1973 Nervous Breakdown

[Dave Monroe]

Further in Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown:
Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties
America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), Ch. 4,
"Personality Crisis," 111-36 ...

   "To survivors of the sixties, here was one answer
for the seeming failures of that decade's utopian
aspirations: the schizoid awareness that institutions
were toppling and yet remained more firmly in place
than ever, was rooted in the discovery that secretly,
people love what oppresses them.  Before it could take
place in the arena of politics, change would have to
take hold at another level, that of the family. 
Faling that, revolutionaries would be condemned to a
seemingly inescapable cycle rooted in the
'micro-politics' of the family: blaming the mother for
their own 'impotence' (both political and sexual) and
erecting in her place wild travesties of patriarchal
authority ...." (p. 129)

Cf., e.g., ...

"The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is
terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been
masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual
interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still
trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out
of date. The fathers have no power today and never
did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them,
we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same
masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and
worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate
men of power our own infant children must hate, and
wish to usurp the place of, and fail...."  (GR, Pt.
IV, p. 747)

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