Hey! Where's the Lingo?

Psychoanalytic writing is a curious genre in so many ways, but in view of the warmth and intimacy of its founder's narrative style, what seems especially odd is the cold complexity of its prose style. Especially in American journals, at some point in the 20th century it became standard practice to write in language as surgical and emotionally neutral as an author can make it, and to turn the subject into an adversary that must be surrounded, cornered, lassoed, and defeated in 25 to 50 pages. Occasionally a case history is briefly sketched (and what a relief that is!). But even then, anonymity (the patient's) and secrecy (the analyst's) are at a premium. The vignette over, we readers are back to the grindstone, laboring along with the abstracted narrator, in darkness, obfuscation, and theory. What is persistently missing save for a few exceptions is the analyst's affective response. In the classic version of this genre, what is never missing is the certainty that the patient is sick, defective, resisting, and just plain wrong, and that the analyst is right, right, right, a steadfast scientific puzzle-solver, a master of the evenly hovering attentional style, extraordinarily calm, lucid, superior.

For the beginner in this body of work, it sometimes seems as if the one great consolation is the humor that results from the contrast between the language and the subject matter-that is, the emotional monotone, the polysyllabic words, the odd contortions of syntax indicating redaction, the innumerable disclaimers that purport to circumscribe and neatly tie up and deliver the most human of subject matters, the stuff of love, hate, sex, fear, misery, madness, and hope.

Not only is emotion excluded, but every detail pertaining to the analyst's own life, personal circumstances, class, race, and age is omitted or covered by a large fig leaf. Of course, some reality does leak out. The address printed at the end of a piece in a journal is often read as evidence of a personal life, ev