By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 6/2/2010 2:52 PM
This is my last blog posting in the American Psychoanalytic Association’s “President’s Corner”. I turn over my spot in the lower left hand corner of APsaA’s home page to Warren Procci, my successor as President of the American. Warren takes the virtual gavel from me during our annual meeting in Washington D.C. on June 11. His term as President coincides with APsaA’s 100th anniversary year-2011-so I am sure there will be many opportunities for interesting posts on the past and future of psychoanalysis.
I have approached this blog with the conceit that psychoanalysis can provide an interesting perspective on just about any matter of importance to human beings. To that end I have written about advertising, a Wisconsin fish boil, dogs, Mad Men (the TV show), the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, and the perfect donut. I have also posted on more expectable subjects such as health care reform and DSM V revisions.
Here’s why I think that my “conceit” has some real substance to it. People want explanations. They want meaning. Not because of some high moral purpose but because when things happen without a reasonably compelling explanation, people get very anxious.
I’ve been playing around a bit with an I-phone application called Mind Map. It is meant to help you think creatively by providing a mechanism for non-linear, pictorial thinking. It appeals to me because I tend to think in charts and diagrams anyway. I ran across an old “note” I made that visually captured this sequence:
I was thinking about some of the terrible events that have happened in the last year, such as the Fort Hood and University of Alabama at Huntsville shootings. I watched the newscasters in the early hours after these stories broke, and I can best describe them as desperate for explanations and meanings. The problem was that the “explanations” and consequent meanings they came up with, using well-known concepts, and sometimes experts, more often than not had nothing to do with the phenomena at hand. For example, in the case of the psychiatrist who shot his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, for a day or two the news was full of discussions of PTSD and his wish to avoid service in Iraq. The problem was, neither of these ideas came even close to explaining his behavior, and in fact diverted anyone attempting to understand from their search for real meaning. The professor in Alabama went on a shooting spree and the discussions went quickly to “stress” and “women and aggression”. Again, perhaps interesting topics, but irrelevant, when the topics at hand were severe behavioral discontrol, and the likelihood of psychosis.
The main contribution psychoanalysis can make here is not to the correct understanding of these particular events (this is essentially a psychiatric problem) but rather to the phenomenon of “a rush to meaning”.
Psychoanalysis is a discipline that attempts to explain and find meaning. Human beings are in desperate need of explanations and meaning, but they are quite willing to settle for pseudo-explanations if a more correct or complex one is either unavailable or too frightening. In the individual treatment situation, this is called resistance. Even the patient most eager to understand himself will shy away from explanations and understandings that are very painful to know. It is in this point of convergence between human experience and understanding that the tools of psychoanalysis are powerful and, I believe, indispensible. The fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis—the unconscious, transference and human development—are infinitely pliable and helpful in understanding what people do and why they do it.
I will continue to blog on a psychoanalytic slant on just about anything in the Psychology Today blog and Huffington Post. |