October 28, 1981

ONCE upon a time, when a gallon of gasoline cost 20 cents and mortgage rates were at 5 1/2 percent, mustard came in two flavors - French's and Gulden's. There was still only one kind of kind of bagel - hard. It was a time when we had just learned to distinguish between Emmenthaler and Gruyere and been introduced to red wine vinegar to use in place of white distilled. Food purchasing was simple, if uninspired. Today it is simply bewildering. We have entered the era of brand proliferation, the dozens of flavors and colors of basic products that set our heads spinning when we shop. According to Bill Hyde, the manager of Balducci's in Greenwich Village, this proliferation is due to more ''sophisticated tastes.'' ''Americans,'' he said, ''have discovered what Europeans have known about for a long time.'' But like so many things, Americans believe if a little is good, more is better. Or, as Ted Kronyn of Universal Foods Company, an importing firm, said, ''It doesn't take much for Americans to pick up on something and then you get a tremendous ride very ordinary.''

MORE and more people with personal problems are coming out of the closet and seeking the help of psychotherapists. Prompted by the stresses of family and social upheavals, the narcissism of the ''me'' generation, publicity about new approaches to treatment and a plethora of popular books prescribing do-it-yourself emotional inventories, they are trying to unravel the intricacies of their psyches and improve their potential for happiness. But the smorgasbord of available approaches to psychological problems would confuse even the most stable potential client. To someone who is emotionally troubled the staggering number of choices can be paralyzing. In addition to traditional talk therapies, there are therapies called Jungian, Gestalt, Adlerian, Rogerian, group, reality, cognitive, integrity, drug, sex, family, marital, shock, hypnotic, drama, poetry and primal scream. These have been joined in recent years by biofeedback, behavior modification, orthomolecular psychiatry, rolfing, transactional analysis and bioenergetics, not to mention such lay approaches as ESTing, rebirthing and various ''anonymous'' self-help groups. ''The Psychotherapy Handbook,'' edited by Richie Herink (New American Library, $9.95), describes more than 250 therapies now in use.

A medical examiner said today that the bodies of 33 drowning victims amounted to ''good, hard evidence'' that many of the thousands of illegal Haitian immigrants who have made it to these shores have been helped by smugglers. Dr. Ronald Wright of Broward County performed autopsies on the Haitians who drowned yesterday morning when their homemade boat capsized within sight of the expensive condominiums of Hillsboro Beach, a resort town 10 miles north of Fort Lauderdale. The medical examiner said his examinations showed that those who died had consumed large, cooked meals less than two hours before they drowned. The meal could not have been cooked aboard the overcrowded 30-foot boat and the food was fresh, so Dr. Wright concluded that it must have been served on a ''mother ship'' or freighter operated by smugglers. U.S. Prosecution Seen Possible He said he also thought that by pinpointing the time of consumption he might have established that the Haitians were dropped off in choppy waters that lie within the jurisdiction of the United States, and the State of Florida, and thus that the smugglers could be prosecuted if caught.

In the midafternoon drizzle, there were people giving out leftist literature at the arching gates that lead to College Walk on the Columbia University campus. It sometimes seems that there have always been people at these gates giving out literature - through rain and snow, gloom of night, the heat of the Vietnam War and the lukewarm early 1960's and 1980's. The technique never varies: the mimeographed flier, the paper passed from one hand to another, and the ritual crumpling of the flier that is then tossed into the trash can that has long been set just inside the gates, perhaps for this very purpose. Columbia is a place in which almost anything can be disseminated - and discarded. It is a large and distinguished university, and so it is a kind of safe house of ideas, a home to the thoughts of Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevera as well as Plato, Socrates and Descartes.

The Consolidated Edison Company reported yesterday that its earnings for the third quarter rose by 51.9 percent, to $202.9 million, or $3.05 a share, from $133.6 million, or $1.96 a share, for the similar quarter last year. It attributed the gain primarily to the 15.5 percent rate increase that the New York State Public Service Commission approved last March 12.