The great psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, with no degrees in psychology or psychiatry, in 1950 published the foundational study of developmental challenges at each life phase and their resolution to ego stability and virtue.  From 12 to 18, adolescents resolve the question of identity vs. role confusion through experimentation in beliefs, ideals, and purposes.  This enables teenagers to enter adult life with a stronger sense of self.  Erikson identified the virtue of fidelity as the achievement of teenage identity experimentation.  

My own experiments in the 1960s, from hilarious to dangerous, will be compared to today’s teenage identity experimentation, which often focuses on sex identity.  Unfortunately, sex identity and sexuality comprehend no high ideals and can only resolve into fidelity to one’s own wants.  My and my friends’ exquisitely erroneous notions exemplify why teenagers can’t reach abiding conclusions about moral and political issues, and why endocrinological or structural harm to the teenager has disastrous effects across the lifespan which youth cannot foresee.

My experimentation in Eastern mysticism was guided by Alan Watts, various forgotten gurus, and “The Magical Mystery Tour.”  I started sleeping on the floor of my brother’s room, who was away at college.  My mother asked why.  I told her, “I am experiencing asceticism.”  “Ah-what-a-cism?”  “Asceticism, what it is to have nothing.”  She said “OK, I won’t change your bed this week.”

Because I had a great mom, I never took drugs, but at 15 I parroted that if psychedelics were put in the water supply, consciousness would expand to create universal peace and happiness.  I explained that to my mother’s friend who had a Down syndrome child.  The patience and kindness of that generation of women in the face of such foolishness is a memory I will always treasure.

Outlandish experiments in truth-seeking were abetted by my co-conspirator Barbara.  She was more sophisticated than I; She read The Village Voice.  At 16, she began dressing entirely in black,  prescient in 1967.  A high school friend asked me, in Staten Islandese,  “Wuy does she come tuh school in black everyday?  Huh fathuh’s a doctuh, can’t she buy cloze?”  I explicated thusly: Barbara was standing against the tyranny of fashion.

I wanted to understand the experience of former mental patients.  Barbara found a support meeting, and we sailed forth on the ferry to shabby rooms in the East Village, which today are worth millions.  We heard former mental patients speak about what they had suffered.  When a large, agitated man raged, in juvenile assuredness I suggested to him, “I think you need more help for anger.”  The meeting detonated.  The man reared up, ready to kill me.  People jumped on him; someone shouted, “Get the f--- outta here”; and Barbara and I ran down the stairs for our lives. 

The truth regarding the Vietnam War confused me.  My people, eternally conservative Staten Islanders, adamantly supported “the boys.”  A boy in the neighborhood liked me and asked for a date several times, which I declined.  When he was on his way to the bloody height of the Vietnam War, he came to say goodbye.  I was polite and friendly, but uncomfortable that he chose to say goodbye to me.  After he left, my mother said, “You should write to him.”  Shocked, I asked, “Why?”  “Because he’s a boy from the neighborhood going to war.”  I loved my mother dearly, and I tried to bring happiness to her, but clearly she didn’t understand the world.  How could she?  She had only a high school education and didn’t go to art museums. 

I went to the university where Abraham Maslow taught.  Yes!  I was closing in on the answers.  I didn’t notice that on every big issue, everybody there believed exactly the same.  One day, while in a large antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., I suddenly couldn’t see anything — completely blind, my face  awash in tears.  Wow, I’ve been tear-gassed!  Cool!

Years later, I received my answer about love in its highest degree in American warriors who fulfilled their duty.  And in its least degree, the Soviet Union’s insane lust for world domination.  Humanity owes gratitude to the American warriors who contained the Soviets until their leaden ambition collapsed under the weight of its own falsehood.  

Barbara declared we had to tackle racism.  In 1968, the infamous teachers’ strike started in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, Brooklyn, then spread to all of New York City.  We painted signs in my basement and waved them enthusiastically — unfortunately supporting the racist and antsemitic side of that controversy, which mainly targeted Jewish teachers.   

When people try to hang racism on President Trump, they go to back 1973 and a federal lawsuit about racial discrimination in housing.  That’s early TDS, because the entire outer boroughs were rigidly racially segregated, through the 1970s and beyond.  That mode of life was not invented by the Trumps.  So to confront racism on Staten Island, we had to travel at least ten miles to find an actual black person. 

Barbara discovered an interracial youth conference.  We couldn’t drive, so we jumped on the train again.  The meeting turned into a party, the hour grew late, and how were we to get home?  Barbara asked some boys who happened to be black if they would drive us.  I remember the fear on the face of one of those boys during the drive.  Barbara’s parents and brothers were away; the young men waited in the sun room while Barbara and I made sandwiches.  Then her older brother came home unexpectedly.  When he looked in and saw two black men, he assumed that the house, which contained a medical office, was being robbed.  He turned to go to the police, but thank God he saw us laughing in the kitchen and turned back.  

Since the 1960s, treatment of mentally ill persons has greatly improved; American Vietnam warriors have gained their rightful honors; and regardless of dim-witted color categorization, Americans are   free to pursue the life enabled by their effort, abilities, and preferences.  Therefore, the left had to instigate new causes (notably climate and the LGBT purée) to divide us and give shallow-thinking people a basis for assumed superiority.

Today, many teenage Americans seek shelter from lives drained of the Eriksonian virtue of fidelity, through sex-identity experimentation.  An 18-year-old today is less mature than his 1950 counterpart.  But then and now, teenagers lack the experiences, triumphs, and failures that enable one to fully think for himself, so it is dangerous when young boys inflict endocrinological sickness and mutilation on themselves.

Today, as a mother and grandmother, I say to these precious children, sex is inscribed in every cell of your body and cannot be changed.  “Transgenderism” undermines the natural gifts of your inborn sex without replacing them with the gifts of the opposite sex.  Take, for example, Bruce Jenner.  As a teenager, would he have given up incomparable masculine gifts of strength and swiftness that won him fame, wealth, and honor to America to stand in front of a makeup mirror and fluff his hair?  Probably not.

You are yet to know what gifts of nature you will need to win the race of your life.  Also, unlike the bedevilments of racism and tortures of war, “transgenderism” is a political fad.  If your experiments involve irreversible damage to your body, ten years from now, you may find yourself cast as a human hula hoop, a bygone amusement.  Forgo experiments against your own body.  Whatever happens, you may one day find the Love and Truth that is seeking you.  Then the only worthy experiment is how to forget ourselves.

Deborah invites to you read other works, including “Non-Violent Violence of Israel and America,” on her Substack page.

Image: ElisaRiva via Pixabay, Pixabay License.