Inroducing psydbar

I’ve been alerted independently by my partner, daughter and and a few therapy clients who want me to get my ideas out into the world, that mentioning our current political situation early on will give readers the wrong impression—that this newsletter and its writer are “political.” So I will allay their worries and maybe mine when I tell you I might reference from time to time some national awfulness but I veer quite strongly towards the not-particularly-political. One of the functions of psydbar, in fact, is to re-frame what is going on in this country right now from being seen as a political problem to a serious problem in truncated human development that gets played out in the political arena.

I’m a Columbia School of Journalism graduate who once declined an enviable reporting job at The New York Times to become a shrink. I had to face the fact that I was a journalist less interested in the news than I was in explorations on the order of: Through what frame-of-reference could 77 million people elevate a particularly childish person into a particularly grownup role? I was interested in consciousness. And I could no longer buy into the idea that I’d be messing with objectivity if I approached stories as if the people behind them were actually influenced by psychological drivers. In fact, I believe I’d be putting an end to fake news.

It would be nutty to blame the state of the world on highly intelligent, usually quite dedicated journalists—but if you consider how they operate, the current state of journalism reflects society as a whole in terms of what in life is frequently foreground and what remains background, if not completely hidden. Journalists typically write beautifully detailed side bars explaining to their audiences how tsunamis work, how self-driving cars and weight-loss drugs work, how drug cartels and child porn rings work. But, startlingly, they rarely address how human beings work.

Ever see a reporter take a timeout to explain that when a multi-convicted felon in chronic denial chronically labels others, “Crooks,” and is on the rampage characterizing innocent people as criminals, that this might be the time to explore whether the defense mechanism known as “projection” is in play? Neither have I. It’s a stunning failure—and certainly a missed opportunity—to educate. This is where psydbar comes in.

I have created psydbar not only to raise psychological awareness for the man in the street, but to start a conversation that I hope will go on for a very long time: How do we respectfully incorporate our understanding of people’s inner worlds into more constructively illuminating what’s actually happening in the realms of the public and the political. I love what futurist Buckminster Fuller had to say about such a radical transformation:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

I am inviting your sincere interest in helping me bring my thinking out of my therapy office into mainstream America. I envision this newsletter to be not just about impacting journalism per se and definitely not psychoanalyzing Trump and his followers endlessly, but making the world of The Unseen knowable and real to a larger segment of the human race.

The truth is, without access to the world of The Invisible, we cannot be in reality. When we’re bombarded with complex stories with virtually no recognition of the psychological factors driving the players, a picture gets perpetuated that life’s predicaments are engineered by two-dimensional good or bad humanoids. This reinforces an adversarial view of life and makes it harder to see the underlying humanness of humans. This thinking behind this newsletter has been percolating in me for a long time. With quiet excitement I am inviting you to become a part of psydbar so we can update an outdated model of the human condition.

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