Lecture 3 - Foundations: Freud

Overview:

This lecture introduces students to the theories of Sigmund Freud, including a brief biographical description and his contributions to the field of psychology. The limitations of his theories of psychoanalysis are covered in detail, as well as the ways in which his conception of the unconscious mind still operate in mainstream psychology today.



Now, if that's the sort of thing you know about Freud, you are not going to have a very high opinion of him or of his work, but at the core of Freud's declamation, the more interesting ideas, is a set of claims of a man's 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 with 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 of 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.
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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 interest. 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 and the way you think are products, not of a singular rational being, but of a set of conflicting creatures. And these three parts are the id, the ego, and the superego and they emerge developmentally.

The id, 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, "The Pleasure Principle." It wants pleasure and it wants it now. And that's, according to Freud, how a human begins – pure id. 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 reactions to cope with the fact 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 works on the principle of 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 emergence of the ego for Freud--symbolizes the origin of consciousness.

Finally, if this was all there it might be a simpler world, but Freud had a third component, that of the superego. And the superego is the internalized rules of parents in 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 get in your head a superego, a conscience. In these movies, there'd be a little angel above your head that tells you when things are wrong. And basically your self, the ego, is in between the id and the superego.

One thing to realize, I told you the id is outrageously stupid. It just says, "Oh, hungry, food, sex, oh, let's get warm, oh." The superego is also stupid. The superego, point to point, is not some brilliant moral philosopher telling you about right and wrong. The superego would say, "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, "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 id, the forces of the id and the forces of the superego, 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.
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And the problems with Freud go like this. There are two ways you could reject a theory. There are two problems with the 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 was a popular theory for many years. It's a possible theory. It just turns out to be wrong but another way--And so one way to attack and address a scientific theory 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 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 Pauli said this: "That guy's work is crap. He's not right. He's not even wrong." And the criticism about Freud 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 the 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 enough to be science. So, for example, within psychology the sort of claims we'll be entertaining throughout the course include claims like, damage to the hippocampus causes failures of certain sorts of memory, or everywhere in the world men on average want to have more sexual partners than women, or exposure to violent television tends 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.
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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 the 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.

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, here's one finding from social psychology. If somebody goes through a terrible initiation to get into a club, they'll like the club more. You might think they'd like it less because people do terrible things to them. 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 like it. From the standpoint of politics for instance, 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 don't necessarily know this but still they're subject to this.

Another example is 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--they put you in front of a computer screen and then they tell you, "Oh, just sit in front of the computer screen and then 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 Asians?" "What do you think of Jews?" "What do you think of blacks?" "What do you think of vegetarians?" "What do you think of people's 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 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 primes 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 is simply to illustrate that these sort of things can have--that things you aren't aware of can have an effect on how you think.