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Batman and Robin are denounced as a pair of latent homosexuals. Why do teen-agers idolize the Beatles? Explains Joyce Brothers, formerly a TV "authority" and now a columnist on psychological matters: "It's because of their 'Oliver' haircuts and too-short jackets. Oliver Twist, you will recall, was an orphan. By embracing a quartet of orphans as heroes, our teen-agers achieve two unconscious goals. They symbolically 'kill off' the adult generation. They show how neglected and misunderstood they believe themselves to be."
Neurosis has become glamorous. Movie Critic Pauline Kael speaks of "the nervous breakdowns, miscarriages, overweight problems, husband troubles, and all those mental and physical ills which now comprise the image of a great star. In the frivolous, absurd old days, stars were photographed in their bubble baths; now they bathe in tears of self-pity."
As for literary critics, most of them would be lost without pop-psych, though not all go the distance with Britain's William Empson in his analysis of Alice in Wonderland. Alice, noted Empson, fell "through a deep hole into the secrets of Mother Earth," where she found herself "in a long, low hall, part of the palace of the Queen of Hearts (a neat touch)," from which the only way out was "through a hole frighteningly too small." In short, Alice re-enacted the birth trauma.
Such extravagant interpretations were put in their place by Freud himself who, so the story goes, once started a conference by lighting a stogie and announcing: "This may be a phallus, but, gentlemen, let us remember it is also a cigar." Says Philip Solomon, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard: "Almost everything is straight and narrow or rounded and curved. To apply genital meanings to all these things is ridiculous."
Still, pop-psych flourishes—but it has entered a new phase. From conventional concern with repression and frustration, the fashion has shifted to alienation and identity problems.
Alas, Poor Oedipus
Literature reflects the change. In the early and primitive stages, psychological motivation was probed incessantly and mechanically. Eugene O'Neill stopped his characters in mid-dialogue for asides to the audience about what they were really thinking, and every up-to-date fiction writer streamed with stream of consciousness. Dreams were busily explored for sex, and the denial of the sex instinct was blamed for nearly everything. Seducers in novels (as well as in real life) were forever telling girls: "The trouble is you're repressed."
The villain was Mom and, by extension, women in general. From novels to movies and musicals, the case history dominated the scene. Sooner or later there had to be a flashback to some childhood trauma, and its explanation (unloving mother, weak father, hateful sibling, stolen Teddy bear) became as de rigueur as the revelation scene at the end of a detective novel in which the mastermind explains who done it.