The new pop psychology was invigorating, even lifesaving, news to the millions of women it reached through therapy groups, talkshow experts, self-help books, and magazine articles. So they hadn’t been crazy all along to blow up at that inverted bowl of Rice Krispies on the floor and the dirty socks on the coffee table. So it was all right for a woman to want something for herself, whether it was better sex or a higher salary or a little bit of recognition. Pop psychology amplified the youthful voice of the new feminism: It’s OK to be angry; it’s OK to be a woman; it’s OK to be you. Summing up her own transformation by the new psychology, one woman wrote:
I’m entitled. That’s what I learned … I’m entitled to a life of my own. I don’t have to do everything they want. I’m not bad for wanting to do what they don’t approve of—my mother, my husband, my sons.51
But ultimately pop psychology turned out to be as problematic for women as the domestic ideology it replaced. Finding no place for the values of love and nurturance in the Market, it had fastened them onto woman. More precisely, nailed them into her flesh. Women would love in a world that did not honor love, so, as it was put in the final neo-Freudian debacle, women would have to love pain. But the new ideology was willing to accept the values of the marketplace as universal principles; in the world of the marketplace psychologists there was no place for the old “human” values of love and caring—not even on the backs of women. In a flash all the feminine traits that had been glorified as natural and instinctual were exposed as the trappings of a “socialized sex role,” which—almost overnight—had become obsolete.
The new psychology that would set guidelines for the late-twentieth-century woman was first born in the expansive, almost rebellious atmosphere of the Human Potential Movement. The HPM grew out of the broad spectrum of psychological methods and styles that flourished together in the iconoclastic atmosphere of the nineteen sixties. The thrust of the movement grew from the work of “Third Force” (“humanist”) psychologists—neither Freudians nor behaviorists—optimistically dedicated to the “self-actualization” of a psyche presumed to be possessed of an almost infinite capacity for expansion. By the mid-sixties, psychotherapists from every kind of professional background were becoming excited by the mass appeal of the movement, its dramatic techniques (such as group work, physical touch, and direct expression of feelings) and its utopian vision of mass psychological transformation.
Because it was concerned with the “expansion of human potential,” the new psychology was for everyone. “If there is one statement true of every living person it must be this: he hasn’t achieved his full potential.”52 HPM methods were not about “making sick people well”—they were about “making well people better.” In fact, the new techniques worked best on people who were “healthy” and “open” (encounter-group leaders learned that psychotics and neurotics had to be screened out or the new “expansion” techniques would only worsen them by bringing up “unmanageable material”).
The point of achieving one’s full potential, according to HPM ideologues, was not to be able to get more work done, or make a greater contribution to society, or any other old-fashioned, “inner-directed” goal—but simply to have more fun. In Joy, an early manifesto of the HPM, Dr. Schutz tells us that the worst aspect of unfulfilled potential is that it “robs us of pleasure and joy in living.” With the techniques he recommends (developed in experiments in the Air Force and various corporations) as well as at Esalen, the institutional mecca of the HPM, he promises a return to the bliss of childhood: “Perhaps we can recapture some joy, regain some of the body-pleasures, share again the joy with other people that was once possible.”53 Schutz looked at his own newborn son as a creature who was in danger of losing his infant joyousness as he grew up, unless Joy techniques were widely practiced: “We’d better hurry,” he warned, “The culture is already getting to him—Ethan looks as if he is beginning to feel frightened and guilty.”c 54
A major theme of the HPM and the various schools of pop psychology that followed it was that you didn’t have to grow up, at least not in any old-fashioned, repressive, Freudian sense. Why be forced to give up the pleasures of a permissive childhood at any age? Characteristically, pop psychology sought psychic liberation through sensual indulgence, peer-group closeness, sexual experience, and other characteristic discoveries of adolescence transported to the world of adults. It gave a place of honor to “the child within us” as a permanent inhabitant, as if the Gesellian infant “with all his inborn wisdom” remained within each of us in a state of perfect preservation, lovable and hedonistic. While the birth rate fell throughout the sixties and seventies, more and more adult Americans were looking within themselves to find the “child” that they would nuture.
But the fact that you didn’t have to grow up didn’t mean you didn’t have to change. HPM theory implied that it is not only a pleasure to expand oneself but almost an obligation: Who could be sure that their personality didn’t need improvement? Any rejection, any dead-end relationship, any failure to advance at work could point to the need for psychological help.
In the context of the singles culture, with its rapid-turnover “relationships,” compulsive sexiness, and nervous pressure to have “fun,” this message took on special urgency. People were easily convinced that their personalities did need work, and hundreds of thousands of seekers from every kind of background converged at the sites of the new psychological practices. HPM workshops of every stripe flourished in locations as disparate as suburban community centers, college and high school campuses, corporation boardrooms, in every conceivable type of professional and semiprofessional training program, in political organizations, and even in churches. Speaking of encounter groups alone, psychiatrist Joel Kovel writes:
… such groups constitute a major social phenomenon, albeit one that seems, like acid rock, to have peaked in the late Sixties. It had to. At the rate it was growing then, the movement would have engulfed all other forms of social organization by now had it not slowed. I recall being told during a visit to Palo Alto, California, in 1969 that that modest-sized town sported something like 360 ongoing groups.55
When encounter groups peaked, other therapies had already begun to fill the gap, including Psychodrama, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Primal Therapy, more unorthodox new ones (such as “est”) and even “traditional” methods—like Jungian, Reichian, or Sullivanian approaches—plus a hundred “eclectic” variations on all of them. In addition there were “theme” groups—groups for the married, or the divorced, groups for smokers, or overeaters, or insomniacs. “Joy is burgeoning” exulted Schutz prophetically in 1967, exclaiming that if things kept going right, all of our institutions and even “the establishment” would soon be hooked on joy.56
With this mass demand for psychological counsel, psychotherapy became a growth industry in itself, and soon a degree in psychology became one of the best bets for a college graduate looking for guaranteed status and money. But “pop psych” was too much of a bonanza to be contained by any mere academic discipline. Only a psychoanalyst can psychoanalyze you, but lots of people can be “marriage counselors” or “group leaders,” and just about anyone with a computer and an opinion can write a book advising people on how to live. A horde of new psychological experts, loosely educated with a few inhalations of HPM doctrine, rushed in to meet the demand for guidelines in the confusing new singles culture. Front-runners in the psychological gold rush were the veterans of the manipulation industries (marketing and advertising) who, recognizing that this was their natural turf, began the mass production of self-help books in the nineteen seventies. Jean Owen, whose background was in television audience and opinion research was the interviewer-editor of the best-selling How to Be Your Own Best Friend. I Ain’t Much, Baby—but I’m All I’ve Got, a popular book, and, followed up with, I Ain’t Well—but I Sure Am Better were written by Jess Lair, who had a successful career as a marketing and management consultant before getting a Ph.D. in psychology.
Success Through Transactional Analysis, by Jut Meininger, applied Transactional Analysis directly to business. How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty was co-authored by Dr. Herbert Fensterheim and Jean Baer (his wife) the former public relations director of Seventeen magazine. After the success of How to Say No, Jean Baer broke into the psych market on her own with How to Be an Assertive (Not Aggressive) Woman.
Soon even the strongholds of academic psychomedicine, finding themselves left with the old domestic masochistic formulas, had to learn from the paperback book racks. Jean Baer co-led an assertiveness training pilot study program at the Payne Whitney clinic of the New York Hospital. Eric Berne, a psychiatrist who was denied admittance to the American Psychoanalytic Association in light of his Transactional Analysis theories, would, had he lived, have had the satisfaction of seeing TA taught in medical schools and psychology programs. Freud was relegated to the back shelves while the more progressive M.D. and Ph.D. programs rushed to catch up with Gestalt, TA, “behavior mod” and their more overtly commercial variations.
With the seventies’ boom in self-help book sales, modern marketplace psychology, composed of one part HPM philosophy (drawn eclectically from the burgeoning new pop psych tendencies) and two parts sheer hardheaded marketing cunning, really took off as a mass cultural phenomenon on its own. Marketplace psychology took the cheerful expansiveness of the HPM and transformed it into a philosophy of ruthless self-centeredness. In the post-domestic world, where the old ties no longer bind, all that matters is you: you can be what you want to be; you choose your life, your environment, even your appearance and your emotions. Nothing “happens to” you. There are no “can’ts,” only “won’ts.” You don’t have to be the victim even of your own emotional reactions: you choose to feel what you want to feel. “You are free when you accept the responsibility for your choices,” write Newman and Berkowitz in How to Be Your Own Best Friend, adding that the only obstacles they know of are that “people cling to their chains.” Similarly, Transactional Analysis is “realistic,” according to popularizer Thomas Harris, M.D., “… in that it confronts the patient with the fact that he is responsible for what happens in the future no matter what has happened in the past.”57 In pop psychology logic it followed that the only thing that held women back was a “negative mental set”: “… women don’t think of themselves as equal to men so they don’t act equal; consequently men, employers, relatives, society do not treat them as equal.”58
The corollary of the proposition that you are totally responsible for your feelings is that you are not responsible for anything else: “You don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations.” Selfishness is not a “dirty word”—it is merely an “expression of the law of self-preservation.”59 A behavior-modification book warns you that when you embark on their program people will accuse you of being selfish, egotistical, or egocentric. Don’t worry. The person who does this “is himself self-centered and is merely saying, indirectly: you are not centering enough on ME.”60 Book after book assumes that the only way to avoid being “stepped on” is to “put yourself first.” They promise to help you look out for Number One, or to help the person you love the most—yourself!: “Selfishness (self-ness) is simply the recognition and acceptance of the reality that each person is the most important person in the world to himself.”61 The flip side of “Don’t be a victim” is “Don’t rescue” any other victims. The “Gestalt Prayer” which found its way onto thousands of posters, greeting cards, and coffee mugs, puts it best:
I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to
your expectations
And you are not in this world to live
up to mine.
You are you and I am I, and if by chance
we find each other, it’s beautiful
If not, it can’t be helped.62
If you are not responsible to anyone but yourself, it follows that relationships with other people are merely there to be exploited when (emotionally) profitable, and terminated when they cease to be profitable. The primary assumption is that each person in a relationship has a set of emotional, sexual, or other “needs” which he or she wants met. If they are no longer being satisfied by a friend or sexual partner, then that bond may be broken just as reasonably as a buyer would take his business away from a seller if he found a better price. The needs have an inherent legitimacy—the people are replaceable.
Thus, a bad relationship is one where you “put in” more than you “get out.” Relationships—especially marriages—are in reality financial/emotional “contracts” in which rights and responsibilities should be clearly agreed on, and preferably spelled out in writing, down to the last intimate expectation. With this the veil of sentimentality is finally torn away from what Charlotte Perkins Gilman had called the “sexuo-economic relation.” Marriage, it is revealed, is a deal like any other which begins when two people “sell” themselves to each other. Robert Ringer (former real estate salesman and author of Winning Through Intimidation and Looking Out for Number One) sets forth these four steps for successful personal “selling”:
1) Obtain a product to sell (e.g., a woman’s “product” could very well be herself—as a wife),
2) Locate a market for the product (in the above example this would consist of available men who would meet her standards),
3) Implement a marketing method (put into effect a procedure for selling herself), and
4) Be able to close the sale (get the stiff to sign on the dotted line and hand over the ring).63
Once you’re in a relationship, according to another advice book, its success will be based on such conditions as “the desire and ability of both partners to reinforce the expectations of each in a trade negotiation sufficiently balanced to maintain consonance.” For example, an assertiveness training manual recommends that couples follow certain rules for “behavior exchange contracts” in which couples alter their behavior for each other. Some of the rules include:
a. Each partner gets something he/she wants from the other. For instance, you contract to “wear a nice robe in the morning instead of that torn one.” He agrees to “come home for dinner on time instead of drinking with the boys.” You start with simple behaviors and progress to more complex (“She should initiate more sex …” “He should kiss me more.”)….
d. Whenever possible, keep track of the target behavior with graphs, charts, points, or tokens.
e. Avoid disagreements about the contract by writing it out. Keep it in a spot where you both can see it easily. Many couples put it on the refrigerator or bedroom door. When you effect one Behavior Exchange Contract to your mutual satisfaction, go on to another.64
Should such negotiations break down, according to a different book, there can be a “successful divorce,”—by no means to be thought of as a failure—but one that “has been pre-considered in terms of personal upward mobility, with stress laid not nearly so much on what is being left, and may therefore be lost, as on what lies ahead that may be incorporated into a new and better image.”65 After the successful divorce, this behavior-modification book tells us, “Little Affairs” may be useful for many reasons, including “the opportunity to replace lovers who have contributed sexual dissonance with others more able to contribute consonance.” The person with a “Positive Self Image” need not worry about promiscuity. All these affairs will be “meaningful” because they will all contribute to the “self’s reservoir of experiences.”
If relationships are business transactions, the Self is now an owner, an investor, and a consumer. One can almost hear the scratching of pencil on paper as the “strokes” are counted and the tabulations of love-given/love-received are totaled up. In the language of psycho-business, we are smart to capitalize on our assets and cut our losses, maximize the return on our (emotional) investments, and in general put all our relationships—whether with lovers, co-workers, or family members—on the psychic equivalent of a cash ’n’ c
arry basis.
From the business metaphor for relationships, it’s a quick leap to the “game” metaphor—already so stylish in the real business world. Marketplace psychology divides the world into two categories of people—“winners” and “losers.” The Winner’s Notebook, Born to Win, Winners and Losers, and Winning Through Intimidation are only a few titles from the self-help book rack. (In the nineteenth-century economy, everyone knew that most people would be “losers.” But in the modern consumption-centered economy, where “winning” doesn’t necessarily mean gaining wealth and power, but having fun—suddenly everyone can be a “winner”: it just takes the right frame of mind.) “What is called for is concentration on the forthcoming material and the desire to minimize losing streaks while maximizing winning ones,” says Winners and Losers. “In poker, it’s done every day in the week: cut your losses; throw in the bad or “maybe” hands and bet big on the good ones.”66 And don’t get too upset about anything—it’s only a game!
As an abstract system, marketplace psychology postulates an emotional “economy” in which standardized “players” interact, like real businessmen, according to definite rules of possession and exchange. Standardizing the players is the hard part, since they are, of course, human. The first step is to dismiss, as much as possible, the unique personal past. Almost all the marketplace psychologists pride themselves on their avoidance of time-consuming and confusing history: one Gestalt book dismisses the past with the words, “… reality exists only in the present. A person’s memory of the past (despite his sincere denials of this fact) is a collection of obsolete distortions and misperceptions.” With their personal autobiographies eradicated, people do appear more similar, and can be analyzed in terms of their needs and their behavior in the here-and-now: “What we do and how we function is our self.”67 The conception of the self is simplified, and whenever possible, mechanized. “The brain functions as a high-fidelity tape recorder” says Harris. “The Adult [ego-state] is a data-processing computer.” When they’re not tape recorders or computers, people most often appear as robots whose “programming” keeps them from taking in “positive input” or from stopping other robots, who are looking for “negative payoffs,” from pushing their “anger buttons.” “Freedom,” is, of course, “standing at your own controls.”
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 35
