This chapter presents two composite portraits of students with quite different drug-use behavior. Both portraits are of young men attending the same university, ones with similar ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. One prototypical young man is Jurgen, whom we have named after James Branch Cabell's hero who drank of every cup offered, thereby tasting many a sweet draught and many a poisonous one. Enchanted, he slew monsters, delivered princesses, loved sorceresses and queens, but in the end returned home to a nagging wife and humdrum job to live happily ever after. Our student Jurgen has also tasted many draughts, mostly of the mind-altering sort, for he is a drug user and has tried cough syrup laced with codeine, airplane glue sniffed from a paper bag, marijuana and hashish, LSD, psilocybin, STP, DMT, DET, opium and barbiturates, and methamphetamine. He has used heroin as well, that quite recently, but only a few times and, as he says, almost by accident. He also smokes tobacco and drinks alcohol, the latter to excess in the past but no longer. At the moment he is devoted to marijuana but is decreasing his previously intensive use of other exotic drugs. We shall see the reasons for that shortly.

Our other portrait is of Paul, named after the apostle who preached against the pleasures of the flesh; advocate of abstinence, he was the one who said, "It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak. . . . Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth. And he that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith; for whatsoever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:21-23)." Our Paul has had a few sips of wine and a taste of beer. He does not smoke and is glad of it, for tobacco would be bad for his health and would impair his athletic prowess—a matter on which his varsity coach is firm. Furthermore, his parents do not smoke, and he likes neither the taste nor the smell of tobacco. Paul uses medicine rarely and is reluctant to take aspirin unless it is prescribed by the family physician—a rare event since he is a healthy young fellow. He considers marijuana and the exotic-illicit drugs to be "artificial" in their effects and undesirable. He has acquaintances but no close friends who use them.

As Greek peasants are wont to say, "Everything is real; everything is unreal." So it is that our Jurgen and our Paul are real and unreal. Composite portraits are not real people no matter how many true-to-life elements are blended in the painting. Yet they are real insofar as conceptions and generalizations can be so and the component parts out of which the portraits are derived do exist. In the case of Jurgen and Paul, each portrait is derived from information gathered from three to four hours of interviews with a group of students representing, within the limits we imposed of sameness of background, two extremes: the campus "heads" nominated by their student peers and the abstainers also identified and sent to us by students whom we know. The essence of the composite is blending, and so it is that the originals, Jurgen #1, Jurgen #2, Jurgen #3, and so forth, may have differed politically, one being an anarchist, another a member of the New Left, a third an independent radical, whereas our Jurgen is a compromise which resulted from our judgment of the most representative political affiliation among all the Jurgens. This was easier to do for Jurgen than for Paul, since among the abstainers we encountered a greater variety of moral stances; for example, one group was made up of individual Gospel fanatics and, simultaneously, right-wing extremists; another, strict sectarians reared in the abstinence tradition; whereas a third subgroup was not so specialized religiously or politically but was, instead, athletic, solid, and nature-loving. Rather than to try to blend from among these, we elected to create our Paul out of the latter subgroup—a group, in any event, whose members came closest in being like Jurgen in religious and socioeconomic background. As it turned out, the two groups of students who sat as models for these portraits were from very similar backgrounds indeed. Furthermore, they sometimes had the same majors and classes, sometimes were interested in the same sports, and were all alike in being bright, able, personable, healthy, wealthy, and a pleasure to come to know. Their choice of the university and its choice of them assured other similarities, for their interest in its high status, lyrical setting, and excellent facilities and amenities implied an appreciation in them of the good things in life as conventionally defined. The university's choice of them by means of rigorous selection procedures implied, in turn, qualities of leadership, outstanding academic records in high school, wide extracurricular interests, and athletic prowess.

The families of both our Jurgen and Paul are well-off. In the case of the several "original" Jurgens, the range of family income was from $50,000 to $200,000 per year; and in the case of our subgroup of Pauls, from $20,000 to $40,000. Our composite boys are both WASPs—that is, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, all of whose parents and grandparents are—or were—native-born Americans. Each has siblings (in the subgroups never more than three). Family stability is the pattern, marred neither by divorce nor by frequent moving from place to place. All of the parents are moderates by their own lights, although Paul's are much more likely to be on the right. Both boys have been and are veering toward more liberal views, as one would expect of students attending a liberal university. Jurgen is further left than Paul, although he has traveled no more steps than Paul in his political changing, since his parents are the more liberal.

The fathers of both young men share a remarkable number of characteristics. Both came from poor but hard-working backgrounds; both struggled to achieve their present positions of income, security, and community respect—and in the case of Jurgen's parents, national fame. Both are self-made men who worked days to support school at night or, when a bit more was saved, combined work and schooling. Both are practical men who measure the world and their sons in concrete terms and who gauge others in terms of the work ethic and success, on the one hand, and the humane and Christian virtues, on the other. The fathers of Jurgen and Paul are fulfillments of the American dream; they are the embodiments of the culture hero Horatio Alger and subscribe themselves to that mythology. Paul and Jurgen are Horatio Alger's children. They understand their fathers better than the older men their sons. Both Jurgen and Paul admire and respect their fathers' character, ability, stamina, and, last but not least, their success. They appreciate their fathers' values of work, of doing everything for oneself, of honesty, of exploring all the possibilities and not taking anything for granted, and of optimism (that effort will be rewarded). Jurgen even explains his experimentation with illicit drugs in terms of his father's ideals for him—that is, his father has always taught him to do for himself, to question, and to be curious. Consequently, Jurgen is trying out quite a different type of life for himself, which includes exotic drugs, feeling that he is basically following his father's precepts to their ultimate conclusion. Jurgen and Paul both sympathize with what they describe as their fathers' dawning awareness of nihilisrh in sectors of the country and which they feel bound to combat. Of the same cloth as their fathers, these young men hardly regret the reserve which holds them at a distance from them; they admit that it is easier to talk to their mothers, who, unlike their fathers, are able actually to make them feel bad, who can, in turn, be made to cry, and who can be asked to give them what they would like to have. They think of their mothers as emotional, sensitive, and volatile in contrast to their well-controlled, formidable fathers. In spite of the professed warmth of feeling attributed to their mothers, neither Paul nor Jurgen can give many instances in which this has manifested itself. Demonstrativeness is clearly not part of either family's style; and if it ever has been, the sons seem to have forgotten it as quickly as possible. In their youth the mothers of both Jurgen and Paul were the fine, strong, energetic, outgoing, community leaders or college graduates one would have expected to make a suitable match for the men who were to become models of the American dream come true.

Paul and Jurgen reflect in themselves the happy outcome of the union between such vital personalities and of the advantageous family circumstances. They are good-looking chaps, well mannered, confident of themselves and their future even though both are in the midst of a transitional period, aware of inner changes and of ambiguities, but welcoming these in a mood of adventure as a widening of their horizons and the opening of doors onto sights that will be pleasing. They are athletes, achieve a good grade average although the competition is quite fierce, and they carry a heavy academic load. Their parents support them at the university (although Jurgen's parents do not approve of his drug use and therefore pay only his tuition and a basic allowance for food and essentials—by design not enough for his two motorcycles, his living outside the dormitory in a commune, and certainly not for the illicit drugs).

In one sense one can say that Jurgen stumbled into his drug career by following his elder brother's footsteps. Like him, he became an athlete and was a member of the school football team; also like his older brother, he became a discipline problem in junior high school and was picked up by the police, together with some friends, for drinking beer in a car. His parents did not discipline him harshly for his continued alcoholic binges, for apparently they had found punishment ineffective with the elder son (who did not go on to the use of exotic drugs, however). Jurgen and his friends found their fun and excitement in drinking themselves into a stupor and, on occasion, driving around in stolen cars. Jurgen also smoked to excess in company with his "elite" friends, all sons of the wealthy. His drug career gained momenttum in high school, where he drank more frequently and heavily. At the same time, he gave up smoking as he made the varsity team and tried to live up to its code. This did not last for long. He became increasingly bored—though he mentions that his boredom had already started in kindergarten—but at the time he did not know how to label that discontent. The more bored he became, the more he was moved to copy his friends who were already trying pep pills, codeine cough medicine, and phenobarbital. About then it dawned on him that he (and his group was different from the rest of the students who liked school. In conversation he does not say much about his growing awareness of alienation; he does not dwell on the rise of his sense of difference and discontent, but he does say that he was upset enough to try to "drink his problem away." That only aggravated the situation. His parents then transferred him to a private military prep school. He was able to embrace its strict code for a while until once again he became "intolerably bored" and, together with new friends, passed the time by taking phenobarbital stolen from a fellow student who had obtained the drug from his physician father. Jurgen dates his real involvement with exotic drugs from that time. It was at the military academy that he made friends with student activists ( albeit covert rebels then), who smoked marijuana at their bull sessions. He was soon deeply involved. Later on, during vacation, he did not return home but instead lived with his friends in an apartment where they systematically tried all the pills and drugs any of them could obtain. He says that one of their suppliers ". . . used to motorcycle to the apartment with a shoebox. He would hold open the shoebox, which was filled with pills, and say, 'Take all you want, but don't mix the colors.'" In the fall Jurgen returned to school, where he joined his activist friends and continued to smoke marijuana heavily but intermittently. He was then seventeen. To combat the boredom of dormitory life, he "buried himself in literature." This failed and he returned to marijuana. He contends that he and his friends managed to "function quite well while stoned" (on from two to six "joints" a day) ; but, nevertheless, they were discovered. A few were expelled; the rest were disciplined. Jurgen was put on probation and was allowed to graduate at the end of the year. He spent the first week after graduation camping with his friends in the woods near home, smoking a mixture of marijuana and cocaine most of the time, and trying out LSD. LSD produced a "tremendous revelation" which started him on his current adventure with oriental philosophy and existentialism The rest of the summer he spent in communal living with a group of about twenty to twenty-five young men and women, all of them constantly "high on acid." (He states they "dropped acid every two or three days.") For a week they tried heroin. They took methedrine ("speed"), used "pot" constantly, and went to shows and jazz concerts "stoned out of their minds," giving drugs to the doormen to get in free. Jurgen and his friends then began dealing in illicit drugs. His income from peddling reached $1,000 one month. When he came to the university in the fall, he once again joined the activist students, with whom he continued to smoke marijuana socially. He also pursued his LSD interests and hopes to try mescaline soon. The other mind-altering drugs have palled on him as these are not in vogue at the university. When he is in the mood for them, he goes to a nearby campus where he finds friends with whom to "shoot speed, heroin, and Demerol." Paradoxically, he does not find these to his taste. His experiences with LSD continue to stimulate interest in matters transcendental and have led him to the writings of oriental mystics and to try out Yoga and Tantric meditation. He has also visited one of the local Buddhist chantresses, and found that her recital of the mantras put him into a trance state that surpassed the visions he had had under LSD. In spite of this, he has no intention of visiting her again but plans to continue his use of marijuana. He is dropping to more potent substances. He admits that he has to be cautious, because he has been arrested for narcotics possession and sale and is now out on bail. The arrest upset him so that upon release he went to his room and proceeded to take five bumper-to-bumper trips on "acid" in order to think the whole matter over. After his arrest he also had a violent scene with his father. Both parents were deeply shocked. Jurgen believes that the shock has been a good thing for their relationship. He claims that his parents now consider him more of a person in his own right, one living his own life independently from theirs. It may also be that the emotional tumult which followed the discussion about his drug use convinced Jurgen that his father, usually calm and rational, actually did care for him very much since that imperturbable fellow so lost control that he wept. Jurgen was pleased to see he had "gotten through" to his father. In the past it had been only his mother who would get upset over him. His father talked things over logically, not only with Jurgen but also with his mother; and, incidentally, he was able to bring her to tears with the invincible correctness of his argumentation. Ever since the arrest and explosion, Jurgen considers his relation to his parents as "groovy."

Paul, on the other hand, needs no such proofs of love. He has always been able to get his parents shouting mad. Furthermore, his father and mother were always home when he was growing up, while Jurgen's father's business required prolonged trips and his mother's charitable and committee work took her outside the home. Later, of course, Jurgen himself was sent off to private school. Even now, Jurgen is farther from home than is Paul, whose family lives close by, visits him every other week, and lends him the family car for the weekends. Paul goes home about once a month; Jurgen only for some holidays. One senses that there is a more intense attachment between Paul and his parents than there is in the case of Jurgen, even though the latter reports far less friction—with one major exception—between himself and his family.

Paul says that his father's main interest is to put his children through good colleges and to see that they have an easier life than he had when he was making his Horatio Alger climb. Jurgen's father, on the other hand, is too absorbed in business, too "tiredly energetic" to dedicate himself to his children's lives. Nevertheless, Jurgen describes an idyllic family life and a perfect family much in the same manner that he describes his friends as members of an "elite" or otherwise superior group. Jurgen's picture of himself depends very much on his belief in the excellence of his associates. There is another aspect as well: the only time that Jurgen "lost his cool" during our conversations was when he was asked to discuss family troubles. He had graciously assured us that he would talk about anything and that there were no problem areas. Yet he was mildly annoyed and politely sarcastic when we touched upon the distasteful business of his allowance from home and of how his father acted in a superior manner to his mother. Anyone talking to Jurgen must be impressed with how he shows himself and his associates in the best possible light, with his social grace, cooperativeness, capacity as a raconteur, and his charm and warmth. Given these, and what the researchers (Seeley, Sim, and Loosley, 1956) in Crestwood Heights consider general to upper-middle-class suburbia—namely, the formation in childhood of a salable self-image, a persona which becomes a commodityl for the social market place—one can readily see the reason for Jurgen's resistance whenever he is invited to discuss tensions that mar this picture.2

Paul makes no effort to prove how groovy his family is. For one thing, he is in the process of differentiating himself from his parents so that, by now, their personal goodness or badness is their own and no reflection on him. For another, he is not interested in what or who he is or in putting only his best foot forward. Furthermore, he really enjoys his family and has grown up in a setting where his parents were home evenings, weekends, and vacations. His father also organized the Little League and taught all the kids how to pitch, while his mother kept score; she was also the neighborhood den mother for Cub Scouts. Paul says his mother understands children because she has always been with them so much. Jurgen's family was certainly less child centered and less cohesively organized as well, at least from a child's eye view. Yet both childhoods, to hear the reports, were equally happy. Jurgen's account is of a cloudless sky in a radiant childhood without memory of sadness, fear, or disappointment; he had a family without harsh discipline and sleep without nightmares. All Jurgen remembers, in terms of clear events, are items such as his putting on the golf course or beating his father in a game while his mother practiced tennis. He also remembers, with some pride in his mother's strength and devotion, how she used to carry him in her arms, walking him up and down for a long time when he was very small and could not set-de down to sleep. Of punishment meted out, of disharmony and anger, he can call but little to a reluctant mind. On occasion, his parents talked over his minor infringements of rules; of course, later, when he engaged in more serious misdemeanors (stealing cars, drunk driving without a license, doing badly in school), his parents would attempt to control his behavior, but not harshly; and, to be sure, they did not succeed.

Paul's parents were, in his eyes, rather intolerant and overcontrolling. They did not respect his opinions, nor did they trust him very far, jnsisting that he be home at certain hours, inform them where he went and with whom, and tell them exactly what he had done. If he had not done his homework, his outside activities were restricted and he was not allowed to use the family car. He recalls spankings and adds, ruefully, that it was not only his father who took a hand in disciplining the children. Once, as a little tyke, he made off with a piece of candy and had to endure a long lecture from his father, which he has not yet forgotten. That was his last delinquency. He considers his childhood a happy one, full of small worms and snails to be collected and examined, with wilderness outings with his parents on weekends and summer camping trips with much fishing and hiking, swimming and sailing.

Nowadays, he finds himself in some disharmony with his family, for he tries out his newly acquired perspectives on them and finds them falling on deaf ears. Paul feels that his father has not given the burning issues of today enough consideration, that he gives only lip service to the ideals of equality and integration. However, he thinks of his father as an honorable man who acts according to his conscience. One senses that Paul does have to work rather hard at finding fault with his father's point of view since they both are rather staunch middle-ofthe-roaders; yet the son is more optimistic about the possibilities of reform.

We have mentioned in passing that both Paul and Jurgen admire their fathers. Although Paul speaks of disagreements between himself and his father, his own goals have been for a long time exactly those that his father had for himself when he was a young man and dreamt of becoming a marine biologist. Paul's father was not able to realize his dreams because of his early struggles to make a living.

With Jurgen, matters may be fundamentally no different, but on the surface, at least, there does appear to be a divergence between his and his father's aspirations. Jurgen will admit that he may—a long time from now when he is old, over thirty, that is—return to the fold to become a businessman as his father would have him be. Meanwhile, his life and he himself are the diametric opposite of his parent's. Typically, he is interested in "soft-headed," subjective enterprises foreign to his father's interests: drugs, meditation, jazz music, trance states. He surprised his patriotic brother, who is serving in Vietnam, by turning in his draft card; he also participates in activist sit-ins occasionally, as the spirit or his friends move him, and goes on selected protest marches. In school he tries to take only those subjects which fit in with his immediate concerns. He can be found in classes of oriental philosophy, film making (which may become his major), and creative writing. He speaks with disdain of required courses which do not touch him in a subjective, emotional way; the current term of derogation for them is that they are "irrelevant."

Jurgen is unusually bright; studying has always been easy for him. When he applies himself, he is able to make very good grades; but subject matter outside his prevailing range of interest has always been neglected. Teachers with whom he does not have a personal relationship cannot get him to do the work. He may cut classes, arrive "stoned out of his mind" on marijuana, or if he does any work at all, he may substitute for the assignment a topic that happens to touch him personally—a discussion on why Socrates should have disobeyed unjust laws instead of allowing justice to take its own course, for example, when instead his comments should have been on the relationship between Socrates and the sophists. When Jurgen does become involved with a given subject matter, he is capable of turning out a respectable piece of work, not necessarily in the spirit in which his professors would have him go about it, but with his own, always distinctive, and sometimes even distinguished, idiosyncratic interpretation. His grades in individual courses reflect this, whereas his grade-point average, which is slightly above the norm, does not. Had Jurgen been sent to progressive schools in which the emphasis is to bring out creative and original abilities in students, centering the teaching around their own areas of interest, he would have been outstanding. As it is, his career through conventional high and prep schools and now in the university follows an up-and-down course, with so many hair's-breadth escapes among the steep precipices he skirts that one is surprised to find him still in college.

Without question he has a number of genuine intellectual interests and in the university his voyage of discovery includes philosophy, poetry, and literature. He has come to admire Hermann Hesse, Newman, Marcuse, Sartre, and Ginsburg. Closer to home, he admires a film professor, himself a fine artist, who knows how to get the best out of his most erratic students. Depending on his other professor's tolerance, Jurgen may also get a high grade for his quite unconventional essay on oriental thought. He will need all the good grades he can collect to offset the incompletes he is amassing. Another plus in Jurgen's life is that since he has come to the university, some of his poetry has been published in the school paper as well as in one of the little magazines. His English professor may include one of his short stories in a publication of student writings. In spite of all this, Jurgen is seriously considering dropping out of school, at least for a little while "to see where his nose will lead him." Perhaps he'll start on his voyage this summer and return for the fall term; perhaps, he'll stay away longer. Who knows? Meanwhile, as we have seen, he is doing well enough in the extremely competitive and demanding university he attends.

Like Jurgen, Paul is doing well, even if not brilliantly. He is a B student. Like Jurgen, Paul is also critical of some of his classes; however, his objections are that the subject matter is either poorly taught or is unnecessary for his career plans Unlike Jurgen, he has chosen "hardheaded" science classes which will allow him to become a marine biologist—a career combining his enthusiasm for various swimming and crawling creatures with his enjoyment of outdoor activities. Paul was on the high school swimming team and is still in training. Exploration of the inner space, or world, does not fascinate him as it does Jurgen, who prefers the tale of Steppenwolf to the tale of Seawoq. Yet Jurgen is a good athlete too; but sports take a very secondary place in his life, far behind his search for meanings, for esthetic and sensual pleasures, and his religious and political concerns.

For both young men the past has been benign—it is true that Jurgen has skirted disaster from time to time, but so far he has escaped unscathed. It appears he will even beat the narcotics charges now against him. Let us see how the two of them tackle the business of fashioning their future lives. Paul knows exactly where he is going, what steps will lead there, and enjoys the prospects of a profession that will bring him status, respect, money, and interesting work. The hours will be arduous and the program of studies required will be hard, but as it is in line with his natural bent for science, he looks forward to it.

Jurgen enjoys the anticipation of going into the unknown, for he has no definite plans other than to let himself be carried along the stream of events wherever it takes him. Anxiety as well as pride can be detected over this ambiguous adventure, so different from the serious business of ascending the straight-and-narrow path to success his father chose, with goals firmly in view and no deviations allowed,

Perhaps Jurgen feels there is no challenge in traveling the same path, especially since it stretches out so smoothly before him. The security it offers is unbearably boring. How can there be conquest when someone else has laid the garlands of victory at one's feet? Too, that earlier victor, his father, though he may be followed, cannot be surpassed. Jurgen can never be Horatio Alger and achieve his father's national reputation, for birth prevents him from beginning at the bottom. Still, there is a way to be someone special, not by competing or by copying, but by being different. He need not follow the path, in the Christian metaphor, of active seeker but can let the river of life carry him, in the oriental metaphor. Yet, a Western child after all, he casts himself into the river, but once there looks forward to uncharted experiences, to new discoveries. In his eyes he is also a pioneer, an explorer now of inner experience and of the immediate present; he considers himself in his way as vigorous an explorer as his striving father before him, who, in his youth, also could not know where his journey would lead even though the goal itself was certain.

For Jurgen there is danger on the frontiers of the mind and psychopharmacology and in the optimistic belief that one can expand consciousness or find a chemical nirvana. The danger is that achievement may be the illusion of vanity or drug-induced euphoria. It would not be his first illusion, for he has long been led into mischief and intoxication with only visions as guides. Even now, it is illusion which shapes his view of his own life, for we do not believe the harmony of his childhood. Unnoticed by him, two themes recur in his story which sound discordant notes. One is his preoccupation with achieving forgetfulness; the other is his fight against boredom. It is remarkable how little Jurgen does recall; and he complains about his memory. Considerable repression must be at work when one so bright, so capable, and so creative has so little to report of his childhood, which, after all, was not so very long ago. Had Jurgen chosen to mislead us deliberately, he would have found it very easy to regale us with an interesting and dramatic account. We believe that he is genuinely amnesic for most of what was significant in his past.

One of his stated aims in taking drugs is to help him concentrate on a single emotion or experience, to blot out all extraneous stimuli, feelings, and thoughts. Quite often he ends up stoned, totally unconscious, together with his friends. In fact, one of the few problems which he has mentioned is the inability to concentrate, to shut out unwanted problems, seemingly irrelevant remembrances, and emotions.
His drug use, whatever else it represents, is an ally in his struggle to -
keep his consciousness focused on one single content, a struggle which entails attempts to abandon much that belongs to the past. One infers that bygone unpleasant events and painful conflicts have indeed occurred which are better forgotten.

From the clinical point of view, not too much credence can be given to the one-dimensional family- and self-portrait Jurgen has conjured. We may speculate, calling to our aid the second theme which recurs in Jurgen's life: boredom. Recall that he said that nursery school must have been "intolerably boring" but that he did not know what boredom was at the time. Certainly by junior high, boredom had become a recognized and unwelcome guest. The state is one in which he "feels nothing," in which he has "lost touch with things." Boredom happens to him when he is "doing things that mean nothing"—for example, some of the required courses produce boredom when they "don't mean anything to me as a person."

We mentioned that in junior high he and his friends stole cars for a lark. As Jurgen describes it, there was more in this for him, something of a cure for his boredom, for "It was at least feeling something." Football, too, was thrilling for the same reason; he says once again,

"It was feeling something." He looks on his riding a motorcycle in the same light, considers it to be dangerous, and therefore "forces you to be more aware, and especially when the traffic is dense, there is the thrill of danger. Interesting for a while. To maintain attention against death, one must be aware of everything. It's a kind of meditation." During meditation, he says, he is flooded with experiences and feelings. That is not boring. Nor is taking drugs boring. He explains that it is "a synthetic way of creating something to feel, like taking methedrine." Jurgen thinks that bad experiences during meditation or "bad trips" are good in the sense that "that is the way it should be." He adds, "Now the thrill of danger is transferred to realizing that everything is good and bad." By that he means his life is satisfactory when he feels the heights of pain and joy and intolerable when everything is smooth. Right now he describes his life as going extremely well and badly at the same time—it is "as it should be."

The notion of extremes of feelings is romantic; it has been beautifully described by Goethe : "Jubilant to the heavens, despondent unto death, such is the heart of one in love." Most Americans, however, seem content without this Dionysian exaltation. Why does Jurgen continue to yearn so many years for intensity of experience to the point of actually risking his health and life—not to mention his invitation of other disasters, as he walks the tightrope of being almost expelled from school and almost being sent to prison?

Jurgen has not told us much that would explain these feelings and actions. We shall therefore present our own speculation, not with a claim to truth but as a working hypothesis. What Jurgen describes as boredom would be labeled by a clinician as subacute depression, a dysphoric state which apparently began when Jurgen was quite young. He can overcome it temporarily by drugs, either by being stoned out of his mind or by the opposite effect of intense concentration. The latter state he can also achieve by meditation or by placing himself in imminent danger. He has recently obtained longer-lasting relief by the intense emotional interaction between himself and his family, as when the outburst between father and son over the drug issue took place. It appears that the cure for Jurgen's dysphoria consists in ( 1 ) forgetting and (2 ) emotional intensity, or more specifically, emotional intensity between himself and his father. Turning the puzzle around, we deduce that the origins of his dysphoria lie in Jurgen's relation to his father. We find further support for this notion in the two childhood memories

Jurgen has been able to dredge up. Both are early scenes depicting parental concern over him. One is of his parents waiting for many hours with him at the pediatrician's office when he had been slightly injured; the other is of his mother patiently walking up and down with baby Jurgen in her arms to help him go to sleep.

If one were to probe more deeply than we have been able to in our conversations with Jurgen, we would explore the possibility with him that he is suffering from a "loss of object cathexis," as the psychoanalysts would put it. In ordinary language, the inference would be—to be verified later by Jurgen himself through many additional talks—that, indifferent though he may seem to his mother and father and unbeknownst to himself, he actually suffers from a sense of loss in the absence of a flow of emotions between himself and his parents, especially his father. He feels as though they were quasi-dead. He is mourning their nonexistence, though, of course, they are alive. What Jurgen indicates is that their relationship to him has not been as alive as he needs it to be, except on those occasions when he manages to provoke them into an emotional storm.

Why is it his relationship to his father which Jurgen feels to be especially blighted? He has told us that when he was little his father was at home in the evenings and helped bring up the children. It was only later, when Jurgen was about seven or eight, that his father began to absent himself for long periods, sometimes for three months at a time. Weekends and evenings were spent on business. Is it not likely that Jurgen felt this absence as a loss? His father was absent not only physically but in other, more subtle ways as well; for in his self-controlled, unemotional, and rational approach to his family, it was hard for Jurgen to discern any warmth. He thought of his father as a distant, uninvolved figure. In a word, he believed that his father "felt nothing" for him; and now to "feel nothing" is the very state of boredom Jurgen finds so "intolerable" and combats in the various ways we have described. We cease our speculation at this point as we cannot go beyond it to gain a more profound perspective, nor do we have any way of validating it from the conversations we had with Jurgen. We believe we have presented a heuristic interpretation, limited though it be, of Jurgen's past—mostly forgotten—and the present. What about the future?

We have already discussed Jurgen's predilection for charting an indeterminate course, for uncertainty, and for leaving all the doors unlocked in case a kind wind of fate would blow one of them open to some unforeseen enchantment. In a sense, the future does not exist any more than does the past. Jurgen lives not for the moment but in the moment. His time perspective and definition of selfhood are those of Sartre, in whose philosophy, expressed in its most extreme and allegorical form, man in his manner of dying determines whether he is a hero or a coward. So Cicero, inviting death fearlessly, thereby placed heroism as the indelible stamp upon the whole rest of his previously hesitant and vacillating conduct, according to Sartre's doctrine. With each engagement, with each new encounter, a new man emerges. Jurgen thus feels himself free to become at will what he chooses to be from instant to unconnected instant. Another illusion? Perhaps. Yet, without the conception, without the dream, the impossible will never be a reality. Jurgen is trying to create what the conventional world holds impossible: the phoenix ever renewed, all roads open.

Jurgen subscribes to the New Left, occasionally actively, but more often as a critical sympathizer. He is neither leader nor permanent cadre. He subscribes to Mao's doctrine of "permanent revolution"; and one can see, given his attention to the immediate an$;1 his faith in himself as phoenix ever renewed, that he is consistent in so doing. He is convinced of the need for constant change, rebirth, purification, not just as social policy but as a personal demand. Why? Perhaps to avoid stagnation, to avoid becoming part of that which has just been denounced, to prevent being bypassed and outdated by a younger generation following but a very few years behind, and to avoid the depression of an inescapable course which contains the trap of empty material success, that illusion which Jurgen, like Siddharta, readily diagnoses. Perhaps, too, Jurgen's absorption in the moment is a passive adaptation to the accelerating speed of social and technological change to which his generation is exposed. Life may be, after all, what his friends imply: a series of unrelated, uncontrollable, and unpredictable "happenings" arising from revolutionary transformations in his surroundings. Perhaps by making their own tiny "happenings," his friends maintain the illusion of control, but at a deeper level their choice of entertainment terms betrays their uncertainty.

In Jurgen's writings—and he has considered a career as a serious writer—one gains a feeling for his immediacy and for his attempt to dissolve the ordinary categories of space and time. Let us quote, with his permission, from the first page of a novel he has begun. It is about himself.

. . . everything is always spinning so many times faster than life. So many recordable incidents are falling into my conscious awareness and then slipping out again just as simply as they had come. People drift in and out of their everyday noday things . . . Here I sit confusing life with my life . . . Through all the confusion our cheshire cat keeps reminding us that "We're all Mad" . . . Meanwhile back in insanity, we all try to keep our sanity, which we never seem to really want anyway . . . Constantly . . . the record player spins on our lives. Which brings me back where this whole insane thing began. Now where did it all begin . . . ?
I never have been able to remember . . . and I'm always smoking a cigarette. Funny how cigarettes last forever . . . but they're always there. Just burning down. Things have a different meaning now. Maturity's eyes have-have-have changed my perspective. It's all your point of view. But view of what? And that brings me back. Music—it's always . . . It's always.

From a historical perspective, Jurgen's attitudes and ideals are by no means without antecedents. Although relating the new to the old is not an act of which Jurgen would approve—with him history begins With his own birth and is made only by his private experiences—
we think it is of value. Jurgen's nihilism, for example, including his one-dimensional concept of time and his denial of past and future, aspires to the breaking of form which Nietzsche's Zarathustra preaches and which the German existentialist Heidegger propounds in his theme of the "negation of negation." That theme is in vogue today on many fronts, the arts especially, where artists experiment with the destruction of forms, which, instead of leading to new forms, moves on then to destroy the earlier product which itself was in the destruction of form—that is, the destruction of destruction. ( See Kahler, 1968.) Jurgen as artist, as well as Jurgen as philosopher and Jurgen as experiencing man, is seeking the negation of negation. Insofar as what he is doing is derived from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and artists who have gone before, it is, ironically, a form of approach which he has learned. With his optimistic nihilism, Jurgen hopes to bypass the conventional categories of sensing and responding so as to overcome the limits of time and space and destroy the ordinarily perceived and logically categorized barriers between beholder and that beheld, between the adorer and God, between madness and sanity, or reality and dream. Such aspirations are supremely individualistic, for they assume that a man, one man, because he wishes to, may do and become what other, ordinary men have tried and failed.

Kant in his lifetime dealt at length with seeking final truths through metaphysical speculations by means of the use of a mental apparatus fit for processing empirical data. He concluded that man's machinery is not adequate for the task, which is best abandoned. Later philosophers disregarded the Kantian warnings and sought superhuman understanding, as in Zarathustra, for example. Paradox enters, for these understandings are to be found in the destruction of reason itself. Jurgen feels himself to be superman during hallucinogenic experiences when he is one and the same as God, when the supreme power of feeling and understanding illuminates him. It is an experience not found through intellect or even by means of the ordinary mystical seeking—the latter depending on concentration, discipline, control, and other qualities much like work. Jurgen accepts that his metaphysical attainments depend on the negation of forms and, insofar as form impedes and rules are expressions of impeding forms, he must 136 anarchic. Without rules or a hierarchy of values imposed from without —whether from the wisdom of culture or simply from the power of the Establishment—he must denounce such rules. Simultaneously, faced with the fact that he shall, as a living creature, act, he must select among acts or justify those acts taken. The existential solution, which has arisen partly from a counterreaction to Kant, is accepted by Jurgen. There are no external values which dictate what to do, no "categorical imperatives." Simply to choose any "engagement" is sufficient—that is, an act justifies itself. For example, one of Sartre's heroes is approved for drowning some kittens. Jurgen also wants to be "engaged" and prides himself on belonging to the New Left, whose other members join with him in espousing the destruction of forms. There is an important difference between his activism and that of Mao, whom he admires. With Marxists the ends justify the means, whereas for Jurgen the means are the ends themselves.

One of Jurgen's acts of engagement was to join an antiwar march. The marchers were attacked by a motorcycle gang, one of whom rode his cycle straight at Jurgen. He would have been badly hurt except for the intervention of the police, who protected him. He does not recall being afraid, but he remembers wanting, furiously, to kill the cyclist. After that, Jurgen decided he was not nonviolent and, furthermore, that he wanted no part in dangerous engagements. He, nevertheless, turned in his draft card to symbolize his protest against the war in Vietnam. His next political steps are uncertain. He thinks of leaving the country to avoid a prison sentence, should he refuse induction; yet he realizes to do so would make him a permanent expatriate, a role he does not want. He is also unhappy about looming punishment on the drug-sale count. He finds, ironically, that even though he has wanted to remain "uncommitted," his actions have led him into very serious predicaments which jeopardize rather than maximize his freedom.

Paul has no such paradoxes to resolve. Under the impact of his university experiences, new friends, new ideas, exposure to activism, and the freeing effect of being away from direct parental supervision, he feels himself gradually evolving from a moderate conservative toward being a liberal Democrat. He does not consider going as far as the activists, nor does he count any of them among his friends, but he would like to see an end to segregation and is sympathetic to the Black Student Union on the campuses.

Comparing the attitudes of the two young men, one senses that Paul is really trying to think matters politic out for himself without particularly trying to annoy his parents. In Jurgen's case, one has the impression that he is not only working through various possibilities of improving the world but also by his actions is satirizing his parents' liberalism. To paraphrase him, "We are putting into action what our parents were preaching in the Thirties." "Preaching" is the word he underlines to show his disdain for their lip-service principles. Such overtones are absent in what Paul says about his political growth in relation to his parents.

Implicit in Jurgen's position is that he and his friends are very different from—and superior to—their parents in the ideological-philosophical sphere. He accepts the generation gap as a phenomenon and would deem it desirable. The novel, the young, the innocent, and the idealistic are the wave of the future capable, perhaps, of unsullying the tawdry machinations of a generation of money-making, war-instigating hypocrites. Although Jurgen did not say it, we believe he thinks of history as a sequence of ever more monstrous errors. To escape the inherited calamities, the sins of the father, the generation gap must be a chasm across which misery and ugliness cannot pass. On the young side of the gap, new history will be created and it will honor gentleness, love, and beauty, not as form but as experience. Yet, as we sense it----albeit from the corrupted side of the crevasse—there is in Jurgen a nostalgia for things that were rather than for things that will be. Consider his appearance when he is not required to look square: his long hair, colorful shirts, and other finery suggestive of the dandy, nineteenth-century style.

His interest in literature and music—not to say the films—gives him a poetic stance, one, we believe, that is derived in part from the radical romantic revolution which evolved in England during the late part of the eighteenth century. Briefly, that spirit insisted upon the rights of man; furthermore, it insisted that government exists only to protect those rights, and that—after Rousseau—man is born noble and can be corrupted only by unnatural institutions. Men are brothers, and authority which destroys equality is intolerable. Thomas Paine said, ‘‘. . . a great part of what is called government is mere imposition." Godwin concluded in 1793 that all man-made institutions are shackles to be discarded. Shelley looked forward to the abolition of the tyrannies of religion, custom, and government. Coleridge, in the fashioning of a concept of mind itself made in God's image, denied Kant and embraced metaphysics and, in his poetry, sought to dim the line between the real and unreal. His "Kubla Khan," perhaps inspired by an opium-induced dream, is the essence of that romanticism. These poets strove for mystic ecstasy, too. Wordsworth's rapture is an example. The romantic poets were, furthermore, interested in mind itself—in its analysis and in confessions. That interest led some—for example, De Quincy in England, Baudelaire in France—to explore the mind with drugs—opium and hashish—out of which literary creations grew. This is not to ignore the immense importance of alcohol for most Englishmen after the mid-1700's. There was also a fascination with other states of consciousness, such as the excitement over hypnosis demonstrated by enthusiasts from Mesmer to Janet to Freud. The excitement over mind in all its various states of consciousness and in experience for its own sake was an aspect of the romantic period.

We propose that Jurgen is, in part, a romantic poet without history to tell him from whence his poesy came. This same ahistorical stance also requires him not to know that his nostalgia is for causes already espoused and in some ways irretrievably lost. Wordsworth and Coleridge adored the French Revolution, but after the Terror they became conservatives. Hypnotism was exciting, but Mesmer proved a fraud. Opium and hashish were delights, but not for long, whereas alcohol, commoners' blessing, proved commoners' curse as well. As for the dissolution of enslaving government, Marx and Lenin conceived how with Communism the state would wither and die--an advocacy to which the USSR cannot in good faith testify. As for the syndicalists and anarchists who emerged later in the 1800's, their myths have also grown to weeds. Jurgen, not knowing these things, is not simply an old-fashioned boy but one who, having set himself the task of reinventing civilization, will have little time left to advance it.

As one would expect, Paul and Jurgen occupy their leisure in quite different styles. Jurgen is busy earning money to support his drug use, which costs him from $25 to $50 a month. Since his parents refuse to support it, he gets money from selling drugs to students and by working in one of the university laboratories. He carries a full academic load as well, which means his leisure is limited. What he does is to enjoy being with his friends in the small "commune" in which he lives, where music, marijuana, sex, talk, and parties are ways of having fun. Paul's leisure life is centered around his residence as well, but he lives in on-campus quarters. In addition, sports are very important to him. He dates girls, but he feels a bit uneasy about boy-girl matters. He recalls that his parents were so restrictive—quizzing him closely about each date as to where he had been and what he had done and insisting on a midnight return throughout his high school years—that he never brought a girl home for his family to meet for fear they might embarrass him and her. His parents were afraid he "might do something" with girls, not that they talked directly to him about sex or ever taught him the facts of life. He did not "do anything" and while in high school considered intercourse immoral. Now he is not so sure, although still in conflict: "If I really liked a girl, it (sex) wouldn't seem important, for you can love a girl without it; but if I see a girl crossing the street, cute and neat . . . that's what I want to do. When I know and like her, it goes down in value to me."

Jurgen, more sophisticated, is living with Jennifer, with whom he has been sleeping for some months. He is fond of her, and they share money and marijuana. He says they usually do not make love when smoking marijuana since one's prevailing mood can make sex with pot much worse, as well as much better. Jennifer is not the first girl Jurgen has had intercourse with, although his first sexual encounters were "disastrous." In high school among his friends on the football team, the prevailing code was "for all the rods to screw every chick." Jurgen went along—"It had to be done"—but he could never quite bring himself to complete the act. Somewhere in the middle of it, he was struck with the absurdity of it all and "everything kind of dropped off." The girls could not understand why, but they seemed not to mind his failure since they were scared, too. His parents, like Paul's, had not told him anything about the facts of life; sex was never discussed at home. However, his parents made no fuss about undressing; and everybody was casual about nudity. His grade school friends saw to the rest, telling him "horrendous things." He cannot remember conversations about sex in prep school. He does not consider that his lack of detailed knowledge has ever hampered his life, nor is he concerned about it.

He found his first intercourse "enlightening," for it taught him that sex could be both ugly as well as beautiful. He felt guilty for not caring about the girl herself—"what was inside the chick's head"— and found it unsatisfactory to just use her to "let out his sexual desires." Nothing ever came of their meeting; he has not seen her since. Before he came to the university, Jurgen had lived with a girl for a few months. This was a far better experience for both. They did not rush into sex, had been living in the same room, sleeping in the same bed, and smoking marijuana together for some time before they had intercourse.

Jurgen had one nightmarish sexual adventure during a school vacation; it was a descent into the underworld, perhaps a dream—although he tells it as an actual event. This happened during an earlier experiment in communal living, on an afternoon when everybody in the apartment had left and he was alone. He had not tried heroin yet and decided this was the opportune moment. By mistake he "snorted" a whole package, thinking it was a very small dose, and passed out. Three hours later, he opened his eyes to find someone sitting on his lap. It was a black girl. She commanded him to "ball her." He followed suit as best he could in his semi-drugged state, feeling degraded and disgusted: "It was just purely the physical thing . . . the miserable, horrendous, weak situation." When he was fully conscious again, his friends assured him that it had not been a dream, that the whole thing had really happened. This was his last venture into casual sex relations.

When he came to the university, he eschewed the usual form of dating around. By this time he had gotten away from his football team's "playboy" attitude and was looking instead for someone with whom he could "function as a person" and be friends with over a period of time. In Jennifer he found a girl who would go to movies with him on the spur of the moment, study with him, have a beer or smoke marijuana, or walk to the library with him if they happened to meet. No advance notice was needed. It was not dating in the usual sense. In this spontaneous manner, they drifted into an intimacy.

One brief mention must be made about homosexuality. Paul has never considered this as a possibility. Jurgen has a more tolerant view of it by now than he did when a high school student. Many of his friends are homosexuals and have often tried to seduce him. Jurgen says the prospect does not appeal to him.

With regard to religion, the parents of both young men are Protestants. Both sons have only a philosophical interest in the Protestant religion; yet Jurgen is much more concerned with religious issues than is Paul. He reads books on Eastern meditation and is currently practicing Yoga and Tantrism. He attends courses at the Free University which deal with religion. Jurgen also has experienced mystic hallucinations. Not surprisingly, he thinks of himself as profoundly religious. Indeed, he claims he may give up the use of most drugs soon in favor of trance-induced mystic states. Paul, on the other hand, neither probes nor poses religious mysteries. A lukewarm Protestant, he has moved as far from his parents in religion—for they are reasonably strict observers—as he has in politics. It is no rebellion, but simply a loosening of ties compatible with the liberal irreligiosity of many of his student friends.

What about the future? There is no question that Jurgen's is at risk, at least as viewed in conventional terms. Expatriation, a prison sentence, drug dependency, a fall over the academic precipice should he encounter too many "irrelevant" courses: all are possibilities. Yet we have also seen his strengths, which are many. It is his drifting and "going with it" which make prediction uneasy. So, too, does the shallowness which we detect in his relations to friends and causes, for that is the essence of his "cool," his non-commitment. Yet in that same shallowness we detect a masquerade. Because he has not put his heart into it, because he does not take it too seriously himself, his emphasis on immediacy allows a different interpretation, for it may mean that right now simply does not count. Erikson (1968)  suggests that adolescents endure a moratorium before taking on adult roles. Indeed, the very notion of the university provides for much exploration before settling into one channel of life. Jurgen himself tells you, sheepishly, that when he receives his large inheritance, he does not plan to give it to the worthy causes his ideological beliefs recommend. He then adds that he will come into a large trust fund next year, which he knows he should give away. But he will not because some day he "might" have a family, and it is wise to plan for that. Listening carefully, watching closely, one detects a subtlety in his maneuvers which, while inviting risks, seek to avoid self-destruction. He is, after all, a suave and deceptive young man. Heroin is dangerous: he agrees that he will not use it again. The drug charges? Well, the family lawyer is working on it, and the chances are excellent that . . . . The draft card? Well, he has not really decided yet. . . . And so it goes.

Other Jurgens we have known are not so protected by their personal strengths, by superior social skills learned during the course of growing up in a social elite, or by a family which is in our Jurgen's case—and in spite of parental uncertainties and outside interéstsstable, cohesive, respected, responsible, and at least moderately affectionate. Those other Jurgens—for example, the pallid nightcrawlers, sick and unkempt, on the Haight-Ashbury scene, the still struggling students who are personally disorganized and without claim to stronger resources, or simply the young and foolish—are more likely to be victims of their own game.

As for Paul, we have given him less attention simply because he is the more solid and simple of the two, if it is "simple" to be a good citizen in good health moving along confidently without giving or receiving undue pain from his fellow man. Repression? Yes. Limitations? To be sure. A future too certain to be exciting? Quite likely. One may protest that Paul is dull at a party or even wish, when he is a student in class, that he might be more imaginative. But these are small complaints and most societies are pleased to have a solid core of citizens who, with good hearts, are pleased to work and to be alive.

In retrospect, what clinical inferences are to be drawn? First, and contrary to surface appearances, we propose that it is Paul who is the more independent. Paul was reared so closely to his family that peers have never exerted great pressures on him. Certainly they have not dictated his morals, his values, or his directions of experience. It is no accident that he has chosen friends whose codes are similar to those of his parents. That was partly his parents' supervision and partly, too, because he is a whole creature a-building. He does not need to be contrary or, more psychodynamically, to choose a social setting consonant with superego demands, or the demands of his conscience derived from parental teaching. Repression of undesirable impulses, clearly seen to be at work, has been reinforced, rather than challenged, by his peers. One here thinks of a total, balanced integration, not just of the intrapsychic structures of self, family, and surroundings. In any event, as Paul matures in school and tests life slowly, as he continues to differentiate himself from his parents without rancor or compulsive opposition, he is free to fashion standards and styles that fit him best. He is not and never has been a slave to conflicting or competing standards from peers, nor has he been dog-at-the-knee for their approval. One says "free to fashion" with strong qualification. His freedom will be limited by a strong superego and by a commitment to family, institutional, and cultural values, which he cannot and probably would not wish to escape.

Not so Jurgen on any count. With his mother and father often away, he was not closely supervised at home, nor did his parents have the energy or even the conviction that would have allowed them to mold him in directions deemed important or to stand against undesirable outside influences. They had not that simplicity, certainty, and firmne:Ss which Paul's parents had. Recall that Jurgen said his parents had given up disciplining him strictly after they sensed the failure of punishment to bring results with his heavy-drinking, then-delinquent, older brother. That brother is now a military officer with no illicit-drug use, sympathy for political anarchy, or present delinquency. Or so Jurgen reports. For Jurgen the rules were never as clearly defined or enforced as they were for his own brother—or for Paul. Yet Jurgen, too, in growing has had to act and in acting has developed guides, beliefs, and conceptions of value. But much of Jurgen's acting and orientation has been with and toward his peers, who then and now have helped him to constitute an idea of self and to provide him with his sense of worth. His parents, of course, have played such a role as well; but their distance and uncertainty have made his own response to them more uncertain and, as we have seen, a matter of anger and amnesia as well as of admiration. As Jurgen has grown away from them, much more fitfully than Paul and in a legal-social sense perhaps even dangerously, he has come to depend more and more on peers. Denouncing organization and rigidity, he has, nevertheless, required structures of a sort; and his definitions of what life and experience and being a person are all about have come from companions. Thus, distance from parents has meant more leaning on confreres, which, unadmitted by Jurgen, confines him to their shared postadolescent fashions, condemns him to discomfort from the ambiguity of standards none can acknowledge as "right," and may also have engaged him in specific dependencies on psychoactive drugs as such.

There is, in this regard, an additional variable which has contributed to Jurgen's vulnerability to nonfamily influences. It is pleasure. Recall that in Paul's case it was his parents who not only arranged for but also participated in the fun and leisure of his free time after school, on weekends, and on holidays. There was only one car in the family and Paul depended upon it—and his mother's driving—for outings and later, with his family's permission, for dates when he could drive himself. Even now his parents come to the university to bring him the car for his own weekend use. Since they could easily afford to get him a car, one sees in this a continuing control, as well as an opportunity for giving and receiving and for getting together as a family. Consequently, throughout most of his life Paul has looked for his primary source of gratification from his parents. Even now he does not expect his peer group to fill the void as Jurgen does.

Jurgen's situation was different. He attended private schools when quite young, and although his family got together—and still does—to celebrate major festivals and occasionally to have a party, their leisure-time activity was not an interdependent affair. It was rather a side-by-side arrangement, as well illustrated by the incident Jurgen recalls when he practiced his game while his mother practiced her own, and different one. So it came about that Jurgen shifted for himself—that is, he turned to his peer group as the primary source of pleasure. It is no wonder that for a long time now he has been dependent upon his friends for fun, derives his self-esteem from association with them, and is therefore doubly bound to their rules. Expressed in psychological language, it is the peer group which controls his libidinal and narcissistic supplies and is thus in a position to play a superego function. It determines what conduct will be experienced by him as pleasurable and as inviting derogation. His friends decide what is good and what is bad. Jurgen's peer group has arrogated to itself the traditional parental and authorial roles relinquished by his mother and father and other authorities dealing with him.

Jurgen's tale is replete with recollections of how he tried out first one and then another kind of conduct—however difficult or uncongenial—in accordance with the different groups he belonged to because "it was the thing to do." He and his friends got together to engage in this or that form of illegal pleasure, because the group wanted to.

We have noted that he does not have to struggle to emancipate himself from his parents as Paul does, for Jurgen was never much influenced by them. Jurgen, however, would have a more arduous task to free himself from peer-group codes; it would be difficult because the pressures are more diffuse and insidious and because they change depending on the group with which he is associated. Recall how he once followed the football team's credo and then abandoned it when he discovered that it was not as satisfactory as the activist's code. For a while it was the prep school spirit that inspired his performance, but not for long. Presently, he follows the lead of artists in the communications courses in which he is intensely interested. We here underline the fact that Jurgen's drug use, starting with cigarettes and alcohol, was initiated by his friends. It was as a group that they smoked secretly and drove about drunk in stolen automobiles. It was as a group that later they stole barbiturates and smoked marijuana and cocaine. It is with groups that he now uses and peddles illicit drugs.

Let us extrapolate from the Jurgens and the Pauls we have known. We suggest that the type of education which draws heavily on the notion of equals teaching equals, which rewards teamwork in play and work, and which frowns on solitary or individual enterprises from nursery school onward cannot but fail. "Failure" is defined here as the inability of education to transmit the history or value systems of our culture as such, the stewardship of which is vested in people who are older, more powerful, and different from the young. What parents, teachers, judges, doctors, policemen, or the rest of the bearers of tradition teach cannot be the same as that which a child's peers will value and teach him when they are left to their own enterprises.

The implications are many. Foremost, with regard to the use of dangerous or illicit drugs, it follows that if one does not wish one's children—or other people's children—to follow the expanding fashions which find the young playing with their brains as with a basement chemistry set, then one must see to it that one takes the trouble to tie children to the immediate family group by controlling the sources of pleasure as well as using the family as a vehicle for transmitting values and common sense. Common sense about drugs includes, at the very least, concern about taking risks, about pretending to be invulnerable, or about acting as if there were no tomorrow or tomorrow were not worth the trouble. It is also evident, we believe, that the family must consistently control behavior through the application of negative as well as positive sanctions. Furthermore, the parents themselves must serve as models to whom there are affectionate as well as simply proximate ties. As models, parents must teach sensible drug behavior through concrete personal example. From other data, reported here and elsewhere, we know that alcoholic parents put children in danger of alcoholism; tobacco-smoking parents teach their children to smoke; and marijuana-smoking parents are more likely to have children who smoke marijuana heavily; and finally, as Robins (1966) shows, sociopathic fathers produce sociopathic children. Clearly, then, the bad habits are easily transmitted. To get the good habits across means effort and non-abdication by parents to the tyranny of youthful peers.

We think one reason for the abdication of many parents, ieachers, and other elders is that in this youth-worshipping, change-oriented society the elders doubt themselves. They are ambivalent about holding or exercising authority and have placed an optimistic, admiring, and benevolent faith in the young, hoping that the clear-eyed innocent will do a better job. Certainly in a culture which changes daily it is imperative that youth be flexible, be prepared to adjust, be critical of that which no longer works or never did, be inventive, and avoid blind ties to styles of life which are either inappropriate or downright destructive. Granting the inevitability of new ways, one must not conclude that all of the old ways are expendable, that the great heritage of our civilization is without strength or merit, or that every social experiment will work simply because it is both new and idealized. To the contrary, most social experiments, like most evolutionary mutations or most laboratory experiments, will fail. If we are lucky, we know this in advance and prepare to learn rather than perish from the failures. Caryl Haskins (1968), president of the Carnegie Institution, has recently written:

As in biological evolution, effective social evolution must be at once radical and conservative, freely embracing the new yet scrupulously preserving basic and well-tested elements that have had high survival value in the past and which remain relevant to the present.
• . . In embracing new and experimental courses with the ardor that we must, we must not discard long-tested values and long-tried adaptive courses which, if they are lost, will only have, one day, to be re-won—and probably at enormous cost. . . • Successful adaptive evolution within any society can only be accomplished in the presence of as complete a nexus of communication among all parts of the social structure as can possibly be secured (p. 181) .

The elders—and we speak now of everyone with responsibility to the young—must not allow the young to stumble or to perish because of their ignorance of their history of either man or other evolving creatures. This means that communication between young and old must be enhanced, not restricted. We believe that teaching is one of those vital forms of communication. Necessarily, the teacher himself must have insight and wisdom and must not, through his teaching, simply perpetuate or even magnify error. Thus, the requirement for the elders is that they do have wisdom, which means, at the very least, insight, reflection, humility, and the capacity to recognize vanity and error in their own lives. Teaching itself is more than telling and certainly more than mechanical programs of instructions. It is human guiding; and guiding is more than recommending. It is seeing that the conditions for learning, for maturing, and for directed development exist.

What the personal histories of Paul and Jurgen teach is that children as well as nature abhor vacuums. If well-meaning but otherwise ineffective elders do not shape the child, then the child will seek his molding elsewhere. Should his random search not yield a mold, that child will be chaotic. We were talking to a hippie mother the other day, a girl just back from a "happening" for children in the Haight-Ashbury. There had been lollipops and soft drinks, and then a puppet show as the big event. The little ones had run wild, had thrown bottles at one another, had trampled on the lollipops and used them as spears, and in a grand finale had launched a cannibal attack on the puppets, tearing off their arms and legs. The mother was appalled by the savagery; it was not what her genuine gentleness had intended.

If fewer savages and fewer Jurgens—to avoid the risk of disaster—are to be produced, some major changes in education and child rearing are in order. We propose the following be considered:

That parents provide and control the majority of the pleasures for their children throughout childhood and the adolescent years. Thus, in addition to supervision, there must be conjoint fun in which the parents are pleasure-givers and not simply observers. The provision of pleasures becomes a sanction capable of being withheld so that, with punishment available as well, parental control is enhanced. This intense involvement also provides a deep source of affective ties. By parents we mean both parents, the implication of which is that the American father reconstitute his role as head of the family, director of activities, model for his sons, and partner in recreation and meaningful age-appropriate work with his children, not as a peer but as a leader.

That peer-group domination be reduced rather than increased and special efforts should be made to protect the child from the requirement that he adapt to each and every age-mate group. If peers provide fewer pleasures for one another acting as isolated groups but, rather, act more often as children integrated with other age levels and with institutional structures as well, it will be easier for the child to avoid peer domination and chameleon shifts in conduct. It would be in order that the separatist and centrifugal aspects of adolescent subcultures be countered at all levels, from the mass media to the intimate family.

That elders continue to dedicate themselves to teaching to the young the cultural wisdom they have learned. In the drug arena this means teaching the young that which is known about the safe uses of drugs, beginning at an early age. It should begin, for example, with prohibitions against access to the medicine chest and careful instruction in the dangers of aspirin, chocolate laxatives, and other remedies. The goal is to produce a generalized awareness that any drug which produces benefit is also likely to produce damage and that decisions to use such substances are not simply private choices but are also social acts subject to authoritative control during childhood and, then, during adulthood, to concern for the welfare of others as well as self-health. One sees the evidence for such teaching of drug use in the success of ethnic groups such as Italians and Jews, who learn early to use alcohol unemotionally and in integrated and controlled settings.

That the family be reconstituted by creating parents with confidence in their own knowledge and in their right to exercise authority as well as to grant freedoms—rather than further fragmentation of family responsibility through reliance on specialized agencies for taking over family functions (schools, welfare departments, mental-health organizations, recreation departments). We suggest that the competent child-rearing or child-supervising specialist in these many fine programs serve as consultants to families rather than as surrogate parents to other people's children. What are needed are programs of teaching, training, and confidence-building—many of which might also be psychotherapeutic—directed to parents themselves. In the drug arena one envisions course offerings and parent meetings sponsored by schools and PTA's, health and medical associations, women's and fraternal clubs, and other interested organizations, which can assist parents to expand their own capabilities for rearing children in this increasingly complex society. One envisions programs designed specifically (1) to help parents themselves become safe drug users through the control of their own addictions to tobacco, alcohol, tranquilizers, and the like; ( 2 ) to give parents information about drugs and the effects of various styles of use along with guidance on how to communicate that knowledge to children at various age levels; and (3 ) to support parents morally and emotionally as they approach their children to achieve safe rather than unsafe drug use. The perspective required is a matter-of-fact one which does not rely on romanticism, demonology (see Chapter Fourteen in Drugs I) or on lies to transmit data about drugs, personal hygiene, and social responsibility. A further perspective requires that parents and others realize that many of the problems in drug use which worry us —drig abuse per se—are best conceived as social and psychological difficulties centering about the circumstances of use and the particular individuals who are using drugs. Thus, the prevention of drug abuse requires the application of the same principles of social and mental hygiene which are to be applied to the prevention of other personal or interpersonal distress.

1 Stein (1960) in a critique concludes that Seeley et al. show clearly that "Children manipulate their personalities according to the latest theories which they pick up almost as quickly as their parents. They know the importance of appearing 'well-balanced' in order to sell themselves to the primal customers, their parents, as well as to their peers and teachers (p. 214)."

2 The importance of maintaining one's "cool" may be taken as more than noninvolvement and as a frank acceptance of a naive mental-health doctrine which values tension-free states combining with the rational-emotional void deemed necessary for the interchange of people as parts in a technological apparatus.