Author's Response

I find myself in virtually total agreement with all of the discussants, other than James Simon Kunen. Therefore, I shall address myself only to the questions—and they are fundamental questions—that he raises. Although we share a similar critique of American society, we differ in our conviction about what I am first tempted to call the “relevance” of psychoanalysis to social struggle. But he suggests even more—the “counterrevolutionary,” or at least, “counter-reform” nature inherent in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic research of social-political phenomena.

But first, he suggests that the study tries to explain what the Strike “really was, as opposed to what it appeared to be.” I do not see the “opposition.” Things are what they appear to be, and in addition, something much more. This is no less true of Marxian

theory than it is of Freudian theory. There is the issue of the proper use and the misuse of psychoanalytic theory as an explanatory instrument, and this has been the subject of Robert Coles' discussion. To his eloquence, let me add a few words: To lead in bringing about social change requires a unique capacity to perceive external conditions and communal needs rationally and realistically and to integrate these perceptions with adaptive, original forms of action that happen also to fulfill the unconscious aims of the social activists. The harnessing and guiding of the energies of the community by actions attuned to the communally felt needs is to be appreciated as healthy virtue, or, in Erikson's terms, the most creative form of healthy ego functioning—social generativity. When social action is reduced to the level of being regarded as simply acting out of unconscious conflict, with the insidious implication that it belongs in the social wastebasket labeled “psychopathology,” I am in full agreement that it can be in service of political repression. However, to come back to Columbia—what happened there, happened because there were “real” issues regarding Col