The problem with pop psychology

James Bond is not what he used to be. His motivations were once so simple: MI6 had told him to do it. Of late, though, he has been propelled about the screen by his inner demons, shooting people he’s not supposed to shoot, revisiting his childhood, collecting traumas, developing a mother-complex with Judi Dench. What makes Bond, Bond? Once, it didn’t matter, now it does. The next film, Bond girl Léa Seydoux has said, will be ‘even more psychological’.

The screen reflects the culture. Psychology, it seems, is what we want now. The stuff is simply everywhere. Imposter syndrome, projection, narcissism, Stockholm syndrome, triggering, boundaries, personality type, self-care — these terms now pepper the discourse. The same impulse which in recent years caused an academic to diagnose Mr Darcy with autism now impels people to identify each other as narcissists, or gaslighters, or enablers, or of being in denial.

The problem? For a start, we often get it wrong. Psychology and psychiatry are perfectly respectable fields and the terms I’ve just listed all refer to real things, but what bubbles to the surface, through non-scientists and on social media, are pet theories and cherry-picked studies, wielded by people with no idea what they’re talking about. And the trouble with that is that this semi-medical jargon is strangely powerful. When it enters debate, it shapes it.

To illustrate that power we don’t have to go much further back than the government’s flirtation with ‘behavioural fatigue’. The idea, floated in March, was that locking down too soon would cause the public to get bored and start breaking the rules. The theory, experts wrote in the BMJ, had ‘no basis in behavioural science’, yet it became a major part of government strategy.