I am addressing this to the ordinary, average psychoanalyst, like me, not to the scholar, the author of many books and articles, or the academic. I believe each of us has the potential to develop, as part of our psychoanalytic identities, the persona of the public intellectual.
I am guessing that the other contributors to this section of TAP are true scholars and thinkers who have managed to learn to communicate their ideas outside of what Glen Gabbard has called “the cathedral” of psychoanalysis or the ivory tower of academia. We all are dependent on these thinkers to transmit the value of psychoanalytic ideas to the public. Outside of scholars with a public voice, the iconic public intellectual could be Gore Vidal or Christopher Hitchens writing for The New York Review of Books. Or Jeffrey Toobin explaining the intricacies of the courts in a long essay in The New Yorker. For psychoanalysts, the public intellectual is generally considered to be a Drew Westin or Jonathan Lear.
There are a few technical issues to master…and the capacity to tolerate a speck of exhibitionism…
But I contend that every psychoanalyst who wants to bother can contribute to the public conversation on virtually every concern of people today. I will explain what I mean by “wants to bother” below. There are a few technical issues to master, but none require more than a little attention and the capacity to tolerate a speck of exhibitionism, exposure, criticism, and the occasional frame shift. Once you dive in it is not that hard.
To be a public intellectual you have to say something intellectual—that is, about ideas. Or ideas about ideas. And it has to be public.
In the aspects of the public sphere I am going to talk about, one must be brief, sometimes extraordinarily brief, clear, and either jargon free or very good at quickly and clearly defining proprietary concepts or terms of art. Meeting these bars takes practice. But the real challenge, I have found, comes in finding something to say that is psychoanalytic, that is, conveying ideas that essentially only a psychoanalyst would say.
Let's take firearm violence as an example. One can say, “There are over 11,000 homicides due to firearm violence each year in this country—this constitutes a public health emergency.” While this is a useful and important statement to make, it could be made by anyone in the health fields. It is much harder to try to say something uniquely psychoanalytic.
I talked to a lot of colleagues about this at the recent APsaA meetings, and we shared a frustration that we could not seem to add, from the unique point of view of psychoanalysis, anything useful to the understanding of, for example, why we tolerate such a high level of violence in this country. Finally, Jeff Taxman, in one of these conversations, thought of this: Maybe the shocking tolerance of violence in the U.S. is an extension of the dynamics Stuart Twemlow describes as the bully-bystander phenomenon. I was immensely relieved to finally have a psychoanalytic idea to contribute. Perhaps we can offer useful ideas about internal splits, projective identification, affective numbing, and so forth. We still do not know the answers, but Taxman's light bulb allowed my thought process to become activated. I could start thinking like a psychoanalyst, rather than a helpless, well, bystander.
I consider the psychoanalytic public intellectual to be a person who adds psychoanalytic ideas and concepts to the conversations in “the commons,” that public space where ideas are expressed and exchanged. Ours is an explanatory discipline. Explaining outside the consulting room really is not such a foreign exercise. It should be done, however, with grace and humility.
I have always liked the phrase “the commons.” It conjures for me a public square, or a coffee shop, where ideas are sought, shared, debated, and expanded. You, my friends, must make this leap: The Internet and social media are the commons of today, the public space where people of divergent ideas, divergent intellectual backgrounds exchange ideas. And yes, I mean blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
I have two websites, three blogs and a Twitter feed. I have also been interviewed by the press and written letters to the editor and op-ed pieces. I use myself as an example and hopefully an inspiration, because I make no pretense of being anything but an ordinary psychoanalyst. I am not trained as a scholar. My only intellectual credential, in fact, is that I am a psychoanalyst.
I use all these corners of the public square to try to talk about human affairs that interest me, using a psychoanalytic perspective. Here, I will explain how just one of those media engages me. I chose Twitter because it is my most recent discovery, and I am in a stage of mild infatuation with it.
I am a tweeter. A member of the twitter-verse. It is fun, intriguing, and a great exercise in precision of language. Twitter is the latest in a long line of “modern” developments that
Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D., is a past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is the current head of APsaA's Social Issues Department.
I once swore I would never engage, starting with protestations against e-mail in 1990, moving through websites and blogs, and Facebook. I find I start with a sense of mild revulsion and protest against each of these innovations, and then fall in love with many, and become dependent on others.
Though I have been playing with the ideas of psychoanalysts as public intellectuals for some years, I did not join Twitter until last summer when a close and highly respected analyst friend told me he loved it. Startled, I asked why, he explained, and I jumped in.
The idea in Twitter is first to open an account and begin to “follow” other tweeters. That is, your first and I think major task is to read, to expose yourself to others' ideas. Your account is identified with the “@” symbol followed by your username. I identified myself on twitter as @pgourguechon, and crafted this profile: “Psychoanalyst/writer.”
You can open a Twitter account and never write a tweet. Then you are a passive member of the intellectual commons—not a bad thing. Through the equivalent of word of mouth, you learn to “follow” other people's Twitter feeds, such as Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist. He has 983,028 followers. Tyson writes about science. Here's an example of one of his recent tweets:
“In 5-billion yrs the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.” (January 24)
You can follow him on Twitter @neiltyson.
It is a good idea, by the way, to engage as a “coach” a young person in his or her twenties, to help you get started. It was my coach, a brilliant 26-year-old, who knowing of my interest in public intellectuals, introduced me to Neil de Grasse Tyson. There are ways to search out thinkers and resources on Twitter who have interests similar to yours. When you do decide to tweet, you create content with your own ideas, thus actively entering the conversation. There are methods to make you and your ideas more visible in Twitter's virtual space. I will not explain them here; your young coach and Twitter itself will do it better.
A post on Twitter is called a “tweet.” It is limited to 140 characters, not words, characters. This provides extraordinary practice in intellectual discipline—what few words can communicate an idea. Tweets rely heavily on links to articles, blogs, news reports, whatever. (And one technique you have to learn is how to shorten links so they do not use up all your characters).
I avoid posting about personal matters— where I am, where I'm going, how I felt, what I ate. I keep in mind that patients may well be reading my Twitter feed, and that those who use Twitter for self-promotion annoy me. I like the discrimination of Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University. (By the way, I would not have encountered his ideas but for Twitter). Rosen writes, “I don't do lifecasting but mindcasting on Twitter.”
I post ideas, links to articles, reactions to events or other ideas. An example of “mind-casting” (good) is “Popularity of @neiltyson suggests heartening survival of human search for meaning.” An example of lifecasting (bad) would be “Disgusted by TV news; had pbj”.
When I read a tweet by someone that I think is important I can “retweet” it and it goes out to my followers. Or I can “mention” someone in a tweet. These actions are important because if I retweet or mention someone else's idea they find out about it, and therefore they might find out about psychoanalysis.
Recently I learned through Twitter that Senator Al Franken was especially interested in increasing the availability of school-based mental health services, an important interest of many of us. I retweeted. I also passed this on to colleagues engaged in psychoanalytic advocacy.
So please follow me on Twitter. I will follow you. Friend me on Facebook (I have just established a professional page there).
As an ordinary psychoanalyst you have a great deal to contribute to the exchange of ideas “out there” in society. And, in doing so, you will contribute to the preservation of our profession. The more we join the conversation in the commons, the more we will be on people's minds when they need clinical help.