Experienced Psychoanalysts know that the best interpretations are the simplest ones. There is a good reason for this. A short interpretation offers the patient less of an opportunity to deny its validity by focusing on a possibly inaccurate subordinate piece of the comment.
A good interpretation (ie, one that is accurate) exposes to the patient's conscious mind a piece of previously unconscious mental activity. Thoughts, fantasies, impulses, wishes, are maintained in the unconscious mind because they are felt to be unacceptable to the Executive apparatus of the mind (the Ego).
One particular, and very clever, defensive maneuver is the veiled negation of the minor error. Often enough, a correct interpretation is undone by a minor factual error, which the patient then can us to negate the entire interpretation, even while appearing to give it careful consideration.
After a session in which a patient had become overtly angry at me for what he felt was my lack of support, the following day he called to cancel 5 minutes after the session was scheduled to start. The following day, when we talked about the missed session, he reported that he had been out the night before, had a couple of drinks (unusual for him during the week) and had subsequently overslept. Further exploration revealed he had gone out with co-workers, despite his policy of never going out during the week for drinks after work. Conspicuously absent, even in response to my prompting, was any connection to our session of the day before, where he had been so angry at me.
I finally suggested to him that he might have decided to change his policy because he was angry at me and that his "forgetting" to set the alarm was an expression of his unconscious anger at me. He appeared to give this some thought and replied that he had been annoyed at me, had thought about canceling his session anyway because he wanted to get drunk, BUT in reality it wasn't that he had forgotten to set his alarm. His clock was broken and he hadn't had time to replace it. He added that if I had paid attention, I would have remembered that his clock was broken because he had mentioned it just last week.
By underlining my minor factual error, the patient was able to dismiss the entire incident as a meaningless event. In this way, he was able, at least for a time, to avoid acknowledging his responsibility for the use of an action to convey his feelings and avoid understanding why he was so angry with me. Furthermore, if I had fallen into his trap and argued the point, we would have been effectively derailed from understanding what was going on in his mind.
Since this was a rather typical type of enactment by this patient, there would be and were many more occasions in which to address his tendency to deny by way of the minor error. Since one of the things that brought him into treatment was his tendentiousness, especially with his bosses, which stemmed from his troubled relationship with his obsessional and angry father, his well being ultimately depended on understanding these issues rather than enacting them.
We see this tendency to change the subject to avoid unacceptable thoughts and feelings in much of our public discourse.
For example, the current dispute over the treatment of detainees is a classic example of such misdirection. Bill Clinton was interviewed by NPR this morning. He said that we should not codify the use of torture and that we need to agree that it isn't right to smack around and torture detainees, some of whom are innocent. In fact, Bill Clinton, often recognized as one of the smartest men to inhabit the White House in recent years, knows quite well that no one in the current Administration is suggesting we routinely torture detainees. The question is how we define torture, not whether we should torture. Is loud music torture? Cold temperatures? A Belly slap? Our interrogators have the right to know what behavior puts them at risk for being sued by the ACLU.
Another example, perhaps more problematic, is currently playing itself out in the blogosphere. Michelle Malkin, among many others, has been following the story of an AP photographer who has been held by coalition forces in Iraq since May, when he was picked up at breakfast with an "al Qaeda in Iraq" leader and another "Insurgent" leader (as per the report by Judy Swallow at the BBC this morning.) Michelle received a note from the AP today disputing her characterization of Bilal Hussein. She prints the AP letter with her response in AP stands for Advocacy Press. Here is the pertinent part of the letter from the AP:
For Publication in those newspapers who used the Malkin column in print or online:
September 20, 2006
Letter to the Editor:
Michelle Malkin’s incendiary Sept. 20, 2006 column about Associated Press is filled with innuendo, distortion and factual error. This is not surprising because AP has found numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Malkin’s online blog references to AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who has been detained in Iraq for more than five months by the U.S. military without being charged. Malkin would deny Bilal due process and the rule of law by trying him in her column and assuming his guilt by mere association.
Among other things, Malkin asserts in her column that Bilal took photographs “before, during, and after the Iraqi desert execution of…Salvatore Santoro.” This is absolutely false. The man identified as Santoro was already dead by the time anyone working for The Associated Press was brought to see him. The AP story, filed on December 16, 2004, explains that masked insurgents stopped Hussein and other AP journalists at a roadblock and took them to the site where the blindfolded body lay, already stiff with rigor mortis. For the full story and photo captions that AP transmitted, see http://www.ap.org/response/response_091906a.html. [Emphasis mine-SW]
As Michelle points out, this is the single factual error that she made and this is the basis of the AP assertion that Michelle's column about the situation was "filled with innuendo, distortion and factual error." In her post today she goes on to catalog some of the questions she has raised with the AP handling of the story and concludes:
With its non-response response to my column, the AP has made its priorities crystal clear. AP stands for Advocacy Press. Its reporting on military detentions and interrogations of enemy combatants and security detainees--and its coverage of the accompanying legislative and legal debates--cannot be trusted as fair and impartial as it lobbies aggressively for the military to subjugate its security concerns and intelligence-gathering mission in favor of what AP exec Tom Curley calls "justice."
You can count on AP, the "essential global network," to support your "right to know" and cover the news--except when the news organization deems it more important to cover it up. Right, AP?
Silence. Deafening.
The underlying issue is the use of the AP by terrorists as agents of their information warfare against the West. While it is remotely possible that the AP willingly participates in terrorist propaganda efforts, I would grant them the benefit of the doubt. I would not question that they truly believe they are upholding a greater good in their reporting from Iraq. However, the use of a minor factual error to deny and avoid the implications of Michele's column suggests a need for the AP to remain unaware of the effects of their inadvertent complicity.
Three things that can be brought from Psychoanalysis to the situation:
1) When there is a denied, unconscious motivation for behavior, the hidden impulse will continue to press for expression. If the AP (or any MSM outlet) has a need to facilitate enemy propaganda, this will be more and more apparent as time goes on and as attention is paid to those occasions when the impulse breaks through in unmistakable ways. Rathergate and Pallywood are the rules, not the exceptions.
2) When patients use such transparent maneuvers, it is because more effective defenses are no longer working. In the case of my patient, our work together had brought him close to the point where he would be unable to continue to deny and minimize his barely unconscious rage against me. Once brought into the open, it becomes available for therapeutic work and is a precondition for him changing his behavior. The AP's transparent and ineffective defense suggests they are having difficulty maintaining their denial and minimization.
3) If Michelle, et al, can avoid polemics, and avoid engaging in arguments over the minor error, it will allow the facts to speak for themselves. This will deny the AP the opportunity to use an argument over minutia to deflect attention away from the most important questions. In this specific case, maintaining the focus on Bilal Hussein and the AP's overt behavior is the best approach to getting at the facts.
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