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Legends of the Beat Generation in New York, in San Francisco, in Tangiers, and elsewhere have been repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam-but there's precious little psychoanalysis, or any other kind of critical analysis, of the Beat Generation: the literary movement that defied conventional American thinking and behaving, that was simultaneously imitated and reviled, and that brought its members suffering and pain as well joy and glory.
You can read about Kerouac and football, Burroughs' drug-induced experiments in the English language, Ginsberg's adventures in India, but you won't find extended discussion of the Beats and Freud, the Beats and Jung, or the Beats and R. D. Lang in any of the major biographies-though Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs are all ripe for psychoanalytic study and interpretation. Biographers and critics focus on outer actions-Beat adventures in the world-not on the journeys that took place in their heads or the deep psychological motives for their actions. Beat territory might seem to have been mapped, but it has never been thoroughly explored.
If they haven't been subject to psychoanalytic scrutiny, that may be because psychoanalysts are not on the whole drawn to the Beats-perhaps because they seem transparently adolescent and obviously locked in real and imaginary battles with their mothers and fathers. Perhaps, too, they haven't been analyzed because the Beats psychoanalyzed themselves, one another, and were analyzed by their own psychologists and psychiatrists both in and out of hospitals. Moreover, though they were drawn to intensely psychological writers such as Dostoevsky, they didn't gravitate to psychological approaches to the novel and to poetry.
For the most part, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs thought of psychologists and psychiatrists as squares and not hipsters. They thought that they were smarter than their own shrinks. But at times even squares are helpful, if only as a wall to bounce off of and to define one's own identity as