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The youth scene of the 1960's has exerted on behavioral scientists of all disciplines and persuasions a fascination in direct proportion to its flamboyance and complexity. Psychoanalysts in particular have felt themselves challenged to deal with the events of this period, and their efforts range from relatively dispassionate studies such as those of Erikson and Greenacre to highly personal statements pro and con, such as those of Liebert on the one hand and Bettelheim on the other. Rarely have analysts been obliged to deal so extensively with matters outside the province of their consulting rooms—and often outside their professional competence—as they have been in their attempts to make sense of the turbulent behavior of the young people they have seen and read about during the kaleidoscopic years following the election of John F. Kennedy.
Dr. Solomon's study represents another valiant effort to encompass the social and psychological phenomena of this era, and in many respects he has grasped the essentials. Certainly his delineation of some of the social influences on the process of adolescing and identity formation during the sixties—the Civil Rights Movement, the fear of the Bomb, and, above all, the Vietnam War—is astute, as are his frequently perceptive observations about the age-old developmental problems of the adolescent who seeks to cope with the enigma of existence, the crisis of identity formation, and the demands of intimacy.
I fear, however, that Dr. Solomon's courage and perspicuity are somewhat vitiated by an ill-concealed distaste for virtually every aspect of the picture he is attempting to interpret. His disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, he appears to regard the whole business—rock music, drug use, campus protest, mysticism, sexual “license” (sic)—as pathological and a bit distasteful to boot.