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I have to say right off that I found Dr. Solomon's paper sadly biased and unbalanced, at times extravagant in its claims, at times sour and cranky. And this is a pity, because we badly need the clinician's perspective on this subject. But instead we get sweeping generalizations worthy only of the worst kind of social science—the kind this society of ours has come to live with so very comfortably.
Dr. Solomon begins by letting his readers know that he believes many youths are “wholesome” and “healthy,” not at all candidates for his kind of analysis; but soon enough he is talking about “the young people” and he never stops doing so. Which young people? Presumably those who become patients, several of whom he describes. There is no doubt that in doing so he takes risks which any critical reader of his paper is bound to consider. How can such sweeping and unqualified generalizations be made by a doctor who has seen only a limited number of avowedly troubled youths? If Dr. Solomon had left his office and spent time talking with social and political activists of one sort or another, if he had observed them as they did their work, and followed them along over months or years of their lives, he might be in a position to offer us a clinician's estimate of what a number of somewhat representative (one can never be really precise and accurate in such research, and no one is asking that of Dr. Solomon) young people are like psychologically, even if they have no occasion to consult someone like him. As it is, he arrives at his conclusions after talking only with those who have chosen to go see him, and he is neither kind nor generous to a whole generation of people, whose “pathognomonic features” he feels so confidently able to describe.
One wonders what other kinds of patients Dr. Solomon sees
in the course of his San Francisco private practice. Elderly businessmen? Middle-aged stockbrokers or lawyers? Over-thirty political conservatives of either sex? And on the basis of his