Discussion of Joseph C. Solomon's Article, The Incredible Sixties: Psychodynamics of Youth

Taking into account the genetic factors that gave birth to the youth of the 1960's, there are good reasons to believe that a great many of their expressions which Dr. Solomon considers maladjusted are merely manifestations of a corresponding

adaptive reaction response. To catalog these youth as pathological is to adopt a gerontocratically a priori position. Such youth emerged as the natural consequence of recent sociocultural developments, such as the devastation of modern warfare, the extreme shattering destructiveness of atomic weapons, the brutality of contemporary initiation rites that subject adolescents to the ordeal of military service and war, the meaningless university careers which compel young people to spend one of the most fruitful periods of life storing up an overwhelming quantity of information and cramming for exams under high academic pressure and humiliating and obsolete requirements, only to find themselves in the end ill-equipped to cope with reality; and last but not least, the calamitous contemporary rupture of the parental function by which motherhood has become more an illusory attitude than a reality. Which attitude, then, is in fact more pathological—that of the youth of the 1950's: “subdued, passive, and silent,” or that of the youth of the 1960's: “vocal, rebellious and discontented, openly demanding change”?

We may question the validity of considering progressive or regressive behavior as indices of evolution. There are reasons to support the belief that the evolution of a superior species is accomplished at the cost of fetal regression of the preceding species. Volk and his followers have shown through comparative anatomy that the human being looks very much like the anthropoidal fetus. It seems that we have to accept the fact that evolutionary modification calls for a previous regression to earlier stages where the creative powers are to be found, and from which the modified evolution would spring. Therefore, the belief of young peo