ABSTRACT
In this cultural stage, the lament of the individual suffering from persecutory guilt: ‘I am an abject sinner’, gives way to the depressive lament: ‘My life is empty and sad.’
The 1920s were characterised by a swing from Victorian propriety, industriousness, and discipline to their polar opposite. The 1930s then disappears in the necessity caused by Depression; and the 1940s in war and slow recovery.
The 1950s and the 1960s mark the key period for the cultural shift into depressive guilt. The 1950s established the base point. It had one foot firmly planted in the old order. Family culture and habits were unchanged – rigorously patriarchal. Emblematic of the period was Rebel Without a Cause, the cult James Dean film. The story blamed parents – a nagging, hysterically egocentric, bossy mother, and a grovelling subservient father – for the disturbed condition of their teenage son. The film’s title is motto for an era incapable of developing cultural sublimations to suit its disposition.
The Beatles proclaimed: ‘All you need is love’, putting Herbert Marcuse’s creed of ‘de-repression’ – the catch-cry of the 1960s – to music. The central character in the emblematic film of the period, The Graduate, drifts out of college and into life, morosely depressed. What Ben sees ahead of him in adult life, as represented by his parents and their circle, is a kind of ghostly nightmare of unhappy, hollow people full of pretence and false enthusiasm.
