Episode 189: The Anality of Evil (Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents")

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:39] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. I'm Tamler Sommers and I'm a professor of science and ethics at the University of Houston. I'm Tamler Sommers and I'm a professor of science and ethics at the University of Houston.

[00:01:56] I'm Tamler Sommers and I'm a professor of science and ethics at the University of Houston. I'm Tamler Sommers and I'm a professor of science and ethics at the University of Houston.

[00:02:49] Today, in case you haven't figured it out, we're going to talk about Freud, Sigmund Freud and his last work, I believe, Civilization and its Discontents. Penultimate. Penultimate. Penultimate. Oh, okay. Yeah. He had Moses and monotheism, which I don't know if it's worth talking about.

[00:03:10] That was one day down the line. Yeah, when we run out of everything. We need topics and given that we need topics, we have topics.

[00:03:22] And what we're going to do in the opening segment is narrow down from just a bunch of suggestions on Patreon for our Patreon, our beloved Patreon listener selected episode.

[00:03:34] We got over 150 suggestions and we had to narrow it down to like five or six so that we can give those as the finalists to our beloved $5 and up subscribers. So we've each have chosen five or six of our favorites and hopefully there'll be some overlap.

[00:03:55] There usually is some overlap. I don't think it's ever. As I was picking, I was like, ooh, I wonder if I could selectively choose so that there wouldn't be overlap. But I'm sure I didn't.

[00:04:07] I mean, it would be bad because then we have to fight over every single one. But yes, I'm excited. This is great. A great crowd source. We're still probably milking the first list. Yeah.

[00:04:19] As always, we will do more of these topics than even what makes it onto this list. All right. So what's your first one? My first one is do something Lovecraft, HP Lovecraft. I've never really, I think I've read one of his stories, but it was motivated.

[00:04:39] This was from a suggestion from a Patreon, Matthias Hall Anderson. And I was especially motivated because I was talking to my students in my lab the other day and they were telling me about the new Jordan Peele project,

[00:04:53] which is based on a book that's based on Lovecraftian shit, like mingled with race shit. And so yeah. Which also was, as I understand HP Lovecraft mingled race with his shit or racism, I guess. That's what I've heard.

[00:05:12] I didn't know that, but then I'm glad he's being reclaimed as a champion social justice war. Yeah. No, I don't think anybody thinks of him as that.

[00:05:24] The thing I heard about him was even for his time he was racist, but I have never read any of his stories and they seem to have inspired a lot of the art that I currently love. So I would love to do that.

[00:05:41] Yeah, I think it'd be worth it. But like you, I've read, I've clearly read shit including like comic books that are inspired by a Lovecraft world. Yeah, there's a podcast that I wanted to shout out because I listen to it every so often called Weird Studies.

[00:05:58] And do you know this? Oh yeah, I've heard of that. I've heard of it. I've never listened to it though. Yeah, it's this guy Phil Ford and J F Martel.

[00:06:06] They're very focused on the weird in all its various dimensions, but they're extremely inspired by Lovecraft and hearing them talk about it seems it's a it always sparked my interest for a while. So cool. I think this will probably make our list.

[00:06:22] I'll go a different tack for my first one. This is from username. Have you guys ever considered talking about video games? Not sure if you play, but would be awesome if you picked some choice and consequence game like Disco.

[00:06:36] Elysium or a wolf among us and compared what choices you guys made, not to mention all the other real world topics surrounding gaming. Wow. I will admit that I didn't put any video game stuff on my list out of fear that it would be outright rejected.

[00:06:53] So there was another person that suggested a different game. So like, I like the idea of playing like a choice and consequence game that we then can compare. Like how, you know, like, you know, I think that would be fun to, you know, our personalities would be reflected.

[00:07:08] I think in the different choices. Oh yeah. Ethan Fisher also said like the static speaks my name. It's a 15 minute long indie game where you play as a deranged man who's obsessed with a painting. I've never played anything like it. And I think it's perfect for this audience.

[00:07:24] So I think that would be kind of cool. I'm worried that it'll get me down a rabbit hole where I start playing video games again for real and I don't want to do that. Worth it. It's worth the risk. So we'll keep that on the.

[00:07:37] Yeah, I like that. I yeah, like I said, I didn't put video game stuff because I didn't think you'd be up for it, but I've totally down for it. I contain multitudes. So complex. All right, my next one is.

[00:07:54] Something I guess we've touched upon but never really discussed and that's just long termism in its in its various forms. So I don't think we've dedicated a show to just this this philosophy called long termism.

[00:08:05] So this was suggested by both Gray Meckling and I think Tom Marsh Bank and they listed so a few people who might talk about this, but including Paul and I. I'm not that interested in it.

[00:08:17] Honestly, like I saw that one and I agree that it is a topic that others find interesting, but like the existential risk stuff. The you know, I think we talked it. We definitely talked about it a little bit with McCaskill and also Peter Singer. I find that stuff.

[00:08:32] It's so riddled with uncertainty. That it's really hard to take a stand. And it also as we've talked about, like it often seems like it's an excuse to just devote resources to your pet cause. So, so Tamo doesn't recycle and I do recycle.

[00:08:51] It often seems like it's an excuse to just devote resources to your pet cause. So Tamlo doesn't recycle? I do recycle, although I think as a separate issue that's kind of worth it. Yeah, no, no. I suspected you might think that way.

[00:09:14] I think we could eke out maybe an article that might be interesting but I concede. All right. Well, we'll see. So here is the Plasmidan one. I know this is a repeat request but I would love you guys to tackle eunimus plurum and this

[00:09:32] essay on television by David Foster Wallace. I thought I think that would be very cool to do that specific essay. I like that he gave us a specific essay to do. I looked at it. It looked interesting. Yeah. That Plasmidan suggestion was on my long list.

[00:09:49] The literal only reason it didn't make my short list was because I figured we would do another David Foster Wallace thing anyway so I thought, well, let's put something that has less of a shot.

[00:09:59] This is a meta thing but there were some like that for me at first and then I was like, but wait a minute, we say that and then we don't actually end up doing it. No, that's true. That's true. Like denial of death. Yeah.

[00:10:13] We made a listener very upset with our constant flirting, constant teasing with denial of death. I'm like I said, the David Foster Wallace would have been on my list so. Well, we'll put it to the side and then we'll see if it makes it.

[00:10:32] The one I was going to say is doing something like fear and trembling from Kierkegaard. I have that too. Yeah. So Travis Neil suggested that. I feel like the theme is emerged in these last couple of episodes and I feel like we'll be

[00:10:47] putting a button on it with some Kierkegaard and maybe even later with some Dostoevsky. Yes. An announcement to come. I don't think we'll make it today but there's an announcement concerning Dostoevsky to come.

[00:11:02] In a related vein, I like the idea of Kierkegaard but also Benjamin Miller said I'd love to hear you explore a topic relating to theology and religion. H. Richard Nyborg's The Responsible Self comes to mind or C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

[00:11:18] I've heard that those are really interesting texts and I'd also be interested in that. I mean, I guess they're two separate topics so maybe we could do Kierkegaard now and set the other one aside. I think both are really interesting ideas. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:35] I'll do my next one then. A bunch of people asked us to do more Borges stories but a couple people suggested actual stories, one called The Immortal and one Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote. This is one of those where we're going to do more Borges, right?

[00:11:57] But like listeners could just make us do it right now, you know? Yeah. That's true. That's exactly why at first I didn't have on the list just like with Dave Busser Wallace. Have you read Pierre Menard, author of The Quixote? No.

[00:12:11] So that was exactly the example I had in mind when I said that we could write Denial of Death after reading these three people. I was thinking of the guy. I don't know if I've read Immortal Man but absolutely there's just no...

[00:12:25] We should just put it on the list even if we have to make the list six. And I feel like somehow Borges is a good summer episode. I don't know why. I have fond memories of doing them over the summer. Absolutely.

[00:12:38] And yes, I totally agree with you that giving a specific work, especially a short story, not like... Like somebody suggested Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature and I was like, yeah, I'd love to talk about that but to talk about it responsibly I'd have to read 600 pages

[00:12:50] and like really what am I going to read 600 pages? I've read a lot of that book and I'm not interested really in talking about it. Into what I say about it and why on our matters.

[00:13:01] All right, my next one is this book that I tried to mention last episode maybe and then forgot but then remembered. But I think that you would enjoy it. It's called The Myth of Mental Illness by a psychiatrist named Thomas Saz... S-C-A-E-S-C.

[00:13:23] I was a book written, I think in the 60s but it's a super interesting take on what mental illness is with like a historical... In a historical context it sort of tells the history of the concept of mental illness

[00:13:39] and how it evolved and what it's done to us now and our sort of view of what disease is and the metaphor of disease that's parted over to the mind. It would be fun to do. That was by Mark Kerr. Mark are you related to Steve Kerr?

[00:13:57] And somebody else, Daniel Cosme also suggested just talking about mental disorders which we would talk about if we talked about the mental illness but maybe that's also a separate topic. I don't know. I would like to do that because there's also interesting meta-psychology, meta-philosophy

[00:14:19] kind of questions about it that I think we would... Like we could probably get a clinical guest like Matt again or somebody else to talk about the DSM-5 and how it was developed and like controversy surrounding it and all that stuff.

[00:14:34] Yeah, I think that might even relate to some of the things we're going to talk about in the second segment. Yeah, I like that for some reason. I'm seeing it not on my list which makes me worried that some of the ones that

[00:14:46] I liked didn't make my list somehow but I remember thinking that would be really good. So I'm happy to put that on. Cool. Okay, Richard Arndover would love to hear you talk about JD Salinger's short and wonderful book or story Franny and Zooey.

[00:15:06] I remember really loving that story but I was also in my, I think early 20s, early to mid-20s when I read it, I'd be very interested in revisiting it. Yeah, and Salinger in general. So I don't know, did that not make yours?

[00:15:24] It didn't make mine but I don't remember seeing it. So... It was, I don't know if it was on the, there were two posts that we, so maybe it was on a different one. I've heard good things about it.

[00:15:35] I like I, I mean I'm always up for literature. We'll see. We'll see if it makes the final cut but I think we should put it right now on the board. Yeah. I think I have exhausted all of mine.

[00:15:46] There were a lot of Kafka suggestions which I like speaking of a good evolution from Nietzsche, Freud, Borges and Kafka. I think we don't have to put it on the list but I think that they're right that we should do another Kafka episode soon. Yeah.

[00:16:07] Didn't we have Tolstoy on there at some point? What are we going to do? Death of Ibn Ilj. Yeah, I'd love to do that. But I don't think anybody recommended it. Last one then for me is there are a couple film ones.

[00:16:22] I'm going to hope to get at least one of them on. The movie Primer which is like a time travel mind fuck of the century I think. That one was from Jeremy Silver and then Steven Cowpar.

[00:16:39] Oh, Steven is a student here at Cornell who's in my lab even though he's actually a PhD in math. Oh, interesting. So you know him. Great guy. Well maybe he asked how about the seventh seal, the Bergman movie? Steven coming with the fucking hoity-toity cinema.

[00:17:01] One of the things that I thought would like I'm probably not going to watch the seventh seal unless we do an episode on it. And then if we did, I think I'd get a lot out of it, you know? Yeah. So like I'm not a huge Bergman fan.

[00:17:15] I'll admit like not because I've seen them all and I don't like them. I've seen the seventh seal a while ago but I don't remember much about it except the chess scene. But yeah. It's about all I know about it. It's like literally the only thing I know.

[00:17:29] Chess with death. Yeah. You know, I think there's a reason why people consider it great and I think it's very philosophical or a primer, one of those. Primer I didn't put on my list because just how fucking complicated it is.

[00:17:47] It's to the point of complication that I've never gotten the satisfaction. I think you have to watch it four or five times and then like read, you know, like look at XKCD famously has sort of a diagram of like all of the time.

[00:18:02] You know, maybe in the summer, maybe it'd be a fun thing to do. People say that it's probably the best time travel movie. Yeah. And he made it for like $6,000 or some ridiculous. Yeah. That's great.

[00:18:15] I am, I want a movie on this list and I don't have one. So I'll let you, I'll let you decide. I'll go a seventh seal. Hmm. Because there's only, this is the only way we'll do that as if listeners pick it. Right?

[00:18:31] I mean, and I, I want an excuse. So all right. So what do we have? Let's go through them. So we have seventh seal. We have a video game to kind of like a bunch of options. So we'll just put video game as a topic. Kicker guard.

[00:18:52] Kicker guard. Did we say yes for Lovecraft? I think so. Yeah. Okay. Lovecraft, kicker guard, seventh seal, video game. And then the myth of mental illness and David Foster Wallace. And more Borjas. And more Borjas.

[00:19:09] I'll go Borjas over Foster Wallace, but I do want to do an episode on that, that essay. Yeah. That's, is that six if we do Borjas, seventh seal, mental illness, kicker guard, video game, Lovecraft. Yeah. Want to go with those? Yeah.

[00:19:27] I don't think the seventh seal is going to win, but I love it. I don't say that because you'll get a mounting. I'm happy to be surprised. No, I would love it. Go for it. Yeah. Stephen Cowper, Irish fuck you.

[00:19:47] And I also want to keep in mind and the Benjamin Miller keep reminding me if we forget the like Nibor, or if that's how you're a knee borer, the responsible self. Or this would be pretty cool.

[00:20:01] I can see myself being more open to that stuff than I have been. Yeah. As I say, I've read, I think both of them definitely mere Christianity. And I prefer Kierkegaard as my apologist, but the Nibor I haven't read. I don't remember if I read.

[00:20:16] He's the one that I've heard good things about. Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll be right back to talk about Sigmund Freud. Look, it's a pandemic. We're all struggling. We're all having trouble adjusting to lockdowns and social distancing and so much uncertainty about what's to come.

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[00:23:32] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the show, as you might expect, where we like to reach out to our listeners and thank them for all of the support all of the support you've given us as our listeners.

[00:23:43] We really, really appreciate it if you can't tell from the way in which we gushed with appreciation in the first segment for all of the ideas that you give us, but also just for the communication for the reaching out to us for whatever reason.

[00:24:00] If you want to reach out to us, you can always reach us over email at verybadwizardsatgmail.com or you can tweet to us at verybadwizards or at Tamler or at P's. You can join one of two or both communities where there might be lively discussion.

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[00:24:50] Well, it was obvious you were like Nietzsche, Ubermensch, you know. It was it actually was an automatic suggestion from the Instagram algorithm. I mean, everybody knows that's how you perceive yourself. So I actually in my mirror, I just have like a blonde wig

[00:25:09] that's like pasted on to where my head usually goes. No, but we really we really appreciate all of you reaching out to us like we always say it's what keeps us going, especially in shitty times

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[00:27:38] Oh, really quickly, we are going to when you if you hear this on the first day that we release it tomorrow, we should be appearing unless it goes terrible, less. It's terrible. We will be guest guesting on YOL in bar and Mickey and Slick's

[00:27:57] podcast to psychologists for beers. We're going to be joining them to have a discussion about who knows, who knows, but that should be fun. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. Thank you, everybody. All right. So shall we move on? Yes. To our main.

[00:28:15] Let's get to our main topic. I think both of us were excited about doing this this week. We decided to focus on Freud's probably his most famous work, civilization and its discontents. I just want to say a few things by way of introducing the text

[00:28:35] and that the text sort of speaks for itself. So we'll get into the nitty gritty of the argument. But it sort of does assume a little bit of knowledge about Freud's psychoanalytic theory. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about that, but also the historical context.

[00:28:50] So this book was written in 1929 and published in 1930. It was aside from Moses and monotheism, it was Freud's last book. I'd say his last book in a coherent state. He was on his deathbed and was he died in 1939.

[00:29:08] And I think that he regard this as sort of the culmination of a lifetime of thinking about these psychoanalytic concepts and applying them in an analysis of civilization just more broadly. But by no means is this the first time he tries to do this.

[00:29:24] He has a number of other books before this where he's applying his psychoanalytic concepts. I teach Freud in intro psych. And one of the things that I always try to make clear is that particular historical and autobiographical context.

[00:29:39] So Freud was living in Vienna, Austria at a time when it was just the Victorian era. People were extremely, extremely conservative, especially in all manner, sexual, you could say, or to borrow from Freud, they were sexually repressed. It was a very interesting time,

[00:29:56] probably quite unlike any other, definitely different from today. And Freud was a physiologist. He was an MD. He was a doctor. He was seeing patients who were coming in to report that they were suffering from physical maladies and his practice grew into sort of talking therapy

[00:30:17] from visiting with a lot of these patients who were reporting physical problems that had no organic cause. So Freud was living in this stifle time. A lot of people attribute his willingness to say shit

[00:30:33] that nobody else would say to the fact that he was already probably an outcast in just just because he was a Jew in that period in time in that particular place in the world, that he was more bold.

[00:30:46] Like he just clearly didn't give a fuck about rocking the boat. And you know, for whatever you think about Freud's ideas, I don't think that it would be ever fair to call him anything but brave in his willingness to talk about stuff,

[00:30:59] especially stuff that nobody was talking about. His ideas, though, were weird. There's just a lot of what we would find to be strange, odd ideas. I'm going to give an example later on when it comes up when we're talking about the text itself.

[00:31:12] But Freud was fundamentally interested in the development of personality. He was a personality psychologist. He wanted to understand how the child went from, you know, this blabby, mucusy, poopy thing to having the personality of a full grown

[00:31:27] adult and in particular how mental illness could arise as a product of development. So to his credit, he was one of the first people to point out that early development plays an important role in adult personality. People just thought of kids as like many adults kind of like

[00:31:47] that didn't really matter. You could ignore them for the first few years of life. So you developed a theory. I don't want to get too much in the weeds of the theory, but the theory basically said at its heart, the human organism and all organisms are pleasure seeking.

[00:32:01] And for Freud, this was the very first piece of your mind. The psyche was what he called the it was just the it, the thing, which was purely driven by a desire to seek pleasure. And over time, the source of pleasure changes.

[00:32:19] So at first, the infant primarily would seek pleasure from breastfeeding what he called the oral stage of development. And then that moved to the anal stage of development when children were learning to when they were getting potty trained, when they were learning to control

[00:32:37] their their bowels and being punished or rewarded if they did or didn't properly. Then it moved on to the phallic stage by phallic here. He meant essentially when little kids start twiddling their dick in the bathtub. I could he didn't mean full on like like adult sexuality.

[00:32:54] He meant like so when you progress past the anal stage, you moved into what he called the phallic stage. And this is when you derive pleasure from twiddling your dick, not full blown adult sexual satisfaction, but just like that. That stage in life where kids are discovering

[00:33:11] that they can get pleasure from from that part of their body. Just twiddling it like it's not just. Yeah. What does that mean? It just moved. It just moved from once you resolve potty training you realize that bodily pleasure can be had.

[00:33:27] And so for Freud, it is an important point, I guess, for Freud, sexuality was really broad. So so kids would start touching themselves in their genitals at this stage. Like he pointed out that kids actually derive pleasure from the general. They just didn't.

[00:33:41] It's not sexual in the sense that you and I have it. But for Freud, sexual meant broadly any source of pleasure. And that's all before school age. So so wait. So the anal stage, you're what? Right around when you're potty training to three years old.

[00:33:58] But what? Why is it like just because you're just because you're not fiddling with your ass? No, but he believed that pleasure was derived from the feeling of pooping and the feeling of having control over when you poop.

[00:34:15] When when we say that somebody is fixated like orally or anally, we what what Freud meant is that during that stage of development, something happened that didn't didn't wasn't smooth. So people who constantly put shit in their mouth, we say they're they're fixated orally

[00:34:34] for Freud, that just literally meant that during the stage of breastfeeding you were somehow frustrated. You didn't get your needs, your needs met. For I put a lot of a lot of stock in what happened in those first few years.

[00:34:47] And because because you're in the source of all your psychic energy, the source of all your your whole mental energy, your life energy, was the desire to seek out pleasure. Those are the sources with which you can get pleasure are the primary movers of development over time.

[00:35:08] So this is all before we get to full blown adult sexuality. So what Freud believed is that when you hit school age, all of a sudden the child realizes sort of over time that they can't be pleasure seeking machines.

[00:35:22] They have to play by some some sort of rule and they they all of a sudden just repress all of this stuff and they go into latency. He called so so that's you just for this is the stage at which kids think

[00:35:38] you know, boys are gross girls are gross. You get cooties. You don't want to think about sex. To him, that was just all of a sudden your mind just shuts down all thought of pleasure and in sexual pleasure broadly defined.

[00:35:50] And then you hit puberty and you finally get to what he called matured genital sexuality. So for Freud, what happens in those especially zero to three years of age when you end up in the phallic stage? That was really important.

[00:36:06] And we'll get back to what happens at the end of the phallic stage, which is the edifice complex. So yeah, I have questions about. So he doesn't really do he just kind of assumes it in this,

[00:36:17] but he doesn't go into the whatever possible evidence there might be for it or it's it's no not at all. And it's it's funny to think, you know, as I was reading it, like, of course, Freud by now, like this is 1930,

[00:36:31] there were so many people who had drunk the Kool-Aid, right? Like the whole world was really into the ideas of Freud so much so that it was no longer is Freud right. It was what parts of Freud are more right and what parts should we correct?

[00:36:48] So of course, he's writing this for an audience that is intimately familiar with all these theories in a way that's a little jarring for us. Yeah. So the pleasure principle that is fundamentally the id that that thing that drives us all.

[00:37:02] Freud believed God suppressed when kids had to understand that there is reality. Reality imposes constraints upon our happiness. We can't just go around sucking boobs and sticking our finger up our ass as much as we'd like to.

[00:37:17] There are constraints that are externally imposed, like you just can't do that. Importantly, he thought that after some time, we internalize all those rules that we actually move from being reminded of the cold reality, what he called the reality principle. We could no longer act on our pleasure.

[00:37:36] We had to act on the constraints of reality. That's when our ego, our self develops. And then a little bit later on, what we do is we internalize all those rules and we incorporate them into ourselves as the superego. And that becomes our conscience.

[00:37:50] Society's rules become become our conscience. So let me just back up a little bit. So the ego, as I understand just from this text, it is the thing that is that divides you from the external world, which you don't even have as a room. You're very young.

[00:38:09] It's like you have a more expansive view of the self when you're really young. You don't have this sharp division between you and the external world. But then when you are developing that sense, you now start to have a sharper delineation between what's you

[00:38:26] and your feelings and your beliefs and your thoughts versus just the world. That's exactly right. It's the first boundary. It's the boundary that gets put between you and everything else. And that is obviously a sort of can be a source of frustration

[00:38:41] because you are now you are seeking pleasure for you yourself. You're in that. That means that you have to interact with other selves. And you don't always get what you want. And you can. Yeah, that's. And that's what he called the reality principle. He had an interesting.

[00:39:01] He had an interesting story for how we develop our moral sense, this super ego that he called it. And the story some of you might be familiar with is the one of the edible conflict conflict.

[00:39:12] And so what he said essentially was, look, I let's take the male child because it was developed for basically just for men. He had adapted for women. He said, basically, you're like, I like the pleasure that I derive from my mother. She fulfills all my needs.

[00:39:30] I, you know, am warm and I'm fed and taken care of. I got to suck on her titties. I got to suck on her titties a lot. And and here is this man in the house who is imposing all these rules on me.

[00:39:45] Like, I can't do this fact. He wants the woman for himself. There's this jealousy. This is all, of course, unconscious for Freud. He doesn't believe anybody has a memory of this. And what happens is there becomes this frustration grows and this resentment where the child feels aggressive.

[00:40:02] The boy feels aggressive toward his father and he wants to kill him. Freud actually believed that one of the things that happens in this stage is that young boys realize that they can never defeat their father and therefore just join him, right?

[00:40:22] They just give in and they incorporate their father into their own self. So that's the super ego. And he thought that one of the ways they did it is if they had little sisters, they would look at the little sister like in the bathtub

[00:40:35] and see that she didn't have a dick. I'm not making this up at all. They would see she didn't have a dick and be like, holy shit, they're going to cut my dick off. And that fear of the fear of castration made them get in line real quick.

[00:40:49] Like that she must have pissed off dad so much. He cut her dick off. And this leads to people like sons really internalizing the norms of their father and trying to impress their father and trying to be a man and trying to.

[00:41:06] This is where this is the origin of the source of that. Like a lot of Freud, like the very specific details sound far fetched. Or at least I want to know just why he thinks that. But it feels like he's on to something, if not that.

[00:41:23] There is a you've put your finger on this sentiment that I couldn't. I'm torn because I read a lot of for like when I read Freud, there is so much that makes sense, but it's embedded in like you say these

[00:41:37] details that seem so weird and off to me that I'm like, wait, like it's this mix of wisdom and insight with like, oh, by the way, obviously, like we're all bisexual. You know, she's like stuff like that. It's like, wait, what does have to do with it?

[00:41:55] And we all want to sleep with our siblings and exactly. And that's the first like that's one of the first also repressions that you have to do. Yeah, the greatest disappointment. Yeah. That insects is that what he calls it? That's right. Yeah.

[00:42:09] Yeah, I like I somewhere wrote wrote out that quote. Specifically because he's like he calls it like one of the earliest disappointments is that incest is right. Hey, maybe that's why all that porn hub shit exists. Freud really was honest. This is in in chapter four.

[00:42:31] He says that incest is the drastic mutilation that man's erotic life has experienced through the ages. That the elimination of incest is the drastic mutilation. Yeah, right. And that's like that sets us on a like a trend. So Freud's theory of individual development of how

[00:42:51] we go from seeking out pleasure or happiness through these organic ways like, you know, trying to try and to please ourselves in the ways that our bodies feel pleasure. Then get gets frustrated. And we even when we develop normally, what we're developing is

[00:43:11] this sort of understanding that we will never be able to really satisfy our all of our desires. That's I think a good starting point here where this is what Freud is, I guess by way of analogy, but I'm not sure.

[00:43:26] But he's basically taking the tack that understanding that can help us understand how civilization developed historically. So if we understood so it's a sort of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny argument where just like individual development, society developed civilization developed. And that's the source of much of our discontent.

[00:43:49] Just like problems in development are the source of our neurotic misery in individuals. The development of civilization has put us all into this state of perpetually unable to find the happiness that we so crave. I want to talk about the analogy between the individual development

[00:44:09] and the development of the civilization and like because he maps it pretty specifically, like what's the super ego for civilization? What's the super ego for us? What's the ego for civilization? What's the id? So a couple of things about it first, it comes right at the end.

[00:44:24] I was surprised by it. It's very reminiscent of Plato and Republic. You know, he has the same similar kind of thing where he does this analysis of the tyrannical man and then the tyrannical city and the democratic man, the democratic city up till then.

[00:44:41] It is really like civilization isn't an analogy. It is just trying to figure out why there is this tension between individual happiness and the demands of civilization. And then you know, you start the text. Well, actually you start the text, which I want to ask you about

[00:45:01] the oceanic feeling and tying that to religion. But it really the idea as you're going into that last chapter is this is about why people are unhappy or dissatisfied and why what role does society play in that? To what extent is it inevitable?

[00:45:19] When did we start to understand that civilization was a source of distress? Is there anything we can do about it? And then it just does this little twist at the end, which it's hard for me

[00:45:31] to tell to what extent that's necessary or plays into what comes before it. Yeah, I'm with you because, you know, on the one hand, I was as I was reading as I, well, this is a different style book.

[00:45:46] Like we're trying now to sort of say what our main claim is. Like our central claim is this. And then we build the case for that central claim. And that gives the reader a sense of what you're doing the whole time. And this is a very different style.

[00:46:02] This is I'm going to take you through this journey, almost a stream of thought but more organized than that. And we're going to arrive at the place that I think is the deepest truth because throughout he's sort of setting the stage like you say,

[00:46:17] he starts off with this. He says, you know, I got this buddy and this buddy says he read he read my book and he's like, I think you're doing a disservice to a lot of why people are religious. For me, it's this oceanic feeling.

[00:46:31] It's this feeling that I have of being part of something bigger, that I am something limitless and unbounded. Hence the term oceanic, a feeling of connection with eternity. And Freud says, yeah, I believe that you feel it, but that can't be why like it can't religion.

[00:46:51] Like, if anything, this has to be explained. We have to explain why you have this oceanic feeling to begin with, because as a good atheist and a good scientist, he thinks that can't be just because God gave it to us. So he embarks on this explanation.

[00:47:06] But then, as you say, in the last few chapters, introduces a whole new set of ideas and wraps everything up in a way that he thinks he wrapped it up in a way that I don't think I don't think he did.

[00:47:20] Regarding the oceanic feeling, he seems to have respect for it, even though he says he doesn't feel it himself. So it is this kind of. Yeah, I like that. It was nice. He was no Chris Hitchens. So my stab at what he's up to there is separating that

[00:47:41] kind of spiritual feeling, that feeling of transcendence from religious and religious Christian ideas, which he has like Nietzsche, like just a ton of contempt for. And that that is that is a consistent theme throughout the text is that he finds Christianity a special form of delusion and repression.

[00:48:07] And, you know, it it urges us to disvalue this world. It infantilizes you and he has a lot of like this comes up a lot in the text, his contempt for the idea that you should love your fellow man.

[00:48:20] He's like, all that does is just dilute what love means. And like your fellow man don't love you. They feel aggression towards you and you're supposed to love them. Like it's meaningless. It's just a bromide. And I and I thought maybe he wants to separate that stuff,

[00:48:40] a specific manifestation of the oceanic feeling from the oceanic feeling itself. Which like he has seems to have a lot more respect for and leads off the book with. Yeah, like all of the stuff that he talked about in

[00:48:55] in the future of an illusion, which was kind of dissing the content of religion, like in all things it said, he's like, well, there's this one piece that, you know, I think deserves some attention, which is this oceanic feeling.

[00:49:10] And I think for Freud, this is a detective's, you know, this is the work of a detective. He's saying, this has to have a natural cause. It has to have its ideology in some sort of psychoanalytic development in the way that he describes.

[00:49:24] And so I think that he's clearly undermining it as a source of religion. But he's, I think, explaining it as a psychologist in a way that he finds satisfying. And that isn't like a pathology or an illness or something or just a dilute.

[00:49:39] Like the feeling itself is real. And even if it doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. So then it goes into this diagnosis of we have this pleasure, this drive, like our it is these drives, like the pleasure principle,

[00:49:56] but then also an instinct for aggression, which he doesn't totally, I guess, separate from the pleasure principle. But but it but it manifests itself in different ways. Like the pleasure principle can lead you to erotic love and sexual gratification,

[00:50:13] or it can it can also be a manifest itself, right? As an as an aggression. I guess the fundamental tension is like this is just inevitable. You have a society and they are imposing constraints on you getting pleasure or satisfying your the id, your drives.

[00:50:40] And so it becomes really difficult to negotiate that terrain. He says like maybe if you're an artist, you're less dependent on others for your happiness. If you derive satisfaction from your work in that way,

[00:50:57] that can maybe do it for but it's very few people that can live that life. And for most of us, our happiness and our gratification is going to depend on other people and the outer world in ways that we can't control and that will frustrate us. That's right.

[00:51:17] The the fleetingness of the pleasure that we get even even when we're doing our best, I think is part of the problem. For instance, we, you know, mature adults get a lot of pleasure from sex.

[00:51:31] And so what we do is we and we do things like get married in an attempt to have like a constant source of anybody who's married will laugh. Oh, I get to fuck whenever I want. But but that's just like that's just not how happiness works.

[00:51:53] Right. So so we are we are misery for for Freud. You know, talking about the aggressive the aggressive drive or the death drive, which he brings up later on, that was a late addition to his theory. For most of his life, he was arguing that all drives,

[00:52:12] all motivations are from the id, the fountain of sexual energy that it is from the id. That was the heart. That was the libido. The libido was the source of all that carnal desire. And we try we try to to make it by by creating these these institutions

[00:52:32] like marriage where we'll get get get it on the regular. But there's one that, you know, much like Buddhists, he starts off with saying, like, look, all of the suffering that we're experiencing, though, is inevitable.

[00:52:42] Like even in the best of conditions, we're going to have a bunch of suffering. And there's as you were pointing to, there's a few ways out of it. One is to drink your, you know, or take drugs to pacify this suffering.

[00:52:56] The other one is to do something like sublimated into art. The other one is to seek out the through meditation or what he calls yoga, the dissolution of the ego, because then then you're eliminating the source of suffering.

[00:53:12] He thinks all of these are lacking, though, like all of these are just going to be patchwork because for him, there's a big tradeoff that is to be made and this is the source of suffering. That is the big tradeoff is we have created.

[00:53:26] We have to regulate the way other people get happiness if we are to get a shot at happiness. Like if we're going to live in a society and get a shot at happiness, we have to agree to these certain rules.

[00:53:38] And I think what he's saying is that the rules of civilization in his especially in a screed against Christianity are oppressive, like they've gotten oppressive. He plays he's on the border of trying to just make descriptive claims. Like this is the source of human misery

[00:53:55] and making some sort of like normative claims about how we should. Did you ever get the sense that he's actively saying we shouldn't have civilization or we should go back? No, I don't know if he thinks that's possible. I think he has like the normative elements of this.

[00:54:12] He has a lot of hostility towards overly repressive forms of society, like the Christian society of his time. But he's not like a noble savage. I think he finds that naive as well because that there's there's no security, right? Like he has a nice quote.

[00:54:34] It's about the battle between liberty, individual liberty and happiness and the needs for a social organization. He says, the liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture. It was greatest before any culture, though indeed it had little value at that time

[00:54:47] because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it. And so you have this need for security and like the world is going to come get you some way. Like the world isn't going to organize itself so that it can just gratify your needs

[00:55:03] if you just didn't have civilization. It's just inevitable that we have to have some sort of social organization. He thinks and I think he's probably right about that. And so then the question is, well, how do you do that? Now, you say that the aggression comes late

[00:55:17] and I knew that about the death instinct came late, but the aggression plays a big role. It seems like in this text, right? Like he talks about we can have love for people as long as it's a constrained group and we can have aggression towards.

[00:55:32] So it's almost like a balance. Like we need aggression towards an out group if we're going to love people in our in group. And this aggression also plays a role in like it's like the formation of our guilt, right?

[00:55:45] Like we have this aggressor and towards the external world towards other people that we then have to society makes us repress that. And so we turn it on ourselves and that's the origin of guilt. This feeling that punishes us even when we don't act upon our

[00:56:06] naughty impulses, but just that we have to just that we are conscious of having those impulses at all. I don't know sleeping with your sister or or your mother or killing your father or so now your aggression instinct, which can't manifest itself externally.

[00:56:22] You you now turn it on yourself and you start to feel guilty for things that not even that you've done, which he thinks is fine, but that you haven't done, but just thought of,

[00:56:32] which is just part of who you are and part of your development as a human being. Right. Much like the super ego or the moral conscience develops through the internalizing of the father's rules. So he says he says a few times guilt takes on two forms.

[00:56:48] One is the guilt that comes from, yeah, you know something's wrong and you're worried that you're going to get caught and you might get caught and you feel bad in that sense. But it's when you internalize it that you start to feel that second kind of guilt.

[00:57:00] And he thinks that what? Especially religion, just sort of as an institution has been writ large, that same thing. You've internalized the rules of civilization so that you feel guilty. And he has a great little part there where he says, you know,

[00:57:17] that it's the people who are the most saintly that seem to feel the most guilt over everything they do. Because, of course, they have the most active super ego, right? They they when you're that sensitive to right and wrong,

[00:57:33] a lot of what you do might might seem to be wrong, which seems right to me. I like couldn't help but think of Augustine and his pairs and then he has that great Mark Twain foot. Yeah. What is that?

[00:57:50] The first he's he talks about he was he was watching Mark Twain and this is awesome. Like someone should write a story. It's so awesome, right? If they haven't already like a play or something in a delicious little story, he said, the first melon I ever stole,

[00:58:06] the melon as it happened was unripe. I heard Mark Twain tell the story himself in one of his lectures after he'd given out the title, he stopped and asked himself in a doubtful way. Was it the first? That was the whole story. I thought it was great. Yeah.

[00:58:24] So but I guess my point is, is that the aggression seems to play in this in this text, a big part in our dissatisfaction and our unhappiness. It's this, I guess at the way it manifests itself, you know, through the super ego,

[00:58:39] we turn the aggression that we can't. That's what we want to that we're driven to impose on others towards ourselves. And that leads to neuroses and various forms of that's right pathologies. That's right.

[00:58:52] And and you could also have a view, which I think he used to have that aggression is the result of, for instance, like the side effect of trying to satisfy you know, I want to fuck your wife.

[00:59:06] Right. You know, you might beat me because that's the source of your pleasure. It's later on when he posits that it is its own drive, like yes, the drive, essentially the Thanatos, the drive to death, that it gets a bit more controversial.

[00:59:21] And that does seem to come a little bit out of the blue. But I find it really interesting that so just to in case we're not being clear because we're jumping around, but the aggression, I agree, it is the frustration from not being able to gratify your instincts,

[00:59:38] like not getting like just non gratification of powerful and stinctural urgencies, he says. And that leads to aggression. But this destruction instinct, he introduces at the end, he says, I can no longer understand how we could have overlooked the universality of non erotic aggression and destruction

[01:00:00] and could have omitted to give it its due significance in our interpretation of life. So this destructive trend is directed inwards. It usually includes our perceptions, but it's this instinct for like, it's like you want to fuck up your life. If your life is going well,

[01:00:17] you still want to fuck it up. Like I don't know to what extent this is. Well, I got to what extent any of this has empirical basis in the, but I mean, this is such a big thing in art, right? In like notes from underground, like,

[01:00:32] that's nothing if not a self destructive instinct that makes him act the way he does, especially in the second part of Dostoevsky. This was a big thing in that Alex Garland movie annihilation where everybody in their own way is trying to destroy themselves.

[01:00:47] And so you have to do battle with that aspect of you. There's like, that's another tension, right? You're not even mad that you can't have something. You can't have sex with somebody. It's that you just want to, I don't know, fuck shit up. Fuck shit up.

[01:01:02] You want to do two things. You want to fuck and you want to fuck shit up. Right. And I don't know. There's something that strikes me as true. We're not good at like just being happy and letting that, letting that last, you know?

[01:01:16] Yeah. So we want to destabilize things. Well, so this is the story of why we are seeking pleasure seems fairly obvious, straightforward. Right. Like this is to be hard to disagree with the claim that one of the things

[01:01:33] we want to do is satisfy our needs and and the pleasure is good. And it feels good. It's that the death as a drive or destruction of a drive that's non-instrumental does seem a little weird to me. But Freud seems to think that one that the death drive,

[01:01:53] Thanatos was so sort of a when you're just dealing with life and pleasure, you're constantly in this sort of like satisfy it, be unhappy, satisfy it, be unhappy and that the death drive was this sort of desire

[01:02:08] for there just to be stasis for like all living things to just finally end in a non-living state because yeah, it's draining. It's draining to have this drive that's constantly, constantly. You're either seeking pleasure or frustrated from having pleasure. Yeah, it's different.

[01:02:28] But that is different than what then I get the intergroup relation stuff. Like I get the frustration and aggression. Yeah, but and I guess the way I understood it as just reading it here was that even when, you know, like these other forces aren't making you unhappy,

[01:02:46] there's this thing to reckon with too. If it wasn't bad enough, the fact that civilization and your individual instinctual urges are at odds, then there's this other thing. And it seems to have some sort of connection with our it's the super ego

[01:03:02] and guilt, but then also just has a life of its own. Right. I don't think that it's it's weird for us to be a bit confused here. I think the understanding of what Freud meant is up for grabs a little bit.

[01:03:15] He himself in the book says that, well, I know this is contested by again, you know, this huge community of psychoanalysts who had already adopted his ideas was like, well, then when Freud brought up a new idea, they were already the establishment.

[01:03:28] They're like, no, not even Freud, you're wrong. Early Freud was right. And he says that's how I felt. Yeah, like that's how I felt when I first heard about this, you know, like, but it's a good rhetorical technique. No, I get why you're objecting.

[01:03:43] I was like you too. It was once like you. All right, well, let's let's set that aside for now. But because I want to like get yours. I want to get your just general sense of to what extent do you think he's

[01:03:56] he's brought a lot of insight to the human mind and the human condition. And one of the things I sort of like about it is he's not offering some sort of major general solution to this problem. Right. In fact, I think he thinks that there is no

[01:04:14] he's very clear explicit that there's no general solution. It always depends on the individual finding a balance will be different for every person. And there's no like formula that will that will work for for everybody. But then he also has a kind of fatalism or tragic sensibility about

[01:04:30] the you know, the competition between civilization and need satisfaction. It's very possible. I think here's the quote we shall accustomed ourselves eventually, hopefully to the idea that there are certain difficulties inherent in the very nature of culture, which will not yield to any efforts of reform.

[01:04:49] Like this isn't something that we can fix. We can make it better, maybe or at least not make it worse, like with certain forms of overly repressive forms of society. But like this is something that is going to be a deep

[01:05:04] tension within us that will be an obstacle to individual happiness. And it's just life. It's tragedy. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I like that he doesn't try to solve this all like right. He says, you know, I don't know,

[01:05:19] communists think that the root of all this is is human desire for personal property, you know, the introduction of personal property, private property. That's not it, because we're going to be miserable either way. Right. Like he's like, I don't think we were less miserable before.

[01:05:33] You know, Freud has sort of this he's off-sided quote where he says that the goal of psychoanalysis is to turn hysterical neurosis into common unhappiness. And that's the sort of mix of his optimism and pessimism right there. He's like, look, I think we could do better.

[01:05:51] I think that the internalization of these strict rules about the body, about pleasure are creating neurosis. And he has an interesting part here about whether or not we can call this culture neurosis, but that we're creating the conditions for making people especially unhappy.

[01:06:11] The way that we're doing it now, it really does feel more like diagnosis in a way that he's like, well, you know, we'll see, we'll see what happens. He's not really giving advice because there's always a trade off. So we can make people love their fellow man more.

[01:06:27] But then the trade off for that is they're going to have to have aggression towards an outside group. And you can try to gratify your instinctual urges that are condemned by society, but then society will punish you and you will punish yourself through guilt.

[01:06:45] And, you know, so that's that's also like a dead end to happiness. And he does have this very interesting you you alluded to this before, but so the love. So we are a deep source of pleasure is sexual love, right? So sexual activity, getting our pleasure that way.

[01:07:09] So we form these human relationships where we're like, OK, like you have sex with me and we'll and then we get in this deep. You know, he's very pessimistic about about the misery that human relationships especially will give you.

[01:07:24] And then he says that one way that people get around this is to say, well, I'll just love everyone. And that move which many people have thought a brilliant move of society by saying, like, love your neighbor as yourself

[01:07:40] or like some sort of golden rule, some sort of impartiality principle. He thinks that that's just a patchwork attempt at taking that sexual desire and saying, maybe I can just satisfy this by saying everybody love everybody and like removing it from the carnal pleasure.

[01:08:01] But he thinks he thinks that this just won't work. And there is where I think he gets normative. Like he says, if you love everybody, then the people you actually love, like in your family, they're now just in the same boat as everybody else.

[01:08:17] Yeah, it's like, isn't that kind of a dick move that like you should all of a sudden drop everything for some stranger when like you have. You have actually people who depend on you and who love you and those people you're loving

[01:08:31] have nothing but regression and hatred for you. And yet you're still loving them as much as the people around you who who need your love. Right, I was sympathetic to that. I was kind of sympathetic to that. And at first I was like, well.

[01:08:48] But he doesn't he doesn't get what people mean when they say you should love all humans. But his point is well taken was like, well, it means nothing. It means very close to not at all what we mean when we say love your loved ones.

[01:09:05] So like, what's the point? No, it reminds me of like the Williams critique of utilitarianism or, you know, like then if you just love everybody, then you're not even like a person anymore. I mean, what if you guys started loving all Gentiles?

[01:09:19] Like it would just be complete like waste. We can't do that. No, they don't love us. That's for sure. I do. I love them all. Yeah, I think there is this this deep strand of much like Nietzsche, the one thing that I got on board with was

[01:09:45] that at least his society had gone to great lengths to specifically find the sources of pleasure and tell people I can't do it. Like that that belief that there is a part of human nature

[01:09:58] that needs to be able to roam freely in a field, like let this happen. Stop trying so hard to suppress the very things almost because they're the things that bring us pleasure. Like stop giving us guilt for this.

[01:10:15] And he thinks that that guilt, both at the individual level and at the cultural level is just a cancer that's eating away at us. And that's at the heart of our discontent because we we turn it into hate for ourselves that's almost identical to what Nietzsche said. Right?

[01:10:32] Yeah, although I think Nietzsche has a more optimistic takeaway, which is you can make it sublime. Like once you recognize this and you recognize the fake boundaries of religion and morality and rationalism and all of that,

[01:10:51] like that there is that there's a way to live and and solve this at the level of the individual, not at the level of society. And I don't know if Freud believes that like even the lip service he pays to the artist is barely his lip service.

[01:11:09] Right? He's like maybe. But like if that's true, it's a very small number of people. And I don't even know if it's true. That was the sense I got from it. He's more just like into the tragic tension of it all.

[01:11:24] I actually think that that quote where Freud says, turn hysterical neurosis into common unhappiness. I think that's his lofty goal. Like maybe let's just let's just be normally thwarted in life. Let's have just the normal level of frustration,

[01:11:41] not any of this extra extra guilt at the even having the thought of doing something wrong. And the way I understand guilt, a lot of this guilt is unconscious and is manifesting itself in ways that we don't recognize as guilt in some like physical illness, like physical.

[01:12:01] He thinks that's right. He thinks neuroses are the body's way of harming its punishing itself. Right? And so I take it what psychoanalyst is doing is just revealing that. And that's exactly what you're saying. Then that turns what is what is it to common unhappiness?

[01:12:19] Yeah, hysterical neuroses, hysterical neuroses. So like it's the you didn't know that you wanted to have sex with your mother and kill your father or you didn't know that whatever the thing is that it's haunting you, it's just manifesting itself in some other physiological way.

[01:12:34] And then you're if you can realize that this is the optimistic at a certain level. But again, it's a very limited optimism. Then you then then you'll just go back to people who are just can't gratify their desires. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:12:50] So to give you I like to give people examples of the kinds of people that Freud saw because I think maybe more so than now, it really was the case that these these kinds of neuroses were turning into bodily symptoms.

[01:13:03] And but certainly is the case that we have bodily symptoms for all kinds of shit now, too. But the first, you know, the sort of breakthrough case for Freud was this woman named Anna O who came to see him and she was having a particular kind of paralysis

[01:13:21] that they called the glove paralysis. Basically, she couldn't feel anything from her wrist up. And Freud as an MD knew that there was no physiological way that that could happen because the nerves don't work that way like that. You wouldn't lose feeling only above your hand.

[01:13:39] And the way that he started treating her was just talking to her about dreams and stuff as he talked about her symptoms. Sometimes the symptoms would disappear. And so especially when they were talking about about things, you know, these deep seated desires and interpreting her dreams.

[01:13:59] This was the talking cure that that kind of made these things go away. And I think that's would be the most optimistic he could get about. I think he's trying to do something like psychoanalyze society, but even he admits that it's not clear what that even means.

[01:14:14] Right. And he says, you know, he says, one of the differences between treating a person and, you know, diagnosing civilization is that when you one of the ways in which we define a mental illness is that they are having trouble adjusting to their environment.

[01:14:30] Right. So there's something wrong with you that's preventing you from leading a quote unquote normal life in your environment. And what does it mean to say that all of society is neurotic with no there is no comparison group there?

[01:14:45] Like what is what is the normal control sort of society that wouldn't be neurotic? I just want to read you really quickly. This this is not from the text, but this is a correspondence that Freud had with Jung just to get back to the the anal.

[01:15:00] So this is this is a description of a patient says, first trauma between third and fourth year saw her father spanking her older brother on the bare bottom. Powerful impression couldn't help thinking afterwards that she had defecated on her father's hand. From the fourth to seventh year convulsive

[01:15:19] attempts to defecate on her own feet in the following manner. She sat on the floor with one foot beneath her, pressed her heel against her anus and tried to defecate and at the same time to prevent defecation. Often retained the stool for two weeks in this way,

[01:15:36] has no idea how she hit upon this peculiar business, says it was completely instinctive and accompanied by blissfully shudder some feelings. Later, this phenomenon was superseded by vigorous masturbation. That's that's incredible. This is. So like well, no wonder he's developing theories about butt stuff.

[01:16:03] Sometimes I wonder, like, did this should just go away with the disappearance of such repressive sexual, especially for women? Or are there just people that we just don't hear about? Who have no, I wonder that too, like, because I think,

[01:16:19] you know, at the time he talks about we have all these, you know, we want to fuck men, women, sisters, brothers. We want to do everything. And all we're allowed to do is like heterosexual love. Now that's no longer true, right? Right.

[01:16:35] But that didn't solve people's hangups, right? Like it definitely made people happier. It made certain people more free to be able to. But it didn't like cure society's ills. And in fact, the people who were just inclined to heterosexual love didn't just start having sex.

[01:16:53] It's not like once, you know, same sex. We're normalized. It's like all of a sudden we're all having sex. We're all fucking like men and our sisters. So so like it's obviously true that an overly repressive will just lead to unnecessary unhappiness

[01:17:14] and maybe maybe shitting out like on your foot. I don't know. But we can't just have a more tolerant society. That's not going to that's not going to do it, you know, because. Yeah. And I don't know.

[01:17:32] I'm trying to, you know, maybe he would say, well, the permissiveness now has swung the other way and our problems are due to that. It really is hard to detach his critique of society sort of sorry, his diagnosis of how civilization works

[01:17:51] from the critique of the society that he was part of. I just don't know that that can be done. You know, he. He seems to think he has a wide sweeping understanding of history, but he admits that he doesn't really like it's not.

[01:18:04] This isn't the sort of thing. So what do you think? Where do you stand on Freud and as a psychologist? I'll say that. Yeah. I because when I teach intro, psych, I have to make a decision

[01:18:19] whether or not to teach Freud and I really try to teach the course as a course on the science of psychology. And so I have very little by way of like, you know, ancestor worship. I teach Freud anyway, because the ideas of Freud are so

[01:18:34] ingrained in our culture that I want them to know about it. And I also think that it's a good example of a theory that doesn't have empirical evidence. In fact, it often was completely unfalsifiable. So I like to shit on it for not being scientific

[01:18:53] for the sake of my kids to teach them what a scientific theory is and isn't. But I always try to tell them that something that we've talked about a lot, which is if you think that the only source of insight in truth is

[01:19:07] empirical science, then I think that's where you're mistaken. And if you read Freud, there's a lot of what he says that I find insightful. Like, I actually think that a lot of what he says is like actual food for thought.

[01:19:22] And the best way I could put it is it at least gives me some sense that if I contemplate some of the points he's making, I feel like I might be more wise by understanding this this basic tension.

[01:19:36] Like, I think that some of the stuff he says here is just basically true about the trade off and the frustration of being the human condition. The human condition is not just us as individuals in this world, just roaming around as individuals, but also the very structure

[01:19:54] of what it means to live with other people. I think that that's true, you know? And I also find him fun to read. So I I actually incur I like to encourage people, if especially this book, I say, like, just give it a read.

[01:20:11] Like there's some interesting stuff in there. Like, I don't think it's short. Yeah, and it's short. I do think, though, I was thinking about this very thing that you were asking earlier before we recorded. And I thought, well, so what am I saying?

[01:20:25] Am I saying that this isn't psychology? And I don't think I want to say that. I think I want to say, yeah, like the psychology that I do is is presumably purportedly or ostensibly scientific. But that's not all psychology.

[01:20:40] A lot of psychology is therapy and a lot of therapy is applying some real basic wisdom from experience or from other people's experience. And I think we can get something valuable from Freud. So I think we often would say that Freud is unfalsifiable pseudoscience, whereas clinical psychology

[01:21:00] might be a real science. But if you look at, say, you know, pharmacologists and the way certain disorders are treated now, it's not totally clear to me why that is more of a science or at least giving us better psychological theories. Both psychotherapy and, you know, and pharmacology

[01:21:24] treat disorders and they have a track record that you can test. And there's just different ways of going about it. Neither have produced a theory of the human mind that is, you know, that that is testable and they're not even close, right? Like in either case.

[01:21:44] So I'm wondering if there's a way in which I haven't reflected on this enough, but there's a way in which like psychology has to be unfalsifiable at the levels that Freud is talking about, because there's just no way to test these broad general

[01:22:02] claims about the human mind and human development. And as soon as you go into the things that you can test, now the, you know, there's no way to extrapolate those those things that you can that you can study into a broader understanding.

[01:22:22] Yeah. So you're saying two, two things. One, you know, Freud was a big theorist of the sort that we just don't have that much anymore. Right? There's people don't. You know, his was a theory of development, of personality and of mental illness all wrapped into one.

[01:22:38] And, you know, in this case, analysis of how civilization works. We there are definitely things that are entirely unfalsifiable in the sense that I don't know whether what you did was because of an unconscious desire to fuck your mother that was stifled at age three.

[01:22:57] There's no way that I can ever know that there is like I was getting ready to disagree more vehemently with you. But I think, yeah, if if if what you are looking for theories, these these integrative theories that are falsifiable, that's increasingly, I think,

[01:23:15] harder and harder to to accept that we have any of those. What you do have is say clinical trials where you say does this pill reduce depression in a double line, whatever placebo control and you see whether it does.

[01:23:31] And you can do that for like cognitive behavioral therapy. And we know, for instance, that like cognitive behavioral therapy is really good at things like simple phobias. You know, it's not very good at general malaise. Like so we can test those things out.

[01:23:43] But those aren't those aren't theories in the sense it's psychology, but it's not a psychological theory in the sense that. But in that sense, you could do that with psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, too. Right? Like you could do you could do trials on how effective it is

[01:23:57] and to what extent. And they do. Right. And they do. And so it's not an expert in this area. But one of the problems is that psychoanalysis really does say like, no, you need five years of this stuff before you're going to. You can.

[01:24:14] But, you know, I think plenty of psychoanalysis actually helps people and whether or not we have the right tools to measure that. It turns out that it's super difficult to figure out how to test therapies against therapies, because oftentimes

[01:24:30] just talking to people is enough to have an effect. Is that placebo or is that active ingredient? Like it's hard to know, right? The fact that somebody is sitting there and talking to you two days

[01:24:40] out of the week for five years, you know, maybe that just turns on whether your therapist is good or not. But so that's interesting, because if you then say, well, it's not falsifiable in the way that clinical trials are, because, you know,

[01:24:57] they say it takes five years and you can't get. Well, that's that just means you're reducing the scope of what you're willing to consider as treatment, right? Just so that you can do it into bite-sized things that you can that you can then test. But what if.

[01:25:15] But then but then you're excluding the possibility that what if they're right that that, you know, this is something that needs five years of of work with somebody like you wouldn't even that wouldn't even be a possibility. That wouldn't even be something that you could ever achieve

[01:25:32] if you were insisting on these bite-sized treatments so that you could clinically test them. And I'm not saying there's a good solution for this, but it's not obvious to me that it has it has to be wrong because it has this long, long treatment length.

[01:25:48] I don't mean to say what I think it sounded like I said, which is there have been plenty of people who have looked at years worth of therapy, including psychoanalytic treatment and they compare those two things. What I was more pointing to is that psychoanalysis

[01:26:04] has this ability to. Flexibly sort of avoid criticism in a way that other ones don't like if your CBT therapy says that it should work in this way and it doesn't. And I think CBT therapists are going to be like, oh, what went wrong? It didn't work.

[01:26:22] Whereas the psychoanalysis is a little more fuzzy in that way. So people have. But yeah, but the other point is still true, though, that it's hard to know what a control condition for therapy is. Right. I was going to say that I wonder if some of Freud's

[01:26:41] disrepute is also Freudians and the defensiveness that they feel and how they act. I was I listened just briefly to a podcast with the Freudian and then a couple of critics of Freud and the Freudian was really just jumping all over anybody who would attack, you know,

[01:26:58] the least part of it. And, you know, that like there's clearly like personalities here that are sick of being the butt of everybody's jokes. And so here's another question. I know we have to wrap up, but if you didn't know anything about

[01:27:14] Freud and you picked up this book. Would you think it's a work of philosophy or psychology? And I know there's a because he doesn't talk too much about him treating other people. In fact, I don't like I don't know if he talks about

[01:27:31] his treatments of patients at all in this text. He talks about other people's treatments. I let's do it. But like could this be a work of philosophy and it would be more in the vein of ancient, ancient philosophy or maybe as late as

[01:27:49] human, you know, his treatise on human nature. But it seems like the boundaries here between philosophy and psychology are pretty fuzzy because he's doing this big idea kind of and and like sociology kind of. Yeah. And sociology for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question.

[01:28:11] My initial answer is if I had never heard of Freud and I read this, I would be very confused because I would be like, what the fuck is he talking about with this anal shit? You know, yeah. But I was wondering the same thing.

[01:28:24] I think that one of the things that I have become far more accustomed to is the amount of psychology that's in philosophy. So even later than you, you know, I think you go even go to Nietzsche.

[01:28:39] There is a lot of him talking about the human condition and about the human psyche. And I think that it's in that vein. So I hesitate to say, no, this is just philosophy because what I mean

[01:28:48] is it's the I feel to me like the kind of analysis that mixes, you know, the traditional philosophical methods with just a real introspection or observation of the human condition. Absolutely. Yeah, sorry. So when I said as late as Hume, that was wrong.

[01:29:08] Like I think the 19th century philosophers, yeah, even like all these guys that I never really show up in how to show up. Yeah, exactly. Kierkegaard, like it's their, their, their psychology, their psychologists in a similar way, or at least there's a lot

[01:29:21] of psychology, as you said, I guess what I'm was thinking is at the time that Freud is writing, philosophy has now taken this turn, at least analytic philosophy as this just purely the deontological consequentialist debate and more versus Citwik. That's super interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:29:43] And so like this is this is the kind of thing that like picks up where Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and those guys left off. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I think that, that the beginning of the end was around the corner for this kind of thinking.

[01:30:02] And, you know, like I'm this is a case where I'm glad that at least the, you know, so-called scientific psychology from Wundt in Germany made its way and we had like even just like perceptual psychology and that kind of stuff that it

[01:30:19] made its way and it it arose as an independent thing from Freud. But I've softened it up about Freud. I used to be a fan in college because that's what you like in college. And then I was like really hardcore, like, you

[01:30:35] know, this is bullshit. How do we even tolerate his ideas now? Like why don't we just tear him out of the textbooks because none of what he said. Now I'm just like, well look, if what if he was claiming that he had, you know,

[01:30:52] irrefutable evidence of some empirical point, which he bore he bore it is on that arrogance sometimes. But he's not he's not. Yeah. He's not cargo culting it. Right? He's not pretending that he's in a lab with a lab coat on with test tubes. Not at all.

[01:31:11] Right. Yeah. And there is something to me where it's like if you think that poets or other artists are capable of expressing something true about the human condition, then it would be extremely arrogant of me to say that when it takes

[01:31:28] this kind of in between form that it's automatically incapable. Like this is to me, this is a text of ideas that if it took the form of say, a novel like a Dostoevsky novel, it might give me the same insights. So I put it in a

[01:31:48] category of enjoyable potential for insights. It's not what I do in the sense that we share the same word psychology. It's not you know, I would never do anything but I like it. I'm softened to it. What do you think?

[01:32:02] I totally agree. Like I think it is in in the vein, like it's a valuable type of contribution to understanding human beings and society. And in the same way that Nietzsche is in the same way that good philosophers are good sociologists. And it would

[01:32:23] be a shame if nobody wrote in this vein. I mean, I think because he gets very detailed about certain things. I just want to point people to get this book and look at the footnote on the chapter three is I think it's the first footnote

[01:32:42] it's just brilliant that that's that's at least he saved those weird details for his footnotes in this. Yeah, what is that? Hold on. I will it's psychoanalytic material while incomplete and impossible to interpret with any certainty at least allows a surmise a fantastic sounding one about the

[01:33:00] origin of this great human achievement. It is as though primitive man was in the habit when confronted with fire of using it to satisfy an infantile desire by urinating on it and so putting it out extant legends leave us in no doubt about

[01:33:14] the original phallic interpretation of the tongues of flame stretching upwards, extinguishing a fire by urinating on it. Was therefore like a sexual act performed with a man, an enjoyment of male potency in homosexual rivalry. Whoever first renounced this pleasure and spared the fire was able to take it

[01:33:33] away with him and make it serve his purpose. It's great. It goes on. That's where you know if you're going to be a Freud critic you can have a field day with some of that stuff, but then other the stuff it's like yeah that seems right and it's

[01:33:52] actually kind of insightful or at least it seems plausible and yeah I'm a fan of this and I'm glad like this is a text I think people should teach you know while being with all the caveats with all the necessary caveats.

[01:34:07] One thing he doesn't give get enough credit for all I believe is that in you can tell in reading this book he really wanted a theory that was consistent with what we knew about human evolution like Darwinian natural selection

[01:34:21] and he went to I think great lengths to make a theory that was consistent with that. You know we treat it now like the positivists made us think that none of this could ever be you know like consistent with science but I think he was trying.

[01:34:37] Yeah I agree. I mean he was trying to be naturalistic for sure even some of the weirder ideas have a kind of naturalistic origin and yeah he talks about Darwin. The incest thing is weird because we shouldn't have

[01:34:52] this drive to fuck our family members if you buy you know even I think theories of evolution that were around at the time right. Yeah it's more of an evolutionary puzzle than like an inevitability. I had a so I'll end with this I had a sociology

[01:35:10] professor once who like we were talking about incest and somebody expressed kind of what you did which was like that's just weird and he looked at us it was like a small seminar and he goes incest is a temptation in any

[01:35:26] family and we are all what the fuck you have two sons man get out of here. Yeah. But brothers and sisters in a family like the love between brothers and sisters in a family is also called love although to us this relation merits the

[01:35:47] description of aim inhibited love or affection love with an inhibited aim was indeed originally full sensual love and in men's unconscious minds is so still she draws a lot of attention to the unconscious in a way that I think

[01:36:03] is good it's just the details of what he says are but like it's definitely true that we have these drives and urges that we're not fully conscious of or even maybe at all conscious of it seems like they reflect

[01:36:19] more his personal hangups at times than like some sort of universal law. Yeah. And that's the thing is you can never end this happened a lot right people like what are you talking about this is unconscious he's like well of course well like

[01:36:34] you can't measure it it's unconscious right like of course of course you don't know about it of course you're revealing against it. That's exactly what an unconscious desire to fuck your sister would make you say. Like a simulation. All right. Exactly.

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