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Paul Goodman ( 9 September 1911 New York City – 2 August 1972 ) was an American Sociologist , poet, writer, and Public Intellectual . He described his politics as Anarchist , his loves as Bisexual , and his profession as that of " Man Of Letters ". Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of '' Growing Up Absurd '' and for having been, during the 1960s, an activist on the Pacifist Left and an inspiration to the Counterculture of that era. He is less remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and 50s. EARLY LIFE As a child, Goodman freely roamed the streets and public libraries of his native New York City, experiences which later inspired his radical concept of "the educative city"). He completed a Ph.D. at the University Of Chicago in 1932. While teaching there, he was dismissed for falling in love with a student. For a number of years afterwards, he was forced to support himself and his family by a series of modestly paid menial and teaching jobs. WORKS Goodman was a prolific writer of essays, fiction and poetry. Although he had been writing short stories since 1932, his first novel, ''The Grand Piano'', was published in 1942. More novels followed, including the notorious ''Parents' Day'' (1951), which addresses the issue of Pederasty {Link without Title} , and more than 100 short stories. In 1947, he published two books, ''Kafka's Prayer'' and '' Communitas '', a classic study of urban design coauthored with his brother Percival. Fame came only with the 1960 publication of his '' Growing Up Absurd : problems of youth in the organized system''. Goodman was strongly influenced by , Isadore From, Goodman, Elliot Shapiro, Paul Weiss, Richard Kitzler - the founding members of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. Goodman wrote on a wide variety of subjects; including education, Gestalt Therapy, city life and Urban Design , Children's Rights , politics, Literary Criticism , and many more. In an interview with Studs Terkel , Goodman said "I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist." He was equally at home with the Avant-garde and with Classical texts, and his fiction often mixes formal and experimental styles. The style and subject matter of Goodman's short stories influenced those of Guy Davenport . In 1967, Goodman's son Matthew died in a mountain climbing accident. Paul's friends claimed that he never recovered from the resulting grief, and his health began to deteriorate. He died of a heart attack just before his 61st birthday. VIEWS AND OPINIONS Hayden Carruth wrote "Any page of Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom — that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time." Bisexuality The freedom with which he revealed, in print and in public, his homosexual life and loves (notably in a late essay, "The Politics of Being Queer " (1969)), proved to be one of the many important cultural springboards for the emerging Gay Liberation movement of the early 1970s. However, his own views ran counter to the modern construction of homosexuality. It was his opinion that it was pathological not to be able to make love to someone of the opposite sex, but that it was equally pathological "not to be able to experience homosexual pleasure." Likewise, it was his view that sexual relationships between men and boys were natural, normal, and healthy, and that they could lay the foundation for continuing friendship even after the sexuality is outgrown (since "sex play does not last long between males, as a rule").(ibid, p.88) In discussing his own sexual relationships with boys, he acknowledged that public opinion would condemn him, but countered that "what is really obscene is the way our society makes us feel shameful and like criminals for doing human things that we really need." In diagnosing the problems of modern education, which even in his time was accused of killing the spirit of the youngsters and leaving them bereft of curiosity and creativity, he underlined that "a good pupil-teacher relationship inevitably has sexual overtones" and that acknowledgment and proper channeling of these tensions would lead to a better educational environment.(ibid, p.89) Radical politics After having been a strong advocate of the student movement during most of the 1960s, Goodman eventually became a staunch critic of the ideological harshness the New Left embraced toward the end of the decade. In "New Reformation" (1970), his tenth book of social criticism, he argued that their "alienation" and existential rage had usurped what worthwhile political goals sixties youths had had in the earlier part of the decade (e.g., the Port Huron Statement ), and that therefore their tactics had become destructive (p. 47-60, 144-163). The book further situated the drama of the tumultuous sixties in the larger context of what Goodman called "the disease of modern times" (p. 22). In drawing this parallel between young people's socio-historical consciousness and their political activism, Goodman made an early contribution to the argument that the philosophical underpinnings of the New Left were largely informed by postwar disenchantment with Enlightenment conceptions of science, technology, truth, knowledge, and power relations. For instance, after a hostile exchange with student radicals who had heckled him "heatedly and rudely" at a campus appearance in 1967, Goodman wrote, "suddenly I realized that they did not believe there was a nature of things. them there was no knowledge but only the sociology of knowledge. They had learned so well that physical and sociological research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they were doubtful that there was such a thing as simple truth, for instance that the table was made of wood--maybe it was plastic imitation...I had imagined that the worldwide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, and I was sympathetic to this. But I now saw that we had to do with a religious crisis. Not only all institutions but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore Of Babylon , and there was no longer any salvation to be got from Works." (48) After a life of revolutionary revelry and social criticism, Goodman's likening of the youth revolt in the 1960s to the Protestant Reformation of 1517 made up the crux of his belief about American modernity in the late sixties: "It is evident that, at present, we are not going to give up the mass faith in scientific technology that is the religion of modern times; and yet we cannot continue with it, as it has been perverted. So I look for a 'New Reformation.'" (xi) Goodman participated at the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, held in London and coordinated by South African psychiatrist David Cooper . The Congress aimed at "creating a genuine revolutionary consciousness by fusing ideology and action on the levels of the individual and of mass society" {Link without Title} . Goodman's views on politics, social psychology, and society could be usefully compared and contrasted with those of fellow attendees Herbert Marcuse and R. D. Laing , and with those of Norman O. Brown . QUOTATIONS
:the Stars & Stripes my red & white & blue :& my Black Flag the sovereignty of no :man or law! :- Paul Goodman, in Noam Chomsky , For Reasons of State (1973) BOOKS BY GOODMAN Nonfiction
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