By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 4/28/2010 9:52 AM
Something puzzles me. “Psychoanalysis” continues to pop up in all kinds of contexts in popular culture -- way out of proportion to its place in treatment, or theories of the mind. Why does it have such continuing power as a bit, a shtick, a metaphor? But as treatment and theory, not so much?
Two recent examples, that arrived in my household in the same day: one, a Forbes magazine article entitled Psychoanalyze This. (I’ll write about it in another post, as the content is worthy of some reflection in its own right). The article is about marketers targeting emotions to get a better sell.
The second was an invitation. (Still on paper—not an e-vite!). It was from a real estate market analysis company (not something you’d automatically associate with psychoanalysis). When you pulled the invitation out of the snazzy envelope, the first thing you saw was a blank white page with just one sentence on it: “We’ve been in analysis for 25 years.” Open up the card, and it is revealed that this company is celebrating its 25years in business. I thought about this reference to psychoanalysis. The real estate company does “analysis” to. But without the cultural referent of psychoanalysis in the background their cute card wouldn’t have had much cuteness.
Though I continue to be mystified by the prominence of psychoanalysis in ads, jokes, invitations, movies etc, I am certainly very happy about it. Perhaps there is something of interest to extract from these examples. In the marketing article, the work being described involved going deeper than before. It also focused on the importance of emotions in decision making, not a simple or overworked concept at all. (see Drew Westen’s book, the Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation). From the point of view of these two concepts, the use of the term “psychoanalysis” is quite appropriate. I would like to see our "brand" (since marketing is in the mix) used to represent the deeper exploration of human affairs in a tremendous range of contexts.
In the invitation, a firm that did “analysis” wanted to root itself in some recognized tradition of “analysis”. So real estate analysis was linked in the copy to psycho analysis. Actually, “analysis” on the opening page was not identified as psychoanalysis, but it was clear that it could refer to nothing else. This leads me to the conclusion that our “psychoanalysis” has become a sort of cultural prototype for the intellectual process of analyzing humans per se. Even in an age when psychoanalysis lacks the cultural penetration it had in the middle of the last century. |