and and your emotions are regulated and so but the state of being unemployed doesn't just produce psychological consequences so the distinction between the psyche in the world in some sense is quite arbitrary and the psychoanalysts I think it air too much on the side of the subject they tend to think that too much of you is inside of you and too little of you is outside of you and part of the reason I believe that is because of my clinical experience I love the psychoanalyst man they're brilliant they're brilliant they're deep they grapple with real problems like with the problems when people have real problems that I mean profound problems there really won't profound moral problems or problems of good and evil really you know there are things going on in their family that are so terrible that well that there are there are sometimes fatal you know lie upon lie upon lie upon lie for decades and decades and decades it's awful and that's not exactly inside them it's out there in the world and lots of the people that I see very famous critic of psychology I can't remember his name but I probably will criticize the practice of psychology quite effectively in the leave in the early 60s the myth of mental illness by Thomas says Szasz it's a classic you should read it if you're interested in psychology read it like it's it's a classic and he basically said most people have problems in living they don't have psychological problems and so I've experienced despite my love for the psychoanalysts very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work you know and you can parameterize that it's like what do you need how about some friends that people kind of like that how about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future that would be good how about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere so at least you've got some possibility of rising some possibility of stabilizing yourself and our schedule in a routine because no one can live without a routine you just forget that if you guys don't have a routine I would recommend like you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine you need to pick a time to get up whatever time you want but pick one and stick to it because otherwise you dis regulate your circadian rhythms and they regulate your mood and eat something in the morning I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders I had one client who was literally starving very smart girl sheet there's very little that she liked she kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day she came to me and said I have no energy I come home all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over what like is that weird and I thought well it depends on how hard you work you know it's a little weird but whatever it's familiar you're looking for comfort so I did an analysis of her diet it's like three quarters of a cup of rice it's like you're starving eat something you know you'll feel better so she modified her diet and her all her anxiety went away and she had some energy it's like yeah you got to eat so schedule that's a good thing man your brain will thank you for it it will stabilize your nervous system with it's a bit of a plan that's a good thing you need a career you need something productive to do with your time you need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol most particularly alcohol because that does even a lot of people you need a family like the family you have your parents and all that be nice if you all got along you could work on that that's a good thing to work on and then you know you probably need children at some point that's life that's what life is and if you're missing you know you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions it's not mandatory but I can tell you that if you're not operating reasonably well on four I think I mentioned six if you're not operating reasonably well on at least three of them there's no way you're going to be psychologically thriving and that's more pragmatic in some sense than psychological right human beings have a nature there's things we need and if we have them well that's good and if we don't have them well then we feel the lack and so behaviorists behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing you know it's practical it's like strategizing make a career plan figure out how to negotiate because that's bloody important figure out how to say what you need figure out how to tell the truth to people figure out how to listen to your partner in particular because if you listen to them they will actually tell you what they want and sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they'll return the favor and if you practice that for like 15 years well then maybe you're constantly giving each other what you want well hooray that would be good and then there's two of you under all circumstances and it's better to have two brains than one because people think differently because of their temperament mostly and so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises and it's part of the transformation the psychological transformation that's attendant on an intimate relationship and one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship anyways when that falls apart chaos ensues and that's why chaos is represented so continually in myths and stories and I'm going to walk you through a bit of that more today I talked about the story of Jonah now here's something to think about the internal representations of language meaning evolved partly from our pre linguistic ancestors knowledge of social relations like modern monkeys and apes our ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that were simultaneously competitive operative the demands of social life created selective pressures for just the kind of complex abstract conceptual and computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication although baboons have concepts and acquire propositional information from other animals vocalizations they cannot articulate this information they understand dominance relationships and matrilineal kinship but they have no words for them this suggests that the internal representation of many concept relations and actual action sequences does not require language and that language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought well you you know you can think without language well take the case of someone who's deaf and mute they have no language well they can operate in society they learn how to represent other people and they do that with image now with the post modernists who I despise would be a reasonable way of putting it have this proposition that there's no meaning outside language and and it's a powerful argument by the way but it's seriously wrong there is a meaning network outside of language and it's what language is grounded in and that's this pre verbal comprehension of the world it's an embodied comprehension of the world animals have it lobsters have it you know this particular scientist Seyfarth talks about our shared history with you know higher primates that probably goes back 20 million years something like that we split from the common ancestor with chimps about 7 million years ago but you know lobsters have dominance hierarchies they hardly have a nervous system at all which is partly why they're studied quite extensively and so they have a social structure and they understand it like if one lobster thira lobster to be quite a shark to you if it happened and you were fighting with another lobster and you lost you would remember that and the next time you saw that lobster you'd scuttle off somewhere else and you know that and all the lobsters in an area know who's top lobster and who isn't and top lobster gets the best bloody place to be and the best food so this dominance issue this cultural issue you know the fact that we live in a social environment is far deeper than people usually consider and it's also worth considering and that this is what you might think of from an evolutionary perspective you know you think of natural selection as producing evolution right well random mutation with natural selection but here's something to think about and Darwin knew this but Darwin was really smart and the biologists who followed in his footsteps even up to now have only expanded out a fraction of what he had to say you know he was very interested in sexual selection now one of the things about human beings that's unique is that human females are picky majors they're choosy they're also sneaky because you can't tell when they're ovulating and with many other female animals you know so they have hidden ovulation and they're choosy and they tend to choose men who are more successful in the dominant turkey well they're there's a shock I mean if you have a choice why not if you pick someone who's at the bottom of the competence hierarchy well that's probably not going to work out very well for you and since women bear the burden of representation you know when you think of a doorman sorry you might think well it's the powerful guy the aggressive guy say that rises to the top of the doorman it's hurricane that's not true it's not even true among chimps like you can get a chimp tyrunt but then what happens is other chimps gang up on him and tear him to pieces and they don't do it nicely they don't do it nicely and the chimps that tend to maintain their dominance for long periods of time have a pretty wide network of friends roughly speaking with whom they engage in reciprocal interactions like grooming and they actually pay a lot of attention to the female chimps who have their own hierarchy by the way and to the their offspring so they're like baby kissing politicians and so the idea that it's raw power that produces dominance is a it's just wrong it's it's wrong now you know tyrants you know it's pretty damn up unstable business being a tyrant there's lots of people who want to kill you plus you know you tend to rule over something approximating hell so maybe that's bit worse better than being a subject in hell but it's not much better so anyway so this social social now so what this means think about this for a minute so imagine you know imagine what I'm telling you bears some vague resemblance to the truth I think there's quite a lot of evidence for it from from a biological perspective I mean this choosy mating thing occurs with lots of species you know there's this bird called the bower bird you got to look up bowerbirds man those things are you just can't even believe they exist and so the male bowerbird he makes this really complicated nest that's close to the ground he weaves it it's really quite nice you couldn't make one so and then he sweeps this yard in front of the nest and then he runs around the forest or flies cuz he is a bird finding pretty things so maybe he'll find a nice collection of red leaves and so then he'll take the red leaves one by one and fly back to his front yard and make a little square you know he's a bird so it's not a great square but he makes a little patch of red and he takes a look at that and then he goes off and finds something blue and and he decorates it makes a little piece of abstract art in the front of his nest and a lot of male bowerbirds do this all at the same time and so then the females come along they hop on something nearby and they kind of look like this checking it out and if they're happy with it well then things proceed but if they're not they'd fly off to someone else's piece of abstract art and if a male piece of art is rejected by like three females in a row he gets irritated and brushes it all off with his wing and then he makes another one it's like God well they obviously have a sense of where well developed sense of beauty it's so cool you know and I guess the idea is that who knows what the hell the idea is the female birds like artistic males something like that but if you're thinking about it biologically maybe it's an indication of intelligence right it's a marker of intelligence you know and it's certainly the case that female humans prefer creative men so and no wonder of course we wouldn't be creative if that wasn't the case so then imagine that there's two primary forces of evolutionary selection operating on us and they're not really the natural world which is what people always think like the environment you know the animals and the trees and nature but it is nature that selected us it's two other things well partly it's two other things so one is the dominance hierarchy the male dominance hierarchy is one of the primary mechanisms of selection so it's like well women are faced with a hard choice which guy to go after right that's a hard choice well so they do the same thing that people do with the stock market they outsource the cognitive problem the computational problem to the male dominance hierarchy then they just let the male Sirk themselves out however they're going to and then they appeal from the top and so what that means is the dominant male dominance hierarchy itself is a selection mechanism because if you fail at it then you don't leave any offspring and so what that means at least in part is that we have adapted to be better and better at attaining status in dominance hierarchies over god only knows how long a period of time and that doesn't mean just power you know it might mean cognitive flexibility because you could imagine dormant its hierarchy a dominance hierarchy be dormant its hierarchy see okay so if like if you're really successful you climb up dominance hierarchy a right but you'd be and see know if you happen to land it knows you just be a failure so then you could say the ideal human being is someone who can climb to the top of a doorman it's her key no matter what the doorman is hierarchy is right so we've evolved to we've evolved such that success across the set of possible dominance hierarchies is the target and I think that's why we have general intelligence because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism and it's a single factor even like there is intelligence is a single factor it's it's not divisible despite what people like Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner falsely claimed so and then from the female perspective females are the next gatekeeper and that's why they're often Mother Nature took me a long time to figure this out why the hell is nature feminine in mythological representations it's a very very it's extraordinarily common mother nature you don't think a father nature you think of mother nature it's like why well nature brings forth new forms so that's feminine and nature select in fact that's the definition of nature from a Darwinian perspective nature is that which selects women select their nature and that's partly why far more men than you might think like far more are terrified of women because to be rejected as a romantic partner by a woman is to be classified as vaguely acceptable life form huh no value in propagating it though right so it's a major major rejection and you know I've had dozens of clients and many many people write to me whose primary problem is that they're so terrified of women they can't even approach them very very very common so all right I want to show you this little triangle thing this is kind of cool go yet so no no nonverbal right nonverbal so what happened well there's mother triangle I would guess and mutter triangle has circle as a child and triangle is maybe a friend but not one that's very welcome according to mother and child Circle goes out to try to play with triangle child and mother doesn't like that so she goes out there and pecks the hell out of her out of him chases him away pushes child circle back into the home and goes into the home and then child circle isn't very happy about that it's running around causing trouble and it manages to escape and then bad child triangle shows up and they play together and run around and run around and round around and run around with mother chasing them and then they well maybe they elope who knows and then mother triangle has a fit and blows down the house right it's obvious reasonable would you consider that a reasonable story about what happened perhaps you had other interpretations but I suspect they were vaguely along that line well but the point here in this is the point of this experiment is how much information do you need from which to derive a narrative and the answer is like none it just it's just immediate you you can watch some triangles moving around a box and instantly you personalize it and that's because that's what you're like and the reason you're like that is because your environment isn't nature your environment is culture your environment is other people other people and that was even more true for chimpanzees and so forth and especially animals that had a limited diet like like gorillas they pretty much only eat like leaves you know a chimp spends like 12 hours a day chewing and that's where they have a gut like this it's like you can't eat leaves you know have you tried they have no nutrition so if you're gonna eat leaves you have to eat a lot of them and then it takes like three months to digest them and so what we've done and this is pretty cool because we're so smart is that we've traded gut for brain and that's why we're so svelte and the way we manage that it appears is that we learned how to use fire to cook things and that meant that we had high quality nutrition much higher it's easier to digest cooked things especially meat and so because we invented fire we didn't have to have so much intestine and we could spend a little more time on the brain so human beings really are fire users we invented fire or discovered it or whatever man mastered it at least a couple of million years ago a long time so that's all pretty cool as far as I'm concerned so that's partly how you think and that's naturally how you think you think a certain way and so we'll say that your fundamental architecture is social cognitive you tend to view the world as if it's personified and the reason for that is that the world in which you emerged as a being was primarily social and what you needed to know was who's the big primate who's the little primate and who's related to who and you know among chimps if a big chimp is threatened by a small chimp well you know the big chimp could just tear the small chimp apart but the big chimp will back off if it knows that the little chimp is associated with some really big chimps and so the little chimp can bully the big chimp because it's part of a dominant family and that's because the nervous system of the big chimp doesn't respond to the little chimp like a little chimp it responds to the little chimp like it's a little chimp with four great monsters attached to it because it's true so it's nervous system is actually responding to the network around the chimp and so that's exactly what you well it's not exactly what you're like cuz you're not chimps but you know it's that kind of platform that constant it's the evolutionary underpinnings of your psyche so what does that mean well it means this is like perfectly fine to us right can animate things we can hit rabbits are people no problem will go along with that you remember Roger Rabbit I presume most of you've watched that so this is the detective whose name I don't remember he has to go to toontown because there's cartoons and there's people and you know they share the same world and you can go to toontown although it's kind of annoying because cartoon figures are kind of annoying like there's slapstick types and so he's not very happy to be there and this is what it looks like right everything is animated meaning alive anima means soul by the way so everything has a personality and you know when you're reading books to kids the son has a personality train has a personality jet has a personality doesn't matter what it is it has a personality and that's because the child is learning to understand the world using the architecture of social cognitive architecture and so and the thing that's really interesting about that this just blows me away you know evolution is conservative and so once it's produced something it has to build on it it's like dass the operating system it's like really it's still there if I remember correctly under Windows 10 you can't get rid of the damn thing because it's part it's part of the structure now and it's like the keyboards we use which were actually designed to slow typers down because with mechanical typewriters if you type too fast the keys would jam so they divine devise the keyboard to slow you down and we still use it which is stupid you know you want the high frequency letters close to your middle fingers that isn't what it's like at all but we can't change it because everyone uses it so your body plan that thing is been around a long time man if you look at mammals particularly but even lizards there's so much like us in their in their skeletal structure that it's just mind-boggling you know and we're all variants of this same symmetrical four-legged mouth here structure and so you have to build in what you have and if you have a social cognitive architecture then you have to first understand the world through the social cognitive categories and what's so bloody strange about that is it actually seems to work we actually seem to develop a coherent representation of being I would say of being that's not the same as nature it's not the same as the world because when we think of the world we think of the objective world and I'm not talking about the objective world I'm talking about the world of human experience and we see that through social cognitive filter and it makes perfect sense to us and it works that's so strange so anyways everything's got this animated nature and we don't have a problem with that in fact we actually find it quite fun you know people go visit the Disney toontown and participate in it and and have fun with it and so that shows you as well how how natural it is for us to to view things this way you know cars have faces right designers know that they know that people don't want a car with three headlights because like who wants to be associated with a three eyed monster no one it's like two eyes that's something you could be comfortable with and so cars have faces like a BMWs the new ones they really look cat-like you know and they have sexy curves they do they do there's been a more eye studies of that so if you show men photographs of attractive women looking directly at them there's a little part of their brain called a nucleus accumbens that lights up because to have someone look directly at you especially if they have like a smile is is interpreted as an invitation to approach and women they have the same damn problem because with women because if you go into drugstores say and you look at women's magazines they're all the same they've all evolved to the same endpoint they all have an attractive woman on them all of them and they're looking right out and so when women see that they actually see it as something to it approach it's an ideal and you know when people say that those Beauty ideals are to women and all ideals are oppressive but the empirical research some of it done here suggests that interacting with those images helps that it performs the psychological function of helping the woman equate herself with the ideal and in most cases that actually produces a pop and elevation and mood and you know think about it you're really gonna go to the magazines store when you're just looking for something to do and you're gonna buy something that makes you feel depressed and oppressed it's like no you're not going to do that magazines that do that to you they will die because no one will buy them and there's a reason they all turned out the same way it's like they're just responding to demand so faces oh yes with regards to the sexy curves so a woman who looks a woman's picture looking right at a man will produce this activation in the primary reward system cocaine produces the same response and so does sports cars especially curvy red sports cars and so that's why you often see an attractive woman sitting on a curvy red sports car in an ad because it's you know if there's a an ad for beer on the side it's like hey everything's perfect so and you know those are all primary real reward representations and they produce attraction because part of positive emotion that dopamine dopaminergic Li mediated element of positive emotion is an approach emotion it's not a satiation satisfaction emotion it's oh good there's something good here I can move towards it and that that is what happiness is that's directly what happiness is it's not attaining something because that just puts in a whole new problem you got to figure out what to do next alright so I suggested to you that one of the problems that we have the problem I would say is not what the world is made out of but how we should be in the world because we're alive and how we should be well it's fairly straightforward not so much pain would be good that'd be good not too much anxiety hey we're bored for that little pleasure down then some stability not dying that's a big one that's a big one and then let's say from the Darwinian perspective propagating and so that's what rained out and the reason we're aimed at that is you just think about this it's so amazing so every single one of your of the relatives you have in your ancestry every single one of them successfully produced a child who successively successfully produced a child all the way back to three billion years ago it's bloody unbelievable like the probability that you exist well it's a hundred percent because there you are but the probability of predicting that you would exist you know if you tried to predict it it's like you the chance that the chances that you're here are so infinitesimal that it's just absolutely mind-boggling think about that unbroken sequence of success over literally over billions of years god it's amazing and so you have to obviously you have to think that there's a pretty strong proclivity for that to happen I mean some of obviously was necessity but not only that I mean it's necessary that impregnated females have an infant it isn't necessary that they keep it alive so you can't account for that continuity merely from necessity you have to interject least a small amount of consideration that the care that's associated especially with taking care of infants because there you know there are a lot of work that's there to tennis it's actually I think it's manifested in the personality trade agreeable to us as it looks to be like agreeableness is one of the dimensions where men and women very most substantially agreeableness looks to be like the manifestation of the maternal instinct now men can be agreeable to because of course male human beings take care of children you know if you're a grizzly bear female you just chased the damn male away because he'll kill your Cubs that's not so helpful but they're not maternal at all quite the contrary but you know human men are pretty damn maternal they're not as maternal as women on average although some women are less maternal than some men because you know the curves overlap but but on balance how are we in the world well we're aware of our own vulnerability who are aware of our own shortcomings let's say and that's I think that's partly from being a social being because people are always signaling your shortcomings to you to such a degree that you even signal your shortcomings to yourself because well you might as well fix them before someone else points them out that's guilt and shame you know when Freud called out the super ego the super-ego is kind of like the internalized representation of the judgmental father and culture I think is represented as a father figure God the Father let's say because it's actually oh it's actually quite a bit like there is an all-seeing eye that's always watching you it's a really really intelligent way of conceptualizing it because the group which is more or less eternal is watching you all the time all the time and it's judging you all the time and we know that if you put people in a room and you put a big eye on the wall you know that you give them an opportunity to cheat on some little Chiti thing you know nothing too important if they're in the room with the big eye they're less likely to cheat if they're in the room with no eye at all so you know and what do you do you keep an eye on your kids and the reason you do that is so they don't misbehave and we keep an eye on each other and so we have a representation of that and as far as I can tell we represent it as a transcendent figure of judgment and it's like yeah it's hey that's a pretty good metaphor so one of the this is a major intellectual battle the major intellectual battle and it's raging in universities it's basically a battle between post-modernism and traditional and tradition I think that's the right way of thinking about it for the post modernists human beings have no nature we're blank slates everything that we are is enculturated so we're completely malleable and all elements of our identity are valuable on the other side are the traditionalists who are I would say grounded more in biology on the one hand but also in in historical humanities tradition that suggests that people have a nature I explained some of that nature most people want to have threads it's part of your nature you know most people want to find love part of your nature and you suffer without it so and you know you could say those are all social constructs but you can say you can say anything so you know and don't ever trust someone who has one explanation for everything you know how much intelligence does that take you got one explanation you just trot it out for every phenomena this is an alternative now here's what happened in part Nietzsche back in the late 1800s was very interested in the dissolution of traditional faith in the West we fell out of our myth that's a way of thinking about it we start believing in its fundamental axioms we start believing that there was such a thing as a transcendent deity for example it did it didn't mesh well with the emerging scientific viewpoint and so in the late 1800s Nietzsche announced the death of God which sounds fairly presumptuous but it wasn't something he was celebrating the full quote and I haven't got it exactly right is God's dead we've killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the rivers of blood so like that's a lot different than what you see scrawled on bathroom wall you know and echip hypothesized that in the 20th century millions of people would die in the conflicts over what values were going to reign as an alternative to that tradition and he particularly brilliantly pointed to communism he said that's where it's gonna be and Dostoyevsky did the same thing and so and since then there's this being this battle hey and the battle is kind of like this the battle is on the one hand between social construction social constructionist utopians who believe that human nature is infinitely malleable and that with the proper transformations in society you can bring apart about the perfect state and the perfect human being and and traditionalists and young I think is the classic example of this who believe that there is a human nature and it's deeply embedded within us and that the cultures we set up have to manifest themselves in accordance with that nature or they will fail well Jung believed in the existence of a meta-narrative the hero myth roughly speaking and he explained its connections to various religious traditions in a staggeringly brilliant manner Camille Paglia who I would recommend and I think I already told you that you know she she's already concluded after going through a radical feminist period early in her life that the proper way for society orient itself is within a mythological structure and that that's part of what the humanities provides and the alternative is rational arguments over what values are going to dominate and it isn't obvious that rationality can solve that problem I don't think it can that's Humes point David Hume said you can't derive an art from it is right you cannot use science as a guide to behavior so what do you use instinct instinct manifested in imagination and the evolution the evolved structure of your organic cultures something like that do they have a structure that's the question okay so you ask yourself this question what is it that every human being shares regardless of place and time so any universally comprehensive language that would be a meta-narrative a myth a hero myth let's say a myth about what a human being not only is like but should be like has to speak to us about those aspects of experience that we all share because otherwise we wouldn't understand the damn story now we go to how we go to stories that we understand all the time like Star Wars and it really doesn't matter what country you know everybody gets it more or less so obviously there's stories that we can understand and mutually you know we understand love stories we understand stories of conflict we understand stories of betrayal we understand stories of anger and that's because we can feel jealousy we can feel love we can feel anger it's it's part of you it's right there we even know where the circuits are you know and then you're like other animals they feel it too so very similar emotions as far as we can tell so here's here's this is derived in large part from you but not only here's what we share natural world social world and the fact of our existence as an individual and that can be represented different ways it can be represented as you the known the and unknown or it could be you culture and nature all the same representations and the cultural representation tends to be male that's God the Father let's say and the representation the feminine representation tends to be female this is the known the culture Apple Indian control that's associated with the Sun consciousness the king the patriarchy the plow because it pushes up the earth the phallus obviously order and authority and the crushing weight of tradition the wise old man and the tyrant Dogma the day sky the country man the island heights the ancestral spirits the activity of the dead Captain Hook he's a tyrant and that's why Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up to become him and that's why Peter Pan does well because he thinks that adults are all tyrants why is Captain Hook a tyrant because a crocodile ate his hand and the crocodile has a clock in its stomach and the reason for that is that the crocodile is time and times already got a piece of Captain Hook and he's not very happy about it he's bitter and resentful and tyrannical and when Peter Pan looks out adulthood that's what he sees and he thinks why should I sacrifice the potential of childhood for the singularity of tyranny and so he stays immature his entire life and he's king of the Lost Boys Jesus great there's a porn star named Jeremy Christ I can't remember his name it's really an ugly guy he is he is he is an ugly guy he admits it and he said something funny I was watching a documentary about him and he said the funniest thing he said I'm the hero to people who think people like me are heroes I had what a drag a I mean he's just did in this horrible situation he doesn't admire the people that admire him but he gets admired by them all the time well it's sort of like Peter Pan it's like well he's king of the Lost Boys he doesn't get Wendy either right she grows up she has a family he asked to content himself with Tinkerbell and you know what Tinkerbell doesn't exist well that's what happens when you don't grow up that's a representation of culture that's a nasty one eh he'll will kiss us we'll kiss a statue of Stalin who cares that he murdered 30 million people culture well you know in the university you hear a lot about the patriarchy and how impressive it is it's like yeah Yeah right definitely no kidding but you know it's kind of useful as well since it provides light the food and all of that which you know kind of counterbalances it to some degree culture has a pause development and a negative element the individual has a positive the negative element nature has a positive element and a negative element and if people tell you a one-sided story which is the ideological story they leave out that they say all culture is terrible the human being is a Despoiler and nature is perfect it's like no nature kills you culture keeps you alive and there's things about you that are honorable and good as well as things about you that aren't and you need to know both of those and that's what the great stories tell us all right |
[Music]
all right so I suggested to you last class that human beings world as a place
of action through the lens of their social cognitive biological sub
structure and I made that argument on the basis of the supposition that our
primary environment was actually other people and I mentioned to you I believe
that those other people are arranged in hierarchies of influence and authority
or power or dominance which is often how its construed and that the dominance
hierarchy as a structure is at least 300 million years old
which makes it older than trees and it's for that reason that you share the same
neural biology to govern your observations of your position in the
hierarchy as lobsters do which is a remarkable fact you know it's a
remarkable that the lobster uses serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate
its status position and that modifying the serotonin function in the lobster
can produce changes in its behavior can can / help the logs to overcome defeat
for example which is very much equivalent to what happens to a human
being when they take antidepressants you know it's it's it's a good example of
the conservation of biological structure by evolution and another a good
illustration of the continuity of life on Earth it's really amazing but the
other thing it is a testament to is the ancient nature of the social structure
now we tend to think of the social structure as something other than nature
right because society is I suppose mythologically opposed it's opposed in a
narrative way cultures opposed to nature it's the town in the forest but the town
has been around a long time so to speak and the structure of the town is also
part of nature in that the dominance hierarchy is part of
and because it's so ancient you have to consider it as part of the mechanism
that has played the role of selection in the process of natural selection and so
roughly seem what seems to happen is that there is a plethora of dominance
hierarchies especially in complex human communities and many of them are
masculine in structure in that their dominance are keys that primarily men
compete in or that has been the historical norm and that some men rise
to the top based on whatever the dominance hierarchy is based on and they
make their preferential mates and it's a good strategy for women to engage in
because why and many sorts of female animals do precisely this is they let
the male's battle it out and then pick from the top and or often the dominant
males there's no choice on the part of the females it's the dominant males just
chasing away the subordinate males but with humans it's usually the case that
the females have the opportunity to do at least some choosing and so we have if
you think about that what that implies is that we have evolved to climb up
dominance hierarchies and then I would say it's not exactly that even because
there are many different dominance hierarchies and so the skills that you
might use to climb up one might not be necessarily the same skills that you
would use to climb up another and so then I would say what we have all
evolved for instead and I'm still speaking mostly on the masculine edge of
things historically speaking is the ability to climb up the set of all
possible dominance hierarchies right and that's that's a whole different idea
it's like the averaged hierarchy across vast spans of time and I think it's for
that reason that we among others that we evolve general intelligence because
general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism and it seems
to be situation in depend so to speak and of course there's been
an arms race for the development of intelligence between men and women
because each gender has to keep up with the other and women have their own
dominance hierarchies there's certainly no doubt about that
and of course now men and women more increasingly compete within the same
hierarchies and we don't exactly know how to sort that out yet because it's an
extraordinarily new phenomena but in any case because of the the permanence of
the dominance hierarchy it has come to be represented in fundamental narratives
because human beings and this is something that we share everywhere it's
the thing the Wall Street bankers shares with with the kalahari Kung Bushmen who
are among the genetically speaking they seem to be very close to what the
original most original human beings were like in Africa before the Diaspora about
fifty thousand years ago but you know both of those people
despite their vast differences live in communities that have a hierarchical
structure that are composed of individuals that are embedded in a
natural world you know the world outside of the dominant Sarki and so that's the
standard human environment I would say and so stories that rely on the
representations of those environments and their interactions are what you
might describe as universal stories and that's why people can understand them
and I would say further and this is drawing substantially on say derivation
of the work of Carl Jung because I think he delved into this more deeply than
anyone else so a lot of this stuff is quite Union in its in its origins we the
commonality between human beings so you know you have to have commonalities in
order to communicate right axiomatic commonalities because otherwise you have
to explain everything and so there's many things that human beings don't have
to explain to one another we don't have to explain anger we do
have to explain jealousy we don't have to explain fear we don't have to explain
pain we don't have to explain joy we don't have to explain love etc those are
built into us and so there are predicates of being human and you could
say that those human predicates and the standard human environment produce
standard narratives and then you could say even further and this is more of a
leap I would say is that those who act out the role of the victor in those
standard narratives are precisely the people who attain victory in life and I
would say biologically defined in that they make more attractive partners but
also I believe that there's an alignment between human well-being which is a very
weak word and participation in these meta narratives that drive success
because well do you want to be a failure or a success well you know it's hard to
be a success you have to adopt a lot of responsibility and so you might be
willing to take your chances as a failure but I can't exactly I'm not
going to make the presumption that that's going to put you in a situation
other than one where you experienced a lot of frustration anger disappointment
depression pain and anxiety at the bottom of the heap and so generally
that's not what people are aiming for although under certain circumstances if
people don't like responsibility and are willing to take their chances they might
take the irresponsibility and it's apparent freedoms over the necessity of
thinking things through the medium and long run anyways we stop here I
suggested to you that one of the primary narrative representations was the known
or culture or order I think those or the explored territory or the dominance arc
I think those things are basically interchangeable from from a
representational perspective and you know in the movie The Lion King that's
represented by Pride Rock which is the central place of orientation founded on
Raw which is the sort of thing that people
embed their memories in that's why we make sculptures and gravestones and that
sort of things rock stands for permanent and to have rock under your feet as to
be on a solid foundation and that's a pyramid in some sense in that movie and
the pyramid has topped by you know the king and queen and they're their
offspring so that's that's the divine couple that's one way of thinking about
it and Simba of course is the newborn hero and you know you extend that even
though it's lions and drawings of lions at that and animals are acting it out
it's completely irrelevant to you that those characters happen to be animated
and that what you're watching is a fiction so and I would say to you with
regards to fiction you know you might say well is fiction true or not and the
answer to that is yes and no it's not true in that the events portrayed in
fiction occurred in the world they didn't but they're fiction is true the
same way numbers are true I would say like you know if you have one apple and
one orange and one banana the common analogy between all of those three is
one and you might say well is one as real as one fruit is the abstraction one
as real as one fruit and I would say it depends on what you mean by real but
representing things mathematically and abstractly gives you incredible power
and you could make the case that the abstraction is actually more real than
the phenomena that it represents and certainly mathematicians would make that
case they would say that mathematics is in some sense more real than the
phenomenal world and you know you don't have to believe that mostly it's a
matter of choice in some sense but you can't deny the fact that an abstraction
has enough reality so that if you're proficient in using it you can really
you can change the world and in and in insanely powerful ways you know I mean
all the computational equipment you people are using or depending
on the abstractions one and zero essentially and I mean look at what
emerges from that and so I would say with regards to fiction if you take
someone like Dostoyevsky oh I think it's a favorite of mine by the way I would
highly recommend that you read all five of his great novels because they are
unparalleled in their psychological depth and so if you're interested in
psychology Dostoyevsky's the person for you
Tolstoy is more of a sociologist but Dostoyevsky man he gets right down into
the bottom of the questions and messes around transformative reading anyways
Dostoyevsky's characters this character named her skull in the Cobb is a
character in crime and punishment and Raskolnikov is a materialist rationalist
I would say which was a rather new type of person back in the 1880s and he was
sort of taken by the idea that God was dead and took and convinced himself that
the only reason that he that anyone acted in a moral way in a traditional
way was because of cowardice they were unable to remove from them the
restrictions of mere convention and act in the manner of someone who rose above
the norm and so he's tortured by these ideas he's half starving he's a law
student he doesn't have enough to eat he doesn't have much money and so you know
he's not thinking all that clearly either and he's got a lot of family
problems his mother's sick and she can't spend him send a much money and his
sister is planning to engage in a marriage that's loveless to someone
who's rather tyrannical who he hopes will provide the family with enough
money so that he can continue in law school and they write him brave letters
telling him that she's very much in love with this guy but he is smart enough to
read between the lines and realizes that his sister is just planning to
prostitute herself in you know in an altruistic manner he's not very happy
with that and then at the same time as all this is happening he becomes aware
of this pawnbroker who he's you know pawning his last possessions to and
she's a horrible person and not only by his estimation
she pawns a lot of things for the neighborhood and people really don't
like her she's grasping and cruel and deceitful and and resentful and like and
she has this niece who's not very bright intellectually impaired whom she
basically treats as a slave and beats all the time and so Raskolnikov you know
involved in this mess and half starved and a bit delirious and possessed of
these strange new nihilistic ideas decides that the best way out of this
situation would be just to kill the land let the pawnbroker take her wealth which
he all she does is keep it in a chest free the niece so that seems like a good
idea so remove one apparently horrible and useless person from the world free
his sister from the necessity of this loveless marriage and allow him to go to
law school where he can become educated and do some good for the world you know
so one of the things that's lovely about Dostoyevsky is that he you know when
sometimes when one person is arguing against another or when they're having
an argument in their head they make their opponent into a straw man which is
basically they take their opponent and curricular their perspective and try to
make it as weak as possible and and laugh about it and and then they come up
with their argument and destroy this straw man and feel that they've obtained
victory but it's a very pathetic way of thinking it's not thinking at all what
thinking is is when you adopt the opposite position from your suppositions
and you make that argument as strong as you can possibly make it
and then you pit your perspective against that that strong iron man not
the straw man and you argue it out you battle it out and that's what Dostoevsky
does in his novels I mean he's the people who stand for the antithesis of
what dust is dust is he actually believes are often the strongest
smartest and sometimes most admirable people in the book and so
takes great moral courage to do that and you know in risk Olenick oov what he
wanted to do was set up a character who had every reason to commit murder every
reasonable reason philosophically practically ethically even well so risk
Olenick off goes and he kills the old lady with an axe and it doesn't go the
way he expects it will because what he finds out is that post murder
Raskolnikov and pre murder Raskolnikov are not the same people at all they're
not even close to the same people he's entered an entirely different universe
and Dostoevsky does a lovely job of describing that universe of horror and
chaos and and and deception and and and suffering and terror and all of that and
he doesn't even use the money he just buries it in a and an alley as fast as
he can and then doesn't want anything to do with it again and anyways the reason
I'm telling you all this is potentially to entice you into reading the book
because it is an amazing amazing book but also because you might say well his
risk is what happened to Raskolnikov true are the stories in that book true
and the answer to that is well from a factual perspective clearly they're
untrue but then if you think of Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a
particular type of person who lived at that time and the embodiment of a
certain kind of ideology which had swept across Europe and really invaded Russia
and which was actually a precursor a philosophical precursor to the Russian
Revolution then Raskolnikov is more real than any one person he's like a
composite person he's like a person who's irrelevant sees have been
eliminated for the purpose of relating something about the structure of the
world and so I like to think of those things as sort of meta real meta real
they're more real than real and of course that's what you expect people to
do when they tell you about their own lives about their own day you don't want
a factual description of every muscle twitch you want them to
distill their experiences down into the gist which is the significance of the
experience and the significance of the experience is roughly what you can
derive from listening to the experience that will change the way that you look
at the world and act in the world so it's valuable information and they can
tell you a terrible story and then that can be valuable because that can tell
you how not to look in the world look at the world and act in it or they can tell
you a positive story you can derive benefit either way which is why we also
like to go watch stories about horrible psychopathic thugs you know and and
hopefully we're learning not to be like them although there are additional
advantages in that you know someone you might be some say that someone who is
incapable of cruelty is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of
cruelty and I would say and this follows young as well that that's incorrect and
it's dangerously incorrect because if you are not capable of cruelty you are
absolutely a victim to anyone who is and so part of the reason that people go
watch anti heroes and villains is because there's a part of them crying
out for the incorporation of the monster within them which is what gives them
strength of character and self-respect because it's impossible to respect
yourself until you grow teeth and if you grow teeth and you realize that you're
somewhat dangerous and let or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and then
you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and
other people do the same thing and so that doesn't mean that being cruel is
better than not being cruel what it means is that being able to be cruel and
then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel because in the
first case you're nothing but weak and naive and in the second case you're
dangerous but you have it under control and you know a lot of martial arts
concentrate on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training it's like
we're not training you to fight we're training you to be
peaceful and awake and avoid fights but if you happen to have to get in one and
then I guess the philosophy also is is that if you're competent at fighting
that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight
because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence and
with any luck and this is certainly the case with bullies with any lock a
reasonable show of confidence which is very much equivalent to the show of
dominance is going to be enough to make the bully back off and so the strength
that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace
and that's partly why Jung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate
their shadow and he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt
because the human shadow mmm which is all those things about yourself that you
don't want to realize reaches all the way to hell and what he meant by that
was it's through an analysis of your own shadow that you can come to understand
why other people are capable and you as well of the sorts of terrible atrocities
that characterize let's say the 20th century and without that understanding
there's no possibility of bringing it under control when you study Nazi
Germany for example or you study the Soviet Union particularly under Stalin
and you're asking yourself well what are these perpetrators like forget about the
victims let's talk about the perpetrators the answer is they're just
like you and if you don't know that that just means that you don't know anything
about people including yourself and then it also means that you have to discover
why they're just like you and believe me that's no picnic so that's enough to
traumatize people and that's partly why they don't do it and it's also partly
why the path to enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was
all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy then everyone
in the world would be a paragon of wisdom but it's not that at all it's the
it's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face and everyone has that
old there's this old story in King Arthur where
the night's go off to look for the Holy Grail which is either the cup that
Christ drank out of it the Last Supper or the cup into which the blood that
gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified the stories vary but it's
it's basically a holy object like the Phoenix in some sense that's
representation a representation of transformation so it's a it's an ideal
and so King Arthur's knights who sit at a round table because they're all
roughly equal go off to find the most valuable thing and they and where do you
look for the most valuable thing when you don't know where it is well each of
the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle and enters the
forest at the point that looks darkest to him and that's a good thing to
understand because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of
personality which is exactly the same thing is precisely through the porthole
portal that you do not want to climb through and the reason for that's
actually quite technical this is a union presupposition - is that well there's a
bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped and a lot of those things
are because there's things you've avoided looking at because you don't
want to look at them and there's parts of you you've avoided developing because
it's hard for you to develop those parts and so it's by virtual necessity that
what you need is where you don't want to look because that's where you've kept it
and so and that's why there's you know an idiosyncratic element of it for
everyone your particular place of enlightenment and terror is not going to
be the same as yours except that they're both places of enlightenment and terror
so they're equivalent at one level of analysis and and different than another
so anyways back to the fiction and and and and what it does if it distills
truth and it produces characters that are composites and the more they become
composites the more they approximate a mythological character and so they
become more and more universally true and more and more approximating
religious deities but the problem with that is they become more and more
distant from individual experience and so with
literature there's this very tight line where you need to make the character
more than merely human but not so much of a God that you know one of the things
that happened to Superman in the 1980s Superman started out he's got a heavenly
set a parents by the way in an earthly set of parents and he's an orphan like
Harry Potter very common theme is that when Superman first emerged he could
only jump out of her buildings you know and maybe he could stop a locomotive but
by the time the 1980s rolled around like he could juggle planets and you know
swallow hydrogen bombs and you know he could do anything well people stopped
buying the Superman comics because how interesting is that it's like something
horrible happens and Superman deals with it and something else horrible happens
and Superman deals with it and it's like that's dull he turned into such an
archetype he was basically the omniscient omnipresent omnipotent God
and that's no fun it's like God wins and then God wins again and then again God
wins and you know so then they had to weaken him in different ways with
kryptonite you know so green kryptonite kind of made him sick and red kryptonite
I think kind of mutated him if I remember correctly and anyways they had
to introduce flaws into his characters so that there could be some damn plot
and that's something to think about you know there's a deep existential lesson
in that in that your being is limited and flawed and fragile you're like the
genie which is genius in the little tiny in the little tiny lamp
you know this immense potential but constrained in this tiny little living
space as Robin Williams said when he played the genie in Aladdin but the fact
that you have limitations means that the plot of your life is the overcoming of
those limitations and that if you didn't have limitations well there wouldn't be
a plot and maybe there would be no life and so that's part of the reason why
perhaps you have to accept the fact that you're flawed and insufficient and and
live with it and consider it a precondition for being it's at least a
reasonable it's a reasonable idea so anyways one of
the main characters is the country the known the explored territory we went
over that a bit and it always has two elements I mean your country is your
greatest friend and your worst enemy you know because it squashes you into
conformity and demands that you act in a certain manner and reduces your
individuality to that element that's tolerated by everyone else and it it
constrains your potential in a single direction and so it's really tyrannical
but at the same time it provides you with a place to be and all of the
benefits that have accrued as a result of the actions of your ancestors and all
the other people that you're associated with so there's the good tyrant or the
bad tyrant and the good King and those are archetypal figures and that's
because they're always true and they're always true simultaneously you know
which is partly why I object to the notion of the patriarchy because it's a
myth the law the it's the what do you call that it's the apprehension of a
mythological trope which is that of the evil tyrant without any appreciation for
the fact that the archetype actually has two parts and the other part is the wise
king and you know you can tell an evil tyrant story about culture no problem
but it's one-sided and that's very dangerous because you don't want to
forget all the good things that you have while you're criticizing all the ways
that things are in error that's a lack of gratitude and it's a lack of wisdom
and it's it's founded in resentment and it's it's very dangerous both personally
and socially I told you that Captain Hook is a tyrant because he's got this
crocodile chasing him in the crocodile has a clock in its stomach and that's
death it's like obviously right tick tick tick tick and it's a crocodile and
it's under the water and it's already got a taste of him so he's being chased
around by death and that makes him terrified and resentful and and cruel
and bitter so he's a tyrant and he wants to wreak
havoc everywhere and then Peter Pan of course looks at Captain Hook and thinks
why the hell should I grow up and to be a tyrant and sacrifice all the potential
of childhood and the answer to that is the potential sacrifices itself if you
don't utilize it as you mature and you just end up a 40 year old lost boy which
is a horrifying thing to behold it's almost as if you're the corpse of a
child the living corpse of a child because who the hell wants a
six-year-old 40 year old you're a little on the stale side by that point and not
the world's happiest individual so you know your potential is going to
disappear because you aged anyways and so you might as well shape that
potential in a particular direction and at least become something no matter how
limited rather than nothing so you know Peter Pan that's a great story it's a
great mythological story so well so let's talk about tyrants well not only
are they mythological figures but they exist and they tend to be deified I mean
Stalin was for all intents and purposes God the Father in Soviet Russia although
he was pretty much only the worst elements of Old Testament God who was
you know constantly smiting people and and wiping out populations and doing all
sorts of things that seem to be quite nasty but nonetheless you know people
worshipped him in many ways and and he's a representation of just exactly what
goes wrong when things really go wrong when people stop paying attention and
when they all lie because one of the things that characterized the communist
state was that no one ever got to say anything they actually believed ever and
that was partly because one out of three people was an informer which meant if
you had a family of six people two of them were informing on the government
about you and that included your own children and you and if you were an
informer you were often amply rewarded by the state so that if you lived in an
overcrowded apartment building with three families in the same
flat and you informed on you know the woman down the hall that you didn't like
she got shift shipped off to the old concentration camp and you got her
apartment and so that was a lovely society and it only killed about thirty
million people between 1919 and nineteen fifty-nine so that's what happens when
the archetypal structure gets tilted badly when people forget that they have
a responsibility to fulfill as citizens as awake citizens who are capable of
stating the truth and the archetype shift so there's nothing left of the
Great Father except the tyrant and let's not have that happen I mean the one on
the right is really interesting because consciously or unconsciously you know
there's Stalin surrounded by what is for all intents and purposes fire you know
he looks like he looks like Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty when she shows up at
Aurora's christening you know she puts her arms up in the air and green fire
surrounds her it's like it's like he's surrounded by fire and there's Lenin
above him who's like king of the fiery realm and that's for sure
so I mean all the terrors that happened in the Soviet Union didn't start under
stell and they started under Lenin and Lenin was or Stalin was definitely
Lenin's legitimate son let's put it that way so you know this is another example
of the tyrannical element of the Great Father and the sorts of things that can
happen I mean I kind of got a an evil kick out of this bad that was quite old
you know it's kitschy in some sense and and you
know it shows I don't think that's something you'd ever see at a magazine
today 10 unusual stamps showing evil dictator
you know well fair enough I mean that's what he was and that's the consequence
and that's just a tiny bit of the consequence because the Nazis wiped out
a very large number of people often using compassion as a as a as a
as a justification so when they went after the mentally ill and the
terminally ill and those who whose intelligence was compromised for
biological reasons and and those who were too old
they basically justified it by saying that the enforced euthanasia was
merciful and that you were actually being a good person by complying with
the requirements and so something to think about
more mythological representations I like these quite a bit so there's their
Hitler as you know Knight of the faith essentially with I suppose that's a
recreation of the Christian holy spirit dove you know except it's an eagle which
is a bird of prey and and a prayer and uh what do you call those things a
scavenger right so that's kind of interesting but that's Hitler as night
of the of the blood roughly speaking and there this is an allied war poster
essentially that assimilates the Nazis to poisonous snakes and you know we
don't like poisonous snakes very much and and it's probably because they've
been preying on us for approximately twenty million years because snakes and
primates humans in particular co-evolved and so the snake is a representation of
that which lies outside the comfortable domain and that can be you know a snake
obviously or it can be an abstract snake and the abstract snake is your enemy or
an even more abstract snake is the evil in your own heart and this is going to
be a bit of a leap for you but there's this ancient idea that developed in what
in the West over thousands of years far predating Christianity that at least its
origins that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan which is like of
what the hell it's a very strange idea but the reason for that as far as I can
tell is that you know we have this circuitry that detects predators and a
predator representation of a predator is a snake
or a monster that incorporates snake-like features like a dragon or
something like that or a dinosaur with lots of teeth or a shark that lives
under the water and will pull you down you know because I suspect a lot of our
ancestors met a nasty death at the hands of Nile crocodiles while they were in
the African veldt going down to get some nice water so you know that's the thing
that jumps up and pulls you under and you know that happens in your own life
because things jump up and pull you under you know and use the same
circuitry we use the same circuitry to process unknown things that upset us as
we once used to detect predators who were likely to invade our space and so
and and human beings are capable of abstraction and so you know you could
think about the real predator that might invade your space and maybe that's a
snake or a wolf or or some kind of monster you know and that's pretty
concrete and biological chimps have that you know chimps don't like snakes and so
if you a chimp comes across a snake in the wild then like a big let's say I
don't know what live with chimps I don't know if they're pythons but they have
constrictors there anyways so you know maybe there's like a 20 foot constrictor
and this and the chimp like stays a good distance away from it but it won't leave
and then it has this particular cry that it uh ters that's called a snake rah WRA
a and so it makes this noise which means something like holy shit that's a big
snake and I actually mean that because the circuits that primates use to utter
distress calls are the same circuits that we use to curse just so you know
that's why people with Tourette's syndrome swear because like what what's
up with that how can you have a neurological condition that makes you
swear well it turns out that guttural effect Laden curses are mediated by a
different speech circuit and that's the speech circuit we share with the
predator alarms of other primates so that's pretty cool so anyways this chimp
stands there and makes this snake noise and then all bunch of other chimps come
running and you know some of them stay a fair ways from the snake
can some of them get pretty close but they'll stand there and watch that snake
for like 24 hours you know so they're fascinated by it and you know if you've
handled snakes you can understand that fascination because they're fascinating
you know and they're numinous I would say that that's the right way of putting
it at numinous is a word that means intrinsically meaningful like a fire you
know you can't look away from fire you know if you're sitting in front of a
fireplace it's like you're staring at it and that's because you're all descended
from the first mad chimpanzee who had some weird genetic mutation that made it
impossible for him to stay away from fire it was like the first chimp
arsonist you know and and he figured it out and well hey now he was a chimp with
a stick with fire on it like that's a mega chimp man and so you know we have
that mutation in spades and no wonder so anyways so they they make this you know
they have this reaction to snakes and chimps that have never seen a snake if
they're in a cage and you throw a rubber snake in there it's like bang they hit
the roof but then they look at the snake you know it's so it's like it's
terrifying and fascinating at the same time and you should look at the snake
because you want to know what it does but you should stay away from it because
it's a snake so you you're kind of screwed in terms of your motivations
right one is get the hell away and the other is well don't don't let that thing
do anything that you're not watching and so that's really the reaction we have to
the unknown it's terrifying but we watch it and then you know the meta story is
that not only do we watch it but we go explore it and so you might think well
back in the Garden of Eden so to speak when we were living in trees the snakes
used to come and eat us and and our offspring more likely and you know we
weren't very happy about that and then we figured out how to maybe maybe by
accident draw up a stay a stick on a snake and that was a good thing because
the snake didn't like that and then maybe the next thing we learned a little
later was to like actually take a stick and like
ock the snake with it and you can believe that the first primate who
figured out that was just as popular as the guy who mastered fire and so we're
pretty good at whacking state snakes with sticks which is why Springfield has
a snake whacking day it's devoted to nothing but
that right I don't know if you know that Simpsons episode but it's quite comical
so well so then you think about the snake as a predator and it's the thing
that invades the garden always because you just can't keep snakes out of the
damn garden no matter how hard you try and then you think of snakes and maybe
you think of meta snakes and like a meta snake would be also a predator but maybe
that's the predator that represents the the destructive spirit of the other
tribe because chimpanzees for example are quite tribal and they definitely go
to war with one another and so you think you abstract out the idea of the
predator to represent malevolence as such and then you take that one step
further and you realize that the worst of all evil predators is the human
capacity for evil and then at that point you know you're starting to I would say
psychologize or spiritual eyes the idea of danger and making it make it into
something that's conceptual and something that's psychological and
something that you can you can face sort of on mas I mean one of the things
people had to figure out was how do you deal with danger and so you feel figure
out how you deal with a specific danger but then because human beings are death
so damn smart they thought well what if we considered the class of all dangerous
things and then what have we considered a a mode of being that was the best mode
of being in the face of the class of all dangerous things well that's a lot
better you get you know you could solve all the dangerous problems all at once
instead of having to conjure up a different solution for every dangerous
thing and that's basically as far as I can tell where the hero's story came
from and the hero's story is basically you know there's a community it's
threatened by the emergence of some old evil
often represented by a dragon that's sort of typical say of the Lord of the
Rings stories there's a hero often a humble guy but not always sometimes a
knight decides he'll go out there you know and chase down the snake maybe even
or the serpent or the dragon maybe even in its lair and he'll have a bunch of
adventures on the way that transform him from you know useless naive Hobbit into
you know sword wielding hero and he confronts the dragon and gets the gold
and frees the people that it had enslaved and then comes back transformed
to share what he's learned with the community it's like well that's the
human story fundamentally and that's that's our basic instinctive pattern and
it's represented in narratives constantly and that's partly what this
see this has meaning you know what this means
why why do you know well you know because it draws on symbolic
representations that you already understand you understand that a mess of
tooth snakes is not a good thing and that may be the sensible thing to do is
stomp them and it's not like you need an instruction manual to figure out what
the poster means and so you know that's two different representations of Hitler
that's sort of the pro-hitler representation and I would say that's
the anti-hitler representation and you know that's the real Hitler who at this
point does not look like a very happy clam so so that's the known that's
culture that's order and what's eternally juxtaposed to culture and the
known and the explored and order is the unknown and the unknown is a strange
place the unknown is actually it's a physical place like the unknown is the
place that when you're camping and you're around a fire the unknown is
everything outside the circle of the light and you remember in the Lion King
you may not remember when when when Mufasa that's the king right goes and
takes Simba up to show him his territory he says he is the king of everything
that the light touches and that's a very old idea and you guys
had no problem with you know that was fine that made sense and that I would be
on the light was the darkness and that was the elephant graveyard that was
death that was the place of death and danger that's where the hyenas hung out
and you weren't supposed to go there and so of course Simba because he's a rule
breaking hero just like Harry Potter immediately goes there and so you know
that's like the forbidden fruit it's the same sort of idea if you want someone to
do something the best thing to do is tell them that they shouldn't and not
explain why you know so for example if I said to you at the beginning of this
class look I've got one rule here don't sit in that chair no matter what you'd
be thinking the whole year especially if I reminded you well just what's up with
that chair like let's chair as magical all of a sudden you some of you might
even well you probably wouldn't because this is a ridiculous example but maybe
you know you come to class early and sit in that chair just to see what would
happen you know and people are very curious and that's exactly what we're
like and that's a very old story too right it's like opening Pandora's box
don't open that box you'll be sorry it's like oh huh you know all the horrors of
the world fly out and believe me you will open Pandora's box many times in
your life because you know with your family or maybe your mate or maybe your
children you'll have this idea that they have a box with things in it that you
want to know about and you'll say well I'm kind of curious about this
particular event so why don't you tell me about it and they say well no we
probably really shouldn't open that box and you keep bugging them and then they
open it and then all sorts of things fly out that you didn't expect and then
maybe you think hey it would have been better if I would have just left that
damn box closed but and you can do the same thing to yourself believe me
and so the Pandora's box idea the forbidden fruit idea that's that's a
major-league idea and part of the reason in the judeo-christian tradition why
people are saddled with the notion of original sin is because hyper cortically
developed chimpanzees without much sense can
keep their hands off things and so they keep exploring even when they know
better and every time they do that they learn something that is that destroys
the paradise that they currently inhabit right because there's plenty Unni and I
never learned anything in your life that's of importance without it having a
pretty damn destabilizing effect on you at the moment of realisation right you
learn something happy it's like whatever you know that all that means is that I
was doing things right like it's nice and everything but it's not informative
you do something and all hell breaks loose that'll make you think that's for
sure you might never stop thinking for the rest of your life so anyways the
unknown the unknown is that which surrounds the known it's an unexplored
territory it's usually represented as female I think for a variety of reasons
and not not as female exactly it's not the right way to think about it as
feminine and that's not the same thing because feminine is a symbolic category
whereas female is like an actual female and so you don't want to confuse the
metaphor with with the with the actuality because we have these social
cognitive categories built-in you know you might say masculine feminine and
offspring something like that we had to use what we could to represent what we
were attempting to figure out and we kind of mapped them onto the external
realities of being the best we could using what we could and so you know
nature is benevolent and it's fruitful you know all things come from nature and
all things come from the unknown right because the known is already there it's
the unknown that manifests the new right and so that's part of the reason for the
characterization of the unknown as feminine and then there's also the case
that women play a massive role in sexual selection among human beings so that mmm
from an evolutionary perspective you're twice as likely to be a failure if
you're a man then you or if you're a woman in that you have
twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors and you think well that's
impossible but it's not all you have to do is imagine that every woman has one
child half the men have two and the other half have zero and so end of
problem and that's basically how it works out so women are more choosy
mater's than men by a substantial margin there was a funny study done by the guy
who established it's one of the big dating sites and he looked at how women
rated men and they rated the 50th percentile man at the 15th percentile so
85% of men were below average according to women's ratings now men had their
same arbitrary choices because of course they preferred younger women to older
women and and they were more swayed I would say by by attractiveness but that
didn't have set nearly as big an effect on their actually actually writing of
women so anyway so you know from from a Darwinian perspective nature is that
which selects so that's all it is and so sexual selection plays a massive role in
human evolution you know the fact that we have these massive brains is very
likely a consequence of a positive feedback loop and sexual selection
you know because otherwise that's the only time you can get really rapid
changes in evolutionary space where you know you get a process going that
reinforces itself so there's a little preference for intelligence and then
that produces more intelligent men and women and then there's a little more
preference for intelligence and you know maybe then that turns into the ability
to speak and or to master fire and then there's way more selection for
intelligence and the brain just goes like this you know and women have paid a
pretty big price for that because your hips are basically so wide that you can
barely run and if they were any wider than you couldn't and of course the
pelvic passageway through which the baby travels is too small so it's
really painful and dangerous and the baby's head has to compress quite a lot
I mean they come out cone-shaped often and then they're born really young so
you have to take care of them forever like what the hell you know a deer is
born a fawn is born and it's like two seconds later it's standing and then
it's running from a lion it's like you know it's like 15 minutes later and a
baby it's like you just lies there and you know utters plaintive noises that's
all it can do and that does that for like ten months before it could skitter
away from a sloth if it was predatory you know so you really got to take care
of those creatures and so that's a big price to pay that's a big price to pay
for our cortical evolution so anyways here is some of the symbolic represents
representatives of the unknown the unconscious Dionysian force of the it'd
that sort of Freud's representation of the unknown the terrors of the darkness
that's the unknown the monsters that lurk they're the source and the resting
place of all things the great mother the Queen the matrix which means matter
which means mother the matriarch matter mother the
container the cornucopia the object to be fertilized the source of all things
the fecund the pregnant the strange the emotional
the foreigner the place of return and rest the deep the valley the cleft the
cave hell death and the grave because it's beyond the moon ruler of the night
and mysterious dark and matter and the earth then you know all this because
when you watch a movie that's rife with symbolic representations it draws on
those underlying metaphors and they're natural I mean where does a witch live
well in a swamp for God's sake she doesn't live in the penthouse of a New
York Tower she lives in a swamp and it's dark there and if the moon's up that's a
better and maybe it could be a crescent moon or maybe it could be a full moon
but you know witches live in the right place if you're going to understand it
and you all you understand all of that and it's part of the structure of your
imagination you could say and so it's part of the unspoken
fantastical imagination that unites all of us and it makes us specifically human
there's a good representation of the underworld and the place of
transformation so that's Hell in Isis in Egypt was queen of the underworld and
the underworld generally has a queen and she usually shows up when order falls
apart and so you go to the underworld when your life falls apart that's what
it means and so when you see these stories of the hero you know journeying
to unknown lands of terror and danger that's that's what happens to you it
happens to you all the time you know you're you're in this little safe space
like The Hobbit in the Shire and then you know there's a great evil brewing
somewhere and you can no longer ignore it so off you go into the land of terror
and uncertainty and better to go on purpose then accidentally that's for
sure because at least you can be prepared and we also know that if you're
going to face a threat if you face it voluntarily what happens is your body
activates itself for exploration and mastery but if you face it involuntarily
same size threat then you you you you revert to pray pray mode and you're
frozen and that's way way way more stressful it's way harder on your body
and so it's better to keep your eye open and watch for emergent threats because
you all know you know what you're not doing quite right and where your life is
likely to unravel you all have a sense of that and the best thing to do is to
not ignore that to pay attention to it to watch it and to take corrective
action early and then you know you stay on top of things and things your little
trip to the underworld might be a few minutes long instead of a catastrophe
that produces post-traumatic stress disorder knocks you out for four or five
years and maybe you never recover so and that's right you know that's what these
kind of symbolic representations mean it's those are states of being that that
that indicate being devoured and you can be devoured
your own unconscious Jesus that happens all the time what does that mean well
you know and it's an autonomous thing in some sense you know like if you if you
get depressed or if you get really anxious you don't have any control over
that it's like it sweeps up over you and pulls you down why down well down is
where you go when you're sad you don't go up man I'm up today oh that's too bad
no it's man I'm down today and well that's partly this and it's partly
because this is subordinate and it's partly because down is closer to the
ground and farther from the sky like there's all sorts of reasons you're
feeling down rather than up up is where you're aiming right yeh MUP you don't
aim down well there the reason those phrases make sense is because they're
locked deeply into this underlying structure of imagination and well those
are the architect or the archetypal structures according to Jung and I I
think that he's far as I can tell he's dead accurate and I think we understand
the biology of such things much better than we did so there is more
representations she's she's quite the friendly creature that's Kelly
I like this representation better those are heads by the way in hands so she
sort of represents well very complex things she represents death she
represents transformation in this I already like this representation I think
it's brilliant so imagine that what the people were doing who formulated these
representations what they were trying to do was to make a representation of the
domain of threat itself right so that they could deal with the idea that
because we can say threat well what is that what the hell does that mean well
threat is the category of all threatening things and so then you can
think about threat and you can think about threat across all those individual
instances and maybe you can figure out how to deal with threat right how what's
the best way to be in the world so that you most effectively deal with threat
well that's sort of like apart from how do you deal with pain that's sort of
like the ultimate question of human beings you want to be
terrified No so you want to be in danger No so like
you better figure out how to deal with threat so first of all you have to
conceptualize it so we'll take a look at this representation so that's Kelly
shear her hair is on fire well fire you know
that's that's a numinous phenomena dangerous but transformative she's
wearing a headdress of skulls she has a weapon in this hand and and she has a
tiger's tongue she often has a snake around her waist need none of these do
but she often does but in this case this then that's because you know it it's a
snake we've already covered that well these things that look like snakes here
aren't you notice how her belly is concave well it's because she's just
given birth to this unfortunate person that she happens to be standing on and
she's eating him intestines first and that's a fire ring which he is in and
then it's got skulls on the inside of it it's like what's that supposed to do
well partly it's supposed to represent that which terrifies you it's like yeah
fair enough man because I don't imagine you saw those things in there before I
explained them but someone who was familiar with that image would know what
it meant it's like some poor artist was sitting there thinking well how do I
represent destruction it's like bang whoa okay well put that down and then we
won't look at it again so and then what do you do with this you make sacrifices
to it and you think well that's kind of primitive you know first of all well
that doesn't really exist well it does if it's an amalgam of threat symbols I
can tell you that it exists that's for sure so it exists as an abstraction if
nothing else do you offer it sacrifices well what the hell do you think you do
what are you doing in class why aren't you like drinking vodka and snorting
cocaine you know because you could be doing that instead here you are
listening to me you know slaving away in university you're young it's like really
you've got nothing better to do than sit there you know well what you're willing
to forego today pleasure for tomorrow's advantage and
that's what sacrifice is and human beings discovered that dramatically
first you know like we were we were apes for God's sake we didn't just leap up
and think oh we better save for tomorrow you know we it took thousands of years
for that idea to emerge and it emerged in dramatic form and it was sort of like
well society is sort of like a god know what they weren't thinking this through
is like if you're gonna represent society well it's like this
masculine God that's always judging the hell out of you that's everywhere all at
the same time it's like yeah yeah that's true absolutely and what do you have to
do with it well you have to give it what it wants why why do you have to give it
what it wants because it'll crush you if you don't and that's exactly right
and if you're lucky and you give it the right sacrifice then it'll smile on you
and you get to have a good life and that was like that was the major discovery of
mankind man that was a killer discovery it was like the discovery of the future
you know we discovered the future as a place and it was a place that you could
bargain with you can bargain with the future wow that's just what an idea that
is you know it's it's so unlikely well how do you bargain with the future well
you give it what it wants and you know some of that you maintain your social
relationship and you know you make yourself useful to other people and you
shape yourself so that you can cooperate with people and you you don't act
impulsively and maybe you squirrel something away for the next harvest even
if you're hungry and you know and then the future isn't hell and you make the
proper sacrifices and so if you sacrifice to Kelly then she turns into
her opposite and showers benevolence on you and that's Mother Nature right it's
like look out for Mother Nature man you know two weeks out in the bush right now
and you're dead and it's not pleasant and then if it's the spring you last
longer huh but the bugs eat you and so that's not very fun either
so nature you know it's bent on your destruction but if you treat it properly
and carefully and make the right sacrifices then maybe one of her trees
will offer you some fruit and that would be okay and so believe me lots of people
died trying to figure that out so here's another way of looking at it
so I said you know order and chaos known unknown explored territory unexplored
territory I love this this is the Taoist symbol it's a symbol of being and being
isn't reality as you would conceptualize it as a scientist it's more like reality
as it manifests itself to you as a living thing which is completely
different you know science extracts out all the subjectivity all it is there is
an array of our objective facts of equivalent value and that's part of its
method but that's not the world in which you live the world in which you live is
full of motivation and emotion it's full of terror and pain and joy and
frustration and and other people that's for sure and so that's the real world
and so well that's what this is it's it's the real world and what is it made
out of well it's made out of all those things you know that can get out of hand
you know because the explored territory and the known can get so damn tight that
it's nothing but a tyrant and then it's all those things you don't know and
that's pretty exciting because you know you want to go find out some things you
don't know and that adds a lot of spice to life you want a little adventure you
don't want to go out with someone who's so predictable that you know everything
about them in a week you know unless you're hyper conservative you want to go
out with someone who's got they're a little erratic like not too erratic
let's say they're a little dangerous perhaps not too dangerous but some of
that at least you want predictability with a bit of unpredictability in there
well that's exactly what this means it's like that's predictability with a little
unpredictability in it and what that also means is that what you know can be
turned into what you don't know just like that and that's going to happen to
you lots of times in your life man when someone close to you dies suddenly it's
like poof order turns into chaos and now you're in
chaos and what the hell are you gonna do there and that's a good question
because you need to know what to do there cuz you're gonna be there and it
happens to you when your dreams fall apart you know I mean your dreams for
your life or you know when you discover something awful about yourself that you
didn't know or you know it flips on you all the time and in small ways sometimes
you know you have a fight with a friend or in big ways that that wipe you out
for well indefinitely sometimes because you can fall into chaos and never get
out you know that's the people who are trapped in the belly of the beast it
isn't necessary that when you descend into chaos that you learn something and
you get back out you could just be stuck there suffering until you die and that's
you know I wouldn't recommend that you know it's something to avoid but it
happens to people all the time all the time you see them wandering around you
know shattered on the streets of Toronto you know they're done they're in chaos
and there's so much chaos around them that you won't even go near them the
chaos spreads like eight feet around them and so when you see someone like
that you're like well first we're not going to look too closely and people
like that often don't like you to look at them because that also helps them
remember where they are and that's no Pleasant thing and you're gonna just
stay away from that maybe you'll cross the street maybe you'll keep your head
down whatever you're not going anywhere near that chaos and no bloody wonder you
know and and you don't think about it much after you pass it because it's a
hell of a thing to think about and what are you gonna do about it anyway so you
don't know what to do about it you might just make it worse well so chaos you
know that's the other half of life and it can turn into order sometimes better
order that's actually what you do when you explore right you explore you find
out something new not too new not to Pandora boxy you know you bite off as
much as you can chew but no more and so that rearranges the way you look at the
world but you're doing it voluntarily so you can kind of tolerate there the
recalibration and you strength and the order right because now you
become more competent and I would say that you're trying to live on the edge
between order and chaos and I and I mean that's a real place that's an actual
it's a meta place but it's more real than places because it's so old it's
such an old place it really exists and your nervous system knows that it sees
the world this way in fact the right hemisphere is roughly specialized for
chaos and the left hemisphere is roughly specialized for order which is why the
left hemisphere tends to have the linguistic elements and and why people
are right-handed and the right hemisphere has a more diffuse structure
it's more associated with negative emotion and imagination and the two
communicate between each other through the corpus callosum and the right
hemisphere appears to update the less left hemisphere kind of slowly often in
dreams and so if you were hurt if your right hemisphere is hurt for example
back here in the parietal lobe then you lose the left part of your body you
can't move it anymore but you also lose the idea that you have
a left part of your body so it's like blindness it's a blindness to the left
and so if someone comes along and says you know you're not moving your left arm
you're gonna say yeah well my arthritis is bothering me 2d have moved it for six
months MA my arthritis is bothering today or you know you don't move in your
left foot it's like well you know uh I'm too tired well what's happened is the
left hemisphere has a representation of the body and it's not being updated
because the part of the brain that would notice that the left is gone because of
a stroke it isn't there anymore and so the left already has a model and it's
not gonna change just it's hard to change your model of yourself you know
have a tooth pulled what happens it's like your damn tongue is in that hole
for the next six months fiddling around constantly and that's because you're
rebuilding your neurological model of your body it's like try it out with your
whole left side and see how well you do you know so this guy named Ramachandran
was experimenting with people like this and one of the things he did was kind of
he was checking their balance and you can do that by
irrigating the ear with cold water and that makes people go like this makes
their eyes move back and forth because it upsets the vestibular system and what
he found was that if he if he poured cold water in the left ear of someone
with right per aisle damage who had left neglect that they'd all of a sudden sort
of wake up catastrophic ly they'd have a terrible reaction to the fact that they
were paralyzed on the left and they would know that it had happened and cry
and you know amid all sorts of distress and no wonder
and then like 20 minutes later they'd snap back into their damaged mode of
being and they would not deny because that isn't really what it is is that
they couldn't update the model they just didn't have the neurology for it anymore
so they were back to not noticing that it was gone and coming up with stories
about it and so well so that's a good example of how the right and left
hemispheres worked together and how they're kind of mapped onto this weirdly
enough so you know we're map were adapted to the meta reality and so what
that would be is we're adapted to that which remains constant across the
longest spans of time and that's not the same things that you see flitting around
you day to day those are just they just like clouds they're just evaporating you
know there's things underneath that that are more fundamental that are more
fundamental realities like the dominance hierarchy like the tribe like the danger
outside of society like the threat that other people pose to you and that you
pose to yourself those are eternal realities and we're
adapted to those that's our world and that's why we express that in stories
and so then you might say well how do you adapt yourself to this world and the
answer to that isn't I believe this is a neurological answer I believe this that
your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and
order and the way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and
meaning so let's say there's a place in the environment you should be okay what
should that place be well you don't want to be terrified out
of your skull like what good is that and you know you don't want to be so
comfortable that you might as well sleep you want to be somewhere where you know
you're kind of on firm ground here but over here you're kind of testing out new
territory and some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable you
know you're gonna go pretty far out into the unexplored territory without
destabilizing yourself and other people are gonna just put a toe in the chaos
and you know that's neuroticism basically that's that your sensitivity
to threat that's calibrated differently in different people and more some people
are more exploratory than others that's kind of extraversion and openness
working together and and intelligence so some people are going to tolerate a
larger admixture of chaos in their order those are liberals by the way and I mean
that technically liberals are more interested in novel chaos and
conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that
already exist and who's right well it depends on the situation and that's why
conservatives and liberals have to talk to each other because one of them isn't
right and the other wrong sometimes the conservatives are right and sometimes
the liberals are right because the environments go in like this you can't
predict the damn thing so that's why you have to communicate and that's what a
democracy does it allows people of different temperamental types to
communicate and to calibrate the damn societies so anyways so let's say you're
optimally balanced between chaos and order so what does that mean well you're
stable enough but you're interested right because a little novelty heightens
your anxiety that wakes you up a bit that's the adventure part of it but it
also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity and that's
actually associated with pleasure that's the dopamine circuit and so if
you're optimally balanced and you know that you know you're there when you're
listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one it's a real
conversation you know you're saying some things you know and the other person is
saying some things they know but the both of what you know is
changing it's like wow that's so interesting you'll have a conversation
like that forever or maybe you're reading a book like that or you're
listening to a piece of music that models that because what music does is
provide you with predictable forms multi-level predictable forms that
transform just the right amount and so music is a
very representational art form it says this is what the universe is like you
know there's a dancing element to it repetitive and then cute little
variations that sort of surprise and delight you and and you think wow that's
so cool and it doesn't matter how nihilistic you are you know music still
infuses you with a sense of meaning and that's because it models meaning that's
what it does that's why we love it and you know you can dance to it and that
sort of symbolizes you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of
reality and positioning yourself properly and you like that too you know
you'll pay for it oh boy I get to go dancing you know oh boy I get to listen
to music it's like what the hell are you doing listening to music what good is
that well you think that's a stupid question I don't care about your dopey
criticism I'm going to listen to some music right it did there's no rational
there's no rational argument against music it's like you just don't even
think about it you just walk away from someone who's stupid enough to ask that
question it's like some things are obvious
well why okay so that's pretty fun so what mediates between these two domains
well that's what consciousness does far as I can tell and that's sort of the
individual and that's the hero that's another way of thinking about it it's
the logos that's another way of thinking about it it's the word that generates
order out of chaos at the beginning of time it's the consciousness that
interacting with the matter of the world produces being that's basically it
that's basically you for all intents and purposes
how do you do that well the unconscious does it to some degree you know because
it's with our fantasy that we first meet the unknown right well look say you're
going out with a new person it's like what do you do you project a fantasy on
them and then you fall in love with the fantasy and aren't you stupid because
you're gonna find out that the match between your damn fantasy and the actual
person is tenuous at best and so young would call that a projection of either
the anima or the animus you know the anima is what a man projects onto a
woman he finds desirable it's like oh she's the perfect woman
it's like well how do you know that you've like seen her for four seconds
you know but it grips you and the same thing happens in the opposite direction
and it's an action of instinct you know it's like you fall in love with the
image and but interestingly enough what you do in a relationship that works is
that you actually I think that what you see
it's a rough approximation when you project the ideal and fall in love with
it you see what could be it could be that but it's going to take you a hell
of a lot of work because like you got no shortage of flaws and the other person
has no shortage of flaws and so you're bringing your flaws together and that's
going to produce a lot of friction and you're gonna have to engage in a lot of
dialogue before you approach that level of perfection again but maybe you can do
it then you get to live happily ever after
well would not be nice well so the unconscious meets the unknown and it it
meets it with imagination and fantasy and dream and art that's how you take so
you don't just go from what you don't know to fully articulated knowledge in
one bloody leap you can't do that you have to extend pseudo pods of fantasy
and imagination into the unknown that's kind of what theorizing is like right
even scientifically you know you don't know something scientifically you
generate a theory well it's an imaginative representation that your
unconscious is helping you generate and so you meet the unknown with fantasy
that's what the unconscious is for from the psychoanalytic perspective that's
what rheems do and you can see why you dream
about the future you know it's like well what's the future gonna be like well you
have a little imaginative story going on and it's like you don't really create it
it's sort of you watch it unfold you know maybe you could tweak it here and
there but it sort of comes to you from wherever the hell things like that come
from you know the unconscious that's the psychoanalytic answer it's not really
much of an answer because it's more like a representation of a place that we
don't understand but that's where creativity comes from and I mean some
people are really creative right down to the bloody core so in my clinical
practice I often see people who are high in openness because they're attracted to
me because they watch my lectures and you have to kind of be high in openness
to like my lectures so because well you do because they go everywhere you know
and and they're not necessarily very orderly so so anyways lots of my clients
are really high in openness and they're funny people often especially if they're
smart because sometimes they have the most nihilistic intelligence you can
imagine it's just self-critical and nihilistic and brutally brutal man and
smart and so they just criticize themselves out of existence and so often
I have to just try to get them to quit listening to their chattering right
self-critical rationality and go out and create something you know with their
massive creativity and as long as they're doing that they're engaged in
the world and happy as hell but as soon as that self-critical rationality comes
in and shuts down the creativity they're just they're just like walking corpses
you know and it's because if you're really open like that's your a tree and
it has some trunks and you know your your most prominent trait is the most
lively trunk and if you're a creative person and you're not engaging in a
creative enterprise you're just you're like a tree that that
has been that has had its vitality amputated and so this is not trivial
this stuff is this is deeply deeply deeply rooted in your biology and and
those are people often who have like dream lives you just can't believe I
have one client he has like four spectacular
dreams a week and most of the time we just spend discussing them I mean God he
and I had another client who could be lucid in her dreams which is more common
among women she could ask the damn characters what they represented and
they would tell her it was like okay that was pretty weird and like a lot of
the things they told her were really helpful and they were not things that
she wanted to hear she she basically one of them told her she if she was gonna
live she'd have to go visit a slaughterhouse and the reason for that
was because she was raised as a little princess and protected from horrible
mother nature until she hit puberty in which time she turned into an evil
villain because that's how the family worked perfect child
evil teenager overnight and then well that was hard on her and she wasn't
prepared because she thought the world was princess world and you know she
couldn't go through a butcher store without having a fit and no wonder you
know like really Jesus you know it's no wonder but you do it but she couldn't so
we used to go to butcher stores and that would make her cry and and that she was
a vegetarian that would make her cry and you know bemoan the cruelty of the world
and it's like yeah fair enough man those are bloody slabs of meat it's like I
don't know why everyone isn't screaming when they walk through the butcher store
but but you got to get used to it man because you can't live in the world
otherwise and so the dream character who was a gypsy told her that she had to go
visit a slaughterhouse which seemed rather impractical and so I asked her if
she could think of anything else to do and she saw it well why don't we go
visit a funeral home and and watch an embalming and I thought oh how good that
sounds that sounds like a fun way to spend a day and so I phoned up a funeral
parlor and I said I had a client it was terrified of death yeah and I was the
therapist who was also a little shaky on the concept myself and so they they had
no problem with that they deal with death all the time which is really
something to think about right a human being can actually have an occupation
where they do nothing but deal with death and they don't go stark raving mad
it's like what the hell's up with that it's like working in a
palliative care ward where your your clients that you you know have a
relationship all they're gonna do is die this week next week the week after
people do that it's like those people are tough man they're tough so anyways
we went and watched this embalming which was I have a rather high level of
disgust sensitivity so it was a little on the rough side for me but she sat
there and first while she was not we were outside this little room she was
not looking at that man no way and she kind of go like this and you know that
was pretty good and then she'd go like this and then she go like this and then
and she watched it and then she asked if she could go in and she put on the glove
and she touched the body and she didn't have a fit she didn't have a panic
attack and so she walked away from there learning that there was a hell of a lot
more to her than she thought there was and that she could see things that she
didn't think she could see and live and after that she sort of had a touchstone
it's like well I'm kind of afraid of this well is it as bad as going to see
the embalming no it's not that bad well I guess I can
do it it's like an initiation right she had an initiation and so did I you know
and I learned a lot from doing that I learned that one of the things you need
to do if you're going to be a human being is to prepare yourself to be
useful in the face of death and so when you have a parent that dies which you
know shatters people's ideas often they can't even think about it if you can't
even think about that man you've got some thinking to do because you need to
be able to at least think about that because otherwise you're just gonna be a
wasteland when it happens and you never know you could even have a higher
ambition maybe you could even be useful when it happens instead of being part of
the heap of destroyed people who also have to be taken care of you know and
that's brutal you have to be brutal to be useful in the aftermath of your
parents death you know you don't get to crumble and fall apart and no you have
every reason to so you got to be kind of some tough monster to manage that but
you want to be useful in the face of tragedy or do you want to be
well you make your choice so out of the unconscious you get ritual you get
dreams you get drama you get stories you get art you get music and that sort of
buffers us we have our little domain of competence and we're buffered by the
domain of fantasy and culture and that's really what you learn about when you
come to university if you're lucky and and the professors are smart enough to
actually teach you something about culture instead of constantly telling
you that it's completely reprehensible and should be destroyed it's like why
you would prefer chaos to order is beyond me and the only possible reason
is that you haven't read enough history to understand exactly what chaos means
and believe me if you understood what it means you'd be pretty goddamn careful
about tearing down the temple that you live in unless you want to be a denizen
of chaos and some people do you know because that's when the impulses that
you Harbor can really come out and shine and so a little gratitude is in order
and that makes you appreciative of the wise King well being smart enough to
know that he's also an evil tyrant it's like that's that's a total conception of
the world it's balanced it's like yeah we should preserve nature but good god
it is trying to kill us and you know yes our culture is tyrannical and
oppressive people but it is protecting us from dying that's helpful you know
and yes we're reasonably good people but like don't take that theory too far
until you've tested yourself and you know that's wisdom at least in part and
that's what these stories try to teach you
there's a nice mythological representation I love this one it's like
the Dome of the known and the seeker looking outside you know that's a that's
a metaphysical representation you know and then that is the world as it looks
to us right you go out in a field and it looks like there's a dome covering it
it's a circle a big circle with a dome over it and you know what's outside the
dome well the unknown right that's where heaven is theoretically
you know it's a projection obviously heaven is in the unknown well it was
localized in space I suppose that's partly because when
people looked up in the sky they were overwhelmed with all so it's a
reasonable conclusion you know it it's a projection of an unconscious
presupposition it's a projection of fantasy you know heaven is a fantasy and
and I'm not denigrating fantasy by the way and it's projected imaginatively
onto the sky and that's part of the way you discover what's in your fantasy well
this is us man we mediate between chaos and order and you know those are the two
archetypal representations fundamentally you know and I think they apply to both
genders you know like women can act as the individual who holds the world on
his or her shoulders and males men can play a maternal role you know meet
female human beings are quite masculine and male human beings are quite feminine
and so you know maybe maybe this archetype dominates among men and that
archetype dominates among women which I would say is that is the case as far as
I'm concerned although there in our individual conceptions and of course
those two things have to work in conjunction but that's you the eternal
mediator between chaos and order which also has its enemy so that's that's
Horace there and that Seth who's eventually turns into Satan as though as
the West progresses so to speak and that's represented there as well the
temptations of I would say resentment and hatred which everyone has to fight
with all the time all right initiations so this is cool this is a
standard hero story and initiate initiative rights are a part of human
heritage and so let's take a look this is from el yada
I would like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic
vocation is not profaned it does not belong to ordinary
symptomatology it's not mental illness it has an int initiatory structure and
signification short it reproduces a traditional
mystical pattern the total crisis of the future shaman sometimes leading to
complete disintegration of the personality and to madness can be
valuated not only as an initiatory death but also as a symbolic returned to the
pre cosmogonic chaos to the amorphous and indescribable state that precedes
any comes Morgan II well what he means by that is that I suppose the
mythological view of the emergence of order that's a cosmogony is that there's
a state of potential and chaos out of which order emerges and you know here's
here's how it is that you think that way because you do think that way so you
know imagine what you're facing when you're facing the future right well you
might say well the future is full of potential right it's full of potential
what the hell does that mean you know you act as if that you act as if that
potential is really a real thing and you're confronting it all the time I'm
confronting the potential of the future well it doesn't exist yet so did what
you're confronting doesn't even really exist what you're conceptualizing
doesn't really exist and in some sense you bring it into being by plotting your
path through it well the pre cosmogonic chaos is the same as the potential of
the future it's exactly the same idea it's the realm of possibility from which
actuality emerges and you participate in turning that possibility into actuality
that's what you're doing all the time now can I explain that well no I have no
idea how consciousness and the substrate of the world interact
i I can only say that that's how it looks that's how it feels
you know that's how people act and they'll get into trouble if they don't
manifest their potential whatever that is that's all those things you could be
that you're not well where are those it's just potential well that's the
chaos this is a that's the I would say that's the the cosmos that's the cosmos
that you live in all the time it's a little story it's the thing that you
extract out of the chaos it's - consists of your conception of where
you are now and your conception of where you want to be at some point could be
ten minutes could be three years if you can slide it and then you have a little
plan about how you should move your body to do transform one in into the other
that's your action powder and that's a little story and when you ask someone to
say what they were up to you they'll tell you a little story like that you
know I was at some place and I went somewhere else and here's how I did it
then they might tell you more interesting story which is I was
someplace and something happened that I really didn't expect and it knocked me
for a loop you know and that's a good divorce story I came home one night and
my wife was gone it's like yeah chaos and probably a bit of willful blindness
preceding it we might suspect anyways down into chaos and then well
maybe you learn something down there and maybe you don't but hopefully you do and
you put yourself together if you're lucky and then pop bang you pop up into
another little structure of order and that's an initiatory process it's like
you're some more stable falls apart or maybe you break it apart on purpose you
do it voluntarily you know people do that all the time you know they do that
for example when they experiment with drugs and they do that when they go on
wild adventures and you know when they break themselves out of their normal
routine and throw themselves somewhere they don't understand and hope that
that's going to produce a transformation of personality that's the basic story
that's the initiatory story now this is William James who was the one of the
establishes of modern psychology and a kind of an odd guy he was an early
experimenter with psychedelics of course they'll never tell you that but he was
and he is his drug of choice was nitrous oxide which is an inhalant gas which
seems to be inert no one really knows why it works but it produces quite
intense hallucinogenic experience mystical experience although if you
breathe too much of it then you die because it doesn't it doesn't have any
oxygen in it so so don't do that and and he wrote some really bad hippie poetry
back in the 1880s well he was you know
experimenting with with nitrous oxide I'll read a little bit of that to you
pure experience is the name which I give to the original flux of life before a
reflection has categorized it only newborn babes in persons in semi coma
from sleep drugs illnesses or blows can have an experience pure in the literal
sense of that which is not yet any definite what though ready to be any
sorts of what's both full both of oneness and of many 'no specs that don't
appear changing throughout yet so confusedly that its phases
interpenetrate and no points either of distinction or of identity can be caught
1905 William James Journal of philosophy you know a lot of these old guys that
established what we regard is you know fairly stable bodies of knowledge we're
just as crazy as you could possibly imagine they're just the most peculiar
damn people and they get sanitized you know as they are represented in history
and that's no fun you know I mean it's much more interesting to know what they
were like they were just so bloody peculiar and and strange and involved in
all sorts of weird things that's a lot more fun to know that here's his poem
Wow it's like right from 1968 no verbiage
can give it because the verbiage is other incoherent coherent same and it
fades and it's infinite and it's infinite don't you see the difference
don't you see the identity constantly opposites United the same me telling you
to write and not to write extreme extreme extreme something and other than
that thing intoxication and other nest and intoxication every attempt at
betterment every attempt at other menthe is a it fades forever and forever as we
move it's like it's just about as incoherent as post modernist philosophy
so we know for archaic and traditional cultures that a symbolic return to chaos
is equivalent to preparing a new creation it follows that we may
interpret the psychic chaos of the future shaman as assigned
the profane man is being dissolved and a new personality being prepared for birth
transformation here's a way of thinking about it paradise
Paradise Lost redemption classic story of mankind always it was a great past
we're in a state of chaos we're heading towards a better future everyone thinks
that way the stories are based on that well that's that now Ellen Burch a who
wrote a lot about the psychoanalysts believed that Freud and Jung in
particular had a creative illness which he regarded as a sort of spontaneous
shamanic transformation and he said a creative illness has these elements it
follow succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search
for certain truth it's a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of
depression neurosis psychosomatic ailments or even psychosis Jung was in
that state when he wrote this book called the red book which was just
released last year which is full of visionary illustrations and hands very
strange poetry and it contains the the communications he had with imaginative
beings that he conjured up when when practicing doing exactly that he
practiced that for years and he had these autonomous beings manifest
themselves in his fantasy it had long conversations with them it just you know
while he was working as a doctor and having a sane normal life and well it's
kind of well it's really something whatever the symptoms they're felt is
painful while he thought maybe he was going mad and some people think he did
if not agonizing by the subject with alternating periods of alleviation and
worsening throughout the illness the subject never loses the thread of his
dominating preoccupation it's often compatible with normal professional
activity and family life but even if he keeps to his social activities
he's almost entirely absorbed with himself he suffers from feelings of
utter isolation even when he has a mentor who guides him through the ordeal
like the shaman apprentice with his master the termination is often rapid
and marked by a phase of exhilaration the subject emerges from his ordeal
with a permanent Tran formation in his personality and a
conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world
many of the 19th and 20th century figures regarded universally as great
Nietzsche Darwin Dostoyevsky Tolstoy Freud Jung were all additionally
characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and
uncertainty well you don't generate a new theory
without some birth pangs right because your old theory has to bite the dust
first and when your old theory bites the dust it's like where are you you don't
know do you know if you're gonna come up with a new one no here's a cool thing
this is my daughter she was five years at this point
she was playing prince or in princess with Julie and her three-year-old she
said dad if we killed a dragon we could use his skin as armor
wouldn't that be a good idea I thought hey yeah that's that's a hell of an idea
kid you know you go right after the thing that frightens you the most and
you develop something that protects you from doing that it's like where did she
get that idea well good work kiddo she had plenty of
dragons in her life so the following dream was described by my daughter
Mikayla three years nine months old about my son Julian one year Julian was
in the process of toilet training and rapid speech development was having some
trouble controlling his emotions Mikayla liked to call him baby
we had several discussions about the fact that he wasn't really a baby
anymore she told me this story while I was at the computer so I was able to get
it for Batum she wasn't very happy with the idea that he wasn't a baby anymore
because she kind of liked the baby she took care of that baby a lot and her
little brain was having a hard time with the notion that whatever that thing is
now it isn't a baby it's like well where's my baby and believe me plenty of
mothers go through the same thing then they attempt to keep their children
babies for the rest of their lives so this is what Mikayla said the dream
Julian's eyes fell out and then he falled into pieces I said what sort of
pieces she said Julian pieces and the bones fall doubt too then a hole got him
and there was water in it and when he came out he was big mom Julian isn't a
baby anymore no he a big boy and a bug with legs got him
out cuz bugs can swim and the whole was in the park and it moved into the
backyard and he fall into it a tree burned and left the hole I thought wow
that's so amazing it's like it was a it was a shamanic transformation dream it
was like the tree that's The Tree of Life had burnt and left a hole the kid
fell into it it dissolved him right down to his bones this little bug which would
be a union representation of the self like Jiminy Cricket by the way in
Pinocchio the bug was the thing that was alive that helped him through the
transformation he stepped out and now he was big it's like that was her little
brain conjuring up the notion of radical transformation so this is cool I hope
this works this is a dream that my my nephew had
did someone animated Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist from the
University of Toronto Maya do disagree with some of his fundamental ideas but
his thoughts and facing problems merge with my stoic values within one of his
maps of meaning lectures he tells a true story about a four year old boy his
nephew who for months was suffering from terrible night terrors terrors that were
waking him up screaming this boy by the way did have some areas of instability
in his family life Jordan visited the young boy's house and the boy was
running around dressed as an eight with a sword a shield and a helmet at night
aim he would take a sword and shield to bed so Jordan got speaking to him and
the boy described his dream and the dream he's standing surrounded by
knee-high Dwarfs these dwarves had beaks and every time you would try to move the
dwarfs would jump up and bait him a very fretting scenario for a young boy and if
you look behind all the dwarfs away in the background there was a dragon and
every time this dragon would puff out fire and smoke more dwarfs would be
created so there's no point fighting off the dwarfs because more would just be me
it so Jordan tapped him and asked what
could you do about that so the kid says he could jump up on the Dragons head he
could poke out his eyes with a sword so he couldn't see then they could go go
down the throat to the box where the fire came from carve a piece out of that
box thereby destroying it and use that piece as a sheet its shamed before
Jordan arrived was already a keynote in life what he knew he had to do and after
that conversation he had no more Nate pears this is what Marcus really is
meant when he said the impediment to action advances action what stands in
the way becomes the way he was tell not us that we must not shy away from
problems or shown or personal responsibility we must be willing to
sacrifice her comfort Goethe source of her problems to solve them and then take
something away well there you go so yeah he was waking up screaming at night for
four weeks that's night terrorist he couldn't
really remember what hell was going on and there was instability and his family
his parents got divorced soon after and he was off to kindergarten and that was
kind of destabilizing him too and so it was fun to watch him zip around as a
knight it's like you know where'd he get that idea well you know he watched TV
watch movies see his little imagination was aggregating the picture of the hero
and then he was trying to act it out that's what he was doing pretending
right I'm pretending to be the thing that takes on the unknown and then he
has this amazing dream it's like it's mind-boggling it's so sophisticated it's
like well here I am and there's troubles everywhere and
they're biting me they're jumping up on me and it's like a Hydra you know in the
Hydra you cut off a hydras head and seven more heads grow it's like that's
life man solve one problem seven more appear right so also that that was the
Dragons at the background chaos itself and chaos kept breeding these are the
evil little Dwarfs which is what it does it's like it's one damn trouble after
another we fight this one off fight this one off it's like who cares the dragon
the dwarf generating machine is still working in the background so he
I asked him and that was purposeful what could you do
see that's a leading question that implies that there's something that he
could do he said well I take my dad that was missing in the animation and we go
well poke the dragon's eyes out go right down to the source of the problem
extinguish it make a shield right so that meant that he would have
strengthened his character by the encounter so brilliant and then and I
talked to his mom for months afterwards done no more night terrors what had
happened he identified with the mythological hero he did identified with
st. George and the dragon he identified with that little bloody tree dwelling
primate who 20 million years ago was the first one to drop a stick on a snake he
adopted the classic human mode of being in the face of uncertainty and construed
himself as that which could prevail end of terrors well I guess we're done E so
we're gonna do something a little different than the syllabus today
because you know we got this one hour to our problem and I really can't cover
constructionism reasonably in two hours or one hour that was supposed to be
today so what I'm going to do is instead is
continue on the line that I've been pursuing but I'm going to expand it up
more into Union psychology which is the what we're going after after
constructivism anyways and so I can weave the constructivism and the depth
psychology together and it's nice to do that because it gives you a kind of a
coherent view so just so you know we're one lecture ahead at the moment roughly
speaking and I'll do constructivism on Tuesday for two hours so all right so I
showed you that anime animation I told you about my nephew's dream which is a
remarkable dream you know really it's just amazing amazing dream and it's it's
got this archetypal pattern you know and the pattern is that there's a threat and
worse than not that there's there are threats
and at the back of it there is the the fact of threat itself you see so human
beings were so smart hey so this is so amazing that we figured this out so you
imagine well human beings are the only creatures that can really conceive of
the class of all threatening things right and that's kind of why we can be
permanently anxious there's so it's sort of annoying so you know here you are and
it's safe there's no Lions here or or anything that might prey on you but you
can think of something to be anxious about no problem you know I'm certain
you've got some little skeleton rattling around in your closet somewhere that's
like eating away at you and so I think part of the reason we're so damn awake
human beings is because we're always anxious like and you have to be awake
when you're anxious and the the anxiety system actually activates your reticular
activating system and that that that actually produces its the substrate for
consciousness if you snap a few fibers in the back of your brain that are part
of the reticulating activate reticular activating system in a car accident or
something you'll go into a coma and that'll be that here you're not getting
out of it doesn't take much of an injury either in the right place so anyways so
human beings have been struggling with this problem of threat forever
really for as long as there's been life or at least as long as there's been life
with a nervous system and you know that's several hundred million years
it's a long time and of course it's easy to you know to respond to a particular
threat think about zebras they're out there on the veldt and there's lions
everywhere right but the zebras are like they're calmed because there's lions are
sleeping and so the zebras don't think apparently oh my god what was going to
happen with those Lions wake up because they don't think that way you know and
they're not going to be happy if the lion goes into a hunting Crouch and
starts its hunting approach obviously but it's not like the zebras are
freaking out non-stop because there are Lions around you know so they can react
to specific threats but human beings partly because we discovered the future
which was a big mistake was a big mistake
because the future is an uncertain place we realized that well there isn't any
threat right now but there might well be some tomorrow and if there isn't some
tomorrow well maybe next week or next month or next year like it's coming and
so there's danger so it's the category of danger you know and out of the
category of danger emerged specific threats and the dragon seems to be a
symbol of it is a symbol I believe of the ever-present fact of predatory
slightly predatory threat but our nervous systems as they've become
capable of abstraction have used that underlying architecture to represent
more abstract categories so it's not it's not a predator like a dragon is not
a predator because there are no dragons but maybe a dragon is a snake and a and
a crocodile and maybe a leopard and maybe a predatory bird all mangled into
one monster because a monster is actually technically something that's
made out of disparate parts and so it's a good symbolic representation for the
unknown as such that which lies beyond the campfire let's say and what lurks
out there and so the eternal problem is what the hell do you do with the dragon
and that also explains why the dragon typically is a treasure garter right
because it's even more the problem is even worse out there
in no-man's land out there in potential there's threat and and and like mortal
threat but there's also endless opportunity and riches and wealth and
and and the possibility of attracting someone and all of that and so well the
dragon you can't just be afraid of it you just
stay in your burrow the whole time and lots of animals more or less do that is
you know especially the nocturnal ones they just hide away but that is what
human beings alight because we're not only prey animals right we're also
predators and then of course we're crazy we're absolutely insane chimpanzees
right we're crazy and so we're always out there mucking about with things and
with our you know fingers and and our thumbs and and taking the world apart
and putting it back together and we're crazily exploratory and and in
troublemaking and so we don't just run from dragons we go hunt them down and so
and so there's a story here there's the oldest story that mankind knows and
literally it is the oldest story that we know is this stories in this story
basically is there's a bounded space a walled garden a walled city you know on
all the original cities were walled because if they weren't barbarians would
swoop in and they'd just steal all your stuff and so you know that was kind of
pointless so you know you wanted to have some major-league walls surrounding your
territory and so that's inhabited space and inside that is here little dominance
hierarchy and so all you primates knew exactly who was who inside that space so
you didn't have to fight with each other and you could predict each other's
behavior because you believed the same things and saw the world roughly the
same way and acted the same way and so you were sort of secure but then the
problem is is that that can always be breached there's always something
outside of it that's a danger and so that's signified by this this little
creature here this is dragon and that that twirl in its tail is very common
among dragons actually it's actually a symbol because you imagistic languages
imagistic symbols have an ancient language and it it's referring to
something that's basically eternal and so it lives down here in this in this
cave because it's an underground thing it's an underground thing and you can
kind of imagine what that's like and sometimes this happens in initiation
rituals among archaic people they're gonna when they're gonna initiate
usually the young men because nature initiates women know by itself usually
the young men maybe they'll put them in a cave and leave them there you know for
like well who know who knows how long and Sagada think what's in a cave that
caves are dark man I don't know if you've ever been in one but like they're
dark and they're really dark and so not only is there whatever there is in the
cave and you don't know what the hell's in the cave there's whatever you
imagined might be in the cave and so when you're in that cave and you're
alone you you're confronting the devils and demons and monsters of your own
imagination you know and so then you have a chance to perhaps deal with that
and overcome it and that's perhaps part of the initiation ceremony you know and
that's part of growing up because you have to learn how to face the things
that terrify and upset you and and we cast them and put them back
together we talked a little bit about this idea of the pre cosmogonic chaos
that that Iliad it refers to and and that's this stuff out of which order is
produced at the beginning of time and it's also the stuff out of which you
constantly reproduce order and the young unions the psychoanalysts especially the
really deep psychoanalysts like young Freud was a more surface psychoanalyst
and that's not an insult there's some things that Freud figured out they're
absolutely amazing he was a precursor to Jung for sure for Jung the hero's
journey was the journey inside the unconscious and that would be perhaps in
some sense that the the willingness to face everything terrible that's happened
to you and to think it through and to articulate it and and to come to grips
perhaps with your own capacity for malevolence that was a really important
part of Union ideas that the first step towards individuation which is the
manifestation of your full self let's say was the discovery of your shadow and
your shadow is the part of you that will do terrible things under the right
circumstances and maybe even without that much provocation and you know and
it's a terrifying part of you to come into contact with because it's sort of
it's sort of the way that you're specifically attached to the archetype
of evil that's a that's a good way of thinking about it and you know modern
people they don't really think much about think much about the idea of good
and evil but that's because the most of them are so they I'm naive you can just
barely even comprehend it you know if you read any history if you really read
it like and you and you don't come away with the idea that evil exists it's like
you're just reading the wrong kind of history you know it's just unbelievable
what people can do to each other and we're so imaginative you know and one of
the things I figured out about people the reason that we're we have the
knowledge of good and evil let's say is that because we're self conscious and we
know about ourselves we know about our own vulnerability right you know what
hurts you you really know what hurts you way more than an animal knows and so
when you're all so creative and so once you know what hurts you man you can
really hurt someone else and you can do it in such a creative way you can draw
it out you can make it excruciating you can take people
apart physically and psychologically and you can keep them say even right on the
edge of death so that you can keep doing that endlessly and you know that happens
hell of a lot more than you think it happens it happens a lot and so well and
you think well you know that doesn't involve me it's like oh yes it does man
that's the problem because you know you're human and that's the sort of
things that human beings are capable of and I'm not saying you're all it's all
probable that you do that ever or or that but I'm saying that you know you
got to take that into account when you're looking at the world and you
think about all the perpetrators out there it's like it's not like there's
perpetrators and there's victims that isn't how it works it doesn't work that
way at all and so the horrors of humanity as well as the noble elements
of humanity are all elements of your central being and for you and this is
the terrible thing for young the pathway to higher wisdom was through the
terrible portal of well you could say hell for that matter really in and so
who wants to do that man it's like no you know like maybe you're resentful
about something well you probably are because like everybody's resentful about
something you know and resentment is just vicious emotion it's really useful
it's really useful because if you're resentful about something it either
means that you should grow the hell up and accept the responsibility and quit
sniveling around and whining or it means that someone actually is oppressing you
and and pushing on you too hard and bullying you and demeaning you and you
have something to say or do that you're not saying or doing and no wonder you're
not saying or doing it because you know it can be really dangerous to say things
or do them to free yourself from from being oppressed you can get in a lot of
trouble in the short term for doing it so it's easier just to not say anything
sort of day after day in the short term you protect yourself but just crushes
you and then the the resentment comes up and resentment and that can just get so
out of hand you know it starts with resentment and then it starts it goes to
the desire for revenge you know because you'll play nasty
little tricks on the person that's opressing you
at any chance you'll talk about them behind their back and if they want you
to do something you'll do it badly or you'll do it grudgingly or you'll do a
half rate job and you'll set up little traps and you know so it puts you in a
poisonous space and then if that if you really start to dwell on that say in
your basement for three or four years about just exactly how terrible the
world is and how that's focused on you and how everyone's rejected you and how
you get to this point where you're thinking that you know existence itself
is a kind of poisonous endeavor and that the best thing for you to do is go out
there and do as much you know create as much mayhem as you possibly can and if
you really get to a dark place you think I'm going to create as much mayhem as I
possibly can by targeting the most innocent thing I can possibly imagine
and then you end up shooting kids in Connecticut and that's how you get there
and so that's a bad road man there's dark things down there but you can go
there and people do and they go through the hole of resentment and so resentment
can tell you you've got something to say you bloody well better say it you've got
a free yourself from what's oppressing you you have to stand up for that
because otherwise you become oppressed and then once you're oppressed that's
just not so good and so like in your marriage and your relationships you got
to tell people what you're thinking you don't have to assume you're right that's
a whole different story because you're not cuz you're you know ignorant and
you're biased and you know so you're not right but you can stumble towards your
this the expression of yourself and then you can listen to the other person and
hope that they tell you some way that you're stupid that's useful so you can
be a little less stupid in the future because that wouldn't that be good and
so you know you go after the unknown you don't protect what you know you already
know what you know you go after what you don't know that's why you have to talk
to people you don't agree with that's where you have to talk to your enemies
because they're gonna tell you things you don't know you could even listen to
them it's possible they know a thing or two you don't know but people don't like
that you know they just talk to people who think the same way and then they
just stay stupid and so that's and that's not
because if you're not wise the world will wallop you it'll flatten you and
and far more than it has to and then you'll be better and resentful and
you'll be part of that force that Wallops instead of the force that fights
against that so well so you go after the dragon and that's what that's what this
guy is doing he's going after the dragon it's it's threatening the society
because it always does chaos what's outside of order always threatens order
always always and so you have to step forward you know in this manner
voluntarily and and and go after that when it's still manageable right and
that's the case in your own life too so you know if you're if you've had a
proclivity to be bullied in the past you know and you want to get out of that
what you have to do is you have to make yourself awake to the to the Maite to
the to the what would you say to the to the initial stages of that sort of
bullying emerging in your life again that sort of domination and you have to
step forward against it when it's still in its developing stages because maybe
you can just not have it happen that would be better and so you have to be
ready to speak what you have to say more or less at a moment's notice you can't
be impulsive about it you know like if you and I are talking and you make a
mistake or I make a mistake even if it's bothers one or the other of
us we should just write it off because it's like one encounter what the hell
you you know maybe we had a bad night's sleep or something you know you gotta be
a little forgiving and what if it happens twice then you know you should
be a little awake and you should remember both times and then if it
happens a third time it's like that's when you that's when you act and you say
look we talked and this happened and I thought yeah whatever and but then you
did it again and then you just did it again well then
the person is basically like what are they gonna do you know no well maybe
they might argue with you but you kind of got them and you're generally if you
just point that out to people just like that just that you noticed and they're
willing to say something about it they'll back the hell off they'll often
apologize and sometimes you even make them a little more conscious which is
like hey that's not such a bad idea that's what all this
means and so this caught this chaos idea it's so for young it was the unconscious
right it was the contents of your unconscious and so that might be the
unknown past the threatening past that you have never dealt with there might be
the threatening future it might be the threatening present but you realized as
his as he got older that that the unconscious was also the world and you
think and so the chaos is not only your unconscious mind which meets the unknown
but it's actually the unknown itself mingled together you think what the hell
does that that's why the dragon is a land creature and an air creature it's
matter and spirit at the same time and this sort of gets us into constructivism
because the constructivist think that basically what happens is that you
encounter those elements of the world that don't fit into your theory and out
of those new elements you make the world through your perceptions and you make
yourself by incorporating the information and transforming yourself
and that's how Piaget explains the development of a child if the child
starts out with some reflexes basic reflexes and manifesting the reflexes
produces results in the world and then the child has to reorganize its
perceptions to take into account the transformations and so then it it gets a
little more sophisticated and then it can do a few more things and then it can
manifest more changes in the world and then it martyr it attracts them and
modifies its perceptions and actions to account for them and it just keeps doing
that that's how the child boots itself up like a computer does it's a very cool
idea and so from from the Piaget Gian stance so it's constructive the stance
you could think of the world as a latent pool of information it's something like
that with a structure obviously that you can interact with with your little
fingers in your body and your mind and your eyes and your mouth and you make
changes happen and you track them and you model them and you build your skills
and as you continue to do that in the safety of your house initially under the
care of your parents who who fill in where you're ignorant you you you just
emerge more and more competent and confident and ready to move ahead so
that's that's how the constructivist idea works and so so there's kind of a
chaos idea at the bottom of that which is that out of which you emerge and the
world emerges at the same time because you know you don't see reality not at
all you see almost like an animated version of reality you know like when I
look at you I just see the front of you I just see the outside of you I see you
at this height I don't see any of your internal structure I don't see the the
back part of you at all I don't see your family I don't see your history I don't
see your future you know I just see this slice of you you're so complicated I
just see this little like oversimplified slice of you right now and I think
that's the reality that's it's it's sort of the reality the way that the Simpsons
a Simpsons character is you it's like it's sort of like you and it's enough so
that you can watch the story but the real you man god only knows what that is
and that's a union idea you know that the real you is something that radically
transcends your perception of yourself or your conception of yourself and that
you get to that higher you at least in part by going into the darkest place and
so it's a hell of an idea man it's really but it's the old idea of
initiation it's as old as time that idea and and there's something to it and we
definitely recreate it in psychotherapy like this isn't an airy theory it's
quite the contrary because what you do and as a psychologist always always a
behaviorist say that the most the most logical clinical type of psychologists a
behaviorist is it an initiatory shaman even though he or she doesn't know it
because what they do is they say okay well let's take a look at your life like
okay you got a bunch of problems and they're like massive dragons and you're
just like you're not going anywhere with those problems you're just cowering in
the corner and what the behavioral therapist does is cut them cut that
dragon into those little Dwarfs until the dwarfs are small enough so that you
can really kick the hell out of them and so and that by the way they do that is
they they take the problem and they decompose it into elements that are
small enough that you have a reasonable probability of mastering them so you
take that problem apart into into its micro problems careful careful
process and then you think okay well how could we progress a little bit this week
and some of that is to face to practice facing things you're afraid of so like
if you're a graphic and you can't get on an elevator you can't get on a taxi and
you can't stand up to your husband and I'm saying husband because most
agoraphobic sar women most of them are middle-aged women and most of them were
too dependent for most of their life so that's a monster
it's like society husband elevator taxi subway it's a monster and it's that
place you will not go and that's because you feel this high and everything else
looks this big and so and partly that's because you've run away and when you run
away from something it grows and chases you which is well it's exactly what
happens to a prey animal man if you go in the woods and you find a bear
especially a grizzly well you're in real trouble if it's a grizzly but if it's a
black bear you know generally speaking if you stand your ground and make a hell
of a lot of noise that thing will leave you alone but if you run well what's it
supposed to think it eats things that run from it so that's exactly where that
idea came to come from you turn tail and run and then the thing that you're
afraid of is really a monster and it's gonna like get you and eat you it's like
well that's true psychologically as well and and the same circuits that we use to
when we were you know out in the forest even even in trees the same circuits
that we used to parse up the world then into safe territory and place where the
predators loom is the way we parse up the world now which is safe territory
and the place where the predators loom it's just become abstracted way up
abstracted way up so but it's the same damn circuits it's we know this like the
same circuits you used to forage for information
it's a dopaminergic circuit is the circuit that squirrels use to forage for
nuts and you think well why well it's because there's no difference between
information and food like you trade information for food all the time that's
what you're doing when you're working especially if you're working on a
computer so the idea that there's there's an equation between information
and food it's like well obviously obviously there's an equation between
them so of course you'd use the same and I mean the damn squirrel has to
remember where the nuts are and so for him information is food even so when
what happened to human beings is that we started thinking hey maybe it's better
to go after information than it is to go after food because going after
information produces more food than just going after food and so that was a
pretty damn smart idea so we're still doing that so anyways this is what
you're supposed to be doing and so and this is what behavior therapists do they
decompose your problems what are you afraid of well okay you're afraid of
everything well let's get something specific you're afraid of
well I'm afraid of an elevator okay an elevator so I have a client she's afraid
of elevators the elevator door open she goes that's a tomb and I thought oh wow
I thought it was an elevator but for you it's not a bloody elevator
it's death and so that's what you're afraid of it's worse than that you're
afraid of being trapped inside there in the dark alone alone not knowing if
anyone is going to rescue you stuck there with your damn imagination
freaking out it's like and if that's not and then maybe you have a heart attacks
because you're so terrified and you die it's like you know so that's the
elevator well it's no bloody wonder there no
one's gonna get into something like that and then maybe underneath that is your
distrust in the mechanisms of society right because you know a normal person
those weird creatures they'll get an elevator what the hell they don't care
and partly it's because they have an implicit belief even if the thing stops
somebody will come along and rescue them and usually you don't even think about
it right it's like no what the hell it's an elevator it's like the danger is
invisible to you and it's partly because you implicitly trust the structure and
so maybe you go into the unconscious presuppositions of the person who is
terrified of the elevator in the subways and you find out they have a real
problem with trusting Authority that's partly why they don't get along with
their husband why they've never been able to stand up for themselves so then
you say okay well you're afraid of the damn elevator but it's not an elevator
it's a tomb and the tomb is partly you and partly it's partly the elevator and
partly your unconscious mind and so well what can you handle can you go look at
an elevator from and feet away it's like yes okay how
about 9 feet away yes 5 feet yes 4 feet no okay no problem four and a half feet
we're gonna go from that elevator we're gonna look at the damn thing until
you're bored of it because that's what we're trying to you should be bored of
the elevator because then you're not afraid of it obviously it's like it's an
elevator you just don't notice it right all these things around here that you
don't notice I take you out of here and ask you what color the walls are you
haven't got any idea you know yeah I suspect for most of you there's not a
chance you'd be able to identify the gender of the person who's sitting next
to you unless you know them it's like you just don't remember anything and why
should you everything works like you don't have to pay attention to it it's
like is that staying up yeah it's still up yeah still up still up if it's like
really no you know you get bored of that real quick and so then you just ignore
it and but the agoraphobic has had that veil of ignorance torn away and what
they see behind it is mortal threat and so that's really what you're helping
them deal with and so this week there are four and a half feet from the
elevator next week they're a foot from the elevator and the week after that the
horrible gates of Hell open and they look inside and they don't run and so
hey they're tougher than they thought they were and that's what you're
teaching them actually you're not teaching them that the world isn't
dangerous because that's a stupid thing to teach someone bloody right the world
is dangerous it's terrifying and sometimes people under they realize that
and the veil lifts and they see horror everywhere they see that and then they
think well I'm just a little rabbit I'm over here in the corner
I can't move I'm petrified and then they can't move they hide it home they cower
at home because everything has become a predatory domain and so what you teach
them is you're not as much of a rabbit as you think and part of that is that
you help them grow some teeth so that they can go home and have that fight
with their husband that they should have had 25 years ago and it happens very
frequently with agra phobic clients that you get them so they can go on the damn
elevator and they can go on the subway and they can take a taxi
maybe they learn to drive Wow they get some autonomy and then they're a little
tougher and so then they can stand up from loot for themselves and they go
back and like their husband might not be very happy with any of this really it
depends on what sort of guy he is you know if he's a real tyrant he might be
just perfectly happy that he's married to someone who you know was afraid of
her own shadow because then she won't ever leave and so that's a nasty little
story and believe me it's not uncommon so she gets tougher by facing what she
fears and what she finds out is there's a hell of a lot more to her than she
thought and that's really what happens when you do behavior therapy with
someone who's agoraphobic it isn't really that they get less afraid it's
that they get braver that's way different it's because brave is alert
and able to cope naive is there's no danger it's like hell yeah right there's
no danger Jesus what a stupid theory that is so anyways that's what all this
is that's that's the story man and it's a it's a major story it's the story of
human transformation and growth it's the evolution of mankind it's like it's a
major story and we've been working on the damn thing for like god only knows
how long you know snakes and primates co-evolved and our vision are sharp
sharp sharp vision seems to have been an evolutionary adaptation forced on us by
the presence of predatory snakes and we're talking tens of millions of years
ago and human beings have unbelievably sharp eyesight the only thing that can
out see us is birds of prey and they have eyes like an eagle a bald eagle has
eyes as big as ours and it has two phobias that phobia is the central part
of the vision so an eagle is all eyes man and so but human beings we're kind
of like that too and like half our brain is devoted to visual processing we have
acute vision in Madagascar where there are primates with no predatory snakes
there are lemurs they can't see worth a damn and I'm a anthropologist named Lynn
Isabelle did a comprehensive study worldwide trying to account for the
acuity of primate vision and what she found was that the more predatory snakes
in the vicinity the sharper the eyesight of the primates
and so we have a really sharp eyesight so that means a lot of us were eaten by
snakes and none of your ancestors fortunately because otherwise you
wouldn't be here but a lot of those who fell by the wayside were snake snack and
you know when you're little and living in a tree a snake is no damn joke and
even now lots of people get bitten by snakes and people are phobic of snakes
at quite a rate and some of that actually seems innate there's arguments
about cycle between psychologists about this but even the ones who don't accept
the fact that it's innate accept the fact that you can make someone afraid of
a snake by conditioning just like that we're trying to make them afraid of a
flower by conditioning is really really hard so we're at least at minimum
prepared to be afraid of snakes minimum and I believe it's I don't I believe
this fear is actually an 8 although you can learn to control it
so anyways so that's that story and like what a story man it's an amazing amazing
story you see the the den of the dragon here is littered with skulls and bones
that's what that is so either thing is no joke it's like look the hell out and
that's this you know and look it up at the top right hand corner there you know
that's from Peter Pan right well you remember Captain Hook we talked about
him already he's a tyrant and he's a tyrant because he's afraid of death and
that's all he sees in life and so it makes him cruel and better and death has
already taken part of him right that's why he has a hook and that damn
crocodiles chasing him tick tick all the time and of course that's the same
situation you're all in man there was a crocodile with a clock at its stomach
chasing you and it could easily turn you into a tyrant it can turn you into a
tyrant or a cowering victim or a hero those are the options fundamentally so
and that's the Gorgon looking at her own the Medusa looking at her own reflection
you know mother nature with a head full of snakes you know a terrifying vision
and that's actually to some degree an archetype that men get confused with
women and you know that's the witchy part of women and that's the part that's
attractive attractive attractive but rejecting rejecting rejecting it so many
men are petrified by women they won't approach them at all they have no idea
how to talk to them they're just petrified into
and that's way more common than you think and so that breeds resentment like
you wouldn't believe you know you hear the guy who shot up like Dawson College
it's like what the hell do you think motivated him it's like he that's what
he saw and and it was because well he was my opinion is he was too goddamn
useless to be attractive to anyone and so that's a hell of a place to be in
you know it's then that's the problem too if you're chronically rejected by
people it's often because of your own insufficiencies you know whether that's
cowardice or lack of social skills or whatever it is it's like you can't just
brush it off as oh well you know no one likes me but really I'm okay it's like
no no wrong if everyone rejects you there's probably something wrong and
it's probably deep and difficult and it's going to be horrible to fix and so
it's this isn't a trivial problem it's not a trivial problem at all and so you
know that's mother nature for man too because from from the sexual selection
point of view if they if they're not selected as a mate Nature has taken them
out of the game right and so you know people don't really like that they're
not that happy with that and so but getting all whiny about it and then
getting violent it's like that's just not all not really very helpful although
it's very common so this is Lyndon Isabel an evolutionary arms race between
early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large
brain in primates a radical new theory suggests these are old representations I
really like this one this is I don't remember
I think it's Greek but it doesn't exactly look Greek it might be older
it doesn't matter anyways you see it's the same thing same ideas as Graham's
dream right it's like there's this thing that exists this this multi headed snake
and it's got this infinity problem it's everywhere that's that little circle
down there and the problem is well what do you do with it you cut off one head
seven more growth that's the eternal problem of life and the problem is there
there there is the category of problems in life and it ain't going anywhere and
so the question is can you deal with the whole category at the same time
that's the thing that's how to be in the world is to deal with that category all
at the same time and so how did how did human beings what did they come up with
as a solution and that's so cool too because the solution they come up with
not only was the heroism that allows you to approach what you're terrified by and
what you find offensive and to learn from it but also the idea of sacrifice
and and that was played out by cultures everywhere including human sacrifice and
you think what the hell was up with those crazy bastards so long ago they
were sacrificing two gods all the time what kind of clueless behavior was that
burned something and please God burn something valuable and please God it's
like what was with them what were they thinking well they weren't stupid those
people if they were stupid we wouldn't be here they were not stupid and believe
me they lived under a lot harsher conditions than we do so those were some
tough people man you know back then you'd last about 15 minutes and so you
don't want to be thinking of your ancestors as stupid like there's no real
evidence that we're much different cognitively than we were a hundred and
fifty thousand years ago so anyways sacrifice what does that mean
sacrifice well it's a discovery man it's the discovery of the future it's like
the future is actually the place where there is threat and it's always gonna be
there so what do you do you make sacrifices in the present so that the
future is better right everyone does that that's what you're doing right now
that's what you're doing here that's what your parents are doing when they
pay money to send you to university they think you can bargain with reality it's
amazing you can bargain with reality you can forestall gratification now and
it'll pay off it at a place in time that doesn't even exist yet it's like who
would have believed that it's like that's a miracle that that occurs and
it's not like people just figured that overnight you know we were chimps for
Christ's sake like how are we gonna come up with an idea like that well it's like
well we thought about it for seven million years and you know we got to the
point where we could kind of act it out but we didn't know what we were doing
but it was a merge it's like a dream it was
so the terror of the future is a dream and the solution to the terror the dream
of the terror of the future is another dream and and it comes out in mythology
and in fantasy and in drama where you act out the sacrifice and then it's a
step on the way to full understanding so we can say sacrifice now instead of
doing it you know although we still do it it's just not concretize like it used
to be we do it abstractly and we all have faith that it will work you know
and we also set up our society so that it'll work and one thing about you know
I'm not a fan of moral relativism for a variety of reasons partly because I
think it's an it's an extreme form of cowardice but anyways apart from that no
no no no there's minimal ways that you can set up a society that will work and
so one of them is is that the society has to be set up so that your sacrifices
will pay off or you won't work and then the society will die and so it has to
make promises people have to make promises to one another and that's what
money is money is a promise that your sacrifice will pay off in the future
that's what money is and so if the society is stable you can store up your
work right now you can sacrifice your impulses and you can work and you can
store up credit for the future and then you can make the future a better place
but Society has to be stable enough to allow for that hyperinflation will do
you in so the promise that's implicit in the currency is the promise that what
you're doing now will pay off in the future and if people don't have that
promise then well we know what they do because in in gangs for example and say
gangs in North America the time horizon of the gang members shrinks rapidly
because they don't really expect to be alive at much past 21 and so they get
really impulsive and violent and like why the hell not that's that's what you
do when when the future doesn't matter when it's not real you you default back
to living in the moment and you take what you can get right now and no wonder
because you don't know if you're gonna be around you know in a year and you get
whatever you can well you can bloody well get it and that's like anarchy that
state and so you don't want to live and some people
like to live in that state because they're really wired for that you know
and so they're they're much more comfortable in those conditions there
they're kind of like warrior types I would say in some sense but you know for
most people that's just where that stress will just do you in you know the
stress of a life like that so that's a pretty horrible picture the one on the
right I think and you know it's it's a creepy picture and don't you think
doesn't it seems like a creepy picture to me yeah and so that's quetzel a codel
if I remember correctly who's me who is an Aztec dragon God and that's the Eye
of Horus by oh by the way this little thing here and that see the Egyptians
they worship the eye yeah well that's cool because well why
did they worship the eye well wake the hell up and look at the world that's
your salvation to do that pay bloody attention especially to the things you
don't want to pay attention to and use your vision have some vision and you can
use your vision to see into the future and that is your that's your Redemption
and the Egyptians they didn't know how to say that but they knew how to
represent it and that's how they represented it like the pupil on that is
completely open completely dilated and that's a God as far as the Egyptians
we're concerned it's Horus and I'll tell you Horus a story at some point so early
primates developed a better eye for color detail and movement and the
ability to see in three dimensions traits that are important for detecting
threats at close range humans are descended from these same primates all
right so now the initiation when you go into
psychotherapy or when you make any supreme moral effort which is roughly
the same thing you have to confront that which you do not know now I mentioned
the called prima cosmogonic chaos and the idea that at the end of Jung's life
he sort of thought of the unconscious and the world as the same and you think
what the hell does that mean but here's what it means so let's say you're in a
long-term intimate relationship and you get betrayed okay so what is it that you
see when you see your partner at the moment you know of the betrayal well you
see the pre maganda chaos and here's why well it
rattles your unconscious up because you don't know anything anymore you don't
know what the past was right you don't know what it was and it's supposed to be
real and all of a sudden you don't know what it was and so you come up with wild
ideas about what it might have been and what it represented and then you don't
know what the future is gonna be anymore so then your fantasy fills that space
and you don't know who the hell you're looking at that's for sure and you don't
know much about human beings and you certainly don't know anything about
yourself and so all of a sudden not only is
everything in chaos inside your mind but everything is in chaos
in your world and it actually is and there's no telling the difference
between those two things you know and so then they you're just shattered and so
then you go talk to a therapist for like two years and you think what happened
what was the reality and the reality is because who knows what the reality was
like but as far as you're concerned the reality is I better represent this
properly in my head I better figure out who I was who that person was what we
did together and what it meant because I do not want this to happen again and so
you're healed when you get to the point where you've
grasped the bloody moral of the story what went wrong and how can I not have
that happen again because that's the purpose of learning
right that's the purpose of memory it's to prepare you for the future and so you
have to pull out of that massive chaos a functional representation that increases
your wisdom so that you're not this naive target the next time you enter
into a relationship so at least you can have another relationship without being
so traumatized that you know you you're done and you know it can take people
years to talk that through because this landscape of potential opens up when
when they're betrayed it's like well anything could have been the truth well
you to sort through that you have to wander through all that mess and it's
really painful and and emotional as well you have to sort through all that mess
to come out with the new you right there renewed you and so
well this is a representation of it this is how people act this out by but
whatever method he may have been designated the shaman is recognized as
such as only after having received two methods of instruction the first is
ecstatic dreams trances and visions the second is traditional shamanic
techniques names and functions of the spirit mythology and genealogy of the
clan and the secret language well one of the things that happens this happens to
you even if if you encounter something terrible like a betrayal what happens is
that you have to take a journey into the domain of morality essentially which is
how did I act and how did that person to act and how should have they acted and
how should have I acted and so and that's part of your cultural structure
and so that's the idea of rescuing the dead farther from the depths right and
that's what we'll show you some examples of that so this is a critical issue with
regards to the shamanic transformation is that people go through these terrible
terrible experiences often drug-induced by the way with regards to the shaman
they usually use psychedelic chemicals of one form another often mushrooms but
but they've come up with some very strange concoctions like ayahuasca down
in the Amazon and ayahuasca is an amazing substance it's made out of the
bark of one thing and another plant whose name I don't remember that hardly
even grow in the same place and that have to be cooked together in a special
way and no one has any idea how the damn Amazonians figured that out it looks
impossible and if you ask them they say well the plants told us how to do it
which you know Western people don't find very helpful but the shamans are
perfectly helped happy with that that description in ayahuasca takes them
apart and it does that in part because its effects the serotonergic system very
very powerfully like all psychedelics do and it transports them to another world
and that's how they interpret it and and and and what we know about psychedelics
you could put in a thimble and then throw the thimble away we know nothing
about psychedelics there's new experiments going on at Johns Hopkins
for example with psilocybin which is part of this active chemical in magic
mushrooms same structure basically as LSD and mescaline
all the real psychedelics have basically the same structure except the one that's
derived from Amanita muscaria which is called muscarinic acid and it's a it's
its own weird thing that no one knows anything about anyways they have
profound neuro chemical effects in very small doses and the research group at
Johns Hopkins has given psilocybin to research subjects
you know purified psilocybin because they started the new experimentation
with psychedelics and that's been banned for like 40 years
because psychedelics were so terrifying to our culture that we just put them
away it's like oh no we're not going there and so even from a research
perspective and even though some of the psychedelics look very promising for the
treatment of disorders like alcoholism they recently used psilocybin to help
people stop smoking down at Johns Hopkins and I think they had an 80%
success rate which is just like that's just absolutely mind-boggling
and so but if you give people psilocybin and they have a mystical experience
which is very common among people who take these sorts of chemicals then their
personality transforms permanently such that one year later their one standard
deviation higher in openness and openness is the creativity dimension and
that seems to be a permanent transformation so that's really
remarkable and about 80 percent of the people who undergo the Johns Hopkins
experiments report that the experience is like one of the two or three most
important things they've ever that's never ever happened to them and so well
that's that's something you know it's like and then there's this guy named
Rick Strassman down at I think he was at the University of Texas and he did
experimentation with DMT and DMT dimethyltryptamine I remember I remember
correctly is the active ingredient in ayahuasca and you produce it in your
brain and it's in plants it's like a very common chemical but DMT is a weird
hallucinogen because it has an extraordinarily short mechanism of
action it's like and people who take it report that they're blasted out of their
body like out of a cannon and then they go out somewhere and encounter beings of
various sorts and then ten minutes later they're back and virtually everyone
reports that which is really strange and and so strassman was giving people DMT
intravenously so that the trip would last longer he this was all all
you know nih-funded experimentation all cleared with the
relevant ethics boards all conducted within the last 10 years and he
basically quit doing it because he was a pretty straight scientist you know he
was measuring heart rate and pulse and all that sort of thing trying to look at
the physiology and then the people he was giving these chemicals to kept
coming back and telling him these these crazy stories and well it just it was
too much for him you know and no wonder you know cuz they all said the same
thing and he'd say well that was a dream and they'd say no and it was the most
real thing that ever happened to me and he'd say well you know it's an
archetypal experience and they'd say no no no that was no archetypal experience
I went somewhere else and I saw things and I'm back and like I don't care what
you think and like who the hell knows right because it's all subjective but
but the weird thing about it is that everyone's reporting the same thing how
the hell do you account for that and then the shaman you know when they take
these psychedelic chemicals they basically say the same thing they say
well first of all it more or less killed me that's this you know i dissolved two
skeleton and then I climbed the tree that unites heaven and earth and I went
into the realm of the gods and they gave me some information and I'm back it's
like okay well you know we don't really know what to make of that and we and
certainly that's what Elia describes when he describes the shamanic the
shamanic procession not the shamanic initiation and you know there's
dissolution to a skeleton first and then like a death the symbolic death or
experienced as an actual death and then bang up into the realm of the gods and
then they come back there's a very old idea and that's a medieval
representation of the tunnel that people travel through at the end of their life
to you know to find the light which is a very common near-death experience report
and people don't have any idea what the hell to do with those reports except say
well it's the paroxysm zuv the dying brain which you'd expect to be a hell of
a lot more random in my opinion and the idea is there's a rebirth after that and
you know here this is the Scandinavian representation of that tree that unites
earth with heaven and so there's the Scandinavian representation it has a
snake snakes down here eating it and and that's the amazonian representation
it's like how the hell he account for that I mean those those pictures are so
similar that it's just it's beyond belief well you know we lived in trees
for a long time a long long long long time millions of years and there were
lots of snakes around them and so the idea that reality is a tree that's
surrounded by a snake is that's in us man it's down there it's deep and
there's something about it that's true now not true like we normally think of
truth a truth true in an entirely different manner so and all that's
pretty damn strange we'll stop with this my son drew this when he was seven years
old blew me away man I thought it was so cool so I had it laminated and so here
is what it is on the right hand side that's ordered it's like the yin-yang
thing that's order left-side chaos right and those are all mushroom houses which
I thought was amazing and then there's this river that runs right down the
middle like the line for order and chaos and then there's this tree that goes up
to heaven and that's heaven up there it's like there st. Peter there's the
pearly gates there's the clouds it's like it's he never went to church you
know it's like what the hell and then there's a little bug there that goes up
and down from heaven to earth and that was him and I thought he had a very
organized psyche that kid he was a very very stable kid and still is and I he
drew that and I thought Jesus that's just bloody will unbelievable and I
still think that when I look at it and that's a great example of an archetype
and so we'll see you Tuesday you |
this one's particularly complicated so
because with Piaget you enter a whole new domain of of axiomatic thinking
that's the right way to think about it say each of these people that were
discussing each of these theories comes out the construction of the world from a
different perspective and it's it's really fundamentally different it's
different way deep down at the level of fundamental assumptions and so Piaget
who's a who's probably the world's most famous developmental psychologist but
although he didn't consider himself a developmental psychologist he considered
himself a genetic epistemology and what that meant was that he was interested in
Paestum ology which is how knowledge structures work and genetic means
formulation of and so he was interested in how children formulate their
knowledge structures in the world and he was a constructivist because he believed
that human beings construct the they don't only construct the representations
of the world and it's deeper than that it's more like they construct the world
itself now it depends to some degree on what you think of as the world and of
course that's so there's a reality definition issue that's nested at the
bottom of this and it's a very complex one and so I'm going to have to walk you
through it piece by piece now Piaget was a genius he was he wrote a paper I
believe on mollusks when he was ten and had it published in a scientific journal
and he was offered the curatorship of a museum as a consequence of that and his
parents had to write the museum directors and tell them that he couldn't
curate the museum because he was only ten and so that gives you some idea
about Piaget and he's published many many many books and many of them haven't
been translated into English yet and so he was quite the he was quite the you
know large intelligence creature and he studied all sorts of things so I'm gonna
tell you a little bit about constructivism I'm gonna start with a
quote from Piaget and it's uh it's he's some book some of his books I found
quite straightforward and some of them very difficult and I think it's often
because of the quality of the translation this happens to be a
relatively difficult section I don't think it's translated that well but
whatever we're going to go through it I'll explain it to you a little bit so
Piaget said the common postulate that's assumption of various traditional
epistemology theories of valid knowledge is that
knowledge itself is a fact and not a process and then if our
various forms of knowledge are always incomplete and our various science is
still imperfect that which is acquired is still acquired and can therefore be
studied statically hence the absolute position of the problems what is
knowledge or how are the various types of knowledge possible under the
converging influence of a series of factors we're tending more and more
today to regard knowledge as a process more than a state any being or object
that Sciences attempts to hold fast dissolves once again in the current of
development it is the last analysis of this development and of it alone that we
have the right to state it is a fact what we can and should then seek is the
law of this process quotes we are well aware on the other hand of the fine book
by kuhn on scientific revolutions now there is an awful lot of information in
that paragraph so we'll unpack it a little bit before we go on now one way
of looking at science is that it's a collection of facts right that's that's
what Piaget is stating to begin with and that we assume that the facts that
science has gathered are facts and Static but if you observe them across
time what you find is that scientific facts tend to shift and transform
because scientific theories that are applicable in one century let's say turn
out to be less applicable in the next now there's been a lot of argument and
discussion about this because the fact that facts change seems to indicate that
they're not so self-evidently fact and there are people and perhaps Kuhn would
be among them who believe that science consisted of the juxtaposition of
paradigms so those are sets of axioms within which something operates and the
paradigms he considered them often in commensurate you couldn't move from one
to another because the axioms were different there was no necessary no what
what might you say there was no necessary means of communication between
them but and and and Piaget knew of Thomas Kuhns work that's the scientists
structure of scientific revolutions which was published in 1962 it's a
classic text in the philosophy of science and and what Piaget
soon more was more like a I would say more like a classic view of science
where so for example when Newton came up with Newtonian physics there was a set
of propositions upon which Newtonian physics was based and then when Einstein
transformed those propositions what happened was that Newtonian physics
became a subset of Einsteinian physics and so the way that Piaget looked at the
development of factual ideas at least in part was that you'd come up with a set
of ideas that were facts and then that would be superseded by a different
theory within that within which that original theory would be nested and so
that what happens that each theory in some sense although it transforms it
becomes more complete as the scientific progression continues now Kuhn didn't
precisely believe that although exactly what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift
because Kuhn originated that term isn't clear but he didn't seem to actually
believe that science had this capacity to present a series of facts and then
alter the underlying presuppositions and then to nest that within a broader
series of facts like you would assume if you were thinking about the relationship
between Newton and Einstein so Newtonian physics is a subset of
einsteinium physics so now that's kind of how Piaget thought about how human
beings developed knowledge he believed that we came up with well let's say you
wanted to chop down a tree that might be a good example I mean you could use a
dull axe made of bronze and it's like well that would chop down the tree it'd
be a lot of work though and then maybe you replace that with a sharp steel axe
that's designed like a wedge so that you can really hack down a tree with it or
maybe you replace it with a saw and so the it's not like the bronze axe could
chop down the tree but the steel axe can do a better job in the saw can do even a
better job and so the way that Piaget thought about the transformation of
human knowledge structures from from infancy onward essentially was that
infants would produce a representation of the world that was sort of low
resolution but quite tool like it would work in the world but then as they
progressed the nature of those tools would become refined that sometimes
transform completely so some sometimes imagine that a child would use in a
sense a low resolution picture of something and then they would increase
its resolution as they filled in the details that would
be assimilation that's the page idea notion of assimilation you're using the
same basic theory but filling in the details and then now and then you'd have
to switch to another picture entirely and that would be more like
accommodation that's where you'd have to transform your internal structures
completely in order to properly represent an act within the world and so
that's the basic difference between accommodation and assimilation so
assimilation is like micro alterations and accommodation is transformation of
the knowledge structure itself and so that's part of so what khun pointed out
was that there'd be a set of facts and then there'd be an anomaly arise of some
sort so like at the end of the 19th century the only remaining anomaly was
at least one of the remaining anomalies was that no matter which direction you
shine a light beam in and no matter how fast the platform on which you're
standing is moving the light beam has exactly the same velocity which seems
impossible so you know if the earth is moving this way around the Sun and you
shine a light off the earth you'd expect the speed of light to be the speed of
light plus the speed of the earth and then if you shone it the other way then
you'd expect the speed of light to be the speed of light - the earth speed but
that isn't what happens no matter how fast the platform on which the person
shining the light is standing the speed of light is always the same to every
observer so and people kind of thought of that as that wasn't the only anomaly
but that was one of them thought of that is the only anomaly left
in physics at the end of the 19th century and turned out that was a bad
one how long there was some other ones as well like the fact that light tends
to behave as a wave and a particle more or less at the same time which doesn't
seem possible so there's a couple of things left over in Newtonian physics
that the Newtonian physics couldn't explain but by the end of the 19th
century there were famous scientists saying yeah well we got this all wrapped
up there's really nothing left to discover and then Along Came quantum
mechanics and Einstein Yin relativity and bang the whole world was like really
different and quantum mechanics is much more comprehensive theory of the world
then Newtonian physics all of the electronics you used wouldn't work if
quantum physics wasn't correct roughly speaking and so that little tiny anomaly
blew into something that knocked the slats out underneath from underneath the
entire axiomatic structure of Newtonian physics it showed it was wrong at its
fundamental levels even though it turned out to be a subset
a correct subset of something that was much broader and so you can kind of
think of that as that's what kids are doing as they progress they develop a
theory that accounts for a certain set of you could say fact but this is
another place it gets tricky and then they modify those and make them more and
more refined but now and then they have to under grow quite a transformation not
be a stage transition in Piaget and thought that that's the stage transition
idea and that would be akin in some sense to a kuhnian scientific revolution
now what Piaget is trying to state here is that because you there's this weird
problem with facts which is that they tend to transform across time you know
like if you go take a biology course right now in 20 years pretty much
everything you read you learned or very much of what you learned will turn out
to have been wrong and that's kind of weird because it isn't wrong right now
and you think well how can it be wrong in 20 years and that that's a really
complicated problem and in order to solve that you kind of have to think
about facts like tools instead of them as thinking about them as objective
independent realities because a bad tool can still work as a tool whereas a bad
fact just kills you stone dead and so there's any ways in any case that seems
to be a completely unnecessary phenomena Oh God
there's no reason for that that's just sheer spite as far as I can tell mm-hmm
okay so so here's one of psays propositions and and it is that because
facts flux in some sense across time you're looking for something that
doesn't change across time to call it a real fact and so what Piaget is trying
to point out in this let's call it introductory paragraph is that the one
thing that doesn't change is the manner in which people generate facts rather
than the facts themselves so the ultimate fact is a fact about the way
people generate facts all right and so psays theory in part is a is a theory
about how knowledge is acquired and transformed and so it's not that no it's
not a study of the knowledge itself it's a study of the process by which the
knowledge is generated and he believed that that process was unchanging at
least with regards to human beings and so you could think of the Piaget alien
genetic epistemological mystery as being how is it that people form and transform
representations of the world and one of his conclusions about that is that
there's a standard process and then the reason that I'm telling you about Piaget
right now is because as far as I can tell the standard Piaget daeun
description of the manner in which knowledge is acquired and transformed is
the same thing that's represented in the mythology of the shamanic transformation
which is that there's a state of being and then it's derp up disrupted by
something chaotic and there's a disintegration period and that's the
space between the stage transitions for for children in which time they're often
upset because their little theory about the world isn't learning it isn't
working anymore and then in that chaotic period they
adjust themselves to new anomalies and anomalies or what occur when you act in
the world and what you want to happen doesn't happen right because that means
there's something wrong with your knowledge structure if you act and then
something happens you don't want to happen something's wrong with the way
you're representing the world or you could say something's wrong with the
world but good luck with that although you know people can modify the world as
well as modifying their belief structures and people do that a lot but
so this the piagetian stage transition as far as I can tell is a micro case of
the broader idea of the the existence an orderly state its dissolution into a
chaotic state because something unexpected has occurred and then it's
retransfer Meishan into a more integrated state now Piaget would say
well the initial state and the chaotic state and the final state aren't the
ultimate realities the ultimate reality is the process of moving through those
stages and that's how people acquire knowledge and that's you could say
that's the central element of human beings and I would say that's a that's
another reason Tatian of the hero myth because the hero is the person who notes
uh normally notes something that's changed that's outside of explored
territory encounters it defeats it let's say or get something of value from it
and then recasts it into the world shares it with the community
restructures of the world and so that's the central story it's it's not the
central story of human beings but it's it's close enough for for our purposes
at the moment so okay so that's what Piaget is about how do human beings
encounter the world and and what happens when they
do that now the thing about the world for Piaget is it's also a complicated
place it's not exactly the set of it's not the set of all objective facts that
remain to be discovered because Piaget is a constructivist and he's more of a
pragmatist than he is precisely a scientific realist and so that's a
complicated thing very very complicated thing I don't know if any of you and
maybe this is completely irrelevant I don't know if any of you listened to my
argument with Sam Harris but Sam Harris is a scientific realist and I was trying
to make at least in part at Piaget Ian's point but he was having none of that
that's for sure but but Piaget makes the point and so you know I'm going to let
him speak in some sense as we proceed through this and and well you'll see why
he does what he does so if all knowledge is always in the state of development
and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete and efficient
one so that that implies a hierarchy of states right that you move from one
knowledge structure to the next one which includes the previous one and is
better and it's better because it covers more territory that's how you know it's
better it does the same thing the old tool does plus some additional things so
it's a definition of better it's a good thing to have a definition of better and
worse all knowledge is always in the state of
development and consists in proceeding for one state to a more complete
deficient one evidently it is a question of knowing this development and
analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy which is something I happen to
agree with but that's partly because I read Piaget and and I think I understand
what he meant and he's quite the thinker and so I'm gonna see if I can like clue
you in a little bit about this because it's it's well it's exceedingly complex
you know and most of the time when people talk about Piaget they just talk
about his surface experiments they don't talk about what he was actually up to
and what he was up to was well he was trying to figure out how people
represent the world and learned and that's not only it's not only that you
know this is another thing people don't know about Piaget is that he was trying
to reconcile the chasm between science and values that's what drove him through
his entire intellectual life he was attempting to bridge the gap between
science and religion that's another way of thinking about it and and that was
explicit he knew that that's why he did everything he did and so the thing
that's so cool about Piaget I think is that he actually started to provide what
you might think about as a rational basis for morality it's not exactly
rational that's the thing because it's rational rational belief like scientific
realism has a certain set of presuppositions at its core and Piaget
doesn't use those presuppositions to solve the problem get a problem so deep
the gap between what is and what ought to be that's the David Humes problem you
can't derive a naught from it is just because you know a bunch of things
doesn't give you an unerring guide to know what to do about those things
there's a gap there and Harris and people like him say that gap is illusory
but most philosophers including David Hume including Piaget these are
heavy-duty people including Heidegger would would disagree with that they
don't believe that that that that gap is non-existent and and and Harris believes
that you can nest values within science and and that's the proposition that he
continually puts forward like most of the so-called new atheists but it's a
hell of a lot more difficult to do than you think that's for sure and so anyway
so how is Piaget purporting to manage this well one thing he does is he for
Piaget it's really important that you have a body and that's one of the things
that's four cool about his thinking so you could
think about him as an early exponent of embodied cognition it's like he's not
exactly a Cartesian a follower of Descartes he doesn't really believe that
you have a spirit or say a rational mind that is in some sense separate from your
body which is an implicit presupposition of a lot of a lot of of philosophical
claims Piaget really sticks you in your body and the other thing that Piaget
claims is that your abstract knowledge is actually determined by the structure
of your body and that it unfolds from your body up into abstraction and that's
what happens as infants transform into adults first of all almost all their
knowledge is embodied and what that means is that it's not look there's a
couple of different kinds of memory like the most the most fundamental
distinction you might think of is between procedural representation
procedural memory and and representational memory so when you
remember your past that little movie or that runs in your head or maybe the
facts that you can recite about your past
that's episodic memory that's representational but procedural memory
is different procedural memories how you walk you don't know how you walk that's
how you ride a bike it's how you play the piano it's how you type so it's it's
automatic right it's built into your nervous system it's built into the
nerves that innervate your musculature and there's completely separate memory
systems now one can represent the other which is interesting the
representational system can represent the output of the body which is
basically what you happen what happens when someone tells a story even when you
tell a story about your own life but the contents of procedural memory precede
the contents of representational memory and they're shaped in different ways
so for example part of the wisdom that's encoded in your body is there because of
things you've practiced but it's also there because you've practiced things in
a social environment and so while you practice those things the effect of the
social environment shaped the way you learned it and that's encoded right in
your neurons it's not representational it's encoded
in the way you do things it's encoded in the way you smile when you look at
someone or frown or when you do that and that's all implicit it's not under your
conscious control it's not even in that system and so Piaget figured this out
and so one of the things he said was that you start as an infant by building
your cedral memory not your representational
memory that's partly perhaps why you can't remember your infancy you know I
actually don't have that kind of representational memory there what you
do is you act you learn to act you build your body so that it can move and you do
that partly by experimenting with your own body but you also do that by
experimenting with your body in a context that's shaped from the beginning
by the presence of other people so for example you know what child learns how
to breastfeed its mouth is pretty wired up right at birth hey and and the rest
of its body isn't wired up very much at all but its mouth is and you might think
well that's just a reflex and that Piaget would agree with that it's a
built in it's something built in that that a baby can do right at birth but
even in the act of breastfeeding the baby has to learn how to modify that
reflex so that it gets along with its mother so even at the very beginning
with the most you might think the most primordial acts there's a sociological
and influence and there's a mutual dynamic going on that's really really
important it's really important and so in some sense for Piaget the structure
of society is implicitly built into the structure of the procedural memory
system and so one of the things you might think about that and Piaget makes
much of this because he looks at the relationship between play and dreams and
imitation so he's kind of a quasi psychoanalyst one of the things that
means is that coded in your behavior coded in your behavior is is this is the
social structure in which you emerged and it's coded in a way that you don't
actually understand you just know how to act and then you can figure out how
you're acting and you can extract out of that some of the social rules but you
don't you don't that doesn't mean that you know the rules it meant that the
rules were built into you here's the way of thinking about it like a wolf pack
wolf pack knows how to operate together it knows how to hunt right and each wolf
knows where every other wolf is in the dominance hierarchy but they don't know
they know that they don't have rules right they don't have a code they don't
have laws what they have is behavioral regularities patterned behavioral
regularities and those are like a morality they're very very in fact
that's exactly what they are a dominance hierarchy of animal
that aren't representational you know that don't have language at least they
don't have language the dominance hierarchy is a kind of morality it's a
way of it's a way of setting up individual behavior within a social
context to maximize cooperation and minimize competition and so well so
Piaget would say that you know the origin of more and and Fran's de Waal
who's a great primatologist by the way Fran's fr ansd de w AAL he's written a
lot of books about the emergence of morality and chimpanzees in particular
and you know he follows the same line of logic it's that the morality emerges out
of the interaction between the chimpanzees and it's bounded by the
necessity that the actions take certain forms so for example if the chimpanzees
act in a way that each of them kills everyone else it's like that's the end
of it it's the end of the game so that's not a
very functional morality it's it doesn't produce survival of the individuals it
doesn't produce flourishing of the individuals certainly it produces
extinction of the individuals and the death of the group so as far as do all
would concerned from an evolutionary perspective that sort of mode of
interacting is a dead end and so one of Pia Jays claims implicit claims is that
and this is one of the things that's so brilliant about Piaget is that the
interactions between people the social interactions between people necessarily
emerge within a kind of bounded space and the space is the space of the game
so we're always playing games always and a game you might think about a game as a
microcosm of the world and a small child's game is a tiny fractional
microcosm of the world but then you get up into adult games and you could think
about those maybe as multiplayer online games that's one good representation but
even more sophisticated things like being a lawyer say are like working at
McDonald's or any of those things those are also forms of game and and that P
and people negotiate the rules and that game is nested inside sets of broader
games and so for Piaget that the game that killed the games the children play
kind of transform inexorably and and and what incrementally into the games that
adults play and and a a game that's playable as an adult is a
functional game it's it's an acceptable game and one of PJ's claims is that not
only do people start playing games unconsciously in a sense and implicitly
then they start to play games more consciously they actually they actually
represent the games to some degree at least in their actions then they start
to learn the explicit rules of the game but only later after they know how to
play it and then at the highest stage of moral development they start to realize
that not only are they players of games and followers of a rules but they're
also producers of rules so it starts you start out not being able to play a game
at all then you can play a game with yourself then you can play a game with a
few other people then you can play rule-governed games with lots of people
and then you realize that you make the rules and you can make new games and
that's the highest level of moral development according to Piaget it's
varrick's brilliant it's it's bloody brilliant he's the first person that I
ever really encountered who was able to put the notion of an emergent morality
on something you know broadly commensurate with a scientific
perspective but you have to understand that in order to do that he had to
sacrifice a little bit of his notions of scientific realism and that's what makes
him a constructivist and so and so we're going back to constructivism so he says
at the beginning and this is the beginning of the development of
knowledge does not unfold itself as a matter of chance but forms a development
so he said there's not only do knowledge structures change across time and
they're embedded in the social world but the manner in which they change across
time actually has a bit of a structure and so that would be the Piaget lien
stages of development just so you know now people have debated ever since
Piaget proposed this if those developmental stages are fixed and
necessary and if he identified them properly and even and as well whether or
not they could be sped up which he always called the American problem could
you speed up these stages of development and there's a lot of argument about
whether those stages exist in the manner that Piaget described there and whether
they're fixed at all of that but that's still the fundamental elements of his
the fundamental element of his theory so and in since the cognitive domain has an
absolute beginning which means you were you're here now but at one point you
weren't so there was an absolute beginning to to you as a phenomena it's
to be studied at the very stages nor known as formation that's his
rationalization for being a genetic epistemology right someone who studies
the formation of knowledge structures across time like an embryologist someone
like that right who developmental embryologist the first aim of genetic
epistemology is therefore if one can say so to take psychology seriously and to
furnish verifications to any question which each epistemology necessarily
raises yet replacing the generally unsatisfying speculative or implicit
psychology with controllable analysis and so basically what he's saying there
is that you can guess in a sense like Freud did about developmental psychology
Freud kind of projected backwards from his patients into the dim mists of
childhood and came up with like a what would a hypothetical developmental
sequence and Piaget said well we're not going to do that we're going to go run
experiments on kids often individuals but sometimes multiple individuals we're
gonna we're going to observe exactly what they're doing he watched his kids
in their cribs for example unbelievably intently and with great he was like an
ethologist which is a person who studies animal behavior observational II like
Fran's de Waal he was like an ethologist of children not exactly an experimental
psychologist although also an experimental psychologist and he more or
less established the field of developmental psychology so he said well
let's empirically analyze how children learn and then maybe we can figure out
how this knowledge process unfolds and we don't have to guess about it we can
we can use controllable analysis and so you could say he introduced scientific
methodology even though he wasn't a scientific realist he introduced
scientific methodology into the study of child development but more importantly
into the study of how knowledge structures unfold across time so he was
a philosopher as well but a strange type of philosopher because he was interested
in how philosophy itself emerges in the mind of the child and so that's what
Piaget was up to and so quite quite remarkable and he had incredibly wide
range of interests befitting someone who probably had an IQ of like 190 I mean he
was seriously smart guy like way way outside of the normal range and so this
is the sort of questions he was trying to answer well how do you on what do you
base your judgments cuz you make judgments about things better or worse
well how how do you come up with that ability how does that emerge and on what
basis do you make the judgments there's a famous ruling on pornography
that I believe the Supreme Court of the United States laid down and one of the
justices wrote something that's become infamous or famous depending on how you
look at he said well I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it
and and that's and that's a notion of the incomplete ability of the
representational system to represent the contents of implicit perception or the
procedural system you can know that you know something but you that doesn't mean
you can describe why it doesn't mean you can describe how you know it and you
don't how do you focus your eyes like you don't know how you focus your eyes
you just focus them you know how do you smile like this well maybe less ugly but
you know you you can't describe how you do it you can't describe the musculature
you can represent the output of the act and you can do it but you can't
represent it and you're just stuffed full of skills like that which is
another example of the way that you're way more complicated than your
understanding of you you know one of the things people often ask is how can we
use the rat as a model of a person because like you know a rats not much of
a person depending of course on the person but the the real answer to that
is well compared to what like compared to your understanding of a person a rat
is an excellent model of a person so it's not as good a model of a person as
a person is but compared to imagination let's say it's incomparably better and
you know that's because we share like I don't know what 98% of our genes or some
damn thing with rats it's like it's really up I think we share 90% of our
genes with yeast for God's sake you know and so we're a lot more rat-like than
yeast like so and I think with chimps it's over 99% you know so it's not a bad
model obviously it's not perfect but it always depends on what you compare it to
you know and you hear animal rights activists say things like well we can
replace that with computer simulations it's like no we can't because you can't
simulate what you don't know or at least not very well so that's a silly idea you
know even though they have a point it's not so great to torture animals to death
and all but what are his norms well that's a
good question where do norms for behavior come from you have norms when
they're violated it annoys you doesn't mean you know what your norms are but
you do kind of get a sense of what they are when they get violated that really
upset me well what does that mean well you don't really know you might
have to think about that for like six months why you got so upset about that
but you can notice that you got upset and that means that you do have
expectations and norms let's say but you don't know where they came from now
obviously in part they came from your intrinsic structure but also a core
they're a consequence of your learning but even more importantly they're our
consequence of your learning in a social environment so all of those phenomena
which exceed your comprehension determine the nature of your norms and
often you only detect them when they're violated so because why bother paying
attention to something that works you just don't know one does they take
it for granted it's almost the definition of something working it's
like you know you think I'm driving my car to school and you think you're in a
car but you're really not in a car you're in a thing that gets you from
home to school and you can pretend that that is so annoying you can pretend that so you might think well the thing that
I'm I'm in is it's kind of a weird example is it is this object with
objective qualities that you call a car but but that isn't exactly how you
actually perceive or act towards it what happens is is that as long as it's doing
what it's supposed to do which means that its function is intact not what it
is but its function then you can use a really low resolution representation of
the thing the car is just what gets you from point A to point B right and so the
fact that you don't understand the damn thing at all is completely invisible to
you but it isn't when it quits as soon as it quits it becomes a car it's like
bang car oh my god I don't understand this thing at all now what do I do
well you panic a little bit right because well what do you know about your
car nothing nothing nothing at all and worse than that now the car has become
an intersection between you and whoever's going to fix your card so that
introduces a whole bunch of human elements into it like are they going to
figure out what's wrong with it are they going to rip you off is your car ever
going to work again are you going to get to work what's going to happen tonight
so all of a sudden that thing that you were in that was a car turns into this
massive complex unbelievably complicated thing and that's actually what it is
your initial representation of it it's like it's really low resolution it's
like one bit and then bang it breaks down and poof complexity complexity
complexity everywhere and that complexity that's what the world's made
out if you remember we talked about William James and that crazy nitrous
oxide induced pseudo hippie poetry that he was writing in the 1890s when he was
talking about chaos well that chaos that he was talking
about out of which him order emerges that's the same thing as that complexity
that's hovering in the background and children have to operate in a world
that's actually that complex but they're not smart enough and neither are you so
they build partial representations that sort of work and the parents scaffold
them so the way children manage that's like children they don't know anything
but stay they're still alive so what's up with that you know
part of it is the child is laying out one of its procedures in the world in
accordance with its understanding and something goes wrong what does the child
do cry right it defaults it defaults to this
distress cry and what happens is the adults move in with their superior
skills and their enhanced understanding and they mediate between the partial
knowledge of the child in the actual complex world and without the child
that's why if you take your child to the mall and just leave you know it doesn't
take very long for them to get really really really really upset you know
depending on the child some of them almost instantaneously you know one day
I was in the Boston Airport with my daughter she was about three and three
and a half maybe and my son he was about two and we were there to pick someone I
was just packed and so I had them by the hand you know and I were told my
daughter a bunch if she ever got separated from me in a crowd just to sit
down immediately wherever she was or as close there by it I would find her don't
move well somehow I got separated from them and I looked behind them and they
weren't there and I found out later she followed someone else who looked like me
from behind and she I found her in about three minutes you know which is a long
time man if you're three years old at that Airport she was sitting there like
paralyzed you know but her brother was with her he didn't care at all and the
reason he didn't care is because as far as he was concerned she was an adult but
as far as she was concerned she was an abandoned kid in an airport you know it
was very hard on her and it's because the you know she was protected from the
complexity by her primordial representations and my presence but as
soon as my presence disappeared the complexity came flooding back and just
overwhelmed her that's chaos and uncertainty and then she'd cry and the
cry says help I'm out of my league I'm drowning I'm drowning you know
intervened and so that's how kids in part can get along in the world with
their incomplete knowledge representations always huh also how you
get along in the world because you're incomplete beyond belief but you got all
these other people around you in the whole damn society filling in the gaps
and so you walk around like you know what you're doing but you don't you know
you just hardly know at all you know if you can fit into that system great
you've got it on your side and you can use it to fill the gaps that's also
partly why people are so concerned with maintaining their social identity like
the real identity on talking about some surface identity but
you see because you have set up a set of expectations and desires about how you
want the world to unfold and you do that within a social context and as long as
your desires and the actions of the community match which means you're at
home roughly speaking as long as they match you stay emotionally regulated you
like that that's why you can stay calm in here it's like your desires are being
played out by everyone else because one of your desires is that none of these
crazy primate starts brandishing a knife for example or even twitching or any of
that sort of thing you don't want any of that and if it starts happening it's
like you get weary very quickly and maybe you look and maybe you won't and
maybe you'll freeze maybe you'll get the hell out of there or maybe you'll get
aggressive but that match has to maintain itself intact or your entire
nervous system gets dysregulated and the reason for that is that as soon as that
match is disrupted the underlying complexity and chaos of the world
reveals itself and so does your inadequacy and then your body defaults
into predator mode and and the fact that you don't know anything and that
everything is really complicated becomes very evident to you very quickly and
people hate that it's the worst thing that can happen to them the bottom
falling out of their world and so that happens more when your fundamental
presumptions about things are are challenged and then you have to solve
the problem of what constitutes a fundamental presupposition you know how
do you know which presupposition is peripheral in which one central and you
can tell in part because the more upset you get about something the more central
it is that that things about to your entire structure of belief and that's
one way of getting into that unconscious structure of belief from a
psychoanalytic perspective so what are the things that happens to me for
example as a therapist is I'll be talking to my clients and they'll be
talking about something difficult and all of a sudden they'll cry and they
often don't know why so I stopped them right there it's like something went
through your mind something happened and the cry indicates that you've moved
beyond your domain of competence out into the unknown world all of a sudden
into chaos what's that chaos what exactly happened and people you know
they're usually embarrassed that they cry but often make
remember what flitted through their mind and it's a represent it's a it's some
encounter with the chaos beyond their conceptual systems that produces that
emotional response and then we can dig into that find out oh that's a trauma
especially if it's more than a year - how fold and those can be of various
depths and profundity you know sometimes they're so bad that the person just
breaks down completely and they never put themselves together you know that's
when something's just walloped you it's hit you right at the bottom of your
axiomatic structures so to speak right at the trunk but when you're doing
therapy with people and you watch how they respond emotionally you look for
those tiny eruptions of negative emotion and those are like holes in their
conceptual structure and those have to be sewed up by their man you in the
process of dialogue you figure out okay there was a bit of unexplored territory
there that manifested itself it produced an emotional response in you that
indicates that you've reverted in some sense to childhood that would be the
Freudian interpretation now we have to figure out what it was that that's in
that hole what caused that tear and then we have to go back and articulate it and
analyze and study it until we can sew it up and then and art and and get to the
gist of it to make it into a adaptive story and then you can leave it behind
and it actually produces neurological transformation as you do that the
memories in some sense actually move their psychophysiological location you
could say their location in your psyche but you can also note that the brain
systems that are handling the memories aren't the same
so they're much more limbic they're way lower and closer to the emotional
centers when it's still raw trauma and by the time it's fully articulated it's
more represented in an articulated story a causal story and that's partly why
writing about emotional events actually helps you overcome them so and it's
possible that writing about how it is that you overcome emotional events in
general is actually the best kind of therapy right not how do you solve a
particular problem but how is it that you orient yourself in the world so that
you solve the class of the fact that there are problems right that's that's
the ultimate story and I think that's the hero myth and I also think that
that's the knowledge generating process that Piaget is talking about you that's
because you have you're constantly overcoming problems in the world
and the problems are that you don't know enough to get what you want from the
world and so you get that mismatch mismatch
there's you've got whole brain systems that are designed to do nothing but
detect that mismatch like crucial central brain structures and we'll talk
about that a lot when we get into the into the physiology so all right how
does on what does an individual basis judgments water is norms how are they
validated how do you know if you're right about your norms what's the
interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general that's
a really tough one it's like well you have norms and expectations as a human
being and because of that they they have a determining influence on the manner in
which you conduct science so for example here's one of the problems with a
straight realist view so we could be having a discussion and I could say well
you know that tile is to the right of that tile and then I could say well this
brick is smaller than that brick and then I could say you know the roof is
white really quite white there and start back there and like after about 20
statements like that you're just going to want to slap me and the reason for
that is that well those statements are perfectly valid representations of fact
but there's an infinite number of facts and most of them are irrelevant and
that's the thing that's the thing the facts have to be relevant like if you
come to a lecture and all the person does is tell you irrelevant facts what
happens you've been in lots of lectures like that what happens when you start
fantasizing about something that might be more worthwhile
you know or you go to sleep because your brain is a lot smarter than you are it
figures hell if all we're gonna get exposed to here is an infinite infinite
number of irrelevant facts we might as well have a nap until something
important happens so it's true it's exactly how it works now this is gonna
get big isn't that what happens next No so okay so and then how does the fact
that the child children think differently affect our presumption of
fact itself children live in the world they think differently about the world
but yet they survive and so well I already mentioned a partial solution to
that adults intercede you know around the edges around the borders children do
this all the time a so it's called referencing and they do it two ways so
for example if you're in a room with your child maybe to wait and mouse runs
across the child will orient to it watch it track it that's pretty much
unconscious and the mother let's say will do that too and then the child
looks at the mouse and then looks at the mother and the reason is is because the
child doesn't know what the mouse is and so then it looks at the mother to read
from the mothers face which is a projection screen of emotions how to
classify the mouse in terms of import and if the mother is like all calm about
it and gives the kid a pad it's like you know okay whatever
you know not a danger that's what the mouse is first danger not danger
it's way after that that it's a mouse you think no it's a mouse to begin with
it's like these things are not so straightforward they are not so
straightforward so anyways if the mother climbs up on the table it has a
screaming fit then the child's already prepared because of this anomaly to be
emotionally responsive the child looks at the mothers face it's got terror on
at the mouse child takes small danger big danger it's like phobia phobia
phobia now all kids that won't happen to you because some are very emotionally
robust but if they're very Charles very high in neuroticism trait neuroticism
the probability that they'll develop a permanent semi-permanent fear of the
mouse is extraordinarily high and that's what should happen because the mother
tells you what the mouse is and in the face does it's a mouse it says safety
danger and that's the first thing you want to know about something is it safer
is it dangerous and that's a tricky one eh
because whether something is safe for dangerous is not exactly an objective
fact there's a guy named JJ Gibson who wrote a book called NACA logical
approach to visual perception which I would highly recommend and his claim in
that book it's a real work of genius I believe is that when you see when you
walk towards a cliff you don't see a cliff you don't see a cliff and infer
danger what you see is a falling off place and you infer cliff and you can
tell that some of you have vertigo you go up on the 26th floor out into balcony
and it's like you don't want to go near the edge maybe you feel like you're
gonna throw yourself over because people have that kind of what if what if I fell
or what if I jumped over it's like stay away from that it's like that perception
of the danger precedes your perception of the balcony and the object now you
know that's how your brain is wired the dangers first object second so in people
with blind sight who I've talked about before who think they're blind they
can't see then they tell you that they could still detect fearful faces and you
could detect their detection by measuring their skin conductance and so
their eyes are mapping right on to their fear and reflex systems without any
intermediary of objective perception whatsoever so don't be thinking that
what you see in the world is the objective world and then infer its
meaning it could easily be exactly backwards and it looks like if you look
at how the brain is set up that it is in fact actually backwards or at least
parallel but but the but the danger not danger perception has to be very very
very very fast and so it precedes the more elaborate cognitive interpretations
even the perceptions because it actually takes a while to see something because
it's really complicated to see something and so you can't just wait around to see
the damn thing before you act you just not fast enough so they say if you're a
pro tennis player the time it takes the ball to leave your opponent's racket to
get to you is not long enough for you to plan any motor act so what you're doing
is you've got them what you dis inhibit the motor act by looking at the stance
of your opponent and watching and by the time they hit it you're already prepared
for the response because you just not it's coming at 120 miles an hour it's
like it's going fifty feet you don't have the reflexes for it so your your
your eyes are making body ready without in some sense without
your conscious perception you become conscious if you make a mistake right in
fact that's kind of what consciousness is for it's like detect error fix detect
error fix that's consciousness it's not plan what
you're going to do next although it's not that simple either other problems
that Piaget was trying to address well what water numbers what does it mean for
there to be space what what do we mean when we when we talk about time how do
we how did we come up with that concept what does speed mean how do we know an
object is permanent how do we know that an object stays the same across sets of
transformation so that's a very classic piagetian problem so let's say you give
a kid a bowl of clay and then you crush it so it's now a cylinder is like is
that the same thing or is it a different thing and the answer is well it's the
same thing and it's a different thing but there's something about it that
remained constant across the transformations and so one of the things
that Piaget is trying to figure out is what remains constant across
transformations because you might think about that is a real fact protons are
like that right they remain constant across transformations and so we assume
that they're pretty damn real and they last I don't know how long protons last
it's like I don't know what it is it's some tens of billions of so don't worry
your protons are going to just sit right there and behave you know so they last
for a very very very long time across sets of transformation so we can regard
them as real he was interested in why children play and why there are patterns
in play and how that's related to dreams and he was really interested in the fact
that we imitate other people and this is another part of Piaget staggering genius
in my estimation because he was one of the early developmental thinkers who
understood that our capacity for learning was not so much mediated by
language as it was mediated by our capacity to use our bodies to represent
the bodies of other people and that's mind-boggling it's a mind-boggling idea
so you know you hear monkey-see monkey-do but it's actually not true
they're not very good at imitating octopuses or octopi they can imitate
actually so if you give a octopus a bottle with a cork in it and there's a
crab in the cork it can figure out how to get out the cork and sneak out the
crab but if you get an octopus to watch it
our octopus do that it'll learn to do it faster those things are smart and that's
partly that's because they're all tentacley right and so they actually
have something they can do something with like our hands there's our
tentacles you know an octopus I can operate in the world because they have
tentacles and and you know you hear about the superhuman intelligence of
things like dolphins and whales it's like ya know they're basically test
tubes you know what what are we gonna do now tap a city it's like no they're not
gonna do that they can't manipulate the world so
whatever their intelligence is it's way different than ours okay imitation so
partly what you're doing all the time is imitating other people all of you are
imitating each other right now you can tell because look around you're
all doing exactly the same thing so it's it's mass imitation and that's really a
huge part of social structure is that we're constantly imitating each other
and so that means that your body and her body are very much matched
physiologically right now you're in the same state and you can tell because you
basically have the same expression and as long as all you crazy primates
violent primates have the same expression on you can pretty much be
sure that all of you are thinking and about to do approximately the same thing
and so you can keep that match between your desire slash expectation and
reality happening and that's why we have a face it's so that other people know
what the hell we're up to and that's why you're always watching people's faces
because you want to see what they're up to and that's why you have white
surround your iris gorillas don't and so that's because I can see exactly where
your eyes are pointing because they're highlighted by that white and I'm
unbelievably good at detecting the precise direction of your gaze and so if
you stand on the corner and look up the buildings other people will stand beside
you and look up because they think well that guy would be standing there
pointing his eyes into the sky unless there was something of interest to a
primate like me and so this classic social psychology experiment you'll get
people gathered around trying to figure out what the hell it is that you're
pointing your eyes at right because that indicates intense interest interest in
something valuable that I might be able to share partake in if I can figure out
what it is that you're up to and so all your ancestors who didn't have nicely
defined eyes they all got killed or they didn't mate and that's
why you have these beautiful white eyes with this like colorful
iris in the middle it's so that people can tell what the hell you're up to and
they're more likely to cooperate with you more likely to mate with you and
less likely to kill you which is you know probably a good thing all things
considered and so you know if you look at the same thing that someone else is
looking at you're imitating them and one of the things that's interesting is that
if you're looking at the same thing that someone else is looking at and you would
have at the same value structure then your emotional responses are going to be
very much akin to one another and you can tell that when you go to a movie and
you watch the hero and you embody the hero while you're doing so and the
emotions that you produce inside of you by imitating the hero on the screen
enable you to figure out what the hero is going through and you can learn from
that and so that's a very complex form of imitation and we do that when we tell
stories or we watch stories and those stories are really complicated because
as we already outline they're not just factual representations of someone's
action during a day their representations of the important things
that the person did the meaningful things and so when you go see a movie
all you're doing is watching meaningful things if the movies any good and you
know that because well if the movie isn't meaningful well then you leave
your board right it's and the fact that it's meaningful is what keeps you in the
seat and you don't necessarily know why in fact you often have no idea why it's
meaningful it's like watching Pinocchio rescue is
farther from a whale it's like what the hell you know how I is that meaningful
well you don't know but it is so moral concerns well we already talked about
Piaget is concerned about morality oh boy this is really not good okay here's a proposition constructivist
proposition knowledge does not begin in the eye by by which he means they're
kind of two ways of looking at the world there's more but we'll start with that
one is is that all of your knowledge comes from outside sense data okay and
now that's kind of a behaviorist claim and before that it's a it's an
empiricist claim and then the other ideas no that can't be right because you
have internal structures that enable you to look at the world and interpret it
and so and and some of those might be implicit axiomatic like the fact that
you have two eyes and you look at the outward into the world and that you can
hear and that you can touch it's like the fact of those senses isn't dependent
on the empirical reality for those senses to manifest themselves they're
already built into you and people like Kant for example made the proposition
that we had a priori knowledge structures and that we use them to
interpret the world and so it's different than him it's different than
empiricism and so what Piaget is saying well it's neither of
those are right exactly it's not like you will learn everything from the world
through your senses and it's not as if you project everything onto the world as
interpretation it's something in-between and it's a dynamic it's a dynamic and so
and it's like bootstrapping that's the right way to think about it
you know when your computer boots up that means bootstrapping
its off and then a bunch of simple processes occur and then out of those
simple processes some more complex processes emerge and then out of those
some more complex processes emerge and all of a sudden your computer is there
well that's kind of what Piaget thinks happens to you you bootstrap yourself
and so you have got a couple of reflexes to begin with like the sucking reflex
for example and you've got some proclivities like maybe you can sort of
flip your hand or or you develop that and you have reflexes so you know if you
blow on a baby for example a baby you'll go like this it's built into it it's
like an it's a it's a startle reflex essentially so that startle reflex is
there right from the beginning so whole body reflex and you know if you stroke
the bottom of their feet their feet will sort of curl up and if you put your
finger in their hands even a newborn if you put your finger in their hands you
can lift them right up and it's sort of well clinging ape
you know because chimpanzee infants cling to their mother for like five
years and so without reflux is still there so the kid comes into the world
born with these simplistic low resolution procedures that enable it to
get a foothold on the world and then out of that the child emerges and that's so
the constructivist idea is that well it isn't like you have your heads full of
fully developed axiomatic structures and it isn't that you get all your knowledge
from the world it's that you have a bit of structure there to begin with that
gives you a toehold on the world and then you act in the world and as you act
you generate information and out of that information you make the structures
inside of you and you make the world that's a constructivist idea is that you
take whatever's there this tremendous complexity and you sort it into you and
the world and so and so that that goes back to that William James idea about
that initial chaos and it's a hard conflict it's a hard hard concept to
grasp because that isn't really how we think you know we think that there's an
objective world and there's a subjective world and that the objective world is
just there and the subjective world is maybe a subset of that but that is not
piagetian presupposition it's not a presupposition of phenomenologist sin
general who we'll talk about later but so here's one example of how to
think about this in a sense it's like you know you think as Piaget said you
kind of think that your representations of the world are fixed so we'll go back
to the you're in a long-term relationship and the person betrays you
a scenario right so you've been with this person 10 years you assume fidelity
and faithfulness and honesty and all of that you you weave a shared narrative
you both inhabit that it structures your existence and regulates your emotion
then you find out that the person has not only betrayed you once but multiple
times it's like okay what you thought isn't what happened but here's the weird
thing you see because you interpreted the world obviously within the confines
of that relationship and you hadn't you know obviously you had an interpretation
but there was also a world that's the world you thought you lived in it's like
those were facts well all of a sudden those aren't facts they're not at all
facts and so what happens that's that descent into the underworld it's like
all of a sudden what happens is that past that you thought was fixed now
becomes this weird mixture of fantasy because you're wondering what what what
what is it that happened then and you're gonna run through all sorts of fantasies
some of them are gonna be really dark you know really dark about what happened
in the state of the world and all that and those are unconscious fantasies and
that's mingled inextricably with the world right because you don't know the
facts anymore which kind of suggests that maybe you never did know them and
that's pretty strange thing because you know you're operating as if you've got
this factual representation of the world but it can be upended like that and so
that makes you think well what about these facts like they're kind of they're
kind of hard to get a handle on you know and you see this a lot in court room in
courtroom situations because of course what the court decides is what happened
and the answer is we don't exactly know because you can keep making the context
of interpretation wider and wider so you know maybe you bring your partner to
court because they've betrayed you let's say and you're trying to get a divorce
settlement predicated on that but then they tell a bunch of stories about how
you were just as miserable as you could possibly be and that anybody with any
sense would have betrayed you and never told you about it because you know
that's just what a normal sensible person would do and so then the question
is well were you actually betrayed and if you were well who was it that
betrayed you was that your partner was it you or is it your bloody mother or
your father who taught you act that way or who didn't teach you it's like it's a
hell of a thing because you can just keep altering the interpretive context
and within it the facts shift around and then you might say well they're not
facts it's like yeah yeah you can say that but it's it's more complicated than
that by a large margin anyways so PJ's notion is essentially
that well this is how I interpret it this is sort of this is my thinking in
some sense but I'm offering it to you as a scheme for helping you understand
Piaget it's like junior Rome Bruner famous famous cognitive psychologist
said we seem to have no other way of describing live time SEP except in
the form of a narrative and a narrative as far as I could tell I think this is
the same thing as one of PS J's knowledge representations as far as I
can tell there's a representation of you and there's a representation of the
future and there's behaviors that you use to transform one into the other and
so when Piaget talks about so this is kind of where the mind meets the body
that that's how it looks to me it's like you have a conception of you and you
have something you're aiming at you want to have happen
those are both representations but when you act in the world those aren't
representations anymore those are actually actions and some of mine
transforms into body when you act out your notion and that's that's sort of
how the mind is linked to the body as far as I can tell and so what Piaget
says is that the behaviors are built before the representation and so we're
going to take a look at that so here's here's a Piaget a notion of assimilation
and accommodation whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by
changing their species so that's through Darwinian means right
so what happens is a bear is a kind of solution to a set of problems and
they're the problems that the bear's environment presents and the bear is
just a bear so it's sort of like bears were ten thousand years ago and the only
way the bear can solve a new problem basically is by generating new random
bears which is what it does wouldn't reproduce us and hoping that one of
those more random bears is a better fit for whatever random change might occur
in the environment that's the whole Darwinian issue right you can't predict
which way the environment is going to go and so what you do is you take your
structure and you vary it and you throw those out into the world and some
animals do that expensively so they have infants that they have to program to
that specific environment but it takes a lot of investment and some creatures do
that cheaply like mosquitoes it's like they don't care for their kids but they
have a million of them so like who cares if nine hundred and ninety nine thousand
nine hundred ninety eight die there's still twice as many of you as there were
so those are two different reproductive strategies and you could think about all
those mosquito offspring as new mosquito ideas in embodied form and most of them
are bad ideas and so the environment just wipes them out
Opia Jays point is we do the same thing with our cognitive structures and that's
the thing that's so interesting about people in some sense that we've
internalized the Darwinian problem and so when you think about the future what
you're doing is generating a multiplicity of potential environments
and then you're generating a sequence of avatars of yourself to live in those
fictional futures and then you watch what happens as that Avatar lives in
each of those those fictional futures and if the Avatar fails you don't act
that out it's bloody brilliant it's brilliant
that's what our brain does it's like it hypothesizes potential futures it runs
simulations and it kills them and that can be really painful but it beats the
hell out of dying yourself or maybe sometimes you won't think so because it
really can be painful but it's it's it's something that as far as we know only
human beings can really do right we invent possible futures and invent
possible future selves and kill them off in our imagination and that's what
you're doing in an argument that's what an argument is it's like well here's an
avatar a representational avatar you know that's based on certain axioms and
all articulated and you articulate yours and we'll have them have a fight in
which everyone survives we'll accept as true and we'll move forward and act that
out and you know arguments can be pretty damn intense but hypothetically they're
not as intense as acting out a stupid idea that's the thing right better to
have some conflict and reach resolution in an abstract sense than to embody your
stupidity and die and so you know it's sort of a trade-off between anxiety and
and an annihilation or pain whereas other animals cannot alter
themselves except by changing your species man can transform himself by
transforming the world and construct himself by constructing structures and
these structures are his own they're not eternally predestined either from within
or from without also Piaget you know he's well he's a constructivist he
believes that there's something that your biology brings to the table and and
and sets up the parameters let's say within which you can play games but
within those parameters there's a very wide range of games that you could play
and so it's not a biological determinism even though it's a biological framing
and you can think about it like a chess game you know let's let's assume that
the rules of chess are biologically determined just for the sake of argument
you can still play a near infinite number of chess games and so it's the
same with you you come into the world with a set of built-in axioms that's
sort of your body and your nervous system but you can play a very large
number of games within that set of frames and one of the things that's very
interesting about that something that's very mysterious to me is this is a game
that I played before with students so I'm gonna play it with you if you don't
mind so we're gonna play a game you ready okay you move first right exactly
you don't know what to do right and that's well that's so interesting
because I basically made the presupposition that you could do
anything you're completely free and what do you do you throw up your hands it's
like you don't know what to do I'm so free it's like free to do what well
that's not freedom it's it's just nothing but if I said well look what
we're gonna do instead is when I move my arm right you're gonna move your arm
right so let's do that okay so I'm gonna go like that you're gonna good and then
I'll go like that and then we'll have a little dance yeah yeah so you can play a
game like that with it with a kid instantly and they like that they've got
that man and so I've got so I've got some pictures of that I'll show you that
in a bit but even a newborn baby you stick out your tongue they can stick
their tongue out back and now do you think about that that's just absolutely
mind-boggling that they can do that and they really can they really do seem to
be able to do that right at the moment of birth and so you know you hear babies
have no theory of mind it's like ah yeah no they can imitate that's pretty bloody
amazing man like you haven't seen robot that can do that yet although there are
robots now that you can teach by moving their their arms you move their arms and
then they'll do it and so you can actually program them by moving them and
then they'll just repeat it and so they're getting damn close to imitation
they're really getting close and then look the hell out man because they're
gonna be imitating each other as well as us and they're gonna do it so fast you
just won't be able to believe it so that's coming the organism adapts itself
by but materially constructing new forms to fit themselves into those of the
universe where as intelligence extends this creation by constructing mental
structures which can be applied to those of the environment that's that there are
winny an idea that I just mentioned you know the guys that are building the
autonomous cars like they don't think they're building on Thomas cars they
know perfectly well what they're doing they're building fleets of mutually
intercommunicating autonomous robots and each of them will to be able to teach
the other because their nervous system will be the same and when there's ten
million of them when one of them learned something all ten million of them will
learn it at the same time so they're not gonna have to be very bright before
they're very very very smart because us you know we'll learn something you have
to imitate it's like god that's hard or I have to explain it to you and you have
to understand it and then you have to act it out we're not connected
wirelessly with the same platform but robots they are and so once those things
get a little bit smart they're not going to stop at a little bit smart for very
long they're gonna be unbelievably smart like overnight so and they're imitating
the hell out of us right now too because we're teaching them how to understand us
every second of every day the net is learning what we're like it's watching
us it's communicating with us it's imitating us and it's gonna know it
already knows in some ways more about us than we know about ourselves you know
there's lots of reports already of people getting pregnancy ads or ads for
infants sometimes before they know they're pregnant but often before
they've told their families and the way that that happens is the net is watching
what they're looking at and inferring with its artificial intelligence and so
maybe you're pregnant that's just tilting you a little bit right to
interest in things that you might not otherwise be interested in the net
tracks that then it tells you what you're at what you're after it does that
by offering an advertisement so it's reading your unconscious mind
so well so that's what's happening so all right so what's the motive for
development dis equilibria that's a Piaget lien term well this is a
life is suffering idea it's like why learn something cuz you're wrong who
cares it makes you suffer you care so you know if you run out a little scheme
in the world a little action pattern you don't get what you want if you're
especially if you're two years old you burst into tears and cry and why is that
it's because you don't know what you don't know where you are and you don't
know what you're doing it's like time for some negative emotion
it indicates that you're wrong and that's terrible in some sense because it
all it almost always means that to learn requires pain now I don't believe that
exactly because people are curious you know and to go out and be curious and to
learn new things can be very exciting and so what it seems to be is that
there's there's a rate of learning that's too fast and that hurts you
that's what makes you cry but if you get the rate just right you're just opening
up enough novelty so that you can benefit from the possibilities that
gives you a dopamine kick fundamentally you can benefit from the possibilities
without being overwhelmed by the by the unexpected element of it and you can
tell when that's happening and this is one of the coolest things as far as I'm
concerned this is and I learned this partly from Piaget it's like you know in
order to withstand suffering let's say your life has to have some meaning okay
well that that means a bunch of things it means that part of the way that you
overcome suffering is by making the suffering into something meaningful and
I don't mean that metaphysically I mean it technically you made a mistake it
causes you suffering you learn something about it you don't make that mistake
again it's real adaptation it's not it's not
defense against death anxiety or something like that it's real adaptation
but more importantly the reality that you learn through pain is the oldest
reality will say it's it's really old it's as old as nervous systems and so
you've adapted so that you've learned to transform your knowledge structures in a
way that will minimize your potential exposure to future pain
they at a rate you can tolerate or maybe even enjoy and so what's happening is
you don't actually like being static it bores you but you don't like being
thrown into chaos it's like no a little bit of that's fine what you want is you
want to be opening up your knowledge structures on the periphery to
transformation voluntary transformation that's voluntary exploration and letting
those things manifest a little bit of interesting chaos and so you have a
little bit you put a little feeler out there that you're willing to let die and
it comes apart and you gather a bit of information it comes back together
stronger and you do that all the time if you're if you're smart and you're
looking for new information foraging for new information and that means you keep
taking little bits of yourself apart and reconstructing them and overtime that
keeps you alive and active you know part of the reason you're alive is because
you're dying all the time right all the cells in your body like if they don't
die you get cancer and that that's it you're done you're a very very tight
balance between death and life at every every single level including the
cognitive level and it's not that fun to learn something because you have to kill
something you already know in order to learn it that's another piece yet in
observation because you're always interpreting something within a
structure and if that interpretation is wrong even in a microwave you have to
kill that structure and it's a biological structure it actually hurts
to kill it but maybe you can generate something new in its stead and if you
get the dynamic right let the rate right then you find that exhilarating not
painful and that's and that's well you can tell when you're doing that as far
as I can tell you can tell when you're doing that because you're engaged in the
world in a meaningful way and what your nervous system is doing is signaling to
you that you're not in a static place that's death you're not in a chaotic
place that's death your balance between the static and the chaotic such that the
static structures are transforming at exactly the right rate to keep you on
top of the environmental transformations and so you're surfing you know in Hawaii
the surfers surfing was sacred well that's why it's like do you can you tell
someone how to surf well you can't because they have to go out there and
dynamically interact with the wave but they can stay on top of the wave and
that's what you have to do and if you're
staying on top of the wave properly then it's exhilarating and that's the kind of
meaning that that it rejuvenates you literally it makes you able to tolerate
the suffering in life and it's not metaphysical precisely it's because that
is what you're doing at that moment you're you're overcoming your
limitations and of course that's what you have to do in order to to know and
to learn because you want to be doing both of those things at the same time
that's what you do when you play a game properly your parents say it doesn't
matter whether you win or lose this is a PSAT and observation it's how you play
the game what does that mean well it means that you should play the game in a
manner that increases the probability that you're going to be invited to play
many games in the future perfect so you master the skills of the game but at the
same time you master a set of meta skills which is the skills that remain
constant across transforming sets of games and that's what it means to play
fair that's a bloody basis of morality as far as Piaget was concerned it's so
damn smart you know because you think all interactions have this game-like
quality they're sort of bounded and but there are commonalities across all the
games and you want to extract out the commonalities and you want to learn to
inhabit the universe that's made out of the commonalities between games and
that's what it means to be a good person roughly speaking you know it varies to
some degree from culture to culture obviously because each culture is a game
unto itself but there's something that transcends that that's the nature of
games across game contexts and you know that you know that because you can tell
the difference between a game and and something that isn't a game instantly
everyone knows and it's not like there's only one kind of game there's hockey say
and there's there's a world of warcraft I know it's way out of date but so am I
so it's not surprising so but the fact that those things are very very
different in many many ways doesn't stop you from identifying the underlying
commonalities you know they're games and they're they're like stories in a sense
so and that's a piagetian that's a piagetian observation very very smart
so why do you develop well it's because your your previous idea their your
previous frame micro frame let's say doesn't fit the circumstance and so
something happens it you go like this what's up well the world isn't what you
thought and there's something wrong with your knowledge structure this is partly
what's makes Piaget a pragmatist you see the pragmatist American school of
philosophy William James and his followers they knew that we had bounded
knowledge we don't have infinite knowledge and so they thought well that
means we can't really be right about anything because we're definitely wrong
and so how is it that you can operate in the world given that you're always wrong
and the answer is you you set up a procedure that has rules for what
constitutes true within the procedure itself so you play a game and at the
same time you set up the rules so you might say well is this joke funny and
then the answer is well do people laugh now when I tell the joke do they laugh
and if the answer is yes then it's funny enough you've you've you've taken a
particular definition of funny you've transformed it into a local phenomena
and if your behavior matches the prediction in that local area you say
well that's true enough is it like transcendently funny well maybe you'd
have to tell it to 200 different groups of people to figure that out but mostly
it's it's funny enough so that when I predicted what would happen when I told
the joke that's what happened and you don't predict it by the way you desire
it it's not the same thing because prediction has no motivation in it but
desire does and we're always motivated always always motivated so well here's a
way of thinking about the Piaget teen system so two-year-olds they're very
chaotic and they bounce between one highly motivated emotional state to
another and so the first thing that the two-year-old has to do is get his or her
act together more or less inside and so you know two-year-olds still have
tantrums and they still cry a lot and and they still run around like mad being
joyful crazily which you have to train out of them right away because it's
nothing but disruptive and it's one of the most painful things about being a
parent like 90% of the time you're going stop
having fun stop having fun you know and then you turn into a teenager and your
parents get what they ask for and so but because positive emotion is so impulsive
and so chaotic it's really hard to manifest itself it's manifested within
it within a predictable environment and so you're dampening down your child's
enthusiasm non-stop it's but it has to be regulated because happiness is
impulsive and chaotic and people don't like to think that because they think
well we should be happy it's like Mannix are happy but they're maniacs that's
where the word comes from like they're just you it's not good they're too happy
way too happy like someone who's way too stoned on math or on cocaine and I mean
that technically because it's it's they're very similar they're very
similar biochemical states so and and cocaine produces happiness pretty much
in its pure form so does meth very rapidly and so it's
just not good you know you lose judgment you happy people you don't have good
judgment they're too happy maybe they get dopey it's like you know it's like
irrational stock market bubbles oh boy it's always going to go up it's like no
no it's not always going to go up but that's what you think when you're happy
anyways the two-year-old has to get all these motivational systems sort of
hammered into one thing internally now in some sense from the PIA jetty in
perspective that happens within the child he thinks of the child is
egocentric but and that that development takes place internally and then it's not
till a child's let's say about three that it can learn to bring its
controlled unity into a unity with another controlled unity and make a game
that happens around three and so what happens is that instead of the child
only pursuing his or her goals although modulated by the social
environment the child is able to communicate with another child and
establish a shared goal and that's what happens when they play and so obviously
you play Monopoly that's what you're doing but when you play peekaboo
you're doing the same thing it's like with your parent you're actually playing
with object permanence dad's go on oh look dad's here haha
he's there dad's gone that's here yeah it's gone dad's here
like a kid man you can do that for like three hours they never get tired of it
because every time you reappear it's an it's a miracle unis watch babies it's so
funny like you go like this and they go then you talk back holding like they're
so happy they're just overjoyed and then you take yourself away and they're like
what's going on what's going on bang you reappear they don't have a real memory
you know it's like reality is manifesting itself in all its freshness
moment by moment and and they can't remember there are neurological
conditions that do that so sometimes and there are people who that this has
happened to so they get hippocampal damage and so they can't move
short-term information into long-term storage and there's this one guy it's
very interesting case he was a concert pianist and he had hell of a
neurological injury and he could still play the piano he couldn't remember
eight he couldn't he had amnesia and he couldn't move information from
short-term storage into long-term storage so as far as he was concerned it
was it was always like ten days before he had his accident he never got passed
out he was stuck in that moment and then but he could still play the piano and
but was so interesting you watch him there were films of him before he sat
down to play the piano he'd have like a seizure and then he could play the piano
procedural memory that was intact and then at the end he'd kind of have a
little seizure and then he'd go back to being who he was but he had these
notebooks and all he did was write in them over and over the same thing it's
as if I have never seen this before it's as if I've never seen this before
it's as if I've never seen this before so he's in this ecstatic state where
everything was novel and new and pure and paradisal but there was no
continuity and so when his wife would come to visit him he would just be
overwhelmed to see her overwhelmed every time and even if she just left the room
and came back in it was exactly the same thing it's just like the kid it's like
no object permanence and every time the face appears it's it's a staggering and
you can see that in the reflexes of the child and that's that's without object
permanence and so that's what Piaget was talking about with regards to object
permanence it's very very cool so anyways the two-year-olds a collection
of these sort of random motivations more or less gets
his or her act together by about three if they're being socialized properly and
that means that the parents are doing their best to make the child acceptable
to other children that's your damn job as a parent you have to understand that
because if your child isn't acceptable to other children they won't play with
your child and then your child will be lonesome and isolated and awkward and
they will never recover because if the kid doesn't get that right between two
and four it's over they're never gonna learn it the other
kids accelerate forward that kids left behind and it's not a good life for that
kid they don't learn how to play with others and then they're done and there's
a huge literature on trying to rectify antisocial children say from the age of
four on it's like no you can't and you can go ahead and read three four hundred
papers on rectification of antisocial behavior and figure it out for yourself
but I did that for about five years and it was a while ago but I know the
literature hasn't changed so you got to get it right between that period you got
to get the kid together enough so they can control themselves well enough so
that they can adopt a mutual frame of reference with a peer so that they can
start using that to scaffold their development further and become more and
more sophisticated in social interactions and that's what you're
you're acting as a proxy for the social environment as a parent that's what
you're doing now a gentle proxy an informative proxy maybe even a merciful
proxy but a proxy nonetheless because they're not going to be around you
forever they're gonna be out there among people who don't really care about them
and if they don't have something to bring to the table at least the ability
to cooperate they're gonna be lonesome and isolated and that's not going to be
good well here's an here's an here's an idea so as you're moving from what is to
what should be you're in this little frame of reference this little game this
little Piaget alien game sometimes you get what you want or predict that's on
the left-hand side that makes you happy and it validates your frame so if the
frame keeps working across different circumstances you get a reward from that
the reward produces a dopaminergic kick that makes you feel good but the
dopamine also enhances the strength of the circuitry that underlies that
particular representation that's what reinforcement is
it's different than reward reward is what you feel let's say roughly speaking
reinforcement is the effect of the dopamine bathing the neurological
tissues to make it stronger and grow and so if the neurological tissue underlies
a sequence of actions that produces a desired outcome there's a biochemical
kick that strengthens the nervous structures that were activated just
before the good thing happens and so that's how something you know that's
valuable gets instantiated and if it fails instead you get punished
pain anxiety and that that starts to extinguish that circuitry and we don't
know how that works exactly we don't know exactly if those circuits then
start to die because they can degenerate across time or if what happens is you
build other circuits that inhibit them so it's like you've got this knowledge
structure it's built into you and once it's there there's not really much
getting rid of it but you can build another one that tells it to shut up
that's sort of what happens when you're addicted to drugs
so cocaine bathes the tissue that was active just before you took the cocaine
with dopamine and so that gets stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger
and so you're basically building a cocaine seeking monster in your head and
that's all it wants and it has rationalizations and it has emotions and
it has motivations and it's alive but it wants one thing and the problem is once
you build that thing especially if you nail it a couple of hundred times with
the powerful dopaminergic agonist like cocaine that thing is one vicious
monster and it's alive and it's in there and you can't get it to go away the only
thing you can do is build another structure to shut it up but the problem
is is that as soon as you get stressed it interferes with that new structure
and the old thing comes popping back up not good I wouldn't recommend it and the
faster acting those dopaminergic agonists are cocaine is a good example
but so is math the faster they hit you which is often why people inject them
instead of snorting them say the faster that transformation from steady state to
dopaminergic path the bigger the kick is and so you know so speed of introduction
of the substance matters which is why you drink shots instead of drinking say
wine or beer because alcohol has you know very similar very similar effects
so all right so if you get what you want
well then you feel good but not only do you feel good but the frame itself is
validated and if you don't get what you want well then not only do you not get
what you want but the frame itself starts to come apart at the seams and
the question part is how far should the frame come apart how deeply should you
unlearn something when you make a mistake god it's a very very very hard
problem and I'll show you a partial solution to it this very useful thing
and this is a pia jetty an idea - let's see yeah I'm gonna go to this for a
minute so so I'm gonna decompose something for you and and this is partly
to give you an introduction to the way behaviorists think but it's also to help
unpack how the pia jetty in oceans work and so from a piagetian perspective
high-order abstractions are actually made of what's common among actions and
perceptions so and those things are unified in some sense so an abstraction
isn't what's common across sets of objects it's more like what's common
across sets of perceptions and actions and so that's a hard thing to understand
but but this will help you understand okay so let's say you want to be a good
person it's kind of abstraction all right
and then you think well what does it mean to be a good person it's a box it's
an empty box no it's a box and it says good person on outside but it's full of
things it might even be full of transforming things so but you know what
it means you say good person you kind of know and you kind of know but you know
if we started talking about details we might start to argue but it's like
pornography you know what when you see it okay so what does it mean to be a
good person well we could decompose it we could say well if you're one way of
being a good person is to be a good parent and you basically say that being
a good parent is a subset of being a good person right because person is
bigger than parent and maybe it'd be to be a good employee and to be a good
sister and to be a good you know to be to be a good good partner sort of on the
same level of abstraction so you decompose good person into your major
functional roles let's say and you're good at all of them whatever that means
well let's say if you're a good parent well you have to have a good job because
otherwise you starve and so do your children so at least you have to
financially provide in some manner that's a subset of being a good parent
it's not the only subset and then to be a good to have a good be a good parent
you also have to take care of your family and so you could decompose that
into play with baby or complete meal you might say well if take care of family
you can either order a meal or you can cook one it's like good for you and so
then you're cooking a meal and you think well what do you decompose that into
well now you're starting to get to the micro level say because let's say you're
making broccoli so you take the broccoli out of the fridge and you put it on the
cutting board that's actually action that's not abstraction it's actually
something you're doing with your body so the abstraction grounds itself out in
micro activity actual action that's the connection between the mind and the body
and so you're cutting broccoli right but that's not abstraction and so if you
take apart these higher-order moral abstractions what happens is you
decompose them into action perception sequences and they're embodied now
Piaget is basic claim is you build the dam abstractions from the bottom up
that's his that's the fundamental Pia jetty and claim it so the kid comes into
the world with some reflexes and starts building a body of embodied knowledge
out of that interaction with other people and then they start playing games
and that abstracts but but they move from the bottom of the hierarchy which
is actual micro actions up to the top of the abstraction world and so it's this
is how you boot yourself up little bitty stories what little bitty stories at the
bottom cut broccoli you know and then cut corn here set table do dishes
complete meal take care of your family be a good parent be a good person and
you know one of the propositions that I am offering you in this class is that to
be a good person you're actually not stuck in one of these to be a good
person means that you're the thing that transforms these things continually
and so that's what's at the top of the hierarchy and that's basically the hero
story which is you're in a state of being and it normally occurs you allow
it to demolish you and then you rebuild and that's at the highest end of the
moral hierarchy and that's also a sense reappears Yeti and claim so so let's
think about emotional regulation because this is a really good schema for
understanding emotional regulation how upset should you get and how do you
calculate it because if you make a mistake you wake up in the morning in
your side hurts okay you it's the first symptom of pancreatic cancer you're dead
in six months 100% chats or you know you pulled a
muscle well which is it you might say well the chances of the pancreatic
cancer or low but they're not zero and like infinite times any proportion is a
very large number so you might be thinking why don't you just have a
screaming fit any time ever any little thing happens to you which is exactly
what happens by the way if you're two years old right that is what you do so
and it's because you don't know you don't know like things fell apart what
does that mean could be anything well that's no good well so let's say you're
arguing with your with your partner you know and they I don't know if they make
a lousy meal or maybe no meals and you're kind of sick of it you know and
so you say you're a bad person and what's the evidence not only are you a
bad person but you've always been a bad person and the probability that you're
going to improve in the future looks to me to be zero it's like what's the
person supposed to do punch you right really because there's no room in there
for any discussion you're done it's like you're horrible and you don't change and
you've always been horrible and you've never changed and you know inferring
from that into the future you're gonna stay horrible and you're
not going to change well any argument can go there immediately it's a really
bad idea and it happens all the time and this is why people can't have a civil
discussion you know they can't say here's an example so you've got your
four-year-old you want them to clean up their room and so it's full of toys
let's say they're three and a half you look at it you say look you know clean
clean this up clean up your room so you shut the door and you go away and you
magically hope that when you come back the room will be clean but of course the
child has no idea in all likelihood at that age or maybe
it's two and a half something like that they
know what clean up a room means that's like way up here man it's like you told
your child there's mass every be a good person you know and then you come back
in half an hour and they're no better a person than they were and you get upset
it's like you can't do that you have to say you see that teddy bear and you know
that that kid knows how to see a teddy bear and they know how to pick it up
because you've watched them see a teddy bear and pick it up and you know that
the child knows the name of the teddy bear it's teddy bear and so you point to
the teddy bear and you say do you see that teddy bear and they go yes and you
say that's good pat pat and they get a little kick of
dopamine so that's happy day for the kid and then they smile at you so you feel
pretty good about that too and then you say you think you could pick up that
teddy bear and they say yeah and so they go over there not every kid by the way
but they go over there and they pick up the teddy bear and it's like it's a good
day for both of you and then you say you see that little space on the shelf
because you know they know what a shelf is and you know they know what a space
is and you say take that teddy bear and put it in the shelf and then go over
there and they put it in the shelf and then they look at you and you're smiling
and so the probability that they'll do that again is now increased because but
watching you smile produces a dopaminergic kick and you've just
strengthened those circuits so I would highly recommend that you do that with
your children and with your partners right you watch them like like a sneaky
person and every time they do something that you actually want them to do you
notice and you give them a little pat on the head yeah and then they like you
that's cool but if they don't if you don't want them to like you because you
hate them and then you won't do that but and you think well I don't hate them
it's like oh yes you do you just think about the last month man there's been
twenty times you absolutely hated them and maybe that's the predominant emotion
and that's not so good over time so when they do something good if you really
want to screw things up watch like a hawk and wait till they do something
good and then punish them that's really fun that is that really messes with them
and people do that all the time so if you really want to mock things up you
can even do it more subtly you can wait till they do something good especially
if they've never done it before and they're just kind of tentatively trying
it and then you can ignore them that's a really good what that's even better than
punishing them because at least when you punish
you're paying attention if you ignore them it's like that's that's just
perfect also takes hardly any effort on your part so that's an additional plus
so anyways so if you're having a discussion with someone it's like what
you're doing with this kid you know it's like you say maybe you're negotiating
about meals you don't start with you're a bad person let's way the hell up here
you know you blow the whole person schema right out from underneath them
and you might as well get divorced which is what will happen if you keep doing
that soon you'll roll it your eyes at each other that means you're getting
divorced by the way so if you ever watch it he does I'm serious there's good
empirical data on that once you're at the eye-rolling stage there's no going
back so you should intervene way before that it's discussed that AI role once
you've hit disease-carrying rodent status in your mates eyes there's no
coming back so anyways so what you do if you want to have a conversation with
someone that's a corrective conversation is you sort of take a piagetian attitude
and the attitude is go to the highest level of resolution that you can manage
so let's say and that's what you're doing with the kid
it's like clean up your room be a good person it's like no they don't know any
about anything about that but they do know how to pick up a teddy bear and
then maybe you think cleaning up your room is a hundred things like that and
so you have to teach the child each one of those hundred things and then they
learn this is the scheme they learn what's the same across all of those
different actions that's clean right pick up the teddy bear put away the
Legos make your bed what those have nothing in common really like the motor
outputs completely different but they fall under the heading of clean but
unless you fill the heading of clean with all the subordinate categories of
the action perception sequences that make up clean kid can't do it and so
partly what you're doing by attending to your child constantly is noticing where
they are in the construction of this hierarchy and they start way down here
right and so that's why you play peekaboo for example it's like they can
do that and you can you know you interact with them because you can watch
you do a little something and if they respond you got some sense that you're
you're at the same level and kids and playgrounds do that with each other
right away so if you if you see two three-year-olds
together say they're fairly sophisticated for three-year-olds what
they'll do is they'll start playing a little primitive game with each other
like door like a dog you know what a dog does what it wants to play it kind of
goes like that and and that's what kids do and that's what adults do too it's a
plague it's play it if it tastes like I'm ready
but you're smiling it's not like I'm ready it's and so you can tell the
difference between a play fight and play and kids can too so it's an invitation
to play and so if you're interacting with your little kid they got that play
circuit man that thing's in there like when they're from birth I think because
you can play with a kid right from birth at least something like peekaboo and so
you're on the same wavelength fundamentally and then you interact with
them and you see if they're following what you're doing is what I'm doing when
I'm lecturing more or less I'm watching you guys and seeing if we're more or
less in the same shared space you know and we want the space to be expanding
because if it's just staying the same well you might as well play whatever you
play on your computer it has to be expanding at the same time that's
optimal and so when you're playing with your kid you put them on that
developmental edge where they're undoing and then rebuilding their little skills
you know you can do that like I had this memory from when I was a little kid a
while back and I remembered I used to go over to these peoples house with my
father and my mom and it was way up in northern Alberta and these people were
Russian immigrants as children of Russian immigrants and they had a
farmhouse way way out in the country way out by the way there where the railroad
actually ended if you walk north from there you'd walk until you hit like
southern Europe without fun running into another person it was way the hell out
in the middle of nowhere and anyways they had a nice house it's like a warm
house you know they had three kids and they were way older than me but it was a
real fun comfortable place to go and I used to sit in the living room with my
father and his friend whose name was Nick and Nick was a really playful guy I
really liked him he was like my surrogate grandfather and I used to I
don't think I was more than about three I'd sit there and I try to hit his foot
with my fist and he would be talking to my dad you know and my dad would say
Jordan don't bother Nick and Nick would say well he's not really bothering me
and his dad was checking it out to see if I
was anoint were poor if I was a fun kid you know cuz it's a fine line and so I
tried to hit his foot and he would move it and now I had this memory while back
and I thought wow that was a good memory and I thought what is going on there
exactly and I realized well he's sharpening he was sharpening me up you
know it's like I was aiming at something you're aiming at something if you're
pointing your eyes at it you're pointing your whole damn soul out it you're
aiming at something and you're trying to get your behaviors and your conceptions
in line and organized so that you can attain that aim that's what people do
you know we throw rocks at things we we fire arrows at things we shoot guns at
things we aim at things our whole body is that platform for aiming and I was
trying to aim at his feet and he'd move his feet you know but he'd let me hit it
what now and then and so let's say you're a rat okay because like I said it
rats a good model for a person let's say you're a little rat a juvenile male and
you want to play because you want to play and you'll work to play and that's
how we know you want to play if we're experimental psychologists because
you're Bosch put button push like mad to get access to an arena where you can
wrestle with another little rat and so rats wrestle just like human beings and
they even pin each other just like human beings and they love that and so if you
put little rat a in with a little rat B and little rat B is 10% bigger little
rat B can stomp the hell out of little rat a all the time so they go out there
and they have a little dominance competition and little rat B is gonna
win because he's bigger so now he's dominant rat so then they play in they
wrestle and little rat a loses but and then next time they both know that
little rat a is the inviter because he's subordinate so he's the one
who has to go up to the big rat and go you ready and the big rat then we'll
wrestle however if you repeatedly pair them and the big rat doesn't let the
little rat win at least 30% of the time the little rat won't invite him to play
anymore and that was york panksepp who figured that out and that is
mind-boggling because it tells you like the bit there's a there's an ethical
basis for play that's so deep that the damn rat and their rats
not known for their sense of fair play the big rat has to let the little rat
win 30% of the time or the little rat will not play anymore and even rats know
that it's it's so profound that discovery like banks have discovered the
play circuit in mammals that's a big deal that's like discovering a whole
continent like that's a big deal he should have got a Nobel Prize for that
and to see that that's built in that sense of fair play that's mind boggling
you know cuz that's evidence for the biological instantiation of a complex
morality fair play even if you can win you shouldn't all the time well so when
I'm trying to hit Nick's feet with my hand like I'm really paying attention
and he's moving it pretty well but now and then I get to nail it and I'm
feeling pretty good about that you know and he makes a little bit more difficult
all the time so that my aim gets better and better and I'm building up my motor
coordination I'm building up my social skills cuz I don't hit too hard and I
don't cry when I miss because that just makes you annoying to play with right so
I'm learning really complicated things about how to go about finessing my aim
and that's what you're doing with your kids and what are they aiming at well
they aim higher and higher so when my son was about two and a half we had him
start setting the table it's you don't say you know you want to take grandma's
fine china and go set the table it's like no you don't do that you say
you know what a fork looks like he goes yeah see if you wanted the forks are
well that doesn't work because the Drover's way up here right so you have
to hand him a fork you say look take this fork and go put it on the table
he's like this high you know so he goes over to the table and he puts the fork
up here can't even see what he's doing he puts the fork up there and then you
know he's reasonably happy with that and you could give him a path and then you
go and give him a really sharp not no you don't do that you don't do that you
give him a spoon and you say well go put the spoon beside the fork and you don't
say look you're stupid kid you got to leave enough space between the fork and
the spoon so the plate can fit there don't you know anything
you're stupid it's like well that's right up here right you're a bad kid no
that's bad you don't do that you go down here and you say well good micro routine
adaptation there Chum well let's try it again you know when you
build that up and like men you can't extend the kid past its point
his point or her point of exhaustion because it's got to be a game and a
two-year-old can probably only do that for you can watch them and some are more
persistent than others but 10 minutes 15 minutes you pushing your luck you can
take a two-year-old to a restaurant for about 40 minutes and expect them to sit
and behave but after that you know they're the will exhausts them all right
well anyways that's Piaget in his nascent form fundamentally and so if you
if you remember that diagram and you think about how that would be built from
the bottom up and how there would be a stage transition every time those things
are learned you kind of got the essential elements of piagetian theory
so we'll see you Thursday |
so I think the best way to continue to
walk you through the thinkers that we're planning to cover is to do that with
examples they stick better and they're more interesting and it's very difficult
to understand you outside of a narrative context and so I'm going to walk you
through the Lion King today how many of you have seen the Lion King yes
so how many of you haven't right okay so so you obviously were raised in a box
somewhere out in the middle of field so anyways you know it's it's it's an
amazingly popular animated movie I think it was the most highest grossing
animated movie ever made made until frozen which I actually absolutely
detested but the Lion King The Lion King is actually consciously influenced by
archetypes as well as unconsciously influenced by them so it's a bit of a
cheat I would say in some sense but it doesn't I don't for the purposes that
we're using it for I think it's just fine and so partly what you might think
about is that it's its relationship to archetypal themes that made it so
overwhelmingly popular it's same being the case with say books and movies like
Harry Potter or the entire Marvel series the Marvel series is quite interesting I
know somebody who wrote for Batman and for Wolverine I know Batman he's into
Marvel comic but one of the things that he told me that was quite interesting
was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their own they
have a backstory and which becomes part of the mythology that's collectively
held by the readers and if you you can invent an alternative universe where you
can muck about with the backstory but otherwise you better stick with it or
the readers are gonna write you and tell you that you've got the story wrong and
so there's a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the readers
after these things take on a life of their own and so and of course the they
they tend to the the comic books in particular tend to tend towards
mythological themes very very rapidly and so anyways Carl Jung was a
fascinating person I think you can read his biography autobiography
/ biography which is called memories dreams and reflections which in many
ways I think is an unfortunate book because it's usually the only book that
people read that's that is more or less by young but and it is more popular yet
popularly accessible which is probably a good thing but it's also it's not as
rigorous as his other books and so the problem with someone like Jung is you
kind of have to read him as much as you can in the original because interpreting
him is not a very straightforward matter he was a very visionary person by which
I mean he had an incredible visual imagination and he used that a lot he
used it in his therapy practice I believe that most of his therapy clients
were high in trade openness I have a lot of clients who are high in trade
openness they kind of seek me out because I'm high and trade openness and
you know they watch my videos and that sort of thing and they're interested in
what I'm doing and many of them are astute dreamers and prolific dreamers
and many open people in my experience have archetypal dreams whereas people
who are lower in openness they either don't dream at all or they don't
remember their dreams as much or they're not interested in them and they're not
interested in the mythological underpinnings of them so I've taught
psychology roughly speaking to many different types of people including
lawyers and lawyers and physicians and they tend to be higher in trade
conscientiousness than in openness and they're much more interested in the
practical applications of psychology and maybe the big five theories than they
are in the narrative underpinnings and you know people say that when they went
to um-- they had union dreams but I don't and then when they went to Freud
they had Freudian dreams and I don't really believe that's exactly true I
think it was a matter of selection bias a priori selection bias on the part of
the people who were likely to go see either of those two and so but I've been
struck by some clients in particular how unbelievably continually they can
generate deep archetypal dreams with a really coherent narrative structure it's
really phenomenal and how revealing those dreams our problem with archetypal
dreams is that they're not really personal right so if you're looking for
a personal way out of a situation an archetypal dream doesn't help you that
much because it gives you the general pattern rather
than a specific solution to your problem but a good dream will do both at once
anyways yung was an astute student of Freud's I will cover Freud next although
generally and in personality courses the the order is reversed Freud first
menuing because of their temporal of the temporal order of their thought but I
think it's better to start with Jung because it's it's as if you Freud
excavated into the basement and then Jung excavated into many many floors
underneath the basement of the mind and so from if you're transitioning from an
archaic understanding of archaic modes of thinking towards Freud it's better to
go through young because Jung is I think I think Freudian theory is a subset of
Jungian Theory fundamentally just like Newtonian physics is a subset of
Einstein Ian's physics and I think that Freud knew that even to some degree
although he was very much opposed to any sort of religious thinking or
mythological religious thinking I would say he was a real 19th century
materialist and he didn't like the fact that Jung's work started to delve into
religious themes in a manner that actually in some sense validated those
themes and so that's actually why they split they split when you published a
book called symbols of transformation Jung was also a deep student of
Nietzsche Nietzsche wrote a book called thus spake Zarathustra which is kind of
an Old Testament revelation poetry kind of book it's a strange one and I
wouldn't recommend if you want to read Nietzsche that you start with that one
but most people do but you get a seminar on thus spake Zarathustra which is about
I've got this wrong it's somewhere between 700 and 1100 pages long and it
only covers the first third of the book and thus spake Zarathustra is actually
quite a short book and so well so you can imagine how much you had to know
about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words and
Nietzsche was a well an absolute absolute genius and Jung was actually
trying to answer the question that Nietzsche posed fundamentally which is
why part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a
Freudian he was so nietzsche basically stated let's say explicitly that
scientific empiricism / rationalist had resulted in the death of the
mythological tradition of the west roughly speaking that's Nietzsche's
comment on the death of God and in that comment he also said that the fact that
God was dead was going to produce tremendous idiy a tional and social
historical upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people that
that he didn't say all that in one place it's it's spread between part of its in
will to power and and I can't remember the source of the other one some of its
referenced and thus spake Zarathustra but Nietzsche believed that in order to
overcome the collapse of traditional values with the idea say of God as its
cornerstone people would have to become creatures that could produce their own
values as a replacement that we would have to become capable of generating
autonomous values and Jung but but that's easier said than done because
trying to impose a set of values on yourself is very difficult because
you're not very cooperative and you know that if you try to get yourself to do
something that you don't want to do or that's hard you just won't do it and so
it's not like you can just invent your own values and then go along with that
that just doesn't work and so what Jung and the Freudians did Freud first I
would say was to start looking to be looking into people's fantasies
autonomous fantasies unconscious fantasies to see if they could - and and
discover that values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies and you
can imagine for example if you've become enamored of someone that you might start
fantasizing about them and if you read off the fantasy then you can tell what
you're after and what you're up to and so the motivational force composes the
fantasy and Freud was more interested not in a personal sense so in in so far
as your fantasies might reveal your personal history so for example if you
have a burst of negative emotion in the clinical session there'll be a fantasy
that goes along with that an association of ideas that that that kind of manifest
themselves of their own accord and they're not necessarily coherent and
logical they're linked by emotion that's the free association technique in
Freudian psychology and they also might manifest themselves in dreams and
fantasies and so Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous let's call
them fantasies and Jung link that more at Freud did this first with the oedipal
oedipal complex but then you linked up
spontaneous fantasies and dreams with with myth mythology and fantasy across
history and of course Piaget did the same thing from a completely different
standpoint so and that a lot of that's embedded in this movie so we might as
well just walk through it so the first question might be well why is a lion a
king right and because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king and
of course a lion is an apex predator and so which means it's at the top of the
food chain roughly speaking and it's sort of golden like the Sun so that's
also useful and you know it has that Mane that makes it look majestic and of
course it's very physically powerful and it's it's and and and it's intimidating
and so it's something that you run away from as well right or you're awestruck
by so the fact that you know it's like snail king just doesn't make any sense
right but lion king that works and and you got to think about those things
because it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king but uh but a snail
wouldn't but it fits in with the your metaphorical understanding of the way
the world works much better and so the Lion King makes sense and well and when
things like that that aren't rationally self-evident makes sense you have to ask
yourself in what metaphorical context do they make sense so you have the Lion
King now the movie opens with a sunrise and the sunrise is equivalent to the
dawn of consciousness so that in many archaic stories the Sun was a hero like
Horus if I remember correctly was a solar king but but Apollo in particular
but Apollo Greek Greek myth the idea was that at the Sun was this was the the
hero the hero who illuminated the sky in the day and so heroism and illumination
and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically and then at
night what would happen would be that Sun would fight with the with the dragon
of darkness basically or with evil all night and then rise again victorious in
the morning and so it's a death and rebirth theme and it's very very very
very common mythological theme and the reason the Sun is associated with
consciousness as far as I can tell is that were not nocturnal creatures right
we're awake during the day and we're very very visual half our brain is
devoted to visual processing and to be lightened and illuminated means to
develop to move towards a higher state of consciousness and we naturally use
light symbolism to to represent that you know like the light bulb on the top of
someone's head you know you don't say I was in darkened when you learn something
new and so again that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that
that's I think deeply biologically grounded but but also social or socially
grounded so it's a new day it's the start of a new day and a day day
actually means like French your name means day the day trek in some sense and
how to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question the day is
the canonical unit of time and so you have to know how to comport yourself
during the day and part of that is a journey from consciousness into
unconsciousness and that's and that return so like Apollo you you've you
descend into unconsciousness and then re-emerge and of course that's not
metaphorical at all that's exactly what you do you descend into the underworld
of darkness and dreams and strange things happen down there and so and then
you awake if you're fortunate or unfortunate depending on your state of
mind you awake in the morning and it's a new day right and so the dream world
seems to help you sort out your thoughts by the way if you keep people awake for
an extended period of time then they they they they lose their minds
essentially the dream that the unconsciousness and the dream state seem
absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health although people don't
exactly understand why it looks like dreams might help you forget because
forgetting is really important you just can't really wait you just can't
remember everything that happened to you gets today I'm cluttered that that you
you'd fall apart and so you reduce things to the gist and when you're doing
that you pack them in it's like you compress them in some sense you pack
them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant and the
dream seems to not be part of that it also seems to be a place where you
deeply encode learning that might have been done that day which is something
that Freud actually noted in his interpretation of dreams which is a
great book if you're ever gonna read a book that Freud wrote the interpretation
of Dreams is the proper one to read in my estimation it's a brilliant book and
it laid the groundwork for a lot of what Jung did and so anyways that's how the
movie starts and the animals come out in to the light and that's that's a
metaphor for the dawning of consciousness to come out into the light
where you can see and so this is a baby giraffe and babies emerge into the light
roughly speaking and that's that's like I said that that's a representation of
the emergence or expansion of consciousness and so this is how the
movie starts it starts a very expansive music as well
celebratory music and that's to indicate to you to set the tone for the movie but
also to indicate to you that you're about to watch something of import and
the opening scene is actually a real scene of genius in my estimation the
animators did a great job and it goes along very nicely with the music and so
you see this little a sand then you see this rock Pride Rock I believe it's
called and in the middle of it and it's the center it's the center it's like the
spot that's marked by a cathedral which is an X or a cross and you're right in
the middle of that and so it's the center of the light that's another way
of thinking about it or it's the center of the territory or it's the home or
it's the fire in the in the wilderness or it's the tree in the center where you
live it's all of those things at once it's inhabited territory with you at the
center and the rock represents tradition because people tend to inscribe their
traditions on rock right or to build them into rock like the pyramid so you
could think about that as a pyramid as an Egyptian pyramid and it's the right
way to think about it you could also think about it as a
dominance hierarchy with the apex predator at the top and that's the lion
so it makes sense that the lion would be in the light on the rock that's a
pyramid in the middle of the territory right that makes sense to people
psychologically so because that's what the state is the state is a hierarchy
with with something at the top that occupies a space that has been
illuminated and made safe by consciousness that's what the state is
and that's all represented right away in this movie and all the animals come to
to observe what's happening in the pyramid and at the top because they need
to know what happens at the top partly to organize their world that's
the pyramid but also to see how the organizational principle works and
that's why they're all gathering and so they're gathering in the light in the
morning to observe something new that's going to be born that's of significant
importance and that's the birth of the hero and this little bird here Zazu
right the zoo is like Horus the Egyptian God
who was a Falken and an I at the same time he is the Kings I in this Kings
eyes in this movie right he flies up above outside of the pyramid so he can
see everything that goes on and reports to the King and so partly what that
indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be an
eye and that's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the back of
the American dollar bill it's exactly the same idea or if you look at the
Washington Monument which is a pyramid at the top you see that it's capped with
aluminum and you think well why aluminum and the answer to that was it was the
most expensive metal at that time and so the notion is is that at the top of the
pyramid there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid it's
something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything and so you could
think about it this way is that you're gonna be in a lot of pyramids in your
life dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that and
they'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy and there'll be something at
the top and the top is the thing that can do well across hierarchies so it's
not stuck in any one pyramid it and it's partly associated with vision and the
ability to see a long long distance also to see what you don't want to see and to
report that back to the king and so the king fundamentally as far as you guys
are concerned from a psychological perspective that's your super-ego
that's the Freudian perspective or it might be the moral system by which you
comport yourself but your eyes are the thing that updates that right you need
it to orient yourself in the world you need it to orient yourself among other
people but your eye and your capacity to pay attention especially to what you
don't want to pay attention to is the thing that continually updates that
model exactly as Piaget laid out with children so and all of that's packed
into the imagery in the first you know a few minutes of this movie and that's
actually why it relies on imagery why this isn't just a lecture by a
psychologist you know when you go to see the movie it's because the images they
say a picture is worth a thousand words but and there's thousands of pictures in
this movie obviously but maybe a picture is worth more words than you can
actually use to describe it if the pictures is is profound enough and we
have many many pictures like that any deeply symbolic picture
is virtually inexhaustible in terms of its of semantically with regards to its
explanation images are very very dense so anyways the animals all gather now
the animals are also in representations from the Freudian perspective and the it
is the part of your psyche from the Freudian perspective that's animalistic
and and and full of of implicit drives sexual and aggressive in particular as
far as Freud was concerned and that's because those two drives say unlike
thirst or hunger are much more difficult to integrate into proper social being
and tend to be excluded and left unconscious and so a lot of Freudian
psychology and I would say psychology in general is focused on the integration of
sexual impulses and aggressive impulses into the psyche I would also add to that
anxiety because anxiety is also a major problem anxiety and negative emotion
that's pain like is also a major problem for people and so the animals represent
those it'd like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically before you can
become an integrated being and precisely the piagetian manner right because
Piaget would say well the child comes into the world with reflexes and maybe a
more modern psychologists would also concentrate on the implicit motivations
and those have to be organized inside the child into some kind of hierarchy of
unity before the child can organize him or herself into the broader unity of the
state and that's basically what's being represented here and so so Zazu the eyes
of the king comes to check out the King and that's uh what's his name what's the
King's name Mufasa yeah and he's a very regal looking person lion and he stands
up straight and tall and that means that he's high in serotonin because serotonin
governs posterior flexion and if so if your dominant and near the top of
hierarchies you tend to expand so that you look bigger than then you could if
you shrunk down and so if you're low dominant person you wander around like
this so that you look small and weak and you don't pose a threat to anybody but
if you're at the top you expand yourself so that you can command the space and
that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture and if you look at his
facial expression you see that it's quite severe it like he's he's capable
of kindness but he's also harsh and judgmental and that's what
society is like that's what the super-ego is like and what that means is
that he's integrated his aggression and I've seen this happen in my clinical
clients when they come in and they're too agreeable they look like Simba looks
later in the movie when he's an adolescent and he's sort of like a deer
in headlights everything is coming in and nothing is coming out but when the
person integrates their shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves
integrated into their personality their face is hardened and if you look at
people you can tell because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and
innocent and the people who well a hyper aggressive person will look you know
mean and cruel but uh let's see if that's good that's still working so but
I've seen people's face changes change face change in the course of therapy men
and women so and what happens is they start to look more mature and it's it's
more like they're they're judging the world as well as interacting with it
properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them it's very very
necessary that's part of the incorporation of the Union shadow or the
incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective but old Musa Musa
there he's already got that he's already got that covered so and he's capable of
obviously he can smile and he's full capable of the full range of expressions
but he's a tough looking character and and now this baboon here who's supposed
to be basically just a fool when the story was first written he turned into
what's essentially a shaman across time and so he represents the self from the
Union perspective now the self is everything you could be across time so
you imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you whatever that
is you know and potential is an interesting idea because it's represents
something that isn't yet real yet we act like it's real because people will say
to you you should live up to your potential and that potential is partly
what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain
you the most information right because you build yourself out of the
information in the piagetian sense but it's deeper than that - because we know
that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment new genes
turn on in your nervous system they encode for new proteins and so you're
full of biological tential that won't be realized unless
you move yourself around in the world in two different challenging circumstances
and that'll turn on different circuits so it's not merely that you're
incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist
sense it's that by exposing yourself to different environments you put different
physiological demands on on yourself all the way down to the genetic level and
that manifests new elements of you and so one of the things that happens to
people and this is a very common cultural notion is that you should go on
a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central and that would be say like the
rock in the Pride Rock and the Lion King because you take yourself out of your
dopey little village and that's just a little bounded you that everyone knows
and that isn't very expanded and then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to
the central place and while you do that you have adventures and they tough on
you and pull more out of you like partly because you're becoming informed which
means in formation it means you're becoming more organized at every level
of analysis but there's also more of you too and so that's a very classic idea
and then in in cathedrals in Europe especially at Chartres there's a big
maze on the floor a circular maze which is a symbolic representation of the
pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it and so it's a huge circle divided into
quadrants which is a union Mandela and you enter the maze at one point and then
you have to walk through the entire maze north east west and south before you get
to the center and the center is symbolized by a flower that's carved in
stone it looks like this it's big this maze a it's it's large so that you can
walk it and that's a symbolic pilgrimage it takes you to the center that's the
center of the cross because it's in a Cathedral and that's the point of
acceptance of voluntary suffering that's what that means and so you walk through
you can call that a circumambulation you go to all the corners of the world to
find yourself and so well the self is the baboon in this particular in this
piece of mandrill actually in this particular representation and he lives
in the tree he lives in the tree of life it's a bale bob tree in this particular
so he's the spirit that inhabits the tree of life and he's the eternal wise
man that's a way of thinking so is the king but
he's sort of a superordinate king or an outside king in some sense he's the
repository of ancient wisdom and the king is the manner in which that wisdom
is currently being acted out in the world and so they're friends and that
means that the king is a good king because if they if the king was a bad
King he would be alienated from himself and that would make him shallow and
one-dimensional and that would make him a bad ruler no Union with the traditions
of the past to be a good ruler you have to rescue your father from the
underworld and integrate that and of course that's a main theme in this
entire movie so hey a new mystery to solve okay so the hero is born and that's what
the Rising Sun represents and everybody goes oh oh isn't that cute and the
reason for that is because you're biologically wired especially if you're
agreeable to respond with caretaking activity - cute - cuteness and cuteness
button nose big eyes small mouths round head symmetry and helpless movements and
you'll respond to that across the entire class of mammalian of mammalian
creatures even maybe down to lizards you know isn't that cute it's no it's a
lizard but you know so so so that's an archetype as well that's the archetype
of the vulnerable hero at Bohr the vulnerable hero newly born and that
should invoke a desire mostly on the part of males to encourage and mostly on
the part of females to nur it to nurture but males and females are quite cross
wired among human beings and so there's encouragement from the women and there's
also nurturing from the men and of course those those curves in some sense
overlap so there's more nurturing males and more encouraging females but that's
roughly the archetype and so he looks cute and everybody goes on and that's
because the animators nailed that they caught the essential features of
cuteness and he's also in the light right and so then the shaman mandrel
basically baptizes him nots essentially what he's doing and he uses something
that symbolic of the Sun which is this ripe fruit and fruits are symbolic of
the Sun because of course they need the Sun to ripen and they're round like the
Sun and so and people know that they need light but and and so anyways the
animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to
break and the Sun and so he's also being baptized into the Sun and that means
that he's being baptized into the light or that he's being transformed into a
hero and so then everyone's happy and that's basically you know the divine
father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self who's taking
care of that and there's a union between the baby and the wise old man because
the baby is all the potential that's realized in the self and there's an old
idea that the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain
it it's a brilliant idea and that that that echoes through mists all
over the world and that means you have to regain your capacity once you're
disciplined and you know how to do something you have to regain your
capacity for play and sort of for wide-eyed wonder and that's maybe the
childlike part of your spirit and the reintegration of that childlike part
with the adult grown-up part Reviva Faiz the adult grown-up part and allows the
child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world and so
that's all being hinted that there and then they showed the shaman shows the
baby the newborn hero to the crowd and it's very cool what happens in the movie
all the animals spontaneously Neil and I can give you an example of that kind of
spontaneous action in a crowd it's imagine you're watching off
gymnastics performance right and and it's like at a high level world-class
performance and someone comes out there and they do this routine that's just
dead letter-perfect you know and they stop and everybody claps like mad right
and it's perfect and so then the next contestant comes
out and they're basically in real trouble because you know this person
just got nine point seven out of ten and it was perfect so how do you beat
perfect and so will they come out there and then you watch them and you're right
on the edge of your seat because what you see them do is something
extraordinarily disciplined just like the last person did but they push
themselves into that zone that's just beyond their discipline capacity and you
can tell every second you're watching it that they're that close to disaster and
so you're right on the edge of your seat and and you know that they're doing a
high-wire act without a net and so when they finally land triumphantly you'll
all stand up and clap spontaneously and it's because you've just witnessed
someone who's a master at playing a game who's also a master at improving how to
play that game at the same time and people love that more than anything to
see that it's just absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to
the human spirit and you'll respond automatically and unconsciously to that
and that's why that's an analogy to why the animals all spontaneously bow when
now what happens is they shows the Lion King and the Sun breaks and shines on
that the hero at the same time so there's this concordance between an
earthly event and a so-called heavenly event and you would call that
synchronous that's his idea of synchronicity where
something important subjectively is also signified by something that appears in
narrative keeping with that in the outside world that's one of the most
controversial elements of his theory but I've experienced a variety of
synchronous events and they often happen in therapy especially around dreams but
they're very hard to communicate because they're so specific to the context in
which it occurs they're very difficult to explain so anyways it's the
synchronous event that make drops all the animals to their knees so there's
the Sun coming out and there's shining on them and all the primates go mad for
that and that's of course exactly what we do when we applaud and then we switch
to scar now scar is mufasa's brother evil brother the king always has an evil
brother and so does the hero the hero always has an adversary and the reason
for that is the king always has an evil brother and that means that the state
always has a tyrannical element and the tyrannical element exists for two
reasons one is the state deteriorate of its own accord and that's an entropy
observation what that means is that the state is a construction of the past
right but the present isn't the same as the past and to the degree that the past
is mismatched with the demands of the present then it's then it's then it's a
tyrannical it's malfunctioning and so it's it's a continual problem with the
state it's always two steps behind the environment and so then that means that
the awareness of living people has to update the state and so Eliot and Maria
Eliot who's a great historian of religions looked at flood stories from
all over the world because there are flood stories from all over the world
partly because there are floods all over the world but that's there's a
psychological reason to so imagine that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane
right a flood didn't you say well that was an act of God but then you think
wait a second wait a second they knew those dam dykes weren't gonna hold they
knew they weren't built strong enough they took the money that was allocated
to the dikes and spent it badly and that was willful blindness and so you could
say that it was God who caused the flood so to speak metaphorically but you could
also say that it was the degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of
the politicians that call the flood in Holland they build the
dikes to withstand the worst storm in 10,000 years in the you southern US they
built them to withstand the worst storm in a hundred years and they knew that
that was insufficient and so the flood if there's a flood well you can say well
that's an act of nature but you can also say just wait a sec maybe if there was a
flood because we looked the other way and because our systems were out of date
and that's why in flood stories there's there's a continual theme which is the
the people get wiped out by the flood because God judges them harshly for
their senility and their willful blindness and it's a story that's very
much you'll have a flood in your life right it'll be a flood of chaos and
you'll find of one form another and you'll find when you investigate the
causes of the flood that some of it will be and sometimes this is cake the case
it's just random you just got singled out you got a
terrible disease and that's the end of you or something like that but there'll
be other situations where the flood comes and you're surrounded by chaos and
you'll look into it you'll think I knew this was coming I knew I wasn't paying
attention I knew I hadn't sorted things out and the consequences of that will
have cascaded and wiped you out and then you're in real trouble because not only
did you get wiped out but you also know it's your fault and that is not a good
thing that makes you bitter and resentful and murderous when that
happens so anyways scar is scarred right so what that implies is he's had a
pretty rough life and he's kind of skinny and he said he was born in the
low end of the gene pool and so he has reasons to be resentful
he's also hyper intelligent and rational and it's one of the things you see very
commonly about the evil adversary of the state or of the individuals often
intelligent and hyper rational and the best commentator on that was probably
John Milton and Paradise Lost because that's how he represents Lucifer or
Satan who's the spirit of rationality and enlightenment strangely enough hence
Lucifer the bringer of light and the reason for that as far as I can tell and
this is something that Milton figured out when he compiled all these ancient
stories about evil and tried to make them coherent was that the problem with
irrationality with rationality is that it tends to fall in love with its own
product right and so then it comes up with a
theory that makes that a totality and then it won't let go so the rational
mind has a totalitarian element and we know that to some degree because that
kind of rationality seems more left hemisphere focused and the left
hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world and be updated by the
right hemisphere and the right hemisphere generally updates it with
negative information and with fantasy and so the left hemisphere will impose a
coherent structure on the world which is really necessary for you live in it but
the problem is there's a tension between coherence and completeness and that's
partly why you need two hemispheres you need one to represent the world and you
need one to keep track of the exceptions and to feed those slowly into the
representational system so that it so that it can stay updated without
collapsing into complete chaos so anyways scar and he's got this like
droopy mouth and this whiny arrogant voice and he feels hard done by and he's
resentful and and in in classic heroes stories stories of the state as well the
so this is an Egyptian take on it Osiris was was the god of the state and set who
later became Satan that name became Satan as it transformed through Coptic
Christianity Osiris had a brother named set and set he didn't pay attention to
set enough attention and set was always scheme scheming to overthrow the kingdom
just like scar is and the Egyptian said straightforwardly that the reason that
Osiris got overthrown by said he got chopped into pieces and his pieces
distributed throughout the state in the mythological representation and those
pieces were actually the provinces of Egypt technically speaking so and that's
what the Egyptians thought so that's quite cool but the Egyptians said
explicitly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by set was because he was
willfully blind old senile and willfully blind same idea as the flood myth you
don't see that quite here because Mufasa is sort of on to set or to scar but scar
is more treacherous than Mufasa believes and he gets at he gets at Mufasa by
going through his son by by by playing on on the impulsivity and and juvenile
qualities of his son so obviously there's some antagonism
between these two as you can see by their facial expressions there and there
is a good example of scar you know he's got that droopy kind of whiny malevolent
face and that malevolent voice that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly
well and he's always skulking he's a creature of the night he always skulks
around he's not a creature of the day in any sense of the word and you know
obviously Mufasa is golden like the Sun and scars dark like the night that's
another thing another clue another hint okay there's the tree that's The Tree of
Life we already talked about that I think that represents the multiple
levels at which you exist simultaneously all the way from the subatomic all the
way up to the cosmic so to speak and that's a different kind of dimension and
that's the that's the place that the self inhabits and it can kind of move up
and down those dimensions but anyways that the shaman lives inside that tree
and and that's our first introduction to him basically but he's the spirit of the
ancient tree that's another way of thinking about a very very common
element in stories right the spirit of the ancient tree and so all right so now
Mufasa has taken taken Simba up to the top of the pyramid right so that's the
the aluminum place let's say or the place of the eye where you can really
see a long ways and he's explaining to him what his kingdom is going to be and
you see the Sun of course appears that that to begin with and that's another
hint about being at the top that's the illuminated part of the pyramid and so
they're up there talking and what Mufasa tells Simba is that his kingdom is
everyplace the light has touched and that's so brilliant so one of the things
you'll notice if you move into a new apartment you're like a cat cats don't
like changing houses and they have to zoom around in every corner to see
exactly what the hell's going on there before they calm down they need to know
where they can hide and where the potential dangers are and what you'll
find if you move into a new place that you will not be comfortable there until
you've investigated potentially cleaned and repaired every single square inch of
it the more attention you pay to it the more it'll become yours and that's far
more than mere like material ownership which is also relevant
but in order to feel comfortable somewhere and to dominate that place to
be in meshed in that place you have to attend to it you have to shine light on
every corner and you have to do that with yourself and with your
relationships as well and so anyways Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is
everything that the light shines on and that's exactly right and then there's a
metaphor there too which is that what you've Shawn light on which is what
you've come to understand and master is surrounded by an Otherworld of all the
things that you don't understand and some of those would be natural things
and some of them would be tyrannical things and some of those would be things
you don't want to know about yourself but they're outside of where you've
managed to shine the light and so that's exactly what Mufasa tells Simba says we
live in this pyramid we're at the top there's a domain of light around it
that's explored territory outside of that there's explore unexplored
territory and that's partly the unconscious because you fill it with
fantasy and it's partly what you just don't know and then Mufasa tells Simba
and it's sort of like God telling Adam and even in the Garden of Eden not to
eat the apple Mufasa tells Simba there's that this outside place that's dark
that's not part of your kingdom and you should not go there and that's really
interesting because Simba doesn't even know about that place yet and so Mufasa
is doing something very contradictory there it's like telling him that it
exists and and heightening his curiosity but also saying that he should go there
almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do you see this in the
Pinocchio movie to where Pinocchio is planning to jump into the ocean to go
get Geppetto from the underworld and he's following his conscience is along
with him Jiminy Cricket and the cricket is warning him about all
the dangers that he'll face down there and telling him that he will be fish
food personally and while he's doing that
Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail around a rock so he can sink and
and the little cricket helps him tie the knot so well he's warning him about the
adventure he's going to undertake at the same time he's encouraging him to do it
and there's that paradoxical thing which is that if you go outside what you know
it will cause a fall because it'll damage your knowledge structures and
you'll go down into chaos and that can really destroy you so you should
do it but by the same token if you do do it and you do it successfully then the
new you that are' arises can be stronger and more complete than the previous you
so you should do it and you shouldn't do it and that's anyone sensible says look
don't bother right but sensible isn't enough that's the thing you have to also
be not sensible enough in order to live and your typical hero and Harry Potter
is a really good example is always a rule breaker always but he you know the
rules he breaks are like there's judicious nough speaking the hero breaks
a rule in the service of a higher good but he's still breaking the rules and
that's what puts them outside the boundary of the social of the social
establishment so now at this point Simba also gets introduced to scar and that
that that has two meanings one is that scar is the tyrannical element of the
state and so as a child when you're being socialized you encounter the
tyranny of the state and one of the best you can't yet there's no way around it
one of the best examples of that is that children are always running around
having fun and they're really bubbly and and impulsive and joyous and playful and
that causes a lot of trouble because positive emotion is very disruptive
they'll run around and break things they'll hurt themselves and they'll get
into trouble and so you're always saying calm down sit down behave don't do that
and it's it's not because they're crying or angry it's because there's a day I'm
happy and impulsive that no one can stand them and so and so that's a
tyranny it's like that the state puts puts pressure on you to regulate your
emotions positive negative and positive and it crushes you it crushes the life
out of you a lot of it and so you end up you know your age and you're all mopey
because the holes especially because you've been forced to sit down in school
for like 17 years you're all mopey and it's no wonder you know you've had the
spirit taken out of you by the process of discipline but without that you'd be
completely useless so it's another one of those paradoxical you know gifts and
and catastrophes that you encounter as you move through life so anyways Simba
look at how happy he is you know I mean he doesn't know a damn thing he's so
naive you can tell but oh look it's my uncle Scar it's like you know and this
is not a guy you smile at clearly but he's all positive emotion
and joy and enthusiasm and that's not good because that means this character
can take serious advantage of it and that's exactly what he does and so scar
pretends to be on his side which is what a good pedophile always does by the way
and so you know you you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and
openness in order to exploit them and that's that's what horrible people do
that all the time including the parents of children and other children
themselves so you know there's this false I mean look at the animators are
so damn brilliant Hey look at that expression really like you know you just
look at that and you think well that's just a facial expression but of course
it's not some damn animators worked really hard to get that they're really
observant and they distill the facial looks like the face is right it covers
the whole head and and they've got the eyebrow lifts proper and they've got
this horrible sanctimonious smile and the tilt of the head then you know and
he's sort of crushing him while he's hugging him at the same time and really
really and you know it took a lot of thought for every single one of these
frames to be put together right there's a tremendous amount of cognitive effort
that went into that so none of this is accidental
yeah well that pretty much says everything it's like whoo I hate that
kid and to hardly wait till he's gone and didn't I pull one over on him you
know it's a real testament to an adult's genius when he can fool a kid so then
Simba encounters the anima that's the anima the Jungian anima and the anima is
the feminine counterpart in the soul and she well yeah you could tell what she
does to him right because she's got this supercilious and and what would you say
judgmental and teasing look on her face and she's really trying to put him down
and it's work it like bad he's not very happy about that at all and she's the
thing this is what the anima does the soul she's the thing that teaches the
exploratory hero that that it's not everything it could be right and that's
part of this can be read multiple ways but it's part of the eternal tendency of
women to makes men self-conscious by their sexual selectivity that's part of
it because that makes men self-conscious like nothing else and it's also perhaps
been one of the phenomena that's produced the evolutionary arms race in
this in the sex is among human beings that's caused
our rapid cortical expansion and our quick movement away from chimpanzees who
aren't selective mater's by the way so look at him Jesus you just want to slap
him right he's a he's the son of a king so he's very very privileged and he
confuses his privilege with competence rich of course all of you do because
you're all sons of the King which is why you can sit here in the university and
you confuse your privilege with competence as well because it's not has
nothing to do with any of you that the lights are on and that's the place is so
peaceful right but you take that for granted and
it can make you false and arrogant like like Jesus that's just so sad you look
at that kid you think he's he's in for real trouble man he thinks he knows
everything and of course then he has a wrestling match with what's-her-name
what's it was it Nala yeah he has a wrestling match with Nala and she just
pins him every time right gotcha again pindy again and that's basically right
one of the things that happens with men when they meet a woman who they really
desire that Myers they project an idea onto her immediately that's an anima
projection and then that Adam a projection judges them and they act all
inferior and stupid and it's partly because they are that's why and so then
they they go down in defeat constantly to this thing that they're projecting
which at least has some concordance with the actual woman but not that much so
okay they keep wrestling and then they're on the fringe of the kingdom
this wrestling match between this pairs of opposites takes them to the edge of
the kingdom and they end up in the elephant's graveyard right and and
there's there's bones everywhere and so now they're out into the kingdom of
death and what that means is that these two kids as they've grown up encounter
death right they go outside the light it's very very shocking for them they're
very curious about it obviously they go to explore the skeletons and all of that
even though they were told not to but their curiosity they can't stay away
from death they're too curious about it and so they developed knowledge of death
and that and then of course out there in the Deadlands is where the hyenas are
and that's exactly right because hyenas are scavengers right and they can break
bones with their teeth they're really really quite the animal and you know you
kind of have a shudder of repugnance when you see those things
and I think it's partly I mean we shared an evolutionary landscape with the
ancestors of hyenas for a very very long time and like vultures too you know you
couldn't imagine something that would be more well designed to look like it was a
horrible thing than a vulture right and there's this weird concordance and crows
and ravens are like that - carrion eaters you know the Eagles are kind of
an exception but they look just as creepy as they are which is really quite
interesting and of course hyenas fall into that category and they laugh -
which is you know really you you also have to laugh really with all these
other things you have going for you and anyways the hyenas and hyenas are
enemies of lions and they can take lions down they're tough things and you know
they're not one high in obviously but a bunch of hyenas can give a lie in a
pretty damn rough time and so and these little lines are really
no match for the hyenas so they get threatened very very rapidly and one of
the hyenas of course is just completely out of its mind and one of the things
that's really interesting and you see this with the Muppets - there was often
a puppet that was like a crazy puppet and its eyes would move in different
directions you know and one of the things that happens with people who are
schizophrenic is they show involuntary eye movements and it's because you have
a brain center that controls your eyes voluntarily and you have another one
that controls them involuntarily so you can see that look ahead and try to move
your eyes smoothly back and forth you can't do it you'll see that they jerk
hey but if you watch put a finger in front of your face and then do this
they'll move perfectly smoothly and that's because you're using different
eye control centers one voluntary and one more involuntary and the involuntary
one is actually more sophisticated and so in schizophrenic the involuntary eye
control centers tend to disrupt the voluntary eye control centers and that's
likely part of the hallucinatory process you know because you have the ego in
this schizophrenic that's being disrupted by processes underneath
fantasies and that sort of thing and that looks like it's reflected in
involuntary eye movements like like dream movements so anyways so much for
the crazy hyena and they're in real trouble now the Kings I who's supposed
to be keeping an eye on this and was supposed to be watching Simba is trying
to intervene but I mean look at him he's a like a delicious little bird and so
that's not working out very well anyways and then you see this immediate
juxtaposition of the domain of death and the hyenas with hell right and everyone
looks at that and they think well they know exactly what that means it's no
surprise to anyone that that happens and I suppose that's partly because on the
veldt where we evolved in large part but not by no means all part fire was an
ever-present danger in the grasslands right and so and so that's a good that's
a good example of Hell so huh well I guess that's it we'll do some more of
this when we meet on Tuesday bye you |
so we'll continue with our union
analysis of the Lion King today we ended at the point where remember Mufasa had
taken Simba up to the top of Pride Rock and described to him the fact that his
kingdom essentially constituted everything that the light touched and
you can think about that as the domain of the roughly speaking of the great
father with the domain of the great mother on the outside of that being
symbolically equivalent to the underworld or to death or to nature all
of those things seem to be approximately equally true and he forbade Simba from
going to investigate what was beyond the confines of the light and in some sense
that's exactly what a tradition does for you it because the tradition is
precisely what defines the domain of the light and to be moral from the
perspective of the tradition it's akin to playing a piagetian game but only
adhering to the rules you know how Piaget described the fact that when kids
first master a game they learned they learn how to act it out and then they
learn what the rules are and then they regard the rules in some sense as sacred
you can't go outside the rules and then later in moral development if they get
to that stage then they start to recognize themselves also as formulators
of the rule or formulators of the game and culture tells you don't go beyond
the rules that's the definition of morality within the box of culture and
you don't go outside of that and so that's why Mufasa plays that particular
role and it's wise because if you go outside the domain of what you already
understand then it's dangerous out there clearly it's dangerous out there but the
downside of that particular message and this is perhaps this is the mythological
reason why Mufasa isn't as aware as he could be of scar
you know his knowledge is bounded and he's no I'm not aware enough of what
lies outside of that in this realm let's say of death and destruction and so scar
is he is able to overcome his his brother one you see this sort of thing
happening to people very frequently for example who developed post-traumatic
stress disorder and one of the things that's not as well
known about post-traumatic stress disorder as might be known is a it
happens to you if you encounter an experience that sort of blows out the
axioms of your knowledge system that's one way of looking at it it's so
unexpected that you can't account for it within the confines of this of the
system that you're using to interpret the world that often happens to people
when they encounter something that's truly malevolent and that can be within
them or it can be in the form of someone else who is genuinely out to hurt them
they're often people who develop PTSD are often but not always somewhat naive
and they're not aware of the full catastrophe of the world that might be
one way of looking at it and then they encounter someone who's truly out to
hurt them and they can detect that even in in the way the person's face looks or
they encounter a part of them that's much more malevolent than they had ever
imagined it could possibly be and then they do something terrible and then they
don't know what to do about it so delay or the the Canadian General
wrote a book called shake hands with the devil and it was about what happened to
him in Rwanda when he was stationed there as a UN warrior or a UN soldier
and I mean Dallaire was not naive but what he encountered was truly malevolent
and it just blew him into pieces and and that that's what happens and so there's
real utility and staying within the bounded domain but the problem is is
that there may be information that's outside of that domain that you
absolutely need to know and so part of the problem with being alive is that you
have to continually determine how much you're going to maintain your stability
and how much you're going to explore and you have to explore because the stable
part of you gets outdated but if you explore too much or too too unwisely
then you can encounter things that flip you upside down it's actually one of the
problems with being high and trade openness especially if you're also high
in neuroticism because if you're open you're creative you're always looking
for for ideas that are outside of your current systematic way of thinking but
if you're high in eroticism so you parents a lot of anxiety and emotional
pain and that sort of thing you can continually upset your own apple cart
now the other thing that you might want to think about this is really useful as
far as I'm concerned is you might want to think about this politically and
we've been doing a lot of work I'm gonna have one of my graduate students
actually come and talk to you about the work we've been doing on personality and
Paul and political belief so what happens with political belief is that if
you're high in openness and low in conscientiousness you tend to be a
liberal the openness being the particularly important part of that and
if you're low in openness and high in conscientiousness especially orderliness
you tend to be a conservative now it's kind of strange because openness and
conscientiousness aren't very highly correlated so it's not obvious why those
two traits would combine to determine political belief and and the
relationship is actually quite strong between temperament and political belief
if you measure political belief comprehensively but it seems to me that
the fundamental distinction and this is the political game at least along the
liberal conservative axis this boils down to one thing it boils down to how
open borders should be compared to how close they should be and you know you
can see that reflected for example in the attractiveness of Trump to a large
part of the general population because he's going to close the borders build a
wall and fortify the borders and conservatives like that they like to
have borders between things stay tight and they don't even care if it's state
borders or political borders or town borders or ethnic borders or borders
between ideas or borders between sexual identities conservatives like to have
things stay in the damn box where they belong
partly because they're orderly and partly because they're lone openness
they don't get any real they're not interested in what happens if you free
up your conceptions all they see in that is the probability of disorder whereas
liberals who are high in openness and low and conscientiousness slash
orderliness they get a real charge out of letting things out of the box so that
they can creatively interplay now the issue is who's correct and the answer is
you don't know because the environment underneath the political landscape moves
and so sometimes the right answer is tighten up the borders and fortify and
sometimes the right answer is no no loosen things up because everything's
good to static and tight and we need more
information and the dialogue that occurs in the political landscape with this is
why dialogue is so important is fundamentally between these two opposing
views of borders and because you can't say with certainty which one is right at
any given time an open dialogue has to maintain itself so that the entire
political State can maneuver properly along that moving line it's absolutely
crucial it's really really really useful to know that people vote their damn
temperament it gets you it gives you more of an understanding at least in
principle of your of those who sit on the other side of you on the political
fence and there's been recent newspaper articles quite interesting I tweeted a
couple of them about this company and UK called Cambridge analytics and they're
using the damn big five they can extract out big five information from your
Facebook Likes they've got a model of every single person in the United States
big five personality and they help Trump craft political messages right down to
the level of apartment buildings to appeal to people based on their Big Five
temperament and that's all recent work and so one of the things that's very
interesting is we are teaching computers to understand us so fast you can't
believe it and we really do risk walking into an electronic world where you will
only see what you want to see I mean obviously the marketers are trying to do
that as fast as possible right they only want to send you ads that you're going
to be interested in because it's expensive and foolish to send you
anything that will annoy you or that you'll ignore and so the marketers are
trying like mad to map who you are even by watching your eyes they're trying to
figure out who you are so they can send you the right information but the danger
is that that will happen say in the domain of news and broader information
increasing this tendency for people to be siloed in their exposure to the
external world it's a big sort of like each of us is becoming a micro celebrity
surrounded by electronic sycophants who do nothing but tell us exactly what we
want to hear it's a real problem Karl Popper a famous philosopher science
said that one of the things that you should do and this is akin to the PIA
jetty and view is you should always look for information that contradicts your
cur viewpoint now that's painful right
because who wants their axioms contradicted it can take you apart but
it's the only way that you can ensure that you're learning at the same time
that you're maintaining your stability and that's another reason why it's
really necessary to engage in dialogue with people that you do not agree with
because they're the ones who will tell you things that you don't know it's crew
it's crucial importance in the maintenance of your own stability the
worst thing that can happen to a person know because there's many horrible
things that can happen to a person but one of the worst things that can happen
is that you find yourself in a situation where no one is offering you corrective
feedback anymore because you rely on the corrective feedback provided by other
people to keep yourself sane to keep moving in the ever-changing environment
and if you cut yourself off from that feedback then well then you end up
static and shrinking it's really it's really not good you get less and less
competent you get less and less confident and the threats outside of you
loom larger and larger so that's all to do with the you know the domain outside
the light see young would also say that out in this domain that sort of beyond
what you understand that's also where you encounter the archetypes of the
collective unconscious now that's a really really complicated idea but what
he means by that is that if you're put outside the domain of your competence
you're going to start to use fantasy to organize your world so I can give you an
example of that so you you I presume most of you are old enough to have a
conscious memory of when the Twin Towers came crashing down and so everybody in
the days after that was wandering around like they were in the days and the
reason they were in the days is because well it wasn't exactly clear what fell
right there was the physical towers fell but that was only a tiny bit of the
problem because those physical towers were embedded in a network of meaning
like a very very sophisticated network of meaning but also a political network
and an economic network and a military network and like they're they're nodes
inside a very complex system and so when they come crashing down you don't know
what's come crashing down right so you're out there in the unknown and and
wondering what's going on and wandering around in the days which is exactly what
happened to people and then what bush did
George W was immediately turned that into a good versus evil drama instantly
and that's an archetypal idea so that's when he came up with the idea of the
axis of evil I think that was Iran North Korea and I don't remember the other one
at the moment but but he yeah he immediately turned the political
landscape into a good versus evil drama and he said to everyone in the world
that they were either with him or against him fundamentally and that was
the that was part of the retreating into a I guess a more protected landscape
that's one of the ways that human beings deal with the encounter with a traumatic
threat and so the reason you meet the unconscious and even the collective
unconscious on the border of your knowledge is because when you hit the
border of your knowledge you start to use fantasy in order to bring the the
newest form of order out of the unknown so that you can start to make sense out
of it and that's what artists always do that's what they do and so from the
Union perspective people who are engaged in creative art are the ones who are on
the perimeter of knowledge structures and so what they're doing is taking the
absolute unknown which would be in Rumsfeld terms they're unknown unknowns
and turning them into partially known unknowns that's what an artist does and
and especially the more classical artists who deal with mythological and
religious themes which was the case for art right up until really until the late
20th century they're they're using these mythological
ideas to sort of extend the domain of human knowledge out beyond its current
parameters and so artists do that and literary people do that and and
dramatists do that and they help us extend our knowledge now that's where
open people live that's another way of thinking about so think about it this
way so you're in a city you know what and the city has parts of it that
degenerate and so you could think about that as order degenerating into chaos
and then the open people who are creative come along and they find places
in the city that have degenerated but that still have interesting potential
right and then they move in there where it's cheap to and they start producing
art they start producing galleries and then the coffee shops move in and then
the thing starts to get civilized and then of course the more
all conservative types move in those would be the yuppies roughly speaking so
they're they're much more conservative than the artists but they're still
liberal compared to the bulk of the population and so the more daring people
move in after the artists have civilized it and then after that you know then the
chain stores start to move in and soon it's completely turned into Zellers or
something like that and then the artists have to go somewhere else and find
another place on the boundary where they can live and it's a fizzy elizacass much
as a mental boundary and so you because you think each of those personality
traits there's five dimensions each of them represent the possibility of
inhabiting a kind of niche right an ecological niche so if you're an
extroverted person your niche is the social environment if you're an
introverted person the niches I think nature I don't know that for sure
because I've never figured out exactly what introverts are adapted to but it's
not exactly the social world if you're agreeable then your niches relationships
if you're disagreeable your niches competition if you're conscientious your
niche is duty and effort and so and and that those niches are partly social
because so much of our environment is social but they're also partly natural
because our social being is nested inside the natural world and so you can
think about the big five traits as different kinds of adaptations to
different kinds of niches and that's the niche that the open people the open
exploratory types occupy so that seems to make a higher-order super factor
extraversion and openness called plasticity as opposed to stability which
is conscientiousness agreeableness and emotional stability and there's a play
off between those two things because the stable people obviously are stable but
the plastic types of people are more dynamic and they're they're more
concerned with transformation and in order to get a system optimally stable
and dynamic you have to have a continual interplay of those of those factors
because static doesn't work because everything changes that's the problem
with conservatism and the problem with liberalism fundamentally is yes
everything changes but you have to bring forward some structures from the past so
it's very it's very very difficult to get that balance correct so
all right so anyways out there in the underworld in the place beyond your
current conceptualizations that's the place of death and nature and it's
beyond the light and it's also the place of Hell and that's what you see here and
what do you how do you conceptualize that well one of the things you'll see
if you're interested in this sort of thing if you ever go read the writings
of the Columbine killers the teens they're very interesting they're very
much worth reading especially I think it's Dylan Klebold who was the more
literate of the two but he tells you exactly where he went after brooding and
brooding and brooding on his his isolation and segregation from mankind
so he's out there beyond he's out there in a chaotic domain and because he's
tortured by that his thoughts take an unbelievably dark turn like it's
unimaginably dark if you're interested in that sort of thing you could read
that there's another book you could read called panzram PA and Zed ra m and it's
a fascinating book it's about this guy who I think he raped 1200 men so that
sort of tells you what sort of guy he was extraordinarily physically powerful
and brutal and malevolent and he was kind of a juvenile delinquent type and
they put him in a reform school and he was not well treated in that reform
school it's sort of like the worst of the Canadian residential schools and
when he came out he was not a happy boy and so he spent the rest of his life
trying to be as destructive as he could possibly imagine and purely consciously
with malevolent intent and then and and believe me he was pretty destructive he
kept track of the dollar value of all the buildings he burned down he tried to
start a war between Britain and the United States like he was all out for
all-out mayhem his dying words they're gonna hang him he told the guy who was
going to hang him he said hurry up you who's your bastard I could kill 12 men
in the time it takes you to hang me and that's exactly the sort of person he was
and he made friends with this physician in the in the prison who he thought was
like the first person who ever did something nice for him gave him a dollar
for cigarettes if I remember correctly and the physician encouraged him to
write his autobiography and so he did and it's it's available and so if you
want a view because you know you you always think of people you think well
people have good intentions you know that you especially think that if you're
naive and agreeable so all of you who are sitting there out there thinking
people have good intentions you're probably high in agreeableness but
that's not always the case people can have very dark motivations
that are fully conscious and very well elaborated and panzram was know he was
smart and his book is very well written and he tells you exactly why he thought
the way he thought and so it's a good glimpse of exactly this sort of thing
where you can get to if you want to by brooding on your specific misfortune you
know and his his basic credo was that human beings were so reprehensible that
they should just be eliminated and believe me that's what he was trying to
do and these people who do terrible things like the Columbine shooters
that's exactly what for black of a better word they're possessed by its
sheer malevolence and the Columbine kids had a much more spectacular catastrophe
planned than the one that actually occurred and they knew it was going to
be a full-blown media circus and lots of these people who engage in those sorts
of mass murders they know about the other mass murders and they're engaged
in a competition and the competition is who can do the most brutal thing the
fastest something like that so you can't just be thinking about people who've you
know who have good intentions but have somehow gone wrong if you ever meet
someone who isn't like that and you think that you're just a tree with ripe
fruit to be plucked so you don't want to be in that situation you have to keep
your eyes open and so anyways that's basically what's encapsulated in this
part of the story now the hyenas go after the little lion obviously but they
managed to escape it's very malevolent scene and Mufasa
shows up at the last minute to rescue them so and you know that there's also a
mythological trope there which is that if you go outside your domain of
confidence and you encounter something you don't understand the first thing
that you're going to do is look to the knowledge structures that you already
possess to explain it right and that's the you could say from a symbolic
perspective that that's the manifestation of the father as of course
that's what you're going to do and you you know what's really interesting
- is because I've had a lot of clients who've had PTSD and and without
exception every single one of them was induced by one form of malevolence or
another they have to develop a very sophisticated philosophy of good and
evil to get out of it because they have a worldview in which those things don't
really exist there's no such thing as pure malevolence well that's fine unless
you encounter it and then as soon as you encounter it as soon as you encounter it
you won't know what to do and then you won't be able to get on with your life
you'll do nothing but think about that and think about it and think about it
and think about it'll disrupt your sleep it'll put you into a permanent state of
preparation for action because the part of your brain that's detected that which
in my estimation by the way is the same part at least in part that detects
snakes it's the same damn circuit once it's seen something like that it is not
gonna let you go till you figure it out and that's basically what post-traumatic
stress disorder is and you know to some degree each of you will have experienced
that maybe not all of you in here but many of you and you can tell that so if
you go back and you think about your past and you have any memory that's more
than about eighteen months old and when you think about it it produces a fair
bit of negative emotion then that's like a minute that's like a place where
there's a mini post-traumatic stress problem and what's happened you remember
I showed you that hierarchy moving from tiny motor actions all the way up to
high order abstractions well you can imagine say you have good person at the
top and and you you kind of use that that scenario to construe other people
people are basically good well then you run into someone who is not good and
boom the whole bloody system comes tumbling down because it's violated that
highest order axiom so that's post-traumatic stress disorder
if something has violated an axiom that's more differentiated you know
closer to the actual motor output not quite so high in the abstraction chain
then all it does is wipe out that part of the structure it doesn't wipe out the
whole thing and you can tell if you have holes in your perceptual value structure
by checking to see if you have memories that are still alive in a negative way
that are old enough so that they should have been incorporated into your
personality and so one of the things you can do
you're doing one of the exercises that's on myself authoring site you guys do the
personality analysis but there's another program there called the that's called
the past authoring where you write down an autobiography and thinking through
these things that have happened to you in your past that are negative is a good
way of making them go away and thinking them through kind of means you have to
figure out what happened right and then you sort of have to figure out how to
make it not happen again what you're trying to derive is some kind of causal
analysis how is it that I was put into a situation where I was made vulnerable
you know and that could be well because you're only four and you couldn't
protect yourself and now it's time to update that because you're a fully
functioning adult or there may be things that you have to think through and
change in your own personality or attitudes that you've been holding on to
since you were tiny I have this client once and she came in and told me that
she had been sexually assaulted by her older brother and she told me the story
and I kind of got the impression that maybe she was like eight and he was like
17 or something like that and she was about 27 when she came and talked to me
and then I found out by further questioning that she was 4 and he was 6
and I thought she still had this story in her head of her being tormented by
this older person right that's how she told the story and what I told her was
well look another way of looking at this is that you two were very badly
supervised children because I mean he was 6 for God's sake you know he's a
little kid that doesn't mean that what happened to her was any less traumatic
but but he wasn't 17 right if the story was different than the one she had in
her head and you know by the time she left after we had that conversation it
was clear that the way that she was construing the experience had radically
shifted and it was very interesting because you know you think of the past
as fixed but and it is in some sense but the reason you remember the past isn't
to make an objectively accurate record of the past it's so that you can use the
information in the past to prepare you for the future and your mind won't leave
you alone unless that has happened so if you've encountered something that's
negative and you don't know why and you don't know what to do about it if that
have again in the future then that will stay
with you and I think one of the things that does too is it increases your
overall physiological load is actually physiologists who've been talking about
this I can't remember the damn phrase but you could imagine that your mind is
doing something like this all the time it's it's it's it's got a record in some
sense of your autobiographical experiences and what it's doing is
calculating how frequently you've been successful versus unsuccessful and the
more frequently that you've been successful the higher you are up on the
dominance hierarchy that's one possibility so your serotonin levels go
up and you're calmer but also it's reasonable to assume that the
environment is less dangerous right because that's sort of what constitutes
danger you're somewhere in and you act and and something you don't want to have
happen happens that's danger and so your brain is always trying to figure out how
to calibrate how anxious you should be and one of the things that does is by
sort of keeping track of your past success failure ratio and so to the
degree that your past has been characterized by will call them failures
that those are situations where you do not get what you want then your your
body your brain puts your body on constant alert because if everything
that you've done has resulted in catastrophe
then you're somewhere insanely dangerous and you should be like like a you know
like a prey animal that's ready to dart in any direction and how much you should
be a prey animal is dependent on it's an estimate partly your trait neuroticism
partly your your success as adjudicated by other people right because they'll
pop you up the doorman its hierarchy if you've been successful but also partly
on your record of failures and successes in the past and so you can go back and
you can find out where you have holes in your in the structure through which
you're viewing the world that's one way of looking at it and you can sew those
things up and that's a very that's in some sense that's what you're doing in
psychotherapy you know partly it's exposure to things you're afraid of and
disgusted by and are likely to avoid that's a huge chunk of it but if you go
back into your past and you start talking those things through it's really
the same thing it's more abstracted so Freud of course was always when
he was doing his free association process with his clients he'd find that
if he just let them talk that their speech would circle until it hit a place
like that where they were confused and doubtful and then their speech would
sort of wander around that and and then they'd have an emotional expression that
was a consequence of that he thought the emotional expression was what was
curative it was cathartic in his terms but later James Pennebaker upon whom
these writing exercises I described his research it is based on that my read my
exercises are based on his research he found that if you brought college
students into the to the lab and you had them write for 15 minutes three times
over three days about the worst thing that had ever happened to them or the
worst thing they ever did if I remember correctly they got worse in the short
term but better in the long run for example they went visited the doctor
less and markers of their physical health improved and so I think the
reason for that is because what does that called is called something load
just about it got it right from the physiologist it doesn't matter
they got healthier as far as I can tell because they basically calmed down once
they had gone through the negative memory and sorted it out properly and
told a properly articulated story and figured out how to deal with it then
their physiology calmed down and so then they weren't as stressed they weren't
producing as much cortisol and so cortisol suppresses your immune function
and so they were more likely to stay healthy and so well so that's all very
much we're thinking about that's all in the domain outside of the light that's
one way of thinking about it now of course Simba and his and what's the
girl's name mala yeah they're you know pretty cowed
about what has happened because they sort of stumbled stupidly out into the
unknown they stumbled foolishly out into the unknown and this actually highlights
another union archetype and that's the archetype of the trickster and the
trickster is like the Joker in the king's court and the trickster is
someone who will be or play the fool and the thing about the fool is that the
fool is close to the truth because you can't learn anything new unless you're
willing to be fool right you know what that's like you
you know exactly what that's like your chart you have to master a new skill but
you're avoiding it because you know that you'll be bad at it when you first do it
and if you're perfectionistic you're gonna say well I can't allow myself to
be bad at anything I can't allow myself to be a fool and no wonder but the
problem is is when you try something new you're always a fool and so unless
you're willing to be a fool you can't learn anything new and that's also why
you can regarded the trickster as the precursor to the Savior architect Lee
speaking is because you cannot do the right thing unless you're willing to be
a fool first and that's really worth knowing lots of times you guys are gonna
make a stage transition in your life and you're gonna feel like an imposter when
you get a new job or when you get a promotion or something like that you're
gonna feel like an imposter and you are because what do you know when you make
that first transition right but it's gonna make you embarrassed and it's
gonna make you ashamed and all of those things but you have to understand that
you are a fool when you first try something new but you're a worse fool if
you don't try it now that doesn't mean you should you know make like you know
everything as soon as you're promoted or you have some transition in status
that's that's foolish of the wrong sort but to know that to know that you have
to be fallible in order to progress is an unbelievably useful thing it can free
you up you know what I was talking to a writer the other day about his process
for beginning writing he's written many books he writes a very very very bad
first draft right and that's a good way to think about things is throughout your
life you're gonna be doing that is writing the next draft of you and it's
pretty bad to begin with but that's okay because it isn't gonna get any better
unless you put yourself out into the domain of the unknown to begin with and
you know you might you might it might go badly I mean that's what happens here anyways Mufasa has a chat with Simba and
you know tells him that he's he did what he wasn't supposed to do although you
know even in that situation with fauces discipline is paradoxical because
there's part of him because he's reasonably wise that knows that breaking
the rules like that is actually necessary
even though you still have to say play by the damn rules you know you have to
leave that door open so that the rules can be broken an appropriate amount so
he forgives him and and and peace is made between them and then they're there
they involve themselves in sort of gazing at the night sky and so the two
of them do that together and the night sky is an interesting place you know
because that's where the absolute unknown resides and one of the things
young wrote a lot about was astrology strangely enough slash astronomy and one
of young contentions this is a very interesting one was that because the
night sky was completely unknown people could project their fantasies into it
and that's what they did without with astrology so astrology is this
cumulative fantasy that's going on in the in that roughly speaking in the deep
unconscious projected on to the sky and so if you analyze old astrological
writings what you're really doing is analyzing old fantasies and because of
that you could develop some insight into the structure of the mind and so he did
the same thing with alchemy and his later writings which are very very
difficult to understand but extremely worthwhile ok so anyways back to the to
the hellish domain now I told you that that domain that's outside of knowledge
you could think about that as the underworld or you can think about it as
nature the negative element of nature in particular and so I mentioned that one
element of that is hellish and that's exactly what the movie explains next it
does exactly that we go back out to this domain that scar the adversary or the
negative king that's another way of looking at him this is his his the
domain over which he rules and so you can see him there surrounded in fire
same ideas the you know as the hyenas surrounded by fire earlier although this
is green fire and smoke which I think is even worse and this is where the movie
starts to draw on essentially Nazi symbolism at least the symbolism of
totalitarian states and you know you think about you think about a
totalitarian state you think about the Nazis and they're goose-stepping
what's happening is that every single person in the military becomes an
identical unit right a unit they're all uniform and they're all in some sense
imitating The Dictator in in an absolutely perfect
way and so the dictator wants to impose strict uniformity on the entire
population that's order order and one of the things we've discovered that's
really interesting is that discussed sensitivity is associated with
orderliness and that's associated with conscientiousness and one of the things
about Hitler was that he was very disgust sensitive and a lot of his
hatred for non-aryans so imagine inside the aryan box it was all uniform outside
it was all parasites and predators and so and that was a manifestation of
disgust not of fear it's a whole different thing
and if you read Hitler's table talk which is a collection of his spontaneous
dinner speeches from 1939 to 1940 - it's a very interesting book you see that his
metaphor for the Aryan race was a body a pure body
unof salted by parasites or predators and that he was trying to erect a border
around it to keep all of that away so it's an immunological disgust like
metaphor and there's some recent work that was published in PLoS ONE about
three years ago showing that brilliant study should have got much more
attention showing that if you went around and looked and sampled political
attitudes in different countries or even within the same country what you found
was that the higher the prevalence of infectious diseases the higher the
probability of totalitarian political attitudes at the local level and you can
imagine well what happens if there's infectious diseases is you want to put
borders around everything you don't want free movement between ideas or people
because that's partly how the disease spreads you're going to have much more
strict sexual rules for example because that's a great way for diseases to be
transmitted and before Hitler went on his rampage against the non-aryans he'd
cleaned up all the factories and like he went in there and fumigated them it was
part of the law he went on a public health campaign to get rid of
tuberculosis and he got rid of the bugs in the factories as well he used cyclone
B that's an insecticide and that's the gas that he used in the gas chambers
eventually so first it was the bugs in the rats and then it was people who were
then it was euthanasia that was the neck move and forced you euthanasia and the
the rationale for that was compassion by the way just so you all know it's it's
it's merciful to put these people who are burdensome to themselves and their
families and the state who are living second-rate lives its merciful to
euthanize them and that was a huge campaign in Germany it was after that
that the more racial purifications began and so that's the disgust thing that's
unbelievably important it's it's it's because lots of times people think that
conservatives are more anxiety sensitive than liberals and that's why they're
closed in terms of their ideas that doesn't look right
first of all conservatives are less neurotic than liberals although the
effect isn't that big so it doesn't look and they actually are there they score
higher in measures of well-being the most unhappy people are liberal men by
the way so but you know people are often accused if they're conservative of being
fearful and that's why they you know suppress other people's viewpoints but
that doesn't look right it's low openness and high orderliness and that
looks like it's associated with disgust and that looks like it's associated with
something called the extended immune system which is the proclivity of people
to to keep themselves away from potential sources of contamination it's
really terrifying because one of the things people often said about Germany
was that you know it was a very civilized country and yet it descended
into barbarity but conscientiousness is a very good
predictor of long-term success and so you could say well conscientious
societies are more civilized but they're also more orderly and that makes them
more discussed sensitive and so what it might have easily might have easily been
in Germany was that it was an excess of civilization rather than its lack that
produced exactly these consequences and that's a far more frightening
proposition and one that's I believe much more likely to be true Hitler
bathed four times a day and he was also an admirer of willpower so he could
stand like this for eight hours in the back of a car and the thing about
conscientious people is they're very willpower oriented and so if you're
unfortunate enough to be sick chronically in the house of someone
who's conscientious if it's a mental illness you're more
likely to relapse because the conscientious person is going to be
judgmental and they're going to say to you if you're schizophrenic they're
going to say well if you just organize yourself and get up in the morning and
try a little harder you could overcome this which is of
course true except you can't because you're schizophrenic and so the pressure
put on you by the anger and the contempt is going to increase the probability
that you'll relapse so orderly people are very judgmental and you know
orderliness is very highly associated with things like anorexia and the
anorexic is basically someone who's so disgust sensitive that they become
unable to tolerate their own body and they see it as a source of corruption
and imperfection which of course is exactly right it is and it's very
difficult thing to maintain order around so anyways so what happens out here in
this terrible domain where scar rules is that things turn into a totalitarian
state you know and he's presented here as as a Nazi like leader and see there's
another thing that's really interesting this even deeper than this from a
mythological perspective I don't know if I can even go into it well not really I
guess what I'll have to do is satisfy myself with this observation there's
always been some antagonism for example between the Catholic Church and
rationalism and everyone knows that it's a very long-standing antagonism that
sort of runs its way through at least the last thousand years or so of Western
civilization and the people who regarded kaathal catholics as antithetical to
science take the Catholics to task for that and
describing it as prejudicial and super and superstitious and fair enough
but there's something else going on there that's more important and that's
the observation and this is at a deep level again the observation that
rationality has one big problem so it's it can easily become arrogant and
believe in its own theories so if you're smart and there's gonna be some of you
people who are like that to some of you your primary the primary trait that
distinguishes you from other people over the course of your whole life was that
you are more intelligent than most and you may have staked your identity on
that and an over value and rationality and the problem with
that is that you you make a theory of the world and then you tend to assume
that it's 100% correct that's the tendency to fall in love with your own
theories and that's what a totalitarian does the totalitarian says here's the
damn theory and it's exactly right and you're gonna act it out exactly and if
you don't well we've got some special treats in mind for you and one of the
most terrible things that that I encountered while reading about
totalitarianism and this was even more true of the Soviet Union under Stalin
was that the true believers and and there were many of them we're in a
terrible position because according to their own doctrine they're already
involved in the process that was going to bring utopia to mankind the problems
had already been solved but many of them were still suffering terribly as
individuals but if you're a totalitarian believer in Utopia your own suffering
becomes heretical right because your suffering is an indication that the damn
theory isn't correct and so then you're in a terrible position because you
either admit that the theory isn't correct and fall apart because of that
and maybe face terrible punishment as well or you have to separate yourself
from your own suffering and lie about it fundamentally and of course that's
exactly what happened in places like the Soviet Union where everyone lied about
everything all of the time to themselves to their family members to their friends
the entire system was completely permeated by lies and so you get this
terrible place that scars the ruler over which is totalitarian and brutal and
murderous and resentful and deceitful and arrogant all at the same time and
that's brought about so mmm-hmm the columbine guys for example when they're
justifying their murderous nests and their plans to shoot up the schools they
keep making reference to the fact that people had slighted them for example you
know and insulted them and that they were alienated they weren't bullied
exactly the way the press made it out I don't know if they were bullied anymore
than people usually are in high school but they took their alienation
personally and we guarded that their isolation from common
humanity as indication of the pathology of everything and then they went out to
destroy and that's exactly what this sort of thing represents that's the
uniformity and you see he's got this kind of vicious grin on his face which
is malicious and and pleased all at the same time there's no fear in that
it'sit's quite quite the opposite and there's another image of you know using
what's essentially imagery of Hell which everyone understands strangely enough
and that associates him with the crescent moon and the crescent moon is
well it's a symbol of darkness and and the underworld fundamentally so all
right so anyway so that's we see the the underworld we see that which bullet lies
beyond the light and in there we see a fragment of that that's basically
hellish and all of that's incorporated into the story and everyone understands
that when they see it even without I would say the overt references to Nazism
okay so now scar has a plan he's going to kill the king and he's going to do
that by putting what the King loves in danger and so scar feigning sympathy has
enticed Simba down into this ravine and scars minions are going to cause a
wildebeest stampede right so a mindless stampede to to to put to put Simba in
danger and so that's what happens here the Whale debate start to march into the
ravine and everyone is making a scar tells Mufasa that Simba is down in that
ravine and entices him down there and so they're all off running to see if they
can save Simba and then you see Mufasa running in front of the wildebeest herd
trying to try to find his son and trying to stay ahead of them the mad mob that's
put his son in danger and so he tries to escape climbing up the Butte which is
almost a sheer cliff and when it gets to the top mmm his brother is waiting for
him there and he asks him to pull him up and scar basically before he
indicates that he's betraying him and puts his claws into Moo fusses paws and
throws him off the cliff and so that's that and it's a sad part of the story
it's a hard part that's very hard on kids because the father has died and you
know it's a rare kid who won't cry about that scene in particular where you see
Simba very upset and his father dying now this is a hard part of the story to
interpret and I don't know if it's because of my lack of ability to
interpret her because the story takes a weird twist here but there-there is this
confusion in the story about whether Simba is an innocent victim who set up
for the murder of his father or whether he actually bears some guilt for it you
know and he's broken some rules and and that and and so on so he's not exactly
placed in the position of innocence but of course he's also been set up by scar
in any case scar tells him that it's his fault pure and pure and that because of
that he's going to have to leave he's gonna have to be banished beyond the
kingdom now you see this motif quite quite frequently in heroes stories where
the hero has to be raised outside of the kingdom that happens with King Arthur
for example and it happens with Harry Potter right because Harry Potter is
raised by muggles instead of being inside the Magic Kingdom so it's a very
common theme and partly what it means is that it means two things one is that you
do grow up alienated from your culture to some degree there's no way around
that because the culture doesn't match you perfectly and it doesn't work for
you perfectly and it's old and it's kind of corrupt and it alienates you as it's
shaping you and so you're going to develop some separation from it and you
see that in intergenerational rhetoric you know we're the new generation has
the proclivity to blame the previous generation for everything that's wrong
with the current system and fair enough you know because you do inherit
everything that's wrong of course you also inherit everything that's going
well which is a good thing to also notice but the idea is that you can't
help but be alienated from let's call it the patriarchy for for lack of a better
word because it's got a tyrannical element and because it's not matched
well to you so but then there's also this other issue which is well maybe
you're not being successful by the terms that are by the values that are
instantiated in the current system and you might say well that's because the
system is set up in an unfair manner and fair enough but it's also possibly
because you're just not very good at acting out those values right so part of
the reason you get alienated from your culture is because the culture is
corrupt but another part of the reason is you're just not doing as well as you
could be you're not playing by the rules properly and so you get alienated and
you're unsuccessful because of your own inadequacies and so the movie plays both
of those it's obviously Simba is set up but there is an intimation that he's not
entirely blameless as well anyways he's very broken up about this and no wonder
it's also partly a story of the emergence of adolescence because you
know when you're a child and you're ensconced right inside the familial
framework then you sort of exist within that system of rules like you would
under the piagetian scheme but when you become an adolescent then there's much
more of a proclivity to break free and to start breaking rules and so that's
also akin in some sense to the death of the father and that's a necessary
developmental stage anyway scar comes down into the ravine it's all foggy now
because that goes along with the sort of murkiness of death and tells Simba that
it's his fault and that he's going to have to leave he's going to have to
leave the kingdom of his father which makes sense now his father's dead so how
are you gonna once your father has died how are you going to stay around in his
kingdom so to speak so and then scar tries to get these hyenas to go track
Simba down and kill him so and Zazu goes back to tell all the rest of the Lions
that Mufasa is dead and that Simba has disappeared and then scar takes over
Pride Rock and so what's happened now is the malevolent element of the King has
obtained control over state right and so this is the king the
wise King wasn't paying enough attention that's one way of looking at it and so
the malevolent part of the state has now got control this is a very very old idea
I've traced it back at least several thousand years in its in its
representation in stories you can see it in Egyptian mythology for example so the
idea is that as the social structure builds in complexity it offers you the
protection of a functioning complex system but it also becomes increasingly
likely to turn into a tyranny and because it's more and more powerful the
fact of its potential for tyranny becomes more and more of a danger and so
then the question is well what are the factors that encourages it turning into
a tyranny and one factor would be the wise part of it is not paying enough
attention to the malevolent part of it and you could say that's true at the
state level it's also true at the individual level right you have to watch
your own proclivity to upset yourself and other people and and take that into
account and pay careful attention to it because otherwise it can gain control
especially because you're gonna avoid looking at it and one of the
characteristics of the wise King who gets overthrown by the tyrant is that he
has an evil brother and he won't pay enough attention to him he avoids he
doesn't look and so the the evil King gets the upper hand and that's what's
happened here and so notice now he takes possession of Pride Rock not in full
daylight right but at night so that ties his rule into the rule of unconscious
processes and and malevolence alright so Simba runs away from the
kingdom out into the desert now why is that well you remember maybe you
remember and maybe you don't maybe don't know it the story of Exodus when Moses
takes the Hebrews out of Egypt they end up in a desert well why well it's
because when you leave Kingdom no matter how ironical you still fall into
disorder you're out in a place that's desert there's no civilization there you
know that's what happened to Iraq after the Americans went in you know the the
Americans the neo-cons were all convinced that the Iraqis would Oh
welcome with open arms and there would be this
smooth transition to democracy same idea and Libya it's like no that's not what
happens what happens is the state devolves into a desert chaos and maybe
then you can make order but probably not and so Simba has left the kingdom and
the first thing that happens is he damn near dies in the desert and so you know
if you have an old belief system and it's not working very well and you
abandon it well good for you because you're out of the old belief system but
now you're nowhere one of the things that happens to alcoholics for example
and and draw a draw other drug addicts as well so imagine that you're trying to
stop drinking alright fine maybe you have to undergo some medical treatment
so when you first stop you don't die of seizures because that often happens to
people who are addicted to alcohol so and then they get valium or something
like that from a doctor to see them through the first bits of what do you
call it well of sobering-up and so they get through it and then then maybe two
weeks later they're not physiologically dependent on alcohol anymore
the same thing is true of cocaine but if you take them back and you put them in
their environment say they go back out of the treatment center back into the
normal world they start drinking or using right away again and the reason
for that is that well let's say you've been an alcoholic for 20 years okay
first of all that's all you do for entertainment you drink and all your
friends are alcoholics right and so if you're gonna stop drinking not only do
you have to rid yourself of the of the physiological addiction but you have to
completely learn a new way of living because what do you know you have to get
rid of all your friends because they're all drunks pretty much or if they're not
there at least people who are facilitating your drinking so you have
to build a whole new social network you don't know how to amuse yourself because
of course the way you've done that is by going to the bar sitting at home
drinking and so there's a huge hole in your life you abandon the previous
pathological mode a patient but that just leaves you with
nothing and then you have to rebuild that thing from from from from scratch
it's extraordinarily difficult and that's why so many people fail when
they're trying to overcome a major addiction so alright so anyways
Simba's out there in the desert he's left his family and the comforts of home
and he's he's discovered by these by Pumbaa and who's a little rats named Tim
Timon yes he's a meerkat right which are very
cool things and they discover him and this is sort of his transition into
adolescence and he he kind of finds and this is I would say more typical of the
male transition into adolescence because females of course hit puberty so much
younger the males who aren't very attractive when they're young like and
just starting to undergo puberty they're not very attractive to females they tend
to clump together in in gangs and and and manage the transition over what
could be seven years so and that's what happens here is Simba joins this little
gang of you know these guys are alright but you know they're a little on the
primordial side you might say you know one of them is basically just a walking
gastrointestinal tract and the other one is he's not so bad but he's like you
know a foot high really what good is he and so he he's got some second-rate
companions out here past the desert but he enters he's out of childhood now and
now he enters the adolescent world and what happens here is that very quickly
in the film he goes from being a little cub to a full full adolescence and
there's about a five minute transition and so it's the next stage in his
development and now he's out there in this paradise which is kind of strange
because adolescence really is no no picnic but the idea here is that he
really doesn't have any responsibilities right none and that is one thing about
adolescences and even the stage of life that you guys are out is you have lots
to do but you're not really responsible for anyone other than yourself and so
even though you might be quite burdened with your current responsibilities it's
nothing compared to what it will be like when you you know you have
responsibilities for four children for example or for the people that are
working for you or or whatever so anyways out here it's a kind of
of place as well and adolescence is like that we've had high school students try
to do the future authoring program you know where they have to think three to
five years down the road it's like forget that they just can't do it and
I've watched them and what happens is you you immediately become aware of just
how little high school students know when they're like fifteen or sixteen
three to five years forget it they don't have the world knowledge to
project themselves out that far in the future not even close and so we've built
a high school version that helps them design a better future three to six
months down the road and even that's really pushing it but you know
adolescents are more impulsive and they live more for the moment and there's
some utility in that I mean being impulsive and living for the moment is
one of the things that gets you pregnant as a teenager and that is certainly one
way that the species has managed to propagate itself and so positive emotion
and impulsivity are very tightly linked and so he's out there in this adolescent
delusional fantasy that might be one way of thinking about it but more important
he's out there where he's in a domain now where the impulses of the moment
basically take precedence and so and I think they sing some song about yeah
Hakuna Matata right which basically means do whatever you do whatever you
want and tomorrow will take care of itself or something like that so it's
very impulsive and lacks all responsibilities one of the things that
I would recommend to you if you want to protect yourself from ideological
possession shall we say is that when you hear people speak politically and they
don't say anything about your responsibilities you should probably
stop listening to them because whenever they're trying to offer you something if
it doesn't come along with an equivalent cost there's something being hidden from
you and they're appealing to the part of you that's well I would say at best
adolescent so alright so anyways he's out there in his little adolescent
paradise and with his dopey chums and back at at Pride Rock things are not
good right Skaar who's arrogant and refuses to learn and who will not
establish a reasonable relationship with the females all he does is tyrannize
over them he ends up ruling over a completely barren landscape and that's
really what happens in totalitarian states and we also know quite
interestingly is that one of the best predictors of economic development in a
state is the degree to which they extend rights to women it's one of the best
predictors and I would say well if you're going to terrorize your own women
you're gonna Tarin eyes everything you're gonna Terran eyes ideas you're
gonna Terran eyes structures like if you have to enslave your own women you're
you've del adapted a pretty damn pathological view of the world and the
probability that that narrow constrained restricted viewpoint is going to pay off
for you economically is extraordinarily low so anyways Skaar it's like what
happened in the Soviet Union no part of the reason it collapsed by 1989 is that
it just could not move any farther it was like this really complicated motor
that was worn completely out that no one had ever taken care of and it's just
ground to a halt it just stopped working because it
because it didn't work and so if your totalitarian and you won't update your
system and adjust it then it wears out and grinds to a halt and everything
becomes unproductive no it's it's not easy to figure out what makes a society
productive because you might say well it's Natural Resources or something like
that first of all natural resources are very often a curse to a country because
they produce corruption they call that the Dutch disease there's a reason for
that you can look it up but natural resources
in and of themselves are by no means sufficient to guarantee the well-being
of a country Japan has virtually no natural resources at all and it's really
rich and one of the prime natural resources actually seems maybe there's
two one is honesty another is trust and if you can set up a society where people
are roughly honest which means they do what they say they're going to do and
where the default bargaining position on both sides is trust then the probability
that that culture will become wealthy is very very high so and a functional legal
system is also a natural resource of tremendous tremendous value you know
it's partly why people in China for example wealthy people in China are
dumping their money into the real estate market in North America like mad because
one of the things you do know if you buy real estate in North America is you
actually own it it's still gonna be yours 20 years in the future 30 years in
the future there's no doubt about that and so that fact of ownership is
embedded in the functioning legal system and that's what gives those sorts of
properties crazy value you know much to the much to the problematic situation
for all of you people who are at some point most of you are gonna try to buy
property in Toronto and that's really going to be entertaining so now look the
the other thing about scars he's got the little bird locked up right that's the
vision of the king well he doesn't want to know anything he already knows
everything so why does he need this stupid bird flying around telling him
what's going on the last thing he wants to know is
what's going on yeah Stalin I mean God he gave that guy bad news or good
news he was going to have you killed it kept the bad news to a minimum and
that's a real problem right because if you torture people who bring you bad
news then you're never going to learn anything well you don't have to if you
already know everything anyways and so that's the situation here well his
little minions the hyenas are getting pretty unhappy because they haven't had
anything to eat and the reason for that is they've just stripped the landscape
bare right I mean and I read at the demise of the Soviet Union that
something like 10 to 15 percent of the entire land mass of the Soviet Union had
been rendered permanently uninhabitable by industrial pollution so you know that
I don't remember if that included Chernobyl you know where that terrible
nuclear accident took place but but there were massive domains of
devastation and in those countries that you know will take hundreds of years to
fix so anyways when scar rules everyone starves that's a good way of thinking
about it or everyone dies but that's okay because that's really what he's
after anyway so that works out quite nicely now back out here in paradise I
mean look at him how pathetic can you get look at the expression on that
creatures face you know he's he selfs he's sated like someone who's just eaten
a gallon of ice cream and he's got this pathetic self-satisfied naive clueless
unconscious grin on his face which the animators did a very nice job of
capturing like that's a complicated expression and you just want to slap him
and that's exactly what should happen and that's exactly what does happen so
anyways he's out there be an unconscious dingbat well his society is degenerating
and that's bloody well worth thinking about because that's an archetypal trope
right it's like things are sinking around you the question is what are you
doing about it you know are you just staying in kind of a blithe
unconsciousness because you can get your next meal are you gonna wake up and do
something about it well that's the call of the self so now we go back to two
Rafiki here and he knows what's going on in the kingdom he's a symbol of the self
and he also has some inkling that Simba is still alive
so so the son of the king is still alive despite the fact that the land has
become ruled by a tyrant and the son is absent he's still around somehow and so
in a union from the Union perspective there isn't much distinction between the
self and the and the and the child the self is the sum total of all possibility
and the child is possibility itself and so so let's say you've become an
adolescent you're all cynical right and everything's falling apart around you
which is the typical state of human beings right because adolescents are
cynical generally speaking and everything's falling around falling
apart around them generally speaking and so what do you have to do in order to to
do something about that well one is you have to be drawn by the call of wisdom
and the other part is that you have to rediscover that part of yourself that's
a childlike part that's associated with the son and associated with that early
you know the early exposure of Simba to the son you have to find that again and
then trust that some childlike exploration and a bit of manifestation
of faith might get you to the next place and so that's what's happening here with
a little you know the baboon and the tree and the and the drawing so anyways
he knows that Simba is alive now and so he goes off to find him and
meanwhile Simba and his dopey companions are out hunting for bugs
you know because he's a lion you know he should meet bugs for crying out loud but
they're easy and so you see this scene where Pumbaa goes after this bug and
then another lion shows up and chases him so she's gonna kill him and eat him
and ha see that's an interesting thing because one of the things that happens I
suppose you could think about this one of the things that happens in late
adolescence is that the formation of male gangs is often broken up by the
proclivity of one or more members of that gang to get involved in an
individual romantic relationship and so the idea that the female lion is the
carnivore the female is the carnivore that will devour the group is exactly
right and so what a girl will do often if she's in relationship with you know
somebody like a young man or an older adolescent is she'll try to separate him
from his dopey friends and like no wonder you know why wouldn't she do that
because he does have dopey friends and it'd be better for him if he could get
beyond them and so anyways they're pretty freaked out about this and so
then Simba goes out and has a fight with this lion to protect his dopey chums and
I'm sure you don't need any explanation about what that means and they have this
huge fight and neljä who it turns out to be pins him and so that goes back to the
beginning of the story where when he first encountered her she pinned him all
the time she's an animal figure right and now what she does immediately is
shame him so she he's an atom a figure in part she's an animal figure in part
because she actually does shame him right so she's the gateway to higher
consciousness she makes him self-conscious and rightly so but he's
also a she's also a psychological figure because he imagined that when a young
man is establishing a relationship with a young woman and he's he's enamored of
her he's falling in love he projects an idea onto her and that ideal is going to
be partially fulfilled by the relationship the degree to which is
unspecified and sometimes it'll collapse completely but he projects an ideal on
to her because otherwise he wouldn't be attracted to her and then the ideal
judges him and so that makes him feel all self-conscious and and useful
which is useful because he is useless and should feel that way and so it's
part of the impetus to growing up so and of course one of the you need necessity
in order to mature you because to mature is to take on responsibility and you're
not going to feel that impetus unless adopting the responsibility has some
sort of payoff and women tend to mate across an up dominance hierarchy so they
tend to actually like men who are useful and so if they encounter a man who isn't
useful at all they're gonna that's exactly what's going to happen they're
gonna not be happy about that in the least and so and no wonder and I think
the reason for that it's an economic and a biological reason the reason is is
that women are in the position of having to take care of infants primarily and an
infant is a very heavy load and so even a woman who's extraordinarily competent
is going to find herself substantially limited in her possibilities if she has
an infant and so then she's looking around for someone who'll pick up part
of the load it's perfectly reasonable and you're not gonna pick up part of the
load if you're completely useless and so it's in the woman's best interest not to
have two children roughly speaking so anyway she pins him and then he's all
resentful about it immediately because she's calling him on his stupid friends
and the fact that he's out there gallivanting impulsively in paradise
when there's real problems to be solved and so look at him he's all resentful
and useless and and you know feeling put upon and picked upon and you just you
got to slap him again fundamentally and she's just completely stunned by that
it's like and tells them you know where's the sim buy used to know right
well he's a little doubtful about the whole situation there the animators do a
very nice job of this part of the movie because one of the things you see is
that his eyebrows are always pointing up in the middle whereas his father's
eyebrows were pointing down in the middle and so that's the difference
between this which is sort of like things are happening to me and this
which is more like I'm imposing my will on things and that's an immature face
and and the animators capture that brilliantly so here's where she shames
him again she tells him how much she liked him when he was little and you
know a potential king and how hurt she is that he's this useless
you know wide-eyed naive impulsive pleasure-seeking adolescent and she
tells him that she missed him and god only knows why because look at him again
it's like completely appalling palling creature and this is when Pumbaa and
Timon sing that song about the fact that you know their friends doomed because
you know this girl's got him and and then they switch into another archetypal
scene and so they're falling in love here and so the paradisal imagery is
really highlighted in the movie and so they go off and have this like romp
self-reflective romp through this new paradise and they wrestle around and and
play and then he pins her more or less and she licks him that's that's not so
good and this is one of the most brilliant
shots I think that the animators manage because she's obviously pushing this a
little bit farther than he knows what to do with and so they're wrestling and he
she licks them and then she lays down and makes this face which is every
single class I've ever showed this to all laugh when they see that image and
that's a good example so Freud said that jokes were a good route into the
unconscious so the question is and this is an archetypal facial expression and
everyone knows exactly what it means there's something sexually seductive
about it and something very sexually seductive about it despite the fact that
it's a lioness and the animators do an extraordinarily good job of capturing
that and so that has a huge effect on him while these guys know that hey the
game's up man it's like they know they're dead whatever attractions they
can offer are paling in comparison to this so so anyways things don't really
progress past out but you know he gets a hint of her longing for him what's
waiting for him if he grows up and the fact that she's completely disappointed
in him because he's so completely useless and so now he's lounging about
you know like some basement with cheeto dust all over his chest and
and trying to justify his absolutely useless life and you know saying that he
doesn't have any responsibility to the devastated Kingdom and he's out there
where Hakuna Matata you know I can just do whatever I want and and follow my
impulsive pleasures and she thinks he's pretty pathetic and the reason for that
is because he is actually pretty pathetic and she she tells him that you
know she's extraordinarily disappointed he gets all pouty about it I mean even
here you see when he when he's got kind of an aggressive look on his face
there's still nothing about it that's commanding it's petulant right it's like
well now I'm irritated but he's got no force and and still completely appalling
in this in this particular situation so she judges him very harshly and leaves
and that makes him think yeah he make gets all self-conscious because this
female that he admires wants to have nothing to do with him
and so he's first of all then he thinks well maybe I'll just hate all women
which is you know pretty pathetic conclusion and but a very common one and
the next is well maybe there's actually something wrong with him right which is
a very painful bit of self-reflection so he he had he notes that there's
something wrong with him and then he calls out to his father and says look
you said you were always going to be here for me and you're not and so what's
happening is that he's become aware of the insufficiency of his current
adolescent value structure and he wants something beyond it which would be
associated with identification with the father but he can't he can't find the
father the father's dead it's like when Pinocchio goes down to the bottom of the
ocean to bring Geppetto up from the depths right that's the situation that
that Simba finds himself in right now the father's gone and has to be brought
up from the depths so this is where the movie takes the the archetypal pathway
of an initiation ceremony so he says he wants to change now one of the things
Carl Rogers one of the clinicians that will talk about pointed out was that if
if someone was going to come to psychotherapy there's some things that
had to happen before they went into psychotherapy and one thing that had to
happen was that they had to admit that there was something wrong and they had
to want to change you had to have that before
went into the psychotherapeutic situation and what happens here is Simba
is actually he's dropped his arrogance and he's looking upward kind of like
Geppetto wishing on the star in Pinocchio he's looking upwards he
looking towards something higher and he wants to transform himself so he's asked
the question how can I change for the better and he doesn't get an answer and
then Rafiki shows up so what does that mean it means that as soon as you know
you're wrong about something as soon as you admit that you're wrong about
something and you open the door to potential change that part of you will
respond so and you know this because think about this you're thinking so you
ask yourself a question because that's what you do when you're thinking and
then you generate some answers it's like it's very strange the thinking will
actually work you can actually come up with answers if you think about
something and so this square this issue is okay I thought I was real good in my
little impulsive paradise but then it turns out that I'm just a half-wit and I
noticed that and I want to do something about so the question is now the
question is has now been posed and what young would say is the deeper part of
yourself the part that still contains your undeveloped potential will respond
to that posed question and change the way that you look at things and change
the way that you act it'll start it'll start changing things so that you can
tap those parts of yourself that are not yet developed and you certainly do that
in psychotherapy but you can do that young said that psychotherapy could be
replaced by a supreme moral effort and by that he meant was that if you really
wanted things to be better if you wanted to get your act together and you
admitted that you were insufficient in your current state and you meditated on
the issue and tried to figure out what you should do next to make to put
yourself together that you would be able to find out that there's something in
you that guides the process of development that's the self that's a
higher its the higher self in some sense it's the thing that remains constant
across transformations you know because you're somewhere then you fall apart
then you get somewhere else but there's something outside of that that's guiding
that process and that's that's also the self that's what you
would be and you can communicate in some sense with what you could be and that's
a very strange thing about human beings anyways Rafiki shows up and Simba is
sitting by the water self reflecting there's a little pebble that drops into
the pool to attract his attention and up pops the self and Rafik he's a trickster
he tells him weird jokes and he hits him with a stick a bunch of times thank God
because someone really needs to and he he makes some stupid jokes about bananas
and kind of entices Simba into following him right he lets him know that he has a
secret and he entices Simba into following him so simha's all of a sudden
become interested in something so if you ask yourself what the next developmental
stages and you really want to know that all of a sudden you're going to become
interested in things that might move you to the next stage and that'll happen
more or less unconsciously so anyways Rafiki entices him and then runs away
and Simba follows him and well that's where he reveals himself as a sage and
then he tells Simba to follow him and he goes underground and this is the
initiation scene right which we talked about at the beginning of the class this
is the descent into the underworld and it's a it's a prerequisite to radical
personality transformation so anyways he goes through this horrifying underground
tunnel system where everything's all tangled up which is you know if you ever
fall into chaos that everything down there in chaos is tangled up it's a
tangled mess and he's quite and there's horrifying music going on in the
background and he goes deeper and deeper until Rafiki says he finds a pool in the
middle of the chaos a deep pool and that's another symbol of the self it's
it's the deep unconscious to something down there that's alive that can be
drawn up to the surface and so Rafiki shows him the pool and Simba who's quite
terrified at this point looks in it and the first thing he sees is he only sees
himself he only sees his own reflection and Rafiki says look deeper now you see
what the animators do here it's very cool
so there's Simba and there's his reflection but you see that is already
half is farther and you look at the difference in the eyebrows and the
so there's a there's a tightness of jaw and a firmness of face that's starting
to manifest itself there and that means that he's starting to see the man he
could be beyond the adolescent that's a good way of thinking about it and then
all of a sudden well they're you know that's a whole different face right
that's a seriously different face that everything's going in and that it's like
get out of my way because things are going to happen around me very
judgmental as well so it's not it's not naive by any stretch of the imagination
but you know we know as far there's a good guy and so there's something
archetypal about this and so he sees the man he could be reflected back to him
and then that's which is that actually becomes a cosmic event and we switch up
to the sky instead and so Mufasa manifests himself
basically as a solar deity and he tells Simba that he's forgotten who he is
which is the son of a king and that he should remember that and start acting
like it and that's an archetypal idea so if
you're just a useless adolescent then you've forgotten who you are and the
consequence of that is that the state is going to fall around fall apart around
you and you're not going to do anything to fix it and you're not going to be
good for anything and no one's gonna be able to rely on you and you're gonna be
all whiny and resentful and then after that it even gets worse and so that's
basically what Mufasa tells him and so Simba is like blown away by this vision
right because he sees what he could be and also what he's not which is pretty
damn horrifying so anyways the storm so to speak clears and Rafiki comes up and
and Simba's a lot more thoughtful and not quite as whiny and resentful anymore
and Rafiki leaves and so Simba now knows what he's supposed to do he's supposed
to stop being useless and take on the moral requirements of setting the
Kingdom straight and so he runs back across the desert there's all sorts of
impressive music happening and then he comes back to his kingdom and it's not
looking so good and that's the consequence of his his abandonment of it
that's a big part of it so now it's dead but also his
abandonment of it - nothing but malevolence and chaos and so he's pretty
taken aback and what's happened and that he exaggerates his guilt or it should
anyways and neljä shows up and and they decide they're gonna do something about
this so in the meantime Simba's mother is complaining about the
fact that there's no food in the kingdom anymore and that they've gone as far as
they can and Skaar doesn't want to hear this so he he attacks her and Simba
decides to go to war and so this is where he wakes up and he's willing to
encounter the shadow at this point and so he confronts scar and scars very
concerned about this because actually Simba is looking pretty impressive now
and he thought he was dead besides and so he tries to use treachery and whiny
Nessun and subordination to excuse himself but he's planning to overthrow
Simba nonetheless to resist him so he tells scar to leave he's going to banish
him to the nether regions outside of the kingdom like scar did to him and scar
basically refuses and then a storm gathers right and lights the Deadwood
around the rock on fire so we have another kind of descent into hell seen
here very common in Disney movies this this this notion of the hero fighting
the evil force on the edge of something that's burning it's quite a common motif
you see it in Sleeping Beauty for example so they have a big war and scar
ends up putting Simba in the same position that Mufasa was in and then he
whispers to him that he killed his father so Simba has been thinking all
along that it was only his fault and it is sort of his fault but he didn't know
that there was a more archetypal theme playing out in the background which is
that societies are always endangered by malevolence always and that's
independent to some degree of Simba's decisions and his and his lack thereof
anyways scar tells him because he thinks he's won and that energizes Simba to
have this sort of final battle he leaps out from the
and they have a big fight and he pins him basically and the female lioness has
come to his aid and Simba tells him that again that he has to leave and so they
have a big fight that's a particularly good bit of animation so there's real
demonic aspect to scar they're sort of King of Hell imagery and but he loses
and then ha he blames his minions he blames the hyenas for everything
terrible this happening forgetting that they can hear him and then he falls off
the cliff and the hyenas go in and finish him off
so it's pretty brutal ending for poor old scar eaten by his own minions and
then scars dead and Simba has one and so the rains come immediately and so what
does that mean well it means that when proper order is restored in a kingdom
then everything starts to flourish again and so the rains come and then while
it's raining Simba climbs up to the top of the rock and now he's completely
mature right that the facial the pathetic facial expression disappears
entirely knee straightens himself up because now he's full of serotonin after
having defeated good old scar and all the lionesses are roaring and he climbs
up Pride Rock and they roar at him which is good they're tough and he's tough and
they showing their teeth it's it's not it's not a society of naive and harmless
creatures it's it's something that's got some bite and the rains come and then
the next thing you see is the restoration of the kingdom and so
basically that what that means is that if the individual is willing to confront
their own shadow and then to take on the malevolent forces that continually
undermine society then harmony can be restored and everyone can do well and so
then we have a return to the beginning right and so Simba and nella are now a
couple along with Pumbaa and Timon and they have a baby and Rafiki shows up and
does the same thing you know he's gonna present the baby to the Sun and have all
the animals bow again and and that's the end of the movie so that's all packed that's all packed into an archetypal
tale and and so one of the things that young would point out is that you all
understood this right while you were watching it because otherwise at some
level all these things made sense they all cohered and the narrative appeared
to be an appropriate narrative even when you're a little kid it because it
strikes a chord inside you and well that chord the thing that it strikes inside
you that's the archetype because if there wasn't something inside of you so
to speak that this could communicate with and it would fall on deaf ears and
it speaks to the part of you that's most particularly human and it's a story of
the development of the sovereign individual that's that's the right way
to think about it's a hero archetype that's another way of thinking about it
and people are going to get that story one way or another and now and then a
piece of public art comes along like this that does a good job of
encapsulating and it captures everyone's imagination and so that's why you've all
seen it and why I presume you all enjoyed it when you were kids and maybe
still enjoy it now so well that was actually faster than I thought it would
be today so this is what I'm gonna do we've got 20 minutes so why don't you
think for a minute or two and I'll take some questions which I don't often do
but and they can be any questions about anything we've covered in class so take
a minute and yes - movie
you feel like you know the character but it's not exactly that character like
become so - you know can like it feels like you know for a wise
old man archetype yeah yeah well there's not
much difference between Gandalf and who's the wizard in Harry Potter
Dumbledore they could be the same guy it's right right and so well that that
is precisely the indication of the existence of an archetype it's like an a
movie one time a student asked me well if if there are these archetypes why
don't we just tell the archetype over and over why do we need fiction for
example which is like a bridge if there's individuals here and the
archetype is up here you know at a high level of abstraction fiction sort of
fills the gap between them and so what you want is a story that's archetypal so
that you understand its basic structure but you want enough variation and
specificity so that it's new and interesting and also applicable to you
so you have to humanize the archetype to some degree otherwise it's so abstract
you can't you can't relate to it and and good stories really do that they bridge
the gap and some of them are more personal and less archetypal but if
they're completely non archetypal there's nothing about them that captures
you it doesn't have any force and then if it's two archetypal well it gets to
be too abstract and you can't relate to it so good fiction writers and and good
purveyors of dramatic entertainment we think about it as entertainment are
really good at occupying that middle position so yeah and they reveal the
archetype through the individual that's one way of thinking about it and and
that keeps it fresh and you know one of the things that you pointed out to was
that you're you're going to be manifesting archetypal patterns of
behavior in your life whether you know it or not
even when you do something like fall in love because that's going to be a very
particular experience for you but it's also a very common experience at the
same time right and and romance is older than people that's one way of looking
about looking at it I mean because sex is older than human beings and so you're
in the grip of something that's really ancient but at the same time it's really
personal and so a good novelist or a writer of fiction is able to capture
both the personal element of that to show show the transpersonal within the
personal and so and in some sense your destiny property
study from a union perspective is to consciously express an archetype and so
be the archetype there's a bunch of them but one of them would be the archetype
of the hero and you're supposed to manifest that in the conditions of your
own life so that makes the archetype real in the conditions of your own life
and Jung would also say that when you're doing that your experience will manifest
itself as meaningful and so it's because in some sense you're acting in
accordance with your deepest instincts technically speaking right you're you're
acting out what it means to be human in the world and you're gonna find that
meaningful so yes like like I just like because it's mine process from life
like happy but is like appreciating to help so like you know like love and subsidies okay so the question is about the
relationship between the shadow and the okay so the first thing you have to
understand with regards to trying to come to terms with the conception of the
shadow is to understand the idea of persona and persona is the you that you
present when you want people to accept and like you often like let's say that
you go to a party and you're trying to impress the people that are there and
you're trying to get them to like you and so you maybe get jabbed out a little
bit and you laugh and you know you're you go along with everyone so that they
like you and then you go home and you're bitterly resentful about the way that
you were put down at this party and that's going to make all sorts of
aggressive I wish I could have said it's gonna make all sorts of aggressive and
vengeful thoughts sort of flashed through your imagination well the first
part of the problem is that you were too much persona right you sacrificed
yourself in some sense at the party so that people would like you and in the
second part you're refusing to admit to the existence of those elements of you
that would have actually protected you from doing that so let's say you go home
and you're all bitter and resentful and you have fantasies of revenge I mean
that reveals to you the shadow part of you that's aggressive and the thing is
you actually need that because if you would have integrated that more
successfully into your personality when you went to the party you wouldn't have
had lit you wouldn't have had to let people put you down to get them to like
you you know instead of having a face like this which says I'll take anything
that's coming my way you know you have a face and a stance that's more determined
and assertive and if you manifest that properly people aren't gonna mess with
you to begin with but you know you may have already
adopted a morality that says well I have to be likeable and I shouldn't do
anything that causes any conflict and I shouldn't ever you know hurt anybody's
feelings and so you're just to present yourself as a punching bag and you think
that that makes you a good person but it doesn't and there's no integration of
the shadow in that situation so you see that at the end of the movie
we know I mentioned this when Simba climbs up the rock to take control of it
all the female lionesses bare their teeth and he roars it's like that
aggressiveness is integrated into him and so resentment is a really good
emotion for making contact with the shadow side because if you're resentful
about something it basically reveals two things it either means that you're
immature and you should stop whining and get on with things you know someone's
ass this often happens with adolescents who are asked say by their mother to
clean up the room they get all resentful about it it's like shut up and clean up
your room you know it's not that much to ask or so that can be a gateway into the
observation of your own immaturity or it's possible that you're resentful
because people really have been poking at you too much and taking and and
taking shots at you and oppressing you but what that means is that you've got
some things to say that you haven't been willing to say or don't know how to say
right you can't stand up for yourself properly and in order to do that you
have to grow some teeth and be willing to use them and again that's something
that might violate your morality because you might say well I shouldn't be able
to bite people and the thing is yes you should be able to bite people hard and
if you're able to bite them then generally you don't have to but they
need to know that you can because otherwise especially people who are
badly socialized they'll just keep encroaching on you and encroaching on
you and encroaching on you and encroaching on you until you you put up
a wall like someone who's really well put together won't do that you know
because they're sophisticated but if you run into people who only have boundaries
because other people impose them on them and you won't do it you're gonna be the
bullied one in the office for example you're not gonna get a raise people
aren't gonna credit you with your own work other people are gonna take credit
for it you know and you're gonna go home angry because you're doing your best and
you're trying to get along with everyone and nothing ever goes your way well it's
because you're a pushover and you think that's good because you confuse
harmlessness with with with reality it's it's about it's not right
just because you can't do any damage doesn't mean your morale just means your
you don't have the capability for mayhem and that makes you a pushover I mean the
yogya stuff is very very dark you know it's very dark because his notion of
what constitutes a moral human being is much different from the typical view he
really thinks you get that horrible side of yourself integrated so it's up there
where you can use it because otherwise you're you're dangerous you can't say no
to people and you'll go along with the crowd and then if the crowd does
something particularly pathological which it's liable to do you won't be
able to resist it you won't have the strength of character and so then you'll
fall prey to to crowd pathology and it'll be because you're too agreeable
with a you know with a shadow resentful side that the crowd and its murderous
intent is gonna act out so yes yes so the question is the relationship between
archetype archetypes and the idea of memes well
oh yeah that's a complicated one so Richard Dawkins was the guy who
originated the idea of meme and his notion was that you could produce an
idea or a set of ideas that had the capacity to propagate across minds for
whatever reason it was catchy let's say like a like a song that gets stuck in
your head you know it and that those he called those memes which was sort of a
play on the idea of genes so there are these stable sets of ideas that can be
transferred across minds well I've often thought when I was reading Dawkins that
if he would have kept thinking he would have turned into Carl Jung because an
archetype is a meme but it's a really really really deep meme so you can
imagine that an idea has been sold around for so long and that people have
acted out for so long that it's actually become part of the landscape that does
the selection so think about it this way so it's more or less a truism that if
you take a male dominance hierarchy the probability that the men at the top of
the hierarchy will leave offspring is much higher than the probability that
the men at the bottom will leave offspring and it's true in many many
species now there's a much higher probability of the average female
leaving offspring than the average man so so now then imagine that there's
characteristics that push a man up a dominance hierarchy okay and then
imagine that there are characteristics that push a man up a set of dominance
hierarchies so that each dominance hierarchy has something in common with
all of the others it's sort of like the idea of a good player of a game being a
good sport across games so then imagine that the idea of the successful male
starts to become encapsulated in in in biology because this species is going to
the male part of the species at least is going to be adapting to the selection
pressures placed on the male by the male dominance hierarchy so what happens is
you have a competition between men the men that win the competition find
partners in mate so the the male is going to start to
adapt to the fact of the selection that's implemented by the dominance
hierarchy then you can imagine that that's going to take case take place
across dominance hierarchies because this is happening in many many
situations spread across time and so then the idea of how the proper man
should act starts to become incorporated in the biology and also in the
expectations of the society and then that starts to loop so as the
expectations become clearer and clearer the notion of what it constitutes
success becomes clearer and clearer as well and the two things get tangled
together now and I think you can see that a manifestation of that whenever
you go watch a movie because you immediately identify the hero and you
identify with them it's like he's the person that your mythological
imagination grasps on to and you play that out using your body as a
representational platform when you watch the movie and so maybe you admire the
hero if he's a successful hero you do well that admiration is the
manifestation of the instinct that drives you towards that kind of behavior
and not only can you manifest it in which case you're likely to feel good
about yourself because you know that sometimes you can feel good about
yourself and sometimes not but you're also going to be able to recognize it
when you see it in the world and that's going to manifest itself in admiration
and admiration is the proclivity to imitate so the meme can be soul so you
can imagine dominance hierarchies are very very old they're like 300 million
years old they've been around a very long time and
the idea that we have an image of what it takes to climb the dominant targets
it's more or less self-evident because that's the landscape that selected us
and at the same time you know the the archetype the pattern that propagates
you up the dominant arc is also the same pattern that makes you attractive to
women they're the same thing so and of course that's a massively
powerful selection mechanism and sexual selection has really shaped human beings
it's turned us into what we are and that's an interesting thing too because
you know this is one of the things that really bothers me about the emphasis of
evolutionary scientists on randomness it's like the the general mutation
generation process is random or quasi random we don't know that for sure
because there is evidence now that you can inherit acquired characteristics and
that was nobody thought that was possible 20 years ago so things are have
taken a very weird twist in the Darwinian world but for the sake of
argument we could say that the mutation process is random but the selection
process isn't random it's not even close to random ever since creatures have been
able to evaluate one another the selection process hasn't been random and
so basically we're selected by you could say by the manifestation of
mind in the world unless you believe that women for example exercise no
conscious choice in their made selection which seems completely absurd first of
all men consciously choose who's going to lead them at least in part you know
who's going to succeed in a hierarchy and women consciously choose their
sexual partners so the idea that the selection process that the evolutionary
process is random is it's an absurd proposition sexual selection makes it
non-random and Darwin knew that he emphasized sexual selection a lot but
modern biologists since the time of Darwin except for the last about twenty
years down played the role of sexual selection and I think the reason for
that is that it brings mind into the evolutionary process in a way that they
don't like and no wonder it's complicated you know it's like to some
degree we're consciously directing our own evolution at least through the
mechanism of selection so yes yes well Dawkins just thought of
memes is something that weren't he never thought about them is something that
could last long enough to play a role in selection itself you know he thought
about the Moroz parasitical cognitive entities I would say that just sort of
floated on the surface of the mental landscape he never he never grappled
with the idea that a meme could be something that could last for hundreds
of millions of years roughly speaking so we got time for one more question if
anybody has yes yes from a political perspective like if you divide people by
their political affiliation it looks like liberal men are the most unhappy
they're higher in neuroticism I think the openness probably
contributes to it as well but we don't and also possibly the low
conscientiousness when my graduate students come in or one of the many ways
we're gonna talk about this in some detail because she's going to tell you
because we've also looked at the personality predictors of political
correctness which is extraordinarily interesting as well because it doesn't
really seem to fall exactly on the liberal conservative continuum so we'll
talk more about that when we get into the Big Five part of the course okay
good we'll see you on Thursday when we're going to do a speed review of
Freud |
So on to Sigmund Freud We're going to give him somewhat short shrift. I'm afraid because we only have an hour to talk about Freud, but that's okay We could get a fair way through it He's still persona non grata, I would say among experimental psychologists and probably clinical psychologists as well But that seems to me to be very unfair Freud Freud is one of those thinkers who? All that's left are his mistakes and the reason for that is that everything that he Discovered or put forward is so entrenched in our culture now that we think it's self-evident and so everything correct has been assimilated and that just leaves everything that's more or less floating on top to look wrong and But Freud is also one of those thinkers who was always wrong in an interesting way and that's very useful. And so I also think that many of the things that he put his finger on that are of still disputed for example, the idea of the Oedipus complex are much more useful than people are willing to admit especially in the clinical realm because the eatable complex which we'll talk about quite a bit is actually a description of a fairly stable form of familial psychopathology where child gets trapped within the confines of a family because the relationship with one parent or the other or both is so tight that they can't break beyond it and maybe because of their own inability to move towards independence but more frequently because of What you might describe as a kind of conspiracy between the son and and the parent or the child and the parent that prevents them from moving towards Autonomous life and keeps them in a state of essentially a state of childhood dependence Freud said I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients under the influence of an older friend And by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious and psychic life The role of instinctual urges and so on out of these findings grew a new science psychoanalysis A part of psychology and a new treatment for the neurosis. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory Resistance was strong and unrelenting in the end I succeeded in inquiring pupils and building it up in international psychoanalytic Association But the struggle is not over he made that recording just shortly before he died. He moved to to England to escape the Nazis Before Freud I guess The mind was It's complicated because Freud of course was not the only person to be thinking along the lines that he thought Pierre jennae who was one of his teachers had originated and started to develop many of the ideas that I would say were popularized by Freud but The idea of the unconscious mind was not Certainly not as well developed prior to Freud as it became afterwards and Before that I suppose You might say that insofar as people thought of the mind at all They thought of in philosophical terms and the mind would be that part of you That's that you're aware of like in the dark in The Cartesian sense Descartes said I think therefore I am and it kind of seems in some sense Self-evident that you're aware of and have control over the contents of your own mind But that was what Freud really questioned and he questioned it deeply said well first of all the idea that you're one thing like one mind is a dubious idea to begin with because People are full of internal contradictions. And then the idea that your mind is all of one type it's it's all of one form was also very questionable as far as Freud was concerned because you could be fractionated into subcomponents and You know the idea for example that your anger or your sexual desire could be an autonomous part of your personality in some sense It could overtake you and control you. That's really a Freudian idea and one of the classic Freudian ideas really is that people are made out of sub personalities and Those sub personalities are alive. And that's one of the things I really like about the psychoanalytic thinkers because even the Psychologists who say over the last thirty years are they're about Since maybe longer now anyways, since the demise of behaviorism as an ideology and the admission by psychologists that there were There is an active unconscious or many active unconscious which is a better way of thinking about it Psychologists still really haven't come to terms with the idea in any deep sense that these unconscious Processes are living things, you know there When psychologists talk for example about the cognitive unconscious they're talking about something that that they describe it more machine-like with more machine like metaphors and that's not reasonable you you understand things a lot better if you understand that the sub components that make up people the fragmentary bits of them and also the biological subsystems that that are part and parcel of your being are Much more intelligently viewed as personalities there there are kind of uni dimensional personalities in some sense so that for example, if you're angry you're nothing, but angry I mean That's an overstatement obviously or if you're afraid you're nothing but afraid or if you're hungry you're nothing but hunger well That's certainly true If you get hungry enough or thirsty Or too hot or any of those things you you kind of collapsed to a simpler personality. That only has one Motivation in mind and we'll talk a lot as we progress about the grounding of those uni-dimensional Motivational systems in biology, but I'd have to say that Freud was among the first at least the first to Synthesize a coherent theory of this multiplicity and to put it forth while also insisting that much of what was happening to you and inside of you was not immediately accessible To your awareness and it's a very profound. It's a very profound discovery it means among any among many other things that you can formulate ideas First of all, it means that you can act out things That you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand it also means that Your memory can contain things that's represented in one way, but that can't be understood in another So for example, and we know this is true because there are independent memory systems. There's an independent memory system for procedures That's for actions. There's an independent memory system for what you might describe as imagination for for the memory that uses images and then there's a another system that articulates knowledge that's the semantic memory system and it's not obvious at all that the contents of all of those are equivalent and that's why for example you can dream things that you don't know because one of the things you might think is that your dreams watch you act and they Watch other people act and then they make a little drama out of that and that drama has information in it But you don't necessarily know what that information is in that you can't describe it consciously Right. It's it's akin to the PA Chetty an idea. That kids can play a game and you can take them away from the game and then they won't know how to describe the rules even though they can play the Game and so dreams can contain information. That's full of the encoding of behavior that has information in it that you're not consciously aware of and so then you can become consciously aware of that in a kind of a revelation side Maybe that's what you do when you become aware of the meaning of a dream or the meaning of a fantasy or something like that and That's all all our ability to think that way in some ways can be traced back to Freud Now Freud concentrated mostly I would say at least in terms of pathology on sexual and aggressive Impulses and I I don't think that there's any mystery for modern people about why aggressive impulses might be particularly difficult to integrate into the personality and might remain underdeveloped or will say repressed although those aren't the same thing and I think in order to you might think that in different times in society Some things are allowed to surface express themselves and other things are less allowed. And so Victorian times had a number of characteristics that made the repression of sexuality particularly likely and perhaps also the repression of aggression and we're talking about Victorian times in in Europe, obviously and only one time in one place As Henry or Ellen Burgess says this is a great book by the way the discovery of the unconscious if you're interested in If you're really interested in psychoanalytic ideas Freud Jung and Adler and also the history of those ideas There's no better book than the discovery of the unconscious. It's an absolutely remarkable book a great work of scholarship I think it it goes for about 250 pages before it even gets to Freud and so it places Freud's discoveries in their historical context So that's a really good thing to know Allen Burgess says it was a world shaped by man for man in which women occupied the second place Political rights for women did not exist the separation and dissimilarity of the sexes was sharper than today women who wore slacks their hair shorter smoked were hardly to be found and the universities admitted no female students, man's Authority over his children and his wife was unquestioned education was authoritarian The despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel Laws were more repressive delinquent youth sternly punished and corporal punishment was considered indispensable now So the times themselves I would say were harsher and more repressive but then there was an element to sexuality that was also Extraordinarily Problematic. I mean the first thing you might notice might consider and people generally don't it's almost impossible to overstate how revolutionary the birth control pill actually is You know people like to think that the political rights that women have attained have been a consequence of a political struggle But I don't buy that for a second. I don't think that's true even in the least I think that what happened was that we underwent a biological revolution in the 1950s late 1950s with the emergence of the birth control pill and that for the first time in human history gave women Pretty reliable control over the reproductive function not really transformed them into entirely different biological beings in many many ways like here's an example a subtle example, so, you know if you track women through their Ovulation cycle and you show them a picture of a man same man And you do nothing but vary his jaw width When they're ovulating the guy with the wider jaw is more attractive and when they're not Ovulating the farthest away from that the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive and that's associated with testosterone levels And so women who are fertile like more masculine men and basically if you're on the pill then you're never in that Ovulation phase and so one thing that may have happened and I don't know this for sure but it's it's interesting to consider is that Since women have been taking the birth control pill their preference for less masculine men has become more pronounced and that could easily be one of the things that's fueling at least some of the tension that's Existed and exists now politically between men and women, but the point is is that you just cannot ignore The massive consequences of a biological revolution like that and to make any other factor causal when you're trying to understand The political movement movements especially in the last say 40 years. It's you're putting the cart before the horse now It's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology if certain Political changes with regards to the emancipation of women hadn't already been in place, right? No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception So you can't separate the biological from the political entirely but it's still it's still very useful to organize your organizing your thinking to realize just how profound a Revolution that was but now back in the Victorian times There's another thing about sexuality Modern people like to think that there's nothing dangerous about sex and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever Hypothesize because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous Emotionally it's dangerous socially it's dangerous because of the Possibility of unwanted pregnancy and it's dangerous because of the possibility of sickness and that's a major one I mean So when aids emerged in the 1980s that could have easily killed all of us now the fact that it didn't was wonderful But it did kill hundreds of millions of people. So it was no joke. It was a big deal and ADEs mutated to take advantage of promiscuity and so the Relationship between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease is actually mediated at the biological level. But anyways back in the 1890s They had the same problem, right? They had the problem with syphilis and syphilis is one nasty disease it's it can mimic almost any other disease and it's devastating to your nervous system and you can pass it on to your children and so part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was not only because of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy the relative poverty of people You know back in 1895 in Europe the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in in modern terms You know it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were and so sex in a poverty-stricken place is also a lot more dangerous than it is in a rich place because especially if you were, you know, given the lack of employment opportunities for women back in the Victorian period if you happen to get pregnant out of wedlock you were and You were in serious trouble and so the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly as hardly a surprise because it was so difficult to integrate into the full-fledged personality, you know, and it has it as it still is so Sexual repression supposedly characteristic feature of the Victorian period was often merely the expression of two facts the lack of diffusion of contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease it was all the more dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost Invariably contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection we can hardly imagine today how monstrous silithus syphilis appeared to people of that time Well, we can imagine that a little bit better than they could in 1970 because it hasn't you know, AIDS is still with us Although it's nowhere near the plague that it was say 25 years ago Well, here's the Freudian world Freud so let's let's take a look at the history of or the idea of the Unconscious to begin with and one of the things that you might want to consider Conceptually is that there are many different forms of unconscious There's not just one and so Alan bursae points out that by 1904 functions of the unconscious had been described There's a conservative function. So the unconscious stores memories often unaccessible to voluntary recall Well, that's a strange one, you know obviously you remember your past but you don't remember all of What you can remember at any given time and you don't really have access to that full store of memories although you can try to remember so the unconscious is the You could imagine the memories are represented somehow Neurologically, but neural the neurological structure isn't exactly the mind like the neurological structure isn't exactly your consciousness There's some relationship between them that we don't know and the unconscious from a conceptual perspective is the place that your memories are that you Sometimes can get access to and sometimes can't and so you might think well that there are the memories that you can't get access to there might be a variety of reasons you can't get access to them one might be that you've just forgotten them and One might be that they're so painful that you don't want to bring them to mind You'll you'll engage in tricks to stop yourself from getting access to them And or maybe they're memories that are so complex that and painful that even if you did get access to them You wouldn't exactly know what to do with them and so there's not a lot of reason for you to bring them to mind because all it is is pain without any without any Utility and when you understand that a little bit you understand more about what Freud meant by repression The thing about Freud is that he kind of believed that like many people believe now that when you remember an event in the past It's it's almost as if you're using a video tape recorder and that when you experience that the memory is somehow Recorded in you like it happened But that's not a very accurate version of how memory works I mean We know that memories can be easily distorted for example if you interview someone about an event and You make suggestions that there was something present in the event that wasn't there and then you bring them back a couple of weeks later And you ask them about the same event? they'll often incorporate the thing that they were told into the event and So and the idea that you can make an objective record of something that's happening to you is kind of a strange notion anyways because so for example if you're having an argument with someone and Later you I asked what the argument was about and the other person has asked what the argument is about there's no necessary reason why the accounts will Jibe at all because a lot of time when you're having an argument with someone you're arguing about what the argument is about Right say well, you're angry at me. Well why this is why I think you're angry at me You say no this is why I think this event has occurred and you're thinking about especially if we know each other Well, you're thinking about the contextualization of that event across our entire history and I'm doing the same thing and I'm gonna highlight things that you're not gonna highlight and I'm gonna draw causal inferences that you're not Going to draw and for us just to get on the same page about the memory. It's going to be very difficult So the idea that in specially with complex interactions with people that you can somehow make a video recording of the memory and actually capture what happens is is very very It's it's not true. You you can't I mean you might be able to extract out certain objective facts, but But generally if it's a dialogical issue if it's a relationship issue It spans such a long period of time that just cutting a slice of it out doesn't constitute a reasonable record of what it means and That's what you're more concerned with - like when when you have an experience, you know I'm not so much concerned about what happened from an objective perspective You're more concerned about what the experience means and then you might ask Well, what does it mean to mean something and that was the question? I was trying to answer in that paper I had you read right at the beginning of the class but one of the things that meaning means is that it has Implication for the way you look at the world or the way you act in the world. And so if I tell you something meaningful what that's going to mean is in the future you're going to act slightly differently or maybe Radically differently depending on how meaning it meaningful it is but also that the way that you look at the world has shifted And the way that you look at the world is actually an unconscious. It's actually an unconscious process I mean You don't know While you're looking at the world how it is or why it is that you're looking at the world in that way I mean because well First of all, it would just be too complicated and second you wouldn't be able to concentrate on what was actually going on So your attention? For example is mediated by unconscious forces and you know that you know that perfectly well and this is another Freudian observation, you know if you're sitting down to study for example your conscious intent is to study but you know perfectly well that all sorts of Distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination Non-stop and annoyingly and and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except maybe wait it out, you know So you'll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away. You'll think about I don't know Maybe you want to watch the G in the virgin on Netflix or something like that Or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich or you should get the dust bunnies from out from underneath the bed or it's time to go outside and have a cigarette or maybe It's time for a cup of coffee or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't Very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by and so they pop up and try to take Control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop. Maybe you think well, this is a stupid course Anyways, why do I have to read this damn paper? And what am I doing in university? And what's the point of life? It's like you can really well You can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework and and and then you might think well what is it in you that's trying to avoid because After all, you took the damn course and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen? Well, because you're you're a mess now. That's basically why you haven't got control over yourself at all And no more than I have control over this laptop Okay, so there's the memory function of the unconscious and there's the dis dis eluted function That's an interesting one the unconscious contains habits once voluntary now are tamo ties and dissociated Elements of the personality which may lead a parasitic existence. That's an interesting one I would relate that more to procedural memory, you know, so what you've done is practice certain habits, whatever they might be Let's call them bad habits and you like those things to get under control? But you can't so maybe when you're speaking for example, you use like and you know And you say I'm a lot and you've practiced that so you're really good at it and you'd like to stop it But you don't - because you've built that little machine right into your being right? It's Neurologically wired and it's not under conscious control and anything you practice becomes that It becomes part of you and and that's another element of the unconscious a different part And then there's a creative part which is that well You know you're sitting around and maybe you're trying to write something or maybe you want to Produce a piece of art or a piece of music or maybe you're just laying in bed dreaming and you have all these weird ideas And especially in dreams. It's like what where do those things come from and even more strange? One of the things that's really weird about dreams and almost impossibly weird is that you're an observer in the dream It's like a dream is something that happens to you. Well, you're dreaming it theoretically so how is it that you can be an observer? It's almost like you're watching a video game or a movie but you're producing it that at least in principle Although the psychoanalysts would say well, no not exactly your ego isn't producing it. Your unconscious is producing. It's a different thing It's a different thing. And of course Jung would say well it's deeper than that. The collective unconscious might be producing it It's in some sense It isn't you? exactly or it isn't the you that you think of when you think of you and that's the ego from the Freudian perspective the you that you identify with that's the ego and outside of that is the unconscious the it'd That's more the place of impulses and you could think about those as the biological Subsystems that can derail your thinking right and that govern things like hunger and sex and aggression and your basic instincts is another way of putting it and it's a reasonable way of thinking about it because these are Subsystems that you share with with animals you share them certainly with mammals You share most of them with reptiles you share a lot of them with em Finian's and even going all the way down to Crustaceans there's commonality for example in the dominance hierarchy circuits and so these are very very old things and the idea that you're in control of them is Well, you're not exactly in control of them and I would say the less integrated you are The less you're in control of them and the more they're in control of you and that can get really out of hand, you know You can be like with people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. For example which which which is Which seems to be I would say that dissolute of elements in some sense of the unconscious the way that it's portrayed here Poor people with obsessive-compulsive disorder they can spend half their time Doing things that they can't really control and they have very strong Impulses to do them and it's very hard on them to block them You know, they they'll almost panic if those things are blocked and then you have people with Tourette's syndrome you know that they'll be doing all sorts of weird dances and spouting off obscenities and and and and imitating people without being able to control it and and Sometimes a little bit of anti-psychotic medication can dampen that down but it's as if there are these autonomous semi spirits inside of them that grip control over their behavior and make them do things and you know, you find that to some degree in your own life because maybe You've become very attractive to someone even maybe you don't want to be attracted to the person and then you find yourself You know texting them when you know perfectly well that you should be going to bed and you know you're you're in a grip of something and and you can't control it and that's all part of the unconscious and all part of what Freud was studying The dynamic unconscious it's alive and it's a compass that the mind is a composite of contradictory drives now The way Freud thought about this basically was that with the end and the ego and the super-ego so if you think about the end as the place where these contradictory drives emerge So it's sort of nature within the ego is the thing that's sort of being pushed back and forth by those Contradictory drives and the super-ego is the thing that's on top saying you better behave yourself you better behave yourself and so it's a different model than the Piaget daeun model because Piaget assumed that what would happen is that As the child and I like the Piaget and model better I think I think in healthy development the Piaget daeun model is correct But in unhealthy development I think the Freudian model is correct that Instead of integrating say the aggressive and sexual drives for the sake of argument into your personality as you develop What happens is the super-ego just represses them instead so they don't become a dynamic part of you Integrated into your ego. They're just repressed. You just don't manifest them and That's how you be a good person and you can be the victim of a very harsh super-ego and that often happens if you've had a particularly tyrannical Parent one or both or maybe a tyrannical grandparent or maybe you're your own inner tyrant And you've picked up tyrannical voices through your whole life and aggregated them into this terrible judge that's always watching you that's criticizing everything you do and Restricting you badly and really badly and what you're allowed and not allowed to do you see that with anorexic women? Well men could be anorexic too, but it's much much less rare They have super egos that are just or one way of thinking about it That's just they're just deadly they're just criticizing every bit of them. Well right to the point They're really criticizing them out of existence right is you have to be so perfect that the perfection is not Aligned with the ability to live you don't get to eat, you know and and people like that They look at their bodies they even look at their bodies incorrectly like anorexic seem to be unable to see their bodies as a whole they can only see their bodies as parts and When you start seeing your body as parts you're really in trouble because you can't get a sense of actually what it looks like and body perception is very very complicated, but anyways Piaget thought about the ego as in some sense as the game that's played by all these Dynamic drives that's shaped by the broader community. And so that could all be integrated But Freud would say well look when that doesn't happen instead You're subject to the tyranny of the super-ego and it just says you should never be angry, right? You should never express yourself sexually because if you do there's something wrong with you you're a bad person and you're a bad person if you ever get aggressive or and so and then people who are living like that under those circumstances You know they get they well they're they're repressed is the right way to think about it Now Freud was interested in the idea that mental disorders could be caused for two reasons one would be purely Bodily, like maybe a head injury or say in the case of schizophrenia Which is a good example of manic depressive disorder we have reason to believe that there's something Physiological going on even though but identifying that has been very difficult and it's because there isn't one form of schizophrenia there's probably many pathways of brain injury that lead to schizophrenic like symptoms and there's likely not one form of manic depressive disorder either if you think of the form as having a Standard causal pathway. We know that there are because we've done genetic Studies on people Who have manic depressive disorder in their family and you can identify genes within a family that seemed to be contributing to the disorder? but the problem is is that those genes don't seem to be so then you'll take another family group with manic depressive disorder and it'll be a different genetic combination that causes that so so part of the reason why It's difficult to associate the even the more biological Mental disorders with with biology all the way down is because they're so complex and then there are other forms of mental Disorder that don't seem to be structure at all structural at all They seem to have more to do with well Let's call it the psyche right and that it's more like the contents of your thought have a problem rather than the structures Underlying your thought and of course that distinction is difficult to make in a fine-grained way But you kind of get the point I mean just because there's an error in your thinking doesn't mind really mean that the underlying biology in some sense has been compromised it's complicated because if the air is bad enough, then it can compromise the underlying biology but but whatever it's a conceptual distinction and part of the conceptual distinction is is Helpful, if you're trying to think at least in part about how you might cure it because if you're thinking about a brain disease then that Implies a different course of treatment at least in principle then it does if you're thinking about a psychological disorder where you might think about talking to someone for example and straightening out their thoughts or helping them learn to behave in a different way and It was really Freud Who started to? Think that he was the first person to really pause it and this is pretty interesting that directly pause it that dialogue or conversation Or speaking could be curative And now that's another thing that people don't like to give him credit for I mean there wouldn't be all these helping industries social social work and psychology and and Biological Psychiatry insofar as that also involves communication and counseling and all these things now that would have existed In all likelihood if Freud wouldn't have made the original hypothesis that There was something about communication that could be curative. No Freud believed that Experiences that hadn't been now. He thought about experiences has repressed and this goes back to the videotape idea of memory so the idea would be that you have a record of everything that's happened to you and the records actually accurate and then some of those things that happen to you were very very shocking to you were very hurtful or very depressing or very threatening and so you've decided that you're Those have become repressed you're not paying any attention to them now He has a complex mechanism to account for that and I actually think this is a place where his theory went badly wrong because you don't have a videotape memory and It isn't obvious that the memories that you have of traumatic events are fully fledged and causally appropriate but just not paid attention to it's more like they're murky and Unclear in and of themselves and they contain too much and I don't think that people so much repress as they do refuse to attend to or are unable to attend to so it's more like a passive avoidance than a Passive avoidance of something that needs to be explored and gone through rather than it is something you know that you don't want to look at that you are part of you has put away and and I think that's a major weakness in his theory and has led to a lot of Problems with the idea of repression per se. But anyways, that was his idea that Terrible things have happened to you and you or some part of you doesn't want to To know about them to know about them. And so they live this those repressed experiences live an autonomous life of their own - and You here's an example of a trivial example of how that might work imagine that you're at work and Your boss says something to you that disturbs you maybe it makes you question whether your job is stable So you're kind of set about that But it's a casual offhand comment and you go back to work and you just sort of forget that that even happened, you know Maybe because you're attending to something else but then you go home and you're just Crabby as can possibly be and you go home and one of the people there says something a little annoying and you snap at them It's like well that's analogous to what Freud would call a complex, right? Is that this because you could imagine what's happened is that the boss's words have brought up a whole little sub personality predicated on doubt Up to the surface and who knows how deep that would be? Well what happens if I lose my job and if I lose my job, well, what sort of person am I? Exactly. And what about all these other times that I've failed and then maybe you remember the other times that you failed and what am I going to do in the future. So it's this whole cluster of ideas that surrounds that doubt and that's been activated It's a little part of you and then maybe you're not attending to that because you're busy doing some other work But when you go home something triggers it and like it's already there It's all you get way more upset than you should and that's that's what a complex is except in a much more complicated manner like a complex might be a whole series of experiences that you've had that are united by some emotion like threat That aren't haven't been transformed into a coherent representation But that can rise out of the unconscious and possess you if you guys many of you guys have been Depressed at at least one point in your life, you know, it's actually very common for University of Toronto students especially in their first year It's about one in three if you if you have students the Beck Depression Inventory But one in three taught University of Toronto students in our research have have hit criteria for hospitalization I mean the back is a little oversensitive as far as I'm concerned, but but you know what? It's like when you're depressed It's like it's it's it's a part of your personality sort of subsumes the whole and depression quite classically is well You can't think of anything good that happened to you in the past and you can't think of any reason why the present is good For anything and you're pretty damn hopeless about the future and so that's a complex as well and it's a complex that consists of nothing but negative emotion and it structures your Memory and your percept and your plans for the future all at the same time now Freud had a very lengthy list of ways that people could be treacherous towards Experiences they had that they wanted to repress and so he called them defense mechanisms This is how you fool yourself into believing that you don't have to take into account a certain set of negative experiences you know, it's like Well, we'll go through the repression. Okay. Well we talked about that denial. Well that often denial is a very complicated one See if I can come up with a good example It was a classic example for people who have I think it's called anis Ignasi, I don't remember exactly it's neglect That's a less technical way of thinking about so let's say you have a right parietal Damage from a stroke and you lose the left side of your body so you can't move it anymore, but worse you don't know It's there and you don't know that the left side of anything Is there anymore and god only knows how that happens but like you'll only eat half the food on your plate only on the right hand side and if someone asks you to draw a clock you'll cram all the numbers into the one side and so you kind of Lose the idea of left and I think it's sort of like, you know how when you're looking forward There's nothing behind you. You can't see anything back here. It's it's not black. It's not even gone It's just simply not there at all. And so if you could imagine that sort of stretching around halfway That seems to be something what neglect is like, but anyways, if you if you take someone with neglect according to Ramachandra and then if you irrigate their ear with cold water the Ear on the opposite side, then they'll kind of have a little convulsion and then all of a sudden They become aware of their missing left side If you talk to them before you do the irrigation, you say well well what's up with your left arm and they'll say well I My arthritis is bothering me and I don't want to move it they come up with some Something that sounds akin to denial, you know And then if you can snap them out of that with that irrigation and they'll have a catastrophic emotional response logically enough to the loss of their entire left side and Ramachandran report that lasting about 20 minutes and then they'll snap out of it and go right back into the denial and sometimes people deny things because They can't update what's happened to them is so overwhelming that they cannot Construct a new model. They just rely on the old one and you see this Well, imagine first that you've just had a tooth pulled and you know How many how long your tongue takes to like remap the inside of your mouth? It's really hard to come up with a new concept of you if something catastrophic happens, and so sometimes the denial is just that Something the thing that has happened is so overwhelming that the person can't model it But then maybe also they refuse to think about it and you see this emerging in lots of strange ways so for example, if people develop diabetes, for example They're often not very good at taking their medication or regulating their diet and you might say well they're denying the existence of their illness and to some degree They're probably doing that because who the hell wants to think that they're diabetic but even worse than that It's like it's complicated to be diabetic You're no longer the same person that you were and so you have to learn a whole bunch of new ways to be this new Person what to eat when to eat how to check your blood you have to be careful whenever you go out and eat like there's there's a Hundred new things a day that you have to learn and so separating denial from inability is a hard one But you can also understand that people might deny. No, that's just not happening. That's that's I'm not going to admit to that Reaction formation. Oh, that's one. Maybe you hate your sister and maybe you have your reasons, but you shouldn't hate your sister So what you do is act as if you really really like her. That's an overcompensation So that's another form of defense mechanism displacement My boss yells at me. I yell at my husband. My husband yells at the baby the baby bites the cat Well, they're not really dealing with the problem, which is the boss. It's just pushed on down the road and Identification you're bullied and instead of coming to terms with the fact that bullying occurs. You start bullying other people Rationalization, well, you know what that means already, you know Maybe you don't do your homework you're procrastinating. I bet you can come up with fifteen rauch No problem for why it's actually not necessary for you to do your homework right then Intellectualization what Woody Allen's movies are about like that. He's got all these neurotic problems, but he's smart and so he can come up with Intelligent reasons why he's so messed up even though he knows he's messed up and it doesn't help sublimation Well that that was one of the things that Freud thought characterized art So for example, there's a lot of erotic content in art and so if you're having trouble establishing a relationship or if you want to have a relationship with many people then maybe what you do is sculpt nudes or paint them and then there's projection which is I'm having an argument with you and I'm unwilling to admit to my moat my dark motivations, and I'm very skeptical of you And so I assume that you're characterized by all the dark motivations that I won't admit to in myself so Now Freud also believed that it was unconscious ideas that were at the core of psychological conflicts and he Described those conflicts as incomprehensible distress psychosomatic symptoms and so those would be the manifestation of psychological of The manifestation of psychological content in bodily form that might be stress a stress-related illness might be one way of thinking about that I've had clients who had hysterical epilepsy. So that was quite interesting. So that was a somatic manifestation of a psychological problem back when Freud was practicing Hysteria was much more common and maybe that was partly because Victorian society was so Centred on the theater and so dramatic and people would come in with like a paralyzed arm or something like that that he could Sort out with hypnosis, and so they were manifesting their Psychological distress in bodily form often in a manner that was representative of that psychological conflict in some way Behavioral anomalies hallucinations and delusions. He thought that all of those could be manifestations of inner internal psychological conflict with their sets of unconscious ideas, so You know, let's go back to the - the boss example Your boss says something nasty to you. Come home Someone says something a bit Provoking and you fly off the handle and then you have an argument about what the hell is up with you because they say well Look what I said was, you know this big and you reacted like this and you're gonna say, well no No, you're always annoying like that And which is kind of a denial thing and maybe the person doesn't let up and they say no No, I really know that something's wrong And you do like six other things to keep them the hell away from you and finally they're persistent enough so you break down crying and you say well I had this terrible day at work and you didn't even really notice that you knew that until the moment of the moment of the tears and you see that very frequently in psychotherapy - if you're talking to people for example Maybe they're relating a story about their their marriage that collapse badly and they're talking and all of a sudden they'll say something and they'll tear up and Then they'll continue and you can grab that you say look you just said something I noticed that your eyes filled with tears when you said that what was going through your mind Now often they'll they unless you catch it quick they'll forget So they're talking and they'll have and the talking about the past is you know flashing off imagistic memories and you'll say well that made you cry and And they often don't like that because for obvious reasons that something's come up that they don't want to talk about and So you say well what was flashing through your mind and the person will tell you like quite a lengthy little memory fantasy about a sequence of events that you know is still a Hot-button issue and that's another example of this underlying complex, you know and if you watch people You can watch people in normal conversation this happens all the times their eyes will move or they'll smile or you can see as They're speaking that all sorts of different ideas are flitting through their head It's dreamlike in a sense - it's sort of as if the person is talking and they're dreaming at the same time There's this image Laden set of memories that's going on at the same time and that can be quite broad far broader than they could encapsulate in the words and so you can catch that and if you're really listening to someone really paying attention to them you can see when they're doubtful or when They pause for a long time. That's another one You know that some things come up that that that's occupying their mind and interfering with the flow of conversation Freud was very good at listening in that manner While that happens with jokes too, you know and Like for example when I was showing you guys the Lion King Stills the other day and I showed you that picture of nella laying on her back with that peculiar expression on her face everybody immediately laughed and the you be Freud would have considered that an entry point into the Unconscious because there is a reason you were laughing about it. It goes along with it well it would have gone along with a sexual complex in that situation and everybody recognizes it instantly and they laugh about it and Comedians are really good at that because if they're good comedians They say what everyone's thinking but no one will say and it's a relief to everyone. You know, he What's his name? Canadian comedian so he's making racial jokes. No. No, it's Canadian. Uh, yeah Russell Russell Peters I mean, he's a great example of that, you know He feels a whole stadium with people of all different ethnicities and every single one of them is dying to be Insulted because of their racial background, you know it's a relief to everyone so he had salts the herbs and then he insults the Jews and then he insults the Christians and he's going Oh, I'm so glad finally someone said that No, so so he's speaking to part of their unconscious and it's the part that's actually uncomfortable with all of that kind of discussion Being repressed and staying below the surface It's way too weighty for people so jokes expressed in playful language what culture will not? formally express so You know to that when the culture starts going after the comedian's that things are not good So you should leave the damn comedians alone Because there are the people that can tell the truth and if you start to get annoyed at them, then that's not good so So a Freud was also extraordinarily interested in dreams Poor Freud who were just not gonna be able to cover him in enough detail. Well, um, How will we do this because I should tell you about the dreams Freud wrote a book called the interpretation of dreams and he he was the first person I would say who subjected dreams to a really comprehensive analysis and he used them to Investigate the place of complexes in his psychotherapeutic practice. So his clients would recount their dreams to him now He believed that dreams always expressed an unconscious wish and that was tied into his theory of repression And so for example if you were very very sexually repressed which was very common at the time then you'd have dreams with sexual content that we're expressing the the expressing the Undesirable fantasy essentially and by analyzing the dream you could get down to what you could get down to what was being repressed now Freud believed that the dream more or less tied itself in knots trying to hide its Content in some sense and Jung believed instead that the dream was actually trying to be as clear as it could it just wasn't part Of the let's call it the semantic memory system It was it was more like a feeler out into the unknown it was trying to Represent things as clearly as it could and so its use of symbols and that sort of thing wasn't so much to hide the actual Unpleasant content from the dreamer but to express it in the only language that the dream could use and so Freud Of course also believed that some of that was true All right. Well, we're gonna have to stop there. So since it's 2 o'clock, so we'll see you on Tuesday |
All right. So... We're going to leap out of the psycoanalytic domain, now. and start talking about a form of approach to personality and its transformations that's predicated on a different... a set of different philosophical assumptions. And...it's a bit tricky to navigate this because... it requires the adoption of a different frame of mind and, of course, that's the case with all the theorists that we're going to be discussing. Uh... Phenomenology probably had its most thorough explication in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. And Heidegger was actually trying to reconstruct western philosophy from the bottom up. He tought that we had been pursuing an improper pathway conceptually really ever since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Back around the turn of the century -- the previous century, that's from the 19th to the 20th century -- a new form of geometry was invented and that geometry was predicated on different axioms than Euclidian geometry. Now, people had thought for thousand of years that the world was properly described by Euclidian geometry. and, you know, when you employ a system like Euclidian geometry you have...there's axioms that you have to accept and they're like the rules of the game and, once you accept the axioms then you can go ahead and play the game. But there are other forms of geometry invented and...in the...in the later part of the.. 19th century and it turned out that those forms with different axioms actually described the world better than the Euclidian forms, sort of like the transformation from Newton to Einstein...this was the.. transformation from Euclide to, say, -- I think I"ve got his name right -- Rie...Riemannn, R, I, E, M, A, N, N., who developed a new form of geometry and turned out to be just the geometry that Einstein needed when he was putting his theories forward. And, the reason I'm teling you that is because you can think of systems that have different axioms as... as different tools Same idea that Piaget was trying to express when he talked about how children's cognitive representations underwent stage transformations so that they were starting to apply new principles. Not only a new way of looking at the world but they were fundamentally retooling their presumptions about how the world operated. And Heidegger tried to do the same thing with philosophy. And so... And it's tricky to figure out exactly what he was talking about but I'll give it a shot and then, we can move forward with Rogers So... Since the dawn of the scientific world and, likely, before that, we have tended to believe that we are subjects in a world of objects. And that 's obvioulsy a very useful way to view the world and you can tell that because, formalizing that in the form of science, has enabled us to extend control over the world in ways that we were not able to before. Uh...To formulate the idea of an objective truth has been an extraordinarily useful maneuver and so, the idea, roughly, is that everyone's perceptions can be contaminated by their own biases and their own fantasies, that subjective biases and fantasies and you can overcome that by stringently specifying the conditions under which an observation takes place -- so that would be an experimental method -- Having multiple people view the consequences separately, have them detail out what the consequences are and then look for commonalities across them. And, you think, well, the commonalities across a set of observations constitute a description of the objective world. And that's been insanely powerful. ..uh....crazily powerful. I mean that's not all there is to the scientific method but it's a big part of it. Now... there is an emergent problem with that perhaps, It's complicated but one of the emergent problem with that is... maybe, a consequence of stripping the subjectivity out of the world So... What science does is..consider anything subjective as a form of bias or error in the observation and then, get rid of it and so what you're left with, when you... formulate the scientific world, is a world that's stripped of subjectivity. Now, the problem with that is that you're a subject and so, when you strip the world of its subjectivity, that sort of leaves you isolated, like an isolated being with no necessary connections to objective reality, in the midst of a set of impersonal facts. And, that seems to have psychological consequences and the psychological consequences are that, well, for example, I think it's easier to develop a nihilistic sense of being, for example, if you believe that the world is nothing but objects and that you're,... fundamentally, an object among many and not a particularly important one, at that. So...there are psychological consequences to adopting the scientific worldview. Prior to the emergence of the scientific worldview, people were more embedded in what you might think about as a mythological landscape, you know, where every element of being had its place in something that approximated a master plan or, at least, a meaningful plan. And so...the idea of ... the meaningfulness of life was not necessarily such a pressing intellectual concern. And then... well, and so, we don't know the full extent of that ...I mean... I've talked to you a little bit about Nietzsche's idea that's expressed at the end of the 19th century about the death of God and his prognostication that the collapse of... classic systems of meaning open up people to posession by nihilism and also by potentially totalitarian political systems and that seems to have been what happened Now, Heidegger was very concerned about that, among other things. And so, he decided to reconsider reality from the bottom up. And so, what he did was generate an alternative set of axioms. He said something like "what if we decide to make reality everything that we experience? Forget about the subject/object divide. And...One of the other problems with the subject/object divide for example, is accounting for consciousness, right? because it's a problem that science really hasn't got any distance with at all, as far as I can tell. I mean, people have been trying to crack the secret of counsciousness, obviously, for a very long time but they've been trying to do it formally and using scientific methods, at least for the last 50 years and my sense of that is that they've got absolutely nowhere. Maybe, that's a bit unfair. We're better at representing how conscious experiences manifest themselves in the brain but we're but we're certainly no better at understanding how it is that we experience things. And that's the problem of "qualia". That's how the philosophers describe it. And qualia is the quality of your experience, like the fact that pain, for example...A pain you feel is by no means identical, at least, as far as your concerned, to some pattern of neurological activity, right? It's pain. It seems to be a fundamental reality of some... In fact, I think pain is THE fundamental reality. I think it's the only thing that people will never deny. But... So, there's these aspects of your existence that are subjective, like your experience of colour and your experience of beauty and just your experience of things or, maybe, just your experience. Your eperience plays an indeterminate role in the structure of being itself. 'Cause you might ask, well, what would there be if there was nothing conscious? and you could say, well... what would there be if there was nothing conscious of being? Well, it's a tricky question, because it depends on your a priori axioms but...it's not obvious what there would be in the absence of a conscious oberver. There wouldn't obviously be any duration between things. It would be very difficult to specify things in terms of size. There wouldn't be any of the qualities that we experience... ...that we experience our being is having 'cause colour doesn't seem to be an intrinsic part of the world, smell doesn't seem to be an intrinsic part of the world. It's very difficult. The more you think about it, you'd find the more difficut it is to determine exactly what there would be if there was no one to observe it. And...that's not the tree-in-the-forest idea, precisely It's not so much if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear it, it doesn't make a sound 'cause that's more a matter of the definition of sound than anything else. This is more, like, if there's a tree in the forest and there isn't anyone, is there a tree ? And that's a whole different question. Anyways, so, what Heidegger did, partly because he was not pleased, I suppose, with the metaphysical consequences of the scientific worldview, and also, perhaps, because he wasn't very happy about our ability to account for consciousness, he decided to see what would happen if he played a different kind of game. And you can do that in an intellectual discussion, you know, you can say, well, here's a set of axioms out of which a system will emerge, like, here's a set of rules out of which a game would emerge. Same idea. What if we start with a different set of rules? Let's see what we can do if we do that. You kind of do that when you play one video game rather than another. You know, there're little worlds that pop out. There's a different underlining structure. And then, you can go inside that world and experiment with it and see what comes out of it. So Heidegger decided to say "OK, what we're gonna do instead is we're going to assume that everything we experience is real. We're going to make our field of experience itself reality". And...So that would mean, from Heidegger's point of view, that everything about the being that manifests itself to you is to be regarded as equallly real. So, then, you think, well, that makes pain a fundamental reality. That makes anxiety a fundamental reality. It makes beauty and colour fundamental realities. They're not self-evidently reducible to anything else, which they would be... ...which they are in a scientific...from a scientific perspective because you have to think about them as manifestations of some more fundamental underlying material reality. And I guess that's another problem with the subject/object model and the material model. When you aggregate atoms, when you arrange them in certain forms. When they manifest themselves as certain molecules and then in more complex structures, they seem to take on all sorts of qualities that you couldn't predict if you just knew about the subatomic particles and the atoms themselves and so, of course, the... those are called emerging properties and you say, well, you can observe hydrogen and you can observe oxygen but that doesn't make it self-evident for you to be able to predict the properties of water. And, of course, that's a more simpler problem, all things considered, than the problem of figuring YOU out. You're this crazily complex aggregate of these hypothetical... hypothetically simple entities but it isn't obvious how their elemental properties can combine to produce YOU. It's not obvious at all. It's certainly not obious how a material that's supposed to be dead matter, so to speak, can manifest consciousness, no matter how complexly it's arranged. So... The phenomenologists, Heidegger leading them, were... attempted to produce a philosophical model of being. And...We'll talk more specifically about the phenomenologists after we're done with Rogers, but he is... he fits in that philosophical framework. And... One of the things that I've thought... -- This is a bit of a tangent but I'll move back to the model afterwards. -- See, I really like the psychoanalysts. And I like the idea that you have a psyche that's inside of you and that is structured, in part consciously and in part uncounsciously. There's something about that that's really cool and I've learned a lot from the psychoanalysts. But, you know, there is a funny conesquence of thinking the way they think -- and you do think the way they think, even if you don't know it -- like we tend to think that a lot of us is inside our head, you know. That's the psyche model basically. But, the more I've practised as a clinical psychologist the less I've actually been convinced that that's true So, I could say, well...Let's say I want to know about your personality. We think, well, I wanna now you. I wanna know about your subjectivity and I want to know what's inside of you. But that is not exactly what you do want to know if you're doing clinical work, say, with someone. You wanna know do they have any friends? That's really important. Because, if you're miserable and anxious and badly placed in life and misbehaving, one of the reasons that all of that can occur is 'cause you don't have any friends, you don't know anyone. And that's not something that's inside you. It's you, localized in a broader sphere. And then, you might say, well, do you have a job? And...Well, let's talk about the job. Do you actually make enough money with your job? Is it satisfying for you in any way? Are you bullied all the time when you're at work? Does it provoke anxiety? Is it a carrier that allows you to go somewhere? Are you overworked? Or...But let's start with just the first question. Do you have a job? Well, if the answer to that is "no", you have a serious problem and that would enough might be to depress you and make you anxious and hopeless and nihilistic and all of those things. And, you could say, well, you're not reacting very well to not having a job but that's kind of a foolish objection, even though some of it might be true. One problem is that you're not reacting very well to not having a job but another problem is that you don't have a job and that, actually, constitutes the problem, right? You don't get to eat, you don't have a place to live. Those aren't psychological problems precisely, even though a psychological probem could make it worse. Well, are you as educated as you should be? That's another question. How do you handle drugs and alcohol? Are they taking you down a bad pathway? Know? Uhmm... What about intimate relationships ? Do you have one? Do you have a plan for one? Or is that a never ending series of catastrophes or something that you avoid completely? That's a big problem! And, maybe, people don't... aren't attracted to you for one reason or another and.... You can think about that as a psychological problem but...it's an interpersonal problem. And the degree to which that's a psychological problem is... is certainly unspecified when you first begin to talk to somebody. What about your family? Do you have a family? 'Cause' it's hard to be in the world all by yourself. That's for sure! It makes things a lot more stressful...even though having a family can also be extraordinarily stressful...you know.. Do you have plans to have children? How are you doing with your parents? Do you get along with your siblings? You know, all of that, all of that, to me, is more fundamental and it's outside of you. Those are elements of your experience. More broadly...conceptualized... more than they are objects of your psychology or of your internal experience. You know, it's sort of like Well, a person is a creature that exists at multiple levels of analysis. Right? Something might go wrong with you at a cellular level. So, maybe, you're born with a genetic abnormality. So, something's wrong with you molecularly. Or you have something wrong with a major organ. Or, maybe, there's something wrong with you psycologically. Or, maybe, you're in a pathological family. Or, maybe, you're stuck in a pathological social system. And... figuring out why you're suffering means going up and down those different levels trying to specify the appropriate level for analysis and also the appropriate level for intervention. And, for me, as I said, even though I'm a great admirer of the psychoanalysts and I do things like dream analysis which I really find incredibly useful and enlightning, the first, the fundamental level of analysis is, well, what's your experience structured like... exactly? And that isn't localized in you. Now, the behaviourists do that to, because... -- which is one of the things I really like about the behaviourial approach of psychotherapy. It's very very concrete and practical. It's like, they'll say, well, there're certain things that you need to have in order to live properly and, maybe, you don't have the skills or the wherewithwall... wherewithal to accumulate them and we'll break them down into tiny little pieces and you'll practice. So, for example, someone who doesn't have any friends and you do a micro-analysis of their...social skills, say, and maybe an analysis of the kind of anxiety that are stopping them from going out and meeting people and then you address those things practically one by one. You try to get the person have some friends. You try to figure out how they can establish an intimate relationship. You see if you could help them sort out their family. You do what you can about their employment and...A lot of that's only tangentially related to -- really, in some sense -- to the structure of their psyche. But, one of the things you'll see, if you work as a clinician, or as a counsellor, is that, most of the time, people come and see you because they have problems, not because they have psychological problems. And those things are not that easy to distinguish. You know, it's sort of the psychoanalytic idea, sort of like, well, if you juste got your act together, everything would work out for you. It's like, yeaaaah... There's some truth in that. But... But, you know if you're 55 years old and you've just been laid off work, and, maybe, through no fault of your own, it isn't obvious how much getting your act together is gonna help you find another job...because... the actual problem that you're facing may have relatively little to do with you. And that would especially be the case if you're, maybe, on the bottom half of the itelligence distribution, for example, and so...it isn't as easy for you just to go out and pick up new skills at the drop of a hat...you know...and that gets harder as you get older because your IQ actually declines quite substantially as you get older, the working or the.... the fluid intelligence part, anyways -- exercise can keep that at bay, by the way, it's the best way to keep that at bay. So, anyways...you can think, from the phenomenological viewpoint, of your experience as a whole, instead of you being a subject in an objective world. And so...here's another way of...here's something that's quite useful. Jung talked about this 'cause he was moving towards a phenomenological perspective later in his life. The last book he wrote was called Mysterium Coniunctionis. He talked about three conjunctions that needed to take place in order for someone to be well constituted psychologically. And, you know how Piaget talked about learning that you could, not only follow rules, but that you could make rules for new games as sort of a highest level of moral development. I would say Jung extended the Piagetian moral continuum up past what Piaget had envisioned. Now, he didn't... he didn't do that 'cause he wasn't trying to extend Piaget's model. But... But you can think about it the same way. And it's not easy to come up with a moral mode of being, say, that transcends the ability to make rules for new games. That's damn smart, man, that's... That's a major home run by Piaget, as far as I am concerned. But Jung said something like this. He said, look, when you're going through the process of psychological integration... Here's a way of conceptualizing it. He thought about this as... symbolically, as male-female pairings, because... as I've tried to point out, the most... one of the most fundamental categories that our mythological imagination uses to structure the world is the category of masculine and feminine. And it moves that around, you know, it's a fundamental metaphor so you can move that around anywhere. And so Jung thought well, one of the things that you're trying to do is to get your thoughts and your emotions integrated. And so, you know, the classic Enlightenment viewpoint, roughly speaking, is something like, passion is the enemy of reason. Right? And so, to the degree that you're rational, it's sort of a Freudian viewpoint 'cause you've got your emotions under control. And...there's some truth in that but...not enough truth. I like the Piagetian idea better, which is that, no, no, that isn't what happens. What happens is if... if you're playing the proper game is that, you integrate your emotions underneath your thinkings, something like that. So, they're all working in the same direction, you know. So, for example, you can make your anxiety work against you or for you. And, one of the ways... I made a program, called the Future Authoring Program that I think helps people do that. 'Cause, one of the things you see when you're talking to people and they're trying to solve problems is that they're afraid to face the problem. And so, then, their anxiety is working against them and you can think about it as a... as antagonistic to rationality. But then, I could say, well, what if you think for a while about what your life would be like if you didn't face this problem? Because, if you think that through, if you have a problem and you really think through what the consequences are gonna be in two to three years of not facing it, then you're gonna get more afraid of not facing it than facing it. And that's great because then, your anxiety, instead of standing in front of you...instead of... you having a dragon that's guarding the path in front of you, you have one chasing you down the path from behind. That's a lot more useful. And so... you know, that's just a... a minimal example of the utility of getting your emotions and your... and your thoughts aligned the same way. The same thing happens with the aggression. You know...One of the most common reasons that people come and seek psychotherapy, really, is because they're too agreeable. But...what that means is they're not assertive enough. They haven't integrated their capacity for aggression. And so, other people can push them around. And...and they're very conflict avoidant. And...and so, the consequences of that across time is that you don't stand up for yourself well enough and you get taken advantage of and that spirals badly downwards. And so, partly what you do when you're doing assertiveness training with people is you find out what they're angry about...and... They're usuallly angry, if they're not assertive enough, because other people are taking advantage of them or, you could say, because they're not putting their own... necessities forward with enough force. It's hard to distinguish between those two things. But, anyways, you... get them to talk about what they're angry about, that often makes them cry, often many times, and then, you get them to kind of envision what they would want to have instead, which they're often afraid to do because people are afraid to think about what they want because that makes it more clear when they're not getting it and that's painful, right? Or, maybe, they're afraid of hoping so they won't specify a clear aim. But, anyways, you get them to think about what they might want instead. You get them to think about the cost of not pursuing that and then, you help them develop strategies for integrating their aggression and... with their thinking, so they can come up with a plan to approach the world in a more confident way. So, for example, someone might come to me and say "I'm being bullied badly at work". And so, then, I'll say "well, what are your options? You have to put up with it? Well, we'll figure that out cause maybe you do, maybe you don't have options. But here's how to find out. Get your damn CV together, so it's pristine, right? It's ready to go. Get over your fear of a new interview, because people are generally afraid of that. Get over your fear of applying for a new job. Start thinking about what it would mean to have a different job. Start thinking about what it would mean to have a better job, even. Cause, maybe, your fear is just making you stuck here but I can tell you one thing : if someone's picking on you at work and you don't have options, you lose." So you get the person to start building a strategy. It's like, "OK, if you're gonna tell this person to stop, you have to know how to make them stop and the one thing you need for sure is an option, and, if you can't...if you don't have an option then, maybe, we start thinking about the fact that you need some more training or something like that. Because you cannot negotiate if you don't have any power. So...because while....especially if you're dealing with someone who's really out to get you or really disagreeable, If you don't have a leg to stand on, they'll just push you over and, maybe, they'll jump on you too because that's what they're like and enjoy anyways, so... It's no joke. So... You put your options behind you and then you start to think about strategy." So I tell people "Look, if you're being harassed at work, you document it every time it happens. You write it down. So you've got like twenty stories about it and it's fully documented. And then, you go confront the person at some point with, at least, 3 pieces of evidence. And you have some sense about what you tell them about what will happen if they don't stop. So you have to figure out : well, they don't stop? What are you gonna do about it? Leave? Not if you can't leave. So, you have to be able to -- what is it? -- wield a big stick and speak softly. But, you see, that way...that's how you take your aggression, which is an absolute necessary part of your psyche and manifest it up into a sophisticated means of dealing with the world. You don't just suppress it and say "well, I should be able to put up with it" or "I wish I wasn't so angry" or some...it's like...forget that! That's... All that'll happen is your blood pressure will stay high and you'll die of a heart attack. Because anger, for example, is a very toxic emotion. And it does cause heart damage over time. It's the only emotion that we really know that's been linked to things like cardiovascular risk. And anger is toxic because it's like, you're driving a car, you're stepping on the gas and pushing on the brake at the same time. Because anger tells you to run away and to attack ...at the same time, cause you don't know what's gonna happen. And so, it really amps up the physiological demand on your body. And so, if you... -- including your heart and your musculature -- so, if you stay like that for like 10 years, you know...you're gonna age 20 years. And that's a bad plan. So... So, you know, you take your underground emotions and you integrate them into a sophisticated reality. Now... Jung said, so "FIrst of all you unite your mind, your thinking, let's say, with your emotions. So that makes one thing, instead of two fighting things." OK. That's a good one. And then, the next conjunction he talked about was "It isn'tenough to unite your mind and your emotions". And he tought about that as male/female pairing, symbolically. That's how it would manifest itself sometimes in dreams. So you take the masculine element and the feminine element, the thinking and the emotion, unite those and that makes you more like one thing. OK and now, all of a sudden, that's represented as symbolicaly male, that one thing. And it unites with something else that's now represented symbolically femin...female. That's the body. So you take the mind/emotion integration and integrate that in your body. So what'd that be? You act it out! Instead of just thinking. So, there's this philosophical idea called a... -- now I'm gonna forget what it's called -- It's a contradiction in action! There's actually a technical term for it. But that's when you think and believe something but you don't act it out. And so, that means there's a dissociation in you somehow between your abstract representations and what you manifest in action. Wel that's another form of discontinuity that isn't doing you any good. You know, the driver is going one way and the car is going the other. And you won't even be able to understand yourself, if you do that. But, even more, you're not putting your principles into practice. So, you're dissociated. Your being is dissociated. So... Once you get your mind and your emotions working together, then the next thing to do is to act that out consistenly. That was the second conjunction, as far as Jung was concerned, and then the third one was -- this is the tough one, and this is the one that's related to phenomenology -- you erase the distinction between yourself and the world. OK. That's a tough one. So, imagine you're dealing with someone who's hoarding. Now, people who are hoarding are often older or neurologically damaged or they have obsessive compulsive disorder. But then, you walk into their house and there's like ten thousands things in their house. There's...there's...there's There's, maybe, a hundred boxes. And you open up a box and, in the box, there's some pens and some old passports and some checks and... there's collections of silver dollars and some hypodermic needles and some dust and... you know, a dead mouse and...and... there's boxes and boxes and boxes. It's like that in the house. It's absolute chaos in there. Absolute chaos. Not order...chaos. And then, you think, is that their house or is that their being? Is that their mind? And the answer is : there's no difference. There's no difference. So, you know, I could say, well, if you want to organize your psyche, you could start by organizing your room...if that would be easier, cause, maybe, you're a more concrete person and you need something concrete to do. So...you go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk and you think, well... Just exactly what are you organizing? Are you organizing the objective world or are you objecting your field... are you organizing your field of being, like your field of total experience? And Jung believed that...and I think there's a Buddhist doctrine that's sort of nested in there, that, at the highest level of psychological integrration, there's no difference between you and what your experience. Now, you think, well, I can't control everything I experience. But that's no objection because you can't control yourself anyway, so the mere fact that you can't extend control over everything you experience is no argument against the idea that you should still treat that as an extension of yourself. Well, let's say that you have a longstanding feud with your brother. Well... Is that a psychological problem? Is that him? Is it a problem in the objective world or is it a problem in your field of being? And it's very useful to think that way because you might ask what could you do to improve yourself? Well, let's step one step backwards. The first question might be why should you even bother improving yourself? And I think the answer to that is something like : so you don't suffer any more stupidly than you have to. And, maybe, so others don't have to either. It's something like that. You know, like, there's a real injunction at the bottom of it. It's not some casual self-help doctrine, it's that if you don't organize yourself properly, you'll pay for it. And in a big way. And so will the people around you. Now... And, you could say, well, I don't care about that but that's actually not true. You actually do care about that. Because, if you're in pain, you will care about it. And so, you do care about it. Even if it's just that negative way, you know. It's very rare that you can find someone who's in excruciating pain who would ever say well, it would be no better if I was out of this. This sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it. It's incontrovertible. So...You get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary. So then, the question might be: well, how would you go about getting your act together? And the answer to that -- and this is a phenomenological idea too -- it's something like: look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it. So...Now, you think, well let's say you go into a -- you can do this in a room. It's quite fun to do it just when you're sitting in a room, like, a room...maybe, your bedroom, you can sit there and then just sort of meditate on it, think, OK, if I wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better, what would I have to do? And you have to ask yourself that, right? It's not a command, it's like a genuine question. And things will pop out in the room that, you know, you...like...there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you and you know that, maybe, a little order there would be a good thing and, you know you haven't... There's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for, like, six months and...the room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way and... like, if you...if you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment, there'll be all sorts of things that will pop out in it, that you could just fix. And, you know, I might say, well, if you're coming to see me for psychotherapy, the easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room. You think, well, is that psychotherapy? And the answer is, well, it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being And, I would say, start where you can start. You know, if something announces itself to you, which is a strange way of thinking about it, as in need of repair, that you could repair, then, hey! fix it! You fix a hundred things like that, your life will be a lot different. You know, I often tell people too, "fix the things you repeat every day. Cause people tend to think of those as trivial. Right? You get up, you brush your teeth, you have your breakfast, you know, you have your routines that you go through everyday. Well, those...those probably constitute 50% of your life. And people think "well, they're mundane, I don't need to pay attention to them", it's like no, no, that's exactly wrong. The things you do every day, those are the most important things you do. Hands down. All you have to do is do the arithmetic. You figure it out right away. So... A hundred adjustments to your...broader domain of being and there's a lot less rubbish and.. there's a lot less rubbish around and a lot fewer traps for you to step into. And so... That's in keeping with Jung's idea about erasing the diss...once you've got your mind and your emotions together and once you're acting that out, then you can extend what you're willing to consider yourself and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extent. Now, sometimes, you don't know how to do that. So, you might say, imagine you're walking down Bloor Street and there's this guy who's, like, alcoholic and schizophrenic and he's been on the street for ten years. He sort of stumbles towards you and, you know, incoherently mutters something. That's a problem! And...it would be good if you could fix it but you haven't got a clue about how to fix THAT. You just walk around that and go find something that you could fix because, if you muck about in that, not only is it unlikely that' you'll help that person, it's very likely that you'll get hurt yourself. So... you know, just because, while your experiencing things announce themselves as in need of repair doesn't mean that it's you, right then and there, that should repair them. You have to have some humility, you know. You don't walk up to a helicopter that isn't working and just start tinkering away with it. You have to stay within your domain of competence. But, most of the time, when people look at their lives, you know.... -- It's a very interesting thing to do. I like...I like the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat. You know, go back to where you live and sit down and think "OK, I'm gonna make this place better for half an hour. What should I do?" You have to ask. And...things will just pop up like mad. And it's partly because your mind is a very strange thing. As soon as you give it an aim, a genuine aim, it'll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim. That's, that's actually how you see, to begin with. And so, if you set it a task, espec... -- you have to be genuine about it, which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and then, you have to get them in your body, so you're acting consistently. You have to be genuine about the aim - But once you aim, the world will reconfigure itself around that aim, which is very strange. And...and... it's... it's..it's technically true. You know, the best example of that -- you've all seen this video where you...watch the basket ball being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the black team and, while you're doing that, a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don't see it. It's like... -- you know, if you thought about that experiment for about five years, that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it. Because, what it shows yo isthat you see what you aim at. And that, man, if you can get one thing through your head as a consequence of even being in University, that would be a good one: you see what you aim at. And so, because...one... inference you might draw from that is... be careful what you aimt at! Right? What you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you. And so, if the world is manifesting itself in a... very negative way, one thing to ask is: are you aiming at the right thing? Now... you know, I'm not trying to reduce everybody's problems to an improper aim. People get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons, you know. They get sick, they have accidents, There's a random element to being, that's for sure. But -- and so, you don't want to take anything, even that particular phrase too far. You want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people. But it's still a great thing to ask.-- OK, so, Rogers was a phenomenologist. He was interested in...he didn't start his philosophy from the perspective of subject versus object or from the idea of psyche, like, sort of inside you, your mind with it's layers. That's not how it looked at it. And so, let's go through... (now...) I'll introduce you to Rogers. I think that... then we'll talk more about him next time. I'm gonna start though, with something that I learned from him that I think was of crucial importance. And so, we'll set the stage for the further discussion with this. And I'm gonna read it to you. ROGERS : "Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications, we may say that the greater the communicated congruence of experience, awareness and behaviour on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing relationship will involve a tendency towards reciprocal communication with the same qualities. Mutually accurate understanding of the communications, improved psychological adjustments and functioning in both parties, and mutual satisfaction in the relationship." It's quite a mouthful. What does it mean? "Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications." Okay, we are having a conversation. I'm deciding I'm going to listen to you. Right, That's different than how people generally communicate, because usually when they communicate, they're doing something like: Okay We're going to have a conversation, and I'm going to tell you why I'm right, and I'll win if you agree or maybe you're having a conversation where i don't know what your trying to do, maybe your trying to impress the person you're talking to, so you're not listening to them at all, you're just thinking about what you're going to say next. Okay, so that's Not This. This Is: You might have something to tell me. And So, I'm going to Listen On the off chance that you'll tell me something that would really be useful for me to know. and so, you can think about it as an extension of the Piagetian... you know Piaget talked about the fundamental The fundamentally important element of knowledge being to describe how knowledge is sought. The process by which knowledge is generated. Well, if you agree with me and I find that out, I know nothing more than I knew before. I just know what I knew before. And, maybe, I'm happy about that because, you know, it didn't get challenged. But I'm no smarter than I was before. But, maybe, you're different than me and so, while I'm listening to you, you'll tell me something I would... I don't like. Maybe, it's something I find contemptible... or difficult, whatever. Maybe you'll find...you'll tell me something I don't know. And then, I won't be quite as stupid. And then, maybe, I won't run painfully into quite as many things. And that's a really useful thing to know, especially if you live with someone and you're trying to make long-term peace with them and they're not the same as you. And their way they look at the world and the facts that they pull out of the world aren't the same as your facts. And... even though you're going to be overwhelmed with the procilvity to demonstrate that you're right, it is the case that two brains are better than one. And so, maybe, nine of the ten things they tell you are dispensable, or, maybe, even 49 out of 50. But one thing...all you need to get out of the damn conversations is one thing you don't know. And one of the things that's very cool about a good psychotherapeutic session is that the whole conversation is like that. All you're doing is trying to... express the truth of the situation as clearly as possible. That's it! And so... Now, Rodgers' proposition -- and I'll tell you why he derived it -- was that, if you have a conversation like that with someone, it will make both of you better. It will make both of you psychologically healthier. So, there's an implicit presupposition that the exchange of truth is curative. Well, that's a very cool idea. I mean, it's a very deep idea. I think it's the most profound idea... It's the idea upon western civil... upon which western civilization -- although not only western civilization -- is actually predicated. The idea that truth produces health. But for Rogers, that was the entire purpose of the psychotherapeutic alliance. You come to see me because you want to be better. You don't even know what that means, necessarily. Neither do I. We're gonna figure that out together. But you come and you say "Look, things are not acceptable to me and maybe, there's something I could do about that". So that's the minimal precondition to engage in therapy. Something's wrong. You're willing to talk about it truthfuly and you want it to be better. WIthout that, the therapeutic relationship does not get off the ground. And so, then, you might ask: well what relationships are therapeutic? And the answer to that will be: if you have a real relationship, it's therapeutic. If it isn't, what you have is not a relationship. God only knows what you have. You're a slave, they're a tyrant. You know, you're both butting heads with one another. It's a primate dominance hierarchy dispute or, I don't know, you're like two cats in a barrel or two people with their hands around each other's throats. But what you have is not a relationship. So... All right. ROGERS "We may say that the greater the communicated congruence of experience, awareness and behaviour on the part of one individual"...PETERSON That's a reference to the same idea that I was describing, with regards to Jung. so... Let's say, you come and talk to me and you want things do go well. Well, I'm gonna have to more or less be one thing. Because,
if I'm all over the place, you can't trust any continuity in what I say. There's no....and...you There's no reason for you to believe that I'm capable of actually telling you... ...I'm capable of expressing anything that's true. So, the truth is something that emerges as a consequence of getting yourself lined up...and beating all the... -- what would you call? -- ...all the impurities out of your...out of your... out of your.... soul, for lack of a better word. You have to be integrated for that to happen. And you do that, at least in part, by wanting to tell the truth. ROGERS "...the more the ensuing relationship wil involve a tendency towards reciprocal communication with the same qualities...." PETERSON : So, one of the things -- 'cause I've been quite influenced by Rogers -- One of the things I try to do in my therapeutic sessions is, first of all, to listen, to really listen. And then, while I listen, I watch. And while I'm listening, things will happen in my head. You know, maybe, I'll get a litte image of something or I'll get a thought or a question will emerge and I'll just tell the person what that is. But it's sort of directionless, you know. It's not like I have a goal -- except that we're trying to make things better -- I'm on the side of the person...I'm on the side of the part of the person that wants things to be better, not worse. And so, then, those parts of us have a dialogue and the consequence of that dialogue is that certain things take place. And then, I'll just tell the person what happened. And it isn't that I'm right. That's not the point The point of this is that, they get to have an hour with someone who actually tells them what they think. Here's the impact you're having on me. You know...This is making me angry. This is making me happy. This is really interesting. This reminds me of something that you said an hour ago that I don't quite understand. And the whole... the whole point is not, for either person to make the propositon or convince the other that their position is correct, but merely to have an exchange of experience about how things are set up. And it's extraordinarily useful for people because it's often difficult for anyone to find anyone to talk to that will actually listen. And so...another thing that's really strange about this listening is that, if you really listen to people, they will tell you the weirdest bloody things so fast you just cannot believe it. So, if you're having a conversation with someone and it's dull, it's because you're stupid. That's why. You're not listening to them properly. Because they're weird. They're like wombats or albatrosses or rhinoceroses or something, like, they're strange creatures. And so if you were actually communicating with them and they were telling you how weird they really are, it would be...it would be anything but boring. So.... And you can ask questions, that's a really good way of listening. But, you know... one of Rogers' point is that, well, you have to orientate properly in order to listen. And the orientation has to be: look, what I want out of this conversation is that the place we both end up is better than the place we left. That's it! That's what I'm after. And, if you're not after that, you gotta think: why the hell wouldn't you be after that? What could you possibly be after that would be better than that? You walk away smarter and more well equipped for the world than you were before you had the conversation. And so does the other person. Well, maybe, if you're bitter and resentful and angry and anxious and, you know, generally annoyed at the world, then, that isn't what you want. You want the other person to walk away worse, and you too, cause you're full of revenge. But...you know... You'll get what you want, if you do that. So... ROGERS "We know from our research that such empathic understanding..." PETERSON: It's already defined, that. I want to hear you, I want to hear what you have to say, so we can clarify it and move forward. I want to have your best interest in mind...And mine as well...but... you know...both at the same time. Your family's too, if we can manage that. We're after making things better. ROGERS: "We know from our reserach that such emphatic understanding -- understanding with a person, not about them -- is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality. Some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people and that you have never seen such results. The chances are very great that you have not been listening in the manner that I have described. Fortunately, I can suggest a little experiment that you can do to test the quality of our understanding. the quality of our understanding. The next time you get into an argument with your wife, or your friend, or a small group of friends, stop the discussion for a moment and, for an experiment, institute this rule. Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately." PETERSON: What "accurately" means is they have to agree with your restatement. Now, that's an annoying thing to do! Because, if someone is talking to you and you disagree with them, the first thing you wanna do is take their argument and make it the stupidest possible thing out of it that you can -- that's the straw man -- and then, demolish it. It's like...so then, you can walk away feeling good about it and, you know, you primate domins... dominated them really nicely. So... But that is not what you do. You say, OK, well, I'm gonna take what you told me, and, maybe, I'm even gonna make your argument stronger than the one you made. That's useful if you're dealing with someone that you have to live with. Because, maybe, they can't bloody well express themselves very well but they have something to say. So you...make their argument strong. All right...then... ROGERS: "You see what this would mean. It would mean that before presenting your own point of view, it'd be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker's frame of reference -- to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him. Sound simple doesn't it? But if you try it, you'll find that it's the most difficult thing that you've ever done." PETERSON: OK, good, we'll leave it at that and then, we'll see you on Tuesday. |
so we started to talk a little bit about phenomenology last time and about carl rogers and, uh, I mentioned that the phenomenologists were interested in experiences in some sense as the ultimate as the ultimate reality, and that's a very complicated concept to grasp the existentialists also adopted that viewpoint. they were concerned with the the quality of subjective experience, not that they were ignoring the reality of the objective experience but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience and they were also more focused action than on on statement or belief. because here's something to think aboot you can think about this for a very long time if you're trying to understand what someone believes even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world if you should pay attention to how they act or what they say and that's a profound question, even from a from a neurological posi- perspective or a neuropsychological perspective, because the memory system, that you use to represent what you say, that you believe, is not the same memory system that you use to embody your knowledge about action so, it's akin to the distinction between telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike those are not the same things the descriptions don't even lay very well on top of one another because you don't actually know how you ride a bike you just know how to do it. it's built into your physiology, right it's a skill, and that's called procedural memory, and procedural memories are the same kind of memories that that basically structures your perceptions it's not that you can't orient orient your perceptions consciously, you can but once you've oriented them consciously let's say, some goal, it's automatic procedures that take over because you really don't know how that you organize your senses so that you pay attention you just know how to do it now the existentialists believed that actions spoke louder than words and that if you were interested in belief and even if you were interested in analyzing belief that it was better for you to look at how someone acted than what they said. Now one of the things you might think with regards to rogers is that his psychotherapeutic practice would be predicated on the idea that that you should bring how you act into alignment with what you say you believe so that there is no discontinuity between your body, that's one way of thinking about it, and your mind and so that there are fewer paradoxes in your in the way that you manifest yourself in the world so the concentration on action is one of the fundamental characteristics of existentialism another one is the insistence upon trouble and suffering as an intrinsic element of human experience So, you could say that we concentrate Well we could say: "Ok, well built into that is Trouble, built into that is Chaos, built into that is Anxiety and Pain; and Disease. You can fall prey into those things Without there being something wrong with you. Now, if you pin down a psychoanalyst like Jung or Freud They would of course admit that human misery is endemic to human experience, but Freud in particular tended to look for adult psychopathology in childhood misadventure in pathological childhood experience he at least implicitly claimed that If you hadn't experience childhood trauma and you had developed properly what would is that you would end up healthy, roughly speaking certainly, mentally sound but the existentialists don't really buy that belief in the beginning they basically make a different claim which is that Life is so full of intrinsic misery, let's say but suffering is a better way of thinking about it suffering that manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic vulnerability, that psychopathology is built into the human experience There's no real way of avoiding it or at least... There's no real reason to look for extra causes that might be a better way of thinking about it and you'd be surprised how often that observation is useful for clinical clients for example because one of the things that is quite characteristic about people, especially if they are introverted and don't have many friends; they don't have people to talk to if they are suffering, maybe they are depressed or anxious or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia or obsessive compulsive disorder one of the things that they always presume is that the fact that they are suffering in that manner means that there is not only something wrong with them but something uniquely wrong with them so that it is their fault and no one else is like them and one of the things that you do as a diagnostician; you know, you'll hear a lot of rattling about how labelling is bad for people and certainly myth labelling is bad for people and eve an accurate label can be a box you can get out of, but it is very frequently the case that you diagnose someone, it is a relief to them that you can't believe because they come into you knowing there is something isn't going properly but they think well, they are the only person facing it that it means that they are idiosyncratically strange in some incomprehensible way that no one else can possibly understand and there's no way that they can ever get better the things you do is that you point out to them depression and anxiety doesn't really require any explanation right, there is plenty of reason; I don't remember who said it "everyone has sufficient justification for suicide". I think that was the claim, well the point is that Is that you look through the experiences of the typical person Unless they are very very fortunate and they wont be that way forever that certainly is the case that they can point to traumatic experiences throughout their lives death and loss and illnesses and humiliation and all those sorts of things is sufficient to account for existence in the state of quasi-pemanent negative emotion now often if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature they assume that everyone else is the smiling face of that you see on facebook and so that alienates themselves from people and from themselves even more than certainly far more than necessary part of the psycho-education that is going on in therapy is merely educated people to understand that a fair bit of misery is the norm and that there is plenty of genuine reason for it and so the existentialists basically start from that stance It's like a 'Fall of Man' stance you know, because (it) is deeply rooted in the Western tradition roughly speaking is the idea that people are divorced from some early paradisal fate and that is the emergence of something like self-consciousness that produced that demolition of humanity and left us in a damaged state and people think they don't believe that but they believe it all the time and it's frequently how people experience themselves as if there is something wrong that needs to be rectified and it seems unique in some sense to human beings it doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way but people definitely think that way and so all the existentialists basically take that as a given. and then, they offer another question well, given that is your lot and then, there is ample reason for misery How is that you should conduct yourself? Because merely say giving into that misery or multiplying it, doesn't seem to be it doesn't seem to be doing anything other than multiply it it doesn't seem to be doing anything than increase it "It is bad to begin with it", you might say well increasing it is something you have to regard as worse so how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery? Ok, how do they present that to begin with? Ok so, this is from Pascal, and this is an existential statement that describes the position of the individual in the universe you might say, or you could say it explains a deep characteristic of individual experience, or existence. Hence, existentialism. All he does is he spends his hole trying to make |
I don't know if any other personality course in North America talks about Binswanger and Boss anymore maybe not But I think their ideas are extremely interesting And so I'm going to talk about them They were influenced very much by Martin Heidegger Who was one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers I would say probably - This school of This part of the phenomenological school was more influenced directly by a philosopher than any other school. And just to reiterate because you might keep wondering why I discuss so many philosophers in this course It's because Clinical Psychology in particular is not strictly a scientific enterprise It's because it's oriented towards values as far as I can tell And I don't see that there is any way of getting around that and that because what you are trying to do as a clinical psychologist and perhaps what you're trying to do with your own life is to figure out how to live properly Now you can construe that as the absence of illness Which is - That's about as close as you get to a scientific model of living well So you don't have any illnesses But even the idea of illness is an idea that's not precisely scientific It's an amalgam of scientific concepts and ethical concepts so There is no escaping it and if you're in the domain of ethics or values Then you're in what is more or less a philosophical domain But also if you're a scientist - if you're a scientist who is interested in personality It's also something you have to grapple with conceptually Because people live within an ethic and the ethic structures their perceptions And so even to study human beings as objects You still have to take into account they ensconce themselves within a value system and you have to understand what that means So for me it's easier and more straightforward just to get right to the root of matter to begin with and these people also had insanely interesting ideas They're really useful to know And so this, I would say maybe these The philosophy that underpins this might be the most complex of all the philosophies That we're going to discuss And that's really saying something because there is no shortage of complexities say in Jung And it's very difficult to portray what these people were up to I started by telling you, when we discussed Rogers a little bit That the phenomenologists were interested in the fact that people live within a self-defined perceptual world That might be one way of thinking about it Part of the way to start to conceptualize what that means is to consider for a moment just consider for a moment how many things there are in this room that you might look at and the answer to that is there's an infinite number of them Depending on how you're going to scale your perceptions You could spend, if you were a painter, you could spend a month painting that tile Painting a representation of that tile because it's infinitely complex To get the colors right, to get the patterns right, there's no end to it really Because to make a representation that was accurate It would have to be as detailed as the thing itself and it's crazily detailed But you don't concentrate on that sort of thing So you think, you're surrounded by an infinite number of potential things to apprehend But that isn't the world you live in The world you live in is a very very constrained subset of those things And part of the question is then: what's the nature of that constrained subset That's what you inhabit that's what makes up your experience And also how is it related to the infinitely complex objects that are around you And that's really what these people were trying to figure out. So you're in this perceptual frame, that's one way of thinking about it. That's the Dasein, by the way That's the existential frame or the phenomenological frame Because you can't think about it merely as perception Because it contains also, all of the things you experience subjectively The emotions and the Qualia that You know Qualia is an element of being that say philosophers or scientists of consciouness have a particularly difficult time with. And it's like - it's the quality of pain which doesn't seem reducible to a set of objective facts Or the quality of color, or the quality of beauty, or the quality of love, or the quality of sorrow Those things seem irreducible to some degree in and of themselves Like what is pain made of? It doesn't even seem like a reasonable question. I mean you can say, how do you decompose the neurological circuits that are involved in the experience of pain? Fine. But to ask what pain consists of or is composed of or what beauty is composed of, or love. Seems to be - There is something wrong with the formulation of that question Because those things sort of manifest them self as raw facts of existence And so they're constituent elements of this - of your field of experience Your phenomenological frame or this Dasein Which is the way that Heidegger conceptualized it. That's being there with you at the center of your what? Your realm of experience Now here's some characteristics of the Dasein The thing that makes up you The past and the present are implicit in it What does that mean? Well, say you have a particular emotional response to something, maybe it's a negative emotional response. And you see this very frequently with arguments with people You're having an argument with someone you love. Like a family member, that's a good example So lets say it's the same damn fight you've had with your mother 50 times Okay that's interesting because what it means is that All of those 50 times you've fought with your mother are implicit in this fight So althought it's taking place right here and now, the past has shaped it And if you wanted to investigate the fight completely You'd have to get to the bottom of that entire train of interactions you've had with your mother So it's implicit in your current experience that's one way of thinking about it But the future is implicit in it too because What you're doing right now, it's as if the future is folded up in what you're experiencing right now and it unfolds as you interact with it And so the reason it's conditional to some degree on you and your past is because it's your past and you that are determining the actions that you undertake right now that determine how the future is going to unfold around you Now not completely obviously because you don't have complete control over how things unfold But you seem to have some ability to determine how things unfold So one of the ways I've sort of conceptualized the phenomenological viewpoint This is one way of thinking about it I believe is that Instead of thinking - It does mean you have to reconceptualize your idea of objects Like an object seems like a unidimensional thing in some sense. It's an object. But most of the things people interact with aren't like that at all So like here's an example Let's say you have Let's say you get You're writing the MCAT, you want to go to medical school You've written the MCAT, you get the envelope in the mail, it tells you what your score is You hold the envelope, what are you holding? Well if you think about it from an objective perspective, it's an envelope Who cares? It's just a little piece of paper right? It's a rectangle of paper But that isn't what you're holding at all That's not what that thing is, that's how you see it. But it's not what it is at all and you know that. Your body knows that Because you're shaking. Well, what are you scared of? The envelope? Well the fact that you see it as an envelope is only an indication of just how narrow your perceptions actually are. Because it's a portal. Right? it's a portal through which you are going to walk into one of two worlds One in which you're in medical school and the other in which you're not And it also actually contains the past Which is really strange because you think, well you already know what the past is. No you don't. Whatever that score is in there determines what your past was and you know that too. You go watch a movie and a bunch of things happen in the movie and then something twisted happens at the end and all the sudden (trilling) Everything that you thought about the movie was wrong and a whole new past for the movie pops into being Well, are you a pre-med student? A valid pre-med student? Well the score will determine whether or not you were. Very strange, very strange Because you think of the past as fixed You know? And you think of the things you're interacting with as the things that you see and they're not And you're body is smarter than that, way smarter than that. Because it responds to, you could say And this is sort of a Rogerian perspective, your body is more likely to respond to what the thing actually is, than how it is that you see it. Okay so, the past is implicit in the current being and the future is implicit in the current being And so the past and the future sort of folded up inside it And you can unfold them and take a look at them Now, here's the next thing So, from a classic scientific perspective, There's the world of independently existing objects and there's the world of subjects And the subject is really in a secondary relationship to the object Because the objective world is what's real But one of the things that the phenomenologists were concerned about that Is that, well you run into this problem again of exactly how it is that you define the object Because, just as the envelope with the scores in it can't be reduced to the paper, So the object that you're interacting with only reveals what it is as a consequence of the way that you interact with it So for example if you take a complex object like another person It's like well, what is it that you are. Well a huge part of that is going to depend on exactly how I interact with you Because you could be a raging beast if I interacted with you one way and you could be a perfectly, you know, cooperative entity that was very pleasant if I interacted with you another way And so partly what's happening - you can think of what you're interacting with as something that's really multi-faceted. Truly multi-faceted And you say, well you're trying to determine what it is. But the problem is that what it is manifests itself only in accordance with how you behave towards it And it's actually the case with even objects that you reduce right down to their constituent elements So you might say like lets talk about subatomic particles. Hypothetically, the most objective thing there is Well it turns out that whether they're a wave or a particle depends on the way you set up the experiment Now I don't want to make quantum analogies but what I'm saying is that the object is a very very complicated thing And so even defining what it is means you have to adopt a frame of reference with regards to it And you undertake only some procedures and not others So, when you're defining an object even scientifically you actually don't define the object. What you say is here is a multi-dimensional entity if you approach it in this manner, that's the procedure, right? The methods. If you approach it in that manner, it will manifest that set of traits But the problem is, is that there's all sorts of other traits that it could manifest just as well If you treated it a different way And so the object itself is not something that - it's not something easily reducible to a single set of properties I was talking to one of my students yesterday, he had a pretty smart thing to say about images. We were talking about deep images you know the sorts that you might see in a really high quality museum So maybe they're I don't know 15th century or 16th century renaissance masterpieces They're inexhaustible to some degree Which is why they're in museums and people go look at them you know decade after decade And it's partly because Every time you look at them you're different You go in one week, you look at it, you see something. You go in the next week, you look at it and you see something else. Well it's partly because You're bringing something entirely different to the situation and the image is complicated enough to allow it to reflect something new to you depening on the stance you take in relationship to it And lots of things are like that lots of things are like that A book you read when you were sixteen is going to be an entirely different book when you read it when you're 35 Say well the book's the same. It's like, it depends on how you define the book Because it isn't even obvious where the book is exactly Well it's on my shelf in the library It's like no, that's a chunk of paper that's on your shelf in the library Where exactly the book is, that's a much more difficult question to consider So it depends on how you define the book So without a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such True this implies that every object Everything objective in being merely objectified by the subject is the most subjective thing possible Well you also know this again when you're in an argument with someone "it's you" "no, it's you" "no it's you" It's like, you don't know Are you being biased? Are you looking at the situation incorrectly? The person you're arguing with trying to convince you that it's your problem You think "no you made me angry" It's like hmm an interesting statement you know? as if you could do that But it does seem that way, you were being provocative "Well you're just too sensitive" "hmm how are we going to settle that?" Well it's a continual argument and that again has to do with the crazy entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception I've showed you this before and I actually think this is a pretty good Schematic representation of what's meant by Dasein And this is a complicated little diagram Although the diagram itself is quite simple It's predicated on the following assumptions You need to narrow down your world and what you're doing is narrowing it down from lets say an infinite set of possibilities To a finite set of manageable possibilities and you do that a bunch of ways Partly - merely - you can't your senses aren't acute enough to detect everything. So pure stupidity in some sense stops you from being absolutely overwhelmed You don't have eyes in the back of your head for example so you don't have to worry about all those things you're not looking at behind you But then it's far more than that You just can't handle that full complexity so there's a continual narrowing process And then you exist inside that narrowed reality Like if I look at you like that There's not a hell of a lot of difference between that looking at you like that Like I can't really see these people. I can tell they're people, that's all I can see your face I've got just about all of it right there That's a very narrow and you know you're moving your eyes around and inhabiting this constant narrow space Well what's that space - what does that space you inhabit consist of Well that's Dasein that space that you inhabit and so we can say It's something like this You have implicit in that perception a sense of where you are and what you are doing right now it's in the perception and then in the perception as well is what you're aiming at Because you're not just sitting here passively or you'd be asleep or you'd be unconscious You're sitting here doing nothing You know, physically But you have an aim in mind and the aim is what you're pointing your eyes at The aim is what's structuring your perceptions The aim is what's revealing that part of the world that is being revealed to you, to you That's the revelation of the world It also structures your emotions. It also primes your behaviors So it's not a drive, it's not a goal it's not a motivation, it's more than that. It's all of that at once. That's sort of what your personality is You see the phenomenologists don't really think about personality They think about the manifestation of your reality It's not exactly your personality It's that you're the center of a reality and you constitute that reality But all of your elements of experience constitute that reality and so it's simplest element is something like Where you are and where you're going and the embodied actions you undertake to relate those two things Which would include your eye movements because of course perception is an active phenomena You are shaking your eyes back and forth unbelievable rapidly Otherwise, if you can make your eyes stand still, which you can do with great concentration Everything will black out Because you have to move your eyes back and forth so the light hits different cells cause the cells get exhausted And then they stop reporting. So you're just whipping your eyes back and forth in a micro-way constantly And as well as moving them around voluntarily and involuntarily So even perception is a lot more like feeling things out with your fingers Even when you're using your ears or your eyes It's very active, there's no passive perception it's a motor act to perceive and so your motor act is determined by your hierarchy of values that's one way of looking at it So another way of thinking about it is that's how the past and future are implicit in it Your very active perception is determined by your entire value structure So It's implicit inside of it, it's folded up inside of it You can tell that too because if something violates it Again, maybe an argument with someone It's good to think about people as the thing you interact with the most as the canonical object Cause they're so damn complicated and they get in the way all the time and when someone gets in the way of what you're doing You know, it isn't obvious what they're interfering with It might be the little micro-routine that you're undertaking right now You know, maybe you go home and you make a nice dinner and the person you're making it for is all rude about it Okay so what exactly are they getting in the way of? Well They're certainly getting in the way of your expectations of having a nice emotional time for the next hour But you have no idea how indicative that is of some serious flaw In you, or them, or the relationship, or the situation, or the way you've conducted your whole life Or the way they've conducted their whole life and all of that's packed in there It's sort of like the unconscious of the psychoanalysts but it's more - it's not the same conceptualization. It's another way of looking at the same phenomena So Alright so the two people we're going to talk about most are Medard Boss And he was influenced by Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher Taken to task often because he turned out to be tangled up with the Nazis more than he should've been And Husserl, that's Edmund Husserl, who was actually if I remember correctly was Martin Heidegger's teacher That's Ludwig Binswanger - and they were Both of these two people were influenced both by Freud and Jung Okay so here is one of Binswanger's claims I love this claim it's such a cool idea And I think there is neurological support for it. Neuropsychological support What we perceive are "first and foremost" not impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch Not even in things or objects, but meanings Well that's an interesting idea Because You know it's been said that every person in an unconscious exponent of some great philosopher's presuppositions Well, mostly the way you think about the way you perceive is that there are objects in the world You see the objects You think about the objects, you evaluate the objects You decide how to act on the objects, and then you act Right? it's from Object, sense, perception, emotion, cognition, action That's wrong. That isn't how it works It's partly not the way it works because You're actually - the way that you interact with the world exists at multiple levels So for example You have reflexes so if I If I poke you hard, you'll react like that. You'll jerk back And that, you do that without thinking That's part of a neurological circuit that's very deeply embedded and that's virtually automatic It's reflexive. It doesn't require conscious perception at all It's too slow for starters And so you have - there's multiple levels of you interacting with the world. And at one level, you're seeing objects, you're thinking about them, you're planning what to do But you're doing all sorts of other things that are way faster than that and other things that are way slower at the same time. Now what Binswanger claims Is that what you see in the world are meanings So it's the meaning detection first and the object recognition second Now that's a hell of a claim, that is But there's definitely levels of your nervous system That operate in that manner So for example Here's a good example, people have blind sight There visual cortex is damaged they can't see objects So they think they're blind But if you show them an angry face, they'll manifest a change in the skin conductants, They'll orient And it means that the eyes are still mapping the face onto the amygdala And the amygdala is mapping the pattern onto the body, no object perception Pattern Pattern Pattern No object perception And so the meaning is what's being perceived first and foremost And you have to perceive meanings first because you actually want to stay alive That's the trick So the world is full of these things that have meanings to you that are relevant to your survival And what you're perceiving first is the relevance of the pattern to your survival And the idea that you can conceptualize that as a set of objects Well first of all, that's a pretty new idea Technically speaking, right? Because Technically speaking we didn't really start to conceive the world as subject in an objective world until we really formalized science Now science was implicit long before it became explicit But it didn't become explicit until about 500 years ago So you react to meanings So here's an example Babies if you If you have two surfaces and you put a piece of glass between them You know, they're elevated And you put an 8 month year old baby on the one surface so they can crawl It won't crawl across the space And you might say it sees a hole and won't crawl across it But that isn't what it sees. It sees a place to fall off Direct, that's direct perception So when I see this for example My eyes see that as a pattern That pattern's on my retina it's propagated through my optic nerve It's propagated into my brain, it's propagated onto my motor cortex And the propagation is This That Right? So I can pick it up And as soon as - when I look at that this is implicit That's implicit in the perception You think well why do you see that at the size and resolution you see it at? That's why So the fact that you see it that way has this implicit in it It isn't that you see the object and match your hand to it It's that matching your hand to it is part of the perception of the object It's what gives the object meaning And so you see actually you perceive the meaning of the object It's part of the perception And you can't not see the meaning of the object Well if you're a scientist you can sort of separate out the object from its meaning That's actually what science does It tears the object away from its meaning And then of course there is nothing meaningful left So science ends up value free. But that's because the meaning has been torn out of it Now there's technical reasons for doing that But Binswanger's point is don't kid yourself you see the meaning first. Here's an example You watch the trade towers fall What did you see? Well you could say you saw the towers fall It's like why are you in shock for two days afterwards then? Well because what are the towers exactly? As long as they're standing and operating, they're towers. As soon as they fall, God only knows what they are Maybe they're the beginning of the next war You know? Who knows what they are? And so everyone was in shock for three days Because what they saw was the indeterminate meaning of that event And it opened all sorts of gateways It's like well, the towers fell, there's gateways open everywhere. We don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going to happen next. We don't know where we are And that's direct perception mapped onto your body. Bang, you're in shock You see the meaning first And well you constrain it down to well why are you so upset? Well the towers fell It's like that's the best you can do for a verbal utterance It's what your perceptual systems reported to you But God only knows what happened We still don't really know what it meant that they fell Now most things have put themselves back together but And then you think well what does it mean? What does it mean that what you see first is the meaning? and that's a really tricky question because you might say well That's when you get back to the problem of what constitutes real So I could say well you've evolved to see the meaning Well then we might ask Well if you've evoled to see the meaning and that's kept you alive Is there anything more real than the meaning? Because somebody who is a materialist would say "well no, the object is more real" It's like no, it depends on how you define real It might be that the most real thing about the visual cliff is that that's a falling off place And that its secondary description as a you know an object A hole or something like that That's something you paint over the top of the primary reality And so, Well here's a practical application of it or at least one of the things I think is practical You know, you can have experiences that differ in their, lets call it, high quality meaning You know so you get engaged and engrossed in something and you're happy about that It's not that you're happy It's that you're engaged and engrossed in it, you would do it again Even though it might take effort You can tell that where you are is meaningful Well I think what happens in that situation is that You're in a Piagetian place Where many of the games that you're playing are stacked sort of isomorphically on top of one another And the experience of meaning is the fact that you're playing a small game properly Nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly Nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly too, etc all the way out Past is balanced, future is balanced everything is stacked up And there's a report coming from your being telling you that, that's why you're engaged You might say well maybe that's real. Maybe it's more real than anything else That's a strange thing because if you think that meaning is separate and secondary from the real objective world Then the reality is the object But it isn't obvious that the reality is the object It's certainly not how we act It's not how we perceive And so Did we evolve to perceive reality? It depends on what you mean by perceive Perceive might mean did we evolve mechanisms that allowed us to survive in the face of that reality. Yes. Is that whats real? What enables you to survive in the face of reality? It's a definition It's a perfectly reasonable definition unless you can come up with a better one Meanings are primary Now that brings up a strange issue So what determines the meaning of what it is you're perceiving Well this is where Binswanger and Boss disagree Binswanger says It's the a-priori ontological structure. The world design, or matrix of meaning Okay so what does that mean? Well, you have a particular history. Biological and cultural and individual And you're viewing the world through the lense of that set of particularities So it's almost if you are behind a curtain and the curtain has certain hoels in it And you can see through the wholes in the curtain but the curtain is your construction so the curtain with the holes determines what you see Well, Boss would say no it's the opposite in a very strange thing The meaning of the world manifests itself to you more or less of its own accord And It's a tougher one to explain Disclosure of meaning: Boss the revelation of the object The emergence of the phenomena: the numinous The very word phenomena is derived from phainesthai To shine forth, to appear, to unveil itself, to come out of concealment or darkness Okay here's an example you see someone beautiful Is it your perception is it your perception or does the beauty exist? That's the difference between Binswanger and Boss Cause Binswanger would say well the reason that thing appears to you as beautiful is because of the way you're filtering it And Boss would say no The beauty inheres in the object itself and manifests itself. It shines forth And so I really like this concept this concept of phenomena That's why they're phenomenologists phainesthai means to shine forth From the phenomenological perspective you pursue those things that shine forth Now you remember this is kind of a parallel idea I suppose it's a parallel of Jungian ideas You remember in Harry Potter that when they're playing Quidditch he's always chasing the snitch? And you remember how, if I've got this correctly, Quidditch is basically two games at the same time right? There's the standard game and there's the game that the seekers play Yes? I've got that right? What happens if the seeker gets the snitch? Games over right? They win Very interesting. She has a brilliant imagination that woman, Rowling So the idea is that in every game there's two games going on at the same time. There's the ordinary game And there's the game that the seekers play and the seekers chase the thing that shines at them And that's what that little thing is the snitch. It's a round circle with wings. It's a very very old old old symbol It's a symbol of what It's a symbol of reality before it's fractionated into its parts I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that It's a symbol of It's a symbol of Imagine that there are things that move forward to make you curious And you were trying to figure out what was common among all the things that made you curious That thing that Harry Potter's chasing, that's a symbol of that It's golden like the sun, it flits around and attracts your attention and it's always moving And if you're seeking, you chase it. So that's the phenomenological idea, that's the disclosure of meaning You say well when you're curious about something, why are you curious about that? Is it calling to you? Or is it something that you're interpreting? Well I would say it's both I think that's the way to resolve this puzzle It's that There isn't a perceiving entity without a structure And your structure has been evolving itself for three and a half billion years There's no perceiving entity without a structure But by the same token the thing that's being perceived Also shines forth with its own potential manifestation And you need to think of it both ways at the same time But the curiosity issue is a really fascinating one Because curiosity pulls you forward It's not random That's the thing that's so cool You can't really control it, but it's not random If your curiosity is random, you're schizophrenic And I mean that technically Because one of the things that happens to schziphrenics is that the mechanisms that establish relevance become pathologized And they see meaning everywhere, randomly And that's partly why they generate delusions Because the incoherent manifestation of meaning calls out for a representation They develop a paranoid delusion if they're intelligent enough to put everything together So you're curious and something pulls you forward Well you can interact with the curiosity and you can follow it but you can't really direct it The question is where is it taking you? So that little ball, that was a manifestation Of what the Greeks referred to - Greeks? Is that right? - Mercurius It's a Roman and Greek God Mercurius The spirit Mercurius is the messenger of the Gods. The winged messenger of the Gods It flits around You say well the curiosity pulls you forward To where? Well to wherever it wants to take you Well that's a Jungian idea as well Is that your curiosity is like the manifestation of your self to the ego Right? It's the thing that you could be in the future calling you forward Something like that Very strange idea Very interesting. See when you start to understand That you're not in control of what makes you interested in things The whole world shifts around on you Because the question is if you're not in control of that, what the hell is directing it? What's going on? It's not you It's not under your control It's not random. It's alive. It's dynamic It has an orientation towards something That's the Jungian self. Or that's the manifestation of meaning Yes very strange I told you this already See there's an old representation, a very old represenation of the snitch right there Now this is an old symbol, eh? You've got this dragon of chaos here It's kind of like an octopus as well That twist in its tail refers to infinity. Dragons almost always have an infinite tail like that And it's got the claws of a bird, maybe a bird of prey The body of an animal and the head of a snake And then down here You see its got the sun up there so it's sort of aiming upwards towards the sun this thing And then down here is this thing called the round chaos. It's an old alchemical system And if you look the dragon is fertilizing this And that has potential in it like an egg It's full of potential And so it's matter and spirit at the same time It's sort of like it's a representation of that which you're exploring Because you could say well the thing that you're exploring It's sort of a constructivist idea You explore something new What do you generate from the exploration? You. Because as you explore it you learn things. That changes you. So you generate psyche out of the exploration. That's spirit. And you also generate the world out of it But the thing to begin with is psyche and world at the same time And that's what this thing represents And that's what Harry Potter is chasing That's what makes him a seeker Very strange ideas Now I'm going to tell you a dream There was a dream I had while working on these ideas And I'm going to tell you the dream for two reasons One is because it bears directly on these ideas Two because well we just covered psychoanalytic thought and I want to show you how a dream can work Cause it's not easy to find a dream that you can interpret in a way that's public that makes sense Cause they're usually so tightly defined contextually You can define them in the therapeutic context because you know so much about the person It's very hard to pull that out and make it meaningful outside of that context But this dream works. Ok so, I was dreaming I was dreaming that there was a small object. It was a circle, a sphere about this big. And it was floating on top of the Atlantic Ocean And I had kind of a birds eye view of it and I was following it along Like maybe you know like a drone would follow behind an object And it was floating And it was really zipping along man, it was really really fast And then the scene shifted To a bunch of scientists they were sitting inside a room full of television monitors And they were watching this thing move across the Ocean And so it was here and it had four hurricanes beside it one here, one here, one here, and one here So it was in the center of four hurricanes So whatever it was was like some bloody potent thing zipping across the ocean Then the scientists got a hold of it I guess and the scene shifted And I was in a museum like an old Victorian museum And this thing, this ball was now inside a Imagine a wood stand With a glass case on top of it It was inside the glass case and it was floating and it was sort of pulsing a little bit And so inside the room there was Stephen Hawking And the American President I don't remember who it was he was sort of faceless But Stephen I thought, Stephen Hawking? What the hell Disembodied intellect That's Stephen Hawking so that's what that meant And the President well he's just the symbol of order And so this thing whatever it was that was surrounded by these winds Had been placed into a category system right? It was in a museum, it was boxed in. It had been conceptualized and categorized Partly by disembodied intellect, that was Stephen Hawking, and partly by social order And so there's a Binswanger Boss thing going on there The thing pulses and is alive so its got its own power But it's also encapsulated in a category system So I'm a third person observer in there I'm not in the room I'm just seeing this So that was fine So the next thing that happened Oh yes, one of them described the features of the room Its walls were seven feet thick They didn't want this thing going anywhere And it was made out of titanium dioxide I thought, what the hell is that? Well it's a paint It's a paint substance but it's also what the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of So my dream was saying well what's the hardest substance there is? Well it's titanium dioxide It's not getting out of that box The walls were designed to permanently constrain the object Okay now the next thing that happened was this object was You could tell it was kind of alive And it kept shifting around and at one point it turned into a chrysalis you know a cocoon And I thought what the hell does that mean? And then, so it turned into a cocoon And I don't know if you've seen a chrysalis when it's just about to hatch But it twitches around eh? It's alive that thing So they're very strange things And then at the end it turned itself into a pipe Like a Meerschaum pipe And I thought Then it reformed itself into a sphere And just shot right out of the room Like the walls weren't even there It decided it was gone bang! It was gone And I woke up and I thought what the hell What the hell does that mean? It took me forever to figure this out So then about two years after experiencing this dream, I was reading Dante's Inferno In the ninth Canto, a messenger from God appears So Dante goes down into hell right? It was Dante's attempt to describe It's brilliant So imagine that you go to a bad place psychologically right? So your life has collapsed that's terrible But then you're trying to figure out what you did wrong and how you're to blame for it And so what you do is a descent A descent into your own foolishness and stupidity Level, by level, by level And that's what Dante was trying to explain That's what that hell was Levels of catastrophe and there's something right at the bottom And he found that it was betrayal that was at the bottom So in any case I was reading that And there's a line in there that made me remember this dream Cause I tried to figure out this dream for years eh So that was like a herald of the arrival of this messenger It's a very powerful scene And I thought about this dream with this thing with the four storms So The pipe thing that really, that really took me forever to figure out And I finally remembered this painting by Magritte This is not a pipe Right so what does that mean? Well what it means is the representation is not the thing It's a very famous painting right? The representation is not the thing Well even the perception is not the thing And that's what the dream was trying to get at It's like this thing This thing that was so powerful and so capable of transforming Could be encapsulated temporarily within a conceptual system But whenever it decided to leave it was just going to leave And so What is was referring to was the potential that there is inside objects So for example And it's such a complicated thing to explain Nobody knew what cell phones were going to do You make the cell phone You think you know what it is You don't know what it is No one knew what the birth control pill was going to do You make it, you think you know what it is, you have no idea what it is And it's going to do some of the things you think it will do And it's going to do a bunch of things you have no idea about And that's because Things are more complex than they look They're multi-dimensional and they have I wouldn't say a life exactly but they have an intrinsic complexity That tends to unfold across time And it's only somewhat predictable And so you have things under your control and in your grasp to some limited degree But at any point it's like the switch in the yin yang symbol At any time chaos can collapse into order Or order can collapse into chaos And that's what that dream meant Another painting by Magritte trying to express the same thing right? All men in suits, all uniform, all thinking the same way Same haircuts, completely socialized Blinded by their own perceptions That's us Cause you think well your perceptions illuminate and bring you information It's yes and no They also constrain to equal degree I dreamed much later about a year later This was a very cool image too You know that image I think is it Da Vinci or Michelangelo Of the man inscribed in the square inside the circle It's a very famous image Well it was like that except It was a cube and not a square And so there was kind of a faceless person, almost like a mannequin inside this cube And he was suspended about two feet off the ground And on the front wall It was like wall paper designs, there were these little squares about this big And they mandalas square with circles inside them And then inside the circle there was a little snake tail that was out And the whole wall was covered with these snake tails And the person When the person walked forward the wall would move forward And when he walked backwards the wall would move backwards So it was always this far away And he could reach out and pull any of those snakes into being And so that was another dream of the same sort of idea What do you have in front of you? A world of objects No You have a world of potential in front of you And you can interact with any aspect of that potential And while you're doing so, you realize it You pull something into being that wouldn't have been there before And what you see in front of you is a wall of potential The potential is not infinite because you're constrained But, it's still For all intents and purposes it will do you just fine it's more potential than you could ever need And so the dream See dreams Dreams are at the forefront of thinking They get there before you The creative imagination is at the forefront of thinking If you think that you're moving out into the unknown To gather new information What gets there first is the imagination Obviously that's what Piaget says about children as well You imagine it first Then maybe you can represent it in speech And a dream is part of that imaginative process That's what artists are doing They're going out into the unknown And representing it imaginatively So what does that painting mean? Well if the artist knew that he'd just write it down Right? The art is beyond what's articulable otherwise it's not art it's just propaganda So the artist and the dream their out on the frontier right? That's the open imagination And so when you're conceptualizing new things The dream and the imagination can bring you places that you don't even know that you can go And it's a mystery too It's like I don't know how I figured this out It was as if the figuring out manifested itself inside me Cause that's the experience in a dream right? You don't feel "I dreamed this up" You feel "I had a dream." Where did that come from? It springs out of the unknown and offers something to you Here's pathology as conceptualized by the phenomenologists It's a very interesting way of thinking about it Existential guilt and fear as debt to possibility Well so there's this idea It's like an exisitential idea that you have some problems That you have some problems in your life Well part of the Dasein is the sense of responsibility that you have to address those problems It's part and parcel of the way that human beings manifest themselves in the world So part of your pathology would be failure to bear the responsibility for your being And a sense that you have a debt to your existence And according to the phenomenologists that's built right into the sense of your being It's a remarkable conceptualization Right well that's a good place to stop Okay good we'll see you in a week and a half |
So, I want to tell you about a book today. The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago." (to the camera crew) You ready? (to the students) The book is called "The Gulag Archipelago," and it's by a a Russian author... a Soviet author named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was in the Gulag Archipelago concentration camp system for a very long time. He had a very hard life. He was on the Russian front when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the early stages of World War II. Now, Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact and Hitler invaded the Soviet Union anyway. And from what I've been able to understand, the Soviets had prepared an invasion force for Europe at that point but were not concerned with having to defend their territory, and so they were caught completely unawares by Hitler's move. And the conditions on the Russian front were absolutely dreadful, and Solzhenitsyn was soldier on Russian front. He wrote some letters to one of his friends, which were intercepted, complaining about the lack of preparation, and using bitter dark humor to describe the situation, and the consequences of that was that he was thrown into work camp. The Soviet system relied on work camps, and so those were large labor camps of people who were essentially enslaved, many of whom were worked to death — often froze to death — working in conditions that were so dreadful, that they're virtually unimaginable. Solzhenitsyn spent a very large number of years in these camps, sometimes in a more privileged camp, because he was an educated man, and sometimes in worse camps. He also developed cancer later, and wrote a book about that called "Cancer Ward," which is a brilliant book. So, he had a very hard life. There's just no way around that. To be on the front, and then to be in a concentration camp, and then to have cancer, That's... that's pretty rough. Now, he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago." He wrote a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" first, that was published in the early 1960s, when there was a brief thaw. Stalin was pretty much out of the picture by the end of the 1950s. There’s some indication that he was murdered, by Khrushchev, and Khrushchev became a premier of the Soviet Union after Stalin. And there’s some indication, perhaps, that Stalin was either murdered by Khrushchev and a set of his cronies, or, when he was very ill, just before he died, was not helped, at least by… wasn’t provided with any medical attention because of the intervention of Khrushchev and his cronies. Now, there's some indication as well, at that point, that Stalin, who was an absolute— absolutely barbaric in every possible way you could imagine, was planning to start a third World War. And he was certainly capable of doing such things, because he had already imprisoned or killed tens of millions of people. Now... just after Stalin died, there was a bit of a thaw in the Soviet Union with regards to internal repression. In the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn published a book called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which was a story about one day in the life — his life, really — inside one of these so-called "gulag archipelago" camps. Now, he called it the "gulag archipelago" because an "archipelago" is a chain of islands, and so Solzhenitsyn likened the work-camp system in the Soviet Union, which is made of isolated camps distributed across the entire state... He likened that to a series of islands, and hence the metaphor. And "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was one of the first publications released in the Soviet Union that dared make public what had happened inside these camps, at least initially. Now, that thought didn't last very long, but that book had a tremendous effect. It's a short book; it's worth reading. After that, he spent— he wrote a number of other books which were also— He's a great literary figure; in the same category, I would say, as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which is, like, really saying something, you know. Those two are perhaps the greatest literary figures who ever lived, with the possible exception of Shakespeare. He wrote this book called "The Gulag Archipelago," which is published in three volumes, each of which is about 700 pages long. The first one details the origin of the oppressive Soviet system, at least in part under Lenin, and then its full-fledged implementation under Stalin and the deaths of... Well, Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in internal repression in the Soviet Union at something approximating sixty million, between 1919 and 1959. Now, that doesn't count the death toll in the second World War, by the way. Now, people have disputed those figures, but they're certainly in the tens of millions, and the low-end bounds are probably twenty million, and the high-end bounds are near what Solzhenitsyn estimated... He also estimated that the same kind of internal repression in Maoist China cost a hundred million lives, and so you can imagine that the genuine historical figures, again, are subject to dispute, but somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. And one of the things that's really surprising to me and that I think is absolutely reprehensible — absolutely reprehensible — is the fact that this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West.any of these it's because your education - your historical education Establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor. One of the things that's quite interesting about the gulag camps, and this is something that's very relevant to understanding modern Russia is that so, ordinary criminals were put into the camps, and so were political prisoners. but the ordinary criminals, and so those would be rapists and murderers, let's say, as well as thieves who were engaged in theft as an occupation. Those were regarded by the Soviets as "socially friendly" elements. And the reason for that was that they assumed that the reason that these people had turned to crime was because of the oppressive nature of the previous Czarist/Capitalist system. And that the only reason that these criminals existed was because they had been oppressed -- they were oppressed victims of that system and so one of the convenient consequences of that absolutely insane doctrine was that the Soviets put the ordinary criminals in charge of the camps. And these were very, very seriously bad people, and so, you can imagine the way that they treated the political prisoners who were regarded as socially hostile elements, sometimes because of their own hypothetically traitorous acts, but more often merely as a consequence of their racial or ethnic identity, or the fact that they were related by birth to, say, people who had been succcessful under the previous systems, so who had any any association with nobility or any association with were known as the Kulaks, who were the only successful class of former peasants in the Soviet Union. Because they were regarded as "privileged." You may have heard that word more recently. They were regarded as "privileged" and therefore as enemies of the state. And it didn't matter if it was your father, or your grandfather, or your great-grandfather who happened to be "privileged," but the mere fact that you were a member of that group was sufficient reason to put you into a camp. |
so I want to tell you I want to make a little announcement first. I'm going to do a series of lectures, I think, starting in May. Maybe at the Isabel Bader Theatre? We're trying to look into booking that. On a, I'm going to do a psychological interpretation of the bible from beginning to end. That's the plan anyway. So I'm going to do that once a week. So if you are interested in that, I would recommend that you... (and maybe your not an that's fine obviously) but, if you go onto my Twitter account you can just, there's a place you can sign up It doesn't mean that you'll attend. I'm just trying to see if there are people who are interested. I've been interested in doing that for a long time and so I think I'm going to try it and so. Anyways! That's the announcement. Then, is that about it? I guess so. OK! So look we are going to switch gears today. Um. The first half of this course, as you've no doubt already err gathered, is... because it's grounded essentially in clinical theories of personality it tends more towards the philosophical. And I told you that the reason for that was that I regard clinical psychology as a branch of engineering rather than a branch of science. It's Human Engineering obviously; and because of that it's an applied science and so that means it straddles the ground between a science and a practice and and it, because it's, it involves human beings, it necessarily involves value because we live inside value structures; and so the logical consequence of that is that investigation into the philosophy of value is necessary in order to understand clinical Psychological theories. Because really what you are trying to do as a clinician, you could say that you are trying to do two things; one is to help people have less terrible lives. But you are also trying to help them have better lives. and there is obviously a value structure that is inherent in that attempt because you are moving from something of less value to something of more value and so.. and it's best to just to face that and all the complexities that come along with that, head on. Now! I think that what you do as a clinician, to overcome what ever tendency you might have to impose your value structure on someone is you do an awful lot of listening And so my basic practise with people is to say to them. "Well; obviously you are here because you would like things to be better. But that's OK. We can use your definition of what constitutes better. We can use your definition of what constitutes worse. Or we can establish that through dialogue, and negotiation. What are you aiming at? How would you like things to be better a year from now say? If you could have what you wanted, if your life was put together what would that look like? And you can have a very straight forward discussion with people about that if you are not cram the way that they are orienting the world into your particular perspective. Now. That's one of the dangers of being the adherent of a given psychological school. Now having said that. It's also... There was research done many years ago, showing that if you were an eclectic psychotherapist which means that you sort of pick and chose from different therapeutic schools. You tended to not be as effective as you were if you were the dedicated adherent of a given school and I think that the reason for that is that there are so many schools of psychological thought that if you say that you pick an choose from all of them, what that really means is that you don't know anything about any of them. And then there's also the additional factor (maybe, you might call it) that if someone comes to you and they're very chaotic and confused. Helping them impose ANY STRUCTURE onto their life is likely to be an improvement over no structure at all. And you can think about that in a Piagetian sense, is that you know you’re going to be happier playing a game, rather than no game. And there's many games that you can play that are better than no game. And so if you go to a therapist that has a particular view point and they help you structure your understanding of the world within the confines of a given clinical model; and you came in there very chaotic and uncertain, then maybe that's going to be a lot better for you than just floundering. And I think that there's some real truth in that. And I think that that's part and parcel of the same, er; of another, what, you might call it "reasonable observation about maturation" is that it's very necessary for people at some point in there life to dedicate themselves to a single game, of some sort. Which is kind of what you are doing at University. You Know, you have to become 'one thing' at some point in your life; and the sacrifice of course is that you give up all the other things that you could become. But you don't really have a choice because if you don't decide voluntarily to become one thing. You know to become a disciplined adherent of some specific er practise or profession or view point then you risk just ageing Chaotically And you don't get away with not ageing. So you might as well age into something that's actually something rather than just becoming an old child Which is really... Which is not a good thing. It's not a good thing to see. Especialy when people hit about 40. It's not, it's not pretty, For them or anyone else. And even at 30, it's getting pretty old at that point. 40; it's like almost irreparable at 40. And the reason for that is, you start running out of opportunities when you're young and stupid people don't care because they think, you know, whatever. You've got decades of of possibilities still ready to unfold in you, but if you are in the same unspecified position at 40 people are much less forgiving especially if they are going to hire someone who doesn't know what's going on. Or employ them or sorry engage them is some sort of productive activity. They might as well take a chance on someone young and full of potential rather than someone who has really lived more than half of their life already because of course you have, by the time you are 40. OK. So, anyway, so that is with regards to putting the first half of the course to bed so to speak. The second half is more scientific. and there is a bit of a gap and it's a bit of a gap I am trying to resolve conceptually because now we move into more biological models and into models that are psychometric and Psychometrics is the psychological study of the study of psychological measurement. And now if you are a scientist there's a couple of things that you are obliged to do if you are a scientist one is to utilise the scientific method that's usually the experimental method where you take 2 groups randomly selected, apply a manipulation to one of them and not equivalent manipulation of a different sort to another; hypothesize about what the outcome is likely to be and then test it ah, that's the technical experimental model anyways you're also obliged as a scientist to come up with a measurement of your, of your to come up with a measurement, let's just put it that way that's reliable and valid. Okay, and what a reliable measure is one that measures the same way across multiple measurements. So, for example, you wouldn't want to take a ruler that's made out of flexible rubber to measure things with because it wouldn't give you the same measurement if you put it in different situations That's reliability, and it's a term you need to know. It means that the measurement tool produces stable results across different instances of the measurement. Without that, you don't have a measurement. And the other critical factor with regards to a measurement is that it has to be valid, which means that it actually has to measure what it preports to measure and it actually has to be usable for an array of different purposes as a consequence, so, you might think well the purpose of scientific endeavor is to predict and to control, you could say understand, predict, and control but understanding, prediction, and control are all manifestations of the same underlying throughly designed comprehension. Now, here's what's happened with the measurement of personality It's a funny story in some sense, a peculiar story, because in many ways, what we've come to understand about personality from a scientific perspective, developed in a very atheoretical manner. It's not very common in scientific endeavor that that occurs, is that what we know about personality emerged from, I would say, statistically rigorous observation, without it being the consequence of any real model. So, often, what happens, in scientific endeavor is that someone generates a model first, a theoretical understanding, and then they generate measurement tools based on that theoretical understanding and then they test the measurement tools to see if well if the measurement tools perform properly, and if they fail at least to invalidate the underlying theory That isn't what happened with psychometrics. Except in a loose way, so here's the loose theory, and you've got to get this exactly right to understand this properly. You've got to get it exactly right, and it's really important, because, insofar as you guys are interested in psychology, especially in the experimental end of psychology, measurement is everything and so much of what psychologists publish and write about is incorrect, and the reason it's incorrect is cause they do not have their measurements properly instantiated. It's a massive problem especially in social psychology. In fact it's probably a fatal problem, in that most of the things that social psychologists measure don't exist. And social psychology has been rife with scandals for the last 4 or 5 years, and there's good reason for it but a big part of the problem is is that, the measurement that people are not stringent and careful enough about their measurements so we're going to walk through this very very carefully, so I'm going to set forward a set of propositions and you have to think about it, cause each of them are...they're axiomatic, so you sort of have to accept them before you go on to the next step. And there's certainly room to question them. But here's the bare bones of the psychometric model of personality so we'll call it roughly the big 5 model and the reason it's called the big 5 model is because the psychometric investigations have indicated that you can specify human personality along 5 basic dimensions. You might ask well what exactly is personality, and well that's partly what we have been trying to wrestle with in the entire course so far and I would say umm what exactly is a trait. Think of an trait as an element of personality; and I think the best way to think about a trait is as a sub-personality. So you are made up of sub-personalities that are integrated into something vaguely resembling a unity.
But the unity is diverse. There are describable stable elements that characterize you. That are elements of your being. So for example, here are some common ones. I would say, are you so sure ,or would you rather be alone? So here is a good question for you to define decide whether you are an extrovert or an introvert. It's pretty straightforward. It is the first major dimension. Basically if you take any set of questions, about, any set of questions that could be applied descriptively to a human being, and you subject them to a statistical process called factor analysis. You can determine how they group together. So, what I would be interested in, Let's say I ask you a hundred questions. |
[Music] I started to talk to you about trade Theory and now I'm going to make a jump to biology and that that's a strange jump in some sense because the two levels of analysis are relatively disconnected but what's happening right now at at the sort of outer echelons of personality research is that the workers at the Forefront of the field are trying to integrate what's being established at the statistical level of analysis with what's known at the psychobiological level and so this emerging science is known as personality neuroscience and um it's developed in a rather strange way because the traits that were identified that I discussed with you on Tuesday the big five traits all emerged as a consequence of the statistical analysis of of descriptors characteristic mostly of the English language although it's been duplicated in other languages so in some sense it was an a theoretical model right it just came out of the linguistic data so there was no real initial inferences about brain area or neurological activity or or anything like that to drive the formulation of the big five model in instead the big five model came first and then people started thinking okay can this be put into alignment with what we know about the brain and so people have been hitting that pretty hard I would say over about the last it's probably 30 years something like that because H Zink and and his student Jeffrey gray were pretty far along on this kind of thinking by say 1982 when gray published his book The neuros pychology of anxiety which the paper you're reading now a model of the limic system and basil ganglia basil ganglia applications to anxiety and schizophrenia that's a very short summary of the book that gray published in 1982 which has been incredibly influential um if you're interested in going on in Psychology especially on the scientific end but I would say pretty much regardless if you're interested in going on in Psychology that's a that's a very useful book to tackle there's a newer version it was published by gray and MCN and I think 2000 something like that it's Hardo like and you may F have found the paper that way too gray was a very very unfortunately he died a few years ago he was a very very smart person and he knew the animal literature on Behavior neuro neuroanatomy and neuropsychopharmacology inside out and backwards and so whenever he defined a term he always made sure that the term was intelligible at a behavioral level and at an anatomical level and at a pharmacological level it had to you know the the the the ideas that he were developing had to make sense at these multiple levels of analysis before he would accept them as as genuine and gray did a remarkable job of extending our knowledge of the biological and evolutionary basis of at least the first two personality traits say extroversion and neuroticism roughly corresponding to positive and negative em so um so that's partly why you're reading gray and and Gray's theory is also cybernetic Theory um cybernetic theory is a is a variation of a theory developed by an MIT cognitive scientist named Norbert Wier who who was an early AI artificial intelligence researcher and he proposed that that that intelligent entities were go directed and that they organized their behavior around reducing deviations from a goal while they were approaching it once they had decided what it would be and that that's also proved to be incredibly influential um we'll talk a fair bit about cybernetic models as we progress um so gray is sort of a combination of artificial intelligence cybernetic theorizing and then an incredible amount of data that's come in from animal behavioral research and as far as I'm concerned most of the things that we know about the brain have been derived from animal research um the animal researchers tended to be extraordinarily careful scientists they were influenced by um um BF Skinner who established the sort of the initial theoretical basis for understanding how animals learn we'll talk about that a little bit next class so anyways that's the that's the context within which gray is working Leo these are all papers you're going to read except the third one which is optional Leo is also an an emotional he's an affective neuroscientist so he's someone who studies emotions mostly again animals and Leo has done a lot to sort of add some of the pieces that were're missing in in gray gray probably concentrated a little bit too much on a brain area called the hippocampus which is the brain area that sort of lets you know if it's reasonable to be calm where you're currently situated and so what the hippocampus does in some senses compare what it is that you want to have happen with what is happening and if the two things are the same then you're calm so it's a match mismatch detector and it has access not only to memory but also to formulations of say the desired future um Swanson I had people read the Swanson paper last year I put it in your reading list as optional um it's worth hacking through if you can man manage it it's very hard paper though which is why I took it out of the you know required reading list the reason I like Swanson we're going to talk a fair bit about him today is Swanson's not a psychologist he's actually a developmental neuro I can never say this properly an he studies developmental Anatomy we we'll do that um and so he's very interested in how the brain unfolds across time during embryonic development and then up into maturity and so he understands the brain differently than a psychologist would because a psychologist tends to analyze the brain you know as a sort of mature thing usually in adulthood but but for Swanson it's a much more living and transforming system and he's trying to set forth a schema for understanding brain anatomy and also associating that with function you know and you might think that that's a well Advanced science already that we know how to segment up the brain and we know you know roughly what the pieces do but we haven't even really managed to establish the terminology prop properly yet it's very neuro real Neuroscience is a very new field and and there's no limit to the number of things that we don't know about it including even the basic classification structure now Swanson has put forth a very intelligent basic classification structure and part of the reason that I think it's so relevant to a personality class is because it maps in a beautiful way way onto some of the things that we've already talked about especially P so there's a nice direct mapping of PJ's developmental Theory onto Swanson's theory of neural development and then of neural function and and that's completely accidental because Swanson never cites P so they're non-overlapping literatures and I kind of like that because you know if if something pops up in one place with one method and pops up another place with a completely different method especially if those two places are distinct in terms of their historical development you might start thinking there's actually something there you know it's sort of like seeing something and hearing it at the same time you got two independent sources of data it's like triangulation in a sense and so it was very exciting to me to come across this paper by Swanson um I think he's one of only two scientists I ever wrote a fan letter to I mean really it's a brilliant paper and then uh there's there's other reasons why it maps on to what we're going to talk about too because Swanson also points out quite clearly the function of the he kind of roughly separates the hypothalamus into two halves and uh he points out that they have quite distinct functions and the functions also map on to some of the things that we've been talking about in a very lovely way and so there's a lot of reasons to to go through Swanson's paper carefully you know it's like 50 pages long but the guy put it in some sense his whole life's work is in those 50 pages so you know even if it takes you 12 hours or 20 hours to read it it's like that's not too bad if you're going to extract out like 30 years of solid research Gray's Book is the same like if you read that book you you've got if you read it and understand it you've basically got a fair chunk of neuroanatomy a lot of animal behavioral uh analysis so um behaviorism in general a lot of psychopharmacology and a lot of understanding of the functional signific of the brain's major neurotransmitter systems you can get all that from Gray's Book that's that's a killer book you know if you can extract all that out so anyways Carver and Shire also take a cybernetic perspective fundamentally they're more cognitive scientists you're going to find their paper a little bit farther down the road but they're also very interested in how creatures human beings in particular select goals and then align themselves with those goals and for our purposes we're going to talk a fair bit about motivation today and the distinction between motivation and emotion is not clear they're both words that sort of function within a linguistic context but for the sake of argument and of course all the emotions aren't the same it's not like there's one circuit that subsumes emotion there's multiple circuits that subsume emotion and they're not identical circuits you know so it isn't like every emotion is a variant of the same thing it's not and it's the same with the motivations so they're very loose groupings motiv and emotion but for the purposes of our argument we're going to make this case roughly motivations set goals and roughly emotions Orient you in relationship to those goals now like I said those categories overlap anger is usually considered an emotion and it often has a goal right the goal is to hit something or hurt something that's that's one possible goal so emotions can segue quite easily into motivational States but whatever you got to use a category system of some sort to clear clarify things and so that's what we're going to we're going to uh pursue motivation set goals it's actually more complicated than that you know I showed you that little oval diagram with uh you know desired future and unbearable present so to speak motivations actually don't just set goals they also Prime behavior and they also set up the perceptual frame within which you interpret the world so for example if you're hungry it isn't just that you're driven to eat first of all eating is a very complex Behavior especially if it's associated with food preparation say you're the the systems that you've used in the past to procure food and then to ingest it are sort of disinhibited by the motivational state so they're at the ready and then your sensory system is tuned so that it's going to focus on those things that are relevant to eating and tune out everything else so the motivational State also does perceptual tuning and then there's a felt component of it as well so it's not it's it's not reasonable to only say that motivation sets goals or that it drives Behavior it it does three things goal setting behavioral driving plus it provides a perceptual schema within which those other two things make sense and so a motivated state in some sense is like a little micro personality it's it's only got one aim it's sort of a oneeyed micro personality you know so it's only aiming at one thing but it still has all the other aspects of personality so sort of you know for me that that aligns nicely with the psychoanalytic idea that you know you're you're you're a you're a loose aggregation of multiple fragmented personalities you know they're sort of coherently tied together at the highest level of analysis but they can go off and do their own thing you see that in situations for example like eating disorders where the hunger system itself starts to become almost a spun-off part of the personality and the rest of the personality then Wars with that and that's sort of in some sense that's like cortex versus hypothalamus and you never win cortex does not win over hypothalamus the hypothalamus is what keeps you alive so it's one of the things that keeps you alive you could do without your cortex but you cannot do without your hypothalamus and the connections stretching upwards from the hypothalamus which is a very old brain area are much more powerful than the connections coming down from the cortex to modulate the hypothalamus and that's another indication of just exactly who's in charge when the chips are down you know and that's why it's so hard for you to override your basic emotions or motivational States it's like the system evolved to keep you alive and it's not particularly willing to give up control in a sense given that your survival is staked on its function so it's useful to know that because you know if you if you if you if you pursue Psy ology and you stay within the human side of psychology say instead of wandering off into the animal behavioral research you'll see that most human psychologists and neuropsychologists are very cortico Centric they really like to think that it's the newly evolved parts of the brain that are in charge and that's just not right the newly evolved parts of the brain are in charge only when nothing is bothering you like if you're not hungry you're not thirsty you're not too excited you're not too curious you're not too terrified you know you're not too cold you're not too warm any of those then the cortex is in charge but if you deviate substantially across any of those Dimensions the probability that control over your behavioral output and your perceptions is going to devolve Down The evolutionary hierarchy to more primordial brain areas is extremely likely you know and you see the same thing happens you know maybe you're having a discussion with someone right and they exhaust the limits of your rational knowledge which means basically they out argue you well what happens well usually what happens is that people cry or they get angry it's like they're out of Cortex it's bang right down to the more the lower and more primary evolutionarily determined systems so okay now we're going to we're going to take a look at how the brain functions in general and so we're going to start pretty General and then we're going to go narrow and the first thing that you might want to think about is what problem exactly is the brain wrestling with and the major problem is that reality is so complicated it has so many layers and so many interconnected causal links that it's complex beyond comprehension and that's a big problem I mean you think about all the subatomic complexity that's that's a horrible thing then there's the complexity at the atomic level and that's you know pretty overwhelming and then there's the molecular level which makes the atomic level look simple and then there's the comp exceedingly complex structures that emerge out of the molecular level especially in living organisms so that would be roughly at the organ level of existence you know and then there's you as a totality with your brain which is and the brain is so much more complex than everything else in the universe that it's not even in the same category so there are estimates for example by Gerard Adelman that there are more Connections in your brain more patterns of Connections in your brain than there are subatomic particles in the universe so you know that's one major league complex thing and there's lots of them around and you know they're all integrated into families and then uh you know roughly tribal groupings some of which get large enough to be Nations and then that's all embedded inside of some biological system and so on and so forth all the way out to the limits of the cosmos I mean this is one complicated place and you know your job in in large part is to understand it but also not to become overwhelmed by it because you have to simplify it down to the point where you can sort of think about one thing and do one thing and so you have to screen all of that out so that the complexity complexity doesn't overwhelm you when you're attempting to do anything anything simple even to look at yourself in the mirror which is also a very complicated thing to do part of the problem your brain is is always facing is what can I ignore and the answer to that is well you need to ignore almost everything and and that's that's a problem because of course it's not always obvious what it's okay what's okay for you to ignore you know and that changes on you suddenly too because you know because you have imperfect knowledge you might think something's irrelevant and it turns out to be of critical importance it's a deadly it's a deadly deadly difficult problem and so one of the ways that we solve this is we're actually pretty blind to to to to almost everything you know our sensory input is limited by our physiological limitations certainly so there's like in terms of vision there's we only see a very small uh Little slice of the whole electromagnetic spectrum and it's the same with sounds and you know we can only touch things that are basically within our reach and so that limits things substantially and then there are also things we can't detect like we're not very good at detecting um like we don't have the same ability that say is it platypuses and some fish can detect electromagnetic disturbances around them on their skin and like there's senses that we don't have so we're we're narrowed a fair bit by what it is that we're able to perceive um and we're actually narrowed in what we can perceive far more than anybody ever guessed so I'm going to show you a little video here the Monkey Business illusion count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball e the correct answer is 16 passes did you spot the gorilla for people who haven't seen or heard about a video like this before about half missed the gorilla if you knew about the gorilla you probably saw it but did you notice the curtain changing color or the player on the black team leaving the game let's rewind and watch it [Music] again here comes the gorilla and there goes a player and the curtain is changing from red to Gold when you're looking for a gorilla you often miss other unexpected events and that's the Monkey Business illusion learn more about this illusion and the original gorilla experiment at the invisible gorilla.com so how many of you saw the gorilla no let's let's do the see the gorilla okay how many of you had no known about this video beforehand yeah the gorilla part of it yeah so you guys don't count now and then you know I get someone who's seen it before and they still miss the damn gorilla so that's pretty funny so but but of course Simon Dan Simon set this up because his original video got so popular you know viral popular that everybody has seen The Invisible Gorilla and so you know now he's showing you that well you think you're smart you've been clued into how blind you are and it turns out you're not any smarter than you were to begin with right so how many people saw all three things that changed I saw the oh you've seen it before so okay and how many didn't yeah okay so the vast majority of you missed one or more of the things that changed you know and they're not really trivial things like The Disappearance of a person from six people that's fairly major and you know the whole background changed color and you might think you'd clue into that and so so the weird thing is even when you're primed to notice what you're supposed to notice which is to say count the balls and you know that something weird is going to happen you're not that still doesn't Prime you enough so that you can keep track of all the weird things that are happening and like this was an absolutely staggering experiment when when it was first shown people the psychologists were just like knocked over by it because the hypothesis up to that point had been always that you know you could concentrate on what you were concentrating on but if something anomalous or unexpected happened your attention would be automatically devoted towards it and of course that's what people would think right you'd think that if you're watching people play basketball and a gorilla walks into the you know area and it's not small that of course you'd be surprised and you'd see it and it turns out that that's just wrong and you know it it tells you a lot about how your nervous system is set up so you're focusing on Counting the balls and so for some reason getting the correct answer to the question how many times are the is the ball thrown back and forth turns out to be motivationally significant why like why why did you you know you got the instructions fair enough but why did you listen to them does it narrow your attention to the Target oh sure it does but the question is why did you even comply with the instructions you wanted to the answer right yeah said that because you wanted to get the answer right why did you care if you got the answer right well think about it for a minute like guess that means you're smart means you're yeah that's right so that's one possibility it's like instantly you sort of interpret it as a little cognitive test maybe and then you want to see if you can do it and you know so that Taps into your hierarchy of values part of your value is I want to be maybe a smart and competent person or I want to be at least as smart and competent as everyone else's playing this game and so you know the instruction Taps into a pre-existent value structure and then it's motivating okay so yeah what compliance as well yes that's another thing it's like that you know the room in some ways is set up to ensure a degree of compliance right because there's an there's an implicit story in the room which is if I'm at the front of it and so that sort of makes me at the top of the dominance hierarchy and the fact that you're here means you've already bought into that presupposition and so it's a logical thing to do to to play along with the game so yes also that true that that's more like the playing a game issue right is that well maybe something interesting will happen okay right right right okay so there's a variety of reasons why you might listen to the instructions but the point is the instructions actually tap into your motivation in your intrinsic motivation enough so that you will in fact attempt to play the game and then as soon as you play the game what happens well you focus your very limited attentional resources precisely on what it is that you're supposed to do now we could talk a little bit about how the visual field is set up so you know you you notice that like if I'm looking around the room if I want to see you all of you I can't just stand here and look straight ahead because all you people over here you're like I can't see if I'm looking straight ahead I I can't see the faces of anyone past here and I can only see them sort of as blurs and unless they move and if they move up something then I can see the movement but I can't it's not clear to me what's moving and it's the same for the people over here the only person I can really see right now is the is the woman who's sitting there in the white sweater all the rest of you are like and the and the person to the right I can more or less as long as I look at her I can more or less see that he's dressed in Gray but I can't see his face at all now he nodded his head and I could pick that up so what's very strange about your visual system and your sensory systems are like this in in in uh you know all your sensory systems are like this is that you have a tiny little point of focus where the information is Rich and that's partly because so the center of your eye is the fobia and it's most densely uh it's most densely packed with cells but more importantly each of the cells in your fobia which is the very center of your vision you can tell when someone's pointing their fob fobia at you cuz then you you know you have the sense that they're looking at you and human beings are unbelievably good at figuring out when someone is pointing their phobia at you like we can we can detect eye um what would you call it deviation from direct gaze with an accuracy that's absolutely remarkable now each of those little cells in the fobia is connected each of the one cells is connected to like 20,000 cells at the first level of the hierarchy of the visual system and so the reason that your whole eye isn't phobus because your head would have to be this big to manage it so you know what's evolved is sort of a compromise is that in the center of your vision it's the center of your vision is very very detailed and and then what you do is you zip that center around like snap snap snap snap snap snap and your brain sort of makes a Amalgamated picture out of all those little snapshots and you know then it weaves it together so it seems to you like it's a continuous what a continuous movie of Consciousness even though it's really not and then the sides of your eyes the periphery of your eyes well they don't have the same potency as the fobia and so they they kind of play a triage game it's like okay I can't see if I'm looking straight ahead I can't see everything what might I use as an indication that I should move my gaze from where I'm looking to somewhere else and one answer to that is movement so the perip is pretty good at picking up movement and so often if you see movement in the periphery then you'll move your fial vision to where the movement was and then you know then you can keep track of what's changing so what your brain sort of assumes is that when you're looking at something everything else is irrelevant and it's also it also sort of Fades into the background and so that's what's happening with the Gorilla video and so the part of the reason you can't see the damn gorilla is cuz he's dressed in black like the players and so when you're focusing on the basketball all the black moving things look the same you know there's no distinction between them at all and then the background of the curtain it's like well first of all why would you be primed to see the curtain change color like things just don't do that in real life right I mean big objects don't suddenly change color very very seldomly so and but and more importantly the fact that the gorilla shows up the fact that one player leaves and the fact that the curtains change color has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you can complete the task right so it doesn't matter if you ignore the information and that's because it's irrelevant in terms of the interpretive frame the motivated interpretive frame that you're applying to the scene and so the rule for perception is don't pay attention to anything that isn't directly relevant to the desired outcome now exactly how you calculate what you can pay attention to and what you can't that's very complicated it's I mean you build that knowledge bit by bit over time and and you can be wrong about it too but um so so the old idea was you know well first of all that you were very much conscious of the environment period which you're not and then the second idea was well while you're being conscious of the environment if any changes radically you will definitely Focus your attention on it and then and what turned out to be the case is well you're not very conscious of the environment and radical things can happen and you won't notice them unless they interfere with what you're doing so something that emerges that interferes what with what you're doing that you don't expect you will in instantly Orient towards and concentrate on so it isn't anomaly or novelty that attracts your attention it's the unexpected disruption of the relationship between your behaviors and the desired outcome of those behaviors and that's a much narrower claim only pay attention to things that make you fail it's something like that or at least additionally pay attention to things that make you fail and you know generally speaking that's also associated with an emotional response you know so if you're doing something and and you know you think you know how to do it and so you're doing it and then all of a sudden something unexpected happens you're going to have an emotional reaction and we'll talk more about the emotional reactions in the next class but the emotional reaction partly prepares you for the worst in case this unexpected thing is bigger than you think it is and sort of also primes you to be curious and to start to explore to figure out what it is so that you can reconstruct your expectations and Desires in accordance with the transforming world so this slide is an elaboration in some sense of what I was telling you a little bit earlier about the multiple levels of reality you know so the idea is that the thing that you see which in this particular schema would be the computer H is nested inside all of these systems or has other systems nested inside of it and that's part of an indication of the complexity of things now you know one of the things that you might think about for example if you're using your computer one of the things you might ask yourself is like why is your computer a black rectangle or a like a silver rectangle it's all smooth and shiny why is that you know like it's not clear first it's not transparent okay and and then it's got this smooth cover and it wouldn't necessarily have to why why do you think that's appealing to you it's familiar for like a book okay so it's familiar yeah and that that's good so it's familiar what what else is it's simple yeah you know want to you don't want to in interact with the computer at all you want to interact with little pictures on the screen and then you don't even really want to interact with those you want to interact with some subset of what that picture is doing on the screen and so you're very very rarely using the computer right you're just paying attention to well let's say the screen and the keyboard so the computer is whatever is underneath that and then what what that is is a collection of parts that are so bloody complicated that you don't want to have anything to do with them that are nested inside a whole network of things that are so complex you don't want to have anything to do with them and so so you know what happens when you're using a computer is all of a sudden it stops working well then it's a computer as soon as it stops working it's a computer before that it was whatever it was you were doing and as soon as it turns into a computer what do you do with it well you know you stupidly hit the on and off button maybe you plug it in and you know and out or something maybe you check your switches to make sure that a fuse didn't burn out or a breaker go and that's pretty much the end of you in terms of your ability to deal with the actual entity you know and then you curse with your primate brain and then you send it out to be fixed and so one of the things that's that's that's worth considering because this will also help us understand what happens in terms of brain function as we go along is that as long as things are going according to how you want them to go you can really pretend that the world is unbelievably simple all the world consists of is those few things that you're doing in your little bounded perceptual frame and everything else is zero and then unfortunately now and then the hypothesis that everything else is zero is radically wrong like when your computer crashes and then you actually actually for a while have to deal with at least some of the complexity that's actually there and that's usually extremely anxiety-provoking so you know you can imagine the same situation is while you're in your nice smooth car and you're on the highway and all of a sudden you know you hear a horrible grinding noise and smoke comes out of the back and you're you're off pulled over to the side well what was merely a means of getting from point A to B and comfort like two seconds ago is now a collection of extremely Troublesome Parts none of which you know anything about plus it's disrupted your day plus it's disrupted your pocketbook Plus plus you have to now deal with a bunch of people who are going to tell you what's wrong with your vehicle and maybe fix it for some completely unknown amount of money and with dubious utility and so poof the car turns into that and so it's it's almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which we live within a world that's bounded by our expectations and desires and how much time we spend keeping everything that's complex away from us so that we don't have to deal with it okay so now we might want to think about how we do that I'm going to show you this is a little schema that might be helpful so like I made this little diagram of dots because I wanted to make an ambiguous figure so I'm hoping that when you look at that figure what do you see when you look at it the center what what what shape is the center across okay so you can see across what else can you see it's a rectangle yeah what else can you see four S it's four squares yeah exactly so and what else can you see that's a good one I haven't seen that one I'll take your word for it though what else can you see I'll show you some of the things you can see okay you can see that right you see that see that you could see that you could see that okay so the first thing that you might note is that the thing in the beginning the thing in itself let's say you can see M multiple ways it's not exactly that you have an opinion about what it is you know it's that you can actually see those different things you can see it manifesting those different perceptual objects and that that's a strange thing because you know how people always think that arguments are about opinions there's some facts and you have one set of opinions about them and you have another and then you argue about the opinions till you get to the fact facts unfortunately it's a lot worse than that because the facts themselves are often reasonably subject to debate so so you might ask for example which of the five ways that you could see that initial thing is the right way to see it and the answer to that and this is a pragmatic answer is it depends on what you want to do with your perception you know so if you want uh if you want the highest resolution that captures as much detail as possible then you want something as close to the thing in itself as possible so that' probably be object five there you know if you want to know the rough area let's say that's a map of an orchard you might think about object one if it's an orchard from the top right and you want it to walk from north to south you might want to think about it in terms of object three you know so those are different ways you can perceive that object and then I would say that what happens at the next level of abstraction and that's where you've got the numbers and words down here is that you have the thing in itself which is complex and can be seen many ways then you have the things you see which are partial sort of low resolution representations of the thing itself and then there are words which are at least in part references to the image of the thing and so by the time you get to the word it's pretty compressed and I I really like the the metaphor of compression you know so CU a lot of the things you see are sort of like thumbnails and why are thumbnails useful you guys have done some you know image processing say like a obviously a thumbnail lacks some things that a 16 megabyte is that about right now how big are cameras 16 megabytes for a single photo what's that yeah well I think the new cameras are up I think they're up to 16 the newest iteration okay so why have thumbnail if you have a 16 megabyte picture okay but why not use the picture because right that's exactly it is that there's a tradeoff between detailed representation and time utilization time and and resource utilization and you know like like a computer you guys have limited time and resources and so you don't actually want to see anym than you need to see in order to get what you're supposed to get done done because otherwise it's just a waste of energy and so what that means is that your brain is always trying to figure out in some sense what's the simplest way I can represent this so that I can undertake whatever it is that I'm planning to undertake next and that's sort of again from a philosophical perspective that's actually something pragmatic okay so then you might ask yourself you organize your perceptions in relationship to your goals and then you might ask yourself well where do those goals come from you know and we've we've heard from thinkers like say Freud who talked about the ID functions and the ID is sort of the seat of primordial impulses right and so you might might think about the ID as the producer of primary goals or drives and fory did think about them as drives so they were things that led to you know a relatively rigid behavioral algorithm once the the state had Arisen now as I mentioned before I think that that's a flawed Viewpoint because the motivational state is more than merely a drive because a drive is something that say triggers a a pre-programmed sequence of behaviors and a lot of the early behaviors thought about animal behavior in that way right they'd say the animal would encounter a stimulus and the stimulus would produce a response and then the responses would get chained together and then when the animal encountered the stimulus again then just those chained responses would automatically run and one of the famous experiments that showed that that was wrong was a rat was trained to run through a maze you can sort of train a route pretty quickly if you know you you put him in the Maze and there's like he can go this way or this way and you put some cheese over here you do that three or four times the rat learns to turn right and then you add another piece to the Maze and you know then the rat learns to turn left and so you can get it turning you know extremely in an extremely complicated way to walk through the maze but then what they did was they took a rat and they wrapped up its hind legs you know like with tape so it couldn't use them and then they put its little rare end on a cart and then they had the little rat scoot through the maze on the cart and it's obvious that a scooting and a running rat don't use the same motor output not even close and the rat could still get through the maze so the idea that all the rat had done was chain together learned automatic responses turned out to be wrong rats it's more like rats learn what's going on and can generalize from it just like you do so so anyway so so the notion that the drive just instantiates a sequence of pre-programmed behaviors in most cases in many cases especially with complex Behavior turns out to be wrong there's some limited circumstances under which it's right okay so the first hypothesis we're going to entertain is the idea that you have to frame the world in order to interact with it this is sort of a little mythological diagram that I whipped up a long time ago and the bottom thing that's auroboros by the way which is a dragon that eats its own tail it's an ancient symbol of chaos and chaos is what you see when you don't know what you're looking at and so you could say in some sense chaos is all the complexity that surrounds you that could possibly intrude on your little safe world and then to grasp that chaos or to operate within it you have to put it within a framework and so that's the great father there that's actually God you see and God's got the sun behind him because God is like the son he's you know reliable and he's associated with Consciousness and then he's sort of ruling over this city and so for me that was a good symbol of culture and in part culture is what's outside of you but in part culture is also the Frameworks that you've learned to use by being with other people the Frameworks that you've learned to use to narrow and specify the world and in my mode of thinking the framing is associated with security on the one hand because it tells you what you can do and you know makes things safe for you and tyranny on the other hand because it can get out of control and you know it can start to get too rigid whatever regardless of the pros and cons of framing if you see something one way then you can't see it another it's harder to see it another so that's the con side of framing the pro side of framing is well then you get to do something if it's unframed you're in chaos it's existential anxiety you're not going to move ahead at all so you have to frame things you have to simplify them and really in some sense you even have to oversimplify them depends on what you mean by that but what you're really trying to do is to never make your perceptual task any more complex than it has to be in order to get done what you need to get done so how do you frame things well the first thing we should point out is that a lot of framing doesn't even happen psychologically right so here you are sitting in this classroom and you're not overwhelmed by chaos well why well first of all you're in a city that's helpful there's electricity here and there's natural gas and there's people to fix all the plumbing and so the fact that you're in a City makes life much simpler right off the bat there's not nothing trying to eat you you don't have to contend with the fact that it's like minus 20 for 3 months and you know so that's a whole bunch of complexity that the world the Civilized world is just taken care of for you and then you know now you're in the university in the city and that eliminates a whole bunch of other hassles you know there's some things you have to do but there's a bunch of things you don't have to do and then you're inside this building and wow look at that there's electric light here and you know and the chairs work and there's not going to be an earthquake and probably the whole building isn't going to fall down so you know by the time you're sitting in your chair here also with your clothing on you've screened a lot of complexity out already and so you can sit there fairly calmly and so that's all external now part of the reason and this is this is worth thinking about because this isn't only psychological you guys will hear a fair bit about Terror management theories as you progress through your education and so Terror management theories are theories that attempt to account for why people are uh say patriotic in their beliefs why they adopt belief systems and the idea is that a belief system protects you from death anxiety and so Freud s sort of said that about religious systems that was his critique of religion people are afraid of death and so they they have this infantile desire to have that fear go away so they turn to religion and religion says well death isn't permanent and that's why people are religious and and the extension of that is well that's also why they have belief systems in general they're trying to protect protect themselves against this deep shaking anxiety and to some degree I suspect that's true but you should also remember that when you're protecting your culture say if you identify with it you're patriotic or whatever it is or you think that your culture is worth defending you're not just defending something psychological it's like the culture the function the functioning culture Keeps the Lights On you know so it doesn't just protect you from death anxiety it also protects you from death and that's even more important most of the time than being protected from Death anxiety now there's a psychological component to it too but you don't ever want to underestimate just the Practical utility of being nested inside you know what PJ would consider a relatively functional game it's like your world's a lot simpler you know you have to work to maintain it and everything and that's kind of a drag maybe that's the tyrannical element of it but you know the payoffs pretty big okay so if you look at Medieval cities this is a well-preserved medieval city in France there's a lot of medieval cities that still exist in Europe and you see this is a typical sort of human habitation it's like inside there's order and outside there's chaos and barbarians and then there's a couple of walls to keep the chaos and The Barbarians out and then inside you know there's a dominant Hier and everybody can live their relatively productive and relatively peaceful lives inside of that it's all framing getting rid of complexity unnecessary complexity same thing with how they do the same thing for you and then social institutions do the same thing too it's like okay this is uh is it Kennedy there and and Obama I think so this is part of the transition in power from George Bush to Obama and you know that's a pretty scary thing to have your the leader of your dominance hierarchy replaced by another leader and you know among chimpanzees for example that's often the occasion for a fair Bit Of Mayhem and it's also the case often for for people that that's you know that that occurs and you know we still have that in the form of political corruption and so on but all things considered you know the power transition from Obama or from Bush to Obama was far more peaceful than such power transitions generally are if you look across the history of mankind and so that means you're also protected by your social institutions they screen out a lot of potential complexity as well as long as they're functional and and also I think as long as they follow some of the pedian rules and so one of the pedian rules for a for a playable game is there's some reciprocity you know you regard the system roughly speaking as either fair or fairer than any other system you can think up you know it boils down to the same thing because if it's not fair but you can't come up with a better fantasy well it's as good as it can be so so the the sociological or sociopolitical structures that keep complexity away from us can only operate under a certain limited number of constraints but still they perform their function you know and and very admirably it's it's amazing I think because I see people in my clinical practice all the time you know and most people that I see and I think this is true of most people in the world have at least one serious problem you know and it might be they have an illness that's just God awful or or if they don't have an illness one of their immediate family has an illness that's god- awful or their you know they're really old and they're and and they need to be taken care of or they're suffering from some insane economic problem or they've just been unemployed or whatever you know there's there's something in the their immediate circle that's really really difficult to Grapple with and yet people still go out and maintain their place in the world and the whole thing roughly works and to me that's just a continual source of Amazement that people can pull that off you know so anyway so a lot of the screening that you do to get rid of that complexity is external and part of that is a consequence of good well functioning sociological um organization then the next thing that sort of Screams things out for you is your body right now look you kind of naturally see things at a particular level of resolution right there's no obvious reason why that should be so you know you see the front of people you can't see the back of them you see their external covering their skin and their clothes you can't see inside them when you look closely at them you can't see their cellular structure or their molecular structure or their atomic structure you can't really see the social situations that they're embedded in so if I look at you I can't see your family I I you know I presume you have one I can't really see the political situation that surrounds you either I have to know that abstractly and then the ecological level is almost completely imperceptible to me and so part of the way that complexity is screened out is that your body just doesn't doesn't allow you to pick a lot of it up you're just blind to it so you see at one level of resolution and that's the human level you see things of approximately our size you see things that are approximately the size that we can grip those are sort of the things that you're likely to can to think of as objects like clearly a mountain isn't exactly an object you know so usability is part of what defines perceptibility and so that also screens things out and so then you're left with well what it is that you have to deal with once everything's been screened out and then you might ask well there's still a lot of complexity left there like there say there's plenty of complexity within the average family and there's plenty of complexity in The Mating domain you know to find a partner and to establish a reasonable long-term relationship and to have children and to raise them there's plenty of complexity left and then the question is how did biology how did biology come to solve those problems given that they're almost infinite in complexity how can you do it and the answer to that is fundamentally a darwinian answer you start simple so that's back in the days of the one-celled organisms we have no idea how those things got their start right I mean the actual beginning of Life is a serious mystery and I'll tell you it's such a serious mystery this is completely unbelievable but one of the people who discovered DNA I think it was Francis crick in fact I'm virtually certain it was he actually believed that DNA came from an alien civilization he wrote a whole book about that it's called panspermia and so he believes that believed posited that it's possible for DNA to drift through space for millions of years and to land on planets and to start living and that God only knows how old DNA is cuz he just couldn't figure out at all how it could have possibly evolved so scientists are a lot weirder than you think when you start to read you know about what the scientists who discovered things really thought they're completely you know out of their mind but whatever we'll assume that DNA got there somehow and then Evolution took over after that so what does evolution do it basically says well here's a terribly complex problem that we've sort of partially solved and partially solved means we've lived long enough to produce another copy of ourselves that constitutes the solution that's it so we've live lived long enough so that we could conceivably duplicate ourselves how should we do that well a variety of different ways that's the answer we should produce variants so that might be multiple Offspring or it might be it might also be facilitated by random mutation hypothetically the mutations are random although there's increasing evidence by the way that organisms are much more complex at the genetic level than anyone ever ever assumed and bacteria for example swap DNA back and forth with other bacteria all the time and there are experiences that you can have that will change your genetic structure sufficiently so that you will transmit that to your children so you know the idea that everything's purely darwinian and it's only mutation that drives Randomness that's clearly likely but not not complete these other mechanisms are clearly there but the the the issue is is that what you do is you you start with something that kind of works and then you produce microvariants of it and then the world around you changes a little bit and hopefully one of those microvariants manages to do the same thing and then it produces a bunch of microvariants and then they manage to do the same thing and so what's happening is there's an arms race between the environment which is always changing and the organisms that are trying to keep up with it and that arms race just goes on forever and you know different life forms proliferate as that as that occurs it's sort of like life is always playing catchup and you never get it right you cannot get it right the best you can do is get it right long enough to live long enough to reproduce that constitutes the sum total of your knowledge so and so what that means at least in part is that you guys are all the beneficiary let's say of a evolutionary process that's basically been going on since the beginning of life and that's about 3.5 billion years ago and so so your body your psychophysiology has been in an arms race with the transforming environment for 3 and A2 billion years trying to keep up and poof you're the Stellar consequence of three and a half billion years of like effort and death so you know you might thank the cosmos about that you think about this every single one of your female ancestors successfully reproduced like it's mindboggling it's mind bogling you're so unlikely that you would be here that that it's that it's almost incalculable so good for us here we are you know how successful can you get so my my point is that part of the way that complexity is dealt with is is haphazard it isn't ever really dealt with that's why you die you can only manage it to a limited degree and for us that's like three kids in 100 years if you're lucky and that's what that's hard knowledge after 3 and A2 billion years so the complexity problem is a rough one okay so that's your body now let's look inside your body now you might think that you know we have this sort of idea that's kind of leftover cartisian that there's a u and there's a your body and the U is in your brain and so just out of curiosity how many of you have the subjective sense that the U is in your head how many of you would locate you like for me like I can locate me somewhere seems to be about there I feel like that's where I am what and so how many of people think have like the center of their sense of subjectivity in their head how many people are like that okay how many people are different than that okay so oh good okay so where like where do you feel the center of your subjectivity where would it be that's hard to conceptualize like I have like religious views so I believe and I oh I was thinking more about how about how it feels fair fair enough fair enough you know that that's perfectly reasonable I'm thinking of it more as a subjective experience though my bra okay for me the heart so you're kind of located here how many people would would agree with that oh yeah so qu quite a few of you he so that's the same same for you here I don't know more like here oh h h h and any other places any other places you can talk about so yeah yeah yeah sorry any other places outside of my body I don't know it's not like oh that's not good no I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding okay okay so okay so we kind of got head and heart and you know that's really kind of historically standard the Greeks seem to Lo have located the themselves sort of in their heart you know and there's some theory that as people became more intellectualized that that feeling sort of went up to their head and maybe before the heart there was the stomach you know and you know you might think that you're your stomach if you were hungry all the time right I mean you're just not ever hungry so like why the hell would you think you were your stomach but you know that's another way that culture sort of keeps complexity at Bay you don't even that's that's almost like a motivational state that modern people don't even have to contend with cuz you're never really hungry I mean how many of you have gone without food for more than 24 hours oh that's pretty good how many of you involuntarily went without food for more than 24 hours oh yeah well that's that's rough okay how about a week nobody how about 3 days okay well so you know there's a couple of people who've gone for reasonable periods of time without eating but fundamentally you can tell we've we kind of got that problem under control so you don't have to worry too much about your about you being your stomach but I'll tell you if you were starving at some point that's probably where you'd locate yourself okay so now you're inside the body and so let's take a look at how the Body Works inside so you kind of feel that you're in your brain most of you anyways but and you know you kind of think your brain is in your head but really that's not right I don't really understand ever why we kind of decided that our brains were in our head because well look at it there's there's the nervous system it's like it's not in your head it's distributed through your whole body there's a lot of it up in your head but there's the whole spinal cord that's an important thing and then it has all these branching nerves that allow you to move your hands and to feel things and it's like your nervous system is distributed all the way through your body so it's it's not reasonable to think about the way that you operate as you see things with your brain and then you do things now if that's sort of true but there's important ways that it's not true at all and it's important to know the ways that it's not true it helps you understand phenomena that you couldn't otherwise understand so I can give you an example there are people who experience blindness so but it isn't because their eyes get damaged it's because they have brain damage and so it it damages the visual cortex and so that's the higher order higher order part of the brain that's responsible for conscious Vision okay so maybe they get I don't know they get a tumor or they get hit in the head or they get shot or something and then poof they're blind and so then um they tell you they can't see anything and then you say to them okay well that's fine you can't see anything but let's play a game okay I'm going to hold up my left hand or my right hand and you're going to guess about which I'm holding up and so you do this and they go right and you do this and they go left and left left right right and they're right and you tell them you're right and they say well I can't be because I don't see anything so that's one that's blind sight okay so here's another kind of blind sight so you take the same person and you set them in front of a screen and you say well look at the screen and they tell you I told you already I can't see anything and then you flash faces at them and you you you check for changes in the conductivity of their skin because when people react emotionally they sweat a little more a little less and that changes how electricity passes through their skin and so you show them a smiling face and there's not much of a change and you know you show them a um neutral face and there's not much of a change and then you show them like a really aggressive or really afraid face and poof spikes and you do that a number of times and you show them well as soon as I show you a face of someone who's afraid or face of someone who's angry you react to it psychophysiologically you think well how the hell can that happen if they can't see and the answer to that is you don't just see with your vision you see with your body and so one of the things that you'll find for example if you go through Swanson's paper I'll read you a little bit about this later is that most of your sense map onto multiple levels of your nervous system so some of them map right onto your spine and that's good because now and then your eyes should tell your spine to do something before you think because thinking's too slow and so you know you got to understand like way back when we were frogs roughly speaking we had eyes we didn't have much of a brain so like what the hell were the eyes doing it's not like the Frog exactly sees and you might think well how could eyes inform you about the world if you don't exactly see and then you got to kind of think of it in a pedian sense it's like here here's an example you might take an animal like a sponge pretty simple animal and it can open and close pores on the outside of its surface according to different changes in the ocean that surrounds it and so its perception is sort of like the ocean has three states whatever those might be maybe it has 10 I don't know but for the sake of Simplicity we'll say three the ocean manifests itself in three pattern States in pattern State one I do this in pattern state two I do this in pattern state three I do this and so it's direct pattern onto action mapping and so animals can use their eyes just to react with they don't have to see the thing you know because you think you see and then you act but why do that you can just react and you know this already because in a simple way if you put your hand on a hot stove you'll go like this and then you'll feel the pain and what that means is that your body has conserved the relationship between your Sensory neurons and your motor neurons at a spinal level so that you will your perception of the heat is this it's not of the heat it's just mapping a bodily pattern onto a sensory pattern and so a lot of really primitive sensory input is exactly that it's just the sense detects a pattern and with no intermediary of interpretation that pattern is translated into a behavioral output and so there's actually generally the first the simplest cells are sensory motor cells so they do both they map the pattern and they react and then the sensory and the motor cells differentiate and then neural tissue grows inside them and so then what happens is that instead of an outside pattern being mapped immediately onto a behavioral pattern the neural inter mediary says okay this pattern could mean any of these three things and then that neural layer grows and grows and grows until in creatures like us it's like a whopping layer and so we see a pattern and we go that could be this this this this this this this this and then all of those things could be mapped on to this or this or this or this or this so you know it makes us more slower but more flexible and slow can be a problem so like when you're walking down a pathway and a snake appears you don't want to be thinking you know snake rubber hose stick whatever you know because then you're dead because the snake bites you what you want to do is catch the snake out of the corner of your eye and jump up into the air before you even know that you saw a snake and you can do that because your eyes can map right onto your spine and they don't just map right onto your spine they map onto your nervous system at all sorts of levels so for example with the blind sight person who's looking at the face so it's an angry face the eyes are still mapping information onto the amydala and so the AMD changes the psychophysiology you know it says prepare for threat and so the person might feel uneasy but that's a it's weird but that's a form of sight to feel uneasy can be a form of sight so and that that's to say even more clearly that your brain just isn't in your head it's like it's all the way up it's all the way from and this is a nice pan Viewpoint because you know in some sense what P says about children is they sort of organize themselves from the spinal level upwards you know they learn these little sub routines first of all they have a few sub routines those are like built right into the spine and then they start playing with those and chaining them together in flexible ways and they keep doing that you know in more and more complex ways until they're capable of the abstract representation of thought and you can see how this will work as we go through the the nervous system so your brain's in your body in fact there's some evidence and there's more than one kind of nerve system too right there's the central nervous system that allows you to move voluntarily and that you know provides you with sensory feedback some of which you're conscious of there's also the autonomic nervous system that runs your all the complex Machinery that you're too stupid to attend to you know because your Consciousness gets little jobs it doesn't get to run your liver for example you imagine what your life would be like if you were in charge of your liver it's like you'd have been dead years ago cuz what do you know about livers so you have a whole system like the autonomic nervous system which has more neurons than the central nervous system that just runs all that stuff for you which is you know a good thing you then you don't have to pay attention to it so so anyways there's a lot of distribution of neural tissue throughout your body and there's even some evidence that you have a like a second brain of sorts in your solar plexus where you know that's perhaps part of the reason why you really don't like to get hit there but there's a tremendous number of serotonergic neurons for example in your in your midsection and there's increasing evidence that those are associated with things like emotion and mood and so the idea that the brain is here it's like no not not really it's it's a Continuum you know your body is a psychophysiological entity and to separate it into body and mind is like it's not right the other thing that seems to be increasingly clear among say the robotics guys is you can't even be smart unless you have a body and so that's why the advanced advanced intelligence guys are building robots from the bottom up they're doing it just like PJ would have suggested it's like well build some things that can move and then chain those things that can move together so that they can move in more complex ways and then chain them together so they can work in more complex ways and once you've got this thing that can do things then stick a brain on it and that'll then it'll have things it can do with its brain and if you don't do it that way you get something that can't function intelligently it's close to that so so there is the brain and the major one way of dividing it into its major subcomponents is represented there's a variety of ways you can do this you can divide it into hemispheres because it's sort of split down the middle the right hemisphere seems to be kind of specialized for the processing of unknown information and the left seems to be more comfortable working where you know what's going to happen and that left is most generally the linguistic part of the brain although not always it's it's a rough you know what would you call it it's a rough truth there's lots of exceptions the the linguistic system tends to specialize in the left and the left sort of insists that it knows what's going on and the right is always looking out for things that don't fit and sort of convincing the left slowly and sort of under the table to change its viewpoints and that seem a lot of that seems to happen when you're asleep and you're dreaming so the right maybe what's happening when you're dreaming is that during the day your cognitive processes are pretty tight and defined and they better be right because you don't want to be dreaming your schizophrenic dreams in the daytime that's a bad idea so you got to stay kind of focused and and narrow in a way during the day but the problem with that narrowed narrow focus is that you're not paying attention to a lot of things and so it kind of looks like your right hemisphere keeps track of the potentially important things that you're not keeping track of and sort of and then at night your your category system sort of broadens and loosens you can tell that in dreams because they're so weird and that's maybe when the right hemisphere is sort of tapping some new information into the left and playing with how it might be recategorized without completely overwhelming the left because you don't want to just because you learn something new doesn't mean you want to upset yourself totally right so it's a real it's a real complex dynamic between stability and learning and it's conceivable that's why you have two hemispheres so who knows it's a good theory though and and the guy who came up with it fundamentally his name is Goldberg um El Conan Goldberg he was a student of Alexander luras who was a great neuropsychologist so you know it's a credible it's credible idea so here's some rough divisions you've got your cerebellum that cerebellum we don't know what the hell that thing does if you don't have one you get all wobbly but there's more neurons in the cerebellum than there are in the rest of the brain so like is it just making you not wobbly seems like a tremendous devotion of resources to something that's relatively simple so uh alcohol when you're a new Drinker alcohol is really hard on the cerebellum which is why you're you know totally useless in a motor way and you fall down and all those things happen but so that's the cerebellum and we don't know what it does even though it's very complexly branched it kind of looks like a cauliflower and it's just packed full of neurons and then there's the occipital lobe and that kind of use that to see with more or less and then the pride lobe kind of keeps helps you keep track of who who you are from a bodily perspective and sort of where your body's located in space and sort of who you are as an embodied person so for example if you lose the right parietal lobe because you have a stroke then you lose the left side of your body and even more weirdly you lose the left side of every so all of a sudden you can't see the left side of anything and no one can figure out what that's like because say I'm looking at this room and I have this parietal damage if I'm looking at the room do I not see the left side of the room and then if I look at you all of a sudden I don't see your left side like we can't figure that out like the left is gone but then the left is relative to where you happen to be looking I think one of the ways of understanding it is sort of like you know how you clearly can't see anything behind your head head and it's not black where you can't see right it's black if you close your eyes but there's a difference between what you can't see behind your head and the block you see when you close your eyes because the block sort of seems like nothing but compared to what's behind your head it's it's not nothing at all so I think what happens with people who have neglect paranal damage is that that like back part just goes like this and so instead of you know you seeing this much of the world and this being just not there at all as far as vision is concerned it goes like this so then you've only got like a quarter of the world that you're and so people like that sometimes they'll throw their own legs out of bed so they wake up and they think oh my God because they can kind of detect the left but not very well and they're quite freaked out because you know like do you really want to wake up with a leg in bed with you no so they grab it and throw it out and that's not so good because they're attached to it or so they'll eat they'll eat and they only eat half the food on their plate but if you turn the plate then they'll eat half of the half that's left so anyways that's the prial lobe temporal lobe that enables you to hear roughly speaking there's a lot of um memory there too and the frontal lobe well first of all the frontal lobe seems to allow you to make voluntary movements sort of at the at the highest level of abstraction and then the prefrontal cortex which would be right at the front of the yellow there it's sort of like the back part of the of the frontal lobe enables you to make volunt movements but the prefrontal cortex enables you to represent the potential motor movements that you might make before you implement them and so it evolved out of the motor strip during the course of evolution it's sort of like well first you learned how to act voluntarily and then as that grew and it's particularly big in human beings that part was able to divorce actions from your body represent them in an abstract space run them as simulations calculate the outcome and then Implement them or not and you know it's a it's a it's a hit and miss business because lots of you people undoubtedly simulate catastrophic outcomes and then go do whatever it is you were going to do anyways like you know that happens to people all the time say when they're trying to stop drinking or to stop using cocaine or not to Bing eat or so you know your prefrontal cortex can whip up these simulations but other parts of your body can override them quite quite badly so that's sort of roughly the brain at least from you know looking at it from the side and then this is it split down the middle and you can see that it's not precisely two hemispheres all the way down in the middle it's one thing and then it grows these two things like little hat and uh as far as I'm concerned all the important parts of the brain are low down Central old you know because people like to think that well if it evolved a long time ago it's primitive it's like no if it evolved a long time ago it's been around a long time it's really smart that's why you don't run your liver the autonomic nervous system runs it because it's been around for an awful long time and it knows exactly how to do it and so it's really in some sense the new parts of the brains are the brain in many ways are the parts that are primitive so and the the old parts are extremely necessary and sophisticated and so the areas we're going to concentrate on most particularly are well the cortex we've already talked about the cortex is probably responsible people like to think of it as responsible for Consciousness and there there's something about that that's right but it's quite clear that human beings can remain conscious even if they have a substantial amount of damage to the cerebral cortex so Consciousness is a really weird thing we're we're not very good at figuring out it's localized at all cerebral cortex Thalamus the thalamus is the place where all your sensory information comes together so you know when you look at the world it's kind of like a Continuum of experience despite the fact that you have these five different sensory inputs and the thalamus seems to sort of unite all that and then it sends the messages that it amalgamates up to the cortex and the cortex sends them back and the thelus sends them back and there's like this Loop between the thomus and the cortex and maybe that's part of what Consciousness is you know rather than being localized in an area it could easily be a process and you know the fact that Consciousness sort of turns on in the morning which is a very weird thing seems to indicate to me that it it's probably something like that it's a loop it's the looping interaction between brain areas and you know if something's looping like that it gets really weird properties so that's a positive feedback system you know and I don't know if you've ever turned a vid hooked a video camera to a TV and then turned the video camera on the TV you know it starts doing extremely weird things you can get all sorts of unbelievably complex designs and weird phenomena because the TV is recycling its own signal you know so there's this circuit in there that's looping and I suspect Consciousness is something like that the hippocampus the hippocampus is responsible for the movement of short-term information into long-term storage it's a very important part of the brain we'll talk about that more next time the amydala is responsible for a lot of emotional responses and the hypothalamus is responsible for a lot of primordial motivational States and so we'll stop and we'll start with the hypothalamus on Tuesday see you soon [Applause] |
[CLASSICAL MUSIC] We've discussed the big five traits: extroversion, that's sensitivity to positive emotion. Neuroticism: it's sensitivity to negative emotion. Not all negative emotions. Mostly fear, anxiety, and emotional pain seem to load on neuroticism. Disgust, which is another negative emotion. It seems to be more associated [COUGHS] with conscientiousness, particularly its orderliness aspect. Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. We're going to talk about agreeableness today. Agreeableness is a very difficult personality dimension to understand, I think. Partly because it's difficult to dissociate from neuroticism, and as well from extroversion. Because agreeable people like you, and so that kind of sounds like extroversion. And disagreeable people sound like they're hard to get along with. And they sort of are. But people who are high in neuroticism are hard to get along with too. And they tend to be volatile and irritable. And so most of the time, if you're engaged in a contentious issue with someone, and emotions flare, it usually has more to do with trait neuroticism than with disagreeableness per se. So what I'm going to do is try to describe to you what the agreeable trait is, on both of its dimensions. And also to lay out the pros and cons of existence on that normal distribution trait at more or less every point. Because I think, the way I look at it anyways, is, of all the traits, agreeableness is the one that seems to come with the most marked positive and negative aspects. Features, let's say, so we don't confuse it with aspects. The most positive and negative features at each point on the distribution. It seems to be a very, very complex dimension. So, I'll read you some of the questions from the Big Five Aspects Scale and that will give you an initial rule-of-thumb estimate about whether or not you're agreeable or disagreeable. And so here are some of the questions. Imagine that you're answering these for yourself on a scale from one to five, strongly disagree to strongly agree. So the first question is: I'm not interested in other people's problems. So, if you are interested in other people's problems, that tilts you towards agreeableness. Agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness. Which also sound like very positive things, right? Because everyone wants to be compassionate, and everyone wants to be polite. And so you might say, "Well, is that a virtue? Are those virtues, with the other end being actually negative, to be not compassionate, not polite." It's certainly worded that way. And that's actually a mistake, because we know that these traits are normally distributed, roughly speaking, right? And that that means that there has to be positive and negative features at every single position on the distribution. And so to make the pre-supposition, for example, that being extroverted is better than being introverted, or that being emotionally stable is necessarily better than being neurotic, is to make a kind of confusion of moral obligation with trait position. You have to assume that there's advantages and disadvantages all the way along, or the distribution wouldn't have set itself up that way. Especially because these things seem to be biologically instantiated traits. So Anyways If you're interested in other people's problems, they like to unburden themselves to you, you care about them: that's a mark of compassion. If you're more or less indifferent to other people's stupid problems and you wish they'd just get on with it, then you're less compassionate. You're harsher and more, well, at the extreme, more callous. Ah, let's see. Respect authority. That's politeness. That's part of agreeableness. Feel others' emotions. Compassion. Inquire about others' wellbeing. Compassion. Can't be bothered with others' needs. Take advantage of others. That's disagreeable, obviously. Sympathize with others' feelings.' Avoid imposing my will on others. Wait for others to lead the way. Okay, I think all of those are associated with the trait agreeableness or disagreeableness. So let's think about this for a minute. So I'm going to tell you how I conceptualize agreeableness. The first thing you want to know is that women are more agreeable than men. About half a standard deviation. And that's approximately enough so that if you took a random male and a random female out of the population, and you tried to guess who was more agreeable, and you guessed the female, you'd be right about 60% of the time. But what's interesting about that, and this is something also to keep in mind, about normal distributions, you know. Imagine you have normal distribution, so that most people are in the middle. And then you have another normal distribution, male and female, and mostly they overlap. But, you see, out here, and out here, they don't overlap at all. And so, even though on average, men and women aren't that much different in terms of their levels of agreeableness by the group, if you go out and you look at the extremes, they're very different. So all of the most agreeable people are women, and all of the most disagreeable people are men. And the thing is, the extremes are often what matter, rather than what's in the middle. And so one of the ways that's reflected in society, by the way, is there's way more men in prison. And the best personality predictor of being in prison is to be low in agreeableness. It makes you callous. Now, you might think, "What's the opposite of compassion and politeness?" And the answer to that is, I think it's best conceptualized as a trading game. So let's say that we're going to play repeated trading games. And if you're very agreeable, then you're going to bargain harder on my behalf than you're going to bargain on your own behalf. Whereas if you're very disagreeable, you're going to do the reverse. You're going to think, "I'm in this trading game for me, and you're going to take care of your own interests." Where an agreeable person is going to say, "No, no, at worst this has to be 50-50, but I'd like to help you every way I can." Okay, so you kind of understand that. Now the advantage to being agreeable, then, is that you're good in teams and you're very much likely to give other people credit. The down side of being agreeable is that you're not good at putting forward your own interests. And so one of the things that predicts salary across time, for example, is agreeableness, and it predicts it negatively. And so it's part of the reason why women get paid less than men, and this is something for the women in the class to really listen to. Because how you get paid across time depends on a very large number of things, right? It depends on your skills and your abilities and your position and your social network and all of that. But the other thing it depends on is whether or not you actually go ask for money. Or maybe that you don't even ask. Because actually, you don't ask for money. You tell people that you need to be paid more or something they don't like will happen. And I don't mean as a threat. I mean that you have to be willing, when you're negotiating, to have an alternative. You go talk to your boss, who isn't going to give you money, because everyone wants money, right? It's a competitive game. You're going to have to go there and say, "Look, here's what I do. Here's why it's useful. Here's why you have to give me more money. And this is my opportunities if you don't." And then, you're not taking your boss's money anyway, because it's very frequently the case that he's working for a whopping big company. But he needs an excuse to give you money because everyone's asking for money all the time. And so you have to put your case forward powerfully and disagreeably. Now, you don't want to do it too disagreeably because then he's gonna think that you're a son of a bitch and maybe he's not gonna give you anything and maybe you'll get fired for being mouthy, and all of that. And that certainly happens to people who are too disagreeable. You gotta get the balance right. But it's definitely the case. And the other thing that happens to women that's also worth noting, and this is probably because they're higher in negative emotion, is they tend to underestimate their own utility in business settings. Right, because if you're trying to evaluate what you're like, and you're more tilted toward negative emotion, then the things that you do that are wrong are gonna stand out more on the foreground than the things that you do that are right. So if you go into a negotiation, and you're uncertain already, because you have self doubts, and then you're agreeable in the negotiation, what's going to happen is that you're not going to win as often. And winning, in a business setting, or in a career development setting, means more opportunity for promotion and more revenue generated. Now, the downside of that, of course, is as you climb the business hierarchy, you also have to take on more responsibility, and that responsibility is sometimes unpleasant as well, especially to people who are agreeable. Because you're not necessarily liked if you're in a position of authority. And agreeable people really like to be liked. It's their primary motivator because they're concerned about the maintenance of intimate, positive relationships. That also makes them conflict avoidant. Okay so now, you guys can think about this, but I'll tell you why I think the personality differences between men and women exist. Now, these are speculative hypotheses, but they're reasonably well documented by the relevant literature. So let's think about it. The first thing we might think about is: what's the difference between men and women? How do they differ? Well the first thing we might observe is that if you look at personality differences between pre-pubescent boys and girls, they're not very large. Boys and girls don't differ in terms of their trait neuroticism, for example. What happens is that, when puberty kicks in, women's trait neuroticism rises and it stays higher than men for the rest of their life. And this is why you see this reflected in the different kinds of psychopathology that beset the two sexes. So men are over-represented in alcoholism, drug abuse, anti-social personality, and a host of learning disorders as well as attention deficit disorder. And women are over-represented in depression and anxiety, primarily. That seems to be tightly associated with higher levels of trait neuroticism. Because if you're at the 95th percentile or higher, let's say, in trait neuroticism, there isn't much difference between that and being somewhat prone to depression and anxiety. And because the curves overlap, the curves aren't identical, the normal distributions aren't identical for men and women, you tilt the women's curve to the right towards higher levels of neuroticism. You go out and you look for the person in twenty who has the highest levels of negative emotion. It's much more likely to be female than male. Okay, so let's see if we can figure out why. So, we're gonna tell you some basic differences between men and women and you can tell me what you think about it, if you agree or disagree. Okay, first. Size differential emerges between men and women at puberty, right? Because boys and girls are roughly the same size and roughly the same strength. But men get bigger at puberty, when testosterone kicks in. And more importantly, not only do they get taller and heavier, but their upper body strength is much higher. And that's a real issue for combat, because human beings punch, and there's other animals that do that. Kangaroos do that too, so we're not the only people that punch. But we have clubs on the ends of our arms, and so that's how we defend ourselves. And so if you have a lot of upper body strength, especially across the shoulders, and you're heavier, then you can step into the punch and it's a lot more devastating. Now it is the case that, if you look at the statistics for physical altercations in marriage, women attack their husbands more often than husbands attack their wives. Well, you think, "Why is that?" Well, let's assume that there isn't any reason, other than both people in a relationship can get upset, and the women know that if they hit their husbands, nothing's really going to happen. Right, because if you're a woman about that high, and your husband is, say, my height, unless you hit me with an object or something that's sharp, the probability that you're going to do me any serious damage is pretty low. You might hurt me. But if I do the reverse, and hit you, and I really hit you then I might kill you. And so, at least one of the reasons why women can be more physically aggressive in minor ways in a relationship is because everyone knows, the wife and the husband equally, that the consequence of the physical aggression is much more limited. So, men do more serious damage to women. But women are more aggressive in relationships. So that's interesting. So ok, so there's a body size difference that's important, a strength differential that's important. Next thing, I think... So let's assume that the reason that women are higher in sensitivity to negative emotion is because the world is actually more dangerous to women, right? Because that would be the most logical reason why there would be a sex difference in something like fear sensitivity and punishment. Well first there's the danger of physical altercation. Second, there's the sexual danger. So women become sexually vulnerable at puberty. And why do I say vulnerable? Well it's straightforward. It's because the cost of sex for women is way higher than it is for men. Or it certainly has been throughout our evolutionary history. Because if a man has an unwanted sexual encounter, well then he walks away and maybe he is persecuted by the the state or prosecuted by the state for it. But if a woman has an unwanted, unwarranted, or incautious sexual encounter, and she ends up pregnant, then, well, in traditional societies, you're just done. And even in modern societies that are rich like ours, you're... it's a... I don't have to go into that. It's big trouble. No matter what you do about it, it's big trouble. So being more nervous about that makes perfect sense. But then, here's the last thing. I think that women's nervous systems are not adapted to women. I think women's nervous systems are adapted to the mother-infant dyad. Because you are not the same creature when you have an infant. Not at all. You're way more vulnerable. And it's partly because you have to express the vulnerability of the infant. And you also have to care for it. Right, so, you think about an infant, especially under nine months. So let's say, how are you going to be wired up if you're going to optimally care for an infant under nine months? And I'm saying under nine months because women generally do the bulk of child care for infants who are under nine months old. And part of the reason for that, there's a whole host of reasons, but part of the reasons for that, obviously, is that they breast-feed. But imagine what you need to be wired up biologically in order to care for an infant. First of all, they're very demanding. Right? Because they're completely helpless. And they're demanding twenty-four hours a day. And it's quite an emotional load. And an infant under nine months is never wrong. Right? What you do to an infant under nine months, is, when they're in distress, you always respond. You never tell the infant, "Get your act together and stop whining." Right? Which you can do to a child that's eighteen months old. You can start having that sort of conversation. But under nine months, it's like, nothing is the infant's fault, it's surrounded in an extraordinarily threatening world, and you have to be responsive to what it needs, regardless of what you want. And you have to be very sensitive to the threats that emerge in the environment. And so I think the price that women pay for that ability to have an intimate relationship with infants in the very earliest stages of development is that their nervous systems are actually wired so that they can perform that role optimally. And the disadvantage to that is that having a temperament like that doesn't work that well when you're dealing with adult men. Especially when you're dealing with them in a business environment. Because it's not the same thing. Not at all. It's a competitive environment. So agreeable people are compassionate and polite. What are disagreeable people like? They're tough-minded, they're blunt, they're competitive, and they won't do a damn thing they don't want to do. So it isn't exactly that they're aggressive, although they will push you the hell out of their way if you're in the way. They're not volatile like you are if you're high in neuroticism. It isn't defensive aggression, it's more like predatory aggression. It's dominance behavior. And so for someone who's highly disagreeable, they look at the world as a place in which they can compete and win. And I'll tell you a story. I have a friend. I gave him my personality test, the Big Five Aspect Scale that Colin DeYoung developed, in my lab. I knew he was a disagreeable guy. By interacting with him. I mean, he's even rude to people sort of spontaneously on the street. I actually like him quite a bit. He's very, very funny. He's also very conscientious, so you can trust him. But he's disagreeable as hell. So I gave him this test because I thought it would be funny, and he came out as the most disagreeable person in ten thousand. [STUDENTS LAUGH] Reasonable in compassion, about thirtieth percentile, but point zero-zero-one in politeness. So he's extraordinarily blunt. He'll just say absolutely anything, no matter how horrible it is. And he was often brought into corporations to sort of clean them up. So if a corporation was tilting and not doing well, they'd bring him in to find out who the useless people were and fire them. And I talked to him about that, because I had the mis-opportunity to have to not have graduate students in my lab, for example, that weren't performing well. And I find it very, very difficult, to, you know, to dress someone down, and certainly difficult to fire them. I just hate it because I'm actually quite an agreeable person, much to my chagrin. And I asked him about that. And I said, "Well, what do you do? You have to fire people all the time. How do you handle that?" He says, "Handle it? I enjoy it!" [STUDENTS LAUGH] And I thought, "Wow, that's so interesting, that someone would have that response." So I said, "Well, what do you mean you enjoy it?" He said, "Look, I go into these companies, and I analyze the performance of groups of people. Right, and in those groups there are people who are really striving, really trying hard and working, themselves, really hard, and being productive. And then there's these people that are just doing nothing. They're completely in the way. They don't carry their weight at all. They take advantage every chance they get. And they're always whining about why they can't work. It's like, I find out who they are, I call them into my office, and I tell them exactly what they've been doing. It's like, hit the road, buddy. You've had your run of it." And I thought, "Oh yeah, okay, fair enough." Well, I can tell you, you know, I've had situations in my lab where I had under-performing graduate students. And one of the things that was really awful about that was that it was really hard on the high-performing graduate students. You know, because they felt that even being in the same category as the people who weren't working hard and pulling their weight devalued what they were doing. You know? And that's exactly right. And so this is also why there's a conscientiousness trait and an agreeableness trait. Because conscientious people judge you on your accomplishments, right? They don't give a damn about your feelings. Not a bit. It's like, "Are you doing the work, or not?" Whereas agreeable people think, "Well, you know, your mother's sick, and you've got a bunch of family problems, and we all have to take care of each other." "And it's no wonder that you're having a rough time." You can't say that one of those attitudes is correct and the other isn't correct. You can't say that! There wouldn't be those two dimensions if there wasn't something correct about both of them. But you can certainly point out that often they conflict. You know, and so the demand for inclusiveness and unity and care, and the demand for high level performance in a hierarchical structure- they're very different orientations in the world. It's complicated for people who are agreeable AND conscientious. And actually, I think often, that large corporations, large institutions of any sort, run on the un-heralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness. And they're disproportionately women. My experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately, No, not appropriately.. If you want to hire someone to exploit productively, you hire middle-aged women who are hyper-conscientious and who are agreeable. Because they'll do everything. They won't take credit for it, and they won't complain. And that's nasty. And I think that happens all the time. And so one of the things you have to be careful of, if you're agreeable, is not to be exploited. Because you'll line up to be exploited. And I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants. And so, that just doesn't work so well in the actual world. One of the things that happens very often in psychotherapy, you know, people come to psychotherapy for multiple reasons. But one of them is they often come because they're too agreeable. And so what they get is so-called "assertiveness training." Although it's not exactly assertiveness that's being trained. What it is the ability to learn how to negotiate on your own behalf. And one of the things I tell agreeable people, especially if they're conscientious, is Say what you think. Tell the truth about what you think. There's gonna be things you think that you think are nasty and harsh. And they probably are nasty and harsh. But they're also probably true. And you need to bring those up to the forefront and deliver the message. And it's not straightforward at all because agreeable people do not like conflict. Not at all. They smooth the water. And you can see why that is, in accordance with the hypothesis that I've been putting forward. You don't want conflict around infants. It's too damn dangerous. You don't want fights to break out. You don't want anything to disturb the relative peace. If you're also more prone to being hurt, physically, and perhaps emotionally, you're also maybe loathe to engage in the kind of high intensity conflict that will solve problems in the short term. Because it takes a lot of conflict to solve problems in the short term. And if that can spiral up to where it's dangerous, which it can, it gets uncontrolled, it might be safer in the short term to keep the waters smooth, and to not delve into those situations where conflict emerges. The problem with that is it's not a very good medium to long-term strategy. Right, because lots of times there's things you have to talk about. Because they're not going to go away. And so partly what you do with agreeable people is, you get them to figure out- and they have a hard time with this too. If you ask a disagreeable person what he wants, say, or she wants, they'll tell you right away. They go, "This is what I want, and this is how I'm going to get it." Agreeable people, especially if they're really agreeable, are so agreeable, that they often don't even know what they want. Because they're so accustomed to living for other people, and to finding out what other people want, and to trying to make them comfortable, and so forth, that it's harder for them to find a sense of their own desires as they move through life. And that's not... look, there's situations where that's advantageous, but it's certainly not advantageous if you're going to try to forge yourself a career. That just doesn't work at all. So... All right. What else do I want to tell you about agreeableness? Well, I can tell you a little bit about the regulation of aggression. One of the things I studied, especially when I was in Montreal, was the development of antisocial behavior in children and in adolescents. Antisocial children, so they tend to be aggressive, antisocial children tend to turn into antisocial... It's conduct disorder, technically speaking. Conduct disordered children tend to turn into conduct disordered adolescents. And then they tend to turn into antisocial and criminal adults. And so I can tell you little bit about how that progresses, I think, because it's quite interesting. And it isn't what people generally think. So, the first thing is, if you want to be criminal, the best way to do it is to be really low in agreeableness and really low in conscientiousness. Because low in agreeableness means, "Things are for me and not for you. And you're not going to get me to do a damn that I don't want to do, and I'll stand my ground." And low in conscientiousness means you can do all the work and I'll sit back and take the benefits. And so if you have someone who's really disagreeable, and really unconscientious, you have someone who's starting to border on psychopath. And if you add high intelligence and high emotional stability to that, then you have someone who won't work but will reap the benefits, who doesn't give a damn about you, who is assertive as hell and who's smart. And a person like that's also going to be charismatic because extroverted disagreeable people are kind of narcissistic. But they're... they'll put themselves forward strongly. And if they don't show any signs of fear, that also indicates that they're confident. And it's easy for people to confuse that with competence. And that's how psychopaths get away with what they're doing. Although they have to move from person to person because their reputation will track them. So anyways, back to the development of aggression in children, the development of criminality in adults. Here's how it seem to work, at least in part. It's more complicated than this, but I'll put in some of the sociological elements as well. So If you take children and you group them together in groups defined by age, So let's say you have 30 two year olds, 30 three year olds, 30 four year olds, all the way up to eighteen. And then you watch them interact, and you code their behavior for kicking, biting, fighting, and property theft, then what you'll find is that the two year olds are by far the most aggressive of the lot. So that's pretty interesting, you know, because you think, "Well, children are naturally peaceful, and if they're aggressive it's because they learn it." It's like, no, that's true for a small minority of children. But there's a substantial number of children who are aggressive at two, by nature. Most of them are male. Now that doesn't mean most children are like that, because they're not, even if you look at two year olds, who are the most aggressive human beings. Most two year olds aren't aggressive. But some of them are. And most of those are male. Okay, so then let's say you identify this cohort of aggressive two year olds. And you track them across time. Track them for the next 2-4 years. Track them until they're four years old. What you find is the vast majority of the hyper-aggressive male two year olds get socialized perfectly well. So by the time they're four, they're temperamentally probably still more aggressive, but they become civilized little monsters. So other people can tolerate them. And that means that they've had parents, or peers, or educational experiences, that enabled them to learn how to interact productively with other kids. And to bring their aggressive nature under control. Some of that seems to be mediated by the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play. And that's one of the things that we know that that helps socialize rats, for example. It's vital to them, but it also seems to really be good for socializing young kids. And rough-and-tumble play, which is something that adult males particularly like to do with young kids, by the way, not before nine months, because they're just too little, but once they become ambulatory, and kind of puppy-like so that they're a little bit more robust, then you can play a lot with them. And you can play with them right at the edge of danger, too, which kids, they absolutely go nuts for that. They love that. When I had little kids, I made this kind of wrestling ring out of these two couches that we had that would hook together. And I'd bring them on there and, you know, toss them up in the air and catch them, you know. Eight, ten feet- no, no. [STUDENT LAUGHTER] A foot in the air and catch them, and they'd go like this, and then, you know, I'd catch them, and they'd laugh, and I'd throw them up and they're all freaked out and then they'd laugh. So they're learning trust with that in the bodied way, and they're also learning, and this is from stretching them out, and wrestling them, and twisting them around, and letting them pull on your hair and hit you, and all of those things, they learn deep in their bones exactly what can hurt them and what doesn't. And you want to kind of push them to the edge, you know, so that they can tell the difference between what hurts and what's still within the realm of the game. And you do the same thing when they're wrestling with you. So they learn not to, you know, awkwardly stick their thumb in your eye. Or do things that are actually painful like grab your lip and pull it. It's like, no, no, you let go of my lip, you know? And so, that seems to help regulate the aggressive impulses. And help the child find a more appropriate embodiment. You can think that what you're doing, in some sense, when you're rough-and-tumble playing with kids is teaching them how to dance. Because that is what you're doing. You know? You're making them comfortable in their bodies in all of its extension. And building in that kind of body fluency that you see in people who are well-situated inside themselves. And so that's something to really think about, you know? And it's appalling. We know that the ability to engage in rough-and-tumble play among rats inhibits aggression, impulsive aggression, among rats. We also know that if you deprive rats of the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play, they show pre-frontal cortical developmental deficits. And manifest behaviors that are akin to attention deficit disorder, which you can then treat with Ritalin. And so one of the things that's happening with boys, because they're way more dosed with attention deficit disorder medication than girls is that their natural proclivity to engage in robust and troublesome active play isn't appropriate for a school environment where you're supposed to sit down and shut up. And so the kids get hyperactive. And instead of letting them out to run around until they fall over half exhausted, which is exactly what you should do, you know, and you medicate them, so that their exploratory systems, the activity of which is facilitated by the dopaminergic agonist, that's the ADHD medication, suppresses the play function. It's absolutely appalling. There's no excuse for it. You know, but it's a good indictment of the education system, because why in the world would you take six year old kids and get them to sit without moving for five hours, unless you want them to grow up fat and stupid? Why in the world would you train them to do that? Well it's easier. That's one thing. And when they're sitting there, there's nothing disruptive about the rough-and-tumble play, and that can be quite disruptive. So anyways, most of these kids are reasonably well socialized by the time they're the age of four, using one mechanism or another. They learn how to regulate their aggression and they learn how to engage in fictional play structures with other kids. They learn how to cooperate and compete. And the advantage to having a well-socialized disagreeable person is that they really don't let much get in their way. So if you can get a kid who's disagreeable socialized, that person can be quite the creature, you know? Because they're very forward-moving in their nature and very difficult to stop. But if you don't get them successfully "domesticated," tamed, roughly speaking, by the time they're four, their peers reject them. And that's a big problem because your job as a parent is to make your child socially desirable by the age of four. You want to burn that into your brain. Because people don't know that. That's your job. And here's why, it's easy if you think about it carefully. So you imagine, you've got a three year old child, so halfway through that initial period of socialization, and you take that child out in public. Okay, what do you want for the child? Who care about you? What do you want for the child? You want the child to be able to interact with other children and adults, so that the children are welcoming and smile and want to play with him or her, and the adults are happy to see the child and treat him or her properly. And if your child's a horrible little monster because you're afraid of disciplining or you don't know how to do that properly, then what they're going to do is, they're going to experience nothing but rejection from other children, and false smiles from other parents and adults. So then you're throwing the child out there into a world where every single face that they see is either hostile or lying. And that's not something that's going to be particularly conducive to the mental health or the wellbeing of your child. If your child can learn a couple simple rules of behavior, like don't interrupt adults when they're talking too much, and pay attention, and try not to hit the other kids over the head with the truck any more than is absolutely necessary, and share and play properly, then when they meet other kids, the kids are going to try out a few little play routines on them, and that's going to go well, and then they're going to go off, and socialize each other for the rest of their lives. Because that's what happens, is that from four years old onwards, the primary socialization with children takes place among other children. And so if the kids don't get in on that early, they don't move into that developmental spiral upwards and they're left behind. And you can imagine how terrible that is, because a four year old will not play with another four year old who's two. But a five year old certainly will not play with a five year old who's two. Right, because the gap is just starting to become unbelievably large. And so the kids start out behind, and then the peers leave them behind, and then those kids are alienated and outside the peer group for the rest of their life. Those are the ones that grow up to be long-term anti-social. They're already aggressive. It doesn't dip down. Now what happens to normal boys, roughly speaking, imagine the aggressive two year old types, they get socialized, so their level of aggression goes down, and then they hit puberty, and testosterone kicks in, and bang! Levels of aggression go back up. And so that's why males are criminals between the ages roughly of sixteen and about twenty-five. And it matches the creativity curve, by the way. It's so cool. If you look at the spike of creativity among men, sixteen to twenty-five, it starts to go down, criminality matches that absolutely perfectly. So that's quite cool. So the testosterone levels raise the average level of aggression among men, more dominance than aggression, actually, and testosterone is by no means all bad, and then it starts to decrease around age twenty-five or twenty-six, which is usually, with men, stop staying up late at night, stop drinking as much, develop a full time career, and take on the burdens and responsibilities and opportunities that are associated with a long-term partner and family. So that's the development of what I would call predatory aggression, because I also think that the agreeableness distribution is probably something like predatory aggression, versus maternal sympathy. It's something like that. So if you look at other mammals that are predators, because we're predators as well as prey animals, if you look at other animals like bears, the male bear has absolutely nothing to do with the raising of the infants. In fact, the female bears will keep the male the hell away because he's likely to kill the infants, and maybe even to eat them. So there's no maternality at all in solitary, male, mammalian predators. Now it depends on how social they are, but roughly speaking, that's the situation. Whereas with human beings, males are quite maternal. So, but anyways, I think the extreme of agreeableness, on the low end, so disagreeableness, is predation. And the extreme on the upper end is maternal caring. And those two things compete, right? Obviously, it's very difficult to be both of those at the same time. And so men, of course, in the wild, so to speak, are... Very, very few women hunt in modern societies or in archaic societies. And you can also understand why that it because hunting actually requires hurting something, killing it. And it's usually something that's not very impressed about being hurt or killed, and it will emit a lot of distress while it's happening. And so for anybody who's compassionate, who's got compassion as one of the fundamental elements of their temperament, that's something they're just not going to be able to tolerate at all. In the evolutionary landscape, because that's really what we're talking about, there's tension behind the development of different modes of being in the world. And if you're good at one thing, that sometimes means that you can't be good at the other thing at the same time. So... I was going to have a guest speaker for you last week, but the person I had invited in had some familial trouble, so that didn't work out. She's a graduate student of mine and one of the things that we'd be working on in my lab, generally speaking, is the delineation of the relationship between personality traits and political belief. And so I told you a little bit about the things that distinguish liberals from conservatives, right? The conservatives are high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness, and low in trait openness. And so that means a conservative is someone who puts someone in boxes, puts the boxes in order, and doesn't like them to be messed up. So they like the borders between things to remain determinate and what would you say, inviolable. And I think that's true at every level from the conceptual all the way up to the political. I think that the fundamental political question and I think this is why the temperaments align across these political dimensions, is whether the borders between things should be open or closed. We see this reflected worldwide right now in then arguments about immigration, right? Because the liberal types are saying, "Open the gates." And the conservatives are saying, "Wait, you don't know what you're inviting in." And you might say, "Well, who's right?" And the answer is you don't know. That's the thing. Because sometimes the right answer is, "Open the gates, these are interesting people, we could trade with them, we could learn from each other." And sometimes the answer is, "Don't bother. What's going to come in is going to wipe you out and kill you, and really do it." I mean, so, here's an example. This is why I think orderliness is associated with disgust sensitivity. And it's one of the determining factors of conservative political belief. What happened when the Europeans came to North America? What happened when the Spaniards came to North America? 95% of the Native Americans died. Why? Because the Spaniards brought illness. Smallpox, measles, chicken pox, all these things that the Native Americans had absolutely no resistance to. There were hardly any diseases at all in North and South America. The Spaniards showed up, within 15-20 years, 19 out of 20 of the Native Americans were dead. You never know what people are bringing with them. And so what that means is that how should you respond to people who are outside of your circle of familiarity? Well the answer is One, they might kill you, in all sorts of ways . Two, they might bring with them things to trade that are of inestimable value. So you're stuck. It's like, how the hell are you going to reconcile that problem? And the answer is, well we reconcile it temperamentally, roughly speaking. So half the people are temperamentally wired up to say, "No, no, no! Let's keep the damn boxes closed. Took a long time to pack everything in there and to get it into order." And the liberals say, "Well wait a minute. You don't know if you've got things in the right boxes to begin with. The things that you're keeping in there were getting stale and old. And maybe we need some new ideas and new people to rejuvenate the situation." That's political discussion. And the political discussion has to proceed because there's no way of solving that problem except by discussing it. Well, how does that relate to agreeableness? We also looked at political correctness. And so here's an interesting thing. Purely from a scientific perspective. You might ask yourself, If you talk about political correctness, one of the things that the people who tend to be labeled as politically correct say is there's no such thing as political correctness. It's just a pejorative label that people who are opposed to those views impose on a set of beliefs to demonize it. Perfectly reasonable objection, and you never know, it might be true. But the thing is, psychometrically, you can solve that problem, and you solve it the same way that you solve the problem of what constitutes human personality. So this is the way we tried to solve it. You can think about it methodologically, because that's how you should think about it. The first thing we did was collect a very large number of statements from press accounts that seemed to indicate what people generally referred to as political correctnes. So we had a small team of people combing media reports to come out with opinions or attitudes that looked like they were characteristic of the differentiation between politically correct people and people who aren't politically correct. So we got about four hundred statements like that. And what you want to do is, you imagine that there's a core set of beliefs and statements that people are defining in a particular way. And you're trying to get a handle on what that is, and even if it exists. What you do is over-sample it. If you can find questions that might even tangentially be related to the phenomena in question, you include those. Because the statistics will take care of the excess. Okay, so then what you do is you take your four hundred items, roughly speaking, and you get people to register the degree to which they agree or disagree with them, get a thousand people to do that. And then you subject that to a factor analysis. And what the factor analysis does is tell how those questions clump. Now, they might not clump. So for example, you could do a factor analysis of a set of questions, and you could find that there are two hundred factors, let's say you have four hundred items. There's two hundred factors. And none of them... there's no big set of questions that are clumping together. And you say, "Well, there's no evidence here that there is a single, underlying phenomena that unifies those questions that you can reasonably characterize with a name." Well that isn't what we found. We found that there were two dimensions of political correctness. One of them looked like liberalism, except that the people who were politically correct, in addition to being liberal, were very high in trait agreeableness. And agreeableness has almost nothing to do with the classic liberal-conservative divide. It's weakly related in that conservatives are more compassionate than liberals, Sorry, liberals are more compassionate than conservatives, the difference isn't huge, and conservatives are more polite than liberals, and the difference isn't huge. So those are the two aspects of agreeableness. If you put them together, they cancel each other out. And so on average, conservatives and liberals don't differ in agreeableness. But political correctness did clump together into two categories, PC liberalism, we call it PC authoritarianism. The PC liberals were high in openness, high in verbal intelligence, and high in agreeableness. And the second group was PC authoritarians. And they were also high in agreeableness, but they were high in orderliness, and the correlation with that was negative in relationship to verbal intelligence. So we found that there were two categories of political correctness, that it does in fact exist, but that it's a very unstable construct because factor one, which was PC liberalism, and factor two, which was PC authoritarianism, were only correlated at 0.1. And so what it indicates, and this is our prediction, roughly speaking, from the lab, is to the degree that there's unity, so to speak, on the politically correct left, it'll fragment into two groups. One will be the PC liberals, and the other will be the PC authoritarians, because although they're united by their tendency to agreeableness, they're not united by other temperamental traits, nor in their core beliefs. So the PC authoritarian types, for example, are very obsessed with language control. And it's funny that it's agreeableness. I've really been thinking about that. You know, again, this is a hypothesis in development, but I think what's happening is that you know, your temperamental proclivity allows you to lay out a kind of radical simplification on the world. That's part of the advantage of having a temperament. So if you're a conscientious person, the world is a place to go out there and work. If you're an open person, the world is a place to go out there to discover new ideas and do artistic things. If you're an agreeable person, the world's a place to go out there and establish intimate relationships. So they're simplifying perspectives, and simplifying personalities. They're the manner in which you're adapted to a particular niche. I think what you see in agreeableness in relationship to political belief is a proclivity for people to divide the world into defenseless infants and predatory oppressors. And that that's blasted forward onto the political landscape, and things are conceptualized along that temperamental variable. Anyways, that's where we're at with regards to the analysis of political belief. Well, we've got three minutes left, and I'm wondering if anyone has a particularly intelligent question or failing that, any question at all? Because I told you a lot of things that are, I would say contentious. But I also think they're very much worth knowing. So I, yes? Did you say that high in agreeableness is the simplified perspective of the mother-infant dynamic? Yeah, that's what it looks like to me, yeah. Projected onto the world, period. Yeah. So what would you say is the best way to go about, knowing that we have these simplified ways of looking at the world, what then? It's really useful to investigate the viewpoints of people who have opposing views to yours. Because they'll tell you things, not only will they tell you things you don't know, they'll also tell you how to see the world in ways that you don't see it. And they'll also have skills that you don't have, that you could develop. So for example, if you're an introverted person, it's very useful to watch an extroverted person, because the extroverted person has ways of being in the social world that aren't natural to you, that you can use to improve your toolkit. And if you're disagreeable, one of the best things to do with disagreeable people, especially if that's alienating them from other people, for example, because it can, you know, people treat you like you're a selfish, arrogant son-of-a-bitch, and maybe that's because you are. It's like, okay, so what do you do about that? One of the most promising "treatments," let's say, is get the person to do something for someone else once a day. Just as a practice, and learn how to do it. Maybe you can wake the circuit up, you know, if you think that it's lying dormant in you, which is probably right. You know, I think we have a very wide range of propensities within us. Some are switched on. Genetic propensity. Some are switched on. But I think that if you put yourself in the right situation or walk yourself through the right exercises, you can switch some of these other things on as well. But it takes work and dedication and discipline to do it. So actively confront the things which are not a part of our personality? Yes. Well, I would say, generally speaking, if you want to adapt yourself properly to life, you should find a niche in the environment that corresponds with your temperament. Right? You shouldn't work at cross-purposes to your temperament, because it's just too damn difficult. But having done that, then you should work on developing the skills and viewpoints that exist in the space opposite to your personality. Because that's where you're fundamentally underdeveloped. That way you can extend out your temperamental capability across a wider range, and to me that's roughly equivalent as bringing a richer toolkit to each situation. You know, so if you're hyper-extroverted, you should probably learn to shut up at parties now and then. And listen just to see what's going on, to see if you can manage it. And if you're introverted, well then you should learn how to speak in public, and to learn how to go to parties without hiding in the corner and saying nothing to anyone. And if you're agreeable, then you need to learn how to be disagreeable, so people can't push you around. And if you're disagreeable, you need to learn how to be agreeable so that you're not an evil son-of-a-bitch, you know? And the same thing applies even in the conscientious domain. If you're too conscientious, you need to learn to relax and let go a little bit. And if you're unconscientious, it's time, like, get out and Google "calendar," man, and start scheduling your day, right, and beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick until you're disciplined enough so that you can actually stick to something for some length of time. And not living in absolute squalor, which is something that would characterize someone who is very disorderly, for example. Because they just don't notice. It doesn't bother them, disorder. It's like, maybe they can see it, but it doesn't have any emotional valence and so it doesn't have any motivational significance. The other thing you might want to think about, too, if you're choosing a partner, is try not to choose someone who's too distant from you on the temperamental variables. Because you're going to have a hard time bridging the gap. You know, it's hard for an introverted person and an extroverted person to co-exist. And it's really hard for an orderly person and a disorderly person to co-exist because they will drive each other nuts. Why don't you pick up? Why are you so obsessed by it? That's the basic argument. So it's useful to know about your temperament so that you can negotiate the space with your partner as well, and I don't think you should try to find someone who's exactly the same as you, because then you don't have the benefits of the alternative viewpoint. But you've gotta watch it because you may hit irreconcilable differences of various sorts. And I've seen that most particularly among couples who are high and low in openness, that's a rough one. And also high and low in conscientiousness, that's another rough one, because they just cannot see how the other person sees the world at all. Okay, I'll see you on Tuesday. |
[Music] well we're going to continue our discussion of the big five traits today and I'm going to talk to you about openness and intelligence um roughly speaking so the first thing I want to do is put them into context you need to understand where in Ence fits in the in the trait hierarchy structure and so we've we've looked at this before but you can break the big five into the big two plasticity and stability we'll start with stability here and stable people are conscientious high in stress tolerance or emotional stability or low in neuroticism depending on how you look at it and high in agreeableness and then conscientiousness breaks down into industrious and orderliness um neuroticism breaks down into volatility and withdrawal and agreeableness breaks down into politeness and compassion and then for the second major trait you have the the big two trait you have plasticity and plasticity is made up of extraversion and openness and those look like the reason they Clump together the reason the first three Clump together we think is because they're roughly associated with serotonergic function um and the reason that latter two Clump together is because they're roughly associated with dopaminergic function and the dopamine system mediates exploratory behavior in the face of the unknown but it also mediates positive emotion and and it's because in order to move forward into the unknown it isn't that you have to experience positive emotion it's that the emotion you experience when you're motivated to move forward into the unknown and explore is a positive emotion and positive emotion is very much also associated with interaction in the social environment and maybe that's because a tremendous amount of what you're doing in the social environment is essentially exploratory Behavior right because for example when you're communicating with people that's primarily exploratory behavior um so it's not surprising that the circuitry overlaps in in that manner um openness is the one we're going to concentrate on most particularly today and it it's openness to experience technically and it seems to break down into intellect and and openness proper which is it's it's intellect which is interest in ideas maybe facility with ideas and openness which is more like creativity that's that's now you can't divide them into interest and ideas and creativity so precisely because they they overlap to a to a great degree but there is there is reason for differentiating between them so for example women are about a third of a standard deviation higher than men in openness SL creativity and men are about a third of a standard deviation higher than women in interest and ideas and intellect and that's actually quite a substantial difference within a trait that's when the two traits are so highly correlated so there's reason to do the to do the fractionation so anyways so we're going to concentrate on openness today and the reason that I'm presenting the trait description first rather than moving immediately into say IQ and creativity is because it's reasonable to it's useful to know that you can take intelligence and put it in the big five taxonomy and you can actually measure intelligence a lot more accurately with an IQ test and perhaps also with a creativity test than you can with a self-report personality test that relies on adjectives you know because I could ask you guys well how smart are you on a scale of 1 to seven and that would be roughly correlated with your IQ but if I really wanted to know how smart you were roughly speaking it would be much better to give you an IQ test and if I was wanting to know how creative you are rather than asking you how creative you are and getting you to report even though there would be some accuracy in that it would be better actually to give you some of the different tests of creativity that we'll talk about today now the weird thing about the big five or one of the weird things about it is that we don't have great tests for the traits independently of self-report for almost all of the traits so for example one of the things that I've been trying to do in my lab for the last 5 years is to find some sort of laboratory task that conscientious people do better on or unconscientious people do worse on and you think that would be simple because conscientiousness for example is a very good predictor of long-term life exess success it's also a very good predictor of University grades it's not as good as IQ but it's still a good predictor but we have had one insanely difficult time trying to find a non-self-report test that associate that that that actually predicts conscientiousness so much appreciated yesen sare no it's neuroticism neuroticism is associated with being more self-aware and it's actually it loads on negative emotion so being self-conscious is associated with being high in negative emotion I mean you can assess neuroticism using tests that that ask you about anxiety and emotional pain or depression but that's also not much different than than than self-report anyways we're going to concentrate on openness today and we're going to concentrate both on creativity and intelligence and there's actually almost nothing in Psychology that's more contentious generally speaking than the investigations into the the the technical or the what the the set of skills and abilities that falls under Trade openness and the reason for that and this is especially the case with intelligence is that intelligence is actually quite measurable we've been able to measure it since roughly the beginning of the of the of the 20th century um Benet originated the first I would say reliable and valid IQ tests and they've been used quite extensively for a long period of time and IQ I'll tell you what IQ is as we go through this but there isn't anything that social scientists have been able to measure more successfully than IQ and there's nothing that socialist or very little one there's one exception the relationship between income inequality and male homicide is a power more powerful relationship than the relationship between IQ say and General Life success or IQ and general school Success it's it's even a little stronger than the relationship between IQ and the rate at which you learn something new but other than that it's pretty slim pickings and so we're going to walk through very carefully how IQ is IQ tests are created and formulated and exactly what it is that they measure and why and we'll equate that to some degree to creativity and also differentiate it from creativity as well making the assumption that the aspects of openness intellect and and openness proper are the proper aspects and that they're usefully differentiated so the first thing that you might want to consider is that the world is a very complicated place now we've talked about this before and the way that you handle there's way too much complexity for you to handle in its in its entirety so for example in a room like this there's an endless number of phenomena that you could focus your attention on right from the sort of macro phenomena which would be the overall say color or appearance of the room to the micro phenomena which would be the details at the highest level of detail that you're able to perceive that litter the landscape anywhere and so one of the problems that you have to solve when you're operating in the world is how you perceive the world and we do that in part by making would say that we perceive low resolution representations of the world and we also confuse those with the world so when I'm looking at you I'm really looking at a low represent what I perceive consciously is a low represent low resolution representation of you right I only see the front of you to begin with I only see your surface and in some sense you know I even perceive you in some sense as a more or less uniform color it's hard to tell exactly what color skin is it's sort of a light pink roughly speaking but my my perception is fairly is fairly I don't know a better way of putting it than low resolution and I seem to perceive you at the level of resolution that's that's sufficient the the lowest resolution that's sufficient to facilitate our interactions because I don't want to clutter up my perceptions of you when we're just talking with excess detail so there's lots of things about you I don't need to see I certainly can't see any of your micro structures below the below the phenomenal level like I can't tell without tremendous further investigation What You're Made Of biologically for example and I certainly can't perceive the networks of society that you're engaged in your family or the other sorts of networks that you're embedded in I see you here now the front of you at low resolution and you can tell that to some degree and we've talked about this before because if you see say animated movies that use very low resolution representations of people like South Park is a really good example because the imitate or the animation in South Park's very iconic and and and and simple it actually makes almost no difference to following the story and so that shows you how iconic your perception really is can be replaced by very simple icons and you instantly adapt to that you know and so we can go and see The Lego Movie Batman Lego Movie for example and the fact that it's Batman which is an abstraction to begin with and then it's made out of Legos is almost irrelevant to following the plot so some people have compared our perceptions to the user interface on a computer you know when you're interacting with your computer you don't really interact so to speak with the computer there are iconic representations on the screen of the computer that you interact with and those represent obviously they share some functional relationship with what's going on in the computer but mostly they're there so that you using your perceptual structures can interact with the computer in a manner that's easy for extremely intelligent Apes roughly speaking now so one of the problems that you have to solve in the world because it's so full of detail and so complex is how do you actually see the world how do you actually perceive it and it isn't really self-evident that that's a problem because you think when you look at the world that it just presents itself to you but it's a tremendously complicated problem and that's partly why developing artificial intelligence systems that can actually see the world and act in it in any real way has proved to be a much more difficult problem than people had originally supposed because you know we were told maybe from the early 60s onwards that such things as speech to text or object Rec recognition or robots that could operate in the world we're only two or three years away and well I mean we're in we're in a situation now where there are some fairly complicated robots built but they're still really in their nent form and it's because perceiving the world and then figuring out how to act and it turns out to be a much more complicated problem than we originally thought because the borders between things are not self-evident and what level of resolution you should be perceiving things at for say maximal functional utility is also not self-evident it's also tied up very strangely and in ways we don't understand with the nature of your embodiment you know so for example we tend to see see things that are handy because we can pick them up and manipulate them and we can make use of them and so to some degree our brains are evolved to make the world manifest itself to us in a set of discret usable tools that's that's a reasonable way of thinking about it and they're discreet and usable because we have a certain kind of biological platform you know because we have hands and mouths and because we walk in a bipedal manner then it's logical for us to break up the world in a manner that makes operating in this body maximally useful but that doesn't mean that there's a straightforward one-to-one relationship between our perceptions of things and the things themselves quite the contrary and that's partly of course we know that because with any perceptable object like I could con cize you as one thing for all sorts of purposes but if I'm trying to solve a complex problem in relationship to you it's going to be very difficult to determine how to conceptualize you so if I'm if you come to me because you're suffering from a psychological problem of some sort then I have to figure out you know is it organic is it is it there's actually something physiological wrong with you and I need to know what level of analysis I would probably conceptualize you at is it psychological is it and if it's psychological is it functional like do you lack the skills or do you lack the ability to apply the skills or is there something really gone wrong with your family or maybe it's even a reflection of an overarching sociological problem we know for example that when the unemployment rate goes up 1% psychiatric hospitalizations go up 5% and so then you might ask well you know if you're if there's a huge rise in depression and anxiety across the population and at the same time there's a huge increase in in unemployment you have to ask yourself what level of perception would best be suited to solve that problem because it isn't self-evident that it's psychological at the level of the individual anyways my point is is that perception is a very difficult problem and so now here's here's something interesting you can think about this for a minute I went and saw an autistic woman speak at one point her name was Temple grandon she's really worth looking up Temple grandon is a very interesting person she's very seriously autistic when she was a child but her mother and her worked her out of it so that she could be she's very functional she works as a professor I don't remember where it's in the midwest somewhere now she's famous not only be for being a highly functional autistic person who talks a fair bit about what it's like to be autistic but also for Designing slaughter houses across the United States and the reason she can do that as far as she's concerned is because she thinks she thinks like an animal thinks and so she doesn't and and she's identified maybe at least part of what the core problem is with autism so she the talk I heard her at was in Arizona and and it was a was a really uh entrancing talk she showed some showed some really interesting pictures of animals so what she's done is she's redesigned slaughter houses so that when the animals enter the slaughterous they go in a like a spiral basically they can't see what's around the corner and the walls are high so they're not distracted by anything outside so one of the things she showed for example was a bunch of cows was going through a standard uh sequence of of gates essentially and off to the side there was a windmill spinning and the cows would stop because the windmill they didn't understand what the windmill was and they'd stop or showed other pictures where cows were going down a pathway too and there was a Coke can sitting in the middle of the pathway and the cows would all stop because they didn't know what to do with it or she had another picture of cows out in the middle of the field all surrounding a briefcase and they were all looking at the briefcase and the cows didn't like anything that shouldn't be there and had a hard time mapping it now she said here here was a little exercise she did she said think of a church okay so maybe you think you imagine a child's drawing of a church it's like your standard house like a pentag pentagon right which is basically how children draw the front of a house with a steeple on top and maybe a cross on top of it or something like that which actually isn't at church it's an icon of a church and you think about how children draw houses too Pentagon rectangle what is it trapezoid chimney almost always with smoke which is quite interesting it's I don't know where kids get that exactly but they almost always draw a chimney with smoke even though chimneys with smoke aren't that common anymore but anyways you know you you can see what a child's picture of a house looks like in your imagination one of the things that you might want to think about is that is not a picture of a house at all right it's an iconic representation that's kind of like a heroglyph because no house looks like that and then you think about how a child will draw a person Circle stick stick stick stick stick and you show it to someone they go that's a person it's like really it looks nothing like a person right it I mean you you immediately recognize it as a person but it looks nothing like a person well what grandon said was that when she thinks of a church she has to think of a church she's seen she can't take the set of all churches and Abstract out an iconic representation and use that to represent the set of all churches she has she gets fixated on specific Exemplar and she thinks that one of the problems with autistic people and they have a very difficult time uh developing Language by the way is that they can't abstract out a generalized representation across a set of entities they can't abstract and then they and well and of course if you can't abstract then it's also very difficult to manipulate the abstractions and you see very strange Behavior with autistic children for example so they don't like people and that's because people don't stay in their perceptual boxes like a human being is a very difficult thing to perceive because we're always shifting around and moving and doing different things like we don't stay in our categorical box so autistic people have real trouble with other people but they also have trouble so for example if your autistic child gets accustomed to your kitchen let's say and you move a chair then then especially if they're severely autistic they'll have an absolute fit about it because you think kitchen with chair moved they think completely different place because they can't abstract the the the constancies across the different situations and represent them abstractly so I I made this little diagram I made this little diagram here to to kind of give you a sense of what you might be doing when you're abstracting perceptually and so you could say think about something that's that complicated it's sort of my model of how complex the world is but the world is a lot more complex than that but the world is made out of everything is made out of little things and those little things are made out of little things and so forth and those things are nested inside bigger things and so forth and where you perceive on that level of of abstraction is somewhat arbitrary it has to be bounded by your by your goals that's the other thing is that your perceptual structures are determined by the goals that you have at hand I mean some of that's that's not completely true because your perceptual systems also have limitations right there's things you can't see or hear even if you need to so there limitations built in but within that set of limitations you're still trying to tune your perceptions to your motivated goals and that's also very useful to think about when you're trying to understand artificial intelligence because for human beings without goals there's no perception because there's no filtering mechanism that you can use to determine the level of resolution at which you perceive anyway so there's the there's a thing made of smaller things which are made out of smaller things and it's so it's kind of my iconic representation of the complexity of the world and then you could think well what is this how can you see this object and I think if you just look at it you can detect it's like a Necker Cube you know those cubes that that are line drawings that you can see the front of and then it'll flip to the back have you seen those so this is kind of Necker Cube like or at least it is for me in that when I look at it my perceptions play around with it sometimes I focus on the kind of cross-like shape in the middle and sometimes I can see these other lines and then sometimes I'll focus on that square and sometimes I can see the little dots there maybe one dot and my perceptions are going like this trying to fit a pattern to it and I you can kind of detect that when you're watching it and so I would say well you have the options of perceiving this in its full complexity or you can simplify it essentially there's lots of ways you can simplify it but some of them are laid out there so you take the comp complex thing you make a low resolution represent ation of it so that's its rough that's the rough area that all those dots occupy that's the rough area broken down to its four most fundamental quadrants that might be how you would look at it if if this was a map of an orchard and you were trying to walk from south to North that would be a useful representation this combines this and this that's the that's the highest level of resolution that you can perceive this object at that's lower resolution than the object itself so the first issue is how should you look at things well that's a problem that intelligence has to solve so that's one of the problems that intelligence goes after and then I think what happens is we have the thing in itself and then we simplify it with a perception and that's like a an iconic representation and then we we nail the iconic representation with a word and that's how we compress the world's complexity into something that we can manage we take the complex thing make it into an icon and represent the icon with a word and then when I throw you the word so to speak you decompose it into the icon and then decompose it even further into the thing if you can't if you know the icon and you know the thing and so then we can use shorthand right because you have representational structures and so do I and I'm just tossing you markers about your representational structures and you can unfold them that's what you do when you're reading a novel because the novel comes alive in your imagination in your own idiosyncratic way and it would if you didn't understand the references of the novel right the novelist has to assume that your basic perceptual structures and your intuitions and your instincts are basically the same as his or hers because otherwise they have to assume that because otherwise they would be lost in an infinite regressive explanation so and it's problematic often for example if you start reading Victorian novels you may find that it takes a while to get into them because the presuppositions the expectations are slightly different and so is the language you have to update the representations but anyway so that's roughly as far as I'm concerned that's roughly a representation of what intelligence is doing in the world it's or a big part of it it's how in the world do you look at things so that you can use them for the purposes that you need to use them for and then the next problem that intelligence has to solve which is related is once you've got the perceptual landscape sorted out how do you abstractly represent the action pattern p s that you're going to implement in the world so it's how do you perceive where you are now how do you perceive where you're going and how do you construct up and then Implement strategies that enable you to move from where you are to where you're going so it's a continual process of mapping and movement and so it's it's it's navigation that's what we're doing in the world all the time is navigating through it because we're mobile creatures we're navigating through it attempting to make the world manifest itself in accordance with our wishes and that's the fundamental problem that intelligence has to solve and animals have their perceptions to rely on but we have our perceptions and our ability to abstract from those perceptions multiple times and then to abstract finally into into language so we live in a very abstracted world and it also means that we can learn a lesson in one place and generalize it across many other places which is also something something that animals have a hard time doing because they they don't know how to do that perceptual initial perceptual generalization so okay so then the question might be well if intelligence has to solve the problem of how to perceive in and perceive and navigate within the world towards ends towards in order to fulfill uh in in order to uh to make the world manifest what it needs to manifest so that you can maintain yourself and stay alive what ends is it orienting itself towards and I think that's a good way of thinking about the traits the traits the traits motivate the perceptual frame and so you might think that well extroverted people are after social success and you can understand why that would be because social success brings with it all sorts of rewards social failure brings costs and you could also understand why that would frighten you away from it and social success also requires the expenditure of effort and introverted people seem to be much more conservative in a sense in terms of expending social expending energy socially and I suppose they're protecting themselves to some degree against the possibility of social failure we don't really know we know more about how extroverts in some sense how and why extroverts Orient themselves the way they do in the world we're not so sure about introverts um what it is that what the what the proper landscape is for introverts I I can show you a word cloud I'll do that at some point that introverts that were generated from introverts on Facebook and they seem to be into fantasy and gaming a lot and and I don't know why that is exactly because the fantasy element should be more local localized in openness but the the the introverted types I mean I suppose they're the people that are on The Big Bang Theory roughly speaking you know they seem to be the introverted types and um but don't understand that much about them exactly how it is that they're orienting themselves in the world people are high neuroticism are oriented towards security and safety agreeable people versus disagreeable people are oriented say towards cooperation versus competition conscientious people are oriented towards order Duty obligation and implementation and open people are oriented towards abstraction in I both ideational and in representation and so those are also to some degree you might also think about those value systems right because what you value is definitely not only what you pursue that's too narrow a view value is also what you perceive and pursue and so thinking about these things as this entire frame of reference I think is a much better way of doing it we talked about this earlier this sort of structure earlier as a micr personality and I mentioned that determination of micr personalities by fundamental underlying biological systems like defensive aggression and sexual ual um sexual uh uh desire and hunger and thirst and so forth those are all systems that can grab your perceptions make you look at the world in a certain way make you pursue something else in a certain way and Prime action responses that are in keeping with all of that the the traits seem to be something like higher order agglomerations of those more fundamental biological motivations although we don't quite understand the relationship between the underlying biology and the traits we're starting to sort it out so we know for example if you look at the function of the hypothalamus the hypothalamus regulates the basic biological motivations that I just outlined but it's also the place where the exploratory systems find their ultimate physiological grounding and openness and extroversion seem to be variant manifestations of the exploratory impulse and that's grounded into in the hypothalamus so we're starting to be able to put the traits to sort of nail the traits down to their underlying biology with regards to neuroticism um well if you're high in neuroticism you're more sensitive to anxiety and that's regulated at least in part by the hippocampus and and generated in part by the amydala there's another part of the brain called the per aqueductal gray that seems to be associated with the experience of pain and pain is quite a complex phenomena depression is pain-like grief is pain-like social isolation is pain-like dis disappointment is pain-like there's anxiety components to that too and so neuroticism seems to be something like threshold for Activation in those negative emotion systems so if you're higher in neuroticism one unit of uncertainty might produce let's say three units of psychophysiological response whereas if you're lower in neuroticism one unit of uncertainty might produce one unit of psychophysiological response it's heart you know obviously that's a simplified schemata but there's variability because if something unexpected or threatening happens to you it isn't obvious how upset you should get one answer would might be brush it off it's nothing another answer might be it's a bloody catastrophe and often when something uncertain or threatening occurs you don't have enough information at your disposal to make a full determination of the potential import of this of the circumstance especially if it's uncertain and so then you have to guess at how upset you should be and where you are on the normal distribution with regards to trait neuroticism say that sort of determines what your guess on average is going to be so you know the other with conscientiousness say you might say well how hard should you work well that's a really difficult question if you're going to die tomorrow and then you probably shouldn't work very hard today at all so one one thing you might say is that the degree to which you should work hard is dependent on your assumptions about the stability of the future we actually know this to be true because if you put people in wildly uncertain circumstances they discount the future which is exactly what you should do right it's only makes sense to store up goods for future consumption if the future is likely to be very similar to the past and the present you need a stable Society for that and conscientiousness only works in in a stable Society because all you do otherwise if you're piling up Goods which is kind of what conscientious people do is leaving them there for the criminals to take or waiting for the next chaotic upheaval to wipe out everything that you've stored and so even conscientiousness is a kind of guess hardworking people say well you know M uh sacrifice the present for the future that's great as long as the future is going to be there and you can predict it but if it's not going to be there and it's unpredictable then the right response is take what you can take right now well the getting's good now you know obviously there are troubles with that too and I'm speaking you know I'm I'm offering rough rules of thumb but I'm trying to provide you with some indication of how and why these difference in value structures exist because they're applicable in different environments you know sometimes in a dangerous social environment it's not obvious that being an extroverted person is a good idea because extroverted people they stand out especially if they're extroverted and creative right because not only are they noisy and and dominant and assertive they're also colorful and and flamboyant and provocative well that's great if you're in a society that rewards that sort of thing but if you have you know if you're ruled by an authoritarian King who wants absolutely no threat whatsoever to his stability ever then dressing in Gray and shutting the hell up is a really good survival tactic so the utility of the trait depends on the structure of the environment that surrounds it and that's why there's variability in traits and so you you have to be careful when you're thinking about it from a strict scientific perspective to make the assumption that positioning at any place on the normal distribution is preferable preferable to positioning anywhere else now one exception to that maybe might be IQ because one of the things that you can see in I with IQ is that people with higher IQs seem to do better but that's also only true in complex societies and then there's another problem that seems to emerge with IQ and I don't know exactly what to make of this but we know that as women's IQ increases the probability that they're going to be to remain without a mate also increases because women tend to mate across or up dominance hierarchies and so if you're a woman with an IQ of 130 then you've already eliminated about 95% of the men and that's only using one criteria that's just straight intelligence and so there also might be limitations to the to the utility of intelligence with regards to reproduction that we don't really understand very well yet so anyway so you get the point so there's these underlying I kind of put down two value structures there capitalize on social groups that would be an extroverted value structure saying maintain order that would be a a conscientious strategy and conscientious people are going to want to maintain order because they don't want things to shift across time because if they shift too much across time then the things that have been stored up for the future start to become increasingly irrelevant there's lots of other reasons to maintain order as well but that's one of them so all right so that your cognitive ability get allows you to do modeling now this is where human beings have have leaped ahead of their competition so an animal animals can think but it isn't exactly obvious how they think they think strategically I think they think the same way that children think in some sense when they're playing with Legos when they're not thinking about the Legos you know when they're when they're just moving them around we know like if you watch a smart Predator group like lions go after a you know their target or watch chimpanzees hunt down a monkey you can see intelligence at work because hunting behavior is very very complicated obviously you know especially if you're chasing something intelligent but there isn't that level of abstract representation so where is so let's look at this so here's here's a here's a a picture of the of the human brain um with someone facing this way right so here's the here's the primary motor cortex okay so you're using that to voluntarily move your body okay now then I might say to you close your eyes and imagine doing something so just close your eyes and imagine picking up the cup that's in front of you and just visualize it okay so then you might say well what part of your brain are you using then and the answer is use part of this part this part because it that's where you have your body represented but use this part here the premotor cortex to Envision potential actions now what's happened is that this part of the brain evolved out of this part and that makes sense because the first part is just how you would move but the second part is how you would think about how you would move and then the next part which is this part huge in human beings is how you would think about how you would think about how you would move so be because that enables you to start to do extraordinary extraordinarily abstract planning so I I could say well Envision how you would pick up the cup and obviously that's something that you've separated out as a as a potential simulation from the actual action but we can talk about extraordinarily high level abstractions that have effects across multiple specific domains way into the future and the more abstract that your manipulations become the more they seem to be moved away say from the primary motor cortex out into the prefrontal cortex hierarchies of abstraction and the the reason for that as this was Carl poer this is really really worth thinking about why think let's say you're an animal and you act and it doesn't go very well then you die well you've learned that acting that way didn't work but now you're dead so that's not that helpful and then you might think well maybe you should represent how you're going to act so you know here's a box with a snake in it and your coffee cup is inside the box with the snake in it and I say to you imagine picking up the coffee cup and you imagine it you think oh I'll pick up that coffee cup and then the snake will bite me and I'll die and so then you do you decide that implementing the strategy of picking up the coffee cup is probably not a very good idea and so that stupid idea has to die and not you and so Popper's idea was that the reason that we developed the capacity to abstract was so that our stupid ideas could die instead of us and that's really it's almost impossible to overstate how brilliant an observation that is because what mean what it means is that like as a standard animal you would have to produce variants of yourself reproductively to go out into the world and try their hand at survival and that's pretty costly because you have to produce all the biological replications of you so you could only probably manage that maybe 13 times if you really really worked at it and then then the cost of their failure is extraordinarily High because they die while you can just sit there and produce like 20 different ver versions of you extending out over the next week or the next month and you can run them through a simulation and kill off all the ones that you don't regard as suitable and then only implement the successful ones now you know you could debate about how accurate you might be at doing that because it would depend on your knowledge but we do know that intelligent people tend to do better across the course of their life and so it does seem that there is some utility with regards to survival or at least with regards to positioning in the dominance hierarchy which is somewhat of a proxy for survival and for Reproductive success there's some association between that and the ability to abstract so we could say that part of the reason that people got smarter was because smarter people were more likely to stay alive now I think it's more complicated than that too because I believe that human males and females are in an evolutionary cognitive arms race roughly speaking and so as men get trickier women get trickier to understand them and then as women get trickier to understand men get trickier to understand them and so we've been chasing each other around this cortical expansion Loop pretty much since we parted ways with our common with the ancestor that we had in common with chimpanzees and so that's roughly about 7 million years ago we've undergone a tremendous cortical expansion since then and there's there's lots of reasons that that have been propelling that so so what do you have to do when you're thinking well you have to figure out where you are and how to see that you have to figure out where you're going and what that should be and then you have to you have to um generate and represent appropriate action strategies and simulate those in time and space and then one of the things that's worth noting is that's what you do when you read a story or when you tell a story and so part of the reason that you like to read stories is because that's exactly what story stories are telling you how someone is going about doing that and so then you can see how if you think about preference for fiction which is actually part of openness preference for fiction the utility in fiction is that allows you to experience a plethora of simulated worlds and to embody the consequences in abstraction without having to go through the trouble of doing that for yourself and we do know there's good empirical literature now showing some of it done by ex students from my lab showing that reading fiction does improve your interpersonal intelligence for example your ability to understand the position of other people logically enough because that's what you're doing when you're reading so okay so I'm trying to give you some background so that you can understand what it means to abstract and also why it's useful because we need that in order to move forward with the idea of intelligence so here we go okay so that's how you act voluntarily and then that's how you represent how you act voluntarily and then that's how you think about how you represent acting voluntarily and the reason I'm telling you this is because it's useful to think about intelligence as abstract action because we tend to think about intelligence as abstract representation right intelligence is the manipulation of facts or the understanding of facts but if you look at it neurologically I would say that's a misapprehension because the part of the brain that does the highest level of abstract thinking is actually something that's emerged from the motor cortex now you can that doesn't mean you don't use your intelligence to represent you do but the purpose of intelligence is to represent potential action patterns and we're embodied creatures and we need to move in the world and so that's the proper as far as I'm concerned that's the proper way to conceptualize intelligence so and here's a here's a a study I'll read you the study imagery in the premot cortex well studies on healthy subjects have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery and stroke patients with hemiparesis so a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits well here's an interesting side consequence of that so let's say I'm thirsty and I look at that glass of water and part of what happens when I look at the glass of water is that my eyes activate this directly so you know I've already talked to you to some degree about how your eyes work right there's patterns there out there in the world the patterns are mapped onto the the retina so it's a pattern display uh Matrix and then that pattern is propagated along the optic nerve and then that pattern manifests itself in the visual cortex and then that pattern manifests itself in the motor cortex and it manifests itself in bodily movement or preparation for bodily movement technically you don't need conscious imagery for that to happen now that's something really useful to know is that your eyes can activate your body without you being aware of the image because you think there's the world I see it then I determine how to act it's like yes but also no there's the world and seeing It prepares me to act forget about the damn imagery so when I look at that cup part of the part of the act of looking at it is preparing that gesture and that's a especially the case if I also happen to be thirsty because if I'm thirsty the cup signifies something that I can use to quench my thirst which makes it a very different thing than what it is when it's empty or when I'm not thirsty so I'm not even going to use the same part of my brain to perceive it because it's not the same thing in relationship to me so I look at it and then just just even just understanding the size of it there's not much difference between understanding the size of it and doing this so you let's see how I got that so that's pretty good so that's my under when you ask well what does it mean to understand something well that's what it means in so far as this is a cup because it could be Tinder for lighting a fire for example or something to stomp on to make a noise in so far as it's a cup then understanding it means pattern mapping it onto exactly this and if I do that successfully then I get a little reward a little hint a little kick of dopamine and that dopamine makes me feel a little bit better but it also bathes the neural tissue that I use to make that perceptual that to to to structure that perception and also to undertake that act and it makes it just a little bit more likely that I'll see it that way and act that way in its presence again and that's how you learn right you lay out a perceptual scheme it's got a goal if the perceptual scheme and it's associated action patterns make the goal manifest itself then you get a little burst of positive emotion click then that makes it those little the neural circuits that instantiated that thrive a little bit and get a little bit more predominant and that's also why you got to watch yourself if you're taking psychomotor stimulants like cocaine or alcohol even for that matter because they produce hyperlearning and so you know I'll glance at that and maybe it'll trigger off a bit of thirst but if that was if I was a cocaine addict and that was cocaine par parhelia and I glanced at it was like w that thing that I've built in my head out of repeated you know massive hits of dopamine is going to grab my perceptual structures and my actions and bring me that'll be that craving which is an Impulse to move forward towards it you'll feel that instantiated in your body that's the craving it's very very difficult to get rid of that even if you're if you're a cocaine abuser and you've gone to a treatment center for several weeks and got over the worst of the least initial parts of of the relearning not to abuse the second you go back into your natural environment and take a look at the cues bang that thing will be right back there directing your action and what happens is when one of those perceptual systems comes up you can see this when you're hungry it supresses all the other potential perceptual systems you can see this when you're angry too right you get angry and you're angry with your partner and all you can think of is all the stupid things they've done for the last 10 years you don't even remember that you like them it's like you could remind them I know you're but remember you like me well not right now you know so so it just it shows you how those micro personalities cond Dominate and suppress that's that's what happens because if they didn't suppress the other micr personalities they wouldn't be able to run themselves to conclusion and then you'd never get what you want okay so anyways um Studies have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits so what happens is you see something and it primes you for the appropriate action few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery in stroke patients with hemiparesis hemiparesis is is uh motor impairment from from uh from the stroke this work is exam aimed at examining similarities between motor imagery and execution in a group of stroke patients 11 patients were asked to perform a visal motor tracking task by either physically or mentally tracking a sine wave Force Target using their thumb and index finger so they're doing this during fmri scanning results whole brain analysis confirmed shared neural substrates between motor imagery and motor execution in bilateral premotor cortex so that's the part that I was talking about I won't tell you about the rest of the brain in parial lulle is is partly associated with body recognition so so basically I I I showed you that study because it it it's one it's one of the studies that lend Credence to what I was just describing is that imagery is the precursor to action and that it's Associated you get the imagery going here and the action there think about think about thinking think act that's roughly how it works okay now now down to cognitive ability well how can you conceptualize intelligence well this is a major problem because your initial conceptualization determines in part the strategies that you're going to use to investigate intelligence and when you say when you when you pair a sentence down to what is intelligence the sentence is problematic because part of it is a question about H if and how such a thing might manifest itself in the world so there's a fact out there that or set of facts that corresponds to intelligence but the other problem is well what do you mean when you say intelligence and you kind of have to nail that down if you're going to have a conversation about intelligence that doesn't go entirely astray and so you've got a you've got a definitional problem as well as an empirical problem and so there have been and this was especially true in the 1990s people have been studying intelligence IQ intelligence since the 1920s and and is a very wellestablished branch of psychology one of the things I have to tell you about IQ research is that if you don't buy IQ research you might as well throw away all the rest of psychology and the reason for that is that the psychologists first of all who developed intelligence testing were among the early psychologists who instantiated the statistical techniques that all psychologists use to verify and test all of their hypotheses so you end up throwing the baby out with the bathat and the IQ people have defined intelligence in a more stringent stringent and accurate way than we've been able to Define almost any other psychological construct and so if you toss out the one that's most well defined then you're kind of stuck with the problem of what are you going to do with all the ones that you have left over that are nowhere near as well defined or as well measured or as or as uh or or whose predictive validity is much less and has been demonstrated with much less Vigor and Clarity anyways despite all that people have posited a number of different intelligences and reasonably so because there's if you think of intelligence as that which might move you forward successfully in the world obviously there's a fair number of phenomena that are associated with individuals that might fit into that category so we have people have made these distinctions Bob Sternberg for example is distinguished between practical versus analytical intelligence and he kind of thinks of practical as like Street smarts and has attempted to dissociate that from the kind of analytical intelligence that um that characterizes more straight IQ research I I don't think he's done it successfully as well at all and since the 1990s interest in his practical intelligence has declined precipitously because when it is matched head-to-head with with standard IQ intelligence the IQ intelligence eats up all the variability what's really happened as far as I can tell so far is that when we're trying to predict people's course through life IQ does a very good job and then one of the traits does a very good job as well which is conscientiousness but it doesn't do as good a job as IQ now that partly might be because we can't measure conscientiousness very well we're stuck with self-reports or maybe I could gather peer reports about you or I could gather your parents reports about you or teachers reports and each of those seems to pick up a little bit more of the pattern because you know yourself but other people know you differently than you know yourself and there's still some accuracy in that you can get multiple rer reports of something like conscientiousness and that'll up its predictive validity but in the final analysis the best you seem to be able to do with conscientiousness is about a point4 correlation with long-term performance whereas with IQ in complex jobs you can probably get 0.5 and maybe 6 and so 0.5 is 25% of the variance you got to square it 6 is 30% 36% of the variance and 04 is 16% of the variance so even at the low end let's say high end for conscientiousness is 04 or 16% low end for IQ is 0.5 or 25% low-end estimates of IQ make it one and a half times more powerful than the high-end estimates of conscientiousness and I think that's about right you'd think why do we even have to debate this and because it's so bloody obvious to me that intelligence is a major predictor of Life success I mean you people I measured the IQ of University of Toronto people you know people in this room who have an IQ of less than 120 are rare well why well smart people go to university now is that actually a contentious statement well it shouldn't be a contentious statement it's self-evident universities were actually set up so that smart people could expand their abilities that's why they were there and you're selected on the basis of Assessments that are essentially there to assess something like intelligence yes but that that well that's that's well that is part of the controversy is it reasonable and this is a measurement issue and that's why we're that's why I've been instructing you to some degree in psychometrics because we actually know how to do this we know how to answer that question so let's take a look at how at how intelligence has been assessed and why and then you can make up your own mind anyways here's some of the examples of other forms of intelligence and so then the question is well what does it mean to have a different form of intelligence would would form a and Form B be completely uncorrelated like extroversion say in neuroticism or would they be slightly correlated or would they be highly correlated and then you might ask well how highly correlated do they have to be before they're the same thing or how uncorrelated do they have to be before they're different things and actually the answer to that comes down to something like practical utility it's like imagine I'm trying to figure out how well you'll do in University and I measure one thing and it's correlated at 7 with another thing I measure about you then I might say well are those two things the same or different they're pretty highly correlated you're high in one it means you're going to be high in the other well so what is there any utility in measuring both things and the way you figure that out actually is you do it statistically so we take the target which might be your performance across University then we say well can we predict your performance across University better by using one variable or two variables so we would enter them both into a regression equation all a regression equation does it's quite simple so you're trying to predict the Target and the regression AG the regression equation tells you how well you can predict that Target if you know another fact now then gets a little complicated because that's a correlation how well you can predict B with a well a regression will say how much you can predict C if you know a and b or a and b and c and d and e because you can use multiple predictors and you can waight them so it might be 2 * a + 1 * b equals c and that's all a regression equation does it's just multiplication and addition very very straightforward and so two variables are sufficiently different functionally if you can use both of them simultaneously to predict something of Interest so again it's a tool likee approach this is how the psychometricians do it is something real well it's real if you can measure measure it and it helps you predict that's that's how it's defined so then you might say well are are there these multiple intelligences well the first question would be well what do you mean by are there and the answer to that would be well let's specify the question since we're going to be scientific about it let's predict how well people do in University we'll start with the assumption that intelligence if intelligence isn't associated with University success then you're probably not talking about intelligence now you could argue that right because you could say well intelligence has nothing to do with University success but that's a definitional matter we'd have to agree to begin with is it reasonable to start with the presupposition that intelligence and University success share something in common well I think you have to be daed to to deny that initial proposition although you could because you could say it was privilege or socioeconomic status or or or or any number of sociological phenomena and some of those are obviously relevant social class for example because you know if you're in a higher social class and all things being equal intelligence included if you're in a higher social class you're more likely to go to university than you are if you're in a lower social class so there's other there's other factors that are going to influence whether or not you do well in University but we're going to assume that one of them might be intelligence well then you would ask well if you measured social intelligence so that's what do they call that social intelligence no emotional intelligence which does not exist by the way emotional intelligence moral intelligence linguistic musical logical mathematical spatial body kinesthetic interpersonal and interpersonal all different forms of intelligence okay so to answer the question question of whether they exist what you do first is pick a Target prediction of University performance then you make a measure for each of them then you test to see if the measure measured the same thing across multiple instances within the same person that's a reliability test because what the hell good is your ruler if it stretches when you use it it has to measure the same thing multiple times and then you would say okay we'll take all these different intelligences measured the way we've decided to measure them the first thing we'll do is see how highly correlated are CU if they're complete two of them are completely correlated then you have one you don't have two CU that's the virtually the definition of one instead of two you can Factor analyze them and see if you can pull out what's common across all of them that's another thing because then you might say well intelligence is what's common across all the measures of these intelligences it's it's a proposition it's not a fact you have to decide if you're going to agree with it but that if you were going to do that you'd use a factor analysis and you'd say well if someone was more likely to be musical if they were also high in linguistic ability and more likely to be logical and mathematically inclined if they had high spatial ability Etc then you'd be hypothesizing that there was one factor behind all of those manifestations that's somehow similar and maybe there wouldn't be and then you'd take all your measures and you'd put them in something like a multiple regression analysis and you'd predict your Target University performance and then maybe you'd say well wait a minute let's not just use University performance let's use Junior high performance high school performance University performance and job success and then let's say that only things that predict success across all of those categories and that are the same we're going to Define as intelligence well that's basically how you end up with IQ you could say that IQ is what's common across all possible sets of of intelligence tests now people are going to debate that because you still have to Define what constitutes a test but the way the psychometricians have managed it and have taken care of this at least to some degree is to say well we're going to we're not going to Define everything that we measure as intelligence so extroverted people are more socially fluent are we going to call that intelligence no we're going to call that personality we're going to call that extroversion and we're going to call stress tolerance you could say well if you can tolerate more stress you're more intelligent it's like well no that isn't how we've defined it we're going to Define that as being lower in aism if you're Cooperative you're more intelligent that's emotional intelligence well what you're less intelligent if you're competitive well no so we parsed that off to agreeableness so then the question might be is there anything left of these so-called intelligences once you control for personality and IQ and the answer is no nothing nothing left of them and the people who keep pushing these ideas keep trying to push them because they don't like the idea of real individual differences and to me that's just a matter of sticking your damn head in the sand because it's obvious here you're going to have a child you want the child to have an IQ of 65 or 145 decide okay so you're all going to vote okay you think any one of you is going to vote to have a child with an IQ of 65 that child's going to have a hard time developing even linguistic ability they're never going to learn to read right they're never going to leave home in all likelihood so which child are you going to pick well so do you believe in intelligence or not well obviously if you have any sense um so let's say we took off all the labels and we just for every time something statistically came out other we just gave it a lab so all these things just have their statistical validity and just names so then we're going to assign Nam to them after are we assigning the names based on what we consider to be reasonable okay that's a good question so look here here's one thing so let's say this is actually what happened when people developed the big five so I'm going to give a very large number of people every question every a huge set of questions that cover every element of their personality I can think of it's agnostic right what I'm really trying to do is come up with the biggest possible set of descriptors that someone could actually fill out that's a li you know I can't give you 10,000 questions that's just so maybe i' take a set of 10,000 questions and randomly select a few sets of a 100 right because then I I would have represented the entire set then I give them to a th people agnos then I do the factor analysis bang five factors come out and then the factor analysis tells me which questions load on each factor and what the factor analysis is saying here's 20 questions and there's something about them that's the same so then I read the questions and I think well those questions are referring to something the same what is that well then maybe I talk to three colleagues and we think well that's something like sociability bang we have a name and then we could go see now that we have a measure of sociability we could go associate it with other measures of sociability like we might say well are people who score high on this measure of sociability more likely to go to parties and the answer would be yes because what happens if you take 10,000 questions about personality and randomly select sets of a 100 and give each of them to a thousand people and do a factor analysis the first factor is extroversion and it's the it's the factor in human personality that seems to pick up the biggest amount of variant and so so then we say from a statistical perspective Ive extroversion is real but we Define real real means that if you use linguistic representation randomly applied across large sets of people and you factor analyze it these come out as Clump together because you have to Define what constitutes real if you're going to play that this is real game which is basically what you're doing in science and so that's what happened with the big five and then people started to look well okay is there a biological substrate for this bang turns out there is incentive reward that's the positive reward system so and then well neuroticism that's often but not always the second Factor well is there a biological basis for it yes threat sensitivity and pain sensitivity they seem to lock together agreeableness that's the care system that yak PP has identified so that's basically that's basically maternity it's something like that you had another question people intelligence well it's because we found out how to measure intelligence so and I'll get into that right now so then the question is well how do you measure intelligence okay well it's similar it's similar to this linguistic approach but here's how it differs generate 10,000 questions that require knowledge and you get get 50 people to do it and have them and have them be of diverse opinions about what constitutes knowledge so much the better then you cover the you want to over sample the territory so you want to have some qu questions in there that only one person out of 50 would think that measures intelligence because you can oversample the statistics will take care of that so you want to answer ask more questions than you think are reasonable and that's part of the way that you get rid of bias in the sampling it's like you think go find out 10 questions that someone could answer if you think they're intelligent I don't care what they are and then 50 of you do that bring me the questions well let's say we get a nice set of 10,000 questions then we can take random sets of a 100 and give them to a th people and then we can score their answers to the questions and then we can rank order we could say correlate their performance across different sets of questions so I give you one set of 100 questions you score 90 I give you another set of questions you score so 90 out of 100 you score 10 out of 100 well then we would think if a bunch of people did that those aren't measuring the same thing because if you're high on one you should be high on all of them well with IQ it's like if you do that the reliability is like 0. n it's unbelievable you take one set of 100 questions you rank order people you take another set of 100 questions you rank order people you correlate the rank orders it's like this it's 0. n the people who did well on one do well on all of them the people who did bad on one do bad on all of them that's IQ or more technically this is what IQ is take a thousand people and give them 20 tests of 100 items and then Factor analyze the 20 tests and extract out the central Factor that's G that's fluid intelligence so then what do you do with that well then you can try to use it then you can see well is there a biological basis for this is there something about if you're higher in the ability to operate across these sets of questions are there things about you that are physiologically different and the answer to that is yes your reaction time is faster just simple reaction time so light turn on you push a button light turns on you push a button okay there's a lag between the light going on and you pushing the button the shorter the lag the smarter you are well what is it and that's really interesting because you know if you're perceiving something complex it takes a lot of neural connections to generate the perception but simple reaction time is like two neurons whack there's no complexity in that at all and yet how fast you are at that is still correlated only at about 0.25 but that's not trivial if you're doing research in Psychology generally speaking and you come out with a 0.25 correlation between whatever you're measuring and whatever you're interested in you're having a pretty good day 0.25 is not bad at all and so it's not accounting for all of it but it's accounting for a fair bit of it how big your head is that's also correlated how how big your brain is physically and then even more accurately how big your brain is in relationship to your body now again these are small correlations but they're not they're not nonsignificant what else nerve peripheral nerve conduction velocity that's this study two studies with sample sizes of 90 and 90 roughly speaking are reported that investigated relationships among measures of intelligence speed of information processing and peripheral nerve conduction velocity in both studies neural conduction velocity was significantly correlated with IQ scores 042 and 048 man that's a whopping correlation how do I know that because a guy named hemp Hill where is he right there you might say well how big is a correlation coefficient before you call it Big and the answer to that is generally let's guess so if you talk to psychologists and they talk to you about how big effect sizes are they use guesses that were generated by statisticians in the 50s and so they radically underestimate the actual magnitude of correlation coefficients because they never studied it empirically well this guy hhal because how big is a correlation coefficient to be big how do you answer that take a thousand psychology studies rank order the effect sizes and break them into percentiles right that's an empirical way of doing it how big is the effect that the typical study generates then you can use that as a way of assessing how impressive the effect is that you generated okay so this is it here hemp Hill 2003 interpreting the magnitude of Co correlation coefficients now you could say that's a Dopey way to do it because wide defined size in accordance with the size that people have discovered and hemp Hill would say well that's because I'm doing it this way with this paper if you want to do it a different way go right ahead but there's utility in this you come up with an R of point2 How likely is it that your next paper is going to have an effect size of that magnitude how happy should you be well the answer is a lot happier than you think so to get an R of 05 that's 25% of the variance so you still have 75% of what's ever explaining your phenomena left to be explained R of5 90 to 90 97th percentile so 19 out of 20 psychology studies that are published and that's a hell of a lot more fewer psychology studies than exist right because this tiny fraction of them get published 95% of them show a a correlation coefficient of less than 0.5 for for third. 35 to 050 it's that's greater than 75% of them 0.15 to35 is pretty typical and the typical correlation between a personality trait and the target of interest is usually something in the neighborhood of 0. 2 to 0.25 with IQ you get up to 0.5 the relationship between income inequality and male homicide is like 75 it just covers all of it which is to say that everywhere that everyone's poor there's no male homicide and everywhere that everyone's Rich there's no male homicide but places where there's poor people and rich people the male homicide rate goes way the hell up right especially if it's a steep distribution because the men at the bottom think somebody has a lot more than me and that's not very fair I'm going to do something about that and that usually means killing other men and so it's a it's unbelievably powerful relationship that's a useful thing to keep squired away in your imagination poverty does not cause crime relative poverty causes crime that is a completely different thing so and it's dominance hierarchy issue fundamentally it's man man are generally the criminals and as the dominance hierarchy gets harder to climb the young men especially the aggressive ones get more likely to turn to violence you really need to know that it's a incredibly important fact I'm going to interview the guy who figured that out Martin Dy I'm going to interview him for one of my podcasts in the next month or so so you might be interested in tuning in on that if you're interested in this sort of thing okay so back to these correlations look peripheral nerve conduction velocity is correlated with IQ at like Point let's say 045 it's a whopping effect man and that's that's a pretty straightforward thing speed of electrical propagation along your neural tissue determines how intelligent you are well is that really so surprising you'd expect if that's associated with neurological integrity at least to some degree it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect but it shows you how biologically based it is too faster neural conductance velocity was associated with higher IQ scores and faster speed of processing why who knows here's a hypothesis um what if you're trying to remember a phone number just the seven digigit one what do you do when you're remembering the phone number you say it over and over again right or you or you if you don't say it you think it over and over again and if someone distracts you then you lose it that's working memory roughly speaking and your working memory capacity so imagine you could do four digits and remember them you could do six you could do eight you could do 12 likely not 12 is really pushing it that's a great estimator of IQ working memory in fact there's almost no neuropsychologists like to think that working memory is something in and of itself but that's because they don't know a damn thing about psychometrics generally speaking there's almost no difference between fluid intelligence and working memory and the reason for that is that all measures of intellectual function collapse into G and so we can take a look at what that means this is from this character here Carol John Carrol if you want to know everything there is to know about IQ this is a book that everyone who's a psychologist should it should you shouldn't be able to be a psychologist unless you've read this book in my estimation there's a couple of key texts and this is one of them this guy Carol wrote this thick book you don't have to read the whole thing because a lot of it's just in some sense demonstrations and proof of what he's saying but what he did for IQ is the same thing that psychometricians did for the big five you've got the big two at the top they're not very highly correlated I think it's about 2 something like that so they're pretty independent then they fragment into the big five and then you can differentiate them further into the Big 10 and there really are five different traits because they're only correlated with each other at about 2 to3 they're really quite distinct um the question is if you fractionate IQ how correlated are the things that you fractionated into and the answer to that is 08 or 0.9 there's one factor IQ roughly speaking you if you if you take imagine that you you took an IQ test and you took it was 100 items long and you took the 50 items that were the most correlated with each other and then the 50 items that were the least correlated with those 50 items so you broke it into two as much as you could you maximally differentiated it you might ask well how correlated would the scores be on those two different subsets and the answer would be like 0. n because there isn't two things that you're measuring even if you break it up that way post Haw and say well it's unfair but we're going to say because these are the 50 most highly correlated and these are the leftovers like we're really capitalizing on chance there you're still going to get an almost identical readout from both sections of the IQ test and it's just not the same with personality so and so this is this is Carol's model basically stratum 3 that's the highest level of abstraction that's fluid intelligence and then you can break it down into these subcategories of cognitive ability and you might say well how different are those subcategories and the answer is not very if you're high in one you're very likely to be high in all of them now there's a bit of a coda to that which is that the lower your IQ the higher the correlation between these sub aspects of intelligence the lower your IQ the higher the correlation between the sub aspects of intelligence as you get up into the higher strata of IQ your your intelligence differentiates more across the potential range of differentiation which is to say there's one way of not being very bright but there's multiple ways of being bright so but even even so if you're high on one you're still quite likely to be high on the rest of them so then the question is what's the correlation between G and each of these sub elements of G and then what's the correlation between the sub elements of G themselves so if this was PL itic it and we were looking at openness and extroversion the correlation here would be about point I think it's about 0.5 something like that and the correlation between openness and extraversion would be about. 3 quite a bit of difference but with this there's G there's the sub elements there's the correlation coefficients 0. n almost 0.95 Point what is that 6 or 8 88 6889 pretty much n pretty much well you can fractionate it the best you possibly can doesn't matter it's one thing it's one thing and it looks like it's the ability to abstractly represent and then to manipulate the abstractions I said with working memory you know you can get it that simply how many digits can you keep in your head simultaneously without dropping one that's it God it's unbelievable it's pretty straightforward and then it's this viciously powerful predictor long-term life success probably prediction of around 05 now psychologists okay psychologists hate this they won't admit that it exists and I think it's because there's something about intelligence that rubs against our intrinsic egalitarianism right there's two things that do it first let's say you're successful you like to think I'm successful you know and you like to attribute it to your own doing and fair enough you know I'm not saying that there isn't an element of it that's your own doing whatever means but if your nerve conductive velocity happens to be high there's a lot more probability that you're going to be successful and it's kind of hard to blame that on you or to attribute it to you for that matter so it it indicates a kind of statistical arbitrariness about the distribution of success and failure in our society okay so that's one thing people don't like that idea the second thing is is that it turns out to be very difficult to raise IQ now It's Tricky because it looks like you can raise IQ across whole populations because at least fluid intelligence looks like it's been rising quite substantially over the last 100 years maybe as people are better nourished and better educated but also more prone to continually manipulate abstractions in their life because I I mean kids start with computers when they're like two you know so but if you take a group of people and you try to if you take a group of low IQ people and you try to raise their IQ it's very very difficult to manage it without a tremendous amount of investment that doesn't necessarily mean the investment isn't worthwhile but it does mean that it's very difficult well the best thing to do as far as we can tell the best thing to do is get nourishment right that seems to be the most effective yeah yeah yeah so part of the reason part of the reason the theory is part of the reason that population IQs have been increasing over the last 100 years is because there's just no one left who's seriously enough malnourished so that it's going to profoundly impact their intellectual capabilities so breastfeeding seems to raise IQ so it's two two points three points with every year of breastfeeding it's something like that so it's it's it's and that's actually quite a lot two or three points actually makes a difference as it turns out so okay so so is IQ real depends what you mean by real IQ is averaged performance across averaged sets of questions that require abstraction to conceive of and and answer is it real well it's real statistically and you can use it to predict important outcomes that other things can't predict and from a scientific perspective and and it's also correlated with various physiological and biological phenomena well that's that's how you define real scientifically so yes it's real are there other factors that determine people's success and worth I keep isn't a measure of people's worth in any intrinsic sense it's a it's an estimate of their ability to succeed in AB in hierarchies that are dependent on the ability to manipulate complex sets of information there's lots of other things about people that differentiate them in terms of quality and quantity and all of those things and the the most evident of those are the big five traits now if you're a psychologist this is another thing every psychologist should be taught if you want to discover something about human beings that hasn't already been discovered the first thing you should do is make sure it isn't IQ and it isn't any of the big five traits and psychologists almost never do that because what happens is that if they control for IQ so in a regression you'd say okay here's the thing I'm interested in predicting the first thing we're going to do is add IQ and not a measure that you took in five minutes either like a real IQ test because you want to use a good measure to test your hypothesis against and not a 10 item measure of the big five either like a 100 item measure so you get a reliable measure you throw in IQ you throw in the big five and then you throw in your Dopey construct and then you see if it can predict anything and the answer is no and so psychologists don't do it because whenever they do it properly it destroys their construct and that makes them irritated because their claim to their position of authority in the educational dominance hierarchy is predicated on the validity of their construct now if you're a real scientist what you try to do is destroy destroy your construct you think okay it looks like this is real then you think it's probably not and I don't want to spend the next 10 years chasing a ghost and a chimera so I'm going to try to destroy the damn thing so you say well we'll match it up against a good measure of IQ and a comprehensive big five and it still survives we'll do a couple of replications to make sure that we can't kill it any other way and maybe we'll do the statistics three or four different ways to make sure that the thing just doesn't disappear when you use a diff different statistical procedure and people don't do that and that's why the replication rate even among wellestablished psychological findings so to speak ones that have been highly cited is extraordinarily low and if you talk to psychologists they'll wave their hands and they'll say well I don't really believe an IQ it's like okay you know we're not talking about uh what do you call those what did the Ghostbusters hunt down we're not talking about paranormal phenomena they're not things you get to believe in or not right they're rules TOS for defining what constitutes something that's real from a scientific perspective and a psychometric perspective so you don't get to say well I'll apply one definition of reality because I don't like IQ and then I'll use the same definition to justify my own constructs like sorry that isn't how it works not you can do that if you're a postmodernist you can do that but if you're a person who actually thinks scientifically you don't get to play that game so now you know part of the reason that we need to know about these sorts of things let's see how are we doing for time here oh yeah we're doing good I think we need to know these things partly because they have policy implications first of all you need to know them for your own life because you got to know that there are differences in intelligence it's really important if you go into a job and you're not smart enough for that job you're going to have one bloody miserable time and you're going to make life wretched for the people around you because you won't be able to handle the position and as you climb hierarchies of competence the demand on fluid intelligence increases and so unless you want to fail you don't put yourself in over your head well what's over your head well that's a tricky thing to figure out I mean you have to figure that out with intelligence you have to figure it out with conscientiousness you have to figure it out with creativity you have to figure out with stress tolerance with agreeableness because you want to go into a Cooperative environment and not a competitive one if you're agreeable and with neuroticism you want probably want to keep the stress level of your job relatively low because those are all places that you can break down and most people have at least one significant weakness in their intelligence personality makeup and you got to be careful not to place yourself in a position where that's going to be a fatal flaw but what you really want to do as far as I can tell if you want to maximize your chances for both success and and let's say well-being is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper cortile that's perfect then you're a big fish in a small pond and you don't want to be this you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room it's a bloody rough place to be so and you probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is you should be in a different room right you should look at a place where if you're right at the top it's you've mastered it it's time to go somewhere where you're a little lower so that you've got something to climb up for so and I can if you're not hyper conscientious for example you're probably not going to want a job that you have to work 70 hours a week at because you're just not wired up that way you'd rather have some Leisure and like more power to you if that's how you're wired up there's nothing wrong with having some Leisure but if you're someone who can't stand sitting around doing nothing ever then maybe you can go into a job that's going to require you to work 75 hours a week and almost all jobs that are at the top of complex dominance hierarchies require very high intelligence and insane levels of conscientiousness as well generally speaking as pretty damn high levels of stress tolerance you know because that can knock you out too because there's going to be sharp fluctuations in your career generally speaking at the higher levels of a of a of a of a structure and you have to make very complicated decisions often with very short time Horizons so you have to decide if that's what you want okay so here's some IQ items so this is this is from a test roughly it isn't from the direct test but it's an analog of the Ravens Progressive matrices now here's how the Ravens was derived so imagine that you have you got your 100 questions and you can take out the sum of those and call that IQ okay so now you have a score then you can do a correlation between all of the items and that score and you can find out which single item is the best predictor of the total score because you might see that question 39 has no correlation with with the with the mean with the average you say well that isn't a very good question you'd actually throw that out of the next test but you'd say well item number 15 is correlated at 75 with the total score so that's a good single item so then imagine that you went across sets of IQ tests and you took out the best single item predictors of fullscale IQ what you'd end up with is something like this so the Ravens Progressive matrices is a very good test of fluid intelligence and it's relatively non-linguistic which is also an advantage right because imagine you wanted to assess the intelligence of a very diverse range of people and they all came from different linguistic backgrounds well as long as they can understand the instructions which are all almost self-evident then they're going to be able to do this okay so this is you see you have to guess in case you didn't already figure this out which you would have had you been using your intelligence and applying it you're trying to replace the question mark with one of these and so here's how you do it roughly speaking it's also a it's probably a working memory test because you have to hold a variety of variables in imagination at the same time okay so the first thing you say see is every row has a star a triangle and a square and each row has a DOT two dots and three dots and so every row has to have a triangle square and star and one two or three dots okay so this one first of all what's it missing in terms of shape triangle excellent see that's why you're at the UFT and then okay and then what's it missing for dots two dots excellent so we do a little scan here and we see oh look well it could be that one or it could be that's it it's that one and so is that right yes aren't we smart no that was easy so no you're not very smart if you figure that one out because pretty much everybody can figure that one out I think this next one is more difficult okay so in the first row you see that there's two objects each are different color and they move together right they join that one they're separate there they join they're together they're separate there and they join there so this one should be halfway in between those two and the other thing that happens is let's see oh this item actually might be incorrectly represented because the blue should be on the other side whatever um what's that three yeah yes did they flip okay well anyways you see that it's three see I'm not very bright because I've just lectured for an hour okay so so that was a more difficult item and then this one is more difficult if I remember correctly so let's see so they're all three different colors so that has to be color then what's the other thing the relationship between the colors change so what's the answer ha you're all you're you're all scared to answer aren't you cuz you might be wrong yeah and the the more anxious people are even less likely to answer number three okay so if you want to test someone's IQ then you put together a like nice batch of these at different levels of difficulty and then you sum them and then you rank order and then you correct for age and then you have IQ and that's that and then you can say well then you can sort people into the complexity of their occupations and isn't that dismal and wretched but it's true so here you you go this is from the wonderlick people they're a commercial company that makes General cognitive ability tests and it's often used by corporations even though it's actually illegal it's actually illegal to use IQ tests but the wonderlick doesn't promote themselves as testing IQ I think they I think it's General cognitive ability which is the same thing but whatever the SATs the Gres the lsats all of those are IQ tests so now they're more crystallized than fluid we'll get to that in a minute but crystallized knowledge is what you acre across time so you could say that fluid intelligence is what programs your brain it fills it with facts let's say it fills it with knowledge and then but you can get an estimate of your intelligence by sampling your domain of factual knowledge and the reason for that is that well obviously the better the programmer the better the content and so what that also means is that you can you could if you were prefrontal cortex was damaged later in life your fluid ey could plummet but your crystallized IQ remain more or less intact so even though they're not different one produces the other and then once the producer has produced then the producer can disappear and you still got the encoded knowledge so at that least that's how it looks to me so okay so how smart do you have to be to be different things in life well if you have an IQ of 116 to 130 which is 85th percentile and above so so it's one person in 8 up to one person in 130 I believe is 85 90 95 is it 95 I think it's 95 one person eight to one person in 20 then you can be a attorney a research analyst an editor an advertising manager a chemist an engineer an executive manager Etc that's that's the now that's not the high-end for IQ by the way you know that it can go up well it can go up indefinitely although there's fewer and fewer people as it goes up so if you want to be the best at what you're doing Bar None then having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity and maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that's make making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in 100,000 and then also to really be good at it you probably have to be reasonably stress tolerant and also somewhat conscientious so you know people and you think well why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies and the answer to that in part is because they get there first right I mean everything's a race roughly speaking and the faster you are the more likely you are to be at the Forefront of the pack and intelligence in large part is speed that's not all of it is so if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly the faster people are going to get there first so IQ of 115 110 to 115 so that's 85th to 73rd to 85th percentile copywriter accountant manager sales manager sales analyst general manager ping purchasing agent registered nurse sales account executive uh if you look at universities the smartest people are they're Above This who are the smartest people at University what do you think mati mathematicians physicists and mathematicians right right I could tell you who's on the other end but I [Laughter] won't yeah I'd like to though anyway anyways okay going down the now 103 to 108 is slightly above average right 60th to 7 percentile store manager bookkeeper credit clerk lab tester general sales telephone sales accounting clerk computer operator customer service rep technician clerk typist so you see at this level people are people have some technical skill and some ability to deal with complex things okay that's dead average 100 is average dispatcher in a general office police patrol officer receptionist cashier General clerical inside sales clerk meter reader printer teller data entry electrical helper 95th to 98 machinist food department manager quality control Checker security guard unskilled labor maintenance arc welder die Setter mechanic good good IQ range for relatively qualified trades people 87 to 93 messenger factory production worker assembler food service worker nurses aid warehouseman custodian janitor material handler Packer now what you're seeing what you're starting to see is that as you move down the hierarchy the jobs get simpler they're more likely to be assigned by other people or they're repetitive because what IQ predicts to some degree is how rapidly you can learn something but once you've learned it it doesn't predict how necessarily how well you do at it and so the more repetitive jobs tend people with lower IQs are more suited to more repetitive jobs under 87 is there something well no right that's a big problem and it's something our society has not addressed at all jobs for people with IQs of less than 85 are very very rare so what the hell are those suppos people supposed to do it's like one it's 15% of the population what are they supposed to do well we better figure it out because one of the things that's happening too is that as the as the high IQ Tech Geeks get a hold of the world the demand for cognitive power is increasing not decreasing right you want to be a teller well you know those checkout machines they're not so simple you want to work at McDonald's you think that's a simple job you don't see robots working at McDonald's and the reason for that is that what McDonald's workers do is too complex for for robots to do so well so this is a discussion that no one wants to have but that's okay it's still a problem and it has to be dealt with so the US government I think I told you this at one point already it's illegal to induct anyone into the US Army if they have an IQ of less than 83 right it's about 10% of the population because the US Army and they've been doing IQ testing since IQ testing began because they want everybody they can possibly get into the army because in peacetime they use it as a way of moving people up to socioeconomic ladder and in Wartime well obviously you need as many soldiers as you can get your hands on and so you're not going to be any pickier than you have to be so when the US Army says it's illegal to induct anybody into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ of less than 83 then you know that they've done it for absolute necessity right and when people have made a finding that contradicts what they want to hear and they're doing it out of absolute necessity you can be reasonably true that it's one of those facts that just won't bloody well go away and so you might think well if there's nothing for someone with an IQ of less than 83 to do in the Army what makes you think that there's something that they can do in the general population and then the issue is you know because the conservatives will say well they should just work harder like sorry that ain't going to fly and the Liberals will say well there's no difference between people anyhow and you can just train people to do everything and that's wrong so they're both wrong and they're seriously wrong and the fact that neither side of the political perspective will take a good cold hard look at this problem means that we're going to increasingly have a structural problem in our societies because we're complexifying everything so rapidly that you can't find employment unless increasingly unless you're intelligent you guys are really going to face this you know lawyers are disappearing like mad and the reason for that is you can look it up online increasingly you can do things yourself if you're smart and so like the workingclass people have been wiped out pretty nicely over the last 30 years by by Automation and various other things it's the low end of the white collar class that's coming up next so I'm not saying that low lawyers are in the low end but lowend lawyers are in the low end of the white color class so there's still going to be plenty of positions for people who are creative and fast on their feet and super smart in fact those people are going to have all the money that's already happening to a great degree you know cuz if you're smart and you can use a computer you're so smart it's just absolutely unbelievable right and if you can't use a computer and lots of people and I don't mean you know you can open word that isn't what I mean I mean maybe I mean you can program and if you can't program well you're right at the next end so if you haven't got that with you you're you're going to be left behind what's going happen when a lot of them will take demoll that's what's happening in the United States yeah it's a no it yeah so there's a massive drug problem emerging in3 yeah no I'm telling you that is what's happening there yes drugs yeah drugs of abuse fallet well that what H what is is happening to a large degree is people drop out of the employment race they get very depressed they develop chronic pain problems especially if they're men because chronic pain and depression are very much the same thing and then they subsist on opiates which are subsidized by Medicaid in the US I'm not kidding about this this is exactly what's happening what what else is going to happen to people for whom there's nothing to do they have a terrible time especially if they're conscientious that's a good question you know the AI guys are pushing hard on this what's the biggest employment category driver think about it what's Tesla doing what are all the AI guys working on as fast as they possibly can driverless cars no problem except that's the biggest employment category for men so what are those guys going to do yeah they're going to sit home and you know be miserable with their wives and take opiate because they have chronic pain problems right nasty and you might think well could they think up something else to do well if you have an IQ of 83 or less you're not going to be doing a lot of thinking about something else to do you know that isn't how it works because you're more of a to to you're an act person not a thinking person roughly speaking you know and so if you have a task at hand especially if you're conscientious you can diligently go about it but you know I've tried to train people with IQs of 80 and less to do what I would consider tasks that that that one of you could learn to do in 10 minutes and and never make a mistake again and it's like tens of hours with bare minimum Mastery of the tasks so yeah it's ugly situation no doubt about it okay openness so creativity well I can talk more about this on on on Thursday maybe we'll just stop and I'll go into creativity on Thursday so we've got about 5 minutes so if anyone has a question I'd be more than than happy to entertain a question so did it what I tell you like what you need we're in a technical area to some degree right so you need to understand how these tests come about because you can't understand the concepts without understanding it so I'm hoping that the way I told you that the IQ tests were derived made sense I mean it's a fairly straightforward thing but that's what you want to concentrate on you had a question y y you can't change you can't train simple reaction time it's really hard you top out very rapidly and here's but let's take your question a little further so let's say um IQ predicts how fast you'll Master a video game so then and it does so then let's say we're going to train the hell out of you on a video game so you get super good at it and then you'll get like Tetris everyone does everyone know what Tetris is okay well Tetris is really an i an IQ test for all intents and purposes it's spatial rotation test so you can get really good at Tetris right you think hey my IQ is increasing it's like well here's the problem let's say I produce a variant of Tetris that requires that that that the idea is basically the same but it requires different operations being good at Tetris won't help you be good at that test you don't get crossover and people have been trying this for a long time it's like well maybe you could practice a bunch of IQ tests and you'd get better it's like no you get better on the IQ test you practice ractice but you don't get better on IQ tests and you see even fluid you can't move it there are people who come up with claims all the time like the Lumosity people it's like well here's a bunch of complex so then they thought look practice one test that doesn't work to make you smarter so then practice a whole bunch of tests and then maybe what you learn across all the tests will make you smarter no it doesn't work and it really sucks because one of the things you'd hope is that once you had extracted out a central factor for intelligence that you could get people to practice the micro skills that were associated with it and it would boost IQ it's like it doesn't work and you know about every five years someone comes out with a claim that says hey we've developed a new test and if you just do this test you'll get smarter and then someone tests it out and they usually use the Ravens Progressive matrices as the marker and they show no it's the same thing domain specific knowledge doesn't generalize to other areas so it's a hell of a thing if you if if you can figure out how to raise people's fluid IQ you will be a billionaire but you won't be able to do it because it looks like it's impossible but you never know you know you know maybe someone will crack it at some point but we certainly haven't yet so no transfer no there's no General no no generalizability of a specific skill to IQ so you know if you practice one thing and it there's something that you're doing that's close to that there's going to be some generalizability it's kind of hard to Define what close means though pro pro well it depends on it would depend on how big the factor you changed was but the general rule of thumb is no transfer yes oh yeah the higher the higher IQ oh yeah the higher IQ person will learn learn the new thing faster pretty much no matter what it is yes yes but even so then you might think well what if you practice learning a bunch of new things fast would that make you faster at learning new things and the answer is a people are doing that all the time so you're probably maxed out on that to some degree and B no it won't so and it believe me people have tried this for a long time so and for for good reason and we haven't got anywhere yes yep yeah the language one is tougher because like if you say say you learn two languages can you pick up the third faster and well the answer is how it depends on how linguistically close this the new language is to the two that you've already learned and then if you learn 30 you can probably learn a new one in like two days because once you've learned 30 you've covered the domain of languages so the language issue is a little bit more complex because languages have a fair bit of commonality in their underlying structure so but you don't learn one language faster after you've learned three because you've got smarter you learn one language faster after you've learned three because you know more about languages so okay we should stop we'll see you Thursday |
[Music] today we're going to talk a little bit more about the fractionation of openness to experience and we've done a fair number of studies with the Big Five aspect scale which we talked about a lot which enables the Big Five model to be differentiated down into two aspects per trait and those aspects have been useful for a variety of reasons for example when we're looking at political behavior we've been able to determine that conservatives who are generally regarded as higher in conscientiousness are actually more specifically higher in orderliness it's not a lot of difference between liberals and conservatives with regards to industriousness and we've also been able to determine at least to some degree that orderliness seems to be associated with disgust sensitivity and disgust sensitivity as part of the behavioural immune system and so part of the reasons that conservatives are more inclined to want things like close borders is because they're more concerned about maintaining the boundaries between things and the reason for that seems to be fundamentally associated with disgust and I'll talk to you a lot about that next week because once we've sorted that out it really really illuminated my way of thinking about things that had happened for example in Nazi Germany because people tend to people tend to think about like when people have been studying conservatism from the scientific perspective they've tended to assume that it's associated with fear of the out-group say and the Conservatives are more fearful the Liberals but that actually doesn't seem to be conservatives are not hiring trait neuroticism and that's a really tough one because if you are going to make a case that a group one group is more anxious let's say or threat sensitive than another and you don't get differences in treatment autism then you've really got a problem well yeah but the theories the theories seem to be more trade like rather than situation yeah so so but what we have found is that that you know for a long time people thought that all of the negative emotions loaded on neuroticism and it was like the global the global trade for negative emotion but disgust seems to be its own peculiar thing and but I will talk to you more about that next week and but that's just an example of why differentiation at the aspect level seems useful you also pick up differences between men and women at the aspect level that aren't obvious at the trade level as well so you can think about the model says you know you have a model that operates at different levels of resolution and low resolution representations are good for one set of operations and higher resolution representations are good for other purposes and the purpose of course is to predict at least that's one of the primary scientific purposes and so you pick the level of analysis that gives you the most prediction and perhaps also the most utility in terms of formulating scientific theories so and so we'll concentrate a little bit more today on openness per se so openness to experience fragments into intellect and openness proper and I think the right way to think about intellect is that it's the personality instantiation of IQ roughly speaking and the reason I think that is because well first of all working memory predicts intellect quite nicely and working memory tests are very very highly correlated with G and specifically G being the first factor that you pull out of any set of IQ tests right that that's the technical definition of G you set up sets of questions do a factor analysis and extract out the first factor which is roughly equivalent by the way to the total or to that to the mean of the items if it's if there's a one factor solution it's not much different than the average so the average is actually a factor that's that that where the hypothesis is that every single item loads equally on that factor because you're adding them all up and then dividing them by the number so it's no different than a factor analysis sometimes you'll hear people like Steve and Jay Google did this when he was complaining about IQ back in the 90s he said a factor and a factor analysis like a factor is just a mathematical abstraction it's like well yeah so is the average you think it's the average of a set of numbers real and answer that question is depends on how you define real you can use it for certain functions which is a pretty good definition of real as far as I'm concerned but when you ask questions like that you have to define both your terms and you do that somewhat arbitrarily anyways people with high IQs tend to think that they're smart which is and that's right and so then they can to describe themselves as smart if you give them the opportunity to do that and then that shows up when you ask them questions about their problem-solving ability and that loads mostly on intellect and so it isn't even obvious that there's any real utility in assessing intellect from the self-report perspective when you could replace that with an IQ test because the IQ test is way more accurate so but that gives you some sense you think about the whole five factor model you know where intelligence slots it slots in underneath opens now the openness proper part of openness to experience which which I tend to think about as creativity you can use that at least as a shorthand to sort of aid your understanding of what it is creativity seems related to IQ in that more people with higher IQs are likely to be creative or if you take people who are noted for their creativity there's a high probability that they'll have a higher IQ but there's more to it than IQ and and what what creativity seems to be associated with then again depends on whether or not on how you define creativity because you could define it as the sum total of creative achievements that you've made in your life which would be the actual production of say artifacts of one form or another performances or inventions or artworks or or what-have-you we'll go over the dimensions in the middle in a minute or you could also define it as the proclivity to engage in creative thought and I think we'll start with that first so what does it mean to think creatively it's it's sort of like it's something like this you imagine that I toss you out an idea and there's some probability that when I toss you that idea that that will trigger off other ideas in your imagination so you can think about it as a threshold issue if you're not very creative I'll throw you an idea and hardly any other ideas will be triggered and the ones that will be triggered are going to be very closely associated with that initial idea so let's say I toss each of you an idea and I asked you to think tell me the first thing that comes to mind okay so what we would see first is that the first thing that comes to mind for you the first thing that comes to mind in like in all likelihood we'd be shared by many of you okay so then you can think about that as a common response right and so that's a less creative response and then there'll be some things that come to mind for you that are that they're so idiosyncratic that you're the only person that thinks that and no one can understand it well that's also not exactly creative because the thing that you for something to be creative it has to be novel and useful at the same time that's sort of rough definition creative something creative is novel and useful and obviously you know there's a there's a certain amount of judgment that goes along with that clearly but if it's too novel then no one else can understand it and it's unlikely to be useful so there's there's a there's a range of convenience so anyways if you want to decide if something's creative like what we would do for I could say to you okay in the next three minutes I want you to write down all the uses you can think of for a brick so okay so someone tell me your use for a brick breaking windows yes okay what else can use a brick for build a wall it's very small wall haha a wall for ant and what else paperweight okay okay well so you get the idea you're not feeling very multi today obviously but so so you see that so if we gathered your responses say I said you have to think of 20 items that 20 things that that you could do with a brick then a bunch of the things that you thought would be the same and some people would come up with something different like yours was reasonably different than one about using it as a publish stone for your feet but someone else might come up with that but it's it's a good creative response because it's unexpected and it you could actually do it you know so anyway so you'll get a graph of probability of response right and the more probable the less creative roughly speaking it's not the only criteria though because you also have to look at utility so if I said okay you've got three minutes to write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick I would score that in a variety of ways the first thing I would do is just figure out how many uses you generated that's called fluency and we could also do that I could just say write down as many words as you can begin with the letter s in three minutes or that begin with the letter C or four-letter words that begin with the letter D no I can I can constrain it and if I counted how many words you generated if I had an IQ measure and I had a measure of how many words you generated IQ plus the number of words that you generated would be a better predictor of your creativity than just IQ so there's this fluency element that's and so that's something like the rate at which you can produce say verbal ideas and one of the things we do know about about the creativity dimension of openness is that it is associated with fluency and it's also associated with originality and originality would be how improbable your use was compared to the uses generated by other people so so anyway so you can think of you get thrown an idea and there's some probability that that will Co activate other ideas and if it Co activates many other ideas that's like fluency and if it co activates ideas that are quite distant from the original idea something like that and you could you could track distance by comparing it to to probability that other people have generated it then that's also another indication of creativity so they have to be unlikely many unlikely responses that are useful that's what creativity is roughly speaking and then you can tracks innate it in two different dimensions so that's creative thinking but then creative achievement would be the ability to take those original ideas and then actually to implement them in the world and that's obviously much more different than merely being creative and so and then what creativity is depends on which of those measurement routes that you take now I developed a questionnaire it's one of my students Shelley Carson about Jesus just about 30 years ago now 20 years ago I guess called the creative achievement questionnaire and I'll show you that here and I'll show you some of the things that are interesting about it you know you hear very frequently people say things like everyone's creative it's like that's wrong okay it's wrong it's just as wrong as saying that everyone's extroverted first of all you have to be pretty damn smart to be creative because otherwise you're just going to get to where other people have already got and that's not creative by definition so so being fast and being out there at the front of things really makes a difference and then you also have to have these divergent thinking capabilities and that's part of your trait structure and creative people are really different than non creative people you know partly because for example they're highly motivated to do creative things and to experience novelty in two and two and to chase down aesthetic experiences in to attend movies and to read fiction and to go to museums and to enjoy poetry and and and to enjoy music that's not conventional music for example these aren't trivial differences and so and so it's a real it's a real myth statement to make the proposition that everyone's creative it's just simply not the case it's a matter of wishful thinking it's like saying that everyone is intelligent it's like well if everyone is intelligent and then the term loses all of its meaning because any term that you can apply to every member of a category has absolutely no meaning now that doesn't and you know the other thing you want to be thinking about here is that don't be thinking that creativity is such a good thing it's a high-risk high-return strategy so if you're creative you just try this there's creative people in this room man you guys are going to have a hell of a time monetizing your creativity it's virtually impossible it's really really difficult because first of all let's say you make an original product you think the world will beat a pathway to your door if you build a better mousetrap it's like that's complete rubbish it isn't it isn't true in the least if you make a good creative product you've probably solved about 5% of your problem because then you have marketing which is insanely difficult and then you have sales and then you have customer support and then you have to build an organization and you have to if it's really novel you have to tell people what the hell the thing is you know we built this future authoring program right and so it's available for people online how do you market that no one knows what that is and that's a real problem if you wrote a book well then you have the problem that another million people have also written a book but if you produce something that's completely new and doesn't have a category people can't search for it online how are they going to find it so you just have and then you have pricing problems and it's really unbelievably difficult to produce something creative and then monetize it and even worse if you're the creative let's say you have a spectacular invention you've got no money right you've got no customers those are big problems and so maybe you go and you find a venture capitalist we start with family and friends because that's how it works you raise money for your product you raise money from your family and friends that's assuming you have family and friends that have some money and that they're going to give it to you and most people aren't in that situation so it's a terrible barrier right off the bat and then of course you're putting your family and friends it's substantial financial risk because the probability that your stupid idea is going to make money is virtually zero even if it's a really brilliant idea and so then let's say well you get past family and friends and you get venture capitalist capitalists involved because that's often the next step or an angel investor that's there's their steps in building a business family and friends angel investor that's some rich guy that you happen to meet some manner in some way who's who's into this sort of thing and is willing to provide you with some money to get your product off the ground well how much of your product is that person going to take well most of it most of it and then if you get a venture and no wonder because you know you don't have any money how are you going to bargain for control over your product he'll just say well do you want the money or not and if your answer is no then he'll go and do something else with his money it's not like there's no shortage of things that you can do with your money because there's a million things you can do with it so you're not in a great bargaining position and then if you get venture capitalists involved they'll take another big chunk and maybe if they're not very straight with you they'll just throw you out because maybe by that point in the company's development you're nothing but a pain in the neck because what do you know about marketing and sales and customer service and building an organization and running a business like you don't have a clue so why do they need you so even if you're successful at generating a new idea and you put it into a business the probability that you as the originator of the of the idea are going to make some money from it is very very low so don't be thinking that creativity is such a is such a something you would want to curse yourself with now you know it's not all bad because it opens up avenues of experience for creative people that aren't available to people who aren't creative but it definitely is a high-risk high-return strategy you know so the overwhelming probability is that you will fail but a small proportion of creative people succeed spectacularly and so it's like a lottery in some sense you're probably going to lose but if you don't lose you could win big and that keeps a lot of creative people going but also they don't really have much choice in it because if you're a creative person you're like a fruit tree that's that's bearing fruit so you don't really have you can suppress it but it's very bad for you you know the creative people I've worked with is if they're not creative they're miserable so they have to do it but and and you know there's real joy and pleasure in it and and the end and and and psychological utility but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an intelligent it's certainly not a conservative strategy for moving forward through life so and you know whenever I talk to people who are creative and you guys should listen to this because I know what I'm talking about if you happen to be creative if you're a songwriter or another kind of musician or an artist or or any of the other number of things that you might be find a way to make money and then practice your craft on the side because you will starve to death otherwise now some for some of you that won't be true but it's a tiny minority your best bet is to find a job that will keep body and soul together and parse off some time that you can pursue your creative things because then well as a long-term strategy you medium to long term strategy it's a better one but it's got incredibly difficult for people musicians for example it's incredibly difficult for new musicians to monetize their their craft even if they're really really good at it so it's it's well so anyway so don't be so I say well everyone's not everyone's not creative and everybody goes oh that's terrible it's like it's not so terrible it's not something it's not self-evident that you would curse someone with high levels of creativity so alright so here's how our creative achievement questionnaire works what we did essentially was we thought up how many domains there are in which you might be creative and this is remember when you're designing a questionnaire you want to be over-inclusive because the statistics will take care of it right so you can you can take a big area of potential you can take a large area and aim your questionnaire at it and you can do statistics post talk to see you're covering the area if if the things that you're measuring are nicely correlated they're this you know there's something about them that's similar if they're not correlated then maybe you're measuring two different things and you can get rid of one of them that's fine so we did start with a pretty wide range we thought okay well what domains can you be creative in visual arts painting and sculpture then we had experts sort of rank order levels of achievement within those domains and so if you are a painter you can 0 gives you I have no training or recognised talent in this area okay so you really want to keep an eye on the zeros alright so then I have taken lessons people have commented on my talents I have won a prize my work is being critiqued in national publications all right so you get you get you get zero to seven points but you can indicate more than no maybe that's happened to you more than once so and what happens this is interesting is that higher you are up in this hierarchy the more likely it is that those things have happened to you more than once and that's that's another example of this weird thing called the Pareto principle or Prices law which is that it's sort of good things happen to you the probability that more good things will happen increases right so because once you're famous people give you all sorts of opportunities to do other things right so your your your success doesn't go like this goes like this zero zero zero skyrocket that's how it works but getting from zero getting from zero to one if you're starting a business the hardest customer you'll ever get is your first one and then the second hardest one will be your second one it's virtually impossible to get a first customer because they're going to say to you first of all you're going to be selling to people who are basically conservative and there aren't going to be evaluate they're not going to be willing or able to evaluate whether your damn product is good for anything and so they'll say well who are your other customers and if your answer to that is well we don't have any it's like well then what they're going to be the first one no because people don't stick their necks out at all not a bit ever and so unless you're well established in the market especially if you're dealing with a big company you can just bloody well forget it it's like a three year sales cycle anyways it's RIT because big corporations move very very slowly and you might be able to find a small company that doesn't have much money who would be willing to use your stoop product for nothing if you're really nice to them and you get one customer that way it's very very difficult and so you'll you'll end up you know and what do you think the royalty just out of curiosity so I've written a book it's going to be published by penguin Random House and in January what do you think the royalty is for an author on a book so you make something creative you get a percentage of the sale what do you think the percentage is just out of curiosity guess yeah it's like 5% so think about that so that means that you make your thing and 95% of it belongs to someone else and that's that things are going quite well for you and it doesn't really matter what you manufacture or produce that's about what you can expect sales marketing distribution it eats it all up so us all well anyways you need to know these things because they're not self-evident okay so seems to be working all by itself all right so let's take a look well how else can you have creative achievement well you can be a musician I have no training or recognize Talent recordings of my composition have been sold publicly that's the top end my composition has been copyrighted recorded critiqued in local population publication I have composed an original piece of music well let's try this how many of you have composed an original piece of music wow there's lots of creative people in here that's very impressive so there must be 10 or 11 people in here oh that's cool so how about your coffees composition has been copyrighted how about it's been the recordings have been sold publicly and actually sold how many people - two okay well so what you can see is there's a rapid drop-off in the number of people who say yes how many of you fit into category zero I have no training a recognised talent in this area yeah okay okay zero is the median score on all of these median is the score that's the most likely for people to have or it's different than the mean median score is zero so what's the median score and the entire creative achievement questionnaire zero you you add up all over all thirteen domains the most difficult score is zero so that's how creative people are there's zero creative at all yes everybody has a certain degree not really creative well the thing is you could say that people have people all people are creative and that all people can generate ideas but the issue isn't whether or not you can generate ideas it's whether or not you can generate ideas that are different from the ideas that other people generate that's the critical issue because it mean it depends on how you define it you could you well the novelty is a huge part of it but that's that's sort of built into the definition of creative it has to be novel and useful and if your idea that you generate is the same as the idea that a bunch of other people have it's not it's an idea fair enough and if you define creativity that way then everyone's creative but it's a foolish way of defining creativity because everyone does it and and we know that there has to be something novel about creativity useful idea today the Integra's all seem to be artistic and well as requiring specific non-creative skills for example music and require yeah are there ways to be creative outside there well let's go through the rest of the domains because we did include domains that aren't that aren't artistic and yes there are engineering is a good example of that or writing nonfiction that those things tend to tilt more in the intellect direction but I'm concentrating most particularly here on sort of creativity that would be associated with openness so yeah okay so dance well it's roughly the same as music so we won't we won't move forward into that architectural design my architectural design my architectural design has been recognized in the national publication Creative Writing my work has been reviewed in national publications million books sold last year 250 of them sold more than 100,000 copies right so that's another that's another example of high risk high returns so probably you won't write a book if you write a book probably no one will publish it if you publish it almost certainly no one will buy it so you see you see what I mean there's exclusion the exclusion criteria there are so there's so thoroughly they're so difficult because it's very difficult to write a book even a bad one you have to work a long time to write a bad book and then your book has to be pretty damn good before you're going to get it published and and you also have to know about know how to go about getting it published that's also you don't send a book to a publisher by the way they don't want your stupid book they want a summary of the book they want an outline of the book they want three chapters of the book they want to know who the hell you are and why anyone should listen to you they want to know what other books your book is like and most importantly perhaps they want to know where it would sit in a bookshelf in a bookstore and the reason for that is that and I have trouble this is trouble with the books that I write is no one was where to put them that's a big problem because then the marketing people don't know how to market them and maybe that's because they're more creative than usual it doesn't matter if there isn't a place that you can put the book where people can find it then you're not going to publish it and even if you do you can't sell it because no one can find it so you just think about the difficulties and being a successful author you're not going to write a book it's too hard there's no damn way you're going to get it published and if you do it probably won't be a very good publisher then they have to do a really good job of selling it and marketing it then you have to enter the market at the right time right and then you have to be reviewed by the right people and then it has to be put in the right places it's like most what happens is your book will go out for a week no one will buy it and it'll disappear and that's if you've done 99.99% of things right so okay creative writing our humor my humor has been recognized in a national publication that's at the top and I've written a joke or cartoon that has been published I've written jokes for other people I've worked as a professional comedian inventions I regularly find novel uses for household objects I've built a prototype of one of my designed inventions I've sold one of my inventions to people I know has anyone in here built a prototype of a designed invention no one okay has anyone in here created original software for a computer one to three people yes three people how about I've sketched out an invention and worked on design flaws how many people so maybe two or three yeah I mean if this was an engineering class and all likelihood there would be more people in not telling but that this is more in the domain it's not the exactly the artsy end of the creativity distribution it's more on the ideas and and mechanical end of it and and and that's a reasonable way of thinking about it I would say so um scientific discovery I do not have training or recognizability in this field I received a scholarship based on my work in science or medicine how many people have received a scholarship based in their work on science and medicine okay nobody so we don't have anybody that goes up that high I've won a prize at a science fair or other local competition anybody there yes there's maybe two or three four people there so that means we've got four people in the class of about 150 who hit the third the second level of scientific discovery anybody received a grant to pursue their work in science and medicine its highly unlikely you guys are mostly too young to have had that happen to you okay so theater and film anybody who's at how many people have performed in theater or film oh yeah your Narsee bunchy so my acting abilities have been recognized in local publication how many people for that one that's it anybody higher than that I have directed or produced a theater or film production one two I've been paid there's a good one I have been paid to pit one two two okay my theatrical work has been paid to direct the theater film production ha got you there so you've done that Hey congratulations you're way the hell up on the list right right right right hard to monetize how many films did you make you made poor did you make any money oh you did well congratulations yeah yeah yeah well that's about yeah yeah calab recruiter and then also piracy got really bad right yeah well that's one of the big problems with anything that can be distributed digitally it's like yeah yeah yeah I rat right timing is everything and that's it's actually well that's that's another one of the terrible cut offs is that not only do you have to be right and have yourself together and produce the proper thing but the market has to open it's exactly that moment so that you can walk through there has to be a demand so people won't buy anything that they don't have a crying need for because they have priority say it's imagine everybody has ten priorities and ten number ten is important but no one ever does it and number eight is important that no one ever does it and so you have to go talk to someone to buy what you have and that has to be priority one or two for them because they'll say oh that's good we really need it but it's priority eight it's like forget it they'll never buy your thing because they never get to priority eight on their list of ten priorities they only get down to like priority four so and then the other thing that will happen too is if you go up try to sell your product you won't know who to talk to and you'll end up spending ninety five percent of your time this is especially true in companies with the people who will talk to you right obviously but those aren't the people who ever make any decisions so they'll tell you all sorts of good things about your product and how interested they are but they'll never buy it because they can't make make decisions and you won't be able to get to the people who make decisions because other people who know how to do that have already got there and that's not you so that's very difficult as well culinary arts my recipes have been published nationally anyone how about I often experiment with rest misses purposeful experimentation right not accidental experimentation yes sorry alright my recipes would be published in the local cookbook anyone know okay okay well you get the you get the point right you see you see how this works it's just well here are ways you can be creative and here are strata of accomplishment within those ways and so then the question is what does it look like yes yes yes yes fair enough and and this probably needs to be updated to reflect that so so there's there's the distribution of scores now that's dismal that's a dismal thing to look at you have to understand that why look at this zero right the median person has not done anything creative ever in their life with anything on any dimension right it's really important to know that and then you have these horrible people out here right they do everything they do everything price is law here's prices law this is something to hammer into your heart the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work okay so let's go through that you have ten employees three of them do half the work makes sense that's reasonable you have a hundred employees ten of them do half the work that's problem so the other 90% are doing the other half who cares about them you have 10,000 employees 100 of them do have to work right so here's that here's a nasty little law as your company grows incompetence grows in it exponentially and confidence grows linearly got it right because it with ten it's three who are doing half the work but at 10,000 it's 100 that are doing half the work so nine thousand nine hundred of your employees are doing as much as the best 100 you might not even know who the best 100 are but probably they know and maybe their peers know too and so one of the things that's really interesting when big companies start to shake which means maybe they've had a bad quarter too bad quarters and the stock price starts to tip down and the people the hot people who have options are not very happy about that and maybe they start to announce layoffs all the hundred people who have opportunities leave and they're the ones who were doing half the work so boy that puts your company in a pretty rough situation because now you've got the ninety nine hundred people left over who we're only doing half the work and the next time you announced layoffs the next most productive hundred leave and so then you're left with nobody who's productive at a massive overhead payroll prices law you can look that up to Sol a price to Sol a price is a guy who is looking at scientific productivity and one of the things he found was when he was looking at PhD students is that the median number of publications for a PhD graduate when he did his work which was in the early 60s was one okay half as many had - half as many as that had three half as many as that had four - real stepped out and one of the corollaries of that is that there's a number of people who are hyper productive and that's these people out here and if you were graphing the distribution let's say you graphed how many people in that population of 300 had $10,000 in a savings account it would look very much like this some of them would have are some of some of them would most people would have like no savings whatsoever the median person would have no savings whatsoever and then you go up here where the 1% is they have all the money but the thing you want to understand about that 1% issue that you always hear about is that it applies in every single realm where there's difference in creative production every realm doesn't matter number of Records produce number of records sold number of compositions written so here's here's an example 5 composers produce the music that occupies 50% of the classical repertoire by Bach Beethoven Brahms Tchaikovsky who's Mozart that's right those 5 ok so here's something cool so you take all the music those people wrote 5 percent of the music all those people wrote occupies 50 percent of the music that of their writing that's played so not only do almost all the composers never get a listen but even among the composers and you get a list and almost none of their music ever gets played so so then that's that's another example of this price is law of scaling so and it applies to all sorts of things like number of hockey goals scored is also distributed this way number of basketball basketball basketball successfully put through the hoop follows the same distribution size of cities follows the same distribution it's a weird it's a weird law and you you can think about it in part why does this happen law imagine what happens when you play Monopoly what happens everybody has the same amount of money to begin with right so then you start playing it's basically a random game well some people start to win a bit some people start to lose a bit and then if you win the probability that you'll keep winning starts to increase and if you lose your vulnerability increases as you lose and then maybe you've got to say six people play Monopoly soon one person has zero what happens when they have zero they're out of the game so zero is a weird number because when you hit zero you're out of the game so so then if you keep playing people start to stack up at zero right what happens at the end of the game one person has all the property and all the money and everyone else has none right that's what happens if you play an iterated trading game to its final conclusion and that's part of the the law in a sense that's underlying this kind of distribution so it's it's really it's it's it's not a consequence necessarily of structural inequality it's built into the system at a deeper level than that so you know people talk about all the time about how unfair it is that 1% of the population has the vast amount of the money and 1% of the 1% has most of that money and 1% of the 1% of the 1% has most of that money but it is a it's a it's an inevitable conclusion of iterated trading games and we don't know how to fight it we don't know how to take from the people who have and move it to the bottom without instantly moving back up to the top different people maybe but still back up to the top because even the 1% turns a lot like I think you have a 10% chance if I remember correctly you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life and a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year in your life that's in Canada in the u.s. it's less so in Europe so there's a fair bit of churning at the top end it's not the same people all the time you have the money but it is a tiny fraction of the people all the time who have all the money yeah people inside redistribute to recreate no not usually I mean they do but it's attenuated because the people mean if you reach up the entire company and put everywhere somewhere else there's some probability that some of those people would rise to the top that weren't at the top before but in that company that that isn't generally what happens people get stuck in their niche and they don't move so yeah this is you kill you wonder sometimes well how can companies die so quickly well they go they go into a death spiral it's almost impossible for them to get out of so and it happened happen extraordinarily quickly this is why you know the typical fortune 500 company only last 30 years that's it it's not that easy for these Bale moths to continue existance across time so and it's because it's really easy for something to die it's very unlikely that it will be built it's very unlikely that it will be successful and once successful it's very unlikely that it will continue to duplicate its success because the underlying landscape shifts on it and it doesn't know where to go and that's also partly because it's not that easy to integrate creative people into your company right you certainly don't want them at the bottom because they're supposed to be people who are doing what they're told to do so you filter out a lot of them at the bottom and then you need them at the top but they've already been filtered out and also creative people are troublesome to work with because they're always how do you evaluate a creative person you all you almost can't by definition because they keep coming up with new things and you don't have a good evaluative strategy for a new thing it wouldn't be new if you had a good evaluative strategy for it right it would have to be the member of a class that you've already encountered substantially so anyway so the take-home lesson from this is zero right right and then that's like that's like a graph of money monetary distribution as well and the thing the problem with being at zero is it's very difficult to get out of zero this is also why people get stuck in poverty you know you can't get a bank account if you're if you don't have any money right if there's a bunch of things that start to move against you when you're at zero that you can't shake it's very difficult to get out of the to get out of the that the pit here because zero is a kind of pit okay so now we've got the creative achievement questionnaire and we're going to take your score and your score is summed across all the categories and and and all the exemplars of the categories that you've chosen so then the question is well can you predict creative achievement and and this is this is this is how we did it with this was construct delegation the first thing we wanted to know was was the creative achievement questionnaire actually associated with something that you might regard as creativity okay so we got a number of students to come in and we gave them a collage kit and so then everybody got exactly the same tip and then we had to make a collage out of the collage kit then we have five artists rate the collage for quality and then we averaged across the ratings now the first thing you would do if you did that is because you would might think well can artists actually come up with a a measure of how creative a collage is and the answer to that is actually technical if all say you guys are the panel if all of you identify the same collages as of high quality and the same ones as of low quality then we can assume that there's something about your judgement that's like independent of your idiosyncrasies we could say well there is a judgment that emerges as a consensus across artists and the first thing we found was that there was there is quite a high correlation between each artists judgment of the quality of the collages I can't remember what the inter-rater reliability was but it was something like 0.8 it was really high so it was clear that trained artists could make reliable judgments about the quality of collages because you had to check that out first because if they're all over the place you got no measure right it's like everyone's using a different rulers got no measure so they have to be using the same ruler well we found that the correlation between the creative evaluation of collages and the total taq was 0.59 which is mind-boggling I told you last time that under 5% of published social studies social science studies have a are demonstrate a correlation coefficient of an effect size greater than 0.5 this is 0.6 and if you if you square it point 5 squared is 25 percent of the variance point 6 squared is 36 percent of the variance point 6 is a lot more than 0.5 and point 5 is unheard of and so the fact that you could estimate someone's lifetime creative achievement by having them do a collage that for artists rape was an indication that there really is something real at the bottom of it right that's like the definition of real the creative personality scale you use circle adjectives that are associated with creativity from a very large list of adjectives that work pretty well Goldberg's adjective markers that's another Big Five variant that was correlated at about 0.5 1 it doesn't measure to experience it just measures intellect but be that as it may it's still an personality marker of trade openness it was correlated at 0.5 won the Neel PIR openness was correlated at 0.33 and then we use the divergent thinking tests and I told you about those already's how many uses can you think of for a brick for example and so those are scored according to fluency how many answers you provide and then also originality how many unique useful answers do you provide and that was nicely correlated as well overall correlation of 0.47 and then fluency 0.38 originality 0.46 and flexibility point 3 7 so so what does that mean well the creative achievement questionnaire indexes lifetime creative achievement in a way that's powerfully associated with actual creative production of a single item plus creative creativity as it's indexed by personality markers on the C IQ is also potently predicted by IQ which is exactly what you'd expect so you can do an extraordinarily good job of determining how likely someone is to have high levels of creative achievement across their lifespan by using psychometric tests so it means that creativity is a real thing that's the first thing both in terms of thinking creatively that would be the divergent thinking tests and also in terms of creative production and and that creative production and creative thinking are quite tightly aligned so that was good that's been a very influential paper I think it's got about 500 citations now people use the creative achievement questionnaire a lot to assess creativity it's also associated with a higher than average likelihood of psychosis and the other thing you see with creative people is that they tend especially if they're writers they tend the pathology that goes along with that is often manic depressive disorder and that's partly because manic people become unbelievably fluid I think they speak incredibly quickly they generate ideas like mad and it's a hyper arousal of the positive emotion system roughly speaking and that can have as a side effect creativity so this is a cool study I just found this one today it's a terror management study so what I'll read it to you the relationship between creativity and symbolic mortality had been long acknowledged by scholars in the review of the literature we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using a terror management theory paradigm overall supporting the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns also a mini meta-analysis of the impact of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small medium weighted mean effect we examine the existential buffering functions of creative achievement as assessed by the creative achievement questionnaire in a sample of 108 students at high but not low levels of creative goals creative achievement was associated with lower death thought accessibility under mortality salience well that means if you remind people that they're going to die the creative people were less likely to generate death related thoughts as a consequence to our knowledge this is the first empirical report of the anxiety buffering functions of a creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of the cultural worldview it's like a empirical examination of some of the existential theories that I was presenting to you previously because part of the idea that was put forth to say by people like Nietzsche was that one of the ways to fight back against existential anxiety and death anxiety and all of that is to engage in creative production and so that was actually put to the empirical test in this study so I thought that was quite cool so there's another paper this was by Kaufmann and a couple of my students Jacob Hirsch and Colin Dion I'm on that paper as well near the end there they were interested in whether openness and intellect predicted different elements of creative achievements or goes back to your question about the differentiation between the artsy end of creativity and maybe the more practical idiot and the practical end associated for example with the proclivity to like nonfiction the Big Five personality dimension openness / intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement little is known however regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects discriminant validity is whether one aspect predicts one set of things and the other aspect predicts a different set of things if there's no discriminant validity if they can't be used for different purposes then there's no point having them so you want to see that they're actually capable of differentiating between between real world phenomena two of its aspects openness to experience reflecting cognitive engagement with perception fantasy aesthetics and emotions and intellect reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information primarily through reasoning in relation to creativity in four demographically diverse samples totaling over a thousand participants we investigated the independent predictive validity of openness and intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability divergent thinking personality and creative achievement across the Arts and Sciences we confirm that hypothesis that openness predicts creative achievement in the arts and intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability that's IQ and divergent thinking indicated that the relationship of intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities lastly we found that extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts independently of openness so what that means is that creative achievement in the arts is actually a function of higher-order trait plasticity right because plasticity was openness plus extraversion and that's associated fundamentally with activation of the underlying dopaminergic system which is the system that mediates exploratory behavior so if you're dominated by that the function of that system you're an exploratory gregarious person then you're more likely to manifest creative ability in the arts so apparently it's time stop yeah I think that's the same student who always does that alright we'll see you on Tuesday [Applause] |
[Music] I called the course personality and its transformations and I think you could think about that as a restatement of the idea of being and becoming and that's what you are you're for whatever that means you're an entity that both is and is transforming and there's a rule that goes along with that by the way which is don't sacrifice who you could be for who you are which means if you have to choose to transform in a positive direction or maintain your current position then it's better to transform in a positive direction so you might even think of that as the core of your being that's a piagetian idea it's a union idea as well who are you you're the thing that transforms who you are now you're also who you are but on top of that you're the thing that transforms who you are and I do think that that's and that's not an arbitrary statement you know one of the things that modern universities do dreadfully now is convince their students that value structures are relative and that and that's a that's a big mistake it's there's a lot of things wrong with that idea and one of the things that's wrong with that ideas that doesn't include what I just mentioned which is that's a good moral rule is you are the thing that is and you're the thing that becomes and you should put the thing that becomes at a higher place than the thing that is that means you also have to allow yourself to shake off those things about you that you might be pathologically attached to habits and people for that matter ways of thinking all of those things you have to allow yourself to shake those off and that's more like a burning that's why the Phoenix is that's why the Phoenix is the symbol that it is right it's all in a deteriorate so bursts into flame and then it's reborn it's like well do you want to be reborn like that's not the question the question is do you want to burst into flame and the answer to that generally is no but that's the wrong answer the right answer is you let all that nonsense burn away and you know and you might say well I don't know what I should leave behind and the answer to that is that's a lie you know some of the things that you should leave behind you all you have to do is ask yourself you'll come up with a list instantly of a hundred stupid things that you're doing that you know you could stop doing some of them maybe you don't know you could stop doing well fine leave those alone for now but there's a bunch of things you perfectly know well that you could stop doing that would improve your life and so do that see what happens that's a good that's a good idea all right so it's personality and its transformations because partly I wanted to talk to you about talk to you about what you are as a human being and also as an individual but also what you could become and that's actually a crucial question in the domains of clinical psychology in particular because a lot of what you're doing with people as a clinician is trying to figure out who they could become that's right you come you have a problem your life isn't what it could be it's like fine let's see what it could be like if we changed it we'll figure out how to change it that's got to be a negotiated dialogue right because like I don't know what the hell you should do with your life I can help you figure it out maybe we can talk about it but you are the person who has to decide if the things that you're aiming for you know get you out of bed in the morning because that's really the that's at least one of the crucial issues so you got to specify the goal and then you go to specify the transformation processes and start practicing them and you have to understand that you're going to be bad at it but it doesn't matter because Bad's fine persistence is what you need to be if you persist with tiny improvements if you persist you win so okay so in a broader you know in a broader context you can think about this as a more fundamental ontological question so one the one question is how you should act to the world the other question is well what is the world and that's a complicated problem this this is a scientific answer to that question and that is that the world is a collection of objective phenomena and that's a very powerful perspective and we have a good method for determining what the world is like as a collection of objective phenomena and and that's made us very technologically powerful and so more power to us and all that but leaves a question unanswered and the question is well the world isn't just a place of objective phenomena because it's not a panoply of inert matter it has living conscious creatures in it and that's a different they're a different order of be and the fundamental issue for conscious active creatures is not what is the world from an objective perspective but how it is it that you should conduct yourself in the world and that's a and there's a very there's a kind of unbridgeable gap between those two domains of inquiry and I think the reason for that is that there's a the scientific method removes value from its description so that's actually what it does and so once you're left with value free descriptions it's very difficult to extract out a value proposition from them because you've that's the scientific method removes the value propositions you're supposed to be left with only that which is objective right and value propositions are in the domain of the subjective so I think the idea that you can derive what you should be or do from a collection of facts is flawed a because the collecting the facts themselves gets rid of the value structure but B there's an infinite number of facts and so which how are you gonna pick which ones should guide you you can't you can't you you have to do something else the facts do not tell you what to do with the facts you need something else to help you figure that out well it's come to me over the years that that's what essentially that's what the narrative cognitive framework does it's the framework that we use to specify how we should act in the world and so you could divide the world into the world as it is and the world as perhaps it should be that gives you some direction and you need that and we know this technically right you need direction the reason for that is its direction that produces the primary that produces primary positive emotion and so if you need positive emotion to move through life which you do because you can't even move without positive emotion and also positive emotion is a good bulwark against terror and pain if you need those things then you need direction you need a goal you need a value structure so that doesn't seem particularly disputable to me you could still say well what value structure it's like okay fine that's a good question but I was you know I've thought a lot about that too so if we're gonna adopt a value structure there's a couple of rules that go along with it and this is why the bloody post modernists are wrong as far as I can tell is a it can't just be my value structure because I'm stuck with you and we're both stuck with all these other people and so if I'm going to lay out a value structure which is a way of interpreting the world let's say and there's an infinite number of potential ways of interpreting the world it's like the out fine no problem except that I have to interpret the world in a way that I can use while I'm dealing with you and the world two of us are dealing with everyone else and while all of you are dealing with everyone else and so that that's the piagetian game proposition if you want to be a popular kid on the playground you better play games that other people want to play that's a brilliant brilliant brilliant observation and I told you that Piaget was trying to heal the rift between science and religion and that's one of the things that he did that he thought helped do that his question is well where the moral judgments come from well they partly come emerge as a consequence of consensus and it's a bounded domain if we're gonna if we're gonna occupy the same space for any length of time and those are two critical propositions the same space and a long time then we have to figure out how to play an iterative game that doesn't spiral downward hopefully that might even improve that we both don't object to because otherwise it's not gonna work right you'll walk away and play another game or the game will will disintegrate catastrophically so there's massive social constraint on what constitutes an appropriate frame of reference so so much for the relativist argument and then there's another issue that's equally relevant and it's associated with the idea of objective reality to some degree but it's not exactly it's not that's not exactly correct because it's not exactly objective reality let's say that you and I decide to occupy the same place for some substantial amount of time and we figured out how to solve the problem of being together but you and I still have to figure out how to solve the problem of being together in a manner that doesn't make the world object too much and it isn't just other people although that's a huge part of the world you want them to know what object you may even want them to support you that would even be better but you also have to deal with the you know the the the tendency of matter to object because so your mode of being in the world your interpretive framework as a description of how you should act is actually the laying out of a strategy that will produce the ends that it predicts which are the things that you want so this is the pragmatist perspective this was worked out by William James and his people back in the late 1800s in New England the only genuine brand of American philosophy and what the pragmatist said is how do you decide if something's true the answer is how the hell can you you don't know anything well that's true but that isn't helpful because there you're stuck with the problem of how to be in the world well so what you do is you lay out a mode of interpretation that has an endpoint and then you run the mode of interpretation embodied right because you act it out and if it doesn't produce the outcome then it's not let's say true the claims within it aren't they're not true by the definition of the game itself so you might say well you're a kid on a playground you want to play a game one of the implicit demands is that the game is fun if it's not fun it's not worth playing so you play it for a while and then you see well was that fun if the answer is yes then you keep playing the game you say well that game is it's good enough it's accurate enough it's true enough and so you lay out interpretations in the world and they're subject to massive constraints other people have to go along with them and cooperate with you because if they don't then look the hell out like it's a major serious non-trivial constraint and then the other thing is well social proof isn't good enough it also has to work in the world outside of the social world you know so if you have an illness and you have some hypothesis about how to construe it you might say well is my understanding of the illness correct well it implies that I take these actions well how do you know if it's correct while you take the actions and if the illness gets worse then by the definitions that are implicit in the framework of reference that you're using you've made an error and so there's no relativism in that you could still say well there's a lot of potential solutions to any potential set of problems it's like yeah yeah there's lots of different ways to play chess on the on a single board right but that doesn't mean that any old solution is as good as any other solution it doesn't mean that at all so okay so then we're looking at things two ways we're trying to figure out well how does the world present itself and then how is it that you should act in it and so well there's other there's other constraints on the mechanisms of interpretation that you place in the world so we could say well you're constrained in your interpretations by the constraints that other people place on you but there's internal constraints as well we talked about those mostly from a biological perspective because you could also regard yourself in some sense as a loose internal society that's sort of a psychoanalytic dictum right you're you're a collection of sub personalities or you could say your collection of subroutines I don't care how you how you formulate it but you're a unity but you're a you're a universe unity that brings together a plurality of sub components and part of the constraints on how it is that you lay out your interpretation of the world is that you have to satisfy those internal subsystems right so you're the ego but it's more like you're the captain of a ship full of people who were rowing you got to keep the people rowing you're not you know a tyrant you're not an impotent tyrant of your own destiny you're constrained by the nature of your own being and so you have to provide yourself with food and you have to provide yourself with shelter and you have to provide yourself with water and all of these things and and those are demands that are laid on you by the nature of your internal processes and of course how they lay themselves out as demands and what the appropriate solutions to that is to those problems are is is debatable infinitely but you can see that constraints stack up you have to satisfy your internal constraints so they have to be brought into a unity that seems to happen at least in part but between the ages of two and something like between the ages of birth and four years old maybe even two years old you bring yourself together into something that's sort of functioning as a unity then you have to turn that unity into a unity that can function in the social world in with increasing breath and that unity in the social world has to be a unity that can function inside the natural world it's something like that so it's you're stacking up these games into a hierarchy of increasing complexity and one of the questions that emerges from that is well what should be at the top of the hierarchy if it's a hierarchical structure it has to be a hierarchical structure because some things have to be worth doing more than others or you can't act which is another thing I really don't like about the postmodernist ethos because it claims that value structures are there to eliminate to exclude and oppress and never once notices that well yeah fair enough but value structures are also there so that you know which way to walk because you can't figure out which way to walk without saying that that direction is preferable to that direction so you stuck with the damn things and and they do exclude obviously category structures exclude the question is if you're going to have a value structure how is it that it should be constituted well ready to describe some of the constraints like if your value structure is perfectly functioning except that you don't get enough to eat that turns out actually to be a fatal problem right and it might be you can run into all sorts of fatal problems you're too lonesome while means you're let's say that your value structures too narcissistic there's lots of reasons to be lonesome but that might be one of them or you're too timid or something like that like you're gonna be informed by your own internal biological mechanisms when the value structure that you're laying out in the world is insufficient to keep itself propagating across time and some of that's just you and some of that's other people in some of that's the natural world constraints galore and so in the phase of all those constraints and absolutely unreasonable to say and the old solution goes try it generate a random solution run it as a simulation in the world and see and see how many slings and arrows come your way they'll be plenty and you might say well I don't care about slings and arrows it's like ya know that's a claim you don't get to make so okay so you know you're you're being informed internally as to the nature of your value structure you have to specify where you are you have to specify where you're going you have to integrate all your underlying biological mechanisms into that into that schema it's something I think that's actually kind of weak about the P a jetty an idea say because Piaget a great fan of Piaget but Piaget tended to think that the child came into the world with nothing but a set of reflexes and that's his technical claim and that the boots drop off those reflexes and I think that's it underestimates the degree to which the child comes into the world as it already prepared unit and I mean he just thought of those things that's so self-evident that you don't need to talk about them but that's actually not true you do need to talk about them we know for example that if you provide children with food and shelter and an adequate food and shelter but you don't interact with them socially almost all of them die in the first year right it's not optional touch is not optional for children attention is not optional for children play is not optional for children so it isn't just like well the child comes in to the world with a set of reflexes and can adapt to any old environments like no the environment has to be structured in a certain way or the child will die and it's very interesting when it comes to things like play and touch because you wouldn't think of those as fundamental necessities right but it turns out that they are if you deprive a child badly enough of play and touch in the first three years of their life even if they survive what comes out at the end of that is often something that's like barely recognizable as a functional human being and cannot be repaired after that point and that that experiment was done with Romanian orphans back in the back in the 90s so it was it was an ugly situation to say the least okay so now you take these underlying biological systems and maybe they aggregate themselves into something that vaguely looks like your temperament your your five temperamental dimensions so maybe if you're an extrovert you're dominated by the dopaminergic system just like you are is if you're high an openness and if you're if you're you know if you're high in eroticism it's mostly that you're dominated by anxiety systems and systems that mean mediate emotional pain and if you're agreeable you're dominated by the function of the underlying maternal slash care affiliation systems but so you could say well you've got these loose you've got a multitude of fundamental biological predispositions that manifest themselves as implicit stories something like that and they organize themselves into the primary temperaments and the primary temperaments are biasing factors that determine in part the nature of the interpretive structure that you're going to lay out in the world it's not entirely determined by your temperament we know that personality is only predicting you know something like let's say 10% of the variance in most complex social outcomes and and the other elements are well temperamental as you might be used have to get along with other people in the world so you you know you come in with these internal biases but they have still have to be modified extensively by your social and your natural surround okay and then you develop your routines from the bottom up as Piaget pointed out and sometimes from the top down because now and then you can think yourself into a radical transformation but mostly what you're doing is building the micro units of your interpretive schemas and your behaviors and aggregating them into higher order structures that you can then tag with higher order abstractions and we talked about that you can't tell a three-year-old to clean up his room and the reason for that is he those are empty boxes as far as the kid's concerned clean he's doing he might he might have room he might have that clean he doesn't have he might have pick up the teddy bear and put it in that space right so that's one of these little micro routines and maybe you say you put 20 of those micro routines together and now you can say clean up your room and basically what you're saying is here's implement the 10 micro routines that you've learned and so a well-functioning personality has all the micro routines in place that's actually something that you help people with if you're a behavioral therapist because one of the things you assume if you're a behavioral therapist is that sometimes the reason people aren't doing things is because they don't know how you know sometimes maybe the person is depressed but potentially high-functioning they got all the damn micro routines they're well socialized they're just dormant you got to get them awake again and implementing them but sometimes you get someone in your in your practice say who's just been neglected like you cannot believe right the parents never paid any attention to them or maybe just punished them every time they did something good that's really fun and then you know they didn't make friends and so they're really really big and and and poorly articulated and so then what you do is you work at the bottom of the micro routines and get them to practice building up all these little attributes that they didn't build up and you know one of the things you can think about in terms of character development is so now maybe understand something about your own personality you might say well what could you do to improve your personality and the answer is develop some of the micro routines on the other side of the personality distribution so if you're disagreeable as hell maybe start learning how to do nice things for people and that actually works by the way so if you take disagreeable people who are depressed and you get them doing nice things for other people their depression tends to lift but then by the same token if you're agreeable then you should practice doing some things for yourself and being more tough minded in your negotiations and so you can sort of place yourself on the on the personality trait distribution you know you're extrovert it's like okay man learn to spend some time with yourself right you're low in openness well try reading a book that's outside of your you know your your sphere of interest now and then if you're conscientious well you should probably learn how to relax occasionally and and so forth so you can I think partly what you're doing is you're developing your personality is not moving the mean much the average where you know where you're located but you're extending the standard deviation so that you're a bigger bag of tricks than you were before and I think you can practice that consciously it's like you're hyper orderly it's well get a dog you know dogs they're messy horrible things you know it's just what you need if you're hyper orderly because they're gonna leave hair everywhere and force you live with it and so okay so and so this is sort of you right this is your personality it's this connect collection of root subroutines that you've turned into a hierarchy and then there's something at the top of it and that's that's a big question like what the hell should be at the top of the hierarchy because that's the ultimate question of unity and then the clinicians would say well it's the self-actualized person or it's the self or something like that you know that's that's the ID that's the implicit and perhaps explicit ideal that you're aiming for and you might say well is does such thing exists that I would say well do you admire people because that's your answer right do you despise people well you like some people and you don't like others you respect some people you don't respect others well you're acting out the notion that there's at least an implicit ideal you do the same thing when you go to movies you know you you know who the hero is you know who the bad guy is you're acting out the proposition that there's some sort of value hierarchy and there's some sort of manifestation of it that's coherent across time so you appear to believe that and you know you are driven at least to some degree by your own inner ideals and so you tend to answer the question is that real with an affirmed and if you don't there's catastrophic consequences Nietzsche and the existentialist we're very good at detailing that's like you let your value hierarchy disintegrate well then what well part of it is nihilistic chaos whoo that's not so much fun and then there's the alignment of nihilistic chaos with the intrinsic desire that someone will come along and tell you what to do right so what happens is if you let this devolve you end up with nihilistic exists not with nihilistic chaos or the demand for for the tyrant to come forward and we've had that happen lots of times and doesn't seem to have gone that well so all right well so what happens when you you lay out these little routines in the world at different levels of analysis well this is how your emotions function broadly speaking you know you're aiming at something and this is an oversimplification which is why I want to show you this right when I show you this assume that it's made out of that right it's just a schematic oversimplification because even if let's say that I'm trying to do something as simple as walking towards the door I mean that the action of walking towards the door is predicated on the existence of all the subroutines that enable me to propel my body across time and space and like there's that took a lot of internal organization to get that right it's a traumatized now and so you can treat it like it's invisible but implicit in any one of these structures is this entire structure and you actually see this in therapy very frequently too so I was talking to a client the other day it was so interesting this person said something he had been talking to his mother and he's he just made a casual comment he said he was talking to his mother who was in a state of grief for for good reasons that were it independent of this particular person who said and I hate her and I thought oh that's interesting like where did that come from and so I made a comment on that that's a Freudian slip right because there was the conversation was flowing and then this little emotion tagged utterance came forward and whenever an emotion tagged utterance of that sort comes forward you know it's associated with a whole rat's nest of underlying pain and anxiety and and and on what would you call it disappointment and frustration that hasn't been properly rectified so it's like a marker and yet you know this when you're talking to people they say something and you think oh you know what Wow too much information that's one way of thinking about it's like just what are you up to and and then if you have any sense you just forget that that even happened and you continue but that's that's like the snout of a dragon peeking out from a cave and you might say well it's just a snout man but it's not because dragons snouts tend to be attached to the whole damn dragon and so this is also something to know about relationships because when you're in a relationship with someone they'll do that now and then they'll you know utter something and you think huh-huh it's like there's a bump in the road well we're gonna look underneath that at our peril but if you do go down there and you look at it then then the whole thing comes you can start to disentangle the the web of of memories and and experiences that are all tangled together as a consequence of their emotional identity because I could say well everything that makes you anxious or everything that makes you upset is the same as every other thing that's ever made you upset and so and then there's an even different subset instead of that which is all those things that have made you upset that you've never dealt with they're all laying down there at the bottom of your nasty little soul waiting to pop themselves up in some in some random utterance right and so then you go in there at your peril because if you're the person who pokes around in that then you're gonna get blasted with all of that stuff it's gonna come out like almost uncontrollably then then you can sort it out and so what you find is if you ask a person a question like that and then you let them free associate which is just talk about it they'll do a wandering around like that maze that I told you about they'll do a wandering around of that entire territory and sometimes just having them worn during it can help them straighten it out but you might find out that something happened to them 15 years ago that left them with a terrible sense of guilt or dismay or frustration and then when when they interact with their parents in a certain way the parent knows exactly how to tap that and then that all comes up and that's what produces that that little that little utterance and so that's the material of the world manifesting itself that's what matters manifesting itself and it almost always manifests itself as an object something that objects we're having a conversation it's going quite well no problem there's a bump in it there's an emotional disjunct right now we're no longer in the same place at the same time we're no longer playing the same game so that I might say okay well let's open that up and see what's behind it well the question is what's behind the game you're playing and the answer to that is all the world that you're ignoring always so when so when imagine that think about it this way you're trying to do well in a class and you get a bad grade okay so you're in this little frame you want to get a good grade that isn't happening you got a bad grade okay what is it that's manifesting itself as the bad grade well you could say well it's a c-minus on a piece of paper it's like well that's you know really no that's the objective manifestation you got a piece of paper with a c-minus the value-free proposition is that you've been delivered a piece of paper with a curve on it a little you know negative sign well you think well that's what that is well you know it's as dopey as thinking well here you got your failing grade you go into the lab and you like weigh it on a scale then you burn it and see what it was made of it's like well why did I get so upset about that it's just paper it's like no that's not just paper it's an entity that exists in a web of connections the fact that it's signified by paper is almost completely irrelevant what is it the answer is you don't know and that's why when you pick it up you get this paralyzed sinking feeling because your limbic system is a lot smarter than your perceptual systems and your perceptual systems say well that's a piece of paper and your limbic system says nah for sure dragan right right and so then you're sweating and then maybe you put it away and you go play video games because you know better the hypothetical dragon than the real dragon and so instead you pull out the piece of paper maybe and you think okay why I did I get this c-minus well that's a hell of a question isn't it it's like maybe you're stupid well that could be or at least stupid compared to who you think you are like that's that's the real horror that's lurking there writes like all I thought it was kind of smart that's a that's a proposition of the highest order I thought I was kind of smart it's like yeah well what about this c-minus it's like well that goddamn professor right that's the first thing it's it's I've been attacked by a predator that's the first response right so it's it's a nonsensical message it's just delivered by someone evil and predatory well that's you know possible but I wouldn't go there I wouldn't go there first necessarily so but then well then say you don't go there okay well so what is this exactly do you not know what you thought you know are you not who you think you are do you not work hard enough or your values not organized properly do you misuse your time are you in the wrong field is the way you're construing your life completely inappropriate are you acting out what your parents wanted you to do it and you're pissed off about it so you're only running at 40% despite them despite the fact that they're paying $25,000 a year for your education because that's a fun game yeah I'll go do what you want me to do but I'll fail but not completely because then that would wouldn't cost you very much I'll just fail a little bit so that you have to spend all that money forcing me to do what I don't want to do but you'll never get to escape from it and then every time we interact I'll stab you in various ways that you don't quite understand just to show you how irritated I am that I happen to be acting out the destiny that you've put forward for me so maybe that's part of the dragon' right and then that pulls in the whole parent thing and you know it's these are bottomless pits often when you when you're in the world there's something objects to you something that matters objects to you then in the entire unrealized world is in that thing that objects it's all tangled up inside that's why it's the great dragon of chaos it's everything that's outside of your conceptual structure and what is that it's everything that lurks outside of your of your walled city and it's manifested itself like the snake in the garden and the easiest thing to do is say I'm not having anything to do with that but the problem with that is well you get your c- and you don't do anything about it maybe you're a little bitter and more resentful in your study habits get a little worse so the next time you get like a d-plus and then you collect a bunch of FS and then you stop going to school then you stop showering right then you end up jumping off the bridge and so that's a that's that's how the dragon eats you when you don't pay attention to it and so it's no bloody wonder that people avoid you know it's really no wonder that they avoid because error messages contain within them the implicit world now the upside of that is while they contain within them the implicit world and the world isn't all negative and so maybe you get your c-minus and that's actually the best gift you ever got because somebody finally took you and went whack you no clue in and so you take that apart and you think oh I don't know how to write I don't know how to think I've never read anything in my life my study habits are abysmal you know like maybe I'm working at 2% efficiency which which is probably I would suspect that you know some of you aren't doing that but I bet you that I bet there's thirty thirty to fifty percent of the people in the room are working at two percent efficiency it's like you got it that's so to find that out is so optimistic I mean if you're barely hanging in there but you're only working out 2% you might imagine what you could have as a life if you work it out like 50 percent so so that the c-minus can be the best gift you ever had and that's the gold that the Dragon hoards right that's exactly what that means and so well so you're moving from point A to point B in your little circumscribed world you've made everything invisible and as long as that works then your Theory's good enough it's accurate enough it's true enough you're in your little paradise but if something comes up and objects well that's where your character is tested fundamentally that's the character test it's like what do you do with messages of error and that's a tricky issue okay so here's a solution to that here's what not to do I am a bad person I got to see mice I'm a bad person I'm out I'll just go jump off the bridge it's like no that's not good because what that means is that every time every time you try to learn something you're going to make a mistake because what do you know so you're gonna make mistakes and if the rule is every time you make a mistake you're gonna go jump off the bridge then that's not a useful problem-solving strategy and so when you make a mistake you don't get to beat yourself to death with a club it's a bad strategy and you'll have your internal tyrant in there who's perfectly happy about doing that that's the you know overactive super-ego that Freud talked about maybe it came to you via a parent who was too authoritarian or a grandparent or or maybe it's just you because you're disagreeable and neurotic and so you'll take you're at hyper conscientious you'll take yourself apart well starting the and so you've got a problem something has objected to you then the question is well what does that mean well maybe you're not looking at the world right maybe your goals are wrong maybe you're not acting properly it's okay so the question that arises when an obstacle emerges is which part of this structure needs attention and the first answer can't be all of it which is why when you're arguing with someone in an intimate relationship and you're angry at them and you want to win which is a big mistake you want to win you say well your this is what you're like here's another ten examples of how you've done that in the past and I can enumerate more of them if you'd like and so it doesn't that's actually what you like and I've tried fixing you and didn't work and so it looks like you're gonna be like that up into the future and you're basically saying to them well you're a bad person and the only thing they can do is either collapse or punch you and punching you is actually better than collapsing look you don't you know what I mean it's such a counterproductive way of arguing they you don't leave the person any out and so maybe while they're civilized so it doesn't get physical well maybe that's good and maybe it isn't but then they end up either really not happy with you in a way that they will manifest the first possible opportunity they get or they have to go off in the corner and cringe it's like great you won it's like now your partners either hates you or is cringing it's great that's a real good victory man cry rack up about a hundred victories like that and you'll be in divorce court and spending two hundred and fifty thousand dollars while being miserable about it yeah so anyway so something objects to you and you think okay well I need to I need to take myself apart right because there's a piece that's broken somewhere and then you might think well let's let's assume it's a little piece to begin with that's the right mechanism it's like okay you got a c-minus that doesn't prove that you're stupid and now it implies that you might be stupid but it doesn't right really it does and that's why you don't want to look at it maybe it implies that you're lazier implies that you're ignorant or like it implies all sorts of terrible might imply that you're a bad person even but you don't want to leap to that and that's sort of the proclamation of innocence before guilt assume that you're the least amount of reprehensible and ignorant possible and so then you look at the micro routines it's okay well I got a c-minus in this course maybe I should study for that course fifteen minutes more a day for the next three months and then you ask yourself do you think you could do that no I'm too useless okay how about fifteen minutes every second day you think you could do that you put it in your schedule like 15 minutes every second day in the morning and that's while you think well what's wrong with me well I'm not very good at managing my study schedule that's not quite down here at the behavioral level but it's pretty close because what you you can take an action you can open up your schedule and you can say all mark 50 minutes of it aside then you can practice doing that it's pretty low level in the hierarchy means while you're still not a horrible person you just gotta polish up your work ethic and so what you want to do is you want to it's like it's like the old adage you got to stand up for yourself but you don't want to make unnecessary enemies that's a really good thing to know it's like shut the hell up most of the time but now and then you don't shut up because it's time to say something you don't you don't want to make unnecessary enemies though well you don't want to take yourself apart any more than is absolutely necessary start little and you do that with people around you too like if you have a child you know and the child does something that isn't right then you think okay minimal necessary intervention what can we do to decrease the probability that that's going to occur in the future so and that's so that's a good thing to know with children it's also a good thing to know with your partners you have an argument some it's like okay what the hell do you want what's the minimum thing you can request from them that would satisfy you and the evil part of your soul is going to be I want them cringing in a corner it's like yeah get that get that stuff under control man see if you can figure out what that person could offer you that would be minimal that you would accept and then tell them that it's like here's the words I would like you to say in the apology I would like you to formulate assuming that you think you did something wrong we have to argue about that because maybe you didn't but if you did I want to specify it precisely and narrowly and I want to give you an escape route and you know you might only be able to do it badly because you're still mad so you apologize half-heartedly it's like you get a pat on the head for that good next time it'll be 51% not half-heartedly right so it's careful training its careful training of yourself and other people with with the goal in mind but also with the least amount of harshness possible and then the other thing to do as well and this is also true for you and this is something I learned from studying the behavior is like watch the people around you like a hawk whenever they do something that you think is good you tell them that's wisdom man you'll get so far with that you cannot bloody well believe it because most people you know they're afraid of any number of things but one of the things they're really afraid of is that now and then they'll creep out of their cynical shell and try to do something good you know it's like they're it's like they're popping out this thing that's unbelievably vulnerable to try to do something good and creep right back into their persona and they'll look around see if anyone noticed and sometimes they'll get punished for it and then well then they won't do it again so don't do that but then now and then you think hey I saw you do this it was actually that was actually pretty good Oh someone noticed it looks like wow and then they'll think yeah I could maybe I like I could do that again and if you want to live with someone for a long period of time I would say every time they do something that you would like them to do more of number one notice number two tell them right because I know you don't want to because you really want to dominate them and you don't you don't want them thriving because then maybe a they'd be competition to you and you wouldn't be able to go complain to your mother about what a miserable partner you have and you know how delightful that is so you have to forego all that pleasure if you actually help your person develop so you got to get over all that it's really annoying so you know you've got this person peg this yeah you're stuck with them and you know maybe it's the best you can do but you got one eye open and then every time they do something good you don't want to notice because if that elevated them a little bit you wouldn't be able to feel so resentful and miserable and keep your eye open for the next possible affair and that is what people are like that is what people are like and that's what you're like - that's what people are like so you got to decide if that's what you want or you want to help the person that you're with grow you know that's dangerous because they might out sign you well good then you have someone to compare yourself to that would be a good deal it's really rough with kids you know because parents will stop their children from succeeding beyond them they get jealous and then they'll put them down and then they have kids that do not like them and they'll pay for it so one of the things that I figured out over the last years is this is a good proposition so you know it's pretty self-evident that life is has got its rat's nest of miseries and that's for sure and maybe you could even make a categorical statement that life is mostly a rat's nest of misery you know and you can make a pretty powerful argument for that but then there's a counter question which is well what if you tried not to make it any more miserable that had had to be right then what then what would it be like and my suspicions are is that a lot of that misery I would suspect that most of that misery would go away because it's the unnecessary misery that really brings you down you know it's like well someone has cancer it's like that sucks but it's not like it's not like you can say if only we had done this differently then that wouldn't have happened but when someone's out like torturing you in a malevolent way or maybe you're doing the same you could always ask yourself was it really it's this really necessary is this just like an useless add-on to the miseries of life that's what disheartens people and so even in your own life if if you if you aren't suffering from self-imposed misery and your only suffering from an escapable misery maybe you could handle that and you know you could you could survive you could bear it and even maybe without becoming irredeemably corrupt so the goal would be well yeah life is a rat's nest of miseries and maybe it has no ultimate meaning we could say that for feeling particularly pessimistic but it still leaves one question open which is if you didn't do everything you could to make it worse how good could you make it be and the least answer is well it it could be tragedy but maybe not hell and I think that's right I really believe that that's that's the most pessimistic proper statement the worst-case outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your life could be tragic but not hell and that's blood better than hell right it's it's and you think I could give you an example of the difference you're at your mother's deathbed well that's tragedy here's another scenario you're at your mother's deathbed and all you you and all your idiot siblings are arguing well that's the difference between tragedy and hell and you might be able to tolerate the first circumstance and maybe it would even bring you closer together with your family members the second one no one can bear that you walk away from a situation like that sick of yourself and sick of everything else - and you know it's often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the Dragons because the stress is high and all those things that people haven't dealt with they don't have the energy to repress and and all the bitterness comes pouring forward it's like seriously man you know so that's actually a good it's a rough lesson but it's a good hallmark for figuring out whether or not you're you've got yourself adjusted properly and in relationship to your siblings it's like if you are all gathered around the bed of someone close who is dying could you manage it if the answer is no it's like well put your life together because it's going to happen and you should be the person who's there that can do it and do it properly and then maybe you'd find that it isn't the sort of thing that will undermine your faith in life itself and I've seen I've seen both of those situations you know ugly ugly ugly situations you know murderously ugly situations and then they're opposite where people had terrible things happening to happen to them as a family and you know they pull together and they rebuild their damn ship and they sail away so that seems to me to be a lot better that makes you know when the flood comes right well okay so the same thing the question emerges well who are you well you could say your this plan that's what people usually that's how people usually identify maybe they have no plan at all and they're just in chaos right that's like being in the belly of the beast they're nihilistic and chaos they have no plan they're just chaos itself and that's a very dreadful situation for people to be in or maybe they conjure together a plan that's their identity it's kind of fragile and they're holding on to that with with everything they've got it's their little stick of wood that they're floating in the ocean clinging to you know and so they're identifying really hard with that plan that's what happens when you're an ideologue is that you're identifying really hard with that plan the problem is if something comes up to confront it well how do you act well you can't let go with a plan because you drown then you cling to it rigidly well that's no good because then you can't learn anything then if that's you you're a totalitarian you're not going to learn anything you're gonna end up in something that's close enough to hell so that you won't know the difference and you might drag everyone along with you that's happened plenty of times right it's the whole story of the 20th century happened over and over and over and it happens in people's States it happens in their business organizations it happens in their cities it happens in their provinces it happens in their states and it happens in their psyches all at the same time you can't blame the manifestation of that sort of thing on any of those one levels it happens when a society goes down that way it goes down everywhere at the same time it's not the totalitarians at the top and all the happy people striving to be free at the bottom it's not that at all it's totalitarianism at every single level of the hierarchy including the psychological and so you don't want to be the thing you don't want to be in chaos that's for sure but you don't want to be the thing that clings so desperately to the raft that you can't let go when someone comes to rescue you right you don't want to be that so then you think well exactly what are you you know what the chaos you not the plan maybe you're the thing that confronts the obstacle and I would say that's the categorical lesson of of psychology insofar as it has to do with personal transformation that's what you always teach people in psychotherapy I don't care what sort of psychotherapists you are you're always teaching them the same thing you're the thing that can you not you're not the plan you're the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plan and then when you know even further that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself well then your whole view of the world can change because you might think well I've got this plan something came up to object to it it's like it's possible that the thing that's objecting has something to teach you that will take you to the place where you develop an even better plan that's a nice framework to use it's like are you so sure that this is a problem is that the only way that you can look at it or is it an opportunity I mean I'm not trying to be you know naively optimistic there are some things that's pretty hard to extract gold from some dragons and maybe the death of a family member is a good example of that but in even in a situation like that I can tell you that it's an opportunity for it's an opportunity for maturation that's for sure and the thing is you might say well it's pretty miserable to go to be digging for gold when someone's falling into the grave well if they really love you first of all that's what they'll want you to do and second you're gonna make their death a lot more palatable experience for them if you're someone who can be in the room and be helpful instead of be you know quivering in the corner and feeling that the entire world is collapsing in on you I mean that's another you want to be the useful person at the funeral how's that for a goal that's a good goal man you know that you've got yourself together in a situation like that because you're gonna be at them and maybe you want to be the person on whose shoulder people cry that'd be a good goal that's kind of you know I don't like being naively optimistic so when I tell you to get your life together I'm not gonna say roses and sunshine it's like that's that's that's that's pablum for fools but it really is something to be the reliable person out of funeral right and you can aim at that you can do that it's and you got to be tough to do that because it also means that you can sustain a major loss without collapsing and that you've got to be a monster to do that right because you might think and I've had clients like this while I love my child I love my mother so much that I couldn't survive if anything happened to them it's like you have some serious thinking to do about that it's like you really want to curse someone with that kind of love do you I couldn't live without you it's like my god get away from me really it's terrible that's the eatable mother right that's like I'll forgive you no matter what you do it's like really you no matter what I do eh you are not my friend that's for sure not at all it's a horrible thing to do to someone that's that's the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story all gingerbread and outside to the lost kid inside you feed them candy and make them fat and eat them right that's Hansel and Gretel that's the eatable mother that's one of Freud's major discoveries it gets a major discovery it's like the devouring force of love you want the person to be able to stand on their own and price you pay for that is that you stand on your own it's like good to have you around I'm glad you're here but if if tragedies win and if and when tragedy strikes either of us I hope that one of us is standing when it blows past and and that there's a harshness about that that's unbelievably cruel because you know you say well if my mother died I could live well what kind of monster are you exactly death of your mother doesn't do you in well turns out that being a monster is the right thing so and that's a rough thing to learn but it's necessary to learn you know because it also makes you you know at some point for example as you get older mm-hmm by the time you're in your mid-20s something like that you should start having a relationship with your parents that's approximately one of peers and you can tell if you have that so here's a little trick you can use so you have parents obviously they have friends you probably care what your parents think I would imagine do you care what their friends think of you and answer that is well not nearly as much and so then I would say well why do you care what your parents think of you then they're the same you know what I mean it's just luck of the draw that your parents are someone else's kids friends they don't think the same way about them that you do well that's where you see that you have a projection right if by the time you're 30 if what your parents think of you matters more than what say a random set of their friends think of you then you've still got your parents confused with with God that's one way of looking at it you've still got them confused with an archetype and you're still a child and you might think well it's pretty damn rude not to think about what your parents think of you anymore not to care it's like yeah it's kind of rude but maybe you'll be useful for them when they get old and that's a much better form of caring it's like you're going to be independent enough and strong enough and and detached enough so that when the taught when the when the power dynamic shifts which it will that you'll be the person that can carry things forward well you can't do a better thing for them than that right that's the best of all possible outcomes for your parents well you can think about the world this way you can think about it as your orderly little plan that's a place and you can think about it as the place that things that disrupt your plan comes from that's another place this is a bigger place than this because there's an endless number of things that can disrupt your plan and only a tiny number of them that can you know that will help you work it out so part of the question then too is like are you the friend of your plan or are you the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan and I would say you should work to become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan because there's a lot of that and then if you become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan then you start to develop strength in proportion to the to the disruptive force and that's really what you want you want to be able to implement your plan obviously but you want to be able to take on the consequences of error and learn from it and then then you win constantly because even if something goes sideways you think there's something to be derived from this that's wisdom fundamentally so and so those are the eternal domains right there's the domain of order that's a snake by the way and that's a domain of chaos and that's the world and maybe you're in the order and maybe you're in the chaos but those can flip on you and maybe you shouldn't be in either of those places maybe you should be right in the middle and that's where you should be as far as I can tell and I think this is this is another escape from postmodern nihilism let's say that's actually a real place it's not metaphysical or maybe it is but it's metaphysical if metaphysics is more real than physics and you can tell when you're at that place because that's a maximally meaningful place and you drift in and out of it all the time in your life and when things are really bad for you you're not there hardly at all right because everything is overwhelming you or the things have become sterile but if you watch your life even over a week or two you'll see that now and then you're there I think you stand up straighter right because you're in the right place at the right time you think aha I got the forces of chaos and order properly balanced it's unstable and it'll fall apart on you but you know you can practice bringing things together continually and then you can end up so that you're there more often than not and then that's that's a meta place it's not a place it's a meta place and it's a place that you can be in all places and and it's not an illusion of any sort it's the deepest reality your nervous system is always orienting yourself your is always orienting you to that place always and and that's because it's a real place that's another way of thinking about it well that's the normal world with that's the garden with the snake in it and that's chaos that that's the chaos that arises when your plans collapse right that's the world in the underworld and so the underworld is always there and it's lurking beneath everything it's like the figure of the shark in the jaws poster right there you are swinging at the top and there's that terrible thing underneath that can come up and pull you down that's the world so you need to be able to operate here and you need to be able to operate here and when you operate here well that's when you rescue your father from the belly of the whale that's when you go down you see when you're down in chaos and you don't know what the hell's going on you have to rediscover the values that orient people have oriented people forever that's what you have to discover so for example when I'm dealing with people have post-traumatic stress disorder and they've usually encountered someone malevolent they have to relearn the description of good and evil because if they don't they have no framework they're lost they think well there's a malevolence afoot in the world and I'm a naive I'm a naive I'm a prey animal a naive prey animal for the malevolence of the world it's like well good luck functioning under that set of assumptions man you just do not recover from that you stay at home in your burrow that's what you do well you have to you go down into that you think okay well malevolence is afoot I better be the sort of person that can understand it and deal with it and that's another reason why you have to transform yourself into a monster that's the Jungian incorporation of the shadow it's no bloody joke because the only thing that a monster won't mess with is another monster and you might say well I don't want to transform myself into a monster it's like you don't have a choice you can either be a pathetic monster or you can be a monster with some power those are your options there's no non monster alternative weak or strong and I don't mean strong like dominating tyrant strength that isn't what I mean at all I mean strength like functioning at a Funeral strength and that's a kind of monstrosity and when you're down in chaos that's what you have to rediscover well that's partly what that means you're lucky if you come back out remember I told you the story of Jonah at the beginning of the course it's like he had something to do and was refusing to do it and so God pulled him down to the depths of being and threatened him with death but worse not just death he'll really well he decided it was better to come popping up back into the light and go do what he was supposed to do well there's a reason that like that's the oldest story of mankind as far back as you go into the archives of history you find this story right and it's because well it's because not only is it because it's true it's because it's true and everyone knows it's true even though they don't know that they know that this is the story - it's the same thing there always a city it's always enclosed right there's always people who inhabit it there's always someone who's willing to notice that the dragon hasn't gone away the skulls are still around there's someone who's willing to come out of the fortress and and take that on right and to prefer perform the job of rescuing that's an eternal story are you the city are you the dragon are you the thing that engages voluntarily in combat with what lies outside your range of safety because that's what that image represents it's that is the monster amalgam symbolic amalgam of all that which lies outside your realm of safety you want to be safe forget that right that is that's not that's not in the cards you're not gonna be safe well then you have to be meta safe and that's way better because then you're not safe but you know how to cope with danger well find that that solves the problem and maybe it's even a better solution because if you're safe then you just have to stay in your burrow but if you can confront danger then you can go wherever you want and you can have an adventure and maybe that's what you need to do is to go out and have an adventure so you don't even want safety because of how exciting is that not Dostoyevsky said very clearly let's say we made you perfectly safe all that you had to do is eat cakes and worry yourself with the continuation of the species what would you do you'd smash it all down as soon as you possibly could just so you had something interesting and challenging to do so you don't want safety you want to be able to cope with danger that's a whole different thing and I'm like this isn't again metaphysical that did clinical data on this is clear when you treat someone for an anxiety disorder like Agra phobia you do not get rid of their anxiety you make them braver that's way better there's no going back like once your agoraphobic your heart's not doing them you know it's it's it's missing beats now on that it's like death like the crocodile that's got the clock and it's in his stomach death is after you there's no there's no going back to naivety you don't get to be safe ever again well so what happens you get to be stronger well hey it turns out that's a better bar anyways so Lin is Bell an evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brain in primates a radical new theory suggests the idea proposed by Lin is Bell and anthropologist at the University of California suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand that's Hercules right well that's infinity that symbol and this is the snake you cut off one head and seven more growth it's like the it's an infinite snake you're never gonna run out of snakes those are the things that object to your plans well you can't get rid of the snake so what do you do you learn how to handle them right that's it that's that's the answers you learn how to become a handler of snakes both physical and metaphysical see you see the little halo around it I think that's st. George might be st. Michael but I think it's st. George why is he go to halo well that's the Sun well what does that mean it's gold - Gold is pure it's the pure gold Sun it's associated with consciousness it's the pure gold Sun of consciousness that can confront the terrible thing that paralyzes and that's the same thing that's death right the clock in the stomach of the crocodile it's already got a taste of Captain Hook Captain Hook's no st. George that's why Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up I'd always sees his Captain Hook I don't want to be Captain Hook he doesn't see this so he stays at home and plays video games with the rest of the Lost Boys look I got nothing against video games by the way I mean everything in moderation right and I mean they demand skill well so what's this you know there you are you go down into chaos and then you come back up and so you might say well am i this or am i the chaos or am i the new new solution an answer is you're not this or you shouldn't be because that's your old dead self right that's the thing that needs to burn away you know what chaos itself but you're also not the new regenerated order you're the thing that can make the journey and more than that you're the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily and then more than that you're the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily for as long as it takes and that's where you derive your strength it's like there's no getting rid of chaos it's eternal there's no getting rid of order it's eternal those are both traps you mediate between them and that's where your strength lies and that's not only strength for you it's strength for you it's strength for the people around you strength for the community and strength for everything it's the thing that makes everything order itself properly and thrive you have to ask yourself and this is the thing you ask yourself this is the existential question do you want things to be ordered properly and thrive because if the answer to that is yes you have to give up your hatred of being you have to give up your resentment you have to give up your martyrdom and your victimization and all of that because to the degree that you carry that forward it will corrupt you and you will not want the best because to be if you aren't the best you have to be without Rachel hey treated rancor and and resentment because you know if I resent you for your inadequacies or even for your for your accomplishments I'm not going to have a conversation with you where I'm aiming for the best I'm gonna have all sorts of motivations I'm gonna take you down somehow you know especially if you're successful that's the Cain and Abel story it's like I bet I want to be who you are but I can't be so I'll just cut you off at the knees and that'll do just fine and then I can get my revenge on you and I can get my revenge on being and you know the fact that it helps turn everything into hell well maybe that's just an additional benefit that's represented all sorts of different ways the masculine Sun and the feminine moon and that's Horus in gold right Horus is all speech and eyes and that's Osiris the god of tradition and Isis the queen of the underworld you see the same thing here suffering individual that transcends it by accepting it nested inside of society and the patriarchal structure nested inside the natural world and the feminine that's the same idea there that's Buddha emerging from the lotus flower and the lotus flower if its roots go down into the murk at the at the bottom of the of the the pond so it emerges out of the darkness and manifests itself and then it climbs upwards towards the light and then the Lotus floats on the surface of the water and blooms open and inside that the Buddha sits golden buddha sits in the light it's the flowering of being and that's that's a Mandela from the Union perspective it's the Mandela opens up and it reveals this mode of perfect being that's what the Buddha means and he found enlightenment underneath the tree because that's the human environment there's to find enlightenment underneath the tree he's got the Sun on his head - and he's gold for the same reason gold is pure you see the same thing in Hinduism so that's the yoni feminine symbol case you were wondering masculine symbol that's the union of the two right that's the union of chaos and order with a snake lurking in the background and it's golden because it's the union of those two things that produces the power of the snake that's something that you might think about you could think about those as two halves of the DNA molecule that is what they are although I can't tell you how I know that but it's the same idea it's the same idea here so this what happens here is that you see this is a very remarkable picture so this is Eve Eve is handing out skulls to mankind right it's self-consciousness and the discovery of death this is Mary as the church on this side and she's handing out these things that are the hosts it's those are pieces of Christ's body and see so he's put up there on this tree the same as the skull as an antidote the antidote is something that you incorporate and the thing you incorporate is the voluntary acceptance of suffering as the cure for death that's what that picture means people worked on that bloody picture for a long long long long time and you know we see the picture but we don't know what it means but that's what it means means the same thing that this means it means the same thing that this means means the same thing that this means see there's there's pride rock this is the Scandinavian world tree there's pride rock right there there's the territory outside see it's a serpent it's a snake that's the territory outside that's outside of the light and that's all in a tree that's how can you not read that as a history of the evolution of mankind that's exactly what it is that's our eternal home well we better stop before that girl comes in it was very nice having you all in the class and I appreciated the warm welcome I got especially in January because it was a rough time in January and so I'm glad this all worked out so well and it was a pleasure teaching you so good luck to you all I mean it be what you can be God you let the world dissolve around you otherwise that's not a good thing you've got something that everyone needs man including yourself it's like let it out that's where everything you want is and it's this it's the case for every single one of you so you know hoist up your goddamn privilege and go out there and do something in the world see ya [Applause] |
MEASURES OF
PERSONALITY AND
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL
CONSTRUCTS
Edited by
GREGORY J. BOYLE
University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia
DONALD H. S AKLOFSKE
University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
GERALD MATTHEWS
University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
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Preface
Along with scientific advancements in quantitative assessment in personality and social psychology has come
an explosion in both researchers’ interests in self-report/rating scales and objective performance test measures,as well as the ever increasing number of scales/measures available. The need for a comprehensive collection ofup-to-date leading instruments is clearly evident. This book builds on the volume edited by John P. Robinson,Phillip R. Shaver and Lawrence S. Wrightsman, in 1991. The editors of the previous book noted the proliferationof scales/measures at that time. Subsequent work has generated new and improved versions of existing scales,as well as entirely new areas of investigation. The task of providing a systematic review of social-personalitymeasures is no less daunting than it must have been in 1991 (prior to the advent of the internet).
We may echo also the statement by the previous editorial team that a book of this kind is a guide to the
researcher’s investigations, not an end-point of study. As Robinson et al. stated: ‘Whenever possible /C0given
copyright restrictions and authors’ justifiable reservations /C0we have included actual scale items and scoring
instructions. Nevertheless, these materials and our brief comments on them are no substitute for reading the orig-inal sources and subjecting the instruments to further item analyses and validation studies. This book is meant tobe a starting point, an idea generator, a guide /C0not the last stop on the way to a perfect measure.’ (1991, p. xiii)
We are privileged to have worked with some of the world’s leading researchers in editing this volume, which
would not have been possible without the diligence, commitment, and patience of the contributors. Producing a
book of this magnitude has also illuminated for us the impressive scope and depth of research involving contem-
porary social-personality measurement. Modern notions of validity encompass the use of scales/measures for aspecified purpose, and we hope readers will apply their own expertise in using this book as a resource. At thesame time, the evidence for reliability, validity, and utility of specific scales/measures remains variable, and amajor focus of this work has been to provide the detailed psychometric information necessary for the researcheror psychological practitioner to compare and contrast and to weigh up the various scales/measures available foreach construct covered. We have tried also to provide as much information as possible on locating the respectiveinstruments.
In line with ongoing advances in scientific technology and the contemporary trend towards the use of objective
measures in psychological research, our book also discusses the reliability, validity, and utility of behavioral,psychophysiological, chemical, and neuroscientific methods for measuring specific social-personality constructssuch as empathy or forgiveness. We are optimistic that their use, in the coming decades, in conjunction with themore traditional self-report and rating scales/measures, will enable significant advances in both personality andsocial psychology. We are especially excited about the prospects for using a combination of measures in appliedresearch, in line with the growing cultural acceptance of evidence-based approaches to a range of social-personality issues.
We thank the editorial team at Elsevier, especially Nikki Levy and Barbara Makinster, for their unstinting sup-
port of this project, and guiding us through the maze of obtaining permissions for scales.
Gregory J. Boyle
Donald H. Saklofske
Gerald Matthews
xi |
List of Contributors
Saad Al Shohaib King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia
Faten Al Zaben King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia
Anton Aluja University of Lleida, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain
Bob Bermond University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands
Jim Blascovich University of California, Santa Barbara, CA,
USA
Gregory J. Boyle University of Melbourne, Parkville,
Victoria, Australia; and Australian Institute of Psychology,Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Fred B. Bryant Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
John B. Campbell Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster,
PA, USA
Raymond C.K. Chan Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing, China
Sherwin I. Chia Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore
Chi-yue Chiu Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore & Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China
Oliver Christ Philipps-University Marburg, Germany
Andrew Day Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Kate J. Diebels Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
M. Brent Donnellan Michigan State University, East
Lansing, MI, USA
Benjamin Fell University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Ephrem Fernandez University of Texas, San Antonio, TX,
USA
Velichko H. Fetvadjiev Tilburg University, Tilburg,
The Netherlands; and University of Pretoria, Pretoria,
South Africa
Susan T. Fiske Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Gordon L. Flett York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Marı´a Teresa Frı ´asUniversity of California, Davis, CA, USA
Katharine H. Greenaway University of Queensland, St
Lucia, Queensland, Australia
Emily J. Hanson Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem,
NC, USA
Patrick R. Harrison Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL,
USA
Claudia Harzer University of South Carolina, Columbia,
SC, USAEdward Helmes James Cook University, Townsville,
Queensland, Australia
Paul L. Hewitt University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada
Miles Hewstone University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Kimberly J. Hills University of South Carolina, Columbia,
SC, USA
Ronald R. Holden Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario,
Canada
E. Scott Huebner University of South Carolina, Columbia,
SC, USA
Carroll E. Izard University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
Simon A. Jackson University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW,
Australia
Eranda Jayawickreme Wake Forest University, Winston-
Salem, NC, USA
Daniel N. Jones University of Texas, El Paso, TX, USA
Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno Duke University, Durham, NC,
USA
Elise K. Kalokerinos University of Queensland, St Lucia,
Queensland, Australia
Doaa Ahmed Khalifa King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia
Sabina Kleitman University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW,
Australia
Harold G. Koenig Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;
King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Caroline Lavelock Virginia Commonwealth University,
Richmond, VA, USA
Mark R. Leary Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Simon Lolliot University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Winnifred R. Louis University of Queensland, St Lucia,
Queensland, Australia
Gerald Matthews University of Central Florida, Orlando,
FL, USA
Mario Mikulincer Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya,
Herzliya, Israel
David. L. Neumann Griffith University, Gold Coast,
Queensland, Australia
Rachel New University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Michael S. North Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Paul Oosterveld Leiden University, Leiden, The
Netherlands
xiii |
Stacey L. Parker University of Queensland, St Lucia,
Queensland, Australia
Delroy L. Paulhus University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, BC, Canada
K.V. Petrides University College London, London, UK
Sandra Prince-Embury Resiliency Institute of Allenhurst
LLC, West Allenhurst, NJ, USA
Richard W. Robins University of California, Davis, CA,
USA
William S. Ryan University of California, Santa Barbara,
CA, USA
Mark S. Rye Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY,
USA
Donald H. Saklofske University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario, Canada
Katharina Schmid University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Phillip R. Shaver University of California, Davis, CA,
USA
Alexander B. Siegling University College London, London,
UK
Joanne R. Smith University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Lazar Stankov Australian Catholic University, Strathfield,
NSW, Australia
Hermann Swart Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch,
South Africa
Deborah J. Terry University of Queensland, St Lucia,
Queensland, Australia
Loren Toussaint Luther College, Decorah, IA, USAKali H. Trzesniewski University of California, Davis, CA,
USA
Jo-Ann Tsang Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA
Ashley K. Vesely University of Western Ontario, London,
Ontario, Canada
Fons J.R. van de Vijver Tilburg University, Tilburg, The
Netherlands; North-West University, Potchefstroom,
South Africa; and University of Queensland, St Lucia,
Queensland, Australia
Alberto Voci University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Harrie C.M. Vorst University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Ralf Wo ¨lfer University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Wendy W.N. Wan Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou,
China; and Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan
Yi Wang Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Marco Weber University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC,
USA
H. Rae Westbury Griffith University, Gold Coast,
Queensland, Australia
Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet Hope College, Holland, MI,
USA
Everett L. Worthington Jr. Virginia Commonwealth
University, Richmond, VA, USA
Matthias Ziegler Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Marvin Zuckerman University of Delaware, Newark, DE,
USAxiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS |
CHAPTER
1
Criteria for Selection and Evaluation
of Scales and Measures
Gregory J. Boyle1, Donald H. Saklofske2and Gerald Matthews3
1University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia;2University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada;
3University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
The ever increasing knowledge of human behavior emanating from psychological research and allied disciplines
is matched by the need for reliable and valid measures to assess the constructs used in both the research laboratory
and applied settings. Measures of personality and social psychological factors have been a major contribution from
psychology since the early part of the last century and continue to proliferate to this day. There is no lack of interest
in the assessment of the wide range of personal characteristics, both familiar and novel, but rather a demand for
more and better measures. The ever-increasing array of specific scales/measures available to researchers and prac-
titioners alike is a sign of the strength of psychology’s contributions to our knowledge of human behavior.
Concurrent with our descriptions and models of human psychology have been advances in the methods
underlying scale construction and validation. In contrast to how ‘tests’ of 100 years ago were constructed,
standardized, and evaluated, there has been a steady evolution in both the foundations and methods of psycho-
logical measurement and in the rigor demanded by both researchers and practitioners over time. Psychologists
and all others impacted by the study and applications of psychology expect the precision, exactness, and
accuracy in the measures used to assess what are often theory driven constructs (latent traits) such as extraver-
sion, anxiety/neuroticism, self-concept, narcissism, empathy, and perfectionism. Like subatomic particles and
gravity in physics we cannot directly see such hypothetical constructs as intelligence or empathy, but we can
infer their ‘existence’ because of observed individual differences in behavior. Thus, we can create quantitative
models to describe these latent traits and, in the process, also develop measures that reflect their theoretical and
operational definitions.
The rapid growth of psychological tests was readily observed from the early part of the 20th century onward (see
Gregory, 2014 ). By the third decade, the Mental Measurements Yearbook founded by O.K. Buros in 1938 (now
19th MMY; see Carlson, Geisinger, & Jonson 2014 ), along with the Tests in Print series, both published by the Buros
Institute for Mental Measurements (now the Buros Center for Testing), was created to both catalogue and provide
critical reviews by experts on the ever increasing number of assessment instruments. Large test publishing houses,
focusing on the development and marketing of psychological tests appeared early in the last century such as
Houghton Mifflin (now Riverside Publishing), and The Psychological Corporation (now Pearson) founded by
J. McKean Cattell in 1921. A growing journal literature on assessment including both the foundations and profes-
sional psychology applications, but especially new measures, began to appear. Studies of assessment now appear
in peer-reviewed journals such as Assessment; Applied Psychological Measurement; Educational and Psychological
Measurement; European Journal of Psychological Assessment; International Journal of Selection and Assessment; International
Journal of Testing; Journal of Personality Assessment; Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment ;Journal of Psychopathology
and Behavioral Assessment; Journal of Testing and Evaluation; Practical Assessment Research and Evaluation; Psychological
Assessment , as well as a host of personality, organizational, clinical and school psychology journals.
3Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00001-2 ©2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
Handbooks on psychological assessment have proliferated and we can expect to see new volumes published
regularly such as the recent three volume APA Handbook of Testing and Assessment in Psychology (Geisinger et al.,
2013), and the Oxford Handbook of Child Psychological Assessment (Saklofske et al., 2013 ). Other major resources
include the 11-volume Test Critiques series ( Keyser & Sweetland, 1984 /C01994; Keyser, 2005 ), the APA PsycTESTS
online database (focusing mainly on unpublished tests, not commercially available), as well as the current edi-
tors’ 4-volume SAGE Psychological Assessment series ( Boyle, Saklofske, & Matthews, 2012 ), all of which have
become increasingly important to researchers and practitioners alike (also see Boyle & Saklofske, 2004; Boyle,
Matthews, & Saklofske, 2008).
Another important tool for finding relevant measures of focal constructs is the Health and Psychosocial
Instruments (HaPI) database, produced by Behavioral Measurement Database Services (BMDS; Pittsburgh, PA,
USA/C0available online from Ovid Technologies).
‘The HaPI database can be used to find alternative versions of existing instruments (e.g., original vs. short forms; state vs. trait
forms; adult vs. child versions), available translations of instruments, and multiple scoring frameworks for a given instrument ...The
flexibility of combinatory searching (e.g., optimism ‘and’ trait ‘and’ English ‘and’ children) offers far greater power and efficiency in
finding measurement tools than the printed sources can provide. But the sources cover a plethora of tests ranging across a diversity of
fields including education and psychology.’ ( Bryant, Pers. Comm., 2012 )
Professional Associations such as the American Education Research Association and the American Psychological
Association , as well as the Association for Psychological Science have assessment ‘right up front’ in their publica-
tions and conferences and ongoing continuing education offerings, as well as working diligently to ensure
‘best practices’ and ethical guidelines for use of psychological tests. The Standards for Educational and Psychological
Testing (AERA, APA, NCME, 1999) are regularly updated in light of new knowledge (cf. Boyle, 1987 ). This effort
has been further supported by the International Test Commission (ITC); the first sentence on the ITC webpage
states that it is an
‘association of national psychological associations, test commissions, publishers and other organizations committed to promoting
effective testing and assessment policies and to the proper development, evaluation and uses of educational and psychological instru-
ments.’ ( ITC Directory, 2001 ,a twww.intestcom.org )
Most professional and regulatory psychology associations see assessment for purposes of diagnosis and pre-
scription planning as being central to the work of psychological practitioners, as expressed through their publica-
tions, guidelines and codes of ethical conduct.
However, there is a downside to this proliferation of scales and information that is both cumulative and forth-
coming on a continuous basis. It has become more difficult for researchers to determine and locate the bestvali-
dated scales for a given construct as they can be scattered through a multitude of journals and books, and also in
commercial presentations by publishers. Not all journals are necessarily available to those who might be inter-
ested in a particular measure or even traceable using internet searches. The internet is a mixed blessing here;
ease of search is offset by the intrusions of poor-quality measures into the scientific as well as popular literature.
As well, some scales have names or titles that do not directly relate to the construct being assessed and can there-
fore be missed in a typical online search.
AIMS AND ORIGINS OF THIS VOLUME
The aim of the present volume is to assist researchers and practitioners navigate these ‘choppy waters’ and
locate valid scales/measures suitable for their specific goals from the plethora of instruments currently available.
Thus, rather than simply serving as a catalogue of available scales and assessment instruments, or providing
reviews of all currently available measures that would fall within the personality and social psychology frame-
works, we have focused this volume predominantly on reviewing the most often used contemporary measures
by experts in each of the areas selected for inclusion.
The origins of this volume go back over 50 years to a collection of social attitude measures compiled by the
Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan (see Robinson & Shaver, 1969 ). The original work was sub-
stantially updated and configured as an edited volume by Robinson, Shaver and Wrightsman in 1991. Its scope
was increased to cover personality as well as attitude measures. The current editors share the goals of previous4 1. CRITERIA FOR SELECTION AND EVALUATION OF SCALES AND MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
editors in seeking to provide systematic reviews of high quality instruments. Measures of Personality and Social
Psychological Attitudes was enormously successful in providing a concise compendium of a broad range of scales
and measures that were extremely useful for social-personality research and assessment. However, it is now
more than two decades since this volume was published, so it is time to produce a completely revised and
updated resource for researchers and practitioners alike. In addition, the landscape of assessment in personality
and social psychology is very different from that in 1991, and we briefly introduce this volume with an overview
of some of the key developments that have impacted assessment methods since that time. The original title has
been broadened to encompass, Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs , thereby allowing inclu-
sion of a considerably wider range of key topics, in a major expansion from 12 chapters in the 1991 version, to no
fewer than 26 substantive chapters in the present volume. An examination of the most often cited areas of
research and professional need, and more frequently used measures in the current social-personality literature
further guided our selection of the chapters covered in this book.
We first provide an account of the evaluative criteria which guided the reviews of each of the scales/measures,
followed by a brief overview of the contents for each of the chapters that follow.
Systematic Frameworks for Personality Assessment
While major personality models and theories and accompanying personality inventories such as Cattell’s Sixteen
Personality Questionnaire (16 PF), the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R), and the Comrey Personality Scales (CPS)
dominated the psychological literature throughout much of the last century (see Cattell & Meade, 2008 ;Comrey,
2008;Eysenck & Barrett, 2013 ;Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985 ), converging lines of evidence from psychometrics, behavior
genetics, longitudinal studies and cross-cultural research have contributed to the current popularity of various ver-
sions of the Five Factor Model or FFM (e.g., McAdams & Pals, 2006 ;McCrae & Costa, 2008 ;Poropat, 2009 ). At the same
time, there have been significant challenges to the FFM, including alternate systems (e.g., Ashton & Lee, 2008 ;Block,
1995, 2001 ;Boyle, 2008 ;Cattell, 1995 ;Eysenck, 1991, 1992 ). As Piekkola (2011) pointed out:
‘According to this approach there are five underlying structural factors common to all people and independent of cultural influences /C0
an asocial, ahistorical, biologically based conception. Examination of the theory finds it to be dealing with traits of temperament rather
than personality and judges it insufficient on that basis. Rather than conceiving of personality as fixed and universal, it is argued that
personality is an adaptation worked out in the cultural and historical context of the individual life.’ Piekkola (2011, p. 2)
Moreover, broad factors necessarily fail to capture much of the normal personality trait variance, let alone the
abnormal trait variance ( Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988 ). Indeed, use of multiple lower-order or ‘primary’ personality
scales has been shown to improve predictive validity ( Paunonen & Ashton, 2001 ). The present volume aims to
highlight measures of a range of social-personality constructs that are more narrowly defined than those of the
FFM and other broad factors.
Social-personality research and assessment requires multivariate models, whether these are drawn from com-
plex theoretical models describing direct and indirect (mediational or moderating) influences, empirical evidence,
case studies, or the clinician’s experience and capacity to create heuristic descriptions to guide intervention and
preventive actions. As the measures reviewed in the current volume demonstrate, social-personality measures
have become increasingly integrated within mainstream disciplines of psychology including psychophysiology,
cognitive neuroscience, and cross-cultural psychology ( Boyle, Matthews, & Saklofske, 2008a,b; Matthews et al.,
2009; Saklofske & Zeidner, 1995 ), although some doubts have been expressed over the extent to which integration
is possible ( Cervone, 2008 ). One source for optimism comes from evidence that core concepts in personality and
social psychology may sometimes ‘interact’ in various ways that present a larger and more complete picture of
cause, pathway, and effect models. Renewed attention to advancing theory, and the development of new statisti-
cal techniques for analyzing large data sets (e.g., multilevel confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation
modeling; Rowe, 2003 ) have led to a slow but steady advance ( Roberts et al., 2007 ), whether those processes are
neurologically based or traced to social-cognitive influences. In turn, theoretical progress raises the bar for con-
struct validation in scale development. The onus is on researchers to establish a case for interpreting psychomet-
ric scores in terms of process-based theory.
Theoretical insight and empirical evidence is accompanied by practical application. For example, occupational
psychology has moved on from its historical roots towards a more measured appreciation of the benefits and
limitations of systematic personality assessment. A series of meta-analyses of social-personality measures as
predictors of various occupational outcomes has played an important role in this process (e.g., Swider &
Zimmerman, 2010 ).5 AIMS AND ORIGINS OF THIS VOLUME
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Across various fields of application there is an increasing demand for personality and social psychological
scales/measures that are valid and reliable, as well as being defensible in more general social, economic and legal
terms. At the same time, practitioners are also aware of the well-known limitations of the self-report questionnaires
that are most commonly used, including their vulnerability to conscious and unconscious motivational response
distortion (see Helmes et al., Chapter 2), and their neglect of implicit traits and attitudes that require assessment
via behavioral measures. Good practice in social-personality scale development and use can mitigate some of
these limitations, but advances in standardized objective test measures (cf. Schuerger, 2008 ) as well as structured
observation and interview (cf. Rogers et al., 2010 ), will likely feature strongly in any future edition of this volume.
Key Themes in Personality and Social Psychological Assessment
The time when a single volume could hope to include coverage of all important constructs in personality and
social psychology is long past. Instead, the editors of this volume have aimed to highlight constructs that are
influential in theory and practice, and for which there have been substantial advances in measurement since
1991. Some of these constructs (e.g., anger/hostility, sensation-seeking, self-esteem) are well established but
development of measures is ongoing. Others (e.g., measures of alexithymia, emotional intelligence, dark person-
alities) are of more recent vintage and define newer areas of inquiry (cf. Matthews et al., 2004 ). Our selection of
constructs was guided by five themes that are prominent in the current social-personality literature (some con-
structs attach to multiple themes):
Emotional dispositions. Many researchers habitually think of stable emotional tendencies in terms of negative
affectivity (overlapping with neuroticism) and positive affectivity (overlapping with extraversion)
(cf. Saklofske et al., 2012 ). While the importance of such trait constructs is undeniable, researchers often
require more fine-grained assessments of emotionality and mood states, in relation to constructs such as anger
and hostility , and hope and optimism . By contrast, there are also practical needs for the more broad-based
construct of life satisfaction , a source of interest even to national governments. Whether narrowly or broadly
defined, emotional dispositions also overlap with cognitive constructs such as self-esteem and confidence.
Emotion regulation. Emotion reflects not only emotional dispositions but styles of emotion-regulation, because
emotions are actively constructed and managed. Regulation implies both the capacity to be aware of the
emotions of self and others, and capacities for modifying and managing emotion. Thus, measures of empathy
and of alexithymia identify individual differences in awareness, and scales for resilience and for coping
discriminate emotion management capabilities. Sensation-seeking may also be conceptualized as a style of
emotion management in that experiencing thrills and excitement is a key personal goal. The construct of trait
emotional intelligence represents an over-arching factor of this kind around which specific dimensions for
awareness and management may cohere.
Interpersonal styles. Convergence with personality trait perspectives allows social psychology to address
stable interpersonal dispositions, although the relative importance of dispositional and situational factors
remains a topic for debate. Individual differences in interpersonal style may be rooted in the attachment
patterns established early in life. Like emotional dispositions, interpersonally defined constructs also bring
together cognitive and affective dimensions. People differ cognitively in relation to concerns with public image
and social evaluation. The ways in which people interpret themselves as social beings also influences /C0and is
influenced by /C0social emotions such as forgiveness. Indeed, social psychologists emphasize the interpersonal
roots of seemingly personal qualities including self-esteem and emotional intelligence .
Vices and virtues. In the natural science tradition, personality psychologists have been wary of value-laden
constructs. However, values have always been central to studies of social attitudes. In recent years, values
have attracted more attention in personality as well as social psychological research, as shown most directly
in studies of values and moral personality . Measures of religiosity and the transcendental are also relevant in this
context. Values are not always benign. Researchers have also been interested in traits that are closer to vice
than virtue, described as dark personalities or the dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
Some seemingly beneficial traits such as perfectionism may also represent a misapplication of values such as
striving for excellence.
Sociocultural interaction and conflict . In a globalized and culturally fluid world, many people are
challenged by the need to get along with others whose interpersonal style and values are different from
their own. Relationships between people affiliated with different social groups are a perennial concern
of social psychology, but the last 20 years have seen major developments in inter-cultural assessment.6 1. CRITERIA FOR SELECTION AND EVALUATION OF SCALES AND MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
The importance of cross-cultural studies is highlighted by including a chapter on personality, beliefs and values
across cultures. From the social /C0psychological perspective, measures of intergroup contact may define both
positive and negative aspects of contact between different ethnic groups. Regrettably, contacts are often
harmed by stereotyping and prejudice . An example is the prejudice often experienced by gay, lesbian and
bisexual individuals, explored here in relation to attitudes towards sexual orientation. Finally, contrasting with
the ‘emic’ approach of investigating culturally-rooted traits, researchers also pursue the ‘etic’ approach of
applying general measures of personality across cultures .
CRITERIA FOR SCALE EVALUATION
As in the 1991 volume, a number of evaluative criteria were employed in reviewing the scales/measures,
including item construction criteria, motivational distortion criteria, and psychometric properties. In determining
the approach to the presentation and evaluation of the scales to be described in each chapter we were guided by
several criteria relating to reliability, standardization, validity, and utility ( Boyle et al., 2012; Ormrod, Saklofske,
Schwean, Andrews, & Shore 2010; Saklofske et al., 2013 ). Thus, the lens for viewing and evaluating any psycho-
logical scale, test or assessment instrument must take into account both psychometric properties and practical
considerations. In regard to the psychometric criteria for assessing construct validity, the present volume focuses
closely on the factor analytic structure of each of the scales/measures discussed, as well as providing close scru-
tiny of convergent/concurrent, divergent/discriminant, and criterion/predictive validity as well as the reliability
of each of the respective measures.
Reliability
A scale/measure may be deemed psychometrically sound if the scores obtained from it manifest ‘good’ reliabil-
ity reflecting consistency over time (test /C0retest), consistency across parallel forms, as well as consistency across
raters (inter-rater reliability). Despite the common misperception, reliability coefficients reported in test manuals
relate only to the scores obtained from specific samples . Importantly, and overlooked by many textbooks on assess-
ment, reliability is nota feature of an actual scale/measure itself, but rather it is a property of the responses of indi-
viduals to the items within the particular scale/measure (see Thompson & Vacha-Haase, 2000 ).
Measures of item homogeneity within a scale (Cronbach alpha, KR 20, split half) cannot assess the consistency
of individuals’ responses over time. Such indicators (e.g., Cronbach, 1951, 2004 ) provide not only an index of (i)
internal consistency; but also of (ii) item redundancy. A high Cronbach alpha coefficient (0.8 or 0.9) may simply
reflect high item homogeneity related to internal consistency and/or item redundancy ( Boyle, 1991 ). Thus, if an
item is rephrased in a number of different ways so that each is merely a variant of the same item (i.e., measuring
the same discrete piece of information), each of the variants cannot contribute new information, and the breadth
of measurement of the particular construct/factor remains narrow. Therefore, despite common misperceptions,
maximizing alpha coefficients may not necessarily be a good strategy for selecting which items to retain within a
given scale/measure.
More desirable is a greater breadth of measurement whereby each item contributes new information with
regard to the particular construct/factor under consideration ( Boyle, 1991 ).Kline (1986) proposed that Cronbach
alpha coefficients should fall within the 0.3 to 0.7 range. Lower than 0.3 and the scale has insufficient internal
consistency; higher than 0.7 and the scale has too much item redundancy (cf. Schmitt, 1996 ). Furthermore,
Zinbarg et al. (2005, p. 123) stated that, ‘ important information about the psychometric properties of a scale may be miss-
ing when scale developers and users only report αas is almost always the case. ’ The frequent reporting of high alpha
coefficients in the psychological test literature as the sole evidence of a scale’s reliability can only be frowned
upon. While statistical packages such as SPSS may view the alpha coefficient as an index of ‘internal reliability’
this is really a misnomer, as what is being measured is not consistency over time, but rather, item homogeneity.
Moreover, Cronbach (2004) argued that measurement error is a better metric for reporting and assessing reliabil-
ity than is the alpha coefficient. Indeed, Cronbach (2004, p. 403) concluded that, ‘ I no longer regard the alpha formula
as the most appropriate way to examine most data. Over the years, my associates and I developed the complex generalizabil-
ity (G) theory ...’ (cf. Brennan, 2001 ;Webb et al., 2006 ). Thus, analysis should go beyond computing simple ‘inter-
nal consistency’ coefficients to determining reliability generalization ( Thompson, 2003 ). However, as the authors7 CRITERIA FOR SCALE EVALUATION
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
of most social-personality scales/measures have reported estimates of ‘internal consistency’ such as alpha coeffi-
cients, we include these details in the chapters that follow.
Reliability of scores over time is best examined through test /C0retest methods, in terms of both the immediate
test/C0retest (dependability) coefficients and longer-term test /C0retest (stability) coefficients over days, weeks,
months, years, etc. (cf. Cattell, 1973 , pp. 352 /C0356). It would be expected that for both state and trait measures,
dependability coefficients would be high (say 0.8 or 0.9), that longer-term stability coefficients would remain rela-
tively high for trait measures (say 0.7 to 0.8), but would be considerably lower for state measures (say 0.3 or 0.4),
if they are truly sensitive to situational variability ( Boyle, 1985, 2008 ). To take just one illustrative example,
Borteyrou et al. (2008) , reported that for the French adaptation of Spielberger’s STAXI-2, over a two-month
test/C0retest interval ( N5139), stability coefficients were found to be .70 for the trait anger scale and .32 for the
state anger scale, respectively. Unlike more enduring trait dispositions, the scores on transient state constructs
are expected to vary across time due to contextual influences such as environmental stressors and circadian
rhythms ( Matthews et al., 2002 ). Thus, one must be careful not to expect high stability coefficients when they are
not theoretically or clinically relevant (such as for emotional state and mood state measures).
Standardization
Standardization is important for measures that will be used across persons so that the administration instruc-
tions, content format, and scoring procedures are predetermined and identical no matter who administers and/
or undertakes the scoring. Today, computerized scoring of many personality measures is readily available,
thereby standardizing scoring procedures and removing the possibility of scoring errors. When such measures
are normed, each person’s raw score is interpreted in relation to the most relevant normative group. The same
point applies to criterion referenced measures whereby an individual’s score is compared with a preset listing of
performance criteria that may be dichotomous (‘met or exceeded’ vs. ‘did not meet’). For example, emotional
intelligence (EI) measures based on an ability model most often assign meaning or at least address the question
of ‘how much’ of the characteristic a person has by a comparison with subjective ‘expert’ definitions of emotional
competency. Trait EI measures, on the other hand, rely on normative data from large groups or standardization
samples as the basis for individual score interpretation. Thus, methods for standardizing a scale/measure may
also impact on the interpretation of obtained scores.
Validity
The validity of a scale/measure and the test scores as they relate to meaningful information about the person
have traditionally been bound to content, criterion and construct validity. While classical test theory views of
validity have been criticized for being both limiting and not focusing on the validity of an individual’s scores,
these components still form much of the method of validating tests. Messick (1980, 1995) extended the view of
validity to include multitrait /C0multimethod comparisons as well as the social consequences of assessment. Given
the sophistication of current statistical techniques, validity can now be assessed beyond more static convergent
and discriminant validity coefficients. Both exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analysis, measure-
ment invariance statistics and especially structural equation modeling (SEM) have expanded the way a measure
of a construct or latent trait is understood (e.g., Cattell, 1978; Child, 2006; Comrey & Lee, 1992; Cuttance & Ecob,
1987; Gorsuch, 1983; Loehlin, 1998; McDonald, 1985 ). SEM has moved us from examining simple correlation pat-
terns between a predictor and criterion measure or from descriptions of static personality factors (e.g., FFM /C0see
Cattell, Boyle, & Chant, 2002 ), to testing competing structural models of trait constructs in dynamic patterns of
cause and effect and moderating and mediating relationships with other factors. Item response theory (IRT;
Embretson & Reise, 2000 ), based on formal modeling of the influence of person and item parameters on test
responses has also become increasingly influential in assessment.
Despite the increased popularity of CFA, many scales/measures have been constructed using less than optimal
factor analytic methods ( Costello & Osborne, 2005 ). While many EFAs have been based on item intercorrelations,
such item responses are notoriously unreliable. For this reason, intercorrelations of item-parcels (Cattell), or of
Factored Homogeneous Item Dimensions or FHIDs (Comrey), have been preferred as the starting point for reli-
able factor analysis (see Cattell, 1978, 1988 ;Comrey, 2008 ;Comrey & Lee, 1992 ). The use of sound EFA methodol-
ogy remains essential in valid test construction (e.g., use of an iterative maximum-likelihood procedure with
squared multiple correlations (SMCs) as initial communality estimates and number of factors determined by an8 1. CRITERIA FOR SELECTION AND EVALUATION OF SCALES AND MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
objective Scree test ( Gorsuch & Nelson, 1981; Hakstian et al., 1982; Raı ˆche et al., 2012; Zoski & Jurs, 1996 ), parallel
analysis ( Velicer & Jackson, 1990 ), plus oblique (direct Oblimin or Promax) rotation to maximum simple structure
(Child, 2006 ). All too frequently, psychological scales have been constructed using less than optimal factor ana-
lytic methods that fail to attain maximum simple structure solutions. For example, Kaiser’s (1970) ‘Little Jiffy’
approach (principal components, with number of components determined by the eigenvalues greater than one
rule, plus orthogonal Varimax rotation) necessarily results in inflated loadings that fail to differentiate between
common factor variance, unique variance, and error variance. This crude ‘Little Jiffy’ approach has been critiqued
extensively ( Boyle et al., 1995; Cattell, 1988; McDonald, 1985 ). Maximizing the 60.10 hyperplane count ( Boyle,
2008, p. 299; Cattell, 1978, 1988 ) provides empirical evidence of the approximation to simple structure criteria.
Practicality
A scale/measure may be psychometrically sound with good reliability and validity indices and map onto a
comprehensive theoretical foundation, but if it is lengthy to complete or complex to score, then it lacks practical
utility (cf. Schuerger’s, 2008 , discussion of the Objective Analytic Battery which includes performance tests of factor
analytically derived personality trait factors, but takes more than 5 hours to administer). Also, given the high
cost of psychological assessment services, there is a trend towards having available both longer and shorter forms
of the same measure. Certainly the longer form of a measure can give more information and finer descriptions at
the subscale and item level, but short forms can well serve screening needs or an immediate estimate of the char-
acteristic being assessed. Short forms are also useful in many research studies where there is limited testing time
available due to the necessity to measure a wide range of variables. Despite the increasing popularity of short
forms in both research and professional psychology, the disadvantage is reduced reliability, in line with predic-
tions based on the Spearman /C0Brown prophecy formula (cf. Stanley, 1971 ).
Other Considerations in Scale Construction
Clearly, the psychometric attributes of reliability, standardization, validity, and utility operate conjointly. For
example, no matter how ‘elegant’ in appearance or how compelling is its ‘face validity’, a scale that incorporates
more measurement error than true score variance and is a poor predictor of relevant criteria, adds nothing or
may even detract from the very purpose for which it was intended. At the same time, adequate psychometric
characteristics, whether of a personality questionnaire, an attitude checklist, or a specific social-personality scale,
are essential for accurate measurement and assessment.
In this regard, the most frequently used response scale formats include 4-point forced-choice scales, and
5-point Likert-type scales (cf. Likert, 1932 ).Dawes (2008) investigated the effects of using 5-point, 7-point or
10-point response scale formats on mean scores, and their dispersion. He found that while use of 5-point and
7-point scales resulted in the same mean scores, use of a 10-point scale produced significantly lower (p ,.05)
mean scores (Dawes, p. 61). Accordingly, the choice of response scale format needs to be considered carefully in
constructing self-report and rating scales such as those reviewed in this book (see Carifio & Perla, 2007 ).
Hubley and Zumbo (2013) described two broad classes of psychometric theory that provide a roadmap for
developing scales/measures used in social-personality assessment, including both rational theory based
approaches as well as observed score and latent variable approaches (see also Zumbo & Rupp, 2004 ). As can be
seen in the descriptions of the various measures included in each of the following chapters, both approaches are
used in a reciprocal and complementary way in scale development, standardization and validation, irrespective
of whether or not a particular measure is based on a rational theory approach (e.g., MSCEIT; Mayer et al., 2003 )
or an empirical factor analytic approach (e.g., 16PF; Cattell & Mead, 2008 ).
The psychometric underpinnings of test construction and validation leading to the production of theoretically
and practically useful scales, much like the theories that guide them, have undergone considerable change since
the ‘brass instrument’ era of Galton or the publication of the 1939 Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale (now WAIS-
IV; see Weiss, Saklofske, Coalson, & Raiford 2010 ). Many of the scales presented in this volume were created in the
past 10 /C015 years and have been developed with an increased psychometric sophistication reflecting changes in
validity models and methods. A valid scale/measure should correlate positively with scores on other measures of
the same or similar constructs, and correlate negligibly with unrelated measures or negatively with measures of
related but different constructs (e.g., measures of curiosity correlate negatively with measures of anxiety, but they
are discrete constructs), and exhibit significant (positive or negative) correlations or standardized beta coefficients9 CRITERIA FOR SCALE EVALUATION
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
predictive of real-life criteria. Traditional views ( Campbell & Fiske, 1959 ) have focused on validity as an empirical
feature of a scale/measure and have been mainly concerned with construct validity ( Cronbach & Meehl, 1955 ).
Furthermore, reverse-worded items typically are loaded by a separate factor suggesting that they measure
a distinct construct (i.e., reverse-worded items do not simply measure the inverse or opposite of a particular
construct /C0e.g., see Boyle, 1989 ). Therefore, inclusion of reverse-worded (reverse-keyed) items in rating and
self-report scales potentially may be problematic. In view of this problem, some scales/measures have been
constructed, deliberately avoiding the inclusion of reverse-worded items (e.g., the Melbourne Curiosity Inventory ;
Naylor, 1981 ). It is noteworthy, however, that many more recently constructed scales/measures have not
addressed this source of measurement error, and have prominently included such reverse-worded items in the
hope of minimizing certain response sets (such as yea-saying or nay-saying).
Also, there appear to be ethnic group differences in responding to Likert-type scales. For example, Bachman
and O’Malley (1984, p. 491) reported that:
‘blacks are more likely than whites to use the extreme response categories, particularly the positive end of agree /C0disagree
scales ...The findings reveal potential pitfalls in dealing with racial differences in survey and personality measures, and illustrate the
need for great caution in reporting and interpreting such differences.’
The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, NCME, 1999) stated that validity must
also be tied to the test scores (or measures derived from a test) and the interpretation of test data. While test
scores must be viewed in relation to standardization and normative data, reliability, and additional factors such
as moderator variables, ‘ test validity is central to test interpretation ’(Decker, 2013 , p. 37). Five sources of validity
evidence are prescribed in the standards and include: test content, relations to other variables, internal structure,
response processes, and consequences of testing (cf. Boyle, 1987 ;Sireci & Sukin, 2013 ). The focus on validity
in the present book is extensive in examining convergent/concurrent validity, divergent/discriminant validity,
construct/factor analytic validity, and criterion/predictive validity.
While we can expect to see increasing sophistication in methods of assessing the psychometric qualities of
scales/measures, a final note on validity is warranted here. Messick (1998) has argued that a scale’s validity
should not be constrained to just the mechanics of construct and criterion validity but also take into account how
an individual’s responses on a scale/measure are interpreted, as well as the likely resulting social consequences.
This is reflected in a 2 32 matrix describing validity from the perspective of test use and interpretation (i.e., test
function) in relation to the evidential and consequential basis. More recently, Hubley and Zumbo (2011) have
expanded on Messick’s (1998) inclusion of social consequences and have presented a list of the forms of evidence
that should be considered when determining the interpretation and use of test scores, including: score structure,
reliability, content-related evidence, criterion-related evidence, convergent and discriminant evidence, group evi-
dence, invariance (across groups, contexts and purposes), social and personal consequences, including unin-
tended social or personal side effects. Ethical questions and guidelines abound on the use of scales/measures
(e.g., for diagnosis, or selection), and test interpretation has been ‘battled’ in the courts of law, although psycho-
metric scales in themselves are just measures.
CHAPTER CONTENTS
Here, we briefly introduce the chapters, in relation to the broadly defined thematic areas just described. This
chapter and the one that follows introduce core issues for social-personality assessments. Questionnaires based
on subjective self-reports are so prevalent in the field, despite their known limitations, that their usage requires
special attention. As Helmes, Holden, and Ziegler discuss in their chapter on Response Bias, Malingering and
Impression Management , detecting and countering response bias is critical for securing valid measures from per-
sonality and attitude questionnaires. Their chapter covers contemporary scales for assessment of bias and related
constructs, as well as promising new constructs and future challenges.
The section on Emotional Dispositions reviews measures of general affective tendencies, cognitive disposi-
tions closely linked to emotion, and transient states. In the first chapter in this section, Bryant and Harrison
review Measures of Hope and Optimism: Assessing Positive Expectations of the Future . Hope and optimism tend to
overlap but they are conceptually unique and can be distinguished psychometrically as both global and more
context-specific constructs. Fernandez, Day, and Boyle review Measures of Anger and Hostility in Adults . Taking
the MMPI as the starting point for measuring anger traits, they demonstrate how contemporary anger and10 1. CRITERIA FOR SELECTION AND EVALUATION OF SCALES AND MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
hostility scales may be used to assess a range of expressions and facets of anger/hostility. Measures of life satis-
faction have attracted attention from policymakers as well as psychologists. Weber, Harzer, Huebner, and Hillsdescribe Measures of Satisfaction across the Lifespan , and discuss their utility for professional practice applications
as well as basic research. In their chapter on Measures of Self-Esteem , Donnellan, Trzesniewski, and Robins high-
light the long history of the self-esteem construct in psychology. Current assessment strategies are based both onwell-established scales and several newer competitors. In their chapter, Stankov, Kleitman, and Jackson reviewMeasures of the Trait of Confidence . These have proved useful in various contexts including academic and voca-
tional tasks, decision-making and sports. In this domain, questionnaires are increasingly complemented by
online, performance-based, assessments. Affects may be assessed as ranging all the way from transient emotionalstates, through longer lasting mood states, through motivational dynamic traits, all the way to relativelystable and enduring personality trait dispositions, the topic of the chapter on Measures of Affect Dimensions by
Boyle, Helmes, Matthews, and Izard. This chapter points out that measurement using multiple instructions acrossa range of timeframes is clearly desirable.
Emotion Regulation scales go beyond general dispositions in measuring factors that may contribute to under-
standing and managing emotions. In their chapter, Bermond, Oosterveld, and Vorst discuss the use of Measures
of Alexithymia to assess various facets of the person’s level of difficulty in identifying and processing emotion, an
issue relevant to clinical contexts. Because alexithymia scales are both research and diagnostic instruments, it isespecially important that subscales are not highly correlated, to allow diagnostic differentiation. In presentingMeasures of Empathy: Self-Report, Behavioral, and Neuroscientific Approaches , Neumann, Chan, and Boyle et al. indi-
cate both the complexity of the construct and its importance for interpersonal functioning. Questionnaires focusto differing degrees on the affective and cognitive affective components of empathy, with additional perspectivesemerging from newer work on alternate behavioral and neuroscientific measurement approaches. Measures of
Resiliency discussed by Prince-Embury, Saklofske, and Vesely are important for understanding vulnerability and
resilience under stress, in both research and practical contexts, including educational and clinical practice. Scales
for both children and adults are evaluated. Resilience may in part depend on the effectiveness of coping withstress. The chapter by Greenaway, Louis, and Parker et al. on Measures of Coping for Psychological Wellbeing
describes both trait and state coping measures. Scales are placed in the context of theoretical frameworks for cop-ing as well as future challenges. In the chapter on Measures of Sensation Seeking , Zuckerman and Aluja consider
how assessments have progressed since the publishing of Zuckerman’s original Sensation Seeking Scales (SSS).Individual differences may be understood in relation to brain systems and their regulation by monoamine neuro-transmitters and enzymes. The final contribution to this section is on Measures of Ability and Trait Emotional
Intelligence , by Siegling, Saklofske, and Petrides. Emotional intelligence is a new integrative construct that may be
measured via questionnaire or via performance testing. Measures may be designed either for the general popula-tion or for use in the workplace.
The section on Interpersonal Styles introduces some traditional social-psychological themes in the context of
personality assessment. In their chapter on Measures of Adult Attachment and Related Constructs , Frı´as, Shaver, and
Mikulincer consider how scales for attachment orientations and related constructs have developed fromBowlby’s original observations and theorizing about attachment and separation. Such scales continue to evolvebut remain pertinent for understanding adolescent and adult relationships. The chapter on Measures of Concerns
with Public Image and Social Evaluation by Leary, Jongman-Sereno, and Diebels addresses how individuals differ in
their concerns about how other people evaluate them, in their reactions to negative evaluations, and in their regu-lation of public impressions of themselves to others. The chapter presents measures of nine relevant personalitycharacteristics. In the chapter on Measures of Forgiveness: Self-Report, Physiological, Chemical, and Behavioral
Indicators , Worthington, Lavelock, and van Oyen Witvliet et al. set out scales for various aspects of forgiveness,
including forgiveness of self and others, as well as trait and state measures. The chapter also includes objectivebehavioral, chemical, and psychophysiological indices that may be used to supplement self-reports.
The next section on Vices and Virtues is also at the intersection of personality and social psychology; adher-
ence to moral standards is an individual characteristic that is shaped both by sociocultural influences and person-
ality. The section begins with Campbell, Jayawickreme, and Hanson’s chapter on Measures of Values and Moral
Personality . A variety of scales have been developed which allow personality researchers to complement other
approaches to studying morality and the values which infuse moral decision-making and behavior. Koenig,Al-Zaben, Khalifa, and Al-Shohaib point out in their review of Measures of Religiosity and the Transcendental that
religious and spiritual constructs can be nebulous and subjectively-defined. Quantitative scales/measures cansupport research progress. They focus primarily on measures of religiosity relevant to a range of faith traditionsas well as scales for spirituality. Personality is defined by vices as well as virtues, a topic addressed by Paulhus11 CHAPTER CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
and Jones in their discussion of Measures of Dark Personalities . The majority of scales are directed towards the
overlapping constellation of traits often called the ‘Dark Triad’: Machiavellianism, narcissism and subclinical psy-
chopathy. Additional dark traits with aversive interpersonal qualities may also be assessed (cf. Livesley, 2010;
Widiger, 2012 ). Finally, in considering Measures of Perfectionism , Flett and Hewitt address an apparently virtuous
trait that may carry some adaptive costs. The authors point out the complexity of the construct and the need for
explicit conceptualizations to bring meaning to it. The scales/measures reviewed assess trait, cognitive, and self-
presentational components of perfectionism.
The final section on Sociocultural Interaction and Conflict addresses one of the focal concerns of social psy-
chology, relationships between different groups, and the socially-defined attitudes that may variously encourage
harmonious group interactions or stoke adversarial relations. In reviewing Measures of Cross-Cultural Values,
Personality, and Beliefs , Chiu, Chia, and Wan point out the importance of consensual culturally-defined views in
solving complex social coordination problems. Their chapter reviews measures that are representative of the
extensive efforts of cross-cultural psychologists to capture cultural differences in human psychology. In survey-
ingMeasures of Intergroup Contact: Predictors, Mediators, Moderators, and Outcomes , Lolliot, Fell, and Schmid et al.
emphasize the practical and policy importance of contact for improving intergroup attitudes. Scales reviewed
pertain to direct and extended intergroup contact, to mediating and moderating mechanisms, and to outcomes
such as outgroup attitudes. The dark side of intergroup contact is prejudice. Fiske and North cover Measures of
Stereotyping and Prejudice: Barometers of Bias . Contemporary scales for intergroup bias go beyond traditional con-
cerns with authoritarianism and overt racism to also address more subtle biases associated with social domi-
nance, racism, sexism and ageism. In their chapter on Measures of Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation:
Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Internalized Stigma , Ryan and Blascovich are concerned with bias towards Lesbian,
Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) individuals. Measures are directed both towards bias shown by heterosexual persons,
and the attitudes of LGB individuals towards their own sexual orientation. In reviewing Measures of Personality
across Cultures , Valchev and van de Vijver consider the cross-cultural application of general personality invento-
ries (i.e., monoculturally-devised measures that were not intended to capture inter-cultural aspects of personal-
ity). The format of this chapter differs a little from the others, as the focus of the research reviewed is not the
monocultural reliability and validity of individuals’ scores on the measures, but rather, the extent to which mea-
sures show quantitative structural equivalence or similarity of dimensional structure across different cultures.
In closing, the following chapters written be leading experts have been structured to follow a template that
reflects current views on test validity, reliability and utility. We have also followed the general outline used in
the previous volume ( Robinson et al., 1991 ), although expanding upon it, as the information is germane to evalu-
ating the psychometric properties of the social-personality measures reviewed in the current volume. We asked
authors to focus on the most often used and cited scales/measures with a particular emphasis on those published
in recent years. Each scale is identified and described, the sample on which it was developed is summarized, reli-
ability and validity data presented, and a final comment from the chapter authors precedes presentation of the
scale, in full or in part, where permission has been obtained to do so. In some instances, permission to reproduce
the full or even part of the scale was not obtained but the references to it will guide the reader to its location.
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Weiss, L. G., Saklofske, D. H., Coalson, D., & Raiford, S. E. (Eds.), (2010). WAIS-IV Clinical Use and Interpretation . San Diego: Academic.
Widiger, T. A. (2012). Changes in the conceptualization of personality disorder: The DSM-5 debacle. Clinical Social Work Journal ,41, 163/C0167.
Zinbarg, R. E., Revelle, W., Yovel, I., & Li., W. (2005). Cronbach’s alpha, Revelle’s beta, McDonald’s omega: Their relations with each and two
alternative conceptualizations of reliability. Psychometrika ,70, 123/C0133.
Zoski, K. W., & Jurs, S. (1996). An objective counterpart to the visual scree test for factor analysis: The standard error scree. Educational and
Psychological Measurement ,56, 443/C0451.
Zumbo, B. D., & Rupp, A. A. (2004). Responsible modeling of measurement data for appropriate inferences: Important advances in reli-
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Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.15 REFERENCES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
CHAPTER
2
Response Bias, Malingering, and
Impression Management
Edward Helmes1, Ronald R. Holden2and Matthias Ziegler3
1James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia;2Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada;
3Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
RESPONSE BIASES AND SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING
Motivational distortion and response bias (either intentional or unintentional) remain as important issues for
contemporary social-personality assessment ( Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Podsakoff, 2012; Rogers, 2008; Ziegler,
MacCann, & Roberts, 2012 ). Attempts at correcting for motivational distortion and response bias, including
sophisticated mathematical modeling approaches (e.g., Cattell, 1967 ;Cattell & Johnson, 1986 ) have only been par-
tially successful. More recently, construction of fake-resistant measures using item response theory (IRT; Stark,
Chernyshenko, & Drasgow, 2012 ), and Bayesian detection methods ( Kuncel, Borneman, & Kiger, 2012 ) have
made further inroads in detecting and controlling motivational distortion, faking and response bias.
Although historically the issue of social desirability responding was raised by Edwards (1953) , debates over
the ensuing years have continued to argue selectively for interpretations based on style or substance ( Ba¨ckstro ¨m,
Bjorklund, & Larsson, 2012; Block, 1990; Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1992; Helmes, 2000; Holden & Passey, 2009,
2010; Jackson & Messick, 1958; Lonnqvist, Paunonen, Tuulio-Henriksson, Lonnqvist, & Verkasalo, 2007; Ones &
Viswesvaran, 1998; Paulhus, 2002 ). Despite the frequently partisan tone to aspects of the debate, to many who are
interested in the ongoing issues, the distinction originally made between self-deception and impression manage-
ment by Sackeim and Gur (1978) has proved to be useful. These constructs can be termed response styles, differ-
entiating between stable response tendencies that generalize across situations from response sets that may be
unique to particular assessment contexts. Here we do not cover response sets such as carelessness or acquies-
cence in completing psychological measures. Carelessness is usually dealt with by infrequency scales, and a vari-
ety of measures have been used to assess acquiescence or ‘yea or nay saying’, most of which tabulate response
patterns with some cutoff for excessive numbers of responses of one type. Although most consistently embodied
in the research of Paulhus (1984) through the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR), the concept of
self-deception has taken on a theoretical and empirical life of its own (e.g., see von Hippel & Trivers, 2011 ).
Many problems remain unresolved. For example, Holden and Passey (2009) pointed out that many current mea-
sures of socially desirable responding do not coalesce and clearly do not assess a uniform construct. As a second
example, Paulhus (1986,1991) has long argued that self-deception largely constitutes overly favorable self-reports,
which appears to be a stable characteristic and one that is not necessarily amenable to conscious awareness. Arguing
for a content interpretation, Ones and Viswesvaran (1998) stated that social desirability is related to a variety of posi-
tive characteristics that are associated with aspects of actual job performance, but not others, and as such, it is likely
subject to conscious awareness. In addition, characteristics most valued in applied settings are not predicted by
socially desirable responding, an argument for the lack of generalized influence of this particular response style
(Ones, Viswesvaran, & Reiss, 1996 ). Such views can be contrasted with those that argue for the importance of social
desirability management as a confounding influence in several assessment contexts ( Holden, 2007 ).
16Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00002-4 ©2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
Despite detailed discussion of response bias in the previous edition of this book ( Paulhus, 1991 ), there is a con-
tinuing need for efforts to integrate and systematize the accumulated knowledge on response styles and response
biases. Given the increasing use of computers to administer and score scales and questionnaires in modern days,
and more sophisticated developments in analytic methods, we devote some time to discussing the differences
between the various modalities of item administration in terms of social desirability and other modes of response
bias. Finally, an overview of other more sophisticated methodologies for detecting, correcting or even preventing
motivational distortion and responses bias will be discussed.
In this prefatory chapter, we first discuss measures of response styles found in measures of ‘normal’ personal-
ity and then turn to those developed for measures of psychopathology, where motivational and response distor-
tion (both conscious and unconscious) are more likely to occur than with the assessment of ‘normal’ aspects of
personality. We have selected a variety of commercially published measures to illustrate the range of approaches
to dealing with motivational distortion and response styles that have been adopted.
Response biases in self-report measures are regarded as impediments to the valid assessment of individual
differences. These biases may be classified as response sets where these sets are transient or temporary influ-
ences brought about by factors such as general situational demands (e.g., high stakes testing) or specific assess-
ment conditions (e.g., time of day), or these biases may be classified as response styles where these styles
constitute relatively stable factors that endure over situations and time (e.g., to be agreeable with everything,
a habit of always saying no). As an example of the complexity of these issues, Weijters, Baumgartner,
and Schillewaert (2013) report on the relative influence of careless responding and acquiescence on the score
variance of short measures of self-esteem and optimism in the context of the issue of whether or not to reverse-
key items.
Prominent response biases include response sets such as acquiescence (agreeing with everything or ‘yea-say-
ing’), dis-acquiescence (disagreeing with everything or ‘nay-saying’), midpoint responding, extreme responding
(Weijters, Geuens, & Schillewaert, 2010 ), and styles such as socially desirable responding. Within socially desir-
able responding, various sub-dimensions have been identified and labeled (e.g., Holden & Fekken, 1989 ;
Paulhus, 1984 ). Over the past 25 years, the differentiation of socially desirable responding into components of
impression management and self-deceptive enhancement has been widely accepted. Whereas impression man-
agement has been regarded as a deliberate, conscious misrepresentation or distortion, self-deception has been
viewed as an unconscious positivity or negativity bias ( Paulhus, 1998 ) that may be related to narcissism or other
personality aberrations or misperceptions resulting in distorted self-perceptions. Such unconscious motivational
distortion/response bias is not even recognized by the respondent.
Faking is usually regarded as a subset of impression management and has been defined as involving intent,
deception, and other-orientation ( Holden & Book, 2012 ). That is, there is a conscious attempt to mislead someone
else in order to achieve a goal ( Ziegler et al., 2012 ). However, faking can be either deliberate/conscious, or unin-
tentional/unconscious, ranging all the way from lack of adequate self-insight to deliberate dissimulation (e.g., see
Boyle, 1985 ). Although faking may be multidimensional or context dependent, it is often viewed as emphasizing
either positivity (faking good) or negativity (faking bad, malingering). Consequently, malingering is a type of fak-
ing, which is a type of impression management, which is a type of socially desirable responding, which is a type
of response bias.
Clearly, the validity of individual respondents’ scores on self-report measures will be distorted by non-
content-relevant responding ( Paunonen & LeBel, 2012; Ziegler & Bu ¨hner, 2009 ). Further, although some measures
of response biases arguably may be confounded with content that is relevant for particular assessments, any for-
tuitous association between content and style seems theoretically post hoc and weak ( Holden & Passey, 2010 ).
Moreover, there is empirical evidence that faking in particular distorts the ranking of test-takers which may in
turn have detrimental effects, for example, in selection contexts ( Converse, Peterson & Griffith 2009 ). After sev-
eral years of controversy, it is clear that faking in real-life applicant settings indeed does occur ( Griffith,
Chmielowski & Yoshita 2007; Griffith & Converse, 2012 ). These authors provide a conservative estimate that the
proportion of individuals who either intentionally fake their responses on personality questionnaires is around
one-third in a non-threatening applied setting. With regard to malingering in threatening contexts, empirical evi-
dence suggests the proportion of those faking ranges up to 70%. Thus, there is potentially an even larger preva-
lence of deliberate faking than unconscious motivational response distortion in some contexts ( Hall & Hall, 2012 ).
Overall, therefore, response biases continue to remain as threats to the use of construct valid rating and self-
report scales for the measurement of individual differences. We now turn to evaluating different approaches to
the measurement of response style as construed by the designers of ‘normal’ personality instruments, followed
by approaches used in the assessment of psychopathology.17 RESPONSE BIASES AND SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
MEASURES REVIEWED HERE
1.NEO-PI-R & NEO-PI-3 (PPM & NPM Scales) ( McCrae & Costa, 2010 )
2.EPQ-R Lie Scale ( Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991 )
3.16PF (5th ed.) IM Scale ( Cattell, Cattell, & Cattell, 1993 )
4.Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding /C07(Paulhus, 1998 )
5.Marlowe /C0Crowne Social Desirability Scale ( Crowne & Marlowe, 1960 )
6.Personality Research Form E /C0Desirability Scale ( Jackson, 1984 )
7.Structured Interview of Reportable Symptoms (2nd ed.) ( Rogers, Sewell, & Gillard, 2010 )
8.MMMPI-2-Restructured Form (L, K, F Scales) ( Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 )
9.PAI (INF, ICN, NIM, & PIM Scales) ( Morey, 2007 )
OVER VIEW OF THE MEASURES
Here we review several impression management and response bias scales that have been published since the
previous edition of this book (Robinson, Shaver, & Wrightsman, 1991). We also provide updated comments on
some instruments that were reviewed then as well, but which continue in widespread use. We concentrate on
several commercial multiscale inventories that include measures of response styles. The oldest of these invento-
ries, the venerable Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), now includes more measures in its lat-
est revision (MMPI-2-RF) to detect manipulative or distorted response patterns than the original version. Many
instruments intended for use with normal populations (such as the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire /C0
16PF) also include such ‘correction’ scales, although not all do so. In addition, specialized instruments to detect
feigned responding have been developed or revised over the last two decades. These measures include a struc-
tured interview to detect faking of psychiatric disorders in the criminal justice system ( Rogers et al., 2010 ). In pro-
viding comments primarily on commercially published measures, we are following what appears to be an
increasing trend to publish scales commercially rather than to make them available through the psychological
journal literature. The field of commercially published measures appears to have increased since the first edition
of this book appeared in 1991 and continues to attract broad interest.
Positive and Negative Presentation Management Scales (PPM & NPM)
in NEO-PI-R & NEO-PI-3
(McCrae & Costa., 2010 ).
Variable
The NEO-PI-3 manual itself ( McCrae & Costa, 2010 ) does not report response style measures other than to
evaluate stereotyped response patterns through scanning the response sheet. Nonetheless, Schinka, Kinder, and
Kremer (1997) analyzed the items of the earlier NEO-PI-R and formed three 10-item response styles scales, of
which Negative Presentation Management (NPM) and Positive Presentation Ma.nagement (PPM) are of interest
here (cf. Meade & Craig, 2012 ).
Description
The two Schinka et al. (1997) scales of interest are in the tradition of those designed to measure faking good
and faking bad. Both scales were formed through the selection of existing NEO-PI-R items. Blanch, Aluja, Gallart,
and Dolcet (2009) provided a summary of the research since 1997 on the PPM and NPM scales and also give the
item numbers on the NEO-PI-R. For the PPM scale, there are two items from Neuroticism, three from
Extraversion, three from Openness, and one from each of the Agreeableness and Conscientiousness domains. For
the NPM scale, two items are drawn from each of the NEO-PI-R domains. Being derived from existing NEO-PI-R
items, the PPM and NPM scales use the same 5-point Likert-type response scale. Morey et al. (2002) proposed
that stylistic responding may occur on the NEO-PI-R. The Morey et al. structural equation model provides for
both substantive and stylistic contributions of the NPM and PPM scales, with the two underlying constructs
being correlated with one another.18 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Sample
Blanch et al. (2009) provided a summary of the normative, clinical, and employment samples in which the
NPM and PPM scales have been used. The samples ranged in size from 22 to over 21,000 respondents. No studies
could be located at the time of writing that used the NPM and PPM scales with the NEO-PI-3. Means on the
PPM scale tended to be lower in clinical samples and higher in employment samples, while scores on the NPM
tended to be higher in the employment groups than in either of the other groups ( Blanch et al., 2009 ).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Schinka et al. (1997) reported Cronbach alpha coefficients of .60 and .56 for the PPM scale and .52 and .67 for
the NPM scale in two separate studies. Blanch et al. (2009) reported alpha coefficients ranging from .43 to .70 for
the PPM scale and from .52 to .75 for the NPM scale.
Test/C0Retest
To date, no studies have reported test /C0retest reliability (either immediate dependability or longer-term
test/C0retest stability /C0e.g., see Cattell, 1973 , pp. 352 /C0355, Table 54) for either the PPM or NPM scales.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
Only one such correlative study was located for the NPM and PPM scales. Detrick, Chibnall, and Call (2010)
showed that the PPM scale performed as expected for a faking good scale in its sensitivity to demand effects.
Divergent/Discriminant
Blanch et al. (2009) reported that the NPM and PPM scale scores discriminate between known groups in
predictable ways. Detrick et al. (2010) also showed that the PPM scale performed as would be expected for a fak-
ing good scale. Using a large sample of job applicants in France, Marshall, De Fruyt, Rolland, and Bagby (2005)
stratified respondents on the PPM scale, finding significant differences across all five NEO-PI-R domains. Their
second study contrasted a group of job applicants with a group of career counseling participants, wherein the
PPM scale score differentiated between the two groups from the Belgian normative sample, somewhat better
than the main Big 5 domain scale scores performed. Four of the five NEO-PI-R scale scores, excepting only
Agreeableness, were able to differentiate some, but not all of the three groups.
Location
McCrae, R.R., & Costa, P.T., Jr. (2010). NEO inventories for the NEO Personality Inventory-3 (NEO-PI-3), NEO
Five-Factor Inventory-3 (NEO-FFI-3), NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R) professional manual . Lutz, FL:
Psychological Assessment Resources.
Schinka, J.A., Kinder, B.N., & Kremer, T. (1997). Research validity scales for the NEO-PI-R: Development and
initial validation. Journal of Personality Assessment, 68, 127/C0138.
Results and Comments
With the NEO scales having been used predominantly as a measure of normal personality (with presumed
honest response patterns), there has been comparatively little research into distorted response patterns involving
the NPM and PPM scales. The limited research into motivated/response distortion (undertaken in clinical and
forensic contexts) suggests that the NPM and PPM scales have value in detecting under- or over-reporting on the
NEO-PI-R (and presumably also on the NEO-PI-3). However, little is known about these scales’ ability to detect
single individuals who have distorted their responses.
The following lists of item numbers are based on the Schinka et al. (1997) NPM and PPM scales, but give the
item numbers for the NEO-PI-3. Note that two items were slightly re-worded from the original NEO-PI-R.
NEO-PI-3 Positive Presentation Management (PPM) Scale
19, 30, 37, 146, 153, 162, 173, 196, 213, 222 *.
*Item rewritten from its original wording in the NEO-PI-R.19 OVERVIEW OF THE MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
NEO-PI-3 Negative Presentation Management (NPM) Scale
31, 57 *, 104, 129, 135, 161, 168, 182, 223, 225.
Lie Scale /C0Eysenck Personality Questionnaire /C0Revised (EPQ-R L-Scale)
(Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991 ).
Variable
The Lie Scale included in the EPQ-R comprises 21 items. One-third of the L scale items are keyed for a positive
response (for a summary of the construction of the various Eysenck measures ( Eysenck, 1962; Eysenck &
Eysenck, 1968; 1975 ), see Furnham, Eysenck, & Saklofske, 2008 ).
Description
The EPQ-R Lie scale aims to detect ‘faking good’. As such, it not only indicates dissimulation or under-report-
ing, but also has a degree of relationship to substantive measures of personality ( Holden & Book, 2012 ).
Although Eysenck has argued for a single interpretation of the L scale, two components have been suggested,
one for social conformity and the other more representative of traditional under-reporting measures ( Francis,
Philipchalk, & Brown, 1991 ). Other studies (e.g., Ng, Cooper, & Chandler, 1998 ) have supported Eysenck’s posi-
tion for a unidimensional interpretation.
Sample
In the original normative EPQ sample ( Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991 ), means of 6.8 ( SD54.14) for over 1600 males
and 7.7 ( SD54.18) for a sample of almost 2500 females were reported for the L scale. Scores on L increased with
increasing age for both men and women. The manual ( Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991 ) reported differences between
four ‘abnormal’ clinical groups (psychotic, neurotic, endogenous depressed, and prisoners) on all four EPQ
scales, with the L scale being more sensitive to these differences than were the E, N, and P scales.
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Ko¨hler and Ruch (1996) using a sample of 110 German adults (51 males; 57 females) aged 17 to 83 years
(M545.6 years, SD515.8) reported a Cronbach alpha coefficient of .77 for the L scale. Likewise, Caruso,
Witkiewitz, Belcourt-Dittloff, and Gottlieb (2001) in their reliability generalization review of 44 studies that used
either the EPQ or EPQ-R, reported a median alpha coefficient of .77 for the L scale (ranging from .59 to .88).
Test/C0Retest
The EPQ-R manual ( Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991 ) reported test /C0retest reliability coefficients for a combined
group of students and social workers ( N5257) ranging from .61 to .90 over an interval of one month. Likewise,
Mundia (2011) reported a stability coefficient of .77 over a 5-month test /C0retest interval.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
The L-scale correlates positively (.54) with the NEO-PI-R Conscientiousness scale ( Poortinga, van de Vijver, &
van Hemert, 2002 , p. 289).
Divergent/Discriminant
Discriminant validity has not really been explored in any depth for the L scale. The prolonged length of time
that the scale has been in use without serious concerns for its discriminant validity being raised supports its
interpretation as a faking good measure.
Construct/Factor Analytic
Whether the L scale measures one or two components is an issue of the construct validity of the scale. One
study ( Jackson & Francis, 1999 ) scored the two components separately with different groups instructed to fake
either in a socially desirable direction or in a socially unacceptable direction. Scores on both subscales correlated20 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
approximately equally with the Neuroticism scale, and did not differ between themselves, although both
component subscales differed from the group taking the EPQ under standard conditions. Ferrando and
Anguiano-Carrasco (2009) reported that the Lie scale can be interpreted similarly under both instructions to
respond normally and to fake good. Generally though, the L scale appears to function as does any other measure
intended to assess faking good ( Ferrando & Chico, 2001 ).
Location
Eysenck, H.J., & Eysenck, S.B.G. (1991). Eysenck Personality Questionnaire /C0Revised . London: Hodder &
Stoughton.
Results and Comments
Although the EPQ-R Lie-Scale has not had the length of use of its equivalent MMPI faking good measure,
there is an extensive literature on its use over the various editions of the Eysenck personality measures. As a
measure of faking good intended for use with normal populations, it exhibits adequate test /C0retest reliability
(Caruso et al., 2001 ).
Impression Management (IM) Scale (in 16PF, 5th edition)
(Cattell et al., 1993 ).
Variable
The fifth edition of the 16PF incorporates three response style scales: Impression Management (IM),
Infrequency (INF), and Acquiescence (ACQ) ( Russell & Karol, 1994 ). As measures of response sets, we do not
consider further the INF and ACQ scales here. The IM scale is primarily associated with the Faking Good and
Faking Bad scales from the previous versions of the 16PF. It is the only 16PF validity scale discussed here.
Sample
A total of 2500 individuals in the general population provided norms for the IM scale as well as the other
16PF scales ( Cattell et al., 1993 ). Correlations between the IM scale and the 16PF factors were derived from sam-
ples of 2205 males and 2364 females ( Conn & Rieke, 1994 ).
Description
The IM scale comprises 12 items answered using a 3-point rating scale. Although high scores on the IM scale
may be accurate for certain individuals, they can also reflect an unconscious, idealized self-image or conscious,
deliberate faking. Conversely, low scores on the IM scale may reflect an overly critical self-image or individuals
deliberately presenting a need for attention.
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Conn and Rieke (1994) reported a Cronbach alpha coefficient of .63 ( N53,498) for the IM scale.
Test/C0Retest
For the IM scale, Conn and Rieke (1994) reported a two-week test /C0retest reliability coefficient of .70 ( N5204)
and a two-month stability coefficient of .63 ( N5159).
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
Convergent validity for the IM scale has been demonstrated with positive correlations ranging from .49 to .54
with other scales of socially desirable responding such as the Marlowe /C0Crowne Social Desirability Scale (.54),
and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR). The IM scale correlates positively with the BIDR
Self-Deceptive Enhancement subscale (.54), and .49 with the second BIDR subscale (see Conn & Rieke, 1994 ;
Crowne & Marlowe, 1960 ;Paulhus, 1986 ). The IM scale correlates positively (.45) with the 16PF Form A faking
good scale, and .48 with Form C faking good scale. The IM scale correlates positively (.16) with Factor A
(Warmth), .50 with Factor C (Emotional Stability), .34 with Factor G (Superego), .20 with Factor H21 OVERVIEW OF THE MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
(Social Boldness), .17 with Factor Q3 (Perfectionism) /C0(Conn & Rieke, 1994 ). Literature searches failed to identify
any simulation or known group studies of either faking good or faking bad on the IM scale of the fifth edition of
the 16PF.
Divergent/Discriminant
The IM scale correlates /C0.01 with Factor B (Intelligence), /C0.02 with Factor E (Dominance), /C0.09 with Factor F
(Liveliness), /C0.03 with Factor I (Sensitivity), /C0.39 with Factor L (Vigilance), /C0.36 with Factor M (Abstractedness),
/C0.12 with Factor N (Privateness), /C0.39 with Factor O (Apprehension), .06 with Factor Q1 (Openness to change),
/C0.21 with Factor Q2 (Self-reliance), /C0.53 with Factor Q4 (Tension). ( Conn & Rieke, 1994 ).
Criterion/Predictive
As evidence of criterion validity, the IM scale correlates approximately equally with both self-deception and
other-deception scales on the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (Paulhus, 1986 ) and with the Marlowe
Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960 ).
Location
Cattell, R.B., Cattell, A.K., & Cattell, H.E. (1993). Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, Fifth Edition .
Champaign, IL: Institute for Personality and Ability Testing.
Conn, S.R., & Rieke, M.L. (1994). The 16PF Fifth Edition technical manual . Champaign, IL: Institute for
Personality and Ability Testing.
Results and Comments
Conn and Rieke (1994) stated that studies that did report on the reliability and validity of the 16PF (5th ed) IM
scale suggest that it performs reasonably well for its purposes, since the evidence for its reliability, as well as its
convergent and discriminant validity is well-documented.
Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding /C07 (BIDR IM & SDE Scales)
(Paulhus, 1998 ).
Variable
The BIDR (also known as the Paulhus Deception Scales /C0seePaulhus, 1984 ) assesses two factors of socially
desirable responding with scales of Self-Deceptive Enhancement or SDE (measuring an unconscious favorability
bias of the self) and Impression Management or IM (assessing deliberate misrepresentation to others). The BIDR
has gone through several editions, and the seventh revision was commercially published as the Paulhus
Deception Scales. Some published studies report the latter name, while others use the original BIDR-7 title.
Description
Items on each of the BIDR-7 scales were rationally constructed. The current item content for the SDE scale
focuses on the inflation, exaggeration, or enhancement of one’s personal characteristics. For the IM scale, current
items emphasize overt behavior where misrepresentation is interpreted as deliberate, conscious lying. With
a total of 40 (5-point) items (ranging from Not True toVery True ), the BIDR-7 takes only 5 to 7 minutes to
complete, requires a minimal reading level, and is appropriate for clinical and non-clinical individuals. Scoring of
the BIDR-7 scales is fairly straightforward with half of the items on each of the two scales negatively keyed
(although reverse-worded items typically are loaded by a separate factor suggesting that they measure a distinct
construct /C0see Chapter 1, this volume). All items are scored dichotomously (0 or 1) with the 20 SDE items each
having two keyed response options and the 20 IM items each having one keyed response option.
The BIDR has been translated into a number of different languages with some versions using continuous
(polytomous) rather than the dichotomous scoring approach. Vispoel and Tao (2013) reported higher coefficients
on all measures with a 7-point polytomous response scale than with a dichotomous response scale, suggesting
that a polytomous scoring system should be used ( Li & Bagger, 2007; St ˝ober, Dette, & Musch, 2002 ).22 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Sample
Normative data for the BIDR-7 are provided in the manual ( Paulhus, 1998 ) for separate populations of the gen-
eral public ( N5441 urban and rural Americans and Canadians between 21 and 75 years of age), college students
(N5289 Americans and Canadians), incarcerated offenders ( N5603 Canadian incarcerated offenders), and
military personnel ( N5124 American navy recruits).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
The BIDR-7 manual ( Paulhus, 1998 ) reported Cronbach alpha coefficients for the normative sample ranging
from .70 (college students) to .75 (general public) for the SDE score and from .81 (college students) to .84 (general
public) for the IM scale score. Vispoel and Tao (2013) used the older BIDR-6 to evaluate the elements affecting
BIDR scores using generalizability analysis over a 1-week interval. They reported transient errors accounting for
3% to 6% of BIDR scores, with random response effects accounting for larger proportions of variance.
Generalizability coefficients were higher for polytomous than dichotomous scoring.
Test/C0Retest
Paulhus (1991) reported 5-week test /C0retest reliability coefficients of .69 and .65 for the SDE and IM scale
scores, respectively. For the SDE and IM scale scores, Lonnqvist et al. (2007) reported 3-year stability coefficients
of .44 and .68, respectively, and 2-year stability coefficients of .71 and .68, respectively. Crutzen and Goritz (2010)
reported a 5-month test /C0retest reliability coefficient of .74 for the IM scale score. Vispoel and Tao (2013) reported
test/C0retest reliability coefficients of .78 and .83 for dichotomous and polytomous scoring of SDE scale, as well as
.83 and .86 for the IM scale, over a one-week interval.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
Paulhus (1998) reported positive correlations for the SDE scale with the Edwards Social Desirability Scale
(Edwards, 1957 ) and the Desirability scale of Jackson’s (1984) Personality Research Form as providing evidence for
convergent validity. Barchard (2002) reported that the SDE scale correlates positively (.24) with a Positive
Expressivity Scale (PES). In regard to the IM scale, its positive correlations with the Marlowe Crowne Social
Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960 ) support its convergent validity.
Divergent/Discriminant
Barchard (2002) reported that the SDE scale correlated /C0.02 with a Negative Expressivity Scale (NES), while
the IM scale correlated .08 with the PES, and /C0.15 with the NES. Also, as evidence for discriminant validity,
Paulhus (1998) pointed to the factor analyses in the manual with the IM and SDE scales loading on different fac-
tors and to his Study 8 in which both IM and SDE scales showed neutral values on a 7-point rating scale, in con-
trast to measures of adjustment, which were rated significantly higher.
Construct/Factor Analytic
A principal component analysis of the two BIDR-7 scales using a sample of 320 undergraduates in conjunction
with other measures of socially desirable responding supports the distinction to be drawn between the SDE and
IM scales since the SDE and IM scales are loaded by distinct components ( Paulhus, 1998 ). Furthermore, at the
item level, factor analytic evidence confirms the structural integrity of the BIDR item scoring ( Holden, Starzyk,
McLeod, & Edwards, 2000 ).
Criterion/Predictive
Evidence in Paulhus (1998) for the predictive validity of the IM scale score is its responsiveness to naturally
occurring and experimentally induced demands for impression management. However, Pauls and Crost (2004)
concluded that the BIDR-7 itself is not immune to faking and provides little diagnostic information regarding fak-
ing beyond what can be gained from faking scales on standard personality questionnaires.
Location
Paulhus, D.L. (1998). Paulhus Deception Scales (PDS): The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding /C07. North
Tonawanda, NY: Multi-Health Systems, Inc.23 OVERVIEW OF THE MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Results and Comments
The BIDR has undergone substantial change through its evolution from editions 1 through 7. The nature of
content has shifted from rather psychologically threatening issues to the current range of content. Substantial evi-
dence has been provided for the two primary dimensions of Self-Deceptive Enhancement and Impression
Management. Although not all studies have supported their independence, continued research into the
dimensionality of measures of social desirability responding seems warranted. The evidence remains mixed, and
resolution of the methods of scoring the BIDR-7 would help by removing one confounding variable.
On a related front, Paulhus and colleagues (Blasberg, Rogers, & Paulhus, in press) have developed a new ques-
tionnaire measuring Impression Management, the Bi-Dimensional Impression Management Inventory (BIMI). That
questionnaire does not aim at identifying individual faking, but rather measures the evaluativeness of personality
questionnaires and the demands that a specific situation might elicit, thereby showing whether an instrument is
more loaded with agentic or communal aspects. Additionally, the BIMI can be used to specify whether a situation
has a higher demand for agentic or for communal behavior that makes faking in the specific direction more
likely. This use of a social desirability scale is highly innovative in its use for situations rather than individuals.
Marlowe /C0Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS)
(Crowne & Marlowe, 1960 ).
Variable
The MCSDS measures socially desirable responding through the self-report assessment of culturally approved
and sanctioned behavior that occurs infrequently. Paulhus (1991) reviewed the earlier literature on the MCSDS
(cf.Paulhus, 1991 , pp. 27 /C031). We focus on the more recent literature here.
Description
The MCSDS normative data are from over 50 years ago, and many short forms have been developed (see
Fischer & Fick, 1993 , for an analysis of some short forms). The scale and its numerous short forms have also been
translated into various languages. Ballard, Crino, and Rubenfeld (1988) raised concerns over the continued appli-
cability of about one third of the scoring key of MCSDS items due to changes in the social acceptability of those
items’ content over the years.
Sample
With a sample of 402 Canadian undergraduates, Holden and Fekken (1989) reported a mean MCSDS score of
15.61 ( SD55.33). This score is about two points higher than the original normative values reported by Marlowe
and Crowne (1960).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Holden and Fekken (1989) reported a Cronbach alpha coefficient of .78 ( N5402), Helmes and Holden (2003)
reported an alpha coefficient of .74 ( N5202), and Holden and Passey (2010) reported an alpha coefficient of .81
(N5602). Beretvas, Meyers, and Leite (2002) reported alpha coefficients of .80 for women and .70 for men from
their reliability generalizability study.
Test/C0Retest
For a sample of 60 university students, Crino, Svoboda, Rubenfeld, and White (1983) reported a test /C0retest
correlation of .86 for a one-month interval. The latter stability correlation was the highest reported by Beretvas
et al. (2002) for the 21 test /C0retest reliability coefficients that they reported, too few for a reliability generalization
analysis. The lowest coefficient that they reported was .38 over a two- to four-week period.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
For a sample of 202 university students, Helmes and Holden (2003) reported that the MCSDS score correlated
.63 and.53 with the IM and SDE scale scores, respectively, of the BIDR-7 ( Paulhus, 1998 ). They also reported a
correlation of .57 with the Denial scale score of Jackson’s (1989) Basic Personality Inventory . Furthermore, Holden24 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
and Fekken (1989) reported that the MCSDS score correlated .27 with the Personality Research Form Desirability
Scale scores ( Jackson, 1984 ) and .26 with the Edwards’ Social Desirability Scale (1957) scores.
Divergent/Discriminant
Although the MCSDS loads on a general factor of social desirability, when multiple desirability factors are
extracted, the MCSDS shows stronger associations with impression management scales than with other social
desirability scales not explicitly constructed to measure impression management ( Helmes & Holden, 2003 ).
Construct/Factor Analytic
Whereas Seol (2007) found evidence for a single dimension, Ventimiglia and MacDonald (2012) reported mod-
erate fit for either a one-factor or two-factor (impression management and self-deception) model, while Holden
and Fekken (1989) supported a five-factor (considerateness, endurance, patience, integrity, and adherence to
social norms) model for the structure underlying the MCSDS items. Different theoretical models and factor ana-
lytic methods in these studies preclude any strong conclusions about the structure of the MCSDS.
Location
Crowne, D.P., & Marlowe, D.A. (1960). A new scale of social desirability independent of psychopathology.
Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24, 349/C0354.
Results and Comments
The MCSDS norms and recommended item selection procedures have changed over time and are less applica-
ble today than originally. These factors may also underlie the lack of consensus in the literature as to the internal
structure of the MCSDS.
Personality Research Form E /C0Desirability Scale (PRF Desirability)
(Jackson, 1984 ).
Variable
The PRF Desirability scale assesses the tendency to describe oneself using terms judged as socially desirable.
This tendency may be conscious or unconscious, accurate or inaccurate.
Description
The PRF Desirability scale comprises 16 true/false items of the larger 352-item Personality Research Form E
constructed by Douglas N. Jackson (1984) . From a large pool of items for which judged desirability values were
available, a subset of items were selected and screened in order to avoid psychopathological reference and con-
tent homogeneity. Items were then chosen using item-total correlations based on the self-report responses for a
scale development sample. The end result is an internally consistent, content heterogeneous index of the ten-
dency to present a positive picture of the self in answering personality statements. The scale takes 3 to 5 minutes
to complete, and requires a 6th grade reading level. Scoring of the scale is a simple task. All items are scored
dichotomously (0 or 1) and half of the 16 items are negatively keyed.
Sample
Normative data on the PRF Desirability scale are provided in the test manual ( Jackson, 1984 ) for college
students ( N52765), juvenile offenders ( N5341), psychiatric patients ( N583), and military personnel ( N53988).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
In the PRF manual ( Jackson, 1984 ), Desirability scale score split-half reliabilities were reported as .68 for college
students and .52 for psychiatric patients. For college students, Desirability scale Cronbach alpha coefficients
have been reported as follows: .73 ( Fekken & Holden, 1989 ), .61 ( Helmes & Holden, 2003 ), and .68 ( Holden &
Passey, 2010 ).25 OVERVIEW OF THE MEASURES
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Test/C0Retest
(Jackson (1984) reported two-week test /C0retest reliability coefficients (.86 and .84) for the PRF Desirability scale.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
Positive correlations between the PRF Desirability scale and other measures of socially desirable responding
(Holden & Passey, 2010; Jackson, 1984 ) showed congruence of the Desirability scale with other measures of social
desirability.
Divergent/Discriminant
Holden, Book, Edwards, Wasylkiw, and Starzyk (2003) found that the PRF Desirability scale score could distin-
guish between respondents answering honestly or faking (either in terms of positivity or negativity) and that this
capability was unsurpassed by other commonly used measures.
Construct/Factor Analytic
A principal components analysis of the PRF Desirability scale with other measures of socially desirable
responding ( Holden & Passey, 2010 ) revealed evidence for the construct validity of the Desirability scale.
Criterion/Predictive
Studies of experimentally induced faking support the merits of the PRF Desirability scale score in the identifi-
cation of non-content-based responding. Holden and Evoy (2005) noted a large effect size for the PRF Desirability
scale score in its association with an underlying dimension of dissimulation.
Location
Jackson, D.N. (1984). Personality Research Form manual (3rd ed.). Port Huron, MI: Sigma Assessment Systems.
Results and Comments
The PRF-E Desirability scale was originally developed as a validity scale for Jackson’s measure of Murray’s
needs. The scale underwent the same item selection processes as for the content scales, and this care in its devel-
opment is evident in its evidence for construct validity in comparison to some other measures of the construct of
desirability. For the most part, the scale correlates with both Impression Management and Self-Deception scales
because it originally was not developed to have a content interpretation.
MALINGERING
Malingering may be regarded as an extreme form of Impression Management, and recent evidence suggests
that malingering is not categorically distinct from less extreme forms of response distortion ( Walters et al., 2008 ).
The American Psychiatric Association (2000) defines malingering as ‘ the intentional production of false or grossly
exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms, motivated by external incentives ’ (p. 739). It is helpful to differentiate
malingering from the feigning of symptoms, where feigning is defined as ‘ the deliberate fabrication or gross exagger-
ation of psychological or physical symptoms without any assumptions about its goals ’(Rogers, 2008 , p. 6). Although
more general terms, such as dissimulation, have also been used in descriptions of the deliberate distortion of
responses, there is less of a consensus on definitions. Such response distortions may involve exaggeration, but
sometimes the minimization of responses occurs as well. Rogers (2008) noted that three domains of malingering
can be defined. Here, we exclude the intentional production of symptoms of cognitive impairment or of feigned
medical symptoms ( Rogers et al., 2010 ). This leaves the feigning of symptoms of psychological disorders, their
fabrication or exaggeration.
Individuals can knowingly distort the ‘true’ situation for a variety of reasons and over a range of content.
There is as lack of consensus as to whether or not this tendency to distort is a consistent trait that goes across
many situations, or a state that occurs only under certain circumstances ( Ziegler et al., 2012 ). In addition, the
issue of intentionality or conscious production of symptoms differentiates feigning symptoms from those pro-
duced through a dissociative process, where the symptoms arise as a result of unconscious processes. Although
the term ‘malingering’ is sometimes used less precisely, the concept of ‘faking bad’ is closely related, but without26 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
the presence of a clear source of motivation for the distortion of responses. In contrast, individuals who fake bad
on a measure of psychological adjustment may wish to make their distress very clear to the professional staff.
Analog studies of motivational/response distortion have difficulty in establishing realistic incentives comparable
to those found in real life.
The validity scales in multiscale inventories often include measures of faking bad, such as the MMPI F scale
and the PAI Negative Impression Management scale. Here we review one of the few explicit malingering mea-
sures, the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; Rogers et al., 2010 ).
Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms, 2nd edition (SIRS-2)
(Rogers et al., 2010 ).
Variable
The SIRS-2 was designed to assess eight forms of feigned psychological disorders, including rare symptoms,
symptom combinations, improbable symptoms, indiscriminate symptom endorsement, symptom severity, obvi-
ous symptoms, common or subtle psychological problems, and reported versus observed symptoms.
Description
The SIRS-2 is updated and slightly modified from the 1992 version (Rogers, Bagby. & Dickens, 1992). The orig-
inal Symptom Onset scale was dropped, while a new scale, Rare Symptoms and two new index scores were
added, as well as the Improbable Failure scale. The 16-page Interview Booklet has 156 unique item stems, some
of which have supplementary questions or have sub-questions. Items 87 to 102 are repeated in order to determine
response consistency. Scoring the SIRS requires substantial familiarity with both the literature on malingering
and also structured interviewing. The front page of the interview booklet provides a profile for the eight Primary
Scales as well as classification scales and six Supplementary Scales.
Sample
The comparison data set comprised 2298 protocols, of which 167 were administered under simulation instruc-
tions. Subsamples included general clinical and clinical forensic samples, a larger correctional sample, and 217
community/college cases. Samples of individuals undergoing competency evaluations and insanity evaluations
are also reported in the manual ( Rogers et al., 2010 ). Reasonably good descriptions of the comparison data sets
are provided in the manual.
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Cronbach alpha coefficients have been reported by Rogers et al. (2010) for six of the eight scales ranging from
.77 to .92 for the original 1992 version ( N5211), while 100 cases were used for the SIRS-2, with alpha coefficients
ranging from .77 to .93.
Test/C0Retest
Repeated administration of the SIRS over a period of 7 to 13 days resulted in test /C0retest reliability coefficients
ranging from .24 to .91. Some of the scale scores were affected by floor effects, notably the one with the lowest
reliability.
Inter-Rater
Rogers et al. (2010) reported higher inter-rater reliability coefficients than for the original (1992) SIRS, ranging
from .95 to .99.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
Convergent validity of the eight Primary Scale scores is reported with MMPI/MMPI-2 validity scale scores as
well as with Personality Assessment Inventory ( Morey, 1991 ), SIMS ( Widows & Smith, 2005 ), and M-FAST
(Miller, 2001 ) scale scores.27 MALINGERING
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Divergent/Discriminant
Discriminant validity evidence is reported in Rogers et al. (2010) .
Construct Validity
Confirmatory factor analysis has been used to examine the underlying factor structure, which tends to yield
two dimensions labeled: Spurious Presentations and Plausible Presentations (see Rogers et al., 2010 ). To a large
extent, the SIRS has defined the construct of malingering in terms of the many ways in which individuals can
malinger and serves as a reference in many other studies of malingering and feigning (e.g., Kucharski, Toomey,
Fila, & Duncan, 2007 ).
Criterion/Predictive
Validity data for the SIRS-2 classification rules are also provided, and the manual reports sensitivity of .80 and
specificity of .98, with an overall correct classification of 91% for a validation sample.
Location
Rogers, R., Sewell, K.W., & Gillard, N.D. (2010). SIRS-2: Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms Professional
manual . (2nd ed.) Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
Results and Comments
The SIRS-2 has established new standards for the assessment of distorted responding, without getting into the
unproductive debate over conscious versus unconscious faking. Based on the theoretical analysis of ways in
which individuals can distort their presentation, the SIRS-2 also has extensive empirical evidence for its validity.
Evidence for the ability of the SIRS-2 to differentiate at an individual level is extraordinary.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF)
(Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 ).
The MMPI-2-RF is a major development for this venerable measure whose previous revision failed to over-
come many of the original version’s weaknesses ( Helmes & Reddon, 1993 ). It is based upon the MMPI-2, but
uses only 338 items of the original 567 MMPI-2 items ( Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 ). The main change is the use
of the Restructured Clinical scales ( Tellegen et al., 2003 ) in place of the traditional clinical scales. For basic clinical
use, a reduction in the number of scales that are scored to 50 means interpretation will be more straightforward
than with the parent MMPI-2. The strength of the original MMPI in its validity scales has been continued, with
no fewer than eight on the MMPI-2-RF. Because of the common item core, the norms for the MMPI-2-RF are
those for the MMPI-2 with an additional comparative study done to ensure the continued comparability of the
norms. In order to make comparisons easier, the validity measures of the MMPI-2-RF will be discussed in the rel-
evant individual sections. For information on the literature on malingering and faking with the MMPI-2, Greene
(2008) provides a recent summary.
MEASURES OF UNDER-REPORTING
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2-RF L-rScale)
(Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 ).
Variable
The original Lscale and its later forms are designed to detect those who present themselves in an overly favor-
able light through the denial of the minor faults and shortcomings that are common in most individuals.
Description
The revised L-rscale consists of 14 items (down from 15 on the previous form) and is also referred to as
Uncommon Virtues , which is the unifying theme of the various items. The logic is that even individuals with tradi-
tional values as part of their makeup will not achieve very high scores on this scale. High scores can also occur
due to inconsistent responding, which should be checked through the use of the VRIN and TRIN response28 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
consistency scales. Eleven of the items are keyed for a ‘False’ response, which differs from the original Lscale on
which all the 15 items were false-keyed.
Sample
Because the item pool of the RF version is based upon the MMPI-2, RF scales can be rescored from any sample
of MMPI-2 respondents that has item level responses available. The MMPI-2 norms of 2276 individuals are used
by the MMPI-2-RF ( Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 ) and are reported on a non-gendered basis. Tellegen and Ben-
Porath (2008) reported normative figures for the validity scales in Table B-1 of the manual, while Ben-Porath and
Tellegen (2008) used Figure F-1 and the MMPI-2 profile sheet to convert raw scores to T-scores using the com-
bined gender norms. Tellegen and Ben-Porath (2008) also reported on the comparability studies between the orig-
inal MMPI-2 and the RF form. They concluded that using the norms for the MMPI-2 in this manner for the
interpretation of the RFscores was defensible. For the overall normative sample, the reported mean score was
2.61 ( SD52.07).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Tellegen and Ben-Porath (2008) reported Cronbach alpha coefficients for five samples ranging from .57 to .65
for the L-rscore.
Test/C0Retest
The Technical Manual ( Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008 ) reported a test /C0retest reliability of .79 for a sample of 193
individuals who had taken the MMPI-2-RF twice, one week apart.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
No new evidence for the L-rscale was found during the search for this review.
Divergent/Discriminant
Sellbom and Bagby (2008) reported that the mean L-rscale score was significantly higher for student and
patient groups instructed to fake good as compared to those taking the test under standard conditions. The same
was true for a sample of individuals taking the MMPI-2 as part of a child custody evaluation as compared to
those undergraduate students instructed to fake good.
Construct/Factor Analytic
The extensive literature on the MMPI-2 can be consulted for factor analytic results of the MMPI scales. The
term ‘construct’ really only applies to the RF version. The empirical keying approach used for previous editions
of the MMPI would preclude studies at the construct level.
Location
Ben-Porath, Y. S., & Tellegen, A. (2008). MMPI-2-RF: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured
Form. Manual for administration, scoring, and administration . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tellegen, A., & Ben-Porath, Y. S. (2008). MMPI-2-RF: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured
Form . Technical manual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Results and Comments
With only modest item differences in content, existing validity data for the MMPI-2 Lscale score should apply
to the L-rscale, although the shifting composition of the scale and relocation of items in the item booklet means
that the conservative user will likely wish to see some harder evidence of comparability than is provided in the
current materials for the MMPI-2-RF. The Technical Manual ( Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008 ) reports data from
existing samples of correlations of MMPI-2-RF validity scale scores with one another in its Tables 3-13 to 3-15.
MMPI-2-RF K-rScale
(Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 ).29 MEASURES OF UNDER-REPORTING
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Variable
The original Kscale was intended to assess the defensive approach to responding that minimized the open
expression of psychopathology. This approach to answering items resulted in essentially normal profiles in indi-
viduals who clearly did possess identifiable pathology by other criteria.
Description
The original scale had 30 items that were selected empirically by the contrasted groups method used for the
early MMPI. The revised K-rscale (Adjustment Validity) has 14 items, two of which are true-keyed and 12 of
which are false-keyed. Previous versions of the MMPI have incorporated a correction procedure using the Kscale
for other scales. This correction is no longer used on the MMPI-2-RF.
Sample
The same sources as reported for the L-rscale apply to the K-rscale. The figures for the non-gendered norm
sample give a mean of 7.45 ( SD52.91) ( Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008 ).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
The MMPI-2-RF Technical Manual reports Cronbach alpha coefficients ranging from .67 to .76 in five samples
ranging from the norm sample to two samples of psychiatric inpatients.
Test/C0Retest
Tellegen and Ben-Porath (2008) reported a test /C0retest reliability coefficient of .84 over a one-week interval
(N5193).
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
The Technical Manual ( Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008 ) reports correlations among the various MMPI-2-RF valid-
ity indices. Sellbom and Bagby (2008) reported that the K-rscale functions as a measure of defensiveness in
responding in groups instructed to fake good as compared to those given standard instructions.
Criterion/Predictive
Sellbom and Bagby (2008) also reported that a group of individuals undergoing child custody evaluations
exhibited higher scores on the K-rscale in comparison with undergraduate students responding under standard
instructions.
Location
Ben-Porath, Y. S., & Tellegen, A. (2008). MMPI-2-RF: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured
Form. Manual for administration, scoring, and administration . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tellegen, A., & Ben-Porath, Y. S. (2008). MMPI-2-RF: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured
Form. Technical manual . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Results and Comments
The K-rscale represents a substantial change to the older Kscale, having fewer than half the items. This has
likely led to an increase in its utility as well. It likely is also an advance in practice that the K-correction is no lon-
ger applied to clinical scales in the RFform. The limited research to date is encouraging in that it appears to find
more evidence for the validity of the K-rscale.
MEASURES OF OVER-REPORTING
MMPI F Scales
(Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008 ).30 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Variable
The MMPI-2-RF contains no fewer than four Fscales. The original MMPI Fscale was intended to identify
those individuals who are attempting to fake bad or over-report psychiatric symptomatology in order to gain
sympathy or other benefit. The F-rscale is the analog of the original Fscale for Infrequent Responses. It has 32
items that are infrequently answered in the keyed direction by individuals without psychopathology.
Independent evidence of the presence or absence of that pathology is essential for the proper interpretation
of the Fscales. The more recently developed Fp-r scale (Infrequent Psychopathology Responses) ( Arbisi &
Ben-Porath, 1995; Archer, Handel, Greene, Baer, & Elkins, 2001 ) is intended to compensate to some extent for
those individuals with genuine psychopathology. Scores on this scale’s 21 items are less likely to be confounded
with severe distress than with the F-rscale. The Infrequent Somatic Responses scale ( Fs) has 16 items with
somatic concerns that are rarely reported by true medical patients. It is based on the same logic as the other
varieties of Fscale. The Symptom Validity Scale (SVS) or Fake Bad Scale ( FBS, FBS-r ) on the MMPI-2-RF has 30
items out of the 43 items on the original FBS ( Lees-Haley, English, & Glenn, 1991 ). That scale was developed to
identify individuals who had apparently exaggerated their symptomatology in the context of civil litigation.
There has been substantial controversy over the application of this scale with the original MMPI-2 ( Arbisi &
Butcher, 2004; Ben-Porath, Greve, Bianchini, & Kaufmann, 2010; Greiffenstein, Baker, Axelrod, Peck, & Gervais,
2004; Greiffenstein, Baker, Gola, Donders, & Miller, 2002; Greve & Bianchini, 2004; Iverson, Henrichs, Barton, &
Allen, 2002 ), but this seems to have been resolved to an extent such that the MMPI-2-RF manuals report data on
theFBS-r from the MMPI-2 norm sample.
Sample
See the above description of the various samples involved with the MMPI-2-RF validity scales. The manual
(Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 ) reports means of 1.68 ( SD52.20) for the F-rscale score, 0.89 ( SD51.17) for the
F-p-r scale score, 1.00 (SD 51.23) for the F-sscale score, and a mean of 7.62 ( SD53.15) for the FBS-r scale score.
All these values are for the non-gendered MMPI-2-RF normative sample.
Reliability
Internal Consistency
The Technical Manual ( Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008 ) reports Cronbach alpha coefficients for five samples, two
of which are psychiatric patients. For the F-rscale score, alpha coefficients range from .69 to .88, and are generally
higher in clinical samples. For the Fp-r scale score, alpha coefficients range from .41 to .60 and again are higher in
clinical samples. Turning to the F-sscale score, alpha coefficients range from .40 to .68, and showed a similar pat-
tern to the other frequency scales. Finally, for the FBS-r scale score, alpha coefficients range from .50 up to .76,
with the clinical samples again tending to be higher than for the normal samples.
Test/C0Retest
With the same test /C0retest sample as noted above, test /C0retest reliability is highest for the F-rscale score at .82,
and lowest for the F-sscale score at .51. The Fp-r scale score and FBS-r scale score have intermediate test /C0retest
figures at .70 and .72, respectively ( Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008 ).
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
The Technical Manual ( Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008 ) contains correlations among the various MMPI-2-RF
validity scale scores. In addition, there has been some research based upon existing samples to examine the ques-
tion of the ability of the various Fscale scores to discriminate among groups. Sellbom, Toomey, Wygant,
Kucharski, and Duncan (2010) used the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; Rogers et al., 1992)
to split the sample of 125 criminal defendants into groups felt probably to be malingering and felt to be not
malingering. All four Fscale scores from the MMPI-2-RF were significantly higher in the group of 25 probable
malingerers. Differences had the largest effect sizes for F-rand Fp-r, with overall correct classification rates of
80% and higher.
Divergent/Discriminant
Sellbom and Bagby (2010) contrasted a group of 214 undergraduate students instructed to fake bad either with
or without coaching and a group of 146 genuine psychiatric patients who took the MMPI-2 under standard31 MEASURES OF OVER-REPORTING
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
instructions. Means on the four MMPI-2-RF Fscales were highest in the uncoached group of students instructed
to fake bad. The coached group also responded in such a way as to have significantly higher mean scores than
the patient group. Effect sizes tend to be the smallest for the FBS-r scale and highest for the Fp-r scale, which is
consistent with the derivation of these two scales. Overall correct classification rates were higher for the Fp-r scale
than for the F-rscale. Wygant et al. (2010) included the four MMPI-2-RF Fscales in their comparison of indivi-
duals from disability and forensic settings who had and had not failed symptom validity tests. Once again, the
F-rscale and Fp-r scale had the largest effect sizes, although all four scales were statistically significantly different
between the groups who passed and failed the symptom validity tests in the forensic sample. In the disability
sample, the largest effect sizes were seen with the Fsand FBS-r scales. This again is consistent with the derivation
of the scales and with their intended applications. Similar findings were reported by Wygant et al. (2009) for
head injury and medical simulation groups.
Although Rogers, Gillard, Berry, and Granacher (2011) reported that the MMPI-2-RF over-reporting Fscales
did perform well in differentiating a group deemed to be feigning a mental disorder, performance was not as
good in differentiating a group feigning cognitive impairment. Rogers et al. also noted that Fp-r was particularly
useful in differentiating over-reporting from genuine depression in their samples. When less traditional psychiat-
ric disorders are the focus of the intended distortion, it may be that the traditional over-reporting indices are less
effective. For example, Harp, Jasinski, Shandera-Ochsner, Mason, and Berry (2011) reported the Fscales as less
effective in differentiating coached faking symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Similarly, Jones
and Ingram (2011) reported that the FBS-r scale was better than the older Fscales in predicting effort in a sample
of military personnel.
Construct/Factor Analytic
To date, no studies appear to have explored the factor structure of the various faking measures on the MMPI-
2-RF. Having such a strong empirical-keying selection history, the concept of construct validity does not really
apply to the various Fscales.
Location
Ben-Porath, Y.S., & Tellegen, A. (2008). MMPI-2-RF: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured
Form. Manual for administration, scoring, and administration . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tellegen, A., & Ben-Porath, Y.S. (2008). MMPI-2-RF: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured
Form. Technical manual . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Results and Comments
One of the significant strengths of the MMPI-2-RF is its validity measures and the latest version of the test has
expanded the number of Fscales. Significantly, this is one of the few occasions in which a scale not developed at
the University of Minnesota, the FBS, has been incorporated into the official scoring keys. Further study of these
various scales should reveal whether one or more is effectively redundant with the others or if each has its own
specialized niche of applicability or focus of demonstrated utility and validity.
Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI): Infrequency (INF), Inconsistency (ICN), Negative
Impression Management (NIM), and Positive Impression Management (PIM) Scales
(Morey, 2007 ).
The PAI contains four validity scales: Infrequency (INF), Inconsistency (ICN), Negative Impression
Management (NIM), and Positive Impression Management (PIM). Only the latter two scales will be dealt with in
this section. The PAI manual ( Morey, 2007 ) also details various discriminant functions that have been used to
supplement the regular validity scales of the PAI. These include functions for faking bad or malingering and
defensiveness or faking good. Facilities for calculating several of these functions are provided on the PAI hand
scored answer sheet and are, of course, available with the computer scoring software.
Variable
Morey (2007) describes negative impression maneuvers as suggesting ‘an exaggerated unfavorable impression
or represent extremely bizarre and unlikely symptoms’ (p. 29). The items possess comparatively low rates of
endorsement among non-clinical clients. High rates of item endorsement can reflect both an exaggeration of32 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
distress and true distress among those with major problems in life, but the NIM scale can help distinguish
between the two. In contrast, positive impressions represent ‘the presentation of a very favorable impression or
the denial of relatively minor faults’ (p. 30). Non-clinical samples normally endorse more items on the PIM scale
than do clinical samples. High scores can have several interpretations: a true absence of minor faults, or an
attempt to appear as having few faults, or an absence of awareness of personal weaknesses. These definitions are
generally in keeping with other definitions of underreporting and over-reporting. There is no implication as to
whether these tendencies represent conscious attempts to present a false or distorted picture of the self or
whether they reflect aspects of an underlying personality of which the person may have limited conscious
awareness.
Description
The PAI was constructed on the basis of construct-oriented principles of test development. As such, each item
is intended to have a demonstrable link to the underlying construct. Morey acknowledges the influence of
Jackson (1970) and the principles of test development outlined therein. The items use a four-alternative response
format: False ,Not at All True; Slightly True; Mainly True; and Very True . The NIM scale has nine items, all true-
keyed. Similarly, the PIM scale contains nine items, eight of which are false-keyed with one true-keyed item.
Items on both scales are spread throughout the item booklet.
Sample
The standardization sample is a subset of a group of 1462 community dwelling adults over the age of 18 years.
Twelve U.S. states were used, and a census-matched sample of 1000 individuals was selected to match the vari-
ables of gender, race, and age with the U.S. Census for 1995. The PAI manual reports raw score means of 1.69
(SD52.70) for the NIM scale and 15.07 ( SD54.36) for the PIM scale. An additional sample of 1051 university
students from seven American universities is also reported in the PAI manual. The raw score mean for that
group for the NIM scale is 1.50 ( SD52.20), with a mean of 13.08 ( SD54.36) for the PIM scale. A clinical sample
of 1265 patients from 69 clinical sites is also reported. In this group, the raw mean score for the NIM scale was
4.38 ( SD54.27) with a corresponding mean of 12.24 ( SD55.07) for the PIM scale. The growing research literature
on the PAI provides further information on scores of the NIM and PIM scales in specific groups such as criminal
defendants ( Kucharski & Duncan, 2007 ).
Reliability
Internal Consistency
Cronbach alpha coefficients for the NIM scale score range from .63 in the college sample to .74 in the clinical
sample. Alpha coefficients for the PIM scale score range less broadly, from .71 in the census-matched sample to
.77 in the clinical sample. The manual cites eight other studies that report alpha coefficients for the NIM scale
score ranging from .45 to .77 with a mean of .60, while alpha coefficients for the PIM scale score range from .58
to .80 (mean 5.73). The PIM and NIM scales are relatively short at nine items each, and have a diverse range
of content.
Test/C0Retest
The manual ( Morey, 2007 ) reports on two samples providing test /C0retest reliability. The first was on 75 adults
from the community, tested an average of 24 days apart. The second sample comprised 80 University students
tested four weeks apart. Stability coefficients for the NIM scale score were .71 and .80, respectively. Likewise, sta-
bility coefficients for the PIM scale score were .81 and .75, respectively.
Validity
Convergent/Concurrent
The manual ( Morey, 2007 ) reports validity correlations of the NIM scale with scores from the MMPI-2 validity
scales, MCMI-II validity scales, the Marlowe /C0Crowne Social Desirability Short Form and the SIRS. The validity
correlations are invariably in the predicted direction, with the exception of correlations with the MMPI Lscale.
The same constellation of validity evidence is reported in the manual ( Morey, 2007 ) for the PIM scale score. PIM
raw scores show a steady increase in mean value, from the clinical sample to the normal sample to a group
instructed to fake good. Correlations with a variety of other validity scale scores are reported as well.
Correlations with scores from the MMPI validity scales are all substantial and in the predicted directions.33 MEASURES OF OVER-REPORTING
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Correlations with both Self-Deception and Impression Management scale scores of the Balanced Inventory of
Desirable Responding ( Paulhus, 1998 ) exceed .70, while correlations with the Marlowe /C0Crowne scale score are
approximately .50.
Divergent/Discriminant
Correlations of the PIM scale with the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; Rogers et al., 1992)
scale scores are almost uniformly lower, with a correlation of /C0.67 reported for the Defensive Symptom
scale of the SIRS. A variety of cutoff scores for the PIM scale have been suggested to distinguish simulated and
realistic mental health. A raw score of 23, equating to 68T, is more than two standard deviation units above the
mean of the clinical sample, while a mean of 18, equivalent to 57T, is used as a less conservative cutoff, one
which identifies just over 30% of the community sample. Almost 18% of a sample of individuals undergoing
capacity evaluation for child custody scored above the higher cutoff point, while relatively high proportions,
over 80%, of non-clinical samples score above the lower cutoff point of 57T. Three cutoff scores for the NIM
scale are commonly used, equal to or above 73T (one standard deviation over the mean for the normal sample),
equal to or over 84T (one SDover the mean for the clinical sample) and equal to or over 92T, a value that is
two standard deviations above the clinical mean. The manual reports studies finding different identification rates
for a variety of samples. Classification rates as high as 89% are reported in the manual, those being for the identi-
fication of a malingered severe mental disorder. Rates for the identification of feigned specific psychological
disorders are generally lower.
Construct/Factor Analytic
The literature reviewed to date has not located any studies reporting factor analysis of the PAI validity scales.
Location
Morey, L.C. (1991). Personality Assessment Inventory professional manual . Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment
Resources.
Morey, L.C. (2007). Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) professional manual . (2nd ed.) Lutz, FL: Psychological
Assessment Resources.
Results and Comments
The fact that identification of distorting individuals is focused on in validity attempts has to be applauded.
Effect sizes for group differences between feigned and honest report are generally statistically significant and
range up to 3.7 standard deviations. Most, however, are in the neighborhood of one standard deviation. Mixed
results have been reported for the utility of the various discriminant analyses developed for use with the PAI.
In one report with psychiatric inpatients, Baity, Siefert, Chambers, and Blais (2007) suggest that one discriminant
function and the NIM scale score were the most sensitive measures for detecting faking bad, while the PIM scale
score was most sensitive for detecting faking good. A formal examination of the utility of the difference score
between NIM and PIM scale raw scores showed that its effect size was not notably different from those provided
by the NIM and PIM scales alone in detecting response styles ( Hopwood, Talbert, Morey, & Rogers, 2008 ).
Gaines, Giles, and Morgan (2013) recently reported that a combination of scores on 7 of the 11 PAI clinical scales
performed better in differentiating feigning from non-feigning inmates of a psychiatric correctional facility than
the NIM scale or PAI discriminant functions for faking. These findings warrant replication and extension to other
populations.
In balance, PAI validity scales for impression manage ment appear to be effective measures despite their
relatively short length and corresponding modest relia bility. Although there is not much evidence in the liter-
a t u r ea sy e t ,i ta p p e a r st h a ti na tl e a s ts o m ec o n t e x t s ,t h e PAI validity indicators offer a degree of incremental
validity over the validity scale scores of the MMPI-2 ( Blanchard, McGrath, Pogge, & Khadivi, 2003 ).Braxton,
Calhoun, Williams, and Boggs (2007) report higher concordance rates between the PIM scale of the PAI and
MMPI-2 Kscale than for the NIM scale. The MMPI-2 validit y scales flagged more cases as suspect than those
on the PAI, with the two scales agreeing in about two thirds of both inpatient and outpatient cases
(Morey, 2007 ).34 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
COMPUTER ADMINISTRATION AND RESPONSE BIAS
Technology has had many influences on modern society, one of which is the increasing use of computer-based
technology for the administration of psychological measures. Here we combine studies that examined the admin-
istration of the test items through individual desktop or laptop computers, computer networks, and via a variety
of Internet-based applications. Concerns over the influence of response bias and socially desirable responding on
responses to computerized test administration date to at least the late 1960s ( Dwight & Feigelson, 2000 ).
Studies have explored whether computerized test item administration leads to more or less socially desirable
responding, and whether or not respondents are more or less prone to attempting to fake good or bad when
responding by computer. Factors that are known to influence paper and pencil responding also appear to influ-
ence computer-based administration. For example, the extent of control and anonymity in responding are both
known to influence socially desirable responding across both forms of item administration ( Fox & Schwartz,
2002; Joinson, 1999; Lautenschlager & Flaherty, 1990 ). Impression management seems to be more susceptible to
the form of scale administration than does self-deception ( Dwight & Feigelson, 2000 ). One meta-analysis suggests
that increasingly sophisticated forms of computer administration that have developed with time, perhaps along
with increasing familiarity with computers by respondents, has led to a reduction in willingness to disclose
socially undesirable characteristics with computer-based administration ( Dwight & Feigelson, 2000 ). For what-
ever reason, such changes over time have occurred. Richman, Kiesler, Weisband, and Drasgow (1999) reported
from their meta-analysis that being alone while responding, anonymity, and being able to backtrack to change
responses to previous items were all factors that led to less distortion on measures of social desirability that were
administered by computer. More recently, Weigold, Weigold, and Russell (2013) evaluated the quantitative and
qualitative equivalence of paper-and-pencil and internet administration of several survey measures in two stud-
ies, including the 13-item short form of the Marlowe /C0Crowne Social Desirability Scale ( Reynolds, 1982 ). In both
samples of university undergraduates, the short social desirability scale showed qualitative and quantitative
equivalence across forms of administration despite its modest level of reliability in both samples. In contrast,
most of the computer-administered attitude scales reported by Helmes and Campbell (2009) showed more nega-
tive attitudes toward older adults than the same scales administered by traditional paper-and-pencil methods.
The results of the above two meta-analyses agree that few differences are evident in recent research between
computer administered and paper-and-pencil measures of most personality constructs. For example, Grieve and
de Groot (2011) found no differences between groups instructed to fake good in responding to a personality
questionnaire and to fake bad in responding to a measure of psychopathology in responding via paper-and-
pencil and computerized administration. It remains true that responding under conditions of anonymity, whether
by computer or paper-and-pencil measure, can lead to greater levels of disclosure of undesirable actions
(Kreuter, Presser, & Tourangeau, 2008 ). At the same time, there is some evidence that increasing awareness of
the pervasiveness of computers in modern society can lead to greater reluctance to reveal private information
and to increase efforts to manage one’s image through impression management techniques ( Rosenfeld, Booth-
Kewley, Edwards, & Thomas, 1996 ).
It thus appears that for many psychological measures, little difference is to be expected in terms of simply the
form of scale administration by traditional or computer-based methods. It is also evident that the same sorts of
factors that influence response styles with paper-and-pencil measures also influence computer administered
scales. Factors such as the ability to change previous answers, genuine anonymity, and the social relationship
between respondent and the researcher remain influential. Recent efforts (e.g., Kubinger, 2009 ) to prevent or min-
imize faking good in personality measures that are computer-administered questionnaires may, however, lead to
more valid descriptions and conclusions with computer-based administration.
ARE RESPONSE BIAS SCALES PURELY RESPONSE BIASES?
In addressing whether response biases are confounds for the valid assessment of personality, the issue can be
reflected so as to ask whether personality constructs impede the accurate measurement of response biases. In par-
ticular, are scale operationalizations of response biases free of content or other variance? Apparently not! In this
regard, a number of findings are relevant.
First, as an alternative to stylistic conceptualizations, factor analytic investigations of socially desirable
responding scale items (e.g., Holden & Fekken, 1989 ) also support substantive interpretations including realistic35 ARE RESPONSE BIAS SCALES PURELY RESPONSE BIASES?
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
thinking, social integration, self-confidence, hardiness, responsibility, considerateness, social sensitivity, and toler-
ance. Furthermore, in some instances, response style scales themselves have been defined by their authors as
being proximally aligned with a personality trait. Paulhus (1998), for example, describes his Self-Deceptive
Enhancement scale as ‘closely related to narcissism’ (p. 9). Subsequently, he has also indicated that socially desir-
able response style scales may be differentially representative of the content dimensions of agency and commu-
nion ( Paulhus, 2002 ).
Second, response style scales empirically demonstrate associations with various content scales of personality.
In reviewing recent investigations of social desirability, Holden and Passey (2009) indicated that socially desirable
responding scales may assess both relevant content and confounding style and that distinguishing between these
interpretations is both theoretically and operationally challenging. Furthermore, in examining a number of differ-
ent socially desirable responding scales, Holden and Passey (2010) reported non-zero associations with personal-
ity dimensions of agreeableness and conscientiousness. These associations were maintained even when
personality was assessed through peer-report rather than self-report. Although the authors noted that the associa-
tions did not necessarily merit strong substantive interpretations (all correlations were less than .30), results
served to indicate that response style scales are not pure indicators of content-irrelevant, stylistic variance.
Third, the interpretation of response style scales can vary as a function of context, either naturally occurring or
experimentally induced ( Holden, 2007 ). Consider that, whereas respondents who are faking will score at the rela-
tive extremes on scales of socially desirable responding, individuals scoring at the extremes on a scale of socially
desirable responding are not necessarily faking. Further, the personality scale validity-moderating effect of
socially desirable responding has been shown by Holden (2007) to vary as a function of natural versus experi-
mentally prescribed dissimulation.
Thus, despite the relative psychometric merits of response bias scales for indicating invalid responding, such
scales are not perfectly reliable, pure indicators of distorted responding. As is the case with personality scales, the
interpretation of scores for response style scales should be undertaken with caution. This is especially true as long
as empirical evidence for the scales’ ability to identify individuals distorting their answers is either missing or weak.
OTHER METHODS TO DETECT OR PREVENT FAKING
Within the literature, attempts to prevent faking or social desirable responding are often differentiated by
either focusing on the test or the test taker ( Ziegler et al., 2012 ). Although attempts to warn test takers have
yielded mixed results, there are some promising new developments in trying to make personality questionnaires
less susceptible to faking. With regard to detecting faking and social desirable responding, statistical methods
such as decision trees, structural equation modeling or item response theory have been used. In the following,
we will first focus on attempts trying to prevent faking and later on detection.
CREATING TESTS LESS SUSCEPTIBLE TO SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING
Attempts aimed at making a questionnaire less susceptible to faking and socially desirable responding usually
try to change the items themselves. For example, Ba¨ckstro ¨m, Bjo ¨rklund, and Larsson (2009) demonstrated that a
regular Big 5 questionnaire contains a general factor due to the evaluative content of the items. This content pro-
vokes social desirable responding. By rephrasing the items those authors substantially reduced the evaluativeness
of those items (see also Ba¨ckstro ¨m et al., 2012 ). As one consequence, the underlying general evaluative factor
more or less disappeared while internal consistency and validity evidence remained mostly unchanged.
However, it remains to be seen whether such items maintain their low evaluativeness in high stakes situations
such as employment applicant settings.
For quite some time, there have been efforts to use forced choice items to prevent faking and socially desirable
responding. In the most basic sense, forced choice items ask the test taker to choose between two alternative answers
the one most like her or him. Matching those alternatives according to their desirability should then yield answers
that go back to the trait only. Empirical findings have been mixed though ( Heggestad, Morrison, Reeve & McCloy
2006; Jackson, Wroblewski & Ashton 2000 ). Besides the mixed evidence for the lower susceptibility of these items
with regard to social desirability, there is, however, another issue detrimental for most assessment purposes /C0
forced choice items are ipsative. This means they yield scores that represent the relative level of a person’s trait36 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
compared to other traits. Thus, inter-individual comparisons with regard to the absolute level of a trait are not possi-
ble. This would make forced choice questionnaires useless in most applied settings where selection or the compari-
son to an absolute standard is important. However, more recent approaches have grouped four items from different
domains and asked participants to choose the alternatives most and least like them. These formats are often called
multidimensional pairwise preference scales ( Chernyshenko et al., 2009 ). Using item response based approaches
(Brown & Maydeu-Olivares, 2011; Stark et al., 2012 ), it is now not only possible to extract a normative score allowing
for inter-individual comparisons, but empirical evidence also suggest that such scales indeed are more immune to
social desirable responding, especially intentional distortion. However, constructing such scales is an immensely
demanding enterprise. Moreover, effects of coaching test takers have not been tested yet. Nevertheless, this
approach has great potential to overcome some of the problems discussed so far.
A less costly approach involves so called anchoring vignettes ( King & Wand, 2007 ). This technique requires
the administration of additional items at the beginning of a questionnaire. At this point, participants are asked to
rate the descriptions of hypothetical people using the questionnaire’s rating scale. These described profiles have
already been rated by experts. Using this information, the participants’ answers are used as anchors for their self-
descriptions. Applying an intuitive formula, the scores are then transformed to correct for response biases.
Anchoring vignettes have successfully been applied in large scale assessments such as PISA ( Buckley, 2009 ).
However, as becomes evident from their description, although anchoring vignettes may demand less investment
than multidimensional pairwise preference scales, they are by no means easy to develop. More empirical evi-
dence is needed before any further conclusions can be drawn.
OTHER ATTEMPTS TO DETECT SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING
Within the preceding parts of the chapter a detailed overview of attempts to detect social desirable responding
using some form of questionnaire has been provided. Other attempts to detect response distortion also exist in a
wide variety.
Ziegler and Bu ¨hner (2009) introduced a method in which they combined a known group experimental design
and structural equation techniques to model a latent variable comprising variance due to response distortion.
Analysing data from a sample collected in a laboratory setting, the authors demonstrated that social desirable
responding affects the internal structure of a personality questionnaire but not the test-criterion correlations of
the test scores. However, whereas the approach might be useful to model faking, its use to identify individual
response distortion seems limited. An additional problem is the need to collect data derived from an anonymous
situation for the same participants. This caveat also applies to the otherwise promising approach suggested by
Griffith et al. (2007) in which they used confidence intervals around honest scores to detect response distortion.
For several years now, the idea of applying item response techniques to capture individual response distortion
has attracted a lot of attention. Most notably, Zickar and colleagues ( Zickar, Gibby & Robie 2004; Zickar & Robie,
1999; Zickar & Sliter, 2012 ) have applied the so called mixed Rasch model to identify response distortions on an
individual level. These models look for qualitatively distinct response classes based on distinctive response pat-
terns. Within each response class, the trait scores are allowed to vary. That way, mixed Rasch models are a com-
bination of latent class analysis and Rasch models ( Rost, 1991; Rost, Carstensen & Von Davier 1997 ). Based on
this approach, Zickar and colleagues have described two response classes supposedly representing slight and
extreme faking. This otherwise promising approach has been critically viewed by other researchers. One of the
criticisms is the conceptual similarity with midpoint and extreme point responding, two response biases unre-
lated to response distortion ( Ziegler & Kemper, 2013 ). Thus, further studies are needed to determine the specific-
ity of mixed Rasch models to identify individual response distortion. A similar approach but based on a
combination of structural equation modeling and latent class analysis has been used by Leite (2010) .
A statistically less demanding approach to identify response distortion is the use of decision trees ( Lukoff,
2012; Lukoff, Heggestad, Kyllonen & Roberts 2007 ). This approach first requires data from a known group
design. Using learning algorithms, decision trees are generated. Such trees state the probability of a person dis-
torting the answer when choosing a certain response category. These probabilities were gathered from the data.
The approach is relatively intuitive and can be implemented in computer-based assessment. It is also possible to
combine this technique with warnings that are shown to the test taker during the test session if certain response
categories or category combinations across items are chosen. Despite the relative ease of the technique, empirical
findings regarding actual sensitivity and specificity of the trees to discriminate between honest and distorted
responding reveal further need for improvement.37 OTHER ATTEMPTS TO DETECT SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
Regardless of whether to immunize the test itself or to address the test taker, future efforts to deal with
socially desirable responding would strongly profit from an extended knowledge regarding the actual answering
processes during response distortion. Ideas have been presented by several authors (e.g., Krosnick, 1999 ;Robie,
Brown & Beaty 2007 ;Ziegler, 2011 ). Most models see the process as a sequence of understanding the item content
(comprehension), retrieving relevant information (retrieval), comparing item content with retrieved information
(judgment) and finally mapping this onto the rating scale (mapping). Ziegler proposed that immediately after
item comprehension an evaluative judgment regarding the item is made. Furthermore, during item answering
involving response distortions, situational aspects as well as person characteristics determine the degree of
response distortion. Ellingson (2012) , as well as Ellingson and McFarland (2011) have elaborated on potential per-
sonality traits as well as situational characteristics influencing response distortion. However, considerably more
information is needed to fully understand the actual response distortion process. This information will then allow
more customized efforts to prevent or detect social desirable responding.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Response biases, in general, and faking, in particular, continue to be arguably important issues of concern in
self-report personality assessment. Although preventing the impact of response biases in self-report measures
may be an ultimate goal, it is somewhat of a holy grail /C0an elusive quest that may or may not ever be fully
reached. In the interim, some of the intermediate goals are to reduce the effect of response biases, to correct for
the impact of response biases, and to identify individuals whose report may be strongly affected by response
biases. Traditionally, this latter goal has focused on the development of scales such as those reviewed in this
chapter. Many of these scales can perform their task well and have empirically supported merit. That being said,
personality assessment does not stand still. As the field continues to evolve, we optimistically anticipate new
developments that will take advantage of innovations in the understanding of the process of test item responding
(e.g., Bayesian and other mathematical models), in methods of test construction, in psychometric theory, and
in technology.
A road less travelled but of interest to research in faking and social desirability might be to investigate the
actual answer process to personality items. So far, the methods used with respect to such analyses have been
‘think aloud’ techniques or retrospective questioning of test takers. However, new methods such as diffusion
models ( Voss, Rothermund & Voss 2004; Voss & Voss, 2007 ) might offer more straightforward and empirically
less difficult options. Diffusion models have successfully been used to describe decision processes in experimen-
tal psychology. The parameters analysed are derived from response times and offer a multitude of information.
Regarding the answering process, comparisons between honest and faked responses based on diffusion models
potentially broaden our understanding of the actual answer process. The same holds true for the application of
techniques such as eye movement. van Hooft and Born (2012) successfully applied eye-movement analyses to
investigate the answer process in a fake good experiment.
Thus, the application of new techniques from other areas of psychology might provide the chance to further
our knowledge about faking or social desirable responding. Each of these methods provides a multitude of infor-
mation. Combining this information might provide a better basis for mathematical models describing faking and
social desirable responding.
A non-exhaustive list of some promising possibilities includes:
1.The development of better (e.g., more reliable, more targeted toward specific forms of socially desirable
responding) scales to detect response biases; such scales need to show better discriminant validity with regard
to personality questionnaires.
2.Based on Item Response Theory and Bayesian theory, the identification of response biases through the
examination of item response patterns.
3.The use of item response times, collected through computer-assisted and/or on-line assessment, to detect
response biases.
4.The use of ancillary neuroscientific physiological measures (e.g., eye-tracking, heart rate) concomitant with the
collection of self-reports (see Chapter 10 by Neumann et al., this volume).
5.The development and construction of objective personality tests rather than continued reliance on subjective
rating or self-report scales/measures (e.g., see Cattell & Warburton, 1967 ;Schuerger, 2008 ).38 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
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I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT |
CHAPTER
3
Measures of Hope and Optimism: Assessing
Positive Expectations of the Future
Fred B. Bryant and Patrick R. Harrison
Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Individual differences in expectations of the future are a basic ingredient of many theoretical frameworks in
psychology, including models of depression ( Beck, 1967 ), subjective well-being ( Bryant & Veroff, 1984 ), and gen-
eralized outcome expectancies ( Rotter, 1954 ). In this chapter, we consider two distinct, yet highly related types of
future perceptions, which together form part of the conceptual bedrock of modern positive psychology: namely,
hope and optimism. We begin by reviewing dominant theoretical perspectives on hope and optimism and expli-
cate the meaning of each term, including the conceptual uniqueness and overlap of hope and optimism. We then
examine and evaluate the most popular ways of measuring hope and optimism in the empirical literature, includ-
ing global versus domain-specific instruments.
Previous theorists and researchers have often blurred conceptual distinctions between hope and optimism.
Although separate lines of work have evolved for each construct, the two terms have frequently been used inter-
changeably in the literature, with optimists sometimes said to be ‘hopeful’ toward the future (e.g., Affleck &
Tennen, 1996 ) and pessimists said to exhibit ‘hopelessness’ (e.g., Beck et al., 1974). Although hope and optimism
share a great deal of conceptual ground in common, they each also possess unique features that distinguish them
from each other. Theorists and researchers must be careful to explicate and define each of these constructs clearly
and precisely.
Concerning conceptual commonalities, both hope and optimism assume that whereas contextual information
is important, stable trait-like beliefs also influence people’s cognitions and behaviors in pursuit of goals ( Rand,
2009). Both hope and optimism are viewed as positive future-focused correlates of subjective adjustment that
reflect adaptive orientations to uncertainty ( Bryant & Cvengros, 2004; Magaletta & Oliver, 1999 ). Reflecting this
conceptual overlap, some researchers (e.g., Carvajal, Clair, Nash, & Evans 1998 ) have used optimism and hope as
dual indicators of a single global dimension reflecting future orientation. However, more recent evidence
suggests that ‘the reduction of hope and optimism to a single positive expectancies factor is not tenable’
(Gallagher & Lopez, 2009 , p. 552).
Prevailing theoretical models of hope and optimism carefully distinguish these two constructs as reflecting
unique aspects of future-oriented perceptions. Indeed, in An Essay on Man (1733/2006) Alexander Pope wrote,
‘hope springs eternal’ (p. 13) /C0note, however, that he did not suggest that optimism springs eternal. Although
hope’s agency component necessarily implies a sense of personal responsibility for goal attainment, optimism
implies no such personal attribution: ‘A person may hold favorable expectancies for a number of reasons /C0
personal ability, because the person is lucky, or because he is favored by others. The result in any case should be
an optimistic outlook /C0expectations that good things will happen’ ( Scheier & Carver, 1985 , p. 223).
Whereas optimists possess a generalized expectation that they will reach their goals, they may lack the self-
efficacy to implement these plans. Thus, ‘a lack of agency in pursuit of a goal gives rise to the likelihood of pessi-
mism about reaching that goal; whereas an absence of pathways towards a goal but a continued commitment for
it (i.e., agency) does not necessarily promote such pessimism’ ( Peleg, Barak, Harel, Rochberg, & Hoofien 2009 ,
47Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00003-6 ©2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
Subsets and Splits