We're going to give him somewhat short shrift. I'm afraid because we only have an hour to talk about Freud, but that's okay

We could get a fair way through it

He's still persona non grata, I would say among experimental psychologists and probably clinical psychologists as well

But that seems to me to be very unfair

Freud Freud is one of those thinkers who?

All that's left are his mistakes

and the reason for that is that everything that he

Discovered or put forward is so entrenched in our culture now that we think it's self-evident and so everything

correct has been assimilated and that just leaves everything that's more or less floating on top to look wrong and

But Freud is also one of those thinkers who was always wrong in an interesting way and that's very useful. And so I

also think that many of the things that he put his finger on that are of

still disputed for example, the idea of the Oedipus complex are much more useful than people are willing to

admit

especially in the clinical realm because the eatable complex which we'll talk about quite a bit is actually a

description of a fairly

stable

form of familial psychopathology where

child gets trapped within the confines of a family because the relationship with one parent or the other or both is so tight that

they can't break beyond it and maybe because of their own inability to

move towards independence but more frequently because of

What you might describe as a kind of conspiracy between the son and and the parent or the child and the parent

that prevents them from

moving towards

Autonomous life and keeps them in a state of essentially a state of childhood dependence

Freud said I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients under the influence of an older friend

And by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious and psychic life

The role of instinctual urges and so on out of these findings grew a new science psychoanalysis

A part of psychology and a new treatment for the neurosis. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck

People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory

Resistance was strong and unrelenting in the end

I succeeded in inquiring pupils and building it up in international psychoanalytic Association

But the struggle is not over he made that recording just shortly before he died. He moved to to England to escape the Nazis

Before Freud I guess

The mind was

It's complicated because Freud of course was not the only person to be thinking along the lines that he thought Pierre

jennae

who was one of his teachers had originated and started to develop many of the ideas that I would say were popularized by Freud but

The idea of the unconscious mind was not

Certainly not as well developed

prior to Freud as it became afterwards and

Before that I suppose

You might say that insofar as people thought of the mind at all

They thought of in philosophical terms and the mind would be that part of you

That's that you're aware of like in the dark in

The Cartesian sense Descartes said I think therefore I am and it kind of seems in some sense

Self-evident that you're aware of and have control over the contents of your own mind

But that was what Freud really questioned and he questioned it deeply said well

first of all the idea that you're one thing like one mind is a dubious idea to begin with because

People are full of internal contradictions. And then the idea that your mind is all of one type

it's it's all of one form was also very questionable as far as Freud was concerned because you could be fractionated into

subcomponents and

You know the idea for example that your anger or your sexual desire could be an autonomous part of your personality in some sense

It could overtake you and control you. That's really a Freudian idea and

one of the classic Freudian ideas really is that people are made out of sub personalities and

Those sub personalities are alive. And that's one of the things I really like about the psychoanalytic thinkers because even the

Psychologists who say over the last thirty years are they're about

Since maybe longer now

anyways, since the demise of behaviorism as an ideology and

the admission by psychologists that there were

There is an active unconscious or many active unconscious which is a better way of thinking about it

Psychologists still really haven't come to terms with the idea in any deep sense that these unconscious

Processes are living things, you know there

When psychologists talk for example about the cognitive unconscious they're talking about something that that they describe it more machine-like

with more machine like metaphors and that's not reasonable you you understand things a lot better if you

understand that the sub components that make up people the fragmentary bits of them and also the biological

subsystems that that are part and parcel of your being are

Much more intelligently viewed as personalities there

there are kind of uni dimensional personalities in some sense so that for example, if you're angry you're nothing, but angry I mean

That's an overstatement obviously or if you're afraid you're nothing but afraid or if you're hungry you're nothing but hunger well

That's certainly true

If you get hungry enough or thirsty

Or too hot or any of those things you you kind of collapsed to a simpler personality. That only has one

Motivation in mind and we'll talk a lot as we progress about the grounding of those uni-dimensional

Motivational systems in biology, but I'd have to say that Freud was

among the first at least the first to

Synthesize a coherent theory of this multiplicity and to put it forth

while also insisting that much of what was happening to you and inside of you was

not

immediately accessible

To your awareness and it's a very profound. It's a very profound discovery

it means among any among many other things that you

can formulate ideas

First of all, it means that you can act out things

That you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand it

also means that

Your memory can contain things that's represented in one way, but that can't be understood in another

So for example, and we know this is true because there are independent memory systems. There's an independent memory system for procedures

That's for actions. There's an independent

memory system for what you might describe as imagination for for the memory that uses images and then there's a another system that

articulates knowledge that's the semantic memory system and it's not obvious at all that the contents of all of those are

equivalent and that's why for example

you can dream things that you don't know because one of the things you might think is that your dreams watch you act and they

Watch other people act and then they make a little drama out of that and that drama has information in it

But you don't necessarily know what that information is in that you can't describe it consciously

Right. It's it's akin to the PA Chetty an idea. That kids can play a game

and you can take them away from the game and then they won't know how to describe the rules even though they can play the

Game and so dreams can contain information. That's full of

the encoding of behavior that has information in it that you're not consciously aware of and so then you can become

consciously aware of that in a kind of a revelation side

Maybe that's what you do when you become aware of the meaning of a dream or the meaning of a fantasy or something like that

and

That's all all our ability to think that way in some ways can be traced back to Freud

Now Freud concentrated mostly I would say at least in terms of pathology on

sexual and aggressive

Impulses and I I don't think that there's any mystery for modern people

about why aggressive impulses might be particularly difficult to integrate into the personality and might remain underdeveloped or will say

repressed although those aren't the same thing and

I think in order to you might think that in different times in society

Some things are allowed to surface express themselves and other things are less allowed. And so

Victorian times had a number of

characteristics that made the repression of sexuality particularly likely and perhaps also the repression of aggression and we're talking about

Victorian times in in Europe, obviously and only one time in one place

As Henry or Ellen Burgess says this is a great book by the way

the discovery of the unconscious if you're interested in

If you're really interested in psychoanalytic ideas Freud Jung and Adler and also the history of those ideas

There's no better book than the discovery of the unconscious. It's an absolutely remarkable book a great work of scholarship

I think it it goes for about

250 pages before it even gets to Freud and so it places Freud's discoveries in their historical context

So that's a really good thing to know

Allen Burgess says it was a world shaped by man for man in which women occupied the second place

Political rights for women did not exist the separation and dissimilarity of the sexes was sharper than today

women who wore slacks their hair shorter smoked were hardly to be found and the universities admitted no female students, man's

Authority over his children and his wife was unquestioned education was authoritarian

The despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became extremely cruel

Laws were more repressive delinquent youth sternly punished and corporal punishment was considered indispensable

now

So the times themselves I would say were harsher and more repressive but then there was an element to sexuality that was also

Extraordinarily

Problematic. I mean the first thing you might notice might consider and people generally don't it's almost impossible to overstate

how

revolutionary the birth control pill actually is

You know people like to think that the political rights that women have attained have been a consequence of a political struggle

But I don't buy that for a second. I don't think that's true even in the least

I think that what happened was that we underwent a biological revolution in the 1950s late

1950s with the emergence of the birth control pill and that for the first time in human history gave women

Pretty reliable control over the reproductive function not really transformed them into entirely different biological

beings in many many ways like here's an example a subtle example, so, you know

if you track women through their

Ovulation cycle and you show them a picture of a man same man

And you do nothing but vary his jaw width

When they're ovulating the guy with the wider jaw is more attractive and when they're not

Ovulating the farthest away from that the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive and that's associated with testosterone levels

And so women who are fertile like more masculine men and basically if you're on the pill then you're never in that

Ovulation phase and so one thing that may have happened and I don't know this for sure

but it's it's interesting to consider is that

Since women have been taking the birth control pill their preference for less

masculine men has become more pronounced and that could easily be one of the things that's fueling at least some of the tension that's

Existed and exists now politically between men and women, but the point is is that you just cannot ignore

The massive consequences of a biological revolution like that and to make any other factor causal when you're trying to understand

The political movement movements especially in the last say 40 years. It's you're putting the cart before the horse now

It's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology if certain

Political changes with regards to the emancipation of women hadn't already been in place, right?

No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception

So you can't separate the biological from the political entirely

but it's still it's still very useful to organize your organizing your thinking to realize just how profound a

Revolution that was but now back in the Victorian times

There's another thing about sexuality

Modern people like to think that there's nothing dangerous about sex and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever

Hypothesize because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous

Emotionally it's dangerous socially

it's dangerous because of the

Possibility of unwanted pregnancy and it's dangerous because of the possibility of sickness and that's a major one

I mean

So when aids emerged in the 1980s that could have easily killed all of us now the fact that it didn't was wonderful

But it did kill hundreds of millions of people. So it was no joke. It was a big deal and

ADEs

mutated to take advantage of promiscuity and so the

Relationship between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease is actually mediated at the biological level. But anyways back in the 1890s

They had the same problem, right? They had the problem with syphilis and syphilis is one nasty disease

it's it can mimic almost any other disease and it's devastating to your nervous system and you can pass it on to your children and

so part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was not only because of the

possibility of unwanted pregnancy the relative poverty of people

You know back in 1895 in Europe the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in in modern terms

You know

it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were and so

sex in a poverty-stricken place is also a lot more dangerous than it is in a rich place because especially if you were, you know,

given the lack of employment

opportunities for women back in the Victorian period if you happen to get pregnant out of wedlock you were and

You were in serious trouble

and so the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly as hardly a

surprise because it was so difficult to integrate into the full-fledged personality, you know, and it has it as it still is so