Introduction to psychology: Sigmund Freud

last class we talked about the brain now I want to talk a little bit about some foundations so today and Monday we want to talk about two very big ideas and these ideas are associated with Sigmund Freud and BF Skinner and our psychoanalysis and behaviorism and I want to talk about psychoanalysis today and behaviorism next week now one of these things one of the things that makes these theories so interesting is their scope most of the work we're going to talk about in this class most of the ideas are narrow so I'm going to talk about some but is that somebody's idea about racial prejudice but that's not a theory of language acquisition we'll talk about theories of schizophrenia but they're not explanations of sexual attractiveness most theories are specialized theories but these two views are grand theories they're theories of everything encompassing just about everything that matters day-to-day life child development mental illness religion war love Freud and Skinner had explanations of all of these now this is not a history course I have zero interest in describing historical figures in psychology just for the sake of telling you about the history of the field what I want to tell you about though is I want to talk about these ideas because so much rests on them and even more importantly a lot of these ideas have critical influence on how we think about the present and that's there now for better or worse we live in a world profoundly affected by Sigmund Freud if I had to ask you choose a psycho name a famous psychologist the answer most of you be Freud he's the most famous psychologist ever and he's had a profound influence on the 20th and 21st century some biographical information he was born in the 1850s he spent most of his life in vienna austria and but he died in london and he escaped to London soon after a treating there at the beginning of World War two as the Nazis began to occupy where he lived he's one of the most famous scholars ever but he's not known for any single discovery instead he's known for the development of an encompassing theory of mind one that he developed over the span of many decades he was in his time extremely well known a celebrity recognized on the street and throughout his life he was a man of extraordinary energy and productivity in part because he was a very serious cocaine addict but also just in general he was just a high-energy sort of person he was up for the Nobel Prize in medicine and in literature didn't get either one of them didn't get the Prize in medicine because Albert Einstein everybody loves Albert Einstein well Albert Einstein really wrote a wrote a letter because they asked for opinions of other Nobel Prize wrote a letter saying don't give the prize to Freud he doesn't deserve a Nobel Prize he's just a psychologist now yeah okay well he's almost universally acclaimed as a profoundly important intellectual figure he's also the object of considerable dislike this is in part because of his character he was not a very nice man in many ways he was deeply ambitious to the cause of promoting psychoanalysis that a cause of presenting his view and defending it and he was um often dishonest extremely brutal to his friends and and you know terrible to his enemies he was an interesting character my favorite Freud's story was as he was leaving Europe during the rise of the Nazis as he was ready to go to go to England from I think either Germany or Austria he had to sign a letter from the Gestapo Gestapo agents intercepted him and demanded he signed a letter saying that at no point had he been threatened or harassed by the Gestapo so he signs the letter and any rights under that the Gestapo has not harmed me in any way in fact I highly recommend the Gestapo to everybody if it's he had a certain aggression to him he was also he's also disliked often hated because of his views he was seen as a sexual renegade out to destroy the conception of people as good and rational and pure beings and when a Nazis rose to power in the 1930s he was identified as a Jew who was devoted to destroying the most sacred notions of Christianity and too many extent the Sun extent many people see him this way and to some extent this accusation has some truth to it Freud made claims about people that many of us maybe most of us would rather not know well ok what didn't you say well if you ask somebody who doesn't like Freud what he said they'll describe some of the stupider things he said and in fact Freud said a lot of things some of which were not very rational for instance he's well-known for his account of phallic symbols arguing certain architectural monuments are subconsciously developed as penile representations and related to this he developed the notorious theory of penis envy and penis envy is an account of a developmental state that every one of you who is female has gone through according to Freud and the ideas that you discovered at some point your development that you lack the penis this is not this is a catastrophe and so each of you inferred at that point that you had been castrated you had once had a penis but somebody had taken it from you you then turn to your father and love your father because your father has a penis so he's a sort of penis substitute you reject your mother who's equally unworthy due to her her penis lack and that shapes your psychosexual development now if that's the sort of thing you know about Freud you are not gonna have a very high opinion of him or of his work but at the core of Freud's explanation the more interesting ideas is as a set of claims of immense intellectual importance and the two main ones are this the two main ones involve the existence of an unconscious unconscious motivation and the notion of unconscious dynamics or unconscious conflict which lead to mental illnesses dreams slips of the tongue and so on the first idea the idea of unconscious motivation involves rejecting the claim that you know what you're doing so suppose you fall in love of somebody and you decide you want to marry them and then somebody was asked to ask you why and you'd say something like well I'm ready to get married this stage in my life I really love the person the person is smart and attractive I want to have kids whatever and maybe this is true but a Freudian might say that even if this is your honest answer you're not lying to anybody else still there are desires and motivations that govern your behavior that you may not be aware of so in fact you might want to marry John because he reminds you of your father or because you want to get back at somebody for betraying you if somebody was to tell you this you'd say that's total nonsense but that wouldn't deter a Freudian afford Ian would say that these processes are unconscious so of course you just don't know what's happening so the radical idea here is you might not know what why you do what you do and this is something we accept for things like visual perception we accept that you look around the world and you get sensations and you figure out there's a there's a car there's a tree there's a person and you're just unconscious of how this happens but it's unpleasant and kind of frightening that this could happen that this could apply to things like why you're now studying at Yale why you feel the way you do towards your friends towards your family now the marriage case is extreme but Freud gives a lot of simpler examples where this sort of unconscious motivation might play a role so have you ever liked somebody or dislike them and not not know why have you ever found yourself in a situation where you're you're doing something or you're arguing for something or making a decision for reasons that you can't fully articulate have you ever forgotten somebody's name at exactly the wrong time have you ever called it the wrong name in the throes of passion this is all the Freudian unconscious the idea is that we do these things these things are explained in terms of cognitive systems that were not aware of now all of this would be fine if your unconscious was a reasonable rational computer if your unconscious was really smart and looking out for your best interests but according to Freud that's not the way it works according to Freud there are three distinct processes going on in your head and these are in violent internal conflict and the way you act in a way you think our products not of a singular rational being but of a set of conflicting creatures and these three parts are the ED the ego and the super-ego and they emerge developmentally the it'd according to Freud is present at birth it's the animal part of the self it wants to eat drink pee poop get warm and have sexual satisfaction it is outrageously stupid it works on what Freud called a pleasure principle it wants pleasure and it wants it now and that's according to Freud how human begins pure it Freud had this wonderful phrase polymorphous perversity this pure desire for pleasure now unfortunately life doesn't work like that what you want isn't always what you get and this leads to a set of real actions to cope of the facts that pleasure isn't always there when you want it either by planning how to satisfy your desires or planning how to suppress them and this system is known as the ego or the self and it works on the reality principle and it it works on the principle trying to figure out how to make your way through the world how to satisfy your pleasures or in some cases how to give up on them and the ego the mergence of the ego for Freud symbolizes the origin of consciousness finally if this was all there was it might be a simpler world but Freud had a third component that of a super ego and the super-ego is the internalized rules of parents and society so what happens in the course of development is you're just trying to make your way through the world and satisfy your desires but sometimes you're punished for them some desires are inappropriate some actions are wrong and you're punished for it the idea is that you come out you you get in your head a super-ego a conscience in these movies would be like a little angel above your head that tells you when things are wrong and basically yourself the ego is in between the it'd and the super-ego one thing to realize I told you two it is a rage ously stupid it just says oh hungry food sex oh let's get warm Oh the super-ego is also stupid the super-ego according to Freud is not some brilliant moral philosopher telling you about right and wrong the super-ego is like you you should be ashamed of yourself that's disgusting stop doing that oh and in between these two screaming creatures one of you one of them telling you to seek out your desires the other one telling you should be ashamed of yourself is you is the ego now according to Freud most of this is unconscious so we see bubbling up to the top we feel we experience ourselves and the driving of the air forces of the it and the forces of the super-ego are unconscious in that we cannot access them we don't know what it's like the workings of our kidneys or our stomachs you can't introspect and find them rather they do their work without conscious knowledge now Freud developed this this is the Freudian theory in broad outline he extended it and developed it into a theory of psychosexual development and so Freud's theory is as I said before a theory of everyday life of decisions of errors of falling in love but it's also a theory of child development so Freud believed there were five stages of personality development and each is associated with a particular erogenous zone and Freud believed as well that if you have a problem at a certain stage if something goes wrong you'll be stuck there so according to Freud there are people in this room or are what they are because they got stuck in the oral stage or the anal stage and and that's not good so the oral stage is when you start off the mouth is associated with pleasure everything is sucking and chewing and so on and the problem for Freud is premature weaning of a child depriving him of the breast could lead to serious problems in his personality development it could make him as the phrase go goes into an aural person and his or ality could be described literally it fraud uses as an explanation for why somebody might eat too much or chew gum or smoke they're trying to achieve satisfaction through their mouth of a sort they didn't get in this very early stage of development but it can also be more abstract if your roommate is dependent and needy you could then go to your roommate say you're an aural person the first year of your life did not go well a phrase even more popular is the anal stage and that happens after oral stage and problems can emerge if toilet training is not handled correctly if you have problems during those years of life you could become an anal personality according to Freud and your roommate could say your problem is you're too anal and according to Freud literally it meant you are unwilling to part with your own faeces it's written down here I know it's true and and the way it manifests itself as you know from just now people talk is your compulsive you're clean you're stingy this is the anal personality then it gets a little bit more complicated on the next stage is the phallic stage actually this isn't that much more complicated the focus of pleasure shifts to the genitals and fixation can lead to excessive masculinity in females or if you're in males or if you're female need for attention or domination now at this point something really interesting happens call the Oedipus complex and this is based on a story the mythical story of a king who killed his father and married his mother and according to Freud this happens to all of us in in this way while all of us by all of us Freud men men so here's the idea you're three or four years old you're in the phallic stage so what do you interested in well you're interested in your penis and then you seek an external art object Freud sort of vague about this but you know you seek some sort of satisfaction but who's out there who be sweet and kind and loving and wonderful well mom so the child and for in first mom is nice hello mom so far so far and so but this is not crazy well boy falling in love of his mother problem dad's in the way um no now this is gonna get progressively weirder but I won't have to say as the father of two of two sons both sons went to a phase where they explicitly said they wanted to marry mommy and me if something bad happened to me that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world so so so there's this but now it gets it gets a little bit aggressive so so the idea is that child determines that he's going to kill his father every three and four-year-old boy thinks this but then because children according to Freud don't have a good sense of the boundary between their mind in the world which is a problem the problem is is they don't they think their father can tell that they're plotting to kill him and they figured her father is now angry at them and then they ask themselves what's the worst thing dad could do to me and the answer is castration so they come to the conclusion that their father is going to castrate them because their illicit love for their mum and then they say dad was and then they don't think about sex for several years and that's the latency stage the latency stages they've gone through this huge thing with mum and dad fell in love book mom wanted to kill my father dad was going to castrate me fell out of love of mum editor sex business and it's sex is repressed until you get to the general stage and a general stage is the stage we are all in the healthy adult stage now matter you're adults and you've gone through all the developmental stages where do you stand you're not out of the woods yet because unconscious mechanism even if you haven't got fixated or anything there's still this dynamic going on all the time with your age your ego and your super-ego and the idea is your super-ego remember your super-ego is stupid so your super-ego isn't only telling you not to do bad things it's telling you not to think bad things so what's happening is your your ear is sending up all of this weird sick stuff all of these crazy sexual and violent desires oh I'll kill them I'll have sex with that I'll I'll have extra helpings on my dessert and and your super e your super-ego say no no no and this stuff is repressed it doesn't even make it to consciousness the problem is Freud had a very sort of hydraulic theory of what goes on and some of this stuff slips out and it shows up in dreams and it shows up in slips to the tongue and an exceptional case that it shows up in certain clinical symptoms so what happens is Freud described a lot of normal life as in terms of different ways we use to keep that horrible stuff from the air making its way to consciousness and he called these the fence mechanisms you're defending yourself against the horrible parts of yourself and some of these make a little bit of sense I mean one way to describe this in a non-technical non Freudian way is there's certain things about ourselves we'd rather not know there's certain desires would rather not know and we have ways to hide them so for instance they're sublimation sublimation is you might have a lot of energy maybe sexual energy or aggressive energy but instead of turning it to a sexual or aggressive target what you do is you focus it in some other way so you could imagine a great artist like Picasso turning the sexual energy into his artwork there's um there's displacement displacement is you have certain shameful thoughts or desires and you refocus them more appropriately a boy was bullied by his father may hate his father and want to hurt him but since this would this is very shameful and difficult the boy might instead kicked the dog and think he hates the dog because that's a more acceptable target there's projection projection is I have certain uncertain impulses I'm uncomfortable with so rather than own them myself I project them to somebody else a classic example for Freud is homosexual desires the idea is that I feel this tremendous lust towards you for instance and any any of you all are you u3 and and and I'm ashamed of this lust so Rhett so what I say is hey are you guys looking at me in a sexual manner are you lusting after me how disgusting because what I do is I take my own desires and I project it to others and Freud suggests that perhaps not implausibly that man who believed other men who are obsessed with the sexuality of other men are themselves projecting away their own sexual desires there's rationalization which is that when you do something or think something bad you rationalize it and you give it a more socially acceptable explanation a parent who enjoys smacking his child will typically not say I enjoy smacking my child rather will say it's for the child's own good I'm being a good parent by doing this and finally there is regression which is returning to an earlier stage of development and you actually see this in children in times of stress and trauma they'll become younger they will act younger they might cry damn I suck their thumb seek out a blanket or so on now these are all mechanisms that for Freud are not the slightest bit pathological they're part of normal life normally we do these things to keep an equilibrium among the different systems of the unconscious but sometimes it doesn't work sometimes things go awry and what happens is a phrase that's not currently used in psychology was popular during Freud's time hysteria hysteria includes phenomena like hysterical blindness and hysterical deafness which is when you cannot see and cannot hear even though there's nothing physiologically wrong with you paralysis trembling panic attacks gaps of memory including amnesia and so on and the idea is that these are actually symptoms these are symptoms of mechanisms going on to keep things unconscious it's a common enough idea in movies often in movies what happens is somebody goes to an analyst they had some horrible problem they can't remember something or they have some sort of blackouts and so on and the analyst tells them something and at one point they get this insight and they realize what what why they blinded themselves why they can't remember and for Freud this is what happens Freud originally attempted to get these memories out through hypnosis but then move to the mechanism of free association and according to Freud ideas patients offer resistance to this and and then the idea of a psychoanalyst is to get over to resistance and help patients get insight the key notion of psychoanalysis is your problems are actually reflect deeper phenomena you're hiding something from yourself and once you know what's going on for deeper phenomena your problems will go away I'm going to give you an example of a therapy session now this is not a Freudian analysis we'll discuss later on and of course what a Freudian analysis is but this is not a pure forty now that forty analysis the person is lying on a couch does not see their therapist or therapist is very non directive but I'm going to present this as an example here because it illustrates so many of the Freudian themes particularly themes about dreams the importance of Dreams about repression and about hidden meaning so this is from a television episode and the characters many some of you may have seen this many of you will not have the character is suffering from panic attacks in particular he has panic attacks when he sees he's his first panic attack originated when he walked to a swimming pool and he saw a family of ducks fly away and he had a panic attack heart high heart pounding sweating flush and he passed out and these panic attacks grew worse and worse until he saw a therapist who ended up prescribing and medication and this is discussed as one of is one of the meetings he had with the therapist Freud's contributions extend beyond the study of individual psychology and individual pathology Freud had a lot to say about dreams as you could see in this illustration he believed that dreams had a manifest content meaning manifest meaning what you experience in your dream but dreams always had a latent content as well meaning too hidden the hidden implication of the dream he viewed all dreams as wish fulfillment every dream you have is a certain wish you have even though it might be a forbidden wish that you wouldn't wish to have you would want to have and dreams had and this is an idea of long predated Freud dreams had symbolism things and dreams were often not what they seem to be but rather symbols for other things Freud believed that literature and fairy tales and stories to children and and like carried certain universal themes certain aspects of unconscious struggles and certain preoccupations of our unconscious mind and Freud had a lot to say about religion for instance he viewed a large part of our of the idea of finding a singular all-powerful God as seeking out a father figure that some of us never had during development what I want to spend the rest of the class on is the scientific assessment of Freud so what I did was so far as I've told you what Freud had to say in broad outline I then want to take the time to consider whether or not we should believe this and how well it fits with our modern science but before doing so I'll take questions for a few minutes do people have any questions about about Freud our Freud's theories yes it's an excellent question the question is that the conflicts and psychosexual development that Freud describes is is always assumes that a child has a mother and a father one of each and a certain sort of familial structure and the question then is what if a child was raised by a single parent for example what if a child was never breastfed but fed from the bottle from the start and and Freudians have had problems with this Freud's Freud was very focused on a family life of the people he interacted with which is rather upper-class Europeans and and he's where the questions would have been difficult for Freud to answer I imagine that what a Freudian would have to say is you would expect systematic differences so you would expect a child who just grew up with a mother or just grew up to be a father with a father to be in some sense psychologically damaged by that failing to go through the normal psychosexual stages yes the issue the question is do modern psycho analysts still believe that women do not have super egos Freud was was as you're pointing out Freud was notorious for pointing for suggesting that women were morally immature relative to men I think Freud would say that women had super egos they're just not the sort of sturdy ones that men have I think psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic scholars right now would be mixed some would maintain it it really are deep sex differences others would want to jettison that aspect of Freudian theory yes well what sublimation is a lot of these it's a good question the question is sort of what is sublimation how does it relate to to other defense mechanisms a lot of defense mechanisms involve taking a desire and turning it now what displacement does is it takes it from you to her like I'm angry at you but maybe that's forbidden for some reason so I'll be angry at her what projection does this takes a desire for me and then puts it on somebody else heading outwards and what sublimation does is it just gives up the details and keeps the energy so you stay up you know your roommate stays up all night working and you say to your roommate for instance that's just because you haven't had sex in a long time and you want to have sex to do it all your energy to your math exam and then and then you say that's sublimation I learned that in intro psych and you may be very pleased one more one more question yes the question is which is related to the issue extending the issue of the two parent versus one family parent family as to what extent are these notions validated across culturally and that's such a good question I'm going to defer time I talk about it in a few minutes because that's actually that speaks to the issue of the scientific assessment of Freud so I want to try to get to your question in a little bit Freud Freudian theory is now at this point of time extremely controversial and there's a lot of well-known criticisms and attacks on Freud this is just actually an excellent book on the memory wars by Frederick Cruz which and Frederick Cruz is one of the strongest and most passionate critics of Freud and the problems with Freud go like this there are two ways you could reject the theory there are two problems with a scientific theory one way you could reject a theory is that it could be wrong so suppose I have a theory that the reason why some children have autism a profound developmental disorder is because their mothers don't love them enough this is a popular theory for many years it's a possible theory it just turns out to be wrong but another way and and so one way to attack and address a scientific theory is is to view it as just to see whether or not it works but there's a different problem a theory could have a theory could be so vague and all-encompassing that that it can't even be tested and this is one of the main critiques of Freud the idea could be summed up by a quotation from the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Pauli was asked his opinion about another physicist and Polly said this that guy's work is crap he's not right he's not even wrong and the criticism about Freud is is that he's not even wrong the issue of vagueness is summarized in a more technical way by the philosopher Karl Popper who described who introduced a term of falsifiability the idea of falsifiability is that what distinguishes science from non science is that scientific predictions make strong claims about the world and these claims are of a sort that they could be proven wrong if they couldn't be proven wrong they're not interesting not to be science so for example within psychology the sort of claims will be entertaining throughout the course include claims like damage to the him pic hippocampus causes failures of certain sorts of memory or everywhere in the world man on average one have more sexual partners than women or exposure to violent television tend to make children themselves more violent now are they true or are they false well we'll talk about that but the point here is they can be false they're interesting enough that they can be tested and as such they go to they might be wrong but they graduate to the level of a scientific theory this should be contrasted with non scientific programs and the best example of a non scientific program is astrology so the problem of a struggle of astrological predictions is not that they're wrong is that they can't be wrong they're not even wrong I did my I got my horoscope for today on the web a couple of negative aspects could make you a little finicky for the next few days okay I want to watch for that the presence of both Mars and Venus suggests you want to box everything into a neat ordered structured way but keeping a piece of jade or car million closed will help you keep in touch with your fun side and starting this morning I got from my wife a little piece of Jane I've been sort of in touch with my fun side the problem is a few days aren't gonna go by I said God that was wrong it can't be wrong it's just so vague I got a better horoscope from the onion actually riding in a golf cart with snow cone in hand you'll be tackled by two police officers this week after matching a composite caricature of us that's affected murder now then it's that's a good prediction because because wow if it's if it turns out to be true I'm gonna say those guys really know something it's falsifiable arguably Freud fails the test because Freudian theory is often so vague and flexible that it can't really be tested in any reliable way a big problem with this is a lot of Freudian theories claim to be validated in the course of psychoanalysis so when you ask people why do you believe in Freud they won't say oh because it is to experiment that experiment this data said and that data said well I'll say it it's Freudian 2-14 theory proves itself in the course of psychoanalysis the success of psychoanalysis but it's unreliable I mean the problem is say Freud says to a patient you hate your mother page says Wow that makes sense Freud says I'm right hey poison you hate your mother because there's no I don't let's tear like that's disgusting Freud says your anger shows this idea is painful for you to repress to from dying I am right and and the problem is the same sort of dynamic plays itself out even in the scientific debate back and forth so Freud Freudian psychologists I'm putting Freudian but what I mean is well-known defenders effort will make some claims like you know adult personality traits are shaped by the course of psychosexual development all dreams are disguised wish-fulfillment psychoanalysis is the best treatment for mental disorders scientists will respond I disagree there's a little or no evidence supporting those claims and a Freudian responses your rejection of my idea shows that they are distressing to you this is because I am right and this is often followed up seriously enough you have deep psychological problems and now now I don't want a caricature Freudians a lot of fourteens have tried and made a research program of extending their ideas scientifically bringing them to robust scientific tests but the problem is when you make specific falsifiable predictions they don't always do that well so for instance there's no evidence that oral and anal characteristics the personality characteristics I talked about about being needy versus being stingy relating any interesting way to weaning or toilet training and there's been some efforts cross-culturally to it to go back to the question this young man asked before looking at cross-cultural differences in toilet training and weaning which are really big differences to see if they correspond in any interesting way to personality differences and there's been no good evidence supporting that similarly Freud had some strong claims about sexuality for why some people are straight and others are gay these have met with very little empirical support and the claim that psychoanalysis proves itself by being by its tremendous success in curing mental illness is also almost certainly not true for most maybe not all but for most psychological disorders there are quicker and more reliable treatments than psychoanalysis and there's considerable controversy as whether the Tony Soprano method of insight where you get his insight and his discovery oh now I know makes any real difference in alleviating symptoms such as anxiety disorders or our depression this is why they're sort of often sort of a sticker shock when people go to a university psychology department where they say look hey where is them so I mean it's like how do I take classes on Freud who's your expert on Freud and the truth is Freudian psychoanalysis is almost never studied inside psychology departments not the cognitive or developmental side not the clinical side there are some exceptions but for the most part even the people who do study Freud within psychology apartments do so critically not very few of them would see themselves as a psycho analytic practitioner or as a Freudian psychologist Freud lives on both in a clinical setting and in a university but Freud at Yale for instance is much more likely to be found in the history department or the literature department than in a psychology department and this is typical enough but despite all of the sort of sour things I just said about Freud the big idea the importance of the dynamic unconscious remains intact we will go over and over and over again different case studies were some really interesting aspects of mental life proved to be unconscious now there's one question I'm actually going to skip over this for reasons of time and just go to some examples of the unconscious in modern psychology so here's a simple example of the unconscious in modern psychology language understanding so when you hear a sentence like John thinks that Bill likes him in a fraction of a second you realize that this means that John thinks that bill likes John if you heard a sentence oops John thinks that bill likes himself in a fraction of a second you would think that it means John thinks that bill likes Bill and as we will get to when we get to the lecture on language this is not conscious you don't know how you do this you don't even know that you are doing this but you do it quickly and instinctively so much of our day to day life can be done unconsciously there are different activities you can do driving chewing gum shoelace tying wear if you're good enough at them if you're expert enough at them you don't know you're doing them I was at a party a few years ago for a friend of mine and we ran out of food so he said I'll just go pick up some food an hour later he was gone still gone and was supposed be around the corner and we called him up on his cell phone and he said oh I got on a highway and I drove to work he works like an hour away we got in the highway and and these some version of these things happen all the time maybe more surprising Freud's insight that our likes and dislikes are due to factors that we're not necessarily conscious of has a lot of empirical support a lot of empirical support from research into Social Psychology for example so if we're in here's here's one finding from social psychology if somebody goes through a terrible initiation to get into a club don't like the club more you might think they'd like it less because people do terrible things but actually hazing is illegal but a remarkably successful tool the more you pay for something the more you like it and the more pain you go through to get something the more you'd like it from the standpoint of political politics for instance if you if you want loyal people in a political campaign do not pay them if you pay them they'll like you less if they volunteer they'll like you more and we'll talk about why there's different theories about why but my point right now is simply that people know necessarily know this but still they're subject to this another example and some weird studies done in a discipline of social psychology known as terror management which involves subliminal death primes the idea of subliminal death primes is this you sign up for your Human Subjects requirement and then you um they put you in front of a computer screen and then they tell you oh just sit in front of a computer screen and we'll ask you some questions and then the questions come out and they're questions like how much do you love your country what do you think of agents what do you have Jews what do you think of blacks think of vegetarians with you people political views different from yours here's the gimmick what you don't know is on that computer screen words are being flashed like that but they're being flashed so fast it looks like like that you don't see anything words like corpse dead dying the flashing of these subliminal words subliminal meaning a fancy term meaning below the level of consciousness you don't know you're seeing them has dramatic effects on how you answer those questions people exposed to death crimes become more nationalistic more patriotic less forgiving of other people less liking of other races and people from other countries again the claim the explanation for why this is so is something which we'll get to in another class the point now simply to illustrate that these sort of things can have that things you aren't aware of can have an effect on how you I think the final example I'll give this is a short demonstration to do I'm gonna cut the class in half at this point so you'll be on this side of the class the right side my right and this will be on the left side and I simply want everybody to think about somebody you love so think about some of you love your girlfriend your boyfriend your mom your dad think about somebody you love just okay now along this screen is going to be instructions but I want to give the instructions to this half of the class I'm gonna ask everybody in this half of class please either turn your head or shut your eyes okay teaching fellows to that and everybody in this half obey okay has everybody read that okay okay now turn your head this group now this group look at this and take a moment you don't have to do it on paper but take a moment to do it in your head you each group had instructions some people may have seen both instructions follow the instructions you bought for you now this was research done by Norbert Schwarz and here's the question I want you to ask yourself how much do you like this person and here's the effect half of you were asked to list three features of the person half of you were asked to list ten the finding which is not a subtle finding is that liking goes up in a three group and liking goes down in the ten group and here's why I have to think about three positive features of somebody so oh yeah they my girlfriend I have a girlfriend I think my god what oh she's smart she's beautiful and she's kind good how much do what do what do I think of her pretty good smart beautiful kind Mario yeah but the problem now Schwartz's clever though he says list the other group gets ten positive features smart beautiful kind really nice good cook punctual smart no I mentioned that the problem is nobody has ten positive features and and the the fact that being asked to do ten positive features is people find this hard and then those people and ask how much do you like this person I'm saying couldn't really make it that ten I guess I don't like them very much now the point of this illustration again is that matiee you don't know this subjects who are asked to do ten positive features and then later ranked a person lower and then asked why did you rank the person lower don't say because you told me the list ten typically we are oblivious to these factors that change our points but what we like and what we dislike and this is in fact a substantial and important part of the study of psychology I'm particularly for instance the study of racial and sexual prejudice we're one of the big findings from social psychology and will devote almost an entire lecture to this is that people have strong views about other races that they don't know about and that they don't know control their actions so to some extent this rounds out Freud because some extent the particulars of Freud are for the most part have been rejected but the general idea Freud is actually been so successful both in the study of scientific psychology and in our interpretation of everyday life that to some extent Freud's been a victim of his own success we tend to to underestimate the importance of Freudian thought in everyday life because he's transformed our worldview to such an extent that it's difficult for us to remember that there's any other way to think about it so to some extent he's been a victim of his own success we have time for for some further questions about Freud and about scientific implications of Freud I took a class once on how to teach when I was a graduate student and I just remember two things from this class one thing is never great in red pen posted people don't like that the second thing is never ask any questions because renewing is very frightening say any questions and people find it's intimidating I'm supposed to ask what are your questions so what are your questions yes and back sorry Detroit believe in medication Freud had an it's a good question um the question was did Freud believe in medication medication of course being a major theme of how we deal with certain disorders now particularly depression and anxiety disorders um on the one hand Freud made its start as a neuroscientist Freud studied the mind in the brain and was intensely interested in the neural basis of thought and behavior but the answer to your question the end is no although Freud was very sensitive to the brain basis of behavior Freud was totally convinced that the method through which to cure disorders like depression anxiety would not be medication but rather through the sort of talk therapy and insight moreover modern psycho and modern therapists including some people who aren't psychoanalytically defined will say look these drugs are all well and good but what they do is they mask the symptoms so if you have panic attacks say it's true the drugs might make the panic attacks go away but the panic attacks are actually not your real problem and by making them go away you don't get to the root of your problem so the answer is both Freud and modern-day psychoanalyst would think that medications are substantially overused in the treatment of mental disorders yes the question is what about research on dreams dreams is such a fun topic that I want to devote half a class to sleeping and dreams so for instance I will answer the question what is the most common dream I will also answer the question who thinks about sex more in reims men are women and what proportion of there's so many great questions I will answer dreams from a Freudian standpoint there's been some evidence that dreams do in some often do have some relationship to what you're thinking about and worrying about through the day but the strong Freudian view but symbolism and wish fulfillment has not been supported by the study of dreams what are your other questions yes whoever Erica's pointing to purple sir yes the Electra complex the Electra complex is the penis envy story Freud developed business this is this is a crude summary but Freud developed the oedipal complex you know mom I love mom he dead and then it's as if somebody reminded him Sigmund there are also women oh yeah and that story I told you with the penises and the penis envy and the replacement is a sort of a very shortened version of Electra complex I think it's fair to say that Electra complex was I sort of add on to the main interest of Freud too oedipal complex one more please yes according to Freud the the it's not a fixation in the stage in the same sense as an oral or anal stage but yes the claim that Freud would make is that the woman's discovery that she lacks the penis plays a fundamental role later on determining her allegiances and life and in fact her own sexual preferences and interest so it's not the sort of thing that affects her just for a short period

Channel: PsychED

Views: 172,641

Rating: 4.8824968 out of 5

Keywords: Sigmund Freud (Author), Psychology (Field Of Study), Lectures, Podcast (Website Category), Yale University (College/University), Self, University (Building Function)

Id: XG9TPpFjc90

Length: 56min 30sec (3390 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 07 2014