What Freud is almost universally acknowledged as a profoundly important intellectual figure. He's also the object of considerable dislike. This is in part because of his character. He was highly ambitious in the cause of promoting psychoanalysis, often dishonest, sometimes brutal to his enemies and sometimes particularly brutal to his friends and his students. More important that is the content of his views. At the time, he was seen as a sexual renegade out to destroy the conception of people as good and rational people. When the Nazis rose to power in the 1930's, Freud was seen as a Jew who was attempting to single-handedly destroys some of the most cherished notions of Christian morality. Now, to some extent, many people see him this way, and to some extent this accusation has some truth to it. Freud told us things about ourselves that are immensely uncomfortable and some things that many of us would rather not know. So, what did he say? Well, if you ask someone who hates Freud, they'll talk about the sillier stuff, and in fact Freud said a lot of things and some of them were wacky at the time, and many of them certainly did not survive the verdict of scientific history. Many of his ideas were simply silly. Possibly the dumbest thing he ever said, which is something which many people think of him and associate with his name, is the idea of penis envy. So, penis envy is an account of a developmental progression. The idea is that at some point in her development, a little girl discovers that she doesn't have a penis. For her, this is a catastrophe because she infers, according to Freud, that she was castrated. So, she turns to her father to get a penis substitute because he has a penis and rejects her mother who's equally unworthy, and Freud calls this process the Electra complex. Now, if that's all you know about his work, if you think about Freud in terms of penis envy, or phallic symbols, or kind of pop interpretation of dreams, you won't have the highest opinion of him. But at the root of Freud's work is a set of ideas of immense importance and significance that are worth taking very seriously, and very broadly these are the ideas of unconscious motivation, that there're unconscious reasons for your feelings and actions as well as the notion of unconscious dynamics. That you are not one entity, you are many entities and the clash of these different systems inside your mind, inside your brain has all sorts of consequences leading among other things to dreams, to errors in speech, the sort of jokes you make and what you find funny, and often and in some cases to madness. Now, certainly Freud wasn't the first to believe in unconscious motivations, unconscious reasons, unconscious dynamics. You could find a lot of the same ideas in many scholars and elsewhere, like the plays of William Shakespeare, but Freud took it to an extreme and systematized it and turned it into science. The first idea, that our unconscious reasons, unconscious motivation, is a rejection of the common sense conception that we know what we're doing. So, suppose you fall in love with somebody and decide you wanted to marry that person, and suppose somebody was to ask you, "Why?" You might say something like, "Well, I'm ready to get married. It's time of my life. I really like the person. I want to make a life with that person, and so on," and maybe that's true, but a Freudian would insist that your desires and motivations that govern your behavior, that you might simply not know about. You might want to marry John because he reminds you of your father, or you want to get back at your mother for betraying you, or some other such reason, and if somebody was to tell you this you would deny it, and you'd sincerely deny and say, 'No. That's not the reason." But this wouldn't deter a Freudian. A Freudian might argue that these processes, these motivations, these reasons are unconscious and they happen without your awareness. Now, this idea that you don't know how your mind works, you don't have access to the systems that give rise to your experiences, and beliefs, and actions is something we accept for other psychological domains, like language comprehension, and visual perception, and we'll talk about those later on in the course, and we'll learn, talk about different theories of how we come to, say, understand language or see the world. They're going to propose all sorts of things that you have no awareness of, and you'll say, "Okay. Well, let's evaluate these theories on their merits." But it's downright scary to assume that this sort of unconscious, unknowing system operates to explain the most significant choices of your life. Now, the marriage case is extreme, but there are a lot of simpler examples. Have you ever liked someone or disliked them and not known why? You just find this either a sort of powerful attraction to a person or you find a person repellent, but if you had to articulate the reasons you couldn't really explain them. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you've asked, "What the hell am I doing here? Why am I doing this? Why did I get caught up in this?" And again not know the reasons. Have you ever forgotten someone's name at exactly the wrong time? "Yes, nice to meet you. This is my wife," and wondered later, "Why did I forget that?" Have you ever forgotten an appointment? And those cases actually, they're sort of an intuitive grounding for a Freudian theory. Have you ever forgotten an appointment that you really didn't want to go to? And rather than not go to it, you just slipped your mind somehow, and what this suggests is there's a lot more going on in our heads that we're aware of, and this is what Freud called the unconscious. Now, this might be okay if the unconscious was a reasonable rational computer planning for you and always doing the right things, but according to Freud things aren't always so tidy. According to Freud, there are three distinct processes going on in your head, and they're in violent internal conflict. These processes are the id, the ego and the super-ego. The id is present at birth. It's the animal part of ourself. It wants to eat, and drink, and poop, and pee, and get warm and get sensual pleasure. So outrageously stupid. It works in what Freud call the pleasure principle. I want satisfaction and I want it now. The problem is the world doesn't work that way. One's desires, even as a baby, are rarely immediately satisfied. You could want milk but the mother's breast isn't there, and this failure of the world to give you what you want leads to a set of reactions, lead to a whole another system in the head called the ego, and the ego has some understanding of reality and logic. The ego works on the reality principle, which is it tries to pragmatically satisfy your desires or it suppresses them. But either way, it deals with the way the world is and how to reconcile that with what you want, and for Freud your ego is you. Your ego is your conscious self, and this is where consciousness emerges. It is, as you go through your day and think about things, and remember things, and plan, that's all your ego. Now, if that's all there was, all there was was an id and an ego, it will be a simpler world, but then there's the super-ego, and the super-ego is the part of the mind that has internalized rules of parents and society. So, for instance, imagine a child who learns not to cheat in school, and one way to think about this is that the child learns that cheating, you get punished for it, you get caught, you get in trouble. That's a very ego thing. You may repress your desire to cheat because of worries about the consequences, but what really will happen is you come to internalize these moral rules and ultimately you believe you shouldn't cheat because it's wrong to cheat. You would feel guilty or ashamed if you cheated. In other words, it's not merely fear of consequences but rather you develop an understanding of what's right and wrong. So, the ego then serves two masters. It's stuck between raging animal desires on the one hand, the id, and a sort of moral conscience on other hand, the superego. Now, it's tempting to think, as I'm framing it this way, that the id is dumb and animalistic and the super-ego is something advanced and civilized, but it's not so simple. A lot of the prohibitions set up in the super-ego were setup early in development, and are grounded on the prejudices and beliefs of the society in which you're raised, not necessarily an accurate moral understanding. So, for instance, it's very possible that you might believe, intellectually, that some act you engage in, some sort of sexual act for instance, is perfectly fine morally, but your super ego, which is developed in childhood, may scream at you. As irrational as it is, it might scream at you, "You should be ashamed. That's disgusting. That's filthy." So, part of what we do in our life, part of what we have to struggle with is the conflict between id and super-ego and to some extent your ego, yourself is stuck in the middle. You could see it as an iceberg, where a lot of it, it should be submerged and unconscious, but what we experience is mostly ego and a bit of super-ego. But a lot of what goes on into id, for Freud, is unconscious, and so desires trickle up, but often you don't really know what you want. You don't know what's driving you, and this is particularly the case, as we'll see, if these drives, these desires are somehow forbidden.
