ABSTRACT
In Jewish tradition, and, for that matter, all great world religions, speaking and listening to gossip is regarded as a terrible sin—"God does not accept the prayers of one who speaks gossip," it says in the Zohar. Gossip is also deeply psychological, in that it expresses unconscious wishes, anxieties, needs, and fantasies. This chapter discusses an attempt to understand the individual psychology of gossip within its social context and the anxiety and insecurity that drive, animate, and sustain gossip, a largely psychoanalytically unexplored topic, at least in a systematic way. It suggests that gossip-mongers who engage in malignant gossip, especially habitually, whether analysand or analyst, have unresolved, deep-seated, personal deficits and conflicts that need to be put right. The chapter provides some thoughts about the toxic effects, the social divisiveness, that widespread "bad" gossiping has for the psychoanalytic community. Gossip also controls the individual conduct of the group's membership.
