What Has Replaced Freud?

Josh Landy
What’s the latest wisdom about the unconscious mind?

Ray Briggs
Can modern scientists do better than Freud?

Josh Landy
Could anyone do worse?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re asking what has replaced Freud?

Josh Landy
You know Ray, I am not a huge fan of Freud. And I think it’s a good thing he’s being replaced. But I will give him one thing, he did popularize the idea that we don’t always know why we do the things we do.

Ray Briggs
Right. He didn’t invent the idea of the unconscious, by the way, which has actually been around for millennia, like the ancient Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, he talked about how we have an unconscious fear of death that motivates us to act in irrational ways,

Josh Landy
Right yeah, exactly. Freud’s contribution was to bring these ideas more into mainstream consciousness, no pun intended. Nowadays, pretty much everyone’s familiar with the idea that there’s a lot we don’t know about ourselves.

Ray Briggs
Oh, I would actually give Freud a little more credit than that. It’s not just that now everyone knows about unconscious beliefs and desires and all that stuff. But those ideas gained a new kind of scientific respectability because of him.

Josh Landy
Scientific what?

Ray Briggs
Respectability? What’s your problem?

Josh Landy
Come on. The idea that boys all want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers, women all wish they had male genitalia and envy men for that. These aren’t exactly scientific. I mean, there’s a shred of evidence for half of what Freud says. And that’s precisely why he’s fallen out of favor.

Ray Briggs
Yeah okay, I’m not gonna argue with you on the Oedipus complex. But no science is static. I mean, biologists used to think that maggots appeared spontaneously out of rotting food. And now we know the flies lay eggs. Look, science evolves, Josh.

Josh Landy
Yeah sure okay, for maggots. But I mean, Freud, Freud’s claims were never scientific in the first place, because he didn’t follow the scientific method. And if you don’t follow that method, you’re not doing science.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I agree with that. But I would also add that your findings have to be replicable.

Josh Landy
How do you mean?

Ray Briggs
So let’s say you’re conducting an experiment to see how people’s judgments are influenced by factors they’re not aware of. And so you get a certain result like that holding up a warm cup of coffee leads people to develop positive opinions about strangers and and holding a cold drink, leads them to develop negative opinions.

Josh Landy
Okay, yeah, this sounds like that famous experiment by the psychologist John Bargh.

Ray Briggs
So now, let’s say other scientists try to replicate this experiment, but they never get the same result.

Josh Landy
You know, that would be a big problem.

Ray Briggs
Right, and you would question the legitimacy of the original experiment. You would doubt that there was any real effect ever discovered.

Josh Landy
Yeah okay. Look, I see your point. And I’m just as eager to ditch the results of those bad experiments as I am to ditch Freud. But come on. I mean, with Freud, it’s even worse. He didn’t conduct experiments like that at all. So there’s nothing even to try to replicate these. At least some of today’s science is going to hold up.

Ray Briggs
You’re in denial.

Josh Landy
Oh, nice one, Sigmund.

Ray Briggs
Look, I see a ton of psychological experiments that failed to replicate. Come on, they’re even calling it a replication crisis. Freud’s theories were unscientific, but what replaced Freud, it’s not doing a whole lot better. And I bet our guest today, Stanford professor Blakey Vermeule is going to agree with me.

Josh Landy
She’s great. I’m super looking forward to this. And you know, I gotta say, this kind of skepticism is very healthy. In fact, I wish people had more skepticism when it came to Freud. But still, Ray, I don’t know. I feel like there are lots and lots of results from today’s science that do replicate and you know what? They’re pretty cool.

Ray Briggs
Well, cool or not, they can be dangerous if you take them too far. Like, what happens if your psychologist thinks you’re full of repressed memories, but you really aren’t? And what if those memories are of really bad stuff like child abuse? What if innocent people are prosecuted because of those fake memories?

Josh Landy
Or what if guilty people are exonerated because of doubts about memory? We sent our roving philosophical reporter Holly J McDede to find out more. And just a quick warning, Holly’s report does contain references to sexual abuse, and acquaintance murder, so listener discretion is advised.

Holly McDede
The idea that memories can be repressed has been around since Freud first proposed that painful memories are often very deep in the unconscious. But a recent effort to cast doubt on repressed memories began a few decades ago, in 1990, a researcher named Elizabeth Loftus got a call from a lawyer defending a man named George Franklin. His daughter had accused him of murdering her best friend decades earlier after apparently recovering memories of the crime during therapy.

Elizabeth Loftus
The only evidence against was the testimony of his daughter who said that she had witnessed this murder when she was eight years old and that she repressed her memory for 20 years and now the memory was back.

Holly McDede
Franklin was convicted and spent five years in jail before doubts over his daughter’s testimony were raised and his conviction was overturned. Loftus has continued to study how memories can be unreliable. She’s testified in sexual misconduct and murder cases involving defendants like Ted Bundy and OJ Simpson. During the trial against Harvey Weinstein, Loftus testified that leading questions by investigators and extensive media coverage contaminate and alter memories.

Elizabeth Loftus
Without independent corroboration that can confirm the memory or exonerate it, you can’t know for sure whether somebody’s report is true or false, but they’re often people, you know, on the other side of the case, who in so many words effectively insist that the memory is real.

Holly McDede
The idea that memories can be false is often used to discredit victims. After Christine Blasey Ford testified against then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, her memory was also questioned. And some speculated she may have confused Kavanaugh with someone else.

Unknown Speaker
How are you so sure that it was he? The same way that I’m sure that I’m talking to you right now. So just basic memory functions. And just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that sort of that neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus. And so the trauma related experience then is kind of locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.

Holly McDede
You can trace some of that discourse around repressed memories to two parents, Pam and Peter Fried. In the 90s. Their daughter Jennifer privately accused her father of sexually abusing her. Jennifer has said that memories of abuse resurfaced after speaking with a therapist.

Warwick Middleton
Her parents turned what was a private family issue into the most extreme public one imaginable.

Holly McDede
Warwick Middleton is one of Jennifer’s good friends and a professor at the University of Queensland. He says Jennifer is now one of the most famous psychotherapy patients in human history. Her parents, both academics, deny the allegations and responded by forming an organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

Warwick Middleton
And then pursuing, you know, a political agenda whereby they send out newsletters, but also sort of take in accused parents which is what Pamela and Peter Freid portrayed themselves as being falsely accused parents, with the accusation being that the daughters therapist somehow implanted false memories into her mind.

Holly McDede
Middleton says the discussion around memories at the time led to extremes. On the one side, some people thought that we’ve all been abused, but don’t know it. On the other side, people thought that there were out of control therapists creating false memories everywhere.

Warwick Middleton
The impetus of the false memory syndrome foundation position, was that, you know, the general populace went from believing victims accounts of abuse, to focusing on falsely accused parents. And yes, and undoubtedly, amidst the confusion of it all, there were some people falsely accused. There’s always been. There are also many people who were abused as who shielded under the threat of prosecution by invoking a false memory defense.

Holly McDede
Laura Brown is a psychologist who specializes in trauma, and she says the ideas of the false memory syndrome foundation worked their way into intro psych textbooks.

Laura Brown
I used to teach a class for first year medical students about the medical and psychosocial consequences of childhood sexual abuse. And inevitably, someone would say, but what about false memories?

Holly McDede
She says the bottom line is this: it’s possible for people to develop false beliefs about things that happen in their lives. And people can also have things happen in their lives that are confusing, painful, hard to understand, and therefore difficult to recall.

Laura Brown
Until something made it necessary for them to recall. And both of those things are true.

Holly McDede
The false memory syndrome foundation quietly folded in 2019. But there’s still a lot we don’t understand about the nature of memory. In sexual abuse cases, there is rarely physical evidence, documentation or witnesses. But there are infinite opportunities for doubt. And memories are an easy target. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that fascinating and complex report. Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about what has replaced Freud.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Blakey Vermeule, who’s a professor of English at Stanford University, and the author of “The New Unconscious: a Literary Guided tour in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Blakey, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Blakey Vermule
Thank you, Ray. It’s nice to be here.

Josh Landy
So Blakey, you’re a literature professor, and one of the best I know, but these days, you’re writing about the unconscious mind. So how did that happen? How did you get interested in that?

Blakey Vermule
Well, I studied Freud as an undergraduate. And then I went to graduate school, and I worked with a professor named Frederick Cruz, who is probably the most closely associated with bringing Freud’s legacy into disrepute. I was absolutely rooting for Fred, as he was writing his papers in the New York Review of Books. And I’ve since come to think that we have made a terrible, terrible mistake in ditching the Freudian framework.

Ray Briggs
Can you tell us more about why we ditched or why you thought we should ditch the Freudian framework?

Blakey Vermule
Well, the Freudian framework is just insane, it makes absolutely no sense from beginning to end, it was something that that was sort of created out of whole cloth, by a person with a profound hero complex, and the desire to be the head of a kind of religious movement. And he succeeded in a way beyond his wildest dreams. And his influence really kind of lasted up until about the 1970s, when, in fact, many medical schools had entire curricula devoted to psychoanalysis. And then it just collapsed. The whole sort of legacy, more or less collapsed, in a way over the course of a single decade, the 1980s and early 90s.

Ray Briggs
So if he was so unscientific, why was it a mistake to ditch his theories? It sounds like a good thing.

Blakey Vermule
Well, because I think that what Freud showed us is the sort of deep lack of access that we have to our unconscious mind. And that was a very, very powerful, indeed, necessary intervention. But more than that, his framework was fundamentally pessimistic. It was fundamentally drawn from the world of Schopenhauer. What has replaced him has a totally different framework, and I think that that’s something worth exploring.

Josh Landy
Okay, so that second part makes sense. The first part, though, I don’t know. Like, I mean, precisely because people like Schopenhauer on the scene and Nietzsche, yeah, this guy Hartman, who wrote the whole book, the philosopher, the unconscious, right. I mean, like, he really invented Freud. Yeah, it said that light at one point, you know, to most people who’ve been educated in philosophy, the idea of anything psycho, which is not also consciousness is inconceivable. That was never true. It was a good like sales pitch. But is it really the case that we needed Freud in order to tell people that there are things you know, there are motivating forces that are driving us that we’re not aware of, and things like that?

Blakey Vermule
Well, whether we needed him or not, that was how the information spread was through his influence. And his influence was profound on popular culture, on academia, on science on the practice of psychoanalysis. And so there was a kind of brief moment or brief, maybe a five decade moment, in the 20th century, when people really deeply understood the forces of irrational human behavior.

Ray Briggs
I’m a little bit surprised that that you think we’ve thrown out Freud’s idea of the unconscious as well, because it seems like now lots of people still believe and did believe before Freud, that lots of what’s going on in our minds isn’t consciously accessible. Is that part of the baby that’s gotten thrown out with the bathwater or not really?

Blakey Vermule
I think that it’s hard for us to accept the degree to which our conscious reasoning is just this kind of puny little, I mean, they’re, they’re different metaphors in circulation. But I think my favorite one is that it’s like a snowflake on top of an iceberg, basically. And the reason it seems to kind of exist is to give us a kind of after the fact sense of a plausible narrative, and also to justify the kinds of things we are likely to want to do in any case.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re asking what has replaced Freud with Blakey Vermeule from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
If you don’t know what you’re thinking, who does? Is science any better than psychoanalysis? How can we tell which theories will stand the test of time?

Josh Landy
Consciousness, complexes and cognitive biases along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Freud had some crazy ideas. Not sure you ever suggested getting a second head though. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the unconscious after Freud with Blakey Vermeule from Stanford University, author of “The New Unconscious: a Literary Guided tour in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies.”

Josh Landy
We’re definitely conscious of the ongoing pandemic. So we’re pre recording this episode from the safety of our respective homes, and unfortunately, can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us comments@philosophytalk.org Or you can comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Blakey, we’re going to start this segment with an email from a listener. This comes from Kirk in East Lansing, Michigan, who says, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s research into biases, contextual influences affecting rationality and failures and reasoning has replaced the model of the unconscious mind, but not necessarily the idea of unacknowledged forces acting on thinking and influencing desires. So what’s that about, Blakey? Who were who were Kahneman and Tversky?

Blakey Vermule
Well, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, are two of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century. And they more or less developed the experimental framework that has set our understanding of the unconscious, they began working together in 1969, I believe, or 1970. Their collaboration produced a whole series of papers for which ultimately, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002. Tversky would have also shared in the Nobel Prize, except he had, unfortunately died of cancer. So I would say that they’re the most influential psychologists of the latter part of the 20th century.

Ray Briggs
And so Kirk says they believe in unacknowledged forces that act on thinking and influence desires, what kinds of unacknowledged forces?

Blakey Vermule
Well, in a nutshell, their contribution to the sort of psychological literature is the idea of the dual process brain. And that has now become sort of the standard view of how the mind works, that they’re, there are two systems in the brain. One is called system one, and the other one is system two. So system one is automatic, it’s efficient, it’s fast, it’s immediate. It’s easy, we can easily sort of recall things in system one and system two, that which we would call sort of consciousness is controlled, it’s flexible, it’s slow, and most importantly, it’s effortful. So that’s the kind of key insight that they had is that system to what we call rationality or consciousness is actually difficult for people. And that most people or as Kahneman put it repeatedly in his writings are lazy, and they don’t want to have to think too hard.

Josh Landy
So that sounds to me like a somewhat pessimistic framework where I mean, I mean, they’re famous for introducing they and others, I guess, famous introducing things like the idea of the confirmation bias, right? Where we’re constantly attending to things that confirm our pre existing opinions, or, or like the cognitive dissonance idea of cognitive dissonance, we hate to feel like we were wrong or stupid, or, you know, the anchoring heuristic, where you start with a number and everything looks good or bad, like Donald Trump saying 2 million COVID desk that was gonna look good. By contrast to that whatever happened, you know, so isn’t this is somewhat pessimistic framework that human beings are so susceptible to these cognitive biases, these things that kind of bypass our our reason and make us make mistakes all the time?

Blakey Vermule
Well, I think that’s a good point, Josh. And to be fair to both Kahneman and Tversky, they never, in any sense, put a kind of moral or cultural framework around their, around their work. In fact, if you go back and reread it as I do, from time to time, what strikes you over and over again, or what strikes me over and over again, is how really sweet and innocent it is. They’re just, they’re just sort of trying to figure stuff out about how people reason, and it’s wonderful. I think the sort of the disaster, for this way of thinking was that it was more or less taken up by capitalism, as it were, by the sort of financial industry, by business schools, by hedge funds, by corporations as a way to try to get people to behave more or less rationally. And that to my mind has been just disastrous.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so what’s wrong with behaving rationally? Isn’t that something that we should all want to do?

Blakey Vermule
Sure, we should, except that I think that, so let me put it this way, that a lot of this work. So there there are certain there certain names, before and after Kahneman and Tversky. So in the late 20th century that is sort of the more famous the most famous psychology experiments, they started off with the Asch conformity experiments. Then there were the Milgram experiments. Then there was the work by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson on consumer choice, and then came Kahneman and Tversky. And they really sort of blew this whole field apart. And then came Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. And they were the two who more or less tried to popularize behavioral economics, behavioral psychology, Prospect Theory. And they made it a question of sort of policy. And so in the 90s, as I’m sure you remember, lots of and the 2000s, a lot of sort of governments across the globe developed Nudge units. Obama’s famously did, the British government has a Nudge Unit to this day, in which they try to put in place incentives to get people to behave better or more rationally or more in keeping with their long term interests.

Ray Briggs
So it seems like trying to get people to behave rationally is kind of separable into two parts that I want to understand those two separately. So one is the idea of trying to get people to behave in a way, which lots of entities do, like corporations do that every time they advertise something to you. And you might think, like, that’s, that’s slimy. But you can either do it well, or badly depending on how well you achieve your goal, like so. So if you have a theory that works, you could use it to slimy ends. But it could still be a true theory that like correctly predicts stuff. And then there’s this other thing about like, what is in their best interest or rational for them to do which seems like a value judgment that you might want to let them in on. So is, is your worry about like one part, or both parts of that?

Blakey Vermule
My worry is about the more or less the consumer framework that has underlined this whole the what we might call the sort of popularization of this entire realm of research. So the people who have made it popular are Malcolm Gladwell, most famously, in his book, Blink, he was the person who sort of more or less popularized the Kahneman Tversky view. But the message that has gotten out there has been relentlessly kind of solutionist and optimistic. And it’s about, you know, perfecting constantly sort of perfecting your life and trying to, you know, be better at things like self care, or to be better at things like just, you know, little nudges and fixes that might or might not make you into a better sort of subject of the bourgeois capitalist experience. But at the same time, while all of this has been going on, there’s been a kind of brewing, economic and social disaster, starting in the 1970s, because of the very same kind of call it neoliberal framework that has been producing these these Nudge units. So I guess that’s more or less my view is that we’ve been paying attention to the kind of tight moving tiny little pieces around the board, while at the same time missing a kind of deeper disaster. And that’s where I think a Freudian more or less a Freudian worldview would actually be useful.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the unconscious after Freud with Blakey Vermeule from Stanford University. So gosh, there’s so much here Blakey, I, you know, I love what you’re saying. I personally think we can have our pessimism without resorting to Freud. You know, like, it’s like, build a castle, learn from Monty Python, if you build a castle in the swamp, it’s gonna sink into the swamp, like, let’s, let’s build on different foundations. We could start back with Schopenhauer. Or we could start with Nietzsche, or Adorno. There’s lots of great pessimists, including Milgram. So you mentioned Stanley Milgram. I mean, those experiments are very pessimistic. I mean, they seem to show that people would, you know, or regular folks would, you know, torment other people if they were told to and so, do we really need to return to Freud just to get our pessimism back?

Blakey Vermule
That’s a great question, Josh. Okay, so maybe a different maybe a better maybe a sort of more substantive way of putting this is that yes, that Freud gave us a kind of mad, pessimistic framework, but he also gave us a sense I mean, he so like, all of the more or less than non scientific writers before him who were talking about or thinking about the unconscious, he was drawing on a realm of mythology or of sort of shared human storytelling. And one of the things that I believe very much that has gone away apparently, in the post Freudian collapse has been any sense of shared mythology shared kind of shared register of, you know, meaning making. Nudge units definitely don’t give us a sense of meaning they don’t give us a sense of a sort of wider framework of human human endeavor, that the unconscious seems to be sort of part of or tapping into. And to me, that has been a tragedy.

Josh Landy
That makes sense to me. And you know, the thing I would say to staunch Freudians, when they make that argument is Scientology does too. Let’s, let’s choose a meaning making framework that that we believe, but but I want to come back to this idea of nudges. And I mean, I really like your thought that there’s a kind of a negative side to them. But, you know, I’ll play angel’s advocate here on behalf of the nudges, like, think about cases where there’s always going to be some defaults, like, for example, you know, you sign up for some service, and the default setting is you’ve opted in to their mailing list, which kind of sucks, right? Maybe it’d be better if the default setting is you opt out, and then you know, you you’re forced to opt in if you want to. So why not think that there are cases like that where it’s actually, in our own interest is benevolent? It’s like, that’s very nice. If you look, there has to be some default. You can’t set up a system with no default. So let’s think together about what the best default is for the average human being and go with that. What’s wrong with that?

Blakey Vermule
Well, I have a one word answer for you, Josh. And that, well, two word answer. And that’s Donald Trump. I mean, you can sample the defaults you want in your nice little kind of rational system. And lo and behold, here comes the jack in the box.

Ray Briggs
Actually, I want to I want to push on this too, not because I like Donald Trump, obviously. But because I’m, I’m not sure that like the theory of like, behavioral economics, and nudges is really to blame. So it seems factually true to me that little differences in people’s environment, will affect how they behave. And like you can either ignore that or kind of try to act on it. And in fact, it seems like a lot of the way that the Twitter environment is set up, it causes people to do nasty things on Twitter, like, I don’t know, trumpet misinformation, or harass each other. Um, and that different, maybe a different environment would produce different results. So I guess like, is it the observations of behavioral economics that are wrong? Are they are they reporting falsehoods? are they reporting truths that are somehow like, distracting us from considering other truths? Or are they reporting truths that enable them to like, manipulate others in harmful ways, even though you need a theory to do that?

Blakey Vermule
Yeah, I guess I think that’s a good question. So I look back at the history of social psychological experimentation in the 20th century, which is it’s a fascinating sort of field. And it’s worth trying to study and understand the kind of sweep of it. But some of the first social psychological experiments, like the ones that were done by Nisbett Wilson, in Michigan in the 1970s. And then the whole tradition that they inaugurated were largely about tricking people about fooling people into basically being duped for this sort of experimental situation. So the sort of more most, you know, there are a couple of famous examples, one of them. Maybe the best one to talk about is the the Xerox experiments that were done by Ellen Langer at NYU or CUNY, and then at Harvard in the 70s. And they were basically, you know, as follows. So, suppose you have some Xeroxes that you have to make. You go up to somebody at the Xerox machine, you say, can I make some Xeroxes? Can I cut in front of you and make some Xeroxes? They’re gonna say no, if you say, I want to cut in front of you, because I need to make some Xeroxes then the chance that they’re sort of, you know, acceptance rate is going to go way up. That’s just a sort of small example of how adding a kind of level of causality or explanation is going to induce people, influence people to do what you want them to do.

Josh Landy
That’s great. Blakey, we have an email from Carl in Portland, Oregon. Carl says this conscious versus subconscious mind distinction is BS. Certainly a great many of our mental functions are executed necessarily with no or marginal awareness. And surely our frontiers of awareness can expand volitionally to some degree, but it’s clear that such a maneuver would not necessarily be to human advantage. So isn’t the real query one concerning the dimensions and degrees of awareness we choose to seek?

Blakey Vermule
Right. So there are certain aspects of our brain that we simply can’t have access to through introspection, right? So color detection, there’s simply there would be absolutely no advantage to us to having a sense of you know, how we go about detecting colors or edges. But there are plenty of aspects of our unknown mind that we do have, or we can have introspective access to, or more specifically access because other people have shown us that we’re slipping on a kind of banana peel, and that that’s maybe what Freud called the subconscious. That’s the stuff that’s actually very interesting to social psychology note that edge detection.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about what has replaced Freud with Blakey Vermeule, professor of English at Stanford University,

Ray Briggs
Will we ever solve the replication crisis? Are today’s social scientists making the same mistakes as Freud? What will our picture of the mind look like tomorrow?

Josh Landy
Freeing ourselves from Freud, plus a conundrum about nature’s design from one of our listeners, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Who doesn’t love someone for psychological reasons? Is that what Freud figured out? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Blakey Vermeule from Stanford University, and we’re thinking about the unconscious after Freud.

Josh Landy
So Blakey, what if we made you Dean of all research and experimental psychology, what would be the first thing you’d change?

Blakey Vermule
I wouldn’t be Dean. But aside from that, the first thing I’d change is to really try to give full shrift understanding to the fact that people have very, very strong trends into a need for transcendence intuitions for transcendence, that treating them as sort of consumers who are able to kind of choose between tiny little different choices, is actually really pretty profoundly undervaluing our needs, that’s the first thing that I would do is take people’s need for transcendence seriously.

Ray Briggs
So Blakey, you’ve mentioned transcendence, now and a couple of earlier times, storytelling. And I’m wondering, like, where we might look for sources of those things, apart from Freud, and I thought, like, there are actually a lot of places we could choose from. So I think the entire field of literature is kind of about trying to make meaning from our lives in a human rather than a, like, objective way, isn’t it?

Blakey Vermule
It is, I guess. So to come back to the example that I was, you know, going to avoid earlier, Josh and I have a long standing interest in Mafia movies. And, and one of my sort of little pet theories about our current moment, is that the Godfather and The Sopranos and so forth, Breaking Bad, more or less made a certain kind of style of mob boss actually appear kind of friendly, and palatable and delightful. So when that mob boss kind of came along, people were more or less prepared to find that style acceptable. To me, that’s an example of ignoring, more or less the kind of mythic structure of people’s psychic life, which I think that the current kind of psychological establishment really, really does.

Josh Landy
Yeah, let’s look to [unintelligible], let’s look to Nieztsche. I mean, of course, you know, we, as a culture have a long history of thinking about I mean, Pascal, you know, the heart has reasons of which reason those nothing. Let’s let’s reread all of these folks, I agree with you, let’s think hard about what the deepest needs of human beings are, whether they’re being met, and how to meet them better.

Ray Briggs
I’m kind of wondering about exactly how we situate meaning. So one approach you could have is that like, a good approach to psychology should give humans meanings but I’m not really convinced by that because I think like lots of religions provide meanings and they’re bad meanings that harm people. And those mafia movies provide like harmful meanings. But it sounded like one of the points you’re making with that example. And correct me if I’m wrong, is that we got to understand how humans make meanings in a way that doesn’t just treat them as little mechanistic objects in order to accurately predict what they’re going to do and like large scenarios, not just small ones. Is that a good way of saying what’s going?

Blakey Vermule
Yeah I think maybe, so I guess the way I would put it is that humans do make meanings, we have a tremendous need to make meaning. And we’re going to do that. Whether or not we’re being sort of nudged into behaving sort of more rationally for our own long term interest or not. I think this sort of QAnon conspiracy theory is a perfect case in point. It’s a collective example of storytelling, where people are sort of desperate to try to impose some order on a disorderly world. And so the fact that we’re, we’re still doing that, we’re making meaning. It’s just that we’re doing it outside of these kind of narrow little bands of what contemporary mind science considers the realm of experimental understanding.

Josh Landy
Okay, so this may sound too Kumbaya, but I’m wondering if we kind of sort of reached a kind of peace accord here, where you could have a bit of both because, you know, very often when you ask these folks, tell us a little about transcendence that they won’t say to you, it’s not a real need, they might just say, we’re not sure about that. So I’m wondering if the things can’t be compatible like this, I find a lot of stuff really exciting about the new psychology, for example, I think it’s leading to better forms of treatment for patients with certain conditions. Really, I think powerful coping strategies for folks who are in need, you know, helping us protect ourselves against fraudsters, because fraudsters are using, are exploiting our cognitive biases. You know, I kind of like the way that unlike the Freudian view, it isn’t the hermeneutics of suspicion, right, it doesn’t assume that all unconscious processes are anti social, and, and the sickest motivation is the truest and everything genuinely. So couldn’t we have a little bit of both, couldn’t we bring back just as you want, writing very powerfully, are urging us to do a sense of the pessimism, that tragic side of life, the dangers, the deep, deep human needs, but also keep some of these findings in place?

Blakey Vermule
Yes, yes. And maybe here’s where here’s what’s actually motivating my interest in this. Humanists have been completely swept aside in this conversation since the 1970s. I mean, there’s now a large kind of set of tree branches, which stretch across the academic world, from business schools, to psych departments, to neuromarketing schools to nudge units to corporations. And there’s one group of people, namely humanists, and philosophers, if I may say, who have been almost entirely left out of conversation. And that’s, that’s kind of the point. In a way I watched it happen in the 80s, when the sort of the new psychologists were fighting the Freudians. But this whole new way of thinking has left behind not only the tragic sense of life, which I think we need to bring back, but also, also the humanities, also storytelling and meaning making. So I think that that’s my objection to it.

Ray Briggs
Right. So I have a question about, like, where we fit. A lot of the studies that you cited sort of leading up to and following on from Kahneman and Tversky, were experiments where you just put people in a like little lab situation, and manipulate their behavior. And it seems to me like, there are some things about human beings that you can find out that way. And there are an awful lot of things about human beings that you can’t find out that way. Because there are aspects of them that you either can’t or shouldn’t manipulate in a lab. And like, I don’t know, maybe, maybe some of them, like the Milgram experiment involves manipulating things that you shouldn’t manipulate. Like, is that where we as the humanities fit in?

Blakey Vermule
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And and, and it’s also the case that, that so many of these psych experiments have been, as it turns out, done on American and European college students. So they’re within a kind of framework, which is now called the WEIRD framework. And maybe you’ve heard this acronym that means-

Ray Briggs
Western, educated industrial-.

Blakey Vermule
But essentially, that this sort of the upshot of this is individualism. Individualism, and a kind of extreme psychological extreme of individualism.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and I’m excited. I’m excited about more recent developments where they’re starting to question that and to run these experiments in different parts of the world, for example,

Blakey Vermule
Right. So it turns out that the Asch conformity experiments were outliers in the sense of, of not conforming with the Asch conformity experiments, but the Milgram experiments seem to replicate very well, which is a little terrifying.

Josh Landy
That is indeed disturbing. Well, Blakey, this is a demoralizing, but I think also a very powerful place to stop, especially with your pitch for the necessity of storytelling, the humanities, which I share completely. And, you know, given the [unintelligible] bias, you know what that means? It means it’s been a great conversation. So, thank you so much for joining us today.

Blakey Vermule
Good. Thank you, Josh. And thank you, Ray.

Josh Landy
Our guests has been Blakey Vermeule, professor of English at Stanford University, and author of “The New Unconscious: a Literary Guided tour in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies.” So Ray, what are you thinking now? Do we need to ask your therapist?

Ray Briggs
No, I think I can introspect. I’ve been thinking about two books on the human mind that I’ve been reading and enjoying that are pretty different. So the first is this 1985 book by Oliver Sacks called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which is basically a series of case studies of people with strange things happening to their minds, that can be explained by their neurology. So I think that this is a really good set of cases for the experimental approaches that Blakey talks about. So you know, somebody who is a painter, and then has a nerve injury that prevents them from being able to see color at all in sort of ways that don’t function like usual color blindness. And the explanation for this is kind of internal to them in their brain and admits of scientific explanation. And they still have to deal with it. So there are those kinds of examples. And the other book that I’ve been really enjoying is a really different book called “Trauma and Recovery,” which is a 1992 book by Judith Herman, which I believe, introduced the idea of PTSD. And that book takes a very different approach that’s a sort of like cross cultural observation approach to trauma. So she connects actually, some of Freud’s early work on trauma and his patients, which he later repudiated and, like stories about shellshocked soldiers and shows how, like these people’s narratives about their experience, reflect a lot of common points. And so that’s a really narrative approach. And I thought it was really cool that both of these books seemed valuable to me in different ways.

Josh Landy
That’s fantastic Ray. I also recommend our own Jennifer Eberhardt “On Implicit Bias” and our Philosophy Talk regulars, Alison Gopnik, Paul Bloom and David Eagleman, we’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Now, let’s check in with a listener looking for a little philosophical advice. It’s time for a conundrum. Diane, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Diane
Thanks very much.

Josh Landy
Where are you calling from Diane?

Diane
Portland, Oregon.

Ray Briggs
And what’s your conundrum for us today?

Diane
We have two cats. One of the cats sits in the sun that doesn’t bother anybody and the other cat is a huntress. We have to keep her in, so she doesn’t kill birds. If we know coyotes or bobcats are in the neighborhood, we have to keep both cats in so they don’t get eaten by something else. We have insects that prowl around in the kitchen and are an annoyance. But I say to them aloud, you can bother me when I’m interred when I’m in the ground, you can eat me up. But don’t bother me now. And, you know, we have this virus that everybody’s cowering in front of that just wants to use us as a place to replicate more efficiently. Everything in the world, every animate thing in the world from a virus to a bobcat and beyond is out to eat everything else or prevent itself from being eaten for a while. It seems to me when I think about it, like a crazy way to organize a planet. And I’ve got to believe that there are science fiction writers who have taken this on.

Ray Briggs
One science fiction writer I know who has taken up this issue is Ursula Le Guin.

Diane
And Marge Piercy is another one.

Ray Briggs
Yes, yes, actually. And so So Ursula Le Guin has this great story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from the Omelas.” And one one kind of cool thing that I learned recently about the story is that NK Jemisin now has a story that’s kind of a reply to it called “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” where she kind of challenges or premise and writing this story. So Le Guin is kind of grappling with the idea that in order to live in a civilized society, maybe you need to do some terrible evil to somebody. And sort of then just describes like people faced with this choice and what they do and NK Jemisin says, why did you set the choice up that way? Basically. So that’s kind of what that essay is about.

Josh Landy
Here’s a question I have for you, Diane. You consider the Gnostics you know, my grandma used to say to me, look at the beautiful world the way setup, you know, every creature finds another creature to eat and, and every you know, there must be a God. And I would say yeah, you know, look at the Emerald cockroach wasp. That’s the one that like hijacks the brain of a cockroach, drags it around like a tank, lays eggs and it eats alive. I mean, it’s like a horror movie. There’s death going on naturally. That’s like torture on an unimaginable scale. So, so here’s my thought, what if the Gnostics are right, and there is a Creator, but the Creator isn’t benevolent? Maybe there’s a benevolent super being somewhere out there. but that being isn’t in charge of our world. Our world was created and is ruled by someone who’s either incompetent, or malevolent or indifferent or some combination. What do you think about that?

Diane
I think there’s a counter argument from religious sources that we need baser instincts are in our composition to rise above to propel us to become more in the image of God.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I’m a little skeptical actually, of the idea that, that we need sort of evil and base instincts to rise above like, this is a kind of common response to the problem of evil. I’m not sure I buy that we need the amount of evil that’s in the world to make us good people. There’s, like, do human beings really need to like commit genocide and child abuse so that we can pass some kind of moral test? That seems excessive?

Josh Landy
Of course, one of my favorite lines, Schopenhauer’s line, where there is a reason for all this suffering and cruelty and in the world of animals, including human animals, and that’s to show us how terrible everything is. Which in turn, hopefully, he thinks should cause us to stop desiring and couldn’t get off that treadmill and ultimately bring everything-

Diane
How many illegitimate children did he father?

Josh Landy
That was a decisive argument against him. Nietzsche thought playing the flute was a good argument against him too.

Ray Briggs
But yeah, I’m not sure that we should think that the universe is the way it is to teach us a lesson. Number one, because why should we be the center of it? Like, why should the universe care whether we are happy or sad? And number two, if I were designing a lesson plan, I don’t think I’d give myself very high marks for the world as it exists if my learning objective were that my students learned to be nice to each other.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I love that point. But just to say one thing in defense of Schopenhauer. It’s not for our benefit that the world teaches us a lesson. It’s for its own. It’s this elaborate sort of suicide by cop plan on the part of the universe, right that it wants to come to an end, it needs us to kind of do a little bit of work and then everything vanishes.

Diane
That is my conundrum in a nutshell is what is the advantage to nature? That it is red in tooth and claw? What does nature get out of that or the creator or however you view this?

Josh Landy
Well, that is a fantastic conundrum. I’m delighted that we haven’t answered it. Because I think it’s a great thing to keep thinking about for a very long time. I’m so grateful to you for having raised it for us today. Thank you.

Ray Briggs
If you’ve got a conundrum that’s got you in a bind, a dilemma in your personal life that might benefit from some philosophical insight, send it to us at conundrums@philosophytalk.org and maybe we can think through it together.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.