Self-Affirmation and Ethics in Erikson’s Psychohistory

The discipline of psychohistory plays a special role in outlining the ethical concerns that face our contemporary world. My focal point is Erik Erikson, a pioneer in the field, who had a special concern for ethical matters relating to the problems we currently face.

Erikson’s psychological work attests to his focus on a person’s existential being. Erikson’s major psychohistorical works on Gandhi and Luther, more than any part of his oeuvre, clarify the contours of his life cycle theory and the important role that both negative and positive elements play in identity formation. For example, when we look at young Luther, could he have become such a prolific and talented writer and speaker without the forced moratorium and silence he experienced in the monastery, coupled with the guilt and shame of his early childhood? Could he have succeeded in

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forging a happy married life without the pains and pleasures of an extensive period of isolation? Erikson plainly answers no to both of these questions; one must experience both the positive and negative identity aspects of the life cycle in order to achieve identity.

Erikson’s portrayal of Gandhi’s negative identity is even more searching than the portrayal of Luther. While the reader of Young Man Luther can almost feel Erikson’s idealization of him and, concomitantly, his (omitted) personal investment in the work, Erikson’s work on Gandhi bears the marks of a wide array of investments and feelings, most of which Erikson is candid about. It was in this work that his disciplined subjectivity truly shined as an example for the next generation of psychohistorians. Erikson is both highly complementary of Gandhi and highly critical. Nevertheless, he shows deep respect for Gandhi’s navigation of the life cycle and tempers his criticism of Gandhi by pointing to the ways in which Gandhi’s negative and positive identity elements worked in tandem (and with the particularities of historical context) to bear the fruit of his life. Indeed, we cannot know Gandhi or recognize his achievement without his negative identity aspects—some of which had disastrous developmental consequences for others, his own children among them.

Erikson’s approach to negative identity aspects has widespread applications in reforming what we have called “Western ethics.” Western ethics rely on a paradigm that shows what one should not do and what one should do without much regard for particularity. For Erikson, this kind of thinking is distracting from the truly important ethical or moral aspects of life, namely those parts of one’s being. Self-affirmation or the development of ego strength that we see so clearly, for example, in Erikson’s Young Man Luther, cannot co-exist with the paradigm offered by Western ethics. This is because Western epistemology denies the exigencies

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of particularity through a process in which specific facts (such as the evidence assembled in psychohistorical inquiry) are gathered, categorized, and presented as freed from their particularity. No doubt part of the difficulty psychohistory has had in gaining legitimacy as a field of inquiry has had to do with this very problem of denying particularity in Western epistemology.

In the March issue of Clio’s Psyche on heroes and role models, David Lotto ended his article by explaining how learning about the identity failings of his mentors and role models assisted in deepening his sense of intimacy with them. Erikson’s focus on the development of ego strength, or self-affirmation, is directly connected to Lotto’s example of his deepened identification and concomitant intimacy with his heroes and role models. For Erikson, self and society are transformed not by posting reminders on the wall of what one should or should not do, but rather by uniting the idiosyncratic particulars of one’s being that find it difficult to befriend each other.

This process, I believe, is directly connected to the aesthetic sensibilities Erikson developed as a young artist, for the artist (and the psychohistorian) are aware that the most satisfying of portrayals and portraits are the ones that engage the antipodes of existence in dynamic perspective. This process, in which opposing aspects of self and society befriend each other, is often called Erikson’s principle of mutuality. In Gandhi’s Truth, mutuality strikes at the core of his claim that psychoanalysis could greatly assist in the process of seeking world peace since, for Erikson, psychoanalysis assists in the flowering of mutuality. Indeed, perhaps the greatest achievement of Gandhi’s Truth is the way Erikson described Gandhi’s idiosyncratic expression as a style of mutuality, which was occasionally mutual and at other times downright resigned to complete abnegation of the parts of himself he could not make peace with. Erikson was a wizard

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at penning the ways in which self-misery and the misery of the world dynamically interrelate.

The ought and ought not approach, or as I like to call it the either/or approach, of Western epistemology and ethics had at its origin a sense of deep self-loathing. (Any strong dose of Descartes, Hobbes, or Hume, and others, when read in light of Erikson makes this abundantly clear.) This self-loathing is infectious and has taken a strong foothold in the academy, government, and houses of worship. It assists in the process of sustaining aspects of our lives that are decidedly un-mutual—dichotomies of race, class, and sex that wear on our individual psyches and collective culture like an ulcer.

The task of the psychohistorian is to counter the individual and collective self-loathing with an ever deeper, more aware, and articulate sense of the human personality and its relation to historical context. In other words, the task of the psychohistorian is to express the particular in all its glory against the tendency to retreat into the unsafe refuge of concepts and categories that deny those particularities of existence that the psychohistorian works so hard to express and elucidate. We, as psychohistorians, feel the pulse of the beating heart in individuals and in society, and our task is to simply listen to it and have the privilege of telling its story.

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