Discussion of Robert S. Liebert's Article, Radical and Militant Youth: A Study of Columbia Undergraduates

For several reasons, this paper of Dr. Liebert's is as important as it is interesting and revealing. For one thing, the activities of young radicals have inspired a virtual industry of discussion that must by now amount to millions of words. Particularly sad has been what I suppose has to be called, a bit awkwardly, “pseudo psychoanalytic commentary”—most of it the all-too-familiar and banal and absurd kind that has flourished so persistently in this nation for reasons that perhaps our radical youth would consider very significant. (I have heard them say, again and again, that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts suit the purposes of a middle-class mind that shuns, for obvious reasons, a really venturesome and unflinching kind of political and social and, most of all, economic analysis.) Then, apart from the temptations that our society's present crisis offers to anyone (so it seems) who can capture an audience willing to hear yet another thought or two about our troublesome youth, there is the serious matter of psychoanalytic theory—which has a history of its own, and which has gone through its own particular development. How (if at all) shall we “apply” psychoanalytic concepts? And what “models” shall we use when we do so?

There is a history to the various applications of Freud's ideas, just as those ideas have gone through any number of developmental periods or stages or sequences. For a while, essentially clinical concepts—that is, concepts that had their origin in offices and hospitals and were meant to clarify events that occur in such places—were transferred boldly and often ridiculously, or, at the least, comically, to the world of politics, to the marketplace, or to the lives of great men, however untroubled or unremarkable, or

conventional and ordinary their minds' psychopathology was presumably found to be. As a result, we met up with a sad and disedifying intellectual and professional spectacle: universals were summoned to explain particulars. So-and-so, a