Personality Lecture #9

Discussion thread for Personality and Its Transformations - Lecture #9

study group discussion

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

my notes

  • 04:00 - not just one mind, we have sub-personalities - if we had one mind, we would be able to control it - if you are hungry, you are nothing but hunger - if you are angry, you are nothing but anger

  • 08:30 -, 9:40 - slide - book - the discovery of the unconscious (freud, jung, adler)

  • 10:20 - slide

  • 10:30 - women on birth control are essentially biologically different creates - ovulation and attractiveness, and how birth control stuffs it up << http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/08/birth-control-makes-women-unattractive-and-crazy/

  • 12:45 - modern people like to fantasise that there is nothing dangerous about sex, but that is ridiculous, because everything about it is dangerous

  • 14:00 - back in the victorian period, the repression was a lot about prevention of unwanted pregnancy, and unwanted disease - people were incredibly poor, the average person lived on <$1/day (modern $1)

  • 14:55 - slide

  • 15:15 - slide - four forms of consciousness - conservative; the unconscious stores memories, unaccessible to voluntary recall. dissolutive; the unconscious contains habits, once voluntary, now automatized, and dissociated elements of the personality, which may lead a “parasitic existence”. creative: the unconscious services as the matrix of new ideas. mythopoetic: the unconscious constructs narratives and fantasies that appear mythic or religious in nature.

  • 16:00 - types of memories that we repress - no point in pain without utility

  • 17:00 - arguments and memory

  • 19:00 - what is meaningful, is something that alters our future path in a trivial or more way

  • 22:30 - dreams are strange, as we observe them, rather than produce them with a conscious effort

  • 24:00 - the less integrated you are, the less control you have over your sub-personalities, and prone to disorders - in healthy development, the piagetian model is correct - in unhealthy development, the freudian model is correct

  • 26:00 - superego is what is tyrannical, and lords over you with judgements - anorexia is a form of an out of control superego

  • 28:40 - slide - idea/emotion as pathogen

  • 33:00 - doubt as a sub-personality, and when a sub-personality is unleashed, it becomes a complex (when a whole series of unprocessed experiences come together to overtake you)

  • 35:00 - 1/3 of first year university of Toronto students pass the “hospitalised depression” criteria

  • 36:00 - strokes in the right hemisphere, they can forget their left side even exists, it isn’t so much neglect but unawareness

  • 39:00 - slide of defence mechanisms; repression (if you don’t like it, lie about it - especially to yourself), denial (the truth isn’t so bad), reaction formation (I really really really really love my sister), displacement (my boss yells at me, I yell at my husband, my husband yells at the baby, the baby bites the cat)

  • 39:52 - slide of defence mechanisms, continued; identification (I want to be the bully), rationalisation (we all know what this means), intellectualisation (woody allen), sublimation (ok then, I’ll sculpt naked women), project (it’s not me, it’s you)

  • 41:00 - slide of neurotic manifestations; "unconscious ideas are at the core of psychological conflicts; incomprehensible distress, psychosomatic symptoms, behavioural anomalies, hallucinations and delusions

  • 46:00 - slide on jokes - jokes allow for the expression of repressed wishes and ideas. for example, the Jester, or medieval court fool, was often the only individual in the kingdom who was allowed to tell the truth to the king. Jokes express in playful language what culture will not allow formally expressed. It is a relief for someone to communicate something of which the repression of it tires you.

  • 47:00 - jung and freud believed dreams were trying to communicate repressed desires, in the best way they could (even through twists and knots so you can deal with it gently, or as direct as its ability of communication could allow)