In this episode, I discuss the 4 basic personality types, the heuristic I use to categorize them, and how to recognize them. I also talk about Freud's theory of the ego and the id, and the relationship between the two.
00:00:01.000Last summer, I'd started a series of videos on psychology and the four main types of personality disorders,
00:00:08.000and how you can recognize them and avoid those people in your life.
00:00:13.000And I never actually finished the series.
00:00:17.000There were a few reasons, but the biggest reason is I just wasn't happy with the quality of them.
00:00:23.000Making these videos is a skill that you get better at over time, and my early videos are harder to watch than these.
00:00:32.000And so, partly because I've had a bunch of requests to finish the series, so I guess the material was good, even if the presentation wasn't,
00:00:40.000I've decided to completely relaunch the series.
00:00:44.000This is going to be the first of five videos covering, in this one, what the four basic personality types are, what the heuristic I'm using is,
00:00:55.000and the following four videos are going to cover the personality disorders that you need to look out for, the most common, and how to recognize them.
00:01:05.000They are the psychopath, the histrionic, the narcissist, and most dangerous of all, the borderline.
00:01:17.000Now, to reiterate what I said in the other videos, it's important to remember that psychology isn't really a science.
00:01:26.000Now, it has this elaborate framework based upon experimental data, but any set of data needs to be incorporated into a certain heuristic.
00:01:38.000You need a set of laws that says what this means, how you categorize things, what's black, what's white.
00:01:48.000And with psychology, the theoretical framework it's based upon has never been tested, verified, let alone proven.
00:02:02.000Freud used to dominate psychology, and then they threw out Freud for the modern system for no particular reason.
00:02:13.000And soon, I think we're going to see the modern system thrown out, because the amount of things they're categorizing as personality disorders nowadays is becoming absurd.
00:02:23.000And the fact that it's obviously a democratic process, not a scientific process.
00:02:29.000To give you two examples, homosexuality used to be a mental disorder, and then it wasn't because it was politically incorrect.
00:02:36.000The explanation for schizophrenia used to be the schizophrenic mother, that parents that abused or didn't pay attention to their kids cause schizophrenia,
00:02:51.000and then a whole bunch of parent lobbies got together and forced them to take that out of the diagnostic manual.
00:02:58.000Once again, science isn't decided by popular opinion, but psychology is.
00:03:10.000So, although I'd be cautious to throw out everything in modern psychology, we do need to recognize that fundamentally there's a lot of guesswork to it.
00:03:23.000There's a lot of guesswork to it. There's a lot of opinion to it.
00:03:27.000And humanity? Here's the thing. We are born with a module in our brains that very accurately imitates other brains.
00:03:38.000We know how to understand how people work.
00:03:42.000If you've ever read a really bad story with characters that act in ways that make no sense except for plot contrivance,
00:03:49.000you pick up on that because you're designed to pick up on that.
00:03:55.000And the skills that make a good therapist are very, very similar to the skills that make a good author, or a good priest, or a good advertiser.
00:04:07.000It's more of an art to understanding the human condition right now than it is a science.
00:04:16.000For the most part, the science is just used to prove what we already know to be true.
00:04:22.000So, the heuristics I'm going to use are no more based upon neurology than modern psychology is.
00:06:24.000And so these are the two different parts of the brain struggling against each other.
00:06:29.000And when I said there's some neurological justification for this, you have the left brain, right brain phenomenon.
00:06:36.000And in fact, this pattern goes back millennia, where the right side of the body is considered the male half, the part controlled by the left brain, the rational brain.
00:06:48.000And the left side of the body is considered the female half, the emotional, the intuitive, so forth.
00:06:57.000So yeah, that's it. Once again, funny how neurology is actually proving some of our old myths.
00:07:04.000But the important thing to remember about the id and the ego is neither of them is properly rational all by itself.
00:07:12.000The ego, although logical, is not rational.
00:07:19.000It is too logical. It's the sort of thing. It knows the value, it knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
00:07:26.000To balance these two aspects of the personality, you have the superego.
00:07:32.000And the superego is the self. It's the auto-reflective thing inside of you that looks at yourself thinking and chooses between the two of these.
00:07:43.000Now, to go back to neurology for a second.
00:07:47.000There's quite a bit of evidence that when we choose to do something, we've actually already decided to do it.
00:07:53.000And we're creating a post-hoc rationalization for why we chose something.
00:07:57.000But nonetheless, there does seem to be an element in our brain that makes decisions.
00:08:02.000And that would be the superego. It balances these two forces, the emotional and the rational, to create the true rational result.
00:08:16.000And the reason I'm bringing this up and elaborating on it is because with each of the four personality disorders,
00:08:24.000it really seems that they don't have a superego.
00:08:29.000That their id and their ego just run amok.
00:08:32.000Their wind-up toys just t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t going through society and causing havoc wherever they are.
00:08:41.000That's the difference between a sane person and an insane is that we have superegos.
00:08:47.000Now, the second heuristic I'm going to use, the basic breakdown into the four personality types,
00:08:57.000is essentially the four humors of old medical science.
00:09:02.000And these four humors are best broken down upon two axes.
00:09:08.000There's the vertical y-axe, is that of extroversion and introversion.
00:09:15.000The extroversion is the aggressive male sort of energy.
00:09:22.000It's the pursuer, the one that goes out into the world and initiates things.
00:09:29.000Whereas the introvert is the female seductress.
00:09:36.000It's the passive one, the one that lets stuff come to them.
00:09:42.000The x-axe, on the other hand, responds very much to the id and the ego.
00:09:54.000And Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Red Mars speculated upon the stabile and labile personalities.
00:10:05.000So the stabile, or id personality, is that personality which doesn't like new situations.
00:10:16.000They're task-oriented, they like to be in a familiar environment, and they like to become a master at their craft.
00:10:26.000They're going to be more interested in things like mechanics, computer programming, reading books.
00:10:35.000The labile, or the id on the other hand, is ultimately people-focused.
00:10:43.000They want to meet new people, do new things all the time.
00:10:47.000They're not so much into reading, they're into experimenting.
00:10:55.000They're not so much into rigor, they're into doing new things.
00:10:59.000And it's at the four vertices of these two very similar axes that you get the four basic personality types.
00:11:10.000So, starting off with the extrovert stabile, that is the person that enjoys mastering their environment, enjoys being in control of their environment, but is also very extroverted, very willing to go out there and initiate things, you get the choleric personality.
00:11:37.000It is the personality that likes people, it's an extrovert personality, likes to talk to people, but ultimately wants to organize them towards some task.
00:11:49.000They will organize and use people to accomplish this task.