Our Youth: Apathy, Rebellion and Growth: A Symposium

We are Pleased to welcome you to the symposium on “Youth: Apathy, Rebellion and Growth,” sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. The symposium held here last year was entitled the “Changing Image of Man.” It included the changing image of the psychoanalyst. This morning's presentations are an expression of this changing image actualized. We are to witness no startling advances in theory, but we are to experience the advancing of psychoanalysis into fields heretofore mainly explored by other disciplines.

The two subjects for this morning, “Disadvantaged Children” and “Learning Problems” can be related, although they deal with different youngsters. The disadvantaged children will have learning problems; children with advantages and learning problems will become disadvantaged in our society.

Both groups contribute to the larger group which we call drop-outs. The road from barren existence to more fulsome living is paved by education. This statement is corroborated by a general belief which Americans hold: every young man or woman should complete 12 years of school, and in most instances the youngster who drops out before graduation is to be considered a social failure, a person likely to become a delinquent or a welfare problem. Putting aside considerations about the accuracy of this belief, it is clear that the economy and modern technology demand ever higher levels of training. The scope of the dropout problem is evident in the statistics that stun our imagination: of the 3,800,000 Americans who reach the age of eighteen each year, at least 1,200,000 will be dropouts. An equal 30 % will drop out of colleges and universities largely because of learning problems.

In the face of these staggering numbers, what can a handful of psychoanalysts do? We certainly cannot hope to treat this vast number of youngsters in our usual ways. Can we make any contribution to the understanding and alleviation of the grim psychological in