No problem turn on everything ready
so I'll start by telling you a
Little bit about psychoanalysis now
That's not a very straightforward thing to do because there are a number of different schools of psychoanalysis
And they don't come to the same conclusions
but
I'm going to try to
Tell you what I think is common and deep among the different schools and then
Give credit to the originators [of] the ideas where that's due
psychoanalysis
Is I would say a romantic school of thought and the [reason] for [that] is that
for pSychoanalysts
emotion and motivation are far more important than
rationality and
I would like to point out that that's true
It's it's not a theory. We know a lot more [about] the limitations of
Rationality now partly because of our explorations of artificial intelligence than we did
120 years ago when the pSychoanalysts started their
theorizing
you can't think without motivation and emotion in fact you can't think without a body and
even if you had a body you couldn't think without the surrounding social world and so
For the pSychoanalysts, and this is also true of thinkers like Nietzsche
You make sense out of the world because you're boxed in by Society, and then you're boxed in by your body
and then you're boxed in by your motivations and emotions, and then only inside that circumscribed space can your rationality operate and
Part of the reason for that is [that] most of the world is technically uncomputable?
so for example if
You play chess here's an example?
the fastest
supercomputer ever invented cannot calculate all the permutations
in a single chess game if it ran from the beginning of time till now
and
that's just [the] chess game and
So what happens is that?
Every action you take has consequences and then those consequences have consequences and those consequences
Of the consequences have consequences and you can't compute your way through life
We orient ourselves through life by mechanisms. We really don't understand and the psychoanalysts figured that out
from a quasi scientific
perspective before anyone else
Another way you can think about that is that for centuries or for thousands of years or maybe since the beginning of human?
consciousness it was
accepted as
universal wisdom that human beings were the pawns of the gods
We might say and these were at minimum
Causal forces with personality that operated behind the scenes and whose essential motivations were mysterious to us
now modern people no longer believe that but the
psychoanalysts, began their theorizing
from that
fundamental perspective
even freud who portrayed himself as
rationally
anti-religious
Merely replaced religious notions with notions like the super ego, or the it'd now he localized them inside
but
Whether the gods are inside, or outside makes very little difference to whether or not there [are] gods
Now what the psychoanalysts offered us?
That no other school of pSychology has managed so far is
The notion that human beings are basically a loose collection of spirits
instead of
Entities that are transparent to themselves in primary rot primarily rationale for the pSychoanalyst
you're like a room full of ghosts and
You do you that you think you are might be one ghost among all those ghosts and it even might think that it's the ghost
in charge, but the probability that
The part about being in charge is true is zero. It's simply not the case and
One of the other things that the psycho analysts have to offer which neither the cognitive science scientists nor the even the emotional
Neuroscientists have realized is that?
The structures through which we look [at] the world and [also] the structures that motivate us are actually alive. We don't have
mechanical cognitions, what we have is
What we are is a sequence of embodiment by different motivated spirits
and you know that perfectly well if you watch yourself behaved over a two-week period
You're a different person when you're angry you're a different person [when] you're afraid
You're a different person [when] you argue with someone you love you're a different person when you're confused
you know you're a different person when you're
Egotistical you're a different person when you're wrong
And it takes a [tremendous] amount of psychological development before there's any
Coherence across those multiple selves except the Coherence of memory and post Hoc rationalization
Now one [of] the most terrifying realizations that the psycho analysts lead people to is the realization [that] they are not alone in their heads
Now you can debate whether or not the space that you inhabit is in your head
Because I don't really think that's accurate but I don't think you can debate the proposition that
you are not alone in your being and
It's also very difficult to debate the proposition that you're not the captain of the ship or if you are
There's plenty of skeletons below decks
Now freud for his part even [though] he was a 19th century
Rationalist at least in terms of his formal thinking
was also someone who is painfully aware of the
role of
fundamental irrationality romantic irrationality in People's lives and freud basically concentrated on
the two elements of existence that were particularly an ethe amat to the victorians and one of those was sexuality and
the other was
aggression now
Sexuality was problematic for the victorians, not merely because they were repressive, but because sexuality is a terrible Demon
so to speak [I] mean a
large part of the movie that you just watched is an
Expression of the idea that sexuality is a terrible Demon and also that it's closely allied with aggression
[I] mean the blonde woman is basically possessed and she's possessed to the point where she becomes not only murderous
but Suicidal and
freud
attempted with all his might to point out to the victorians especially the aristocratic victorians who thought of themselves as
rational masters that they were embodied creatures with an animal nature and that they were motivated in large part by
Forces that not only did they not understand but they didn't even want to admit
existed
now
The blonde woman in the initial parts of the movie when she's seen off by her uncle
And aunt is basically dorothy from the wizard of Oz. You know she's she's raised somewhere
by loving relatives and the aunt and the Uncle
[or] the older couple
Played that role
[they're] they wish her well in her wonderful adventure into Hollywood and [she] naively accepts their benevolence as you know an
Appropriate way [of] interacting with her and of course. It's not appropriate at all. She's naive right to the bloody core
Whoever really were her parents did an absolutely?
dismal job of preparing her [for] reality they allowed her to nurture naive princess-like fantasies that are so
Fractured and sketchy that there there there they have zero adaptive utility and they basically set her up for
Catastrophic failure and from the freudian perspective, that's an eatable story
Because the fundamental lesson of freud's oedipal theory is do not let
your theoretically benevolent caretakers
Delude you into naive Faith
So in the freudian scheme of things the eatable mother for example
Infantile [isis] her son
Now freud read that as a familial pathology, and you read that as a as a mythological
Pathology even though freud did talk about oedipus as a myth and
freud's basic idea with regards to the eatable complex was that it's very easy for
a mother to entice her son, but even more broadly
For parents to entice their children into a false sense of dependent
security by helping them pretend that the world is much more benevolent and simple than it really is a
Freud's observation of that was that the reason that the parents did that was twofold one was that they were
Cowardly and unable to look at the world as it really was and second that their fundamental aim was to
Eradicate the independent strivings of their children so [that] they would never leave home so that the parents didn't have to suffer from Loneliness
So it's an ugly ugly ugly story, and this is partly why freud is being met with so much resistance. There's lots of reasons
But he's absolutely right the in freud's
basically Oedipal theory was [that]
The most difficult thing that a human being has to do is to develop enough
independence to break away from
the
Maternal nest or the familial nest
so that they can live an independent existence
and that there's multiple ways that that can be seriously
interfered with some of which border on
Incestuous and
I mean I
Appreciated that when I first read freud but once I became a clinical psychologist. [I] thought well
Yeah, that's that's just exactly how it is. I never have anybody in my therapy practice whose parents made them, too
Independent that never happens never I
I have any number [of] people in my clinical practice whose parents seriously?
interfered with their children's striving towards independence, so and
Freud believed that was universal he believed that
the [reason] the Oedipal myth was universal was because it was very difficult for creatures who had as long a history of
Dependence as human beings and who were born so helpless to develop an independent identity
given the need for their protection across you know an 18 year period So
Jung
[viewed] that in a slightly more profound manner in some ways because he thought of it as a problem that
Transcended the mere family because Jung believed that
The one of the temptations of consciousness itself was to hide from reality and [that] you didn't necessarily need any parental
Interference with your development to hide your head head in the sand from the true nature of reality like someone who was naive
So he believed that that was also an existential problem
And he believed that partly because he was a student of Nietzsche who observed quite rightly that much of what passes for
Morality is in fact Cowardice and of course this movie picks up on that theme to some tremendous degree because although
Betty is very naive
Part of that naivety is merely Cowardice
she just does she just doesn't have any life experience at all and you see very rapidly in the movie that when she's
Actually presented with temptation her facade of you know naive morality is
Eradicated instantly the second she's given any temptation so she falls prey to the love affairs she break
she is
Hesitates not at all to break and enter. She ends up hiring a murderer
I mean, she's not a good girl Betty you know [betty] liked the betty in the Archie comics
She's not a good girl at all
she's just someone who's so inexperienced and clueless that she lives in an Oedipal dreamworld and she thinks of Hollywood as a
magical fantasy place where dreams come true
Like they do for Cinderella
and you see the cinderella motif the first time she encounters the director and does her scene when she's singing like some princess and
Then she has to run [out] at the last moment. You know. There's a bit of a brief
Utilization of the myth of Cinderella, and they're just like there is
Utilization of the idea of the Wizard of oz I mean betty is basically dorothy and you see the great and wonderful oz
manipulating things behind the scenes
so
So the psychoanalytic perspective is that people are inhabited by multiple spirits?
and they are not clearly the masters in their own houses and and
As far as I'm concerned to not believe [that] is mere naivety it seems to me especially
As a consequence of thinking of it for so long that it's self-evidently true and that if people
Merely meditate on that in their own life for any period of time they can understand that very rapidly
Now the second thing [that] the pSychoanalysts really brought to the Forefront
along with their emphasis on
irrationality so motivation and emotion say was their emphasis on both the unconscious and on dreams now freud was really the
great formalizer of the idea of the unconscious although there were many precursors to that idea the
Archaic idea of the Underworld for example is a
romantic and religious precursor of the idea of the unconscious
the ancients
Externalized the unconscious and thought about it as the place of gods Whereas by the time we had freud
We started to believe that most of the unexplained complexity in the world was actually localized inside our head. Which is not clearly true
anyways
for Freud and then again for Jung, the unconscious was the place of
either disguised Secrets which would be the freudian [Viewpoint] or
Knowledge that had not yet come to be which was the Jungian viewpoint now
I think Jung wins that argument hands down although
[I] have seen people who were compartmentalized [in] their thinking in exactly the manner that freud
described
now
freud believed that
fantasies in some sense and you could include this movie as an example of fantasies like that were essentially wish
fulfillment
And that what they fulfilled were unconscious wishes and unconscious wishes were are often
Wishes that were generated [by] parts of the psyche that were had either not been allowed to manifest themselves properly
Let's say in the case of sort of Id generated
fantasies or that that had been actively repressed
That the ability to distinguish between what's merely underdeveloped and what's actively replace repressed
That's not such an easy distinction to make and it's conceivable that it's valid
Especially in situations that are like the freudian Oedipal situation where people are raised in
Situations where all Sorts of things are merely not allowed to exist
Which is [Beti] state of mind when she naively encounters [hollywood] for Jung the situation was more complex, and I think
Jung had a dream once that he was excavating a basement with freud which is of course essentially what he was doing and that
He dug underneath what freud was digging
Was was excavating and he found a an iMmense
Cellar basement mansion with thousands and thousands of rooms and I think that's exactly right
I think that is what Jung did in relationship to Freud it was in some ways as if Freud opened the door and
and Jung stepped through it
And it was very hard on you on freud because there were limits to the places that he was willing to go even though
He was a very courageous person
Jung believed that dreams could be revelatory and
And he has a very very very sophisticated theory about how [that] might come about so for Jung
the Dream was and
You can include in the dream
All genuine art all genuine literature all the elements of human creativity that we would consider fine arts or humanities
Based anything that's like that that's not ideological
Would fall for you under the rubric of compensatory
Fantasy so jung's idea was that the ego basically attempted to impose a coherent and somewhat simplified
Perspective on the world Which would be like Betty's initial Viewpoint and that the fantasy world
Did everything it can could to account for what that system could not account for and then to try to start making?
sense out of it and the reason it used fantasy and dreams and artistic productions and so on even rituals is because
The non understood reality has to be acted out and presented an image before it can be understood [in] any articulated Manner
So for Jung it was also a theory [of] the progression of knowledge, so for Jung
the intellect and
articulated knowledge
occupied a very limited and
Circumscribed space and then outside of that area there was the dream world which included all [of] artistic production
And then outside [of] that was the unknown itself and the way the unknown was
Transmitted to the conscious articulated mind was through a lengthy process of dreamlike
representation and
every time you go see a movie [or] every time you read a book of fiction or every time you have a fantasy or a
Dream you're participating in the process by which what's truly unknown is transformed through the dream into articulated
Knowledge and any way any genuine artist does that and this is part of the place where I have some trouble with David Lynch
Because lynch is clearly a post-freudian. He's like Salvador Deli and
psychoanalytic thought can easily become ideological it happened very frequently with freud's
Followers it happened in the case of artists like Salvador Dali too who would take
Freud's
excavation of symbolic language and then use it consciously in a in a in a manner that that
[aped] or mimicked
true
spontaneous symbolic revelation, and [I] could never escape the deep suspicion that that
Lynch is doing exactly the same thing
He's a little too calculated for me
You know and because the film for example could be laid [out] in a linear structure
but it's as if he laid it out in linear structure, and then randomized it which I [think] is a rather cheap trick and and
He the film lacks. I think what you see in truly
Deep symbolic movies which is the revelation of something Beyond?
Understanding what lynch attempts to make the audience feel as far as I'm concerned
Is that he is revealing something that's not yet understood, but I think Lynch understands, too
Well what he's doing and and he's playing a freudian game with the audience. Just like [Salvador] Dali did now that doesn't mean he isn't
Creative because he is and the film is fascinating to watch, but there's something about it [that]
there's a lack of
there's a lack of spontaneity about what he's doing that to me makes him into a quasi freudian, ideologue and
That sort of thing is
genuinely generally, not that helpful [a] real artist is someone who is
Isn't using symbols to Express what they're attempting to express a real artist is
Attempting to Express what has not yet been expressed and has no choice other than to use imagistic or symbolic
representations because there isn't anything else yet, and you can really see this when you read someone like
Nietzsche
But even more so in the case of Jung because Jung is quite obscure
But the reason he's obscure is because the things he was writing about are way more obscure than you
so
Spreader you can see this especially in his writings about alchemy
I mean alchemy is so obscure that it's basically incomprehensible, and young's writings on alchemy are almost
Understandable, and that actually constitutes a move forward, but jung is not trying to [be] obscure
He's trying to be as clear as it possibly can whereas with Lynch [I] feel
Every time I watch a Lynch movie. I feel uneasy and as if I'm being manipulated because the
complexity is
more than the
information demands, so he's playing a game and
I think that that's
I think that that's a pSeudo intellectual move because what someone who's
Genuinely exploring is trying try is
What someone genuinely exploring is trying to do is to lay out something complex as simply as possible?
[now] it still may be incredibly complex, but the complexity isn't added for the point of mystification and
Lynch plays so many games and
I think I see most of his films that I just can't suppress the notion that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark
so
All right, so what's the basic statement, and then I'll [start] what's the basic theme?
well the basic theme to me is the the terrible gap between
naive and motivated innocence, so it's
overprotected
fantasizing and you know the cataclysmic sexual and aggressive nature of reality and we
And lynch weaves together a narrative of a an innocent and naive not innocent naive
[they're] not the same thing a
Naive girl
Who has unrealistic?
expectations both of the world and of herself and her like absolutely traumatic [encounter] with the
Subterranean realities [of] the L.A. scene
Now we do know just so you know that if you want to be developed post-traumatic stress disorder
which is sort of what happens to the girl in this movie the best way to do that is to be really really naive and
then go somewhere horrible and
that'll do it and
often what the
Clinical observations are is that when soldiers for example go off to battle and develop post-traumatic stress disorder?
It's often because of something that's revealed about themselves rather than something that they see
So you know there are cases for example [of] post-traumatic stress disorder where people are on duties like body cleanup
but generally speaking
soldiers developed post-traumatic stress disorder when they see themselves doing something they could never imagine doing and
What that means to some degree?
They're naive about the treating themselves and a few managers in General
I'll just say a little bit about movies in General
And I would also like to say a little bit about how genuine revelations are possible
because one of the
Because what freud?
Hypothesized was basically that your mind operated like a video recorder in some sense that you were recording
Reality all the time and that what you were recorded was reality and that were some elements of that reality that you didn't find
acceptable because of your familial or cultural conditioning, and so you would [just] put those somewhere which would be the unconscious and
[know] [and]
Forbid them to Emerge in this case. They would emerge in fantasies and dreams in a somewhat work sense and
They would have to
Disguise their true content and symbol so as to not upset the statement [receiving] the repressive now
There's a whole bunch about that that's wrong and too complicated first of all you don't incorporate like [Athenian] [Phase]
II lots of things happen to you that you don't understand
So so you don't have to repress them to not be clear about them you just don't understand them third
There's no real evidence for the kind of censoring or a sensory mechanism
That's [probably] talked about you on the other hand said no no no
The dream is doing its best to make something that's not clear clear
Now you can't make it any clearer than it is making it because that's the limit of understanding now
That's exactly what your participated in when you go to remove
So you can imagine
La is where all the movies are made but it's also where most of most of the
Pornographic movies are made although you know Eastern Europe is
coming up pretty hard behind that so
there is the
Myth the fantasy it's not even a myth
It's a naive fantasy and then there's the actuality and I mean La is a fascinating place partly because it contains so many contradictions
But you know it's definitely the place where dreams go to die
So and that's certainly what's portrayed at least in part in this movie, [so] [that's] all I have to [say] about that
