Psychological Science & Society: Summer@USC

The official Tumblr for the Psychological Science & Society class at USC Summer Programs. Psychology, neuroscience, current events, social justice, pop culture, and GIFs. Imagine if Buzzfeed and Upworthy had an unabashedly nerdy lovechild. That's this. Curated by @leslie_bern. Questions? (And you certainly don't have to be in the class.) Ask or tweet me!

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More contemporary research on "Freudian slips" suggests that they occur when people have two different concepts or words in their mind at one time, like "great" and "cool," rather than because of any covertly sexual motivations. 

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And finally denial. This one is exactly what it sounds like--refusing to accept what everyone else knows to be true. 

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Projection is when you attribute your own threatening impulses/desires to other people. So, for example, when people go on Maury accusing their partners of cheating, but then end up confessing to cheating themselves. 

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Rationalization: When you offer self-justifying explanations after something doesn't work out so that you can make yourself feel better. See above. 

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Regression: When you revert to behaviors typically associated with an earlier developmental stage.

Side note: I have it on good authority that this works really well to talk your way out of traffic tickets. One of my mentors has used "Oh my dad's a cop! He's going to be so mad at me!" every single time and she says it has never failed her once. 

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This one's called displacement. It's when you redirect all of your anger to a more "socially appropriate" target, rather than the person that caused your anger. 

We're not here yet, but it's also worth noting that cathartically venting your anger actually makes you *angrier* in the long term. More on that later.

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Turns out there's actually a term for what Helga was doing to Arnold. Freud called it reaction formation and it's when you deliberately show the world the opposite of what you're feeling. 

Granted, he thought boys did this to buffer against the anxiety of wanting to kill their fathers and do their moms, but whatever. People do this all the time, but, hopefully, for other reasons. 

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No, people do not gouge out their eyes out because they want to have sex with their mothers

According to the story, Oedipus gouged his eyes out once he realized that he had, in fact, killed his father and married his mother. Although this isn't something people do in the Freudian context, it's worth noting that auto-enucleation (removing one's eyeballs) is a very real, although very rare, thing. In particular, a new study has looked at this very specific kind of self-mutilation around the world and found that it's most often due to undiagnosed psychosis (e.g., the belief that your eyeballs are possessed, etc.)

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Presented without comment. 

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Because that's not all, Freud also believed that, somewhere between the ages of 3-6, boys developed an Oedipus complex (after the Greek tragedy of the same name). In short, they start to develop romantic feelings for their mother and intense jealousy/hatred towards their father, who they now view as their rival. He also thought that boys developed castration anxiety out of the intense fear that their father would catch onto them and, yes, exactly what it sounds like.

Crazy, right? Here are some puppets. 

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In addition to believing that most of our thoughts were unconscious and out of our control, Freud believed that the mind had three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. I usually liken these terms to your shoulder devil, your shoulder referee, and your shoulder angel, but this picture does it even better. 

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Freudian slips that have appeared on live newscasts. Oops. 

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Freudian slips are errors in speech thought to reveal our "true" motives. So, when you slip up and say a word that you didn't mean to, there was probably a reason behind it, and that reason was probably sex. 

But, if you ask me, I think the term just refers to how Freud came up with all of his ideas in the first place. 

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ICYMI the first (several) times around like I did, Rose makes an *awesome* Freud joke near the beginning of Titanic (around the 34:00 mark).

Mr. Ismay is talking about the sheer size and strength of the ship and then she drops this masterful line asking whether he's ever heard of Dr. Freud. BURN. 

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Freud heavily believed in the symbolism of dreams. In other words, he believed that they reflected every one of your unconscious (aka sexual) wishes or desires that was socially inappropriate to express in public. But you didn't know what your dreams meant. Only he did. So, if you came to him with a dream about, let's say, eating a hot dog or smoking a cigar, he would tell you that you weren't *really* dreaming about either of those things at all. 

But sometimes, really most times, a cigar is just a cigar.

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Scientifically speaking, most of Freud's ideas don't hold any theoretical ground today. And when people say that he paved the way for future research, they're usually being very, very kind. In psychology classes, you generally only learn about Freud as an ~important historical figure~, but he's huge in humanities class, and that's because his ideas tell you a lot more about the culture from which his work emerged (i.e. 19th century Victorian Europe) than they do about the mind itself.  

In the inimitable words of one of my students, "Fuck this. I thought Freud was right!" 

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Study Funded By Soda Industry Concludes Diet Soda Helps People Lose Weight

Your friendly reminder to always look out for conflicts of interest in scientific findings.