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This is a lucid and well-documented book. Moreno shows that reductive psychoanalytical and sociological explanations in terms of motive and the traditional nonconformism of youth, do not cover all the facts of the widespread revolts. He examines declarations made by students in continental Europe, pin-pointing their main features: protest against all systems and institutions since these are instruments of power and authority, demand for the ending of underprivilege in any form and the open recognition of the value of sexuality in all its varieties.
Moreno sees this ‘arrogant negativism’ as a continuation of the breaking-down of the 19th century patriarchal code with its certainty of being the possessor of all values, and he identifies it as an emergence of the puer aeternus archetype. Marcuse's theory—as expounded in Eros and civilization—from which the students draw much of their language, is criticized with great acuteness, both on the grounds of its inherent contradictions and of its utopian promise, this latter being based on the eventual elimination of all tensions created by opposites. While very alive to the paradisical and shadow aspects of the puer aeternus archetype as expressed in Marcuse's concept of Eros, as well as to the inflation and paranoia present in the student manifestos, Moreno maintains there is an authentic aspiration here for the renewal of society. In this he sees the positive, integrative aspects of the archetype. He concludes this cool yet sympathetic study with a warning: that it is dangerous to see in the rebellion only a need to integrate the shadow understood as pregenital sexuality, and thereby to miss the symbolic meaning of this phenomenon in our still predominantly patriarchal society with its over-emphasis on conscience and performance.