Encountering the Beat Generation

When Spyros Orfanos, Chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis), asked me to chair the committee's invited panel at of the spring meeting, April 23-26, 2015, in San Francisco, I thought, with the City Lights Book Store just a couple of blocks away and the rich history of the Beats in San Francisco, it would be appropriate-and fun-to put together an interdisciplinary panel on “Encountering the Beat Generation.” The Beats were an inspiration to me when I was a teenager and first old enough to be so inspired. That would have been the late 1950s, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind changed my life. Kerouac and Ginsberg and others were to follow.

With the help of my old friend, San Francisco community organizer Michael Nolan, I was able to find historian Jonah Raskin, the author of a fascinating and scholarly book-length essay on Allen Ginsberg's Howl, called American Scream.

Emilie Kutash, a philosopher and psychologist and herself something of a Beat poet, agreed to join the panel. So too did our psychoanalyst colleague William Fried, who as a graduate student had interviewed Allen Ginsberg for a research study on charisma.

I sent all three panelists some framing questions to think about. I wanted to make clear-to them and to readers now-that we were not looking for a reductionistic psychoanalyzing of individual writers. More, we want to focus with a psychoanalytic lens on the meaning the Beats had and still have in and for American culture and society. The questions included:

• What is the relationship between free association as a psychoanalytic method and the Beat (Kerouac's and Ginsberg's) recommendation for unedited outpouring from the writer's “heart”?

• Anti-society writing of course has a long history. The idea that civil society itself is the problem seems to take a particular flavor and form in Beat writing. Why, for example, the emphasis on in