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Dr. Solomon's paper is stimulating, exciting, and also somewhat puzzling: stimulating as a psychoanalyst's contribution to understanding a multiphasic sociologic phenomenon; exciting as it evokes the phenomenology of youth by considering young people as a biological and historical entity; and puzzling as it presents a psychodynamism that comprises such a vast sector of humanity; it is somewhat like walking through a labyrinth.
In the first pages, Dr. Solomon guides us firmly through this labyrinth. He does not hide his doubts and vacillations, demonstrating throughout his work that he is conscious of the difficulties. This becomes most obvious when the demonstrative force of the thesis begins to weaken as many of the ideas being developed do not adjust adequately to his pursued objectives. But this is not surprising. The fulfillment of such an ambitious project demands a clear conceptualization which in a case like this is difficult to attain.
As Dr. Solomon remarks, the behavior of youth in the United States lends itself to broad comparisons with that in other countries. I will concentrate on the Chilean scene after some general observations.
In his introductory remarks we can see that Dr. Solomon follows the trend of thought of those who have tried in the past to establish a psychoanalytic characterology or a psychoanalytic anthropology: Freud initially with “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930), “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), “Totem and Taboo, Part 3: Animism, Magic, and Omnipotence of Thought” (1912-1913), etc.; then Marcuse, in his philosophical and political discussion of psychoanalysis,
Teilhard de Chardin, Adorno, and many others. We must also mention Fenichel and his methodology for the establishment of a psychoanalytic characterology, as well as the work edited by Kruse (1957), Integrating the Approaches to Mental Disease.
Dr. Solomon makes som