Ginsberg in the 50s

Ginsberg in the 50s

A brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1996):

Ginsberg's stay in the mental ward was not intended to help him realize his desire for life to be a "sweet humane surprise." Ginsberg tried to conform, returned after several months to Paterson, dated women, and found a job. He was miserable until he moved to California in 1954 and began seeing a $1 an hour psychiatrist at the university in Berkeley. In San Francisco Ginsberg saw another psychiatrist, Philip Hicks, who asked him what he would like to do. "Doctor," as Ginsberg recalls his answer, "I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear,"

but I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone -- maybe even a man -- and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. Then hesaid "Well, why don't you?" I asked him what the American Psychoanalytic Association would say about that, and he said . . . if that is what you really feel would please you, what in the world is stopping you from doing it?

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/ginsberg50s.html