As chair of APsaA’s Committee on Public Information, I am spearheading our effort to launch a new blog, Psychoanalysis Unplugged. The blog will be housed on the Psychology Today website which will allow for a larger audience and for comments on the posts. The blog will link to the APsaA website as well. We plan to launch the new blog by the end of 2016.
Instead of lamenting how psychoanalysis has been marginalized in the media and the medical profession, we should take action to remedy our PR problem.
It should be an essential part of our careers to educate the public about the good we do and the power of psychoanalytic ideas. This requires us to learn to communicate effectively with those not in the field using clear, direct, accessible language.
Fifteen years ago I started a workshop at the William Alanson White Institute. Each of the 10 group members chose a topic to both write and speak about for the general public. We worked with a communications coach for the first few months. What an eye-opener. No matter how jargon free we thought our writing was, she did not get what we thought we were saying. It required real effort on our part to make our ideas accessible to the coach, but eventually we succeeded. Our group ran successfully for 12 years.
The importance of speaking clearly without jargon was driven home to me during my years as a sign-language interpreter for deaf people. Try to tell a deaf man he has been indicted by a grand jury or a deaf woman that she is HIV positive. The jargon that constitutes communication in ordinary English is utterly useless for this. Psychoanalysts have a common language comprising many terms that are vaguely defined or ambiguous. When we talk to or write for other analysts, we have the illusion we are communicating. That illusion evaporates when we talk to the general public. This becomes obvious when you try to help a layperson understand the meaning of terms such as “projection,” “enmeshment” and “interpersonal/relational.”
My interests in translating and in communicating with the general public led me from our institute writing group to blog writing for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Action, the blog I established and co-edit with Melissa Ritter and David Braucher at the White Institute.
Now for APsaA’s new blog, we need authors who want to publish posts that will be accessible, relevant and compelling to the general public. As stated above, the blog will be housed on the Psychology Today website and posts will be disseminated on social media by our director of public affairs, Wylie Tene, leading people back to our website and attracting the interest of reporters and other people from the media.
Blog posts are short communications—800 words are optimal. A post has to have one main idea. The headline must communicate that idea, but also be catchy. The main point, the “lede,” should be spelled out in the first few sentences. The post should show rather than tell—compelling examples and vignettes are preferable to explanations. If you would like to try to write a blog, please check out the Blog Editorial Guidelines on the APsaA website . Submission should be sent to me at this email address: .
Max Belkin, who has contributed many widely read posts to Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Action, has given me permission to use this example of blog writing: Belkin’s original title was Vagaries of the Erotic Mind. Cute, but vague and not catchy. Here was his original first paragraph:
From Berlusconi and Strauss-Kahn to Roman Catholic clerics, some men continue to behave badly. In puritan America, the media scrupulously chronicles extramarital escapades of politicians and celebrities. No wonder the cover stories of American newspapers often resemble a hit parade of erotic tableaux that depict statesmen of different political and sexual persuasions: Schwarzenegger and the housekeeper, McGreevey and the Israeli dude, Spitzer and the call girl, Sanford and the Argentine belle, to name just a few. Millions of TV watchers and New York Post readers regularly consume the salacious details of sex scandals as if they were made of popcorn. Who needs the Kardashians in the era of CNN?
Erudite and clever, but this expressed no central idea.
Max and his editor re-titled the post Erotic Fantasies: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. This catchy allusion to Clint Eastwood echoed the theme of the newly focused first paragraph:
A vibrant erotic life requires synergy and tensions among our good, bad and ugly fantasies and desires. Our sexual fantasies provide a window into our inner lives: who we want to be, as well as who we are afraid to be.
This post used Sullivan’s concept of dissociation, which Sullivan himself described without jargon as “The good me, the bad me and the not me.” Max’s jargon-free post illustrated this concept in action in the realm of erotic fantasies. His post has been very popular, so far garnering 12,000 hits on the Psychology Today website. Here is the link to the post:
Give blog writing a try. It is an excellent way to communicate with the public, and it will also help you clarify and articulate your ideas about psychoanalysis.