The Process of Processing
Archaeology of a Colloquialism
It is clear that words change over time—they come into and fall out of use, they undergo semantic shifts. But what about concepts? More specifically, concepts that seek to describe facts of nature, human nature included? To a faithful Foucauldian or Kuhnian, this question poses no serious challenge: knowledge of social, psychological, and even physical phenomena is constrained by the epoch in which it arises, resulting in inevitable discontinuities from epoch to epoch. Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn set their sights on subjects of a certain heft (madness, sexuality, science), but this principle is intended to apply as well, of course, to the mundane. Thus the essayist Scott Alexander has remarked that the statement “My abuse gave me a lot of baggage that I’m still working through” would have been as incomprehensible a few centuries ago as “I’m clicking on an icon with my mouse.”1 Each individual word has a discernible meaning, and there is nothing grammatically wrong with the statements as a whole. But our inability to imagine speaking them at any time in history other than the present is a testament to the epistemic discontinuity between past epochs and our own.
The only concept more deeply rooted in our present epoch than “working through” might be its close cousin: “processing.” As a transitive verb, the term is certainly not new, but its contemporary use stands out because of the stark contrast between its prevalence in colloquial speech and the lack of institutional consensus about its meaning. Consider the following representative examples:
(1) a. My therapist is helping me process my resentment.
b. It took her several months to process her breakup with Alex.
c. I’m still processing the argument we had this morning.
As we can see, what is most often “processed” is a distressing emotion or event. We can refine this general rule by noting some restrictions (where * indicates a statement that is inadmissible and ? a statement that is dubious):
(2) a. *My therapist is helping me process my joy.2
b. *It took him several months to process his car, which was stolen when he was already in dire financial straits.
c. *I’m processing my coworker, with whom I argued this morning.
d. *I’m processing the brightness outside.
e. ?I’m processing the fall of Rome/the American Civil War/the Holocaust.
f. ?Even though they have since been released to their parents, the teenagers are still processing their arrest.
g. ?Give me some time; I need to process.
Although older senses of processing take physical objects, the contemporary sense—which may perhaps best be described as “therapeutic”—does not, as (2b) shows. (However, “It took him several months to process the theft of his car, which occurred when…” seems perfectly acceptable.) Neither can the object be a person (2c). If the object being processed is an experience, it must be of at least a moderate duration or take at least a moderate emotional toll. Momentary sensations and impressions, especially physical ones, fall beneath the threshold of significance (2d). The experience must also be the subject’s own. (2e) may be acceptable if the speaker has an intimate connection to one of the events mentioned (e.g., if one of their grandparents survived a concentration camp), but in the absence of such a connection, the event would exceed the scope of the speaker’s processing ability.
There seems to be a fundamental awkwardness in using “process” in the third-person plural, or perhaps any plural (2f). The problem lies not with the third person (as is evident with [1b]), but with the difficulty of ascertaining that two or more individuals are going through the same psychological activity at the same time. The admissibility of (1b) suggests that a third-person report is in no way epistemically inferior if the speaker of the sentence has sufficiently reliable knowledge of the subject’s state of mind. (Compare “I’ll give them/you all some time to process the news,” which addresses itself to multiple subjects but avoids specifying a temporal window.) Finally, the use of “process” as an intransitive verb (2g) is becoming increasingly common.3 In most of these cases the object of processing should be considered elided or implied instead of nonexistent, since it would be rare for (2g) to be spoken out of the blue; the statement would most logically follow a reference to the object of processing in the greater context of the conversation, making it equivalent to “I need to process this/that.” However, the growing prevalence of intransitive uses suggests that the term may be acquiring an independent meaning, utterly unmoored from any relation to a direct object.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists several distinct definitions of “process” (verb), the latest of which dates from 1973 on: “to come to understand or accept (something, often a complex emotion or difficult personal situation), esp. over a period of time.” This definition maps fairly closely onto the quasi-therapeutic usage of the verb as seen in (1a-c), but it merely recapitulates generalized impressions without accounting for the idiosyncrasies in (2a-g)—in other words, it fails to provide a theory of the concept. So where might such a theory come from? One place to turn would be older definitions of “process,” three of which appear to be relevant historical antecedents to the therapeutic sense: industrial processing (“processed food”), bureaucratic processing (“processing an application”), and technological-informational processing (“data processing”). Although the OED stops short of drawing any conclusions, one can surmise that the definition of the verb, in its various forms, has something to do with the definition of “process” (noun): “a continuous and regular action or succession of actions occurring or performed in a definite manner, and having a particular result or outcome; a sustained operation or series of operations.” That is, to process something means to put it through a process, a series of interventions that is enacted on the object of processing and that causes it to emerge, in the end, changed.4
As the closest temporal antecedent to therapeutic processing, technological-informational processing shares much of its vocabulary with information-processing theory, a school of cognitive and developmental psychology that rose to prominence in the 1960s in parallel with the rise of the modern personal computer and its primary source of power (the CPU, or central processing unit). Researchers working within the paradigm envisioned the human mind as a system that converts an input (a written passage, a problem to be solved) into an output (long-term memories, motor behavior).5 Like a computer, the mind is assumed to operate according to certain algorithms, and any inquiry into the system is fundamentally an attempt to clarify the nature of and relationships between the algorithms. There are certainly similarities between therapeutic processing and the kind of processing represented by information-processing theory, perhaps best termed “cognitive processing.” Processing, in both senses, is carried out on a discrete unit of input to which the subject is exposed, and it ends when that input has been fully converted into an output. There is no fuzziness regarding its bounds; at any given moment, the subject either is or is not engaged in processing. It also designates a special type of psychological activity that is qualitatively distinct from all other activities. Regardless of what actually occurs at a granular level during processing, those who use the term agree, at least, that what is taking place cannot be accurately described by related verbs like “perceiving” or “thinking about” or “analyzing.”
However, there are also differences. For one, the cognitive and therapeutic senses of processing diverge widely on the range of acceptable inputs. Whereas therapeutic processing is usually conducted on significant emotions and events, the objects of cognitive processing tend to be far more fleeting and mundane. Well-known studies in cognitive psychology have investigated how well adults can recall a sequence of letters after solving an intervening reasoning problem,6 what kinds of heuristics children use to predict the effects of weight and distance,7 and how children generate reactions in social interactions with peers.8 Statement (2d) would in fact be perfectly coherent within the information-processing paradigm; indeed, the “information” in information processing seems to extend exclusively to inputs that can be treated in seconds, if not milliseconds. The discrepancy in input type brings us to what is perhaps the most striking characteristic of therapeutic processing. Because cognitive inputs are so ephemeral, cognitive processing is necessarily continuous with perception. An individual who is instructed to memorize a sequence of letters “processes” it as soon they hear it, for example, whereas the same individual can defer therapeutic processing for hours, days, weeks, months—even years after the precipitating emotion or event. Consider the following examples (where process1 indicates cognitive processing and process2 therapeutic processing):
(3) a. *I read the restaurant’s address yesterday, but I only started processing1 it today.
b. I had a run-in with my ex-wife yesterday, but I only started processing2 it today.
c. All I needed to do to process1 the restaurant’s address was read it over twice. Now I have it memorized.
In (3b), the precipitating event occurred (i.e., the subject underwent it) a day ago, but the subject is only starting to process it now. No activity took place in the interim; processing was thus voluntarily deferred. Granted, nothing prevents therapeutic processing from commencing immediately after perception (a possibility that [1b-c] leave open), but the fact remains that deferral does not occur at all in cognitive processing. Deferred (as opposed to immediate) therapeutic processing may be the norm, to the point that deferral—and along with it, the idea that processing involves voluntary choice—may be what distinguishes therapeutic processing as a psychological activity.
It is here that the relationship between “process” as a noun and “process” as a verb, specifically in psychology and psychotherapy, becomes once again significant. As it turns out, the field of psychology is no stranger to thinking in terms of “processes” of varying scope, from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Processes endure in psychology because they are normative: they describe ideal, expected, or typical progressions of affairs that serve as benchmarks for particular cases and are imbued with explanatory power. Psychotherapy, the practical application of psychology for therapeutic benefit, is itself assumed to take the form of a process—one that leads from the onset of pathological symptoms to professional treatment and the eventual amelioration of distress.
The concept is at the heart of a dichotomy that surfaces occasionally in the literature on the theory of psychotherapy: that of process versus content. As Edward and Faith Teyber explain in Interpersonal Process in Psychotherapy, a statement made by a patient has a content (i.e., the substantive issue at hand) but can also be situated within an interpersonal process—the relationship between the patient and therapist that is unfolding while they converse.9 For example, when a patient asks their therapist, “What should I do?” a response to the content might consist of a direct, object-level response to the question (“What you should do is…”). A response to the process, however, might involve examining the event of the utterance itself (“I notice that you’re expecting me to make a decision for you”) and its significance in the interpersonal dynamics between the two interlocutors (“It’s almost like you’re treating me as the authority on your life”). In other words, the process dimension is metacommunicational: it inquires into the conditions under which an act of communication takes place on the assumption that they illuminate the overall communicational picture as much as the explicit words spoken.10 Although the origin of the process/content dichotomy is unclear, one can surmise that process is so named because it requires attention to the process—an awareness of the broader context in which the present moment is taking place, and, as a result, a more richly layered understanding of the present’s significance.
Psychotherapy is not the only field in which “process” is set against a conceptual counterpart; the process/outcome dichotomy, which contrasts the desired goal (outcome) with the set of procedures used to reach the goal (process), has spread into the popular imagination from its origins in management science.11 In both cases, “process” is distinguished from its counterpart because the metacommunicational or metaprocedural dimension is more resistant to examination, hence the need to stress its value. (The colloquial phrase “trust the process” is directed, presumably, towards those who would otherwise fixate solely on the outcome.) Insofar as an individual undergoing any kind of process tends to be unaware of the process qua process, highlighting the process dimension increases self-reflexivity—the capacity to observe, describe, and ultimately manipulate the process while in the midst of the process itself. Self-reflexivity may be considered beneficial in management science and the popular imagination, but in psychotherapy it is more than beneficial: it is a precondition. A patient cannot embark on a course of treatment without accepting, as a stated or unstated assumption, that their very thoughts and feelings will be under study; likewise, a subject cannot claim to be processing something unless they are aware of their processing ability and the process of processing as such. It is worth wondering if the rise of psychotherapy itself, with its emphasis on psychological reflection, has contributed to the rise of therapeutic processing, and if statements like (1a), which make processing a collaborative activity, have been influenced by the specifically discursive nature of psychotherapy.
It is fitting that this essay began with a comparison between “processing” and “working through,” for the latter is perhaps the synonym that sheds the most light on the theoretical underpinnings of the former. “Working through” duplicates many of the criteria that are characteristic of “processing:” it takes direct objects that tend to be weighty emotions or events, it can be deferred, it is under voluntary control, and it can be conducted on only one object at a time. The popular sense of “working through,” however, has a historical antecedent that is much more technical and narrowly defined—namely, Freud’s. A remarkably faithful translation of the German durcharbeiten, “working through” was first presented in Freud’s 1914 paper “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” as a critical stage in psychoanalytic treatment in which the patient is called upon to overcome (work through) their resistance to analysis.12 At first glance, the term seems only tangentially related to the contemporary use of processing, given that its applicability seems restricted to the consulting room. But Freud goes on in the paper to acknowledge that resistance, far from being a preliminary hurdle to overcome before the real work of analysis can begin, is in fact the work. Resistance manifests itself in the transference that takes place between patient and analyst—the maladaptive interpersonal patterns, learned early in life, that the patient ends up reenacting with the analyst and that it is the task of analysis to transform.13 At a certain level of abstraction, working through becomes the very substance of treatment.
When we consider what is arguably the fundamental condition of processing, that it takes a direct object, the comparison to working through turns out to be an illuminating one. For psychoanalysis is unique among modalities of psychotherapy for conceptualizing the psychological landscape in terms of things that act and are acted upon. Freud’s early theory of infantile seduction was groundbreaking for positing that childhood sexual trauma was the origin of neurotic symptoms in the present day—in other words, that emotional disturbances could be traced back to historical residues in the psyche that must be located, exposed, and broken down in order to restore the patient to normal functioning. Although Freud eventually abandoned the seduction theory as his thought matured, the attribution of distress to pathological entities in the psyche has remained a core principle in the analytic tradition. The traces of the paradigm can also be seen in the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, with most Freudian defense mechanisms deriving from transitive verbs (e.g., repression, denial, projection) and the rest taking object complements (e.g., identification with, compensation for).14 It is also a paradigm that is markedly different from that which informs the family of behavioral psychotherapies (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy), which focus on extinguishing maladaptive patterns of thinking and acting, and the family of humanistic psychotherapies (e.g., person-centered therapy, existential therapy), which tend to avoid formulations of pathology altogether. An object-oriented paradigm is thus a historically contingent phenomenon—one that has become so pervasive that it appears self-evident, but one that is bound by the conditions of our current epoch nonetheless.
Interestingly, a zone of convergence between colloquial and institutional usage may be materializing, as evidenced by the recent surge in popularity of therapy modalities like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and cognitive processing therapy (CPT).15 Both modalities fall into the behavioral tradition and were initially developed in the 1980s as trauma therapies, although their use is more widespread today. Their roots in trauma treatment are apparent in their methodologies, for they ground their emphasis on “processing” in a precept of trauma theory: that traumatic experiences are stored in long-term memory (“processed”) differently from typical experiences, and that redoing the process of processing will alleviate pathological symptoms. Unlike other modalities, they seem able to specify the object of processing (traumatic experiences) and to enumerate the discrete steps that take place—in other words, to propose a theory of what it actually means to process something.16 One possibility raised by these modalities is that processing is not a unitary phenomenon, but an umbrella term for sets of procedures that vary by therapeutic modality. In this view, statements (1a-c) might describe different activities depending on whether the subject speaks from the perspective of EMDR, psychoanalytic therapy, existential therapy, and so on, which would provide at least a partially satisfactory theory of processing. However, such a possibility would call into question any nonprofessional or casual usage of “process.” How could the subjects of (1a-c), for example, claim to be processing unless they committed to a therapeutic modality (and the paradigm of processing that it entails) from the outset? There seems to be no simple way to pare down the amorphous bounds of the concept—but that, of course, may be the utility of the concept in the first place. By remaining resistant to precise definition, “process” allows speakers to gesture towards a general phenomenon and be understood by their interlocutors without, for that matter, having full knowledge of the subject matter.
The possibility raised at the beginning of this essay—that the intelligibility of concepts rises and falls from epoch to epoch, and that the present moment is one in which “processing” has become uniquely intelligible—now deserves renewed attention. What does it mean for processing not to have existed, in the way we understand and use it at least, in previous epochs? What does our use of the term have to do with our understanding of the concept? And if processing isn’t a timeless universal, to what extent does it deserve to be treated as a fact of psychology? As scholars have grown more accustomed to acknowledging the relativistic and contingent aspects of social phenomena, they have also endeavored to explain these aspects in a way that allows social science to remain a science. This is, for example, the main thrust of Ian Hacking’s “looping effects of human kinds,”17 as well as Anthony Giddens’s theory of the “double hermeneutic.”18 For both Hacking and Giddens, social phenomena are distinctive because the very act of observing and describing them can affect how they play out, and thus how they are observed and described anew. Such phenomena are not so much discoveries as collective constructions; at the same time, their constructed quality does not prevent them from being experienced, at an individual and subjective level, as facts of human nature.19 If the same can be said of processing, then we can admit the salience of historical influences and popular conceptions without thereby undermining the legitimacy of the phenomenon. In fact, contingency makes the identification of discontinuities all the more essential, for it is only by seeing how a phenomenon diverges from an existing epistemic milieu that we can see what characterizes it in its own right.
As a discipline, psychology has not typically concerned itself with the history and philosophy of its own concepts. And in this regard, it finds itself in the position of the natural sciences, wherein the discipline proper occupies itself with the synchronic dimensions of phenomena and diachronic investigations are delegated to the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, and so on. But one could also argue for the deep disciplinary relevance of studying a concept’s historical development—as has psychologist Nick Haslam, for example, in discussing the problem of “concept creep.” In truth, many of today’s most salient psychological concepts have undergone and are undergoing rapid transformations (Haslam takes as case studies the terms “abuse” and “trauma,” among others), which he characterizes, notably, as “semantic changes.”20 Unlike the institutional definition and redefinition that psychiatric conditions undergo with every edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, concept creep concerns terms that have diffused into the popular consciousness and are thus caught in a bottom-up use-meaning feedback loop. Speakers infer what “processing” means by listening to other speakers use the term (possibly in utterances like [1a-c]), and by applying the term themselves in new contexts, they influence, in incremental ways, the conceptions held by their peers and the status of the term in the linguistic community. But “processing” is not a concept subject to the oversight of institutions and professionals; the very lack of a formal theory (as well as lack of awareness of this lack!) means that it is up to speakers themselves to identify instances of and maintain a coherent discourse around the phenomenon. Furthermore, the self-reflexivity inherent in processing means that conceiving of an activity as processing is essential to making it processing. The legitimacy of the concept cannot be divorced from the popular use of the term.
The rise of therapeutic language in everyday discourse has been a thorn in the side of commentators ranging from mental health professionals warning against the danger of misapplying clinical terms to cultural conservatives decrying what they see as the coddling of a helpless, effete generation. Like the examples of concept creep that Haslam enumerates, many of the terms commonly derided as “therapy speak”—including “trauma,” “narcissism,” and “codependency”—have attracted suspicion because they are originally clinical terms that have diffused into colloquial speech and have, as a result, suffered from semantic watering-down. But what critics of both concept creep and therapy speak overlook, when they deplore the popular misuse of vocabulary, is that popular use may also have a generative effect, giving rise to the very phenomena that clinical terms are responsible for capturing. This effect is all the more salient in the case of processing, for it is the term par excellence whose use furnishes the conditions of possibility of its own meaning. It is surprising, then, that processing rarely attracts attention (or ire) as a prime example of therapeutically driven semantic shift, given its insistence on self-reflexivity, the capacity that psychotherapy is built upon and makes it its mission to expand.
That such semantic shifts occur is without question; and that their occurrence has, potentially, deleterious consequences for public discourse is also a familiar complaint; but what their occurrence means about the culture that makes them possible is a question that remains curiously neglected. Our current epoch is one in which the paradigm of processing structures thought and speech, but only to the degree that certain forms of self-reflexivity exist and are actively cultivated. Perhaps what is most arresting about a study of the concept is not the topography we have mapped of it in the present, but how it might evolve in the future—along with the myriad other phenomena to which the epoch may give rise, about which we can only speculate, for which it is still too early to tell.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” Slate Star Codex (blog), June 1, 2020, https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/. I would go further and argue that both statements would have been incomprehensible as little as a century ago.
Though (2a) would not be out of place if the speaker had just, for example, experienced the death of a loved one. Most emotions that call for processing are straightforwardly negative, but ambivalent emotions are also acceptable, as well as positive emotions when they would be surprising or incongruous.
See for example Still Processing, the title of a popular New York Times cultural podcast. Uses that would once be in the passive voice are increasingly being expressed in an active, intransitive fashion (my banking app regularly tells me that my “payment is processing,” the meaning of which seems closest to “your payment is being processed”). Interestingly, a number of verbs may be undergoing the same phenomenon, including “release” (“the book is releasing in June”) and “ship” (“the package shipped yesterday”).
Like “attack” and “demand,” “process” comprises a noun-verb pair in which the definitions of the noun and the verb are etymologically linked. These are examples of linguistic conversion (also known as zero derivation), a phenomenon in which a new word of the same form but a different word class is created from an existing word. All zero derivations are homonyms, but not all homonyms are zero derivations; what distinguishes a zero derivation from a homonymic noun-verb pair like “bear” is the shared etymology, and consequently similar definitions, of the original and the derivative. Cf. “affect,” another noun-verb pair of great interest in psychology, though the noun and the verb ultimately differ in word stress and thus in their pronunciations.
Patricia Miller, Theories of Developmental Psychology, 5th ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2009), p. 266.
Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, “Working Memory,” Psychology of Learning and Motivation 8 (1974): 47-89.
Robert Siegler, “Three Aspects of Cognitive Development,” Cognitive Psychology 8 (1976): 481-520.
Nicki Crick and Kenneth Dodge, “A Review and Reformulation of Social Information-Processing Mechanisms in Children’s Social Adjustment,” Psychological Bulletin 115, no. 1 (1994): 74-101.
Edward Teyber and Faith Teyber, Interpersonal Process in Therapy, 7th ed. (Belmont, CA: Cengage, 2017), pp. 8-9.
It is surprisingly difficult to find a cogent explanation of the process/content dichotomy in the psychotherapy literature, given how often it is cited verbally among professionals. The other major explanation of the dichotomy of which I am aware is in Irvin Yalom and Molyn Leszcz’s classic introduction to group psychotherapy, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, 5th ed., pp. 143-145. Interestingly, the process/content dichotomy seems to play a more prominent role in group psychotherapy than individual psychotherapy, with “process groups” (groups that focus on interpersonal relationships between participants rather than, for example, skills education) being a fixture in the subfield.
The dichotomy seems to have originated with economist W. Edwards Deming, who was known for advocating for improving processes instead of aiming for certain outcomes.
Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in the Standard Edition, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 145-156.
Though it should be noted that Freud’s exact definition of working through is still a matter of contention among scholars, given that the term appears only sparingly in his corpus and does not receive the comprehensive explication enjoyed by other technical terms he coined. For a brief summary with textual references, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 5th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), pp. 305-306.
The only defense mechanism that does not seem to fall into either of these two categories is regression. Although Freud and other analysts writing in German tend to refer exclusively to the noun form Regression, it is worth noting that “to regress” is commonly expressed in colloquial German by the reflexive verb sich zurückentwickeln—reflexive verbs having, of course, their reflexive pronouns (sich) as their direct objects. Regarding objects, see also the object relations school of psychoanalytic theory, one of the predominant schools of analytic thought today (e.g., Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983)).
Another zone of convergence that may be materializing is that between cognitive and therapeutic processing. The growing prevalence of usages like “I need some time to process the idea of meeting with my ex-wife” or “I was so enraged by the headline that I could barely process the rest of the article” suggest that the distinction between the two modes of processing may not be so clear after all—or that the paradigm of therapeutic processing is now so ascendant that even perceptual and intellectual objects can be invested with emotional weight.
Specific procedures can be found in foundational texts for these modalities, for example Patricia Resick’s Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD (New York: Guilford, 2017) and Francine Shapiro’s Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy, 3rd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2017).
Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, eds. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford: OUP, 1995), pp. 351-394.
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 284.
Worth comparing here are Ferdinand de Saussure’s claims about language in the Course in General Linguistics. The multiplicity of natural languages shows that the relationship between particular signifiers and signifieds is arbitrary; additionally, it is clear that languages change internally over time. However, the individual speaker enters into language only as it is already spoken by their linguistic community and is powerless to reconfigure signifiers and signifieds through their own efforts.
Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2016): 1-17. It is important to note that, as indicated in the title, Haslam is interested specifically in semantic expansion rather than contraction or displacement. This motivates his claim that concept creep is a force that benefits and is largely driven by the political left, given the left’s reputation for “sensitivity to suffering and maltreatment.” I hesitate to make the same claim for processing both because it is unclear to me whether the concept is a result of a straightforward expansion rather than a displacement, and because there seems to be no prima facie political bent to the way it is used—certainly not to the degree that “bullying” and “prejudice,” two additional case studies of Haslam’s, can be considered politically charged. However, I admit that there is something subtly pathologizing about the way that reactions to minor disturbances can now be described as “processing,” with all the emotional gravitas that the term bestows.