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Feb. 4, 2015 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:13:39
2015 Personality Lecture 09: Depth Psychology: Sigmund Freud (Part 02)
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As you know, Freud believed that a substantial proportion of the symptoms he saw among his clients were of psychological origin, despite the fact that some of them were manifest physically.
These things do happen, by the way.
I had a client who was from an Eastern European background, which is relevant in that I believe her upbringing To be more similar to the kind of upbringing that the Victorians, that Freud studied, were than, say, the people in the West.
And she had the same thing that her grandmother had, which was psychosomatic epilepsy.
And so she expressed what were often sexual conflicts through epileptic seizures.
She had an epileptic seizure of this type in my lab, my office one day.
And, you know, she was unsure whether they were real or not.
But I've seen people have epileptic seizures, and as a general rule, it's quite upsetting.
But she had an epileptic seizure in my office, and one of the things I noted was that it didn't really bother me.
And one of the things I've noticed about being a therapist is if someone is manifesting a lot of emotion, and it's not bothering me, Then, it's a good hint that there's something wrong, that it's not real.
There's something about it that isn't exactly right, because it doesn't seem to hook in your empathic systems the same way.
So, I had another client.
This has actually happened to two of my clients.
The first one was attacked by her boyfriend.
And she was unbelievably naive.
She was so naive, you could write a whole book about how naive she was.
I'm serious, it was unbelievable.
Her parents actually taught her, this is the literal truth, her parents taught her that adults were angels.
It's not a good way of preparing your child for the grown-up world.
Anyways, she had a fight with her boyfriend, and he attacked her with sexual intent.
When we went through this, and it was under hypnosis, she described his face.
She said he had a look of sheer malevolence, right?
She'd never seen that.
She was like a 28-year-old woman.
She had an undergraduate degree.
She was no idiot.
I asked her, like, how could you reconcile your belief that adults were angels with all the things that you learned about history in your undergraduate degree?
And she basically said, well, I just put those things in a compartment and didn't pay any attention to them.
It's like...
Yeah, okay.
So, she saw this guy's face when he was intending harm, and it was actually the look on his face that traumatized her.
And it traumatized her so badly that she had severe psychosomatic symptoms, severe enough to get her diagnosed as schizophrenic, for five years non-stop at night, for four hours at a time.
And the symptoms were that her whole body would shake, and she would be unable to sleep.
So, and I had another client who had the same thing.
Not the same thing, but a similar thing happened to her in high school where a boy was picking on her continually with malevolent intent and the thing that really made that memory stick in her face was the look of malevolence on his face.
So you see some people are definitely capable of some Behavior that is most properly explained, as far as I can tell, in terms that are similar to Freud's.
What's repressed?
Unbearable memories, often sexual and impermissible desires.
How do you defend against things that you don't want to be true?
Well, there's repression.
Freud really thought that was unconscious.
People didn't know they were repressing.
So, I sent you guys a link.
You may have noticed about the Gottman studies on married couples.
I think their studies are bloody brilliant, you know?
And what Gottman found, and it's exactly typical, is that the couples who are going to get divorced, when you see them in their natural habitat, they're all nice to each other, but their psychophysiological systems are just going berserk.
They're like prey and predator to each other.
You know, I don't know if that's repression or if it's suppression.
These things are very difficult to distinguish because they're not that well-defined.
But there is a lot of activity beneath the surface, that's for sure.
And the problem with being psychophysiologically aroused like that is that The consequence of that over time is physical, right?
Because what happens when you're aroused like that is you produce a lot of the stress hormone cortisol and that activates the general stress response.
And the general stress response basically robs your future stores of energy and ability to overreact in the present.
And if you do that long enough, well, you'll damage your brain.
That's one of the things that happens.
But there's many other things that happen too.
Denial.
People will just say, well, that's not so bad, or maybe that's normal.
We'll see a lot of that when I show you this movie.
Reaction formation, which is, it's like, it's overcompensation in some sense.
So maybe you really hate your sister and you buy her a great big Christmas present, you know, because you'd like to think that you like her, but really you don't like her at all.
Often sibling rivalry can be unbelievably intense.
Displacement.
This is a good one.
My boss yells at me.
I yell at my husband.
My husband yells at the baby.
The baby bites the cat.
You know, so it's a cascading chain of emotion.
Often I find with people, though, that if they come home and they're in a bad mood and they're touchy, you know, and you say something to them and, you know, they fly off the handle.
It isn't exactly so much that they've suppressed or repressed or denied what's happening at work, at least not in any obvious sense, not at that day.
Often you have to like pry around in the person and talk to them and harass them a bit until they You know, often till emotion arises, which is partly why Freud thought about his transformation process as cathartic.
And then they figure out, they'll cry and say, well, I'm really upset at my boss.
And it's not obvious that the person actually knew that when they came home.
Like, the unconscious issue is quite a difficult one to tear apart.
My conclusion has been that when people...
That repression isn't really much different than lying.
Except that...
The lie is initially conscious when you first make it.
But if you keep habitually lying about something, you develop a little automated circuit that either does the lying or that has the replacement story at hand.
And after, you know, 200 repetitions of the same damn lie, you've built a little machine in your head that handles all that.
And at that point, it can be unconscious.
Because you don't need to be conscious to make that decision anymore.
So if you practice something deceptive long enough, I think it becomes habitual and unconscious.
So I would recommend that you don't do that unless you want your head full of little pathological monsters that you can't control.
I mean, maybe it's already like that.
That would be a Freudian idea.
Identification is another defense mechanism.
You're bullied.
You want to become the bully.
Rationalization, that's when you don't actually...
This is the thing that people who are highly intelligent are really good at.
You know, they've got a problem and they come up with some perfectly coherent and reasonable explanation for the problem or the misbehavior that has absolutely nothing to do with what's actually going on.
If you marry someone, for example, who's more introverted than you or less verbally fluent, this is something to really watch out for because just because you could win an argument with someone doesn't mean you're right.
and if you're verbally fluent and extroverted you can often tie people up in knots but I would say beware of that because just because the person you're arguing with can't formulate their ideas as fast as you and just because they may not be able to hold their own in an argument with you that does not mean they don't know what they see and if you have any intelligence and you're married to someone like that you actually try to coax what they think out of them and help them articulate it and formulate it because there's always the possibility that you're doing something underhanded and sneaky and Dangerous in
the medium to long term, and it might be better for both of you if you figured it out.
Intellectualization, well, if you've ever watched a Woody Allen movie, you know what that is.
Woody Allen should have had Jungian psychotherapy, not Freudian psychotherapy, because he's a creative person, and one of the things I've noticed is that I have clients who are very creative, and other clients who aren't as creative, and the ones who are creative spontaneously manifest processes in their dreams that are most easily Interpreted in Jungian form.
It doesn't seem to be the case for people who aren't creative though.
If I talk to them about Mythological or symbolic ideas, it doesn't click for them.
So we usually do things that are much more practical, much more like behavior therapy.
Projection is a good one.
I'm not irritated, you're irritating.
You know, and it's a toss-up often because, you know, you might think, well, no one can irritate you without your permission.
It's like, believe me, if you think that, you've not been around some world-class irritating people because there are certainly people, borderline personalities are like that, who, I don't care if you're a saint, man, Sooner or later you're going to get irritated because that's actually the goal of the behavior in large part.
So...
Freud's fundamental theory was that unconscious ideas were at the core of many psychological conflicts like incomprehensible distress or psychosomatic symptoms.
A psychosomatic symptom is when your body attempts to represent something that you're repressing.
Now, I think there's two ways of looking at that because I don't actually think...
I don't always think that's what happens.
I think sometimes...
The reaction to the situation in question is actually somatic to begin with.
And then, if it's articulated and worked out, the body can...
It's like the memory locale shifts, or the representation area shifts.
So, for example, I had a client.
She had a wonderful time.
She got fired from her job, and they bundled her into her car, and it was sudden.
She didn't see it coming, and then on the way home, her car was hit by another car.
So, like, that was a perfect way to be traumatized, because she was already...
Really upset and on edge obviously and then this car hit her at about 50 miles an hour and it hurt her quite badly and she had like minimal brain injury which is a really rough one because it has non-specific symptoms and like she'd come to therapy and I talked to her.
Her ideas were quite fragmented so It took us quite a long time to kind of weave a coherent story together, but she'd sit there like this, you know, and one of the things that I found after a while when I was working with her was that I was really uncomfortable watching her and it was a discomfort that seemed to center about here.
It was a physiological response, probably a mirroring response.
And one day I said to her, and it was like a spontaneous impulse, I said, come over here.
We'd worked together for a long time by this time.
I said, look, come over here.
Lean on the desk.
So I had her lean on the desk, and then I sort of pounded on her shoulders, down her spine.
And she started to cry, and she cried like for 45 minutes.
And then that loosened up a shoulder.
And then another thing we did was to...
She said she couldn't lift her arm, so we were doing, basically, exposure.
I said, okay, lift your arm, and then let it go, and then lift your arm another inch, and let it go, and then lift your arm another inch, and let it go, and soon we had her arm up like this.
She hadn't moved her arm above her head in like five years, because she was in this, like, protective crouch.
It's like a startle response.
And I think that if you're traumatized often, what happens is your body throws itself into a state of hyper-preparation.
And then unless you can...
Unless you can bring the meaning of the traumatic event up and articulate it and throw away what it isn't, you know, like because when she got hit by the car and lost her job, part of her idea was, well, my life is over now, you know, because...
You can understand why someone would think that.
So I would say, well, yes, that's understandable, but it's too global and vague a formulation to be helpful.
But if your life is over and there's nothing you can do, this is probably the right thing to do.
And so sometimes it's not so much that the somatic symptoms Or a consequence of repression and then symbolic representation.
It's that the actual response to the event starts out physiological and it never gets any farther than that.
And so partly what you're doing is...
And I think it's like a permanent manifestation of the stress response.
So he thought of behavior anomalies in this way and hallucinations and delusions.
Like a lot of this stuff is dead on as far as I'm concerned.
You see this a lot with people that you have an intimate relationship with.
There's something off about what they're doing.
Well, for example, in the Gottman study, that's a good example.
You know how Gottman said, The successful couples responded to each other's bids, right?
So if you're in the house and your wife says, oh look, there's a cardinal in the backyard and it's really pretty.
What that means is, maybe you could come over here and look at this bird with me and that would help me understand that you like me and are interested in what I'm doing.
And so you can say, in Gottman's terms, you can just say, I don't want to look at your stupid bird.
That's not a great response.
Or you can say, Really?
Okay.
You put down your newspaper, whatever it is, and look like you're really perturbed, and then you walk over there.
That's a good response, too, because then you can also destroy her pleasure in looking at the bird without really looking like a son of a bitch, so that's a good one.
Or you can just sort of sigh.
I love that one.
Which means, oh, you're annoying.
I'm so put upon.
You're always asking me to do stupid things.
And I'm so generous and giving.
And here you are exploiting me again.
And then you go over and you look at the bird.
And maybe you smile with your mouth, but not your eyes.
And that's real nice.
And then the other one is, well, you go over there like a civilized human being.
Like interacting with someone that you'd actually like to get along with for the next 30 years.
But the things in all those other three categories, those are...
There's, like, just in that sigh, there's a whole bloody mess of snakes underneath it, you know?
And if you watch someone...
Who does that?
And you go after them.
You know, if you decide you're going to solve this.
You have to dig down into that sigh, like God only knows how deep.
It might be a decade old.
You know, they're harboring some bloody resentment that occurred like 15 years ago.
Those things are just stacked up like little bombs underneath the surface of this little tiny behavioral action.
You know, and usually people will just ignore it.
Which is not a good idea.
But, because they're conflict avoidant.
People are very, very conflict avoidant.
And they like to think that Well, if everything's just alright right now, it'll stay alright into the future.
It's like, no, it won't.
It absolutely will not.
And if you don't deal with those little things, then all the monsters that are packed up inside them will eventually eat you.
But that's a while in the future, so you don't really have to worry about it.
It's not a very good way of thinking about things.
Freud also noticed that people make jokes about things that are often repressed, and that's definitely the case.
If you watch a good comedian, Especially the ones that are a little bit more on the outrageous side.
What they're doing constantly is saying things that people don't want to believe but know are true.
And so they'll reveal something that everybody knows and everybody will laugh because, yeah, we know that, but you're not supposed to say it.
And what's his name?
The Indian comic from...
Yeah, yeah, that's the guy.
I mean, he's always making racial jokes, right?
It's so funny because his whole audience is full of...
It's a really, really racially and ethnically mixed audience.
And all he does is pick out people and, like, assault them for their race or ethnic identity.
And they're all laughing away.
Like, oh, it's so cute that we're all in here, like, insulting each other.
But, you know, he's giving voice to...
What?
To commonly held stereotypes that no one will admit to holding or knowing.
And so it's kind of a relief to everyone to have that brought out in the open in some safe place.
So, slips of the tongue are also an interesting phenomena.
You can watch people very carefully for this because now and then They'll say something that means something other than what they thought it would say or it means something contrary or it's a hint into one of these stacks of monsters that normally they don't want to admit to.
You have to be sharp to catch these things.
You have to pay real attention.
You can also see the same thing with micro-expressions often with people.
That's given rise to this whole new politically correct movement about Suppressing microaggression, which is like one of the most pathological things I've ever heard of.
You know, like getting rid of your microaggression expressions, that does not make you a good person.
It just makes you a trickier sort of psychopath.
So...
Freud also was extremely interested in dreams.
And his theory was that a dream was a wish fulfillment.
And I really don't think that's a good theory.
I think that sometimes some dreams have a wish-like element.
Although I should say, even though I'm not very fond of the wish fulfillment theory, I don't think it's comprehensive enough.
The other things he had to say about dreams were absolutely brilliant.
If you want to read one book by Freud, I would say the book on dreams is the best.
Unfortunately, at the moment, I can't remember what it's called.
The Interpretation of Dreams, right.
It's a very thick book.
You can't boil down Freud's theory of dreams, it's a whole book, into one phrase, wish fulfillment.
He's way smarter than that.
Freud's writing is sort of like fiction.
You can't condense it.
You have to read it.
So, you know, sometimes it seems obvious, like, if the dream is of a sexual nature, you can easily see, well, that that might be, you know, a wish fulfillment or something like that.
And hungry people will dream about food, and so it's not the case that...
And lonely people will dream about social comfort and so forth.
So it's not the case, precisely, that the dream can't have anything to do with wishes.
Jung's idea, which I think is a better idea, and I think it's more grounded in how we understand dreams in the modern world, was that the dream was compensatory so that if you had a particularly rigid viewpoint of the world and that rigid viewpoint was actually impeding your progress forward that the dream would spin up counter propositional fantasies in an attempt to update the stiffening and the rigidity of the more explicit belief system I
think there's some good evidence for that in modern studies of dreaming.
It's certainly the case that dreams do seem to update your memory.
And I think partly what the dreams are doing too, and this is maybe where some of the symbolic content comes from, is there's this, you know, it's not obvious how you should structure a category, right?
Because categories are very fluid.
You might think, well, all men is a good category.
And then you might think, well, all white men and all non-white men is a good category, depending on what you're discussing.
And so on.
You know, the contents of your categories often depend on what you want to do with the category.
So it's not obvious what should be in the box and what shouldn't be.
And partly what the dream is doing, too, is by loosening up the categorical structure.
You know, because things can fluidly change and transform in dreams.
It allows you to experiment with recategorization while you're asleep without having to suffer the consequences of that.
In the waking world, because you're paralyzed, right?
So I think it's more accurate to think of the dream as part of the process by which new knowledge becomes eventually articulated.
And that's more of a Jungian perspective.
So you start out not knowing anything about it, and then maybe you can code it onto your behavior.
That would be something Piaget would suggest.
After it's coded onto behavior, maybe you can start expressing it in image, especially in dynamic images.
And so that would be something like fiction.
And so you can think of dreams as a kind of fiction.
And then once you've got the thing laid out in fiction, especially if it's kind of coherent, then it's not a huge leap from that to having an articulated model.
And I think a lot of what you're doing when you do dream interpretation in psychotherapy is you're doing the same thing that you would do if you were interpreting literature.
And, you know, you think, well, is it worthwhile thinking about literature?
It's like, well, you know, it's worthwhile reading it, fine.
Is it worthwhile thinking about what you're reading?
It's a different process.
It's like, arguably, well, so the dream has a function, and it does whatever dreams do, and then perhaps there's also some utility in attending to the dream consciously, and trying to elaborate up on its contents.
Freud would do that with free association.
It works.
It really works.
It's quite fun.
If you have someone who's a good dreamer, you know, you say, okay, the way I do it is they tell me the dream, they read it, and I listen to it, and I let my imagination work on it, so it kind of builds up an associational net.
And then I have them start from the beginning again, and whenever they come to a theme or an object or something like that that's identifiable, then I ask them what that reminds them of.
And so, to me, what we're doing is fleshing out the associational network, and that's a Freudian idea.
And then, if you walk through the whole dream like that, and then, you know, people will associate, and then that will remind them of something, and then maybe they'll remember why a specific date is in the dream, or something like that, and so, it's like, the dream is putting together ideas that have a vague cloud around them, and it's trying to sequence and organize them, and you seem to be able to facilitate that process with conscious reflection.
So, And for some people, it's extremely useful.
One of the things Jung said, which I really liked, was that if you're stuck in a problem and you can't solve it, you have no idea how to solve it.
Terrible conflict of some sort.
You have to look where you don't know.
And he thought, well, one of the places that you don't know is in your dreams.
And you think, well, dreams are doing something.
And there's good evidence that part of what dreams are doing is dealing with novel information.
They're trying to conceptualize novel information, so that's a good place to look for potential solutions because you can also think of the dream as part of a hypothesis-generating mechanism that would also be the creative imagination.
I think often the reason I think maybe the reason that sometimes people remember dreams that are extremely emotional and they feel compelled to tell them is perhaps is because the people who did that I think about it from an evolutionary perspective the people who did that and exposed the fantasy to the group were more likely to gather information about what it meant and possibly more likely to survive and so there seems to be a trigger level you know above which the dream is specifically Sufficiently
emotionally impactful, so that you actually remember it when you wake up.
And Jung would often consider those big dreams, you know, especially if they had archetypal content.
And those would also sometimes be dreams that had relevance beyond the relevance to the specific individual.
So they might be dreams that are working really hard on a problem that's collective.
And you know, you think, well, where do new ideas come from?
Well, they just appear in my head.
It's like, that's not a very good theory.
The idea has a birthplace.
The birthplace is in the unknown.
And then there's a tremendous amount of elaboration of that information before it ever gets up to where it pops into your head as an articulated statement.
That's not an instantaneous magical transformation.
Or maybe you can think it is.
It's not a very useful theory and the idea that there are multiple stages of processing of information each with their own nature is much more in keeping with the way that modern people look at the brain which is as a organ that's evolved that has very very archaic elements like massively archaic like the ones I told you about that you share with lobsters and then there's all sorts of weird systems built on top of that that are basically there for biological purposes You know,
then there's a cortical cap that sort of elaborates and all those things are working together to extract out information that you can use for living.
It's certainly not mechanical.
It's not exactly computational.
It's a multi-stage process and dreams and imagination are involved at least at the hypothesis stage.
So you can think of dream as a hypothesis in some sense.
Although I don't think it's reasonable to say that dreams do one thing any more than it is reasonable to say that thinking does one thing.
But the compensatory idea is a good one.
And you can kind of think of the wish-fulfillment idea as a subset of that.
The dream is also, Freud says, a process of regression that manifests itself simultaneously in three fashions.
As topical regression from the conscious to the unconscious.
As temporal regression from the present time to childhood.
Sometimes you see this with people who've had repetitive nightmares.
One thing I can tell you, you can try this.
If you have a repetitive nightmare, usually it presents the same thematic problem over and over.
Like maybe you're being chased by a monster when you turn around.
Maybe your hands are tied, or something like that.
If you told me about that, I'd think, well, who or what is tying your hands?
That would be the first question.
But one of the things you can do to make that nightmare go away is to sit down, reimagine the nightmare, and fix the ending.
Now, you have to come up with a reasonable ending.
So, for example, I had a client who was afraid she had a cabin.
It was a very interesting case.
She had a mouse phobia, and she was afraid mice would run up her leg.
That was the specific content of the phobia.
and she had a cabin and she didn't like to go to the cabin for two reasons one was a mouse might run up her leg and the second was she was up there alone and she was afraid that she would get attacked and sexually assaulted so it doesn't take much of a Freudian genius to figure out the connection between those two things but one of the things we did was first of all talk it through as if it was a reasonable fear it's like well you are up there alone maybe You could have an alarm system and some good locks.
So your fear might be predicated on some realistic appraisal, which you're repressing.
You're not dealing with it.
It is potentially dangerous.
Fix that.
Get a dog!
So we did all that and simultaneously treated her mouse phobia through behavioral exposure.
And then she was having these dreams of these guys breaking in and raping her, and so we had her walk through.
I think she bought a bat and put it by her bed, which was something I suggested.
And then we walked her through, I walked her through the dream, and we changed the ending.
So what she did was the guy climbed in the window, and she picked up the bat, and she smacked him one, and then she sprayed him with oven cleaner, which is like a really nasty thing to do.
Then she tied him up in a chair, and she was like, she was dancing around in the office thinking that's, you know, that's a hero myth, essentially, right?
We transformed the dream from victim to hero, essentially, and that was the end of her nightmares.
And that happens more often than you might think.
Because the dream is presenting you with a problem, right?
It's like a threat detection mechanism.
It says, well, here's a threat.
Maybe it's expressing it in symbolic terms.
Or maybe it's using a general category, like monster.
It's like...
Are monsters chasing you?
Well, it depends on what you mean by monsters.
But functionally, yes, they are.
You know, well, you might think, well, conceptualizing them as monsters isn't exactly accurate.
It's like, well...
It's not exactly clear that it's not accurate.
So...
I think a monster is like a representation of the class of all things that could chase you and devour you.
And there's lots of those that are symbolic and articulate, like if you're arguing with someone who can defeat you, or, you know, there are certainly predators on the internet that are waiting for you at pretty much any moment to slip up.
And, like, the idea that the world is full of monstrous embodied forces that have you as target for prey, it's like...
Yes, that's right.
Obviously that's right.
So Freud's theory of dreams was essentially that there was a latent content in the dream, which is what the dream really meant.
And then the layers of weird transformation of the idea, he thought about displacement where one thing would stand for another, Or condensation, where a lot of events would be rammed together in a very short sequence.
Or symbolization, so like the mouse in my client's phobia would be a good example of symbolization of fear of sexual penetration and dramatization.
He thought of those as all ways that the dream was hiding the The latent content from the dreamer in order to protect sleep.
Whereas Jung and Freud really argued about this, and it's part of what broke them apart.
Jung said, no, no, no, that might be right in some cases, but generally what the dream is doing, it's just a fact of nature.
The dream is trying to think something up.
And so, it might be concentrating on something that you refuse to admit to and repress, but sometimes it's just like out there with free play and fantasy, trying to generally orient you in the world.
So he thought about it.
And Jung also thought, it's like Jung was an archaeologist of the id, in some sense.
He thought of the id as a more creative place, in some sense, than Freud did, and as the place where new ideas and new adaptive patterns were born.
He believed that the dream was generally fairly illogical, and that one of the things you did when you recounted the dream, no matter how accurately you tried to recount it, was to transform it into more of a narrative form than it actually took as a dream.
And so, no doubt that's true, because when you describe an experience, even if it's an experience you have every day, you basically extract out the gist to then describe the experience.
And you have to do the same thing with dreams, because you can't present the images.
So, just the act of telling the dream might even be useful in that sense, because what you're doing is making whatever that thought is more coherent than it would otherwise be.
So, I want to run through this psychosexual theory very rapidly, and then I want to show you some examples of it.
So, Jung believed that, in some sense, you know, you had a primary energy, and that psychic energy, that's what we call energy, you know, when you say, I'm feeling energetic today, it's not obvious what that means, but Freud regarded that as libidinal, and he thought that there were multiple sources of libido,
but the most fundamental source was sexuality, and I think he thought that in part because of the influence of Darwin's ideas, because Darwin basically said that the goal of organisms was essentially to procreate, you know, and the sexual urge is extraordinarily strong, and so he thought it was primary,
and you can make a reasonable case that it's primary, but I think it's too reductionistic, because there's lots of drives that people have, and it isn't obvious that they all coagulate into a single source of energy somewhere in the psyche.
If you look at the way the brain is structured, actually, the part of the brain that wakes you up is called the reticular activating system, and it's some strands way down in the brain stem that branch out in many, many ways out into the brain, like a tree in some sense.
If you twist your head the wrong way when you have a car accident, sometimes you can shear off those tracts, and then you're in a coma, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
But the reticular activating system is really, really old.
It seems older than all the motivational and emotional systems.
And so, if there is a libido, which would be whatever it is that the reticular activating system does in order to awaken you from your slumbers, say, or to put you on alert when something happens, it looks like it's older than all the The isolated motivational and emotional systems.
So, libido, per se, isn't sexual by all appearances.
It's something that's below sexuality.
But, you know, it's still reasonable to note that sexuality is a powerful driving force.
Freud said it begins its development in infancy.
The infant is a sexual being by which he meant the infant is capable of experiencing sexual pleasure.
So when I should let you know that one of the practices of Victorian nurses with male babies was to masturbate them till they Till satiation, so they would sleep.
So it's not like there's no evidence for sexual pleasure in children, in infants in particular.
Freud thought about that as polymorphously perverse, by which he meant that the infant was willing to take pleasure in any activity whatsoever, and babies can have some pretty messy habits, without any structuring of that, and then that that got channeled in various ways as the As the baby developed.
So here are his stages.
The oral period.
Well, it's quite interesting that when a baby is born, the part of its body that is in fact most mature, most like a mature part in terms of its eventual function, is in fact the mouth and the tongue.
And there's obvious reasons for that because the baby has to be able to latch onto the nipple, you know, right away and that's actually quite a complicated activity.
It's a complicated social activity and it requires a fair bit of coordination between the baby and the mother.
It's not something automatic.
So if the baby didn't come out, you know, wired up for certain basic In certain basic ways, it wouldn't be able to get going to begin with.
So it's definitely wired up in an oral manner.
So he thought of the oral character as passive, optimistic and dependent.
And there's the anal period, where Freud thought that's where the ego met the superego for the first time in some sense, where the child had to renounce primary pleasure, and so that would be the pleasure of defecation, fundamentally, in favor of a more complex form of behavior, and that that was actually an inhibitory process.
And it's certainly the case that parents can get into, like, year-long wars with kids over toilet training.
I've seen some pretty weird examples of that.
I saw one parent who was in such a war with their three-year-old that that three-year-old would only defecate if the mother put a diaper on them.
So it had perfect control, but it was like there was a war going on.
And he thought of anal people as orderly, parsimonious, and obstinate.
It's kind of interesting too, because one of the things that we found recently is that Conscientiousness is one of the big five traits, right?
You can break it into orderliness and into industriousness.
And orderliness predicts conservatism and predicts authoritarianism and it's associated with disgust sensitivity.
So I thought, huh, that's pretty interesting, you know?
And it's also, the other thing that's really cool about orderliness and disgust sensitivity is that it is associated with disgust, associated with anything that would contaminate And so the idea that that's associated in some sense with with with anal thinking is It's there's something about it.
That's right You know and it's also pretty important to note that the reason that all you people are going to live to be ninety or thereabouts Roughly speaking isn't doctors.
It's plumbers So right really so you know the the Life is in itself contaminating, and we have a built-in system, that's the disgust system, to take care of that problem, and it's clear that that does vary in strength between individuals, and it's also clear that the degree to which that If you have a stronger disgust system, you're much more likely to be conservative in your political beliefs.
So that's pretty cool.
It's like, it's not something obvious, you know.
The phallic period, three to five.
That's when Freud believed that children often discovered masturbation, and that's when girls developed penis envy.
And boys developed castration anxiety, which I said is a small price to pay for the possession of a penis.
Yeah, so, alright.
Here's a way of thinking about the Oedipal phase.
It's basically hostility and erotic attraction towards the parents.
Now, Freud thought about this as a normative part of development.
And that's a tough one.
It certainly does seem to be the case, and there is some experimental evidence, that boys fight more with their fathers and girls fight more with their mothers.
So that's kind of interesting.
But I'm not so sure that the idea that this is normative development is exactly right.
And maybe Freud got skewed over a bit because he was always dealing with people who had one form of pathology or another.
Now, here's how to develop an Oedipal situation.
If you want to.
with your children some of you will take this road so maybe this will help you do it better if that's really what you're into so the thing to do is make sure that your marriage is quite hostile so that you have a lot of underlying resentment to your partner and that will that will encourage you to subtly turn one of your children or more of them against that parent without them really knowing it and you can do that by covertly reinforcing them when they do that or ignoring them that's even better when they do the opposite So,
you know, maybe your daughter is being nice to your husband, you're really mad at him, so that you, you know, you make it known to her, using one strategy or another, that you don't really approve of that sort of behavior.
So that's a pretty effective way of doing it.
Then the next thing to do is, this works really well if you have a young boy and you're a woman.
It's like, you know, you want to develop a lot of hostility towards your husband, so you really don't want to have anything to do with him, and you don't really want him to even touch you, and because of that, you're not even really all that happy about men.
And so then you do two things, is that, You turn to your son because he's kind of harmless and you make your relationship way closer than it should be with him and you encourage all sorts of things that are really kind of on the edge of acceptable behavior and at the same time you repress and crush any part of him that would develop the kind of masculinity that would enable him to turn into the kind of monster that you think your husband is.
So that's really effective and people can do that for like 20 years and The outcome is that I have a lot of business as a therapist because I do see this sort of thing and a lot of a lot of what happens in therapy is that it's an interesting thing is people come to see me to solve all sorts of problems like of a very large number of sorts but one of the common problems is they cannot get away from their families they can't they can't Break those initials.
It doesn't even break them.
The family can't negotiate a way to allow the person to manifest the independence that would be necessary for them to have their own life and their own family and their own career.
And so they're struggling and they're caught in these often ugly nets.
Like often unbelievably ugly nets.
And they can't get out of them.
And that's what we're going to see right now.
So, now this character, Robert Crumb, he's quite the character.
We should turn those lights down.
Yeah, that's good.
Maybe...
We can do a voiceover on this later, so it doesn't really matter if we have...
Whoop.
Let's do that Okay, so Robert Crumb was an underground cartoonist is an underground cartoonist and he lived in Berkeley in the late 60s and he This documentary was made about him and his family.
And so I'm going to get you to watch as much of it as we can watch and maybe I'll show you a bit more in the next class.
I'm not supposed to because we're supposed to do something else, but I might anyways.
Now, this film, I love this film for a variety of reasons.
First of all, I think it's a work of genius.
Second, I've never ever seen any film of any sort that does as good a job of illustrating not only what Freudian psychopathology is and how it manifests itself symbolically, but also how the family plays into it.
So, away we go.
So, away we go.
So, away we away we go.
So, away we go.
Thank you.
Hello, Mother.
I'm Philadelphia.
I'm going to get a talk about that this art school.
So, Harry and this is going to come over here with me.
So, they'd like to come over and drop me off and talk to, possibly to Charles, because maybe it's only him.
You guys want to do it?
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
If you don't want to, you certainly won't.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Okay.
So, here's what happens.
The film crew wants to go to his house where his brother still lives and film his brother Charles who's lived there since he was, he's like 55 and he's lived there since he was a teenager.
And you notice how Robert uses a very soft voice.
He's talking to his mother.
And, you know, he's got a whole...
He's a famous guy.
He's got a whole film crew there.
And he's basically asking his mother if it's okay if he brings his friends over.
And she basically says, well, I don't think that would be such a good idea.
And he backs off right away.
And then when he gets off the phone, he says, well, she said, no, you know, that's it.
So, you know, that's...
If you have a good snake detector Working And you're listening and watching closely You know that there are a tremendous number of snakes Under the surface already One of the few times I actually have a Love for humanity You hear this part of the soul Of common people
Their way of expressing Their connection to eternity Whatever you want to call it Modern music doesn't have that Loss that people can't express themselves That way anymore So that's a very paradoxical set of statements Because on the one hand he's expressing He says he really loves old music And he loves it because he can hear the soul Of the common man being expressed But then he takes like a pot shot At the entire world of music since 1920 Which indicates a tremendous amount
Of implicit arrogance And he also says That's the only time That he feels any love for humanity It's like, well, first of all, I'm not sure that his attitude towards humanity as a whole is actually all that relevant.
And second, if you've put yourself in the position where you regard yourself as a credible judge of humanity, it's like you might want to take a few steps back from your narcissism right then and there.
And I'm not kidding about this.
I'll tell you.
Those kids who shot up that Columbine High School, They had their motivations, and they wrote them down, and they knew exactly what they were doing.
And the leader, who was the more literary of the two, said quite explicitly that he was the judge of the human race, and as far as he was concerned, it didn't pass his judgment, and that it was perfectly reasonable for him to go on a cleansing binge.
You know, and he didn't just want to shoot up a whole, you know, a few students in the school.
He had bombs planted all over the school.
He wanted a whole apocalyptic scene.
And they had dreamed about blowing up Detroit.
And so you can imagine what would happen if someone like him got their finger on the button of a hydrogen bomb.
So, you know, Jung said, if you go deep enough into the shadow, you find hell.
It's like, that's exactly right, and it's no joke.
This is mom's house.
So, Charles, have you written any good books lately?
I guess I have.
I don't know.
It's a good kind of like recycling a lot of these books.
They've got a very interesting voice tone, which you might pick up on as well.
It's very ironic, like everything they say is ironic.
It's got this kind of bitter and arrogant twist in it.
And they're talking about absolutely catastrophic things, like nightmarishly catastrophic things.
Yet there's this sort of adolescent Like banter and laughter about it
And...
They're not nearly as interesting as the old Victorian writers Of the late 19th century So, you know, Freud would say here That there's an awful lot of intellectualization going on And there definitely is
So, these guys are very divorced from their bodies, and they have every reason to be Yeah,
so you hear that laugh?
It's like...
That's the situation they're in as adults.
And Charles could see that coming and he had all sorts of homicidal fantasies about...
about Robert.
Thank you.
I think basically that Robert and I are still competing with each other.
When I'm drawing comics, I still think of Charles' approval for what I'm drawing and whether I'm going to like Charles, everybody drawing comics.
Yeah, so what basically happened was Robert got the world and Charles got his mother.
So they both won, but...
Charles, I don't think, is very happy with what he won.
That was the kind of club we had as little kids where we sat around and talked about economics.
I was usually the president, and Robert was usually the vice president, and Carol was usually the secretary, and Sandy was the treasurer, and Maxon was the supply boy.
And he still resents that.
He still resents the fact that we imposed the role of supply boy on him.
Max, Proctor, 310. 310.
Maxon was the scapegoat in the family.
He was five kids.
He was definitely at the bottom of the family.
What I wanted to explain is that we had these meetings for this club that Charles would be dealing with.
The Animal Town Comics Club.
Yeah, some sort of comics and all that stuff.
Everybody got their different job, like a secretary, a president, a vice president, and all that.
I was the fly boy.
I got a little more heavy on direct than Robert did or something.
It's almost the whole thing.
It's this incredible, crazy sibling thing between me and Charles and Robert up in this little room upstairs, and the whole rest of the world didn't know what the fuck was going on.
It's like these three primordial multis We're
This old coat of my mother's, this long green coat, and he made himself a three-pointed house, and he had a crutch, and he tied his leg.
We'd go around town that way.
I didn't realize until years later how fixated Charles really was on this Treasure Island, and this thing dominated our play and our fantasy for six or seven years after that.
We drew these comics about Treasure Island, and it became this real broke, elaborate thing way beyond the original Disney film.
This is one of Charles.
This is one of our two-man comics in which he would draw some of the characters, and I would draw some of them, and we'd have them interact with each other.
That was also a great school of cartooning for me was having to come up with clever retorts to him.
He was actually much clever and funnier than I was.
It actually got kind of tiresome, but he had to do it when he was in charge.
I had this very, like, definite bad problem about trauma ulcers.
And sometimes I think a lot of it had to do with my, like, overly morbid sensitivity to the guy or something, too, as well as his, you know, natural affinity to get in there and profit off of, you know.
Robert, of course, was somewhat of a middleman.
I had this way of, like, restricting or causing, like, this, like, terrible self-consciousness and restriction in me as a kid.
I was, like, morbidly modest about my body.
Like, sex was, like, completely removed.
Like, it came time for me, like, to Becoming sexually aware when I was at puberty or something.
Sex was nowhere near in my life.
I personally had nothing to do with it.
It was so heavily repressed, which I naturally had a panic.
That's where the seizure started.
I had a seizure, so the seizure was like a point where behavior becomes, "Wow, I'd have to get into the whole sex trip, which is a normal, bald topic." That's all I thought about when I was in my late teens and early 20s, was sex.
And I masturbated about four or five times a week.
How frequently did you masturbate?
I mean, when I was sexualized, I completely did.
Like I talked to the other night, I can't even get an eruption anymore.
Oh.
I don't know whether it's one thing or maybe it's a combination of things.
Maybe it's a combination of a medication and a lack of external stimulation.
Maybe approaching old age too has something to do with it.
I don't know exactly.
I mean, you need some external stimulation to keep up your interest.
I don't know, now that my sexual desires are gone, I'm not so sure I want them back in yet.
Like early sexual memories?
Well, I remember actually, I remember being like four years old and getting erections I think it was my aunt or my mother's sister and kind of humping her legs and her shoes like under the table.
I remember going to my mother's closet and she had these cowboy boots that she wore when it rained and humping those in the closet.
And I remember singing while I was doing things, Jesus Christy, this afternoon, or this afternoon.
When I was about five or six, I was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny.
And I cut out this Bugs Bunny off the cover of a comic book and carried it around with me.
I had it in my pocket and took that and looked at it periodically.
And it got all wrinkled up and handling it so much that I asked my mother to iron it on the ironing board to flatten it out.
And she did.
And I was deeply disappointed because it got all brown when she ironed it brittle and it crumbled apart.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I have this sexual attraction to cute cartoon characters.
You tell me, I don't know.
That all changed when I turned 12.
I came fixated on Sheena.
Sheena, we had a jungle.
TV show around like 55, 56.
As I came totally obsessed with Sheena, I went a bit early thinking about things I wanted to do with Sheena.
Now you see how he conceptualizes himself in relationship to her too.
So he's like this...
Well, he's a lot smaller than she is, and he's clearly dependent on her physical strength and ability.
So he definitely conceptualizes himself as a subordinate entity Robert, I was very hung up on sex when he was a little kid Even more so than I was I think you were more inhibited as a child or not Even sexually I think you were more afraid of women than I was as a young person When I was in high school I had a few dates with girls
When you were in high school you didn't have any dates at all with anybody You were actually sort of good looking at everything I was a handsome, good looking chap when I was a teenager But there was just this something that was wrong with my personality High school was an absolute nightmare.
I was the most unpopular kid in the high school.
People were always picking on me and beating me up, and the girls didn't have anything to do with me.
They treated me like I was the scum of the earth.
This strip I'm talking all about my problems with women, starting with high school, where I learned a lot about women because there was this guy in Scutch, this guy here, who was like a mean bully, but he was also very charming.
And all the girls liked him.
He was the dreamboat, but he was also a bully.
And my brother, Charles, was one of the guys who singled out for particular attention.
He had this gang of flunkies that hung around with So that was probably enough to get his depression going because it's a major dominance hierarchy defeat and he was also an outcast so
he's not even in the dominance hierarchy he was one of the class of boys by his own account that was so contemptible that he wasn't even in the realm of possible date partners for any of the girls and so when you're thinking about why Robert is drawing women with like vicious bird heads one of the things that you might think about is that For men at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy,
or outside the dominance hierarchy completely, like these guys were, all they ever got from girls, including their own mother, was rejection, like harsh rejection.
And it was enough, basically, well, it was really, in the final analysis, it was enough to kill Charles.
Now, I'm not blaming the girls, but I'm trying to explain why Robert is expressing himself the way that he's expressing himself.
Why these images come up.
I made a few feeble attempts.
I made a few attempts.
People that are out there.
You've got to take into consideration.
The fact that I'm taking tranquilizers.
And that makes it a lot easier.
Than it would otherwise be.
You know and so Charles still has this kind of dream.
In the back of his head too.
Which is really the image.
The idea that Charles is living out.
Which is that Charles has it much easier.
And much better than he does.
because he doesn't really have to deal with the world and he can just stay at home in comfort with his mother.
It's like, he's not in comfort.
The guy, he commits suicide six months after this Now, that's extremely interesting.
So, Jung had this idea about synchronicity.
He said now and then things would happen in the world that were connected weirdly because of an emotional contagion.
It's a very strange idea, but I wanted to show you an example of it because it's actually caught on film here.
When Charles and Robert are talking about their mother, you notice Charles hunches right over, right?
He's like even more inside than he normally is.
And they turn into two 13-year-old teenage boys talking upstairs so their mother won't hear them.
As soon as they mention her, she pipes in.
If it wasn't for them, I'd probably go completely crazy living here at home with my mother.
I have to walk on eggs when I'm around.
Oh, yeah.
You can't tell my mother the absolute truth.
She's in any spirit.
I don't think we should be talking about this.
I'll tell her about her mother.
Now, you see, when he did hear her, she's complaining about the curtains being closed or something, and this camera crew cluttering up her house, which, you know, probably hasn't been cleaned and this camera crew cluttering up her house, which, you know, probably It's not really that she matters, that she cares that they're there.
What she's doing is expressing her dominance, and she does it in a very subterranean way.
and Charles is absolutely terrified of her.
What?
What?
What thing?
What's wrong with it?
It's some film equipment or something.
It's some kind of film equipment, Mother.
I don't know.
Don't worry about it.
So I'm going to be out of here and I'll be back to normal.
Uh-oh.
And here it shows all these girls talking about how one of their friends got a date with Scutch and how envious they all are.
This is how I felt about it.
I'm a little bitter about it, as you can see here.
Show here how I felt that most of the teenage boys were very cruel and aggressive and everything like that.
If girls would see that I was more kind and sensitive, they would like me more.
They would be impressed by the fact that I could draw, but I couldn't understand why they liked these cruel, aggressive guys and not me, because I was more kind and sensitive and everything more.
More like them.
I was more like them.
I didn't realize that they wanted me to be like them, basically.
I felt very hurt and cruelly misunderstood because I considered myself talented and intelligent, and yet I was not very attractive physically.
And I didn't think those things really mattered.
It was what's inside.
When I was 13, 14, trying to be a normal teenager, I was really a jerk.
I tried to act like I thought they were acting.
It just came out all wrong and weird.
So then I just stopped completely and just became a shadow.
And I wasn't even there.
People weren't even aware that I was in the same world they were in.
And that kind of freed me completely because I wasn't under those pressures to be normal.
So I got interested in old-time music and went to the black section town, knocked on the doors and looking for old records and things like that that would be unthinkable if you were going to be a normal teenager.
So Robert, you know, he, despite the fact that he grew up in a family that was very difficult to escape from, did follow his creative interests.
He picked a path that was characteristic of individuality, and it did get him out.
He gave up on conformity, but he found an alternative.
It's pretty impressive, and he did become very successful.
I want to show you, I can't show you all of what I wanted to show you today, but I do.
I understand, they went through the war and they just wanted this thing that was so tight.
It's a self-conscious desire to be a teenager and he forced me.
It's like he flew into the door and you take her outside, you've got to put this high girl's living color.
It's like a very hard, armored personality line and quintillions right within the quintillion.
You've got a good grand intestine, you've got the lights, fascinating.
Yeah, I want to spray.
Come on, yeah.
There's six weeks.
Oh, missed it.
Where is it here?
Thank you.
When I thought I died in GD2, my jabs hit you real hard.
When I was five years old at Christmas, and this whole thing happened where he blew a stack at me and something busted in my collarbone.
Charles had a pinching for getting in trouble.
He's very diabolical.
I was like, "Oh, I called the Cuban." And my father would beat him unmercifully for these things that he was always doing, these crimes he was always committing, and it just made him worse, I think.
That's so precious desire to be punished.
I don't know.
I think that "amphetamine" means "amphetamine" would never...
Now, where in the world is this?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh yeah, here we go.
Yeah, I think we've got 10 minutes here, so.
About age 17, I started being driven by that obsession.
I'll go down in history as a great artist.
That will be my revenge.
It's my image celebrating Valentine's Day.
February 13th, 1962.
I decided to reject conforming when society rejected me.
I've heard all that be yourself stuff.
When I'm myself, people think I'm nuts.
Guess I'll have to be satisfied with cats and old records.
Girls are just utterly out of my reach.
They won't even let me draw them.
Yeah, all that changed after I got famous.
I was used to what he had been doing, which was really quite sweet.
And then he did this one that was just incredibly hostile to women, very sexually hostile, and I was I wasn't expecting it, and it was really, I was really shocked and just taken aback and, you know, really just kind of like, whack!
It's hard for me to believe that he can't just channel himself into doing better work.
I like a lot of his work, and certainly I don't miss the satirical aspect of it, but then I find myself in a completely different reaction, you know, perhaps being really turned off and disgusted, and, um, You know, this cartoon, Joe Blow, is one that I thought about a lot in that light.
On the one hand, it's a satire of the 1950s, the healthy facade of the American family, and it kind of exposes the sickness under the surface.
But at the same time, you sense that Krun is getting off on it himself in some other way.
And on another level, it's an orgy.
It's a self-indulgent orgy.
In a fantasy.
And the fantasy, you know, specifically this story is a story about a father who commands his daughter to give him a blowjob.
And she does, and they wind up having sex.
And the little sort of leave-it-to-be-her type brother character comes running in and sees the father and his sister, and he's shocked and upset.
He goes right into the mother to tell her, And mom comes out of the closet wearing the sort of S&M kind of get-up, and the wolf waves, oh cool, you know, and the next thing mom and son are having sex, and the whole panel ends, the whole cartoon ends with the parents saying, gee, we should spend more time with the kids, you know, or something like that.
So, you know, you read something like this, and I think that it has gone over the line from Satire of a 1950s hygienic, you know, family in denial into something which is just from producing pornography.
And I think this theme in his work is omnipresent.
It's part of an arrested juvenile vision.
So the mother has these cute things scattered everywhere. - I talk a lot about things. - We don't really talk that much.
We hold aloof from each other for the most part.
You spend all your time down here watching television.
So you can see how well they communicate.
We're two recluses living in the same house.
Well, you do also the talking and the relationship, Mother.
There's no doubt about that.
Yeah, but not as much as I would if I wasn't taking the medication.
What do you think would happen if you stopped taking that stuff?
I don't know.
I tried it a couple of times.
I didn't like what was starting to happen.
You get so solemnly up.
I thought it was the way we were becoming gradually unhinged.
So I got back on them again in a big hurry.
I tried this a couple of times, about two or three times.
Do you still think they're picking my brain, mother?
Yeah.
Now, she doesn't have to clean up for the cameras.
That's for sure.
I'm not going to be ashamed.
He's a good person.
People like Charles.
Some people like me and some don't.
So you realize that this is a man who spent like 30 years in his room upstairs and has no friends and has never had any friends.
And that's his mother's response.
I'm a very quiet, well-behaved citizen.
I've gone from one extreme to the other.
We're supposed to make trouble on the streets.
One of the last times I went out with him, he was walking around and he just went up to some old lady in the street and started drilling her about her spiritual life and she just got really frightened and tried to call the police and everything.
She just goes up to these strangers on the streets and starts raving at them.
No, he was just a kid having fun, that's all.
I was thinking about 30, but...
No, we want to know how they want.
We're still doing that kind of stuff, but...
I don't know.
...why doesn't even leave the house anymore?
He's always got in trouble whenever he went out.
No, he didn't.
Can you give me one good reason for leaving the house?
At least he's not out taking illegal drugs or selling illegal drugs.
It's all the crazy things.
Or being married and making someone miserable.
Right.
This is true.
You've got to kind of leave them in there.
You don't even know they're there.
Why do we need to go anywhere?
I never see anybody.
To chew food or what?
I believe in...
I take a bath about once in six weeks.
I believe in having a certain pride in yourself.
And why not that your ego gets out of hand or you're an egomaniac.
I can't exist except in relation to other people.
Yeah?
Your hygiene habits are pretty good.
I've never constipated.
That's about all I can say for myself.
Give it 15 more seconds.
Oh, Charles.
Well, that's a lot, you know.
Your father used to have trouble that way with constipation.
He was constipated all the time.
I could say something by the way.
When we were kids, they were always giving us a past story.
I was obsessed with it.
Why, when you, all you kids were real little, I used to have to take care of you by myself, so I'm...
You tried giving us all animus and that didn't work out?
No, I never gave any animus.
Somebody threatened to give us animus if we didn't be hid in front of them.
No, I did not.
Somebody tried to give you animus.
I don't know who it was.
Yeah, it's just that the mind of a person who's interested in legs and feet is very different from...
Well, that gives you some indication of a Freudian family.
It's not pretty.
Good luck on the exam on Thursday.
As you know already, there are lots of sample questions posted on the net.
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