Erikson Revisited

For those who think an optimistic Freudian is like a Swiss admiral, there is always Erik Erikson. Freud's vision, despite his promise of healing, was a dark one, overlaid with personal and cultural pessimism. Erikson, now 72 and in semiretirement in California, is probably the most influential living psychoanalyst and certainly the most optimistic thinker the Freudian tradition has produced. His famous work on religious leaders (Luther, Gandhi) attempts to show how men can use neurotic conflict for constructive social purposes while healing themselves in the process.

In recent years, Erikson has been the target of growing criticism. Students complain of the ambiguity and elusiveness of his pronouncements. Feminists denounce him for his 1963 essay, Womanhood and the Inner Space, in which he insisted that anatomy is destiny, and that a woman is "never not a woman." He recently repudiated his long-held sunny view of the American character and depicted the nation as a world bully that has "transgressed against humanity and nature." One of his critics, University of Michigan Psychologist David Gutmann, wrote in Commentary last fall that Erikson "has begun to sound less like a psychologist lately than like a theologian."

In a new collection of essays and lectures, Life History and the Historical Moment (Norton; $9.95), Erikson returns to some of these issues:

> On social identities: In Erikson's thinking, each person works out his or her identity in relation to a group that is worthy of respect--a nation, class, tribe, or caste. In recent years, however, he has downgraded the value of these groups, referring to them as dangerous "pseudo species" that maintain their own uniqueness by dehumanizing others. Each of these groups enforces a "normality" which may, in fact, be sick.

> On the ethics of psychoanalysis: Analysis traditionally regards itself as a therapy that provides self-knowledge but avoids prescribing values for patients. Erikson now says that this is an illusion: analysts intervene in the process by which patients create their values. Sometimes this is done by adjusting an individual to society's expectations, sometimes by seeming to encourage destructively "unrepressed" behavior (like a selfish sexual life that uses other people as objects). Erikson is unclear as to whether analysts can ever stop prescribing values, however unconsciously. But he insists they must try to do so, particularly since he expects rising pressures to turn them into gurus.

> On women: Erikson's clarifications of his 1963 essay do not clarify much. He seems to be saying that biology is destiny, sort of. He describes again his clinical observation of the play of pubescent children: he saw girls building low enclosures, that contained more people than the high towers the boys built. This suggested to him that women have a heightened sense of inner space and nurturing, partly derived from anatomy. He still thinks so.

Explaining his views on women to TIME Correspondent Ruth Galvin last week, Erikson added: "At the moment, of course, women are sensitive to any reiteration of sexual differences, as if we were trying to put them in their place. I think the energies which so far have been primarily concentrated on nurturing and on maternity can certainly be widened to apply to collective things, to a kind of vision of the world. But as I say in the book, I honestly believe that men's way of doing things has led to a number of dead ends. For women to join the power game would be no solution for them or for the men."

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