The Americanized Psychoanalyst

Cushing Strout

Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson
By Lawrence J. Friedman
Scribner $35.00

Sporting his "post-modern" colors, Stanley Fish in a recent op-ed piece declared: "All that biographers can do is to substitute their own story for the story of their announced subject" because "all biographers are all autobiographers, although the pretensions of their enterprise won’t allow them to admit it or even see it." Fish allows no room for narrative interpretation and explanation; only simple facts about birth, marriage, and death escape his subjectivism. The half-truth in his dogmatic skepticism is that biographers are attracted to writing about their subjects for reasons both explicit and implicit. But the poverty of Fish’s idea is pointed up by the success of Lawrence J. Friedman’s biography of Erik H. Erikson, which is a richly informative examination of a complex person, always sensitive to his familial, professional, and political contexts, and appropriately appreciative as well as critical of his work.

Friedman joined the early "psychohistory" movement but became disenchanted when too many participants "failed dismally in their historical judgments and their aesthetic sensibilities." He does not thrust himself into the story, acknowledging only in a footnote that as "a red diaper baby," who had tried as a student to sue the University of California for suppressing communist speakers, he might be "too harsh" in his criticism of Erikson’s role in the loyalty-oath controversy in 1950 at the University of California, because he opposed one oath on principle as a form of "official truth" and resigned his full professorship in psychology; yet he seems to have signed a somewhat similar one in order to stay on for fifteen months in an institute affiliated to the psychology department. Friedman also mentions prefatorially that a friend’s delayed recovery from a life-threatening illness influenced the shape of his story by making him more aware of both triumphs and tragedies in Erikson’s and anyone’s life. Perhaps that accounts for the relentless chronicling of his physical decline in old age, which gives a sadder arc to the story than it would otherwise have.

For historians like Lawrence J. Friedman (and myself), Erikson’s revisionism was congenial because he rejected Freudian "originology" about childhood and was always concerned about the outer as well as the inner life of his subjects. Beginning as a teacher of children, he came increasingly to focus on later stages of life, where documentary evidence is much more likely to be found, and his biographies centered on "identity diffusion" in adolescence or on issues in adulthood about "generativity" versus "self-absorption." The highwater mark of his pertinence to historians was the Daedalus volume Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (1970), with its essays on such leaders as Gandhi, de Gaulle, Bismarck, Newton, James Mill, and William James.

What little Erikson had to say about Jefferson, however, in his Jefferson Lectures (1973) seemed dwarfed by "the monumental achievement of Jeffersonian biography." Over half of the lectures were given over to Erikson’s rambling musings on topical matters more suitable for political intelligence than for psychoanalytic sensitivity. By then he was ruefully aware that the "identity crisis" had become warped by helping "to glorify the drama of youth, with all its dangers, as a semipermanent state." That distortion was particularly ironic in light of Erikson’s first essay in psychohistorical analysis, revised in 1942 after he interviewed German prisoners of war in Canada. He characterized Hitler as a gang leader who appealed to estranged German adolescents, encouraging them to believe "that the adolescent is always right, that aggression is good, that conscience is an affliction, adjustment a crime."

It is often forgotten that his early formulation of the identity crisis as a stage of development in its aggravated form—as he had experienced it himself as a wandering and wayward artist in Germany—was specific and concrete. When Dr. Howard Feinstein and I applied it to William James and his father, it meant a youth’s attempt to renew and redefine identifications made in childhood but falling prey to an "overidentification" with a disturbed parent, who "out of an inner affinity and insurmountable outer distance has selected this child as the particular child who must justify the parent" and, by an "all-pervasive presence and brutal decisiveness of judgment," precipitates the child into "a fatal struggle for his own identity."

Friedman’s subject kept pace with his own theory of the eight-stage life-cycle. The historian recognizes that as Erikson in old age struggled with its issues of "integrity and despair," he tended to substitute "spiritual evocation" for "shrewd analysis,"and his prose grew increasingly abstract. In 1975 Erikson was under wounding attack by Marshall Berman for being "the man who invented himself," charged with dropping his stepfather’s name Homburger to disguise his own Jewish origin. Increasingly assailed also by radical feminists, orthodox Freudians, and neoconservatives, he paid the price for his extravagant eminence as the most publicized and honored psychoanalyst in America.

There are several interesting stories in Friedman’s biography of Erikson. There is the familiar one of the Americanization of an immigrant from Germany, drawn to the New World by the political threats of the Old World and finding in New Deal America a hopeful place of freedom and personal success. There is also the complex story of Erikson’s own family history. He had the mixed heritage of a Danish Jewish mother and a German Jewish stepfather. To complicate matters further, Erikson’s mother falsely told him that his natural father was her deceased first husband, a fiction designed to cover the scandal of her son’s illegitimate birth, and she tried to discourage him from trying to find out the truth. He assumed from the rumors of relatives that his father was Danish, aristocratic, and Protestant. The son’s choice of the name "Erikson" not only reflected this myth of origin, but also fitted his deep interest in such Protestant figures as Luther, Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich. It seems poetically appropriate that Erikson and Joan Serson (of Canadian Episcopalian background) met at a masked ball and were married in three ceremonies—Protestant, civil, and Jewish. He was always moving on the borders of different traditions.

There is also the story of a marriage in which the wife carries the largest share of the domestic responsibilities and is a crucial asset to her husband in his work. Friedman shows that Erikson was an absentee father, who was more successful in dealing with the troubled children of his colleagues than he was with two of his own. Part of that problem, Friedman believes, is the result of the Eriksons’ mishandling of their crisis in 1941 of having a Down’s syndrome child, Neil. They followed the advice of hospital authorities and their friend Margaret Mead to institutionalize him, as was often done in those days, and they pretended for some years in their family circle that this child had died. (This deception eerily replicates the deception Erikson’s mother and stepfather had practiced on him.) When the son died at 22, the Eriksons, who were then in Italy, left the cremation and burial services to be carried out by the son and daughter who had been the most hurt by the way that Neil had been excluded from their family.

Friedman also lucidly chronicles the development of Erikson’s life-cycle theory. Though he never cut loose from the Freudian schedule of oral, anal, and genital phases, his own autobiographical writing consolidates five of his theoretical eight stages into one and organizes his life in "decidedly non-Freudian" terms, much as Friedman does. A skeptical historian may suspect that the Eriksonian life-cycle theory is limited to modern Western societies and Erikson himself was well aware that there were some contemporary young people for whom traditional transitions had no authority and who indulged themselves in "deliberate changeability."

Friedman is taken with Erikson’s "prophetic" role, when he turned Gandhi’s philosophy of "soul-force" or "truth-force" into a hope for modern salvation from a technologically dangerous world. But Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932 made a much more realistic case for the virtues and limits of nonviolent resistance, prophetically observing that "the emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy." Friedman also wants to credit Erikson for anticipating fashionable "post-modern" ideas about the "decentered" subject, but the attempt is as anachronistic as Erikson’s own unhistorical efforts to identify Luther with the individualistic humanism of a later Renaissance or Gandhi’s Satyagraha with a psychoanalytic perspective.

Friedman is on much better ground in detecting a "certain resonance with Erikson in efforts by psychoanalytic thinkers of the next generation like Roy Schafer and Donald Spence to determine what makes a personal narrative ‘feel true’ and convey meaning." Erikson was fortunate that when he left Vienna his wife pointed them to the Boston area, where American psychotherapy had primarily developed, under the leadership of James Jackson Putnam, a close friend of William James. Putnam became a convert to psychoanalysis when Freud visited America, and it was Putnam’s daughter who gave Erikson crucial entrée to Boston medical circles. Though Erikson was imbued with German romanticism, cunning Clio saw to it that he became part of a vital humanistic and undogmatic American tradition, linking him to James, Putnam, and these younger analysts.