The Ego & The Id & Caesar & Me (Part 2)

In 1923 Sigmund Freud formalized his theory of the dynamics of the self. Forty-one years later we find much of the book illustrated in a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone. 

Fig. 1, The only figure to appear in The Ego and the Id.
Absent is the depiction of the super-ego.

II The Ego and the Id
In chapter two of The Ego and the Id, Freud describes the nature and dynamics of the ego and the id. In the opening sentence Freud announces a shift in his theoretical focus from repression to the ego. The question we are confronted with is: How is it possible to know the unconscious--how do we become conscious of the unconscious?

Freud makes a point to reiterate that ego is both conscious and unconscious, a quality that, in today's classroom, is often only ascribed to the super-ego. The ego is said to be the first system that is reached by the outside world. The conscious ego receives all sensations from the external world (Freud calls these sense-perceptions) and from the internal sensations and feelings. But there is one other aspect of the internal world that we must consider; namely thoughts. Freud asks, "How does a thing become preconscious? ...Through becoming connected with the presentations corresponding to it."

Thoughts are language, and Freud describes language as that which makes a thought conscious. Thoughts that do not have a word-presentation remain unconscious (Ucs.), whereas thoughts, "through becoming connected with the word-presentation corresponding to it" becomes preconscious. The preconscious (Pcs.) that Freud describes here is much like what cognitive psychologist today call the short-term-memory.

Freud describes that "only something that has once been a Cs. perception can become conscious, and that anything arising from within the psyche (apart from feelings) that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perceptions...by means of memory-traces." What Freud is describing here is how a thought or memory that we do not have a word to describe is projected onto the outside world (cathexis) without our conscious awareness of it. He makes a clear distinction here that a memory is something we are consciously aware is not a perception, whereas a hallucination is a perceptual cathexis of the unconscious that we experience as something in the outside world, but is actually from our unconscious.

In Caesar and Me we find this interplay between conscious, preconscious, and unconscious as illustrated by the id (Caesar), the ego (West), and the super-ego (Susan) passing in and out of West's room. The door that separates the boarding house lobby from West's room is a boundary between the conscious and the unconscious -a psychic muscle that is controlled by the ego (West holds the key). We find that most of the dialogue that takes place between West, Caesar, and Susan is in West's room--it is taking place unconsciously. In fact, we will notice that West only hears Caesar while in this room, or from within Caesar's trunk.

Freud emphasizes the distinction between linguistic and iconic thinking. "Thinking in pictures," he writes, "is...only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically." What Freud is telling us here is that visual thinking is more primal, both to personal history and to the history of our species.

These early, visual, memories are largely unconscious and find conscious expression through cathexis, that is, by fusing with some word-image of the conscious. In other words, what is unconscious within us finds conscious expression in our perception of reality.

James Strachey points out in a footnote (Pg. 17) that Friedrich Nietzsche used the term id (das Es) to signify "whatever in our nature is impersonal and, so to speak, subject to natural law." Freud credits his discussion of the id to George Groddeck. The remainder of chapter two describes the characteristics and dynamics of this system.

Just as we only hear Caesar speak from within West's room, the id functions unconsciously. The id speaks through cathexis, that is, though fusing thought with some external perception -usually through dreams, hallucinations, or symptoms. When West is alone in his room, he and Caesar speak within the unconscious. The fact that West and Caesar only speak in the unconscious makes it apparent that the ego also functions somewhat unconsciously. We will see that it is only when reality intrudes into the unconscious, in the final scene of the drama, that Caesar no longer speaks to West. The unconscious has been made conscious.

There is an important distinction to be made between Jonathan West speaking for Caesar, and Caesar speaking for Jonathan West. When in conscious reality, that is, outside of the room, Caesar only speaks as an agent of Jonathan West. It is not until West and Caesar (the ego and the id) are in West's room (the unconscious) that Caesar is heard speaking for himself.

In figure 1, the only figure we find in The Ego and the Id, Freud illustrates the following:

"We might add, perhaps, that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world through the medium of the Pcpt.-Cs.; in a sense it is an extension of the surface-differentiation. Moreover, the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id. For the ego, perception plays the part which in the id falls to instinct. The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions." (Pg. 18)

The characteristics of the ego and the id which Freud describe here are evident in both West and Caesar. West, in a continual state of negotiation with the demanding and desiring Caesar exemplifies the dynamic that Freud describes between the ego and the id. Freud adds:

"The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches of motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go, so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own." (Pg. 19)

The Ego & The Id & Caesar & Me (Part 1)

In 1923 Sigmund Freud formalized his theory of the dynamics of the self. Forty-one years later we find much of the book illustrated in a half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone. 

In the opening chapter of Sigmund Freud's 1923 text, Das Ich und das Es, we find a statement that prefigures contemporary theories of consciousness.

"...psycho-analysis cannot situate the essence of the psychical in consciousness, but is obliged to regard consciousness as a quality of the psychical, which may be present in addition to other qualities or may be absent."

What Freud is reiterating in this opening paragraph is the idea that consciousness is a mental process that precedes any talk of reality as such. This statement, which Freud calls "the first shibboleth of psycho-analysis," is at the center of contemporary neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The shibboleth that Freud speak of in 1923 is the questioning of the assumptions of objectivity itself; a question that leads to an unraveling of the Enlightenment assumption of a subject perceiving an object.

Freud continues,

"To most people who have been educated in philosophy the idea of anything psychical which is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic. I believe this is not only because they have never studied the relevant phenomenon of hypnosis and dreams, which--quite apart from pathological manifestations--necessitate this view." (Pg. 3)

What we find here is a critique that applies directly to any theory of mind that assumes objective reality outside of our conscious experience. We see a direct attack of objective theory which suggests that a world is independent of the mind's production of consciousness. This is central to the psychodynamic proposition of the structure of the self, which Freud fully develops for the first time in this text. It is also a critique of much of the research that continues to be taught in the social sciences, namely that objectivity is somehow parsable from subjectivity; the endeavor of positivistic empiricism. The proof of Freud's thesis is shown by examples from the dream life and hypnosis, which constitute a psychical production of reality. Cognitive neuroscience calls this  top-down processing.

In the English translation (The Ego and the Id, 1925) we find a model that allows us to consider conscious experience of not only the world and others, but also of ourselves. But we must keep in mind that this theory is one which proposes that reality is a participatory act of the mind, one that is also found in the later writing of Wilhelm Wundt through his concept of voluntaristic apperception.

Freud proposes four systems that interact dynamically to produce the phenomenon of the self. These four entities are all aspects of the psyche as a whole and interact dynamically (psycho-dynamic). We experience these four systems (the external world, the ego, the id, and the super-ego) as a unity, what we call our self.

The 1964 Twilight Zone episode, Caesar and Me provides us with an illustration of much of what is proposed by Freud in  The Ego and the Id. Written by Adele T. Strassfield, Caesar and Me would be the only episode of The Twilight Zone to be written by a woman.

 Caesar and Me is the story of a ne'er-do-well ventriloquist named Jonathan West (Jackie Cooper) who is arrested after turning to a life of crime. The story unfolds as West's ventriloquist dummy, Caesar, comes to life and talks West into committing crimes. At the end of the drama we find Caesar talking a young girl named Susan (Morgan Brittany) into murdering her aunt.

Ostensibly we have the paranormal story of a ventriloquist's doll coming to life and convincing his owner to commit self-destructive crimes. However, if we consider the characters and the story in the context of Freud's Ego and the Id, we find a working illustration of the dynamics of the soul.

There are four characters, each playing a unique role in the drama: West (the ventriloquist), Caesar (the dummy), Susan (the niece of the West's landlady), and Mrs. Cudahy (West's landlady). Each of these characters correspond to one of the four systems that Freud describes. We are told the story from West's point of view, we experience reality, as West does, as something outside of himself. However, if we view the drama as West's projection, that is, as each character embodying an aspect of West's psyche, we come to see that the episode is a meta-psychology of West himself. In other words, each player of the drama is a part of West, a part which is projected into a conscious awareness of reality.

Let us consider the four systems in this way. In West we find illustrated Freud's concept of Ego (Ich). Caesar is the manifestation of id (das Es). Susan embodies super-ego (Über-Ich, also called the ego ideal). Finally, Mrs. Cudahy, along with the police, and the nightclub owners, serve as West's perceptual conscious, that is, the external world that functions on the reality principle.

I Consciousness and What is Unconscious
In the opening scene we find Jonathan West selling a family heirloom watch at a Goldstein's pawn shop. Goldstein assures a defeated West that "things will get better". As West is leaving the shop, Goldstein motions to West's ventriloquist case, offering him $25 for his dummy. "Oh no," responds West, "No thank you, no. He is not for sale."

In this opening scene it is established that West and Caesar are inseparable. Closer even than the memory of West's own grandfather (represented by his watch) West views Caesar as part of himself, something that is "not for sale".

This exchange illustrates at least two things from the first chapter of The Ego and the Id. Firstly, we understand that ego and id are fused, that the id is more valuable to the ego than any material object or family tie. Secondly, we are shown an act of repression in service of the id. West transfers his family history from conscious to unconscious in the act of pawning his grandfather's watch. We are told that this repression is not permanent, that he will have thirty days to get his watch back. What we find here is the ego repressing something from conscious awareness (West's hands) to the unconscious (his watch disappears into his well-guarded unconscious--the shop keeper's storeroom).

Freud illustrates that through repression the ego transfers awareness from conscious to unconscious. We must remember that this is not something that exists outside of the psyche, conscious and unconscious are systematic states produced by the psyche. This is illustrated by the fact that we are at once watching the story of Jonathan West's psyche from the eyes of Jonathan West. In this way, the episode is a kind of meta-cognition of the experience of the self. Freud tells us:

"There is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his ego. It is to this ego that consciousness is attached; the ego controls the approaches to motility--that is, to the discharge of excitations into the external world; it is the mental agency which supervises all its own constituent processes, and which goes to sleep at night, though even then it exercises the censorship on dreams. From this ego proceed the repressions, too, by means of which it is sought to exclude certain trends in the mind not merely from consciousness but also from other forms of effectiveness and activity." (Pg. 8)

 What we see here is that the ego (the "I") is the manager of all aspects of the psyche. It serves as perceptual conscious of the world and others, and the realistic pressures of those objects (functions on the reality principle), but is also partially unconscious. That is to say, the ego is somewhat hidden from itself. In Freud's words:

"We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed--that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious." (Pg. 9)

Freud goes on to say that the neurosis arises from a conflict between the coherent ego and the aspect of itself that it has repressed. We find here that the act of West repressing his conscious memory of his family might be at the root of the psychic drama that is about to unfold. We must note here that Freud clearly states that the ego is partly unconscious.

Rod Serling & The Postmodern Condition

Our earliest years form the foundation of not only what we think about, but more importantly, how we think. It is evident that how we think is shaped by the culture from which we emerge and the unique situations that we experience. William James likened our minds to clay on the potter's wheel; each of us uniquely formed by the pressures of the hands of culture and experience. The television media environment of the 1940s through today provides a unique ecology to understanding how we think, feel, and interact with the world.

As a child I was fascinated by the television programs that my parents' generation came of age with. In particular, I was captivated by Rod Serling's Twilight Zone from the 1950s and the 1960s. My father, after returning home from working the night shift at a local steel mill,  would record the 1980s re-broadcasts of the show which appeared on WPIX 11 from New York City. The next day I would absorb the previous night's program, waiting for the trademark Serling twist that would come at the end -the kick that brought home the message -things aren't what they appear to be.

Serling the soldier. (http://www.rodserling.com)

I started reading philosophy when I was 15 years old. A high school teacher named Terry Male had turned me on to Plato's Parable of the Cave -my first encounter with thinking about thinking. The themes of the cave came comfortably, I felt as if I was reading about something that I had taken for granted, namely that appearances can be different from reality. I recall being aware that the philosophy I was reading was very similar to the reruns my father had recorded for me years earlier. It turns out that I am not alone in this; many of the thinkers I meet who were born in the 1970s were influenced by Serling's Twilight Zone.

Throughout graduate school I would entertain myself by finding an episode (there were 156 of them) that illustrated a theoretical concept that I was studying. Some of the episodes are better than others, and not all were written by Rod Serling. What did become apparent to me was that the series was not merely about the supernatural, space aliens, and other dimensions -it was in fact a rich commentary on existential philosophy and humanism.

http://www.rodserling.com

Rod Serling cut his writing teeth at Antioch College, in Ohio. Awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for serving in combat in World War II, Serling attended Antioch as an English major on the G.I. Bill. While in college Serling converted from Judaism to Unitarianism; philosophical traces of which can be found in his writing.

While in college Serling submitted radio drama scripts with mixed success. Although he received over 40 rejection letters, he did manage to sell some of his work to popular radio programs. In 1950 Serling began writing for television. Adapting his radio scripts for television, many of which had to do with the soldier's struggle during war and after, he managed to shop his scripts to some of the most popular live drama programs of the golden age, including Kraft Television Theater and Hallmark Hall of Fame. Serling and his wife moved to New York City in 1954 where he would become influenced by the Beat writers and thinkers. In 1955 his 72nd script was produced by Kraft Television Theater, a script that would change his life. The drama was called Patterns. Serling followed up Patterns in 1956 with a knock-out script that won him a Peabody Award and an Emmy called Requiem for a Heavyweight.

In 1958 Serling took on the problem of American racism and bigotry in a Playhouse 90 teledrama called A Town Has Turned to Dust. The controversial drama met with considerable sponsor and executive censorship, which Serling successfully fought for broadcast. However, the experience brought corporate censorship to the forefront of Serling's concerns. He endeavored to create a program that would address civil rights issues, existentialism, and the residue of McCarthyism. Serling sought to write popular television dramas that provoked audiences to think rather than be merely entertained.

http://www.rodserling.com

In The Time Element (1958), Serling premiered what would become his trademark psychological teledrama. He had proposed the script for a new series he called Twilight Zone, but instead it was presented on The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, introduced by Desi Arnaz. Not unlike Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969), The Time Element deals with the psychological consequences of war, a theme that would recur in Twilight Zone.

In Twilight Zone we find Serling addressing the issues of death, mortality, choice, and existence that are at the heart of the human experience. Cloaked beneath the facade of space aliens, supernatural forces, or science fiction we find the weighty issues of postwar America, issues of civil rights, Red Scare McCarthyism, and the question of technology in the modern world. What Serling managed to do in Twilight Zone was to introduce the conversation of the postmodern condition into the livingrooms of Americans who might otherwise be silent about the social conditions which American society was facing.

To the typical adolescent or adult of the 1950s and 1960s Twilight Zone was fantasy, Sci-Fi thriller, or purely a half-hour horror show. But for the close reader of the television text we find Serling addressing something much deeper than our fear of the outer limits; he was introducing a generation of children into the world of continental philosophy, existentialism, and Critical Theory. Serling was not telling us tales of science fiction and horror, he was showing us how to think in ways that questioned what we know as reality. The "twilight zone" is the world of the phenomenal experience, the fleshing out of that place in which the fiction is the reality.

How do we Study Personality? (Part 4)

Transcript

Continuing and concluding our discussion of assessment and research practices in personality theory, we now come to the clinical interview. Typically, a clinical interview takes place over an extended period of time and goes into either a surface level, a medium level, or an in-depth survey of the individual who is being interviewed. It's referred to as a clinical interview typically because it takes place in a clinical setting between a therapist and a patient.

But the clinical interview can also be used and is also used for in-depth research between a subject and a researcher. The subject or the interviewee will come into the office and go through an extended period of in-depth interviews. From that, information is gathered and contributed to the research project.

If you're interested in clinical interview technique, there's an incredible book that investigates relationships. It's called Love and Limerence by Deborah Tennov. And Tennov uses the clinical interview technique not as a therapist, but as a researcher.

This is a research psychologist who interviewed individuals regarding their experience with falling in love and being in relationships. And through a systematic series of interviews with many different individuals, hundreds of different individuals, she found insight into what she refers to as love and limerence, or relationships and crushes. So this is a fine example of an entire book that's based on clinical interviews.

Behavioral assessment is another technique that's used, and this is when an operational definition is set. In other words, a trained professional observes someone's behavior and makes note of describing the individual's behavior. And that is called behavioral assessment.

Now, thought and experience samples. This is a very common method used in personality psychology for research, and it's really a self-assessment. At different moments, the individual record what they're thinking, what they're feeling, and keep a log of these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and actions. And this is then kept as data, research data. This is referred to as thought and experience samples. So it's really an introspective phenomenological approach to research. These are all valid forms of doing research into personality.

But let us turn now to our two final quantitative methods of research, and that's experimentation and correlation methods. Experimentation has been probably the predominant and preferable choice of most scientific and quantitative psychologists. And this is because it offers the cause-and-effect evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship. Other forms of research don't provide this.

There are limitations to this benefit of establishing a cause-and-effect relationship, and that is that not all circumstances in the human condition are observable and measurable under experimental conditions. Not all qualities of the human condition are observable and measurable, and especially, it seems, things such as personality. How we observe and measure personality is still quite a controversial mystery.

Even the concept of cause and effect necessitates the idea of determinism, which we discussed earlier in this lecture. And we'll find, especially in theories of personality, that cause-and-effect thinking is not very popular amongst most theorists in psychology.

By contrast to cause and effect, there is the concept of overdetermination. And that's the idea that multiple factors influence an individual phenomenon or an individual cause. So rather than having cause and effect, we have causes and an effect.

So keeping that in mind, the experimental method, as a review from what you have studied in an introduction to psychology course at least, is the controlling of all variables except one variable in a situation. And in so doing, we determine whether that one singular variable, when either present or absent, changes the results of the experiment.

So we have what's typically called a control group and an experimental group. And each of those groups are identical in all ways but one variable. And if there's a difference in the results between the two groups, then it must be concluded, through statistics and through logic, that there's a cause-and-effect relationship between that one variable and the change that took place.

So let's take an example. Let's say, for sake of an example, there was a research study that a student once performed in my course in social psychology, and they were interested in how a red cup might affect users of a social media website to say yes to their friend request.

So they made two identical profiles. Everything in the two profiles were completely identical, with the exception that in one profile the profile picture showed an individual, a male, holding a red cup, a party cup, a Solo cup. And in the other, it was just the individual, same individual, standing there. Everything else in the photo was identical, the absence of the cup.

And as it turned out, after sending out numerous random friend requests to individuals, there was a difference of 80% of the individuals who were friend requested with the red Solo cup profile said yes to the request as opposed to only 20% of the group without the red cup. So we might be able to conclude from this that there's a cause-and-effect relationship, that having a red cup in a profile picture on a social media network causes more individuals to say yes to a friend request.

Now, unlike classical Newtonian mechanics of billiard ball interactions and laws of physics, we can't conclude that 100% of the time the red cup causes this fixed action behavior of responding yes to a friend request. That's obviously a silly conclusion.

So when we are talking about these cause-and-effect relationships in psychology, we are always talking relative to the individual. 80% of individuals is certainly not 100% 100% of the time. So I caution students to always take cause-and-effect research for what it is concerning cause-and-effect relationships or any sort of lawful human behavior while psychology is still looking for its first law of human behavior.

So regarding cause-and-effect relationships and experimentation, we typically have a control group and an experimental group. An experimental group-- there can be more than one experimental group. You could have a control group and simultaneously run as many experimental groups against that control group as one wishes.

But in the simplest form, there's one experimental group, one control group. Each group has at least 40 participants to make it statistically valid. That's a lowercase n of 40 in each group. And in total, you'd have 80 subjects. Large uppercase N is the subjects of the entire study, about 80 to make it valid statistically.

Random sampling is used to select the participants for each group randomly. That means anyone in a given population has equal chance of being assigned to either group or even being assigned to the study.

Correlational research does not show cause and effect. When we look at correlational research, we're looking at relationships between two or more variables. Now, if there is a strong relationship between two variables, it doesn't necessarily exclude cause and effect. But using correlational methods, we cannot claim cause and effect as we might be able to in experimental research.

So in a correlational research, you simply have two separate variables, two things, and the occurrence of those two variables together is measured. So for example, we can have a linear correlation, such as the correlation or the relationship between SAT scores and college freshman GPA.

It turns out that there is a very positive, highly positive, correlation between what one scores on their SAT while in their senior year of high school and what their GPA will be in their freshman year of college. So there's a positive correlation, meaning as one goes up, the other goes up. This doesn't mean that taking the SAT causes the high GPA a year later. What it means is that it has predictive value.

Now, again, a strong correlation, a strong positive correlation, positive doesn't mean good or bad. Positive certainly means that as one variable increases, so does the other. So in a positive correlation, we can have a very strong correlation. That means it's very strongly correlated that as one goes up, the other goes up.

And we could also have weak correlations. And that means as one goes up, the other might go up slightly or a little bit, but not dramatically. So we have different levels of strength in our correlations.

We also have negative correlations. And that means as one goes up, the other goes down. So in a negative correlation, as, say, time partying goes up, GPA goes down, that's an inverse or a negative correlation. Negative does not necessarily mean bad. As one exercises more, their health issues decrease. Now there is a negative correlation. So when we talk about negative and positive, we're simply describing the relationship between two variables.

So most of psychology research is actually correlative research. And certainly when we're looking at personality theory, a lot of the things that we discuss are correlational. As a matter of fact, the majority, as I said, of psychological research does turn out to be correlational.

And although it's not praised as much as experimental design, and there are philosophical and political reasons within the science of psychology for why that exists, which you'll study that more in a history of psychology or a philosophy of psychology and science class. But for right now, we should keep in mind that correlation is a very useful predictive tool.

Now, in correlations we can have what are known as linear correlations. And that is there's a direct relationship, either positive or negative. As one goes up, the other goes up, or as one goes up, the other goes down, the variables. That's a linear correlation.

And we also have non-linear correlations. And non-linear correlations are things including a U curve or an inverted U. So in a U curve, that means that variables will go down to a certain point, and then they'll begin to rise again. So in other words, there's a certain point at which the relationship changes.

And a common example of this would be a U curve is typical in talking about years of marriage and report of enjoyment and satisfaction in those marriages. And it turns out about 20 years into the marriage, the marriage begins at honeymoon as very enjoyable, and then after a few years enjoyment level is reported to drop, till about the 20th year when it starts to rise again.

And so that would be a U curve, and this is non-linear correlation. And some of the explanations for this could be the child leaving home and the couple back together just the two of them again after the children leave the house.

An inverted U is a commonly described non-linear correlation between income and enjoyment of life or satisfaction with life. It turns out that to a certain degree, income will increase with the pleasure of life. And at a certain level, income and pleasure of life reverts back down, and it's typically around $70,000 a year. That income in excess of $70,000 a year, individuals start reporting a decrease in the enjoyment of life. And that, if you could imagine, looks like an upside down U on a correlational graph.

So we have non-linear correlations. We have linear correlations. And they're simply showing relationships to one another rather than necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship.

Finally, I'd like to make a few remarks regarding the scientific method. The scientific method is unique in the way that it's employed in psychology. The scientific method itself is something that changes from one science to another. How science is done is dramatically different in physics as it is in biology, chemistry, to social sciences. So we should keep in mind that this idea of a scientific method is specific to psychology.

But the thing that is common within scientific method is that it really comes in three stages. We can understand this in three stages. And the three stages are not unique to science. They are identical, whether we're doing philosophy, or whether we are doing theology, or any type of endeavour where we ask a question, we come up with an answer, and we find evidence for that answer to support that-- to support that argument. So we're really talking about like a court of law of ideas.

So as the scientific method in psychology goes, we state an idea, a solution, some sort of idea of why things occur as they do or a solution to a problem. We call this a hypothesis, a hypothesis. So the hypothesis, the hypothesis, is something that is hypo. It's below thesis, the theory. It's not yet a theory. It's an idea.

We then look for evidence to support that hypothesis. And that evidence in psychology is found through the methods that we've just explored in the past lecture. That could be the clinical study method, the correlational method, the projective test method, the experimental design method, and the behavioral observation method. So we look for evidence to support or disapprove our hypothesis.

And then if we have successfully either supported it or not disproved it, it then becomes a theory. So the idea is that there's hypothesis, hypothesis testing through research, or finding evidence, and then presenting the theory.

The next step is when a theory is so regular that it never changes and one can always count on it. That's when it becomes a law. And so far in psychology, we have no laws. There are laws in psychophysics, such as laws of how sensory organs function. But that's physiology. That's not psychology. That's a branch of physiology.

When we talk about psychology and certainly personality theories, we have no laws and very, very few strong cause-and-effect relationships between anything. Most things are correlational.

So those are some ideas to keep in mind about research methods, about the scientific method as it's used in psychology. And I think now we are ready to approach our first theory of personality, which we'll begin Lecture 2, Week 2, which is the foundational psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud.

How do we Study Personality? (Part 1)

Transcript

I'd like to begin our exploration of personality with the word itself, "personality." If we look into the etymology of the word "personality," we find the Latin word "persona." This term has its most recent origins in Etruscan language of northern and central Italy meaning "mask."

So we have the Latin use of the term "persona" that relates to the Etruscan use, which is mask, a mask through which we speak. And even earlier than this, some scholars trace the word back to Persephone, who was the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology. Persephone, persona, mask, personality.

Reification. Reification is the idea that when we describe something using a word, we bring it into being. There are some that contend that personality doesn't exist, that it's a social construct, that it's a psychological construct, and maybe even an evolutionarily byproduct of other things that aid in survivability. The fact that we talk about it so much might just bring it into real being. That is the concept of reification.

For example, the term "traits." This is a term you'll hear quite often in personality research in the 20th and 21st century. And we're going to study this in depth, trait psychology. The word "trait" is a word. It simply means adjective It is a word that is used to fill in for the term adjective or descriptive word.

When traits were first described, they were done so by collecting the adjectives in the dictionary. Instead of calling these descriptive words adjectives, the individual psychologist referred to them as traits. Over time, the term "trait" has become reified to the point that when most individuals talk about traits, they imagine somehow that there's some sort of substance that might even exist in DNA or genetics somehow. In fact, the word "trait" is a word that means adjective, means descriptive word. It is a reification.

And the concept here is that-- quite possibly the argument is that personality itself might not actually exist. It might be something that we have brought about through naming it. This is where we're going to begin with our study of personality. We are looking at theories of personality. The assumption is that personality exists in this course. And we are going to look at the various theories that describe what personality is.

The study, the investigation of personality certainly did not begin with contemporary psychology. And by contemporary psychology, we roughly mean the mid- to late-19th century. Experimental, scientific psychology has its origins in the 19th century as does therapeutic clinical psychology. We usually point to William James or Wilhelm Wundt in the experimental or scientific, even into the philosophical, areas of psychology. Wilhelm Wundt was concentrated more on laboratory experimental psychology whereas the American William James was interested more in a theoretical psychology. And James actually did investigate personality.

But we usually begin our discussion of personality with Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic and consequent psychodynamic theorists. But, of course, the history of the study of personality has existed long before Freud or James or even psychology.

I guess if we would point back to some of the earliest theories of personality, we could begin with Eastern philosophy with the Vedic cultures. We could look at Hebrew culture. We could look at the Confucian philosophy, Taoism. We even can look to the pre-Socratics, the Sophists, Socrates, the character of Plato and Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. All of these individuals had theories of personality.

In fact, if you simply replace the word [GREEK]-- "psyche, soul"-- in Plato's writings with the word "mind," you'll have a contemporary psychology textbook. And if you remember, this word "psyche" refers to soul. The transition of this term from soul to mind didn't happen until this enlightenment, scientific revolution. So if we read these ancient texts of the Greek philosophers and we simply think of psyche-- "soul"-- as mind or personality, we have contemporary psychology textbooks.

We are going to begin our exploration of personality with Sigmund Freud, mid-19th century, late-19th century theorist, into the 20th century. And we're going to pick up the story from there. But we should be clear that the story doesn't really begin with Freud. It's much earlier than this.

As we explore Freudian theory, we're going to find that much of what Freud said was a synthesis of earlier thinkers. We're going to see a lot of Judaism in his personality theory. We're going to see mystic kabbala in his personality theory. We're going to see the writings of Plato in his personality theory. And we're going to see a conglomeration of many theories that existed before Freud taken from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and others that Freud put together in a certain-- what he called the new science, a new science for exploring this thing called personality. Well, let's just keep in mind that the story begins much earlier than where we are beginning in this course.

In this, our first lecture, we are going to begin by talking broadly about the study of personality. We want to describe what it is that we're talking about, if we can touch on that. We want to look at how personality, perhaps, develops. We're also going to look at different definitions of personality, what we mean by this term "personality" through the different schools of thought within psychology.

We are then going to look at different assessment techniques in personality. How do we describe and measure the different aspects of personality? We'll be looking at reliability and validity and self-report personality tests, online tests, projective techniques, clinical interviews, behavioral assessment, thought and experience. So this would be introspective techniques. And we're going to look at also gender and ethnic issues in assessment.

We'll also be looking at the clinical method of research, the experimental method. We're going to look at virtual research methods, correlational method. We're going to explore some qualitative methods as well, so both qualitative and quantitative methods in research in this lecture.

We are also going to look at a brief understanding of the major questions about human nature, such as, are we in charge of our lives? So free will versus determinism. What dominates us? Our inherited nature or our nurturing environments? Are we pressured more by genetics, by environment? Or is the question itself a problematic question?

We're also going to be looking at whether or not there's a unique or universal human nature. Are people born good or bad, in other words. We're also going to look at whether or not we have-- whether we arrive at an ultimate persona, an ultimate personality, or if we're constantly becoming. Are we being? Or are we becoming individuals? This is the understanding of reaching a certain satisfaction, an end state, or a constant state of growth.

We're also going to look at some basic understandings of whether or not we are universally pessimistic or optimistic, or whether or not this is something that is distinct for each individual theory. We're also going to finally conclude by looking at effects of ethnic and cultural background on how this thing we call personality manifests. Before we dive into those questions, let's take a look at the history of personality, how the study of personality integrates into the history of psychology as a whole.

Wilhelm Wundt, the first scientific experimental psychologist, was primarily interested in consciousness, in conscious awareness of things around us and of ourselves. He initiated-- in many ways, he replicated much of the physiological research that had been done for at least 50 to 70 years before 1879 when he started his first lab in Leipzig. He was interested in reaction times and how the brain voluntarily organized conscious experience into what we might call consciousness or in reality.

Now it wasn't really until William James where a really distinct study of self-consciousness took place. And James did this in his 1890 textbook, chapter 10, on consciousness of the self. William James, American born, Harvard professor of psychology, is also considered to be one of the first founders of scientific psychology. His theory of psychology was greatly rooted in philosophy and pragmatism and in what was called semiotics. And his type of psychology was called functionalism. And this was one of the first discussions in psychology of self-consciousness. And, again, you can read about this if you'd like, outside of this coursework, in the 1890 Principles of Psychology, chapter 10, by William James.

The thing we want to focus on here is that the earliest psychologists-- that is, Wilhelm Wundt, William James in the United States-- were primarily interested in consciousness and consciousness of the self. This is what we refer to in this way as personality. This way of doing this psychology actually-- through personality psychology-- was the dominant paradigm, the dominant way of doing psychology, studying it as a phenomenon of consciousness.

Now it's very interesting to point something out. The bookends of personality psychology and social psychology actually share a common journal and, in fact, share two brothers in scientific research. That is Gordon Allport and Floyd Allport. We're going to study Gordon Allport-- he's the father of trait theory-- in great detail in this course. And his brother Floyd Allport was a great social psychologist. So these two bookends of personality theory-- that is, psychology of the individual versus social psychology, which is the psychology of group dynamics-- are intimately connected, and in the earliest psychology actually shared the same division in the APA and share the same journal.

Now we can trace this connection back earlier than the Americans Floyd and Gordon Allport to the gestalt psychologists, if you remember those folks from Introduction to Psychology class. You remember Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka And maybe you will recall a guy named Kurt Lewin, spelled L-E-W-I-N. It looks like Lewin, pronounced luh-veen. And Kurt Lewin is a gestalt psychologist who is considered to be the father of social psychology.

Now Kurt Lewin introduced a dynamic theory of personality. And this is what the Gestaltists were interested in-- not just consciousness of self, but how the environment and the entire gestalt-- the entire field within which one exists-- comes to dynamically shape personality.

So we have this shifting from the earliest paradigms of psychology of consciousness to a psychology of self-consciousness with William James, and then a melding into the Gestaltist view of phenomenology of the personality as something that arises from both dynamic interactions with the environment and the internal phenomenological world.

Now I'm going to pause for a moment and just discuss this idea of phenomenological world. The phenomenological world may be understood as the subjective world. But it's much different than this. The phenomenological world would be what temperature feels like versus what temperature is. So in the empirical world, we look at a thermostat. And we measure it through different expanding and contracting of metals or certain liquids that are sensitive to certain pressures in the environment. And we might say, ah, the temperature is 65 degrees. That's an objective, empirical understanding of temperature.

The phenomenological understanding of temperature is what one experiences. Are you warm? Are you cold? Are you hot? Are you just right, just comfortable? That's the phenomenological world.

We can experience phenomenological world, the gestalt psychologist taught us, in contrast to the empirical world. For instance, a typical lecture might last an hour and 20 minutes empirically, objectively, measuring that through a chronological timepiece, a theoretical work of time. But the experience of the lecture could be very different for many people. For some folks, the lecture might feel like it lasts three hours. That's the phenomenological experience of time. Or for another, it might be so engaging and exciting that the lecture might feel like it lasts for 20 minutes.

So this is a distinction between empirical time and phenomenological time, between empirical consciousness or experience of the world and phenomenological experience of the world. And this is what the Gestaltists and Kurt Lewin entered into discussion of personality, the dynamic structure of conscious experience as a relationship between ourselves and the world. And this has its roots in gestalt psychology and, ultimately, in the bookend of personality psychology, social psychology, division eight of the American Psychological Association, the division of personality and social psychologies.

So let's take a moment here for just a recap so that you can make a note for yourself. You can write down this little schematic. We begin with, of course, ancient Eastern and also Western approaches to personality. But we begin our conversation with Wundt and consciousness. We then shift towards James and self-consciousness. We're now discussing a very interesting phenomenon that arose in Germany at the time of a gestalt phenomenological approach to personality. This is an interaction between the environment and the individual, and the distinction between objective reality and phenomenological reality, or what we might call empiricism and phenomenology.

We're now going to talk about a current that began simultaneously in Austria at this time. And that's the idea of psychodynamic theory, or psychoanalytic theory. Now this is important to make a distinction between psychoanalysis and psychodynamic-- psychoanalytic versus psychodynamic. Psychoanalytic refers only to Sigmund Freud and his initial theory, which the seminal work was 1899. So you're seeing this is about 20 years after Wundt's establishment of an empirical, scientific, objective psychology. Sigmund Freud is publishing 1899 his Interpretation of Dreams, which is really the seminal work of personality theory for Freud. And this is called psychoanalytic. Anything that comes after Freud, we call them the neo-Freudians. That means folks like Carl Yung and Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, some of the individuals we'll be studying in this course. They're referred to a psychodynamic thinkers. So psychodynamic refers to post-Freudians. Psychoanalytic refers to classical Freudian theory.

Now the interesting thing about Freud and his theory was that he was very skeptical that the personality, that persona, personality could be studied using only empirical methods. He said that we cannot investigate things such as the dream life and the eternal life, the introspective life of an individual and emotional life, through empiricism because we can't observe and measure these things. He called for what he referred to as a new science. And he laid forth the new science, as he called it-- psychoanalysis-- as a way of understanding and describing the internal world. We might even call it the phenomenological world. This is the world of dreams, the world of emotions, all those things that we cannot empirically observe and measure. Freud said that if we're going to study personality, we have to have a new science that goes beyond what Wundt was describing.

Now it will be of interest for you to note that the first chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, is filled with citations of Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt was an authority on investigating the dream life and consciousness. And Freud was very aware of Wundt's work. If you look at the reference section of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams-- it was published in English in 1900-- if you look at that reference section in the first chapter, you'll see a lot of references to Wilhelm Wundt and Wundt's ideas of dreams. And this is where Sigmund Freud really lays out his ideas of how a new science must be developed to study this thing called personality.

Now while this is taking place in Europe, primarily in Germany and Austria, the Americans and the British are becoming fascinated by Darwin's theory of evolution and how this is playing into psychology. This mixture of American philosophy, which was really rooted in Scottish common sense philosophy-- we might think of this as a very kind of empirical, objective philosophy with evolutionary theory-- leads to a 1913 and John B. Watson's Behaviorist Manifesto. This is the idea of America's maybe first dominant paradigm of psychology called behaviorism. And for Watson and the behaviorists, really, the paradigm that dominated American psychology from 1913 all the way through the 1960s, behaviorism was interested in how personality's a manifestation of learning. So we could have reward and punishment schedules and operand conditioning. And we can have the associative learning of classical conditioning. And then, eventually, different models of learning, how personality is a set of learned responses. And behaviorism really dominated American psychology up and through the 1960s.

But in the 1960s, something happened. The advent of computer science and computer programming led to individuals, primarily at Harvard university, and individuals who were investigating language and thought, primarily Noam Chomsky, the linguist, to really challenge the basis of behavioral psychology. And they began to find problems with the behavioral model and introduce new models of psychology, of personality, of thinking and decision-making and of consciousness that had to do with artificial intelligence computer models and linguistic theory. And that's what we call the cognitive revolution, cognitive psychology. It was really ushered in by a few individuals at Harvard and primarily Noam Chomsky, the linguist.

So we have this transition now. If we pause and just take an overview beginning with Wundt and consciousness, James and the idea of self-consciousness, and then we look at the gestalt theorists and their idea of a more holistic, dynamic theory of environment and individual. We look at Sigmund Freud's new science of psychoanalysis of personality. We then look at behaviorism and how that dominated the field of psychology and personality theory through the 1960s. And then in the 1960s, the advent of cognitive psychology, the cognitive revolution, and looking at things like artificial intelligence and the study thinking, the mind, which is cognition.

It's around this time that Gordon Allport, someone who we'll be studying in depth, introduced the idea of traits, the idea that we could measure traits. This theory of personality has become possibly the dominant way of studying personality in the late 20th and early 21st century. And Allport basically described measures of these descriptive words he called traits that could serve as a conglomerate in ways of viewing the world and behaving in the world and thinking in the world that we come to call this thing personality.

Finally, where we are at today is a continuation of this line of thinking into cognitive neuroscience. And neuroscience is interested largely in, as we will see, three understandings of how the mind functions as the organ of the brain. So the brain is the organ. And the organ of the brain minds. Just like the heart beats, the brain minds.

And for neuroscientists, there are three assumptions. And that is the assumption of reductionism, that things reduce down to an element, whether it be a brain chemical, a brain tissue, or a neural connection or neuron. That's the idea of reductionism. We have the idea of materialism. And that is everything is ultimately some sort of physical substance, whether that's a chemical or a tissue or a cell. And, finally, the third aspect of neuroscience is mechanism. And that is if we keep dissecting far enough, if we keep analyzing the structures enough, we will come to some kind of mechanized understanding of how this thing called personality or consciousness unfolds. So we have reductionism, mechanism, and materialism as the hallmarks of a biological neuroscience.

Now that's a brief overview of the history of personality psychology. And if we look at these ways of doing things, we'll see that a shift takes place. And it's typically a 50-year shift. We can see that things will not remain in the current paradigm. It will shift again. We'll be doing personality theory in an entirely new way in the future. But for right now, that's a brief, thumbnail sketch of the history of personality research. For those interested in an excellent overview of theories of personality that have existed before psychoanalytic and psychological theories, I recommend a 2005 book Who Are We? Theories of Human Nature by Louis Pojman. And that link is below in the link area of the lectures as are a few other links that I've referred to in this talk.