Word: psyching
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Still, pop-psych flourishes-but it has entered a new phase. From conventional concern with repression and frustration, the fashion has shifted to alienation and identity problems...
...psych turns up everywhere in the news. Lyndon Johnson's hostile or suspicious behavior is ascribed to his "regional inferiority complex." Russia's inflexibility is attributed to the custom of binding newborn babies tight in swaddling clothes. Charles Whitman's shooting people from the clock tower of the Texas campus is diagnosed as a case of sexual overcompensation (on a phallic tower with a phallic rifle). Stanford Associate English Professor Bruce Franklin notes that "our basic method of fighting in Viet Nam is anal-sadistic. A man in an airplane is in a nonorganic environment, symbolically defecating...
...literary critics, most of them would be lost without pop-psych, though not all go the distance with Britain's William Empson in his analysis of Alice in Wonderland. Alice, noted Empson, fell "through a deep hole into the secrets of Mother Earth," where she found herself "in a long, low hall, part of the palace of the Queen of Hearts (a neat touch)," from which the only way out was "through a hole frighteningly too small." In short, Alice re-enacted the birth trauma...
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...