Thanks to Dennis Fox, who links to it to assuage his defensiveness at irregular posting, for pointing to this piece by a marketing professor.

Since the Nov.15, 1999 origin of Follow Me Here (2423 days ago), I have posted 14,438 posts (including this one). The argument that prolific isn’t necessarily good certainly applies to FmH. But, as you have no doubt noticed, the frequency of posts has indeed fallen off here recently. Posting less frequently here is done without much anguish at all; I am way past the article’s touted pressure to post daily to establish one’s seriousness (FmH speaks for itself).

I agree, traffic is not generated by daily posting and it is irrelevant to FmH’s ‘success’, such as it is. Whether a significant decrement in post frequency would affect the loyalty of those who frequent FmH remains to be seen, even if you continue to surf over here and check for new posts in a ‘Web 1.0’ way rather than subscribe to my RSS feed á la Web 2.0. I get several hundred hits a day; I have only several dozen RSS subscribers. Certainly, if the posts slow down too much, beyond a certain point loyal readers would find it unproductive to keep surfing over here, but I hope I am still far from that level.

Frequent posting may drive poor content quality and negatively affect the credibility of the ‘blogosphere’, the author says, but I have never posted to meet a quota; I post if I have something to say or if I have something to which I think you would be interested in being pointed. While much weblogging has evolved into either diary, confessional, or pretentious punditry, I have always said that I come from the original late ’90’s weblogging tradition (Rebecca Blood ) in which what you post is — literally — a log of your interesting surfing. If I surf the net, which is an integral part of my self-informing, I hit a few keys and log what grabs me, albeit finding my own voice in the process.

So, then, if there has not been any sudden liberation from the compulsion to post daily, why am I posting less?

• First of all, I am in a busier phase in my career and my community involvements than I was when I started this.
• Secondly, I am sleeping better these days; by comparison, go back and look at the timestamps of my posts during more prolific periods here. It has become far more important to be far less sleep-deprived, and I love my family too much to choose this over them if I cannot have my cake and eat it.
• Third, I have an incredible degree of Bush fatigue; it is not that I cannot get outraged anymore, but there is only a finite roster of ways in which a government can lie, cheat, steal, kill, destroy, and oppress. Bush and his minions have long since done them all; I have long since taken note of them here; nothing surprises me, and my outrage is constant and numbing.
• And I have only a limited tolerance for my own frustration and despondency that a more effective movement of opposition has not arisen in response to his outrages. And I have no confidence that weblogs like FmH are change agents. (I don’t know what would be effective activism these days, I guess, but I can no longer rationalize as I did for so long that FmH was an integral form of activist activity)
• It also seems that the polarization of the blogosphere, like that of the country, has been proceeding apace. I don’t think I have readers with whom I don’t agree on the large issues and I don’t believe dialogue across the culture war in modern America is productive. So my conversation with my readers is or should be more nuanced and subtle; the opportunity for that inherently arises less often than for bolder pronouncements, or maybe it is just my taking the opportunity less often.
• And, yes, the ‘landfill’ of useless blowhard weblogs proliferates, but so too are there more of those who do have something thoughtful to say, or something interesting to link to. They’ve gotten there first and said it better, whatever ‘it’ is.
• Also, I think, the non-blog web is more homogeneous and, well, less interesting, than it was when the original webloggers emerged in the late ’90’s. There may be less cataloguing of interesting sites going on today because there may be less interesting sites, or at least I am finding them less. The quirky early web users have moved on. The web is so much less a place to be quirky and original for the novelty of it. Certainly, in numbers, there are diverse numbers of independent sites around, but many of them are rubbish. So the links to the New York Times, Wired, Salon and the like take over…
• And finally, I do want to be responsive to what I imagine my readers want. Over the years, I have noticed which posts generate comments and discussion. That is a rough indicator, since each individual post doesn’t have a click-through or a hit counter, of what grabs you. And it is not the simple linking posts, but the ones in which I make a comment — insightful, pseudo-insightful, absurd, outrageous, provocative, hackneyed, trite or limited. I am not saying I will be able to do more of that, but it certainly means I will do less of the other.

Comments?

Lo! How the mighty have fallen, one might say. This essay considers Freud’s legacy as he turns 150, describing the state of British psychoanalysis. The authors, one of whom is a British psychiatrist, remind us of the fury and “seriousness with which disputes over psychoanalysis were being conducted in the 1980s” (typified by the controversy over Jeffrey Masson so ably described by New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm back then), and how far toward the edifice passing with a whimper, instead of a bang, we have come in the two decades since.

The British government and, I might add from my perspective, U.S. managed care companies, are gangbusters over cognitive therapy instead these days, insofar as they have any truck with ‘the talking cure’ at all anymore. The article describes cognitive therapy and how it is different from psychoanalytically-based therapy. The article seems to contrast the two first and foremost on the basis of technique — focusing on Freudian analysis’ reliance on free association and the transference. “…The process is classically driven by (these) two mechanisms, and these are essentially all there is to the technique…” I think there are more extensive, and more accessible, ways of capturing what is unique about psychoanalytic therapy. For example, that it is insight-based, that exploration of one’s past is considered important to that insight, that the therapist is attentive to what is avoided and not said by the patient as well as what is being discussed, that there is an emphasis on how the patient functions interpersonally, and that the internal life of wishes, fantasies and dreams is considered important. All of these are largely absent from cognitive therapy.

I also think the essayists are misleading about transference. They describe it as “what takes place between you and the analyst as you become embroiled in an intimate relationship that is unlike any other you might have outside the consulting room”. It is not different; it is simultaneously the same and different! The beauty of analysis of the transference is that the patient will create a relationship with the therapist that cannot escape replicating the rigid and problematic patterns with which they interact with everyone else in their social spheres. All that is different is that the therapist is a trained observer with respect to this process, so that s/he can understand it, comment upon it, and facilitate the patients’ reshaping it, all while staying somewhat above the fray and preventing the relationship from being disrupted. It would not work if it were “unlike any other” relationship the patient has!

Quite rightly, the authors point out that one has to consider not only technique but the theory on which it is based. The true lynchpin of psychoanalysis, the understanding of the human being that it informs, and the therapeutic impact of the insight patients develop through psychoanalytically-based therapy, has been the notion of the unconscious` — that some of the forces which shape how we think, feel and behave are not obvious to us, remain undiscovered and out of our control, and that that is the basis of our distress. The notion of the unconscious has little empirical backing and is different from the subconscious processes that cognitive science posit and the neurophysiological underpinnings of mental function that biological psychiatry and neuroscience suggest.

In contrast to the baroque complexities of psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy is built on the idea that distress is an outcome of dysfunctional and correctable thoughts that patients have aboout themselves. The article has a good description of what a patient can expect to find in a cognitive therapy. The empirical evidence for cognitive therapy’s efficacy is reviewed.

Much is made of the notion that, in psychoanalytic treatment, instead of “tell[ing] you what it is that you’ve got,… [or] explain[ing] how you will get over it,… you embark on a personal exploration during which you find that you don’t only suffer from the symptoms you thought you did, but also a range of other conflicts underlying them.” Arguably, from this perspective, patients do not get ‘better’ in psychoanalysis. Much is made of Freud’s famous (perhaps his most famous) statement that “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” Certainly, shouldn’t the result-driven governments or insurance companies funding mental health treatment abhor such an empirically unproven, costly and unproductive practice!

In a word, the problem lies in the lack of precision, refinement or specificity about what getting better means. Quite simply, cognitive therapy was developed to deal with depression and anxiety. Along with medications, it is an effective and cost-effective treatment for limited subtypes of the human misery we are dealing with in the mental health field, the bread-and-butter disorders of the field. You may not need to understand yourself better to improve from these and similar conditions and, indeed, understanding yourself better may not help.

But that is a far cry from dismissing psychoanalysis for the “near-uselessness of its insights,” as Janet Malcolm is quoted as saying. Whether empirically proven or not, psychoanalysis works because its practitioners are skillful at spinning a web of belief and enlisting their patients into adhering to a coherent and believable story about why they feel and act the way they do. This exists in an entirely different sphere than that in which you can measure the ‘truth’, or the empirical validity, of what one comes to understand. It is more akin to faith than scientific knowledge; treatment is more akin to going to church to reaffirm and extend one’s belief than going to the doctor’s office. Argue as you might about the damage that faith may bring; there are spheres in which it is important, and in which nothing else works. Paradoxically, perhaps, this is the case for some of our least sick patients, the so-called “walking wounded”; and also some of our sickest, the so-called personality-disordered or character-disordered patients. In contrast to someone undergoing a depressed episode, these are people who have chronic and pervasive maladaptive ways of being in the world and interacting with others throughout the bulk of their adult lives. In these cases, getting ‘better’ may mean not so much repairing anything as it does entering into a new, more comforting and perhaps more empowering storyline about oneself and one’s relationships. Doesn’t it make sense that there might be a distinction between conditions in which relief comes from changing what we cannot bear and others in which it is a matter of bearing what we cannot change? And that different techniques might facilitate those two kinds of solution? As the authors conclude:

Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. CBT, medication-based treatment, etc., have largely supplanted open-ended exploratory and revelatory therapy not because they are better or more suitable for all but because they suit a society which has gone overboard with quick fixes, with linear and concrete understanding instead of nuanced analysis, with the romance of the evidence-based, and ultimately with cost-consciousness. This is a society that has excised most of the meaning out of people’s lives already. At least, in my profession, I can draw the line somewhere, and continue to attempt to help patients find meaning in their suffering and value in their lives.

This Prospect Magazine article is by Fred Pearce, an acquaintance of mine in years past from Cambridge who I have always found to be one of the more thoughtful and smart writers on complicated technological issues and their environmental and social impact, but from whom I have not heard much in a few years. As it turns out, he has a forthcoming book, The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change. Here he considers whether the dream of fusion power is worth pursuing.

This is a consideration of the other famous literary characters whose authors killed them off (among them Little Nell, Emma Bovary, and Sherlock Holmes, the clamor about whose death was so great that Conan Doyle was compelled to bring him back, as you know) and whether we should really want it any other way:

(New York Times )

“…[A] bear cub sits in a vintage red Buick convertible in a Lake Tahoe neighborhood, in Stateline, Nev., in this Sunday, July 2, 2006 file photo. The bear drew a crowd of spectators as it munched on barbecue-chicken-and-jalapeno pizza in the back seat of the 1964 Buick Skylark. It also apparently washed it down with a swig of a Jack Daniel’s mixer, an Absolut vodka and tonic, and a beer taken from a cooler, the vehicle’s owner said.” (Yahoo! News)

Ken Lay’s death prompts confusion on Wikipedia (Reuters)

And: A Google News search on ‘ “Ken Lay” and “suicide” ‘.

And:

“Oh, for crying out loud.The whole point of America is that you can burn the flag.”