Roundhouse: Joe Berke and the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation

The 1967 ’Summer of Love’ brought all sorts of unusual people and events to London but perhaps nothing so extraordinary as the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. The congress, organized by the American ’anti-psychiatrist’ Joe Berke, with help from Leon Redler, R.D. Laing, David Cooper, and a host of students, ex-students, psychiatric ’patients’, and secretaries, took place at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm Road over two weeks during July, and was designed to ’demystify human violence in all its forms, the social systems from which it emanates, and to explore new forms of action.’

But that bald summary of the purpose of the congress, accurate as it is, hardly does justice to its immediate achievements or to its long-term significance. Mingling with the many then famous speakers: Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Stokely Carmichael, Gregory Bateson, C.L.R. James, Julian Beck, Emmett Grogan, Thich Nhat Hanh, Paul Sweezy, John Gerassi, and Lucien Goldmann, were many younger people who arrived with their own ideas and who themselves went onto distinguished and influential careers in the arts, politics and academia. One was the American artist Carolee Schneemann, who devised a happening which was performed on the last day of the congress. Another was the British psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell. A third was the American feminist, Angela Davis.

This book, which is in part a biography of Joe Berke, traces the Congress from its origins in the United States to its major outgrowth The Anti-University of London, and concludes with some brief reflections on the congress’s relevance to today’s ’revolutionary’ identity-based politics.

Martin Levy is a librarian at the University of Bradford and an occasional writer on various subjects including anti-psychiatry and the free universities movement of the 1960s. His book of interviews with the peace campaigner and anti-nuclear activist Michael Randle was published by ibidem in 2021.