The Missing Identity Crisis
LIPSET, DAVID
The Missing Identity Crisis Life History and the Historical Moment By Erik H. Erikson Norton. 283 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by David Lipset Given a new book by Erik Erik-son, we take a deep breath...
...Erikson introduces himself splashily, saying, "I was born two years before the birth of my century...
...he has evolved fascinating notions on male-female differences from play experiments with young children...
...Perhaps best of all, Erikson has seemed warm and parental...
...Reviewed by David Lipset Given a new book by Erik Erik-son, we take a deep breath in anticipation...
...On the other hand, he remembers his mother's artist friends, who "provided [him with his] first male imprinting before [he] had to come to terms with that intruder, the bearded doctor, with his healing love, and mysterious instruments...
...The volume concludes with an examination of the ethical biases of psychoanalysis...
...Initially, Erikson had artistic aspirations...
...He casually praises his parents' "fortitude" in allowing his youthful ramblings to go on unhurriedly...
...In an essay on Freud, Erikson quotes the master as having stated, "We cannot do without men with the courage to think new things before they can demonstrate them...
...This is followed by an analysis of Freud's letters to Fliess, a review of Freud's and Bullitt's biography of Woodrow Wilson, an essay on psychohistorical evidence, suggesting possible methods for weighing personal, and therefore highly subjective, data, an article on the theoretical meaning of nonviolent protest (originally a lecture Erikson delivered to South African university students), and a clarification of Erikson's well-known and controversial paper on women...
...He had given me his last name . . and expected me to become a doctor like himself...
...They lived in a Lutheran principality, and Erik, "blond and blue eyed...
...Upon his graduation, he emigrated to the "New World" because it seemed "an invigorating as well as politically advisable idea...
...By 1914, though, Erikson had abandoned his Jewishness, and when Denmark remained neutral during World War I, he became, like his natural father, a Danish citizen...
...The biography is most restrained just where it begins to stimulate...
...Erikson eventually found his way to Vienna, to Anna Freud and to her father...
...He is a hero-one of the few to come out of the academy- with a wide scope of interest and little taste for provincial thought...
...That his stepfather was a pediatrician may similarly be linked to Erikson's attraction to child-analysis, and to Freud...
...Still, his childhood appears to have been a happy one: "My adoptive father was anything but the proverbial stepfather...
...Alas, Life History and the Historical Moment turns out to be a collection of minor writings connected in only the loosest way...
...While training as a children's analyst he taught youngsters, and in the process learned to work regular hours...
...It opens with an autobiographical piece that hints at causal links between Erikson's own life history and his ideas on identity and development...
...All of these, except for Erikson's reiteration of his discussion of femininity, are reprints, and nowhere in Life History and the Historical Moment can one find the exuberance that made Childhood and Society, Young Man Luther and Gandhi's Truth such exciting reading...
...The pieces of the puzzle are certainly all here-and they are fascinating...
...At this point, the narrative gets opaque...
...His mother's artistic leanings apparently first led him to seek his own identity in art...
...Intensely alienated from everything [his] bourgeois family stood for," he spent his formative years as a Wandenwogel, a bohemian, floating around Europe on a little cash from home...
...The autobiography, inviting us to share the psychoanalyst's famous "identity crisis," has the greatest potential...
...In fact, Erikson's upbringing echoes loudly throughout his adult life-except for his Jewishness...
...and compared to other social scientists, he writes beautifully...
...The same, unfortunately, can be said about this disappointing book as a whole...
...grew flagrantly tall...
...The child was raised by her second husband, a Jewish pediatrician, who entered the household when Erikson was three and made it "intensely Jewish...
...He has shown us how the cultural aspects of society affect children as they are growing up and how this relates to their adult behavior...
...On this, however, he is silent, and we can say only that his break with Judaism represents the central discontinuity between the young and the mature man...
...Erikson says he has forgotten his fatherless period...
...He confesses to a "kind of work disturbance," and remembers needing time...
...His attraction to Freud, he explains, was the result of "some strong identification with my stepfather, the pediatrician, mixed with a search for my own mythical father...
...He writes that whereas he was referred to as the "goy" in his stepfather's temple, to his schoolmates he was a Jew...
...Nor is Erikson any more enlightening about his identity confusion, and since the concept of the identity crisis is central to his theoretical work, the silence here is deafening...
...he has introduced psychoanalysis into history without reducing men to oedipal puppets...
...He arrived in Boston in 1933 and began his career...
...But his indisputable creativity may have generated unrealistic expectations on our part, and by now we may be asking too much from this thinker precisely because he has already given us so much...
...I will not describe," Erikson says, "the pathological side of my identity confusion, which included disturbances for which psychoanalysis seemed, indeed, the treatment of choice...
...It has been exactly for this sort of courage that we have admired Erik-son's contributions over the years...
...His mother, whom he describes as "pervasively sad," hid from him the fact that his Danish father had run off before Erikson was born...
Vol. 58 • July 1975 • No. 15
