Comments and Criticisms

To the Editors:

I would like to comment on Dr. Kasin's excellent and thought provoking analysis of the dilemma of today's young person. (This Journal, volume 8, No. 1).

If Dr. Kasin's thesis is correct, viz., that "our youth suffer—from an ill-defined sense of fear of abandonment by the society they so urgently require to achieve their new mutuality needs, " then it becomes important to understand the reason behind society's perceived inability to come through for them. The beginning of the answer to that question is implied in Dr. Kasin's distinction between the authoritarian and "permissive" parent and the consequent attenuation or augmentation of the possibilities to look at one's self and others and to create one's own unique attitude toward the world. I would like to suggest that the authoritarian parent limits his own and other's freedom because the awareness of that freedom is terrifying.

When the child initially experiences his capacity to perform an autonomous act, it is exhilarating but also panicking because in some sense he has awareness of separation and I believe, in some way, perhaps archetypal, a foretaste of the ultimate separation, death. This may be the most frightening aspect of death. The fright itself, the felt expression of the idea of death, may be primarily separation anxiety—an awareness that no matter how extensive the security operations a person develops, there will ultimately come a time of separation.

The experiencing of one's own freedom is a reminder that nothing in living is inevitable—not even the neurotic symptoms which serve to perpetuate the myth that "things will always be this way." Resistance, incidentally, can be looked at from this point of view. The force in the individual to keep from consciousness those memories or affects, the deep experiencing of which will lead to a modifiction of the character structure and even the structure of consciousness itself, may have as its basic motivation the unwillingness to acknowledg