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Erikson's rambling musings on topical matters more suitable for politi–
cal intelligence than for psychoanalytic sensitivity. By then he was rue–
fully 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 "overidentifica–
tion" with a disturbed parent, who "out of an inner affinity and insur–
mountable 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 "spiri–
tual 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 drop–
ping 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 Erik–
son. 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, Erik–
son'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 illegit–
imate birth, and she tried to discourage him from trying to find out the
