Freedom: Anti-Age Grading
Section 8 of my book: Transmissions From Parents to Children Within The Counterculture
Anti-age grading.
When the middle-class Baby Boomers went to college they were confronted with curfews, housemothers, rules of gender segregation, and rigid curriculums that were designed to take care of and control the incoming young people as if they were children. The job of the university as parent was to herd them towards the society’s ultimate goal of placing them in awaiting corporate and academic jobs. Up to that point the Baby Boomer generation had been measured and cared for by age specific structures often described as “age grading.” David Farber suggests that this cohort was more visibly age defined because of the size of the group (57). He writes, “The social impact of this youth cohort was all the more powerful because the generation preceding them was unusually small as a result of the economic onslaught of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II” (57). The Boomer cohort was given a nationally unified world view that the larger society, and Dr. Spock (Roszak xix), considered to be appropriate at each developmental stage “marketers, educators, parents, religious authorities, and others from the older generation did their best (and often succeeded) to shape and control that world” (Farber 57). The kids of the baby boom were also more unified because of the new popularity of television, “from television they gained a shared world of words, images, and of course, a desire for consumer products” (Farber 56). In looking at the unification myth of revolutionary Baby Boomers transforming society Farber warns, “It is easy to run amuck with the image of Unified Youth on the March” (58). He lists the many factors that separated the generation from each other “race, economic class, religious beliefs, level of education, politics, gender,” (58) but he admits, “many young people self-consciously claimed common cultural referents in the 1960s and did have at least a superficial sense of being co-participants in a new world partially of their own making” (58). The systemic agreement that they were a cohort, the feeling that they were being programmed at the college level, and an independent wish to do more than just become part of the established structure informed the counterculture’s dislike and suspicion of age grading. Farber writes that to manage the over crowded State Universities, administrators “insisted on maintaining a host of anachronistic in loco parentis rules, from parietals that restricted student visiting hours to regulations that limited student’s freedom of expression” (195). They were being treated like small children, while at the same time facing a looming adulthood of conformity that was antithetical to the value of freedom. In Beyond the Barricade, Whalen and Flacks write that the goals of the counterculture demanded the freedom to explore. “To ‘settle down’ into career, marriage, family, neighborhood without having undertaken such exploration and without ensuring one’s continuing freedom of movement would be profoundly wrong” (14). In his book on counterculture communes The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life Among Rural Communards Bennett Berger writes, “Many communards are veterans of university conflicts in which they demanded from authorities a ‘right to participate in the decisions that shape [their own] lives.’ Met with rebuttals that they were too young or too inexperienced or too incompetent to shape university curricula, to assess the competence of professors, or to make other academic judgments” (73). Berger concludes that as a result of this experience there was a greater emphasis on the rights of children, that it was harder to ideologically dispute giving greater autonomy, sometimes unprecedented freedoms, to children.
As young adults they didn’t want to be treated like children so they decided they would raise their children like young adults. Bennet Berger writes about the formulation of anti-age grading among countercultural commune parents. From a negative view of age grading counterculture parents turned towards children’s liberation. Liberation was freedom from defined structure, expected behavior, and in some cases this became freedom from any rules or even freedom from parenting “The evidence of children’s sexual interest and behavior, their drug use, and their rights to autonomy in the settlement of their disputes and disagreements all suggest a greater equalitarianism with respect to age than seems to be normal in either working-class or middle-class sectors of the mainstream of American culture” (Berger 72). Berger goes on to say that this resembles the equality given in “work roles and the right to a political voice in family/commune affairs, and to personal decisions normally made by parents themselves—for example, the kind of education a child will receive and the place in which he or she will be exposed to it” (72). Wolf and Rothchild in their book The Children of the Counterculture describe children in a disorganized rural commune they visited roaming free in a pack. In the morning these kids get themselves dressed and Rothchild and Wolf note that the kids have attempted to make themselves look nice, “Each of them has managed to do one thing. Andrew looks all right from the feet to the waist, Cato from the head to the neck. Maybe it was the beginning of a new communal spirit; as long as Joy brushed her teeth, it was good enough for all of them, and so on down to the shoes” (84). What strikes me in reading this chapter of Rothchild and Wolf’s book is that the authors spend a lot of time in what seems like a defensive position. The way that they write about these very small children who are experiencing very little parenting, trying to clean themselves up at the beginning of the day does not come from a place of compassion, but is rather snide, as if something about these children makes these two adults feel as if their own freedom has been called into question. This juxtaposition between the visible neglect of counterculture children, and the awestruck, defensive, and often jealous adult witnesses, becomes a theme throughout many descriptions of Post-Cool Kids primarily Generation X by the generation above them, primarily Boomers.
While the level of independence described above was far more prevalent in the commune lifestyle from which both of these descriptions come, it is the extreme end of a spectrum that ran throughout the counterculture. Children took on various levels of personal responsibility, were talked to as adults, were expected to make personal life choices, and be their own advocates. In “Rewriting History,” a piece in Chelsea Cain’s Wild Child anthology, Suzanne M. Cody writes to her infant daughter that she swears “to let you be a child for your entire childhood.” She goes on to write, “When I turned eleven, your grandpa told me I could leave home whenever I wanted—eleven was old enough to take care of myself” (173).
What freedom meant for counterculture parents could be as benign as letting children define basic self care and hygiene decisions. In her memoir about growing up at her parent’s hippie commune school for disturbed adolescents entitled Pagan Time, Micah Perks writes about not wanting her hair brushed, “My mother says, You could fry an egg on your hair, it’s that greasy, or It’s so tangled it looks like a bird’s nest, but she lets me go on stuffing it up in that hat. My sister’s hair has slowly snarled until one side is eight inches shorter than the other, with a tangled knot the size of a real bird’s nest over one ear” (23). She goes on to write “Hair is warmth, freedom, an outpouring straight from the brain” (23). Freedom could mean allowing children to run and play in nature unsupervised for many hours “Children are regarded as intrinsically worthy of love and respect, but not necessarily of special restrictions or privileges or attentiveness or close monitoring” (Berger 63). There was a sort of throw back to a Huckleberry Finn romanticism of being allowed to roam in the open air and let nature unfold within the individual child.
A was born in Southern California in 1969 and moved to a beach town within days of his birth. His biological father who he saw twice a year was from India, brought to the United States at the behest of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg to open an Ashram in the Bay Area. His mother and stepfather were herbalists and lived a counterculture lifestyle of psychedelic experimentation, communes both urban and rural and occasionally nomadic bus life. As a preteen his older brother whom he was very close to died. Soon after his brother’s death, they joined an activist theater group called the Illuminated Elephants Traveling Gypsy Theater that traveled down to Mexico and interacted with the indigenous peoples, learning their rituals and doing theater performances, teaching ecological sustainability. He moved back to his hometown to live with and take care of his grandmother, in time to attend junior high school, at which point he attended public school for the first time. In high school he found a ceramics mentor and became interested in alternative engines. He now manages the transportation fleet for a university and is an alternative engine and energy activist who is involved with countless advisory boards, community organizations, and environmental programs, including electric car advocacy, the hydrogen highway project and advising on green energy. A describes roaming around with his older brother and friends, “It was kind of a time where, where it seems like, we were out there just doing, just having fun and you know doing what ever we kind of could come up with.”
Z was born in California in 1965. Her parents were left activists living in the counterculture; her father was an influential left-wing lawyer. She was given early exposure to extreme antiwar activism, Black Panther party actions, and other Berkeley counterculture activities. When her parents separated her mother moved into a lesbian/women’s urban collective and then later, once remarried, moved Z to urban Oregon. Z was exposed to mainstream culture for the first time in a rural suburb of an Oregon city. She experienced isolation and shaming from peers in the community and was more at home when her family moved to an urban ghetto. Z left home and school early and lived on the streets for a while. As a young adult she lived with her affluent grandparents in Los Angeles. She shifted from a party lifestyle after living in Paris for a year; she went back to school and discovered in her first year of law school that she was dyslexic. When told to leave school because of her disability she organized a coalition of disabled students and won the access rights she needed to complete law school. She now works as an activist lawyer for children with special needs. Z speaking about the contrast between her parent’s choices of where they were taken as children and her own choices for her children “the positive of it was let children experience their childhood and the world without the confines that close down their inherent curiosity and creativity and I totally abide by that in the way I raise my kids and I’m really thankful for that in the way I was raised, um but,” she reflects, “that also is kind of an excuse when you’ve had children too young and you kind of wish you were on your own to not pay attention and not be present. And I think both went on.”
Bennett Berger echoes Z’s belief when he writes, “A conception of childhood and children, therefore, that diminishes the apparent need for, or even the desirability of, heavy, deliberate socialization, that emphasizes the natural intelligence or wisdom of children . . . reduces thereby the degree to which the deliberate socialization of children may be said to be fateful or self-implicating for parents” (81). The amount of freedom given to children was at times extreme, allowing children to use drugs, be sexually active, or insisting that they resolve their own conflicts unaided. Bennett Berger writes, “Children are also encouraged to express their views on communal affairs at family meetings and to participate in useful labor. But the sharpest breaks in age-grading . . . are to be found in the handling of drug use, quarreling, and sexual behavior” (64). Berger warns not to make too much of this extreme permissiveness as there were plenty of moments of actual restraint among parents, especially when the freedom might mean the loss of an expensive tool, or the real mortification of a child’s ego. Yet, Berger often seems to fall victim to a biased romantic view of the counterculture experience, qualifying extreme behaviors with apologetics about the intelligence of the particular group he was studying. Moon Zappa, the daughter of intelligent counterculture people, describes her exposure. She writes in Wild Child, “No first-graders I knew found pornographic cartoons lying around next to blow-up sex dolls in their childproof homes with the backyard swingsets. They didn’t know about R&B or astrology or the Oujia board or how to have a séance” (Cain xvii). In contrasting her own worldliness to conventional children Zappa is ironic and proud while still not being romantic,
Absolutely no one my age cussed (and therefore remained sadly unaware of our terrific freedom-of-speech amendment) or knew what gay was or made Barbie and Ken fuck and orgasm loudly or bent spoons in her spare time or got to stay up late and either go to clubs, or watch scary movies or skin flicks with their moms and dads. Other children could not keep up with me or keep me entertained; neither could timid grown ups for that matter (xvii).
Sometimes during the telling of the more extreme stories you can see the Post-Cool person begin to be possessed by one of these cultural complexes. To be possessed by a complex is to find the ideals suddenly flooding into your system and taking over control of your mode of speaking, the phrases used, the valuations of everyday things. With Freedom their affect changes toward a kind of windy agitation, their voice gets stronger, their posture will open or their gesture will become manic, they will move their seat to the edge of the chair. In this Zappa quote you can just sense the position shift as the story moves from play, cartoons, dolls, swings, to spirit, Oujia boards and séances, to the shift when her father’s voice comes through—a known freedom of speech activist— as she starts to speak of libido based sexuality, orgasm, gay, scary movies and skin flicks. Finally she has become fully inflated in her freedom complex and she can look down from this height to the children and timid grown-ups below who could not “keep up.” This is an example of what it looks like when the complex takes over an individual psyche, Zappa has become inflated by the counterculture complex of freedom.
Children were often expected to be a part of the household work force. In a rural environment this included working in the garden, with the animals, and a pioneer-like farming lifestyle. Unlike the pioneers the children could also be expected to be responsible for their own hygiene, their meals, and their daily life decisions. Nathan from Born Dropped Out shares, “I went through a period of time where my stepfather insisted, if I was going to eat meat I had to understand and at least witness if not participate in the slaughtering and butchering of these animals, so after witnessing the murder of some pigs I had raised, I stopped eating meat for about a year and I was just like, I can’t be a part of that.” He eventually resigned himself to killing animals, “one day I remember smelling the bacon cooking in the morning as I was coming down stairs and I thought I’m ready to kill the pig, I’ll kill the pig” (Clark).
E was born in Illinois in 1967. Her parents were deep in the counterculture and the experimental jazz scene of Chicago when she was born. When she was a toddler they dropped acid and boarded a plane to California. They moved to a notoriously counterculture town in Northern California where they lived in a very simple way, in poverty, her parents were often difficult and she sought out models of loving outside of her house from gentle neighbors. Her parents found a piece of land in Humboldt County and moved the family into an armored troop carrier, with the hope of building a house. As an isolated family of five, they grew their own food, dug holes in the ground to poop, bathed on the steps of the troop carrier with a sponge and a pot of water, and her father became a blacksmith to make money. E was still living this way until the end of high school—no house was ever built, not even an outhouse—she had one bunk in the troop carrier that was her space. E now lives in a beautiful home with her loving husband and three engaged and loving children; she works hard to be conscious of all of her interactions and intentions, loves deeply, worries about her foot print on the planet, is meticulous about organics and sensitive to the environment around her. E describes repeatedly working, self-motivated, in the garden until her lips were white with heat stroke without adult intervention.
If the household was an intentional community children would often be expected to sit in circle with adults. “Rather than being members of an autonomous category of ‘children’ or being inadequate versions of their parents, legitimately subject to their arbitrary authority, children and young people . . . are primarily regarded as ‘persons,’ members of the communal family, just like anyone else” (Berger 59). Wolf and Rothchild describe an urban commune scene in which the household has a regular meeting that is part operations and part consciousness raising. In this commune the children did not actually speak in the circle, “The children sat very attentively, like they understood the seriousness of this event. They did not hold the baton, but just passed it along to the nearest grownup. We could not tell if they were allowed to speak. The children held onto and smoked the joints, which were flowing in the other direction. They were allowed to do that” (66-67).
M was born at home in Northern California in 1964. M was born into counterculture royalty; his grandfather is a prominent intellectual leader within the counterculture, one of the leading influences of countercultural thought. This rarified position did not buffer him from the harsh realities of countercultural life. He was still affected by the transience and experimental uncertainties of his parent’s choices. His father, a lauded musician, left to go be a spiritual leader early in M’s life. His mother moved them to Bolinas where they lived in typical hippie simplicity and he was immersed in the very free kid culture that counterculture towns like Bolinas presented. The level of dare-devil behavior and drug use in his peer group was extreme. They would often sleep out on the beach or in the woods for months at a time. By his teen years he made his own money and moved out of his mother’s house. He negotiated deals with his high school teachers such that he never went to school but still managed to receive a high school diploma. He was sexually active with women his mother’s age, often at her behest. He drove nice cars and was a heavy drug user. M suffered an early crisis of awareness that his life was not working, he moved to Southern California, got sober and became a musician, theater impresario, child educator, and arts education activist. He is a caring husband and father and extremely active in his community both culturally and politically. When M was asked if there were other care providers besides his mother he replied, “I want to say yes, but I think the prevailing sense is that we were really left alone a lot.”
Children might be left to make grown-up decisions that would effect their lives like whether they wanted to go to school, or whether they wanted to leave home. Berger reflects that “Children’s rights” and “children’s liberation,” both very much in debate in the 1970s, “tend to connote quite different postures. My impression is that those who use the term ‘children’s rights’ are primarily interested in guaranteeing the protection of children from abusive treatment by adults, whereas those who use the term ‘children’s liberation’ are more interested in freeing children from even the benevolent authority of adults” (f56).
Children were not talked down to in the counterculture. On the contrary in some groups children were looked at as purer souls with lessons to teach the corrupted adults around them (Berger 78). They were allowed to be in grown up conversations and were often spoken to from infancy in normal adult voices, using adult vocabulary rather than the simplified words used when speaking to children. In “Nonconventional Family Life-Styles and School Achievement: A 12-Year Longitudinal Study” Thomas S. Weisner and Helen Garnier found that, “Nonconventional families often engaged in intense conversations about their goals and actions, and included children in these discussions from an early age” (610). M reflects “I was super mature for my age because I was surrounded by intellectual adults who’d never censored, they didn’t believe that it was a good idea to talk down to me, so I was involved in a pretty rigorous discussion from day one.” As a result counterculture children spoke as if they were adults. Berger saw this adult language as an indication of emotional security, “Commune children look to me much like other children, except that their tongues are saltier, there are very few shy or withdrawn ones (the younger ones tend to be very loud and boisterous), and the older children (say, between eight and twelve) seem far more self-possessed and confident than comparable middle-class children” (89).
V was born in Ohio in 1967. Her parents were very involved in political action as part of the student movement, her mother was an activist at Kent State. Her biological father left early to become a socialist organizer. She was adopted by her stepfather; he was also an extreme student activist. In her early childhood she was moved to Minnesota to a neighborhood that also housed the head quarters for the American Indian Movement (AIM). She was often beaten-up by other children for being the only white girl in her community. Her mother lived a very countercultural, activist lifestyle with a lot of drug use, community action, health food, bouts of poorly planned rural living, and occasional alternative education. Her mother remarried a man with mental health issues and her preteen and teen years became more difficult with extreme health food diets that created malnutrition, random tantrums from the adults, isolation, and estrangement from her mother. They moved to the Central California coast and soon after V dropped out of school, left home, and lived on her own. She partied for a while and then lived in a very other focused relationship for a long while, when that ended, she drifted in crisis until she married, became pregnant and decided to be a focused mother and wife. She is a Waldorf Trained teacher, Permaculture Activist, active in her community both culturally and politically, a very involved mother of three mature and loving boys and committed to her relationships as projects to be worked on and taken seriously. V remembers, “I was introverted, and shy with other children, but not with adults.”
Children presenting themselves as adults created a number of interesting effects. Adults not in the counterculture would find the odd juxtaposition of a child body with an adult affect jarring. Other children, not raised in the counterculture, would find these children alien or confusing. Adults in the counterculture seeing increased mature affect would allow for greater and greater freedoms.
An example of what this strangeness looks like, when a young counterculture child speaks as an adult is depicted in a scene from the film Humboldt County. The film is about a conventional culture man named Peter who feels discontent with his straight life, and accidentally finds himself stuck in the pot growing culture of Humboldt County. After several jarring scenes, Peter is feeling overwhelmed by the strangeness of the counterculture world he has entered. He is in need of rest. Charity the eight-year-old girl who lives in the house helps him to find a room he can rest in. She has made Peter uncomfortable with her open and precocious questions. She is aware that he is uncomfortable and tries to make him feel more at home. Charity asks if he would like her to read him a book.
Peter replies, “What do you have?”
Charity goes to the bookshelf and looks, “Oh, here's my favorite. How about The Closing of the American Mind?”
Peter says, “That'll do.” But his body deflates as if in submission to the reality that this girl cannot be defined by his worldview.
Another effect of being raised as a member of the adult community is that counterculture children often were more at home among adults than with other children their own age. M describes how by the time he was in high school he was socially astute, “I was really mature for my age always, and super advanced linguistically and my language was tough . . . I had this outrageous kind of super structure ego, you know, so I just thought I was too big for all of it, you know. And so I just didn’t do it.” If these children found themselves in public school or other conventional culture environments there was often a sense that they were not on the same level with their peers. E talks about being completely alienated from the working class kids in her high school whose parents were loggers and ranchers. In “A Dual Life,” Diane B. Sigman writes, “Friendless and unspeakably lonely, I despaired of finding people who shared my world view. My peers were a bunch of smart, rich kids following the party line … their predictable behavior patterns enraged me. I had no desire to be like them. I wanted them to be like me” (Cain 144).
Feeling alienated as a result of this adultish-ness was alleviated if the children were being raised in a community with a large number of children who were equally equipped for maturity. Rothchild and Wolf describe a commune free-school of early pubescent kids in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The kids were totally reliant on each other and their wits, “If the school was to survive, Andy Peyote and the other twelve- to fourteen-year-olds who chose to live here had to think up ways to make money, or barter, or grow food, or something” (109). While Rothchild and Wolf thought that the plan was “grandiose” they were surprised by the commitment of the few kids making adobe brick in the summer heat, “They were doing it, they said, because the school had agreed to make Tom and Aline a new house in return for the one they had donated. A new house was the schoolwork for the year” (110).
Rothchild and Wolf become caught up in Andy Peyote’s freedom complex while they are hanging out with him. Although they throw around judgments like “grandiose” during their reflections, they ultimately use Andy’s inflated and charismatic ego position as a measure of many of the other children they write about. Their outside perspective sees him as at his most free when he is in transit alone. This is a part of their adult projection of what freedom should be. In my interviews it became clear that the moments of genuine community, and not isolation, seem to be the most psychologically freeing for counterculture children. The collective security of being with like minded peers offered them mirroring, and comfort. The self-sufficiency of these group experiences with little grown up intervention allowed for an empowering camaraderie. A describes tagging along with his older brother and his friends as a large group of kids from his extended counterculture community “I think that we as a bunch of kids, a pack of kids, felt empowered to kind of do what ever we want in terms of being able to move around the community and do what we wanted to do. So we probably were a lot more . . . maybe worldly.” Later, I encountered another Post-Cool Kid who had taken to calling this style of familiar community support among kids his own age Peer Bonding.
It isn’t just that Post-Cool Kids as children spoke like adults. They had a street-smart quality. Certainly they seemed mature for their age because of their vocabularies and their assertiveness, but also because they had to be survivors. This was often learned out of necessity, and situational. In her forward to the Chelsea Caine’s book Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture, Moon Zappa writes that a man tried to make friends in the grocery store with her as a way to pick up on her mom, “At the ripe old age of two, I already knew enough to sense that something was energetically ick about the whole shabooh, and reportedly announced, ‘Fuck off, pervert’ ” (xv). When I asked M if he was an insider or an outsider in High School his response was, way out “I was dating women in their 30s, I was gone. I was up at the Russian River in a tent, drinking wine with some woman twice my age.” V describes the time that a man—who had tried to molest her after her mom let him take her for the afternoon—had come back to their house weeks later to shower, because they had the only hot shower in the area. She was nine years old, playing with new kittens that they had in their closet, “I’m on my hands and knees and he sticks his hands up my shorts and I horse kicked him, right in the . . . like right here and I turned around and I went ‘Never fucking touch me again! I’m gonna tell!’ We didn’t see hide nor hair of Bubba again.” She tells me this laughing really hard. Post-Cool Kids often have a sort of inflated pride in their worldliness which contrasts to their usually understated easy going demeanor. They tell war stories with the swagger of an old vet. This leans into the pirate/trickster aspect of the Freedom complex.
As jaded as they can be about certain topics Post-Cool Kids can be ironically youthful for their age, at the same time. They exude an ageless quality and an often naïve hopefulness not typical of the blasé affect of the majority of Generation X. Counterculture children were often taught to be repulsed by certain serious adult ways, even as they were insistently pushed to take on adult responsibilities. This created a very eclectic relationship to adult responsibilities. Behaviors that would seem commonplace to a child raised in conventional culture can require extreme amounts of reflection and processing for Post-Cool Kids. I will discuss in greater detail the impact of parents who place an emphasis on the value of child-like behavior and how this develops into a complicated, both naïve and jaded, personality when I discuss the anti-authority complex.
In the movie Humboldt County there is a beautiful illustration of the larger impact of a child not having rules while being given self authority. During a conversation between Max, a man raised in the counterculture, and Peter who was raised in conventional society, Max calls out the inconsistencies.
Max, “My middle name is The … I'm serious.”
Peter, “No you're not. Your parents named you Max the Truman?”
Max, “No, my given middle name is Forrest, but I changed it, legally. When I was 11 years old I was obsessed with Alexander the Great, couldn't leave it alone. So I told them I was old enough to make my own decisions and god damn if they didn't let me do it.”
Peter, “That's awesome.”
Max, “No it's not. It's fuckin' stupid. They should have told me to shut the fuck up.”
There is an intensity in Max’s anger over being allowed to change his name that would seem misplaced and out of balance with the topic. Yet, it is symbolic of a larger issue, an issue that counterculture children are far too familiar with. Max was not given incremental mentoring while he was growing up. There was no training process for learning to make decisions. To make it even more complex he was encouraged towards whimsical and sometimes outlandish life choices, as is shown in the behaviors of his parental units. The character, Max, later dies in the film as a result of an under-developed sense of his own limits. While the changing of his middle name seems trivial, it is symbolic of an entire childhood of freedoms that shaped Max into the creative, street smart, unstructured adult, who lacks the necessary impulse control to ultimately survive. A shadow element of the freedom complex is the lack of containment. M remembers, “the door was swinging wide open and we were running wild in nature and our imaginations at the same time, which was powerfully good…in terms of giving us a sense of identity and freedom and power, and, um you know, I look back and think that we never knew anything about any boundaries ever. And so I’ve given a lot of thought to the importance of boundaries, especially as a parent.”
I now take us back to Hillman specifically to warn against seeing all of this story from the singular perspective of Mainstream dominant culture. To judge and evaluate the tone of experience that emerges from the Freedom complex one must find an intersectional perspective that sees simultaneously from inside and outside the counterculture childhoods that lived this inculcation of values. In “Oedipus Revisited,” James Hillman reflects on the missed meanings when staying within the confines of a single narrative perspective, in this case in response to Oedipus Rex,
I did not realize at first that I was in the play, that the drama was so powerful, Freud so keen-scented, and that this play plays through the inquiring mind and heuristic method of our culture from which I have not escaped. I did not recognize that it was I who could not hear to the heart of my own discourse. Even my asking and answering ‘why did I come, why do I speak?’ is Oedipal.” (160)
He insists that it is only if we see the entire narrative of all of Sophocles’ Oedipal plays through to Oedipus at Colonus that we can get the real trap that befalls psychology as a result of Freud’s staying with the first play, “Only when Oedipus goes under the hill, only as he walks away from us, might the nightingales, the freshening waters of Poseidon, and the greening of Demeter touch our field, a psychology of anima released from the tyranny of Oedipus” (160).
The goal in turning toward Hillman’s insight is to warn against getting trapped within the rational interpretation. In digging for meaning—what Freud recognized while viewing Oedipus Rex as his perfect metaphor for depth psychology—we find ourselves always returning to the tragic flaw of literalizing the oracle. We perceive sealed familial patterns into the next generation’s activities. Hillman suggests that we might frame our lives with other myths. Rather than digging for meaning we might try experiencing life. So too, to understand Post-Cool Kids we must escape measuring this story as only the fates of family dynamics. Yes, there are stories of broken homes, abuse and neglected children, but if we simply stay within the myth of Oedipus, within what Deleuze and Guattari call the “dirty little secret” of the family drama (49), roiling in the shame of it all and plucking out our eyes, then the other possible story frames will be lost. Counterculture childhoods are not nuclear family dramas. There is more at work here than just neglected street smart children.