Where Should We Begin?
In which, true to psychoanalytic form, I exhort you to pay me for my allegedly helpful thoughts.
Psychoanalysts are weird about money.
Of course, therapists in general are weird about money; psychoanalysts, as is often the case, are the weirdest. A colleague of mine, a shrink-turned-anthropologist named Talia Weiner, wrote what I think of as the definitive study of this weirdness. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork in which she observed the transition that a bunch of therapists made from working in public agencies to starting their own private practices. This transition was a mindfuck for the therapists. They had pursued lives of service, only to find that service can’t pay your student loans or let you go on the vacation you really need if you’re to avoid the nervous breakdown your emotionally grueling work would otherwise inevitably induce. And, it turns out, therapists don’t really respect public service; we respect money, even though we’ll never cop to it, and we’re all in search of respect.
So, the therapists Weiner studied had to find a way to self-defensively bullshit themselves in the exact sort of way therapists are notionally supposed to help other people not to do. In Weiner’s terms, they learned to disavow political economy—that is, to pretend that they weren’t making financial decisions for financial reasons, and to find ways to convince themselves and others that it was really in their patients’ best interest to pay them more money (what Weiner drolly calls, following the lead of her subjects, the “therapeutic fee”).
To be clear, Weiner’s shrinks weren’t really rapacious or mendacious. They were totally normal people (if there is such a thing) on whom it gradually dawned that they’d signed up for what was, financially speaking, a bum deal. They had, often, gotten swindled by shitty masters-degree programs that spit them out into an American public sector that has devised an especially immiserating and humiliating form of austerity for people who need, and provide, mental healthcare. (Click here if you’d like to see me making a sad face in a ProPublica article about this state of affairs). Many found themselves acting as the proverbial Giver for about $40k/year, after paying roughly double that for their degree.
So it has been for me, to various degrees (ha). I worked in community mental health for years, earning about $29k per year on average with my MSW. That quickly became untenable, so I started taking on side jobs—teaching adjunct, working with my then-girlfriend selling chocolate at the farmers market. (I’d steal bars to trade for groceries, and hide under the table when I saw my grad students). Teaching adjunct, in turn, seduced me into getting a PhD, for which I only got about 50% funding. I’ve probably spent $120k on graduate school, all told, much of that at a 6.8% interest rate.
After said girlfriend became my wife, I went into private practice to support us while she spent her own three years in grad school. Since 2017, I’ve worked two full-time jobs; I’ve seen a full-time caseload in private practice, while teaching a more-than-full-time courseload at various universities. I lucked into a tenure-track job a couple of years ago, but because it’s at a tiny, underfunded public college, it still has me teaching eight courses per year, on top of more or less the same workload I’ve been doing for nearly a decade.
On paper, I think I probably look pretty successful. I have cool-sounding jobs, I publish a lot, I get to put a bunch of fancy institutions in the same paragraph as my name. Yet I spend half of every year in a state of grinding anxiety worrying about whether I’ll have enough money to pay my heat bill, because most of the prestigious things I’ve done I’ve done for free, had to pay to do, or done instead of doing something that would pay a reasonable wage.
This experience has been radicalizing; it’s turned me into an anticapitalist union organizer. But it’s also been something I’ve been reluctant to talk about frankly in public, for fear of undermining my public image as highly successful and, therefore, worthy of the money I hope someone might pay me, that I might funnel it into the heat bill.
Rarely is the symbolic capital vs economic capital divide more stark than in matters of writing. As a professional academic, writing is a big part of my job—one for which I am not paid. If I taught at a fancier school, the work of writing would be factored into my pay and workload; at a public teaching college, that’s not true. Of course, I still need to publish—because, as much as anything, there’s always the chance my college might close, as little rural colleges often do, and I’d need to try to beat out hundreds of other candidates for another teaching job. So writing is something I have to do on nights and weekends; it’s my second side hustle, but heretofore unpaid, so what sort of hustle is that exactly?
It’s time to take the leap and see if anybody might want to pay to read the stuff I write. I feel a certain ambivalence about hanging out this shingle; politically, I’m of the general “knowledge should be free” persuasion. Personally, I’m of the “my heat bill is super not free” persuasion, and it’s the latter persuasion that’s feeling particularly persuasive these days. I’d like to think that I might be able to offer you, the would-be reader, something of value, in exchange for heat bill money. Here’s my pitch:
Why You Should Give Me Money
For several years now, I’ve been thinking and writing about a suite of related issues that are, regrettably, more relevant with every passing day. These include—psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and mental health and illness; fascism, and antifascism; propaganda; bigotry and discrimination, particularly of the racist, anti-trans, and anti-Palestinian and generally Islamophobic varieties; climate change; farming and foodways; the ethics of violence and killing; union organizing; and anarchism.
I am, I trust it’s clear, very relaxed, and extremely fun at parties.
This is all to say that I’ve become an academic expert, soi-disant, in a bunch of issues that many people are very worried about. Some people are so worried about them that they pay me to talk to them about said issues—these people include my patients, my clinical supervisees, my students, and various professionals who hire me to give grand rounds at fancy hospitals and the like. Of course, the price of admission to being a patient or a student or a supervisee is quite high, because there’s a lot of other stuff you get in the package deal (e.g. many hours of my undivided attention). I’m thinking this newsletter could let people buy one part of the package deal—the ideas part—à la carte, and at rather a discount.
My aim is to use this newsletter as a public notebook, a venue for lots of different kinds of writing. I’d like to be able to share ideas with readers that would otherwise be hard to access, for various reasons. Sometimes, I write about these issues in scholarly articles and books that live behind huge paywalls, or get stuck in years of editorial limbo. Sometimes, I give talks for which I write up prepared remarks that are only ever heard by a few colleagues; might as well post them, since they were notionally good enough for someone to pay me to read aloud. Sometimes, I write about these issues in my monthly recipe column for my local newspaper—Larder Ardor with Carter Carter—which you are unlikely to read unless you are one of the 1695 people who lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts. (From my perspective, if you have to suffer through reading about critical theory there should, ideally, be a recipe at the end.) Quite often, I have great conversations with my students and supervisees that never get put to paper, that I wish I had some way to share more widely.
It seems to me that there are probably some people who’d like to read all this stuff, who wouldn’t otherwise have access to the venues in which it usually appears, or who might have the good sense not to want to pay the exorbitant costs (financial, or psychological, e.g. beating your head against a wall of jargon) that are often associated with accessing it.
Case in point: tomorrow, I’m giving a keynote address at APA Division 39, the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. I’ll be working with a panel of amazing scholars, talking about ecocide and genocide and destructiveness and self-deception. The conference is pretty expensive, but I can at least post the text I presented, and talk about what we all discussed. Hopefully that’s worth $5 (the lowest monthly rate Substack will let me charge).
In any case, it seems to me that it’d be good to get some of these ideas in wider circulation. The world does not progress at the pace of academic publishing, for better and worse. Issues of fascism and climate change, in particular, seem like topics on which it might be useful for people to have information and ideas to guide their choices day to day.
I’d be very grateful if you’d join me in this experiment. I hope you’ll find it’s worth your while.
See you next week?