[speaker001:] [female reading too quietly to hear]
[Chris:] Just a second we've gotta re-arrange the furniture slightly here. Erm, I'm afraid the late-comers get the plastic chairs.
[speaker001:] That's okay.
[Chris:] This is your punishment, okay? Hope they won't be too uncomfortable. erm, won't you start again because you'd only got a couple of minutes into it, hadn't you? Start again.
[speaker001:] [female reading too quietly to hear]
[Chris:] Well done, excellent. Very clear and pretty complete account really of, of what I've you to cover but it was quite a lot of ground erm she went over and er some of it may be less easy to understand than other bits. Any, any questions to start off with? [cough]
[speaker001:] Yeah, okay, and can we go over what [too quiet to hear] Okay,an and so what it said then was that ego, ego is where all these things come together
[Chris:] Ya.
[speaker001:] and that repression was a way of leaving the ego free of anxiety?
[Chris:] Yes, yes, that's right. I mean, this is a good point is a good place to start actually because the, the concept of the ego is the key to whole of this and the changed role of anxiety highlights the difference I think, I think rather, rather, rather clearly. What did Freud think anxiety was in, in what I call the first psychoanalytic revolution, the first period, the eighteen nineties? What was his view of anxiety then?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, certainly sexual something. Specifically it was, he regarded it as kind of transmuted libido. But if, if libido was aroused by for example seduction in childhood it could go nowhere, it was repressed in the unconscious, where it transformed itself by some kind of psychological chemistry into anxiety. Now, clearly this theory has some problems. I think you can see what they were. But y I think you can also see the appeal of this to Freud in that time because in the early years Freud's model of the mind, which is really what we're talking about today, was erm a kind of hydraulic one. I mean th the, the analogy that occurs to me is of a dam holding back a raging torrent. The force of repression is like a great dam that holds back the raging torrents of the instincts of the unconscious and allows er some of them through, but others break through in holes, and holes and cracks appear which are the unconscious returning as one
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Chris:] and what repression tries to do is to plug those holes and to keep the repressed repressed. So this leads to a kind of erm stratigraphic view of the mind, with the unconscious, which is everything that is permanently excluded from conscious consciousness by repression, the pre-conscious which is what is not currently conscious but is accessible to consciousness, you can recall it in other words, and the conscious is what you're presently aware of. So, that very simple view of the mind fits with this an idea of anxiety as forced back into the unconscious and then changing, sorry, as, as libido being forced back into the unconscious and then changing into anxiety. Now, that's what this kind of hydrographic or stratigraphic view... in the nineteen twenties, as was telling us, Freud developed this famous model. And there, in order to understand this model, well let's put it this way, I think the easiest way to understand it is to start from the ego. It's a kind of egocentric model, not in the everyday sense of egocentric, that is selfish, but egocentric in the sense that it starts with ego as its reference point. Now, what is the ego in this technical Freudian sense? I mean, we all know what it is in everyday life. Well, let's start with the everyday meaning. What is it in everyday life? If you say someone's got a big ego, what do you mean?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] S er excellent, yes, very good way of putting it, erm, a sense for themselves. Okay. What does ego mean as a technical term in Freud's second model of the mind? Who would like to define all this. has already but could anybody gi give it in their own words?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] That's certainly part of it. Everything that is conscious is in the ego. That's certainly true, but is the ego wholly conscious? No. This is important. Er, is right, the, the area of the mind that is open to, for example, sensory stimuli to your ears and eyes, touch and so on, things that you're conscious of, is in your ego. However, your ego also en encompasses a larger unconscious part. So you can immediately see that it would be quite wrong to make the mistake that people sometimes do make and think that the second model of the mind is really just the first one given new terms and that the ego is equivalent to the conscious. It isn't completely equivalent. Everything that's conscious is in the ego, but not everything that is in the ego is conscious. In other words, the ego is more than just consciousness. So it goes beyond the original definition of the conscious that we talked about when we, when we did that. So, what else is there apart from what was talking about? What else have we to say about ego?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, but how does it do that? Can you elaborate that a bit. That's a bit vague. How does it do this assimilating? What in particular does it?
[speaker001:] [cough] Well, it seems to be the place where every erm every source every mental or cognitive psychological source seems to [cough] and then juggle
[Chris:] Yes, that's, that, that is quite true. The, another analogy that I find is quite useful for the ego is erm Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise, okay? When you watch Star Trek, as I'm sure you all do, none of you watch serious television I'm sure. Erm, er, Jim is, Jim is sitting on in er on the flight deck of the Enterprise and he is the guy who has to make all the decisions. This is the great thing about Star Trek. Poor old Jim always has to make the decision because he is in command, okay? The buck stops where Jim is sitting. And that's what the ego has to do. The ego, as says, is open to the outside world and furthermore to stimulations from inside, from inside the body, that reach it through subjective sensations like hunger when you need food, or fear when something threatens you, and cognitive er awareness like er okay you realize that before you have your lunch you're gonna have to go to the bank to get some money to pay for it. These, all these things, are directed, as says, to the ego, and the ego can be thought of as a decision making agency. That's the clearest, simplest function of the ego in this Freudian model of the mind. It's the managerial agency. Freud talks about the ego as an agency, a psychological agency, just as we would talk about say er a social agency. You might say like the law courts here, you know, you might say what're the law courts er as associated in what they, they do? The answer is that they dispense justice, or they're supposed to, although in Britain I'm afraid only sometimes. Erm, so you could say what does the psychological agency, the ego, do? What's his function? And Freud's answer to that is its fundamental function is decision making. You could regard it as that part of the personality which is contr in control of voluntary thought and movement. Now clearly not everything that goes on in the body or mind is voluntary. For example, we cannot voluntarily control our heartbeat or basic bodily functions like that. Those are under automatic control and they go on even when our ego is non-functional, as when we're asleep. But an awful lot of things we can control by volunt voluntary movement, our arms and legs and so on, and we can control our thoughts. We can consciously direct our attention to certain things and think about them. And all of these functions are carried on by the ego. This is the decision making, the command giving part of the mind. And this is why, as rightly said, Freud regarded the, all the other agencies and forces as being
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Chris:] into the ego, so the ego was as it were the command centre of the, of the erm of the personality. Er, again if anybody's seen that very amusing film by erm Woody Allen, what's it called, er Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but w Were Afraid To Ask. Has anybody seen that film? Do you remember the scene where erm er they're inside somebody's body, do you remember this, and he's about to make love and the, the er there's mission control, do you remember that? And then there's other scenes down in the body and they're getting all ready, and there's also some horror scenes of the stomach aren't there, where th he's having dinner with the lady first. The guys in the stomach are trying to deal with all this awful stuff that's coming up. But anyway, this is a very amusing film, but, but the idea of mission control is the concept of the ego, where it is portrayed in a very amusing way in this film by Woody Allen, that the consciousness, Woody Allen's consciousness, is portrayed as mission control at Houston erm and er erm it, that particular scene ends with er when er control erm mission control sends a message down to the lower parts of the body, I won't mention which, says we're going around again boys, and they think oh my God [LAUGHTER] they're very amusing. Anyway, so that's, that's the ego. That's the idea of the ego. Now,
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Chris:] we shouldn we shouldn't get carried away, however, by this er focus on its managerial agencies, agency, and think that everything it does in this respect is conscious, because a lot of the processes that occur in the ego are actually not conscious. So this is a major complication and I think this shows why Freud had to introduce this second model of the mind, because in his first model of the mind it was very simple and repression was the force that distinguished conscious from unconscious. But what that model didn't really explain was why repression operated and what controlled repression. Now in the second model of the mind, what controls repression? What sets repression in force? What directs repression? Which agency?... Erm, yes, that's correct. Er, but, but and there are two buts here. The but is the superego is a part of the ego so we have to er before we go on to the superego, let's just say for the time being that repression is directed by the ego itself. Now, the complication comes when we notice that there are parts of the ego that are not conscious. And of course the process of repression is not conscious. You're not aware of the fact that you're repressing things. If you are, that is not what the technical term repression means in psychoanalysis. That is what we might call suppression. I mean you may be on a diet and see a wonderful cream cake and consciously resist temptation to eat it. Well, that is suppression. You are consciously suppressing, your ego is consciously making a decision not to do something even though you know you want to do it. That's suppression. Repression would be looking at the cream cake and saying, I'm not in the least bit interested, how revolting, disgusting, even though you actually unconsciously want it very much. And of course that kind of thing can happen. Okay
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, but taking place in the unconscious mind. Th that's the thing you must remember. Now er reminded me of the next thing really I ought to have got on to. In the term, the only term we needed to explain the whole structure of conscious, unconscious, pre-conscious, was repression and we saw that repression was really a key concept. Now, however, Freud expands that concept as well and interestingly enough he goes back to the first term he used for repression. What was, does anybody know what the first term was? What did Freud call it first time round, in the, this would be in the late eighteen eighties?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes,wh in his first papers in hysteria, he didn't call repression repression, he used another term. Can anybody recall? I did mention it at lectures but. Well, he called it defence. One of his first papers was called the neuro psychoses of defence, and defence meant fending something away from consciousness, what he later called repression. In the nineteen twenties Freud returned to this concept of defence as, as has just said, with the concept of defence mechanism. And Anna Freud was to write the famous book called The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Now, what are the mechanisms of defence and what have they got to do with the ego? First question first, what are the mechanisms of defence? Well you used the term, would you like to
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Could you give an example?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, that's right, that's a good example. The, the mechanisms of defence are a concept which overlaps, and to some extent replaces, repression. It doesn't re re replace repression completely because of course repression is the prime and in many ways fundamental mechanism of defence. Because what defence mechanisms do is is as says, is fend the unconscious off from the conscious. And that is, as we know, repression. But, what Freud had realized by the nineteen twenties was that there are lots of different ways of doing that, and has given one example. Another example wh which one can't help feeling one often meets in people in universities is rationalization. The construction of elaborate intellectual er defences which stop people having to think about things which might cause them anxiety, by elaborate rationalization. So erm if you ask them why they don't do a certain thing you get a very very elaborate argument about it, which is often very difficult to er to er criticize or, or, or attack. Another one would be reaction formation, turning something into its opposite. As I mentioned earlier, you want to eat a cream cake, you think yuk cream cakes' re disgusting so there you turn the desire for something lovely into the opposite er yuk hateful. Er, reaction formation, that's a very common one. And there are lots of them, in fact Anna Freud in her book, The Ego and the Mechanism, gives a list, and I can't remember how many terms there are on the list
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Chris:] seventeen and since then people have discovered more and in a sense the list is more or less limitless. The point to remember, however, is that these mechanisms occur unconsciously, they're things the ego does to defend itself from anxiety and from and the result of which is to force things into the unconscious. So, repression, it's not that Freud dropped the concept of repression but that he elaborated it and made it much more sophisticated, and the mechanisms of defence are the means, you could say they're the means by which er repression erm comes about. Erm, another example for instance that sticks in my mind because Anna Freud explained this to me, is isolation. Er, she explained to me a case she had analyzed where she, Anna Freud, was quite certain that some of the symptoms of the woman she was analyzing went back to infantile masturbation. The woman denied that this had ever happened quite vehemently. And Anna Freud had great difficulty in suggesting to her that it might have happened. And then one day the, the lady in the course of her associations, described an activity she had often indulged in in childhood. And she had given a certain name to it, and I can't remember what the name was now, something like fiddling, I mean fiddling is too obvious, it wasn't that, but it was something like that, an ordinary everyday term like that. And she said that's what I call you see. And Anna Freud said, okay that's what you called it, but supposing we had to look what you've just described up in a dictionary, what word would be found? And the woman thought for a minute and suddenly she realized and she said er you know gosh, that's masturbation isn't it, and Anna Freud said yes it is. Now this woman had always been aware of the as a child, she had always known it, it hadn't be unconscious in the sense she'd forgotten it, but it had been isolated, it has been given a new name, and ca unfortunately I can't remember what it was, but it was, it was completely er innocuous, the name was the term she used was totally innocuous. And because it had that name she didn't link it up to other terms like masturbation or whatever. So it was kept isolated in her consciousness and other, other ideas weren't allowed to touch it, and very often this is how repression works. In actual practice you could find an analysis that very often the things that have been repressed have not been repressed in the sense that they've been totally submerged from your consciousness and totally forgotten without any trace, but what often happens is they've become isolated or, or divorced from their context in your memory. So you remember them but they don't have any significance because you don't link it up with an emotion, or with a situation, or with other er ideas, they're kind of isolated. So isolation is quite a common defence mechanism, particularly in obsessionals, who're very good at isolation. And er this is probably one of the reasons why, as says, they like ritualization and they're very very tidy about. Obsessionals are very good at dividing up their minds as it were, but they're not necessarily divided up in the sense of conscious and unconscious. Very often they're, they're kind of divided up in this isolated way. So erm the mechanisms of defence are the means that the ego uses to stop itself being worried by any, anything that might seem to, that might seem to throw them. And another advantage of these mechanisms of defence is they apply to other inputs to the ego, not just those from the er from the unconscious or from the organism itself but from the outside, for example the denial is a defence mechanism that can be used against reality and is used by psychotics to great and often disastrous effect. They simply deny things in the real world they don't want to recognize. Okay, so that's, is everybody getting a feel now for, for mechanisms of defence??
[speaker001:] Yeah, in all, in all system you know we have er the pre-conscious and the unconscious
[Chris:] Yeah
[speaker001:] so, and we were repressing, repression was pushing into the unconscious, so does the unconscious still exist as a place where we repress everything?
[Chris:] Yes it does. I think what we have to say is that the term unconscious is, is still used by Freud of course, and is still very useful, and it, it describes er if you like erm a relationship between levels of consciousness. The superego model doesn't do that, as we've seen, because a lot of the ego is unconscious as well as all of the conscious being ego. What it does is talk about psychological agencies, so what we've got here is two overlapping er models of the mind if you like, but they're somewhat different models. One is in terms of er levels of consciousness, the other is in terms of agencies that do things. They overlap but they're to some extent slightly different criteria. Does that
[speaker001:] Yeah, so the new one doesn't replace the old one?
[Chris:] It doesn't replace one, it overlaps it, it overlaps it. And this is confusing, I mean I must admit it is confusing and even, even s writers in the psychoanalytic literature get confused by this, because sometimes they, they er don't see that to some extent the two systems are overlapping and to some extent they're about di slightly different things. Okay, we we've talked about the ego. Er, what about the id? What's the id?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] I didn't understand that.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yeah, it does mean something. What di what does the word id mean? It's not an English term, it's a Latin term. What does it mean in Latin? It. Yes. And in German, the German for, for it used was das es. E S is the German pronoun for it, third person singular pronoun. It. And in German, Freud just says das es. The it, as it were. Freud's English translators er attempted to Latinize for him, make it more kind of medical, they introduced some ridiculous terms like which is pure gobbledegook and is not found in Freud f er the terms of Freud's which correspond to those are not er observed Latinisms like that. Unfortunately they did it to, to er these terms as well, so they turned das es, the it, into id, which is Latin for it. But we're lumbered with it now, and I don't think we can change it. I mean it's a pity. It's a pity it wasn't just translated the it. It would've been better but erm I think that these terms have now become so widely known there's, there's no way of changing it back. Although erm I don't think I like, I never use that term and I hope it passes over. It's just ridiculous. Erm, okay, so, so that's what, what the term... now, what does it mean, erm, could you hazard a description or definition of the id, or das es?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] I D, yeah, in a way that's true yes. But there's a bit more to it than that. It certainly is everything that has been fended off by the ego, so to that extent it, it corresponds more closely to erm to the unconscious. In the first model of the mind, remember we said that the unconscious was everything that was either primarily unconscious, could never become conscious, or had been forced into the unconscious by th by means of repression. Well, the id is, does represent the total unconscious that has been repressed. Not the unconscious part of the ego of course which is doing the repression, this is regarded as a separate agency. But nevertheless everything that has been repressed into the unconscious is in the id. So to that extent, you're right. What else would we expect to find in this id?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, the instinctual that's right, this is a very good portrayal of it is giving us. The instinctive, the, the er everything that has been excluded from consciousness. Consciousness and, and the ego operate on the basis of what Freud called the secondary process. Now, the secondary process was that basically logical realistical thinking. It's the kind of thinking you want to completely dominate your activities when you're writing exam answers, okay? Clear, lucid, logical, erm, remembering facts, open to reality, lucid. That's the secondary principle... in the unconscious and the id the primary principle. So the primary principle is actually the opposite of that, it's irrational, it's illogical, it can think er six impossible things before breakfast and not have the slightest difficulty with it. It's a kind of Alice in Wonderland world of er of, of extremes, of opposites, and the primary process can tolerate these contradictions er with complete ease. It doesn't er it's not bothered by contradiction. It's not in the same tradition as, as, as the ego. Er, an analogy that I think helps to make this clear is that the ego after all is a managerial agency. Now, if you're charged with managing anything, you have to make decisions and when you have to make a decision, you can't have your cake and eat it. You've either got to eat the cake, in which case you no longer have the cake, or you decide to preserve the cake, in which case you can't eat it. You can't do both at once. In a real world where you face managerial decisions and you have to make a decision, you can do one thing or a number of other things, but you can't do them all at once, it's just not possible. If you try to, the result is a disaster. Now, the id is not like that. The id is not a managerial agency, it does not have to make decisions, it is not in contact with the real world and therefore it can have its cake and eat it. It really doesn't bother the id. So the id is a jumble of contradictions and the reason it's a jumble of contradictions is that it's not in contact with reality. It's a bit like political parties who have no hope of ever being elected making wild promises. I mean, of course they can, they can make all sorts of wild promises and all kinds of crazy policies because they know they'll never be called upon to carry them out. If, however, you get elected and you then have to carry out your policies, then of course you face the real world and the you can't have your cake and eat it problem. Let us see how Bill, Bill Clinton fares in this
[speaker001:] True
[Chris:] er, my guess is not all of his promises will, will turn out to be realizable. And that's, that's, that's what the ego is like. The ego, to use another analogy er I use, is like the President of the United States. The ego is the executive agency, the id could be regarded as something like the Congress, as o which er seen as a, as a large mass of conflicting demands. You know, there're people in Congress want all kinds of different things and they can't all have them at once, but that doesn't stop them all wanting them.
[speaker001:] Is, isn't the id ever conscious?
[Chris:] No.
[speaker001:] For example, there's a piece of cake in front of us and, and you know you just want it so badly and you just eat it, or even having sex, anything, I mean any desire that you have that you just follow.
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker001:] without thought, without, I mean, perhaps without even thinking of the consequences.
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker001:] Isn't that partially id?
[Chris:] Well no, you see what's happening there is, is a, a demand or a drive from the id is being gratified by the ego. What, Freud would regard that as a situation in which the ego had surrendered to the id and said okay eat the cake. And of course the ego has to do that, I mean if you're gonna stay alive, the ego has to take account of these internal demands. The difference between the ego and id however is that if that is gonna happen in the real world, there has to be a cake there for you to eat. If the id is completely in control, and in psychotics for example, you often get the feeling the id is in control, they will eat the cake even if it's not there. So they'll have an hallucination of eating the cake and say yummy isn't this cake lovely, and you and I can see there's no cake there. Now that person is under the control of, of, of the id. There the ego has become so fragmented and is so er erm sick as it were that the id has overwhelmed it and the reality sense is lost. There perhaps you would say the id is beginning to dominate the ego, but in accepting these extreme cases of, of psychotics who are severely divorced from reality, the, what always happens is the id has to make a demand on the ego which then gratifies it. The reward however, well what's the reward? What reward does the id give the ego when it's gratified?
[speaker001:] Pleasure.
[Chris:] That's right, the, the, the id rewards the ego as it were with a feeling of pleasure when it's when it's met its demand. When it doesn't meet its demands, the ego is likely to feel anxiety or discomfort or whatever it may be. It certainly
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yeah.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear] They can be gratified too, of course. [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, because
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] oh yes, because you see the ego is in charge of the voluntary muscles and these are the ones you've gotta use in aggressive behaviour. So, er er aggression again can be seen as a demand placed on the ego by the id, or for erm release as it were, when an ego erm goes and does something that, that releases the aggression. And if you can't do it, er you know very often it, it, it shows itself in other ways, like people stamp their feet or they begin to shake with rage. When you can't do something you know, you might actually kind of, your whole body kind of starts to, and that would be the ego as it were trying to express this, this er drive from the id. Of course, sometimes when that happens I mean the ego kind of gets carried away with it to some extent, but that's all, you know that's in the nature of the ego. It is I'm afraid a rather, compared with the id, it's a rather weak agency. You know, very often Jim does things on the Enterprise he doesn't want, want to do you know, but he just has to do them unfortunately.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, when it, when it is irrational it is operating either under the influence of the id or it's overwhelmed by some external circumstances that it just can't understand the controls, therefore making all the wrong decisions and acting in a completely inadequate manner. Okay. What about the third agency then? The one we mentioned earlier, er the superego. Again this is a Latinism er what's it, what was Freud's original term in German, does anybody know?... The ego was das auge, the eye, the id was das es, the it, what's the superego? That is in German. Got any German speakers here? Just one? Well, it was uber auge, rendered into English, superego. Okay. What is the superego? Again this is a term that's passed into everyday speech.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] It's the conscience. It certainly is. That is the, that's the aspect of it that's passed into everyday usage. It's er and it is in many ways the kernel of the of the concept. also said a sensor. The er, to revert to my American constitutional analogy, which is quite a good one actually, if, if the Congress represents the id and the President represents the ego, then the superego is represented by the Supreme Court. Because the Supreme Court, I think I'm right in saying, with my knowledge of the American constitution, erm it has er supremacy in matters that affect the law and constitution, doesn't it? I mean it can, it can, it can constrain the President, can't it? I mean, there are, are certain things he can and cannot do aren't there? Laid down by the Supreme Court. And of course, it represents the morals, ethics and law of the nation and similarly in the, in the mind superego represents the moral values, the aesthetic values as well, and the sense of right and wrong in the, in the individual. What else does the superego do, because it certainly does all of that, but it has other functions. We mentioned one of them earlier. It punishes er how does it punish the ego?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, that's right, yes. Guilt is the prime means that the superego has to punish the ego and er as says, guilt, you can be made to feel guilty by external agencies, by other people, but we also know you can also be made to feel guilty by yourself. And this part of your mind that makes you feel guilty Freud regarded as an internalized representation of other people to some extent, and indeed he thought that it, the superego was constituted by internalization and identification with the parents at the culmination of the Oedipus complex. However, it's important to point out here, of course, sociologists and a number of have seized on this as Freud's theory of socialization, but it's important to point out that s s psychoanalytic findings, does anybody know, what do psychoanalytic findings show about the severity of the superego and the type of childhood a person's had? Does anybody know? I think there's now a consensus about this. Could you guess, could you guess?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] But what would you call a bad childhood there though?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] And you, you'd expect that to produce a severe superego?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well it might, yes, yes
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] it might. However, I think what most analysts would tell you was, er but then again it might not. Certainly Freud thought, and I think most analysts also think, that there is no correlation necessarily between the severity of a person's superego and that of their parents. Strictly speaking, Freud's view was that any individual superego is the internalization not of their parents as such, but of their parents' superego. And er I well remember on one occasion in the course of my analysis with Anna Freud I had the uncanny feeling, well this was more than an uncanny feeling, I think it was the reality, I touched the superego of Sigmund Freud because at one point I said something in my analysis which implied that her father, for instance, might have some interest in religion and Anna Freud flared up and what I felt was flaring was her superego and this was the superego she had got by identification with her father. I had the uncanny feeling that the ghost of Sigmund Freud was chiding me for thinking this and she was clearly incensed that I could suggest that her father could have had any interest in religion whatsoever. She totally childish and not something that somebody in the twentieth century should waste their waste, their time with, and for a brief moment I felt the moral force of Sigmund Freud as through his daughter and of course psychologically this makes sense because I'm quite sure her superego was modelled on her father's. However, however, in general analysts don't report that for example children of very strict parents have very strict superegos themselves. Sometimes they do but sometimes they don't. Sometimes they go to the opposite extreme and seem to have a very lax superego because they relied on their parents to punish them, and subsequently have no internalization. Sometimes, as said children can have virtually no proper socialization at all, have very lax or indulgent parents and have tremendously punitive superegos themselves. So, I think most analysts now think that the, the concatenation of circumstances which produces a person's superego is so complex, and there are so many factors interacting, probably along with any genetic factors, there probably is a heritable basis of guilt to some extent, but the, you can't say in a very simple way that a person's childhood socialization will determine every aspect of the superego. That doesn't seem to happen. So the result is you get children from very punitive authoritarian homes with very lax superegos and vice versa. There doesn't seem to be a generalization about this.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Oh yes, absolute shame would be ano we should have mentioned it. I'm glad you reminded us. Shame is another very important way that the superego punishes. Yes. And again you would expect socialization and environmental factors to operate, and clearly they do in a trivial sense. I mean we all live in a society where people wear clothes and we'd probably feel a bit ashamed if we didn't have to wear any, but if you grew up in a society where nobody wears clothes, you wouldn't, wouldn't bother about it for one moment. But those kinds of relatively trivial aspects of socialization cl clearly affect it, but again shame can be a much deeper emotion in people and some people you know get, irrationally get very shameful about certain things that other people don't, and you wonder why. And again, it's a complex issue. It's not easy to predict why shame should operate one way or, or another and although it has something to do with the superego, you can't just say well the superego is er purely the result of erm of, of socialization, if you have strict parents you have a strict superego, it's not that simple. So erm, that's an important point to bear in mind. The parents do contribute an awful lot to the superego but they don't seem to contribute everything, and the superego remember, is formed by the ego through an active process of identification internalization and there the ego itself is, is a factor and I think mentioned this. I'm pretty sure she did and that was an important and excellent point to make. Another thing that the superego does that we, we should mention because it's often forgotten, is to provide the ego with a sense of reality. Now, of course to some extent the ego gets its sense of reality from the senses, from its direct observation of the world, but not entirely, and the reason for this, Freud thought, was that as children we learned that reality through direct experience is very important, but also through teaching and education from our parents and as a result parental authority represents the demands of reality. You know very often a parent, if a parent senses a child it's partly in the interests of reality you know, like I say to my younger son you know, look if I buy you a third Big Mac, let's face it, you won't be able to eat it. Okay, I'm speaking on behalf of reality. Occasionally I might buy him the big third Mac, the third Big Mac, just to prove to him he can't eat it, and this establishes in the superego a, that the, the superego to some extent speaks for reality and, and the reality sense is part of the, is part of the standards which are built into, which are built into the superego, and to, and therefore to a large extent the superego opposes the pleasure principle that operates in the id. And this is why as I can't remember if we mentioned it now, maybe did, maybe or someone else did, that the ego carries out repression very often at the demand of the superego, so the superego has its standards, its barriers, its sense of conscience, its threat of guilt, and the ego, to satisfy those demands, to avoid guilt, carries out repression at its, at its command, or at its insistence. I think the best way to think of the superego is a kind of sub-division of the, of the, of the ego. The way, to go back to my Star Trek analogy, erm, who in Star Trek corresponds to the superego, would you think?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, you could say that. I would say Spock. Er, er I would say Spock because Spock er is the second in command and he tends to be critical of Jim, I mean he gives Jim good advice. Erm
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, that's true, he
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] pr I think Scotty speaks for the id to that extent, for the internal demand, you know how much fuel there is left, that's right. He's concerned with, with, with keeping the ship going, erm, the remit of Spock is much wider isn't it? I mean Spock is more concerned with the external situation, and what're they gonna do, and you know he says Captain that's not rational, or this is life but not as we know it, er that kind of thing. Er er, but er well it's not a perfect analogy but you see the point I'm making. One should regard the superego as a kind of critic built into the ego. It's, it's, it's a bit like erm you know the Catholic idea of the guardian angel sitting on your shoulder only it can punish as well as give good advice and threaten you with guilt. How does the superego reward? We saw that the id rewards with pleasure. How does the superego reward?? It punishes with guilt and shame, how does it reward?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] That's right, feelings of moral er a moral self- righteousness, self-congratulation, pride, self-respect. These are all er ways in which the superego rewards you. So you know when you do something er for the right reasons, you know, you, you feel good about it. You want to pat yourself on your, on your back and think you know what a good boy I am, or what a good girl I am, and of course you're doing, your superego is doing to you what your parents would've done as, as, when you were a child, they're rewarding you saying good boy, good girl, haven't you been good? Now you can
[speaker001:] [cough] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right now again you remind us of an important thing we should've mentioned. Where does the energy that the superego uses, the, the, in the shame and the guilt come from? Where does it get these weapons? Where does the superego get them from? Cos this is important. touches on it now. Can you guess?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] From the id, absolutely. This was Freud's finding. In a sense, guilt is aggression directed against your own ego if you think about it, isn't it? It's, it's beautifully shown in the Catholic Mass when erm they say well it's, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault and where you strike your own breast. Striking your own breast is directing aggression against yourself. Freud's finding was that guilt is, starts off as an aggressive drive in the id that could go anywhere, preferably towards other people, but the superego uses some of this aggression and destructive energy arising in the id and then turns it back against the ego, and uses it to punish the ego, so the aggression, instead of going into someone else or into the outside world, is turned back against the self and to that extent is self-destructive. And as says, in some cases this becomes a very powerful force in the personality, some people mobilize so much guilt and hatred against themselves of course it does become self-destructive. And this can happen.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, yes, I think in, I think in general one can certainly say that the more, and this touches on what said about personality types... if a personality has a strongly developed superego themselves, they're likely to be very independent, sometimes to the point of arrogance. You know, you've met the kind of person who's so sure they're right they won't listen to anything, you know, they're, they're self-righteous and arrogant and that's because their superego is very very strong. A person with a weak superego tends to be much more influenced by other people and especially external authority. And sometimes they need external authority to control them and give them standards and tell them what to do. If they don't have that external authority they tend to flounder. Or even sometimes to actually look for it. They actually look for strong leaders, or they want rules because they feel insecure without them. Is that the kind of thing you meant?
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Oh yes.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] What if all, if ego and superego? Yes, the ideal state of normality for Freud would be a, would be a perfect balance between the three institutions. If they were all reached in accommodation together and kind of lived together with relatively little conflict.
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Oh no, it wouldn't, I wouldn't think of it as an alternative to interaction with other people. I would think of it as er
[speaker001:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, I would think that if a person had a normal personality, if the interaction between the in institution and the personality was normal, you'd expect their interaction with other people to be normal. For example, people with very strong superegos would punish themselves and are very often very ready to punish other people too. You've only got to look at the history of religion, especially Christianity, to see that at... as the guys who went round flagellating themselves also went around killing other people if they didn't believe in the right religion and that unfortunately er happens all too often. The reason of course. If I'm punishing myself for my religious beliefs, I've damn well got a right to punish you too. If you don't punish yourself, I'm gonna punish you. And that happens and self-righteous people get like that. Folks, we've come to five past eleven. We must stop. I'm much indebted to you. That was an excellent presentation. Next week we start the second part of the course, our erm, our key as it were and we'll look at the first one with er [incomprehensible]. Thanks very much. Apologies for those who had to sit on plastic seats.... [tape ends side one and starts side two] Okay now erm, there's a slight change of plan because er following one or two of the classes last week I realized that erm I hadn't made myself very well understood last week and er what came back from one or two people was rather garbled, and really it's my own fault because I probably tried to do too much too quickly and as a result perhaps er didn't make myself clear. So, what I want to do is to er really repeat what I said last week but with a different emphasis. And what this means is that from now on the cla lectures will trail the classes, which, which doesn't matter and is actually quite er a good thing in the sense that what will happen from now on is that we'll first do a topic in the class and then I will give the lecture on it the week after, or possibly even two weeks after, which is okay because it means that then in the lecture I can concentrate on filling in the gaps, straightening out the misunderstandings and generally adding to what we did in the class, rather than leading as it were as I have up until now. So what I intend to do from this week is that very thing, try and fill in as it were and er make up for what wasn't covered in the classes because I must admit that this year I've been struck by the high st high standard of the class presentations. So far anyway they've been excellent I must say. So if I trail the classes in this way it's not gonna do any harm I don't think because the class presentations and the class discussions in general have been so excellent this year. So what I want to do is to go back over what I was talking about last week but with a different emphasis. Instead of, instead of giving the emphasis to er what Freud said and trying to rather hurriedly, and as it turned out, too hurriedly, er fill in as it were the, the background from the point of view of modern er modern understanding of the evolution of sex. What I want to do is concentrate on the modern sex theory and then er explain that and then relate it to Freud. So it's going over the same ground but from the different er different emphasis because clearly my mistake last week was to try and cram in too much and to erm assume that what I was saying about modern sex theory was erm self-evident. Well it's self-evident to me but it's obviously not to, not to other people. Now in order to understand this and not to misunderstand terms, we've got to unders the first thing we have to understand is what Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is all about and the problem with this, and in some ways this is analogous to the problem with Freud, and I'll be talking about this later, is that er when Darwin put forward his Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection in eighteen fifty nine it was confused and misunderstood because of the ideas of other people like Herbert Spencer and the so-called Social Darwinists, who coined slogans like, for example, survival of the fittest. And survival of the fittest has since become a slogan, it is nothing more, a slogan associated with Darwin. Not, it shouldn't be associated with Darwin. In the first place, Darwin didn't coin it and used it very reluctantly. In fact it was coined seven years before Darwin published his theory, by Herbert Spencer. In fact, evolution does not select for er the fitness of individuals, if by fitness you understand what normally mean by fitness and that is health and wellbeing. If it did, however would you explain this? This is a graph, a rather murky one I'm afraid... I don't know whether, is that muck on the screen, or is it on my thing, let's see. No, I think it's on the screen. Nothing we can do about that. Okay. Erm, this is a graph for annual mortality of males and females aged one to four for different years of the twentieth of the century.
[speaker001:] [cough]
[Chris:] The only year where they coincide is nineteen twenty, the great erm influenza epidemic actually killed more people than the first world war, and er as you'll see, despite increasing trends in health care which have reduced the overall rate, the difference in death rate between males and females has remained in the same or, if anything, widened slightly in recent years. So in terms of infant mortality er males die more than females. It's not just true of infant mortality, it's true of all mortality as a matter of fact. This is excess male mortality in humans as a function of age and you can see that it peaks in the mid-twenties and the peak is mainly accounted for by violence and accidents and er things like that, risky behaviour on the part of males and er, as you'll see, throughout the life span there's a, there's a positive percentage excess in male mortality. And finally, sorry I had one more and I lost it, no I haven't, here it is. Ratio of injuries to deaths for all accidents as a function of age and sex. And again er male, the male rate is least up until age sixty five. And of course it's er it's a commonplace that human males die more readily than females. If you go to any old people's home and look around you, most of the people you'll be looking at will be females. Males on average die between five and seven years earlier than er females do and males die from all causes that affect both sexes, and some you wouldn't think did, er more than females. For instance in nineteen eighty eight more men died from breast cancer in the United States than died from AIDS. An astonishing statistic. You wouldn't think men could die of br die of breast cancer, but they do because men have residual nipples and they do produce small amounts of oestrogen. So, what does this mean? Well, in terms of survival of the fittest what it means is that natural selection doesn't select for fitness because if it does, what is it doing? Now nature may be feminine by gender but surely not feminist by conviction. Is nature persecuting males? Well no. What is actually happening is that natural selection does not select for fitness understood as health and er individual health er and wellbeing, athletic ability and so on. What natural selection actually selects for, we now know, is the reproductive success of individual genes and in fact this explains all these figures. The reason why males die more readily than females do is attributable to the effects of testosterone and the only cure for this is to be castrated, and the earlier you are castrated the lo if you're a male, the longer your life expectancy will become compared with, compared with females. What kills males in other words, preferential to females, is the very thing that promotes their reproductive success. So this is er this is an interes this is er a critical thing to remember if you're tempted to believe slogans like survival of the fittest. Natural selection does not select for any kind of qualitative improvement. Again, Herbert Spencer believed that evolution was an on and upward process of, of increasing perfection culminating in Victorian man, and Herbert Spencer probably did mean man as opposed to woman. Darwin never a never accepted that one. Darwin erm repeatedly said that evolution was not a perfecting mechanism. Darwin knew far too much natural history to know that was er true. Evolution does not always make creatures more complex, more intelligent, bigger, better adapted to their environment, or whatever. Sometimes it has the er the opposite effect. All natural selection does is reward reproductive success. Those organisms who have more offspring pass on more of their genes to the future and those genes are increasingly represented in the future if some kind of natural factor, like the environment or the climate or other organisms determine who has the greater reproductive success. Today er Darwinists don't use the term fitness. I tell my students during my evolution and behaviour course not to use the F word and the F word is fitness and I advise them strongly not to, and if I could ban it I would. Er, it's not in my nature to be authoritarian with my students but if I could be authoritarian I would say look, you're not allowed to use that word, and if you do you've gotta pay a pound. Er because it's the F word and fitness er is not what it's about. The trouble with fitness is that it leads to mistakes about evolution because it makes people think in terms of qualitative terms. Darwin's insight is into evolution as a purely quantitative measure. Reproductive success is purely quantitative. It is not quality. It is unscientific and wrong to draw any qualitative conclusions from it whatsoever. You cannot do that. All you can say is that natural selection selects for the reproductive success of individuals in their genes and some individuals have more reproductive success than others. You cannot say, as the Victorians said, that this is all bound up with certain races being superior or certain classes being superior. That perhaps was an understandable mistake in the nineteenth century when, for example, in this country the population was expanding very rapidly. But today the fittest populations in the technical sense of the term are the Third World. They have the greatest reproductive success and in terms of Darwinian evolution it is Third World rapidly expanding populations which are enjoying the highest levels of reproductive success. But nobody today would assume that necessarily went along with be better personal health or wellbeing because we know it doesn't. In the Victorian era it did but it doesn't today. So the point I am making is that terms like reproductive success are purely quantitative, they're wholly objective and scientific. They are not in any way to be interpreted as qualitative judgments. There is no room for qualitative judgment in science. I erm like most people in this institution believe in science and think I am a scientist and I have not time or room for such qualitative judgments. If it can't be quantitatively based, ultimately it's probably not worth doing in science. And so the point I'm making is that, is that a modern insight into Darwinian evolution is based on a wholly scientific basis and social Darwinism may have got Darwinism a bad name by associating it with slogans like survival of the fittest, but modern Darwinism er isn't like that. I've in fact printed out a short extract from my new book erm which illustrates this, albeit using a computer program, and you can take a copy of that away with you. It's very short, it's only about fifteen hundred words, and that I think explains it even more clearly. It would take too long to get the computer up and do it for you, but erm you can take that away with you if, if you like, that just makes the same points I've been making now, but using a computer simulator. Okay, so our modern view then is that evolution is all about the quantitative reproductive success of individuals and in fact of individual genes. So that is a quantitative objective scientific and ultimately measurable factor. Now admittedly in practice, measuring reproductive success is a damn sight more difficult than it seems. When you actually have to do it, you discover that there are all kinds of problems with it in practice, but in principle the, the situation I think is completely clear. Okay, now let's, having dealt with the concept of reproductive success, let's deal with the concept of sex. Now in modern evolutionary biology, sex again is based on a scientific quantitative definition, not on a subjective human or qualitative one. And the quantitative distinction which is well illustrated by this photograph, which is completely typical... let me get the one, hang on... right, this is a photograph of a hamster ovum with a hamster sperm just fertilizing it there and you can see that the hamster sperm is a lot smaller than the hamster ovum, and this is totally typical, it's smaller by many orders of magnitude. If you weighed them, you'd find that it was probably a thousand times, ten thousand times less in weight than the ovum and er also many times smaller in volume, and this is typical. In modern biology sex is defined purely in terms of the size of the sex cell and the convention is that the male has the small mobile sex cell and the female has the large relatively immobile sex cell and, with very few exceptions, this is found everywhere, throughout sexual animals, plants and fungi. Some algae admittedly produce sex cells of more or less equal size. When this happens they are not called male and female but they're arbitrarily labelled plus and minus. But plus and minus sex is very rare and er what is called erm dimorphism or anisogamy is the rule. Anisogamy just means sex cells of different size. It probably evolved because if you do computer simulations erm you find out that one of the stable equilibria to which er differing or same size sex cells leads is one with a very large cell and one with a very small cell. It's too complicated to explain er why this happens, but such simulations have been done, notably about Parker Baker and Smith who did the famous one and it does suggest that if you start off, even if you start of with similar size, that is sex cells, they will be driven by a competition for reproductive success to the extremes and you'll end up with two extreme types, a large type proto-ovum and a tiny type, a proto- sperm. So again, sex is defined purely quantitatively, there's nothing qualitative about this concept. It's purely quantitative and it's in terms of the size of the sex cell. Okay. Now, one of the consequences of this differing size of sex cells is that females usually concentrate on parental investment. Now parental investment is a technical concept which we don't need to go into in this course in too great detail, suffice is to say that parental investment represents everything a parent sinks into its offspring which promotes its offspring's reproductive success. Obviously food. Well, in the first place obviously the size of the sex cell Er, er its genes, the size of the sex cell, the food it gives its offspring, the protection it gives it, the transportation, education, instruction, protection, er you name it erm whatever the parent does, in the case of birds, warmth is a major factor, incubating the eggs. Anything that the parent contributes to the offspring which promotes that offspring's reproductive success is called parental investment. Now because of this initial asymmetry between the sexes and the size of the sex cells, the tendency is for females to concentrate on parental investment and males to concentrate on mating success. And the reason for this is that usually the male has a vast number of sex cells and consequently can afford to compete er for er female cells to fertilize. In grasses, for instance, it's not the ovule that is dispersed by the billions on the wind, it is the pollen. The pollen is tiny and minute, so minute that it can get up your nose and give you hay fever, but er you're never gonna catch hay fever from modules because they'll never be released, they're relatively massive compared with, compared with pollen. So what the pollen cells are doing are investing in mating success. That's why they broadcast themselves to the wind. This is the blunderbuss approach, the fertilization, fire off billions in every direction and a few are bound to hit females. What the ovules do is they stay in the grasses and they wait for the pollens to arrive. And this is, this is a typical, this is a typical pattern. So what tends to happen is that females invest in parental,i in their offspring, males put their effort into mating success. The proof of the pudding here is sex role reverse species. Now, there are more of those than you may think. There are quite a few species where the sex roles have become reversed and where males behave like females and females behave like males. One of the best examples, for exam erm, one of the best examples, for example, alright I'll say it, erm, is er, er what're they called now, er sea horse, sea horses. Sea horses are interesting because what happens is, males produce sperm of course, that's why we call them males of course, females produce eggs of course, that's why they're called females. But the females compete for males because the male has a pouch literally on the front of his, of his belly, you know what a sea horse looks like, he looks like a horse actually, not surprisingly, you know they have this kind of, they have a kind of tail and they have this kind of pouch. And what happens is that females, females have pouches that produce eggs but they only hold a small, they only hold a small volume. Males have much larger pouches and what happens is the females compete with each other. As a result they, they grow large, they grow aggressive, and they're highly coloured and they fight each other for access to males. Males erm are rather coy and, and retiring and er submit to er females planting their eggs inside their pouches. So females fight for males and plant their eggs in the male's pouch if he is, if he is er if he is accessible. Then the male fertilizes the eggs once they are inside his pouch and then he looks after them until they hatch and the poor male staggers around with an enormous great pouch full of wriggling er baby sea horses until they're finally born. And he, erm, in fact puts in a greater investment than she does because he has to do the transportation, protection and everything. He has to oxygenate them inside him and everything else. So this is a sex role reverse species where males in fact invest more in offspring than females do and er the females compete for males. The females compete for somewhere to put their eggs. Of course, in er mammals wha you could say what was happening in mammals is that males are competing for access to uteruses. They're doing the exact opposite of what female sea horses are doing. They're competing for access to male pouches, what mammalian males are doing is competing for access to female uteruses because it's only in a female uterus that an offspring can develop if you're a mammal. So the result is that in mammals there are, I think I'm right in saying, no sex reversed species whatsoever, in fact I'm sure there aren't. There are no sex reversed species and mammals have, if anything, exaggerated the fundamental differences er in sex, but I emphasise that this is based on quantitative factors, erm, there's nothing qualitative about this. One of the quantitative consequences of this which I mentioned last week and I, I think may have been misunderstood is what is called variance of reproductive success. If I can find a rubber, I'll write it up for you... I'm afraid my ink, my pen, is running out. Er, variance of reproductive success. Now, this is illustrated by the following diagram which is based on a, on an actual population. This is based on a closely studied population of deer on the Scottish island of which is not inhabited by human beings, but is by deer, and the easiest way to see it is, is at the bottom here. This shows the lifetime reproductive success of er hinds as opposed to stags and what it shows is that hinds start their reproductive life earlier, soon after age two, and they continue it longer, right up to age seventeen. Erm, I don't think they live much longer than that. Whereas stags start their reproductive life somewhat later, around about age three, and their reproductive life ends earlier, around about age fourteen. The difference, however, is that stags are vastly more successful during their usually very brief period when they're controlling a harem of hinds. And of course, as this erm part of the diagram shows, some stags have no reproductive success whatsoever. In fact, in this population, about er half the offspring are accounted for by about five percent of er of the stags who have the best territories and the largest harems of, of hinds. So, although they start later, in fact ma mature sexually later, erm, than hinds do, just as human beings do, where of course males mature sexually a couple of years after females, their reproductive success can be vastly greater than any female. In this case, this stage had a mean number of er calves per year, about two, whereas this hind had a number just under one, which is about right. They normally only have on one per season. And since he would have had several hinds, at the peak of his reproductive career, his reproductive success would have been considerably greater. But, as I said, some hinds will have, er some er stags will have no hinds at all, they won't manage any matings, and as a result they'll have no reproduction success. So again, when I talk about variance of reproductive success, this is a purely quantitative objective numerical measure. It is a fact, it's not an opinion, it's a fact, that in the mammalian species, males can be vastly more reproductively su successful, or vastly less reproductively successful than females. It's not a value judgment, it's a fact. It's, it's reflected in mammalian societies like deer and er there are good reasons for thinking that it also applies to er human beings. Okay. So that's variance of reproductive er success and I mentioned I think last week, I anyway, the most extreme examples of this which is elephant seals where in once again a similar population to this, a closely studied population in California, five percent of the males were found to account for ninety five percent of the offspring in one season. Which suggests that ninety five percent of the males had virtually no reproductive success at all. So that shows variance of reproductive su success to an extreme degree. Okay, now, one of the things, I was gonna say this later but I'm gonna say this now because it fits in here quite nicely, although as you'll see I'll revert to this later, but while we're doing sex theory I'll mention it. One of the distinctive things about modern Darwinism is that it exploded the myth of group selection. Now group selection is, is the idea which grew up after Darwin and remained very common until the nineteen sixties and seventies, that natural selection could act on entire groups or species. In fact it can't. People realized it couldn't when, in nineteen sixty four, a biologist by the name of Wyn Edwards at the University of Edinburgh actually bothered to publish a book arguing the theory, and when Wyn Edwards argued the case, almost immediately most people began to realize that it, that it didn't make sense and that most of the evidence that he thought supported the theory doesn't in fact do so, and today Wyn Edwards has himself refused it, even he now er admits that group selection er cannot work. Erm, and the reason for this, of course, is that, as I said, natural selection selects for the reproductive success of individuals, it does not select for the reproductive success of the group. Supposing it did. Supposing that natural selection was rewarding behaviour which benefited the group. For that statement to be anything but trivial, there would have to be situations in which an individual was faced with a choice between an act which would promote its own reproductive success and that wou wou would injure its reproductive success, but promote that of the group, shall we say by foregoing eating something, by not fighting with another member of the group, by not mating with a female, whatever it may be. All kinds of circumstances could be such situations. Supposing the majority of th supposing everyone in the population did that. They all acted in a way that was in the interests of the group overall, shall we say by not eating too much foods. It would only take the appear the appearance of a mutant, who chose to put its own reproductive success first, for the whole system to break down. Because, by definition, the mutant who was acting selfishly would have greater reproductive success than the other members of the population who were foregoing these opportunities for selfish, selfish gain. By definition, the selfish mutant would have more offspring than the other members of the, of the population, and if they had more offspring, before long the mutants would begin to become an increasing, an increasing number in the population. There's no way in which you can stop er free-riders like that invading systems where individuals are striving for the benefit of the group. It simply won't work. One area where it er absolutely does not work is sex. I mean, if you think about it, supposing sex were for the benefit of the species. Well, imagine how different our life would be for us for a start. I mean, the first thing you'd notice is that erm sex would be something that was, you know, a public duty and an open. You know, everybody would, would applaud any sexual activity because it was you know, adding new members to the human race. Now we all know that life isn't like that. Again, in erm, in animal populations what studies of sexual behaviour actually shows is that individuals are not reproducing the species for the benefit of the species, they're reproducing themselves and their own genes as fast as they possibly can, given whatever other constraints may be operating. I mean you could say in this situation the stag was doing it for the benefit of the species but er you don't need to er you don't need to take that point of view. If you did, there's one fact that you couldn't possibly explain about this. If that were true, why is the species producing a large number of males who never mate? There is no way that you can explain sex ratios on a group selection basis. Take the sea lions. In sea lions only one in ten, sometimes one in twenty, males mate. That means that nine out of ten never mate. Why are they producing males and females in more or less equal numbers, which they are? Surely the benefit of the species would be served by prod producing ten females for every, every male. There should be a ten to one sex ratio. There shouldn't be a one to one sex ratio. But there is a one to one sex ratio. Why is that? Well in the ninet er Darwin didn't know, frankly. This was one of those problems that worried Darwin. He couldn't solve it. In the nineteen twenties the Darwinist, R A Fisher, solved the problem. Again it's too complicated for me to go into the details of this. I'm afraid sex ratio theory is complicated, but you'll have to take it from me that Fisher solved the problem by showing that it would never be an individual self-interest. The short explanation, if you want to know why elephant seals keep er an even sex ratio and not a one to ten sex ratio, even though only one male in every ten mates, is that every male that does mate has ten times more reproductive success than those that don't. In other words, as long as you don't know which of your males are gonna be the successful ones, it pays to produce an equal number of males and females. Because those that are successful will be ten times more successful than those that aren't. So if you have ten male offspring, nine of them will be wasted, they'll never have any reproductive success, but the one that does will have ten times the reproductive success of all the others and you end up evens. That's what Fisher realized. So, the idea that th our modern insight into evolution is, is that sex is an anti-social force of evolution. Now you might think that's a quote from Freud. It should be. Freud, as we'll see, said very similar things to that. In fact, it's not a quote from Freud. It's erm in fact a quote from Wilson, the founder of Socio-biology, the mo in other words modern er Darwinism as oppo as, as a applied to animal behaviour and Wilson's point in saying that sex is an anti-social force in evolution was to suggest that what is really happening is that if natural selection is a question of the reproductive success of individual genes, then individuals should be motivated to produce as many copies of those genes as they possibly can, and that will inevitably bring them into competition with other members of the species who wanna do exactly the same thing. One of the consequences of this emphasis on the individual was to revolutionize biological views of sexual deviation. Now, here again, in the past, group selectionist thinking had tended to the view that all you need for sex if it's for the benefit of the species is a regular male, a regular female, doing the regular thing and er everything will be alright. When you discover er irregular er males or irregular sexual activity, well that's some kind of pathology. That's er something that's unnatural as it were. But erm, just take a quick look at this. Not a very good photo I'm afraid. This is a species called the blue gill sunfish. In the, in this species... there's a female and there's a regular male. The regular male is much larger than the female cos males compete for nesting sites. However, there are two other kinds of males. There are transvestites, or female mimics, who look just like females, are the same size and have the same coloration. They're, they look just like erm females, and there are little sneaks. Er, this one here, which is, which is very much smaller. And they all co-exist. Regular males invite regular females into their nest to spawn, and the regular male swims round with the regular female, as she disperses her eggs, he disperses his, his er sperm and er that's the way it should be for the benefit of the species. Okay? That's all we'd need if sex was for the benefit of the species. We wouldn't need little sneaks. What little sneaks do is they hang about near the nest. When this process starts, they zoom in, instantly ejaculate and zoom out. And believe me, I, when I mean zoom, the whole thing takes place in a tenth of a second. It was only discovered because somebody left a film camera running on an aquarium in which these fish were present and they noticed a blur and when the film was slowed down and analyzed it turned out that this was happening, that a little sneak was going in, instantly ejaculating, and zooming out. In fact the same thing happens with deer. We know male deer develop enormous antler at vast cost to themselves to dominate harems of females, but not all male deer do that. There are some male here who never develop antlers, they look just like females, and they hang about on the edge of harems, acting like females. When the male is preoccupied, when a stag is preoccupied, fighting another stag or mounting another female, they zoom in, quickly mount a female, ejaculate almost instantly and zoom off again. They're called hummels and they're sneak fertilizers. Such sneak fertilizers are surprisingly common and in the case of er sunfish, here is one. These little sneak fertilizers however are young and small of course, this is what they rely on their enormous of speed for, and they grow up into female mimics or transvestites, and what a transvestite does is when a regular male and a regular female are in the nest swimming around together doing the regular thing, the transvestite swims in, appearing as a second female. The male doesn't know that this fish is in fact male and not female, and in place of ovaries this male, which is that one there, has enormous testes. The testes of these female mimics are vastly larger than those of a normal male. This is a normal male and that's his testes, they're quite small. This is a female mimic and er she has enormous testes. And what the female mimic does is it swims in and instead of releasing eggs, which is what the resident male expects, they release vast clouds of sperm and of course fertilize some of the eggs. Now, from the group selectionistic point of view, this is a kind of sexual deviation. From the individualistic selfish gene point of view, it's just another way of gaining reproductive success. And you cannot make qualitative prejudicial judgments and say one is better than the other. You can't say, for example, that a regular male is a better male than the transvestite. There's certain respects in which the transvestite is more male, for example, he's got vastly bigger testes, so if you think that being male is a function of how large your testes are, then the female mimic is the best male. Well, clearly, such considerations are ridiculous and prejudicial and they're not scientific. All you can say is, there are different ways of getting reproductive success and er being a female mimic, or a little sneak, is er, is just one way of doing it. So the, the consequence of this is that if you concentrate on individuals rather than on er groups, you take a completely different view of sex. You take the kind of view that Freud took of sex, namely that sex is, to quote his term, polymorphously perverse, that sex isn't just a simple question of a regular male er doing it with a regular female. Now, another consequence of this way of er looking at it... again, something to which I referred last week, is what is known as the Trivers Willard. Now what Trivers and Willard suggest was was this. They said look, if males can have greater reproductive success than females can, then parents who have some way of knowing that their offspring are gonna be particularly reproductively successful should invest in males, whereas if they have some way of knowing that their offspring are not gonna be particularly reproductively successful, they should invest in females. And the reason, to go back to the stags, where in fact we know this happens, er i is clear. In other words, if your offspring is going to be very reproductively successful then, because of variance of male reproductive success, you should have male offspring. Whereas if you think your offspring are not gonna be particularly successful, you should have female offspring because they always get, get mated in this kind of, in this kind of set up. In fact, this happens. It happens with deer, where female deer appear to be able to manipulate the sex ratio to their own advantage. We don't know how they do it, but high-ranking females in the best harems, that is those that have the best feeding grounds on run, produce significantly more males than they do females. And there are plenty of animal examples. Lot of them. I won't bore you with those. It also occurs in human beings. According to tax criteria, the top ten percent of the U S population produces an eight percent excess of males by comparison to the bottom ten percent. Actually, I think we do know how that comes about. What happens is this. Er, because w er males because of er variance of male reproductive success, another way of looking at it is to say look, males are expendable, you don't actually need a lot of males to keep all your females fertilized so you can waste them, and in fact we do waste them, for example in wars. It's usually er er males that go to wars rather than females, and you can waste them on a vast scale like we did at the time of the first world war and, and find virtually no effect on your population. Erm, the consequence of that is that at conception the sex ratio in the white U S population is about a hundred and twenty males to about a hundred females. What that means is that if you have a spontaneous abortion, you're much more likely to abort a male than you are to abort a female. Partly because there are more males to start with and partly because male foetuses don't survive as well as female ones, as any erm er erm erm maternity hospital will tell you that deals with very young you know, premature babies. They'll tell you that the males don't have the same chance as the females do. So, what probably happens is that women at the bottom of the social heap in the United States, having poor health care, high stressed lives, crime, drugs and all these kind of problems, probably have more spontaneous abortions, therefore the sex ratio away from males towards females, whereas women at the top of the social scale, low stress lives, good health care, better maternity erm medicine, stuff like that, retain more foetuses, therefore you'd expect them to have more males, and this is what seems to happen. If that's a natural as it were adapted effect of the Trivers Willard effect, there are plenty of cultural ones as well. The most astonishing is the case of Rajput castes in Northern India of the nineteenth century. These were high status castes and many of them were found to have sex ratios as low as a thousand to one, sorry, a hundred to one. In other words there were, for every hundred females, er for every hundred males, there was only one female. And they did this by practising er extensive female infanticide. And ratios of four to one were common as well as in China and other places erm, even in the middle ages in this country there is evidence that the sex ratio was quite seriously skewed er in favour of males and away from females. And this is usually the result of female infanticide. Recent data for example, from two hospitals in India, where amniocentesis was used to diagnose the sex of the foetus before birth, showed that ninety five point five percent of all female foetuses were aborted, but not a single male was aborted even though the amniocentesis showed that some of the males were genetically defective. In other words, Indian parents who could afford amniocentesis, the rich ones, wanted sons and they certainly didn't want daughters, because they aborted ninety five point five percent of the daughters but none of the sons, even when the sons were genetically defective. Historical data from a German parish spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that the wealthiest farmers preserved more males but the poorest labourers more females than the wealthiest farmers. Now, if child survival were simply a question of affluence as you might think it was, there's no way you could explain these figures. Because if that were true, both sons and daughters of wealthy farmers ought to survive better than sons and daughters of the poorest labourers. In fact, the daughters of the poorest labourers survived better than the daughters of the wealthiest erm farmers. The reasons seems to be differential parental investment. The wealthiest farmers were investing preferentially in sons and possibly the poorest labourers in daughters. This doesn't necessarily mean they were practising infanticide, although some of them may have been. The, the possibility is that they just looked after one sex better than the other and there is some anec anecdotic evidence that this kind of thing occurs, which I haven't got time go to into because I'm getting towards the end of the lecture. Anyway, you can see the point I'm driving at. The Trivers Willard effect is an inevitable consequence of the quantitative disparity in the sexes and the variance of male reproductive success. Now, my theory that I was proposing last week about preferential parental investment in sexy sons or little boys who showed phallic behaviour, is a consequence of the Trivers Willard principle, because basically what it says is that little boys who advertised, as it were, in their childhood, evidence of their own adult reproductive success by precocious sexuality towards the women of the family and aggression towards the males, might be rewarded by preferential parental investment, a Trivers Willard effect in other words, and if, when they grew up, those oedipal sexy sons were in fact more reproductively successful, then the result would be a kind of self-perpetuating cycle of parental investment in oedipal sons who then grew up to be more reproductively successful than non-oedipal sons and, and so on. In the end, as I said, with that kind of selection cycle going, you'd end up with the situation where all males had the, had that er had that trait of oedipal behaviour. However, the individualistic approach of modern Darwinism which looks at it from the point of view of the reproductive success of individual genes, isn't like the older group selectionistic thinking was, prejudiced in favour of any group. You see, the trouble with group selectionistic thinking is it's prejudiced in favour of big groups. It says individuals ought to conform to groups, because what is good for the group is good for the species and what is good for the family is good for the group is good for the species and everything like that. The modern individualistic approach says there are no privileged individuals in any population. You can't say that males, females, the old or the young a are those who, who carry on their sexual role in a regular way, or those who do it in an irregular way have a privileged point of view. That would be a qualitative prejudicial judgment, the kind of judgment that social Darwinists went in for. Th the modern scientific view of evolution says you must treat all individuals equally because all individuals are equally just the temporary packaging for their genes. It's their genes that are struggling for reproductive success. Consequently, you cannot say that one individual has privileges over another. The consequence of that is, you have to ask yourself, okay, oedipal behaviour is fine for sexy sons them, but what about daughters? Daughters are losing because their parents, perhaps especially their mothers, are investing preferentially in their sons, and we know that happens on a quite vast and astonishing scale in, in societies. What are they gonna do? My suggestion is that penis envy evolved as a counter-tactic, to motivate little girls by saying look, anything that has a penis is probably getting something that you're not getting, you should envy it and compete with it, and try to get those resources for yourself. Such a gene could pay for itself if it motivated little girls to in fact compete with their brothers for what their brothers might otherwise er get uncontested. There's nothing in our modern view of the evolution to say that one party has privileges over the, another. On the contrary, if the gene can pay for itself in terms of reproductive success, that is all that matters. So all I'm arguing is that all such a gene for penis envy would have to do would be to promote the reproductive success of the little girls who've had it to that gene eventually to become established throughout the entire female population, just as the gene for oedipal behaviour, or phallic behaviour, would become selective in males. These are not prejudicial judgments, they're not based on, on value judgments. They're based on simple qualitative calculus of what would happen if natural selection operated this way. Now, of course, it may well be that er all this is completely crazy and it doesn't work that way, and that my hypothesis about these things erm are, are quite wrong. They can be tested of course. Erm, I mean I could generate P H D theses for you by the dozen out of all this. I mean, we could, one of the big problems you know in science is people only start protesting things when they think they're credible, and often it's very difficult to get people, first of all to think it's credible, before they erm before you can get the tests. One test, for example, that I suggested to you last week which would have surprised Freud, is by contention the children who were overwhelmed with parental investment, particularly by perhaps the parent of the opposite sex, shouldn't show much oedipal behaviour. I've said that there is evidence from the studies of Robert Stoller that this is true. Now that's, that's a prediction that I think er you wouldn't make on the basis of the Freudian theory, but on the basis of my interpretation of it, it kind of follows. And there are lots of other ones erm you could, you could, you could make as well. So you see what I've been, what I've been trying to do in this lecture is to explain the, the modern biological basis which I think makes Freud's findings intelligent. Because on otherwise they're pretty unintelligible. I mean, let's face it, penis envy is a is a pretty wacky idea however you look at it, and you can't blame people for thinking, oh you know, this Viennese professor must have had a, had a diseased mind or something to come across such a crazy idea. It does seem crazy. On the surface it looks very crazy. If you read the Trivers Willard erm literature, as I have done, about preferential parental investment in males as opposed to females, it, it starts to make al a lot of sense. Indeed, Robert Trivers in the original path breaking paper of his that launched the whole theory of parent offspring conflict, without knowing it, predicted it. Because in that paper there is a passage where Trivers says, if my theory is right, and basically it's this Trivers Willard thing he was talking about, that parents and offspring will be in conflict about parental investment, he says, if my theory is right and if parents discriminate investment on the basis of offspring success, then he makes two predictions. He said first, selection will select for offspring to know what sex they are and secondly, selection will favour offspring who compete er with the, with the sex er wh in whom the parents are, are erm favouring. Now, he doesn't say anything about penis envy in, in putting that forward and I don't know whether penis envy was in his mind at the time he wrote those words and even if I asked him today, he probably wouldn't admit it. I happen to know, from a friend of mine, that Robert Trivers, long before he was the great evolutionary biologist he is today, when he was an illustrator of children's books, argued the whole thing to and fro with a friend of mine who was a Freudian analyist and he tells me that in the beginning all they talked about was Freud. It was only later that Trivers began to link it up with Darwin. So it may well be that indirectly, whether consciously or unconsciously Trivers' own thinking was influenced by Freudian findings erm, I don't know, I'm pursuing that possibility. It would be interesting to know, but however that may be, it's significant that within this very first paper Trivers makes this prediction and my interpretation of penis envy is effectively what, about what, Trivers predicted. Well, I hope that clarified a few iss issues and made one or two things clearer. They're probably even clearer if you take this copy of my er which I'll leave by the door and er we'll carry on next week. Don't forget, those of you in Tuesday class, next week it's at four P M and not two P M. Thank you very much. [tape change]