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...

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