Terrific question from Dougill, one that gets to a heart of the sixties. I
agree with others here on the importance of Paul Goodman (and Perls and the
Gestalt therapists) in the stirring, in late 1950s and very early 1960s, of
the sense society not self was sick. (The psychology of Wilhelm
Reich--rather, of some of his interpreters, particularly in NY--had similar
effect.) There was a whole Greenwich Village bohemian crowd,
too--partially predating the Beats--but one can go back to J.D. Salinger,
esp. Catcher in the Rye, with its highly sane and compassionate "sick" young
hero, and to several pop books of the time (The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,
Reismann's Lonely Crowd), which at least implied repression was a problem.
(And de Beauvoir pointed out some alternative ways to look at things, for
women anyway, before Friedan.) And there was a tendency for young college
intellectuals, in a culture no longer laced in religion, to question their
campus parietal rules and emphasis on "saving it for your husband" (with the
assumption there had to be a house/job/husband/little-boxes)...especially
once they saw a broadcast of folks sitting down at a Southern lunchcounter,
or heard about a Campus SANE meeting that might begin to give the tiniest
start of a bit of barest hope that maybe there was possibly something one
might begin to try to do that conceivably could somehow possibly prevent
armageddon.
And people, especially young people, spoke with one another in coffee
shops and wherever about these books and ideas--and of course lambasted one
another for not being cool--in the new senses, soon, of uninhibited--enough;
and, with a wee help from LBJ becoming president, and the like, it spread.
It's interesting, and probably natural, so many of us have written of the
escape the sixties offered from the (40s and) fifties. From the Dark Ages is
right, Marty (but maybe the Dark Ages had more going for them). --See my
"You asked 'What was happening then?'" in Viet Nam Generation vol. 6 no. 1-2,
on the ways many of us women found we were indeed whole and loving and
strong, after decades of being told we were not. (See Rickie Solinger's Wake
Up, Little Susie! esp. the chapter on the Little Girl Who Wasn't Loved, on
this, and on the blaming of mothers' mothers in the 1945-65 period.)
The subject is terribly important.
Paula
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