Core Colloquy: "Freud in the 21st Century: Psychoanalysis and/or Psychology"

good evening we're going to get started I expect some people will continue to struggle in but we want to make maximum use of our time so we're going to get started my name is Ray Hilliard and I'm the coordinator of the core course I'm glad to see so many people here this evening it's hard to say whether Sigmund Freud since he first invented psychoanalysis in the last the late 19th century has been more controversial or more influential during the last quarter of a century or more there's been a consistent attack on Freud and his ideas while at the same time psychoanalytic theory has continued to influence our thoughts about human behavior about human behavior even though we don't always realize that we're thinking in Freudian terms have you ever described a person as anal or anal compulsive as being in denial as being emotionally repressed or as having a love/hate relationship with something or someone if so then you've absorbed ways of thinking about human behavior that come to us from Freud we hope that our session this evening will help you better understand Freud's role in the development of modern culture and it has been a very significant role and the reasons why he remains controversial our moderator is the chair of the you our Department of Psychology dr. Jane Barry and she'll briefly tell you more about what to expect and introduce our featured speakers Thank You dr. Hilyard and thanks to dr. Tom Bonfield from modern literate literature's and cultures for suggesting the idea for this forum the three of us and my colleague Scott Allison from psychology have taught Freud's civilization and its discontents in the core course all of our first-year students many of whom are here tonight are reading are about to read this text our speakers tonight will address Freud's legacy in the 21st century we will open with an argument for the staying power of some of Freud's most influential ideas from dr. Timothy Halsey an associate professor of clinical psychology and Dean of the Honors College at Virginia Commonwealth University our own Scott Allison professor of social psychology at the University of Richmond will offer a rejoinder I'd say a rebuttal but that's way too fraught with Freudian meaning dr. dr. Halsey will speak for no more than thirty minutes followed by a 15 minute reply from dr. Allison and then we will open it up to the floor for questions from you especially students so faculty try to put a lid on it it's actually an auspicious year to hold such an event it's the 100th anniversary of Freud's only visit to America where he lectured at the invitation of G Stanley Hall at Clark University in August of 1909 William James from Harvard showed up to see what Freud was like literally to see what Freud was like were his words we're glad you showed up tonight to see what Freud is like and was like and now dr. Timothy Halsey [Applause] good evening thanks for turning up on such a lovely evening to hear us talk about long dead men and their ideas I'm gonna pass these pictures around and just have a look and pass them along and hopefully by the time I get to the point where I want to discuss them you'll have all seen them it's an interesting interesting fact that over the past probably 40 years there's been a dramatic decrease in the teaching of Freud and Freudian ideas in Americans like psychology departments instead in the United States where Freud Freudian ideas are taught at all they tend to be taught in departments of literature or philosophy when psycho and psycho analytic ideas are taught in psychology classes they're almost always oversimplified and/or misrepresented how many of you have had an intro psych class a couple of you so you'll know what I'm talking about most introductory psychology techs present a sensationalized version of psychoanalytic theory that focuses on infantile sexuality and the psychosexual stages and they're presented as though this were the pinnacle of Freudian thinking and that his ideas on the subjects were clear and of course when you studied Freud for as long as I have you realized that neither of those things are true they those ideas occurred toward about midway through his career or earlier and were in fact never clear in his mind in the way that they're presented in in texts the other mistake that's often made in introductory text and it occurs in other personality texts abnormal psych texts is that they never teach you the intellectual context within which these ideas were developed nor do they teach you that most of the language that Freud used was metaphorical the it'd is not a thing the ego is not a thing the anal stage is a metaphor for the period of life when at that point in history and still in most Western cultures children are trained are potty trained and the struggles and issues that are thought to occur with children at that time the oral stage is a metaphorical description for the period of a child's life when he or she uses his or her mouth to explore the world it's highly metaphorical in which but it gets reified in textbooks and presented to you as though it's a thing is a clear idea and it's easily ridiculed when these books and faculty often talk about Freud and they present him as ridiculous obsessed with sex and probably addicted to cocaine neither of those things was true he was a very bourgeois middle class Austrian Jew with very bourgeois middle class Austrian Jewish morals and like almost all educated people of his class tried cocaine in the 1890s and quit it most texts ignore his later writings and offer little or no discussion of any of the psychoanalytic ideas that have been developed since Freud's death anyone here could write a one-page one just one page double spaced 12 point font paper on object relations Theory anyone ego psychology self psychology that's my point so all of the ideas of modern psychoanalysis get left out of these discussions of psychoanalytic theory in certainly introductory texts but even in advanced undergraduate psych texts instead Freud gets presented as unscientific his ideas unsupported a historical footnote to be reviewed and then quickly passed on in favor of modern psychological ideas excuse me in part these biases stem from the fact that most textbooks are written by experimental psychologists with no clinical experience who have never studied formally typically typically psychoanalytic ideas he's by C's also stem from the fact the psychoanalysis the theory of psychoanalysis never really has had a home in American academic psychology psychoanalysis came into the u.s. through this psychiatric community and particularly through psychiatrists who practice while this is happening Freud's in at Clark in Worcester in 1909 Americans the university had departments of psychology that were beginning with initially the early behavioral models Watson and all of that and then later in the 20s and 30s moving into a more formal behaviorism eventually arriving at Skinner and then information processing theories in the 50s and then cognitive psychology in the 60s and 70s and then cognitive neuroscience in the 70s and 80s and now cognitive neuroscience continuing and evolutionary psychology taking place alongside of it all that's happening in American academic departments of psychology and so what you see is that you have this basis of study within the department's of psychology and then you see psychoanalysis for much of the 20th century as the dominant theory practiced by a particularly psychiatrist who are out in practice so this antagonistic relationship is created almost from the outset and so when after World War two clinical psychology emerges and Freudian ideas begin to trickle into departments of psychology they're not met with a warm reception so our question tonight then is why if most of the things that you get taught in your undergraduate psychology education if those things are true why then are we here in 2009 more than 150 years after Freud's death talking about this guy and why is it as very pointed out earlier the so many of our ideas about psychology and about each other have at their origins psychoanalytic roots and often it's there so it so permeates our culture that we don't even realize if that's where those ideas came from why hasn't this guy been removed to the dustbin of history with all those other nineteenth-century charlatans and cranks that's the question my undergraduate experience is probably not too different from yours I was taught by experimental psychologists who required books written by experimental psychologists who poo-pooed Freud and initially I didn't think much of it I mean it seemed reasonable they were all much more excited about modern theories and their own research and it was infectious and fact I didn't set out to be a psychology major thought maybe philosophy year I don't know something else but I had some very talented and enthusiastic psychology professors who really pulled me in and so I took undertook an undergraduate degree in psychology and started these ideas and I don't know round about my junior year I started to have a question at first to myself and later out loud to the dismay of my professors if this guy's so ridiculous why is he so famous most ridiculous people pass away into the mists of history you don't hear anything about them but this guy didn't that hadn't happened in fact his ideas had all kinds of cultural currency and currency in fields outside of psychology that were quite relevant and quite lively but in psychology the field he was he's often credited with having founded placed by some his ideas were ridiculed well I was curious why that was and I became more curious and then eventually through my graduate education and there's some intentional choices began to learn that there were a number of things about this theory that make it interesting not the least of which is it's very complex and nuanced and it seemed to fit with my own experience of what it is to be human especially when it comes to understanding oneself I don't know if you ever noticed this but our friends are very easy to understand but we not so much you could always tell your friends what to do and your advice is usually good but when it comes to solving your own problems it's a mystery and so this idea that that knowing oneself would be an easy task never made sense to me and and the psychoanalyst psychoanalytic theorist comes at it from a perspective of saying it's not easy and in fact much of it's hidden from you I learned some other things Ford's ideas about human nature as I've mentioned and culture as you know from reading a civilization and its discontents or complex and sophisticated an app look applicable to a wide range of ideas beyond individual psychology my colleagues in philosophy and literature and history never want to talk to me about cognitive psychology about behaviorism Freud's theories played a signal role in our understanding of literature and biography art and music history and politics sociology and anthropology and even linguistics rhetoric and philosophy not to mention our understandings of mass culture and advertising Freudian ideas permeate our understanding of each other this rate pointed out earlier even when we don't recognize that they were Freud I also learned that critics often misunderstand Freudian theory or attack out-of-date versions of psychoanalytic theory psychoanalysis hard to believe is not mummified I just had a friend who was turned down in his application to join the psychoanalytic training Institute in San Francisco they still exist and they still even turn people down Freud's dual instinct theory you know the love and aggression that model is the one that is about the only motivator psychoanalytic motivational theory that undergraduates in psychology ever get taught despite the fact that virtually all contemporary psychoanalytic psychologists hold that humans have a number of motives many of them rooted in biology like sex and aggression but nearly all elaborated by culture and experience whereas Freud emphasized the pursuit of sensual and sexual pleasure object relations theorist self psychologists and relational theorists include needs for relationships and self-esteem most American academic psychologists have read little or no Freud shocking I know but ask them yet they still have opinions about them often strongly held opinions often opinions held so strongly that it makes you wonder why they have such strong emotional response to someone about whom they've never bothered to read and what other arena of academic life would this be allowed psychoanalytic theory contrary to much is supported by scientific evidence contrary to much opinion while it's true that Freud did not conduct his work in a lab or follow the dictates of the 19th century model of science that dominates American psychology even today to dismiss his ideas outright is naive and it ignores the way that science actually works philosophers of science distinguish between the contexts of scientific discovery in which initial observations are made and hypotheses are framed and the context of justification in which hypotheses are tested by use of the scientific method Freud and I'm quoting here did not conduct group studies and apply statistical methods to confirm or refute predictions his methodology was not borrowed from the Natural Sciences and the way that it has been by experimental psychologists rather he relied upon in-depth analyses of single cases while this methodology rages raises legitimate concerns about the generalizability of his findings if his analysis of single case studies revealed a pattern that reflects universal human tendencies this is valuable as an analogy Darwin's finches on the Galapagos might have been equally unrepresentative as a population survey by epidemiological standards but yet his observations gave rise to the major theory in biology today and contrary to the claims of many there is in fact a considerable a considerable body of empirical work to support many psychoanalytic contentions if you have questions about any of this after or really want to know where I'm getting this please feel free to come up after the talk and I will give you it's more than you want so who was this guy who's created all this controversy for 150 years and gets people so riled up freud was born in town then called freiburg and what was then Moravia it's now pre-war in the Czech Republic in on may 6th of 1856 now you got to think about that what's going on in 1856 what's the Western European world like in 1856 he died in 1939 September 23rd 1929 in London having having removed there in his very late years after fighting cancer of the jaw for 15 years fleeing the Nazis what was Vienna like in the late 19th century anyone in many ways it was an intellectual one of the intellectual centers of Europe it where there was a kind of liberalism that had evolved there that allowed with some struggles even a Jew like Freud to succeed in academic circles he seemed to have struggled more and Jews seemed to struggle more in that in that context but they were able to succeed nonetheless Freud always experienced itself as an outsider now here's this guy he comes from the small town in a fairly remote part of the of the Empire he's always the first in his class his teachers always recognize how smart he is he gets into the best college he goes to the best medical school he trains as a neurologist this isn't someone who came from nowhere this is someone who came from humble roots and ends up at Harvard and Johns Hopkins he works with very famous neurologists who become mentors to him and sponsor his academic career which is a requirement and at that point in yerevan still in some ed and today in some areas of Europe he reads Darwin write Origin of Species published 1859 three years after his birth he's heavily influenced by this as was everyone else he's also influenced by the fact that they've just discovered they just discovered the neuron about 20 years previous to that and so the excite and the excitement of that there's this explosion as today of biological explanations for psychological disorders but Freud wasn't convinced by this logic he was curious a very curious guy and so at about the age if you seen that picture the age of him with the big black mustaches and the and the dark black hair about that age he decides to raise a little money cuz he didn't have any to go to Paris to study with this very very famous French neurologist named Charcot Charcot is at the end of his career and he so famous he can do anything he wants and what he's doing is he's demonstrating how psychological disorders can be created without any physiological intervention he's using hypnosis to create hysterical symptoms and remove hysterical symptoms and patients must have whom were female so far it goes to study with him Charcot recognizes his genius they become acquainted well-acquainted Charcot finds freud very intelligent ask him to into a translate some of his works into German invites him to his lectures they have long discussions and Freud begins to pressure him with some difficult questions about the role of sexuality in in in the etiology of hysteria surely there's some sexual conflict here and you'll pardon the mangled pronunciation I'm about to produce Charcot says toujours la shows genital it always comes to sex and Freud at in his 20s says to himself in his diary if he knows this why does he never say it this is he's struggling to understand these things he's seeking out the best minds he's trying to understand why we do what we do and he spends the rest of his life trying to understand why we do what we do over the course of the 45 or 50 years of his writing about psychology as ideas change you would expect them to the book that you all are most of you read civilization and its discontents was written near the end of his career and is in some ways a culmination of many of his ideas I know that it's difficult to read in the beginning if you haven't had much background because you don't know what some of the terms mean he assumes that you've read all of his other stuff so it gets into all the stuff about ego and it and and context ease and catharsis and yeah you don't know but if you'd followed his career of course he'd built up these ideas and explained them and explored them for years many years I'm trying to humanize the guy for you and I wanted to show you younger pictures of him because there's iconic Freud the gray bearded balding man with a cigar that all of us have in our minds but he wasn't always that guy he didn't come out looking like that he was a young man struggling to understand things and to communicate his understandings to a wider audience he's doing this from the perspective of being a Jew at a time and place in Europe where even though it was easier it was still difficult and always experiencing himself as an outsider he would anticipate the criticism that his books would receive before it ever occurred and then seek out the criticisms they see I told yourself even and ignore the positive reviews that would also emerge he's working with patients lots of patients actually over the years there's often a criticism well he only saw middle-class Europeans well yes living in Vienna and the late 19th and early 20th century his supply of patients was fairly monolithic there's nothing he could really do about that you can argue about whether or not theories based on that population or the in general generalizable you can't fault him for who he saw he saw who was there for its theory as I mentioned before and the theory that it developed over time became increasingly increasingly complex and increasingly sophisticated and changed in a response to events for example two of his sons fought in world war one world war one was a cataclysm and Europe they call it the Great War it didn't affect America in the same way so we don't think about it in the same way but it was horrifying millions and millions of people dying in trenches made muddy with the blood of the Fallen mustard gas in the beginning of World War one they had airplanes but no aerial bombs they would fly over the trenches with mail sacks full of steel darts and pour them out Freud saw all of this and was much closer to it being in Austria and on the losing side and it affected them deeply and it affected his theories a lot of these theories if you don't understand him in the intellectual context that he developed over the course of his years do see Marie that gets the Oedipus complex we all know absolutely for sure that we none of us ever wanted to have sex with our parents right right but there's another way to think about this as a metaphor the Oedipus complex signals for the first time in a child's life the awareness of a relationship from what from which he will always be excluded and when you think about it that way it doesn't seem so weird there is a sexual component I'm not trying to deny that but it's not sex in the grown-up way Freud never posited sexual feelings not adult sexual feelings in children he posited a sexual instinct as part of our biological inheritance and influenced as he was by Darwin of course he would if the principal function of DNA is to replicate itself wouldn't you expect that to have a psychological component wouldn't you expect our psychology to evolve in such a way as to facilitate that drive what Freud talked about were immature and childlike versions of this think about the way in which children explore their own bodies and you've been around three-year-old boys lately what do they do all the time where's their hand all the time maybe I should say if you've been around three-year-old working yeah you know it makes and it makes adults uncomfortable they want to explore your body too that makes you even more uncomfortable right this is a natural thing but they they know what the touch themselves in particular ways feels good they don't understand it in an adult way they don't have sex with somebody in an adult way they don't know what sex is but they know that touching themselves in certain parts of their bodies in certain ways feels good and that exploration is part of this instinct the Freud did seek to describe Freud also maintained that the feelings we have as children are not trivial either then or when we're adults think about it when's the last time you saw a three-year-old we'll use three year old have a tantrum it's serious I mean can I hopefully you never feel like that again in your whole life what the intensity of that experience is profound or when they wake up from a nightmare for to argue that those kinds of profound experiences are formative and that the memories we have of them as adults are also important for it and in the end for it offered self awareness particularly awareness the contents of our unconscious as the path to freedom don't sit very well these days people don't want it to be like that you can all and in this era of Oprah induce psychobabble and dr. Phil's phony fixes you can almost hear Freud I won't fake the accent but you can almost hear Freud saying you'd like this to be easy you want to swallow a pill to confess on television and be cured before the last commercial but you don't even know what your disease is and that focus on the unconscious and the fact that so much of our minds and the things that influences lie outside of our awareness is probably the core element of psychoanalytic theory of course Ford was wrong and some of his ideas about human nature his theory of drives the sex and aggression drive and his views on aggression were too mechanistic and simple Anna and simplified and simple his theory of development focused too exclusively on sexuality and not enough on the interpersonal and social conditions to shape our minds and his theory of female development was wrong but to reject psychoanalytic theory because Freud's in to reject psychoanalytic thinking but because Freud's instinct theory or his view of women is dated is like rejecting modern physics because Newton did not did not understand relativity the more remarkable point in my view is that many of Ford's fundamental propositions about the nature of the human mind have stood the test of time many of his assumptions about human nature have a considerably stronger empirical basis than most critics realize or admit and let's be honest this is probably the best anyone could hope for in a rapidly changing discipline like psychology seventy years after his death there are in particular and I'll leave you with this five propositions developed originally by Freud that have found widespread empirical support and homes and experimental modern experimental psychology though often without acknowledgement of their origins these include that much of mental life including thoughts feelings and motives is unconscious which means that we sometimes behave in ways that are inexplicable even to ourselves to mental processes including emotions and motivations operate in parallel so that we can have conflicting feelings toward the same person or situation feelings that motivate us in opposing ways and lead us to strange or unpleasant interactions that occur over and over those of you who have had more than one long-term intimate relationship will realize that you find yourself having the same argument with different people there's one constant in that equation number three stable personality patterns begin to form in childhood and childhood experiences play an important role in personality development particularly in shaping the ways we form lauder later intimate relationships for our mental representations of the self others and relationships guide our interactions with others and influences influence the ways we behave how we think about people the ideas that we have that are formed over the course of our lives influenced how we think about the people in our lives now how we treat them the kinds of people we choose the kinds of relationships we choose there's how many students are here 5,000 or so 3,000 students let's imagine that there it's 50/50 male-female it's not let's imagine that it were would you be equally likely to pick any of the preferred gender to go out with of course not we all have these unconscious algorithms in our minds that lead us to prefer certain things over others even if someone's perfectly reasonable that you may not be attracted to them and you won't necessarily know why five personality development involves not only learning to regulate sexual and aggressive feelings but also moving from an immature dependent state to a mature independent one those five things are broadly accepted in many areas of psychology and there's much support for those claims the fact is modern psychology has borrowed many ideas from Freud often renamed them and then fail to credit they're just cover from the implicit thinking of modern cognitive theory to the notion of a modular mind current and neuroscience ideas initially presented by Freud his followers now find homes in developmental psychology in social psychology and cognitive psychology and in the labs of the neuroscientist perhaps in the future psychologist and neuroscientist will become less reticent about situating their ideas in their proper historical context and finally giving freud his due thank you thank you for that overview Tim and I'd like to turn it over now to Scott Allison who will offer some ideas from the modern perspective of psychological sciences I'm gonna can you hear me okay I'm gonna hold this rather phallic looking object and I'm gonna sit here because I'm not worthy of the podium see I'm one of these experimental psychologists whose knowledge of Freud you can fit into a thimble because that was my training that was the bias so I don't know nearly as much as Tim does I just what I do know is that in graduate school during my training there was a strongly held unwritten rule don't listen to Freudian Theory don't take it theory seriously whatever you do don't incorporate it into your own ideas because that's ancient outdated obsolete stuff that is giggle worthy let's face it when I teach Freudian psychology and my classes you know we start going over the psychosexual stages of development and the students start giggling and so when I think about some of the reasons why Freud or why there's anti Freud sentiment one of the reasons is is the the the Electra complex the oedipal complex castration anxiety penis envy all these things that make students giggle and then what they do is is that they when they when we get to the really good stuff that has some validity and has a foundation and an objectively obtained evidence support of it we get to the good stuff that's supported they they dismiss it because it isn't this the same guy who said that girls have penis envy and boys want to marry their mother and and so they kind of discount they throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of a situation with my teaching a Freud that that this emphasis on childhood sexuality is one reason why Freud isn't taken seriously if you had that to say then we can't take seriously anything else he has to say plus not to mention that that anyone who fails to use rigorous experimental methodology well we can't pay attention to their data and there is a strongly held bias in the academic community to only seriously findings that were obtained through rigorous controlled scientific systematic experimental methodology and Freud of course used other techniques he was more creative actually he used hypnosis TIF a dream interpretation free association he used a variety of of psychoanalytic techniques that that that were very unscientific from the modern so-called modern enlightened perspective and I got to tell you early in my career the scientific method and scientific methodology was the only way to get it valid data and the only way to make valid inferences about human behavior wasn't an experiment and I've since learned better now I I almost done a 180 now I really welcome as a breath of fresh air techniques like Freud's a good that dare go beyond the scientific experiment and and Tim mentioned a bunch of reasons why Freud is so important today and I he did a much better job than I can about articulating the the importance of Freud for one thing he is to be admired for coming up with the first theory of human personality just a hundred years ago you think about all of human history Freud's was the first Ford was the first to propose a theory of human personality and that is amazing that he was able to do what he did propose what he did from scratch being the first and and another reason why Freud is important I think is even if you disagree with Freud and a lot of people did and still do a lot of theories of personality used Freud as sort of a a base of opposition to develop their own theories so the humanistic psychologists who believe humans can be self actualized in humans have the ability to reach beautiful healthy full potential they used Freud's theory as a base of opposition because froy if you read civilization as discontents this is kind of a bleak view of human nature that we're destined to be unhappy or that it's much easier to be unhappy than happy and there's so many things operating against us to derail our attempt to be happy well humanistic psychology argues that we can be happy this is how what can happen sort of a precursor to modern positive psychology that focuses on health and well-being and subjective well-being and Tim mentioned a variety of ways that that modern research in psychology is now discovering a lot of things Freud said a century ago like the role of the unconscious wow I never thought when I started in social psychology almost thirty years ago that so much emphasis in my field would be on unconscious processes because thirty years ago social psychologists would laugh at the idea that social behavior determined unconsciously and now there are volumes of research dedicated to the role of unconscious processes in social behavior we look at nonverbal behavior which is a better indicator of how you're really feeling what you're saying or what your body language is and we know that body language is actually many times a better better revealing of what you really think and feel because you have less control over your your posture and your facial expressions and your gesturing and because you have less control over it the real you is going to leak out non-verbally and we know that also Freud's idea of defense mechanisms brilliant that we use we use defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from anxiety whether it's regression or displacement or sublimation or reaction formation we use defense mechanisms and we're not aware of it but they protect us they shield us from anxiety it's just a fact automatic processing fascinating stuff and in the last ten years in social psychology there have been studies done in the last just in the past few years showing that if I give you a bunch of sentences to read and embed it among those sentences their sentences about the elderly when you walk out of the experiment you're gonna be walking out more slowly you're gonna have less good posture you're gonna resemble the elderly because the category of elderliness has been primed just from reading sentences about the elderly no lie that's that's the finding and there's many different fascinating things that we have found that suggest that are we are influenced by forces beyond our control or by on beyond our awareness there's a literature in social cognition on spontaneous trade inferences that we automatically make judgments about people we're not aware of it we have no control over it but if we see someone behave in a certain way we make judgments whether we know it or not and with it and we have no control over there's research on implicit attitudes stereotyping that all of us have implicit attitudes and even if we maintain that we are unprejudiced unprejudiced there are tests like the implicit association test that show that we can't hide our prejudices they leak out in ways that we're not aware of and it's very humbling for us to recognize that and recognize there are theories by people like Freud that are a hundred years old that predicted this very thing and so Freud is being vindicated in a lot of ways and yeah we can giggle it Oedipus complex and penis envy but oh my gosh the guy was incredible the brilliant man who had amazing insights about human nature human sexual desires humans as animals humans as self-destructive how many of you know someone who is self-destructive how many of us are self-destructive in one form or another you do through substance abuse or unhealthy habits Freud was right on top of that and that's probably all I have to say really what I'd love to do now is turn this over to Jane and get questions from you we'd love to hear from you well your thoughts observations either about the book Freud or anything Tim or I have had to say before I do turn it over I just like to add my two cents as a developmental psychologist I study the lifespan with a particular emphasis on aging and memory and so from my field we know that two aspects of Freudian theory at least are on target are supported by modern experimental research one is the presence of infantile amnesia what we do and don't remember from about the age of three and a half and beyond and then secondly Freud Freud I've just made a slip here not Tim but Scott my daddy over there maybe I don't know his Scott mentioned the defense mechanisms and developmental work social developmental work shows that we become increasingly sophisticated in our use of defense mechanisms moving from as young children the use of denial and repression and regression to more sophisticated abstract complex cognitive defense mechanisms such as the use of humor intellectualization and sublimation we sublimate our aggressive and loved instincts passion instincts in socially appropriate ways and finally we internalize our parents the so called super-ego Freud got a lot of the labels wrong but Scott's absolutely right that he gave us the first personality theory and of those that try part its structure that the ego and the super-ego the super-ego is just that set of rules that our parents and society have taught us have we have internalized a moral code the methods are different from psychoanalysis we model a good behavior our parents shape good behavior and so modern social learning theorists have given us that kind of information about Freudian ideas packaged differently so without further ado I'd like to turn it over to anyone who has the first question for our panelists yes and I'm going to ask you to speak into the mic because this is being taped not to make you anxious well you just mentioned something about how Freud had this idea sort of that we were doomed almost unhappiness and I get the feeling just because we I haven't read in-depth Freud yet I've just sort of started it so maybe a quick answer but people seem to have this misconception about Nietzsche too that he was quite pessimistic and that he was just like oh we're all doomed to you know miserable lives and we don't know what that we're talking about but it seems to me a lot more like Nietzsche was really just saying yeah life is kind of a struggle get over and accept it so you can thrive on it is that is Freud really saying this you're doomed to unhappiness or these are the conditions around around which you have to work to gain happiness yes Freud was his view of humans was quite pessimistic he believed that by and large were animals and that we struggle against our animal nature's all the time civils I mean if I can do it a terrible injustice and distill civilization and its discontents to one or two lines it's that we're animals social animals with all these urges that society forces us to contain at the threat of death and that for most people most of the time people who don't have the luxury or don't have the willingness to get to know themselves really most of their lot most lie most of life is spent in response to these urges either in response to the urges or in responses to the attempt not to get punished for having and expressing the urges toward the end of his career he became even more pessimistic of course like I said he had jaw cancer for 15 years before in the end he died and he died um as a result of a morphine overdose administered by his personal physician at his request the treatment I should tell you this may give you some insight the treatment was to have the necrotic tissue scraped away with a metal blade and the wound pact was sulfa drugs and then a prosthesis replaced every day so 15 years of that and your view of human life is probably not the rosiest it's interesting though because he did he did always till the end offer the idea that self-knowledge gives you away at way out his famous dictum on where it has been ego shall be that as you come to know yourself and absorb those parts of yourself that of previa they've been unconscious into your sense of who you are then and only then do you have a kind of freedom and the ability to make choices where before you merely acted and reacted from from these instinctual drives there's a great quote there's a guy named Ernest Becker that at some point your life you should read it's a very very famous book actually from the 70s called the denial of death Becker was an existentialist and he reimagined Freudian theory from an existential perspective and his his turn of phrase and its course but it's accurate is the reason that humans struggled the way that we do is because we're God's with anuses that we have mental capacities that allow us to think in abstract ways about things that don't exist most importantly the inevitability of our own death but still animals I have to go poop and somewhere in that crucible is the psychology of the human so there's a long answer to your question but Scott do you have a reply to that next Jamie dr. Allison you mentioned that Freud is beginning to be vindicated you know more recently and I'm wondering how much a Freud would you really be willing to teach in one of your classes and would you be more willing to teach Freud if it was you know say rebrand it as something else as a more modern theory but like I said thirty years ago you would be vilified if you defended Freud or believe in Freud and even now even though Freud is being vindicated to largely by current data it still would not behoove you to acknowledge Freud too openly in public I'll ask you be laughed at it's probably it's gotten a lot better I think in social psychology there are other articles that that will now say you know hey Freud may have been right about some things there there's a reluctant acknowledgement of his contributions more and more that's so would I be willing to teach for it in my classes yeah but I might skip over the psychosexual stuff so they don't get the giggles because that the minutes you get the giggles when people start like 10 was just saying well you know I'm giggling about poop jokes well there's the Altaf might protest too much that sort of thing that people may be giggling because there's something there I think a lot of psycho innit analysts might look into that but yeah I'd be willing to do that Jamie would you take me seriously if I taught Freud and said Freud it was right on top of some modern social psych research would you be okay with that or would you start a rumor just keep students away from my classes if I did that you'd never do that okay but would you take the class with you other questions you'll have to excuse me for not being too well-read with Freud but it seems to me that a lot of the reluctance to accept his theories nowadays have to do with his methodologies and I didn't hear any real defense of his methodologies even here it seems like most of the defense of his work is when it's applied to the the modern you know the modern experiment theory you know we can we can test these things empirically now in the labs and it sounds like dr. Barry and dr. Allison have both done this but we talk about things like hypnosis and free association and stuff the methods of Freud is that is there really any defense to this because of all I've ever heard is criticism you don't believe everything you hear right you find out for you but you find out for yourself right this is what this is what I'm talking about Freud without ever having learned much about him and imagine someone well we have we also have the same argument now in public about Darwin right people have questions about Darwin our question Darwin's theory and methods in public from religious perspectives without ever having a read Darwin usually but to get to your question as I said earlier I think Freud's methodologies are probably best suited to generating hypotheses not to testing them now he said he did both but of course he's in a different tradition this kind of the kind of really 19th century methodology that still dominates in psychology really doesn't dominate another sciences in the same way in fact other Sciences claim that psychology isn't a science and the one you know what they say to us is well if your science where are your laws because psychology has been using the empirical method about as long as the other disciplines there's just mythologies get taught in intro psych psychology is a young science no it's not so I called she's been using the scientific method maybe 50 years less than biology and chemistry maybe well we've still had a hundred and fifty years at it they have lots of laws we don't have any right so there's a big arguing about the about the finality of findings from in the empirical method as well but that's another discussion about the philosophy of science well I can say to you about Freud's methods are I think principally they were best for generating ideas not testing them and that taking his word for yeah I tested this and it was true is probably best done with a grain of salt but like dr. Allison says there are some examples of it that get tested from other perspectives things like free association the implicit association test do in fact find lots of support for those methods now hypnosis is a strange case because for one there's a whole little literature and modern research on hypnosis including all kinds of eg studies and lots of empirical research on hypnosis but Freud never really liked hypnosis and had abandoned it by 1895 he didn't like it because for two reasons one that it produced only temporary results like catharsis which he also abandoned very in the early 1900's because the results were always only temporary and the other thing that made him really uncomfortable being a middle-class bourgeois Austrians you was that it changed what later he came to recognize as the transference so that when you used hypnosis it caused these patients to admire you and think how powerful and wonderful you were and in one instance he cites the young woman after brick coming out of hypnosis looked up and hugged him which he was about what he was mortified so for that in a variety of other reasons and some rumors there wasn't a very good hypnotist he gave that up pretty early but your question about the methodology is it's a kind of more complicated than you might think but here's the thing again let me encourage you this guy is a seminal thinker whatever you think of it whatever you think of him at the other end of after studying him but study and learn don't have an opinion about someone this important without knowing for yourself when you owe yourself does that sort of intellectual experience and then when people ask you questions you can speak from from knowledge it's really too bad but you know back when I could still read German and didn't fall out of practice reading for in German is an amazing experience I'm he was an incredible writer in translation it's highly variable the early stuff that was translated by the straight cheese is very hard to read it's very hard to read they they they took some of the terms like it ego and superego Freud never used those terms use German terms s very very much simpler and closer to experience he didn't use Latin like that they thought they'd you know spice it up with some Latin so but but even it but even in translation reading and standing that probably six or seven things you ought to read and then have an opinion and I think what you'll find is you're at least more sympathetic even if you're not convinced other questions in fact the physical sciences have accused psychological science of having physics Envy it's true so what was the reason that Freud was using these you know seemingly ridiculous metaphors if he didn't want to be ridiculed I mean they're ridiculous to us now because we've heard them and and thought about them in a very prescribed way but you know have you spent you know think about an eight month old baby okay crawling and what do they do with everything they find put it in their mouth so what Freud was talking about was the anal state or the oral stage rather was the mouth is the vehicle of exploration of the world and that at the same time the child is managing certain psychological issues around dependence what happens when I depend on someone they don't think about it in that way but they learn what happens when you're dependent upon another person because if your parents stop feeding you you can't crawl down to the Ukrop's you know you're done right and so the experience of dependence and of nurturing of nurturing and and of how your parents respond to your needs becomes an important part in fact at that point if it's almost all of your experience what happened what happens when you cry what happens when you need your diaper changed or you're hungry and you can't express that that's what the oral stage is about right the anal stage is that's a metaphor he centered it on potty training for issues of control and creativity there's a little known or L that's not little-known it's widely known but little discussed fact if you don't want to poop no one can make you and if you do no one can stop you but kids know that right and if you've been around about a pot touch all being potty-trained you'll realize that they know that and this idea of control and control of the body but also control of others occurs at the same time that language is developing and think about this as a psychological event language for the first time makes real the distance between you and other people because up to now they could kind of be an extension of your own fantasies but once you have to use language to communicate and realize there's a different word for you and mom this that you get the beginning of this realization right so embed a forkel in that sense and then that and those senses I don't think it's ridiculous but when it gets presented to you the way that it does is these discrete stages and you know anal and they use words like that you know and genital and you won't have sex with your mom look it is ridiculous but it's much more complicated and then he would never be famous if it were merely that [Music] hi dr. Halsey you mentioned a little bit about how a lot of the terminology a lot of the terms used by Freud are actually kind of disguised or kind of renamed in other theories that are better accepted can you talk a little bit about that you mentioned how the the term the Freudian terms are kind of laughed at a lot of the times and and not as well accepted but in other theories the same sort of concepts same sort of issue just named differently can you talk a little bit about just a brief answer cuz Scott's better situated to answer this question than I am well for example there's the notion of implicit thinking that the man that occurs in cognitive psychology or the cognitive unconscious kill streams cognitive unconscious late seventies and early eighties the idea that in fact much of what we do we do without thinking about automaticity is another term that people use this might this will scare you but if you if you if you really knew where modern cognitive neuroscience is you would be very uncomfortable because in fact what modern psychology maintains is that about 95 percent of what you do is controlled by processes outside your awareness blink Malcolm Gladwell's book blink was sort of a popular version of that idea that you don't know what you do have to talk more than have 95% of the time now Freud's unconscious is dynamic it's a seething cauldron of forces and sex and aggression and all this the the automatic unconscious or cognitive unconscious isn't described in the same ways but the basic idea that much of our behavior is controlled by forces outside of our awareness is very simple the modular mind right for it had a mind that had parts in it conscious and pre conscious and unconscious and then the mind was sort of divided into modules that that were ways of thinking well if you read Dennett's book consciousness explained or or a Steven Pinker's book on unconsciousness that's is what they're arguing for to a modular mind not dissimilar from that one so and there there are a number of those but Scott knows this stuff better than ideas well as I was just gonna say that the ego took the ego that's the self and so modern psychologists study the self they don't study the ego the super-ego is your moral compass it's your internalized voice telling you what's good and bad and right and wrong so people who study moral behavior would would use that term instead of the super-ego the it'd we've talked just about those unconscious impulses and instinct yeah instincts and by the way speaking of one of the most popular Freudian metaphors or metaphors attributed to Freud the tip of the iceberg he never used it he never said it I defy you to find a reference to Freud using that metaphor and it will appear in every intro psych book you read on Freud and social psychologists discovered in 1977 this thing called the false consensus effect the idea that we think other people share our attitudes and opinions and real that for it's talking about projecting and projecting biases long before that so we tend to come up with new labels for the old stuff and forget about the origins of the idea because they're Freudian origins and we don't want to go there perhaps and a more modern clinical term for anal-retentive would be obsessive-compulsive and that's perfectly acceptable and in the dsm-5 or whatever version clinical psychologists on are on for DSM the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual other questions yes we're right at 8:30 and I know that some people need to leave but others are welcome to stay we can stay about another 15 minutes or half hour even yes ray I wonder in your opinion was Freud a pessimist or was here used well that's a great that's a nice distinction actually I I mean I could argue both ways I think that's a great question I think sometimes he was pessimistic and many times he was realistic but this is gonna reflect my own personal biases he would have to to answer your question I think probably he was realistic when I look around at the world and what people actually do not what they say about what they do not what they say they'd like to do what they actually do it's not so good and you know I mean and you look at the history of humanity we're just not nice to we're not nice now it's not to say that individuals aren't nice so that nice things don't happen but when you look at the arc of history it's kind of littered with the bones of people with spear points in them so I it seems pessimistic and probably is at times and maybe even overly so but I think a lot of it's pretty realistic I mean you don't have to look very far in the world today to see that a lot of the ideas about aggression and sexuality get played out every day all over the world and they're not usually that nice that's a great question I love that the nuance because real people often say was the apes' mr. an optimist what clearly it wasn't an optimist but a realist that's a much more important distinction seesee as we know that like a phrase many of phrase theories like derived was were derived based on he's like clinical experience and like but and i know like many of his patient at that time were like from the middle our upper class so like if his theories is it's the kind of like beautiful based on like those patients do you know do you think like those theories is still applicable to curve into society we have almost an entire field of psychology based on the study of eighteen and nineteen year old college freshmen sophomores as participants I'm really not in a position to criticize Freud's narrow slice of a sample to study but that has been a criticism of Freud that he looked at mostly and maybe Tim can rebut this or rebuked it that he looked mostly based his theory largely on his observational observation of Victorian era young women who were highly neurotic but then so much of what we study is generalizable so many studies of college freshmen and sophomores had been published nineteen ninety percent of psychology studies published using intro psych students as participants have been replicated using a broader sample maybe Tim can speak to two populations outside of Freud's sample course is that before I couldn't help that he was alive in the Victorian era and couldn't help who came to see him right he was it was it wasn't a choice there wasn't really anybody else for him to see but your observations correct there's a little more variability in it than that he saw man he saw people younger and older and he saw quite a few actually over the course of his career but in the end your criticism is accurate the the validity of the claims though have to come later I really think that that has to be borne out Freud's the discoverer I think is maybe that's the best way to get back to your question the best way to understand him as the discoverer of ideas then now these ideas have been discovered they have to be held up to the light of day and examine and we see if they're if they're valid for a broader swath of humanity and some were some have been in some haven't but there's another piece to this one is that there are multiple methods to assess the validity of a claim not just the do it in a lab with eighteen-year-old college students there are multiple methods and those often get short shrift in psychology the alternative to the empirical method that's you know one big thing the other is we're really not that different from each other like we'd pretend if an anthropologist came from Mars I don't think it he she or whatever would really see us is very different we focus on the little sliver of difference the tiny fraction of percents in which we differ rather than seeing the ways that we're all the same I mean not just I mean physiologically we're the same our physiognomies is essentially the same you know I look out across this room the way we dress is essentially the same I mean we're really very similar and so I think that even while there are notice differences cultural differences that are important and noticeable to us I'm not sure how different how different we are from a more distant perspective can I add one little supporting thing to that which is that we're saying well Freud the only patients he saw may have been bourgeois middle-class Viennese but he was he was obviously he was an incredibly erudite well-read European man who had read the great European literature especially famously Dostoevsky where he found a lot of his theories kind of confirmed in these in these novels and these novels are not about middle-class European bourgeois citizens they're about these completely psychotic hysterical illiterate fanatic Russian peasants that murder their fathers and but I think he I mean famously found some of his theories kind of indicated and also inspired by how we gonna call it fictional views of a part of human nature that he couldn't have encountered on major over here I was really curious when you're talking about Freud being in Vienna and how how influenced was he by the Vienna circle of philosophers and what was going on in the edgy air I guess the education also society there during the late 18-hundreds how influenced was he by them and how did he influence that Society qualified answer this tonight but I'll do what I can it's very interesting that because Freud clearly read Nietzsche for example it's less clear how many of the other philosophers he read he read a lot of archaeology that was his thing it's really interesting if you go to his house in London they have his library it's a cool thing to read Freud but it's a much cooler thing to have been read by Freud and what you find in his library is that most of it is archeology and he was really taken with this he collected up antiquities mostly little statues but other kinds of things Etruscan and Egyptian those raised big ones but not a lot of philosophy was really in it he read it all of Po and all of Mark Twain it's there's a lot of people who've challenged said well his ideas clearly came from this phosphorus at and when pressed he would sometimes admit as much clearly Nietzsche influenced his thinking you know he's roughly contemporary to Heidegger there's this sort of these ideas in the air in this part of Europe at the time help me huh no before that anyway there's some more I'll think of it I think about children there's a culture of ideas in the in the air around this time it's got to be that they cross pollinated each other it has to be because by the time let's by 1915 or so for its already famous I mean he's published a number of things by then his dream book is though at first it sort of receives no notice it starts to catch on he's written three thirty three essays 1/3 of sex well I mean a lot of these basic ideas have already been published he's created a circle around him it's becoming an international circle so he has to have been he was never clear about it and never discussed it and even his biographers don't don't have done offer much insight into that there's a great bog maybe the best thing I could recommend to if you really want to know something about Freud is go get Peter gays biography you'll see it you'll go it's that big and you'll say Peter gays a great writer he's historian not not a psychologist and his writing is very accessible and it's very conversational in tone and easy to read I mean maybe you read it a little bit at a time over the course of some weeks or months but it's a great overview of Freud's life in theories I have two questions member maybe they're related it's like Freud has in theory like based on what people actually do so we may think he's a realistic actually I met her ISM or something but when you talk about like ego he talked about like our ego is first first of all the whole world is our you go and then and the real world the outer world came out of this ego so it's kind of like the real the real things coming out from our mind from our feeling not not just from the real things and I think it's like for all I think of our meaning of life we like in his mind me love life is mainly about happiness and happiness is actually a feeling not like not something material but the feeling and actually he says like people tend to pursue those happiness and at least just void at least why the pain so for himself he he killed himself using some like like to avoid a pain of the unis so that's that's actually a good example of his of his opinion of like mininum life because he wanted why the pain but if that's so should people like use more and more drugs because drugs definitely give you happiness or feeling of happiness but if we talk people about this question people have definitely not to take so much drug because they have something more important in our life so can we talk about this wide-ranging wide-ranging fright of ideas let me begin with the idea of happiness Freud said that the closest we get to happiness is to love someone and be loved by them in return and to find work that's gratifying and if you do those two things you've won that was his definition of happiness now the pleasure and the pleasure principle that you're describing he didn't use the word in the way that it was used later by be purists so when Freud talks about the pleasure principle he's not talking about seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in the way that you might think of with with the behaviorist he's his ideas about it are much simpler as a child when all the world is it could the ego - emerges from the it'd the pleasure principle is most active and you can be as a child you can be satisfied through fantasy up to a point in a way that you can't later that that thinking about a thing and the experience of the thing aren't yet separate and so the thinking of the thing evokes the experience of the thing infancy that's the Freudian theory he suffered with lots of pain for a long time before he died and produced some of his most memorable works during that time so I'm not sure that we can say that that in the end he the drugs were to take away the pain he in fact took his little of the morphine as he could because he hated its effects he said it clouded his his mind and he couldn't think or write and he couldn't work with patients so he was always taking as little as he could and toward the end it became problematic in fact he probably would have died a few years earlier but he needed to sort of retain his wits to get his family out of Vienna when the Nazis came in in fact he didn't want to even even leave after the Nazis came in but then the second time that his daughter Anna was detained and they kept her overnight he realized it was time to go but of course he's 80 years old by then 82 years old so but he saw his family to London it took major interventions by the French government and the American government the president personally intervened to get him and his family out of Vienna he goes to London he gets the house set up and he lives about another year and then says that's all I'm done I'm 84 years old I had Cajal cancer for 15 years I've done everything I wanted to do I'm done and dies now I don't I mean I don't what conclusions you can draw if any about his views on drugs from that I think that probably what he would say is that people use drugs to escape reality and that would just in the same way they do we do all kinds of things to escape reality we use defense mechanisms we buy bury ourselves and the love of another or the love of an idea or the love of a career all in an attempt not to know ourselves because the scary thing about psychoanalysis as a theory as a therapy is that it asks you not only to know things about yourself that you don't know but it asks you to know things about yourself that you don't want to know right things that you desperately want not to be true right it asked you to open the basement door and go see what's down there Scott did you and I add anything at this point well just that the I think tim has said it but the reality principle grows out of the pleasure principle and that the delay of gratification characterizes the egos task so whereas the it will say I want it now and the three-year-old boy who can run around yanking on his penis can't do that when the ego emerges and the reality principle kicks in he needs to delay the twenty-year-old needs to delay that gratification or that exploration of the erogenous zone because the ego and even more importantly the super-ego the external world is internalized saying you can't do that now delay that so that relationship between the pleasure principle and reality principle are he is critical in the emergence of in the developing right other questions yes this is addressed either speaker from what it seems to me I just like I don't want to be to comment on this it from what it seems to me from thus far I've I've read in the amount that I've read in for it it seems to me like his ideas are mostly compatible with with sort of an intensive agricultural society as a port as opposed to more primitive more simple sort of hunter-gatherer societies where where pleasure and happiness almost doesn't exist in the same form you don't get surplus you know you don't have the opportunity to create art and such you know if you follow um Maslow's pyramid how do you think how do you think Freudian views would would work in in such simpler societies where you don't have the same sort of this intangible term happiness or pleasure is not the same thing because hunter-gatherers do in fact make art and always have right I mean even as far back me you've got the cave paintings I mean art right and they had high as far as we can tell and from modern period that primitive tribes we do have good evidence highly evolved cultures and I think that relat the issue of deprivation depended a lot on seasons and location I mean if you look at the places where primitive cultures have survived typically in the tropics they've got an abundance they got so much abundance they don't have to work but about three or four hours a day and the rest of the time they spend doing the kinds of social things that tie groups together so I'm not sure to sits it's accurate to say that their experience of happiness is fundamentally different from ours or from cultures who live in other ways the things that make them happy might be different but the underlying experience of it I yeah I'm not sure that that's true I think probably if we could time travel or pick ourselves up and go to another time and spend enough time there really in any point in history to learn the language and integrate ourselves into the society I think we'd find out that they're pretty much the same as we are shorter but otherwise pretty much the same that's my sense and the older I get the more sure of that I become actually so that so that's back to your question about happiness I think probably and Freud's claim clearly was it the basic the basic pressures on us and the things that Ward our happiness are facilitated or thwart aggression or the expression of other sorts of instincts the specifics may change but the underlying urges don't so I mean it's hard hard to say for sure but that's his client I think one of the most popular psychological frameworks the lovely men come in contact with is the myers-briggs personality profile and I've known about it since I was little when there's even an app on Facebook that a lot of my friends have you know just to get your little four letter designation INFP but it's it's my understanding that the the myers-briggs was developed from Carl Jung's work and I know at least for a little while Carl Jung and Freud we're very close and I know that changed but where does you know obviously the myers-briggs is a modern test and so where does it stand between psychoanalysis and modern psychology myers-briggs is not based in psychoanalytic theory it's based kind of loosed on some mccollum Jung's later work Jung and Freud had a famously ugly falling-out for a lot of reasons and neither was blameless but I have to say Jung was more to blame I mean if it's a great history if you everyone read it Jung was treating a woman named sabina spielrein who later became a really important social worker theorist with whom he was also having an affair and Freud to his shame helped young out of it and covered it up and shortly after that young became incredibly bitter toward Freud and began really escalating in this kind of hostility and we write these letters that were increasingly hateful in Freud would say my dear Carl what's going on here I don't understand your anger and Carl would say you don't understand because you don't want to it is a very kind of father-son thing very strange but I digress myers-briggs has no bearing on sacramentally theory per se in fact there aren't any Freud was never involved with any sorts of tests other than the kind of say the first thing the first thing that comes to your mind tests but tests that developed out of psychoanalytic theory were things like the sentence completion you know I have a start a sentence and you finish it the Rorschach inkblot test the those are based inside that's based on psychoanalytic ideas the word association test or and I say a word you say the first name times behind those but they weren't developed by Freud but only in response to his theories the MBTI actually has some research to back up its dimensions it's a modern personality theory but it is way over shadowed by the big five or five factor model of personality in fact the creators of the big five personality model have gone to great lengths to take every other personality test that's ever been published by anyone and show that all of them are derivatives of their five factor model Causton McRae but it's an example the MBTI being affiliated with or coming from unions psychology as being dismissed by serious practitioners of personality psychology today and it's used more in an applied settings personnel and so on other questions or comments as we wrap it up one more from us well let's have one from one of our core instructors and we have another student up there let's hear from a student and then we'll let Tom speak after having read civilizations and its discontents I was just wondering what you would think about what Freud would think about the atrocities of civilization like the apartheid or like the Holocaust and the factions within societies I think he'd say but of course I mean really I think he I'm living for but I I think for that's really kind of what he saw for most humans most of the time he saw our tribalism he saw our base animal nature he saw our instincts and he saw very few checks on those civilization being one of them but of course there's a price right civilization exact surprise in return for suppressing your instincts so that you can live in a group what happens you get neurotic right that's the trade and it's a necessary trade according to Freud to be able to live together in big groups but even even within that always always lurking just under the surface are these drives and urges and wants and given the opportunity given the opportunity they burst out and sometimes even without the opportunity they burst out criminals and such so I think he would be shaking his head sadly and saying I told you so but I wished I was wrong he might guess Tim could you say a few words about the value of Freud studies in hysteria what are you what do you want to know I mean that's a big just a huge question so I'm curious what year well if you could contrast what he was doing with hysteria with modern popular notions of hysteria also the fact that he was criticized for being the first person or one of the first people to define hysteria in men well hysteria it's an old notion and it doesn't and part of my confusion is that hysteria doesn't get used now like it got used in hysteria was a generic catch-all term hysteria was later what we came to be called neurosis it was a generic term for a kind of fairly mild psychopathology that a lot of people had you want a great read go read actually no that's not fair to say you want to understand something fundamental about Freud go read the psychopathology of everyday life because what Freud wasn't saying that that he wasn't demonizing neuroses he was saying quite the opposite he was saying we're all neurotic and we do neurotic things all the time and Durrant neurotic is normal but early in his career in particular hysteria was the term that was more widely used and of course it has pejorative and sexist connotations all the way back from the original Greek well it's the sort of a bachelor's version of the term for wandering uterus and it was based on some old theories about women's reproductive organs causing him to be crazy and so the term came to them that way Freud was claiming that these same symptoms exist in man well can exist in man Mendel have uterus well but of course the same kinds of symptoms do exist in man and it became a much broader sort of notion that come to came to be called neurosis now there is a disorder now called histrionic Personality Disorder which is characterized by some of the kind of hyper sexualized symptoms you would see in the classic hysteric but of course the thing about history onic personality disorders they're very flamboyant and liked to be the center of attention I'd like to draw attention to themselves by virtue of their sexuality but they don't actually like to have sex so you can imagine what quandary this is for the men who are drawn to them but it but that's a person that's a very narrowly defined personalities who are not the broader that was used in 19th century yes one of the things about teaching the history of psychology which is the undergraduate classes I teach most often is that you get very humble because what you begin to realize is that there was never a point in history when if you could go back in your time machine and ask why did people do that they would have said well no idea well they always had an idea humans it's our nature to have causal explanations they always had theories and the theories were often very sophisticated and there's all this great sort of pendulum where in times of Plenty we have physical descriptions for psychological problems in times of lack we fall back on psychological and spiritual explanations of psychological problems and it goes back and forth and every generation thinks they've found the answer and we're no different than that just that we're sure because we have machines and body fluids but I mean it's it's a really interesting thing to see a lot of Freud's ideas can come right from Aristotle it's not really that different we're coming to the end of our time if there's one more burning question we'll entertain it Freud said that a Freud refused to grant religion any special place in the human condition refused to grant at any sort of special status said it was just another symptom of neurosis as far as he could tell there was no God nobody ever found any proof for one and that people who believes no one did so for a neurotic reasons namely we would all really really like it if a very kindly and loving grandfather that was all-powerful and all-knowing lived somewhere in the sky and looked after us but it just ain't so probably without the age I'd like to thank our panelists dr. Tim Halsey and Scott Allison for fascinating [Applause]

Channel: University of Richmond

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Length: 86min 11sec (5171 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2009