Although a youth culture was in evidence by the 1950s, the first obvious and dramatic manifestation of a culture generated by peer-orientation was the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The...
The result in. successive generations of children is seen in alienation, drug use and violence—what Robert Bly has astutely described as the rage of the unparented. Bly notes in The
In Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom reports that Morrie Schwartz, his former professor terminally ill with ALS, was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless.’ The imme...
More daunting for those who hope for scientific and social progress, the genetic argument is easily used to justify all kinds of inequalities and injustices that are otherwise hard to defend. It serve...
Nowadays it often takes two parents working full-time to secure the same standard of living one wage earner could provide thirty or forty years ago. Deepening social stresses and the growing sense of...
The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize—winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American identity. This dynamic country, he wrote, subjects its...
The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of...
A dramatic illustration of how environment shapes personality is the story of the Gilmore family. On January 17, 1978, in Utah, the convicted double murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad,...