Episode 50 - The Unconscious
Transcript
David: 0:06
Hi, I'm David Pena Guzman,
Ellie: 0:08
And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,
David: 0:11
the podcast where two friends,
Ellie: 0:13
who are also professors,
David: 0:15
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
Ellie: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, I usually record from my closet as you know, but my laptop is in the shop right now. And so I'm using my big Pomona desktop computer in my living room, but the one time I recorded in my living room, there was too much echo. So I am currently coming at you from a full on fort, in my living room, which feels perfect for an episode that has to do with psychoanalysis, because it basically feels like a womb.
David: 1:02
Ellie regressed all the way to the moment of pre-birth, to unity which we all strive.
Ellie: 1:12
You can see how red my cheeks are right now. Like I'm a full on baby under here, like warm under my duvet cover, which is propped up by my couch cushions.
David: 1:22
Also because I do have visual access to you, is the duvet pink, or is that a reflection of the back red sheet that you have? It all looks like different shades of red and pink giving it a very graphic quality. Like I'm really uncomfortable looking at right now. I need to look away.
Ellie: 1:43
I look like a birth photo. It's just like my head emerging. Um, no, my duvet, my duvet is beige, so it is just an optical illusion, but yeah, the, the overall it's giving red and pink womb for sure.
David: 1:54
Yeah. It's the womb combined with the phallic Yeti microphone. It's a primal scene of conception.
Ellie: 2:02
Oh, my God. Okay, well get ready for more weird imagery, because I can not wait to start off this episode by telling you about the plot line of one of my favorite teen movies, Josie and the Pussycats.
David: 2:14
I have never seen.
Ellie: 2:16
Yeah, you have to watch it. You have to.
David: 2:19
So I I've heard about it a lot and I want to know what it's about.
Ellie: 2:23
So it's 2001 when this movie is released, it stars Rachael Leigh Cook, who plays Josie, and then her two band mates who are played by Rosario Dawson and Tara Reid, like how much of a Y2K cast is that right there. And they're this unknown band who then gets discovered by this famous music producer, classically played by Alan Cumming and Parker Posey is also involved. She's like helping them get famous. And it's this amazing girl band whose records instantly start jumping up to the top of the charts. And they realize that the reason is that actually the music producers are putting subliminal messages in their pop songs and that are making them get famous. And that are also making the people who listen go out and buy things. So there will be like a subliminal message saying buy Coca-Cola. You will love it. It is so tasty. It's better than Pepsi. And there's a secret track that is subliminally underneath the main track of their music.
David: 3:23
Wait so, in the movie they actually make reference to that Coca Cola example?
Ellie: 3:29
I think so. There's all of these actual brand placements in the film, which is part of what makes it so fun. It's totally campy. But then part of the main plot line involves Rachael Leigh Cook, Josie of Josie and the Pussycats, receiving subliminal messages through her own music that she should start a solo career and leave behind her band mates, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson.
David: 3:50
No, it's like Destiny's child all over again with one breaking away from the herd.
Ellie: 3:56
Yeah, except that in this case, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson are the subject of an attempted murder by a fake Carson Daly which I don't know if our listeners remember Carson Daly, but he was the host of that MTV show. Uh, what was that, like, the one where they showed the music videos.
David: 4:12
I don't know, this is before my time.
Ellie: 4:14
Oh, TRL, TRL. I was going to say TLC, but that's something different. I've received too many subliminal messages about TLC's home shows.
David: 4:22
TMI, TMI all over the place.
Ellie: 4:26
So why talk about Josie and the Pussycats in an episode where we're going to be talking a lot about philosophy, especially that of Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre. I would love to hear what they would think about this film, Josie and the Pussycats. I do know that Jacques Derrida had a favorite spice girl. I think it was Baby Spice, but in any case.
David: 4:44
Well. I mean, I have a question about Josie and the Pussycat Dolls though, because what kind of-
Ellie: 4:50
Josie and the Pussycats, not dolls, pussycat dolls is a different- pussycat dolls is a different band.
David: 4:57
What kind of music did they play? Was it like rock?
Ellie: 5:01
Yeah, I was calling it pop a moment ago, but then it, it occurred to me that in the movie, they actually insist on calling it rock and roll. So let's, let's play a little bit for our listeners. Ooh. And then I'll give you a brief clip of the subliminal messages that.
David: 5:13
Yes! You know, I don't hate it, actually kind of enjoy it, um.
Ellie: 5:43
You might like the subliminal message track more, right. Which is also, we have to talk about that later because it's so funny how it's just like, you should have a solo career by yourself. Like as if the subliminal messages are coming across through language, anyway.
David: 5:56
And in, the, in about a week, you're going to be like, David, I need to break out into a solo career as a podcaster. Goodbye. The subliminal messages have come through.
Ellie: 6:04
They're actually subliminal messages going out to our listeners right now telling them that I should be the only host of Overthink. So we're going to, we're about to get a bunch of comments. Okay. I'm so sorry. I derailed you. You're trying to react to this clip.
David: 6:16
I don't hate it, but it's interesting that it's at the edge of pop and rock and roll because historically, one of the concerns that people had about rock and roll, here now I'm connecting to Freud, indirectly, is that rock and roll threatened to liberate a lot of hidden fantasies and energies in the audience. And that was the American fear around the original spread of rock and roll. So it's kind of fitting that here, it's a pop rock band that is through its music, engaging in a kind of collective mental manipulation of the audience.
Ellie: 6:51
Yeah. Interestingly in the film, they say that the reason that so many rock and roll artists die young and in really tragic or bizarre situations is because they found out about the subliminal messages. And so the establishment had to find a way to get rid of them. And the movie actually starts with this like hot boy band called DuJour. So great. Um, who dies tragically in a plane crash or so you think I won't give away spoilers, because they discovered this alone while.
David: 7:24
Oh my gosh. So, but if you discover the subliminal messages, then are they subliminal any longer?
Ellie: 7:30
Well, they don't discover them by listening. They discover them because they like discover the secret track behind it. That's what happens with Josie or something, you know, like you wouldn't notice the subliminal messages just by listening in a normal state. Like you'd have to find out about this secret conspiracy.
David: 7:48
Indirectly, not through the actual product. And the reason I say that is because, you know, the movie, The Exorcist? When it was released, it was also accused of engaging in mind control through subliminal messages, through its imagery, and all of that. And it's highly symbolic in its content of course, since it's-
Ellie: 8:06
Yeah.
David: 8:07
the devil, but the director responded to the criticisms by saying, if you spotted the messages, that means that they're not subliminal. So he didn't even deny that he was trying to like, kind of nudge people to feel and think.
Ellie: 8:19
They were just Easter eggs.
David: 8:20
Yeah. They're just like, they don't actually rise to the level of subliminality because you can know that they're happening.
Ellie: 8:27
Yeah, because subliminal means below the threshold and the threshold here would be the threshold of conscious experience. And there was this whole moment, I think it was probably in the nineties, especially where people were obsessed with the idea of subliminal messaging, especially related to capitalism, right. This idea that capitalism is feeding us fake desires through subliminal messages in the media, as opposed to just thinking that there are all kinds of other ways that capitalism manufacturers desires that don't have to rely on a secret track behind the pop music you're listening to.
David: 8:59
And the clearest expression of this for me is that, is that example of Coca Cola sneaking buy Coca-Cola and eat popcorn message into movies. And it turns out that that was largely an urban myth.
Ellie: 9:13
It largely was an urban myth or it was an urban myth, because it was only largely than they were doing it sometimes?
David: 9:17
Well, no, it w- the idea was that they put this into a movie and then they were able to increase sales of Coca-Cola at the convenience stand in the movie theater by like 80% or whatever. And it turns out that that part was false. But what we are learning now about the unconscious is that you can, in fact alter people's behavior by sneaking in messages below that threshold that you're pointing to of conscious awareness, making something like the Coca Cola experiment, a very real possibility.
Ellie: 9:50
Yeah, so let's get into it and we are going to be talking not entirely, but largely later in the episode about psychoanalysis, which is where this idea of the unconscious really comes from. And subliminal messages one small and kind of pop phenomenon related to this. So we will get into the weeds, but I just really want to talk about Josie and the Pussycats.
David: 10:10
And Coca-Cola.
Ellie: 10:15
Today, we're talking about the unconscious.
David: 10:17
Do mental processes that unfold below the threshold of conscious awareness attest to the existence of an unconscious?
Ellie: 10:25
How did Sigmund Freud, who popularized the term, understand the concept of the unconscious?
David: 10:30
And why does existentialist philosophy claim that this Freud in concept is unfounded?
Ellie: 10:39
The concept of the unconscious is most often associated with psychoanalysis, which is the school of psychology that Sigmund Freud founded in the early 20th century. And psychoanalysis has had a lot of phases of being in and out of fashion. It was huge in like, you know, the first few decades of the 20th century as Freud's work started to get traction and then suddenly everyone was in analysis and then within academia, it sort of fell away as people got more interested in the mid 20th century in grounding psychology as an empirical science, which had already been a thing too, actually Freud tries to ground psychoanalysis as an empirical science by doing neurology experiments, but it didn't work very well. So then he ended up in more speculative territory. In recent decades, psychoanalysis has been sort of the bastard child of mainstream psychology. And that sometimes has meant that psychologists have ignored or rejected the concept of the unconscious, right? Cause it was, it had this Freudian taint, but there's also a lot in mainstream, empirical psychology to suggest the existence of at least unconscious mental processes, whether or not it's like the whole kit and caboodle of the Freudian.
David: 11:52
Yeah. And the story about whether or not psychoanalytic concepts are truly scientific or not scientific was already a battle that was taking place in Freud's day because Freud himself always had nothing but negative things to say about philosophers, because he was super invested in being seen as a scientist, right. He constantly made the claim that all of his claims, all of his theories, are based on empirical observation of clinical cases or on meta psychological reflection.
Ellie: 12:23
So the psychologists are like, Freud's not one of us. And then he's like, I'm not one of the philosophers.
David: 12:28
Yeah. Definitely. He was always trying to position himself at the center of psychology as a science and everybody else around him was like, Ooh, like he thinks he's one of us, but maybe not.
Ellie: 12:40
Philosophers actually like Freud because a lot of his work has important theoretical resonance, even if it doesn't have psychological, empirical backing.
David: 12:47
Yeah. And in fact, if you trace the legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis, it's a discourse that lives primarily in the arts and philosophy for much of the 20th century, it really faces a gigantic eclipse in psychology during this period. But as you point out, it's made a comeback in recent decades, but the reason that it was vilified originally, in the early 20th century, is precisely because a lot of people worried that it was too speculative. This argument was most famously made by the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, where he says the problem with Freud and assertions about the psyche is that they are ultimately unfalsifiable, right? There is nothing that you can say to Freud to convince him that his interpretation of somebody's symptoms is mistaken. And if something is unfalsifiable, then in principle, it is meaningless because it doesn't adhere to any standards of verification.
Ellie: 13:48
And so what does that mean? Can you give us maybe an example?
David: 13:52
Yeah. So for example, let's say that you have a patient who displays certain symptoms, that they have a fundamental fear of dogs, maybe because they were bitten when they were young. And that fear is now manifesting itself in a very bizarre symptomatology, like freaking out whenever a word that reminds them of dog is pronounced in their presence. Freud would say, well, that's because of this original experience that the patient doesn't remember, and that has been repressed. And Karl Popper says, well, the problem with that is simply a sequence of associations that is made by Freud, but there is nothing that you can do to convince Freud that no, actually it's maybe a neurological condition or maybe it is caused by some other childhood experience or maybe not by a childhood experience at all. And so Freud always presupposes that he knows better than everybody else, including his patients, what it is that happened to them. And if they say no, that didn't happen to me, Freud's line of response is always the same, which is that that's evidence of how much you are repressing the experience that did happen.
Ellie: 15:08
And then that would also extend to other psychoanalysts beyond Freud, who would use this same principle of, Well, psychoanalysis can explain anything and everything. And even if something looks like it doesn't fit into the psychoanalytic framework, I can craft a story about how it does, how it is rooted in this childhood trauma or Oedipus complex or something like that. And so to that extent, it's unfalsifiable for any practicing psychoanalyst?
David: 15:35
I think according to Popper that's right. And Popper is ultimately concerned with articulating the conditions needed for empirical knowledge, so what does it mean to know something scientifically? And he says, in order to have scientific knowledge, we need to know what it would take to reject a theory and falsify it. Even if it's not yet falsified, we need to know what it would take. And the fact that Freud can not answer that question because he's not open to the possibility of falsification proves that he's not engaging in science, he's engaging in pseudoscience or rather in metaphysical speculation, something that is beyond the empirical realm, where confirmation and falsification take please.
Ellie: 16:18
To stick with literary theory, then sure, you can have an unfalsifiable theory. But the problem is that scientific theories need to be falsifiable because they are empirically grounded in, say, the scientific method.
David: 16:28
That's exactly right. So it's just not abiding by the scientific method. And the truth is that Popper is not entirely wrong here because Freud often wrote with the unwavering confidence of a white European man, um.
Ellie: 16:42
Okay. So did Popper though.
David: 16:46
Point. Uh, but nevertheless the point here is that his concept of the unconscious in particular has itself sort of come back from the dead, into the scientific mainstream in the 1980s, nineties, and now the two thousands, because research in fields like cognitive psychology, behavioral economics is now showing that, Hmm, guess what? Maybe Freud wasn't entirely wrong when he made the claim that a lot of mental and emotional processing goes on in the mind, unbeknownst to us, and that processing can actually influence our thoughts and our behavior.
Ellie: 17:26
Okay. So the scientists have started to come around. Tell, tell us what's happening next.
David: 17:32
of the repressed, the repressed here being Freud himself. Um, a good example of research that is changing people's minds about the scientific relevance of the concept of the unconscious is research on what is known as semantic priming. In the late 1990s, the French neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene carried out a bunch of experiments in which he asked people to do a really simple task. He would show them a number on a card from zero to nine, and then they would have to press a button if the number that they were shown was smaller than five and another button if it was larger than five. So is it larger or smaller? That was the question. Then before the subjects saw the number, Dehaene would sneak in another number subliminally by flashing a cards super fast that the subject's brain would sort of pick up, but without the subjects being aware that their brain had it up. And what Dehaene found is that when he presented a number subliminally, that was in-congruent with the number that the research subjects were shown consciously, it would actually throw off the research subjects in terms of which button to press. So if they were shown consciously number eight, but unconsciously, they were subliminally presented the number two, they would actually waiver. They were not sure whether to bigger or smaller, even though they reported having only seen the number eight.
Ellie: 19:08
And just to clarify the difference between seeing it consciously and seeing it unconsciously is only based on the amount of time that it was shown to them?
David: 19:18
That is one way in which psychologists mask stimuli. It is by presenting information under 40 milliseconds, which is the threshold of conscious awareness in most adult subjects. But there are other ways of masking phenomenon. In this particular case, it was a case of masking by percenting things under 40 seconds. Um, uh, just under 40 seconds, idea what happened there, um.
Ellie: 19:45
A full 39.5 seconds in order for something to stay subliminal, but once it hits 40 seconds.
David: 19:52
Good. Ah, yeah, by presenting stuff under 40 milliseconds.
Ellie: 19:56
Which is interesting, cause that's different from the Josie and the Pussycats narrative where there's like this secret track underneath the main track, which is part of why I think that movie is so ridiculous because the notion that like you'd have just this real time, like, oh, you could be as big as Will and Grace if you were to do a solo career and leave your pussycat friends under the main track is weird. It just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. But this notion of under 40 milliseconds, that's the magic time, right? Just as a quick flash.
David: 20:26
Well, it kind of does make sense, but because there's also the cocktail party effect. Imagine that you're at a cocktail party, there is a lot of people talking. There's a lot of noise, everybody's having conversations. And yet you can try to focus on a conversation that is happening across the room, right? Maybe you're trying to eavesdrop on a conversation that your boss is having with another person, or you're just interested in what's happening over there. What happens in those cases is that we can devote all of our attentional resources to isolating that conversation and pushing everything else into the background. Yet, even though we push all the other stimuli into the background, which is happening live, like you said, kind of like that musical track underneath this song of Josie and the Pussycats, even though we push it in the background, our brain continues to track it and to interpret it. And that's unconsciously, without us realizing. And that's why when I'm trying to focus on a conversation happening across the room and suddenly somebody in the opposite side of the room says my name, even though I've already pushed all of that into the background, I suddenly turn. Not because I heard it, because it was louder than everything else, but because my mind is constantly scanning everything that is happening live in the background in order to isolate what is significant. And so people interpret that recognition of the name as an instance of unconscious mental processes that I am not aware of while it's happening, because I'm focusing on the other conversation. But again, that nonetheless moves into pretty high decision-making areas of the brain.
Ellie: 22:11
And that makes a lot of sense when you think about the need to survive, even though we're bad at multitasking. If we had perfect tunnel vision focus on a single thing at a time, and weren't on some level aware of what was going on behind us, we would not be likely to stay alive for very long. And so it doesn't have to be this scary, subliminal messages, narrative of the unconscious. But I think what you're describing David is pretty clear attestation of at least mental processes that are happening outside of our conscious awareness.
David: 22:43
Well and another example of this kind of processing information in the background that is live is The Lion King, the Disney movie, there was that controversy about them spelling the word sex in the, in the sky.
Ellie: 22:56
But that is a nefarious, subliminal message, least according to purity culture.
David: 23:02
Well, yeah, I, I read that it was reported to some Catholic organization who then made a big fuss about it, which led to people talking about it.
Ellie: 23:10
Yeah, but like then secretly it was a Catholic priest who had put it in there to begin with.
David: 23:14
Really? I did not know that.
Ellie: 23:16
Oh, no, I just made-
David: 23:16
Oh.
Ellie: 23:17
Just, just like just riffing, like this Catholic priest animator, you know.
David: 23:22
Well, no actually the animator, one of the animators for the film later years later, it came out and said, oh yes, we did sneak in a hidden message. So they recognize that, but then they cleaned it up by saying it was not supposed to be S E X. It was supposed to be S F X for special effects. It was supposed to be sort of like an insider joke between the animators about their ability to create special effects.
Ellie: 23:50
That is fascinating because I could kind of see that being real. But then I could, like, that actually makes more sense than that Disney would sneak in a message that said S E X because of a Catholic priest animator.
David: 24:01
Yes, your lie, your blatant lie that I almost bought.
Ellie: 24:07
But I also think that that's a really easy coverup, right? Maybe it was just that they wanted the parents watching Disney movies to, to get a little more action than they were in their child's youth.
David: 24:20
Yeah 'cus Disney thrives when there are more children in the world because that's their customer base. And you know, when thinking about the concept of the unconscious, as it appears in contemporary neuroscience and psychology, one of the really fascinating things for me is that it's not simply the case that we are registering things like words, images, isolated numbers, but that we're actually performing quite complex mental operations unconsciously, and that includes things like mathematical calculations.
Ellie: 24:53
Okay. Maybe you, I don't know that I'm doing that.
David: 24:55
Well, no, definitely not me cause I'm very bad at math. I don't know if you know that about me. Um, but one of the most famous mathematicians of our time, a French guy by the name of Henri Poincare, he talks about discovering solutions to math problems from one second to the next sort of having that aha moment of mathematical discovery, but he says I had those moments of discovery when I was doing things completely unrelated to mathematics. When I was chatting with somebody, when I was doing physical activity, and he believes, this is his own account of his own process of mathematical discovery, that it's because his mind was unconsciously working on these problems behind the scenes and then spit out the answer. And so he became conscious of the solution only when the unconscious part of the mind finally spit it out after working on it in the background and the neuroscientist that I mentioned earlier, Stanislas Dehaene, interprets this as an example of what he calls unconscious mathematics.
Ellie: 26:08
I don't know about unconscious mathematics for me, but I do totally resonate with that idea of having insights at unexpected moments. It's what people call shower thoughts, right?
David: 26:19
Thoughts? I've never heard that.
Ellie: 26:20
Yeah. Well, when you're in the shower, you might have a breakthrough. And I think, honestly, I think this is especially salient for young people because when you and I were younger, we had a lot more moments where we weren't occupied by our phone or something like that. We couldn't go on walks. Maybe we had like an iPod going on walks, but we weren't listening to a podcast going on walks, et cetera. So I think there used to be more opportunities for sort of random interstitial moments that now just happened in the shower. But yeah, people will talk a lot about insights that they have in the shower. I think for me, it also often happens in the middle of the night or when I first wake up and or when I come out of a deep meditation. Ah I had, I had an amazing breakthrough. One of my most important research breakthroughs recently happened just coincidentally, right as I was emerging out of a meditation.
David: 27:04
Well, and there is research about the role of sleep in problem solving so that when people wake up, you mentioned that as one of these liminal moments, when you sort of just like open your eyes and suddenly a solution to a problem that had been vexing you for some time is given to you with absolute clarity, even though you were not consciously working on the problem. And because I am interested in the history of mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics in spite of being terrible at mathematics, which is why we'll never succeed in that field, the, the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard wrote a book in 1945 called An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, where he talks about the fact that discovery for mathematicians happens in three stages. First, there is a stage of initiation when a mathematician begins to study a problem, think about it, try to figure it out. Then there is a stage of incubation when the problem just sits there in the background of the mind, while the mathematician goes on with their life, you know, the period of not figuring it out. Finally, there is a stage of what Hadamard calls illumination, that Eureka moment when the solution is generated. And that second stage of incubation has been interpreted by people as analogous to, again, what you are calling an interstitial moment, analogous to sleep, analogous to meditation. When a problem just sits there in the mind and the mind works on it without you being aware of its operation.
Ellie: 28:43
All right. Well, let's let that incubate and get into Freud. The unconscious is the grounding concept of psychoanalysis. I feel confident in saying that because the professor who taught me this in grad school, who is a psychoanalysis expert, said this. Shout out to Claire Nouvet, hope we don't bastardize Freud here because we are not w- we know psychoanalysis- ish, but we're not super experts in it. And it is such a complicated and daunting body of work that you and I David have decided to just focus on one text, which is Freud's 1915 essay, "The Unconscious," and part of the reason for this is because Freud goes through a variety of different interpretations of the unconscious over the course of his career. And so we just don't have the space to do justice to the way that his views change over time. So we don't talk that much about psychoanalysis. We're going to do it.
David: 29:54
Yeah, we're just going to talk about the 1915 essay, which by the way is longer than I remembered it being.
Ellie: 30:00
I know, me too.
David: 30:02
A lot of Freud's papers on meta psychology, where he reflects on the terms that he uses for thinking about the psyche are like four or five, six pages. And this one is like a 40 page beast, but I think it makes sense to start thinking about this essay literally from its own beginning because Freud opens by asking a really simple, but I think important question, which is what evidence is there for the existence of the unconscious? Why should you believe me when I say that there is this hidden compartment of the psyche at all?
Ellie: 30:37
Yeah. And so he says that even before psychoanalysis, hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion lead to the conclusion that there must be an unconscious. So right, near the end of the 19th century, everybody's obsessed with hypnosis. It's part of this like weird moment in history where people are doing seances and hypnotizing each other. And so he says that kind of phenomenon revealed that even after you emerge out of a state of hypnosis, just as one example, you are still acting in such a way that you have been primed to act in by your hypnotic state, or by the person who hypnotized you.
David: 31:17
You yeah. What's the term for your hypnotizer? You're-
Ellie: 31:21
hipness, Hypnotist?
David: 31:22
Hypnotist. Yes. Hypnotist. And Fred himself was a hypnotist early in his life. And then it-
Ellie: 31:28
Wait, what? I don't think.
David: 31:29
Yeah, he used hypnosis on his patients and later, very famously disavowed it as a method because he thought that it was unreliable because you have too much control as a hypnotist over the behavior of your patients. So you can ultimately get your hypnotisee, your hypnotized patient to do whatever it is that you want them to do. So there are two pliable and too easily controllable, but we don't have to just rely on hypnosis in order to think about the unconscious and Freud says that there are other more fundamental psychological phenomena, that point to the existence of the unconscious. And the most obvious example for him is of course, psychopathology, when people fall victims to different kinds of neuroses, you really see the unconscious acting up at the level of their symptoms. So all the symptoms of all the patients that visited Freud in his clinic, which he describes in great detail in his case histories, all those symptoms are really hard to understand, Freud says, if you don't assume the existence of an unconscious, precisely because the patients don't understand why they are doing what they're doing. So the symptomatology is an expression of these unconscious urges coming through. And in the essay, Freud then goes on to say that. You might think that only pathological subjects have an unconscious because I've been talking primarily about psychopathology, but in fact, we all have an unconscious, the unconscious is a normal part of the human psyche.
Ellie: 33:10
So it's not just like somebody who has a condition where they're compulsively washing their hands, or they're like obsessed with their fear of spiders or something. Not to, yeah. Those are pathological examples that Freud might use, which isn't to like stigmatize people who experienced those conditions, but just to give an example of the pathologization.
David: 33:30
Yeah. So he says in pathological cases, this is just his language, you see the unconscious bursting through in the symptoms, but you see that also in normal behavior of quote unquote normal. You see it in our dreams when our hidden desires suddenly come to the fore, you know, you, you have dreams about sleeping with your neighbor's significant other or with your hot boss or whatever. You know, people have all kinds of dreams.
Ellie: 33:58
Or like your mom, I mean.
David: 34:00
Oh, I didn't know you were dreaming of having sex with my mother, Ellie.
Ellie: 34:05
I had, I had a messed up dream last weekend. I dreamed that my partner killed and dismembered the comedian David Cross.
David: 34:13
Oh, wow. Oh wow. You are ripe. You are ripe for the couch, for the psychoanalytic couch.
Ellie: 34:21
There was no blood. It was like casual. It was. Yeah. Anyway, I, that that has, that has lived rent-free in my mind. Not even unconscious, just consciously since I don't know what my unconscious was doing.
David: 34:32
I mean, dreams, death, murder. I love that for you. Um, and Freud would point to that example and say, look, this is where you see Ellie's unconscious acting up and it making itself manifest. But another place where you see it, according to Freud in this essay, are in the very famous Freudian slips of the tongue, which is when you accidentally slash not really accidentally give yourself away and give away what you're really think or feel or believe.
Ellie: 35:05
By calling your teacher, mom.
David: 35:06
Yes, exactly. Which I mean, I have had students call me dad once or twice, um, which is really upsetting. Um, cause it once happened when I was like 23 and I'm like, I'm just like four years older than you. This is a really obvious slip of the tongue.
Ellie: 35:23
One time, this philosopher who specialized in psychoanalysis thought that I had a foot fetish because I accidentally said shoes when I meant something else.
David: 35:31
Yeah, this would be a slip of the tongue that would be open to interpretation.
Ellie: 35:35
Yeah, I could not convince them otherwise. It was unfalsifiable.
David: 35:39
Yeah. Suddenly you're like I'm Popper and this is pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. Um, and the, the fascinating thing about these examples, which are dream, slips of the tongue, and all of that says Freud, is that there is not a trace of pathology in them. Everybody dreams. Everybody has slips of the tongue. And I believe this is why Freud's concept of the unconscious was so controversial and groundbreaking in the early 20th century. Because even though initially it seems to reify the difference between the normal and the pathological, in fact, it actually blurs that difference by saying everybody has this, again, hidden compartment. If we want to use that visual image, which is the unconscious.
Ellie: 36:28
Totally. And what this amounts to is saying that each of us has a stranger within, which I think is super interesting. You know, this idea that there is not a single self, but there are these, uh, different dimensions to our self experience. And in that vein, one of the things I find really interesting about this text is that Freud draws an analogy between the way that we interpret other people and the way that we interpret our own unconscious. So he says that, okay, when I look at another person, I don't know exactly what they're thinking, because I don't know it directly. I don't know what they're thinking or feeling directly. But I make inferences based on their behavior that give me maybe a rough outline of what their thoughts, feelings, motivations, et cetera might be. When I notice my own dreams, my own slips of the tongue or other versions of psychoanalytic symptoms, I try and draw inferences about those to my own behavior, and the best way to do this is not by self interpretation, but actually by working with a psychoanalyst who can really treat me as an other person. And of course, there's a fundamental difference here between making inferences about other people's consciousness and making inferences about my own unconscious, because the unconscious is not structured like consciousness, but he says to some extent, this analogy really helps us understand the way that we relate to ourselves in terms of relating our conscious mental processes to the unconscious.
David: 37:56
Yeah. And I think the key term here is inference, right? That by observing manifest behavior, you can infer underlying unobservable mental and psychic processes that you couldn't otherwise have access to. And this is precisely how we come to have knowledge of the very mechanics and dynamics of the unconscious itself. And in this particular essay, he ends up painting a scene in which certain thoughts and ideas that express repressed instincts and drives end up facing censorship by the conscious mind and are blocked from reaching conscious awareness. So that's the model that he ends with.
Ellie: 38:38
And let's dive deeper into this model by spelling out the process that Freud describes, because he says that a psychical act goes through two phases as regards its state. In the first phase, the psychical act is unconscious. So we've got this just kind of unconscious soup of all of these different representations that are existing in I was going to say liminal space, but I guess we could say subliminal space and these unconscious representations want to become conscious. They're like pushing their way through this subliminal space, trying to reach the glass ceiling that will take them over into the space of consciousness. But at the glass ceiling, there is the censor. And the censor decides what is allowed to pass into consciousness and then what gets rejected. So it's like, oh, desire to eat a rice cake, you get through, you get to go to the conscious, or representation of a desire to eat a rice cake if I'm being extra, extra specific. And then it's like representation of the desire for dismemberment and you which- you shall not pass. That unconscious representation has the state down and it just gets to continue existing in this weird subliminal space. But this unconscious representation, it's not satisfied. It wants to get past the censor this like evil person. Sorry.
David: 40:09
Cerberus of the mind.
Ellie: 40:12
Who's sitting at the- I'm like weirdly mixing metaphors between a glass ceiling and a censor here. It's like a border guard. Yeah. The border guard at the glass ceiling between the unconscious and the conscious. So the unconscious representation has to find ways of deviously trying to evade the censor. And so the unconscious representation is like, how do I get past the censor? Oh, I will get by in a dream. And in the dream, the dismemberment will be weirdly metaphorical, right. And so it won't alert the censor. Or maybe it will be a slip of the tongue. And so in Freudian theory, the psychoanalyst is trying to pick up on the cues of the unconscious in order to trace together a narrative of what actually is ailing the patient by rendering the unconscious legible.
David: 41:09
Yeah. And two aspects of the activity of the unconscious that is, uh, almost funny, the first one is that it's just like this voracious little thing that tries to get out, kind of like an animal trying to break out of its cage. So all of our own conscious desires and impulses are not happy to just remain latent. They want to manifest themselves. And the second thing is that they're really wily and smart and cunning. And so when they get to the border of consciousness and unconsciousness and they see the censor, they're like, oh, I better put on a guise. I better disguise myself in some way in order to evade detection. And this is Freud's interpretation of what happens in dreams. When we dream, because we are asleep, the censor is not really paying attention. It's on vacation. And so impulses have an easier time getting through by disguising themselves a little bit. And the whole thing just reeks of a spy novel with an agent trying to bypass all the security measures in a high security building in order to get to the treasure of conscious perception. I just imagine your necrophiliac desire for dismemberment ,Ellie, as Tom Cruise in some Mission Impossible movie, like hanging upside down by a cable trying not to any sensors at all. And ultimately succeeding, right? Because you did have that dream in which somebody was dismembering somebody else.
Ellie: 42:37
Yeah. Well, and on that point, I mean, I do think that's a great analogy, so I don't want to rain on your Tom Cruise parade, but the reason that I specified before that it's actually not a desire for dismemberment that is unconscious and potentially trying to become conscious, but it's rather a representation of the desire for dismemberment is because Freud is very clear that he does not think that the unconscious reflects reality as it is. Instead, the unconscious is a world unto itself. It has its own laws and principles. And so we really have to treat it as such. I think there's a temptation constantly to think that the unconscious just reflects reality one-to-one, but that would encourage us to ultimately see everything through the lens of consciousness, which is always trying to grasp on to reality. And it's a much more complicated situation with the unconscious and related part of that too, is that the unconscious is eternal according to Freud in the sense that its contents can exist outside of temporality, right, outside of-
David: 43:38
They don't age. Yeah.
Ellie: 43:40
Yeah. Yeah. So who knows maybe that idea of the desire for dismemberment has been trying to get through since I was four years old.
David: 43:47
Yeah. Ever since you broke out of your original womb and replicated it 33 years later in your career recording a womb like a studio construction.
Ellie: 44:00
Which I am so hot in by the way.
David: 44:26
Ellie, I feel like we've done a really good job of laying out the contents of the spy novel that is Freud's concept of the unconscious.
Ellie: 44:36
Okay. Cause I was a little bit worried about my mixed metaphor of the glass ceiling and the censor. So glad you think it went well.
David: 44:41
Yes superb, but you work in existentialist philosophy and a lot of existentialists are not fans of the Freudian unconscious. So I want you to talk to us about that. Why do existentialists have beef with Freud relation to this concept?
Ellie: 45:00
Yeah, I'll focus on Jean-Paul Sartre who develops a critique of Freud's unconscious in Being and Nothingness, because I think it's the clearest articulation of this although arguably, he's doing a bad job of cribbing from Heidegger.
David: 45:14
Hm.
Ellie: 45:15
Sartre says that the idea of the unconscious is very tempting because it appears to help us solve the paradox of self-deception. How can I deceive myself if I'm both the deceiver and the deceived? It seems like on the one hand, we self deceive all the time, right? We are not honest with ourselves as people. We don't always have our own best interests at heart. We don't always know what we want. But then on the other hand, there has to be some duality between the deceiver and the deceived in order to explain self deception. And that seems kind of weird when we think about the self, right? Because the whole point of the self is that it's supposed to be unified. And so Sartre says that Freud introduces the concept of the unconscious and especially the concept of the censor that we talked about in order to try and resolve this paradox, because it seems like by granting the existence of unconscious ideas that are trying to break through into consciousness, we can make sense of self-deception. But the problem for Sartre is that the unconscious ends up just splitting the self into multiple parts. And just from a broad existential standpoint, this is problematic because the self is not taken in this kind of philosophy to be a thing. So it can't be a thing with parts because it's not a thing at all.
David: 46:38
I see, I see,
Ellie: 46:40
Yeah, existentialists conceive of the self as we might call it a project, we might call it a nothingness, we might call it a freedom, and the self is always existing in relation to its environment. It appears to be a thing, some points, right? Like we can talk about ourselves as having names, as having delimited bodies with personalities, et cetera. But even if we really think about ourselves as bodies, from an existential perspective, the body is not a thing in space; it's rather a perspective on the world and that perspective.
David: 47:14
A potentiality.
Ellie: 47:16
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so for Sartre there has to be a kind of a unity to this perspective even if this perspective isn't ultimately a substance or a thing. Paradoxically it's unity is in the fact that it's nothing.
David: 47:29
I see now, let me ask you two questions about this because I am more familiar with the Freudian theory of the unconscious than with the Sartrean critique of it, uh, so I'm definitely stepping a little bit outside of my comfort zone. So is Sartre's concern simply about the fact that in talking about these compartments or parts or layers, that Freud is hypostatizing or reifying the self into a thing with spatial parts, or is it that in splitting the self into all these parts, the concept of the censor in particular doesn't fit in particularly well, because you mentioned that Sartre focuses on the concept of the censor in Freud.
Ellie: 48:14
Yeah. So I'm going to get into the concept of the censor. I just wanted to provide a sort of background for the reason that an existentialist would take issue with this splitting of the self in general. And so, yeah, that would be this first point. So you mentioned the wonderful jargony words, hypostatize and reify, which both basically mean turning something into a thing. And yeah, that is, that is a problem for existentialism with actually a lot of philosophies, but including this psychoanalytic view. So the concept of the censor specifically, though, to get at your second point is where Sartre really develops the critique of Freud on Freud's own terms. So it's like, Hey, even if you disagree with the existentialists that the self is not a thing or not something that we can treat as a thing, Sartre's going to give you an argument for why you shouldn't take Freud to be offering a real solution to the paradox of self-deception. And that is the role of the censor. So he says that by splitting up the conscious and the unconscious and setting up a censor in the middle, in the, on the glass ceiling, as I talked about.
David: 49:21
Glass ceiling that takes you up.
Ellie: 49:23
Yeah, Freud ends up just placing the problem on a different level and this resolves nothing. In order for the censor to be able to say, ding, ding, ding, you can go ahead to certain representations and to say to others, you shall not pass, the censor has to know what it is repressing. And this means that ultimately the censor is playing the role of consciousness. Even more, it's playing the role of the self. For Sartre, self-deception has to be happening at the same level. It has to be a phenomenon of unity because the self is a single perspective on the world. And he says that even though Freudian psychoanalysis supposedly rejects this by doubling the self into conscious and unconscious, it ends up actually positing this single self of this unity through the censor. So it posits a double activity at the heart of unity and thus its contradictory.
David: 50:25
Okay. I can see how the role of the censor is actually unstable within psychoanalysis, because it seems as if the figure of the censor has to have access both to the domain of consciousness in order to have a sense of what is allowed and also to the domain of the unconscious in order to be able to police the movement from one domain to the other. And so it has to have a foot in both without really being entirely either. And so I can see it being sort of this floating or moving target in Freud's system that ultimately ends up taking the role of the self as, as you point out. But if we become the censor on Freud's account, according to Sartre, then it seems like subjectivity is just reduced to a policing function. Is that roughly correct?
Ellie: 51:19
He doesn't put it quite that way. He says that what happens more with the censor is that the duality between deceiver and deceived that Freud is, according to Sartre, trying to resolve or offering a tempting way to resolve is actually just happening again at the level of the censor. So there's a duality of the deceiver and the deceived that's happening at the censor because the censor is at the threshold of the conscious and the unconscious.
David: 51:49
And so there is no real possibility of self deception all.
Ellie: 51:54
Or there is, but Freud is not giving an adequate account of it. Yeah. Sartre's alternative is bad faith for what it's worth, which is a way of lying to oneself that involves a unity at the heart of conscious. That said, I don't know that I necessarily buy Sartre's critique of Freud. I do agree with existentialism that the self is not a thing like other things. Although I have a complicated view on that, which someday I will write a book about, hopefully within the next five years, but I think a Freudian might say, well, no, the conscious and the unconscious are not things for Freud. They have fundamentally different structures from this, especially the unconscious, because recall that Freud says that the unconscious is not structured like consciousness. That's the limit of the analogy to the consciousness of other people. And Jacques Derrida picks up on this. And he says that even though there are moments in Freud where it really seems like he's treating the unconscious as some sort of thing, and that for Derrida is also very problematic, even though he's not an existentialist, he says that the real insight in the Freudian concept of the unconscious is the temporal component that we talked about earlier. This idea that the unconscious is this sort of repository, to put it very metaphorically, because that makes it seem like a thing and that's what we're trying not to do, where symptoms can emerge after a period of delay, what Freud calls nachträglichkeit. For Derrida, the unconscious has a trace like structure.
David: 53:25
And so with the focus on temporality, it seems like one possible implication is that when we talk about the unconscious, because it's something that's been buried below the threshold of conscious awareness that has lingered in a latent form and later gets expressed when we finally experience it, the temporality somewhat bizarre because we experience in the here and now something that is actually been there all along. And so it seems to complicate any simple distinction or dichotomy between the present and the past, because it means that the present is always experienced with a trace of the past. And I think you see this very clearly in Freud's patients who through their symptoms, which emerge arguably from a childhood experience, they're always experiencing the present as a restaging or reenactment of the past. And that's simply what the present is for them. Is this the point that there is- that a trace of the past is always there in the present? Is that Derrida's point about the trace like structure?
Ellie: 54:32
Oh, yeah, the traces of the past, but also that when we think about those traces of the past, we can't think about them as at one point present, right. Because if they were at one point present at least to consciousness, then we'd be thinking about the unconscious back in terms of conscious, and we'd probably be turning it into some repository or thing, which it's not, even though it's really hard not to talk about it that way. And so this notion of a nachträglichkeit, or what's translated as afterwardsness, is this idea that experiences that were never even experiences come to us later in ways that we don't recognize as coming from ourselves even. It's not because they were hidings in some space, it's because they were never present to begin with.
David: 55:26
So then we could say following Derrida, in the present, my unconscious incubation of the next great mathematical discovery of the century is already being prefigured. The traces of what has been is about to be or something like that.
Ellie: 55:48
Oh, God, I'll let you have that one. Cause I am desperate to get out of this womb right now.
David: 55:54
You are becoming as pink as your surroundings, I will say.
Ellie: 55:59
It's so hot. Okay, bye.
David: 56:01
Okay, ciao. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 56:15
You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.
David: 56:22
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter @overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production assistant Sam Hernandez.
Ellie: 56:32
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