Journalism and psychiatry: an approach to communication

I accepted the challenge posed by Dr. Ana Brambilla to talk about these two subjects: journalism and psychiatry. Political communication in Latin America has been leaning toward that intersection, for example the book Chilean journalist Dr. Felipe Vergara Maldonado is writing with a European friend in psychology.

On the occasion of the “1st Advanced Seminar on Political Communication” at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), I asked Maldonado which psychotherapy approach was included in his research. He could not answer, which is an answer.

From the psychoanalysis that is out of one’s depth (so deep) to the simplification of behavioral theories, it is hard to connect American-style lead journalism with psychic questions. It is not impossible. But it is hard because vastness invites hasty conclusions, such as giving some public figure the diagnosis of a president weak in the head.

Would the methodologies inherited from the social sciences, such as content and discourse analysis, not be enough to explain communicative phenomena? Yes and no. If it were exclusively yes, this article would be useless.

Yes, because with such resources one can describe a multitude of emotions and feelings. No, because communication research may lack even deeper aspects, capable of making the objects’ contours sharper.

When Sigmund Freud draws a parallel between the worldviews recorded in history and the formation of the individual [neurotic] psyche, he makes us look at animatism, animism, religion and science.

Although animatism gets a name of its own, it is often understood as a pre-animism stage. From pre-animism to religion, we deal, to a greater degree, with explaining the world under the “omnipotence of thought.” Indeed, what precisely divides the first two phases is the outsourcing of the individual’s understandings, in the figure of spirits, namely angels and demons. Sorcery and magic fit in this paragraph.

When these worldviews are evoked, Freud uses the records that anthropologist James Frazer made of totemic peoples, the Aboriginal peoples of Oceania.

Julio Fachini, researcher in philosophy of psychoanalysis:

As an observation, I note that Freud identifies totemism in Melanesian, Polynesian, African and American peoples, besides traces of totemism in various other cultures around the planet. For Freud, as for Frazer and others of the anthropologists cited in Totem and Taboo (1913), the traits, vestiges and inheritances of totemism seem to have a character closer to the universal than limited to Australian Aboriginal peoples. (Our translation.)

It goes more or less like this: what the human species experienced across history serves as a metaphor for personal formation. That is, there is a “little Aborigine” in every person, just as there is a “religious person” and a “scientist.” Very, very roughly like this. Best-selling neuroscientists explain it with reptilian, limbic and neocortex. Transactional analysis has a brilliant idea with the Parent, Adult and Child ego states.

But only in the scientific phase, the last, does one perceive the surrounding reality and conform to it. That is when one stops making the Sun revolve around the Earth.

From here one could discuss what post-truth is. The term has been vulgarly explained as the emotional and sentimental interest attached to a word or a text. From the psychoanalytic bias, it is nothing new at all. Sad is the journalism that did not pay attention before.

It remains to mention that the news audience is drugged, as can be proven by traces of cocaine in London’s sewage or of anti-inflammatories and antidepressants in Curitiba’s latrine.

France debates “child psychiatry” every other day. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government there provided ten therapy sessions for each child or young person between three and 17.

There is something to think about regarding the public’s behavior, no?