The author reviews a number of papers that attempted psychoanalytic interpretations of the student protest movement of the late 1960's. The majority of these papers ignored the theoretical basis of the student movement and generalized from experiences with individual student patients. A frequently used interpretative pattern reduced the behavior of the politically active minority to reactions of a war generation to the loss of the fathers, or to the neurotogenic state of the universities. Mediating positions between the strictly psychological and the sociological interpretations are those of A. Mitscherlich and P. Parin. The author describes the subsequent transformation of the student movement into concurring factions: contrary to the present trend of denying the anti-authoritarian past, the original emancipatory aims are restated.