It’s all Freud’s fault. He let people absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions. Blame your parents instead, instructs the Freudian school of psychotherapy, and while you’re at it, enrich lots of therapists who have the patience to listen to your self-indulgent whinging.
Hence the famous Oedipus complex when motherhood gets too intense and the Electra complex when fatherhood goes farther than it ought. Freud was of course an old fraud, who faked many of his session notes, and should maybe have stuck to his original panacea which was injecting cocaine (strictly medicinal of course).
L Ron Hubbard, the father and sole proprietor of Scientology, went further than Freud. He traced mental problems back to the womb, where the parent’s actions can lay down ‘engrams’ to plague the future adult’s sanity. Then he proclaimed that humans are actually plagued with memories from long dead aliens who were upset at being destroyed by a mad monarch with hydrogen bombs eons ago.
The few double-blind tests ever done on psychotherapy, even the traditional kind, suggest that mentally ill people get better at the same rate without therapy as they do with it, satisfying though it may be to have someone listen to you complaining. But it costs.
As Hubbard once said in his previous incarnation as a (bad) science fiction writer, ‘Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.’ And that is precisely what he set about doing, beginning with psychotherapy.
But the key point, you note, is that people are prepared to pay for all this dubious science. And even if the editors of IR magazine have adjusted the penny a word rate for inflation, Hubbard had a point and it gives the Speculator inspiration. Most schools of therapy are now old hat. We need new ways to tempt neuro-dollars from twitchy clients’ bank accounts. And who has the most money? Baby boomers!
The BBs’ parents are somewhat past blaming now. They’re either dead or the harm they did, even if it lived after them, has already been exorcised by previous therapies. It is not a good business plan to go fishing in fished out waters.
But do not despair! Think longitudinally, and in the opposite direction to the parental box. Who can the BBs blame for all their problems? Their children.
Baby boomers gave up many of the creature comforts that the 1960s generation was beginning to expect, just to nurture children who came of age at a time when a college degree was a minimum requirement to run the till in a supermarket, and when tuition fees – in the US, at least – were growing at twice the rate of inflation.
Baby boomers found their ambitions, their idealism and their plans to change the world and make a mark on history all frustrated by the reality of having rugrats in whom the selfish genes were dominant.
They parented a generation that would not flee the parental nest as rents and house prices soared. Much easier to stay attached to the umbilical cord, not least since BBs were such indulgent parents that there was no reason for a kid to move out. They could bring their sexual partners of any gender home and they could even smoke, as long as they pretended it was cool grass and not noxious tobacco.
And have the boomers won respect for this tolerance? No way! Their kids give unwanted lifestyle advice, mock the pictures of the demonstrations, and roll on the floor with laughter when they see the bell bottoms and flowery cottons and long hair.
Do the BBs get gratitude? No way! Their children are anxiously reading about the evaporating Social Security fund and wondering why they should pay taxes to support their aged Ps. And the average BB has every reason to fret about possible future financial and physical dependency on their fickle, feckless offspring. Expect a resurgence of interest in involuntary euthanasia.
So there we have it. A psycho-entrepreneurial opportunity: blame the kids. For instance, when a CEO is on trial, we could – for a fee– provide an expert witness with a doctorate and a Middle European name (that’s New European, of course) to testify about how the lack of respect from grasping parasitic offspring and anxiety about the future of Social Security and retirement drove this pitiable man to pump his stock.
The Speculator’s crack team of therapeutic researchers and venture capitalists is already hard at work on this new school of psychoanalysis to treat Xgenerational dysfunctional syndrome. We’ll call it something like the Youngian school. Prospectuses available from the editor – at much, much more than a penny a word.
The Speculator
