Psychology Porn

Back when I was in high school, I hungrily and indiscriminately devoured such periodicals as my parents happened to subscribe to.   Some, like The New Yorker (still going strong) and Scientific American (now intellectually defunct, but fine while it lasted), opened up whole new world’s, to my lasting enrichment.  Others, like the middle-brow Saturday Review, Time, Life, and (even) Soviet Life, were at least worth glancing at for a time.  One, Psychology Today (still being published, apparently) did not begin publication till I had left home, but my mother subscribed, and I would leaf through it sometimes when I visited home.   It turned out to be pretty lame.

Unlike the topics of physics porn or philosophy porn, which have heft, being aimed at the well-educated (the latter, indeed, egregiously in The New Yorker), pop psychology (short for popcorn psychology)  is not worth noticing, let alone polemicizing against:  its audience understandably needs something to occupy their eyes while they concentrate on chewing their gum, bless ‘em.   But there is an interesting paragraph in the “Retrospect” chapter of the final volume of Ernest Jones’ classic biography of Freud, worth quoting here.   Jones himself was a practicing Freudian analyst, and towards the end of a long career, writes:

What impresses [the psychoanalyst] is the shallowness of so much of what passes as acceptance of Freud’s ideas, and the superficiality with which they are treated.  They are so often bandied about lightly as a form of lip service, that one cannot help suspecting that much of the so-called acceptance  is really a subtle form of rejection, a protection against assimilation of their profound import.

-- Freud, vol. III (1957), p. 433.

An intriguing -- and typically Freudian -- take on the matter;  and yet, I suspect, inaccurate.   For with no such suspected motives of Widerstand (resistance, Abwehrmechanismus) the educated public (and the middle-brow media that serves them) also widely trivializes the findings of physics, misunderstands those of linguistics, and caricatures those of philosophy.  So, Case Not Proven.

(Nor yet disproven.)

~

Jones’ conjecture as to the source of public acceptance-through-trivialization of Freudian theory, while not persuasive, is yet suggestive.   So let us think aloud.

That a movement or doctrine may be emasculated by an embrace, was well known to those of us in the antiwar movement, self-imagined as the revolutionary youth movement, in the late 1960’s:  we called it coöptation.   Individual activists could be bought off by being given a nice job at a university or think-tank, or be lured into self-parody by an ingratiating media.  As for the unreflective mass of followers, they were offered cooptation by trivialization:  “You’ve come a long way, baby” and “You’re in the Pepsi generation” (ads respectively for a cigarette and a soft-drink)

That parallel, however, will not take us far towards elucidating the case in question.  For that was a conscious and cynical maneuver, whereas Jones points to classically Freudian unconscious Resistance, where the obfuscators are largely unaware of their own motives.  Moreover, the Youth Movement has too little theoretical gravitas  to parallel Freudian theory:  a Marxist critique of the capitalist war-economy may have been logically at its center, but sociologically  was far on the periphery.   To examine the undercurrents of resistance in the way Jones intends, we need something with more intellectual heft.

Not, however, Freudian theory itself.  Its results are too uncertain, its current position in the noosphere too beleaguered, and cooptative lip-service by now too rare, to provide a useful test-case.  But let us check for parallels or anti-parallels (among the many skew lines) in the more settled fields of physics and linguistics.

~

“How on earth do you know that?” I asked.

“Now, Watson, confess yourself utterly taken aback.”

“I am.”

“I ought to make you sign a paper to that effect.”

“Why?”

“Because  in five minutes  you will say that it is all so absurdly simple.”

-- A. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904)

Holmes’ prediction  proves, of course, correct (it is for such scenes that Nigel Bruce was so perfectly cast).  And the exchange illustrates both prongs of the scientific-academic strategy of dismissal, of any theory put forward by a rival: 

(1) wave it aside as preposterous

(2) wave it aside as old hat

Specifically, as regards the reception of Chomsky’s psycholinguistic theories, these took the forms as follows:

 (1) Caricature the theory, so that it seems to lead to absurd conclusions;  then point out that these conclusions are absurd.

(2)   The exact opposite:  So far from rejecting the theory as absurd, embrace it as true -- but as obviously true.  Plato/Vico/Groucho already said that.   Or:  I said that; and your own “theory”, with its welter of neologistic terminology  and slippery symbolisms, is naught but a “notational variant”  of mine.

[to be continued, inshallah]