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

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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.