Blogging about Blogging II: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Articulates His Blogging Envy and Concerns about Net Neutrality

I have been blogging for about six years and wrote about the process of blogging four years ago.  This is an extended postscript to that, but it is informed by having written a post in a very different environment and also by some interest in the disappearance of net neutrality.   First things first.  With some nudging, I wrote a heavily edited piece for the American Psychoanalytic Association’s blog, one that is on the Psychology Today blog site and with my real life name as the byline.  My initial version of the post – they asked me to write about dreaming after refusing my first offering to explain what psychoanalysis is (here) – was considered way too wordy and was not catchy enough.   

The intention of the feedback about my first attempt at a dream post (here) was to make the post more attractive to the average blog user.  The feedback from the editors (isn’t a blog supposed to a reasonably immediate and spontaneous reaction to the world?) was not scathing - they wanted me to retitle the piece – to call it 7 Reasons you should interpret your dreams – or something like that - and to create more white space on the page – and for God’s sake (they said) use less words. The intent was to make the material more visually appealing, especially for people accessing the blog from their phones, which is the way that people increasingly read blog posts these days.

In addition to offering suggestions about what I should do, they moved my words around in ways that sometimes didn't make sense to me – the coherence of the piece was lost.  So I rearranged my now fewer words to get some coherence and tried to reinsert ideas that I thought were important to the overarching idea of the piece, and I used their proposed outline of 7 reasons.  The resulting piece, I thought, was fine, but a bit fluffy, at least when I sent it off (you can judge for yourself - I included it at the end of this post).

 

The central concern I had when I reread the fluffier dream post on an official blog site with my name attached was that it gives the impression that learning to interpret your own dreams is pretty easy.  In the post, I reported that we (a co-teacher and I) had good luck getting students to interpret dreams in a class.  When I have talked with others who have tried to accomplish dream interpretation with a class, they want to know how we did it because they have not had a similar experience.  I don’t know if the process we used will work in other settings, or, if we repeat it, with another class – but it is a process that includes readings about dream interpretation and practicing by interpreting other people’s dreams and interpreting literature as a dream of the author before starting in on interpreting, with the help of classmates and teachers, one’s own dreams.

   

The point is that writing a post that is light, fluffy and engaging can mislead people who will then be frustrated when they wake up in the morning and are puzzled by dream symbols that they don’t feel they have the skills to interpret (because they don’t in fact have those skills).  It might make for good reading and also, though, disappointment if people want to execute the process.  But, because this might be exactly what people want to hear, according to my editor, they will be drawn into reading the piece and, after all, isn’t that the point?

I was recently told that Psychology Today decided to feature the edited dream post on their website – they chose to put it out there for their 1.7 million follower’s on Facebook.  This will, based on past results, likely result in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 page views of the post.  Wow.  To put that into context, I have been blogging for six years as the Reluctant P.  I have a total of 130,000 page views of over 200 posts.  My most popular post has about 3,500 views that have been garnered over the course of five years.  So, 10,000 views in the first month of a post? Wow.

As evidenced by the last paragraph, part of blogging is the feedback loop that comes from the statistics that are gathered.  In a recent Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld talked about not understanding how novelists and other writers work.  As a stand-up comedian, he gets immediate feedback about the quality of his jokes – people laugh or they don’t.  If someone writes a bestseller – why?  What is it about the piece that led the people at Psychology Today to nominate my post to be headlined on their website?  I don’t know.  What leads people to read this Reluctant P. post but not that one?  I don’t always know.  Sometimes I am able to discover what people have searched for and that helps (and sometimes there is little other material out there about a topic), but which posts are the ones that readers get excited enough to browse for other posts at the end of their reading?  I don’t know.  All I have is the gross numbers.

I also don’t know why the Psychology Today editors chose to highlight the piece on Facebook.  Is part of the reason the post was selected was that it was short?  Was it because it was suggesting that a hard thing is easy, and that it was therefore sexy?  Should my posts follow this pattern?  I am not willing to mislead people in exchange for more readers – which leads me to wonder why I was willing to do that when I actually put my name to it.

But I think another reason is that it was on a very different platform – whether it was featured on the Facebook page or not, it likely would have garnered more views than a similar post on the Reluctant P. site, which is stand alone.  More insidiously, the Reluctant Psychologist site has been losing readers.  People are not coming to the site at the rate they were.  My paranoid self wonders if the timing of this is related to the ending of the net neutrality laws.  Has Google changed their algorithm to include in the rankings of sites that those that have advertising (which mine has not had to this point) would be rated below those that have ads?  This is my hypothesis.

 

The data that I have to this point is limited.  One of the things that I can access is where searches are coming from.  In the history of my site, the ratio of hits from the US has been 50 to 1 over the next country – Canada – and 100 to one over the country after that – England.  But in the past month, there have only been four times as many hits from the US as from Canada.  I think this is a little fishy.  But it is not proof.  I also don’t know whether the decrease in hits might have to do with factors other than including ads – the ads that Google would supply to me would, I think, probably not raise great revenues for them – then again, every dollar, or penny in the case of clicks, is a penny in the Google bank.

So, I have been thinking about an experiment (at the risk of repulsing my readers and – perhaps more to the point having them get bored with what I write and clicking to sites that would advertise on mine – thus losing them forever).   In this experiment, I will add ads to my site, and see what happens to traffic.  After they’ve been around for a while, I will get rid of them (apparently it will cost me ten bucks to do that) and we’ll see if things change after that.  If the traffic goes up then down, I’ll bring them back on board, to prove the relationship. 

Even if the ads bring in readers, should I keep the ads?  Psychology Today wants short posts – people can’t attend to longer material is the implication.  Am I contributing to this by including flashing doohickeys that will distract the reader from reading my post – and send them careening off to another corner of the internet?  Isn’t the point of psychoanalysis to engender deeper rather than more surface engagement with material that is, or should be, enthralling?  At what point does this medium, one that helps me connect with people about something I care deeply about (despite my ambivalence) actually interfere with the intended communication?  

The insidious concern is that we are driving ourselves to distraction.  By building a world that is filled with more and more shiny objects there is more opportunity to engage with that world (I am, btw, all in favor of that), but engaging deeply - and learning how to follow a train of thought without being distracted into another area - is the real gift of analysis.  I believe that when people are freely associating they are able to follow a thought to its roots, to not be distracted, in the case of neurosis, by defensive functions and, in the case of being an engaged reader or thinking, not being distracted by stray thoughts that are not central to the thesis.  Great works of art and of thought involve immense effort as people work to articulate what is at the heart of a given complex matter.  For us to truly follow them there requires more than skimming a wikipedia article about the topic - it involves immersing ourselves in it - of being quietly connected to a living, breathing person, idea or experience and resonating with it.  I fear that we are building a culture that is, from stem to stern, opposed to this lofty but difficult to achieve goal.

  

By the way, I’m under no delusions – adding a few ads will not give me the power of Psychology Today – they have a stable of people writing – and managing their content and web presence.  They know what their readers want (that said, I have taken some satisfaction in the rejected post – the one on what psychoanalysis is – having been my “best seller” of the last few months).  I have added below the content of the material that ended up in the Psychology Today post – if you are curious to compare…  

[Post script:  I am somewhat relieved that when I tried to add ads to this blog I was rejected.  The robot that makes decisions did not include reasons for the rejection, though did encourage me to resubmit when I had fixed the problems.  When I wrote to Google about this as a quandary, they responded that they could not individually respond to emails...  So, I am stuck with my paranoid ruminations - I can't perform my experiment.  But at least I preserve the uncluttered reading space.]

7 Reasons You Should be Interpreting Your Dreams

How to get to know your unconscious self

As we age the things that we desire from life become more complicated. Sometimes we want things that don’t feel right to us.   For example, we may want our boss’s job.  If she knew that, it could get us into trouble. So we hide that desire from both our boss and from ourselves.

Instead of talking or thinking about taking that job, we might dream about beating someone at a game.  The person that we beat would resemble the boss in some important way, but also NOT resemble the boss in some other important way.  Our unconscious recognizes the symbolized person as being equal to the boss, feels satisfied by the dream, and lets us continue to sleep because our secret wish is being gratified. 

Dreaming is a very complicated activity. According to Sigmund Freud, the goal of a dream is to satisfy those desires that we can’t even voice, much less work towards satisfying, when awake. This means that we need to decode our dreams in order for them to reveal our unconscious wishes. This is not always easy! 

Dreams Are Not Just Random

In a class I teach on dream interpretation students are asked to bring in their own dreams to analyze. Every time a student presents their dream something similar happens.  As dreamers begin to analyze their dreams they describe the process as “unnerving”.  They thought they were bringing meaningless dreams to class, but the dreams end up having important and relevant information about what is currently going on in their life and about their wishes and desires.  Each student discovers that their dreams are not just random, but have important meanings.

For instance, a student had dreamt about being on a luxury liner that she was swimming on and off of.  As she began associating and had supportive ideas from her classmates, she began to think about this as representing her family: a vehicle that had carried her to this point, but one that she was increasingly “swimming away from” as she began to direct her own life.

Dreams can be unsettling

When a dream is interpreted, it can reveal something that is very disturbing. For example, we may discover that we are in a relationship with someone who reminds us in very important ways of a parent and wonder whether we have married our mother or father. There may be an uncomfortable moment that this person is too close or too familiar – that there is something incestuous about the relationship. Thus, dreams can reveal uncanny, extraordinary and unexpected aspects of ourselves.

Here are 7 reasons why it is important to interpret your dreams:

1.           Take advantage of your dreams. You dream every night. When you wake up and think about a dream, you have an opportunity to access a product of your unconscious.

2.           Dreams are familiar territory.  They are formed, in part, by what has gone on the day before. 

3.           Dreams are not just reiterations of what happened during the day. They also include our actively working on problems that were “insoluble” in the light of day. Some important scientific discoveries occurred as the result of a dream.

4.           Remembering and interpreting your dreams can open up the weird and offbeat parts of yourself that are kept under wraps.

5.           Although we may be unaware of the unconscious, it is revealed in our dreams.  If we understand how the dream is constructed, we can understand something about the part of our minds that we can’t see. 

6.           Dreams are meaningful.  Each of us makes up our own sets of symbols and we use these symbols to hide the meaning of our dreams. So the boat in the dream of the student does not mean that all boats symbolize a family. This is her own idiosyncratic use of the symbol.

7.           The meaning in dreams is hidden because the truths of dreams can be strange and unsettling. Dreams are intended to keep us asleep.  To do this they grant the wishes of the parts of ourselves that want something – and would wake us up to get it.  For example, a child who is hungry will dream of eating something wonderful and this will satisfy them enough that they can stay asleep.

To get started interpreting your own dreams try these:

•            Keep a dream journal by your bed and write down the dream as you wake up.

•            Try to think about the dream soon after having it. The longer you wait the harder it is to remember. 

•            Consider telling the dream to someone who knows you well. It need not be a therapist; a close friend or lover can often see things that are out of your awareness. 

•            Think about your dream as a work of fiction or a poem and try to interpret it as you would a work of art. 

Sweet dreams!

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