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

(3 of 6)

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 All the introspective talk of castration anxiety, latent homosexuality or oral emphasis has been replaced by sibling rivalry, alienation, dependency, powerlessness in society, fear of freedom.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."