D2: Psych class notes

"Al-Musharaka" meets Psych 214

I've just made the following post to the Rabat American School Moodle (registration required):

By George (a fictional character from American folk wisdom), I think we've got it! I used last Thursday's class (link to the April moment in Psychology 214b) to

• provide background for hearing Mahmoud Darwish's "Rita and the Rifle" (as performed by Marcel Khalife) in the history of the Palestine/Israel conflict and the Lebanese Civil War
• wonder out loud with professor friends born out of the US whether Americans have a "sense of the tragic"
• set the stage for understanding Nass El Ghiwane's "Sabra and Chatila" in terms of Moroccan politics 20 years ago, and now
• reflect on the innocence of the Eisenhower, early Kennedy, Simon and Garfunkel years, and the tiresome politics of the 60s
• report the welcome Americans receive in Morocco since 9/11
• ask rhetorically how 9/11 affected our media
• play Ani Difranco's "Self Evident"
• wonder out loud whether it's 1955, or 1965, or 1968, here on the Main Line, in terms of the political future immediately ahead for my students
• cite Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning"

As our class ended, Gar Green's began, and it's podcast from RAS (download MP3). Tomorrow, with a little luck, we'll continue our discussion with Gar's class's in mind; and then I'll call on Skype and introduce us to them.

Now, where can we take this? How about some accounts of our responses to the music we like, podcast from Haverford and Rabat? Lots of you have iPods and other MP3 recorders, right? What about asking some old folks like your parents what they were thinking, as they listed to Khalife/Darwish or Ghiwane in their youth?

Oh, and what do you want to know about the stuff we're listening to at Haverford, and how it relates to youthful American politics? Could we, like, interview each other on Skype, and podcast that?

Oh, and do listen to بين ريتا وعيوني . . بندقيه

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Erotica and the Internet

I've been busy with my LiveJournal blog in connection with my writing seminar. This posting from earlier today (and private on my LJ) is one to which I'd welcome comment by whoever reads this blog. I've been interested in these questions for some time.

It's no secret that much of the information that whizzes about the Net is titillating to someone. I suspect much of the common activity of older children and young adults on-line has to do with sexy pictures and words. This seems a daunting kind of fiction to write in our public setting, but you may want to satisfy your curiosity about what erotic fiction is being published daily in cyberspace, as you think about how fiction is changing in an AIM world. You might start with the FAQ and the dated archive page at alt.sex.stories.moderated. Caveat lector! I would be interested in hearing from those of you who do browse this literature how you think the availability and the particular content of Net erotica is changing personality and social behavior. Freud thought the flavor of our adult sensual lives was set in the first several years of life. He had (IMHO) no real theory of personality change in adolescence and adulthood. He did think that having to work to find a "love object," a partner to our desire, made us grow up and helps keep us sane, as we repeatedly shape our wishes to what the real world will provide. What if our fantasies could be fulfilled, at little cost to us and none to anyone else? What would happen to our notions of morality? To our interest in and skill at maintaining our culture?

See: Davis, D.A. (1997). A glossary of Freudian terminology. Freud, S. (1933). The Structure of the Unconscious. From New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1933], translated from the German by W. J. H. Sprott, New York, 1933, pp. 104-5, 105-7, 108-12.

Me, Myself, and I

I make a point of telling my Intro Psych students that Freud's special interest in masturbation, and his ambivalent and quite personal thinking about it, are one of the reasons we still read him. I've just suggested to my Psych of Adolescence students that Moroccan youth 20 years ago in a rural town were more ashamed to talk about masturbation than were their American counterparts. I explain some of the biographical connotations of Freud's thinking and writing in the late 1890s, and I suggest a historical critique in terms of Victorian mores, but I do not develop this. In the latest New York Review of Books I've found a fine summary of the history of masturbation as a theological and social concern in 18th century Euope:

Greenblatt, Stephen. Me, Myself, and I. The New York Review of Books. Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004.

The key to understanding early modern Europe's sudden preoccupation in the 18th century with the supposed dangers of solitary sexual gratification appears to be its very privacy and embeddedness in un-monitorable fantasy. "Modern masturbation," therefore, "was the creature of the Enlightenment."

There were, Laqueur suggests, three reasons why the Enlightenment concluded that masturbation was perverse and unnatural. First, while all other forms of sexuality were reassuringly social, masturbation—even when it was done in a group or taught by wicked servants to children—seemed in its climactic moments deeply, irremediably private. Second, the masturbatory sexual encounter was not with a real, flesh-and-blood person but with a phantasm. And third, unlike other appetites, the addictive urge to masturbate could not be sated or moderated. "Every man, woman, and child suddenly seemed to have access to the boundless excesses of gratification that had once been the privilege of Roman emperors."
Privacy, fantasy, insatiability: each of these constitutive features of the act that the Enlightenment taught itself to fear and loathe is, Laqueur argues, a constitutive feature of the Enlightenment itself. Tissot and his colleagues had identified the shadow side of their own world: its interest in the private life of the individual, its cherishing of the imagination, its embrace of a seemingly limitless economy of production and consumption. Hammering away at the social, political, and religious structures that had traditionally defined human existence, the eighteenth century proudly brought forth a shining model of moral autonomy and market economy—only to discover that this model was subject to a destructive aberration.

Which brings us to Freud:

Joyce's marvelous parody, published in 1922, was written from the other side of a great cultural divide. For, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the whole preoccupation— the anxiety, the culture of surveillance, the threat of death and insanity —began to wane. The shift was by no means sudden or decisive, and traces of the older attitudes obviously persist not only in schoolboy legends and many zany, often painful family dramas but also in the nervous laughter that attends the whole topic. Still, the full nightmare world of medicalized fear and punishment came to an end. Laqueur tells this second part of the story far more briskly: he attributes the change largely to the work of Freud and liberal sexology, though he also acknowledges how complex and ambivalent many of the key figures actually were. Freud came to abandon his conventional early views about the ill effects of masturbation and posited instead the radical idea of the universality of infant masturbation. What had been an aberration became a constitutive part of the human condition. Nevertheless the founder of psychoanalysis constructed his whole theory of civilization around the suppression of what he called the "perverse elements of sexual excitement," beginning with autoeroticism. In this highly influential account, masturbation, as Laqueur puts it, "became a part of ontogenesis: we pass through masturbation, we build on it, as we become sexual adults."

Freud's puzzled fascination with feminine eroticism fits Laqueur's thesis (as summarized by Greenblatt) quite nicely. Now, I need a class in which to try to explain Freud's place in the history described by Laqueur. Perhaps I can try to sketch the rural Moroccan adolescent male’s attitude toward his own and a female partner’s sexuality, comparing and contrasting my picture with Freud’s…

Anna Freud

I found myself wanting to talk about my unfinished work on Anna's realtionship to her father. In addition to my draft materials, I found a recording (internal Haverford access) of comments to a class in the early 1990s. I've suggested as an essay topic for the Psych 105g Blackboard that they consider Anna Freud in light of Gilligan's writings, and I've prompted them with Anna's adolescent fantasy:

Anna was the sixth and last of the children born to Martha and Sigmund Freud. She was born late in 1895, the year of Freud and Breuer published Studies on Hysteria, the year Wilhelm Fliess operated on Emma Eckstein. Her conception seems to have resulted from a failure either of her parents’ contraceptive technique or their resolve to employ it; and she took form along with Freud’s hermeneutic in the summer of the “Irma” dream. Her childish speech is quoted by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he describes her expressing her longing for strawberries. She admired and envied her two older sisters, Mathilde and Sophie, lacking the former’s feminine home-craft and the latter’s beauty. She seems to have been a serious girl, but she remembered her father's characterization of her as his "Little blackamoor." In early adolescence she developed a severe psychopathology, consisting of sado-masochistic fantasies accompanied by compulsive masturbation, an eating disorder, and depression. Her father treated her at several points in her adolescence, and initiated regular psychoanalytic sessions in the fall of 1918, when she was approaching 23. She and her father reconstructed her fantsies in three phases, from the masturbatory beating fantasies of puberty to the 'nice stories' of her mid-teens and finally the poetry and romantic fiction she composed as a young adult. As both youth and adult, Anna found herself ugly, clumsy, dumm, especially when the adolescent “nice stories,” with their tortured, princely, self-sacrificing youth, would intrude on her sublimated analytic work and entice her back to the body’s demands, and she would give in to sado-machochistic fantasy, and to lust. In her own analysis of the beating fantasies, presented as her candidacy paper to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in 1922, Anna tells her "nice story" fantasy as follows, referring to herself in the third person as befits a case history:

The material she used in this story was as follows: A medieval knight has been engaged in a long feud with a number of nobles who are in league against him. In the course of a battle a fifteen-year-old noble youth (i.e., the age of the daydreamer) is captured by the knight's henchmen. He is taken to the knight's castle where he is held prisoner for a long time. Finally, he is released. Instead of spinning out and continuing the tale (as in a novel published in installments), the girl made use of the plot as a sort of outer frame for her daydream. Into this frame she inserted a variety of minor and major episodes, each a completed tale that was entirely independent of the others, and formed exactly like a real novel, containing an introduction, the development of a plot which leads to heightened tension and ultimately to a climax. In this she did not feel bound to workout a logical sequence of events. Depending on her mood she could revert to an earlier or later-occurring phase of the tale, or interpose a new situation between two already completed and contemporaneous scenes-until finally the frame of her stories was in danger of being shattered by the abundance of scenes and situations accommodated within it. In this daydream, which was the simplest of them all, there were only two figures that were really important; all the others can be disregarded as incidental and subordinate by-players. One of these main figures is the noble youth whom the daydreamer has endowed with all possible good and attractive characteristics; the other one is the knight of the castle who is depicted as sinister and violent. The opposition between the two is further intensified by the addition of several incidents from their past family histories -- so that the whole setting is one of apparently irreconcilable antagonism between one who is strong and mighty and another who is weak and in the power of the former. A great introductory scene describes their first meeting during which the knight threatens to put the prisoner on the rack to force him to betray his secrets. The youth’s conviction of his helplessness is thereby confirmed and his dread of the knight awakened. These two elements are the basis of all subsequent situations. For example, the knight in fact threatens the youth and makes ready to torture him, but at the last moment the knight desists. He nearly kills the youth through the long imprisonment, but just before it is too late the knight has him nursed back to health. As soon as the prisoner has recovered the knight threatens him again, but faced by the youth's fortitude the knight spares him again. And every time the knight is just about to inflict great harm, he grants the youth one favor after another. (Freud, A., 1922)

She then works out the psychosexual twists of her story in classic Oedipal fashion:

In the first phase the person who beats also was the father; however, the child who was being beaten was not the fantasying child but other children, brothers or sisters, i.e., rivals for the father's love. In this first phase, therefore, the child claimed all the love for himself and left all the punishment and castigation to the others. With the repression of the oedipal strivings and the dawning sense of guilt, the punishment is subsequently turned back on the child himself. At the same time, however, as a consequence of regression from the genital to the pregenital anal-sadistic organization, the beating situation could still be used as an expression of a love situation.

This was the age 14-15 successor to the "nice stories" of childhood (age 7-9), themselves reactive transformations of the original wishes that the father might beat one's siblings. The resolution of these tendecies in the final phase is a nice story, indeed:

The sublimation of sensual love into tender friendship is of course greatly facilitated by the fact that already in the early stages of the beating fantasy the girl abandoned the difference of the sexes and is invariably represented as a boy.

Thus equipped, Anna Freud entered the profession of psychoanalysis she would inherit from her father. From the self-conscious and self-critical teenager sent off to visit the English relatives, she was able to become the dedicated companion of several women and surrogate mother to other women's children. She remained devoted to her father thoughout his lifetime, and to a strict-constructionist expression of his theories throughout hers.

My Blog, Myself

I've proposed to Haverford's Educational Policy Committee that I offer a first-year writing-intensive course in Fall, 2004, about blogs. Here's the draft description:

A review of self-expression on the Internet, with special attention to weblogs produced in adolescence and adulthood. Students and the instructor will form a friends group using LiveJournal or similar software to construct mutually-linked individual weblogs and will use these to share personal experiences, to annotate and discuss course readings, and to practice more and less structured writing about the psychology of such biographical discourse. Discussions will focus on existing biographical materials avaliable on the Net, on discussions of these by psychologists, and on our own experience of reflecting on each other's writing.

The reading list will grow and link from:

Davis, D. (1994-95). Erotic Computing. Webster's Weekly.

Davis, D. (2003). Milennial Teaching. Academe.

McNeill. (2002). Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks. Biography.

Turkle, Sherry. (1995). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Zuern. (2002). Online Lives. Biography.
TomD points to evidence that the writing-teaching community is now interested in classroom blogs:

There is a pretty vigorous group of rhetoric/composition scholars who have been exploring the intersections of emerging technology and writing (and teaching writing) for the past 20 years or so.

I've lots to learn, as I try to pay off on the speculations of a decade ago.

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Here's the Fall, 2004, course web page for Haverford College WPR 115A

Designing a memex

The take-home final for Psychology 311a involves designing and beginning to build your own memex. Here's a summary of what I have in mind: Plan yourself a memex, create (or at least design in some detail) your own blog, and put a CV and one other page of your memex there. We’ll spend about half our remaining class time discussing our progress on these, and the rest on constructing a rudimentary ego psychology with which to describe and study such work. I’ll hold office hours as needed to work with each of you on your project.

Things to consider including in your memex:
• The relation of this class to your memex project
• An explanation of the design of the front page of your memex
• Pictures, film clips, old receipts, contracts, fiction, drafts of fiction, audio memos …
• Links to library resources
• Links to others’ memexs
• Memory/navigation aids for your future self
• A place to put all this.

As part of preparing you for this project, I wish to review psychoanalytic "ego psychology" in light of PCs, the Net, and the blogosphere.

As we start this discussion, I'd like to make an important philosophy of science point about psychoanalytic ego psychology (and most of personality theory generally). Its content, its critical terminology, is all metaphor: it’s made up, it’s not real. Terms like “libido,” “need,” “anxiety,” “Id,” “Ego,” are used metaphorically in our discourse. Thus we say, “It’s as if there were a part of his self that functions autonomously and determines how he directs his attention, organizes his thoughts, and accesses his memory. This sort of writing – and of thinking – turns out to be fine for some kinds of Psychology and most of the “humanistic” disciplines. We can do serious work on, say, the personality factors and issues that most impact the extent and type of folks’ use of personal computer and the Internet without assuming that our subjects’ “Extraversion” is an entity that can be measured by a self-report test and expressed as a number. From here on out, this is a class about using the language of personality descripton, with respect to ourselves, in a way that can be understood by others. Your mid-term projects gave you some experience with this. For example, what vocabulary, and what background knowledge, is required to adequately describe
• Your suite-mate’s 30 hour a week EQ habit?
• Your own fascination with [favorite actor/author]?
• Your semester-abroad friendship with ___, from ___?
We can be helped in talking about such matters by ego-psychological concepts if we do not reify or scientize these.

For Monday

I want us to get ready to think about gender-bending in CMC -- role-playing, chat, whatever -- by

reading Amy Bruckman's (1993) "Gender-swapping on the Internet" and her (1996) "Finding One's Own in Cyberspace"

browsing a couple of the other links from the online links bibliography at Fragment.nl, then

discussing CMC gender-bending with a friend who's done it, and/or trying it ourselves.

If you want to get out ahead of next Wednesday's discussion, read also Thomas H. Ogden's A NEW READING OF THE ORIGINS OF OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY (on-campus access) and start thinking how one's "object"-relations history affects their role-playing, self-construing, activity in cyberspace. And after that, there's "The Performance of Cyberspace: An Exploration Into Computer-Mediated Reality," by Gretchen Barbatsis, Michael Fegan, and Kenneth Hansen.

Jung

It's time, in Psych 311a, for Jung. Here are the resources I used last Spring in Intro, plus Jung's own (1921) description of The Psychological Types. There are two linked versions of my Intro lecture on Jung, of which you might try one if this is all new to you.

The lecture ('02)

D2 Freud and Jung

Intro'/Extraversion

Anima/Animus

Jung's Dream

A case study in "Individuation"
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Notes on Adler and Jung (Spencer)

Marc Fonda Jung site

Jung Web resources

Jung's own (1921) description of The Psychological Types
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I'm looking for convenient, interesting, and free versions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and related Jungian typing tools. Several are linked along with articles and other resources at The Enneagram and the MBTI - an Electronic Journal

There is interesting background information at The Fundamental Nature of the MBTI

A straightforward explanation of the types and opportunity to select one's four-letter code is available at PersonalityPathways.
The Kiersey Temperament Sort, formerly free, now seems to provide only a basic score and to sell the profile. Other suggestins welcome.
My ususal type, BTW, is INFP, and these websites offer me lots of advice about what this means.
So, what's your type? Did you learn something from the description? How stable do you think your type will be across days, months, years?
Could we infer one's type from the content of their IM logs, RPG logs, weblogs?

P311: The mid-term project

Originally I thought I'd ask each seminar member to pick an idea from Turkle, to find someone who illustrates it, and to study them. By today I realized that was backwards. Here's the (draft 2) assignment: Either
1. Pick someone whose use of (and involvement with) a personal information system intrigues you, talk to them about it, watch them do it, and report on it in light of some point in Turkle's book; or
2. Get yourself into an on-line setting (MUD, MMORPG, AIM, ...) in which you can "meet" and interview one or more participants and share in some of their experience by "watching" them act and interact in the virtual setting.

The main goal of this exercise is to get us out of the "zoo patron" role described in class today, to force us to acknowledge that some folks care deeply about what they do with PCs and online and that we need to understand them on their own terms. When these projects are done we'll have some real examples to discuss as we continue to read about specific computer-mediated activities. Then perhaps we can begin to imagine what a personality theory that accounted for cyberbehavior would look like. Some specific questions to frame these interviews are included in the course FAQ.

I'd like a one-page prospectus (a statement about whom you plan to interview/observe, and why; or what sort of person you'd like to interview/observe); or what setting(s) you plan to explore. If nothing comes to mind, let's try to talk either Friday AM or early next week. I want to spend some class time comparing and helping with each other's projects, and I want you to have time to write up the results in half a dozen pages by Friday, October 24 (the Friday after Fall Break).

Then we'll interview each other in class about what we learned of our "subjects." Maybe a couple of them would even join our class for a discussion, or for show 'n' tell ...

I'll post this description of the assignment to the P311 syllabus, and I'll revise in light of questions or comments posted here.

The Clinical and Statistical Prediction of Terrorism

My working topic for the 9/26 meeting of the Senior Seminar is "The Clinical and Statistical Prediction of Terrorism." I have emailed each seminar member Chapter 6 ("Descriptive Theory of Probability Judgment") from Jonathan Baron's Thinking and Deciding (3rd Ed.) in PDF format. You may print this or read it in the Adobe Reader (I suggest you upgrade to v. 6, which has searching and improved formatting for reading on-screen). My copy will be on the top right shelf in the Psych Lounge (along with a shelf of recent books on personal computing and the Internet), should you want to read the chapter (or browse other chapters) there.

I suggest you first read and explore these links in the order given:

Salon.com Technology | Is Big Brother our only hope against bin Laden?

Terrorism Information Awareness Systems

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery

Washington Post: The Plot: A web of connections

You are welcome to comment here, as an alternative to sending me your suggested discussion question(s) by email.