Sigmund Freud. Of all the names in psychology, that's the one name I'm pretty sure you're already familiar with. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you talked about somebody making Freudian slips, or if you described one of your friends as being "anal", or something like that. All of that is really the legacy of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud is a fascinating character on many levels. What we're going to focus on now though is the influencing that Freud had on the development of psychology as a discipline. Freud will come back. He will be in this course off and on. especially as we get, you know, later towards the clinical and personality issues. But here, I want to give you a taste and again, really emphasize how Freud changed psychology. Alright. So, here we are, week one, lecture four: Freud, the Fork in the Road. Alright. So, I want to put this in a little bit of context. Freud um[UNKNOWN] a lot of his ideas in the late 1800's, early 1900's, during what was called the Victorian Era. And during that era, the notion is that you know, men were gentlemen, women were ladies. There was a properness about how things were supposed to happen. And there were certain issues in two paramount among them. sex and aggresion that people just did not talk about. They were not polite. It's not the sort of things people discussed. And in this context comes this guy named Sigmund Freud telling this you know sort of dark story of man kind. so Sigmund Freud, these are just a few quotes but let's just focus on the underlying stuff. He talked about that humans are far more immoral than they can imagine, and that there's this you know, dark side of them on the third quote that approximates that of a psychotic. Within us there's like this little psychotic and that if we look at somebody carefully we will see evidence of this, the betrayal oozes out of his every pore. So if somebody who's trained to analyze can see things about a person that that person not even know about themselves. and he describes this tendency to aggression and in fact to sexuality as being innate Independent and an instinctual disposition in man. So he really describes humans as having this really dark side, you know. Think of Jekyll and Hyde. This was the same time as the, the book Jekyll and Hyde was out. So he says humans have this dark side. It's inside of us but a lot of us aren't even aware. Some of these aspects of ourselves. and so perhaps not surprisingly this fascinated many people in the Victorian era. They couldn't help but be drawn to this very provocative notion of humanity. and then once they got there, Freud had this really kind of complex story of how he thought. humanity worked and, and let's go to that story. so, he thought a lot of issues people had came about from psychic conflicts. I'll describe the virus part of that in just a moment. But let's go right to the little monster inside of a cell. Forray thought there were three components to our Psyche. one was the id, which in German just translates to the it. so within us is an it. This is a very primitive, primitive part of us. It has various drives you know, it wants all the biological drives met. So it wants food, it wants water, it wants comfort. but it also wants sex. And, in certain context it wants to behave aggressively. And it behaves according to what Freud called the pleasure principle. That he thought the Id, wanted to gratify these desires immediately. So the notion of immediate gratification. If I'm hungry, I want to get some food. If I'm thirsty I want to get something to drink. If I'm cold I want to put on a sweater. If I see somebody over there I'd really like to have sex with then the it within me wants to just go and do it. Now we say primitive because perhaps this is how things happened in the primitive times. Y'know perhaps Primitive humans did just try to force themselves on whoever they wanted and did just have you know, aggressive acts on whoever they wanted, when they wanted. But Freud thought there was this interesting interplay between that part of us and society. And the society part was largely represented by a part of our psyche he called the super-ego. The super ego is that part of us that wants to be the perfect us, 'kay? Wants to be the kind of us that people like and respect. And so we, we want to be somebody that does things competently, does things well, has sort of leadership qualities. And that other people have come to like us and admire us. Now obviously, if we're just going to go and, you know, force ourselves on everybody we'd like to have sex with, that's not going to get us liked, respected, or admired. You know, that, there's going to be a problem, there. and so there's conflict between these two - the primitive version of us, and then the version of us that society has made us endeavor to be. And so how do we resolve those conflicts? Well that's where the ego comes in. The ego, the job of the ego is to try to find ways of satisfying the id without compromising the super-ego. Not always an easy job. And Freud talked about all these interesting ways in which. These conflicts could play out. So let me just give you one taste, just so you have a feeling for it. Let's say you were raised very conservatively, in a culture that was very conservative, perhaps very religious. But you've heard about this thing out there in the real world, called pornography. And there is part of you, this part of you, the Id part of you. That wants to see it, that wants to experience it. But there's another part of you, the superego part of you, that wants to be viewed as a correct, good, positive member of society. And this part of you knows that viewing pornography is not geenrally seen as virtuous, is not the kind of behavior that would get people to like or respect you. So how can you view pornography and yet not compromise this identity? Well that's where the ego comes in and here's one potential solution. Maybe you could become a crusader against pornography. If you're going to crusade against pornography, well you have to know your enemy. You have to get a sense of what, what is out there? if, if I'm going to talk about how evil pornography is, well I have to know what it is. So now I have a reason, a reason to view pornography, satisfying the id and yet justifying that in a very moral, outstanding way by saying, yeah, I'm only doing this so I can argue against it. Which allows you to fit with your societal norms and be viewed in a positive light. Okay so that's that's a complex way in which the ego might try to satisfy both. And Freud thought you know all through our lives we're trying to kind of do these two things. And then often we can find. Reasonable ways of satisfying those two things, but sometimes we can't. Sometimes these things cause an inner conflict that gives rise to psychological problems. Okay. And a lot of times, by the way, the real cause of these psychological problems are below our level of consciousness. So we don't even know about the conflict that's going on but it is going on and it is shaping our behavior. So, now let's bring this back into the discussion of psychology as it was growing. It was growing as a science. But what Freud brought to psychology is a nonscientific perspective. Specifically, he brought a medical perspective. so Freud approached Psychology as a doctor approaches disease. And what I mean by that is if you go to a doctor and imagine this little girl here is suffereing flu like symptioms so we see all the symptomolgy. You know, headaches, fever, maybe a stuffed sinus. maybe achy body, These are all symptoms. And to a doctor, yes, they're relevant and, yes, if you can alleviate them that's cool. But what you really want to do is figure out what's causing all this, because these are just reflections of some underlying cause. In the case of a flu, it could be like a virus. So what you really want to do is to deal with these symptoms. Is to not deal with them directly but instead deal with the cuase. If you can get at the cause, and if you can somehow eliminate it then the symptoms should just disappear. And so that assumption that symptoms relfect some underlying cause and it's the underlying cause you want to go after. Is reflected in their method. in the medical approach you typically come up with some treatment, that hope, that you hope for whatever reason will treat that underlying cause, will reduce it's strength, and if that works then the patient will feel better. Now, now in this case it didn't work. Apparently, we tried a treatment and the patient looks just as, as bad, as she did before. and so we might try different treatments and it becomes this quest of coming up with treatments that work and we sometimes don't even really care why they work, if we find some treatment that makes a patient feel better, that's cool. That's really cool and we'll use it widely and hope it makes other patients feel better. Now this whole way of doing things is very different from the scientific method. The notion of, you know, manipulating some variable tightly across groups, and seeing what effect that variable has, and measuring everything as you go along, and doing very controlled, Intentional comparisons of data. That is not what Freud did. What Freud tended to do was interact with patients, and if he found a patient that had psychological issues, but no clear physical cause, he would try to figure out what the underlying conflict was. And he would go back to eh, notions like the id and the ego, and what could be going on underneath, causing this conflict, that ultimately was causing the symptoms that you'd see. And once he, and now this is hard, of course, because often these psychic conflicts are completely unconscious, so he came up with all these ways of trying to get at this conflict. Because he felt really the right way to treat this was to bring it in to the patient's awareness. That once they understood that underlying conflict, that alone might be the beginning of a treatment that might alleviate the symptoms. So before we go any further I want you to get a bigger picture of, of Freud in general. And so I've got a couple of links here. One is just, this is meant to show you why Freud was provocative. Okay, this is a, a link to a short video about Freud's psychosexual development of personality. So even with kids he thought, he emphasized that kids were seeking sensual pleasures in the Victorian era so check that out see what you think of that. And then once you watch that, watch this which is part one of a documentary that really kind of outlines Freud's influence And, and and why he has this dual nature of being both loved at some ways and hated in others. Okay, so check that out and then come on back. Alright, welcome back. so what I now want to emphasize is just at the very end of this is, is, is this impact Freud had. By through his ideas and through his approach, he forged a new path psychology was all about showing you could scientifically study the mind. The story I was telling you before this lecture. But, suddenly Freud is bringing a much more clinical approach, he's, he's trying to treat people with psychological disorders and he's coming at it from a medical perspective. and that's very different and that caused a lot of tension in the early days in psychology. What was psychology to be was it to be a science or was it to be more like a healthcare approach That's the story we're going to continue in the next lecture. And you're going to see there was some really strong backlash within the scientific community to Freud's ideas that led to, you know, in some ways this identify crisis widening. although more recently I think it's coming back together. So we'll talk about that in the subsequent lecture. I did give you just a couple of other things here you could follow up on. First of all there's part two and three of that documentary that you just watched. If you, if you haven't gotten enough and you want more. But I also gave you a link here to the complete works of Sigmund Freud. why I did that is I think you should just pick some, pick something and read a little bit of it because what I would like you to notice is that just about anything that you read is fascinating. I mean Freud had something really interesting stories, interesting ideas about how things all work. But can't help but fascinate the mind. They're good reading. But I hope you'll also consider the following: When you're exposed to these ideas, ask yourself, "If I were a scientist, how would I test this idea to find out if it were true or not?. And what many scientists have concluded is that the vast majority of Freud's ideas are scientifically untestable. They're just interesting ideas that you can never verify as being correct or not. And to a scientist, that makes them almost worthless. So think about that too, because that will be a good lead-in to some of the scientific backlash we'll take up in the next lecture. Right. Thank you, see you there. Have a good day!
