Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

Sigmund Freud belongs to a group of select few who have generated work so creative and provocative that it has had a revolutionary impact on the course of human values, thought and behavior. Freud’s fundamental assumption about mental life is that it is divided into three parts: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The conscious operates merely on the surface of personality and plays a relatively minor role in personality development and functioning.

While it is true that psychologically healthy people have a greater awareness of their experiences than do unhealthy ones, still Freud believed that even relatively mature people are governed by unconscious needs and conflicts. Unconscious can consist of repressed memories of which we are not aware and bringing them to awareness can cause tremendous anxiety. A key point in his theory is that such repressed memories seek expression in various defensive, disguised and distorted ways. Unconscious ideas, memories, and experiences may continually interfere with conscious and rational behavior.

Traditions of Western thought which emphasized human rationality and the virtues of ethical conduct, were shocked to learn that human beings are often irrational and that they continually engage in internal struggles to keep their sexual and aggressive impulses in check. Freud removed humans from their narcissistic pedestals and forced them to examine the dark side of their natures. At first he was publicly reviled and scorned but eventually investigators in many disciplines started taking his ideas seriously. Today Freud’s influence is world wide. Scholars in literature are fond of using psychoanalytic constructs to explain motives of fictional characters, and many Freudian concepts such as Oedipal conflicts, “ego trips,” “Freudian slips,” denial, repression, regression etc., have been adopted by laypeople. Whether we ultimately reject or accept his view of human personality, Freud has clearly earned his place in history.

Discsussion Questions: Freud thought that the major conflict experienced by individuals was between their needs to gratify their impulses (id), and society's need to control (superego) the expression of such individual needs. What do you think can be the best possible solution to this problem?

Do you agree with Freud that psychologically healthy people are adjusted satisfactorily in two major areas of life--love and work? Can you think of any other areas in which satisfactory adjustments must be made if people are to be psychologically healthy?

Personality & its Development: Introduction

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown,
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

The Player King in Hamlet


Personality psychology is a flourishing area of research and offers valuable insights for understanding why we are the way we are, and if and how can we change. The phenomena encompassed by human personality, however, are far too complex and diverse for any one theory to unite them into a single theoretical framework. Thus no theorist so far has been able to come up with a comprehensive theory of personality; there are as many definitions of personality as there are personality theorists.

Please join us at Brooklyn Book Talk this month as we discuss some of the major theoretical perspectives on personality such as psychoanalytic, trait, cognitive, humanistic/existential and social-behavioristic, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses by using uniform criteria for evaluation which include comprehensiveness, precision and testability, parsimony, empirical validity, heuristic value, and applied value. Understanding personality of self and others in a more objective manner can not only help satisfy our curiosity but can lead us to make adaptive changes, wiser choices and live more satisfying lives.

Green Metropolis by David Owen

David Owen and Nature & Parks

David Owen has what seems to me to be contradictory views on nature. On p. 192, he discusses the growing trend toward "videophilia" - Americans, particularly children, stay home and watch movies rather than leave their homes and exert themselves in the natural world. This is connected to the growing rise of obesity (which is at 42% even in Manhattan, the island that Owen views as the model for the rest of the world). At the same time, Owen also advocates:

"A sensitive person's first reaction to the mounting evidence that Americans. especially young Americans, may be losing interest in directly experiencing the natural world is likely to be of regret and loss, or even despair. But is it necessarily a bad thing, globally speaking? It seems perverse to say so, but sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor recreational activities, including most of the ones that the most committed environmentalists tend to favor for themselves. In the end, it may not be a bad thing for the earth or the human race if increasing numbers of Americans would rather watch our shrunken wildernesses on TV" (p. 199-200).

It is this quote that drove me out of the hour into a two-hour trek in the park across the street from me. What Owen appears to not consider is this mentality will lead to the destruction of the parks. If you can just watch them on TV or experience them in a virtual environment, then why keep the actual park? Sell off the land and build condos on it, flood it with a dam, strip mine the mountains into plains. Shoot all the animals in canned hunts.

I recently went to a community board meeting where someone present at the meeting complained that raccoons were getting into her garbage and couldn't the board put down poison to kill all the raccoons in the neighborhood. I see raccoons all the time - in the spring, I see raccoon babies with their mom. I also see possums, chipmunks, and smell skunks. It would never occur to me to kill these animals; watching their families enriches my life and those of my neighbors. We simply keep the garbage safely contained until garbage day to minimize problems. Since we have less of a disconnect with wild animals, we are able to see the value of their lives and to work to preserve them.

Owen also seems to prefer sanitized parks. In his comment on Central Park, he notes:

"Central Park covers 843 acres. Those acres would work far better, and function less as a barrier to the overall human flow, if they had been situated somewhere other than in the center of the city, or were penetrated by many more artificial attractions (concession stands, restaurants, sports facilties, museums, playgrounds, theaters) designed to generate and sustain an unbroken chain of lively interaction all the way across the park" (p. 169-170).

My reaction to this passage was, once again, to go for a walk in my park. I live next to Forest Park. Forest Park, along with Central Park and Propect Park, were all three designed by Frederick Olmstead. Olmstead's park designs usually include a wild area (in Central Park this is called The Ramble) that recreates the original forest. In Forest Park, this area is an oak wood crossed by dirt paths. When you enter this oak wood, you enter the Queens of four hundred years ago, before Henry Hudson sailed to Manhattan. All you can see are trees with birds flitting around and chipmunks and squirrels scurrying at your feet. You can smell the rich loam of the forest floor. Invariably I (and whoever is with me) get lost for an hour or so before I locate a trail marking that leads me to the perimeter of the forest and one of the perimeter paths that border the street. My visits are sometimes mildly frightening as I have no sense of direction, but always refreshing.

The beauty of Central Park is that it allows Manhattanites to have a similar experience. Anyone who lives in Manhattan can easily visit a concession stand or museum or theater - they trip over them on the street. Entering a bird-filled forest where for an hour you can get away from people only to re-emerge into Manhattan is an enormous luxury for people who spend their lives in extremely small apartments. Owen, a suburbanite, doesn't want a park - he wants an open-air mall in the middle of the city. I doubt that most city-dwellers will agree with him.

In my next post, I will discuss the pros and cons of sprawl.

Green Metropolis by David Owen

Urban Farms and Locavorism

On pages 300-304, David Owen gives a compelling argument about why locavorism is actually an energy-intensive, inefficient way to produce food:

"The distance that a particular food item travels between its grower and its ultimate consumer is not a accurate measure of the amount of energy that was required to put it on the table...The California raspberries I purchase at my grocery store have a smaller carbon footprint than the local raspberries I picked recently at a farm just a couple of towns away, because the California raspberries crossed the country in a shipment containing tons of other produce and therefore represent a minute expenditure of fuel per berry, while the local raspberries were obtained by my wife and me during a thirty mile round-trip in a car whose only other cargo was ourselves" (p. 300).

Owen goes on to further develop the idea that costs other than those of transportation such as labor, fertilizers, etc. must be counted when the cost of locally-produced food is calculated. He also criticizes Dickson Despommier's idea of "vertical farming" for creating wasteful infrastructure needed to build vertical farms in the city since Owen feels Manhattan land could be used for more valuable things than farming.

Interestingly enough, Despommier was one of the speakers at the Municipal Art Society Urban Farming panel that I attended on November 4th and he discussed vertical farms (his book about them will be published next year). He advocated building the farm as a working component of the building design. For example, greenhouse gases from the farm would be used to heat the building. One building being discussed would have a cafe that used only food grown in the building's farm.

Another speaker on the panel mentioned that if all the yards in the five boroughs were used to grow food, then 750,000 people could be fed from it. Despommier talked about the enormous amount of grey water that NYC produces every day - enough, if treated (in my opinion) to water those yards while growing water-hungry vegetables. Other panelists talked about rooftop gardens but warned that the structure of the roof must be able to accommodate the weight of wet soil. While it would be pricey to retrofit roofs, it is possible for new buildings, like the one being discussed, could be designed with the idea of a roof garden. However, as Owen points out, the increased load-bearing capacities of the roof design would be an extra cost to be factored into the cost of any food that it produces.

Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability by David Owen

Introduction and disclaimer:

I read this book last month when I was on vacation. I had just stayed up to six AM because of a twelve hour marathon of season 4 of Doctor Who, slept for eight hours, and awoke at 2 PM with a migraine. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the sky was blue, and I had not yet gotten out of bed. Overcome with guilt, I decided to read an educational book with my coffee and picked Green Metropolis since it appeared to advocate cities. Amazingly enough, after one hour I felt the need to go to my nearby park and commune with nature in its relatively wild oak forest. I'm not sure how happy that urge would make David Owen.

In the first chapter, David Owen admits that he and his wife, empty-nesters, live in a large house in a small town in Connecticut. He uses a huge amount of heat and energy. He drives everywhere and uses big box stores. I appreciated his disclosure of his lifestyle, which directly contradicts what he advocates in his book. As such, I wish to make a disclosure statement about myself before I lead this virtual discussion.

I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens in a pre-war building. I use lots of paper towels, strip-mined cat litter, and plastic bags daily while taking care of my elderly cats. I don't feed them organic cat food (they refuse to eat the expensive food or use PC cat litter). I also don't use energy-saver light bulbs since the day when one of the cats broke a lamp, and ran in with a piece of broken light bulb as a present for me. Since these bulbs contain mercury, I don't want them where the cats get mercury on their mouths or paws. I recycle, I am not a vegetarian, and I can rarely make it to a farmer's market because there are few in Queens and I usually work Saturdays. I decided not to join a CSA since there are none where I work and I would have to take time off from work to pick up my order at a distant location.

Tonight I will be attending a Jane Jacobs Forum lecture at the Municpal Art Society about urban farming:

http://mas.org/designing-urban-farms-to-feed-new-york/

Tomorrow will be my first post where I discuss David Owen's views on urban farms as well as what I've gathered from my own research and the lecture.

Self, Identity and Free Will

Self and Identity have great relevance when we think of ourselves in terms of our political and social identities and their implications. We consciously or unconsciously, adapt to our given identity at various stages of self-development. Self-development can be conceptualized in a variety of ways depending upon which developmental psychologist you refer to i.e. from pre-conventional to conventional to post-conventional (Lawrence Kohlberg), or from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric (Jane Loevinger), or from mythic to rational to pluralistic (Gene Gebser) etc. Identity or perhaps more accurately, our current stage of development, influences us in our everyday life choices--choices that can range from mundane to momentous, from love to hate, from peace to war. For instance, religious, national and ethnic identities have been and continue to be major factors behind choices which lead to conflict and violence. But our choices may seem to us as if they were based on reason and “free will” rather than some unconscious or rationalized aspect of our identity. Since identity we are born into is a chance of birth, and every choice we make has a predominant unconscious dimension to it, how can we be sure that our choices are rational and optimal? Murathan Mungan, contemporary Turkish poet asserts that "all types of identities--ethnic, national, religious, sexual--or whatever else, can become your prison after a while. The identity that you stand up for can enslave you and close you to the rest of the world." Do you agree?

Self & Identity: Introduction

Over the last few decades, the intertwined concepts of self and identity have been systematically researched from many perspectives and some of the findings are nothing less than paradigmatic. In much of the 20th century, behaviorism and psychoanalysis dominated academic psychology but now with the emergence of cognitive science and cross-cultural research, the understandings of self and identity have made immense progress and have significant implications for matters as salient as perception and personality, ethics and education, aesthetics and politics, culture and metaphysics. Indeed, our whole experience of being in the world, as unique individuals as well as members of specific groups, is influenced by such understandings.

From one perspective, identity is the group within the self; from another perspective, it is the self within the group. Much of what we desire to do or what happens to us in the world is significantly influenced by the way world perceives us, and the way we define ourselves--consciously or unconsciously. The process of making the unconscious (biological, cultural, personal), relatively more conscious over time, is indeed what distinguishes human beings from all other animals. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the human capacity for objective self-awareness is that it allows human beings to control their own behavior, to make thoughtful choices and take full responsibility for them.

The purpose of this month-long discussion will be to disseminate and integrate some major interdisciplinary thoughts about self and identity and discern their implications for self-awareness and self-education.

Please share your thoughts and observations as we develop this discussion. Thanks.

Shop Class As Soulcraft: Critiquing Crawford

Crawford's critique of the modern working world is quite good, in my view. Unfortunately, I think that Crawford begins to stumble when he moves from critique to prescription, which at the risk of some oversimplification boils down to “big is bad, small is beautiful.” He calls for a widespread return to localized, face-to-face economic exchanges through more small entrepreneurship, a vision based in part on an overly romanticized concept of the good old days and of manual labor generally that’s probably not possible for many people to pursue.

Before I detail some of specific criticisms on this point, I'd like to pose a few questions:

1) Why do you think that the interest in manual labor that seems to have gripped the reading public is occurring now?

2) Do you think it's possible or desirable for more people to go into business for themselves as a way of avoiding the ills of modern white-collar life?

3) What about labor unions and other worker organizations? How could they help to address some of the issues Crawford addresses in his book?

4) What might citizens organize for politically in order to make work better?

Shop Class as Soulcraft: Crawford's critique of modern work

I have summarized the main points in Crawford's critique of the nature of the modern working world below, with some of my own commentary. To help guide discussion, I would like to propose a few questions:

1) What do you make of his argument that truly understanding how things work in the world requires getting one's hands dirty, so to speak? Does this idea apply only to manual labor or to other fields as well?

2) Does college really serve much of a function today besides socializing people to be "good workers", as Crawford argues, or does it continue to educate students into being good citizens and well-rounded human beings as well? If you have attended college or are currently in college, does his criticism reflect your experience as a college student?

3) If you are or have been a white-collar knowledge worker, has your working life been impacted by the threat of outsourcing/offshoring or the process of degradation that Crawford describes? If so, how?

4) Is there a relationship between the degradation of work as Crawford sees it and the state of our polity and culture? What might some of the broader social effects of a degraded working life be?

5) What do you make of Crawford's critique of consumerism?

Feel free to comment on my commentary as well.

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For Crawford, the central problem of modernity is a struggle for individual agency, that is, the capacity of human beings to have some sort of control over the things that have the biggest impact on their lives. Work definitely falls into this category, as we spend most of our waking hours engaged in it, preparing for it, and recovering from it. But the nature of the modern world constantly undermines this goal. “Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces,” Crawford observes. “We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.”

Because many of us in advanced capitalist countries are engaged in occupations that don’t involve the production of any tangible, material goods, we often don’t know exactly what is expected from us in our work or what its larger purpose is, and this situation can create serious psychological and social trauma. As Crawford observes of young people entering the working world, “the college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show – his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy? There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.”

For decades, we have been told by supposed experts that to avoid a life of mindless toil and the possibility of deskilling and offshoring, pursuit of a college education and a white-collar, “knowledge work” is necessary. But scientific innovation has made any job that can possibly be done remotely through advanced communications technology subject to export and to relentless deskilling and degradation, not just blue-collar manufacturing work. Somewhat surprisingly for a conservative, Crawford draws on the work of Marxist economic historian Harry Braverman to analyze the way capitalist industrialization has effected the separation of thinking from doing wherever possible and to provide caution to those who don’t see the value of work that can’t be outsourced or deskilled. “If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help, Crawford notes impishly, “because they are in China.”

Paradoxically, by promoting a vision of liberation from responsibility through technologically mediated production on one hand and rampant, compensatory consumerism on the other, contemporary society actually makes us less free by subordinating us to the power of the market. As Crawford argues, “the activity of giving form to things seems increasingly the business of a collectivized mind, and from the standpoint of any particular individual, it feels like this forming has already taken place, somewhere else… But because the field of options generated by market forces maps a collective consciousness, the consumer’s vaunted freedom within it might be understood as a tyranny of the majority that he has internalized.” If anything, the critique of commodity fetishism advanced by Marx one hundred and fifty years ago and echoed here by Crawford has only become more relevant and terrifying.

All this has a literally demoralizing effect on working people, and educates us into a certain way of looking at the world and our jobs. “Degraded work entails not just dumbing down but also a certain unintended moral reeducation…We have all had the experience of dealing with a service provider who seems to have been reduced to a script-reading automaton. We have also heard the complaints of employers about not being able to find conscientious workers. Are these two facts perhaps related? There seems to be a vicious circle in which degraded work plays a pedagogical role, forming workers into material that is ill-suited for anything but the overdetermined world of careless labor.” Needless to say, this moral and intellectual degradation makes many of us ill-suited to participate fully and effectively as citizens in a supposedly democratic society that is less responsive to the needs of its people as it becomes increasingly dominated by corporate power.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford

If this recession has taught us anything, it’s that what used to be glowingly described as the Great American Jobs Machine may be beyond repair. The state of job market is so devastatingly bleak that pundits and economists celebrated when the economy shed 247,000 jobs in July, instead of the 600,000 to 700,000 jobs per month it hemorrhaged earlier this year. While I suppose it’s good that the economy sucks somewhat less these days, all signs point toward a jobless recovery. The official unemployment rate remained steady at just under 10 percent, but the Labor Department’s broader and less heralded measure that takes into account the underemployed and “discouraged workers” who have stopped looking for jobs is over 16 percent. Even more discouraging is the news that the problem of long-term unemployment is sharply intensifying. The number of Americans unemployed for 15 weeks or more was 7.88 million, the highest figure ever recorded, and the average unemployed person has been jobless for over 25 weeks. Giddy talk about “green shoots” has obscured the fact that even if the recession ends on paper in the next couple of months, its effects are going to linger in the everyday lives of (possibly) working people for years to come.

But even if Team Obama can restore the status quo ante and succeed in getting the Great American Jobs Machine going again, would that be such a great thing? After all, in the halcyon days of the late 1990s and the pre-recession boom, many of America’s fastest growing occupations were the kind that Barbara Ehrenreich took on in her book Nickel and Dimed - highly precarious service sector jobs that pay little, provide minimal or no benefits, and are physically and psychologically enervating. Even many of us fortunate enough to have made our way into the cadre of white-collar “symbolic analysts” at the heart of an information-driven economy became subject to the same deskilling and off-shoring that has decimated the ranks of America’s blue-collar working class over the last three decades. The lean, mean Great American Jobs Machine of business press lore tended to resemble a meat grinder more than anything else for most of us.

The time is ripe for a wide-ranging reevaluation of the ways in which we go about securing our livelihoods in the world, and the book publishers of the English-speaking world seem to agree. In recent months, a spate of books on work has hit the shelves, including Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford.

By now, anyone with any exposure to Crawford’s book probably knows at least something of the man’s background. The marketing department at Penguin Books certainly won’t let us forget. Educated in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he renounced his sinecure as the head of a Washington think-tank (as far as I can tell, it was related to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in some fashion) to retire to Norfolk, Virginia to open his own vintage motorcycle repair shop. While many reviewers have conceived of the book primarily as some sort of self-help or career advice manual, Shop Class as Soulcraft is an engaging, fairly serious work of ethical and moral inquiry and sociopolitical criticism.

Crawford’s position is deeply conservative, but unlike many contemporary conservatives he has a deep skepticism about the goodness of modern corporate capitalism. He seeks to conserve what he sees as the best aspects of work generally and the manual trades in particular from the relentless onslaught of corporate power and the culture of consumption, which he sees as the most dangerous current threats to individual liberty rather than the state. Don’t fret, however. The book is not always as heavy as my description so far might make it out to be. There are a number of entertaining discussions of the life and work of a mechanic, and of the absurdity of Crawford’s previous incarnations as a harried cubicle dweller.

We will explore various aspects of Crawford’s book this month, but before we get to some of his specific arguments I would like to start the discussion by inviting you all to share some of your thoughts about the nature of the modern workplace. What do you find to be the best and worst aspects of work? How do you find meaning in your work (if any)? If you could change one thing about work, what would it be? Don’t worry, I won’t share the comments with your boss!

If you can't get the book right away, I recommend checking out this recent author talk:


or this recently published article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.