Tommy , Primal Therapy, and the Counter-cultural Critique of “Sick Society” and “Cripple Psychology”

Abstract

One of the criticisms the counterculture aimed at post-war capitalist society was that commonly held mental states were “disabled” or “diseased.” This stigmatization of those who did not adopt the counterculture’s norms risked reinstating the dynamic of oppression that was ostensibly being overthrown. Sickness and disability are central to The Who’s “rock opera” Tommy (1969), which used a multiply disabled character to signify most people’s impoverished psychological existence. However, the plot and iconography of Tommy warn that the alternative lifestyles associated with “the 1960s” risk imposing new codes of conformity. Given its countercultural origins, it is unsurprising that Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy posited everyday life as existentially and literally disabling, but like Tommy it understood many of the counterculture’s activities as pathological alternatives. The article finishes by analysing James Saunders’s play Bodies (1977), which dramatized the tyrannous potential of Janov’s claim that Prim...