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Chapter 1: Freud on Neurosis and Repression
"Psychoanalysis has enabled us to recognize that the symptoms of neurosis depend on the operation of repressed ideas having a sexual content. They originate in the sexual needs of unsatisfied people and represent a substitute for gratification. Our civilization is largely responsible for our misery. The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness." Sigmund Freud
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Freud's theory of sexuality shook the Victorian world. Yet the Freud eventually embraced by the psychoanalytic establishment was the sober, rational Freud who said, "Where id is, there shalt ego be."
Although Freud came down, finally, on the side of sublimation, he often made statements such as "We may well raise the question whether our 'civilized' sexual morality is worth the sacrifice which it imposes on us." Freud believed that the suppression of sexuality damaged healthy psychological functioning.
During Freud's time, the power of religion and traditional morality made it nearly impossible to conceive of a sexually liberated world that accepted the pursuit of pleasure as a valid impulse. Freud stated:
What decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle. Yet its program is at loggerheads with the whole world. There is no possibility of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of creation.
In Freud's world, the "reality principle" seemed unalterable, predominating over the pleasure principle. "Society" imposed its rules and regulations upon individuals—and these rules and regulations could not be evaded.
Today, the boundary between the reality principle and the pleasure principle is blurred. Sexual impulses and activities which, in Freud's time, were hidden from public view now are expressed everywhere. Desires once condemned by society—considered morally reprehensible—are depicted openly and embraced.
However complex Freud's thinking may have been, the public understood and embraced one message, which might be summed up as follows: "Human mental problems, suffering, and unhappiness are caused by the repression of sexual desires. If one is to be happier and healthier, one would do well to overcome one's inhibitions and act upon one's sexual desires."
A central idea generating the liberation of sexuality in American society was Freud's theory that neurosis is caused by repression. The cultural effort to liberate sexuality represented a kind of collective psychotherapy.
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Chapter 2: Wilhelm Reich: Orgasm as Therapy
"Psychic health depends upon orgastic potency, i. e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. Neurosis is nothing other than dammed-up sexual energy. The entire politics of culture (film, novels, poetry, etc.) revolve around the sexual element, thrive on its renunciation in reality and its affirmation in the ideal. If all humanity dreams and poeticizes about sexual happiness, should it not also be possible to translate the dream into reality?"
Wilhelm Reich
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Wilhelm Reich took Freud's theory of the sexual origins of neurosis seriously and sought to do something about it. Freud saw therapy as "making conscious the unconscious"—liberating sexuality from repression, but then helping the patient to control or sublimate his or her sexual impulses. Reich posed the question of whether it might not be possible for persons to "live out" their desires.
The theories of Wilhelm Reich profoundly impacted the American sexual revolution. In the Sixties, intellectuals and others sought the "good orgasm" as a means toward happiness and liberation. Further, Reich's idea--that blockages within the body suppressed energy and distorted character--became extremely influential.
An article in Harper's Magazine in 1947 was one of the first depictions of the "builders of the new Paris"—a bohemian community of artists and writers that arose in Northern California and evolved into the "beat" movement. According to the author of this article:
The core of the philosophy of this new bohemia rests on the sexual thesis. If by strange and splendid change you happen to be one of the few orgastic potent, you are one of the few "normal, natural, healthy human beings" left in a world peopled by terrified and frustrated neurotics.
The author found that what differentiated this bohemia from its predecessor was that it was "profoundly religious," but not in a conventional way. This bohemian community saw the "sexual sacrament" as the acme of worship, believing that God "revealed himself fully only in the self-effacing ecstasy of the sexual climax."
Religious faith was supported by psychoanalytic argument: "The ultimate authority is no longer Freud, but one who now wears the mantle of Freud: Wilhelm Reich, whose Function of the Orgasm is probably one of the most widely read and frequently quoted contemporary readings in this group."
Reich's ideas influenced both the "beat" movement of the Fifties and the hippie revolution of the Sixties. The "religion of the orgasm"—of sexual gratification—became central in American society. The sexual act, according to Norman Mailer and others, was one place where society could not enter or interfere.
The idea of sexual liberation became bound up with rebellion against society. In the Sixties, the antimonies set up by Freud and Reich— between pleasure and civilization, health and society, the body and the intellect, liberation and oppression—became themes of the counterculture. The revolution of the Sixties—as well as subsequent liberation movements—took the side of the body and pleasure in the struggle against civilization.
American culture became involved in a struggle to overthrow the constraints of society, evolving out of this collective wish to overturn repression; to embrace and act upon sexual desire.
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Chapter 3: From Perry Como to Jerry Lee Lewis: Release of the "Great Ball of Fire."
The America of the Fifties was a sunny, optimistic place. A survey indicated that the most pressing problems in American schools in 1950 were talking, chewing gum, making noise and running in the halls. Americans were becoming affluent and many families were able to purchase their own homes with two cars in the garage. Television came into being, providing entertainment for everyone.
The most popular American singer in 1953 was Perry Como. He had many hit records, his own TV show, and was admired for his amiability, stability, and warm, easy-going personality. When he sang, he stood perfectly still. One year later, Bill Haley was "Rocking Around the Clock." Shortly thereafter performers such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were moving and shaking with an intensity and energy unimaginable a few years earlier.
The world in which we live today began with the explosion of a "great ball of fire" in 1955: the time bomb of the Rock and Roll, which introduced a new mode of consciousness into American society. Rock and roll expressed a more energetic experience of the body as well as a more intense, physical approach to women and romance.
In 1954, the Four Aces called love "a many splendored thing"—comparing it to "an April Rose." A year later, Shirley sang to Lee: "When you touch my lips, oh what a thrill I get." Elvis Presley was known in the Fifties, not as "the king," but as "Elvis the pelvis" for the way he shook his hips. Rock and roll revealed a more intense experience of bodily energy than hitherto had been unknown in American life, beginning a process whereby excitement and energies contained within the body were expressed and enacted in society.
Early rock and roll was about energy, excitement, movement, and fun—expressed through the vehicle of dancing. Rock and roll represented an implicit rebellion against the blandness of the Fifties in its capacity to depict a more intense, exciting experience of life. Some critics, however, saw something darker within the music.
As rock and roll was "beating its way into the national consciousness," many condemned it, connecting it with rioting (that sometimes occurred at live performances), juvenile delinquency, and the breakdown of morality. The magazine Music Journal in 1958, for example, saw rock and roll as a "definite threat to civilization." Teens listening to the music were
influenced in their lawlessness by this throwback to jungle rhythms. Either it actually stirs them to orgies of sex and violence, or they use it as an excuse for the removal of all inhibitions and the complete disregard of the conventions of decency.
To teen-agers of the Fifties, looking for some old-fashioned, all-American "fun," such statements seemed overblown. The perceptions of critics, however, were prophetic. Early rock and roll consciousness evolved into the "sex, drugs and rock and roll" of the Sixties and Seventies.
Gay Talese observed that prior to the publication of Playboy Magazine in 1953, few American men had ever seen a color photograph of a nude woman. A 1955 Gallup poll found that 55% of men and 73% of women disapproved of "Women wearing Bermuda shorts in the street."
In his classic, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Leslie Fiedler concluded that the central characteristic of American literature was that "our great novelists tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman." Fiedler suggested that the "odd shape" of American fiction was only what one should expect, given the nature of American life: "Because there is no real sexuality in American life, therefore there cannot very well be any in American art."
How did Americans get to be who and what they are today. transforming from a sexually repressed and inhibited society—to one in sexuality in all forms are part and parcel of everyday life?
Many of the changes in American consciousness were expressed or articulated through the vehicle of rock and roll music. The story of the liberation of American sexuality is not separate from the history of rock ‘n’ roll.
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4. Norman Mailer, the Hipster and the Struggle Against Middle-Class Morality
"The psychopath knows instinctively that to express a forbidden impulse is far more beneficial to him than merely to confess the desire in the safety of a doctor's room. The dream of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy."
Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," 1957
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Norman Mailer was among those who did not find the sweetness and light of the Fifties to his liking. He declared that the "creeping totalitarianism" in America amounted to "slow death by conformity--with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled." Morris Dickstein, a historian of the Sixties, called Mailer's psychopathic hero a "bomb that explodes beneath the bland surface of the Fifties, constructed out of all its repressed violence and rebelliousness, the longing for personal autonomy and extreme experience that could not be satisfied by respectability, maturity and competitive success."
Mailer expanded upon Reich's idea of the liberating potential of orgasm. The "hipster" or "white Negro" was, according to Mailer, a newly emerging American type who lived by his senses and sought kicks and adventure in the urban night.
Mailer and "beat" writers such as Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac put forth a critique of the American middle-class character: the "square." Steven Marcus explained that the middle-class character was involved in "an immense effort of self-discipline and self-denial, the ability to learn how to defer gratification indefinitely and to persist in the deferral." For some, this ascetic approach to life no longer made sense.
Ginsberg in 1959 sensed a "crack in the mass-consciousness of America—a sudden emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld," writing "America is having a nervous breakdown." Kerouac defined the Beat Generation as a "swinging group of new American men intent on joy."
According to Mailer, the essence of "hip morality" was the "divorce of man from his values, the liberation of the self from the Super-Ego of society." To be hip was to "do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible." An analysis of the Beats found that writers such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso shared "the same dissatisfaction with conventional American life, its obsessive sense of responsibility, its monolithic conformity."
Evil was defined in terms of whatever “inhibited experience or impinges on the spontaneity of the individual soul." Beat Philosophy was "a brand of hedonism" that reduced to "the psychology of self-expression, an attempt to murder the super-ego and liberate the id, a desire to break out of the traditional forms for living, to rediscover the innocence of the natural man who lives by instinct rather than by reason."
The ideas of Mailer and the Beats represented a challenge to the "American way of life." They generated an impulse toward rebellion against society by believing—with Freud and Reich—that "civilization" was a source of discontent: inhibiting spontaneity, sexual desire and joy.
The "struggle against the super-ego"—against conventional morality—was to become a central theme of the Sixties. Mailer set the terms of the struggle: "One is Hip or one is Square, one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society."
Psychoanalysts use the term "acting out" to describe impulsive behavior: when a patient acts upon impulses and desires without examining them. The bellwether of the "middle-class character" had always been the ability to "postpone gratification;" to control and modulate one's impulses in the expectation of future rewards.
Mailer set himself in opposition to these tenets, idealizing the psychopath as one who was strong enough to act upon his impulses rather than to suppress them. This began a process one may describe as the "transvaluation of values:” What had been "good," the capacity to control one's impulses and to postpone gratification, came to be perceived as a sign of weakness; an inability to experience and express desire.
The "square" or "well-respected man" (song title by the Kinks) came to be viewed as a person who blindly followed society's norms; was obedient, dull and lifeless. Whereas one who was "hip" did not take the moral norms of society so seriously. The hip individual was in tune with his inner desires—particularly sexual ones—and not afraid to act upon them.
Whereas the patient in psychoanalysis was expected to examine his fantasies, Mailer's psychopath was difficult to psychoanalyze because the "fundamental decision of his nature” was to try to “live the infantile fantasy." Mailer's prophesied that the psychopath might be the “perverse and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the Twentieth Century is over."
Mailer’s prediction came true. The barriers of middle-class inhibition and morality broke down. What can be seen in the Internet today goes far beyond the Mailer’s deepest, darkest fantasies. “Middle-class morality” vanished from the scene.
Norman Mailer's idea of the "hipster" became a model for what was to follow. In advocating the liberation of the self from the “Super-Ego of society," Mailer was following Freud’s example by blaming human discontent upon "civilization." He also was acting in the tradition of the American dream of freedom. In the late Fifties the struggle for liberation from society began: the struggle to free the self by throwing off the shackles of inhibition and morality.
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