Psychoprattle
For two reasons, Sigmund Freud is the bane of my existence: 1. As a culture, we’ve become consumed by psychobabble that weakens our thinking; and 2. Because this psychobabble has so thoroughly infested our culture, it is almost impossible to have a conversation without resorting to this very same psychobabble. It’s a frustrating tautology. If you want to see it in action, clock how lengthy a conversation you can have before one of the speakers falls into the following language:
- saying someone else is being “defensive” (even when previous generations might have said they were “responding to criticism,” especially logical fallacies)
- calling someone’s desire (or their achievement of that desire) “wish fulfillment,” as though results magically appear from wishes and human will had nothing to do with it
- being accused of “projecting” when others are being criticized
- calling someone with standards “anal”
and so forth.
(And right now, I’m sure that some people reading this are thinking that I’m either projecting or being defensive.)
What really drives me bananas, though, is the sort of blithe characterization novelist Jane Smiley performs over on Huffington Post of the quote unquote president. More appropriately, her blithe characterization troubles but doesn’t surprise me — this is what novelists do: characterize people. What’s upsetting is that dozens upon dozens of readers of the piece are confusing it for “insightful analysis.”
I’m not a fan of the quote unquote president or of his invasion of the wrong country. (When he invaded one of the right countries — Afghanistan — I was a supporter.) But 500 words of literary assumption — about his psychology, and the psychology of his colleagues — does not equal penetrating analysis. It equals one of two things: literature, or psychobabble. To think it something else cheapens the language.
Or maybe I’m just being anal.
January 23rd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Get a blue collar job. Listen to your co-workers conversations. Join in.
You will no longer miss psychobabble.
February 20th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
[…] What was refreshing about Mr. Crichton was his allegiance to the facts as he knows them. Unlike Jane Smiley, he didn’t purport to be able to read the mind of George W. Bush or to channel past events involving the quote unquote president. He parsed administration actions, like the partial ban on stem-cell research, for both the upside and the downside. When Charlie Rose tried to paraphrase Crichton’s words, the latter would gently but firmly correct him because the paraphrase wasn’t right. At other times, Crichton said, “I don’t know.” And why didn’t he know? Because he isn’t a mind reader, hadn’t been at the event, didn’t have empirical evidence, wasn’t presented with the data — and so, he couldn’t know. […]