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To the Editors: Dr. Heilbrunn's article, “How ‘Cool’ is the Beatnik?” is, unfortunately, a good example of the cognitive drift of many analysts today. After the Freud-Bullitt-Wilson controversy, it is surprising that Dr. Heilbrunn could fall into the same trap, or perhaps even a worse one. To attempt to psychoanalyze a patient who has never been on one's couch, let alone a social group, from the experience of two patients, strikes one as certainly less than scientific, or to say the least, psychoanalytic.
What is sadly lacking in a supposedly scientific approach such as Dr. Heilbrunn's is the awareness that Freud's investigative tools and framework are being confused with a catechism of man. Both Freud and Einstein were agreed that any theoretical construct is by its very nature a partial and temporal truth at best.
Without this awareness, dogmatic observers diminish reality by failing to see its complexity and thus miss the opportunity for significant insights. Furthermore, to assume that a psychological theory which may hold true for the individual can be applied without modification to a group is indeed a risky generalization.
It would seem that Dr. Heilbrunn takes issue with what he calls the beatnik minority because of their regressive antisocial behavior. He implicitly assumes that what exists as the established social order with its inherent values is necessarily desirable or has intrinsic-objective value in itself. As several of the discussants point out, many of the values espoused by “beat” groups are the human ones which so often a commercial society kills.
The fact that the history of protest in the United States is one of impotency presents a challenging psychological study, but to assume that the values held by any minority are negligible or can be overlooked, simply because their proponents are unsuccessful, is in the vernacular of the day, to “cop out” to commercialism.
A great social thinker of the 19th century said that to understand reality is to chang