 Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. My name is Serb Agni. I'm the author of several books on psychology. This is the most known of them. Malignan said blood and now this is the British one. If you don't mind. This is the end of the club. Now to the lecture. Please, if you could only rise. You can sit down. Why did you get up? Because I asked you. Okay, any other question? Why did you get up? Authority. Authority? Yes. Why did you get up? Respect. Respect. Respect to authority. Or you didn't want to embarrass me. You didn't want me to shame you. Yes. Maybe we want to win. We want to be good start. Respect. We say get up. We get up. If I say get up, you get up. We'll tell you to jump out the window and jump out the window. For the first time, we can win. Okay. I have lectured in many, many countries, as you can imagine. And I can tell you that there are countries in which almost no one will get up. For example, the country that I come from. Israel. If I tell a group of Israelis in a lecture, same setting, authority figure, audience and so on. If I tell them get up, one or two will get up in a group like this. And the others will say why? What for? Why do you want us to get up? What will happen after that? Where are you leading, et cetera, et cetera? In other words, ladies and gentlemen, it's very, very important. It's a culture and society that people come to you as therapists or as psychologists. Some of you will become therapists. Some of you will become psychologists. Some of you will become, normally, it's Macedonian politicians. But those of you who become therapists and psychologists will encounter people. Patients, other therapists, colleagues and so on and so forth. Always ask yourself what is the cultural and social background of your patients. It is critical. Don't think that this is a secondary issue. It is actually the first issue that you should ask yourself. Macedonia belongs to this group of societies and cultures. Conformist, collectivist, you care very much about what other people say about you. You care very much about other people's opinions. You are embedded in a community and you define yourself. Your self-identity is derived from your relationships with others. With your family, with your generation, with your colleagues, with your friends and so on. So you are collectivist. You are consensual. You are conflict averse. You don't like conflict. You are trying to avoid conflict at all costs. Sometimes too much cost. You are consensual. And you are hierarchical authoritative as I just spoke to you. I stood here, I'm an authority figure. Whatever that means. I told you to get all of you, all of you, not one of you, remain seated. So you respond to authority. Contra to that. These societies, some of them are very, very accomplished societies such as Japan. Japan is identical. It's also conformist, collectivist, consensual, etc. So the Japanese are the same. Here you would put, for instance, Israel. Some parts of the United States. Not all. In the South, South and United States is more like this. But East Coast and Northern United States are more like this. These societies are individualistic. They do not respect authority. They doubt authority. They question authority. So they are defiant. And they are narcissistic. They pursue their own goals, accomplishments and desires and benefits at the expense of others. They are exploitative. These are examples of two types of societies. If you have an Albanian patient and a Macedonian patient, this would require two completely different treatment approaches, treatment plans. Completely different considerations. If you're someone from Turkey and someone from Israel, again, two completely different plans of treatment approaches, techniques. Which techniques to use? Gestaltis for one type of patient. Cognitive behavioral therapies for another. You can't use all the treatment options. All the treatment modalities with all the patients. Today what I'm going to do, I'm going to discuss five topics in psychology, like this one, culture and society and so on. Five issues in psychology. And I'm going to demonstrate these issues via little known, little known, mental health disorders. Disorders that you cannot find in the diagnostic and statistical manual. Or disorders that are so rare that there are few people in the world with these disorders. But each disorder will teach us something about human nature. Human mind and US therapies. Or teachers of psychology or psychologists or whatever. Let's start with culture and society. We have something called culture-bound syndromes. Culture-bound syndromes mean syndromes, mental health problems, that are unique to specific locations in the world. When such a patient emigrates to the United States and goes to a psychiatrist or a therapist, this kind of patient will not be understood. Because his disorder, the pattern of abnormal behavior, is unique to his culture, society and geography. Cannot be found anywhere else in the world. I'll give you four very brief examples. Each example I will write down the name of the disorder. And you, if you want to, can look it up later on the internet or in books and learn more about it, if you want. It's up to you. The disordered marker. The first one is called ZAR. ZAR is when a patient comes and claims to have been possessed by a demon. It's possession, in effect. But not possession, like in Western society. In Western society, the demon is an external, hostile entity. It is an entity that is evil, malicious, takes over someone's body in order to use the body for its own purposes. ZAR is something different. ZAR is a disorder which we find in Iran, Ethiopia, other parts of the Middle East as well. ZAR is an intimate relationship between the patient and his or her demon. It's a little like a couple. Like a couple. The patient has intimate knowledge of the demon, develops a relationship with the demon, accommodates herself or himself to the demon, and they live together happily ever after in the same body. They are sharing the same body. It's like someone once defined friendship. That's what is friendship. Friendship is two souls in the same body. Avistose. Friendship is two souls in the same body. Two souls in the same body is ZAR. When such a person comes to you, the best treatment technique would be couples therapy. I'm not kidding. Couple therapy. It is a form of possession, unique to special geographies. You're not likely as a therapist to come across someone with ZAR. But it shows you that mental health is not a science. In the sense... Culture. Talking about ZAR. Mental health is not a science with strict quantifiable elements. It's not like physics. Mental health depends where, who, when, when also, as you will see later. It's very fluid. It's a little like art, closer to art than to science. Although if you go to the Western universities, the psychologists, they will be very angry. They will say, no, no, it's a science. We have now machines that measure blood flow in the brain. So it's a science. That's of course a joke. We'll come to it later. Psychology has never been a science. And never will be a science. Psychology is about human beings. When human beings are involved, we don't have science. We have observations. Yes, we have observations. We can even systematize the observations. But we can never make a science out of it, which we will come to later. Another example is called... That's a tough one. They are all examples of culture. I think you for sure, is a mental health disorder found only in one country in the whole world. Japan. Japanese are, as we just said, collectivists and centralists, they are very... They are shame driven. It's a society that is shame driven, embarrassment driven. The main thing in Japanese society, as in Arab society, by the way, and some other societies, is shame. To avoid shame. To avoid embarrassment. To avoid disgrace. People not to talk about you, etc., etc. Japanese are like that. This disorder, means my body is an embarrassment. It is the belief that the patient develops. That his body causes other people embarrassment. Not him. But the body causes other people embarrassment. So for instance, he believes that he has a bad smell. His body exudes a bad smell. Or his body is ugly. Very ugly. And he's not concerned about himself. He's concerned that other people are inconvenienced. That other people feel bad, because they are exposed to bad smell. Or to ugly person. That is strictly Japanese. I think it would be very difficult to find in other societies. Something you even are familiar with, because it existed in Macedonian society, until recently, maybe even today. Mandyoko. Mandyoko means evil eye. Evil eye. Evil eye means, if you have a baby, or a child, and someone looks at the baby, or the child, and he's jealous. Jealous that you have a baby, or jealous that the baby is beautiful, or jealous that the baby is healthy, and so on. That person who is looking at the baby, gives the baby the evil eye. It's called Mandyoko, and it's common in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, and so on. It is a mental health disorder, because the person who believes in Mandyoko develops total paranoid ideation. Total paranoia. It's a paranoid spectrum disorder. But unique to Spanish-speaking provinces. There was something like that in Macedonia. Evil eye. And we say poopo too. In Spain. And by the way, in Spanish, Spanish, for instance, Spanish Jews that emigrated to Turkey. My mother is a Turkish Jew. Spanish, Turkish Jew. Her family emigrated from Spain to Turkey. So they brought with them the Mandyoko to Turkey. So the Spanish Jews in Turkey, the Ladino Jews, have this. In these societies, developed huge rituals, treatment modalities in psychotherapy, rituals outside psychotherapy, and all codes of conduct to avoid Mandyoko. It's a whole science of how to avoid Mandyoko. I will give you one example. If a baby becomes sick, after a neighbor saw him and gave him the Mandyoko, so there's a neighbor, she saw the baby, she gave him Mandyoko, baby became sick. Why she? Do you know men with... if you like? They say that this is culture, see, it's a cultural artifact. Absolutely. That's why I asked. Absolutely, it's a cultural artifact. It's a gender discriminatory approach, gender prejudice. But I'm mentioning she all the time because Mandyoko, the people who cast Mandyoko are exclusively women. That's not correct to me. I was sure about it. Excessively women. So if this neighbor woman casts Mandyoko on the baby and the baby becomes sick, there is a whole procedure. The baby has to be sold to another family. Sold. For one coin. So they take the baby to another family, they give the baby, they take the coin. And the baby changes his name. Why? To deceive the devil. So when the devil looks for him, for Kouhe, he will not find him and the baby changes his name. And these babies are called Merkado. If you come across someone in Spain, Portugal, Latin America, Brazil and so on, called Merkado or Merkada means that he is a sold baby. He was sold because of Mandyoko. He or she. Sold for a coin. Not for a ritual. It's a ritual but that family like Koum, a little like Madremia. Finally, the last example I will give you although there are many, is homosexuality. And this time, in the West, I don't know if you know that until 1980, 1980, not 1880, 1980, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. It was defined as a mental health diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 3. So if you get a copy of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 3, you will find among the other mental health problems, paranoias, schizophrenia, you will find homosexuality. So homosexuality was a mental illness in the West. Actually, it was also criminal offense in Britain until the 1940s, in Switzerland until the 1950s, in the United States until the 1920s and so on, so forth. That's besides the point. More importantly, it was a mental health problem. People were treated for homosexuality. They were taken to psychiatrists and therapists, and the psychiatrists and therapists tried to teach them to love women, if they were men. Or to love men if they were women. This is a nice case. There are bad cases for treatment. No, that's a criminal. People were put in jail, Oscar Wilde, of course. No, no. From the Swiss side. Yes. Homosexuality is an example of culture-bound syndrome. In Western society, homosexuality was considered to be a mental illness in others, no, not at all. Okay. This is the issue of the one, culture versus society. I would like two volunteers to come here, and if no one comes here, I'm choose, like in the Israeli Army. Two volunteers. I'm looking at you. I have to shoot. No, you are too knowledgeable. I have to be careful. Of course you. I'm looking at you half an hour. And a woman. No, woman. I'm looking for a woman. I'm looking for a woman. You were treated. You're not much. You're not much. You will be in the next demonstration. Sorry, sorry. You have been chosen. Don't worry. Just taking this one. So, sir, maybe we should have some of the speaks in usual. We are not sure. We are not sure. Come. For this demonstration, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. For next demonstration, I will ask you to prove to me that you are real. Verbally? Any way you choose. Prove to me that you are real. I don't believe you are real. That's all very convincing. Prove it. They can see me. They can hear me. We take a coffee break? No. Go ahead. It's only you and me. I want you to prove to me that you are real. I can't see me. You can hear me. I can't touch you. You can touch me. Maybe you can smell me. If you're closer, you can feel something about me or I about you. You've heard, of course, of hallucinations. Yes. So, maybe I'm hallucinating that you're here. I'm hallucinating that you're touching me. I'm hallucinating. It's very wrong. It's very wrong. It's very wrong. I don't do that. Just like this. Finish this. Leave it to the... What's your name? Lydia? I'm surrounded. All Lydia's are surrounded. Really? Lydia is trying to convince me that she's real and she says that I see her, but we have hallucinations where people think that they see something and it's not there. She says that I can touch her and we have type of hallucination that's called tactile hallucination where we can touch something and it's not there. She says I can hear her and of course the most common form of hallucination is auditory hallucinations where we can hear voices and we came out of family and we came out of family but there was no such force. So auditory hallucinations tactile hallucinations visual hallucinations at this stage I'm not convinced that you're real. I know where you are. Can you find something that will convince me completely that you're real? Beyond doubt. Not possible to be hallucination. No. Solicism. I'm not vouching for any philosophical system. I'm asking you to convince me that you're real. You told me that I can see you. Not convincing. You told me that I can touch you. You told me that I can hear you. Do you have anything that will convince me that you're real? I want to be real. Do I want you to be real? Yeah. If I want you to be real it makes things even worse because it means you're real. Maybe you're real. Maybe you're real. What we call voluntary hallucinations. So the thing is, the thing is this there is no way she can convince me that she's real. Because of it. Just to jump in real quick. So the majority in our culture makes the objective be yourself. It's all about you. When we all see and touch her it's very true. One on one or one on many doesn't matter because there is something called shared psychosis where a group of people develop common hallucination to all of them. Yes. There is no way to convince me or you as a group that she's real. Since you're not real you can be real. So how do we know that she's real? How do we know that she's real? How do we know that Lydia is real? What's your name? Sethan mentioned an agreement. When we have a sufficient number of sensor sensor is information that we get through our senses through our eyes, ears, smell, face, etc. We call all this information coming through the senses sensor. Many sensors together are sensorium. When we have an overwhelming a lot of sensor organized not only sensor but organized in a sensorium in a matrix or in a pattern we decide totally arbitrarily that this is real. Reality is therefore a convention. A convention something we decide totally arbitrarily based on sensory input that is organized in a certain way. Lydia gives me sensory input voice, I can see her she touched me etc. But this sensory input was not random input it was organized in the form of Lydia it came from the same direction when she said I'm touching you, I also felt the touch so there was correlation between the her mobile is ringing despite the sound so here's another When you put all the sensor together in a matrix that is consistent no part contradicts the other that is coherent the parts sit together and create a story narrative we call it and that is strong we call it a strong sensorium that cannot be explained by any other way when we have this we say that this is real but there is no way to prove it we cannot prove reality there are mental states like psychosis and other mental states not only psychosis I'll give you a few examples maybe to silence it I don't know how to deal with it let me have a step on it the perception that something or someone is real depends not only on sensor that are organized but also depends on your state of mind I can give you a drug your state of mind will change your sensorium will change your perception of reality will change you can become psychotic especially if you listen to the lecture to the end you can become psychotic perception of the world will change perception of reality will change there are dozens of mental health conditions where perception of reality changes the other option is to answer most or you can answer it's new I don't know how to deal but you can answer is that proof that you are real? no hallucination that answers the phone now I'll give you a few examples of mental health conditions where reality itself is in question not only perception of reality but reality itself is in question these patients will never agree with you about reality never mind what you do never mind which technique you use never mind which treatment option modality that you cannot reach agreement with them on reality I'll give you a few examples all these examples as I told you at the beginning are rare conditions conditions that are very rare you are not likely to have a person in practice ever but it's interesting that they exist because they teach us some cupgrass delusion cupgrass delusion is all of them are named after the doctor who discovered them cupgrass delusion is the delusion that your wife husband family members pet your dog is not really your wife, husband family member or pet but has been taken over by aliens or by another entity so if I had cupgrass delusion I would look at Lydia my wife and I would say she looks like Lydia she talks like Lydia she smells like Lydia and moves like Lydia but I know very well that it's not Lydia it's an alien who took over her body and is using her body to communicate with me to do something to me and so cupgrass delusion is the delusion that there is an imposter inside the body of people who are close to you or even your pets it's that bad and nothing you can do will convince these people that your wife is your wife what are you talking about, it's your wife nothing cheap, no no, it's not my wife it's an alien, it's an imposter this is cupgrass delusion psychosis now this is something much more common it's a part of a much bigger disorder called schizophrenia parallel psychosis is a situation where fragments of the personality and the sense that go with them are projected outside so it's like a breakdown, this integration of the personality fragments, it's like explosion personality exploded the fragments of the personality were thrown all over and each one of them is attached to some kind of sensor so it could be auditory this kind of person would hear voices it could be visual so he would see visions, etc etc this is psychosis it's also a condition that denies reality because these people are convinced beyond any doubt that what they hear, what they see is real but it's not there, of course not only are they convinced that it's real they act as though it is real so if a voice tells you to do something you do it if you see something, you walk around it it's very common one of the tests in initial therapy of psychotic people is to ask them if they see something they say yes, I see everything and to ask them to walk into it they walk around it's one of the initial tests so psychosis is an example of denial of reality shared psychosis shared psychosis is the new term for foli adeur foliacrisio which in French means going crazy in two or going crazy in a lot many people go crazy foliacrisio now known as shared psychosis is psychosis it's classic psychosis with auditory hallucinations visual hallucinations and so on and so forth paralleled her secretary delusions, paralleled hallucinations someone is chasing me, the CIA is bugging me Gueski is after me you know, this kind shared psychosis mealk so I'm not politically it's mealk mealk is chasing me that would be precise in my case it could be you so it's a psychosis that is shared by more than one person usually there is one dominant person this person is called the host one dominant person and this dominant person infects the others, exactly like epidemic infects the others we have this in counts in count settings, we have shared psychosis so for instance the famous case of 900 and something people who drank poison Jones the famous he said the world is ending the world will end in two days and before the world ends better to commit suicide 900 and something people committed suicide some of them voluntarily some of them not so but a few hundred volunteered to commit suicide because they believed that in two days the world is ending so this is shared psychosis shared psychosis is auditory visual and so on but mostly parallel shared psychosis is usually parallel but the important thing is not to define now but the important thing is these people lose touch with reality their reality is different if I am an evangelical church in the United States I could induce shared psychosis in my congregation towards Lydia claiming that she is the devil and there are documented cases like hundreds isolating a single person in the congregation and saying she is the devil and inducing shared psychosis towards her so it involves paranoia but lack of contact with reality Anton Babinski Anton Babinski syndrome Anton Babinski syndrome is someone who is blind the patient is blind cortically blind the optical nerve, the cortex are dead there is no electrical activity in the brain in the optical regions the optical nerve is completely dead but the person insists that he is seen or she is seen they insist that nothing is wrong with them they can see anything in everything even though they are totally blind so to compensate for their blindness because they are blind they can't say anything but they claim that they see anything so to compensate for that they create a whole reality in their mind they create a reality that they believe is outside themselves and they walk in this reality which is completely in their head they walk in this reality as though they see like they see we call this the Anton Babinski syndrome again denied of reality and finally a very bizarre syndrome pseudo-insomnia sleep state misperception again remember what we are talking about we are talking about mental health disorders where there cannot be agreement on what is reality if such a person comes to your office as a therapist you cannot begin to talk to them because there is no agreement on what is reality you cannot the modes of communication are closed in psychosis first you have to treat with medication and only then you can start talk therapy because of that there is no agreement on reality if you tell the psychotic person you are not hearing what they are talking about God is talking to them can't you hear? can't you hear the voices? so you have to treat them with medication first pseudo-insomnia or sleep state misperception is when someone is asleep but thinks that he is awake and they are convinced that they are awake and when they wake up in the morning they say I didn't sleep one minute and their body reacts as though they slept their body is well rested there is no problem no reaction to but psychologically they become more and more and more tired they become sluggish, they can hardly move they sit a lot they develop psychosomatic, psychogenic symptoms like tachycardia because they didn't sleep and they didn't sleep and they begin to faint they begin to collapse and they leave the night they sleep weather, by the way these people sleep very well but they are convinced that they are awake they wake up in the morning they didn't wake up, they are still awake this is called pseudo-insomnia here is a disagreement on reality you tell the psychotic person you are asleep here is a video, you see you are asleep here is your EEG electricity patterns in the brain you see that you are asleep here is a video of you asleep another they did not sleep, they know they did not sleep you are cheating them, you are inventing something this is called pseudo-insomnia what is she feeling what is she feeling in her hand cold water wet and what is he feeling how do you feel I don't know but I feel the same how do you know that you feel the same I feel that too you feel it, how do you know that he feels it same water yes but are you the same person how do you know anything about him same water yes but are you the same person are you him he, you think how do you know he has water, you have water he is feeling it, how do you know what is feeling you know You said that she is feeling wet. How do you know that when she is feeling wet, it is the same like you are feeling wet? Okay, you are feeling wet, she is feeling wet. How do you know it is the same feeling? Now tell us. How do you know that she is feeling wet, like you are feeling wet? How do you know it is the same feeling? She is a person. And you are a person. That's common basis. So tell me, are you the same person? You are a person. Are you the same person? So how do you know that her wetness is your wetness? How do you know that the way, the way, natural, that she feels wet is the same way that you feel wet? Because I know that she is a normal with normal feelings. So what you are saying is this. Let me translate you. You are saying we are two identical machines. We are the same machines. We are machines with programming to react in certain ways. So you are saying we are identical. Because look, if you are not identical, you cannot know anything about her. If you are not identical in every bit, every aorta, every atom, every molecule, if you are not exactly the same, you cannot know how she feels wet. But if you are identical, if you have two copies of the same machine, iPhone 6, iPhone 6, that machines are the same. Even machines are not the same. If you ever work with machines, you know that each machine is its own personality. But machines are the same. If I take my laptop to this technician, that technician, that technician, that technician, we all know what machines are the same. Are people machines? How do you know that she feels wet? Like you feel wet? The answer is you don't know. You don't know that she feels, you never know. You don't know that she feels wet the same way. You don't know that she feels pain the same. You don't know that she sees the color red the same way like you. You can agree to call this red. But that's it. You don't know that she experiences red the same way you experience it. There is Daltonism, color blindness, two people looking at red. They will both call it red. But the Daltonist experiences red differently. So we don't know. Thank you. If we don't know, if we don't know anything about another person, any single thing, what do we do? We project what we know of ourselves onto another. All human relationships are projection. Projection, as you know, is a defense mechanism in psychology where we attribute to other people what is going on in our minds. Something is going out in our mind. And we say it must be the same with her. It must be the same with him. This is projection. Sometimes projection is pathological. So if I'm a very jealous person, I would say my wife is very jealous. That is projection. I'm actually jealous. I'm projecting. This is pathological projection. But there is non-pathological projection, normal projection. In this normal projection we call empathy. Empathy is when we put ourselves in someone else's shoes. We say, how would it be to be legal? How would it be to be legal? So I put myself in her shoes for a minute. I project myself. But it's important to remember. I project myself. I will never know what it means to be legal. Ever. In principle. No human communication is possible. When we communicate, we exchange symbols. And we agree on the symbols, but not on the people. When I talk to one of you, we exchange symbols. I give you words. You give me words. And we agree on the words. But I don't know anything about you. And you cannot know anything about me. Ever. Now this approach is known in psychology and philosophy, sorry, as solipsism. Solipsism is the belief or school in philosophy that says that essentially the only object of knowledge, the only thing we can know, anything about, is us. Me. I can know maybe. I can know something about me. But zero about you. And nothing about reality. And nothing about the world. Only thing I can say for sure is this. This is the only thing I can say for sure. I think, therefore, I am. I cannot prove that you are. I cannot prove that you are. I cannot prove anything. But I can prove, and only to myself, that I exist. Because if I don't exist, who is thinking this? If I don't exist, who is thinking I don't exist? For me to think I don't exist, I must first exist. The machine. The machine thinks. It's a machine like perception, yes. But every sentence comes from existence. So if even the sentence I don't exist proves that I exist. Because I have to say it. So this is solipsism. This, by the way, was said by Descartes. No, I know that you do. So this is solipsism. Now, as I told you, we know everything about ourselves and nothing about other people. So how do we manage? How do we function? A society is grown. You're all here together listening to me and talking to you. I assume that you exist. Why? What is all this? This is something we call the intersubjective agreement. Stefan, this is the agreement you talked about. Stefan mentioned an agreement. This agreement is called the intersubjective agreement. You are subject, I am subject. People are called subjects. In philosophy, they are called objects in psychology, by the way. Very interesting. In psychology, we call them objects. In philosophy, we call them subjects. So in philosophy, we say that subjects, people make agreement about the world. You can ask, and how do we know that this agreement is correct? Because it works. We don't know that it is correct. We know that it's working, not like we know. We make an agreement between us about reality and we don't know if it is correct agreement. We don't know if it is really reality. For instance, I made an agreement with you about what it is to be human. I am wet. You are wet. What it is to be human. You are feeling wet. I am feeling wet. This is an agreement. Do I know it's true? No. Because I don't know how you feel wet. And I know only how I feel wet. I don't know if it's true. But I know that it's working. Because we can agree that we are both wet after a cold water. Understand? It's agreement. This agreement, don't make a mistake, is not true. It's not correct. It's not real. This agreement between people about what is reality and what it means to be human. What it means to be human. This agreement is not real, not true, not correct. It's functional. It's working. Okay. Again, I will give you a few examples. I think it's better to have a little break. Five, ten minutes. I'll give you a few examples, enough that we take a break. Those who survive, come back. Again, a few mental health issues that demonstrate that we can't access other people. That the agreement about what is to be human. The agreement about what is reality is totally arbitrary. There's none of that. Totally arbitrary and only functional. It doesn't have to be real. So, start with a disorder called Quota. Quotac syndrome, patient with Quotac syndrome, believes that she already died. I'm saying she because two-thirds of patients are women. Believes that she already died. Or, believes that she doesn't have a body. Or, believes that she doesn't have parts of the body. She believes she doesn't have a heart or brain. But it's not believed. She behaves as though she doesn't have a body. So, she walks around and she refuses to eat. So, I don't need to eat. I don't have a body. I don't have a body. Or I don't have parts of the body. So, for instance, if she says, I don't have a stomach, I don't need to eat. Or, I don't have a brain, so I don't need to watch or read. There's been, the first case of Quotac reported in the 19th century was a woman we don't know her name. But she was identified with literature as Mademoiselle X. Of course, a Frenchman discovered it. So, as Mademoiselle X. And Mademoiselle X died because she refused to eat. And she refused to eat because she said she doesn't have a stomach and intestines. And she wouldn't eat. Why? So, she didn't eat. She died of starvation, of hunger. She was a rich woman. But she didn't eat. Why is this? How is this relevant? People with Quotac syndrome don't accept the intersubjective agreement. You remember we have intersubjective agreement? What is to be human? They don't accept this agreement of what is to be human. For them, it's possible to be human without a body. Possible to be human without a brain. These people didn't say I'm not human. They didn't say I'm alien. They said I'm human, but I don't have a body. So, they did not accept the intersubjective agreement that we all have about what is to be human. This is Quotac. And indeed, in French, it's called de l'ir de negation. The illusion of negation. So, they negate their humanity. They don't accept the intersubjective agreement. Another example is Saxonia. Saxonia, also known as sleep sex, sounds good. Saxonia, sleep sex, is having sex while you are truly and deeply asleep. Not pretending to be asleep, it's not half asleep, it's nagogic, or it's napontic, between sleep and waking up. Not it's nagogic sleep, not it's napontic sleep, it means between waking and sleeping, but deep sleep, extremely deep, dreamless sleep. Non-rapid eye movement sleep. Dreamless delta phase of sleep. Yes, the deepest phase of sleep. And during this phase, the person has sex. Orgasm, everything. I cannot make a demonstration on this particular issue. It's for our homework. No, I forgot, simply for homework. Yeah, homework. But Saxonia sleeps sex. And these people have sex and everything, and even there were many cases, several cases, of impregnating pregnancy that resulted from Saxonia, and there have been at least seven documented cases of rape. Rape where the rapist was exonerated based on Saxonia. It's a rape condition. Now, why am I mentioning this condition here? Saxonia, because there is no agreement, the intersubjective agreement breaks. The intersubjective agreement says to be human is to have a body. People with Cotal say, no, I'm human, I don't have a body. The intersubjective agreement says to have sex, you must be fully awake. And sex means meeting not only of the bodies, but also of the minds, not to mention condoms. So these people say, no, I can have sex while I'm totally asleep. While I'm not there. I can have sex without being there. Now that is way outside the intersubjective agreement. They challenge the intersubjective agreement again. And finally, there is a very much more famous and much more common condition called fugue. Fugue state. This you see in movies also. Fugue state is you have a family, you have work, you have everything, and then suddenly you wake up completely elsewhere with another family, another work, other memories, another life completely. And then you wake up in that life. You continue that life, and a few months later you kind of wake up from this dream and you go back to your first life. These are called fugue states, fugue states. They are actually some condition of something called dissociation, dissociative disorders. The most extreme form of dissociative disorder is known as dissociative identity disorder, which before that was called multiple personality disorder. So the most extreme form is dissociative identity. And this is considered a benign form. Benign because most fugues last a few minutes to a few hours. Very extreme fugues last up to eight months. There is no known case more than eight months. Ten. The single longest case in literature is ten months. Fugue state. That person, ten months, was a man. It was a troubling statement. He was under huge stress because he was about to lose a job. It usually happens after stress. He was to lose his job and so on. So he fugued out, disconnected, dissociated, cut himself from his life, moved to another city, found another job, met a woman, married her, and had a child with her. Ten months later he reverted, we call it reversion. He moved back and he woke up to his first life, not knowing anything about his new wife and his child and his work and his book. He was shocked to find himself in a totally foreign environment. Why am I mentioning this? Because our intersubjective agreement, the agreement about what it means to be human, intersubjective agreement means agreement about what is it to be human. The agreement says to be human is to have continuity, to have a biography, to have continuity, to have memory, to have a continuous memory. Without continuous memory we cannot be human. I repeat, without continuous memory of our life we cannot have identity. Identity is memory. Also in the political sphere. Nations as well. Without memory there is no identity. That's why nations, especially new nations, come up with history. They need history. They need memory. Monuments. Monuments. It's a legitimate part of inventing history. So intersubjective agreement is about memory, identity, who we are. But here are these people. I am human. I am human. I am human, but I don't have continuous identity. I am here, I am there. This family, this family, I don't remember anything. I am human. And this leads to the question. People with dissociative identity disorder, multiple personalities, 40 personalities, the most extreme case, Malibu, 80 personalities. 80. Are these humans? In which sense are they human? Don't they challenge the intersubjective agreement completely? Of these 80 personalities of Robert Maligan, 23 were children, 17 were women, 26 were men, 43 were above the age of 18, 12 were above the age of 70, 2 were infants less than 6 months. All of them were Robert Maligan. Who is Robert Maligan? Human being? In which sense? This intersubjective agreement breaks down when we confront such people. We can't understand. There's no way we can understand it. It's not that he's pretending to be a baby or that he's pretending to be a woman. It's a real personality. It comes out really. He really becomes a woman. He really becomes a baby. He really becomes old man. Real, totally real. Each personality has its history, its memories, its fears, its artistic talents, those languages that the other personalities don't know, etc., etc. We're talking about 80 people, 80 distinct people in one body. Do we agree to call this person a human being? He has 80 personalities in one body. Intersubjective agreement breaks down in front of such people. Completely. Okay, we take a break. If any of you comes back, which will be a major surprise, we will continue. In courtes, there was a guy who was working in a place called Bletchley Park. It was a secret facility of the British government intended to break the codes of the Nazis, especially the Enigma machine. He was a mathematician and he, in order to break these codes, implemented or applied one of his theories, which was published a decade before, maybe 15 years before, which was called the universal machine theory. What he called the universal machine is what we call today the computer. And the Turing invented the computer. Tell you this, so that you don't underestimate it. Hello? I didn't find the answers. What about your children? I don't like your children. Oh, right. Turing, so that you don't underestimate it, is the guy who invented the computer, one of the choices of mathematicians in world history, and so on and so forth. It was also homosexual. When it was discovered that he's a homosexual, he was subjected to interrogation by the British government. He was fired and imprisoned. When he was released, he was imprisoned after homosexual, nothing else. When he was released from prison, he survived a year or two and then committed suicide. Acupuncture bound symptoms. So, any Turing came with this. This is called the Turing test. The Turing test is a rope. In the rope, the rope is divided by a curtain. The curtain is not transparent, so that here and here separate. No one can see into the other's compartment. Here, there are three people, people, human beings. Investigator one, investigator two, investigator three. In his version, it's three, it would be more. There's one, doesn't it? Investigators. These are humans. They sit, their job, in a minute, I will tell you what it is. Here, there are two test subjects. Two test subjects. One of them is human. One of them is a computer. One of them human. One of them computer. Three human investigators. Now, the job of the three investigators is to decide which of these two is human, which is the machine. Sounds simple. So, in order to determine which is human, which is the machine, the three investigators ask questions. Ask each one of these questions. The questions are transferred through a hole in the curtain in writing so that they don't hear voices. The voice can tell you if it's machine or human. They pass on written questions and they receive written type answers. This is the Turing test. Turing said that when the machine we don't know who is the machine only when the machine will succeed to deceive to cheat the investigators only then do we have artificial intelligence. What is artificial intelligence? It's a machine, a computer that can convince another human being that it is a human being. That's Turing's definition of artificial intelligence. Now ladies and gentlemen, this happened last week. Last year a machine, a computer convinced three Harvard professors that it is a human being. That's not easy. The questions are not stupid questions. Do you have two legs? Questions are very complicated. Write a poem or let's talk of how do you feel today your own structure because machines, computers have an advantage when it comes to structure chess mathematics. There are no such questions. Questions are highly human questions. So the computer for instance wrote a poem. What is it? You try. You are humans. You try to write a poem. Wrote a poem. Describe its mood. Describe its mood. Chat it with the three professors and so on. And last year, the first time in human history a machine, a computer based on Watson, IBM's Watson cheated, deceived three professors into believing that it is the human and the human is the computer. And now we have finally according to Turing surely artificial. And this leads us to a very interesting question. That is a question known in French philosophy and French psychology. Because in France, by the way, philosophy and psychology are very mixed disciplines. There is no distinction like in the United States where everything is very technical between technical philosophy and technical psychology. But it's very mixed. So if you have people like Derrida or Foucault, they would write equally in philosophy and psychology and mix the two and it's flowing very close all the time as we used to be the case before scientific psychology was invented in the middle of the 19th century. Before the middle of the 19th century there were two disciplines. Totally mixed. So in France it's called the question of the other. The other. Now that computers can cheat us and convince us that they are human and we don't accept them as human. Why? Because they have metal and silicone and we have cargo. Why are they less human than me? If they are sufficiently good to convince a Harvard professor that alone three, that they are human why aren't they human? In which sense these computers are not human. They don't reproduce. They don't have sex. Question of time. Not yet, yes. In many humans not at all. They don't fall in love. Also question of time. Did you see the movie Blade Runner? Androids. Philip K.D., the famous author. The electric ship in the dream. Androids they are falling in love and have sex and so on. It's really a question of time. No doubt about it. Finally, 50 years from now, 100 years from now there will be androids, robots, machines, computers, whatever you want to call them they will be exactly like you. They will be with artificial skin or real skin. Because today we have 3D printing machines that print real skin. Today I repeat. We have 3D printers that print real skin. So they will have real skin they will have a body that will look exactly like you. And it will be if we have a Tony Namu skin robot and a Tony Namu skin robot I might be confused. And it's not a question of only getting confused but in which sense that Tony Namu skin robot is not human. It would be very difficult. So there's a question of the other. But it goes even deeper than that. Because if I relate to a robot as a human I relate to all humans as robots. What are you to me? Each one of you. A package. You're a package. Your nerves and muscles and other organs act nicely. It's in shrink wrap skin. And that's it. You claim that you're human. I take your claim as it is. I take your word for it that you're human. You talk to me. I talk to you. We have intersubjective agreement which I can have with the machine tomorrow. What is your advantage of a robot? In which sense are you not robots? And the answer is after many years of thinking and analyzing and so on that there is no way for you to prove that you are distinct in any way shape or form from advanced robots of the future who look like you, smell like you, act like you talk like you and think like you. So there's a question of the other. Now why am I mentioning this? I said that we relate to others with empathy. We have an agreement who is human. The intersubjective agreement about who is human, what constitutes human. We call it empathy. If I have empathy I relate to you by thinking how easy to be you. How easy to be you. As I'm thinking how easy to be you I can relate to you. It's projections, it's not true. But it's what it was. We've gone through it. What happens with people who have no empathy? Some people have no empathy. Some people have no sex life. Some people have no hair. Some people have special qualities in the polls. But what do you do if you cannot have empathy? What do we do when there's no empathy? There are people who have no empathy. We are not sure if they are who have no empathy. We are not sure yet whether it's because of genetics upbringing, childhood abuse combination of the three. But for some reason they lack empathy. They are unable unable to sign the intersubjective agreement. They cannot put themselves in other people's shoes. What happens with these people? We just said that in order as human beings we need empathy. If you don't have empathy you cannot relate to other people as human beings. You have to relate to them. You have to relate to them because you need something from other people. You work with other people. You sleep with other people. You have children with other people. You need other people. You can't isolate yourself completely. My store fixes your television. You can't avoid people. But some of them. If you don't have empathy how do you relate to these people? You don't have the intersubjective agreement. You relate to them as robots. Simple. You relate to them as avatars. As symbols. As representations. As representations. Symbols. Functions. Avatars. Proposals. For you other people if you don't have empathy other people are there as kind of a function that comes and goes. There is also no object constancy. Object constancy means that even when you are not with me you are still in me. Babies have that. Babies don't have object constancy. When the mother leaves the room because if mother is not there and they don't see mother there is no mother. Mother goes, no mother. So people with no empathy don't have object constancy. If my wife if I don't have empathy and my wife is here she is here but if she is not here she is not in my mind. They have no object constancy. Politicians. Politicians? No, stop it. You need a different kind of agreement. Now now empathy are called narcissists. And people with extreme form of narcissists in a way that is still debatable but an extreme form of narcissists is what we call psychopaths. Now this is a complex issue The official category the official diagnostic category is anti-social personality disorder. There is no psychopath. There is a psychopathy in the diagnostic and statistical manner. Only anti-social personality disorder. Psychopathy and sociopathy are terms used mainly by the media and a few scholars, a few psychologists who are not considered orthodox such as Robert Bear. So there is a group of psychologists that they insist that there is something called psychopath but the mainstream orthodoxy says there is no psychopath there is anti-social person. And in the DSM-5 in the latest edition of the diagnostic and statistical manner published last year narcissism and psychopathy are conflicted. They are not amalgamated they are not put together completely but they are kind of on a spectrum. Okay. Narcissists and psychopaths have many traits but the most important thing if I have to choose a single thing they have no empathy they don't have empathy so they are unable to relate to other people they relate to other people only in as much as these people give them something in as much as these people are functional in their lives so mostly it's what I call narcissistic supply, attention attention, miration adulation, affirmation but not only services. Only then they relate to other people they don't care about other people's emotions partly because they have no access to their own emotions needs other people's needs, priorities preferences, wishes are non-existent because they don't really relate to other people they relate to the function that other people fulfill in their lives they relate it's like through a glass they don't really touch someone else they touch the glass behind which there is someone else and so they need to interact with the glass not with the person so they don't care about the other person's priorities it makes it of course very difficult also to communicate with them because in order to communicate we must have an intersubjective agreement communication is based on being similar that is why it would be very difficult to communicate with an octopod from Neptune because an octopod from Neptune is not likely to be similar to you and you will not have a dictionary but it's easier for me to communicate with Lydia or Zola not only because we have a lot in similar we have a lot together common the intersubjective agreement narcissists have no empathy they have no intersubjective agreement they cannot communicate for them for the narcissists everyone else is an alien everyone else came from another planet they cannot talk to aliens extraterrestrial they use the extraterrestrial for services for narcissistic supply attention and these things but they can't communicate within aren't they lonely? they're not lonely because the narcissist is his own object as we say in psychology when we grow up as children we begin to notice that there are other people that accept us you know until the age of about 2 we are totally solipsistic we know only that we exist even mother is our extension mother there's no mother in we there's mother we mother is our continuation as we grow up there is a break it's a very traumatic break there is a whole sea of literature after the age of 2 when the child suddenly notices that the mother is not part of him the mother is not part of the child the child suddenly sees that there is mother and there is me it's a child break, traumatic break second birth and we call this object relations this is when we have suddenly an object and we relate to it narcissists and psychopaths of course before this step they don't progress beyond this they have no object relations because they have no objects they are the true solipsists they and they alone exist there's no one else there all of you are for the narcissists all of you are kind of dim reflections on distant screens from time to time I touch the screen because I need your function touch you like a computer exactly like a touch screen touch the screen bring it forward use you and remove my finger it should disappear if you refuse to disappear it's a malfunction if you insist on being real with the narcissists if you say hey wait a minute I'm real I'm a real human being with my needs with my wishes, my hopes, my fears the narcissists is even I would say terrified as you would be terrified if an icon on the computer would wake up and start talking to you as you would be terrified exactly the same now in my book I suggested that narcissists and psychopaths don't have empathy but they have a variant of empathy which I call cold empathy cold empathy so everyone has warm empathy cold empathy is the ability to fully understand other people but without emotions exactly like I would read the user manual of a laptop so I would fully understand a laptop but of course I don't fully love a laptop well it depends which laptop I choose no I prefer a laptop you understand what I mean so I say that the narcissists has cold empathy to read other people like X-ray like the narcissists has X-ray and is able to look at someone and read that person but in a cold calculated way like I would read a manual of a television say or a refrigerator laptop and say oh this is the person now in order to get him to do this I need to push this button these are his buttons I need to push his button this is his weakness these are his fears these are his needs and I can push these needs and fears and vulnerabilities to get him to do what I want and this is what I call cold empathy but this is a new suggestion a new one and it's still not accepted the current orthodoxy in psychology is that there is no empathy at all I don't think it's possible not to have empathy how does the narcissist know to manipulate people? narcissists manipulate people all the time how can you manipulate if you have nothing in common, I mean no ability to read so I think there is more to it but definitely not the classic type of it psychopaths are even worse why the narcissist regards other people as potentialities so if I look at you if a narcissist looks at you he would relate to you as potential for let's say a narcissistic supply or you all potentials for narcissists but right now a narcissist doesn't need supply so he doesn't activate you but when he needs supply he will activate you how will he activate you? you need compliments he will give you compliments you need to feel intelligent he will make you feel intelligent you need to feel beautiful he will tell you beautiful whatever it takes like a rendian machine or MRI and then push about the psychopath doesn't bother even with it psychopath not only lacks empathy but lacks the wish to interact with people narcissists is forced to interact with people because the narcissist needs narcissistic supply the narcissist needs to be told brilliant that he is perfect that he is beautiful that he is amazing that he is one of a kind narcissists needs this constant adulation admiration, attention if he stops getting it he falls apart like a vampire no narcissistic supply no narcissistic narcissistic supply is used to regulate some of women self worth the sense of self worth of the narcissist fluctuates one day he thinks he is gone one day he thinks he is gone in order to keep thinking that he is gone which is a good thing he needs constantly people to tell him you are gone so he needs people to regulate his sense of self worth and to keep it in this level psychopaths don't give people 8 or they don't need narcissistic supply they don't need people 8 or psychopaths dehumanize and objectify in other words they treat people as total objects they don't expect anything from people they don't want from you attention, adulation, admiration nothing, they don't want anything from you get to you as an object take you, shake you get from you what they want whatever they want from you sex, whatever narcissistic and psychopaths dehumanize and objectify the extreme form of psychopath the one we see in movies the one we see in movies is of course the psychopathic sadistic serial killer most serial killers are sexual sagies but also have been diagnosed with psychopathy Robert Hare made 30 years of studies in prisons and interviewed I think all the serial killers in the universe and all of them were 80, more than 80% of them were diagnosed as psychopaths as well as some of them small minority were sexual sagies now the serial killer objectifies to the maximum very common for a serial killer to take a trophy what is trophy? body part body part nose and ear vagina, body parts this is the ultimate objectification while the psychopath the regular psychopath will come to you and regard you as a bank account or as a sex machine and will treat you as a bank account until he gets what he wants and if he doesn't get what he wants he will get violent in most cases it's a classic psychopath the serial killer psychopath will treat you totally as object he will kill you rape you, kill you, cut you off and take you as souvenir in most cases it's called trophy so this is the extreme the extent to which it can get this is the extent to which it can get narcissists will not cut you off because they need you for narcissistic supply and so on but they will not hesitate to damage you in other ways they will take souvenirs from you in other ways maybe not body parts but other things there's now narcissists and psychopaths deserve their own but narcissists and psychopaths are also mental leaders yes a question about the cold empathy so is that something that defines narcissists and psychopaths it's only found in narcissists narcissists and psychopaths or is that something that they possess because there are a lot of other examples of social manipulators like social predators and the liars people who lie all the time they do yes they possess a kind of cold empathy but it's not what defines them my contention which is now common thinking is that most of these people are narcissists and psychopaths social prejudice is narcissistic and psychopath usually if there is a money there is a motivation if there is a motivation to feel great grandiose the difference between narcissists and psychopath is that the narcissists want one thing and the psychopaths another attention and psychopath wants practical things money, sex what will manipulate what will manipulate, what will manipulate what will manipulate, what will manipulate the other difference cold empathy is a new suggestion my suggestion is not part of your talk but I suggest I oppose that it''s limited to narcissists and psychopaths narcissists and psychopaths are extreme mental death cases but the humanization andだけ bake are common responses, much more common than narcissists and psychopaths. Narcissists and psychopaths together are less than 2% of the clinical population, population who gets to the mental health system. So it's a very small number of people. But objectification and humanization, treating people not as humans but as objects, that is much more common. Of course, a very famous example is the way Nazis regarded the Jews. They dehumanized the Jews. They made propaganda films comparing the Jews to mice, to vermin, to fleas, to viruses, and so on. They dehumanized the Jews, then they objectified the Jews. They treated the Jews as objects. They took them off the train, immediately dumped them in a gas chamber, killed them in the gas chamber, burned their bodies, processed the bodies, made soap out of the bodies, converted them to real objects. So aim, objectification, and dehumanization are very common collective responses to conflict. Collective responses to conflict. Where Rwanda, or Kutzi, and Kutuz dehumanized, objectified each other. Whenever there's a conflict, especially eruptive conflict, we dehumanize and objectify. Even with the Ebola epidemic, we have dehumanizing, objectifying reactions to people. Especially since we isolate them, we put them away. Like their objects, we put them away, we current them. It's an object of national response, but it's also objectifying response. Whenever there's a collective, a collective, not individual, we're stressed. When conflict, we react, we become psychos. The Nazi period was a period of ascendent psychopathy. Psychopaths was in charge, but the vast majority of Germans became psychopaths as well. Shared psychosis, an effect full circle. It's possible for a collective to become psychopathic or narcissistic. It is an infectious disease, an epidemic. We should not think of mental health as something unique or isolated to individuals. Individuals can and do infect each other. With Ebola, but with psychopathy also. With malaria or tuberculosis, but also with narcissism. We have collective responses and collective mental health issues. The final topic is the current state of psychology. The dirty secret of psychology is as opposed to as distinct from psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are also medical doctors. The dirty secret of psychology is that when they grow up, they want to be scientists. They want to feel that their psychology is an exact science. They want to feel that they are physicists. They envy physicists. Physicists envy. I'm saying physicists because I'm physicists. Also physicists. So they envy physicists. Physicists deal with quantifiable elements. They get beautiful machines. They get global prizes. They are famous. They appear on Discovery Channel and so on. It's very nerve-racking. Huge, envious reactions. And so, psychologists, psychologists. Psychiatry has always been distinct from psychology. Psychiatrists always held psychologists in low regard, especially talk therapists. Psychiatrists always thought that talk therapists are quite doctors. Shamans, you know. Which doctors? So, whenever a doctor is a psychiatrist anywhere in the world, doesn't matter where, they will go home. They will be raised. Psychologists and definitely therapists. Talk therapy has always been considered kind of witchcraft. White magic. Which it is not. Because it's been proven now, today, in the last two decades, it's been proven that talk therapy creates changes in the brain. The brain is very plastic. Talk therapy creates several types of changes in blood flow, in rewiring neural pathways. Neural pathways change with talk therapy and so on. So talk therapy properly administered does have effects on the brain. And that is the joke on the part of the psychiatrists, yes? But still, psychiatrists believe that they are here and psychologists and therapists should clean the toilet, if possible. So why? Because psychiatrists have studied medicine. They have MD in addition to psychology. I don't want to begin now about medicine. Sometimes it's too difficult together. But I will limit my comments to psychologists and therapists, not to psychiatrists, for this distinction to be clear. Psychologists and therapists want to scientific, to make psychology more scientific. And how do you do that? By imitating and emulating the exact sciences. For instance, by using an auto-mathematics. So if you read modern papers in psychology, they are all with statistics, with mathematics, with matrices and everything looks very scientific. Differential equations and all that. And the second way is to use machines. Because if you use machines, it is accurate. It's quantifiable. And it's objective. You can argue with the psychologists. You can argue with the therapists, but you can never argue with the never argue. Because them arrive as colors and that's it. That is a bit childish. A lot of childish, actually. For several reasons. And the only hope for psychology, in my view, this past, this last second, is by opinion only. In my view, the only hope for psychology is not in machines. More and more sophisticated, more and more costly. It's not in mathematics. More and more complex, in our understanding. Including the authors. It's in philosophy. The only hope for psychology is in philosophy. And I don't mean philosophy, classical philosophy. But in generating, in forming a philosophy of psychology. In adopting from philosophy the rigorous tests that philosophy applies to each discipline. It's including philosophy of physics. My doctorate is in philosophy of physics. This is where the hope applies. So now we give you a few examples. I'm not talking about psychiatrists. Because psychiatrists are doctors. Psychiatrists are doctors. They give you pills. Most psychiatrists, vast majority of psychiatrists, will give you pills. You come, they write a prescription, they give you medication. These are pill dispensing doctors. Only they don't treat your kidneys or heart. They treat your brain. So I'm not talking about them. They are medical discipline. I can talk about medicines all the time. It's on the form. I'm talking about psychology. Classical psychology. Modern psychology. And therapy institution. The first mistake that most modern psychologists make is that they confuse correlation with causation. In other words, they demonstrate that certain self-reports, because it's all self-reporting. If you talk to a patient, the patient has to report. You're dependent on the patient. There's a psychologist and a therapist. You're dependent on the patient. And that's the first big difference between psychology and physics. If I study the sun, I'm not dependent on the sun. The sun is the sun. It continues in its cycles. I use my instruments and I measure the sun. The sun is there forever. My instruments are there forever. But if I talk to a patient, I'm dependent on the patient's honesty, ability to introspect, introspection, lack of defenses, need to be held. I'm totally dependent on the patient. Okay. What modern psychologists are trying to do? They're trying to correlate. They're trying to find which self-report by a patient goes with which objective phenomenon. So on the one hand, they have self-report. Self-report. And on the other, they have objective pain. I treat the patient pain. And suddenly, a part of the brain in the MRI lights up. Every time I treat the patient, the same area in the brain lights up. Say the modern psychologists. We follow pain. Pain is this part of the brain. This part of the brain generates pain. And that is, of course, a very, very first year mistake in philosophy, but in philosophy. The big problem is that vast majority of psychologists are not trained in rigorous logical thinking in philosophy. And I'm not kidding. There is a big difference between correlation and causation. This is correlation. Every time A, then B. Every time A, then B. But what caused what? Did A cause B? Or did B cause A? Can we establish causation? We cannot. There's no way to establish causation. So the psychologists say it's not true. We can establish causation. If we stimulate this area of the brain with electron. If we stimulate this area of the brain, we get pain. So this is causation. We first stimulate the area of the brain. And then we obtain the same effect. It must be that this area of the brain generates or creates the pain. True. However, not the same experiment. Very true, but not the same experiment. This and this are not the same experiment. You cannot learn from this experiment on this experiment. This experiment tells us nothing about this experiment. This is a very important distinction. One of the major problems in psychology, in psychology, is that we cannot repeat experiments. Experiments in psychology are not repeatable. If I make an experiment on this, I put it in fire. I put it in acid. I'm breaking. I can repeat this experiment with very, very high degree of accuracy. Because Tony will get me another 50. And I will repeat the same thing with 50. Not so sure. But if I make an experiment with 50 human subjects. 50 human subjects. Can I ever repeat this experiment with 50 other subjects? Never. More. Can I ever repeat this experiment with the same 50 subjects? Never. Because the first experiment was Monday. The second experiment was Wednesday. In the meantime, you divorced. You had an accident. You went and didn't sleep well. You didn't sleep well. So you are not the same subjects. By the second experiment on Wednesday, you are not the same subjects. It's a major problem in psychology. Experiments are not repeatable. One of the major demands in scientific method is that experiments can be repeated. Not possible in psychology. This is a total mixup which a first year student in philosophy will be thrown out of their school. A leading to B. A and B happening simultaneously. And then B causing A. We can learn nothing from this on this or from this. Because they are not the same experiment. So we have a problem of repeatability. We can't repeat experiments. We have a problem of self-reporting. We are dependent or dependent on the people in the experiments and they think what they do, what they do. You know you heard the defense mechanisms. People deny. People forget. People suppress. People are not reliable. Test subjects rely. What do we have in modern psychology? When you go to, we just came to religions of these faculties. What do we have? You have many, many psychologists. Working or in a magazine, maybe. And they are producing dozens of studies, thousands of studies, mapping brain activity compared to self-reports by patients. Does this tackle the core issue? Your raw material is a problem. The patients, it's a problem. The raw material you are working on, that's your problem. Not what you do to these raw materials. Not which machines you are using. It's the raw materials. Imagine that they check a group of 10 people you never are. So they have brains, they have beautiful color marks and so on. And then they need to repeat. Because if you don't repeat, it's many. Many of these tests are not repeated. They are once, and that's it. You need to repeat. With the same 10 people. Are they the same 10 people? Am I the same Sam Vaknin that I was yesterday? No. I'm not the same Vaknin. I'm changing minute to minute. Hour to hour. I can never repeat the same test. Psychology is... Psychology is in the dead end today. In the dead end, because it is trying to be a science, it lacks the philosophic rigorousness and philosophical underpinnings, especially in logic and understanding of scientific methods, philosophy of science. It lacks all this. It is using machinery, which is an objective element, on non-objective test subjects which change constantly and cannot... Periments cannot be repeated. It's stuck completely. The history of psychology can be roughly divided to three periods. Roughly. You can divide it to 20 periods, but roughly to three. And with this, I'm finished. Up until the 1860s, up until the 1980s, and up. Up until the 1860s, the study of the human mind, study of the human mind, which is what we call psychology, was an integral part of philosophy. Else, by the way, was physics. Physics was an integral part of philosophy. So, it was called natural philosophy. So, the study was an integral part of philosophy. It had its limitations. The fact that it was amalgamated with philosophy had its limitations, of course. But it had its strong points, because philosophy... What philosophy teaches you? Philosophy teaches you to think. It doesn't teach you anything in mind. Not really anything about the world, really. But it teaches you one thing perfectly, to think. And so, these people who wrote a psychological text before 1860, more or less. At least, they knew how to think. You can see rigorous thinking in the text. Between 1860 and 1980, this was the artistic phase. Artistic phase. So, you had people like Freud with psychoanalysis and after this, other schools, including quasi pseudo-scientific schools like behaviorism and so on. You had these schools and they were writing narratives. They were writing stories. They were narrative, narrative psychology. It was a little like movie scripts. They were writing movies about mind. No one saw an ego or a superego or an it or... But it was a nice literary creation. It was more literature than science. And it was artistic and it was narrative. And it was a story about how the mind behaves until more or less the 1980s. Starting with Freud, or even before Freud, and so on. And ending, let's say, with object relations. Core-foot, window-up. Starting in the 1980s, we have the pseudo-scientific phase. Pseudo-scientific phase, which uses mathematics and machines. And this is the medicalization of psychology. Psychology is a branch of scientific medicine. Where will this lead? I don't know. Because when these people came to control psychology, which they do now, they got rid of all of this. They said that, oh, this is garbage. It's not scientific. It cannot be proof. It's nonsense. It's art. It's, I don't know why. And therefore, who should we know? Not a single university in the United States who teaches for a while. If you want to study psychoanalysis and modern psychoanalysis, post-trail, of course, there's a lot of work done in the 70s. I mentioned coal, Cernberg, others. If you want to study object relations, object relations schools are a derivative of psycho-dynamic psychology, which is derivative of psychoanalysis. Oh, Phil, Charles Phil. If you want to study any of this, go to the Psychoanalytic Institute in New York. You can't go to any university. You can't go to Harvard. You can't go to Yale or Princeton or anywhere. No one teaches in Seattle. It's considered garbage. So they threw all of it, all this giant thing. They threw it to the garbage. Today you go to, you don't have to believe me. You can go online and look at the curriculum, the syllabus of Harvard. You can go to any university, especially in California, go to any university to study psychology. You will study electronics, mathematics, machines like MRI, you will study statistical behavior, interpretation, demographics, and the epidemiology and so on. In all these syllabus, one thing is missing. The human. The human mind. And the human. And the human as a test subject. And how to overcome the fact that we are locked inside. Locked inside. Communicate with each other through an inter-subjective agreement. Indirectly. All of us. I will finish with the famous story of the French editor of a fashion magazine. I don't know if you saw this movie. It's a book. It's a book first, movie second. He was an editor of a fashion magazine. Then one day he took his son, his divorce. He took his son to a sports game or something. And on the way he had a stroke. He had a stroke in a car. In his car. And he was picked up and he brought to a hospital. He was brought to a hospital. And he had something which we call locked in syndrome. Locked in syndrome. Locked in syndrome is when your mind functions perfectly. Functions perfectly. But all your body, all your bodily functions are destroyed. You can move nothing. Nothing. Not a finger. Nothing. You are locked inside. As a perfect human being. No community function is impaired. You're perfect. You still think the same. So this guy was locked in. He was able to move the lower lead of his left arm. The lower lead. Like an olivist. Nothing. No other part of his body. Only the lower lead. He hired a somehow sexy little woman. To hire a woman. A nurse. A second. He developed a system where the letter A is this. The letter B The letter C is 3. And he dictated a Bessemer. He dictated a big Bessemer. I mean like 700 pages. Very big. Using his eye only. That's all. Moving his eye like this blinking. With the blinks. Letter by letter. Can you imagine this? The human mind. The will. The willpower. The willpower. The human mind. Was lowered in evidence. His body was finished. All his functions were performed by other people and other machines. All his eye moved. He dictated the whole book. Capture this with an MRI. Show me the mathematics to describe this. It's about it. The new direction of psychology is utter nonsense. Philosophically non-reversed. And ignoring the subject matter itself. Thin that stands at the center and should always stand at the center. The human mind. The true subject of our studies is Ghana. You do not find the word human mind in the Harvard-Cedemus of psychology. The entire series. You don't have to trust it, don't you? You do not find the word mind in the Harvard-Cedemus of psychology. I think it's also much more. Thank you. So it's a long one. There's a question that was just briefly repeated. So that question is not really It's not It's not, so that question is... No, English is great. That's how it is. I will answer in Hebrew. It's not about history itself, it's... I mean, it does, but it's because the human mind can only respond to a lot of responses. Like, let's say to a conflict, he can run away, he can run back, so that's why they're... When I say, repeated, that if I make a test on you today, you are not the same person. It's because of humans that make a fluid at several responses, but history retains itself, and that's why, like at the beginning, there was sociology, and they went into... That's not covered by sociology. That's not covered by sociology. I think that's... There's going to be old school psychology, and there's going to be new school psychology, but it's probably going to be named different, so it's going to be a new science. It's not other bullshit. No, bullshit in terms of psychology, in terms of neuroscience. When you try to take from... It reminds me when you sometimes you go to all kinds of Islamism, and they talk about energy. Energy is a term in physics, as a clear definition. The minute you take it out of context, and you bring it to another field, and you misuse it, you are Islamic. The minute you are taking, the minute you are detaching, the minute you are calling this psychology, you are in a way... Same activity is being done in neuroscience. The neuroscience departments, they don't make any psychological claims, they don't analyze, they want psychology. They start in the brain. They don't make interdisciplinary claims. They start in the brain, and they say, okay, when there is a pain, there is reaction here, but they don't make any claims that are supposedly about the human mind. Is this cross that I'm against? Yeah, I get it. It's happening right now, the future is just... What is happening right now, it's dividing the two, but it's slowly. It's slowly, so until they make a whole new science... I think the machines will take over. In other words, everyone wants to be so scientific that I think the parts that are not describable with mathematics and are not describable with machine activity would be neglected to the point of the revolution. What you call old psychology, I think we're done. Because no one is teaching it. And there's no new generations, no continuation. Paradoxically, only in non-western countries, you still have this going on. So in India, for instance, you have flourishing schools, or psychodynamic therapy, and so on. But in the West, it's dying. Why in the West it's dying? Because everyone is looking for money, and you can't get money for this kind of thing. You can get money for them all. It's easy to explain, easy to show beautiful charts with color, with these mathematics. In other words, mathematics must be true. So the whole thing is going to be ready. Here in Macedonia, faculty was first publishing... They made a connection at the time. It was normal for them to have psychotherapy. It was in medicine. So it is divided. I mean, it was divided. I just hoped that the time would work out as it should be. I have nothing against that in the brain. But to call it psychology, as many as most psychologists are doing today, that is to misrepresent what psychology is, and what are the possibilities and limitations of psychology. It's very important to know when you are in discipline what you can and cannot do. You know what it reminds me? I'm watching Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking. A physicist. Great or not, it's debatable. I used to work with one of his students. But that's beside the problem. Stephen Hawking is a physicist. Suddenly I see him on television talking about God. I don't know what the meaning of God is. What the fuck? You're a physicist. You know, it is this misuse of your authority, professional authority. Stephen Hawking as a layman wants to express his opinion, not speaking his authority, because he is a physicist. He touched God. He knows. This is wrong. This is wrong. All these phenomena are wrong. It's like asking a movie star about foreign policy because it's famous. It is the cult of celebrities. And psychologists, modern psychologists in the West want to be celebrities. They want money. They want power. They want to be on the media. They want to... Can you be on the media with a lecture like this? No. Trust me. But can you be on the media with nice color charts from the name of God? You can. And you are. And you are. It's a big talk. All the psychology was concerned with human mind. The new psychology was concerned with the brain. It basically all comes to the culture. It basically comes to the confusion between brain and human mind. What do you think about the writers? Are they narcissistic or not? Narcissistic? Yes, narcissistic. Some writers are narcissistic, some not. It's not about what you do. It's how you do. It's not what you do. It's how you do it. If you do what you do, many things. Attrination, narration.