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Psychoanalyzing Society
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13228 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1987 |
5,461 Words |
| Author
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Larry D. Nachman
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A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS
Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980
Erik Erikson
Edited by Stephen Schlein
New York: W.W. Norton, 1987
$29.95
The measure of the success of an intellectual can frequently be judged by the influence he has on people who have never read his books. It happens sometimes that a writer's concept become part of the common intellectual currency, and the ideas he developed inform the thinking of large numbers of people who are not aware of the source of the thought that is shaping their viewpoints. Erik Erikson has enjoyed just such a success. Wherever and whenever someone worries about an identity crisis, he is invoking the work of Erikson. More than anyone else, he has accustomed us to think of historical and social issues by examining the psychology of the participants. If we now turn to psychology for the answer to all of life's problems, it is Erikson who has preeminently been our guide in that search.
A Way of Looking at Things is a compilation of Erikson's papers, talks, and essays from 1930 to 1980. They stretch over his long career as psychoanalyst and writer. Included in this volume are the early essays on child analysis and play therapy, and on his field work with the Yurok and Sioux Indians. These essays formed the basis of his major work, Childhood and Society. Similarly, one finds here the basic materials for important works such as Identity and Toys and Reasons. This collection reflects the unfolding thought of a leading contemporary thinker. Its publication provides an appropriate occasion for a review of Erikson's long career and of his many contributions to the making of the contemporary mind.
Psychologists of the Ego
Erikson is the most considerable and influential of those who have built a social theory out of psychoanalysis. His thought is far reaching and supple. Erikson's theories developed under the impact of ego psychology, which was presaged in Freud's metapsychological essays and elaborated in the 1930s by Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann. Ego psychologists have typically represented their theory not as a revision of Freud's theory but as a shift in its emphasis. Psychoanalysis had begun with a concentration on the unconscious, that is, with the organism's difficulties in resolving conflicting internal stimuli. In ego psychology, one becomes attentive to the adaptive and integrating functions of the ego. In the psychosocial theory that Erikson constructed, he made use of ego psychology in three important ways.
First, inasmuch as in classical Freudian theory the ego has among its functions the task of maintaining contact with and mastering the external reality that surrounds the person, ego psychology can serve to clarify the interactions between a person and his social environment.
Second, psychoanalysis' provenance was the pathological. It provided
an account of what was wrong with a person and of why the person fell apart or stopped developing; it attempt[ed] to assign to the particular malfunctioning a diagnosis in line with the observer's
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