Empathy or Bird Calls: How We Write Matters

How do we write from an empathic vantage point? In what ways can we or should we use empathy to imagine our audience's reaction to our written words?

Although these seem to be very simple questions, I am impressed at how little attention writing has received in both self psychology and the world of contemporary psychoanalysis, in general. It is through our written words—presented in journals and books and in papers read at conferences—that our discipline is constructed, our guiding beliefs are honed, and we enter into a shared community of terms, ideas, and meanings. That consideration of how our audience is receiving our words should matter may seem obvious. Yet, as psychoanalysis moves in a postmodern direction, I have come to wonder if the obscurantism that often characterizes postmodern theoretical discourse is seeping into our writings.

Many—certainly not all—postmodern thinkers rely on aspects of a continental philosophical tradition that devalues verbal transparency in favor of jargon and neologism. What this obscure, if not obfuscating, use of language conveys is that the author is in the know and the reader or listener, who does not understand, is not. Thus, little value is placed on the audience's understanding or experience. Instead, this writing style appears

to be intended to impress rather to communicate, or to communicate with only a select few who matter, who are in the know. Language, thus, can be thought of as serving as a series of birdcalls to other privileged birds—fellow members of the flock who are in the know.

As contemporary psychoanalysis increasingly incorporates ideas, thinkers, references, and languages from other fields such as philosophy, neuroscience, and systems theory, I believe it is more important than ever to empathize with our audience. It is critical to ask if the general, psychoanalytically informed reader or listener will understand the jargon, the references to thinkers outside the psychoanalytic canon, and the