Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (review)

Abstract

Lawrence J. Friedman's comprehensive and engaging biography of the American psychoanalyst and prophetic cultural critic Erik H. Erikson is organized around a suggestive paradox: the man who delineated identity as a protean concept that would appeal, in the 1960s and 1970s, to everyone from revisionist psychoanalysts to college students in search of authentic selfhood, was a man fated, by the accident of his birth to a single mother who never divulged the name of the man who had abandoned her, to be forever in search of the most fundamental dimension of his own identity, the name of his father. Born in 1902, in Frankfurt, Germany, Erikson first was given the surname, Homburger, of the pediatrician his mother married several years after his birth. Emigrating to the United States in 1933, he gradually shed this patently Jewish name and, exemplifying what he would later characterize as the American penchant for self-invention, took the name Erikson as he filed for citizenship in 1938. A fatherless immigrant, who envisioned himself a racial and religious mixture--his father, he believed (though never proved), was a Danish aristocrat of artistic bent--and thus echt American, Erikson in this fantasy of rebirth became father to himself, like the paradigmatic immigrant child, "his own parent and master" (p. 180).