Psychoanalysts use a lot of terms of art – terms that convey meaning to us, but that often have the fact of alienating or putting off non-clinical people. In addition, many of our ways of thinking are unfamiliar, or threatening, to people who haven’t themselves undergone psychoanalysis. We’ve done a piss-poor job of communicating what we mean when we talk, and much of the wider world mistakenly has concluded that psychoanalysis is discredited, that Freud was a charlatan.
I won’t engage with those perspectives here, at least not now. From where I sit, Freud’s opponents mostly are arguing with a Freud different from the Freud I know; psychoanalysis’s detractors argue against a psychoanalysis that bears little relation to the psychoanalysis I know.
Mostly, I blame psychoanalysts for this.
In a coming series of posts, I will discuss psychoanalytic concepts the misunderstanding of which has contributed mightily to the “discrediting” of Freud, and of analysis.
#1: Penis envy
