Word: psyched
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...Your Essay on the pop-psych movement seemed very impressive [Oct. 7]. Your criticism of the "movement" itself is justified, but you've got to admit that their hearts are in the right places. As in anything of this sort, one may go to extremes, such as "psycholumnists" and the folks who think that after a 45-minute psychological program, they are fully capable of couching their neighbors and giving them sound advice as to how they may cope with their personal and social problems...
...Your Essay on Pop-Psych [Oct. 7] bristles with thinly veiled snobbery. "Pop-psych" is one of the few esoteric studies that have ever reached "the mass" intact; the popularity of pop-psych indicates a widespread concern among human beings. The very fact that psychology has some relevance outside of academia seems to make it untouchable in the eyes of your essayist; but at least he kept it at exactly two pages...
Freud predicted sourly that the only use the U.S. would have for his theories would be to make advertising more effective. Certainly a major achievement of pop-psych is the art known as "consumer motivation," whose leading exponent, Ernest Dichter, keeps pouring out fresh insights in a monthly newsletter. Dichter perceives qualities in objects and situations that nobody, except possibly a mad metaphysician, has seen before. He proclaims that lamb is less popular than beef because it is associated with "gentle innocence"; that rice is a favorite "feminine food" because in the cooking "it expands and swells." Dichter also asserts...
...young, today, the teachings of Freud and his heirs are old-fashioned parts of the intellectual scenery. And most pop-psych strikes them as ludicrous. Even as interpreted by the expert, Freud's vision was never one of scientific "fact," but a fascinating mythology. The mythology can work successfully as part of treatment. But in the hands of amateurs, only a grotesquely distorted version remains, with its talk about stamp collecting as anal and piano playing as masturbatory. "That belongs to an earlier period," says Critic Alfred Kazin. "By now, people know that the passions are real...
...addict of pop-psych, this exchange only raises the question of what the computer itself stands for. Machinery, according to some more-or-less-experts, "is always an alternate to sexual procreation." This idea is borne out by the current intellectually fashionable bestseller Giles Goat-Boy, in which a super computer gets pretty sexy with the coeds, and in fact sires the hero. Other theorizers, however, are not quite sure whether the computer is a father or a mother figure, or stands for Jung's "wise old man" in mechanized guise, or represents modern man's ultimate alienation...