The goal of this series is to describe the four main personality disorders - the Psychopath, the Histrionic, the Narcissist, and the Borderline - in such a way that you can understand them emotionally, and avoid them.
In this video I lay out the heuristics I'm going to use; a quick-and-dirty explanation of Freud's Superego, along with the framework of the four personality types - Choleric, Phlegmatic, Sanguine, and Melancholic.
TVTropes sums them up well: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourTemperamentEnsemble
www.staresattheworld.com
Last summer, I'd started a series of videos on psychology and the four main types of personality disorders and how you can recognize them and avoid those people in your life.
And I never actually finished the series.
There are a few reasons, but the biggest reason is I just wasn't happy with the quality of them.
Making these videos is a skill that you get better at over time.
And my early videos are harder to watch than these.
And so, partly because I've had a bunch of requests to finish the series, so I guess the material was good, even if the presentation wasn't, I decided to completely relaunch the series.
This is going to be the first of five videos covering in this one what the four basic personality types are, what the heuristic I'm using is, and the following four videos are going to cover the personality disorders that you need to look out for, the most common, and how to recognize them.
They are the psychopath, the histrionic, the narcissist, and most dangerous of all, the borderline.
Now, to reiterate what I said in the other videos, it's important to remember that psychology isn't really a science.
Now, it has this elaborate framework based upon experimental data, but any set of data needs to be incorporated into a certain heuristic.
You need a set of laws that says what this means, how you categorize things, what's black, what's white.
And with psychology, the theoretical framework it's based upon has never been tested, verified, let alone proven.
Freud used to dominate psychology, and then they threw out Freud for the modern system for no particular reason.
And soon I think we're going to see the modern system thrown out because the amount of things they're categorizing as personality disorders nowadays is becoming absurd.
And the fact that it's obviously a democratic process, not a scientific process.
To give you two examples, homosexuality used to be a mental disorder, and then it wasn't because it was politically incorrect.
The explanation for schizophrenia used to be the schizophrenic mother.
That parents that abused or didn't pay attention to their kids caused schizophrenia.
And then a whole bunch of parent lobbies got together and forced them to take that out of the diagnostic manual.
Once again, science isn't decided by popular opinion, but psychology is.
So, although I'd be cautious to throw out everything in modern psychology, we do need to recognize that fundamentally there's a lot of guesswork to it.
There's a lot of opinion to it.
And humanity, here's the thing.
We are born with a module in our brains that very accurately imitates other brains.
We know how to understand how people work.
If you've ever read a really bad story with characters that act in ways that make no sense except for plot contrivance, you pick up on that because you're designed to pick up on that.
And the skills that make a good therapist are very, very similar to the skills that make a good author, or a good priest, or a good advertiser.
It's more of an art to understanding the human condition right now than it is a science.
For the most part, the science is just used to prove what we already know to be true.
So the heuristics I'm going to use are no more based upon neurology than modern psychology is.
So keep that in mind.
This is just a metric I'm using because it does a really good job explaining things.
And we've been using it for a long, long time, which does suggest that it has some validity to it.
But ultimately, if we're going to understand how people work, we need to understand how the brain works and what the brain structures are.
Neurology is the true science for understanding what intelligence is.
With that out of the side, let's get to the first little heuristic, the first metric I'm going to use.
And that is Freud's id, ego, and superego.
I'm sure most of you have heard of this already.
It's pretty common knowledge, even if it is discounted by psychology.
But Freud breaks the brain down into three essential elements.
And for the record, there is a little bit of neurology that would suggest that, yeah, these things are a little bit accurate.
First, he breaks the brain down into the id and the ego.
The id is the animal side of the brain.
It's the emotive side of the brain.
It's the part that wants to eat, that falls in love, that has emotions.
It's the part that honesty stems from, funnily enough, because it can only feel what it feels in the moment.
On the other half of the brain is the logical, the rational, the bit that measures and is scientific about things.
The ego.
And so these are the two different parts of the brain struggling against each other.
And when I said there's some neurological justification for this, you have the left brain-right brain phenomenon.
And in fact, this pattern goes back millennia, where the right side of the body is considered the male half, the part controlled by the left brain, the rational brain, and the left side of the body is considered the female half, the emotional, the intuitive, so on and so forth.
So yeah, that's it.
Once again, funny how neurology is actually proving some of our old myths.
But the important thing to remember about the id and the ego is neither of them is properly rational all by itself.
The ego, although logical, is not rational.
It is too logical.
It's the sort of thing.
It knows the value, it knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
To balance these two aspects of the personality, you have the superego.
And the superego is the self.
It's the autoreflective thing inside of you that looks at yourself thinking and chooses between the two of these.
Now, if go back to neurology for a second, there's quite a bit of evidence that when we choose to do something, we've actually already decided to do it, and we're creating a post-hoc rationalization for why we chose something.
But nonetheless, there does seem to be an element in our brain that makes decisions.
And that would be the superego.
It balances these two forces, the emotional and the rational, to create the true rational result.
And the reason I'm bringing this up and elaborating on it is because with each of the four personality disorders, it really seems that they don't have a superego.
That their id and their ego just run amok.
They're wind-up toys just going through society and causing havoc wherever they are.
That's the difference between a sane person and an insane, is that we have superegos.
Now, the second heuristic I'm going to use, the basic breakdown into the four personality types, is essentially the four humors of old medical science.
And these four humors are best broken down upon two axes.
There's the vertical y-axis is that of extroversion and introversion.
The extroversion is the aggressive male sort of energy.
It's the pursuer, the one that goes out into the world and initiates things.
Whereas the introvert is the female seductress.
It's the passive one, the one that lets stuff come to them.
The X-axis, on the other hand, responds very much to the id and the ego.
And Kim Stanley Robinson, in his novel Red Mars, speculated upon the stabile and labile personalities.
So the stabile or id personality is that personality which doesn't like new situations.
They're task-oriented, they like to be in a familiar environment, and they like to become a master at their craft.
They're going to be more interested in things like mechanics, computer programming, reading books.
The labile, or the id, on the other hand, is ultimately people-focused.
They seek out new environments.
They want to meet new people, do new things all the time.
They're not so much into reading, they're into experimenting.
They're not so much into rigor, they're into doing new things.
And it's at the four vertices of these two very similar axes that you get the four basic personality types.
So, starting off with the extrovert stabile, that is the person that enjoys mastering their environment, enjoys being in control of their environment, but is also very extroverted, very willing to go out there and initiate things, you get the choleric personality.
The choleric is the leader type.
It is Leonardo from Ninja Turtles.
It is the personality that likes people.
It's an extrovert personality.
It likes to talk to people, but ultimately wants to organize them towards some task.
They will organize and use people to accomplish this task.
Down here, you get the melancholic.
This is the person that is introverted and likes familiar environments.
They like to master what they're doing.
You get the bookworm, you get Donatello.
Donatello likes to master his machines.
He likes to be completely in control of his environment and doesn't necessarily seek out other people.
He's pretty happy just reading his books and tooling around on his computer and doing whatever it is he enjoys.
This is probably the most anti-social of the personality types, but it doesn't mean they're not social.
It just means that they don't need people around them.
They need books.
They need things.
If you're having a house party, this is the person that's going to make sure that everybody has a clean glass.
They're going to make sure that there's enough booze at the party, that everybody has a ride home.
But they're not going to force themselves on everybody.
They're going to go around in the background taking care of things to make sure that everybody else has a good time.
As opposed to the choleric, the choleric is the one that's going to make sure that everybody agrees on what the party is.
Are we going to listen to music?
Are we going to have a barbecue?
Tries to, is watching over everybody, is going to involve themselves if somebody's sitting not talking to anybody else.
They're going to be the ones managing the party.
This person is going to be doing the background work.
The next type of personality, let's go up here to the sanguine.
The sanguine is the extrovert, likes approaching other people, likes talking to people, and they're also labile in that they seek out new situations.
They're very, very people-focused.
They like adventures.
They like experimentation.
It's the Raphael.
They have a lot of self-confidence, but they can get bored easily.
And so the Raphael, in the party scenario, at the house party, he's the guy saying, hey, you know what we need to do?
We need to go jump in the pool, or we need to do this.
He'll have all the ideas, and he'll experiment, but he won't follow through on them.
So it's generally the choleric that's going to say, okay, that's a great idea, but he's going to organize it, make sure everybody gets in a car and drives to the park to go get drunk in the park or whatever you're doing.
There's a sanguine, the happy, outgoing, experimental person.
And finally, you get the phlematic.
The phlematic person, they are interested in people.
They really like people.
They like new situations all the time, but they don't like to initiate contact, or they don't like to initiate new experiences.
They like the new experiences to come to them.
They're an introvert.
And so they actually make excellent HR people, excellent bureaucrats, because they get along very well with other people.
Unlike the melancholic, or the melancholic, he likes to play with his machines, right?
The phlematic likes to deal with people all the time, but they don't like to be the center of attention.
And so in the party situation, these are the people that want to come with you to a party, but they don't really want to talk.
They maybe just want to dance.
They're quite a bit of a follower in a lot of ways.
Like, they want a good leader to take care of the leadership responsibilities so that they can just talk to people, maybe get some sideways compliments because they don't want direct attention, and just have a great time.
They're the body of the party.
So, those are the four personality types: choleric leader, melancholic bookworm, the sanguine optimist, and the phlematic bureaucrat.
And each of the personality disorders that I'm about to describe is essentially one of these personality types with the brakes gone.
Choleric becomes the sociopath, melancholic becomes the histrionic, the sanguine becomes the narcissist, and the phlematic becomes the borderline.
So, in the following videos, we'll go into a little bit more depth about what each of these personality types is like, and then how that corresponds to the personality disorder based off of it.
