"I used to be Superman . . . Wherever you looked I was saving somebody. Then one day I pulled this chick from the river. Do you think she thanked me? No! She just wanted to know why I had this compulsion to rescue . . . She accused me of doubting my masculinity . . . She took one look at my cape and said I was a latent transvestite."
SUPERMAN'S troubles as chronicled by Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, are readily recognizable. It sometimes seems as if most of the U.S. population were engaged in disassembling each other's psyches, second-guessing motivations, and ferreting out symptoms. As the Frenchman worries about his liver and the Englishman complains about his catarrh, the American is concerned with his mental health. No other nation has so high a quotient of mind probers of one kind or another; there are some 40,000 professionally recognized psychiatrists and psychologists. Serious, important work is done by these practitioners—at least, by most of them—but their work is surrounded by a penumbra of popularization. Ever since the U.S. adopted Freud as a major prophet in the 1920s and '30s, more and more Americans have turned into do-it-yourself psychologists.
The unconscious, once a startling discovery that put every motive in question and turned every word or act into its opposite, is now a universal cliche. The game of spotting Freudian slips and symbols, once chic and daring, has filtered down from the cocktail party to the corner bar. Anyone who can read seems qualified to bat around complexes, compulsions and obsessions. Pop-psych is all over the place.
Also a Cigar
Pop-psych is the commuter carefully tallying his "compatibility quotient" in a newspaper quiz ("Do you resist asking directions in a strange town?"). It is the applicant for a new job checking True or False on a personality test ("I have strange and peculiar thoughts." "I have never seen a vision"). Pop-psych is found in heavy-breathing advice to the lovelorn, warning girls to beware of their father fixations. It is in the domestic-advice columns telling the anxious mothers of bed-wetters that the children are resenting their "free-flowing" permissiveness. The "psychosomatic" cold and eating to "compensate" have become part of folklore. Pop-psych even appears on the sports page, as when a feature writer for New York's new World Journal Tribune gets a psychiatrist to describe baseball as a ritual performed in a crib (the diamond) and dominated by an elevated father figure (the pitcher on his mound).
Pop-psych turns up everywhere in the news. Lyndon Johnson's hostile or suspicious behavior is ascribed to his "regional inferiority complex." Russia's inflexibility is attributed to the custom of binding newborn babies tight in swaddling clothes. Charles Whitman's shooting people from the clock tower of the Texas campus is diagnosed as a case of sexual overcompensation (on a phallic tower with a phallic rifle). Stanford Associate English Professor Bruce Franklin notes that "our basic method of fighting in Viet Nam is anal-sadistic. A man in an airplane is in a nonorganic environment, symbolically defecating on the organic world below."