You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 383, part two, finishing up our treatment of

Sigmund Freud's group psychology and the analysis of the ego. We pretty much spent our whole time, last time talking about one chapter,

chapter eight on being in love and hypnosis, and in fact, didn't really talk about the

hypnosis part. And I think we wrapped up kind of thinking about what it is to be a self

and is the idea that we've talked about in past episodes of having a circle of

concern, a circle of ethical concern, so that in a broad sense, anything I care about is part of

myself, but we understand that it's in a broad sense so that, you know, my identifications

implicate things in the outside world. I think that's a form of self-understanding that now, I'm thinking

of it during our break, is completely compatible with Freud's, well, you know, you could still

ask why you've extended yourself concern. You could still, on some level, talk about the thing

that you care about being literally yourself as being an extension of your libido, an extension

of your ego or something. But he's just talking about something sort of under the hood,

whereas our self-understanding is just a different thing. So I don't think that Freud's talk

necessarily has to obscure or cloud the waters of the other kinds of self-understanding that we've talked about

on this podcast in many other cases. There's two questions. Does one think that there might be an

objection to depth psychology in general? Does one want to think about the unconscious or about

identity in this way or developmental processes? and it all becomes very, very speculative.

Or the more narrow question is that does Freud have it right? And Freud would admit, as he does

many times. The more you read Freud, he's constantly saying, you know, this is probably wrong and it's

provisional. Or he's saying, hey, back in this paper, I was wrong. He's just speculating to the best of

his ability about this stuff. And then there's

more than 100 years of people amending his point of view and trying to make it, trying to get it to

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