Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves

The Voyage Out

From the main deck of the Celebrity Edge , the entire ocean looks like an infinity pool. Launched in 2018 and costing a cool billion, the Edge is the flagship liner of the high-end travel company Celebrity Cruises. As well as a 1,000-strong crew, the Edge can accommodate nearly 3,000 guests in an ambience of spacious opulence. There are grand state rooms, multilevel villas, a portfolio of restaurants, the inevitable shopping concourse and the main deck itself: a rooftop plaza of gardened spaces and heated pools resting some fifteen storeys – 128 feet – above sea level. At this height the nuances of the sea recede, and the panorama dominates. Aside from its amenities, the privilege of this view is one of the main luxuries of a trip on the Edge . As ‘the most refined ship at sea’ it places its guests luxuriously nowhere : out of time and out of place. The numerous stops on its Atlantic and Mediterranean itineraries are, of course, full of local colour but in between, when the Edge glides quietly across the ocean, life on board becomes a pleasing experience of drift . Passengers reclining on the roof deck get the full spectacle of this calm movement: a featureless vista where the sea and sky are nothing but two shimmers of blue converging at the horizon.

Celebrity Cruises sell a piece of the celebrity lifestyle. Before the coronavirus pandemic took a massive bite out of the entire cruising industry, they excelled in offering guests aspirational holidays full of peak experiences, prestige service and the trappings of wealth (plus all-day, all-night, all-you-can-eat buffets). To that end the company regularly courted the great and the good to act as product partners and social media cheerleaders. Which is why, in what now seems like the far distant past of early 2019, the Edge welcomed a delegation from Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and lifestyle brand Goop. Elise Loehnen, Goop’s chief of content, and an entourage of Goop staffers came onboard to sample ‘the ultimate in modern cruising’. By all accounts it did not disappoint. ‘It’s not that we were ever afraid of the water,’ trilled an unattributed write-up on the Goop website sometime after the trip, ‘it’s just that we’ve always enjoyed it from the perspective of the shore, with a drink and a book in arm’s reach.’ Having managed to wrench themselves away from this comfort zone, the Goopers found, unsurprisingly, that the Edge was one massive, floating comfort zone. Not only did its poolside plazas offer plenty of places to drink and read, but its elegant Suite-class rooms with their ‘wall-to-wall glass […] fragrant Le Labo personal care products and fluffy Frette robes’ (not to mention personal butler service) made the huge ship feel like the ‘chicest of penthouses’.

Strolling into the Grand Plaza, the Edge’s very own piazza – where you can sip espresso by day and take a martini by night – Loehnen and her party were spoilt for choice. Should they go for a glass of biodynamic wine at Blu, or order a plate of sashimi ‘in the buzzy atmosphere of Raw on 5’? Eventually they opted for the virtuous, but no less luxurious, option of a few hours in the ship’s gym and spa. Spread over two floors and accessed via a curving white staircase, the spa is a palace of marble and glass that offers a full menu of treatments: facials, acupuncture, reflexology, halotherapy and many more. Entering like souls offered passage to paradise, the Goopers found massage beds filled ‘with warm quartz sand’ the texture ‘of a soft powder beach’, subtle lighting precisely calibrated for colour therapy and a cloud of ‘rattan pod-style seats suspended from the ceiling in the Float Room’. They each took a pod and were ‘lulled to sleep by the gentle swaying’. It is a moment that sums up the excess of the Edge: onboard a ship that was gently floating across the sea, they chose a private experience that simulated the feeling of gently floating across the sea. Given that Goop was offered the full-on VIP treatment it’s hardly surprising that, quid pro quo, they responded with some utterly uncritical brochure copy. However, beyond the sales pitch, Goop’s account of a cruise on the Edge carries traces of a much older idea, one that is deeply inscribed into the human imagination: that of the sea voyage as a journey of transformation.¹

In the mind-bending odysseys of Homer, Apollonius and Virgil, the sea in all its vastness and uncertainty is a space of the impossible. Those who head out into this fluid territory of giant monsters, whirlpools and uncharted islands are deeply affected by their experiences. Their oceans are watched over by the likes Neptune, Poseidon and, as in the case of the sacred Buddhist text the Mahānipāta Jātaka, the goddess Manimekhala. These are the deities who rescue sailors, control the weather or otherwise consign the unfavourable to the waves. In these stories, taking to the water is not just a matter of finding safe passage, it is also a rite of passage. The star-led captains who make it to the other side or who gloriously return to port are often not the same as those who began the journey. Somewhere out there, in full fathom, as the water took them or as they reached the peak of enormous waves, they changed, and often for the better.

So too for those aboard Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, the ‘Ship of Fools’ that glides through the ‘imaginary landscape of the renaissance’ in search of lost reason, as Michel Foucault elegantly put it. The same could be said of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mariner who endures a torturous, albatross-heavy voyage in his journey towards redemption. And so it was for the sea-bound Goop contingent. If they were seeking deep relaxation, the pods and the other spa treatments seemed to do the trick. But later, when trying out the gym with its Peloton bikes and hot yoga, Loehnen and company noticed a subtle but distinct change of mood. Running on the treadmills, facing the glacial sea as if there was no window between, they began to lose their moorings. Their outlines faded: ‘We fell quickly into rhythm with the waves.’ Sigmund Freud called this sense of unbounded oneness a feeling of the ‘oceanic’. For the Goopers it was a revitalising moment of aquatic ease. Having previously been tied to the comforts of the shore, the team found themselves eagerly slipping into this new state: ‘We’re definitely water people.’²

*****

Since it launched online in 2008, Goop has grown into a business empire worth some $250 million and in so doing it has become the market leader in the contemporary wellness industry. This burgeoning commercial sector is driven by ‘consumer interest in exercise, healthy eating, self-care, mindfulness, stress reduction, healthy aging, complementary medicine, holistic health’ and many other on-trend practices. With an estimated global value of $4.5 trillion the wellness industry is a contemporary success story but neither the word nor the concept is new. The first written record of ‘wellness’ dates to 1654 and can be found in a diary entry by the Scottish statesman Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston. Writing with poignant relief, he records that his daughter has recovered from a period of illness and he blesses God for her present wealnesse. As James William Miller puts it, Lord Wariston ‘meant simply that his daughter was no longer ill’. Here ‘wellness’ was used as an ‘antonym of illness’ and this ‘continued to be the common meaning of the term until the middle of the twentieth century’. At this point, in the light of the reconstructive politics of the post-1945 period, the word took on a more specialised meaning. In the work of the American physician and biostatistician Halbert L. Dunn, wellness, or ‘high-level wellness’ as he termed it, described an aspirational rather than a functional state of health. Writing across the 1950s and early 1960s, Dunn advocated for a movement beyond treatment models that, in his view, sought only to alleviate the symptoms of disease. He was not interested in ‘patching up’, nor did he believe that such a makeshift approach was sufficient for the challenges and opportunities of the post-war world. Instead he wanted to inspire an appetite for the zestful, maximised fulfilment of individual and social potential.³

Later, as the countercultural projects of the 1960s began to merge with the New Age beliefs, speculative therapies, and health-focused attitudes of the 1970s, Dunn’s ideas were gradually embraced by those seeking an alternative to ‘conventional’ medicine. Programmes offered by the Wellness Resource Center in California’s Marin County, founded by Dr John Travis in 1975, sought to foster this sense of affirmative self-responsibility by teaching clients how to, in his words, ‘diagnose common illnesses and, where possible, to treat themselves’. Heavily influenced by Dunn, Travis worked on the principle that ‘health is not simply the absence of disease’ and, as such, his intention was neither to diagnose nor prescribe but rather to help clients ‘discover why they are sick’. To that end he encouraged a thorough examination of their ‘whole lifestyle: their diet, work habits and physical activities’. With this holistic approach at its heart, wellness emerged as a lifestyle choice oriented towards ‘optimal health’ and the achievement of your ‘highest potential for well-being’. As Dan Rather put it on the American television show 60 Minutes in 1979 when he reported on Travis’ work, wellness was ‘the ultimate in […] self-care’.⁴

At the same time, terms like ‘self-care’ were generating significant political currency among the period’s feminist and civil rights movements. As Aisha Harris puts it, in the 1970s ‘women and people of color viewed controlling their health as a corrective to the failures of a white, patriarchal medical system to properly tend to their needs’. For a wide range of activist groups, undoing the link between poverty and ill health was a key target in the overall struggle against inequality. As such, taking on the responsibility of self-care was a way to achieve an autonomous, empowered state of personal and political advancement.⁵

In contrast, the high-net-worth, 21st-century version of wellness appears to have lost much of this radicalism. As Daniela Blei has described, it seems that ‘wellness’ and ‘self-care’ have become catch-all terms to describe the rapid rise of ‘juice bars, meditation retreats [and] detox diets’. For the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, the emphasis remains on the idea of ‘thriving’ rather than ‘surviving’, while the Global Wellness Institute similarly defines wellness as ‘the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health’. However, the attainment of such optimal gains now seems more like a matter of leisure than health, a recalibration that is very much to the detriment of those most in need of a holistic model of care. For example, Latin America was one of the most buoyant sectors of the wellness market in terms of its pre-lockdown travel opportunities. Its spas, health hotels and glamping sites saw exponential growth in the decades leading up to 2020. At the same time, though, domestic health care funding underwent a significant decline. If you were fortunate enough to be able to travel to Brazil or Colombia for a spiritual detox you would have found a healthy and welcoming market. If, however, you lived there and needed basic care, it is likely that you would have encountered the sharp end of economic inequality: severe privations and a considerable lack of access. The continuing worldwide impact of the pandemic has served only to widen this ‘wellness divide’. ⁶

Contemporary wellness brands sell an attractive lifestyle that is superficially depoliticised and philosophically diluted. For Goop, wellness is a ‘deeply individual’ but largely non-specific approach to personal health, in which ‘the mind’ is never removed from ‘a conversation about the body’, nor ‘the body from a conversation about the mind’. Similar companies like WellCo, Well+Good and Thrive Global, not to mention a wave of bloggers, Instagrammers and influencers, work in the same vein, offering what typically amounts to a combination of self-help, product-focused diets and secularised spirituality. With their spectacles of aspirational health – often made by and for an affluent, white, middle-class demographic – wellness brands typically cherry-pick from a rich history of global food cultures, New Age ideas and religious traditions. The resulting products are lucrative, palatable and often peculiarly anodyne: websites and books which, in Hadley Freeman’s words, ‘mix recipes with vague nutritional advice and, of course, many, many photos’. In the world of wellness, yoga can be added to your daily routine as easily as goji berries to a smoothie. If that doesn’t work, you can just swipe onto the next screen and watch the latest vlogs about crystal therapy or energy cleansing. The idea is that this restless (or in Goop’s terms ‘curious’ and ‘open-minded’) movement from one product to the next will not just keep you generally healthy but will also open a path to fulfilment. It will help you find your better, truer self.⁷

To its advocates, wellness is a vital toolkit. The word describes a set of techniques that bring moments of calm into the accelerated pace of modern life. It’s often said that pursuing wellness helps people realise their potential and achieve their goals, and that in their championing of women’s health the likes of Goop and WellCo offer platforms of support that are ever more necessary in the post-#MeToo world. To its detractors, however, not least Sir Simon Stevens, former head of NHS England, contemporary wellness is mere quackery: a confidence trick in which celebrities – with their disappearing jade eggs, their super elixirs and their expensive bags of stones – promise miracles by peddling little more than snake oil.⁸

Goop’s detractors and defenders were equally on hand in January 2020 when the company announced, with great fanfare, their latest venture: ‘Goop-At-Sea’. Having been suitably impressed with their time on the Edge, Goop pressed forwards and pitched a high-profile event to take place aboard her sister ship and Celebrity’s flagship liner, the Apex. Intending to take full advantage of the Apex’s facilities – gourmet cuisine, plunge pools and a crystalarium – ‘Goop-At-Sea’ promised a grab-bag of ‘transformative workshops’ led by ‘trailblazing healers’, talks presented by ‘fascinating culture changers’ as well as the main event: an intimate Q&A with Paltrow herself. Promoting the cruise on the interview circuit, Paltrow offered a glimpse of the chat guests could expect. ‘I love being on the water, I love being by the water, and I love being in the water,’ she told USA Today with a typical combination of the vague and the obvious. ‘I think, energetically, it’s very cleansing to be near the sea or in the sea.’

Soon after, the Goop website warned that space would be limited and it encouraged readers to book before the full programme had even been finalised. This limit was not due to the close confines of the ship – like the Edge, the Apex had capacity for thousands of guests. Space would be limited because Goop’s headline-grabbing, widely reported, heavily advertised, social-media-circulated ‘ultimate getaway’ was, from the outset, intended to be resolutely exclusive. Originally scheduled for August 2020, during Celebrity’s eleven-night Mediterranean cruise, ‘Goop-At-Sea’ was only open to luxury-class passengers: those who were prepared to pay $4,200 for both the ‘basic’ cruise and a suite at the Apex’s onboard spa, ‘The Retreat’. It was only then that these high rollers had the privilege of paying a further $750 for the event itself, a single day of ‘goopy perks’. Hitting peak Goop at the apex of health, celebrity and cruising culture would thus be a snip at just under $5,000.⁹

Clearly, there is a distinct exceptionalism at play here in which the attractions of leisure and travel elevate the pursuit of wellness beyond the concerns and practicalities of social health. Based on its price tag alone ‘Goop-At-Sea’ says that in order to access the riches that come with being well you already need to have done well; you need to be standing high on the pyramid of available time and money. The seafaring modernists of Virginia Woolf’s debut novel The Voyage Out (1915) come to mind here. Having reached the South American resort of Santa Marina after weeks on board the good ship Euphrosyne one of Woolf’s ensemble, Mr Flushing, announces that he’d like to push into the further journey of a long life and carry on ‘for a hundred years’. ‘Think of all the things that are bound to happen!’ he says before Mrs Thornbury, one of his fellow travellers, responds with a cheerful echo. With total faith in the progress of history, momentarily ignoring the recent, feverish death of another in their party, she looks forward to ‘the changes, the improvements, the inventions—and beauty’. The Voyage Out was set in 1905 and those reading it in 1915 as Europe was sinking further into war may have had difficulty sharing Mrs Thornbury’s optimism. More than a hundred years later, though, ‘Goop-At-Sea’ promised nothing but ‘improvements’ and ‘beauty’, on board a ship which according to Celebrity Cruises was ‘designed to leave the future behind’. At a time when the modern ocean was a theatre of socio-political crisis, a disputed space in which the tragedies of migration, piracy and pollution played on without pause, ‘Goop-At-Sea’ invited its clients to float above it all; unhindered, unaware. ‘A cruise does away with the most annoying aspects of travel,’ gushed the sales pitch with all the ease of Mrs Thornbury. ‘The details – every destination, reservation and breakfast pancake – are in the expert hands of someone else.’¹⁰

*****

In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film The Holy Mountain (1973), there is a scene in which a group of men and women seeking enlightenment embark on a sea voyage. In the company of a grinning alchemist, they try to reach the sacred site of the title. However surprising Elise Loehnen and the Goopers found their transformation into ‘water people’, this was nothing compared to the experiences of Jodorowsky’s travellers. They are made to symbolically divest themselves of all the trappings of their former lives, which have to go overboard like so much excess baggage. It is only when they are free of their names, their clothes and their identities that they are truly ready to climb the mountain. It is a necessary ritual given the nature of their destination. Although they travel miles across the sea, Jodorowsky’s characters are really voyaging inside their own heads. They are on their way to inner space. Here the problems of the mind can be encountered, the ego can be unravelled, and the ‘self’ can be recalibrated.

John Travis had a similar idea in mind when he published The Wellness Index (1975) and then later The Wellness Workbook (1981). Among other concepts he wrote of the ‘Iceberg Model’, the idea that in order to ease mental and physical ailments one must go deep into the personality to find the underlying root cause. Contemporary wellness, by contrast, appears to have moved very much in the opposite direction. The industry looks outwards towards business models that accumulate economic and cultural capital, that depend upon masthead personalities, that promise lives of resonating health by encouraging feelings of perpetual illness.¹¹

That said, with its programme organised around the classic wellness trinity of the ‘mind’, the ‘body’ and the ‘soul’, ‘Goop-At-Sea’ was still coded as a personal, interior journey. As with the other key players in the wellness industry, Goop invited its guests on a voyage out that was equally a voyage in. While today’s glossy websites are a far cry from the experimental therapy centres of the 1970s, there is a bridge between the pursuit of wellness then and the pursuit of wellness now when it comes to this exploration of an individualised inner space. The two industries also appealed to similar markets. Many of the alternative medicine and New Age retreats of the 1970s may have seemed like the preserve of hippie survivors but they advertised themselves towards the suburbs rather than the underground. They had in mind the type of affluent, comfortable but quietly fragile households who had fondue on the dinner table, Valium in the medicine cabinet and Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972) in the bedroom.

It is simply too easy to see the two versions as utterly polarised. Whenever the latest wellness trend is decried on account of its consumerism, its appeal to a luxury market and its invitation to narcissistic self-indulgence, these criticisms repeat objections levelled at the culture of well-being in the 1970s: the quintessential ‘Me’ decade. It was the author Tom Wolfe who bestowed this enduring title upon the period, by way of an essay he wrote for New York magazine in 1976. Wolfe had in mind the growing popularity of that decade’s wellness and alternative health practices and in an argument that could easily apply to Goop and their contemporaries, he claimed they were generating a pervasive cultural solipsism. For Wolfe, health retreats were little more than playgrounds for the rich; holiday sites where navel-gazing white people could go to luxuriate through their mid- – or even quarter- – life crises. Wolfe was one of the main critical voices who helped frame the ‘seventies’ as a comedown decade, one in which the vibrant radicalism of the ‘sixties’ dwindled into a period of beige, suburban complacency. In this reading the anxieties of the prior decade remain, particularly those relating to nuclear power, inequality and generational tension, but for writers like Christopher Lasch – the American sociologist who dubbed the 1970s a ‘culture of narcissism’ – this new decade found the satisfaction of individual material needs taking priority over the fulfilment of a wider social agenda. If the 1960s were all about changing the world, the 1970s were all about changing yourself. It is an enduring story, one that often points to an arc of cultural decline extending out from the decade and reaching its nadir in the current smartphone-obsessed, selfie-fixated online era.¹²

Other versions of the 1970s see it as a time of socio-political and personal crisis, a veritable ‘post-trauma’ decade. In this telling, a wide range of therapists, writers, artists and practitioners variously responded to the idea of a ‘sick’ society – one defined by Watergate, international industrial discontent, the exhausting pace of modern life and what President Jimmy Carter termed in 1979 the ‘Crisis of Confidence’ – by striking out for inner spaces and questioning accepted notions of health, wealth and happiness. While the alleged narcissism of the decade may well have anticipated our own contemporary self-regard, the fifty-year gap between the 1970s and the 2020s also closes when it comes to this matter of crisis, personal and political. We are equally living through a time of trauma with global conflict, climate change, inequality, racism and misogyny standing alongside and feeding into poverty, housing emergencies and economic precarity. Add to this the enormous mortal and psychic implications of COVID-19 and it is clear that health and well-being should, more than ever, be on the agenda.¹³

‘Goop-At-Sea’ was one of the many, many events cancelled as the virus took hold. As well as the unfeasible logistics, one could easily argue that a celebrity-branded cruise was not what the world needed as the shutters came down. Advances in epidemiology are more of a priority during a semi-apocalyptic pandemic than luxury wellness holidays. However, the unprecedented experiences of lockdown, which sent many of us into our own inner spaces and from which some of us are yet to fully emerge, have since placed mental health at the centre of a web of intersectional support needs. As with other sectors of the health service, provision in this regard is suffering from significant privations. A period of intense anxiety and uncertainty requires a strategic therapeutic response and as we move further into a post-viral period, the work of Ministers for Mental Well-Being, access to online and offline therapy and the practice of robust self-care measures all need to be prioritised. With these imminent conversations in mind, then, it is necessary to reassess and in some cases remember what wellness could and should involve.

This is the focus of Well Beings: in charting the birth of modern wellness, it argues that the 1970s can point the way to such a re-examination. There is much that this often misunderstood and maligned decade can teach us – in both a cautionary and an instructive sense – about what it really means to be well. Terms like ‘wellness’, ‘well-being’ and ‘self-care’ have long histories, but they only really took root in the 1970s. These concepts, which seem so very 21st-century, started to gain traction over four decades ago at the meeting point of alternative medicine and the wider health care profession. Promising not just the absence of disease but a better, healthier and more fulfilled life, these methods, projects, diets and even cults offered an antidote to the strains of the modern world.

The 1970s marked the point where a generation of innovators and psychic explorers, borne out of the tumult of the 1960s and facing a new and uncertain world, set off into off into their own equally uncharted waters. These experimental voyages were grand adventures; sometimes perilous, often problematic, but not without potential. Buried within them are maps of our own road to recovery, not least because the world they were responding to was busy rolling out mobile phones, credit cards and the tendrils of the internet, the very engines of alienation that have since come to dominate and in many cases damage the wiring of contemporary life. Well Beings is the story of these journeys and, like any number of relaxing cruises, floatation sessions and guided meditation tapes, it starts with the gentle sound of lapping water.

PART I

Bright Horizons

CHAPTER I

The Possibility of an Island

1970–1972

The town of Westport, in Ireland’s County Mayo, opens out into the buffeting waves of Clew Bay. Storms come easily here. With the force of the Atlantic feeding it, the bay can quickly turn into a cauldron of cloud and churning water. Fishermen setting out on a quiet Westport day can often be in for a rough ride once they reach the deeper waters. This was the case one morning in September 1970 when a loose group of friends gathered at the harbour. Not long out of summer, the weather was still warm and with blue skies, Westport looked its postcard best. A light breeze carried the sound of gulls as the water gently lapped against the sea wall. The friends were a curious lot: a gaggle of long hair, beards, flowing scarves and rucksacks. ‘Hippies’ the locals would have called them, with a fair amount of disdain and suspicion. Chatting and excited, they clambered into a few waiting oyster boats and set out to brave the waves. Through waters variously calm and turbulent, the small flotilla made for Dorinish, one of Clew Bay’s many rocky, exposed and uninhabited islands. Standing proudly at the fore of the leading boat, with a shock of flame-red hair, was Sid Rawle, a 25-year-old Englishman recently dubbed ‘King of the Hippies’ by the British press. ¹

Rawle was an enterprising visionary with a background in trade unionism. A passionate believer in the liberative promises of the 1960s counterculture, he had spent the last few years moving through England’s network of squats and communes in pursuit of a utopian or, more specifically, eutopian agenda. It was the English statesman Thomas More who coined the term ‘utopia’, a compound of the Greek ou for ‘not’ and topos for ‘place’. By this he meant a ‘no-place’ or ‘nowhere’, because the main hook of More’s political fiction Utopia (1516) was that his idealised island society does not exist. However, in one of the book’s prefatory poems, ‘On Utopia’, More gave his concept a small, but telling, tweak. He had his poet ‘Anemolius’ give voice to the book’s utopia, and it proceeds to compare itself to Kallipolis, the imagined city of Plato’s Republic. Where that city has been ‘depicted with words’, however, More’s utopia claims to be more than a fiction having been ‘produced / With men and resources and the best laws’. As such, it is keen to be known by another name, not ‘Utopia’ but ‘deservedly, by the name Eutopia’. Replacing ou with eu – meaning ‘happy’ – gives rise to ‘eutopia’, a happy or ‘good place’; a concept that is no less idealised than the ‘no-place’ but, in keeping with the suggestion of the poem, carries with it the teasing sense of a somewhere that does or could exist. It is this sense of possibility that would have chimed with Rawle’s worldview. He had no desire to hypothesise an impossible, idealised ‘no-place’. Instead, he wanted to actually build a ‘good place’, somewhere amenable to a better life, a place of happiness and fairness, where all would be well.²

For Rawle, getting a better life was contingent upon changing the world. If you were unhappy with your lot you had to alter, reorganise and in some cases dispense with the structures that govern how you live, where you live and why you live. For Rawle, the ambitious simplicity of this project ‘all [went] back to the land’. He was aghast at the iniquitous history of English land rights that had led to ‘some folk owning hundreds of thousands of acres and others owning none’. Determined to go beyond the ebb and flow of stoned conversation, Rawle wanted to realise his good place by revivifying the public claim to common land and establish upon these legal, political and physical grounds a viable alternative community. In the mid-1960s, Rawle had taken his cause to London’s Hyde Park, an iconic space that had long struck a delicate balance between private ownership and public use. There, Rawle convened a radical collective called the Hyde Park Diggers, and among the expansive grounds and the libertarian atmosphere of Speakers’ Corner he set about extolling the virtues of self-sufficiency. By growing your own food, by living on and with the land, by ‘gradually evolve[ing] a new society’, as the writer and ‘ardent digger’ Charlotte Yonge put it, you could break free; you could unshackle yourself from the ‘screwed-up’ ‘straight world’.

The Hyde Park Diggers, later known as Digger Action Movement, were directly inspired by one of Rawle’s spiritual forebears, the 17th-century Protestant, activist and land reformer Gerrard Winstanley. Winstanley and his group, the Diggers or ‘True Levellers’, moved through the uncertain atmosphere of Civil War-era England cultivating vacant tracts and reclaiming land which had been enclosed into private ownership. Anyone who worked with them had equal share in the food they produced. This political project – Winstanley’s intervention into the constitutional crisis following the execution of Charles I – came with the added force of mystical vision. It was God who made the earth, preached Winstanley in his pamphlet The New Law of Righteousness (1649), it does not belong to landowners whose titles had been ‘founded in conquest’, and it should thus remain ‘a common treasury’ for all. Rawle’s argument was no less impassioned and similarly infused with a sense of post-war mission as well as an incipient nationalism. If ‘[w]e can be ordered to fight and die for Queen and Country’, he wrote in a later essay, is it ‘in peace time […] too much to ask for just a few square yards of our green and pleasant land to rear our children on’?³

There was much talk among the Hyde Park Diggers of starting rural communes and co-operative farms; of spreading out to explore the common ground across the British Isles, but Rawle was also keen to agitate for the means and the right to embark upon this project in the heart of the metropolis itself. An opportunity came in the late summer of 1969 when Rawle and various Diggers joined in with another collective, the London Street Commune. The combined group, which initially numbered about 100 hippies and activists, took up residence at 144 Piccadilly, an empty five-storey mansion and former hotel a stone’s throw from Hyde Park’s manicured gardens.

After gaining entry in late August they secured water and electrical supplies, barricaded the doors and windows from the inside, installed a makeshift drawbridge to control access from the outside and, finally, with the perimeter secure, cheerfully announced themselves as outlaws by provocatively flying a Hells’ Angels flag from the roof. Once word of the squat travelled through the city’s alternative scene, the group quickly swelled to about 300 occupiers and attracted the attention of both the tabloid press and the Metropolitan Police. The People and The News of the World gleefully reported that the building had become a pit of depravity, teeming with such horrors as sex, squalor, drugs and, even worse, ‘foul language’. Meanwhile, Rawle’s announcement that he wanted the building to be ‘a permanent urban guerrilla base for underground activities’, got the authorities twitching. The response was inevitable: ‘Hippiedilly’, as it became known, was raided by the police in mid-September and the squatters were violently removed. There was no way it could have lasted. Aside from the establishmentarian anxiety regarding the so-called ‘counterculture’ – a wave of left-wing activism, intergenerational tension and social change that reached critical mass in 1969 – Rawle and the London Street Commune were guilty of that other great crime of British manners: the assumption of undue privilege. Staking a largely symbolic claim to public parkland was one thing but taking up residence in one of London’s most exclusive enclaves without the prior qualifiers of wealth, property and ‘good’ social standing was quite another. This was simply not the way things were done in England, particularly in the overheated economy of late-1960s London.⁴

The city was still dominated by the old guard, the English aristocracy. If you looked out from the top of a 1960s tower block then, as now, you would see a city largely in the possession of the Crown, the Church, and the remnants of the landed gentry. Of the latter, the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estate remains one of the wealthiest. Dating back to 1677, shortly after Winstanley agitated against the injustices of landownership, this largely inherited estate has steadily grown, absorbing along the way the most expensive bits of the Monopoly board: around 200 acres of Belgravia and 100 acres of Mayfair. Ducking and diving alongside these empires other territorial claims were being made, based not on ancestral money but on London’s post-war enterprise opportunities. In the late 1960s and across the 1970s self-made businessmen like the British club owner and pornographer Paul Raymond, publisher of King magazine (1964), bought up large swathes of Soho, one sex shop or massage parlour at a time. The size of Raymond’s portfolio was nothing compared to the Grosvenor Estate, but the so-called ‘King of Soho’ nevertheless shared the Duke of Westminster’s attitude to investment. As a speculator, Raymond saw property as an asset, a source of wealth: it was not there for the purpose of living.

This shift towards a post-shelter economy would gain pace across the 1970s, setting the scene for the contemporary housing crisis that has left London all but uninhabitable for most homebuyers, let alone renters. Standing between these holdings, at the nexus of old and new money, 144 Piccadilly was the ideal place for Rawle and the London Street Commune to highlight these problems. As a grand mansion built in the 1790s for Sir Drummond Smith with no expenses spared, it epitomised property privilege. When the squat was forcefully ended, the point was clearly made: this was a charter’d zone in which there was no place for those in need of accommodation. Between the demands of high capital and community action there was no common ground.⁵

Rawle came away from Hippiedilly undaunted but resolved to make good the plans he had previously mooted in Hyde Park. If he was to be excluded from land grabbed by the rich, he would indeed give the Diggers a space elsewhere. This would not be a place at loggerheads with the straight world but somewhere beyond it. He began to think seriously about an off-grid, autonomous counterpoint to modern life; an experiment in communal living that could lead the way for others wanting to escape the privacies and privations of this unfair, unsustainable and unhealthy ‘society’. And here it was. Little more than a year after leaving the London squat, Rawle was cutting through the waves off the West Coast of Ireland, watching the cliffs of Dorinish loom into view. With a fleet of followers behind him, and a fine prospect in front, Rawle felt that he had finally struck gold. Here, it seemed, was the coastline of a new world, a place where he and his Diggers, now rechristened the ‘Tribe of the Sun’, could pursue their great eutopian work uninterrupted.

Disembarking on the island’s pebble beach, the group got started. The most important thing was to find fresh water. Tommy Cribbons, the Westport boatman, showed Rawle ‘where the old water place had been’, and after a little bit of digging they soon found ‘the stone lips of a well’, the opening of a ‘vast underground network […] connected to the shore’. Next a fire was made using driftwood from the beach, and then the tents went up. With dusk falling, Cribbons cast off in his oyster boat and faded from view, effectively severing the link between Rawle, his group and the mainland. Undaunted, they celebrated their good fortune. The island had granted them safe passage, it had welcomed them ashore, and it had provided them with fuel and water. With the smell of food and firewood in the air, an aura of well-being descended on the camp. They gave thanks to Dorinish, toasted each other, and looked forward to the adventures to come. There was also a wave of gratitude towards their benefactor, the actual owner of the island who had given them the opportunity to come here in the first place: the writer, artist and – most famously – ex-Beatle, John Lennon.⁶

*****

Lennon had bought Dorinish in 1967, paying less than £2,000 for it at an open auction. Buying an island might sound like the most rockstar of rockstar indulgences, not least because Lennon had, by proxy, outbid a group of Westport farmers who had wanted to use Dorinish as grazing land. It was not quite modern-day enclosure, more like a grandiose version of second-house syndrome: the flow of distant capital drowning out local needs. Unlike the speculators of central London, however, Lennon was willing to share his asset. He did not intend to zombify the island and take it out of use, but rather to put it to use in a particular way.⁷

Since the mid-1960s Lennon had, like Rawle, been giving serious thought to another way of life. He wanted to find a space of playfulness and creativity for The Beatles and a select entourage. What Lennon had in mind was not so much a revolution as a retreat, a movement away from the demanding glare of publicity into a more contemplative phase. Spending time with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Wales in 1967, and then again in Rishikesh in India in 1968, had been an attempt at this. Lennon’s eventual disillusionment with Transcendental Meditation and the yogi himself, coupled with a set of seismic upheavals in his private life and his 1969 exit from The Beatles, meant that by 1970 he was looking for a very different direction. In part, this came in the form of ‘Primal Therapy’, a course of radical psychotherapy he and Yoko Ono undertook between April and September 1970 with the method’s originator, an intense and iconoclastic psychologist from Los Angeles named Dr Arthur Janov.

Primal Therapy was a supercharged form of psychodrama that eschewed the analysis of psychoanalysis in favour of an intense, non-verbal treatment of neurosis. Janov was not interested in getting into the minds of his patients. Instead, he wanted them to perform a psychic purge by opening their heads and spilling it all out. For Janov, neurosis was ignited by the trauma of birth, developed during early years of unmet emotional and physical needs and fully ingrained by subsequent mistreatment from adult and authority figures. To survive all this ‘Pain’, argued Janov in The Primal Scream (1970), we repress it all. We push it so deep down that we are relived of the need even to express it. The problem, however, is that it stays down there, growing, radiating. ‘Pain’ in Janov’s terms does not return like the repressed fixations and phantasies analysed in Freudian theory. Rather, it spreads out like a canker-blossom, causing illness at a physical and psychological level. Worse still, this dark flower carries on whispering to us, reminding us that repression is the only way to deal with our emotions, our desires and ourselves. Gradually, as the tendrils reach further, we are split in two: the ‘real’, suffering, pain-saturated ‘authentic’ being and the unfeeling, neutral ‘automaton’ who interacts with others. Janov’s method sought to unlock this trapped self.

Working out of the LA clinic he opened in 1968, Janov would encourage his patients to relive traumatic memories and thereby express the unprocessed pain associated with them. Typically, a course of therapy would last around seven months and it would begin with a series of open-ended individual sessions with Janov. In a sound-proofed, semi-darkened room he would invite the patient to lie on a couch before starting to probe at their ‘tension and problems’. This was an information-gathering exercise. Janov was trying to get a glimpse of the patient’s defence systems and any emotional fissures pointing to issues that lay deeper than surface-level headaches and general low moods. From here, he would carefully steer the patient away from the ‘personality (or unreal self)’ that describes, intellectualises and largely avoids painful memories in order to prompt them into ‘feeling’: an often overwhelming re-experience of a previously buried, unarticulated emotion. After this first phase the patient would then join an extended series of group sessions in which the same process would take place but with the added support – and intensity – of the other members working through their private dramas at the same time. In each instance the aim was to have patients arrive at the emotional breakthrough of a ‘Primal’: a volcanic moment of yelling, pillow-thumping, floor-banging catharsis. Janov saw the crying and screaming that often occurred at these turning points as acts of unblocking, a ‘methodical emptying out of the tank of Pain’. When the floodgates opened, he argued, the mask of neurosis would shatter, leaving in its place the clear face of the authentically ‘feeling’ self. Over the course of the whole treatment Janov wanted to leave his patients drained, finally free of their psychic baggage. ‘Once the tank is empty,’ he wrote, ‘I consider the person real, or well.’⁸

The Primal Scream has its origins in the counterculture of the 1960s. Indeed, Janov cites the confrontational, emetic performances of ‘destructivist’ artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz as the inspiration for the first ‘eerie scream’ he heard from a patient. For Paul Williams and Brian Edgar, though, Janov was not merely reflecting isolated works but pulling into his therapy room the radical ideology of the decade’s New Left politics. As they put it, Primal Therapy mirrored the ‘act first, analyse later’ anti-intellectualism of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Youth International Party (the ‘Yippies’) as well as the idealisation of childhood experience central to the playfulness of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters as well as Richard Neville’s book Play Power (1970). With its emphasis on liberation from inherited patterns, The Primal Scream also echoed the general sense of intergenerational tension that characterised the countercultural impetus. This effort to break away from the normative grip of sexual mores, work patterns, drug laws and adult authority was visible across the spectrum from the emergence of ‘hippie’ enclaves to Rawle’s attempt at communal independence. More specifically, when Janov called the ‘forceful upheaval’ of Primal Therapy ‘revolutionary’ he was also aligning his work with the self-conscious violence of 1960s radicalism, evident according to Williams and Edgar not just in the provocative art of Ortiz and his contemporaries but also the political extremities of far-left pseudo-terroristic groups like the Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground (or Weathermen) grew out of the nominally non-violent national protest group Students for a Democratic Society. They were a militant splinter cell frustrated with the apparent ineffectuality large-scale marches, preferring to bomb buildings rather than occupy them. Their rhetoric spoke of an assault against ‘the system’, an aggression that chimed with Janov’s own stated attempts to eliminate ‘neurosis’. Both had the pernicious effects of modern capitalist society in mind. Janov, however, was not a voice from the activist bunkers mounting a transgressive attack on bourgeois values. In The Primal Scream he was trying to highlight and minister to the day-to-day struggles of modern Americans, those shuttling between atomising jobs and nuclear families while quietly disappearing into insomnia, loneliness and depression. As Janov put it, ‘hard work takes care of some feelings, yelling at the children helps a little more, cigarettes and alcohol drain off even more’ but ‘there is still a need for tranquilizers and sleeping pills’. More so than the much-publicised menace of LSD (available under the trade name Delysid from 1947 until 1965), it was the pharmacy-bought contents of the medicine cabinet like Valium, Quaaludes and Sominex – as well as the social rituals feeding their use – that at the turn of the 1970s were giving rise to widespread, high-functioning catatonia.⁹

For all his fiery rhetoric, hip credentials and tendency to set himself apart from rival therapeutic systems, Janov was keeping pace with an increasing public interest in psychology, mental health and the psychodynamics of everyday life. Consciously or not, The Primal Scream incorporated ideas from a full spectrum of parallel writers and thinkers ranging from the ‘anti-psychiatry’ of R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1967) to the poststructuralist interrogations of psychoanalysis that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would develop into Anti-Oedipus (1970–72). Janov’s emphasis on the suffocating weight of the inauthentic, ‘public’ self also resonated with Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964). This bestselling introduction to ‘transactional analysis’ dissected the adult–child dynamics that extend out from private to public life and back again. We are constantly playing games, argues Berne, and the family structure of ‘Parent, Adult, Child’ reoccurs in every social aggregation. Partners, teachers, bosses: they are all ‘parents’, explains Berne; they are all struggling to subjugate the ‘child’. He offered Games People Play as a rulebook, that his readers might better understand and thereby navigate these power-laden interactions. While Janov would have agreed with Berne’s portrait of social conditioning, he was not interested in using therapy to teach the ‘rules’. If anything, he was keen for his patients to dispense with the game altogether so they could start to live on their own terms.¹⁰

In this way, the attempt of Primal Therapy to revive the submerged or hidden self overlapped with another school of thought: the field of ‘humanistic psychology’. A broad church made up of varying approaches and methodologies, humanistic psychology made its public presence known in 1961 with the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, a publication spearheaded by the academic psychologists Anthony Sutich and Abraham Maslow. Maslow, along with such like-minded correspondents as Carl Rogers, author of On Becoming a Person (1961), was frustrated with the then dominant approach to the study of psychology: behaviourism. As David Cohen explains, the ‘central tenet of behaviourism is that thoughts, feelings and intentions, mental processes all, do not determine what we do’. Instead, led by empirical evidence and with a focus on experience, behaviourists saw the individual as a conditioned product of their environment. According to this view autonomy is an illusion. We humans are not thinking, feeling, individually wilful agents, but environmentally programmed ‘biological machines’ who do not consciously act but rather ‘react to stimuli’. For Maslow, this emphasis on conditioning too readily disregarded the value of inner motivations, the variation and potentiality of psychological experience and what he outlined in Toward a Psychology of Being (1962) as ‘the depths and the heights of human nature’. Maslow was not content to liken cognitive human experience to that of rat in a maze responding only to the next corner, obstacle or puzzle. The mind, he argued, had the ability and the plasticity to take us beyond such reactive limitations. As such, the focus of humanistic psychology was not then on ‘sickness, not health even’ but ‘transcendence’, what Maslow called ‘self-actualization’: the growth of ‘full humanness’.

An early definition of self-actualisation appeared in Maslow’s paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ (1943). Drawing on the work of neurologist Kurt Goldstein and his book The Organism (1939), Maslow described self-actualisation as ‘a desire for self-fulfilment’, a tendency that ‘might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming’. For Maslow, self-actualisation was about realising one’s own capabilities in excess of the ‘warped, repressed or denied’ personality conferred by the behaviourist view. It was a goal that depended on the prior satisfaction of other, more basic needs. ‘Man’, wrote Maslow in ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, is a ‘perpetually wanting animal’ who is constantly driven to satisfy a set of somatic and psychic demands. These range from the immediate physiological needs for food and water to the pursuit of ‘safety’, the acquisition of material and emotional security. Having satisfied these, Maslow argues, the individual