the Inner Infant meeting: weaponized kitsch sincerity
I’d like to suggest we men all hold our bears tight and let our Inner Infant nonjudgmentally listen to Kevin’s Inner Infant expressing his grief and loss.
Context
The scene is the anthology's control case — the bogus twin of AA's clichés-that-work. Everything here is sincerity as performed kitsch: teddy bears throttled to sweatered chests, "the energies I'm feeling in the group are energies of unconditional love," treacly cello, the leader's "blandly kind didactic quality." It looks like the earnestness the book keeps defending, but it's counterfeit — "some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing," the register that K. D. Coyle already parodies at E.T.A. ("Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!"). The crucial contrast with 074 is that AA's clichés are banal AND true, tested against actual death, while the Inner Infant liturgy is banal and hollow, weaponized therapeutic language performed by men who've never been "engaged with anything more substantial than an occasional wine cooler." The book is precise: it isn't sincerity it distrusts, it's manufactured sincerity — and this room is the manufactured kind, which is why the ironist's contempt for it is, for once, half-earned.