Word: psyching
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Instead of the neat Oedipal triangle, the talk today is more likely to be about "unresolved dependency needs." Instead of "libido" disturbances there is apt to be worry about failure to "communicate." Adler's "inferiority complex" has been widely replaced in pop-psych jargon by "feelings of inadequacy," which sounds less formidable. And as a result of recent sexual emancipation, the problem no longer seems to be repression so much as living up to everyone's high hedonistic expectations...
...witnesses the confusion of modern man. For this modern man is uncertain of his place in society, with his old roles as husband, father and guardian of tradition diminished in favor of his work-and his work less and less under his own control. Another current hero of pop-psych is Norman O. Brown, author of Life Against Death. Not a trained psychologist but an English professor, he belongs to a group of academics who have been described as "professional amateur psychologists." Brown's joyful acceptance of uninhibited love and play as the right way of life seems...
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...