Psychology 230S: Personality and its Transformations

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Psychology 230S Personality and its
Transformations

• Jordan B. Peterson

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Personality Mythological Representations

• Personality theory in a global and historical
  context

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What is the world made of?

• Two hypotheses
• objective/phenomenological
• objective/subjective
• scientific/moral
• materialistic/mythological

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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?

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The Nature of Categorization

• To understand the categories of myth, we must
  understand the nature of categorization.

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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

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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.

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Mythological The world is a forum for action

• All the world's a stage,And all the men and
  women merely playersThey have their exits and
  their entrancesAnd one man in his time plays
  many parts.
• Shakespeare, As You Like It

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Morality and Mythology

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

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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?

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The constituent elements of the world
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Social Cognition

• Primate Social Cognition
• The internal representations of language meaning
  evolved partly from our pre-linguistic ancestors
  knowledge of social relations 610.
• 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

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Social Cognition

• Primate Social Cognition
• The internal representations of language meaning
  evolved partly from our pre-linguistic ancestors
  knowledge of social relations 610.
• 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.

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The Animated World
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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

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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

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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

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Order and chaos constitute the stage
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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