You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To the Editors: Dr. Heilbrunn's paper “How ‘Cool’ is the Beatnik?” [The Psychoanalytic Forum, Vol. 2, No. 1] makes a number of suggestions about the role of the school which do not seem to follow from his own speculations about the dynamics of his patients. Leaving aside the question of whether all beatniks are alike (or, for that matter, sick), it still seems possible to isolate a group of young people who are deeply depressed and are “superego fugitives.” In my own experience with such patients, I have found that such people must escape their own superegos precisely because the superego introject is unloving and punitive. Hence they run to Haight-Ashbury, sex, or “grass”—any place that will promise escape from the depression caused by this terrible, archaic burden.
It is Dr. Heilbrunn's remedial prescription to the school that makes no sense to me. It is well known that most of these young people come from middle and upper-middle class homes. As the Head of the School Social Work Department, working in a high school serving such families, I find that the pressure to achieve constitutes an unremitting demand, enforced by the threat that failure to achieve at a high level cuts off the road to a good college and a good job.
The problem is aggravated by the school's prohibiting all libidinal gratifications: i.e., no smoking, no talking in class unless called upon, absolute silence in Study Hall, no sloppiness or sensuality in dress. Where else in our society except in a middle-class high school is the very function of speech circumscribed for a solid eight hours a day? Where else is all food prohibited except during a terribly rushed (20-minute) lunch period most of which is spent standing in line? Contrary to what Dr. Heilbrunn thinks, the school reenacts the unloving superego.
What is needed is not an increase in authoritarianism and externalized superego controls. On the contrary, what the high school needs to do is to return to the student much of the freedom