Word: pseudo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Each day millions of Americans talk, scream, confront, jump, paint, dance, strip, tickle and grope their way toward emotional fulfillment. They are sampling one or more of the 200 or so therapies and countless pseudo therapies that are now being peddled in the U.S. as panaceas for unhappiness, anxiety or worse. At one end of this therapeutic spectrum are such exuberant exercises in self-help as biofeedback and Transcendental Meditation; at the other end, close-order drill for the psyche, like est. All but trampled by this stampede toward satisfaction lies the battered body of the medical specialty that once...
This scientific smorgasbord may indicate great creative ferment, or simply confusion, a hedging of bets against what will turn out to be the hot therapy of the 1980s. Psychiatry seems sure of one thing: it does not want to move in the direction of the pseudo therapies, although it occasionally profits from them. Says Miami Psychiatrist Paul Daruna: "Some Pop therapies generate business by stirring people up, jostling them about so they eventually turn to individual therapy." Still, many psychiatrists already feel underemployed, because they often fill many of the same functions as psychiatric social workers, nurses and related professionals...
Lydon overreaches his intellect as well. The political and social critique of Bollocks was acceptable because it was sincere and angry; the critique in Public Image rings hollow, the dull abstractions of a pseudo intellectual. Consider "Religion," a tedious diatribe against the Church, which is trite and too long...
...plus his call for a Constitutional amendment mandating a balanced U.S. budget, Brown has Carter worried over the religious issue. Carter may have the support of the Fundamentalists, the Born-Again folk, but Brown taps the Tao, culls the Zen support, rides the whole neo-Eastern-religious-cultists-pseudo-mystical wave. And Carter can scarcely forget that out of the last ten or so primaries in 1976 he only won a handful, and lost every head-to-head match he had with Brown...
Lasch detects narcissism nearly everywhere, in the buzz words of the "human potential" movements, in the "pseudo needs" created by advertisers for restless consumers, in the adulation of celebrities whose only claim is that they are well known, in business and government that have a greater concern for credibility than for truth. He warns of creeping trivialization that downgrades history as nostalgia, and educators as socializers rather than conveyors of knowledge. Literature is trivialized by absurdists, emotions by promiscuity, and in the locker rooms of professional athletics, Lasch sniffs the odor of terminal degradation. Sport, once the arena of heroes...