Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth:Psychoanalytic Truth, the Post-Truth Era, and History as a Series of Psychoanalytic Sessions

Abstract

Dubbed the "Summer of Love," the summer of 1967 found U.S. youth coming together for music, sex, and drugs, but more importantly, coming together for an escape from and opposition to dire circumstances of social unrest, including the Vietnam War and the civil rights conflicts that abounded in the 1960s. [...]the topics at the forefront of intellectual and broader societal thought in the 1960s are some of the very same topics we wrestle with today. Antiintellectual disdain for experts and critical thinkers has reappeared as documented in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (2008), Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (2000), Tom Nichols's pre-Trump-era essay, "The Death of Expertise" (2014), and David Masciotra's "Anti-Intellectualism is Back" (2020), which reprised Hofstadter's work in reference to attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci and the development of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. Climate change is a current critical topic, but has an important history in the album's 1967. A 2015 poll was conducted by The Carbon Brief, in which members of the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chose an article by Manabe and Wetherald (1967), written in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences from the same year as Reynolds's album, as the most influential paper on climate change research and the first to demonstrate the effects of carbon dioxide on global temperatures through a computer model (Pidock 2015).