Jordan Peterson - Is Small Talk Useless?

the part of you that you consider you roughly speaking UN considered the ego and you might think about that as the most individual part of your psychophysiological being I mean the difference between individual and collective in that sense is that you share very many attributes with other people obviously your physical form is very much like that of other people and then you share attributes with other living creatures way back down the phylogenetic chain and so in that regard there's nothing specifically individual about you but the part of you that you identify with most completely and that you regard as unique that's the Union ego now young sort of conceptualized your psyche as I would say as a place I suppose that many spirits could inhabit and you might think about a spirit from from the Union perspective as a personality that can inhabit the psyche and so like all the psychoanalysts young regarded the psyche as a relatively loose collection of partially integrated personalities and each of those personalities had their own perspective their own thoughts like their own way of looking at the world that would be the perspective their own thoughts their own emotions their own habits and their own actions and those are roughly aggregated into some sort of unity and that was the that was the ego now ego has a public face and the public face Jung called the persona persona means mask and the persona is both that part of you that you showed other people instead of the part that you hide and then also to some degree it might be the form that your ego takes even to you so for example if you're a naive person you might think that your public face is all there is of you the rough difference between the ego and the persona might be conceptualized this way that you know there are things that you think that you won't say in public maybe not even in private some of those things you're pretty aware of and those would be thoughts that are relevant to the ego but not the persona and then some of them you don't even really want to be aware of and you would consider those more associated with the shadow now the shadow the existence of the shadow first of all you might want to remember that the best way to conceptualize Jung's archetypal constructions is in some sense as metaphors so you could say that while Jung thought that it was useful to separate up the psyche into persona in ego and then shadow it isn't that there aren't other ways that it could be broken up but breaking it up this way is you useful for certain purposes and Jung regarded this terminology is particularly useful from a psychoanalytic perspective and also from a historical perspective so perhaps the divisions could have been made could be made otherwise and there are there are many ways of looking at archetypes but this is sufficiently useful to progress with now people's personas are generally somewhat harmless and somewhat socialized if you don't know how to act in public you don't have a well-crafted persona you know some of you are going to be the kinds of relatively deep thinking intellectuals who think that small talk is nonsense and there's some utility in that thinking because in some sense from a philosophical sense obviously it's nonsense but if you don't know how to make small talk basically what that means is that you have a poorly developed persona and what that'll mean is that you're not going to do very well at least at the beginning of social in social engagements because you need to be able to convince people that you're basically civilized and social before it's even reasonable for them to go beyond pleasantries with you and the ability to exchange pleasantries in a relatively banal way in a variety of different circumstances is part of having a persona and you don't want to denigrate the utility of that because you need it you know as you progress in your careers for example you're going to be thrust into situations where you don't really know anyone and the purpose of the gathering is to familiarize a large number of people with one another and there's a skill that's associated with that that's somewhat glib social ability the union's would say well you shouldn't if you don't have a persona you're just a disaster but by the same token you shouldn't be only persona because one of the possibilities is that the ego can identify with the persona and then the person thinks that they are what they show the social world and the problem with that at least from the Union perspective is that a people are a lot more than the persona they're a lot more than the ego and be a lot of the things that make them more than mere persona or mere that more than mere ego are not necessarily things that are acceptable in casual public gatherings so for example because of your psycho physiological makeup you all have the capacity for aggression now a lot of you especially the ones that are more agreeable you could say that even it's either that that capacity Keifer aggression has been underdeveloped because you've identified with a certain mode of social being or you could say perhaps if to the degree that agreeableness is temperamental that the aggressive tendency isn't as powerful in you as it is in other people that might lead you to make judgments like and I'm sure some of you perhaps some some of you who had an angry parent or particularly an angry father have decided at some point in your life that to be aggressive is wrong to be angry is wrong for example or to be aggressive is wrong it's morally wrong one of the things that happens in psychotherapy very frequently though is that people come into psychotherapy for a variety of reasons some of them are merely practical they're having problems in adaptation because their lives have got very very complicated and they really don't know what to do about it sometimes they go into psychotherapy because they have very high levels of negative emotion and that can be associated with the first problem but very often they come into therapy because they're getting pushed around constantly and they really don't have anything that's a sufficiently well-developed personal identity and generally those that happens by the way most more often with women than it does with men and that's because women are by temperament more agreeable than men and perhaps also by socialization temperament certainly plays a big role often then the goal of therapy is assertiveness training and assertiveness training you could think of as the behavioral psychologists equivalent to incorporating the shadow' so you know you may think well it's it's a necessary part of existence to be nice to other people and there's some truth in that not really it's a very shallow way of looking at the world because nice is not a very sophisticated work but even if that's the word that you do use you should also be nice to yourself and sometimes what that means is that you have to put forward your own wishes and desires in a manner that causes a certain amount of conflict and in order to withstand that conflict you have to have you have to be able to draw on the the sources of a grass that in some sensor are a deep part of your your inbuilt set of possibilities now the reason that's necessary in part from a biological perspective is that people are often afraid of engaging in conflict because they're afraid because because because conflict can be real trouble and anger inhibits fear so if you don't have a well-developed capacity for while we could say rage then you can't overcome your fear and then you can't stand up for yourself and then you're gonna get run over now the problem with that is is that if you get run over enough it'll make you resentful and then that will make you aggressive except it'll make you aggressive and sneaky underground and somewhat unconscious ways that are much less likely to be productive than you know a frank exchange of viewpoints and some conscious negotiation so one of the things I do in therapy for people who need assertiveness training is I get them to pay attention to the resentment and resentment is often a good Avenue into the shadow because first of all resentment is a pretty destructive emotion it's extremely useful emotions but it can be very destructive because it gives rise to well first of all sense of victimization and second then the underground growth of all sorts of ideas of revenge and vengeance and and also a kind of stubborn non cooperative Ness because who wants to cooperate when they feel taken advantage of and so part of Jung's idea with regards to the shadow is that obviously the social world wants you to be peaceful and predictable and maybe even easy to get along with but that doesn't necessarily mean that peaceful predictable and easy to get along with they are the only virtues because they're certainly not and one thing we know about virtues is that if they're taken to to great and extreme they become vices and be they're certainly not the only virtues you know there are what you might call darker virtues so to speak there there are more dangerous virtues in some sense because they harness forces that can be very destructive if they're not utilized consciously and aggression is a certainly an example of that so

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson New, Psychology, Philosophy, Personality, personality disorders, self-improvement, Truth, Self Improvement, Jordan Peterson Personality, Jordan Peterson Personality Disorder, Jordan Peterson 2018, How to cure Personality Disorders, Motivation, Inspiration, How to improve myself, Self Help, Clinical Psychology, Depression, Anxiety, Jordan Peterson Depression, Jordan Peterson anxiety, Counseling, Jordan Peterson Psychology

Id: RaW1RgqIOqA

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 01 2019