UNPROTECTED SPEECH
BY AUSTIN RATNER
The Psychoanalyst’s Aversion to Proof, cover sketch, Austin Ratner.
TAP is a survivor. It began as the APsA newsletter, graduated to intermittent capitalization and italics as The Newsletter in the APsA bulletins, and for the last thirty-four years has been published under the name The American Psychoanalyst. During those years, psychoanalysis suffered more than a few reverses, but through it all TAP kept coming, three or four times a year, a heartbeat proving that psychoanalysis was still alive.
Nobody I’ve talked to remembers exactly what the newsletter looked like. Issues from that misty bygone era are now locked away in a document storage facility in Edison, New Jersey, with the forbidding name “Iron Mountain.” But TAP has in many ways remained a newsletter: a comfy space where psychoanalysts can report their activities to their peers in an informal but semi-public way. Written and edited at night and on weekends by volunteers whose workdays were devoted to their patients, TAP has been a labor of love. It’s drawn on the considerable intellectual firepower of the analytic community to produce some great thinking and writing from time to time, but it’s also struggled to staff itself and carry out its business. As listservs and websites have replaced some of its custodial functions, it has lost direction. Even to some of its writers and editors, it’s become a bit outdated and moribund.
I was invited to think of ways TAP might evolve. The search committee specifically welcomed change in tandem with APsA’s evolution into a more open and public-facing organization. That sounded right to me. Psychoanalytic knowledge is too important to be kept secret. So, perhaps against my better judgment, I applied to be editor and they offered me the job, perhaps against theirs. I am not a psychoanalyst. I am an author who has published two novels. Not exactly what you might imagine for an editor of the present publication. And yet I have published a history of psychoanalysis, as well as many articles pertaining to the topic, including an essay about transference that the New York Times Magazine in 2017 named one of its sixteen all-time best Lives columns. In addition, like many analysts, I have earned an MD.
Having undergone my own personal psychoanalysis and studied Freud’s writings under an APsA mentorship, I’ve become an advocate for the public rehabilitation of psychoanalysis. In keeping with that aim, I’m reimagining TAP as a voice that might beckon to readers beyond the profession, to interest them in psychoanalysis, restore lost trust, and welcome them to the indispensable conversation about feelings, transferences, defenses, and the unconscious mind. If TAP can be made more interesting to general readers, I hope it will become more interesting, not less, to APsA members too.
Under my editorship, TAP will continue to publish material pertinent to the internal affairs of the field of psychoanalysis, but it will also attempt transformation into something fresh and new. Progress is of course impossible without change. As Kerry Sulkowicz noted in his remarks to the APsA board at the winter meetings, change brings with it uncertainty and loss. Even change for the better—that is, “growth”—means inevitable discomfort. One such loss may be the former comfiness of TAP as a space for psychoanalysts to say whatever they want without fear of “outside” judgment or misunderstanding. TAP has in the past represented a form of “protected speech” within the walls of psychoanalysis, a form of speech that’s essential to the conduct of talking therapy but does not always lead to healthy public discourse.
What do I mean by psychoanalytic “protected speech”? Psychoanalysts have long understood that the severest of censors resides within, in the speaker’s unconscious mind. They’ve therefore taken great care, in consulting rooms hushed by white noise, to foster conditions that might relax this censorship, allowing patients to express uncomfortable, antisocial feelings. Sigmund Freud felt “outside” resistance to his antisocial ideas threatened psychoanalytic discourse altogether and preferred to confine that discourse to private institutions for psychoanalytic members only. My book The Psychoanalyst’s Aversion to Proof details the emotional underpinnings of that sort of protected speech, as well as an unintended consequence: the field’s withdrawal into a cloister.
That said, a good editor must tread a line between perilous withdrawal on one hand and, on the other, pandering to “the noble rabble,” as Freud sarcastically described the public in a 1907 letter to Carl Jung. I look back at the Hogarth Press, which in 1924 published James Strachey’s English translations of Freud, as a fine example of editorial balance between quality on one hand and public currency on the other. Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded the press in 1917, hand-printing their books on their dining room table at Hogarth House, their home on Paradise Road in West London. In an early promotional flyer, the Woolfs described their mission as follows: “to publish at low prices short works of merit, in prose or poetry, which could not, because of their merits, appeal to a very large public.”
“I’m reimagining TAP as a voice that might beckon to readers beyond the profession . . . and welcome them to the indispensable conversation about feelings, transferences, defenses, and the unconscious mind.”
Merit and commercial appeal were in the Woolfs’ eyes mutually exclusive. They began by writing and publishing for the small audience they thought would take an interest. In 1923 they published the first UK edition of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in an edition of a few hundred books, and the next year they published Freud’s collected works for the first time in translation. By 1930, they had a couple of bestsellers (Woolf’s Orlando and Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians), which sold tens of thousands of copies. They grew as a press not by catering to the lowest common denominator but by publicizing works of aesthetic and intellectual merit. They did not chase an audience, in other words, by pandering or dumbing down, but by introducing more people to their rarefied treasures. Their initial attempt to communicate with a select few ended up spreading modernism and psychoanalysis to the whole English-speaking world.
Illustration by Austin Ratner
After a long period of contraction and marginalization, psychoanalysis has begun to make a recovery. I’m hoping TAP can help build its momentum by alerting more people to the treasures of psychoanalytic knowledge. I humbly ask for your patience, even your support, as we together discover what TAP might say going forward, who might help it speak, and which new audiences might listen. At the presidential symposium titled “The Question of Applied Psychoanalysis” at the 2023 APsA winter meeting, Kimberlyn Leary observed that activists who attempt to create change must be able to tolerate uncertainty and unpreparedness. I find myself in that uncomfortable position now. My main preparation for this moment is having been unprepared so many times before. It’s the plight of the writer, trying out his voice with unknown audiences again and again, encountering a lot of rejection and just enough receptivity to keep him whispering, offering his unprotected speech to the darkness. “All these years,” the obscure writer Kilgore Trout says in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, “I’ve been opening the window and making love to the world.”
I’ve organized this issue into six categories of offerings: Stories from Life, The Arts, Spotlight on Research, Education, Play, and Work. In Stories from Life, TAP marks the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, which pulled US combat troops out of Vietnam, with a gripping personal account of the subsequent 1975 American evacuation of Saigon. Artist-writer-filmmaker Tati Nguyen, who was eight at the time of the evacuation, has hauled the baggage of history ever since. The Arts features an essay by eminent Shakespeare scholar Leonard Barkan on Shakespeare’s divergence from Freud into postmodern terrain in Antony and Cleopatra and another on “regression in the service of the ego” in the plays of Aristophanes, written by poet Aaron Poochigian, translator of four Aristophanes plays published by Norton in 2021. In Spotlight on Research, Austen Riggs research director Katie Lewis and her coauthor Steve Ackerman write about their efforts to integrate psychoanalytic research with general psychological research. Education includes psychiatry resident Abram Davidov’s account of his journey from pharmacology to psychotherapy. Education, along with Spotlight on Research, will be aimed at students on a psychology or psychiatry career track who want to learn more about psychoanalysis, its history, theory, and evidence base. Play introduces a crossword puzzle on psychoanalytic themes. Work includes an article on the social progress reflected in the work of this year’s recipients of the Sigourney Award, focusing on Jack Drescher and written by journalist Ryan Lenz, a former reporter for the Associated Press who was embedded with the 101st Airborne in Iraq in 2005.
I am lucky to have with me on the journey managing editor Lucas McGranahan, who is himself editor of Tableau, the humanities magazine of the University of Chicago, not to mention a PhD in philosophy, and art and design directors Austin Hughes and Melissa Overton, who have transformed TAP into something visually remarkable. Austin is a visual artist who spent years at design agency Donovan & Green creating movie posters for Paramount Pictures, Parsons School of Design catalogs, and more. He is an American Institute of Graphic Arts awards winner. Melissa served as creative director for the MoMA Design Store from 2015 to 2018; has designed print material for Ian Schrager hotels, Dolce & Gabbana, and many other high-end brands; and served as associate production manager at Interview Magazine in the 1990s. Many thanks to Michael Slevin, who edited TAP from 2004 to 2007, for his guidance and help. ■
Published in issue 57.3, Fall/Winter 2023