The Hippie Counterculture: Utopia, Persona, Alternative Social Construct
The Hippie Counterculture: Utopia, Persona, Alternative Social Construct

Summary/Abstract: In order to analyze the social impact of the hippie phenomenon, I will attempt to deconstruct ideas and social behaviors of the hippie counterculture that led to the emergence and propagation among the young people of the late 1960s and early 1970s of a new lifestyle that substantially contradicted institutional values and mainstream culture. Additionally, I will adopt a psychosocial point of view and focus on the role of tradition in the construction of the self and on the fragmentation of the self and other psychological defense mechanisms in the face of individual and collective trauma as reflected in the escapist tendencies of the Flower Power generation. Moreover, I will observe the dynamics within these groups that proposed a dissident social attitude and the intrinsic mechanisms that led, in some cases, to deviant behaviors, despite the movement’s optimistic and, at first glance, harmless ideas. Last but not least, I will observe the different facets of the self, determined both by one’s own beliefs and especially by the sum of intersections with other members of the same counterculture, as variants and variables of functioning within an alternative system. Such a system was being dominated by avant-garde ideas and by the denial of social conventions unanimously accepted by the majority, with application to the Romanian case. In the same interpretative key, I will also isolate the potential effects at both individual and group level of a psychosocial manifestation of this kind.

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