Readability and human interest scores of twenty-eight books on psychoanalytic technique
✍ Scribed by Charles A. Peterson
- Book ID
- 101342386
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1984
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 258 KB
- Volume
- 40
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0021-9762
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Presented the readability and human interest scores of 28 books on psychoanalytic technique and briefly discussed in relation to "psychoanalyeese" and psychotherapy training.
Reik is reported to have coined the term "psychoanalyeese" (Devereux, 1950) to describe a burgeoning technical vocabulary that not only grew at an alarming rate, but threatened to strangle the thread of humanness in our psychoanalytic writing. Devereux opined that the technical terminology had emerged to desexualize the language, thereby "defending our professional integrity by means of intellectualization'' (p. 203). Sterba (1967) criticized the tendency toward a bloated bibliography and implied that erudition may be fueled by many a motive. More recently, Bonime and Bonime (1978) observed that the obscurity of psychoanalytic prose often is rationalized as an inevitable byproduct of theoretical abstraction. Consider how frequently a bright graduate student or resident will complain about the difficulties in understanding the turgid, tortuous writings of Kernberg or Kohut. Then, too, everyone personally has encountered that one book that truly seemed printed in ink composed of ether.
Psychoanalytic prose comes in many forms: Ponder the elegant, tasteful disclosure of Reik, the so-called id mythologies of Klein, the compact wisdom of Isakower, the tender erudition of Masud Khan, and the evocative, harrowing voyages of Searles. And there are bright spots, like Freud's winning the Goethe prize as a "distinguished master of prose style" (Jones, 1957, p. 417). Some writers (e.g., Peterfreund, 1971;Schafer, 1976) have proposed that the existing (confusing) languages in psychoanalysis be jettisoned in the service of greater clinical relevance or congruence with certain philosophical systems. Bonime and Bonime (1978) suggest something less radical: The "frequent coupling of the abstract with the concrete, a marriage of concept and illustration" (p. 387). It is case material that grounds the soaring metapsychology and translates the technical language into "felt experience" (p. 382). The clinical data thus render the text more readable and more interesting to the reader.
When choosing a book for our students, we are guided by several factors. We may pick a book that had been sponsored and endorsed by our teachers. Then, too, the text must be faithful to our view of the psychoanalytic corpus. The text may be chosen for its comprehensiveness, its special emphases, its talmudic exigeses, or its ability to evoke movingly the clinical situation. Two additional aspects to consider are the objective reading ease and the human interest of the material.
Using the methodology established by Flesch (1948Flesch ( , 1951)), the readability and human interest of 28 psychoanalytic therapy texts were examined. These books are psychoanalytic in orientation (some might say psychodynamic), focused on therapy technique, general in scope (e.g., no books on topics as narrow as dream interpretation), and are not edited collections of multiple authors. One exception was granted: Freud's (191 1- 1915/1958) Papers on technique was treated as one "text." What's permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to lesser mortals. For each text, 20 pages were selected at random; from these pages five 100-word samples were chosen to reflect the entire text. Each 100-word sample yielded a reading ease and human interest score. The reading ease and human interest scores vary between zero and 100; the higher the score, the more readable and