14 Psychoanalytical Concepts To Understand Yourself - Dr Jonathan Shedler - #567

I can't speak to it. Do we or do we not have free will? What I can say with some confidence is there are things that we can do to develop a free or well, freer than before. And that might make all the difference. We can come to know ourselves more fully. Fundamentally, there are things about ourselves, why we do what we do, that aren't fully under our control. For the people who aren't familiar with you, what's your background? Who are you? What do you do? I'm a psychologist. I'm a professor of psychology at University of California San Francisco. I practice psychoanalytic psychology, which for people who may not know, is based on the understanding that we don't fully know ourselves, that there's such a thing as unconscious mental life, and that we can explore it and understand it and be better for it. What is unique about that compared with other approaches for psychology? Yeah, that's a good question. There's been a trend. First of all, there's just mind-boggling psychological illiteracy in the culture. It's not the fault of anyone. It's what they're teaching in universities. Even people who take university level courses in psychology are going to miss something really important. The important thing is that over the last 25 to 30 years, the entire field of psychotherapy has really been getting very, very shallow. There's been a focus on increasingly brief, increasingly superficial, and increasingly cheap interventions, and they get sold to the public by academic researchers, and I'm not taking shot. I am an academic researcher. I'm not trying to trash anyone, but they get sold to the public, as these are scientific forms of treatment. They're evidence-based. They're the gold standard, but actually they've been getting increasingly superficial. What I mean by superficial is there's an assumption that it can happen very quickly, that we can deal with what's on the surface of consciousness. Your conscious beliefs and thoughts. The focus is very much on managing symptoms and dealing with thoughts and behaviors that are very much on the surface of things, rather than the underlying psychology that gives rise to them. The entire tradition that I'm part of is based on the understanding that we don't fully know our own hearts and minds. Nobody does. It's the nature of the human condition. It's rooted in the structure of the brain. We don't fully know ourselves. Because we don't fully know ourselves, we find ourselves repeating the same kinds of patterns and getting into the same kinds of difficulties over and over again in life. The idea is that by coming to know the parts of ourselves that were previously unknown, that gives us some freedom to be able to do things differently so that we're not doomed to repeating the same patterns over and over. Given that we don't know ourselves, does that not provide a very difficult challenge when it comes to trying to uncover that? If somebody doesn't know how do you get to know? Well, it's a matter of degree. This entire approach to therapy is all about how do we work in a way that makes the unknown parts of ourselves more known? Actually, probably the most straightforward way to explain it is the unknown parts of ourselves emerge in a relationship. It doesn't happen in a vacuum, which is why all these self-help programs and wellness apps and online things are sort of miss the point that the things about ourselves that we don't know are manifested in our relationships. We tend to repeat the same kinds of relationship patterns over and over again for better or worse. Psychotherapy, meaningful psychotherapy is also a relationship, so we tend to bring our patterns and our templates for relationships into the psychotherapy relationship and they get repeated there and a therapist who really knows what he's doing. That's not a distraction from the therapy. That is the therapy. It's because we bring our patterns into the therapy situation that it becomes possible to recognize them, understand them, and hopefully to rework them. When I say parts of ourselves, we don't know. Our repetitive relationship patterns have been there from the very beginning. They're formed in our earliest relationships with caretakers. Because they've been there from the beginning, they're as invisible to us as water as to a fish. For us, that's just how it is. It's in the context of a relationship where somebody else can say, "Well, wait a minute. You're assuming this. You're doing that. Perhaps there's another way to think about this." That's kind of a short quick answer. You look puzzled. No, I like it. I like it very much. I'm fascinated by human nature and by the parts of us that we don't understand. As far as I can see it, the only way to transcend your programming is to become aware of it. At least first, you have to become aware of it. You have to become aware of it and you have to become aware of it, not in some cognitive or intellectual sense. You have to become aware of it in a deeper, emotional, lived way that actually makes a difference. Because intellectual knowledge is kind of cheap. When we say in psychoanalytic therapy, we talk about insight. We don't mean something that somebody can just tell you or that you can read in a book, women insight that really sinks in at a deep emotional level in a way that leads you to do something different. I would say it's lived insight, not intellectual insight. You had this thread. This is how I came across. You did this brilliant thread on Twitter, which broke down a bunch of psychoanalytical concepts and ideas. Some of them people are probably going to be familiar with and some will be new to them. But the reason that I really liked it was it identified to me where I had misunderstood some ideas that I thought I had a really good grasp on. So I just want you to go through a bunch of them today and we can riff off some of my favorite ones from that tweet thread. And for the people who want to go check it out, I'll link that below and they can go and check it out once we're done. So moral masochism, leaving your suffering makes you more important or virtuous than others. For example, feeling superior to others based on your self deprivation or self sacrifice. What's that? So this is a very interesting concept. We all do things. We have to do things to try to find a way to feel good about ourselves, to feel like we're good people. Other people like us, other people care about us. We're a good human being. But moral masochism is something really specific where somehow the person's self esteem gets tied up with how much self renunciation or self-suffering they endure. So the idea is I'm a better person than you because I suffer more. I'm more morally virtuous than you because I'm a victim. I'm more morally virtuous than you because I deprive myself of more, give up more. It's kind of the martyr complex. It's very difficult to treat in psychotherapy that usually nobody comes in and says, "I'm here because I struggle with moral masochism." That has never happened in the history of the world. Usually when somebody like this comes to therapy, the way they experience it is depression. They're down, they're listless. They've lost their enthusiasm for life. They're despondent. Normally when you treat depression in psychotherapy, there's an improvement fairly quickly, at least initially. It comes about just by virtue of being in a relationship where the person can be heard deeply. Listen to, understood, where there's an expectation of help. There's usually a fairly quick shift, at least at the start. What happens when you see somebody where moral masochism is prominent is they don't respond positively to the therapist's sympathetic compassionate interest. It's unconscious, but there's an important way they don't want to feel better because they're suffering and their self-deprivation and their self-punitiveness is what makes them feel like they're a better person. Actually, we see this in social media all the time. You can get to look at your Twitter feed, just look for five minutes and you'll find examples of moral masochism. Basically, the message being broadcast is that I'm somehow morally superior or morally more virtuous than you because I'm more deprived. The person ends up, it's not just that they're deprived. They really have a strong psychological incentive to remain deprived. Further the deprivation. Because if they gave up the deprivation, well, then they're just a human being like the rest of us. They're not self-righteously virtuous or morally superior in any way they're just you know just people it feels like there's maybe two broad categories that are contributing here one being what the world is doing to the person i.e. the world holds back from them or puts them into a situation which causes them to suffer and the other side of this is what the person does to themselves it's how they either continue to propagate or cause in the first place and instigate the issue yeah and the person who is not morally masochistic who is put by the world you know circumstances social conditions you know put in a position of deprivation or suffering they will do whatever they can do whatever they know how to do to try to escape those conditions right right it's not like they see any particular virtue and it's like like this sucks like you know how can i how can i you know find something better for myself in the world i can i find a better place for myself you know where i'm not being so put upon or so deprived whereas for somebody with with moral masochism it's like you know they'll complain bitterly about it but a part of them is you know is really really attached to the suffering they're reveling in it almost there's a way that they're reveling in it are these so just for when we go through these concepts are these all clinically diagnosable are these are represented in the clinical literature yes but but see all of these things are matters of degree like these aren't these aren't special you know mysterious things that you know apply to some disturbed subset of the population i mean these are things that apply to humans to varying degrees right every when all the things we're going to talk about today i mean every one of us does some of these things you know some of the time to some extent right it becomes a problem when this becomes a you know sort of dominant way of living in the world yes so the moral masochism thing my eyes a little when you first said that throughout most of my twenties i attached my sense of self worth to the business that i ran which i don't think is too uncommon you know you a young guy going out into the world not really much of a sense of self you find something that you're good at and then you begin to attach you to the performance of the thing that you do i imagine the athletes and and classical music players probably have the same sort of thing they have a good recital or a good practice or a good game they feel great they have a bad one they feel bad the interesting thing that changed after a little bit of time was i started attaching my sense of self worth to the amount of suffering that i went through in order to achieve the outcome of the event so let's say that the club night that we ran went well or badly that would be the first phase so if it went badly i was going to feel bad but if it went well i would always look at how much did i suffer in contribution to this performance and if it had come too easily i'd feel like i'd cheated somehow or like i like i owed something it was like a puritan work ethic that just came through well i would say that you know that sounds more like that sounds more like internalized guilt if things are going very well for you you know maybe you don't deserve it maybe you're doing better than other people in your life that you that you care about you know friends family loved ones you know maybe you feel like you're getting getting away with something right so so that's that's actually a little different than moral massacism because what you're describing it's not that you're feeling you know superior or virtuous or especially righteous because you know because you've worked so hard and suffered so much it's i mean it sounds like you know things were going pretty well and you were having some some real successes right and then you have something it's it's kind of closely related to survivor guilt like you see this in uh i mean you know uh most saliently in the military in a combat veteran you know they're they're whole you know their whole platoon gets attacked you know every most everybody you know gets killed you know and a lucky one or two come home and you think god they've got it made just like you know they there's a real likelihood they may suffer the rest of their lives because they have this guilt it's like why did they deserve to die I mean why did why did they deserve to live when people who were you know equally or more deserving worthy and go to human beings as they are you know when they didn't live right so so some of us have to like expiate or atone for our guilt as a precondition for being able to enjoy our successes some of this you know it's you know you asked is this just about you know pathology or these disorders or or is this everyone it's it's everyone and some of this is um you know different societies and religions have found ways of institutionalizing you know ways of handling this so you know like the the confession and Catholicism is a kind of an institutionally structured way of dealing with guilt you can be successful you know in your life and then you know feel good about it but here we have this very structured channel place where you can go and you know confess to your sins and your crimes real and imagined and be granted absolution and you know then you can carry on I like that okay so next one false self a false sense of identity borrowed from others in place of exploring and developing your own yeah um you know of all of the ones I wrote I wrote 16 you know 16 concepts that that's actually the one I was least happy with how I described it I don't think I did justice to it so um this goes back to early childhood and infancy that under ideal circumstances with you know sort of empathic loving parents who are not using a child you know to sort of compensate for some you know some felt deficiency of their own right with the the parent is in the business of helping helping the child to grow and discover who they are I think that's what we'd ideally like to see it's sort of a process of you know growing up is becoming more fully ourselves but but often something goes wrong and so you have um you have a parent you know typically a parent with some narcissistic difficulties they don't feel good about themselves in some important way and they need the child to be something to make them feel better about themselves so rather than you know rather than parenting as being about um you know we're discovering together who this growing person is becoming right it becomes about the child has to be something we have to do something they have to behave a certain way they have to be very good at something they have to look a certain way not for their own sake but but basically for the parents ego and you know when this starts very early on it's like this way a child really never has an opportunity to discover their own thoughts their own feelings their own experience their own you know preferences likes and dislikes they end up kind of having to mold themselves into being something that that serves the parents needs and we call that a false self as opposed to a true self and that can last a lifetime and you see it in I just imagine that when you get to later later into adulthood and people really have this discordance they'll probably be almost kind of two versions of themselves battling inside of their mind well you see it in entertainment a lot you see in celebrities a lot you know like looking from the outside it's like my god this person has everything you know fame wealth looks talent right and inside there's something about it that all feels empty and it's like it's never enough no matter how much success how much money how much fame accolades it's sort of never enough to fill the emptiness inside and it's because and it's because it's like they they have to be these things really explaining very well I mean I imagine you know a child is very physically attractive and the parents take great pleasure in that for their own purposes right they don't love the child's experiences they don't feel loved because they're them they feel loved because they look a certain way and that does something for the parents right well now they grow up imagine they become an actor or a model or something like that and it's like they end up living out you know living out somebody else's needs living out their parents needs rather than discovering and living their own right so they perpetually feel unhappy and empty and then people look from the outside and say you know I don't get it this person has everything but it's because they can't see this discordance that's going on inside of them it's because they never had an opportunity to discover who they are and what's meaningful to them what brings them satisfaction and you know and meaning you know independent of serving a function for somebody else is it so you is it always um parental induced is there any other way that a false sense can false self can come about Um, oh, good question. I think it starts in early childhood with your primary caretakers. But then it, you know, then it tends to continue elsewhere, right? It begins that way and then it develops a certain, you know, a certain momentum. So, you know, suppose a child feels, you know, the parent that, usually the child has some gift or ability. Suppose they're, you know, very bright. And parents take great pleasure in this. But, you know, it's like, it's not that the child enjoys being bright. It's that they have to be. Otherwise, they feel like. Well, they're not, they're not really loved. They're not loved for themselves, right? Well, now they go to school and maybe they attract teachers' attention because they're, you know, particularly bright, right? And then it, and then it just, just kind of. You know, it kind of creates a sort of vicious circle. It feeds on itself, right? You do more and more of the thing that you get attention for. Positive attention for. But at the expense of, you know, discovering what's actually meaningful to you. And at the expense of feeling loved and worthy for your own right, you know, versus some particular, you know, gift or ability. Transference. Responding to another person as if they were someone from your past. For example, punishing someone in the present for wrongs, someone else did to you when you were growing up. That's the big one. So let's go back to we, what I said at the beginning, we, we form certain kinds of patterns of relational patterns, ways of relating to other people. And we tend to recreate these patterns for the rest of our lives. You know, sometimes we're better, sometimes we're worse. And the patterns are formed in our earliest attachments. You know, they begin with our, our parents and family siblings and so on and they continue through other people. And, you know, the patterns are invisible to us, but the thing is our expectations of what happens in relationships are, you know, are forged in our earliest relationships. So we don't see other people so much as, you know, who they are in any, any objective sense, we see them through the lens of our own patterns, our own experience, our own relationship patterns. I mean, let me make it a little more clear, you know, in our earliest relationships, we learn, you know, how to be with another person, you know, how to respond when somebody is angry with us, how to make somebody like us, how to, you know, get attention, you know, what other people find charming, what other people find intolerable. It's like we kind of internalize these, these rules of the relational road about, you know, how to live and how to be in relationships with other people. And how you go out in the world and you encounter new people who you don't know and you apply the old rules of the road for better or worse. So it's like our experience of other people in relationship is always experienced through the lens that the lens is that we bring with us. Now, you know, this is the sort of gradations, you know, I like that's always the case. It's just bring who we are into a relationship that, you know, ideally there's some, you know, some relationship, some, some, some, you know, some, I don't know, synergy between what we're bringing and being able to experience the other person as they are when things go wrong. We don't even see the other person. We just bring our own, you know, our own assumptions and our own, you know, desires and wants and needs and it's like the other person is irrelevant. It's like they, they get shoe warned, you know, to fit into our patterns. So, you know, imagine somebody who's grown up and, you know, a family where they were mistreated in some way or mistreated, coerced, they just, the experience of their people is, you know, angry and hostile and trying to control and coerced them. Now they go into the world. You know, in bump up against all kinds of people who do what they do, but everything is through the lens of their feeling put upon their feeling mistreated and they tend to lash out at the people and the person getting lashed out is like, you know, like, what the hell, what did I do? So, this is the most important concept, I think, in all of, in all of psychology. So, the idea is we transfer the word is transfer, we transfer our early patterns, wishes, desires, fears, needs that were created in early relationships, we transfer them into current relationships. And imagine that somebody that has more extreme transference will start to believe, will see more, not serendipity, but a deja vu occurring because all of their relationships, they always end really bitterly, they're always, people are always this to me and people are always that to me. Is that the case? Or is it the lens for which you're seeing this is coloring whatever they do? Well, it's a little bit of both, right? It's the lens through which you're seeing that. But if you then respond accordingly, you know, if you think somebody is being, you know, hostile or controlling or coercive, right? And then, you know, you respond to that, you know, you respond with hostility yourself, right? And now there's a way we end up creating, we draw the other person, we draw the other person into our patterns, we end up recreating, you know, recreating the patterns that we brought to it. Let me give you a concrete example, this comes up a lot. So, one of the personality disorders is paranoid personality. So, these are people who go through the world with constant chronic suspicion. They think other people are out to do them harm. That's their default assumption. And it's like water to a fish. It's not like, well, I think that about this particular person because here this unusual thing happened. It's like there's always something in their mind that explains why they think somebody else's, you know, is out to hurt them. And so they begin acting very, you know, angrily and belligerently and become controlling around other people, you know, out of a desire to protect themselves, right? Well, if you're on the other end, if you're on the receiving end of that, it's like who the hell wants to deal with that person, right? So, you know, now you don't include them, you're not upfront with them, you don't share things with them, you watch your back, you know, like you tend to get more controlling yourself because, you know, the other person's going to take advantage of you if you don't. So, someone with a paranoid personality style, this way that they create a paranoid environment for themselves, right? They make it come true. So, this way we bring these lenses, you know, from past relationships, we bring them with us into new relationships. But the other people, you know, they're involved, it's an interaction, there's two people here, right? The other people get kind of drawn into, like, you know, interested in the magnetic field of, you know, of, it's like, it's like they get, it's like they get gravitationally pulled in to the other person's distorted view of things. And now it's actually happening. It feels to me like you have another concept that might be very closely tied to this projective identification, projecting when acknowledged feelings, motives onto someone else, then behaving in ways that provoke the very feelings you have projected, for example, projecting rage onto someone else, and then treating them so badly that they actually become enraged. Well, that's a, yeah, that's the most complicated one of all. And in fact, that is a very particular version of transference. And we're seeing a lot of it in public life right now. So, let's start with the simpler instance. The simpler instance is just plain projection. Plain projection is there something unacceptable, you know, something I feel unacceptable in myself, you know, my anger, my hostility, my sexual wishes, whatever. Unacceptable myself, I don't want to know it about myself. I defend against it. I'm not these things. And the way I defend against it is I projected onto someone else, onto you. I'm not, you know, angry and toxic and, you know, destructive and wanting to hurt people. You are, right? That's the projection. What makes it a projected identification is the person takes it a step further. It's not just that I see you as being angry and hostile when you otherwise might not be at all. It's that I then proceed to treat you in ways that, you know, that actually evoke those feelings in you. In other words, I make the projection come true. Right. So if I see you as angry and hostile and I then treat you so badly and do it so relentlessly until you actually become angry. And so like now it's confirmed, right? It's not defense. It's really true. You know, I wasn't a projection that I saw you as angry and hostile. Look at that. You are angry and hostile. So, right? So projected identification is getting rid of some, you know, some feeling or motive that we find is intolerable on ourselves mistakenly imagining that it applies to somebody else and then treating them in such a way that you actually, you know, you actually manage to, you know, actually manage to create the kinds of, you know, feelings and attitudes that you've projected to begin with, I could think of it as a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Precisely what I had in my mind yet. And also, it, it ends up justifying your own viewpoint to yourself, right? If you do provoke somebody to become enraged or whatever it might be, when they do finally snap and treat you in that manner, it is a reinforcement mechanism for your prediction. You got, I knew it. I knew it all along. It's can't, exactly. It's confirmation. Right? So, you know, the way it, it works, it goes hand in hand with another defense, but the people who do this tend to see the world in very black and white terms. So other people are, you know, good or bad caricatures, you know, they're heroes or they're villains. Oh, that's a splitting, right? That is splitting. Yes. So, you know, projected by an indication, you decide that someone, some group, some identity is bad, you know, they're evil. And then you treat them as if that were true, as if it were a fact. You treat them like they're evil and you treat them so badly, you know, that they finally react against it and, you know, and push back and, you know, and, you know, become angry and aggressive, because they've got no choice. They've pushed into it. They're getting, you know, they're getting treated like a punching bag, you know, and, and, you know, and they put up with it, you know, so long, and finally they punch back and say, ha, see that person is toxic. I knew, you know, I knew they wanted to punch me. It's kind of like that. So going on to splitting, perceiving others in black or white categories, seeing them as one dimensional, as purely good or purely evil, this is something that I see so much online at the moment. Yes. And I've always wondered what's going on psychologically that is causing people to choose a lower resolution view of other people. I understand that it's simpler to throw people into categories of either good or bad or evil or my team or their team or whatever, because the nuance of I disagree with this person on X, but may agree with them on Y requires an awful lot more mental effort. Well, everything you said is right, but it goes much deeper than that. So our understanding of early, you know, early childhood development is, let's see, I don't know. We have a concept in called object constancy, so object constancy. So if you spend time with little children, you see it, that before a certain developmental stage, if something isn't like physically present in front of them, the child or the infant doesn't really have the capacity to hold it in mind. So, you know, for example, parents all over the world play, you know, usually mothers and children, they play the peekaboo game and there's, you know, with the squeal, you know, peekaboo and there's like squeals of delight from the children and the children never get tired of it, you know, they can play peekaboo forever. But, you know, why is it so exciting? What's really going on? They just, when the, when the mother, you know, covers her face, peekaboo, up to a certain developmental level, the child actually doesn't have the, you know, the mental equipment at that point, they say, oh yeah, she's still here, she's just, you know, behind her hands, right? So the child's experience is something like she magically, you know, vanishes and magically reappears. And the moment the child, you know, achieves what we call object constancy, which is the ability to recognize that something still exists, whether we see it or not in front of us, right? The moment that happens, then the game stops being fun, it's just like, oh, you know, mommy's hiding her face, right? The magic of it is gone. So if you take that concept and you apply it to people, I mean, you don't have a stable enduring sense of, you know, this is my mother, this is my mother, you know, in this setting, this is my mother, when she's cuddling me, this is my mother, she's scolding me, punishing me, right? In the absence of object constancy, it's like the child keeps having these unrelated experiences with different mothers. We know it's the same mother, right? But up until a certain developmental point, the child doesn't know, right? So you can think of it as like kind of shifting kaleidoscope of mental representations of the other person or the self in relation to the other person. And they're all separate. It's like they're shifting kaleidoscope of like fragmented parts and pieces. And with development comes the ability to start to integrate those different representations and you recognize it's the same mother, you know, the mother who accidentally poked me with a diaper pin, you know, and made me cry is the same mother who held me and cuddles me and feed me. It's not two different people. It's one person, right? So think of these, these, you know, snippets, pieces of relationships as the kind of the building blocks of mental life. Now, when the building blocks start getting integrated into what we call, you know, a whole representation, right? A three-dimensional representation of the mother. And it's the same mother, right? The mother's angry at me is the same mother who, you know, who loves me and cuddles me. It's the same person. You now have what we call a more integrated representation of the person, right? It encompasses, you know, both things that we feel good about and things we feel bad about. And as the building blocks come together, they don't come together randomly. They come together along emotional lines. So the different images of the mother that are positive that we feel good about come together and create one image of good mother. The, you know, images that we feel bad about, you know, pain hurt, aloneness, anger, whatever, those come together. We have an image of a bad mother, right? They're like two different people, the good mother and the bad mother. And then with further development, the good and the bad get integrated. And it's like, oh, you know, it's mother and sometimes she's good and makes me feel good and sometimes she's bad and makes me feel bad, but it's the same person. And I have all the, right? So in a way, the child achieves ambivalence, right? An ambivalence means you have, you know, you have multiple and sometimes conflicting or contradictory feelings toward the same person, right? So I like this about you. I don't like that about you, right? That's ambivalence. That's a, that's a very, you know, nuanced three-dimensional view of you. So when something goes horribly wrong in development and often it's related to abuse or neglect, that level of integration doesn't happen. And you experience the world in this, you know, fragmented way where, you know, people are good or bad. Don't see people in their in their complexity. And, you know, and you carry that forward, right? It's like something that was supposed to happen developmentally never happened. And, you know, what happens is when the person gets upset, they completely lose the capacity to recognize that somebody else is another human being, you know, just like them with good qualities and bad qualities. And, you know, that people are nuanced and complicated and, you know, exist in shades of gray. That's just, you know, that's the human condition. That's so. The person loses the ability to perceive it that way so that in certain other people are seen as, you know, all good, all virtuous, heroes, you know, and others are seen as all bad, as villains. So the person ends up seeing the world in this very caricatured cartoon like, you know, cartoon like way, you know, when there's heroes and villains and no three-dimensional whole people. And when you're on the receiving end of it, you know, right? Because, you know, you're just going about your life, you know, interacting with them, doing whatever you do. And all of a sudden, you know, you're getting vilified in this extreme way. You're getting seen as somebody that just has no relation to how you experience yourself. It's like, where did that come from? Right? Well, where it came from is this bad, you know, this bad representation inside the other person, right? They don't recognize it as a part of themselves. It's gone projected onto you. And now you're the bad person. And they can treat you that way. And I honestly think this goes a long way to explaining some of the worst aspects of the culture wars, because we lose the ability to see other people as complex three-dimensional human beings. We start seeing the world as caricatures of good and evil. And the good people are, you know, completely right and virtuous and in the right. And what they want to do is, you know, what they want to do is the right way. And the people who become the bad objects, you know, they're evil. And they should be treated that way. You had this other tweet thread that I loved, I think, splitting projection and projective identification seem to all tie into this. Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks I'm a sadist or I'm a malignant narcissist. They find a belief system or social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true. and right. Well, think about it. You know, nobody thinks of very rare exceptions. Nobody thinks, I'm a bad person. I'm cruel and I'm vicious and I want to hurt people. And, you know, I like, you know, I like destroying things. I like doing damage. I like causing other people pain. I mean, it's pretty hard to live your life and think that about yourself. Right. Now, in fact, there's something inside the person. They do want to, they do want to do damage to others. There is something in these people that's very cruel and very destructive. But that's not their experience of themselves. Right. Their experience of them. Their experience is all that evil isn't inside of me. It's inside you. You're the one who's evil. Right. So, so there's the splitting and the projection. Right. The splitting. If the person were not splitting, they'd be like, you know, this is me and I have some good qualities and God, sometimes I'm just an asshole and, you know, sometimes I'm just needlessly cruel. But, you know, I'm more than that too. I'm also kind of loving. Right. We have this very complex nuance view of ourselves. Ideally, when splitting happens, we don't have that. I'm good, you're bad, you're cruel, you're violent, you're destructive, you're a bad person. Right. So, so that's the splitting and the projection. If I see you as a bad person, you know, who's harmful and destructive, you know, and needs to be rained in. Now, I feel fully justified in treating you horribly, you know, in abusing you, mistreating you, hounding you out of a job, you know, canceling you. I can do anything to you because you're evil and you deserve it. There's no limits on, you know, how there's no limits to my cruelty because in my mind, it's not my cruelty. You're the cruel evil person and you need to be held to account. Right. So, you treat somebody that way long enough, you know, well, they will become enraged and they will want to fight back. Right. And like we were talking about before, that now confirms my view. You really are, you know, you really are this evil, violent person who wants to, you know, who wants to do harm. Right. So, we find a way to justify our worst impulses and imagine ourselves to be very good and virtuous while we're doing that. Right. We're not being cruel, we're fighting evil. The problem is even with disunderstanding, even knowing the fact that most people see themselves not as evil or bad or purposefully trying to do ill stuff to everybody else, when we see the impact of what these people's actions do, it's very hard to find empathy for them. You're like, why should I, why should I care? Why should I care that you have this litany of issues which is contributing to the way that you're behaving and that there's maybe even some clinical diagnosis that could look at this person as it toward the upper end of this particular spectrum of disorders or a combination of spectrum of disorders. You just think that person's a dick and I need to respond to them in kind. And that's the project of identification. Right. Now, you don't get to respond to them the way you might otherwise spontaneously, you know, want to treat them. You're now responding to the provocation. They are turning you into the worst version of yourself. Right. So the projection becomes true. I think this person is a dick. I treat them horribly and low and behold, they start acting like a dick. You know, I was right. Right. So, so the person engaged in this gets a, it's a very primitive kind of defense because you know, it, I mean, it's really saying here are these, you know, things about me, you know, my capacity for cruelty, you know, my, you know, my, my pleasure in hurting people, my destructiveness, we all have it. It's in all of us. Everybody has a capacity for these things. And it's saying, no, no, these don't belong to me. You know, this is not me. This is you. And so it's a defense that that really distorts our perception of the world and our perception of other people. It's a costly defense because it really causes us to lose touch with who the other people are around us. What's the role that the group, the group plays here? So you said, they find a belief system or social group that validates their most hateful destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. Yeah. So, so some people get, you know, some people get the goodness projected onto them and they're, you know, and they're treated wonderfully. They're, they're heroic. They're good people. They're virtuous. They can be appreciated. They can be admired. Well, those people start thinking, how are you a great guy? The people that you're projecting the badness onto and mistreating. I think you're a horrible person. So you've got, you know, two groups of people that are having completely different experiences of the same person, right? Depending on, depending on whether the good or bad is being projected onto them. So, you know, usually, you know, especially if you spend it in sort of moral terms, you know, they're bad and immoral. They need to be stopped and we're good and we're moral and we're going to stop them because we're fighting the good fight. You know, if you, you know, if you do that, then the people doing the most cruel and toxic and destructive things, you know, kind of find an in group that shares them on and says, yes, yes, you know, we're on the side of good and right and virtue. Repetition and enactment, when something we do not want to know or understand about ourselves gets played out with others over and over. Yeah, well, that would be an example, right? And think if something we don't want to know about ourselves, it's just our capacity for cruelty and destructiveness. And, you know, we keep making other people the villains, not because the other people are inherently villains, because we need to see them that way. And we keep reliving this relationship over and over and over again. Not just the best thing. Wherever I go in the world, you know, there's just horrible, vile evil people that need to be stopped, no matter where, no matter which social media side I go on, by God, there, here they are also. And then there's no acknowledgement, you know, that the, the, the, the, the Kate and the cruelty and the destructiveness comes from within. But that, that's an extreme example where we're all involved in repetition and enactment. So repetition is the idea. You know, we have, we all have all kinds of unresolved conflicts. We sort of carry with the nest. This isn't go to bad or pathological, it's just, it's just human nature. You know, and in one way or another, we tend to repeat it over and over again as we go through our lives. And what, right? So that would be, that's called a repetition. When we draw somebody else into playing out that script with us, we call it enactment because now there's two people involved in enacting it out together. And actually, this is how the kind of therapy I practice works. People come into therapy and they begin repeating what they repeat in relationships in general. But now they're doing it in the therapy relationship because that's a relationship too. And they draw the therapist in to reenacting something. It's almost unavoidable. You get pulled into enacting something. And the therapist does. And what makes therapy therapy good therapy and not just, you know, one more relationship where the same old thing happens is in the rest of life, you just continue reenacting the pattern. In therapy, you reenact the pattern. But somebody, hopefully the therapist has the capacity to step back and say, basically, something's going on here. What are we doing? Let's think about this. You know, did you notice, you know, did you notice, you seem to assume this or that about me? And, you know, and treated me on that basis. You know, when I had to cancel, when I had to cancel our appointment because of, you know, an emergency came up in my life. In your mind, it's because I don't like you. I'm fed up with you. I would rather not have you as a patient. I would rather, you know, I'd rather be done with you. And you responded to me on that basis. The, you know, I wonder if we can think about, that may be true. But I wonder if you can think of other reasons why I might have had to cancel the appointment. You're trying to sort of expand the person's capacity to think differently so that the things they take for granted, right? The things that I call water to a fish suddenly become things that we can, you know, call into question and reflect about it. It's like, oh, like, maybe you didn't hate it. Maybe you don't really hate me and want to be rid of me with a patient. Well, maybe you have a sick child at home or whatever, right? So we take these patterns that we just reenact, you know, kind of mindlessly throughout our lives. And we basically say, look, there's a pattern going on here. Let's really think about this. how did this came about? What led up to it? You know, how did you understand when I did lesson so? How did you understand it? When you responded, you know, lesson so, right? So that what we're really doing is in the rest of life, things happen very automatically and rapidly. You know, we go from point A to point B and it just, you know, in our mind, that's just that's just the way it is. What we do in therapy is we slow things down and say, well, between point A and point B, a lot has gone on. There's all kinds of thoughts and feelings and experiences and memories and maybe it's not a foregone conclusion that, you know, that A leads to be and that just, you know, that's just a fact. Maybe there's choices between point A and point B. Maybe A, you know, maybe A doesn't have to inevitably lead to point B. Maybe there's more freedom there than we realize. Reaction formation, masking, underlying feelings and attitudes by expressing that opposite to an exaggerated degree, for example, expressing exaggerated approval and admiration towards someone you secretly look down on. Yeah, so it's a pretty straight forward defense where we protect ourselves from knowing something that we don't want to know about ourselves by experiencing the opposite of that. An example would be, imagine somebody who's just absolutely fascinated drawn to pornography. But that's completely unacceptable. They weren't raised in a community that has any place for that that could possibly accept it or understand it. It's bad. I'm not the kind of person that's interested in pornography. In fact, I hate, I do test pornography. It needs to be condemned. So imagine somebody like that who then devotes himself to becoming an anti-pornography crusader, which requires constantly looking to find pornography, so that you can condemn it. That's a reaction formation. It's saying, you know, I'm not interested in this. I'm not drawn to this. I'm disgusted by it. So we often, you know, we can mask a particular feeling or attitude by substituting the opposite. The example I gave in the thread that you read was, what did I say again, would that pertinent? Expressing exaggerated approval and admiration towards someone you strictly looked at. So suppose you look down on someone, you know, you load them. You think they're inferior, but you're not the kind of person that would ever look down on and think somebody was inferior. Certainly not on the basis of, you know, some identity characteristic, you just, you know, you're just not that kind of person. Well, you know, if the impulse to look down on them is strong, you need to defend against it, you know, maybe you turn it into the opposite. Well, you know, you valorize and glorify them, right? And then, you know, all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden, the person could do no wrong in your eyes. When you scratch, you know, scratch the surface of those attitudes, though, you know, sometimes you find quite the opposite. So this performative empathy that is often being maybe you'll become, you know, very deferential and worshipful to, you know, to the group that you'll see. Many, many, many parallels with the modern world at the moment. Yes. You see, that's the thing, you know, these are concepts that go back to the turn of the, you know, the turn of the century, the turn of the 20th century. I don't know, these are, you know, 100 plus year old ideas. And people sometimes they get discussed as if they were like these ancient artifacts, you know, we don't we don't have to deal with that anymore, right? That's what I meant when I said we have very cheap, superficial kinds of therapies now. These are these ideas don't apply to us. These are, you know, things from the distant past. Like, no, they're not. They're here with us every single day. We're swimming them all the time. You know, people, people may not know the words or the concepts, but we're living with them all the time. And it's not like this is some dated, outmoded thing that's not relevant to day-to-day life. It could not be more relevant to our day-to-day life. Displacement, shifting feelings from one person or situation to a different, safer one. For example, attacking someone who cannot defend themselves in the place of attacking someone who can retaliate. Yeah. So the classic example of that is, you know, somebody feels badly treated at work. They're angry at their boss. They feel like their boss, you know, their boss didn't, you know, did wrong by them. You know, they'd like to shout at the boss or punch the boss, but of course you can't do that. Maybe they come home and kick the dog, right? That would be a pure example of displacement. So one of the things that we, you know, we understand in psychology is that there's something about feelings that they can be shifted very easily. They can be redirected so that a feeling that originates in one place can be expressed in another place. And that's what that's what displacement is. The feeling is still there, right? Whatever the feeling is, but we're directing it at something else, something or someone else, other than where it really started. That sounds quite cowardly. That seems like a cowardly approach to whatever's going on rather than pushing back against the person or the thing which is causing you issue, you go to something which is more vulnerable. Well, it would be cowardly if it were a conscious choice and we knew that that's what we were doing. But the thing about, you know, all of these defenses is they operate relatively unconsciously. While we're doing it, we think we're just dealing with reality. We kicked the dog because the dog was being bad. You know, I mean, so I mean, you know, when you start to talk about, you know, cowardice, bad implies understanding and choice. Like delicious, yeah, yeah, and volition, whereas if this is operating outside of awareness, it's not clear that there's that much choice. Well, that is where the difficulty in culpability comes from. You know, we like to think that people are the architects of their own actions. You know, we definitely like to think that we are the architects of our own actions. We like to think that we don't want to feel like we're at the mercy of our programming and there's just some several hundred thousand year old biological predisposition just pulling the strings above us. That's definitely not something that we want. I mean, you know, maybe maybe other people are certainly not us. I'm certainly not the people. So it seems like a very difficult situation to be able to find the requisite understanding and empathy for people who do these things, especially given most of the stuff that we've gone through today is really fucking annoying. Like if anybody did that, it's so super, super irritating. And people do it every day. There's nothing mysterious about any of this. We encounter this, you know, we encounter this regularly. There is this sort of modern Bailey thing as well with the pullback. Like this is what I'm saying. That wasn't what I was saying. Actually, I meant this. And then you get the response and then somebody complains about the response. And then maybe they end up doing something to somebody else because of the response that you gave to them. And I can see that these all kind of I would imagine not like co-morbidities, but co. Yeah, they're all inter-complexly interrelated. Yes. Yes. And one will cascade down into others. And this is the essence of it. I mean, this traces all the way back to, you know, to Sigmund Freud and, you know, turn of the century of Vienna, that he, you know, I mean, some of what he wrote has stood the test of time. Some not so much. But the fundamental breakthrough is we don't fully know ourselves. We don't fully know our hearts and minds. There's such a thing as unconscious mental life. And that is the essence of it. That has stood the test of time. And now we have research, you know, they couldn't do it. And for it today, we have research in experimental psychology. We have research in cognitive neuroscience. We know that it's true. We don't have one brain, right? The brain didn't, you know, evolve all at once. The brain is composed of multiple structures that came up about, you know, at different points in the evolution of the species. And they're not in harmony, right? The conflict, meaning contradictory, contradictory experiences about things, contradictory motives is rooted in the architecture of the brain itself, right? We know that now. So, so Freud said in his own time, he said that his insight was the third of three great blows to human dignity. And the first blow was Copernicus, said, we are not at the center of the universe. We're just one more planet among, you know, many others, right? Man is not at the center of the universe. The second blow came from Darwin, who said, you know, we are not separate in a part from the animal kingdom. We are part of the animal kingdom. We are biological, you know, we are animals. They're biological beings with all of the evolutionary heritage that goes with that. And the third, the third great blow was the one that, that Freud himself identified. And it is, we're not masters of our own house. We think that we're doing things because we've decided to and it's volitional and it's conscious. And what we consciously think about something is all there is. Whereas, in fact, mental consciousness is like the tip of the iceberg of mental life. So we're doing all sorts of things all the time for reasons we don't fully understand. The other contribution was it doesn't have to stay that way to that extent. That in fact, we can come to know ourselves more fully. And that's what this kind of therapy is about. But fundamentally, there are things about ourselves why we do what we do that aren't fully under our control. What do you wish more people knew if you could try and give a single insight that you think would have the most impact to the well-being of people's psychological health? Would it be that? Would it be the fact that we are not completely in control and that there are mechanisms that are working below the surface? Or is there something else? There's mechanisms working below the surface. But many of them can be brought to the surface. I mean, we get into the question of free will, which is a philosophical question that's not going to have an answer. I can't speak to it. And as far as what I'd like people to know, so people are getting sold a bill of goods about what psychotherapy is. It'll take depression, for example. That's probably the most common diagnosis that you see in medical records. There's the kind of this cultural myth that depression is like a disease. Depression, you have depression. Well, for most people most of the time, depression is an effect, not a cause. The thing that's wrong isn't your depression. The thing that's wrong is something going on psychologically that's causing distress, and we experience distress in the form of depression. So good therapy, as I understand it, is let's find out what's underlying this depression so that maybe it doesn't have to continue. Versus, you have depression. Depression is the love problem. Here's techniques and interventions we use for depression will change your thoughts. It's medication without any concept of, wait a minute, there's more to this than meets the eye. We're more than our symptoms. We're more than our conscious thoughts and our behavior. There's more to us than that. And before we get in such a hurry to get rid of a symptom, which generally doesn't work, get rid of the depression, maybe it's there for a reason. Maybe we can understand the reason. And out of that understanding comes the freedom to do things differently so that we don't have to keep experiencing the same kind of distress. How can people choose or work out whether they are currently with a therapist that is useful and effective for them? What is a way that a patient or somebody that is going through therapy would be able to judge the usefulness of the therapeutic relationship with the particular clinician they're working with? So there's different, I should put this in context. I mean, there's different kinds of therapy for different purposes, the kind of therapy that I practice and that I talk about is called psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, which is oriented around coming to no aspects of our experience that we're not fully known. And that requires a relationship. It happens in a relationship. So remember I said, you come into the therapy relationship, you bring your lenses or your templates from your past relationships and you start reliving them, reenacting women therapy. That's where the information is. So once you understand that, what it means is, if you're in meaningful therapy that's aimed at inside an understanding, means you're going to be talking about the relationship in the room with the therapist. So here's like a two question test. Are you getting meaningful for psychotherapy? It comes from a friend and colleague of Michael Carson. I can't take credit for it. Think of a time that you were upset with your therapist. Did you tell them? Yes or no? If the answer is yes, might be in meaningful therapy. If the answer is no, you're not in meaningful therapy. Why? Because the work is, we count on the patient to fuck up the therapy relationship in the same kinds of ways that they fuck up their other relationships. We have to talk about, we have to pay attention to what goes on in the psychotherapy relationship. It is an intimate relationship. We're talking about very, very personal, private, emotionally charged things. It is impossible to have that kind of relationship sustained over time where you do not get upset with the other person. It just doesn't happen. They're going to say, so they're going to piss you off. They're going to misunderstand you. They're going to say the wrong thing. They're going to get it wrong. They're going to say something that sounds called or callous. It's going to happen. What makes therapy, what makes this kind of therapy meaningful, is you can tell the therapist you're upset, that's the thing, step one. Now, a lot of people are very inhibited about asserting themselves about saying to another person, I don't like this and this pissed me off. Some people have a hard time doing it, so I went and had a qualification. Think about a time you were upset with the therapist. Did you tell them, or is the work in therapy moving in a direction where you're going to be increasingly likely to tell them, increasingly able to tell them in the future? So did you tell them, if you told them you might be a meaningful therapy? And then part two, when you told them, did they respond with interest and curiosity? Or did they get defensive? It's a competent therapist, you know, say to your therapist, you know, you can't even ask all about blah, blah, blah, whatever. A competent therapist doesn't explain themselves and say, oh, no, I didn't mean that. You mean it's understood? I meant to do this. When they're rushing within apology, a competent therapist basically says, oh, tell me more about that. I'd like to understand this better. So the things that are going on in the therapy relationship between the two of you, the sources of friction, become things to think about and talk about and reflect on together, right? So we say, we count on the patient to fuck up the therapy relationship the way they fuck up their other relationships, by talking about it, thinking about it, reflecting on it together, we go through a process of, you know, unfucking it, right, making sense of it, clarifying it, finding a way to have a relationship that works for two people, not just for one person at the other's expense, right? And once we know how to have a relationship that works for two people, right? That then, you know, that then that understanding, that way of being and thinking, you know, then carries over into other, other life relationships, right? So we can have a more intimate relationship with our partner, husband or wife. We can have more meaningful and closer friendships. We can, you know, collaborate more effectively with, you know, co-workers, people at work, right? Our capacity for, you know, communication and connection with other people and intimacy with other people, increases. So let's come full circle and bring it back to the example of depression. There's a lot of ways to get to depression, right? Depression is like, depression is like the psychological equivalent of fever. So what's fever? Fever is a non-specific response to an enormous range of underlying, you know, physiological difficulties, you know, anything from the common call to Ebola, right? So, you know, when a physician takes your temperature and you have fever, that's not, you know, that's not the end of the diagnostic process. That's the beginning, right? So it's non-specific. Depression is a non-specific response to an enormous range of underlying psychological difficulties. When we know somebody is depressed, we haven't diagnosed the problem. We've, you know, we've described, you know, the most surface, you know, surface manifestation of a problem. Now we've got to figure out what's going on, what's making them depressed. So, you know, suppose something consistently goes wrong in your relationships. You never get your needs met. Are there people never respond to you the way you'd really like? You never feel cared for. You never feel like you matter in relationships. Is that going to lead to depression, you know, hell yes. You are going to, sooner or later, that is going to show up as depression. What do we treat? Do we treat your depression? Or do we look at what's going on in the relationships? That's getting in the way of getting what you need from them. Well, that's what we do. We look at what's going on in the relationships that's getting in the way, starting with what's going on in the therapy relationship itself, and that understanding and carries over into our other relationships. I imagine that there must be a difficulty if the client patient is very concerned with politeness, maybe, or with not being seen by the therapist as making too much of a fuss or misbehaving in some way, because what you end up with is a very sort of sheltered, in veil that kind of obscures some of the stuff that you're looking to do. It's so such an interesting dynamic to say that what you're actively looking for as a therapist is for the patient to fuck up the relationship between you and them in the same way that they do with everybody else. Yeah, we don't even have to look for it. It just happens. What we have to do is be able to recognize it and create a space together where it becomes possible to think about it and discuss it, right? They are going to fuck up the relationship in whatever ways they're going to. And actually, the example you get may be the most common. So we see this a lot that there are people who are either relatively unaware of their own emotional needs. They don't let themselves know what they need or want, or they know, but they have a lot of difficulty speaking up and saying so. They tend to go together, actually. So if you're that kind of person, and it's really common, I mean, I really want your listeners to understand that these are not obscure disorders. This is just woven into the fabric of day to day life for lots of us. And if you're the kind of person who has difficulty recognizing or expressing your needs from other people, your experience of life, your experience of relationships is you don't get your needs met. Then a lot of things follow from that. You're likely to feel depressed, hopeless, deflated. Nothing ever works out for me. I never get what I really want. I met this guy. I thought he was wonderful. This guy was going to be different, but he doesn't care about what I need either. And then maybe the person gets increasingly resentful because they're putting all this effort and energy into this relationship and their experiences. Nothing is coming back to one way street. He's saying, you know, what's wrong? My husband doesn't, he doesn't give a shit about my feelings. He thinks only about himself. Maybe you get the husband, you get the husband and you might hear a very different take. The husband be like, I do everything I can to try to please her and make her happy. And it's like, you know, nothing I do is good enough. Why is it not good enough? Because she never said what she wanted. He's not a mind reader. So the idea is that dynamic is going to get recreated in the therapy relationship. So all kinds of things are going to come up day in and day out where the person, the patient is unhappy about something in the therapy or want something that they're not getting. And they don't speak up about it. That's the problem right there in the therapy relationship. Now they start to get, you know, resentful or sullen. And the thing that makes it therapy is you don't just relive the pattern with another person. You're just reenact it with somebody new, right? The therapist says, but something is going on here. You know, there seems to be something, something that you want from me that you're not getting. No, no, you're great. You know, you're a really good therapist. You know, everything is good. He's like, well, yeah, I know. I mean, I appreciate that you're, you know, I appreciate they're being so nice about it. But it seems like we're only hearing from one part of you. It seems like perhaps there's another part of you that has something else to say that we're not getting to hear from. So, you know, repeatedly, we just keep inviting into the room. What's being left out? I mean, a pretty sort of trivial, normal example is supposed therapists five minutes late for the session. A lot of patients who are, you know, sort of agreeable, nice people will say, oh, no, the therapist, I'm sorry, I was late. I had blah, blah, blah. Something ran over time. Oh, no, it's okay. And, you know, you're always here on time, you know, always. I knew there must have been a reason, right? They'll sort of, you know, let it slide. And what we say in therapy is, you know, basically, you know, all of that's true. You know, yes, I am always here. But, you know, I notice, I notice we're not hearing. Neither of us are hearing. You know, wow, what, you know, what it was like for you when you were here and, you know, I wasn't here when you expected me. You know, it seems like we're not hearing from that part of you. No, you've taken very good care of me. Yeah, I know that's, that's true. But perhaps there's something else that's also true. Maybe we could make some room for that. Well, I did think for a moment, maybe you just forgot about my appointment. Now, we just now we've just, you know, got a little crack in the door about, you know, there's a whole world of meaning behind that that we wouldn't otherwise hear from here about, you know, unless we pursued it. Chances are the person who does that is probably, you know, suppose they're, you know, suppose they're, I don't know, happily or unhappily married or they're in a marriage and they're dissatisfied with something. Do you think that kind of interaction? Oh, no, it's just fine. Do you think that doesn't happen every single day? In some way or other, right? Maybe we don't get to hear about the things that aren't just fine. So, right, that's, that's kind of the parallel between what goes on in the therapy relationship and what goes on in real life relationships outside of the therapy. I really like that insight. Jonathan, let's bring it home. I've really, really enjoyed this. I love your insights here. Why should people go if they want to keep up to date with the stuff you do? Well, I'm on Twitter, Jonathan at Jonathan Shedler on Twitter. I've got a web page online. It's my name and people can find articles and blogs and papers that I've written. All right Jonathan, I appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thank you.