ABSTRACT
I argue in this chapter that far too much of the psychoanalytic literature is afflicted with jargon, obtuseness, fuzzy thinking, appeal to authority, and universalization of formulations on the basis of a very limited number of clinical cases. As I attempt to demonstrate, these problems are especially prominent in the writings of Bion, Klein, and Lacan, and tend to compromise the standing of psychoanalysis in the larger culture. I call for changes in psychoanalytic training and education that would encourage the formulation of psychoanalytic ideas in the language of identifiable processes and in a mode that links them to empirical data from clinical and nonclinical sources.
