What I learned now was that the LSD retreat and inward plunge can be compared to an essential schizophrenia, and the antinomianism of contemporary youth to a paranoid schizophrenia. The sense of threat from every quarter of what is known as the Establishment -- which is to say, of modern civilization -- is not altogether a put-on or an act for many of these young folk, but an actual condition of soul. The break-off is real, and what is being bombed and blown up outside are actual symbols of interior fears. Moreover, many are unable even to communicate, every thought being so charged for them with feeling that in rational speech there is no name for it. An astonishing number cannot bring forth even a simple declarative sentence, but, interrupting every attempted phrase with the irrelevant syllable 'like,' they are reduced to mute signs and feeling-loaded silences, pleading for appreciation. One feels, sometimes, in dealing with them, that one is indeed in a lunatic asylum without walls. And the indicated cure for the ills that they are shouting about is not sociological at all (as our news media and many of our politicians claim) but psychiatric.

• soul
• thought
• lsd
• speech
• schizophrenia
• symbols
• media
• civilization