20th CENTURY-PSYCHOANALYSIS AND BABY BOOMERS

The 20th century is marked by two wars and deep social changes due to the industrialization process that had taken place in the last 4 centuries. It changes power from aristocrats/ to industrial bourgeoisie/, which constitutes a new “caste”, owner of a new model of social and individual aspirations: moral values, habits and tastes/[1]. Without getting into details, the new way of life reaches its heyday at the beginning of the 20th century/, lightened by a boom in diversity during the years between First and Second World Wars. Channel, Collette, Salomé, Virginia Wolf among others, give a voice to women’s need for freedom of speech and self-expression. Germany goes through a transsexual boom right before Hitler’s rise. Adolescence, in its turn, is voiced by medicine, art and literature and becomes naturally associated with transgression and need for freedom[2]. These young people are the post-war generation parents. They come from a dark and hopeless period and are known as “Silent generation”. Their children, the so-called, “baby-boomers[3]”, are born in an euphoric and hopeful time. They are given this name because of demographic explosion during that time. It is also a time of much credit /and boomers experience similar needs for sexual freedom and self-expression of 20th decade in another version -Vietnan War and moral/sexual revolution of the 1968: “brad’s burden”/freedom of love. The following generation (X- from 1965-80) faces the consequences of previous euphoria. There aren’t jobs as there were before. They have more individualistic values and are associated with ambitions and work addiction (the term workaholic[4] comes from this time). This brief overview aims at a quick glance to social-cultural changes that are the background of new subjectivities and mental health conditions from the 80s on[5].

To be continued on the next Post

[1] Elias, N. Civilizing Process. [2] Savage, John. Youth… [3] As a group, baby boomers were wealthier, more active and more physically fit than any preceding generation and were the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.[3] They were also the generation that reached peak levels of income in the workplace and could, therefore, enjoy the benefits of abundant food, clothing, retirement programs, and even "midlife-crisis" products”. Free encyclopedia in Wikipedia.com [4] From generation baby-boomers to post-millennials- 50 years of change, in: www.iberdola.com [5] Even without having a consensual conclusion whether Freud was, himself, unsatisfied with his comprehension of neurotic symptoms in 30s (Inhibition, symptom and anxieties), it’s fair to say that psychoanalysis was the sovereign theory to understand and treat mental disorders, even in psychiatry, until pharmaceutic industry boom in 60s and 70s, when scientific mainstream thought slips from personality to syndromic understanding of clinical psychopathologies.