Word: rosen
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...critic Harold Rosenberg once proposed an intellectual version of the "what a drag it is getting old" cry of the Rolling Stones. "Psychoanalysis Americanized" made explicit a point implied in Rosen's later book, declaring in 1965 that...
...Rosen's new book, Psychobabble, is an attempt to interpret some of the therapeutic trends outside traditional psychoanalysis that he has observed here in the '70s. The book is not a survey and the issues he addresses ("the relationship between language and psychology and the subversion of that relationship by the jargon of today") are "beyond considerations of who can find what kind of happiness when..." His approach is highly intellectualized rather than that of a "How-to" type guide. It is rarely pedantic, though, barbed as it is by a wit akin to stainless steel wire, brilliant and deadly...
Rosenberg was right in labelling this view austere. While it is easy to admire the manner in which Rosen explores the simplistic view of humanity inherent to what he calls "fast talk and quick cure in the era of feeling," the book would nevertheless disappoint anyone seeking alternative avenues towards some brand of contentment. This, Rosen is quick to declare, was emphatically not his objective. Indeed, a fairly persistent theme of Psychobabble (one derived from Rosenberg) is that the intellectual turns answers into questions...
...Rosen quotes a local psychoanalyst who defines psychobabble as "just a way of using candor in order not to be candid" or, in other words, a vocabulary of terms lifted from psycho-analytic theory and popularized into meaninglessness. Think, for example, how often you use the words paranoid, fixation, neurotic, depressed, or manic when describing acquaintances. Such catch-phrases should be seen as "the expression not of a victory of de-humanization but as its latest and very subtlest victory over...
...ROSEN DESCRIBES in what is frequently excruciating detail the failures of the quacks to resolve the fears and anxieties of the seriously ill. He doesn't stress sufficiently, though, how many failures legitimate" psycho-analysts have had for similar reasons--perhaps because of a too-rigid theory of personality, perhaps an arbitrary and superficial diagnosis; the list is infinite...