Psychobubble

Toward the end of Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard rails against psychoanalysis, almost as vehemently as McMurphy does in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (my Contrast movie).  Having already initiated a dialogue between this movie and my disaster, as well as between Baudrillard and my disaster, I want to try to elicit a conduction from Baudrillard through the movie to my disaster: psychoanalysis in Baudrillard, psychoanalysis in Cuckoo's Nest...psychoanalysis in standardized testing? 

Baudrillard citing Canetti on psychoanalysis: "The harm done by the interpretation of dreams is immeasurable" (177).

Baudrillard on psychoanalysis: "it transforms every sign into a symptom...every representation into a hallucination of desire" (178).

Deleuze and Guattari on psychoanalysis: "Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says" (Anti-Oedipus 23).

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard clearly seems to be drawing on D&G's use of schizophrenia as a relay when he describes, for example, the catastrophe as a pure event "where the subject himself is no longer a word but a thing, and functions at the mercy of things" (190).

In 1975, the same year One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won Best Picture, journalist Richard Dean Rosen invented the word "psychobabble" to denote the explosion of psychological treatment and terminology witnessed in the 70s:

Psychobabble is … a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candour, 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.

With the proliferation of standardized testing, we can extend the critique of psychobabble to account for the these educational practices as "psychobubble."  Standardized tests, like Rosen says of psychoanalysis, kills off the very understanding it pretends to promote and reduces insight to a collection of standardized observations.

Possible "writing with the icon" image: screenshot of McMurphy post-lobotomy with bubble sheet letter-graphics layered over his face and body; caption: "words for things."