The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 22, 2020


146. Sigmund Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious


Episode Stats

Length

59 minutes

Words per Minute

176.55855

Word Count

10,509

Sentence Count

664

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

9


Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson explores Sigmund Freud's theories and delves into Freud's work on the unconscious mind. Dr. Peterson is a neurologist, psychoanalytic researcher, and author of the book, Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious: A Guide to the Unconscious Mind. He is also the author of The Freudian Hypothesis and The Dialectical and Freudian Approach to Psychology, which is available for purchase on Amazon for $99.99. If you haven t checked out Dad s Intro to Personality, it is on sale this Black Friday, from November 26th-Dec. 4th. It's $60 for hours of video content instead of the regular price of $140, and is incredibly insightful. If you think you're dating a psychopath or a pushover, find out if you're in fact a sociopath or a narcissist, check it out at Dr. B.P. Peterson's course, on sale Nov. 26th. Also, tomorrow, November 23rd, 2020, my dad is releasing a YouTube video with a huge announcement at 10am EST. Be sure to check out The Kayla Pearson videos on YouTube. Enjoy this episode and your week, and the course if you buy it and the announcement tomorrow! Enjoy, and a Happy Thanksgiving! - Dr. Michaela Peterson and the rest of the family! Thank you so much for listening to Season 3, Episode 33 of the Jordan Peterson Podcast. . Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. and a brighter, better future you all deserve. Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Holidays! xoxo, Dr. - MJP - Michaela (and the rest will be back next week! - MJB , Caitlyn & her family And, of course, - P. (PSA to her Dad, ) ~ - J.B. Peterson - PSYCHOLOGICAL AND THE DAILY WISHING FOR A BONUS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST WITH A MORE CHANCE TO STARTING TO FEEL BETTER THAN YOU DREAMING OF THE THANOTHER EPISODES OF THE FUTURE YOU CHASING OF A CHANCE OF A RELATIONSHIP WITH A CHAMPION AND A MORE THING THAT WILL CHANGE THAT?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and
00:00:05.560 important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those
00:00:10.560 battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can
00:00:15.700 be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.080 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you
00:00:25.520 might be feeling this way in his new series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that
00:00:30.400 while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're
00:00:35.700 suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope and there's a path to feeling better. Go to
00:00:42.100 Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety. Let this be
00:00:48.080 the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Welcome to Season 3, Episode 33 of the
00:00:57.600 Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's child with a better sense of humor than
00:01:03.100 the other child. It's so good Julian doesn't listen to these intros, or perhaps I will find out Monday
00:01:08.680 if he does. This episode is from Dad's personality series, Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious.
00:01:15.280 In this episode, he explores Sigmund Freud's theories and delves into Freud's work on the unconscious
00:01:22.400 mind. A few quick updates. One, if you haven't checked out Dad's video course on an intro to
00:01:28.640 personality, it is on sale this Black Friday from November 26th, this Thursday, to December 4th.
00:01:35.980 It's $60 for hours of video content instead of the regular price of $140. It gives a university-level
00:01:44.080 introduction to personality and is incredibly insightful. If you think you're dating a
00:01:48.380 psychopath or a pushover, find out. Check it out at jordanbpeterson.com slash personality
00:01:54.120 on sale November 26th. Second update. Tomorrow, November 23rd, 2020, my dad is releasing a YouTube
00:02:02.080 video with a huge announcement. 10 a.m. EST. Be sure to check it out. Like I said, it's a doozy.
00:02:08.700 Enjoy this episode and your week and the course if you buy it and the announcement tomorrow.
00:02:14.220 Also, I released an episode on my podcast with Matthew McConaughey. So if you want to check that
00:02:19.960 out, please do. The Kayla Pearson videos on YouTube. Okay, I'm done. Enjoy this episode.
00:02:24.420 So on to Sigmund Freud. We're going to give him somewhat short shrift, I'm afraid, because we only
00:02:44.900 have an hour to talk about Freud, but that's okay. We can get a fair way through it. He's still persona
00:02:52.500 non grata, I would say, among experimental psychologists and probably clinical psychologists
00:02:56.900 as well, but that seems to me to be very unfair. Freud is one of those thinkers who all that's left
00:03:06.020 are his mistakes. And the reason for that is that everything that he discovered or put forward is so
00:03:12.820 entrenched in our culture now that we think it's self-evident. And so everything correct has been
00:03:18.540 assimilated and that just leaves everything that's more or less floating on top to look
00:03:22.940 wrong. And but Freud is also one of those thinkers who was always wrong in an interesting way.
00:03:28.460 And that's very useful. And so I also think that many of the things that he put his finger on
00:03:34.060 that are still disputed. For example, the idea of the Oedipus complex are much more useful than
00:03:39.820 people are willing to admit, especially in the clinical realm, because the Oedipal complex,
00:03:46.380 which we'll talk about quite a bit, is actually a description of a fairly stable
00:03:55.420 form of familial psychopathology where the child gets trapped within the confines of a family
00:04:01.900 because the relationship with one parent or the other or both is so tight that they can't break
00:04:07.660 beyond it. And maybe because of their own inability to move towards independence, but more frequently
00:04:15.020 because of what you might describe as a kind of conspiracy between the son and the parent or the
00:04:21.180 child and the parent that prevents them from moving towards autonomous life and keeps them in a state of
00:04:30.460 essentially a state of childhood dependence. Freud said, I started my professional activity as a
00:04:37.740 neurologist, trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients under the influence of an older friend.
00:04:42.780 And by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life,
00:04:49.260 the role of instinctual urges and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis,
00:04:53.820 a part of psychology and a new treatment for the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good
00:04:59.420 luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong
00:05:05.260 and unrelenting. In the end, I succeeded in inquiring pupils and building it up in international
00:05:09.900 psychoanalytic association. But the struggle is not over. He made that recording just shortly before he died.
00:05:16.060 He moved to England to escape the Nazis. Before Freud, I guess...
00:05:25.660 The mind was... It's complicated because Freud, of course, was not the only person to be thinking
00:05:31.100 along the lines that he thought. Pierre Jeannet, who was one of his teachers, had originated and
00:05:37.020 started to develop many of the ideas that I would say were popularized by Freud. But
00:05:40.620 the idea of the unconscious mind was not... certainly not as well developed prior to Freud as it became
00:05:51.820 afterwards. And before that, I suppose... you might say that insofar as people thought of the mind at all,
00:06:02.060 they thought in philosophical terms, and the mind would be that part of you that you're aware of,
00:06:08.220 like in a Cartesian sense, Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. And it kind of seems in some sense
00:06:14.540 self-evident that you're aware of and have control over the contents of your own mind. But that was
00:06:21.260 what Freud really questioned. And he questioned it deeply. He said, well, first of all, the idea that
00:06:27.020 you're one thing, like one mind, is a dubious idea to begin with because people are full of internal
00:06:33.420 contradictions. And then the idea that your mind is all of one type, it's all of one form, was also
00:06:40.780 very questionable as far as Freud was concerned. Because you could be fractionated into sub-components
00:06:46.700 and know the idea, for example, that your anger or your sexual desire could be an autonomous part of
00:06:52.620 your personality in some sense, that it could overtake you and control you. That's really a Freudian idea.
00:06:58.380 And one of the classic Freudian ideas really is that people are made out of
00:07:03.260 sub-personalities and those sub-personalities are alive. And that's one of the things I really
00:07:08.940 like about the psychoanalytic thinkers, because even the psychologists who say over the last 30 years
00:07:15.580 or thereabouts, since maybe longer now, anyway, since the demise of behaviorism as an ideology,
00:07:22.460 and the admission by psychologists that there is an active unconscious or many active unconsciouses,
00:07:31.580 which is a better way of thinking about it, psychologists still really haven't come to
00:07:35.340 terms with the idea in any deep sense that these unconscious processes are living things.
00:07:41.580 You know, when psychologists talk, for example, about the cognitive unconscious,
00:07:46.220 they're talking about something that they describe in more machine-like, with more machine-like
00:07:52.060 metaphors. And that's not reasonable. You understand things a lot better if you understand that the
00:07:57.980 sub-components that make up people, the fragmentary bits of them, and also the biological subsystems that
00:08:04.460 are part and parcel of your being are much more intelligently viewed as personalities.
00:08:11.020 They're kind of unidimensional personalities in some sense. So that, for example, if you're angry,
00:08:15.180 you're nothing but angry. I mean, that's an overstatement, obviously. Or if you're afraid,
00:08:19.580 you're nothing but afraid. Or if you're hungry, you're nothing but hunger. Well, that's certainly
00:08:23.980 true if you get hungry enough, or thirsty, or too hot, or any of those things. You kind of collapse
00:08:28.700 to a simpler personality that only has one motivation in mind. And we'll talk a lot as we progress
00:08:35.020 about the grounding of those unidimensional motivational systems in biology. But I'd have to say that
00:08:40.860 Freud was among the first, at least the first to synthesize a coherent theory of this multiplicity
00:08:49.340 and to put it forth while also insisting that much of what was happening to you and inside of you
00:08:56.060 was not immediately accessible to your awareness. And it's a very profound discovery.
00:09:05.820 It means among many other things that you can formulate ideas. First of all, it means that you
00:09:14.300 can act out things that you don't understand for reasons that you don't understand.
00:09:20.540 It also means that your memory can contain things that's represented in one way, but that can't be
00:09:26.940 understood in another. So for example, and we know this is true because there are independent memory
00:09:31.900 systems. There's an independent memory system for procedures. That's for actions. There's an
00:09:36.940 independent memory system for what you might describe as imagination for the memory that uses
00:09:42.700 images. And then there's another system that articulates knowledge. That's the semantic memory
00:09:49.100 system. And it's not obvious at all that the contents of all of those are equivalent. And that's why,
00:09:55.660 for example, you can dream things that you don't know, because one of the things you might think
00:10:00.380 is that your dreams watch you act and they watch other people act. And then they make a little
00:10:05.500 drama out of that. And that drama has information in it, but you don't necessarily know what that
00:10:09.740 information is in that you can't describe it consciously, right? It's, it's akin to the Piagetian
00:10:15.660 idea that kids can play a game and you can take them away from the game. And then they won't know how
00:10:21.340 to describe the rules, even though they could play the game. And so dreams can contain information
00:10:26.300 that's full of the encoding of behavior that has information in it that you're not consciously
00:10:31.740 aware of. And so then you can become consciously aware of that in a kind of a revelation, say,
00:10:36.540 maybe that's what you do when you become aware of the meaning of a dream or the meaning of a fantasy
00:10:40.620 or something like that. And that's all, all our ability to think that way in some ways can be
00:10:47.420 traced back to Freud. Now, Freud concentrated mostly on, I would say, at least in terms of
00:10:54.300 pathology, on sexual and aggressive impulses. And I don't think that there's any mystery for
00:11:01.980 modern people about why aggressive impulses might be particularly difficult to integrate into the
00:11:07.420 personality and might remain underdeveloped or we'll say repressed, although those aren't the same thing.
00:11:13.420 And I think in order to, you might think that in different times in society,
00:11:19.820 some things are allowed to surface and express themselves and other things are less allowed.
00:11:24.460 And so Victorian times had a number of characteristics that made the repression of sexuality,
00:11:30.540 particularly likely, and perhaps also the repression of aggression. And we're talking
00:11:34.220 about Victorian times in, in Europe, obviously, and only one time in one place.
00:11:38.380 As Henry Ellenberg says, this is a great book, by the way, The Discovery of the Unconscious. If you're
00:11:45.580 interested in, if you're really interested in psychoanalytic ideas, Freud, Jung and Adler,
00:11:50.300 and also the history of those ideas, there's no better book than The Discovery of the Unconscious.
00:11:54.460 It's an absolutely remarkable book, a great work of scholarship. I think it, it goes for about 250
00:12:00.620 pages before it even gets to Freud. And so it places Freud's discoveries in their historical context.
00:12:05.740 So that's a really good thing to know. Ellen Berger says, it was a world shaped by man for man,
00:12:10.460 in which women occupied the second place. Political rights for women did not exist.
00:12:14.940 The separation and dissimilarity of the sexes was sharper than today. Women who wore slacks,
00:12:20.540 their hair short or smoked were hardly to be found. And the universities admitted no female students.
00:12:25.340 Man's authority over his children and his wife was unquestioned. Education was authoritarian.
00:12:30.780 The despotic father was a common figure and was particularly conspicuous only when he became
00:12:35.420 extremely cruel. Laws were more repressive. Delinquent youth sternly punished and corporal
00:12:40.380 punishment was considered indispensable. Now, so the times themselves, I would say,
00:12:47.420 were harsher and more repressive. But then there was an element to sexuality that was also
00:12:53.500 extraordinarily problematic. I mean, the first thing you might notice, might consider, and people
00:12:59.260 generally don't. It's almost impossible to overstate how revolutionary the birth control pill
00:13:06.460 actually is. You know, people like to think that the political rights that women have attained have
00:13:12.700 been a consequence of a political struggle. But I don't buy that for a second. I don't think that's
00:13:16.460 true. Even in the least, I think that what happened was that we underwent a biological revolution in the
00:13:21.340 1950s, late 1950s, with the emergence of the birth control pill. And that, for the first time in human
00:13:27.420 history, gave women pretty reliable control over their reproductive function. And that really
00:13:32.300 transformed them into entirely different biological beings in many, many ways. Like, here's an example,
00:13:38.380 a subtle example. So, you know, if you track women through their ovulation cycle and you show them a
00:13:44.620 picture of a man, the same man, and you do nothing but vary his jaw width. When they're ovulating, the
00:13:51.260 guy with the wider jaw is more attractive. And when they're not ovulating, the farthest away from that,
00:13:56.060 the guy with the thinner jaw is more attractive. And that's associated with testosterone levels.
00:13:59.980 And so, women who are fertile like more masculine men. And basically, if you're on the pill, then
00:14:05.340 you're never in that ovulation phase. And so, one thing that may have happened, and I don't know this
00:14:10.140 for sure, but it's interesting to consider, is that since women have been taking the birth control pill,
00:14:15.100 their preference for less masculine men has become more pronounced. And that could easily be one of the
00:14:19.820 the things that's fueling at least some of the tension that's existed and exists now, politically,
00:14:25.100 between men and women. But the point is, is that you just cannot ignore the massive consequences of
00:14:31.500 a biological revolution like that. And to make any other factor causal, when you're trying to understand
00:14:37.500 the political movements, especially in the last, say, 40 years, you're putting the cart before the
00:14:42.940 horse. Now, it's reasonable to point out that the pill wouldn't have been accepted as a technology
00:14:49.420 if certain political changes with regards to the emancipation of women hadn't already been in place,
00:14:55.740 right? No one would have even been allowed to do something like investigate contraception.
00:15:00.300 So, you can't separate the biological from the political entirely, but it's still very useful to
00:15:06.460 organizing your thinking to realize just how profound a revolution that was. But now, back in the
00:15:14.060 Victorian times, see, there's another thing about sexuality. Modern people like to think that there's
00:15:18.300 nothing dangerous about sex, and that is like the stupidest thing you could possibly ever hypothesize,
00:15:23.340 because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous emotionally, it's dangerous socially,
00:15:28.780 it's dangerous because of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, and it's dangerous because of the
00:15:33.980 possibility of sickness. And that's a major one. I mean, so when AIDS emerged in the 1980s, that could
00:15:39.660 have easily killed all of us. Now, the fact that it didn't was wonderful, but it did kill hundreds of
00:15:44.540 millions of people. So, it was no joke. It was a big deal. And AIDS mutated to take advantage of
00:15:51.180 promiscuity. And so, the relationship between sexual behavior and the transmission of disease
00:15:57.260 is actually mediated at the biological level. But anyways, back in the 1890s, they had the same problem,
00:16:02.460 right? They had the problem with syphilis. And syphilis is one nasty disease. It can mimic almost
00:16:08.380 any other disease. And it's devastating to your nervous system, and you can pass it on to your
00:16:12.780 children. And so, part of the reason that sexuality was heavily repressed in the Victorian period was
00:16:18.060 not only because of the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, the relative poverty of people. You know,
00:16:24.140 back in 1895, in Europe, the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in modern terms.
00:16:30.300 You know, it's almost impossible to understand how poor people were. And so,
00:16:35.340 sex in a poverty-stricken place is also a lot more dangerous than it is in a rich place. Because,
00:16:40.540 especially if you were, you know, given the lack of employment opportunities for women back in the
00:16:46.460 Victorian period, if you happened to get pregnant out of wedlock, you were in serious trouble. And so,
00:16:53.180 the fact that sexuality was repressed is hardly a surprise because it was so difficult to
00:16:58.780 integrate into the full-fledged personality, you know, as it still is. So, sexual oppression,
00:17:06.380 supposedly characteristic feature of the Victorian period, was often merely the expression of two
00:17:10.540 facts, the lack of diffusion of contraceptives and the fear of venereal disease. It was all the more
00:17:15.340 dangerous because of the great spread of prostitution and because prostitutes were almost invariably
00:17:19.500 contaminated and therefore potential sources of infection. We can hardly imagine today how monstrous
00:17:24.620 syphilis appeared to people of that time. Well, we can imagine that a little bit better than they
00:17:29.580 could in 1970 because it hasn't, you know, AIDS is still with us, although it's nowhere near the plague
00:17:34.220 that it was, say, 25 years ago. Well, here's the Freudian world. Freud, so let's take a look at the
00:17:44.460 history of, or the idea of the unconscious to begin with. And one of the things that you might want to
00:17:49.100 consider, conceptually, is that there are many different forms of unconscious. There's not just
00:17:53.660 one. And so, Ellen Berger points out that by 1900, four functions of the unconscious had been
00:17:59.260 described. There's a conservative function, so the unconscious stores memories often unaccessible to
00:18:05.740 voluntary recall. Well, that's a strange one. You know, obviously you remember your past, but you don't
00:18:11.100 remember all of what you can remember at any given time, and you don't really have access to that full
00:18:16.860 store of memories, although you can try to remember. So, the unconscious is the... you could imagine
00:18:23.020 the memories are represented somehow neurologically, but the neurological structure isn't exactly the
00:18:29.500 mind. Like, the neurological structure isn't exactly your consciousness. There's some relationship between
00:18:34.380 them that we don't know. And the unconscious, from a conceptual perspective, is the place that your
00:18:39.820 memories are that you sometimes can get access to, and sometimes can't. And so, you might think,
00:18:46.700 well, that there are... the memories that you can't get access to, there might be a variety of reasons
00:18:50.940 you can't get access to them. One might be that you've just forgotten them. And one might be that they're
00:18:56.220 so painful that you don't want to bring them to mind. You'll engage in tricks to stop yourself from
00:19:01.980 getting access to them. And... or maybe there are memories that are so complex that... and painful that
00:19:07.980 even if you did get access to them, you wouldn't exactly know what to do with them. And so, there's
00:19:12.380 not a lot of reason for you to bring them to mind, because all it is is pain without any... without any
00:19:17.580 utility. And when you understand that a little bit, you understand more about what Freud meant by
00:19:22.540 repression. The thing about Freud is that he kind of believed that, like many people believe now, that
00:19:29.820 when you remember an event in the past, it's almost as if you're using a videotape recorder.
00:19:35.100 And that when you experience that, the memory is somehow recorded in you like it happened.
00:19:41.100 But that's not a very accurate version of how memory works. I mean, we know that memories can be
00:19:47.500 easily distorted. For example, if you interview someone about an event, and you make suggestions
00:19:53.420 that there was something present in the event that wasn't there, and then you bring them back
00:19:57.660 a couple of weeks later, and you ask them about the same event, they'll often incorporate the thing
00:20:01.580 that they were told into the event. And so, and the idea that you can make an objective
00:20:06.940 record of something that's happening to you is kind of a strange notion anyways. Because,
00:20:11.660 so for example, if you're having an argument with someone, and later you're asked what the argument
00:20:17.100 was about, and the other person is asked what the argument is about, there's no necessary
00:20:21.660 reason why the accounts will jibe at all. Because a lot of time when you're having an argument with
00:20:26.780 someone, you're arguing about what the argument is about, right? Say, well, you're angry at me.
00:20:31.660 Well, why? This is why I think you're angry at me. And you say, no, this is why I think this event
00:20:36.860 has occurred. And you're thinking about, especially if we know each other well, you're thinking about
00:20:41.900 the contextualization of that event across our entire history. And I'm doing the same thing,
00:20:47.420 and I'm going to highlight things that you're not going to highlight, and I'm going to draw
00:20:50.380 causal inferences that you're not going to draw. And for us just to get on the same page about the
00:20:55.020 memory is going to be very difficult. So the idea that, especially with complex interactions
00:21:00.060 with people, that you can somehow make a video recording of the memory and actually capture
00:21:05.260 what happens is very, very, it's not true. You can't. I mean, you might be able to extract out
00:21:12.300 certain objective facts, but generally, if it's a dialogical issue, if it's a relationship issue,
00:21:18.940 it spans such a long period of time that just cutting a slice of it out doesn't constitute
00:21:24.540 a reasonable record of what it means. And that's what you're more concerned with too.
00:21:29.340 Like when, when you have an experience, you're not so much concerned about what happened from
00:21:33.980 an objective perspective. You're more concerned about what the experience means. And then you might
00:21:39.740 ask, well, what does it mean to mean something? And that was the question I was trying to answer
00:21:45.260 in that paper. I had you read right at the beginning of the class. But one of the things that meaning
00:21:50.060 means is that it has implication for the way you look at the world or the way you act in the world.
00:21:55.260 And so if I tell you something meaningful, what that's going to mean is in the future,
00:21:59.740 you're going to act slightly differently or maybe radically differently, depending on how
00:22:03.580 meaning it meaningful it is. But also that the way that you look at the world has shifted.
00:22:08.460 And the way that you look at the world is actually an unconscious. It's actually an unconscious
00:22:12.300 process. I mean, you don't know while you're looking at the world, how it is or why it is that
00:22:17.900 you're looking at the world in that way. I mean, because, well, first of all,
00:22:23.020 it would just be too complicated. And second, you wouldn't be able to concentrate on what was
00:22:26.780 actually going on. So your attention, for example, is mediated by unconscious forces.
00:22:33.180 And you know that, you know that perfectly well. And this is another Freudian observation.
00:22:37.100 You know, if you're sitting down to study, for example, your conscious intent is to study.
00:22:44.620 But you know perfectly well that all sorts of distraction fantasies are going to enter
00:22:49.180 the theater of your imagination nonstop and annoyingly. And there isn't really a lot you
00:22:54.060 can do about that, except maybe wait it out. You know, so you'll be sitting there reading and
00:22:59.100 your attention will flicker away. You'll think about, I don't know, maybe you want to watch Jane
00:23:02.780 the Virgin on Netflix or something like that. Or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich,
00:23:06.940 or you should get the dust bunnies from out from underneath the bed, or it's time to go outside and have
00:23:11.580 a cigarette. Or maybe it's time for a cup of coffee. Or it's like all these subsystems in you
00:23:16.780 that would like something aren't very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're
00:23:21.580 actually bored by. And so they pop up and try to take control of your perceptions and your actions
00:23:26.780 nonstop. Maybe you think, well, this is a stupid course anyways. Why do I have to read this damn
00:23:31.260 paper? And what am I doing in university? And what's the point of life? It's like, you can really,
00:23:36.300 well, you can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework. And then you might
00:23:41.660 think, well, what is it in you that's trying to avoid? Because after all, you took the damn course
00:23:47.980 and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen? Well, because you're a mess. That's
00:23:55.340 basically why. You haven't got control over yourself at all. And no more than I have control over this
00:24:02.220 laptop. Okay. So there's the memory function of, of, of the unconscious and there's the
00:24:09.680 dissolutive function. That's an interesting one. The unconscious contains habits once voluntary,
00:24:15.660 now automatized and dissociated elements of the personality, which may lead to parasitic existence.
00:24:21.520 That's an interesting one. I would relate that more to procedural memory, you know? So what you've
00:24:26.560 done is practice certain habits, whatever they might be. Let's call them bad habits. And you'd like
00:24:31.740 those things to get under control, but you can't. So maybe when you're speaking, for example,
00:24:35.940 you use like, and you know, and you say, I'm a lot and you've practiced that. So you're really good
00:24:41.080 at it and you'd like to stop it, but you don't get to, because you've built that little machine
00:24:46.120 right into your being, right? It's neurologically wired and it's not under conscious control. And
00:24:51.620 anything you practice becomes that it becomes part of you. And that's another element of the
00:24:57.440 unconscious, a different part. And then there's a creative part, which is that, well, you know,
00:25:02.420 you're sitting around and maybe you're trying to write something, or maybe you want to produce a
00:25:07.740 piece of art or a piece of music, or maybe you're just laying in bed dreaming and you have all these
00:25:12.060 weird ideas. And especially in dreams, it's like, what, where do those things come from?
00:25:16.700 And even more strange. One of the things that's really weird about dreams and almost impossibly
00:25:23.360 weird is that you're an observer in the dream. It's like a dream is something that happens to
00:25:27.320 you. Well, you're dreaming it theoretically. So how is it that you can be an observer? It's almost
00:25:34.200 like you're watching a video game or a movie, but you're producing it that at least in principle,
00:25:39.240 although the psychoanalysts would say, well, no, not exactly. Your ego isn't producing it.
00:25:43.500 Your unconscious is producing. It's a different thing. It's a different thing. And of course,
00:25:47.480 Jung would say, well, it's deeper than that. The collective unconscious might be producing it.
00:25:51.420 It's in some sense, it isn't you exactly, or it isn't the you that you think of when you think of
00:25:56.420 you. And that's the ego from the Freudian perspective, the you that you identify with,
00:26:01.020 that's the ego. And outside of that is the unconscious, the id. That's more the place of impulses.
00:26:07.340 And you could think about those as the biological subsystems that can derail your thinking,
00:26:11.440 right? And that govern things like hunger and sex and aggression. And your basic
00:26:15.660 instincts is another way of putting it. And it's a reasonable way of thinking about it,
00:26:19.660 because these are subsystems that you share with animals. You share them certainly with mammals.
00:26:24.460 You share most of them with reptiles. You share a lot of them with amphibians. And even going all
00:26:29.280 the way down to crustaceans, there's commonality, for example, in the dominance hierarchy circuits.
00:26:33.780 And so these are very, very old things. And the idea that you're in control of them is,
00:26:40.000 well, you're not exactly in control of them. And I would say the less integrated you are,
00:26:46.800 the less you're in control of them. And the more they're in control of you.
00:26:50.880 And that can get really out of hand. You know, you can be like with people who have obsessive
00:26:56.620 compulsive disorder, for example, which, which, which is, which seems to be, I would say that
00:27:02.200 dissolutive elements in some sense of the unconscious, the way that it's portrayed here,
00:27:06.540 poor people with obsessive compulsive disorder, they can spend half their time doing things that
00:27:11.540 they can't really control. And they have very strong impulses to do them. And it's very hard
00:27:15.840 on them to block them. You know, they, they'll almost panic if those things are blocked. And then
00:27:20.040 you have people with Tourette's syndrome, you know, that they'll be doing all sorts of weird
00:27:24.440 dances and, and spouting off obscenities and, and, and, and imitating people without being able to
00:27:31.660 control it. And, and sometimes a little bit of antipsychotic medication can dampen that down,
00:27:37.040 but it's as if there are these autonomous semi spirits inside of them that grip control over
00:27:42.140 their behavior and make them do things. And, you know, you find that to some degree in your own
00:27:47.100 life, because maybe you've become very attracted to someone, even maybe you don't want to be
00:27:51.480 attracted to the person. And then you find yourself, you know, texting them when you know
00:27:55.300 perfectly well that you should be going to bed. And, you know, you're, you're in a grip of
00:27:59.040 something and, and you can't control it. And that's all part of the unconscious and all part of what
00:28:03.480 Freud was studying. The dynamic unconscious, it's alive and it's a composite. The mind is a composite
00:28:10.280 of contradictory drives. Now, the way Freud thought about this basically was that with the id and the
00:28:17.340 ego and the superego. So if you think about the id as the place where these contradictory
00:28:22.100 drives emerge, so it's sort of nature within the ego is the thing that's sort of being pushed back
00:28:27.600 and forth by those contradictory drives. And the superego is the thing that's on top saying,
00:28:32.780 you better behave yourself. You better behave yourself. And so it's a different model than
00:28:36.720 the Piagetian model because Piaget assumed that what would happen is that as the child,
00:28:42.780 and I like the Piagetian model better. I think, I think in healthy development,
00:28:47.280 the Piagetian model is correct, but in unhealthy development, I think the Freudian model is
00:28:51.880 correct. That instead of integrating, say the aggressive and sexual drives for the sake of
00:28:57.320 argument into your personality, as you develop, what happens is the superego just represses them
00:29:02.220 instead. So they don't become a dynamic part of you integrated into your ego. They're just repressed.
00:29:08.100 You just don't manifest them. And so that's how you be a good person. And you can be the
00:29:12.440 victim of a very harsh superego. And that often happens if you've had a particularly tyrannical
00:29:17.580 parent, one or both, or maybe a tyrannical grandparent, or maybe you're your own inner
00:29:23.400 tyrant and you've picked up tyrannical voices through your whole life and aggregated them into
00:29:27.880 this terrible judge. That's always watching you. That's criticizing everything you do and
00:29:32.880 restricting you badly and really badly and what you're allowed and not allowed to do.
00:29:37.540 You see that with anorexic women. Well, men could be anorexic too, but it's much, much
00:29:42.600 less rare. They have superegos that are just, or it's one way of thinking about it. That's
00:29:46.300 just, they're just deadly. They're just criticizing every bit of them. Well, right to the point,
00:29:51.620 they're really criticizing them out of existence, right? Is you have to be so perfect that the
00:29:56.660 perfection is not aligned with the ability to live. You don't get to eat, you know, and, and
00:30:03.280 people like that, they look at their bodies. They even look at their bodies incorrectly. Like
00:30:07.920 anorexics seem to be unable to see their bodies as a whole. They can only see their bodies as parts.
00:30:13.780 And when you start seeing your body as parts, you're really in trouble because you can't get a
00:30:17.840 sense of actually what it looks like. And body perception is very, very complicated. But
00:30:21.980 anyways, Piaget thought about the ego as, in some sense, as the game that's played by all these
00:30:30.400 dynamic drives that's shaped by the broader community. And so that could all be integrated.
00:30:34.780 But Freud would say, well, look, when that doesn't happen, instead, you're subject to the tyranny of
00:30:39.520 the superego. And it just says, you should never be angry, right? You should never express yourself
00:30:43.920 sexually because if you do, there's something wrong with you. You're a bad person and you're a bad person
00:30:48.460 if you ever get aggressive or, and so, and then people who are living like that under those
00:30:53.800 circumstances, you know, they get, they, well, they're, they're repressed is the right way to
00:31:00.040 think about it. Now, Freud was interested in the idea that mental disorders could be caused
00:31:08.320 for two reasons. One would be purely bodily, like maybe a head injury or say in the case of
00:31:13.980 schizophrenia, which is a good example, or manic depressive disorder. We have reason to believe
00:31:18.280 that there's something physiological going on, even though by identifying that has been very
00:31:23.340 difficult. And it's probably because there isn't one form of schizophrenia. There's probably many
00:31:27.520 pathways of brain injury that lead to schizophrenic like symptoms. And there's likely not one form of
00:31:33.300 manic depressive disorder either. If you think of the form as having a standard causal pathway,
00:31:38.380 we know that there are, because we've done genetic studies on people who have manic depressive
00:31:44.380 disorder in their family, and you can identify genes within a family that seem to be contributing to
00:31:48.860 the disorder. But the problem is, is that those genes don't seem to be. So then you'll take another
00:31:53.620 family group with manic depressive disorder, and it'll be a different genetic combination that
00:31:57.380 causes that. So, so part of the reason why it's difficult to associate the, even the more biological
00:32:06.120 mental disorders with, with biology all the way down is because they're so complex. And then there are
00:32:11.940 other forms of, of mental disorder that don't seem to be structural at all, structural at all. They seem
00:32:17.560 to have more to do with, well, let's call it the psyche, right? And that it's more like the contents
00:32:22.480 of your thought have a problem rather than the structures underlying your thought. And of course,
00:32:28.100 that distinction is, is difficult to make in a fine grained way, but you kind of get the point. I mean,
00:32:33.480 just because there's an error in your thinking doesn't mind really mean that the underlying biology in
00:32:38.620 some sense has been compromised. It's complicated because if the error is bad enough, then it can
00:32:43.080 compromise the underlying biology, but, but whatever, it's a conceptual distinction. And part of the
00:32:49.020 conceptual distinction is, is helpful. If you're trying to think at least in part about how you
00:32:54.320 might cure it, because if you're thinking about a brain disease, then that implies a different course
00:33:01.220 of treatment, at least in principle, then it does. If you're thinking about a psychological disorder,
00:33:06.060 where you might think about talking to someone, for example, and straightening out their thoughts
00:33:10.340 or helping them learn to behave in a different way. And, uh, it was really Freud who started to
00:33:16.660 think that he was the first person to really pause it. And this is pretty interesting to directly
00:33:21.900 pause it that dialogue or conversation or speaking could be curative. And that is another thing that
00:33:28.560 people don't like to give him credit for. I mean, there wouldn't be all these helping industries,
00:33:34.180 social, social, social work and psychology and biological psychiatry. And so far as that also involves
00:33:41.060 communication and counseling and all of these things. Now that would have existed in all likelihood, if Freud
00:33:47.500 wouldn't have made the original hypothesis that there was something about communication that could be
00:33:55.020 curative. Now, Freud believed that experiences that hadn't been now, he thought about experiences,
00:34:04.020 as repressed. And this goes back to the videotape idea of memory. So the idea would be that you have
00:34:09.940 a record of everything that's happened to you and the records actually accurate. And then some of
00:34:14.980 those things that happened to you were very, very shocking to you or very hurtful or very depressing or
00:34:19.980 very threatening. And so you've decided that you're, those have become repressed. You're not paying any
00:34:28.280 attention to them. Now he has a complex mechanism to account for that. And I actually think this is a place
00:34:33.080 where his theory went badly wrong because you don't have a videotape memory. And it isn't obvious that
00:34:39.400 the memories that you have of traumatic events are fully fledged and causally appropriate, but just not
00:34:47.380 paid attention to. It's more like they're murky and unclear in and of themselves and they contain too
00:34:54.140 much. And I don't think that people so much repress as they do refuse to attend to or are unable to
00:35:02.040 attend to. So it's more like a passive avoidance than a passive avoidance of something that needs
00:35:06.680 to be explored and gone through rather than it is something, you know, that you don't want to look
00:35:12.160 at that you are part of you has put away. And I think that's a major weakness in his theory and has
00:35:17.640 led to a lot of problems with the idea of repression per se. But anyways, that was his idea that
00:35:22.660 terrible things have happened to you and you or some part of you doesn't want to, to,
00:35:29.040 to know about them, to know about them. And so they live this, those repressed experiences live
00:35:35.380 an autonomous life of their own too. And you, you, here's an example of a trivial example of how that
00:35:41.800 might work. Imagine that you're at work and your boss says something to you that disturbs you. Maybe
00:35:48.160 it makes you question whether your job is stable. And so you're kind of upset about that, but it's a
00:35:52.400 casual offhand comment and you go back to work and you just sort of forget that that even happened.
00:35:58.420 You know, maybe because you're attending to something else, but then you go home and you're
00:36:01.920 just crabby as, as can possibly be. And you go home and one of the people there says something a
00:36:06.260 little annoying and you snap at them. It's like, well, that's analogous to what Freud would call a
00:36:11.460 complex, right? Is that this, because you can imagine what's happened is that the boss's words have
00:36:17.200 brought up a whole little sub personality predicated on doubt up to the surface. And who
00:36:23.380 knows how deep that would be? Well, what happens if I lose my job? And if I lose my job, well, what
00:36:27.520 sort of person am I exactly? And what about all these other times that I've failed? And then maybe
00:36:32.420 you remember the other times that you failed in, what am I going to do in the future? And so it's
00:36:35.780 this whole cluster of ideas that surrounds that doubt. And that's been activated. It's just a little
00:36:40.680 part of you. And then maybe you're not attending to that because you're busy doing some other work.
00:36:44.840 But when you go home, something triggers it. And like, it's already there. It's already, you get way
00:36:49.660 more upset than you should. And that's, that's what a complex is, except in a much more complicated
00:36:55.180 manner. Like a complex might be a whole series of experiences that you've had that are united by some
00:37:03.020 emotion, like threat, that aren't, haven't been transformed into a coherent representation, but that
00:37:09.720 can rise out of the unconscious and possess you. If you guys, many of you guys have been,
00:37:14.560 depressed at at least one point in your life, you know, it's, it's actually very common for
00:37:19.720 University of Toronto students, especially in their first year. It's about one in three. If you,
00:37:26.960 if you have students, the Beck depression inventory, but one in three Toronto University
00:37:31.380 of Toronto students in our research have, have hit criteria for hospitalization. I mean,
00:37:36.520 the Beck is a little oversensitive as far as I'm concerned, but, but you know what it's like
00:37:40.160 when you're depressed, it's like, it's, it's, it's a part of your personality sort of subsumes
00:37:45.040 the whole and depression quite classically is, well, you can't think of anything good
00:37:49.400 that happened to you in the past. And you can't think of any reason why the present is good
00:37:53.020 for anything. And you're pretty damn hopeless about the future. And so that's a complex as
00:37:57.940 well. And it's a complex that consists of nothing but negative emotion. And it structures
00:38:02.360 your memory and your perception and your plans for the future all at the same time. Now, Freud
00:38:09.540 had a very lengthy list of ways that people could be treacherous towards experiences they had that
00:38:17.220 they wanted to repress. And so he called them defense mechanisms. This is how you fool yourself
00:38:22.840 into believing that you don't have to take into account a certain set of negative experiences.
00:38:28.940 You know, it's like, well, we'll go through the repression. Okay, well, we talked about that
00:38:34.120 denial. Well, that often denial is a very complicated one. See if I can come up with a good example.
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00:41:34.980 It was a classic example for people who have, I think it's called anasognosia. I don't remember
00:41:39.360 exactly. It's neglect. That's a less technical way of thinking about it. So let's say you have
00:41:43.900 a right parietal damage from a stroke and you'll lose the left side of your body so you can't move
00:41:48.900 it anymore. But worse, you don't know it's there and you don't know that the left side of anything
00:41:53.520 is there anymore. And God only knows how that happens. But like you'll only eat half the food
00:41:58.140 on your plate, only on the right hand side. And if someone asks you to draw a clock, you'll cram
00:42:02.540 all the numbers into the one side. And so you kind of lose the idea of left. And I think it's sort of
00:42:07.900 like, you know how when you're looking forward, there's nothing behind you. You can't see anything
00:42:11.940 back here. It's not black. It's not even gone. It's just simply not there at all. And so if you could
00:42:19.360 imagine that sort of stretching around halfway, that seems to be something what neglect is like.
00:42:24.600 But anyways, if you take someone with neglect, according to Ramachandran, and if you irrigate
00:42:29.880 their ear with cold water, the ear on the opposite side, then they'll kind of have a little convulsion.
00:42:36.280 And then all of a sudden they become aware of their missing left side. If you talk to them before
00:42:42.740 you do the irrigation, you say, well, well, what's up with your left arm? And they'll say, well,
00:42:46.860 my arthritis is bothering me and I don't want to move it. They come up with some something that
00:42:52.740 sounds akin to denial, you know? And then if you can snap them out of that with that irrigation,
00:42:57.440 then they'll have a catastrophic emotional response, logically enough, to the loss of their
00:43:02.540 entire left side. And Ramachandran reports that lasting about 20 minutes, and then they'll snap out
00:43:07.680 of it and go right back into the denial. And sometimes people deny things because they can't update.
00:43:14.560 What's happened to them is so overwhelming that they cannot construct a new model. They just rely
00:43:19.640 on the old one. And you see this. Well, imagine first that you've just had a tooth pulled and you
00:43:25.960 know how many, how long your tongue takes to like remap the inside of your mouth. It's really hard to
00:43:30.480 come up with a new concept of you if something catastrophic happens. And so sometimes the denial
00:43:35.820 is just that something, the thing that has happened is so overwhelming that the person can't model it.
00:43:41.100 But then maybe also they refuse to think about it. And you see this emerging in lots of strange
00:43:47.340 ways. So for example, if people develop diabetes, for example, they're often not very good at taking
00:43:52.800 their medication or regulating their diet. And you might say, well, they're denying the existence of
00:43:57.460 their illness. And to some degree, they're probably doing that because who the hell wants to think that
00:44:01.760 they're diabetic? But even worse than that, it's like, it's complicated to be diabetic. You're no longer
00:44:06.960 the same person that you were. And so you have to learn a whole bunch of new ways to be this new
00:44:11.960 person, what to eat, when to eat, how to check your blood. You have to be careful whenever you go out
00:44:17.140 and eat. Like there's, there's a hundred new things a day that you have to learn. And so separating
00:44:22.720 denial from inability is a hard one, but you can also understand that people might deny, no, that's
00:44:27.900 just not happening. That's, that's, I'm not going to admit to that reaction formation. Oh, that's one.
00:44:34.000 Maybe you hate your sister and maybe you have your reasons, but you shouldn't hate your sister. So
00:44:38.840 what you do is act as if you really, really like her. That's an overcompensation. So that's another
00:44:44.680 form of, of defense mechanism. Displacement. My boss yells at me. I yell at my husband. My husband
00:44:51.400 yells at the baby. The baby bites the cat. Well, they're not really dealing with the problem,
00:44:56.240 which is the boss. It's just pushed on down the road and identification. You're bullied. And instead of
00:45:03.980 coming to terms with the fact that bullying occurs, you start bullying other people, uh,
00:45:09.820 rationalization. Well, you know what that means already. You know, maybe you don't do your homework.
00:45:15.800 You're procrastinating. I bet you can come up with 15 rationalizations. No problem for why it's
00:45:21.220 actually not necessary for you to do your homework right then. Intellectualization. Well, Woody Allen's
00:45:27.120 movies are about like that. He's got all these neurotic problems, but he's smart. And so he can come
00:45:31.960 up with intelligent reasons why he's so messed up, even though he knows he's messed up and it doesn't
00:45:37.640 help. Sublimation. Well, that, that was one of the things that Freud thought characterized art.
00:45:44.340 So for example, there's a lot of erotic content in art. And so if you're having trouble establishing a
00:45:49.460 relationship, or if you want to have a relationship with many people, then maybe what you do is sculpt
00:45:53.880 nudes or paint them. And then there's projection, which is, um, I'm having an argument with you and I'm
00:46:00.820 unwilling to admit to my, my dark motivations. And I'm very skeptical of you. And so I assume
00:46:06.380 that you're characterized by all the dark motivations that I won't admit to in myself. So
00:46:11.400 now Freud also believed that it was unconscious ideas that were at the core of psychological
00:46:19.320 conflicts. And he described those conflicts as incomprehensible distress, psychosomatic
00:46:24.860 symptoms. And so those would be the manifestation of psychological, uh, of, uh, the manifestation of
00:46:32.240 psychological content in bodily form. So that might be stress, a stress-related illness might be one way
00:46:37.920 of thinking about that. Um, I've had clients who had hysterical epilepsy, so that was quite interesting.
00:46:43.360 So that was a somatic manifestation of a psychological problem. Um, back when Freud was, uh,
00:46:50.780 practicing hysteria was much more common and maybe that was partly because Victorian society was so
00:46:57.180 centered on the theater and so dramatic and people would come in with like a paralyzed arm or something
00:47:02.140 like that, that he could sort out with hypnosis. And so they were manifesting their psychological
00:47:08.100 distress in bodily form, often in a manner that was representative of that psychological conflict in
00:47:16.140 some way, uh, behavioral anomalies, hallucinations, and delusions. He thought that all of those could
00:47:21.980 be, uh, manifestations of inner internal psychological conflict with their sets of unconscious ideas.
00:47:30.280 So, you know, let's go back to the, to the boss example. Your boss says something nasty to you,
00:47:37.100 come home, someone says something a bit provoking and you fly off the handle. And then you have an
00:47:42.100 argument about what the hell's up with you because they say, well, look, what I said was,
00:47:46.140 you know, this big and you reacted like this and you're going to say, well, no, no, you're always
00:47:51.160 annoying like that. And which is kind of a denial thing. And maybe the person doesn't let up and
00:47:56.540 they say, no, no, I really know that something's wrong. And you do like six other things to keep
00:48:00.380 them the hell away from you. And finally they're persistent enough. So you break down crying and you
00:48:04.700 say, well, I had this terrible day at work and you didn't even really notice that you knew that
00:48:09.660 until the moment of the moment of the tears. And you see that very frequently in psychotherapy too.
00:48:15.340 If you're talking to people, for example, maybe they're relating a story about their,
00:48:19.680 their marriage that collapsed badly and they're talking and all of a sudden they'll say something
00:48:24.380 and they'll tear up and then they'll continue. And you can grab that. You say, look, you just said
00:48:29.220 something. I noticed that your eyes filled with tears. When you said that, what was going through
00:48:34.060 your mind now, often they'll, they, unless you catch it quick, they'll forget. So they're talking
00:48:40.620 and they'll have, and the talking about the past is, you know, flashing off imagistic memories.
00:48:46.280 And you'll say, well, that made you cry. And, and they, they often don't like that because
00:48:50.960 for obvious reasons that something's come up that they don't want to talk about. And so you say,
00:48:56.480 well, what was flashing through your mind? And the person will tell you like quite a lengthy
00:49:00.240 little memory fantasy about a sequence of events that, you know, is still a hot button issue.
00:49:06.860 And that's another example of this underlying complex, you know, and if you watch people,
00:49:12.940 you can watch people in normal conversation. This happens all the time. Their eyes will move or
00:49:16.720 they'll smile, or you can see as they're speaking that all sorts of different ideas are flitting
00:49:21.880 through their head. It's dreamlike in a sense too. It's sort of as if the person is talking
00:49:26.500 and they're dreaming at the same time. There's this image laden set of memories that's going on at the
00:49:31.880 same time. And that can be quite broad, far broader than they could encapsulate in the words.
00:49:37.340 And so you can catch that. And if you're really listening to someone, really paying attention
00:49:41.080 to them, you can see when they're doubtful or when they pause for a long time, that's another one,
00:49:46.180 you know, that something's come up that, that that's occupying their mind and interfering with
00:49:51.140 the flow of conversation. Freud was very good at listening in that manner. Well, that happens with
00:49:57.660 jokes too, you know, and like, for example, when I was showing you guys, the lion King stills the other
00:50:04.920 day. And I showed you that picture of Nella laying on her back with that peculiar expression on her
00:50:10.160 face. Everybody immediately laughed. And Freud would have considered that an entry point into
00:50:16.380 the unconscious because there was a reason you were laughing about it. It goes along with it.
00:50:20.400 Well, it would have gone along with a sexual complex in that situation. And everybody recognizes
00:50:24.640 it instantly and they laugh about it. And comedians are really good at that because if they're good
00:50:29.760 comedians, they say what everyone's thinking, but no one will say, and it's a relief to everyone,
00:50:34.720 you know, what's his name? Canadian comedian. He's always making racial jokes. No, no, it's Canadian.
00:50:45.640 Yeah. Russell, Russell Peters. I mean, he's a great example of that. You know, he fills a whole stadium
00:50:50.320 with people of all different ethnicities and every single one of them is dying to be insulted because
00:50:55.660 of their racial background. You know, it's a relief to everyone. So he insults the Arabs and then he
00:51:00.400 insults the Jews and then he insults the Christians and everybody's going, Oh, I'm so glad finally
00:51:04.640 someone said that. No. So, so he's speaking to part of their unconscious and it's the part that's
00:51:10.360 actually uncomfortable with all of that kind of discussion being repressed and staying below
00:51:15.920 the surface. It's way too weighty for people. So jokes express in playful language, what culture will
00:51:22.080 not formally express. So, you know, too, that when the culture starts going after the comedians, that
00:51:27.180 things are not good. So you should leave the damn comedians alone because there are the people that
00:51:31.620 can tell the truth. And if you start to get annoyed at them, then that's not good. So, so Freud was also
00:51:39.480 extraordinarily interested in dreams. Poor Freud. We're just not going to be able to cover him in
00:51:45.860 enough detail. Well, um, how will we do this? Cause I should tell you about the dreams.
00:51:56.260 Freud wrote a book called the interpretation of dreams. And he, he was the first person I would say
00:52:01.640 who subjected dreams to a really comprehensive analysis. And he used them to investigate the
00:52:08.940 place of complexes in his psychotherapeutic practice. So his clients would recount their dreams to him. Now,
00:52:14.900 he believed that dreams always expressed an unconscious wish, and that was tied into his
00:52:20.200 theory of repression. And so, for example, if you were very, very sexually repressed, which was very
00:52:25.540 common at the time, then you'd have dreams with sexual content that were expressing the, the, uh,
00:52:32.800 expressing the undesirable fantasy essentially. And by analyzing the dream, you could get down to what
00:52:39.080 you could get down to what was being repressed. Now, Freud believed that the dream,
00:52:44.900 more or less tied itself in knots, trying to hide its content in some sense. And Jung believed instead
00:52:51.200 that the dream was actually trying to be as clear as it could. It just wasn't part of the,
00:52:55.580 let's call it the semantic memory system. It was, it was more like a feeler out into the unknown. It
00:53:00.540 was trying to represent things as clearly as it could. And so its use of symbols and that sort of
00:53:06.180 thing wasn't so much to hide the actual unpleasant content from the dreamer, but to express it in the
00:53:12.300 only language that the dream could use. And so Freud, of course, also believed that some of that was
00:53:17.640 true. All right. Well, we're going to have to stop there.
00:53:20.800 I hope you enjoyed this episode. Next week is dad's first actual interview podcast in two years.
00:53:32.600 You heard that right. An actual interview podcast. The following is a message from one of our sponsors,
00:53:40.920 Wondery, the new Jack swing sound. You know, the songs, Bobby Brown's my prerogative,
00:53:46.860 Bell, Biv, Devoe's Poison, Blackstreet's No Diggity. It wasn't just hit songs. It became a
00:53:53.120 movement that took over music, culture, and style. Wondery and Universal Music Group present
00:53:59.320 Jacked, Rise of the New Jack Sound, hosted by Taraji P. Henson. Jacked follows the story of a group of
00:54:07.500 young musicians who use their unique style and undeniable talents to create a new kind of music,
00:54:13.280 new Jack swing. Go behind the scenes and into the recording studio with movement's most influential
00:54:19.820 artists as they create music unlike anything that had been heard before and forever changed American
00:54:25.960 culture. You're about to hear a preview of Jacked, Rise of the New Jack Sound. While you're listening,
00:54:32.000 be sure to subscribe to Jacked on Apple Podcasts. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen to the
00:54:39.300 entire series ad-free. Listen today at wondery.fm slash jacked underscore jvp.
00:54:56.180 Have you ever had a dream? Something you wanted so bad you just couldn't let it go?
00:55:02.000 For Timmy Gatling, his dream was music.
00:55:07.960 And we were hip-hop and ARMY. We were unique because we dressed fly. We knew all the hip-hop stuff.
00:55:15.000 You're like, wow, these little kids are dangerous. And in 1989, the group he founded had made it.
00:55:23.680 They're getting ready to go on stage in front of 41,000 people at the Los Angeles Coliseum in the crowd
00:55:30.720 of fly girls wearing Donna Karan jumpsuits. Guys wearing leather troop bomber jackets and
00:55:36.180 obsession cologne is all in the air. This is the biggest black music tour of the day.
00:55:44.340 I was there. It was in L.A. It was the Budweiser Superfest.
00:55:47.520 The Budweiser Superfest.
00:55:49.940 You know, I remember what a big deal the Superfest was back in the day, honey. It was the kind of show we
00:55:57.780 would get our hair did, our nails did, our everything did did. In the summer of 89, rappers Kool Moe D and
00:56:05.480 MC Hammer are on the bill. Patti LaBelle and Timmy Gatling's group, Guy.
00:56:12.260 All right. Trim. Flat top haircut. Well dressed. Timmy moves through the crowd of VIPs and people
00:56:20.340 recognize him. Hey, what's up? What's up, man? But here's the thing. Timmy isn't playing with his
00:56:27.180 group that day. And so people asking me, why are you not on stage? What's up? You're not
00:56:31.300 performing? Yo, Timmy, you're not performing? Because what they don't know is that Timmy is
00:56:38.280 no longer in the group. What? The fans didn't know. It was like a conundrum. People was like,
00:56:45.840 okay, wait a minute. It was confusing. That was worse than anything. Instead, Timmy watches his
00:56:53.000 former bandmates as they go on stage without him. And now he's watching as the crowd at the L.A.
00:57:08.100 Coliseum go off. Guy's dreams have come true, but not Timmy's. There's no other, how can I put it?
00:57:22.560 It was totally bittersweet. You're hearing your songs. It takes you back to how y'all wrote the
00:57:29.900 songs, where you were at in the hood in Teddy's living room. And now they up on stage and you're
00:57:35.900 not a part of it. Well, what happened to Timmy's dream? I mean, how did this group of kids from
00:57:44.060 Harlem rise to the top of the music industry only to come apart? The story of Guy and New Jack Swing
00:57:51.780 is a story of friendship, double crosses, gangsters, two-timing, and the invention of a new sound that
00:57:59.800 changed pop music forever. And if you listen close, you can hear it all in the mix.
00:58:06.800 From Wondery and Universal Music Group, I'm Taraji P. Henson, and this is Jacked.
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