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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 genera–
tion like Roy Schafer and Donald Spence to determine what makes a
personal narrative 'feel true' and convey meaning." Erikson was fortu–
nate 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 Amer–
ica, and it was Putnam's daughter who gave Erikson crucial
entree
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.
Cushing Strout
Shadowy Autobiography
THE COLLECTED POEMS
OF
ROBERT PENN WARREN. Edited by John Burt.
Louisiana State University Press. $39.95.
"THIS IS CLEARLY AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY, but Warren does
not elaborate enough to identify it. . . .Another unidentifiable but
clearly autobiographical allusion." So goes an explanatory note by John
Burt, the editor of this massive edition of Robert Penn Warren's poetry,
glossing these lines from the late poem "The Place":
How had you ever forgotten that spot
Where once wild azalea bloomed? And what there passed? ...
How,
Alone in a dark piazza, as the cathedral clock
Announced 3 A.M. to old tiles of the starless city, could you bear
To remember the impossible lie, told long before, elsewhere?
In the last decade or so of his life Warren was given to repeating, as if it
were a mantra, that he would never, under any circumstances, write an
autobiography or memoir. In correspondence with the present reviewer
