Word: psych
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...every word or act into its opposite, is now a universal cliche. The game of spotting Freudian slips and symbols, once chic and daring, has filtered down from the cocktail party to the corner bar. Anyone who can read seems qualified to bat around complexes, compulsions and obsessions. Pop-psych is all over the place...
...psych is the commuter carefully tallying his "compatibility quotient" in a newspaper quiz ("Do you resist asking directions in a strange town?"). It is the applicant for a new job checking True or False on a personality test ("I have strange and peculiar thoughts." "I have never seen a vision"). Pop-psych is found in heavy-breathing advice to the lovelorn, warning girls to beware of their father fixations. It is in the domestic-advice columns telling the anxious mothers of bed-wetters that the children are resenting their "free-flowing" permissiveness. The "psychosomatic" cold and eating to "compensate" have...
...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...