Analysis: Creative Writing & the Science of the Mind.

i almost never or actually never
tell you to watch an earlier video before the one you're seeing right now it's incredibly rare i think pretty much all my videos work as standalone statements on any given topic even if it's my 35th or 36th video on a given topic any of my videos about veganism any of my videos about quitting video games in my videos about quitting alcohol i think they work as standalone videos this video in particular philosophically is a sequel to two seemingly unrelated videos i'm following up on an earlier video i made about how to write nonfiction and the advice given in that video it applies equally to how to compose a youtube monologue how to do the type of youtube content i do myself not filmmaking with a bunch of actors in a script particularly how to write an essay or how to do a video essay equally but this is also a sequel to an earlier video i had in which i briefly discussed what i called the golden age of psychotherapy the golden age of psychology psychiatry the golden age of really the kind of philosophy of the mind before people tried to drag those categories into the hard sciences now they did that both because they want to make money selling drugs and because they want to professionalize what they were doing and make more money wearing a lab coat than they could make if they dressed and behaved and presented themselves like socrates right what did socrates do he stood around and asked people questions about what it means to be a man what virtue is how to lead a meaningful life he didn't make a whole lot of money doing that not even if you believe what the comedians say who made fun of him back in ancient athens because one of some of the best sources we have on who socrates really was uh we get from the uh the comedians who criticized and ridiculed him okay but you can imagine just with that comparison what a different world we would live in if people like psychiatrists and therapists actively consider themselves inheritors of the socratic tradition where they said okay we're going to sit down and we're gonna philosophize about why you make the decisions you make in your life why you do the things you do why you feel the way you feel why you're having the problems you're having and you know what at the beginning and end of the conversation the therapist i'm going to openly declare to you that i do not know i'm going to ask you questions i'm going to say i don't know the answers i am not going to come to a scientific conclusion that your problem is that you're depressed you're bipolar et cetera et cetera i'm not gonna i'm not gonna identify your behavior and then claim that my perception of your behavior means that you correspond to a box a check mark in a book called the dsm that this is the condition you have and then we're not going to pretend that that's a medically real condition we're going to actually engage in socratic dialogue philosophically about what your problems are with both of us acknowledging that we don't know the answers you as the patient you're you're here because you've got a problem and you either don't know what the solution is or you don't fully understand the problem yourself and me i'm just an outside observer who's asking some of those questions but he doesn't presume now what a different world we would live in if what i'm calling the golden age of therapy had gone off in that direction and the most fundamental reason why it didn't is money you make more money wearing a lab coat without even getting into making money selling drugs and so you can already see this in sigmund freud in the earliest stage of freudianism when by the way they rejected the use of drugs it's one of the defining aspects of freud's uh school of thought uh but already the use of needless latin terminology and pretending that we can give you a specific diagnosis that's scientifically real so we already are on the downward spiral from the earliest stage of freud's career and the financial incentive to professionalize therapy it's already very clear in freud's life as a whole and then after his death with the inheritors who take over his foundations and institutions okay um the problem with the golden age of therapy the golden age of the philosophy of the mind if you like the problem was that any given analysis reveals just as much about the analyst as it does about the person being analyzed right now i have sat down with therapists if i sit there and tell them about the story of how i first decided to do research in cambodia how i first started learning the cambodian language how that was tied to this other language called pali and this literature and this philosophy and humanitarian work and politics i can tell the whole story i'm a good talker right it's not like i have some kind of psychological barrier to overcome in telling that story you tell me what's revealed by the opinion of the analyst the opinion of the therapist the opinion of the psychiatrist whoever it is in that professional role i'm telling you pretty much all that we reveal is what their attitude is toward my research my decisions in life now some people in that line of work might be so unsympathetic that they really regard those decisions i made as as signs of of some kind of profound psychological problem they'd say oh well this is greatly irrational obviously you had this emotional trauma you were trying to overcome or you're trying to overcompensate for something they could diagnose this really like an illness and on the other hand you could have someone in that role as a therapist who is of an intellectual character or cultural character where they really understand and appreciate why i was motivated to do these things that they really regard what i was doing as something quite virtuous they may even say i've had people in that position they say wow i wish i had more clients like you i wish i had more people coming in to talk about their lives who led lives like you as opposed to people coming in and telling me that they're an alcoholic who cheats on their wife and hates their job you know they deal with a lot of problems that are a lot less interesting right you make it very positive however this tells me almost nothing about myself and my problems now i'm not i'm not a complete nihilist on this i'm not claiming i'm not claiming that absolutely nothing can be revealed from the detached perspective of someone else analyzing my case analyzing my problems in life analyzing my life story as such but i'm making the sternest caution imaginable against the assumption that there is anything objective about that outside opinion it's just a different kind of subjective judgment that we're inviting into our lives right now for many people the presumption is that the person in the therapist role has some kind of um elite education some kind of philosophical or scientific education that necessarily gives them a better insight into into your life than you could possibly have yourself about that claim i am tremendously skeptical right now the strength and the weakness of this of this little puzzle i've described to you applies profoundly to the creative writing process when you write a story and i mean the word story here in a way that embraces and includes writing a newspaper story writing a non-fiction story writing a book of history or politics right all of these have elements of story when you write a story you are implicitly telling the reader as much about yourself as you are about the subject of analysis okay you're telling us as much about the analyst as you are about the thing analyzed so in the last episode where i was discussing this how to be a nonfiction writer one of the things i emphasized was don't summarize don't narrate generalities ideally i would even go so far as to say don't express approval or disapproval i think that's actually a very profound misunderstanding about what creative writing is all about especially creative writing in in non-fiction right when you're going through this research you've got this body of facts you've got the history of a given century let's say the history of the 19th century in japan or something if you've written out a summary of your research or some of these facts there are going to be moments where you yourself say wow and sorry why are you saying wow maybe you're saying wow because what happened at this particular moment of history is the exact opposite of everything you were taught to believe growing up in school it was the opposite of your own hypothesis when you started doing the research there is some reason why you say wow looking at this particular issue this particular episode of history right but in disclosing that again you are telling the audience just as much about yourself as you are about the thing being analyzed okay so i grew up with all kinds of misconceptions one that i grew up with was the idea very much given to me by my parents given to me in book form by books provided to my parents but also even given to me in the school system from newspaper articles from television i was given the assumption that communism started off with some kind of grand ideal but gradually over time became corrupt many people think this way about the roman empire about all kinds of things in history many people think this way with the history of the catholic church that at the beginning it started with some great deals but gradually became corrupt when i was studying the history of japan and the very first years of the russian revolution and russian civil war period so 1917 to say 1924 or something like that in that earliest period i was shocked i was shocked to see that the massacres and the rape and the corruption and the radical looting behavior like all of the worst aspects of communism were present not five years after the regime was established not even five weeks after the resume which was right there from day one all of these things were evident and even some of the extravagances of communism like creating a new theater creating a new opera this kind of thing i was in this small town in the easternmost part of the soviet union where they're at war with the japanese the japanese are present it's so far east in the soviet union there's a mix of white and asian peoples there in this story in these bizarre circumstances you saw okay now you may think you may think this is objectively interesting right of course everything is subjectively interesting right why is that interesting why is that shocking for someone else it wouldn't be but for many other people they're going to share my assumptions they're going to respond soon i as the analyst am inextricably part of this analysis and for me that is the story that's the moment where you're going through these facts you say wow you know there's a story to tell here now of course a particular book may have many stories a particular youtube channel may have many stories but you should structure your writing you should start your creative process around what is the story not around a summary not a narration of generalities not in my opinion not even around a thesis probably a different video to talk about that that even the idea of a thesis can be very misleading and counterproductive uh for for a creative writer i think that also relates to what i said earlier that i don't think approval and disapproval should be the purpose of writing or recording a youtube video like that same episode of history it becomes boring and banal if your thesis is communism is bad that's a weak way to write that what's really strong is in to include yourself to involve yourself in the analysis you know to write yourself into the story where it's the reader can feel your surprise your interests show they can participate in how you felt about this how amazed you were in discovering this chapter of history and why what the implicit contrasts were right so again the analyst is is part of the analysis now in doing this also you're disclosing your bias in effect and then you get to limit your bias and you get to challenge yourself and say things that you know or maybe 180 degrees opposite of your own bias too by disclosing your bias you get to you get to challenge your bias okay um here's the difference between therapy and creative writing i'm really talking about creative nonfiction i suppose okay the difference is if the story doesn't work you get to change who you are right the same story i just told you i can tell it again i can tell it again from the perspective of a japanese soldier living through that same period of history and i can talk about their assumptions and their perspective on the history and how shocked they were because when they went to russia this wasn't what they were expecting at all right what about a japanese person who was born in the 1860s and who's then living through this chapter of history and they grew up with all of these myths and legends about what the japanese empire was supposed to be and the japanese empires and turned out the way they'd imagined it at all right there they also had assumptions about who what the russian empire was and who the russians were and now they're encountering the unbelievable savagery cruelty massacres rape and so on of the of the soviet communists and they're having to reevaluate everything okay so you you get to change in the act of writing you can adopt two three four many perspectives you can find that moment in history that's interesting and if it's not interesting from your perspective or if the story can't really be told from your perspective you can challenge yourself to do the research and adopt another perspective provisionally whether that's for one chapter for one youtube video or one book and then see it that way now i'll be honest with you i think in the future therapy has to become more like creative writing i think the therapist has to recognize that what he or she is doing is fundamentally much more like the interpretation of literature the creation and analysis of stories than it is like anything that exists in the sciences and probably one of the healthiest things you could possibly do with a therapist i i'm not encouraging any of you to waste your time or money doing this but when a therapist tells you why did you leave behind your home in canada your family your career and education prospects why did you leave behind this wonderful life in canada to go live in poverty and difficulty in cambodia and try to do humanitarian work and try to learn these others you must be crazy and believe me you can encounter attitudes that hostile and worse why did you do these things my girlfriend melissa she she wanted to talk to a therapist because her parents perceived her sudden decision to move to china as irrational or unreasonable or crazy and they tried to get her into the company of a therapist who would take the same kind of unreasonable position now you know hey whether it was so ridiculous to move to china you know it's another it's another question i've worked out all right if it's a 21st century why not why not move to china and get a job in china there's nothing wrong with that but her parents were freaked out by it and you if you're in if you find the right therapist you find the wrong therapist they may also want to diagnose that right wouldn't it be different if you could challenge your therapist to say hey why don't you think through how do you how you would see this if you were considering it from someone else's perspective maybe you as the therapist maybe you are a wealthy homosexual intellectual who got interested in freudian psychoanalysis and then went to study for this reason that reason this is who you are this is your story so you can't appreciate this or you regard it as really bizarre extreme tell me something tell me something when i got there to cambodia how do you think the other people working in the humanitarian industry regarding it there were all these other people who were employed by these agencies and for whom this is normal how do you think peasants who farm rice and who grew up with that religion with buddhism and so how do you think they were going to be do you think they thought it was so weird that a white guy would want to join their religion you know aren't there some other perspectives here couldn't we put on that hat could we put on those glasses couldn't we try to again disclose our own bias and instead of pretending that we're going from darkness to light that we're going from the unexamined world of the desires to scientific certainty about what it is we do and why a diagnosis right wouldn't it be better if we recognize that we're going from one kind of colored light to another that we're going from one kind of deeply subjective ultimately kind of literary analysis to just another subjective but contrasting literary analysis