In the Eye of the Beholder: How we Determine the Meaning of the News

Paul Lazarsfeld, lead researcher of
The People's Choice Study.

Common sense holds that when we are presented with information that is contrary to what we believe, we are forced to reexamine not only the new evidence, but also our beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions. This is the belief that when a rational individual is confronted with evidence that runs contrary to their assumptions, that individual will rationally change what they believe.

Our news media landscape is more diverse than ever before. Digital, electronic, and print media each provide an assorted and democratic array of perspectives, including conservative, liberal, and centrist attitudes. We have at our fingertips what seems to be a limitless variety of ideologies to guide us towards making rational, informed, and deliberate conclusions about our world. However, one of the earliest studies in media psychology research suggests otherwise. It tells us that far from challenging our beliefs, contrary evidence reinforces the beliefs we already hold.

The 1940 American presidential election found the incumbent Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt running for an unprecedented third term. His tremendous popularity overshadowed the unknown Republican challenger Wendell Willkie. In the end, Roosevelt became the only president in U.S. history to serve three, consecutive terms.

What makes the 1940 U.S. presidential election interesting to us today is that it was the first election in which social scientists examined the influence of information on the voter's thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Five important concepts were produced from The People's Choice Study that are relevant to us.

1. We are influenced by people whom we admire

Through the 1940s it was commonly believed that information was injected directly from books, newspapers, film, radio, and television into the person, not unlike a hypodermic injection. The model, which is commonly called the hypodermic needle theory or the bullet theory held the view that people contemplate and interpret new information independently from others. The principal researcher of the study, Paul Lazarsfeld, found that we are influenced more by who is saying it, rather than what is being said. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found that we are influenced more by opinion leaders than we are by information. In other words, our attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts are influenced by the interpretations of those we admire, rather than by our own thinking. This model, known as the two-step flow model, revolutionized how media theorists think about how media influences the audience.

2. We seek-out information that confirms our beliefs

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found that far from providing us with a diversity of information, increasing the number and diversity of information "channels" did not increase the diversity of our political opinions. Rather than considering the assorted explanations and attitudes presented by various sources, audience members tended to selectively expose themselves only to programs that confirmed their attitudes. In other words, people with centrist beliefs tend to spend their time listening, reading, and watching centrist programs. The same is true for liberal and conservative attitudes.

3. We hear only what confirms our beliefs

We often find Liberals complaining of a "conservative media bias" and Conservatives complaining of a "liberal media bias".  How can this be? It turns out that the bias is more in the individual than in the message. The People's Choice Study reported that Conservatives or Liberals who were exposed to information that challenged their political attitude were reinforced in their preexisting attitudes. In other words, liberal news programming reinforced the Conservative's belief  and conservative news reinforced the Liberal's belief. When it comes to news programming, we selectively perceive what we are exposed to.

4. We remember what confirms our beliefs

It should come as no surprise that two friends, watching the same movie, will recount two different films. Not only do we selectively perceive what we are consuming, we also selectively remember what we have been exposed to. Selective retention was found to exist when Democrats could report instances of Roosevelt's trademark fireside chats, while Republicans could not. Of course at the basis of selective recall is selective perception; we cannot remember what we did not perceive.

5. Information reinforces rather than converts

Focusing on campaign media, the People's Choice Study concluded that campaign advertisements and public relations messages were not likely to change an individual's choice of candidate. Rather than convincing people to vote against their political party, political ads encouraged those within their party to get out and vote. In this we see how partisan news media serves not to convince others of their views, but rather to reinforce the views of their own party.

Although conducted over seventy years ago, The Peoples Choice Study and Paul Lazarsfeld's text, The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Election, both remain valuable resources for considering how we understand our relationship with media.

America's First Movie Star

Until 1991 America's first movie star rested under an unmarked grave in Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard. Over 50 years after her death an anonymous British actor memorialized her grave marker with the words, "The Biograph Girl/The First Movie Star".

Florence Lawrence's story is the template for Hollywood celebrity. Her grandparents escaped Ireland's Potato Famine to Canada where her mother became a vaudeville entertainer known as Lotta Lawrence. Her father, a carriage builder from England, would die in a tragic coal mining explosion when Florence was between 2 and 8 years-old (the exact date of her birth is a mystery). Upon her father's death she and her mother emigrated from Ontario, Canada to Buffalo, New York, and eventually to New York City.

When Florence and her mother moved to New York City in 1906, New York and New Jersey were the center of American motion picture making. It was that year that audiences saw the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire; history written in light, as well as the gangster film The Black Hand. Growing up on the vaudeville stage, Lawrence immediately found work as a silent motion picture actress, appearing in 38 Vitagraph Film Company films by 1908. In 1906 she and her mother were both hired to appear in Thomas Edison's production of Daniel Boone. Lotta and Florence were paid five dollars a  day to film in the freezing cold in Bronx Park in the Bronx.

In two years Edison would establish The Motion Pictures Patents Company, an organization that would enforce Edison's patent use fees on any filmmaker using his technology to produce motion pictures. Known as The Trust, filmmakers were eventually forced to leave the oppressive climate of New York and New Jersey for the freedom of the West Coast -the birth of Hollywood.

In 1908 Florence Lawrence appeared in 60 films directed by D.W. Griffith for Biograph Studios, which filmed in a brownstone studio near Union Square in Manhattan. At the time, motion picture studios did not credit the actors, fearful that doing so would increase the actor's bargaining power for pay. When Biograph Studios began receiving letters inquiring into the name of the beautiful actress, the simply called her The Biograph girl. In a curious move, Biograph eventually fired Lawrence for courting other film companies.

A German immigrant named Carl Laemmle saw profit where Biography Studios saw control. Laemmle, who ran Independent Moving Pictures (IMP) in Manhattan, signed Lawrence on as an actor in 1909. But before she appeared in an IMP film, Laemmle pulled on the most successful publicity stunts in motion picture history, a antic that would launch Lawrence into being the first movie star.

Laemmle put out a rumor that The Biography Girl, Florence Lawrence, had been tragically killed in a street car accident in New York City. After newspapers reported the story, and the shocking news was on the public's lips, Laemmle ran a strategically placed newspaper ad that simply said, "We Nail a Lie". The ad identified Lawrence with a headshot and announced that she was alive and well, and that she would be appearing in the IMP film, The Broken Oath.

Laemmle's plan to manufacture Lawrence as The Imp Girl,  came to a climax when he fabricated a press story that Lawrence had been stripped of her clothes by a frenzy of St. Louis fans upon her first public appearance after the false report of her death. America's first movie star was born.

An 18 year-old Mary Pickford would take Lawrence's place after she left IMP for Lubin Films of Philadelphia. Lawrence went on to appear in hundreds of films for production companies in New York and New Jersey.

In just under ten years, Lawrence not only acquired fame but also fortune. In 1915 she began shooting a picture for Victor Film Company called Pawns of Destiny; a filming that would result in the ending of her stardom.

While filming, a staged fire erupted and Lawrence was severely burned leaving her with facial scars and a fractured spine. At the time D.W. Griffith had introduced the close up shot into filmmaking; a technique that conjured an intimacy between audience and actor like never before. Left with facial scars Lawrence starred in one last feature for Universal Films, Elusive Isabel. 

In 1927 The Jazz Singer ushered in the world of talkies to cinema. Like most of actors of the silent movie era, Lawrence's career was over. In 1929 the stock market crash and sudden death of her mother plummeted Lawrence into emotional and financial depression.

For eight years she survived on bit parts and finally moved to Hollywood where MGM gave her small rolls. She was living at the home of her friend Bob Brinlow in West Hollywood when she received a diagnosis for an incurable bone disease. On December 28th, 1938, Lawrence drank a mixture of cough syrup and ant poison. She left this note.

"Dear Bob, Call Dr. Wilson. I am tired. Hope this works. Good bye, my darling. They can't cure me, so let it go at that. Lovingly, Florence -P.S. You've all been swell guys. Everything is yours."

Me & Caesar & The Id & The Ego (Part 5)

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.

V The Dependent Relationships of the Ego
Whereas much of the first four chapters of The Ego and the Id describe the origins, development, and nature of the systems of the psyche, this final chapter deals with the dynamics of those systems; how they act and interact.

Freud begins the final chapter by summarizing what has been explored in the previous four chapters, namely how the ego and super-ego emerge from the id as identifications with lost love objects (abandoned cathexes). Freud tells us that the development of these three systems of the psyche not only mirror the child's development through puberty and adulthood, but also preserve the conflicts (complexes) that a child experiences during those years. "As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego."(Pg. 49). Freud goes on to remind us that,

"...the super-ego is always close to the id and can act as its representative vis-à-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is." (Pg. 49)

The above passages illustrate for us the dynamic nature of the psyche, namely that there are aspects of the super-ego and the id that are unknown to the ego; private conversations that take place behind the back of the ego. It is important to recall that Freud described that the ego itself is partially unconscious and unknown to itself.

In Caesar and Me we find conversations between Jonathan West and Caesar only taking place in
Jonathan's room. The room is private and closed off from reality--a place where conversations take place between West, Caesar, and Susan. Whereas West's conversations outside of the room are placating, superficial, and hurried, his conversations inside his room are deliberate, penetrating, and searching. West's internal dialogue, the unconscious thoughts that express the demands of the id and super-ego, is authentic, whereas the conversations he has outside of the room (conscious conversations) are calculated performances, ego defenses against the demands of reality. We also note that Susan and Caesar have conversations unknown to Jonathan, illustrating the unconscious dynamics that Freud describes, between the super-ego and the id.

Jonathan has just settled his debt with his landlady using money that he swiped from the neighborhood delicatessen. Jonathan, Mrs. Cudahy, and Susan interact in the lobby of the boardinghouse. Mrs. Cudahy is supportive and encouraging to West while Susan berates him, "Will wonders never cease... Better count it again, Auntie, see if they're real." We find here the dynamic interaction of the ego, super-ego, and reality taking place in consciousness. The id is silent, only speaking unconsciously. It is not until we enter West's room (the unconscious) that we find Caesar admonishing Jonathan:

West: A common thief. What a way to make a living.
Caesar: You couldn't make it any other way.
West: What's happened to me? A no-talent ventriloquist. Worse, a second-rate thief.
Caesar: Third-rate.
West: Starving to death. In the profession I know, paying the bills by robbing the neighborhood delicatessen.
Caesar: Well, that's show biz.
West: I guess I wasn't too bad considering it was my opening performance.
Caesar: Let me straighten you out before you start taking too many bows.
West: Oh Caesar, just let me alone, please.

Let's first consider the dynamics of the conscious interaction between West and Mrs. Cudahy. West is always placating, polite, and superficial with Mrs. Cudahy. It is as if he is acting as one acts when one is in public. West is performing, meeting the demands of reality by obsequiously capitulating to the social commandments of civilized society. His interaction with reality is consistently submissive and appeasing, as if to say, "pardon me for my impotence". West is almost deaf to Mrs. Cudahy's praise. Freud tells us,

"There are certain people who behave in a quite peculiar fashion during the work of analysis. When one speaks hopefully to them or expresses satisfaction with the progress of the treatment, they show signs of discontent and their condition invariably becomes worse... One becomes convinced, not only that such people cannot endure any praise or appreciation, but that they react inversely to the progress of the treatment... They exhibit what is known as a 'negative therapeutic reaction'... We are accustomed to say that the need for illness has got the upper hand in them over the desire for recovery... In the end we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a 'moral' factor, a sense of guilt, which is finding satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering." (Pg. 49) 

Despite the fact that West is satisfying his debt, he is unable to accept praise from Mrs. Cudahy. Meanwhile, Susan is whipping him with for his sin, partly in consciousness and unconscious, she knows the true origin of West's payment, and she won't allow him to forget it. Susan is West's conscience seeping through into consciousness. It is clear that West is suffering from guilt. Freud tells us how this unconscious guilt functions:

"An interpretation of the normal, conscious sense of guilt (conscience) presents no difficulties; it is based on the tension between the ego and the ego ideal and is the expression of a condemnation of the ego by its critical agency. The feelings of inferiority so well known in neurotics are presumably not far removed from it... In melancholia the impression is that the super-ego has obtained a hold upon consciousness is even stronger. But here the ego ventures no objection; it admits its guilt and submits to the punishment... in melancholia the object to which the super-ego's wrath applies had been taken into the ego through identification." (Pg. 52)

We find here why West must not take compliments from Mrs. Cudahy, for he feels he deserves punishment for his guilt. This underlying guilt is latent and pervades West's entire character. The guilt is not merely over the petty crime of robbery; it is a much deeper guilt that, in fact, the guilt drives West to commit crimes. Freud tells us,

"It was a surprise to find that an increase in this Ucs. sense of guilt can turn people into criminals. But it is undoubtedly the fact. In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate." (Pg. 53)

What Freud proposes is that underlying both depression (melancholia) and neurotic obsessions (Obsessive-Compulsions) is unconscious guilt. The former resulting symptom is self-reproachment, while the latter is pleading and forestalling. Each, Freud surmises, is incited by an unconscious intrusion of the death-drive. In other words, depression and obsession are both unique expressions of the ego's defense against the unconscious desire to return to the inorganic--to die. Freud warns, "The more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes the ego ideal's inclination to aggressiveness against his ego." In other words, repressed aggression results in self-admonishment, illustrated clearly in the relationship between Susan and West.

What is it that Jonathan fears? Freud tells us, "The superior being, which turned into the ego ideal, once threatened castration and this dread of castration is probably the nucleus round which the subsequent fear of conscience has gathered; it is this dread that persists as the fear of conscience." (Pg. 60) What we find here is that we are driven not by guilt or conscience, but rather, to the unconscious fear of what conscience threatens to do to us. At a primal level it is castration, the symbolic annihilation of the self.

In the final scene of Caesar and Me we find the collapse of the dynamic structure of the self. The boundary between conscious and unconscious is breached as the unconscious is penetrated by the external world (reality). Two police officers enter the room and witness the breakdown of Jonathan West. An anonymous phone call has lead the police to Jonathan as a suspect in a crime. Of course this anonymous call was from Susan, illustrating how the super-ego betrays the ego as symptoms, which, although anonymous by nature, can be seen by others. In response to Jonathan's monologue of confession, begging, and acceptance, Caesar is silent. The intrusion of reality marks the collapse of the ego defenses and the dynamic self. What remains is an unconscious which is vacant of the ego; a Jonathan West his has been reduced to id and super-ego, without conscious expression.

Caesar & The Id & The Ego & Me (Part 4)

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.

IV The Two Classes of Instincts

Freud tells us that two impulses are predisposed at birth: a drive towards life and an drive towards death. The event of birth is something endured, not something invited. Freud claims that humans  yearn to "re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life." Here we find Freud describing the idea of the death-drive, the opposition of Eros, the life-drive.* Eros had been the lone drive in Freud's theory, a bifurcation of the desire for sexual objects and the desire for self-preservation.

We find that the life-drive and the death-drive are not merely in opposition, but are also fused and complimentary. Freud tells us that "...a special physiological process (of anabolism or catabolism) would be associated with each of the two classes of instincts; both kinds of instinct would be active in every particle of living substance..." Freud describes the death-drive as a necessary part of the organism protecting itself "against the external world," in other words it is "alloyed with" the life-drive.

An instance of this fusing can be found in the "sadistic component of the sexual instinct... and the sadism which has made itself independent as a perversion [that] would be typical of a defusion..." This fusion and defusion between the life and death instincts, Freud surmises, is not only the core of sexual sadism, but also the impulse for the "fundamental phenomenon" of ambivalence -our simultaneous feelings of desire and disgust, often experienced as the simultaneous desire to be both protected and independent -"the polarity of love and hate". Freud characterizes this:

"There is no difficulty in finding a representative of Eros; but we must be grateful that we can find a representative of the elusive death instinct in the instinct of destruction, to which hate points the way. Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularity accompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in a number of circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate." (Pg.41)

In Jonathan West we find curiously little evidence of either a life-drive or a death-drive. His words and actions with others are empty placeholders, temporary acts that fend-off and forestall the intrusion of reality. This is most obvious when we see West auditioning for a ventriloquist job. His act is unconvincing, dispirited, and impotent. The same is true with his interactions with other objects of reality, including Mrs. Cudahy; West is repeatedly inert to his landlady's overtures of nurturing and love. We get the feeling that West is somehow unable to respond to her willingness for affection. The only emotional investment we find in West is within himself.

Freud describes how the erotic libido (the sex drive) can be transformed into ego-libido (self-preservation drive), which serves to de-sexualize the libidinal energy. Freud describes this de-sexualization of the libido as a way of dealing with the loss of a love object, particularly a forbidden love object, such as the cultural restricions of a homosexual love object-cathexis. Freud tells us,

"By thus getting hold of the libido from the object-cathexis, setting itself up as sole love-object, and desexualizing or sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual impulses." (Pg. 45)

This, of course, is illustrated by Jonathan West's narcissism. His only investment of libidinal energy is with himself, that is, with Caesar and Susan. In an attempt to deal with some object-loss in reality, West has redirected his erotic libido onto himself, which leaves nothing for the external world. Freud tells is, "The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from objects."

It is important to note that Freud does not point to homosexual object desire as the cause of this neurotic way of dealing with the world. This illustration clearly shows that it is the forbidden status of that homoerotic desire that the ego reacts to. In other words, it is the social imposition against the desire, rather than the desire itself, that results in the shift from love of the object to disgust. Freud illustrates this economic redirection of the drives with a joke. "Such behavior on the part of the unconscious reminds one of the comic story of the three village tailors, one of whom had to be hanged because the only village blacksmith had committed a capital offence."

We find Caesar, in playing the role of id, driven by the pleasure principle. His demands are life-preserving, an attempt to counterbalance the narcissistic deflation of the ego. We see that without Caesar's prodding, West would be little more than a living corpse. Freud tells us that this relationship is "illustrated in Fechner's principle of constancy... [it] governs life, which thus consists of a continuous descent towards death, it is the claims of Eros, of the sexual instincts, which in the form of instinctual needs, hold up the falling level and introduce fresh tensions." Here we can see that far from being merely destructive, Caesar is the one force that is keeping Jonathan from death.

Freud concludes the penultimate chapter of the book with a description of how the ego and id corroborate in a maintaining the life-drive. Through this description of the id's drive towards pleasure, we can understand how Caesar, far from being a mere destructive force in West, is also a life-sustaining function that keeps West alive.

"This accounts for the likeness of the condition that follows complete sexual satisfaction to dying, and for the fact that death coincides with the act of copulation in some of the loser animals. These creature die in the act of reproduction because, after Eros had been eliminated through the process of satisfaction, the death instinct has a free hand for accomplishing its purpose. Finally, as we have seen, the ego, by sublimating some of the libido for itself and its purposes, assists the id in its work of mastering the tensions." (Pg. 47)

*Freud uses the German Triebarten where James Strachey chose Instincts. Triebarten is similar to the English word modes, and refers to what we today call drives.

Phenomenology: The Other Psychology

In 1815 A German astronomer named Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel came across the curious story of an assistant researcher at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. He found that in 1795 David Kinnebrook was relieved from his duties for sloppy data recording. It seems that the head researcher (Reverend Nevil Maskelyne) noticed a consistent half-second discrepancy between his and Kinnebrook's recording of the "transits of stars".

What Bessel found intriguing was that Kinnebrook was not the only researcher whose data recording was questioned. The more Bessel investigated, he found increasing evidence that there are distinct individual differences in our experience of the the world; a personal equation. This is the event that many scholars point to as the impetus for the development of a scientific psychology.

Gustav Fechner (1801-1887)

The predicament of the the personal equation challenged the Enlightenment certainty in the objective observation and measurement of the natural world; the project of the scientific revolution of the 16th century. A new field called psychophysics emerged to investigate how individual differences occur at the sensory level. In an attempt to understand the personal equation, researchers including Johannes Müller, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Weber, and Gustav Fechner took up the task of examining how the sense organs function.

The culmination of the psychophysicists' work was presented in Gustav Fechner's 1860 text, Elements of Psychophysics. We find in Fechner's book, some 7 years before Wilhelm Wundt's first course on experimental psychology, much of what Wundt taught in that course. So great was Fechner's influence on Wundt (Wundt gave the eulogy at Fechner's funeral) that we find an almost seamless transition from Fechner's psychophysics to Wundt's experimental psychology.

Franz Brentano (1838-1917)

The physiologically oriented psychophysicists were not the only Germans investigating the sensory experience of the world. In 1874 a German-Italian named Franz Brentano published a book that challenged nearly every aspect of Wundt's experimental psychology. In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano argued that the experimental methods of the psychophysicists were of limited usefulness in the study of the human mind. He proposed that psychology should be based on qualitative observation, rather than on quantitative measurement. It is interesting to note that in his final work, the ten volume Völkerpsychologie of 1900-1920, Wundt himself described the limitations of a quantitative, experimental psychology.

Brentano's influence on psychology is significant. At the University of Vienna, where he was professor of philosophy for 20 years, he taught students including Christian von Ehrenfels,  Edmund Husserl, Carl Stumpf, and Sigmund Freud. Freud was so taken by Brentano's lectures that he enrolled in five of Brentano's courses. Later Freud would regard Brentano as a "genius... a damned clever fellow".

If we trace the lineage of the Gestalt psychologists and the existential phenomenological (humanistic) psychologists we arrive at Brentano. Carl Stumpf, one of Brentano's best known students, was influential in the founding of Gestalt psychology. Stumpf's students included Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka (two of the main founders of the Gestalt movement), and Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of social psychology.

What made Brentano's psychology different from Wundt's can be seen in the qualities of its descendants. Social, Gestalt, existential-phenomenology, and psychoanalytic psychologies are all based on meaning arising from the interaction between and individual and their world; it is the study not of the quantitative functions of the senses, but of the qualitative contextual experience.

For Brentano experience was an activity, not a structured contents of sensory elements, as Wundt and the psychophysicists held. Act psychology, as Brentano called it was interested in describing the act of experiencing a phenomenon; rather than dissecting consciousness into associations of sensations. 

This way of doing psychology is strikingly different from Wundt's tradition of objective measurement. Brentano's psychology is entirely descriptive and experienced from the first-person perspective, rather than the third-person, which is common to the the tradition of experimental psychology. This difference, the description from the first person, is not merely a grammatical variation--it is an act that calls into question the separation of the subject and the object; it eliminates the possibility of distinctly "subjective" and "objective" experience.

For Brentano, and the phenomenologists who followed, there is no distinction between subject and object, there is a dynamic interaction between a person and the world, from which experience emerges.

Phenomenology is descriptive psychology. For Brentano, as he discusses it in his text Descriptive Psychology, it is the description of experience from the first-person point of view. Edmund Husserl, who is often cited as the founder of the phenomenological method of research, built his theory upon Brentano's writings on descriptive psychology, as well as those of Brentano's student Carl Stumpf.

What made Brentano's theory of mind different from the experimental psychologists can be seen in three concepts which Brentano attributes to mental phenomena. He claims that experience is: internal, experienced as a whole, and always intentionally directed. These three concepts place the focus of psychology not on the objective world, but on the internal world of the individual. Like Freud's new science of psychoanalysis, the phenomenologists rejected the experimental approach of studying psychology. The focus of psychology should be on experience, not measurement. 

In his 1874 text Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint Brentano  describes intentionality:

"Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, a direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here a meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes somthing as object within itself..."(Pg. 88)

This passage illustrates the issue that positivist, experimental psychologists took with Brentano's descriptive psychology. To them, Brentano's psychology was vague, unscientific, and lacking in the rigour of the psychophysical tradition.

*An excellent introduction to the work of Franz Brentano can be found at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Caesar & The Ego & Me & The Id (Part 3)

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.

Susan as the super-ego.

III The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego Ideal)
Jonathan and Caesar do not make the story. The drama can only unfold when there are outside pressures, reality, which intrude upon Jonathan and Caesar. The subject of our story is not Jonathan, but rather, Caesar. Jonathan West himself only emerges as a character from the presence of outside forces.

Freud describes how the ego emerges from the id as a result of tensions on the id from the outside world. We can see this in the newborn infant, who is little more than a bundle of biological drives with a perceptual system (the five senses). Through the intrusion of others, the infant begins to develop a sense of self; ego. The ego emerges from the id as a circumstance of the demands from the outside world. The initial point of contact is directly between the outside world, the perceptual system, and id. From this initial contact emerges ego; a sense of self.

Susan embodies the super-ego (also called the ego ideal). Shooting poison darts, she is, from the beginning, a tormentor, tyrant, and dictator to Jonathan. We find here a resentful young girl who berates and chastises Jonathan for all of his shortcomings. "Want to bet you didn't get a job?" she taunts Jonathan. Her hostility and antagonism are the hallmarks of the authoritarian demands of the self-righteous.

These are the characteristics of the super-ego, that part of our self that repeats the demands of the overbearing, controlling parent, police, political, and social system. In Freud's description it demands, "You ought to be like this (like your father). It also comprises the prohibition: 'You may not be like this (like your father)--that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative" (Pg. 30). Freud continues,

"The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipal complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on--in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious guilt." (Pg. 30)

But Susan is more than a mere high-minded pest. Jonathan seems hardy in his ability to brush off Susan's reproaches (in one scene he actually reprimands her). But there she is something more than a vehement child, she is a window into an aspect of Jonathan's psyche. Susan is a glimpse of West's experience of his parents and the residue of his childhood. She personifies the wellspring of reproaches that Jonathan will make against himself--the source of his depression and impotence.

Freud details how the super-ego manifests from the ego and the id through the Oedipal imbroglio that is experienced in early childhood. We find a clue to Jonathan's childhood Oedipal conflict in the first conversation he has with Caesar.

Jonathan: "You just sit right here and relax and I'll fix us some dinner! A fella deserves something in his stomach at the end of a tough day, huh? Now, this ought to do it, I'll warm up some of that fine potato soup I made for you. And don't you worry, we're gonna get a bookin' any day now, you and me. We're gonna be headliners! Just like you and that other fella used to be...only I won't skip out on you like he did. No sir. The shame of it all. Abandoning you for some woman. No sir. It's gonna be you and me pal; together forever!"

West talks with his id.

What we find here is Jonathan having a conversation with himself. He is speaks to himself as a parent speaks to a child. What is important in this conversation is that Jonathan expresses a loss. At some point in his life someone (presumably a parent) betrayed him, "skipped out on him," as he puts it. This loss (experienced as a betrayal) exhibits the experience of the little child who, when coming to terms with the simultaneous need to be the absolute meaning of one parent's existence, and the fear of abandonment and punishment from the other parent; illustrates the Oedipal situation. Freud claims that the super-ego develops as a psychic internalization of a love object that is lost.

We can't conjecture who Jonathan's lost love object was, but we can suppose that Jonathan's impotence is somehow rooted in this early loss. Freud tells us, "...an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego--that is, that an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification." Freud goes on to describe how the super-ego serves as the foundation for our friendships, how we form social bonds with others based on our identification with others who share our experience of conscience (morality).

West and his landlady, Mrs. Cudahy.

"It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved. The self-judgment which declares the ego falls short of its ideal produces the religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his longing. As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt. Social feeling rest on identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same ego-ideal." (Pg.33)

The closest hint of a social bond that Jonathan West experiences is with Mrs. Cudahy, whom we assume shares familial history similar to West's (her last name indicates that she is of the same Irish ancestry as West). This social bond is frustrated by West who, by all accounts, is not only friendless but asexual, an issue Freud takes up next.