The young Joseph Berke’s countercultural bent was visible early. At medical school in the Bronx, he was the only student to sport a beard—a sign of his radical and Beatnik affiliation. In New York, where he befriended the early countercultural rock group, The Fugs, Joe also read his own Beat poetry in cafes, spent time with Timothy Leary at his upstate Millbrook community, and, most importantly, helped establish an alternative college, The Free University of New York. 

 

When he came to London in 1965, Joe brought a wealth of countercultural experience, plus his characteristic energy, organisational skill, and can-do determination. He soon got involved in R. D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall, an alternative mental healthcare-cum-experimental community that Joe considered an ‘anti-institution’: a democratic social formation critiquing existing mental healthcare and, more broadly, questioning usual ways of living together. 

 

Alongside his involvement in the Hall, Joe voiced his opposition to the war in Vietnam, speaking, for instance, at an event in Trafalgar Square in October 1965.

 

Whilst Joe later strongly distanced himself from the Left, at that time Joe was a committed leftist, consciously building the revolution. For him, like many young radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, that meant moving away from ‘Old Left’, class-based politics and taking part in utopian experiments that embodied new ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. Joe was the principal organiser of a New Left London congress entitled The Dialectics of Liberation, a key New Left event which attracted up to 5000 people over two weeks in the summer of 1967. 

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The Dialectics of Liberation brought together radical psychiatrists, such as R. D. Laing and David Cooper, with European and US radicals to discuss the nature of violence—not just the physical violence of the state and the war raging in South-East Asia, but also interpersonal violence, the violence of everyday racism, and violence against the eco-system. Joe’s old friend from the New York Beat scene, Allen Ginsberg, spoke at the event. So did Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher then teaching in California. Gregory Bateson, an English polymath working in the US, warned that the planet was heating with dangerous rapidity. Stokely Carmichael, the Trinidad-born Black radical, spoke about ‘structural racism’, a phrase that most present would not have heard before. 

 

At the Dialectics of Liberation, Joe sold copies of his own countercultural art magazine. Fire was a handsome publication that would continue until the opening of the next decade and include contributions from Joe himself, R. D. Laing, Gary Snyder, and several people living at Kingsley Hall. 

 

After the Dialectics of Liberation, Joe contributed to the countercultural Oz magazine. His work was a satirical piece making fun of well-to-do people’s platitudes. Alluding to Berke’s Peerage, Joe entitled the piece Berke’s Bourgeoisie. 

 

Joe turned his attention to education. Drawing on his experience of establishing the Free University of New York, he helped set up The Anti-University of London, which in 1968 (and in one form or another up to the beginning of the 1970s) offered low-price classes in psychology, politics, poetry, and politics. 

 

The Anti-University sought to bring together the various aspects of the counterculture and promote a parallel society. So too did Joe’s 1969 book, Counter-Culture: The Creation of an Alternative Society. Similarly to the Dialectics of Liberation, the book brought together contributors from the UK, mainland Europe, and the United States. The book was expensive, however, and the illustrations, in black and white, did not come out well. (Joe, who had wanted the book to look like the super-colourful San Francisco Oracle magazine, was disappointed in the look of his book.)

 

His next book became his best known. He wrote Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness with Mary Barnes, who, with Joe’s help, had broken down and rebuilt herself at Kingsley Hall. The book offers an unusually fine-grained account of living in an alternative community. 

 

Joe continued to feature in the countercultural press. For instance, in November 1971, he was interviewed by Frendz magazine. 

 

Alongside establishing his own therapeutic community and psychotherapy training programme after the closure of Kingsley Hall in 1970, Joe began work with his friend Calvin Hernton, a sociologist and poet, on countering myths about the counter-culture’s most used drug, marijuana. The Cannabis Experience: An Interpretative Study of the Effects of Marijuana and Hashish, drew on extensive interviews with dope smokers and countered myths promulgated by the media, government, and conservatives in the medical profession. 

 

In later years, whilst Joe retained his countercultural spirit— he rejected key tenets of the left, lamenting the politics of envy, themes he explored in his most revised work: Malice Through the Looking Glass. He never lost his enthusiasm for shaking up the establishment and was ever generous to researchers curious about experiments in the 1960s.