Behavior: Psychobabble

Down with Muzak of the mind

The psychological patter of the ’70s is as inescapable as Muzak and just as numbing: Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight? Boston Writer R.D. (for Richard Dean) Rosen calls it psychobabble, and in his new book by that title (Atheneum, $8.95) sees America awash in soggy therapeutic clichés. “One hears it everywhere, like endless panels of a Jules Feiffer cartoon,” Rosen writes, “this institutionalized garrulousness … this need to catalogue the ego’s condition.”

Psychobabble, says Rosen, is the official dialect of the narcissistic cult of candor that is tyrannizing the culture. The language “is difficult to avoid and there is often an embarrassment involved in not using it, somewhat akin to the mild humiliation experienced by American tourists in Paris who cannot speak the native tongue.” According to Rosen, self-help and sex books, instant therapies and self-improvement courses like est purvey psychobabble in pure form. The problem is not just that psychological ideas dominate national conversation, but that psychobabble is a deadened tongue with no words to express “the paradoxes of emotional life.” At least that’s what Rosen is into, where his head is at, the feeling he’s going with, and it’s, like, you know, warm, I mean real beautiful, man.