In Memoriam: Erik Erikson (1902-1994)

Psychohistorians in general, and psychobiographers in particular, could do worse than to claim Erik Erikson as a founding father. Along with many others, a good deal of my work of the past thirty years — teaching classes in psychohistory, personality development, and conducting research on the Holocaust — has been directly informed by his pathbreaking

Page 1

example, has become a classic foundation text in developmental psychology, while at the same time serving as a major resource for therapists, psychobiographers, and others concerned with questions of culture and personality.

Then there are his biographical studies of Luther and Gandhi: outstanding creative efforts which virtually defined the field of psychobiography for my generation and firmly established its legitimacy as an area of scholarly-intellectual discourse. And at a more popular level, when the phrase “identity crisis” became something of a household word in the late 1960’s, it was largely owing to Erikson’s articulation of this concept. Especially admirable in this connection I think, was his stubborn resistance against demands for a positivist definition of identity: “The more one writes about this subject [identity], the more the word becomes a term for something as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive. One can only explore it by establishing its indispensability in various contexts” (Identity, Youth and Crisis, 1968, p. 9). What an exemplary expression of intellectual chutzpa [assertiveness, nerve]!

Apart from his substantive achievements, however, there is another more figurative sense in which Erikson was emblematic of psychohistory. Just as the field itself has been characterized by a history of marginality, so too was Erikson’s own life. Born out of wedlock to a Danish Christian mother but raised in Germany as a Jew by his adoptive father, he grew up rejected by anti-Semitic Germans for being Jewish, and by Jews for looking like a Nordic Gentile. Then, after several marginal wandervogel [wanderlust] years, he trained with Freud’s circle in Vienna, was analyzed by Anna Freud, came to the States in 1933, and after a short time walked away from the opportunity to gain a PhD at Harvard.

We will undoubtedly soon be seeing psychobiographies of Erikson that will document his life and work in detail. Meanwhile, it must suffice to acknowledge that with his passing we have seen the last of those extraordinary Freudian conquistadors, and the end of an era.

Page 2