https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BSh37_x5RNY
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 that 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. 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 almost 100 years before. There’s some resistance in this, and that’s what a psychoanalyst would say, there’s some resistance 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 processor, 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, that the human psyche and its subordinate components are better conceived of as personalities and subpersonalities than in any other manner, than in systems or than information processing machines. 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 subpersonalities. I mean, even when modern people talk about themselves, they talk about the I, which would be roughly the ego in Freudian terms, they tend to think of themselves as a unitary phenomena, 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 observations 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 theatre 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. No, 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 phases 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 organizes itself into that animal. 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. What that shows is that the brain is organized in such a way so that isolated components of it will take on the function of the entire personality, and that’s demonstration in some sense that the sub-elements of the psyche or perhaps subsystems of the brain can organize themselves into functional living units. And it stands to reason. I mean, if you lose an arm you don’t stop functioning. You just reorganize 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 that 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. 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 15 minutes. 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 the 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 focused, 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 area that controls fundamental motivational 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, I think I told you this before, that if you take a cat and you take off its entire cortex and even most of its emotional systems, if you leave it just with the hypothalamus and the spinal cord, which basically means it has almost 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 that might be an ego-related goal, or you could even think about it as a goal that’s motivated by other unconscious forces, because maybe she doesn’t know exactly why she wants to starve. But in any case, what generally happens is she’ll run into an emotionally upsetting situation. Now emotional upset, say it makes you anxious or it 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 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 prefrontal 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 like 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 dissociated. You know, it doesn’t feel like them. Well, you can imagine why in some sense. I mean partly is the whole realm of eating behaviour. And eating is a sub-personality. It’s not just a behaviour, 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, you know, what social surroundings are 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 part, 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. You know, 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. 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, a person who’s very close to you 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 the, generally, the visual systems that identify faces and the emotional systems that tag the identified face with familiar emotion. So basically what happens is, 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. Well, if it’s not my mother, it looks exactly like my mother, well then what could possibly be going on? And the answer is, well, obviously, she’s being 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 even, 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 are 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 overrepresented 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 overrepresented too. And then we communicate about that with our face and our tongue. So there’s huge representation there. So and if you touch that you’ll get a motion, or at least the person will describe a strong impulse to move. Well out of that grew the prefrontal cortex. And the best way to think of it, people think about that as the substrate of abstract thought. 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 can 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. 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 would 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, one, memories that were traumatic, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, and two, 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 property, partly because in their pure manifestation they disrupt the social order. So think about how well regulated all of you are sitting here. You think, well, it’s six million years since you dissociated or 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 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’ve learned 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 of these potential subsystems 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 the state of nature everyone is at war with everyone else. And so you need a Leviathan, a talk-down control system, a Leviathan, who will punish any deviance from the social contract. So that’s the Freudian superego. Now Freud thought of the unconscious and the conscious mind to begin with, but later he dissociated that up into id, ego, and superego. And then he thought that each of those had their unconscious elements. So you know, if you’re under the grip of an id-related sub-personality, let’s say, you can 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, you know, 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, you know, 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’s 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 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 you. Ideologies possess you in exactly, not exactly the same way, but in a very similar way. So okay, so you’ve got the id and you’ve got the ego and the superego, and as in the Hobbesian worldview, there’s real tension between them, so 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, 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 mimic 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 superego say would approve of, was a marital 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 until he was in his mid to late 20s. He just didn’t have the resources, and 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 in full, 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 superego in a sense, 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, right? 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 pathologized, particularly characterized by resentment and the desire for revenge. Because remember, these systems think, you know, 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, unidimensional drive. 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, and 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, and so he had intercourse with her and immediately after that was unbelievably guilty. You know, 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 it’s, you know, well, in this particular example it was guilt and shame and anxiety, terror even, and self-loathing, all of those things. 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 slash aggressive impulses, because those are generally the ones that culminate in the particularly atrocious, you know, individual crimes, and they’ll commit them and then they 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, and it’s very – now, they’re tied together by memory, generally speaking, although Freud would say You can also dissociate memory. So Freud talked about memories being repressed, and that’s caused an awful lot of trouble, because – well, 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 actually 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’d 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’s 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 if something terrible happened to you when you were a child, that you had a record of it was there as the memory, as the event, and then you needed something like a sensor 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 – and then he also thought that 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, the hierarchical layer model that we’ve been entertaining as we progress. 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 naive, 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? And the answer is, to remember something, you have to represent it. That’s the thing. You don’t just have a memory of the event. It’s always interpretation, because there’s so many things going on. 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 something 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 as repression. Avoiding thinking about something is not the same as repression, because it doesn’t require an active repressor 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 multi-layered neurological phenomena. 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. 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 until 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. We don’t exactly know why you would experience negative emotion or what function the negative emotion has, except that we do know that a pattern of neurological behaviour that’s or a threat is less likely to be re-implemented in the future. Okay, so the reaction to the anomalous thing is bodily, 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. 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. So one time I had this client, she was about 27, I only saw her once, this was when I was just training to be a psychotherapist, and she came into 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 somewhere between 10 and 13 and her brother being somewhere between, say, 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. And then I said, well, okay, how old was your brother? And she said, well, he was six. And so I said, well, look, 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’d 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 50% older, so it’s a big deal when you’re four. But if the issue for the memory is its relevance to current conceptualization 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 like the four-year-old’s this high, and like, what the hell were my parents doing anyways? And that’s an entirely different story than the one that she had come up with, come in with, you know, and 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, is that the thing won’t leave you alone. It keeps 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, and like it invades your mind. There’s a reason for that, and the reason is that the underlying emotional systems that are associated with anxiety, so those are mostly 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 that 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 you know, so then she’s all primed for being threatened, and then, so that kind of means you’re open to rewiring in some sense, and so then when she’s in the hospital, they don’t let her parents come and see her for a couple of weeks, you know, 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 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 I met her, had turned into a whole philosophy of institutional oppression, but its core was that, and 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 the core of a whole large sub-personality, and that has to be taken apart very carefully, especially if that sub-personality 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, right? Because, I mean, if a dog comes up to you and it’s looking suspiciously and barking and growling, you’re not going to pet it, you know? The way 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 dissociability 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 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 actually do seriously counterproductive things. So for example, people can be… I just had someone write me here a while ago, 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. 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, and 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 insturquilinus infinitur, 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. You know, and those are, 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 that you don’t want to face, obviously. Now the shadow element of the psyche, in some sense, when you were watching the movie, for 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 inn. But then there was another more complex side of that where the people were reacting to that, you know, because they felt downtrodden and oppressed and antisocial 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. You know, 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 the Freudian world, like the world of the psychoanalytic unconscious, is quite a terrifying place because it makes you second-guess everything. It’s not a paranoia, although okay. You never, 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 because, you know, 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 that 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 maneuver. What you’d expect in a mail-out like that is, you know, here’s six things that we’ve done in the last year that 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. No, there’s something wrong there. And I mean, that’s, I picked Greenpeace because it just happened to pop in mind, but it’s the case for all sorts of organizations. So all right, 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? 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 a subpersonality, but there’s something else that’s worth understanding too. So let’s say you start practicing a new minor mode of being, a new attitude or a new personality attribute or new habit, let’s say. It can be a fairly small thing. When you first start practicing it, you’re not very good at it. For those of you who are musicians, you know, 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 quite weird. I’m not a very good pianist, but I learned to play one really difficult song. But the terrible thing is, is I’ll learn to play it, and then at some point I’ll realize that I don’t know the notes anymore, and as soon as I realize 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 the 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 practiced. 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 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 a rig 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, bang, 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, it’s like poof, you’re 14 again. And it’s partly because that’s the 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 queued by ongoing events. It’s habitual. And so 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? This doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, what, are you conjuring something out of nothing? Well, you could say, well, they’re combinations of old ideas, but you know, that’s not that helpful, because you can’t just take a bunch of old ideas and shuffle them and come out 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 relate… 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. Freud and him were excavating the basement of a structure, and 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 knows 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 in Social Behavior 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 ants are interested in a bunch of things that you just 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 behaviors. 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? Like 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, 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 organized 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 behaviorists. And the behaviorists 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, but it’s a book. It’s a work of sociology slash 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 for at least 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, 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 like you’re creative, right? 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 with 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. So 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. It’s to be, 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 had 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 of 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 can 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. 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 have 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 their eyebrow a quarter of an inch, right? That can indicate irony and it can indicate a relationship of a 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 imitated behaviour. And 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. You know, and you have your category systems and your theories and so forth. And so then the dream puts forth what that, like an image, 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 unbelievably 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, sometimes you have a realisation or a moment of insight. You know, and 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. It’s 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 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 woman 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 where you’re going. So that is in large part what’s happening in psychoanalysis. It’s certainly what happens with dream analysis, which is something that Freud also pioneered. You know, Freud believed that dreams were wish fulfilments. And he believed that the function of dreams about wish fulfilments 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 fulfilment 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. 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, your 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 a solution using your memories and your skills and everything that would be related to successful outcomes of that form, 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, and because women are actually slightly higher in part of openness than men are. So what else? 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 created. So if you have the kind of mind that works in association. So for example, if I told you guys, all right, 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 break? 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, it’s a thing. 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. Because that’s an originality dimension. And actually, if you calculate those two dimensions, fluency and originality, from a divergent thinking task, which is what I just told you about, you can predict how creative people are quite well. Anyways, the really creative people seem to have a deep wellspring 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. 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 how you interpreted the last book you read is true? And the answer to that is, you don’t know how. You don’t. And even if you did, you don’t know how you know it. Right? 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 as you can and try not to think about it too much because we don’t want post-dream editing. 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 I’ll let my associational network work on it and see what that reminds me of and then I’ll ask the person what it reminds them of and then we’ll talk about these. 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 it 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 your 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 postmodernists, you know, ended up in their little hole with regards to literature. They realized that, well, 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. That’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, you know, that’s the most dangerous theory, that. So anyways, you talk to the person about the dream and the dream imaging, about what that triggers off in their memory, and you also watch what they say because sometimes, so for example, this just happened recently, someone might be describing a dream 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, is 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 utilized. And that’s now 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. 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 up 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 like express your feelings, then that would help you. Expressing your feelings does not help you, by the way. Because that turns out to be wrong, although it’s 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 into the lab on three sequential days and he had them write for 15 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 traumatized 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 a two-week time span, everyone would have said, never, never write down your traumatic experiences because it would 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. 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. Here you’re expressing your, you know, 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 used, particularly as your narrative developed, that indicated comprehension and understanding the better you did over time. And so what happens is not, 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 analyze 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 that doesn’t happen again, or maybe you just don’t go those places anymore. You know, either way. And 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. 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. It’s like, okay, think about them chasing you. You’ve got to visualize it. Really visualize 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 tell, say what it is or whatever, but maybe they don’t even do that. And I say, okay, now before you go to bed at night, just when you’re almost falling to sleep, you’re in a hypnagogic state where images are starting to come, you run that. So they run that, poof, that nightmare is 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 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 hunting 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 questions about, sort of representative questions of the exam when I get home after this lecture, probably this evening. The essays are there. 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. So it’s not a tricky test.