Welcome, everyone.
You know the feeling when you want to recall someone's name or a specific word, and it's on the tip of your tongue. And yet, you cannot remember. You vaguely recall consonants or vowels or some syllables, and you thrash about and you flail and you are stressed.
But no, it doesn't come to you. You can't remember the name. You can't remember the word. You can't remember the phrase.
And you're observing yourself in this process. It's as if you're standing aside, looking at yourself, trying this feat of memory unsuccessfully.
Science has just discovered something amazing.
If you hug yourself, the impacts, physiological impacts, medical impacts, psychological impacts, are identical to if you are being hugged by another person.
So let me repeat this because it's an astounding fact.
If someone hugs you, it has the same effect, biologically, physiologically, psychologically, absolutely the same effects as when you hug yourself.
It's as if someone is hugging you when you hug yourself, someone who is not yourself.
And when you're trying to remember this word or this name and you keep failing, it's as if you're observing yourself failing.
It's as if there's two of you, two of you, not one. It's as if all of us have a self and an observer of the self.
We constantly observe ourselves. And this is known as self-awareness.
Think about this phrase. Self-awareness. We are aware of the self.
But wait a minute. Who is doing the awareness? Who is it? Who is aware of the self?
Clearly there's a second entity here. There's the self and there is something or someone who is aware of the self.
Again, we come across this duality, this dichotomy. There are two of us. Not one. There are two of us.
And what happens when you say to yourself, I'm so ashamed, I feel so guilty, I should have behaved differently, or I did really well, who are you talking to? Who are you talking to? Who is making these observations?
When you say, I am so ashamed, who is the person who informs you that you're ashamed?
Again, we have an observer and we have a self in a process known as introspection, looking inwards.
What I would like to suggest in this lecture is a bit revolutionary. I would like to suggest that what we conceive of as personality is actually the observer.
I would like to suggest that the self is not the personality and that what we call personality is an outer layer, a shell, an observer function that observes the self and then conceives itself, becomes self-aware, and then acts in highly specific ways according to the information that it glins, it gathers about the self.
So what I would like to suggest in this lecture, based on the work of many eminent scholars and scientists, is that there are two structures in us, not one.
Because hitherto we believed that there was only the self, or only the ego. There was only one core identity.
But I would like to suggest that there are two, always two.
There is the self, which is the core, which is who you are, which is your essence, and then there is an observer of the self, someone who observes the self.
And this observer is the personality.
Now this whole process of becoming self-aware, observing yourself, analyzing yourself, making sense of yourself, criticizing yourself, maybe praising yourself, being happy with yourself or being unhappy with yourself, this whole process of introspection and interaction with yourself, which properly put, we should not call it interaction because it is not inter, it's not with someone else, it's with yourself.
So it should be called intra-action. Interaction is with other people. Intra-action is between you and yourself, between your personality and yourself.
So in this process, we use something called metacognition.
Metacognition is another word for self-awareness, but self-awareness that generates behavior.
So metacognition involves observing yourself, realizing what's happening, making sense of your behaviors, of your attitudes, of your thoughts, of your emotions, of everything, and then having created a theory about yourself at any given moment, deciding to act and to behave in order to control some aspects of yourself and your personality.
So metacognition involves action, action of controlling, especially controlling your cognitive processes, your thoughts.
You're beginning to see a very complex picture.
We are used to think of ourselves as a unitary entity.
When I ask you, who are you, you would say, I am Marian, I am Sam. It's as if there's only one Marian and one Sam. I am.
But that's not the truth at all.
There is Sam and there is another entity that is observing Sam all the time and analyzing Sam and making sense of some.
And then there is a process known as metacognition where the information gathered, the information harvested by the observer, is used to modify cognition, used to modify cognitive processes, especially thinking.
It seems, therefore, that our thoughts, the way we think, and the contents of our thoughts, are determined not completely independently, not completely autonomously.
It seems that many of our thoughts, many of our cognitive processes, are determined by self-awareness, by self-observation, by self-reference.
Many of our thoughts have nothing to do with reality, nothing to do with the environment, nothing to do with other people, even when we think that they do.
Even when we believe that our thoughts have to do with other people or even when we think that they do, even when we believe that our thoughts have to do with other people or with reality or with some assignment and some task, or with the future, or even when we believe that our thoughts are like small independent animals that suddenly rise and take over, the reality is that many of our thoughts are the result of an internal dialogue, an internal dialogue between the self, this core identity, and the observer, the personality in my work.
So many of our thoughts have to do with us, with ourselves, with our personalities, not with anything external to us.
We could generalize and say that we spend most of our lives inside our minds, arguing with ourselves, talking to ourselves, criticizing ourselves, analyzing, evaluating, appraising, thinking, planning, appraising, appraising, thinking, planning, everything happens inside the mind.
It's a totally enclosed universe.
And within this universe, there is us and there is the observer. There is the self and there is the personality which observes the self.
And the dialogue between these two, the self and the personality or the observer, this dialogue is what we call our psychological life, our internal life, our cognitive process.
This is it, this internal dialogue, actually.
Now there are many other voices.
Inside our minds, inside our heads, there are many other voices. They are known as introjects.
There is the voice of your mother, the voice of your father, the voice of influential peers, the voice of teachers, voices of teachers. There are many voices there.
And all these voices are competing and all of them are talking some of the time. And all of them react when they are needed. And some of these voices create coalitions.
For example, your conscience, your conscience is a coalition of voices, especially parental voices, and your conscience tells you what you're doing is right, what you're doing is wrong, you should not behave this way, there will be consequences or it's morally not justified, etc.
So your conscience is a coalition, a constellation of such voices.
But all these voices are at the service of the personality. All these introjects are either in favor of the personality or they attack the personality. They are either friendly or hostile.
And so the personality makes use of these introjects in order to make sense and decipher and understand the self.
It's as if the introjects were soldiers, the personality was an army, and this army wants to conquer the self, wants to make the self a known territory, a colony if you wish.
This constant dialogue, this constant conflict in effect between the self and the personality is at the core of many of our attitudes, motivations, behaviors and so on, and we will come to it a bit later in this lecture.
Now, everything I'm telling you in this lecture, some of it is mainstream, orthodoxy, the accepted wisdom, and some of it is cutting-edge research, the most recent studies, scholarship and research, and we are beginning to change our view of the internal dynamics within human beings.
We are beginning to regard concepts like personality and self differently, very differently. And I'm going to introduce you to some of this thinking today.
But before we go there, before we go to the study of personality and the study of the self, here's something to consider.
The minute you develop self-awareness, the minute you become aware that you have a self, the minute you develop the observer, the minute there is someone who is observing you and telling you you exist, there is you.
That minute, you break apart from the world, you divorce the world, that minute you become a separate entity, an island.
So when the child begins to develop self-perception, self-conception, self-realization, self-awareness, self-consciousness. When the child begins to separate itself from mother, when the child begins to understand, comprehend, experience, feel that mother is not him and he is not mother. These are two separate entities.
The minute this separateness begins to happen, of course, the child becomes an island. The child becomes an entity, an element in reality that is separate from other elements, that is distinct from other elements.
In short, the minute you become self-aware, you become aware of the existence of other people. If you are not aware of your own existence, then you cannot be aware of the existence of other people.
Because who is doing the observation? When you notice that other people exist, who is doing the noticing? When you realize that other people exist, who is doing the realizing? When you say, yeah, this room is full of people. Who is it that is saying this?
Yourself. Yourself is doing this.
And so without a self, if you do not possess a self, you are unable to tell the separate existence of external objects of other people.
What I'm telling you is that the minute you become self-aware, the minute you develop metacognition, the minute you begin to observe yourself, to introspect, at that minute, at that very minute, you also realize that other people exist. You realize that you are only one of many elements, of many people, of many objects, of many entities that together make up reality.
The minute you become self-aware, self-conscious, reality breaks apart. And from a unitary entity, it becomes a multiplicity of entities.
That minute that you have developed metacognition, you also develop social cognition. You begin to realize and accept the separate external existence of other people and you become a social animal. You're beginning to socialize.
The emergence of the self and the ability to observe the self and the ability to become aware of the existence of the self within you, these are preconditions for social functioning. Social cognition and metacognition are flip sides of the exact same coin.
Now when I say social cognition, it involves perceiving other people, thinking about other people, interpreting the behaviors of other people, categorizing other people, and judging other people.
At the same time, you apply this criteria to yourself. When you perceive other people, it's because you perceive yourself as separate and distinct to these people. You are not these people, and they are not you. So you perceive yourself, the very minute you perceive them.
Similarly, when you judge other people, you apply the same criteria to yourself, and you're judging yourself as well.
Typically when you judge someone, you say, they misbehave unlike me. They have misbehaved unlike me.
So you are judging yourself at the same time.
When you categorize people, when you put them in boxes, when you classify them, you're classifying and categorizing yourself as well.
Everything you do with other people and everything you do to other people, and every way you think about other people, and every way you analyze other people, and every way you perceive other people, automatically, instantaneously, unconsciously is applied to you.
That shows that the same processes are simultaneously in operation with regards to yourself and with regards to others.
It is not true that you can think of other people without thinking about yourself.
In other words, it is not true that you could be objective. There is no such thing as objectivity.
Because the minute you think about another person, that very split second, you are thinking about yourself in the same terms.
And this triggers you. This provokes in your all kinds of resistances, defenses, memories, etc.
So objectivity is a myth. We, as human observers, as human judges, we can never ever be objective.
Because we are unable to contemplate, to consider other people without at the very same moment contemplating and considering ourselves, our own social behavior and so on.
So when we interact with other people, we engage in a series of behaviors, a series of cognitive processes that apply to us as well as to them.
For example, attribution theory. We attribute to other people. We attribute to them.
For example, attribution theory. We attribute to other people. We attribute to them motivations. We attribute to them attitudes. We attribute to them traits.
Here's the fact. You can never enter another person's mind. You can never really know what is happening in another person's mind.
I would even say more. You can never know that another person has a mind. You cannot prove the existence of a mind in another person.
You are totally dependent on self-reporting. You're totally dependent on what the other person is telling you, and you are totally dependent on observations of the other person's behavior.
So when you want to understand another person, when you want to communicate with another person, when you want to make sense of another person, when you want to judge another person, when you want to analyze another person, interpret another person, any interaction with another person, you need to observe the behaviors of that person. You need to ask that person questions.
And then based on the reporting of the other person, based on the self-reporting, and based on the observations of his or her behaviors, you create a theory, a theory of attributions.
So if you see someone crying, that's a behavior. Someone is crying, that's a behavior.
So you go to that person and you say, why are you crying?
And the person says, I am sad because I just broke up with my girlfriend.
So now you have two bits of information. You have a behavioral observation, the person is crying, and you have self-reporting. The person told you that they are sad because they just broke up with a girlfriend.
So now you have these two bits of information. And what you do, you create a theory. This is known as an attribution theory.
You say, okay, probably this person is sad. Probably this person wants to reconcile with his girlfriend. Probably and probably and probably.
So you create a probability theory of the other person. What is this theory built on?
Your own personal experience. Your own traits, your own prejudices, your own cognitive processes, your own emotions, your own history.
What you're doing is you're projecting yourself into the other person. You see yourself in the other person.
You have no access to the other person's mind. Maybe he's lying. There's no way to make sure of that.
So what you do instead, you attribute to the other person yourself. You become that other person. And this is what is called empathy.
Empathy is when you become another person by projecting yourself onto the other person because you have limited information and you don't know how true it is. Maybe it's not.
So this is an example of social cognition.
But social cognition involves, of course, metacognition.
In order to attribute to the other person, emotions, thoughts, intentions, motivations. In order to do that, you need to be aware of your own emotions, of your own cognitions, of your own motivations, of your own attitudes.
You need to have metacognition and then you're projected to the other person and it becomes social cognition.
We could say that social cognition is simply the projection of metacognition into the intersubjective space, the space between you and another person.
You engage in metacognition, self-awareness, self-observation, then you take this information about yourself and you catapult it, you throw it at the other person across the space between you and it becomes social cognition.
So that's one example.
How you perceive the other person also crucially depends on how you perceive yourself. How you gauge the other person's influence depends on your reaction to the other person.
So again, you are constantly involved. There is no impersonal observation. There's no such thing as objective observation. There's no such thing as I can look at the other person and I can be totally unbiased. I will have no prejudices. I would just gather information.
It's no such thing. Any interaction with another person involves you, crucially, and you are the key, because all your interactions with other people are actually interactions with yourself. You're just projecting yourself.
That's the meaning of social cognition in effect.
And when you judge other people's morality, moral cognition, processes of moral cognition, when you judge their morality, you judge the spontaneity, you judge how attractive they are, you judge, whenever you judge them regarding any dimension, you're actually making self judgments.
And this leads us to very interesting outcomes.
Because if what I'm saying is right, and it seems to be, this is what we know nowadays, this is the contemporary knowledge, if what I'm saying is right, and whenever you interact with another person, you're actually interacting with yourself. And whenever you attribute something to another person, you're projecting yourself onto the other person.
This allows you to bond with the other person. This allows you to create friendships, to fall in love, to collaborate, to create a society, to work together, to set common goals and so on.
The glue of society, the thing that holds society together and drives it forward, is this metacognition converted into social cognition.
I will tell you about a famous experiment with monkeys.
Monkeys feature very prominently in psychology. Psychologists seem to have an affinity with monkeys and with students, because they conduct experiments on monkeys and experiments on students.
So a famous experiment with vervet monkeys, type of small monkey.
When members of a clan, a family, let's say, of monkeys are attacked by another family. So there's members of one family, members of the other family, and members of the second family attack the first family.
The members of the first family will counter attack the second family, even though they're all monkeys.
And theoretically, they don't have social cognition or higher level cognitive processes and functions.
They absolutely bond, they identify each other within social groups, and they act accordingly. They are aware of themselves as members of a group.
So to belong to a group, to act within a collective, to share the same beliefs and values, to be a member of a nation, a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, all these functions depend on self-awareness, self-perception.
When you're a member of a group, you're telling yourself, I am a member of a group.
In other words, your knowledge comes not from the group to you, but from you to the group. The direction is from you to the group.
Metacognition, I, and I'm observing myself as a member of the group, social cognition, from meta to social.
Okay, you remember that we started this lecture when we were all much younger and I mentioned that there is a self which is supposed to be a core, some nucleus, your essence, who you are, that's the self.
And then there is someone who is observing the self.
How do I know that?
Because you keep using sentences like myself. Yes, you keep using the word myself.
So when you use the word myself, when you use the word I, there is an observer. Someone is observing the self.
So who is doing the observation?
I told you that I'm going to propose that the entity that is doing the observation of the self is what we call the personality.
Now, this is a mine field. It's a mine field because there is a huge debate in psychology regarding the concept, the very concept of personality.
The mainstream view of personality, what we teach at universities, what you can find in textbooks, and I would say the common sense perception of personality, the layman perception of personality, is that the personality is something that never changes. It never changes. It's enduring.
And it's a bit like a collection, you know, like a DVD collection or a book collection. It's a collection of all kinds of things. Experiences, memories, traits.
So there is this huge jumble, huge collection. And once it's finished, the collection is finished at age 21, at age 25, whenever the case may be, once the collection is finished, it is stable, it is permanent, it is enduring, it's immutable, it's unchangeable.
You're the same when you are 21 as when you are 41, and you're the same when you're 41 as when you're 61. In all these ages throughout the lifespan, you have the same personality.
That's why you believe that you are the same person.
If you ask me, I'm 64, 63 and a half, and you ask me, am I the same Sam Vaknin that I used to be at age 40? I would say, essentially, yeah. Essentially I'm the same person.
Of course, in the legal system, in the legal system, there is the belief that you are the same person all the time.
For example, if you murder someone when you are 20 years old, you murder someone, and then they catch you, they find you out when you're 60, you will go to prison. You will go to prison. You have murdered the other person when you were 20, and yet you go to prison when you're 60, because there is the underlying assumption that you're the same person.
Otherwise, it's not fair. If you're not the same person, it's not fair to punish you when you are 60 years old for something you have done when you were 20 years old, if you're not the same person.
But the assumption, of course, is that you are the same person.
Now, let me use a metaphor to kind of explain what I'm talking about.
Imagine that you have an apartment. Okay? You have an apartment.
And then you change the furniture within the apartment. You move the kitchen to the other side. You move the living room to the other side to put the television in the bedroom. You change all the furniture. Everything internally changes. Is it still the same apartment? Yes? It is the same apartment. Okay?
What about if you build walls? You build a wall in the middle of the apartment and you divide it in two parts. Is it still the same apartment? Yes, it is the same apartment. In the catastrophe, in the registry of real estate, it is the same apartment. You would pay the same taxes, you're still the owner of that apartment. Even though the furniture have changed, there are new walls, it's been divided. The internal space is not the same, but it's still the same apartment.
This is the conception of personality. Of course, you have new experiences, you change, you mature, you develop new beliefs and new values, you have new relationships. Things happen to you, of course, but you are still the same person. You are still the same apartment. Even if the mental furniture in your mind was moved, even if the furniture in your mind has been moved around, you're still the same person. Even if you develop a wall, for example, you get very sick and the doctor is forced to amputate your hands, for example. Even when you are without your hands and without your legs, you're still the same person.
So there is this conception that personality is something stable across the lifespan, enduring and essentially, in essence, unchangeable, this entity.
First of all, I would like to point out that this is a confusion between personality and self. I think when people talk about the personality, they actually mean the self. The self can be described as this core, this nucleus, this essence that doesn't change, not the personality.
Okay, so that's observation number one.
Observation number two is that people who work with people, for example, therapists, psychologists, clinicians, they know that this picture is not true. They know it's not true.
People are not like a pond, you know, a lake. People are not like a lake. I'm right now in Ohid. There's Lake Ohid. People are not like Lake Ohid. They are not fixed in time. They are not with stable boundaries. They are not the same body of water.
People are much more like a river. A river has banks and a river has a trajectory, of course.
But you can never enter the same river twice because the water is not the same.
So there's a flow of water. The content changes, the content of the river changes. Not the contour, not the shape, I mean, rarely the shape, but the content definitely changes every second, minute.
So there was this saying in ancient Greece, Panta Rhei, you cannot enter the same river twice. Everything changes, everything flows.
This is a much more accurate description of human psychology than the Lake Ohrid description.
We change all the time in very fundamental ways. Our content changes all the time.
And so there's a new school in a relatively new school in psychology. And I belong to this school.
You don't have to accept my view, of course. I'm just presenting to you various options.
I belong to this school and this new school in psychology says that actually there is no core identity. There is no stable nucleus.
But what we have, we have something called self-states or sub-personalities.
Let me give you a comparison. Imagine that there is a director and the director is shooting a movie. And in the movie, there are ten roles, ten protagonists, ten characters in the movie. So you have ten actors, ten actors and actresses playing the roles, playing the characters.
It's the same in the new theory of sub-personalities or ego states or self-states, it's the same perception.
The idea is this. We have a group of reactive patterns. We have a group of, I would say, configurations, a group of ways to put things together. A group of algorithms.
And when the environment changes, one of the algorithms that is best suited to the environment takes over. One self-state that has the skills, the tendencies, the capacities to cope with a specific environment, this self-state takes over because this self-state is best adopted. This self-state is a positive adaptation.
But in this new theory, which was first proposed by Philip Bromberg, in this new theory, the self-states are simply collections. They are collections of traits, collections of adaptive strategies, collections of coping mechanisms, collections of cognitions and emotions, and so on.
So there are these curated collections and these collections are activated according to the need. As the environment changes, different collections are activated.
So we have self-states, a little like in a kaleidoscope. We have self-states. And whenever the environment changes, another self-state takes over and comes to the fore and the other self-states are deactivated. They become dormant.
This is a second view of personality.
So remember, the first view, the personality or more precisely the self, is stable across the lifespan, is enduring, is immutable, unchangeable, etc. That's the first view.
The second view, there's no such thing as a self. There's no such thing as a personality. There's just algorithms. Algorithms that react to changing environments.
And the algorithms make use of resources, like skills and memories and experiences and traits and so.
So there is a database of skills, a database of resources, a database of memories, and the various algorithms, the various self-states, the various ego states, the various sub-personalities, they access these common databases in order to perform well in a changing environment, in an environment that has changed.
And this is the process of adaptation.
Personality, in both views, in both schools, the personality is the sum total of adjustments to life. Personality is comprised of adaptations and maladaptations.
The ways we adapted to an environment that presents new challenges all the time, these ways could be positive. In other words, our adaptations can be helpful to survival, or we can adapt in the wrong way.
So this will be a maladaptation. This kind of negative adaptation would make it more difficult for us to survive and to obtain positive outcomes, to be self-efficacious.
I mentioned the common databases that are accessible to all the self-states. And I also mentioned that the classical view of personality or the classical view of the self is that once the self is integrated, once the process of the formation of the self, the constellation of the self is finished, the self doesn't change anymore.
So these are the two views.
But both views agree that the personality, whether it changes or whether it is self-states or whichever way you look at the personality, all these theories agree that the personality is, or the self-state, is comprised of traits, and we will discuss traits a bit later, interests, drives, values, and beliefs, self-concept, self-perception, self-awareness, in other words, metacognition and the observer function, abilities, emotional patterns.
This tells you that personalities or self-states depends which school you adhere to, or the self.
For example, in Jung's work, it's the self.
So this tells you that the self is highly complex and that it is dynamic.
Even when the ideathat the self is unchangeable, immutable, enduring, stable across the lifespan, even in this school of thought, the self is dynamic.
Because there's no question that we need to constantly adapt to an environment that constantly changes. And the only way to do this is if we are dynamic.
So the self is integrated, but is capable of responding in a variety of ways to a variety of environments.
Which is why I personally think that the self-state model is much more realistic, because there is a tension, there is an inherent tension between an integrated, consolidated, rigid self and the ability of such a self to react on the fly dynamically to changing environments.
If the self is rigid and stable across the lifespan, how is it able to change in order to react to a changing environment?
I think there's a contradiction here. I think there's a big problem here.
And I think the self-states approach solves this issue, this apparent contradiction.
Our internal space, whether you call it a self, whether you call it a personality, whether you accept what I say that the personality is an observer of the self, whether you don't accept it, whichever way you go, there is no question that our internal environment is the inevitable outcome and confluence of a series of parameters, a series of elements.
We start with genetics, the hereditary blueprint of who we are.
And so there is this set of instructions encoded in the DNA of mother and father.
And these DNAs, when they combine in a very long and intricate process, they produce a blueprint and the cells get to work. And you become, you're created through heredity and genetics.
There is a huge debate, which is still very far from resolved whether everything you are, every aspect of you, every dimension of you, every nook and every cranny, every single square centimeter, everything from the color of your eyes to your character, if all of this is encoded in the DNA or not?
So some people say yes, some people say no. Some people are totally materialistic, so they belong to the school of materialism and they say everything is in the DNA, everything that you will ever be, including your personality, including your personality disorders, including your mental health or mental illness, including your behavioral choices, including your social functioning, including your eye color, including the mate you will select. Everything is foretold, preordained and determined by the DNA. Everything is there. One day, 100 years from now, a thousand years from now, we will be able to read the DNA so thoroughly and so profoundly that we will be able to predict totally the life of an individual. That's the materialistic school.
The vitalist school says that the DNA is just a template, and that it is the environment that causes parts of the DNA to express and suppresses other parts of the DNA.
So it is the interplay between nature and nurture, between genes and environment that this interplay creates the individual.
And then you have the body. The body is the outcome, mostly of heredity and genetics.
Gradually, as you age, the environment interferes, and the body becomes the playground of the clash between nature and nurture.
There is the constitution. Your constitution is your set of tendencies, the group of predispositions, your proclivities, your predilections, your inclinations, your potentials.
This is your constitution. You physically mature with age.
And all these feed into who you are. All these constitute important elements of our identity.
Some schools in psychology tend to underestimate and undervalue the role of the body. They remove the body, they eliminate the body from their description of the human being. That's a serious mistake, of course.
We know that many psychological processes, cognitive and emotional, manifest through the body, are encoded in the body and can be transformed by manipulating the body.
One example is trauma.
Trauma is deeply encoded in the body and by manipulating specific parts of the body, for example the eyes, you can reduce the impact of trauma and even completely reverse post-traumatic stress disorder.
So the body is very critical. The body is what you start with. These are the starting conditions. This is the equipment you have.
Marianne here has a camera. If he doesn't turn the camera on, then it's just a piece of equipment.
So when we're born, we have the body, and then we are exposed to the environment.
There is early training, there is interactions with parental figures, there's identification.
We identify with parental figures, with role models, we imitate them, there is modeling in social cognitive theory, we socialize, we become social creatures, we learn how to behave.
We have sexual scripts, we have social scripts, we acculturate, we adopt the values of our culture and society, the mores.
We enter a role. We begin to play all kinds of roles.
For example, we play the role of a woman or a girl. We play the role of a boy.
So role play, it becomes very important.
And you could say, taking all this into account, you could say that in a way the personality is a kind of performance.
It's like you're performing. It's performative.
And if you agree with that, then you begin to realize that many of the things you are used to think of as who you are, are actually performance. You're just performing.
For example, you are used to think of yourself as a woman.
But this is just performance. You're a female, but to be a woman is to adopt a social role.
You're acting as a woman. You're performing as a woman or a man.
These are roles.
I go much further in my work and I suggest that the entire personality is just a performance, not the self.
Again, make a distinction between the self and the personality.
But the personality, because it has a social dimension, because it involves metacognition and social cognition, the personality is just a performance. It's just a role. It's performative.
You learn how to be a man, but you also learn how to be Sam. You learn how to be a woman, but you also learn how to be Nina.
You learn how to be who you are.
You get many cues, many feedbacks, the environment molds you. You get many reinforcements, negative and positive.
You are punished. If you misbehave, you're rewarded if you behave.
Gradually, this shapes you, this molds you, and you become, poof, who you are.
And from that moment on, you perform.
And when you perform in a way that runs contra to your expectations of yourself and society's expectations of you, there are mechanisms inside you that regulate you.
For example, you say I'm ashamed of myself, or I feel guilty, or my conscience wouldn't let me do it.
So these are examples of social control that is internalized.
We internalize social control and it becomes a crucial element of who we are.
So who we are is not just determined by our own equipment, our own experiences, our own memories.
Who we are is determined mostly by society, by others, by our experiences with others, by our relationships, by memories we have with others, by our wishes which usually involve other people, by our attempts to manipulate other people, or to work with other people, always, there's always other people there.
Lacan, Jacques Lacan, the famous psychoanalyst, French psychoanalyst, who by the way looks exactly like me. He's identical twin. I'm kidding you not. If you go online, you will see a photo of Sam Vaknin, this guy.
And his expertise was narcissism, exactly like mine.
So Jacques Lacan suggested that even the unconscious, even the unconscious, which is supposedly the unconscious, is supposedly the most private individual thing. He said, no, even the unconscious is the sum total of the voices of other people.
In other words, our personality is a performance that we put in front of other people in order to be able to survive. It's a survival strategy, a coping strategy, and a manipulative strategy.
Our personality allows us to be self-efficacious. Our personality allows us to operate in the environment and on the environment in order to secure beneficial outcomes.
It's an algorithm. It's a set of instructions on how to be.
But it's visible to others. Our personality is observable by others, and we are aware of this.
And so we modulate our personality according to other people's expectations, society's rules and mores, and so on.
Our personality, therefore, could easily be described as a performance.
So you're beginning to see that there is quite a disagreement on what is the personality.
And the situation is even worse when we discuss a concept such as the self.
Our behavior, unquestionably, our behaviors are determined by experiences, relationships, memories, and everything else I've mentioned before, traits and so on and so forth.
And so here's another confusion, because we tend to conflate and confuse the personality with behaviors.
It's like we observe behaviors and we attribute a personality to the behaving person.
I observe someone's behaviors and then I say, oh, this guy is, and I describe his personality. It's as if I can derive the personality with a lot of certainty by observing someone's behaviors.
But of course that is completely untrue. It's completely untrue.
Because the relationship between behaviors and personality is far from clear. Of course, if you can't define what is personality, it's very difficult. If you can't agree on what is personality, it's very difficult to connect it to other things like behaviors.
Moreover, we have situations. We have outliers, clinical outliers, for example, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, to some extent bipolar disorder. We have clinical situations, not to mention, of course, psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia.
We have situations where the identity itself is missing. There's no identity. Or, let me put it more accurately, there is an identity that changes all the time.
These people have like a hundred identities.
Of course, in the most extreme clinical case known as dissociative identity disorder, used to be known as multiple personality disorder, people had a host, had a group of altars, a group of personality-like fragments that they presented to the world with a coordinating feature known as a host personality.
So we have many, many cases, where the identity itself is either missing, or it's fragmented or it's diffuse or it's disturbed or where the individual displays dramatically different identities, mutually exclusive identities from day to day, from week to week, from month to month.
And this shows you that personality is not necessarily identity because these people have a personality. They don't have an identity.
So it seems the relationship between personality, identity, self and behaviors is not clear at all. Not clear at all.
You could have a personality but not an identity. You could even not behave. You could be catatonic, for example, where there's zero behavior, but clearly you have a personality and an identity.
You could have a set of behaviors and an identity and a personality, but no memory of who you are, no perception, no self-awareness, for example, in dementia or Alzheimer.
So the relationship between these concepts is far from settled and far from clear.
And we could say that in many clinical conditions, behavioral indeterminacy, unpredictable behavior, crazy making behavior, acting out in borderline personality disorder, for example, or rage attacks in narcissism, behavioral indeterminacy reflects identity diffusion or identity disturbance, but without any damage to a clear-cut personality that is actually rigid.
Personality disorders are rigid personalities.
So we see from this outlier, from these clinical cases, that you could have a personality, which could be even rigid and enduring and stable, even if it is disordered and dysfunctional and sick, it's still there, you could have a personality, but not a stable identity, not self. And your behavior could be either stable or unstable, indeterminate.
In short, what I'm trying to tell you, dear students, is that we are at the very beginning of attempting to understand these concepts. We have no clear understanding of them, and we have no view of them that is uncontested. And we have many ways of looking at the same animal, at the same issue.
And so I mentioned the self-states approach, or sub-personalities approach, versus the stable core or the stable personality approach and these are only two the others.
So we should be very careful when we talk about I am, myself. Who are you? Who are you? What is this I that you're talking about? What is this self that you're observing and who is doing the observation? What do you think your identity is? Do you feel the same as you were, let's say, six years ago? And if you don't feel the same, why do you keep insisting that you are the same? That you are the same person? What in you makes you the same person, despite massive changes to your body, to your mind, to your experiences, to your memory, and so on? In which sense are you the same person?
Even on the physiological levels, 95% of the cells of the body change every five years.
So in which sense are you, you?
There's no answer to this.
We intuitively know that we are, but we don't know what that means and why.
We intuitively know that we are, but we don't know what that means and why.
We intuitively know that we are conscious, but no one can define consciousness or understand it at all.
We are in a very strange field. Psychology is a very strange field because we are investigating ourselves. We are our own topics of investigation. Psychology is a giant exercise in metacognition in effect.
Okay, I mentioned personality traits and so and so forth.
There is a word that we used to use before we came up with the word personality.
By the way, personality means a mask. The word persona in ancient Greek means mask. To put on a mask.
It's very curious, because we believe the personality is who we are.
But the very word personality means to not be who you are, to put on a mask.
So a much better word is character. Character is really who you are. Character reflects the totality of attributes and personality traits. Your attitudes, social attitudes, moral attitudes, all kinds of religious attitudes and so on your behaviors your physique body your characteristics when you put all these together you get your character so character is really more who you are but character is not a stable thing character can change.
Any grandmother will tell you this. Any Baba will tell you this. Characters change.
But character is closer to your essence than personality, which is a performance, or the self, which appears to be unstable and kaleidoscopic, rather than stable core.
So in my work, I like to use the word character when I'm talking about the essence of a person.
Mind you, the essence now, that this very same person can have another character 10 years from now.
And one of the most important things in every description of personality or character is traits. They're also known as personality traits. They're also known as trait domains.
Because there's a big disagreement whether traits are an integral part of the personality or whether the personality determines traits. There's a big debate about this.
So many psychologists prefer not to use the phrase determines trait. There's a big debate about this. So many psychologists prefer not to use the phrase personality traits. They use the phrase traits or trait domains.
For example, the international classification of diseases, the most widely used book of mental health diagnosis uses the term trait domains, not personality traits.
So what are we talking about when we use the word trait?
Again, it's very difficult to define. Very difficult to define.
We know that traits are stable. We know that they are consistent. We know that they are enduring. We know that they are internal. And we know that they exist.
But if you ask me to define the trait, what is a trait, I don't know to answer.
So how come I use the word?
Because of how we actually discover traits.
To discover a trait, what we do is we observe behaviors. We take a subject, study subject, another person, and we observe the behaviors of that person. We observe the attitudes of this person. We ask this person about feelings and habits and cognitions and so on.
When we put all these together, the observable behaviors, the self-reported emotions and cognitions, and the observable habits. When we put all these together, we can derive from this, we can conclude from this that there is an underlying trait.
So for example, if someone never pays the bills, if someone always saves money, if someone goes around turning off the lights, we could infer, we could deduct, we could reach a conclusion that the observable behaviors of this kind of person indicate that he has a trait of stinginess. He is stingy with money.
If someone comes to work one hour before everyone else, if someone leaves work, one hour after everyone else, if someone never gives up until a task is finished, until an assignment is completed, if someone dedicates the weekends and works extremely hard on a vacation, just to deliver results, we can deduce, we can infer from these kind of behaviors and habits that this kind of person has the trait of conscientiousness. This is a conscientious person.
So traits are the names that we give to combinations, agglomerations of behaviors and habits, plus self-reporting on feelings, emotions, cognitions and so.
But the main things are the habits and the observable behaviors.
And then we say, okay, these are the traits. Based on the behaviors, based on the habits, this must be the trait.
And then we use the trait to explain future behaviors, to predict future behaviors, and to change the conduct of the person.
So we observe a person and then we go and say, do you realize that your behavior has to do with this trait? Do you want to change your behavior? Then we need to change this trait.
So, traits are therapeutic tools as well.
From everything I've told you about traits, the only thing you can learn is that we don't know what are traits.
That's a summary of this section. We have no idea what are traits. Traits are just names that we give to combinations of behaviors and habits. These have behaviors and these habits, we call them a name and this name is a trait. Okay? As simple as it.
Now, their theories of traits.
The most famous theory of traits was proposed by Gordon Allport, a major psychologist in the last century, and Allport suggested that we have three families of traits.
He didn't call them traits. He called them much more accurately, dispositions. Disposition is a tendency to act in a certain way, the potential toa tendency to act in a certain way, the potential to act in a certain way.
So you're inclined to act in a certain way. I can predict your behavior because I know that usually you act in a certain way. This is called disposition. And he used the word disposition, not trait.
And he said that we have three types of families of dispositions. We have cardinal dispositions. These are dispositions that affect all the behaviors. Every single behavior you have is affected by your cardinal disposition.
You have central dispositions that affect many behaviors, but not all behaviors. And you have secondary dispositions that affect behaviors in highly specific situations. And only in these situations, not in other situations.
So these are the three types in his work. He said that dispositions are dynamic and they are interactive and intra-active.
In other words, dispositions interact with each other and they interact with other people and other people's dispositions. They interact with the environment as well.
So let me think of an example. Cardinal disposition would be, for example, if you don't like to hurt people, you're empathic, you're nice, you're kind, you're compassionate. You don't like to hurt people.
So you will never hurt people. You will not hurt people in a hotel. You will not hurt people in your workplace. You will not hurt people in your family.
This is a cardinal disposition of yours. You are the kind of person who does not hurt people. In any environment, in any situation, in any circumstances, you will never hurt people.
So this is cardinal. A central disposition would be if you, let's say, like to eat, yes, like me, I love to eat, you like to eat. So you are likely to eat in certain situations. You are actually very likely to eat in many situations, but there will be situations where you will not eat for a variety of reasons, medical, social, maybe eating in a certain situation would be frowned upon, would be socially unacceptable. So this would be a central disposition, but you will not use it everywhere.
And finally, a secondary disposition is when you find yourself in a specific situation and one of your traits will manifest.
So you will be in a situation and this trait will be provoked or triggered, you will behave in a certain way, but only in that situation.
This is the work of Gordon Allport on dispositions.
Another famous figure in trait analysis or the theory of traits, is Raymond Cattell.
Rather than define traits and then try to find behaviors to fit the traits. He analyzed behaviors. He analyzed behaviors using statistics. He used theory in statistics called factor analysis.
So Cattell is the father of the factor models of personality. And he analyzed behaviors. And he tried to find the common denominators of behaviors, the factor that underlies the behaviors.
And so he used factor analysis. And he identified what he called surface traits versus source traits.
The surface traits are interrelated, they're observable, and they involve behaviors.
So the traits manifest, express themselves via behaviors. They are consistent and they're usually in a cluster.
So if you have one trait, you would have the others also. One trait would lead to the other.
So if you don't like to hurt people, you would have another trait of helping people.
So there's a cluster. These are the surface traits and they are reflective of deeper traits, much deeper traits, that are known as the source traits.
And Cattell identified 16 source traits in human beings. Examples are boldness, dominance, openness to change, conscientiousness, and so on.
And he divided all the source traits to three groups.
Ability traits, these are the traits that allow you to obtain results, to reach your goals, to have accomplishments, to be self-affecting. So ability traits.
And then dynamic traits, these are the traits that motivate you to act, the traits that are attitudinal and motivational.
And the last ones are the temperamental or temperament traits, which involve emotions. Emotions determine many of your behaviors, and because they determine them in a very predictable consistent manner, you could talk about emotions as if there were traits.
And he identified 16 of them, as I said.
Now when you put all this together, the traits, the personality, the self, the observers, this, this, that, it stands to reason that you can divide all of humanity to big groups.
And this is known as personality types.
Personality types are groups of people that share the same behaviors, show, demonstrate, exhibit the same behaviors, and so they are likely to share the same traits and the same psychological dynamics, the same emotions, the same cognitions, the same attitudes, the same motivations. They are like one big family.
And so many, many scholars and many, many psychologists throughout the last hundred plus years divided humanity to personality types.
Of course, 2,500 years ago, there was a theory of personality types. The ancient Greeks, to be ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians, they divided humanity to four groups according to the four fluids that they believed were flowing through the body.
They said that the body has four fluids and these fluids are flowing and when they combine or when they confront each other within the body, this creates a temperament. This creates what we today would call personality or a character.
So you had the choleric personality. This is melancholy, depressed, morbid, constantly pessimistic, doesn't believe in good, sees only the negative side, and so on, that's the choleric personality.
And that's a personality type who is influenced by the cholera, the choleric fluid that is flowing through his or her body.
This was 2,500 years ago.
And mind you, of course, these fluids don't exist, except in the imagination of the ancients.
But they use this theory to distinguish four types of people.
Since then, we have had numerous, numerous personality type theories.
You can watch a video on my YouTube channel regarding the MBTI system. It's a system of dividing people into types. So I analyze the system, the MBTI system, its strong points, its weak point. It's an example of a personality type theory.
We have constitutional theories of personality, constitutional theories of personality. These are types of personality. These are types of personalities that rely on the body.
Whether you are long and thin and slim, whether you are short and stocky, whether you are fat or thin, by disposition, by constitution, genetically and so on so forth, determines your personality type, the psychologist believed.
So we have a personality type of Carus. We have the famous personality type of Kretschmer. We have the personality type of Sheldon, which is used to this day, to this very day.
For example, when people design diets, food, nutritional diets, they take into account the Sheldon type of body. Endomorphic body, for example, is supposed to react differently to exercise sugar consumption and so on and so forth. So endomorph, exomorph, and so on. The Sheldon theory is still used in some circles, especially on the internet.
And these are constitutional theories. These are theories that said, look at the body, and you know the personality type. That's all you need to know, just a body, and you immediately know the personality type. That's one approach.
Very close to this approach is the type A, B, D personality. You heard of type A personality? Type A personality is someone who is very ambitious, very driven, goal-oriented, hardworking, and so on. This is type A personality. The incidence of heart disease and heart attacks and strokes among type A personality is much higher than in the general population.
Then there is type B personality. Type B personality is laid back, a bit lazy, doesn't care about accomplishments, enjoys life, has fun, etc. My kind of guy.
So this is type B personality.
Type D personality is distressed. This kind of person is always worrying, always catastrophizing, always anticipating the worst, always planning for the worst, always anxious, etc. That's type D.
Type T personality is interested in thrills, risks, dangers. This is the kind of guy who glides or parachutes or does crazy things, crazy sports, extreme sports.
So here's another example of a personality type theory, A, B, D, T.
One of the most famous personality type theories which is still in use today is Jung's theory.
Jung's theory is pretty complex actually and distinguishes between functional types, other types, and so on.
But what has survived to this very day from Jung's theory, because vast majority of this theory is not used anymore, but what is used to this very day is a distinction between introverted and extroverted personalities.
It was Jung who proposed this distinction. The introverted person is avoidant, is shy, socially anxious, prefers solitary activities and so on. The extroverted person is a party animal, likes to go out, likes to socialize, enjoys a company of others, and so on.
And this was first proposed by Jung.
But Jung's theory of personality types is much deeper and has other distinctions. And I encourage you to go and study, if you wish.
Another famous psychologist who came up with a personality type theory was Eysenck. Eysenck came up with a PEN theory, P-E-N theory. Eysenck said that there are three traits which are critical, and when you combine them, you get nine personality types.
These traits are psychoticism, neuroticism, and extraversion.
So, the psychotic, someone with psychoticism, is usually highly creative. Creativity is linked intimately with psychoticism.
An extrovert, we all know, the neurotic type is someone who is very preoccupied with mental health issues, could be depressed, and so he is usually also introverted.
Here's another theory, Eysenck's theory. Eysenck's theory is still influential when we study creativity.
In the study of creativity, we still use Eysenck's insights that creativity is linked somehow to psychoticism.
The dominant theories today are not Jung and not Eysenck and not any of the theories that I mentioned.
The dominant theories today following the footsteps of Cattell. They are factor theories.
And the two most dominant ones are known as the Big Five Personality type theory and the five factor model of personality theory.
Both of them use the same five traits.
And the five traits are openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and extraversion.
These are the five factors.
These theories and models believethat if you combine these five elements, the combinations give you a total description of the human mind, of the human condition, of human psychology. You need just these five elements, just these five factors. You don't need anything else.
So if you want to describe someone, you would take openness, put it together with extraversion, and agreeableness, and you will get the person. You will take a neuroticism, combine it with, let's say, conscientiousness, and you will get another type of person.
So the combination of these five factors create a multitude of personality profiles. This is in the big five factor theory.
The big five factor theory says that these traits explain personalities. If you understand these traits in depth, you understand all the personalities that exist on Earth. So there's no personality that cannot be captured with this.
These are therefore dimensions. It's a dimensional theory. The dimensions, when you draw the dimensions, you capture the personality.
The five-factor model uses the same traits, exactly the same five traits, but they say that these traits are causal, they're causal forces, they're etiological.
In other words, these traits cause action.
When you have any of these traits, it causes you, forces you, coerces you to behave in a highly specific way. You cannot behave differently when you have this trait. These traits determine and predetermine your behavior.
So there's a big difference here.
The Big Five theory or the Big Five model says that these traits explain your personality but are not necessarily connected to your behaviors.
While the five factor model, the FFM, says that these traits explain your personality but much more importantly, determine your behavior.
Of course, major gulf between them.
And it is pretty shocking that even scholars, even authors of textbooks, confuse the two theories. They simply get it wrong. And they talk about these two theories as if they were one and the same, and they're absolutely not one of the same.
Okay, we're about to end. And we will end where we started with the body.
Here's the problem. Psychology can never be a science, ever. Never mind what psychology or psychologists do, it can never be a science.
That you use mathematics or that you use statistics or that you wear white coats doesn't make you a scientist. Mathematics is a language. Statistics is a language. You can describe nonsense with mathematics and statistics. It doesn't have to be a science.
There are many problems with psychology, but the major, the main problem is this.
The raw material of psychology, what we study in psychology, changes all the time.
The very act of observation, when we observe, what we study is human beings. In psychology, we study human beings. There are branches of psychology that study animals, and the situation there may be ironically better.
But when we study human beings, the very act of observing someone changes them. When you observe someone, they become self-conscious. They become self-aware. They modify their behaviors in very subtle ways.
The act of observation changes the observed person.
Even worse, if you want to study a person from one day to the next, it's not the same person anymore.
The person you studied yesterday and the same person you think tomorrow is not the same, that person has been exposed to new stimuli, has had interactions with people, received news, good or bad, watched a movie that influenced him or her.
We cannot study the same person twice.
You remember what I told you in the middle of the lecture? We cannot enter the same river twice. Panta Rhei.
So psychology cannot study the same people twice. And consequently, 80% of the studies in psychology cannot be replicated. We cannot repeat them and get the same results.
That's not a science. That's not a science.
Psychology is literature. It's not a science. That's not a science. Psychology is literature. It's not a science.
And so if we want psychology to be a science, we need to connect it to the brain.
The brain is an objective entity that can be studied, that can be analyzed, and that remains the same from one day to the next, grosso modo, not 100%, but all in all remains the same.
We need to reduce psychology to neuroscience. We need to make neuroscience the foundation of psychology.
Anything we find in the brain is science. And if it manifests as a behavior or a trade or a personality, then that behavior, trait, and personality are also science.
Ifscience. If we can connect a behavior to a specific pathway, specific part of the brain, specific neurons in the brain, specific processes in the brain, if we can link the behavior, then the behavior can be scientifically studied.
By manipulating the brain, by studying the brain, we can then study the behavior scientifically.
We need to ground psychology. We need to take it down from the clouds. And we need to ground it in hardware. We need to ground it down from the clouds and we need to ground it in hardware. We need to ground it in objective reality, in entities. We need to ground it in the brain.
Why this introduction?
Because in personality theory and in personality studies we need to do the same.
We claim that there is such a thing as personality, and then we even create a classification. We create a typology. We say there's this kind of personality and that kind of personality, and then we connect personalities to traits, which we cannot even define, we can define just behaviors.
We observe behaviors. These behaviors change all the time.
It's a mess. It's a complete mess.
This is not the way science is done. Absolutely not.
So what we need to do, we need to observe behaviors, we need to link them to organs or to pathways or to neurons or to processes in the brain, and we need to create a new theory of personality which is based on neuroscience and observable behaviors.
This would be scientific. And ironically, this is how the ancients, the ancients, that was their approach.
I'm sorry, they came up with the concept of temperament.
Temperament is biological.
Character is not, personality is not, character is psychological, personality is psychological. Traits, it's a psychological concern.
They have nothing, they have no clear, direct contact to biology.
But temperament is biological. And the concept of temperament is thousands of years old.
These people relied on biology.
Even the humoral system that I mentioned, you remember, that there are four fluids in the body, and the four fluids in the body determine your personality?
It's a biological theory. It's biological.
The ancients had a much more scientific mindset than current day psychologists.
Current day psychologists are less scientific than the people 3,000 years ago who proposed that there are four fluids flowing through the body.
Because these people, for 2,000 years ago, they wanted to rely on biology, and that's the right orientation.
We need to go back to the body, to the brain, to biology.
And so what is a temperament?
A temperament is a biological determinant of personality. We are not quite sure what is this biological determinant because we have neglected this direction of research, but it's a biological determinant of personality.
And some advances in neuroscience probably will bring us full circle to the attitude of the ancients, to the direction of the ancients. I believe that neuroscience will revive and restore the biological orientation.
So temperament, as I said, is a biological determinant of personality. It is present, starting in early life.
You talk to any mother, any mother, and she will tell you that babies as early as one week old have temperament. One baby is difficult, one baby is easy, one baby sleeps all the time, one baby cries all the time, one baby is curious, one baby is lethargy.
Mothers would tell you that even babies who are very young, one week old, one month old, already have something that looks a lot like character or personality.
And that's actually the temperament. That's biologically determined because at this stage, one week old, one month old, there's no experiences, no memories, no cognitions we think, nothing, basically. So it's all biology.
Even empathy at this stage is biological, reflexive empathy, it's biological. Baby smiles at mommy. When mommy smiles, baby smiles. That's a biological connection. It's a biological type of empathy. Reflexes, instincts, they're all biological.
So temperament exists in early life. It is linked to some kind of energy level. Lack of energy, too much energy. It involves emotional responsiveness.
I mentioned reflexive empathy, later on, cognitive empathy, but it involves emotional responsiveness.
Demeanor, way of behavior, mood, response, response tempo, how fast the response is, and behavioral inhibition. What behaviors are manifest and what behaviors are not manifest. These are all elements of temperament in the first week of life.
The first week of life, we can learn all these things.
And then, with a rigorous agenda of neuroscientific studies, we can chart, we can draw a map how these elements evolve and with inputs from the environment, experiences, relationships, memories, how this all becomes what we call today a personality, how traits emerge, and so on so forth.
This would be a lot more scientific. It's a scientific agenda.
And so we know, for example, that babies are willing to explore, and some babies are not willing to explore. Some babies are neophobic. They are afraid of new things and some babies actively seek out new things. Some babies are shy. Some babies are bold. Even in animals, by the way.
So we know that there are differences between babies.
Isn't this the foundation for character? Isn't this the real foundation?
This is how it starts. We should go back to basics, to the start, and we should study babies, we should study brains, and we should forget, we should literally forget all this nonsense that we have come up with over the last 150 years because maybe science is too difficult and it's much more pleasant to sit in an armchair and create theories out of thin air.
It's time for psychology to become a science or to disappear altogether and leave the real work to real scientists in neuroscience and similar disciplines.
Okay, thank you for listening, and I promised you bad news.
I will be with you next week. You have been warned.