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While Charles W. Socarides may be best known for his theoretical and clinical work in the field of sexual perversions, it would be doing him an injustice to evaluate his contributions solely in terms of his psychoanalytic work. He has long been known for his great personal and moral courage in standing up for his convictions, even when this has meant considerable personal risk. As a social thinker, he has not hesitated to offer criticism of popular trends of thought whenever he felt such trends were not in the public interest. Beyond Sexual Freedom shows him in the role of social critic, and his critique is often quite acerbic. I believe, however, that it would be an underestimation of the true value of his book to see it primarily as a polemic on problems of sexuality as the author sees them manifest in promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, feminism, and the modern state of marriage and family life. The book has a more profound motivation: underlying all Socarides's combativeness there is genuine doubt about, perhaps despair over, the possibility of a future for mankind, for Western civilization, and for American civilization in particular.
Socarides is one of those who have been voicing intellectual concern about what has been called the "New America." These distressing doubts we find expressed in many poignant statements of our best literary commentators. Socarides's views belong, for example, in the context of the following statement by Elizabeth Hardwick:
Only the forgetful can easily ignore the duplicity practiced upon the defining imagination by the sudden obsolescence of attitudes and styles just past… These elements … had the shape of reality, of historical presence … and even though they could not be asserted as eternal they still could not be experienced as mere historical moments soon, very soon, to be