1973 Nervous Breakdown

[Dave Monroe]

More from Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown:
Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties
America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), Ch. 1, "Fear of
Flying," pp. 13-44 ...

   "The effort to psychologize the hijacker, and with
hime the sixties culture which had ostensibly produced
him, reached its apotheosis with [David] Hubbard's
sepculations....  In a series of case studies, he
defined hijacking as a highly symbolic act that
combimned defiance of society with defiance of ... in
particular, the laws of gravity.  Bizarrely, Hubbard
attached great value to gravity as a psychological
construct, seeing it as the missing elemnt in Freud's
theory.  It's true importance had been revelaed only
by modern man's increasing mastery of the skies since
the invention of aviation and more recently the space
program... the fear of gravitational pull (the first
thing a baby is aware of at the moment of birth)
served as the paradigm of all other fears, and that
under some circumstances it could be linked to severe
'ego strain' and even schizophrenia in infants.  In
his view, gravity replaced the father as the focus of
the child's complexes: the Oedipus complex had been
superseded by a Newton complex ...."  (p. 36)

See ...

Hubbard, David,  The Skyjacker: His Flights of
   Fantasy.  New York: Macmillan, 1971.





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