Author's Response

To do justice to the incisive comments of the discussants would require an entirely new paper. Rather than attempt to answer them, I should like to restate and elucidate the intent of “The Analysis of an ‘Outsider.‘” The purpose was to examine psychoanalytically a current proposed solution to an existential problem.

This problem has two roots. By the very act of coming into existence man becomes alienated or estranged. Once born he is beset by the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization.

Freud commented in “Civilization and Its Discontents”: “Life, as

we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.“ The problem is solved only by death which returns man to the ground of his being and ends the conflict between instinctual forces and civilizations' demands.

Though the problem is insoluble, everyone attempts to solve it by palliatives, examples of which are art, science, religion and drug taking. For the primitive Yoruba the solution was living according to custom, facilitated by the practice of magic. For Western man the answer was building a better world, either in Heaven or on Earth. The collapse of the belief in progress and of the belief in a better world has led to the development of the hallucinogenic drug movement. Whether this collapse is the result of the failure or the success of rationalism is moot.

The “Outsider,” as I understand him, is one who sees through the traditional solutions. “He sees too deep and too much.” Perhaps he recognizes there is no solution but is condemned to persist in the search for one.

The hallucinogenic drug movement appears to offer a solution. Its point of view has been expressed by Rita Dershowitz in the current issue of Harpers, October 1967: “I deeply feel the inadequacy of the values I learned while growing up; categories of social worth; drive for possession of things