[Chris:] Let's er find my... the light... thingy No, not today. No, there's no film today. Okay, so who's entertaining us this morning? Ah, how nice it's from psychology. Is it? Yes. Okay, off you go now. Well done, excellent. Well done Joy erm [cough] a nice summary of a [cough] complex book and er there's obviously a lot of things that will have to go of the erm lecture on it next week, so really this is not due to be talked about. By the way Tom while I'm on it erm I mislead you yesterday erm I look in my list I realized I It's, it's Tom who's doing it, I just wrote Tom and I thought you were in yesterday's group, but you're in today's group so it can't be you, it's Tom. So ignore that, I mixed you up with Tom I do apologize. You're not doing. In fact we haven't got you down for a paper at all in this class yet I don't think so if you'd like to do one for us you can see me about it afterwards. Okay, well erm Joy has outlined as I said this, this, this rather complex book erm what erm... wh wh what issues do people want to er want to raise about it?...
[speaker002:] What's it say that the people who don't like being in groups...
[Chris:] Well... What would you say? [cough]...
[Joy:] Erm
[Chris:] Some people are more groupie than others. Some people are
[Joy:] [LAUGHTER] I think erm yeah they are...
[Chris:] What, taking the kind of analysis Freud uses in this book, what... features in the individual would you look for, in order to answer these questions? I mean what, what psychological characteristics would make one person more... groupie than another or more needing or wanting or enjoying belonging to a group than another? Can anyone suggest what features of the individual you might isolate as critical? Mhm n n why's that, could you explain that?
[Dean:] Because... in a group you y y y you get this erm... the individual's ego and they,th they take on this the super ego of the, of a leader... so they get this transparent idea... so if a person got a stronger ego, then they're, then they're less likely to... lose that and take on somebody else's ideas.
[Chris:] Yes I think that's, that's certainly true isn't it and here erm Dean puts his finger really on what is a central concept of Freud's group psychology and one reveals transparent in the title of the book which is Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego or in German erm Masse Psychologie und dich Analyse so erm
[speaker002:] [cough]
[Chris:] the fact that Freud linked the two things together, the very title of the book shows the evil th that group psychology and ego psychology were intimately... intimately connected with one another and er the central idea was that as Dean rightly says is that in a group the leader or the leading principal, and it doesn't always have to be a person, although usually a person plays, kind of represents the, the er... the leader in the way that the Pope represents Christ for example, you know Christ can't be here right now, he's doing other things elsewhere I presume. Erm [cough] the... the leader of the... of, of, of the group is, is the focus and... as Dean has said and as Joy explained, takes over functions of the individual's ego, super ego. What kind of functions does the leader exercise for the individual?... Because there's quite a list of them and I think they explain many of the descriptive characteristics of o of goods or that Freud refers to. That's certainly true and in a sense that's the most obvious thing isn't it? The leader as always is er is a directive agency, the leader [cough] as it were erm... takes over the individual self-determination by erm effectively telling... telling the good what to do erm... how can this er... does this have to be in... in one direction only I mean one gets the feelings very often you know you see things in the newspaper crowd hysteria and so on, erm do crowds always have to become kind of primitive and regressed or... or can leaders influence them in other directions?... Cos certainly you, sometimes you get the feeling don't you that okay being in the crowd or the group may reduce people's... self-determination and self control, but the result is mayhem. So does that always have to happen?... Well what would you say Joy, because you did touch on this in your, in your comments? Do, do groups always have to the behaviour and performance of their members or can they do the opposite?... What do you think Dean I mean? Is that why you were thinking some people might not want to belong to groups cos they always see er the group as detracting from their ego?...
[Dean:] Yeah perhaps, I, I know that it applies to some people.
[Chris:] Mm.
[Dean:] I mean I, I don't feel comfortable talking... I'm talking in a whole group I don't feel quite as comfortable not actually here, but in, in a debate situation talking to say two or three people.
[Chris:] Yes.
[Dean:] there must be some people there that wonder what that was really.
[Chris:] Well of course tha that might just be intimidation by large numbers of other people, like you know having to stand up in front of a group of other people, I think anybody feels the same. Erm... er... embarrassment or reticence because there are so many other people erm there, but I think you, you meant more than that didn't you and
[Dean:] Yes, yeah I did yeah
[Chris:] er you were, you were saying that er for some people the group is a kind of a danger cos it takes something away from them, and that's certainly true, but the th the point I was, I was getting at was that
[speaker002:] [cough]
[Chris:] if, if Freud's theory of the group is correct, that it's centred on the leader playing the super role then the... presumably the leader could exhort members of the group to act better than they normally would, because after all one of the super leader's functions is to set the goals for the ego and to give the... the goal, the ego something to aspire to... so er and as Joy mentioned in her papers and I'm trying to remind you of,y you, you said that quoting Freud if you recall that, that, that Freud says and I think he, he, he repeats this from the also made the same observation that... in a group or a crowd people can act a lot worse than they normally would, they can be more destructive, primitive erm and er more governed by their erm base emotions as it were, but equally in a crowd people can act better than they normally would. They can be more selfless, more public spirited, more erm idealistic than they would be on their own, because the super ego can presumably erm influence the ego in both directions, it can make the ego erm transcend itself as it were to higher ideals and like someone sometimes sees this in, in group behaviour, but equally of course it can erm debase the ego by setting lower standards than the ego would normally accepted itself. So erm,it it's important to remember that... Freud's theory explains both of these tendencies and both the tendency for the group to make people better than they might normally be, but also that the tendency for the group perhaps to make them worse and of course either can happen and presumably a lot depends on the, on the leader, the leader [cough] or whoever is playing the, the leadership function presumably has erm some responsibility for this. Er... in a sense you could say that the leader becomes the conscience of the, of the group. Now in, in, in the book, and this is a diagram in the book that the person who did this paper yesterday in yesterday's class put on the board, erm... Freud doesn't use the term super ego, that term I think was first used by Freud a year or two later in his book The Ego which I think is nineteen twenty three. In nineteen twenty one he used the term ego ideal for what
[speaker002:] [cough]
[Chris:] the term ego ideal I think reflects very nicely this idea of erm... the super ego as setting the standard to which the ego inspires. The later term that Freud adopted to this super ego has become... synonymous in people's minds with conscience the idea of... the super ego as the... the role of conscience and presum presumably that's another aspect of the same thing and er... Serg Moskovicy in his excellent book Age of the Crowd erm which is on the reading list which I can thoroughly recommend... in discussing this point of how Freud sees the leader as the kind of super ego of the followers quotes one of the Nuremberg war criminals, I forget which it was now erm... Goering or Goebbels or one of these er people who when asked of the Nuremberg war tribunals why did you do the things you did, replied Adolf Hitler was my conscience and that's er that's a very erm good example of this idea of er how the... the role of conscience can be transferred from the individual to the, to the leader of the group and I suppose Dean you would say erm illustrates one of the greatest dangers of group, group membership because er obviously if... if that happens in a group, then erm individuals are to some extent erm surrendering their moral self-responsibility and of course if Freud's insight is correct, then there was an element of truth in... in this... in this excuse Adolf Hitler was my conscience. I'm not saying it's one that the tribunal should have accepted, but, but, but what I'm saying is th there is an element of psychological truth in that, because if Freud's theories if er bond Freud theory group behaviour is correct, then that does seem to happen some extent that the... leader as it were takes and presumably this is why some people erm... presumably er feel better in groups, perhaps that they get something out of a group that their own ego cannot provide, but other people are uncomfortable in groups because they feel that their ego is being alienated and they're losing some of their... some of their power. So some people are erm... are really rather allergic to groups, and I'm certainly one of them!
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Which is why my career has never flourished. Well no, er at least I don't think he does er
[Heather:] Well why
[Chris:] Yeah. [cough] Well this would be the other side of the picture. In the book Freud emphasises the bonds portrait of the crowd that... Joy outlined to us. The, the other side of the picture is, is, is, is the loner as it were. Now, explore the psychology of the loner a bit more for us Heather, I mean what Usually does. Would everybody think that?... Well explain why because there's an interesting point here you touch on.
[Heather:] Erm
[Chris:] Just expand that a bit. Why, why do you come to that judgment? Yeah, you see, you see the paradox Yeah, I see what y y y you're getting at, let me give an ex er an illustrated example which I think might help or at least bring, bring the paradox out of those clearly. What about psychotherapeutic groups? Because if... if you... took the... the ideas of Freud's seriously, and a lot of people who work with groups, the therapeutic groups claim to, do you think you would... come to the same conclusion as Heather, I mean c could you have for example a, a psychotherapeutic group could you do group psychotherapy? Well if, and if you took this Freud's theory seriously. What are the implications of that for group psychotherapy? You see the individual
[speaker002:] it's not so good is it not yeah
[Chris:] You see the individual patient's dilemma, we've got no problem with the loner who comes for individual psychoanalysis they have been on their own th there's no problem there, but... but what about the group analytic situation? What, what's the problem there?
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Well yes, I mean... th this is certainly the was born in fact I, I commented on this in my... in my book when I was talking about this book before group psychology I... I made one or two erm fairly erm critical comments about, about group, group, group psychotherapy. I would like to think that if Freud... were alive today, he would have said the same thing, of course when Freud wrote this book in nineteen twenty one er... there was no such thing as group psychotherapy it hadn't been invented yet, it was to become very much after World War Two but partly existed before and perhaps it's past its peak now, but erm it did become very much a after World War Two and the point I made was and this is really wh wh what Heather ha h has just said, that if you take Freud's book on, on group seriously, how can you do group psychoanalysis? You can certainly do group suggestive therapy and here we touch on another point that erm Joy reminds us of and Freud makes quite a bit on the book the parallel between being in a group and being hypnotized, because the, the, the role of the hypnotist is to take over completely
[speaker002:] [cough]
[Chris:] you go or the person who has been hypnotized so that in the most extreme cases, as we know, the hypnotized person lapses into a kind of trance, whether a kind of sleeping automaton with no ego and their decisions are now being made for them by the hypnotist who tells them what do to and they, they act as a kind of a, a puppet as if their ego ha has been turned off al al al altogether and clearly there's a parallel here with what Freud's going on in the group. So... if you think about it a therapeutic group could certainly use suggestive therapy like hypnosis and my guess is that most successful groups like Alcoholics Anonymous or groups of people who wanna stop smoking or do slimming and things like that succeed for that reason, cos every member of the group reinforces every other member with a kind of group super ego and says look, you mustn't smoke, you mustn't drink, you mustn't put on weight and it, it reinforces every individual's erm... super ego by means of identification with the shared value of the group and... similarly reduces feelings of shame and guilt if the individual fails the group, cos next week when they come back they say oh dear, I've put on five pounds, erm that they're gonna feel bad about it because it offends against the ideal of the of the group if it's Weight Watchers or something. However, the suggestion is quite different from analysis because as what we've seen what happens in analysis is in analysis the, the individual faces up to their inner and resolves them themselves, it's a kind of a loner solution to use... to use, to use Heather's term. The, in analysis you don't get er someone else to do it for you or you don't get the therapist to play the role of your ego which is really what happens in this suggestion. You get your own ego to face up to its own problems and to make its own decisions, er as I mentioned before a very painful process and a, and a, and a rather gruelling one. So it seems to me that you cannot do analysis in a group because by definition the ego of a person in a group is, is detracted from, whereas in individual psychoanalysis and ideally the ego of the person is added to and enlarged to give them more competence by being made to face up to its repressions. So I must say I entirely agree with Heather on this, it seems to me inevitable logic of Freud's theory and erm... my own view is that group psychoanalysis is a contradiction in terms, you cannot do psychoanalysis in a group of this and those who say they can I think have n... never understood what psychoanalysis is all about and are misleading the public and people pay good money for it. I think if you say you do suggestion therapy in a group, that's fine, that's honest and correct, but to say you can do analysis in a group I think is, is... is actually erm... erm... fraudulent in the sense that it is not true analysis, it must be suggestion therapy. Right. No. Oh, of course the opposite happens in a group, I mean what happens in groups you know therapeutic groups tend to be like this one, they sit in circles and they, they kind of focus on... very often on the leader who often plays a very, very... powerful role even if they claim not to. Very often in therapeutic groups they do claim not to, but in fact er the leader does play a very dominant role er and even when the attention shifts to members of course, the fact that all the other members are watching them means that their reactions and what they say and think and do in a group would have been very much constrained by their actions and expectations o of the other members. Now erm this is... this is... archetypical group behaviour, but... whatever it is, it cannot necessarily reflect erm that individual's own erm peculiar self as it were using peculiar in the... in the strict sense and proper to them, because as we've seen what happens in a group is, is, is the individual. So erm... you can't even see the things you're looking at, I don't think in a group for the, for the reason Heather said, because what will happen is, you will see reflecting individual, the values and aspirations of the group and especially the, the disturbing effects of the other members and the leader. What you're not likely to see is the peculiarities of, of the person erm... showing themselves and if they do show too much, the likelihood is that the rest of the group will start to erm freeze out that individual, regardless because they're no longer corresponding to the... to the ideals of the group... and er so consequently, erm I personally have no time for group psychoanalysis and I would never recommend it to anybody, although of course, for non-analytic things like losing weight or in stopping smoking or drinking, there's a lot to be said for it, but one shouldn't confuse that kind of group reinforcement with erm analysis, cos analysis as we've seen is quite different.... [cough] So that's an important point and one which is not in Freud's book although I'd like to think it would have been, had he written it much later on when, when group... erm therapy had become very fashionable. Though my guess is that it is very unfashionable, is that right Dawn, that people think that? Do you think it's less fashionable than it was? And in the... in the sixties and seventies it was all the rage, but I've got the feeling it had a Yeah, well... therapy of all kinds, I mean [cough]
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] That's true, that's true. Mind you Woody is getting on now as er
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] as he reflects the situation of a few years ago.
[speaker002:] the erm, I mean if there's only one much worse that they know that everyone much better for their
[Chris:] Well that's true yes.
[speaker002:] And so if they er when normally there's only one reason.
[Chris:] Yes, I think whenever one makes judgment about therapy being better or worse you have to say er on what criteria and there are certainly certain criteria on which group therapy would do better for certain problems like us making feel people feel better if they had a symptom or problem which erm make them feel worse because, because they felt isolated from the community, so it means other people who have got the same problem makes you feel better erm and er certainly suggestion therapy can produce dramatic results especially in the short run.... Th the problem with suggestion therapy whether it be hypnosis or group therapy is it doesn't tend to last in the longer run after the person stopped going to the group or they haven't seen the... the er hypnotist for reinforcement. There's a very good example of that some years ago er in one of these groups I had erm a student had a severe stutter problem and he said that he had hypnosis and for two years he was fine, he had no stutter and suddenly one day under stress it came back an and ever since erm then he was having some other kind of treatment I think, but er but that's typical. I in the shorter run erm often suggestion therapy will work, but seldom in the long run and er then it needs reinforcement you need to go back and have more. So, but there is something to be said for it I'm certainly not running it down, what I am saying is you can't. Certain people have claimed that in group psychoanalysis and that I think is fraudulent, because they are not doing analysis they're doing something different and erm I think it is something described I think very well in this book, although of course as we said this was written erm... er... group therapy.... Okay any other points that people want to raise about this?... There's one paradox here that I think can confuse people and we ought to talk about a little bit... and that is the libidinal aspect. Again Joy mentioned it, because of course it's important, you'd expect in a, in a Freudian theory. The libidinal aspect of, of group membership, now how does that work? What happens to people's libido in a group? Cos this is important and it can be confusing... and, and there is t er there is a little of a paradox in here, which will come out even more clearly next week, oh no the week after. The week after when Marie-Anne does civilization and. Can anybody see the... the paradox I'm getting at when we talk about the libido in the group?... Well let me put it this way er it's the two's company three's a crowd problem. T to what am I? Two's company, three's a crowd?... I think if you had asked Freud what's the minimum number numerically for one of, for the Bond Freud Crowds, Freud would have thought for a bit and I think he would have said three.... He certainly wouldn't have said two, why not?... Why is two company and three a crowd?...
[speaker002:] They can't be a
[Chris:] Er... well er perhaps not, but what's the, I mean what's the context in wh wh which people quote that saying?
[speaker002:] left out and two would interact and
[Chris:] Right, right but the two's company and three's a crowd idea is that if you've got er two people, they, they may have er some libidinal interest in each other and they may have a couple, but a third person is, is just a complication. It it's, it's the eternal triangle they're the stuff of which novels and soap operas are made. What wo what would they do without the eternal triangle? Virtually none one suspects, so ca can you see the problem here? The problem is... Freud believes in the libido, the libido erm directs you towards another person for gratification and that makes a couple and this can be very gratifying as well. So how on earth can there be a libidinal dimension in a group or a crowd whereas we've already said the minimum number is three and actual number of course is vastly greater. So how can there possibly be a libidinal dimension to crowds if crowds are... just erm many more extra points in the eternal triangle? How does Freud get or to refer to Marie-Anne's erm subject couple weeks, how could Freud think that libido was involved in groups when he says in the book that she's gonna tell us about tha that society and civilization erm is in conflict with indiv wi with, with individual's erm... libidinal self-interest,th th their personal libidinal desires. Right, now how does that come about? Could you, could you expand that a little bit Duncan? How does the libido of the individual interact because Freud certainly thinks it does?
[Duncan:] some form of identity group demands of the group.
[Chris:] That's certainly true.
[Duncan:] sorry.
[Chris:] Go on.
[Duncan:] Isn't it that the unconscious and the ego comes through
[Chris:] Yes. Right that tends to happen too.
[Duncan:] ... So you're
[Chris:] So we we expect the libido if anything to be erm... to be more evident in a group.... What kind of libido are we talking about?... Because here I think we see one of the chief reasons why... Freud adopted the term libido and why when we talked about libido through last term I said we would see that there were some very good reasons in Freud's erm application of his ideas to society for having this libido and that now we've come to it, what... what kind of libido are Dean and Duncan talking about?... Because I think we have to make distinctions here between different types of libido. What kind of libido Duncan is involved in the kind of thing we're talking about? Well it's to do with ego ideal. What kind of libido would you think would be involved with the ego ideal?... Well, er wouldn't it be narcissism? The idea of love directed towards one's own self is specifically towards one's own ego. You will recall that when we talked about the libido theory, I said that there were erm different... one of the reasons why Freud had to introduce the libido theory was he wanted to get away from the narrow biological reproductive concept of sex to do with genitals and reproduction which is of course he'd want to expand it to include psychological never seen before er or never seen before so clearly, such as erm love of the self and, and this he gave the name narcissism, well he didn't actually, somebody else invented it not long before and he took it over very quickly. Er narcissism and narcissism, narcissistic libido is, is, is that part of libido which is concerned with the ego and it is this aspect of the libido especially which is involved in a group, because as I think erm somebody said over here when developing this point, this leads to for example a group narcissism. What do I mean by group narcissism? That's right. That's right. I mean erm... you know erm... when I go to the London Group erm we all know that erm actually er there's a kind of, there's an inner feeling you know well we've got the right computers, we, we're the you know, we, we believe computing and we, we're very sorry you know we're erm... we may not actively despise them, but we, we're sorry that they have to bother with such an awful operating system and everything else. So there's a kind of feeling, and this happens in all groups doesn't it that, that a group to which one's
[speaker002:] [cough]
[Chris:] which one identifies, there's a kind of feeling erm you know, we're, we're the members and there's something special about us and er at the best we're sorry for the non-members, we'd like to have more of them and so we might proselytize and preach the gospel, you know you know throw away your idioms, become or in the worst possible way we might be an exclusive group and say we are, we are erm special, we are we, we know the truth and everybody else is infidels and you know they should be killed or driven out or... or in some ways discriminated against because they're wrong and we're right. Because we're right we're... we, we're, we're better people as a result, so th th there's a tendency just as in individuals can get proud and even arrogant and self-satisfied, so does the tendency for groups to get proud, arrogant and self-satisfied because and... what fuels this group erm feeling is narcissism. It's not the heterosexual... strand of the libido because there of course there is a problem. As far as heterosexual object libido is concerned, three is a crowd and two is ideal. Two's company, three's a crowd, but when you're talking about this generalized and more desexualized supplemented narcissistic libido to do with ego, then of course three is not a crowd in fact three erm is, is, er is the... is er just as easy to accommodate as three thousand or three million, because it's, it can be channelled into the group. However, how does that come about, I mean if supposing you were a, a member of a very large group like the Catholic Church getting on to a billion people say, well you can't possibly... identify with a billion other people you can't meet them in one lifetime let alone ties with them, so how does, how does narcissistic libido unify the members of vast groups like the Catholic Church? How does it actually come about, because you couldn't meet the majority of
[speaker002:] [cough] in a lifetime. Everyone can
[Chris:] Right.
[speaker002:] shared value.
[Chris:] The, as, as, as, as, as you both say the, the narcissistic... libido of the individual is concerned... initially with their own ego.... The, the group usually has a leader or symbols which represent its aspirations like the statue of the Virgin Mary or, or Golden Churches or something to which act as representatives or icons for the aspirations, the ideals of the individual's ego and every member of the group shares those, that leader or those icons or those ideals and consequently the group is unified by a kind of sentry petal flow of individual narcissistic libido towards the centre, towards the leader and that makes them more identifiable with each other. So that the erm... we really are again and this is what this diagram in Freud's book is supposed to illustrate that the, the erm... every... every individual ego has its own ego ideal and objects external objects like erm... say the Pope can become the focus of this erm individualistic narcissistic libido because every individual identifies the Pope with their own ego ideal. So every Catholic feels an identification with every other Catholic because they've got a considerable aerial overlap in their, in their ego ideals and er narcissistic libido is directed towards the central focus. So it's not as, it, it's erm uniformly spread everywhere in the first place, it's directed first at the focus and then when you meet another person whom you realize has the same ego ideal, then you identify them, with them by a kind of secondary erm secondary identification.
[Oliver:] What about
[Chris:] Well.
[Heather:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Well, well his parents I mean the extreme Protestants are, are on the rise I mean in South America you know I mean the world's largest Pentecostal Churches are in Lima and Peru and millions are now becoming erm born-again Christians in South America. Erm so erm but of course I mean t to make the point because it doesn't really contradict what you're saying Heather because of course the rather more extreme kinds of Protestant Sects that do emphasise for example erm... er narrow dogmatic teaching much more so you could say that erm and I think this would perhaps be the answer to, to Oliver's point to some extent because it goes back to Dean's original point that erm here we're we we're talking about a general theory of groups, but of course some groups can be more groupie than others. Some groups can be more individualistic where the individual identifies less strongly, there are fewer icons, there's less erm dogmatic er certainty about doctrine and so on, so more room for an individual variation and those groups will be relatively er looser and there would be less identification of the individual with the leader or the leading principals. Other groups however, possibly smaller ones or more erm... or, or more er or ones that are kind of more fired up with er,wi wi with with feelings of group membership, you find the opposite, you find stronger identifications, more emphasis on leaders and consequently followers. So, so what we're talking, we're not saying you know there are groups and there're individuals and there's a gap in between, what we're saying is there's a kind of continuum from very groupie groups where the individual is, is practically hypnotized by the, by, by, by, by the group to erm more or less complete individualism where individuals belong to, to emotional groups that are very, very weak and where identification with the with the sentries is pretty... pretty minimal.... erm you know like for instance I mean erm I mean I suppose I feel British but I mean I don't feel I have any very strong identification with... with other British people because there are so many other people in the world speak English and erm often people from other countries who in many ways you identify with them more. So, but still I suppose I have some residual identification with, with my own ethnic national group. it's not one that will inspire me with erm... with, with great kind of nationalistic fervour as might have happened in the past... when, when you look at nationalistic movements, so erm presumably we're looking at a range of behaviour which goes from extreme fanatical group membership to relatively weak identification with a group but really doesn't to anything else but saying you know if you ask me what I'll say I was British. Well that doesn't mean very much. Does that answer your question? So we know, we should and remember of course that in the book Freud chooses two examples as Joy told me the church and the army... and these are just examples and of course Freud chooses them partly because they're very big groups so they in some ways they er exemplify the principles he's talking about because clearly in a small group like this you could say well look, what is going on is really I mean we all have, we all know each other and it's a face-to-face group and really what happens here is an of the dynamics group and I think it is actually. For example one notices over many years of you know having teaching I must have taught hundreds now in different class groups, can't help noticing that although you're the same, subject is the same, the syllabus is the same, the reading list is the same, the room is the same, the time of day may be the same, but the groups are completely different. Some classes erm go with a buzz and everybody gets a lot out of it you think you know oh that was that was worthwhile, we achieved something. Other classes struggle all the time, to get anything done you feel you know why are we having this class, we're not making erm it's not making a lot of educational sense and one comes to the conclusion... after many years of bitter experience that it personal dynamics, it depends on who's in the group and some groups erm this one successful and some groups which I won't mention are relatively unsuccessful and one feels okay that's because of the inter-personal, it's who's in the group and how they interact with each other and try as one might, I suppose I play th the leading role in this group
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] try as one might, one can't change the group, but, but clearly these are not th the examples that Freud chooses are really big groups where the kind of factors he's talking about comes through very clearly because y y you cannot explain what happens in the Catholic Church or an army. so he chooses the examples he does to illustrate his, his theory and of course he's chosen inevitably good examples. Well, yes sorry perhaps I myself. I meant not in the same way.
[speaker002:] at the end of the day there must be something
[Chris:] Oh I'm sure that's true. Yes now what I meant was that, that erm in a group like this, the... the th th the leader or the leadership role may be relatively minimal and the individualism of the members may be relevant, but I hope it was cos I... I think it's a mistake for class in groups and that so one would hope in this kind of group, the individual variation would be so important that these kind of group phenomena that Freud is talking about in this book but clearly in other groups they're... they're more important, partly because you can never organize a group by kind of having a meeting with everybody. I mean you couldn't have a meeting with the whole Catholic Church for example to decide on doctrine. So what happens of course in an institution like that is the... the leaders define the doctrine congregation for the doctrine of the faith, lays down the doctrine of the faith and then the believers are then obliged to believe it. The followers a a are obliged to believe it and so the faith, the creed of the Catholic Church then becomes an article of membership and if you don't subscribe to the creed, then this has implications for your standing in the group and you can for example be persecuted and Catholics not believing, whereas in a group like this, I don't think we need a creed, we certainly wouldn't persecute anybody because we didn't believe a particular thing, because we can all negotiate our personal relations face- to-face. Do you see, that's what I meant by it.
[speaker002:] Yeah, this is just
[Chris:] Mm. Oh, it does, oh it does yes. Oh, this, this is a very important book of course and one of the, one of the astonishing things is the way totally ignored and if you look through even people who write about psychoanalyses and the social sciences and there's a lot of them, this book is hardly ever mentioned... and I, I normally nowadays routinely look for it in the, in the references and index an and many books th that purport to talk about groups and sociology is never mentioned I think, and those that do don't ever seem to understand what it says. An astonishing fact. Well look folks we'll have to stop now it's gone eleven and I have to give a lecture Joy, er that was an excellent er summary, well done. As I said I'll be talking about this in the next couple of weeks in the lectures and I hope to cover various things we didn't have time to touch on. Next week we're being entertained by Heather. Now. Oh, first thing is last week's summary. Let me pass that round. Just pass that round, that's last week's summary. Today's lecture is on erm... what you might call female interest in sex and in particular in... in the concept of erm female choice... and I was struck er this morning by looking at Nature. Nature of course as you know is the world's leading science journal... and er I have to read Nature every week. The reason why of course and I take this as a matter of pride because er not only am I, I think probably the only member of the L S E as published in Nature recently, but erm... er the other thing I take pride in is the fact that erm one really can't ignore it, because all the time stuff is being published in the world's leading science journal which is directly relevant to this course and how many other courses are in L S E are like that? For example a couple of weeks ago there was a thing on tit for tat and this week there's a fascinating thing on snakes and female sexuality which erm illustrates er some of the points I'll be, I'll, I'll be making and although as Sue rightly says erm, most of the articles in Nature are rather technical and difficult to understand if you're not a specialist... they do make concessions to the rest of us by publishing very often erm summaries er in the first part of the journal erm and there is one on this and er I can recommend that. In fact I'll, I'll Xerox it and pass it round if people are interested.
[Sue:] I also find
[Chris:] Yeah. Yeah. Alright, I, I borrowed this one from the Senior Common Room. But it is in the library, it's in the library erm every week, so m my, you know you can get it down the... down the library. Oh no, I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend anything to. I mean it's far too technical an and I, I, I wouldn't either, but erm it's er as I said, it's just er it was struck me as coincidentally since I was talking about this, this today. Okay now you remember I said that the key concept in our modern understanding of sex and sexual behaviour. One of the virtues of parental investment er theory I would say is that er it's particularly sensitive to female interests in, in... in sexuality and nobody who knows me or has read er my works would, could possibly suspect me here of fashionable feminist prejudices er so I don't say this because I think this is what people like to hear, but because I happen to think it's true, I'm afraid I'm one of these old-fashioned and you may think stupid people who believe that you should er say things cos you think they're true, not because you think er it's what you think want w want to hear or if you say it, you'll be accused of sexual harassment by a lecturer as I was last year.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Erm... the daring to... the daring to say things which I did, did think were true, but I knew were true because many of them were facts. Erm... the reason why parental investment theory is... is particularly sensitive to, to the female point of view of course is as we've seen one of the fundamental consequence of anisogamy is the fact that females normally invest more in offspring than do males, whereas males concentrate on mating success normally, females normally concentrate on erm parental, in individual offspring. So the divorce of sex from reproduction which is erm a very common and even fashionable view in the later twentieth century and of course is one very much facilitated by modern birth control technology and things like that... this, this divorce of sex and reproduction is in a way you could say a characteristically male way of looking at things if the male's er contribution to offspring doesn't go much further than the initial fertilization. For males sex may be very important, but for females reproduction may be, may be more significant if it involves as it does in the case of all mammals and certainly human beings, considerable parental investment on the part of the mother. So I think that er to put parental investment theory centre stage is more reliable and better than the rather old-fashioned biological approach which in talking about sex emphasise things like sex chromosomes and hormones, so that a sex chromosome in a mammal for instance was something that a male had but a female didn't and this gave rise to hormonal effects like those of testosterone erm which are thought to be very important. Well these things may er describe erm... sexual behaviour and how to facilitate it, but they can't explain it and nor are they really fundamental, because after all okay in mammals males may be the sex defined by the X chromosome, but in birds it's the other way round in birds it's the female chromosome and all, in other words, all bird embryos start, start out as male and differentiate into females if they're going to, whereas in mammals all embryos start out as female and differentiate into males, in so far as those terms have any sense. So it seems to me that parental investment erm theory is, is much better because not only is it universally applicable, it also explains why the sexes a are, are the way they are in ultimate evolutionary terms and that talk about hormones and sex chromosomes never can do.... Now if we took this view about parental investment theory, it would immediately erm... concentrate our attention if we're talking about human beings as we are in this course on er... one... critical factor which er is astonishingly important... and that is er body fat. Now you may say well why, why does body fat matter er for female reproductive success and the answer to that if you think about it is pretty easy. A female mammal is if you like erm the egg... in... in other classes of higher animals a female lays an egg, the egg contains all the nutrients or possibly incubated. In the case of a mammal, the egg is retained within the body so the mother's body is effectively another part of the egg providing it through the placenta with nutrients and so on. So the state of the mother's body is critical for the reproductive success of any implanted egg. This probably explains why menarche the age of which er menstruation begins... menarche er why the age of menarche has dropped progressively... in the last century from about fifteen and a half to about twelve and a half er today. The reason appearing to be that menarche is weight-triggered and in particular is turned on by er body weight reaching erm... a certain proportion I think it's about eighteen percent of weight erm... erm... represented by body fat triggers, triggers menarche. There is some evidence Sorry, twenty four percent, twenty four percent body weight erm about a quarter in other words when, when a young woman's body is about one quarter fat, she can start menstruating for obvious reasons. There is some residual evidence that daylight length may be a factor and that the invention of electric light has also lowered the age of menarche but this effect is not erm absolutely clear and there's some controversy about it. Most people think if it, if it's, if it's real at all it's er it's much less important than weight. Of course few quantitative studies have been done of this, but those that we have show pretty unmistakable results. A study of the Atchee hunter gatherers in Paraguay... show that a woman's body weight was erm directly related to her reproductive success as was her age of menarche in other words the younger... the younger menarche and the heavier the woman, the greater her lifetime reproductive success and this again er shouldn't surprise us.... Another one of the most er interesting bits of evidence about this is the rate of fraternal twinning. Now as you know, there are two types of twins tha that people can have. You can have fraternal twins, in which case the relatedness is a half and the twins although they were born together result from two def separate eggs, they were separately fertilized. So in other words they were just like any other sibling, just happens to be they were erm conceived at the same time and er developed in the womb together. Identical twins have relatedness R equals one genetic identical every gene in one is represented in the other and they result from a split in a fertilized egg which splits into two and then each develops as if it were,wer were a separate egg. Now the rate of identical twinning erm is remarkably constant which suggests that it, whatever causes it is relatively independent of other factors. Perhaps it's erm some kind of mistake in the way erm cells divide after they've been fertilized, I don't know, but this is not true of fraternal twinning. Studies in Europe for instance show that er in populations which experienced starvation during World War Two such as the Netherlands, the rate of fraternal twinning dropped dramatically during the war, but then recovered to its pre-war level after the war, and this strongly suggests that the rate of fraternal twinning was related to how much food women were eating, and when they were starved they were less likely to two eggs than when they were fell fed. This is an affect well known in some domesticated animals like sheep, it's well known that if sheep are, if, if, if, if ewes are well fed just before they mate, they're much more likely to er to twin than if they're er not given extra food supplement and nowadays erm... farmers wh wh who, who breed sheep for lambing er frequently feed, feed ewes a special diet just before er conception for that very reason, the rate of twinning increases. So this again is quite interesting evidence for er... for the importance of, of body fat for female reproductive success. Another interesting erm angle on this is, is anorexia nervosa.... Anorexia is a relatively modern illness er the first descriptions of it are found in the nineteenth century and today it's er by no means an uncommon illness in er mainly in young women, very occasionally in men, but, but er y it's more or less safe to say it's er it's a disease of er women and almost always younger women. It's hardly ever reported in the Third World and er... taking the facts that we've just been talking about into account, it would be tempting to see anorexia as related to conflicts about the beginning of a young woman's reproductive life because what normally happens is, and has certainly happened in the only case of this that occurred in my family, the young woman in question lost so much weight that she stopped cycling and in fact erm puberty changes went into reverse, she actually regressed, she started puberty and er she had this anorexia problem and she stopped cycling and, and all her body changes reversed, she went back to... to pre-puberty again erm because of oh no, oh no it didn't, she lost her body hair and stuff yeah, er her, her, her hormonal changes. Mind you, she was starving herself to the point of endangering her life and had to be hospitalized, but er oh no, her hormon her hormon well her hormonal changes went into reverse, they absolutely did. Erm, so it's tempting to see er anorexia as part of this whole picture, because it usually happens in younger women usually at the beginning of their reproductive careers and there is usually, or so therapists report, conflict usually with parents related to things like career, er possible choice of marriage partner which erm create conflict about the young, about the young woman's er future reproductive life. So it would be erm... it would seem natural to think that anorexia fits into this picture somewhere. Admittedly the details may be complicated, but erm... it, it certainly seems that these, our knowledge about fat and reproductive success may erm throw some light on this. In other words fat issue it's probably an issue.... Now erm... all this really goes back to eighteen seventy one. As we know er Darwin published his great work in eighteen fifty nine cos he had to, he really didn't want to but was forced, but in eighteen seventy one he published another important book called the Descent of Man or Evolution in Relation to Sex and in this book Darwin established a principle, which a which at the time he was widely criticized and ridiculed and this was the principle of female choice.... Essentially what Darwin realized was that sexual dimorphism, particularly where it makes the male spectacularly different from female is not always the outcome of inter-male conflict, very often it is, we saw examples of the films of stags, of erm elephant seals, those kinds of animals where the dimorphic differences appear to be the result of inter-male conflict, for instance elephant seals are seven times heavier, the males are seven times heavier than the females on average because sheer weight is what wins those astonishing battles they have on the beaches when they, they kind of lunge at each other. They have these enormous canine teeth again stabbing each other and the thick blubber round the neck again as a defence... and if the canines go in they go into the blubber and not to arteries and stuff like that. So a modern sexual dimorphism is explicable in terms of erm inter-male er conflict and it may be in the case of human beings er most of them are, for example the larger body weight of males that we saw when we looked at sexual dimorphism in human beings is probably explicable erm in terms of inter-male conflict like it is in chimpanzees.... Er my guess is that beards may be the same. I don't know what you think about this, but what occurs to me is this, supposing you had to kill somebody with your bare hands, how would you do it? suggestion. You gotta kill me. The obvious thing is to strangle okay? Erm we haven't got anybody here with a beard so we can't demonstrate and anyway it would be a dangerous experiment if we did, but supposing you tried to strangle me and I've got a big beard you know, a kind of Karl Marx style beard [LAUGHTER] well a big beard, er you get your hands round my neck and what can I do? I can do that and if I pull my beard I'm gonna loosen your grip. So my suggestion and this is only a suggestion, the beards which in the past have been interpreted as a kind of erm epigrammatic signal, in other words a kind of erm sign on the face of the male as they're deceived, my guess is that,th that beards may actually have evolved to protect the throat because erm the critical thing in, in killing somebody is to block the, the windpipe and that's and in fact even, even lions do this, you saw in the film when a lion kills an antelope or something, he doesn't go to all the trouble of making horrible gashes, he grabs the, the windpipe and holds on until the antelope or whatever it is is just er Most predators do. It, it Yeah. Yeah. Well perhaps they do that too. Perhaps they do that too unless the canines go each side of the when they squeeze the windpipe. Anyway of course, actually while you mention canine teeth Sue, it's worth pointing out that canine teeth are usually for use, use on other males. Er it's true that hunting animals like for instance er female cats, the cat family, lionesses and we know lionesses do most of the hunting, not the males that do the hunting normally, they have canine teeth. However the males have got bigger canine teeth and certainly in most mammals er for instance horses, males have big bigger canine teeth most primates. Chimpanzees for instance have enormous canine teeth, but the males have them and not the females, so the idea here is that normally a big canine tooth, a sexually dimorphic canine tooth is probably related to inter-male conflict, rather than to killing and, and whether, how that affects your er what you say about the spacing I'm not sure, but certainly it would be a safe... erm... generalization to say normally big canines are an aspect of sexual dimorphism and in mammals are very common. So what was I saying? Oh yes, erm perhaps beards are more to do wi with, with inter-male conflict than anything er and most of the other characteristics are. Erm... the one element in human... sexual dimorphism if you can call it that, strictly speaking it isn't, its primary sex difference is the size of the human penis. Nobody knows why it's er it's as big as it is, female choice is a possibility, only a possibility, but er it's hard to know otherwise why, why it is that way. Erm... now... it, it's interesting to point out that... female choice... and of course one of the best examples of that is birds where the female chooses... not, you saw it on the film, but this is just a reminder. Where the female chooses not so much the male as what the male's got is erm... female choice as I said when Darwin suggested was widely ridiculed, partly because i it, it contradicted Victorian prejudices. People said things like for instance well females aren't intelligent enough to make choices and er which is, which is clearly pretty silly, and er there was also I think and the uncomfortable erm... prospect that females could in some way or another control the evolution in males which I don't think it appealed to the Victorians either and in fact many social Darwinists like Edward Westermark for example rejected the whole concept of sexual selection as Darwin called it the female choice, because it didn't promote survival of the fittest. Erm... peacocks' tails may make them beautiful and more... reproductively successful with peahens, but they don't make them fitter in terms of erm life expectancy. On the contrary peacocks don't live long in the wild because of those enormous tails make them easy to catch for predators. So if peacocks' er fitness as understood by social Darwinists is, is, is, is, is reduced, but erm... and this was one of the reasons why they, why they liked the idea of erm female choice and er the call, so called sexual selection. The... the consequence of course you want to say something? No they don't erect them when a, when a predator comes along, they just run or fly if they can. Sometimes there are displays that are erm,b but like erm the lizards that have frills, but I think you find them in both sexes... because you see if it's to scare off a predator, why doesn't the female have them? And my guess is the peahen normally would. I don't know about the frilled lizard. Er Oh yes, you get that, you get that kind of mimicry, but again you'd expect it in, in, in both sexes I should think, unless it just happens that males for example normally are bigger and then it's taken on a, a secondary characteristic which is a possibility. I honestly don't know the answer to that. Okay, erm so the consequence of this and as I said this is not fashionable feminism this is, this is, this is real science. That the consequence of this is that we can no longer take the view of females as being passive victims of male advances. Often it looks as if they are, erm... but they don't need to be. Here's a... here's an example of this in book. This is a stag. Now you might think well stags have harem groups and they've got these enormous antlers and they could bully and er I mean a harem group looks kind of fascist kind of social structure you know when a male dominates female, but in fact field observations of how stags actually deal with their females show that they're very tender erm towards them and they have to have the cooperation of the female in order to mount. In fact if you think about it, erm any quadruped or mammal can easily stop a male mounting. You don't often see photos of this I've only ever found one, here's one, or I did find one. This is un the top, the top one, well and the bottom one, unsuccessful mounting attempts by male jackals, sorry hyenas, male hyenas on, on a female. The female erm... just doesn't want to know. In fact this is more interesting than you may think... because female hyenas have a pseudo-penis, they have, they have a pseudo-scrotum and a pseudo-penis, reasons which aren't fully understood and in order to mate, the male has to insert his real penis into the female pseudo-penis in order to reach her... her genital and it's a bit complicated. So if the female doesn't want it and this one clearly doesn't, she just sits down and if she sits on her pseudo-penis, there's no way the male is ever gonna get into her, but in fact this is true er in, in general terms of er if you think about it a, a female quadrupedal mammal... I mean it looks like male domination, the male mounts and it looks as if she has to submit but she doesn't. All she has to do is to walk away, he can't walk cos his fore legs are on her back back legs are on the ground. If she moves forward, there's no way that he's gonna get anywhere with her.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] I remember making this point a couple of years ago, yeah I made this point last year and I showed these pictures, I spent about twenty minutes on it, the following week I was, I was libelously accused and it was a libel, it was a serious libel erm er that I, that I said that females always had to submit erm... I was very angry about that. Pity it wasn't in the national newspapers because my lawyer said I could have retired on the proceeds.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] laugh, unfortunately you can't erm can't erm... when I was giving this similar lecture two or three years ago, erm there was er a student in the class she put up her hand she said yes, she said that's absolutely right she said, what you're saying about the female doesn't have to submit she said I used to work as a, as a stable maid at Newmarket at a stud farm and she said er you've gotta have five people for er er to cover a mare. You have one on each leg erm and one erm on the bridle and apparently they use special tools that er hobble the mare and stop her moving, so she hasn't got any choice and when they lead the stallion in, they got these five guys there erm with these various tools and they make, hold the mare still to make sure the stallion can mount, because apparently very often the mares won't have it and th they kick or they walk away. Yeah, yeah, but remember that these, these are expensive race horses you see, this is er Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you see the point I'm making that, that in mammals it's easy to get the impression that, that you know er particularly in, in, in, in er harem-type mammals like, like, like erm stags, that the males mount and females submit, they don't. Not only of course u u unfortunately of course and Sue, Sue mentions there are tragic exceptions to this and one tragic exception i is human beings because unfortunately it is possible for a male human being to force er a female at intercourse because we tend to do it lying down and males are bigger and stronger. And hands er I don't think rape could happen if we were quadrupedal, much more difficult. Erm... so quite apart from fro from that, this approach to the whole question concentrating on parental investment and female choice would not only make us sensitive to... to female choice in the sense of either submitting to a male or not... but secondly it would make us er wonder what happened even after a female had mated and we could predict couldn't we that females ought to be discriminating abou about the subsequent fate of any fertilized erm... zygote and indeed there's plenty of evidence to show that human females highly discriminated and far from passive even after they've been fertilized. For example, in er twenty five erm... percent of cases er of infertility in women as reported by infertility clinics there's an antibody reaction to sperm. In other words a woman's immune system is er able to deploy erm er antibodies against a, a, a, against sperm. In ten to fifteen percent of fertilized zygotes there will be no implantation and er forty two percent that do implant will fail to cycle and will be re-absorbed again. So it's a very high proportion we're talking about. er in other words what I'm saying is that erm... a woman doesn't have to accept a fertilized er egg once it's been fertilized. Er twenty eight percent for instance of all embryos er will be spontaneously aborted and in England and Wales mothers of large families, which I think was defined as more than six children, er had more spontaneous abortions than others. In sixty percent of spontaneous abortions the foetuses are normal and thirty percent in the first trimester show gross chromosomal abnormalities. In other words, it looks as if mothers erm actively discriminate against er embryos which are not normal and are not gonna develop into... into... in in into er offspring who will survive. Yeah, oh yes, yes, but the point is that the mother knows it's she's not... her reproductive system is not a passive erm... I mean you see how it looks in Yes, exactly, look exactly. I in a mammal it looks as if that the mother's body i is, is an oven, and once you've put the bun in, it's gonna rise it's not like that. The point I'm making is that in fact erm a woman's reproductive system discriminates actively. One of the most astonishing pieces of evidence for this comes from a study of two hundred and sixty eight female prisoners in the U S... these are all convicted criminals. They had three hundred and seventy three live children between them and on average they should of had twenty seven children with birth defects if they'd been the same as the rest of the population, the non-criminal, non-prison erm erm erm non-prison population. In fact they had none at all. However their entire spontaneous miscarriage. So the implication of that study and it's a rather astonishing one, although it fits exactly with, with the argument we're developing is that because these, these women were living in very difficult circumstances, in prison, they were even more discriminating about the offspring they were actually and they didn't carry a single one to term that had a birth defect. So the idea is that the more difficult the... the situation the mother finds herself is in the more likely she is to spontaneously abort and the more likely any... retained er foetus is to be normal an and, and to, and not to have any defects. Another example of that for instance, and this is something we'll, we'll have to wait a full explanation of this we'll have to wait a little bit later itself. At least seventy three percent of all foetuses aborted in the first trimester are male. This suggests that er mothers discriminate against male offspring Seventy three percent. Seventy three percent in the first trimester, in other words the first three months are male. Now er let's just accept that as a fact as we go by erm it looks as if mothers not only discriminate against un un unfit offspring, but also against males. Why they discriminate against males must wait.
[speaker002:] where do you get the
[Chris:] No, no oh in the general population.
[speaker002:] In the general
[Chris:] This is the general population and as you will see this, this er patches on the whole issue of sex ratios and what is known as the Trivers Woolard effect and I'll explain that later cos it's so important. We have a separate thing on sex ratios and I'll explain why males are discriminated against in this, in this respect cos as we'll see there's a profound er reason why er this should happen. Finally, and this is a suggestion on my own, although actually I discovered afterwards it was also made by somebody else, erm... but it does seem in many ways er erm... an obvious interpretation, is this could be the background also to post-natal depression. Post-natal depression is a distressing phenomenon where women who have just given birth feel fed up, weepy, don't like the baby, don't want to be mothers, can't really take an interest in it. It's a very distressing erm syndrome for many women and er there's quite a lot of evidence that it's hormonally linked and most women suffer from it in one way or another. Some admittedly have it much worse than others, but nearly all women er seem to, seem to have it erm to some extent and one wonders why. Well, the Mexico City earthquake if you will recall some years ago, buried a maternity hospital on the day of the quake. All the mothers died at once. However fourteen days later they were still pulling out er live babies and they'd been in there in the rubble for fourteen days. They had nothing to drink, nothing to eat, they kind of hibernated and apparently they lapsed into a state of, of a kind of hibernation and inactivity, but they were still alive and they were alive when they, when they were pulled out fourteen days later. The reason probably is that human neonates, the newborn human beings have much more subcutaneous fat than any other primate. If you look at a new-born gorilla or chimpanzee they seem skinny little things compared with human babies. Human babies are usually fairly plump when they're born, they've got considerable subcutaneous fat. My... suggestion is that the evolution of subcutaneous fat in neonates and post-natal depression is an example of co-evolution and what has happened is mothers are programmed to be depressed for the first few days after birth because in primal conditions when remember this is where evolution set the parameters of human behaviour, in primal conditions it would probably pay a mother to test her new-born offspring to see if it could survive, because if it was defective or if it was sickly, or if there was some reason why that baby couldn't make it to adulthood and its own reproductive life, that mother should not invest in it, because that's her reproductive success. So it might pay a mother to wait for a few days and see what happened to the baby. A healthy baby might survive, and unhealthy one might not. Sue you're sceptical.
[Sue:] I'm a bit worried about that ninety percent
[Chris:] I see Yes. Yes, I heard that, I've heard that theory. My
[Sue:] But it does happen in that way.
[Chris:] Yeah it does happen in that way m my,m my explanation of that though is that it's true,i it could just be a hormonal side effect. It could just be that and of course it would be very naive to assume that evolution had adapted us always to be happy with everything. In fact if you think about it evolution might promote your reproductive success by making you vaguely unhappy most of the time, cos that might make you strive for more success. So it would certainly be naive to think that whenever people felt unhappy erm it was er was some kind of pathology and that, that evolution couldn't explain it, and it may just be that the women feel a bit fed up because of hormonal changes and it doesn't awfully much, it's just one of things you pay for being a mother.
[Sue:] .
[Chris:] Well not immediately no. and it's and it's certainly hormonally linked and at first of course a woman doesn't have milk, she has colostrum.
[Sue:] Yes, not very much
[Chris:] But you see my explanation may be that because of that erm the, the onset of post-natal depression is slightly postponed because erm the mother needs a signal from the baby or in her breasts signal that will then start changes in her breast tissue which will produce milk when the time comes. So she needs the baby to do that and at that point once her milk production schedule is under way as it were, at that point when, just before she's about to start giving them, then she should test the baby because that's the big energetic cost to her. The energetic cost is providing milk. She can have the colostrum anyway. Yeah, oh yes. Sure, oh I can imagine. Well it's just an idea
[Sue:] yeah
[Chris:] it's just an idea,i it may not be right
[Sue:] nobody's
[Chris:] I, I mean it may not be right, but it, I mean as I think you can see it has a kind of logic about it, erm and, and i it may be that it, it's not the right explanation, but... the very fact that erm we're suggesting it, I think shows that erm again it's naive to think that motherhood is a kind of er is a one-sided affair where you know mothers sacrifice themselves er for their offspring, because nature demands it. At the very least this theory about post-natal depressions shows it's not that simple, the mother has a self-interest as well as the offspring and our modern insight into parental investment theory shows us that we have to take every individual's self-interest seriously... we're not committing th the, the crude errors of group selectionism and saying you know mothers exist for the benefit of society to have children, they should put up with it. I mean the trouble with group selectionistic thinking is you, you completely discount the costs that some people pay for the benefits of others and so oh well, you know everybody benefits from mothers erm having children and sacrificing themselves to their offspring. Our modern parental investment individualistic view wouldn't allow you to make that error, instead you'd say you know you've gotta look at the costs and benefits of the mother too and perhaps there are benefits to mothers in actively testing as it were their offspring, erm rather than just passively er accepting that they're gonna have to be mothers and gonna have to get on with it and again you see, er I would er and this may have been the big mistake I made last year, er but again I stand by my er view on this and it's a perfectly defensible one, erm again I think those who say that abortion is unnatural and kind of erm offends against er you know nature, are wrong. I mean that the data on spontaneous abortion is so unmistakable that it seems to me that artificially induced abortions are just a continuation with modern technology of something women have always done anyway discriminate against their ab about their offspring, sometimes discriminating against them. So those who say arti artificial abortion is unnatural, are I think er on a, on, on, skating on very thin ice, because you could equally well argue that it was just a continuation of a natural trend.
[speaker002:] If this doesn't happen it's almost like it's never happened any other way
[Chris:] Yeah that's right yeah Yes. Yes, but you see the, the, yes an and that of course is a is i is a good one. As I said at the beginning I think one should be wary about using the word natural, because sometimes people use it you know to promote something you know like on advertising you know it's natural, must be good for you, but at the same time there are certain things that are natural that are very bad for you like death and if I were to say you know death is natural, nobody would think I was advocating suicide of course not. Well sorry, I, I just mentioned that in passing but Yeah Well er in general I would say that erm and this goes back to my earlier discussion o of, of the pleasure principle. It would seem that erm i it wasn't in the interests of one's ultimate reproductive success to be too easily satisfied too much of the time... because remember, it's a question of relative reproductive success an and the individual that gets that little extra is... is effectively gonna be, gonna be the one selected, so yes I would think that erm it's probably naive to think that natural selection would, would make you feel er satisfied and content all the time it would probably induce erm a state of mild chronic discontent which is I think what most people actually experience in life Yes
[speaker002:] then you're less likely
[Chris:] Right. Well possibly and less likely to enjoy it, I mean I've made a complete failure of my life, so I'm, I'm not and I never really enjoyed from the beginning I must say Well, well
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] if I'd been given the choice, erm you know if they'd said you know okay you're next, you going I'd have said no thanks, send somebody else, but er Well well perhaps not, erm... no my life was all a terrible mistake erm
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] i i i it was because of the doctor was too stupid to diagnose breast cancer when he saw it, urged my mother to have another baby told her it was a mastectomy erm er sorry erm sorry mastitis er and it would help if she had another baby and it was of course was actually cancer, it was a disaster. But there we are thus on such er tiny threads do entire lives hang.... Where did we get to before we got into this? Er oh yes abortion yes now coming back to the point about abortion. One of the, and this we'll get on to later when we talk about culture, the culture problem. It seems to me you see that it's, it's naive to think that there's a complete divorce between culture and technology like for instance abortion technology or birth control technology and nature. It seems to me what actually happens if you think about it is that, is that technology and culture builds on trends that already have a natural foundation. For example birth control, you see you could use the same argument, you could say oh the Catholics say birth control is unnatural and we know they have a whole position on that and yet the data on infertility shows that in fact most women generate antibodies to some sperm, so the, those datas suggest that actively discriminating against sperm on the part of the women is actually natural and all that is happening in modern birth control technology is that women are developing or building on a natural er foundation that is already there namely to be choosy about when they become pregnant and by whom. So and I would extend the same argument to abortion and I would say erm wh what happens in abortion admittedly erm an artificial abortion mean means that presumably a spontaneous abortion has hasn't happened, but a modern woman is using extra means that she has er at her disposal, probably to deal with extra problems which evolution originally could not foresee and ultimately her self-interest might be just as well served by having er induced the abortion ultimately as it would by erm... by not having but I mean this is just my personal view, and I don't Well yes, I think, I think their view is dominated by the old group selectionist or point that women are there to do their duty Yeah, that females are there to do their deed for the species or the race or whatever an and er and indeed I mean not so long ago you know in our own country I mean
[speaker002:] I think it's a moral issue
[Chris:] Yeah, oh it is a moral issue yeah. But the, the link between sex and reproduction is always likely to be more critical to a woman... So, so, so you see th th the point I'm making is these insights seem to me to be to have a kind of relevance to er women's experience of sex that is some ways greater than it is to male males can you know once they've done their fertilizing work, they're, they're really through as far as erm... as far as biology is concerned, not perhaps as far as social.... Were you gonna say something Sue? Oh I think so, I mean I, again I hope there aren't any Catholics in the audience who are offended by my remarks, but it's just my personal opinion, that yeah,th th you know,th th that is the case and at the least I mean whatever judgment one makes about this thing, I, I repeat what I said earlier about you gotta be terribly careful when using the word natural. I think it's unscientific, prejudicial and subjective to use it in a term that carries any kind of recommendation or erm disapprobation... and er... I think, I think one has to exercise caution in erm in the way you use tha tha that, that term, perhaps it's better not to, not to use it at all.... Well that makes a kind of convenient break actually, because what I wanted to start on er then was things which really perhaps ought to be postponed till, till next. What I wanna talk about next week is some er peculiarities of human female erm... adaptations such as concealed oestrus and menstrual synchronization. Just before we leave it, er to come back to the nature it's quite interesting, what these people found was they studied adders in I think Denmark and what they found was adders... adders copulate, but females can store semen for months. They counted the number of the copulations and they found the females were copulating much more than they needed in order to have, have offspring, so the big problem is why do female adders go to all the trouble of extra copulations with extra males when they could easily just make do with one or two and store the semen, and er the consequence as you could have predicted I think having attended my lectures, is that there does seem to be selection for erm sperm competition in male adders and the, the supposition seems to be that females are openly inciting male sperm competition, because they're mating with many more males than they need to and there doesn't seem to be another gain, they don't get provisioning from a male, they, all they get is sperm. The question is why
[speaker002:] they enjoy sex
[Chris:] Sorry what makes what more likely?
[speaker002:] Sex.... The female
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker002:] She's more likely to indulge
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker002:] some behaviour like that.
[Chris:] Yes it might, but the authors don't mention it actually as a possibility. Perhaps you ought to write in to Nature.
[speaker002:] why females have orgasms.
[Chris:] Mm.
[speaker002:] I mean if males have orgasms why shouldn't
[Chris:] Well that's next week's Yeah, I agree with that, I, I agree with that. That's the Alexander Noonan theory we'll be talking about that. Yes, as you'll see I mean basically I think the erm... the reason is they just need to hang on until the male's finished, but we'll
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] we'll come to that next week.