This article refers to the neologism. For the Frou Frou

Frou Frou

Frou Frou was a British electronic duo composed of Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth. They released their only album, Details, in 2002. Both of them write, produce and play instruments on the tracks, while Heap also provides the vocals...

 song, see Details (album)

Details (album)

-Personnel:*Imogen Heap: Vocals, Acoustic Guitars, Keyboards, Synthesizers, Piano, Drums, Percussion, Samples, Software*Guy Sigsworth: Acoustic Guitars, Keyboards, Synthesizers, Piano, Drums, Percussion, Sampling, Software*Mich Gerber: Bowed Upright Bass...

Psychobabble (a portmanteau of "psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

" or "psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

" and "babble

Babble

Babble is a British internet telephony service. It was one of the first commercialisations of VoIP technology, appearing in 2004 approximately 6 months after the proprietary Skype opened up interest in telephony over the internet...

") is a form of prose using jargon

Jargon

Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...

, buzzword

Buzzword

A buzzword is a term of art, salesmanship, politics, or technical jargon that is used in the media and wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context....

s and highly esoteric language to give an impression of plausibility through mystification, misdirection, and obfuscation. The term implies that the speaker of psychobabble lacks the experience and understanding necessary for proper use of a given psychological term. Frequent usage can associate a clinical word with less meaningful buzzword definitions. Some psychological buzzword

Buzzword

A buzzword is a term of art, salesmanship, politics, or technical jargon that is used in the media and wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context....

s have come into widespread use in business management training, motivational seminars, self-help

Self-help

Self-help, or self-improvement, is a self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis. There are many different self-help movements and each has its own focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents and in some cases, leaders...

, folk psychology

Folk psychology

Folk psychology is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology...

, and popular psychology

Popular psychology

The term popular psychology refers to concepts and theories about human mental life and behavior that are purportedly based on psychology and that attain popularity among the general population...

. Laypersons may overuse such words in describing life

Personal life

Personal life is the course of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity. It is a common notion in modern existence—although more so in more prosperous parts of the world such as Western Europe and North America...

 problems as clinical maladies when such nomenclature is not valuable, meaningful or appropriate. Theodore Dalrymple defines the term as "the means by which people talk about themselves without revealing anything".

Psychobabble is also a psychological term used to denote the misdiagnosis and misclassification of natural variation in human psychology as psychopathological, or mentally disordered, and is based upon the premise of exaggerated overmedicalization of physiological ailments to increase profits for the medical industry.

Basis of the term

The use of psychobabble reflects the idea that social and personal situations become more understandable through the use of complex, descriptive or special esoteric language. The word itself came into popular usage after the 1977 publication of Psychobabble: Fast talk and quick cure in the era of feeling by author and journalist Richard Dean Rosen. He invented the word in 1975, and it featured in a cover story in the magazine New Times, titled "Psychobabble: the new language of candor". The book Psychobabble explores an explosion of psychological treatments and terminology, in both professional and non-professional settings. Rosen's description is as follows:

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.

Most profession

Profession

A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain....

s develop a unique vocabulary which, with frequent usage, may become commonplace buzzword

Buzzword

A buzzword is a term of art, salesmanship, politics, or technical jargon that is used in the media and wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context....

s. Psychology-practitioners may reject the "psychobabble" label when applied to the "ownership" of their special terminology. The vagueness

Vagueness

The term vagueness denotes a property of concepts . A concept is vague:* if the concept's extension is unclear;* if there are objects which one cannot say with certainty whether belong to a group of objects which are identified with this concept or which exhibit characteristics that have this...

 inherent in many psychological concepts increases the use of psychobabble.

Some pejorative allusions to psychobabble imply that certain psychological concepts lack precision and eventually become meaningless or pseudoscientific. Science demands the testing of ideas in experiments where results are repeatable. In this context, the "psychobabble" label is pejorative in the implication that the language of psychology is often not based on scientifically proven concepts. In other cases, psychobabble can refer to the use of jargon to imply meanings beyond those accepted by scholars and trained practitioners.

Likely contexts

In some contexts, certain psychological jargon may be dismissed as psychobabble when used without training, or in discussion of pop psychology themes. New Age

New Age

The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...

 phraseology

Phraseology

In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units , in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than or otherwise not predictable from the sum of their meanings when...

, self-help

Self-help

Self-help, or self-improvement, is a self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis. There are many different self-help movements and each has its own focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents and in some cases, leaders...

 groups, personal development

Personal development

Personal development includes activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitates employability, enhance quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations...

 coaching, and Large Group Awareness Training

Large Group Awareness Training

Large-group awareness training refers to activities usually offered by groups linked with the human potential movement which claim to increase self-awareness and bring about desirable transformations in individuals' personal lives...

 often include alleged psychobabble.

The word may refer contemptuously to pretentious gibberish

Gibberish

Gibberish is a generic term in English for talking that sounds like speech, but carries no actual meaning. This meaning has also been extended to meaningless text or gobbledygook. The common theme in gibberish statements is a lack of literal sense, which can be described as a presence of nonsense...

 with psychological jargon

Jargon

Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...

. Automated talk-therapy offered by various ELIZA

ELIZA

ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, DOCTOR...

 computer programs produce notable examples of conversational patterns that, while not loaded with jargon, can be accurately described as psychobabble. ELIZA programs parody clinical conversations in which a therapist replies to a statement with a question that requires little specific knowledge of a given topic.

A related term to psychobabble is neurobabble (Miller 1986). In Unvalidated Fringe and Fraudulent Treatment of Mental Disorders, Beyerstein (1990) writes that neurobabble can appear in "ads [that] suggest that brain 'repatterning' will foster effortless learning, creativity, and prosperity" and relates neuromythologies of left/right brain

Lateralization of brain function

A longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres, connected by the corpus callosum. The sides resemble each other and each hemisphere's structure is generally mirrored by the other side. Yet despite the strong anatomical similarities, the functions of each...

 pseudoscience to specific New Age products and techniques. He adds that "the purveyors of neurobabble urge us to equate truth with what feels right and to abandon the commonsense insistence that those who would enlighten us provide at least as much evidence as we demand of politicians or used-car salesmen."

Examples

Psychobabble terms consist of selected words and phrases with roots in psychotherapy practice. Psychobabblers commonly overuse such terms as if they possess some special esoteric value or meaning when they might not. (Various terms and phrases from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders...

are but one significant source of psychobabble, as the usage of various terms waxes and wanes, while, for the most part, the incidence of true mental disorders does not vary significantly over time).

Terms to consider include:
co-dependent,
delusion

Delusion

A delusion is a false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence. Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological...

,
denial

Denial

Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.The subject may use:* simple denial: deny the reality of the...

,
dysfunctional,
empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, racial, educational, gender or economic strength of individuals and communities...

,
holistic,
meaningful relationship

Interpersonal relationship

An interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the...

,
multiple personality disorder,
narcissism

Narcissism

Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...

,
psychosis

Psychosis

Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...

,
self-actualization,
synergy

Synergy

Synergy may be defined as two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable.The term synergy comes from the Greek word from , , meaning "working together".-Definitions and usages:...

.

Extensive examples of psychobabble appear in Cyra McFadden's satirical novel The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County

The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County

The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County is a satirical novel about Marin County, California, written by Cyra McFadden . Beginning in 1976, the book's chapters had been serialized in the Marin County alternative newspaper, Pacific Sun...

. Lodge gives a structural analysis of the language used in the book, and an endorsement by McFadden of the use of the term in Working with Structuralism.

See also

• Corporatese
• Glittering generality
  Glittering generality
  Glittering generalities are emotionally appealing words so closely associated with highly-valued concepts and beliefs that they carry conviction without supporting information or reason. Such highly-valued concepts attract general approval and acclaim...
  
  
• Gobbledygook
  Gobbledygook
  Gobbledygook or gobbledegook is any text containing jargon or especially convoluted English that results in it being excessively hard to understand or even incomprehensible...
  
  
• Legalese
• Technobabble
  Technobabble
  Technobabble , also called technospeak, is a form of prose using jargon, buzzwords, esoteric language, specialized technical terms, or technical slang that is incomprehensible to the listener...