https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=A07DV3FXyPo
So, as you know, Freud believed that substantial proportion of the symptoms he saw among his clients were of psychological origin, despite the fact that some of them were manifest physically. These things do happen, by the way. I had a client who was from 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, the people in the West. And she had the same thing that her grandmother had, which was psychosomatic epilepsy. And so she expressed what were often sexual conflicts through epileptic seizures. She had an epileptic seizure of this type in my lab, my office, one day. And, you know, she was unsure whether they were real or not. But I’ve seen people have epileptic seizures, and as a 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 manifesting a lot of emotion and 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 empathic systems the same way. So I had another client. This has actually happened to two of my clients. The first one was attacked by her boyfriend, and she was unbelievably naive. She was so naive. 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 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. She’d never seen that. She was like a 28-year-old woman. She had an undergraduate degree. She was no idiot. I asked her, 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 five years nonstop at night, for four hours at a time. And the symptoms were that her whole body would shake, and she would be unable 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. The thing that really made that memory stick in her face was the look of malevolence on his face. So, you see some people are definitely capable of some behavior that is most properly 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 Gottman studies on married couples. I think their studies are bloody brilliant, you know. And what Gottman found, and it’s exactly typical, is that the couples who are 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, 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 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 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 overcompensation 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. They’re often sibling rivalry can be unbelievably intense. 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. So it’s a cascading chain 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 say something to them and, you know, 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 pry around in the person and talk to them and harass them a bit until they, you know, often until emotion arises, which is partly why Freud thought about his transformation process as cathartic. And then they figure out, they’ll cry and say, well, I’m really upset 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 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. Identification is another defense mechanism. You’re bullied. You want to become the bully. Rationalization, that’s when you don’t actually. This is the thing that people who are highly intelligent are really good at. You know, they’ve got a problem. And 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. If you marry someone, for example, who’s more introverted than you or less verbally fluent, this is something to really watch out 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 Allen movie, you know what that is. Woody Allen should have had Jungian 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 Jungian 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 we usually do things that are much more practical, much more like behavior therapy. Projection is a good one. I’m not irritated, you’re irritating. You know, and it’s a toss-up often, because 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 world-class 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. A 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 reaction to the situation in question is actually somatic to begin with. And then if it’s articulated and worked out, the body can, it’s like the memory locale shifts, or the representation area shifts. So, for example, I had a client, she had a wonderful time, 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 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 an hour. And it hurt her quite badly, and she had minimal brain injury, which is a really rough one, because it has nonspecific symptoms. And she’d come to therapy, and 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’d worked together for a long time by this time, I said, look, come over here. Lean on the desk, so I had her lean on the desk, and then I sort of pounded on her shoulders, down her spine, and she started to cry, and she cried like for 45 minutes, and then that loosened up a shoulder. And then another thing we did was to, I had her, she said she couldn’t lift her arm, so we were 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 protective crouch. It’s like a startle response. And I think that if you’re traumatized often, what happens is your body throws itself into a state of hyperpreparation. And then unless you can bring the meaning of the traumatic event up and articulate it, and throw away what it isn’t, because when she got hit by the car and lost her job, part of her idea was, well, my life is over now, because you can understand why someone would think that. So I would say, well, yes, that’s 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. And so sometimes it’s not so much that the somatic symptoms are a consequence of repression and then 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 like a permanent manifestation of the stress response. So he thought of behavior anomalies in this way and hallucinations and delusions. A lot of this stuff is dead on, as far as I’m concerned. You see this a lot with people that you have an intimate relationship with. There’s something off about what they’re doing. Well, for example, in the Gottman study, that’s a good example. You know how Gottman said, the successful couples responded to each other’s bids, right? So if you’re in the house and your wife says, oh, look, there’s a cardinal in the backyard, and it’s really pretty. What that means is, maybe you could come over here and look at this bird with me, and that would help me understand that you like me and are interested in what I’m doing. And so you can say, in Gottman’s 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. That’s a good response, too, because then you can also destroy her pleasure in looking at the bird without really looking like a son of a bitch. 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. You’re always asking me to do stupid things, and I’m so generous and giving, and here you are exploiting me again. And then you go over and you look at the bird, and maybe you 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 interacting 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 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. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common, and it’s the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. And then there’s the other category, which is, you know, the one that’s the most common. 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 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. It 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 theory. I think that sometimes some dreams have a wish-like 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, the other things he had to say about dreams were absolutely brilliant. So, his book, if you want to read one book by Freud, I would say the book on dreams is the best. Unfortunately, at the moment, I can’t remember what it’s called. The Interpretation of Dreams, right. It’s a very thick book. 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’s way smarter than that. 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 a wish fulfillment or something like that. And hungry people will dream about food. 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 anything to do with wishes. Jung’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 had a particularly rigid viewpoint of the world, 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 stiffening and the rigidity of the more explicit belief system. And I think there’s some good evidence for that in modern studies of dreaming. It’s certainly the case that dreams do seem to update your memory. And 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 might think, well, all men is a good category. 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. 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 part of the process by which new knowledge becomes eventually articulated. And that’s more of a Jungian perspective. So you start out not knowing anything about it. And then maybe you can code it onto your behavior. That would be something Piaget 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. 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 a 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, OK, the way I do it is they tell me the dream, 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 that, 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 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, 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 it. 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 new 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 sufficiently emotionally impactful so that you actually remember it when you wake up. And Jung would 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. 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 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 an organ that’s evolved that has very, very archaic elements, like massively archaic, like the ones I told you about 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 extract out information that you can use for living. It’s certainly not mechanical. It’s not exactly computational. It’s a multi-stage process. And dreams and imagination are involved, at least at the hypothesis stage. So you can think of dream as a hypothesis in some sense. And although I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that dreams do one thing any more than it is reasonable to say that thinking does one thing. But the compensatory idea is a good one. And you can kind of think of the wish fulfillment idea as 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. Maybe your hands are tied or something like that, you know, which 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. It was a 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 it 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 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. She was like she was dancing around in the office thinking that’s, you know, that’s a hero myth, essentially. We changed. 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, while 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 are certainly predators 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, 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. So like the mouse in my client’s phobia would be a good example of symbolization of fear of sexual penetration and dramatization. He thought of those as all ways that the dream was hiding the latent content from the dreamer in order to protect sleep. Whereas Jung and Freud really argued about this, and it’s so important that we think about this. 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 and fantasy trying to generally orient you in the world. So he thought about it. And Jung always thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. He thought about it. And Jung also thought, it’s like Jung was an archaeologist of the id in some sense. He thought of the id as a more creative place in some sense 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 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 I want to run through this psychosexual theory very rapidly, and then I want to show you some examples of it. So Jung believed that in some sense you had a primary energy, and that psychic energy, that’s what we call energy. 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 libido, 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, 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 some strands way down in the brain stem that branch out 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 accident, 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 slumbers, say, or to put you on alert when something happens, it looks like it’s older than all the isolated motivational and emotional systems. So the libido, per se, isn’t sexual by all appearances. It’s something that’s below sexuality. But it’s still reasonable to note that sexuality 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, and I should let you know that one of the practices of Victorian nurses with male babies was to masturbate them till satiation so they would sleep. So it’s not like there’s no evidence for sexual pleasure in children, in infants in particular. Freud thought about that as polymorphously perverse, by which he meant that the infant was willing to take pleasure 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 baby developed. So 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 mouth and the tongue. And there’s obvious reasons for that because the baby has to be able to latch onto the nipple 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 wired up in certain basic ways, it wouldn’t be able to get going to begin with. It’s definitely wired up in an oral manner. So he thought of the oral character as passive, optimistic, and dependent. And there’s the anal period where Freud thought that’s where the ego met the superego 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 kids over toilet training. So I’ve seen some pretty weird examples of that. So I saw one parent who was in such a war with their three-year-old that that three-year-old would only defecate if the mother put a diaper on them. So it had perfect control. But it was like there was a war going on. 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 disgust 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 anal thinking is 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 thereabouts, roughly speaking, isn’t doctors. It’s plumbers. So, right, really. So, you know, 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 individuals. And it’s also clear that the degree to which that, 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, three to five. That’s when Freud believed that children often discovered masturbation, and that’s when girls developed penis envy. And boys developed castration anxiety, which I said is a small price to pay for the possession of a penis. Yes, so, all right. Here’s a way of thinking about the Oedipal 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 for their sex. 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 Freud got skewed over a bit because he was always dealing with people who had one form of pathology or another. Now, here’s how to develop an Oedipal 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 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, and you’re really mad at him, so that you make it known to her, using one strategy or another, that you don’t really approve of that sort of behaviour. 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 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 behaviour. And at the same time, you repress and crush any 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 do see this sort of thing. And a lot of what happens in therapy is that it’s an interesting thing, as people come to see me to solve all sorts of problems, like 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… it 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. Now, this character, Robert Crumb, he’s quite the character. We should turn those lights down. Yeah, that’s good. Maybe… We can do a voiceover on this later, so it doesn’t really matter if we have… Let’s do that. Okay, so Robert Crumb 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 how the family plays into it. So, away we go. So, away we go. So, away we go. So, away we go. So, away we go. So, away we go. So, away we go. So, away we go. 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 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. 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 music. He says, well, you know, when I was a kid, I was a big fan of the soul of the music. And I was always a big fan of the soul of the music, and I was always a big fan of the soul of the music. And so he’s talking to his brother Charles, who’s a very famous guy, and he’s talking to his mother, and he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he says, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. And he’s like, well, I don’t think that would be such a good idea. It was perfectly reasonable for him to go on a cleansing binge. And he didn’t just want to shoot up 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 a hydrogen bomb. So Jung said, if you go deep enough into the shadow, you find hell. It’s like, that’s exactly right. And it’s no joke. This is mom’s house. They’ve got a very interesting voice tone, 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 banter and laughter about it. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. And it’s a very interesting voice tone. I don’t know if that’s interesting. Most of them aren’t very good. Most of them aren’t very interesting. They’re not new. It’s interesting. The old Victorian writers of late 19th century. So, you know, Freud would say here that there’s an awful lot of intellectualization going on. And there definitely is. So these guys are very divorced from their bodies. And they have every reason to be. I was kind of in need of your life, you know what I mean? Because my life is so connected. I think they’re a little so detached from the human race. They’re all working on the same cost of environment, new books, and the way that’s working in the industry. Charles is the one that started this whole comic thing, the family. He was completely obsessed with comics when we were kids. And absolutely no other normal kid interested. He wasn’t interested in toys or games. He played sports. He was interested in comic, draw comics, think comics, and talk. I mean, I like drawing, but I had other drawing interests besides comics. I had to draw realistic scenes and, you know, just pictures of buildings and cars and stuff. I wasn’t interested in that at all. I’m only into comics. The earliest one that still exists that I had as a child was this one. That’s supposed to be me and that’s me. 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 Robert. I’m probably well prepared to die. Maybe I was unconsciously imitating him when I forced him to draw a comic book. There’s still a kind of sibling rivalry going on between me and Robert. Like there was when we were little kids and he was still living in our house. I think basically that Robert and I are still competing with each other. 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. And Robert was usually the vice president and Charles was usually the secretary. And Sandy was the trader and Maxon was the supply boy. He still resents the fact that we enclosed him in the role of supply boy. Max Crawford, 310. Max was the scapegoat in the family. He was definitely the bottom of the family. What I wanted to explain is that we had these meetings with this club that Charles was a biblical man. The Antitown Comics Club. Everybody had their different jobs. They were different. Like the secretary, the president, the vice president. I was the supply boy. I got more and more heavy on directing Robert. It’s this incredible, crazy sibling thing that me and Charles and Robert have. It’s like a little room upstairs and the whole rest of the world didn’t know what the fuck was going on. It’s like these three primordial monkeys working it out on the trees. Just so it seemed like they slept in the same bed together until they were 16 or something. Very intimate, a close situation. I’m a little inspired by the Disney movie where Robert played along with John Silver. I remember when I was on TV in 1955, we started playing pirates. He made this ship out of a refrigerator cart and everything. Charles would walk around town dressed up like Long John Silver. He was all coated in my mother’s long green coat. He made himself a three-quartered hat. He had a crutch and a type of leg. I don’t know how fixated Charles really was with this treasure island. This thing dominated our play and our fantasy for six or seven years after that. We’d do these comics about the treasure island. He came to this real baroque elaborate thing way beyond the original Disney film. This is one of Charles. This is one of our two-man comics in which he would draw some of the characters. And I would draw some of them. We’d kind of interact with each other. The school of cartooning for me is going to come up with clever retorts to him. He was actually much cleverer and funnier than I was. It actually got kind of tiresome, but he had to do it. He was in charge. I had this very deaf and bad problem about Charles. I think a lot of it had to do with my overly morbid sensitivity to the guy or something too. As well as his natural affinity to get in there and profit off of him. I had this way of restricting myself. I had this terrible self-consciousness and restriction in me as a kid. I was morbidly biased about my body. Sex was completely removed. It came in time for me to become sexually aware. I was like a puberty or something. Sex was nowhere near my life. It had nothing to do with it. Sex was so heavily repressed. Naturally, I had a panic disorder. I have a seizure. The seizure is like a point where your behavior becomes, wow, I had to get the whole sex trip. There’s an awful involved topic. That’s all I thought about when I was in my early 20s. It was sex. I masturbated about four or five times a week. How frequently did you masturbate? When I was sexualized, I was a completely dim man. I talked to the other night. I can’t even get an erection anymore. Oh. I don’t know whether it’s one thing or maybe it’s a combination of things. Maybe it’s a combination of a medication and a lack of external stimulation. Maybe approaching old age too has something to do with it. I mean, you need some external stimulation to keep up your interest. I don’t know now, but my sexual desires are gone. I’m not so sure I want them back. Are there any sexual memories? I remember actually I remember being like four years old and getting erections. I think it was my aunt or my mother’s sister. And kind of humping her legs and her shoes under the table. I remember going to 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 I was doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember doing it. I remember when the ironing board flattened out. And she did, and I was deeply disappointed, because it got all brown and she ironed and brittle and crumbled apart. I don’t know. I had this sexual attraction to cute cartoon characters. You tell me. I don’t know. That all changed when I turned 12 and then became fixated on cheating. She got me into the jungle. To be sure, I like 55, 56. I was totally obsessed with shemans. Went to bed at night thinking about things I wanted to do with shemans. Now you see 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. So he definitely conceptualizes himself as a subordinate entity. Robert, I was very hung up on sex when I 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 than 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. I was a handsome, good-looking chap when I was a teenager. But there was just this something that was wrong with my personality. Did you have any of the kids here? High school was an absolute nightmare. I was the most unpopular kid in the high school. People were always taking on me and beating me up. And the girls wouldn’t have anything to do with it. This trip, I’m talking all about my problems with women starting with high school. I learned a lot about women because there was this guy in scutch, this guy here, who was like a mean bully. But he was also very charming. And all the girls liked him. He was the best guy in the world. He was the best guy in the world. He was a mean bully, but he was also very charming. And all the girls liked him. He was the dreamboat, but he was also a bully. My brother, Charles, was one of the guys who singled out for particular attention. He had this gang of wonkies that hung around him. I think this guy’s scutch. I remember this scene where the scutch punches up my brother in the hallway at school. Charles gave up trying to be popular and have girlfriends or anything. Everybody saw that he couldn’t fight back and beat up my 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 hierarchy. He was one of the class of boys by his own account that was so contemptible 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 drawing women with 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 I’m trying to explain why Robert is expressing himself the way that he’s expressing himself, why these images come up. 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 Charles is living out, which is that Charles has it much easier and much better than he does because he doesn’t really have the same kind of dream that he had when he was a kid. And so he’s not really the type of guy that’s going to be able to do that. He’s not going to be able to do that. He’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. And so he’s going to be able to do it. She pipes it. Now you see, when he did hear her, she’s complaining about the curtains being closed or something. And this camera crew cluttering up her house, which 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 she does it in a very subterranean way. And Charles is absolutely terrified of her. What? What? What thing? What’s wrong with it? It’s some kind of film equipment, Mother. I don’t know. Don’t worry about it. I’m going to be out of here. I’ll be back in a moment. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m out of here. I’ll be back in a moment. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. I heard she was talking about how one of their friends got a date with Skutch and how envious they all are. And this is how I felt about that. I’m a little bitter about it, as you can see here. I’ll show you how I felt. The teenage boys are very cool and aggressive and everything like that. If girls would see that I was more kind and sensitive, they would like me more. They would be impressed by the fact that I could draw. But I couldn’t understand why they liked these cool, aggressive guys and not me. Because I was more kind and sensitive and everything. More like them. I was more like them. I didn’t realize they wanted to be like them, basically. I felt hurt and cruelly misunderstood because I considered myself talented and intelligent. Yet I was not very attractive physically. I didn’t think those things really mattered. It was what’s inside of me. When I was 13 or 14 trying to be a normal teenager, I was really a jerk. I tried to act like I thought they were acting. I just came out all wrong and weird. Then I just stopped completely and became a shadow. I wasn’t even there. People weren’t even aware that I was in the same world they were in. That kind of freed me completely because I wasn’t under those pressures to be normal. I got interested in old time music and went to the black section of town knocking on doors and looking for old records. Things like that would be unthinkable if you were going to be a normal teenager. So Robert, despite the fact that he grew up in a family that was very difficult to escape from, did follow his creative interests. He picked a path that was characteristic of individuality. It did get him out. He gave up on conformity. But he found an alternative. It’s pretty impressive. He did become very successful. I want to show you, I can’t show you all of what I wanted to show you today, but I do. I’m sorry. My plate’s fascinating. Yeah, I want to spread it. Every six weeks. I missed it. Where is it here? I thought I died in 82. My job was to get a heart. I was five years old on Christmas and this whole thing happened. I was stuck. I wasn’t in my color. I was in my body there. My job was kind of a pinching for doing in trouble. It was very diabolical. I was like, Kevin, I thought I would beat him unmercifully for these things that he was always doing, these crimes he was always committing. It just made him worse, I think. I was so conscious of the thought I could be punished. I don’t know. I think I had amphetamine. I had amphetamine. I think we’ve got ten minutes here. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Got that? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.