A Shallow Critique

...Similarly, Roazen's chapter on Erikson's endeavors in the field of psychohistory does not account for the psychoanalyst's prominence in this recent effort by psychologists and historians to forge a new discipline...

...As he sees it, women are psychologically determined by what they biologically have, rather than by what they lack...

...His writings have been far more erratic than Roazen acknowledges, and it is not yet clear how many of them will survive, but there can be no doubt about Erikson's lasting importance as a thinker...

...One of Roazen's better-sustained objections is to what he calls Erikson's conformist, overly, optimistic "trust in the benign functions of the social order"growing out of the psychoanalyst's belief in the continuity between the individual ego and society...

...Unfortunately, Paul Roazen does not attempt to fathom either the renown of Erikson's ideas or the obscurity of the man himself...

...He has examined such diverse subjects as Sioux Indian culture, Thomas Jefferson and George Bernard Shaw, and, in his notable and celebrated "psychohistories" of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi, he has sympathetically considered the function of religion in resolving personal conflicts...

...His theory of the Eight Ages of Man, with its interlocking, regenerative cycles, has a universal applicability...

...With his affirmation of progress, of the familial role of "Mom," and of the need for self-achieved identities (epitomized by his own decision to choose a new surname upon coming to this country), he has furnished an American flavor to psychoanalysis, an otherwise European systematization of human personality...

...That would have forced him to confront Erikson's relationship with his audience...

...He is, says Roazen, "a disciple trying to foist off an original idea onto the founder...

...Roazen does not even note that this revision took place, much less attempt to analyze the rethinking Erikson underwent in those six years...

...But Erikson, who flunked the first psychology course he took in this country (he emigrated from Germany in 1933), has also constructed an impressive body of theory, with a stress on social forces in the process of growing up and the importance of adolescence in what he terms "the life cycle...

...The author, a York University professor of social and political thought, focuses instead on Erikson's ambivalence toward orthodox Freudianism, his internal conflict between loyalty and rebellion...

...In addition, although Roazen is much more critical than Coles was, his criticism is too often of the surface variety...

...In fact, the life cycle (ignored by Roazen, incidentally, in the first half of his book) is undoubtedly Erikson's most valuable refinement of orthodox psychoanalysis, for it compellingly asserts that the personality does not cease its development with the end of childhood...

...What started as a faith in human nature has led him, Roazen states, to a conservative theoretical and political position, manifested in his belief that the final stage of the life cycle must be "the acquiescence in the inevitable" rather than a raging against the dying of the light...

...Adaptability is one of the traits Erikson perceives as central to the American character, too...

...When the disastrous Freud-Bullitt study of Woodrow Wilson appeared, Erikson also sought to protect his mentor's reputation by playing down Freud's contribution to the joint effort...

...Feminists have been the psychoanalyst's strongest critics, attacking his views on femininity and the social role of women...

...He has tried—at times unjustifiably—to find implicit confirmation of his theories in his predecessor's writings...

...Roazen, perhaps in an effort to differentiate his book from Coles', avoids a chronological biographical sketch...

...Hence he tends to accept what already exists in the culture, and to minimize possible discontinuities, disharmonies and alienation...

...In actuality, the gentle, long-haired, grandfatherly Erikson presents more than merely a physical contrast with the harshly furrow-browed Freud: He has had followers, colleagues and critics of his own...

...The Coles volume quoted Erikson so extensively that the book almost seemed like a self-portrait...

...He neglects Erikson's colleagues, including fellow ego-psychologist Heinz Hartmann and Left-wing neo-Freudians like Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Wil-helm Reich...

...Despite the controversy over Erikson's changing positions, there is no denying that his reinterpretation of psychoanalytic theory is refreshingly more concerned with growth, health and creativity than is Freud's biologically reductive focus on neurosis and repetitive, destructive drives...

...But they might be more successful if commentators like Roazen were better able to distinguish what is banal in Erikson's work from what is insightful...

...Of his roots, we know that he was brought up in the home of a German-Jewish stepfather, that at first he planned to be an artist and that he trained as a child psychoanalyst under Anna Freud, but very little else...

...it fails to examine the implications of Erikson's contributions and shortcomings...

...The feminist storm over the essay presenting these views, "Womanhood and the Inner Space" (1968), prompted Erikson to write a partial retraction in 1974...

...Erikson holds that social values and institutions, such as "youthful ideologies," marriage, heterosexual relations, and childrearing, provide individuals with a confirmation of their own feelings and identities...

...Roazen links this distortion and Erikson's obsession with Freud both to his search for a mythical father and to his proclivity for romanticizing his subjects...

...Indeed, many of the author's observations are simply undocumented and unelaborated assertions...

...He should have taken up the charge, made by others, that the psychoanalyst's ideas have tended to shift with the prevailing political mood of the country...

...Reviewed by Donna Arzt If for nothing else, Erik Erikson is assured of lasting influence in both lay and professional psychoanalytical circles for having originated a phrase that has become part of the American idiom?identity crisis...

...he does not discuss the crucial issue of how and why Erikson diverged from the rest of his profession...

...Eriksonian theory has been utilized by his disciples to explore historical areas as varied as Puritan New England, 17th-century French families, radical youth in the 1960s, and 19th-century feminists...

...Yet many of the details behind his mystique have remained concealed...

...And he has been comimendably alert to the necessary engagement of the psychoanalyst with his patients' problems, admitting that the doctor behind the couch is not a mere neutral, passive listener...

...Occasionally, though, we do get something more...

...Still, it had the virtue of attempting to relate Erikson's thought to this life...

...Possibly because he is preoccupied with describing the Freud connection, Roazen's attempt to locate Erikson's place within the psychoanalytic tradition is woefully narrow...

...Erikson discounts penis envy as a significant motivation of female behavior, but he holds that woman's productive inner bodily space accounts for her passivity, inherent pacifism, sensitivity, and tendency toward loneliness...

...One of those followers is child psychiatrist Robert Coles, whose Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work appeared in 1970...

...A critical, balanced study of the life and work of this master is, then, very much in order, and has been for some time...

...As a result, the reader of The Power and Limits of a Vision is left without a coherent sense of the man and his place in psychoanalytic history...

...Nevertheless, as Roazen persuasively suggests, Erikson has deluded himself into discounting the differences between his own ideas and Freud's...

...Partly because of the critical vacuum, The Power and Limits of a Vision is, for all of its shortcomings, an adequate initial overview of this remarkable man and his work...

...For example, he has attributed his own admiration for Christian ethics to Freud, an atheist, and has repeatedly quoted Freud's single reference to the concept of ego identity...

...Although Erik H. Erikson may have overadapted himself—by moving into fields outside his expertise—adaptability is one of the qualities that has made him so popular...

...Roazen is by no means the first to demonstrate Erikson's conservatism (though one would hardly know it, since he cites few other commentators...

...He may be right: Much of Erikson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gandhi's Truth (1969) consists of an idiosyncratic comparison of his two heroes, the one from the West and the other from the East...

...It is no substitute, however, for the writings themselves, which are accessible, sensitive and provocative...

...and in his final chapter, devoted to the problems psychoanalytic therapy will face in the future, Erikson's name is inexplicably missing...

...This concept is so appealing to Erikson himself that he has published at least three "recycled" versions of the original essay...

...Erikson's success in popularizing and revitalizing psychoanalysisas evidenced by his Childhood and Society, a staple in freshman psychology courses, and the cartoon version of the life cycle televised nationally last fallhas led some commentators to eagerly label him an "American prophet" and an "intellectual hero...

...This emphasis creates an imbalance: Roazen portrays his subject as if he lay entirely in the shadow of the first psychoanalyst...

...Many of his followers have been far less successful than Erikson, partly because his investigative sensibility is so inimitable...