The Immediate Is the Ultimate

...All of these developments emerge out of a sense of Identity, continually changing, growing, coalescing...

...Erikson maps out a human growth plan, following the epigenetic principle derived from the growth of organisms in utero, with each part of a person having its time of ascendancy, crisis, and resolution...

...No activist, Freud could promise only understanding and acceptance...

...The biases of early male clinicians, investigating only the suffering of women, precluded a full exploration of the implications of the female anatomy...

...women were passive, masochistic, suffering, hostile to the mother for being "cheated," overly identifying with the father for being "endowed...

...It is rather a compendium from his three previous books and many articles, flavored with new insights and organized under one cover...

...Freud's medical background, as well as the conditions of hysteria he was investigating, dictated a more rigid atomistic approach than Erik-son's...

...The biological implications here are as real and profound as those posited from a crude Electra complex...

...Erickson's shorthand answer is that the Immediate is the Ultimate...

...The volume does not represent a radical departure from his earlier writings...

...Anatomy may be destiny, says Erikson, but it must be looked at with some imagination...

...He is an unabashed eclectic...

...In the dialectic of knowledge, he functions best at the level of synthesis...

...But we must always look beyond to the reconstructed whole, says Erikson: "The freshness and wholeness of experience and the opportunities arising with a resolved crisis can, in an ongoing life, transcend trauma and defense...

...It is a touching comment from one of Freud's most outstanding critics and disciples...

...Of all the followers and critics of Freud, Erik Erikson, it seems to me, is the most sensible...

...These "parts," of course, are not new organs but new capacities...

...Emptiness may be the female form of perdition, Erikson concedes, "but woman's procreative patterns, in varying intensity, pervade every state of excitement and inspiration and, if integrated, lend power to all experience and to its communication...

...Reviewed by JONATHAN BLACK It was Freud's treasured assumption that as a doctor and natural scientist, he operated free from the biases of ideology, and the gloom and pessimism in his work seemed strengthened by this impartiality...

...As the individual grows into adolescence, adulthood, and old age, new needs and capacities are generated...

...Says Erikson: "When Freud said 'love' he meant the generosity of intimacy as well as genital love...

...I felt short-changed only once while reading these studies: Erikson describes a conversation he had with Paul Tillich shortly before the theologian's death, in which Tillich expressed his fear that psychoanalysis, by preaching adaptiveness, prevented man from tangling with the Ultimate Questions...

...The end result is a rich and intricate tapestry, colorfully woven together by Erikson's persuasive powers of observation...

...Freud had described a truth, perhaps, but it was only a partial truth...

...The positive "inner space" of the woman (ovaries, uterus, vagina) is not simply the absence of a male organ but a tremendous source of productivity...

...And psychoanalysis can best function in a state of partial breakdown, when the parts are more clearly delineated...

...A feminine "personality" emerged out of these anatomical findings...

...Man's adult life was not simply a mechanistic repetition of infantile sexual traumas and the channeling of their repressed energy...

...the organism has already broken down...

...He apparently has no axe to grind, and where some Freudian critics over-rigidify Freud's findings for the sake of their own writings, he is inclined to be generous...

...The piece on "Womanhood and the Inner Space" typifies his approach...

...Tillich's apprehension raises profound questions, however, both for man's spiritual life and for psychiatric techniques, and deserves a more detailed discussion...

...The neo-Freudians eager to escape the shadow of 19th-century positivism and the dazzlingly successful model of the natural sciences, revolted against this pessimistic determinism...

...Man was a social being, textured and developed in a multiplicity of environments...

...Identity, in Erikson's hands, is a keen analytical tool...

...Erikson recalls Freud's answer to the question of what a normal person should be able to do well: "lieben und arbeiten" ("to love and to work...

...Erikson does not drop depth-charges of profundity...

...He does not shy away from the ineluctable influence of sexuality and its hazardous impact on all aspects of adult life...

...What might have become nebulous and wishy-washy in a thinker possessing less insight is original and incisive with Erikson...

...Throughout, he writes with elegance, wit, and a profound compassion for humanity...

...But these are quibbles of omission, not commission, and only reflect the provocative quality of the rest of the book...

...Since the so-called adaptiveness of therapy is frequently seen as inimical to creativity, I was also disappointed that Erikson did not amplify his analysis of James and Shaw into a more general consideration of therapy and the artist...

...Using Identity as an organizing principle, Erikson tackles an extraordinary range of phenomena: racism, womanhood, William James, George Bernard Shaw, Indian tribes, slum children, Freud and his dreams, totalitarianism, and a wealth of case studies...

...Some may be grounded in Freudian precepts, but ultimately they venture into a much more encompassing realm...

...when he said love and work, he meant a general work productiveness which would not preoccupy the individual to the extent that he might lose his right or capacity to be a sexual and loving being...

...Erikson questions the validity of a theory built solely on negative presumptions: absence of an organ, resentment at not being a boy, mutilation neuroses...

...He uses anything and anybody he can get his hands on...

...Yet he does enlarge on Freud, embracing his work through the concept of Identity, and then exploring man in a broader social context...

...Freud's oral stage at the mother's breast, for instance, is translated into the growth of a sense of Basic Trust...

...Pathology is by its very nature atomistic, fragmented...

...His is an evolving and enveloping wisdom...

...The striving for Intimacy, the potential for work-fulfillment, a sense of Generativity...

...Much of the original psychoanalytic work on women was based on the "genital trauma," the young girl's sudden comprehension that she does not have and never will have a penis...

...In his latest book, Identity: Youth, and Crisis, Erikson explores these and a multitude of other concerns selected from a life's work...