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, tastes, and habits[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 a euphoric and hopeful time and they are given this name because of demographic explosion during that time. It is also a time of more credit available and boomers experience similar needs for sexual freedom, self-expression and social equities of 20th decade in another version -protests against Vietnan War and the moral/sexual revolution of the 1968: “brad’s burden” and freedom of love’ “flags[4] 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 ambition and work addiction (the term workaholic[5] comes from this time). This brief overview aims at a quick glance to social-cultural changes that are the background of new subjectivities and emotional disorders from the 80s on[6].

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] “(…) Ron (Inglehart, R.Professor of Political Science at University of Chicago 1967, creator of Post-materialism and the author of the Silent Revolution) was observing what was happening in the 1970s (…) That is how he started his work. And he went to Paris and saw people on the streets — young people, workers — everybody out demonstrating and protesting. And his prediction was that in the 1940s and ‘50s, as countries emerged from the Second World War, and particularly in Western Europe and in post industrial societies, there was a basic sense that what was important there was materialism. In other words, growth — economic goods, better housing, better welfare states, making sure there were pensions and national health services and those sorts of things. And particularly amongst the generation that went through the war (…), the Great Recession and Depression, the instability of Hitler, Mussolini and all the changes involved with the rise of fascism, the Second World War, which disrupted lives, in that context, people wanted security. That was their priority (…) The younger generation, however, that subsequently grew up, in particular, those who lived in their early years in the ‘60s and ‘70s, had a very different set of experiences. They could take for granted that there was a certain level of economic prosperity”. Pippa Norris (Cultural Backlash) about the legacy of Ron Inglehart. In: Ezra Klein (New York Times journalist) Podcast, November 1st 2022. [5] From generation baby-boomers to post-millennials- 50 years of change, in: www.iberdola.com [6] Although Psychoanalysis was in full form during the 30s, when Freud has died (1939), it is plausible to assume that the understanding of neurosis’ dynamics was also in change, as we can observe in his questionings in Inhibition, symptom, and anxieties. Still, it is fair to affirm that psychoanalysis was sovereign in the understanding of emotional disorders, even in psychiatry, until the end of the 60s. At the end of 60s and during the 70s, the mainstream current of thought in psychiatry switches from the clinical understanding of personality to syndromic one in what concern psychopathologies, alongside with the development of pharmaceutical industry and the advance on psychotropics research.