Discussion of Charles Savage's Article, The Analysis of an “Outsider”

This paper deals with an important topic which is both timely and timeless. Timely in the sense that drug cultism and the rebellion against organized society are a source of great concern today. Timeless in the sense that the rebellion against society has always been a source of concern everywhere. This last is easily forgotten.

In “Civilization and its Discontents” Freud wrote that civilization begins when a majority stronger than any individual comes together and remains united against the individual. (Actually, a minority, disciplined and organized against a divided majority, can also provide a civilization.) The key to the survival of civilization resides in the outcome of the struggle between the individual and society. The intrapsychic counterpart of this struggle is that of the id and ego against the superego. Dr. Savage's paper reflects a special interest in the relationship among these sets of conflicts.

Ruth Benedict, in Patterns of Culture, set up a dichotomy of culture types which she called Apollonian and Dionysian, based on the two diametrically opposed ways of arriving at the values of existence as described by Nietzsche in his studies of Greek tragedy.

Apollonian cultures value reason, order, and the evidence of everyday sensory experience. Dionysian cultures place a higher value on annihilating the limits imposed by the senses. They pursue unusual psychological states and seek dreams and hallucinations by such techniques as drugs, starvation, solitude, or ritually induced trances.

There have been many examples of both culture types in ancient and modern times. Reflecting the timeless struggle between the individual and society, no culture is homogeneously Dionysian or Apollonian, but the two types are distinguishable by the priority of values which the dominant majority holds.

In these terms, the patient reported in Dr. Savage's paper was an adherent of a Dionysian segment in a predominantly Apollonian culture. It is tempting to view his psychic mechanis