This Is Spinal TAP!
Rock and Roll!
By Austin Ratner
Illustration by Austin Hughes
“Hello, Cleveland!” cries Derek Smalls, bass player in Rob Reiner’s classic 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. The heavy metal band Spinal Tap are lost in the cramped back corridors of a Cleveland music venue, desperately trying to find their way from the dressing room to the stage. “Rock and roll!” the clueless bassist keeps on crying out, convinced the audience must be somewhere nearby. In presenting a music issue of The American Psychoanalyst, I admit I feel a bit like Derek Smalls crying out “Hello, Cleveland!” in the dark.
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I first got involved with the American Psychoanalytic Association when I was appointed to an APsA “rebranding” task force. What is a brand? It’s an identity that an organization or corporation projects into the marketplace to appeal to clients and customers. Branding is essential to public relations. Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays pioneered modern branding and marketing as a means of unconscious influence rooted in the manipulation of emotional associations. Cognitive-behavioral psychology had nothing to do with it. Bernays coined the term public relations itself as a way of rebranding the dark art of propaganda.
Because psychoanalysis gave birth to public relations, you might think an APsA rebranding task force would have much to say about PR. But for most of its history, APsA has been abysmal at PR. It has systematically courted obscurity, and stoically accepted regular assaults on the psychoanalytic brand. The task force itself yielded only a halting conversation about PR and to my knowledge none of its specific recommendations have been acted upon.
Over the past several issues, my team and I have repackaged TAP as an ambassadorial brand for APsA and for psychoanalysis. Drawing on our connections to the arts, including veterans of design and marketing, we’ve tried to craft a brand with appealing, growth-minded associations. Because psychoanalysis connects to so many vibrant subjects, those associations are easy enough to come by. Music is one of them. It’s always good branding. That’s why commercials lean heavily on rock and pop music even if they’re selling soap.
Rock and roll was in fact part of the city of Cleveland’s effort to rebrand itself in the 1980s. To refurbish its 1970s rustbelt persona into something more appealing to tourists, it entered and won the competition to become home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Goodbye, rust. Hello, Cleveland!
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“The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia,” Bernays wrote in his 1928 monograph on propaganda. He was talking about the inertia of consumers but, in the case of psychoanalysis, he might as well have been talking about its purveyors. Inertia has historically been a problem in APsA, cemented in place by certain defensive aspects of psychoanalytic culture. The organization has recently taken some commendable steps forward, including more welcoming membership criteria and the adventurous decision to fund the initial roll-out of the new TAP, but its long-term PR strategy remains unclear.
The insularity of psychoanalytic culture and the long neglect of the field’s brand have put APsA in a vulnerable position. According to an AI estimate of TAP’s mailing list, three-quarters of APsA members are over the age of 65. If APsA does not prioritize rebranding and growth now, it will fold in my lifetime. Psychoanalysis will undoubtedly thrive elsewhere. But APsA members needn’t be prisoner to the old inertia and passivity, the old pessimism about public attitudes to psychoanalysis.
PR must become a well-funded priority if the organization’s going to survive and grow. Some APsA members appreciate this need, while many others do not. Even some members who see themselves as change agents have had trouble understanding the aims of the new TAP. I have heard from some of them a nostalgia for the old TAP, a wish to use the magazine for internal communications with their peers, and an old, familiar pessimism about the prospects of PR efforts. In the digital age, members can easily communicate with each other outside the pages of TAP, whether through the APsA listserv and website or email blasts from the national office.
TAP may or may not succeed at altering public opinion about psychoanalysis, and I can’t guarantee that changes in public opinion will result in near-term growth of APsA membership. But I can promise that the new TAP provides more positive PR opportunities than the old TAP and that it serves an outward-facing PR function that has mostly been missing from APsA. We aim to create original, positive, timely, attention-grabbing content, and push it to new audiences through new channels. There’s no proven method right now. The media ecosystem is currently in flux. We are measuring the results as much as possible in hard numbers—of new followers, subscribers, views, and engagements with the content. If the communication channels we try don’t work, or if the channels themselves fall into dysfunction in the way X/Twitter has, we’ll try others.
But regardless of whether or not TAP is the answer to the field’s PR needs, I would urge APsA members not to take it for granted that someone is minding the store and fighting the fight. Without commitment and support from the organization, activists like me can’t continue on indefinitely. I’d urge younger members in particular to make their voices heard to insure that the organization and the field has a future.
Ask your leaders what they’re spending on PR and on efforts to attract new members. Ask what their rebranding and growth strategy is, what the results have been, and what the PR plans are for the future.
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An issue of TAP themed around music and rock and roll aims to appeal to a younger, broader audience than the current APsA membership. We’ve got a lot of great new content on the music theme: I write up the amazing conversation I had with Paul McCartney in 2012 about his collaboration with John Lennon and the role of dreams in the Beatles’ career. We interview Kurt Cobain’s biographer about music as an antidote to psychic pain, indie rock legend Kristin Hersh about her struggles with dissociation, and Boston Globe music critic Jeremy Eichler about his book on music and memory. A psychoanalyst hears the music steeped in the walls of Slugs’, an old Manhattan jazz venue, and Tati Nguyen writes on “mondegreens”—mishearings of lyrics and what they reveal. On top of our music content, TAP managing editor Lucas McGranahan interviews New York Times–bestselling author and psychiatrist Bandy Lee on Trump and political violence, philosopher Rasmus Winther literally dives into the unconscious, and we have an exhaustive account of the myth of Freud’s discrediting by journalist and social worker Lily Meyersohn. Consider sending it to a colleague, a friend, or a Freud-basher.
I know the stage has to be around here somewhere. … Is this thing on? Hello, Cleveland! Rock and roll!
Issue 58.2, Fall 2024