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A Psycho-Theological Appraisal Of the New Left
By James N. Lapsley

"If a fundamental change is really taking place in the personality structure of persons coming of age, as some people think, then the implications are especially profound for those of us who seek to minister directly to persons.... Young people no longer experience guilt and shame the way we did and still do. They don't need alcohol or the gospel to release them from guilt.... They reject 'up-tight' middle class values as rigid, cerebral, and institutional role-bound.... Guilt stems from an apprehension of some code or law violated…. Shame stems from an apprehension of failure."

ALL of us by now are very much aware that something of great importance is taking place in our society, especially among young people. Some of us speak of it in apocalyptic terms, as though the end of the age is truly at hand. Others speak the language of political and cultural revolution, while still others look on in apprehension or outright dismay, and hope that it will soon pass, like the goldfish swallowing fad of the 30's. Those of us who like to think of ourselves as liberals are probably the most uncomfortable, for the young radicals and hippies are obviously against the establishment with its stuffiness and phoniness, and we have been railing against this for years, mostly to each other. But we are made uneasy by their "acting out" their hostility and by their promiscuity (and by the fact that, by and large, they scorn liberals).

James N. Lapsley is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, and the University of Chicago. He has studied at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, and is the editor The Concept of Willing (1967). Dr. Lapsley is a member of the editorial staff of The Journal of Pastoral Care.

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As yet no definitive handle for understanding this whole eruption has appeared, and hence a multiplicity of perspectives seems desirable. My starting point is "The Electric Circus" and what can be learned from the perspective it affords about what is happening and what the implications of this are for theology, the church, and pastoral care.

I

"The Electric Circus" is a dance hall on St. Marks Place in New York City's East Village. Its name was suggested by the appearance of the interior which resembles the inside of a circus tent and by the entertainment provided, a multimedia electronic assault on the audio and visual senses. While couples are dancing, batteries of projectors are flashing movies, still photos, and various other color effects on the walls of the "tent," as strobe lights flash and the audio system blasts rock and roll, usually hard or "acid" rock. The strobe lights are the really essential ingredient. Formerly found only in physics laboratories, they are called stroboscopes and are used for measuring the speed of movements by rapidly flashing bright beams of light. Turned on the dancers, these lights create an illusion of very rapid movement and suggest that the various parts of the dancers are becoming disconnected, so that a hand may appear to be simply suspended in space, for instance. A coffee and milk bar is attached. No alcohol.

Those familiar with the hip scene have no trouble in recognizing what all this is about. It is an attempt to create for the customers an LSD trip without LSD. Instead of having an "implosion" of effects going on inside one's head, one gets the stimuli from the outside, which, when they meet in the overloaded synapses of the brain, create an "implosion."

The stairway up to the dance hall is designed to establish the right "set" for this to happen. Stairs, walls, and ceiling are painted in furious day-glo fluorescent, ultra violet, yellow, and green mosaics representing scenes from Hindu mythology.

"The Electric Circus" is both concrete evidence for, and a powerful symbol of, something of great importance going on in our culture today. It is the place, as it were, where Marshall McLuhan meets Sigmund Freud, where fruits of the emerging culture can be seen, and an attempt made to understand what is happening.

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In spite of attention now being given in the church to folk masses, spontaneous liturgies, and even worship through touching, it is very doubtful whether the church has any idea of what is happening. If it really seeks to be a community of concern for those coming of age in this culture, however, it needs desperately to learn.

If a fundamental change is really taking place in the personality structure of persons coming of age, as some people think, then the implications are especially profound for those of us who seek to minister directly to persons. Our fundamental understanding of the ways in which persons in our culture are put together, which directly affects our approach to helping them, is at stake. If, on the other hand, phenomena like "The Electric Circus" are only symptoms of one of those bizarre regressive cults that affect young people from time to time, then we can relax a bit, knowing that underneath these kids are really just like the rest of us, their "hang-ups" are merely culturally conditioned in a different way. Therefore if we can understand their feelings about the situation and accept them, then we can approach them from our accustomed stance.

Let us look at the evidence that we do have something really new going in our culture, a revolution of which the hippie movement is one side and the radical student revolt the other. Certainly there is much behavior that is new to us in these movements; we are often made uncomfortably ambivalent about it. We are tempted to regard it as far out, acting out, sociopathic, regressive, hostile, and just plain ornery. On the other hand, the younger generation are attacking the stuffiness and corruption of our society, against which we too have been opposed. What are we to make of it? Have they stolen our thunder and made it roar because they have somehow been immune to the hang-ups that held us back? This is the position that we shall explore.

II

Regarding "The Electric Circus," I was most struck by the feeling that those on the dance floor (as contrasted with those of us standing around watching, trying to appear with it) were very much at home in the cacophony of sound and flashing lights. They danced in the familiar rock shuffle patterns, in which there is little, if any, physical contact between couples. Often as much as ten feet would separate the partners, with others coming in between. There was

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at least one ménage a trois, with two men dancing with one woman, which seemed quite as much in place as the other, more conventional, combines. Couples ranged in age from late teens to early fifties (a guess), and most seemed to give off that paradoxical feeling of involved detachment which has characterized the whole rock movement, and which also characterized its most important ancestor, Dixieland jazz.

One young couple dancing near the place where my wife and I were standing, and who may or may not be typical, were of special interest to us, partly because the girl asked my wife to watch first her purse, and then her sandals and some beads, as the evening progressed. The girl was wearing a green dress with long sleeves and a full skirt of conventional mini-length, several strands of beads, which she removed as the action developed. The boy was clad in a silky blouse, Bermuda shorts, also beads, steel rimmed spectacles, and a "good" short haircut, plus mustache but no beard. Both looked like well cleansed college types, in contrast to the hippies drifting about in St. Marks Place outside, who could probably ill afford the Circus's $4.50 admission.

Neither this couple nor any of their fellow dancers seemed to be paying much attention to the series of images being projected on the walls, sometimes overlaying one another-a recurring red squid, blow-ups of cell tissue suggesting a womb, medieval prints, devils, satyrs, parts of people, and other fragments. All presumably were intended to suggest the world of the LSD trip, especially the heightened sensory awareness level and the "recollective-analytic" level in which the unconscious with its fund of images and symbols of darkness and light begin to emerge.¹ Nevertheless, I had the impression that the visual projections were vital to the whole experience, contributing the matrix of images by means of which couples seemed able to keep dancing their way into the inner world for hours on end with only occasional milk or coffee breaks.

For explanation of these and related phenomena we turn first to Philip Rieff, whose books on Freud and his impact on the culture are one of the best guides in this complex situation. In essence Rieff is saying in his latest book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, that "therapeutic man," thanks to permissive child-rearing and

¹ R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1966), pp. 144 f.

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the decline of moral demand systems backed by symbolic and institutional reinforcement, is emerging in our culture as one who for the first time in world history is able to pursue his own ends because he knows enough about himself and his world to do so.² No longer do the old myths, by which the culture used to induce guilt and release men from its awful terror, bind and loose. The values of therapeutic man are "therapeutic," that is, derived to the health and welfare of the individual as he understands it.

Hence young people no longer experience guilt and shame the way we did and still do. They don't need alcohol or the gospel to release them from guilt and shame. They express themselves through feeling and action on these feelings. They reject "up-tight" middle class values as rigid, cerebral, and institutional role-bound. This same set of values can be seen to be operating among the young radicals of the social action movement, who, according to Kenneth Keniston, are open, sensitive, and self-aware.³ In contrast to the apolitical hippies, however, the radicals have embraced the social values of their parents and are acting upon them. A very interesting, though peripheral point as far as this essay goes, is the relationship between the two movements. Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.,⁴ a study of the origins of the hippie movement on the West Coast, makes the point that many hippies were disillusioned activists. On the other hand, the so-called Youth International Movement (Yippies) is an activist organization composed of former hippies. No doubt the relationship between these branches of the youth culture is complex. Such evidence as I have suggests that one crucial difference is that the radicals came from homes where liberal values were held, and the fathers were perceived as less passive than they were by the alienated, or hippie-prone group.⁵

Rieff's point about therapeutic man can be seen in both groups in the emphasis upon the expression of feelings and the necessity of the individual's being able to do his "thing--that is, to give expression to his most cherished potential, and to do so without delay. The absence of alcohol, the universal super-ego solvent, from places like "The Electric Circus," supports Rieff's contention that the interiorization of inhibition connoted by the super-ego does not exist in the

² New York: Harper and Row, 1966, pp. 56, 60-61, et passim.
³ Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 346 f.
⁴ New York: Farrar, Giroux and Strauss, 1968, p. 357.
⁵ Keniston, pp. 350 f.

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same form among these young people. They have no need to have the restraints relaxed. (This is one way to tell an authentic psychedelic night spot from a bogus one-the latter vends liquor.)

One aspect, and a very prominent one, that Rieff says little or nothing about is the communal flavor of all these phenomena. Both hippies and radicals are group oriented, and live a participative life as far as possible. This is seen in the radicals' emphasis on participatory democracy and the necessity of group decision making, and in the hippie gangs such as Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the prototype of later groups such as the Diggers and the Grateful Dead. It can be seen in "The Electric Circus" in the way couples seem to be involved on the dance floor, even without physical contact. Rieff has noted that, given the therapeutic orientation, any form of religious life would have to be permissive, rather than demanding, as have religions of the past, in the west at least.

Though Rieff has indicated that he does not see a new religion emerging from the hippie movement, there are commentators who think otherwise. For example, Benjamin DeMott, in his article "Rock as Salvation,"⁶ DeMott holds that the whole rock movement is religious in character because it touches both the most primitive and the most sophisticated levels of life and, more importantly, does so by creating a milieu in which the individual loses himself in a collective colloidal suspension. Today's young people need rock because of the frustration of knowing all the answers about life and themselves and, at the same time, being unable to do anything about them.⁷ Rock provides both escape and a quasi-dealing with the problems faced through murky, though engagé, lyrics.

III

For light on the underlying factors which make this kind of solution even possible (if you are over 35, don't stay in "The Electric Circus" too long, or you may blow your mind), we must turn to the guru of the communications industry, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan believes that we are in the midst of a profound cultural revolution because of the shift over the last century from linear, "hot" media which are positioned, relatively unambiguous, and rigid (chiefly print), to more mosaic, non-linear, ambiguous, "cool" media

⁶ The New York Times Magazine, August 25, 1968, p. 30.
⁷ Ibid., pp. 40-44.

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(now chiefly television).⁸ The effect of this shift is to produce persons who are conditioned to participate rather than merely to observe, who are conditioned to constant motion and continuous sound, and hence are right at home in the audiovisual bombardment of "The Electric Circus." They are, to quote Brer Rabbit, "born and bred in the briar patch," saying this of himself on the occasion of his being flung in there by Brer Fox, who was ignorant of the early milieu of rabbits.

The television ads are the principal agents of this conditioning, according to McLuhan, for they provide a continuous education in what is desirable and what is not, thus teaching a kind of morality of esthesis as a by-product of product hunger. Further, they foster what he aptly calls a "retribalization" of western culture in which everybody wants the same thing, and to participate with each other in the having of it, after centuries of individualism. Thus, according to this thesis, just -when each person becomes able to do his own thing, it turns out to be very much like everybody else's thing. This, too, seems to explain some of the "tribal" behavior we find among young people, who find satisfaction in the ambiguity of the rock lyrics in which they can participate in forming the meaning, yet somehow knowing that the meaning is a shared one.

In the jelly jungle of orange
marmalade
There are tangerine dreams waiting for
you in the orange marmalade
In the jelly jungle of orange marmalade.⁹

Finally, we must note that the hallmark of the LSD trip is the feeling shared by many that they have lost their individual identity and have somehow become merged with the All. The similarity between this and classical eastern mysticism has, of course, precipitated an invasion of assorted gurus, swamis, and other exponents of Buddhism and Hinduism, marking the hippie movement with the symbolism and, to some extent, the wearing apparel associated with those faiths. These outward signs, with their overtones of faddism, should not prevent our seeing the hunger for a depth of participation on the part of those who have adopted them and which they feel has been denied them in their own culture. The fact that this comes

⁸ Understanding Media (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), pp. 22 ff.
⁹ DeMott, The New York Times Magazine, p. 30. Copyright Kama Sutra Music.

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at a time when the leadership of many Asian nations is attempting to "westernize," that is individualize, their peoples so that they will be more responsible and productive adds irony to this situation but does not diminish the reality of it for us.

At the present time the hippie movement appears to be disintegrating, due to socio-economic pressure and perhaps the increasing difficulty of procuring drugs. An article appearing in The New York Times (August 26, 1968) indicates that the movement may be migrating to the suburbs. On the other hand, the radical movement shows every sign of growing and continuing. However this may be, the point is not that all young people are or are about to become hippies or radicals (most apparently are neither), but that the life styles embodied in these movements represent very significant forces at work in the culture today which will find other expressions on a broader scale.

IV

Now let us examine the other side of the argument, which is that, though these phenomena may look new on the surface, underneath are the same old psychodynamic conflicts being worked out. Certainly there have been students in revolt in many prior generations, if not in all, and "flower children," naive romantics, have been on the scene in the west from time to time since the Children's Crusade. Paul Goodman, one of the "older" young radicals himself has sharply pointed up the resemblances between the student revolt at Columbia and the patterns of classical anarchism. Goodman makes a strong case for viewing the left wing of the movement, particularly the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as modern day representatives of the tradition of Bakunin, which held the position (stemming from Rousseau) that all the structures of society are corrupt by definition and ought to be destroyed, so that man, good by nature, can flourish.¹⁰ Though this point may have been overstated by Goodman, it was on the mark enough to draw an angry reply from Mark Rudd, SDS head at Columbia (New York Times Magazine, August 4, 1968), who gave this reader the impression that one of his corns had been stepped on. Goodman appears to be right in noting the paradox in the extreme radicals' position that, though they reject all external authority as bad, they do not hesi-

¹⁰ The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1968, pp. 10-22.

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tate to manipulate those in the movement. This seems to be a transparent case of displaced parent-child conflict, the commonest ailment in the "old" culture, rather than the sign of the new age.

Even in the more level-headed, less volatile, Vietnam Summer group studied by Keniston, authority continued to be a great problem, with much group decision-making where this was not appropriate from a functional point of view.¹¹ Keniston also notes that in spite of his general picture of the young radical in this group as mentally healthy, at many points personal problems became more significant than political problems¹² and that the group was basically anti-organizational and "perhaps even ineffectual."¹³

When we turn to the hippies, we have no trouble in seeing schizoid and hysterical personalities everywhere. But it may be said that these are not the real hippies, and there is much truth in this. For the real hippies were (and are, where they are extant) communal types who are not withdrawn and out of contact or afraid of the "real thing." Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the original hippie gang who traveled about the country in a 1939 International Harvester school bus, staying high on LSD, and engaging in mock contretemps with the local citizenry (passing through Phoenix in the summer of 1964, the bus displayed a banner saying, "A vote for Barry is a vote for fun"),¹⁴ and recording these encounters on film and tape, will serve well as a paradigm of hippiehood.

Kesey was a successful first novelist (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962) who took LSD as an experimental subject in a VA hospital in California. He was so captivated by this experience that he took up psychedelic drugs as a way of life, gathering as he did so a group of followers about him, first in Palo Alto and then La Honda, California. Kesey's group included a diverse collection of young people ranging from a former helicopter pilot to an ex-companion of Jack Kerouac, the leader of the beat generation of the fifties, and including a middle class girl from Poughkeepsie called Mountain Girl, a sometime paranoid electronics expert from New York, and a very withdrawn young man from La Honda called the Hermit. Kesey provided charismatic leadership for the group, which took on a religious form in the opinion of Wolfe, whose book has shed so much light on the whole movement. The Merry Pranksters soon became

¹¹ Keniston, pp. 164 f.
¹² Ibid., p. 152.
¹³ Ibid., p. 170.
¹⁴ Wolfe, p. 78.

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dissatisfied with a life of trips and pranks alone and began to seek to convert others to their way of life through a series of "Acid Test" parties at which LSD would be offered amid the kind of electronic overstimulation already discussed in connection with "The Electric Circus." In this way they made the major contribution toward getting Haight-Ashbury off the ground.

The then High Priest of the drug movement, Timothy Leary, and his associate, Richard Alpert, remained aloof from these wild men, preferring the route of meditation. In fact when Kesey's bus visited Milbrook, Leary would not even emerge to greet them, saying he was on a three day meditation.¹⁵ Allen Ginsberg, the poet laureate of the movement, however, showed more interest and even visited the Pranksters in La Honda.

It is necessary to make this point about the distinctions within the drug movement because the hippie phenomenon is not simply a drug phenomenon, although without drugs it is doubtful if it would have gotten off the ground. Rather it is a style of life characterized by a rejection of every form of accepted social restraint in favor of a communal existence of like-minded people in which the only commandment is to do your thing "out front," that is, openly. It is, therefore, particularly against all the concealment devices current in our culture and for color and noise. These concealment devices were the primary objects of mockery, though their status of disengagement extended to some areas of importance for the radicals. Said Kesey to a throng of 15,000 students at Berkeley, to which the Vietnam Day Committee had made the gross error of inviting him to speak:

"There's only one thing to do … there's only one thing's gonna do any good at all … And that's everybody just look at it, look at the war and turn your backs and say: **** it.¹⁶

Both hippies and radicals seem to have a fondness for three and four letter words of Anglo-Saxon origin which refer to excretory and sexual functions. These words are used by them for emphasis usually, as in the above quotation, but they also serve as routine adjectives which make the point.¹⁷ Although it may be said with some

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 108.
¹⁶ Ibid., p. 224. The four-letter word used here for sexual intercourse is rapidly finding public acceptance in books, magazines, on the stage, and in college campus papers. There are important reasons for this as the following paragraphs try to show. The word itself is merely alluded to here rather than risk offending some who might otherwise read no farther or miss the point altogether.
¹⁷ Keniston, p. 149.

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truth that these words are a part of the argot of all young people (or all people), still their reported frequency suggests that they have some special meaning for the users, or that the reporters have overrecorded them, which is a possibility.

The use of obscenities is no doubt, in part, an effort of upper and middle class young people to identify with the underclass, but may also point to unresolved personal conflicts stemming from anal and oedipal situations. The reactive features of the hippie movement make this a very likely possibility in their case, and the young radicals may not have altogether shucked off their authority problems either. To argue that the parents and the culture ought to be rejected is emphatically beside the point. Rebellion, if it is that, still involves the same basic dynamics of personality. To rebel, one must fear the shame of not being a fully participating human being more than the guilt of destroying the persons and structures which prevent this.

V

This point provides the basic clue toward resolving the question of whether we face a brand new situation about which we know little or nothing. In a word, there is a new cultural situation emerging, but its essence is not entirely unfamiliar. It is characterized by the emergence of the shame dynamic as central in determining cultural sanctions and individual life style, in contrast to the guilt dynamic which has been central during the era in which modern psychodynamics developed. We have been aware of the presence of shame in our culture all along, but it has not had the dominant role in individual development or cultural models.

In speaking of dominant motivational patterns, I recognize the complexity of human motivation and that motivation is not limited to negative factors such as guilt and shame but includes positive factors like love and hope as well. Nevertheless these negative factors are the limiting motivations which become dominant especially during periods of stress, thus giving the behavior bounded by these limits a certain pattern or shape.

This is not to say that the distinction made between guilt and shame cultures, made by such anthropologists as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, can be accepted as such. They simply distinguished between Cultures in which the mores were inforced by internal

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(guilt) or external (shame) sanctions. In this way, they equated shame cultures with primitive and guilt cultures with sophisticated, progressive, and advanced civilizations. Milton B. Singer has effectively pointed out the flaws in this position.¹⁸ Nevertheless the distinction between cultures in which guilt is dominant and those in which shame is dominant seems a useful one. I am following the basic position of Gerhart Piers in my understanding of these terms, though not in every detail. Piers sets forth four criteria by means of which shame and guilt may be distinguished:

(1) Shame arises out of tension between the ego and the ego ideal, not between the ego and the super-ego.

(2) Whereas guilt is generated whenever a boundary is set by the super-ego, shame occurs when a goal (presented by the ego ideal) is not being reached. It thus indicates a real "shortcoming." Guilt anxiety accompanies transgression; shame, failure.

(3) The unconscious, irrational threat implied in shame anxiety is abandonment, and not mutilation (castration) as in guilt.

(4) The Law of Talion does not obtain in the development of shame, as it generally does in guilt.¹⁹

These criteria give us a means of clearly distinguishing these phenomena and the feelings they involve, even though the feelings cannot always be clearly separated, and it is, in fact, from their combination that serious mental illness often results. Guilt stems from an apprehension of some code or law violated written or unwritten, conscious or unconscious. Its core is a sense of "badness," for which one fears punishment in kind (Talion law operating). Shame stems from an apprehension of failure, of not measuring up, and the core feeling is weakness, for which one fears that he will be ousted from membership in the community whose standards he has embraced. The root meaning of shame is a covering (to attempt to hide one's shortcomings), while guilt originally referred to something owed, a debt. They are both interpersonal in character, and both have internal and external manifestations. It is true that shame depends

¹⁸ Gerhart Piers and Milton B. Singer, Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and Cultural Study (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas, 1953), pp. 53-54.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 11. My basic disagreement with Piers is with his linking of guilt to the superego and shame with the ego ideal. Though the direction of this linkage makes sense, the uncertain status of the ego ideal has caused some able clinicians to reject Piers' distinction, an unfortunate mistake in my opinion (e.g., Edward V. Stein in his Guilt: Theory and Therapy, Westminster, 1968). 1 think that both shame and guilt are related to the super-ego, as that is understood to contain internal sanctions against failure as well as transgression. What is transgression from one point of view is often felt as failure from another, i.e., the paradigm of the small child who soils his pants transgresses the law of excretory retention, but feels a sense of failure at not meeting his parent's expectation of him.

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upon one's perception by a community, but this community may be present only as an image in one's mind. Unlike guilt, which may be objective without any necessary connection to feeling, shame always has a subjective side. The distinctions between the negatives "guiltlessness" and "shamelessness" make this clear. Guiltlessness means that one is not reprehensible, but shamelessness means that one is reprehensible, and will not feel it. Thus of the two, shame is always relational, while guilt may not be.²⁰

Developmentally, shame has the older roots, in all probability, going back to original separation anxiety. Though Freud's original formulation of super-ego theory placed the origin of guilt relatively late in the oedipus complex, some contemporary theorists trace it back to an earlier period. Both shame and guilt may be activated during the anal phase, but shame is more likely to be the fundamental issue, with guilt not the focal consideration until the so-called phallic (oedipal) phase.²¹ Shame is more directly linked with mother relationship and guilt with father relationship, though this is far from an absolute distinction. High expectations of children coupled with few prohibitions tend to generate shame.

VI

With these points in mind let us examine the behavioral patterns we have been discussing. It is clear that the hippies are "shameless" vis à vis the society they have rejected. But they are far from shameless within the hippie community, where there is an inversion of shame, in the insistence of doing everything "out front," openly. Nevertheless in this "countershame" behavior, the shame dynamic is operating. Exclusion from the hippie community is the price of being "up-tight," inhibited.

"Countershame" behavior is further manifested in the use of obscenity in public, which is characteristic of both wings of the new left, though more blatant among the hippies. Street demonstrations invariably involve obscene speech and gestures directed at the police, which is often cited as a justification for the violence practiced on the demonstrators by the police. In such situations, distinctions between radicals and hippies blur.

Norman Mailer, who was himself arrested at the Pentagon in the

²⁰ Helen Merrill Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), p. 24.
²¹ Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 81.

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demonstration of October 21, 1967, had an illuminating point to make about obscenity in his book about the march, The Armies of the Night.²² Mailer, a celebrated user of obscenity in his works of fiction, says that his army experience in World War II taught him that obscenity is somehow peculiarly American and that its use is tied closely to patriotism. If Mailer is right about this, and my own experience supports his observation, then the police were not just acting out of personal insult, but to protect the national identity for these wild young people were doing "out front" what is supposed to be done in private and semi-private rituals. They were exposing the sacred to the light of day. The same can be said about their open polymorphous and promiscuous view of sex. Their "out front" sexuality is a "scandal" to the middle class community because it exposes a mystery.

The shame dynamic is operating here in the need to deal with the fear of shame, even though the young people appear to be shameless. They come largely from urban and suburban middle class backgrounds in which fewer demands and proscriptions were placed upon them than upon any previous American generation, except for the global "demand" that they succeed. Thus there is nothing in their training which generates fear of punishment for wrong doing, but there is the anxiety that somehow one may not be really making it. It was in this sense that Helen Merrill Lynd rightly saw shame as playing the dominant role in the struggle for identity.²³ Even though parents do not resort as often to "shaming" techniques to enforce toilet training as they once did, the threat of shame is often in the shadows of many parent-child relationships. Instead of the hanging head and the averted eye, there is the fear that one will not make it and hence not be a person or recognized as one by others. Out of this kind of milieu, which Erikson as early as 1950 warned tended to produce in identity crisis,²⁴ came the movements upon which we have been focusing.

The role of television has been to speed up this breakdown of a guilt-oriented culture in which each individual is "responsible" for his behavior. TV has abetted the affiliative trends in the culture and contributed much to the emphasis upon "making it," even though its content may be later rejected.

²² New American Library, p. 47.
²³ Lynd, pp. 204 ff.
²⁴ Erikson, pp. 247 ff.

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The radicals manifest "countershame" to a lesser extent than the hippies, and on the social scale they are still concerned about guilt issues, such as war and civil rights. Yet these seem less related to codes of society than to their need for personal identity-for "making it." To be sure, some radicals (and hippies) may be struggling with unconscious guilt in self-destructive acting out, but studies to date have not confirmed this hypothesis about the majority of participants. The presence of stronger, more respected fathers in the homes from which the radicals come lends support to the view that they are governed relatively less by a shame dynamic. But their emphasis upon group participation suggests that this is probably dominant nevertheless.

VII

Much of our theology, particularly as it gets translated into worship, liturgy, church life, views of the ministry and of pastoral care and counseling, has for long tacitly assumed that it was operating within a guilt culture. It would be instructive to examine these assumptions as they relate to the wider aspects of church and theology, but let me conclude by noting some implications of the present discussion for the specialized area of pastoral care and counseling.

Our emphasis upon catharsis, upon the ventilation of hostility and anxiety, the gaining of self-acceptance through the acceptance of the therapist, the emphasis upon insight, all were fundamentally rooted in the confessional model of relationship. This is quite effective in a guilt culture where penance is the punishment, or where the relationship itself contains elements of penance, such as a fee basis. Also, no matter how accepting the therapist, the relationship is not without an element of judgment.²⁵

One cannot afford, however, to confess much in a shame culture where knowledge of weakness and shortcoming may lead directly to ex-communication. Piers has made the point that the ventilation of hostility by a person plagued by shame makes the person who hears his confession even more threatening, because it only confirms him in his feeling of weakness and inadequacy as contrasted with the counselor's strength, demonstrated in his being able to tolerate all these words charged with negative magic.²⁶

²⁵ James B. Ashbrook, "Judgment in Pastoral Counseling," Journal of Pastoral Care, XX, 1, pp. 19.
²⁶ Piers and Singer, p. 33.

461 - A Psycho-Theological Appraisal Of the New Left

Howard Clinebell and others have been pointing out for some time that the permissive, expressive approach will not work in all instances, though Clinebell's emphasis on catharsis, supportive and educative counseling, still seems to assume a fundamental guilt dynamic.²⁷

If one takes the shame dynamic as fundamental, he is led to the conclusion that the expression of negative feelings may be positively harmful and that what is needed is emphasis on the positive aspects of the person's outlook and behavior. Glasser's reality therapy is one form of approach which does this, though its confrontational element may severely limit its application outside correctional settings. Group modalities seem to me to offer the most promise, since they can effectively check acting out with implicit shame sanctions while the therapeutic process is in progress. It is very difficult for an individual counselor to help the person wrestling with shamebased problems to distinguish between constructive behavior and destructive acting out without alienating him.

A clinician recently observed to me that the church and the seminaries are now serving as a kind of safe place for many young people to experiment with hippiehood without getting too far out.²⁸ I think there is much truth in this, as we look at the forms of worship and the style of life elected by many young people in the church. This means that those of us who seek to help such young people should make as few assumptions as possible about them. They may be ready for "The Electric Circus" and essentially not bound by guilt residuals, or they may only look that way because it is the "in" way to look and actually be fighting a rearguard oedipal action. We must make tip our minds on the basis of careful reflection on what we actually experience in relationships with them.

²⁷ Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling (New York: Abingdon, 1966), pp. 27-40.
²⁸ Maurice Phillips, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, in a personal communication.