LAWRENCE J. FRIEDMAN Identity 's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson New York: Charles Scribner, 1999, 592 pp. (ISBN 0-684-19525-9, C$52, Hardcover) Reviewed by ANAND C. PARANJPE Erik Erikson's psychological analyses of great men of history are said to have provided historians with a new approach to the understanding of history. Now it is the historian's turn to return the favour! historian Lawrence Friedman's biography of Erik Erikson is useful in understanding some puzzling aspects of Eriksonian psychology. To begin, let us note an important biographical detail revealed by Friedman. As Coles' biography of Erikson had noted, and as many of us had known, Erik and Joan Erikson had three children: Kai, a sociologist; Jon, an artist; and Sue, a psychologist (Coles, 1970, p. 404). Friedman reveals that they also had a fourth child named Neil, who suffered from Down's syndrome, and was given away to institutional care right from his birth. This son, who died at the age of 21, was effectively abandoned by the Eriksons. That a great psychoanalyst who had become famous for effectively treating problem children had failed to give even the minimum parental care to his own mentally challenged son comes as a shock. For boldly revealing even the most negative aspects of his hero, Friedman may be recognized as an honest biographer and careful historian. But he deserves even more credit than that, for, in addition to providing factual details, he provides interpretive analysis showing how these facts helped shape some critical aspects of Erikson's theory of human development. In Friedman's view, by putting under institutional care, Joan and Erik had put out of sight what would have been a constant daily reminder of human frailty and sickness. Freed from the daunting tasks of caring for a very sick child, they could focus exclusively on their children, and together work on the eight-stage model of the growth and crises of the healthy personality. On the basis of his detailed and careful inquiries, Friedman points out Joan's significant but neglected contributions in developing the eight-stage model that made her husband famous. He shows, for instance (on pp. 208-220), how Neil provided a basic negative backdrop for Erik's efforts - with Joan's help - to elaborate the nature of a 'normal' life (p. 215). For want of this background information, had often thought, based on David Rapaport's observations, that Erikson's focus on the normal life cycle had come from Heinz Hartmann's emphasis on the average expectable environment (Rapaport, 1959, p, 12). Now, following the historian's observations, it becomes evident that theories are shaped more by deeply personal and intimate experiences than by the influences of the theorist's intellectual forebears. It is ironic indeed that a strong support for Erikson's view of the relevance of deeply personal issues in the development of ideas of great men would be forthcoming from an instance of his own personal experience. There is yet another way in which Friedman's book has helped me to throw light on an aspect of Erikson's work that had puzzled me for a long time. This puzzle concerns one of Erikson's less well-known essays, The Galilean sayings and the sense of 'I', published in the Yale Review in 1981 when Erikson was 79 years old. From the time came across this paper, was intrigued by several aspects of its distinctive features: (1) its rambling and loose structure, sharply contrasting Erikson's usually dense and structured style; (2) its direct reliance on the Bible and scriptural exegesis; (3) its emphasis on mysticism and on the aspect of Jesus's ministry, in contrast to the emphasis on ideological aspects of religion typified in his work on Luther; (4) its discussion of the contrast between Jesus's ethnic background on the one hand, and the pan-human compassion of his healing hand on the other; and (5) its attempt to interpret God's enigmatic expression to Moses: I Am that AM. …
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Jan 1, 2021
Navneet Kaur + 1
Open Access
