b. 37 can psychoanalysis reclaim the public sphere september 2014-libre

8/10/2019 B. 37 Can Psychoanalysis Reclaim the Public Sphere September 2014-Libre

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CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS RECLAIM THEPUBLIC SPHERE?

Carlo Strenger, PhDTel Aviv University

Psychoanalysis has been immensely influential in Western culture, but its public

standing has declined considerably in the last decades, as has been documented

in major studies of the place of psychoanalysis in academia and in mental healthpractice. I investigated the absence of psychoanalysis from a public space of

growing importance: the third culture, the space in which specialists present

their ideas to general, educated audiences in leading newspapers, magazines,

and websites. My central argument is that psychoanalysis could make a unique

contribution to this space that would not only increase its public standing, but

also do an important service to wider educated audiences. I used a psychody-

namic model meant to understand global cultures fetishist fascination with

ranking and rating the self as an example how such audiences can be reached

intellectually and engaged emotionally. I discuss how the difficulties for psy-

choanalysis in finding its place in the third culture can be overcome, and

demonstrate this process by my own journey into the third culture. Finally, I

argue that reaching out to the third culture is an important mission for psycho-

analysis in the 21st century.

Keywords:psychoanalysis, global media, academic influence, global impact

When approaching the shores of the United States of America, Freud famously told

Jung and Ferenczi: They dont know that were bringing them the plague. It is a

truism to say that psychoanalysis was a transformative cultural force in the 20th

century. After initial resistance, the United States came to embrace psychoanalysis as

the lingua franca through which the educated middle classes understood their lives.

Psychoanalytic language pervaded everything, from courtrooms through psychiatric

hospitals. In the 1960s and 1970s, psychoanalysts held many of the most prestigiouschairs of psychiatry; and psychoanalytic psychiatrists edited the most important

handbooks of psychiatry (Hale, 1995).

Carlo Strenger, PhD, School of Psychological Sciences and Cohn Institute for the History andPhilosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carlo Strenger, PhD, School ofPsychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University, 69878 Tel Aviv, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]


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The decline of the public standing of psychoanalysis in the last decades has been

described time and again: Eli Zaretsky (2004), in his valuable study of the cultural

background of psychoanalysis, claimed that its influence had already begun to wane in the

1960s. Philip Rieff (1955), one of Freuds great sociological interpreters, similarly

described a triumphant therapeutic culture (Rieff, 1965) that was replacing Freuds austere

analytic attitude in the 1960s, and Nathan Hale (1995) has already written an integrative

history of the rise and crisis of psychoanalysis in the United States.

Paul Stepansky (2009) has recently given a detailed assessment of the standing ofpsychoanalysis in the world of publishing from the privileged position of former editor of

one of the major psychoanalytic publishers. Until the 1970s, authors like Fromm and

Erikson commanded the publics attention and their books were bestsellers. Stepansky

showed that the number of publishers willing to publish psychoanalytic titles has de-

creased dramatically in the last decades. The major university presses are no longer

willing even to consider psychoanalytic titles. The same holds true for high-quality trade

presses, who in the past carried very successful psychoanalytic books, like Erik Eriksons

Childhood and Society (Erikson, 1959).What are the reasons for the decline in the public standing of psychoanalysis? One is

certainly that psychoanalysis has largely lost its foothold in the universities, as Robert

Wallerstein (2012) has shown recently. Splendid institutions, like the clinical psychology

program at New York University, which had trained generations of psychoanalytically

oriented therapists and generated important research based on psychoanalytic theory in the

1960s, were rapidly shrunk and ultimately closed. Most programs in psychiatry and

clinical psychology turned away from psychoanalysis, and by the turn of the century

psychoanalysts held almost no important chairs in either field (Hale, 1995). This waslargely due to the biological turn in psychiatry and the emergence of the cognitive

neurosciences as the dominant paradigm in psychology department and journals around

the world. Wallerstein (2012) has trenchantly argued for a renewal of psychoanalysiss

institutional ties to academia on intellectual, scientific, and institutional groundsan

argument that is very laudable indeed, but may not take into account that the current

climate in academic psychology and psychiatry does not make such renewal imminently

likely: the paradigm of the cognitive neurosciences is currently too powerful to make an

academic surge of interest in psychoanalysis very likely.In this article, I address an additional sphere that is of great importance today. In the

last years, a new Agora, a marketplace, of ideas has arisen. John Brockman (1995) has

coined the term third culture for the sphere that bridges between the community of

scientific specialists and the wider educated lay-audience. Brockman has been doing much

to promote this third culture on his Edge website (at http://edge.org) on which leading

scientists present important developments in their field in accessible language. He has also

been very successful in promoting books written by leading scientists that are addressed

to a wider educated audience in the major trade presses.The third culture has spread remarkably in the last decade. In addition to trade books,

one of its important venues is the science sections in important newspapers and magazines

like The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and others.

Academics also often contribute to the op-ed sections of these papers, sometimes on their

domain of research, sometimes going beyond these spheres, assuming the role of public

intellectuals.

A number of websites are now devoted to the dissemination of ideas to a wider public.

Foremost in influence is TED.com, a site originally devoted to technology, entertainment,and design. Today, it encompasses most scientific disciplines and many topics potentially


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of interest to a wider public, ranging from environmental protection to new education

technologies. It is built on conference presentations that are limited to a maximum time

of 18 min. The videos of the talks are then put on the TED site, which has so far attracted

more the 750 million views and has evolved into the most viewed site in the third culture

(Strenger, 2012). Other sites, like bigthink.com and Sciencemag.org, have since emerged,

and todays social media like Facebook and Twitter have increased their reach.

Quite unfortunately, psychoanalysis has been all but absent from the third culture

(Prince, Ainslie, McWilliams, Thomas, & Axelrod, 2012). Participating in this space isnot just important for the promotion of psychoanalysis: I believe that psychoanalysis has

a contribution of great importance to the general public, and that our reticence to enter the

new Agora of ideas deprives this public of ideas that could not only be helpful to

individuals, but also to globalized culture at large.

In this article, I present a strategy for psychoanalysiss entry into the third culture

based on a psychodynamic understanding of the fetishization of ratings and rankings. I

will argue that psychoanalytic models can be presented in ways that help educated

lay-audiences to understand their own persistent discontent generated by the deification ofnumbers.

I will argue that the difficulty of psychoanalysis is quite similar to that of all cultural

traditions under conditions of global capitalism: All are threatened by the craze of

quantification. One of the best examples is the fate of the humanities in current academia.

They have to fight for their survival, and student enrollment is falling because students do

not see how studying literature, history, or philosophy will improve their competitiveness

in the labor market. The humanities have also been hard pressed to prove their relevance,

and because they cannot justify their existence by technological discoveries that have an

immediate impact either on the economy, public safety, or public health (Nussbaum,

2010).

There is one strategy that has not been any more helpful to the humanities than it is

for psychoanalysis: decrying the shallowness of global capitalist culture (Barber, 2008). I

will argue that, unlikely as it may be, psychoanalysis can adapt to many of the new forums

without betraying its essence or message, as opposed to what Irwin Hoffman has argued

in an influential article (Hoffman, 2009). At the deepest level, the most important messageof psychoanalysis has always been that the selfs complexity, far from being an imped-

iment to leading a good life, is one of the most important sources of meaning. Psycho-

analysis has in the past been singularly good at communicating how gripping the drama

of the psyches emergence is, and I hope to show that it can regain its function of helping

our culture to embrace and celebrate complexity rather than shunning it. This requires

some work on our individual and collective anxieties and resistance to losing our identity.

I have learned that keeping a distance from the audience is one of the strongest

impediments to getting our messages across, and that personal stories are usually the mostpowerful and effective way to get complex messages across. This, after all, is something

that psychoanalysis has realized and put into practice in the last decade. Our literature no

longer preserves the fiction of the opaque and objective analyst, and many of us have been

writing much more openly about our own processes in our professional literature. I will

therefore tell my own personal journey into the third culture. It was replete with its

failures, frustrations, and resistance to learning from experience. But it also taught me how

much help from others I needed in order to venture into a world initially alien to my

psychoanalytic and academic background. On the basis of many conversations withcolleagues, I now believe that my fears, resistance, and apprehensions are by no means


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unique, and I hope that this article will engender further discussion about the place of

psychoanalysis in the public sphere.

The Cultural Craze for Ranking and Rating

One of D. W. Winnicotts (1965, 1971) enduring contributions has been to show that

humans can maintain psychic health only in an intermediary space, located between thesubjective and the objective. Winnicott specifically put the whole domain of culture into

this space: art, religion, and ideology, and his work detailed how the space of culture

evolves developmentally from the infants bridging the subjective and the objective world

through transitional space. Winnicott, throughout his lifes work, investigated the complex

balance between the space of illusion necessary to stay alive and the psyches ability to

accept the external world as independent of the subject.

Winnicott (1971, passim), time and again, argued that psychic survival from childhood

to death requires that the individuals and the groups intermediary spaces be respected.In the same way as the good enough mother does not question whether the infant has

created its transitional objects or whether they were there to begin with, cultures can only

survive if the ontological status of its objects of belief and the source of its values is not

questioned, whether these be prophets, saints, canonical works of art, or the rituals that

hold a culture together. But this is becoming progressively more difficult when the reach

of the global infotainment system intrudes everywhere, and even traditional forms of life

realize that they are but specks within a global system immensely more powerful than any

particular cultural form of life.Global capitalism (Sloterdijk, 2005) has developed a way of dealing with the relativ-

izing of all cultural frames: the deification of numbers. If no cultural tradition can claim

any absolute validity, is there a way to define value that is, so to speak, unassailable?

Global capitalism has provided a potential answer: the only value that remains unassail-

able is provided by numbers: mathematics is a cultural constant; no matter what your

culture, 2 2 still equals 4; and 1 billion is greater than 1 million.

Quantification has become the Archimedean point seemingly not shaken by global-

ization. If value can be quantified, the psyche can find a resting point in the maelstrom ofcompeting conceptions of the good life. We could finally claim that A is more valuable

than B, if A is numerically larger than B; and we would no longer have to worry that this

conception of value is either threatened or invalidated by a competing culture or value

system. Wealth and celebrity can be quantified, and they seem to provide an unassailable

anchor to determine value: If A is wealthier or better known (i.e., more influential) than

B, then A is more valuable than B. We no longer have to bother with judgments of quality

and worry that others will invalidate such judgments: only quantity matters (see Strenger,

2011, Chapter 2 and passim, for this and the following).As a result, the global infotainment system is flooded with quantitative rankings of

individuals and corporations along several dimensions. First and foremost, of course,

wealth: a persons net worth (the expression is itself telling) is a precise number. Then

there is celebrity and influence. In the age of the Internet, there are seemingly objective

measures for these parameters: number of Google entries; number of searches; number of

hits and views; and the number of followers you have on Twitter.

Some of these rankings are global: Forbeshas its annual hit parade of the wealthiest

and most influential. Time carries its often-quoted ranking of the most influential peopleof the year, and solves the problem that influence is difficult to quantify by outsourcing


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the ranking to the surfers of its site by having them vote on individuals importance. Then

again, there isPeople Magazines list of the sexiest and most beautiful. But each country

and even city has its own rankings of the rich, powerful, popular, and cool.

These lists have become truly addictive. Two senior editors (personal communication,

November, 2011) of influential publications, who have asked to remain anonymous, have

told me that they feel they have created, as one of them said, a monster: One of them

is senior editor in a financial publication that publishes a list of most influential people.

He tells me that he and his staff feel that the list is meaningless; nevertheless, they areflooded with the public relations agents of potential nominees of the list in the month

before its publication who lobby for their clients standing in the list. The other is

editor-in-chief of an influential lifestyle magazine, and tells me that he cannot drop his

annual lists of the most attractive people in his country, because these issues sell better

than all others and bring in new subscriptions every year.

Of course, the absolute majority of earths population, and even 99.995% of the

citizens of developed capitalist societies, never make it into these well-publicized rank-

ings. But this does not mean that they do not play a profound role in this silentmajoritys psyche as well. Google has become the globes dominant search engine.

Professionals and companies can be found in its searches, and Google Ranking often has

significant economic and financial implications, as the Google Ranking determines where

customers will shop and with whom companies will do business (Vaidhyanathan, 2011).

This conception has reached deeply into the domain of culture (Seabrook, 2000).

Publishers and authors have come to crave a place in the worlds most influential

bestseller list. Amazon has provided an alternative to traditional measures like The New

York Timess bestseller list. Furthermore, Amazons users are encouraged to review andrank books. As a result, several numbers now define a books value: its ranking in sales,

the number of reviews, and the average ranking, between 1 and 5. John Seabrook (2000)

has argued that this has led to a culture he calls nobrow: neither highbrow nor lowbrow,

it simply equates cultural value and marketing success.

The logic of this development is seemingly unassailable, even though the results

border on the absurd: according to this logic, Justin Bieber, the celebrity teen singer

catapulted into stardom by YouTube, is immeasurably more valuable than Bachs Mass in

B Minor that has been viewed and downloaded far less than Biebers songs. Andaccording to this logic, Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code would be one of the most

valuable pieces of literature ever produced, because it has sold dozens of millions of

copies worldwide.

The craze for rankings has seeped into the strata of those who do not stand any chance

to make it into any of the more publicized scales. Today, children and adolescents invest

great effort in collecting friends on Facebook and likes for their statuses, pictures, and

videos. The self is not only being quantified, it is shaped from within by the new realities,

and psychoanalysis is beginning to probe the depth to which the Internet is shapingintrapsychic and interpersonal processes, like the development of our sense of reality

(Zizek, 2004; Gibbs, 2007) and of sexual identity, often shortcutting these in dangerous

ways, as Alessandra Lemma (2010) has shown convincingly.

And yet much of pop-psychology is geared toward purportedly helping people to

increase their quantifiable achievement. Sociologist Eva Illouzs (2008) groundbreak-

ing studies have shown the extent to which popular psychology has taken the job to

create emotional competence and guide todays consumer through their various

life-roles, ranging from work through child rearing to sex. This advice is often basedon shaky empirical evidence and packaged into simple three- to seven-step programs


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designed to make people cheerful, communicative, effective, creative, and loving at

the same time.

Illouz (2008) has made a strong case that popular psychology is serving the needs of

the culture at large: It has kept reformulating the ideals of mental health to adapt to

changing circumstances, starting with early research about management optimization and

ending with the theory of emotional intelligence. In doing so, it has both served the needs

of corporations who need employees who work hard without complaining and help

maintain the organizations peace and quiet, and it has served the clients who wantednothing but to function well in the environment that would provide them with status and

an income.

In doing so, some pop-psychology is perpetuating a powerful cultural myth: Each

human being has an inner self with untapped potential (Strenger, 2011, Chapter 3). If this

potential is unleashed, the person will become highly effective and very successful, and,

at the same time, will feel that life is one, big experience of self-actualization. In other

words, great success, supposedly, is not achieved by hard work and risk-taking, but is a

function of tapping sufficiently deeply into the inner selfs unlimited potentiala poten-tial that can be unleashed in brief processes of seven-step programs or crash courses in

positive thinking.

The defining slogan of the era is Just do it! Like Michael Jordan, the icon most

closely associated with Nike, the brand that adopted the slogan, we can all become

legendary, if we reach deep enough into ourselves. Doing so is the new categorical

imperative: The new super-egos demand is be a successful self-actualizer (Laurent,

2011). Because this myth is so powerful, people tend to think that if they have not realized

it in their lives, something must be wrong with them.

This myth is, of course, devoid of any empirical foundation. The economic literature

has shown the precise opposite (Sassen, 2000; Keller, 2005; Reich, 2005; Conley, 2009):

social mobility today is substantiallylowerthan it was 50 years ago, and the best predictor

of economic success is simply the socioeconomic status of the family into which a child

is born. The idea that reaching deep into our inner selves and thinking positively will turn

all of us into immensely successful self-actualizers is nothing but a chimera. The most

probable life course is that those born into societys lower strata will stay there (Keller,2005). And the phenomenally popular seven-step guides to ultimate success are, as Tiede

(2001) has shown, nothing but a contemporary version of snake oil leading to repeated

experiences at failing to achieve the promised miraculous transformation from ordinary

human being into vaulting success story.

A Difficult Personal Journey Into the Third Culture

The psychoanalytic tradition has a lot to give to the members of global culture. It has

always resisted the type of simplistic myths like Just Do It. Well into the 1960s, it has been

successful in communicating compelling theories about what it means to live a human life

that have celebrated complexity rather than shunning it. The retreat from the 21st

centurys public sphere carries a steep price: the psychoanalytic message that the selfs

depth and complexity is a source of meaning, and that there is more to identity than the

selfs marketable properties is today more important than ever. This is why psychoanalysis

should make a serious attempt to communicate its view to the third culture that hasbecome todays marketplace for ideas.


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Participating in the third culture certainly does not come easy to psychoanalysis. As

opposed to the dominant academic culture in the natural and social sciences, psychoanal-

ysis has never been infatuated with novelty. It has insisted on the relevance of its own

canon, and on integrating its own history into its writing and self-understanding, thus

preserving the transitional space of its own culture and history. If modern scientific

research mostly puts a premium on the novelty of results and the technology by which it

is generated, psychoanalysis continues to put its thinking within the context of more of a

century of psychoanalytic writing and theorizing, thus creating a richly textured, multi-layered cultural tradition with a poetic dimension irreducibly intertwined with theory and

practice (Shahar, 2010). Psychoanalysts experience the long, complex history of their

discipline as a holding environment that creates historical depth. This makes it ever more

difficult for psychoanalysis to capture the third cultures attention, because historical depth

is not one of its features (Strenger, 2004): The psychoanalytic canon is not only out of

reach for most of the educated lay public, but, at this point, it has also become inaccessible

for the overwhelming majority of mental health professionals, because most training

programs in disciplines like psychiatry and clinical psychology no longer teach this canon.So how can psychoanalysis join the third culture? The clinical pursuit of psychoanal-

ysis is a very private matter, and it takes years to acquire the skill of communicating about

these intimate processes. Then again, the history of psychoanalysis is replete with gifted

communicators, ranging from Freud himself through Theodor Reik, Erik Erikson, Erich

Fromm, to Winnicott (who made a point of regularly addressing lay audiences), who

succeeded in making aspects of psychoanalytic thought and practice intelligible to wider

circles.

I expect a simple objection: In the times of Reik, Erikson, Fromm, and Winnicott,

you could still expect audiences to listen to longish lectures and to read complex books;

they did not expect to be served intellectually and emotionally demanding material pared

down to the size of a TED talk, a BigThink interview, or an op-ed in The New York

Times!

This argument is weighty, and yet I think that psychoanalysis must find ways into the

third culture, not only to make psychoanalysis popular. The quantification of value and the

Just do it! myth that everything is possible is generating enormous suffering. Psycho-analysis must do what it can to show individuals how they can find a way to validate their

subjectivity over and above quantifiable achievements in a globalized culture.

To communicate with the third culture, we must participate in its rituals and speak its

language, and this, as I have learned the hard way, is not easy at all. Most psychoanalysts

are used to literally reading papers, whereas the third culture requires speakers to engage

with audiences more immediately. We have all been socialized to build our lectures by

connecting our questions to the psychoanalytic tradition. To join the third culture, we must

find ways to reach the audience without presupposing a common theoretical background,and must instead try to reach them with stories and experiences to which the audience can

relate in a more direct manner.

In the last decade, I have ventured into the third culture, and the journey was by no

means easy. My intellectual development was defined by immersion in the classical texts

of the psychoanalytic and the European philosophical tradition. For a long time, I felt that

there was no way of transmitting what I had learned from these traditions to audiences that

did not share this background and were either unwilling or incapable of following

complex theoretical reasoning; and I was suspicious of attempts to simplify ideas to makethem more accessible.


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The process of change was gradual. It began in the 1990s by giving courses to popular

audiences about Freud and psychoanalysis; this forced me to make this tradition accessible

to those who had not prepared for it. These lecture courses worked quite well, because I

met the audiences for an average of 10 lectures.

The problem began when I was asked to speak at conferences for the business

community, where I would be given half an hour at most. To give a simple example, the

world of high tech has been thriving on the myth that it has squared the circle: its

employees never just work hard (Illouz, 2008). They can work endlessly without feelingcheated of their lives, because their work is really just playful self-realization of their deep

self, thus combining financial success with an authentic life.

In some lectures, I tried to debunk this myth using Winnicotts idea that, in healthy

development, we do not simply adapt to the external worlds demand, but require a

complex negotiation that allows us to maintain contact with the true self (Winnicott,

1971). I wanted to point out to my audience that, like badly attuned parents, this cultural

myth could rob those who bought into it of an authentic life, and that they needed to be

attentive to their feelings to avoid this fate.I tried to do so by introducing some of Winnicotts core concepts, without sacrificing

too much of his ideas richness. I failed miserably. After 10 min, I knew I had lost my

audience, and it was quite painful to stay on the podium for another 20 min encountering

blank stares at best, and seeing people walk out of the hall at worst. Friends who were

listening pointed out that I was unwilling to adapt my vocabulary and mode of presen-

tation to the audiences needs; but at first I rejected their well-meant inputs. I thought that

beyond a certain level of simplification I was betraying the psychoanalytic tradition I was

trying to represent.My attitude to my friends admonitions changed when I realized that, by insisting on

a more classic style of presentation, I was effectively renouncing the possibility to speak

to professional groups that most needed to understand the cultural pressures under which

they livedparticularly members of the high-tech sector who function under enormous

pressure and are in more need for self-understanding than my natural listeners, who

already had a background in humanistic disciplines.

The gradual rapprochement between my native psychodynamic language and that of

nonpsychoanalytic audience took some time and involved rather painful failures andembarrassments. I was fortunate to receive help from a number of friends and colleagues,

and in the last years my encounters with wider audiences have become more fruitful and

gratifying for both sides.

Against my earlier principles, I began to use PowerPoint presentations. At first, they

were filled with far too many words and quite useless. Gradually, I opened up to my

friends advice to think in stories rather than abstractions; and began to realize the

phenomenal power of images in illustrating and amplifying stories that could reach

audiences minds and hearts.This process required some self-analysis. I needed to work through my fears that,

without complex vocabularies and wide cultural associations, I would find out that I had

nothing to say. It was not easy to realize that quite often I hid behind a professional

vocabulary to maintain distance from my audiences and to maintain a sense of authority.

As a result, I did not make emotional contact with the audience, and, unsurprisingly, could

reach neither their minds nor their hearts.

After further adjustments, I began to reach audiences I had failed to reach before, like

the high-tech and financial sectors, and the reactions were encouraging. Quite often,members of the audience told me: I suddenly understood what has been driving me crazy


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for years now or I finally understand the source of my perpetual discontent and the fear

that Im living a useless life! My long journey with all its mistakes and blind alleys had

finally brought me to the point of being able to communicate in a way that allowed these

audiences to understand my message. Much more importantly, members of the audience

felt understood by the messages derived from the psychoanalytic tradition and were

encouraged to think more deeply about the cultural myths that were making them

miserable.

Another learning process began in 2007 when I teamed up with a friend, ArieRuttenberg, a former successful advertising executive, to work on a new concept of

midlife transition. My own ideas were strongly influenced by Elliot Jaquess seminal

paper Death and the Midlife Crisis (Jaques, 1965), which first introduced the notion of

midlife crisis. Jaques investigated the creative trajectory of many artists, and concluded

that their creativity underwent a transformation from exuberance to what he called

sculpted creativity, the ability to see lifes tragic dimension and integrate it into their

work. He interpreted this as a deep working through of the depressive position in Melanie

Kleins sense.Of course, I ran into a number of problems: Kleins notion of the depressive position

is not easy to explain to readers unfamiliar with psychoanalytic thinkingeven less so in

Ogdens (1993) enormously fruitful elaboration of developing a truly historical concep-

tion of self and other.

Quite fortunately, Ruttenberg was adamant that we make our ideas accessible to a

wide audience, so we decided to try to write an article for the Harvard Business Review.

Because it is one of the worlds most influential business publications, we hoped that this

would help business executives to take our ideas seriously and implement them not onlyin their lives but also in their organizations.

Here my own resistance to change found a most suitable object for projection.

Ruttenberg, after all, had been an advertising executive through most of his adult life. So

whenever he would push for more accessible formulations, I would say things like this

is exactly where you guys ruin culture: you have no interest in complexity, you just look

for a punchy line. Youre turning this into an exercise in copywriting instead of a

contribution that generates insight! This was an easy way of externalizing my conflict

about reaching out to wider audiences by projecting the part of my self that wanted to doso onto him.

Here again I was lucky, because we worked with a Harvard Business Review editor

with a profound understanding of and interest in psychoanalysis, Diane Coutu. She helped

us find formulations that made psychoanalytic ideas like Kleins depressive position and

Winnicotts differentiation between dreaming and fantasizing accessible to a community

that is far removed from psychoanalytic thinking. The resulting article The Existential

Necessity of Midlife Change (Strenger & Ruttenberg, 2008) generated wide interest, and

was reported in, among others, Time and The Washington Post.During the same period, I began to be progressively preoccupied with political

developments in Israel that I felt were profoundly dangerous to Israels future (Bar-Tal &

Schnell, 2012) and that were contrary to some of my most deeply held values and beliefs.

I decided to approach Haaretz, Israels leading liberal newspaper with a strong tradition

of dissent (Remnik, 2011), because I hoped that I could be of some use in formulating

some of Israelis deepest fears, which were pushing them ever more toward right-wing

nationalism.

I was once again fortunate, because two of Haaretzs editors, including its currentEditor-in-Chief Aluf Ben, patiently worked with me on my style of presentation. They


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kept showing me that I often used the name of scientific or psychoanalytic authorities in

ways that neither contributed to my argument nor were of any real value to a readership

that did not know these authorities. I had to learn the difference between academic writing

and the op-ed format: What I took to be good academic etiquette simply came across as

pompous in the latter format.

Here again there was a psychodynamic aspect to my problems. Not only was this

medium new for me, but Israels political scene is also very heated emotionally. From

early on, I had to deal with often quite aggressive reactions to my ideas. I graduallyrealized that I sought protection behind the mantle of external authorities. My writing

communicated to the readers Dont attack me personally; I represent a class of special-

ists, and hence my political views are buttressed by superior knowledge!

I had to learn that this was inauthentic: Although much of my political writing was

based on and inspired by psychodynamic thought, I was basically denying that I was also

taking a political stance. No amount of name-dropping would change this. If I wanted to

venture into the emotionally charged area of Israels identity, morality, and survival

strategy, I had to accept that I would no longer be protected by specialist knowledge.Moreover, my strategy did not serve the purpose, because readers easily felt that I was

pontificating. I understood that I had to take the medium in its own terms and to renounce

the safety of academic discussion.

The risk of participating in this discourse became dramatically concrete when in

September 2008 a right-wing zealot put a bomb at the doorstep of a fellow Haaretz

commentator, Professor of Political Science and historian of French fascism Zeev Stern-

hell. Fortunately, he was hurt only slightly, and he has continued voicing his trenchant

criticism of Israels policies ever since. I found his courage inspiring, voiced my outrageabout this terror attack in an op-ed entitled I accuse! (Strenger, 2008), and decided that

I could no longer let my fears influence my public writing. I am grateful to Haaretzto have

hosted my blog (at http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction), which integrates

psychodynamic thinking and political analysis, for the last years.

A final example. Early in 2012, I received an offer to present at a TEDX eventa

subbrand of TED, one of the third cultures most influential venues. I wanted to use this

occasion to explain the complex developmental process through which todays new

cosmopolitans, whom I have described in an earlier psychoanalytic paper (Strenger,2013), develop their complex nontribal identities.

How was I to compress psychodynamic formulations I had developed over a decade

and written two books about into 18 min? I think I sweated more over this 17-min talk

than over most articles I have written in my career. There were moments of despair; I was

on the verge of telling the organizers that I could not do this, and I dithered between

self-denigration and rants about the shallowness of the TED format.

My early drafts were rejected, because the TED coaches, Michael Weitz and Abigail

Tenembaum, kept pointing out that the talk was too abstract and uncommunicative. I hateto admit that, at the beginning, I thought that they were just trying to cheapen the talk, and

that I resisted a simple realization: even though I had been lecturing in different contexts

since my early 20s, they knew more about effective delivery than I did, and that I had a

lot to learn from them.

Gradually, Abigail and Michael softened my resistance to the one, rather simple

strategy that they know works in TED: telling personal stories. I realized that, after all, my

theme of how new cosmopolitans develop by working through early attachments, conflicts

with family and tribe, and the resulting process of individuation is a storyeven if it iscodified in our theories. After some reluctance, I accepted the coaches advice to use my


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own life-story as the entry point about how difficult my process of individuation in

adolescence and early adulthood had been. From there, I moved to stories about Freud and

other inspiring figures who upheld universalist values in their lives and work. In this way,

the idea of cosmopolitan identity and world citizenship became much more accessible.

I learned a great deal from this experience, even though the talk has not become a

smash hit on YouTube. I realized after watching it how much I still have to learn if I want

to continue working with this medium. I also have no illusion that I could get across the

full complexity of the individuating processes of new cosmopolitans in the TED format,but this is, after all, never the goal of such a talk. At best, it makes the audience realize

that psychodynamic thinking has something to offer to them: self-understanding and the

possibility of self-liberation from shackles they have always experienced but never put

into words.

The Psychoanalytic Message in the Third Culture

I have related my own learning process in some detail precisely because I think it is not

unique. From many conversations with colleagues, I have come to believe that my own

fears and resistance on the journey of venturing from the safety of the consulting room and

academia into the wider world reflect the difficulties of many in the psychoanalytic

community who seek a place and a voice in the contemporary public spheres.

These fears are the same as those of people from all cultural traditions who feel

overwhelmed by the bulldozing power of the global capitalist system that deifies quan-

tification. We all feel protected by the transitional space Winnicott (1971) has shown tobe essential to our psychic survival, and we are all profoundly afraid of the possibility that

this cultural space could be punctured and flattened by the craze for quantification.

My own journey exemplifies this dynamic. Time and again, I was afraid of losing my

professional and personal identity if I did not use the vocabulary of the psychodynamic

tradition. And I was also afraid of leaving behind the protection of the cultural space that

psychoanalysis has carved out for us: the rituals of analytic work, the psychoanalytic

seminar, and the intimacy generated by dialogue with colleagues who share the same, rich

associative frame.The journey of finding my place and voice in the third culture took the better part of

a decade. Of course, I still feel more comfortable in the institutions and events that have

shaped my professional identity, and I continue to feel safer with colleagues and students

with whom I share a much wider vocabulary than with wider audiences. But I have learned

to feel less threatened in my identity in these ventures into the third culture. I am no longer

afraid that I betray my cultural roots and psychoanalytic values, and, after all, I can always

return to my natural cultural context of colleagues and students to refuel and reconnect to

my cultural and professional roots.Today, I feel that the process, even though at times difficult, frightening, and replete

with sometimes humiliating failures, was worth the time and effort. This journey has

strengthened and deepened my conviction that the psychoanalytic tradition has a lot to

offer the wider public. It has also taught me much about the enormous value of seeking

and accepting help from specialists in other disciplines.

At this point, I expect an important objection: In pleading for psychoanalysis to join

the third culture, are you not asking us to cave in to exactly the craze of quantification that

you have diagnosed as a major source of suffering? Is your proposal not the exactanalogue of what Irwin Hoffman (2009) has decried as double-thinking our way into


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scientific respectability? Does your proposal not empty psychoanalysis of all it has been

trying to protect by participating in the trend of packaging complex messages in short

formats?

I do not think so. Unlike Hoffman, I believe that it has been very beneficial to

psychoanalysis to find ways to communicate with the scientific mainstream (Shahar,

Porcerelli, Kamoo, Epperson, & Czarkowski, 2010; Shedler, 2010). Similarly, my expe-

rience has taught me that, when we are willing to make the effort to communicate with the

third culture, our message is often heard and sometimes gratefully accepted.Forays into the third culture can get across the core message of the psychoanalytic

tradition to wider audiencesthat the self has depth; that the complexity of the psyche and

of human existence are not an impediment to living a good life, but are the source of our

identity; that trying to flatten the self into a marketable commodity described by numbers

achieves the opposite it is meant to achieve: It empties our lives of meaning rather than

imbuing them with significance.

Disseminating this message is a supremely worthy purpose, in todays culture more

than ever, and psychoanalysis has the tools to reach for this goal. Psychoanalysis has aforterarely used when we try to communicate with wider audiences: Roy Schafer (1983)

argued many years ago that psychoanalysis is about retelling human lives. We are, in more

than one way, storytellers, and, as cognitive and anthropological research (Atran, 2002)

has shown, the human mind is wired to remember stories rather than theories. We must

get used to reformulating our stories without relying on a theoretical vocabulary that we

are taking for granted when communicating with colleagues. And we must accept that, in

the new media, we need to engage our audiences within minutes: we must wean ourselves

from the habit of making long introductions connecting what we are about to say totheoretical traditions.

I think it would be a great mistake to see the attempt to find a place in the third culture

as caving into demands that are bound to kill the spirit of psychoanalysis. Instead, we

should see reaching out to the wider culture as our duty, as an integral part of our

professional ethos and missionof deciphering human experience and alleviating suf-

fering through understanding. Finding a language to disseminate this message in the

public space of the third culture could become as integral to the undertaking of psycho-

analysis as finding the words that help individual patients understand their lives.

References

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Barber, B. (2008).Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults and swallow citizens

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Bar-Tal, D., & Schnell, I. (Eds.). (2012). The impact of lasting occupation: Enduring challenges andemerging answers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/

9780199862184.001.0001

Brockman, J. (1995).The third culture: Beyond the scientific revolution. New York, NY: Simon &

Schuster.

Conley, D. (2009). Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How we got from the company man, family dinners, and the

affluent society to the home office, BlackBerry moms, and economic anxiety. New York, NY:

Random House.

Erikson, E. H. (1959). Childhood and society. New York, NY: Norton.

Gibbs, P. L. (2007). Reality in cyberspace: Analysands use of the Internet and ordinary everyday

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