Psychobabble is ... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it prete...nds 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The more the development of late capitalism renders obsolete or at least suspect the real possibilities of self, self- fulfillment... and actualization, the more they are emphasized as if they could spring to life through an act of will alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America, it is an insistence on preventing failures of communicati...on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »