POP-PSYCH, or, "Doc, I'm Fed Up with These Boring Figures'

"I used to be Superman . . . Wherever you looked I was saving somebody. Then one day I pulled this chick from the river. Do you think she thanked me? No! She just wanted to know why I had this compulsion to rescue . . . She accused me of doubting my masculinity . . . She took one look at my cape and said I was a latent transvestite."

SUPERMAN'S troubles as chronicled by Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, are readily recognizable. It sometimes seems as if most of the U.S. population were engaged in disassembling each other's psyches, second-guessing motivations, and ferreting out symptoms. As the Frenchman worries about his liver and the Englishman complains about his catarrh, the American is concerned with his mental health. No other nation has so high a quotient of mind probers of one kind or another; there are some 40,000 professionally recognized psychiatrists and psychologists. Serious, important work is done by these practitioners--at least, by most of them--but their work is surrounded by a penumbra of popularization. Ever since the U.S. adopted Freud as a major prophet in the 1920s and '30s, more and more Americans have turned into do-it-yourself psychologists.

The unconscious, once a startling discovery that put every motive in question and turned 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.

Also a Cigar

Pop-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 become part of folklore. Pop-psych even appears on the sports page, as when a feature writer for New York's new World Journal Tribune gets a psychiatrist to describe baseball as a ritual performed in a crib (the diamond) and dominated by an elevated father figure (the pitcher on his mound).

Pop-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 on the organic world below."

Batman and Robin are denounced as a pair of latent homosexuals. Why do teen-agers idolize the Beatles? Explains Joyce Brothers, formerly a TV "authority" and now a columnist on psychological matters: "It's because of their 'Oliver' haircuts and too-short jackets. Oliver Twist, you will recall, was an orphan. By embracing a quartet of orphans as heroes, our teen-agers achieve two unconscious goals. They symbolically 'kill off' the adult generation. They show how neglected and misunderstood they believe themselves to be."

Neurosis has become glamorous. Movie Critic Pauline Kael speaks of "the nervous breakdowns, miscarriages, overweight problems, husband troubles, and all those mental and physical ills which now comprise the image of a great star. In the frivolous, absurd old days, stars were photographed in their bubble baths; now they bathe in tears of self-pity."

As for 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.

Such extravagant interpretations were put in their place by Freud himself who, so the story goes, once started a conference by lighting a stogie and announcing: "This may be a phallus, but, gentlemen, let us remember it is also a cigar." Says Philip Solomon, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard: "Almost everything is straight and narrow or rounded and curved. To apply genital meanings to all these things is ridiculous."

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.

Alas, Poor Oedipus

Literature reflects the change. In the early and primitive stages, psychological motivation was probed incessantly and mechanically. Eugene O'Neill stopped his characters in mid-dialogue for asides to the audience about what they were really thinking, and every up-to-date fiction writer streamed with stream of consciousness. Dreams were busily explored for sex, and the denial of the sex instinct was blamed for nearly everything. Seducers in novels (as well as in real life) were forever telling girls: "The trouble is you're repressed."

The villain was Mom and, by extension, women in general. From novels to movies and musicals, the case history dominated the scene. Sooner or later there had to be a flashback to some childhood trauma, and its explanation (unloving mother, weak father, hateful sibling, stolen Teddy bear) became as de rigueur as the revelation scene at the end of a detective novel in which the mastermind explains who done it.

The case-history plot has been dead for some time, but it was not formally buried until Murray Schisgal's Broadway comedy Luv kidded it into oblivion. And the protagonist of Saul Bellow's play, The Last Analysis, complains bitterly: "Doctor, I'm fed up with these boring figures in my unconscious. It's always Father, Mother. Or again, breast, castration, anxiety, fixation to the past. I am desperately bored with these things."

Today, if the novel and the stage are dominated by any one theme, it is the psychology of alienation, in which human crisis is explained not by a single case history but by a sort of cosmic hypochondria, a feeling of universal futility. This trend seems to be reflected in clinical experience. The old compulsion neuroses and guilt feelings, many psychologists report, are being replaced by diffuse anxiety neuroses and a vague sense of meaninglessness. According to Chicago Psychiatrist Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, the new fashion in popular psychology "reflects a greater interest in social interrelationships--it's more outward in its direction. All the introspective talk of castration anxiety, latent homosexuality or oral emphasis has been replaced by sibling rivalry, alienation, dependency, powerlessness in society, fear of freedom. The new accent is on society. I know very few psychiatrists who even mention Oedipus to their patients any more."

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.

Theorists about child raising have abandoned other old psychological certainties, including the overriding importance of toilet training. "The Scott-tissue theory of personality is out of fashion," says Harvard Psychologist Gordon Allport. Now there is more general concern about "total relationship" between parent and child. Sometimes the children themselves become ardent pop-psychers. "No one is more adept than a child at using psychological terms as a substitute for reality," says Chicago Child Psychiatrist Dr. Ner Littner. "Nine-and ten-year-olds chatter away quite happily about sibling rivalry, talking of the urge they have to kill an older brother or sister. But adolescent psychologizing is in the main an intellectual exercise that only goes skin-deep."

One of the heroes of today's amateur psychologizers is Harvard's Erik Erikson, perhaps the most influential of the new generation of builders upon Freudian foundations. Erikson is known for his study of the life cycle ("the eight ages of man") and for his work on the problem of identity, by which he means the bewilderment of youth as it 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 to out-Freud Freud, who thought repression was a necessary price to pay for the fruits of civilization.

The result of such work is that the formal, deterministic view of psychology is outmoded and being replaced by a far freer eclectic, and occasionally chaotic, scene in which nobody seems afraid to get into the act.

Indigestion as Status

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 that gloves are sexy because taking them off to shake hands is an "act of undressing" which provides "skin contacts"; that shaving is a masochistic ritual associated with virility, and that therefore the most popular aftershave lotions "have to burn almost to the extent of hurting"; and that indigestion is a status symbol because it suggests high living and responsibility.

This sort of thing is not necessarily bought by Madison Avenue, let alone by American business. Yet in dealing with their own personnel, many U.S. business firms also act on fairly fanciful assumptions and do their share of amateur psychologizing. A growing number of corporations sponsor a psychological technique known as "sensitivity training." Its goal is to make executives better able to deal with their business peers and underlings, better able to see themselves as others see them.

A group gathers in seclusion under the guidance of a leader who refuses to give leadership in the expected sense. There are no rules of procedure, no agenda. In this planned vacuum, minus labels, titles and props, each member demonstrates his "life style" simply by talking. The authoritarian sounds bossy, the abdicator yields in arguments, the critic criticizes, and it is all supposedly plain--often painfully plain to the subject himself--when the others' observations of him begin to "feed back." If things go well, a kind of agape results. If not, the practice can be dangerous: nervous breakdowns have occasionally resulted from the intense personal exposure. These sensitivity sessions have developed a vocabulary that is fairly typical of today's popular psychology, some of its leading terms being "meaningful relationships," "openness," "interface situations," "shared feelings," "involvement."

Sensitivity training is in the same mode as group therapy, which is probably the most important U.S. contribution to psychotherapy so far. On a TV program called Therapy, carried by Los Angeles station KHJ, groups have been airing their neuroses since mid-July before an estimated 110,000 viewers. Each 45-minute installment is entirely authentic, culled from a video-taped therapy session two to three hours long, complete with real tears, confessions and accusations (obscenities are blipped out). These sessions, of course, are professionally guided, but their exposure on television contributes mightily to do-it-yourself analysis.

Group therapy is in the tradition of American psychiatry, which has stressed the positive values in the individual's interaction with society--often in contrast with Founder Freud's profoundly pessimistic view that society demands repression as the price of its cultural fruits and that repression produces a basic human neurosis for which there is no cure. Psychoanalysis, he once said, could only relieve a patient of his misery, leaving him with the ordinary unhappiness that is common to mankind.

Sexy Computer

To the 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 but not that readily symbolized. There is very little philosophy per se in this country, and Americans have been left high and dry by the evaporation of religion, but in talk about psychoanalysis there is a kind of authentic quest. It's an attempt to get back into philosophy in a roundabout way."

At the same time, America's popularization of psychology is doing much to destroy the mystique that used to surround the psychiatrist. So is humor, from the countless stand-up-comics' jokes ("A psychoanalyst is a Jewish doctor who hates the sight of blood"), to the literary satires that are themselves becoming stock (Lillian Ross's Vertical and Horizontal). The mind doctor is looking more and more like any other pro with a job to do--a job not free from the pressure of automation. M.I.T. once programmed a computer to talk via typewriter like a psychiatrist. Excerpts from an actual dialogue with "a distraught young lady":

Patient: Men are all alike.

Computer: In what way?

Patient: They're always bugging us about something or other.

Computer: Can you think of a specific example?

Patient: Well, my boy friend made me come here.

For the 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.

Then, of course, it is also possible that a computer is just a computer, even as a cigar is just a cigar.

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