Shadowing Practice: 3. Foundations: Freud - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
699 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Professor Donald K.
2
Professor Donald K.
3
Professor Donald K.
4
Last class we talked about the brain.
5
Now we're going to talk a little bit about some foundations.
6
So today and Monday we're going to talk about two very big ideas.
7
And these ideas are with Sigmund Freud and B.F.
8
Skinner and our psychoanalysis and behaviorism.
9
And I want to talk about psychoanalysis today and behaviorism next week.
10
Now, one of these things, one of the things that makes these theories so interesting is their scope.
11
Most of the work we're going to talk about in this class, most of the ideas are narrow.
12
So, we're going to talk about everybody's idea about racial prejudice.
13
But that's not a theory of language acquisition.
14
We'll talk about theories of schizophrenia but they're not explanations of sexual attractiveness.
15
Most theories are specialized theories but these two views are grand theories.
16
They're theories of everything, encompassing just about everything that matters.
17
Day-to-day life, child development, religion, war, love.
18
Freud and Skinner had explanations of all of these.
19
Now, this is not a history course.
20
I have zero interest in describing historical figures in psychology just for the sake of telling
21
you about the history of the field.
22
What I want to tell you about though is I want to talk about these ideas
23
because so much rests on them and even more importantly,
24
a lot of these ideas have a critical influence on how we think about the present. And that's there.
25
Now, for better or worse, we live in a world profoundly affected by Sigmund Freud.
26
If I had to ask you, choose a psych… name a famous psychologist, the answer most of you would be Freud.
27
He's the most famous psychologist ever and he's had a profound influence on the 20th the 21st century.
28
Some biographical information, he was born in the 1850s.
29
He spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria, but he died in London
30
and he escaped to London soon after retreating
31
there at the beginning of World War II as the Nazis began to occupy where he lived.
32
He's one of the most famous scholars ever, but he's not known for any single discovery.
33
Instead, he's known for the an encompassing theory of mind, one that he developed over the span of many decades.
34
He was in his time extremely well known, a celebrity recognized on the street.
35
And throughout his life he was a man of extraordinary energy and productivity, in part because he was a very serious cocaine addict
36
but also just in general he was just a high energy sort of person.
37
He was up for the Nobel Prize in medicine and in literature, didn't get either one of them,
38
didn't get the prize in medicine because Albert Einstein,
39
everybody loves Albert Einstein, well Albert Einstein really wrote a letter because they asked for opinions of other
40
Nobel Prize, wrote a letter saying, don't give the prize to Freud.
41
He doesn't deserve a Nobel Prize, he's just a psychologist.
42
Oh, yes.
43
Okay.
44
While he's almost universally acclaimed as a profoundly an intellectual figure.
45
He's also the object of considerable dislike.
46
This is in part because of his character.
47
He was not a very nice man in many ways.
48
He was deeply ambitious to the cause of promoting psychoanalysis, to the cause of presenting his view and defending it.
49
And he was often dishonest, extremely brutal to his friends and terrible to his enemies.
50
He was an interesting character.
51
Freud's story was as he was leaving Europe during the rise of the Nazis,
52
as he was ready to go to England from I think either Germany or Austria, he had to sign a letter from the Gestapo.
53
Gestapo agents intercepted him and demanded he sign a letter saying
54
that at no point had he been threatened or harassed by the Gestapo.
55
So, he signs the letter and then
56
And then he writes underneath it, the Gestapo has not harmed me in any way.
57
In fact, I highly recommend the Gestapo to everybody.
58
It's, it's, he had a certain aggression to him.
59
He was also, he's also disliked, often hated, because of his views.
60
He was seen as a sexual renegade, out to destroy the conception of people as good and rational and pure beings.
61
And when the Nazis rose to in the 1930s, he was identified as a Jew who was devoted to destroying the most sacred notions of Christianity.
62
And to some extent, many people see him this way and to some extent, this accusation has some truth to it.
63
Freud made claims about people that many of us, maybe most of us, would rather not know.
64
Well, okay, what did he say?
65
So, if you ask somebody who doesn't like Freud what he said, they'll describe some of the stupider things he said.
66
And in fact, Freud said a lot of things, some of which were not very rational.
67
For instance, he's well known for his account of phallic symbols,
68
arguing certain architectural monuments are subconsciously developed as penile representations.
69
And related to this he developed a notorious theory of penis envy.
70
And penis envy is an account of a developmental state that every one of you who is female has gone through, according to Freud.
71
And the idea is that you discovered at some point in your development that you lacked a penis.
72
This is not, this is a catastrophe.
73
And so each of you inferred at that point that you had been castrated.
74
You had once had a penis but nobody had taken it from you.
75
You then turn to your father
76
and love your father because your father has a penis so he's a sort of penis substitute.
77
You reject your mother who's equally unworthy due to her penis lack and that shapes your psychosexual development.
78
Now, if that's the sort of thing you know about Freud, you're not going to have a very of him or of his work.
79
But at the core of Freud's explanation, the more interesting ideas is a set of claims of immense intellectual importance.
80
And the two main ones are this.
81
The two main ones involve the existence of an unconscious,
82
unconscious motivation, and the notion of unconscious dynamics or unconscious conflict which lead to mental illnesses,
83
slips of the tongue and so on.
84
The first idea, the idea of unconscious motivation,
85
involves rejecting the claim that you know what you're doing.
86
So, suppose you fall in love with somebody
87
and you decide you want to marry them and then somebody was asked to ask you why.
88
And you'd say something like, well, I'm ready to get married at this stage of my life.
89
I really love the person.
90
The person is smart and if I want to have kids, whatever.
91
And maybe this is true.
92
But a Freudian might say that even if this is your honest answer, you're not lying to anybody else,
93
still there are desires and motivations that govern your behavior that you may not be aware of.
94
So, in fact, you might want to marry John
95
because he reminds you of your father or because you because you want to get back at somebody for betraying you.
96
If somebody was to tell you this, you'd say, that's total nonsense.
97
But that wouldn't deter a Freudian.
98
A Freudian would say that these processes are unconscious.
99
So, of course, you just don't know what's happening.
100
So, the radical idea here is you might not know what, why you do what you do.
101
And this is something we accept for things like visual perception.
102
We accept that you look around and you get sensations and you figure out there's a car,
103
there's a tree, there's a person and you're just unconscious of how this happens.
104
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,
105
why you feel the way you do towards your friends, towards your family.
106
Now, the marriage case is extreme
107
but Freud gives a lot of examples where this sort of unconscious motivation might play a role.
108
So, have you ever liked somebody or disliked them and not know why?
109
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you're doing something
110
or you're arguing for something or making a decision for reasons that you can't fully articulate?
111
Have you ever forgotten somebody's name at exactly the wrong time?
112
Have you ever called it the wrong name in the throes of passion?
113
This is all the Freudian The idea is that we do these things.
114
These things are explained in terms of cognitive systems that we're not aware of.
115
Now, all of this would be fine if your unconscious was a reasonable,
116
rational computer, if your unconscious was really smart and looking out for your best interests.
117
But according to Freud, that's not the way it works.
118
According to Freud, there are three distinct processes going on in your head and these are in violent internal conflict.
119
the way you act and the way you think are products not of a
120
singular rational being but of a set of conflicting creatures.
121
And these three parts are the id, the ego, and the superego.
122
And they emerge developmentally.
123
The id, according to Freud, is present at birth.
124
It's the animal part of the self.
125
It wants to eat, pee, poop, get warm, and have sexual satisfaction.
126
It is outrageously stupid.
127
It works on what Freud called the pleasure principle.
128
It wants pleasure and it wants it now.
129
And that's, according to Freud, how a human begins, pure id.
130
Freud had this wonderful phrase, polymorphous perversity, this pure desire for pleasure.
131
Now, unfortunately, life doesn't work like that what you want isn't always what you get.
132
And this leads to a set of reactions to cope with the fact that pleasure isn't always there when you want it,
133
either by planning how to satisfy your desires or planning how to suppress them.
134
And this system is known as the ego or the self.
135
And it works on the reality principle.
136
And it works on the principle trying to figure out how to make your way through the world, how to satisfy your pleasures or,
137
in some cases, how to give up on them.
138
And the ego, the emergence of the ego for Freud symbolizes the origin of consciousness.
139
Finally, if this was all there was, it might be a simpler world.
140
But Freud had a third component, that of the superego.
141
And the superego is the internalized rules of parents society.
142
So, what happens in the course of development is you're just trying to make your way through the world
143
and satisfy your desires but sometimes you're punished for them.
144
Some desires are inappropriate, some actions are wrong and you're punished for it.
145
The idea is that you come out, you get in your head a superego, a conscience.
146
In these movies it would be like the little angel above your head that tells you when things are And basically yourself,
147
the ego, is in between the id and the superego.
148
One thing to realize, I told you the id is outrageously stupid.
149
It just says, oh, hungry, food, sex, oh, let's get warm, oh.
150
The superego is also stupid.
151
The superego, according to Freud, is not some brilliant moral philosopher telling you about right and wrong.
152
The superego is like, you should be ashamed of yourself.
153
That's disgusting.
154
Stop doing that.
155
Oh!" And in between these two screaming creatures, one of them telling you to seek out your desires,
156
the other one telling you you should be ashamed of yourself, is you, is the ego.
157
Now, according to Freud, most of this is unconscious.
158
So we see, bubbling up to the top, we feel, we experience ourselves.
159
And the driving of the id, the forces of the id and the forces ego are unconscious in that we cannot access them.
160
We don't know what… It's like the workings of our kidneys or our stomachs.
161
You can't introspect and find them.
162
Rather, they do their work without conscious knowledge.
163
Now, Freud developed this.
164
This is the Freudian theory in broad outline.
165
He extended it and developed it into a theory of psychosexual child development.
166
And so Freud's theory is, as I said before, a theory of everyday life, of decisions, of errors, of falling in love,
167
but it's also a theory of child development.
168
So, Freud believed there were five stages of personality development and each is associated with a particular erogenous zone.
169
And Freud believed as well that if you have a problem at a certain stage, if something goes wrong, you'll be stuck there.
170
So, according to Freud, there are people in this room
171
they are because they got stuck in the oral stage or the anal stage and that's not good.
172
So, the oral stage is when you start off.
173
The mouth is associated with pleasure.
174
Everything is sucking and chewing and so on.
175
And the problem for Freud is premature weaning of a child, depriving him of the breast,
176
could lead to serious problems in his personality development.
177
It could make him, as the phrase goes, into an oral person.
178
And this orality could be described literally.
179
Freud used this as an explanation for why somebody might eat too much or chew gum or smoke.
180
They're trying to achieve satisfaction through their mouth of a sort they didn't get in this very early stage of development.
181
But it could also be more abstract.
182
If your roommate is dependent
183
You could then go to your roommate and say, you're an oral person.
184
The first year of your life did not go well.
185
A phrase even more popular is the anal stage and
186
that happens after the oral stage and problems can emerge if toilet training is not handled correctly.
187
If you have problems during those years of life, you could become an anal personality.
188
According to Freud, and your roommate could say, your problem is you're too anal.
189
And according to Freud, literally, it meant you were unwilling to part with your own feces.
190
It's written down here.
191
I know.
192
It's true.
193
And the way it manifests itself, as you know from just how people talk, is you're compulsive.
194
You're clean.
195
You're stingy.
196
This is the anal personality.
197
Then it gets a little bit more
198
The next stage is the phallic stage.
199
Actually, this isn't that much more complicated.
200
The focus of pleasure shifts to the genitals
201
and fixation can lead to excessive masculinity in females or if you're in males or if you're female,
202
need for attention or domination.
203
Now, at this point something really interesting happens called the Oedipus Complex.
204
And this is based on a story
205
It's a mythical story of a king who killed his father and married his mother.
206
And according to Freud, this happens to all of us in this way.
207
Well, all of us, by all of us, Freud meant men.
208
So here's the idea.
209
You're three or four years old.
210
You're in the phallic stage.
211
So what are you interested in?
212
Well, you're interested in your penis.
213
And then you seek an external object.
214
Freud's sort of vague about this, but you know, you seek some sort of satisfaction.
215
But who's out there who'd be sweet and kind and loving and wonderful?
216
Well, mom.
217
So the child in first, mom is nice.
218
I love mom.
219
So far, so far, so far, and so far this is not crazy, a little boy falling in love with Dad's annoyed.
220
Problem.
221
Dad's annoyed.
222
Now, this is going to get progressively weirder but I will have to say as the father of two sons,
223
both sons went to a phase where they explicitly said they wanted to marry
224
Mommy and me.
225
If something bad happened to me that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
226
So there's this.
227
But now it gets a little bit aggressive.
228
So the idea is the child determines that he's going to kill his father.
229
Every three and four-year-old boy thinks this.
230
But then, because children, according to Freud, don't have a good sense of the boundary between their mind and the world,
231
which is a problem.
232
The problem is they don't, they think their father can tell that they're plotting to kill him.
233
And they figure their father is now angry at them.
234
Then they ask themselves, what's the worst thing dad could do to me?
235
And the answer is castration.
236
So they come to the conclusion that their father is going to castrate them because of their illicit love for their mom.
237
And then they say, dad wins.
238
And then they don't think about sex for several years.
239
And that's the latency stage.
240
The latency stage is they've gone through this huge thing with I fell in love with mom, wanted to kill my father,
241
dad was gonna castrate me, fell out of love with mom, out of the sex business.
242
And it's sex is repressed until you get to the genital stage.
243
And the genital stage is the stage we are all in, the healthy adult stage.
244
Now that you're adults and you've gone through all the developmental stages, where do you stand?
245
I haven't got out of the woods yet because unconscious mechanisms are still, even if you haven't got fixated or anything,
246
there's still this dynamic going on all the time with your id, your ego, and your superego.
247
And the idea is your superego, remember your superego is stupid.
248
So, your superego isn't only telling you not to do bad things, it's telling you not to think bad things.
249
What's happening is your id is sending up all of this weird, sick stuff, all of these crazy sexual and violent desires.
250
Oh, I'll kill him.
251
I'll have sex with that.
252
I'll have extra helpings on my dessert.
253
And your super-ed goes, no, no, no. And this stuff is repressed.
254
It doesn't even make it to consciousness.
255
The problem is Freud had a very hydraulic theory of what goes on.
256
And some of this stuff slips out and it shows up in dreams
257
and it shows up in slips to the tongue and in exceptional cases it shows up in certain clinical symptoms.
258
So what happens is Freud described a lot of normal life as in terms of different ways
259
we use to keep that horrible stuff from the id making its way to consciousness.
260
We call these defense mechanisms.
261
You're defending yourself against the horrible parts of yourself.
262
And some of these make a little bit of sense.
263
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.
264
There's certain desires we'd rather not know and we have ways to hide them.
265
So, for instance, there's sublimation.
266
Sublimation is you might have energy, maybe sexual energy or aggressive energy,
267
but instead of turning it to a sexual or aggressive target, what you do is you focus it in some other way.
268
So you can imagine a great artist like Picasso turning the sexual energy into his artwork.
269
There is displacement.
270
Displacement is you have certain shameful thoughts or desires and you refocus them more appropriately.
271
The boy who is bullied by his father may hate his father and want to hurt him.
272
But since this is very shameful and difficult,
273
the boy might instead kick the dog and think he hates the dog because that's a more acceptable target.
274
There's projection.
275
Projection is I have certain impulses I'm uncomfortable with.
276
So rather than own them myself, I project them to somebody else.
277
A classic example for Freud is homosexual desires.
278
The idea is that I feel this tremendous lust towards you, for instance, and any of you, all of you, you three,
279
and I'm ashamed of this lust.
280
So, what I say is, hey, are you guys looking at me in a sexual manner?
281
Are you lusting after me?
282
disgusting because what I do is I take my own desires and I project it to others.
283
And Freud suggested, perhaps not implausibly, that men who believe other men, who are obsessed with the sexuality of other men,
284
are themselves projecting away their own sexual desires.
285
There is rationalization, which is that when you do something or think something bad,
286
you rationalize it and you give it a more socially acceptable explanation.
287
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.
288
I'm being a good parent by doing this.
289
And finally, there is regression, which is returning to an earlier stage of development.
290
And you actually see this in children.
291
In times of stress and trauma, they'll become younger.
292
They will act younger.
293
They might cry, they might suck their thumb, seek out a blanket, Now, these are all mechanisms that for Freud are not the slightest bit pathological.
294
They're part of normal life.
295
Normally we do these things to keep an equilibrium among the different systems of the unconscious.
296
But sometimes it doesn't work.
297
Sometimes things go awry.
298
And what happens is a phrase that's not currently used in psychology but was popular during Freud's time, Hysteria.
299
Hysteria includes phenomena like hysterical blindness and hysterical deafness,
300
which is when you cannot see and cannot hear even though there's nothing physiologically wrong with you.
301
Paralysis, trembling, panic attacks, gaps of memory including amnesia and so on.
302
And the idea is that these are actually symptoms.
303
These are symptoms of mechanisms going on to keep things unconscious.
304
It's a common enough idea in Often in movies what happens is somebody goes to an analyst.
305
They have some horrible problem.
306
They can't remember something or they have some sort of blackouts and so on.
307
An analyst tells them something and at one point they get this insight and they realize what,
308
why they blinded themselves, why they can't remember.
309
And for Freud this is what happens.
310
Freud originally attempted to these memories out through hypnosis but then move to the mechanism of free association.
311
And according to Freud, the idea is patients offer resistance to this
312
and then the idea of a psychoanalyst is to get over the resistance and help patients get insight.
313
The key notion of psychoanalysis your problems are actually reflect deeper phenomena.
314
You're hiding something from yourself.
315
And once you know what's going on with deeper phenomena, your problems will go away.
316
I'm going to give you an example of a therapy session.
317
Now, this is not a Freudian analysis.
318
We'll discuss later on in the course what a Freudian analysis is, but this is not a pure Freudian analysis.
319
A Freudian analysis of versus therapist, does not see their therapist.
320
Their therapist is very non-directive.
321
But I'm going to present this as an example here because it illustrates so many of the Freudian themes,
322
particularly themes about dreams, the importance of dreams, about repression, and about hidden meaning.
323
So, this is from a television episode and the characters, many… some of you may have seen this, many of you will not have.
324
The character is suffering from attacks.
325
In particular, he has panic attacks when he sees… His first panic attack originated
326
when he walked to his swimming pool and he saw a family of ducks fly away and he had a panic attack.
327
Heart, high heart pounding, sweating, flushed and then he passed out.
328
And these panic attacks grew worse and worse until he saw a therapist who ended up prescribing him medication.
329
And this is discussed as one of the meetings he had with the therapist.
330
Freud's contributions extend beyond the study of individual psychology and individual pathology.
331
Freud had a lot to say about dreams, as you can see in this illustration.
332
He believed that dreams had a manifest content, meaning manifest, meaning what you experience in your dream.
333
But dreams always had a latent as well, meaning the hidden implication of the dream.
334
He viewed all dreams as wish fulfillment.
335
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,
336
you wouldn't want to have.
337
And dreams had, and this is an idea that long predated Freud, dreams had symbolism.
338
Things in dreams were often not what they seemed to be but rather symbols for other things.
339
People believe that literature and fairy tales and stories to children and the like carried certain universal themes,
340
certain aspects of unconscious struggles, and certain preoccupations of our unconscious mind.
341
And Freud had a lot to say about religion.
342
For instance, he viewed a large part of our,
343
of the idea of finding a singular all-powerful god as seeking out a father figure
344
that some of us never had during development.
345
What I want to spend the rest of the class on is the scientific assessment of Freud.
346
So, what I did was, so far as I've told you what Freud had to say in broad outline,
347
I then want to take the time to consider whether
348
or not we should believe this and how well it fits with our modern science.
349
But before doing so, I'll take questions for a few minutes.
350
Do people have any questions about Freud or Freud's theories?
351
Yes?
352
So would a child who did not grow up in a two-parent family lack of
353
that as conflicts in other normal stages of development?
354
Professor Charles D.
355
It's an excellent question.
356
The question is that the
357
conflicts and psychosexual development that Freud describes is always assumes that a child has a mother and a father,
358
one of each, in a certain sort of familial structure.
359
And the question then is what
360
What if a child was raised by a single parent, for example?
361
What if a child was never breastfed but fed from the bottle from the start?
362
And Freudians have had problems with this.
363
Freud was very focused on the family life of the people he interacted with, which is rather upper-class Europeans.
364
And these sort of questions would have been difficult for Freud to answer.
365
I imagine that what a Freudian would have to say is you would differences.
366
So, you would expect a child who just grew up with a mother, or just grew up to be a father,
367
with a father, to be in some sense psychologically damaged by that, failing to go through the normal psychosexual stages.
368
Yes?
369
Do modern psychodynamic bearishists still believe that women don't have superegos?
370
Professor Charles D.
371
The issue, the question is do modern psychoanalysts still believe that women do not have super egos.
372
Freud was, as you're pointing out, Freud was notorious for pointing, for suggesting that women were morally immature relative to men.
373
I think Freud would say that women had super egos, they're just not the sort of sturdy ones that men have.
374
I think psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic scholars right now would be mixed.
375
Some would maintain that there really are deep sex differences.
376
Others would want to jettison that aspect of Freudian theory.
377
Yes?
378
You define sublimation as being a displacement.
379
Does that make it sort of a subgroup of displacement?
380
Professor Charles D.
381
Well, what sublimation is, a lot of these, it's a good question.
382
The question is to sort of what is sublimation?
383
How does it relate to other defense mechanisms?
384
A lot of defense mechanisms involve taking a desire and turning it.
385
Now, what displacement does is It takes it from you to her.
386
Like I'm angry at you but maybe that's forbidden for some reason so I'll be angry at her.
387
What projection does is takes a desire from me and then puts it on somebody else heading outwards.
388
And what sublimation does is it just gives up the details and keeps the energy.
389
So you stay up, you know, your roommate stays up all night working and you say to your roommate,
390
for instance, that's just because you haven't had sex in a long time and you you don't have sex,
391
so you put all your energy to your math exam.
392
And then you say, that's sublimation.
393
I learned that in intro psych.
394
And your roommate would be very pleased.
395
One more question.
396
Yes.
397
What kind of evidence is there for like
398
Professor Charles D' The question is, which is related to the issue, extending the issue of the two-parent versus one-parent family,
399
is to what extent are these notions validated cross-culturally.
400
And that's such a good question, I'm going to defer it and I'm going to talk about it in a few minutes because that's actually,
401
that speaks to the issue of the scientific assessment of Freud.
402
So, I'm going to try to get to your question in a little bit.
403
Now, Freudian theory is now, at this point in time, extremely controversial.
404
And there's a lot of well-known criticisms and attacks on Freud.
405
This is just actually an excellent book on the memory wards by Frederick Cruz,
406
which, and Frederick Cruz is one of the strongest and most passionate critics of Freud.
407
And the problems with Freud go like this.
408
There are two ways you could reject a theory.
409
There are two problems with a scientific theory.
410
One way you could reject a theory is that it could be wrong.
411
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.
412
This is a popular theory for many years.
413
a possible theory, it just turns out to be wrong.
414
But another way, and so one way to attack and
415
address a scientific theory is to view it as just to see whether or not it works.
416
But there's a different problem a theory could have.
417
A theory could be so vague and all-encompassing that it can't even be tested.
418
So, this is one of the main critiques of Freud.
419
The idea could be summed up by a quotation from the physicist Wolfgang Pauly.
420
And Pauly was asked his opinion about another physicist.
421
And Pauly said this, that guy's work is crap.
422
He's not right.
423
He's not even wrong.
424
And the criticism about Freud is, is that he's not even
425
The issue of vagueness is summarized in a more technical way by the philosopher Karl Popper who described,
426
who introduced a term of falsifiability.
427
The idea of falsifiability is that what distinguishes science from non-science is
428
that scientific predictions make strong claims about the world and these claims are of a sort that they could be proven wrong.
429
If they couldn't be proven wrong, they're not interesting enough to be science.
430
So, for example, within psychology, the sort of claims we'll be entertaining throughout the course include claims like,
431
damage to the hippocampus causes failures of certain sorts of memory, or everywhere in the world,
432
men, on average, want to have more sexual partners than women, or exposure to violent television tends to make children themselves more violent.
433
Now, are they true or are they false?
434
Well, we'll talk about that.
435
But the point here is they can be false.
436
They're interesting enough that they can be tested.
437
And as such, they go to the—they might be wrong, but they graduate to the level of a scientific theory.
438
This should be contrasted with non-scientific programs and the best example of a non-scientific program is astrology.
439
So, the problem with astrological is not that they're wrong, it's that they can't be wrong.
440
They're not even wrong.
441
I did my, I got my horoscope for today on the web.
442
A couple of negative aspects could make you a little finicky for the next few days.
443
Okay, I want to watch for that.
444
The presence of both
445
Mars and Venus suggests you want to box everything into a neat,
446
ordered, structured way, but keeping a piece of jade or carmelian close will help you keep in touch with your fun side.
447
Starting this morning, I got from my wife a little piece of jade
448
and I have been sort of in touch with my fun side.
449
The problem is a few days aren't gonna go by.
450
I said, God, that was wrong.
451
It can't be wrong.
452
It's just so vague.
453
I got a better horoscope from The Onion actually.
454
Riding in a golf cart with a snow cone in hand,
455
you'll be tackled by two police officers this week after matching a composite caricature of a suspected murderer.
456
Now, that's, that's a good prediction.
457
because, because, wow, if it turns out to be true, I'm going to say those guys really know something.
458
It's falsifiable.
459
Arguably, Freud fails to test because Freudian theory is often
460
so vague and flexible that it can't really be tested in any reliable way.
461
A big problem with this is a lot of Freudian theory is claimed in the course of psychoanalysis.
462
So, when you ask people why do you believe in Freud, they won't say, oh, because of this experiment,
463
that experiment, this data set, and that data set.
464
What they'll say is it's Freudian theory proves itself in the course of psychoanalysis, the success of psychoanalysis.
465
But it's unreliable.
466
I mean, the problem is, say, Freud says to a patient, you hate your mother, the patient says, wow, that makes sense.
467
Freud says, I'm right.
468
Freud says, you hate your mother.
469
Freud says, no, I don't want to tear away.
470
That's disgusting.
471
Freud says, your anger shows this idea is painful for you to repress it from .
472
I am right.
473
And the problem is the same sort of dynamic plays itself out even in the scientific debate back and forth.
474
So Freud, Freudian psychologists, I'm putting Freud here but what I mean is well-known defenders of Freud will make some claims like,
475
you know, adult personality traits are by the course of psychosexual development.
476
All dreams are disguised wish fulfillment.
477
Psychoanalysis is the best treatment for mental disorders.
478
Scientists will respond, I disagree.
479
There's little or no evidence supporting those claims.
480
And the Freudian response is, your rejection of my idea shows that they are distressing to you.
481
This is because I am right.
482
And this is often followed up.
483
Seriously enough, you have deep psychological problems.
484
And now, I don't want to caricature Freudian Freudians,
485
a lot of Freudians have tried and made a research program of extending their ideas scientifically, bringing them to robust scientific tests.
486
But the problem is when you make specific falsifiable predictions they don't always do that well.
487
So, for instance, there's no evidence that oral and anal characteristics, the personality characteristics I talked about,
488
about being needy versus being stingy relate in any interesting to weaning or toilet training.
489
And there's been some efforts cross-culturally, to go back to the question this young man asked before,
490
looking at cross-cultural differences in toilet training and weaning, which are really big differences,
491
to see if they correspond in any interesting way to personality differences, and there's been no good evidence supporting that.
492
Similarly, Freud had some strong claims about sexuality for why some people are straight and others are gay.
493
These have met with very little empirical support.
494
And the claim that psychoanalysis proves itself by being,
495
by its tremendous success in curing mental illness is also almost certainly not true.
496
For most, maybe not all, but for most psychological disorders there are quicker and more reliable treatments than psychoanalysis.
497
And there's considerable controversy as to whether the Tony Soprano method of insight where you get this insight and this discovery,
498
I know, makes any real difference in alleviating symptoms such as anxiety disorders or depression.
499
This is why there's sort of often sort of a sticker shock
500
when people go to a university psychology department where they say, look, hey, where's, so I'm in,
501
so I'm in, how can I take classes on Freud?
502
Who's your expert on Freud?
503
And the truth is, Freudian psychoanalysis is almost never studied inside psychology departments,
504
not the cognitive or developmental side, not the clinical side.
505
There are some exceptions but for the most part even the people who do study Freud within psychology departments do so critically.
506
Not very few of them would see themselves as a psychoanalytic practitioner or as a Freudian psychologist.
507
Freud lives on both in a in a clinical setting and in a university, but Freud at Yale, for instance,
508
is much more likely to be found in the history department or the literature department than in the psychology department.
509
And this is typical enough.
510
But despite all of the sort of sour things I just said about Freud,
511
the big idea, the importance of the dynamic unconscious remains intact.
512
We will go over and over and over and over again,
513
different case studies, where some really interesting aspects of mental life prove to be unconscious.
514
Now, there's one question.
515
I'm actually going to skip over this for reasons of time
516
and just go to some examples of the unconscious in modern psychology.
517
So, here's a simple example of the unconscious in modern psychology.
518
Language understanding.
519
So, when you hear a sentence like, John thinks that
520
Bill likes him, in a fraction of a second you realize that this means that that
521
Bill likes John.
522
If you heard the sentence, oops, John thinks that
523
Bill likes himself, in a fraction of a second you would think that it means John thinks that
524
Bill likes Bill.
525
And as we will get to when we get to the lecture on language, this is not conscious.
526
You don't know how you do this.
527
You don't even know that you are doing this, but you do it quickly and instinctively.
528
So much of our day-to-day life can be done unconsciously.
529
There are different activities do, driving, chewing gum, shoelace tying, where if you're good enough at them,
530
if you're expert enough at them, you don't know you're doing them.
531
I was at a party a few years ago with a friend of mine and we ran out of food.
532
So, he said, I'll just go pick up some food.
533
An hour later he was gone, still gone, you know, it was supposed to be around the corner.
534
And we called him up on his cell phone and he said, oh, I got on a highway and I drove to work.
535
You know, he works like an hour away, but he got on the highway.
536
And these, some version of these things happen all the time.
537
Maybe more surprising, Freud's insight that our likes
538
and dislikes are due to factors that we're not necessarily not necessarily conscious of has a lot of empirical support,
539
a lot of empirical support from research into social psychology, for example.
540
So, here's one finding from social psychology.
541
If somebody goes through a terrible initiation to get into a club,
542
they'll like the club more.
543
You might think they'd like it less because people do terrible things to them but actually hazing
544
illegal but a remarkably successful tool.
545
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.
546
From the standpoint of politics, for instance, if you want loyal people in a political campaign, do not pay them.
547
If you pay them, they'll like you less.
548
If they volunteer, they'll like you more.
549
And we'll talk about why.
550
There's different theories about why.
551
But my point right now is simply that people don't necessarily know this but still they're subject to this.
552
Another example is some weird studies done in a discipline of social psychology known as terror management which involves subliminal death primes.
553
The idea of subliminal death primes is this.
554
You sign up for your human environment.
555
And then you, they put you in front of a computer screen and then they tell you,
556
oh, just sit in front of a computer screen and then we'll ask you some questions.
557
And then the questions come out and there are questions like, how much do you love your country?
558
What do you think of Asians?
559
What do you think of Jews?
560
What do you think of blacks?
561
What do you think of vegetarians?
562
What do you think of people with political views, different from yours?
563
Here's the gimmick.
564
What you don't know is on that on the computer screen words are being flashed, like that.
565
But they're being flashed so fast it looks like that.
566
You don't see anything.
567
Words like corpse, dead, dying.
568
The flashing of these subliminal words, subliminal meaning, a fancy term meaning below the level of consciousness,
569
you don't know you're seeing them, has dramatic effects on to answer those questions.
570
People exposed to death crimes become more nationalistic,
571
more patriotic, less forgiving of other people, less liking of other races and people from other countries.
572
Again, the claim, the explanation for why this is so is something which we'll get to in another class.
573
The point now is simply to illustrate that these sort of things can have, you aren't aware of can have an effect on how you think.
574
The final example I'll give of this is a short demonstration.
575
To do this I'm going to cut the class in half at this point.
576
So, you'll be on this side of the class, the right side, my right, and this will be on the left side.
577
And I simply want everybody to think about somebody you love.
578
So, think about somebody you love, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your mom, your dad.
579
Think about somebody you love.
580
Just think about somebody you love.
581
Okay.
582
Now, on this screen is going to be instructions but I want to give the instructions to this half of the class.
583
I'm going to ask everybody in this half of the class, please either turn your head or shut your eyes.
584
Okay?
585
Teaching fellows too.
586
Okay.
587
And everybody on this half obey.
588
Okay, have everybody read that?
589
Okay.
590
Okay.
591
Now, turn your head, this group.
592
Now, this group, look at this. And take a moment.
593
You don't have to do it on paper, but take a moment to do it in your head.
594
You each group had instructions.
595
Some people might have seen both instructions.
596
Follow the instructions you got for you.
597
Now, this was research done by Norbert Schwartz and here's the question I want you to ask yourself.
598
How much do you like this person? And here's the effect.
599
Half of you were asked to list three features of the person.
600
Half of you were asked to list ten.
601
The finding, which is not a subtle finding, is that liking goes up in the three group and liking goes down in the ten group.
602
And here's why.
603
I have to think about three positive features of somebody.
604
So, I think about my girlfriend.
605
I have a girlfriend.
606
Oh, she's smart, she's beautiful, and she's kind.
607
Good.
608
How much do you, what do I think of her?
609
Pretty good, smart, beautiful, kind.
610
Oh, yeah.
611
But the problem, now Schwartz is clever though.
612
He says, the other group gets ten positive features.
613
Smart, beautiful, kind, really nice, good cook, punctual, Smart.
614
No, I mentioned that.
615
The problem is nobody has ten positive features.
616
And the fact of being asked to do ten positive features is people find this hard.
617
And then those people when asked, how much do you like this person say, couldn't really make it that ten.
618
I guess I don't like them very much.
619
point of this illustration, again, is that it shows that you don't know this.
620
Subjects who are asked to do ten positive features and then later rank the person lower and then asked, why did you rank the person lower,
621
don't say, because you told me to list ten.
622
Typically we are oblivious to these factors that change our points, what we like and what we dislike.
623
And this is in fact a substantial and important part of the study of psychology, and particularly, for instance, the study of racial and sexual prejudice,
624
where one of the big findings from social psychology, and we'll devote almost an entire lecture to this,
625
is that people have strong views about other races that they don't know about and that they don't know control their actions.
626
So to some extent, Now, to some extent this rounds out Freud because to some extent
627
the particulars of Freud are for the most part have been rejected.
628
But the general idea of Freud is actually been
629
so successful both in the study of scientific psychology
630
and in our interpretation of everyday life that to some extent Freud's been a victim of his own success.
631
to underestimate the importance of Freudian thought in everyday life
632
because he's transformed our worldview to such an extent
633
that it's difficult for us to remember that there's any other way to think about it.
634
So, to some extent, he's been a victim of his own success.
635
We have time for some further questions about Freud and about scientific implications of Freud.
636
I took a class once on how to teach
637
when I was a graduate student and I just remember two things from this class.
638
One thing is never grade in red pen.
639
People don't like that.
640
The second thing is never ask any questions because it's very frightening to say, any questions, and people find it's intimidating.
641
I'm supposed to ask, what are your questions?
642
So, what are your questions?
643
Yes, I'm back.
644
Professor Charles D.
645
Sorry.
646
Did Freud believe in medicine people for certain problems or that ?
647
Professor Charles D.
648
Did Freud believe in?
649
Medicine, medication.
650
Professor Charles D.
651
Medication.
652
Freud had an… It's a good question.
653
The question was, did Freud believe in medication?
654
Medication, of course, being a major theme of how we deal with certain disorders now, particularly depression and anxiety disorders.
655
On the one hand, Freud made his start as a neuroscientist.
656
Freud studied the mind and the brain and was intensely interested in the neural basis of thought and behavior.
657
But the answer to your question in the end is no. Although Freud was very sensitive to the brain basis of behavior,
658
Freud was totally convinced that the method through
659
which to cure disorders like depression and anxiety would not be medication but rather through the sort of talk therapy and insight.
660
Moreover, modern psychoanaly… modern therapists, including some people who aren't psychoanalytically defined,
661
will say, look, these drugs are all well and good but what they do is they mask the symptoms.
662
So, if you have panic attacks, say, it's true the drugs might make the panic attacks go away
663
but the panic attacks are actually not your real problem
664
and by making them go away you don't get to the root of your problem.
665
So the answer is both Freud and modern-day psychoanalysts would think that medications are substantially overused in the treatment of mental disorders.
666
Yes?
667
Are there any research on dreams that have really consequences?
668
The question is what about research on dreams?
669
Dreams is such a fun topic that I'm going to devote half a class to sleeping in dreams.
670
So for instance, I will answer the question, What is the most common dream?
671
I will also answer the question, who thinks about sex more in dreams, men or women?
672
And what proportion of… Oh, there's so many great questions I will answer.
673
Dreams from a Freudian standpoint, there's been some evidence
674
that dreams do in some… often do have some relationship to what you're thinking about and worrying about through the day.
675
But the strong Freudian view about symbolism and wish has not been supported by the study of dreams.
676
What are your other questions?
677
Yes, whoever Eric is pointing to.
678
Purple shirt.
679
Purple shirt.
680
Yes.
681
The Electra Complex?
682
The Electra Complex is the penis envy story.
683
Freud developed, this is a crude summary, Freud developed the Oedipal complex, you know, mom, I love mom, he did.
684
And then it's as if somebody reminded him, Sigmund, there are also women.
685
Oh yeah.
686
And that story I told you with the penises
687
and the penis envy and the replacement is sort of a very shortened version of the Lectra complex.
688
I think it's fair to say that the Lectra complex was a sort of
689
add-on to the main interest of Freud to Oedipal complex.
690
One more, please.
691
Yes.
692
So are women stuck in that stage for their life according to Freud?
693
Like in that envy penis envy or does he not continue to do that?
694
Professor Charles D' According to Freud, the… it's not a fixation in the stage in the same sense as an oral or anal stage.
695
But yes, the claim that Freud would make is
696
that the woman's discovery
697
that she lacks the her uniqueness plays a fundamental role later on determining her allegiances in life
698
and in fact her own sexual preferences and interests.
699
So, it's not the sort of thing that affects her just for a short period.
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
Same Channel
C11
1. Introduction
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
The Renovations of Notre-Dame | The Age of Cathedrals with R. Howard Bloch
University StudentsWorking Adults
C11
1. Introduction: What is Political Philosophy?
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C15
Contract Law 1 Intro Hamer v Sidway (just say no)
Cambridge Exam PrepBusiness EnglishUniversity Students
C23
1. Introduction
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C15
2. Foundations: This Is Your Brain
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C16
2. Socratic Citizenship: Plato's Apology
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep
FOR YOU
Recommend Video
C12
187 sentences
Hellraiser, Bataille and Limit Experiences
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
142 sentences
Remembering and Forgetting: Crash Course Psychology #14
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
117 sentences
Psychiatrist vs Psychologist 💥 Career Battle (Which Should You Choose)
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C12
103 sentences
Hannah Arendt's lessons for our times: the banality of evil, totalitarianism and statelessness
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C12
754 sentences
Stanford's Sapolsky On Depression in U.S. (Full Lecture)
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
345 sentences
Ethics of Care Lecture
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C12
141 sentences
The Seven Traditions: Mapping the Field of Communication Theory
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C13
179 sentences
Heidegger’s Forgotten Lectures to Psychiatrists
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C1534 sentences
Personality, Creativity, and Well-being || The Human Potential Lab | The Psychology Podcast
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
64 sentences
Core Knowledge (Stanford Psych 60)
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C18
499 sentences
The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & Noam Chomsky (1977)
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “3. Foundations: Freud”. This video has 242 sentences and 8163 words to shadow. The speech runs for 56:17. The speaker talks at a steady 145 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| unconscious adjective | /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/ | Not awake; having no awareness (usually as the result of a head injury). |
| psychology noun | /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/ | The study of the human mind. |
| extent noun | /ɪkˈstɛnt/ | A range of values or locations. |
| disorder noun | /dɪsˈɔɹdɚ/ | Absence of order; state of not being arranged in an orderly manner. |
| oral adjective | /ˈɔː.ɹəl/ | Relating to the mouth. |
| mechanism noun | /ˈmɛk.ə.nɪ.zəm/ | Any mechanical means for the conversion or control of motion, or the transmission or control of power. |
| insight noun | /ˈɪnsaɪ̯t/ | A sight or view of the interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection; frequently used with into. |
| roommate noun | /ˈɹu(m)ˌmeɪt/ | A person with whom one shares a room, as in a dormitory, barracks, rooming house, or apartment. |
| explanation noun | /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/ | The act or process of explaining. |
| panic noun | /ˈpænɪk/ | Overwhelming fear or fright, often affecting groups of people or animals; (countable) an instance of this; a fright, a scare. |
| medication noun | /mɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/ | A medicine, or all the medicines regularly taken by a patient. |
| instruction noun | /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/ | The act of instructing, teaching, or providing with information or knowledge. |
| consciousness noun | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | The state of being conscious or aware; awareness. |
| symptom noun | /ˈsɪm(p)təm/ | A perceived change in some function, sensation or appearance of a person that indicates a disease or disorder, such as fever, headache or rash; strictly, a… |
| displacement noun | /dɪsˈpleɪsmɪnt/ | The act of displacing, or the state of being displaced; a putting out of place. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| go away verb | To depart or leave a place. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| stay up verb | To remain awake; to not go to bed. | |
| call out verb | To specify, especially in detail. | |
| follow up verb | To take further actions remaining after an event; to continue, revisit, or persist; especially, to maintain communication or verify. | |
| get back at verb | To retaliate against; to take revenge on. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Have you ever forgotten somebody's name at exactly the wrong time?
- You can't introspect and find them.
- You're three or four years old.
- Are you lusting after me?
- What are your other questions?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if something goes wrong, you'll be · If you pay them, they'll like · If they volunteer, they'll like |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has not harmed · has gone · have you ever liked |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are specialized · was born · been threatened |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | somebody who doesn · men who believe · rationalization, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 156 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, math /mæθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, medication /mɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/, instruction /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/
- Long words — get the stress right: psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, mechanism /ˈmɛk.ə.nɪ.zəm/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, medication /mɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/, psychologist /ˌsaɪˈkɑl.ə.d͡ʒɪst/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like unconscious, psychology, extent.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.