The Psychobabble Reduction

If you do any sort of psychological writing at all, it's an allegation impossible to sidestep. It comes from predictable quarters, but unexpectedly too. I'll call it the psychobabble reduction. What it means is this: a strict tendency to dismiss any and all forms of psychological analysis with the reflexive charge, "Psychobabble!" A little history. Apparently the term itself derives from a book written in the mid-1970s. The reference was to 1) empty, obfuscating jargon that was pseudo-explanatory or 2) the throwing around of concepts for which no clear scientific support existed. Sometimes, of course, these two features coexisted.

Now don't get me wrong. Psychobabble is a perfectly fine term, although I don't recall ever using it. (I prefer the simpler, cruder "bull***"). But it's also mindlessly overextended, like a lot of terms with useful but limited applications.

First off, to some people out there, including many with a duty to know better, ANY effort to interpret ANYTHING psychologically is psychobabble, ipso facto. In some cases this is simple naivete. But in others there's a more complex motive at work. My sense is that the psychobabble reduction sometimes reduces itself to a need to defend the phenomenon being explained, as if explaining it amounts to a sort of violence against assumed, intrinsic purity. What's being objected to is not necessarily psychology, but explanation, such that any stab at making sense is automatically pseudo, ersatz. Here another assumption often enters the picture, namely the notion that people, or phenomena, simply can't be explained, period. Therefore, any effort to do so is nonsense, a misguided, deluded enterprise. I hear it all the time, and probably you do too: "You're a psychologist? Well, don't analyze me!" Somehow, for many people, the idea of analysis constitutes a denuding. It's threatening. It's intrusive. It's even, according to some, impolite. So, calling any and all psychological analyses psychobabble is a sort of warding off of anxiety. "Don't try knowing me, and don't try knowing anyone else either, because I'd prefer to keep my illusions intact" is the subtextual plea.

I write psychobiographies (go here for more info if interested). I trace the subjective, personological, life-history origins of art through the use of scientifically-validated personality research. My work, then, is almost a taunt for those with psychobabble-hating inclinations. Plus, I'm often talking about people---Truman Capote, Diane Arbus, Sylvia Plath, etc---for whom fans of the work feel special affection. Interpreting what they do, the art they make, analyzing their emotional lives and defenses and habitual reactions and styles of coping--all that is seen as a violation, because (to some) a psychological approach damages the presumed uniqueness and specialness of the artist in question. It really has little to do with the value of the terminology, or its origins in science, or the strength of the case made. All that is beside the point. It is more about "knowing" itself, and the wish not to be known, because to be known is to be understood, and to be understood is to be exposed. There's just one way to avoid the psychobabble reduction. Don't do psychology.