Sigmund Freud got it mostly wrong. The brilliant Jewish neurologist and “father of psychoanalysis” postulated theories of the mind and treated patients according to his concepts of the causes of mental anguish and maladaptive behaviors. Freud was enamored of the subconscious, that part of the mind elusive to awareness, but responsible (supposedly) for drives and motivations. Freud coined terms including id, ego, and superego to represent and explain conflicting urges, motivations, and the mental mechanisms for mediating and controlling impulses in civilized and socially acceptable ways. Freud posited a death wish and strong subconscious sexual drives to explain much of behavior.
That was a stretch! Sorry, Dr. Freud, but I was not motivated to kill my father in order to have sex with my mother (ugh!), no matter how you may have impugned my subconscious and superego denial. (Come to think of it, though, there were times I felt angry enough to want to kill my father.)
Freud made a big impact by imputing significant meaning to dreams and their interpretations. We all dream, of course, and many of us dream vividly and remember dreams with emotional reactions and some astonishment. For me, entering sleep is like going to the movies every night (free and fantastical shows, regularly). Dreams fascinate me, but I can’t make any sense of them. Nor do I try. Being an empiricist, I rely on tangible evidence, observable results, cause-and-effect relationships, and reliability. To add some disclosure to my views, I reveal that, as an adolescent, I was in therapy with a psychiatrist whose psychoanalysis of me included dream interpretation. I saw him every Monday and Thursday; as if in compliance, I dreamed heavily each Sunday and Wednesday night, thereby dutifully reporting my dreams for his interpretation during our sessions. This process led nowhere, and was neither meaningful nor helpful to me in solving my numerous problems at the time.
The psychoanalytic notion that our repressed conflicts emerge in maladaptive behaviors where we act out and repeat unresolved issues just does not hold water. As I am convinced of the neurophysiological bases of much behavior, I’m similarly persuaded that dream contents are reflections of the brain’s residual processing of its internal events in the service of recharging and sorting emotional and cognitive experiences. There is no practical sense in looking for hidden meaning behind these phantasmagorical neurophysiological images. The brain is simply cleaning itself up at unconscious and routine low arousal levels.
The bizarre imagery of dreams comprises one domain of what I call “mental deepfakes.”
You’ve probably heard of or seen the evolving technology of deepfakes. This involves a confabulation in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else’s likeness. Today’s technology, evolving with escalating sophistication, goes way beyond editing or photoshopping images. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, computer and Internet representations can provide eerily realistic and barely detectable simulated combinations of people and environments to substitute for and to fake reality. The political and social import notwithstanding, deepfake technology ushers in a new era in misrepresentation, misinformation, and problems in discerning creative fiction from reality and truth.
Deepfake technology is increasingly used by some with surreptitious agendas to misrepresent, embarrass, and malign prominent individuals. This falsification is akin to digital graphic conspiracy. Aside from the furtive intent, deepfakes should make us think about how we construe truth and differentiate it from counterfeits and simulations. You may scoff at QAnon and rumors of baby-eating pedophilic politicians; but, perhaps you have to look several times and question your own interpretation of a video of a famous person engaged in questionable behavior or opinions.
The interface between one’s own reality and consensual reality (shared in common by most others) has always been of great interest to psychologists, philosophers, artists, spiritualists, and social thinkers. From a psychological perspective, mental deviations and departures range from creative imagination and fantasy to dissociative psychoses.
Though I’m not partial to psychodynamic explanations for human motivation and behavior, I attribute some credence to the interplay between mental fantasy and real-life behavior in the service of gaining reward and gratification. To some degree, we all fantasize: about our own potential grandeur, victory, or domination, and perhaps about acquiring wealth, admiration, recognition, or the allegiance of a coveted partner. Fantasies serve a purpose in mediating the frustrations and limitations that characterize our lives, abilities, and extent of control. However, the inner imaginary life must be carefully balanced, not only by the inhibition of unacceptable behaviors, but by the practiced acquisition of gratification through productive activities and real-life appropriate relationships. Imagining the seduction of or by a celebrity may be inner fun—but, it is not real and should not replace actual meaningful and respectful interactions.
Fantasies are useful and routine psychological tools for mediating desires, frustrations, aspirations, and stress. Naturally, they must have clear boundaries. Think about this: your sexual fantasy is a fantasy because no one else shares it with you!
When inner fantasy life is not sufficiently balanced by normal and appropriate behavior to obtain gratification, we observe the makings and acting out of sociopaths and psychopaths. These people are so thwarted by the discrepancies between their fantasies and their inability to obtain real world gratification through normal means that they compulsively act out to the detriment and destruction of those around them. Regardless of your views about violent video games and movies, you’d likely agree that there is a big difference between gaming and actually shooting someone or robbing a bank.
People with normally functioning, self-controlled minds understand boundaries and distinguish between their inner worlds and the consensual material world in which they live. At times, overwhelming stress and mental anguish can distort these boundaries and cause blurs between reality and idiosyncratic perceptual distortion and imagination. Those with severe mental illness are chronically plagued by distortions, voices, obsessions, and even hallucinations. For them, daily life is a hellish parade of deepfakes, privately tormenting and invalid in reality. For the majority, however, emotional overload can create occasional excursions into fuzziness that questions and disturbs one’s own sense of authenticity.
Some people welcome escape from reality through intoxicants, intense sensory experiences, or vivid entertainment. Others expand upon familiar concepts and tangibles to foster creativity and originality. Those motivated toward creativity and originality try to combine structure and imagination with just enough connection to the commonplace that art or fiction becomes plausible and enjoyable. After all, entertainment and supernormal performance requires some suspension of belief and susceptibility to deepfake influences.
The dimension of dreaming takes us to nether regions where emotion, logic, and memory form strange choreography. Such dances can be delightful, scary, and plainly confusing.
What, then, to make of these unrestrained deepfakes that emanate from the subconscious? Are they to be taken with any seriousness or relevance?
The Old Testament tells the venerated story of Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams. The outcome of those interpretations saved Joseph, elevated him, and provided Pharaoh with practical direction.
Even if Freud overextended, can dreams be a source of meaning, motivation, and direction? Or, are they just neurological deepfake chicanery?
I have made clear my interest in the crossover between private fantasy and appropriate behavior in the development and makeup of functional and productive individuals. As well, I have offered a debunking view of psychodynamic interpretations of behavior. However, I must reveal that in my own life and strange mind, dreams play an important motivating role beyond the colorful entertainment they provide me while recharging. For decades, on a regular basis, I awaken from my sleep and dreams with ideas that I then develop in writing. Usually, I get kernels or phrases, but sometimes whole topics and themes emerge in my dreams. After toothpaste, I hurry to my computer to actualize and develop these notions into coherent writing.
There have been infrequent occasions when I awaken with relatively full documents in my head. I scurry to hit the “Print” button in my mind before they fade. About thirty years ago, I woke up with an entire story in my head in French! I rushed to my computer to translate it into English! This story—Quelquechose Pour Rien (Something For Nothing) was published in my book, Confessions of a Maverick Mind.
I am not Joseph from the Old Testament, nor do I take some lofty cue from him. I do seem to have some quirk that I’ve tried to develop as a gift to be productive, to communicate, and to stave off the horrors that might otherwise envelop me in struggling with deepfake phenomena.
Many years ago, a mentor in the brain technology field advised me on channeling my mental deepfake novelties. He told me to “dream and create it in theta, then write it in beta.” He was referring to the EEG physiology states that characterize brainwaves. For the layman, the translation is “imagine things in the brain’s natural low arousal dreamy state where instinctive ideas flow; then, develop and codify the ideas in higher arousal brain states more activated and conducive to logic and verbal organization.
I have followed this advice and enjoyed writing and publishing for decades. Maybe I am too hard on Freud. Perhaps he dreamed up his theories and shared them with the world.
Decades ago, a respected elder colleague revealed to me a repetitive dream that haunted him in his academic years. In graduate school, as he approached the attainment of his doctorate, he had a recurring frightening dream in which he walked across the stage at graduation to receive his diploma. As the commencement dean shook his hand, someone in the audience stood up and shouted wildly, “No, not him! He’s a fraud—he doesn’t know anything!” My colleague would awaken in sweaty horror, night after night, gripped by the terror of fear, exposure, and ridicule. In his Groundhog Day nightmares, my esteemed and competent colleague battled his fears and anxieties subconsciously.
It’s not only dreams that startle us with confusion about what’s so. Many are haunted by anxieties and insecurities fueled with obsessions, phobias, worries, and negative imagined scenarios. Living in a mental world fraught with what has or may happen mightily interferes with coping and integrating the imaginary and actual worlds. Compromised self-control makes us more susceptible to the deception and manipulation by others. Misrepresentations are more convincing when they contain just enough truth or simulation to deepfake us.
Our minds can also deceive us with look-alike representations arising from perceptual distortions or defense mechanisms. These are called projections. Sometimes, others can attribute behaviors or feelings to someone else that are really their own feelings or acts that are difficult to acknowledge or consciously unavailable. Someone may accuse you of anger you don’t feel or an attitude or behavior that is obvious those of the person who attributes it to you. This can be frustrating and confusing. In extreme or repetitive cases (known as gaslighting), it can toy with one’s sense of reality.
Have you ever mistaken a stranger for someone you know? People can look alike; but, perceptual distortion, impulsivity, or other motivations can sponsor a deepfake case of mistaken identity.
When I was about fourteen years old, I had a traumatic incident of such a projection. I was riding on a crowded subway in New York when I saw my grandmother at the far end of the subway car. She didn’t see me, so I thought I’d surprise her. I got off the train at her station and tailed her to the exit. Sneaking up behind her, I threw my arms around her and kissed her. The elderly woman in my embrace turned to face me and, to my horror, it wasn’t my grandmother!
BRONX TEENAGER ASSAULTS ELDERLY WOMAN ON SUBWAY—BLAMES FREUD
— At 6:30 PM, a white teenager assaulted an elderly Jewish woman as she attempted to exit the Tremont avenue station. The woman was shaken up, but not injured. Transit police found no weapons on the teenager, but did find two books by Sigmund Freud in his briefcase. He apologized, stating that it was a case of mistaken identity arising from his subconscious while studying Freud.
Okay, I made up the part about the newspaper article—but the incident really did happen!
What are the transitions like between your inner and outer worlds? How much do you rely on fantasy for gratification you cannot get from who you are and the world in which you live? Does the past haunt you or control you?
Do you buy into the popular therapeutic notion that you subconsciously repeat and act out conflicts and drives from your earlier life? If so, how is that correctable? What are your dreams like, and how do you respond to them?
What’s your take on deepfakes in the modern world? Not only the esoteric technological wizardry, but your method of sorting out what’s meaningful and believable in your own mind?
You may not be a writer, motivational dreamer, or daydreamer. But, you surely have ideas, brain rhythms, fantasies, frustrations, and plans. How you sort them out in theta, alpha, beta, and the other EEG wavelengths matters in the outcomes of your functionality and satisfaction. Don’t let Oedipus be your subconscious influencer.
Tell me about your dreams—the real and conscious ones about goals and ambitions—and we can get your brain to build a clearer and more cohesive reality where the past recedes in the light of a satisfying present and hopeful future.
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
