The Primal Whimper
The Primal Whimper was the second collection of Journal of Polymorphous Perversity® articles.
The hardcover edition of The Primal Whimper was published in 1989 by Guilford Press.
THE ARTICLES The Primal Whimper consists of 40 articles drawn from the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity®. (No article by the name of “The Primal Whimper” appears in the book.) In “The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Updated,” the author presents some novel new items for this classic personality measure: “Answer each item T(rue) or F(alse): I am easily awakened by the firing of cannons. I believe that I am following others. I was not very strict with my parents. I am troubled by attacks of optimism. My sex life is satisfactory, except when I am with another person.”
The paperback edition of The Primal Whimper was published in 1991 by Ballantine Books (a division of Random House).
SOME REVIEWS OF THE PRIMAL WHIMPER
“A kind of National Lampoon for psychologists and shrinks, it’s also quite funny to anyone who’s ever laughed at the trivial nitpicking and obscurantist word-wanking that haunt all scholarly journals.”
New York Press
“Hilarious . . . Wickedly goofy . . . Beneath the scholarly veneer, there rages in virtually every instance an appropriately berserk sense of humor . . . A book that will have readers laughing out loud from beginning to end.”
Booklist
“A delightfully silly collection of laughable, tongue-in-cheek pieces of actual, made-up research that will bring a much-needed breath of humility to the helping professions.”
Steve Allen, Jr., M.D.
Here are some of the titles appearing in The Primal Whimper:
- Maximum Security Amusement Parks (M-SAPs): A Modest Proposal for the Treatment of Adolescence
- Adult Children of Normal Parents
- On the Robustness of Psychological Test Instrumentation: Psychological Evaluation of the Dead
- A Subjective Assessment of the Oral Doctoral Defense Process in Psychology: I Don’t Feel Like Going Into It, If You Want to Know the Truth [by Holden Caulfield, Ph.D.]
- The Influence of Being Untenured on the Willingness to Submit Meaningless Replies: A Reply to Polloway
- The Academic Oedipal Crisis: An Experimental Investigation of the Need of Assistant Professors to Kill Their Departmental Chairman
HOW TO BUY The Primal Whimper is now out of print. However, both the hardcover and paperback editions can be purchased as used books at the following websites:
