 Ask two psychologists what is the unconscious and you will get three answers on a good day This is what we're going to discuss today We are going to descend from your consciousness to your pre-consciousness. Yes, not sub-conscious Sub-conscious is not a clinical term from conscious to pre-conscious to unconscious I'm going to explore all these floors in the elevator going down into the darkest recesses of your mind depth psychology My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and a professor of finance and the author of malignant self-love narcissism Revisited the book that started it all and was the first to describe Narcissistic abuse. I'm proud to say So what is the unconscious? Well The short answer is we don't know and now you can switch off and move to another video and The long answer is of course explaining to you what we don't know why we don't know it How come we don't know what we don't know and whether there is any hope whatsoever Then they will come a day where we will know finally what we don't know and know what we know Do you understand any of this because I didn't The unconscious is like a black hole We are not quite sure as to what exactly happens inside a black hole There's a lot of speculation the many theories in physics And they describe the innards of a black hole, but a black hole is mostly known by its effects on the environment Similarly, the unconscious is known by its symptoms Not only symptoms, but specific behaviors such as jokes, believe it or not Parapraxis in other words Daily behaviors like losing your keys or what is called a Freudian sleep using the wrong word dreams So all these tell us a lot about the unconscious We could therefore say that the unconscious is comprised of symbolic Representations or at the very least Indirect representations of what's going on the axis is mediated and we need to decipher and decode behaviors self-reporting and information such as the one contained in dreams in Order to obtain a clue as to the specific unconscious of the reporting agent the person Why is that? Well, there's been a lot of discussion in especially in psychoanalytic literature, but not only About the unthought known Things we know, but never think about it Never think about these things Consciously, this is Bolas the guy who described the unthought known is called Bolas Lacan refer to unknown knowledge and unknown memory as Determinant signifiers the things that end up defining your identity Unconscious the concept of the unconscious is perhaps the most widely agreed upon in psychology We find it in psychoanalysis. We find it in cognitive theory. We even find it among certain neuroscientists and Yet there is no single definition and today we are going to explore a variety of approaches To the unconscious we're going to end by describing Unconscious fantasies, of course, we're going to link all this to narcissism because narcissism is at the core of both the unconscious and of Fantasies spawned by and emanating from the unconscious and the unconscious is a kind of language It's an innate capacity. It's like a container coupled with environmental input content produced by others So it's like we are born with this With this repository Empty and then we gather into it. We harvest reactions input and feedback from other people so the unconscious is Very similar to a language. We are born with a language capacity Chomsky and then we imbue it or we collect into it the vestiges and elements and figments of language imitate we emulate we Memorize and so on and at a certain point we start to talk. It's the same with the unconscious We are born empty with an empty unconscious and it gets filled with time The unconscious is a language. We know that because dreams Deploy a highly specific language of symbols as Freud described in 1900 in his famous tone the interpretation of dreams were by the way the modern use of the word unconscious was first described The unconscious is a language, but it's a public act Wittgenstein Wittgenstein said that all languages are public. There's no such thing as a private language I beg to disagree but that's on the point. The point is that being a language The unconscious is also has also a public dimension. This is Lacan the unconscious is the internalization of a group The baby is born Essentially tabula gasa when it comes to the unconscious he has in eight innate capacities for language for other things and for the unconscious then the baby is exposed to a variety of adults and others and Picks up from them cues information data Facial expressions body language you name it Majority of this information is stored in the unconscious and forms the unconscious So it is a group activity. The unconscious is a group activity, but as usual Zingman Freud was there first decades before everyone else And so we are forced to revisit history Start with Leibniz Leibniz at the time came with the concept of Petit perception. Yes, he wrote in French Petit perception Petit perception were gradations in consciousness Leibniz said that not all forms of consciousness are equally potent or equally intense It was a revolutionary idea for its time. And so you could say that Leibniz is the father of the unconscious for much of early history psychology was the his the study of conscious phenomena and conscious phenomena only but This deteriorated very fast to journaling the early psychologists They were introspective early psychologists studied themselves and And by extension and by extrapolation derived general theories about the psychology of others introspectionism is Maybe a good idea in therapy when you're the patient But it's a seriously flawed idea when you're trying to formulate Theory of psychology which applies for everyone because you're not everyone. You're not representative No single psychologist is representative of the human species. Luckily for the human species so introspect introspectionism failed in the early 20th century and Freud belonged to a large to a large extent to the seam To the transition area between introspectionism and behaviorism because Freud tried to introduce science like neurology neurology into Psychology so then behaviorism became the dominant paradigm and behaviorist dealt with the scientific unreliability of introspective reports By ignoring mental states all together the behaviorist considered human beings machines devices Activated by environmental cues and then in the last few decades of the 20th century last four decades Behaviorism was challenged and it was challenged by cognitivism cognitivism understands the mind in terms of unconscious or to be more precise non-conscious information processing We've come a full circle Started with the unconscious in the late 90th century and ended with the unconscious in the late 20th century made a detour via scientism the pseudo science of behaviorism and scientification of psychology cognitive scientists refer to unconscious processes and unconscious content and And But they are not their perception or their conception of the unconscious is not the same as The unconscious in psychoanalytic theory because in cognitive theory the unconscious has nothing to do with affect the unconscious in cognitive theory is removed from affective life and is also incapable even on Prince in principle of Becoming conscious according to cognitive theory that which is unconscious Shall remain unconscious to go biblical on you and according to psychoanalytic theory That that is unconscious should be brought up to consciousness and become conscious as a condition for healing so Freud's work was focused around affect and Around significant effectively significant unconscious thoughts and then admitting them into consciousness That is the core of psychoanalysis Time travel time back to the 19th century There was a huge debate in the 19th century what to do with mental phenomena, so Some said Phenomenon there are some phenomena that are mental, but they are not intrinsically unconscious This was this was known as the dissociationist model The dissociation is model claimed that minds are entirely conscious There is no unconscious So how do you explain that something some thoughts some beliefs Some emotions some effects are not accessible to consciousness If all of mine is conscious then how come some things unconscious and The answer of the dissociation is school was that the single mind splits it doubles Mines are entirely conscious, but they are Divisible this division occurs in response to trauma The parts of the brain the brain splits when exposed to trauma and the portions of the brain Both of them or all three of them all 20 of them remain fully conscious The thing is that no part has access to the other part. There is no direct introspective access To other mental states now, this is very reminiscent of course of multiple personality disorder dissociative identity disorder But it's also very reminiscent of the self-states model And so we are converging here with some of the work of Philippe Romba and Some of my own work in in the field advocates of dissociationism included Paul in Pierre Janet as I'm a little bit me Turn in France James and Prince in the United States. So these were serious names these were very very first rank or psychology at the time But there was another school that contested Dissociation is so to summarize dissociation isn't there's a single mind It is always conscious exposed to trauma it breaks down when it breaks down The parts remain conscious but inaccessible to each other. That's why we misinterpret the situation as Conscious and unconscious. There's no unconscious according to dissociation But there was another school that hotly disputed dissociation This school said that there are mental states that are intrinsically unconscious But they are not genuinely mental they appear to be mental, but they're actually physiological and this was known as the Dispositionalist approach. They said that conscious unconscious mental events are actually nothing more than Neuropsychological dispositions and states under the right circumstances They realized some kind of causal power to produce conscious mental phenomena And here we have philosophers like Brentano in Austria Fekner in Germany meal carpenter Jackson and mostly in England and so on This was more of a philosophical school because it dealt with the issue of dualism mind-body Cartesian or the cards thinking and so on so forth. So on one hand One group was comprised of psychologists and they said the mind is always conscious Unconscious mind is a contradiction in terms. It's an oxymoron It was another group of philosophers and they said yeah, there is such a thing as unconscious But it's not mental. It's just physical events in the body that are yet to manifest or to reach consciousness The dissociation is claimed that unconscious mental states are not introspectable They're not accessible to you because they're excluded from the subjects primary consciousness the study of these states is in itself the province of psychopathology The Dispositionalist you remember the philosophers They said that unconscious states Are not subject to introspection. They agreed with the dissociation is both these schools taught Before Freud in the period before Freud appeared on the scene both these schools taught that unconscious states are not Subject to study. They're not start. They cannot be introspected But the Dispositionalist said that they cannot be introspected because they are not mental How can you introspect something physical or physiological or biological the study of this state? Should be relegated to neuroscience to the study of the brain so everyone Before Freud, let's say up until the 1870s or 1880s everyone Regarded a truly mental state that is unconscious as nonsense if it's mental. It must be conscious Freud was not exempt In the early years of his career, I would say prior to 1896 or even 1900 Freud Embrace this neo-cautigian approach. He never mentioned the word unconscious in any of his writings prior to 1896 here and there he used the word unconscious But in a kind of loose Objective or descriptive sense his early writings are sometimes dissociationist and sometimes Dispositionalist but never Freudian So We are faced now with a philosophical conundrum. How can and by the way There is confluence strong confluence between philosophy and psychology in many countries in the world Psychology is in the faculty of philosophy. The department of psychology is in the faculty of philosophy for example consider the following how can non-sensory thoughts Which contain obstructions? relations logical operators such as and or if then I mean How can such totally abstract thoughts be represented in a concrete Sensory mode of consciousness Where's the transition from abstract to concrete? It is this conundrum that pushed Freud forced him to come up with the first of His amazing insights Freud was a genius on par with Einstein. It was a genius of the inner universe Einstein was a genius of the outer universe that we have chosen to discard Freud is Inane and I would even say suicidal species wise so Freud was faced with this problem How do we transition from abstract thought? to Neuro neurological events in the brain and sensory modes of consciousness and he proposed a solution and the solution is that and today the solution is known as the Sententialist solution or sententialist theory of thinking He said that cognitive activity is the silent manipulation of language like propositions Which reflect? structured neural codes There was someone who said it before him a guy by birth by the name of Bertolt del Brug But he didn't say it as clearly You can see the direct lineage between Freud and Lacan Freud suggested that the solution is language The unconscious is a language the conch consciousness Cognitive activity is also a language and this language reflects the reality of Neural structures neural pathways neural networks. It's an extremely advanced thinking Which surfaced or resurfaced only in the 60s and 80s of the 20th century So Freud said that in order for thoughts to be represented in consciousness They must be expressed through some qualitative Sensory medium that must be Reinforced by new qualities as Freud put it in 1950 so Freud said that they are hierarchies of Propositions and symbols which are homologous which are reflective of the brain's own neural hierarchies He believed that language fulfills all these requirements. It's a bridge in Freud's thinking language is a bridge On the one hand, it is rich in symbols on the other hand. It is structured There is an order of propositions Languages also Richly sensory it involves the senses auditory visual kinesthetic Language involved That's why we say body language, you know, look at my face how animated it is as I speak and no, it's not my Parkinson's Okay in order for an unconscious thought to become conscious Said Freud it must activate the mental representation of a sentence capable of expressing it So he came up with the idea or of verbal representations of verbal residues Which go hand-in-hand correspond to and are described by motor representations here through language Freud created a linkage between body brain movements and mind conscious and unconscious Cognitive processing and if this linkage exists then it is true language that we can convert unconscious processes and phenomena into conscious ones hence Talk therapy. That's why we have talk therapy as we talk we bring up with reger the unconscious Structure it via language which corresponds to activity and structure in the brain that way render it conscious conscious thought in Freud's thinking involves talking to yourself in effect and This anticipated Lashley's idea Lashley came up with something called subvocal speech and It anticipated Lashley's idea by Decades 40 something years so We have the we have consciousness. We have the unconscious and When we try to convert one to the other the unconscious to when we try to bring up the unconscious to consciousness We use language And we talk to ourselves. We have an inner dialogue and through language We verbalize the unconscious Freud believed it thoughts never become conscious. They may merely produce conscious effects essentially in via the mediation intermediate of language can't tell you how revolutionary this thinking was and honestly Still is how amazingly postmodern it is This man was a towering genius conscious mental processes actually conscious representations of unconscious information structures Freud's claim was was stunning. He said that and I'm quoting mental processes are in themselves unconscious 1915 and Lashley in 1956 said exactly the same thing That's almost 60 years later. So 40 years later. I'm sorry. So Freud Reversed psychology completely put it on its head Prior to Freud everyone said Any mental state and any mental process is always conscious After Freud everyone said Any mental state and any mental process is unconscious and this is a direct antecedent predecessor of current day cognitive theories, which are the main theories in psychology. So cognition and consciousness are activities of entirely distinct mental modules and thoughts can only enter consciousness via the proliferation of information From cognition to consciousness from first system to the second system Freud broke the mind Created a schism of the mind. He said that the mind is actually a compound collaboration between two systems as I said cognition and consciousness and that the bridge between them is information It is possible for information to be excluded from consciousness or repressed And in order for mental content to be repressed It just needs to be cut off language We for any content to be repressed to be inaccessible to consciousness this content must be isolated from linguistic representations from words from language It must be rendered moot silent dumb repressed ideas are in an invariably representatives of Instinctual drives later. This was called the id So instinctual urges and drives They're kept back They're kept back by isolating them from language So repression was now intimately connected to socially unacceptable urges and drives and language became thought police Language is used in Freud's theory to police the internal space to push down socially unacceptable unrealistic potentially risky and dangerous Drives and urges by not allowing them to reach pre consciousness How is this accomplished by isolating them from language? If These drives and urges are allowed to reach consciousness. We experience alarm and pleasure displeasure panic Anxiety So this is all based on the pleasure principle Consider how revolutionary this is Freud said urges and drives if they are like loose if They are allowed to roam free will will have dire consequences not the list of which is that we're going to be egodistonic all the time We're gonna feel bad all the time so they're cut off repressed and Isolated by not being given access to language Therefore therefore they can never reach consciousness Can ever interact With the ego later and therefore can never operate in reality Freud believed that only thoughts can be repressed initially Effects cannot be repressed because they are sensory and they are non-propositional in nature in other words effects or emotions Or even moods they don't require language so they cannot be repressed so They There's no need to translate them into language and This way to participate in the structure of consciousness There was initially later he brought effects into the picture okay Freud came up with a trilateral model initially was known as the first topographical model and He divided the mind to three functional units consciousness system pre-consciousness and system Unconscious so conscious pre-conscious and unconscious Consciousness he described as an organ for sensing mental qualities Pre-conscious is essentially unconscious Descriptively like we have no access to it But the pre-conscious the mental contents in the pre-conscious are able to enter consciousness If we focus our attention on them, so their pre-conscious is like This big refrigerator with many many goodies and candies and food and everything But it is sealed off from consciousness via the door But if you open the door by focusing your attention You can extract the goodies and foodies from the refrigerator and render them conscious consume them Freud was not known for consistency many of his views over the years because he's been active for like 40 50 years so over the years he contradicted himself And the system unconscious was not exempt from his vacillations Initially, he described the contents of the system unconscious as Thoughts that have been excluded from or denied access to the pre-conscious by the operation of a filtering mechanism, which he called censorship So the unconscious is full of thoughts. There is a sensor censorship and these thoughts are not allowed to reach the pre-conscious and At least potentially consciousness. This is the repressed or dynamic Unconscious it operates under the pleasure principle. It is known as a primary process urges drives primitive reptilian the stem brain Things which are usually socially frowned upon or even punished severely It's illogical. It's irrational down there It's seething and fermenting and needs to be controlled and contained It's like the proletariat in Vienna in the turn of the 20th century We see with a reflection of this in the structure of the mind Freud argued that and the unconscious is illogical and rational, but he listed five distinct characteristics of the unconscious And he said that this characteristics distinguished the unconscious from the pre-conscious number one Exemption from mutual contradiction the unconscious can hold two mutually exclusive cognitions together mutually contradictory Number two exemption from negation in other words when one Is confronted with a repressed wish or a thought or a feeling that had come to consciousness One tends to negate it one tends to defend oneself against the repressed content one says It's not mine. One disowns it Disavows it. This is called negation In the unconscious. There's no negation There's no discrepancy. There's no fight or call internal conflict Everyone is one big happy family Everyone gets along Displacement so many things that happen in the unconscious are Misattributed to other processes or traits or behaviors Contensation when a single ID image memory thought dream objects Represents several Associations and IDs. So one thing stands for many. These are all features of the unconscious Timelessness which we will discuss a bit later and disregard from reality in his Famous essay in 1923 ego and either Freud rejected the model of the three systems He disowned and disavowed the model of unconscious pre-conscious and unconscious and He replaced it with what came to be known as the structural or second topographical model which had what Freud called Stunson agencies Eid ego and super ego Which is the famous trilateral model of Freud which everyone knows From that moment on Freud actually did not use the term unconscious and did not link it to any mental system it fell out of favor in Psycho early early psychoanalytic literature It was still used descriptively or is an adjective To refer to a property of mental events or systems, but not as a system So the Eid Was described by Freud as irrational And so people mistakenly Connected the Eid with the unconscious because I said the unconscious is Irrational and illogical the Eid is irrational and illogical So the Eid must be the unconscious and Freud himself Described the Eid as possessing the five characteristics, which he had previously attributed to the unconscious He said that the logical laws of thought do not apply in the Eid and so This created a huge mess and a confusion with which persists to this very day The rational and logical components of unconscious mental functioning were pushed into the ego and The ego was described as a mental module which represents reason and common sense But The ego has an unconscious part Initially in the first topographical model the unconscious was comprised of irrational illogical components and rational and logical components now The Eid was the repository of all the irrational illogical components of the previously previous unconscious And the ego was the repository of the logical and rational components of the previous unconscious system So both the Eid and and the ego Have powerful unconscious elements The ego is partly unconscious Super ego is a part of the ego. It's like the tip of the iceberg of the ego So the super ego by definition is also partly unconscious So now do we need the pre-conscious? Because the old distinction between unconscious and pre-conscious was now replaced Now we have unconscious Eid Unconscious ego. Why do we need the pre-conscious? Let's go back to the first topographical model you remember conscious pre-conscious unconscious Freud at the time said that you need to analyze what he called narcissistic psychoneurosis Today we call them psychosis He said that if you analyze these narcissistic psychoneurosis They can furnish us with conceptions and I'm quoting him can furnish us with conceptions through which the enigmatic Unconscious system will be brought more within our reach as it were made tangible The first theory of mental structure the topographical model he said that You remember the mind is divided to Psychical localities the unconscious conscious and pre-conscious and He said that This psychical life is a conflict between these three and This is what came to be known as the dynamical model He said that there is energy there Energy is stored in repressed memories and repression is a form of energy condensation Think of it as a battery repression is creating a battery and When events are brought or memories are brought from the unconscious to consciousness They bring with them. They drag with them this energy a process known as a reaction memory itself Exists without any specific prejudice or interest the energetics the structure of psychic processes is Determined beyond consciousness and this was came to be known as the economic point of view fine a inaccessibility to consciousness is Undeniable the descriptive point of view but a Transition is possible this became the heart of Psychoanalysis ideas representations that are intolerable irreconcilable repressed durable pathogenic Beyond association forgotten all of these were outside of consciousness. It's like one big trash can Indian conscious the conscious system is Not merely that which is outside the field of consciousness at any given time But that which has been radically separated from consciousness by repression And so cannot enter the conscious pre-conscious system without some kind of distortion energetic distortion This was a very warlike civil warlike description of the mind the mind contains wishes which are unconscious Indestructible the mind contains repressed memories and events affected by libido By libido in other words, there's emotional investment there is emotional energy free energy All this is regulated by the pleasure principle the primary processes of displacement and condensation Operate in the unconscious system the conflict between repressed instincts and censorship creates dreams and Compromise formation kind of I'm gonna tell you what's it's like the dream is saying dreams are saying to you I'm gonna we're gonna tell you what's in your unconscious, but we're gonna do it symbolically We can't talk to you directly. We have to talk to you via code or symbols and imagine all this sitting cauldron Witches cauldron is the mind it goes on inside your mind The reality of the unconscious Reveals itself in numerous localized processes. I mentioned joking for getting words Symptomatic activities and and so on so forth the unconscious system depends on instincts Repression is constantly in operation. It's a primal repression and actually Freud implied although he never said it Directly and totally he implied that Repression creates the unconscious Impression is the outcome of unconscious. He said that the unconscious Quoting contains the things think Catexes the emotional investment in things of the objects The first and true object catexes while the nucleus of the unconscious system Consists of instinctual represent representatives which seek to discharge their catexes to discharge the energy That is to say it consists of wishful impulses He wrote this in 1915 and two years later. He says that the unconscious is the missing link between the body The mind the soma and the psyche. So we have inside our heads inside our minds This cavity this black hole this system Which is timeless Nothing there is ordered Temporally, there's no timeline Nothing is altered by the passage of time. There's no reference to time at all the Freud wrote there is an exemption from mutual contradiction primary process mobility of cathixis Timelessness and replacement of the external by Psychical reality you're beginning to see the link to narcissism Because in narcissism in early childhood and if it persists into adulthood in pathological narcissism there is and there is a replacement of External objects with internal objects as a confusion between external objects and internal objects The external is replaced by psychical reality Which is a great description of how the narcissist relates to the world Narcissism therefore is a hostile takeover of Consciousness by the unconscious the unconscious takes over the narcissists The unconscious drives the narcissists The narcissist is an inverted or reversed person is unconscious is out there and his consciousness is repressed In Freud's second theory of mental structure the structural theory The mind is divided into the agencies of ego super ego need which I mentioned and here I Emphasize again Not one of them is identical to the unconscious All of them have unconscious parts Now this should not be confused this age at this Structure mental structure of the unconscious the unconscious system should not be confused with the unconscious concept Freud wrote In an essay titled from the history of an infantile neurosis He defined the term unconscious concept and he gave an example feces baby and penis form a unity an unconscious concept sit venia verbal the concept namely of Something small that can be separated from one's body So Fred gave an example of a few things feces baby penis and He said that it creates a concept a principle of operation and Organizing principle an idea that makes sense of the world and in this case the idea is There's me and there are small things that come out of me or are not connected to me or can be disconnected from me And this is known as an unconscious concept In philosophy concepts refer to groupings of objects of experience so we have objects of experience and we group them into classes Freud adopted this philosophical approach to the unconscious concept he says it's The equivalence of objects within a certain relationship that allows us to this to talk about the concept The notion presented by Freud is complex. It's complicated because the his concepts are unconscious They're not the result of a process of analysis or judgment or They just happen. They just erupt or occur or emerge and we Now we come to the crux of the God awful confusion even among scholars and The fact that there is not a great terminology We use unconscious in three separate ways We we use unconscious descriptively and It refers to the mental The fact that mental content is not accessible to reflective self-awareness So descriptive consciousness includes the pre-conscious Descriptive unconscious, I'm sorry includes the pre-conscious then we have another type of unconscious this system unconscious. It's an aspect of mind Operating according to the pleasure unpleasure principle and primary process or id thinking as I mentioned before this is the classic Freudian approach and It is not the same as the descriptive unconscious the descriptive unconscious is functional It's operational if you can't think of it if it doesn't come to your awareness. It's unconscious Freud said something else. He said there's a structure there and This structure is subject to the pleasure or unpleasure principle and they are primary Processes and they are repressed and you know came up with a whole movie about what's happening inside the mind It's not merely It's not merely something that you can't recall or something you have no access to that's not the unconscious might be Some content in the unconscious, but the unconscious is a dynamic system according to Freud and then there is This leads to the dynamic unconscious. It's the repressed material and Repression is an active process. It occurs all the time Otherwise the material can emerge or erupt and disrupt function So the material has to be repressed all the time actively and This material exerts pressure in the direction of the conscience to quote Freud It includes highly organized unconscious fantasy, which we will discuss in a little while So we have a structural description a Dynamic description and a purely Operational descriptive description and we tend to confuse the three all the time. There was a guy There was an essay published in 1975 The unconscious is infinite sets an essay in biologic Major work so it was major seminar work published by Ignacio written by Ignacio Matei Blanco he says that Consciousness is in the footsteps of Freud. He said that consciousness is subject to classic asymmetric logic Unconscious he says Rises from two principles the principle of generalization, which I call the principle of nesting and The principle of symmetry which I call the Alice in Wonderland principle Let's explain these two principles. Let's expound The principle of generalization which is present also in classical logic and Maybe this is the bridge between conscious and unconscious this fact that they share some elements of logic but according to Matei Blanco the Unconscious is the main is mainly operated by the principle of generalization It postulates this principle that in the unconscious Each entity is treated as part of a set with other elements and This set is treated in turn as a subset of a greater set Which in turn is part of a greater set and so this is why I call it the nesting the nesting principle Entities are distinguished one from the other They're grouped together through obstruction of similarities in sets The second principle in this essay is that the in the unconscious Asymmetrical relations are selectively treated as if they were symmetrical and the result is that relations of succession and contiguity Disappeared Time for example three-dimensional space These are ways in which we arrange relations between entities and if anything goes Symmetrical is asymmetrical asymmetrical is symmetrical. There's no point in talking about time, which for example is asymmetrical and so A part can equal the whole and Similarities can be transformed into identities and everything is equal to everything. That's the unconscious is aggregate of infinite sets And he was he took off the work of Richard did a king did a king who was Mathematician in the 90th century Dedekind worked on infinite sets was later his work was later developed by Kanto and What Mate Blanco did he created Mathematics of the mind Beautifully rendering Freud's work in effect in Into mathematical shape or mathematical form Using set theory or more specifically infinite set theory and using symmetrical and asymmetrical asymmetrical Logic so he said that symmetrical logic can be an expression of a symmetrical system and Where reality is indivisible Homogenous is a tropic and some an asymmetrical logic is a manifestation of asymmetrical systems where reality divides into parts and In states of intense emotion The experience and logic of the symmetrical system They are dominant So for the mind the emotional object is infinite and it's also part of an infinite set He succeeded in formalizing the study of the unconscious Mate Blanco. He discovered Isomorphism among the emotional the unconscious and infinite logic. It's an amazing piece of work Okay back Freud said the repressed does not cover everything that is unconscious this is another amazing observation because First he said that mental processes are unconscious Then he went on to explain how the how things become unconscious memories events and Then he went on to say that there is there are areas of the unconscious which are essentially not the outcomes of repression although He also says that repression creates the unconscious so He actually suggested that the unconscious contains four elements or four categories He divided the unconscious to four categories. Each category is a content category representation of instincts like the Eid Material accrued accumulated owing to primal repression Trauma for example Number three contents pushed down by the forces of repression Unpleasant memories and things you wish to forget. So number four phylogenetics skimata That manifests through primal fantasy with pH. This is a precursor of Jung's collective unconscious. That's what Freud was saying is that being born human predisposes you to have specific structures and elements in your unconscious He called it phylogenetics skimata Jungian the Jungian term collective unconscious It's just what Freud said part of the unconscious that contains archetypes And it's common to all June humanity What are arcade archetypes? skimata schemes So here I'm afraid Jung preferred Freud Not to say plagiarize them once again Okay, I hope you got you got some feeling of as to what is the unconscious conflicting schools disagreements ideas and so on and now through the bridge of narcissism Let's discuss unconscious fantasies. Narcissists engage in fantasy. We all know that I elaborated on the work of Sander 1989 and I brought the concept of shared fantasy into the study of narcissism but I think what people Misunderstand or don't realize is that the shared fantasy is in large part an unconscious fantasy And this is why it's very wrong to demonize narcissists and say that they are lying and skinning and cunning and manipulative and Machiavelli and they're not These are psychopaths psychopaths are like that Narcissist are slaves to their own fantasies They come to believe their own fantasies They inhabit the fantasy much more than any of their victims. They're heartbroken when the fantasy dissolves Narcissists are creatures of fantasy. Narcissism is a fantasy defense gun or I The force self is fantastic Grandiosity is a cognitive fantastic cognitive distortion Narcissism is all about fantasy and a lot of the narcissist fantasy life Is unconscious Let's talk about Melanie Klein and her school Kleinian psychoanalysts Regard the unconscious is made up of fantasies and the fantasies pertain to relations with objects in the mind of the narcissist other people are objects So any relationship with any object animate or inanimate would buy Kleinian definition be a fantasy These fantasies are the mental representation of instincts And so they are kind of primary We will talk about the work of Susan Isaacs in a bit Freud's paradigm of the psychological world was That There's an unconscious fantasy of for example Mother father and me This came to be known as the edipus complex edipus complex is a fantasy It's a fantasy about bedding mother and killing father if you are a boy The electro complex Bedding father and killing mother if you were a girl But this what are these things? These are relations with objects Their mother and father are known as primary objects These are relations with objects relationships with objects which are fantasized So the edipus and electro complexes are fantasies It's a fantasy of a three-person constellation he Freud contrasted internally bidinal fantasies or the edipus complex with the desexualized fantasy that is the basis of sublimated activity like daydreaming the Freud made a distinction between submerged Unconscious fantasies which he claimed initially to be totally suffused with sex because they are instinctual they're libidinal they reflect the eat and Fantasies which are much more Cognitive much more conscious and Consequently, they are not sexual They're not sexual fantasies, but they have to do with daydreaming or planning or you know, you made a distinction with the role of the fantasy Is to the role of these latter fantasies this it let's call them evolved cognitive fantasies is to sublimate libido The main role of these fantasies is to convert libidinal instinctual urges and drives like for example sex into socially acceptable expressions and manifestations and this is done via daydreaming or creativity aesthetic or other types of creation It is not the same as primary unconscious fantasies primary unconscious fantasies which are sexualized remember provoke conflicts so sublimatory sublimatory fantasies guide activities and Produce things they lead to creative efforts Primary unconscious fantasies are violent sexual Prohibited forbidden Therefore they call for it repression. They need to be repressed Susan Isaacs in 1948 defined unconscious fantasy as the mental representation of instinct same as Freud The Libido is an activity of the mind It has physiological origins and functions of course anyone with genitalia would confirm this But it takes the form of a fantasy of performing some activity with an object aka sex And so on the basis of such fantasies the raw expressions of instinct the primitive mind of the infant Starts to structure itself. It creates order There are further primitive fantasies Projection introjection splitting denial the child begins to Use fantasy to make sense of his or her environment and to control his or her impulses it relieves the child of Terror and primitive conflict fantasy is an outlet. It's like a steam valve It releases energy and in many ways You could conceive of fantasy is Reactive in other words you could conceal a fantasy is a bridge between the unconscious and consciousness And you remember what Freud said? Freud suggested 100 years ago that this bridge is language and Lacan expounded only a bit later That this bridge is language what if this bridge is language and fantasy is a bridge then fantasy is a language It's a language element It's a dialect of one's Native language native. I mean the language of one's mind So The developmental sequence starts with the unconscious fantasies in Early stages and evolves through fear Through other emotions other conflicts it evolves Sex is taken away fantasy becomes desexualized and leads to Activities such as planning and daydreaming and creativity children Express daydreaming all the time when they play for example, it's an important activity Daydreaming is provides with what second analysis called sublimatory opportunities You can fantasize and daydream And it's risk-free. There's no danger. It's accepted by society Kleinian psychoanalysts exercise the rules of fantasy life in the unconscious But Freud doesn't dispute this. He just says there's another layer Melanie Klein in nineteen fifteen fifty-five developed a kind of child analysis that Demonstrated the workings of the unconscious in the fantasies at play. She developed a technique Of figures she gave children figures if the children Positioned the figures in their play and based on that she was able to decipher and decode the fantasies and she created the theory on how objects are positioned in relation to each other and Reflect and a map of the inner self Klein Suggested that the details of play Somehow reflect defensiveness Primary conflicts impulsives and we use this insight today When we debrief children after sexual abuse we let them play with figures The unconscious roots of impulses and defenses are expressed in relations with objects the nature of very early Primitive primary fantasies is still hotly debated Unafroid Freud's daughter who was a very prominent child psychologist. She completely disagreed with Melanie Klein she said that She had infants have coherent fantasies from a very early age Not primary well developed She regarded The unconscious fantasies that Klein and her colleagues reported as secondary elaboration at later stages of development She said we children are born with fantasies. They just learn To structure them order them dress them up with language and communicate them Unafroid said that the infant develops cognitively by establishing representations of reality and the objects in reality But these representations do not cohere into a meaningful Hole they these are not they don't be these fantasies don't become motivating fantasies until Some later stages like auto eroticism and primary narcissism Piaget in 1954 Jean Piaget and Margaret Mahler in 1975 They also described the emergence of representations of reality from these early objectless phases and Child psychologists such as Daniel Stern In 1985 they saw the infant as possessing a sophisticated mind early on Somewhere between Klein and Unafroid So what is an unconscious fantasy the definitive work on unconscious fantasy is Jacob Arlow's In 1969 Jacob Arlow described seven elements of the unconscious fantasy Number one Although it is unconscious it contains fixed verbal elements number two In contrast to the operating principles of the system unconscious Unconscious fantasy is internally consistent and internally organized number three In tandem or conjunction with fixed fantasies There is an ongoing unconscious fantasy life number four External events can trigger unconscious fantasy which in turn can color the perception of external events Number five Unconscious fantasy is a group together around basic childhood wishes Though there are different versions Evolved during different phases of life Can service defenses against each other Elements of both drive and defense are contained in an unconscious fantasy number six Encroachment of unconscious fantasy upon the realistic ego may be complete or partial And this is of course narcissism Where the ego and there's no ego So the fantasy encroaches on the space that should have been reserved for the ego Now the ego is the reality principle If you don't have an ego or your ego is not allowed to develop You don't have proper reality testing And fantasy is the only way that you can refer to your environment hence narcissism And finally the seventh principle While unconscious fantasy is usually quite personal in nature It is not uncommon to discern a certain Communality of elements in members of the same cultural or social groups Arlo's work was Seminole 1969 foundational And it was expounded upon by Theodore Shapiro Well into 2010 2008 Frederick Levine in 1993 Donald Moss in 2008 and so on and so forth Beyond Lacan and Freud All agreed That language is the key Language is a bridge and the mediator between the con consciousness and the unconscious However, they fail to re to accept fantasy As its own language fantasy has an identical mediating function Fantasy is a bridge between consciousness and unconsciousness, but going the other way Fantasy People like the narcissist who are abnormal Grants them access to the unconscious And represses conscious elements While in healthy normal people Fantasy Does exactly the opposite because it's a language It brings elements from the unconscious to consciousness In narcissism it takes elements from consciousness And renders them unconscious And instead Invades The space That should have been reserved for consciousness Should have been reserved for the ego And becomes fantasy becomes In effect a monopolistic primary And secondary process And this is as good a description of pathological narcissism as I've ever heard I hope you survived this lecture because I Haven't