You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If the following discussion seems to label American youth of the 1960's as truly pathological, it may be, in part, because as a clinician I see mainly maladjusted people who are seeking help or parents who are distressed at their children's behavior. From these and other sources, I also have the opportunity of gaining a wider overview, and I know that there are many healthy young people to whom none of the following descriptive material particularly applies, except as it has applied to young people from time immemorial. Nevertheless, the youth of the 1960's, and probably of the 1970's as well, present distinctly pathognomonic features which differ from those of any previous decade in this country, including the 1920's. These changes have been manifest at all levels of society, and represent interactions between many changed environmental conditions and alterations in family structure.
Whereas the youth of the 1950's were subdued, passive, and silent, the opposite was true of the youth of the 1960's. They became vocal, rebellious and discontented, openly demanding change. Some of these demands seemed quite reasonable and may ultimately become a part of a changed society, while others were unrealistic and highly charged with emotion.
The young people, for the most part, were convinced that they were progressive thinkers. They believed that the answer to human discontent was to modify or destroy all existing cultural and governmental institutions, and they became highly resentful at the suggestion that much of their behavior
was regressive rather than progressive. We cannot yet judge with certainty what part of the present social turbulence is in fact progressive and what is regressive, and scholarly approaches are warranted from many disciplines, including psychoanalysis.
Although the psychoanalyst's expertise is directed mainly toward the intrapsychic phenomena which constitute only a portion of the total picture, it must also be integrated with the culture and envir