STEVEN MARCUS
233
From Kardiner's cross-cultural studies there emerges the
hypothesis that certain things that "we were induced to regard as
parts of human nature - the capacity for idealization of the parents,
the capacity to introject the parents and thus lay a firm basis for
super-ego formation , so essential to the stability of a culture . ..
these essential features in the development of a conscience can be
strangulated in infancy." And from his historical excursion there
reemerges the hypothesis that the disposition of forces within the
superego may , within a single culture, change across historical time .
Hence it is possible to imagine and discover societies or cultures in
which there is an actual superego deficit ; and hence it is also possible
to demonstrate within the course of development of one complex
society and culture alterations within the unconscious .
This reading of Kardiner's major work leads to the inference.
that it ended with the covert stipulation that two further books be
written . Their titles would almost certainly have had to be
Childhood
and Society
and
Young Man Luther.
I make such a remark, not to mini–
mize the substance of Erikson's contribution, but to suggest its con–
sequent place in an overdetermined sequence of developments (to
which I cannot here do anything that resembles justice). Erikson is
the most cheerful of ego psychologists, and to the buoyancy of his
native temperament, he has added the incurable optimism of his
adopted culture.
Identity, as used by Erikson in the context of ego psychology,
means something very like "the self' in one of its several psycho–
analytic bearings - the inner representation of the ego as it is
invested with narcissistic impulses. Erikson first used the term, how–
ever, in the form of "ego identity," which he both associated with and
distinguished from the superego and the ego ideal. Erikson con–
ceived of the superego as "a more archaic, more thoroughly internal–
ized and more unconscious representative of man's unborn procliv–
ity toward the development of a primitive, categorical conscience."
The ego ideal, however, in Erikson's own redesignation of it, "seems
to be more flexibly and consciously bound to the ideals of the partic–
ular historical era as absorbed in childhood." And the third step in
this hierarchy is ego identity or identity, which would "in compari–
son be even closer to changing social reality in that it would test,
select, and integrate self-images derived from the psychosocial crises
of childhood in the light of the ideological climate of youth"
(Identity:
Youth and Crisis) .
As that last clause suggests, Erikson tends to use
the term in ways that include all three of the differentiated phases.
What I think he essentially means by the conception is described in
