Psychobabble: Fast talk and quick cure in the era of feeling

by R.D. Rosen

A book of this grade is generally well kept and is in good shape to read and store. Sturdy spine all pages intact physically. Solid cover. Might have acceptable shelve wear. Might (rare) have very limited notes.

Genres: Nonfiction

233 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Richard Dean Rosen's writing career spans mystery novels, narrative nonfiction, humor books, and television. Strike Three You're Dead (1984), the first in Rosen's series featuring major league baseball player Harvey Blissberg, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America in 1985. Blissberg's adventures continued in four sequels, including Fadeaway (1986) and Saturday Night Dead (1988), which drew on Rosen's stint as a writer for Saturday Night Live.

Rosen's three nonfiction books include Psychobabble (1979), inspired by the term he coined, and A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West (2007). Over the past decade, he co-created and co-wrote a bestselling series of humor books: Bad Cat, Bad Dog, Bad Baby, and Bad President.
 
He attended Brown University and graduated from Harvard College.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is just a journalistic review of a number of types of "mind cure" that were fashionable in the 1970s, including early pseudo-AI therapy, est, and Art Janov's "primal therapy", perhaps the one that lingers most in people's consciousness thanks to celebrity patients such as John "Mama don't go! Daddy come home!" Lennon.
Just journalism, but the quality of the writing as writing and of the thought and understanding behind it, made me feel that our time is deluded in feeling superior to those times.
Read the Guardian today: the journalists typically can't spell, don't know the meanings of words and are incapable of any kind of thought beyond endorsement of the half-baked liberal truisms of the day. Never mind the cheesecloth and the flares, come back 70s, all is forgiven.

Just to take one recurring example: Rosen has read Freud, and done so with critical intelligence, rather than skimming a couple of short pieces for plausibility and then spouting predigested and ignorant second-hand prejudices. It's instructive to be reminded how far Freud's star has fallen in such a short time - not through any scientific advances so much as precisely through a decline of hands-on engagement with difficult thought.

In any case, this all means that Rosen is intellectually as well as journalistically competent to report on and size up these competing therapies - which, however, and rather undermining my 70s-glorifying tone hitherto, were in all the cases at hand both patently bullshit and moderately to enormously successful. But no era has a monopoly on suckers I suppose.

Recommended, for an enjoyable if not particularly topical insight into the way we were 40 years or so ago. If you only read one contemporary account of once-fashionable treatments for troubled minds this year...

[Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super interesting, very dramatic towards the end. I really enjoyed the reference to Tom Wolfe’s essay “The Me Decade”