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The application of psychoanalytic insights to the elucidation of social and individual phenomena beyond the data of the psychoanalytic consulting room out of which the concepts were originally generated has been considered variously an obligation, an opportunity, a temptation, and a danger to our field. The cautious position against forays into the enormous complexity of social phenomena, against the seductive lure of formulations extrapolated, possibly inappropriately, from individual to social dynamic, was pressed forcefully in the response of a senior and renowned analyst to a question raised for the panel of experts at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Copenhagen in 1967. The question, in regard not to student activitists, but to another prominent group of somewhat related dissident youth was, “In what directions can psychoanalytic knowledge cast light on the phenomenon of so many of our most privileged, most sophisticated, and best educated youth joining the ‘hippie’ movement, caught up in the drug culture, drop-outs, and protesters?” The response,
given on that occasion, was that psychoanalysis, an enterprise of individual psychological investigation, would be able to study these youth only when and if they should offer themselves for therapeutic analysis.
Dr. Liebert's stance, with which I am in full agreement, is a contrary one, that if psychoanalysis has a fair claim to being (or becoming) a general psychology, it would indeed need to have (in concert with the other behavioral sciences) something to say about how one could begin to study and understand (i.e., to construct testable hypotheses within the psychoanalytic frame of reference concerning) these kinds of major social movements, so dramatic and compelling a part of our contemporary scene. Such a commitment, however, poses difficult methodological issues in appropriately articulating knowledge from the separate behavioral sciences, each conceived within the framework of differing restricti