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I WOULD FEEL MORE SECURE if I were going to present this evening a single case report. I could then tell you with reasonable certainty that he said this and I said that, he did this and I did that, and after a few months or years we had come to some agreement as to what was bothering him about living and why. But I have chosen a much larger field for discussion, namely, "Youth in Turmoil, " which general as it may be, I am confident gives you a fairly clear idea as to the phenomenon I wish to discuss.
Quite recently, although gradually developing over a somewhat longer period, great restlessness and malaise have come over our young population, a demoralization and dissatisfaction that have assumed epidemic proportions. Newspapers, books, periodicals, learned journals have been filled with an ever-increasing number of articles and studies of these young people behaving in strange and disturbing ways. They are described as alienated, disaffected, rebellious, rejecting, self-absorbed, in a moral crisis, in a crisis of faith, and so on. They are lauded as the finest generation of young people we have ever raised, and they are equally referred to as effete intellectual snobs.
I have read a great deal of the reportage and theorizing on these developments and, what is more, encountered these phenomena in healthy, bright, intelligent, eager young people—the children of friends and associates moving into the period of youth—as well as all around me in the streets and public places, and in referrals to my practice, which made me wonder what I knew that would justify the supposition that I