Integrating Psychoanalysis and Quantitative Research in Psychology with Dr. Chris Hopwood

speaker-0: fundamental difference within a personal theory is it's not about what's inside the person, it's about how the self relates to others. So it's like a fundamentally dynamic and contextual way of thinking about people. And that just resonates a lot more with my experience of being a human, of trying to help other humans, of of being a person who's who's wanted help from others.
speaker-1: Welcome to In-Depth: Psychoanalysis in the Academy, a podcast from Academics for the Advancement of Psychodynamic Psychology, also known as A2P2. We're a group of scholars, clinicians, and educators working to promote psychodynamic research, training, and clinical practice in a field that's becoming increasingly narrow in both theory and treatment. This podcast is a space for thoughtful conversations with psychoanalytic academics who are actively shaping the future of psychotherapy and psychology education. If you're drawn to depth-oriented thinking, critical scholarship, and the enduring relevance of the unconscious, welcome. You're in the right place. I'm Bevan Campbell, and you're listening to In-Depth. In the psychological sciences, both personality and psychopathology are most often constructed, understood, and studied through the lens of individual experience. But in our clinical work, it's impossible not to come to know our patients as existing in a web of relationships and interpersonal context that contribute to who they are. Dr. Christopher Hopwood felt a sense of disconnect between the work he did as a student, studying personality assessment in a lab. And the clinical work he did with patients. To bridge this gap, he turned to the work of psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan and Interpersonal Theory. Now a professor in Zurich, Dr. Hopwood's deep philosophical commitment to the scientific method and scientific falsification might seem, on the surface, to be at odds with his interest in psychodynamic theory. But as he points out, quantitative analysis in the sciences is born from the same truth at the bedrock of psychoanalytic theory. It is extremely easy to deceive ourselves. Science is making a bet, according to Dr. Hopwood, and many of the bets we've placed when studying psychoanalytic core concepts have paid off. In this episode, Dr. Hopwood has a great take on being a sheepdog in one's professional life, particularly relevant for students trying to find a place in academia. We also discuss the turns his scholarship has taken post-tenure into human-animal relations. One of the things I love about these conversations on in-depth is how they highlight the remarkable variety of ways to work with psychoanalytic ideas in the academy. And this episode is no exception. It's a fun one. Enjoy. Christopher Hopwood PhD is a professor of personality psychology at the University of Zurich. He received his PhD from Texas AM University and completed his doctoral internship at Harvard Medical School. Massachusetts General Hospital. He was formerly on the faculty of Michigan State University and the University of California, Davis. He has published on clinical assessment, personality disorders, interpersonal processes, sustainability, and vegan psychology. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, the International Psychoanalytic Association. Animal Charity Evaluators and the Humboldt Foundation. He is the editor-in-chief of Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations and has been an associate editor at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Personality Assessment, Journal of Personality Disorders, and Assessment, and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals. He has also served on the professional boards of the Society for Interpersonal Theory and Research. Society for Personality Assessment and North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders, and is a founding member of the Personality Change Consortium and the Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations. So to start, I just want to ask you how you decided to join academia as a profession. What kind what was your path here?
speaker-0: Total accident. ⁓ I was a first generation student. When I went to my undergraduate program, I got bad advice from an advisor and I never went back. So I just kind of wandered through the course catalog every semester, which, you know, back in that century when I was a college student was like a piece of paper. It was like an actual catalog that you'd have to go to a building to pick up. And ⁓ I would just take the classes that looked cool.
speaker-1: actual catalogue.
speaker-0: And at the end, I went to I finally went to an advisor and I was like, what am I supposed to do? And they were like, well, you could take three classes and be a psychology major, or you could take four classes and be a religious studies major. But if you take four, it's gonna take two semesters. So it's like, I guess I guess I'm a psychologist. And that last semester, I took a class from Bert Karen, who was ⁓ a sort of well known psychoanalytic scholar, and he made us read ⁓ like the Strachey translation of Freud and he brought in a bunch of tapes of him doing psychotherapy and he introduced me to Sullivan and that's probably where I got a taste for psychodynamic theory.
speaker-1: Was that your first introduction to psychoanalytic thinking?
speaker-0: I mean not really. Like, you know, it's it's college students have a very weird experience, I think. I think this is probably still the case where a lot of people had very strong feelings one way or the other. It was the first positive ⁓ impression that I got about psychodynamic theory. Yeah, I gra I still didn't really think I was gonna be a psychologist. So I I graduated and I went overseas and did a bunch of stuff and then I was in New Orleans and I saw the c collected works of Harry Steck Sullivan and really nice bound to like double volume kind of situation in a bot like a cardboard box. So I thought it looked cool basically is why I bought it and it reminded me of Bert. And I I bought that book and then I read it and I thought it was really cool. And then I called him and when I was overseas because I I I was living with these people and they were all going to the bar and like they would come home drunk at two in the morning and I would be like reading Sullivan. And they'd be like, Nerd, what are you doing here? Like, why don't you go to c like, why don't you go to graduate school? Don't you think this is what you're supposed to be doing? Like normal people don't do what you do. And so I was like, Yeah, maybe. So I called him and I was like, What you think I should do? And he suggested that I go to graduate school. So he was really important in my development. Yeah.
speaker-1: What appealed to you about Sullivan?
speaker-0: Yeah, I don't know. You know, it's interesting because I think originally it was kind of like well, it's kind of like a pop star to a teenager. It's just, I don't know, sort of happenstance and th it's like aesthetic more than it is meaningful, but ⁓ aesthetics are meaningful, but you know I mean. It wasn't until I was in in my PhD program actually, when I had my first well, not my first. I I was in a master's program first and I saw patients and actually I had a psychodynamic practicum ⁓ But then in my PhD program, I was doing work on assessment and personality disorders with Les Mori. And I was like, the work that I was doing in the lab and my experience of working with clients were like so disconnected from one another that I was like, I don't even know how to put these two things together. And I went to Les and I was like, he he's sort of famously coy about about orientation. And and so I, even though I was his PhD student, I still didn't really know like how he thought about. That kind of thing. And so I said to him one day at lunch, like, How do you think about this? And he just handed me a book by Lorna Smith Benjamin, which I thought was great. And then that led me to this book that Mark Lenzenvecker published with John Clarkin about major called Major Theories of Personality Disorder. I think it was like 2005, Guildford Press, if I recall. This is what a nerd I am, is I remember details of that. And in that book was an article by Aaron Pincus about interpersonal theory. And this is the first paper chapter that I'd ever read. Where I could see the connection between what I was doing in my research, the papers I was trying to write, and the the way that I was trying to interact with clients. It like gave me an answer to the question of like, if a if a person says this to you right now, like what are you supposed to do? Right. And so that's how I kind of got attracted. So I kind of, and then Aaron's theory is interpersonal, which of course traces right back to Sullivan. So somehow there was this strange synchronicity that led me back.
speaker-1: you talk about the role that Sullivan or maybe interpersonal theory more broadly plays in your scholarship and how you've sort of used it in the because I'm I'm so used to thinking of of it from a clinical perspective. And I'm really yeah, I mean, I think you've done something really interesting and how you've sort of taken it into the quantitative world.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well, you know, I so I study personality and psychopathology, and in mainstream personality and psychopathology research and the kinds of journals that I usually publish and societies I usually go to, both of those are kind of like individual psychologies. So, you know, person the most common model of personality is the as a trait model, the five factor model, which I adore and love and use all the time. and the most common model of psychopathology is something like the DSM. And in both of those models, it's kind of like can you characterize what's inside the person that's like wrong with them or that makes them different from other people or whatever. And the the fundamental difference within a personal theory is it's not about what's inside the person, it's about how the self relates to others. So it's like a fundamentally dynamic and contextual way of thinking about people. And that just resonates a lot more with my experience of being a human, of trying to help other humans, of of being a person who's who's wanted help from others, of like what's important about personality and psychopathology is and so you know he he defined Personality is like the recurrent pattern of relatively enduring pattern of interpersonal situations that characterize a life or whatever. So it's not like a profile of characteristics or features. It's like, what what are the what are the ways that you in relation to others kind of pattern your life? So like if a if a person does this, how do you respond? And that that was kind of the question I was searching for in the clinic as well. And so there was just a kind of mapping. And this coincided scientifically. With a kind of transition in research to studying dynamics. So using intensive longitudinal models to try to understand not just what people are like on average, but how people change over time and across context, et cetera. So there's a nice my career, in my career, there's kind of a nice confluence between the kinds of methods that we started using and the kinds of questions that you could ask. And it all kind of came back to this dynamic processes of self and other.
speaker-1: Well, you started to touch on something I wanted to talk about, which is, you know, I feel like the area that you're in of personality, personality assessment, personality disorders, it to me, you know, not being like fully in that world, it does seem like an area where there's a lot of debate, like a lot of debate about how to think about these things, a lot of debate about how to ⁓ measure them best, or even like what these constructs are. And so I I guess you're touching on one aspect of that debate is like how much of it is ourself in context versus ourself as sort of like independent structures. But I'm I'm curious what else you think that we might be getting wrong about personality assessment, personality, personality disorders.
speaker-0: This is so interesting. I mean, like the history of personality disorders is so interesting. Right. Because from a psychodynamic perspective, all disorders are personality disorders. In other words, like your person the kind of person you are is the kind of like the context within which we can understand symptoms, right? And this was this was more or less the way mainstream psychiatry operated until DSM three. And the idea there was like, okay, fine, but all your diagnoses are super unreliable. So we should try to try to we should try to make things a little more objective, right? So but in order to do that, you also have to make things more superficial. You have to like be able you have to use diagnostic criteria that any person can kind of see and rate relatively reliably, which, you know, is a virtue for sure. ⁓ because you know, complicated personality dynamics are like hard to see and people don't always agree about what's happening when you're talking about that kind of stuff. So, you know, the DSM three was a major revolution in that direction, but at that time there was this kind of political situation where a lot of the members of the American Psychiatric Association were still psychoanalytically oriented. And they were, I think, really annoyed at the idea of losing personality from the diagnostic manual in the kind of feiner world of you know the Robinson Gouzette kind of criteria situation. So I think there was this kind of compromise where they're like, Well, we'll just give you a different axis, right? And you can have like personality disorders, but it it it sort of fundamentally changed what was originally meant by that by by sort of turning the idea of you have to understand a person's symptoms within the context of who they are as a person into there's like these 10 other diagnoses that are not the same as like depression and substance abuse or whatever. Right. And so and then on top of that there were these categories that kind of don't work. And you know, after 30 years there's no specific treatments for any of them and they're all comorbid and Everyone who studies person almost everyone who studies personality disorders sort of agreed, okay, these categories are sort of a mess. And in the meantime, in within personality psychology, trait models really came to the fore. And in and they even made inroads in psychopathology. So then there's this idea of like, you can use factor analysis to describe the structure of personality and psychopathology. And it's basically the same, right? Like The traits that structure individual differences in general are also the traits that can distinguish different kinds of disorders from one another. So then it was like, well, maybe we kind of introduce this idea by reformulating the personality disorders. And, you know, that's fine. But the trouble is, if if all you need is traits to diagnose personality disorders, and traits are also the structure for psychopathology in general, then functionally there's no such thing as personality disorders. You've you basically remove the logic.
speaker-1: Because everyone is on that spectrum.
speaker-0: Yeah, there's no difference, right? There's no difference between personality disorder and other kinds of disorders. So then the other thing that, you know, what changed with the DSM five and the alternative model and the ICD eleven was this concept of personality functioning, which is something I've been preoccupied with. And you know, what is that? And the where I've come to what I've come to think about that is that it's something like the sort of developmental model that Freud sort of described in 1905 of like, you know, first year we have oral problems, et cetera. And that you kind of go through these developmental sequences that are rooted in our evolutionary evolutionary needs to adapt. And that at different life stages you have to have like different challenges because those are th like when you're first born, you have to figure out how to eat. Otherwise you won't live. And then eventually you have to figure out how to distinguish yourself from other people and good feelings from bad feelings. And then if eventually you have to like figure out how to find a job and ⁓ you know And and and raise kids and form attachments or whatever. So so so then person so for me, personality functioning is descriptively is like whatever all personality disorders have in common that make them different from other kinds of problem, like symptom disorders, you could think of them that way. ⁓ the trouble is it's like really hard to get evidence about this. In in cross-sectional data, personality functioning looks like kind of Neuroticism with a little bit of low conscientiousness. So it's really difficult to distinguish personality functioning from traits and cross-sectional data.
speaker-1: Meaning, can you s can you say what that means a little bit more meaning? Like when you look at sort of the average personality disordered person, that's what you'll find the neuroticism?
speaker-0: Well, like if you if you measure people if you measure people's maladaptive traits and you measure their personality functioning using using scales that are called like measures of traits and personality functioning, and then you do a factor analysis, let's say, the personality functioning items will load on the trait factors. Okay. If you then try to s do something like see if you can predict something else, like treatment outcomes or symptoms or substance abuse or whatever. And you do like an incremental validity analysis, the traits, the trait measures and the functioning measures won't really add anything to eat to each other. So in those kinds of data, it's difficult to make the argument that they're really that different. And this has led some people to say, well, personality functioning isn't a thing. To me, trait from a psychodynamic perspective, you could think of traits as something like patterns of object relations and defense. So, right? So, like at the same level of developmental organization, One person might be more of an externalizer, one person more of an internalizer. One person might have a kind of paranoid defensive structure, and one person might have a more dependent defensive structure. And so that like across there's like the developmental piece, which is sort of quantitative, like how mature is your personality? And then there's the stylistic piece, which is like at any given level of maturity, what kind of a person are you? And to me, this is the only way that that. that that that distinction kind of makes sense, but you have to have longitudinal data to be able to distinguish that. And even then I think it's an open question of whether Freud was right, basically, whether whether whether this developmental dimension really is something meaningful, right? And and whether, as Kernberg sort of hypothesized, there's a kind of level, there's a level at which you could think of like personality disorder people as having splitting and kind of very ⁓ immature defenses and fragile
speaker-1: d almost like a developmental arrest at a certain level of functioning. Exactly. I I mean this makes me want to ask how much in conversation are the worlds of personality and clinical psychology? Like how siloed are they?
speaker-0: I don't know many people. I mean, I can think of a handful of people who really are active in both worlds. And it's it's a kind of bizarre it's I mean, you're you're in the States and I gather that your politics is a little bit like this, that it's like the the the words that you use mean different things.
speaker-1: You're like speaking different languages.
speaker-0: You're really speaking different languages. And so, you know, I think it for example in the psychodynamic community, I think the word trait means something totally different than it mean than than what it means to a trait psychologist. Mm-hmm. It means something like that's that's totally stable, that's kind of static and only descriptive, that there's no processes involved that and and but but in in the basic science of personality, people are studying why do traits change, what are the underlying mechanisms that are involved in those changes, etc.
speaker-1: If you had to make a case for it, why would you say that personality scholarship matters clinically? Like it like d even sort of from a public health perspective or in terms of providing optimal treatment?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, this is this is a bet, right? Like I c I could I couldn't go to a policymaker and say that I'm that I have evidence. And I think, you know, i in in our science we know so little that we're all just kind of making bets and then trying to figure out whether we're wrong or not. But but but the bet that I kind of I don't know why they make this bet, but I just sort of have the bet that understanding a person's problems in the context of who they are as a whole human being will will will will make it less likely that you miss stuff. It will make it more likely that you can draw connections between b between what their childhood was like and what their current functioning is like or what they're like at work and what they're like at home, w how their symptoms kind of go together and and how their relationship with you is meaningful for the problems they're having, that a that that a sort of whole person big picture perspective is ⁓ that has value. And the opposite bet is that doesn't matter. Just figure out what their main problems are and and use a very specific focal treatment for those main problems and then let the rest play itself out. Like that's an all s that's also like a reasonable bet to make.
speaker-1: Well, what do you think it is? Cause I think that you the your work to me seems it it operates in this kind of unique way in that you do something that a lot of psychoanalysts don't do, don't know how to do, are not interested in doing, which is kind of taking these core psychoanalytic concepts and trying to operationalize them, trying to study them. And I'm just curious like what it is about you or sort of how you think are your interest in that. Like, how did you get there? How did how did that become like the things that you wanted to put together.
speaker-0: Yeah, but boy, that's a good you have to ask my analyst, maybe. But ⁓ that's a good question. I mean, I guess my core value is a kind of scientific sort of falsification value. And I'm just not ideologically committed to anything other than that. Like I think the the one thing the scientific method and psychoanalysis agree about for sure is that the the the person you're most easily easily the person you can most easily fool is yourself, right? So ⁓ you know, I I've I I mean you can find people in different sort of orientations who are pretty ideological about things. ⁓ on the second dynamic listserv, there was just a discussion of people who who were like reviewing ⁓ treatment trials who have clearly have a ⁓ sort of identify with a cognitive behavioral perspective and were unfair in their criticisms saying, Well, you didn't have the right control group, and even if you did, then then the mechanisms aren't specified and and sort of apply critiques. To a treatment they don't like that they would never apply to their own. And I and I think the same thing happens all the time the other way around. I think there's some people are like, I love psychodynamic psychotherapy and any I'll read the abstract and the title of a paper that said that psychodynamic psychotherapy worked and I won't scrutinize it further because I want to believe that, right? And
speaker-1: Fits my ideology. Yeah.
speaker-0: Right. And you know, I get that, but it's just I I mean, ⁓ I as I said, I sort of make the bet. And I and a lot of the bets I think are fairly have been shown to be right. Like I think the unconscious does matter. I think that's pretty sh we're pretty sure that's true. Pretty sure that development does matter. We're pretty sure that like attachment matters, that that the relationship in psychotherapy seems to be important. So like a lot of the bets that psychedynamic people have been making all along turned out to be true. ⁓ But there's specific things that were wrong too, right? So so yeah, I guess t to me it's ⁓ it's it's mostly just like ⁓ in the end the truth will come out. And I think the people who are ideological won't th their their positions won't age well, I guess is the way I would say.
speaker-1: Yeah. How do you so you you, you know, used the phrase making a bed and it reminded me in a previous conversation we were talking about the scientific method and theory. And I thought you had some really interesting things to say about what you think the status of theory is currently in psychological science, what it should be perhaps.
speaker-0: Yeah. Well, we're going I'm not sure if this is what you're referencing, but we're going we're going through a kind of interesting transition between sort of loose verbal theories that are that are only kind of theories, they're kind of like stories that are in sort of sort of falsifiable bit vague in kind of key places, to formal computational theories. So it's it's possible to put theoretical predictions into mathematical formulas. And to make models of how people behave or change or how interventions work, et cetera. And then if you can get the model to work, by in the process of getting the model to work, it really forces you to be specific of like, okay, well if I think a traumatic experience is is gonna cause a problem for certain kinds of people, like, well, what kind and how much and what kind of problems and how long should that take? And how many exposures is required? And You know, you're gonna be wrong, but by formalizing, you sort of say, well, here's the universe of ways that could play out. And then you you sort of can map your mathematical models back onto real behavioral data as a way to adjudicate like what's right. And so, this has been common in cognitive psychology and and neuroscience for a while. And it's just kind of making headway in personality and psychopathology in ways that I think are super interesting. And I think the interpersonal model sort of lends itself to that because it's it's it's kind of got specified measurement models. For things like behaviors and effects and and motives. And so so that's one thing that I've been thinking a lot about is how can we make our theories more formal so that they become more specific and more testable. And so we're more likely to see where they're wrong or where we're not being specific enough. Yeah. What
speaker-1: You are have the distinction of being the f are the first guest we've spoken to who is not in the States. And I'm curious about that experience and in general, like what what your finding has been being in Zurich, being in Europe, maybe more generally, in terms of how colleagues, how students feel about you kind of working with psychodynamic ideas, you know, how they're how they feel about those ideas in the classroom, what you've just noticed about that.
speaker-0: I mean my portfolio is broad enough that I I can be whatever I can sort of be a chameleon. I didn't I didn't I didn't advertise my psychodynamic sympathies when I ⁓ took the when I applied for this job. I sold myself as an environmental psychologist, actually. ⁓ w which worked. And it's not full, it's not true, it's not untrue. It's just, you know, not the whole truth. yeah, Curic is a very interesting place because b because it was sort of here at the ground level. When psychoanalysis was being developed. I mean, Vienna, I suppose, is the is the is the first place you'd think of. But there was a lot of action happening here in Zurich. Carl Jung is a person that many people would think of, but actually there's a very rich psychodynamic community in Zurich and in Switzerland. And ⁓ you know, the Rorschach, for example, was was developed ⁓ just down the street from where I'm at right now. And, you know, Bloiler and those guys were trying to figure out what schizophrenia is and ⁓ and we're using like word association methods with young etc. So the theory was really kind of imp important at a time when psychology was starting to get its legs in Switzerland. And then because of the war and and because because Switzerland was one of the few places that was safe for Jewish intellectuals to be During the war, you know, there was like the states, there was a huge influx of intelligence into Switzerland at a very key time in the development of psychology and psychoanalysis. So for for those for those reasons, ⁓ you know, I think outside of Manhattan, Zurich has like the most psychoanalysts per capita. and it's and still a pretty rich tradition. The Young Institute is still pretty active, etc. ⁓ at the same time, just like in the States. You know, academic psychology sort of got a distaste for psychoanalysis for reasons that are fair and unfair in the middle to late twentieth century. And so most of my colleagues wouldn't describe themselves as analytically oriented. I'm not in the clinical program, but I don't think there's anybody in the clinical program that would would sort of classify themselves as psychodynamic.
speaker-1: So sort of a similar trajectory as the states in terms of the move in that direction. Yeah.
speaker-0: I mean, of course, there are really good programs in the States that are s are sort of ⁓ advertised themselves as psychedynamically oriented, but for by and large, like the the standard experience at most university at or clinical doctoral programs would be so sort of suspicious, I would say. So, you know, that that's it's a similar situation here, I would say. ⁓ I I don't think I mean I I I like to think that we're getting past this a little bit. In in insofar as like there's now fairly good evidence that treatment orientation just doesn't matter that much one way or the other. Mm-hmm. And and anybody who's serious about interpreting the scientific literature sort of has to acknowledge that. And so I I it's not like I would be shy about about about saying I mean, I've got books on my wall that sort of giv give me away. If anyb ⁓ you know, I don't I don't feel bad about it. And I think the students are really interested, although I also get j in the States I got this and here I get this too. I get this thing of like students saying, ⁓ but I thought the Rorschach was totally invalid or I thought I thought psychodynamic therapy was unfalsifiable and all these kinds of things, these tropes that you hear sometimes. Yeah. So th th those kinds of things are going around my department just like every other department.
speaker-1: When you to go back to this idea of theoretical orientation, because I think what you're saying about this is interesting and I it it makes me reflect on how in my role as a teacher, maybe because I I teach at a program that kind of represents more than one way of working, I often talk about this idea of like picking your theoretical orientation or like developing it or, you know, because that's gonna decide how you formulate and what you know, how your theory of change and and all of this. But How important do you think it is? Like when you think about clinical work, one's, you know, sort of quote unquote theoretical orientation, how d is that something that because of your exposure to the research, you feel like just doesn't matter all that much?
speaker-0: No, I wouldn't say that. But I do I do I just sort of want to pick up on what you said. Isn't it great to be in a department like that? I mean, that that's what my doctoral program was like too. We had people tr I got trained in C B T and dynamic therapy and there wasn't a kind of tension. I guess there maybe was some competition, but not much and
speaker-1: Yeah. I went to a program like that as well and I wonder how you know, how frequent they'll exist into the future. But it yeah, it was a rich experience. And I think it is for students now too.
speaker-0: I mean, I I'd like to think our field is heading in a more integrated sort of post camp world, but I I'm probably too optimistic. I mean, the rest of the world doesn't seem to be doing that, so I don't I could be wrong about that. But ⁓ yeah, I you know, the reason I think orientation is really important is not because I think that any orientation has a particularly privileged like privileged access to truth, but it's it's it's grounded ⁓ in my experience with clients, which is It's it's really easy to become part of the psychopathology rather than part of the treatment. In inadvertently. Like it's r it's really easy to find yourself in a situation where you're like, ⁓ my, ⁓ my God, I'm actually like making it worse. Right? Like the psychopathology is often more clever than you are. So so having an orientation to to me really provides a kind of heuristic framework for an for making a formulation. For making testable hypotheses at the like N of one case level and and for and and for having a model for figuring out like why am I doing the things that I'm doing and and in what sense are they in what sense are they connected to some kind of long term goal? Where whereas if you're just kind of like, well, I'm gonna try to be nice and try to h understand this person, try to help them understand themselves, I think it's very easy to fall into traps through projective identification processes.
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: ⁓ that that are more easily avoided if if you have if you're grounded in an orientation.
speaker-1: You just reminded me I I I say this a lot and maybe I don't even know totally what I mean by it. But when super FCs ask me, like, well, you know, how do I know if that was the right thing to say or the right thing to do? I often find myself saying, like, well, it's an empirical question, right? They have to see what happens next. You have to see, are they talking more? Are they shutting down? Are they leaving the session? You know, are they getting better? So yeah, I it in a way you're talking about like the map that we need in order to even have a sense of where we're gonna go.
speaker-0: Right. Yeah, totally.
speaker-1: You have this whole part of your research that's really fascinating and in some ways seems disconnected, which is human-animal relations. So can you tell me about that and how you like what that means to you, how you got into that?
speaker-0: Yeah, I mean there's this thing of like after you're tenured you feel like on the one hand you can do whatever you want, but on the other hand, you're sort of obligated to do something that's important. I think ⁓ many of us have this kind of crisis of like, ⁓ now they're j they get what, just gonna keep paying me? Like what am I supposed to do? So
speaker-1: Do I mess around or do I double down?
speaker-0: I mean you could I mean I don't know. I I guess my superego is functioning just well enough that I that I I'm not gonna just mess around. So this had always always been something personally important to me and and it it was something that I I sort of observed a lot of young people being interested. And I thought, you know, me being a a relatively old person, maybe I can provide some opportunities for those people. You know, there's there's billions and billions of ⁓ animals on factory farms throughout the world. And these people love their loved ones and f have feelings and don't want to die and don't want to watch their friends and families die either. There's no reason to be killing them. ⁓ and in fact by killing them we're we're making it l less able to feed people on the planet. We're ruining our water. We're cutting down forests. We're ruining our planet we're creating risk for pandemics. We're creating the worst working conditions. For humans that that are known to to to the economy. So it's to me it's a moral crisis and it just doesn't it it's so there's this sort of there's a sort of intellectualized piece of like it's it shares with psychodynamic theory a kind of interest in why do people do things that don't make sense? And why do people do th how do people resolve conflict? Because Almost nobody who eats animals behaves in a way that's consistent with their own values, and yet they're able to do that anyway. but but from a personal perspective it's just like if there's something I can do to be helpful here, I doubt that I can be very helpful, but if I can be, I sort of feel obliged.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean it's it's it's such a really interesting point. I mean it it's it it's the as I heard you say it, like the area of psychology that has to do with how we can almost get away in ourselves of doing things that ha that we have some kind of objection to, which obviously like through the history of defense and rationalization, psychoanalysis has a a you know, a big history in trying to understand. Although I'm also curious what you think about because there's a lot of conversation here in this, maybe not a lot, but I I think there's a growing conversation in the States around how do we work with clients who have very realistic and reasonable fears about climate change, about the environmental future. And historically, I do think there has been a way in which psychoanalysis can sometimes take the stance clinically that if a if a patient is talking about like that that If they're talking about something sort of outside the room, outside their lives, something sort of further away, there's more of a chance that they're that's really a stand-in for others, some kind of like more personal experience or it's really a symbol. And and you know, there's like a growing dissatisfaction, I guess, of thinking about it this way. And I'm just curious if that's something that you've thought about, like working with that clinically, working with fears around climate change. Cause they're not what we would call neurotic fears, right? They're not, ⁓
speaker-0: No, if you're not worried about climate change, you're not worried you're not paying attention. Right. ⁓ yeah, you know, I've never had a client who ha whose main problems is like eco anxiety or something like that. I do experience this myself. I mean, I'm I try not to think about, you know, what's happening to animals throughout the world because it may it's really upsetting and you feel really helpless. And it's well, there's many examples of how humans are doing things that are cruel. ⁓ But to me, this is the best example. It it's the at scale. ⁓ it it's it's really difficult. And I I mean yeah, I can see the point. Certainly there are plenty of examples of where a person will displace a sort of personal conflict onto something more abstract as a way of dealing with it. Maybe that's what I'm doing. I mean, again, you'd have to ask my analyst about that probably, but ⁓ Well, I don't experience it that way, but then I wouldn't if it was a defense, right? So ⁓ it's it's I I I sort of can't really speak to that from my own personal experience, but I do think there's something real and distressing about what humans do to non humans, ⁓ that's legitimate and not just a defense.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's and and it's I to me it raises a question of like how to work with that. I I remember like I was reading an existential ⁓ psychologist who was talking about this idea of like sometimes psychoanalysts when they come up against like some painful reality in the external world are just kind of like, Well, that's life you know, like how do you work with it? That's life. But ⁓ maybe that sort of suggests we don't clinically have a great way of thinking about our individual experience of wider scale problems, violence.
speaker-0: Yeah, there are things like that, right? Like sometimes your parent just sort of sucked, right? Like and that's the reality, and there's nothing you like you can't change that fact. So part of it is just incorporating reality into your identity and your experience of the world. And this is a part like humans do really awful things. And this is this is a very sale example that I'm particularly attuned to. ⁓ I mean, you know, I You tr I think that I guess the existential approach would be well, you try to make some meaning out of that. And I guess that's maybe what I'm doing by starting a society and a journal and creating a platform for people to study this stuff. 'Cause I feel pretty hopeless about it otherwise, you know.
speaker-1: What has Yeah. Right. A way to work with that hopelessness. What what has the response been?
speaker-0: Yeah, there's so many super talented and enthusiastic junior scholars that are interested in this field. So they're like, you know, our journal is pretty active and and ⁓ our society is super well attended and it's really taken off. And that ⁓ that gives me a lot of joy. And Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it's still regarded as a fairly fringe topic among other areas of psychology, probably. and, you know, defenses operate at that level also, but ⁓ But yeah, I think it's I think it's been I think so far I I I feel pretty happy about how things have been going.
speaker-1: ask you if you have any advice and and particularly since our audience might be students who are psychoanalytically inclined or they know they're really interested in psychoanalysis and they want to enter into academia, they want to do research, and maybe sp especially you being someone you know who does quantitative research, what would you say to them or what's your sort of advice?
speaker-0: ⁓ don't take advice from people like me. It's be my first piece of advice. ⁓ you know, I I I I always think about this time that I was like in junior high and we took these vocational assessments or whatever at my school. And the outcome for me is that I should either be a college professor or an actuary. And the and my teacher said, Well, you know, it's really hard to be a college professor, so maybe you should aim for actuary. ⁓ you know, when when when I talk to students who like I was lost for a long time as the story I told you earlier kind of points out. And I think it's totally normal to not know exactly what you want to do when you're whatever, twenty or twenty-two, or twenty-five, or thirty-five, or whatever. Like this is just the way things go. In a world where many of us have enough privilege to have options and it's not just like I'm gonna work on the farm because otherwise my family doesn't eat or whatever. You know, it's like that creates a kind of existential anxiety of choice. ⁓ there's a German expression qual deval, which means the agony of choice. And I think this is part of what's going on for college students of like there's all these majors, there's all these things, and I kind of have this like taste for psychodynamics stuff and and quantitative psychology, whatever. They're normally not put together. How can I do that or whatever? I get it. Usually when I talk to students who are kind of in that place, ⁓ I I talk about sheepdogs. You if you take a sheepdog who's n who's like been raised in Manhattan, let's say, and you take them to the countryside and you put them in a field where there's sheep, this dog will round up the sheep and will continue doing this and they'll be slobbering and they'll be breathing and they'll like they will do this until they collapse. And if you were to be able to ask them like, you know, you're working pretty hard here, how's it feel? They'd be like, what do you mean I'm working hard? For you one imagines that in their experience, this is like what they're supposed to be doing. And when I got to my PhD program and starting work working with Les, I had an experience like that of like I've been wandering around all over the teaching, doing this, doing that, waiting tables, whatever. And now it feels like, wow, this is the thing that like it comes so naturally to me. I wake up thinking about it and and it's been like that ever since then. Like every morning I wake up ⁓ thinking about what my work and I I read the journals out of interest. I would do this job for free if you know I had if I was independently wealthy. So if you can If you can afford to be patient enough to wait until you find your sheep and try out enough things until you get to that field where the sheep are, this is the best case. Now, there is this situation of like, okay, but what if I never find them? I get it. Like I don't I was lu maybe I was lucky to have to have had it worked out. Well, you know But I think I I've I had a lot of students who did the opposite thing of like they selected into something and sort of convinced themselves it was the right idea and didn't like it. And then they found themselves in this opportunity cost situation of like, okay, but I've invested ten years studying this thing, I've now got a reputation, I could get this job and be sort of mildly fulfilled for the rest of my life. This to me is worse than still not being sure what to do.
speaker-1: Yeah. But I mean, there's maybe it's luck, but I'm also thinking there's some sort of self-guided agency or sort of belief in your creativity that must be relevant. Because I I mean I've I read a lot of Sullivan because I went to his institute for training and I never read him and thought, I wonder if you could operationalize this. You know, like so s there is some interest you had that and some faith you must have had at that doing something new or kind of like something unexpected would be feasible, would be possible.
speaker-0: Well, I mean Leary was doing it thirty years before I was born, so I can't really t take credit for that. But I you know, I was never a very quantitatively oriented person. I'm not a mathy person. I I struggled for my first four years of stat. I think eventually it kind of kicked in that like statistics is just like a way to be careful about how you're thinking about stuff. And to and to and to be sure that you're not like fooling yourself. And so when I think about it that way, then it's really useful. I'm still not You know, my my students do most of my data analysis. I'm still not like like great at it, but I I do think it's important because my biggest concern is trying to prove myself wrong. And I think it's if if you're just dealing with language, it's very easy to convince yourself of stuff that you couldn't really defend. Whereas if if you have to measure it and test it against a plausible alternative hypothesis and you have to be transparent about your methods and other people can criticize you, you're just much more likely Much less likely to fool yourself. And so this is why I value that approach.
speaker-1: Can I I wanna to ask for my final question just because you I think you've done a really great job already, especially in the in the sheepdog analogy, which I love of sort of dispelling some myths about what it is like to be an academia and what you know on a day-to-day basis. But what does your daily life look like? Like how do you balance? Cause I'm I'm sure you teach and you do scholarship and research and how like how do you sort of make that work or s or organize your time?
speaker-0: Yeah, ⁓ that's a good question. How do I do that? Yeah, I don't know. you know, well, my partner is also a psychologist. We work together a lot, we publish together a lot, we supervise students together, and so that helps save a lot of time. We can go between, you know, who's gonna change the diaper, are you gonna pick up groceries, to how are we gonna analyze these data, to like when is that grant due? And that it's all just kind of seamless. And I think that saves me a lot of time.
speaker-1: So Mary, your colleagues chat just ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah, well, Mary a Kelly who's much better at her job than you are. That's number one. ⁓ yeah, I mean, ⁓ I the the great thing, I guess I would say two things in general. One is like it's not for everybody, and this is part of the sheep thing. And like that, I think sometimes you get the impression of like we should all be aiming to be a professor, but there's no there's no world in which that makes any sense. There's not enough jobs for that. And and for a lot of people it would be more stressful and boring than otherwise. So like it's like it happens to be for me, but it For many people, it doesn't make sense. I don't think I could do full time clinical work, even though many of my friends do, and it's really fulfilling for them. But I think for me, I I like the diversity of my job. I can teach, I write, I s I mentor, I edit, ⁓ you know, I give talks, I I do all kinds of stuff. And that to me is the central thing is like variety. So I do all kinds of things throughout the day and I don't have any schedule. I try to have as few meetings as possible. This is a piece of advice actually I would take. Avoid meetings at all costs. Like them off. Sometimes academics confuse meetings with working and they're they're not the same thing. A lot of oftentimes meetings is an excuse not to work. But so I just kind of do whatever feels like what I want to do at the time. And sometimes that's driven by like anxiety about I haven't been doing this thing that I kind of owe somebody. And so, you know, the schedule kind of like the plan kind of comes together, I guess, l like my major did and it all sort of works out. But that's not a life plan. It's not like a you know, I wouldn't tell a a young person like, Well, just don't ever plan anything and see how it goes. So I don't know, it's just kinda how I do it.
speaker-1: But you do, I mean, I think that whenever I have to write, I I love that advice because it's if if you don't have like time and space, it's really hard to generate anything new, you know. And so there is sort of a way in which you have to have a an a a vacuum. I really love this conversation. I think you said things that will be very helpful for people to hear. And ⁓ I'm just so grateful you were able to join us.
speaker-0: Hey, it was fun hanging out. Good luck with the podcast.
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