The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 146. Sigmund Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious

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

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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

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00:01:54.120 on sale November 26th. Second update. Tomorrow, November 23rd, 2020, my dad is releasing a YouTube

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00:02:08.700 Enjoy this episode and your week and the course if you buy it and the announcement tomorrow.

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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... 0.51

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, 0.94

00:12:20.540 their hair short or smoked were hardly to be found. And the universities admitted no female students. 0.97

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 1.00

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 0.98

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, 0.99

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, 0.99

00:15:23.340 because everything about it is dangerous. It's dangerous emotionally, it's dangerous socially, 0.99

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 0.98

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 1.00

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 1.00

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, 0.99

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 0.99

00:23:47.980 and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen? Well, because you're a mess. That's 0.99

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 0.97

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.93

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 1.00

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 0.81

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 0.99

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 0.99

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.

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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.

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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

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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

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00:56:12.260 All right. Trim. Flat top haircut. Well dressed. Timmy moves through the crowd of VIPs and people

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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.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 22, 2020

146. Sigmund Freud and the Dynamic Unconscious

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