Word: psychically
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wrote of it brilliantly in The Day of the Locust, but no one has recently taken the measure of the neon void with such savage precision as Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays was a novel about a young actress, Maria Wyeth, crumbling into the pieces of a psychic jigsaw. Didion drew the Southern California landscape with poisonous accuracy, using its shifting scenes to delineate states of an increasingly troubled mind...
...experience may well amount to a kind of loss of innocence. It demonstrated, for one thing, that American technology does not always work; all the F-111s and "people-sniffers" and laser-guided bombs and helicopters could not ultimately, not really, enforce the American will. Of more psychic importance, the war may have forever soured the almost subconscious, idealized conviction that Americans are somehow morally superior beings. My Lai, the massive bombing campaign, the image of a napalmed child?such things have corroded the American selfesteem. But how deeply...
Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton believes it may amount only to a kind of "psychic numbing," an emotional state encouraged by the Administration. The President still uses the high rhetoric of "peace with honor." Says Lifton: "Nixon has made it very clear that he wants to end the war without coming to terms with it. To learn from Viet Nam the country would have to accept some very painful truths?most notably that it was wrong. The impossible truth for Americans is that we are capable of evil and have committed it on a large scale...
...film, however, Losey makes a sonorous attempt to turn the murder into an oblique existential tract and the assassin into a schizoid avenging angel. Like characters in such previous and more estimable Losey films as The Servant and Accident, Jacson is a scarred and desperate man, searching a psychic void for some small sign of life. When he whispers to his police captor, hoarsely but triumphantly, "I killed Trotsky," it becomes not so much a confession as a self-confirmation...
Harmless. It sounds absurd, of course; yet many otherwise rational people are enthusiastic about TM. And unlike many supposed remedies for psychic malaise, it has drawn little criticism from behavioral scientists. At worst, say the experts, the hordes of American meditators-an estimated 250,000 strong, with thousands of new converts a month-are doing themselves no harm, though they may be kidding themselves about TM's effectiveness. At best, the meditators may really be on to something...