Hippies and Violence

PART of the mystique and the attraction of the hippie movement has always been its invitation to freedom. It beckons young people out of the tense, structured workaday world to a life where each can do "his own thing." The movement has flowered and spread across the U.S. and to many parts of the world. It has drawn all sorts of people: the rebellious, the lonely, the poets, the disaffected, and worse. Some two years ago, says Dr. Lewis Yablonsky, a close student of the phenomenon, criminals and psychotics began infiltrating the scene. They were readily accepted, as anyone can be who is willing to let his hair grow and don a few beads; they found, just as do runaway teenagers, that it is a good world in which they can disappear from law and society. "Hippiedom became a magnet for severely emotionally disturbed people," Yablonsky says.

A few of them, like Manson, also found other advantages to being a hippie. The true gentle folk were relatively defenseless. Leaderless, they responded readily to strong leaders. But how could children who had dropped out for the sake of kindness and sharing, love and beauty, be enjoined to kill? Yablonsky thinks that the answer may lie in the fact that so many hippies are actually "lonely, alienated people." He says: "They have had so few love models that even when they act as if they love, they can be totally devoid of true compassion. That is the reason why they can kill so matter-of-factly."

Yablonsky believes that there has been far more violence among the hippies than most people realize. "There has always been a potential for murder," he says. "Many hippies are socially almost dead inside. Some require massive emotions to feel anything at all. They need bizarre, intensive acts to feel alive--sexual acts, acts of violence, nudity, every kind of Dionysian thrill."

Charles Manson unintentionally put some clues into his particular psychological makeup on a piece of paper last week, as he sat in court for arraignment on car-theft charges. The insights came in the form of doodles on a legal pad--disoriented scribblings that suggest to two experts a psyche torn asunder by powerful thrusts of aggression, guilt and hostility. According to Dr. Emanuel F. Hammer, a psychoanalyst who studied the doodles without knowing who drew them, they point to "an inner tension that is jampacked with jarring elements. The drawings hit you like chaos on the part of the mind that drew them." He notes the phrase "Howmuchcanonegive," and says such stringing together of words "shows a lack of respect for the integrity of things" and people. The starlike figures, covered over or enclosed in circles, represent "guilt or attempts at control over aggression." The drawings of armless beings "are goonish and ludicrous, which may show a demeaning and devalued view of people."

Dr. Harry O. Teltscher, a psychologist and handwriting expert who knew the doodles were Manson's, finds cosmic implications in the sketches. "This whole drawing looks like part of the universe.

Ofttimes, paranoid-schizophrenics identify themselves with cosmic situations." In the squiggles, Teltscher also sees "a tremendous amount of repressed anger and hostility against all mankind." If Manson is guilty of commanding the Tate murders, as police suspect, then, "telling these giris to act out these killings was his way to express his anger."

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