Jeff Fine-Thomas

“A strikingly cyclical effort to sanitize speech has contributed to widespread misunderstanding of psychoanalytic tradition. Over time, whatever the original intentions of those people who coined any specific psychological term, labels for certain conditions ineluctably come to have a negative connotation. Language that was invented to be simply descriptive—in fact, invented to replace previous value-laden words—develops an evaluative cast and is applied, especially by lay people, in ways that pathologize. Certain topics seem inherently unsettling to human beings, and however carefully we try to talk about them in nonjudgmental language, the words we use to do so attain a pejorative tone over the years. Today's ‘antisocial personality,’ as a case in point, was in 1835 termed ‘moral insanity.’ Later it became ‘psychopathy,’ then ‘sociopathy.’ Each change was intended to give a descriptive, noncensorious label to a disturbing phenomenon. Yet the power of that phenomenon to disturb eventually contaminated each word that was invented to keep the concept out of the realm of moralization. Any phenomenon that tends to trouble people, for whatever reason, seems to instigate this futile chasing after nonstigmatizing language. One outcome of this doomed project to sanitize language is that the older a particular psychological tradition is, the more negative, judgmental, and quaint its terminology sounds. The swift consumption, distortion, and prejudicial application of psychoanalytic terms, within the mental health professions and outside them, have been a bane of the psychodynamic tradition.” —Nancy McWilliams