A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

The line satirizes the mid‑20th‑century elevation of psychiatric authority to a quasi-religious role: the psychiatrist becomes a modern substitute for God—an arbiter of meaning, confession, and salvation through diagnosis and treatment. The second sentence punctures that reverence by stressing the transactional, class-bound reality of care: access to this “god” depends on money. In Plath’s orbit of themes—alienation, institutional power, and the commodification of intimacy—the quip reads as both social critique and personal bitterness, implying that modern systems promise redemption while simultaneously rationing it. The humor is dark, but the target is serious: spiritual needs are redirected into professional expertise, then priced.