Erik H. Erikson as a Pioneer of Psychohistory

By the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s, Erik H. Erikson had begun to study the childrearing practices of two Amerindian tribes, the buffalo hunting Sioux of South Dakota and the fishing and acorn gathering Yurok on the Pacific coast. Although Erikson had close connections to “national character” and “personality and culture” research, he did not posit a causal link between certain native childrearing practices and certain adult traits or a certain tribal character. While describing goals and values of the Sioux and the Yurok, Erikson was not trying to establish their character structures. Still, he anchored some behavioral “configurations” to certain childrearing practices, for example, the generosity of the Sioux to the “oral paradise” of long breast­feeding and the retentiveness of the Yurok to over­controlling “anal” training.

These tribal groups and their economic and cultural “synthesis” were not delineated by Erikson as pathological. Rather, Erikson saw that what in Western clinical parlance were called “orality” and “anality” were evaluated and emphasized by the Indians according to whether these would help develop individuals whom the culture considered “good.” He insisted that there were no proper terms to clinically characterize group scale irrationality, which is now studied by psychohistorical group fantasy analysis.

In 1942, Erikson for the first time psycho­logically sketched Hitler in “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth” (further expanded in a chapter in Childhood and Society in 1950 and 1963). Erikson believed that Hitler’s adolescence stored up rage because of unfulfilled potentialities, which in turn blocked positive actions. Hitler brought the Aryan adolescent imagery of Germans to political dominance. He planned, and to a large extent managed, to “prevent” developmental conflicts in German children through trance-like action and obedience. Organized ideological education for sacrifice and purity (without individual explorative learning) reinforced crushing the enemy without any respect for God, parents, ethics, love of neighbor, or friendship.

This fragmentary profile of Hitler opened the way to Erikson’s later psychohistorical investigations, which related the particular identity needs of a leader to large groups. Although at unequal levels, the leader and the led had reciprocal needs. On a national scale the masses made demands on their leader, who acted out conflicts of national consciousness and conscience, and also global conflicts of human evolution. Kings were thus seen by Erikson as “toys” of the people.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Erikson formed his concepts of identity, adolescent development, and the life cycle. He laid more emphasis than most Freudian psychoanalysts on the psycho­social, cultural, historical, and ego developmental aspects. Erikson claimed that his eight develop­mental stages are universal, escaping the specific effects of historical time, society, and culture. His version of the psychoanalytic method insisted that the psychoanalyst was to become a participant historian, influencing what he or she observed. For Erikson, the historical process was a kind of huge “metabolism” of individual life cycles. Erikson’s method was at first linked to clinical case histories but gradually was molded into the life history approach.

Through Erikson’s lens of “disciplined subjectivity,” psychoanalysts and psychohistorians are both observers of and participants in the history of humanity. Their means of understanding history are based on history. They make multiple tentative and flexible interpretations of single phenomena and events, getting emotionally involved and immersed into a life history. “Hard” scientists, on the other hand, lay stress on a unitary explanation of multiple phenomena and events, shunning emotional investments and favoring logical intellectual mastery of knowledge.

Erikson’s works invite his readers to ponder moral and other personal values in connection with social, historical, and global processes. There is also a streak of psychopedagogical utopian reformism attached to Erikson’s views of the beneficial societal effects of the improvement of child­rearing practices. Erikson opposed with fervor child mistreatment and childbeating adults who really remained children themselves. Erikson’s tone is enlightening yet sermon like: “Some day, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.” (Young Man Luther A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, 1958, p. 70) For Erikson, both Luther and Freud reached out through introspective means to acknowledge, “the

Page 15

child is in the midst.”

Erikson’s psychobiographies of young Gorky, young Luther, and Gandhi became for him examples of transformative identity crises. Their “psychosocial identity” consisted of “somatic,” “personal,” and “social” categories. Erikson was concerned with analyzing not only conflicts but also creative tensions among these three groups. He wanted to expand the Freudian clinical perspective from conflicts and debilitating disorders to potentials and restorative means of action.

Before Erikson, Preserved Smith had introduced the morbid Oedipus complex into Luther studies, and Fromm had taken a much more sinister view while pointing out Luther’s hostility and demands for submission and self-sacrifice. Erikson turned resolutely away from such formulations, towards more imaginative and life-affirming aspects in Luther’s life. Luther, Gandhi, and Freud were for Erikson reformers of inner worldviews, creative transformers of established institutions.

Psychohistorians should be, according to Erikson, more conscious of their “re-transference” of the “unlived portions” and “unrealized selves” of their own lives, which are projected (with a personal bias) onto psychohistorical research: the choice of subject, remembering, reviewing, and interpreting historical motivations. Different interpretations of historical motivations have to be related with each other and co-constructed. By revealing compulsory repetitions in themselves and others, psychohistorians bequeath historical processes to future reappraisals.

The polylogue among psychohistorians even calls for changing old definitions of basic, long cherished concepts such as “Mom.” In Childhood and Society, Erikson figured “Mom” as a stereotype and a caricature containing all kinds of victimization and blamings. He anticipated the interdisciplinary study of such stereotypes, a new kind of history, which would remove impression­ism and sensationalism.

Lawrence J. Friedman has called Erikson “identity’s architect.” Erikson’s challenging psychohistorical enterprise and its constructed identity are worthy of further study.

Page 16