The Heroic Myth and Impact of Erik Erikson

One of the things I found most surprising and instructive about this excellent account of Erikson’s (1902-1994) life and work is how often it reminded me of Joseph Campbell’s (1904-1987) archetypal “myth of the hero.” Thus, in accord with the first phase of Campbell’s scenario, Erikson had an unusual childhood. He was born out of wedlock in 1902 in Germany and raised as a Jew by his mother and stepfather, Theodore Homberger. Erik suffered the standard anti-Semitic taunts of his schoolmates, while at the same time his blond, blue-eyed Viking appearance led some Jews to label him a “goy” (a Christian). Upon graduating from Gymnasium, the bright, sensitive, artistically inclined youth fulfilled the mythic exploratory phase by wandering around Europe until a chance encounter in his mid-twenties put him in touch with a power figure that defined his future life path. That person was Anna Freud, who took him on to assist in her work with troubled children. In Campbell’s third phase, the hero “finds himself.” Erikson gained self-affirming success by becoming a full-fledged analyst certified by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. He married the attractive young Canadian-American love of his life, and in that ominous year of 1933, moved to the New World that would be the site of his creative contributions to the understanding of human behavior. I might even push the hero myth a bit further by suggesting that he brought with him to the inhabitants of the New World some fire (psychoanalytic theory) from a God of the Old World, and in the 1960s was celebrated by them for adjusting the theory to their needs. But hold! As psychohistorians have often demonstrated, heroes run a substantial risk of becoming sacrificial objects, and Erikson was not immune. By the mid-seventies his work was being criticized as implicitly sexist, Eurocentric, and conservative, and he was accused of concealing his Jewish background by changing his name from Homberger to Erikson.

Daniel Burston has examined Erikson’s life story in a remarkably fine book. At first glance, it could be dismissed as “psychobiography light,” because although it provides a useful biographical narrative, there is very little about his relations with his wife and children, not much about how he got along with friends and students, except that they all liked him, nothing about his sex life, and one can’t even tell if he drank, smoked, or liked to go to the movies. However, for such material Burston generously refers readers to Lawrence Friedman’s detailed biography of Erikson, as well as works by Paul Roazen and others.

By contrast, as indicated by his book title, Burston has gone after bigger, and in many ways, more interesting game. His book offers something like a psychohistorically informed, anthropological study of Erikson’s central role in adding a cornucopia of neo-Freudian perspectives to American culture. These include not only widely accepted concepts like adolescent identity crisis and psychosocial stages of development, but also a set of adaptive ego qualities defining healthy progress through the life cycle. And there is hardly any work accomplished in the area of psychohistory and psychobiography that has not directly or indirectly benefited from his studies of Martin Luther and Gandhi. Indeed, it is partly due to these studies that many traditionally trained historians now recognize the importance of considering psychosocial factors in their research, even if some of them refuse to admit it. In general, Burston correctly notes that neo-Freudian ideas about relationships between culture, personality and historical events were promulgated in America by a number of other theorists, particularly Erich Fromm, but none of them had the impact of Erikson’s 1950 book Childhood and Society. It is arguable that this book, along with Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, also published in 1950, probably contributed more to what has been called “the Americanization of psychoanalysis” than anything else. Anna Freud must have seen the signs of immanent theoretical disloyalty in Erikson’s book because she claimed not to understand it.

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Her attitude was shared by most of those in the orthodox psychoanalytic establishment, and in a particularly noteworthy discussion, Burston explains that Erikson was able to remain in good standing with them by frequently proclaiming his loyalty to Freud while arguing that if he were still alive, he would surely accept the necessity of expanding his theory. Consequently, unlike R.D. Laing, Erich Fromm, and others who openly challenged or criticized the Freudian corpus, Erikson appeared conciliatory even while undermining and/or de-emphasizing such cherished Freudian concepts as childhood sexuality, the neurotic nature of dreams, and the maladaptive quality of most instinctive behaviors—notions that were among the most difficult for Americans to accept. In this connection, Burston makes it clear that Erikson differed from many émigré European intellectuals because he genuinely liked American society and was enthusiastic about the fundamental value it placed on redemptive individual change, as well as cultural change. His theory of the life cycle, for example, suggested that unresolved problems at a given stage of development could be dealt with effectively in one or more later stages. Although Erikson recognized the significance of the past, this typically American present and future orientation also shows up in his psychobiographies of Luther and Gandhi.

Burston’s concise, insightful and convincing discourse about these issues and how they relate to the complex history of psychoanalysis in America is admirable. Having written four prior books and a number of articles on this topic, his mastery of the subject matter is not surprising, but readers will also appreciate that he writes about it in a lively, jargon free fashion. These qualities are manifest throughout the book, and they show up to particular advantage in a final ten-page chapter titled “Erikson’s Erasure.” But although it might well pass muster as a stylish New Yorker article, it seems to me that in contrast to the prior chapters, most of the views confidently expressed in this one are problematic and, in certain respects, distressingly superficial. The general conclusion asserted here is that Erikson’s major theoretical and scholarly achievements—the mapping of the life cycle, the contributions to neo-Freudian theory, and the promulgation of psychobiography and psychohistory—were all at their height in the sixties and early seventies, but are now largely forgotten or seen as irrelevant, because our present socio-cultural milieu is so different from what it was then.

The milieu is certainly different, yet based on my recent teaching experience, it is my impression that most college courses in developmental psychology today are still implicitly or explicitly organized along the lines of Erikson’s life cycle framework. Furthermore, college students aiming for careers in the helping professions can hardly avoid exposure to one or another variation of Erikson’s developmental schema. Even though Burston is correct to cite changes in the norms and technologies associated with childrearing, and family life in general, I would argue that Erikson is still directly relevant to contemporary bio-psychosocial descriptions of the life cycle.

Burston’s claim that Erikson’s contributions to neo-Freudian theory are irrelevant today seems largely based on his view “that the influence of psychoanalysis as a whole on American culture has declined dramatically.” True enough, but I think it is arguable that since much of Erikson’s work was critical of traditional psychoanalytic theory and practice, he deserves some credit for its decline. Furthermore, his emphasis on the important role of historical and cultural factors in the formation and growth of the ego appears directly relevant to contemporary clinical and theoretical concerns with development of “the self.” In short, if one looks beneath the semantics to the conceptual substance of present day psychology and psychiatry, one can see a good many of Erikson’s neo-Freudian ideas.

Finally, Burston suggests that because psychohistory has not lived up to its earlier promise of becoming a robust, independent discipline, Erikson’s path breaking work in the field is not widely known or appreciated today. The only problem I have with this bit of conventional wisdom is that it is too conventional. That is, it fails to discuss the extent to which psychohistorical and biographical perspectives have migrated into mainstream history, political science, and social psychology, a development that Erikson encouraged, and secondly, the fact that while psychohistory has not thrived as a separate scholarly discipline, it has certainly persisted and has steadily gained recognition as a significant field of study.

But none of my remarks are meant to imply that Burston wishes to throw the Eriksonian baby out with the psychoanalytic and psychohistorical bathwater. On the contrary, his treatment of Erikson throughout the book, as well as in this erasure chapter, is always sympathetic; I just wish he had in-

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cluded more discussion of the points noted above. Oddly enough, despite his conclusions about the reduced status of psychohistory, I believe his book deserves high praise for providing a valuable psychohistorical account of the recent history of both psychoanalysis and psychohistory.

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