Freud and the Unconscious - Dr Mark Vernon, PhD

we're starting off with a Freud and the unconscious and I'm going to speak and we'll have a break about halfway and then time for questions and so on at the end so please do save questions for the end and questions are good because they help develop the discussion very much so please do save those for the end and I thought I'd start just by setting the scene a bit and there's two ways to set the scene broadly first of all is as now said you know I am a psychotherapist I work with people and when you're working with people you very quickly realized that all the ideas that people have about the unconscious and how it works whether it be from neuroscience or from behavioral science and all the more speculative sciences you always have to adapt to try and connect with where someone's at so a lot of these ideas and models they become kind of possibilities or Maps when you're actually in the therapy room and they're it's almost like you have a smorgasbord of possibilities before you and and they work when they just help you to take the next step not because they show you the whole way at all but because they're Harold hope we take the next step and so Freud himself is very much like that sometimes you know people dismiss Freud these days it's very common to hear you know someone talk about Jungman as it were imply pour'd Freud you've got it all wrong you're wrong but Jung got it right and but when you actually read Freud and you realize that his genius is that there's about ten ideas on every page and one of those ideas might help you make the next step so I think that's really why people keep reading him not because he got it right but because reading him is so productive for your own journey and that's very much what I want to try and communicate and it's not that he had one idea about the unconscious but reading him opens up this whole domain of the side of life of which were not that conscious and how we might become more conscious of it and he does have proposals and we will go through some of those proposals and this broader spirit that I really hope to open up to you and suggests that's really why Freud is still worth engaging with he didn't get it right but he really opened something up and when you read him he can open up for you as well there's another way that I wanted just to suggest that the Freud moment if you like is interesting and this is also by way of a minor book plug and this is my book which is coming out later this year actually but I've got some advance copies here today for a reduced offer so if you want to know but if you want to know the bigger picture then please do you think about buying the book there be outside but broadly the idea of the book is that the deep story if I carry on like this is that work yeah okay I remember that so the deep story of which Freud is the kind of 20th century moment it's that human beings I think of always found ways of trying to engage not only with their own inner lives but with the inner life of the natural world the inner life of the cosmos the inner life of the gods and Christianity I'm shaped a lot of the Western ways of doing that and for about 1,500 years and it drew together what had been going on for about a thousand years even before Christianity I argue in the book so this is the secret history runs for about 3,000 years secret just meaning inner and at the beginning of the scientific revolution the Enlightenment the Reformation these periods in the fifteenth and sixteenth century that fell into crisis Christianity fell into crisis and ever since we've been trying to work out how to engage with that inner life again and Freud is so interesting because he it's a major sort of resource for trying to do that again not cuz he got it right and but because he he kind of almost relaunched and for twenty year from now twenty first century Minds how to engage with our inner life once more and even more importantly I increasing anything the inner life of nature and the inner life of the cosmos as well so if you like the little bit of detail and we're going to go into by thinking about Freud this morning and want some more of the bigger picture then do please have a look at my book here is the famous couch now at number 18 number 20 Mayer's field gardens and immediately I hope you get some sense of that because it's a sort of comfy couch but it's it's what you might call an overdetermined couch and there's a hell of a lot of stuff getting on that couch not only with the rugs and carpets and but with the the lines of God's and the images all around it and I think this also says something that's really important about Freud that that Freud and he did make remarks like this he said that he's deeply informed by science and what science can say and if you know anything about him you know that he actually started off in the very new science of his times at the end of the 19th century of neurology and so he was very interested in the way that the brain works but and I think he's interested in science was always in the service of this wider interest of the human mind which is as well accessed and thought about and opened up by the arts and even by the gods by religion you know so he had lots of gods around in his consulting room as well as works of art and so on and then he people you might well know that he won a Nobel Prize sorry he won the Goethe prize and the big German Prize for Literature and he when when he gave a speech when he received this prize he said that um it was a sort of recognition that whilst everyone had thought he was a scientist really at heart he was an artist and I love that because that group the really great thinkers the really revolutionary thinkers do that they bring them both together um you know Einstein became as well known for his thoughts on the imagination as his thoughts on relativity and so Freud is its genius too is that he was trying to do that too he was very conscious of the science but using almost as a springboard in order to enter reality you know science is always a kind of step back from reality trying to model it trying to capture a certain aspect of reality in some way so Freud helps us to make that leap back another reason why he's so interesting to engage with still and then particularly for us you know coming roughly a hundred years after his great works there's the seminal essay and for me this morning that he wrote was called and the unconscious and it was published in 1915 and so or maybe 1917 but some middle of the the sort of 1910s and so we nearly were over 200 years on from that now but what he does in that essay is he launches a kind of direction of travel and he unleashes a whole series of thoughts about the unconscious some of which he more directly picked up in his own ongoing developments and work and but some of them he get left kind of hanging and I want to try and pick up some of those ones that he left hanging because in some ways I think that they're more relevant to us now and certainly I hope that they'll resonate with later speakers and the day as well with Adler and Jung because in some ways I think Adler and Jung picked up on and these other thoughts that Freud himself left rather hanging and so hopefully there's a kind of direction of travel of force of flights you might say and that we can unleash in this first talk this morning that will carry across the day as well so that's something by way of background I thought it might also be worth and while us engaging you know our sense of cells because I hope a lot of what I'll say will really make sense when you can connect it with yourself with some of your own experience and then it really comes alive and rather than as we're just being told proposed facts or theories about the unconscious and so just for a minute or two and turn to a neighbor and just have a one or two thoughts just to kind of get yourself in the room properly about this subject and ask each other you know what do you make of the notion of the unconscious when you hear the word unconscious what comes to mind what do you make of the notion of the unconscious just just for sort of spark for a minute but just as I wear drop into yourself what do you make of the unknown unconscious and share it with a neighbor next to you [Music] [Music] [Music] okay just a few more seconds on that wrapping up it's just the kind of marker it started for ten [Music] okay I'm going to ask you to draw to a close on that I'm going to ask you to draw to a close on the speaking now let's come back to the room as a whole I hope the microphones haven't fallen flat it was just the noise in the room can you still hear me is it coming out again now yes it's coming out now you can hear that all right at the back show us to handle something if you can hear this all right at the back excellent thank you very much thanks Cheers so that's just a starter maybe just hold on to one thought that you had about the unconscious now and then we'll check back again at the end and see whether it was you know resonating what's been said thoughts that have emerged and so on just so you know some sense of something opening up perhaps for you to over the course for the next couple of hours so just remember one thing you thought about the unconscious now and then that can be a kind of reference point as we come back to things and unfold things towards the end okay good now look why might we even think there could be a part of us at least they're part of life perhaps of which we're not very conscious and there's lots of reasons why this might be the case one of them probably corporate practices and this is when we say something we don't quite mean to say they're supposed to be a little ripple of laughter around the room of this this is a quite famous Tweep I came rest up early in the morning he tweeted one day taking meetings in Silicon Valley and of course he's married to Kim Kim Kardashian who presumably was lying in bed next day and when he tweeted this so these little slips somebody comes out of the otherwise we didn't think was going to be there dreams of course dreams are huge and I think Freud and Jung and debt psychologists in general tend to think that we're dreaming all the time actually but what happens when we go to sleep is as a were the Sun of our daily ego sets and the stars of the unconscious you might say come out and our dreams come out in the gloom of sleep and we remember some of them perhaps in the morning so dreams what's going on with dreams anyway I mean people have different ideas about this but there's something to be asked about that and I must say I'm very glad as a psychotherapist that dreams have been taking much more seriously now for quite a lot the 20th century they were ago that is just the kind of white noise of the brain and but that this immediately starts to to not make sense when you consider your dreams they have some sort of meaning hypnosis again contested what hypnosis is actually doing but it's certainly at least using suggestion to bring to the fore an aspect of ourselves which previously had been in the background and then a skilled hypnotist can work out the people for whom that's a very powerful experience and then make the most of it obsessions you might have an obsession and what what that's all about and again psychologists and depth psychology is very interested in what the meaning of an obsession might be Young himself one things that marked him out was in his early life when he was working in a mental asylum he got very interested in people's madness and felt that there must be a mean he tried to listen to the madness from the obsessions and one of the famous stories he told was about a lady in the asylum who just clean shoes all day long and he spent several years working out why on earth she cleaned shoes and gradually unpacked something which otherwise had been unconscious memory you know this feeling of it's on the edge of my tongue and sure enough it pops back into your conscious mind you know what's going on there memory in the unconscious is another huge area psychosomatic conditions and the body keeps score is it sometimes said we're going to come back to this and because it's very very fascinating indeed and particularly if you work in mental health not only because most mental health conditions like depression and anxiety and schizophrenia and so on they're not really diagnosis in the sense of understanding the cause they're more clusters of symptoms of which people then have various ideas about causes that's very very few mental health conditions where there's an actually unknown cause basically the ones where the brain very dramatically and physically changes like Alzheimer's their proper diagnosis but most so mental health conditions like depression anxiety schizophrenia psychosis and so on and it's not remotely known really what causes all this it's much more about clusters of symptoms that then get put into a depression box or put into an anxiety box and this can manifest in the body too as well of course so and the psychosomatic side of it's very fascinating more going on than meets the eye the way that you can come up with a solution to a problem you know you sleep on it and bingo in the morning it's all sort of somehow worked out or you go for a walk and this seems to release a different side of yourself and you can solve something is that unconscious showing itself latency before you saw this little question what did you have for breakfast it wasn't on your mind what'd you have for breakfast but now it's immediately come back into your conscious mind what you had for breakfast and so you know a lot of life is like that we can very quickly bring something to mind that wasn't in the forefront of our mind before and the things like muscle memory playing the piano driving a car unconscious bias all these things which with a little bit of effort you can learn and then the actual action as it were and becomes unconscious and you need it actually to be unconscious in order to do it well you know if you constantly struggle over that over the score when you're playing the piano you won't play it fluently it's when you can not think about it and that you can do that and then of course getting to know yourself the thing that interests step psychologists you can seem almost like a magician just by bringing in the the right conditions that enable someone to reflect on themselves that little bit more deeply and the thing I never thought that before just by walking into a therapists room even the unconscious something that hadn't been there had been aware of can come to mind so this is just sort of soft evidence there's lots of dispute about what causes these different things a lot of people don't like what psychotherapy has come up with but nonetheless there's there's a question here to be answered and that's what interests Freud now look it's a starter for ten here is a kind of model that's often presented of Freud's answer to how the unconscious works he did talk about this at one point in his career but as I was saying he changed his mind quite a lot of times as things developed and evolved for him and but it's good to have a little starter and even if it's only then to kind of get over and dismiss it but there's this analogy that our minds are like an iceberg and the conscious part is just the tip of the iceberg and the bit that's in that I'm the sunshine of the egos day if you like and on the edge of the waves just beneath the waves is the preconscious so that would be something like what'd you have for breakfast as it were your conscious mind can turn and look just beneath the waves and very easily we retrieve what is otherwise preconscious like mutiny or toast or whatever it was but then there's a kind of a deeper level where things are more seriously unconscious and it takes a lot more work to retrieve those contents and as you go deeper down there may be suffered you never quite fully retrieve an obvious example of that would be what happens in the first 1 2 3 years of your life and for which most people don't have any direct memory it's always indirect when that starts to rise up into shallower water you might say so that there's a set there's a sense that there's this deep unconscious as well as less unconscious and what what Freud imposed on that is the iceberg itself and he said there's a way called all das ich in German and it's translated as the ego little unhelpfully perhaps it's sometimes said because it's really just that that that that part of yourself mostly conscious a little bit unconscious that you think of as yourself as you as my I this is kind of the person I am it may not be that coherent but you know broadly speaking is how you recognize yourself and it's sort of your inner reference point and when something resonates without any reference point you feel more at home in the world when something jars with that reference point you wonder what's going on and and and there's some kind of more uncomfortable response beneath the ego is what he called the AIDS the it and that this is the less well formed less coherent part of yourself it might feel quite alien to yourself it may feel like instincts and drives or unwanted memories or what on earth was going on then very embodied kind of feelings that might feel strange and very hard to decipher so this is the Lesko 8 part of yourself that goes into the deeper unconscious and then sort of running up and down the sides of that it's what Freud called the uber and the super-ego and this is a part of yourself that you've it's not so much come from with yourself but you've kind of intro ejected it perhaps from your early life perhaps um your parents attitudes to things perhaps some social cultural attitudes to things and it too actually works quite powerfully on the inside to try and organize life to say whether it's good or bad to say whether it's friendly or unfriendly to say whether it's safe or unsafe and so the super-ego doesn't quite belong to you but it's part of you whereas the ego is more part it more deaf you know closely belongs to you if you like and that's broadly the idea of this super-ego running alongside and so si put super ego thoughts vary a lot from culture to culture and from society to society your parental upbringing to you know if it was very different from even quite a close friend and your you can quite easily realize you have very different attitudes to things and something which is very easy for your friend is very difficult for you because it's over I am is having an influence as well as just your sense of eyeness so that's something about Freud's one of Freud's well-known models but I want to challenge it and it's a useful map it does work in some situations you know you you do meet some people who have a very powerful super-ego I'm certainly in certain parts of their life it's a good useful way of talking about it there's things that they just cannot do it just feels completely impossible for them to do and you'll wonder whether a super-ego notion is useful to think about that to take the next step but it's just the starter for 10 and I thought we could try and open it up by looking at one of Freud's own cases this is slightly adapted but broadly um it's one of Freud's own cases he wrote brilliant case studies and it's the case of mr. R and I want to think about how on earth you might explain this behavior so imagine you have a patient and one day during a session he describes how he was walking along a track and came across a branch partly blocking the way and then you remember that a friend of his would be coming down that way later so he put the branch to one side and he walked on but as he walked on he grew increasingly uneasy and after a few minutes he turned around found the branch and put it back across the track and then as he's describing this incident to you and he becomes increasingly anxious and then he says you're going to think I'm going mad now how do you explain that and what earth is going on this situation the chat walks along the path clears the branch because he remembers his friends going to come that way later on and then becomes sort of anxious and uneasy and puts the branch back and then as he describes its instance you the the anxiety is actually in the room too and he says you're gonna think I'm going mad what's going on there now one way of thinking about that and this might be a sort of more pop psychology way of putting it a bit of a Freud light you might say as it percolated into popular culture and is what you might call the two minds theory of the unconscious and this is that we have a conscious mind and then we have an unconscious mind and the two are kind of in some sort of tension often and that this incident is a moment when they're in tension so there's the conscious mind of the patient who clears the branch for his friend presuming so his friend doesn't trip over it or something like that but then there's an unconscious bit of him perhaps he doesn't really like the friend actually and so he decides is where the unconscious mind says look we're going to put that branch back and if he trips over it then it'll just be my quiet revenge for that time last week you know when he was a bit nasty to me and didn't even realize and there's a kind of unconscious mind that wants to put the branch back but Freud didn't like this explanation of things and the reason why he didn't was because he said that this implies that not just our conscious mind but the unconscious mind it's quite rational it's got sort of cause and effect style behavior and that is a word you might say the conscious part of this chaps mind is the concert it's a bit that loves his friend but the unconscious mind is a bit that not maybe doesn't hate but feels a bit more aggressive or you know just has it that quite conscious that quite and activated by a dislike of his friend and so does a rational thing to express that dislike by putting the branch back before I just said so this cannot be the case and because if both are conscious and unconscious Minds were two minds that were both we'd be able to work it out for ourselves you know we'd be able to say look it's just my unconscious mind it's done something because it doesn't like the frame very much and it wouldn't create this sense of anxiety and it certainly wouldn't prompt someone to say you're thinking to think I'm going mad you know the patient if they did have a rational unconscious moment to say look I like the friend I don't like the friend I put the branch down I put it back well you know I can decide what to do but then I carried on and there wouldn't be a sense of trouble here and so we thought there's something much more interesting going on in our unconscious states and that's not readily captured by thinking about it rationally so what might be going on and he thought well he said that the problem this chap perhaps has is that he hasn't formed rational thoughts about his friend he's still at some level of his being quite powerfully shaped by things that can't be captured in rational straightforward ways of understanding and moreover what isn't so rational what he doesn't really understand has been repressed this is a key word for Freud and the idea that maybe the conscious ego likes to think that we're rational that we know what we're doing that we understand life and when things which are less easily captured by that rationality emerge the ego works quite hard to suppress them to repress them to push them down under and they go into the id's it's much less rational even completely irrational side of ourselves and then that's the nature of the tension that the irrational thought has a kind of vitality a life because maybe because it precisely because it's not so ordered and it can push up and that perhaps that's what was happening with this chap that he did the rational thing when he moved that when he moved the branch but then as he left the the incident where rationality as a war had reigned his irrational mind got increasingly agitated and thought wait a minute you know I want to say here as well and so did so this let this Lesko rate thing of putting the branch back and for reasons that his ego wasn't really quite so clear about um but but what what more interesting for it it's not even quite as straightforward as that he thought that maybe this chap is actually acting out something in himself that pulls him one way and then pulls him another that actually it's not even that his conscious mind is that rational and but that he's acting out a kind of attention here and he's acting out his his hateful and his loving instincts in this case directed towards the friend it's slightly obsessive behavior what you might say you know who knows he might have as it were walked on move the branch walk back unmoved it again you know kind of done that quite a few times you could see how this might have developed into some sort of obsession and we thought of this is the kind of acting out that the what's going on in the external world and it's actually a kind of representation of the inner life as a whole not just of as it were conscious mind versus unconquered unconscious Minds and but the mind of the individual as a whole seeing them as a whole person I'm expressed in this one incident and that's why he becomes anxious because in that moment he realizes he's become a stranger to himself he actually doesn't know that what on earth he's doing even in apparently simple thing like walking along the path and so he says you know I think I'm going mad that he suddenly gets a half a glimpse that he is a stranger to himself and instantly this is why Freud is sometimes said to be the successor of Galileo that whereas Galileo is that were pushed the earth out from the center of the cosmos and made us a minor planet you know of all eventually a revolving around a minor Sun and so Freud did the same for us as individuals he he dislodged this sense that we somehow know what we're doing in life and helped us to realize that actually and were floating in all sorts of strange spaces as they were revolving around all sorts of centers that we don't really understand and this little tiny vignette you know an everyday moment that he might not have even thought about but does because he's coming to therapy and gets this sort of sense that he doesn't understand himself at all in fact so this this idea that maybe it's not so much two minds with the unconscious being a sort of more or less another version of ourselves that we can just ham how pop into and conscious experience and kind of solve and get and get over and but that perhaps were word strangers to ourselves and with all sorts of unconscious unknown unaware forces influencing you know even the way we're sitting even the way you arrived here this morning even the way you're hearing me it's going on all the time and what's so interesting about us as human beings is to try and enter this terra incognita much more generally so you might say it's not so much that the unconscious as another aspect of our mind but the unconscious is just that part of our everyday lives of which we're not very aware and it's something much more general much more diffuse and the effort of therapy is not as it were to solve this that the the contents of our unconscious mind and but it's to work out what it is that prevents us from becoming more aware of life more generally and you know you suddenly realize that you're sitting slightly awkwardly now and you think that what's that about you know why do I sit that way and and that becomes a much so greater task and a much more difficult problem and but I'm also equally a kind of fascinating want so this is my sort of first big point as it were the unconscious is not like a second mind and the unconscious is rather the stance that we have towards perhaps a lot of ourselves and then perhaps to a lot of wider reality as well not just not in our lives but external life as well it's that part of reality that we just don't see but if we pay a bit of attention actually is expressed perhaps in strange behavior behaviors like the case of mr. are and but perhaps also in in in all sorts of other ways as well and so the task is to become more aware to to sort of wake up a little bit more in life now this took Freud down a really fascinating path which was to get very very interested in human development it's really quite a modern idea by which I mean emerging sort of in the 17th 18th century and to think that the first maybe four years of our life are really very very seminal in how we then go on to experience the rest of our lives um you get kind of glimpses of every so often in earlier writers Plato for example was a little bit interested in children he realized that children's education kind of matters but he didn't really take it that much further it's not really until you get figures like Rousseau I'm in the 18th century where he gets very interested in what it is to be a child and sees the kind of freedom in childish behavior his famous remarks that were born free and yet everywhere in Chains there's something enchained about adult life he thought and so began to get interested in childhood and then figures like Freud's and others like Piaget really grabbed this and run with it and as always mentioning the beginning it's it there's something to ask here because clearly week one of strange things about being human is that we just don't remember the first two or three years of our life on the whole occasionally someone will pop up and say they remember their birth or something like that and you think well I wonder who they do or not but nonetheless and you know on the whole your earliest memories perhaps you know lying in a carry car you've been three put down in a strange place you know you somehow remember it's snowing outside something like that a very sort of almost like a little picture somehow in your mind but what was going on before you don't consciously remember it's there somewhere but nonetheless you didn't consciously bring it to mind and so people like Freud and Piaget got really interested in this development and what's going on and is development a really crucial part of why certain aspects of reality ourselves and more generally on aware and don't make we aren't aware of them that we perhaps repress them or don't want them or have forgotten them in some way so just a little sort of slight slight recap on on developmental ISM because Freud's at the heart of it so with respect to the master I thought I ought to say something about it there's been a lot of different ways that this has been taken in the meantime you know there's like four stages seven stages ten stages all sorts of different models they they're all useful in their own way particular when you're working with someone because you might think I you know Piaget Stage five that maybe that helps us take the next step maybe there's something in there for us but but broadly speaking I think you can sort of gather them to get maybe three or four stages and the first stage is when you're a neonate when you're first born maybe even when you're in the womb and and this is when you don't have a sense of what's me and not me as where you're kind of one with the cosmos there's no ego as yet Freud makes this rather beautiful comment that the first ego is the body ego it's not something cognitive it's actually when you start to as it were experienced life through your body and presume that happens quite quickly after you're born when you start to realize that this unity that you had with it seems presumably everything and has been broken at birth but it's what you might call a narcissistic state narcissism isn't a bad word in psychotherapy and it just means that your love of yourself is completely merged with your love of everything else and there's no differentiation and Freud is said to have come to this realization when one time when he was in London and went to the Royal Academy and saw this picture actually and which was entitled and her Majesty the baby and this is a model of a young child not quite a baby but nonetheless and if you can sort of look at the picture it's like the whole of the world comes to a stop just so her majesty the baby can walk across the street you know the horses pull up there on the left and her primary carers we now put it and was there right behind her holding her stuff to make sure that it's okay the policeman even there is sort of stopping the traffic - that's the baby go by and this is something what it's like you know if you've ever had a young child you'll know that everything has to stop for the young child you'd probably make a special room in your house and you wonder how on earth you're going to get back to work the whole of life kind of has to stop and for his or her Majesty the baby and this is this kind of narcissistic state it's necessary you know it's necessary so that the vulnerability of the very early human child can be cared for and all the attention emotional and physical can be you know you as a parent become very very aware of that in order but because of this state but it can become problematic if as it were a child gets stuck in this early narcissism can't move on and then they might develop Cystic tendencies in later life here's a famous picture of Caravaggio's narcissus turn turning into the pool and the idea here is that at some level maybe not quite consciously and they can't actually see anyone else apart from themselves and the person with narcissistic problems in later life and that's why this image is so powerful they don't realize it they think that they're living as a were in the rest of in reality just like you and I but they're unconscious but is there actually still stuck in that very early stage when actually they act as if there's only one person in reality and that's them you know so they when you meet someone with these kind of tendencies you and maybe when we all go back to that slightly we can all become narcissistic and it's more pathological sense from time to time and it's like you think they don't actually know that I'm here we somehow have this sense so that that's there's this fall back to this early stage now what happens most of the time is that gradually we realize that there is someone else in the world and so this moves us on to a kind of stage two and it's quite helpful because if in stage one it was almost as if there's only one person in the cosmos in stage two you start to realize that there's two people and this is you and the primary carer it causes trouble you know the baby who suddenly realizes that milk doesn't appear in their mouth by some sort of strange divine command but because someone has to supply it that can cause you know kind of fearfulness and anxiety and problems you know getting the baby onto the nipple or onto the bottle but you know the connections made life continues and moreover the baby there may be gazes up rather beautifully into the parents eye as it's being fed and this is the second stage emerging it's not just me but it's me and another and there's a dyad life you might say becomes two-dimensional and and grows as a result the babies become more conscious of someone else existing they're not just existing in this semi-unconscious state of everything's one they become more conscious of something else existing reality has grown to their conscious mind it was there all along but it's grown to their conscious mind now this this is good and that stage to it probably most keenly kicks in when we fall in love and as it were falling enough I think can partly be understood when we regress to this stage where there's just me and my beloved in the cosmos and no one else if you've ever sat opposite on the train or the bus and people are just fallen in love you immediately get this sense they they're acting as if no one else really matters apart from their beloved I don't like people kissing in public not because I'm some sort of prude but because they're implicitly saying to me you don't matter this is what matters to me there's something slightly aggressive about it and it's fine you know we all fall in love we all go through that stage but eventually you have to come out of your bedroom stop ordering pizza and get back to life and I think one of the things that can happen is someone they get stuck in this in the second stage you know maybe someone that just has repeat relationships they never quite move from the falling in love stage what they're acting out in their life is trying to get back to that early moment when it was just them and one other and they're not conscious that there's more to life if you said to them there's other people in the world they say what of course there is but at some less conscious part of themselves they're actually constantly trying to go back to this earlier stage so they just have you know one relationship after another perhaps or it can manifest in all sorts of ways I'm being slightly caricature here but nonetheless something like that goes on but again if you manage to get over that second stage you enter a third stage where is it where it's not just two people in the world there's three or maybe four or five six so this third stage more than two three or more people and you realize you're living in a family you know there's maybe rage against your siblings for quite a long time perhaps no father if it's there or mother's there depending on primary carers and all that or maybe mother has interests other than just you maybe father does as well you realize there's more in the world than just you and one other life takes on three dimensions and again it can be a painful tricky time and that can be um sibling rivalry that can be panic and when a parent disappears and but it's a good stage to go through because you become more conscious of life you do realize that there's other people the siblings there's external world there's more going on outside of life and so again you get you hope again in the pattern that these developmental stages they they're coupled to anxiety in difficulty and yet if you can overcome anxiety difficulty not just repress the anxiety and difficulty you become more conscious of reality reality opens up to you more and more and I think this is the this is the sort of the general pattern which which Freud was onto and the developmental stuff is really opened up for us so if you can do that then you can have friends if you can't do that then you constantly feel a little bit left out and it's tricky to have friends you know maybe this first began to emerge in the playground you know the met perhaps were early signs but they were rather brushed over people didn't become conscious of them at that stage it's maybe only later in life that you really become aware that there's something going wrong and want to to look at that more fully now there's a fourth stage which rather fascinates me because of my religious interests which is that I think there's a fourth stage where you can become aware that if you like love was there all along it wasn't just as a were you and your mind it wasn't just you in your parent it wasn't just you and your family even but maybe in nature in the cosmos in the gods or God if you like that kind of talk there was love that was there all along and maybe this is the greatest awakening the greatest sense of consciousness and it certainly tested to in you know all the great spiritual positions here's a very early side of that where I think as were one of the earliest times that human consciousness evolved to become aware of this itself evolved there's a kind of an evolution of human consciousness across the species you might say as well as just in the individual and it's one of the famous images of Akhenaten and his family his nuclear family it's very fascinating that the Akhenaten imagery picks up on the nuclear family on this for the first time and Akhenaten seems to have realized that there was a love if you like a blessing that existed in the cosmos as the whole that he identified with with with the Sun with the Artem and you see there's lovely rays which have hands actually at the end of them offering life you can see the anchor sign at the end of the hunt other of some of the hands there his awakening his his consciousness seemed to have told him that there's a love that permeates the university identifies it with the Sun and tries to launch the whole religion as a result in ancient Egypt and but unfortunate for him most of his peers weren't that conscious and didn't like it so the minute he died they regressed back to some sort of earlier pantheistic states you might say without wanting to be too porous of about pantheists but nonetheless you know that know that there's lots of different siblings there's also different gods in my cosmos that's the way I want it not some unifying general love sustaining care false spirit divinity that I can actually become conscious of as well and I think this is our modern predicament that one way or another I do put this pejoratively because I feel we've got to wake up to a more general sense I sort of lay my cards on the table there and but nonetheless and the anxiety of the modern world is that we've lost connection with and the ways that told us that actually life is sustained and much more broadly than even certainly in our own minds even in our own families even in our own societies and cultures and so on and but there's something in nature more generally something in the cosmos more generally that's sustaining us and that we can become conscious of - and so you get all sorts of existentialist art and everything else that we're very aware of in modern times that again I love this you know this this picture is it's very undifferentiated it's powerful feeling you know when you're getting in touch with something that is you're less conscious of because the feelings are tremendously powerful but it's undifferentiated you know you can barely see the islands there you can barely see make out the difference between the sky and and the island and you know the face is quite distorted it's driven by pure feeling pure impulse there and that's a key sign you're engaging with something that you're not conscious of and which Freud and others have made so much of so I'm going to slightly skip through some of these things this was extra stuff these are some of the mechanisms that Freud divides the idea that things can be repressed and then we have defenses against the uncover e of what's being repressed so in the case of mr. R and his defense was his anxiety the anxiety actually stopped him becoming more conscious of himself he became preoccupied with his anxiety and you'll think I'm going mad and that was that were filling his conscious mind and so part of the task of therapy is to just enable the anxiety to step to one side to some degree in order that that which is repressed might come out so I'm anxiety and anger and these kind of feelings psychotherapy tends to think of them as just symptoms or defenses they're not the main event and that would make it very different from for example from a behavioral approach but she's the anxiety or sees the anger as the main event and tries to solve it at that level it's on the reasons why it's called depth psychology because it tries to look beneath and the defense's censorship I've said something about already resistance and it's a more conscious thing it's like oh why not forever want to go there you know maybe I won't show up to therapy next week and just pretend I forgot and that kind of thing goes on so these are some of their mechanisms which Freud identified I'm going to return to them in the later in the second half of the talk a bit and because they're one of the ways that before we can be tested a bit you know do these stuff do these mechanisms really exist in the mind so we'll come back to that a bit I hope you've got some sense that there's something really very different and radical going on that for heed unleashes which is the business of what why we're not conscious of everything I'm is much much larger much more interesting and I want to go through now some other sort of the case against Freud and then the case for Freud I'm in order to deepen this sense of how we can engage with our unconscious selves so here's the man himself we haven't seen a picture of me at his iconography is instantly recognizable now one of the things which Freud said is that if there's a large part of ourselves or reality of which were not unconscious maybe life is full of symbols that have a kind of charge or vitality for us that is it can be explained because a part of life which we're not conscious of is speaking through the symbol you know you'd say the symbol has meaning you know you carry a ring if you ought you're married because it becomes a symbol for you of that which you're not conscious of all the day and yet when you look at the ring you become aware that you're in your marriage and all of that means to you and so symbols become very important there the convert interfaces between what were aware of them what we're not aware of the conscious and the unconscious side of life but said some people sometimes a cigar is just a cigar you know and he'll cover interesting cigars this boy was a tremendous smoker and in some parts of his life of course he got very interested in phallic symbol symbols and all that and cigars seem to be prime cases in point but the case against for some say sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and that's that's people say look don't be so ridiculous you know yeah you're over-reading these symbols they're you know they're just objects maybe people project a bit onto them but it's not like there's a whole side of life trying to come through the symbol and speak to them the power of plaque seeds remember the power of practices these kind of slips that I make sometimes people have said you know if someone asks you one day would you like bread and butter or some cake and you reply I'll have bed and brotherplease it's not because you've got secret sexual desire on the person in front of you it's just so you made a slip of the tongue bread and beds I mean almost did it myself then when I was trying to get it out and would you like bread and butter awesome cake I'll have bed but no they just slip to the tongue you know it's just language it's its inherent in language that it's often quite hard to differentiate between words and so it hadn't means no more than that it's not some secret erotic impulse making itself felt um behaviorism is a you know has had a long complicated history with with psychotherapy I think it's a lot more open now actually and but nonetheless and some people would say your fear of flying for example hasn't got any deep meaning that you somehow have to try and understand it's not a great defense against the side of life and that you'd rather not know about it's just something relatively trivial that a virgin course that welcomes you onto an aircraft tells you how it works and takes you up and down I'm into the air rather quickly you know can more or less deal with you can learn to manage the fear and maybe there's some truth in that you can learn to manage the fear but it raises this question of whether there is something deeper about flying that leads you to feel unconscious the view needs you to feel weary I mean flying in dreams is often associated with freedom and maybe the freedom that flying represents is really quite scary some reason or other would be one more deeper kind of possibility the idea that you can actually leave the ground is really quite terrifying not because the aircraft may be unsafe but because this means something to you and in terms of your development that got a bit stuck but nonetheless their behaviors were saying you know I go on the flying course and don't worry about it and then dreams I've mentioned dreams now the image there on the left is these broken fences and slightly pop psychology interpretation that use of it of Freudianism would think well fences broken defenses broken you know the mess that the defended fence is broken down is there some sort of pun going on the dream there and the in the dream of the broken fences was representing a previous day's moment where your defenses felt a bit broken down and then you could try and think what did I feel troubled about you know the day before the dream and oh yeah you know is that maybe you know I didn't like that and so you can become a bit more conscious of something by reflecting upon the dream I think that's that's one way that that dreams can work but say you know the the skeptics about Freud sometimes we just have weird dreams you know there's a picture of Salvador Dali very good at the surrealist imagery you know what on earth does that mean make some sense of that no no it's just kind of like the brain jumbling around itself connecting rather than connecting a with B connecting a with P and producing some strange image that doesn't really have any more innate meaning other than the ego organizing day kind of principle isn't there so you get these debates about dreams as well personally of course in I feel there's much more to Freud and then others since have said about dreams mostly because if you work with dreams they start to open all sorts of things up it's quite pragmatic but again that's the kind of evidence which you only find in the therapy room how you take that into the lab and there's someone else's difficulty but nonetheless dreams are one of the ways in which Freud and others since have been charged just to develop and the sense of how dreams take you deeper maybe you can feel this a bit if I said I am a tiger you think no you're not you know that's that's kind of like the most conscious ego kind of side side to it but if I said no no really I am a tiger you might have a second thought and thought well it's got ginger hair ginger beard maybe that's what he's thinking about there's a kind of analogy you know maybe he's a bit of a pussycat as well something like that so you're just dropped into a slightly different level of reality something has become a bit more conscious you know there's an analogy being used here if I said no no I'm a tiger you think oh my goodness he's telling me something about another side of his life that maybe I should be a bit more wary elf it's not manifest now I'm not conscious of it now but perhaps some part of him is saying he can really lose the plot sometimes he's got ginger hair after all you know so that's that's a different level of reality but dropping down is different every reality if I said it again know I'm a tiger you think oh no something's got a bit Meritus something's got a bit creepy this is another level perhaps a writer where there is maybe an inchoate state and where you're not quite sure what's going on doesn't quite make sense and it can be a bit unsettling a bit disturbing you know someone on the bus kept saying I'm a tiger I'm a tiger you might decide to move downstairs just avoid that madness so that that can be another level of our of our conscious awareness as well but if I look rather blissed-out and I said no I'm a tiger you think is he telling me something about reality that I'm just not aware of at all and I like this this story of I'm a tiger because there is a story that Buddha in a past life you know remember one of the features have become enlightened is that you remember all your past lives which you might say is to become a conscious of everything that has an impact upon you he remember that in a past life he'd actually given himself to a tigress who was starving and couldn't feed her cubs but he already had a perception that kind of life was one and so you know it was fine for him to sacrifice himself to feed the tiger so he was the tiger you might say and there's some very deep sense he there's the story I think is trying to capture and that he become conscious of that one way which I think dreams can work vacant as it were be taking us through these different levels of reality that it's not so strange when you think about it particularly in poetry you know that I'm a tiger is an analogy I'm a tiger no Tiger Tiger burning bright and all that you know you you get taken in poetry through different levels of unconsciousness which is just to say it makes a sides of life become more conscious so you haven't quite been aware of before now another charge against Freud just to return to that is that look we're just driven by instincts and drives they're perhaps smart deep evolutionary past you know we needed to fight we needed to flee we needed to forage we need to deform and these kind of common instincts and drives people talk about now and actually Freud was was very influenced by this you know he lived very much in the first wave of post Darwinian fever after Darwin published the Origin of Species and you know this is a tremendous new way of thinking about the world and and both Freud actually and Jung were very very influential in how evolution on our deep past might affect us for Freud it was also coupled to the age of the steam engine you know trains were going up steam engines are going up and much like we grab computers to try and understand ourselves now that was very common in the Victorian period as well steam engines seem like progress and we'd like to identify ourselves with progress so maybe our minds work a bit like steam engines and so you know much like instincts instincts therefore a kind of like steam that builds up in the steam engine and needs releasing if it's not to explode so notions like effects this and so on come into Freud and at one point pointing is critically he felt that maybe therapy is just about kind of releasing the pressure a bit and if someone can get angry in the room in a safe space they might feel better afterwards so instincts and drives but to my mind and this isn't such a good way of thinking about things now because these instincts and drives just seem to proliferate endlessly you know you've heard a fight and flight and all that well there's now falling there's fear there's flopping to sleep you know there's endless of these and it seems to me to be saying that maybe not the not describing something deep there just a description of another manifestation of something deep and so drives and instincts I think as one area where Freud has been left behind and certainly in modern psychotherapy that driving instincts notion has been eclipsed by what's known as object relations theory and which I'm going to come back to but basically before I did mention this a little bit but figures particularly this country like Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott Fairburn in the in Scotland and they were onto this object relations idea which is that were not driven by instincts we're actually driven by kind of subpersonalities different aspects of ourselves that come to the fore for one reason or another in different situations I'm going to say a little bit more about that but instincts I think it's one area where Freud probably you know got too enamored with early early evolutionism and the steam engine but the case for Freud I think in a way the big big reason why people are now much more interested in Freud and his ideas and they they have been outside of psychotherapy is because of neuroscience you know if neuroscience shows you anything it shows you there's more going on the brain than you're consciously aware of maybe consciously we can manage doing three or four things at one particular time neuroscience clearly indicates that we're doing many hundreds if not thousands of things of which were not aware so neuroscience has kind of launched a new interest in psychotherapy and it's still a bit marginal behaviorism still has has the day mostly and but there are some really interesting psych analysts who also neuro scientists and if you wanted to pick this particular thread up a really good chap to to look out online to Google he puts lots of talks online it's a chap called mark Soames which is about Sol m/s Sol m/s he considers for example how it seems as networks in the brain you can broadly cross-reference to what Freud called the ego that kind of thing which you do read a little bit about now I'm a bit of a neuroscience skeptic myself I think there's a lot more going on than the brain the neuroscience can quite pick up and also I feel very aware that it's your body as well as the brain that matters and I feel very aware of cultural cultural forces and influences as well so I think our sense of self is much more dispersed our consciousness is much more dispersed and just inside our heads but nonetheless neuroscience has been it's becoming a bit of a boon for for psychotherapy now a really big plus for Freud which developed after his death more though is this thing of attachment theory this area of attachment theory and the great thing about attachment theory is you can make predictions and then test them so it's amenable to the scientific method and attachment Theory broadly is that in our development in this one two three and when we've moved away from ourselves to relationships with another to relationships with three or four people in the world depending on how well those transitions went lays down a kind of attachment pattern within you and particularly in moments of stress you tend to reserve revert to that basic attachment pattern and if it hasn't moved beyond say the second or third stage that will cause you trouble in life maybe not all day every day but every so often perhaps particularly with relationships or with trusting your boss and whatever it might be and if it becomes you know really tricky so it seriously limiting life you might then come to therapy and attachment theory is one way of trying to understand what you're not conscious of what's got stuck in your development and the therapy broadly tries to uncover what happens so you can become conscious of it so as a way you can pick up your development and it can carry on I put this picture of the monkey in and the robot on the on the pivot but on the on the screen because it's been tested in other ways that in the days when you could do these kind of experiments with monkeys they took baby monkeys for mothers at birth and then put them with various robotic creatures and and realized that the monkeys preferred and the comfort of a soft robot the monkey and than just a mother monkey that was otherwise why I but could feed them and it was a great boost to the idea that our psychological development is perhaps even more basic to us and then our physical development I mean we prefer comfort to feel safe in the world than we do to feel well fed more physically in the world and again you can google these kind of monkey tests and attachment theory and and be heartbroken baby monkeys being starved emotionally but attachment theory has been a big boon and the John Bowlby Center here in London is one centre of excellence for that we're not conscious of our attachment patterns but we can become conscious of them and our development helps us to understand why another really interesting area where in places like the Maudsley where I think there's a lot of interested in sort of psychoanalytic ideas is associated with trauma and then also what are called and conversion disorders so trauma is increasingly talked about and there was just well the wonderful book that came out a year or two back called the body keeps score and which would be a big recommendation if you wanted to think about trauma essentially trauma is defined as something that happened that you couldn't process and it gets kind of stuck in you as a result more likely to happen when you're young because we're in this much more vulnerable state can happen when you're older if you're exposed very suddenly to great violence for example but the point is that you can't work out you can't give it a place as it were in your conscious life it overwhelms your conscious life I'm in the state that it's at and therefore becomes you know a traumatic feeling a terrible sense I'm a tremendous anxiety or terrible rage and trauma can manifest in different ways but again that felt sense indicates that underneath the feeling is something traumatic and so therapists are try to address trauma broadly try to break down first of all the defenses that are to be respected because they're keeping something about that otherwise would overwhelm you and but nonetheless they sort of gradually approach them take them apart and then equally carefully relive the experience in order that the trauma can be assimilated into your conscious mind as various techniques various ways of doing this but but form as a big part of trauma studies is a big part of of how frauds ideas have been reinvented you might say not just going back to what Freud said remember this whole force of flight thing but you think he was onto something and if we read him maybe we can work out something that is relevant now that can be used now another really interesting area is and conversion disorders it used to be called hysteria but now known as a conversion disorders and this includes a whole range of stuff in fact it may be very very prevalent indeed so for example the some research which suggests that up to a third of the reasons why people go to GPS there's no medical explanation it turns out they go to GPS feeding this feeling that sure they're ill in this way having some kind of symptom in that way and but maybe up to a third there's no medical explanation for it and in most mental health hospitals now and there's a unit which is devoted to medically undiagnosed symptoms and it concluding include all sorts of psychosomatic conditions some of which are quite well known now and other things as well one of the ones which I got very interested in the Maudsley was so in the neurology clinic there and it turns out that people who are referred to the more to the having seizures so and by that stage it's really serious seizures you know you really cannot live you'll be having seizures several times a day but if you put a kind of a skull a cap on and try and watch what's going on in the brain about half the people that are having seizures the brain shows pretty much nothing there's nothing showing up in the brain that's indicating a sort of brain storm or something like that and that they're manifesting anesthesia there's something else going on entirely and this is a very very fascinating area what's going on I'm is still very much up for grabs but it helps bring in back notions of conversion disorders there's something else going on completely that somehow got translated displaced into the seizure and that's what you've got to try and focus on this hypothesis would would would suggest throw contested area of course and but nonetheless a very open area and I think actually perhaps much far more widespread than a purely medical or biomedical model and would like to acknowledge and then we've got our pair of practices and a few more of these just to kind of lighten the mood a little bit we need a few loves to break up the monogamy monotony monogamy you know maybe that is saying something about your married life we're all created equal you know a fear of death there perhaps that's going on in the back of your mind and that's really what you should be paying attention to not some rather easy what all created equal as if you know that's all that matters and life's easy after all then a know-all cremated either stomach far more scary to be try and work through there lead the way and I'll proceed and then God mentioned Donald Trump with the unconscious maybe this would be something he might say one day without even realizing what he was saying he didn't say that by the way but as far as I know but nonetheless that kind of a sort of narcissistic little moment there there's still something about his majesty the baby perhaps in lying that it's not just a slip of the tongue wanting to move on now as we sort of wrap up and come to some questions in the next 10-15 minutes they start to gather those questions like we're really good to have a bit of a conversation about this what about this more sort of expansive sense you know if there is something in what Freud unleash that with there is a whole side of reality that is both personal but maybe also transpersonal and that we can be unconscious of and moreover can work to become less unconscious of perhaps through our development and so on what might not be about what might that other side of reality so here we're going for a bit of lift off here and and Freud is on to this too although he's normally read as you know very powerful advocate of atheism and so on against this notion that consciousness may be elsewhere than just inside our head it kept worrying him throughout his life I mean that essay I mentioned at the top of the 1959 essay the unconscious he lists at one point things that he feels he's seen it's true when you're approaching this unconscious side of life I'm a different quality of reality seems to start to emerge he himself just picked up on one or two things particularly with development but people like young particularly I think that Freud's and Jung's friendship was so productive for Jung even there was also tricky and they fell out of course but it was so productive for young because it helped him to to take up other things which which you avoid himself and didn't manage didn't manage to do so let's think a little bit about the things that Freud sort of hinted at but others have picked up and and I think in this this approach to Freud where we can run with things not just read him off the page and we can we can do some of that as well so one of the really interesting features that he noticed about the unconscious side of life is that there's no negative when were in this unconscious side of life one of the first things you learn when you become a psychotherapist it's not to try to comfort the client and the reason for this is not that you become nasty it's because it doesn't really do any good for this deeper side of life you're trying to get hold off because what happens when you say don't panic is immediately people start going what's like panicking about you know should I be aware of where the door is the exit you know is something going and of course in hitchhikers guys the galaxy being good Freudian that book they're very very aware of this I'm you know so if you say to a client look don't worry we'll work this out they're going he doesn't know what's going on does he and maybe I should going try and find someone else there's no negative in the unconscious and it's sometimes put like that and so you know this has very practical ramifications and when you become a therapist and you have to learn not to do that look it's okay we're working out and you can you can almost feel it if I go - it's okay work out you're going to like a part of yourself that you if maybe one thought would be look if that's what I wanted then why will I come here I can get that from my friend I want something else from here and trying to push through that defensive felt a barrier of anxiety and that's actually partly why you've come to therapy you don't just want to be comforted and thinking there's no negative the unconscious is one way that you can perhaps step more into that side of life and and begin to open it up one way of doing that and one the reasons why I like this and this thought as well is that in the spiritual traditions there's often a reflection on how there's no negative as well and so the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus he makes this comment at one point that the road up and the road down are the same and you know the more egoic rational part of you might be saying well he's making an obvious comments that you know you can walk up a hill you can walk down a hill they're the same thing you know big deal what's so interesting about that but if Heraclitus is saying something about how an unconscious side of us can make itself known more deeply by reflecting on this idea that the road up in the road down are the same then it becomes much much more interesting he's almost sort of saying that let go of the rational side step into something that feels less understood maybe provokes an early sense of anxiety but nonetheless if you can tolerate that whole new sense of life might open up for the philosophers in the room in the unconscious there's no excluded middle so no excluded middle it's not like right or wrong never the twain it can be something what deeper can be going on and often in spiritual texts and so on and this is played with the idea that maybe something can be right and wrong and if you stay with that possibility as a way you feel the sort of judging inside the horizon starts shaking but maybe you start to see something over the horizon as well so very intuitively thinkers for many many centuries have been thinking about and this there is contradiction there's paradox there's mystery the strangeness it's not just saying it's rubbish and it's actually inviting you to become more conscious of something of which you're not so conscious now I mentioned something about object relations theory as well this is another thing that Freud picked up a little bit he does in some places about how maybe inside ourselves the part of us which were not so conscious and it's not instinct in drives but actually it's personalities and sub personalities and this was very much picked up in British psychotherapy and it's now the dominant sort of psychotherapy object relations theory that object is rather horrible bird actually but it basically means sort of personalities or part personalities good case in point you know you're driving your car you pull up behind someone a red light the red light turns green they don't pull off within about half a second instantly you're angry and hooting your horn it's like the angry sub personality has come to the fore and then after you think one earth was I say angry was a half a second and yet it's somehow taken over I mentioned earlier on you know what part personality or personality did you unwittingly call forth when you arrived here this morning you know maybe this is a strange building to you and there was a part of you that when I'm fine I can work out my way through this building or another part that when I didn't cooperated to you I just thought what everyone else is doing you know part personalities pop up and down all the time through the day and what's really wonderful is that if you become conscious of your part personalities you can almost kind of interrogate them and ask them you know so if you think about the part personality that pops up this morning and that that made you overconfidence perhaps that's one of mine and and then you want that person you think no if you didn't have to be overconfident what might you do and then my part personality goes well if I didn't have to be so defensive then you know actually I'd be really curious about the place I'd be really interested to come to a new building how do they put you know such things together now and who else is here I'm all sort of open less defended side can come to the fore and you can become more conscious or something you know rather than being rather trapped in your confident bubble and not really very aware of the rest of reality something of reality can open up to you and so it's a really powerful fantastic notion this idea of part personalities becoming more conscious of that immediate mechanism less defended against them asking interrogating the part personalities we honestly opens up that little bit more you've become conscious of something that you were conscious off before in therapy this is used all the time it's sometimes known as the countertransference so here's a book from a scene from Philippa Perry's really rather wonderful book called couch fiction where Philip er uses cartoons in order to show what's going on in the room far more than just that the patient might be conscious of and cartoons are so brilliant I think because they can do this and they can show what you might be immediately less conscious of and so here's the client they're trapping the suit and the therapist they're in the corner and that the chaps saying I suppose you're going to ask me about my childhood hoho bit of pop psychology there and he's thinking it'll be a waste of time because I wanted for nothing and then he carries on says nothing bad at all besides mum and dad didn't split up so I left University so my universe never fell apart and the therapist is thinking uh-oh nothing bad fell apart split up you know this is what he's defending against this is there something like lose here and the I as the therapist need to be trying to sort of be aware of now and start to try and invite my clients consciousness just to reach a little bit more into what is so tricky and difficult and you do that often for using what's known as the counter transference someone saying something you yourself are having a really very different feeling bells are going off alarms are ringing and you don't feed it straight back what's the point of that you know the defences are there for a reason something was perhaps quite traumatic but it's an indicator to you there's something to be explored there's a step to take here if you can possibly with the client tolerate that and take that step counter transference now counter transference is again has a kind of very interesting relationship to spiritual piles as well and because it suggests that there's communication going on that's not just empirical that's not just sense based and again dreams you know might be part of that and we can return perhaps to these seemingly ridiculous dreams I won't try and unpack Dolly's butterfly ship I'll leave that one for you but I've already I hope unpacked a little bit of man might feed himself to a tiger was seemingly completely irrational and stupid thing to do but perhaps he was more conscious of a dimension of reality and the new or I am I speak for myself and and so he's well aligned with the different level of reality much as in therapy one things which you try to to foster in a therapy training is to become more aligned to a different level of reality as well you know for therapeutic and clinical ends rather than spiritual ends and but nonetheless perhaps it can carry on and and maybe even something like telepathy use the Force Luke if you are a Star Wars fan again sci-fi a same kind of sci-fi I can really get onto this and doing a rather wonderful way we can pick telepathy up if you like in the questions but I'm at least open to all that possibility and if you work as a therapist and you start to have coincidences and you think mm-hm you know what does that mean so I'm caught up for thinking about these kind of phenomena in terms of how maybe there's a side of reality of which I'm just not very conscious but because I'm working in the zone is trying to reach into deeper aspects of reality and maybe something like telepathy then just sort of becomes the norm in somewhere or other another feature of the unconscious that Freud lists in his essay but didn't really run with that much himself and was the sense that when you feel that you're entering a slightly timeless zone you're approaching things of which are less conscious he even said that the unconscious is eternal and by which he meant and that time doesn't really matter now one way in which I think this is more that's been proven is with attachment theory that something that happens and when you were say one or two years old can have quite as much impact upon your life 50 60 years later as it did back then when you realizing that time can't explain it something hasn't have faded away just with the passage of time you're approaching a dimension of reality that you're not very conscious of at the moment and here's a renaissance picture one I particularly like Jared and I old man and young child and I think that these kind of Renaissance images appeal to us so much they feel so expansive when we look at them because they're aware that they need to play with a timeless aspect of reality as well as one that's very particular in in a moment so here you know you have that of the old man and his grandson very particular moment you know touching tender moment there and it's definitely one individual encountering another and moves us for that particular moment but then as you look out of the window you're taking into another zone at the same time there's the the road that is ambling taking as it were you towards the mountain which is less well defined and the horizon which almost disappears into the sky it's kind of a timeless zone remember the screen that Muntz used where and things became deaf des differentiated that something else could come through as a result and I think these were Nissan's pictures you know they play with that really rather wonderfully they must have been I think very aware of deeper aspects of conscious life deeper aspects of reality that then get expressed in the art and why it's so lovely for us to look at them now because they feel like they're opening up something for us it's what you want to live with a picture like this and it's like it keeps giving because it keeps taking you to a side of yourself of which you're less conscious and but can become more conscious it's very different from kind of shock art that has one message you get it and then you want to move on this kind of art is doing something else for us and again just to sort of make explicit the the spiritual link this is a picture drawn by Hildegard of Bingen and medieval mystic you can perhaps just make her out in the corner of her desk there and she drew this image of the human minds represented in the human form there that can sort of reach across the cosmos and that is completely free actually from time and space and all sorts of figures have said this Epicurus to use a slightly counter example because Epicurus is sometimes thought as a materialist these days but if you read Lucretius his poem on the nature of things the epic which celebrates Epicurus it starts off by saying Epicure his mind could traverse across the universe he could fly out and sort of come back and it was this if he was a god he could show us how to live in a way that we're just not remotely aware of at all and so this this sort of sense of it's not just about our clinical trouble our own particular problems I think we sort of have to begin there but that's just the start of the journey and again Freud I think was on to this you know he doesn't make these remarks there's something about that which is unconscious that seemed timeless that seemed eternal there's not about space and time he himself I think perhaps you know for reasons is very anxieties and defenses it couldn't quite resolve it he kept writing essays about gold you know Moses and monotheism mama theism civilization is discontent he kept returning to it it couldn't quite push through but maybe as well here later on I didn't quite what take the later speaker will have on young but people often turn to young and to develop things in this direction this is the force of flight which we can go in and here's another chap I like was like invoking a bit of William Blake because he's from these parts he saw angels on Peckham riders down the road and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell one of his statements now very famous because of adults hotly Huxley he said you know if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is infinite if a man is closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern and perhaps you know what Freud shows us and reflections on Freud suggest and it's not just the clinical but is also the spiritual value that you know maybe it's brain damaged that has closed the doors of perception that definitely happens and you know for those of us who get old and then have a disease like Alzheimer's or something like that something like this will happen and that the doors of perception will close it's not because it's not there it's because the brain is damaged and that can happen but perhaps it's developmental issues you know perhaps it you got stuck and in between the first phase you know where you are in a happy state of bliss because everything seemed to be at your service and was one and maybe something goes so well in the transition to the second phase where life could grow and you could become conscious of another person who is feeding with you and who you could relate to who could fall in love with but maybe that transition to the third stage didn't go so well and so when you fall in love as an adult you never quite get over falling in love and can't establish a more sustainable relationship perhaps there's a developmental issue there that prevents you from going into the third stage maybe developmental issues a part of the problem and therapy you know it's really really good at all that but maybe also it's a kind of social cultural blindness maybe one of the reasons why we think that William Blake is a prophet and we look at images that he drew like that one on the screen and wonder what he meant by the marriage of heaven and hell I thought heaven and hell were opposites ah but maybe he's taking us into this zone where paradox where contradiction and can exist and he's doing it because in all in engaging with that strange sense that Heaven and Hell can be married by doing that that itself is a kind of therapy that it's more of a spiritual therapy and that can open the doors of perception that can clean them a little bit more he's inviting us into a process in his art and so you know perhaps all the things which we we do suffer from but perhaps somewhat coming more conscious of I don't know what drew you to depth psychology today in an aisle was telling me that and this has been one of the most popular subjects maybe you know we're part of this trying to reach and through to something else we feel the pressure feel that the allure the attraction of depth psychology because we're wanting to open up not just ourselves and but also I'm some sort of connection with nature and the cosmos and even the gods and I think you know this is what religions traditionally onto here's three images of a full consciousness you might say there's the image of Christ which as I said right at the beginning I think served the Western words well at word world quite well in the mystical sense at least whatever the politics and sociology of Christianity but and certainly people used the figure of Christ as a kind of emblem of full consciousness and they were invited as it were to become christ-like in themselves as a simple put it to take on the mind of Christ and to see themselves as not just human but also is connected to the divine in some way the Buddha perhaps a much more acceptable figure now but again that image of the Buddha meditating you look at that and immediately you know he's on thing that you're not quite sure whether you're onto or not there's a kind of pure consciousness notion certainly in some sort of Buddhism's and they are invited to gradually become more and more aware of to become conscious of and then I like to and the Sufi tradition which you know has these very dynamic ways of expanding your consciousness that the whirling dervish there and also the word someone who loves words I love for the Sufi tradition for that but there's something about words you know words have soul and they have a power remember the poetry and that can open something up as well where we're still surrounded by lots of ways in which we can have to grapple with something grappling is key grappling is key in our development and it's key in our spiritual development as well but nonetheless and these symbols and these images when this process is rounded about and I hope I've begun to open some of that for you now and it we picked up for the rest of the day as well so let's pause and have some questions [Applause] depending on the rate in this instance in question anyone like to pick up something a seeming detail or whatever often that's the seeming little questions can be the most interesting so their hand there and then the one behind you so the lady the pink and then one behind you and there's one over there third so let's do that if you shout I'll repeat the questions or use myth yeah yeah so I didn't say the myth which I just say something about myth perhaps and how it might fit in yeah yeah so family halls being deaf as well to think about death yeah well I think make just a reflection to see whether that's this is helpful at all I think that some one things that can happen before we're fully aware that we're living into smaller world is that the life of the world that we're living in can start to feel like it drains out and you know and then maybe even a worse stage it can feel like what's the point of living and death even you know can come to the fore our consciousness there may be many reasons behind that you know the remember it's always the next step always a map always trying to find out what's going on never a quick solution but it may be that our conscious awareness is too narrow and reality feels too small for us and so death and so on comes with the thoughts of death or fear that life is emptying out comes to the fore and myth which you didn't mention but nonetheless it's a very very powerful way of again encountering this side of which we're not so aware you know myths are not rational stories there may be replete with symbolism maybe they have a kind of archetypal feel no doubt more obvious it about this this afternoon and by living with the myth again you know myths are stories you don't just get in an instant you want to return to them again and again and again and they can even shape a whole culture they kind of provide the life for a whole way of life I think that's kind of what they're doing there rattling your cage a little bit and inviting you to become more conscious or something so just a thought there's an almost amount might be said about that but I thought that the person behind who raised the hand J hi yes so I'm it's only me responding to Freud um as I was trying to say I think the way to read for it is to respond to him not just to read his ideas on the page and the reason a very immediate reason for that is if you try and pin Freud down you can't you know he's constantly changing his mind sometimes people say oh he has three phases or something like that and I think he's constantly trying to explore things and so it's the dynamic of Freud's that I feel is more important than just what he said but it does give you a starting point you know does give you this thing the unconscious what you're going to make of it I've tried to say don't think of it as two minds the conscious minds in the unconscious mind think of it as that which stops you becoming more conscious of reality and maybe for all sorts of different reasons but but you're absolutely right to point that out that Freud himself you know he was really against religion he thought that the desire for connection with the gold was the desire to return to a very early stage of your development when you were one with your mother he thought religion was all regressive but people have thought about this subsequently have said wait a minute Freud in his ownself analysis was very good at understanding his relationship to his father but he hardly ever talks about his relationship with his mother so perhaps he too couldn't quite go there for some reason or another and couldn't see there's more than just regression going on with this desire for unity and so on there's something progressive as much as regressive going on no doubt religious people can constantly flip between the two and want to feel safe and cozy and like you know everlasting love is gonna mean there never fear anything and that would perhaps be a Morgul regressive moment and but that's not to exclude the more progressive moment as well so when he makes these occasional remarks like in the unconscious essay the unconscious is eternal it's timeless you know this is a moment where he's beginning he glimpses something else but perhaps couldn't quite go there himself yeah so thanks well now there was a question over here before other hands went up so maybe pick that our first number come to the back yeah so this is the notion of coincidences which Jung called synchronicities I mean the short answer is I don't know but I do observe an experience and because I've been convinced that there's more of reality than I'm conscious of and indeed the rational processes of investigation can open up to me I want to sort of hold on to those coincidences and just see where they take me not to try to explain them too much and but to treat them as me in that moment being at this edge where what I'm conscious of is meeting what I'm less conscious of and if I could just hold that strange moment almost a felt sense then maybe over time more of reality will start to show itself known so you know synchronous is is I tend to treat not to resolve them but to hold them you know I don't if a synchronicity happens I personally don't say that's what I should do I should say oh this is where I should be I've got to stay in this zone somehow and see what unfolds it's something like that now I would I lost track slightly but maybe one that one of you guys and then some on the back there's lots of hands now this is hey I'll be around over lunchtime and so on so please do approach me and okay that's one of the back right at the back there thank you yeah during the shout out your question right at the back with the lady pointing at you yeah yeah thank you so again about Freud and cause an effect and so on and I think this is the way that Freud has been assimilated into culture rather than Freud himself and if I was going to lay blame at any one particular door I'd actually lay blame at the advertising industries at all one of things which happens and this there's mortar appetizing than this I didn't you know to treat me lightly here but one things that happened and was that post-freudian figures went to the US and they started to use 14 ideas to persuade companies to invest in advertising campaigns if you've watched of the series madmen you you get some of this every so often and so for example there's a famous case we're sort of follower of Freud persuaded a cigarette firm that they should produce ads that showed women smoking and saying now you can be a man and it was playing on this idea that you know the cigarette was actually a phallic symbol that the woman could take into herself and so he could feel empowered in life I don't know whether ad ad campaign even works let alone anything else and but this rather neat you know do one thing something else happened became a way of reading Freud rather than staying with Freud and almost kind of reflecting on for it letting him you know be in the room with him you might say and see where he takes you rather than just treat him as if he was pure scientist you know he was a sort of a physicist of the mind that came up with these mechanisms that you can then prove like it can prove Newton's second law of motion he let know every so often particularly when he won this Goethe prize that actually he was someone who was deeply interested in science but as a springboard to take him back to reality you know science itself is a kind of reduction of reality that can be really useful in certain respects on occasionally you can even make microphones work and but nonetheless you know there's more to reality going on and so that that's how I would invite you to reconsider Freud just pick up a little bit of Freud he's such a good writer and immediately your mind will go in a trillion directions and it's you know it's wonderful as a result I'm gonna have to move on let's pick this up later I realized I'm just giving snippets hopefully little things which you can take with you and run with you in the spirit of Freud's rather than a complete answer here and now but the lady right at the back and then we'll come to the fore yeah yeah that's right yeah thank you very much this is about meditation and psychoanalysis well Freud didn't have the word but I actually think Freud discovered mindfulness meditation his expression was evenly suspended attention and in his more clinical writing for therapists he says what you need to cultivate is evenly suspended attention and this for me is a brilliant description of what is now [Music] offered as mindfulness training in fact when I did my psychotherapy training we had a couple of other people in the training institute who who big meditators and they taught us how to meditate in order that we can cultivate this evenly suspended attention so I think it's absolutely key and the point is that even in evenly suspended attention your conscious mind is there but it's not just grabbing everything and pretending it understands it all you know the Buddhist where would be you become less attached the more psychotherapeutic words you become less defended and so with a kind of sense of evenly suspended attention supported by body posture again you know it's like a therapy the room is really important you don't make changes in the room because then when people come week on week they can use the room to support their free association they too can cultivate a kind of evenly suspended attention they didn't have to worry that the room is going to changed or be distracted this this way and that that's one of the reasons why same time same place same room and so on is so important it's cultivating qualities of minds that I think are very very similar yes and then there's the idea that you know the front middle yeah yeah that's lovely so the Nady saying that someone she knew who became developed out signers and actually released them rather than encase them and it was almost as if something that they warned all their life and they could put down at last and kind of much freer love and could express himself I was feeling someone just the other day he had a similar story he felt but guilty telling me but it wasn't a climb by the way I should perhaps I said this from the top that I don't talk about particular client cases and it's just the kind of casual friend and he said yeah the his one of his guilty secrets his mother became much nicer when she became when she developed Alzheimer's and it was because something will freely could flow I think and I mean you know out summers is can be a hideous lottery it can be really pairing painful and difficult I don't to glamorize it and but every so often you do hear stories like that and as if it's as if a defense came down and that's that was one of the products of the disease yes let's have the middle hand there because I think that's been going out quite a lot and then will come to the front yeah so this is free will I think free will is something that we feel we have at a particular point in our species evolution but also at a little bit of our mind is quite dedicated to its it's got freewill it can make decisions so it's both the kind of a synchronic thing something happens through time and diachronic thing something happens in a moment so freewill for example in the ancient worlds we read Plato or Aristotle you know which I have an interest in as well they never discussed freewill anything anybody notice anything my goodness and you know what's that about freewill is not first discussed and said about the 1st or 2nd centuries ad and I think I might be right in saying that Justin Martyr won the first Christian philosophers is the first-person start talking about freewill and this is all things which I discuss much more in my book on Christianity that I think Christianity is significance in the West is that it gave people a very much deeper more powerful sense of being an individual that's one of the responses that people had to this this this moment and particularly the figure of Christ and the sense that we might have free will rather than be fated that was the standard notion in the ancient world so the Stoics for example said no no the law Goss rules you know it determines everything that's just the way it is a notion of free will starts to emerge and but then you've got to understand what free wills about and I think this is where we've kind of gone slightly wrong now and that we now have such a powerful sense of being an individual that it's easy to default to the notion that we can more or less choose anything in life if we wanted to you know and certainly a consumerist society in a place without very directly it's almost like free will is king and then you get philosophers and people that Sam Harris and others as you are mentioning who say you know that can't be right you know and then and they go to the opposite extreme they see free will doesn't even exist you know so you had this kind of our G bar G that goes on and personally I think that that free will is something that exists in our conscious minds at the part which were conscious but it's freedom is not that I can choose anything it's freedom is that I can get to know myself better I can actually pay attention to myself go to these this interface between one conscious of and less conscious of and discover more and more myself and in a way a modern spiritual enlightenment is not as it were to be blissed-out as it were as if the ego is smashed and annihilated it's to extend that consciousness and that freedom more and more into unconscious spaces and and live life more and more aligns but but having chosen to do so from these other as parts of reality and to join reality as aware freely you might say rather than just because you're fated by the gods at would as would have been the older assumption so I think that's part of what the evolution of our species consciousness means over the last two or three thousand years and as I say that's that's deeply unpacked I hope in my book outside yeah yeah okay yeah yeah so this is but they're not the idea that maybe meditation techniques mindfulness techniques are about kind of resetting something so you can experience life more expansively and I'm sure there's something in that you know the point in where quitting it would be that you are trying to be in your day without your automatic defenses which perhaps would be called your conditioning in another modality than you know more Buddhist kind of modality I agree with that the only thing I would add is that I think actually our defenses have got something to tell us to use another Buddhist phrase the obstacles are the way and it's and that the developmental science backs this up I think because it is a struggle to expand your consciousness you know that all maybe these kind of moments you have to go through like the developmental science you know between those elemental stages between one two people three people more people and so on and they are they are difficult you know that it's about giving something up in order to discover something much more and put it like that so I sometimes I'm not saying you say this but sometimes you do hear people say oh you know meditation just resets and everything's okay I'm wary of that I think that the obstacles have got something for us as well and so I think what meditation can be good at is supporting people to encounter the obstacle that then becomes expansive rather than just somehow sort of bypassing the obstacle I'm not saying you're saying that but sometimes you wonder what people are saying something a bit like that yeah exactly yes yes so the gentleman mentions the Delphic Oracle that had know thyself written above the portico and again to link back to the deep history I think part of Socrates is genius but he refrained that know thyself it had been know thyself as a mortal before the immortal gods fated you know at the mall of the Gods hands and Socrates said in an oh maybe we can take that know thyself to know thyself internally start asking the questions that he became so famous for and that begins the move that I think flowers in Christianity has fallen into some sort of crisis again now but I think the crisis now has meaning too and perhaps we've had some of that this morning but finish there thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 2,950

Rating: 4.8730159 out of 5

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, Freud, Unconscious, Freud and the unconscious, Freud dreams, Freud theory, Freud psychoanalytic theory, Freud id ego superego

Id: i_BM-ekRqSs

Length: 105min 17sec (6317 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2019