Mind Over Masses // Psychology Today: 25 Years of Insight

Publication:
Chicago Sun-Times
Publish date:
December 23, 1992
Author:
Andrew Herrmann


They could have put Cliff Clavin, the know-it-all postman from "Cheers," on the cover.

Or maybe Ross Perot, the know-it-all politician. Or the guy that sits a few desks down from you, the office chatterbox.

Heck, they could've put on the cover any of us who've pronounced our own brand of brilliant insight into the human condition. We start with, "You know why they act that way, don't you. . . ." Then we cap it off with, "It's true. I read it somewhere."

That somewhere just might have been the magazine Psychology Today - or some newspaper item or radio bright lifted from that bible of amateur psychiatrists (and know-it-alls) everywhere.

Celebrating 25 years since its birth with a special best-of edition this month, there aren't too many magazines that can claim contributors as diverse as Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and the Masters and Johnson sex research team.

Combining pop culture and psychology, the magazine over the years has tackled dreams, body language, faux paus, left-handedness, Howard Hughes and suckers.

And sex. Oh, yes, a good dose of that - mainly of the what's-going-on-between-the-ears-while-folks-are-between-the-sheets variety.

Why couldn't Psych 101 have been this fun in college?

"What a long strange trip it's been," notes current editor in chief Owen J. Lipstein.

It was back in 1967 when founder Nicholas H. Charney, "irritated with the pompous and unnecessary vocabularies generated by some psychologists," decided to bring the workings of the inner mind to the masses. "It's time to let the air in," he wrote readers in the first issue.

Looking back in the anniversary edition, Charney says, "The human brain hasn't changed very much in 25,000-50,000 years. Wanting to understand behavior, improve relations, deal with emotions - these issues have been around forever."

Over the last quarter-century, readers have found out loads about themselves and others from Psychology Today's contributors - psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists and just plain observers of human life.

Some of the most interesting insights have been into how we differ, particularly between the sexes. In a survey that no doubt fueled a flood of cocktail party conversation and water cooler confabs, a 1976 query of 52,000 readers found certain insight into happiness.

For single men and single women, the main "pillars of happiness" were friends and social life. But for married men, happiness could only be fulfilled by personal growth (friends came in eighth). The key to happiness for married women was "being in love" (with friends coming in at seven).

Sex slips into Psychology Today with regularity - even when the topic is not precisely about sex. A 1980 look at vacation fantasies revealed that a number of married people's travel wishes did not include their spouses.

The reason? Many married men said their dream trip included random sexual adventures. (The married women wanted to ditch their spouses because they felt "their husbands don't know how to enjoy themselves.")

The 10 most common sexual fantasies by women in 1973 included "pretending I am doing something wicked" and imagining they are "another irresistibly sexy female." A 1978 report on homosexuality found one fifth of gay men had been married to a woman at some point and that nearly half of them had had intercourse two to four times per week during their first year of marriage.

A psychiatrist who treated Robert F. Kennedy assassin Sirhan B. Sirhan reported that his subject "fired each shot as if it would somehow make up for his impotence."

Of course, not everybody is a fan of Psychology Today. Some cite the axiom "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing" - reading a magazine piece may help with party chatter but it is not the place to find legitimate insight into psychology.

Even a magazine contributor expressed negative thoughts about the popularity of Psychology Today: In 1972, Agnew observed that "a number of our young people" appeared to be "overly concerned" about technology eroding their loss of identity.

"I would say to them that they and future generations of Americans face a far bigger threat from the sugar-coated theories of social scientists and behavioral psychologists," Agnew wrote.

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