Psychology 230S: Personality and its Transformations

1. Psychology 230S: Personality and its Transformations Jordan B. Peterson

2. Personality: Mythological Representations • Personality theory in a global and historical context

3. What is the “world” made of? • Two hypotheses • objective/phenomenological • objective/subjective • scientific/moral • materialistic/mythological

4. Science and Morality: Domains • Science: • What is it, that is the world? • Morality: • How are we, in the world? • How should we be? • What is the good? • What is health, and mental health? • Science and Morality: Psychology • How is it that we may best obtain “what is the good”?

5. The Nature of Categorization • To understand the categories of myth, we must understand the nature of categorization.

6. What makes two separable things the same? • Similarity • Prototypicality or Familial Resemblance • Objective: • The approximation to a central group of features • Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan, pp. 66-71. • Behavior-based: • Effect upon affect • Behavioral significance • Gibson, J.J. • Affordance: possibility for action • Functional equivalence • Lawrence Barsalou • Ad hoc categories: functional utility • things to take from the house during a fire

8. Materialistic: The world is a place of objects • “By the aid of language different individuals can, to a certain extent, compare their experiences. • Then it turns out that certain sense perceptions of different individuals correspond to each other, while for other sense perceptions no such correspondence can be established. • We are accustomed to regard as real those sense perceptions which are common to different individuals, and which therefore are, in a measure, impersonal. • The natural sciences, and in particular, the most fundamental of them, physics, deals with such sense perceptions.” • Einstein, A. (1955). The Meaning of Relativity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 2.

9. Mythological: The world is a forum for action • “All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts.” • Shakespeare, As You Like It

10. Morality and Mythology • Mythology, moral philosophy, literature, religion • How are we, in the world? • Tragic self-consciousness • How should we be? • Redemption

11. The Language of Mythology • Any universally comprehensible language must have universal referents. • This means that a good story must speak to us about those aspects of experience that we all share. • But what is it that every human being shares, regardless of place and time of birth?

12. The constituent elements of the world

13. Social Cognition • Primate Social Cognition • The internal representations of language meaning evolved partly from our pre-linguistic ancestors’ knowledge of social relations [6–10]. • Like modern monkeys and apes, our ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that were simultaneously competitive and cooperative. • The demands of social life created selective pressures for just the kind of complex, abstract, conceptual, and computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication. • Although baboons have concepts and acquire propositional information from other animals’ vocalizations, they cannot articulate this information. They understand dominance relations and matrilineal kinship but have no words for them. • This suggests that the internal representation of many concepts relations, and action sequences does not require language, and that language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought . • Triangles

14. Social Cognition • Primate Social Cognition • The internal representations of language meaning evolved partly from our pre-linguistic ancestors’ knowledge of social relations [6–10]. • Like modern monkeys and apes, our ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that were simultaneously competitive and cooperative. • The demands of social life created selective pressures for just the kind of complex, abstract, conceptual, and computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication. • Although baboons have concepts and acquire propositional information from other animals’ vocalizations, they cannot articulate this information. They understand dominance relations and matrilineal kinship but have no words for them. • This suggests that the internal representation of many concepts relations, and action sequences does not require language, and that language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought . • Seyfarth, R.M. et al. (2005). Primate social cognition and the origins of language. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 264-266.

15. The Animated World

16. The Unknown • nature • the unconscious, Dionysian force of the id • the terrors of the darkness • the source and resting place of all things • the great mother • the queen, the matrix, the matriarch, the container, the cornucopia • the object to be fertilized, • the source of all things, • the fecund, the pregnant

17. The Unknown, continued • the strange, the emotional, the foreigner, the place of return and rest • the deep, the valley, the cleft, the cave • hell, death and the grave • the moon, ruler of the night and the mysterious dark • matter and the earth

20. The Known • culture, appolinian control, superego, the conscious • the king, the patriarch, the plough, the phallus • order and authority and the crushing weight of tradition • the wise old man and the tyrant • dogma, the day sky • the countryman • the island, the heights • the ancestral spirits • the activity of the dead

25. Order and chaos constitute the stage

26. and something mediates between them • The knower • ego, consciousness • the trickster, the fool • the hero, the coward • spirit • as opposed to matter • as opposed to dogma • the sun • son of the unknown • the great mother • and the known • the great father