Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.
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It's apparent that we can't proceed any further without a name for this institutionalized garrulousness, this psychological patter, this need to catalogue the ego's condition. Let's call it psychobabble, this spirit which now tyrannizes conversation in the seventies.
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Confession, alas, is the new handshake.
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If we ever do end up acting just like rats or Pavlov's dogs, it will be largely because behaviorism has conditioned us to do so.
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If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America, it is an insistence on preventing failures of communication.
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It isn't sufficient just to want -- you've got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want.
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Are you going out after the truth, or are you going out after something you believe?
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