The “We” Generation

To alleviate human suffering, psychoanalysis has been refined and implemented through the years. And all the while, wars and holocausts have raged and come close to destroying civilization on our planet. Small wonder, then, that the youth of this era have felt bewildered, pained, and angry about the state of the world. Small wonder that they seemed to have lost the desire for continuing personal growth, despite their many professed searchings for “identity.” They accepted the cheapest of instant solutions for relief of their personal discomfort and anguish and, in so doing, created the drug scene. They set up a battle arena wherein human values were slaughtered and anomie posed as freedom.

To no one's surprise, their makeshift solutions proved inadequate. The time of reckoning, of awakening, and sobriety finally arrived. What was lost had to be retrieved somehow. A new muffled voice of despair could be heard whimpering, “I want to be me!” The lost generation shifted its sights, and entered the age of the “Me” Generation.

Had the “all clear” been sounded only to show us the utter destruction, the total desolation? I think not. All was not lost. Even in sickness, the patient almost drowning in a vitriolic medium of self-hate still shows a measure of health and humanness. And in healthy growth, before life's energy is expanded to create a whole person, we deal with the debris of illness. To appeal to some compassion for self-acceptance, it helps to take advantage even of a mirage in the darkness-before the sun comes up.

A dash of narcissism could well be used to bridge the crevices of despair in self-hate, so that patients might achieve a level of self-respect and dignity. It is one means to resuscitate vitality in the Grateful Dead and to husband the will and the strength to live.

The loneliness of the me-only me-is insufferable. Yet somehow it does point the way toward the need to be oneself in order to be able to share life with others. In short, it is the prophetic pre