The Rise of the Wumplet Psychotherapists

The words are meant to jarr

To break the jar

We need the broken glass

To cut through

The garrulous, the vapid chattering, the striated spaces

Of the rise of psychophobic wumplets.

-Bruce Scott-2026

In Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur, he uses the terms “wump” and “wumplet”. They are not technical terms with strict definitions, but rather polemical labels he uses to mock what he sees as cultural stupidity and obstruction. Pound sees a wump/wumplet as a person who is mentally inert, culturally obstructive. Wumps lack intellectual discrimination; they resist new or difficult ideas. More ominously, they passively or actively block the transmission of culture.

Wumps are not necessarily evil or malicious; they are dangerous because of their dullness, complacency, and conformity. Think of someone who treats complex thought as a nuisance, prefers slogans to precision, and upholds “common sense” against learning. For Pound, wumps are among the main reasons cultures deteriorate.

A wumplet is a smaller, more specialised version of a wump. A wumplet can be found in the role of a petty official, a minor academic, a bureaucrat, or a gatekeeper enforcing rules they do not understand. If the wump is the mass phenomenon, the wumplet is the functionary: the person who operationalises stupidity. Wumplets are especially irritating to Pound because they give institutional power to ignorance.

In summary, a wump is the dull-minded cultural dead weight, and the wumplet is the petty enforcer of that dullness.

So why Ezra Pound? The controversial author who was imprisoned in a psychiatric prison for 13 years for his views on World War II? Of course, a cursory glance at Mr Google can readily dish up the dirt on antisemitism, fascism, etc., etc. While not endorsing or agreeing with all the views of Pound (or Mr Google by the way-the Ministry of Google-Truth does tend to distort things to their advantage), in this day and age it is important to be able to draw on many sources (including one’s which one disagrees with) to inform one’s critique of societal and civilisational destruction; a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day and all that. So, for the less robust reader and more hysterical reader, I suggest a safe space or to click on another link spewed up by Mr Google to soothe. One must be realistic anyhow; the wump tends not to want to be shown the mirror of their societal demise and is not likely to read articles like mine.

In his World War II radio broadcasts from Italy, Pound argued that British and American soldiers were being sacrificed in wars that did not serve their real interests; the wars served the political elites (“governors”), and an international financial system based on usury (interest-based credit controlled by banks). From Pound’s perspective, WWII was not primarily about national defence or democracy, but about protecting a corrupt economic order. It sounds familiar in 2026, doesn’t it?

It is important to realise that when Pound made his radio broadcasts from Italy during WWII, he saw himself as warning Americans and Britons, trying to save young men from dying, and exposing what he believed was the real economic cause of war.

Similarly, Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971) presents war as the outcome of manipulation by bankers, international institutions, and political insiders. Allen’s central claim was that the same financial elite funded every major power, including Britain, the USA, Germany, and revolutionary movements (including communists). The mechanism, he argued, was sovereign debt, arms financing, and post-war reconstruction loans. His famous refrain was essentially: “The bankers always win.”

Of course, Allen is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. I suppose it helps to maintain the desire by governments to conscript their own young men (and women-equality in 2026 and all that-thanks feminism) to go and die in a war which makes a few people rich. Our government would never do such a thing today, would it? Anyhow, mentioning such inflammatory things (like warning about going to war), in Pound’s time, got you put in a loony bin for over 13 years. Now people get put in jail for expressing views (contrary to the state Diktat) on Facebook. The direction of travel has remained constant.

Ok, a long introduction, but it is worth laying the groundwork. I know we live in a short attention span society- with social media, TikTok videos, and influencers; any content requiring more than 5 minutes of attention span is for the oldies and bigots….but onward we go.

The “mental health industrial complex” or “mental healthism”, which I have written and spoken about previously, is a major issue in the denigration of what we call psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, or even psychiatry. What we see in this mental health industrial complex is the grossest commercialisation of suffering; human experience is reduced to standardised processes, abstract pseudo-science, and vacuous inanities, all hinged on fancy-looking websites with “spiritual” platitudes rooted in nothing but a narcissistic drive for self-mastery (“you can be THE God-Go get em’ girl”). Some websites ooze this vibe. Corporate-like Wellbeing/psychotherapy/coaching websites spew out wistful daily blogs, navel gazing, posed pictures of “therapists” peering into a babbling brook, or sitting looking pensive and caring with intellectual glasses perched carefully on their nose, notebook and pen in hand.

Basically, mass-produced junk, for the masses to lap up as a cure for their woes. The Eternal Method (it never ends: the method to cure and paradoxically the need for a method NOT to cure). Get it? The pharmaceutical industry has a vested interest in keeping customers; why wouldn’t the psychotherapeutic phenomenon do the same?

Ezra Pound’s wumplet is a placeholder for the vapid mass-produced junk in the market of wellbeing. The wumplet and their products, from the perspective of Jean Baudrillard, are the circulation of the simulacra (a substitution or imitation of the real thing) of psychic/spiritual healing and the healer.

Pound’s litmus paper of content test, “You do NOT know about any substance merely by testing it with litmus paper”: here Pound contrasts Michel de Montaigne with what he scornfully calls “heteroclite gatherers”—i.e., miscellaneous compilers of quotations, anecdotes, and second-hand wisdom. Montaigne thinks that the gatherers merely collect. For Pound, Montaigne is superior because he is not assembling knowledge from elsewhere (for a taxonomy); he is testing ideas against his own mind and experience. The heteroclite gatherer piles up facts, authorities, and examples, but contributes no fresh intelligence. Montaigne’s essays are acts of thinking in motion. Pound’s “litmus paper” test concerns energy (or lack thereof) in language. Montaigne’s prose shows what Pound calls active intelligence—the sense that a living mind is at work. The gatherers’ writing lacks this charge; it’s informational but dead, like a cabinet of curiosities rather than authentic thought. Read a random psychology or psychotherapy journal article. The deadness oozes out of every syllable. When one finishes reading such an article, one cannot help but feel almost sorry for the person/people for having slaved over such a production.

Think of the wumplet platforms treating “mental health” like a mechanical test; listing taxonomies of “mental disorders” that they can “treat”. I am guilty of this grievous sin, compelled on certain websites- by the algorithm- to list taxonomies of reduction and reification. This is because the language of mental and spiritual distress in the mental health industrial complex has atrophied so much. The industry and the public just do not know any other way to discuss these things. The wumplet therapist’s abstraction-wistful, pensive wellness blogs oozing and thriving on obscurantism- is the very thing Pound told poets to resist; the use of vague spiritual psycho-“analytical” language, which depressingly avoids addressing or approaching an authentic truthfulness in suffering; a suffering that might necessarily need to be kept, not erased under the corpse of wumplet language.

The education system and what Pound called the “beanery mentality” (university mentality) is what Pound blamed for the atrophy of language and the result of the production of wumps and wumplets. Indeed, one of Pound’s core arguments is that status (university degrees and professional accreditation, etc.) does not equal truth and IS NO guarantee of insight or expertise. This idea is very applicable to the mental health industrial complex; the chimaera of “professional” accreditation of psychotherapists does not guarantee to confer authority or wisdom. For Pound, the credentialed wumplet is only a product of the sheep-herding process of the beanery; someone who has jumped through hoops; the atrophy of language has not been addressed, and the wumplets just swallow the ready-made phrases and repeat them in an exam or essay.

The wumplet psychotherapist is not a healer-as artist or psychoanalyst-as-explorer; etymologically speaking, psychoanalysis means loosening, dissolving, or breaking up of the soul, mind, or spirit, and psychotherapy is the healing, treatment, or attendance of the mind, soul, or spirit. Sadly, wumplets veer away from the true etymological roots and act as mere functionaries. The defining traits of such a functionary are rooted in the idea of managerial care, where psychic life is to be regulated, stabilised, and returned to “normality”. Suffering becomes a workflow issue; the goal is not striving for the facticity or reality, the individual’s Dasein (being in the world) of Heideggerian lore. Not transformation. Adjustment.

The radical psychoanalyst and psychiatrist R.D. Laing gave us some valuable clues as to why we are in the situation we are in now; Laing argued that modern Western society was psychophobic. Similarly, Pound believed modern Western culture feared intensity. Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari saw the fascist tendencies in modern Western culture as rooted in the negation of lines of flight away from the striated spaces of “normality” and credentialed conformity.

Such a fear of intensity (of Dasein, being in the world) is a fear of depth, obsession, eros, metaphysical hunger, existential angst, and despair. Such intensities are reframed in the wumplet universe as dysregulation, maladaptive narratives, cognitive distortions, trauma, adverse childhood experiences, etc.

With the degradation in how to experience and the degradation of language, the currency of the wumplet psychotherapist is prefabricated phrases, moralised jargon, and therapeutic cliches. The result of atrophied language and crippled words is the repudiation of cutting through obscurantism, deconstructing fantasies, and opening a clearing of Dasein; the atrophied language merely serves to cushion and/or obscure. Such a system of atrophied language reflects perfectly the chilling novel 1984 by George Orwell. One of Orwell’s characters, called Syme, who works on the dictionaries of words, allowed to be used in this dystopian society set in 1984, says to Winston Smith:

“We’re getting the language into its final shape-the shape it’s going to have when nobody can speak anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words-scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before 2050.” (Orwell, 1984, Page 59, Penguin Edition).

It’s a beautiful thing the destruction of words…Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now.” (Orwell, 1984, Page 59, Penguin Edition).

“The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”(Orwell, 1984, Page 61, Penguin Edition).

The chilling extracts from 1984 echo Pound’s damning diagnosis of the atrophy of language. This could be argued to be the main message of 1984: the destruction of language, getting people to the point where they do not even think….as they do not have the words to think. Such a scenario is chilling in its consequences. One can see this sickness in the wumplet mentality in 2026. My novel Gulag Caledonia picks up on similar themes, portraying a dystopian future Scotland in 2050 (as a nod to Orwell), showing how the atrophy of language equals the inability to think, and the inability to think equals the inability to act differently or rebel.

It is important to note that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger diagnosed the same condition when it came to science, when he accused the discipline of being atrophied in thought, as it did not properly THINK about the meaning of Being, but only created a reified, reductive model of human experience that did not approach Being. Psycho-Science-talk only creates an objectified human being and erases/obscures so much.

In Poundian terms, in the wumplet mental health industrial complex, predictability, risk minimisation and liability management are rewarded. The wumplet therapist survives in such a system because they never provoke, never destabilise, and never demand more of the system. Any kind of thinking that introduces a difficulty, a destabilisation, or an aesthetic judgement is treated as suspect. We saw very clearly during the COVID SCAMdemic that this lack of thinking and reaction comes into play. In such a system, moral hygiene is given precedence over insight and critical thinking; the wumplet believes they are justified, that they harm nobody and that everyone is entitled to their fascist version and fantasy of comfort.

People are being mystified and blinded by obscurantism (or confined to the striated space, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms) in the mental health industrial complex dominated by the wumplets. Language being so atrophied has been replaced by a therapeutic Esperanto, psychic adventure (and freedom) has been replaced by coping, and transformation has been replaced by maintenance. The wumplet psychotherapist does not understand suffering-they domesticate it to their fascistic notions of normality and non-thinking.

Bibliography.

Allen, Gary. None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Concord, CA: Concord Press, 1971.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin Classics, 1991.

Orwell, George. 1984. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970.

Pound, Ezra. “Ezra Pound Speaking.” YouTube, video. Posted October 30, 2017.

Laing, R. D. “R.D. Laing, Psychophobia.” YouTube, video. November 28, 2023.

Scott, Bruce. Gulag Caledonia. Self-published, 2022. Available on Amazon, Abebooks and The Great British Bookshop: Gulag Caledonia