Aaron Balick
 

What really motivates people to tweet? What do you get out of it? There are a series of conscious reasons why you might tweet. Perhaps it’s a handy way to communicate with your network of friends; the most expedient way in which you can build a network of similar tastes or interests; maybe you want to promote an event you’re running, a column you’ve written, or your work; maybe you tweet as part of your job.

The job of psychologists is to examine what may be an unconscious motivation to the things that you do. When we think about unconscious motivation, there are lots of models that can help us understand things better*. I often like to talk about Freud’s theories: mostly because people nowadays think he’s full of shit. I think otherwise, and I hope to show you why.

Herr Doktor Freud

With regard to motivation, most people believe that Freud was just interested in the sexual drive or “libido.” While Freud was very much concerned with sex, and did believe that it underlies all of our behaviours, few people know that he further developed his ideas about motivation, and one of these developments is called his theory of:

Ego Instincts

Freud believed that ego instincts ran contrary to sexual instincts. In brief, they are self-preservative and defensive of the “I”, while sexual instincts are pro-creative in nature and involve others, ego instincts are aimed inward rather than outward, and if too much ego instinct gets attached to the ego, you end up with:

Narcissism

Not all ego instincts are bad, and we need a healthy amount of narcissism to create a strong enough ego to encounter the world in one piece – but they can get out of hand. After all, the ego likes to maintain itself, and it likes to look good. The ego’s main interest is negotiating between the internal world and the external world – to have its needs met in socially acceptable ways

So how can we apply this theory to Twitter?

What is the motivation to tweet? While at bottom there may be some underlying sexual instinct in all forms of self-promotion (to put it basely, “tweeting to get laid”), I think that’s unlikely to be the motivating factor for most people. I believe that outside the motivation to relate to others, it’s the ego-instincts that are playing the most important role. (For more on the ego and social networking, see my earlier post).

There’s the old saying, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?” What about that tweet that’s never favorited, re-tweeted, or responded to? Does it make a sound?

For most egos, it’s not good enough just to tweet – that’s like writing a book that never sees the outside of a desk drawer. While there might be some satisfaction in having written the thing, the real aim is to share it (and to know it’s been shared). Modern day psychologists think that relating to others is the single most important thing we do, and fundamentally motivates us (this is a development of Freud’s libido theory). In this context, tweeting is not enough, having your tweets recognised is the real goal.

How many of you feel a pang of disappointment when a tweet disappears into the ether sadly unrecognised? What about that burst of reward when you are re-tweeted, favorited, or mentioned? That means something to your ego, that means what you said mattered.

Have you got Klout?

There are now a whole variety of applications out there that pander to this ego need, the most popular being Klout. According to Klout’s own website Klout measures your online influence by looking at how many people you influence, how much you influence them, and how influential these people are. In short, Klout is a sort of popularity contest ranking some individuals more highly than others based on their score.

My aim isn’t to say that Klout is a good or a bad thing, but I do think the more people get concerned about it, the more it changes the way people engage with Twitter (and not just Twitter, a whole range of social networking applications can be linked into Klout). Twitter debuted by being famously democratised. The average Joe Bloggs could shout out something and be noticed just for being clever, funny, or interesting: and build a following for himself off the back of that. He could chat with a celebrity, or the masses, and get a thrill either way.

With Klout’s metrics, however, it’s “better” to get a mention from a celebrity than it is from just another Joe Blogss (though admittedly, Joe can become a celebrity by climbing up the Klout ladder). Each celebrity mention can jump up your points (because you’ve been noticed by somebody with lots of clout).

When I say this is a game changer I say it because those that are concerned about their Klout rating may change their twitter tactics to achieve higher Klout scores rather than simply using it as a way to connect with others. With further applications allowing you to see the Klout scores of other tweeps, you may be more likely to ignore some (lower Klout) tweeps over others. Your aim moves from being about connecting, to increasing your (ego) score.

The worrying consequence here is that Twitter becomes less democratised and more of a hierarchy, a popularity contest that puts some people at a disadvantage.

Whereas you may be motivated to use Twitter for the conscious reasons I outlined in the first paragraph, unconsciously your ego instincts may be kicking up a fuss. They may want a higher Klout score to increase those ego needs. But while climbing up the ladder of influence may feel good (if you can manage it) it naturally introduces competition and people may very well begin to suffer from “negative comparison”.

To be clear, I’ve got nothing against Klout, or similar applications like PeerIndex. In fact, I do see them as probably the way Twitter was always going to go at some point anyway. My fear is that the free-ranging “wild west” days of the micro-blogging site may be numbered. With promoted tweets and interest in influence growing, will people’s aim be to grow that online ego, or to relate to others? They are surely intertwined, these two things, but like everything else, influence matters.

I only date people with Klout

Already Klout scores are being seen as a way to identify quality in a partner, and the website Tawkify has now added the Klout score to its dating algorithm. Take it from me, a high Klout score will not guarantee you a wonderful date. You can also find events that are limited to individuals with Klout scores over a particular threshold, and many Social Networking gurus are suggesting you include your score on your CV. What are your feelings about this?

For anyone at all familiar with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World you may remember a dystopian world where the “Alphas” have all the privileges, and the “Deltas” are taught to be happy with their lot.

I propose that Twitter and its accompanying applications to measure influence will continue to attempt to separate us into castes that do not reflect what we actually have to offer as human beings, but how we are best able to exploit social media.

Consciously we all know this to be true, but unconsciously, our egos will no doubt seek to climb higher and higher up that mythical hierarchy, and no good can come of that.

*In a previous post I talk about another “Big Five” personality traits, so I’m not All about Freud.

If you’d like to discuss this, please do so here.

 

There are currently a lot of headlines telling us that Facebook is making us narcissistic, or that social networking really is geared for exhibitionists and extraverts. We are told that shy people use Facebook more than those that are not shy (presumably because “connection” is easier this way), and even that those that tend towards neuroticism tend to post messages on walls in preference to using Facebook chat (because livechat makes them nervous). But are any of these headlines true? And if so, what does it all really mean?

 What’s the significance?

Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message” and what he meant by that is that the medium is always implicated in the message. By this he explained that something like television isn’t just some passive medium that can share “good” or “bad” messages depending on the content of those messages, but that we need to think about the television itself as part of the message.

Same goes for Facebook, and arguably more so because this particular medium so mediates how we relate to each other, rather than behaving like a static programme on the telly.

Because Facebook is founded upon an architecture (meaning that it dictates the parameters of how you can interact with it) it does have a lot of influence about how it is used, and who is likely to use it in a variety of different ways.

Researchers at Boston Medical Centre recently published a systematic review that evaluates a ton of recent research on Facebook and personality (Nadkarni and Hofman 2012). Their conclusion is an obvious one, but importantly grounds this theory in research rather than simply common sense:

“The data relating to more specific Facebook usage confirms [that] Facebook gratifies its users in different ways depending on their individual characteristics” (p. 1663).

Briefly, this means that we can’t say it just appeals to narcissists and extraverts (as if we could reduce people to such simple categories) – rather it appeals to those types (as well as others) in ways that suit their personality styles. But it’s not that easy, it does tend to be weighted by design to certain types over others, and types tend to use it in different ways.

 Like anything else, the way in which you use Facebook can be healthy or unhealthy.

 Most of the studies evaluated by Nadkarni and Hofmann utilise what psychologists call “The Big Five.” This is a commonly used psychometric which measures personality on five major scales on the following functions:

  • Openness
  • Conscientiousness
  • Extraversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Neuroticisim

If you’re interested to see where you score, you can take a sample test here. While this test is associated with high validity and reliability, like everything else in psychology, there are disputes. Also, many studies are finding the Big Five measure may be too vague work out the complexities of individual Facebook use and other measures may be preferred such as measures for:

  • Narcissism
  • Shyness
  • Introversion and Extraversion

There are tests for these too, like the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, the Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale, and the well known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

 Please note that these tests should really be administered by a trained psychologist – though you can get an idea about them (and you) by trying them yourself online.

 Nadkarni and Hofmann (2012) looked at a variety of studies correlating personality measures to Facebook usage, and here are a few of their findings:

  • They interpret that Facebook usage is motivated by two major factors: the desire to ‘belong’ and the need for self presentation.
  • There is a significant correlation between personality and FB use:
    • Extraverts reported higher levels of FB use and addictive tendencies.
    • Shy individuals had fewer friends on FB than non-shy individuals.
    • Shy individuals also spent more time on FB and had a more positive outlook about it.
    • Both those with high narcissism and low self esteem spent more than an hour a day on FB.
    • And confusingly . . .

“ . . . the review of the literature of FB use suggests that a high level of extraversion, low self esteem, high levels of neuroticism, narcissism, and low levels of self esteem and self-worth are associated with high FB use. Frequent FB use is also associate with lower academic performance but possibly higher self-esteem and sense of belonging” (Ibid. p. 245).

 –Perhaps it’s just me, but this is hardly clear or conclusive!

 The notion of “statistical significance” is an interesting one too, mostly because it is a judgement call.  For example, Ryan and Xeno (2011) conducted a study in which they state that “there was a significant positive correlation between preference of the Status Update feature and exhibitionism” (p. 1062). However, the significance of this has an r value of a tiny .06!

 An r value exists between +1 (perfect positive correlation) and -1 (perfect negative correlation). No correlation is “0”.

Ryan and Xeno show a tiny positive correlation between exhibitionism and preference for status updates. It is not accidental, as it has a p value of .039 – (indicating a 98.5% assurity that the correlation isn’t just chance) – but it’s still very small.

I am not a statistician, but a psychotherapist and had to seek advice about how to interpret these numbers. My advisor* noted that statistical significance is often a judgement call and advised I consider the “psychological importance” of the finding instead. So it may be statistically significant, but is it helpful to our understanding of how and why people are using Facebook?

My judgment is that we will not get to psychological importance from such small numbers, and furthermore (as is the usual bias of a psychotherapist) the only way to get access to real psychological importance is to ask people what their Facebook use means to them – and that will ultimately mean qualitative rather than quantitative research (fortunately, there is some good quali research happening in this field too!).

However, personality research will continue to be informative so long as it is factored in with the stories people bring to the table about their social networking use.  Coming from the background I come from, I would add one more to the stories we get, and that is to ask also, what is the underlying story – what is happening unconsciously? And this, as many psychotherapists know, is a matter of interpretation. So watch this space.

If you are interested in sharing your story or commenting on this blog post, please do so here on my Social Media Research page. I am collecting stories and comments for my forthcoming book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking.

——

References:

Nadkarni, A., and Hofmann, S. (2012). Why do people use Facebook? Personality and Individual Differences. 52 (pp. 243- 249).

Ryan, T. and Xenos, S. (2011). Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage. Computers in Human Behavior. 27 (pp. 1658 – 1664).

 

* My thanks to Dr. Ford Hickson at Sigma Research for his advice.

Photo credit: http://jezebel.com/big-five-personality-test/

 

 

 


 

Psychotherapy is widely seen as being a bit backward.

Psychoanalysis (one of many forms of psychotherapy) is often seen as the most backward of the lot; anachronistic, old fashioned, unscientific: a dinosaur. You might be surprised to know that when “the talking cure” first emerged at the end of the 19th century, it was actually quite revolutionary and subversive. It was so thoroughly modern, it ultimately defined the modern age!

Psychoanalysis, as always, is a paradox. While I agree that in many ways it has not caught up with the times, in times like these, psychoanalysis is a good antidote. It takes its time, it is thoughtful, and it engages with what it really means to be human despite existing in a time of quick fixes, miracle cures, and short attention spans; I’ve heard it compared to the “slow food movement”. One questions, however, whether it can carry on “business as usual” in our “2.0” world of digital relating.

I believe that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general can, but in order to do so they do need to recognise, accept and understand the technologies in which we are all saturated. With the importance of the human relationship so precious to psychotherapists, this can be a difficult transition. Our traditions are fundamentally based in real time human-to-human interaction.

When I look at my own career choices (a psychotherapist and an academic in psychoanalysis) I am sometimes shocked at how traditional my choices have been. While I don’t really consider myself a traditional guy, I do seem to have chosen some pretty traditional niches: psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and the academy. However, I’m not prepared to be defined by these labels, and nor should psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, nor the academy!

Universities are already bursting through the “traditional” accusation (and have been for years now) by coming up with all sorts of new and exciting ways to increase learning and open access to education. While Itunes University  is a great example of this in its  simple use of the educational podcast, individual universities like Stanford and MIT are at the vanguard of new education methods. This month’s Wired magazine has a great and inspiring article about these developments.

Can psychotherapy do the same thing?

Because of the nature of psychotherapy (and psychotherapists), it is necessary to be thoughtful about how we engage with this world. Dr. Keely Kolmes, for one, has a great resource for this kind of thinking, and has produced her own course in Digital and Social Media Ethics for Psychotherapists. Her work has influenced my own social networking policy. Here in the UK, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy have produced their own guidelines for Online Counselling. Still, mental health professionals need to be thinking even bigger than this.

This has been an area of interest to me for some time, and is the area in which I have been doing my own research. I have a forthcoming article in Psychoanalysis Culture, and Society entitled “TMI in the transference, LOL” which explores an instance of the loss of therapist anonymity in order to open up thinking, in general, about what it means to discover and be discovered on Google (whether you’re in therapy or not).

My interest also extends to social networking, and I am currently writing a book on that entitled: The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. In fact, if you were interested in helping me out with a pilot research project, have a look at my ethics page, and if you are comfortable with that, “like” the Facebook page and join the conversation. I “like” the idea of conducting research in this area within the very medium that I am curious about.

I strongly believe that Web 2.0 is having a massive influence on the way in which we all relate to each other, whether we were raised souped up in digital culture “Digital Natives” or whether you came into it later “Digital Immigrants” (Palfrey and Gasser 2008). I am coming to conclude that quite contrary to the charge that psychotherapy is a traditional “has-been” in the digital age, it can come to be at the vanguard of understanding its meaning as well as utilising new technologies to the advantage of those seeking more positive mental health.

The first thing that comes to many people’s mind when they think of technology and psychotherapy is the use of computer based cognitive behavioural treatment (e.g. http://www.llttf.com/). The advent these treatments have been of great concern to many psychotherapists because they necessarily lack the “human” touch of the therapeutic endeavour. This human touch is not only the reason why most therapists got into the job in the first place, but also, as most research shows (e.g. Norcross 2002) it has a lot to do with the curative factor of psychotherapy in any case.

There is no reason why computer based CBT can’t be one factor in a whole range of ways in which psychotherapists can make use of New Media. There are a whole raft of uses that can be deployed therapeutically over the internet: whether it is through the medium of Skype for counselling or supervision, or the creation of as yet unthought of ways to engage with people’s minds through this exciting medium that seems to develop into something new every day.

However, where psychotherapy really has something to offer is not just working out new ways to deploy mental health interventions over New Media, but to help us to understand the nature of the media itself, and thereby come to understand our society and ourselves and  even better.

It is commonly known that Sigmund Freud completed his first major work of Psychoanalysis The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. However, he delayed publication until 1900 so the book would come at the start of the 20th century. We are now well into the 21st, and psychotherapy has not yet made a leap of similar proportions. What is next for us?

Freud certainly wouldn’t have tweeted, but you may been interested to find that both the Institute of Psychoanalysis AND the Freud Museum London BOTH have Twitter accounts (@freudmuslondon and @psych0analysis if you’re interested), so they have indeed, caught up with the times. Freud couldn’t even drag himself to “the pictures” such was his derisory sense of that “new media” – so it’s nice to see his inheritors are a bit keener on the “next big thing”.

References:

Norcross, J. (2002). Psychotherapy Relationships that Work: Therapists Contributions and Responsiveness to Patients. New York: Oxford University Press.

Palfrey, J. And Gasser U.  (2008).  Born Digital; understanding the first generation of digital natives.  New York: Basic Books.

Image Credit: http://www.ironmaidencommentary.com/?url=album11_vxi/cyberaddiction&link=albums&lang=eng

 

The Cabin in the Woods is a difficult film to review without giving away what needs not to be given away in order to preserve the viewer’s utter enjoyment of this amazing film. Throughout this film we are given hints to its premise, and half the fun (and there’s so much of it to be had) is working out what the hell is going on. If you haven’t seen the film yet, the best advice is to leave enough alone and avoid reviews until after the fact. While I won’t give away any spoilers, I advise it’s best to get there fresh (and therefore soon!).

First, it’s an excellent film, a film that is absolutely saturated with Joss Whedon (a real creative genius in my book) in the most satisfying of ways. Any fans of “Buffy” will see the same use of horror, wit, and humour that we’ve come to be used to from his works. From the opening scene we are introduced to a banal bureaucratic modern office space in which a mundane domestic conversation is occurring between “Steve” and “Richard” who are going on about childproofing a house for an impending baby, while trying to get a soda out of an inoperative coke machine. DVD box set aficionados will immediately be turned on seeing their favourites, Bradley Whitford from The West Wing and Richard Jenkins from Six Feet Under as the ones having this conversation. Everything here is completely banal, and yet we know we are in for a treat.

The film is almost like a frame play following two concurrent storylines – the classic horror trope is framed by the Whedonesque back-story occupying the margins and literally, the underground. Where they intersect, I won’t tell you here, that’s half the fun of the story. The framed play itself is your classic horror, done particularly well. Five attractive young people off to a creepy cabin in the woods to be massacred one by one. However, as this is a Whedon creation, the classic horror tropes are played with to the viewers delight, and the ironic or ‘postmodern’ way they are worked through make the Scream franchise look downright amateur.

It’s as if Whedon winks at us “in the know” and challenges us to make connections. Some are easy, we have The Evil Dead and Friday the 13th right off the bat. The references to Night of the Living Dead are also obvious, but we also get a peak into Hellraiser, The Ring, and a wonderful that seemed to be choreographed straight from Dawn of the Dead. Another great but often overlooked horror My Little Eye is featured heavily.

But how long does it take you to find the extended joke of the Scooby Gang (so often referenced in Buffy) or those flashed seconds, without comment, that uncannily remind us of the butchered sisters observed by Danny Torrence in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (I’m absolutely convinced that in this scene the body parts were placed in exactly the same position as those girls from The Shining). More ‘inside’ jokes include some funny cameos that will excite the Buffy fan to no end!

This is purpose, humour, and artistry in horror! We get the thrills of the horror while at the same time trying to solve a cryptic crossword of the narrative. What the hell is a going on? Well, I said I won’t tell, but I will allude to one psychoanalytic theory that speaks to the narrative without giving it away.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the opening of this film is all ego; white office hallways, a vast complex of corridors, offices, and office workers surrounded by clean lines, white floors and walls, and a highly sophisticated technological world surrounding them: climate controlled. There is ease here, and total control. The ego, you see, seeks to manage as its primary job. It manages both the internal and external worlds, and gradually fools itself into believing that it has more control than it actually does. The frame of this story is about the ego, the ego of our entire culture, what is framed, is a concept of how to manage not just our individual ‘id’ – but our global id too.

Many theories of horror film include the idea that they represent the “id” – the instinctual aspects of ourselves, our desires, both sexual and aggressive. Our ego takes the job of making sure that our desires are tempered by “the reality principle.” We cannot have everything (like our id wants) so we have to keep the id back, under control. Freud described this as the ego being like the rider on a much more powerful horse. When it comes to horror films, this horse becomes something much more monstrous.

Without giving too much away (I want the reader of this review to enjoy the film as much as I did) this film is about what is commonly referred to as “the return of the repressed”. For Freud, our primitive wishes do not disappear, but they emerge in a variety of ways including our neuroses, our symptoms, and most interestingly our dreams. Many theorise that cultural products like film, literature and theatre are like our culture’s dreaming. But what is our culture dreaming and why is it dreaming it now?

The sense of this film is that our veneer of culture and civilisation is just that – veneer. Underneath the clean hallways of the office building, the straight ties of the men and the neat business suits of the women, the banal conversations that intersperse the “very important work” that is going on in this mysterious hive (echoing “The Initiative” from Buffy), there lies something huge and monstrous. On the most basic scenario we can think of the recent banking scandals and how voracious greed and irresponsibility to the social contract led to financial catastrophe: all dressed up in pinstripes and silk ties.

However, this is small stuff compared to what occurred in the face of the daily banality of the nuclear plant at Fukushima in the years before the earthquake and Tsunami. Surely this was just a mundane place to work, filled with banal conversations around the water cooler, when within seconds the illusion of safety was replaced with the emergence of an almost unthinkable horror. Think too, about the world trade centre, another location, that by day was the site of the most conservative looking businessperson going about their day, likely to feel that most things were under control. Then. Bang. Horror.

Our sense of safety in this world is often an illusion we keep from going insane (or at the very least an unending experience of existential angst). Whether it is the forces of nature that come to surprise us, or our own darker nature, we do our best to live in the office space above the giant swell. Most of the time this works out pretty well for us. Joss Whedon, however, wondered what would happen if there really were a “return of the repressed” on a global scale, and that’s what this film is about. Strangely, it doesn’t seem at all pessimistic.

 

It is never a good start to compare a film to a book. Unfortunately for Kiera Knightly, she has now participated in two films that I have seen that have fallen well short of the books that spawned them; Atonement by Ian McEwan and A Most Dangerous Method by Jonathan Kerr. The failure of Cronenberg’s  A Dangerous Method, however, is not all Knightly’s fault. There was something about the entire delivery of the film that lacked that thing so associated with the founders of psychoanalysis: passion.

For me, the historic story of Freud, Jung, and Spielrien has the same pull and fascination as the story of the Titanic. I’m not great fan of that film either (though A Night to Remember was ok), but it undoubtedly captured the sense of expectation and tragedy that the story of the Titanic automatically conveys; A Dangerous Method failed to do this.

In order to see this film with the sense of expectation and tragedy so apparent in the Titanic story, one has to see the story of Freud and Jung in particular, as a love affair; an affair of both intellect and expectation. Spielrein was certainly involved in this affair, but the real passion is between the two men, not Jung and Spielrien. To be clear, I am not suggesting that their affair was in any sense a homosexual one as we understand that today: though it was, nonetheless,a love affair

To read the Freud/Jung Letters is to be drawn into this affair. One reads the movement of salutations from “Dear Professor Freud,” to “Dear Colleague” to “My Dear Friend” to the abrupt and much colder, “Dear Mr. Professor” towards the end of their correspondence. Knowing the story from the start, one can see the hints of dissonance that will ultimately tear them apart, alongside the intense desire and expectation that this will be a lifetime intellectual match. The film conveys none of this.

Both Freud and Jung were passionate men. Spielrein was an intelligent woman who fundamentally influenced both Jung and Freud, notably inspiring the concept of “the death drive” in Freud’s work, and probably the catalyst for his famous essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” However, I would have no expectation that a film like this informs us of such historical or intellectual details, but I do expect it to deliver on the passion and intrigue. Instead what we are offered is a drama that came across as dry, slow and emotionally vapid.

The film was authentic to many of the stories psychoanalysts and fans of psychoanalysis know and love; the original 13 hour conversation between the two men; the mysterious knocking behind the bookcase; Freud’s refusal to report his dreams to Jung on the ship to America because he feared he would “lose his authority”; Emma Jung’s letters to Freud on behalf of her distressed husband; Freud fainting at the hint of Jung’s defection in Munich. But all these stories lack something important – they lack any emotional investment we have in either man because the film failed to court such an investment in the first place: and this is the greatest disappointment.

There was one minor insight I gained from the film. It was on Freud and Jung’s famous boat journey to America to speak at Clark University in America that the event occurs that all scholars of psychoanalysis are aware of. This was the moment (mentioned above) where, after Jung shared his dream with Freud, Freud refused to share his dream with Jung at the risk of losing his authority. Jung later remarked that this was the statement that would ultimately sink their relationship.

In my own reading of this story, I too had always taken Jung’s side. I wondered why Freud had not taken the risk to share himself with Jung, why he grasped so tightly to his authority on this issue. It has always struck me as cowardice, or a weakness Freud’s to open himself up to analysis; a refusal to show any potential flaw to his friend and “crown prince”. However the film offers another angle, subtly portrayed. It offers that this moment was not only the instance in which Jung began to withdrawal from Freud, but I now believe that it demonstrated Freud’s developing mistrust in Jung. That he chose not to “lose his authority” not because he was weak, but because he mistrusted the man who would become his adversary. This enriched, somewhat, the Freud/Jung story for me, and to this I credit the acting of Viggo Mortensen who conveyed this through his face alone.

One other important insight comes from Sabina’s mouth when she warns Freud that if he and Jung cannot resolve their “dispute” it will have consequences for psychoanalysis “possibly forever.”  Unfortunately Spielrein’s prediction turned out to be true. Not only did their dispute forever divide the psychoanalytic development into Freudians and Jungians (and in fact, there are a great deal more splits than this one), but it also influenced both Freud and Jung to cling to their own theories more jealously, to more guardedly mark out their theoretical territories to defend their “brand” more so than to defend the truth of their claims. Both gentlemen were weakened by this unconscious manifestation of hurt and defence, and psychoanalysis and analytical psychology (the term developed to denote Jungian analysis) have suffered ever since.

As a final word on the issue, I would say that you probably don’t need to bother seeing this film. It is a disappointment – it gives little away about the true “danger” of the method, and even worse, it gives very little away about the method itself. Go read Jonathan Kerr’s page-turning book A Most Dangerous Method. If that piques your interest, go to the original source and read the Freud/Jung Letters. If, like me, these two texts make you both curious and fascinated about the early days of psychoanalysis, there’s enough research out there on these issues to keep you reading for years.

 



 

Want to discuss this? Join my Facebook page as a participant researcher and discuss these issues here.




 

For most, the answer to this question is obvious. Facebook brings us together. It puts us in touch with those we lost touch with years ago; it makes us searchable to those who want us to be in their lives; it keeps us in closer contact with those from whom our news comes only from annual Christmas cards; it allows us to see the daily lives of those who live far away. The list goes on.

But does the technology have other consequences? Facebook has the capacity to make us feel alienated, to make us feel left out. It opens up a world in which we can peer into others’ lives and in many cases, make us feel even further away. It can induce envy by requiring that we compare our lives to other lives that may seem more exciting. It can induce destructive envy and isolation.

In my previous post I described the interaction between “false selves” and “personae” and how Facebook enables us to engage in the world from the perspectives of these psychological entities. In the previous post too I warned that the ‘ego’ is not the same as the ‘self’ and that social networking tends to focus on ego expression at the expense of expression of the fuller ‘self’. I argued that this dynamic was not fundamentally a bad one, but one that we needed to be conscious and aware of.

Despite privacy settings, Facebook is a public space. This means that we ‘show up’ on Facebook using our public faces. This is no different than how we show up at work or social events. We all have a social face. However, we can forget this in ourselves and in others, and be fooled into believing what we are showing and seeing on Facebook is ‘the real me’ – it is not, it is an aspect of the ‘real me.’

(I’m aware that the concept of ‘the real me’ is problematic, but it’s useful in the concept of this blog – it will be dealt with in my forthcoming book).

Technology is tempting and seductive. We utilise it like some kind of virtual appendage, and when it starts to feel like an appendage, say, an extension of the arm, we don’t really register that it is not what it seems to be. That is, it is not an extension: it is the public world. Sherry Turkle (2011) uses the sociologist David Reisman’s concept of “the other directed self” noting that Facebook and other social networks take the other directed self to a higher power, she terms it “hyper other directedness” (176-7). This means that we develop a persona with the unconscious intention that it be pleasing to others.

I would alter this term slightly and call it “other ego-directedness”. As you’ll have learned from previous posts, I do this because I don’t believe the whole self is other directed, and it is these aspects of the self that get left behind. While the social network pays handsome dividends to the other directed ego, my concern goes out to these less public facing aspects of selfhood. What happens to our private selves, those aspects that aren’t so readily “shared” “liked” “posted” and “updated.”

Turkle (whom I’ve quoted a lot and give high praise to: you should read her book Alone Together) states the following:

Technology gives us more and more of what we think we want. These days . . . one might assume that what we want is to be always in touch and never alone, no matter who or what we are in touch with . One might assume that what we want is a preponderance of weak ties, the informal networks that underpin online acquaintanceship. But if we pay attention to the real consequences of what we think we want, we may discover what we really want. We may want some stillness and solitude  (p. 284-5)

Once before I quoted Lanier who wrote “You have find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself” (p. ix), who has a similar take on this issue.

I agree with both, but to that I add this important question. Howe do we find a way to be ourselves before we share ourselves? This is a complicated issue because I don’t believe we can find ourselves in isolation, we find ourselves between people. But we need to find ourselves in the real world between person and person – to register their faces, to compare notes, our histories, our memories, our personal narratives. This often invites how we can feel different from each other, and can invite conflict too – but conflict is not intrinsically bad – it is an absolutely necessary way that we find ourselves in the face of others.

The snippets we get on Facebook can make a nice addition to this, a pleasant and enjoyable connection; however, if we confuse our sharing egos with our private selves, therein trouble lies.

 

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References:

Lanier, J. (2011). You are not a Gadget.  London: Penguin.

Turkle, S. (2011).  Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other.  New York: Basic Books.






 

In my last blog I used the psychological concepts of the ego and the self as a way to describe and understand ways in which people might be interacting with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There I described how the ego is a smaller part of the self and seeks recognition and validation through social networking in very much the same way it does in the other facets of our lives.

In this post I will be refining this understanding somewhat by looking at the nature of the ego from two different perspectives in relation to social media; Carl Jung’s concept of the ‘persona’, and British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the ‘false self.’ I will be asking how these concepts can help us to  understand why certain aspects of social networking are so difficult, and what it means for us.

These two different concepts are from divergent schools of psychology but they have a lot in common. Both ‘persona’ and ‘false self’ can be described as ego functions, as they both lie between the experience of the person as an individual and the outside world: what we call ‘society’. Both help us to interact with the world – but both require that we interact with the world in a partial way, leaving vast aspects of ourselves unrecognised.

Jung describes the persona like this:

The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society . . . a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual (Jung 1953, p. 192).

Jung sees the persona as being perfectly normal, an expected psychological development between the person and society. Trouble happens, however, if one identifies with that persona – that is, if someone comes to believe that his or her mask is the whole story.

You have a variety of personas (student, employee, son, daughter, mum, dad, mate, soldier, etc.) and they are necessary. But imagine if you found you had to choose one, and live by its rules all the time? It would be terrible! Do some forms of social networking limit the way we express different aspects of ourselves?

Winnicott has a similar theory. He talks about a ‘false self’ that protects our ‘true self’ from a very early age. From the very start we begin to realise what is “okay” and what is “not okay.” While we continue to feel stuff that’s “not okay” (like anger, rage, anxiety, unhappiness, etc.), we learn that we should hide that stuff, and behave in a way that is okay.  In Winnicott’s words:

 This false self is no doubt an aspect of the true self. It hides and protects it, and it reacts to the adaptation failures and develops a pattern corresponding to the pattern of environmental failure. In this way the true self is not involved in reacting, and so preserves a continuity of being (Winnicott 1956, p. 387).

That’s quite dense, and it’s worth reading twice if you didn’t get it the first time. To put it in other words, it means that you put the true self aside, to let the false self deal with the world for you. The false self does all the work (being nice, saying the right thing, getting on with people, doing what’s expected) while the true self gets protected from all that, still feeling the things you’re not supposed to show.

The catch here is that when the true self doesn’t get any airtime, it can feel suffocated, unrecognised, and unloved. All the attention goes to the false self, leaving the rest of you (which is probably most of you) feeling left out. Like Jung, Winnicott understood that if we learn to totally rely on our false selves, we can really let ourselves down and end up becoming really depressed!

So you can probably see what these two concepts have in common, but what do they have to do with social networking?

I am proposing that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter call upon the persona and the false self very strongly. They are, par excellence the social world and require us to be seen wearing our social masks. This is, indeed, what makes group settings on Facebook so necessary and also so difficult to manage (is it really easier on Google Plus? I don’t know). Having your best mates on the same social network as your mother and your boss requires different personae and false selves for each – so how are you supposed to manage that?

One way, of course, is to get to know the settings on our social networks so we can show the personae we want to the right people. However these settings are clunky, and I personally find it near impossible to set them up to do this. Perhaps this isn’t down to the technology, it is rather down to the complexity of our relational lives.

The way we negotiate our social worlds is complex, subtle, and technology simply doesn’t do it like that. Just think of the way you behave with a group of friends when another friend comes along, say, a work colleague, or a friend from another social group; you subtly shift the way you behave in order to ‘fit in’ the best you can, with the new grouping of people. This process is very subtle, it’s practically automatic.

The clunkyness of the social network makes the moving between different aspects of ourselves clunky too. The concern here is not just the difficulty of managing that clunkiness, the question is whether or not this clunkiness, this lack of fluidity on the social network can makes something clunky inside us as well. Does it feedback on the development of our personae?

The aim of this post is not, however, to tell you how to fix your settings on Facebook, or Google Plus (Twitter is different for reasons I’ll go into another time). The aim is to get you to think about how you present yourself in the world, and then how you do so on social networks. To ask you to think about those dilemmas you face about who becomes a friend, or why you feel anxious or guilty after posting one thing or another as a status update. This anxious feeling is often about the boundaries of our true and false selves – or one social group seeing a part of ourselves that we only reserve for another social group.

You see, we don’t have just one false self, or one persona – we have a whole series of them for different occasions. I believe that some forms of social networking have ways of constraining these possibilities, and sometimes limiting our expression of our multiple ways of being. I would like you to be aware of when you feel constrained, to be curious about what is going on, and to give all different aspects of yourself room for manoeuvre, change, and development. It may not be possible to do that online. I want you to avoid Jung’s fear that you will identify with a single aspect of yourself – that part of yourself on Facebook or Twitter.

As usual I want to make a disclaimer that I am not promoting a sentiment that I feel social networking is bad. I use it a lot myself and get great enjoyment out of it. But I want us all to be aware of the psychological nature of our interaction with it. To use psychological insight to understand ourselves better through how we use social networking.

Jung encouraged us to “individuate” – to become bigger than our persona. Winnicott wished that we didn’t have to defend our true selves so much – that we can be more than we feel we ought to present to the world. Can social networking help us to do that? Or is it, in its current state at least, too limiting to allow the subtlety and complexity of our greater selves to burst through?

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References:

Jung, C.G. (1953). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Winnicott, D.W. (1956). On Transference. In International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 37. Pp. 386-388



 

 

How does social media affect (or reflect) the basic ways in which we understand ourselves and others? One question seems to resurface again and again and that is whether the development of “Web 2.0” is changing us in some way, or whether it is simply a technological development in which the same old psychological traits express themselves differently. There are a variety of psychological concepts that we can examine with regard to their relationship to social media, but in this blog post, I will concentrate on two: the ego and the self. Before defining these terms, it’s important to have a quick look at why we are asking these questions in the first place.

Social media has penetrated into the social and interpersonal lives our connected-up society rapidly and continues to grow. Facebook alone reports that it has more than 800 million active users.  Unsubstantiated reports across Twitter inform me that it is fast approaching one billion. According to the website internetworldstats Internet use is just over 2 billion (just over 30% of the population), which means that for those in the world who are accessing the Internet, those using Facebook alone is approaching half of all Internet users.  There must be something very compelling about social networking to achieve such rapid growth and population penetration.

Psychology has long been interested in what motivates people. The idea is that if we can understand primary human motivation, we can better understand the choices that we make. The concept of what lay behind human motivation has changed a great deal over time: and continues to be hotly debated. Though there continue to be debates in psychodynamic theory, most psychodynamic clinicians and theorists believe that the drive to relate to others (and be related to) is a central human motivator; we are born with the will to relate to others, and this continues throughout life and is one of our most important (and complex) tasks.

The phrase “social networking” itself contains the basic elements of relating and technology; the technology is the “network” and the social is the human bit. We use technology to do human things: to relate. So what do ego and self have to do with it?

If we understand these terms with psychological precision, we will see that they are related, but different concepts. The word “self” is the wider concept, and is inclusive of everything that comes together to create a self; conscious and unconscious; body and mind; cognition, feelings, wishes, dreams, desires; both the mundane and the spiritual. The “ego” is more discrete.  It is the part of us that identifies as “I” or “me” – it is the most conscious aspect of the self, our conscious “identity” how we understand ourselves; it is also the part of us that defends us from slights and hurts. It is what used to be called the homunculus — that is, like the little person who sits in our heads and peers out our eyes to experience the world, the part of me that feels like “me”.

The ego is a small part of the much larger “self”, though it frequently likes to think it is more than it is – it likes to maintain beliefs about itself (either positive or negative ones: usually somewhat distorted ones). Freud’s conception of the ego continues to be a valid one, that its main job is to negotiate between our internal unconscious, and the external world; it tries to keep us safe, but not always in the most productive ways.

What, then, is the connection between these psychological concepts and social media? My own thoughts on this matter continue to develop, but I am coming to believe that social media comes to the service of the ego (possibly at the expense of the self) and the ego interacts with the social network as an extension of the ways in which our individual egos negotiate the world in any case. The ego likes to maintain familiar patterns, and that’s not always in the service of the self. The self seeks recognition from others (full, honest, authentic, and non-judging recognition) – the ego, however, likes its recognition to be conditional upon its own expectations and desires.

If we think of the ego as an estate agent, its three most important needs are “recognition, recognition, recognition.” When we think about social networking, we can see how well it is created in the service of recognition.

Here are just a few examples of ego recognition by social networks:

Facebook

  • Facebook
    • Number of friends
    • Number of comments on a post
    • Number of “likes” received on a post or status update
    • Inclusions onto lists, groups, events, etc.
  • Twitter
    • Number of followers
    • Number of mentions
    • Number of re-tweets
    • Inclusion onto lists
  • Other

These examples are really just the beginning (and notice how many of them rest upon simple numerics), but it is easy to see just what a cosy fit there is between the need for ego-recognition and the way in which social media can meet or deny it.

Transactional Analysis has a wonderful term it uses for moments of ego recognition. They are called strokes; every time your ego receives recognition, it purrs just a little, as if it’s been stroked. The ego needs strokes to keep it going, and when it doesn’t get the strokes it thinks it needs, it can feel pretty bad.

While strokes feel good, they can be trouble because strokes can only give very limited recognition. Young children work out very early how to get strokes from their parents – or to be more precise, their developing egos learn this. The ego, in its desire for recognition uses this knowledge to get more strokes from the parent, often developing what is called a “false self.” What might be called the “true” or “authentic” self (debatable concepts, of course), is in danger of being left unrecognised.

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1986) devised this term “false self” to describe what the young ego creates to cope with the world, “a defence designed to protect the true self” (33).  Interestingly, he goes on to say this, long before the development of the social network:

Society is easily taken in by the false-self organisation, and has to pay heavily for this.  The false self . . . though a successful defence, is not an aspect of health (33) . . . each person has a polite or socialized self, and also a personal private self that is not available except in intimacy. This is what is commonly found, and we could call it normal (66).

I include this quote because it is important to recognise that a false-self is “normal” though it’s not always in the best service of the greater self because what becomes “recognised” is only a part of the whole, and that part is engineered in a particular way by the ego.

To be clear, the argument I am making here supports one side of the question I posed at the start of this article, that is in this case at least, social networking appears to be operating on the same lines as anything else: simply another arena in which the ego can acquire recognition – falsely or authentically – in the same fashion that a given individual’s ego would work anyway in the absence of Web 2.0.

However, I would take it one step further. The two dimensional way in which the ego can measure itself (on the number of likes, comments, followers, etc.) is open to a sort of “object abuse.” That is, the nature of the social network, in many ways, aids and abets a superficial way of judging both others and the self.

Lanier (2011) aptly states, “you  have to find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself” (ix). And I think this is a poignant statement. The conclusion here is not the social networking is essentially superficial (though it may be, I haven’t decided yet), or even that it is essentially a “bad thing.” The concern is that many may be thinking they are being themselves when they are sharing themselves. This danger is possibly even greater for the younger among us who as Palfrey and Gasser (2008) term “Digital Natives”:

From the perspective of the Digital Native, identity is not broken up into online and offline identities, or personal and social identities. Because these forms of identity exist simultaneously and are so closely linked to one another, Digital Natives almost never distinguish between the online and offline versions of themselves (20).

I would take this one step further. The “identities” that Palfrey and Gasser are referring to, I would make a bit more precise, and call them “egos.” The online and offline egos are versions of something greater: they are aspects of the larger “self”. The fundamental question that I will be returning to is whether or not these versions of self, which I am calling ego – inhibit or enhance the development of authentic “selving”. Can Web 2.0 enable us better to be ourselves?

Lanier opens his book You are not a Gadget with the proviso, “This book is not antitechnology in any sense. It is prohuman (ix).” I agree with his position wholeheartedly, which is why my continued research will continue to question the ways in which social networking can both inhibit and enhance the operation of the self, and not just the machinations of the ego.

Would you like to discuss this further? You can do that here: Social Media Research Facebook Page

References:

Lanier, J. (2011). You are not a Gadget.  London: Penguin.

Palfrey, J. And Gasser U.  (2008).  Born Digital; understanding the first generation of digital natives.  New York: Basic Books.

Winnicott, D.W. (1986). Home is Where we Start From: essays by a psychoanalyst. London: Penguin Books.




 

 

We Need to Talk about Kevin (with Melanie Klein)

If there is anyone to be given credit for completely decimating the idea that mother and child are supposed to be star-crossed lovers blindly enmeshed in a warm glow, it would be psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.   Author Lionel Shriver is getting contemporary credit for illustrating this in her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, as is Lynne Ramsay who directed the film: and Tilda Swinton who so beautifully performed in it.

When it comes to psychoanalytic film analysis it used to be Freud who led the pack (can you spot the Oedipus complex? Hitchcock can) though nowadays people utilise French theorists like Deleuze and Lacan.  The application of Klein to such media isn’t so widespread, but that’s a shame.  She has a lot to offer: especially for a film like this which is veritably leaking Klein all over the place.  Here are some initial thoughts on a Kleinian analysis of this film.

Klein herself uses cultural artefacts to illustrate her angle on psychoanalytic theory quite a bit, notably her article “Infantile anxiety-situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse” (1929).  In this she uses an opera by Ravel, in which a child has a tantrum and rampages a room after which the room phantasmagorically comes to life; teapots stoves, chairs and sofas come alive terrifying the child in retribution.  She uses this operatic scene to illustrate the depth and intensity of a child’s sadistic phantasies that emerge from both young children’s wish to destroy and their fears of being destroyed:

“Smashing things, tearing them up, using the tongs as a sword – these represent the other weapons of the child’s primary sadism, which employs his teeth nails, muscles and so on” (437).

What is the child so intent on destroying and why?

For Klein, as it was for Freud, this involves the trauma of the “primal scene”: that moment when the child becomes aware of the sexual union of the parents.  This can be experienced as both a great violence between the two of them (as the child doesn’t understand it) and it can promote intense feelings of envy for being left out of the parent’s union.  For Freud, this came at about the fourth or fifth year of life, at the culmination of the Oedipus complex, for Klein, it is much earlier.  In boys, Klein states:

“. . . the dread of castration by the father is connected with a very special situation, which . . . proves to be the earliest anxiety-situation of all . . . the attack on the mother’s body, which is timed psychologically at the zenith of the sadistic phase, implies also the struggle with the father’s penis in the mother”  (438).

Now this might all seem a bit anachronistic and over the top, both the themes of castration and the primal scene – but anyone who has seen We Need to Talk About Kevin will find essences of these very things throughout (there are spoilers to follow, so quit now if you haven’t watched it yet).

Concepts like “castration anxiety” and “primal scene” need to be understood metaphorically.  After all, We Need to Talk About Kevin is not really about castration in the classical sense.  If anything, Kevin has no castration anxiety and this is indeed what makes him so dangerous: he is very pontent, and nevermore so than in his witnessing of the primal scenes.

Primal scenes and Oedipal themes that are  apparent throughout this film.  There are in fact two primal scenes, both of which are witnessed by the young Kevin.  There is a tricky third where Eva catches Kevin masturbating (a reverse primal scene) and instead of the expected response of his shame, we get a perverse pride mixed with his obvious pleasure in exhibitionism.  In all these scenes it is as if we cannot be in Eva’s head without Kevin being there too — with the incestuous undertones.

Throughout the film we are tied tightly to Eva’s internal narrative; we are too tightly embraced by it, it is claustrophobic.  The first scene creates a sort of trompe l’oeil where smashed and smashing tomatoes create the red motif that we will come back to again and again.  Red suffuses the film (not to dissimilarly from another mother/child thriller, Don’t Look Now) and we come back to it again and again.  The film itself rotates around Eva’s never ending challenge of ridding the front of her house of the red paint that introduces us to the narrative.

Because we are in Eva’s head, it is difficult to make any objective judgments about what is going on.  Is the connection between Kevin and Eva, when Kevin is ill, a figment of Eva’s imagination, her hope that there was some modicum of love in the relationship, or did it really happen?  His behaviour is objectively psychopathic and the accusation throughout the film is that Eva didn’t love him enough.  From Eva’s perspective, Kevin could never receive love; perhaps from Kevin, that she could never give it.

Klein’s brilliance lies in the fluid ways in which things are both taken in (introjected) and thrown out (projected) between people.  Clearly throughout the film destructive phantasies are shared between the two principle characters.  Kevin was produced as a “love child” yet Eva’s resentment of his presence, even as a foetus, is apparent from the start.  Were her anxieties projected into him from this very stage?  His rageful screaming is obviously projected back when he’s a newborn.

In the most literally Kleinian way Kevin employs his own faeces into his sadism.

In Kleinian terms,  “ . . . defaecation may be an initial resource of the ego for generating phantasies of exclusion of hostile internal objects . .. which are then represented mentally as an unconscious phantasy of expelling a bad object” (Hinshelwood 1991, 303).  In other words the child symbolically puts all the bad stuff in his shit, which is externalised.  In this case, Kevin projects the shit, literally, at his mother, which provokes a violent physical response.

This is an attack which at the same time promotes some sort of détente between them, sort of a clearing of the air (what Kevin will later call Eva’s most “honest” moment), while at the same time making Eva vulnerable to blackmail and manipulation by the precocious boy.   She becomes complicit, somehow, which is a major motif within the film.

Throughout Kevin remains sadistic, particularly towards his mother, who ultimately reaps the greatest punishment of all: surviving her son’s actions and thereby becoming a magnet for other people’s projected “shit” throughout the film.  She also becomes his only sustaining relationship

Ultimately, Kevin’s Oedipal desires come to fruition.  Son gets mum in the end, with everybody else removed from the picture.  Eva is left to struggle with her own guilt (washing the red from the front of her home) and her confusion, the underlying “was it me?” question.

The ray of hope in this film is Kevin’s final statement, in which he says that he thought he once knew why he did what he did, but does not anymore.  This, for Klein, would be a movement from the “paranoid/schizoid” position, where the world is split into clear ideas of good and bad (and the self can be idealised) to the “depressive position” where things get a bit more confusing (both good and bad are aspects of the same thing).  Confusing is a higher developmental position, in fact, than assurity.

However, Klein does not wrap up this film for us, there are many questions to be asked and worked through.  We need to talk about Kevin with Melanie Klein to get some answers.  And she’d be the one to talk to, as this was the most “Kleinian” movie I have seen in a long time.

—–

Klein, Melanie.  (1929) “Infantile anxiety-situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.  10: 436-443.

Hinshelwood, R. D.  1991.  A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought.  London: Free Association Books.