Sphere

by Michael Crichton

Norman’s research was considered brilliant, but psychology was notoriously prone to intellectual fashions, and interest in the study of anxiety was declining as many researchers came to regard anxiety as a purely biochemical disorder that could be treated with drug therapy alone; one scientist had even gone so far as to say, “Anxiety is no longer a problem in psychology. There is nothing left to study.” Similarly, group dynamics was perceived as old-fashioned, a field that had seen its heyday in the Gestalt encounter groups and corporate brainstorming procedures of the early 1970s but now was dated and passé. Norman himself could not comprehend this. It seemed to him that American society was increasingly one in which people worked in groups, not alone; rugged individualism was now replaced by endless corporate meetings and group decisions. In this new society, group behavior seemed to him more important, not less. And he did not think that anxiety as a clinical problem was going to be solved with pills. It seemed to him that a society in which the most common prescription drug was Valium was, by definition, a society with unsolved problems.