A Common Craziness
Diagnosing Youth Revolt at the Columbia 1968 Uprisings
hannah proctor
On April 16, 1968, just one month after the My Lai massacre and twelve days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Anna Freud delivered the New York Psychoanalytic Society’s 18th Freud Anniversary Lecture. There, she bemoaned the declining interest in psychoanalysis among young people:
For many of them it has lost the aspect of being dangerous, a forbidden matter, accessible only to the courageous, a useful weapon with which to attack society; instead psychoanalysis is looked on and avoided as a procedure devised to deprive them of originality and revolutionary spirit and induce them to adapt and conform to existing conditions, which is the last aim they have in mind.
This disillusionment, she continued, was not totally misplaced given that “analysis never offered anything except enlightenment about the inner world,” which, “conflicts with the present battle cry of youth of ‘man against society’ ” (an argument that directly contradicts her earlier discussion of the appeal of socially oriented psychoanalytic theories to activists in the German and Austrian student movements of the 1920s).
Exactly two weeks after Anna Freud’s lecture, just a few miles from the New York Psychoanalytic Society in Manhattan, cops stormed the campus of Columbia University to clear barricaded buildings that had been occupied by students for the past week, making 712 arrests. The occupations had started following a demonstration to protest the construction of a new gym in Morningside Park. Despite being built on public land, only 12% of the building was intended to be accessible to the public. Students accused the university of stealing land from black and Puerto Rican communities in Harlem and Morningside Heights. Students also disrupted campus recruitment sessions for Dow Chemical (manufacturers of napalm) and protested the university’s links with the CIA and Institute for Defense Analyses, which they saw as evidence of the institution’s complicity in the on-going imperial war in Vietnam. An occupation began in a university building called Hamilton Hall at which a series of demands were issued and the university’s dean was held hostage in his office. Following the emergence of divergent strategies, priorities, and goals, a group of black students involved with the Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS) evicted the white students who were mostly part of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who left to form their own occupations elsewhere on campus.
In a New York Times report on the police raid, journalist A. M. Rosenthal remarked on the “many moods” that characterized the event:
Somehow the whole night seemed unbelievable, a mixture of moods that seemed to have no relationship to each other: violence and compassion, talk of hatred and death and talk of gentle philosophies, ugliness of action and of speech, and moments of tenderness, a place of learning become a place of destruction.
Contrary to Anna Freud’s claims regarding their complete disinterest in psychoanalysis, many young revolutionaries of the period enthusiastically engaged with the ideas of Freudo-Marxists and radical psychiatrists including Norman O. Brown, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich, meanwhile various not-so-radical psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed social scientists attempted to make sense of what drove so many in this generation of U.S. American young people to embrace revolutionary rhetoric and action with such fervor. Some social scientists speculated about radical young people’s motivations from a distance, while others published analyses based on detailed clinical interviews with them, which, despite being mediated by their authors’ theoretical assumptions and arguments, also document subjective experiences—dreams and desires, fantasies and feelings—of a kind that do not tend to feature in contemporary political treatises and later historical reflections produced by the young radicals themselves. What accounted for the many moods of youth revolt?
From sympathetic liberals to horrified conservatives, “psy” professionals rushed to diagnose politically radical students and came to different conclusions about the family environments responsible for the surge of activism that erupted in the sixties. Psychoanalysts Morton Levitt and Ben Rubinstein claimed white student radicals had overly permissive fathers and were drawn to heroic “men of action” like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh as alternatives. By contrast, Kenneth Keniston’s Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (a follow-up to his earlier book The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society), which was based on research with leaders of the anti-war initiative “Vietnam Summer” at their National Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1967, placed more emphasis on mothers. Among people on the New Left, he encountered two hypotheses regarding the relationship between their family experiences and their political convictions: the first suggested young people were rebelling against the vapid middle-class culture of their upbringings, while the second emphasized how many among them were red diaper babies who shared the political radicalism of their parents. Keniston rejected both of these readings, emphasizing instead the “close maternal tie[s]” many of his interviewees had with their “achievement-demanding mother[s],” while identifying their intensely ambivalent relationships to their fathers. “Activists are not, on the whole, repudiating or rebelling against explicit parental values,” but often acting on those values in a way their parents did not. They learn their “nurturant” empathy with others, he suggests, from nurturing yet professional mothers. Young radicals’ fantasies, he claims, are preoccupied by “Pyrrhic Oedipal victories” in which father figures are deposed only to be supplanted by maternal figures; traditional male authorities are weak but can be replaced by new forms of tyranny.
Among the flurry of publications from the period that placed young radicals on the couch were three psychoanalytically informed books that discuss the 1968 uprisings at Columbia University and Barnard Col- lege specifically: Lewis Feuer’s The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (1969), Robert Liebert’s Radical and Militant Youth: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry (1971), and Herbert Hendin’s The Age of Sensation: A Psychoanalytic Exploration (1975).
*
Feuer’s hefty tome The Conflict of Generations discusses the characteristics of student radicalism in Europe and the U.S. from the early twentieth century, arguing that youth movements, transitory by nature, demand a form of analysis distinct from that used to make sense of class struggle. While labor movements are driven by consciously defined aims, generational conflicts “have been largely dominated by unconscious drives.” Student movements emerge from “the will to revolt against the de-authoritized father,” an unconscious psychological motive disavowed by the movement’s participants. He describes his book as an attempt “to bring to consciousness what otherwise are unconscious processes of history.”
Drawing on Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (first published in German in 1909) Feuer identifies a “mythopoetic urge” at work in twentieth-century student uprisings. In myth, the heroic son rebels against the cruel and tyrannical father who has exposed him to danger. Yet unlike Rank, who proclaimed that “every revolutionary is originally a disobedient son,” Feuer insisted that this “revolt against ‘paternalism’” was specific to young radicals engaged in generational conflict and particularly likely to emerge among disaffected middle-class young people whose “aggressive energies” were not being expended in the “struggle for existence” and so sought another outlet. Feuer implies that unlike the noble labor of the rugged working class of his imagination, effeminate students have nothing better to do than get preoccupied with their fathers:
The heroism of miners, pioneers, seamen, railwaymen, builders is of a different order; the struggle with the material environment, with a hostile nature, for the sake of one’s survival, livelihood or the advancement of human knowledge, calls on all one’s resources, and makes obsolete and irrelevant one’s conflicts with one’s father.
Surveying large-scale student movements from Russia to Germany, Bosnia to France, Feuer’s long book ends with a discussion of the recent student uprising at Columbia.
Feuer is at pains to underline that the students who participated in the occupations were an unrepresentative minority of the student body at large. He writes in a tone of horrified opprobrium about the protestors, characterizing them as violent, hysterical, destructive, amoral, and authoritarian (meanwhile putting the word “brutality” in scare quotes when referring to the violence committed by the police): “The activist unconscious with its fantasies of guerilla uprisings and guerilla heroes enveloped the reality of Columbia University,” he laments, before going on to intone: “The university ceased to be the conscience of the community; it became an enclave for the rule of the id.” He characterizes student resistance to the police as being driven by an irrational “hysteria of generational ferocity.” The physical vandalism of university property that took place during the uprisings had a counterpart in a more corrosive “vandalism of the spirit.” His earlier publications on the 1964–66 student uprisings at UC Berkeley had been greeted with a “tremendous cry of outrage” among students and others sympathetic to their fight who protested at Feuer’s reduction of “the cause of anti-authoritarian protest to pathology” and unresolved daddy issues, a reaction Feuer smugly read as further evidence of the students’ repression and resistance to analysis.
*
Psychoanalyst and Columbia professor Robert Liebert’s Radical and Militant Youth includes a long footnote attacking Feuer’s conclusions. He objects to Feuer’s assumption that generational conflict is universal, unaffected by historical or cultural factors, and takes aim at the assumption that rebellion against the father in the form of political action inevitably tends towards a form of violence that undermines a movement’s political goals. Liebert stated that his own project sought to contextualize the conscious and unconscious motives driving youth revolt: “Lives cannot be studied in pure culture, removed from the currents of economic, political, and social forces.”
The conclusions in Liebert’s book are based on fifty long, unstructured psychoanalytically informed interviews mostly conducted between May and July 1968, when almost all the students he interviewed who had participated in the occupations still had charges pending against them. He distinguished his “firehouse research,” conducted in the heat of the event, from the body of “armchair literature” on student activists being published at the same moment. He favored open-ended interviews, as he believed these would prevent him from imposing his own perspectives on the interviewees, allowing their own associations and preoccupations to guide the conversations. While he claimed that white radical students spoke to him enthusiastically, eager to communicate their subjectively transformative experiences of the uprising, black students who had occupied Hamilton Hall were generally suspicious of the process; the most radical among them refused to be interviewed at all. He interviewed 14 black students and 36 white students, of whom seven in total were women from Barnard. Most of the interviewees were radical students involved in the uprisings but a small number of liberal and conservative students were also interviewed for comparative purposes.
Though there are chapters in the book that consider students’ experiences of care in early infancy and the significance of their parental relationships, often Liebert foregrounds the political over the personal. He frequently emphasizes the rationality of political convictions rather than discussing the irrationality of instincts or drives. Liebert attaches significance to the life-stage of students entering young adulthood who are in a phase of “ego mastery” and sexual awakening, having recently left their family homes, but he insists on the enormous variation in childhood experiences among the students he interviewed and describes “giving up self-interest for social interest” as a form of sublimation. Although he identifies some “regressive” aspects to the fusion of egos in a group, he characterizes this in overwhelmingly positive terms as enabling creativity. He acknowledges the inequalities and injustices identified by the students, proposing that these acquired a particular intensity because the university functioned as a “transitional guiding structure” and locus of authority, situated on the hinge between adolescence and adulthood.
The students Liebert comes closest to pathologizing are those with conservative views who felt violated and threatened by the protests, many of whom related violent fantasies that involved attacking students on the left. He quotes one conservative student who declared: “What I have witnessed on this campus is a nightmare, and, like all bad dreams, it will leave a permanent scar on my mind.” According to Liebert, conservative students were disturbed and threatened by the “disruption of a system [. . .] ideologically congenial to them.”
All of the students Liebert interviewed who spent time in the occupations “expressed some anger, agony, sadness, or fear about what had become of America” and he found in them “some combination of passion, fear, anxiety, brotherhood, and rage.” He details the positive feelings of togetherness and solidarity they associated with the occupations, which they generally characterized as one of the most significant experiences of their lives: “It was the beginning of a new vocabulary—‘brother,’ ‘friend’—a vocabulary of camaraderie, where people didn’t talk before.” Many of the white students reflected nostalgically on the sense of heightened togetherness, mutuality, and “emotional interchange” they experienced in the occupations, which they described as a kind of collective high. The mood in the occupations was labile, vacillating between relaxation and panic, arguments and celebrations, serious discussion and raucous partying. The pervasive fear of a police raid was interspersed with elation at the possibility of victory and moments of revelling in the pleasures of the immediate environment. Emotions shifted, but were shared:
They were afraid together and elated together, sang together [. . .] Distinctions among individuals in the commune were blurred; all communards were equally “brother” and “sister.” In the process the differences between oneself and others also diminished, allowing for the subjective experience of communion.
Most of the black students that Liebert interviewed also discussed their feelings of closeness, openness, and “mutual concern”: “We felt freer and more human. Everyone was a ‘sister’ or ‘brother.’ I really felt there was a humanity and brotherhood toward each other.” The student further reflected that the occupation allowed him to “shed the shell” he wore around white people. Another reflected that afterwards his “white friends seemed empty and dead.” “For the first time,” Liebert glossed, they “felt the exhilaration of their potency as a group, as a black group—a group that could obtain ends, create fear in ‘the Man’ and strengthen their internal bonds.” Liebert notes that “there was much more exhilaration and there were fewer painful fantasies among the white students,” whereas most of the black students said that despite finding the occupation valuable in many ways, they would not wish to repeat it. Liebert discusses ambivalence, guilt, and shame in terms of how the black students in the occupation described their relations to people from the black community in Harlem, as well as their frustrations and anger with white student radicals.
“One interviewee recalled crying uncontrollably while being beaten by a cop which only caused the cop to beat him more ferociously.”
As the occupations went on nervousness came to dominate the mood; according to one student: “the festive atmosphere disappeared. There was more tension [. . .] I got little sleep because of the anxiety.” These anxieties had one major source: the police. The anticipated bust appeared in many dreams and students expressed their fears of being beaten or tear-gassed, which for Liebert revealed their “unconscious guilt and the expectation of retribution stemming from their individual histories of Oedipal and sibling conflict.” In Liebert’s analysis conscious fear of future external violence at the hands of the state was entangled with unconscious feelings deriving from past experiences within the family. Most of the white students had never witnessed police violence before the occupation, whereas all of the black students had and they found the white students’ naivete irritating, as one student reflected:
Most black students are in terror of the police. They know what they can do. For whites the bust was an awakening. The policeman is for them “your friend.” You go to him when you are lost. The blacks had no illusions.
Reflecting on the police raid, students described a range of responses and many moods, including panic, numbness, and “solid obsessional defenses of intellectualization, denial, and isolation.” One interviewee recalled crying uncontrollably while being beaten by a cop which only caused the cop to beat him more ferociously. “Almost all described a blend of euphoria and fatigue” in the police vans with a sense of exhilaration and euphoria at having survived. They almost all subsequently reported nightmares—“Strange scenes of darkness and spotlights glistening off helmets”—which Liebert reads as an attempt to master the “residual anxiety” associated with the trauma of their encounter with the cops. Many reported immediately masturbating when they got home; for Liebert, “This act was a way of reassuring themselves unconsciously about their genital intactness and thereby attenuating anxiety relating to mutilation and castration.”
In his book’s preface Liebert describes walking away from the occupation shaken by the scenes he had witnessed. As the sound of the students’ mimeograph machines faded into the distance, he strolled across campus feeling “tired and old, and very frightened.” Liebert, a 38-year-old professor and father, found himself torn between the student strikers and the stability represented by the institution. He felt momentarily unsure what he would do if the students broke off from the university to form their own counterinstitution—would he join them? Liebert eventually concluded that despite his anxieties he would side with the radical students. Rejecting the conclusions of Anna Freud’s recent lecture, the book’s epilogue exhorts psychoanalysts to embrace the urgent need for social and political change and to continue working to help “conflicted people of all generations” to achieve it. Liebert urged the psychoanalytic establishment to “change its methods and concepts to accommodate psychohistorical forces” and to insist on the “subversive role” psychoanalysis could play within society.
*
Liebert conducted interviews in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, while Herbert Hendin’s The Age of Sensation, published in 1975, was based on research that extended into the 1970s. Student radicals were just one of the cohorts he was interested in analyzing. Alongside interviews with students classified as drug users, homosexuals, “dropouts,” and those experiencing impotency, Hendin conducted “psychoanalytic interview[s] using free associations, unconscious reactions, dreams, and fantasies” with “student revolutionaries who were leaders in the radical movements between 1968 and 1972.” Hendin identifies a shift from the “heady activism” of the late sixties to a “war of attrition” by the early seventies. Student radicals had previously been seen to “herald a movement that would transform America” but were increasingly marginalized and mostly preoccupied with fighting one another by the time he met with them. “What has changed,” he writes, “is that the violent few are no longer able to excite or politicize the anger of the many.”
He claims that most of his student radical interviewees had middle-class liberal or left-wing parents who were not overtly hostile to their children’s political activism, yet he argues that most had suffered from an “atmosphere of polite estrangement,” forms of subtle yet wounding abandonment, and had been plagued by “emotional invisibility” while growing up. An interviewee he calls James reports a dream in which left-wing students are rounded up by the state and placed in detention centers, which the student discusses in explicitly political terms, but which Hendin relates instead to the interviewee’s desire for a more controlling father, suggesting that the father’s refusal to impose strict rules on the son had been felt as a form of “emotional withdrawal.” This dream interpretation is typical of the chapter as a whole in its assumption that a dream’s manifest political content conceals a latent interpersonal meaning. Another interviewee, Carl, describes dreaming of gun battles with the police, which, Hendin says, along with Carl’s general obsession with political violence, guerilla war, and weapons training, arose from feelings of passivity in his sexual life, specifically his inability to cope with a complicated jealous entanglement in a non-monogamous relationship with a woman who was also involved with one of his comrades: “Carl found it far easier to express his anger with the establishment than with [his rival] Kenny.”
Although Hendin claims that the “inner turmoil of these revolutionary students in no way invalidates their critique of society,” he goes on to argue that their “acute sense of injustice derives from the personal, if often unrecognized experience of being victims”; these young people may be affluent but they have been deprived of parental love and attention and their hatred of property and wealth is an expression of their feelings towards their distant parents:
To insist that they are products of overprivilege, the spoiled sons and daughters of the affluent, is to insist that the only hunger is for food and the only deprivation is economic. The fervor with which they attack property, the intensity with which they scorn America’s concern for money must be understood in the context of their lives. They themselves have suffered in families who more than provided for their material needs, but frustrated their personal needs, and continue to be blind to them as people.
Hendin claims that political violence and rowdy protest allows these students to politicize their anger and “depersonalize their suffering,” to turn their personal feelings of frustration outwards, but its therapeutic effects tend to be fleeting, returning them quickly to feelings of despair. Those who choose to go underground, he says, are “giving concrete expression to the emotional state they have long been forced to endure” (one case involves a man “turned on” by the Weathermen who had slept under his bed as a child). The “inner revolution” occurring inside the radical students’ psyches finds a counterpart in their cataclysmic vision of a world heading towards nuclear annihilation: “the bombs that have destroyed some of them have been of their own making.” According to Hendin, student radicals adapt not to society but to their own internal conflicts.
If Feuer characterized the radical students at Columbia as parricidal maniacs giving free reign to the id, Hendin reduced their political motivations to personal ones originating in their comfortable but emotionally distant upbringings, while Liebert (indebted to Erik Erikson’s writings on psychohistory) insisted that the students’ political convictions were grounded in social reality; he was more interested in the psychic impact of the uprisings than their psychic origins in childhood experience without therefore implying that their formative family relationships—which had also unfolded in specific social, economic, and historical circumstances—had no bearing on the present.
*
On June 4, 1968, Columbia’s annual commencement ceremony was moved off campus to the nearby Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Around 300 students walked out of the event in their robes to attend speeches at an alternative counter-commencement ceremony on campus. Socialist-humanist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm addressed the crowds in a speech typical of the radical psychiatric rhetoric of the times. He claimed that the categories “sick” and “insane” should be understood as social as well as psychic:
If enough people share a common craziness, the craziness becomes normalcy, just as long as it doesn’t go beyond that threshold which would make the crazy people incapable of working. In such a society, the person who is not crazy is thought to have lost his mind.
Social craziness for Fromm took the form of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the disavowed but ever-present threat of nuclear war. He claimed that people had become like machines, programmed to be incapable of the critical thinking or intensity of feeling required to rebel against the normalization of mass killing. Despite pervasive social “insanity,” the continued existence of protestors and of young people critical of social tradition and imperial war was a cause for hope.
“Social craziness for Fromm took the form of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the disavowed but ever-present threat of nuclear war. He claimed that people had become like machines, programmed to be incapable of the critical thinking or intensity of feeling required to rebel against the normalization of mass killing.”
Liebert claimed that the “struggle in this country is being played out in microcosm at Columbia.” Reading about Columbia students in revolt in 1968 it is impossible not to think that the same could be said of the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments and their brutal repression at the same university, which is still unfolding and escalating. A “common craziness” that is taken for normality persists but we don’t need psychoanalysts to explain why people were motivated to join the encampments and protests against the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Writing in May 2024, former chair of Columbia SDS Mark Rudd identified commonalities between the two moments in language echoing Fromm’s 1968 speech: “Just as we were, the students are sick at heart and feel compelled to stop a moral obscenity.”
Despite their very different conclusions and emphases, psychoanalytically informed analysts of the 1968 Columbia occupations agreed that activists’ conscious appraisal of social conditions in the present should be connected to unconscious motivations deriving from their past experiences in the family and identified generational conflict as a driving force behind the uprising. But relationships between people of different generations are not inevitably conflictual; they can also function as conduits of solidarity and political knowledge. Just as Liebert was inspired by young student radicals, in a 1993 interview, Edward Said recalled missing the Columbia uprisings of spring 1968 but on returning to campus in the autumn he dis- covered that many of his students had been active in the university “revolution,” and in this context he got involved in activism against the American war in Vietnam; at the same moment, “for the first time in my life,” he recalled, “I got involved in Palestinian politics.”